Ruth tied the handkerchief around the child’s thigh.
“Ready, amigo?” the young man asked the child.
Ronnie nodded, gripping the stick between his teeth.
The young man squeezed water on the scrape, dabbing the dirt away. Ronnie shrieked through his teeth, then dropped his head backwards theatrically, eyes shut.
“Pore devil,” the young man told Ruth. “He couldn’t take it no more. Fainted dead away. Just as well, too,” and he winked at her. “That’s one ugly wound. I reckon he’s a-gonna die. He’d be dead weight, couldn’t do nothin’ but slow us down along the trail. We’ll jist leave him here fer the coyotes t’ eat.”
Ronnie’s eyes flew open. “Don’t you dare leave me here, bastard!” he said through the stick.
Ruth laughed. The young man bandaged Ronnie’s knee and lifted him in his arms. “Okay, let’s head home, tough guy.” He turned toward Ruth. “I don’t know if you noticed, but — I’m not his father.”
She laughed again.
“I’m Daniel,” said the youth. “Daniel Slater.” He held out his hand.
“Ruth,” she said, taking it.
Daniel held it, looking embarrassed. He looked at her and found nothing else to say. In his blue eyes she could see his disappointment at having to say goodbye.
“You have to pay the nurse,” said Ronnie.
Daniel brightened. “You’re right. Good work, Nurse Ruth,” and he looked down a street lined with identical two-story cottages, each with a bit of lawn in front and a driveway that led into the garage. “We live over there. Just about now, Mom should be taking her apple pie out of the oven,” he said shyly. “Wouldn’t you like to sample it?”
“Yes!” Ronnie.
Ruth gazed down the street with its little houses.
“My mother does make a really amazing pie,” said Daniel.
He’d lost his playful manner. He might even have been blushing under his tan, Ruth thought. His blue eyes continued to seek hers, and then he would look down at the ground, nervously. It was as if he grew older and younger all at once, she thought. And every time he looked down, his soft fair hair fell forward, bright in the sunlight. Ruth thought of Christmas, of his hair the color of wheat fields. At the life she had left behind. She looked again at the hundreds of little houses, all alike. How reassuring they were. And she thought she could smell a faint whiff of burnt sugar and apples. She didn’t feel so terribly alone.
“Would you like to come?”
“Yes,” she murmured, as if to herself. Then she looked at Daniel. “Yes,” she said again, out loud.
58
Manhattan, 1928
For over an hour Christmas had been standing at the window of his new eleventh-floor apartment on Central Park West, at the corner of Seventy-First Street. From that height he could see the park itself and the bench where long ago Ruth and he used to meet, laugh, and talk. When they were still just two kids. When Christmas didn’t yet know what would happen in his life, only that he wanted it to be bound to Ruth’s.
That was why he’d bought the apartment. To see their bench. Because he’d stopped looking at it. He had plunged into the adventure with radio without thinking about anything else; like a ram, charging head down. And now he needed to stop and look. He needed to ask himself questions and find some answers.
“Cyril and I are organizing the station move and setting up the technical stuff. We’ll need at least a month before we can start broadcasting again,” Karl had told him the day before, after the contract that allowed WNYC to acquire their station had been finalized. “You’ve got plenty of time to go out to Hollywood and talk with that movie guy.”
“You go,” said Cyril, looking him in the eyes.
Christmas knew that Cyril wasn’t talking about Hollywood but about Ruth.
“You go find her, boy.” Cyril said.
Christmas looked once again at the bench in the park and felt hopelessly alone. He looked beyond, taking in the lake and the Metropolitan Museum, Fifth Avenue, and further off the roofs of Park Avenue, where Ruth had lived. He closed the window and wandered through the empty apartment. There was only an unmade bed. A big bed where he’d felt lost that first night after having slept his whole life on a cot in the kitchen on Monroe Street.
