Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  When Nancy was deep in Catholic high school, she would walk out onto the top of her stoop with nothing on, wiggle her young breasts, give a great yawn, and go back inside. When she graduated, she went to St. John’s University for a week, after which she came home and said she was leaving.

  “They made one of the deans a federal judge,” she told Dolores and her mother, “and they put in the note on the bulletin board that it was a lifetime job. The school took off for the whole afternoon. Let me go someplace where people try to count because of themselves, not because of the fucking job they have.”

  She got in an old car and drove out to the University of Iowa, where they had a program for creative writing. Nobody knew whether she went to school much, but when she returned to Glendale three years later, she announced that she had sold a novel. She did this by standing on the stoop one morning, naked, in a Statue of Liberty pose. Holding up as her lamp what she announced was the publisher’s check. Nancy said she was home only until her apartment in Manhattan was furnished. While she was home, however, she was the only one who ever caused Dolores to feel and listen for something else on these nearly deserted daytime streets whose sameness causes people to suspect anything different, who must see the trolley tracks in order to be comfortable, and who silence so many sounds of encouragement.

  Now, Dolores pulled a Tab out of the refrigerator and sat at the kitchen table with Nancy.

  “Who is he?” Nancy said.

  “Owney. Owney Morrison.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s in the Army but he’s home.”

  “Where?”

  “On Central.”

  “If you love him so much, what are you doing here?”

  “You’re right. I ought to go right over there.”

  “When does he have to go back?”

  “He has to go to Vietnam today.”

  “Today? You’ll go with him,” Nancy said. “We’ll pack you in a big trunk and mail you to him.”

  “Right now!” Dolores said.

  “They’ll send the trunk to Hawaii first. Late at night in the Post Office you can push open the trunk and get out of it and go for a walk on the beach in the moonlight. Waves. Somebody will play a ukulele around a big fire. You can sit with them and sing and then go back to your little trunk, fold up your legs, and pack yourself up. The next face you see will be your boyfriend in Vietnam. Can you imagine his look when he opens his trunk? Standing right there on a battlefield, and you jump up at him?”

  “Wow!”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “I met him yesterday.”

  “Then he must be very much in love with you.”

  “Sure, he is.”

  “And you’re so in love with him.”

  “I can’t eat.”

  “Then we better pack that trunk right now.”

  “I can’t get packed today. I got finals next week.”

  “Oh.”

  “Can you imagine?”

  “What?” Nancy said.

  “That I’m sitting here and I have a boy going away to war. Did you ever think of such a thing in your whole life?”

  “No. I only write about sodomy and things like that. I never wrote about anything as dirty as that.”

  That day, Owney flew to San Francisco, took the bus up to Travis Air Force Base, where he sat through a Northern California evening, staring through cigarette smoke, waiting for the military flight to Saigon. When the waiting room became tiresome, he put on his field jacket and went out into the chilly darkness. A couple of others came out, saw a cab pulling up to the terminal, and asked Owney if he cared to take a ride with them. They told the cab they wanted pizza, and the cab took them to a pizza stand and beer bar just outside the base gates. Owney drank beer and for a moment he saw Dolores in her jeans and work shirt. When they got back to the waiting room and were standing outside the cab while they put together the money to pay for it, there was a sound coming from the darkness on the field. The others went inside the terminal building and Owney, listening to the sound, walked around the building and to the start of the tarmac. The sound defined itself now, a rumbling sound, the rumble of a wagon on a rutted road. It grew louder and Owney went out onto the tarmac looking for it.

  Coming out of a bumpy side road on the base was an electric cart and behind it were wagons that bounced over the bumps; on the wagons were silver metal coffins. As the wagons came into the light from the terminal windows, Owney could see the stenciling on the coffins. HR. Human remains. The airman driving the electric cart got out to open the gate in the low wire fence.

  “What you got?” Owney said to him.

  “Remains from Nam. Had them here in the base mortuary. They got here yesterday.”

