“Claude,” I said, trying not to mimic his grin, but finding it impossible to resist, “what can I get you?” The place was pretty crowded for that time in the afternoon, for which I was grateful. There was no guarantee Claude would speak.
He waved in the general direction of the taps, as if to say it didn’t matter to him which one I pulled. I drew him a beer and wouldn’t take his money for it.
Untemeyer came in and I told Claude I’d be right back. I had half a dozen small wagers for the bookie, who set up shop at his usual place at the end of the bar near the kitchen. Irma came out, her hair in a net, dark perspiration stains under her arms from the steamy kitchen, and tossed two dollars on the bar for her usual daily double.
“Irma La Deuce,” Untemeyer said, writing out a slip.
Irma winked at me, her face humorless. Untemeyer always took her action first, so she could go back in the kitchen.
“You never should have took up gambling,” the bookie said. “You’re an unlucky woman.”
“Tell me.”
“Besides,” Untemeyer said, “one loser per marriage is enough.”
“Not in mine,” Irma said.
“Right,” Untemeyer said. “Not in Mohawk.”
I read him what I had while he wrote. When we finished, he made me read it all again to make sure there was no mistake. Then he took the money. “How come you never bet?” Untemeyer said.
It was true. I’d quit. Left the whole thing back in Tucson. “I’m just looking for the right horse,” I said.
“Me too,” he agreed. “Fifty some years and I haven’t found him yet.” He looked over his thick glasses down the bar to where Claude Schwartz was sitting. “Seven-one-seven,” he said, nodding. “July seventeenth. Half of Mohawk played seven-one-seven that day.”
Skinny Donovan was there with us at the end of the bar. He was drinking Vichy water trying to dry out before Monday. My father had gotten him on as a flagman on a nonunion road job in Speculator on the condition that he wouldn’t be drunk and shaking come Monday when he started. He looked like he wasn’t going to be drunk, but he still had the shivers pretty bad and everybody was kidding him. Wussy had been in, looked him over and shaken his head, glad Skinny wouldn’t be landing no airplanes with those flags.
“Seven-one-seven,” Skinny nodded. “I played it for about a week myself, even though I should’ve knew better. It only works for suicides if they die.”
“It popped just last week,” Untemeyer observed. “You should have stuck with it.”
“For ten years?” Skinny said.
“How many numbers you had in ten years?”
“Never one,” Skinny admitted sadly.
“There you go,” Untemeyer said. “You hadn’t been fickle, you’d have had the one, anyway.”
Skinny drank his Vichy and considered this seriously. “I could use the money,” he said, as if he harbored a secret hope that Untemeyer might give him credit for wanting to bet seven-one-seven all those years and pay off on the intention.
Things always picked up when Untemeyer came in and it took me fifteen minutes or so to get back down to Claude at the other end of the bar. When I finally did, his glass was empty and he’d written me a message on his damp cocktail napkin. It contained his address and the following: “My wife’s name is Lisa. Come see us. My mother lives with us, too.”
“I will, Claude,” I said, folding the napkin and pocketing it.
We shook again, then, and Claude climbed down off his bar stool. I didn’t really expect him to speak, and when he did, it surprised me so, I made him repeat what he’d said, though I’d heard his soft voice clearly. The rasping that had characterized his speech for so long after he’d tried to hang himself was gone now, but he still spoke, out of desire or necessity, at little more than a whisper. Even so, I’d heard him clearly answer the question I’d been wanting to ask ever since I’d recognized him as his father.
“He never came back,” Claude Schwartz said, as if this fact too belonged in his private Guinness Book of World Records.
By the time I got off work, went home, and discovered the napkin in my pocket, the ink had smeared so badly that the address was unreadable. Fortunately, Claude’s mother was listed in the Mohawk directory and I was pretty sure the address was the same Claude had written on the napkin. When I called, it was his mother who answered and said, yes of course it was Ned Hall, and that I was to come right over. I was expected for pizza. When I said I’d have to take a rain check until the following evening, she said that would be fine and did I like pizza? I said I did. Very much.
