Читать книгу Union Square - Adrian Koesters - Страница 11

Part Two: Young Mr. Emerson.

Thursday Morning: She’s Like the Swallow

Young Mr. Emerson had already lived the life that everyone would be living ten years or so ahead. He had just celebrated his fiftieth birthday two days or weeks or so ago. He lived two doors down from Petie in the house his mother and father had raised him in, but now, excepting one cat, he had had the place to himself for almost four decades. Waking, he realized it was not remotely near ten, shut his eyes, determined that he would stay there in bed until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and that time had better be closer to ten than not, or somebody was going to hear about it. He had never met her but knew who Carmen was, and wondered what she might be up to. If she’s up, she ain’t been to bed yet, he thought, and then whistled lightly for the cat to jump up and lay on his chest, which it did. Carmen fell out of his mind as routinely as she seemed to enter it. She was too young to ever have been one of his regulars, when he had regulars.

He lay for what felt like all day, all the while his eyes shut tight. The kitten had apparently found something to eat, it wasn’t fussing at him to feed it. The motor of purring and its heat right under his chin weren’t annoying enough to swat it away. He settled a bit deeper into the covers, and began to think about his mother.

Young Mr. Emerson’s mother had been quite an accomplishment. She was very pretty, with soft light hair that was neither flaxen nor gold nor any kind of yellow, but also not simply brown, fawn, or any other word that he knew. His father, Big Mr. Emerson, used to sing to her, “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” to which she’d reply, “Oh, Mister. My hair is not bloody brown.” When Young declared one morning, around the age of five, in the interests of emulating her and of saying something with exactly the correct intention, that he was not interested in having any bloody eggs, she turned to him and sighed, and said, “Oh, Young. I guess you had better go get the belt.”

He cried, and screamed, but she’d said nothing. She sat down opposite to him at the dining table, watching him, her elbows on the edge of the table, which he already knew one must not ever do if one were a well-mannered little boy, and pressed the tips of her fingers together below her nose, her eyebrows raised just slightly. He stopped howling, stared at her with bleak eyes, then slid down and went to get his father’s thick brown belt, the one he only wore on Saturdays when he wore his awful slacks, the ones he got drunk in once a week when he would sit out on the back steps and drink tumbler after tumbler of something brown, something that made his breath smell sharp and sour, and made him shove his mother around and kiss her for what Young knew had to be far too long.

When Young returned with the belt, his mother held it for a moment, looking at him speculatively, then dealt him one blow across the face that split his lip and cut his eyelid. She neither ministered to these wounds nor spoke of them again. From that point on, when she told him to go get the belt, she might strike him with it, or she might take it from him, in the manner of accepting a plate of food or a dishrag she’d asked for, and hold on to it, stroking it, staring into space. Young would never know which she’d do, and by the time he was seven, he didn’t feel anything about it. He knew that he must stand before her until she gave him leave to move, and this might not come for ten minutes, or half an hour, and that at the end of whatever time it had been, he was as likely to be hit as not. It was as if his presence meant nothing to her. Still, he figured out quickly that he was most in danger of the belt if he said a thing she judged he should not, and this he solved easily. He simply ceased to speak at all, other than to say, “Yes, ma’am,” or “No, ma’am,” but pronouncing each judiciously, so as not to convey the impression that he wished to be spiteful, or arrogant, or that he didn’t know who he thought he was. He was sure who he thought he was, in any event.

She had died in time for Young’s father not to have gone from being Big Emerson to Old Emerson, but she had never called him Big. Her last word in fact had been “Mister,” spoken clearly from the small hospital bed in the ward where sixteen-year-old Young had been allowed to visit her. She had not had the influenza but something else that had come on quickly, but Big insisted should be treated for at the hospital. It was judged Mrs. Emerson was not going to live, and Big declared that whether he would catch ’flu by going to the hospital or not, Young was going to be there in the room with her at the end. They stood side by side at the foot of the bed, his mother’s eyes on his father, she trying to say something, God only knew what, and all Young could think of was where he last left the big brown belt, which over the years had been kept though it had been some years since it was long enough to span his father’s waist. Then she said it, “Mister,” and she died with her eyes open, breathing out a long, slight breath.

Young’s father didn’t bother to call for a nurse or a doctor, but yanked Young by the elbow and said, “Come, boy, we’re getting out of here.” He gave Young his first hard drink then, at the first tavern they came to on Fayette Street, and they stayed a long time. They told the barman it was a family wake, and he took a drink with them in sympathy. Young had thrown up several times before Big realized he ought to get some food in the boy, but by then Young couldn’t keep anything down, and at last they staggered home to find dishes still in the sink, sheets tousled on the beds, and his mother’s pocketbook laying on the kitchen table.

Young had swayed on his feet, holding on to the back of a chair so as not to fall down on the floor. Big opened the bag, pulled out a handful of things, tossed them on the table, and out of this collection picked up and opened a coin purse, where he found only a few copper coins and a hairpin. He whistled between his teeth, then took the bag again and clenched the bottom of it. He grunted, turned the bag inside out, and tore at the silk lining of it with his teeth, which nearly made Young cry, as if he were watching his father take his teeth to his mother’s very flesh. But then Big was proved to be right, for paper cash came out of the slit in the silk like a caesarian birth, more than one hundred dollars, and Big set them on the table as if they had been holy cards and he a convert or a grandmother. He looked at them with affection, too, Young saw, and then he dug deep into his own pockets, where he always kept every piece of money he had. He planted these right next to Mrs. Emerson’s newborn cash, and sat down and appeared to think.

