Old Neighborhood (19 page)

Sam helped me get an apartment on a sublease in a red brick building near the reservoir. The previous occupants, an elderly couple, friends of Sam’s, left behind an old green wing chair. Hanging from beneath the seat was a tag originally meant for the retailer with the admonition “Do Not Remove This Tag Under Penalty of Law,” which the couple had dutifully obeyed for thirty years. I decided not to remove the tag either, the tag had given me an idea. I fixed up the apartment with clean, modern pieces, but inspired by that chair with the tag I turned a section of the living room into a nostalgia corner. I went to junk shops, flea markets, antiques stores in Manhattan, looking for great old evocative pieces from the forties, when I was growing up in the neighborhood. I found the antimacassars for the chair, and an art deco snake lamp whose base culminated in a nymph, a serving tray painted with the trylon and perisphere from the World’s Fair, and a majestic Philco console pushbutton radio with the original station call letters,
WEAF, WJRZ, WOV
. I had a good time searching for these old pieces, which were marvelous.

I wrote a letter to my father, telling him about Beverly and about the agency, composing it carefully, wanting to get it right. I realized that the traffic in Florida was in children’s success stories and I had given my father difficult material to work with. He sent me a kind note in reply:

“Dear Steve. I’m very sorry to hear about you and Beverly. Nothing I can say will make it better, but I want you to know that all around me I hear from people who stayed in marriages that were not good and ended up being bitter. So I think this is for the best, even if it is more painful right now. As for your work, I can only tell you I worked for years in a job I didn’t really like. I’m proud of you for being stronger than I ever was. Frankly, I think you can do better than a candy store, but that’s up to you. In the meantime, there’s a guest room here if you ever feel like being a loafer for a while. I’m buying. Love, Dad.”

I changed seasons with the guys in the neighborhood, we were playing touch football now on the weekends. I was an acceptable pass receiver and played with my faithful hound, Ramón, tied to a fence. His English was improving.

Jack Walsh called to say that Terry Walsh had given birth to a girl and I visited with them in the hospital to wish them well. I became a regular at Shannon’s for Monday night football, met with Sam and Hinda for occasional dinners and sports events on television, and went downtown to Manhattan for museums and movies.

At the candy store, Chris was concerned, as always, with his receipts.

“We have to do more business,” he said, thumbing through the books. “What about omelets?” he asked. “I can make good omelets. I’ve only been making eggs.”

He looked at me, concerned, waiting for my approval.

“I have no objection to omelets,” I said.

Pleased, he put his hand on my shoulder.

“Someday, Steve, we’ll have our dream.”

I was interested to know just what Chris thought this shared dream would be.

“And what’s that, Chris?”

“People standing behind people sitting,” he said with emotion.

After a Sunday morning touch football game at Harris Field I walked back toward Kingsbridge Road with Jack Walsh. We talked about his baby and what it meant to both of us to be a father for the first time. Then I remembered I needed some items for the house and I said instinctively, “Would you walk me to the store?” Jack went with me to the grocery and when we came out we strolled on toward my house.

“Steve, how you doing there—behind the counter?”

“I’m doing all right.”

“Terry and I were talking about you. We were wondering if you’re a little overqualified for the job.”

“Not to Chris. He thinks I’m perfect.”

“But you
could
be doing something else.”

“I could. I don’t want to right now.”

“Well, whatever you do, you’ll do good at it,” he said, wanting to encourage me.

“Thank you for that, Jack.”

It had been a long time since a buddy had walked me anywhere.

I had been speaking to Sarah and Amy regularly by phone and was able to receive information about their activities, they were less than enthusiastic in hearing about mine. My daughters were obviously embarrassed by having their father in the Bronx, it was as though they had discovered I was an alcoholic and were tentative about dealing with my “condition.” So we met on neutral ground, Amy and I had lunches and dinners in Manhattan, and I traveled up to Poughkeepsie to spend time with Sarah. The talk was mostly about them, which I accepted as the terms of the meetings, I was more concerned with being able to see them.

