“That’s the name of a band?”
Konnie ignored his question, but she did turn off the radio. He knew more about odd band names than she suspected: Maia had been a fan of Avocado Unicorn at one point, but at least they’d performed vaguely in the genre of folk rock. He’d listened to a CD once, at his daughter’s insistence: the group sounded like Peter, Paul, and Mary on amphetamines. Also, years earlier, a patient had brought him a recording of her jazz quartet, oddly billed as Hedy Lamarr Was a Communist. He’d been so puzzled by the provocative name, which the patient refused to explain, that he’d actually gone to the branch library—this was in the pre-Internet era—to check out a biography of the actress. Miss Lamarr, it turned out, had been many things: a shoplifter, a pill popper, a plastic surgery addict—but not a communist. Konnie with a K, he realized, as he considered sharing this anecdote, had probably never heard of Hedy Lamarr.
“You know I used to be a musician,” Millard said.
The girl looked up, mildly intrigued.
“I played a mean saxophone,” he lied. “I did gigs with Frankie Valli, Jefferson Airplane . . . You’ve never heard of them.”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“The Rolling Stones. You’ve heard of the Rolling Stones, right?”
“You did not play with the Rolling Stones.”
“I opened for them,” said Millard. “Milwaukee Coliseum. 1965.”
He had no idea whether this venue existed—but hopefully neither did she.
“Oh, you only opened for them,” said Konnie.
She sounded rather underwhelmed by his fabrications—as though, in her world, opening for the Rolling Stones ranked alongside finding a prize in a Cracker Jack box. Initially, his goal had been to lure her into the same trap she’d sprung for him, making up bands and arenas until she claimed familiarity with nonexistent rock stars, but her lack of interest undermined Millard’s own. Besides, he had no gift for this sort of deception. Soon he fell silent, leaving her with his trivial lies, and entirely forgot about their game. They crossed the George Washington Bridge again, following the whims of the magic lady, and Konnie pressed the front of the meter to halt the double rate. If the girl were duplicitous in some matters, she appeared scrupulous in others.
They approached the Grand Concourse from the Cross Bronx Expressway. Millard recalled when the majestic boulevard had been the Jewish Champs-Élysées, before Robert Moses sawed his six-lane highway through East Tremont. He’d lived in the penthouse of the DeWitt Clinton from the age of two until he turned fourteen—and never, he sometimes reflected, has a child lived such a life of sheltered innocence. There were distant calamities: Litvak cousins butchered by Einsatzgruppen, an uncle named Sam who was cared for at an asylum on Staten Island. Years later, following Fannie’s death, and long after Sam’s, Doris had told him about her brother’s breakdown, which sounded like bipolar mania rather than schizophrenia—treatable today with an arsenal of mood stabilizers. But Sam had rarely been mentioned during Millard’s boyhood, where his father preached mostly Democratic politics and an idealistic brand of Zionism. When they sang “Next Year in Jerusalem” at Passover, none of his relatives meant that literally. Why flee to a Middle Eastern desert when you already lived in the borough of milk and honey?
“I grew up in the DeWitt Clinton Building,” he said as they exited onto Jerome Avenue. “This used to be one of the most expensive addresses in New York.”
“Could have fooled me,” said Konnie.
The neighborhood looked in better shape than he’d expected. He’d taken Isabelle and Maia to see his former haunts during the 1990s, when the storefronts had been boarded up and the sidewalks caked with crack vials. They hadn’t dared to get out of their car—and he’d even insisted they duck to the floor until he returned to the expressway, fearful of stray bullets, although it was midafternoon on a Saturday. Now the streets teemed with children again: Latino kids purchasing snow cones, cavorting in the spray of fire hydrants. Yet these youngsters were chaperoned—sometimes by mothers who looked half Maia’s age. In Millard’s day, his friends had claimed free roam of the streets without supervision.
They turned onto 177th Street. Millard scanned the storefronts: an Ethiopian hair-beader, a check-cashing establishment, a bodega flying a Dominican flag. B’nai Yitzhak, the opulent, three-story synagogue where Millard had attended weekly Torah lessons and collected quarters to plant trees on kibbutzim now housed an Evangelical church. A banner hanging behind a baroque gate proclaimed: “Some Questions Can’t Be Answered by Google.” From a second-floor window, another canvas declared: “Salvation guaranteed—or we’ll return your sins.” At least the pastor had a sense of humor. What would Rabbi Kohlberg have said, Millard wondered, if the old man could see what had become of his sanctuary? (Rabbi Kohlberg, who’d insisted that Palestine had been empty before the Jews arrived, who’d refused to permit women wearing pants into the tabernacle.) But Rabbi K. was long gone, and a few years earlier, Millard had read an article in the New Yorker called “The Great Tree Fraud”—which reported that the tzedakah he’d raised for arboreal renewal in the Holy Land had largely been diverted. So let the fundamentalists have the place, thought Millard. Maybe they’d do some good with it.
