Saint Mazie: A Novel (24 page)

They kept the theater running for two years at a loss, paying people out of their own savings. Supposedly they had plenty of money, she and her sister. Secret stashes of cash here and there. But still, to support an entire staff like that.

There was no line at the theater today, we sold three tickets in the morning, and that’s it. Same as yesterday, and the week before, and the week before that. I decided to check out the competition. Everyone was standing in line instead at the Bowery Mission.

I wrapped myself up in my warm cloak, and brought an extra pack of smokes with me, thought I’d hand them out if anyone was craving one. I hadn’t seen the lines up close yet, or maybe I’ve seen them and just wasn’t paying attention. I wore gloves and a scarf and a hat and the new wool winter cloak Rosie gave me in December, and I walked briskly, I swung my arms, and still I felt the chill. And I was thinking if I’m cold, how are those fellas doing?

I walked the line, nodding at the gents. So many of them had suitcases with them and if I didn’t know any better I would have thought they were heading on a trip. But instead they were just carrying whatever they had left, what little remained in their lives.

I knew I’d seen some of them around before. Some of them were hustlers, but some of them were just regular old Joes from the neighborhood, working stiffs without any work, just stiff now. I couldn’t name them, I couldn’t place them exactly, and I thought maybe I was even making it up, them being familiar. But then a couple of them tipped their hats at me, and a few of them said my name. How do, Miss Mazie. So I knew I was right. These were my customers, starving on the streets. I offered out cigarettes to the fellas, and some of them took more than one and I didn’t say a thing.

One of them touched my arm and I turned to him, offered him the pack.

He said: It’s me, Mazie. It’s William. From Finny’s. Do you remember me? It’s been a while, I know.

It was Hungry William, who had savaged my breasts a few years ago. The bites and the bruises, how could I forget him?

I said: Oh, William, of course. I’d know you anywhere.

I was girlish and flirtatious. I wanted to make him feel special right then. He took a smoke, told me that he was down on his luck like everyone else.

I said: Even the bankers have fallen.

He said: Especially the bankers. But I was not so much a banker as a bank clerk, I must admit to you. And now I’m nothing.

He started to cry, standing right there in the line. I felt all hot and teary too. I touched his face. I remembered him as so rough and arrogant, I couldn’t stand to see him as anything but that. There’s not much I ask for in this world anymore, but I want my memories to remain intact.

I said: William, don’t be sad. We had such a good time together, think about that.

He said: There’s no more good times left for me.

I pulled my flask from my coat.

I said: Drink this, it’ll warm you up.

He sipped from it but then other lads yelled for it, and it was gone in a flash. Everyone was sipping. I couldn’t deny them a thing. After the flurry of cigarettes and booze there was nothing left for them to do but stand there in the cold, some of them jumping up and down to keep warm, others hunched over, arms wrapped around themselves. I started to feel it, too, the cold to the bone.

I said: Listen, when you’re done here, you come see me at the theater, I’ll let you in for free. All of you lads, you come in, warm up, see a show, it’ll take your mind off your problems. In no time you’ll feel better. It’s on me, you hear?

They all let out a cheer. I know it’s just temporary, a temporary gift for them. I can’t have them in there every day. I’ll never get another decent customer in if I do. But for one day, I can let these fellas warm themselves under my roof.

Later on Rudy told me half of them slept through the entire movie.

I don’t know if we’ve ever had a fight before, Rudy and me, but letting the bums on the outside in, he isn’t having it. Early this morning, before I opened up the cage, he asked me inside. We sat in the balcony. I hadn’t been in the theater for nearly ten years. I’d forgotten what it looked like. Some theater owner I am. The screen was dark, and the lights were dim, and I was thinking that was for the best, that I wouldn’t want to look too close at anything. The air felt thick and dusty, like maybe I could hold it in my hand. But I could be wrong about everything. It smelled fine in there, not moldy, not boozy. And the chairs were still plush beneath me. Nice seats, high-class seats. Those seats were good enough for me and anyone else who walked through that door. Which was the point I was about to make.

Rudy said: We’re not a shelter or a flophouse, Mazie.

I said: I know we’re not. But they were the same as you and me six months ago. They had jobs and homes and money in their pockets. We’re no better than them. This city is just stricken.

Rudy said: People think we’re letting the bums run the place they’ll never come back again, even when they do have money.

I said: You know what the movies mean to you. Now think what it will mean to these fellas, too broke to have any kind of treat for themselves.

