The Collected Stories, page 19
One of them, passing my tree, stubs his toe on Kitty’s sandal. He shades his eyes to look up at me against my sun. That is Alex O. Steele, who was a man organizing tenant strikes on Ocean Parkway when I was a Coney Island Girl Scout against my mother’s socialist will. He says, “Hey, Faith, how’s the world? Heard anything from Ricardo?”
I answer him in lecture form:
Alex Steele. Sasha. Yes. I have heard from Ricardo. Ricardo even at the present moment when I am trying to talk with you in a civilized way, Ricardo has rolled his dove-gray brain into a glob of spit in order to fly secretly into my ear right off the poop deck of Foamline’s World Tour Cruiseship Eastern Sunset. He is stretched out in my head, exhausted before dawn from falling in love with an Eastern Sunset lady passenger on the first leg of her many-masted journey round the nighttimes of the world. He is this minute saying to me,
“Arcturus Rise, Orion Fall …”
“Cock-proud son of a bitch,” I mutter.
“Ugh,” he says, blinking.
“How are the boys?” I make him say.
“Well, he really wants to know how the boys are,” I reply.
“No, I don’t,” he says. “Please don’t answer. Just make sure they don’t get killed crossing the street. That’s your job.”
“What?” says Alex Steele. “Speak clearly, Faith, you’re garbling like you used to.”
“I’m joking. Forget it. But I did hear from him the other day.” Out of the pocket of my stretch denims I drag a mashed letter with the exotic stamp of a new underdeveloped nation. It is a large stamp with two smiling lions on a field of barbed wire. The letter says: “I am not well. I hope I never see another rain forest. I am sick. Are you working? Have you seen Ed Snead? He owes me $180. Don’t badger him about it if he looks broke. Otherwise send me some to Guerra Verde c/o Dotty Wasserman. Am living here with her. She’s on a Children’s Mission. Wonderful girl. Reminds me of you ten years ago. She acts on her principles. I need the money.”
“That is Ricardo. Isn’t it, Alex? I mean, there’s no signature.”
“Dotty Wasserman!” Alex says. “So that’s where she is … a funny plain girl. Faith, let’s have lunch some time. I work up in the East Fifties. How’re your folks? I hear they put themselves into a Home. They’re young for that. Listen, I’m the executive director of Incurables, Inc., a fund-raising organization. We do wonderful things, Faith. The speed of life-extending developments … By the way, what do you think of this little curly Sharon of mine?”
“Oh, Alex, how old is she? She’s darling, she’s a little golden baby, I love her. She’s a peach.”
“Of course! She’s a peach, you like anyone better’n you like us,” says my son Richard, who is jealous—because he came first and was deprived at two and one-half by his baby brother of my singlehearted love, my friend Ellie Hellesbraun says. Of course, that’s a convenient professional lie, a cheap hindsight, as Richard, my older son, is brilliant, and I knew it from the beginning. When he was a baby all alone with me, and Ricardo, his daddy, was off exploring some deep creepy jungle, we often took the ferry to Staten Island. Then we sometimes took the ferry to Hoboken. We walked bridges, just he and I, I said to him, Richie, see the choo-choos on the barges, Richie, see the strong fast tugboat, see the merchant ships with their tall cranes, see the United States sail away for a week and a day, see the Hudson River with its white current. Oh, it isn’t really the Hudson River, I told him, it’s the North River; it isn’t really a river, it’s an estuary, part of the sea, I told him, though he was only two. I could tell him scientific things like that, because I considered him absolutely brilliant. See how beautiful the ice is on the river, see the stony palisades, I said, I hugged him, my pussycat, I said, see the interesting world.
So he really has no kicks coming, he’s just peevish.
“We’re really a problem to you, Faith, we keep you not free,” Richard says. “Anyway, it’s true you’re crazy about anyone but us.”
