“Marilyn, should I let him go? He led me to you, didn’t he? And if I pinch him, we won’t have any time for ourselves.”
Marilyn wasn’t greedy. She kissed Henry on the forehead and thanked him for bringing Coen. Henry creased his lips into a quarter smile. Then he galloped towards the escalators. After Coen he couldn’t trust the stairs.
Marilyn fumbled with Blue Eyes, her arms inside his camel’s hair coat, her teeth knocking into his jaw. The cop didn’t resist. He had most of her blouse in his hand. Marilyn kicked off her shoes and wiggled out of her skirt. She would have pulled Coen down on the bench with her, but the cop became suspicious. “Marilyn, there are Port Authority detectives running around. They could snitch on us to Isaac.”
“Who cares about snitchers?”
Coen spied an alcove about twenty feet behind Marilyn. It was the entrance to an abandoned toilet. He picked up skirt, blouse, and suitcase. Marilyn carried her shoes. The alcove was narrow, and they had nowhere to lie down. Marilyn leaned into a dirty wall. Coen’s pants dropped to his knees. Their bellies met under the coats. “Blue Eyes,” she said. Soon her mumbling was indistinct.
Taped to a moveable bedboard, a hospital boat with wheels, Rupert stared up at his father and Mordecai, the two shabby princes of Essex Street. He couldn’t say papa, or mouth welcomes to Mordecai. Falling off Isaac’s fire escape, he’d landed on his neck and lost the power of speech. He wasn’t dumb to his father’s words. Only Mordecai kept interrupting Philip.
“Rupert, listen to us. No cocksucker cop can get into your room again. There’s a guard outside with a gun. If that’s not enough, me and your father will sit with you. We’ll stop Isaac next time. Rupert, yon want some orange juice? Just wiggle your chin.”
Rupert’s chin was encased in thick swads of gauze. A nurse had shaved his skull, and wrapped him in a hundred feet of bandage. He didn’t have one free toe.
“Moron,” Philip said. “How can he signal for juice?”
The princes began to bicker. A team of nurses drove them out of the room. Mordecai scratched his knee. Rupert watched the hunched lines of his father’s back. Candy stripes on a twenty-dollar shirt couldn’t hide the bumps under Philip’s shoulder blade. Rupert screamed inside his head. So long, papa. So long, Mordecai. He’d have to mother these two men. They had gray tufts behind the ears: neither of them was a grandfather yet. Mordecai walked with bent knees. Philip had a crooked neck from the years he’d given to crouching on Essex Street. Rupert would take his father out of Isaac’s territories. They’d ride the currents on Third Avenue in Rupert’s hospital boat. They’d settle in a different part of the borough (Philip would die without a few yards of Manhattan). They’d send for Mordecai. The three of them would make war on the pimps who were holding Honey. Then Rupert would bounce upstairs on his bedboard and pluck Stanley Chin out of the prisoners’ ward. The cops would scream for the big Jew. Rupert wouldn’t care. Isaac didn’t exist above Delancey Street.
Rupert’s bliss began to fail. How could he pull Esther out of the ground? Clay in her ears wouldn’t bring her alive. His groin was shrewder than miles of bandage. Bellevue, Isaac, and the mummy’s bag they’d wrapped him in couldn’t stop his erection from pushing through the gauze. He was crying without a pinch of water in his eyes. These weren’t a mourner’s brittle tears. His hunger for Esther Rose couldn’t be quieted with a doctor’s needle, or sugar in his veins.
From time to time an intern would appear and marvel at the broken boy and his erection. The boy’s nurses could see the swelling in the gauze. They giggled among themselves. “Practically unconscious and he gets it up.” Rupert would growl at them behind immobile cheeks. Where’s Mordecai? Where’s my dad? And when they flipped him over, spanked his thighs to lessen the possibility of bed sores, Rupert would hiss through his nose. Ladies, you can’t kill a lollipop.
The door opened. He expected orderlies in filthy green coats to change the tubes and pans under his bed. He saw mittens in a wheelchair and a sad-faced cop. It was Blue Eyes and Stanley Chin. Rupert smiled without untightening his lips. The cop was reticent. He wouldn’t approach the bed-board. “Tell him,” Stanley pleaded. “Can’t you tell him?”
Coen dangled an arm behind the wheelchair. “Didn’t mean to chase you in the storm … you shouldn’t have climbed for the roof … the Chief’s got a tricky fire escape. Rupert, I’m sorry.”
The cop was silent again. Rupert didn’t have to look very hard. The storm wasn’t over for Blue Eyes; flecks of color exploded around Coen’s enormous pupils. Where’s Lady Marilyn? Coen was as sad as Mordecai. Mummified, stuck to a bedboard, he was glad he hadn’t spooned blood out of Marilyn’s neck. Coen could use her kisses.
“Rupe,” Stanley said, grazing the mummy with plaster on his fist. “The bulls can’t keep us apart Shit, Mr. Coen snuck me down here. I’m not supposed to have visiting rights.”
Rupert laughed underneath the canals of his nose. He could no longer feel the distant points of his body. He existed without fingers, elbows, or the blades of his knees. He had eyes, ears, and a sensitive prick. He couldn’t laugh with his kneecaps, or get his belly to shake. His tongue lay dead. But he was grateful to Blue Eyes for bringing Stanley. He’d roll tongues in the back of his head. Clap out a dozen words. Stanley, we’ll mend together. We’ll grow new hands. We’ll flood Bellevue with Isaac’s songs.
The boys couldn’t scrape their bandages in private. Nurses charged into the room. They had swollen red skin. “What do you mean, Detective Coen? Rupert Weil can’t have any guests. Take your prisoner upstairs.”
He heard the rattle of handlebars, the grunt of wheels, and he was in a world without Blue Eyes and Stanley Chin. The nurses grabbed his bedboard. They rotated him between their elbows, so Rupert couldn’t fall. His erection was gone. His cheeks wobbled against the gauze. He was beginning to feel his knees again. The nurses put him back. “Rest,” they said, as they hustled away from him. They screamed at the guard who had been assigned to Rupert by the children’s court. “No one gets through this door. Not even the Chief of Police.”
Rupert dreamed with an eye on the wall. There were shouts and sputters in the corridor. He saw patches of Philip and Mordecai. The two princes from Essex Street were arguing with nurses, doctors, orderlies, and Rupert’s guard. “Are you crazy?” Mordecai said. “This is the boy’s father. We want some satisfaction, please. We’ll crush your lungs if we can’t get in.” A hole formed in the wedge of nurses’ uniforms. The princes slipped through. They arrived at the bedboard. Rupert didn’t have the capacity to wink at them. Papa, he said. Papa and Mordecai.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1976 by Jerome Charyn
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Marilyn the Wild Page 19