Читать книгу Back where I came from - A. J. Liebling - Страница 4

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In the middle of any New York block there is likely to be one store that remains open and discreetly lighted all night. This is the undertaker’s. The undertaker or an assistant is always in attendance, waiting for something to turn up. Undertakers are sociable men; they welcome company during their unavoidable periods of idleness. High school boys study for their State Regents’ examinations in undertakers’ offices on hot June nights. The door is always open, the electric fan soothing, the whole environment more conducive to reflective scholarship than the crowded apartment where the boy lives. Policemen going off duty sometimes drop in for a visit with the undertaker before climbing into the subway for the long trip home to another part of the city.

There is no merchandise in the front part of an undertaker’s store. Usually there are a few comfortable chairs for bereaved relatives, and policemen sit in these chairs. During the day, the undertaker acts as a referee in the disputes of children. Housewives tell him their troubles; priests appeal to him to head church committees. Ten to one he becomes the biggest man in the neighborhood, like my friend Mayor Angelo Rizzo of Mulberry Street. Some New York streets have Mayors, but they are not elected. A man lives on a street until the mayoralty grows over him, like a patina. To Mayor Rizzo Elizabeth Street, although but two blocks east of Mulberry, is an alien place. For the feast of San Gennaro, who is the Mulberry Street Saint, Mayor Rizzo usually heads at least three committees and festoons his shopfront with electric lights. A celebration on Elizabeth Street leaves him unmoved. “Just one of them Sicilian saints,” he says.

Once Mayor Rizzo told me he was hard put to keep track of his constituents’ baths. “I think I will have to get a secretary,” he said, as he improved the taste of a casket salesman’s gift cigar with a swig of iced barbera wine. He sat in front of 178 Mulberry Street, enthroned upon one of the elegant portable chairs which he is prepared to furnish in any number for correct funerals. “They should call this cigar a La Palooka,” he remarked on the side.

“Mrs. Aranciata is getting crazy because she don’t remember whether Jimmy has been to Cooney^[1] Island twenty-two times or twenty-three times. So she come to me and said I should tell the kid not to go no more, because maybe that will make it an even number of times and he will get rheumatism. So I said to her, ‘But suppose he has been only twenty-two times? Then by keeping him home you will be preventing him getting on the odd number again, and the rheumatism will be your fault.’

“ ‘Oh, Madonna mia,’ she says, ‘and what will I do?’

“So I says, ‘Why don’t you forget all about it and purtend this is a new year. Start all over again and when he goes to Cooney tell me, and I will keep track of it on a piece of paper.’ So she is delighted and the next thing I know she tells all her friends and now I got about fourteen women coming in wanting me to keep score how many times the family goes swimming.

“It is like when I feed one cat spaghetti a couple of winters ago and in a week I got a waiting line of 598 cats, including a lot of Sicilian cats from Elizabeth Street.”

“But what difference does it make how many times you go swimming—at Coney or any place else?” I asked.

“What difference does it make?” shouted Mr. Rizzo. “Do you mean to tell me that you, an educated man, do not know that salt-water baths are only good for you if you go an odd number of times? Any old woman on Mulberry Street knows that much.”

To prove his point Mayor Rizzo called the cop on the beat.

“You are an Italian,” said His Honor. “Which is it lucky to take baths, an odd number or an even number?”

“Odd number,” answered the officer promptly. “My mother-in-law, she keeps count on her fingers. She would never go in the water two times, or four times, in an afternoon, but always three times or five times.”

The argument became a little involved here. Some of the folklore hydrotherapists held that each immersion counts as a bath, and if you go in the drink an odd number of times at each visit to the beach, your health will not suffer.

Others maintain that you must keep track of the total number of days’ bathing, and be sure to wind up the season on an odd.

“I remember when I was a kid an old lady from Calabria made me go in fifty-one times one summer,” said Al Gallichio, the restaurant man.

An antique and gracious lady waddling past with a bag of zucchini, was invoked as a superior authority.

“Pardon me, madame,” said Mayor Rizzo, “but I would wish to request a word with you.”

“Voluntarily,” she replied.

“When you are accustomed to go bathing, which is the more auspicious, to go an even or an uneven number of times?”

“Childish,” said the dame. “It makes no difference. But once you have begun to go you must go at least fifteen times, else your bones rot. It is for that reason I have not gone to the sea, this year, because I might not be able to afford fifteen visits.”

She was an exception, because the odd-and-even belief, in one or other of its two forms, is prevalent all the way from Bleecker Street down to Park Row.

“It is very important this year,” said the Mayor, “because we got no public bath in the neighborhood. There used to be a bathhouse on Center Market Place where the fellow would let you take a shower for a nickel. Of course, even the old-timers do not count whether a shower is odd or even. But now the Broome St. Tamanacle^[2] Church has bought the building. A lot of these old houses have no bathtubs even, so the nearest place the people can get a bath is Allen Street and they figure they might just as well go out to Cooney.

“Do I believe in this odd-and-even business?” he said, “Well, I tell you. I went swimming off the Battery just once, which is an odd number, and a kid pushed my head under and nearly drowned me, so I figured if I went back that would be an even number and even worse luck and I probably would remain drowned, so now I do all my swimming in a bathtub.”

[1]	This is the New York pronunciation of Coney Island. It seems to me as noteworthy as the Texan fashion of saying “Hughston” for Houston.

[2]	A regional pronunciation of Tabernacle.