Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “She gets over it,” Owney said.

  “I think you’re overlooking some difficulties,” McNiff said. “I don’t like what I see so much that I think I’m going to have three more Manhattans. Three more Manhattans, not a triple Manhattan. I want to drink them one right after the other.”

  Owney put the beer down and started to walk out so he would be in front of the bar when his wife pulled up. At the doorway, he stepped aside to let a woman pass. The woman went to the pay phone.

  “Excuse me, I’m a little drunk,” McNiff called to her. “Would you care to have sex with me? My wife left me and I haven’t had sex in a long time.” The woman walked out of the bar. McNiff’s blue-striped arm waved. “I read that you can send to Poland for a slave girl. A slave girl! You can beat her up and make her give you blow jobs. Then she has to cook dinner.” He called to Owney, “Here, you better take another drink. Get drunk. Public policy states that you cannot be around with people your own age. You must sit in a saloon with an old man like me and drink until you get sick. You’re not allowed to be young and use drugs. Excuse me now, I have to leave. I’m getting drunk. Oh, it’s probably so much easier using drugs. I wish I could be a drug addict instead of a drunk.”

  “Why don’t you?” Owney said.

  “Because I can’t afford a lawyer. Neither can you.”

  9

  IN THOSE DAYS THAT followed, days that ran into weeks and then became part of weeks that turned into months, on each of those days, he started across a slippery deck, with one hand clutching a taut rope, and always there was the temptation to let go and be carried away with the water and over the side into the heavy seas. Resisting, he would trip the rope with both hands. He simply would raise his arms and feel the water smack him on the chest and sweep him off. He was returning home less and less frequently. Often he would wake up in the hog house, or in his old room in the cemetery, and stare out at the headstones and flinch at the depression that shook him to the legs.

  In the house on 74th Street, Dolores Morrison felt the first shadows of every evening were aimed directly at her life. There was one night when Gladys Farrell, who lived four doors up, stopped in. A white top covered a midsection that embarrassed her. Unbrushed brown-gray hair made her seem older than her fifty years.

  “Waiting,” Gladys said.

  “Looks like it.”

  Gladys Farrell sat down heavily. “For a change, Eddie’s home. Home dead. He was out so late last night he was a zombie today. He was going to take me out last night. A movie. Huh. At eight o’clock, no word from him. At nine o’clock, he calls me from up the avenue. He said he couldn’t look at a movie. You know why? ‘My eyes hurt too much.’”

  “You didn’t believe him,” Dolores said.

  “Who knows what I believe anymore. I went up to meet him for a drink at Fritz’s. He was saving my life inviting me out. When I walked in, and I say walk because we don’t have a car, you know that, well, when I walked in and saw him with all this money spread over the bar, I felt sick.”

  Dolores nodded. “Owney brings me money like he found it in the street.”

  “I’m married thirty-two years; I can’t do much now. If I was your age, I’d know how to handle it.”

  “How?”

  “Stop protecting him. If he lies when he gets home, I wouldn’t believe him. If he doesn’t get home when he says he’s coming, then I wouldn’t let it pass.”

  Dolores said nothing.

  “I’d find the saloon he goes into and I’d walk right in while he’s there and have a drink while he’s there.”

  “That’s not me,” Dolores said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m better than that.”

  Gladys Farrell shook her head. “Confront the man! That’s the only way to change things. After all, you loved him enough to marry him. You can’t just turn off an emotion. You love him.”

  “He ought to remember he loves me.”

  “It takes these men time to realize.”

  “What do you call time?”

  “Thirty-two years and I’m still trying. But I’m hoping. That’s love, I guess.”

  “Whose love?”

  Gladys said nothing, finished her cigarette, and left. Dolores sat as the shadows came down the alley outside her kitchen window and reminded her of the hours that kept passing. That night, Owney was late.

  How late, she never knew. She slept on the couch.

  In the morning, he did not stir and she walked about the kitchen and tended to the baby.

  “Dolores.”

  “What?”

  “Come here.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  His voice, equal parts plea and command, created one of those humiliating instances that she had been raised by gender and landscape to accept. She now thought of how many times she had answered that call, walking to bed like a servant girl in bare feet. Even with this, when he called again she found herself reluctantly considering the idea of going in under the fiction of asking what he wanted. But once in the room she walked right past the bed and toward the bathroom.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing. It’s all terrific.”

  “Then come here.”

  She slammed the bathroom door behind her. Inside, as she reached for the shower handles, her bare feet on the cold morning tiles caused her to remember the night when she knew she was pregnant with Christine. The oil burner had been shorted all during a chill, dark day, which had the house as cold as the street outdoors by late evening, when the burner finally was fixed. Stepping into the shower at that time, Dolores had found the bathroom floor still so cold that she had to stand on the rug. She had waited for several hours for this chance to be alone in front of the long mirror on the inside of the door to see if there would be any reflection of what she knew was happening in her body. She had no idea how long she had been pregnant; her period wasn’t due for another week. Nor that day was her body signifying anything specific: the breasts had gathered no heaviness and while she was a little bit queasy and quite tired at the moment, she at first attributed that to staying out too late with Owney the night before. “One more,” he kept saying. Upon thinking, she decided that her fatigue was not something caused by the hours of the day or night. She knew that she had become one in the highest order of women. Not that she had been part of an underprivileged group to begin with, for she believed out of her education that Catholic married women, under normal living conditions, without even being pregnant, were the only complete women, for theirs were the only bodies nurtured by sperm. How can these other women be whole, she had been taught, if while avoiding God’s clear wish that they have children, they so clog their canals that sperm cannot seep into their bodies, thus leaving these women walking around with parched insides? While the pill did not prevent sperm from entering the recesses of a woman’s body, it caused the blood in the womb to turn sour.

