In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  He remembered it because that was about the only time he ever thought Marie had forgiven him for coming into the world. He’d always remember pushing the baby carriage across Mapes Avenue in a daze of joy, wondering if she’d be taking him to the candy store from now on.

  2

  SOONER OR LATER you’d get to a certain story.

  “Now listen, this is a really good one. Did I ever tell you how I sold my mother out for two ball bearings? You’ll like this. It’s got the right elements.”

  But it never did you any good to tell it.

  The boy in this story of yours was seven or eight. Not smart yet, you said. This kid would still believe anything. One day he came home from school and his stepfather Frank was waiting for him. Frank had been drinking. He said, “Come up on the roof with me. I’m going to give you a present.” The kid fell for it, though Frank had never given him a thing up to that time.

  The roof was covered with deep snow, absolutely smooth—not a single footprint in it. No one went up there in winter.

  “What do you think of these?” Frank said, and he opened up his fist. In the palm of his hand were two very small metal balls.

  He made them roll around so they clicked against each other; they had a mysterious heaviness. Frank told him what they were. Ball bearings like these were very hard to come by, he said, solemnly belching. He kept rolling them around as he leaned against the blackened bricks of a chimney.

  The ball bearings had a dull, pleasing luster. They seemed to possess infinite value. To be offered them was obviously some tremendous thing. The boy had never before imagined that he might occupy any more space in Frank’s mind than a chair that was sometimes in the way and had to be kicked aside.

  Finally he said, “Can I hold them, Frank?”

  At that Frank closed up his fist. “Not so fast. You do something for me and I’ll do something for you.”

  The kid thought maybe Frank needed help that day shoveling snow, but that wasn’t what Frank wanted. Sweat broke out on his heavy red face. He started talking about killing someone he called the Italian, choking him with his bare hands in front of all his customers. He only wanted to know if something he had reason to believe about Marie and this Italian was true, so he wouldn’t be laying down his life for nothing.

  Grabbing the boy by the collar of his jacket, Frank shouted, “You’d better tell me what you know. Don’t cover up—or I’ll leave you up here all night and lock the door!”

  The boy started crying because he didn’t know anything. How could he know what Frank wanted him to know?

  The Italian was a guy called Al who ran a butcher shop on Tremont Avenue with his brother. Marie bought all her meat from these brothers. Sometimes Marie would ask him to go to Al’s for her, and she’d give him a folded-up note telling Al what she wanted. Al had curly black hair and wore a stiff apron always smeared with blood. He whistled while he sawed up chops. After he’d wrapped them up in brown paper, he’d give the string a smart yank and bite the end off with his strong teeth. Al would unfold Marie’s note and read it carefully. Looking him in the eye, he’d say, “Well, tell your mama I said ‘Hello, beautiful.’ Don’t forget.”

  “Al says hello,” he’d report when he got home. He could never manage the word beautiful, though somehow it seemed the most important part of the message and the one his mother might like best.

  Frank said Marie and Al had been seen. They’d been spotted coming out of a house one afternoon in another neighborhood. He said lately Marie had been serving meat all the time. When he warned her they couldn’t afford it, she said she’d been getting it at a new place at bargain prices. Frank said, “You know where it comes from, don’t you?”

  The kid kept crying and saying he didn’t know anything.

  Frank pushed him down and forced his face into the snow. “The present’s too good for you!” He seemed to think it was loyalty to Marie that was making the kid hold out on him. But in his own mind he seemed convinced of the very thing he needed so urgently to find out.

  Finally, he said, “Right. I can see you want to stay up here.” When he left, he padlocked the door from the other side.

  Hours passed on the cold roof. The snow and the sky both turned gray. Lights went on one by one in kitchens across the street, and shouting boys miles below pelted a car with snowballs.

  The weird thing was, you said, that kid could not imagine being looked for. It was as if the skin around the ordinary world had cracked apart, and no one noticed that a boy had fallen through. It wasn’t worse in this new place, only colder. If Frank ever came to get him, maybe he wouldn’t come down.

  The sky grew as dark as the ink they made him write with in school, and the snow turned white again. He saw that light never stood still but must always be moving. He thought about this and stopped being afraid, and lay down against the warm bricks of the chimney.

  At some point Frank returned and he was hauled to his feet. The man shook him out like a rag and kept yelling, “Had enough?” He made the air smell like the inside of a bottle.

  It was as if a radio had gone on in the middle of the night and the words you heard were meaningless because you didn’t know the beginning of the program. And you could say back equally meaningless things because nothing mattered, nothing was to be won. You could fill up the air with any old words, any old words that came to you, so he made up a black car that he saw one day on Tremont Avenue and some man at the wheel and his mother getting in fast, looking over her shoulder. And suddenly the man in his mind startled him by saying loudly, “Hello, beautiful,” and it wasn’t Al the butcher who spoke but his own father. And as the black car screeched away from the curb and roared toward its getaway in the distance, for a moment he saw himself in the backseat.

  Frank took the ball bearings out of his pocket and threw them into the snow. The kid went back the next morning and managed to find one of them. He had it a few days, then lost it.

