The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  ‘Tuna melt,’ said Katy Freeway.

  ‘You spoke?’

  ‘That was the something I ate.’

  We had another round, then another. As the Cutty Sarks worked the body, Bert cast off the liquid laugh, waxed analytic. ‘What I love. No, let’s just make that what I enjoy the hell out of,’ he said, ‘I get to play. At my time of life, I am still licensed to exceed and carouse, throw my toys around the sandbox.’

  I remembered Ellen Fogarty’s childhood billboard, the one at South Ferry that had read DON’T GROW OLD – GROW UP. But Bert Randolph Sugar, he spit on that sign. ‘On Broadway, you don’t have to grow up,’ he said. ‘That’s its whole secret and beauty.’

  ‘Men will be boys,’ said Katy Freeway.

  ‘They’ll never take me alive.’

  Back on the street, it was raining again. As we crossed Times Square towards the Harmony, Bert paused at Jack Dempsey Corner. Where the restaurant had been, there was now a coffee shop, a Chinese fast-food joint, and a porno house. ‘The Manassa Mauler,’ said the Hat, and there on the street corner, in the slashing wind and spittle, he quoted himself verbatim. He was the picture of the warrior, he declaimed. Approaching his opponent with his teeth bared, bobbing and weaving to make his swarthy head with the perpetual five o’clock shadow harder to hit, his black eyes flashing and his blue-black hair flying, Dempsey took on the look of an avenging angel of death.

  When was Life not Life? When it was More. At the threshold of the Harmony, we wavered just a moment, then plunged in blind, hard up a long, steep flight of stairs to a small wooden kiosk. Behind the ticket window sat a wizened body ancient beyond calculation. It had no teeth, no expression, no visible means of support. ‘Wingbing Toth Arbody, Appyomo Bollocks,’ it said. ‘Zattleby Zenbugs.’

  ‘Ten bucks?’

  ‘Maky Thive. Andavan Arbodyus Nye.’

  The big room had fallen on stony times. The place we’d cherished had been darkling and musky, a superior style of womb. What we found this night, however, was stygian gloom and the sick-sweet reek of Roach Motel.

  The Harmony’s proud claim had always been that it offered burlesque legit, meaning cheesecake rather than gynecology. In a debased age, when its rivals featured acts like Pregnant Polly, the Enema Queen, and Tina Toilet Tonsils, it alone had stayed faithful to All-American womanhood.

  ‘Petals of Pulchritude,’ the vintage skinzines had called them. ‘Torrid Temptresses of Tease and Terpsichore.’ And in the flush times, they had been nothing less. But those times were clearly past. Presently at toil on the runway was a redhaired lady of a certain age. We did not catch her name, but ‘Black and Blue’ was her theme song. It matched her varicose veins.

  At the close of her act, she toured the audience. It was a sparse crowd and those few punters that were still breathing, dimly visible through the murk, were widely scattered. To these, the old lady offered up her sex, to be touched or kissed at choice, according to tariff.

  As she passed close and creaking above us, her middle fingers disappeared. When they emerged, she licked them clean, then blew us kisses off their tips. The neat man at the Hotel Martinique had favored the selfsame perfume.

  Across the lobby was the manager’s office. A lean and olive Italian named Robert Anthony Francis Roedere – Bob Anthony – answered my knock. At first he did not wish to speak with me, but then I mentioned Bert Sugar. ‘The Hat,’ said Anthony. ‘Bert Random Slobber. Of course.’

  He was just recently out of the hospital. Business was down, he said, and so was he. But he had had a prodigious ride. He had been a singer, a bandleader, a Broadway personage. More, he had grown up in Hoboken with Frank Sinatra – they’d been childhood chums. ‘The Chairman,’ he said. ‘I owe him all I got, everything I am today. I used to be his secretary and his driver, belt out guys for him and everything.’

  It was Sinatra who’d got him his first job as a singer, in 1944, when he got out of the navy. ‘I worked with the best, believe me. Get a load of the names. Ida Ray Hutton’s All-Male Band, Eddie Duchin, Bob Chester. And I’m still working to this day. I play Las Vegas. I even got a record out. Angela. My biggest hit.’

