Frog (51 page)

“My mother threw out or gave away or loaned, without there being a good chance of getting it back, anything of mine when she felt like it. My electric train set. The one thing, I told her months after I graduated college and went to Washington to work, I wanted kept in my closet or the basement. T might want to give it to my own kids one day. When I have them. It'll certainly be valuable twenty to thirty years from now, if one has to look at it that way.' She gave it to my youngest cousins a year after their father died. ‘Aunt Gussie was broke. Ben left her with no insurance, an overdrawn checking account and nothing but big waddings in all their mattresses. She pleaded with me for some of my boys' old toys. She knew I gave you kids everything of the very best you wanted, and with a basement to store things in, she guessed I still had some of them. So I gave her what I thought you'd never use again and which they'd love most—a twenty-year-old train set—and they appreciated it tremendously; really' ‘The set was around forty years old. I found it in its original box on top of some garbage cans down the block. Someone must have thrown it out because it wasn't working, or maybe it was put on the street by mistake. Or someone had several sets—you know how some rich people are—and got rid of the oldest to make space. Alex fixed the wiring or something in the engine—that's all it needed, plus a new transformer, which it took me months to pay him back for—and for years it was my favorite thing to play with on earth.' ‘So there was little money lost in it, realistically speaking. And if it was that old when you found it, it was ancient and no doubt in ruins when I gave it to them, so what great value could it have had?' ‘Personal. I'd put little clay figures I made into the engine and on top of the coal car and at the back of the caboose, get down real close with my eyes right up to the passenger car windows when I made it pass very slow, and it looked like a real train. And just that I dragged that box home all by myself—none of my friends would help me, jealous, probably, that I found it first. And with Alex's help made the best thing I ever had out of it, except for maybe that used tricycle that could be converted into a bicycle, someone gave you for me, and which was stolen in a week. Because you never would have bought me a new set of trains.' ‘Something like that—like even that tricycle-bike—with so many kids, was just too expensive for us, fairly well-off as we were for a while. Anyway, to me it was a piece of junk. The tracks scratched your floor. And when you played real rough with the trains, crashing them intentionally or using them as dive bombers or something, the engine made holes in the floor. I was also always afraid you'd electrocute yourself. That thing was forever shorting and blowing the fuses, wasn't it?' ‘No. Maybe once. That's nothing and I don't even think you were home. I replaced the fuse myself and later told you about it.' ‘Anyway, what can I do now? I'll try to remember not to repeat anything like that when your heart's so set against it.' ‘You can ask Gussie for it back.' ‘After so many months and when her boys are practically taking the trains to bed with them at night? Please, put yourself in their position. These kids have gone through enough. Their father dying so young. And their being so young when he died. And he was a good father—attentive—just wonderful to them. And his debts and their mother practically begging for them and their being forced out of their house into a cheap apartment and her working at the worst kinds of menial jobs the first year to get them back on their feet. I helped by giving what I could—money, when your father wasn't looking, and everything else, like your trains—and still do, though don't mention a word to him about it. But now for them to lose these trains? Forget it and just feel good they're being distracted by them for an hour or two a day. I know Gussie's very grateful to you.' ‘I never got a card or anything saying so.' ‘She's got other things on her mind. Don't be hard.' A year later, after I continued to be upset about the trains being gone, I wrote Gussie asking if she'd mind giving them back or anything she and her sons might want to part with of them. ‘Though old and not really worth anything, they had a certain sentimental value, which my mother didn't realize when she gave them to you.' I was even willing, I said, to buy her boys a new set if it didn't come up to too much. She wrote back that her sons had busted the transformer and engine and cars where she was almost sure they couldn't be fixed, so she gave the whole thing to a junkman, tracks too. My plants. I went to Europe for a month, left two grapefruit trees with her I'd started from seeds some ten years before and which were about five feet tall, one starting to produce grapefruits the size of tiny mothballs. I'd heard that was impossible. That the seeds had come from ordinary store grapefruits that had grown on grafted trees, and so had no sex. There's a better word for it. When I came back she said ants had got on the trees—I'd put them in her backyard—and she threw them out. ‘Ants?' I said. ‘What are they? You brush them away. They don't hurt people or trees.' ‘These were the biting