by T E. D Klein
“Craziest thing I ever heard of,” muttered Calzone, as he led us back to the elevator. “The kids in this neighborhood may cause a bit of trouble now and then, but they sure as hell ain’t causing it in here!” The elevator door slid shut with a clang. “Look, I’m not gonna lie to you. We’ve had our share of problems. I mean, who hasn’t, right? But if we’ve had any break-ins here it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of it. Fact is, we’ve just beefed up our security, and there’s no way anyone from outside’s getting in. Believe me, your granddad’s gonna be as safe here as anywhere else in New York.”
Since that very morning’s Times had carried the story of a wealthy widow and her maid found strangled in their East 62nd Street town house, these words were hardly reassuring.
Nor was my wife’s expression when we got out of the elevator. She nudged me with her elbow. “I’d hate to think what the security was like before they beefed it up,” she said. Calzone pretended not to hear.
The first battalions of old men and women were marching unsteadily from the dining room as the two of us bid him good-bye. “Come back again and I’ll show you our new TV lounge,” he called after us, retiring to his little office just beyond the stairs. As soon as he’d closed the door, I approached a pair of well-fed-looking old women who were shuffling arm-in-arm across the lobby. The stouter one had hair as blue as the veins that lined her forehead. Gazing up at me, she broke into a slightly bewildered smile.
I cleared my throat. “Pardon me, but would you two ladies say this is a safe place to live? I mean, from the standpoint of the neighborhood?” Silence. The smile, the gaze, never wavered.
“Mrs. Hirschfeld doesn’t hear so good,” explained the other, tightening her grip on the woman’s arm. “Even with the new battery you have to shout a little.” She spoke with her eyes cast demurely downward, avoiding mine. Her hair was tied in a coquettish little bun. Who knows, I thought, Grandfather might like her. She told me her name was Mrs. Rosenzweig. She and Mrs. Hirschfeld were roommates. “Elsie’s very happy here,” she said, “and me, I can’t complain. Three years already we’ve been here, and never any trouble.” The lashes fluttered. “But of course, we never go outside.”
They moved off together toward the elevator, leaning on one another for support. “Well, what do you think?” I asked my wife, as we headed for the exit in front.
She shrugged. “He’s your grandfather.”
Emerging from the lobby, we found ourselves once more in the presence of the guard, slumped glassy-eyed behind his desk. Here he is in the flesh, I thought, Calzone’s beefed-up security. He nodded sleepily to us as we passed.
Outside, dusk had fallen on the block. To the west lay the familiar trees and benches of Broadway, with TV showrooms, banks, and Chinese restaurants. Copperware and cappuccino-makers gleamed in Zabar’s window; Sunday browsers chatted by a bookstall on the corner. “Anyway,” I said, “it’s better than Brooklyn.” But when we turned east I wasn’t so sure. The building next door was a six-story tenement ribbed with fire escapes and a crumbling succession of ledges. On the front stoop, beneath a rust-stained “No Loitering” sign, sat a conclave of bored-looking young men, one with a gold earring, one fiddling with the dial of a radio as big as an attaché case. I wished we didn’t have to walk past them.
“They look like they’re posing for a group photo,” I said hopefully, taking my wife’s hand.
“Yeah—Attica, Class of 1980.”
We moved by them silently, drawing hostile glares. Behind us, with a blare of trumpets, the radio exploded into “Soul Soldier.” Another group of teenagers was gathered in front of a closed-up shop on the corner of 81st and Amsterdam. “Checks Cashed,” a corrugated metal sign proclaimed, and below it, on a faded piece of cardboard taped in-side the window, “Food Stamps Sold Here.” The place was dark and empty, the window grey with dust.
Snap out of it, I told myself, the neighborhood’s not so bad. Just another culture or two, that’s all it was, and no worse here than where I lived, half a mile farther uptown. I noted the ancient public library, a shoe-repair shop, a pawnshop with guitars and watches in the window, a place where Haitian magazines were sold, a Puerto Rican social club, a shop whose sign read “Barber” on one side and “Barberia” on the other. Several botanicas, shut for the day behind steel gates, displayed windows full of painted plaster figures: Jesus, and Mary, a bearded black man brandishing a snake, an angel with a dagger in his hand. All wore haloes.
