Goodbye, Columbus (27 page)

Mrs. Katz jumped up and down. “Who
is
it?”

“I can’t see,” Goldie said. “I can’t—” She pushed up on her toes, out of her slippers. “I—oh God! My God!” And she was racing forward, screaming, “Lou! Lou!”

“Mamma, stay back.” Sheila found herself fighting off her mother. The stretcher was sliding into the ambulance now.

“Sheila, let me go, it’s your father!” She pointed to the ambulance, whose red eye spun slowly on top. For a moment Goldie looked back to the steps. Ida Kaufman stood there yet, her fingers fidgeting at the buttons of the shirt. Then Goldie broke for the ambulance, her daughter beside her, propelling her by her elbows.

“Who are you?” the doctor said. He took a step towards them to stop their forward motion, for it seemed as if they intended to dive right into the ambulance on top of his patient.

“The wife—” Sheila shouted.

The doctor pointed to the porch. “Look, lady—”

“I’m the
wife,
” Goldie cried. “Me!”

The doctor looked at her. “Get in.”

Goldie wheezed as Sheila and the doctor helped her into the ambulance, and she let out a gigantic gasp when she saw the white face sticking up from the gray blanket; his eyes were closed, his skin grayer than his hair. The doctor pushed Sheila aside, climbed in, and then the ambulance was moving, the siren screaming. Sheila ran after the ambulance a moment, hammering on the door, but then she turned the other way and was headed back through the crowd and up the stairs to Ida Kaufman’s house.

Goldie turned to the doctor. “He’s dead?”

“No, he had a heart attack.”

She smacked her face.

“He’ll be all right,” the doctor said.

“But a heart attack. Never in his life.”

“A man sixty, sixty-five, it happens.” The doctor snapped the answers back while he held Epstein’s wrist.

“He’s only fifty-nine.”

“Some only,” the doctor said.

The ambulance zoomed through a red light and made a sharp right turn that threw Goldie to the floor. She sat there and spoke. “But how does a healthy man—”

“Lady, don’t ask questions. A grown man can’t act like a boy.”

She put her hands over her eyes as Epstein opened his.

“He’s awake now,” the doctor said. “Maybe he wants to hold your hand or something.”

Goldie crawled to his side and looked at him. “Lou, you’re all right? Does anything hurt?”

He did not answer. “He knows it’s me?”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Tell him.”

“It’s me, Lou.”

“It’s your wife, Lou,” the doctor said. Epstein blinked his eyes. “He knows,” the doctor said. “He’ll be all right. AH he’s got to do is live a normal life, normal for sixty.”

“You hear the doctor, Lou. All you got to do is live a normal life.”

Epstein opened his mouth. His tongue hung over his teeth like a dead snake.

“Don’t you talk,” his wife said. “Don’t you worry about anything. Not even the business. That’ll work out. Our Sheila will marry Marvin and that’ll be that. You won’t have to sell, Lou, it’ll be in the family. You can retire, rest, and Marvin can take over. He’s a smart boy, Marvin, a
mensch
.”

Lou rolled his eyes in his head.

“Don’t try to talk. I’ll take care. You’ll be better soon and we can go someplace. We can go to Saratoga, to the mineral baths, if you want. We’ll just go, you and me—” Suddenly she gripped his hand. “Lou, you’ll live normal, won’t you?
Won’t you?
” She was crying. “‘Cause what’ll happen, Lou, is you’ll kill yourself! You’ll keep this up and that’ll be the end—”

“All right,” the young doctor said, “you take it easy now. We don’t want two patients on our hands.”

The ambulance was pulling down and around into the side entrance of the hospital and the doctor knelt at the back door.

“I don’t know why I’m crying.” Goldie wiped her eyes. “He’ll be all right? You say so, I believe you, you’re a doctor.” And as the young man swung open the door with the big red cross painted on the back, she asked, softly, “Doctor, you have something that will cure what else he’s got—this rash?” She pointed.

The doctor looked at her. Then he lifted for a moment the blanket that covered Epstein’s nakedness.

“Doctor, it’s bad?”

Goldie’s eyes and nose were running.

“An irritation,” the doctor said.

She grabbed his wrist. “You can clean it up?”