  As for the Harmony, he did not say that it was terminal, only that it was going through a quiet phase and that Broadway rents were obscene. ‘This town, I tell ya, when they gave it away to the realtors, they handed us our heads on a golden fuckin’ platter,’ he said. ‘A golden fuckin’ platter.’

  ‘It isn’t politics,’ said Bert. ‘It’s just who you know.’

  ‘Legit businessmen, tried and proven operators, we don’t got a look-in. This ratrace, I tell ya, it’s a fuckin’ ratrace.’

  Still, there were consolations. From a desk drawer, he fished out a form letter. It came from the White House, was signed by Ronald and Nancy Reagan. In part, it read: ‘Our heartfelt thanks for your friendship and support. With your help and prayers, we can reach our goals and demonstrate that America’s best days are yet to come. God bless you – and God bless America.’

  A miniature Stars and Stripes fluttered from the top of a filing cabinet. Reverentially, Bob Anthony refolded the letter, replaced it in its drawer. ‘You get a tribute like that,’ he said, ‘you know you haven’t served in vain.’

  The theaters were just disgorging; the night beginning its next shift. Crossing Broadway, Bert essayed a few tentative tap steps on the white lines, but his forehead was clammy, his gills distinctly green. ‘My stomach disputes me,’ he said.

  ‘Avoid fried foods, which angry up the blood,’ I answered him. ‘Avoid running at all times.’

  ‘I am wishing I’m never born.’

  The answer sat waiting on the farther shore, in the shape of a health-drink stand. For many years it had traded as Orange Julius. Under new management, it had lately turned into Orange Morris. ‘So give me an orange something, whatever,’ Bert said.

  ‘Orange no got,’ came the grim reply.

  Papayas they had. A grisly concoction was slid across the counter, yellowed and frothing, a liquid lead balloon. Nothing loath, Bert downed it at one swallow. For some seconds, he stood smacking his lips, a man reborn. Then lightly, politely, he sank to his knees. ‘Just follow the Hat,’ he said. And he slept.

  Interval

  In Donegal, the summer that I was nine, Broadway was the ha-ha where the twins took off their clothes and danced. Their names were Sarah and Serena; they were almost thirteen. They were artistes, they said.

  I saw them first at the lily pond, fishing for tiddlers with a tea-sieve and a pencil box. Their mother had dressed them in matching whites – white organdie blouses, cream boaters with faded rose ribbon, long white tulle dresses – but their cropped hair was black and their flesh a deep earth brown. To go wading, they’d tucked their dresses high about their hips, and the dark limbs that slithered below made me think of night creatures, furtive, sly.

  What was I doing there, spying? It was my right. During the term I lived and schooled across the border, but my holidays I spent in the Free State. Buried in the hills above Lough Swilly lay the carcass of an Edwardian estate. My family rented the gatehouse.

  The estate had not always been tumbledown. Between the world wars there had been fancy-dress balls in the big house, garden parties on the lawns. There were three brothers then, goodly stout men who lived to shoot duck and fish salmon, each waiting to inherit from their crippled mother.

  Came a beautiful stranger, name of Stella, to steal and break their hearts in turn. By the time she was through, so was the inheritance. Now one of the brothers was dead, and the others were old men, skimbleshank ruins, but their mother, past ninety, remained. The big house creaked and echoed; the gardens were deserted. Beyond lay wilderness.

  This wilderness was mine. Spread over a thousand acres, there were birch woods and larch woods and pine woods, moors of heather and gorse, purple-headed mountains and unfished tarns, mile upon mile of lost avenues. If I roamed free from dawn till nightfall, and I did, I could not cover all my lan
ds.

  The ha-ha was my headquarters. Sometime back in the age of Stella, the eldest brother had had it dug as part of an ornamental garden, a labyrinth of sunken lanes and trompe l’oeil bowers, consecrated to his love in all her mysteries. But when that siren played him false, he let the whole affair rot. The walkways and arbors went back to jungle, the grottoes to crumbling rockpiles. Only the ha-ha survived.

  It was nothing grandiose, just a brambled grass fosse, some six feet wide by four feet deep. Still, it was the main-stem of my domain; the central artery between the lily pond and the kitchen garden, strategically all-important. Crouched inside its tangles, I commanded a clear view of the big house. Nobody that passed escaped me.

