New York Echoes 2

by Warren Adler

“Hell, why not?” Sam said.

  “What harm is there? I took the pictures myself. By coincidence. My office was just across the street and I had taken my video camera to work. We needed it for some case we were working on.”

  “Across from what?”

  “Across from the World Trade Center,” Sanborn said calmly.

  “That again,” Charley said. “How many times do we have to see those images?”

  “Over and over again,” Sam said. “Repetition. Burn the idea home. Haven’t you squeezed enough mileage from that one?”

  “Could you slip it into your player?” Sanborn pressed, ignoring the comments. Anne noted that he was single-minded now, commanding. None of the insults flung his way seemed to penetrate. If he was agitated, he did not show it.

  “Must we?” Mary said.

  “Yes,” Sanborn said. “I don’t know any other way to convince you.”

  For a moment there was silence as Jack looked at the CD in his hand.

  “Maybe we should have another drink first,” he said, picking up an opened bottle and pouring wine into each glass. Sanborn declined, watching them patiently. Drinks in hand, they all went into the living room where there was a large flat screen. Outside, through French doors that opened to a tiny narrow balcony, was a commanding view of the pulsating city, sparkling with lights and energy.

  “I feel creepy,” Sam said, taking a deep sip of his wine.

  “Is there a point to this, Sanborn?” Charley asked. “We know where you stand.”

  “Yes. There is a point,” Sanborn nodded, calm with certainty.

  “Nothing will ever convince us of your position,” Charlie said. “Whatever is on that CD?”

  “Nothing,” Susan said.

  “You people…” Mary said smugly, directing her comment to Sanborn.

  “Well, here goes,” Jack said, slipping the CD into its slot. The screen morphed to moving images.

  Anne watched the flat screen for a brief moment then caught the eye of Arnold Sanborn. For some reason his glance chilled her. He moved away from the screen to afford the others a better view.

  There was no sound, only an eerie silence. On the screen, they saw the smoke rising from one of the towers as the camera slowly panned along the glass surface of the building. Occasionally the camera would stop moving and caught images of people huddled against the glass looking outward, their faces panic-stricken, their mouths open in silent screams. Then suddenly they saw windows broken by chairs flung through the glass. It was hard to tell how far up the tower the images were.

  Then suddenly, as if on cue, bodies began hurtling out of the broken windows, like discarded plastic toys being thrown away, a small avalanche of human discards. The images jiggled as if the video operator, apparently Sanborn, could not keep his hands steady. There was an attempt by the operator to follow the bodies downward as they fell, but it apparently was futile. For a long time the camera concentrated on the incredible sight of the bodies falling, some holding hands for a brief moment. Shoes fell off the feet of the flying people. Blurred faces in imagined panic moved to certain death thousands of feet below. Not a sound was heard in the room.

  Anne was stunned into both disbelief and denial. This could not be real, she assured herself. Plastic toys falling. This is a camera trick. These are not live bodies falling. No way.

  Before the screen went blank, a sudden chill filled the room and all eyes turned to the opened French doors. For a moment, all movement was suspended. Life was standing still.

  All eyes searched the room for Sanborn. He had disappeared. In the distance, they heard sirens, which was not unusual for the bustling city. They exchanged glances.

  “I guess he needed to convince us,” Charley said.

  No one laughed.

  First Rites

  You don’t hear much these days about what they used to call the “rites of passage into manhood.” It was a big deal back when I was a kid. Men wrote about the so-called moment when they first became a man, when they suddenly acquired this secret knowledge that propelled them in one quick hop from a boy to a man.

  Some said it was when they shot their first bear or had their first piece of ass. Because we had so many damned wars in this century, some said it came the first time they walked into combat, or killed their first enemy soldier or saw their buddy lying dead with his guts spilled all over terra firma.

  Others told of more subtle causes, like having their first broken heart or screwing someone over because they were trying to get ahead of the game or telling their first big whopper of a lie or suddenly being blasted into manhood while being called names by mean-minded people, names like kike or nigger or spic or wop or chink.

  There were also a lot of family-inspired rites of passage stuff, too, like discovering good old Dad was a philandering son-of-a-bitch, or finding out that dear old Mom was drunk on vodka all day long.

  It always struck me that this idea of becoming a man was always portrayed as a sudden experience, like walking out of a black tunnel into a bright sun or… vice versa? Did it mean that you were suddenly thrown into some kind of a jungle, discovering the hostile real world where you had to spend the rest of your life dealing with and trying to avoid predators and pain? Did it come at that moment when you knew that you couldn’t depend on Mommy and Daddy any more, that you were stuck out there all alone to make your way and suffer all those slings and arrows or find some defense against them?

  Maybe we don’t hear too much about this aspect of a man’s life anymore because the age of women has dawned. The philosophy of womanhood is center stage now. Hell, we had a tough enough time dealing with the hardship of being a man, making a living, being the protector and breadwinner, fighting the wars, taking the blows from bosses or competitors and, sometimes, even women. Now you’ve got to apologize even when you call them anything but person.

