Girl of My Dreams (53 page)

“The Reds, the union and guild bastards are accusing us of everything from cradle robbing to stealing their paychecks,” Mossy said. “Don't we have the right to face our accusers? In order to face them we have to know who they are, don't we?”

“I can't tell you names of people who might get hurt because of what I say.”

The gently reasoning Mossy promptly vanished. “Don't push me!” he yelled. “You claim to be loyal and you won't even let me know who my accusers are! I can take the Millevoix assignment away as quick as I gave it to you.”

Another threat. He'd already said he could get rid of me; now he made that concrete by telling me he could take away the Pammy plum. “I know that,” I said.

“Then make it easy on all of us. Help this studio function as it should.”

“I'll do everything I can to make Jubilee even better, but I, I can't tell on people for going to a party.” I was stammering a little, but I didn't budge.

“God damn it!” Mossy's face was hot now, and he paced away from his desk. Then he turned back toward me. “No, God damn
you
! All I ask is a little loyalty from you. I need to know who I can trust. Tell me who was at the party and tell me
now
.”

He pounded his desk. Three times, bam, bam, bam. This was frightening, yes, but strange too. Why did he need to do this? He could easily find out most of the names from others. Why was he testing me this way? I said only one word. “No.”

Mossy boiled over. As he yelled, frothy flecks appeared around his lips like volcanic ash. “Listen to me! I can fire you not only from Jubilee, kid, but from every lot in town! You know that? No one who belongs to the producers association will hire you. You can go teach kindergarten in Oshkosh for all I care. You won't work again, my boy, at any studio in Hollywood. Take my certain word on that!”

My boy
might have been the most accurate thing Mossy had ever said to me. I was in so many ways his boy, coming and going at his whim, working on this script, fired off that one. I was even his bootblack when he told me to be. Yet I mulishly balked. I was his toady, but I wouldn't also become his stoolie. “I don't doubt your word,” I said, though his word was precisely what I did doubt, “but I won't tattle.”

Where had I found such a schoolboy word? Whatever its source, it seemed to calm the Grand Inquisitor. As he walked over to Monet's water lilies hanging above his reflecting pool, I saw him visibly deflating, gas let out of a dirigible so it could land. I began to understand something. One threat was scary; a second froze me in my shoes. But three, four, five threats meant nothing was going to happen. He wouldn't even pull the Millevoix plum out of my mouth.

This was a lesson I learned about Mossy. The really bad things that happened usually sneaked up on you with no threats at all. A single threat might still be carried out and was therefore to be taken seriously. An armada of threats was, paradoxically, unarmed, even toothless. If the threatener failed, he went on to other matters, conceivably with a scintilla more respect for you.

“You know New York, Owen my boy?” He was still standing with his back to me, looking at the lilies, appearing to study them as if some truth embedded by Monet might pop out of them, perhaps the names of all the guests at Gloriana's party.

Remembering my brief stint there when I really was a boy, I said yes.

“You know Morrisania, Crotona Park?”

“Is it like Central Park?”

“Hah,” he said, striding back toward me but looking up at the chandelier over his desk as if it contained an audience. “The boy wants to know if it's like Central Park. Yes, Owen, Central Park is like Crotona Park the way Garbo is like Marie Dressler. No, Owen, Crotona Park is in the Bronnix, as some in my neighborhood used to call it. That's where I was brought up, in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, near Crotona Park, Franklin Avenue and 169
^th
Street. My father was a hatter and always mad. Made and sold hats, had a nice shop the swells came to over on the Grand Concourse.” Mossy preened a little, putting on mock airs as he imitated his father.

“But,” he continued, “Pa ruined it with his temper, and then he did us the favor of squeezing the last pennies out of his failed business and escaping with his bookkeeper to St. Joe, Missouri, leaving us to the tender mercies of my uncle Abe, God bless him. But before Pa deserted my brother and sister, my mother and me, he'd lash out in his lumbering way, and when he took off his belt everyone knew to hide. The apartment was two bedrooms and when I couldn't stand my brother and sister I'd sleep in the living room. He threw water on me once to wake me up so he could beat me. Never dared hit my mother, who was taller and smarter than he was. What he went for were his two sons, his daughter, the family dog, and one night he strangled our pet canary that didn't know enough to shut up when he wanted quiet.”

