Education of Patrick Silver

by Jerome Charyn

  He was called an imbecile, a depraved boy, a hoodlum from a candy store. The brightest girls laughed the hardest at him. “Zorro Guzmann, planets come in spheres.” He was gawked at and told to sit down. He stopped going to school.

  Zorro had one friend in his class, Manfred Coen, a blue-eyed Boston Road Jew, just Zorro’s age. Coen didn’t laugh. A flat world was perfectly tolerable to him. Rounded things like balloons and eggs (Coen’s dad had a tiny egg store) held no delight for him. Coen and his family spent their summers at Papa’s farm. Then Coen decided to draw pictures and attend the High School of Music and Art. He drifted away from Zorro. He became a cop, worked for Isaac the Shit, who tried to exploit the boy’s old relationship with the Guzmanns. Trapped between Headquarters and the candy store, Coen died in a crazy duel with one of Zorro’s pistols. Zorro couldn’t mourn for him. Coen had been fucked by his boss. The big Chief threw Zorro’s pistol at Manfred Coen. Isaac was the killer man.

  The Fox crayoned his face after sneaking out of the ninth taxicab. He had used up all his brown. His cheeks were Crayola blue. But Zorro didn’t have to paint himself for Isaac’s fleet of cars. No one was on Boston Road. The Fox stumbled into the candy store, his heart growling at the omen of desolate streets.

  The front of the store was deserted. A cop or any other thief could have walked off with Papa’s malted machines. Brats could have fingered Papa’s jellies and stolen bricks of halvah. The Fox let out a groan. He went into his father’s dormitory with his ears dripping blue from crayon sweat. Alejandro and Topal were hiding in their bunk beds under an array of towels, blankets, and sheets, like humps on a mountain. Papa leaned against the wall. He wouldn’t give Zorro a recognizable wink, or mutter with his head. Jorge lay on Papa’s linoleum floor with bloody pillows over his legs. A team of Marrano witch doctors were with him, men from Uruguay with amulets hanging from their necks, garlic cloves and the fists of dead monkeys.

  “Papa, was it Isaac, or the FBI?”

  Papa kept to the wall; the ridges along his back told you he was crying, only Papa didn’t make a noise. Zorro wouldn’t question the witch doctors. He approached his brothers’ bunk beds, discovering Alejandro under a sheet.

  “Brother, what happened?”

  Zorro had listened to Alejandro’s muddled talk for thirty-eight years (the Fox would be thirty-nine in October). He didn’t falter now. He pulled clusters of words from Alejandro’s babble. Devil Isaac. Bumpers, Green cars. The Fox sank down next to Jorge and peeked under the bloody pillows. “Jesus and Moses,” he said. He chased the witch doctors out of the candy store.

  Zorro, Topal, Alejandro, Jorge, and Jerónimo were hermanos de padre, boys without mothers. Papa didn’t have any use for a permanent wife. He was an itinerant pimp and pickpocket in Lima, Peru. His boys came from five different wombs. These “aunties,” mestizos and marketplace whores, would rear a child for six months and leave. Zorro was the youngest. His “auntie” must have had more brains than the others. He inherited a certain curiosity from her, whoever she was, and the ability to speak in coherent sentences. He was the one child who got restless in the candy store. Even in a flattened world, the Fox had to crawl beyond the limits of Boston Road. And he knew that garlic on a string couldn’t heal his brother. Jorge would die unless he was bandaged and given blood.

  But Zorro had to shake his father into mobility, and bring Topal and Alejandro out of bed. The Fox didn’t hesitate. He wasn’t a person who liked to brood over a problem while scratching his balls. He threw the towels off his brothers. “Topal, grab two pillowcases. Pack our winter stuff. We aint coming back. Alejandro, go to the taxi company on Southern Boulevard. Knock on the window, but don’t let the hombres drag you inside. They’ll steal your shoes. You understand? Knock on the window and make a fist. They’ll know we want a limousine. Brother, don’t stop for a charlotte russe. We’ll be dead before you come home.”

  The Guzmanns had a chauffeur once, by the name of Boris, but Isaac scared him off the road. Now they had to rely on a portorriqueño limousine service for most of their travel. The Fox and his brothers were city people; none of them could have solved the touch of a steering wheel.

  Zorro stroked his father’s ear. “Papa, if you don’t help me move Jorge, Isaac will finish him and the rest of us. Papa, we can’t stay. Isaac murdered the store.”