  I’m not saying they don’t have a point. All I’m saying is that it was tough enough becoming a man in the first place without having to hassle with one of the few things that gave a man a comfort, a woman. Having a good woman to love made a man feel safe, gave him a back to the womb feeling, made him feel like a boy again.

  So we have this dichotomy of a boy wanting to become a man and a man wanting to become a boy and finally knowing that, in the end, there’s no controlling either transformation. The fact is, though, that there is probably a point, a moment, when a boy does become a man and you’ll only know that when you’re about to become a boy again.

  I know now when I became a man.

  I was twelve, which seems a bit early now, but it really wasn’t. Bobby, my brother, was eleven and I know that he, too, became a man at the same time. But Bobby died in Korea, another one of those stupid wars and, unless there’s an afterlife, which I doubt, we’ll never have the opportunity to compare notes.

  We slept in the same bedroom in those days in our parents’ apartment in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. You can probably pinpoint it geographically, but don’t think you can ever see it as it was. Today it’s an old broken-down neighborhood, shared, if that’s the operative word, by blacks, Hispanics and Lubuvitch’s. I’m not saying we were better. But it was different then, really different.

  My mother’s folks, our grandparents, lived in Brownsville in a row house paid for by my mother’s brothers who had made a few bucks and gone off to live in either Manhattan or Queens, which in those days was a step up the ladder of success. Every week, she would make us all go to my grandparents’ house in Brownsville for Friday night dinner. Sometimes my uncles were there with their wives and kids. There were never fewer than ten or fifteen people and we all made a lot of noise. But the food was great, old-fashioned Jewish cooking, a lost art now.

  The important thing to know was that my grandfather was a man who really believed he was boss, the head of the house. Grandma called him The Papa, which implied that he was the b
oss, but everybody knew that it was really Grandma who was the boss. Grampa was a stern religious man who took himself very seriously. He could cut you dead with a look and I was a little afraid of him, although I had seen his good side often enough. Once he bought me a sled for my birthday, which I thought was a neat gesture, since I was never sure whether or not he ever noticed me.

  Oh, he let me kiss him, of course, although his face, with its Van Dyke, always felt scratchy to the touch and made me itch. He was a very solemn man, who spoke mostly Yiddish, and although I rarely understood every word I sure as hell knew what he wanted when he wanted it. He was also a big man, well over six feet, and he carried with him what they called in those days, a huge “corporation.”

  Maybe because he was so big and bulky, I thought of him as a kind of monument. To me he was a person of awesome dignity. When he walked down a street, even going off to the grocery store, he looked like a man on his way to keep an important appointment, a man on a mission that would decide the fate of the world. I think I loved him. I certainly loved Grandma. Bobby also loved her, but I’m not sure how he felt about Grampa. That’s another thing I don’t think I’ll ever know.

  My mother, being their daughter, loved them both very much or seemed to. In those days, duty to one’s parents was paramount, especially for an only daughter. Sons sent money. Daughters gave themselves. Having never had daughters, I’m not sure how it’s supposed to work these days.

  At that time I truly believe that everyone in my family loved each other. Nor do I have any evidence to the contrary that this was untrue. It was taken for granted. In families, everybody loved each other.

  This one night back in the winter of 1947, Bobby and I were sleeping in our bedroom when the jangling of the telephone awakened us. In those days there was only one telephone in the house and it made a real racket when it rang, not like those new electronic jobs.

  Bobby and I were old enough to know that no good ever came from a telephone call in the middle of the night. Not long after the ring my mother burst into our room and in a high shrill voice announced that Grampa had died and we had to hurry up and get over to the house. Of course, she was sniveling and crying like a baby and both Bobby and I knew what to do in those circumstances. We hugged her, told her we were sorry and that we loved her and Grampa and then we got the hell out of her way.

  It was a cold night. Apartment owners in those days shut down the heat after eleven at night. We got dressed, shivering and feeling rotten, and then we all went downstairs and froze for about a half hour until we got a cab. It was one gloomy trip with Mom hysterical and Dad trying to soothe her.

  We boys really had no idea what to expect. We had only seen death in the movies, nice clean death. People either died in big beds or in people’s arms or in the gutter after being plugged neatly to death with bullets or stabbed with knives or swords and when they died, especially if they were stars, they usually made a speech.

  “Is Grampa dead already?” Bobby managed to ask. Maybe he was thinking the same thoughts I was. We were going to miss the deathbed speech.

  It was still dark and very cold when we got to my grandparents’ house. My mother fell into my grandmother’s arms and they were both hysterical. This happened in the living room. By then, they lived mostly on the ground floor since it was too much for them to be going up and down the stairs. In the adjacent bedroom Grampa lay dead in bed, his eyes closed. He had high cheekbones and in death he looked a little Chinese.

  My father told us to get out of the bedroom where my dead grandfather lay and then went to talk on the telephone. We heard his calm voice as it spoke, but we didn’t get out of the bedroom. Instead we both went close to the body. Bobby touched it.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Why not?” Bobby asked.

  I wasn’t sure, but I was also curious to touch it and reached out to feel Grampa’s dead hand.

  “I thought it would be much colder,” I said.

