“Excellent idea, Murray,” Miss Goldhurst said. She got out of her car, locked it, glared at the television people, and got into the passenger seat of Tepper’s Chevy. They pulled away, driving slowly, at what Tepper always thought of as spot-searching speed. In his rearview mirror, Tepper could see several of the television people arguing, presumably about who should move to make room for him.
As Tepper turned the corner and slowly made his way along Ludlow Street, he and his former teacher talked about the old days at P.S. 128—the time Danny Callahan’s false beard fell off as he recited the Gettysburg Address before the entire student body, the marathon spelling bee between Katie Palermo and Stanley Gershevsky, the problems that the principal (whom they both referred to formally as Mr. Abbott) had with his false teeth when addressing assemblies, the time Murray’s friend Jack nailed Stanley Gershevsky’s galoshes to the cloakroom floor. Finally, as they were coming around to Houston Street again, Miss Goldhurst said, “What’s your game here, Murray?”
“Game?” Tepper said.
“You were a quiet little boy but a thoughtful little boy,” Miss Goldhurst said. “I always thought you understood things you weren’t necessarily saying much about. I can’t see you just sitting in your car to read the newspaper. You could read the newspaper at home. I think you have something up your sleeve.”
“Maybe you overestimated me, Miss Goldhurst,” Tepper said. They had come to a halt back at Miss Goldhurst’s Ford Taurus. Immediately behind her car, a spot was now available. It was being guarded by a phalanx of television cameramen. One of the television crews had been persuaded to clear a space for Tepper, and its van was now double-parked near the corner. Tepper backed into the spot—rather deftly, he couldn’t help thinking.
“I don’t think I overestimated you, Murray,” Miss Goldhurst said, as she got out of the car. “Anyway, whatever you’re up to, watch your tush. And when you see your friend Jack tell him I still don’t know how he managed to graduate, considering the mark I gave him in deportment.”
No sooner had Tepper pulled into the spot and deposited his quarters in the meter than Victor Hessbaugh appeared, accompanied by the same polite policeman who had come to Tepper’s car that night on East Seventy-eighth Street. They stopped Tepper as he turned from the meter.
“We are issuing you this summons, sir,” the policeman began, “for being in contravention of the city ordinance against unlicensed demonstrations or exhibitions that could—”
“I’ll take that for my client,” a small man with a beard said, snatching the summons out of the policeman’s hand. “My name is Jeremy Thornton, I am the senior staff attorney for the New York Civil Liberties Union, and I represent Mr. Tepper here, a man you have just ticketed for pulling into a legal parking spot and depositing coins in a parking meter—activities that, until this moment, nobody in the United States of America has ever had any reason to believe were illegal.” Thornton spoke in a New York street accent so strong it almost seemed inspired by the old Dead End Kids movies, although, according to what Tepper had read about him in newspapers over the years, he was from an old Episcopalian family and was a graduate not only of Williams College but also of Groton.
“Actually, sir,” the sergeant said, “the summons is for—”
“Parking in a legal spot,” Thornton interrupted. “And we will ask a federal court to enjoin you from this cockamamie use of an unconstitutional ordinance to punish my client for obeying the law.”
“Don’t pull any of your civil-liberties flimflam here, Thornton,” Victor Hessbaugh said, as the television cameramen pressed closer to catch the exchange. “You know perfectly well that this man’s intention—”
“His intention!” Thornton said, at nearly a shout. “His intention! Are we putting law-abiding citizens who have broken no law whatsoever behind bars now for what we believe might be their intentions?”
“Nobody’s putting anybody behind bars,” Hessbaugh said.
“You got that right, bubbele!” Thornton said. “And I think a federal district judge will be appalled that you tried. What makes you think my client is here to contravene the order against unlicensed demonstrations or exhibitions? What makes you think he isn’t in the market for some pickled herring?”
“Actually,” Tepper said, “I was going to pick up some herring salad and a whitefish.”
“You were?” Thornton said, apparently surprised that his hypothetical point should turn out to be based on fact.
