by Tillie
And he would dash back indoors, flushed, triumphant, looking to Johnny and Frankie for approval, muttering his guttural heh-heh.
For her part, trying to make herself invisible, the sister immediately ducked for cover in the protective gloom of her shop. I might have said, ‘For her part, the poor woman …’ but that would have been taking sides, and I had no idea what had driven the two apart. I can only guess. Their father had been a grocer, and when he died somehow the center had not held. Dave and his sister. Each side saved up, bided time, girded him (or her) self for battle. There’d be the opening skirmish from Dave, pronouncing her a whore to the world. I doubt if anyone along that stretch of North Street had not a Yiddish vocabulary of at least that one word.
One Friday from across the way the first shot was fired. It was Frankie who brought the news. His brother, he told Dave, had just put big hand-lettered signs out to announce that the enemy was cutting the price of a case of tonic by twenty-five percent.
Dave peered out, squinted, and his eyes took in the sign. He then swiveled round to Johnny.
‘See that, Johnny,’ he said. ‘The kurva wants war. All right, we’ll give her war.’ And with that he instructed Frankie to trundle out the ammunition.
The ammunition consisted of large sheets of paper and a handful of colored felt-tip pens. Then, in bright red and in his rather beautiful clear hand, Dave composed what was to be our first cannonade. All Tonic – Two Cases for the Price of One. And Frankie was sent out to tape the declaration not only to the wooden cases themselves but also across our plate-glass window and onto our portico’s very piers.
That was the summer of the North Street Tonic Wars, as history would one day record it. When over the weeks prices were slashed and counter-slashed and counter-counter-slashed. When there was slaughter and destruction and blood running in the gutters. When the price of tonic plummeted to five cents a bottle – for the big bottles. Both sides were now taking a pounding. Each was losing a small fortune.
Dave’s heh-heh at each turn got drier and drier, but he was not going to be outflanked. I don’t know how many sheets of paper we went through, how many pens ran dry. It was total war, and neither side was about to retreat.
It ended in a stalemate on the tonic, so Dave opened another front. This time the salvo ran: All Paper Goods Half Price. The kurva countered. We had our spies running across the street hourly. They had theirs. North Street was one great traffic jam as word reached the suburbs, and people clogged the highways streaming in to the North End to fill their cars with the spoils of war.
Then one day, at the exact same moment and without prior negotiation, the white flags went out on both sides. Armistice. It was all over. Coke and Pepsi and Moxie and orangeade, the toilet paper and soap powders – all were selling again at their pre-war prices. ‘Heh, heh,’ said Dave, glorying in his satisfaction.
‘They’ve capitulated.’
xl
Those New Haven weekends, escapes, escapades, mentioned earlier.
I used to stay with Mark Strand, my old room-mate from our university days in Ohio. Mark was at Yale now, on a loftier rung of the academic ladder, and, having strayed from painting and the fine arts, was making great strides in his newly-chosen vocation, that of poet. He lived with a great-looking painter named Nancy Stetson, who was also studying at Yale and who hailed from one of the Boston suburbs near mine.
They had a roomy, rambling apartment in a shabby neck of New Haven, and I slept on the floor on a double mattress under a blanket with no sheets. Primitive was all. Nancy and I quickly became pals. For a couple of weeks one summer we even had a little business together on the side. Painting. Not the Joseph Albers school of painting. I mean house painting – or, to be more precise, room painting.
Nancy was a gregarious girl who seemed to know everyone. Mark’s range was narrower, more calculating, more intellectual. He became friendly with the painter Bill Bailey and, years later, went on to write a monograph on Bill’s work. Bill had married a beauty named Sandra, another of our Ohio classmates. It all came close to incest.
