Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  Then, so much later, when she said hesitantly that their lives were being drowned, he listened with a nod and then went out into winds that blew him everywhere. The happiness was gone and he drank in pain.

  “Want one?” her cousin Virginia said. The cellophane roared as she dug for another cigarette.

  “I don’t know what I want,” Dolores said. She began to think about what her real mother had for insides. For Dolores, walking out on her own husband had in these first moments caused a sorrow and, immediately, a snarl. When she thought of the future, all she could see was dust. Her real mother had walked out on both the man and her own child. Dolores couldn’t speak for the man but she could speak pretty well for what the child knew: the mother never glanced back, or took a step to return through all the years since. She wondered what happened to her real mother in those odd moments during a day when the thought of the child she left blinked inside her, an unnoticed mirror suddenly catching the sun’s full light and turning everything blinding white.

  10

  FIRST, THERE WAS A creak somewhere inside the apartment. After it, the sound of several things falling at once. Then a man shouted with all his breath.

  “Who are you?”

  “Dolores Morrison.”

  “What do you want?”

  “A lawyer. I looked for your office downstairs, but the doorman told me that you stay up here.”

  The door opened and McNiff stood in tan pajamas with a middle button missing. He clutched the front of his pajama pants. Black eyeshades were pushed up on his uncombed hair. Eyeglasses sat on the sleep shades. McNiff pulled the glasses down onto his nose.

  “Oh, I know you. I was your husband’s lawyer.”

  “That’s right. The only time I ever was near a lawyer. I’d like to ask you a few things.”

  “What about?”

  “A divorce, or an annulment.”

  “I knew you were mad at your husband that day you were downstairs in the bar. I told that to your husband. I knew you were mad, I knew you were mad. Please wait right where you are. I can’t allow you to come inside. The only woman I’ll let in this apartment is a Polish slave who will give me dinner and sex.”

  McNiff opened the door wider and walked back into the apartment along a narrow footpath that ran between stacks of books that went from the floor to the ceiling. He was as wide as a gunboat and had to keep his arms tight against his sides so an elbow would hot knock over one of the stacks. He reappeared in a blue bathrobe.

  “These books cost me nothing. When lawyers die, their wives look at their legal books and before going to Florida they call up the bar association and say they want to donate their husband’s law books. I have twenty-five copies of everything. I have ten books on kidneys. It’s unusual to have a lawsuit involving kidneys. But the kidney feeds into the bladder. Therefore, why be short-sighted and not have ten books on kidneys? I have all my kidney books the third from the top on a stack. That’s my filing system. Kidney books are third from the top.”

  “I’m here to talk about a legal problem, not medical.”

  “What is it?”

  “Marital.”

  “Oh, the marital, that’s drinking. Drinking affects the kidneys. Why don’t I get out a book on the kidneys? We both can read it here in the doorway. Remember I told your husband that you were mad at him because of his drinking?”

  “I can’t handle that anymore.”

  “Many people in the world go around drunk,” McNiff said. “There’s lots worse things than a drunk.”

  “I just want to get as far away from the whole business as I can.”

  “Did your husband beat you up?”

  “My husband wouldn’t touch me.”

  “Then he’s not the worst.”

  “No, he isn’t. But there’s too much going on. I have to talk to somebody.”

  “Is he on a bender?”

  “I don’t know what he is. He’s drowning my heart. But I have to talk to you.”

  “I can get you a divorce,” McNiff said. “I know all about divorces. Just yesterday I was at Sutphin Boulevard for another divorce case. I was the husband’s lawyer. I had an hour and I went outside. I used to go for a drink and get drunk in the hour. Yesterday I went diagonally across the street from the courthouse. There used to be a bar. Now it’s a Burger King. You know what they had in there? Bargirls in yellow dresses. Bargirls at Burger King! This one girl was so gorgeous. She smiled at me. I thought she wanted to have sex. So I said, all right, I’ll buy another hamburger. Then maybe she’ll have sex with me. Well, I now have thirty-two hamburgers in my refrigerator and I didn’t have sex.”

  “I’m sure the young woman still was very nice to you at Burger King.”

  “She was not as nice as I wanted her to be. Do you want me to get you a hamburger? You can eat it cold right here in the hall.”

  “No, thank you. But I have to talk to you.”

  “I can get you a divorce. I can prove that I can. I got one for myself. I want to inform your husband first. He was my client. I am very ethical. When can you come back?”

  “I have to talk to you now. Or I’ll just have to go someplace else.”

  “You can step right inside the door. But I have to leave it partly open. I can’t have women in here behind closed doors. Unless you’re a Polish slave.”

  He stepped back and Dolores edged into the apartment. He stood in the passageway between the books and Dolores swung the door until it was only a few inches from being completely closed.

  “How long have you been married?”

  “About two years. No, twenty-two. What difference does it make?”

  “Because your husband is a unique figure.”

  “I think I’m the one who is unique.”

  “Don’t be so angry.”

  “I’m not. I’m just not feeling as much as I should.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve left him?”

  “That I’ve left him? Yes. That he’s left me? Huh.”

  “You’re through trying?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Why start an official proceeding?”

