The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place

  —Downtown was booming

  After the war, the veterans returned, and college enrollment swelled, and so did the population. Margaret Rose Landau gave birth to my mother, Naomi. Mrs. Bevilaqua gave birth to Loretta, and Mrs. Vanderwaal had Peter.

  Returning World War II veterans were getting married, and Jewels Bi-Rose was selling a lot of engagement rings and bridal shower gifts and strings of pearls for the groom to give to the bride and watches for the bride to give to the groom.

  • • •

  “After the war Morris started again making trips to repair town clocks. Those were the years when we could count on our sister, Margaret, to help out in the store. Our sister couldn’t repair watches—only Morris could do that—but Margaret knew quality, and she knew how to be nice to customers. We could always count on her.”

  Morris said, “When our sister was living, we didn’t need any Helgas or tattooed boys.”

  I said, “There was a girl in my cabin at camp who had a tattoo.”

  Uncle Morris was shocked. “A girl your age?” I nodded. “A real tattoo?” I nodded. Looking pained, Uncle Morris said to Jake, “Until these last few years, I didn’t even know anyone with a tattoo except survivors from the concentration camps. And I can tell you, those tattoos were not a decoration. They were numbers. Numbers for purposes of identification. The Nazis turned people into numbers.” He shook his head sadly. “But today, these kids decorate their arms and who knows what else. . . .” He looked over at me.

  “Her tush,” I said. “Ashley Schwartz has a tattoo on her tush.”

  Uncle Alex grinned. “A tattoo of what?” he asked.

  “A rose,” Jake answered.

  “You’ve seen it?” I asked, shocked.

  Jake smiled. “Of course I’ve seen it. Every time she puts on her bikini. If she didn’t want people to see it, she would have had it below the bikini line.” Uncle Morris was still shaking his head. Jake cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Where did the clock faces come from?”

  Uncle Alex explained, “They were rescued. Rescued from the big clocks that were being demolished from urban renewal. When we got into the 1970s, urban renewal became the big thing. There had been riots in the big inner cities, and the government was trying to clean them up. What they did was demolish whole blocks of old buildings. Marble came down. Bricks fell. Everything old came down. High-rise glass buildings went up. And parking garages. Parking garages so that people would have a place for their cars when they drive to their offices from the suburbs. They don’t stay downtown any longer than they have to. They do their business and then get back in their cars and go back to the suburbs.”

  Morris added, “They don’t put big, fancy clocks on high-rise glass. I took all the clocks that no one wanted. The faces, we put on top of the towers. They came from all over. Different clocks all over. None of them match.”

  Alex laughed. “They don’t match, but then, they don’t tell time, either.”

  Jake said, “The way they’re set, there’s no way you can see two of them at once.”

  Uncle Alex said, “Not a lot of people figure that out.” Now it was his turn to get up and announce, “Dessert will be Margaret’s favorite.”

  We watched as he whipped cream with a wire whisk and set that bowl in the refrigerator. He removed a roll of chestnut pâté from the refrigerator, dipped a knife into warm water before cutting four slices from it, carefully placed each slice into a stemmed glass, replaced the rest of the pâté in the refrigerator, took a container of vanilla ice cream from the freezer, and slowly dished a double scoop into the glasses, drizzled chocolate sauce over the ice cream, and followed that with a huge dollop of whipped cream. Before he set my portion in front of me, he struck the side of the glass with a spoon to make it ring, then he lifted the glass and held it high and said, “Welcome home, édes Margitkám.”

  “Who is édes Margitkám?” Jake asked.

  “I am.”

  “She’s my sweet Margaret,” Uncle Alex said.

  “Mine too,” Uncle Morris said.

  Jake looked at me and said, “I wasn’t so sure about that twenty-four hours ago, but I am now.”

  My favorite dessert deserved to be eaten slowly. The best way to slow down is to lick your spoon clean each time and to carefully apportion the whipped cream, the ice cream, and the chestnut pâté carefully so that all three flavors finish together. Spoon licking and apportioning make you savor each mouthful.

  Uncle Morris poured the coffee.

