Carnovsky's Retreat

by Larry Duberstein

  In this corner a huge tanker showing a sheet of fire off one flank, and dark gray rolling smoke. The surface of the waves aflame and voices among the mixed lamps on the water yelling Get back, back up, she’s gonna blow any second. She didn’t, though, just kept on burning.

  While in the other corner, hailing from the boat basin on the Hudson side, a pair of big fire-boats that parked a couple hundred feet off the Slip and launched twin geysers at the fireball. Gigantic streams of heavy water—you saw them arching across the harbor like foam rainbows and you heard them thump against the burning boat.

  They got it snuffed, then it flared again, then snuffed for good. Winner and still champion, Bertha III. Quite an achievement to make a fire extinguisher like that, but I guess you better if you already made a boat that holds half a million gallons of oil—and leaks. They do incredible things every day in this city, always some new structure is scraping the sky, yet something’s lost when something’s gained—these monsters are a little out of control.

  Anyway the smoke kept rolling through the neighborhood streets all night, so that you tasted it on your tongue. And it stank, like a cheap kerosene. Came right in through your closed windows, of course, and I wondered if it could spontaneously combust. It was still there in the a.m., doing nothing spontaneous but drenching and fouling the air, and though I fled down to South Street early, to the diner, I found it there too, naturally enough.

  At the scene of the crime, Coentes Slip, I saw the ship burnt on one side, blackened, and the waves oily. Otherwise no sign—nothing to show that monsters had clashed in the dark.

  It’s tonight and the taste of kerosene is still on my tongue. In my dinner, everywhere. Maybe the chill can knock it out—they say temperatures maybe below freezing this week. So starts the cocoa season, and I had Jimmy and sister Bea for treats and a game of checkers.

  Many times I offered to play him and he refused—doesn’t go for “games like that.” (Me neither, but there is no one to play chess with.) But now sister wants a game and he changes his mind. I should make him stand in line for such stinky behavior, except I am going very easy for a while. His conscience is still too soft and until he forgets the five dollars I believe it’s best to spoil him.

  How will I know he forgot? Easy: when he is a hog again. As long as remains polite and turns down a second donut, I will know he’s feeling guilty, like nothing belongs to him anymore. Except me, when sister is in sight.

  The one single most charming aspect of Caddy is her honesty. Saying what she means and meaning what she says. (Also the best proof she was willing to go with me one time, for one hour, solely for the sake of my peace of mind.) And such calm, to assume the act will not ruin her life, such an unselfish attitude. The truth is I am proud of her. In examining my emotions that’s what I find more than anything else. Not left lonely, or sadly disappointed in love, but proud. I will write again to tell her so.

  It is rare to be so honest, to always speak the truth aloud. Not everyone will out-and-out lie, yet very few will consistently speak the truth out loud. Doesn’t usually pay. Even look at myself and my wife during all those years. I am an honest man, I think so, but you do not say what’s on your mind because it’s pointless. Nothing changes.

  If it stands a particular way between people, it stands that way for reasons, the natural shaking down of personalities. So if you complain and get a change put into law, it’s only a superficial change and never a change of heart. If you have No Complaints, then at least no one is blaming you.

  Tanya’s brother had a bitter time, an unspeakable tragedy visited him. He must have been a different man beforehand, because he led a different life. Wife and the two children in Poland, active in the Resistance, a speaker on public occasions, prominent citizen who kept a dozen chickens in his backyard and grew a garden. When he came to the U.S. bereft of his family, Daniel had nothing to say. And he still has nothing to say ten years later.

  For a few years, 1948 to 1952 I would say roughly, he went around with a nice woman named Irma, a tall sophisticated lady who worked at a magazine uptown. Daniel was a sophisticated man himself, of course, university-trained, a professional engineer. They were “friends” and never married and in 1952 she died at the age of forty-six. Another tragedy for him, disease. Since then there has been no one that I know of.

