Billy Bathgate Part 7

"How do I know, look at your program, just remember the number three, you can remember a three can't you?" He sounded testy. "Whatever you earn you can keep. You take it with you to New York."

"New York?"

"Yeah, get yourself on a train. We'll need you to do some things. Go home and wait there."

"What about Mrs. Preston?" I said.

At that moment the operator cut in and asked for another fifteen cents. Mr. Berman had me give him the phone number I was calling from and told me to hang up. I did and almost immediately the phone rang.

I could hear a match striking and then the exhaling of a lungful of smoke. "That's twice now you mentioned people by name."

"I'm sorry," I said. "But what do I do about her?"

"Where is the tomato at this moment?" he said.

"She's at breakfast."

"A couple of friends of yours are on the way. You'll probably see them at the track. Maybe one of them will even give you a lift to the train station you ask him nicely."

This is what I thought as I strode the streets of Saratoga, around the block and then around again, as if I was going somewhere, as if I had a purposeful destination: They had given me all that money, clearly more than I could use up in a day or even two, it was a week's big-time spending, hotel bills, restaurants, and paying for the play bets Drew Preston might want to make. Something was different. Either they really did need me in New York, a kind of advance man of the return to town, or they wanted me where I would not be in the way, but something had changed. Perhaps with Drew out of sight, Mr. Schultz had been persuaded of the danger she represented, perhaps his alienation was merely a reflection of hers, Mr. Berman seemed to think Mr. Schultz was perilously in love, but as I thought about it, after the first week or so when they were together in my company, Mr. Schultz ignored Drew more often than not, she became more like his display, an embellishment that added to his presence rather than someone he doted upon or squeezed the hand of, or seemed to deeply care about in the fond and foolish way people in love comport themselves. Whatever decision had been made, it seemed to me only expedient to a.s.sume it was of the nature of nightmare. I am proud of this boy I was, thinking through his cold dread, and you know the quickest thinking is the thinking of the body, and the body thinks surely, errorlessly, because it is not soaked in character as the brain is, and my best guess was of the worst that could happen, because I didn't remember coming in from the street or going through the lobby, but I found myself becoming aware that I was in my room and I was holding my loaded Automatic in my hand, I was holding my gun. So that was what I thought. The worst was he had turned against her, he needed more death, he was using up his deaths so quickly now he needed them faster and faster. What would she say, what would she do to him, if he wasn't able to protect himself, pinned down by the law, with the gang flying apart like a bomb had hit, and he abandoned and alone like one of those bombed screaming children of China, with the rubble falling down around him?

It was peculiar that Mr. Schultz knew everything about betrayal but the way it worked, in the freedom of the joyfully voracious spirit of all of us, or else why would his Abbadabba take the trouble to give me a horse? Mr. Schultz lacked imagination, he had a conventional mind, Drew was right, he was ordinary. Nevertheless I now faced enormous executive responsibilities, I had to bring things to pa.s.s, I had to engage people to do things I thought they ought to do and from a position of no authority whatsoever. As I thought about it, men in movies who got things done had a.s.sistants and secretaries. On a card right in front of me was the Grand Union Hotel's list of services, including a ma.s.seur, a barber, a florist, a Western Union office, and so on. I had an entire hotel at my disposal. I steeled myself and picked up the phone and in my lowest, softest voice, affecting the kind of nasality of speech of Drew Preston's friends, I informed the hotel operator that I wanted to reach Mr. Harvey Preston at the Savoy-Plaza in New York, and if he was not in residence to find out from the operator there his forwarding number, which might, perhaps, be Newport. When I hung up my hand was shaking, I, the juggler extraordinaire. I a.s.sumed it would take some time to locate Harvey, undoubtedly in bed somewhere with the company of his taste, so I called Room Service and they very respectfully took my order, which was honeydew melon and corn flakes and cream, scrambled eggs and bacon and sausages and toast and jelly and danish pastry and milk and coffee, I just went right down the menu. I sat in a wing chair by the open windows and tucked my Automatic behind the cus.h.i.+on and waited for my breakfast. It seemed to me very important to remain quite still, as one does in a very hot bath, so as to be able to endure it. Mickey would be driving and probably it was Irving with him because whatever they wanted to do would require precision in Saratoga, and perhaps patience, and something deft and sad in its effect rather than outrageous. I liked them both. They were quiet men and bore no ill will toward anyone. They didn't like to complain. They might inwardly demur but they would do their job.