Tepper nodded, and walked into Russ & Daughters. The television cameramen and part of the crowd that had gathered followed him. Irving Saper, by chance, was free, and immediately said, “May I serve you, Mr. Tepper?”
“I’d like a pound of herring salad and a whitefish,” Tepper said. The television cameras pushed toward the counter to show Saper scooping out the herring salad. The reporters took notes.
“Any particular whitefish?” Saper said, after he’d put the herring salad in a package and moved down the counter toward the whole fish.
“Whichever one seems appropriate, in your judgment,” Tepper said, rather formally. “I’m certain that this store has only nice whitefish in its inventory.”
As Tepper emerged from the store, followed by the cameramen and the crowd, he saw that Hessbaugh and the police sergeant had adjourned for a conference a few yards down the street, but two other people had taken their places next to the Chevy Malibu. One was Maxie Allen, dressed in his usual shiny black suit and standing behind an electronic keyboard of the sort you might see used by a trio playing the smaller cocktail lounge of a cruise ship. The other was Bill Carmody, the Woodside Wacko, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt that advertised Grain Belt beer and a baseball cap that said on it HEREFORD—THE ALL BEEF BREED. As Tepper approached, Maxie Allen did a few notes of introduction, and then Carmody began to sing.
When asked to move by someone from some “burb,”
He said, “Right now this here’s my stretch of curb,”
He said it softly. Didn’t storm or shout.
He wasn’t there to hassle or disturb.
But if you’re here to write a little blurb,
Just tell them Tepper isn’t going out.
Though he alone knows what it’s all about,
Just tell them Tepper isn’t going out.
The crowd that had pushed in on the sidewalk and even out on Houston Street began to chant: “Tepper isn’t going out, Tepper isn’t going out. . . .”
24. Sunday Lunch
“THE WHITEFISH IS NOT SO BAD,” TEPPER SAID, LATER that morning, as he put another helping of it on his plate. He was sitting at the dining room table of his apartment with his entire family—his wife, his daughter, his son-in-law, and Max, his grandson.
“I’ve tasted worse,” Ruth said. They were accustomed to expressing their approval of food from a delicatessen or an appetizing store—what Tepper sometimes called New York food—in a restrained manner. “Not bad at all” was about as far as they tended to go toward paying a compliment. Tepper had been brought up that way. His father had always seemed reluctant to display excess enthusiasm at the table, particularly when eating New York food—his favorite sort of food. Tepper always suspected that in his father’s view if someone exclaimed, “This is absolutely the most spectacular pastrami I’ve ever tasted in my life!” the Evil Eye would hear what had been said and immediately infuse the pastrami with E. coli bacteria.
“I can remember going down to Houston Street to get smoked fish with you when I was still in a car seat, Daddy,” Linda said. “It shows some things never change.”
“I think they may have changed the rules on the meters,” Tepper corrected her. “As I remember, it didn’t always say including Sunday. But maybe I’m wrong.”
“Richard, do you want some whitefish?” Linda asked.
“No, thank you,” Richard said, with a quick, tight smile. Richard had never shown himself to be particularly fond of the sort of food the Teppers were likely to serve for Sunda
y lunch, but he’d always been polite about declining seconds.
“Max, you want some whitefish?” Linda asked, cutting off a piece and offering it to her son, a little boy with impossible blond curls who was sitting next to her.
“Nooooo, thank you,” Max said. When offered food he held under suspicion, Max had a way of drawing out the “No” in “No, thank you,” so the phrase sounded like the response of someone asked if he’d like to go along for the ride when a new supersonic fighter plane is test-flown for the first time.
“Ruth, look at Max’s new tooth,” Tepper said.
“What new tooth?” Ruth said. “Maxie doesn’t have a new tooth.”
As she peered in Max’s mouth, Tepper pulled at the top of his fork, which lengthened like a radio antenna until it was nearly two feet long. Then he picked up a piece of whitefish from Ruth’s plate. Ruth took no notice of the theft. Max howled with laughter. He never tired of the extendable fork.