  Jake took a sip and said, “I could swoon. The only thing that would make this the tiniest bit better would be if you wouldn’t mind my smoking a cigar.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Jake reached into the bib pocket of his coveralls and took out two fresh cigars. “Will you join me?”

  Uncle Morris did. Uncle Alex did not.

  After two very long puffs, Jake asked, “Why did you paint them? Was that to protect them?”

  Uncle Alex shrugged his Old World shrug. “They were not rusting. They are stainless steel, and the wires are copper.”

  “Maybe you just needed to take things to the next level,” Jake suggested.

  “I don’t know from levels,” Uncle Morris said. “What my brother needed was exaggeration.”

  “Maybe it was time for rock ‘n’ roll,” Jake said.

  Uncle Alex smiled. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe that’s the way to put it. But it was also true that business was slowing down and down. There was more time. Much more time.” Uncle added, “The first time we ran out of paint, we tried to make a match, but we couldn’t. The new paint never matched the old. We never could judge how much we needed and were always running out of one color or another. So when we ran out of the original color, we would just mix something new. By the time summer was over, the sun would fade the brightest shades, so the colors never blended altogether.”

  “Very interesting,” Jake said. “That accounts for the camouflage pattern.”

  “You don’t like it?” Uncle Morris asked.

  “Oh, I do. I do like it. I like it a lot. I didn’t mean to say that I don’t like it.”

  “People don’t say interesting when they really like something,” Morris said. “Interesting is what people say when they don’t like something but don’t want to say they don’t.”

  “I was trying to say that how it happened was interesting.”

  I said to Jake, “Do you want me to tell you how it happened last spring?” He nodded. “Last spring my uncles let me mix up a batch of paint, so I added some of this and some of that and ended up with a pale orange color that looked like peach in dim light and apricot when the light was bright. There was no color like it anywhere on the towers.”

  “It was extraordinary,” Uncle Alex said. “Like an orange sherbet.”

  Uncle Morris added, “It was unique. Not interesting. It was decorative. Very nice. Very nice.”

  “There was some paint left over, so we used Margitkám’s orange sherbet for maintenance all of last summer,” Uncle Alex said.

  “This year I was supposed to make lemon and lime to go with it,” I said, “but I got sent off to camp.” It occurred to me just then that I would be able to help paint while I was there. “I can mix up the lemon and lime now,” I said. “We’ll have our fruit cocktail after all.”

  “We’ll see, Margitkám,” Uncle Alex said. But he did not look at me when he said it. “It’s very artistic already.”

  “Leave it,” Morris said severely to his brother. Then, softening his tone, he said to me, “It’s very artistic even without the lemon and lime, édes Margitkám. Very artistic.”

  —business was slowing down and down

  In 1965 the Fivemile Creek Mall, a vast regional mall, heated in winter and air-conditioned in summer, opened. It was located near the county line, far from downtown, but it had parking spaces for a thousand cars.

  Osmond’s Department Store moved out of downtown and into the mall. Halley’s
Hardware became part of the Ace Hardware chain and moved into a strip mall on the state road. The drugstore became a Walgreens and followed the exodus. The Tivoli, an old-fashioned movie theater with chandeliers and a stage and a balcony, tried to hold on by becoming a second-run, dollar movie house, but it had to close.

  After office hours, the streets of downtown were deserted.

  People couldn’t wait to move out of the neighborhood. The Vanderwaals left, and so did the Bevilaquas. Those who could not sell their houses rented them, most often to students from Clarion College who were grateful for the cheap rent.

  Jake asked, “What happened to Jewels Bi-Rose?”

  “We lost it,” Morris said abruptly.

  Uncle Alex explained, “Shoppers had all moved to the suburbs. They had to come to us by car. Parking was tight. People couldn’t be sure they would have a place for their car like at the mall. Jewels Bi-Rose was not doing enough business to pay the rent.”

  “We held out until 1970, the year our sister died.”

  “Then we closed.”