  The Italian went on living and selling his meat.

  As for Marie, Frank gave her such bad bruises on her face that she didn’t leave the house for a couple of weeks.

  “And I did nothing,” you said to me once, weeping. “I did nothing.”

  I covered your eyes with my hands. “Don’t, oh don’t.” I held on to you in the dark, frightened, waiting for morning.

  II

  Little Whitey

  Winter 1964

  3

  I REMEMBER CAROLINE Murphy saying, that time I met her in ’sixty-four, that it had been very hard to explain death to the children. You had to put it in terms they would understand, she said. “What I finally told them was, Daddy’s all gone—just like ice cream.”

  She was proud of that explanation. I was careful, I said nothing negative. “Of course,” I said. “It must have been very difficult.” Later I thought about the meaning of ice cream. A Popsicle was what came to mind—it was cold and hurt your throat but you liked it so much you ate it all up and your mother said “All gone,” in a loud, approving voice as if it were all right that everything ultimately disappeared.

  Caroline had flown up to New York with Tom’s two kids just for the weekend. “On impulse,” she said when she called me, as if she were a person accustomed to taking impulsive flights. An old flame had resurfaced, she said, and was taking her to dinner and she wanted to meet me while she was in town. Or look me over. After all, wasn’t I that girl her husband had gone and married? I’m not sure to this day, though, what she wanted.

  “My little nieces have a gorgeous apartment where we’re staying and they seem to believe we’ll all survive the visit. You could see the children if you came by.”

  I said, Yes, I’d like to do that, and wrote down the address. It was the first time we’d ever spoken. She could have been talking to anyone, any friend of a friend in a strange city.

  By then I knew any unlikely t
hing was possible, anything formerly unthinkable. That was the principle upon which the universe apparently operated. You could wait on a street corner, for example, for a man who’d died two hours ago; you could walk into your house and find your life swept away. Caroline had never come with the children while Tom was alive. It made sense she would do it now, when it was too late.

  “This is Joanna,” she told them. “Joanna was married to Daddy.”

  It couldn’t have meant anything to the little girl Celia, who was only three. She sat on her mother’s lap eating animal crackers with great deliberation, taking them out of the box one by one. But the boy stared. His blue eyes fixed on me with a million questions.

  “Well, say hello or something,” Caroline said sharply.

  He looked down at the toes of his sneakers. “Hello.”

  “That one’s Tommy,” his mother said, pointing him out offhandedly as if I wouldn’t have known his name.

  The nieces’ apartment was all the way east in the twenties. It was on a high floor and had a living room that seemed to hang out in space over the river. The river was a hard gray like the air, the color of January. Tugboats kept passing, as they had the day I’d gone to Bellevue and sat in a room that also looked out on the river, waiting for my name to be called. It had all been done in Swedish modern and potted palms for the benefit of the living who were there to make the final identifications. But when they’d ask the next of kin to come outside, the body would be rolled into a kind of hallway, as if it had no real place. Is this Thomas Murphy? they asked and I said Yes it was him and they said That will be all, thank you very much. And that was all there was to death in the dream I couldn’t wake up from, that kept unreeling behind my eyes. In this dream Tom had died, though I knew he’d only disappeared as he’d threatened to do in the dark times. For weeks I’d been seeing resurrections—brown-haired men in bright blue nylon jackets always walking too fast for me to catch up with them, vanishing around corners before I saw their faces. Sometimes a motorcyclist would streak past me into the distant, shifting traffic, bent over the handlebars in a certain familiar way, reckless and unhelmeted. It was only in the dream that there’d been an accident, that I’d seen the body of the rider, stretched out on a steel table, that I’d touched the thick brown hair for the last time.

  Tom’s son had hair of a different color, so light it could have been made of cellophane; even his eyelashes were paler than his face. Until I saw him I’d never understood Tom’s childhood nickname Whitey. Finally, now, I could see little Whitey, exiled among the ashcans, the cement courtyards of the Bronx. Little Whitey had a face I instantly recognized—the face of the child I was never going to have. There’d be other children maybe, but never that one. That one had been lost before it ever existed.

  I’ve been saner than I was in those days. The air buzzed with meaning and I saw everything starkly connected. I kept thinking you had to break the chain, there must be some way you could break it. I looked at Tommy and I wanted to steal him, take him out of there with me.

  Right away Caroline let me know how much trouble he was. All day he’d been pestering her to let him ride up and down in the elevator by himself. She knew what he’d do—he’d push all the buttons. Complaints would be made to the doorman.

  He stood there and listened, trapped by being seven years old. He had that eerie dignity that’s so amazing in certain children. “I wouldn’t,” he said. He touched the sleeve of his mother’s dress, pressed against her thigh, which annoyed her all the more.

  “Don’t lean all over me, Tommy!”

  I couldn’t understand why she didn’t want that child close to her then. She’d fend him off with a word or a look, but he’d keep coming back. Didn’t she realize how it could multiply? Maybe she knew and knew she couldn’t help it and felt anguished secretly. Or maybe I saw it wrong that day because I always blamed her for so much.