Suddenly he was rich. And he would get richer. Beyond the fifty thousand dollars that was his third of what they’d been paid for ceding forty-nine percent of CKC, he would receive ten thousand dollars a year as an actor in Diamond Dogs, and another ten thousand as the program’s author. He’d also share in any profits on the fifty-one percent that he, Cyril, and Karl still retained. Yes, he was rich. He could never have imagined it. And he had his whole life ahead of him.
Christmas took an envelope out of his pocket. The envelope contained a first-class ticket to Los Angeles.
“You go find her,” Cyril had told him.
That was when Christmas realized that he had to stop and look. Because the race to get where he now was had blinded him. Just as he had once been lost in the streets of the Lower East Side.
Christmas shut the door of his new apartment, went down to the street, and, as he headed towards Monroe Street on foot, thought of Joey, of their years spent in speakeasies, and of how he hadn’t known what to say at his funeral. He thought of Maria. He hadn’t heard anything about her for a long time. And the thought that each of them had come into, and out of, his life in silence. Because the race he'd run had also made him deaf. His whole life had been filled with nothing but the sound of his own voice, amplified through the radios of everyone in New York, and he hadn’t had ears for anyone else.
Because he was famous now: Christmas, the one on Diamond Dogs. That was all that mattered. Because he was again exactly like the kid who was getting lost in the streets of the ghetto and becoming a criminal. Because, as Pep had told him, he had lost the look in his eyes. His purity. He’d become a fourth-rate thug. And whether it happened in the alleys of the Lower East Side or in front of a microphone in a radio station didn’t matter, because he was concentrating only on himself. Because he had let himself be infected by a sickness worse than a thousand others: indifference. Even his sorrow over Ruth, even his feeling of incompleteness, had become part of his performance. They were empty of meaning, of deep emotions. They were only the latest aspects of his outward personality.
“You go find her.” Why had Cyril needed to tell him that?
He crossed Columbus Circle and took Broadway.
He knew why. He knew very well why. Fear.
When the WNYC managers had handed him the check for fifty thousand dollars the week before, for an instant he felt that the world had stopped turning. It was like getting a terrific blow on the head that left him without memory. He didn’t remember how he’d gotten to Central Park. He didn’t know how or when he had sat down on their bench. The bench where he had carved their two names, Ruth and Christmas, with the tip of a switchblade knife Joey had given him. When he realized where he was sitting, he’d simply run his fingertips over the incised names from five years ago.
It was in that moment that he felt the fear growing inside him. He got up quickly and walked away from the bench. He went through the entrance of the first building he saw, as if he were looking for shelter. Upon which the doorman asked him, “Are you here for the apartment on the eleventh floor?” That’s how he’d found it. By accident. Because he’d been running away. He looked at the apartment and thought it would be bearable to look from up there and see his world enclosed in a park bench.
And then he understood.
Christmas turned onto Twelfth Street and took Fourth Avenue. Further down, he could see the Bowery. At the corner of Third he looked at the speakeasy where his mother worked as a waitress.
“You go find her.” Sure, now he knew why Cyril had had to say it to him. Because of the fear he’d never wanted to confess and that now, suddenly, he could no longer keep buried inside himself. Because now he was rich. Now he’d made it
. Because it was no longer clandestine, and this meant it was time to come out in the open. Because he’d never been afraid that he wouldn’t be able to find Ruth, but on the contrary, that he would find her.
Four years had passed since the Isaacsons had left New York for Los Angeles. Four years since that evening in Grand Central Station when he hadn’t had the courage to press his hand against the window of the train that was carrying Ruth away from him. Four years since Ruth had disappeared, without ever answering his letters. Because Ruth — and only there, among the crowds of people on the Bowery, did he confess it to himself — had abandoned him. And probably forgotten him. Because Ruth — he thought, as a young boy with a smudged thin face shouted: ‘Diamond Dogs’ turns lawful! WNYC acquires CKC!, trying to sell copies of the New York Times — Ruth had rejected him.
“Rejected,” he said to himself, crossing Houston Street and continuing down Bowery.