Not that he wasn’t saddened by the changes. Virtually nothing remained of the vibrant Jewish and Italian neighborhood that he remembered: Homberg’s Groceries, Mrs. Rudnick’s cigarette and candy shop, Plotnick’s Eggs & Dairy. By the time his family had left for Hager Heights, there were already signs of incipient decline: blacks and Puerto Ricans encroaching north from Melrose and Mott Haven, entire blocks cleared for the pylons of the expressway. But it was a few years later that witnessed the collapse: the shuttering of the Art Deco movie houses, the Third Avenue El sold for scrap. And then Co-op City opened, offering holdouts the opportunity to own their own apartments, and that was the nail in the coffin lid. His aunt Fannie had used a more crass description, one that still made Millard cringe: “The shvartzes moved in and we got out.” But who could blame the old woman for her prejudices? She’d been born in a shtetl and entered girlhood on Orchard Street; everyone she met, from the midwife who delivered her to the mortician who ultimately embalmed her, was an Ashkenazi Jew. All she knew of nonwhites came from listening to Amos ’n’ Andy—and even they were white! In contrast, his mother had grown up in Yorkville, under the care of a black nanny, with whom she later exchanged cards at holidays, and whose husband she visited in the hospital. Dora had come to Millard’s wedding, sporting a stylish lime hat. She’d given him a $50 check—quite a sum for a present in 1965—second only to his own father. He’d felt guilty for weeks. In hindsight, he’d realized that to his mother, who’d rarely socialized outside her extended family, this frail old colored woman was probably her closest friend. Yet how much of a friend could she really have been to Dora when she sat politely in her over-furnished parlor and listened as her sisters-in-law described Dora’s people as shvartzes? All of that now seemed so long ago.
They’d stopped in front of the DeWitt Clinton. The building’s Art Nouveau towers loomed over the avenue like barbicans, flashing the whiplash curves of its stonework. Jackalopes and satyrs wandered the friezes. Gryphons roared in the cornices above the stately entryway, where a red carpet and white-gloved doormen had once greeted residents. Now a potbellied rent-a-cop sat out front on a beach chair; air conditioners buzzed in the windows above, dripping onto the pavement. The sight reminded Millard of a Thanksgiving dinner, many years earlier, when he’d reviewed his parents’ wedding photos with Maia. The bride’s father had splurged on a professional photographer. All of the guests were asked to pose, table by table, quite a novelty in 1937. Millard realized, as he had flipped through the pictures with his daughter, that every last person at the celebration was likely dead. Some—a dandyish young man in a striped blazer with peaked lapels, for instance—Millard could not even recognize, although he was clearly a relative, marked by the same sharp chin and ski-slope philtrum
that distinguished all of his mother’s kin. (Everybody at the wedding, except the rabbi and Dora, was a relation or an in-law, even if the precise links on the family tree lay forgotten in the old country; friendship, outside blood and marriage, had been an alien concept to his grandparents’ generation.) Alas, when Millard was gone—tomorrow—most of the remaining faces would fade into the ghastly oblivion of history. So too would his memories of the DeWitt Clinton: one-armed Eliezer, who overfed the furnace; Dr. Blatt, the optometrist, and his wife, renowned far afield for distributing licorice pipes and Choward’s mints on Purim; primordial, German-speaking Mrs. Kugelman, who banged on her ceiling with a mop handle if he ran across the hardwood floors in his sneakers.
“Here we are,” said Konnie. “Grand Concourse and One hundred Seventy-Seventh.”
To emphasize their arrival, the magic lady announced, The destination is on your left.