“I don’t know how she done this,” he said finally, “but it’s a good thing all around she was smart.” He looked up at Young, and said with pride and something proprietary that later Young would know emanated from love and desire, both as alive as they must have been the day he first saw her and the afternoon they had wed.

“It’s the reason I married her. She was pretty, but the pretty girls flocked round me like bees in them days. She was the smart one.”

Young had also not said a word to his father since he was seven years old, letting his yes’s and no’s to his mother stand in for all the conversation he could muster with either of them, but now he said, “Oh,” and his father nodded as if they’d been speaking to and understanding each other all along, as if Big the man and Young the boy were bound by an honorable understanding of self that was perfect, and that this made everything all right, which Young felt that it did.

Big picked up two gold dollars and several pieces of the paper, along with a few pennies and the hairpin.

“I’m going to leave you with all this,” he said, pointing to what remained on the table. “Tomorrow, take the streetcar down to the bank, and have the banker change one of these”—he picked up one of the bills—“into coins and change. When you run out, go back down and do the same thing. Don’t spend the gold coins until you have to. When you run out all the way, it’ll be time to get a job. Nobody from the police or the schools will come looking for you here. Don’t drink at home, and don’t ever bring a girl here. Thomas over on Pratt will help you get the right things to eat, and Barry down the road won’t let you get too drunk. When you’re seventeen, tell Pauline I sent you.”

He then thrust his hand out, and Young took it, and he said, “Goodbye. I’ll see you again, God willing.”

And then he was gone, and Young knew that he was going to be happier than he had ever been in his life.

Shabbat Shalom

Young Mr. Emerson discovered that he enjoyed cleaning and washing up for himself, and when he had asked, Thomas, who owned the little dry-grocer’s in the next block, called his wife out to the counter, and she told him how to order milk from the milk wagon, and ice, and how to haggle for vegetables when the colored men came around leading their mule-drawn wagons. She told him which dry goods he should keep on hand, and which it was better to come up to their place for every once in a while, and she told him what to use in the event, heaven forbid, he should find himself connected to a dirty girl. Thomas told him not to smoke at home, but would sell him a cigarillo that he could smoke by parts at the tavern.

He hadn’t gone out to the tavern right away, mostly because he was worried how drinking would deplete his money. He found, though, that one of those changed bills would get him through an entire week or two of spending his money on damned well anything he could think of to spend it on, and that he could drink quite a bit on one coin, and soon he was at the tavern three and four nights out of the week. No one mentioned his youth, no one seemed to notice, or if they did, perhaps they thought this was the best way for an orphan who was nearly a grown man to settle his affairs. If he needed a new collar or shoelaces or tooth powder from Woolworth’s, he’d take a bill, and they would change it for him just as if he’d gone to the bank, and that would save him a trolley ride downtown. He’d seen Pauline, and he thought he’d like to turn seventeen just as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

It had one day, and he had promptly fallen in love and asked to marry her despite the difference in their ages. When she’d laughed at him he hadn’t minded, but pulled her over to him again and said, “No hard feelings?” and that was possibly the first time in his life he’d made a joke to someone else at his own expense. He did run out of money eventually, but kept all of the gold coins in a cigar box as a memento of his mother, who now had you asked him was the embodiment of the glories of the saints Elizabeth and Ann and even the Blessed Mother. He found a job that might turn into something, running errands first for the Western Union, and then selling papers for the News American, where he found luck covering funerals and writing obituaries, eventually famed on the floor for the particular elegance and lack of sentimentality in his elegiac style. He had been too young for the first war, and was too old for the second. He had been happy, and productive, and had courted not a few very nice women, at least four of whom would have been very glad to marry him, but he never put the question to them.

And then, on what would become the last day of the second Great War, he had woken up, tried to get out of bed, and found he could not. He had been reading the reports that were coming in from Europe and Asia, and what he read there he identified with in some curiously personal way, although he despised Jews and colored people and had never previously had any reason to change his mind about them, never having come in their way other than to buy things off the nigger carts or have his shoes shined or his hair oiled in the men’s room. When he had come across one photograph of a little boy in Berlin, with a yellow star on his knitted vest sweater and a large bandage on his forehead, Young felt a deep sense of injustice in his heart and soul, more real than anything he had felt since he was small and had stopped talking, and was sick nearly to the point of expelling his dinner onto the archives room floor.

He stayed in bed all that day, despite hunger and needing the toilet. He slept, woke, daydreamed about who knew what, slept again. It wasn’t until he knew that he had to get a drink and that there was none in the house that he forced himself to roll off the bed. From there, he crawled to the dresser and extracted some socks, and stood, staggered to the bathroom, used the toilet, and spit blood into the basin. He looked at himself, as if from a great distance, he thought, as if the entire world had gone quiet and blank. It was novel, and he realized in some part of himself that he enjoyed the feeling.

This had been a Saturday, and normally he worked a half-day Saturdays. On Sunday he felt fine, got up, left the house, and decided he’d just go on “a nice long walk.” He walked down Lombard Street for blocks, enjoying himself hugely, but still bothered with the sense that his physical body was far away from the rest of the corporeal universe, and then he was downtown, near the water, and still he kept walking. “Maybe I’ll walk all the way to the East Side,” he thought, “and get something to eat or something.”