It’s true I do like the other kids. I am not too cool to say Alex’s Sharon really is a peach. But you, you stupid kid, Richard! Who could match me for pride or you for brilliance? Which one of the smart third-grade kids in a class of learned Jews, Presbyterians, and bohemians? You are one of the two smartest and the other one is Chinese—Arnold Lee, who does make Richard look a little simple, I admit it. But did you ever hear of a child who, when asked to write a sentence for the word “who” (they were up to the hard wh’s), wrote and then magnificently, with Oriental lisp, read the following: “Friend, tell me who among the Shanghai merchants does the largest trade?”*
“That’s a typical yak yak out of you, Faith,” says Richard.
“Now Richard, listen to me, Arnold’s an interesting boy; you wouldn’t meet a kid like him anywhere but here or Hong Kong. So use some of these advantages I’ve given you. I could be living in the country, which I love, but I know how hard that is on children—I stay here in this creepy slum. I dwell in soot and slime just so you can meet kids like Arnold Lee and live on this wonderful block with all the Irish and Puerto Ricans, although God knows why there aren’t any Negro children for you to play with …”
“Who needs it?” he says, just to tease me. “All those guys got knives anyway. But you don’t care if I get killed much, do you?”
How can you answer that boy?
“You don’t,” says Mrs. Junius Finn, glad to say a few words. “You don’t have to answer them. God didn’t give out tongues for that. You answer too much, Faith Asbury, and it shows. Nobody fresher than Richard.”
“Mrs. Finn,” I scream in order to be heard, for she’s some distance away and doesn’t pay attention the way I do, “what’s so terrible about fresh. EVIL is bad. WICKED is bad. ROBBING, MURDER, and PUTTING HEROIN IN YOUR BLOOD is bad.”
“Blah blah,” she says, deaf to passion. “Blah to you.”
Despite no education, Mrs. Finn always is more in charge of word meanings than I am. She is especially in charge of Good and Bad. My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster’s or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.
Mrs. Finn knows my problems because I do not keep them to myself. And I am reminded of them particularly at this moment, for I see her roughly the size of life, held up at the playground by Wyllie, who has rolled off the high ruddy deck of her chest to admire all the English bikes filed in the park bike stand. Of course that is what Junior is upstate for: love that forced possession. At first his father laced him on his behind, cutting the exquisite design known to generations of daddies who labored at home before the rise of industrialism and group therapy. Then Mr. Finn remembered his childhood, that it was Adam’s Fall not Junior that was responsible. Now the Finns never see a ten-speed Italian racer without family sighs for Junior, who is still not home as there were about 176 bikes he loved.
Something is wrong with the following tenants: Mrs. Finn, Mrs. Raftery, Ginnie, and me. Everyone else in our building is on the way up through the affluent society, putting five to ten years into low rent before moving to Jersey or Bridgeport. But our four family units, as people are now called, are doomed to stand culturally still as this society moves on its caterpillar treads from ordinary affluent to absolute empire. All this in mind, I name names and dates. “Mrs. Finn, darling, look at my Richard, the time Junior took his Schwinn and how Richard hid in the coal in the basement thinking of a way to commit suicide,” but she coolly answers, “Faith, you’re not a bit fair, for Junior give it right back when he found out it was Richard’s.”
O.K.
Kitty says, “Faith, you’ll fall out of the tree, calm yourself.” She looks up, rolling her eyes to show direction, and I see a handsome man in narrow pants whom we remember from other Saturdays. He has gone to sit beside Lynn Ballard. He speaks softly to her left ear while she maintains her profile. He has never spoken to her Michael. He is a famous actor trying to persuade her to play opposite him in a new production of She. That’s what Kitty, my kind friend, says.
I am above that kindness. I often see through the appearance of things right to the apparition itself. It’s obvious that he’s a weekend queer, talking her into the possibilities of a neighborhood threesome. When her nose quivers and she agrees, he will easily get his really true love, the magnificent manager of the supermarket, who has been longing for her at the check-out counter. What they will do then, I haven’t the vaguest idea. I am the child of puritans and I’m only halfway here.
“Don’t even think like that,” says Kitty. No. She can see a contract in his pocket.
