Numbers Don't Lie (12 page)

“Gotta go,” said Studs. He gave me the secret Ditmas Playboy wave and disappeared through an
AUTHORIZED ONLY
door.

“Nice uniform,” said Candy, straightening her own. “And did you see that big gold medallion around his neck? Wasn't that a Nobel Prize?”

“A Nobel Prize for baggage? Not very likely.”

Our bags were already coming around the first turn. That seemed like a good sign. “How come there's a cell phone hidden underneath the carousel?” Candy asked, as we picked them up and headed for the door.

“Some special baggage handlers' trick, I guess,” I said.

How little, then, I knew!

 

* * *

 

Flying into New York is like dropping from the twentieth century back into the nineteenth. Everything is crowded, colorful, old—and slow. For example, it usually takes longer to get from LaGuardia to Brooklyn, than from Huntsville to LaGuardia.

Usually! On this, our Honeymoon trip, however, Candy and I made it in record time, getting to curbside for the #38 bus just as it was pulling in, and then catching the F train at Roosevelt Avenue just as the doors were closing. No waiting on the curb or the platform; it was hardly like being home! Of course, I wasn't complaining.

After a short walk from the subway, we found Aunt Minnie sitting on the steps of the little Ditmas Avenue row house she and Uncle Mort had bought for $7,500 fifty years ago, right after World War II, smoking a cigarette. She's the only person I know who still smokes Kents.

“You still go outside to smoke?” I asked.

“You know your Uncle Mort,” she said. When I was growing up, Aunt Minnie and Uncle Mort had been like second parents, living only a block and a half away. Since my parents had died, they had been my closest relatives. “Plus, it's written into the reverse mortgage—
NO SMOKING!
They have such rules!”

Born in the Old Country, unlike her little sister, my mother, Aunt Minnie still had the Lifthatvanian way of ending a statement with a sort of verbal shrug. She gave me one of her smokey kisses, and then asked, “So, what brings you back to New York?”

I was shocked. “You didn't get my letters? We're getting married.”

Aunt Minnie looked at Candy with new interest. “To an airline pilot?”

“This is Candy!” I said. “She's with the Huntsville Parks Department. You didn't get my messages?”

I helped Candy drag the suitcases inside, and while we had crackers and pickled
lifthat
at the oak table Uncle Mort had built years ago, in his basement workshop, I explained the past six months as best I could. “So you see, we're here on our Honeymoon, Aunt Minnie,” I said, and Candy blushed.

“First the Honeymoon and then the marriage?!?” Aunt Minnie rolled her eyes toward the mantel over the gas fireplace, where Uncle Mort's ashes were kept. He, at least, seemed unsurprised. The ornate decorative eye on the urn all but winked.

“It's the only way we could manage it,” I said. “The caterer couldn't promise the ice sculpture until Thursday, but Candy had to take her days earlier or lose them. Plus, my best man is in South America, or Central America, I forget which, and won't get back until Wednesday.”

“Imagine that, Mort,” Aunt Minnie said, looking toward the mantel again. “Little Irving is getting married. And he didn't even invite us!”

“Aunt Minnie! You're coming to the wedding. Here's your airline ticket.” I slid it across the table toward her and she looked at it with alarm.

“That's a pretty cheap fare.”

“PreOwned Air,” I said. She looked blank, so I sang the jingle,
“Our planes are old, but you pocket the gold.”

“You've seen the ads,” Candy offered.

“We never watch TV, honey,” Aunt Minnie said, patting her hand. “You want us to go to Mississippi? Tonight?”

“Alabama,” I said. “And it's not until Wednesday. We have to stay over a Tuesday night to get the midweek nonstop supersaver roundtrip pricebuster Honeymoon plus-one fare. The wedding is on Thursday, at noon. That gives us tomorrow to see the sights in New York, which means we should get to bed. Aunt Minnie, didn't you read my letters?”

She pointed toward a stack of unopened mail on the mantel, next to the urn that held Uncle Mort's ashes. “Not really,” she said. “Since your Uncle Mort passed on, I have sort of given it up. He made letter openers, you remember?”

