How she needed a man. She’d trot at my heels as close as a colt when we went down the stairs. She was a Japanese whorehouse in bed, and scornfully mocked me for being a mere boy, years younger than her, when her lopsided liking for me stuck out. She ate on eighty-five cents a day Welfare money with Tony, her son—powdered milk, pork hearts in government cans, and peanut butter. She fried powdered eggs and baked surplus flour. Forkfuls of butter and peas were a pleasure to her, and herring on crackers or a lamb chop was food for a queen. Her boy needed galoshes and toys and everything else and already worried about his mother. “Somebody” would give her a new pair of shoes, “somebody” would give her a sweater, he said, much too young to be hinting. He’d ask me to carry their garbage can down, and if I had change from an errand I’d done for Ida, he ran to her with it as if it were some kind of medicine.
She got colitis, bladder infections, aches in her ears, and every few days appeared to be out of her mind—she yelled in a hollow monotone. Her ovaries formed knots from nervous tension, and it was at one of these times that she thought she had gotten pregnant, which pulled us apart even as we pretended to join together. Fiendishly helpless, she was dependent on clinic interns and procedures whenever she or Tony got sick, and since the furnace broke down about once a week, this was often. At midnight Tony would suddenly wake up laboring to breathe, his temperature a hundred and two. A doctor or ambulance wouldn’t be sent unless it went higher than that; and without my handouts she hadn’t a cent for a taxi. One autumn night when I wasn’t home she went into the street with Tony in convulsions in her arms, and found and convinced a patrolman that help should be called, afterwards standing beside him for twenty minutes. He was a young man and kept wanting to stop the police cars which passed. He went up on his toes, looking to see if the policemen were friends, but knew he would only be reprimanded for not having waited for the ambulance. In all these problems, the money I gave her was scarcely a starter because if her sanity really had cracked for as long as a couple of days, wheels would have been set into motion by the Welfare Department for taking her son away.
With each of us frightened, we sometimes had quite ecstatic excursions, as gay as one gets when the roof may fall in. We rolled the stroller along the East River at Delancey Street. The freighters that came sliding by seemed to fill it completely. We’d race them, while Tony hollered. I was fascinated by him. Week by week he was developing, and very much looking around for an older male. He watched me shave in the morning—“Is that how we do it?” He peered in when I took a shower and came up for regular “battles” with me. I grew very tender, toting him upstairs when Ida stayed late in my room and we put him to sleep on my couch. Then they spent the night, both in the bed. Such cooking, and dashing with tidbits for me—if she didn’t claw me she gave me the moon. Once I had become a passion, she used every tool. She encouraged my fondness for Tony and told me he loved me, prompting trips up by him too to say that he did. The next time we were alone, he would say carefully, “I don’t love you. Gene. I don’t, you know.” She thought me elegant, gentle, and fine, and the security she needed so desperately came into it.
We went out at five in the afternoon, when the pigeon-fanciers were up on their roofs. White swoops and black shadow patterns. And every Friday a farmer sold tomatoes, comb honey, and cider and cheese in the storefront he rented—yellow cream, to make the sick well, and even cornflowers in the summer. He talked Ukrainian with his old neighbors, having left Ninth Street twenty-five years before. It was a link for him, and he was the man who’d made good on their block, and their tie to the woods and fields. He had flat farmer’s arms, blue eyes, and a reprobate’s face, the slack cheeks and lax mouth. “Just the pure stuff, nothing put in it,” he said, like an article of faith, when we asked if the cider was sweet. His pear crates and his heavy old shirt and work boots were as good as a trip out of town.
Often we whooped out to Tompkins Park where there were the modern, sinuous slides. Dusk was the ideal time. Tony crawled through the whale-shaped pipes, giving out screams, and went up to the other children. He always seemed infinitely dearer than them. I followed as if he were mine. He’d negotiate some over a toy, then turn to me and throw his ball, or hike onto a higher slide, wheeing down with the tentative relish of someone enjoying what he knows is likely to be his chief recreation for the day. He always was interested to hear what we thought he’d particularly like to do next year, and he enjoyed these dusk go-rounds in much the same way that we did, for the magical sinking light and the teeming park emptied except for a few muted kids at the swings. He climbed the big slide with boosts from me—it was too high for him—and slid cautiously down. One afternoon they all had got hold of a pup tent and we helped put it up on the baseball field.
