He worked in a furniture warehouse in Red Hook, but really he was an actor, waiting for his career to take off. After dinner he sang Bing Crosby tunes and delivered monologues from plays no one had ever heard of and then pretended to be Gene Autry in The Last Round-Up. He put on records and danced with Paul’s mother around the coffee table. He spun stories of fighting Germans in France, though Paul’s father said later, with an edge of spite out of character for him, that the closest Herman got to France was an outdoor café in Flatbush; he spent the war right there in Brooklyn, working in the same warehouse, which then stored uniforms and blankets.
But the stories mattered less to Paul than the way Herman would kneel and look him in the eye, the surprise of those dark brows and shadowed jaw coming down to his level. Herman didn’t ask silly questions about what he wanted to be when he grew up or who he thought would win the pennant—the distracted, obligatory questions he was used to adults posing—but instead brought up serious matters he’d read about in the paper. What did Paul think about sending the boys to Korea? Was he scared of the Russians getting the bomb? Did he think flying saucers were real? Paul had few opinions about these things, but he’d try to answer anyway, muttering a few words about War of the Worlds, which he’d just read for the third time. And in the process he’d find himself growing confused, feeling even younger than he was, and smaller. The apartment, too, the building, the city, all of it so much smaller than he wanted it to be, the world so vast and indecipherable he felt dizzy trying to imagine it whole. His mother would laugh at his answers, but Herman would listen as if nothing he’d ever heard had been as interesting, encouraging him with occasional nods, and when Paul finally sputtered to a halt, would teach him a card trick. “You’re a smart kid,” he’d say when he left for the night. “A whole lot smarter than a forklift jockey like me.”
And then, in 1953, Herman decided to make his break in the pictures. He packed up his belongings and bought train fare to Hollywood. Paul was twelve, a month away from his bar mitzvah, at which Herman had promised to sing. “Sorry, Paulie-pal,” he said, with no more than a chuck on Paul’s chin. “Duty calls. I’m tired of the small-time.” And like that, he was gone. When the Dodgers left five years later, Paul had the feeling that California was swallowing everything and everyone he’d ever loved. In his mind it wasn’t a state but a vortex, and he swore he’d never set foot within five hundred miles. For several weeks after Herman left he stayed away from the swim club. For a year he refused to go to the movies, to which his father had taken him every Sunday. But when he passed the local theater he couldn’t help glancing at the posters and looking for Herman Fatts’s face.
“I always thought he’d make it big. For a long time I expected to see his name in the papers.”
“If he made it big you wouldn’t have seen his name,” Reggie said. “He would have changed it to something less ridiculous.”
He went to the window to check on his car and was satisfied to see it sticking out into a lane of traffic, a significant presence, hazard lights blinking, other drivers easing around it. “What I don’t understand is how he seemed to know Mom would be there. It’s like he was waiting for her.”
With a groan, Reggie raised the recliner, stood, carried the box to the bookshelf. “She doesn’t know I have these, does she? I hope you didn’t tell her you were giving them to me.”
“I wonder if they kept in touch all this time,” Paul said.
“If she asks for them, I’m not giving them back. They’re mine now.” She began arranging them in the same order in which his mother had had them arranged in the apartment in Forest Hills, which he guessed was exactly how they’d been arranged in the apartment in Crown Heights. He knew their horrible faces better than he wanted to, the round, red cheeks, the pursed lips, the stiffly parted hair, and he couldn’t imagine why Reggie would want to look at them every day. He was glad he’d no longer have to see them when he visited his mother.
“If so, why wouldn’t she have mentioned him?”
Reggie glanced at him over her shoulder, with a sad little smile not so different from his mother’s smirk, and it brought back again, now that he was primed for it, the feeling of shrinking in a universe ever expanding. “Oh, Paul,” she said, with sympathy as surprising as a slap. “You could trade glasses for binoculars and still not see a thing. I envy you.”
“I don’t wear glasses,” he said.
