Cave Under the City

by Mazer, Harry;

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  Cave Under the City

  Harry Mazer

  For my brother, my father, and my son

  1

  Ask me something. There’s nothing I don’t know about this city. I’ve lived here all my life. You want to go to Brooklyn? You want to go downtown? You want to go to the Roxy? Yankee Stadium? Ebbets Field? The New York Coliseum? You want to go to the Bronx Zoo? It’s the biggest zoo in the world. I practically live there.

  Where do I live? The Coops. No, not the chicken coops. It’s really the Workers Co-operative Colony. Two whole blocks of apartment houses. We live in the first block, in apartment W–42. That means we live in section W, on the fourth floor, apartment 2. Every section has a different letter. The Chrissmans live across the hall in W–41. They’ve got two boys like we do. Murray and Max Chrissman. Max is way older than I am, but Murray is sort of my friend. Mostly we have our own friends, but on rainy days we horse around a lot on the stairs, and in the downstairs hall that leads to sections X and Y. There’s a section Z, too.

  Once Murray and I were just fooling around, dueling with a couple of kitchen knives, and I stuck a knife in Murray’s back. That sounds worse than it was. Of course it’s easy for me to talk. It wasn’t my back. But I didn’t really stab him, not all the way in. I just sort of stabbed him. You know how you do, acting like you’re going to go right through, but holding back all the time. Somehow the tip of the knife got a little bit of blood on it.

  I got scared though. He kept trying to see his back. “It’s nothing,” I said. “I just scratched you.” He ran into his apartment, and I just stood there waiting for his mother to come out and murder me.

  My mother doesn’t like Mrs. Chrissman because she’s always after me or my brother for one thing or another. But then my mother doesn’t like any woman who doesn’t go to work or isn’t active outside the house. She says Mrs. Chrissman isn’t an interesting person to talk to. My mother should have heard Mrs. Chrissman that day. She would have learned a couple of new words for sure.

  After that, whenever Murray saw me he used to brag, “That’s Tolley Holtz, the kid who stabbed me in the back.”

  He made me sound a lot tougher than I am. With my own friends I’m pretty relaxed, but we’re not a gang. I hate gangs. Once a gang came down from Barker Avenue to our neighborhood, carrying banana stalks and looking for a fight. I yelled to Bubber to get in the house. He got away, but they grabbed me. I was pushed, they tripped me, and I went down. I was on my back in the gutter and they were standing over me swinging these banana stalks. Bubber yelled, “Leave my brother alone.” He charged right in on them. It was like David and Goliath. He was a peanut; they could have murdered us, but instead they started laughing and we got away.

  My gang, four of us, more or less, hang around together. We’re not a sports gang. We’re sure not a hitting gang. More a talking gang, because that’s what we do best. We talk about everything. We talk about sports and politics, the New York Yankees and Lou Gehrig, and what President Roosevelt is doing about the Depression. We talk about music and about the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. The Lindbergh case is in the paper every day.

  The police have arrested Bruno Hauptmann, an unemployed housepainter from the Bronx. They say he did it. Hauptmann is a painter, like my father. Lindbergh is a flying ace—so who are they going to believe? The police traced a ladder they found leaning against the Lindbergh house in New Jersey. They say Hauptmann went up to the second floor and took the baby, but left the ladder. That’s pretty stupid.

  “I hope they make him fry,” George said, smacking his lips. “Zzzzzzz, like an omelet.”

  Chick was laughing like a hyena. The only thing he cares about is his music. He plays the clarinet.

  “How would you like to fry?” I said to George. “You know what it feels like?” Anything George says, I disagree with.

  “Just turn me over easy.”

  “You’d make a good cannibal,” Irv said. “What if the guy’s innocent? My father said they’re framing a poor workingman.”

  “What frame-up? What are you talking about?” George’s father is a cop. One of his uncles is a detective. “The cops don’t frame people up. They get evidence, hard facts. What do you know?”