I thought of what I would say to the elegant Harvey. I hoped he would be near a phone. It could even be white. He would hear me out having had the most perfunctory concern for Drew's safety over the summer because of the steady flow of charge account bills or canceled bank checks that had undoubtedly come to him in the mail. I would represent myself as transmitting his wife's wishes. I would be very businesslike. In my mind at the moment I had no personal interest at all in Mrs. Preston, certainly nothing that would tinge my voice with love or guilt. Not that I could ever feel guilty toward Harvey. But apart from that, I had lost in this situation any capacity at all for the eroticized affection, it wanes pathetically in terror, I not only could not remember making love with Drew, I could not even imagine it. She didn't interest me. There was a knock on the door and my breakfast was wheeled in and the very cart it came on was gatelegged out under its white linen cloth into a dining table. All the food was served in or under heavy silver. The melon was set in a silver bowl of ice. I had learned last night from Drew not to overtip and got the bellboy out of the room with aplomb. I sat feeling my gun in the small of my back and stared at this enormous breakfast as if I carried Bathgate Avenue where I went, with all the sweet fruits of the earth spilled on my plate. I missed my mother. I wanted to be wearing my black-and-white Shadows jacket. I wanted to steal from the pushcarts and hang around the beer drops and catch a glimpse of the great Dutch Schultz.

At noon, after I packed my bag and left it downstairs with the bell captain, I asked directions to the racecourse and made my way there on foot. It was about a mile from the hotel down a broad boulevard of dark three-story, deep-porched houses, one after another. In the front yards were signs that said park here and the residents stood in the street and tried to wave the pa.s.sing cars into their driveways. Everyone in Saratoga was trying to make a little money, even the owners of these grand gabled houses. Most of the traffic was heading for the track's own parking lot, at every intersection cops in their short-sleeved s.h.i.+rts were waving it on. n.o.body seemed to be in much of a hurry, the black cars moved at a stately pace and n.o.body blew their horns or tried to improve their position, it was the most mannerly traffic I had ever seen. I looked for the Packard even though I knew I wouldn't find it. If they set out in the early morning, even with Mickey driving it would take them to midafternoon to get here. All at once I saw the green roof of the grandstand, like some pennanted castle in the trees, and then I was on the grounds, and the day was festive with people streaming to the gates under their panama hats and sun parasols, they carried field gla.s.ses, men were hawking programs, the place was not as big as Yankee Stadium but grand of scale nonetheless, it was a wooden structure painted green and white, it had the air of a distinguished old amus.e.m.e.nt park with flower beds lining the paths. I stood on line for a clubhouse ticket and was told they would not let me in as an unaccompanied minor, I wanted to take out my Automatic and shove it up the guy's nose, but instead I asked an elderly couple to buy my ticket for me and walk me through the turnstile, which they were gracious enough to do, but it was a humiliating recourse for the trusted a.s.sociate of one of the most deadly gangsters in the country.

Then when I climbed the stairs to the stands and came out to my first glimpse of the great oval track I felt immediately at home, it was that delicious shock of looking down from a deep shade to a green field in the sun, you got it from a baseball diamond or from a football gridiron, and now I saw the racecourse had it too, that sense before the sport begins of the glory of the day to come, the palapable antic.i.p.ation of a formal struggle on a course as yet unmarked, with phantom horses racing to the finish line in a pristine brilliance of air and light. I felt I could handle myself here, I enjoyed the unexpected confidence that comes of recognition.

So there I was burdened with my deadly serious reponsibili-ties on this fine day when it seemed as if the whole society was coming to gamble, and the common people would do their betting on the grounds and stand in the sun by the rail to see what they could of the actual race, which was the homestretch, while the well-to-do bettors sat in the shade of the raked wooden stands so they could see somewhat more of the course, there were the boxes right at the front edge of the stands which had been bought for the season by politicians and men of wealth and fame, but if unoccupied on any particular day could be bought with a bribe to the usher to be used on a contingency basis, and finally, set back on a separate tier above the grandstand, was the expensive clubhouse where the truly sporting came to sit at tables and have their luncheon before the start of the day's races. I found Drew up there alone at a table for two with a gla.s.s of white wine in front of her.

