Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

  “Think the Weeper wrote this?” Jimmy said.

  “He must have,” said Roy. “He was always talkin’ about how he wept every day for all the people who suffer in this life. That’s why he’s called the Weeper. But what’s Kilyazum?”

  “Father Jerry talked about it in Sunday school,” said Jimmy. “I think it’s when Christ returns and reigns in heaven with all the good people, even ones who already died, for a thousand years.”

  “What happens to the bad people?”

  “The devil forces ’em to keep doin’ bad things on earth.”

  “But if everyone who’s good goes to heaven,” said Roy, “that means they must be dead.”

  “I guess so,” said Jimmy Boyle. “You think it’s better to be dead than alive?”

  Roy thought about the woman in the movie pulling her boyfriend down on her in the cemetery.

  “No,” he said, “I don’t.”

  The Swedish Bakery

  Martin Kenna was in a bad spot. The Lingenbergs had been good to him but he knew if he didn’t do what his older brother, Brendan, wanted him to do, which was to leave the back door to the bakery unlocked when he left on Thursday night, Brendan and his friend Double Trouble would beat the daylights out of him. Bren would probably only cuff him around a little, but DT, Martin knew, would make him hurt. Once DT had it in his criminal mind to do something there was nothing Bren could do to stop him, even when it came to kicking the crap out of his would-be accomplice’s little brother.

  Martin had to talk to someone about his predicament, so he decided for the first time in his barely thirteen-year-old life to ask Father Ralph for advice. On his way to St. Rose of Lima, Martin Kenna ran into the Viper.

  “Hey, Kenna, where you goin’?”

  A cold drizzle began so Martin put up the hood of his blue parka. The Viper was hatless. His stringy black hair and glasses were getting wet, but the Viper didn’t seem to mind.

  “Nowhere special. Gotta see someone.”

  “A bunch of us is gonna play football at the empty lot on Ojibway. You want to come?”

  “Maybe after. It’s gonna be muddy.”

  The Viper grinned, revealing big green front teeth, and punched Martin Kenna lightly on his right shoulder.

  “You can cut better in the mud,” said the Viper, “make tacklers miss.”

  At St. Rose of Lima, Kenna entered the church and saw Father Ralph checking the rows, making sure the benches were clean. Martin walked down the aisle to the end of the row Father Ralph was inspecting and stood there.

  “Hello, Martin,” said the priest, “what are you doing here at this hour?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about somethin’, Father.”

  Father Ralph stood in front of the boy and studied his face.

  “You can put your hood down, Martin, the roof doesn’t leak.”

  Kenna shook off the hood. Father Ralph was five foot four, about a half-inch taller than Martin. His dark brown hair was thinning rapidly. Mrs. Kenna swore that Father Ralph used Sultan of Africa shoe polish to cover his bald spot; she said she could smell it when she stood next to him.

  “What can I help you with, Martin?”

  “It’s Bren, Father, my brother. He wants me to do somethin’ I don’t feel right about doin’.”

  “Sit down,” said Father Ralph.

  Both the priest and the boy sat down on the nearest bench. Father Ralph had one blue eye and one green eye. Martin looked mostly into the green one.

  “Now, tell me, what is it Brendan wants you to do?”

  “You know, Father, I work four days a week after school at the Swedish bakery on Belmont and Broadway.”

  “Lingenberg’s, I know. Your mother told me. Go on.”

  “Well, it’s this way, Father. Bren hangs around with this older guy, DT—Double Trouble—his last name is Korzienowski, I don’t know his Christian name.”

  “A Polish boy.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Anyway, he talked my brother into helpin’ him rob the bakery. They want me to leave the back door unlocked next Thursday night so they can boost the receipts which Babe Lingenberg don’t deposit in the bank until Friday mornin’.”

  “How do they know this, Martin? That the receipts will be there overnight.”

  Kenna unzipped his coat, then zipped it up again. “I told ’em, I guess.”

  “And do they know where the receipts are kept?”

  Kenna nodded. “In a desk drawer that’s locked, but it’d be real easy to bust open.”

