The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel

by Dorothy Uhnak

  He reached over without warning and took the familiar sheets of test paper from her hands. The same boy, the same tormenting boy he’d always been.

  “Aw, Sister, not a test today! It’s Christmas vacation time.” And then to the class, “Sister’s present to all of you wonderful, good students is that there’ll be no test.”

  They clapped and grinned back at him, observing only him, his wink to them, his conspiracy against her. They were on his side, he would always save them.

  He turned to the table at the front of the room, spotted the candy boxes.

  “Any leftovers?”

  He approached the table and scooped up some boxes that he handed out to several girls, who immediately ripped open the boxes, extracted candy, and offered him some.

  “Oh, boy, feed Father’s sweet tooth. What do you girls care if I get a toothache?”

  She stood, silent and tense, the headache pounding harder, and watched as he distributed the candy.

  Finally, as though he had just remembered why he had come here in the first place, he told her, “Father Murphy is having me go around to tell all you teachers. School is over early today.” He consulted his wristwatch. “In fifteen minutes, to be exact. The cleaning people are going to leave early, and Father wanted them to have enough time to straighten things out.” And then to the class, “You be good now, do not give Sister any trouble, or I’ll hear about it. Sister, you have any complaints about anyone, you let me know. Well, Merry Christmas, eighth-graders.”

  They called out to him in loud and boisterous voices and then he was gone and they were hers once more. She ordered them to close the candy boxes immediately. There was no eating in her classroom. They fell silent quickly, sat motionless, with folded hands as she demanded.

  “I will wish you all a sacred Christmas. I hope you will be able to put aside your greed for games and new clothes and whatever else your parents see fit to gift you with, and take time to think about what the day means. Whose birthday it is. And how the mother was turned back into the cold. And where Our Lord was born and what his life was. And particularly, after you attend the joyous mass celebrating our Savior’s birth, I want you to think ahead to the end of Our Lord’s sojourn on earth. His Crucifixion. As you celebrate the Holy Child’s birth, never, ever forget his death at the hands of his enemies, the Jews.”

  Her cold, hard eyes blinked rapidly through her smudged glasses and lingered helplessly on the face of Megan Magee. She turned abruptly and, without facing them, stood rigid as the school bell rang, announcing dismissal. No one in her room moved or made a sound. No one dared. Finally, when she decided, she turned back to her class and dismissed them for the two-week Christmas holiday. They gathered their coats quietly from the closet, marched out of the room silently.

  Sister Mary Frances stood by the window and watched as they exploded noisily out onto the street, faces turned up to taste the heavily falling snow. She closed her eyes tightly and began to recite the rosary.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WILLIE PAYCEK HATED MORE PEOPLE THAN anyone else, anywhere in the world. His hatreds were cold, clinical, and for cause. He kept accounts deep within his brain and could, within a split second, bring a person to the front of his mind and run through the catalog relentlessly, without omitting a single injury. He made little distinction between damage done to him physically and damage done emotionally. It was all the same; he noted, he remembered, he would never relent in his determination to pay back.

  And it was important that each one who did him damage knew that someday, without question, little Willie Paycek would finally take his revenge.

  With one exception, he hated all of his teachers. They melded together into one large, indistinct form inside a tangle of black floating veils, foreheads obscured by hard white linen, pinched mean faces, pale eyes batting behind rimless glasses, mouths tight and dry. All spoke in the same accusatory voice, as though their very purpose in life was to catch out some child right smack in the middle of a sinful thought. They knew, these women, they could tell, they had been gifted with second sight that could pierce into the evil heart and brain of some luckless child. Usually the luckless child was Willie Paycek.

  His very physical appearance caught their immediate disapproval. He was a narrow child with a gray complexion and thin hair that was always badly cut and always seemed unclean. His clothes never fit properly; they were either too-large hand-me-downs or his own, worn until his knobby wrists showed from the frayed cuffs of his shirts and his falling socks, sliding into his scuffed shoes, revealed the fish-white skin of his ankles.

