Dissident Gardens (16 page)

Miriam and the Negro girl both wore dark sunglasses. Two teenage girls, laughing at Lenny before he managed to utter a word. What made him understand immediately that his fly was unzipped? It would have been for hours now. He raised his zipper and immediately
resigned the game, to the astonishment of the schmendrik, at whom he merely flipped his palm: You know nothing.

“What are you doing here, Mim?”

“We’re going to the movies, if you’ll buy us tickets.”

“Who’s this?”

“Janet,” said Miriam. “We’re best friends.”

If it was meant as provocation, Lenny wouldn’t bite.

“You live in Manhattan, Janet?”

The Negro girl shook her head, and Miriam said, “We met in school, Cousin Lenny.”

Lenny took a closer look at Miriam’s friend, wondering if there was some connection to Rose’s cop. But the cop and his wife had a boy, a single child, no elder daughter. This instead consisted of one of Miriam’s typical and instinctive rebukes to Rose: Mother hides with her blacks, I brandish mine.

“Terrific, I’m surprised I’ve never seen you around the neighborhood. Now, why not ride back to Queens? They got movies there.”

“We like it better here.” The girls laughed together again behind their wall of glasses, which offered Lenny only sun-shattered glimpses of his wondering self. Through the general maniacal atmosphere Lenny surmised that if there was anything at all to this best-friendship, even if it had only been conjured today and would be gone tomorrow, it was an arrangement that could breathe in Greenwich Village as it couldn’t anywhere near the precincts of High School 560.

“So, what are you seeing, some kind of Mickey Rooney picture?”

“William Holden. Wanna go?”

“I couldn’t possibly sit still for that crap. Opiate of the masses. But I’ll walk you.”

“Pay our way.”

“You don’t have enough for a flick, you shouldn’t be riding the subway.”

“We have enough, just not for popcorn too.”

“I’ll buy you popcorn. That way, Rose hears I ran into you, I had remotely nothing to do with William Holden—I bought you a meal. I put some food in you and advocated you reacquaint yourselves with the 7 train, which is what for the record I am doing right now.”

Lenny, feeling himself expand into the illusion of stewardship over the pair, nonetheless knew it was just this—an illusion. Miriam would apparently have to be allowed to go through a brief beatnik phase.

At twenty-three, at twenty-four and twenty-five, Lenny savored the luxury of believing this the awkwardest passage between them. An eight-year-old could love a baby, sure—it was crazy but undeniable, and nothing could get in the way of it, because it was crazy and a secret. A fourteen-year-old boy could love a six-year-old girl, too, because not only was she contained and presexual but he was still more or less so himself, a handful of wet sheets and furtive jerks notwithstanding. A fourteen-year-old didn’t even yet know what he was jerking about. A grown cousin—
once removed
; Lenny clung to this distinction—could marry his grown cousin. When they were twenty-eight and twenty, say. He’d wait that long. But a worldly twenty-three- or twenty-five-year-old couldn’t love a new-breasted halfling, one tumbling through all manner of teen rituals of self-becoming. Lenny figured both knew it, though couldn’t say, and thus found themselves forced to repel from the whole area, a defensive reaction. Relations between the cousins turned, necessarily, ironic, caustic, sporadic. This would pass.

Lenny in those years went on some dates.

Lenny journeyed a few times up to 125th Street to get his ashes hauled.

Lenny purchased an expensive tailored suit for a dollar from the closet of a man who died ostensibly of woe.

Lenny having proved himself astoundingly inept at the humping of barrels got fired from Real’s Radish & Pickle.

Lenny having proved himself to be the leading self-taught expert in five boroughs on the distinguishing characteristics of U.S. coinage, the eccentricities pertaining to the various mints and corrective restrikings of the high and mighty Silver Eagle and the lowly Buffalo Nickel and Lincoln Cent both, and having learned to suppress a general tendency to lecture career coin men with no interest outside their subject on the political and philosophical implications inhering in same, made himself gradually indispensable to the operations of the public counter at Schachter’s Numismatics on Fifty-Seventh Street. Following an investment of hanging around the counter kibitzing for
three years, Lenny was grudgingly awarded enough hours as an evaluator of collections to manage his Packard Street rent and still find time for chess.