There is no one like Kitty Skazka. Unlike other people who have similar flaws that doom, she is tolerant and loving. I wish Kitty could live forever, bearing daughters and sons to open the heart of man. Meanwhile, mortal, pregnant, she has three green-eyed daughters and they aren’t that great. Of course, Kitty thinks they are. And they are no worse than the average gifted, sensitive child of a wholehearted mother and half a dozen transient fathers.
Her youngest girl is Antonia, who has no respect for grownups. Kitty has always liked her to have no respect; so in this, she is quite satisfactory to Kitty.
At some right moment on this Saturday afternoon, Antonia decided to talk to Tonto, my second son. He lay on his belly in the grass, his bare heels exposed to the eye of flitting angels, and he worked at a game that included certain ants and other bugs as players.
“Tonto,” she asked, “what are you playing, can I?”
“No, it’s my game, no girls,” Tonto said.
“Are you the boss of the world?” Antonia asked politely.
“Yes,” said Tonto.
He thinks, he really believes, he is. To which I must say, Righto! you are the boss of the world, Anthony, you are prince of the day-care center for the deprived children of working mothers, you are the Lord of the West Side loading zone whenever it rains on Sundays. I have seen you, creepy chief of the dark forest of four ginkgo trees. The Boss! If you would only look up, Anthony, and boss me what to do, I would immediately slide down this scabby bark, ripping my new stretch slacks, and do it.
“Give me a nickel, Faith,” he ordered at once.
“Give him a nickel, Kitty,” I said.
“Nickels, nickels, nickels, whatever happened to pennies?” Anna Kraat asked.
“Anna, you’re rich. You’re against us,” I whispered, but loud enough to be heard by Mrs. Junius Finn, still stopped at the mouth of the playground.
“Don’t blame the rich for everything,” she warned. She herself, despite the personal facts of her economic position, is disgusted with the neurotic rise of the working class.
Lynn Ballard bent her proud and shameless head.
Kitty sighed, shifted her yardage, and began to shorten the hem of the enormous skirt which she was wearing. “Here’s a nickel, love,” she said.
“Oh boy! Love!” said Anna Kraat.
Antonia walked in a wide circle around the sycamore tree and put her arm on Kitty, who sewed, the sun just barely over her left shoulder—a perfect light. At that very moment, a representational artist passed. I think it was Edward Roster. He stopped and kneeled, peering at the scene. He squared them off with a filmmaker’s viewfinder and said, “Ah, what a picture!” then left.
“Number one!” I announced to Kitty, which he was, the very first of the squint-eyed speculators who come by to size up the stock. Pretty soon, depending on age and intention, they would move in groups along the paths or separately take notes in the shadows of the statues.
“The trick,” said Anna, downgrading the world, “is to know the speculators from the investors …”
“I will never live like that. Not I,” Kitty said softly.
“Balls!” I shouted, as two men strolled past us, leaning toward one another. They weren’t lovers, they were Jack Resnick and Tom Weed, music lovers inclining toward their transistor, which was playing the “Chromatic Fantasy.” They paid no attention to us because of their relation to this great music. However, Anna heard them say, “Jack, do you hear what I hear?” Damnit yes, the overromanticizing and the under-Baching, I can’t believe it.”
Well, I must say when darkness covers the earth and great darkness the people, I will think of you: two men with smart ears. I don’t believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person’s senses. If it’s truth and honor you want to refine, I think the Jews have some insight. Make no images, imitate no God. After all, in His field, the graphic arts, He is pre-eminent. Then let that One who made the tan deserts and the blue Van Allen belt and the green mountains of New England be in charge of Beauty, which He obviously understands, and let man, who was full of forgiveness at Jerusalem, and full of survival at Troy, let man be in charge of Good.
“Faith, will you quit with your all-the-time philosophies,” says Richard, my first- and disapproving-born. Into our midst, he’d galloped, riding an all-day rage. Brand-new ball bearings, roller skates, heavy enough for his big feet, hung round his neck.