The next afternoon I had Mike let me go home half an hour early so I could go home and shower off some of the beer smell. It also happened to be Wednesday, which meant that I carried about my person the odor of urine. Mrs. Agajanian had again come to visit just long enough to toss back four murderous Manhattans and pee in her booth. And, just as in the case of the previous Wednesdays, she was steadier on her way out than in, her knotted, dry old bones lubricated somewhat, her face frozen into a savage, determined grin, her stockings dripping. Any right-minded person who hadn’t the responsibility of sponging down her booth afterward would have admired her.
Every Wednesday after that first one, she demanded more and more of my time, and she was militantly heedless of whatever else happened to be going on in the bar. I never sat down, but this did not stop her from telling me a long story each time I delivered a Manhattan. Ten years had not diminished by a jot her resentment against Byron, her homosexual and utterly fictional husband, who, I was informed, was now living somewhere in Puerto Rico, having “sunk his faggot ass in butter.” She had stories about half a dozen other eccentric relatives too and she always told anecdotes about them as if they were famous people who needed no introduction. She only once mentioned the invisible son I’d sat on ten years earlier when he was cleaning fish, remarking with genuine regret that he was not the kind of boy you could take places.
She much preferred me to Satch, the previous bartender at Mike’s, who had been slow to lend an arm and whose overall intelligence she had considered suspect. His slender, hairy chest had reminded her of Byron’s. He’d not only made an indifferent Manhattan, he was very slow about it, leaving her to shout and bang on the back of the booth in frustration until her hands throbbed. She showed me her clawlike hands as evidence, and it was easy to believe that they throbbed all right, each finger going in several different arthritic directions. She had been overjoyed when Satch was canned, she said, indeed could not have been happier without having been informed that he had died and gone to hell, even though my own Manhattans were not such a great improvement, truth be told. But I wasn’t to worry about it, because I was a good young fellow. She approved of me, as she could not approve of Satch and the hateful gorilla of a taxicab driver they always sent for her. As I balanced Mrs. Agajanian on my arm, out of the bar and into the gorilla’s waiting taxi, I always wondered how the old woman reconciled her fondness for me with the soaked booth she always left as a token of her affection.
The Schwartz flat was located in a section of town I was not particularly well acquainted with although, according to my mother, my grandfather had once owned a house there and sold it in order to buy the one I’d grown up in. The streets west of Main were older and less symmetrical than those east. They turned around and in upon themselves, as if they’d been laid out by a drunk and then paved by a man who understood him perfectly. Small leather shops, many now closed and empty, rose up on street corners above long rows of two-family houses built much too close to one another, the broken concrete walkways between them so narrow that a broad-shouldered man would have to go sideways, tripping over the rusted tricycles and old inner tubes that inevitably collected there. Most of the houses themselves were sturdy and well built, among the oldest in the city, but they were run-down and neglected now, like the shops and green-fronted, dark neighborhood groceries, abandoned when those who had patronized them moved to newer sections of the city and did their shopp
ing along the highway. Only the occasional tan brick church survived the general exodus, indeed benefited, to some extent, by the razing of a shabby house or two nearby, so that the church parking lot could be expanded, or some ambitious rector’s plan for a church hall, named in his own honor, be implemented. Thus on Sundays the very people who had long before left the neighborhood to welfare renters returned to shake their perplexed heads at the old neighborhood and wonder how they’d ever managed to live in each other’s laps like that. When they went inside the church, they locked their cars.
The Schwartz flat was on Becker Street at the bottom of a dangerous hill that claimed the life of about one child a year, usually in a sledding accident. There were steeper hills around, but Becker Street’s was a long quarter-mile slope with but a single intersection at the bottom, ideal for sledding, that activity’s strict illegality notwithstanding. As a boy, I had not been allowed to cross Main with my sled, and my mother had shown me newspaper clippings in defense of her intractability. These had often contained grainy Mohawk Republican photos, snowy because Republican photos were always snowy, and because these happened actually to picture snow. If you looked at these pictures long and closely enough, and read the captions and stories that accompanied them, you might be able to ascertain that the dark mass in the center was a crazily angled automobile and that the dark something jutting up from under its wheels was a child’s sled. In a way, these vague white photographs did frighten me, leaving totally to the imagination as they did the condition, even the whereabouts, of the victim.