Still, the people of the neighborhood did not. The crime rate, in fact, had been climbing that year, and while Park West Manor seemed as good a place as any for my grandfather, I had doubts about the safety of the block. As my wife and I walked home that night, heading up Columbus with the lights of Sunday traffic in our eyes, I thought of the old brick building receding behind us into the shadows of West 81st, and of the doorways, stoops, and street corners surrounding it where unsmiling black youths waited like a threat. I worried about whether they might somehow sneak inside, and about all the damage they might cause—although in view of what actually occurred, these fears now seem, to say the least, rather ironic.
Wednesday, June 8, 1977
If heaven is really populated by the souls of the dead, with their earthly personalities and intellect surviving intact, then the place must be almost as depressing as an old-folks’ home. The angels may handle their new wings with a certain finesse, and their haloes may glow bright as gold, but the heads beneath them must be pretty near as empty as the ones I saw the first time I visited my grandfather at Park West Manor. Around me, in the game room, old men and women played leisurely hands of canasta or poker or gin, or sat watching in silence as two of their number shuffled round a pool table, its worn and faded surface just above the spectators’ sight. One old man stood talking to himself in the corner; others merely dozed. Contrary to my expectations, there were no twinkle-eyed old Yankee types gathered round a checkerboard puffing corncob pipes, and I looked in vain for bearded Jewish patriarchs immersed in games of chess. No one even had a book. Most of those in the room that day were simply propped up in the lounge chairs like a row of dolls, staring straight ahead as if watching a playback of their lives. My grandfather wasn’t among them.
If I sound less than reverent toward my elders, there’s a good reason: I am. No doubt I’ll be joining their ranks some day myself (unless I’m already food for worms, knocked down by an addict or a bus), and I’ll probably spend my time blinking and daydreaming like everyone else. Meanwhile, though, I find it hard to summon up the respect one’s supposed to feel for age. Old people have always struck me as rather childish, in fact. Despite their reputation, they’ve never seemed particularly wise.
Perhaps I just tend to look for wisdom in the wrong places. I remember a faculty party where I introduced myself to a celebrated visiting theologian and asked him a lot of earnest questions, only to discover that he was more interested in making passes at me. I once eavesdropped on the conversation of two well-known writers on the occult who turned out to be engaged in a passionate argument over whether a Thunderbird got better mileage than a Porsche. I bought the book by Dr. Kubler-Ross, the one in which she interviews patients with terminal cancer, and I found, sadly, that the dying have no more insight into life, or death, than the rest of us. But old people have been the biggest disappointment of all; I’ve yet to hear a one of them say anything profound. They’re like that ninety-two-year-old Oxford don who, when asked by some deferential young man what wisdom he had to impart after nearly a century of living, ruminated a moment and then said something like, “Always check your footnotes.” I’ve never found the old to be wiser than anyone else. They’ve never told me anything I didn’t know already.
But Father Pistachio… Well, maybe he was different. Maybe he was onto something after all.
At first, though, he seemed no more than an agreeable old humbug. I met him on June 8, when I went to visit Grandfather. It was the spring of ’77, with the semester just ending; I
had Wednesday afternoons free, and had told Grandfather to expect me. We had installed him in Park West the previous weekend, after collecting some things from his Brooklyn apartment and disposing of the rest. At one-thirty today, unable to find him in his bedroom on the ninth floor, I’d tried the TV lounge and the game room, both in vain, and had finally gone downstairs to ask Miss Pascua, a little Filipino woman who worked as the administrative secretary.
“Mr. Lauterbach likes to spend his time outdoors,” she said, a hint of disapproval in her voice. “We let them do what they want here, you know. We don’t like to interfere.”
“I understand.”
“He’s doing very well, though,” she went on. “He’s already made a lot of friends. We’re very fond of him.”
“Glad to hear it. Any idea where he might be?”