I knew of course no matter what I told her she would not dream of leaving before she'd had her fill of the horses. I knew too that if I spoke of the danger she was in or acknowledged my fear her eyes would wander, her mind would wander, she'd drift away in her mind and spirit and the light I held in her eye would dim. She liked my precocity. She liked my street-tough self, she liked her boys gallant and bold. So I told her I had a sure thing in the seventh race and I was going to bet everything I had and make enough dough to keep her in bonbons and silk underwear for the rest of her life. It was supposed to be a joke but somehow it came out in a constricted voice, with more fervor than I intended, like a declaration of my childish love, and the effect on her depthless green eyes was to set them br.i.m.m.i.n.g. And now we both sat there in silence and great sadness, it was as if she knew from her own system of reckoning everything I didn't dare tell her. I couldn't look at her but turned my gaze to the track out there in the sun, a long wide beautifully kept raked-dirt oval track with white fencing, inside of which was an inner oval track of gra.s.s with obstacles for the steeplechase races, and inside that were plantings of red and white flowers and a pond with real swans paddling around, and all of it set in a vast verdant countryside with the foothills of the Berks.h.i.+res far to the east, but I only saw oval, and ran my eyes around the closed track as if it were an endless bulkhead, as if I had not all the air of the world to breathe but the stifling diesel fumes in a tugboat deckhouse, and every moment that we had lived since that night was my hallucination, a moment's reprieve from the great heaving sea lunging up from itself to gulp at the night's prey, and people of my barest acquaintance who were dead had not yet died.

Little by little the tables filled up, though neither of us was hungry we lunched on cold salmon and potato salad, and finally the mounted men in red hunt coats came onto the track and the trumpet blew and the horses with their jockeys paraded at a slow pace past us to the far turn where the starting gate had been set up, and the first of the day's races went off, as they were to do thereafter every half hour, every thirty minutes or so a race went off, a mile or more or sometimes less around the broad raked-dirt track, you saw them perhaps for a few moments out of the starting gate and then unless you had gla.s.ses they became a rolling blur, as if one undulant individual animal was rippling around the far stretch of the track, and it was moving not all that quickly and only when it came into detailed view as horses again, in urgent and walloping whipped exertion, did you understand what a great distance they had run in what little time, and they were swift as devils as they galloped past you and crossed the finish line in front of the stands with the jockeys standing up then in their stirrups. And there was much excitement and importuning and shouting and screaming during the race, but it was not the kind of noise and cheering you got at a baseball game when Lou Gehrig hit a home run, it was not a joyous life sound and did not continue past the moment of the first horse's finish, but died off suddenly as if someone had thrown a switch, with everyone turning back to their charts to give the next half hour to the new bets, and only the winners still buzzing with happiness or gloating over their winnings, the flesh of the horse the least of anyone's concern, except perhaps the owner stepping into the winner's circle in front of the stands to pose for pictures with the jockey and the horse in its garland of carnations.

And I knew what Mr. Berman meant, what mattered were the numbers each animal carried around the track, the numbers on the big boards facing the stands that showed the odds at post time. The horses were running numbers, animated odds, even to the very wealthy squires who bred them and bought them at the yearling sales and owned them and raced them and won purses with them.

But all these impressions came to me through the corners of my eyes, as it were, and on the edges of my attention, as I left Drew and came back to her, and then took her down to her box and left her there, and went looking everywhere on all the levels for the hoods I knew and the hoods I didn't know, because this was not the exclusive horse show of the night before, this was a grand convention of all the idlers of the world, I saw people pus.h.i.+ng their two dollars under the grate who clearly were busted, people in the sun by the rail in their unders.h.i.+rts clutching their tickets that were the one way they could get out, whatever it was, to get out of it, I had never seen such pale faces come to enjoy a day, and everywhere on every tier, in every aisle, were the men who knew what others didn't and talked from the sides of their mouths and nodded the knowing nods of commerce, this was such a seedy stand of life, such a grubby elegance of occupation, with the drinkers of tall iced drinks or shots of neat all wanting too much from life and losing too much to it as they stood on the betting lines to try again in their democratic ceremonies of gain and loss on the creaking tiers of these old wooden stands.