  Papa was conscious of the fingers in his ear. Zorro didn’t escape him; he knew each of his sons. He was thinking of the Bronx and North America. The Jews here were wild men. Devils like Isaac didn’t exist in Peru. Ten months ago Papa had been a citizen of the Bronx, a creature of many properties, with a farm and orchards in Loch Sheldrake, a Westchester graveyard for Marranos only, a numbers bank, and a candy store. He gave money and food to the orphans’ asylum, to the Sisters of Charity, to the priests from the Spanish church, to the widows of dead firemen, to gypsies, retarded children, and the poor of Boston Road. The captains of Bronx precincts had drunk malteds with Jerónimo. Detective squads came to Boston Road for Papa’s ice cream. The climate changed after Isaac descended upon the candy store, begging for mercy and a job. Detectives wouldn’t touch the ice cream. Papa’s runners were moody with Isaac in the house. Papa despised his own Peruvian arrogance. He was going to devour Isaac in slow shifts, cannibalize him in the candy store. Isaac was the better cannibal. While Papa ate off small chunks of him, Isaac had started to swallow the candy store, the farm, and Papa’s boys.

  The fingers were going deeper into Papa’s ear.

  “Papa, wake up. Jorge’s dying in our lap.”

  Papa left the wall. With a violent energy he stripped all the beds, pieced towels and blankets together with incredible Christian-Jewish knots, and made a stretcher for Jorge. It was an act of desperation and love. The Marranos had spent their lives packing and unpacking, running from home to home. Papa sinned against his children, seeking permanence in the Bronx. America had befuddled him, turned him into a landed baron. Maybe he was wrong about Isaac. Suppose that whore of a cop had been sent by the Lord Adonai to punish Marranos who fattened themselves in America. No matter. Papa could walk away from his fixtures and his malted machines.

  It took three Guzmanns to get Jorge into Papa’s stretcher of towels, blankets, and rags. They carried him out of the candy store on bended knees. Papa didn’t bother locking the store; the vultures would come soon as the Guzmanns disappeared. Grandfathers, pregnant women, and little boys would crawl through the window like a colony of enormous ants and gut the candy store, brutalizing beds, walls, and woodwork; the store would lose its history in half an hour. Bums would sleep in the ravaged dormitory, with newspaper on their heads. Rats would jump out of empty sockets and sniff for crumbs of halvah. The shopkeepers of Boston Road would shrug and say, “Those Guzmann pimps, they ran to Buenos Aires with their millions.”

  The limousine was waiting for Jorge. Alejandro sat near the driver, licking a charlotte russe. Zorro didn’t begrudge the whipped cream on Alejandro’s tongue. How could he reprimand a brother whose memory died every fifteen minutes? The Guzmanns put Jorge on the rear seat. Then Zorro snarled at Miguel, the driver. “Hombre, my brother had a belt, a watch, and cuff links when he came to you. You shouldn’t have undressed him without asking permission.”

  Miguel smiled. “Zorro, you must have left your army somewheres, because all I can see is blood and a pile of shit.”

  The Fox grabbed Miguel by the wings of his collar. “Hombre, I can buy Mass cards for your funeral without an army.”

  Miguel opened the glove compartment and fished for Alejandro’s goods. “Zorro, I was teasing the boy. Would I steal from a Guzmann? Let the Holy Mother break off my nose if I’m telling a lie. Zorro, where am I taking you?”

  “To the orphans’ asylum.”

  “Por Dios, are you committing the whole family? Zorro, they don’t accept children over twelve.”

  The Fox held on to Miguel. “Stop searching. It’s not your business to tell me about orphans.”

  Miguel dr
ove the Guzmanns to Stebbins Avenue. They entered the orphans’ asylum through the back, with Jorge on the stretcher. The Fox paid off Miguel. “Hombre, if anybody finds us here, you’ll sit with your taxi company at the bottom of the Harlem River. That’s for a start. I’ll throw your mother, your father, your wife, and your wife’s mother out the window. And don’t think they’ll rest in a grave. I’ll tear the bodies out of the ground and hire dogs to piss on them. Hombre, I’ll shame you for the next two hundred years.”

  Miguel walked out with twitching eyes, grateful that he wouldn’t have to chauffeur Marranos again. The Guzmanns were having trouble in the asylum. The matrons were furious that a boy was allowed to bleed in their halls. Calvarados, the chief doctor, stepped between his matrons and the Fox. Zorro pinched the doctor’s sleeve. “Calvarados, I think we should have a talk.”

