He was giving a demonstration, I realized. With his helpless, implausible smile, he was showing me his lapsed world of women. He was broken, and he shook with medication, but he dreamed, it was clear, of one more splintered vial of amyl nitrate on the sweaty bedclothes of a praying mantis from Fort Lee, New Jersey. He had confected a ride with a leggy blonde in a black, convertible Jeep on US 1 in Maine. And if the foreman of the forestry crew would talk to him in front of her tired and resentful men, he would chat up that lady and touch, as if by accident, the flesh of her sturdy, tanned arms.
That was why I backed another pace. That was why I turned and went along the duck walk behind my father, leaving the wreckage of the maple tree and walking toward my car. I wanted to be driving away from him—locked inside with the windows shut and the radio up—before he could tip his cap, and show me his ruined, innocent face, and steal what was left of my life.
VESPERS
THIS WAS THE YEAR in which Ronald Reagan thought to honor the S S dead with a wreath in a German graveyard, and when I was in charge of funding grants to sculptors and musicians in both Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. We had a dozen proposals on, shall we say, the theme of remembering who, from 1936 to 1945, had died the most and worst. And Bert Wragg, Jr., had brought me with him, for luck and for sex with an older woman, while he interviewed and auditioned in New York.
I rang my brother and missed him at his law firm on Clinton Street. Soon he rang back, chivvying me, at once, to recollect.
“Everything goes in a circle,” he said. “Remember? Remember when Daddy said that in Prospect Park when you got lost?”
“Since when did you call him Daddy? We never called him Daddy, did we? And I was six years old, Ira.”
Ira said, “Fine. Pop. Fine. Six. You remember calling him Pop?”
“Of course.”
“The point is not what I happen to be calling my father in conversation with his daughter,” he said.
“This is not a conversation. This is an interborough harangue.”
“Now, I believe, you move on to calling it blackmail. Am I right? As in emotional blackmail, et cetera. Or would that scare the newsboy off? Getting involed with a family where verbal cockfights, in a manner of speaking, are always taking place?”
“You want me to repeat that? So anyone who happens to be standing within six or eight feet could hear me saying newsboy?”
“Up to you,” Ira said. “All I hear is people objecting to every other word I use.”
“You’re the one calling names.”
“You’re making me seduce my own sister.”
“That, big fella, is what they call incest. It’s illegal. It’s immoral. It’s disgusting.”
“’At’s amore,” he sang, in not too bad an imitation of Dean Martin lightly toasted on sixties TV.
It was a routine we had used when we were in one another’s company, with dates, during his years in college—Desi and Lucy, but as brother and sister, the ditzy redhead and the serious, clever, somewhat bamboozled guy. He was between Wife Two and a paunchy, sad time of dating widows and the former wives of other cuffed but not quite beaten men. I was going to remain unmarried forever, though I had no interest in solitude. I was back in New York—in Manhattan, to my brother’s disappointment—while he was in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, and determined to take me and Bert Wragg, Jr., from our hotel on Central Park South back to Flatbush, where Ira and I had grown up, sometimes even together.
I said, “We’d have to go tonight. We’re really booked.”
Bert Wragg, Jr., sat at the foot of the bed and crossed his legs. They were bare, except for navy-blue garters with a red stripe through the center. He was putting on high navy socks that would come over his calf. I had not seen garters on a man since I was a blackboard monitor in the sixth-grade class of Miss Fredericks in P.S. 152. The man had been my father, and I had peeked around the corner of my parents’ bedroom to win a bet: Ira had insisted our father—whom we did call Pop—put his horn-rimmed glasses on before his socks, and I had bet on socks before sight. I won, and I provoked a one-inch rise in my father’s bushy brows. We used to wager, too, on who could bring his elastic forehead higher. Ira usually won. He won the baseball cards I bought to cause him to covert them. I didn’t care to carry or collect them, though I liked the waxy taste of the gum with which they were packed, and they caused Ira to bet with me, which meant that he had to talk to me as if I was not from the Planet Jerk. So: Pop, the garters, and Bert Wragg, Jr., naked from the waist down, his penis regarding me from the nest of his folded groin, and I thought of the circle Ira said our father had described, and I agreed to subject my anchorman-in-waiting, my boyfriend from the middling market of Minneapolis–St. Paul by way of Ames, Iowa, and Syracuse University to what would at best be a sentimental journey, and to what at the very worst would be a long night with Ira Bloom.
