Billy Bathgate (34 page)

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 rectitude, 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 undershirt 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 basement 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 basement floor and he stood in his full height, this glandular genius, and he smiled.

So that was good, coming to the basement 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 passing thought, the sort of idea you have when you’re hurt and in a weakened condition.

But when I went upstairs to look in the old gym and see if I saw there anyone else I knew, a small black-haired girl acrobat, for example, I caused consternation, the rhythm of their games broke and that same silence came over them as when I walked into the block with my suitcase, the children, who now looked awfully young, stared at me in the sudden gymnastic hush, a volleyball rolled across the shiny wood floor, and a counselor I didn’t recognize who was holding her whistle attached to a woven lanyard around her neck approached me and said this was not a public place and visitors were not allowed.

This was the first bulletin of the news that my assumptions were expired, that I could not reinsert myself, as if there were two kinds of travel and while I was moving upstate on roads over mountains, the people of my street were advancing in the cellular time of their being. I found out Becky was gone, she had been taken by a foster family in New Jersey, one of the girls on her floor told me this, how lucky Becky was because she had her own room now, and then she told me to leave, that I shouldn’t come to the girls’ floor, that it wasn’t right, and I went to the roof where before I knew I loved her I had paid that dear little girl for her fucks, and the super was up there painting green lines for a shuffleboard court, and he stood up and rubbed the back of his hand that was holding the brush across his face where the sweat was itching, and he told me I was street trash and that he’d give me
three
to get off the property and that if he ever saw me here again he’d beat the shit out of me and then call the cops so that they could do it again.

Well all this as you can imagine was indeed an interesting homecoming, but really what angered me was how vulnerable I was, and stupid, to expect something, I didn’t know what, from this neighborhood I hadn’t been able to leave fast enough. In the days following I realized that wherever I had been, whatever
I had done, the people knew about it not in its detail but in its fulfillment of their myth-knowledge of the rackets. My reputation had advanced. In the candy store on the corner where I bought the papers every morning and evening, on the stoops of hot twilight, and all the way over to Bathgate, I was known by sight, and who I was and what I did made this light around me as I walked, I understood I was illuminated as one
in their midst
, it was a kind of infamy. I had known those neighborhood feelings myself, there had always been someone like me to know about from the other kids, to hear mentioned only after he had turned the corner, to be feared, to be told to stay away from. Under the circumstances it was pretentious for me to wear my old kid juggler’s rags, I would go back to wearing the wardrobe of my success. Besides, I didn’t want to disappoint anybody. Once you’re in the rackets you can never get out, Mr. Schultz had told me, and he had said it not in any menacing way but with a voice of self-pity, so that I thought, as a proposition, it was suspect. But not now, not now.

Of course I am summarizing the rueful conclusions of some days, at first there was only bewilderment, the worst shock was my mother, whom I saw just a few hours after my arrival, she was coming down the street pushing her brown wicker baby carriage and I knew immediately even from a distance her lovely distraction had gone awry. Her gray hair was uncombed and flowing, and the closer she got the more terribly sure I was that unless I stepped in front of her and spoke to her she would pass me by without a glimmer of recognition. Even at that it was touch-and-go, the first emotion that registered on her face was anger, because the carriage had met an impediment, then her eyes lifted and for a moment I felt as if I was out of focus in her mind, that she saw me and knew just enough to know it was important to make sense of me, and only then, after an unendurable stop in my heart’s beat, did I live again in the recognition of stately, mad Mary Behan.

“Billy, is this you?”

“Yes, Ma.”

“You’ve grown out.”

“Yes, Ma.”

“He’s a big lad,” she said to whoever it was who was listening. She was staring at me now with such intensity that I had to move toward her to get out of the glare, I hugged her and kissed her cheek, she was not fresh and clean as I’d always known her to be, but had about her the acrid, cindery redolence of the street. I looked down in the baby carriage and saw there browning leaves of lettuce flattened neatly and spread like lily pads over the inside, and corncobs, and the spilled insides of cantaloupe seeds still attached in their mucusy webs. I didn’t want to know what she imagined she had there. She was unsmiling and not to be consoled.

Oh Mama, Mama, but once the carriage was in the house she overturned it and dumped the detritus on newspaper and rolled it up in a paper bag and put it in the kitchen trash can, which waited as always for the super’s buzzer to signal when it was to be loaded onto the dumbwaiter. So that was reassuring. I was to learn that she went in and out of her states as if she suffered her own passing weather conditions, and every time she cleared up I decided she would be all right for good now, that the problem was over. Then she would storm over again. On Sunday I showed her all the money I had, which seemed to please her, and then I went out and brought back the materials for a proper breakfast and she cooked everything up in the old way, remembering how we liked our sunny-sides up, and she had bathed and dressed herself nicely and combed and pinned her hair so that we were able to have a morning stroll to Claremont Avenue and up the steep stairs to Claremont Park and to sit in the park on the bench under a big tree and read the Sunday papers. But she would not ask me anything about the summer, where I had been or what I had done, not from any lack of curiosity, but from a knowledgeable silence, as if she had heard it all, as if there was nothing I could tell her that she didn’t already know.

