“Crybaby Sylvia’s a nincompoop,” a boy shouted. She yelled back “You stupid garbage bag” and other things before she was dragged off screaming by her mother.
Poor Sylvia, Henry thought, laughing out loud. Poor, poor Sylvia, He drank down the beer and a shot of bourbon, berating himself for not taking this super-cool attitude to their disturbances from the start. He got up for another drink.
He was sitting in the easy chair by the window, drinking his fifth beer and bourbon and staring at the gray silhouette of the school against the starlit sky, when he heard two of the remaining children telling Mary she was it.
“No I’m not,” she said. “It’s dark and I have to get home.”
“Come on,” a boy said—which one, he once knew, but now couldn’t tell. “You can stay a little longer.”
“Can’t,” and she was gone.
Henry swung at a pesky fly, felt relaxingly high from all the alcohol. He heard a bell chime somewhere the quarter hour of eight or nine, then Timmy saying “See ya tomorrow,” and the rattling of a stick against the steel wire fence as he left the yard. Now it’s quiet, Henry thought. At last—the sole advantage of living in the rear of a building and not facing the street. He slumped back, his shirt soaked through from the drinks and heat, and was dozing off when he heard a loud thumping in the schoolyard followed by a much softer slap. The thumping sounded like something being slammed against something else—a fist against one of those big bags boxers practice on, even, but couldn’t be that—but the slapping sound?, when the noise stopped.
About ten minutes later, while he was trying to balance the empty beer cans on his chest like a pyramid—three, two and now the sixth on top—the same noises started up again. He put his nose against the window screen, couldn’t see anything, and yelled “Hey, what the hell’s going on down there?”
The sounds continued, thump-slap, thump-slap, while he tried to figure out what they could be. Ball against a wall, of course. Has to be.
“Hey, is someone throwing a Spaldeen against a wall or something?” The thumping continued. “For crying out loud, don’t you kids ever stop playing? Enough, already. Beat it! Take off! Let some people around here get some peace and quiet for a change,” hoping a neighbor or two would join him in scolding the kid. He decided nothing would stop the racket short of a trip downstairs himself. He yelled through the window “I’m coming down,” grabbed his keys and money clip off the dresser, hurried through the building and into the backyard, stumbling over a bush in the dark. He got up—same goddamn hand from before, he thought—and walked through the school gate and saw Ronnie Peterson, only dimly visibly from the moon and the lights in the apartment buildings, casually tossing a basketball against a handball wall.
“What’re you doing with that freaking basketball?” he said, rubbing his bad hand against his pants and going over to him.
Throwing it.” He didn’t move a step.
“But why the hell now—when it’s so dark?”
“You don’t have to curse, you know.”
“Okay, then just why now?”
“Because my punchball I couldn’t see.”
“But do you have to play in the same spot all day?”
“I didn’t. We all went home for lunch and came back only after dinner.”
“Look, I don’t mean to seem unreasonable, kid, but isn’t it a trifle late for you and your ball to be out?”
“I got permission. Tomorrow’s no school. And listen, mister, you’re as drunk as can be. I can even smell it from here, so why should I listen to you?”
“Don’t get fresh with me, Ronnie. Take some advice and don’t act so tough when your friends aren’t around to back you up.”
“I don’t need them. You don’t scare me. And don’t be coming nearer or I’ll get my dad to break your nose in.”
“Say, I’d like that. Go on, call him—well, go ahead,” not sure if he was up to facing the boy’s old man if he did take his bluff. “Because I’d really like to speak to Mr. Peterson about his dear considerate son.”
“Maybe later. Stick around. He’ll be here soon to get me.” He poised the ball over his head, threw it against the wall, and retrieved it effortlessly when it bounced back to his chest.
“Now didn’t I ask you nicely just before? I mean, don’t you think you’re just banging the ball out of spite.”
“Shove off, mister,” a slight quiver in his voice.
“Well, what, then? I mean, what do you want from me—my blood?”