All I asked of Drew was that she not go down to the paddock to see the horses before they came onto the track, that she sit in her box, which was numbered and known, just near the governor's box at the finish line, and content herself looking at them through her binoculars.

"You don't want me to bet?"

"Bet what you want. I'll go to the window for you." "It doesn't matter."

She was very thoughtful and still and made a quietness around herself that I felt as a kind of mourning.

Then she said, "You remember that man?"

"Which man?"

"The one with the bad skin. The one he respects so."

"Bad skin?"

"Yes, in the car, with the bodyguards. Who came to the church."

"That man. Of course. How could I forget such skin."

"He looked at me. I don't mean he was forward or anything like that. But he looked at me and he knew who I was. So I must have met him before." She pursed her lips and shook her head with her eyes cast down.

"You don't remember?"

"No. It must have been at night."

"Why?"

"Because every night of my life I am a d.a.m.n drunk."

I pondered this: "Were you with Bo?"

"I think I must have been."

"Did you ever tell Mr. Schultz?"

"No. Do you think I should have?"

"I think it's important."

"Is it? Is it important?"

"Yes, I think it might be."

"You tell him. Would you?" she said and raised her binoculars as the horses of the next race came at a walk onto the track.

A few minutes later a uniformed messenger came up to the box with an enormous bouquet of flowers in his hand and they were for Drew, a great armload of long-stemmed flowers, and she took them and her face colored, she read the card and it said From An Admirer From An Admirer, just as I had dictated, and she laughed and looked around her, up into the stands behind her, as if to find whoever it was who had sent them. I called to an usher and put a folded five-dollar bill in his hand and told him to bring a pitcher of water, which he did, and Drew placed the flowers in the pitcher and put them on the empty chair beside her. She was cheerier now, some people in the next box smiled and made appropriate remarks, and then another uniformed messenger arrived, this time with a floral arrangement so large it came with its own wicker stand, like a little tree with flowers like stalks of popcorn, and big green fan leaves mixed in and bell flowers of blue and yellow with little tails, and the card said Ever Yours Ever Yours, and now Drew was laughing with that shocked happiness of people who get Valentine's Day greetings or surprise birthday parties. I can't imagine, she answered when a gentleman leaned over and asked her what the occasion was. And when the third and fourth even larger deliveries were made, the last a display with dozens of long-stemmed roses, the whole box was transformed with flowers, she was surrounded by them, and there was considerable amus.e.m.e.nt and interest in the boxes around her and people stood up in their seats to see what was going on and there was a flurry of interest that spread through the stands and people started to come over from all directions to ask questions, to make remarks, some people thought she was a movie star, a young man asked her if he ought to be asking for her autograph, she had now more flowers around her than the winner of a cup race, she held them and was surrounded by them, and even more important, she was surrounded by the people who came up to see what all the excitement was about. Some of them were her friends from the horse set, and they sat with her and made jokes, and one woman had her two children with her, two little blond girls with bowl haircuts who were dressed in white dresses and bows and white anklets and polished white shoes, nice shy little girls, and Drew improvised little corsages for them to hold, and a photographer appeared from the local newspaper and took flash pictures, everything was going so well, I wanted those children to stay there, I asked the mother if they would like some ice cream and ran off to get some, and while I was at it I ordered from the clubhouse bar a couple of bottles of champagne and several gla.s.ses, flas.h.i.+ng my roll and dropping Drew's name so that the bartender wouldn't give me a hard time, and soon she was entertaining right there in the box amid her flowers, and I stood back a step and saw that even some of the race officiais on their horses glanced up from the track to where she was, it was as if the queen was present in her flower-bedecked box with little girl attendants and people lifting their gla.s.ses in her honor.

So all that was as good as it could be, still to come were deliveries of boxes of candy from the hotel chocolatier, I just didn't want her alone, I had other things up my sleeve if I needed them, I stood back and looked on my work and it was good, all I had to do was make it go on, how long I didn't know, another race's worth, another two, I thought it unlikely that members of the profession would want to perform at a crowded racetrack, that they would want to add to the history of a great track the story of an inexplicable a.s.sa.s.sination, and it would be clear to them if they checked the hotel first that her things were not packed, that she was not running, but how could I be sure of anything if I didn't know everything, I wanted a moving s.h.i.+eld around her, like a fountain of juggled b.a.l.l.s, like a thousand whirring jump ropes, like fireworks of flowers and the lives of innocent rich children.

