City on Fire (26 page)

He thought about a phone call he’d received that very morning. Instead of one of his army of sources (Have I got a story for you) it had been that stewardess he’d shacked up with, calling long-distance from Florida. She was eight months pregnant, she said. She didn’t expect anything from him, not after the way he’d up and left her, but now that it was too late to change her mind, she felt it was her duty to let him know she was going to have the baby. Richard stared down the street to where cars were crawling along on the West Side Highway, and to the sun on the Hudson beyond. To anyone passing by just then, he would have looked no saner than the madwoman in the median, awaiting the day of judgment. And if the great God Jehovah, tall as the Pan Am Building, should come driving his chariot down the avenue just now, what would His judgment of Richard Groskoph be? Coward. Failure. Drunk. If he kept up like this, he’d be lying in Bellevue before the summer was out.

When he got home, he called his travel agent. He shoveled into a trashbag all the food in his refrigerator and wiped down the inside with lemon juice and water—the first time he’d done so since leasing the apartment. He unplugged the jukebox. He set his houseplants out on the curb, for neighbors to take, and purged the bathroom of anything with an expiration date. He packed his suitcase with all that would fit and then sat by the window and watched the sky go pink and had a glass or three of bourbon, for old times’ sake. The next morning it was already falling away under the silver wing of a plane rising out of Idlewild, or JFK it now was, the thousand square miles of ravaged earth, highways, power plants, apartment blocks, and the tiny, scuttling selves he’d been this close to becoming one of. Picture a burrowing insect running from the light. Or picture a Ulysses trying to outsteer fate. Picture thumb and forefinger poised millimeters apart.

19

AS A LITTLE KID, he’d loved to run his fingers over the spines of the LPs, the heavy cardboard sleeves. He’d loved, too, how little their motley colors (cream, orange, blue) revealed about the music inside. His dad would slap an undistinguished black dinner plate on the rubber mat of the spinner, and it might turn out to be organs, violins, or Gene Krupa banging his drums like pots and pans. Then Dad would sink back into his recliner with his newspaper as though he didn’t notice Charlie playing on the floor at the far end of the room. Sometimes, though, the corner of the paper would come down and behind it would appear one quadrant of the face Charlie loved to look at, thin and mild and clean-shaven, and he’d be able to tell from the one visible eye, magnified by reading glasses, that his dad was grinning. Charlie would grin shyly back and pretend to conduct with a Lincoln Log.

At that age, he could often be found on the floor of whatever room his parents were in. It was as if the house was divided into two kingdoms: one that started at knee height, the other belonging to Charlie. Under the kitchen table, the hanging edges of the tablecloth formed a jungle canopy. Wooden legs were the stout trunks of trees. Die-cut army men with little fins of extra metal at the neck where the machine had stamped them out scrambled up these trunks to perform recon missions on a Friday night in winter. The radio on the counter wasn’t supposed to be on—Charlie knew this because, whenever his grandfather visited, there was no music from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Now, though, it played a big band song from before he was born, a slow, nostalgic, glimmering chandelier of a thing, around which a clarinet swooped and dove like a bird had got into the room. When he edged forward out of the jungle, steam made a gray half-curtain on the bottom of the kitchen window. His mom, bending to the dishwater, didn’t notice. There was a small bunching of pantyhose near her ankle where you could actually see the color of the hose as distinct from the skin. The dishes made their own music beneath her moving hands, a mellow clanking, like the sounds Charlie heard when he held his breath and became a submarine in the tub. Then Dad was pulling Mom from the dishes and bringing her swaying out into the open space. Their feet, hers in slippers, his in his work shoes, found a rhythm, and Charlie’s disappearance was complete. It answered to some deep, sweet need he had to be a part of them—a sense of being, himself, imperfectly stamped out—which was maybe connected to still other music, back beyond the caul of forgetting that covered whatever faces had sung the newborn Charlie to sleep at the Home for Unwed Mothers out on the East End.