Not a Desecration

He reached Lloyd Street, saw a man in a frock hat and long hair coming towards him on Lombard, and realized he wished to speak to him—he didn’t know the man, he simply he wanted to talk to someone, he had kept silent too long all day. But the man, deep in thought, didn’t notice Young, and turned up Lloyd, crossing the street to Young’s side as he did. Without thinking, Young followed him, a slight, rather short man with harsh features that in some way reminded Young of Big Emerson. They reached a square building that looked like a church and yet did not, and the man began to ascend the stairs. Young waited for him to open the door, but it appeared that the man had only wanted to reassure himself the door was locked. He turned, and saw Young standing there.

“What do you wish, please?” the man said in a heavily accented voice. He seemed nervous, as if perhaps he worried Young wished ill for him or even intended to rob or strike him.

“Oh. I thought I might like to go inside, you know, to pray.” Young hadn’t said a sincere prayer in twenty years.

“But it’s Sunday.”

“I know.” What was the matter with that? “But, you know, waking and sleeping, on the doors and all.” He remembered this from his mother.

The man smiled suddenly and then looked keen.

“Are you?” he asked with a friendly but intense look about his eyes.

“Am I what?” Young answered, and immediately the smile changed to an efficient grimace.

“Oh. Pardon me. No matter. Thank you for your interest, but we are not open today.”

Some kind of Amish, Young bet. He had read about the Amish in a file at the paper, and knew they had odd habits of worship, and he’d remembered about the hats and the long hair and beards, although this man wore a moustache. Still, the file indicated one might encounter Amish of several different stripes, and why not here in Baltimore, which was not very far from Pennsylvania. Perhaps this was a mission or some kind of business enterprise. It was interesting.

At that moment, a young man came out of a house opposite, and as God was Young’s witness, it was the boy of the Berlin photograph, or someone just like him. He had on a sleeveless knitted argyle vest, and a long scar over his right eye. And there was a yellow star sewn to the sweater.

Young stared as if looking at himself in a photograph. He rocked on his heels, put his hand out, and the bearded man hastened down the stairs and took hold of his elbow to steady him. The young man across the street saw them, turned, hurried back into his house.

“Tschah, tschah,” the man said. “It’s all right. He wears it in memory only. He does not wear it in public. It is not a desecration.”

Young stared at the man. Not Amish, Jewish. One of those people from that place: of course, he had seen photographs of them.

“I have been there, too,” he found himself saying. “I have seen a boy like that one. I thought it was that boy.”

He meant only the photograph, he was not intending to lie outright, but the other man stopped where he stood and stayed quiet a long time, holding Young’s elbow lightly enough but so that he should not fall down. The grasp felt like a thing that Young had not known touch could feel like, as if it comprehended him, and as if speech, Young’s tormentor and betrayer, would never be needed again.

But then the man did speak, hoarsely. “And you are not. Yet you have seen.”

He seemed to have no other words. He began to say what Young had to imagine were prayers in some Jewish language, and at once he felt terribly sick, and angry, and disgusted at the feel of the man’s hand on his elbow.

These sentiments must have moved across his face, for the man dropped his hand away, and he said, “I beg you to forgive me. May you live a long time, and may you speak to those who have not seen. Shalom.”

Young felt as if he had entered a brothel and found only men and children selling themselves inside. But from that moment, his every spare moment was spent in the newspaper archives, or writing, or drinking, and when he was not doing these things, he was at the Enoch Pratt Free Library downtown. He found out everything about being Jewish he could learn without asking anyone directly, memorized whole passages of Hillel and such portions of Mishnah as he could find translated and reasonably understandable, and began to dot his conversation with Yiddishisms he heard from comedians on the radio.

He also began to attend the services at the synagogue, silently praying the Rosary in Latin to himself when the congregation or the rabbi began to speak in Hebrew. He found the singing of the cantor unutterably uplifting, and would hum those melodies he could recall to himself as he stood ironing his clothing or frying scrapple in the pan, always ending with, “Queen of the Heavens, Queen of the May,” and nodding toward the sky.

He would later refer to this time as his Second Period of Happiness. He was noticed at the synagogue but never introduced himself. Still, he knew his unconscious, still fallacious admission to the man of the steps had spread, for he was treated by some of the members with deference punctuated by a kind of terror and, he thought, disgust, as if they had to admit to themselves that this thing had happened to themselves. By others he felt as if he were bound to them in blood, and that to speak of what was between them would be to rend the fabric of heaven into tatters even worse than those in which it now found itself.

He found the silence of the people exhilarating, the solitude exactly what suited him, the stares of these strangers he eventually began to label as “Four Eyes,” “Jewest of the Jew Beaks,” “Massive Bosom,” and “Yellow Teeth,” the most blessed and perfect form of communication he had ever experienced. At work he had taken to not talking at all, and his obituaries had become the templates around which lesser men at other newspapers fashioned their own scribblings in despair.

The first day he walked into shul, he had been kindly asked to sit at the back of the room, but not to leave, and eventually his rocking and humming—though he never mastered Hebrew or knew the sense of many of the words—had a perfection of cadence that misled children and strangers. He never sought to ingratiate himself personally into the congregation, was never invited to a meal, was never stopped outside services to share a smoke or a bit of talk. He would leave proudly, trot down the steps as if exiting a beloved alma mater, and walk squarely away down the couple of miles to the corner of Lombard and Stricker, turn right, and sigh as he entered his house.