So that was the situation, and I suppose it was during the fifth race, the horses were in the far stretch and all the gla.s.ses were raised, and how could I not know that among thousands of people one pair of binoculars down along the rail in the sun was turned the wrong way, how can you not know in the instant's deflected ray that you are looking down a tunnel into the eyes of your examiner, that through the great schism of sun and shade and over the cupidinous howl of the ma.s.ses, you are quietly under the most intimate study? I turned and raced down the wooden staircase to the ground level and made my way past the tellers' cages, where a surprising number of bettors waited, listening to the public-address announcer's account of the race even though all they had to do was walk a few steps outside to see it for themselves. Everywhere on the ground was a litter of cast-off pari-mutuel tickets, and if I had been a few years younger I would probably have gone around and picked them up just because there were so many like things on the ground that could be collected, but the people who were hunkering here and there, turning the tickets over and picking them up and throwing them down again, were grown-ups, wretched pathetic losers scrounging around for that mystical event, the winning ticket mistakenly cast aside.

Out in front of the stands I immediately felt the heat of the afternoon, the light was blinding, and over the shoulders of shouting people I saw a blur of horses thundering past. You really heard them too, you heard the footfalls, you heard the whips in their sibilance. Did the horses run to win or to get away? I found Irving and Mickey at the rail looking for all the world like citizens of sport, with checked jackets and binocular cases hanging from their shoulders, and in Mickey's case a panama covering his bald skull and a pair of sungla.s.ses masking his eyes.

"Faded badly in the stretch," Irving said. "All legs, no heart. You run a speed horse like that no more than six furlongs, if you're kind," he said and tore several tickets in half and put them in a nearby receptacle.

Mickey trained his gla.s.ses on the stands.

"Her box is just short of the finish line," I said.

"We can see that. All it lacks is the Stars and Stripes," Irving said in his whispery voice. "What is going on up there?"

"He's very happy to see her."

"Who is?"

"Mr. Preston. Mr. Harvey Preston, her husband."

Irving looked through his gla.s.ses. "What does he look like?"

"A tall man? Older."

"I don't spot him. What is he wearing?"

"Let me look a minute," I said and I tapped Mickey on the shoulder. He gave me his gla.s.ses and when I focused them she came into view so close in her anxious glance behind her that I wanted to call out I was here, I was down here, but the charm of my life held because as she stared, there indeed was Harvey coming down the stairs waving at her and a moment later he was in the box with his arms around her and she was hugging him, and they held each other at arm's length and smiled, he was saying something, she was genuinely happy to see him, she said something and then they both looked around them at all the flowers and he was shaking his head and holding his palms up, and she was laughing, and there was this milling crowd around them and one man was applauding as if in appreciation of the large gesture.

"Ain't love grand," I said. "In the madras jacket with the maroon silk foulard."

"The what?"

"That's what they call those handkerchiefs where the tie ought to be."

"I see him," Irving said. "You should have told us."

"How was I to know?" I said. "He showed up at lunch. This is their season here. How was I to know they practically own the d.a.m.n town."

A few minutes later the whole box seemed to rise, a levitation of people and flowers, as Drew and Harvey proceeded toward the exit. He was waving at people like a politician and ushers hurried toward him to make themselves useful. I kept my eyes on Drew with her flowers in her arms, I don't know why but she seemed to move through the crowd with such care that I thought of a woman with child, that was my impression from this distance without the benefit of binoculars, that was my blurring impression. When they had disappeared down the pa.s.sageway I moved with Irving and Mickey through the field crowd back under the stands past the betting cages and stood on the far side of a hotdog counter and we watched the party come down the staircase and Harvey had a car waiting right there, they had let it in through the gates where no cars were supposed to come, Drew turned and stood on her toes to look around, she was trying to find me, which was the last thing I wanted, but Harvey got her into that car fast, and jumped in after her, I had told him no cops, but a couple of state troopers stood there in jodhpurs and gun belts crisscrossed on their chests and those smart olive-drab felt scout hats complete with leather thong ties under their chins, these guys were on duty mostly for decoration, in case the governor showed up or someone like that, but they were large and incorruptible, I mean what could they give you in return, a highway? and the situation was ambiguous, I didn't like the frown I saw on Irving's face, if they had the idea that she was scared and running we were both in terrible trouble.

