Carnovsky's Retreat
Page 13
“I’m chasing this goddamn cat down the block, trying to scare him off because the ugly beast has been jumping in my window all week. And this young lady steps right in my pathway, stands fast with her bundle of groceries in her arms, and yells Halt. Whereupon she starts in with a big lecture about cruelty to animals right then and there on 33rd Street. That was almost fifty years ago, forty-six to be precise, and that was her, my friend, and I say that was no accident. Something else entirely. I still hate a goddamn cat after forty-four years of living with them in my house.”
“Hear hear,” says the Duke.
But Wiley is no dope. He put a son and daughter through law school, a couple of legal eagles under his wing. This wife, with the bag of groceries and the lecture on 33rd Street, also had a father in the fur business—an only child, Sylvia.
The show moves over to Belmont Park, like a traveling circus, the whole operation—lock, stock, and a barrel of oats. I prefer Jamaica because I’m a homebody and it’s more like home. Over here we have the Grandeur of Thoroughbred Racing, translated to mean they are quicker to locate a can of paint and stock a few more flowers. But I’ll admit it’s a major league operation. The oval here is so big that you are out of town without your Teddy Roosevelt binoculars, and the backyard is like old times in Kentucky.
And of course the big horses ship in, the top of the crop, and they carry the big-name riders. Even the sea-gulls look bigger, though they have the same routine. They hit the air when the gate rolls out and float down on the infield while the race is run—then back on the track for twenty minutes of treasure-hunt.
The young lady Caddy Moore came over with the caravan. By now we know each other’s faces, so we have smiled and nodded like friends—but silent friends. All my information on her comes from the Duke of Kent, always a close observer of the ladies. He makes her nineteen years of age, college, and says she owns a horse, though only a pet horse somewhere on the Island. He reports she has a reputation as a snob, which I doubt it. (She has a kind face and owns the easy affection of the horses. She wouldn’t be here if she was a snob.) I figure she is quiet, she is shy, and they are the snobs for snubbing the rich.
Nonetheless, with Wiley spawning attorneys and this cute hot-walker attending college somewhere, I am beginning to think I don’t have enough education for the racetrack. Pretty soon it will take a Ph.D. to steer the garbage-barge down the East River and I can’t even read the House of 7 Gables—I quit after 2 gables! Now I read Pioneers and Indians to a nine-year-old, that’s more my speed.
Day off. Took a haircut and ducked in on Kramer. I’m in your debt, I told him, meaning the job he got me. There is no such thing as being in debt to Kramer for money, it’s pay as you go, one strike and you’re out.
What the hell, he said, you’re no good to me broke, are you? So I gave him a little action.
Linda wrote to say she must miss this week. Guests coming to her home and she can’t get away. Fine, I will utilize the free time. I’ll bring in delicatessen, take a night boat while it cools, and listen to the ballgame. I’ll burn two Coronas and Newcombe will burn up the Braves. That’s my plan unless I get an engraved invitation to the White House for dinner in the interim.
A few days back I happened to take a peek in the alley and saw some young people loading a station-wagon, marching in file with cartons and crates and pieces of furniture, a lamp, a chair, and I thought of course somebody is moving out. Figure it’s the month of June so here goes probably a teacher, or a student, safe bet.
Then I noticed a familiar shirt, oxford cloth shirt in a quiet shade of purple you don’t generally see, lavender call it, and inside this garment is a young lady who fits the description. Dark hair cut short, well-developed, early twenties. Just a female with nothing distinctive except the nose by Durante. I never bothered to take a closer look.
It was her, however. Next two nights the back window stayed black at half-past-ten and then on Saturday, always her night out on the town, the lights came on and I found myself gazing upon a new blue curtain. Orange flowers blooming on a piece of blue cloth. So that’s that. My bare girl has walked away, this miracle of regularity is ended, and I am minus both a temptation and an entertainment. The longest running show off Broadway has closed down.