Thursday Afternoon: You Remember the Kind of Thing

Young never went outside until the sun began to go down, he lived on what the milkman and the bread truck could deliver by day, and he drank by night, nearly never walking up to what had become Dolan’s grocery. He paid his expenses out of a pension from the News American, where he had remained until his left arm had been badly disfigured in an accident two years ago, and because he’d been smart and signed for a settlement, they sent him ten dollars a week, and that was plenty for him, barring a stretch to get through Sundays. He followed his father’s advice and did not drink or smoke in the house, and he would not go to the taverns on Sundays, so those were bad days. He had a feeling that if he could account for his Sundays, he would not be very pleased with himself, but this was a Thursday, and Thursdays were goddamn great.

His father, who had not returned and who Young supposed must have passed on a good while back, was someone Young thought about a lot. He wondered what his father would have made of what Young now called “all that Jew nonsense,” and he thought about this nearly every day. The end of his time at the synagogue had eventually come, of course. A new man had come on to the newspaper in ’47 or ’48, Young couldn’t quite remember now, and they’d met and talked about this and that over the course of the man’s first week, but on Saturday he saw him again as they were leaving the morning service. The man, Martin had been the name, Young thought, raised his eyebrows but didn’t otherwise acknowledge Young’s presence, and he didn’t say anything to him at work the next week. Young didn’t think much of it, but the following Saturday a group of four men stood in the vestibule at the back of the synagogue, and as he entered they approached him.

None of the men seemed very willing to meet his eyes. They stood before him silently for so many moments that Young began to think that one of them might strike him. Finally, the one that Young had named “Young Mr. Shamir” spoke up.

“There is a difficulty,” he began, but at the words Young took a step back, held up one palm as if to stop them all from approaching, though they had not moved. They did not speak, the expressions on their faces showing differing degrees of grief and disappointment. He knew there was nothing to say. He turned, walked down the steps, never went back.

From that moment—and he held no grudge over this with Martin, with whom he’d become rather good pals at the paper—his spiritual life such as it had been was effectively over. His obituaries became so pedestrian that he was finally taken off them and relegated to fact-checker. His schooling, as it had been largely self-directed, seemed to fade overnight, and he began to speak in the slovenly way that characterized him now. He eschewed all women, and the company of most men, and settled down into the drink.

And then the accident to his arm had happened, through nobody’s fault, nobody’s carelessness or drunkenness, and he was at home, with his cat, and his daily round.

Friday Afternoon: Routine Matters

Twilight, now, that was his favorite time of day, and it would be twilight soon, but not yet. Just now it was about three o’clock and he was leaning slightly out of his bedroom window, looking up and down Stricker Street, spitting down on to the walk, timing how long it took the spit to land, trying to get each lob to land in the exact same place, like horseshoes. He heard a screen open slowly in its frame, looked toward the sound, saw the young girl, Catherine, whom he always called Connie because he could never keep anyone’s name straight, getting home, fumbling with the front door key. Connie, he thought as he always did. She’s going to grow up to be a little something.

“Nah, she won’t,” he said aloud. “Not if she keeps wearin them saddle shoes like at.”

He shut up. He could not stand the sound of his own voice.

The painted china clock on the bedroom mantelpiece chimed out four times. Young got up, bending his head a little under the window sash, stretched, walked over to the clock, turned the key in the round brass hole, and wound exactly four and a half times around. The clock began to tick more brightly. He replaced the clock, stretched again, looked around the room. Think I’ll take me a bath, he thought. Then I’ll read the paper some.

He lowered his soaped and scrubbed and dried and boxer-short clad haunches into the relative inflexibility of his living room lounge chair. He didn’t know why, or if, it was really called a lounge chair, but it was old, upholstered in a brown velvet material that looked like horse hair and might have been. The carvings on its frame, a painted brown wood of some kind, were round, ornately dug into roses and other images of no particular identity, and he still meant to get the few smears of paint off the upholstery where whoever had done the painting had been careless, but that was a difficulty, because whom after the sun went down could he ask a question about how he would go about doing such a thing? He didn’t know how to do it, how to get the paint off, and when he had asked at the tavern, they’d just looked at him like he was crazy. They had looked at him, though, so he knew he had opened his mouth, but possibly the words he’d thought he had said were not the ones that actually came out. Or perhaps he didn’t speak loud enough for other people to hear. But nobody had said that. Maybe they were just surprised he’d said anything at all.

Anyways, he said to himself. If he had a telephone he could call the hardware store. The lounge chair was not long enough to lie down in (If I lay down in it I have to bend my knees, he said to himself or out loud as he prepared to get into it, as if that meant something) but the length of it fit the entirety of his legs stretched out, for he had not grown into a tall man like his father.

This fully stretching out his legs upon a piece of living room furniture was a luxury he reserved as a pleasure in a day filled with long hours and small pleasures, and he straightened his bow tie at the collar, adjusted the fabric of his boxer shorts above his knees, and then began to cry, enjoying the crying in the same way that, each morning he managed to get out of bed while it was still morning, after he had finished his eggs and bacon, he enjoyed a nice long laugh, and each noon he enjoyed the twenty-seven push-ups he did on the earth floor of his cellar, wearing nothing but his undershorts and sleeveless undershirt, listening to the rhythm of the ringer washer cleanse his spare dress shirt and pair of slacks. He had two of each, and whichever was in the laundry he called his spare.

His feet hurt him. He looked down at his ankles, blue and red with clustered veins and broken capillaries, admiring them. By the end of the evening they would be round and puffy, but now they were nearly sleek, the elegant bones visible and not precisely sharp. Elegant, he thought, elegant and intelligent. Where was that from? A beer slogan? Laundry soap? Ladies’ face powder? Hmm, he thought. Maybe I made it up.