He wished Delilah were at his side—not merely for her companionship, but so he might show her the streets that had formed him: the alcove behind Schnorr’s Kosher Meats where he’d kissed tubby Lillie Balzer on a dare, the bench in front of the credit union where Great-Uncle Lou had dozed off, never to awaken. Carol knew all the corners and crannies of his history: she’d met his parents, his aunts, his medical school professors. He’d discovered, over the years, that as painstakingly as you described another human being, there was no substitute for actually meeting him. With Isabelle, it had been too late for introductions, but at least he’d taken her to the scenes of his triumphs and setbacks. But for Delilah, his past was as blank as a bedsheet, much as her history was for him: a few theatrical posters, some snapshots on a dresser, a niece in Tel Aviv he’d spoken to twice on the phone. None of this should have mattered to him—love was about the present, not the past—and yet it did. If only he’d met Delilah a few months earlier, when she’d still been able to travel around the city . . . . If only your grandmother had possessed testicles, he’d once heard his father say to a delinquent buyer, she’d have been your grandfather.
“I lived on the top floor,” said Millard—as much to himself as to Konnie. “On a clear morning, you could see all the way to the Statue of Liberty.”
“I went there once,” said the girl. “My ex-boyfriend took me. He passed out on the climb up to the crown and the Park Service had to carry him down on a stretcher.”
At least he didn’t topple over the edge, thought Millard. Or get himself crushed to death like Shorty McTeague. McTeague did odd jobs for Eliezer, the one-armed building manager, and for the tenants of the DeWitt Clinton, running Papa’s suits to the dry cleaner, polishing the bowling-pin newels and barley-sugar banisters, carrying Mrs. Kugelman’s trunk to the curb for her annual flight to Miami. He’d been born in County Sligo and still spoke with a heavy brogue, almost a foreign dialect to a Jewish kid like Millard who’d thought gupel and leffel were English words until the age of eleven, when he’d wanted a fork and spoon at a delicatessen. McTeague was also, Millard realized years later, cognitively impaired. Back then, the neighbors just called him slow, or, if feeling less generous, dopey. One afternoon, shortly after Millard turned twelve, he’d run into Shorty McTeague on the twelfth-story landing, where the factotum was changing the dead lightbulbs in the chandeliers. The eighteen-foot ceilings made this a multifaceted process that involved lowering the chandelier frame, then standing on a ladder to remove each of the frosted glass shades that cupped the candle tubes. That day, one of these glass shades happened to be cracked and required a replacement. “Will you do me a favor, lad?” McTeague asked Millard, who’d been headed down to Carlton’s for a shaved ice. “Keep an eye on this ladder while I go down to the cellar. It’s rather bockety and we don’t needs nobody snapping their neck.” Reluctantly, Millard agreed. McTeague pressed the button for the elevator, and when the double doors slid open, stepped straight down to the bottom of the shaft. The car itself had jammed at the roof and the counterweight buffer had failed. Seconds later, the car dropped through the chute, unchecked, hammering the Irishman to pulp.
Millard had watched the fire department extricate the body. His first dead man. Had McTeague not asked him for assistance, or had he refused, he’d have become the macerated form gurneyed away beneath a cotton tarp. None of this was lost upon him—not at the time, not since. If a career in medicine taught one anything, it was that everybody from the cafeteria cashiers to the exalted President Bloodfinch lived at the edge of a cataclysmic precipice, only one errant bus or mutated cell away from a rapid and painful demise. He’d never told anyone—not even his brother—what he’d witnessed.
“Can you pull around the corner?” asked Millard. “Onto One hundred Seventy-Eighth.”
Konnie did as instructed. The meter clicked through $170.00.
“Pull up a bit,” he ordered. “To the far end of the building—by the cornerstone.”
Sure enough, his engraving endured: MS + LM, surrounded by a cockeyed heart. He’d etched his romantic memorial during the summer after the sixth grade, on the night after they luted over several cracks in the masonry with fresh concrete. Lettie Moshewitz! How he’d worshiped the earth she walked upon—in the way that only a smitten twelve-year-old can. She’d developed early, but hadn’t updated her wardrobe, so every curve of her Maidenform brassieres bulged beneath her sheer blouses. She had been the year ahead of him at Samuel Tilden Elementary, but they crossed paths in the corridors, and her family lived only two doors up the Concourse in the Centennial Arms. To Millard, it was like living a block away from Lana Turner or Jane Russell. His brother and her older brothers played sandlot baseball together on Saturdays, which is how he learned that the Moshewitzes would be spending their summer in Far Rockaway—which forced him to act, possibly prematurely. That June, Millard left a handwritten four-page love note with her doorman, and waited through July and August for a response that never arrived. By the time her family returned in September, he despised her.