Tony had a luminousness, a resonance to him that was pitched very clear, a sing to his affections and words, perhaps just from growing up in a kind of state of emergency. After each bout with flu he seemed changed, a little bit older. He had awful dreams and toilet troubles and slept with his mother, but otherwise wasn’t more nervous than plenty of children, so that whatever effect all of this would have was left in the air. Though he cried during Ida’s lengthiest rages and spent many consecutive hours at the TV with that deadweight stare of a child, he remained promising. Of course Ida’s hope was Tony in school, that there he would get the support he needed; some bright, cultivated teacher might take him in hand. He’d begun at a pilot-program nursery school and the teachers excited her with their comments. She and I had our ups and downs. My helping hand would be abruptly withdrawn, if only because she’d refuse it. In a day the world of dried Navy beans would return, the hard-as-nails mother. There was a middle-aged lesbian woman who paid Ida’s phone bill and gave other aid in emergencies in exchange for the loan of the place certain mornings, and these visits increased. The plastering fell more frequently, provoking wilder reactions. The laundry piled up when the hot water failed and fifty cents wasn’t forthcoming from me to take it around the corner. I wouldn’t know what was happening downstairs, except that I’d hear a groan or two when I went past and resolved all the more to keep my distance, tired of catching sore throats from them, but worrying about the boy.
That Christmas: what a Christmas that was. No money, his mother bewailing into the phone. She’d determined to find some means of buying him a decent spread of presents but she had failed, and the failure knocked all her palisades down, the wolves howled—she was terrified about everything. We had had no contact for a couple of weeks, but the day before Christmas I overheard part of it and went down with a ten dollar bill for a tree and so forth.
“For who?”
“For Tony and us,” I said, in the door.
“More games. More games and games and games,” she told me in the most utterly exhausted tone, although already letting me rub her forehead. She rocked with it. “The dog act,” she called it.
“You won’t leave me alone. You won’t stop knocking, will you? I must fill a function for you. I’m a pool you can splash in and see some results. You can see what a kick you have. You won’t stop dropping in.” Her skin shone with sweat and her eyes with exhaustion and her pale face looked flattened out. Soon she ran out of words and stood there, the uncleanable apartment in a shambles around her—a two-dollar strip of linoleum that was colored to look like a rug. “It’s so painful when you just come and go. You don’t stay, you don’t say anything, you watch us and after a while you go again.” But she gave up resisting and we rushed out and bought a bristly green tree and a bundle of presents, threw snowballs, and put on the radio for the carols, got benevolently drunk, and poor Tony had the kind of a day that he had much too often, a hectic heaped one which he was supposed to appreciate to the hilt, after the climax of weeping and tensions in which all the bones of the holiday had shown through—all the bones of the grownups’ needs, of which his enjoyment was intended to be the relief.
She showed me she made up his bed like an adult’s, since he was
in school, and showed me a plant he’d been given and a drawing he’d drawn. She talked about getting a job once he was old enough, when she’d get off Welfare and burn all her rags. Rags they were too, a pitiful closet. I was brought up to date on everything, except hints were thrown out about new boyfriends in order to keep it all interesting. We talked through the weekend, Ida rooting for me wholeheartedly—my absurd boasts. Her mouth was like her accessible eyes, vulnerably wide, with a deep-set survivor’s smile, a beautiful smile that probably owed part of its permanence simply to being such a large one. I loved looking at it while lying beside her, force-feeding her eyes. She was very acute but always the all or nothing type, and I was experimental. I had never been loved before and was somewhat the tyrant, or anyway fascinated by how variable women were, passion was so different from friendship. Her hair, if it wasn’t limp, was lovely and springy. She had heavy, long, slick-skinned buttocks on rather short legs, and sharp breasts. I hung a bathtowel on myself to show how potent I’d gotten. She said she was glad we had met while she still had some of her youth left to give me. Her cheeks, as wide as a cat’s, could be middle aged sullen or wonderfully girlish. She had toil-ridden hands and a workhorse neck because she’d supported her family from the age of fifteen. She believed in the soothsaying stars as well as her dreams, the latter of which sometimes awed me. On the street, if I spotted her half a block down, she looked intimately linked to me like a relative, but all out of whack, preoccupied, miserable. She lived such a hair-trigger life that she’d wait half the night by her door for me to come home when we’d fought, yet be far from amenable. And I played her the dirty trick of connecting her in my mind with the maids my family had had in my early teens whom I’d never got up the nerve to try and lay but had wanted to. It was especially dirty since she was so conscious of caste. She’d had to leave school to scrub people’s floors, and she would have hated me.