  So the twins. In summer, each afternoon sharp at four, high tea was served on the terrace; tea and scones and iced lemonade, wafer-cut cucumber sandwiches. The old lady and her sons sat huddled in their wheelchairs, shivering under mounds of tartan blankets, skulls wagging like dandelion clocks. Minor worthies – the doctor and the dominie, assorted clerics, spinsters, and gentlefolk in distressed circumstances – passed by in half-hourly shifts. But the twins were different class. Their father had been a judge, so they got to stay a whole week.

  It was a strange season. Most years, Irish summer meant only that the rain felt warmer down the back of your neck. But now it ran dry; there was heat. In shock, the land went into withdrawal. The fields cracked wide open and the wells failed and no birds sang. Inside the ha-ha, the grass turned to scorched straw and scratched my face where I squatted, too torpid to brush the flies off.

  Everything just stopped. Up at the big house the taps coughed up a brownish slime, and there was no ice for the lemonade. Prisoners under siege, the guests clustered round a wind-up gramophone and played the same damn song, over and over: ‘Begin the Beguine.’

  The water in the lily pond was tepid, stagnating. Late afternoon, when the twins went in wading, they roiled up clouds of purpling sludge at every step, turned the whole surface thunderous. Fireflies danced attendance. So did armies of midges and gnats. ‘My titties itch,’ Sarah said.

  ‘What tits?’

  ‘My twin thrones of desire.’

  Hidden in the weeds, I did not rightly know what a tit was, still less a desire, only that both were forbidden. A foundered rowboat lay festering in the slushy mud and I crawled towards it on my belly; I crept. The long grass squeaked, a duck flew in my face. Out in midstream, the twins were playing I Spy. ‘Something beginning with M,’ Serena said.

  ‘Midget,’ said Sarah, not unkindly, and the twins dragged me out from hiding, splashed me head to toe with warm mud.

  They were not identical, not even close. Sarah was longer and lither, more like an otter, while Serena favored a seal. But both were water animals, sleek and slippery, forever secret. ‘Wet things,’ I’d heard a housemaid call them. So they were.

  They’d come here from Kilmacrenan. It was only a crossroads, a hole in the hills, but crossroads were places of power, always had been. Their father lived in a castle and owned racehorses, their uncle had a wooden leg. A few short years, and the twins would also be stars, ‘supernovas.’

  ‘Blazing meteors.’

  ‘The brightest new gems in the showbiz firmament.’

  At home their bedroom closet was stuffed to overflowing with back copies of Photoplay and Broadway Babies and Hollywood Confidential, and they’d learned the argot by rote. Now it was their native tongue. ‘How do you do?’ I said.

  ‘Enchanté,’ the twins replied.

  They sang, they danced; they entertained. In Kilmacrenan, the priest played ragtime piano, one of the grooms had been a juggler, and their own mother knew how to yodel. Performance ran in their blood and bone. As far back as they could remember, they had known this for their destinies, to tread the boards, to star. ‘Broadway,’ they whispered, a mystic and awful conjuration, full of dread, like God. ‘The Great White Way,’ they said.

  It was the gaudiest sunset. The lily pond, stirred to liquid flame, became a tropic lagoon, and the twins ordered me to punt the ruined rowboat out into its heart. At the dead center we stopped, trapped by the last rays. Water ran in through the cracks, the boat began to fill. ‘What now?’ I asked.

  ‘We sink.’

  And we did. Like bridesmaids, perfect in repose, the twins sat up straight, kept utterly still, and slowly we went under. At first the pond felt clammy and unclean; alien. But by the time it covered our thighs and our laps, all sense of strangeness was gone. A thick green broth, rich with weeds and darting silver fishes, it sucked me in unresisting, drew me down.

  Lulled, I shut my eyes. And when I opened them again, I was underwater. The twins’ legs, greenish yellow in the half-light, twined and untwined like streamers. Idly kicking, they danced of their own accord, a slow pagan strutting. I reached out to touch but their flesh slid away, escaped me. I understood that I was drowning. It felt good.