  “And you also told them where this desk is, did you?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Why did you provide them with this information, Martin?”

  Martin Kenna looked away from Father Ralph’s green eye and down at the floor.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Was the robbery Brendan’s idea or the Polish boy’s?”

  Martin looked up again.

  “DT put Bren up to it, Father, I’m positive. DT says he’s from a real poor family and the Lingenbergs are rich, so they won’t miss the money.”

  “As Jesus said, the poor will always be with us, but I am here now,” said Father Ralph.

  “Father, if I don’t leave the door unlocked, Bren and DT’ll beat me up. What should I do?”

  “They won’t lay a hand on you, Martin, don’t worry.”

  “How can you be sure, Father?”

  “Like Jesus, I am here now. I’ll have a talk with your brother, and perhaps I’ll have an opportunity to discuss the situation with this Polish boy. What did you say his name is? His real name.”

  “Korzienowski.”

  “Korzienowski, okay.” Father Ralph stood up. “You go on now.”

  Martin Kenna stood up, said, “Thank you, Father,” and turned to leave.

  “Oh, Martin.”

  Kenna stopped and looked back at Father Ralph.

  “You won’t forget to lock the back door of the bakery, will you?”

  “No, Father, I won’t.”

  Later that afternoon, Martin Kenna saw his brother and DT standing on the corner of Cristiana and Nottingham, smoking cigarettes. The drizzle had turned icy but neither Brendan nor DT had coats on. Both of them were wearing red and black checked flannel shirts, blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up twice and scuffed black Chippewa motorcycle boots. Martin was across the street, they didn’t see him, so he kept going.

  Years later, when Martin heard the news that Brendan had been killed in a knife fight in prison, he remembered seeing his brother and Double Trouble Korzienowski standing coatless in the icy rain. Martin didn’t know what happened to DT or what Father Ralph had said to him and Brendan about their plan to rob the Swedish bakery so that neither of them mentioned it to Martin again. It had always bothered Martin Kenna, however, that he had told Father Ralph about it, that by doing so he had betrayed Brendan. Martin knew it was foolish, even absurd to feel guilty about this, but still he often wished he had not asked the priest to intervene. It might have served him better to have just taken the beating. Now his brother was dead and so, perhaps, was Father Ralph. It’s not only the poor who will always be with us, thought Martin.

  The Man Who Swallowed the World

  Sid Roman, Roy’s mother’s first cousin, was a kind, handsome, intelligent man who dropped his marbles at the age of forty-six. Cousin Sid, as Roy and his mother and her brother, Buck, always referred to him, worked for many years as a clothing salesman, specializing in men’s suits, at one of Chicago’s most exclusive and expensive haberdasheries. This mode of employment lasted, as Roy’s mother phrased it, “until Cousin Sid lost his looks.”

  Actually, Cousin Sid’s loss of his looks coincided with the loss of his mind. One day Sid could not find the silver cigarette lighter with his initials inscribed on it, a gift from his wife, Norma, for
his fortieth birthday, and he decided that he had swallowed it. Cousin Norma was an equally kind, intelligent woman, who was “high strung” (again, Roy’s mother’s words), with a history of nervous breakdowns. Cousin Norma, an unhealthily thin woman with stringy red hair, who chain-smoked unfiltered Chesterfields, told her husband that he must simply have misplaced the lighter.

  “Look in the pockets of your charcoal suit jacket,” she told Sid. “It’s in the pile to go to the dry cleaners.”

  “I already did,” he answered, and pointed to his neck. “Look at my throat. There’s where my lighter is, I can feel it.”

  “That’s your Adam’s apple,” said his wife.

  “I’m going to the emergency room,” said Cousin Sid, “to have it removed.”

  He walked out of the house and did not return until six months later, when he was released from the psychiatric ward at Pafko Hospital.

