Marilyn the Wild

by Jerome Charyn

“Ah,” he lied. “I was thinking of a case.” He mumbled Hubert’s name. “A gang beat him up. They didn’t touch the register. It sounds flukey to me.”

  “They’re probably rejects from the Jewish Defense League. Maybe Hubert isn’t kosher enough. He serves butter with meat”

  “Don’t, Ida. That’s not the work of Jewish kids. Giving an old man puffs on his head.”

  “You think that’s special? Look at my arms.”

  He glanced at the bruises on Ida’s flesh, thumbprints turning brown. The halo surrounding each bruise told him the pressure that must have been applied.

  “Same gang,” she said “They visited me too. They stole blintzes, not money.”

  “Ida, what else did they do?”

  “Little stunts. One of them grabs my arms, while the other sticks a hand in my blouse.”

  The Chief scattered underwear off his bed.

  “Ida, I’ll find that hand and chop it off when I get back.”

  With two fingers Ida straightened the curl in his lip. “Should I tell you the number of times a customer has tried to grab a handful of me?”

  “These weren’t customers,” the Chief said. But Ida had him by the ears. She was massaging the tiny bones at the back of his head. Isaac should have been putting on his tie. He didn’t have ten minutes to spare. His face was deep in Ida’s chest. The suitcase fell.

  Isaac couldn’t wrestle free of old questions. Ida’s milky smell brought Marilyn home to him. The Chief wasn’t playing incest on his bed. He didn’t confuse the girls. But kisses could hurt. He was coveting Ida’s milk, when he had a daughter who went from husband to husband, and couldn’t confide in him.

  2.

  MARILYN survived on lumps of tuna fish. She didn’t peek about until Blue Eyes could assure her that Isaac was on the plane for Paris. The First Dep’s office had verified the news: Isaac embarked at 7 P.M. She’d been lazing with Coen since noon. She watched him button his pretty neck into the collar of a white shirt. The holster went on last “Manfred, wait I’m going with you.”

  Coen was minding Isaac’s car. Blue Eyes hated to drive. There were too many stirrings in doorways, beggars jumping into the street, dogs chasing buses or crawling under his wheels, old women losing their memories in the middle of the road, to thwart a cop’s eye.

  “You suppose Isaac is going to revise the entire French police?” Marilyn was bored. She couldn’t get Coen to jabber. So she enticed him with her father’s secrets. “Manfred, you have a tricky boss. He won’t be mingling with detectives over there. Isaac went to visit his father.”

  Lines formed on Coen’s chin. Marilyn was ashamed of her crude tactics. Coen’s father had killed himself. Ten years ago, while Blue Eyes was stationed in Germany, Papa Coen decided to take gas. Coen wore his sad face ever since.

  “I didn’t know Isaac had a father … a father that’s alive.”

  “It’s an embarrassment to him. Like having a brother in jail.”

  Coen had learned not to mention Isaac’s baby brother Leo, who was entombed in Crosby Street, in a temporary annex to the old Civil Jail, because of alimony trouble. The Police Department shrugged at this indignity to itself. But the First Dep was powerless. Leo refused to step out of jail.

  “Marilyn, what’s embarrassing about a father?”

  “He deserted the family yean ago. Isaac had to leave school. Didn’t he tell you? His father was once a millionaire. Joel Sidel, the fur-collar prince. He threw it over for a stinking paint brush. He had a long nose, like Gauguin. He thought Paris was the new Tahiti. He wanted to paint the jungles around Sacré Coeur.”

  Jungles in Paris meant nothing to Coen. “Why did Isaac pick now for a visit?”

  “Because he’s had intimations of mortality.” Coen’s starved cheeks made her sorrowful of her rotten vocabulary, fed at Sarah Lawrence and at the dinner tables of her many husbands. “Manfred, he’s going on forty-five. That’s a dangerous age. Isaac needs his father. Seeing Joel will prove to him that he’s got years to go.”

  Coen dropped her at Crosby Street. He would park in Isaac’s slot at the police garage, march into Headquarters, blow dust off Isaac’s desk, and answer phone calls in the name of his Chief. He would say, “First Deputy’s office, Inspector Sidel,” with Marilyn’s perfume ripening on him.

  It was past official visiting hours at the Crosby Street annex, but Marilyn had no difficulty getting in. None of the guards could recollect the name of her current husband. They knew her as “Miss Sidel.” Not even the deputy warden was willing to tamper with Isaac’s girl. He brought Leo out to her himself, mumbling little flatteries about Isaac’s trip. “He’ll teach Paris how to nab their crooks. You can bet on that, Miss Sidel.”