The spectacle of this girl undressing for me was as much to be relied upon as the sun in the morning, darkness at night, the trash-man on Thursday. What can you count on? Death, taxes, and my bare girl in the window.
Now the field gets smaller. I scratched taxes already—now scratch my bare girl and what does it leave!
Sitting in Battery Park with Jimmy Myers, inhaling the salt water and listening to it too, in between the honks and sirens. Smoke a Corona. Statue of Liberty right there, growing up in the basin like a big green plant. Jimmy informs me there are rats in the Statue. (Eating the crumbs of tourists I’m sure, like half the world.)
“Living there?” I said. He overheard a sailor’s joke most likely, or a pair of drunks trading rumors. But I took the question up with my sachem anyway. I like to give Wiley first crack at a problem.
“Wiley, what do you know about the rats living inside the Statue of Liberty?”
“Everything there is to know,” he says. “There’s three of them.”
“Not the way I heard it,” chimes in the Duke of Kent.
“Three precisely, named Athos, Bathos, and Pathos. Sid, let me have two vodka gimlets, please. Why, Oscar? You like to borrow my kittycat?”
He won’t take it seriously, of course, and I can laugh too. But there could easily be rats living in the Statue when you stop to think about it. They are in the East River, they are in the Hudson, and they are all over the boats in the basin. A certain number could climb out of the water and move into the Statue like immigrants. They got no quota on a rat.
To me it’s worth knowing, like any fact. To the rest it doesn’t make a difference, rats or not rats, three or three thousand. Very matter of fact on the subject, until you put them in a room with Mr. Rat himself.
If Caddy Moore the exercise girl is nineteen years old (as Mickey Klutz declares) then she was eight when the War ended—bouncing a pink rubber ball and jumping hopscotch squares. I was sitting behind a desk in Brooklyn when the War ended and I was thirty-eight. Paperwork in the War Office downtown Brooklyn—sorting the dead was my department. Dead or Alive Division we called it, because if you use a little subtraction you can also determine who is not dead. That was my real job, to check up on Daniel each week. Tanya’s brother was still in Poland, a Polish citizen, but I had access to that too and every week I checked to see if Daniel was dead, then subtracted so I could report to my wife he was still alive.
The War ended and we stayed put. Reports kept coming—there was still plenty of paperwork after the foot-soldiers went home—but never a word that Daniel was among the dead, and he wasn’t. He made it. But a letter came to the house instead, to Tanya. Daniel didn’t write it, one of the aunts did. He made it, yes, but they slaughtered his family. Wife and the two little children, age nine and seven, gassed by the fucking Nazis.
Daniel made it. He escaped Auschwitz, a miracle. Laying on his face in a latrine forty-eight hours, hiding from vicious dogs in a cold river-bed overnight, freezing and starving for weeks. He crossed Europe on foot and later he came to America. A true story that is hard to believe in 1956, even for me and I know what went on over there. Someone like Caddy Moore, age eight at the time, could never believe such a thing, walking her pretty horses in the morning sun.
That letter—Daniel’s life—is distant past and still it seems very fresh, shocking to me. My blood can still boil and my heart aches for him and his loved ones. So what about him, Daniel himself, now here? With the blue numbers branded on his forearm that like a fool I once asked him, Can they be removed? “What for, Oscar,” he said to me. “So I can forget the past?”
Sarah’s husband Ralph is a great kidder. One of his lines: “You know how the Catholics expiate their guilt? By
making all those nice Jewish boys into Cardinals—Cardinal Newman, Cardinal Spellman …” Not funny, of course, Ralph earns a living but not from his comedy routines. He’s trying—as in the old vaudeville joke, God is he trying. But once when Ralph gave us the line about the Jewish Cardinals, Tanya started up.
“We ought to be running that country now, instead of helping them out. That country should not exist by now.”
“Tanya,” I explained her, “He is talking about the Catholics, not about the Germans, and besides it’s only a joke.”
