Underworld (91 page)

She heard Nick doing something at the kitchen table.

She said, “You should go get the meat.”

She did her beadwork and listened to him doing whatever he was doing. Writing something, it sounded like, but not for school, she didn't think.

She said, “It's paid for. And they close soon. So you should think about going.”

She did her beadwork, her piecework. Sweaters, dresses and blouses. She did whole trousseaus sometimes, working off the books just as Jimmy had.

She did her work and listened to Nick, finally, go out the door. Then she went and looked at the piece of paper he'd left on the table. Made no sense to her at all. Arrows, scrawls, numbers, circled numbers, a
phone number in the Merian exchange, letters with numbers next to them, some simple additions and divisions—all scribbled frantically on the page.

She listened to the radio and did her work. She made an official salary, the money she reported, answering the phone for a local lawyer and typing wills and deeds and leases, mostly, and immigration forms, and listening to the lawyer's funny stories. He told all the new jokes and had a backlog of a thousand old ones and he liked to sing “The Darktown Strutters' Ball” in Italian, a thing he did more or less automatically, like breathing or chewing gum.

The job was good for her because it put her in contact with other people and because it had the virtue of fairly flexible hours. And the money, of course, was life and death.

Bronzini walked toward Tremont, past apartment buildings with front stoops and fire escapes, past a number of private homes, some with a rosebush or a shade tree, little frame houses beginning to show another kind of growth, spindly winged antennas.

He was wondering about being
it
. This was one of those questions that he tortured himself deliciously with. Another player tags you and you're
it.
What exactly does this mean? Beyond being neutered. You are nameless and bedeviled.
It.
The evil one whose name is too potent to be spoken. Or is the term just a cockney pronunciation of hit? When you tag someone, you hit her. You're '
it
, missy. Cockney or Scots or something.

A woman rapped a penny on the window, calling her child in to dinner.

A fearsome power in the term because it makes you separate from the others. You flee the tag, the telling touch. But once you're
it
, name-shorn, neither boy nor girl, you're the one who must be feared. You're the dark power in the street. And you feel a kind of demonry, chasing the players, trying to put your skelly-bone hand on them, to spread your taint, your curse. Speak the syllable slowly if you can. A whisper of death perhaps.

Half a block from his building, on a street where the Italians
thinned out and the Jews began to appear. And approaching now to see his mother in the first-floor window, cranked up in her special bed, white hair shining in the soft light.

Baseball's oh so simple. You tag a man, he's out. How different from being
it.
What spectral genius in the term, that curious part of childhood that sees through the rhymes and nonsense words, past the hidings and seekings and pretendings to something old and dank, some medieval awe, he thought, or earlier, even, that crawls beneath the midnight skin.

The young man struck the match with one hand. He'd learned this when he first started smoking, about a year ago, although it seemed to him that he'd been smoking forever, Old Golds, isolating the match by closing the cover behind it and then bending the match back against the striking surface below and driving the head with his thumb. Then he brought the flared match up to his cigarette, his hand cupping the whole book with the match still secured. He lit up, shook out the flame and conceded use of the other hand to pluck the spent match from the book and send it to match hell.

You need these useless skills to make an impression on the street.

The science teacher fading into the evening, southbound, and his former student Shay, a mopey C-plus in introductory chemistry, walking the other way on the same street, into the shopping district, taking deep drags on his cigarette, with numbers running in his head.

Ever since the game yesterday, Nick's been seeing the number thirteen. The game, the mass hurrah, the way he crouched over his radio, ready to puke his guts all over the roof. All day today, thirteens coming out of the woodwork. He had to get a pencil to list them all.

Branca wears number thirteen.

Branca won thirteen games this year.

The Giants started their pennant drive thirteen and a half games behind the Dodgers.

The month and day of yesterday's game. Ten three. Add the digits, you get thirteen.

The Giants won ninety-eight games this year and lost fifty-nine,
including the play-offs. Nine eight five nine. Add the digits, reverse the result, see what you get, shitface.