  Leo was floundering in an oversized prison shirt. It was hard to consider him an uncle. He’d be Isaac’s baby brother for life.

  Leo was devoid of prison scars. He set his own hours at Crosby Street, ate candy out of a machine, destroyed the guards in pinochle, checkers, and bridge. There were no criminals to mingle with. Just cases like Leo, men who had faulted on their alimony, and were being held in civil contempt. Detectives from the Sheriff’s office had swiped Leo out of a congested lobby in the building where he worked, exposing him to the shameful stare of executives, buyers, and girls from the typing pool, and led him away in handcuffs, on a complaint from his former wife. The Sheriff’s detectives were as restless as Leo. It made them miserable to be recognized as the men who had collared the brother of Isaac the Just.

  Marilyn had a softness for Leo. She hadn’t come to him as Isaac’s compassionate daughter. She could identify with Leo’s plight. Leo was her special kinsman: both of them had endured busted marriages, both of them had been skinned alive.

  They could hug and loss in the prison’s reception room without one snarl from the guards. “Marilyn, are you laughing same as me? I can breathe. The word has come down that Isaac is out of the country. I’ll grow fat in the next few days. What about you?”

  Marilyn extended the hug.

  “Uncle Leo, I wish I had three thousand to get you out of here. Would that be enough to satisfy stupid Selma? I’d strangle her for you, if you want. Don’t you think Isaac could spring me? Only that would leave you a widower with kids. Have Davey and Michael come to visit you?”

  Leo grew somber in the reception room. He broke away from Marilyn. “They stick with their mother,” he said. “They send me poison notes. Selma forces them to practice their penmanship on me. I can hear her tongue behind the words. ‘Dad, you’re killing us.’ Marilyn, that woman has the money to choke an elephant. She keeps her bankbooks in an old brassiere.”

  Marilyn chafed at her inability to help Leo. Her last two husbands had been rich, but she was left a pauper. She had to borrow money from Coen.

  “Sophie or Isaac would put up the till. Leo, I could ask.”

  “Never. Marilyn, don’t forget. In October I was forty-two. Can I go begging to my mother, or scrounge from big Isaac? Better they should take me out and shoot me. I don’t care how they finish me off. As long as Sophie doesn’t know. Marilyn, Isaac didn’t tell mama, did he? I call her every morning. I say I’m at a hotel that doesn’t have a phone in the room. Funny, she didn’t answer today. She must be out buying more junk.”

  “Isaac fucks over everybody, but he won’t snitch. Not because of you. It would make him too uncomfortable. He’d have to explain to your mother why you’re sitting in a jail. Leo, don’t fidget I’ll convince Sophie for you. I’m going there right now.”

  The guards groped for banalities on the way out They were fishing to stay on Isaac’s good side. “We’ll watch Leo, Miss Sidel. We’ve made it like a country club for him.”

  Marilyn crossed the Bowery into Isaac’s territories: the Puerto Rican-Jewish East Side. She had to smile at the old Forsyth Street synagogue, now a “Templo Adventista,” with its Star of David still intact in the little circular window near the roof. Later she would shop for underpants on Orchard Street. She had t
o see Sophie first.

  Israel had taken over Essex Street. Apricots from Galilee, Haifa plums, and spaghetti made in Tel Aviv dominated the windows of tiny groceries. She realized what a blight this must be for her grandmother, who championed the Diaspora, homeless Arabs and Jews in a Gentile universe. Sophie didn’t have the usual allotment of junk on parade outside her door. Was she feeding soup to hobos? Or feeling up a plump goose at the Christian butcher? The door was ajar.

  Marilyn had no knowledge of Haifa plums. She was a girl with an Irish nose, a captive of churches on Marble Hill, with memories of communion gloves and priests who dribbled spit. Hot-blooded, she allowed her cherry to be swiped at twelve and a half. Past fourteen, her fame extended from Riverdale to Washington Heights, with pieces off her underpants rotting in the cellars of Fordham Road. Uptown precociousness couldn’t connect a girl to her mysterious grandmother, Sophie the Hoarder. So Marilyn interpreted the lay of things. Sophie wouldn’t spite her own wares to give her affections to a hobo. She was more careful than that. Marilyn stepped over the damaged perambulators that Sophie prized. They were hopeless vehicles. None of them could move. But Sophie had trussed their bodies with great lengths of wire.