“Catholics, Germans, they’re all the same. It’s not a joke to me.”
Naturally Tanya and Daniel have no sense of humor about Hitler. Count me in, how could you? But even an intelligent person, when angry, can allow her mind to wander. Plenty of anti-semites around I’m sure, and yet it is also possible for a Jew to hold a prejudice. Don’t tell that to my wife, however.
Needles returned 3.30 winning the Belmont Stakes. I left it alone, the short odds. Yet far from the shortest, as we were recalling. Citation never made anyone rich, except his owner. He paid ten cents on the dollar running in Triple Crown races. Or Native Dancer who went off at 1–20 in the Preakness—against the same horse, Dark Star, who had just beat him in the Derby—and fully justified it. More than once, according to Wiley, the price on Man O’ War went 1 to 100. Imagine taking the action. Side bet on the margin of victory, maybe.
This Needles is okay but for a payoff that small he better be a sure thing. He came from the back of the pack and then barely hung on at the wire, and that’s not my idea of fun. Some people believe a handicapper likes to suffer, that he revels in the sweaty palm. A gambler maybe, but not a handicapper. He wants to be right, and win the dough.
A nice quiet night in the Park and back here with Jimmy, following a couple of major league shocks earlier in the day.
One. Maglie is a Dodger. Of course I thought Bulkitis was kidding when he said it, and then there it was in The Post, black and white. Trading Sal Maglie to Brooklyn is like trading Ike to the Communists—you don’t do it. Maglie is the enemy, a New York Giant of the very worst kind, the kind that is tough on right-hand hitters. He can not become a Dodger just by changing his clothes. Bulkitis also screaming about this deal: he says it means the pennant for Brooklyn absolutely, because the guy can still pitch and he will.
Two. Mrs. W. my rich lady has thrown herself at me, makes me an offer I can’t refuse, except that I do. I like you, she says, with frequency, and I give it no weight. It’s only her manner of speaking. Sure she can appreciate the man who carries in her food and drink, in the right way at the right time and never without a pleasant word. It’s her style, the others tell me, and she liked them too.
But she never requested the pleasure of their company, whereas I got myself invited for a weekend at the Saratoga meeting in August, all expenses paid! No sleeping arrangements I’m sure, just keep her company at the table, take her arm at a concert, things they have going on up there. A companion, to share the fun of playing the races.
“A grand time, Oscar, don’t miss it—let it be my treat.”
I wish I could let it. I would love to get there, and believe it I also know what it took a lady like that to put the question to a man and then hear “No thanks.” Mrs. W. does not look down on waiters. The reverse in fact: she looks up. To her the waiter is the true aristocrat—we wear our linen well up here in the clubhouse, we walk a nice graceful line and speak a nice English, and so she requests the pleasure of our company.
“No, Mrs. W., I can’t say yes. I’m sure I would enjoy the time, but I would feel wrong using your money—”
“Why, Oscar? I’ve got the money.”
“I know. It’s me that hasn’t got it.”
“Exactly. If you had it, then you would be the generous spender. We’ll share the money for a week or so, for the fun of it.”
“I can’t. Call it pride.”
“Call it stubborn pride then. Oscar, we are friends. Why should friends be silly about a little money, about pieces of paper?”
“A good question. No reason.” Of course she doesn’t know she is conversing with the man who does things for “no reason” and doesn’t mind saying so. “It’s always in the gut. You understand.”
“I do. Yes, of course.”
“But listen, maybe I’ll get a big win and make it upstate on my own. Then I’ll take you to dinner and treat you to a day of racing. Or better, we’ll take each other, Dutch treat. That I would go for.”
“Oscar, you know I like you very much. So I won’t mention it again.”
Mention it, mention it, maybe you’ll convince me the next time around! I could weaken if given half a chance, because really I would love to get up to Saratoga and really I cannot pay my own way just yet.
But leave the old girl a little dignity, Fish, see it her way. A ladies’ man such as myself has got to use a little consideration, and not take unfair advantages of the weaker sex. You cannot reject them and then hope they come crawling back to try again.