kind—red ants. I was afraid they'd not only nip me when I had my coffee outside but get into the house and all through the cupboards, and that you'd understand why I did it. You know, when you leave something with someone, who's doing it as a favor and which could possibly be inconvenient, although this wasn't. Just a little watering every other day as you told me to do, which I liked—it kept me cool and gave me something to do—though getting rid of them, they were so heavy and spread out, was no easy chore. But anyway, you're doing it with a little risk involved, that's what I'm saying. I could take sick and be unable to water them for a week or remember to tell anyone to. Or something worse happening to me, which could leave them unwatered in a drought, let's say, for the entire month.' ‘But none of that happened. And you could have told me what you were going to do with the ant-infested trees and I would have told you not to. I called from Europe every ten days or so, so what was the rush? I would have asked you to phone a few friends of mine and one of them would have come over and put them in a cab and kept them in his or her apartment till I got back. I only chose you because I thought they'd be cheerful and colorful—some more greenery—and also because they could use a month outdoors.' ‘I didn't think I had the time to wait. They were swarming, seemed to be multiplying every day, and once I had the super put the trees out front, the ants disappeared from the backyard, except for a black ant or two, which I'm used to. So I was right. There had to be something in those trees that was attracting the red ants. The little grapefruits perhaps, or the smell of the leaves. If it's any compensation to you, the trees were gone before the garbage truck came, so I'm sure they got a good home.' He put signs up on her block's lampposts and parking-sign poles and the bulletin board in the corner candy store, saying that two grapefruit trees, approximately five feet tall and one bearing miniature green fruit, were placed by mistake in front of such and such building on around a certain date and he was willing to give a modest reward for their return or replace the trees with two good plants, but no one called him about it and his mother said most of the signs were down in a day. His manuscripts. He got a teaching job in California for a year and left clothes and two dresser drawerfuls of manuscripts in what they called the boys' room in her apartment. He told her he had sublet his apartment to two men who needed both closets for their clothes and more shelf space for their knickknacks and books. Besides, they found his manuscripts on the shelves an eyesore. She said ‘Don't worry, I've got nothing but room in that closet and dresser, so they'll be nice and safe here and I promise never to read what's on the papers.' ‘Read them, I don't mind. About half are typescripts—you know, the original manuscripts, if that's what typescripts are. And the rest I just want to keep and maybe use some day or at least give a last hard look at before throwing them away.' He returned and stayed with her at Christmas for a couple of weeks, looked in the dresser for his manuscripts and later asked her where they were. ‘Oh, gone, did you need them? I thought they were all published, and since you had them in magazines and books as you said, you had no use for them anymore.' ‘Half of them were published, but even most of those I could have used if I ever wanted to rewrite the magazine stuff for a book. And there were tons of unpublished work that some of I have copies, most I don't, and which I might have wanted to rewrite or take parts out of or use in some way. Why didn't you phone me when you were thinking of throwing them out? I wasn't in Europe or Australia but just a dollar-a-minute call away.' ‘It wasn't the money. You know I'm not like that. Money, for all the good it's done me, I piss on, as your father used to say. But the pages were getting brittle and yellow or maybe most of them were old like that when you put them in the dresser. But every time I opened one of those drawers—' ‘Why would you so much?' ‘The first time out of curiosity. To see how they were and if I could rearrange them or stack them better. Then when I saw them all crumbling apart, I looked more and more often, and each time I looked they were worse off than the last. I thought of you, but didn't know how to preserve them. I tried mothball flakes—just sprinkling them on, which I read in the
Times
would help—but then my friend Marion down the block said they might make the paper crumble faster. But it was like walking into a sawdust mill, every time I opened the drawers and so many little pieces had fallen away. I'd also heard that roaches and mice love the ink and glue in paper—' ‘What glue? These were all typewritten or photocopied pages.' ‘That waxy coat you had on what you said was erasable paper. If these pests like glue, I was sure they'd like that or would smell it, and you know I'm scared to death of those things.' ‘If you were really afraid you could have put them in an airtight trunk.' ‘Where do I have one?' ‘You could have told me, about the whole thing and your mothball flakes, and I would have phoned a luggage store around here and had them deliver one to you. It would have been a little extra work for you, transferring it all to a trunk, but probably no more so than sticking them in the garbage cans outside. But I also would have paid some worker—the woman who comes to clean for you once a week—to do it and to bring the trunk down to the basement, or the super for that. Because those things—the unpublished stuff—were practically priceless to me.' ‘Then you should have taken them with you if they were so much to you that way and in the very trunk you say you would have bought for me.' ‘I told you when I left. I couldn't be shlepping them from city to city like that. I thought they had a safe place here till I got back. I also wanted to be away from them for a while, thinking—who knows?