  He was always dirty, not with the healthy grime of childhood that came from vigorous, sweaty roughhousing, but with the fetid, stale uncleanness that came from lack of hygiene. His neck was a particular target of the sharp, inspecting fingers: neatly rounded nails dug in many times to make the point.

  You see, class, this is what happens when you don’t bathe regularly. William, you are a disgrace.

  His hair was inspected regularly, but not by fingers. No, the nuns could not trust the possibility of finding that ultimate of horrors, lice, to fingertips. From first grade on, they carefully leaned over him, two pencils poking and prodding and separating his wispy hair in fruitless search of living prey. Their cold and musty presence overwhelmed him. Nuns had a peculiar odor, and he wondered whether it was something they had been born with or something given to them when they took their vows.

  William knew that nuns were not born nuns. He knew they had been girls once, and that under all the floating black veils in which they hid were women’s bodies.

  William knew a lot of things the other kids never knew.

  The only teacher he had ever loved was Sister Mary Catherine, who taught him in second grade. She was the youngest of all the sisters, and in her pale eyebrows and bright blue eyes, her pink complexion and full red lips, blond healthiness could be discerned. Her hands touched, they did not pinch or punch or jab. They did not form into rocklike fists that cracked into foreheads. They did not suddenly whack the back of an unsuspecting head, causing the face to crash onto the labored piece of writing, the ink to spill, catastrophe to grow because of a momentary lapse of attention.

  She had once cupped her soft white hand under his chin and looked directly at him, which was difficult to do, he knew, because his left eye turned in toward his nose and no one seemed to know how to make eye contact with him. She had smiled at his drawing of the baby Jesus, had caught the meaning in the roll of the infant’s eye toward his Mother, but too far inward.

  Her hand on his chin was cool. Not cold, but cool. There was a difference. She had the most beautiful white teeth, even and small and clean, and she did not smell musty. She smelled, oh, he could not name the fragrance but it contained all about Sister Mary Catherine that he loved. A good smell, clean and fresh but with a hint, a wisp of her humanness, her realness. It was a fragrance he would remember from time to time all his life: something he could conjure up and think about on terrible nights.

  She said to him words he would store away in the otherwise empty section of love deep inside himself.

  “William,” the soft girl inside the nun’s disguise told him, “I think your baby Jesus is very beautiful. And I think he looks just like you.”

  It was a gift she had given him, and he cherished it all his life.

  Such was his poverty.

  He had new reasons to hate his father every day of his life. His father was “the Polack janitor.” It was what he was, had always been, and would always be. Because his father was the janitor, they were all janitors. His mother was the janitor’s wife; his brothers and sisters were the janitor’s kids. He was the Polack janitor’s oldest boy, a little rat. Looks just like his father.

  He knew that to be a fact. He could look into his father’s terrible face, lined and crusted, ragged, unshaven, the small eyes narrowed into tiny slits when he’d been drinking—and when wasn’t he drinking—and he could see himself in the years ahe
ad.

  His mother had to mop the halls, lug the heavy metal garbage pails filled with shaken-down ashes from the furnace to the edge of the sidewalk, then later drag them back through the narrow alleyway to the basement. Willie had been pressed into janitor duty from the time he could remember. His main job now, at thirteen, was the daily collection of garbage from the tenants in the building.

  At first he had helped his father, when his father was sober and tended to the collection, then helped his mother, then done most of it himself. He would stand in the opening, drag the heavy dumbwaiter to the top floor, ring the bells of the tenants on each side of the dumbwaiter. They would load their garbage, mostly in brown paper bags, onto the dumbwaiter, and then Willie would lower it down, hand over hand, and empty the garbage from the dumbwaiter into the metal containers. Then haul the dumbwaiter up again. People were not very considerate. Most were, he admitted that, but some were sloppy and put too much stuff on the shelf and garbage would come flying down, hitting him on the head or arms.