Amy ate no meat for ideological reasons, and now she was boycotting fish. At a restaurant, the waitress announced the day’s special was stuffed sole, and Amy said to her, “Commercial fishermen are the looters of the sea!” She ordered a vegetable plate and in deference to Amy I ordered a salad. I was not the subject of the conversation, we talked this day about the survival of the porpoise and the snail darter. I was, frankly, becoming bored with fish talk, and mentioned that my new friends, the Walshes, had a baby girl, which reminded me of the times when both Amy and Sarah were little. Suddenly, Amy said:

“Daddy, why did you do such a thing?”

“That sounds like ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe.’ I don’t think I’ve done anything bad. If you mean divorcing, it’s not what I would have wanted. If you mean my job, it’s not a criminal activity.”

“What am I supposed to tell people?”

“That your father is a very interesting man. That after twenty years, the work he was doing didn’t mean anything to him and instead of committing suicide he got himself reborn. That ought to get their attention.”

“Oh, Daddy, I love you. I hope you’re okay.”

“I’m okay.”

“Are you lonely?”

“Yes. Some.” And I reached out to touch her face. “But not right now, darling.”

I think the girls must have been talking about me because when I next visited Sarah she seemed more interested than before in how I was getting along. At one point she said:

“It must be hard there—in the Bronx. I mean, intellectually. What’s there?”

“Actually, I read more now that I’m there than I have in years. And I go downtown. I go to galleries and museums.”

“Well, Amy and I don’t have a system yet for telling people about you.”

“Think of me this way. I’m marching to a different drummer. He just happens to be with the Glenn Miller band.”

She smiled and said:

“Why didn’t you just run off to some commune? I could have explained you better.”

“You don’t have to explain me at all, darling,” I said, kissing her on the forehead. “Just stay in my life.”

I called Nancy Reilly, and after expressing her annoyance with my abrupt departure that night at the Walsh’s party, she agreed to an evening with me. She asked if I would meet her on a street corner and I suspected she did not want her parents to see me because I would have seemed too old for her. I asked about this and she said, “No. I just don’t want them to know my business.”

Nancy was a person preoccupied with getting out of her present situation and being on her own.

“If I move in with a roommate, we can go to six hundred a month rent, but if I do it alone, I can only go to maybe three-fifty, and for that, you get a place where you have to live in one room. Or else it’s Brooklyn or Queens and who needs that? I’m already in the
Bronx.
”

She was so high-keyed that if she smoked she would have been a chain smoker. As it was, she kept popping candy mints in her mouth. I wanted to kiss her just for the mintiness of it, and also to calm her down for a moment. She converted everything back to her main interest. Over dinner, out of curiosity, she asked if she might have seen any of the ads I had written when I was in advertising. I mentioned a few of the campaigns I had worked on and she was genuinely surprised, but then asked me if many women worked in the office. When I said there were quite a few, she wanted to know if they all had their own apartments.

We had gone to Chinatown for dinner and, at my suggestion, we went to a revival of a Preston Sturges comedy at the Bleeker Street Cinema. When I had first seen it, Nancy was not even born yet. The audience was filled with young people I presumed were film buffs. It was between myself and one member of a male couple as to who was the oldest person in the theater. Nancy was also thinking of the demographics.

“See all these people? I’m the only one here who still lives at home with her parents in the Bronx.”

She laughed at her own humor, but only slightly.

“There are worse places to be,” I told her.

“
You
can say that. You don’t live at home with
your
parents. And you don’t live at home with
my
parents.”

In the car on our way uptown, we stopped at a light near an apartment building that was under construction and Nancy began to estimate what the rents would be when the building was completed. I leaned over and kissed her on the lips.

“What’s that about?”

“I ache for what you’re going through.”

When we returned to the neighborhood, I invited her to my apartment, and since apartments were her main interest, she said she would like to see it. We entered and she walked directly to the nostalgia pieces.

“Wild,” she said. “You invite women up to see your radio?”

“You’re the first.”

“Steve, I don’t know how to tell you this. You’re not just another guy from the neighborhood.”

