Читать книгу Back where I came from - A. J. Liebling - Страница 12

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Until the end of prohibition there were certain blocks in New York with virtually identical speakeasies in every house. The block I remember best was west of Eighth Avenue, in the Forties. The houses were all brownstone, and the speakeasies all had entrances under the stoops. They were not primarily stand-up-at-the-bar speakeasies, although practically every one had a small bar in the kitchen, where customers paused for a quick one on the way back from the men’s room. They were restaurants with vaguely French table-d’hote dinners and Italian proprietors, and everybody you met knew one where the cooking was the real thing. “The place doesn’t look like much,” you would be told, “but you ought to taste the food. Did you ever have crepes Suzette?” In those basements middle-class New Yorkers were taught that the ultimate in desserts was a pancake that burned with a wan flame. If you let yourself be persuaded to try a new place, you found yourself in a speakeasy exactly like the one three doors down the street, where you went habitually. The only difference would be that the proprietor was named Victor instead of Jean, or Emilio instead of Roberto. The proprietors in the block ran to names like these; never Frank, or Joe, or Al. That was Mulberry Street stuff—not chic. In almost all these places the dinner was a dollar and a half until 1930, when it got down to a dollar and a quarter. Then, in about 1932, it dropped to a dollar. Wine was a dollar and a half a bottle white or red, during the good days, and a dollar later. Some places charged sixty cents for a highball, the extra dime representing pure snobbishness.

Our crowd used to favor a place on this block called Aldo’s. I do not remember why we started going there, but after a while it became a habit. Aldo Bulotti was in the Polyclinic Hospital with some vague ailment at the time of our first visits, and later he went back to Italy and died. His wife, a woman named Maria, ran the place while he was sick, and kept on running it after his death. She was four feet eleven inches tall and weighed a hundred and sixty pounds, and she had bobbed hair set in a series of abrupt permanent waves about half an inch apart. She was an agreeable woman. Mrs. Bulotti had two children: a boy, eight, and a girl, five. She lived with them in Corona, out in Queens. She did not think a speakeasy was any place to raise children. An Italian doctor lived somewhere in the four stories above the basement, and twice, while we were going to Aldo’s, he was deported for practicing medicine without a licence. He came back both times. The doctor had needle-pointed mustaches and a skin like old, yellowed paper. He ate dinner at Aldo’s most nights and was always glad to join parties of other customers, especially if they included young women. He was a real doctor, graduated from the University of Naples, he once told me, but he had never learned much English and, besides, he was so old that his medical theory might have been considered obsolete. For these, and I suppose for other reasons, he was afraid to take the Medical Board examinations.

Aldo’s was a small place, even for a speakeasy of that sort. Maria had one waiter and a cook. She kept the bar herself. She changed waiters often, but Bruno, the cook, seemed to be permanent. He was an Umbrian, very fair for an Italian, with a sharp, tired face. A widower, he got on very well with Maria. When you came into Aldo’s, there was a hall leading from the door straight to the kitchen, and there were two small, connecting rooms that opened off the hall. In the front room were five tables, a disused fireplace, and a mirror, and in the room between that and the kitchen were three tables and a painting of a scene on Lake Como.

Along one wall of the kitchen was a bench, with a trellis over it, and across from that a bar. Also in the kitchen were two tables with checkered cloths, and some of the customers preferred to sit there, where they could talk to Maria and Bruno while they were eating. That way they could hear all about the customers in the front rooms, since Maria and Bruno carried on a running discussion of them, with the waiter joining in from time to time. The customers included a number of married women who liked to talk to strangers about their troubles, and a beautiful girl named Ruth, who told people she was a private secretary and was always busting into other people’s parties. There were also several discreet couples who chose the smallest room when they could get a table there and argued in whispers until they began to feel good, when they would come out in the kitchen and join the other parties. Several of the steadiest customers came from Reuters, the British news agency. Reuters’ office is over on the other side of town, but people used to migrate into those West Side blocks from everywhere to take their dinners. One of the Reuters men was impressive because of his habit of sitting all alone in the front room, staring at the curtained windows and drinking brandy and black coffee out of a tall glass. His name was Skerry. He was a very dignified gentleman with an Old World courtliness. Occasionally, after a good many mazagrans and brandies, he would poke his head into the kitchen before he left for the night and make a little speech to the people at the bar. “By this means,” he would say, swaying gently, “I disinfect myself from the American turmoil.” Then he would bow and go home. We always felt that he was doing all he could to uphold the traditions of the Empire, like the legendary Englishman in the Borneo outpost who dresses every night for dinner in order to keep from going native.