  The distinction was made between a married body and one virginal and thus in need of nothing more from a male beyond a bouquet of roses.

  Her husband, she remembered now, entered fatherhood with the same level of consciousness exhibited by all Morrisons at those slender moments when emotions were raised by beauty and sinew was useless: on the night in which she stood in this bathroom and first examined her face and torso for any signs of added life within her, Owney was in the living room, where he shouted and stamped his feet as he watched the Monday night football game with Artie Brooks, who lived three houses up the block in those days.

  “God owed me one!” Owney called out that night.

  As her husband reveled in the simplicity of a game, she stood with all the mists of the unknown gathering inside her body.

  Now, here at another time, in the morning so long after that first pregnancy, as she picked her feet off the cold tiles and stepped into the shower, the idea of another pregnancy caused a small, blank anger. How did you ever do it in the first place?
she snarled at herself. Immediately, she thought of the baby and said a small prayer in penance. This did not diminish the hostility to the mention of the word in her mind. She felt slightly bloated from taking the pill. Better than the other, she thought, stepping under the water.

  The first time she used the pill was when the baby was two months old and cried through too much of the night and of course her husband failed to come home on one of these nights. He called from the job at six A.M. and said that he had worked overtime and fell asleep. On another night that week, he arrived home at midnight, with a scrape over one eye and the knuckles of his right hand dotted with fresh scabs. He said the marks were from work; she thought a barroom fight. When he reached out to hold her, she went into the next room. She slept on the couch that night, and went to a doctor the next afternoon and got a prescription for birth control pills.

  After several months of using them she went to confession at St. Pancras on Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent. Kneeling alone in a pew in the late afternoon, she prayed and examined her conscience. From years of teaching by the sisters at St. Matthias on weekdays, and by priests of the diocese on Sundays, she believed that birth control by any other means than rhythm was a mortal sin that could send the soul to Hell. There was to be neither deviation nor hope for change in policy. This was a matter dealing with life itself, not some grubby ecclesiastical mistake buried in a subclause such as the taking of meat on Friday, which once was termed a mortal sin. If, after sufficient reflection and full consent of the will, a pot roast was chewed up on a Friday, it was a sin of such magnitude that if the person did not confess it before death, the soul was immediately consigned to the ceaseless fires of Hell. At the same time, so many dispensations were being given out around the globe that more Catholics ate meat on Friday than ever heard of mackerel. Finally, meat on Friday was thrown out as a sin, and presumably the billions of souls burning in Hell for the sin of pot roast on Friday simply saw their sentence sheets changed from eating meat on Friday to being brazen in the face of God. The crackling fires went on.

  Birth control was different; the Church was so adamant that women took to contraceptives with the dull understanding that henceforth they were living in terrible sin. Dolores, however, had decided to differentiate between the received opinion that birth control interfered with life and her own feelings that these church rulings were made by whim and hearsay of the same sort as the backward old Italians who once excommunicated any Catholic who did not believe that the world was flat: She began to think that the old men in Rome were jealous of life in a place like America and that they attempted to pull this life back into lines set out by their dusty thinking. All Catholic theology, as she read and listened, seemed based on ensuring that nothing hinders the movement of male sperm. Nowhere did it set down any obligation attendant to the male discharge, yet there were so many rules for women that one became distracted. So the man could shut his eyes and sleep and the woman suddenly could have a changed body and mind for the next nine months and undoubtedly forever.

  She understood the religion’s hatred of abortion. Dolores never questioned the idea that life begins at conception, at the very instant, and that life came with a soul placed there by God. Abortion, therefore, was unthinkable. Always, she remembered the sermon in church on the Sunday following John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The priest at Dolores’s Mass pointed out that although it had taken a priest in Dallas some time to reach Kennedy’s body at the hospital and give the last rites, it still was considered a valid sacrament, for the soul remains in the body for about two hours after the signs of life have departed. And this very same soul, the priest pointed out that morning, takes up its residence at the very moment that the sperm and egg are joined in the womb.