“Meada du sombrero, mister—you know what that means in Spanish?” Henry shook his head, and Ronnie said “‘Go shit in your hat.’”
He swirled around and threw the basketball against the wall, didn’t see Henry’s fist coming down on his face. The blow caught him square in the cheek and sent him sprawling. The ball rebounded past them, banged against the fence with a ping and rolled jerkily a few more feet before stopping. Henry charged over to him, and was pulling at Ronnie’s shirt and hair when a woman screamed behind him. He jumped up, looked around as if others were watching him, looked at Ronnie, whose eyes were closed and he wasn’t moving, and ran to his building.
Someone pounded on his door half an hour later. “Mr. Sampson? It’s the police. I want you to open the door.”
“Be there in a jiffy.” He was sitting in the easy chair, downing his last beer. The pounding became more insistent. Henry yelled out “I have to put on some clothes before opening up, you know.”
“Just open it now.”
He unlocked the door. Two policemen were in the hallway, and behind them two men in baseball uniforms held up a woman by her underarms. She was sobbing and sweating and saying in a Southern drawl That’s him, that’s him. That’s the filthy crazy bastard I saw nearly kill my boy.” The ballplayers just stared at their spikes, as if they’d been tapped at random by the cops to hold this woman and didn’t want to get any more involved than that.
Henry was so sickened by her wet pulpy face that he had to turn away. He also didn’t like her pointing at him as if he were a common ignorant dipso like herself who’d just committed an unprovoked brutal act. Because there were things to explain. Plenty of things—all proving how justified his attack on her son had been and why it could be labeled a clear case of self-defense.
She pulled away from the men and tried to punch Henry. A policeman grabbed her wrists and tried calming her down. He said “Yes, ma’am…All right, ma’am…Now everything’s going to work out just dandy, ma’am, so you take it easy, you hear?” The other policeman took down Henry’s name and address and began asking a lot of questions Henry found to be embarrassing. Yes, he was not a permanent resident. No, he could not say he had any present visible means of support other than for a little savings. Yes, it’s possible he struck the face of a boy known as Ronald Gregory Peterson. Yes, he had a pretty good idea why he did it. No, he’d never been in trouble in Washington before. Yes, he might have had some difficulties with law enforcement agents in other cities.
And then other questions, some even more disturbing, Henry feeling too dizzy and confused to answer them and really only thinking of a paragraph he wrote last week for the Tips the Natives Know section about the ruthless almost Gestapo-like tactics of a lot of the police here and which he’d have to revise. Because he had to maintain more than a semblance of truth and fairness in his books if they were to be worthy of publication and sell. And these two here—the first policemen he’d spoken to in this city—showed courtesy and considerable understanding and tact, far unlike that fat slobbering Texas cop who arrested him on a street a year ago, when all Henry had wanted from several prostitutes and strippers were statistics and humorous anecdotes for the Strictly Male section of his uncompleted Houston-Galveston book. (Tourists concerned with the current widely discussed issue of law and order in our nation’s major cities will be pleased to learn that the DC police—and this opinion is not only mine but that of many very discerning and influential Capitol Hill friends—is pr
obably the most honest, intelligent and well-mannered municipal protective force in America. Besides being unusually effective in keeping the city’s crime rate down beyond a reasonable low, considering the poverty that exists in some outlying areas here, the police are also helpful and friendly to residents and tourists alike in dealing with matters of a noncriminal nature. In a way, they remind me of those handsome white-uniformed Carabinieri in Naples and Rome. For whenever I approached one for street directions or really any topical or historical information, he would first salute me, smile, even bow a little, and then very graciously and patiently offer his help.)
WHO HE?
Always home for dinner on time, shirt smelling of work: sweat, from all the teeth he pulled out, and the chemicals he used there for plates and fillings.
Scrubbed his hands with a nail brush before sitting at the table—“My fingers have been in all sorts of mouths, so need two to three washes”—my mother at one end, he at the other, various numbers of kids on either side.