I decided not to give in to Richard by responding. I digressed and was free: A cross-eyed man with a red beard became president of the Parent-Teachers Association. He appointed a committee of fun-loving ladies who met in the lunchroom and touched up the coffee with little gurgles of brandy.
He had many clever notions about how to deal with the money shortage in the public schools. One of his great plots was to promote the idea of the integrated school in such a way that private-school people would think their kids were missing the real thing. And at 5 a.m., the envious hour, the very pit of the morning of middle age, they would think of all the public-school children deeply involved in the urban tragedy, something their children might never know. He suggested that one month of public-school attendance might become part of the private-school curriculum, as natural and progressive an experience as a visit to the boiler room in first grade. Funds could be split 50-50 or 30-70 or 40-60 with the Board of Education. If the plan failed, still the projected effort would certainly enhance the prestige of the public school.
Actually something did stir. Delegations of private progressive-school parents attacked the Board of Ed. for what became known as the Shut-out, and finally even the parents-and-teachers associations of the classical schools (whose peculiar concern always had been educating the child’s head) began to consider the value of exposing children who had read about the horror at Ilium to ordinary street fights, so they could understand the Iliad better. Public School (in Manhattan) would become a minor like typing, required but secondary.
Mr. Terry Koln, full of initiative, energy, and lightheartedness, was re-elected by unanimous vote and sent on to the United Parents and Federated Teachers Organization as special council member, where in a tiny office all his own he grew marijuana on the windowsills, swearing it was deflowered marigolds.
He was the joy of our P.T.A. But it was soon discovered that he had no children, and Kitty and I have to meet him now surreptitiously in bars.
“Oh,” said Richard, his meanness undeflected by this jolly digression:
“The ladies of the P.T.A.
wear baggies in their blouses
they talk on telephones all day
and never clean their houses.”
He really wrote that, my Richard. I thought it was awfully good, rhyme and meter and all, and I brought it to his teacher. I took the afternoon off to bring it to her. “Are you joking, Mrs. Asbury?” she asked.
Looking into her kind teaching eyes, I remembered schools and what it might be like certain afternoons and I replied, “May I have my Richard, please, he has a dental appointment. His teeth are just like his father’s. Rotten.”
“Do take care of them, Mrs. Asbury.”
“God, yes, it’s the least,” I said, taking his hand.
“Faith,” said Richard, who had not gone away. “Why did you take me to the dentist that afternoon?”
“I thought you wanted to get out of there.”
“Why? Why? Why?” asked Richard, stamping his feet and shouting. I didn’t answer. I closed my eyes to make him disappear.
“Why not?” asked Philip Mazzano, who was standing there looking up at me when I opened my eyes.
“Where’s Richard?” I asked.
“This is Philip,” Kitty called up to me. “You know Philip, that I told you about?”
“Yes?”
“Philip,” she said.
“Oh,” I said and left the arm of the sycamore with as delicate a jump as can be made by a person afraid of falling, twisting an ankle, and being out of work for a week.
“I don’t mind school,” said Richard, shouting from behind the tree. “It’s better than listening to her whine.”
He really talks like that.
Philip looked puzzled. “How old are you, sonny?”
“Nine.”
“Do nine-year-olds talk like that? I think I have a boy who’s nine.”
“Yes,” said Kitty. “Your Johnny’s nine, David’s eleven, and Mike’s fourteen.”
“Ah,” said Philip, sighing; he looked up into the tree I’d flopped from—and there was Judy, Anna’s kid, using my nice warm branch. “God,” said Philip, “more!”
Silence followed and embarrassment, because we outnumbered him, though clearly, we tenderly liked him.
“How is everything, Kitty?” he said, kneeling to tousle her hair. “How’s everything, my old honey girl? Another one?” He tapped Kitty’s tummy lightly with an index finger. “God!” he said, standing up. “Say, Kitty, I saw Jerry in Newark day before yesterday. Just like that. He was standing in a square scratching his head.”
