Odile got to Jane Street in a Checker cab. Being short of cash, she signed her name and the sum of two seventy-five on a slip of paper and gave it to the driver with a hug. He wouldn’t carry her luggage up the stairs. So Odile had to make three trips, cursing the incivilities of New York.
The state of her apartment baffled her. There was a saucer on the rug with crumbs in it and banana peels in the sink Her minors were covered with towels. She walked into her tiny bedroom. Zorro was asleep.
“Fox,” Odile said, batting the towels off her mirrors. “Fox.” She tore at the lavender bedclothes around his feet. He wouldn’t wake up. “You crawl into a girl’s apartment the second she moves uptown. Guzmann, you’re taking advantage of me.”
A toe moved. His head turtled out of the sheets. He wouldn’t look at Odile. The unclothed mirrors made him gloomy. He muttered something about evil eyes, Peru, and the properties of glass.
Odile was merciful to him. She clothed all her mirrors. “Guzmann, you’d better get out of here. That cop Pimloe likes to follow me. You remember Herbert. Isaac’s apprentice. He could be downstairs.”
She thought the Fox would jump out of bed. He picked his toenails. “I aint moving for Pimloe. I’ll shove him at Isaac with a berry in his mouth.”
He told her what happened to Jorge, Papa, and the candy store.
“Zorro, where’d you put your family?”
“In church, with the big Irish.”
“You left them with Patrick Silver? God, that dummy came to the Plaza without his shoes.”
Zorro was finished yapping with Odile. He caught her by her crepe pants and threw her into the sheets. He shook off her breakfast clothes as if they were leprous articles. The Fox despised the feel of crepe. Pants on a girl always drove him crazy. He wouldn’t allow Odile to hide in any of her decorative husks. He was on his knees licking her body with the salty tongue of the Marranos.
Odile wasn’t embarrassed without her clothes. She enjoyed the liberties Zorro took. He wasn’t Wiatt Stone with his pinkies under the table. She wouldn’t have to be Zorro’s Abishag. She’d rather have the Fox in her bed than lie with any old king.
Two days of Zorro, and Odile had wool in her brains. She wasn’t a girl who could survive very long without peeking into a mirror. She couldn’t wear clothes around the Fox. No panties or ankle bracelets. He wouldn’t eat legitimate meals. She had to chew bananas and stay in bed.
The Fox seemed to have a slow recovery. He licked her once and wouldn’t go near her again. The Guzmanns behaved like little rabbis. They crept into a girl, writhed, and fell asleep with a pious look on their faces. Odile had gotten down with all six of them at different times of the year. She liked the sound of their orgasms; it was the same melancholy moan. Her other boy friends didn’t come like that: loud or soft, their cries couldn’t wrench Odile. Only one other boy, a cop named Manfred Coen, had made Odile’s teeth chatter against her pillows. And Coen was dead.
She had to get away from the Fox for a little while and breathe air that wasn’t perfumed with bananas. She’d find a mirror in the street, have a good search for wrinkles and moles. It wasn’t vanity in Odile; it was the business sense of a girl who was going to sell her face to the movies and had to be aware of every mole.
Odile sneaked out while Zorro was having a snore. She didn’t have the patience for underwear. She put on a wraparound skirt and went downstairs. She could have had all the mirrors in the world if she was willing to spy into antique shops on Hudson Street. But Odile was a discouraged girl. She loved Merle Oberon, Mary Astor, and Alice Faye, women of real quality, with generous foreheads and sorrowful eyes, but everybody wanted her to be Odette the porno queen, a spindle with perfect tits.
Going down Jane Street to Abingdon Square she saw Jerónimo and the big Irish standing in the park. The baby mewled at her. “Leohoody.” (He liked to call her by her family name.) The Irish wasn’t so talkative. He had beautiful gray-white hair. Small black bottles were sticking out of his pants. She adored his great Irish beak. Silver was handsome away from the Plaza.
“What’s that in your pockets?” she said.
“Stout.”
“Stout?” she said. “What’s stout?”
Silver clicked his teeth. He handed her a bottle of Guinness to taste.
“Is it sweet?” she said.
“No. It’s black ale.”
“Thanks,” she said, returning the bottle to Silver’s pants. “I don’t like bitter drinks.”
Silver began to sway in his soccer shirt. “That’s a pity,” he said. “Because we’ll never get on, the two of us. Your not liking Guinness and all. It’s got more vitamins than milk.”
