Coney (37 page)

He parted the curtains. A tug pulled a freighter up the East River toward the towers of
his
Triborough Bridge, where even at this early hour there was light traffic. He imagined the excitement of families getting a first-light start on
his
highways to
his
inland and seashore recreational facilities. He inhaled deeply the sweetness of his thoughts, moving phlegm to his windpipe. He coughed till red-faced.

The bridge's magnificence was a galling reminder of his lack of major projects. A park here, a park there, but nothing monumental whose grandeur and purpose would erase from memory what previously had existed. Perhaps, he thought, Coney Island.

5:36 AM (Warsaw time):
In the kitchen of her apartment on Nalevski Street, Rebecca Fishman Rabinowitz stuffed cleaned carp into an iron grinder and turned the wooden handle. She thought of Heshele standing beside her and crushing down on the fish. She missed him. How so sweet a nature had emerged from the bitter, tramp belly of her daughter was a mystery. It was as if he were the son of her younger daughter who had died during the plague in Warsaw. The wrong daughter had died.

As she brushed the last of the clinging flesh into a bowl, she heard distant thunder. She hoped it would not rain, as she wished to shop among the pushcarts on Mila Street. In America, Heshele often had gone shopping with her, proudly carrying two heavy bags.

The thunder came closer. It was a strange kind. It did not rumble but was sharp, like the crack of a million whips. Heshele's mother was petrified of thunder. As a child she had cowered in a basement or under a bed. In America she had run to the movies.
She fears God's wrath, Mr. Fishman would say. Why should an innocent child fear God's wrath? she had wanted to ask, but knew her place. Yes, she admitted to her daughter, even you were innocent and I loved you.

She went to the window to look for lightning. Suddenly the room was filled with harsh whistling that hurt her ears. She saw the building across the courtyard crumble as if put through a grinder. The floor shook. She looked down. The ceiling buried her.

5:46 AM (Warsaw time):
Horst Petzel, former radio operator on the ocean liner
Bremen
, scanned the Polish countryside from the cockpit of a Stuka bomber. The sky was a curved, blue canopy, unbroken by clouds or other aircraft. He was lost. Somewhere, his fellow pilots flew in tight formation. Perhaps they wondered if he had been shot down. More likely, they were shaking their heads and laughing: Petzel has blundered again.

Petzel had volunteered for the Luftwaffe rather than the more logical choice, the navy, because he imagined the sky a vaster sea. Petzel's soul was warmed by endlessness. On the
Bremen
, he would stare at the sea, imagining a perpetual journey in a portless world and whisper: “World without end, Amen.”

The sky had not disappointed. He sped from infinity to infinity, daydreaming under the spell of nothingness. His mind traveling, however, brought his wings dangerously close to the next plane in the group or, as now, lost the formation. He had been marked as a likely washout as a pilot, but the order to invade Poland had saved him.

As he had bombed Warsaw, the sight of a park had reminded him of a soft green field where he and his father had flown paper planes they had folded into being. During the reverie, Warsaw and his group had disappeared. His instrument panel flashed one remaining bomb.

He saw a village, flew over it, closed his eyes to make a game of it, and released the bomb. It spiraled down. Wood and flames defied gravity.

In the village, people hid, anticipating more planes and bombs. None came. The plane disappeared. It was an act of God, the people said, that only the house where the Antichrist had murdered dear Pavel Sienkewicz had been erased from the face of the earth.

5:51 AM:
Luigi Barbetta stood before an eight-foot-high tailor's mirror, practicing a speech to be delivered in three days, on Labor Day. He would be addressing his own union, but the speech would be carried on radio to most of the Eastern states. It would be the most important speech of his life.