"What's this all about?" Irving said.

"Big-shot stuff," I said. "These guys have nothing better to do, that's all."

Moving quickly without running, Irving and Mickey left the park through a side entrance and moved to their own car. They insisted I come with them and I didn't feel I was in a position to argue. When we got to the Packard, I opened the door to get in the back and was shocked to see Mr. Berman sitting there. He was still up to his tricks. I said nothing and neither did he, but I knew now it was his pa.s.sion I was dealing with. Irving said: "The husband showed up." Mickey got us into the traffic, and he picked up the car within a block and we followed it at a discreet distance. I was as surprised as anyone when it gathered speed and headed south out of town. They weren't even stopping for her things at the hotel.

Quite suddenly Saratoga ended and we were in the country. We drove behind them ten or fifteen minutes. Then I looked through the side window and realized we were abreast of an airfield, planes, single and double wings, were lined up parked like cars. Harvey's driver turned in there and we went past the entrance and pulled off the road under some trees where we could see the hangar and the runway beyond it. A wind sock at the end of the runway hung limp, just the way I felt.

There was a terrible silence in the car, the motor was left running, I could feel Mr. Berman calculating the odds. They had driven up to a single-engine plane whose door was open just under the wing. Someone already inside was extending his arms to help them climb in. Again Drew turned to look behind her and again Harvey stepped into her line of vision. She still had flowers in her arms.

"Looks like the little lady has pulled a fast one," Mr. Berman said. "You didn't see this coming?"

"Sure," I said. "Like I knew Lulu was going to bust me in the nose."

"What could she be thinking?"

"She's not scared, if that's what you mean," I said. "This is the way they travel in this league. The truth is she's been ready to move on for a while now."

"How do you know? Did she tell you that?"

"Not in so many words. But I could tell."

"Well that's interesting." He thought a moment. "If you were right that would certainly change the picture. Did she say anything about Dutch, was she angry at him or anything?"

"No."

"How do you know?"

"I just know. She doesn't care, it doesn't matter to her."

"What doesn't matter?"

"Nothing. Like she left a brand-new car at the hotel. We can take it, it won't matter to her. She's not after anything, she's not naturally afraid like most girls you'd meet or jealous or any of that. She does whatever she wants, and then she gets bored and then she does something else. That's all."

"Bored?"

I nodded.

He cleared his throat. "Obviously," he said, "this is a conversation that must never again be spoken of." The cabin door closed. "What about the husband. Is he someone who we should expect to give us trouble?"

"He's a cream puff," I said. "And in the meantime I have missed the seventh race and I didn't get to put a bet down on that sure thing you gave me. That was my paycheck, that was my big chance to make a killing."

A man came out of the hangar and grabbed one end of the propellor with two hands and spun it and jumped back when the engine turned over. Then he ducked under the wings and pulled the chocks from under the wheels and the plane taxied onto the runway. It was a lovely silver plane. It paused for a moment with its ailerons flapping and its rudder waggling from side to side, and then it took off. After a moment it lifted into the air. You could see how light and fragile it was rising and sliding and shuddering through the volume of the sky. It banked and flashed in the sun and then rose on its new course and began to be hard to see. As I watched it, its outlines wavered, like something swimming. Then I felt as if it was one of those threadlike things drifting across the ball of my eye. Then it disappeared into a cloud but I was still left with the feeling of something in my eye.

"They'll be other races," Mr. Berman said.

PART FOUR.

SEVENTEEN.

The moment I returned I realized the country had damaged my senses, all I could smell was burning cinder, my eyes smarted, and the clamor was deafening. Everything was broken down and falling apart, the tenements looked worn out by history, the empty lots were rubble, but what was most serious of all, what was clearly a sign to me of my brain damage, was how small my street looked, how miserably humble and wretchedly squeezed in among the other streets. And I came along in my rumpled white linen suit with the points of my collar curling up in the heat and my tie knot loosened, and I had thought I had wanted to look good for my mother, so that she would see how well I had done for myself over the summer, but I was instead wilted from the long trip, it was a hot Sat.u.r.day in New York and I felt weak and washed out, with the leather valise a heavy weight on the socket of my arm, but the way the people looked at me I realized I was deranged in this sense of things too, I looked too good, I was not someone returning home but an absolute foreigner, n.o.body in the East Bronx had clothes like this, n.o.body owned a leather valise with two cinch straps, they all looked at me, the kids diverted from their games of skelly and box ball, the adults on the stoops forgetting their conversation, and I walked past them, stepping by in the damaged sense of my hearing, everything now hushed, as if the bitter acrid and stifling air had steeped me in silence.