“So it’ll never come back,” the doctor said, and hopped out of the ambulance.

I
T WAS
in a freshman high school class called “Occupations” that, fifteen years ago, I first met the ex-con, Alberto Pelagutti. The first week my new classmates and I were given “a battery of tests” designed to reveal our skills, deficiencies, tendencies, and psyches. At the end of the week, Mr. Russo, the Occupations teacher, would add the skills, subtract the deficiencies, and tell us what jobs best suited our talents; it was all mysterious but scientific. I remember we first took a “Preference Test”: “Which would you prefer to do, this, that, or the other thing…” Albie Pelagutti sat one seat behind me and to my left, and while this first day of high school I strolled happily through the test, examining ancient fossils here, defending criminals there, Albie, like the inside of Vesuvius, rose, fell, pitched, tossed, and swelled in his chair. When he finally made a decision, he made it. You could hear his pencil drive the
x
into the column opposite the activity in which he thought it wisest to prefer to engage. His agony reinforced the legend that had preceded him: he was seventeen; had just left Jamesburg Reformatory; this was his third high school, his third freshman year; but now—I heard another
x
driven home—he had decided “to go straight.”

Halfway through the hour Mr. Russo left the room. “I’m going for a drink,” he said. Russo was forever at pains to let us know what a square-shooter he was and that, unlike other teachers we might have had, he would not go out the front door of the classroom to sneak around to the back door and observe how responsible we were. And sure enough, when he returned after going for a drink, his lips were wet; when he came back from the men’s room, you could smell the soap on his hands. “Take your time, boys,” he said, and the door swung shut behind him.

His black wingtipped shoes beat down the marble corridor and five thick fingers dug into my shoulder. I turned around; it was Pelagutti. “What?” I said. “Number twenty-six,” Pelagutti said, “What’s the answer?” I gave him the truth: “Anything.” Pelagutti rose halfway over his desk and glared at me. He was a hippopotamus, big, black, and smelly; his short sleeves squeezed tight around his monstrous arms as though they were taking his own blood pressure—which at that moment was sky-bound: “What’s the answer!” Menaced, I flipped back three pages in my question booklet and reread number twenty-six. “Which would you prefer to do: (1) Attend a World Trade Convention. (2) Pick cherries. (3) Stay with and read to a sick friend. (4) Tinker with automobile engines.” I looked blank-faced back to Albie, and shrugged my shoulders. “It doesn’t matter—there’s no right answer. Anything.” He almost rocketed out of his seat. “Don’t give me that crap! What’s the answer!” Strange heads popped up all over the room—thin-eyed glances, hissing lips, shaming grins—and I realized that any minute Russo, wet-lipped, might come back and my first day in high school I would be caught cheating. I looked again at number twenty-six; then back to Albie; and then propelled—as I always was towards him—by anger, pity, fear, love, vengeance, and an instinct for irony that was at the time delicate as a mallet, I whispered, “Stay and read to a sick friend.” The volcano subsided, and Albie and I had met.

We became friends. He remained at my elbow throughout the testing, then throughout lunch, then after school. I learned that Albie, as a youth, had done all the things I, under direction, had not: he had eaten hamburgers in strange diners; he had gone out after cold showers, wet-haired, into winter weather; he had been cruel to animals; he had trafficked with whores; he had stolen, he had been caught, and he had paid. But now he told me, as I unwrapped my lunch in the candy store across from school, “Now, I’m through crappin’ around. I’m gettin’ an education. I’m gonna—” and I think he picked up the figure from a movie musical he had seen the previous afternoon while the rest of us were in English class—”I’m gonna put my best foot forward.” The following week when Russo read the results of the testing it appeared that Albie’s feet were not only moving forward but finding strange, wonderful paths. Russo sat at his desk, piles of tests stacked before him like ammunition, charts and diagrams mounted huge on either side, and delivered our destinies. Albie and I were going to be lawyers.

Of all that Albie confessed to me that first week, one fact in particular fastened on my brain: I soon forgot the town in Sicily where he was born; the occupation of his father (he either made ice or delivered it); the year and model of the cars he had stolen. I did not forget though that Albie had apparently been the star of the Jamesburg Reformatory baseball team. When I was selected by the gym teacher, Mr. Hopper, to captain one of my gym class’s Softball teams (we played softball until the World Series was over, then switched to touch football), I knew that I had to get Pelagutti on my side. With those arms he could hit the ball a mile.