He stopped to scrawl some revisions in the text. He missed Velia Catzker. She was a fast, dedicated typist who could decipher his handwriting. Why had she ruined their relationship? Women are not part-timers, he thought, regretfully. They want dinner and breakfast. He continued:

“In our union, we have Ukrainians, who sing in their native tongue
The Dnieper Weeps and Mourns
; German Meistersingers; Neapolitans, who parade the effigy of their patron saint, San Gennaro; Poles, who dance the polka and mazurka; Jews, who celebrate their escape from bondage in ancient Egypt; Swedes, who set a table of smorgasbord; Czechs, who place their hats in the kitchen sink to be filled with Easter eggs; Romanians, who celebrate on their native country's Independence Day, May tenth; Irish, who parade in praise of Saint Patrick; Greeks, who maintain the Old Country authority of the
koumbaros
, the godfather; thousands who celebrate, on
Columbus Day
, the
Día de la Raza
, the Day of the Spanish Race; and the Negroes, who have made Harlem a world-famous cultural attraction.”

He checked his list of ethnics to ensure against offense by omission, pleased with himself for hiring a college kid to research all that crap. Wait, the idiot had left out the Russians. God, there were thousands in the union. Back to the library with him. No, there was the celebration of the Russian New Year. Fuck the kid and his books. He knew life. He read on:

“We welcome, indeed, prize this wonderful mix of cultures. It
is from this diversity that we draw our strength. We are a living testament to our nation's motto:
e pluribus unum
—one from many.”

“Luigi,” his wife's mannish voice shouted from the bedroom, “who the hell are you talking to?”

He did not answer.

“Oh, you're at the mirror again. I'm surprised you can still look at yourself, you son of a bitch. I think I'll tell all your brothers and sisters what a miserable, whore-hopping shit you are. Think about that, great man! One day I will.”

5:52 AM:
Velia Catzker had heard her husband leave the house. The idiot is driving again, she thought. She lay in bed staring at the dirty ceiling that had not been painted in five years and then slowly begun to nod her head, as if it were regulated by a precise inner mechanism. She rose, put on a pink silk robe and pulled from the darkness of her closet an alligator-skin case, whose dimensions she knew precisely: nineteen inches long, twelve inches wide, four inches deep, weight, twenty-three pounds.

It was a twice-stolen object.

In 1913 her mother had snatched it from under a dozing Polish aristocrat who, before nodding off, had informed Mrs. Fishman, the only other person in the compartment of a train traveling from Cracow to Warsaw, that she, a contessa, shared compartments with no one. However, stupid railway officials had failed to provide her with her usual sleeping compartment, her due for even short, daylight trips. To prove her point, she had opened the case which, she said, always was carried by a stupid maid who had got herself lost in the railway terminal, and displayed the wine-red silk sheets and pillowcases. Mrs. Fishman had grabbed the booty and left the train at a stop outside Warsaw, confident that the woman could not describe her because she never had looked at her.

It had crossed the Atlantic and rested in the bottom of Mrs. Fishman's closet as an anti-gentile trophy. Velia had removed it during her mother's brief hospitalization for heart palpitations in 1936. It had never been missed.

She snapped open the two gold latches at either end of the case, uncovering three tiers of silver bottles, jars and flasks fitted snugly into a velvet lining. Dead center was her favorite, a modified Florentine flask, capped by an eggcup-size spirits holder screwed tightly into threading cut into the glass.

She lifted gently two silver-backed hairbrushes—one oblong, one round—and running them along her temples, felt soothed as if stroked by the delicate fingers of her favorite nun, Sister Lorna. She slowly rotated, each in its turn, three tall flasks and three deep silver jars, finger-tracing the words on their raised nameplates:
eau de cologne, lotion lys, crème pour les mains, poudre 1, 11, 111
. One nameplate was blank. There she had planned to etch:
cold cream
, the ointment that made her feel like a girl.

She slid out two square, alligator-skin–covered boxes. The deeper was reserved, awaiting diamond earrings, gold bracelets and hypnotic jeweled pins. The shallower box contained mascara and a brush that still clung to a few strands of the contessa's gray hair.

From a small box, she lifted an enamel, gold-lined thimble, on which was painted in polished reds, blues, browns and whites a pastoral pastiche of barns, mansions, graveyards, windmills and cloaked men on horses and donkeys. The scene, she was certain, depicted the countryside around her convent, confirming fate's role in placing the case in her hands. She lifted a silver pillbox, inset with an opal, and extracted a cough drop, which she had put there because of its appropriate golden color.