She went into the bedroom which I had decorated with white modern pieces.

“This is more my taste.”

She put her hand on the bed to test the mattress. I was ready for her to ask how much I paid for it.

“It’s a good bed,” she said. “Do you want to make love?”

“Just like that?”

“Is that a—no?”

“Nancy! Do you have any idea what I went through in this neighborhood? Years of teenage torment. Breasts as far as the eye could see—untouched! Passion in hallways—unculminated! The maneuvering just to be alone with somebody, and the ‘Please don’ts’ and the ‘No, Stevies.’ And you just say, ‘Do you want to make love?’ Do you want to make love! I went through all that
then
, for it to be so easy
now?
It isn’t fair!”

I was playing it to the hilt, a broader performance perhaps than even Arturo De Cordova in
Frenchman’s Creek.
I was joking about it, but on some level I meant it.

“Jeannie Drago! Barbara Semmelman! All the rest! I prayed for actual, and I wasn’t even close! And you say, ‘Do you want to make love?’ I mean, the answer is, yes, of course. But it isn’t fair.”

I
WAS NERVOUS THE
first times with Nancy, concerned that her generation was going to have sexual secrets I could not decode. She was shy in sex, though, despite her original bravado, and not more experienced than I merely because she was younger.

We saw each other regularly on weekend evenings, usually going to the movies or to plays with tickets purchased at the cut-rate ticket stand on Times Square, and we became a foursome for dinners downtown with Jack and Terry. One night I entertained them all with dinner at my apartment, which I found in part pleasant and in part depressing, because it was a formalization of my bachelorhood.

Nancy had a degree in business administration from Manhattan College and wanted to make a career in banking. She was planning to take a master’s degree at night to improve her prospects. First, she intended to change jobs when she found an apartment downtown. Her prospective roommate was Patti Dempsey, also a cute brunette, a teller at the bank, about twenty-two soaking wet. They found a newsstand on West 12th Street in Manhattan where they could get the Sunday
New York Times
and the
Village Voice
early, and they met at 7
A.M.
on Fordham Road every day like conspirators, checking the day’s apartment listings in the daily newspaper, dividing up the city, going downtown to look at apartments and hurrying to be back at work by nine. Their momentum was certainly going to carry them right out of the Bronx.

In an interim act of independence Nancy arranged to spend a night at my place, which she had not done as yet. She told her parents she would be at a friend’s house. “Dangerous sleeping around,” she said, when she arrived with her overnight bag. “If my father ever found out, he’d kill me. He’d also kill
you
,” she added, cheerfully.

In the morning I came out of the shower after one of my best “Be My Love”s in years. Nancy did not bother to look up from her reading.

“Mario Lanza,” I said.

“Who?”

I feigned grief.

“Something ought to be done about the way they teach history these days.”

On an evening in November, Sam was stricken with a heart attack and taken to Montefiore Hospital. Hinda phoned me at home and I went to see him. He was asleep, ashen, under oxygen. I stood there watching him and he awoke for a moment, saw me, nodded, then fell asleep again. I thought that at least I had seen him when he was still alive.

The connection it made for me was immediate. I went home and phoned my father.

“Dad?”

“How are you, Steve?”

“Good. I really called about you.”

“I feel fine.”

He told me he was the pitcher for a senior citizens’ softball team, the league was for sixty-fives and over. In their most recent game he pitched an 18–15 victory, going all the way.

“I gave up only eleven hits, but there were twenty-two errors.”

We said that we would get together soon, either I would come down to Florida or he would make a stopover in New York, since he and Rose were planning a trip to Israel.

“I still have the note you sent me,” I said to him at the end of the call.

Sam made a recovery. Within a few days he was no longer receiving oxygen and the color returned to his face.

“I’m just not ready to meet the Big Bookie in the Sky,” he joked when I went to visit him.

He was released from the hospital and in the weeks that followed I visited Sam at the apartment every day for an hour or so after work. I bought several sports board games and we would play during the dark winter afternoons. He was recuperating slowly and he looked forward to these games. Sports, which had been his passion, helped to sustain him now.