“Is there any Way any of us can help?” Matty said. “I remember standing in the back of the church in tears and I didn’t even care who knew it when the two of you got married.”
“That was very nice of you,” she said, and started for the door. “Have a nice day.”
“What about helping him?” Matty said.
Dolores sighed and took the door handle.
“The guy deserves something,” Matty said.
“Did anybody say he didn’t deserve help?” she said, staring at the street.
“Isn’t that your job?”
“I think I was fired from that job.”
“Look out that you didn’t quit.”
“Why don’t you buy him a drink and tell him what you just told me?” She wanted to turn around and look at their faces as she said this, but she was suddenly in tears and went out the door with a hand over her eyes. She cried all the way to school.
She needed Marissa, and found her, in chartreuse sweat pants, seated in the front row of the first class, calculus, a course that Dolores had found excruciatingly hard at first, although never before had she experienced any difficulty with mathematics, and it was Marissa’s presence that had comforted her. Now, Marissa took off her heavy gray coat and revealed a fuchsia blouse as top for the chartreuse sweat pants.
“Lovely,” Dolores said. Inmates would have protested the combination, Dolores thought.
“Thanks,” Marissa said. “You know why it’s so important, don’t you?”
“You started to tell me this morning.”
“You wouldn’t let me finish.”
“Because you wanted to talk about the other thing.”
“Oh, the television on Vietnam. But this is more fun. I never told you this before. I got this old man, he has to be seventy, in Garden City who walks the dog every morning and he gets so excited when he sees me that I’m afraid he’ll die. I don’t want him to do that right now. I come over from West Hempstead to get the train and this old man stands there waiting for me. He just looks and you can see him losing his breath. The ticket man in the station told me the guy is loaded. He has a fortune. He lives alone in a big house. His wife died a couple of years ago. He’s lonely and rich. And, Dolores, he’s so old! You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to make him into a sugar daddy for me. He can pay my way through medical school. Then he can die.”
When Dolores said nothing, Marissa said, “You think I’m talking, don’t you? You should see what my father makes. I told you, he works in a lumberyard. What could my father make? Enough for the house and car, right? Where’s he going to get thousands and thousands to pay for me at some school? What these schools are charging. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to turn this nice old guy into a sugar daddy.”
“How do you know he’s such a nice, old guy?”
“Because he can’t breathe when he sees me.”
“How do you know he’ll want to pay bills for you?”
“I’ll make him happy to pay. I got to the station five minutes early today. When I got there, the man was way down at the other end of the block, walking the freaking cocker spaniel. He saw these chartreuse sweats of mine, all right. Did he start pretending the dog was making him run up to the station! You should have seen him yanking that dog along the street, trying to make it look like the dog was doing the pulling. He’s lucky that I’m only going to make him pay for medical school.”
“How old is he?”
“I told you. I bet he’s seventy.”
Dolores shook her head.
“Do you think that’s so bad?” Marissa said.
“I think it would be very bad if the man lived until he was eighty-five.”
“Oh, don’t say that. He has to die right on schedule. The day my last bill is paid, for the medical school, I want to take a couple of dollars and buy a nice black dress for his funeral. Sugar daddy, nice to have known you.”
Listening to Marissa’s discourse allowed Dolores to put Owney out of her mind. The class, calculus, had taken so much time at home that she would have regarded a distraction now as criminal. The hour, on integration of three-dimensional shapes, went by in silence and in hand, as did the hours that followed.
In mid-afternoon, however, in a comparative literature course, the instructor referred to a Hemingway novel, To Have and Have Not, and began a discussion of transitional devices, and Dolores, who had only skimmed the book once, stopping cold when she reached a point, early, where the hero was able to see vividly the colors of the muzzle flashes of his submachine gun, now dug the paperback out of her shoulder bag and opened it to a passage where the wife was awake and thinking to herself, as the instructor read aloud in a thin voice, “‘Look at him, sleeping just like a baby. I better stay awake so as to call him. Christ, I could do that all night if a man was built that way. I’d like to do it and never sleep. Never, never, no, never. No, never, never, never. Well, think of that, will you. Me at my age. I ain’t old. He said I was still good. Forty-five ain’t old. I’m two years older than him. Look at him sleep. Look at him asleep there like a kid.’”
The instructor suddenly stopped to clear his throat and then there was this little smirk. Dolores knew that she’d best stay out of it, but she found her hand going up anyway. “I don’t think the person who wrote this ever had much experience with a woman.”
“This is Hemingway.”
“I just don’t think he ever slept very much with a woman.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Read the last couple of lines on page ninety-three,” Dolores said.
In them, the man and his wife were at the boat dock. Dolores reread them to herself:
He said: “You aren’t worried, are you?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“You know I lay awake almost four hours just thinking about you.”
“You’re some old woman.”
“I can think about you anytime and get excited.”
“Well, we got to fill this gas now,” Harry told her.