She turned her attention back to the box, set the last of the dolls on the shelf. Then she took a step away and studied them, hands on hips. “There’s one missing.”
“What don’t I see?”
She faced him again, but now the sympathetic expression was gone, replaced by a ferocious one, face all pale angles under dark spiky hair. Even now, though, to Paul’s disappointment, she looked a dozen years his junior. “What did you do with it? Did you keep it for yourself?”
His mother and Herman Fatts. He couldn’t believe it. Or rather, he didn’t want to believe it and tried his best not to before giving in. Believing, in any case, was better than picturing, which was what he did while driving uptown, fast, the Imperial keeping pace with the cabs on Eighth Avenue, charging through yellow lights, weaving around pedestrians, passing the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, which should have led him home.
Beside him on the passenger seat lay the rope of his mother’s hair, white clumps braided around each other, the occasional black strand twisting through. He’d found it on his last sweep of the apartment before the movers arrived and couldn’t decide whether or not his mother would want to hold onto it, or if it would be a painful reminder of healthier, stronger days. On the same sweep he’d come across the crucifix again, indignant once more at the thought of the nurse’s aide—the lovely Jessica, who’d worn a tank-top to the interview, and a skirt so short he had to look away when she crossed her legs, who’d smiled at him with wide, pink, glossy lips—and again determined to throw it away. But when he reached the kitchen he had second thoughts and instead set it on the stove, leaving its fate to the new tenants. Now he wished he’d tossed it out the window, and the braided hair, too. The latter he balled in his fist when he got stuck at the intersection of Broadway and Amsterdam, and to his surprise it disappeared entirely in his grip. He smacked the steering wheel, and when he opened his hand, the braid sprang out, impossibly long, and settled across his lap.
Afternoons in the Crown Heights apartment, once idyllic in memory, now became sordid. There was Herman Fatts, several hours before heading to his swing shift at the warehouse, showing Paul the headshots he’d sent off to talent agents and theater companies, reading from scripts, while Paul’s mother lounged on the sofa, shoes off, the hem of her dress at her knees. “Why don’t you go out already,” she’d eventually say. “It’s too nice to be inside all the time.” And without a thought about leaving Herman and his mother alone, Paul joined the punchball game in the neighborhood’s vacant lot, his father behind the pharmacy counter two blocks away. Never once did he question Herman’s abrupt departure, nor did he wonder about his father’s brief, unexplained bitterness. That his mother stopped laughing he’d noticed only vaguely, thinking it had to do with the headaches his father tried to ease with a generous selection of pills. He’d paid so little attention to the world around him it was no wonder he never realized how little of it he could trust.
Dinner was over by the time he arrived at the Waterview Terrace, and the lobby was quiet. A few residents sat reading or snoring under lamps scattered around its edge, including Mrs. Randawaha, slumped in her chair, a book on the floor beside one of its wheels. He expected the aides behind the reception desk to stop him and ask where he was going before he reached the elevator, but they didn’t even look up when he passed. Anger rose in step with his ascent, and by the time he made it to his mother’s floor he was shaking with outrage, slapping the braid against his thigh, ready, finally, to say enough was enough, to cut all ambiguous ties. The Dodgers who’d abandoned him; Dylan who’d confused h
im; Jessica who’d tacked a crucifix over his mother’s bed and quit after less than a month; Reggie who’d known Herman Fatts had been back in New York since the early eighties, who’d known he and their mother had reconnected a decade before their father died, who’d suggested the Waterview Terrace because she knew he lived there—all of them could go to hell. He’d never think a generous thought about anyone again.
He knocked hard enough to hurt his knuckles. It usually took his mother a few minutes to haul herself out of her chair and hobble across the apartment, longer if she had to find her cane, and he worried the wait would dampen his fury. But this time the door opened right away. And there was Herman Fatts, holding a finger to his lips. “Quiet, Paulie-pal,” he whispered. “She’s sleeping. Big day for her.”
