Car Trouble

by Robert Rorke

  Brian knocked on the restaurant’s glass door and one of the cops—young and fit with a razor haircut—unlocked it. He went in and looked down on the floor, his expression aghast. Someone was hurt. The siren I’d heard before grew louder and a white-and-red ambulance from Brookdale Hospital pulled up behind the squad car. Two men in gray zip-up jackets and wool caps jumped out of the front seats and opened the back door, removing a gurney and wheeling it to the locked front door.

  “It’s Gina,” I said, touching Maureen’s shoulder. “Holy shit.”

  Inside the restaurant, I saw Larry standing next to Brian, his face drained. He pushed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. I glanced down the dark street behind St. Mike’s and saw members of the company come closer, their expressions bewildered as they took in the lights on the cop car and ambulance. Immaculata. Carole Esterhaus and the girls from the chorus. Some guys from the band.

  I kicked an empty beer bottle across the street. “This is a disaster,” I said. “A complete disaster.”

  The ambulance workers opened the door and wheeled the gurney out into the frigid air. Gina was strapped onto it, her bouffant caught in the raw yellow spotlight. Her face was a grimace of pain.

  I gasped and ran forward, and one of the ambulance workers, the hospital logo stitched into the fabric of his jacket, near the pocket, told me to stay back. I called out her name, but she wouldn’t look at me. Her face was turned away and her eyes were shut. The skirt of her suit was ripped on the side; her left leg was covered with a sheet. Immaculata came up behind me in her beaver coat as the gurney was loaded into the back of the ambulance. “Nicky, is that Gina? What the hell happened?”

  I told her what I knew as the ambulance drove away, up Clarendon Road to Ralph Avenue. Larry came outside, looking right and left for a friendly face, and I waved him over. He told us Gina had gotten knocked down in the commotion. “She twisted her leg around one of the booth seats. I think it’s broken.”

  Immaculata shook her head. I felt so dejected, I didn’t know what to say. Wistfully, I remembered the Sunday afternoon Gina had sat with me in the kitchen while Maureen tried to make sense of the pattern pieces of my costume, yelling as she wrestled with the zipper. Gina had been so proud that she was going to wear her mother’s Chanel suit. And now it was ruined.

  You could have seen the rest of the scene on the eleven o’clock news. Two more squad cars pulled up. Cops jumped out, filing into McDonald’s. Vinnie was slumped down in the booth where he had been sitting with Gina. His head was tilted back to balance an ice pack wrapped in silver Filet-O-Fish paper on his left eye. Lamont was sitting across from him, his back to us, hands behind his back.

  “They’re taking everyone in,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Immaculata said. “This is not for me. Let’s go, Nicky.”

  She was wearing a burgundy wool cap and had pulled it so low over her head that her nose looked more Roman than ever. Now that I had cut my hair, my ears got cold really easily.

  “Yeah,” Maureen said. “We’ve seen enough.”

  “So, I guess there’s no show tomorrow.”

  “Not without Gina,” Larry said. “Who else can play her part?”

  I felt tears coming on. Tears of rage. “The whole thing’s over because of someone’s stupid big mouth. I can’t believe it.”

  Then Testagrose came trundling down the street in his black fedora and black overcoat. Flecks of saliva studded the corners of his mouth.

  “As if there wasn’t enough drama,” Immaculata said.

  “I told you schmucks to stay in the gym,” Testagrose said to the kids lingering on the sidewalks in their absurd bobby-soxer outfits, like refugees from some time capsule. “You don’t belong off school property.” Then he banged on the door of the restaurant. The cops ignored him and he banged harder. Brian looked up and gave the okay to open up.

  Larry said he was going to stay behind. I wondered if I should stick around, but Immaculata told me to stay out of it. Besides, Maureen and I would be expected to be home for dinner.

  “So do we have a play or not?”

  Larry shrugged. “I doubt it, sport.”

  “We’re cooked,” Immaculata said.