Darwin, meanwhile, was fizzing along. He concocted electrical devices as well as his medical stuff. He was the kind whom one feels the sorriest for, where the energy’s there but amounts to nothing. He set a room aside for Ohm’s Law, with shelves that almost met in the middle and equipment that hummed from the floor to the top. He began buying equipment in earnest, having inherited a few thousand dollars from an uncle who had died in Columbus, Ohio, and at once became secretive. This was the break that would bring the bonanza. Nights and Sundays he gave to the Law (Sundays his favorite day now), alone in the building except for the painters who had studios; and no love was lost among that bunch. Whenever you stayed in the building late you discovered new mysteries about the people. The fad was to buy camouflage cloth from the war surplus stores, so that, seen from the outside, the windows looked kooky and jungly.
The crazier a person was, the less tolerance he seemed to have for his neighbors, the less mercy or pity, and the harder he was to deal with. We had a woman we used to give leftovers to after lunch, but she wouldn’t open the door no matter how loudly you called out her name. You had to put the food down, knock, and then leave, making plenty of noise so she’d know you were gone. Garbagecan Maisie. Darwin was called Quasimodo by the painters and, in turn, was raucous about their dead ends. He called me Lad, which, feeling as green as I did, I didn’t mind. In his wilder states I was Androcles, never suspected of plots against him. He was quite like Quasimodo, in fact; once I had heard the name I couldn’t forget it. He was cheerful and singing much of the time, blinking and deaf to the outer world. I could see him up in a belltower kicking and pushing away at the bells. His own plots were hair-raising, involving his tubes of Tb as they did. Of course he never carried them out but I had my first taste of powerlessness listening to him, because if I’d phoned the Health Department it was I, not he, who would have been judged to be nuts. With his animals, while he was humane in the short-term ways like water and food, his experiments grew very probing.
At my window, being left to myself, I went through a knightly period. If I saw a colored lady unsuccessfully trying to persuade a taxi to stop for her, I would go down and signal one and hold the door open, so that the driver wouldn’t realize that I wasn’t the passenger until it was too late. And a muscular, rebel Negro in a wheelchair lived around the corner. He would need to go out for food or a bottle of liquor, hating to ask a favor, and yet there was no other way to get over the curbs. When he was sober you’d see him swallow his pride and do it, but if he was drunk he would spin in his chair in circles for fifteen minutes on the edge of the traffic, yowling and sobbing, as the people avoided him all the more. So I used to go down for that.
Darwin took to working far into the night and bought a cot to sleep on at the office at midday. Either he slept scarcely at all or he slept like a dead man, wildly irregular. He cooked for himself and cooked for his mice, and the smells combined with the hammering from the locked room (he was putting up still other shelves) was crazy. As always when he was most withdrawn, he looked his most clean-cut and pleasant. He quit joshing with patients, worked in silence, and contaminated some of the culture plates in his haste. He had laughed at the neighborhood’s burglar alarms, which were always going off, ringing all night, but now he installed one himself. The work we were given fell off. I spent long lunches watching the bocce on Houston Street, more Italian than Italy, really, or walked to the library or to one of the kosher sandwich emporiums or, in the summer, to the public pool near Avenue C where upwards of a thousand children would be swimming and the shrillness was universal like sunlight. Long lines waited behind the diving board: two lifeguards stood ready. Each kid climbed on and walked to the end, every step broadcasting that he hadn’t the faintest idea about how to swim. In he’d plop. The guards took turns going in. Sometimes, leaving the lab at night, I passed by the local high school and found the whole street spread with trumpeters blowing away, the very bleakness everywhere else accentuating the gaiety. Postponing going home, I’d look through the paper for anything uptown to do. In the winter, if worse came to worst, I just sat in the subway where it was warm, reading the news with the men who dreaded going home to their wives. It was a year of intense wretchedness and happiness mixed, each deepening and giving the other color. On the subway, I amused myself by imagining that everyone sitting there was in armor of various sorts.
