Evergreen (18 page)

It was cold this morning; they felt it even in the elevator shaft as they went down to the street floor, and then the wind blasted and slammed them across the sidewalk to where the chauffeur held the door of the car.

“Were going up to the home, Tim,” Pa said.

“Yes sir, Mr. Friedman.” Tim always touched his cap
and asked whether it was cold enough today. Then he went around to the front of the car and swung into the driver’s seat.

The home where Maury’s grandmother lived was on the fringes of the Bronx. Once it had been open country but now it was empty lots, with scatterings of new brick row houses and stores. It looked unfinished. Maury didn’t know anybody who lived here and he only came here to visit his grandmother, which was not very often. It had been a year since he had seen her last, just before his Bar Mitzvah, when his father was so upset because she wasn’t able to come and “see this day.”

“The car runs like a charm,” Pa said. He lit a cigar. He always had half a dozen rich black ones in the inner pocket of his jacket; he and his friends liked to exchange them. They urged their brands on one another, blowing out a blue-gray haze of smoke, not unpleasant, although some women objected to it violently. But Pa seemed proud that his wife like the fragrance, although Maury knew that even if his mother didn’t like it she wouldn’t say so.

His father struck another match, fumbling with the soggy end of the cigar, took it from his mouth to study it, replaced it and puffed again.

“Ah,” he said and repeated, “the car runs like a charm.”

The car was new. They had owned cars as long as Maury could remember, but this was the first car meant to be driven by a chauffeur. It had a sliding glass panel between the back of his neck and where the passengers sat. Maury’s father was still not used to it, was perhaps still uncomfortable with the chauffeur. There had been some talk about it at the dinner table.

“I drive a lot,” he had explained, but it sounded like an apology. “We’ve got jobs all over the city now and out on the Island. It’s too hard to have to worry about parking. Besides, this way I can go over papers and save time while I’m being driven.”

Where he himself was concerned, Pa always had to have a practical reason for anything he spent. He would buy the
most expensive things for his family, toys or furniture or fur coats for Maury’s mother, but with himself he was frugal.

He unfolded the
New York Times
and handed the first section to Maury. “I already read it at breakfast,” he said. “Read it thoroughly; it can be a big help with your school work.”

Pa was so concerned with what Maury did at school. He never had time to go to teacher conferences; Maury’s mother did that, but in the evening Pa wanted to know everything that had been said. And he read the report cards very carefully when they came twice a year. He was always pleased.

He would slap Maury on the back. “Very good, son, very fine,” he would say. “That’s as it should be.”

Maury wondered what would happen if the reports were not “as they should be.” He knew his father wouldn’t punish or scold too hard, the way some fathers did. But he also knew what his father expected.

The home was an old stone mansion, with wings and additions, lawns and a portico over the door. The inside was a net of corridors and cubicles, the corridors clogged with wheelchairs and tin trays of dirty dishes standing outside the rooms. And such a smell! A smell of disinfectant, frying grease and urine. Maury hated it. All the old, old people pushing walkers, and the young nurses, brisk and rapid, rushing in and out of rooms where through half-open doors you could see more old people lying in the beds, their gray hair mussed on the pillows. Maury hated it.

“Your grandmother is seventy-eight,” Pa said now. Her room was at the end of the hall and she lived in it alone. Most of the people lived two in a room.

“Danny has a great-grandmother. She’s ninety-two.”

“That’s very rare. And she had an easy life, that woman, never worked a day or worried a minute. Mama, hello, how are you?”

The grandmother was sitting with four other old men and women in an alcove outside of her room. If his father
hadn’t spoken to her, Maury would have gone right past without recognizing her. All the old women looked alike in their sweaters and printed dresses, either black or lavender. Those who weren’t blobby were shriveled. Maury’s grandmother was shriveled.

“Aren’t you going to say something to your grandma?”

Maury said hello to her and kissed her. He knew he was expected to. He didn’t want to kiss her. His stomach went queasy at the touch; she had a sort of milky film over her eyes that were turned up to him and the spittle was collected thickly at the corners of her mouth. She disgusted him.

