For Dennis’s mother, these excess bits of furniture not only established her new role as benefactress (she, who for so long, throughout her first marriage, in fact, and well before, had been supplicant); they also paid off a debt. She was, to a great extent, beholden to her first husband’s people, who had supported her so generously during the period of his illness and her widowhood and especially in the years after Dennis joined the service. And throughout those years, try as she might to pay them back, or even to temper their generosity with the insistence that her widow’s pension was sufficient, her needs few, they would only hold up their hands and respond with some long and often exaggerated tale of what selfless and bighearted miracle “her Daniel” had once done for them, tales that would more often than not end with tears and a “God bless his soul,” or a “We won’t see another one like him again,” until she, Sheila Lynch, the impoverished widow with the soldier son, would find herself brewing them a cup of tea or pouring out a drop of vermouth or putting an arm across their shoulders to whisper, “There there.”
My father would say this much for his mother: she never distanced herself from her first husband’s family after she married Holtzman. As much as she might have liked to.
In the basement, she would plug in the iron and pause to see if the lights would flicker—they did, something to ask Dennis about. She’d fill her sprinkler bottle at the sink and take the shirts from the line and iron them: her husband’s and then her son’s.
He had been, without question, Holy Father to the entire clan, her Daniel. Forty-four years old when she met him, with a shock of dark hair falling down into his homely face. Holy Father to the world, if it had let him.
The story went that she had been living at the time off Nostrand Avenue in a small and airless apartment that belonged to her Great-uncle Robert and Aunty Eileen, his dour wife. They didn’t want her there—she had seen the man bite his lip when she reached for a second piece of toast and grip the table, as if he might at any minute leap up to stay her hand if she poured more than a splash of milk into her oatmeal. But their only son had left for Europe and news of his empty bedroom reached Washington Heights, where she had been living with another, younger aunt and uncle, sharing a bed with an eight-year-old cousin—a boy with limbs of lead and the odor of a wet overcoat.
Aunty Eileen had resisted the idea of some sixteen-year-old girl occupying her son’s room (drilling the scent of her hair into his pillow, scattering undergarments, bleeding onto his mattress—she thought of everything, that woman) and relented only after she swore never to dress or undress in the son’s room. She was instead directed to leave her bags in a corner of the pantry and to change her clothes there before her uncle was up in the morning and after he went to bed at night. This she did willingly—her cousin’s wide feather bed, all to herself, was such a luxury—and seeing her up and all ready for school just as he was shuffling into the kitchen must have given her uncle an inspiration.
She wasn’t there long when he announced that he’d found a little something for her to do. A couple he knew, countrymen of his, had a bakery on DeKalb, and since the wife was troubled with back problems, they could use a girl to come in first thing in the morning to set out the breads and the cakes. He never said how much she would be paid and she understood without asking that whatever money she made would go straight to him. Her uncle knew that it had been her parents’ dying wish that she stay in school, and he himself had enrolled her at Manual Training the very day she left Washington Heights, but the morning job was a nice way of offsetting what the care of her would cost him without compromising whatever reluctant pact he had made with the dead.
The day before she was to start, she went by the place after school. Only the baker’s wife, Mrs. Dixon, was there, but she was rosy-cheeked and merry and cried out when she saw her, “Oh, but you’re a wee little thing!”
It was like a fairy tale, that first morning. The streets were wet and dark, full of reflections. Somewhat ominous, sure, so early in the morning that it was nighttime still, but also full of promise, adventure. When she came into the empty shop it was warm and dimly lit and full of the scent of baking bread.
All the light came from the back, where the ovens were, but there was enough light to see by, and she found the cap and coat she was to wear folded neatly on the counter. She thought of the elves and the shoemaker. She covered her hair and slipped into the smock. Yesterday, when Mrs. Dixon had showed it to her, it had buckled over her shoes. Now it was hemmed to just the right length, ten inches above her ankles.
Hesitantly, but ready to begin, she peered into the light of the back room. She felt the heat of the stove like a warm hand on her face, and then she saw the baker sitting on a stool beside one of the wooden tables. His shoes and his pant legs beneath his apron were covered with flour; his shoulders were slumped and he had his hand around the glass that was resting on the table beside him. He was a dark-haired man with black brows and a broad, flushed face.
He looked up at her from under those brows and then waved his free hand and said, not unkindly, “Well, come in, come in. I’m not going to bite you.”
She stepped in. The wooden floor seemed soft and it, too, was covered with flour. On another huge table just opposite the great cast-iron stove there was a sheet of scones not yet baked and a wicker basket full of small brown loaves.
“My wife showed you what to do?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes,” she said, but there was little voice in it.
She had to rise up on her tiptoes to get a good grip on the basket and then nearly crashed into the doorframe as she carried it out, feeling him watching her. When she returned, he was standing, slipping the sheet of scones into the oven; another sheet, golden brown and redolent, was on the wide table. He looked at her over his shoulder as he closed the oven door. “You’re a little bit of a thing, aren’t you?” he said pleasantly, friendlier than he’d been before.