  “The boy looks like me, acts like me, is me,” Tom used to say. He’d tell me he wasn’t so worried about the little girl. The baby was going to be all right, she wouldn’t even remember him. But the boy… .

  He once said, “I know what I did to him.”

  He’d had some pictures of the children on him the night he left Palm Beach. But he’d cleaned out his wallet when he got to New York. In a men’s room at the bus terminal, he tore up every snapshot, got rid of his credit cards, address book, the keys to his car and the house his father-in-law had paid for—everything that belonged to the old life.

  “Don’t look back. Someone might be gaining on you,” was his favorite saying.

  Caroline Murphy was taller than I’d expected; she had a face that was all cheekbones, nervous, delicate angles. One of those lean, fair-skinned women who spend too much time in the sun and look older than they should long before they’re forty, as if whole years somehow get burnt up by all that heat and light. She seemed much better at being a widow than I was. She hardly got the door open before she was clasping my hands in hers. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here,” she said fervently. And you could almost believe she truly was, although it seemed strange to me that we would touch each other. I was reminded that she came of very old blood, on her mother’s side at least. She’d been one of those girls brought up to believe that the proper gesture could get you through the most awful situation.

  I don’t think I hated her. What I mainly remember feeling was puzzlement. I couldn’t imagine Tom ever being with this woman, couldn’t picture them lying down in the same bed, even sitting at the same table. It all seemed to have been so fatally arbitrary. By accident Tom had married her. By mistake she’d lived with him thirteen years, given birth to these children he’d had to leave behind. It’s become possible for me to think of her as a woman who boarded the wrong train and got off in a country she never should have visited. Sometimes I imagine her at sixty, still trying to get back.

  At one point she went walking to those windows with the river view. She flung out her arms and cried, “Hello world! Are you out there?” like a character in a William Saroyan play with some sentimental message about living life to the hilt. It made me wish to be elsewhere, like coming upon a stranger in underwear. I didn’t want her revealing herself to me that way. I wasn’t there to be her friend.

  I thought she’d be curious about me, but she wasn’t. She asked me very little about the accident, didn’t seem to want to know the details. She had certain things I suppose she needed to say out loud to find out whether or not she believed them.

  “Weren’t you relieved?” she asked me. “Weren’t you relieved when it finally happened?”

  “Relieved?” I heard myself repeat it like some lesson in a foreign language.

  “Oh, it was there, always—the possibility. Anyone who knew Tom could see that.”

  I said, “Caroline, there were other possibilities.” I remember I was trembling. I did almost actually hate her.

  “Not really,” she replied, drawling out the really a little, “though I understand why you’d want to think so. How long were you two married—a year? You’ll be more careful the next time. We’ll both be more careful. And won’t that be boring?” She’d rallied up her graciousness again, her hostess tone. “You know what I keep telling myself? That maturity means accepting the necessity of boredom. Just imagine what Tom would say to that!” She was looking straight into my eyes. “I do think about him, you know. I listen for that voice of his, don’t you? I even find myself hoping someone else will say the terrible, outrageous thing. But of course no one ever does.”

  I could feel her pulling at me, demanding some sign that this was more like it, this was what a real widow would say. It could also have been the truth, just like the word relieved; the truth was all in pieces.

  I remember thinking, All right. You be the widow. I’ll hand over the goddam title if it means so much to you. And I imagined stepping out from under it as if it were no more than a black vei
l and being an ordinary person in the world again. But I didn’t want my old life back and there was nothing else to step into. I felt the kind of terror you feel when you look too closely at the future and see nothing but unfilled space.

  The children were running in and out of the room while all this talk was going on over their heads. Though you never know what a very little kid understands. A child will remember an atmosphere, the way two women were sitting on opposite sides of a coffee table, an unexplained tension in the air, a sentence or two with no surrounding context. “Weren’t you relieved when it finally happened?” The it might seem ominous, disguising a darkness, Daddy gone—like ice cream melted down to nothing.

  It’s the duty of children to enjoy themselves, to be unaware of serious matters. They’re commanded to play as if play is the work they must do in order to remain unconscious.

  There were toys for the kids in some bedroom, but there weren’t enough toys or not the right ones. The boy said, “Why can’t we play in here?”

  “Because Joanna and I need to visit for a while. Why don’t you go inside and draw a picture for her and come out when it’s ready. Look at the river and draw a picture of the river.”

  She said to me, “You know, at home he always draws. Tom used to take the scribbles he did and tack them up in the studio.”

  The boy was listening. “When did he, Mom? What were the pictures?”

  “They weren’t pictures, they were scribbles. Just like your sister does now. He saw something in them—your father was always seeing things no one else did. You were only two or three.”

  “Well, what did he say, Mom?”

  “Who on earth can remember conversations years later? Only great geniuses and I’m an ordinary person.”

  “I can draw better now,” said the boy.

  “That’s certainly true. Now take your sister and scoot. Draw or don’t draw—it’s all the same to me.”