Morningside Heights

by Joshua Henkin

  * * *

  —

  Tuesdays and Thursdays, Arlo had soccer after school, so the family went back to how it used to be. Sarah and her parents would go out for dinner; at the end of the meal she would delay, ordering coffee and dessert. Sometimes Camille would come along, too. It didn’t bother Sarah that Camille was there: just as long as Arlo wasn’t with them. But once she got home he was back, his cleats scattered across the floor, spreading his stench throughout the apartment.

  Her parents had inherited a car from her grandmother, and her father moved it every night, in deference to alternate-side-of-the-street parking. Now that Arlo had moved in, it was her time alone with her father. She enjoyed being his copilot, enjoyed seeing who could find the first parking spot. “Down Columbus,” she would say. “Over on Seventy-fourth.” And there it would be, as if waiting for them to claim it.

  One night, the car got sideswiped on Central Park West and ended up accordioned to a park bench; thankfully, no one was hurt. The crash was a blessing in the end: her parents collected the insurance and her father didn’t have to move the car at night. But she missed their trips together. Her father must have missed them, too, because a few weeks later, with the car decaying in some heap, he said, “How about we take the car for a stroll,” and they went out, taking the route they’d always taken, only on foot this time, her father asking which way they should turn, Sarah saying, “I’m thinking Seventy-fourth Street, I have a feeling it’s Seventy-fourth Street tonight.”

  But when they got home Arlo was there, and her mother was helping him with his grammar homework.

  “Do you even know I’m alive?” Sarah said.

  “Sweetie, come on.”

  “He’s not even your son, and you act like he’s your child and I’m not. I hate him! I wish he hadn’t been born!”

  * * *

  —

  Secretly, though, Sarah was starting to like Arlo. He was good at math, and when she wasn’t fighting with him, she was asking him for help with her math homework. A friend of hers said, “I think your brother might be a secret genius.”

  Their father was good at math, too, but he was contemptuous of money. “You mean you can go to school for that?” he’d once asked the dean of the Business School. Arlo, on the other hand, had saved the commune several thousand dollars by having them buy dairy wholesale, and on football Saturdays he’d rented parking spaces at the local college and leased them out to visiting fans. Now, in New York, he bought boxes of doughnuts and sold them individually to his classmates. He knocked on the doors of the neighbors’ brownstones, offering to shovel their snow. Then he hired his friends to do the job and skimmed a fee off the top. “You could make money, too,” he told Sarah.

  “How? By selling lemonade?”

  It was winter, he said, so hot chocolate would be better. And cookies. He returned from the store with Pepperidge Farm Mint Milanos and laid them out on napkins with the words celebrate the solstice printed across the front. “Tell me something. Where are the good refugees these days?”

  “Bosnia,” she said.

  He came back downstairs with a piece of cardboard that read 20 percent of proceeds go to bosnian refugees, and two hours later they’d cleared $150.

  * * *

  —

  One night Arlo said, “I wish this whole family wasn’t dead.”

  “Who’s dead?” said Sarah.

  “My grandparents.” Arlo’s father’s parents had been Communists, which made them seem like exotic figures, as if they hadn’t existed at all. His maternal grandparents were dead, too, and his mother was an only child. He was bereft of cousins, cut off from his past, and how could he get to know his father if he didn’t know where his father came from? Even Enid was shrouded in mystery. Every other Sunday, his father would visit her on the Lower East Side. “Why don’t you go with him?” Arlo asked Sarah.

  “I did one time, and I had nightmares for months.” It was the smell of the nursing home, Sarah said—the smell of Enid herself: ammonia and pickles, as if she’d been brined. Now Sarah had a phobia. She was terrified to go to a nursing home.

  But Arlo wasn’t terrified. “Why don’t you take me there?” he asked his father.

  “Maybe I will sometime.”

  * * *

  —

  If Arlo was a genius, then why was he being sent to a special school? And why was his stepmother reading a book about him? The book was about gifted children, and Pru covered the book up whenever Arlo walked in, like a teenager covering up pornography.

  Sarah said, “You’re the only person in the world who gets called gifted and thinks it’s an insult.”

  So that was another problem of his: he was too sensitive.

  When he and Sarah played Mastermind, he didn’t need the little clue pegs. Sarah would give him the clues orally, and he would remember them from turn to turn.

  “You play Mastermind in your head?” Sarah said. “You’re not just a genius, you’re a savant.”

  “Would you stop it with the genius already?” What difference did it make if he was good at Mastermind? If you couldn’t make money at what you did, it wasn’t worth anything. He might as well have been swallowing swords.

  * * *

  —

  This was why Arlo cared about money: he had so little of it. Back on the commune, he would go into town to play his ukulele, but whatever money he earned his mother took away. Every month, his father sent his mother a check. Arlo would rifle through her drawers and find those checks, determined to pay his father back.