They were standing together in the narrow space between the oven and the table, and the empty basket in her hands made the space seem narrower still. He suddenly reached out and pulled at her earlobe with a floured hand. “A wee thing,” he said. He wasn’t much bigger, really only a head taller, than she, but his chest was broad and had begun to press against the basket and her arm. He tugged at a strand of hair near her temple, poked at her cap. By now she could smell the drink on his breath but didn’t know enough then to recognize it for what it was.
“A wee baby doll in her dress,” he said, and pulled at the collar of her smock. He chucked her chin. She only grinned, blushing. He was old enough and she was young enough; she believed he was playing with her the way you would play with a young child, admiring her, making friends.
He told her to take the empty basket to the kneading table. She was grateful to be free of that tight space, free of his attention. She could feel her face begin to cool.
He was on her so fast she thought for a moment that the lights had gone out. He had her head in the crook of his arm and so startled her that he caught her opened mouth with his own and she could hear the click of their front teeth. It was not a kiss, it was all teeth and wet bone, and she could feel the low laughter in his chest in the moment before he released her. Laughing still, he turned casually back to his work.
Out in the shop, she dropped half the scones and had to wipe them off on her new smock. She rubbed her mouth with the sleeve. In the back, he had begun to sing. Pieces of folk songs and of lullabies. Some of the songs her own father had sung—a beautiful maiden much loved by a young boy going off to war, a sea captain bound for his last voyage, kissing his wife at the garden gate. When she returned with the empty tray, he merely glanced at her over his shoulder, his mouth now gently shaped for his tune. He had a good voice, soft and sweet, although the words gave him some trouble.
When she left the shop that morning, the sun was up and the street, newly washed, smelled like the coming spring. The world was populated again, with people whom she might
, in time, come to know. On the way, she met a plump girl from her class, Alma, who was delighted to accept the bag of warm scones Mrs. Dixon had pressed upon her as she left the store. “I don’t like them,” she told Alma by way of explanation. “Never did.”
She lived the next year not so much in a nightmare as on the verge of one. Because there was no telling. Days would go by and he wouldn’t touch her. Then there would be a jolly morning: he might be singing, icing a cake, and in an instant he’d have her by the throat. Or worse, she’d come in to find him morose, mostly silent, hardly moving from his stool. She’d keep her eye on him then, avoid him whenever she could—even taking things out of the oven herself, which Mrs. Dixon told her never to do, so she would not have to disturb him. Sometimes it would work, and she’d slip out of the shop at eight o’clock like a fish released to a stream. Sometimes he would raise his heavy brows and say her name again and again—“Shee-la, Shee-la”—wagging his great head, until she had come close enough for him to grab her wrist or her skirt or her sleeve and aim his murderous yellow teeth toward her breasts. Sometimes he would just appear behind her and take hold of her hair. He’d back her up against the alley door or press her into a wall.
(“A filthy, dirty man,” she said, telling the tale. This would have been in their kitchen in Woodside at the crumb-scattered table, just Dennis and his mother alone in the apartment now. Dennis just beginning his career with Con Ed. What was lucky, she’d said, was that the man was a drinker, or else who knows how far he might have gone. “A man can’t, you know,” she’d said. “After too many drinks. I don’t suppose your father ever told you.”)
Child that she still was, she began devising rituals that might protect her, or at least predict for her how the morning would run. If she could walk from her uncle’s building to the bakery without lifting her eyes, he wouldn’t touch her that day. If she saw the street sweeper’s cart at the corner, he would.
Then there came a morning when she handed Alma her bag of treats and Alma said, “I’m going to miss these.”
She had a job, at an office building downtown. Her father had put her onto it. She was leaving school at the end of the week. Two hours later Sheila herself sat in front of the man Alma had described. He was a balding man with a mustache and a bow tie and an old-fashioned high collar. The cubicle he met her in was small, with one window wide-open to let in the breeze. He began by talking a little about the war and the patriotism of American youth and asked if anyone near and dear to her was over there, carrying her picture.
She said no. Had she leaned any farther back in her chair she’d have been out the window herself.
He gave her the job, no doubt because he thought she was a serious and steady young woman bound for spinsterhood. She didn’t go back to the bakery. She didn’t finish school either. She knew this part of it would have been a blow to her parents, who had been mad for education, but in the nearly half dozen years since they had both—one within four months of the other—taken sick and died (her mother not taking nearly so long to go about it, hurrying to join him, someone had said), she had received very little aid from them and even less comfort. At twelve she had imagined two hovering angels to guide her for the rest of her life, but she had since lived too many desolate nights in rooms where she was not wanted and did not belong, eaten too many bitter meals, every bite and every sip counted and resented. She had tasted Mr. Dixon’s breath, smelled the sharp, lingering scent of his saliva on her cheeks and lips even as she bowed her head and asked them to deliver her. Had they lived, she knew, they would have been sorry to see her leaving school, but they hadn’t and that was all.