Nancy introduced me to Nelson Wu, the university’s Oriental curator. Nelson once treated me to an authentic lunch in a New York Chinese restaurant, where he ordered in Mandarin. By which I mean that the waiter handed Nelson a blank pad and in Chinese characters Nelson wrote out the dishes he wanted. We ate things like shark-fin and bird’s-nest soup, which were not on the printed menu. Nancy cast a wide net. In Boston, she introduced me to an aristocratic Spaniard from an old colonial family in the Philippines. She also introduced me to a local artist, who gave me the round-topped table for my North End flat on which I wrote about Sacco and Vanzetti. In New Haven, Nancy was somehow also friendly with an old professor named Kennedy, whose field was Sanskrit. It was Kennedy, eventually, who paid Nancy and me to paint the walls of his apartment.
New Haven summers were blisteringly hot. Nancy taught me to drink iced lapsang souchong. Or, rather, being an aesthete and a connoisseur, Nancy introduced me to hu kwa, a particular variety of lapsang. And she instructed me exactly where to buy it in Boston, not far from the North End waterfront.
Nancy, Nancy, Nancy. Yes, she was an extraordinary girl, someone who radiated life, was cheerful, lively, curious about everything, inventive, independent, tireless. But if it seems that these New Haven intervals with her are leading to a place called bed or to any sort of sexual attraction or to an unrequited tug on the heart strings, they aren’t. Nancy and I were pals, pure and simple. Mark never married her; I don’t know why. Maybe, in the end, she proved too much for him, a handful.
No, this is about someone else. Another girl. A girl named Patricia.
xli
One night, out of the blue, Nancy brought her home to dinner. She came from a Boston suburb as well. At Yale, she too studied painting at the art school.
She was nothing like Nancy, whom I suddenly recognized was quite tomboyish. Patricia was quiet in manner, quiet in voice, feminine to a degree, not a talker but a listener. That night she wore a simple floral dress, elegant but understated, right for the occasion but wrong for the house, for the company. Nancy and I tended toward the informal and sloppy, shirt-tails flapping, holey sneakers, sweaters paint-stained and out at the elbow. Mark, as a great admirer of his own good looks, was informal but in a careful, studied way. Among us, Patricia, who exuded suburban good taste, was a cool drink of water. I reveled in it.
The evening was remarkable. The company was good, the meal was good. Nobody got drunk or loud. The Opus 76 set of Haydn quartets that Nancy had taught me to enjoy played softly, unobtrusively, in the background. Everywhere were vases and jugs of wildflowers carefully carelessly arranged, with herbs like rosemary and marjoram mixed in, and everything was lit by candles. It was unforgettable, the way a perfect dream is unforgettable.
At some point – and it was not at all late – the whole company just melted away unnoticed, and Patricia and I were sitting there alone and, what was more, we were blissfully unselfconscious. Also remarkable, strange even, was the fact that for once in my life I hadn’t a calculating bone in my body.
I have not said what the girl looked like. I have described how she was dressed and, with that, have perhaps hinted at her aura. I have been careful to talk about Patricia as I found her, as she struck me – that is, in the exact order and progression in which I perceived her. In other words, in the way she revealed herself to me.
I could not have started with her beauty and a catalog of her features, for that would have been too obvious. That would have been about her, elevated to a pedestal, distanced from me. The night was not like that. From the very outset the night was not about her, the night was about her-and-me.
So now I am free to state that she was very beautiful, strikingly beautiful, with a pretty nose, faintly hollowed cheeks, lips that were neither too thin nor too full. Her hair was dark and well-groomed and, being of medium length, it did nothing to hide the curve of a graceful neck. Had she the skin
of a peach? No, peaches had her skin. Patricia was even lovelier than Eve’s friend Mary Pryzborowska, the Polish beauty who had once caused me such turmoil.
Something about Patricia, her rare beauty combined with a quiet grace and easy self-control, did not threaten. For once these things caused me neither fear nor anguish nor panic. I felt safe with her.
xlii
The evening had finished too early. We were mercifully alone, but something more was required. Patricia suggested a night spot only a short walk away. As we left she had me help drape over her shoulders a soft black cardigan that she had brought with her.
