New York Echoes

by Warren Adler

  “What did it cost for admission?”

  She was surprised that she asked such a question. Money was of no real interest to her, but she was suddenly curious about the comparison.

  “Ten cents, and on weeknights when I went with my mother they gave you a dish. You could furnish a whole table with plates.”

  He told her that suits came with two pair of pants and cost as little as $29.95. He had been a traveling salesman carrying a full line of men’s suits at the beginning of his career, then he had formed his own company and still went on the road to sell menswear. Then he told her whatever costs he remembered, from cigarettes to bananas to shoes and socks, to the cost of the subways, which was a nickel, to baseball tickets.

  “Bleacher seats were fifty-five cents.”

  “What are bleachers?”

  He patiently explained everything she asked, and she could tell he was enjoying himself immensely.

  “Nobody ever cared to ask me these questions,” he told Allison.

  She came back day after day to her grandfather’s apartment. He would look forward to her coming and would be sure to give her a glass of milk and cookies, which became a part of their regular routine. She did not tell her parents what she was doing and categorized this project as part of her secret life. Not that they would have objected, but she wanted this for herself and her grandfather alone.

  When they met for the family brunch on Sundays, her grandfather would wink at her as if to say, “keep this between us,” and she would nod her head in agreement. Neither her mother nor father ever noticed.

  Since she was far more technically adept than him, she persuaded him to purchase a computer and taught him the bare rudiments so that he could order things online using his credit card. Having discovered his memories of black-and-white movies, she taught him how to order DVDs online and often they would share viewings of old black-and-white movies. He loved the movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the Thin Man movies, and soon she was conversant with all the old black-and-white stars of the golden age of Hollywood.

  When he told her about the Brooklyn Dodgers, she searched the Internet and found old DVDs and audios of Dodger games. She loved being with him when he recalled these old baseball stories. For months she visited him almost daily, listening to and recording the oral history of his life and pressing him to tell her about all the events that were happening during his lifetime. She even went so far to encourage him to get a microfiche apparatus so that he could recycle all the New York Times of the thirties, forties, and fifties.

  Her parents, Allison suspected, wondered where she went after school every day. Although they inquired, they were very circumspect on how they questioned her.

  “I hope that wherever you go after school you are being careful,” her mother warned, meaning if she had sex she should take every precaution.

  “Don’t worry, Mom.”

  “It’s very dangerous today. You know what I mean.”

  “Of course, I do. I’m very careful.” It was laughable. She was still a virgin.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  Her mother seemed addicted to that question.

  “No mother. I don’t.”

  “Better to postpone that part of life, Allison.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “And stay away from drugs.”

  “I do, Mother.”

  She knew that she was definitely out of the mainstream of the teenage life of the privileged kids who attended her school. She knew it might reinforce their opinion about her nerdiness. She didn’t care and she honestly felt she was learning far more about life from her grandfather than she learned at school.

  Meanwhile, the tapes proliferated and the relationship with her grandfather grew closer. It was as if she had opened a door into his world and she had jumped right through it. Because they read the microfiche copies of the New York Times together, she knew a great deal about such diverse events as the Spanish Civil War, the four Franklin Roosevelt campaigns, and the names of the cars and other products of the era, especially cigarette brands, which were heavily advertised. She learned the titles of movies and the actors of that period, the stocks that went up and down, Hitler and Mussolini, the rise of the Nazis, the battles of World War II, the baseball rivalries, and especially the fate of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  “When they left Brooklyn, I left baseball,” her grandfather told the tape recorder. She learned pretty much everything about his history when he talked into the recorder, including how he had met Gramma at the Freddie Fitzsimmons bowling alley on Empire Boulevard.

  “Freddie Fitzsimmons was a pitcher for the Dodgers. He would wind up with his back to the batter, turn and pitch. Never saw another pitcher do that.”

  He told the tape recorder that he was in World War II, which he called “WW2,” and was in the infantry and won a purple heart. He still had shrapnel in his tush, he told her, laughing after the session. “Only I won’t show it.”

  It surprised her that he had never talked about that part of his life. He told too about all the cars he had owned, including his first, a Hudson, which he bought after the war and which looked like a tank. He showed her a picture of it advertised in the New York Times.

  “Ugly, right?”

  Not only did she spend her after-school hours with her grandfather, she would arrive Saturday morning and stay until nightfall. Usually they would watch a double feature of DVDs of old black-and-white movies, sometimes an extra one for good measure. After months of so-called moviegoing as they called it, she could also name many of the actors and actresses of that era. She thought Tyrone Power, Gary Cooper, and Clark Gable were the handsomest and no woman was more beautiful than Hedy Lamarr and Greta Garbo.

  Then, after a year, it ended abruptly and tragically. Her grandfather had a massive coronary and was rushed to the intensive care unit of Mt. Sinai Hospital. The prognosis was not good. Allison was devastated.

  Allison’s mother, as befitted her daughterly obligation, spent all day in the waiting room. Allison sat beside her, unable to hold back her tears.