  The top-floor people were okay; the fourth-floor people were careless, although Mrs. Commerford always yelled out—too late, of course—oops, sorry Willie, heads up.

  Thanks a lot, fat slob Mrs. Commerford and your stinking lumps of vegetable scrapings and whatever else the hell came tumbling down. He had so much garbage land on him—on his arms, his head, his shoulders, his feet—that he had become accustomed to the stink. He no longer realized he smelled rancid a great deal of the time.

  His father was a husky, short, but large-muscled, frightening man who bullied and abused all of them. He punched and kicked and twisted and stomped. Willie’s mother was battered and bruised, her large, fleshy face discolored, her eyes vacant and staring through purple circles. It was bad when the father was sober, infinitely worse when he was drunk. Willie, as the eldest, was closest to hand, and the most sought-after target. He had learned to become invisible, to disappear, to melt and vaporize, to let some of the other kids take the brunt of their father’s inexplicable fury and brutality. There were times, Willie knew, he had seen, when his father had done certain things to the girls. Not hitting, punching, pushing, shoving—something else. Touching, grabbing, pulling them against him until they cried out in terror, until their mother finally came and pulled them away, scolding the victim for some crime or other, but getting the child free. By doing this, she placed herself in jeopardy. Willie saw, he knew, he had begun to understand.

  For as long as Willie could remember, Walter Stachiew had been involved in the life of the Paycek family. He was either a cousin of his father’s or a boyhood friend from the old country who claimed the privilege of kinship.

  In fact, he claimed far more than the privilege of kinship.

  One day, when he was about five years old, Willie came upon Stachiew and his mother. They were locked in a tight embrace, his hands jammed on her body, her hands on his neck. The small, thin, frightened boy kicked and hammered his small fists against Stachiew, who pulled back, raging at first, then laughing. He lifted the frantic boy with one huge hand, held him high in the air, then tossed him against the wall.

  Through his pain and panic, he heard his mother saying softly, no, no, don’t hurt the child, Walter, don’t hurt the child. There was an intimacy in her voice. Stachiew yanked the boy to his feet, leaned down, his breath sour with whiskey and passion and annoyance and spoke to the boy.

  “Wha’sa madder, kid? You tink bad tings about me, huh? Or maybe you tink bad tings about your mudder, what kinda boy are you, links bad tings about his own mudder? Mudders are sacred, like Holy Mudder Mary, you not a good kid, little Willie, you a rotten little weasel, you got such bad toughts!”

  He emphasized the major points of his speech with a shake or a poke, and the boy’s body felt weightless, helpless, totally without value.

  His mother, standing behind Stachiew, smiled, and whispered at him, “No, no, it’s h’okay, all h’okay, he’s just a small child, Walter, leave him alone.”

  “Ya, let him leave me alone,” the giant said. Then, giving up the whole thing, he turned and lurched from the small basement apartment where the janitor’s family lived, and went into the furnace room where he slept on a cot.

  Willie’s mother said nothing. She merely adjusted her clothing, brushed at herself, touched her hair with her thick red fingers, and went into the kitchen to cook.

  Willie hated his mother, his father, and Walter Stachiew. He also hated most of his brothers and sisters, some of whom looked exactly like Walter and some of whom looked like Willie and his father.

  His real everyday life—at home, on the street, and in school—was intolerable, and at times Willie fell into that most sinful state of mind: despair. Were it not for the other part of his life, the boy sometimes felt he would fade away, bit by bit become paler and smaller and finally invisible and nonexistent. And no one, not anyone, would realize it. Or care.

  Willie Paycek had discovered another reality in the most unrealistic of worlds: the movies. He did not consider the movies he saw every Saturday morning of his young life the way most of the other kids did. He did not walk home pretending to be a cowboy or a gangster or a soldier, walking with an imitated strut or slouch, slapping reins against an imaginary horse, galloping along the sidewalks of the Bronx. He did not become the tall, handsome leading man, radiant with the magic absorbed during the matinee.