  Now, when school let out, he installed himself on the subway platform and played his mother’s music from around the campfire: “Hey Hey, My My” and “Out on the Weekend” by Neil Young; “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; “Broken Arrow” by Buffalo Springfield; “The Circle Game” by Joni Mitchell; and “It’s Too Late” by Carole King. He played “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “Tangled Up in Blue” and “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Lay, Lady, Lay,” which was his favorite, because when his father heard him play that song he said, “It should be lie, lady, lie, Arlo—you don’t lay on a bed, you lie on it.”

  Now, as the subway came into the station and the crowds swelled around him, Arlo belted out the words lay, lady, lay with particular enthusiasm, giving the big fuck-you to his father.

  Sometimes a dollar bill would get dropped into his ukulele case, occasionally a little more. Mostly, though, it was just quarters, good for pinball. But the quarters added up, and in his first week of busking Arlo made $91.67. His second week he made $57.50, and his third week, thanks to two people who tossed in twenty-dollar bills, he crossed the three-figure threshold: $112 even.

  But when his father got word that he was busking, he said, “You need to be doing your homework, Arlo.”

  “I’m already doing my homework.”

  “Then do it some more. I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll find you a real job. Something you can do on weekends.”

  But nothing came of his father’s offer. So Arlo went back to busking—he did it secretly now—selling doughnuts at school, sweeping the snow off people’s stoops, and gathering his money at the end of the week and hiding it under his mattress.

  10

  Spring break came, and Sarah was away visiting a friend, and Pru was traveling for work, so Arlo had his father to himself. They walked around the reservoir one afternoon, just the two of them with their gaits in alignment, just their steady breathing. Arlo watched the skateboarders and Rollerbladers, a man on stilts, and a unicyclist behind him: everyone with their tricks. Beyond the trees, he could make out the West Side and, to the south, the lofty buildings presiding over Columbus Circle. “I wonder how many people are in the park today.”

  “Thousands, I’m betting. Thousands of people and millions of gallons of water. Thank goodness for rai
n.”

  “Is that where our water comes from? This reservoir?”

  “The truth is, I don’t know.” It was just as possible, his father said, that the city’s water was shipped to Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania’s water was shipped right back; with everything, there were inefficiencies. “I wish I knew more about these things.”

  “About reservoirs?”

  His father nodded. “Other things, too.” Electric currents, oil heat, elevators. He kept a book in his office called The Way Things Work. You opened to one page and there was a picture of a cockpit with all its parts. You opened to another page and there was a picture of a car engine.

  Dusk was descending; a firefly landed on Arlo’s father’s shoulder. “We all have our struggles,” his father said, and Arlo wondered if he was still talking about the way things worked or about some other kind of struggle. He had come to rely on his father’s calm regard; it made him feel all was right in the world. His mother had taken her allotment of high drama and made it enough for them both. “Do you think about me when you write down your vocabulary words?”

  “I think about you all the time,” his father said.

  “But especially then?”

  “Yes,” his father said. “Especially then.”

  “I’m glad about that,” Arlo said, though sometimes he didn’t want to be thought about. It could be burdensome knowing you were on someone’s mind. “Do you think about Mom?”

  “About Linda?” his father said, and he gave a sudden, mirthless laugh.

  Two men jogged by holding hands, and Arlo realized one of them was blind and the other one was guiding him. “Do you think Mom’s beautiful?”

  “I suppose,” his father said. “Mom’s always been a handsome woman.”

  Handsome, Arlo thought: what a strange word to use for a woman, but then his father often spoke with a lilting formality. Arlo pictured his mother in a tuxedo jacket and bow tie, her hair clipped short. She’d have been beautiful that way, just as she was beautiful now, with her long hair dark as squid ink. “What about Pru? Do you think she’s beautiful?”

  “All these questions.”

  “Do you?”

  “Absolutely,” his father said. “But that’s not why I married her. Or what made me marry her is what makes me think she’s beautiful.”

  “I think Pru’s beautiful,” Arlo said, but then he regretted having said that.

  “What about you?” his father said. “Is there anyone in your class you think is beautiful?”

  There was: a girl named Katie, whom Arlo would make out with next to school. On the commune, a girl used to kiss him late at night in the open fields, and one time she stuck her hand down his jeans, and in mere seconds he ejaculated. But that wasn’t any of his father’s business. He felt as if it weren’t any of his business either, as if simply to think about it were to violate a trust. He wondered if that girl still thought about him the way his father thought about him when he wrote down his vocabulary words. “I wonder what would have happened if Sarah hadn’t been born. If you’d only had me, maybe you’d have fought Mom harder.”

  “Fought Mom harder for what?”

  For me, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t get the words out.

  “How about we try this?” his father said, and all at once he was off, running along the path in his work shoes. He was twenty yards ahead, thirty yards now, while Arlo stood riveted to the ground. Finally, he went into a trot himself, and it wasn’t until the top of the path that he finally caught up with his father. “Since when are you such an athlete?”

  “I ran track at Cornell,” his father said.

  Arlo looked at him dubiously.

  “I got practice in the old neighborhood. The Italians and the Irish would beat each other up, and then they’d join forces against the Jews.”