If Ruth had refused him, forgotten him, erased him, why would she be glad if he should find her? Even if now he was rich and famous. Even if now he was worthy of her and her wealth. Even if now he could offer her a future. And he thought of reading Martin Eden as a child, of his tragic rise and fall. Of his love for Ruth Morse, of the amazing coincidence of name that had moved Christmas, like a sign from fate, when he had found his Ruth in a filthy side street on the Lower East Side. Of that extraordinary coincidence of social class and success. A success that led to nothing. Martin no longer belonged to his people and he could never really be a part of the gilded world to which he aspired. Martin was hopelessly alone. He had lost his way while following his proud dreams.
Yes, now he was afraid he might be Martin Eden. And afraid that Ruth might no longer be Ruth.
But there was another fear too, more subtle, more deeply buried. A fear that he couldn’t escape. Until now, all the girls he’d gone to bed with in these years, at least for an instant, had been Ruth. And for that instant, Christmas had been able to have her. He’d settled for that, he admitted it. From fear that life, reality, might take Ruth away from him forever. From his dreams, as well.
Because now, he thought, coming through the old and crumbling entrance to 320 Monroe Street, he couldn’t dream any longer. From this moment on, he just couldn’t do it anymore. Every one of the steps that led up to the second floor seemed to have grown steeper and harder to climb; and he thought that it wasn’t money that would make him a better person, as he’d always believed. And, stopping in front of the door to which a brass plate had been fastened many years before, with the words: Mrs. Cetta Luminita, he realized that it hadn’t been success that guaranteed him happiness. Because there was something inside him that had to change.
But he didn’t know if he’d ever have the strength to do it.
A week had passed since he’d signed the contact that had changed his life so radically. A week during which he’d escaped from himself and from Ruth; in which he’d bought an apartment on the eleventh floor of a building where rich people lived; a week in which he remembered that he’d forgotten Joey and Maria; a week in which he’d never thought about going to look for Ruth in Los Angeles.
“You go find her.” Cyril had had to say it. Because he didn’t have the courage to think about it. Because now he was afraid.
He came into the apartment. Cetta was waiting for him, sitting on the divan. Glowing. Smiling.
“In two weeks I’m going to Hollywood,” said Christmas even before he’d closed the door behind him, his head lowered. As if he were telling his mother something shameful.
Cetta didn’t say anything. She knew everything about her son. And she knew when certain things he said had nothing to do with what the words seemed to be saying. She just gazed at him, waiting for Christmas to look up.
Then she beckoned him to sit beside her on the couch. Cetta took his hand and pressed it, still not speaking. Waiting.
“Are you proud of me, Mamma?” he finally asked.
Cetta squeezed his hand again. “More than you can ever imagine,” she said.
“I’m a coward,” said Christmas, his head drooping again.
Cetta didn’t say anything.
“I’m scared,” said Christmas.
She still didn’t speak. She didn’t let go of his hand.
Christmas raised his head and looked at her. “Aren’t you going to say anything? Scold me?” He smiled. “Aren’t you even going to say that a real American is never scared?”
“Why I have to tell you Americans, they assholes?”
Christmas smiled again. “I don’t know what to do, Mamma.”
“You say you go to Hollywood.”
“I don’t even know why,” said Christmas softly, shaking his head.
“Being scared not mean you a coward. But lie, yes,” said Cetta, stroking his fair hair.
“How did you do it all these years, Mamma?” asked Christmas, pulling slightly away. “How did you get the strength?”
“You stronger than me.”
“No, I’m not, Mamma.”
“Sì. You are. You White Fang, remember?”
“No, I’m Martin Eden.”
“Don’t say stupid things. You still White Fang.”
Christmas smiled at her. “It’s impossible to talk with you. You always want to be right.”
“Of course, I’ma always right.”
He laughed. “That’s true …”
“So,” Cetta asked, “Why you go to Hollywood?”
