City of Boys (12 page)

When my mother is out of his sight, Mr. Rosenberg pounds on the floor, but I stay at the window. Across the street small children in tiny white uniforms enter the building that houses a karate studio upstairs. Mr. Rosenberg pounds again, and I walk into the kitchen and turn on the radio. Above, he follows me, a rubbery running squeak along the ceiling. He listens as I switch stations. I leave the radio on as I go out and I close our door as quietly as I can, turn the key in the lock slowly until I hear a faint click, and climb
the stairs on tiptoe, but when I knock on his door, he is already waiting at the other side.

—Who is it? he asks, and when I tell him, he begins undoing his locks, then pulls the door open against the chain and looks at me.

—Oh, he says. —You.

In the dreary sliver of world protected by the weak chain, a burglar would see nothing of value: an old television set, a splintery piano covered with photographs in cheap frames, Mr. Rosenberg’s thin dry face. He closes the door and unhooks the chain.

—So, he says, wheeling toward the television. —Your mother’s gone out.

The television is already on, humming quietly in the corner, throwing a shifting pattern of light out across the floor and walls. My mother never let us have a television. —It’s the one thing I ever did right with you kids, she sometimes says. And, as children, we sat through long evenings while televisions flicked on in the houses all around us, changing the shadows, changing the color of the night outside the windows; every day at recess, when the other children came together to talk about their favorite shows, we stood loosely by, feigning disinterest, but hungering for news of people we had never even seen. I don’t think Mr. Rosenberg ever turns his television off, just lowers the sound when there is nothing on that he wants to watch. Sometimes, early in the morning, before anyone is awake, I’m sure I can hear it hum through our ceiling, and I wonder what might be on, as Mr. Rosenberg sits dozing in front of it, waking occasionally to watch, then sliding back to sleep. He spends the rest of his time rolling restlessly around his apartment; if he ever really sleeps, it is in his chair, sitting up like a cat or a horse, and only for short periods of time.

He turns the sound up now, and as a show comes on, he
rolls back to the shadows in the corner, and I sit in the straight wooden chair he leaves for me in the middle of the floor, close to the television. He chooses what we watch, which is generally whatever channel the TV happens to be on, and we never speak, not even during the commercials. Occasionally he makes a noise, a sigh, a small exclamation, but I never turn around. The only other sound comes from the TV and the steady rhythm of his breath as he lights and smokes cigarettes. He has a large plastic ashtray taped to the arm of his wheelchair, but only rarely does he use it; usually when he has smoked a cigarette down to the filter, he drops it on the floor beside him and lights another. His floor is covered with the small dark scars of burnt-out cigarettes. In good weather, he rides the rickety elevator downstairs, then parks himself outside in front of the doorway to our building where he sits and smokes all day, all by himself, unless someone stops and talks to him. —Step on that, he’ll say, dropping a burning butt on the ground, and he’s got another one lit before you’ve lifted your foot.

—One of these days, my mother says, —he’ll burn the place down. He’ll kill us all, she says with satisfaction, but she smokes the same way, constantly, and our apartment is gray and grimy with smoke.

—Oh, your father hated it, she says. —That’s why our marriage broke up. He said I was trying to give him cancer.

At other times, though, she says it was money, another man, another woman that broke up their marriage. Once, she turned sadly to me from the window and said, as if she’d been thinking about it for a long time, —You know, before you kids were born- and her voice trailed off. —I don’t know, she went on. —Things just seemed to be different then.

She lit a cigarette and looked right through me, while outside
on the street a woman walked by wheeling a broken grocery cart full of plastic bags.

Mr. Rosenberg lights a cigarette behind me and I get comfortable in my hard chair. In front of us, flickering image gives way to flickering image, family succeeds family, plot follows plot, and Mr. Rosenberg lights and drops cigarettes, the sharp hiss of a match followed by the sharper inhalation of breath. When the news comes on at eleven, Mr. Rosenberg stirs.

—So, he says. —So. Found your brother yet?

I turn the sound on the television down low, but I keep my eyes on the screen. Mr. Rosenberg has been asking this question regularly since my brother left more than a year ago.