One night, fondling a girl his age he’d taken outside from a party at an apartment above a laundry on Greenpoint Avenue, a new pack of cigarettes proving a useful excuse for a venture, the girl stopped him and said, “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

“What’s your name?” It was a way of stalling. She had a high black hairdo and a pretty body that was making him feel crazy and a nose and lips that nearly dripped from her face, features years older than the figure that had arrested him from across the room, from where he sat on the cold radiator. Her mother’s face, most likely, prematurely arrived on the daughter’s person—good reason to go out of the brightly lit room to the dark of the street. Now Lenny was being asked to concentrate on recognition. He squinted to make a show of it.

“Susan Klein. We went to high school together. You were a year ahead.”

“That explains it.”

“You fascinated me then, you know.”

“I’d hoped to fascinate you now.”

She ignored him. “My best friend dated a kid from Sunnyside Gardens. Moe—”

“Yeah, Moe Fishkin.”

“She explained it, it always stuck in my head what she said. The Sunnyside Gardens boys, they’re Jews, sure, but
they don’t seem like Jews
.”

The unnameable affliction of his beliefs. Lenny could only smile. By 1959 nobody said “I am a Communist” except in a Hollywood flick, either a swarthy heavy making a dying confession, expiring words from a body riddled with FBI lead, or some tubercular, misguided kid, maybe Robert Walker or Farley Granger, facing up to consequences of his treasonous acts. All sympathies, affiliations, anxieties, smoothed into silence—never say
Rosenberg
, never say
Hiss
, never say even the word
capitalism
for terror of its implicit opposite. Daily life was a patient that had survived a hideous and life-threatening surgery, that of its detachment from history entirely. At any instant the wounds might begin seeping blood.

“Moe Fishkin signed up to the army, summer of ’56.” Let Susan Klein wonder why at that moment a promising intellect like Fishkin had thrust himself into the ranks of anonymous service to his nation. Fishkin had had his morale lobotomized by Khrushchev. Lenny clamped his mouth onto Susan Klein’s motherly features and inserted his hand through the zipper on the side of her dress, found the small of her back, commenced a forage for her daughterly tits.

Lenny in those years conceived the Sunnyside Proletarians, a place for the truth to hide in plain sight. As the new baseball team would encode the Dodgers and Giants, let what was unnamed be renamed, what was lost be found. Or never actually lost, because it had never yet existed.

True Communism was by definition a prophecy of the future.

In 1958, in 1959, the true Communist hung in blank space, sustained by nothing but going on, shed of illusions. No Trotsky diversion now, for Trotsky, too, had been complicit. No Popular Front, no Wobbly organizer, no This Guitar Kills Fascists, no Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism. The true Communist pulled the tab on another tin of sardines in her kitchen. The true Communist put his lips near and issued breath to slightly dampen a gold Austrian 1915 Corona before wiping it with a chamois.

The true Communist was waiting.

Then, at the start of the new decade, Miriam presented her cousin with the Irish folksinger and he said pleased to meet you (dum, dum, dum) and Miriam told her cousin she’d met the man she was going to marry and soon enough Lenny Angrush learned he’d spent his whole life, sunk the dowry of his heart’s expectation, that which he’d hoarded since the day the eight-year-old sheltered the swaddled infant in the enclosure of his arms and lap and crossed legs, in exchange for a shitty doggerel tune, not even possessing a melody, anthem for a baseball team that would never exist.

