Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “He isn’t in yet,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that. He went to a special meeting of his union.”

  “That’s fine. I’m wondering why he didn’t leave any money for his child and his wife.”

  “He wasn’t workin’ for all that time.”

  “He’s been working for the two weeks, hasn’t he?”

  “Oh, yes. Every day. Dolores, you have to stop yelling at me.”

  “Mrs. Morrison, I still love you, but why doesn’t he support his wife and child?”

  “He had to pay the rent on the apartment this week, I know that.”

  “Why did he do that? We’re not living there.”

  “Oh, but you need a place.”

  “For what?”

  “Oh, you do, you need to keep that place.”

  “No, we don’t. At least I don’t. And why didn’t he leave me the government check?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. I know I saw him with it here.”

  “That was supposed to be mine.”

  “But that was his check for having the medal.”

  “No, that was my check for having a family.”

  She remembered now that when she hung up on the mother that night, she immediately pulled open the refrigerator and took out another charlotte russe. Two days later, while Dolores was in school, Owney stopped by and handed Dolores’s mother an envelope with two hundred dollars in it. He then was able to come up with two hundred a week for the next five weeks, followed by one week in which he left a large amount of dust. Dolores called the cemetery house and the sound of her voice blew the bravado out of Owney’s father, who committed the error of answering.

  “He … he’s not around, I think,” the father said, with enough pure fear to supply the dying.

  “He hasn’t been around here, either.”

  “What can I tell you?”

  “You can tell me why he doesn’t leave any money for his wife and child.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  “He’s only your son.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  He hung up, and she dialed McNiff, the lawyer, who took two days to get back to her.

  “We’ll have to go into court and get a judge to order him to pay you so much every week,” McNiff said.

  “Why haven’t we done that before now?” Dolores said.

  “Because you told me you didn’t want to. You started off with papers and a time schedule but then you told me you didn’t feel like going into court. You said you trusted him.”

  “That’s how smart I am.”

  “No, you’re a nice person. And he’s a nice person. But life intrudes. That’s what courts are for.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “We go into court and get a judge to order him to pay you so much every week as support for your child and for you.”

  “When?”

  “I can request a hearing tomorrow.”

  “Then when will it be?”

  “Next month.”

  “That long? And how long after that?”

  “Month.”

  “But he never answered the papers you sent him. Doesn’t that mean he’s—”

  “In default. That’s for you and me. In a Queens’ courtroom with a Queens judge, it could mean anything. If he were in trouble for shooting thirty-five people in a saloon argument, I could walk in and get a judge to burst into tears and try to help him. But if I came in and said, ‘I have to get this hero to pay his wife some money,’ the judge might want to take your husband out for a drink. Judges don’t like to see men forced to pay women anything. You could have six kids who were so hungry that they were crying in the hallway and the judge still would feel sorry for the poor father. A woman? Let them shut up and go back to their mother’s.”

  Beautiful, Dolores now said to herself. She took a last bite of the Baby Ruth candy bar. She hated the Baby Ruth and assured herself she never would eat one again, and then she remembered sadly that she didn’t have another one anyplace in the house. Her mother’s snoring still came through the wall. On many nights such as this, she simply got up and took her books into the kitchen and ate until she was ashamed of herself and read until the pages turned blank. Then she would go to bed, the hour now past the time for full snoring.

  This time; on a Monday night, tired, and with her longest day coming up, with school until ten-thirty at night, with a cold February night wind blowing a tin can along the alleyway under the window, Dolores gave one last thrash at the sheets, swung out of bed, and stepped silently into the hall, then slowly, noiselessly, opened her mother’s door. Now she slammed it shut. Dolores stood motionless in the hall as inside, her mother’s head flew off the pillow. Her mother coughed and sighed, then her feet pounded on the floor, signifying a move to the bathroom. Dolores eased back into her room, and was quickly asleep.

  “I hardly slept.” Her mother’s voice burst out of drowsiness as she saw Dolores using a normal amount of coffee from the yellow bag that had no brand name and came straight from the sale at the Pathmark store on Myrtle Avenue. “You’re puttin’ in too much. Give you nerves all day.” Her mother’s hands got between Dolores and the pot and began spooning coffee back into the yellow bag. “Don’t have to make the supermarket any richer, either. Use a little less. Nice cup of coffee at home doesn’t have to cost a fortune.”

  Dolores left the kitchen, showered, dressed, and was brushing her hair when she heard the phone ring. “It’s that Marissa!” her mother yelled. Dolores grabbed her books and car coat and walked into the kitchen. She took a swallow of her mother’s coffee, which this time seemed to be tan-colored hot water.

  “What can I do for you?” Dolores said to Marissa.