The time of the home run. Three fifty-eight. Add the digits of the minutes. Thirteen.

The phone number people called for inning-by-inning scores. ME 7-1212. M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. Add the five digits, old thirteen.

Take the name Branca—this is where he started going crazy. Take the name Branca and assign a number to each letter based on its position in the alphabet. This is where he started thinking he was as crazy as his brother doing chess positions or probabilities or whatever the kid does. Take the name Branca. The
B
is two. The
r
is eighteen. And so on and so on. You end up with thirty-nine. What is thirty-nine? It is the number which, when you divide it by the day of the month of the game, gives you thirteen.

Thomson wears number twenty-three. Subtract the month of the year, you know what you get.

Two guys were pushing a car to get it started. Nick nearly went over to help but then didn't. He was done with baseball now, he thought, the last thin thread connecting him to another life. He saw the old man who dressed as a priest, more or less, wearing a cassock sometimes with house slippers, or one of those ridged black hats a priest wears, blessing the fucking multitudes, and ordinary shabby street clothes.

He walked into the butcher shop. The bell over the door rattled and the butcher stood above the block, Cousin Joe, hacking at a pork loin.

The other butcher said, “Hey. Look who's here.”

He said it the way you say something in passing, to no one in particular.

Cousin Joe looked up.

“Look who's here,” he said. “Nicky, what's the word?” The other butcher said, “Hey. He wants to be called Nick. You don't know this?”

“Hey. I know this guy since he's four years old. A little skinny malink. How long you been coming in here, Nicky?”

Nick smiled. He knew he was only a stationary object, a surface for their carom shots.

“I seen him with that girl he goes with. Loretta,” the second butcher said.

“You think he's getting some?”

“I know he is. Because I look at his face when they walk by.”

“Nicky, tell me about it. Make me feel good,” the butcher said. “Because I'm reaching the point I have to hear other people's, you know, whatever it is they're doing that I'm not doing no more.”

“I think he's a cuntman. Up and coming.”

“This is true, Nicky?”

Nick's mood was improving.

“I think he's getting so much there's not enough left over for the rest of us,” the second butcher said, Antone, barely visible behind the display case.

“Make me feel good, Nicky. I stand here all day, I look at them go by. Big women, short women, girls from Roosevelt, girls from Aquinas. You know what I say to myself. Where's mine?”

“Nicky's got yours. He's got mines too.”

“Him, I could believe it.”

“And you know why, Joe?”

“He's doing something he shouldn't be doing.”

“He's got that pussy smile when he walks by. Which could only mean one thing. The kid is eating box lunch at the Y.”

“Sboccato,”
the butcher said happily, berating Antone, rasping the word from deep in his throat. Foulmouth.

Nick went to the door and opened it and waited for a woman to walk past and then flicked his cigarette toward the curbstone.

“Who's better than him?” Antone said.

“You going to school, Nicky?”

“He goes when he goes. Hey. Who's better than him?” Antone said. “I would give my right arm.”

Antone took the bag out of the case. It held chops, chicken breasts and fresh bacon. He passed it over the top to Nick.

“Who's better than you?” he said.

“Be good,” Cousin Joe said.

“My right arm I would give. Look at this kid.”

A taste of blood and sawdust hung in the air.

“Regards to your mother, okay?”

“Be good, okay?”

“Be good,” the butcher said.

Bronzini lay beaming in the massive bath, a cast-iron relic raised on ball-and-claw feet, only his head unsubmerged.

Salt crystals fizzed all around him.

His wife leaning against the door frame, Klara, with their two-year-old affixed to her leg, the child repeating words that daddy issued from the deeps.

“Tangerine,” Albert said.

This was happiness as it was meant to evolve when first conceived in caves, in mud huts on the grassy plain. Mamelah and our beautiful bambina. And his own mother, ghastly ill but here at last, murmurous, a strong and mortal presence in the house. And Albert himself in the hot bath, back from the hunt, returned to the fundamental cluster.