“Well, he seems to have hit it off with some of the local people. They sit out there and talk all day.” For a moment I pictured him in dignified conversation with some cronies on a sunny Broadway bench, but then she added: “I’d try looking for him one block down, on the other side of Amsterdam. He’s usually on a stoop out there, sitting with a bunch of Puerto Ricans.”
I walked out frowning. I should have known he’d do something like that. When you gave him a choice between the jungle to the east—with its fire escapes, its alleyways, its rat-infested basements—and the tamer pastures of Broadway, Broadway didn’t have a chance.
The spot he’d picked was a particularly disagreeable one. It was just up the block from an evil-looking bar called Davey’s (since closed down by the police), a little bit of Harlem on the West Side: the sort of place where you expect a shoot-out every Saturday night. The buildings beside it were ancient with grime; even the bricks seemed moist, and the concrete foundations were riddled with something curiously like wormholes. I passed a doorway full of teenaged boys who should have been in school. They were hunched furtively against the wall, lighting something out of sight, while others shot craps on the sidewalk, striking poses out of Damon Runyon. In the dim light of an open first-floor window, heavy shapes moved back and forth. A man in dark glasses hurried toward me, angrily dragging a child by the arm. The child said something—he couldn’t have been more than five—and as the man passed by he scowled and muttered back, “Don’t tell me ’bout your mother, your mother’s a goddamn whore!” Already I was beginning to feel depressed. I was glad Karen hadn’t come.
My grandfather was three stoops in from the corner, seated beside a large black woman easily twice his weight. On the railing to his right, perched above his shoulder like a raven, sat another old man, with skin like aged parchment and a halo of white hair. He was dressed in black trousers and a black short-sleeved shirt, with the white square of a priest’s collar peeking out above it like a window. His mouth was half concealed behind a shaggy white moustache, and the sole incongruous touch was the unnatural redness of his lips, almost as if he were wearing lipstick. On his lap lay a white paper bag.
Grandfather smiled when he saw me, and got to his feet. “Where’s that pretty wife of yours?” he asked. I reminded him that Karen was at work. He looked puzzled. “What, today?”
“It’s Wednesday, remember?”
“My God, you’re right!” He broke into astonished laughter. “It felt just like a Sunday!”
I alluded to the trouble I’d had finding him. Here he was, hiding in the shadows, when only one block over—east to the museum, west to Broadway—there were plenty of comfortable benches in the sun.
“Benches are for women,” he replied, with a conviction that allowed of no argument—just as, in some long-vanished luncheonette of my childhood, he’d told me, “Straws are for girls.” (What does it say about him that he believed this? And what does it say about me that since that time I’ve never used a straw?)
“Besides,” he said, “I wanted you to meet my friends. We get together here because the Father lives upstairs.” He nodded toward the old man, but introduced the woman to me first. Her name was Coralette. She was one of those wide, imperturbable creatures who take up two seats or more on the subway. It was impossible to guess her age, but I could hear, each time she spoke, the echoes of a girlhood in the South.
The man was introduced as “Father Pistachio.” This was not his name, but it was close enough. My grandfather never got his names or facts exactly right. Perhaps this had something to do with his general rebelliousness. It was certainly not a product of his age, for it had existed as long as I’d known him; half the time, in fact, he confused me with my father. Yet the names he thought up for most people were insidiously appropriate, and often stuck. Father Pistachio was one; I never saw the man without a white paper bag in his hand or, as it was now, crumpled in his lap—a bag that had been filled with those obscene-looking little red nuts, whose dye so stained his lips that he might have passed for some inhabitant of Transylvania.
But he wasn’t Transylvanian; nor was he, despite my grandfather’s introduction, a Puerto Rican. “No, no,” he said quickly, looking somewhat pained, “you no understand, my friend, I say Costa Rica my home. Paraiso, Costa Rica. City of Paradise.”
My grandfather shrugged. “So if it was paradise, what are you doing up here with an alter kocker like me?”
Coralette seemed to find this irresistibly funny, though I suspect the Yiddish escaped her. Pistachio smiled, too.