Of course, Charlie couldn’t stay this close to his mom and dad forever. At six, he started trundling off to the red brick box of Charles Lindbergh Elementary. The other kids sometimes teased Charlie for being a redheaded Jew, but his knack for marginality helped him here, too. And anyway, the broader community from which the school drew was more than half ethnic: Slavs, Italians, and even a few Greeks. The men held union jobs or clung to the lower rungs of the professions; the women worked part-time or stayed home. They owned one car per family, American-made, drank moderately if at all, and dedicated weekends to lawn care, to hobbies pursued in basements, or to watching golf in the afternoon with the living room lights off, ostensibly to reduce the glare off the tube but really so that no one noticed if they fell asleep. They were the very middle of the middle class. And this was why they’d moved out from the crumbling boroughs—not for the freedom to do whatever they wanted behind closed doors (though there must have been some of that, too), but to lose themselves in the great mass of America. Normalcy was Long Island’s chief industrial product. Over time, its specs had been drummed into Charlie. As long as your hair was long, but not too long, and your collar was wide, but not too wide, and your slacks were neither too expensive nor too cheap, and you watched the requisite eight hours of prime time a week and kept up with the adventures of Captain America and Iron Man and didn’t bring in anything too weird for lunch, you were pretty much okay.

Charlie’s best friend in those days, Mickey Sullivan, was a redhead, too. In theory, this should have imposed a certain distance between them; one carrot-top per homeroom was necessary to establish balance, but two together was too many. Mickey was big for his age, though, and had older brothers, and was a hitter, so the other kids let their friendship stand. And because Ramona Weisbarger seemed to have mistaken for loneliness Charlie’s failure to obtrude, she would give him permission to ride his bike over to Mickey’s after school.

Mickey had a collection of 45 r.p.m. records purchased with his and other people’s milk money, and always had three or four of the newest ones with him at school to show Charlie. At home, he had a Fancy Trax portable record player with a built-in speaker, and they could kill hours doing goofy dances in front of the mirror or playing tennis-racket guitars. (What, did he think they were made out of money? is what Charlie’s mom said when he asked if he, too, could have a Fancy Trax record player.) For fast numbers, Mickey always insisted on playing the solos, relegating Charlie to rhythm. For slow numbers, they would turn their backs on each other and wrap their arms around themselves and make mwah-mwah smooching noises until they couldn’t pucker anymore from cracking themselves up. And so the high-charting hits of the Dave Clark Five and Herman’s Hermits and Tommy James and the Shondells were also among the songs Charlie would associate with his Long Island childhood. By junior year of high school, they were stacked in a jukebox in his chest, on heavy rotation.

Somewhere in there, too, was the sound of a rehearsing cantor seeping through the nicotine-stained ceiling of MEETING ROOM B in the basement of the Flower Hill synagogue, where the same fifteen kids were dragged together for Hebrew school every Sunday. Rabbi Lidner was a smoker, and seemed always to have a cigarette burning in one hand and another going in an ashtray tipped into the chalk-holder of the blackboard behind him. The ash on this untouched cigarette would grow to the length of a pencil eraser. Of a golf pencil. Charlie kept waiting for the mythical moment when it would reach the filter, creating an entire ghost cigarette, but like the moment when the playground swing swung all the way over the bar, it never came. Rabbi Lidner would invariably decide to supplement his monologue with Scripture, which was, after all, what qualified him as a rabbi, and the fumbling of his sausage-shaped fingers on the chalk-holder or the scratch of the chalk on the slate would jostle the ashtray and crumble that magnificent ash. Charlie, due to his asthma, watched from the far pole of the circle of folding chairs, by a window he cracked even in winter. At that distance, the English phrases on the board were no more intelligible than the Hebrew ones he’d forgotten to practice. He might as well have looked for guidance to the tannish blots above.

The last minutes of each class were set aside for open-ended scenarios in which loyalty did battle with honesty, or honesty with wisdom, or wisdom with courage, and the rabbi expected Charlie and his peers, who could hardly keep their fingers out of their noses, to say what a Jew was to do. “Suppose you’re rummaging in your father’s study—,” he might begin.

“I’m not allowed in there,” Sheldon Goldbarth would blurt. Charlie had it on good authority that Sheldon Goldbarth’s mother let him drink coffee in the morning, but Rabbi Lidner was used to these outbursts.

“So you’ve already broken a commandment, good noticing, Sheldon. But while you’re rummaging, let’s say you discover your father has broken one, too. He has—”

“Coveted his neighbor’s wife!” said Sheldon Goldbarth.

“Coveted his neighbor’s ass,” Tall Paul Stein muttered, to giggles.

Commanding obedience was not Lidner’s forte, nor that of Reform Judaism more generally. “Your father has … stolen something from his job. What are you going to do?”