“I am elegant and intelligent,” he said out loud. By nine o’clock he’d be telling this to Pauline, the name he had given to the tree in his back yard, just before he unzipped his fly and pissed all over her trunk, but now he was pleased with the thought, and believed it, because indeed his ankles were admirable, extending out past the cuffs of his spare pair of slacks. He crossed them, and heard the cat cry from somewhere in the house. I didn’t get no milk out for it yet. I’ma half to do that before long.

The cat cried again. Quit cryin. It cried again. “You stop that or I’ll give you something to cry for,” he called out, but this iteration merely produced more of the same. Young Emerson took a last wistful look at his ankles, uncrossed and swung them over the edge of the lounge chair, and hoisted himself up. Christ knew he couldn’t sit there and listen to that cat crying for the next two hours.

Saturday, Two A.M.: Not a Big Eater

Young Mr. Emerson wanted a glass of milk. But there was no milk. He wanted an egg, and some toast and butter, and some bacon. He knew he had a day-old dry onion roll, and a can of some kind of soup or other and that there was some cat food. He thought he might have a little bit of cheese in the icebox, and he knew there was a block of lard. Maybe there was some tea. He was hungry, but he wanted milk and bread, and there wasn’t any.

It was some awful hour, he thought. The bread truck would not stop today because he had omitted to put in a new order last night, and he couldn’t get out of bed and make out a new slip and open the door this morning to catch the truck before it came by, although that wouldn’t even happen for another hour or two at least. Yesterday morning he had still had some milk and butter and eggs, but he’d eaten and drunk it all, and then last night as he staggered up the steps and seen the milk bottles there with no slip in the box to indicate what he wanted today, he had sublimely refused to make one out and put it in.

He’d gotten drunk, drunk-drunk, and over the course of the drunk had decided he was never going to eat again, and this, he would have told you what, felt like the best thing that had ever happened in the entire course of his existence. He was not a big eater anyway. That was true. It was also true that the more he drank, the less he felt like eating, but last night, last night he had arrived at the certitude that eating was somehow wrong, even defective, that no one should eat anymore, and that the state of euphoria in which he found himself would last indefinitely, just as he inevitably thought that the state of drunkenness would last forever when he was in it, and that the wish for food would from this moment forward would no longer trouble him.

Even on the way home, when he had turned into an alley to vomit, that had felt good and right, too, and had not produced any hunger, but a kind of magical emptiness that appeared to him to be even better than what he’d felt sitting on the bar stool with the last of who knew how many shot glasses of the night in his hand. He had arrived back at his front door and spurned the milk bottle crate at ten p.m., fallen violently into bed and immediately to sleep, and just past midnight had just as violently wakened so hungry and empty that he thought that all he ever wanted to do again in life was eat, and eat.

But now he couldn’t force himself out of bed to see if that cheese might still be in the icebox, nor to fill out an order from the milkman that would include milk, and bread, and eggs. Why was that again? There was a problem with this, and it had come and gone in his mind a couple of times now.

Oh, yes, this was it: Because what would be the good of eggs without bacon? He could not fry an egg in lard, nor in butter. He couldn’t bear the taste of it. And he didn’t know how else to make an egg. And then what would the point of the bread be? And he was double-goddamned if he was going to make toast and dip it into a goddamned glass of milk.

“God god damn it,” he said out loud.

However, he thought as his stomach growled, Dolan’s would open by eight, and they would have bacon. He could get up and put on his robe and slippers, go down the front stairs very quietly, tiptoe to the kitchen and eat the cheese right now, and then slowly step back to the living room, fill out the slip, silently open the door—no, that wouldn’t work. He had allowed himself to be fooled into purchasing one of those new aluminum screen doors with the mechanism that didn’t slam, and that had seemed like a superlative idea at the time, but he later and to his deep chagrin had realized the air-pump noise of the goddamned thing would alert damn near every waking and sleeping person in likely a three-block radius every time he opened it, and while he was comforted by the thought that if anybody else were to open it, he would hear them—and by the clock, he’d know if it was the mailman opening up the door to put the mail in the slot, or the newspaper boy setting the News American in the vestibule—

All right, he could slip out the back door, walk down the alley and up the block to the front steps, put the slip into the crate, walk up the block and around—no. That wouldn’t work, either. He’d have the cheese eaten, but that man across the street who worked on the B&O would be up and he’d look out and see him.

Christ. All right. Here’s what he’d do. He’d go into the bathroom, run a tub of water like that jackass Nevan Dolan had done—it was all anybody who could talk was talking about last night at the tavern—and wait for a heart attack to kill him and if that didn’t work, he’d put his straight razor next to him on the bathtub ledge and slice his wrists open and then that would take care of everything.

Okay. That’s what he’d do, and that would be fine—oh, and he’d be sure to shut the bathroom door so the cat wouldn’t get upset or eat anything he shouldn’t. Somebody would come for the cat eventually. It was a loud damn cat.

He flung himself out of bed, not bothering with robe or slippers, barreled out of the bedroom and lurched down through the length of the house to the bathroom. He weaved a little, the soles of his feet cold on the floor, and leaned over the toilet bowl and threw up another time.

He stood up.

He was so hungry he couldn’t think. He wasn’t going to kill himself, he was going to eat, and he didn’t care if it was lard or a chunk of ice or a dry teabag. He ran as well as a drunk man can run down the back stairs to the kitchen, threw open the icebox door, and saw what he’d completely forgotten about, the end of a ham he had been keeping to make soup. The brown rind covered mostly fat but a little bit of flesh, and he could taste the salt of it right there in his mouth. He pulled it out with the block of lard and threw them both down on the counter top next to the sink, pulled out the big carving knife, and began to cut into the ham. The first bite was half-fat, cold, thick, and soft, with a greasy aftertaste that turned his stomach. Treyf, some deceased place in his mind said, to which he answered, Shut up, you bastard. I eat what I please.