“My dear Herman,” he said, “one is not permitted to stay forever in Eden.” He winked at me, and added: “Besides, Paraiso just a name. Paradise here, in front of your face.”
I nodded dutifully, but could not help noticing the darkened corridor behind him, the graffiti on the crumbling bricks and, just above his head, a filthy window box from which a dead brown ivy plant and two long snakelike tendrils drooped. I wished he’d picked a more convincing spot.
But he was already quoting the authorities for support. “Buddha, he say, ‘Every day is a good day.’ Jesus Christ say, ‘El Reino del Padre—the Kingdom of the Father—is spread upon the earth, but men are blind and do not see it.”
“Yeah, where he say that?” asked Coralette. “Ain’t in no Bible I ever read.”
“Is in the one I read,” said Pistachio. “The Gospel According to Thomas.”
My grandfather chuckled and shook his head. “Thomas,” he said, “always this Thomas! That’s all you ever talk about.”
I knew that Bible talk had always bored my grandfather to tears—he’d said so more than once—but this rudeness seemed uncharacteristic of him, especially to a man he’d known so short a time. Seating myself against the opposite railing, facing the old priest, I searched my mind for more congenial subjects. I forget exactly what we talked of first—the unseasonably warm weather, perhaps—but I do recall that twice again there were references to some private dispute between the two of them.
The first time, I believe, we’d been talking of the news—of the start of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, in fact, which my wife and I had watched on TV the night before. Coralette appeared uninterested in the story, but it brought a curious response from Father Pistachio—“I could tell you of another queen”—and an immediate dismissal from my grandfather: “Oh, stop already with your queen!” The second time came much later, and only after the conversation had taken a number of circuitous turns, but once again the starting point was an item from the previous night’s news: in this case the repeal of Miami’s gay rights ordinance (“Faygelehs,” my grandfather snapped, “they oughta send ’em back where they came from!”), which had led to a discussion of Florida in general. Pistachio expressed an interest in settling there eventually—somehow he was under the impression that more than half its citizens spoke Spanish—but my grandfather had had a grudge against the place ever since, during the ’20s, he’d made the mistake of investing in some real estate “just off the Everglades” and had lost his shirt. “Hell,” he fumed, “they were selling land down there that was still underground!”
I let that one go by me; I could ne
ver have touched it. But it did bring a kind of response: Coralette, who read the Enquirer each week as religiously as she read the Bible, reported that a colony of derelicts had been discovered living “unnergroun”’ in the catacombs below Grand Central Station. (Six months later the story would resurface in the Times.) There were as many as forty of these derelicts, pale, frightened, and skinny, subsisting on garbage and handouts from people in the street but spending most of their time down below, amid the steam pipes and the darkness. “Now some folks be wantin’ the city to clear ’em outa there,” she said, “but it don’t make no difference to me. Fact is, I feels kinda sorry for ’em. They just a bunch o’ poor, homeless men.”
Pistachio sighed, stirred once again by some private memory. “All men are homeless,” he said. “We have journeyed for so many year that—”
“Enough with the journey!” said my grandfather. “Can’t we ever talk about anything else?”
Hoping to forestall an argument, I tried to change the subject yet again. I had noticed a fat little paperback protruding from Pistachio’s back pocket, with Diccionario printed at the top. “I see you like to come prepared,” I said, pointing to the title.
He gave a shrug both courtly and ambiguous, in true Old World style. “Is for my book,” he said. His voice was modest, but there’d been a hint of capitals in it: “My Book.”
“You’re writing something?” I asked.
He smiled. “Is already written. More than forty years ago I finish it. Then I write it over in Latin, then in portugués. Now I am retired, write in English.”
So that was why he’d come up north—to work on a translation of his book. It had already been published (at his own expense, he admitted) in Costa Rica and Brazil. The English title, itself the work of almost three days, was to be “A New and Universal Commentary on the Gospel According to Thomas, Revised in Light of Certain Excavations.”
“I write it just before I leave the Order,” he explained. “It say all I ever want to say. If I live long enough, si Dios quiere, I pray that I may see my book in the seven major languages of the world.”