  “Do you know what you’re talking about?” Irv said. “You open your mouth and hot air comes out. Do you know anything about the labor movement in this country? The class struggle? Did you ever hear of Sacco and Vanzetti?”

  “That’s a lot of commie crap.”

  That’s pretty typical of us. We play handball, too, and we throw a football around. We’re okay, but we’re not the best. When they’re choosing sides for stickball, Murray Chrissman is the first one picked. He’s the best hitter in the Coops. He hit a ball once from one end of Britton Street to the other. I’m no hitter at all. I throw the ball pretty good, but I can’t hit.

  I know I could be a better hitter if I didn’t have to think about my brother all the time. My mother works, and I have to keep an eye out for Bubber after school and make sure he gets home all right. In school they call him Robert, but everywhere else he’s Bubber. Bubby … Bubele. Baby, that’s what it means. He’s sure a baby around my mother. The minute she sits down, he’s on her lap. My father says it’s because she left him when he was six months old to go back to work. But my mother had to do it because my father wasn’t working much. He still doesn’t work much.

  My father’s a housepainter, and he also hangs wallpaper and does floors. But hardly anyone wants their houses painted anymore because there’s no money. My father plays cards a lot with his painter buddies. My father’s not the only one out of work. They’re calling it hard times. Irv’s father says it’s the worst depression this country has ever had. He hasn’t worked for two years. George’s father is working. Cops always have a job. Chick doesn’t have a father. His mother makes women’s hats.

  Every day, on my way to school or after school, I see men on the street or in the park, sleeping on newspapers, or down by the railroad tracks past the river. If you’re smart, you don’t go down there alone. I think a lot about living outdoors. Sometimes I think we could live in a cave by Orchard Beach, and have a fire and fish off the rocks, but mostly I think we’re lucky my mother has a job.

  My mother works in a dress factory down around 135th Street. I’ve been there lots of times. It’s over a row of stores, a big loft with a lot of women, and men, too, cutting and pressing and working at sewing machines. My mother wanted to take my father up there and teach him how to be an operator on dresses, but he said it wasn’t work for a man. I wouldn’t want to work there, either. The place is full of thread and dust. It’s piecework—every piece has a price—so you have to work fast. My mother is one of the fastest workers.

  My mother worries about Bubber a lot. She doesn’t worry about me. Bubber doesn’t do too good in school. He can’t read and he’s not learning. The minute the teacher stops standing over him, he’s looking out the window or walking around. I’m supposed to help him because I’m older and I’m good in school. My mother can’t do it because she works and she has the house and her English isn’t that good.

  I tell Bubber a word ten times, and then when he comes to it in the book it’s always: “What’s that word, Tolley? Tell me again.”

  “Was.”

  “Was,” he repeats. Big smile. He’s got a nice smile. That’s the trouble. He could be mayor of New York with that smile. “I know it,” he says.

  “Then why’d you ask me?”

  “I just forgot.”

&nb
sp; But the next time he sees the word he forgets it again or says it backward. “Saw,” he says, instead of “was.” My brother’s not dumb. He’s good in arithmetic. Sometimes I think he does it just to keep me sitting there. I stay with him till I can’t stand it anymore, then I bop him one. He runs and tells on me, and I’m the one who gets the dirty looks and has to hear how hard my mother works and I’m the oldest and she’s getting no help from me at all.

  2

  Why does Bubber have to do everything I do? Why does he follow me around? Play my games? I have to tell him wait, wait. You’ll get a turn. But he can’t wait. He has no patience for anything. He gets the ball and he does something crazy, runs away with it. If I grab it from him, he tries to bite me. Then he disappears.

  I’m supposed to find him. “Where’s your brother?” That’s what I hear all the time. “Where’s Bubby? You’re supposed to be taking care of him. Where’d you leave him?”