The ham was not going to be enough. He saw the bag that held the onion roll on top of the icebox, took it out and tried a bite, but it was so stale he could barely manage to rip off a mouthful, and the hard crust scraped the inside of his cheek and his tongue.

The slip, he said to himself, just fill out the slip. It doesn’t matter. Just fill it out.

But he wouldn’t open that front door, he knew that. He could go around out back, though, he thought, if he did it right now, if he checked off the boxes on the slip, put on his overcoat and his shoes, and went out the back very quietly. He could do that, surely he could.

The alley smelled of old water sitting, lichen growing on the small stones of the cement, cold brick, and tar. This, what the out-of-doors smelled like, he barely noted, but he watched for rats and garbage cans so as not to run into either. The rear of the funeral home took up most of what would be its yard, and he stepped out from the back corner of that building out onto Pratt Street, under a street light. He clutched the milk order slip tighter in his hand, pulled his overcoat around him like a bathrobe, and walked gently up the half-block, turned and in less than a minute was in front of his house. He looked up and down the street, saw not a light on nor a shade up, laughed to himself in quiet triumph, and tucked the order slip into the wooden crate, between two milk bottles. He’d even ordered cream this time, and an extra dozen of eggs, and another loaf of bread. Just the thought of the food filled him up, and he knew he could survive until the truck came by.

Saturday Morning: All Right, Steve

As he turned to retrace his steps to the alley, he nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of a small man coming up to him, slowly, and in fact he was not at all certain at first that he was not seeing a ghost. But the man’s footsteps made sound, and the man himself seemed to be breathing hard and heavily as if the act of breathing was cutting into some part of him, and that Young could hear the cutting, not of flesh but of bone or, going by the insides of a chicken, of the thick cartilage that separated the lungs from the chest. Then Young saw that it was not a man, but a boy, that cat-swinging boy who beat his dog and who thought he was in love with that foolish girl, Connie. Young always called him Steve, but he knew that wasn’t his name.

The boy came right up to him and stopped. He didn’t seem to want to do anything else. Young waited.

“I need to get me to the B&O,” the boy said in a whisper.

Young didn’t say anything.

“I need to get there,” he said again. He was forcing the words out, and sounded like he might be crying. “I can’t make it.”

And then he had to pause and breathe some more, and then he said a word that Young immediately knew was not a word he often said, maybe not one that he ever said.

“Please.”

Not Help me, but Please, and hearing that Young would help him any way that he could, and he had not known that before, either.

“Okay, Steve,” he said.

Young Mr. Emerson took a deep breath, and despite his frailty grabbed Petie, whose name the boy’s really was, by the hand and dragged him into his house through the front door, “For I am damned if I shall walk through the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad without socks on,” he said. He was no longer hungry and he didn’t care who might be watching. He forced Petie into a chair in the living room, where the cat immediately jumped on Petie’s lap and he began to stroke it with one finger as he stared out into the middle of the floor, and wept it seemed only because he could not help it.

“I’ll be just a minute,” Young said to him when he saw this, but when Petie didn’t respond he put out his hands as if to embrace him, but didn’t touch him, then straightened himself again. “I’ll be right back,” he said, paused, turned, and went upstairs.

He dressed in his Sunday clothes, including a bow tie, but moved quickly and didn’t take a bit longer than putting on his everyday things would have done. He pulled on dress stockings, with garters to finish, then his shoes, then put his overcoat back on over everything, tapped his way back downstairs, got his hat from the cupboard, and entered the living room, finding Petie as he’d left him.

“All right then!” Young said brightly, as if Petie were his own son and they were meeting again after many years, and it was his job to figure out what they were going to do and talk about. “Let us essay the historical haunts of the rail yard,” he said what he hoped was gaily, and it came to him that he was speaking as he used to do, back at the newspaper, like an educated man, a man who had a life of interest with significance to spare. This frightened him, but he didn’t know why, but nor did he care to stop.

Petie didn’t move, and it came to Young that possibly he couldn’t, so he took the boy by one hand, extended his other arm around his back, and lifted him as gently as he could.

“Aaaah,” Petie cried, and the sound of it nearly broke Young’s heart.

“I’m sorry, boy,” he said. “Do you not want to go? We don’t have to go. I can get you home if you want.”

“Please,” Petie said again, and Young knew that he did not mean that he wanted to go home.

“All right!” Young said again brightly and far too loudly. “We’re off to the races, then. Come along, now,” and he steered Petie through the three doors, banging his own body through the screen door, not hearing the pump as it wheezed the screen shut behind them.

They took the three steps to the pavement, turned, and, step by excruciating step, Young holding Petie like a dance partner, his good arm still around the boy’s waist, his poor hand lightly holding the boy’s hand, they shuffled down the block.

They did not speak another word the entire forty-five minutes, as Young estimated, that it took them to walk the half dozen blocks to the B&O. The sun still not yet up, they had not encountered a soul on the street, nor a single vehicle other than a taxi that slowed to indicate a question to which Young waved the negative with his head. Petie’s steps were as labored as those of a very old man, his breath thick and sharp, stepping down off of and up on to the curbs taking every bit of attention he had. Still, Young could tell his thoughts were far away, that he possibly had to force himself to continue to occupy his physical body, and what it had cost him to get to Young’s front steps from wherever he had come from Young could scarcely bring himself to imagine.