I heard him snort into the phone and whisper, “Myrna, can he really hear you?”
“The newsboy? Yes.”
“Are you in love?”
“More than likely.”
“A healthy kind of love, or the dark, clammy lust you get yourself into?”
“Latter, no doubt.”
“So you call one thing another? Love is lust? Or vicey versey?”
“I think there isn’t a y sound, Ira. Just—”
“Could you listen without correcting me? Incorrect as I doubtless am? Could you listen, please? Just, are you coming with the newsboy or without? And I am not being raunchy, I did not intend to be raunchy, and don’t even begin to correct my raunch. Are you or are you not. Period.”
“We will both be downstairs. We will walk outside in, say forty minutes.”
“Half an hour, max,” he said.
“We will ride to Brooklyn. We will look. We will then take you to dinner. So you should—wait a minute. Bert? Does Ira need a tie?”
“Not for the Park Bistro,” Bert said.
Ira said, “I heard him. How does a talking head on Minnesota TV, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, yawn, know what to wear in my city?”
“Maybe that’s why they’re trying him out in New York, Ira.”
Bert had stood up, and I thought I must look like a mean bit of business in my open, pearly rayon robe to have aroused him so. Of course, I thought, it could also be the thought of his own ruggedly gorgeous face on many millions of TV screens in the greater New York metropolitan area. That’s what I liked about Bert Wragg, Jr. He was not above regarding himself in the optimum light, and he was young enough to find his gaze persuasive.
IN THE LONG black car, a Buick, Ira told us, we headed downtown. When we passed Delancey, I knew Ira was taking us over the East River on the Brooklyn Bridge. It was not quite direct, but it would give him a chance to point out to Bert a landmark beloved of hayseeds.
I’d imagined myself next to Ira, with Bert hidden away from my brother in the shadows of the backseat. But Bert had gone for the front, neglecting to hold my door, almost shouldering me out of the way. His awkward posture reminded me of something I couldn’t name, and it wasn’t until the end of the afternoon that I remembered: a boy, my date, a Nelson Someone in a workingman’s bar in Poughkeepsie, stepping in front of me to fight with someone who had expressed distate—quite rightly, I thought at the time—for college kids gone slumming.
Bert said, “Ira, I’m curious.”
“Speak to me, Bert. I’m here as a—what is it, Myrna, in museums and churches?”
“Docent, dear. Little wives and widows who wear white gloves and show you the stained-glass windows.”
“There we are, Ira,” Bert said. “It just seemed—still seems, really—we’d have gone bit more directly by way of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, then the Prospect Expressway, then maybe Church Avenue up to your old neighborhood.”
“Really?” Ira said. “Really and truly?”
Bert shrugged. I heard the wide wales of his tan corduroy sportcoat rasp. He wore it with jeans, a canvas off-tan shir
t from Peterman, and the navy-blue socks held up by the navy-blue-and-red-striped garters.
Ira said, “I thought maybe seeing the bridge was worth the loss of six or eight seconds.”
“Absolutely,” Bert said. He put his left hand up on the bench seat so that it hung behind Ira. I took it. I leaned forward and put his index finger, very slowly, into my mouth. When I released it and sat back, Ira’s eyes were waiting for mine in his rearview mirror.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” each man replied, one with pleasure and one without.
I watched the back of Ira’s head, now that I had seen how familiar his eyes were in their web of lines and folds and the soft flesh in gray-brown crescents beneath that testified to his insomnia. His head had become our pop’s, of course, with the same untamed Howdy-Doody wings of wild fringe a few inches above the pointed ears that hung back around his skull like the folded wings of sleeping bats. His head in silhouette was long and slender, and I thought he’d lost weight because the collar of his shirt seemed not to touch his neck. His hands on the steering wheel were long, like Pop’s. Unlike our father, he murmured to himself as he steered the car: “Uh-huh,” as he turned, “Ah-hm” as he straightened our course again, “Uh-huh” when he checked our location by the street-corners signs. He sang his steering lightly, but with it he confirmed himself to me as a genuine eccentric. I wondered how someone saw me.