—He’s not lost, I say. —He just moved out.

In truth, though, we have not seen him for several months, and I don’t know where to find him, so I suppose he could be called lost, and I do spend part of most days looking for him.

—Well, Mr. Rosenberg says, —he’s going to be lost if you don’t find him pretty soon.

I say nothing and watch a young man being carried out of a burning building on the lower East Side.

—I don’t know, Mr. Rosenberg says. —It’s a wonder you haven’t disappeared too, the way things go.

—He hasn’t disappeared, I say. —He’s around.

—Listen, he says. —You just listen. My Kathy. She was around, too, and then, all of a sudden, just like that, she wasn’t. She was lost. Just like that.

He gestures at his array of photographs, all of them but one pictures of girls and women-his wife and five daughters. In the odd one, he is standing next to his wife, watching her smile as she brings a cigarette to her lips. All the girls look
pretty much alike to me, thin and dark, with the routine false smiles and startled eyes of photographs. Mr. Rosenberg shakes his head.

—I don’t know, he says. —I should have seen it then, in the picture. I don’t know, he says again. —Maybe not. There were so many of them.

On the news a man is being pushed through a crowd, several grinning policemen at his back. Downstairs the front door opens and snaps closed, and footsteps follow in the hallway. I rise.

—I guess I’d better go, I say. —That might be my mother.

Mr. Rosenberg looks at his watch. —Hah, he says. —Too early. He nods, but I stay standing as someone clicks down the hall and climbs the stairs slowly past us and up to the floors above.

—See? he says, but I say I’d better go anyways.

—What are you in such a hurry for? he asks. —You got no TV. Your mother’s not home.

On the news someone charts a pattern of snow from North Dakota through the Midwest, on its way to New York. I cannot imagine what North Dakota could be like.

—What do you do down there anyways? Mr. Rosenberg asks.

—I read, I say. —Or do crossword puzzles. I listen to the radio.

I don’t tell him how sometimes when I am alone I follow the rubbery trail of his chair as the floor creaks above me, tracing his passage from room to room, imagining his face, the smoke in his lungs, the things he thinks about. Every now and then I can feel him poised directly above me, listening, and we wait together, breathless, until one of us finally steals away, leaving the other hovering uncertainly. These are some of the things I do, but mostly what I do is wait, with my mother or without her, for something to happen.
Mr. Rosenberg drops his cigarette on the floor and wheels over to me.

—What else?

Sometimes, I tell him, I feed the pigeons in the alley. The roofs here are covered with pigeons that flutter down to eat from the Dumpsters in the alley. Because we are on the first floor, our side windows are too thick to see through–the glass is greenish and dimpled–so I used to throw bread on the walk out front and watch the pigeons from our window, but my mother said it depressed her to watch all those birds scrabbling after a few crusts of bread, so now I feed them in the alley. No matter how regularly I come with food, they still scatter at my approach, then gently descend as I toss the bread, but they won’t come near me, and wait until I back out of the alley to eat any bread that’s dropped near my feet. They cover the ground efficiently, crowding so close together that when I watch them from the sidewalk, if I almost close my eyes, they look like one big bobbing gray and white shape, like something from a dream.

Before my brother left, he sometimes came with me to feed the pigeons, but now that he is gone, I go out alone. Their feathers are getting thicker as winter approaches.

Mr. Rosenberg wheels around and looks at the wall that faces the alley. His windows are clear glass, but he keeps his shades pulled most of the time, since the building next door is only a few feet away.

—Pigeons, he says. —Rats with wings. He lights a cigarette and tosses the match on the floor. —Get a cat.

—I want a cat, I say, —but my mother says it’s too expensive.

—Expensive? he says. —What’s to buy? I had cats. Five of them. Beautiful. Pigeons. Hah.

He stares at the television for a while. —What else?

—What?

—What else? What else do you do?

My only other activity is walking up and down streets, looking for my brother. I don’t even know anymore why I do this, except that somehow I feel it is expected of me; also, things were different before he left, and I suppose I think if he was back, things would be different again, but this is not something I want to tell Mr. Rosenberg, so I finally say, —Nothing.