Tepper thought the fork was perhaps the only positive thing to have come from his nearly forty years of working with Barney Mittgin, who at one point was trying to sell extendable forks through the mail to people who had sent away for dribbling glasses and hand buzzers. At first, Tepper hadn’t believed that it could be one of Mittgin’s items, since it seemed to have only one use—eating off other people’s plates for the entertainment of small children or the benefit of boorish overeaters. “Not at all,” Mittgin had said. “It’s also a fork.” Seeing Tepper’s puzzlement, Mittgin went on: “It does have two uses. It’s an extendable fork, but it’s also a fork. You can also use it as a fork.”
“I was mistaken,” Tepper said, with mock innocence, when Ruth had completed her inspection of Max’s mouth without finding any new teeth. “Max has no new teeth.”
“Here, everybody, have some more herring salad,” Ruth said, picking up the plate and starting it around the table. “It’s really not bad.”
“How did things go down there this morning?” Linda asked her father.
“Oh, fine, once I found a spot,” Tepper said. “I got waited on right away. I had a little trouble finding a spot, but the driver of one of the television trucks was nice enough to make room for me.”
“There were television trucks?” Linda asked. “Were they there because of you?”
“I suppose they were,” Tepper said. “Although I hardly said a word. It was mostly between a lawyer from the city and my lawyer. Well, I suppose he’s my lawyer—Jeremy Thornton from the Civil Liberties Union.” Tepper thought he heard a sharp intake of breath from his son-in-law at the mention of Thornton’s name.
“Daddy,” Linda said, “Richard and I . . . well . . .”
“We’ve been wondering if this hasn’t, well, gotten out of hand,” Richard said.
There was silence at the table. Finally, Tepper said, “What do you think, Max?”
“Make Grandma look at my teeth again,” Max said.
“Daddy, it was one thing when it was sort of private. But now it’s in the newspapers all the time. You know a reporter tried to interview Maxie and me. And someone mentioned it to Richard at work last week.”
Tepper nodded. Richard worked on Wall Street, trading in something called derivatives. Derivative of what Tepper didn’t know. Tepper knew that it wasn’t Richard’s fault that he made a living doing something his father-in-law didn’t understand. He knew it wasn’t fair to expect Richard to work in some field that had actually existed when Tepper was a young man. Still, he found himself wondering sometimes whether trading in derivatives was a proper job. He wondered whether people who traded derivatives had as much time on their hands as people who traded commodities. He was aware, of course, that his own father wouldn’t have considered brokering mailing lists a proper job.
“Daddy,” Linda went on. “We want you to do whatever makes you happy, but can I just ask if you see this as something you’ll always do?”
“Always?” Tepper said. “No, I wouldn’t think always.”
Linda looked relieved. So did Ruth. So did Richard. The silence was broken by Max. “Grandma,” he said. “Wanna see my new tooth?”
25. Shop Talk
ON A RAINY EVENING A FEW DAYS LATER, TEPPER PULLED into a spot on West Eighty-fourth Street, only a couple of blocks from his apartment. On that side of the street, cars would have to be moved by eight the following morning. Still, the spot he’d found was the only one left. It occurred to him that parking in the area might have become even tighter since he had finally given in to Ruth’s entreaties about renting garage space.
It had been years since he’d looked for a spot in his own neighborhood. He didn’t even know if Hector, the doorman who had tried to teach him the two-fingered whistle, was still working on West Eighty-third, only a block away. For all Tepper knew, Hector had retired by now. He might even have died, taking the secret of his whistling technique with him to the grave. There was a time when Hector had been a significant figure in Tepper’s life. Tepper edged the back wheels of the Chevy a bit closer to the curb. He was confident now that he was a perfect two or three inches from the curb, and equidistant from the cars ahead of and behind him. He remembered how he would have felt in those alternate-side days if he’d found the single available spot on a street just after he began looking—a spot that was pretty tight, in fact, too small for a less skilled parker. True, it wasn’t good for tomorrow, but he was going to return the car to his garage later in the evening anyway. “Beautiful spot,” Tepper mumbled, just loud enough to hear himself. Then he said it in a loud, clear voice: “Beautiful spot!”