—that some new idea might come to me about them if they weren't by my side. That's how it works sometimes.' ‘Well I'm sorry. Doubly so for thinking I could do something good for someone by letting him keep his things here. But people think my place, because of the basement and that I have so many spare bedrooms now, can be a warehouse for them, but OK. I'm also sorry, for when the pages were discomposing to nothing, to think I was doing the right thing by getting rid of them. But my worst fears—roaches and mice, and even rats, possibly, though we've never had one in the house but I have seen one on the street—got the best of me. There's nothing I can do about it now but grieve along with you. But just for my sake, since this is beginning to kill me too, think if all you said was so valuable to you, really is.' Books. She once gave half the books he had in his old bedroom to Salvation Army or some organization like that. ‘They knocked on the door. I have a bell that works, but they knocked. They were very polite, though, when they told me what they wanted my old books and furniture for. The poor, handicapped, and so forth. I was affected by it, thought I could do some good for them and also clean out my place a little, which I'm always promising myself to do but never really get around to it. So I gave them a couple of broken chairs and an old card table and lots of odds and ends in the basement and then some of the books in the bookcases in the boys' room that looked the oldest and also in the credenza in the back hallway.' ‘My books
were
the oldest. A few were more than a hundred years old, and precious to me in other ways. Novels, poetry, critical works, essays.' ‘Some were so old they were coming apart.' ‘I would have had them rebound.' ‘But you didn't. And these people were so needy. And they said they'd box them and carry them out, giving me a lot more shelf space for my own books, besides cleaning up whatever mess they made. They did. Your room and the basement were cleaner than when they came. They also gave me a tax-writeoff slip. Asked me what amount I thought everything was worth—I said three hundred dollars though didn't think it was half that—and they wrote the figure in. I'll never use the slip—I don't earn enough—but you can have it if I can find it. Besides all that, you haven't looked at those books in years, so I thought you lost interest in them and wouldn't mind what I did. If you hadn't gone to your room for something else, you never would have noticed they were gone. Be honest with me: you weren't interested in those books anymore.' ‘Not true. You don't follow my every move. When I come here I often go to my old room, take a book out and sit on the bed and read it for a few minutes, or even longer, and if my interest's sparked or renewed, I take it home with me. But I never told you or showed you the book and said “May I borrow it?” because the book was mine. Just lucky for me I took what I did those times.' Candlesticks. When he was going to Hebrew school to learn his haftorah and such to get bar mitzvahed, he got involved for about a month selling raffle tickets for the synagogue. The boys who sold the most, he was told, would get a big prize, one they'd treasure for life. Besides, the synagogue would always be proud of them. So he went around his neighborhood selling raffle tickets, and tried to sell them at whatever function his parents gave, and cornered strangers who came to the house, like the furnace man, delivery people. He sold the most for anyone in the pre-bar mitzvah group and was invited to the synagogue's auditorium to get his prize. Rows of chairs had been set up, a cookie and juice table was at the side, his name was announced, there was a little applause, and he walked to the podium and the rabbi shook his hand and presented him a box of two wooden candlesticks ‘made in our new state of Israel.' He had his mother use them at dinner that night. His father complained they made the room so hot he was sweating, and they were snuffed out before the meal was over. After dinner she scraped the wax off them and put them in the curio cabinet in the foyer. When he got his own apartment about ten years later and didn't have much to put in it, he thought of taking the candlesticks, but didn't like the looks of them. They were drab, old-fashioned, reminded him of Hebrew school, which he'd hated, and if someone at dinner turned either of them over and saw the ‘Made in Israel' sign stamped into it, he might be thought religious, or zealotic, or even Jewish, when he sometimes didn't want to be. He began