Education of Patrick Silver

by Jerome Charyn

  “Silver, I didn’t mean for the baby to die.”

  “Isaac, don’t bring your rotten business into my father’s house. This is a synagogue. We pray here. We don’t mention the police.”

  The three bearded men began to wail in their soft white shawls. The shawls obscured parts of their anatomy. Either they had humps on their backs, or they were leaning too hard. They collected near the Babylon closet without a prayer book among them.

  Isaac whispered now. “Who are they? Greenwich Avenue mystics?”

  Patrick glowered at Father Isaac.

  “Papa sent them to us. They’re cantors from Peru. Isaac, close your mouth. The cantors are singing Kol Nidre for the shul.”

  Isaac had to whisper again. “Forgive me, Silver. I’m not a rabbi. I’m a cop. But who sings Kol Nidre ten days before Yom Kippur?”

  “The cantors have a different calendar, Isaac. Leave them alone. They celebrate Yom Kippur whenever they can.”

  Isaac listened to the Peruvian cantors. Their singing made no sense. Was it a muddle of Spagnuolo and Portuguese? Only the Marranos could recite the Kol Nidre in a variety of tongues. It didn’t matter to Isaac. The rhythm these cantors could produce, the warbling sounds that seemed to shatter inside their throats, appealed to Isaac’s worm. His belly turned smooth. The flesh under his heart didn’t have any claws. But the handkerchief was quiet on his skull. The First Dep wouldn’t sway to the cantors’ melody. They screamed with enormous tears in their eyes. Isaac hardened himself. He knew about the reputation of Marrano cantors and priests. The best of them had the power to stir the dead. Isaac didn’t want to hear Jerónimo chirp at him from a Westchester grave. He left the Kings of Munster.

  People saw a man with a hankie over his ears. Isaac couldn’t outrun the cantors’ wails. Their Kol Nidre stuck to his body like a cloak of thick, wet fur that was making him stink. He couldn’t go back to Headquarters. He’d have to watch the furniture men dismantle his desk and move all the drawers to Chatham Square. Isaac was the last commissioner to remain on Centre Street. The Irish chieftains were already installed in their brick fortress next to Chinatown. After this month Isaac would be chewing green tea with his fellow commissioners in the mandarin restaurants of Bayard Street.

  He crossed the Bowery with crooked eyebrows. The worm was beginning to crawl. He couldn’t take a step without squeezing his belly. Someone barked at him from the window of a Ludlow Street restaurant. It was his old “fiancée,” Ida Stutz. She came out of the restaurant to gape at Isaac.

  “You expecting a sun shower?” Ida said. “Or is it a cap for your brains?”

  Isaac remembered the handkerchief. He took it off.

  “Where’s your husband?” he said, with a canker in his voice.

  Ida blanched. “Who could get married with blintzes on the fire?… what husband?”

  “Your accountant, Luxenberg. The one with plastic on his sleeves.”

  “That embezzler? Isaac, did you ever see such a man? He hides behind my shoulder so he can monkey with the restaurant’s books. Luxenberg wiped us out.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have ripped the plastic off his arms.”

  “You were busy with the Guzmanns,” Ida said. “Who could talk to a commissioner like you?”

  Isaac looked sad without the handkerchief. He was no longer bishop of the lower East Side. Ida began to take on the musk of an old “fiancée.” She could have fallen on Isaac in the street, hugged him under his commissioner’s jacket.

  “Isaac, should I meet you at your place, or mine?”

  “Mine,” Isaac said.

  “Mister, give me twenty minutes. I have a potato pie in the oven.”

  Isaac went to his flat on Rivington Street. He had two small rooms, where he could shuck off his clothes and get clear of his obligations at Headquarters. At home he was a boy with garters on his legs, not the Acting First Deputy Commissioner of New York. Isaac didn’t have to turn his key. The door was unlocked. He wondered if Papa had left a few “cantors” for him, gentlemen from Peru with mallets in their sleeves that could erase Isaac’s memory, knock the stuffing off his scalp. Isaac would greet Papa’s “cantors” with gruff hellos. He didn’t hesitate. He walked inside without fingering his gun.

  A naked woman sat in his kitchen tub, smoking a cigarette. How could Isaac mistake the tits of Marilyn the Wild? It wasn’t every father who could peek at his daughter’s chest. He heard a whistling in his ears. Would the Irish-Jewish fairies who guarded Patrick’s shul burn out his eyes for squinting at Lady Marilyn? Isaac must have had a prissy worm in his gut. It grabbed his colon with a spiteful energy that drove his knees together and sent him crashing into the side of the tub.