Ida’s laugh became nearly as throaty when I kissed Tony as when I kissed her, since it was plain that I loved him a bit and that her hopes of marrying again weren’t going to suffer because of her son. Her dependence made her even more of a hothead and made me take her for granted, besides. We avoided each other for days, despite his pathetic attempts to bring me back, when he’d knock at my door on his own initiative and tell me his mother wanted to see me, “needed” to (this after I’d heard her drunken yelling). But if we suddenly met, we’d get into each other’s arms again, the sarcasms crackling, and her soft buttocks filling my hands. She’d lean her head back for a kiss. She compared her husband and me, both bastards, and laughed. “Has the dance palled?”—meaning her rivals. I’d never made so much love before, and found it was habit-forming. Success brought success. I chased, phoned, and dashed about, pushing, pushing defenses down, wet in the pants and wet in the mouth, this brimstone to her, naturally. The poor woman could hear the high heels through the ceiling if I brought someone in—I soon didn’t. She’d upend her apartment and clean and explode, and the next day, hearing her yell at her son, I’d show up scared at her door for his sake, wondering who I should call. She asked who I was; had she met me before?
“You thump in here as if you’re some king. Well you’re not, you’re just Johnny Average to me, and you better believe it. You’re disgusting. You walk up and down those stairs—you’re as arrogant as a turkey—I don’t listen for you any more, you know. I’m not your biddy. You think he loves you. He doesn’t love you. And I don’t love you. I’m just curious to see what you’ll come up with next. I learn, you know. I don’t give a damn if a man like you drops dead in the street. You’re just a fucker—yes, you’re
flattered, aren’t you, you’re such a boy. You think that’s a good thing to be. You love me to kiss your chest. You think it’s such a magnificent chest, don’t you? You think it gives me a charge.”
When she didn’t drive me out, she clutched at me like a life ring, and didn’t hear a word she said, because if I left she hadn’t a clue as to why but would stand with the tears slowly penetrating the glaze in her eyes. Holding each other, we watched Captain Kangaroo, who was such a slob that he was a comfort. Tony, letting his oatmeal congeal, stared funnel-faced too. My notion was that, regardless of what happened between me and his mother, someday I would help to put him through college, or get him out to the country for summers. I hoisted him over my head, gulping down my delight in being a father; and the two of them lined up next to the door when I left for work to kiss me off.
Once she thought she was pregnant, everything was intensified. She talked about Tony for hours, as though lonelier now, bored with romancing, only the mother. The round-robin trading of sore-throat germs went on, like her crescendo-type suffering, standing past midnight behind the door. I felt horribly trapped. Why in god’s name was I living down here? Half my attraction from her standpoint was because I came from another world. And why had I gotten myself in the fix—I’d forgotten how new the experience of winning love was. I’d made use of her and now it was nothing but castor-oil pains and a sanity stretched to its limits. I was scared to death. She with her neat, small ears, French nose, and her scrub-woman’s lumpy arms—at my dreariest, I could imagine us going through the clinic mill and the intern’s glances directed at me wondering why. The battered old tenement faucets rang like sleigh bells, and we were as merry as mourners, she sitting beside my knees. She hated men, worshipped men, and I rubbed her forehead, where the slamming she’d taken had registered most, the deprived and underdog bones. But she bloomed in exultancy, maneuvering her figure. She looked like a movie star. It was my baby. We were knitted together now. I was chilled to the bone! I’d never imagined such passion existed, much less that I might be the object of it.
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