  —we closed

  When Clarion State College became Clarion State University, the school built more dormitories as well as apartments for married students—even a day-care center for students with children. Soon the houses around Schuyler Place went empty. They had received more high spirits than high maintenance from the college crowd, so by the time they went on the rental market again, they were in bad shape. The neighborhood went from unkempt to undesirable. During the day, the streets were empty of people and filled with litter. The Bevilaquas’ house was the first to be boarded up. At night vagrants lifted the boards from the windows and took shelter in the empty rooms.

  Morris and Alex took down the mailbox and had a slot cut into their front door. If a package was to be delivered, the mailman left a yellow notification card, and Morris went to the post office to pick it up.

  No one came into the neighborhood unless they had to.

  “But you stayed here,” Jake said. “I know the towers must have—”

  Uncle Morris interrupted. “The truth? After we paid off our debts, we couldn’t afford to move.”

  “After we closed the store, we set up a little business here at the house. We used the dining room. Morris had his watch repair shop near the front window. I did a little business in antique china, glass, and silver. All my merchandise fit in one display case. I also did special orders for people who couldn’t find a particular pattern. We put a little Jewels Bi-Rose sign out front.”

  “A mistake,” Morris added. “It was not an advertisement. It was an invitation.”

  “We were robbed three times—no, four . . .”

  “That’s four times within a year and a half. Every six months . . .”

  “. . . like clockwork,” Uncle Alex finished, and the brothers looked at each other and started to laugh.

  Jake looked puzzled at first, but then he, too, started to laugh.

  Still laughing, Uncle Alex said, “We got to be professional victims. The first time we were robbed, people lost their heirloom watches that they had brought in for repair. After that, we hid the good stuff and kept the safe full of junk. Some money—just so they could go away with ready cash. But mostly junk.” Alex wiped tears from his eyes and asked his brother, “Do you remember the time that crook dropped that Daum crystal bowl?”

  “Remember? Of course I remember.” Morris looked at Jake and said, “It was a beautiful piece. Amber glass. An antique. I asked the crook to save us the pieces. So he picked them up and cut his hand. He got furious. He hit me on the head. Knocked me out.”

  Uncle Alex continued, “After that, we kept handcuffs and socks and tape handy. We found that if we were tied up, the crooks felt safe and wouldn’t beat us up. We didn’t want them getting nervous. A nervous crook is a dangerous crook.”

  “The clean socks were so that they wouldn’t gag us with a filthy rag. We got so that we could tell the combination to the safe with a gag in our mouths.” The brothers looked at each other and broke out laughing again.

  Jake asked, “Did they ever catch any of the thieves?” “Yeah. Those kids who broke the Daum crystal bowl. They left bloody fingerprints, and they had a record.”

  “What happened to them?”

  Alex answered, “They got a few months in jail, but we didn’t get any of our merchandise back. Then while Morris and I were at the courthouse testifying—” He started to giggle, and Uncle Morris caught it. As soon as one of them slowed down, the other lobbed it right back. Jake and I watched, as if at a tennis match, and soon we were laughing, too, even though we did not know why we were, except that we couldn’t not. Finally, between gasps, Uncle Alex said, “While we were at the courthouse testifying, we were robbed again.”

  And Uncle Morris caught his breath long enough to add, “Why should they miss an opportunity like that?”

  Uncle Alex said, “The police let us collect the pieces after they were finished with them. I’ll show you the Daum crystal pendants if you like.” He smiled and added, “They are the only parts of the towers that are recorded history.”

  Morris said, “This is the strangest thing: Even after the neighborhood got dangerous and we were being robbed on a regular basis, no one hurt the towers. Isn’t that funny?”

  “I would call it a tribute,” Jake said. “Even Leonardo da Vinci didn’t escape vandalism. His model of the horse for the duke of Milan was used for target practice by the French soldiers who conquered Milan.” Jake looked out the kitchen window. It was too dark for him to see anything, but he said anyway, “This looks like a nice neighborhood now. I noticed that the houses on either side of you are freshly painted. The yards look nice, and so do the sidewalks. Everything looks to be in good repair.”

  “Not repaired,” Morris corrected. “Don’t say repaired. Say restored.” He put his forefinger to his lips and said, “And don’t call it urban renewal. Our town fathers made that perfectly clear. Urban renewal would mean that they would tear down all the old run-down buildings and build new ones—bigger and higher. Now they say they are preserving the past. They call it redevelopment.”