A woman’s hair is a man’s delight. Almost instinctively, so as to remain close enough to inhale and luxuriate in the scent she was wearing for just one lingering moment more, I gave the garment a pat or two as if I were adjusting how it rested on her frame. Then I caught myself and led the way down the single flight of stairs. Out on the street, she took my hand.
The place was nearly empty. That was my first impression of it. It was a largish room, yet intimate, with ten or fifteen square tables, each set out with four chairs. At one end was a small dance floor, at the other a bar. We sat there for nearly an hour, nursing a single drink. A few people drifted in, women and men, individually. Patricia and I seemed to be the only couple. I can’t remember anything about the music, except that it wasn’t too loud. By this time I was lost in the depths of the girl’s eyes and had begun to long for another draft of her honey-scented hair.
A man suddenly appeared at our table, hovering, waiting. I thought he might be someone Patricia knew. He was older than I was, good-looking, well-built, clean-shaven, and nicely dressed. But she didn’t know him and still he waited expectantly. This was beginning to feel uncomfortable. I felt I should ask him to sit down, and I did. The three of us made small talk. After a minute or two, he asked Patricia for a dance. She refused him. He went eerily quiet. I felt embarrassed for him and told Patricia she should dance with him. Reluctantly, she rose and moved off with him to the dance floor. Foreseeing trouble, I began to kick myself.
They were the only couple on the dance floor, and I watched them carefully. She kept at a bit of a distance from him, and he did nothing to close the space between them, yet I could feel myself starting to smolder with jealousy. They returned to the table, and to my relief he did not seem keen to dance with her again. But I wanted him gone, I wanted to be alone with my new-found treasure.
Instead, oozing virility, he began rambling on about himself. He worked as a telephone line man and told us all about climbing poles and stringing wires. I could see that Patricia was not in the least interested and I was glad of it. She got up to use the ladies’, threading her way among the tables. He watched her go, then turned to me, staring, working up his nerve. I could not imagine what would happen next but could not help feeling that something was about to ruin the evening.
‘Ditch the girl and come with me,’ he said matter-of-factly. He said more but by then my ears had shut down and I heard nothing.
Patricia was back and sensed that something was wrong. She would not sit down; she wanted to leave. I most certainly wanted to leave. I got up and reached for her hand. It was warm and welcoming and eager. Neither of us spoke a word. We left him sitting there.
xliii
We made our way back to Mark and Nancy’s apartment along deserted streets. I had no set plan, no program. I didn’t need to. I knew we were going to spend that night together and whether or not we got around to making love did not seem to matter.
The house was still and dark. Enough light entered my room from the street so that I could see her perfectly without straining my eyes. Only when we were safe in that room did she let go my hand. She stood there for a moment, free of me, her eyes taking in the surroundings, and then, apparently satisfied, she dipped one shoulder and swung out of the cardigan. I did not move, dared not breathe. Patricia went straight to the mattress, bent down, and adjusted the pillow against the wall. Then, oblivious of me, she lay face up, neatly, tidily, in the middle of the bed, careful to smooth the hem of her dress comfortably under her. I knelt on the edge of the mattress and stretched out alongside her. Nothing was spoken, and by now my eyes were accustomed to the half light and for all I was able see we might have been in broad daylight.
As if suddenly noticing me, she turned her face my way and her lips lightly brushed mine. I wanted to reach for her hand, my anchor, but before I could she had sprung up and was undressing and layering her garments carefully over the back of a chair. I was transported. I dared not stir for fear of breaking the mood.
My heart was beating, at once both swelling and melting if such were possible under the barrage of her naked perfection. I drank in her breasts, her thighs, the dark spot high between her legs. Inside my rib cage something wild was breaking and at the same moment trying to break out.
She came back and looked down on me. ‘And you?’ she said.
I was up, taking off my clothes, kicking my way out of them, and with one foot casting them aside in a heap. She waited, wanting me to hold her, our bodies pressed together, standing. We embraced, kissed, and my hand ran slowly down her back to a voluptuous curve. An image burned in my mind. Botticelli, the three graces, and here I was standing naked in their midst.