Coming down the same hill in my father’s convertible, I guessed that there were still all sorts of tragedies on Becker Street. The fact that the Claudes were now reduced to living there was perhaps among them, because these second-story flats were a far cry from the house they’d owned on Third Avenue. The hallway that led up to the Schwartz apartment was dank and airless. At the landing, I stopped to wipe the sweat from my forehead and consider whether it might be possible to retreat and drive away unnoticed. There were voices on the other side of the door, but not close—they seemed to come from the back of the flat, the kitchen probably. I was about to knock when the door opened and Claude, who must have seen me pull up in the street below and traced my progress up the stairs, was grinning at me as if to ask what I thought of all this. We shook hands there in the entry.
His mother peered in from the kitchen and caught us at it. “Honestly, Claude,” she hollered. “Don’t make your friend stand out there in the horrid hall. Have him come in where it’s cool!”
Claude rolled his eyes at me and stepped out of the way, so that I could come in where it was cool. Or at least so that I could come in, because I couldn’t see that it was a degree cooler inside than in the horrid hall. That it was cooler must have been deliberate fiction designed to make life bearable during the summer months. In fact, the apartment was stifling. For some reason all the windows were clamped shut, their dark shades three-quarters drawn. I recognized a few pieces of furniture from the house on Third Avenue, old and faded now. I wondered how on earth they’d managed to get some of the larger pieces up the narrow staircase and into the cramped flat. Unless there was a rear entrance that was more accessible, it looked to me a geometric impossibility.
“Why don’t you run along and get the pizza, dear?” Mrs. Schwartz sang from the kitchen. “And Mr. Hall can have a seat.”
She reappeared in the doorway before the sound of her voice had stopped reverberating. “Scoot,” she told her son. “Scoot, scoot, scoot.”
“If you’d like some company,” I began, already anxious to be out of the apartment.
“I’m the one in dire need of company,” Claudine Schwartz said emphatically. “My son has a wife and the post office, too. What I have is walls.”
By way of punctuation, a door slammed in the extreme rear of the flat. Mrs. Schwartz made a face in the direction of the noise.
“Scoot,” she repeated to her son, whose banishment had been momentarily halted by the sound. He did as he was told though, and his mother and I listened to the sound of his footsteps in retreat down the stairs. I listened for the sound of a car starting up in the street, but there wasn’t any, and I couldn’t tell whether with the windows closed I’d missed it or, more likely, that Claude had set out on foot. The nearest pizza place was Al’s, several blocks away, which meant that I was going to have a good twenty minutes in stir with Claudine.
Actually, Claude’s mother had not aged significantly. Never an attractive woman, she looked to me like her low-slung anatomy might still be accommodated by the same dress size, and her hair was dyed the same cheerful blond it had been when Claude and I were boys. Her skin was more sallow now, perhaps from staying indoors with the shades drawn, but then the sun had never made much of an impression on it. I remembered that afternoon in October when we’d all gone to the lake and she’d beached herself in the sand, covering her eyes with a towel, defying the weak October sun to color her pale limbs. She had asked me to remain a friend to her son that day, and I thought she must be pretty dissatisfied with my performance. But then everyone seemed to have pretty modest expectations where Claude was concerned.
“So,” I said. “Claude works for the post office?”
“For the last six and a half years,” she said. “Since he took the civil service.”
I smiled at the expression.
“He works strictly in the mailroom,” she explained, as if otherwise the idea of Claude as a postal worker might strain credulity. “He’s left alone to do his job and that’s the way he likes it. He reads all the magazines that come in and brings home the ones that can’t be delivered.”
Now that she’d mentioned it, there were a startling number and variety of magazines in the room. There were teetering piles of them up against every vacant wall space.
“You wouldn’t believe some of the gutter filth that comes through the United States mail,” Mrs. Schwartz said, glancing around apprehensively, lest an example might be in plain view. “It’s enough to make you ill. Physically ill.”
I said I bet it was.
“That’s why we can’t open our windows,” she explained, motioning to the drawn shades and drapes.