  Uncle Alex explained, “Our neighborhood has been officially designated as historical and charming.”

  Uncle Morris said, “I spit on charming.”

  Uncle Alex said, “The Rose brothers used to live in a neighborhood. Now we live in Old Town.”

  —call it redevelopment

  After the neighborhood around Schuyler Place went from bad to blighted, the city leaders created the Historic Downtown Trust Fund. This was a large sum of government money put aside to loan to people who wanted to buy any of the derelict downtown buildings and restore them. The Uncles’ neighborhood qualified.

  The city bought the old Osmond’s Department Store building and converted it into government offices. They closed off Summit Street downtown and made it into a pedestrian mall.

  Being close to City Hall and the county offices, Old Town was a good place for young professionals, especially lawyers, to set up offices. The houses were cheap, and using the trust fund money, they got low-interest loans to convert them into offices with all the necessities of modern electrical wiring and plumbing. All they had to do was agree to obey the regulations about preserving the historical integrity of Old Town. They could restore but not change the front of their houses, and they were to use approved colors when they painted. As part of the restoration project, trust fund money was also used to pave the alleys and stripe them for parking.

  “We got a small business loan from the bank and opened the Time Zone—a kiosk on the ground floor of the Fivemile Creek Mall.”

  Morris said, “Most modern watches and clocks need batteries, not a repairman. Nothing ticks anymore. People don’t like ticking. Humming is acceptable, but no ticktock. People love digital. With digital, kids don’t even have to learn how to tell time.” He made a face. “I spit on digital.”

  Alex explained, “We sell watchbands and batteries a
nd what are called fun watches to pay the rent. And occhiali antisole.”

  “Oh, yes. Must not forget the sunglasses,” Uncle Morris said. Even the ends of his mustache turned down. “Here in Old Town, in the pedestrian mall, where Jewels Bi-Rose used to be, the stores that once sold goods and services now sell tchotchkes and three-dollar cups of coffee with as many varieties as Heinz has ketchup.”

  Uncle Alex said, “Heinz has only one variety of ketchup.”

  “It has fifty-seven. Every bottle of ketchup says ‘Heinz 57 Varieties.’”

  “That’s what it is, fifty-seven varieties.”

  “And isn’t Heinz ketchup?”

  “Of course Heinz is ketchup. All the world knows that Heinz means ketchup.”

  “And does it also mean fifty-seven varieties?”

  “Of course. It’s their trademark. But either you have Heinz ketchup or you have fifty-six other Heinz varieties.”

  “If that’s what you insist.”

  “I insist.”

  “May I continue?” Uncle Morris asked.

  Uncle Alex nodded and muttered, “One ketchup. Only one.”

  Uncle Morris glared at him and said, “I’m continuing, with your permission.” Uncle Alex glared back before Uncle Morris continued. “Where Jewels Bi-Rose was is now Tees for Two. Buy one, get the second one for two dollars more. They are selling T-shirts that say things that even the ACLU would want to flush down the toilet.”

  Jake looked at me and laughed. “I’ve had experience with T-shirts that have been flushed down the toilet—or shower.”

  Uncle Morris said, “You can get fifty-seven varieties”—with a sideways glance at Alex—“of cappuccino”—he paused for emphasis—“or patchouli and every other form of incense and nonsense, but there is not a single place to buy a box of detergent or a roll of toilet paper in the new old downtown.”

  —officially charming

  Hapgood, Hapgood, and Martin, the oldest and most prestigious law firm in Epiphany, converted 21 Schuyler Place into offices for their young associates. The city was proud to have them. After they moved in, the business section of the Epiphany Times ran a banner headline that said LAW FIRM STAKES ITS FUTURE ON THE PAST. The article featured a four-column-wide, four-inch-long picture showing Taylor Hapgood holding a piece of paper. The caption under the picture explained that he was holding the original deed to the Vanderwaal house. The article quoted Taylor Hapgood, the senior partner in the firm, as saying that he had invested more money in fiber-optic wiring than the original cost of the house had been when the Vanderwaals had purchased it from the Tappan Glass Works.