  “No need for you to cut school,” her mother said, when Allison refused to attend classes. She did not know anything about her daughter’s special relationship with her father and appeared genuinely baffled by her grief.

  “Life goes on,” Allison’s mother commented philosophically more than once as they sat together in the waiting room. “He had a long life and he was lonely after my mother died.”

  Allison knew better. For the past year he was not lonely. Allison’s visits filled his life with interest and joy, hers as well. It had been a special year, a fabulous journey through her grandfather’s memories, which were now part of her own. Still, it remained their secret, Allison and her grandfather’s secret life.

  On the second night of her grandfather’s hospital stay, his doctor called them into his room. Her mother and father were there as well as her aunt and uncle, who had flown in from the west coast.

  “He won’t last the night,” his doctor told them.

  They stood around the bedside, watching him slowly expire. He was still conscious, his breathing difficult, his eyes barely open. Suddenly he moved his hand and beckoned with his finger, but when his daughters moved forward, he moved his head negatively and with finger signals beckoned Allison forward. She moved close to him and he made her understand that she was to lower her head against his lips.

  Allison heard his thin wispy whisper, which went on for a few minutes. Then she put her lips close to his ear and said something. A minute or so later, his eyes closed, and a stethoscope check determined that he had died.

  “What did he say to you?” her mother asked when they were going back to their apartment in a taxi. Her voice betrayed a slight irritation.

  “What was that all about, Allison?” her father asked, when she didn’t reply to her mother.

  “He had something to tell me,” Allison said.

  “What?” her mother asked. “After all, i
t was his last words on earth.”

  “You really want to know?” Allison asked.

  “Of course,” her father said. “What was so important that he had to tell you, only for your ears?”

  She mused over the request, then smiled. What could it possible mean to them?

  “What he said was Camilli on first, Coscaret on Second, Pee Wee Reese at short, Lavagetto on third, Phelps behind the plate, Dixie Walker at left, Ducky Medwick at left and Pete Reiser at right.”

  “Does that have any meaning?” her mother asked. “It sounds weird.”

  “Yes it does.” Allison said.

  “This is not the time to play games,” her father admonished.

  “You asked what he said. I told you.”

  “Sounds like baseball,” her father told her mother.

  “You can’t be serious, Allison,” her mother said. She turned to her husband. “I can’t believe this. Baseball? Ridiculous.”

  “And what did you tell him when you whispered in his ear?” her father asked, wary with a sarcastic edge in his tone.

  “I told them that even though Durocher was manager he shared shortstop with Pee Wee Reese.”

  “This is not a time for jokes,” her mother said. “My father has just died.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” her father rebuked.

  “He told me the lineup of the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers Championship Team.”

  “Have you lost your mind, Allison?” her mother said.

  “The Dodgers won the pennant that year but lost the series to the Yankees,” Allison said.

  Her mother and father looked at her, exchanged glances, and shrugged.

  “I don’t believe this, Allison,” her mother said. “I just don’t understand.”

  And they never would, Allison thought, chuckling.

  A Love Story

  by Warren Adler

  That spring James Pappas, nee Papanopolis, had come home to New York after, as he told himself and others, forty years of wandering in the desert. Like Moses and the Israelites. He would chuckle at the reference. Others would shrug and look at him, perplexed.

  His life, so far, had been like a pinball, bouncing in a zigzag pattern from one accountant job to another. He had spent ten years in Washington State, fifteen in LA, ten in Vegas, and the last five in Phoenix, baking bronze in what was called semi-retirement since he did a little stock speculation on the side and might kill a half day on the lush green carpet of a Sunbelt golf course.

  With Sally gone, his world in Phoenix had considerably narrowed. She had been the social arranger. Without her activism in that regard he slipped into a kind of nether world of isolation. She was a good wife and he missed her.

  He began to brood. Time was running out. More and more, he began to think about his life in New York City five decades before. Nostalgia became longing. He grew increasingly homesick. It was time to return.

  Sally would have balked at what to her was the worm-infested big bad rotten Big Apple. She wouldn’t go there and insisted that the children visit her in Phoenix. She was from Iowa, a salt-of-the-earth Midwest girl. After having put up with their many venue changes, she was happy to wind up in Phoenix. She was among her kind of people. That’s why he buried her there.

  Even when the illness came, Sally told him Phoenix was a good place to die. It was ridiculous to argue the point. However, in his heart, he knew that New York City had to be a better place to die and not because of the proximity to their children. With its high energy, endless activity, noise and movement, it had the feel of something worth losing, not like Phoenix, a sun-drenched waiting room for people who were half dead already.

  He was the son of Greek immigrants, brought up above the family luncheonette in Manhattan’s East Nineties. As a kid, he had hated the luncheonette where his father and mother slaved away their days and nights, and where all his time away from school was spent as the son-helper in the time-honored immigrant tradition.

  His nostrils still twitched in memory of sizzling bacon fat and the ubiquitous effluvia of olive oil that drenched every molecule of space in their tiny upstairs flat. Once he had referred to it as a “stink.” These days the stink had become perfume.