  Marilyn ventured deeper into the shop. Torn lampshades couldn’t trouble her. That might have been Sophie’s doing. She peeked under a mound of blankets with odd lumps in a corner. She wasn’t shocked by Sophie’s arm; it rested in a natural position, without a flaw in the beautiful veins. Was this how a grandmother sleeps?

  Marilyn tugged at the blankets, following the course of that arm. Sophie’s head emerged, lying in blood that had turned to a thick, corrosive jelly. The jelly reached to her ears. She had marks on her forehead that resembled the sink of a belt buckle into skin. Marilyn’s screams came in a dry wisp. She shambled towards the telephone. She didn’t consider ambulances. In her panic she could only think of dialing for Coen.

  3.

  ISAAC sat in a damp palace high on the Quai Voltaire. His feet were cold. Surrounded by gunsmiths, retired police inspectors, manufacturers of snooping devices, and a team of specialists from the crime labs of Antwerp and Bruges, he tried to make do with his high-school French. Sentences galloped in his ear. He couldn’t decipher all the sputter. Isaac was miserable at heart. His first walk in Paris had broken him.

  Armored with New York, he came swollen-eyed, ready to lick his honey jar and scom this town. Isaac had no instinct for sightseeing. He wasn’t the sort of man who could gravitate towards the Eiffel Tower and the Champ de Mars. A few months back, Herbert Pimloe, the Harvard boy, an underchief with the First Deputy’s office, and a voracious traveler, had returned home from Paris with a newspaper clipping for Isaac, which advertised a certain Monsieur Sidel, Portraitiste, with permanent headquarters in the lobby of an avenue Kléber hotel, near the Arc de Triomphe. “Chief,” Pimloe said, with a finger on the clipping, and proud of himself. “Could that be a relative of yours?” Isaac had a burn in his throat He hadn’t expected his father to play Lazarus after twenty-five years. Joel Sidel was supposed to be among the missing and the dead. Isaac had wanted to forget his father’s name. Now he thought of murdering Joel, or confronting him on the avenue Kléber, and bruising his head. Isaac schemed and scratched a little. He invited himself to a conference on crime staged for gunsmiths and provincial detectives. He was in Paris to kill, maim, and collect his due.

  On his way to the conference, crossing the Seine, Isaac was prepared to spit at barges in the river, ignore shrill parrots belonging to old women with dust on their clothes, and avoid bookstalls and organ grinders. But he couldn’t guard himself properly against the He de la Cité. A stone island, a medieval city that rose out of the water, it turned Isaac dumb. He stared at the island’s grassy point, a twitch of green in front of gray mansion walls and the tips of Notre Dame. Stone pushing through the blur of a smoking river was insufferable to Isaac. Nothing in New York could swallow up this kind of vision. The chimneys of Welfare Island were piddling things compared to such damp walls. Isaac arrived at the conference with a scowling face.

  One of the specialists from Bruges cornered Isaac after a short address on Parisian bank robbers. The Flemish man, who spoke a powerful English, made pessimistic swipes with his head that Isaac failed to comprehend. “Inspector Sidel, what is the position in America? Do you have amateurs committing crimes? Disgusting little apaches who are impossible to trace? Paris is flooded with them. I don’t mean the scum of the African quarters. They’re no threat to us. But young savages from the government projects around Clignancourt, and the other little holes at the ends of Paris—coclcroaches with pistols in their hands. These roaches appear on the Champs-Elysées, stick up a bank, and crawl into their holes. What can one do? No grid, no organized gang, no strict underworld. Nothing but roaches, isolated roaches.”

  “We have them in the United States, Monsieur, but not so many,” Isaac said, preoccupied with the painter Joel, his recreant father at the avenue Kléber hotel.

  “Then what advice do you have for our friends in Paris, Inspector Sidel?”

  “Go into the projects.”

  “With an army?”

  “No, with spies.”

  “Ah,” the Flemish man said, warming to Isaac. “It’s a matter of infiltration. If you can’t flush out the roaches, you sleep in their beds. Inspector, stay in Paris. You have a future with the Sûreté.