I did not sleep that night but drank her in and drank her in and drank her in. I was so intoxicated that for one moment the insane notion crossed my mind that the only way to keep Patricia was not to have her. In those days, a lot of Zen Buddhism was in the air. The arrow and the target being the same. One hand clapping. Salinger. All that sort of thing. But I was no Buddhist, Zen or otherwise. We made love in some slow, strange, quiet new way. My mouth and tongue roved over every part of her body. Nothing further happened; the night turned out to be one long exercise in holding back.
xliv
It was at this time that I began to furnish my North End rooms. A mattress came up off the bedroom floor and onto the brass bedstead that Nancy’s Boston friend gave me when he moved into Newbury Street. I did not want much and had no desire to be raiding skips for things I did not need. I was partial to Thoreau’s ideal that a man is rich according to the number of things he can let alone.
Besides, in our Little Italy there were no skips. Each evening after trading hours municipal vehicles, front-end loaders and trucks, bumped and clattered and racketed backward and forward, backward and forward, crisscrossing from curb to curb, steel grinding against granite, steel banging against steel, scraping and scouring and brushing the market streets, ridding the sidewalks and gutters of their accumulation of half-crushed cardboard boxes and wooden crates and piles of rotting fruit and vegetables and the garbage and other waste that householders added to the chaotic mounds.
In the North End unwanted items like linoleum carpets, cooking stoves, bedsteads, kerosene heaters, refrigerators, battered sofas, and kaput washing machines went surreptitiously and anonymously out onto the streets at night. The luxury of a skip was unknown here. And as for the items so discarded they were discarded for one good reason. They had outlived their usefulness, were dead, had reached the end of the line, were worn out, no good to anyone. Least of all to me.
xlv
There were always cats on the next-door roof. One day one fell into a chimney. I found out from a screaming old woman down on the street. It must have been her cat. She could hear it mewing, she said. She said it was in the chimney ten days.
Men from the Animal Rescue kept coming out but they couldn’t find a way to release the cat. After they left, some kids went up on the roof and dropped boards and bricks down the chimney.
In the end it was decided to break through the bricks four stories below. When they did, there was the cat – a kitten really, in a ball, tangled in the rubble. It meowed. But it was shy about coming out.
One of the rescue men stuck his arm in the opening all the way to his elbow but couldn’t grab the cat. ‘Nice kitty, nice kitty,’ he said, pursing his lips and maki
ng the noises cats are supposed to understand.
At long last, out came the cat’s head. ‘Nice pretty little poor little –’ Wham! He had the cat by the scruff of its neck. ‘Little sonofabitch, now I’ve got you. Giving me four days of trouble.’
Et cetera.
xlvi
I could not get Patricia out of my mind. I began typing brief letters to her, shy and hesitant at first, to which she always replied immediately. Blue ink, blue paper, her script beautifully formed. Once, simply to stay in touch – or maybe because she was unsure what to put down in words – she sent me an old newspaper clipping that showed a picture of her as a girl of ten or twelve, hair braided, dressed in a plaid pinafore. Why she sent it I don’t know. What it represented I no longer remember. She was trying to tell me something, and I was touched. Patricia had grown up in one of the wealthy suburbs north of the city. Her father was a dentist. Her mother, of whom she spoke little, came across from the daughter’s few words as some sort of cold North Shore socialite. Patricia was an only child, the shielded and overprotected offspring of a staunchly Roman Catholic, Irish family. I will not set down her surname for the sole reason that it was the same as that of an influential, bigoted, proto-fascist Irish Catholic priest and political meddler of an earlier day. The man had nothing to do with Patricia or her family, but his notoriety was such that I fear the mere mention of that name in these pages would disturb my father’s ashes in their urn.
Because I was somehow reluctant to put pressure on her, I never poured my heart out to her about anything. But in one letter, referring to the time in New Haven I’d lain sleepless beside her the whole night long, I told her that I felt I had touched eternity.