He said: You want to talk about what the movies mean to people? I don’t want to be rude but a lot of them, they’re not clean. It’s not their fault, but would you want to sit next to someone who doesn’t smell so great? You’ve saved up your pennies, some fella’s taking a girl he wants to impress, or this is your birthday present from your husband, say, and it’s a big night out on the town and, Mazie, you’re sitting in a theater filled with guys who haven’t washed in a week or two because they’re sleeping on the streets. I mean, who’s coming back for that? What’s going to happen to our business?

I heard him. I heard everything he said. It’s his business too, he’s put his whole self into it for so long. Front of the house is me, back of the house is Rudy. I know it. It’s the deal we made. But I’m breaking the rules.

I said: I’ll remind you it’s my business, Rudy.

He said: Mazie, please.

I said: It won’t be forever. And it won’t be all of them. Only the ones that can behave themselves.

He said: And how will you know?

I said: I’ve been looking at these lines of people for ten years. I know.

William’s been showing up every day to the Venice. Filching smokes off me, sometimes I’ll hand him change, and once I brought him a tiny bar of soap from home, didn’t say nothing, just slid it over to him. He nods, I nod. Rudy told me he snoozes quietly in the balcony for a show or two. I never even see him leave.

Sometimes I can’t tell if he’s drunk or just sad. It’s not a mystery I want to solve. I’ve no judgment either way, only I just want to know how to help him, if I can even help him. I know some of these lads you just have to give up on. But how can I give up on the one who sucked at my tit?

Haven’t seen William in a week. Asked around, nothing. Now he’s not even showing up in the mornings. I think I’ll walk the street tonight, see if I can find him. I don’t want him to get lost in the shuffle.

No William, but oh those streets, they’re good for no one at night. The bodies all around, not dead, but some of them seemed barely alive. Passed out, skin and bones beneath their filthy clothes. I gave them all I had in my pockets and kept digging to see if I could find more.

I found him tonight, in an alley off the Bowery, bleeding from his lip, a torn shirt, bleeding from there too. Some vomit down the front of him. He said he’d had work on a train and then he’d spent every cent he made, and what he didn’t spend a buddy of his had stolen from him the night before. And now here he was, bleeding in an alley. I waited with him till the ambulance came, and then I had a drink at Finny’s and then another, and then another, and I let a man walk me home and kiss me good night and touch my behind but I’d seen too much blood tonight to do any more than that.

Went to Tee’s church early this morning because I missed her. I sat through mass, and thought about her believing in those words. I confessed, and I did it with sincerity, and it felt good to speak some truth. Then I crossed myself in front of the shrine to see what the air felt like under my fingertips, if it changed, but it did not. The air is always the same. And I remembered I was still me.

Rosie’s back at her old tricks. It’s been months of it. I can’t move again. I can’t I can’t I can’t.

Oh, this block is dangerous now. Oh, that mission around the corner is bringing all the riffraff here. Oh, we should leave the city, move to Boston, move back to Coney Island, move uptown, move to Brooklyn, move where it’s safe and nobody’s hungry.

I said: Rosie, people are hungry all over this country.

She said: I know, I know! But that doesn’t mean I have to live among them.

I said: We used to live in a house with dirt on the floor. We ain’t no better than them.

She said: I don’t feel safe on this here block.

I said: You crazy old broad, you’re tougher than I am. Nothing scares you.

She said: If you were home more I’d feel safer. Especially at night.

I said: I can’t be home any more than I already am.

She said: I know where you go at night. I know where you go!

But how do I say to her that I need a drink at the end of the day? That a little hooch warms me, like I’m velvet on the inside and out. And that I need the company of men, that flirting feeds me better than her beef stew. Jesus, I need to remember what it’s like to be a woman and not just a bird in a cage. Tee’s gone now. Can I have this one thing? This one part of the day to be mine.

No one’s asking for change for a flop, it’s too hot. In the winter it’s all they dream of, getting warm. In the summer I’m noticing they don’t mind sleeping on the streets. It’s cooler outside than in one of those airless flops. They’ll take the dirt, they’ll take the sweat, over choking on the bad air. They’d rather pass out in the night breeze. Change for a meal, change for a drink, but no change for a home, not tonight anyway.

Jeanie called, said she’s been sick, hasn’t been able to dance, and crowds have been dying down. She’s in Chicago again, and that leg of hers is aching from the chill that rises off the big lake. I said I’d send her some money.

She said: That’s not why I called. I’m not begging for money.

I said: No one said you’re a beggar. I’m just offering. I have it. There doesn’t need to be a fuss about it.

She said: I don’t want you to think I can’t take care of myself.

I said: You’ve been away long enough that’s not even a question.

She said: I worry what you think of me.

I said: That’s a first.