  “I’m in so much trouble. I need your help.” Although it was seven-fifteen in the morning, Marissa’s voice was loud with emergency. Of course, Dolores found it cheerful. She had discovered Marissa on one of the first days of school: a cricket topped by jet-black hair, and thick mascara highlighting green-gray eyes. Earrings made of stiff wire bounced gaily with each move of her head. She carried a leather purse that was so large it should have been carried by a strong porter. She chewed gum and hummed as she went into the purse and brought out notebooks, whose covers, neatly encased in plastic, gleamed. She then took out a set of pens, all of different colors, chewed gum furiously, and waited for the professor to speak. When he did, she wrote down what he said. If he talked for the whole period, she wrote for the whole period. She was nineteen, but she functioned in school as if she were some old trusted employee, who would do the job whether the owner was peering from his office or vacationing in France. Dolores found her comforting, for on the first days of the term she had been bewildered, completely forgetting her earlier successes in these same classrooms, when these new Queens public high school products, mostly Jewish, walked in and began looking rapidly around the room, eyes passing over Dolores without a flicker, counting themselves, and then, comforted in their numbers, talking to each other excitedly, their conversations leading inevitably to the medals won in an important high school science fair that Dolores, raised on Catholic streets, never had heard of.

  Suddenly, Dolores thought she was too old, and carrying too much weight of an unsettled or even a losing life, to keep up. Once, she had walked into this school with no trace of the usual fear of competing against Jews that is carried around by most graduates of Diocese of Brooklyn high schools. She had just taken her seat, done her work, and received marks that indicated that she was a prospect for anything she wanted to try. If she had feelings of resentment at first, they were against her mother, who never had wanted her in college. She subdued the resentment with prayers and with such personal success that she was able to forgive anything.

  Then she met Owney and from then on the only inner voice she heard came from her heart. She walked away from it all, from a future that seemed so assured that she could see it, hangi
ng right out there in the air in front of her. Now, returning three years later, she listened to a young woman talk about driving her younger sister to Westhampton to buy duck eggs for a grammar school experiment in embryonics, and Dolores suddenly despaired and then immediately was calmed by the sounds of Marissa slapping open her stiff notebook a few seats away.

  When she had first noticed Marissa, she had been pleased by her style; and assumed that she was also Jewish, from Forest Hills High, probably, but then noticed that the other eyes swept past Marissa, too. While some outsiders no longer can differentiate between Queens and Brooklyn Jews and Italians, as the two, living alongside each other for so long now, begin to look like so many from the same breakfast table, the Jewish heritage of being slaughtered allows them to know their own at any distance and in any setting. So Dolores, attracted to Marissa at first by stubbornness of approach, now felt for the first time that she could control her apprehensions by her proximity to someone with not only a similar style, but the shared background of a Diocese of Brooklyn education. When Dolores spoke to her one day, Marissa brandished her notebook and said, “I take this home at night and learn it like you learn the Hail Marys. Once I know it so that I don’t have to think about knowing it, then I can sit down and learn what it means. I do my work.” Dolores, who usually was in the school library until nine at night, began staying until closing time, at eleven. Staying with some confidence, for which she silently thanked Marissa.

  Who now was saying to her on the phone, “What goes with chartreuse sweat pants?”

  “Marissa, I’m trying to get out of here.”

  “So am I. But I have on chartreuse sweat pants. What do I put on the top?”

  “Marissa, what do I know? Chartreuse. Something fuchsia, I guess.”

  “Oh, good. I’ll go inside and try on something. Hold on while I go.”

  “Marissa, I can’t. I said I’m leaving.”

  “Then let me ask you about one other thing.”

  “No, I don’t have time.” The swing in Marissa’s voice, causing her to go from teenager in chartreuse to a young woman with something on her mind, alerted Dolores.

  “I got to ask you.”

  Dolores sighed. “All right.”

  “I was just watching the television.”

  “I can imagine what was on.”

  “I know it bothers you, but I have to know.”

  “Go on.”

  “I was just watching Vietnam on the news and they had this film on from, you know …”

  “The place.”

  “That’s right, Vietnam. Now a lot of the fellows were hurt, right as I was watching. It doesn’t matter if they actually were hurt a few days ago and the parents already were notified. All I know is that they were hurt right in front of me. Hurt? Dolores, I screamed. A guy got killed. I’m just thinking, I know about the Constitution, but I also was trying to picture myself as this young guy’s mother. Sitting home watching my son get killed on the television set. Do you think that’s right? Do you think they should let your son die in front of you just because you have a television news show?”

  Dolores was thinking of Owney’s father on a barstool, gulping proudly when his son was mentioned.

  “I think the parents should be flown over so they can see the battles themselves,” Dolores said. “They could all get up on a hill and look down and see their son carrying his gun. If there isn’t a hill, the fathers could get up in trees so they could call down to the mothers, tell them what’s going on.”