“What a brute,” I said. The truth was I couldn't even imagine a father like his.

“The escape for me was outside into Morrisania and Crotona Park, where I'd go to play marbles. I owned it, you understand, I
owned
that part of the city. From a hill in Crotona Park—we called it a hill because you could sled down it—you could see the Jersey Palisades to the west and all the way down to the Brooklyn Bridge if you looked south. But I never wanted to go anywhere because right here, Morrisania, this was not just my world, it was my possession. Marbles was my game and I'd play it every day after school. I got good at it. You know what chalcedony is?”

“No, I don't.” His whole childhood was a foreign country to me.

“It's a beautiful stone, with stripes and lines going through it, and it can hold the colors of the rainbow. You can see into it like you're looking into someone's eyes. One of its varieties is agate, only semiprecious in the gem business but to me the most valuable thing in the world. The best marbles are made from it, aggies. We'd pitch our marbles into a circle and aim at them with our best shooters, using your thumb against your forefinger like the hammer of a pistol. Bing, bing, bing.”

Mossy demonstrated with his thumb. It looked like the hammer of a pistol poised to fire its lethal aggie. What I visualized was Mossy in San Francisco using his aggie expertise to help the longshoremen as they aimed marbles at the charging horses. I also reflected that of course he'd have been on the owners' side.

“At the end of the afternoon,” Mossy said, “I generally won the most aggies by hitting the other boys' marbles. We hardly ever talked about it, but all of us were Jewish. Most of us not religious, just Jewish. My teachers, except maybe phys ed, they were Jewish too. Everyone I knew was Jewish or if they weren't I didn't know it. If anyone had asked I'd probably have told them even my marbles, down to the last precious aggie, were also Jewish. You know why I'm telling you this, Owen?”

I said I did not know. What I figured was he was leading to some incident where he lost some of his prized aggies, or some Christian took them, and he forced someone else to tell him where they were. I still wasn't going to buy tattling.

“So one day I had to go out of this world,” Mossy said, “where the marbles and everything I saw was mine. I was nine. You ever been to the place called nine, Owen?”

I laughed. I said I remembered it well, thinking age was one thing my childhood had in common with his. It didn't seem like the moment to say that was when I lived in New York myself, when my mother was dying. Mossy was back in his own nine now.

“What happened,” he said, “was my great aunt died and I had to go to her funeral with my mother. A sunny Sunday in the spring. The funeral was not in Morrisania. Oh, it was still in the Bronx, the damn Bronx was the entire known and unknown universe, but the funeral was in a synagogue down on Willis Avenue in the Mott Haven section. Maybe only a mile or so away, which in California is nothing though in the Bronx it was a light-year. A kid in a city knows his neighborhood like he knows the freckles on his sister's forehead. But Mott Haven I did not know.”

Mossy walked around his office as if he were surveying his old precinct. I wondered where he was going, either in the Bronx or in this terrain he now ruled. He came to a spot above where I sat.

“I don't remember the funeral except I had to put on a skullcap, a yarmulke, before my mother and I entered the synagogue. I hated that. My older sister and younger brother and my father went somewhere else that Sunday, a Nickelodeon show I think. I was furious they got out of going to the funeral. I hated listening to some intoning rabbinical voice bidding old Tante Clothilde goodbye and another voice, the cantor I guess, singing and chanting. Then it was over.”

I assumed this was his first contact with death. “A terrible experience,” I said.

“No, no, it was what it was, but I'm not there yet,” he said. “My mother and I walked over to a place called the Hub, a kind of Times Square of the Bronx, the intersection of Willis Avenue, 149
^th
Street and Third Avenue. Big shopping area. All the hot shot stores, crowds of people in them. My mother thought she'd buy me a nice pair of pants as a reward for the funeral—short pants, of course, which I couldn't stand. She'd get herself a flowery blouse. Must have been around noon, churches had let out their Christians, people were strolling, but at this point I still thought everyone was Jewish.”

