Blue Money

by Janet Capron

  Evelyn owned a big two-story house in a cul-de-sac by the water near the tip of City Island. There were two kids it turned out: a girl sixteen and a boy seventeen, almost eighteen, both born out of wedlock by different fathers. The first time Evelyn got pregnant, she was a junior in high school living with a taciturn mother who prayed most of the time, some brothers and sisters, and an Italian drunk of a father who beat up everyone occasionally. It did not occur to Evelyn to get an abortion. For one thing, she loved passionately the father of the baby, a petty hood, an honest-to-God Sicilian.

  The girl’s father was Irish, and easier to forget, she told me. I didn’t argue with Evelyn about their comparative merits, because I had never been with a Sicilian, and I had never experienced the unassailable fidelity she described. Even after all these years, it was obvious he had been the love of her life. He had been true. The other one, the Irishman, was cuter maybe but disloyal. He screwed around. She made him sound trivial by comparison.

  Sadly, Eddie’s father did disappear, first to Rikers Island, then to Sing Sing, and finally to the city of Albany, where he now ran the numbers or worked at some other low-profile job. She wasn’t sure. But as proof of the grandness of this first love, it had produced Eddie, her gray-eyed Sicilian, Eddie Carnivale, because she gave him his father’s surname, the hell with the birth certificate.

  “Oh, but he’s trouble, big trouble,” Evelyn said, her fierce brown eyes lighting up whenever she mentioned her son. Her daughter, Ava, had just started to rebel. Up until sometime this year, she’d been tractable, an adult in miniature, shopping for food and sometimes even, unbidden, sweeping the kitchen floor. Eddie, on the other hand...“Oh, never mind,” she said. “He’s a JD, that kid, a little wise guy, a con man, just like his father, no good at all. But a charm boy, I swear, and not because I’m his mother, the boy could sweet-talk an old lady out of her Social Security check before she even makes it to the bank. He doesn’t have to steal; all he has to do is ask for it. I never knew anyone, even his father, like it.” She sat up straight while she spoke, bristling with pride.

  “You’ll see for yourself,” she said at one point late in the week. “I want you to come out some Sunday and have dinner with us. You take the number one train, the local, to the last stop and then the bus to the last stop. It’s a drag, but I’ll get Eddie to drive you home. Nothing fancy, capiche? Oh, but a gorgeous sunset over the city, bright red on account of the smog. And it’s pretty where I live. So you’ll come. I want you to meet Eddie, and Ava, of course. Maybe a week from Sunday. OK?”

  “Yes, sure, I’d love to,” I lied. I hated traveling anywhere except by cab, but I couldn’t think of a reason to say no.

  By the time Friday rolled around, Evelyn had booked me again for the following week, the last week in August. Even though most of her clients went for the novelty of different whores, at least rotating whores, business at that time of year was as slow as it got; besides, I was new talent, so Evelyn figured I could carry two weeks. And she trusted me not to run off with her clients if any of them happened to get attached. Well, it wasn’t trust exactly. Instead, she didn’t entirely believe that I was in the Life, that I was committed to building a book of my own. But I was, and I gave out my number a half a dozen times at least while I was there.

  I became good, too, at hustling the men in and out fast. The bedroom decor helped, it was so impersonal, so brown and laminated like the living room. Impossible to forget where you were in that atmosphere. But I loved it, free as it was of personality, the demands of domestic life, the awful reminders of a happier past, the worn-out, broken-down, sad and familiar things we surround ourselves with and then grow to hate, until the prospect of going home looms like the horror of last night’s ugly dream suddenly recalled. Evelyn’s whorehouse bedroom, by contrast, reminded me of life on the American road, of toilet seats wrapped in paper to prove how sanitary they are, of little individual bars of soap, enough so you could open a new one every time. This bedroom freed me from the burden of self, from the petty responsibilities of daily living. With the solemn reverence ritual inspires, tricks dropped their used condoms in the special metal wastepaper basket reserved for that purpose. I washed the men off again just as reverently before they put on their suits and knotted their ties in front of the cheap mirror attached to the low dresser.