(“That was all,” she had said in the tiny kitchen in Woodside, in the middle of her dark fairy tale. Something else his God-fearing, ghost-hearing, saint-loving father hadn’t told him: they hadn’t lived and that was all.)
Her uncle frowned to disappoint his friend, but since she would turn her salary over to him, he was reconciled.
On a Monday morning, she joined Alma on the train. She figured she had pulled herself from the edge of hell, and even if the job proved dull (which it did) and Alma, without her daily bakery bribe, disloyal (she did not), there was the luxury, anyway, of this gray purgatory.
At Borough Hall, she followed her friend’s wide rump up the steps of the streetcar. Eclipsed by the great expanse of black gabardine that was Alma, she heard his brogue first, that loud and laughing voice. And then, climbing aboard, she got her first glimpse of his homely, happy face.
When she went upstairs again, Holtzman would have opened the window and sprayed the bathroom with cologne. She’d give him his pressed shirt and hang Dennis’s in his room. (Another luxury her marriage had brought her: closets to store things in, closets to step into.) When Holtzman was dressed and ready, he would find her again and kiss her goodbye. He would always have the newspaper under his arm and, without fail, it seemed, a shoebox. He was daily finding new shoes for her in her size (it was, after all, the way he’d wooed her), and more often than not she found them lacking—a harder sell as a wife, my father said, than she had ever been as a customer.
Holtzman took the bus to the store in those days, and as soon as he was gone she would put on a housedress and wrap her hair in a duster and clean. You have to understand what the house meant to her, a woman who had spent so much of her adolescence as a guest in already overburdened households, sleeping on the edge of beds, keeping her clothes in a box out in the pantry or the hallway. Who had spent her first married life in one- and two-bedroom apartments that also served as permanent way stations for an endless string of penniless Irish immigrants.
He was a character. This was the word the passengers on the trolley said to one another, or so the story went: men in straw hats and bowlers (in those days), women in their dark office costumes. They’d lean toward one another in their seats, smiling over something he’d said or, more likely, cried out. “Isn’t he a character?”
“Is it spats you’re wearing today, Mr. Ellsworth?” he might ask the frail old gentleman who had just, cautiously, seated himself. “Aren’t they handsome? Now, if you die in those today, you know, the undertaker will be dancing in them tomorrow.”
Mr. Ellsworth would grin, “Oh, I won’t die today, Mr. Lynch,”—the passengers all around them smiling in anticipation as if they were watching a couple of vaudeville comedians—“not until I hear what happened to Paddy at Asbury Park.”
Daniel would lift his cap and brush back that shock of thick dark hair. “Jaysus,” he’d tell them, “there’s a tale.”
He was a legend—at least in that part of Brooklyn at that hour of the day. He talked constantly, pointing out as he did some fellow on the street, or a cop he knew, or a building that was a part of another story. Eventually, the talk always came around to Paddy—and sometimes Paddy was a brother and sometimes Paddy was a cousin and sometimes an uncle or a friend. Paddy making the crossing and Paddy on Ellis Island and Paddy taking the wrong train to Pittsburgh or Vermont.
“Paddy’s in Philadelphia. My brother put him onto a job there, making cream cheese, of all things. He’s staying with some relations who have a cat as big as a suitcase, and when Paddy comes home the first day at the factory, he smells for all the world like a six-foot bottle of milk …”
There were passengers who waited on the street, letting other cars pass, in order to board Daniel’s. Others who timed their commutes simply to be able to ride with him.
Sheila began to do the same. Not because she cared for his stories—too many of them, she said, were either impossible or absurd—and not because he called her by name or tickled her fancy each day with some sly running joke (old Mr. Ellsworth had made it through another night, and sweet-faced and asthmatic Mrs. Timoney, always huffing and puffing, was being sought by the police, and Saul, a hunchbacked office boy, was a colonel just back from the front, even fat Alma, who carried an umbrella no matter the weather, was a prognosticator of disastrous storms—“Tornadoes today, miss?
” “Is there a typhoon in the air?”). She waited for his car because she silenced him.
Her life had slipped into its tedious routine. Out of the son’s bed by dawn (and always with a shudder to recall what other early mornings had brought) and a quick wash and dress in the tiny space of the pantry. Breakfast for herself and her aunt and uncle and then the washing up, the walk to the train. In the mailroom she was corraled like a horse with an unending number of envelopes and packages, twenty minutes for lunch, ten for coffee … one of the many million, just one more.
But once or twice a day, if she caught the right car, she was a rarity, a sphinx. She was watched for. She silenced him.
He who had something to say to everyone could only stammer and blush as she walked by, could only say, “Good day, miss,” and not even that if she looked him straight in the eye. The other passengers saw it, even Alma saw it, and the initial surprise it had engendered gave way to curiosity and then a sympathetic awe. He was in love with her, they whispered, had to be. And she giving him nothing in return, not even the time of day. In that odd moment of silence that always followed her boarding, she was the one who had everybody’s attention, not Daniel.
And that was what she couldn’t get enough of—after the life she had led. To be noticed, to be singled out. To be recognized as someone unlike any other.
Charming Billy Page 10