I felt by this time terribly guilty of neglect, she seemed so to enjoy being out of the immediate neighborhood, sitting in the peacefulness of the green park, and the possibility that she had
been affected by my actions, that she had been made to feel estranged, as I was, in the general community misgiving of a bad family, a crazy woman who had of course raised a bad boy, was enough to make me want to weep.

“Ma,” I said. “We have enough money to move. How would you like a new apartment somewhere around here, right near the park, maybe we could find a building with an elevator and we could look down into the park from every window. See, like those houses over there.”

She gazed in the direction I pointed and then shook her head no over and over, and then sat and stared at her hands folded on her pocketbook in her lap and shook her head again as if she had to rethink the question and answer it again as if it kept popping up again and again and wouldn’t stay answered.

I was so blue, I insisted we have lunch out, I was ready to do anything, take her to the movies, the thought of going back to our street was insupportable, I was so lost I could only think of living in public places, where something was happening, where I might be able to reanimate my mother, get her to smile, get her to talk, get her to be my mother again. At the edge of the park I flagged a taxi and had him take us all the way up to Fordham Road, to the same Schrafft’s where we had had our tea that day she had come with me to buy clothes. We had to wait for a table but when we sat down I could see it pleased her to be back there, and that she remembered it and enjoyed its dainty pretensions, its suggestion of the dignity given to people from their patronage, though now of course I found it a dull place with very bland food in mincy portions, and thought to myself with a laugh of those heavily taken meals with the gang at the Onondaga Hotel and how they would all look right now if they were eating here at Schrafft’s with the churchgoers from East Fordham Road, the expression on Lulu Rosenkrantz’s face when the waitress served him his little cucumber-and-butter sandwich with the crust removed and the tall ice-cream glass of iced tea without enough ice. And then I made the mistake of thinking about my steak dinner at the Brook Club with Drew Preston and the way she looked across the table leaning on her
elbow and drinking me in with her smiling tipsy dreaminess of expression and I felt my ears grow hot and looked up and there was my mother smiling at me in just the same way, in terrifying resemblance, so that for an instant I didn’t know where I was, or who I was with, and it seemed to me they knew each other, Drew and my mother, by some imposition of one on the other that made them old friends, and that their full mouths matched and their eyes passed like rings through each other’s eyes, and that I was cursed with an undifferentiated love that made them inseparable. This was all in the space of an instant but I cannot remember now when I have felt as catastrophically self-informed, I had molted and muscled out, skin and mind and wit, molted and muscled out again and again, except in the heart, except in the heart. I was all at once enraged, at what, at whom, I didn’t know, at God for not moving as quickly, as adeptly, as I could, at the food on my plate, I was bored by my mother, I loathed the pathetic existence to which she had consigned herself, it was not fair to be dragged back into the hopeless boredom of family life, to be taken down this way after all the hard work of my criminal intentions, I was doing it, didn’t she realize? She’d better not try to stop me. Let anyone try to stop me.

But you know, the waitress comes over and says will that be all and then you ask for the check and pay it.

On that first Monday morning after my return my mother went off to her laundry job as she always had, which suggested to me her madness was self-governed, which meant it was not madness at all but just a passing version of the distraction I had always known. Then I happened to look into the wicker carriage and saw there arranged as in a nest the eggshells from our Sunday breakfast. So for the first time but not the last, I went from confidence to despair in the space of a second. I wondered, as I would wonder over and over as part of the whole irresolute cycle, if perhaps I should stop fooling myself and come to grips with the truth that something had to be done, that I had better get her to a doctor, have her examined and treated, before she got so bad she would need to be put in an asylum. I didn’t
exactly know how to go about this, or whom to consult, but it seemed to me Mr. Schultz had an old widowed mother he took care of, perhaps he could help, perhaps the gang even had its doctors the way it had its lawyers. Anyway, who else could I turn to? I didn’t belong here anymore, I didn’t belong with the orphans or the people in the neighborhood, all I had was the gang, whatever my ultimate intentions and passing disloyalties, I was theirs and they were mine. Whatever desires I had—to abandon my mother, to save my mother—they all convened on Mr. Schultz.

But I wasn’t hearing from him and I wasn’t hearing from them and all I knew was what I got from the papers. I would not go out now except to get the papers or my packs of Wings, I read every paper I could get my hands on. I bought them all, all day and all night, it began late at night when I went up to the kiosk under the Third Avenue El and bought the early editions of the next morning’s papers, and then in the morning I went to the candy store on the corner for the late editions, and then at noon I’d go over to the kiosk for the the early editions of the evening papers, and then in the evening I’d go to the corner and pick up the final editions. The government’s case seemed to me inargu-able. They had evidence on paper, they had accountants from the Internal Revenue Bureau explaining the income tax law, they were really laying it out. I was very nervous. When Mr. Schultz took the stand it seemed to me he was not persuasive. He explained that he had been given the wrong advice by his lawyer, that his lawyer had simply made a mistake, and that once another lawyer had explained the mistake he, Mr. Schultz, had endeavored to pay every penny he owed as a patriotic citizen, but this was not good enough for the government, which decided it would rather prosecute him. I didn’t know if even a farmer would believe that lame story.