  Bubber is scared of the cellars, and he’s too little to open the doors to the roofs. He likes to sit under the hall stairs, or between the rocks in the empty lots across the street. If he’s not there I look by the candy store. After that, if he isn’t on the street, I don’t know where to look. I start to get scared. He could walk off with anyone. Somebody puts out their hand, he’ll walk away with them. He’s that kind of kid, cute, with curly hair and a big smile. It could be another kidnapping story. Another Lindbergh-baby case.

  Once I went looking for my brother and I couldn’t find him anywhere. He wasn’t by the rocks or on the street or by the candy store. I didn’t know where to look anymore, and I didn’t dare go home without him. I looked for him all the way up Allerton Avenue, past the elevated train tracks and the closed-up summer movie house, which is just like a regular theater, with seats and a screen, except there’s no roof.

  I went past a vegetable and fruit stand where the man was singing out to the people walking by. “I got onions big as apples and apples like grapefruits and grapefruits like honeydew melons. I got tomatoes, potatoes …” It was the kind of place my brother would like, but he wasn’t there. There was a delicatessen nearby with long cheeses hanging in the window, and strings of mushrooms and garlic, and sacks of nuts in the doorway and candies in silver papers. Bubber wasn’t there either.

  I was all the way up by the Italian church with the stone grotto around the side. Bubber likes to stand there and look at the waterfall. I saw a gang I didn’t recognize, so I crossed over and went home on the other side of the street, checking the Allerton Theater and the ice-cream parlor and Saperstein’s Bakery.

  By our house I crossed back over and looked up at our lighted windows. What was I going to tell my mother? I was sure my brother was gone. Lost. Someone had stolen him.

  I dragged up the stairs, stopping at every floor. I was remembering all the good times I used to have with my brother, all the times I played with him or read the comics to him (Krazy Kat was his favorite. His second favorite was Little Orphan Annie). Sometimes we’d make believe the rubber tree in the corner of the living room was an apartment house, and the branches were different floors and the little pipe-cleaner people we made were the tenants. I didn’t play like that in front of my friends, because it was baby stuff, but I still liked to do it with my brother.

  “You’re finally home?” my mother said when I came in.

  “I went all the way to Boston Road.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I can’t find Bubby.” I was close to tears.

  “Bubby is in the toilet. He came home right after you left.”

  I fell down on the floor. I went mad. I kicked the floor, pounded it with my fists.

  “Stop it,” my mother said. “They’ll hear you downstairs. Come here, come here. Let me take you around.” She pulled me up and put her arms around me. “Foolish boy, what are you so upset for? He’s home. Your brother is home. Stop crying. What’s wrong? Everything’s all right.”

  3

  Something’s wrong in my house. My father comes in and goes out. He doesn’t stay home anymore. My mother is tired all the time and she yells a lot. My father doesn’t yell that much. Mostly he just looks at you and shakes his head, and that’s as bad as anything.

  My mother is always tired. The place she works in is a sweatshop. All day my father hangs around at the union hall with his painter friends. Then my mother comes home and nothing’s done and they fight.

  I can’t stand it when my parents fight. I don’t want to hear it. I put my hands over my ears. I want to run out. I want to go to the toilet and lock the door. I look at the shades on the window. One’s up, one’s down. The closet door is open. It looks crazy to me. I hear their voices, on and on, like the bird house in the zoo. I want to run out.

  I get between them. “Okay, cut it out, cut it out. Shut up! Don’t fight, please.”

  My mother is coughing, spitting into a napkin. Her face is white. There’s black under her eyes. Her hair is black like wire. She sits there staring at the wall, she doesn’t move. My father pats her shoulder. I want her to feel better, to get up and do things.

  They never used to fight. My mother was always nervous, but not my father. When he worked, nothing bothered him. He was gone before I got up in the morning. At night when he came home, he smelled of turpentine and oil. My mother had supper waiting. Bubber and I would follow my father into the bathroom while he cleaned up. He liked company. My brother stood on the tub and I sat on the toilet. I liked to watch him at the sink in his shorts and undershirt. My father is big, with hair on his shoulders and arms, and bristly black hairs on the back of his hands. He has big, broad feet that look like hands, friendly feet, like a gorilla’s feet. If my father grabs you, you know you’ve been grabbed.