  And on it went, except for the hours when no one called and no one came, hours spent waiting on the sofa with Evelyn, waiting and waiting for the insurance salesmen, the Seventh Avenue wholesalers, the cheerfully settled family men with small retail stores in the neighborhood. I waited for the prosaic, but to me foreign, worlds they brought in with them, for the money, and, not least of all, for the chance to practice my profession, to seduce them.

  I learned how to spike the simple acts we performed together with low-key drama, with a sultry voice and an artful stroke. I learned how effective it was to lower myself on him slowly, to strike a pose in the dim light. Sometimes I brushed my hand lightly across a hard penis, making it seem almost accidental. I knew then the trick would be sucking in his breath and holding it, afraid I might disown the action if he asked for more. I might say, ‘enough of that,’ or some other preemptory thing. It felt so good, all the more because it was out of his control and because I was not aroused. Perverse as it was, the trick often liked being the only one who enjoyed it. Maybe he felt relieved not having to please the woman, not having to worry about her orgasm for once. Underneath that, there was something both humiliating and at the same time exciting about it, succumbing to the all-powerful, remote mother of his infant dreams.

  Even as I began to enjoy the power I had over these tricks in the bedroom, I did not like at all the feeling of helplessness I experienced waiting for them in the living room. Evelyn seemed to take it in stride; not me. More than anything, I had always hated waiting for men. But in the hooking profession in those days, only streetwalkers could escape it. Meanwhile, this is what had drawn me to the saloons, where I could come and go, where I could hunt men instead of the other way around. Now, even though I had chosen to outright reject the society I was born into, I found myself once more obliged to wait for the attention of men. I could barely stand the frustration. If it weren’t for the fact that I was also waiting for pretty good money, I might have hit the street.

  Waiting

  When I was almost seven, my father, Rayfield, called. This was the first time I’d heard his voice in two years. He had come home from Korea with the Bronze Star. He wanted to see me. I couldn’t believe it. My father wanted to see me. It was like the president, or a famous actor, suddenly calling up and saying that he wanted to see me, so out-sized had my fantasy of him become. In the two years that he had been away, I had received one unsigned valentine. My mother had to tell me it was from him. The fact that he hadn’t bothered to sign it even, this drawing of a cavalier monkey in his funny, tilted cap, with only the printed words “Be My Funny Valentine” inside, broke my heart. Maggie patiently, emphatically explained that it was a Valentine’s Day custom, that my father was pretending to be a secret admirer.

  “Couldn’t he have at least put ‘Love, Dad’ on it?” I kept asking. “Just ‘Love, Dad’?”

  Anything would have been better than nothing. I was convinced that he was in a hurry, popped the card in the mailbox, and that was it. I figured he had forgotten about me, and I pined for him. I became seriously depressed. How I did that, I remember, at the fickle age of five, was by vowing to be unhappy all the time. Not just some of the time when I felt like it. That was not serious enough. Grown-ups think you’re simply in a bad mood if you look sad, then ten minutes later start to laugh at something someone says. No, the trick was to stick with it, make them see you’re not just being a kid. It had to be full-time. I was going to be unhappy every waking minute if I could help it.

  When I entered the first grade at an enchanted, strange little European school, where they cosseted neglected uptown kids like me, the depression gradually started
to lift. I didn’t want it to, because I was afraid that I would forget my father, just as he had forgotten me, and then it would be as if we as a duo had never existed. To prevent this from happening, I turned my absent father into a love object and began to revel in the attenuated refinements of unrequited affection. I was determined that I would not forget. Singlehandedly, I would keep this thing we had alive. Before he left, he said to me, “Remember, darling, true love is like this rubber-band. You can stretch it, but it never breaks.”

  So there. So it was true.

  But then, after the initial call in September, we didn’t hear from him. I went into second grade. Thanksgiving passed with no word. Finally, he phoned again. He was settled now, with a job at the copy desk of the Tribune and a room somewhere I never had heard of, White Plains I think it was.