  After this, Cousin Sid behaved normally for a while; although, as Roy’s mother observed, his looks were gone. Before his breakdown, he had resembled the actor William Powell, except for his hair, which Sid wore slicked back in the style of the day, and was silver and thicker than Powell’s. During his residence at Pafko Hospital, however, Cousin Sid’s teeth went bad, resulting in his having quite a large number of them removed. This gave him the appearance of his cheeks having caved in. Also, his color had changed: no longer glowing and golden, his face was now bloodlessly pale, bordering on unearthly. His mustache was gone, too, exposing a wrinkled and shrunken or shriveled upper lip that no longer covered completely his front teeth, of which one was missing. For some reason, he could not grow his mustache back, freezing his mouth in an expression somewhere between a sneer and a contemptuous grin.

  Cousin Sid lost his job at the clothing store. Norma supported them and their fifteen-year-old son, Larry, who was disabled by polio and confined to a wheelchair, by working as a secretary for a law firm. It was months before Sid found work at a discount shoe store on the south side of the city. The job required that he travel almost two hours on the elevated and two buses each way.

  Four weeks after her husband began selling shoes, Norma received a call at the law office from the police informing her that Sid was in their custody at the Cottage Grove precinct. Sid had told a bus driver that he’d swallowed his transfer. When the driver ordered Sid to pay an additional fare, Sid refused, insisting that he was in possession of the transfer, it was in his stomach, and that he had also swallowed all of the money he’d had in his pockets so that it could not be stolen. The driver told him to get off the bus, but Sid took a seat and would not get up. The driver then radioed for the police, who came and removed him forcefully. Following this incident, Cousin Sid became convinced that he had swallowed everything from kitchen utensils to clocks, and Norma had him committed to an asylum in Indiana run by a nondenominational organization called Angels of Victims of Unfathomable Behavior.

  Roy was nine when he accompanied his mother, Uncle Buck and Cousin Norma to visit Cousin Sid in Indiana. It was a sunny, early October day, and Roy enjoyed riding in the backseat of his uncle’s 1955 Cadillac Coupe Deville as they cruised through the Indiana dunes. Roy wondered how different they could be from the deserts of Egypt or Arabia, and imagined himself mounted on a camel among Bedouin tribesmen, his face shielded from blowing sand and intense sun by robes and gauzy scarves.

  At the asylum, which was a huge black-and-gray stone building in the middle of nowhere that looked to him as if it should have been surrounded by a moat infested with crocodiles, Roy was made to sit alone in a waiting room while the others were taken by a woman wearing a gray nun’s habit to see Cousin Sid. There was only one high window in the waiting room which admitted a narrow shaft of sunlight. It would be difficult to escape from this room, Roy thought, if the door were locked, especially because the six metal chairs were bolted to the floor and would have to be pried loose before they could be stacked high enough to reach the window. Roy remained there for an hour and was beginning to feel like the Count of Monte Cristo imprisoned in the Chateau d’If before the door opened and his Uncle Buck said, “Let’s go, champ.”

  Seeing that his uncle was by himself, Roy asked, “Where are my mother and Cousin Norma?”

  “Norma’s pretty upset,” said Buck. “Your mother is with her, taking a walk around the grounds.”

  Roy followed his uncle outside and they stood next to the Cadillac. Buck removed a cigar from an inside pocket of his navy blue sportcoat, bit off one end and felt in his other pockets for a book of matches.

  “How’s Cousin Sid?”

  Buck located his matches and lit the cigar.

  “He thinks he’s swallowed everything he can’t see.”

  “What do you mean everything? You mean including the Pacific Ocean and the Empire State Building?”

  Buck took a few puffs. The smoke quickly disappeared into the crisp air.

  “I suppose so,” he said. “Whatever can’t fit into his little room. I’m afraid it’s the end of the world for Cousin Sid.”

  “He swallowed it,” said Roy.

  “What?”

  “The world. He’s got it all inside him.”

  Roy’s mother and Cousin Norma came around the corner of the big, ugly building and walked slowly over to them. Cousin Norma was crying, a cigarette dangling from the left corner of her mouth. Her lips looked like two long, crimson scratches. Roy’s mother was holding Cousin Norma’s right elbow. They all got into the car and nobody spoke until after Buck had been driving for fifteen minutes.