Now Paul could see in his face what he hadn’t seen earlier: the handsome features slightly distorted by weight and gravity, the eyes that fixed on his with strict attentiveness, eyes Paul could still imagine gazing out from a movie screen. Given a moment he might have recognized Herman on the street, Herman wearing a puffy mask and a white wig. He thought he should imagine himself, as a boy, punching that handsome face, defending his father’s honor, but mostly he saw it backlit by curtained windows, reciting lines from Hedda Gabler.
Herman reached out for the braid, and Paul relinquished it, with relief, before following him inside. There’d been changes in the apartment since this afternoon. Flowers in a glass vase on the coffee table, fruit in the china bowl on the counter, a woven blanket draped over the armchair into which Herman eased himself, dropping the last few inches. The bedroom door was open partway, and though it was dark, Paul could see a hump on one side of the bed, the rest empty and waiting. Herman was out of breath, his mouth open, huge belly heaving, and after a moment he started to cough. Let him choke, Paul thought, but half-heartedly, and immediately felt ridiculous. Herman was still wearing his cardigan and slippers, at least, and not, as Paul had been picturing with horror on the drive uptown, a bathrobe and nothing underneath. “Do you want some water?” he asked, but Herman waved the braid and gestured for him to sit.
What was happening to his anger? As usual, the moment he became aware of its power it began to slip away, to morph into the bewilderment that came to him more naturally, that made anger seem pointless. By the time he hit the couch cushions he felt drained and thirsty. He should have gotten water for them both. What good would shouting do? What purpose would condemnation serve? The questions that had seemed so important a few hours ago—about what had happened to Herman in Hollywood, about whether he’d ever made it into the pictures, about why he hadn’t let Paul know he was back—meant nothing in this cramped space, with its undersized furniture and oversized TV: hardly more than a dressed-up hospital room, where his mother would wither and fade, and after her someone else, and someone again after that.
“Mitzi tells me,” Herman said, hoarsely, and then cleared his throat. “She said you’ve been doing some acting.”
“A little,” he said. “At the Center. Nothing very good. Not like you.”
“It’s all relative,” Herman said. “That’s the only thing I learned in California. No matter how good you are, there’s always someone better.” He draped the braid over his knee and stroked it with a thumb. After a moment he leaned forward and lifted his second pair of glasses, giving Paul the serious look he’d so often turned on him as a boy. “Tell me, though. Does anything feel better than taking a bow and listening to applause?”
In five years Paul had been in as many productions, but he’d hardly mentioned them to his mother, and he’d never thought to invite her to one of his shows. He’d played a gay doctor, a witch hunter, a disgraced lawyer, and in the most baffling two months of his life, a mute slave named Lucky. As Sergeant Toomey, unstable and anti-Semitic, he’d spent the previous spring bullying Eugene, the play’s hero, in a southern drawl Cynthia said wasn’t the worst she’d ever heard. He’d had no training, hardly any direction, and he’d forgotten lines in at least three performances, once going utterly blank, staring at the female lead without moving or even blinking for so long that she rushed over to him, thinking he’d had a stroke. He once walked into a chair that had been set off its mark, knocking the wind out of him, but that time he carried on, delivering his lines doubled-over and croaking.
At first he told himself he did it to spend more time with Cynthia. But two years ago she’d had a falling-out with the company’s director, and when she quit as costume designer Paul kept on. What he’d never imagined was how much he could enjoy being a man others feared, even for two hours at a time. He couldn’t have known how energized he’d feel ordering a seventeen-year-old boy—the director’s son—to stand at attention or drop to his chest and do push-ups in the rain. Those nights he came home with a jaw sore from working Toomey’s Mississippi accent around his resistant mouth were some of the most satisfying he’d ever had.
