Seventh Avenue

by Norman Bogner

  In the middle of the night, Neal got out of bed to go to the bathroom. The scene he had witnessed between Latkin and Sports earlier in the day had floated out of his mind. Apart from the fact that Sports owed Latkin a debt that he could not pay, Neal had not listened to or been particularly interested in the terms of the treaty dictated by Latkin. What had impressed him most about the scene was that Latkin had confirmed his own suspicions about Sports: namely, that he was a gutless weakling, who had married Rhoda for a number of reasons, none of them remotely connected with the ideal of love that sustained Terry and his father. He had made a desperate effort to discover some positive virtues in his mother’s relationship with Sports, but he could not imagine what had first drawn them to each other nor what kept them together. Sports was a dull, thoughtless man, not physically attractive, passively ignorant, with a neutral personality, a total lack of interest in every human activity except gambling, and an active contempt towards Rhoda that he did not disguise. There had been times when Neal had wanted to go to his mother and ask: “Why, why him?” But he had been convinced beforehand that the question would only serve further to complicate their domestic life, so he slipped into the apathetic, backsliding atmosphere that prevailed in the apartment. He asked no questions and sought no counsel. On one point only could he muster any passion, and this came about when he saw with his own eyes that Rhoda was giving Sports money. He resented having guessed Sports’ motive before he married Rhoda. If he was capable of this induction why couldn’t Rhoda see it? What prevented her from seeing what was so evident? How was it that he had been cleverer than his own mother? He couldn’t understand why she had walked into a bear trap, and what was worse, remained there of her own free will. The complexity of their relationship was beyond him, but he felt certain that even when he was older and more experienced it would still seem to him an act of gratuitous destruction.

  Someone was running the water in the bathroom, and there were voices coming from the living room. He tiptoed down the long dark corridor and peeked into the room. He saw about fifteen men on their knees chanting and whispering to each other as a man rubbed a pair of dice together and then flung them against the corner of the woodwork. The man who rolled the dice scooped up a pile of money that was placed in the center of the floor, and another man was busy counting money, which he held tightly in his fist. Sports ambled around the circle dropping ash from his cigarette on the carpet, and Rhoda walked in carrying a tray of glasses and ice in a pitcher. The men called out “scotch” or “rye” and Sports, acting as bartender, poured out the drinks, Rhoda appeared to be dazed as she stood in a corner of the room watching the men skirmishing round the pile of money, Neal stifled a scream when somebody took his arm and shook him.

  “You lost or somethin’, sonny?”

  It was the man who had been in the bathroom.

  “I wanted to go to the toilet.”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s free now. You can go, then hit the sack.”

  “And if I don’t . . . ?” he started to ask defiantly.

  “Just do as you’re told,” the man said, increasing his pressure on Neal’s arm so that his muscle began to throb.

  “It’s my house and if you don’t let me go I’ll call the cops,” Neal said.

  He was shocked when the man released his pressure and then suddenly smacked him. The sound of the slap frightened him more than the actual pain, and he bit his lip angrily, refusing to cry.

  “You better learn some manners, sonny. When you make threats, back them up.”

  “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Rhoda demanded as she came towards them. Neal was rubbing his face.

  “This your kid, lady?”

  “That’s right. What’ve you done to him?”

  “He threatened to call the cops. You better have a talk with him. I’m not gonna have a kid louse up the whole setup.”

  “Just leave him alone.”

  Sports heard their voices over the din and switched on the light in the corridor.

  “What’s up?”

  “A little trouble with the brat,” the man said.

  “Neal, you go back to bed,” Sports ordered.

  Neal glared at him angrily, and Sports turned away.

  “I’ll go back to bed, but not because you say I should.” He turned to his mother who had the flat of her hand pressed against the wall as though for support. “He’s a worm, Mom. A worm!” Neal said and strode down the corridor back to his room.

  “He’ll tell Jay,” Rhoda whined as Neal closed his bedroom door.

  “Who’s Jay?” the man asked.

  “Never mind. I’ll straighten it all out,” Sports said soothingly.

  Jay now never came up to the apartment when he had to meet Neal. He pressed the house phone buzzer twice promptly at ten o’clock every Sunday morning, and Neal would shoot out of the apartment and see him in the lobby five minutes later. This time Neal had not answered Jay’s signal as he usually did, by pressing the buzzer back twice, but had asked him over the phone to come up. Jay was disquieted by this change in their routine. Neal opened the door of the elevator for him.

  “Hi, Neal, aren’t you ready yet?” he asked. He held his watch up to the light. “I’m not early.”

  “I need you, Daddy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The suitcase is too heavy for me.”

  “Suitcase? What suitcase?”

  “I’m coming to live with you.”

  Jay was taken aback and walked with Neal down the darkened hallway to the apartment door, which was held open by a door stopper.

  “I don’t like to go inside,” he said. “Your mother’s still probably sleeping.”

  “The valise is in the foyer. I dragged it in myself, but I can’t lift it.”