But all of this was as nothing when I climbed the dark stairs. The door of our apartment was not entirely closed because the lock was broken, the first of a series of infinitesimal changes the universe had made in the downward direction while I was away, and when I pushed the door it swung open to a dismal low-ceilinged flat that was at the same time familiar and arbitrarily insane with slanting linoleum floors and furniture whose stuffing was hanging out, and a dead plant on the fire escape, and in the kitchen a whole wall and ceiling blackened where my mother's lights must have flared too hot. The kitchen table of burning drinking gla.s.ses was not now in operation, the tabletop was covered with hardened spires and globs and pools of white wax with small black craters and pits that made me think of a planetarium model of the moon. And there was no sign of my mother though she still lived here, I could tell that, her jar with the long jeweled hairpins was not moved, the photograph of her as a young woman standing next to my father, whose figure had been X'd out with a crayon and face carefully excised, that was still there, her few clothes hanging from the back of the bedroom closet door, and up on the shelf the hatbox I had sent from Onondaga, the hat still inside and wrapped in tissue just the way it had come from the store.

In the icebox were some eggs and a stale half a rye bread in a paper bag, and a bottle of milk that was curdled on top.

I turned on a light sat down on the floor in the middle of this domain of a lost woman and her lost son and from each of my pockets removed the folded bills of our wealth and smoothed them out and arranged them by denomination and straightened them into a stack, tapping them on all four sides with my stiffened palms: I had come down from the country with a little over six hundred and fifty dollars, the remains of my Saratoga expense account which Mr. Berman told me I could keep. It was an immense amount of money but it was not enough, nothing was enough to pay the bill for this high holy life of rect.i.tude, faith, and bathing in the kitchen sink. I put the cash in my bag and the bag in the closet and found a pair of old knickers that were torn in the knees and a ribbed unders.h.i.+rt and my old Nat Holman lace-up sneakers with the soles worn away, and I changed into these things and felt a little better, I sat on the fire escape and smoked a cigarette and began to remember who I was, whose son I was, except that the prospect across the street of the brick-and-limestone Max and Dora Diamond Home for Children presented itself first to my eyes and then to my mind, I stuck the cigarette in the corner of my mouth, swung over the side of the fire escape, handed myself down the ladder, and hanging there from my hands dropped the last ten feet to the sidewalk, only realizing as I landed that I was not quite the flowing phantom of grace I had been, there was more of a shock to the knees in this hanging drop and to the little bones of the feet, I had eaten well in the country and perhaps filled out a bit, I looked up and down to see who was watching and walked across the street as slowly as I needed to in order to mask my inclination to limp, and went down the steps to the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Diamond Home for Children, where my friend Arnold Garbage who had sold me my Automatic sat in his ashen kingdom and collected everything as it made its way down to us from the higher realms of purposefulness.

Oh my stolid friend, "Where was you," he said, as if I had been under a misapprehension all these years that he was dumb, the verbosity of the fellow, and he had grown too, he was going to be a giant fat man, like Julie Martin, he stood to greet me and tin pots fell from him clattering to the cement bas.e.m.e.nt floor and he stood in his full height, this glandular genius, and he smiled.

So that was good, coming to the bas.e.m.e.nt again, and sitting around smoking and telling lies to Arnold Garbage while he examined one mysterious unidentifiable inorganic item after another in order to make a determination as to which bin to throw it in, and the footfalls overhead of the Diamond orphans at their games thrupped and pounded the foundations and made me think of the sweet gurgling exertions of children as water springing from the earth. I actually wondered if perhaps I ought to return to school, I would be in the tenth grade if I did, Mr. Berman's favorite number, containing the one and the zero and capping all the numbers you needed to express any number, it was just a pa.s.sing thought, the sort of idea you have when you're hurt and in a weakened condition.