  They were out of the park now, poised by the horses carriaged on 72nd Street. The ices man was closing up shop. A Labrador retriever, hoping to get some scraps, pulled toward the pretzel cart.

  “We should go upstairs,” Arlo’s father said. “Pru will be waiting for us.”

  “No, she won’t,” Arlo said. “She’s in California.”

  “Of course,” his father said. “Silly me.”

  Years later, Arlo would wonder whether this was an early sign. At the time, though, he thought nothing of it. His father was forty-five years old. He was a genius.

  * * *

  —

  They stepped onto the balcony when they got upstairs. Below them, on Central Park West, the trees glowed blue-black. It was eight in the evening, but the traffic was heavy, the cars lined up stern to prow. “You’re in pretty good shape for someone who hasn’t run in twenty-five years.”

  “I make sure to stay fit,” his father said.

  “How?”

  “I do these arm raises every night.” He placed one hand on each shoulder and lifted them straight above his head.

  Arlo did a few arm raises himself. He wondered how he looked to the rest of the city, lifting his arms in the air.

  It had started to rain. Below them, a jogger made his way along the street in a yellow track suit.

  “He reminds me of your mother,” Arlo’s father said. “Too cool to feel cold.”

  “Was she too cool for you?”

  “Everyone was too cool for me, but that was the least of our problems.”

  What was the most of your problems? Arlo wanted to say. He’d asked his mother this many times, but she always gave him the brush-off.

  “She’d go out in twenty degrees in just a T-shirt,” his father said. “Nose down, blinders on. I have some of that myself, but it comes out differently.”

  “Was she a good runner?”

  His father nodded. “We’re both athletes of a sort.”

  “Do you see Mom in me?”

  “Sometimes,” his father said. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  The wind had picked up, the trees bending in supplication. The cars moved along the street, gleaming in the rain like brass.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Arlo’s father took him to a bookstore. “How would you like to work here?”

  “At this store?”

  “I told you I’d find you a job.”

  “Don’t I need to know how to read?”

  “You know how to read.”

  He was getting better, true, but he was a plodder—the tortoise—and though in the story the tortoise won, in real life the hare was the winner.

  “You like books, don’t you?”

  Arlo loved books. It was less the reading than the books themselves—the feel of them, the smell of them, even the taste of them: he had half a mind to lick their pages. Late at night, he would run his hand along the spines of the books on the built-in bookshelves in his father’s living room.

  They found Paul, the bookstore manager, seated in the stockroom. He was thirtyish and low-slung, with a shaved head, little round spectacles, and the vaguest hint of a blond beard.

  “So you’re looking for a weekend job,” Paul said.

  “Yes, sir,” Arlo said.

  “He lives under my roof,” Arlo’s father said, “so I can vouch for him. And I can vouch for Paul,” he told Arlo. “He stocks all the books for my courses.”

  “Do I have to take a test?” Arlo said. There was nothing that terrified him more than tests.

  Paul pointed to a box of books. “Can you lift that?”

  Arlo hefted the box, easily.

  Paul placed another box on top of the first one. “How about that?”

  Arlo hefted that too.

  “Congratulations, Arlo, you passed the test. We’ll put you over in Weight Lifting. The books are shelved alphabetically by author. I trust you know the alphabet.”

  “I do,” Arl
o said. Fatuously, he began to recite it. Fearing he would forget under the pressure of Paul’s gaze, he started to sing the letters. He sang the alphabet song because he was musical, and because he remembered things better when he put them to a tune. He was known to sing passages from his social studies textbook.

  “Bravo!” Paul said. “We’ll put you in Weight Lifting and Music. And Children’s. Pretty soon, Arlo, you’ll be running the whole store.”

  A tabby appeared in the doorway. “That’s Crenshaw,” Paul said. “You’re not allergic to cats, are you?”

  “No,” Arlo said. He was, in fact, allergic to cats, but he wasn’t about to lose his job before he’d even started it.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Arlo’s father took him down to the Lower East Side. At Columbus Circle, they stood on the staircase between the two platforms, waiting to see which train would come first. “I used to do this as a boy,” his father said. “Always perched between two levels.”

  “Better than perched between two cars.”

  “I did some of that too.”

  The conductor announced the next stop, and Arlo’s father, pretending to be a conductor, cupped his hands over his mouth and said, “Seventh Avenue, Rockefeller Center, Forty-second Street, Thirty-fourth Street, West Fourth Street, Broadway-Lafayette, Grand Street.”

  When they got off the subway, Arlo’s father said, “Rumor has it this neighborhood is where people go to hear a band.”

  Arlo smiled: he, after all, was the purveyor of these rumors. He’d started to spend time outside CBGB and other clubs. He’d become a devotee of hardcore—and a practitioner of sorts, though it was difficult to play hardcore on the ukulele.

  “Needless to say, when I was growing up, I didn’t know about bands.” His father said these words with self-mockery, but also with pride. For people like his father, Arlo was beginning to realize, what you didn’t know could be as much a source of pride as what you did know.