  Instead, Willie Paycek left each movie show with a sense of wonder, curiosity, and determination that he discussed with no one. First, there was no one to discuss anything with, and second, he would not know how to put his feelings into words.

  Willie, alone of all the kids in the audience, and probably alone among the adults, wondered about how the movies were made. He took the stories for exactly what they were: stories, written by people for other people, called actors, to bring to black-and-white life. What he wondered was who were all the unseen people involved. Who did what, who besides the actors caused these movies to come into being?

  He made a practice of reading every single word in the credits either at the beginning of the picture or at the end. For everything, there seemed to be specific people involved: directors, producers, writers, makeup people, designers of clothes and sets, musicians and composers, location people, electricians, carpenters. They all came together and made a story that he sat and watched at the Avalon Theatre on Burnside Avenue in the Bronx.

  The “Avvie” was the neighborhood cheap movie house: eleven cents before noon for kids, fifteen cents after that. They changed the program twice a week and you could follow the itinerary of the pictures from the first-run houses in Manhattan to the beautiful Loew’s Paradise on the Grand Concourse, then to the Loew’s Burnside for Loew’s pictures, and from the RKO Fordham on Fordham Road, whose pictures then went right across the street to the Valentine, before hitting the Avvie. Even the cartoons interested him: not the action but the story, which was usually the same (somebody gets bit on the head, chased, blown up, run down by car or locomotive before being rescued and turning on his assailant), not even the animation, although he realized that animation was achieved through a painstaking series of drawings. What intrigued Willie was the overall putting together of the film, the realization that people somewhere were creating all of this—movies, cartoons, weekly serials—out of nothing.

  Willie Paycek could not have said what all of this meant to him, why it intrigued him to the point of restless nervousness. He didn’t really know what, if anything, there was in all of this for him, what promise, what direction for his life to take. All he knew was that when he entered the smelly, dirty, noisy, child-filled movie on a Saturday morning, everything else in his life no longer existed. This environment, that screen, that action, those stories, all those technicians and artists and actors were something that filled him with that rarest of emotions: hope. Somewhere in all of this was a promise he carried with him from one Saturday morning to the next.

  It was the most important part of his life, and alwa
ys would be.

  It was not just at the movies that Willie Paycek learned, and filed away for future contemplation. Feeling always set apart from everyone else, discarded, nonexistent, gave the boy a freedom to watch, to learn, to puzzle over the behavior he saw all around him.

  Who else noticed that the hands of Dominick D’Angelo, the shoemaker, lingered more than necessary when he helped a lady on with her repaired shoe, that his long, stained fingers slid unnecessarily over a well-turned ankle, that his eyes glittered, his tongue flicked over wet lips, his voice went lower, a hoarse quality deepening his innocent-seeming words:

  There, now. Little lady, that good, huh? That feel better now on that pretty little foot, hey, should have only comfort, such a pretty lady.

  And they ate it up. They beamed, they smiled, they let it happen.

  They all, these ladies, these girls, seemed to wait for something, the way he was waiting for something.

  At four-o’clock roll call in front of the Forty-sixth Precinct on Ryer Avenue, directly across from the building where the Payceks lived, the young mothers with their baby carriages, with their little kids, seemed to stand by, watching the blue-uniformed men as they lined up, important, listening, standing straight in two military lines, their faces serious, while the sergeant read out orders. Willie watched the women who watched the men. They glanced directly at the young, strong men, some bolder than others, until a glance was exchanged, some secret contact made, some understanding reached. To do what? To what end? To meet in some basement, some backroom, the way his mother did with Stachiew? Or what? Was it enough, the quick, easy flirting that the tough Irish-faced cops threw at these women, these young mothers?

  Willie knew these were young women, despite the sometimes old look in their faces. He saw too much, he saw a certain tense desperation, a tightening of lips too soon, a drawn, unhappy look that was turned too often into blows on the arms and heads and backsides of young kids who most times didn’t know what the hell they were getting whacked for this time.