Lenin Angrush entered the bounds of the stadium in Flushing, the stadium named for Shea, one time only. In 1964, the year it opened—he entered it only before an official game was played there, never to
return. Tommy’s song was by that time mercifully forgotten, the name Sunnyside Proletarians nearly forgotten, Lenny quit with baseball entirely, save for when his eyes wandered against his will into the rat’s maze of the
Daily News
box scores, there to savor the residual accomplishments of the Dodgers who’d been Brooklynites and still labored in Los Angeles, those Brooklyn stars fading one by one in the sun’s blaze, apart from the ascendant Koufax. Lenny found in himself no appetite for the gimmicky lore of the Mets, under Casey Stengel and from the first a total charade, an advertising hoax. Lenny was by then a chess man and a coin man, a scrivener too, slaving in his off-hours on a monograph on the Gold Eagle. Lenny’s premature middle age, a potentiality anyone could easily have spotted in him at fifteen, was now, at thirty-two, in full flower.

Yet an ancient promise to Carl Heuman trumped Lenny’s vow never to honor the stadium in Flushing with his presence. The kid had taken to the curveball. He stood only five ten, his fastball likely never topped eighty-five, he wore glasses, but the curve snapped. College hitters chased it into the dust, they flung their bats into the dugout chasing it, Lenny had seen. There was always the bullpen. Carl Heuman couldn’t be so much worse than what the Mets featured there in ’63—he could mop up losses as well as anyone they threw out there now, right? Returned from two years in the Peace Corps, the kid had also shed his baby-fat cheeks—maybe a tapeworm picked up in the tropics, who knew. Returned, and bullied by his mother into dentistry, Carl Heuman still had a baseball thought. Lenny kept promises.

So he made a call to the corporate lawyer whose power had only grown. The mighty Shea. Could Lenny still get through? He got through. The week the team moved from St. Petersburg up to get the feel of their new digs, Lenny accompanied Heuman to the clubhouse entrance, still not totally believing he’d accomplished it, though he tipped no uncertainty to the kid.

Those manning the doors at the perimeter of the stadium and at the locker room threshold inside were unresistant, if uninterested. They confirmed that the name Angrush appeared on their list, and shrugged the two men inside. A coach showed them where Heuman could change into a gray road uniform, “New York” across the chest, the only thing they had free in his size. Heuman put his glasses to
one side while he changed and then put on a baseball cap and only then returned the glasses to his face, as though reluctantly. Then the coach led the two men through the tunnel and up the short steps and they were out under the sky of the big new bitten-doughnut of a stadium, the fortress Shea and Rickey had forced the city to build, and for a moment Lenny felt all grievance depart to the sky where at that moment a jet screamed past. Its engines rumbled in the concrete of the dugout and in the dirt and in the grass. The Mets lounged in the outfield stretching and at the cage and Heuman was ushered straight up to the mound, to stand behind a protective cage allowing him to pitch safe from line drives. The coach drew Lenny back across the foul line, to stand with him in the chalk box and watch. Heuman soft-tossed to the catcher a few times, then a Met in home whites stepped in with a bat. Heuman didn’t glance back at his benefactor, remained wholly absorbed in his task, his moment.

“Who’s that?”

“The batter? Name’s George Altman. New outfielder. Had a nice camp.”

“Can he hit a curve?” Lenny couldn’t resist saying it.

“Million-dollar question.”

Heuman threw five pitches before Altman missed one. Thereafter Heuman found his pitch, making the batter look foolish three swings in a row, but the coach wasn’t looking.

“Thattaboy!” Lenny yelled, feeling idiotic but wanting to galvanize eyes to the prospect before them.

Altman hit a long foul, maybe a triple into the corner actually, Lenny couldn’t tell from here. A gloved ball boy ran to gather it. The scene, balls peppered everywhere, players running sprints, seemed less than ideal for evaluating anything. Carl Heuman stood centered in chaos, brow furrowed with sincerity and striving, as much ignored as that night when Lenny had found him squirming in the mud of the flower bed, on the night Communism died. He was like a figure only Lenny could see, an imaginary friend.

Another batter took Altman’s place. Roy McMillan, the old shortstop. This might be how it worked. A veteran like McMillan, basically a scout in uniform, took measure of the stuff. A batter couldn’t look
away from the kid on the mound as it seemed the whole remainder of the universe felt free to.