“Eat all your plate,” he’d say to me. “When I was your age we felt lucky to get one square a day.”
Not “What happened at school today?” but the job I had after.
“Everything still good there? Getting to work on time and not giving them any trouble? You never want to lose or quit a job before you have another one. How much you making now? They don’t hint you’re due for a raise soon? If you do have a few extra bucks a week hanging around in your pocket, you don’t think it’s time you started contributing to the house? I did at ten and never stopped. It costs us a small fortune to bring up seven kids.”
When they didn’t want us to know what they were saying at the table, they spoke Yiddish. He’d taught it to her so she could speak to his mother. His father, a weaver and darner, had spoken a broken English, but only Yiddish at home.
“Go lie on your stomach in a bathtub,” was one of the curses he translated for us. Others: “May his head get so small to fit through the eye of a needle. May the rest of his life be like a hand caught in a jackal’s jaw. May he have no sons to say kaddish for him, and if his wife does give him one, then a son who turns into a goy.” I didn’t understand why he found them so funny.
“Mockey Jew bastard” was the worst thing he could call a person.
“Not at the table, Labe—please,” my mother would say.
“Who he?” he often said when we were speaking about someone he didn’t know. “Who is he?” I once said, and he said “You too? God, won’t any of my kids ever know when I’m joking?”
Home with newspapers he found on subway seats and in public trash cans, yellow with piss a couple of times and once with spit on it, but he said “So what’s the big deal? You just tear that part of the paper off and read the rest. And look what I’ve saved over the years by not buying the afternoon dailies: several trees.”
When one of us said “Why do you have to be so cheap?,” he raised his hand and said “Shut your trap, you nobody,” but never once hit any of us except a few times with a newspaper.
He gave my mother spending money every Friday at the dinner table. He’d come home, scrub his hands, sit down, take out his wallet and say “Here, for the week.” Sometimes she’d say she didn’t know how she could keep the house running on so little, and he’d say something like “What, what I gave isn’t enough? Okay, then—take everything I got,” and throw some more bills across the table at her or slap the money down in front of him and tell one of the kids “Pass it to your mother.”
In a good mood, he’d take a wad of bills out of his pants pocket, unwrap the rubber band around it and say They aren’t all ones either. Who’s gonna count what I took in just for today?” When one of my brothers or sisters would give the figure, he’d say to us “See why I want all my sons to be dentists?”
They argued at least twice a week at the dinner table. When it got really bad I’d get up and start to bring my dishes into the kitchen, and he’d say “Where you going? You didn’t excuse yourself.” I’d say “May I please be excused?” and he’d say “Get the hell out of here if you can’t take it.”
He’d eat the half a grapefruit right down to the white rind, then hold it up, squeeze it in half and drink the juice left in it straight into his mouth.
Got arrested for steering, for a cut of the fee, his patients or women they knew to doctor friends for illegal abortions. He spent two years in prison, lost his dental license and had to give up his practice, and went broke paying for his lawyers.
“Did it standing on one foot,” he liked to say about his prison term, but that was all he spoke about it except that he met lots of very respectable and educated people there—“Judges, important businessmen and politicians”—many of whom will be future patients of his, he said, once he gets back his license.
“If I had a nickel I’d build a fence around it,” he said whenever we asked him for one, and then he usually gave.
Insisted we kiss him till his dying day, he used to say, “just as I did with my father.”
“Pick me a winner,” he’d say when I put my finger in my nose. “Get me a green one this time,” he also used to say, if he didn’t say the “pick me a winner” line.
I was ashamed of his frayed pants cuffs and shirt collars, stained ties and pants, broken shoelaces and other men’s shoes he wore. Dead men’s shoes, given to him by their widows, of several sizes from a too tight to a floppy 11.
“He’s a diamond in the rough,” his best friend told my mother before they got married, “who’ll continue to adore his mother much more than he ever will you.”