  “What’s all this about, Neal? You know you just can’t come and live with me without your mother’s permission.”

  He studied Neal’s anxious face and grew increasingly distressed when he switched on the light.

  “What’s happened to your face?”

  Neal struggled to lift the case, but Jay pulled his hand away.

  “I asked what happened. Your eye’s bruised. Did anybody . . . ?” his voice rose on the tail of the unfinished question.

  “Please, please, Dad. I’ll tell you what happened in the car.”

  They pulled into a diner on the East Side for breakfast. Although Terry was waiting for them, Jay thought it would be better to get the whole story from Neal first so that he could devise a plan by the time he got back to the hotel.

  “We’ll just have orange juice and coffee now. Terry wants to take you to a place in Westchester that specializes in pancakes.”

  Neal sipped his juice, and his face lost that long doleful expression that had alarmed Jay during the course of their drive.

  “I don’t think it’s a very good idea for you to live in a hotel. Maybe we’ll go househunting when Terry’s feeling better.”

  “I’m not going back there,” Neal said with finality.

  “You won’t have to. If your mother wants to get tough, I’ll take her to court. It could last a couple of years, and she hasn’t got the kind of money to do that. I better ring my lawyer.”

  “Will I be able to stay with you?”

  “Of course you will,” he said, but he wasn’t at all certain that he could keep his word. He telephoned Nathan Clay and arranged a meeting at his hotel for two o’clock that afternoon.

  When they got to Jay’s hotel, Terry was waiting for them in the lobby. She wore a fully cut mink coat that concealed the fact that she was in her eighth month. Neal rushed up to her and embraced her, and she rubbed her hands through his hair. Her eyes were bright, and she kissed Jay on the cheek.

  “I thought my two men were standing me up. Did you oversleep, Neal?”

  “No, we stopped off for a quick coffee, and I had to phone my lawyer,” Jay said.

  “Why, what’s wrong?”

  “Neal’s goi
ng to come and live with us . . . I hope.”

  Her eyes opened wide with surprise and Jay’s mouth trembled. As he stood between them, he had a shrinking, constricting sensation in his throat, for he had not prepared her for the news, and he wondered how she would react. He closed his eyes for a second, and when he opened them, he saw her holding Neal’s hands and dancing round him in a circle.

  “That’s marvelous!” she exclaimed, and he sensed that her pleasure was as genuine as his. He didn’t know what he would have done if she had shown any reluctance, but he could see from the expression of open joy on Neal’s face and her warm acceptance of him that a real bond of affection existed between them.

  “Well, are you going to tell me all about it, or not?”

  “Let’s have some breakfast,” Neal said.

  “Sure, if we can persuade this elderly gentleman to drive us up to Larchmont.”

  Neal sat in the back of the car and stared out of the window at the mountainous snowdrifts in Central Park. Sunday morning in New York was quiet, and the empty park had a whiteness and peace that made him feel secure. Every now and then, Terry would turn around to him, smile and squeeze his hand as she listened to Jay’s account of the life Neal had been coerced into, and had submitted to, as a consequence of Rhoda’s remarriage. When he had finished, she kissed Neal on the forehead and said:

  “Don’t you worry, baby. Not anymore. It’s all going to be okay.”

  After a large breakfast of Southern-style buckwheat pancakes and sausages, during which Jay frequently left the table to make telephone calls, they started back to the city. Neal felt much more confident, and he tried to remember bits of Terry’s letter, which he had not understood entirely. He now realized that he was seeing for himself with his own two eyes what she meant. They had never discussed the letter, since Neal had accepted her at their first meeting, which took place at the hotel after he had debarked from the train. He had grown three inches over the summer, his posture was better, and he had acquired a firmer grip on his circumstances or so he thought. After his initial period of rebellion, he submitted to the rigorous training at the camp, and he learned an important lesson: in order to combat a system you have to succeed within the system because then you know its weaknesses. He won the award for the most outstanding camper in his age group, and when he got the medal back to his bunk he had crumpled up the bit of soft copper in his fist and flushed it down the toilet. He had a new strength, which he hoped would carry him over the winter with his mother, but Sports was the imponderable. He could not prevent Rhoda from pandering to his sickness - and gambling was a sickness - because Sports was Rhoda’s sickness, and her ministrations for him worked in reverse. She had been trying to save herself, and Neal had been left stranded like an alien at the border without a passport. He barely spoke to either of them, for they were seldom around, and he preferred solitude to their company. It occurred to him that despite Terry’s remark: “Morality isn’t a question of what other people think but what I do myself,” that her situation was in a sense similar to his mother’s. And yet there was a basic difference that he could not puzzle out. There was something right about what she had done, and something incontestably wrong about his mother’s relationship with Sports. Was it in the quality of the man or was it the very nature of love?

  “Jay, pull up, will you?” Terry said.

  “I’ll drop you at Radio City.” He seemed surprised.

  “Neal and I’ll have a walk. A pregnant woman’s got to get her quota of exercise. We can do some window shopping.”