Pa drew up a pair of straight wooden chairs. “Give your grandma the cookies,” he said, and then corrected himself. “No, put them in her room, she can eat later.” He leaned toward her. “Well, Mama,” he said again.

The old woman stared at him and wrinkled her forehead. Her eyes were empty.

“It’s Joseph, Mama,” Pa said. “Joseph, your son. And I’ve brought Maury to see you.”

Was she deaf, or what? Didn’t she know her own son? Maury stared uncomfortably.

Then suddenly she began to talk. She leaned forward and took Pa’s hand. She cried and laughed. Pa answered her in Yiddish, and Maury understood none of it.

The fat old woman on Maury’s other side touched his arm and tapped the side of her head. “She don’t talk sense,” she whispered loudly. “Don’t pay attention,” she said in English. “Her mind goes sometimes. She talks foolish.”

Pa heard and frowned. But the old woman was not to be discouraged. “You’re too thin,” she told Maury.

The old man in the circle stared at Maury and said, “He ain’t too thin!”

“What do you know? You got any children?” the old woman argued. “I got four children, three grandchildren, what do you know?”

“I got nieces and nephews, anyway. You got to have children? You got eyes in your head, that’s enough!”

“I say he’s too thin.”

“Maury, why don’t you take a little walk around and see the place?” his father suggested.

“There’s nothing to see,” Maury told him.

The old man asked, “That’s your grandma?”

Maury nodded.

“Why you don’t talk to her, then?”

Maury flushed. “She doesn’t speak English.”

Now she was talking volubly to his father, laughing or crying or some of both, perhaps. She was telling a long story, making complaints or requests. Did they make any sense or not? Maury couldn’t tell; his father just listened. Now and then he would nod or shake his head.

Then the grandmother looked at Maury and said something and his father answered. Maury looked away.

The old man said suddenly, “Your father’s an important person. I’m eighty-eight and I know an important person when I see one. You can be anything you want,” he told Maury. “A boy like you.”

Maury looked down at the floor. The old man was wetting his pants. The stain was spreading on his trousers and sliding down the leg. It was starting to soak the tops of his shoes.

Jesus, let me get out of this loony-bin.

A nurse came hurrying and took the old man by the arm. “Oh, my. Oh, my, we have to go to the bathroom, don’t we?”

His grandmother began to cry again.

“Maury,” Pa said, very firmly this time, “Maury, wait outside. I won’t be long. Or take a walk and look around.”

“Why don’t you go see the beautiful recreation room your father gave us?” the nurse suggested. “Turn right at the end of the corridor, you’ll see it there.”

It was boiling hot on account of the old people; he’d heard they were always cold. He took off his overcoat and stood in the doorway of the new room. It was large and
light, with a bright blue linoleum floor and imitation leather chairs. Some old people were playing cards. There was a new upright piano in one corner and a woman was playing on it, the same chords over and over: “My Old Kentucky Home.” A brown radio stood on a table in another corner next to a machine that gave out Cokes and candy bars. There was even a platform with curtains drawn back and fastened to the wall so it could be used as a stage. An old man got up onto it now and shuffled, doing a cake-walk. Maury felt embarrassed for him. Then on the wall beside the double doors he saw the bronze plaque:
This room furnished through the gift of Joseph and Anna Friedman
, it said.

His father gave a lot to charity. The mail was always full of requests from the blind and from hospitals and the Jewish poor. He used to see him writing out checks at his desk. Once Mr. Malone even sent some priests. Maury had opened the door and been surprised to see these two men in their turned-around collars. Pa took them into his den and after a while they came out smiling and saying thank you. “We shall remember you in our masses,” they said when they left.

Maury remembered feeling a certain pride in that. People respected his father. Wherever they went people listened to him as if they wanted to please him. Sometimes Maury went with him to the construction sites and followed him through the din and bustle of unloading trucks and cranes, cement mixers and men running wheelbarrows full of bricks. They climbed through all the confusion of boards and pipes and tubing and rolls of wire, through the damp, dank smell that is the smell of new building. His father asked questions and pointed out something that had been done wrong or not done at all. He knew what all these things were for. Then they went outside to the little wooden house at the curb marked Rental Office, and there Pa went over books and talked on the telephone. He unrolled plans, white ink on blue paper, and talked courteously to people who came in to inquire. They went back
on the sidewalk. Men in hard hats came over and his father introduced him: “My son Maury,” he said, and the men shook hands and looked at him respectfully as if he weren’t just thirteen years old. And he knew that the respect was because of his father.