  “Where are they going now?”

  He pointed to a freight plane that sat with its lighted insides showing.

  “Dover, Delaware. These are East Coast bodies. Fly them to Dover, Delaware, and then I think they put them on the train to their hometowns from there. All right. See you.”

  He drove out onto the runway, with the wagons rumbling behind him and the aluminum military coffins bouncing on the rumbling wagons, and they disappeared into the darkness between the fence and the plane with the lighted insides that was far out on the field. The sound of a rumbling wagon was constant.

  As Owney walked back to the terminal building, his fingers dug inside his jacket for his scapular medal, which was there to protect his throat. It was a silver medal of the Sacred Heart, worn on a chain around the neck, although traditionally there are scapulars that are two cloth medals, bearing pictures of the Sacred Heart on brown cloth, worn on brown cord around the neck, one cloth medal at the base of the throat, the other at the back of the neck. As Owney needed something more substantial than cloth, the head of the ushers at Fourteen Holy Martyrs got him the metal scapular medal, a reduction from the usual two, but permissible and practical.

  Then a transport plane rolled up outside the terminal and a noncom bawled out names and Owney walked out to the plane. Twenty-six hours later, he landed at Ton San Nhut in Saigon, on the military side of the field, and as he walked off the plane from Travis he was directed to a C-130 that, moments later, took off and flew in and out of thunderstorms and landed in the mist at Pleiku, in the Central Highlands. On the wet ground alongside the runway there were two Vietnamese army officers squatting down and chattering to a thin man who had an old face and a young, nasal voice. The thin man wore black pajamas and rubber thongs. One of the officers took his hand. They all kept talking and the officer holding the man’s hand kept looking straight into the man’s eyes and he made no extra sound or effort as he pushed the man’s index finger straight up, then simply kept going and made it snap as he pushed it straight back, like a hinge. The man in black pajamas let out a nasal howl.

  Owney walked by without hesitating. He had been on the ground in the country for a total of only a few minutes and already he did not give a fuck for anybody. Any dates he had to keep had to do with his own throat and neck, and not some gook’s finger.

  On his first day in Pleiku, with the afternoon thunderstorms lighting the sky for miles upward, and turning the ground into ankle-deep mud, he sat in a bunker and wrote a letter to Dolores Kaufhold. For four days, her kiss had lingered.

  The first Kaufholds in New York were a young bakery worker named George and his wife, Bertha, who arrived here from Cologne in 1889, holding hands and wearing festival clothes on deck as the new city presented itself in the first sunlight of a June day. They moved into a room at number 116 Clinton Street in the downtown East Side neighborhood that was at the time as German as a new lathe. That summer, the sound of Wagner and polkas came from the open windows of five-story tenement buildings that were overcrowded with Germans who formed the largest migration ever to reach New York. The Irish, Jews, and Italians arrived here in fewer numbers, and kept shrieking that theirs was the true saga of the New World. The Germans, too orderly as they work
ed through years of the poorest conditions, were all but forgotten.

  George Kaufhold became a bread baker in a large new business owned by a man who called himself Count Gengler and who knew nothing about baking but quite a bit about human tolerance for greed, of which there usually is none. Count Gengler was of common coinage, but in coming to America he took on a royal name in anticipation of charges that would be hurled at him, similar to those in his native Mannheim, where he became the city’s first bowling hustler and was forced to leave. In Manhattan, Count Gengler strolled about in a white suit and in search of indoor or outdoor bowling matches. He would hold the ball as if it were a garbage can, totter forward, and drop the ball. The Count would laugh good-naturedly with the crowd and then say, “I giff you bets.” At which point, there would be those who would shuck off latency and actively try to rob this foolish German Count, who as always would totter to the foul line, but now would release the ball as if it were the product of an explosion. The Count won himself a bakery.

  George Kaufhold, the sweat pouring off his thin body, pushing bread about with long wooden sticks, wondered how long it would take a man to learn to bowl in a league with the Count.