  He works like a dog, makes a load of money, and never sees a friend. He never comes round to visit except on holidays when we plead, and then he sits quiet, nothing to say. Makes an effort with the children, my nieces and nephews, but hides behind language to keep it simple. I happen to know he talks perfect English—I have heard him on the telephone on a business call more than once now. It’s a different Daniel—precise and quick and pushy.

  He won’t heal. He doesn’t want to heal. To do so would be unfaithful to his past and his principles. The world does not merit Daniel’s forgiveness, but what about him? He deserves something from himself. And also what about me? I never get close to this brother. I don’t even try because it would be too difficult. Mind your own business, says Tanya, and I appreciate her point of view. Yet the man is suffering.

  Not that I hold it in my power to cure Daniel Lehman, whose sole ailment is reality, but I could go thirty forty years and never utter the truth—that I love him, that I worry and care, and yes that I am very curious to know more about the War and Hitler and the camps. That I want to hear from him, and to help him.

  Sure I might fail to help, but it is also a failure not to try. It is like not caring. So we could go through life like two lanes on the highway, close together, same direction, and yet we never touch. It’s very sad to me.

  And Caddy Moore would not let it happen. She is only a child, full of high spirits and high hopes. Illusions I’m sure. She might cure my brother-in-law all the same—she might unlock his heart by being simple, and saying whatever comes to mind. Where I think, Be careful not to jog an unhappy memory, she would not think at all.

  She would say, Tell me. How did it happen, such a terrible thing, and how does it feel? She might make him want to tell, although Daniel I admit is a tough nut to crack. A stone.

  I’m sure that two lovers can miss like ships in the night. As with baseball, it’s a game of inches. Tanya and I had been in the same room (and as it turned out very much alive in each other) and yet we nearly missed altogether. We both know how close I came to never even saying hello, much less “Will you have me?”

  Caddy will never miss out that way. She will know it when she sees it and she will speak up, straightaway, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. A rare child.

  I interviewed this morning, on DePeyster Street. The title is Superintendent, for two apartment buildings, fourteen units, make your own hours. That’s why I answered it—good location, good pay, and your own hours.

  The work I don’t mind. Locks, garbage, stray cats, plus a little janitorial. But he says I am to be “on call”—someone has a problem, they phone me up and I come running. This I don’t feature. The trouble-shooter, have mop will travel. That ain’t my idea of make your own hours.

  I reasoned with him. How’s about no emergencies. A real emergency you call in the police or the fire department, anything else can wait a day. What about no hot water, he says. Heat up a pot on the stove in that case, that’s how it used to be done. That’s how we did it in my family, even after I was born I remember. By the time Florence was born we had running hot water, though. It was so hot my mama would let it run half a minute and then put it in a cup with her tea-ball.

  This job is mine on his terms, not mine otherwise. Fair enough, I told him, and call me if you change your mind. I changed my own since this morning, however—I don’t want it anyway. Who needs it? You might meet a few nice people and you might not. But if you do it will never be high tea with muffins, it will be fix the lights, fix the sink, and fix the cat while you’re at it, she just dropped another litter down in the coal-cellar.

  While I seek one new career for mysel
f, Jimmy is seeking two. He is torn. On the one hand he’s becoming a comedian, who writes his own jokes.

  “If a train is a choo-choo, what’s half a train?”

  “A choo.”

  “Gesundheit!”

  Wunnerful wunnerful. He has a dozen of these and he works on them, to perfect his timing. (But expects you to find it just as funny on the tenth time through.) All his pals are learning jokes, asking one another why the moron threw the alarm clock out the window and so forth, but only Jimmy cooks up his own recipes. So he’s invested and Bee-bee better laugh or she gets a kick in the shins from him. She laughs, to avoid the kick, and he is convinced it was very funny. A genuine despot.

  His alternative career, a strongman. I am not sure how he will parlay this into a living, though I know he plans to be Mr. America, the one and only, and endorse Wheaties or Strongman Toothpaste. A true believer, Jimmy. He got his hands on a pamphlet that preaches flexing the muscles. Look in the mirror and flex, sit at your desk and flex—every moment spent relaxing is a moment lost and never to be regained. Jimmy sits in my room with his jaws flexed and his palms pushing against each other (never failing to overturn the sugar bowl) and his legs tense. He’s an eel. A skinny strip of bone and muscle who barely feels free to borrow a hand from himself when it’s time to move the checkermen.