  Then somehow I had surfaced. White dresses spread wide, cream boaters just so, the twins sat still upon the waters, stately as two swans.

  Afterwards, drying off in the ha-ha, they stripped to their slips and their skins, and they performed. ‘Sisters’ was the song they sang. They waggled their arms and flirted their eyes, they kicked their brown legs up higher than their shoulders. Then their mother called them in to their suppers, they were gone. I did not see them again.

  Three

  18

  ‘Sing and dance? We all did,’ said Aggie.

  ‘Had to,’ said Tess.

  ‘Or else.’

  They were not twins, just sisters. Aggie Doyle was seventy-seven, Tess seventy-four, and they had come to Broadway from Dublin in 1936. ‘On a wet Thursday,’ said Aggie.

  ‘In March,’ said Tess.

  ‘And dark.’

  Their first stop had been Times Square. ‘We had to count the lights,’ Aggie said. ‘The last thing before we left home, Father told us we were free to go and show all our legs in the pit of Sodom if that was our notion of duty, only please to remember, pert misses, that we went with his eternal curse on our heads, and if by chance, in the giddy round of fleshly pleasure, we paused long enough to remember those we left behind, perhaps we’d spare an instant to look up and count the lights.’

  ‘Because there was,’ said Tess.

  ‘A broken heart.’

  ‘For every light.’

  ‘On Broadway.’

  They never were good at sums. Before they’d even reached a hundred, they had gotten hopelessly muddled. ‘So we shared a hot dog instead,’ Aggie said.

  ‘With mustard and sweet relish.’

  ‘But no kraut.’ Aggie folded white hands in her lap, drooped her eyes in girlish submission. ‘Father hated the Germans,’ she said.

  His power had not withered with time. Half a century on, perched like schoolgirls on the high stools of Nathan’s Famous, the sisters slavered their lunch with such heaping mounds of onion and yellow mustard, ketchup and sickly green relish, that the hot dog itself was buried without trace. But not one strand of sour cabbage ever soiled their bright-painted lips. ‘Respect,’ Aggie said. Ladylike, she dabbed her chin and powdered cheeks with a lace handkerchief, then she reached for the Tums. ‘Filial obedience,’ she said. ‘You can’t beat it; you can’t lick it.’

  She was sturdy, firmly anchored, while Tess twitched and flittered. But it was Aggie who poeticized, Tess who shot to kill. No matter, they were troupers both: ‘The Emerald Doyles,’ Aggie said. ‘A Song, a Sigh.’

  ‘And a Saucy Smile.’

  It was not the act that they themselves had intended. In Dublin, growing up in the Liberties, the hillside slum between the Christ Church Cathedral and the Guinness Brewery, they’d hungered for elegance, artistic distinction. The name of Doyle had seemed unworthy: ‘Too suggestive of gross endeavor,’ Aggie said.

  ‘Sweat and navvies, she means,’ said Tess. So they had called themselves Les Sylphides, gone in for water ballet. But the three McManus girls – they liv
ed just up the street – had them beat. The janitor at the Glasnevin swimming pool was Caithleen’s fancy man; he let them practice in chlorine for free, while Aggie and Tess, just because they were virgins, must do their splits and entrechats in Dublin Bay: ‘January to December,’ Aggie said, ‘in the slimy green dawn, in the naked salt sea.’

  ‘And us,’ said Tess, ‘with no mother living.’

  So they had come to America. They had traveled to Times Square, and its glitz had hooked them forever. When they got through counting the lights, they became the Vesuvio Sisters, hot stuff from old Napoli; ZiZi and ZaZou, those Frilly Fillies from Chantilly; at last, the Emerald Doyles. Vaudeville was already in its death-throes. That left burlesque: ‘Ten shows a day, six days a week, three hundred dollars a month, and all the free gum you could chew,’ said Aggie, ‘showing everything God gave you.’

  ‘Or didn’t,’ said Tess.

  They were not built to play New York. Back in the Liberties, they had pictured themselves on the Keith-Albee or Orpheum circuits, nestled among true artistes. ‘We thought to rise on winsomeness and grace, inner beauty,’ said Aggie, ‘but all that sold was the big bazooms.’