Of course I remembered. At my Bar Mitzvah Uncle Mort gave me a letter opener (which irritated my parents, since it was identical to the one they had gotten as a wedding present). He gave me another one for high school graduation. Ditto City College. Uncle Mort encouraged me to go to law school, and gave me a letter opener for graduation. I still have them all, good as new. In fact, they have never been used. It's not like you need a special tool to get an envelope open.

“Aunt Minnie,” I said, “I wrote, and when you didn't write back, I called, several times. But you never picked up.”

“I must have been out front smoking a cigarette,” she said. “You know how your Uncle Mort is about second-hand smoke.”

“You could get an answering machine,” Candy offered.

“I have one,” Aunt Minnie said. “Mort bought it for me at Forty-Seventh Street Photo, right before they went out of business.” She pointed to the end table, and sure enough, there was a little black box next to the phone. The red light was blinking.

“You have messages,” I said. “See the blinking red light? That's probably me.”

“Messages?” she said. “Nobody told me anything about messages. It's an answering machine. I figure it answers the phone, so what's the point in me getting involved?”

“But what if somebody wants to talk to you?” I protested.

She spread her hands; she speaks English but gestures in Lifthatvanian. “Who'd want to talk to a lonely old woman?”

While Aunt Minnie took Candy upstairs and showed her our bedroom, I checked the machine. There were eleven messages, all from me, all telling Aunt Minnie we were coming to New York for our Honeymoon, and bringing her back to Alabama with us for the wedding, and asking her, please, to return my call.

I erased them.

 

* * *

 

Aunt Minnie's guest room was in the back of the house, and from the window I could see the narrow yards where I had played as a kid. It was like looking back on your life from middle age (almost, anyway), and seeing it literally. There were the fences I had climbed, the grapevines I had robbed, the corners I had hidden in. There, two doors down, was Studs's back yard, with the big maple tree. The tree house we had built was still there. I could even see a weird blue light through the cracks. Was someone living in it?

After we unpacked, I took Candy for a walk and showed her the old neighborhood. It looked about the same, but the people were different. The Irish and Italian families had been replaced by Filipinos and Mexicans. Studs's parents' house, two doors down from Aunt Minnie's, was dark except for a light in the basement—and the blue light in the tree house out back. My parents' house, a block and a half away on East Fourth, was now a rooming house for Bangladeshi cab drivers. The apartments on Ocean Parkway were filled with Russians.

When we got back to the house, Aunt Minnie was on the porch, smoking a Kent. “See how the old neighborhood has gone to pot?” she said. “All these foreigners!”

“Aunt Minnie!” I said, shocked. “You were a foreigner, too, remember? So was Uncle Mort.”

“That's different.”

“How?”

“Never you mind.”

I decided to change the subject. “Guess who I saw at the airport yesterday? Studs Blitz, from down the block, remember?”

“You mean young Arthur,” said Aunt Minnie. “He still lives at home. His father died a couple of years ago. His mother, Mavis, takes in boarders. Foreigners. Thank God your Uncle Mort's benefits spared me that.”

She patted the urn and the cat's eye glowed benevolently.

That night, Candy and I began our Honeymoon by holding hands across the gap between our separate beds. Candy wanted to wait until tomorrow night, after we had “done the tourist thing” to “go all the way.” Plus, she was still nervous from the flight.

I didn't mind. It was exciting and romantic. Sort of.

“Your Aunt Minnie is sweet,” Candy said, right before we dropped off to sleep. “But can I ask one question?”

“Shoot.”

“How can ashes object to smoke?”

 

* * *

 

Our return tickets were for Wednesday. That meant we had one full Honeymoon day, Tuesday, to see the sights of New York, most of which (all of which, truth be told) are in Manhattan. Candy and I got up early and caught the F train at Ditmas. It came right away. We got off at the next-to-last stop in Manhattan, Fifth Avenue, and walked uptown past St. Patrick's and Tiffany's and Disney and the Trump Tower; all the way to Central Park and the Plaza, that magnet for Honeymooners. When we saw all the people on the front step, we thought there had been a fire. But they were just smoking; it was just like Brooklyn.