to admire the candlesticks about ten years after that, wanted to take them home and use them, but felt they'd been in her cabinet too long to remove. If she ever asks him if he wants them back, he thought, he'll take them, but not till then. About a month ago he was at his brother's for dinner and saw them in his breakfront. ‘Where'd you get those?' he said. ‘Mom. She said “Aren't these yours?” and I said “I don't know, are they? From when?” and she said “Hebrew school, when you were a bar-mitzvah boy and won first or second prize for selling an enormous number of something—rafffle tickets or candies.” So I thought well, it could have happened. I was always doing things like that for the synagogue when I wasn't playing hooky from it, and Iris liked them a lot, so I took them. Mom also said she never cared for them much and only kept them in her foyer cabinet all these years so as not to hurt my feelings. So I didn't think I was really taking anything from her, even if she occasionally says things like that just to give us things because she knows we won't take them otherwise. But what do you think? To me they're kind of graceful and pretty, and they're obviously fairly old, but I'd never put candles in them. If they burned all the way down the wood might catch fire.' Howard said ‘They're nice, but I think Mom got her boys mixed up. I was the one who won them by selling the most raffle tickets for my group at the synagogue a few months or so before I was bar mitzvahed. I even remember the ceremony when the rabbi gave them to me.' ‘No, really, I think Mom was right and I did win them. Once I began talking about them in the car ride home with Iris, I started remembering how I acquired them. I recalled canvassing the neighborhood and all the local Columbus Avenue stores to sell raffle tickes for prizes the synagogue was giving—tickets to the opera at the old Met, for instance. Box seats, in fact, I just remembered, with Lily Pons and I think Richard Tucker in it. He was a member of the congregation at the time. And by selling the first or second greatest amount of raffle tickets, though I don't remember being in any age category or anything, these candlesticks are what I got.' ‘Then I must have been the winner of a different kind of raffle contest. Or the same kind—the West Side Synagogue was always big on benefits at the Met if they had Jewish stars in them—but about seven years later. But OK, let's forget it. You might be right. And what good are they if I can't use them? I've accumulated so much stuff in my apartment that I can't stand owning anything anymore that has no purpose if it isn't at least extremely aesthetic' His old van. She once gave a tenant in their building the extra keys to it and said she was sure her son wouldn't mind him borrowing it for a couple of hours if the man could find a parking space for it good for tomorrow. ‘He came downstairs and asked if you'd help him move something heavy from Brooklyn to his new apartment here. He'd seen your brightly colored van and thought you might also be doing private moving on the side. You weren't here and for some reason I volunteered giving him the keys. Maybe because he's so nice, pays the biggest rent in the building by about double, and has a very dependable job. He was willing to pay fifteen dollars for the two hours, twenty if it came to three, which he said was the going rate for a van with no driver or mover with it, but I told him to work all that out with you when you got home.' The van stalled on Manhattan Bridge. The man couldn't get it started, walked to a garage on the Brooklyn side, drove back with a mechanic and found the battery, wheels and windshield wipers gone. He had the car towed to the garage and called Howard's mom. Howard answered and the man said ‘A valve's shot and needs replacing, plus of course the wheels and battery now and the wipers, for when you need them.' ‘I'd like to get another estimate on the valve job and check around on the wheels,' and the man said ‘Listen, sorry as I am that it happened, it's really your problem coming from years of use on the van, and I also haven't the time to hang around here bargaining with this guy. From what I know about cars, and as a kid I tinkered with them and worked in gas stations for years, what this guy's charging can't be more than twenty to thirty bucks higher than what another mechanic would charge, and to get it to another garage for an estimate you'll have to pay an additional tow charge. What I suggest is you junk it. It's only good now for its parts' Howard asked the mechanic to make an offer, which came to the amount of the tow charge. She was always doing things like that. A while ago at dinner he asked her why. She said she thought she explained it well enough at the time each of those things happened. ‘My train set then. It was an old Lionel and has to be worth a thousand dollars today. The only answer I'm looking for is what could have possessed you to give it away when I'd pleaded with you to keep it?' ‘You didn't plead. You said try to keep it around, which I did but then years passed and you were away and I assumed you lost interest in it. Besides all that, are you going to go that far back to get something against me, for some reason? Your poor cousins needed diversion, nice toys. And