  It was on a Saturday in early December at my grandparents’ penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and my father was coming. I see myself sitting on the window seat, my knees tucked up to my chin, the blue velvet skirt pulled taut over them, staring out the living room picture window at Central Park, twenty-two stories below. I liked to search out an empty space in the rambling apartment where I could pretend that I was living alone. The best way to do this was to enter a room after Bridget had finished cleaning it, preferably when Josephine had slipped off to an afternoon Mass (poor people were Catholics; rich people like my grandparents were nothing at all). Today Grandpa had gone out to his club, but he often took his nap then. My grandmother might try to get me to take a walk in the Park, but the old woman shuffled along on the sidewalk, going nowhere, until she hit a bench. I needed a destination, and I hated the pavement. Instead, I ran for the fields, the big rocks, the densest part of the woods, where you couldn’t even see the buildings.

  Sometimes my grandfather took me there, the Ramble it’s called, deep inside the Park. That morning, the two of us—my round, bald grandfather and I—had skipped down the hill as far as the miniature boat pond. Grandpa bought a small plastic bag of salty peanuts, which he said were for the squirrels. Then, according to ritual, I ate them. At this point, the old man shook his head like his granddaughter was beyond hope and called me a “squirglar,” a thief who stole from the squirrels. I giggled. He had made that word up himself. Grandpa liked me wicked. Good children, he said, were hiding something. And they were dull.

  Now that I was seven, he undertook to lecture me on a variety of subjects from literature to politics. On this particular morning, he had decided it was time to warn me about two phony writers from my father’s neck of the woods called Emerson and Thoreau. These men were muddled thinkers. It was self-evident in their prose, which was filled with parentheses inside of parentheses. Obviously confused. “Never use a ten-cent word when a two-cent word will do,” he told me.

  I was thinking about Emerson and Thoreau and that word I couldn’t pronounce, “transcendentalism”—“a lot of hooey” was how my grandfather explained it to me. The two guys lived on a pond, or one of them did. Well, why not? But if I knew anything, it was that Grandfather was right. His warning tone implied the world was full of fools.

  I was looking out the window at the far side of the big boat pond in the middle of the Park, where the woods grew thick, imagining those two men perched at the edge there rubbing sticks together to make a fire. I pretended I could see them under the trees. I also granted a short audience to Horatio (a clown of a sidekick I had been trying to banish, since everybody except Horatio himself knew and accepted that he did not exist).

  Josephine came out from the back of the apartment, through the dining room, stopping at the staircase adjacent to the front door in the hallway. She looked at me across the wide-open space of connecting rooms and then looked at the door. Then my nurse sighed and started up the stairs. From where I sat, I could see her nylon uniform pull at the seams across her wide, rolling back. She stopped on the landing to breathe, a great demonstration of heaving in and out.

  “C’mon, Janet, I’ll brush your hair again,” she called out to me.

  I got up slowly and walked to the stairs. Josephine had already brushed and brushed my straight ash-blond hair that morning, and still it fell in strings around my head. I wished I had curly black hair like the second grade class leader, Betty. My ears poked out. My white nylon socks were slipping into my black patent leather shoes. I began climbing the stairs, grabbing the polished banister directly above me and pulling myself up one step at a time.

  “Stop that,” Josephine said from the landing. “You’re not an old lady.”

  We went into the big guest room, where we sometimes spent the night. It was furnished, draped, and carpeted in tones of beige. A few of my stuffed animals sat bright and incongruous on a pillow. Usually chatterboxes, always arguing among themselves, even they got quiet here.

  “I see Bridget cleaned the room this morning. Isn’t that nice?” Josephine said.

  “Bridget always cleans the room, every day,” I said.

  The nurse sat down on a taut coverlet. “Not everyone has someone to clean up after them,” she said.

  “Mother says when she was growing up everybody had a maid,” I said.

  “If everybody had a maid, who were the maids then, I’d like to know?” Josephine asked, taking the hairbrush in one hand and my arm in the other. She pulled me between her legs and started to brush, first the left, then working her way around.

