Eggplant Alley (9781593731410) (6 page)

Nicky said, “Dad, what's the …”

Dad said, “Roy. Come on out and have some pie.”

Roy sighed, put out his cigarette. He rolled off the bed.

“My last meal,” he grunted.

Nicky hopped happily out of bed to join the party. He was hungry for food. He wanted pizza pie. And he was hungry for fun and manly fellowship—tall tales, risqué jokes, and worldly secrets. He wanted the inside stories, the stories that the grownups must be telling when he walks into the room and they cease talking. He desperately wanted the story behind that monkey. He could barely wait …

Dad said, “Nicky, stay here. Roy and me need to have a talk.”

Nicky fell asleep without his supper. He thought, as he drifted off, “And I didn't even do anything wrong.”

And the next day, in the beautiful spring morning, Roy loaded his duffel bag into a cab and was on his way to Vietnam, increasing the list of things that ruined Nicky's childhood to five.

T
his happened on a rainy Saturday morning, three weeks after Roy's chicken-flavored, safe-and-sound letter.

Mom went to work cleaning out the refrigerator, which had been wheezing and rattling worse than usual. The noise kept Mom awake at night. The ancient Kenmore was crying for help. The freezer was overloaded with tinfoil packages of eggplant, ravioli, soup, cheesecake, stuffed peppers, chicken cutlets—leftovers from Mom's cooking spree on the day Roy shipped out. The old white fridge could not take the strain.

“It's a sin to throw out all this food,” Mom said. “Take these down to Mrs. Furbish. I'm sure the poor old woman needs food.”

“She scares me,” Nicky said. “Give it to Checkers.”

Checkers painfully lifted himself to his feet under the table. He panted. This was the dog's breakfast he had been dreaming about his whole life.

“Get going,” Mom said.

Nicky rode the elevator, which was not stinky this morning. The Rosatto brothers had not paid a visit. Nicky shivered from the rock-hard frozen packages stacked in his bare arms.

Mrs. Harriet Furbish lived on the second floor. She was an Eggplant
Alley legend. No one knew how old she was, but she didn't look a day under 112. Mrs. Furbish was from the South. Nobody knew how she'd ended up in the Bronx. If you listened to whisper and rumor, she had been a witch, a nurse, a vampire, a seamstress, a professional bowler, a waitress, a gypsy, a sword swallower, a lion tamer, a swimmer of the English Channel, a genie from a bottle, and a onetime girlfriend of President Chester A. Arthur. When Nicky was four years old, Roy informed him that Mrs. Furbish was a cannibal, with a special taste for tender little boys.

Mrs. Furbish especially gave Nicky the creeps because of another rumor. She was reputed to be a crackerjack fortune-teller. One look in your eyes, and Mrs. Furbish knew all about your past, all about your future. Nicky's stomach pretzeled at the very idea. He wasn't worried about a scandalous past. To his regret, he didn't have one. But he was stone-cold terrified of the future.

Nicky stood on Mrs. Furbish's worn-thin welcome mat and knocked on 2-E. A television was going across the hall. Nicky looked over his shoulder. He worried about the Creature from the Second Floor. Nicky imagined the horrid little weasel behind one of the doors, squinting those bug eyes at him through the peephole. Nicky wished Mrs. Furbish would hurry.

From inside 2-E came a slow, muffled noise. Squeak … squeak … squeak. That was Mrs. Furbish, hurrying. Nicky recognized the sound of her wheelchair, a battered wicker porch seat fitted with bicycle tires.

A bolt unlatched, a lock turned, a chain jangled, and the door opened. Mrs. Furbish half looked at Nicky with watery eyes and said, “What you want?”

“My mom sent down some food.”

Mrs. Furbish scrunched up her prune face.

“Might as well bring it in. Put the eats in the kitchen.”

The tiny apartment was dark in the rainy morning. A tired grandfather clock tick-tocked sharply. Nicky looked. The clock had no hands.

He pulled open the freezer. Mrs. Furbish scowled from her wheelchair in the doorway and said, “Jest put 'em on the table. I didn't say put 'em in the icebox. Now come and sit.”

Nicky took a seat on a purple velvet couch that smelled of sweet powder. Mrs. Furbish wheeled in. She stared at the floor. Nicky felt like he was in a coffin with a corpse. He listened to the rain against the windows. Cars hushed along the wet pavement of Summit Avenue. Nicky was unsure how to talk to any woman, other than Mom. He was at a real loss for words with a 112-year-old woman.