He saw as they entered the rail yard that Petie was sort of pointing in the direction of one of the long buildings, and that there was a light on in what must have been the back room.

“All right, Steve,” Young said aloud, shifted their direction, and made his way towards it.

Saturday Noon: Reversal

Young stood in the fresh air on the small porch of the train caboose, watching the city melt away backwards. He had never in his life felt any better. Going somewhere. Had he still been a cigar-smoking man, he would have been smoking a cigar, despite the hour of the day. He wished for an ascot to wear around his throat, but felt that the bow tie was sufficiently dapper and nothing to be ashamed of.

They had met up with a man named Teddy (for the Real Roosevelt, he had said) with whom Petie seemed to be on excellent terms, and who, when he saw Petie, vowed terrible and profane vengeance on whoever had done those things to him, but Petie wouldn’t give up the name. At the sight of coffee and sweet rolls on the table Young had just about passed out, but Teddy was not at all behind-hand in offering both all around, and so he had eaten to the full, and there had also been milk, and Teddy didn’t seem to think that it was unmasculine or out of place in the slightest when Young asked if he could have a cupful. “Please, sir,” he had replied, in fact. A little bit later, while they were giving Petie something to eat by the spoonful that seemed to be doing him some good, there were fried eggs and bacon and toast, and Young ate until he just about did pass out.

He loved these people, he decided. Why had he not ever met them before? He loved Teddy, completely. He liked this train, the motion of it, the sense of the world going in reverse order behind you as you forged ahead into to the place where no one could walk backward anymore. He had no idea where they were going, or why, but he surely liked being here, and he was so happy.

He turned to check on Petie where he sat inside the caboose, propped up on a small chair and sitting on top of some cushions, looking still blankly out of the window. He hadn’t cried when they’d gotten him up and onto the train, but there were some tears on his face now. A coal fire burned next to him in a small cast-iron stove, and every moment or so he would suck on the corner of a saltine cracker and lean over to the little table and try to lift the small cup of fruit juice Teddy had left there for him. Otherwise, Young thought that, had he not had his arm around him for all that while, he would have thought he could pass his hand completely through Petie’s body and not have disturbed either one of them.

He turned back to the view. It was impressive, what you saw from the rail lines, he thought. Downtown they had passed first, and then there were houses, and more houses, a couple of trains in the opposite direction, and now they were headed into the countryside, where Young had never been. The sheer numbers of trees, mostly bare of anything but a few buds on a few of them, frightened him a little bit, and made him feel colder than he was. The morning light on them was beautiful, though, he thought, and he would like to draw how the light looked, or even to paint a picture of it with some real paints. He had some cans of house paints at home, but maybe he could make it to Woolworth’s and they might have some real painter ones. Maybe he could get some of those.

And then the train started to slow, Young lurched slightly where he stood and he turned around. Teddy passed through the little door, nodded to Young.

“This is where he wants off, just about.”

Petie raised his eyes then, and said, “I need to go down the beach. Not right there, though. Pretty close.”

“Well, we’ll get you as close as we can, boy. What you going to do? You want to come back today?”

Petie didn’t answer. Young had no idea what to say, but then Teddy asked him directly, “You want to keep going? You can ride all day if you want to.”

The temptation was intense, but Young had been asked by Petie to get him where he needed to be, and he wasn’t there yet, and so he would stay with him, and he said so. “I better.”

“All right, suit yourself,” Teddy said cheerfully, and the train came to a full stop. “Let’s get eem down, I don’t know how, tell you the truth. I bet you going up was going to be a lot easier,” and it proved to be. As soon as they were clear of the car and off the tracks, Teddy handed Young a thermos and paper bag full of something, and said, “Ima be back around eleven tonight, I’ll look for you. Otherwise you can hop one tomorrow.”

Young nodded, holding the bag in his teeth and the thermos in the crook of his bad arm, his good one once again around Petie’s waist. Petie seemed to be doing a little bit better than before, he thought, for as the train pulled slowly out, Teddy waving to them before disappearing back into the car, Petie lifted his head and said, “Thank you.”

Saturday Afternoon: Found and Lost

And as much as Young had enjoyed the train ride, he knew he had never been in so beautiful and wonderful a place as this small stretch of lake shore where Petie led him, though it again took them the better part of an hour to get down there. The water was muddy-colored under the overcast sky, but Young didn’t mind this at all. It was still water, lapping softly at the bank in a way that made him think of a baby’s cradle rocking, and that perhaps he and Petie were the baby, safe and cared for. The openness and quiet made him a bit nervous, but he was willing to take the feeling.

Petie he propped against the trunk of a thin tree, using his overcoat as a cushion, and in his shirt sleeves in the shade Young was quite chilly. He had sniffed in the thermos and smelled coffee, and tasted it, and it had milk and sugar, too. How could it be that he had never met anyone like Teddy before, so kind, and so thoughtful yet straightforward a person? How had he never met anyone before who didn’t seem to have some kind of terrible trouble that marked his days and distorted everything that he said and thought and did?