Maria made her wine at home in Corona out of California grapes. Some of the customers were allergic to the wine and fell on their heads, but others, thank God, could stand a lot of it. I think it was in these speakeasies that “allergy” got started on its way to being a common word. Everybody, it seemed, was allergic to some particular kind of liquor. You never met a man in a speakeasy who was merely an incompetent drinker. He always said, “I can drink any amount of Scotch or rye, but I’m allergic to brandy.” Or else, “I can hold my hard liquor, but when I drink red wine, I never remember what happens.” One night a man named Jim, who Maria said was a very sweet gentleman except that he couldn’t drink gin, was sitting in the kitchen with his wife. He was drinking gin. Pretty soon he threatened to tear his wife’s clothes off. She said, “Go ahead!” very scornfully, not thinking that he would do it, and he did tear them off, all but a brassiere. The outraged woman rushed from the kitchen into the front room, in search of privacy. It happened, however, that Skerry, the courtliest of the Reuters men, was sitting there alone, drinking and thinking. He turned his face to the wall. “What a big surprise for Mr. Skerry!” Bruno remarked when he told me about it the next evening. Maria lent the woman a coat and put her in a taxi, and Skerry soon after went back to England and got married. In time he will tell incredulous juniors this anecdote of his life in the United States under prohibition, and they will say, among themselves, that it’s a bit thick—the old boy’s in his dotage.

When repeal came, I didn’t bother my head much about Aldo’s. I happened to walk through the block a few weeks afterward, and I noticed that a dozen of the speakeasies had secured licences, hung out signs, and opened up, but that Maria hadn’t. From then on I took it for granted that she had not been able to raise the fee, and had gone out of business. Then, about a month ago, I found myself in the old neighborhood and I got to thinking with some tenderness of Maria and Bruno, and I walked around to the house where Aldo’s had been. The front of the place looked as dismal and taciturn as ever, with all the shades drawn in the barred basement windows. But I thought that the recurrent Italian physician might be living in the house, and that he might be able to tell me what had become of Mrs. Bulotti. Perhaps she had opened a little café in a more prepossessing part of town, I thought, and it would be fun to visit her.

I therefore walked down the two steps from pavement level and rang the bell beside the basement grille. Maria herself came to the door. She was dazzled by the daylight, and peered out warily until I pressed my face against the bars. Then she grinned, and released the catch by pressing an electric button. It seemed to me that time in its flight turned backward to 1928. “Come in the kitch’, Mista Lieba,” she said. “Maybe you like a drink. Bruno!” she yelled down the hall. “Itsa Mista Lieba!” I followed her. The door to the front room was ajar, and I could see the familiar tables laid with their white cloths. Nothing in the kitchen had changed: the copper saucepans hanging above the range, the trellis with its artificial yellow vine leaves, the red-and-black lacquer bar, and on the liquor shelf the pink lamp made out of a French cordial bottle.

Bruno, in his white cap and apron, was slicing eggplant with a long knife, just as I remembered him in a previous gastronomic existence. Maria bought a drink of Courvoisier and smiled as I looked about me. “Just the same as ever, eh?” she said. “I got the whole house now. The Doctor, he’sa gone back to Italy for good. I got the children with me, living on the first floor. Dino is in the third year ’igh school. ’E’s seventeen. Gilda, she’s a freshman. She’s fourteen. I rent out eight rooms on the other floors. Bruno and me, we do pretty good now.”

She has never really got out of the speakeasy business, she told me. Some of the old customers, like me, had taken her retirement for granted and gone off to licenced restaurants. She didn’t see them any more. But a few, either from habit or because they liked personal attention while drinking, had continued to come. Now there were a good many new clients, introduced by the old ones. Some people have never got used to drinking in public restaurants, it seems. The atmosphere is too formal and grasping. Even in reformed speakeasies that have tried to retain the old spirit, the management takes a cold, impersonal attitude toward disorderly conduct. The owners, Maria says with scorn, are afraid that the Alcohol Board will revoke their licences.