We strolled through the lobby, peering humbly into the Palm Court and the Oak Room, then started back downtown, still holding hands. Candy was the prettiest girl on Fifth Avenue (one of the few in uniform), and I loved watching her watch my big town rush by. New York! Next stop, Rockefeller Center. We joined the crowd overlooking the skaters, secretly waiting for someone to fall; it's like NASCAR without the noise. Candy was eyeing the line at Nelson's On the Rink, where waiters on Rollerblades serve cappuccinos and lattes. It's strictly a tourist joint; New Yorkers don't go for standing in line and particularly not for coffee. But when I saw how fast the line was moving, I figured, what the Hell. We were seated right away and served right away, and the expense (we are talking four-dollar croissants here) was well worth it.

“What now?” asked Candy, her little rosebud smile deliciously flaked with pastry. I couldn't imagine anyone I would rather Honeymoon with.

“The Empire State Building, of course.”

Candy grimaced. “I'm afraid of heights. Besides, don't they shoot people up there?”

“We're not going to the top, silly,” I said. “That's a tourist thing.” Taking her by the hand, I took her on my own personal Empire State Building Tour, which involves circling it and seeing it above and behind and through and between the other midtown buildings; catching it unawares, as it were. We started outside Lord & Taylor on Fifth, then cut west on Fortieth alongside Bryant Park for the sudden glimpse through the rear of a narrow parking lot next to American Standard; then started down Sixth, enjoying the angle from Herald Square (and detouring through Macy's to ride the wooden-treaded escalators). Then we worked back west through “little Korea,” catching two dramatic views up open airshafts and one across a steep sequence of fire escapes. Standing alone, the Empire State Building looks stupid, like an oversized toy or a prop for a Superman action figure. But in its
milieu
it is majestic, like an Everest tantalizingly appearing and disappearing behind the ranges. We circled the great
massif
in a tightening spiral for almost an hour, winding up (so to speak) on Fifth Avenue again, under the big art deco façade. The curb was crowded with tourists standing in line to buy T-shirts and board buses. The T-shirt vendors were looking gloomy, since the buses were coming right away and there was no waiting.

I had saved the best view for last. It's from the middle of Fifth Avenue, looking straight up. You have to time it just right with the stoplights, of course. Candy and I were about to step off the curb, hand in hand, when a messenger in yellow-and-black tights (one of our city's colorful jesters), who was straddling his bike beside a rack of payphones on the corner of Thirty-Third, hailed me.

“Yo!”

I stopped. That's how long I'd been in Alabama.

“Your name Irv?”

I nodded. That's how long I'd been in Alabama.

He handed me the phone with a sort of a wink and a sort of a shrug, and was off on his bike before I could hand it back (which was my first instinct).

I put the phone to my ear. Rather cautiously, as you might imagine. “Hello?”

“Irv? Finally!”

“Wu?!?” Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu, my best man. Wu studied physics at Bronx Science, pastry in Paris, math at Princeton, herbs in Taiwan, law at Harvard (or was it Yale?), and caravans at a Gobi caravansary. Did I mention he's Chinese-American, can tune a twelve string guitar in under a minute with a logarithmic calculator, and is over six feet tall? I met him when we worked at Legal Aid, drove Volvos, and went to the Moon; but that's another story. Then he went to Hawaii and found the Edge of the Universe, yet another story still. Now he was working as a meteorological entomologist, whatever that was, in the jungles of Quetzalcan.

Wherever that was.

“Who'd you expect?” Wu asked. “I'm glad you finally picked up. Your Aunt Minnie told me you and Candy were in midtown doing the tourist thing.”

“We're on our Honeymoon.”

“Oh no! Don't tell me I missed the wedding!”

“Of course not,” I said. “We had to take the Honeymoon first so Candy could get the personal time. How'd you persuade Aunt Minnie to answer the phone? Or me, for that matter? Are you in Huntsville already?”

“That's the problem, Irv. I'm still in Quetzalcan. The rain forest, or to be more precise, the cloud forest; the canopy, in fact. Camp Canopy, we call it.”

“But the wedding is Thursday! You're the best man, Wu! I've already rented your tux. It's waiting for you at Five Points Formal Wear.”

“I know all that,” said Wu. “But I'm having a problem getting away. That's why I called, to see if you can put the wedding off for a week.”