  Larry tapped me on the shoulder and nodded. I looked down the block and saw a man wearing a tweed flat cap walking briskly in our direction, the collar of his peacoat turned up. Out of his black robes and black rosary beads, Brother Theodore looked like any other middle-aged Irishman, but the Babe Ruth nose was the dead giveaway. His expression was somber, as if somebody inside McDonald’s were waiting for him to give Extreme Unction.

  Testagrose must have gone to the top floor of the school and told one of the Brothers. That’s why he was delayed in making his entrance. It was just our luck that the school principal was home.

  “He’s going to freak out,” I said, my throat dry.

  Larry agreed. “No shit, Sherlock.”

  No one had to tell me tomorrow’s performance was canceled. I could see it on Brother Theodore’s clenched pink face. Maureen pulled me aside and said, “Nicky, I’m cold. Let’s call Daddy and ask him to come and get us.”

  “No,” I said. “He’ll have a fit.” He was going to have a fit anyway when he found out the fight broke out the day I brought Maureen to rehearsal; I’d just rather not have him have it in front of everybody.

  Maureen said, “Well, we can’t stay here.”

  We walked two blocks to the nearest gas station; the heavy smells of rubber and gasoline cast another pall over the day. Maureen and Immaculata stood under the sign, facing Ralph Avenue and the Midnight Pearl Lounge, a little hole-in-the-wall with two pink neon martini glasses flickering on the sign above the entrance. My shoulders tingled with the cold. Now that the excitement of watching the aftermath of the fight had worn off, the dampness of the outdoors was setting in and I wished I had my coat.

  The pay phone was hiding in the corner behind the gas pumps. The phone booth smelled like a toilet. I picked up the receiver and held it away from my mouth. Fortunately, Mom answered.

  “Can you ask Daddy to come get us?”

  She sounded very serious. “What’s wrong?”

  “Something happened during rehearsal. There was a fight. We’re okay, but we need to get out of here. And we have one friend with us who needs a ride home. We’ll be in front of the school.”

  We went back into the gym to get our clothes. Immaculata had left her clothes backstage in a bag. She found them and said she would get changed at home. I handed Maureen the white bag from McDonald’s. The pies were no longer warm. “We can eat while we wait,” I said.

  “Now you’re talking,” Immaculata said, rubbing her hands together. “I’m starving.”

  Maureen slid the pies out, breaking them in uneven pieces. One for each of us. And one left over. The filling was tartly sweet. While I cleaned out my locker, hanging my jeans and shirt on the hanger inside my garment bag, I remembered why I brought her with me today. I found the girls sitting on two folding chairs, facing the stage where the empty scenery, abandoned instruments, and interrupted melodies told today’s story.

  I dumped my parka on another empty chair and ran up on stage. I had a few minutes before Himself came to fetch us. I stood in front of the microphone, snapped my fingers and began to sing the opening of “A Lot of Livin’ to Do.”

  Maureen wiped her mouth with a McDonald’s napkin. “He made me listen to this in his room like fifteen times,” she said.

  Immaculata laughed. “Oh, let him do it. He’s good.”

  I stopped singing. “Some say I stole my look from Liberace. Others say I stole it from James Brown. But my sister is the one who gave it to me and she didn’t steal it from anybody. It makes me sad to think this may be the only time I’m going to sing in this costume, but hey, it was worth the trip to Orchard Street and the Sundays at the sewing machine because we did it together.”

  I picked up where I left off.

  Sizzlin’ steaks all
ready for tastin’

  And there’s Cadillacs all shiny and new!

  Gotta move, ’cause time is a-wastin’,

  There’s such a lot of livin’ to do!

  Seventeen

  The show did go on, in a halfhearted way. With Vinnie Sorrentino suspended, Brother Theodore reversed his initial decision to cancel the performance and we were allowed to do the play once—on the weekend before Palm Sunday. Brian plucked Carole Esterhaus out of the chorus to learn Gina’s part, but she kept flubbing her lines and her singing was nervous and jerky. I felt bad for her, but nobody’s heart was really in it, including Brian’s. Me, I focused on my family, out there in the audience. I would perform for them. They were all there, except for Himself.

  He wasn’t in the school lobby when I met my family after the show. “If it isn’t my son, the star,” Mom said, assembling me and my sisters for a photo with her Instamatic. I was still in my costume. “Where did you learn to move like that?”