A nurse came up behind him. “What do you think of the room?” she asked Maury.

“It’s very nice.”

“Your father’s been good to us. He’s a very generous, kind man,” she said.

Pa beckoned from the end of the hall. Maury was relieved and pretended to be surprised. “Are we leaving already?”

“Yes, your grandmother isn’t feeling well. I don’t want to tire her.”

“Do you want me to go and say good-by to her?” He hoped not, but knew that he ought at least to ask.

“No, thanks, it won’t matter,” Pa said. “She’s gone to her room.”

They stopped at a desk near the elevator where a nurse sat in front of telephones and charts.

“That matter we talked about,” Pa said. “I don’t want it to happen again. There’s no excuse for allowing her to fall out of bed.”

“Well do our best, Mr. Friedman, of course. But you know, she is failing fast and—”

“That makes no difference,” his father said firmly. “I don’t want it to happen again.”

“Yes, Mr. Friedman, of course.” She smiled brightly, artificially. “This is your son, isn’t he? What a handsome boy! He looks like an Englishman.”

“Yes. He’s a good boy,” Pa said, still not smiling.

She arched her lips at Maury. “I have the most gorgeous little niece. I’ll have to introduce you in a couple of years—”

The elevator door opened and closed on her words. “Idiotic woman!” Pa said.

But Maury was annoyed at something else. Here he had given up his holiday because his grandmother wanted to see him and she hadn’t even known him! That ruined, old,
old—
thing!
Impossible to think of her as part of himself or of his father or anybody at all.

Back in the car Pa took a sheaf of papers out of a briefcase. “Excuse me, Maury, I want to go over these for a minute. I just thought of something.”

Maury knew it was the new apartment-hotel, the largest job his father had undertaken yet. Last week the brick was up to the third floor; above that the red steel framework made a design of squares, forty-two stories of squares against the sky.

“The newest thing in apartment-hotel living,” Pa said now, pausing over the papers. “The newest thing in the city. Did you know we’re half rented already, with completion date not till next fall?”

He reached into his pocket for a cigar and matches and took a few puffs of enjoyment. “You know, sometimes I don’t even believe all this has happened. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I see the light coming through the curtains and for a second I don’t know where I am. Isn’t that queer? I’m not sure it’s all real. Can you understand that? No, how could you? You’ve never known anything different, thank God, and I’ll see to it that you never do.”

He would, too, no doubt of that. He could do anything he wanted to do.

“Only in America,” he said now. “Think of it! The sons of immigrants. Malone from the bogs of Ireland. And in ten years we’ve put our mark on the city. Whenever I see our green and white ‘M and F’ I think of that. But we give good value, we’ve rightfully earned whatever we get. I can truthfully say we have never cheated the public, our work is solid as the pyramids and that’s more than a great many men in our line can say.”

He went back to his papers and Maury started the second section of the
New York Times
for lack of anything else to do. It wasn’t very interesting. But then, neither was looking out the window. They passed a clock in front of a bank. It said half past twelve and he thought, There’s still plenty of time.

“Pa,” he said, “is it all right to drop me off at the rink? I could borrow somebody’s skates.”

His father looked at him and right away Maury knew the answer would be no. “You’ve missed religious school for two weeks running because of your cold,” he said. “You must be way behind.”

A memory like an elephant. You would think that a man who had buildings going up all over the city would have no time for stuff like that. “I can make it up tomorrow. I’ll get up early before school.”

“You know you won’t. No, you’ll stay home this afternoon and prepare your work.”

If he’d only leave him alone with this religious stuff! Most of the boys at his school didn’t have all this religion to fuss about. Their families had given it up as narrow and unmodern. Pa’s attitude was so stern, so solemn and boring. Now, with his mother, he didn’t mind it as much. She made a pretty ritual out of it, the way she blessed the candles on Friday nights, and her silver candlesticks that she had brought from Europe. It was almost like poetry.