Streets of Gold (36 page)

“Will
you
take me there, Mr. Anderson?”

“Me? I don’t know you from a hole in the wall,” Biff said.

“Oh,
take
the fuckin’ kid,” Poots said.

Well, he didn’t take me. He didn’t take me because, as it happened, he was leaving for California in a week to play a gig out there, and if things went well for him, he would stay there through the winter and spring, and probably wouldn’t be back in New York till June or July. When I asked him if he’d take me to the Street when he got back, he told me again that he didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, and said I should get my uncle to take me. Uncle Luke was still asleep, and snoring very loudly at that point. I told Biff my uncle had other things to do, and besides, he couldn’t teach me to play the kind of piano I wanted to play. Biff said Now hold it
just
one minute, kid, who said anything about
teaching
you piano? I never taught anybody in my life, and I ain’t about to start now. I don’t know you from a hole in the wall, go down the Street, get yourself some bop records, it’s been nice talkin’ to you.

My mother would not allow me to go down to Fifty-second Street, either alone
or
accompanied by Luke. She said she wanted me to maintain my good grades at Santa Lucia’s, especially since I’d be graduating in June, and besides, I was doing
enough
gallivanting, what with running off on mysterious errands every time the phone rang. The telephone calls were from Susan Koenig, of course, and they would notify me that her mother would be gone for the evening or the afternoon, whereupon I would hop the trolley to Mount Vernon and spend a few blissful hours in bed with her. Or up against the sink. Or on the kitchen table. All that ended in April when her brother — whose obnoxious name was Franklin — was inconsiderate enough to get himself shot in the foot by a Japanese sniper, thereby earning himself a Purple Heart and managing somehow to finagle a boat ticket to the States at a time when nobody, but
nobody
, was being sent home for minor wounds. In April, too, a week or so before Easter, the Virgin Mary came down to visit my mother and precipitated a family crisis that was more immediate to me than jazz, or the war, or the fact that Susan seemed to prefer her brother’s brand of houghmagandy to mine.

She appeared to my mother on 218th Street and White Plains Avenue at three o’clock in the afternoon. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about that corner, and God alone knows why Mary chose it for her return to Earth. My mother had been out marketing, and was loaded down with shopping bags as she wended her gentle way homeward that afternoon. The Virgin was wearing black. Black topcoat and black stockings, black shoes, and a small black hat. She approached my mother and said, “Stella Di Palermo?”

“Yes?” my mother answered, puzzled. She had never seen this woman before. We had been living in the Bronx for seven years, and my mother knew most of the neighborhood ladies, but this woman was a stranger to her.

“I’m telling you this for your own good,” the woman said. “Your husband Jimmy is in love with a woman on Pelham Parkway. He goes to see her almost every day, after work.”

“Who are you?” my mother asked.

“Never mind,” the woman said. “God bless you, Stella,” and walked off.

My mother stood there watching her as she disappeared. She was forty-one years old, young Stella, and a strange lady in black had just told her that her beloved husband was enamored of a woman on Pelham Parkway, which was exactly where my father delivered mail. My mother immediately concluded that the woman in black was the Virgin Mary. Why this association should even have occurred to a person who hadn’t been inside a church for twenty-one years is beyond me, but again, I have no desire to probe the convoluted mental processes of anyone who happens to be my mother. Maybe Easter had something to do with it. Maybe the religious identification was triggered by the fact that my mother had seen a miniature replica of the crucifixion in the window of the butcher shop an instant before she was confronted by the lady in black. It doesn’t matter. My mother gets these fixed ideas. If Charlie Shoe was a hophead rape artist, then the lady in black was the Virgin Mary, and that was that. And
that
, believe me, was more than enough. As fate would have it, my father was late getting home from work that afternoon, and this naturally confirmed everything the Virgin Mary had whispered to my mother in the street. I was not as fortunate as my father;
I
 got home from school at my usual time and found a raving lunatic in the kitchen.

“I thought it was the bum,” my mother said. “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him the minute he comes through the door.”

