Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  But you know, the waitress comes over and says will that be all and then you ask for the check and pay it.

  On that first Monday morning after my return my mother went off to her laundry job as she always had, which suggested to me her madness was self-governed, which meant it was not madness at all but just a passing version of the distraction I had always known. Then I happened to look into the wicker carriage and saw there arranged as in a nest the eggshells from our Sunday breakfast. So for the first time but not the last, I went from confidence to despair in the space of a second. I wondered, as I would wonder over and over as part of the whole irresolute cycle, if perhaps I should stop fooling myself and come to grips with the truth that something had to be done, that I had better get her to a doctor, have her examined and treated, before she got so bad she would need to be put in an asylum. I didn’t exactly know how to go about this, or whom to consult, but it seemed to me Mr. Schultz had an old widowed mother he took care of, perhaps he could help, perhaps the gang even had its doctors the way it had its lawyers. Anyway, who else could I turn to? I didn’t belong here anymore, I didn’t belong with the orphans or the people in the neighborhood, all I had was the gang, whatever my ultimate intentions and passing disloyalties, I was theirs and they were mine. Whatever desires I had—to abandon my mother, to save my mother—they all convened on Mr. Schultz.

  But I wasn’t hearing from him and I wasn’t hearing from them and all I knew was what I got from the papers. I would not go out now except to get the papers or my packs of Wings, I read every paper I could get my hands on. I bought them all, all day and all night, it began late at night when I went up to the kiosk under the Third Avenue El and bought the early editions of the next morning’s papers, and then in the morning I went to the candy store on the corner for the late editions, and then at noon I’d go over to the kiosk for the the early editions of the evening papers, and then in the evening I’d go to the corner and pick up the final editions. The government’s case seemed to me inargu-able. They had evidence on paper, they had accountants from the Internal Revenue Bureau explaining the income tax law, they were really laying it out. I was very nervous. When Mr. Schultz took the stand it seemed to me he was not persuasive. He explained that he had been given the wrong advice by his lawyer, that his lawyer had simply made a mistake, and that once another lawyer had explained the mistake he, Mr. Schultz, had endeavored to pay every penny he owed as a patriotic citizen, but this was not good enough for the government, which decided it would rather prosecute him. I didn’t know if even a farmer would believe that lame story.

  As I waited for the news I tried to see the good in either verdict as it might be handed down so as to try to prepare myself whatever happened. If Mr. Schultz went to jail we would all be safe from him for as long as he was put away. That was an undeniable good. Oh to think of being freed of him! But at the same time my faith in the quietly working clockwork of my given destiny would be shattered. If something as ordinary and mundane as government justice could tilt my life awry, then my secret oiled connections to the real justice of a sanctified universe were nonexistent. If Mr. Schultz’s crimes were only earthly crimes with earthly punishments, then there was nothing else in the world but what I could see, and whereas I had been humming in the conviction of invisible empowerments, it was my own mind only making them up. That was unendurable. But if he beat the rap, if he beat the rap, I was back in my lines of danger and trusting with a boy’s pure and shaking trust I would get through to the just conclusion of my chosen perils. So which did I want? Which verdict, which future?

  In the way I waited I realized my answer, I looked every morning in the back of the Times at the passenger ship sailings, I just wanted to know which ships they were and where they were going and that there were lots of them to choose from. I trusted Harvey Preston had worked things out, I was beginning to like him, he’d certainly come through in Saratoga and I saw no reason why he wouldn’t now. In my mind I watched her leaning on the railing with the moon out and staring at the silvery ocean and thinking of me. I imagined her in shorts and halter playing shuffleboard on the rear deck in the sun just the way the kids played it on the roof of the orphan home. If I had been wrong, if Mr. Berman and Irving and Mickey had only come to Saratoga to take her back or to talk to her on behalf of Mr. Schultz, well then what, after all, had been lost except Drew to me, except my Drew to me?

  In the Wednesday evening papers, the lawyers presented their summations, and on Thursday the judge gave his instructions to the jury, by Thursday evening the jury was still out and late Thursday night I went to Third Avenue and Mr. Schultz was the headline in Extras put out by both the evening and the morning papers: He was innocent of all charges.

  I whooped and hollered and jumped up and down and danced around the kiosk while a train rumbled overhead. You wouldn’t know from looking at me that I believed this was the man who just a week before had been intending to kill me. He was shown close up, broadly smiling at the camera in the Mirror, kissing his rosary in the Amencan, and holding Dixie Davis’s head in the crook of his arm and planting a big kiss on the top of it in the Evening Post. The News and the Telegram showed him with his arm around the foreman of the jury, a man in overalls. And all of the papers carried the remarks of the judge on hearing the jury’s verdict: “Ladies and gentlemen, in all my years on the bench I have never witnessed such disdain of truth and evidence as you have manifested this day. That you could on hearing the meticulous case presented by the United States Government find the defendant not guilty on all charges so staggers my faith in the judicial process that I can only wonder about the future of this Republic. You are dismissed with no thanks from the court for your service. You are a disgrace.”

