Coney (14 page)

“Mrs. Fishman, I must continue a conversation with Rabbi Elfenbein …”

“To hell with Elfenbein. All he knows is to eat cake and fart. Throw out that angel of death.”

“Mrs. Fishman, as much as I respect your wishes in your own home, I cannot do as you ask. The gentleman you speak of is Label Feinschriber, a talented poet.”

“Another big man with big thoughts. So why can't he think away his hump?”

His father's small Tartar eyes darted like panicked gerbils before beginning to blink rapidly. Now, Harry knew, his father would use words—any words—like defensive fists, to ward off the unpleasant or boring.

“Mrs. Fishman, we should not be so hard on other people's infirmities. After all, we are all God's creatures, and it is his wisdom
that made us what we are. I realize there are superstitions surrounding such deformities and they continue to carry a tribal message, but intelligent people, like yourself, Mrs. Fishman, cannot be governed by mystical powers that have their basis in the luck of the genetic draw.”

“Shit in the ocean,” Bama spat.

Bama pulled Harry to her. “Don't look at the hunchback,” she whispered. “You have not finished growing yet.”

His mother pleaded a headache that demanded air, and fled the shivah. She entered the candy store where her father had tasted the joys of pinball and waited outside a phone booth while a fat man ended an agitated conversation with a slammed receiver and a volcanic eruption of smoke. He ripped at the metal handle on the wooden-framed glass door, which folded inward and momentarily wedged against his belly.

“It's all yours,” he said to Velia, covering her face with cigar smoke.

Velia waited outside the booth, letting it air out. The cigar smoker, now sitting at the counter slurping an egg cream, jerked his head toward her.

“Cigar smoke's good for you, lady. It puts hair on your chest.”

A group of teenagers gathered around the pinball howled appreciative wolf calls. Velia stepped into the booth.

“Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.” The voice was drained of energy, barely audible.

Marie, Velia thought. What a greeting!

“Mr. Barbetta, please.”

“I'll connect you,” Marie said, as if responding to a request for a favor.

“Mr. Barbetta's office,” Sybil sang in operatic high spirits.

“Sybil, this is Velia. Is Mr. Barbetta in?”

“Oh Velia, I'm so sorry about your father.”

“Thank you, Sybil.”

“I'll connect you.”

“Hello Velia. I am sorry I could not get to the funeral service. But as you know, today was a day of critical negotiations.”

The voice leaked a trickle of hoarseness through a timbre that caressed like a blanket of penetrating steam in a Turkish bath. The words were formed carefully. Barbetta never spoke rapidly or used contractions. Like a stammerer who avoids the terrors of
m
and
t
, he feared the speed and compression of his boyhood Neapolitan that lurked, champing for outlet.

“That's all right, Lu …” She wondered if Sybil, hand smothering the mouthpiece, was listening. Maybe even Marie was allowing the switchboard to blink and buzz while plugging her ears into Luigi's line. The hell with it.

“It's really OK, Luigi. I understand. But now I need you.”

“Where is the shivah? I will come as soon as I am finished here.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“I do not understand.”

“I want to be alone with you.”

The receiver crushing her ear, a habit of a childhood in which privacy was an admission of sin, fell silent. She saw Luigi's shinning, soothing black eyes, immobilized by the failure of a stock answer to carry a situation. He would be staring at the phone as if the correct words were about to wriggle through its holes like angel hair pasta. Sniffs of air, bowed on the black hair curled inside his wide nostrils, rasped in her ear.

“But Velia, today. How …?”

“Luigi, I must see you. Isn't that enough?”

“Of course. Of course. Let me see …”

Now, she knew, his free hand patted his thick black-and-white hair, an even split, as if landscaped by a compulsive gardener.

“I could be at the … I can be there by seven-thirty, maybe a little later.”

“You are a wonderful man.”

“Yes.”

She looked at her watch: Five-thirty. Where to go? The shivah
was out of the question. She and her mother were a word away from a screaming match. Moishe's friends—they were hers too, but she always thought of them as his—were settled into their high-toned drivel and probably, no, definitely, ridiculing her father. Yes, he was ridiculous. But she gave them—no less ridiculous—no right to maul him on their rotting gums.