  The sound of the applause was still ringing in my ears. That was the big wow. “Rehearsal,” I said, wiping my grimy forehead. “Lots of rehearsal.”

  Mom was decked out—she was actually wearing makeup—in a dark blue dress I’d never seen. Her lips were bright red and full; traces of iridescent green colored her eyelids. She really turned on the charm when she met Brian. “Tell me, you must have had your hands full, working with so many teenagers.”

  “Nah,” Brian said. “Give kids some encouragement and some freedom to be creative and they really surprise you. And you have two talented children.”

  Brian left to meet other parents and Larry took his place. He asked me where my old man was.

  “He has a new job,” Mom said. “He’s working weekends.”

  He had quit the Mermaid and was driving for a car service called Pronto.

  “Missing the big moment,” Larry said. I tried to shrug it off and Larry ushered me over to the other side of the lobby to meet his parents. As he led me through the crowd, all I could see were the fathers. Men in suits, ties, and overcoats. In another life, any one of them could have been my dad and they would have seen me on stage. I wondered if I was the only cast member whose father didn’t turn up and I got distracted, slow to shake Larry’s father’s hand. Steve. Steve Cahill. That was his name. And he had the same black-frame glasses. It made me laugh, to see how alike he and Larry looked. I supposed I should have been glad Himself wasn’t here because he would have made some facetious remark and embarrassed me, but his absence gnawed at me in a melancholy way.

  And then it was back to school. Brian seemed like he was in a bad mood in class on Monday. We didn’t put our chairs in a circle. When he looked at you, he looked right through you as if he wasn’t there. At the end of the period, he was gone. So I thought of the one place I might find him: the stage in the school gym. I found him moving the ruins of Sweet Apple, Ohio, to the trash bins out by the track. He didn’t see me at first. All that was left on stage was some living room furniture. I hung around and waited for him. He came back in and said, “Nicky, what’s up? I wish I could talk, but I have to return a couch.”

  “Let me help you.”

  Reluctantly, he let me help him tie the faded sofa to the top of his car, a silver Plymouth Duster parked down the block from the Wyckoff House. I opened the passenger-side door when the couch was secured.

  Brian frowned at me over the top of the upside-down olive-colored sofa. “What are you doing?”

  A German shepherd watched us, open-jawed, from behind the fence at Collisionville. “You need someone to help you take it down, don’t you?”

  “I was going to handle that by myself.” He seemed reluctant and glanced back at St. Mike’s, like someone was watching him. “If we’re gonna go, let’s go.”

  He didn’t want to drive past the school, though, backing up the car until he could head out on the street that ran along the side of the wrecking joint. We made a right turn on Ralph Avenue, past the Brooklyn Terminal Market.

  “Where’s this one going?”

  “A friend of mine. Kevin Di Napoli. I took it from his parents’ basement.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Nineteenth Avenue.”

  It took us half an hour to get there. The house was semiattached brick on a block of semiattached homes, very clean and orderly. I didn’t recognize the neighborhood, but the street name sounded familiar. We took the ropes off the couch and carried the sofa, which wasn’t that heavy after all, down a long alleyway. The alley led to a yard with two garages; the basement door, the old slanted kind that opened out from the center, was on the left. A small woman with a salt-and-pepper beauty-parlor hairdo stood there in a white cardigan and navy slacks, smiling.

  “Oh, it’s so good to see you.”

  “Hey, Mrs. D.,” Brian said. “This is my friend Nicky. He’s one of my students.”

  She smiled at me and led the way down into the basement, holding on to the green wooden door, taking halting steps. Brian followed her, backing up to the top step and pausing to catch his breath before he went down.

  “You okay, up there?”

  “Yeah.” I balanced one end of the couch on my pelvic bone so I could wipe my hands on my coat. Then we went down into the cellar. The first room seemed to be some kind of shed with tools hung on nails and planks of wood resting on a cutting board. Mrs. D. led the way. “Watch out for the toolbox over here,” she said, and we shifted to the right. The next room was a finished basement, brightly lit with walnut-color paneling, a gray linoleum floor, and a bar over in the corner made out of bamboo and some kind of white countertop.