If Maria had bought a licence, she said, she would have had to open her door to everybody. On that block, this would inevitably have meant invasion by uncouth types. “Truckadriv’!” Maria said. “They cannot mix with my people. My people would desert me. I gotta keep my place nice.”

It sounded reasonable to me. I asked her if she wasn’t afraid of being arrested. Maria said that she was less worried now than she had been during prohibition. About half the places on the block had opened as saloons, she told me, and the rest operated as speakeasies. They all got along amicably. The saloon-keepers didn’t want any more open drinking places on the block, and so, since they knew the speakeasy trade came from outside the neighborhood, they didn’t complain about the speakeasies.

Even if there was a raid, possession of legitimately bottled liquor was no offence. If inspectors remarked on the quantity, Maria could say that the men who lived upstairs boarded with her and liked a drink with their meals. She never sold to strangers. Anyway, the mere circumstance that a stranger would want to buy a drink at a private house nowadays would suffice to warn the least wary proprietor. As she is not subject to licence regulations, Maria stays open until six o’clock in the morning, while legal bars close at four. This is a great convenience to some of her customers.

Naturally, the business is on a small scale, but expenses also are low. Repeal was such a blow to brownstone rental values that she leases the entire house for one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. She used to pay one hundred and seventy-five dollars for the basement. The eight roomers, who pay four or five dollars a week each, furnish enough money for the rent for the whole building, including Maria’s own living quarters. It is no longer necessary to invest money in liquor in large lots, or in tons of grapes for wine-making. She can buy whiskey by the bottle and wine by the gallon at the liquor store in the next block. At thirty-five cents a drink for whiskey and forty-five cents a pint for wine, there’s a nice profit. The dinner is a dollar, and of course there’s a profit in that. Maria waits on the tables herself now. It agrees with her, apparently, because her weight has gone up to two hundred pounds. She says that she averages about a dozen customers at dinner. There are generally one or two afternoon clients who want seclusion, and then there are usually a couple of drinkers who stay on after four in the morning. It all amounts to twenty or thirty dollars a day, and half of that is profit.

I stayed for dinner and we talked. Bruno likes it better than working as assistant chef in some Italian restaurant. When there are no customers, he plays dominoes with one of the roomers, or reads Italian sporting papers, which are brought to him by stewards on the Rex and the Conte di Savoia. He used to be in the merchant marine, and the place is not far from the piers, so he keeps up his acquaintance. Twice a week he goes to boxing shows.

Every so often, without any particular reason, an old patron will return to the house just as I did, Maria told me. It’s like coming back to the scene of a crime, or one’s childhood. Sometimes the oldsters even pay prohibition-time tabs. One of them, a week earlier, had paid her seventeen dollars which he had owed since 1932.

A woman came in and sat down at the table next to me in the kitchen. Maria introduced us; her name, as nearly as I could make out, was Mrs. Buttercup. Soon we were all talking, as in the good days. Mrs. Buttercup told me that she had a daughter twenty-one years old, to whom she had presented a Boston terrier for Christmas, but the daughter, just because she wanted to go to California, had returned the terrier to her, Mrs. Buttercup, although she knew full well that the Buttercup apartment in London Terrace was no place for a dog. “No sense of responsibility,” Mrs. Buttercup said. She had an irritating way of repeating herself and she was not particularly handsome, but she had an archaic charm, like a Gibson girl. She drank Old-Fashioned cocktails throughout her meal. I found that when a client, especially a lady, is approaching the saturation point, Maria still dilutes the drinks, although of course she does not reduce the prices on the check, as that would arouse suspicion. The place soothed me. Bruno’s chicken en casserole and his cannelloni were really rather good. After all, one needn’t eat the crepes Suzette. Before I left, Maria told Mrs. Buttercup and me about a woman in the front room the other night whose husband had got so angry at her drinking that he knocked out one of her front teeth. Then he had had to pay sixty dollars to have it put back, Maria said, because he couldn’t stand her smile without it.