I called, “Stop!” We were on Ocean Avenue in middling spring at four o’clock. The air was gathering itself for dusk, perhaps just beginning to take on the weight of reflection of the dirty bricks on the six- and seven-story apartment buildings. Traffic was growing denser with the air that poured invisible yet thick onto Ocean Avenue in a section of Flatbush once called Kensington, the streets of which ran to Midwood, where we’d lived. I’d used to ride my Schwinn on its ticking gears to the gas station to our right.
Ira kept the car in the street, his blinker on, traffic pouring around us. “You don’t want to pull in there,” he said. “They pump the gas and then they keep the car, the schwarzim.”
“African-Americans?” Bert apparently felt required to say. His a, from his days in Syracuse, had the lag you could hear in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, even Chicago: a flattened gagging that sounded as if the speaker snarled. Bert Wragg would never snarl. But I wondered if his career could be threatened by the bray of the Great Lakes.
“No, mostly Haitians, as a matter of fact,” Ira said. “And, probably, most of them not citizens. But you can call them African-Americans if you like.”
“I used to put air in my tires,” I said. “And they had a cooler inside where you could get one of those stubby Cokes in the green glass bottle.”
Bert said, “Myrna, those bottles are real antiques.”
“So’s she,” Ira said.
Bert waggled his fingers at me behind Ira’s back. I placed nothing in my mouth.
Two short, slender dark-skinned men stood at the office, where I’d used to pay a dime for my soda.
Bert said, “Their hands are behind their backs.
“They don’t want you to be frightened,” Ira said.
“They’re armed,” Bert said. “Is that correct?”
“Boy, are they armed,” my brother said, in almost a friendly tone.
He pulled out into traffic, and I watched them watch us, alien beings in our time machine. He took a right turn quickly, and then he slowed down because soon—I could feel the car begin to turn, I thought, before Ira murmured at the wheel—we were coming to a left-hand turn, and then the block on which we’d lived. It was as if we had gone across a border, through a checkpoint such as the ones Bert, in his stiff tan correspondent’s trench coat, had passed through, once, bringing home the bad news, for the sake of all Minneapolis–St. Paul, on the killings in Herzegovina. If they gave him the job in New York as backup anchor, and if I left my job and came with him, we would have to build him closets no matter where he lived. His raincoats took up more room than my entire wardrobe.
“No more African-Americans,” I said.
“Whether of African, American, or otherwise descent,” Bert told me.
“Welcome to medieval Poland,” Ira said. “Lubavitchers, all you can eat.” Tall thin boys in black suits walked with heavy fathers in ditto, while behind them on their broad hips came the girls and women. Everyone seemed pale. No one seemed to be away at work. It felt, on our block, as if we had parked in a village square on a market day. We were paid little attention, although two girls in their late teens, wearing cloth coats that seemed to have belonged to large men, stared at Bert and giggled their embarrassment into their hands.
“They live here?” I heard myself say.
“Some of them live in our house here,” Ira said, and I heard the sorrow in him for the passage of time, for the dispossession he had suffered. There was the three-story stucco house, in all its broad shelteredness, a fortress of the rising middle class of 1910 who had built it, and then in the 1950s again, so that our mother had once referred to our block, with an immigrant daughter’s sense of arrival, as The Suburbs. Ocher-colored paint had been replaced with tan, and the dark brown paint of the screened-in porch had been replaced with forest green. A dogwood tree that Pop had planted after a hurricane took down one of the sycamores had in turn been taken down. The other shade tree, across the walk on its little lawn, had been hacked and trimmed, but was surviving. The prickly hawthorn bushes that had lined the walk to our brick stoop were gone. I had hated them, because whenever I played stoop ball by myself on the walk, the ball would go into the bushes and I would have to wait for Ira to show his invulnerability by plunging his hand into the scratchy hedge. Then I would have to wait while he feinted throwing it to me, and then I would have to chase it when he tossed it over my head.