  In Manhattan, he had found himself a one-bedroom rental apartment on the bustling West Side, two blocks from Central Park. He was home, a city boy in his bones, and he quickly adjusted to the environment and established a routine.

  Weekdays, he read the Times on a bench in Central Park, then walked down to the Schwab office on Broadway to spend an hour or two watching the ticker. Later, he might poke around the books at Barnes & Noble, meander through the American Museum of Natural History, view the exhibits at the New York Historical Society, and take long walks down past Times Square, sometimes as far as Greenwich Village. Mostly, he ate in coffee shops.

  Weekends he would visit the kids, an obligatory hegira into irrelevancy. Jan one week, Paul the other, a ritual of kissy-poo with the grandchildren, disinterested conversation with offspring and spouse, discovering how distance can, in the end, inhibit intimacy. He blamed no one for this, annoyed at himself for being so bored and disconnected on these bland and uninteresting weekends. After awhile, he dismissed his guilt, acknowledging his parental failure, but taking some comfort in the fact that he had been a devoted, caring father when the kids were, well, still kids.

  Manhattan’s diversions helped James cope with his grief, which went on longer than he had been told to expect. Nearly fifty years of marriage had considerably reduced his sense of singularity. It was tough enough in Manhattan. It would have been devastating in Phoenix.

  He forced himself to consider his homecoming as a process of reconnection. As part of the process, he followed the adventures of the New York home teams, the Knicks, the Mets, the Rangers, and the Yankees, icons of his youth, although his enthusiasm had waned over the years. Unfortunately, try as he did, he had difficulty reclaiming the old rooting energy.

  To fill further gaps in his time, there were movies and shows and lectures at the 92nd Street Y and, although he was in no mood to socialize, he did not feel totally isolated and was only mildly depressed. There were occasional lunches or obligatory dinners with people coming in from Phoenix, who had quickly faded out of his orbit.

  As he emerged from the deep-freeze of his mourning, he began to note in himself an obsessive interest in observing the faces, mostly older faces, of those who entered his field of vision. He did not realize it at first, but it soon dawned on him that these observations were more investigative than casual. More than once he felt the sting of rebuke by the irritated gaze of those he had stared at longer than might be considered polite.

  Some of these faces struck him as half-familiar, perhaps people he had known or seen years ago when he lived in Manhattan. They might be people he had gone to school with, old friends with whom he had lost contact in the decades of his “exile,” old girlfriends, sweethearts, who had once stirred his romantic interest.

  He was well aware that fifty years had wrought dramatic changes in these aging faces. He tried, in his mind’s eye, to strip away the years and bring the faces back to some earlier focus. More than once, he was tempted to stop a passerby or someone sitting at another restaurant table to solicit their history based on a vague familiarity. Did they go to the same elementary or high school, or to the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church on 91st Street or come into his father’s luncheonette?

  So far he had been hesitant in accosting them, not wanting to seem like a fool. His mind would wander frequently as he pushed himself in memory back to those times of his youth when his life outside the ubiquitous luncheonette was taken up with friends, sports, school, and, indelibly, girls.

  Concentration and focus brought names back, Jerry O’Haire, Tommy Stephopolus, Icarus Cotheo, Chuck Gunther, Bobby Klein, boys in his classes, boys who played pickup games of basketball in the schoolyard or softball in Central Park. Their voices, sounds, even smells, rolled back in nostalgic flash
backs as that lost world, dormant for years, resurfaced in his memory.

  And the girls. Ginny Demes, Vera Vasis, Florence Delaney. Those names and the images pictured in his mind seemed especially vivid. After all, they had shared his sexual awakening and gave him his first glimpse of fleshly pleasures. He chuckled when he recalled his clumsy first efforts at his novice lovemaking, cringing more with joy than embarrassment when he remembered his inability to unfasten a girl’s brassiere or fathom the mysteries of female genitalia.

  With Vera Vasis, whose parents owned a grocery store not far from the luncheonette, there had been more than a hint of permanence. How old were they, fifteen, sixteen? Had they exchanged cheap silver rings? He remembered giving her a slave bracelet and they had made what passed for lovemaking on the darkened landing leading to her parent’s third floor walk-up.

  In those days they called it heavy petting since it would be dangerously unthinkable for a nice Greek girl of good family to “go all the way.” In memory, he still saw their actions on the steps as profoundly passionate, more passionate than if they had “gone all the way.” Indeed, in the mindset of those years, to force himself on her would have been an act of profound disrespect.

  For a girl in that time, a virgin who came to the marriage bed was a most valuable and expected asset, a gift of great importance, a solemn pledge of purity. How long had his relationship with Vera lasted? A few months at most. Yet the echo of its memory persisted, growing stronger with his return to the city.

  He wondered where Vera was today. And the others. Surely they had married, had children and grandchildren, moved elsewhere, eons away in time and geography.

  It soon became apparent to James that most of his thoughts these days were turned to that lost era of his life, and the more nostalgia that insinuated itself into his memory, the more he searched the faces of the people who seemed half familiar.