THE DUKE:
So did Mrs. W. request the pleasure of your hand in marriage?
OSCAR FISH:
What makes you ask? Is this part of her famous modus operandi?
THE DUKE:
No no, you’d be the first for that. We just saw the two of you hobnobbing and it looked more serious than the usual.
OSCAR FISH:
Yes well she offered me her hand in marriage and half her millions but I told her I was unable to make it that day.
THE DUKE:
Too tight a schedule.
OSCAR FISH:
I’m too young for her, Mickey.
THE DUKE:
Well nothing better will come along, Oscar. Count on that.
They say the horsemen are tight-lipped and maybe they are in a way. Maybe it’s true they have nothing to say to the Six O’clock News or to the stockholders of a horse. But they talk easily among their own, so it is interesting that they do not talk to Caddy Moore.
To me she is a distraction, you notice her. This pretty girl always takes her coffee alone, undoes her thermos and leans on the walking-ring rail like a lone cowhand from the Rio Grande—in blue jeans so old that the blue wore off, and the red windbreaker from the stable. With light brown hair and dark blue eyes, she is some attraction and yet not a soul will notice her. What makes this girl invisible to them?
They have a checker-game, card-game, dominoes, and they form their little huddles just punching at the past performances with the back of their hand. They will talk Maglie, and Needles and the eight of clubs, but they don’t talk to this lovely girl, shining in the sun right before their eyes.
They don’t see her, but I think that she must see everything, with eyes like that. She is awake. So does she see me in among the furniture on the backstretch, does she see an interloper from the kitchen patrol? I would say not except that I am in such demand—the ladies’ man. Everyone wants to snap me up all of a sudden, Linda who could not resist the beautiful music of my breathing on the bus to Canada and yesterday my rich lady Mrs. Whitman put in her application too. (Yes I admit it. I reject the application yet accept the flattery.)
And why not the exercise girl? How can she resist what others are craving? Of course it’s a joke and I understand the difference. Still, I am getting regular on the backstretch just in case she decided to take the plunge. It’s a wild idea and I won’t hold my breath waiting, yet when we are both alone down there with our coffees I can feel the possibility. I’m in range.
I’m in range and I am also crazy. Or at least will scribble crazy things late at night when I’m past my bedtime. Now I’m further past it—can’t sleep. What exactly do I think I am in range for? Can I picture myself strolling arm-in-arm down the boulevard with this young lovely? I can not.
Furthermore, how can you like someone you never even met? It’s stupid. She could be Nazi, or at the very least Republican. I resent the fact she is keeping me awake.
Also for a nickel I can grab a boat-ride, travel out over the water to Staten Island and back. The briny deep, and deep it is I’m sure, one helluva bathtub. Miles down and three thousand miles across to Europe—when you are on it it’s so much water you could almost believe in God.
So I live it up like a kid on his summer vacation, except without any pals. A lot of kids have no pals on vacation, however. It was for that reason Walter always hated vacation-times, an only child and he had no pals. (In school yes, but not to ask over. Like my pals at the racetrack. There are friends and there are friends.)
Kids can be lonely too, which people underestimate. Caddy Moore can handle whatever the world sends her way, and Walter will too I’m sure. She is young, however, and it might surprise the snobs at Belmont Park to know that this girl could use a friend. Democracy is a two-way street.
Tested out my hypothetical question on Wiley tonight: how young is too young for a woman to be, if a man is fifty years old give or take. Because there must be a line somewhere in particular and it isn’t forty-two, it isn’t thirty-seven, so where is it? And I am rewarded with the following answer,
“It takes two to tango, Oscar, but it only takes one to waltz.”
What more could a pilgrim wish for? It sounds exactly like an answer should sound, so I brought it home to play with. Anything that sounds that much like an answer must be one. (Unless my wise man is just a wise guy.) So far this one is over my head.