“How you like Titus?” Mrs. Furbish said, staring at the floor.

Nicky had no clue about the identity of Titus. So he said, “Oh, fine. I like him fine.”

“You don't know who I'm speaking of, do you?” She lifted a shaky finger, indicating beyond Nicky's shoulder. “I'm speaking of the bird, dummy.”

A large black-and-green parrot was perched atop the bookshelf, just a few feet away from Nicky. He had not noticed the ratty bird, which was perfectly still. This bird was as big as Nicky's arm. Its beak was cracked. Nicky was sure the bird was dead and stuffed, until he saw one eye slowly close and slowly open.

“That's Titus. Was my big brother's. Till he got took in the army and didn't come back. Say he fell at Gettysburg.”

Nicky stared at the bird. The bird did not look at him.

“Name of Jeb.”

“Hi, Jeb,” Nicky called to the bird.

“My brother 'twas Jeb, dummy. Bird's name is Titus. Titus used to talk. But he don't much no more. He over a hunnert twenty years old, so can't say as I blame him. He could whistle Dixie one time. Few bars, least.”

Nicky was impressed. He nervously chattered, “Wow. A hundred and twenty years old. Imagine. He lived through the Civil War. I wonder what that was like?”

Mrs. Furbish looked directly at Nicky. “What was that like?” she said. “That what you wanna know?” She looked straight into his face. Her expression softened. Her eyes cleared and sparkled blue. The old fortune-teller smiled and arched her scabby eyebrows.

“Civil War?” she said, “Boy, you'll find out.”

T
hree days later, on a beautiful May morning, Mr. McSwiggin conducted social studies class outside. Nicky thought this must be something Mr. McSwiggin picked up in college. Class outdoors. Nicky could not imagine a nun teacher from the good old days condoning such hippie-dippie nonsense.

So they sat on the hot, scratchy asphalt of the St. Peter's playground. Nicky had to admit, the sun felt good, and the air smelled fresher than in the classroom. By the first week of May, the classroom stank of old bag lunches percolating in the heat—ancient salami, sour milk, long-forgotten tuna, banana skins.

Mr. McSwiggin sat cross-legged and faced the class. Just like a hippie at a sit-in. The topic was the Vietnam War. It was hotter news than ever. American troops had jumped from Vietnam into Cambodia. This set off a frenzy of protests, riots, and demonstrations all over the country. There was extra-big trouble on college campuses.

During a protest over the weekend at a college in Ohio, four students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen. A photograph of one of the dead students, facedown, blood trickling from under the corpse, was splashed across the front page of the Sunday
Daily News
. After church Nicky stared at the black-and-white picture and thought, “Roy is safer in Vietnam than this guy was in Ohio.” But Nicky preferred to tune out this brand of disturbing development. He flipped over the
Daily News
and read about the Yankees versus the Senators.

And while Mr. McSwiggin conducted his outdoor discussion on the topic of the Vietnam War, Nicky concentrated on the puffy white clouds scudding by. Nicky thought one of them looked like Donald Duck. Nicky looked at the cloud and remembered that Donald Duck and his sputtery grouchiness always made him tense.

Meanwhile, his classmates said the usual.

“We have never lost a war, and I don't think we should lose one now.”

“We have no right to be there. It's a civil war.”

“If we don't stop them there, one thing will lead to another. I think it's better we fight the communists in Vietnam than having to fight them in California.”

“If a neighbor's house was on fire, and they asked you to help put it out, you'd help put out the fire, right?”

“Don't you people understand? We're the bad guys in this war.” This from Noreen Connolly, who wore a POW bracelet. The bracelets were all the rage that spring: silver-colored, each inscribed with the name of an actual prisoner of war.

Several boys in the class groaned when Noreen Connolly declared we were the bad guys.

Mr. McSwiggin jumped in. “For what it's worth, I happen to think Noreen has a point.” He mentioned the My Lai massacre. It had been revealed in the news that a few years back, American
troops had slaughtered an entire Vietnamese village of men, women, and children.

“Well, that's really bad,” said Vinnie Bonura.