  They went into the doctor’s office. Closeted behind a door, without matrons and his brothers, the Fox began to glower. “Calvarados, the Guzmanns have paid your orphans’ bills. My father was generous with you. We know a lot about orphans, understand? My family couldn’t afford a mother. So we deserve your charity. My brother Jorge will bleed to death if you refuse us.”

  “Señor, we’re not a hospital, we’re a children’s home.”

  “I agree. But you’re a doctor, and you have a small dispensary, enough to provide for my brother’s wounds.”

  “I beg you, take him to Jacobi, or Bronx-Lebanon. We don’t have a blood bank here.”

  “Calvarados, if I wanted Bronx-Lebanon, would I come to a dump on Stebbins Avenue? Hospitals are cozy with the police, and it’s the police who fucked my brother. Don’t I have a family outside this door? We’ll give you all the blood you need.”

  “That’s impossible,” the doctor said. “I can’t close off part of the home to accommodate you Guzmanns. The children will get suspicious.”

  “Calvarados, you aint listening to me. You’re the only doctor we can trust. It’s a simple thing. My brother’s in your hands. So you can’t disappoint us. We’re terrible mourners. We chew heads in our grief. We start fires. We wouldn’t harm an orphan, not me, not my father. But I can’t be sure about your staff. Alejandro likes to broil fat ladies. Topal sucks on fingers a lot. Thank God Jerónimo isn’t here. He’s good for an eyeball and some teeth.”

  Calvarados surrendered to the Fox.

  “Hide us for three days,” Zorro said. “Then you’re rid of the Guzmanns. Doctor, I swear on Jorge’s life, I have a place we can go.”

  Patrick Silver was in the sanctuary with Jerónimo, Rabbi Hughie, and the elders of the synagogue, saying kaddish for First Deputy O’Roarke. He’d gone to Ned’s wake, bringing Jerónimo along, but the Irish undertakers were mean to Jerónimo and wouldn’t let Patrick buy indulgences for Ned, or kneel in front of the coffin. Patrick’s former brothers, the detectives of the Shillelagh Society, ignored him at the wake, and sneaked off to the nearest Irish bar without inviting him.

  So Patrick brought his black ale into the shul and sang the mourner’s kaddish, while Jerónimo sulked under his prayer shawl. The baby had grown quiet since the middle of the week. He no longer mewled. He wouldn’t eat dark or light caramels. Patrick would have rushed him to the candy store to see his brothers, only Papa had forbidden Jerónimo to walk on Boston Road.

  The baby started mewling towards the end of the kaddish. He wouldn’t close his mouth. The prayer shawl whipped around his head. Was he calling Patrick to the window? Silver peeked through a crack in the glass. “God bless,” he muttered, seeing a rickety ambulance outside the shul.

  Silver removed himself from the prayer box. “Excuse, please.” He kissed the tassels on his shawl and went downstairs. The ambulance must have come from a Bronx orphanage. The words STEBB NS AV NUE ORPHAN were painted on its side panel. It drove away, leaving five Guzmanns and a portable hospital bed on the steps of Congregation Limerick. Jorge was under the sheets, with a bluish-white face. When he smiled at Patrick Silver, his cheeks became thin as tissue paper. He had flecks of dried blood in his mouth. His hair was pasted to his skull.

  “Irish, are you going to stare at us?” Zorro said. “Jorge had an accident. He ran into Isaac. You get what I mean? Can your church hold a few boarders besides Jerónimo? Irish, they don’t like us at the uptown hotels.”

  Patrick could never get a straight line out of Zorro. The Fox moved and talked in zigzags. “Come in, for Christ’s sake. You can have the winter room.”

  Zorro and his brothers carried the hospital bed over the humps in the outer stairs. Patrick neglected to tell the Fox that the winter room was the unofficial almshouse of Congregation Limerick, a place where beggars could come for a meal and a pillow. But it was the fifteenth of August, and there were no beggars around (they preferred to sleep in doorways until December).

  Papa was the last one to enter the shul. The loss of his territories had begun to squeeze him behind the ears. He was wallowing in America. The synagogue frightened him. Papa had never been inside a shul. For five hundred years the Guzmanns of Portugal, Spain, Holland, Lima, and the Bronx avoided God’s house, spilling their secret lives into corners and damp rooms. They prayed at home or at the back of the local church, to confuse the católicos and humble themselves to the Lord Adonai. Not even a dead Inquisition could push them into a shul. They didn’t know how to pray among Jews. They recited the paternoster and asked forgiveness from Adonai.