She left the candy store as a teenager whistled
The Bear Came Over the Mountain
to the rhythm of her buttocks. The snow had begun to freeze. She took small steps, testing her high heels before committing her full weight. Climbing the ramp to the boardwalk, she could see over her shoulder the window of the room at the Half-Moon, rented by the Amalgamated, that would be her sanctuary. Her heel hit an icy patch. She slipped to her knees, sliding part-way down the ramp until a pair of hands on her buttocks stopped her. She heard Joe Baker's usual greeting.

She was not afraid of Joe. He was like Aaron, the idiot milkman in Warsaw, whose deliveries included a proud exposure to which housewives had learned to say, “How nice,” whereupon Aaron would carefully stow his treasure until the next admirer.

Her shredded stockings lay on reddened knees. A mirror, she imagined, would reflect a snot-ridged face and the hairdo of an anarchist. All in all a fitting companion for Joe Baker, who was something to prevent her from falling again.

“Hello Joe.”

Accustomed to blows and screams, Joe instinctively jumped backward at the sound of a female voice.

“Don't be afraid, Joe. I like you.”

She slipped her arm in his and tugged him forward. He smiled and began his introduction:

“My name is Joe Baker, my prick is a …”

“Now Joe, you've already told me that.”

She squeezed his biceps.

“Numbers,” he said.

“Two Tolstoys, One Dostoyevsky and seven Chekhovs.”

Joe jerked his head from side to side, as if slapped. He wailed. A cloud of stink covered her face. She quickly shouted:

“2,474, 5,356, 17.”

He gave the answer. They walked arm in arm. At the ramp leading to the Half-Moon, she sought to disengage. He crushed her arm to his side.

“Rosie's,” he said.

“Rosie's? I don't understand.”

“Rosie's, Rosie's,” he shouted, sliding his free fist up and down the dangling end of the rope that held up his pants.

He dragged her beyond the hotel.

“Rosie's!” Velia shrieked.
My God, he wants to take me to Rosie's whorehouse. He thinks I'm …

“2,000, 4,000, 6,000,” she yelled.

“12,000,” he answered, still dragging her.

She sank to her knees, trying to wriggle free. He crouched and pulled her like a sled. She grabbed at his ankle. He tripped and flew forward, landing on his forehead, then skidding about three feet.

She ran slipping and sliding toward the hotel. At the ramp she looked back. He hadn't moved. Had she killed him? She didn't care.

She sat on the radiator in the hotel bathroom for half an hour, moving to a stall when anyone entered. Finally warm, she tugged her hair into some kind of order.

At the newsstand in the lobby she bought a
Daily Mirror
and a Milky Way candy bar and fell into in a leather chair that allowed a view of the entrance. She chewed the chocolate and caramel into a stream of sweetness that soothed her throat and stomach.

It was six-fifty. The only other people in the lobby were a group of old men and women, sitting on the edge of their chairs like birds on a perch and swiveling their heads toward any movement. Their eyes, Velia thought, suck you up, like Luigi inhaling oysters. Suddenly they all rose and, each limping or listing at differing angle, shuffled to the elevator. It was time to switch on the radio and wait for Gabriel Heatter's assurance:
Ah, there's good news tonight.

She read the front page headline:
Pope Dies.
Below was a photograph. Could that worn-out man be the same one who looked down at her from the walls of the convent? She read the report:

“Pope Pius XI, 261st head of the Catholic Church, died early this morning. His heart, weakened by two years of illness, stopped beating. The ‘Pope of Peace' was 81 years old and had ruled for 17 years.”

He was not the one. They all looked the same.

She reread: “His heart, weakened by two years of illness, stopped beating.” She imagined that gentle death: a wistful sigh, the eyelids closing slowly. Not a Jewish death. Jews scream to the grave, as they scream in life. Their brains explode and leave a mess, like Papa.

Closing her eyes, she traveled to the convent which she had entered when she was eleven. She wore a white blouse and blue jumper skirt, surrounded by identically dressed girls. Nuns, reflecting the sun off their gleaming white hats, glided to their chores.