  Worse, he is a proselytizer. It’s not enough he should be a strongman, he wants me to be one too. Checks my biceps: not too bad, he pronounces, but could be better.

  “Jimmy, you know what? I’m not worried about anyone kicking sand in my face at the beach. I don’t go to the beach.”

  “Someone could assault you in a dark alley.”

  “I don’t go in dark alleys either.”

  “Come on, Oscar, danger is lurking everywhere. A man has to be ready for it.”

  “You’re right, I’m sorry. A man must be ready. But let me flex in private, later on.”

  I played a little game with myself, a guessing game—what will Jimmy Myers be when he grows up. His old man is a security cop, Federal Reserve on Liberty Street. A standing-around job, Jimmy won’t go for that. He is his own hero anyway, and will strike out in some new direction. Definitely has the chutzpah to be a comic, and the will to become Mr. America the muscleman. Anything. But I had a terrible thought from this game I played.

  Possibly because I had Daniel on my mind a lot lately. But whatever he might be, or could be, there is also a damned good chance a kid like this will be killed in war. A good shock I gave myself because it’s true—he is the kind that does. However smart he will not be a college boy and he isn’t a shirker, he’ll want to stick his nose into something.

  Adventure! See the World! Join the Army! He could join it Monday, be a hero Tuesday, and get blown up on Wednesday morning. I am upset to entertain the thought, yet won’t blink it, that life for many kids is just the dance of death.

  Jimmy very much alive, thank goodness. I had a bad daydream, that’s all, and it evaporated in the new morning sunlight. And now that I am unemployed, he seems to be back on a regular schedule. I knew things were running smooth again when he came with me to the final race-date—willing to be seen with me in public!

  Of course he was disappointed to miss “the girl with the red horse” so I let him know the girl was in Pennsylvania and the horse was in Maryland, both freshening. Then Wiley put him to work at the waiter-station and placed him on salary. Money is funny. This was nothing alongside the profits from his empty bottle empire. Hear him talk about the easy money in the park, the bottles already collected and waiting in trashcans, and the goldmine at the base of every tree. But now a salary.

  He is still on the strongman kick. It is his great goal to pick up “thirty pounds of pure muscle” and so he travels each day up to Cortland’s Drug Store with a penny to weigh in. As he weighs all of sixty pounds to begin with, it may take him a while to put on the thirty additional, though not for lack of effort. Jimmy interprets the daily reading as constant proof he is not doing enough, and so redoubles his output of flexing and tensing.

  I help out by accompanying him to Cortland’s and treating him to a malted milk with an egg tossed in (unbeknownst to him, as he has an inflexible rule against the ingestion of eggs) telling him a rich milk drink is how the prizefighters build up weight and muscle. Eat well, train hard.

  He will pick up a few pounds I’m sure, and get some muscle tone. As for thirty pounds, that’s next year or the year after—when he is taller. No problem. Just a matter of time until he’s selling us Strongman Toothpaste on television. And now here’s Jimmy Myers for Strongman Toothpaste!

  I am offered the chance to travel south, with Mickey Klutz. It’s warm, he argues, and the ponies will be running. I told him I would give it some thought, and I did. In fact I already had before he spoke out and I won’t preclude the possibility of two weeks in his spare room in February. (Air fare is surprisingly cheap.) For now I’ll stick it out. I’m not afraid of winter after all and will be most comfortable down here on the reservation.

  Like Herbie. Fullblooded Passamaquoddy Indian from the state of Maine who drove truck for me, and who always took off whenever he got a little cash stockpiled. He would go back home—called “down on the reservation.” Conditions were terrible there, with open sewage, unheated shacks, and they would hunt in the woods for their food, or steal it. And booze, of course. But it was home to him and that’s where he always went.