  Jerónimo had gone from the chapel to the winter room to find his father and his brothers. He blinked at Jorge on the hospital bed and began to howl. Patrick, Topal, Alejandro, and Papa couldn’t console him. He humped down near the bed and mourned Jorge’s blue-white face. Only the Fox could teach him not to cry so loud. “Jerónimo, Jorge will be fine. You and the Irish will feed him soup. But he’s not too strong. If you cry, his hair will fall out.”

  Jerónimo returned to his ordinary mewl. Zorro hugged his father and his brothers and left the winter room.

  “Where’s he going?” Patrick said.

  “Irish, detectives are looking for me. They could come into your church with their warrants. Why should I give them a second chance at Jorge? It’s not smart to have so many Guzmanns under one roof. Irish, watch all my brothers. Adios.”

  And the Fox ran down the stairs.

  Part Two

  7.

  ODILE Leonhardy sat in the Edwardian Room of the Plaza Hotel reading the breakfast menu in a crepe suit without pockets or sleeves. She shared a prestigious balcony table with the film producer Wiatt Stone. The menu wiped her out. The Plaza wouldn’t poach an egg for under two dollars. Odile was becoming parsimonious in time for her twentieth birthday. She ate nuts in her room, or depended on Herbert Pimloe to satisfy her lust for French fries.

  She’d lived at the Plaza three months, waiting to be discovered by legitimate movie people. She must have picked the wrong hotel. Wiatt was the only producer Odile ever met in the lobby. And the productions he had in mind didn’t seem far removed from her old career as Odette the child porno queen. Wiatt fondled her leg under the balcony table and offered her the role of Abishag, King David’s infant nurse, in an epic he was planning on Jerusalem, the City of God. Odile would have to spend the film stroking the loins of a dying king. “I’m too old for that part,” she said, using her napkin to pluck Wiatt’s hand off her knee.

  Wiatt wasn’t perturbed. He had Odile wedged in the corner. He could badger her with grapefruits, croissants, and either of his thumbs. “Baby, it’s a natural. I want you for The City of God. Abishag doesn’t stay twelve forever. She ends the film a distinguished lady in King Solomon’s bed.”

  Odile stared at the beamed ceilings of the Edwardian Room, the chandeliers, the pink wallpaper, the exquisite teacups, poached eggs, and the patterns in the chairs, and she made excuses to Wiatt. “Sorry, I have to pee.”

  She got out of the corner muttering damn! At least with porno moguls like her uncle Vander a girl knew where she stood. Vander didn’t snow you with three-dolla
r grapefruits. He’d squint at a nipple under your crepe de chine and say yes or no. There wouldn’t be any talk about Abishag and religious epics. Odile, he’d tell her, I want you to go down on an old king.

  She was off the balcony, past a giant strawberry bowl near the reservation table, and out of the Edwardian Room. Men and women in the lobby gulped at her crepe suit. The elevator boy rubbed close to her. Odile had to remind him who she was with a bang of her hip. “Sonny, I’m not your private tree. Lean on somebody else’s tit for a change.”

  She was downstairs with her bags packed before Wiatt had his second cup of tea. She saw Pimloe come into the hotel. He nearly missed her in her breakfast clothes. She had to wiggle some crepe in front of his eyes. “Herbert, did you just get out of a funeral?”

  “Big Isaac put nails in my head. Odile, we’ll have to skip the pommes frites for a little while. My stomach’s out of commission. Can we meet in the park?”

  “Not today. Do me a favor, Herbert. Go into the breakfast room. Ask for Wiatt the film producer. Tell him Abishag’s going home.”

  Odile hadn’t stripped herself bare for the Plaza’s sake. She kept an apartment on Jane Street. It was a doll’s place, a room and a half where she could entertain all sorts of men, cops like Pimloe and customers that Zorro found for her. She was Zorro’s girl, but who could rely on the Fox? He would space his visits according to the calendar in his head, sleeping with her on different Mondays of the year. She couldn’t understand his preference for Mondays, or the way he could open and close his passion like a fist.

  But she wasn’t worried about Zorro. The Fox would track her to Jane Street some Monday when his need was great enough. The Guzmanns had their virtues. With Zorro as her protector, Odile was clear of burglars and thieves. Every rat in Manhattan and the Bronx was leery of Zorro and his brothers. If you pimped in their territories, or molested one of their girls, you could lose your neck to brother Jorge.