  “Oh, no, that I have to do. I have to get on with my own life. I need some kind of assurances that I’ll have some money. I can’t go running into saloons every time he gets paid. Besides, he has so many tricks that I forget what day he gets paid on.”

  “Is money the problem?”

  “No, life.”

  “Sex? Are you having trouble with your sex life? Are you having trouble with your sex life?”

  “Of course.”

  “What’s the trouble? What’s the trouble?”

  “Get me the divorce and I’ll show you.”

  As his eyes bulged, she laughed, and the sound of her own laugh seemed strange to her. I can’t even remember when I last smiled, she told herself.

  “I wish it were something other than drinking,” McNiff said quietly.

  “It’s a curse,” she said.

  “The bad thing is, that’s what I do. I don’t like to hear it being denigrated. I love being drunk. I love being drunk.”

  “I can’t help him anymore,” Dolores said. “Maybe if I just cut him loose and start going my own way I’ll see if he wants me enough to follow me.”

  “Do you think he will?”

  “I don’t know. He can be fanatical when he has to do something.”

  “Then why don’t you give him a clear warning?”

  “Oh, no, I’ve no more time. I’ll lose my life waiting for him. I’ve gone this far. Now I’m going to continue.”

  “Well,” McNiff said wearily.

  “What do I do?” Dolores said.

  “I will inform your husband that you want to retain me. If he has no objections, then you come back in and we’ll start filing papers in order for you to get temporary support.”

  “It won’t take long?” she said.

  “No. I have to go inside now and listen to my medical tapes. I went d
own to Tulane University and bought all these tapes. They tape medical school lectures. This afternoon, I’m listening to one about blood spattering on the car window in an accident. Blood spattering all over.”

  “One other thing before I go,” Dolores said.

  “Yes, but I have to listen to my tapes. Blood spattering all over.”

  “Do I get a divorce or an annulment? I don’t know the difference.”

  “You’re Catholic,” McNiff said.

  “Of course.”

  He went back down the footpath through the stacks of books. He returned with a pamphlet.

  “This is what your church puts out on annulments. Go home and read that and think about it. I think you then ought to go over and talk to them. Then we’ll discuss what you should do.”

  “Thank you. I’ll call you.”

  “I liked your husband that day,” McNiff said.

  “I liked him too.”

  “I told him he had to watch himself.”

  “I don’t know what he did. I have the baby to worry about.”

  “He should do what I do,” McNiff said. “I go to church and take the pledge. You know what my pledge is now? That I’ll only drink six Manhattans on the last day of every month. That’s the only time I drink.”

  “I’m afraid sometimes Owney drinks that much by noon.”

  She left, and outside the apartment house she glanced across the street at the courthouse and thought with a dead feeling of the one morning she had been there. Then as she started up the street, a young woman walked out of the doorway marked by scarred lettering for the Legal Aid Society. She wore a black jacket over a plaid dress and carried a slim attaché case. Her eyes smiled at somebody she knew and then she took long, quick steps across the street toward the courthouse. Healthy, confident, with her brown hair shaking as she walked.

  As she walked past the Pastrami King restaurant, a place with steamed windows and a narrow doorway leading directly into the crowd waiting at the counter section of the restaurant, there were a half dozen young blacks wearing huge unlaced white and blue sneakers and black sunglasses crowded at the doorway and a small white man in an apron decorated with mustard blocking their way.

  “I said ve got no room,” he said.

  “Sure you do,” one of the kids said.

  “Ve got no room for you, dot’s for sure.”

  “What you mean?”

  “You coming in here just to steal something.”

  “We comin’ from the court.”

  “Dot’s why you’re in court. From stealing.”

  The man shut the door on the blacks, one of whom pounded the glass with a large hand. Dolores looked across the street at the young woman lawyer, who by now was on the sidewalk walking briskly toward the entrance. A crummy world she has, Dolores thought. Then she shrugged. No, it isn’t. It’s life. She thought of one of these Irish lines that she had to listen to for so much of her life. Parnell passing Irish on the roadside who called out, “Ireland shall be free.” And Parnell said to them, “And you will still break stones.” Life. Anything is acceptable as long as you’re free. Her shoulders began to move and her walk quickened as she realized she was free of alcohol, which weighs so much.

  Stepping out of a coffee shop was a chubby man in a three-piece suit who kept one hand clamped onto his head, assisting his toupee in the breeze. With him was a white guy of about nineteen, who had acne, wore a leather jacket, and chewed gum as he talked. He waved a hand angrily at the courthouse across the street.

  “I fuck them where they breathe,” he said.

  “You may not believe this,” the chubby man said, “but I, too, like to fuck women. I’m not young and handsome like you. That’s why I need money when I go out with girls. This explains to you why I need a retainer if I am to keep you out of jail.”

  She smiled—twice in a day, she reminded herself—and walked to Union Turnpike, where, by the drugstore, she got the bus down to Myrtle Avenue. The bus was crowded with airline workers going to Kennedy Airport and she had to stand. Then she had a long wait for the bus going up through Forest Park and into Glendale and Ridgewood. As she waited, she saw Owney’s money sticking wet to the bar. Her foot scuffed the bus stop dirt. She had no car.