In the vestry, she lovingly beheld her white, alabaster angels, with whom she shared a blush of rose on the cheeks. She once again slid her fingers slowly, like a novice Braille reader, over the fluted wings that promised soaring flight—to anywhere.

The Warsaw convent was a place, the nun had told her, where a girl, even a Jewish girl sent there by her mother to plead for sanctuary because her family was starving, could meet God and the Son of God. She had been introduced to the Son of God, eaten his flesh, drunk his blood. She preferred the pure angels, in whose faces she saw her own.

Then, after more than a year of days that were neatly parceled out to be spent with the Father, the Son and the Virgin, the Mother Superior had told her that she was to return to the bearded men who stank, spat and prayed to an invisible God who, she was certain, also stank and spat.

She had pleaded that the convent was her home and all the girls more sister to her than her real one. She wanted to be like
them: a Catholic. The nun had answered that these were not decisions for a child, but when grown-up, she could do as she wished—even become a nun.

The closest she ever came to that goal was Shrafft's. There, scrubbed women wearing white gloves were led to tables covered with fresh white linen, to be served by blond waitresses, corseted in schoolmarm black-and-white uniforms. If the decor did not include angels, she could imagine them hovering over the white food.

At age fifteen she had applied for a job as a waitress, even though it was no secret that Jews were not hired. Leah became Velia and Poland moved to Russia and hints of the Romanovs. The interviewer, sure of his instinctive ability to spot Jews, demanded no credentials from this blond cherub.

She lasted two wonderful weeks, until her father, alerted that she had not been attending school, tracked her down, burst in during lunchtime and yelled at her in Yiddish. She fled in her uniform, never returning to pick up the pay due her. The uniform still hung in her closet, a testimonial to the limitless possibilities of lying.

A disturbance at the entrance ended her reverie. She watched in terror as Joe Baker, shouting, “Rosie's!” was thrown out. Then he was back, allowed in under the protection of the creature in the wheelchair and the chauffeur. The three surrounded her.

“Rosie's!” Joe shouted over and over, until it sounded like the a cheer.

The house detective waddled over.

“What's up, Vic?,” he asked.

“Don't know. Joe is saying he knows this one from Rosie's.”

The house detective squinted professional eyes at her:

“Ain't I seen you here before?”

“Probably. I often take dinner here with dear friends,” she answered in the sanitized accent taught at Schrafft's.

“These whores are really something,” Menter said. “Hoity-toity, and all that.”

Velia lunged forward, missing a slap at his face.

“Hold that whore!” Menter shouted, brandishing a fist, “I'll see to it she never works again.”

Joe put an armlock on her neck. His other hand pawed at her breasts. The house detective interposed himself between her and Menter.

“Vic,” he said, “we can't have that here. Get her outside sometime.”

Menter nodded, now more interested in Joe's vigorous squeezing of Velia's breast.

“Nice feel, huh Joe?”

Baker's cracked tongue slid rapidly between the corners of his mouth.

Menter laughed.

“Vince,” he said, “give Joe a couple of bucks for Rosie's, and let's get away from this cunt so she can go back to work.” His fist masturbated the air.

Joe skipped across the lobby, pulling at his rope, almost colliding with Luigi Barbetta, who ignored her as he walked to the elevator, where Menter and Vince waited.

“Hey, Luigi,” Menter said, “what the hell are you doing here this time of night?”

“A business conference. You know how it is, Vic, we work for our brothers and sisters twenty-four hours a day.”

Menter's eyes swung from Luigi to Velia and back again.

“Sure, Luigi,” he said. “Sure … Luigi. Brothers and
sisters.”

Velia bolted to the elevator. She knocked softly on the door of room 612. Inside, Barbetta was ill at ease. Her phone call had been an open admission of their affair to the eavesdropping staff. She was becoming dangerous.

He sensed a prelude to a campaign for a double divorce. He wanted rid of her, but her fantasy-driven reaction loomed too unpredictable.

He opened the door, flattening himself behind it. She threw
off her coat, directing his attention to her torn stocking and scraped knees. She sobbed out her experience.

“You know that crippled animal,” she concluded, “I want you to give him what he deserves.”