She held a pewter-encased magnifying mirror over a silver jar, revealing a delicately etched
Hermès
, and beneath, illegible to the naked eye, the artisan's signature:
St. Dupont, bis Rue de Dieu, Paris
.

She bunched together under the mirror all the flasks and jars. Each silver lid reflected the initial
V
, etched like a bird's wings soaring upward.
It had been fate
.

She threw the mirror against the wall, wanting to smash its faithless promise. But it struck sideways, settling on the floor under a rain of grimy plaster.

From her bureau drawer she removed a small object and put it into the pocket of her robe. She ran a very hot bath, took off the robe, stood sideways in front of the bathroom mirror and spit on her motherhood.

She eased herself into the hot water which rose to the tub's rim. Under the water she held her father's straight-edged razor-which, for reasons unknown to her, she had kept.

Lifting it, she pulled the blade from its imitation pearl sheath and ran her thumb along the cutting edge, feeling honed ferocity. Closing her eyes and crying softly as she had for many doomed, titled movie heroines, she drew the razor's edge across the mass of veins on her left wrist. There was an initial jolt of pain, which passed quickly. She rested her head against the porcelain rim and felt her life flowing out like ocean waves defying the retracting tide. She begged the nuns to take her into the sky, even though she had done this. They understood and beckoned.

5:52 AM:
As Leslie and Willie drove across the state line from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, Leslie lit a reefer and inhaled a long suck ending with a loud kiss. She carefully removed the flimsy paper from her lips and pushed it into Willie's mouth until he secured it. The virtuoso breath control that made him the envy of every jazz reedman pulled the orange sparks within a singe of his lips. Leslie removed the minuscule butt as Willie gulped, whalelike, the soporific smoke.

They were returning to New York from a gig in Philadelphia, where they had planned an overnight stay at a hotel until word had reached them that cops, hungry for headlines, would arrest them for dope possession. At two-thirty, after the last show, they had sneaked out of a back entrance of the nightclub and into their car, not daring to pick up the luggage at the hotel. Leslie wore her white gown; Willie, a one-button-roll electric blue band uniform. Dumping the marijuana was useless. The cops had plenty of their own to plant.

Now in New Jersey, Willie rammed the gas pedal heavily.

The car backfired, lurched and exploded forward. They felt no speed, the reefer having worked its soothing magic, bending reality into a slow-motion dream.

The car radio was tuned to
The Milkman's Matinee
, which sometimes played their records. As they approached the George Washington Bridge, the disc jockey cut in to read a bulletin reporting the imminent invasion of Poland.

Willie squealed with delight.

“Hee-hee, the white folks is after killin' one t'other.”

“What you got against white folks?” Leslie said, mocking him with minstrel-show delivery.

“Nothin', if they dead. Alive, they dangerous. Like a rattlesnake with no rattle.”

“I think I goin' to turn you in. You a Red or somethin'.”

“I just a somethin'.”

He slid his hand under her gown and probed from place to place.

They rushed up the stairs to her apartment, heated heroin and injected themselves. Omnipotent and immortal, they threw off their clothes and lay side by side, floating in the tide of a warm internal bath. Willie scratched his head and stared quizzically at his fingernails, searching memory.

“Didn't that DJ say Boss Charlie is killin' in Poland, and ain't that where your Jewboy stud come from?”

Leslie patted her pubic hair.

“You got it, lover.”

“How can you let a white cat fuck you?”

“How come you always beatin' on white chicks?”

“That's different.”

“Why?”

“Because it is.”

“You got a solid answer for everything.”

Willie cupped a hand on her breast.

“I ain't seen him around. You get dragged with his little white dick?”

“Other way round. He done disappeared.”

Willie popped her nipple between his fingers. He squeezed and massaged.

“What did the cat do?”

“He's a poet.”

“Like moon and June.”

“No, he want to rhyme moon and gun.”

“Can't do that.”

“Maybe not, but that don't stop him from tryin'. And he was makin' music too. I heard it.”

“Like what?”