  Once, she attempted to go past this belief. The baby was eight months old and suddenly midday of the twenty-eighth day of her cycle passed and Dolores had no sign of her period, though her body usually was as orderly as a parade. By the next morning, her mind was cold with worry. She thought of the word abortion. It could not be a killing of the same magnitude as that of a human being who could be seen and spoken to. All through that day she thought of her husband and pregnancy and each time the word abortion sounded loud in her mind. She theorized that the soul remained in Kennedy’s body for two hours after his death because there was no exact way to identify the moment that physical life finally slipped out of the body, thus signaling to the soul that its time on earth was gone and that it must now head for preliminary judgment; final judgment comes on the day the world ends. There was, as Kennedy’s death illustrated, a reason for the soul to linger at the end: the last sacrament, extreme unction. What would be the reason, however, for a soul to be placed into some collection of cells that were just starting to grow inside a woman? Much too early for a soul, Dolores thought. Perhaps, then, an abortion was not the hideous crime she once felt. Immediately, she prayed for forgiveness, as it was clearly the Devil who was tempting her and what she felt was logic really was his dark influence. That afternoon, however, she was in the Glendale library reading an article about abortion. She became furious that while sitting there in anxiety, the magazine in her hands told of how the civil interpretation of abortion might wind up being based on an old court case involving bakers who were overworked by their owner. The first court ruled against the baker not because he took advantage of needy human beings and he misused them, but because the bakery workers, once they had worked past sixty hours in a week, would in their fatigue bake bread that would make the public sick. Then a second court, the Supreme Court, said that this deprived the bakery worker of his freedom and he certainly could work on. So when an abortion case got to the Supreme Court, the justices might well use the bakery case to determine that a woman had the freedom to get rid of her fetus.

  A bun in the oven, Dolores thought. That’s precisely how they see the whole thing.

  I fit no category, she told herself. I haven’t been raped and I’m not somebody whose boyfriend got her in trouble. Nor am I some bored woman who doesn’t want any more children. I have one baby and a husband who drinks too much and I’m trying to think of a way to get him to stop. If I am pregnant now, it will be a disaster. I am an individual with my own conscience and soul and I will be judged by God for what I am, not for what some old man in Rome, or in a court reading bakery cases, says I am.

  At noon two days later, she found her pantyhose stained, and she never thought of the word abortion again, nor did she remember how involved she had become with the word and its meaning. At a distance from it again, she allowed it to remain in its category of capital sin.

  Birth control was different. On that Ash Wednesday afternoon as she knelt in the pew of St. Pancras, she went over it in her mind once more, then got up and stood in line behind a young grammar school girl at the confessional booth of Father McMahon. The schoolgirl skipped in and out and then Dolores pushed the dusty velvet curtain aside and stepped into the box and immediately the small panel behind the screen window slid open and there appeared the faint outline of a priest whose head seemed heavy. With no preliminaries, Dolores went immediately to the only problem. She said that she had been practicing birth control.

  The priest sighed. “You’ll have to stop.”

  Dolores shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’ll have to. You cannot receive absolution unless you promise to your God that you will cease and desist from committing this grave sin.”

  “I don’t know if I feel it’s such a sin,” she said.

  “It is a very grave sin.”

  “How can it be? It’s not stopping a child by abortion. It is nothing. It’s stopping the male sperm.”

  “I can’t give you absolution.”

  “Then I’m sorry,” Dolores said.

  She blessed herself and walked out of the confessional and into the pale light of a neighborhood church in the afternoon. She glanced across the pews and standing in front of the confessional on the opposite wall
was an unfamiliar priest, a small, thin man with a dark face. A woman came out of the pews and up to the confessional and the dark priest went inside. Dolores went over and looked at his name, which was printed on a sign over the priest’s door. “Father D. Jhabvala.”

  Dolores went into a pew and knelt and looked up at the light coming through the top of the stained-glass window over the altar and she became so intense in her prayer, so in awe of a priest from India suddenly appearing at this moment, that she felt it was the Lord helping her alone.

  When she went in and told the priest from India that she was practicing birth control, the priest said in a soft voice, “I understand that this is considered a serious sin here and as I am visiting this country only for a short time, I must try to speak in the same voice as that of the others in this diocese. So let me say that it is a sin, your birth control, but that it is a sin that you must measure against your own conscience. I say that you must do this. I shall grant you absolution, but you must pray for guidance and examine your own conscience.”

  He blessed her and, free of sin, she walked out. She threw a glance at the box where the old Irishman sat and then she left the church.

  Her memories and thoughts now were interrupted by sharp knocking on the bathroom door.

  “Yes?” she called out.

  “I can’t wait for you,” Owney called. “I’m going to work.”

  “Don’t you want a shower?” Dolores said.

  There was grumbling and he was gone.

  Dolores held her face up to the warm water and tried to think of something hopeful, of another priest from India walking into her life in some new form, perhaps as a saint who could stop her husband’s drinking.

  Later in the morning, she left the baby with her mother and walked resolutely up to Myrtle Avenue, through the peace of houses from which only small, pleasant noises sounded—water running in the sink, a window being opened, a wash line being pulled—and got on the bus to Jamaica. The ride was long and bumpy and required her to change in Richmond Hill and ride along under the el into the fading old shopping center in Jamaica. Dolores pushed her face against the window and watched the construction of a new building growing in the middle of the old cemeteries and ancient-looking boarded-up churches that sat under the el. She remembered walking with her mother on these sidewalks, when they were crowded, and shopping in the Gertz store for an Easter outfit.