Dolores had a picture in her mind of Marissa in her chartreuse sweat pants staying awake four hours for a man who then reached for the gas hose. Dolores said to the instructor, “He was longing to put something into the gas tank. That doesn’t sound like somebody who has such a great life with females.”
“What does it sound like to you?” he asked.
Dolores looked around the class. There were a couple of Chinese men behind her who were gay, and a young woman in front who wore her father’s shirts and seemed mainly interested in other females. Dolores didn’t want to make them uncomfortable, but at the same time she wanted to answer the question. “What does it sound like? The man might have been a little gay.”
She watched the two Chinese gays. They showed no unease.
The instructor now said, “Perhaps you don’t understand the sort of man he is writing about. Harry is a man who lives a dangerous life. An old-fashioned man of action. Perhaps the blood courses a bit differently in such people. Hemingway certainly was that type. He lived quite an adventurous life, so he was able to capture this style of man. I am not taking a position on whether they are so desirable to us here or not. I am saying that perhaps they did, or still do, excite women that much.”
“I never stayed awake for four hours for any reason in life except a baby crying,” Dolores said.
“We won’t get personal,” the instructor said.
“I don’t think what I just said is personal. I don’t think there’s a woman who stays up four hours. The man who wrote that simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“Well, all of us here are from some Queens neighborhood. Probably pretty bland. Hemingway and his people were out on the sea. Men of action in dangerous places. This was the literature of their times.”
Dolores shook her head. “The main character never lived. The man who wrote it never lived this way. And I wonder if the man who wrote it knew what he was sexually.�
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“What would you call him, then?” the instructor said.
“A man with the best writing style who comes out with a little gay in him.”
The instructor laughed.
“Which happens to be his business,” Dolores said emphatically. “Except he does wind up in a classroom discussion, so I do think it’s pertinent.”
“It’s not uncommon for people to dislike his violence,” the instructor said.
“I sure hate it.”
“There you are.”
“Only I have a reason. A person capable of great violence starts believing that he’s impervious to everything, and he refuses to see that the things that can cripple the rest of us do it to him, too. And they sure do.”
“Such as?”
“Alcohol. The bravest war hero who can’t handle alcohol becomes just another drunk. Like anybody else.”
“Well.”
“Well, I don’t see Hemingway saying that. So I don’t think he can see very much.”
“But he isn’t dealing with alcoholism here.”
“Then he isn’t dealing with life.”
The instructor shook his head. “This is about a woman’s thoughts and desires about the hero.”
“Four hours for a guy who couldn’t wait to fill a gas tank?”
Later, she sat in the cafeteria alone and had coffee and was grateful when they began putting out the lights at ten after six, for this signaled that it was nearly time to start the last part of her day. Dolores went outside and stood in the cold evening air and waited for the last class, organic chemistry, which started at six-thirty and went through until ten-thirty. Suddenly, an ambulance, purple lights flashing from its top, rocked down the driveway and she stepped out of the way as it moved up to the building. The back door opened and an attendant stepped out. When his head moved, she saw that he was a lanky guy with shaggy black hair who was in the organic chemistry course. There were three ambulance drivers who always sat together in class, with at least two of them usually in the uniform of white shirt and green field jacket and pants. This one’s name was LaVine, which, as he explained cheerfully to Dolores one day at the start of the term, had always been Levine until he had a grandfather who learned to play golf at Dyker Heights public golf course in Brooklyn and who then decided to get away from a course littered with old cars and, worse, young Italians, and take what he felt was his extraordinary backswing out to some private club on Long Island that didn’t mind his golf game but sure did his name. Enter LaVine with a backswing.
“Here we are,” the lanky grandson now said to Dolores cheerfully.
Propped up in the back of the ambulance was an old white-haired woman with skin so pale that in the harsh light she seemed to be an albino. Her eyes opened in great alarm as LaVine left her.
“You’re supposed to take care of me!”
“I did. You’re fine.”
“What does that mean?”
“That you just stay where you are. I’m off duty now.”
A short guy got out of the front of the ambulance and walked around to the back.
“See ya,” LaVine yelled to the old lady. The doors closed and the ambulance started off.
“Where does she go?” Dolores said.
“Home. She lives alone in Rego Park. She takes a drink and then you get her calling nine one one for the cops. They turn her over to us right away. Usually, we take her to St. John’s Hospital. Some nice Catholic girl brings her ice water and they got a priest in the morning. She stays there a day or two. Gets pampered and goes back home to Rego Park. She never has anything so wrong that she can’t care for herself at home. She’s lonely, just wants somebody to talk to, hold her hand. It’s a beautiful thing for her. But I have to tell you, we can’t do that anymore. We have people shot, thrown off a rooftop. We can’t use up an ambulance run on a lonely woman. What we’re doing tonight, we’re taking her right down the street here to the Queens Hospital Center. That’s how they could drop me off here. It’s on the way. When she gets into one of those wards with a hundred percent blacks—half of South Jamaica comes up the hill to use that hospital—this old Irish lady will get frightened to death. She won’t be calling nine one one so quick anymore.”