“A big shot asked me to come, he wants me to write stories for the–”
“No,” said Cetta. “Why you go to Hollywood?”
Christmas looked at her, not speaking.
“The curtain open,” Cetta began. “You remember, how I always tell you about theater when you little? Fine, the curtain open. On ground, in middle of stage, there a girl almost kill by a dragon. She dying, eh? But now, destino: right that minute, riding a mule, come a poor cavaliere …”
“A knight,” said Christmas helpfully.
“… yes, so poor he have sword made out of wood, but … he handsome. Blond hair. Strong. Is hero. And the audience, they know it. They hold their breath when they see him come in. The orchestra play dark note, very dramatic. This is how story begin. The cavaliere, he save the girl, then he find out she a princess …” Cetta pursed her lips; “… but maybe Jews they no have kings and princesses?”
“Mamma!” Christmas protested, laughing.
“Is love at first sight,” Cetta resumed. “He look in her eyes, she look in his …”
“… they see what nobody else can see …”
“Shh, quiet … then the cavaliere, oh — and he not have land or titles or jewels to marry the princess — he leave for long journey. First, he meet a rich merchant who have a daughter name Lilliput, she trapp’ in deformed body of a little dog with sores. Bad witch do it, but cavaliere free her from spell. This is how the cavaliere get his first golden coin. Then the old wise king, he come to find him in his poor stalla where he live. After that, all the paesani they see cavaliere in different way, and they think his sword of wood is really finest steel. And the princess, to thank him for save her life, and for pledge of love, she give the cavaliere a golden trumpet, so he can play beautiful songs. And he play these songs, he is so bravo, that everybody for miles around, they all enchanted by those angel song. But now evil stepmother, she close princess up in room at top of tower, so she not hear his musica. And so every day, his song is sadder, so sad. It break the heart. Until one day the cavaliere understand is only one way: He have to climb up tower in Hollywood castle. And the audience …”
“Holds its breath, yes, I get it,” laughed Christmas. He looked at his mother. “If I’m able tell stories, it’s all because of you,” he told her gravely.
“You so handsome, my beautiful son.” Cetta stroked his cheek. “Go in Hollywood, find Ruth,” she said at last.
“I’m scared,” said Christmas.
“Only a cretino not be scared to climb up a tower with a
trumpet and a wooden sword in his belt.”
Christmas smiled. He freed his hand from his mother’s. “Have you thought about what I said?”
“I don’ need it,” said Cetta.
“I’m rich now.”
“I can’t, amore mio.”
“Why not?”
“Long time ago, when you still a baby,” Cetta began, “I see how Sal treat Nonno Vito. I learn important lesson, I never forget. If I let you give me nicer house than this, then I hurt Sal.”
Christmas was about to say something when the door opened and Sal came in, in shirtsleeves, and carrying a roll of papers.
“You too, huh?” said Sal to Christmas. He flung the papers on the low table in front of the couch. “Look it over,” he told Cetta.
Cetta took the papers and looked at them.
“Other way up,” Sal said rudely, snatching them out of her hand and turning them right side up. “Doncha know how t’ read a plan right ways up?”
“Which is room where …? I no understand,” laughed Cetta.
“Aw, never mind,” said Sal, taking back the drawings and rolling them up again.
Christmas saw Cetta smiling faintly.
“Come on in here Christmas,” said Sal, “I wanna show ya some work.”
“What work?” Christmas asked his mother.
“Whaddya askin’ her for? I’m what one what runs the building, not her. C’mon, move it, we’re going’ inna office.”
Cetta smiled at Christmas, nodded that he should go with Sal, who had already opened the door, and was disappearing down the hall with heavy steps.
“What’s going on?” Christmas asked Cetta softly.
“Go, go,” said his mother, with a look of happiness.
Christmas caught up with Sal and they went into the apartment that Sal insisted on calling an office.
“Shut the door,” said Sal, spreading out blueprints on the walnut desk.
Christmas came over to the desk. “What work are you talking about?”