Coney (16 page)

Lovable, huggable, Emily Brown
,

Miss Brown to you!

The only jazz he had heard was annoying noise from jukeboxes which hampered conversation. His foot began to keep time to be with her.

Leslie's voice was thin and scratchy like a worn record. It reminded him of a bat, swooping dangerously away from the notes and the beat, always recovering in time. She stood like an awkward schoolgirl, hardly moving her body, trying to hide her hands. She favored bending her neck slightly and singing upward. Between
choruses she snapped her fingers and encouraged the musicians with “Yes, yes,” or “Knock it down.” She received vigorous applause.

For the next two songs the tempo slowed and her voice soared, until it was no longer earthbound. He heard what he desperately sought in his poetry: the soul's voice. The language was mundane. Yet her plaint that her lover was
as cold as ice
was to know ice as Rimbaud had known the color of vowels. And when she sang:

Tell her she's a fool—

She'll say I know, but

I love him so. And that's

the way it goes, when a

woman loves a man
,

he knew he was in love. Their matchmaker, he later told her, had been a swinging Danish cat named Søren Kierkegaard, who had written:

“A poet is one who harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music.”

At the conclusion of her performance, she sat with him. He did not wish to speak, only to hear her voice. She had another show to do. He offered to take her home. She said that was not possible.

“Why?” he asked.

“Life don't set up that easy.”

“Even when a woman loves a man.”

She laughed.

“Even.”

After the second show, Willie claimed her.

“See ya, Aba,” she said.

“When? Where?”

Willie thrust a large, reddish palm at him. “Hold it, Boss Charlie, we ain't on the plantation.”

“Let's go, Willie,” she said.

They turned and walked away. Behind her back she wiggled a finger dialing a telephone.

O
UT OF EARSHOT,
M
OSHE
C
ATZKER WATCHED HIS WIFE LEAVE THE
shivah after justifying flight for Lockerman and Mecklerberg by banging her palms against her temples in an evocation of pain and misery surely copied from the kvetch-ridden Yiddish King Lear, as overacted by Maurice Schwartz.

He told Harry, who was in the clawlike grip of the widow, that he was working the late shift at the paper, and that later on he and his mother would meet at the Cafe Royal. He offered Harry a dollar for supper, an apology for abandonment. The widow swatted away his hand.

“He eats here. He stays here tonight, mine Heshele.”

On the street, he thought to invade the Half-Moon Hotel, then recalled a joke:

A
man catches his wife in bed with another man. The wife screams at the husband: “Aha, loudmouth is here, now the whole neighborhood will know!”

Dr. Sigmund Freud, bent double at the waist, legs long-striding for a vigorous turn of eccentric dancing styled on Groucho Marx, gasped: “Jokes are serious things.”

Catzker thrust his hands angrily into the pockets of his brown tweed overcoat, straining the threads. In the Norton's Point trolley, he imagined himself a tour guide extolling the simple but functional bungalow architecture and eruditely tracing the anthropological and cultural roots of quaint native customs such as wife
beating and drunken pissing out windows. Transferring to the subway, he dozed and dreamed a Victorian scene: his wife and child, seated on a loveseat suspended from the ceiling by a heavy nautical rope, swayed back and forth by pumping their legs as if on a playground swing.

“You know,” his wife said to his son, “you are not his child.”

His son answered, “That explains my low IQ.”

Catzker laughed, cheered and awoke.

Freud, a logger in high boots and plaid shirt, swung an ax at a tree, saying: “If a woman falls and no one hears, is her husband a cuckold?”

Manhattan, viewed from its namesake bridge, was a cemetery of giant tombstones. Near the Statue of Liberty an ocean liner, its enormity outlined by red and white running lights, moved slowly uptown.

On the side of a tenement building, he read once again, the comforting message that America had tamed its goyim: three-foot-high black letters which proclaimed:
Jesus Saves.

In Kiev, Jesus had been a killer. A Capone ordering deaths. His pained face, demanding revenge, drove the goyim wild. They burst out of church doors like crazed bloodhounds.