The day teams were to be selected Albie shuffled back and forth at my side, while in the lockerroom I changed into my gym uniform—jockstrap, khaki-colored shorts, T-shirt, sweat socks, and sneakers. Albie had already changed: beneath his khaki gym shorts he did not wear a support but retained his lavender undershorts; they hung down three inches below the outer shorts and looked like a long fancy hem. Instead of a T-shirt he wore a sleeveless undershirt; and beneath his high, tar-black sneakers he wore thin black silk socks with slender arrows embroidered up the sides. Naked he might, like some centuries-dead ancestor, have tossed lions to their death in the Colosseum; the outfit, though I didn’t tell him, detracted from his dignity.

As we left the lockerroom and padded through the dark basement corridor and up onto the sunny September playing field, he talked continually, “I didn’t play sports when I was a kid, but I played at Jamesburg and baseball came to me like nothing.” I nodded my head. “What you think of Pete Reiser?” he asked. “He’s a pretty good man,” I said. “What you think of Tommy Henrich?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, “he’s dependable, I guess.” As a Dodger fan I preferred Reiser to the Yankees’ Henrich; and besides, my tastes have always been a bit baroque, and Reiser, who repeatedly bounced off outfield walls to save the day for Brooklyn, had won a special trophy in the Cooperstown of my heart. “Yeh,” Albie said, “I like all them Yankees.”

I didn’t have a chance to ask Albie what he meant by that, for Mr. Hopper, bronzed, smiling, erect, was flipping a coin; I looked up, saw the glint in the sun, and I was calling “heads.” It landed tails and the other captain had first choice. My heart flopped over when he looked at Albie’s arms, but calmed when he passed on and chose first a tall, lean, first-baseman type. Immediately I said, “I’ll take Pelagutti.” You don’t very often see smiles like the one that crossed Albie Pelagutti’s face that moment: you would think I had paroled him from a life sentence.

The game began. I played shortstop—left-handed—and batted second; Albie was in center field and, at his wish, batted fourth. Their first man grounded out, me to the first baseman. The next batter hit a high, lofty fly ball to center field. The moment I saw Albie move after it I knew Tommy Henrich and Pete Reiser were only names to him; all he knew about baseball he’d boned up on the night before. While the ball hung in the air, Albie Jumped up and down beneath it, his arms raised upward directly above his head; his wrists were glued together, and his two hands flapped open and closed like a butterfly’s wings, begging the ball toward them.

“C’mon,” he was screaming to the sky, “c’mon you bastard…” And his legs bicycle-pumped up and down, up and down. I hope the moment of my death does not take as long as it did for that damn ball to drop. It hung, it hung, Albie cavorting beneath like a Holy Roller. And then it landed, smack into Albie’s chest. The runner was rounding second and heading for third while Albie twirled all around, looking, his arms down now, stretched out, as though he were playing ring-around-a-rosy with two invisible children. “Behind you, Pelagutti!” I screamed. He stopped moving. “What?” he called back to me. I ran halfway out to center field. “Behind you—relay it!” And then, as the runner rounded third, I had to stand there defining “relay” to him.

At the end of the first half of the first inning we came to bat behind, 8-0—eight home runs, all relayed in too late by Pelagutti.

Out of a masochistic delight I must describe Albie at tht plate: first, he
faced
the pitcher; then, when he swung at the ball—and he did, at every one—it was not to the side but down, as though he were driving a peg into the ground. Don’t ask if he was right-handed or left-handed. I don’t know.

While we changed out of our gym uniforms I was silent. I boiled as I watched Pelagutti from the comer of my eye. He kicked off those crazy black sneakers and pulled his pink gaucho shirt on over his undershirt—there was still a red spot above the U front of the undershirt where the first fly ball had hit him. Without removing his gym shorts he stuck his feet into his gray trousers—I watched as he hoisted the trousers over the red splotches where ground balls had banged off his shins, past the red splotches where pitched balls had smacked his knee caps and thighs.