He said he was happiest when he was at his office, seeing a stream of cronies there, and working on people’s teeth, especially extracting a deep-rooted tooth out of a big man’s jaw. “If I can pull it out with no Novocain, even better. I’ve been blessed with two strong quick wrists to do it, if the guy sits tight, with little bleeding or pain and no swelling after.”
Pulled one of my mother’s molars out two nights before their wedding. “In her parents’ kitchen,” he said, “and without anesthetic. She was an ideal patient; not a tear or peep.”
He supposedly had a woman or two on the side now and then, my mother said, but she never believed it: “He was too stingy to.”
To keep what little hair was left on top of his head, she massaged his scalp several nights a week for years.
“I’ll admit,” she said, “your father and I never had a problem in bed, except when he’d been terrible to me that day. But he always said ‘Let’s work things out before we go to sleep so we can have nice dreams and wake up okay,’ and for the most part we did.”
Rare times we saw him loaded, and it always seemed to be after they came home from the annual Grand Street Boys gala, he’d throw all his change on the kitchen floor for us to pick up and keep. Then my mother would usually say That proves your father’s had too much to drink. Always when there’s an open bar. One of you want to help me get him into bed?”
I can’t remember him ever holding my hand when I was young, teaching me a sport, helping me with my homework, seeing one of my teachers, taking me to a ballgame or park, stopping to talk to me on the street, going anywhere alone with me but once a year to buy me clothes wholesale at a patient’s factory downtown. He did used to take a couple of us to Broadway shows once or twice a year because the theater manager, for free dental work, would give us seats that hadn’t been sold. We’d show up in the lobby about twenty minutes before the play began, the manager would be called out, he’d say “Let’s see if anything’s available,” and we’d wait while he checked. There were always seats for us, though we’d have to be split up, my brother or sister and I in the balcony, my father in the orchestra.
“It’s not what you know but who you know”—quote he used most. Or “Remember this: it’ll help you out in life. It’s not what you know but who.”
“I failed with my sons when none of them went into dentistry,” he used to say. “Artists you had to be. Writers,
reporters, part of the intellectual elite. You’ll all learn soon enough that you went wrong, but by then you’ll be stuck for the rest of your lives at what you’re doing.”
He’d stand me up on the kitchen counter in front of his friends and say “Sing ‘God Bless America’ for us.” His friends would applaud when I was done and give me a nickel or dime each. One man gave me a new dollar bill once. My father took it from me and said “Better I keep it for you for the time being. Otherwise, you’ll lose it.” When I asked him for it a while later, he said “What dollar you talking about? I’ve given you way more in change over the last few weeks. All you kids ever ask me for is money.”
He used the word “schwartzer,” and I said “You shouldn’t say that word.” He said “What’re telling me, that I’m prejudiced, against them? I’m not. They’re in fact great patients, paying up much faster than the Hebes and never once bouncing a check.”
Three of his five siblings died of diphtheria and influenza when they were very young. His surviving brother looked like a wolf and was a bookie most of his life and died of a blood clot in his brain when he walked into a streetlight pole. His sister came to the apartment one Sunday a month with a jar of glutinous soup she made and greasy cookies and onion rolls she baked that were still warm. They always spent at least an hour alone together, talking very low so no one would hear them. After she left, my mother said things like “I wonder how much cash she got out of your dad this time after one of her sob stories. He’s a sucker for everything she says, just as he was for his mother.” Or “I can imagine the loathsome things she said about me and which your dad, of course, let her get away with. I never liked his family. Only his father. A sweeter, sadder shlep never lived.”
He liked to call me “junior boy” because I was small for my age and the fourth and last son. At first I liked it—he said it affectionately and sometimes rubbed my hair. But when I got into my mid-teens I asked him to stop calling me it—it made me seem too boyish. He said “I can’t; it’s gotten into my blood.” “Junior boy, junior boy,” he’d say mockingly when I was in my twenties and angry for one reason or another or indignant over something, usually politics or the state of culture.
What Is All This? Page 46