  “Christ,” he said, “can’t you put something on?”

  He gave her a shirt to wear. Marilyn got out of the tub with a sinuous move that startled Isaac. He wouldn’t stare at the wall while Marilyn pushed her body into his shirt. The shirt came down to the soft furrows at the front of her knees. A clothed Marilyn couldn’t help Isaac the Brave. The proximity of his girl—the bittersweet aroma rising off her hair, the curve of her neck against one of his own collars, the penguinlike awkwardness of her kneecaps—unedged the Chief. He wished he could arrive at his fiftieth birthday without a daughter. He couldn’t exist in a single room with Marilyn the Wild.

  “I won’t bother you for long,” she said. “I didn’t want to live in a crummy hotel until I found an apartment. I’ll be out of here in a week.”

  “Fuck an apartment,” Isaac said. “You can stay with me. It’s not as stupid as you think. Marilyn, I’m never here.”

  “You wouldn’t like the friends I brought upstairs.”

  “Bring whoever you want.”

  “What about Blue Eyes?” she said.

  Isaac cursed all his fathers who had given him a daughter that could bite. His tongue was trapped in his mouth. The Chief had to sputter. “Marilyn, not my fault. I got enemies. Manfred happened to grow up with them. It was a shitty piece of work. I had to bounce him at the Guzmanns … I had no choice.”

  “Balls,” she said. “Manfred would be alive today if he went with me to Seattle. I tried to steal him from the police. He wouldn’t budge. He was devoted to a prick like you.”

  “Seattle,” Isaac said, his cheeks a horrible color. “Blue Eyes couldn’t have made it in Seattle. It’s too wet. The rain would have warped his ping-pong balls. He’d have had to come back to us.”

  “Papa, why is it that everybody around you dies, and you walk away without a scratch on your ass.”

  “Not true,” Isaac said. “I have plenty of scratches if you care to look.”

  The Chief stumbled in his own room, searching for his honey jar. Marilyn had depleted him. Isaac had to have his lick of honey, or die. Marilyn caught him with his finger in a jar. Isaac, the sorry bear.

  “Papa, should I run down for a dozen eggs?”

  The bear was whimpering with honey on his nose. Daughter, I’ve got a worm that’s more precious to me than all my battle scars. Didn’t I catch it in the field? It’s with me when I shit, when I snore, when I go to John Jay. It can spell “Blue Eyes” with the hooks in its mouth. A goddamn educated worm.

  The mad, Peruvian Kol Nidre wailed in Isaac’s head. He was surrounded by priests. Whose design was it? Big fat cop, Isaac the Brave, murdered Blue Eyes, murdered Jerónimo, how many more had he managed to kill? He didn’t need a gun. He snuffed you out with logistics. Isaac was lord of Manhattan and the Bronx. He worked you into a corner, and let someone else supply the instruments. You couldn’t shove your pinkie into his face. Isaac was always clean. He loved that blue-eyed bitch. Hadn’t he nourished Coen for ten years? Marilyn should have picked a high commissioner for her man, not a cop who played checkers with Isaac. He didn’t want Coen to fuck his daughter. It rankled Isaac. Blue Eyes was a piece of him. Should he have spent his life imagining his own “angel” rutting with Marilyn the Wild?

  There was a knock on Isaac’s
door. The Chief recalled his date with the blintze queen. Now he’d have a surplus of women in his room. Marilyn and Ida would stalk one another and growl at Father Isaac. “Baby,” he said, touching Marilyn on her long, long sleeve. “It’s only a friend. Ida Stutz.”

  15.

  ST. Patrick of the Synagogues courted the little goya with Jerónimo in his brain. He stood outside her building with his new shillelagh, discouraging suitors, girlfriends, and pimps. There was a bit of pishogue in his snarl, a touch of Irish sadness in the handle of his broom. Silver had helped destroy the baby. He’d allowed Jerónimo to drift into the war zones that Isaac had manufactured as a kind of plaything, a dollhouse for the Guzmanns and himself. Damn their rotten armies. Patrick was the baby’s keeper, and he’d let him slip away.