  He stopped at the corner of Fifty-Fifth Street, and Fifth Avenue and said:

  “I’ll see you when?” - he looked at his watch – “Four-thirty?” She leaned over and kissed him, and he rubbed his hand affectionately across her cheek. “It’s better if I see them on my own. Look after her for me, Neal, will you?”

  She took Neal’s gloved hand and interwove it with hers.

  “He’s my squire. I like them young.”

  At two o’clock promptly the doorbell rang and Clay’s assistant, a youngish man called Brewster, answered it.

  Rhoda entered first. She had on too much pancake makeup, and the flesh of her neck and throat had a chalk-like texture that made her face unreal, as though she could peel it off. She was wearing the mink coat that Jay had given her years before, and it hung on her, as shapeless as a gunnysack. She might have just dashed out of a restaurant and grabbed someone else’s coat. Sports slunk in behind her wearing a tweed coat with raglan sleeves that were too short for him. He stared at the carpets and when he moved his eyes, he concentrated on the blank wall over Jay’s shoulder, then his eyes roved to the bedroom, as though he were doing a quick plan of the layout.

  “Now what’s all this about?” Rhoda’s voice was loud and harsh. She always shouted, Jay remembered, when she was frightened.

  “I think you remember Mr. Clay, who handled things for me when we drew up the settlement. And this is Mr. Brewster who deals with the divorce actions.” Brewster nodded his head.

  “Don’t tell me it’s not legal?” Sports said.

  “It’s legal all right,” Clay said, rubbing a hand over his paunch and making a face to indicate that he suffered from dyspepsia.

  “So you got your ambulance chasers,” Sports said. “If you give me warning, I would’ve had a few boys over. They don’t know from legal stuff, but they got other things they use to win arguments.”

  “Are you threatening us?” Brewster asked politely.

  “Take it as you like, pal.”

  “Shut up, Sports,” Rhoda said. “Now what’s this crap about Neal coming to live with you?” She flourished a document in Jay’s face. “I’ve got this signed by the judge and I brought it along in case you forgot.”

  “It’s meaningless,” Clay said.

  She flushed and was about to shout something, when Jay pointed to a chair, and said: “Keep calm, Rhoda. Take a seat, and we’ll talk about it.”

  “What’s to talk about?”

  Clay rubbed his hands together and sat down at a table in the center of the room and opened his briefcase. “I’ve got a copy of the custody order.”

  “That and a dime gets you a ride on the subway,” Sports said out of the side of his mouth.

  “Maybe you ought to hear what I have to say before you waste all your wisecracks?” Clay said sullenly.

  “Let’s hear,” Rhoda said.

  “Well, there are two possibilities: either we notify the police that you’re operating a gambling house; and the debt you’re attempting to repay and the people who are forcing you to repay it are indicted by the grand jury, or we settle the matter amicably.”

  “Now just a minute, who told you that?” Rhoda protested.

  “Neal,” Jay replied.

  “Well, he’s a liar. He always tells lies about me. I’ll tell you something for nothing, Jay. He loves you because you’ve got the money and for no other reason.”

  “We’re digressing,” Clay said.

  “What do you mean, ‘digressing’?” Sports asked.

  “Moving from the point.”

  “He’s told you a pack of lies,” Rhoda insisted. “Is there a law against having a few friends over for a quiet card evening?”

  “You’re a liar, Rhoda.” Jay paused. “Why’s his eye black?”

  “Simple,” Sports retorted. “When I walked into the bathroom, the door hit him in the face because he was leaving at that moment.”

  “You mean to say you believe the story he cooked up?” insisted Rhoda.

  “He has no reason to lie. Did he make up Latkin, or does he exist? It’s a simple matter for us to check,” Jay replied hotly. “Rhoda, use your head. If we tell the police, and you’re arrested, you’ll lose every right to legal custody. And I suppose you’ve got to think of your husband as well, not that he deserves it. A shylock always has people working for him, and they’ll put you both in the hospital, or even worse.”

  She began to cry, and
the streaks of makeup on her face cracked like soft earth in a heavy storm. In a moment, her face was unrecognizable and all the men in the room, except for Jay, turned away. He poured her a drink and gave her a handkerchief. She continued to sob, and when she tried to force the drink down her throat, she made a rasping gurgling sound.

  “You can’t look?” she shrieked. “Turn around, Sports, and see what I look like! You bastard. It’s for you that I called my own kid a liar.” She threw Jay’s handkerchief at him as he moved to take the glass from her. “And you, it’s all on account of you, that I am what I am. Dirt you’ve made out . . . my sister . . . we’re all dead . . . we’re just waiting to be buried. All the time you win, why you? What makes you a winner?”

  “What have I won, Rhoda? Two broken homes, a child that’s dangling in thin air, who can’t fall because there’s no one to catch him? I’m trying to catch him, Rhoda. You can see that?”

  She cleared her voice and swallowed the remaining whiskey.

  “I’m sorry, Jay. I had no reason to say . . . You’ve tried to be fair.”

  “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars in cash so that you can get out of this.”