“Why do you wear that rag of a shirt?”
“Not a rag,” he said. “It used to be black and red.” He showed her the faded skull and crossbones on the midriff of his shirt. “It’s the colors of University College, Cork.”
Odile kept frowning at the obscure edges of the crossbones. “Patrick Silver, you’re too old for college.”
“You didn’t get my meaning, miss. It could have been my school, you see, if certain people hadn’t chased my father out of Ireland.”
She couldn’t follow his crazy stories. How do you get from Ireland to Abingdon Square? But she would have liked to discover what was under Patrick’s shirt. Did the Irish have gray-white hairs on his chest? She thought of bringing him home to Jane Street, only the Fox was sleeping in her bed. She couldn’t undress Patrick at his synagogue. The Guzmanns had overrun the place.
“How’s Papa?” she said.
“Alive. He’s learning to pray with us.”
“Tell him Odile is living on Jane Street again. He can visit whenever he’s in the mood. With his boys, or alone. It’s all the same to me.”
“Any more messages now?”
“Yes. I think there’s a cop watching us from both ends of the park.”
“I know. The lads belong to Isaac. Not to worry. They eat Baby Ruths and stare a lot. They won’t harm you.”
Odile kissed Jerónimo and waved to the Irish. If Zorro woke without finding her, he’d bite the walls and swear Odile had abandoned him to the evil eye in her mirrors. She rushed past the blond detective at the top of the park. He smiled at the flimsy opening of her dress, with his cheeks full of candy. “Baby Odile,” he said. “Uncle Isaac will give you a whole bunch of presents if you lead him to that stupid Fox.”
God, Isaac had his jaws on every block. A dog couldn’t piss on a lamppost without some commissioner hearing about it. She ran to Jane Street to warn Zorro about the blond detectives and their Baby Ruths. She came home to an empty bed. The Fox was gone. Maybe he went shopping for bananas. She said shit, shit shit! She could have sunned herself on Abingdon Square and flirted with Jerónimo’s Irish keeper.
8.
ISAAC’S “children” moved from Boston Road to Bethune Street. Green Chevrolets were patrolling the Irish synagogue two days after the Guzmanns arrived. Jerónimo could see their wide fins from the different cracks in the chapel windows. Isaac brought his infantry to the steps of the shul. You could find detectives on foot from Washington Street to Abingdon Square. The new First Dep had Silver and all his people in a shoebox. Isaac could suffocate them, or allow them a few inches of peace.
Patrick wouldn’t surrender to blue boys and a fleet of Chevrolets. He didn’t have to charge into the gutters for random Jews. He could build his minyans inside the shul. Patrick had four new heads to play with: Topal’s, Alejandro’s, Papa’s, and Jorge’s. But he wasn’t crude. He lured three Guzmanns into the sanctuary, but he wouldn’t invade Jorge’s bed. He found a yarmulke for Papa’s middle child and placed it on the prayer stand after Rabbi Hughie pronounced that a sick person who was already inside the shul didn’t have to appear bodily at religious services; he could be represented in spirit and substance by a skullcap or another article of faith, according to the torah behind Hughie’s ears.
Papa was uneasy in the chapel. Afraid that
the Lord Adonai might be offended if an apostate muttered prayers in Hebrew, Papa sang under his breath in Portuguese. He covered himself with a huge linen shawl, just like the elders of the shul. He encouraged Topal not to swing his shoulders until the Torah was removed from the closet near the wall, and he wouldn’t let Alejandro crumble halvah on the stairs around the prayer box. But cautioning his sons couldn’t relieve Papa’s sorrows. How could he forget the Chevrolets? Hearing them gun their motors in the street, he would pull the shawl over his face entirely and withdraw into the only ark a Marrano could make for himself: the dead air in front of his nose.
Seeing Papa in a shroud, Patrick would console him with whispers at the end of a prayer. “Moses, be all right. I don’t care a fig if Isaac is king of the sidewalks. He can’t climb through windows with a Chevrolet. Be all right.”
But he couldn’t hold Papa’s hand throughout the morning service. Patrick was the guardian of the scrolls. The elders had empowered him to dress and undress the Torah. This, the most sacred office of the synagogue, was given to Patrick in memory of his father.