  His pants weighed down with Guinness, his shirt corroding on his chest, Patrick kept to Jane Street, singing about witches and dead Irish kings. It was a freakish serenade. Odile’s windows were in the back. All she could hear was a wretched yodeling and a blather of words. She would come downstairs in a gauzy nightgown to collect St. Patrick. Neighbors spied her buttocks under the gauze, lovely moons of flesh, as she got the Irishman and his bottles into her tiny flat. He built up a passion off the street. Odile had shallow bruises on her neck from St. Patrick’s grizzled chin. He made love to her in a serious way. The little goya could scarcely breathe, with a giant living on her bed. His climaxes caused the walls to shake. His whole body rumbled during one of his spectacular comes.

  After the lovemaking he would suck on his bottles and devour a loaf of bread. Then he lay back, belched, broke wind (his farts had a timbre that could have healed a sick dog), and sang to Odile, mumbled songs that terrified her.

  There was a lad named Jerónimo

  Who caught a disease, a disease

  In his father’s candy store.

  He saw Moses giving little boys

  Licorice and ice cream

  Licorice and ice cream

  And he wanted to color their lips

  Color their lips

  With his father’s crayons.

  “Jesus,” Patrick said, “were they going to cure him with a dose of halvah? Why didn’t they put the lad in a hospital? Couldn’t Papa discourage little boys from visiting the candy store? Who’s going to pray for the infants who died on the roofs?”

  St. Patrick would weep with bread in his mouth and gorge his throat with Guinness. He discovered a circular on Odile’s dressing table, an advertisement for the Nude Miss America Follies. “What’s this?”

  “Nothing,” she said, and she snatched the circular from out of his hands. “They slipped it under the door. Crazy people. Can’t stop inventing new contests.”

  “Is that an entry blank at the bottom of the page?”

  “Didn’t notice,” she said, stuffing the circular into her nightgown. She would shriek if she heard another song about Jerónimo. The goya missed that weird family. The Guzmanns had provided for her, given her customers and pocket money. She’d gotten one postcard from Zorro. He scratched out thirteen words to Odile. “Love it here. You can smell the shit under the streets. Love. César.”

  Odile was approaching twenty. She’d retired from porno films eleven months ago. Living at the Plaza had thrown her into obscurity. Producers couldn’t keep their noses out of her tits. The men she knew wouldn’t honor the emotions of a nineteen-year-old. They wanted a mechanical baby, a doll with nipples that could go hard and soft. But Patrick was in the way. That idiot Irishman talked marriage in her ear. He’d make Odile into a washerwoman yet. She’d have to scrub the drawers of every rabbi at the Kings of Munster.

  Odile had to break off with the Irishman. She couldn’t earn a penny with St. Patrick guarding the house. She packed a suitcase of cosmetics and underpants and ran from Jane Street the next time Patrick attended morning prayers. She picked a good hideout, where she would be safe from any man. It was a lesbian bar on Thirteenth Street called The Dwarf. She could play parcheesi in the back room, eat cucumber salads while she sandpapered her bunions for the Nude Miss America Follies. It wasn’t vanity that compelled Odile. She didn’t need two thousand men to admire the geometry of her pubic hair. It was business, nothing but business. If she won the Follies, she could revive her stage name, Odette, and become a porno queen again.

  The bouncers at The Dwarf were broadshouldered cousins, Sweeney and Janice. The cousins could sniff out transvestites, FBI agents, and undercover cops for miles around The Dwarf. Both of them were in love with Odile. They hadn’t seen the little bitch in over a year. Janice wasn’t utterly pleased with Odile’s invasion of the premises. That girl created havoc at The Dwarf. Bartendresses wouldn’t mix drinks. Customers quarreled. Everybody wanted to dance with Odile.

  Janice came up to her table. The bitch was wearing a mint julep face masque, light green mud that was supposed to purify her skin.

  “Honey, there’s a man outside. I think he belongs to you.”

  The mud splintered close to Odile’s eyes. “Shit,” she said.

  “How did that Irishman find this place?”

  She walked over to the window. She smiled through the mud. It was only Herbert Pimloe. He arrived at The Dwarf in a wilted cotton suit. Isaac’s whip forgot his handkerchief. He wiped his forehead with the ends of his tie. The mudpack made him sulky. He was frightened of a girl with green jaws.

  “Odile, what the fuck?”

  She wouldn’t stand on the sidewalk with Pimloe. “Herbert, I’m in training. Go away.”

  Pimloe had a cowish look. “I want to live with you.”

  “Herbert, your wife wouldn’t appreciate that.”

  “So what? I’m never home more than twice a week. I swear. Isaac keeps me in Manhattan.”