  After he soaped himself all over he rinsed, and then he scrubbed and cleaned his fingernails and rubbed his hands raw to get the paint off. “Take a sniff, Bubby. Do I smell?”

  My brother would sniff and then I would sniff to see if the paint smell was gone. My father shaved and put on a shirt and a clean pair of pants. The last thing he did was comb his hair. He rubbed Vitalis into it, then combed it straight back, shiny and flat. Then he went into the other room and hugged my mother.

  There are two rooms in our apartment, a main room and a bedroom. The bedroom is where my brother and I used to sleep in the same bed. We slept foot to foot, but we horsed around too much, so now I sleep on a cot in the hall. I can touch the bathroom door and hear the icebox dripping.

  My mother worries that the noise we make will disturb the people downstairs. She wants us to sit like statues, not move, not make a sound. Bubber gets yelled at for running up and down too much and sliding on the hall runner, or staying in the toilet too long. “What are you doing in there?” Bubber likes to drop things in the toilet and flush them away. “Is the toilet plugged up?” She rushes in because she’s so afraid that water will spill on the floor and get into the apartment downstairs.

  The table where we eat and do our homework is in the main room, where my parents sleep. There’s a stove against the wall and a sink and cupboards. The icebox is in the hall next to the dumbwaiter. Usually my father eats by himself. My brother and I are too hungry to wait. My mother never sits down to eat.

  My father holds a piece of potato in one hand, a piece of bread in the other. While he eats I do my homework. He cracks the chicken bones with his teeth and sucks out the marrow. When I get my homework done I can go outside. Not my brother. They don’t let him out at night by himself, so he never wants me to go.

  He hangs on me and begs me to stay home and play with him. He hangs on my leg like a leech. “Let go of me. Let go, Bubber.” I whisper it at first, because I’m afraid my mother is going to get nervous. Then I forget and yell. Stupid! Because I give my mother a headache. I do a lot of stupid things, like going out and leaving the lights on in the house. They’re always telling me “Electricity costs money.” Or when I’m on the street with Bubber, I forget about him or I tease
him till he wants to kill me. But that’s not the worst. Sometimes I’m really unconscious. Last Halloween I started a fire in the house.

  I was having a party with my friends, and I put a paper pumpkin from the five-and-ten in the window with a candle inside. I thought I moved the curtains but I guess not far enough, because they caught fire. I didn’t even know it. We were having a pillow fight on my parents’ bed when my mother’s friend Sylvia walked in. “Boys! Are you blind!” The curtains were burning. “Are you crazy! Don’t you see?” She yanked down the curtains and threw them in the bathtub.

  I really got it when my mother came home. I knew I was going to get it. My mother started in on me, and when my father came home, he finished it. Bubber dived under the covers. I was too old for that. My father slapped at me, and I kept ducking and trying to slip out of his reach.

  “What do you think?” my father said. “You’re going to burn the house down.”

  “Not in the head,” my mother yelled. “In tuchus.” Meaning my behind.

  “Say something,” my father said. “Talk. Defend yourself. Do you know how old you are? When I was your age I was working.”

  It’s bad to be hit by your father. It’s the worst thing. It’s worse when you’re wrong. Worse because my father never used to hit.

  4

  I woke up in the night. My covers had slid to the floor. I felt around for them and pulled them back. There was a light in the bathroom. I heard the water in the sink, then the scrape of my father’s razor. Why was he shaving in the middle of the night?

  The light turned off and he came out quietly, tiptoeing past me. I caught his hand and he bent down. I smelled the witch hazel he used after he shaved. “You’re awake,” he said. “Good. In a minute I’ll come back to talk to you.”

  I heard my parents talking, their voices like the buzzing of flies. I was drifting off into sleep again when my father sat down next to me. He was wearing his coat and a hat.