One Easter the scent had led to his home. His father met them, offering himself, a Lot protecting God's angels from the Sodomites. They accepted, but dragged Catzker with them to witness Jesus' work.

His father was ordered to remove all his clothes, except for his shoes, and to walk into a lake. If he could walk on the water, he would be spared. He waded into the icy water, stopping when it reached his knees to turn and impassively watch his son struggling to free himself, and shouting:
“ Tateh, Tateh!”
His father had placed his index finger to his lips, a familiar gesture of the studious man as always, requesting quiet, then continued slowly until the last strands of black hair floated like seaweed. Vanished, he gave his murderers no bubbles to savor.

In America, Jesus was downgraded to a slugger who broke a
few bones, a Polack or Irishman who spat a phlegm-filled “Christ killer,” or a wise-guy college kid who sniggered a tag line to
Jesus Saves
—“
and Moses Invests.”

From the Canal Street subway stop, he walked toward
The Morning Journal
, which occupied a five-story tenement at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge Plaza. The smells of Little Italy provoked a vision of the same murderous mayhem unleashed on Luigi Barbetta that had possessed him when, a year ago, he had overheard Velia on the phone arranging a tryst at the Half-Moon Hotel.

“Why can't I confront her?” he demanded of himself.

Freud, pouting, said: “Why don't you ask me?”

“OK, why?”

Freud shrugged: “Don't ask.”

Pushcarts piled with mozzarella cheese, hard salami, olives, and finocchio lined Mott Street. Beside them, old men wearing long black overcoats and wide-brimmed black hats seemed mourners awaiting a funeral procession. He vowed to write a story transferring the scene to ancient Egypt, where anachronistic Italian entrepreneurs sold food for the tomb of a soon to be buried Pharaoh. Jewish pyramids, Italian catering and Egyptian mummies, he thought,
talk about tour de force!

Attacking a slice of hot Sicilian dough, he burned the roof of his mouth. Did I, he asked Dr. Freud, do that on purpose? Freud, clad in Stalin's bemedaled finery, answered: “There are no mistakes, comrade.”

At Bayard Street, he turned east, thinking: a rotation of a heel and Naples becomes Kiev. He stroked the sleeve of his coat, bought at one of the secondhand clothes cellar shops. He had told his wife that it came from Wanamaker's, because she insisted that all secondhand clothes were stripped from the recently dead. She knew this because she could smell death on them.

A bearded man wearing a yarmulke stood halfway up cellar steps, lightly flicking the sleeve of a gray suit that hung from the street level railing to announce the establishment below.

“Fineh vayra
, ah sport,” he said.

Catzker slid the lapel through his thumb and index finger.

“Pretty thin,” he said. “Feels like from before the flood.”

The man pushed his yarmulke forward until it covered the rim of his forehead.

“A regular Georgie Jessel,” he said.
“Nu
, are you interested?”

“How do know it's my size?”

“If not, we got one that is. Come in, come in,” he said, sweeping his arm toward the blackness below as if offering the delights of a pasha's harem.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he told the entrepreneur.

“Tomorrow will be too late. Strike when the iron is hot,
boyaleh.
”

Freud, in session is his Vienna office, smiled, and said: “When your finger is cut, everything seems to touch it.”

At Manhattan Bridge Plaza, he stopped to admire the arch which, modeled after the Piazza of St. Peter's in the Vatican, was monumental enough to announce heaven, but was forced to settle for the Manhattan Bridge.

Across the street from the newspaper, the display windows of the many jewelry stores were crisscrossed by metal security bars. The street, which during the day was crowded with pacing Jews selling diamonds out of their pockets, was deserted except for one tiny man who wore a built-up shoe for a clubfoot. His eyes followed Catzker, but he said nothing.

“How do you know I'm not a customer?” Catzker said.

The man dismissed him, picking his nose and shooting a piece of dried snot skyward.

“I know,
boychik
, I know.”

A surge of anger broke sweat on Catzker's hands.