  “Are you the big Jew’s baby?”

  Pimloe jumped in his cotton suit. “Who says?”

  “Patrick Silver.”

  Pimloe began to sneer. “That quiff. He got burned out of his own synagogue. Odile, Isaac can’t sign his name without me. I’m a chief inspector now. Silver’s a cunt who wears a naked holster on his belly.”

  “Don’t curse,” she said. “I might decide to marry him.”

  Odile retreated into The Dwarf and left Pimloe flat. He intended to hop over the doorsill and chase Odile, but the image of Sweeney and Janice in their tailored suits soured him. The whip returned to Headquarters. He would raid the bar tomorrow with a squad of blue-eyed cops and drag those fat cousins into the street so he could be alone with Odile. Pimloe was a Harvard man. He would convince the girl to stay with him, bribe her with promises of champagne, chocolate, and pommes frites.

  The little goya didn’t have time to dawdle over Herbert the cop. She had to peel mud off her face. Sweeney lent her a small valise to hold her nightgown in. Janice wouldn’t wish her luck at the Follies, or say goodbye. Sweeney pushed her out the door with a soft kiss. “You don’t have to undress for those pig men. You can stick to parcheesi with Janice and me. I’ll be at the show. If the pigs try to handle you, I’ll tear up the floors.”

  Odile hiked to the Greenwich Avenue Art Theatre with Sweeney’s valise. Posters of nubile ladies and girls had been slapped to the theatre walls. The creatures on the walls existed without a blemish; the girls had amazing white teeth and no brown spots on their nipples. Odile wondered how many photographers had been paid to brush beauty marks off the posters (even the porno queen had a few baby moles on her ass). She went in to register herself.

  The manager of the Follies, Martin Light, ogled Odile. He sat in his undershirt distributing pink cards to all the Follies girls. It was sweltering inside the Greenwich. Martin couldn’t get the thermostat to dip below ninety degrees. He held onto Odile’s wrist for half a minute. “Baby, it’s a lousy crop this year. You’ll walk away with everything. I can tell.” He winked and sent her into the bullpen that had been set up behind the stage for the convenience of the Follies girls.

  Odile was grossly uncomfortable around such girls. They gi
ggled, chewed gum, and had scowls under their eyes that betokened a mad determination to walk on stage without their clothes. It saddened Odile. None of them could compete against the perfect ripple of her bosoms, and the cool outline of her back and legs.

  Odile got into her nightgown and stood away from the girls, who prowled in their kimonos, pajamas, and little robes, or rubbed against the walls in bikini underpants. The air grew thick in the bullpen. The ceiling began to cloud with the girls’ hot breath. Pajamas came off. Panties were flung across the room. The Follies girls had a passion for getting undressed.

  They had a visit from Martin Light. The manager plowed through a bullpen of sweating nipples. He stopped at Odile. This one was in her nightgown. The sight of gauzy material in the midst of so many yards of flesh unsettled Martin. He laid a finger on her hip. “Girlie, you can’t lose. Meet me after the show.”

  Odile did stretches and pliés in her nightgown to prevent her arms and legs from falling asleep. The Follies girls watched this litheness of Odile with swollen faces. They began to despise their own raw bodies. They had lumps on their behinds that couldn’t be smoothed away with all the stretching in the world. They might have finished Odile, ripped the gauze off her shoulders, devoured her fingernails, if the manager hadn’t come for his girls.

  He herded them out of the bullpen, keeping the girls in a scraggly line. They bumped knees wherever they went. You could hear shouts and muttering through the walls of the bullpen. The auditorium was alive. The girls didn’t see a thing. Stumbling in the dark, between paper walls, they couldn’t determine chairs, aisles, or the shape of individual men.

  Martin led the girls into a pit under the stage that was inhabited by a clutch of fiddlers and trumpet players. Amplifiers and trumpet cases were packed near the girls’ feet. No one could bend without striking an amplifier. The girls had to lick each other’s hair, or learn to breathe in a new way. Martin took his undershirt off. Grinning murderously, he powdered his neck, his bald spot, and his eyes, and slipped a dinner jacket over his bare chest. There were scars in the velvet sleeves. A cuff was missing. Martin held his grin. He squeezed around the girls, fumbling into elbows, hairdos, and pieces of crotch, and climbed out of the pit on tiny, wicked stairs. You could say goodbye to the nudie show if you lost your footing. You would have tumbled into the fiddlers and broken your head.