The implication, as Charlie read it, was that Jews were held to extraordinary standards: courage and wisdom and honesty and loyalty, all at the same time. It was this assumption of extraordinariness, paradoxically, that allowed Shel and Paul to cut up in class. Ultimately, the bloodline marked them for better things. It was like the origin story in a superhero comic—the drop of radioactive goo, the faint golden glow descending through the mother. There was only one problem: by this account, Charlie had no superpowers. Sure, he’d seen strawberry-blond Hasidim on the train with their forelocks and patchy beards, and Rabbi Lidner had pointed to stories of adoption in the Torah; Moses was adopted, he said. Yes, Charlie thought, but by Gentiles. And all the really great feats were performed by Hebrews from whom Charlie couldn’t claim biological descent, besandaled heroes and warrior kings. It was said that, in a pinch, you should seek out the help of a Jewish stranger before that of your best Gentile friend. And who was to say that Charlie’s real parents, whoever they were, were the friendly kind of goy? Who was to say that his real grandfather hadn’t, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, tended a German oven?

ONE SUNDAY IN MIDDLE SCHOOL when Charlie was riding his bike back from the synagogue, he happened to pass the church at the bottom of the hill his house was on. The bell had just rung, sailing little boats of sound out over the green world, with families pouring out onto the lawn and an almost military double line there of kids Charlie’s age, boys in slacks on the right, girls in kneeskirts on the left. Perhaps it was how still they were that drew his gaze, for when had Charlie ever known a mixed-sex group to stand so still? A person in penguiny robes crouched before them. At her signal, they turned and headed back into the now-exhausted church. Mickey Sullivan’s red head, taller than the others, turned right past the spot where Charlie was standing, foot propped on a pedal, but if he saw, he made no sign.

Charlie was nervous asking about it the next day—nervous Mickey might give him an Indian burn or a titty-twister, as he tended to do when some awkwardness arose between them. To his surprise, the question seemed to make Mickey five years older instead. Sophisticated. Blasé. Looking past Charlie to where the lunchtables were already filling up, he reached into his pocket. Inside the fist he brought out nestled a gold chain. A small cross rested across either the love or health line of Mickey’s palm. When Charlie reached for it, the palm snapped shut. “I don’t get to wear it until after I make my first communion.”

“What’s a communion?”

“What you saw us practicing for, dummy. You go and kneel on this little like pillow and they give you this wafer that’s the body of Jesus and then you drink his blood.”

“You guys drink blood?” Grandpa had warned him about this stuff, but then, Grandpa was full of weird superstitions.

“Not real blood, you homo.”

“Oh,” Charlie said, pretending to understand.

“And there’s a party, and you get presents”—the goys got presents for everything—“and then you’re basically a grown-up.”

“So like a bar mitzvah.”

“I guess.” Mickey showed Charlie the right way to put one hand over the other, waiting for the wafer, but punched Charlie in the shoulder when he did it to the lunch lady, asking for creamed corn. This was sacrilicious, he said. It was like Mickey had lost all sense of humor—like he’d become a grown-up already.

Knowing what his mother would say, Charlie prepared a list of reasons why he should be allowed to go to Mickey’s first communion. The church was right there down the street, and how could he expect people to come to his bar mitzvah a year from now if he didn’t go to their things? Absolutely not, she said. But he went anyway; it would be easy enough to fib about Rabbi Lidner keeping them late at Hebrew school. It was like one of his little moral antinomies. Honor thy mother and father, the commandment said, but how was it possible, really, to dishonor what was simply an extension of yourself? Weren’t his folks still facets of that unity he’d felt under the kitchen table? Sure, it could grow more or less distinct in the shuffle of daily life, like a lake glimpsed through trees from a moving car, but the lake was always there, wasn’t it? The Benny Goodman Orchestra was always playing somewhere.

Though if he had stopped to think about it—if he had stopped pedaling for a minute—he might have noticed the disorienting blur the postage stamp yards and telephone poles and other solidities of his childhood had lately become. His parents had been more distracted than usual, more excitable, more anxious. His mom had grown lax about making sure he didn’t wear the same shirt or take the same lunch two days in a row. And Grandpa was about to arrive from Montreal that morning for a visit, hastily announced and of unspecified length. But Charlie was still a child then. He saw what it pleased him to see.