“I know better than you!” he shouted. “ And you don't fool me with that clubfoot. Hiding, hiding, hiding. You think I don't know.”

The man hopped and limped toward Canal Street. At a safe distance, he shouted:
“Meshuggener.”

“Don't ask me for a second opinion,” Dr. Freud said, writing out a prescription.

In the lobby of
The Morning Journal
, Fannie, the receptionist/ switchboard operator, was deciding whether to answer the phone. She insisted that she could identify a legitimate call from a crank or anti-Semite by the sound of the ring. If she did plug in, she would answer in English or Yiddish, again depending on her reading of the ring: “So, what is it?”

Fannie regarded him quizzically, which meant that she was trying to remember a message for him. Writing down messages was out of the question, she said, because it was a job for a servant.

“Someone called, Fannie?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Not so fast. You don't say hello?”

“Hello Fannie. Who called?”

“Aha.”

“Aha, who?”

“Aha, your wife.”

“So?”

“So, she's in a movie, a long double feature. She won't be home till late.”

“Did she leave a number?”

“Of what, the movie house?”

“I, too, am going to a movie.”

“Pish, tush.”

His fingers squeezed the brass knob of the entrance door but he could not alter its shape.

He walked quickly now, past dark shapes squatting or sprawled like beached manatees in the doorways of flophouses, pawnshops and restaurant equipment stores. An occasional grimy palm emerged as an emissary of nonsense sounds. Catzker did not turn his head. Just as he had written in the poem he had torn up years ago:

You passed him, the man on the street
,

As he shouted: “Hey, Mac, hey, Mac.”

Third Avenue walks have made you callous

But suppose pain lingered at your back.

Ah, he was just another bum;

You've been a sucker too many times.

Walk on with brisk steps of youth
,

But remember how and where you're going.

He asked Dr. Freud:
Why do I remember that silly poem that was early proof that I was not a poet?
Freud, a dandy in a silk cutaway, minced out of an English drawing room, intoning: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves …”

Under the harsh light of a pawnshop window, a samovar spread its girth like a golden guardian over harmonicas, scout knives and dented trumpets. He pressed his nose against the glass attempting to read the Russian pedigrees etched in medallions around its base. The spigot shocked him by its resemblance to the gargoyles that had strained to fly off the largest church in Kiev and swoop down upon him. His cheeks flushed as he remembered his mother's chapped lips absorbing his tears.

“Hoo, hah,” said Freud, clad in Gertrude Stein's tweed jacket and skirt, “unresolved oedipal is unresolved oedipal is unresolved oedipal.”

At Grand Street, he jumped back as a cat leapt from a garbage can. A leftover
dybbuk
, he thought, recalling that he had seen that play at the Neighborhood Playhouse a few blocks away. Possession by a whining, platonic lover, he thought,
some dybbuk!

Dr. Freud, propped up at a bar, said: “You also saw
Exiles
there.”

“A bad play,” Catzker said.

Freud, chewing on a long fat cigar, blew smoke rings that spelled
Poldy.

On Stanton Street, a line waited in front of the Salvation Army. America, Catzker thought, has even made an assembly line of salvation: first kill the stomach pains with beef stew, and then on the belt to the Bowery Mission next door for conversion to the capitalist
God, the giver of beef stew. He had no argument with it. Full stomachs made drowsy, pogrom-hungry souls.

A stick figure walked toward him. A fingertipless woolen glove removed a stained gray hat, uncovering brilliant, young red hair. The hat, bottom up, brushed Catzker's stomach.

“I'm needin' a nickel, Mac.”

“For what?”

“For food.”

“Isn't it free?”

“I can get it for free. But if I have a nickel I won't be needin' to beg. You know what I mean?”

Catzker did not. He considered dignity a capitalistic ruse that kept people at killing jobs and then preached that starvation was preferable to the indignity of accepting charity. They said his father had died with dignity. How much more dead would he be without it?

“Cheap kike,” the redhead shouted, “you'll be gettin' yours soon.” He turned, bent over and farted. The men on line shouted and applauded.