  Outside the penthouse window, one tall fir tree, standing in its own tub, fought back the sun. Along the glass fence, holly bushes and mistletoe had been planted that week. The earth was still moist and turned. The winter light splashed the roofs of the other apartment buildings, which stretched as far as the East River in this direction, each one of them studded with evergreens growing out of miniature walled gardens, high up in private communion with the sky.

  A little later, Josephine and I sat on the light blue linen sofa in the living room, sinking deeper into its wide cushions, watching The Big Top, a live circus show for kids. I was glaring at the set. The front door slammed and Grandpa swooped in, still wearing his hat and coat, trailing cold air. His delicate hooked nose was red, and behind his bifocals, his blue eyes watered.

  “Hello, girls,” he said, meaning Josephine and me. “Where’s your pa? I was going to steal Ray away from his daughter for a chess game.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Abram,” Josephine said. “Mr. Chace hasn’t arrived. He hasn’t called either. I can’t imagine.”

  “Well, I’m going to my study. Let me know when he shows up,” he said.

  I tried not to look at him when he kissed me before he went away.

  Grandma was still at Elizabeth Arden, getting made over. My mother had gone out for a long lunch with some writer friends. The phone had not rung since after breakfast, so when it did, Josephine patted my arm and said, “That’ll be him, to say he’s on his way.”

  A second or two later, Bridget appeared in the doorway and nodded. Josephine went to the phone in the hall, followed by me.

  “Yes, yes, I understand. Circumstances,” she was saying into the phone. “We were expecting you at one for lunch, but that’s all right. Just hop into a cab. Janet is so anxious to see you.”

  I tugged Josephine’s elbow. “Does he want to talk to me?”

  “No, no. He just called to tell us he’s on his way.”

  “Where is he, in New York?”

  “He’s in New York, right outside Grand Central. He was detained, but now he’s coming,” Josephine said as she hung up.

  “Didn’t he want to say hello to me?”

  “He’s on his way,” she said. “You’ll see him in person in a few minutes.”

  “How many minutes?”

  She hesitated. “Fifteen.”

  I pulled my nurse’s wrist down and read her watch. “It’s exactly two twenty-one.” I began counting with my fingers. “Two twenty-one plus ten plus five, two thirty-six. He’ll be here by two thirty-six.”

  “If not before,” Josephine said, and w
e went back to take our places on the sofa.

  At three o’clock I got up and changed the channel. A still shot of the city at night flashed on the screen. The theme from Gone with the Wind played behind the familiar voice of the announcer introducing this afternoon’s “Million Dollar Movie,” Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. I had seen the last half of it three times that week after school. I loved the part, without knowing exactly why, where the mermaid lay close to Mr. Peabody, drinking out of a glass, a helpless creature, locked in a fish’s tail, rolling around on his patio. I didn’t know whether it was funny or sad. The mermaid wore bright red lipstick; even when she popped out of the sea she was wearing lipstick.

  After the movie ended, with Mr. Peabody looking out his New York window at the falling snow, Josephine put her arm around me, patting my shoulder. “There, there,” she said. That made it worse. I shook off my nurse and went to the picture window. Directly across from me, the deep orange sun began to slip behind the left tower of the Majestic. Suddenly, in between bare trees, the streetlights in the Park came on. An occasional car wound along the drive inside the Park. It was that time of day on a weekend in winter when people find themselves alone and caught off guard by the early darkness.

  The doorbell rang. Josephine leapt to her feet like a fat girl jumping rope and went to the door. Maggie rushed in, the cold air surrounding her like a strong perfume. She threw her dark, sheared beaver coat over the banister. She looked like her father, short and compact, the same periwinkle-blue eyes set in a heart-shaped face. She was wearing a fitted gray flannel suit with a deep red fox collar. A little gray suede hat perched itself at an angle on her head from which flew a gray veil, covering her forehead like a gossamer flag. Her fine hair shot out in loose waves from underneath her hat, suggesting angles in her plump cheeks. She was grinning, as if someone had just told her a joke and she was still laughing. Clutching her purse, she walked deliberately on her high heels, as if she were following chalk marks on a stage floor, and stood at the wide entrance to the living room. Then she was no longer smiling.