He would have to think about this later. There had been too many novelties in one day. After giving Petie a little of the coffee, which he kept down, and another couple of crackers, Young took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his slacks to the knee, and waded out into the cold water until he hit a patch of sun. He let it warm his body as he waited for his legs to do the same to the lake water. All Petie seemed to be able to do was sleep, though Young had gotten a good bit of the coffee into him, along with the end of a sweet roll from the paper bag. The rest was cold chicken and bread and butter, which, when Petie had shaken his head at it, Young had wolfed down until there was nothing left over. He was so used to spending the day doing very little that this much activity had worn him down, and now he was feeling something like irritation, and he wanted to sleep. He was cold, shivering, and Petie was shivering, too, every now and again. Young thought they would have to get out of there soon, but when he tried to say so to Petie, the boy’s eyes filled, and he said once again, “Please.”

So Young let it go, sat down at the water’s edge in a small patch of sun, crossed his legs and closed his eyes. Soon he was standing at his kitchen table, counting out a dollar in coins to give to Pauline. His mouth and nose were nuzzled under one of her breasts, one arm around her waist, the other under her bottom, his body between her legs. He was walking to shul, fingering a rosary in his pocket, walking up on his toes, nodding to a stack of News Americans bundled in packing string on a corner. He rubbed the outside of his arm where his mother struck it with the belt, he pushed his dad upstairs and sang, “She’s Like the Swallow,” with him at the tops of their lungs. He sat in The Bright Side tavern and had a fourth whiskey, he was immobilized before a stack of photographs in the newspaper archive room, he bowed with pleasure as the obit staff applauded his tribute to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was pulling the cat off his undershirt, he was running a bath, listening to the water now running, now lapping like a lake, now hearing the sound of someone saying, “Hello.”

“Hello!” the someone said again, and it was now, the lake, his eyes were open, and just off the shore a boy and a girl in a row boat, the boy rowing straight for him, the girl fair and nearly see-through in the bow turned toward him, the boy pale and dark, both smiling.

“Go on, get out of here!” he thought he yelled at them, but apparently nothing solid had come out of his mouth, for they kept smiling, and approaching, and finally there was nothing left to do but wade out into the water and pull the boat to shore. The girl tumbled out of it, into Young’s arms and out of them, and he heard her say “Peter,” in an under-voice so passionate that it thrilled and terrified him at the same time, and he knew that whatever it had been that he’d won today, it might well in that moment have been lost to him again.

Saturday Night: And In the End

Young Mr. Emerson woke up on the ground in the dark to the sound of the lake water lapping, himself damp and nearly dead with cold and very hungry again. There was no food or coffee left. He knew he had better get up and get moving or he would die of the cold. He remembered exactly where he was, and that he needed to get to the train tracks. He put his hand out for his shoes, put them on in the dark, and, after a couple of mishaps and small twig branches stinging into his face, he found his way to the tracks.

There was no street light, but there was a moon that was just about full, all but a small slice of it on the side, and he could see to get up on the tracks, to walk them, and then, for he was not a person whose physical instincts ever alerted him to anything, he was surprised to realize that he was not alone on the tracks, that something was behind him, something Petie had he been there could have told him was that sonofabitching mongrel Batista, who barked once as Young paused where he walked.

He did not turn around, nor pretend to, nor wish to. He had the same fear of dogs that he had of most other living creatures that were not human or house cat—he was nervous around those, but not afraid of most of them. He could handle as many people as he needed, and he only had the one cat, but dogs were another thing. He thought if he continued to hop along the tracks, one of two things would happen: he would come to some place where he could call out for help, wherever that might be, or the dog would overtake him and kill him, but either way, standing still was stupid. Then the dog’s single bark, a command if he had ever heard one, told him he was right. In the moonlight, Young appeared like an old-fashioned cut-out silhouette, hopping like a woman with one shoe on over the tracks, a pony-sized animal picking its way over the tracks behind him.

But Teddy remembered his promise, and at last Young saw the train approach and slow at the crossing where he stood, the dog having abandoned him at some juncture or other, Young waving his arms madly in delight. They got him on to the caboose where, to his dismay, that part of the universe he had previously imagined could only be experienced in forward motion melted away in reverse, just as the streets and avenues and buildings down home had done, so that now he could not make sense of either. He was certain, holding on to the iron rail of the car porch and looking out into the night and the light of the moon, that had there been any other way to get home short of walking thirty miles over the course of the next three days and sleeping next to alley cans in the nights, he would have taken it.

He was reversing in himself as well, the solidified part of him that had been liquefied on the trip up to the lake that had changed him into a state wholly unfamiliar but completely welcome, not free but even independent of freedom, on which he had been changed from flesh to liquid perhaps even in the water of Lake Roland as he stood in it and hadn’t know it was happening to him even as he was becoming part of the same substance with it, now with each mile and marker and train track clicked away again behind him, began to turn Young back again slowly more solid and heavier and not enslaved but something independent of slavery, as if it were himself again, a conversion, from water to something like pudding and then butter to mud and whatever the next thing after that would be but soon after would be rock hard fall down and scrape yourself to death cement, himself and what he had inside of him all pavement, only sidewalk bounded by brief, so brief forays into the street and the sometimes soft or liquid asphalt, and when he stepped off that train, and he would hop off it as lightly as Donald O’Connor might do, that would be the end of both directions, and he would be finished.

And that indeed was how it was. He let Teddy fill him up with some very good whiskey back at the railroad house, filched a rock-hard doughnut from the plate on the table there and chewed it down, and when he got home and passed into the vestibule through the front door, he looked down at the quarts of milk souring in the crate, and bent to tap his finger on the staling crust of one of the loaves of bread. He stood, his hand on the knob of the interior door, and didn’t seem to know what he must do next.

“All that for nothing,” he said. And every night from now until forever, that goddamned slip.