He summarized the meeting with Father Paulus. A slouching Klara seemed about to speak several times, the way her body begins to drag along a surface, going restless and skeptical.

“An impressive man. I want you to come along next time. Or I'll invite him here.”

“He doesn't want to come here.”

“Doctorate in philosophy at Yale. Graduated magna cum laude in sacred theology from some Jesuit center in Europe. Louvain, I believe,” and he formed the word as a privileged utterance. “Holds a chair in the humanities at Fordham.”

“But he's not inclined to help you with the boy.”

“He'll help. He'll come to a match. Tangerine,” he said to the child and raised his arms out of the water.

Klara lifted the girl up over the roll-rim of the tub and Albert sat up and took her under the arms, holding her upright, feet in white socks barely touching the water so she could step along the surface, laughing, making little kick-waves. And he felt like a mother seal, yes, a mother, not some raucous coughing bull or whatever the male is called—he would have to look it up.

“Do you know the old painting,” he said, “that shows dozens of children playing games in some town square?”

“Hundreds actually. Two hundred anyway. Bruegel. I find it unwholesome. Why?”

“It came up in conversation.”

“I don't know what art history says about this painting. But I say it's not that different from the other famous Bruegel, armies of death marching across the landscape. The children are fat, backward, a little sinister to me. It's some kind of menace, some folly.
Kinderspielen.
They look like dwarves doing something awful.”

He held the girl kicking, raising her just above the surface, then dropping her a notch so she could splash lightly, laughing when the spray hit him in the face.

“Fat and backward. Did you hear that, little girl? As a matter of fact she's getting pretty heavy, isn't she? Whoa. Aren't you, sweetheart?”

Sooner or later the daily litany of delicate questions and curt replies.

“And my mother?”

“Resting.”

“And the doctor came?”

“No.”

“The doctor did not come?”

“No.”

“When is he coming?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow. And Mrs. Ketchel looked in?”

“Looked in, exactly.”

The child stepped along the surface and he lifted her high so Klara could take her. She swung her past the end of the tub and managed to have her wet socks off about a second after she touched down. One of those thousand-a-day death struggles of mother and child. Wails and bent limbs and a certain physical insistence on the woman's part. All done in a compact blur that dazzled Albert and made him lean over the edge to espy the two dinky socks lying soggy on the tile, as confirmation.

His mother suffered from a neuromuscular condition, myasthenia gravis, and she lay helpless much of the time, eyelids sagged, arms too
weak to move except in ever slower syllables of gesture, reduced to units now, and her vision evidently doubled.

He recited the word for the child one last time as she was hustled out.

He'd brought his mother here, prevailing over her own fatalism and his wife's practical misgivings. You are the son, you take care of the parents. And the illness, the drama of a failing body, the way impending death made her seem saintly, with an icon's fixedness, a stern and staring and enameled beauty. Albert, who shunned any form of organized worship and thought God was a mass delusion, sat and watched her for hours, combed her hair, soaked up her diarrhea with bunched Kleenex, talked to her in his boyhood Italian, and he felt that the house, the flat, was suffused with a reverence, old, sad, heavy and impressive—an otherworldliness, now that she was here.

The salts had stopped fizzing and he lay in silence a while. He felt the contentment begin to slip away. There was something about evening perhaps that caused a transient sadness. He heard Klara in the kitchen preparing the meal. Things there he must keep at a distance. Her moods, her doubts. He thought about his own situation. Things he must confront. His complacency, his distractedness, his position at school, his sneaky-pete drinking.

It came to him suddenly when it finally came. Tangerine. How he'd stood in the market this afternoon peeling the loose-skinned fruit and eating the sweet sections, slightly stinging as the juice washed through his mouth, and how the scent seemed to breathe some essence, but why, of Morocco. And now he knew, incontrovertibly. Tangerine, Tanger, Tangier. The port from which the fruit was first shipped to Europe.