“What happens if you have somebody who’s really sick?”
“I wouldn’t have been here. I just went with her to get the ride. My car is the one that’s sick tonight.”
“Have you been doing this long?” she asked him.
“Four years. I finally decided to improve myself.”
“Are you going to try medical school?” Dolores asked.
“Sure. Just like the rest of them. My father’s a doctor, too. I got to uphold the family tradition.”
“That’s nice.”
“Sure it is. He’s a doctor. He’s a doctor in the meat market. He cuts up veal all day. If I’m lucky here, I’ll pass a course and somebody in Health and Hospitals will make me a supervisor.”
He said it with a lifeless voice that made her laugh. He smiled, ran a hand through his hair, and went inside. Dolores followed him; in the four-hour night course, Dolores always sat somewhere near the ambulance drivers because at this point in the day she became annoyed by even the smallest sounds; from about eight on, the simple moving around of the college-age students caused her body to stiffen. The ambulance drivers knew to sit motionless. The class had forty-seven students, half of them regular full-time students, eighteen and nineteen years old, who had signed up for the course on the theory that the chemistry department courses during hours of daylight were the school’s most demanding and that the night courses, accommodating older and slower minds, weary from a day’s work, would be much easier. Thus they were moved to a common wail when, on the first night, there was a change of teachers and the chemistry department’s most demanding professor, Steiner, walked into the room. Right away, Dolores noticed that the professor was highly annoyed by this moaning and at the same time seemed slightly intimidated by the size of the class, and by the presence of so many others who were anywhere from twenty-four and twenty-five, like Dolores, through the late twenties, which LaVine certainly was, all the way up to a man who was at least sixty, a retired courthouse stenotypist who used shorthand to take down the lectures. One night, he had explained to Dolores, “My wife goes to her Eastern Star meeting Monday night. Then I’m here Tuesday. I swim at the Eastern Queens YMCA Wednesday night. Then I’m back here Thursday night. If I could only get something going for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, my life would be complete.”
As the class started on this night, a chubby young woman, with red hair and freckles and only a large Star of David around her neck to set her off from being Irish, said loudly to her friend next to her, “I study better at home than I ever could here. I’m taking off. I’ll be here for the tests. Save my seat.” She walked out, causing laughter among her friends. The professor, Steiner, licked his lips in agitation and then went on. Somehow, Dolores thought, a man in his position of having the power to mark, and particularly to mark these young people who needed high grades so desperately to fulfill parents’ wishes that they become doctors who earn big money, might be unable to forget what these people had done to him all term.
“On the test,” Dolores said, aloud, to herself.
“What’s that?” LaVine mumbled.
“I think he gets a little mad at these kids behind us.”
“You got no idea what the inside of his stomach must be like, four hours at the end of a day like this.”
“I think he’ll get even on the test.”
“I never thought of that,” LaVine said.
“I’m thinking of it now,” she said.
Over the next few weeks, Professor Steiner kept his eyes fixed on a point in the air and his body motionless no matter what indignities were perpetrated by the students before him. When somebody talked during his lecture, the right side of his mouth gave a twitch, which at first seemed involuntary but as the twitch presented itself night aft
er night, it became clear to Dolores that it was studied. Then one night Steiner flushed at the sound of young laughter up in the back of the room. His mouth gave that twitch and now, under his breath, but not that far under, Steiner said something that came out to Dolores’s ears as “ajabaday.” When he muttered this again, Dolores wrote it down. After class, she showed it to Marissa, who frowned and then copied it in one of her gleaming books. “My father might know.” The following Tuesday, Marissa came into the room and handed Dolores a sheet of paper with the words “a giaviada,” and under it, the translation: “We’re going to see.”
“My father says that you don’t say that unless you mean it,” Marissa said.
“Oh, I’m sure he does,” Dolores said.
At ten-thirty that night, Dolores stood in Steiner’s way as he left the room. She pretended to yawn. “I can use a rest,” she said.
“We all can.”
“Do you plan your summer this early?” Dolores said.
“My wife and I go to Italy every year.”
“Really? Where?”
“Sicily.”
“How exciting!”
His eyes closed in an expression of ecstasy. Then he spoke softly. “The orderly tranquility of it all. We sit in the morning in Taormina at this outdoor cafe and here is this man who is in charge of the town. The Don. They really have them, of course. He sits alone with his coffee and these people take their seats at tables all around him. Then he beckons them, one by one, to come to his table and present their grievances. Or their excuses. Then he rules. And his rule is the law. The Don simply gestures or whispers. After that, there isn’t a murmur. Oh, the order! The police of the town? They sleep all day in the sun.” Steiner chuckled. “Of course you never ask what happens to any of the people who have to sit at the Don’s table. Heh. That’s all part of the order. So medieval. And so magnificent. My wife and I were there for three summers before we understood what was going on each day. Your average tourist sits there and doesn’t have the slightest idea. I do. The people trust me. I can’t wait to get there again this summer.”
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