I did not want to appear stupid, but I couldn’t help blinking. Clearly, Claude’s mother did not consider her remark a non sequitur, but I did. Maybe it was the heat, but I was very close to asking her to experiment by opening the window directly behind me a few inches to see if any pornographic pamphlets flew through with the breeze.
“Filth,” Claude’s mother repeated. “You should hear what streams in. Both sides. The way they treat each other. The things they say. You know what it makes me want to do?”
I thought I did, but I said I didn’t.
“Bathe,” she said, surprising me. “I’d rather swelter than listen to filth. Close the windows, I say. Pray for winter. Then at least they have to close their windows.”
In fact, I was hearing noises, but they sounded like they were coming from the rear of the apartment. Another door slammed.
Mrs. Schwartz started to get up, then sat down again. “Actually, we’re having something of a domestic crisis of our own today,” she admitted.
I said I was sorry to hear it, that perhaps I shouldn’t have come, a possibility Claude’s mother appeared too abstracted to protest.
“It’s been suggested that there are other places where I might be content …” Mrs. Schwartz said, though it was clear that she considered this radical notion malicious nonsense, her own recent protestations of discontent notwithstanding. “As if the very bed she’s lying on in there were not my own. Given freely, you understand, I’m no Indian giver. After all, what do I need with a king-size?”
Claudine Schwartz appeared to give the question much consideration.
“You men,” she continued. “How I envy you. The way you can just pack a suitcase when things go wrong. Walk, as they say. Imagine.” She looked around the dark flat as if for an exit sign. “D
o you know what my husband took with him when he abandoned us?”
I said I didn’t.
“Nothing,” she said. “Underwear. Socks. A few shirts. His shaving kit.”
That sounded a lot like my own hasty departure from Tucson, and it made me feel guilty, as if I’d left a girl there, one I hadn’t known about.
“Do you know what I took from our house on Third Avenue when we moved to this … this … place?” she said, and waited long enough for me to raise my eyebrows. “Everything. I took every living thing. Furniture. Dishes. All of it. Half is in storage. What I kept it all for I couldn’t tell you, I’m sure. But I have it, and I’ll keep it.”
She nodded, taking inventory of the room, her expression saddening. “We had such nice things, didn’t we? For the longest time I thought after a while he’d remember all our nice things and get lonesome for them. But I guess men don’t.”
“I doubt he’s very happy,” I said, trying to cheer her up. In fact, I’d occasionally thought of Claude Sr. and wondered what might have become of him. There were two or three scenarios I’d toyed with. In one he was a guilt-ridden, grief-stricken wanderer, tormented by recurring dreams from which he would scream awake. In another he’d changed his name, found himself a long stretch of warm beach, and forgotten all about his previous life. But the one I leaned toward had him managing a small factory in a nearby state, married again, his new wife cheerfully bearing him sons through wide, good-natured hips. Big, slow boys he’d engage in foot races until they were old enough to beat him, or until they despaired and withdrew into defeat.
I continued to think about him even after Claude’s mother got on to more pleasant topics, until we heard Claude’s hurried feet on the stair and he burst, out of breath, into the room with a huge, hot cardboard box. It was just what we needed. Steam.
* * *
Somehow, we got through it.
I was far too uncomfortable to be hungry, but I ate two slices anyway—no toppings, double cheese—each bite pulling long sheets of swaying mozzarella toward vulnerable chins. In the center of the table was a sweating pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid, which made me wonder whether the Claudes customarily drank Kool-Aid with their meals or if this was a special occasion, a nostalgic gesture designed to remind Claude and me of the good old days when we’d drunk pitchersful on the big redwood picnic table in the backyard of their old house. Maybe it was a matter of money. Claude couldn’t have been getting rich at the post office, and there were three mouths to feed. I tried to imagine Claude asking for a raise and couldn’t. Tried to imagine him being given one without asking, and couldn’t swing that either. The fact that they were all living together in a cheap flat suggested at least a degree of desperation. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that inviting me for even such modest hospitality had probably required a sacrifice, and I tried my best not to in any way reveal my most profound wish that they’d reconsidered the project and risked hurting my feelings. God, did we sweat over that pizza.