There would have been no Congregation Limerick without Murray Silver, the dead vicar of Bethune Street. The wobbly closet that held the scrolls of the synagogue was Murray’s ark. It once stood in the King’s Island shul of County Limerick. Carved in Baghdad (Patrick learned from his father), the closet went from Iraq to Turkey, from Turkey to Spain, from Spain to Ireland, in the course of seven hundred years. No one dared question the pedigree of the Baghdad closet. It was the holiest vessel in Ireland for the Jews of Wolftone Street. When the mad people of Limerick chased out every Jew, Murray wouldn’t permit the ark to rot on King’s Island. He carried it to Dublin in a wagon, rowed it across the Irish Sea, and sat with it on a freighter from Liverpool to New York.
Weakened at the corners from its many rides, the closet landed in America with one leg gone. Murray wasn’t disturbed. He walked the hobbled ark past immigration officers and moved it into a boardinghouse with the help of a society for penniless Jews. He met a handful of his former congregants at the society, took them to the boardinghouse, where they rejoiced over the survival of the Baghdad closet and made plans for a synagogue that could house Murray’s ark.
It was this ancient closet with a tattered Irish curtain over the door (designed by the Jewish weavers of Limerick, the curtain was shedding its hair) that so appalled the Guzmanns. Papa and his boys were convinced that the Lord Adonai lived in the Baghdad closet. They looked for smoke whenever Patrick reached under the curtain. They would shudder as the big Irish brought his Torah to them. The Torah had to be kissed. They would peck at its velvet mantle with crinkled lips. The velvet burnt their mouths. They closed their eyes when Patrick undressed the Torah. They couldn’t bear to peek at a raw scroll. The bloodred tongue of Adonai might slap at them from the skein of Hebrew letters.
Except for his periods in the chapel, Papa wouldn’t come out of the winter room. He sat with Jorge, winding pieces of string in a mad game of cat’s cradle that he would play with himself. Patterns snapped in and out of his fingers at a dizzying rate. Papa had no other occupations.
From time to time Zorro would send doctors into the shul. They were always oldish young men in hospital coats, interns, male nurses, and paramedics that Zorro had bribed away from emergency wards in one of the Little Havanas of the Bronx. Only Zorro’s doctors could get Papa off cat’s cradle. They would huddle around Jorge, snipping at his bandages with filthy hospital shears, and then have their consultations in a corner of the winter room. This jabber didn’t make sense to Papa. They talked of silver kneecaps, spinal fluids, stolen pints of blood. They were eager to turn the main floor of the synagogue into a surgical unit. Masks and little knives began to accumulate near Jorge’s bed.
It took Papa a few weeks to discover that these men were poseurs, idiots in hospital coats. They were capable of murdering Jorge with their little knives. He didn’t want silver kneecaps on his boy. He threw Zorro’s doctors out of the synagogue. They hissed the Fox’s name at him from the bottom of the stairs. “The Fox won’t like this. The Fox paid us to watch over his brother. Old man, what do you know about medicine?”
Papa wouldn’t hold a dialogue with imbeciles. “Tell my youngest that I’m not giving Jorge’s knees to you.”
Papa called in his Marrano witch doctors. They had much softer faces than the oldish young men. They knew how to cry for a crippled boy. And they were able practitioners. They hovered over the bed, breathing their cloves of garlic into Jorge’s wounds. Papa had no difficulty with the cures they mentioned in their chants. They promised manifold resurrections: snow in Jerusalem, restored ankles and knees, hospital beds that could rise up a wall, and the return of all Marranos to Arabic Spain. Papa wept at the news. He was beginning to recover from the stupefaction of a thirty-year roost in the Bronx. America was no country for him. The Marranos couldn’t survive around Christians and Jews. But the Spain they were seeking died eight hundred years ago, when the Moors got out of Seville.
Patrick had to feed the Guzmanns and their witch doctors, who were finicky people. Marranos eat with their hands, they announced, scorning Patrick’s spoons. They wouldn’t touch his sandwiches or his soups. Patrick had to run to a Cuban-Chinese restaurant near the Chelsea Hotel for quantities of pork and black beans.
Attending to the Guzmanns could wear a man out. Patrick escaped to the Kings of Munster whenever there was a lull at the shul. He would snort his Guinness and come back to the winter room utterly smashed, singing bawdy songs (about the witch of Limerick and the traffic under Balls Bridge) that no one understood.