  “The mothers could bandage their sons,” Marissa said.

  “Run right out there and be the first ones there,” Dolores said. “There would be only one trouble with my mother-in-law. She would moan so much that you wouldn’t know whether she was the one wounded or not.”

  “Dolores, you’re crazy.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m experienced.”

  “Dolores, you should see on the television what all these poor fella——”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “Then do you want to know why I’m wearing chartreuse sweat pants?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll love this.” She was back to being a teenager.

  “Good-bye, Marissa.”

  She hung up, took a swallow of her mother’s tan water, and left.

  At Myrtle Avenue, she pulled in front of Prine’s candy store. The usual place for breakfast would be Bob’s Diner, eight blocks down, but she was fearful that if she walked into the place, she might find Owney, sitting there with his cup of coffee between his hands as if it were a bowl of rice; if he was in the diner at this hour, seven-thirty in the morning, it would only mean that he had been out all night. She walked into Prine’s and sat at the nearest place along the short, cluttered counter. At one elbow was a display of the most popular newspapers, the Staats-Zeitung und Herold, the tabloid Il Progresso, and the Irish Echo. On a stand against the wall behind her was a low stack of the New York Times newspaper, which was quite popular with schoolteachers traveling into the area to work, and then, rising to shoulder level, the New York Daily News newspaper, known in Queens only as “the paper.”

  Dolores took a Drake’s coffee cake out of a wire rack on the counter and ordered coffee from the owner, Prine, who had not shaved yet and wore a black sweater with his white shirt showing through the elbows.

  Dolores glanced at the Staats-Zeitung, an eight-column paper printed in German and still quite popular in Ridgewood, where the results of the last two world wars have had no effect on bloodlines. The headline, she knew from the German learned while growing up in the neighborhood, had to do with issuance of new postage stamps. Il Progresso, a tabloid printed in Italian, had stories from Trapani in Sicily and Naples, with the word Mafia in each headline. The same Italians reading the paper on Myrtle Avenue would be the first to scream if they saw or heard the word Mafia in American papers or on television. Dolores refused to glance at the Irish Echo. She knew the format by heart: stories of fighting in Northern Ireland on the front page, and then on the inside pages five-and six-column pictures of silver-haired men surrounding a priest at a dinner, and on their table in front of them were glasses half-filled and ready to be drained the moment the camera shutter became still. Of course she would not look at the dailies, the Times or Daily News, for at this time, in 1972, anything she watched or read turned into a tale of young men with smooth faces from neighborhoods like Ridgewood who were being honored at great military funerals.

  Two gaunt men, collars pulled up around their chins in the raw morning wind, crossed the avenue toward the store. Dolores flinched. They were brothers, in their late fifties, Matty and Walter Guerin, who opened the church for the seven o’clock Mass each day, and then went to their hardware business over in Maspeth. Along with sainthood, they also were heroes, or at least they managed that impression while marching in Memorial Day parades as leader and co-leader of the Lieutenant Arthur J. Foley Post, Catholic War Veterans. Dolores had attended a couple of functions at the post, housed in a new brick building on Metropolitan Avenue that had raised gold lettering over the door and a bar inside that could accommodate the College of Cardinals. At each occasion, Owney was honored with a flock of toasts, after which the members, particularly the Guerin brothers, talked so much of the most horrible violence that they had been called upon to perpetrate in the name of God, country, and the dead generations from which they received their heritage, and, probably, thirst, that on the one night that Owney had not felt well, and therefore did not put himself into a haze where he accepted everything, he whispered to Dolores, “I don’t think any of these fellas ever were around a shot being fired.”

  Now, she felt uneasy at their appearance, for she could sense their eyes locked on her.

  “Cold,” Matty said, walking in.

  “Yeah, cold,” the brother Walter said.

  “Cold?” Prine, the owner, said.

  “Canada got nothing on us,” Matty said. He suddenly pretended to n
otice Dolores. “Hey. How are you?”

  She kept the coffee cup to her lips.

  “How’s Owney?”

  She held the cup an inch from her lips and stared straight ahead. “I hope he’s fine.”

  Matty ran a hand over his face. “Geez, you got to forgive me. I forgot for a minute.”

  Dolores drank the coffee.

  “I forgot that the two of you ain’t together.”

  She still said nothing.

  “It’s a shame,” he said.

  “Yeah, I was sorry to hear it,” the brother Walter said. “I just heard it the other day.”

  “News must get to you last,” Dolores said. “It’s been months now.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that,” Walter said.

  Dolores put the cup down and began going through her pocket for change. She could feel the two of them looking at her, straining at the tongue to say something to her before she left.