—I thought so, he says, dropping his cigarette. —You ought to do something, he says, and wheels over to the wall. He stops under the photograph of his daughter Brenda. She is smiling and her body is split by a wide red sash that reads “Miss Florida.”

—Be like Brenda, he says. —Do something.

In the lighted windows of the karate studio across the street, neat rows of children jump up in the air with their legs extended. When they land, their mouths open and close silently. Mr. Rosenberg lights another cigarette.

—Maybe your mother won’t come home tonight, he says.

—Who knows? It happens to everybody sooner or later.

He holds his cigarette to his lips and gazes at me. When I leave, he is still sitting under Brenda’s picture, but I wait on the steps, and after a moment I hear him roll across the floor, then, as I walk downstairs, each lock snapping home.

I try to turn my locks as quietly as possible, try to move from room to room to room, and get in bed, and turn out the light, all without making a sound, but even so, I’m sure I can hear him follow me; he gives himself away with the tiny whisper of a match, and the slow hiss of wood as the floor burns above my head. I have lived here for a long time, though, and sometimes I’m not sure exactly what I imagine and what is really happening. There is so much that seems real, yet can’t be. Underneath us, the subway passes and the whole
building shakes. Mr. Rosenberg wheels away and turns up the volume on his television.

I lie in bed listening to the blowing leaves rattle against the windows, watching the light change against the smokey glass on the alley, and I plan my dream about New Jersey. For months now, I have been dreaming of New Jersey, where we lived once; it is where my father lives now, with his new family. In my mind, it is all beautiful lawns, trees, grass, and children, but when I told my mother this, she just laughed.

—New Jersey, she said. —Everybody wants to get
out
of New Jersey. Why do you think they have so many bridges and tunnels? Just be glad you’re here already and don’t have to make the trip.

—But we were happy there, I said, and at the moment I believed that we were, although I don’t really remember it. She laughed. —Nobody’s happy in New Jersey, she said. —Don’t you remember? But all I remember is a green lawn, a black dog, and my brother’s bony brown legs as he played in the yard.

—That part about the dog, my mother said. —You’re making that up. We never had a dog. Your father’s allergic.

But I could swear I remember it waiting for me in our yard, and I could swear I remember waking up to feel its rough fur, as it slept at the end of my bed. I could swear I remember this.

In my dream, Mr. Rosenberg sits in a circle of smoldering cigarettes; the building is burning, and my mother is inside, but when the wall crumbles and falls, our window is left standing, and my mother’s image is seared against it, striped with shadows of the iron bars. Behind her, men rise from the ashes and walk toward me. —Honey, my mother whispers, —baby.

* * *

The train cuts through my dream and the world trembles every time it passes. When my mother comes home, Mr. Rosenberg rolls restlessly across the floor above us. My door opens a crack and through my closed eyes, I can see my mother in the strip of light. From the bathroom comes the sound of water, a toilet flushing. She closes my door gently, and Mr. Rosenberg follows her trail to bed. —Honey, she whispers, —baby, and Mr. Rosenberg listens for a while until the radiator comes on and the hiss and clatter drown out all other sound. He wheels slowly back across to the windows over my room. I can hear each cigarette butt hit the floor. He sits, staring out the window, smoke rising around him, and when I finally fall asleep, the city is beginning to stir: the horses in the Park stables snort and lift their heads, pigeons flutter around men in doorways, and cabs come out to cruise aimlessly as dawn splits the city open.

At breakfast the man is gone and my mother’s face is tired and pale. She picks up the newspaper and glances at the headlines.

—More bad news, she says. —I don’t know why you get this thing.

—For the puzzle, I say. —It’s got the best one.

—That’s a lot of bad news for one puzzle, she says, and pokes in her pockets, looks around the table for her cigarettes, then goes into the living room.

—Damn, she says. —Listen, honey, she calls, and comes back into the kitchen. —Would you go get me some cigarettes? Carl smoked all of mine. There’s money in my purse. She sits down and picks up the paper. —Unless he took that too, she says to herself.

Just before the door closes behind me, she calls my name
and I catch the door with my foot. —Baby, she says. —Get me a bottle of gin, too, would you?