We were parked next to the fire hydrant outside the house we had lived in for eighteen years of my life, and in the car, between us, it was as if someone were showing those sprockety, ratcheting 8mm silent movies that families like ours used for their grappling with time, capturing in overexposed orange the flesh of children who would one day dissolve into the silt and swamp and thinning memory of what had been East Eighteenth Street, and what had been childhood, and what had been Rasbin’s Meat Market on Avenue J, or the fish store with flounder set out on ice, or the elevated tracks of the BMT on Avenue H above the candy store with its wall of ten-cent comic books. Ira, in the front, looked to his right, past Bert, who had turned, politely, to stare at large old houses on little lawns. I, in the back, regarded them both and I studied my house and waited for clues about what I ought to feel. In the leather cockpit of Ira’s car, I felt our mother in her belted orange house dress, our father in his garters and his boxer shorts, our well-furnished childhood rooms, with doors we little people of privilege could shut at will against each other and, crucially, our parents. I did not, however, taste emotions. Perhaps they would come later, I thought, and then I would clutch myself against the ache.
A man had appeared to stand outside the car. He was tall and broad, and I bent to the window to see all of him. He wore a wrinkled black suit, a rumpled white shirt, and a gray straw fedora with a ribbon that reminded me of Bert’s garters. The frames of his glasses were clear plastic. His smooth-shaven face looked responsive to humor. He was someone I would ask for directions in a foreign country, I thought. It was dusk in New York, and he was home from work, I figured, and here we were, parked outside his house. He was the kind of man who came down steps to defend his home. Ira turned his key to send a current through the car, and Bert pushed the switch that rolled his window down.
I waited for a torrent of Yiddish, or Hebrew. I waited for thick, guttural inquiries or demands. The householder bent, straightened, bent again to stare, and muttered.
He bent again and looked in. His face made it clear that unlikelihood had descended onto Brooklyn. He said, “Bert Wragg!”
Ira said, “Son of a bitch.”
Bert never hesi
tated. “Hi, hello. Now, where do we know each other from?” As he spoke, he opened the door and stepped out and up. Ira looked at me, and I looked back. We should have laughed, and then, I thought, it would have been all right. As it was, he stared suspiciously, and I offered my expression of utter innocence, and we locked each other out.
By the time I joined them, Bert was introducing Heschie, short for Herschel I decided, who had rented from a doctor’s widow for six years on Cleveland Avenue in St. Paul. Heschie, who then decided we should call him Hesch, had bought the house of our parents from the junior high school science teacher who had bought it from them.
“His wife died,” he told us. “Who needs a house without a wife?”
Ira nodded his agreement. “I used to bounce a ball against those steps,” he said.
“No, that was me. I’m the girl who used to live here. I used to live here when I was a girl,” I said.
Heschie had a wen on his forehead and it seemed to pulse red when he was pleased. Nodding to me, he turned to Bert. He boomed, in a voice that sounded nothing like Bert’s but surely was meant to be, “‘Good evening, this is Bert Wragg. And I have news for you.’” He said, “Imagine, in the flesh, with behind him in tow a Jewish girl from the neighborhood, Mr. Bert Wragg, the voice of all Minnesota.”
“I grew up other places, Hersch. I’m no more Minnesota than you are.”
“Except,” Hesch said, pulling at his jacket sleeves as if his body chafed in the dark gabardine, “my boy and my girl, so they wouldn’t talk like me or Ada, this of course is the name of my wife, they listened to you when they finished with dinner before I came home. I was in Special Collections at the U: Hebraica. I’m educated, but not so religious, miss, so you’re safe. Here is no barbarism or from Luddites or other refusers of progress. We own and operate two word processors, each possessing sixty-four megs of RAM, and I am tenured at Brooklyn College, just a walk from here—well, of course you know where is a walk and isn’t. A walk in the jungle, perhaps, if you know what I mean, but nevertheless a walk. But—but—ah: the subject at hand. Raised as we were from backward and Orthodox, we could not instruct our children in acclimating to the local mores, the patterns of speech. You understand. But you, Mr. Bert Wragg, you were their teacher. Thanks to you, my daughter—a girl, and in Minnesota!—became president of her seventh-grade class.”
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 32