  “Maybe he’s still alive,” Bobby said.

  It was then that I touched Grampa’s face. It was colder than his hand. Then we both watched his face for a long time for any sign of life.

  “There,” Bobby said. “I saw him move.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I saw him move. I swear it.”

  At that point I poked Grampa in the upper arm and got no reaction. Then I bent over and whispered in his ear.

  “Grampa.”

  No answer. Then louder.

  “Grampa.”

  Still no answer.

  “Let me try,” Bobby said. He whispered into Grampa’s ear, louder still. Naturally, there was no answer.

  “He’s dead as a doornail,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Bobby said.

  After that, we stood and watched him again for a long time. I heard breathing and it startled me at first, but it was only Bobby’s. Grampa didn’t move.

  “He moved that first time,” Bobby swore.

  My father came back in the room after the telephone call.

  “I told you boys to leave this room,” he said.

  “We wanted to stay here with Grampa. We didn’t want to leave him alone,” Bobby said.

  “Believe me,” my father said. “He won’t know the difference.”

  My father explained that he had called my mother’s brothers and he was now going to Grampa’s synagogue to “make the arrangements.” He would have to talk to the shamus, or caretaker, he told us.

  “I also called the funeral parlor,” he said. “They’re sending someone to take Grampa’s body. You stay here with your mother and your Gramma.”

  We followed him out to the hallway and he waved goodbye. Our mother and grandmother were wailing to beat the band and Bobby and I went back to the bedroom to see more of our Grampa’s body.

  “He’s getting colder,” Bobby said touching his cheeks with the back of his hand as he had probably seen a doctor do. I felt my Grampa’s face again and confirmed his judgment.

  “Is this all there is to it?” Bobby asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Remember that neither of us had ever seen a dead person in the flesh.

  “He looks so different,” Bobby said.

  No question about that. His face had yellowed, which made him look even more Chinese. He seemed to be changing rapidly.

  “Maybe there’s some mistake,” Bobby said. “Maybe he’s really not Grampa, but somebody else who died in his bed.”

  He kept looking at Grampa’s face, concentrating hard as he could, trying to be sure that this was, indeed, Grampa.

  “Boo,” I said, startling him. He shrank back as if I had stung him.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” he said.

  “Think I was Grampa’s ghost or something?” At that moment the possibility certainly existed.

  After a while the doorbell rang and we went downstairs to answer it.

  “I’m here from the funeral parlor,” a man said. He was a small pale man, hunched over and unhealthy-looking. “Where is the deceased?”

  We assumed he meant Grampa and led him to the bedroom. On his back he carried an ominous-looking rolled-up canvas thing. We passed the living room where Grandma and our mother were huddled together and hysterical. They barely glanced our way.

  We could hear the man from the funeral parlor wheezing and muttering behind us, complaining about how he had to park his truck down near the corner instead of in front of the house. There was a hydrant on the curb in front of the house.

  He came into the bedroom behind us and looked at Grampa. He was still changing and no longer looked anything like himself.

  “Big one,” the man whistled. He unrolled the canvas he was carrying and laid it out on the floor beside the bed. We could see what he had in mind then. He was going to get Grampa off the bed
and zipper him into that bag.

  “Charlie never showed up. Gotta do this myself,” he mumbled, then looked at us. “You boys may have to help.” I’ve always wondered what he would have done if we weren’t there. He had no way of knowing that grown men wouldn’t be around and the wailing women would sure as hell be of no help to him.

  Grampa had died under the quilt and the man from the funeral parlor turned it aside. Grampa was wearing striped pajamas and the man took his arms and stretched them out along his sides and then took him by the ankles and put his legs together. He knew what he was doing, all right.

  Then he tugged at Grampa, wheezing like hell all the time, and edged him to the very edge of the bed.

  “Think you can grab his legs?” he asked us.

  We looked at each other and shrugged, then I guess we nodded or gave him some sign of our consent. He slid one arm under Grampa’s shoulders and got a good grip on him, then he turned to us and instructed Bobby to grab him around the ankles and me to grab him behind the knees.

  We did as he asked. I looked down at Bobby and he looked up at me, both of us, I’m sure, wondering what we were doing here grabbing at Grampa’s body.

  “When I say three, you boys just move him easy over the edge so that he don’t fall too hard.”

  We clutched at Grampa and waited for him to count to three and at three we tugged until he gave way and moved over the edge. Only he was too heavy for us to carry. Hell, deadweight he must have weighed nearly three hundred pounds. It sure as hell seemed like it.

  He had barely cleared the edge when we dropped him. Even the man from the funeral parlor lost his grip and Grampa fell like a ton of bricks on the floor of his bedroom. I won’t ever forget that sound. It was like a bomb went off in the house. Everything shook. Things fell off the dresser including a glass vase that Grandma had. It was smashed to smithereens.

  One thing was sure. Grampa wasn’t going quietly. Even the wailing women must have sensed that, because at the sound of his fall, after a dead silence, they wailed even louder than before. They knew it was him that had fallen and they knew, like us, that he wasn’t going to make it easy for any of us.