Two years later, as his parents were packing for Hager Heights, he mustered the courage to telephone Lettie at home.
“You never answered my letter,” he said. “That was a crummy thing to do.”
She seemed genuinely surprised—flustered. She insisted she’d never received it.
“Oh, you left it with Jordi,” she said. “That explains everything. Jordi quit and joined the merchant marine. Cleared out in the middle of the night.” Lettie lowered her voice. “My dad says he owed people money.”
“So you really didn’t get it?”
Millard’s fourteen-year-old heart swelled with forgiveness and hope. Here was a tragic miscommunication of Shakespearean dimensions. Never again would he dismiss the plays Mrs. Galynker assigned in English class as implausible.
“But it all worked out for the best,” said Lettie. “You know I was going with someone. Still am. So I wouldn’t have been interested.”
“Oh,” said Millard, deflated. And then desperation took hold of him. “But what if you weren’t going with someone? Would I be your second choice?”
A long silence followed—like the hollow in the OR after a patient expires.
“I have to go,” said Lettie. “My mom’s calling me.”
He ran into her again thirty years later at Gimbels. He was returning a pair of ice skates that he’d bought Sally for Hanukkah: Who knew that a girl’s feet could grow two sizes between Thanksgiving and Christmas! To his wonder, and in a perverse way his delight, he recognized the zaftig, overly made-up woman behind the sales register. Lettie seemed delighted to see him—and although he was happily married to Carol, he’d still scanned her finger for a ring. All she wore was a pink sapphire on her right index finger. “It’s so good running into you,” she’d said. “And you’re a doctor. We always knew you were a smart one.” For Millard, the downfall of Lettie Moshewitz from glamour queen to counter girl was epic; he couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d found Douglas MacArthur pumping his gas. But to Lettie, who’d never been on the pedestal where Millard i
magined her, working the holiday season at Gimbels was merely the ordinary course of an extremely ordinary life. Somehow, after this encounter, Millard understood that she’d been lying about not receiving his letter.
“You see those initials?” Millard asked Konnie. “Above the cornerstone.”
“Barely,” she said.
“I carved them. Millard Salter and Lettie Moshewitz.” He admired his handiwork, bold finger-scraped characters testifying to affection that had long ago dried up. “I wanted to write ‘forever’ but I ran out of room.”
“Was she your girlfriend?”
“Sort of,” said Millard. “Not really.”
Konnie looked up with more interest. “Well, which was it? ‘Sort of’ or ‘not really’?”
“It would take too long to explain,” said Millard. “On my dime.”
The girl shrugged. “You done with memory lane?”
“In a minute. I’d like to get a bit of fresh air.”
He wondered if anybody he knew still lived in the neighborhood—maybe some brave classmate who’d weathered the blight of the eighties. Not likely. Even the elderly couple dozing on the bench in the traffic median looked Latin American.
“Are you sure? This isn’t a great neighborhood for a guy like you,” she said. “You’re basically walking around with a giant target on your back.”
Now she really sounded like a girl from Scarsdale or Chappaqua. The Grand Concourse midafternoon wasn’t exactly an alley in Hunts Point at four in the morning.
“I’ll take my chances,” he said.
He climbed out of the taxicab into the afternoon heat. Even the shade of twelve stories of solid Minnesota granite provided only limited relief; the sun gleamed off the cantilevered windows that wrapped around the high-rise across 178th Street. The Hotel Saint Claude had once stood on that corner, stomping grounds of Gene Tunney and Mae West and Al Jolson. Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio had occupied the honeymoon suite for a weekend in 1955—and Millard’s brother stayed up all night, patrolling the side entrances, in search of an autograph. A few years later, Greer Garson toppled down the ballroom staircase and broke an ankle. City planners razed the entire structure for urban renewal in the 1970s. At present, many of the windows in the tedious development that had replaced the ornate hotel still displayed vinyl decals depicting curtains and flowerpots, distributed by the Commission of Housing and Development, at the borough’s nadir, to create the illusion of occupancy. Closer by, kids hardly as tall as his waist played pickup basketball around a netless rim, their rib cages limned under dark, sweat-lacquered skin, competing boomboxes blaring from the sidelines. In Millard’s day, the games of choice had been box ball and Johnny-on-the-Pony and Ringolevio, and you couldn’t walk half a city block without stumbling upon the chalk outlines of a Skully board or a hopscotch course.
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