  He tried once, going to a bowling tournament in a place on Park Row and betting half his week’s salary of twelve dollars against a man with a withered right arm. Upon completion of the deal, the man with the bad right arm picked up the ball with his left, which had the muscles of a snow tiger, and each roll caused pins to leap into the air.

  When George Kaufhold had to get a salary advance at the bakery, and was required to give the reason for it, the owner, Count Gengler, sneered at him.

  “Make the door open for yourself by hard work. You don’t know how to do what I do. In Mannheim, I practiced bowling fifteen hours a day until I could giff bets and win them. You only have the will to steal. That is not enough. You must have the ability to steal, too.”

  George Kaufhold took the advice, although his blood was restless.

  In the meantime, he had a daughter, Frances, and a son, Eddie. On May 20, 1904, his wife gave birth to another son, Billy. On June 15, she went out for the first time, taking Frances, then thirteen, and Eddie, fourteen, to the spring outing of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, which was on 6th Street in Manhattan. The outing was a boat ride around Manhattan on the stern-wheeler General Slocum. The boat departed from Pike Slip, East River, with children waving and mothers carrying flowers and food, and it headed up the East River, into a fresh spring breeze. Opposite East 95th Street in Manhattan, the General Slocum caught fire. The captain had the ship on the Manhattan side of the river, with miles of pilings and rocks and concrete shoreline to choose from, but rather than stop the boat and attempt to drift to the Manhattan side, the captain increased speed. His high old wooden boat went right into the breeze, turning into a fireplace. The mother, Bertha Kaufhold, was separated from her children. Frances and Eddie found themselves holding hands and surrounded by flames leaping out of the wooden deck. Everywhere, mothers and children were leaping overboard and, nearly all unable to swim, caused the water to turn white as they flailed at it. From the shoreline the white water looked like that caused by baitfish being pursued by regiments of striped bass. On the top deck, Eddie Kaufhold lifted one of his hot shoes and put it on a foothold on the ship’s flagpole. This gave him an idea and he began to climb the flagpole away from the flames. Frances Kaufhold looked up at her brother and wondered how he would be safe in the sky. He turned and held a hand out, but the deck under her feet was showing smoke now and she had to do something and she looked at the flames around her and was about to start climbing to her brother’s hand when suddenly the sheets of flames along the rail stopped. It was as if somebody had thrown a great rug over this part of the deck. There was flame everywhere else, but none along this one patch of deck. Frances Kaufhold ran for the opening. The boards were black and smoking and they burned through the thin soles of her shoes, but she did not break stride. The rail was gone and nothing was in her way as she slipped between two white-hot metal spokes used to hold up the rail and jumped high and out as far as her wounded feet could cause her to go. She landed feet first in the water and went down so far and so fast, she was afraid that she would not come up. Arms and feet struggling, she ended the plunge and started the long way up toward the vague light at the top of the water, her chest bursting with need. She came onto the surface with her mouth sucking in air and her hands keeping her afloat; she was one of the few who had attended summer swimming lessons given by the Steuben Recreation League. Now as she looked at the ship, which was still tearing upstream into the wind, flames rising higher into the sky, she saw her brother climbing the flagpole. Climbing, climbing, climbing, and behind him the flames licking and, in moments of anger, suddenly leaping at him. Her brother Eddie went higher and now the flagpole, weakened by the fire, began to bend backward. Eddie Kaufhold still was climbing with his feet and knees, but the flagpole was bending him back into the flames. He was a little figure in the air and Frances, frozen as she watched him, started to slip under the water. She put her face into the water and took a couple of strokes to regain her buoyancy. Now when she looked there was no flagpole and no brother. Only fire. Frances floated on her back and shrieked to the sky. Hearing her, a tugboat captain guided his boat over and picked her up. Frances Kaufhold became a rarity: a child who had survived the General Slocum fire, which had taken more than a thousand lives in the bright June morning. Hardly a tenement on the downtown East Side was left untouched. The Germans buried their women and children in the Lutheran Cemetery in Ridgewood, in Queens, and then nearly all the Germans moved from the East Side to Queens, in order to be closer to the graves they visited each Sunday by the thousands. And as they left the streets of the East Side, they were replaced by Jews from Eastern Europe who quickly made the street names, Ludlow, Attorney, Eldridge, Rivington, Allen, Orchard, Delancey, part of American lore. The Germans who had preceded them now lived in Queens, which could be seen clearly from Manhattan, although it was actually a thousand miles away.