Papa couldn’t keep the geography of Ireland in his head. He had his troubles remembering both ends of Bethune Street. Even Boston Road was beginning to disappear. He could forsake a generation of blackberries, malteds, and halvah with the bat of an eye. The chapel was still a frightening place. It had a chair for Elijah and a closet for Adonai. So Papa made his cosmos in the winter room. He could bump into walls with a certain tranquility. He could pester the witch doctors for clearer prophecies. He could wash Jorge’s face with a dishtowel. He could observe Patrick’s restlessness and hear the groans of his boys. Papa wasn’t blind: Topal had a brick in his pocket. What can you do for a boy who stays erect sixteen hours in a row? Papa begged Patrick to bring a prostitute into the house.
“Irish, help me. He’s splitting through his pants … Topal’s in danger. His prick could break.”
“Moses, I’m sorry for the lad, but you can’t have whores in a shul.”
“What about Zorro’s wife?” Papa said, with a bun in his throat.
“Who’s that?”
“The little goya Odile.”
“She can come if she likes,” Patrick said. “But not to fornicate. That’s the law.”
Papa was gritting now. “Didn’t know we were visiting in a monastery, Irish. My boys got pricks, thank God. Take them to the little goya, one at a time. Irish, I’m depending on you. Don’t lead them into Isaac’s fenders. I have one boy without legs. It’s enough.”
“Moses, not to worry. These are narrow blocks. I can dodge a Chevrolet.”
Patrick ran his shuttle from the synagogue to Jane Street. Topal had the greatest need. So he was the first to go with Patrick. “Hold his hand,” Papa shouted from the stairs. “Irish, don’t let him stumble. He could lose his knees.”
They went out of the shul with their hands clapped together. Detectives crowed at them from the green cars. “Patrick, why don’t you give this baby to us? We’re sweet on Guzmanns. We’ll lick his eyes.”
“Be gone,” Patrick muttered, “before I shit on your windshield,” and he dragged Topal away from the cars. He couldn’t get into Odile’s house. He had to buzz her from the street. “Open up, Miss Leonhardy. I brought a lad for you. Topal Guzmann. And greetings from Papa.”
Odile was waiting for him at the door in a party robe. Patrick stood in his black socks. The little goya had patches of skin that could wo
bble an Irishman’s brains. He was becoming a bloody go-between, chauffeuring Guzmann boys to Odile.
“Should I stay in the hall until you’ve finished with him?”
“No,” she said. “Come inside.”
He’d been to whores’ apartments, but none of them had tea cozies, and waffle irons on the wall. Her bed was tiny. Patrick would have had to cut off his ankles to make himself fit. Papa’s little goya was a strange sort of tart. She undressed Jorge with affectionate tugs. Was she really married to the Fox? Or did the Guzmanns have a lien on her? Patrick couldn’t understand the expansions and contractions of Moses’ empire. He was the family strong man, that’s all, and caretaker to three of Papa’s boys. Topal had a curly chest. His cock flared over his belly, but his scrotum was hard to find. The Guzmanns were precious about their balls. They tucked them away, where no enemy, male or female, could ever dig.
Patrick felt his gums shrink into his head when Odile’s robe came off. He couldn’t believe the grip her buttocks had on the stems of her thighs. God preserve us, the little goya didn’t have a wink of loose flesh. And she wasn’t shy around Patrick Silver. She moistened Topal’s cock with gobs of spit and climbed on the boy. Patrick withdrew into the kitchen.
He heard a noise like the grunt of a distempered dog. Then nothing. The silence bothered him more than the grunt. A religious man, nearly a vicar at his father’s shul, Patrick was no peep. But what could Odile be doing with the boy? He looked out of the kitchen. Topal was sleeping on a pillow (he’d had his pleasure for the month). Odile couldn’t have swindled him; there was a deep angelic flush on his face. The little goya sat on the bed without disturbing Topal’s sleep. She was in her robe again.
The silk on her legs made Patrick melancholy. He was an Irishman who carried the Torah in his arms. Could he approach the little goya? Offer her some money? She’d say he was included in the Guzmann bill. Hypocrite, he’d lectured to Papa on the sins of fornicating in a shul. He would have hidden Odile in his father’s sacred closet and stuck himself to her after prayers. He’d have flung Hughie out the chapel window if the rabbi challenged his rights to the girl. And he’d bite off the face of any elder who interfered with him. Patrick would have his concubine, or he’d close the shul.
Education of Patrick Silver Page 7