  I used him when I could, each time he came back around. I knew he would come and go, but I wanted to help him out and whatever went on up there in the forest he never drank on my time. He never missed a single delivery, chipped a fender, or shortchanged anyone a penny, honest injun.

  The ambulance was here in the afternoon and they carried Mrs. Vickers down on a stretcher. She was looking pretty bad, maybe the worst. I don’t know anything more, although I asked and will keep asking. A very sad business. If she is stuck in the hospital awhile, I have got the time to pay a visit, where others who work might not.

  Much colder weather. I brewed up my chicken soup—was hard at it when we heard the siren. Like everything else (including a human being) it’s mostly water. Add in whatever you have around, some cold rice, a few potatoes, vegetables, a pound of boiled chicken meat, and of course the salt. I keep tasting it, and nothing I drop in seems to ruin the taste. Simmer till hungry, that’s my recipe.

  Jimmy had a big portion. I explained him how Jack Dempsey used to train on homemade chicken soup for all his big bouts, and then switched over to red meat for the two Tunney fights. Lost them both before he figured out the problem—he was missing his chicken soup muscles.

  I don’t mind inventing a little story if it gets him to eat good food. Otherwise he fills up on root beer and licorice, and Strongman Cocoa.

  Marconi, the landlord, poking around Mrs. Vickers’ flat. Not a good sign, I would have to say.

  Mrs. Vickers is dead. A stroke did her in, very sad. Her offspring came here to clear out—two ladies not much younger than myself, arrived together in a Chevrolet.

  Dying has to be a trick. When my own mother was in the hospital and dying day by day, she said, “What if I never see another snow fall?” And she did not.

  Yet if she was going in winter she might say instead “I’ll never see the dogwoods bloom or the forsythia in Prospect Park.” Because it wasn’t the snow she planned on missing, it was life. She always hated the sight of snow as a matter of fact, but what you say is determined by the small circumstances, things of the moment, like Tuesday versus Thursday. What you feel is determined by larger circumstances, that don’t change.

  Marconi left a kid in the empty flat with a can of paint, then returned himself with floor oil and a mop. They will wash the windows and double the rent, count on it. Curious who my new neighbor will be.

  Caddy on schedule, due back on turkey day. She will call here on Friday morning “to make a plan.”

  More plans in the offing. Very pleased to hear from Wally Wiley
. He has a fistful of tickets for Sugar Ray in the Garden after New Year’s and includes me in on the party. Boys night out, he says, a few close friends for dinner and the fights. Jack Dempsey’s restaurant, of course, he will buy the dinner and I am to provide cigars for five.

  My girl arrives from Pennsylvania to eat turkey at the family estate, and ventures to Manhattan next day to eat tunafish with me in the Horn and Hardart. I love that.

  Looking terrific. I never saw her in a coat before, otherwise unchanged. But like a Jew, she came down here just to worry about me. Am I working? Am I happy? What will I do next? I do not worry about her, however—I care, but see no cause for worry. This kid has got what it takes.

  Hasn’t lost her knack for conversation, either. Whatever it is, she makes you feel it’s worth saying, and whatever you say she can convince you said it perfectly. So I spilled out a few of my latest daydreams to her, and went back over the fall racing season, plus Jimmy’s big muscle campaign, and she listens, and laughs, and is entertained. Someone like Caddy can be having the time of her life elsewhere and yet still mean it when she says she misses me, and misses the racetrack. She is full of life, that’s all, spilling over life. And I can joke with her:

  “Tell me, what is the Statute of Limitations on our half-hour in bed together? What if I change my mind?”

  “I might change mine too, then.”

  “I won’t ask—you know I’m kidding you. But tell me, do you have a boyfriend at school?”

  “Guess. I’ll make a pokerface and you guess the truth.”

  “Some pokerface! I say you have two boyfriends with that face, and ate the canary too.”

  “Some guess. You’re off by two boyfriends and a canary, Oscar. You must be a really bad poker player.”