  My mother saved the front page of the Mirror with Mr. Schultz’s smiling face and folded it so that just the picture showed, she laid it down in the carriage and brought a threadbare blanket up to its chin.

  And now I will tell of the revels that went on for three nights and two days in the brothel on West Seventy-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues. Not that I knew at any given time whether it was night or day because the red velour drapes were pulled across every window and the lights were always on, the lamps with their tasseled shades, the cut-glass chandeliers, and the particular hour was not something very important after a while. It was a brownstone and one of the sights I remember is of a trembling slightly aged whore’s puckered behind as she ran up the stairs shrieking in mock fear while this hood tried to catch her but fell on his face instead and slid down the flight of stairs face down and feet first and arms up. Most of the women were young and pretty and slender, and some of them got tired and left and were replaced by others. Also there were a lot of men I didn’t recognize, this was supposed to be for the top gang members but word had gotten around and the unshaven faces kept changing, and on the second night or day I even saw a cop in his undershirt with his suspenders holding his blue pants up and a whore with his braid cap set awry on the back of her head kissing his bare feet, toe by toe.

  Women were laughing and getting playfully pinched and tickled by fearsome men, but showing no fear and in fact going off with them up the stairs, like multiples of Drew in their fearlessness of taking killers into themselves. I was stunned by this transformation of the value of feeling into numbers, in a corner of a room I saw Mr. Berman’s sly laughing face appearing through his cigarette smoke, and in the big downstairs parlor three or four women were draped all over Mr. Schultz, on the arms of his chair, in his lap, nibbling on his ears, begging him to dance, he laughed and fondled them and pinched them and handled them, there was a profusion of flesh and as I looked it didn’t seem to be organized according to individual persons but was all jumbled together, profusions of breasts and constellations of nipples, cornucopie bellies and asses and tangles of long legs. Mr. Schultz saw me looking and appointed a woman to take me to bed, she reluctantly disentangled herself and led me upstairs, and there was a good deal of attend
ant merriment on the part of my colleagues, which turned the occasion into something unpleasant for me and for the woman too, who was seething with anger because she felt demeaned by my age and unimportance. Both of us could hardly wait to be finished, this was not the party, the party was elsewhere, it was appalling to me how unsexy sex could be humped up with such scorn and impatiently delivered, I had an actual Manhattan to drink afterward, it at least was sweet with a crunchy cherry at the bottom of it.

  The madam who ran things stayed in the kitchen on the ground floor in the back, a very nervous woman whom I sat with and talked to for a while, I felt sorry for her because Mr. Schultz when drunk had slugged her for some imagined offense and had given her a black eye. Then he’d apologized and given her a new hundred-dollar bill. She was a tiny woman he called Mugsy maybe because she so resembled the little Pekingese she held in her lap, she had a little pug-nosed button-eyed face with highly curled but very thin red hair and a small skinny body dressed in a black dress and stockings which drooped a little at the knees. She had a low voice, like a man’s. I talked to her while she held a slice of raw steak over her eye. In the oven of the stove were all the guns people had to turn over when they arrived. She would not leave the kitchen I think because she didn’t want anyone to come in and get a gun and start shooting up her house, although what she could have done to prevent it, this little tiny lady, I can’t say. She had a staff of Negro maids who kept things going, changing linens, emptying ashtrays, collecting empty bottles, and she had delivery boys, also colored, coming in the back door with cases of mixer and beer and booze, and cartons of cigarettes and hot dinners in metal containers from steakhouses and hot breakfasts in cardboard cartons from neighborhood diners, she was tense but had things very well organized, like a general who had planned well and deployed all his troops and had only to hear them report from time to time how the battle was going. I juggled some hard-boiled eggs in their shell and she was so sure I was going to drop them that she laughed with appreciation when I didn’t, she took a liking to me, she wanted to know all about me, what my name was, where I lived, and I said yes, and how had a nice boy like me come to this sordid profession, which made her laugh again. She pinched my cheek and offered me chocolates from a fancy painted metal box which she kept by her side, it showed scenes of men in knee britches and white wigs bowing to ladies in big hoop skirts.

  But this Madam Mugsy understood my inclination to linger in the kitchen for what it was, and with great delicacy and tact she suggested that she had something special for me, that most desirable item, a fresh girl, by which she meant a young one fairly new to the trade, and she made a phone call and within an hour I was up in a small quiet bedroom on the top floor with what indeed was a young girl, light-haired round-faced highwaisted and somewhat shy and rubbery to the touch, who lay with me through the night, or the quiet hours that passed for night, and fortunately needed as much sleep in her youth as I needed in mine.