  Isaac abandoned the conference before lunch. He regained his stride on the Quai Voltaire, walking towards the Invalides. He would be fine so long as he could distance himself from the sweating stones of the Cité. New York crept back to him; the Mansard roofs of Commerce Street, the crumbling walls of Cherry Lane, the slaughterhouses at Gansevoort, the incredible steel-shuttered factories of Lafayette and upper Mulberry. He could take Paris in a wink.

  The boulevards above the Trocadero were welcome ground to Isaac. He didn’t have to deal with crooked streets. He could close his eyes and sniff out Madison Avenue in the little bakeries and jewelry shops off the rue Hamelin. He wasn’t astounded by The Iroquois of avenue Kléber: it had to be a hotel for rich Americans. All the tributaries of the Ohio snarled over Isaac’s ears from a huge pictograph on the front wall. He had to go around an enormous Eiffel Tower in the center of The Iroquois. Isaac refused to smile.

  He had his father at a disadvantage. Joel Sidel was the only painter in the lobby. Isaac couldn’t be compassionate to the easel of a seventy-year-old. This was the man who had turned his mother crazy, and made a weakling of his brother. Sophie blundered into a rag shop, Isaac became a flic, and Leo drifted from boyhood to marriage to alimony jail.

  Isaac couldn’t ignore his father’s technique. Joel snared Americans off the elevators; with a wag of his finger and artful hunchings of his back he would lure a couple over to his bench. While husband and wife posed with camera, light meter, and guide books, Joel dipped his fat brush into a can and painted their outline and obvious features in under a minute, before they had a chance to protest. He charged twenty francs for his work. Verisimilitude didn’t count The couples would have been offended by too much accuracy. They were in awe of Joel’s speed with a brush. Isaac grunted into the lapels of his raincoat. He hadn’t come to Paris to play spy.

  Joel wasn’t asleep. He made a primal recognition: this had to be one of his two boys. “Leo?” he said.

  “No, papa. Look again.”

  Joel slapped his brush into a paint rag; it wobbled like the head of a fish.

  “Isaac, you must have inherited your brother’s face. I’m not disappointed that it’s you. You’re my oldest Half a century goes by, and you can still call me ‘papa.’”

  “Papa, don’t exaggerate. I wasn’t in this world fifty years ago.”

  Isaac squinted at his father’s unnatural coloring, heightened reds around eyes, cheeks, and nose, and blue on the bumps of the skull. Joel was wearing rouge. He had a scarf on his throat, and a bottle-green painter’s smock that would have identified him as a portraitist in
any setting. It was Joel’s uniform at The Iroquois.

  “I was expecting you, Isaac. I’m not surprised. Have you come to murder your papa?”

  The forks under Isaac’s burly jaw twisted up into his mouth, leaving him with a stingy smile.

  “Papa, search me. I’m clean. You can’t smuggle guns into Paris.”

  “Isaac, you could smuggle anything. Don’t think I’m ignorant of your career. I may be a piece of shit, but I follow my boys. Marilyn’s the name of your daughter. She’s an Irish beauty. She carries husbands on her back. Isaac, are you shocked how much I know? A boy from Seventh Avenue who used to work for me, he’s in Paris once a year. An international buyer, with millions in his pocket, he sips wine and talks about my family. What’s Leo doing?”

  “Leo’s in jail,” Isaac spit through his teeth.

  The rouge jumped under Joel’s eyes. He retreated into his painter’s smock, rising over the easel with his blued skull. He was scanning the elevators for American bait “I’m neglecting my business, Isaac. I can see I’ll have a poor afternoon.” He mentioned an address on the rue Vieille-du-Temple. “It’s in the Marais, on top of the Rivoli. Just ask for the Jews. You’ll find it, Isaac. It will take you a while. You can murder me when you get there.”

  Isaac left The Iroquois so his father could begin to hustle. On the rue Hamelin he took out a gigantic map of Paris and searched for the proper grid. With his policeman’s logic he timed his walk at two hours. Isaac cut east, above the bend in the river, and landed on the Place des Etats-Unis.

  Two men in shiny brown coats hovered close to Isaac looking for pigeons to feed. Isaac watched the play of their hands. Their pursuit of birds seemed elaborate to him (Isaac couldn’t locate a smear of pigeon shit in the Place des Etats-Unis). The shiny coats belonged to a dip artist and his squire. Isaac appraised this pickpocket team with a cool turn of his mind. They can’t be from South America. The Guzmanns (a tribe of pickpockets out of Peru) would never wear shiny coats. These are locals from Algeria, or Sicily. Starving kids with the soft, beautiful fingers of a girl.