  “Can we put it down over here?” Brian asked.

  “Yes. That’s good. I should really throw it out, but I have nothing to replace it with.”

  We set the couch down under a framed poster of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. I rubbed my hands together; my palms were red and stretched out. Brian thanked Mrs. D. profusely for loaning out the couch and began to walk toward the cellar door, which was still open.

  Mrs. D. held a set of keys in one hand. “Would you like to say hello to Kevin before you go? I know he’d like to see you.”

  Brian looked at me. “Nicky, do you mind?”

  I shook my head. A staircase on the left led to the first floor, but we didn’t take it. Instead, we went into the yard again, so Mrs. D. could lock up. Then she took us through the front entrance, a wide stoop painted red with a nice-sized brick patio—a great place to spend a summer night if it wasn’t too hot. While she was fiddling with the lock, Brian turned to me and whispered, “Kevin was injured in Vietnam.”

  “What?”

  Brian touched my shoulder. “Just be cool.”

  I followed him inside the house, glancing up at the address over the front door: 6225. I had no time to think about what I was about to see; suddenly, we were in the living room and there was Kevin, a handsome young man with long, straight hair, medium-brown and parted in the middle, the way mine used to be, and toffee-colored eyes. He looked like he could have been on the cover of a folk-rock album, something by James Taylor or Crosby, Stills & Nash, except that his legs were gone, shot off or blown off by a bomb, and he was sitting in a wheelchair.

  I stood stock-still and tried not to stare, but there was nowhere else to look. Kevin wore shorts, blue but not denim, and they were long enough to cover the stumps. Brian stepped in front of me—maybe he saw me standing there, horrified—and shook Kevin’s hand, squeezing his shoulder. He introduced me again as one of his students but also one of his friends. I felt myself blushing. Even though the play was dead, we would still be friends. That’s all I cared about.

  “Nicky, how ya doin’?” Kevin said in this casual way, like he already knew me or knew about me. His eyes were kind and engaging, actively making contact with mine. I tried to smile and say something, but I just shook his hand instead. Mine felt very cold from carrying the couch. I thought I was going to burst into tears and I was breathing heavily through m
y nose. It was too sad, too much to look at, too much to take in. The floor beneath me swayed and I looked for a place to sit. I felt like I was seeing something obscene, forbidden. Yet it could have been me, if I’d been older and had a low draft number and had Kevin’s bad luck. Himself sneered at guys like Brian who may have become teachers to escape the draft, but how could you blame them?

  “Why don’t you take off your coat and have a seat?” Mrs. D. said merrily, showing me the couch, tweed with wooden armrests. I shook off my parka and balled it up next to me. “Would you boys like some coffee?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer and disappeared down a hallway with Brian’s peacoat. I let Brian do the talking. Kevin told him about his rehab, his time at the V.A. hospital in Bay Ridge. The doctors were talking about prosthetics. Brian nodded and offered to drive him to appointments if his parents couldn’t. All I could think was: How old is he? Twenty-two, twenty-three? Younger? And this was it for the rest of his life? I’d march on Washington too, if this had happened to someone I knew.

  Mrs. D. brought the coffee in this beautiful white china cup patterned with tiny strawberries. The cup shook as I brought it to my mouth, some coffee spilling onto the saucer. The coffee was delicious and it seemed to settle me down. I leaned back against the sofa, settling my shoulder blades into the fabric.

  Mrs. D. sat next to me in an armchair. She was smiling also, as if relieved to have company to break up a Monday afternoon. I wondered if she had other children who could help her take care of him; she seemed too frail to do it herself. A gold crucifix peeked out from under the collar of her white blouse. Her eyes were the same color as her son’s. She told me that Brian and Kevin had been friends since high school.

  “He was the first of Kevin’s friends to visit him in the V.A., when he came home.”

  All of the questions I was going to ask Brian about where he stood with Brother Theodore had flown out of my head. No matter what they thought of him at St. Mike’s, I couldn’t imagine knowing a nicer guy.