Nicky thought about the Yankees, then about stickball, then very deeply about Becky Hubbard. She sat a few feet from him. Her legs were folded neatly beneath her, her plaid uniform skirt just so, her knees pure white in the sunshine. Becky Hubbard's eyes were lowered as she toyed with a lone dandelion that sprouted through a crack in the asphalt. Nicky noticed she had blond eyelashes. He watched Becky Hubbard's delicate fingers touch the dandelion petals. He wished he could marry Becky Hubbard on the spot. He imagined her dressed in lacy, frilly white, clutching a bridal bouquet of dandelions. He wondered what she looked like in shorts.

During lunchtime, Nicky picked a seat by himself. This was his custom. He had no real friends at this school. He had transferred to St. Peter's just the year before, after a boy was stabbed in the eye with a protractor at PS 19. After that, Mom and Dad agreed the public schools were unsafe, and somehow they scraped up the $100 tuition for parochial school. In his first year at St. Peter's, Nicky had buddied around with another transfer, a quiet kid named George. George had not returned to St. Peter's for seventh grade. Nicky didn't care, because George liked the Mets and Eugene McCarthy. George was definitely not best-friend material. Now Nicky didn't mix with the other kids, and that seemed to be fine with them. “A lone wolf,” Mom said, and Nicky liked that because it sounded way better than “a loser.”

Nicky ate lunch and eagerly returned to the daydream about Becky Hubbard. He gazed at the tooth marks in his salami sandwich and imagined what she might look like when she ran a brush along that yellow hair. He built an image of her blond eyelashes, her white knees. He wondered how she might appear at the beach.

The sound of a chair scraping made him look up.

Becky Hubbard stood at Nicky's table, balancing her hot lunch tray. Nicky took this as a gift from God. Becky Hubbard appeared before him, at the precise moment he pictured her in a yellow polka-dot bikini.

Becky Hubbard cased the room. The only empty seat in view was the one across from Nicky. Becky Hubbard set down her tray. She sat. She smoothed a paper napkin onto her lap. She dug a stainless-steel fork into the cafeteria meat loaf.

Becky Hubbard chewed and gazed with great boredom to the left.

She chewed and gazed with greater boredom to the right.

Nicky peeked at Becky Hubbard over his salami sandwich. He prayed those spearmint eyes would focus straight ahead, at him, just for an instant. He watched her pick at the cafeteria meat loaf and thought she was a portrait of shyness and daintiness and incredible beauty.

When Becky Hubbard reached for her milk carton, her eyes flickered briefly across Nicky's face.

Nicky was transformed. He forgot about everything. He gulped the hunk of salami in his mouth and said, “That was a real nice thing, having class outside.”

“What?” said Becky Hubbard. She speared a green bean and examined it.

“A real nice day,” Nicky said.

“What is this?” Becky Hubbard said, making a face at the oddly shaped green bean.

Nicky sweated. This was his longest conversation ever with a girl. A historic record breaker.

He said, “I noticed you like dandelions.”

“What?”

“They are weeds, you know.”

“Really,” Becky Hubbard said flatly.

Her eyes—such a color!—began to focus at something over his shoulder, on a point way across the cafeteria.

Nicky said, “That was an interesting discussion about the war today.”

“Yeah,” Becky Hubbard said. She looked into her meat loaf. “I really like Mr. McSwiggin.”

This was a sign, a warning, a flashing light—and Nicky didn't see it. She was one of Them. Becky Hubbard said she liked Mr. McSwiggin. Mr. McSwiggin, the hippie. Looking back, Nicky missed many signs. Becky Hubbard had worn a
STOP THE WAR
button on her winter coat. During the class photo, she was one of the girls who flashed the peace sign. Nicky should have known. Not one of Us. But he missed the warnings. He was over his head, bobbing in the warm waters of a real-life conversation with the great Becky Hubbard. Nicky drank in the spearmint eyes, the yellow hair, the tender lips. He felt his chest fill with something glorious, and he ceased thinking altogether.

Nicky tried to come up with a grand quotation, something big and dramatic, old movie stuff, profound words that would sweep
Becky Hubbard off her feet. All he could produce on short notice was, “My brother is over there, you know. In the war right now. We're quite proud of him.”

And Becky Hubbard fixed her spearmint eyes on him and said, “Oh, your brother is a baby killer. How nice. You must be proud. I wonder how many babies he killed today?”

After school, Mom took Nicky to Dr. Rosenbaum, the dentist. Nicky needed a molar pulled. It was that kind of day for Nicky.