  On the bus to Glendale, she opened the pamphlet that McNiff, the lawyer, had given her. Her eyes ran over the pages and stopped at a sentence that said, “In church law, and many people are mistaken about this, an annulment does not mean that children born out of the union are illegitimate.”

  She closed the pamphlet in anger. They decree on a piece of paper whether a child who comes out of my body is a real child or something to whisper about?

  She still had this on her mind the next morning, when she came to the last stop of the Astoria el, which forms a roof over a shopping street that runs out from under the el and ends at a street of attached brick houses beyond Ditmars Boulevard. Dolores walked down the el steps, saw that she had a half-hour, and went into a diner for coffee.

  In the next booth there were two women whose shopping baskets blocked the aisle. One, wearing sunglasses, said: “Two in the afternoon, he takes out the garbage.”

  The other, wearing a black raincoat, said: “And?”

  “Comes back three in the morning,” the woman wearing sunglasses said.

  “Doesn’t say where he went?”

  “Nope.”

  “Three kids, leaves her sitting there.”

  “You’d think he’d try to help,” the one in the black raincoat said.

  “Last week, he’s gone two days. For two days. My daughter says to me, ‘He’s going through some sort of nervous breakdown.’ I asked her, ‘Who told you that?’ My daughter says, ‘I know.’ I told her, ‘I sure know what part of him is nervous. And for his sake, I hope it doesn’t have a breakdown.’”

  Sitting in the next booth with her coffee, Dolores felt that she was listening to her own life being discussed. Listening to people speak in the open imparted a little strength to her. She left the diner and walked past the attached houses of Ditmars Boulevard until she came to Crescent Street, where there was a Greek saloon on one corner and a pizza stand on the other. She turned right and walked along a schoolyard fence. Across the street there was a row of gloomy yellow-brick apartment houses with fire escapes running down the front.

  She went through a gate in the schoolyard and went past parked cars. There were double metal doors in one wing of the school building, obviously a Catholic high school, one whose name Dolores did not know. A sign on the door said, THE TRIBUNAL. DIOCESE OF BROOKLYN. The name and authority of the diocese are Brooklyn, but most of the Catholics, and most of the trouble in the diocese, are in Queens.

  Originally, these marital boards were set up in Rome to keep the royal families of Europe in some sort of order so that lands owned by Catholic monks could be protected. Then, Henry VIII of England banished a wife, slaughtered another, and took England out of the Roman Church, thereby consigning untold millions of stiff English souls to Hell for denying the true religion. Rome now was left with rules written to keep kings in line and used mainly for normal Catholics who despised their spouses. In a new country, the United States, the decisions varied so much from diocese to diocese that it was obvious that some marital tribunals were being treated as profit centers and that others were bound by the narrowest use of Jansenism that Irish immigrants could inflict. Divorce was illegal in the Church: “Let no man put asunder.” Only annulments could be granted. In the New York archdiocese, where the straight, cranky Irish ruled from behind rich lace curtains in the Cardinal’s residence on Madison Avenue, annulments were rare, even for the supposedly powerful.

  Then in Rome, the rules were suddenly opened by a deceptive man who became Pope before revealing to people that he could think. There now was less room for old hypocrisies, for there were more people, people without titles or special money, and the Brooklyn diocese’s tribunal became open to all. People were encouraged to question, and even argue. At the
same time, someone like Dolores Morrison, entering the unpretentious school hallway on this day, walked with the obedience to settled authority that had been placed in her during her first years in school. In grammar school, she never had worn a school uniform that didn’t touch the floor when she knelt to pray. Then once, when she arrived at school with teased hair, she was made to put her head under the faucet to bring the hair down and thus satisfy the nun.

  As she became older, she began to question authority. And before she entered the building on this day she was still smoldering from reading the pamphlet the day before. Nevertheless, she was a member of a religion that many people proclaim they have left, but who trust no other form for the major ceremonies of life. In moments of calamity, a sudden, searing chest pain, they reach for priest’s hand before doctor’s.

  The sign on the wall said the tribunal was on the third floor. Dolores took the elevator up. A woman sat in a reception booth and directed Dolores into a small office along a hallway of similar small offices. A priest in his mid-forties, with black hair and a grave face suddenly changed with a pleasant smile, walked in, introduced himself, and sat at a desk.

  “Before we do anything more, we recommend that you go home and prepare a written statement about your marriage,” the priest said. “You write this at your own pace. You tell us essentially why the marriage is breaking up, or why you think it is.”

  “First, I didn’t get your name,” Dolores said.

  “Father Resch.”

  “How do you do. I’m Dolores Morrison.”

  “Mrs. Morrison, I’ll apologize for moving so rapidly, but I felt that before I even got into asking for your name, we would give you the opportunity to read something about this serious topic. Then if you returned, we could start into backgrounds.”

  “I already read your booklet.”

  “Then you know.”

  “I don’t know. The pamphlet uses the word illegitimate in talking about a child. Do you still actually believe in the use of such words?”

  The priest cocked his head. “It’s a word used to describe a situation.”

  “You give a baby a bad name? For life?”