“What?” I said.

“Him and his whore,” she said, pronouncing the last word “hooer.”

“What do you mean? What...?”

“You think I’m stupid?” she said. “Where is he, it’s four o’clock, he’s supposed to be here at three, where is he, the bum? He’s with that whore, that’s where he is. We’ve been married twenty-one years, the dirty bastard, he’s rotten through and through,
la Madonna
opened my eyes, she told me what your father’s been doing, oh, and I
believed
him, I
believed
him when he told me he was lining up wedding jobs after work, sure,
some
wedding jobs, I’ll kill him when he gets home, don’t you say a word, Iggie, I’m going to kill that rotten son of a bitch.”

“Mom, sit down, will you? Mom, please . ..”

“What am I stupid?” she said. “I
must
be stupid to let this happen. I called my father, I called him the minute I came in the door, I put down my bundles and I called him at the tailor shop. I told him
la Madonna
stopped me on White Plains Avenue and told me what a bum my husband was, told me he’s been seeing this whore from Pelham Parkway every day, every
day
, I told him, who knows where they do it, she must have an apartment there, he probably delivers mail to her, or else he met her at one of those beer parties he plays, of
course
, why
else
does he go all over the Bronx playing those jobs, to meet whores, I told my father, I told him. And he said What
madonna
, what are you talking about, my own
father
, would you believe it, he sticks up for that rotten son of a bitch, I saw her with my own eyes, all in black, she had this sad face, there were tears in her eyes when she told me, and she said God bless you, Stella, and then she vanished, my own father didn’t believe me. He told me to calm down, he told me to wait till Jimmy comes home, talk to him, find out what it’s all about, my own father, what’s there to find out about when
la Madonna
comes to me and
tells
me, what’s there to find out, Iggie, oh, Iggie, what’s there to find out?”

“Mom,” I said, “Grandpa was right. When Pop gets here...”

“I’ll
kill
him!” she said.

“Mom,
please
,” I said, and burst into tears.

She came to me, she clutched my head against her bosom. Frantically she stroked my hair, and the hysterical monologue went on, and I half listened, and prayed her rage would run its course before my father stepped through that kitchen door, because I knew for certain she would stab him with a bread knife if she did not calm down before then. “How could he do this to us? To
me
, sure, he doesn’t love
me
, he
never
loved me, but to
you
? Iggie, how could he do this to
you
, doesn’t he know you’re his son, doesn’t he have no respect for the family, you’re blind, doesn’t he know that, isn’t that enough for you to bear, do you have to be ashamed of a bum for a father? Oh, no wonder, oh
now
it makes sense, oh yes
now
I understand, I thank you sweet
Madonna
, I get on my knees to thank you, I’ve been stupid, so stupid, I’ll take care of you Iggie don’t worry your mother loves you she’ll always love you no matter what that bum does I don’t care if he
ever
comes back I’ll kill him when he comes in this house that dirty bastard twenty-one years I’ve been good to him twenty-one years and he finds himself a cheap rotten whore a blond woman
la Madonna
said an Irish whore with blond hair she lives on Pelham Parkway he goes up there all the time when he’s delivering mail he met her at one of the beer parties he plays
la Madonna
said it’s been going on for years now she said she told me everything Iggie and she said God bless you Stella oh Iggie what am I going to do how are we going to manage my own father won’t believe me.”