  I was too self-conscious and unsure of myself and sad to really enjoy these revels. Up in the Bronx as I’d waited for the trial to end I had the avid desire to reconnect with the gang, I felt love for every one of them, there was a kind of consistency to their behavior that made me feel grateful for their existence, but now that I was reunited with them the other side of that gratitude was guilt, I looked to the faces of Mr. Schultz and the others to see how I fared there, in a smile of gold teeth I read exoneration one moment, retribution the next.

  But then, I suppose it was by the second night, I realized I wasn’t the only one in a less than ecstatic state, Mr. Berman had entrenched himself in the front parlor and sat reading the papers and smoking and sipping brandy, he went out a lot to use public pay phones, and while Lulu was still exercising his uncouth being upon a selection of ladies not one of whom failed to complain to the management, Irving absented himself rarely, and only gave way to the joy of the occasion by taking off his jacket, loosening his tie, and rolling up his sleeves and serving as bartender to all the close and casual freeloaders of the criminal trades. I finally realized that Mr. Schultz’s chief lieutenants were waiting, that is all they were doing, and that the celebration was by the second day not a joyful party of men who had been through something together but a sort of statement to the profession, a business announcement that the Dutchman had returned, and all the true merriment and joy and relief of victory had given way to the hollow gaiety of a public-relations event.

  Even Mr. Schultz sought now the places in the house for the quieter pleasures of reflection, and I happened to pass one of the bathrooms where he was sitting in a hot soapy tub puffing a cigar into the steamy air and enjoying a back wash from the madam, Mugsy, who sat on a wooden stool beside the tub and talked and joked with him as if he hadn’t slugged her the day before.

  He glanced up and saw me. “Come in, kid, don’t be shy,” he said. I sat down on the lid of the toilet bowl. “Mugsy this here is my pro-to-jay, Billy, you two met yet?” We said we bad. “You know who Mugsy is, kid? You know how far we go back? I’ll tell you,” he said, “when Vince Coll was on the rampage, gunning for me all over the Bronx, and going crazy looking for me where do you think I was all the time?”

  “Here?”

  “Except then I had my house on Riverside Drive,” the madam said.

  “Coll was so dumb,” Mr. Schultz said, “he wouldn’t know about the finer things of life, he didn’t know what a high-class whorehouse looked like, and while he’s going around shooting everything that moves, hitting bars and drops and clubhouses, the dumb fuck, I am snug like a bug in a rug at my Mugsy’s taking pleasure and biding my time. Sitting in the bathtub and getting my back washed.”

  “That’s right,” the woman said.

  “Mugsy’s as square as they come.”

  “I better be,” she said.

  “Get me a beer, would you, doll?” Mr. Schultz said lying back in the tub.

  “I’ll be back,” she said and dried her hands on a towel and left the room, closing the door.

  “You having a good time, kid?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s important to get that clean country air out of your lungs,” he said grinning. He closed his eyes. “Also to get your heart back in your balls, where it belongs. Where it’s safe. Did she say anything?”

  “Who?”

  “Who, who,” he said.

  “Mrs. Preston?”

  “I think that was the lady’s name.”

  “Well she did tell me she liked you very much.”

  “She said that?”

  “That you have class.”

  “Yeah? Comin’ from her,” he said and a pleased smile came over his face. He kept his eyes closed. “In a better world,” he said. “If this were a better world.” He paused. “I like the idea of women, I like that you can pick them up like shells on the beach, they are all over the place, little pink ones and ones with whorls you can hear the ocean. The trouble is, the trouble is …” He shook his head.

  The steamy water and the tile did something to his voice, so that even as he spoke softly it hollowed out as if we were in a cavern. He was now staring at the ceiling. “I think you only fall for someone, what I mean is the only time it’s possible is when you’re a kid, like you, when you don’t know the world is a whorehouse. You get the idea in your mind and that’s it. And for the rest of your life you’re stuck on her, and you think every time you turn around she’s this one or that one who comes along and smiles like her and fills her in. We have that first one when we’re stupid and don’t know any better. And we walk away, and she becomes the one we look for for the rest of your life, you know?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Hell, she was a dignified girl, Drew. Not ordinary ginch at all, nothing cheap about her. She had this lovely mouth,” he said pulling on his cigar. “But you know the expression ‘summer romance’? Sad to say it was no more than that. We both have our lives we had to go back to.” He glanced at me to see my response. “I have a busine
ss to run,” he said. “And I have survived in this business because of my attention to business.”