A few moments later, he heard a knock on the passenger-side window. A man was standing outside, protecting himself from the rain with a black umbrella.
“Mr. Tepper?” he said.
Tepper leaned over and unlocked the door.
The man closed his umbrella, shook the water off of it, and put it on the floor under the dashboard. Then, as he settled into the passenger seat, he stuck out his hand and said, “Mike Shanahan, Mr. Tepper. Appreciate your taking the time to see me.”
“You said on the phone you take surveys, Mr. Shanahan.”
“Well, I’m mainly someone who does surveying for politicians, Mr. Tepper.”
“You might say we’re in related fields—trying to figure out something about people we don’t know,” Tepper said.
“That’s right,” Shanahan said.
“Only you try to make your universe as random as possible,” Tepper said. “And I try to get rid of all the randomness I can.”
Shanahan nodded. “I suppose that’s the difference,” he said. “Listen, I want to thank you again for meeting me here. I hope it wasn’t inconvenient.”
“No problem at all, Mr. Shanahan,” Tepper replied. “It might have been—I hadn’t realized how hard it’s gotten to park around here, even on a weeknight; I quit leaving the car on the street some years ago—but, fortunately, I got the last spot on the block. A beautiful spot, really.”
“I’ve often found this a difficult neighborhood to find a spot in,” Shanahan said.
“Well, it’s harder than some,” Tepper said. “I’ll tell you the easiest area for parking during the evening; I’m not talking now about good for tomorrow, but just for the evening.”
Shanahan held up his hand. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “The East Side in the seventies, close to the park.”
“Exactly,” Tepper said. “Exactly. Maybe those people are all rich enough to keep their cars in garages. We have some friends who live on Seventy-third and Madison. They’re not rich. They were fortunate enough to be living there in a rent-controlled apartment in the early seventies when the building went co-op, so they picked up their apartment for a song. Anyway, when these friends invite us for dinner, I’m always excited. The food’s nothing special, and you might even say the company’s only so-so—her brother’s often there, and he’s one of those people who’s always telling you how much his house has appreciated—but the parking is glorious. Someti
mes, I’ll pull up to their corner, on Madison, and there are four or five spots available at meters that don’t need to be fed after seven. I just glide into one of the spots. I take my choice. I always say to my wife, ‘Well, I’ve just had the high point of the evening. No matter what happens, the rest of it will be downhill.’”
“I’m afraid your friends are the sort of people who make it difficult for a poll taker to figure out who he’s talking to according to what neighborhood they live in,” Mike Shanahan said. “You can’t count on, say, the 10021 zip code being all rich people. There are people who lucked onto a co-op first offering. There are people who have been in a rent-controlled apartment for thirty years.”
“And,” Tepper said, “you can’t count on neighborhoods to be reliably poor, either. My partner’s niece just paid a fortune for an apartment on Rivington Street. It’s considered hip. But you may have known that.”
“Sometimes I think that there are people out there who act in weird and unpredictable ways just to complicate the lives of people in our line of work,” Shanahan said. “Sometimes I can imagine them out there, purposely living in the wrong neighborhood and voting against their own interests and behaving in ways that everything about them would lead you to believe they would never behave.”
Tepper nodded sympathetically. “There’s always something,” he said.
“It must have been difficult keeping the car on the street and having to move it every day,” Shanahan said.
“Well, I was used to it,” Tepper said. “I had an old car when we got married, and we just kept it on the street. We wouldn’t have had the money for a garage. Also, parking was easier then. My wife’s an artist—she does watercolors of fields or beaches or things like that—and we liked driving out of the city on the weekends to someplace she might want to paint. If we were invited to someone’s place for dinner and it was farther than walking distance, we’d drive, even if it wasn’t on Seventy-third and Madison. If you’re keeping your car on the streets, of course, there’s a decision there, particularly if you’re already in a place that’s good for tomorrow. There are a lot of decisions. It’s not easy. But as a friend of mine who used to keep his car on the street always said, ‘If you want it easy, you could live in Elmira.’”
Tepper Isn't Going Out: A Novel Page 14