In my mother’s temporary insanity there was irrefutable logic. If the woman in black had not been the Virgin Mary, then how did she know who my mother was? My mother, after all, had never seen her before, so how could this woman, unless she was the Virgin Mary, immediately identify her as Stella Di Palermo? And similarly, if the woman had not been the Virgin Mary, how could she have known what my father was up to on Pelham Parkway almost every day after work, how could she possibly have known that he was in love with another woman? My father maintained that the lady in black was a troublemaker, that my mother was a fool to believe a stranger who had stopped her on the street and told her such a lie, how did my mother know the woman wasn’t some kind of nut? “Then how did she
know
me?” my mother screamed. “Why did she pick
me
out of the crowd, the avenue was crowded, everybody was out shopping, she came up to me and said right off Stella Di Palermo, she
knew
me, you son of a bitch!” My father told my mother (this was all in my presence) that she was as crazy as the lady who’d stopped her, if she believed such a thing. My mother said, “Oh, no,
I’m
not crazy,
you’re
the one who’s crazy if you think I’m going to live under the same roof for another minute with a bum who’s running around with some cheap Irish whore on Pelham Parkway,” and my father said, “For Christ’s sake, Stella, will you please shut up, you’re giving me a headache,” and she said, “
I’ll
give you a headache, you rotten son of a bitch,” and my father left the house.

My mother immediately went through all the drawers on his side of the dresser, searching for evidence that would link him incontrovertibly to the mysterious blond Irish whore on Pelham Parkway. She found a bill from a jewelry shop, and she read it off to me triumphantly — “One pair gold earrings, sapphire chip, forty-seven dollars and twenty-two cents, where are those earrings, Iggie? Did
you
ever see those earrings, this bill is dated January twenty-eighth, did he give those earrings to
me
, did you ever
see
those earrings in this house? He gave them to his whore, he spent
our
good money on an Irish whore!” My father told her on the telephone that he had picked up the earrings for a friend in the post office, my mother could go check with the jeweler if she wanted to, but she said, “Sure, the jeweler’ll lie, too, you think I’m stupid?” He had gone to stay at my Uncle Nick’s house in Corona, and on Good Friday, Nick came to my mother as an emissary. Nick told her she was foolish to believe a strange woman who’d come up to her on the street....

“
What
strange woman?” my mother shouted. “
La Madonna
, do you understand me, Nick?
La Madonna,
all in black!”

“Sure, but after all, Stella, are you going to believe some crazy person or your own husband?”

“I’m not crazy, don’t worry,” my mother said.

“Who said
you
were crazy, Stella? I’m telling you this person, this woman who came up to you...”

“La Madonna!”
my mother said.

“Now come on, Stella,” Nick said, “make sense, will you? What the hell is
la Madonna
gonna be bothering coming here to the Bronx to tell you about Jimmy, huh?”

“He’s a no-good bastard,” my mother said.

“All right, so what do you wanna do? I’m wastin’ time here. You want me to tell him to come home, or you want me to tell him to go drop dead? Which is it, Stella?”

“Why won’t he tell me the truth?”

“He swore to me on the Bible he ain’t got no other woman; now what more do you want, Stella?”

“He’s a liar,” my mother said.

“So okay, I’ll tell him to go drop dead, okay? What do you want me to tell him, Stella?”

“Who cares
what
you tell him? Who
cares
about him or what he does with his whore?”

“The kid’s sittin’ right here,” my Uncle Nick said. “You shouldn’t talk that way in front of the kid.”

“Why not? He
should
know what kind of bum his father is.”

“Okay, so I’ll tell Jimmy not to come home, okay? Is that what you want me to tell him? I’ll tell him whatever you want, Stella. I ain’t gonna buck the system, that’s for sure. You buck the system, you wind up with a busted head.”

“Tell him what you like.”

“Well, what kind of answer is that, Stella? Now listen to me, I’m gonna talk to you like you was my own sister, all right? He’s been at my house since last Wednesday, he goes to work in the morning, drives all the way here to the Bronx, and comes home for supper every night when Connie’s puttin’ the macaroni on the table. Now if he’s foolin’ around with a woman here in the Bronx, why’s he comin’ back to
my
house in Corona every night, would you please tell me that?”

“Because she’s
married
, why do you think?” my mother said. “
Married
, you understand, Nick, or are you thickheaded like your brother? If I knew who she was, if
la Madonna
had only told me who she was, I’d go see her husband,
he’d
fix Jimmy’s onions, you can bet on that.”

“Stella, if you don’t know who this woman is supposed to be, how do you know she’s married?”

“You think I’m stupid?” my mother said.