  “I envy Sid,” said Cousin Norma. “He doesn’t have to think anymore.”

  “The sisters will take care of him,” said Roy’s mother; then she added, “I mean, the Angels.”

  “What’s unfathomable behavior mean?” asked Roy.

  “It’s when somebody behaves in a way nobody else can understand,” said his uncle.

  Cousin Norma, who was sitting in the backseat with Roy, lit a fresh Chesterfield off a half-inch butt, which she then tossed out the window on her side. Her fingers were stained and wrinkled like a weathered, well-oiled baseball glove.

  “Kitty,” she said to Roy’s mother, “I remember when I was about Roy’s age, maybe a year younger, and my aunt gave me a beautiful girl doll for my birthday. I looked at it and then handed it back to her. My mother said, ‘You can’t do that, Norma. Take the doll and say thank you to Aunt Rose.’ I ran away and locked myself in my room. I couldn’t keep that doll, she was too beautiful and I was too ugly. I didn’t want to have her around to haunt me, to constantly remind me of how I looked compared to her. I remember how I felt that day. It’s the same way I feel now.”

  Roy stared out the window on his side at the sand dunes. He wanted to tell Cousin Norma the same thing he’d said to his uncle, that he thought Cousin Sid’s world was inside him now, but he kept looking out the window and thought about the Arabs.

  Ghost Ship

  Roy sometimes cut through Rosedale Cemetery on his way to play ball at Winnebago Park. Jews were not allowed to be buried at Rosedale, so Roy thought it interesting that next to the cemetery, on its western boundary, was the Zion National Home, a residential institution for elderly Jews.

  One summer’s morning, Roy was cutting across Rosedale when he saw an old woman walking with a cane along the same path ahead of him. As he approached her, the woman suddenly stumbled and fell. Roy ran up to her and took hold of one of her arms.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  The woman was wearing a pink housecoat buttoned up to her neck and fuzzy purple slippers. She wore thick glasses that magnified her hazel eyes.

  “I’ll survive,” she said, “at least for a little longer. I’m used to this, unfortunately. When you get to be my age—I’m eighty-eight—you never know if your next step will be your last.”

  Roy helped the woman to her feet, then picked up the c
ane and handed it to her. She looked at Roy and smiled. A few of her teeth were missing.

  “How old are you, son?” she asked.

  “Eleven,” said Roy.

  “That’s the age my granddaughter, Esther, was when we left Hamburg on the Caribia, bound for Cuba. This was in 1938. What year were you born?”

  “Nineteen forty-six.”

  “Esther would have been thirty now, had she survived.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “The Cuban government wouldn’t allow the Caribia to dock because most of its passengers were Jewish. We were fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Esther caught the typhoid fever and she died on board. We were forced to bury her at sea. The Caribia truly became a ghost ship after that. Esther’s ghost was with us as we sailed back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a safe harbor.”

  “Why didn’t the Cubans want the Jews?”

  “They were afraid if they took us, more Jews would come expecting to be taken in, too. This happened in many places, in many countries, on five continents.”

  “How long were you on that ship?”

  “Four or five months, I think. Finally, we were granted permission to disembark at Baltimore, Maryland. All of the passengers were housed in the same buildings slaves were kept in after they were brought there from Africa. My daughter, Rebecca, Esther’s mother, and I waited in those slave quarters for weeks—I can’t recall now how many—until we were taken by train to New York City and deposited at the Jewish Orphans and Immigrants Home.”

  “Do you live at Zion National?” Roy asked.

  “Yes, barely, as you can see.”

  “No Jews are allowed to be buried here at Rosedale. Did you know that?”

  The old lady smiled again and said, “Even after death there are places Jews are forbidden to go.”

  She coughed a few times, very deeply, making a sound so loud it frightened Roy a little.

  “Zion stretches out her hands,” the woman said, “but there is none to comfort her; the Lord has commanded against Jacob that his neighbors should be his foes; Jerusalem has become a filthy thing among them.”