I found this hard to believe. “You'd never heard of Methodists and Presbyterians and Catholics?” I asked.

“I'd heard of the Pope, and I knew he didn't belong to us. I'd seen churches, but I hadn't put anything together. I knew there were Irish and Italians in the Bronx, but I'd never met them and for all I knew they were a different kind of Jew. I assumed Lincoln was Jewish because his first name was the same as my uncle Abe. Anyway, we're walking along 149
^th
Street, big thoroughfare, came out of one shop and we're about to go into the place where my mother thought she'd get me a pair of pants I didn't want.

“So I'm looking around, confused, I never saw such a crush of people. Another kid about my age is walking toward us with his mother as I'm coming down the sidewalk with mine. ‘What's that, Ma?' the kid says pointing at a vendor. ‘He's selling kielbasa, Billy, that's a Polish sausage,' says the mother. ‘Over there, what's making that noise?' And the kid looks at a police ambulance going by. ‘That's a claxon horn, it's for letting people know they should get out of the way,' says the mother. Now he points at me, at my head, which I've forgotten to take the yarmulke off. He looks up at his mother and asks her, ‘What's that funny thing on his head, Ma?' She laughs and says to him, ‘Oh my goodness, it's nothing, they wear those caps. That's just a little Jew, Billy.'”

Mossy paused, shaking his head. I didn't get what I was supposed to get, but I knew enough to shake my head too.

“The other kid doesn't understand,” Mossy said, “so he asks something like what does that mean. His mother says, ‘I already told you, never mind. It's nothing. That's just a little Jew, Billy. Pay no attention.'”

Now I got it. But he went on.

“That's right, Owen, my first shot at people who thought me unworthy or different or dismissible. I was so ashamed of my yarmulke I wanted to snatch it off, but I couldn't because that would hurt my mother, who was embarrassed herself. She held my hand tighter, and I sensed her own shame and fury. And her helplessness to do anything that would make a difference, either to me or to the other kid or to his mother. For me it wasn't just the yarmulke either, or my mother's total weakness. It was me that something was wrong with. I didn't have to hear about my people killing their Savior, in fact I didn't hear that until I was in high school, by which time I was armed against such nonsense.”

I didn't know what reaction he expected, so I was mute.

“All I had to hear, Owen, was what I heard—I wasn't a boy, I was only a that or an it. Never mind, she said, and pay no attention, she said, and it's nothing, she said, nothing. Have you ever been a nothing?” (Well, yes, I thought, and at your hands, Mossy, but I didn't dare interrupt.) “She didn't even call me a he, all she said was
that is a little Jew, Billy
. Well, Billy, wherever you are now, if you're not in prison you're probably a cop or a clerk, or maybe you made it into vaudeville, but this here little Jew, Billy, is now head of a studio making moving pictures for all the squirts in Squirtville, for people like you, Billy, and people
are
goddammit paying attention and around here they
are
if they know what's good for them
minding
what I say. Jew-Billy Pictures, is not, I swear on my life, going to be taken away from me by unions, guilds, the New York bloodsuckers, or the sonofabitching Reds. Do you understand that, Owen Jant?”

I understood.

“Then go,” he said.

Back in the writers building, my betters were again huddled, circling the bronzed typewriter of Mossy's dead friend. They still looked like gulls around a lighthouse but now, from the way their heads were all down it was clear the storm had hit. If they could have stored their heads under their wings the way gulls do, they would have. No one was talking. Yancey saw me come in.

“How'd it go?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “He's a tough man.”

“Let me tell you how tough,” Yancey said. “One of the carpenters came back ten minutes ago. Zangwill bought them off with a raise the size of a split pea and the promise none of them would be let go for at least six months. In case anyone didn't get the hint, he's posted a platoon of scabs at the studio gate, all of them carrying toolboxes. They may not even be real carpenters but only extras Mossy hired to stand there. The carpenters' defection leaves us alone—we can't go out without them. He doesn't need to put unemployed extras lugging typewriters outside the gate. He knows we know how many unemployed writers there are. The strike is off. Zangwill wins.”