  George Kaufhold was left with his daughter Frances and a son, Billy, who was only weeks old. He moved to Onderdonk Avenue in Ridgewood, and while outwardly able to carry the tragedy, he became ill and missed work for the first times in his life. In the middle of the second winter in Queens, he came down with a cold that became bronchitis and suddenly one night he had to be taken to St. Catherine’s Hospital on Bushwick Avenue, his breathing sporadic, and doctors said there was no reason why he could not breathe, but his lungs simply stopped working and he died. His daughter Frances, at fifteen, was left with a two-year-old baby brother and a job in a knitting mill. She paid neighbors to watch the baby during the day, leaving her with nights of washing by hand while a baby squalled. She was nineteen, and with eyes that sometimes indicated her mind was in strands as she tried to cope with a six-year-old, when she met Arnold Fink, a plumber. He promised Frances a protected life, but upon their return from a honeymoon at Schmidt’s Farms, Earlton, New York, Fink made it plain that he still expected her to go to work. He would, however, save her money by having a relative care for the baby, Billy Kaufhold. On Frances’s first post-honeymoon shift at the knitting mill, she found that the same people who had treated her as a gardenia only two weeks before now indicated by an amount of indifference that she was merely one of them, somebody who had to work for a living and was not awaiting an important event, a marriage, to lift her away from this. They despised her for having used up their hopes, and then reappearing as a failure, just as they were, people who must work grimly, breathing lint, for just enough pay to keep them from sleeping on the sidewalk. When Frances Kaufhold, now Fink, got home from work that first day, she looked at the baby brother being returned to her in time for bathing and feeding, and then at her husband, who was washing his hands and inquiring about dinner.

  Frances Kaufhold took a deep, angry breath and muttered to herself, “I just guess I’ll have to get by without true love.”
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  She did. There was to be no stare, glance, whisper, discussion that would cause the risk of a fight that would leave her alone. This was a winter of her life that she recounted for all to hear and learn from, through all her years. She got out of work by the simple method of becoming pregnant with the first of four children she was to have with plumber Fink. Her brother Billy, who was placed in the role of the oldest child in the family, and who attempted to fight with Fink as soon as he was tall enough to reach him with a punch, left Grover Cleveland High School at seventeen, worked at a job he hated in a machine shop for a few years. He studied for the police department exam, which he passed in 1925, and went on the job in 1926. During the Depression, when the pain of being out of work was at its highest for the most people, Billy Kaufhold, with his city check guarantee, still regarded his job as one of opportunity rather than security. He became known as a patrolman with insides cold enough to allow him to walk into a speakeasy that was under the protection of captains and lieutenants and attempt to use his silver shield as a lance and shake the place down. In 1928, he met Ellen Kearns, and, against his better judgment, married her in 1937. Ellen lived at 107-82 101st Street, Ozone Park, an attached two-story white frame house that was across the street from the side entrance to John Adams High School. Behind the high school was a rutted athletic field that ran into a large farm. From her stoop, Ellen Kearns could look beyond the athletic field to groups of Czechoslovakian women with kerchiefs on their heads who worked the farm by hand. Then beyond the farm were the old green stands of Aqueduct Race Track. In the spring and fall afternoons, when the horses ran at Aqueduct, the people of 102nd Street—whose speech ran to the Queens “Jeet yet?”—listened to the voice of the track announcer, who, as part of a sport originally English, cried out in traditional tones: “They’re at the haaalf.”