I got sharp with her. I knew she was just playing a game with me. She’d called for money, plain and simple. I told her not to kid a kidder and she asked for a hundred and I sent it her way.

What happened was my father died very suddenly—this was in the summer of 1930—and it was devastating for everyone because he was such a good man, though he was not a young man, so at least we could all say, “Oh, he led a good life,” that sort of thing. Still, it was just awful, because he was so beloved. And then my mother died soon after that because she couldn’t live without him, and this was another devastation, because say what you will about my mother—and people had said plenty—she was a real force in the universe. Although no one was walking around saying, “Oh, she lived a good life,” because she never seemed particularly happy.

So then it was just me and Uncle Al in that tiny apartment. Even with less people in it, it still felt full. One day I asked Al if he thought it was haunted by my parents. I was just kidding around with him. And he said, “Of course. Where else would they go?” I don’t think I had fully recognized what was going on with Al, how bad he had gotten, because my mother was the one monitoring the situation; it was her full-time job. I’d been sent out more than a few times to pick him up if he was sleeping in a park somewhere, and I know that it made my mother feel more secure with me being back home, but I wasn’t home enough to know the complete reality. So when they passed, I found my whole life turned on its head. I had to watch my uncle Al. Now, he was lucid most days, very smart with his head in the books, always the intellectual, but also he was sleeping on the streets half the time. He was too skinny and he had awful bruises. And I just didn’t feel comfortable letting the man wither, especially after my parents had just passed. I’m a human being. We’re all human beings. We look after each other.

It was either I had to watch him, or I had to check him into a mental institution of some sort, and I wasn’t in the financial position to do that, not yet anyway. It would have had to be somewhere sort of high class, not some awful state institution. I knew Al would never survive in a place like that; I’d heard those operations were miserable, real torture chambers. No way, not for my uncle Al.

What I was doing was, I was working all day for Frederick French, who was a very famous and successful developer at the time, but of course someone you have never heard of before because you are a child. This was just before he started on Knickerbocker Village, but he had numerous other properties in development. I was at the bottom of the totem pole but that was fine, I just wanted to get my foot in the door. I didn’t want to work in ties for the rest of my life. How far can you really go with ties? So I’d work from very early in the morning till early evening, and then I’d go home, and if all was well in the world, Al’d be sitting there waiting for me. And we’d have dinner, and maybe we’d go for a stroll through the neighborhood, us bachelors, and maybe we’d have a drink. Also on nice nights we’d go to Washington Square Park so Al could play chess, and I’d smoke a cigar and watch him destroy those poor schmoes who dared to take him on. These were the best nights, and I had sort of resigned myself to this kind of life, at least as long as Al was alive.

But if all was not well with the world, I would come home, and there’d be no Al. And I’d have to hunt the streets looking for him. If I got lucky, he was down the block, or he was playing chess, or he was at the library. If I wasn’t lucky, it could take hours and hours, or I wouldn’t find him at all, and then I’d just be sleepless. It wasn’t that the cops were beating him up anymore, they’d sort of forgotten why they were even mad at him in the first place; they’d found someone new to pick on I guess. It was just that he was damaged goods. He was an easy target. Someone else could beat him up or rob him and he wouldn’t fight them off. And the streets were getting rougher. People were desperate. I lived in fear for Al.

One of the places I’d look for Al was Finny’s, which no longer exists of course. The last time I checked, and this was more than a few years ago, it was a head shop. But at the time Finny’s was one of those untouchable joints. Prohibition or not, there was always Finny’s. The cops liked it; I think that helped. I wasn’t much of a drinker before then, and I wasn’t after, but for that period of time, those darkest days with Al, I can admit I sought some relief in a glass of beer. Oh, I was depressed, I guess. I had work, I was one of the lucky ones, but it seemed like no one else did. People were starving on the streets. We were all sad.

On top of that it seemed like my youth was passing me by in service of this man who did not seem to want to be helped. Of course he wanted his freedom. Of course he did! Who among us would want to have to sit at home and wait for someone? But I’d had this dream that eventually I would settle down, I’d get married, I’d have kids, I’d build this life that wasn’t expected of me but that I expected of myself. But instead I was just chasing Al around every night.

Now the other person walking the streets checking on the lost souls, as you know, was Mazie. The early thirties, she was just starting to become the person she was going to be, if that makes any sense. I guess she was a bit of an eccentric too. I mean what kind of woman wanders the streets like that? At least that’s what everyone used to talk about at Finny’s. Sure, there was a hypocrisy there. Why was I allowed to and she wasn’t? Well she was doing it anyway, so it doesn’t matter what any of us thought.