And this is what he found himself explaining to Herman Fatts, who prompted him with questions that made him talk without restraint, without wondering how much he should say, how little sense any of it made. With his words came another feeling he’d forgotten, the torpor that follows release, his eyes pleasantly itchy, the couch cushions growing softer beneath him. “I’m not sadistic like Toomey,” he said. “Or at least I don’t think I am. But I understand why he goes crazy. Suddenly the world’s so different. He’s surrounded by these people who’re nothing like the ones he’s used to, the way they talk and act…It would make anyone a little nuts.” He looked to Herman for confirmation and received it only in the form of steady eye-contact, the thumb still running over the braid. “No matter who I play,” he went on, “I always seem to find something of myself in him. Who knew I had so many people inside me?”
Herman didn’t answer, but he continued to give Paul that look of focused attention, of openness and generosity, that as a boy had made him wish, on multiple occasions, that Herman were his father, and not the man who stood behind a pharmacy counter all day and asked distracted questions about what Paul wanted to be when he grew up. Only now did it occur to him that he’d betrayed his father each time he’d wished it, and was betraying him again tonight. His father, short and mild-mannered, with a weak chin and wiry brows over eyes that blinked in puzzlement at the complicated world around him. His father who was capable of serious conversation only about baseball, who never took his mother abroad, who never brought her flowers or spoke a word of affection without undercutting it with a joke: your mother’s the most beautiful woman in the city, he’d once said as the four of them—his mother carrying Reggie, Paul holding his father’s hand—walked down a crowded street in the middle of summer, bare-shouldered girls passing on all sides, and then added, too bad your father’s farsighted.
In the bedroom his mother stirred, and Herman, with effort, pulled himself up from the chair and crossed the room, his odd prancing steps, wide torso wobbling on too-thin legs, the braid flung over a shoulder. At the door he turned back and said, “Thanks for…you know. Not everyone would be so understanding.” Before Paul could correct him, he went on. “I’ve missed you, Paulie-pal. I’m glad we’ll be seeing more of each other.”
The indolent feeling didn’t leave him as he drove home, listening to a station that played rock songs from the sixties and seventies, songs he’d blindly dismissed at the time, scorning them without hearing a note. No Dylan songs came on, but he heard echoes of Dylan in plenty of others, simple drumbeats punctuated by attempts at poetry. He should have been hungry—all he’d eaten were the last egg and cheese biscuits in his mother’s freezer—but he felt strangely engorged, as if he’d been stuffing his mouth non-stop since morning. The freeway was relatively empty, and he sailed west without having to brake, the Imperial, shocks recently replaced, floating as smoothly as it had twenty years ago when he brought it home from the lot.
By the time he left Waterview Terrace he found that he had forgiven his mother and Herman, without having intended to do
so. Why begrudge them any moments of happiness now, when they had so few left? And because it was easy, he also forgave Reggie for lying, Jessica for leaving, himself for having failed to stand up for his father. After all, a forgiving nature was one of the things his father had passed along to him, as well as his weak chin. Within days of the Dodgers leaving for L.A., while Paul was still grief-stricken and outraged, his father was talking about Duke Snider’s suntan and the odds that Koufax would marry a movie star. Aside from his one spiteful comment about Herman’s war stories, he never said another word against the man, nor against his unfaithful wife, whom he’d loved and cared for in his limited fashion for the rest of his days.
And Paul had learned other things from his father, too. For one: don’t take anything for granted. On his way out of the city he stopped at a florist’s shop and bought Cynthia a bouquet. By the time he made it to his exit he was thinking less about Herman Fatts and his mother than about Cynthia’s reaction when he handed her the flowers, though most likely she was already asleep. He was thinking, too, about booking them a trip to France.
When he turned onto the road that skirted Greystone, he forgot to slow down, and that was a mistake. Before he’d passed the first building—a newer one, still in use—red lights twirled in his rearview mirror. The Imperial made a little choking sound when he cut the ignition. The officer took his time getting out of the cruiser. While he waited, Paul stared up at the lit windows of the asylum—no: hospital, he thought; just a hospital like any other—in hope that someone might look out.
Between You and Me Page 18