Seventh Avenue (32 page)

He nodded and his knees sagged as he kissed her.

“What a color you are. Terry shouldn’t’ve let you sleep in the sun on your first day. Now where would you like to go for dinner?” Fredericks asked him as they marched up the lawn. There was a fine smell of suntan oil on his wet face, and his back felt less tender. “We can go to Boca Raton or Hollywood Beach and then on to the Colonial to try our luck.”

“Whatever you say, Doug.”

“Well, you need a tux for Boca and I guess you didn’t bring one.”

“No, I forgot. You mentioned it, but I was so anxious to get away . . .”

“Then Hollywood. We’ll have a drink downstairs at seven and then go on.”

Just as Fredericks turned to go, Jay reached out and touched him affectionately on the shoulder.

“Doug, I can’t ever repay you for what you’re doing.”

“Don’t be silly. I’ve got big plans for the two of us.”

“You’re my good-luck piece.”

“You’ve done it yourself. You’re the sharpest young man I’ve met in a lifetime of sharp young men.”

“I just want you to know that I don’t take things for granted and I’m grateful.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just you straighten yourself out with Rhoda, and you’ll fly.”

Jay shook his head reflectively and went to his room where a bath and a bottle of Chivas Regal with ice cubes awaited him. He had a sudden sense of disaster, and he shivered uncontrollably. “Too much sun,” he said to himself.

Miami moons have a color that varies between apricot and ochre, and Jay, dressed in a navy blue mohair suit, his skin a composite of heat flushes and suntan, stood on the balcony with an iced highball in his hand, surveying one of them and considered himself to be the luckiest man on God’s earth. Terry crept up on him and tapped him on the shoulder. She wore a white lace dress with a low-cut bodice.

“Caught you, didn’t I? Thinking about another woman.”

“About you.”

“I haven’t put any lipstick on, so you can kiss me.”

He felt a girding in his loins and his body became as hard as a rock. He kissed her neck and then her mouth.

“Like my dress?”

“Gorgeous.”

“I wore it for the junior prom at Harvard last spring. This year, you’re going to be my escort at our senior dance.”

Jay could not imagine himself at a college prom. It was not simply a world apart, a world he had heard whispered about, but never been a part of - it was a world he was totally ignorant of. Harvard, Yale, Radcliffe were names that suggested nothing to him. He had not even seen them on a road map.

“Have you been to Boston?”

“No, never had any reason to.”

“You’ve got one now. God, I can’t wait to have you meet my friends.”

Jay gave an embarrassed cough.

“You’re scared.”

“It’s twenty years too late for me. I’m what people call a
mocky.”

“What’s that?”

“A Jewish refugee and not a nice one.”

“You don’t talk or act like one. You haven’t got an accent.”

“The inner man has an accent. The outside one might pass for a native born.”

“You act like you’ve got a repressed inferiority complex.”

“If I knew what you meant . . .”

“Other people aren’t better than you.”

“I have no education.”

“That’s not important.”

“To some people . . .”

“Who?” she protested. “I’ll knock their heads off.”

“You sound like me. I’m me because I don’t know any better . . . that’s why I behave like a roughneck. The first few years I was here I thought my name was Jew Bastard or
Kike,
or
Yid.
I know different now, and I don’t mind if people talk behind my back because
I
can buy and sell most of them a hundred times over. I always wanted to tell the world to drop dead. Now that I can, I don’t bother. You’re not Jewish, so you wouldn’t understand.”

“Is your wife a Jewess?”

“Yeah. Is that what educated people call Jewish women?”

“It’s like poet . . . poetess. What do you call us?”

“‘Shiksa’ There’s a saying about
shiksa’s:
use ‘em, abuse ‘em, and lose ‘em.”

“I’ll remember that when you try to get rid of me. Will you divorce your wife?”

“I’ll divorce her, she’ll divorce me. What’s the difference, so long as I can get the kid?” He studied her reaction, but she concealed her surprise under a smile. “He’s my life. I love that kid . . . and now you.”

“Let’s have about six children of our own.”

“He’s my own.”

“Of course he is. And I know I’ll love him.”

“You better.” He made a fist and tapped her on the nose then kissed the tip of it. “I wonder what your father’ll say.”

“He’s fond of you.”

“Not as a son-in-law.”

“Are you going to say anything?”

“Let’s play it by ear for a while.”

“A schoolgirl’s dream.” She stood on her toes and kissed him on the mouth.

Hollywood Beach was a half-hour drive from Indian Creek, and on the drive Jay got an idea of the enormous potential latent in Miami. It was already a large holiday resort with luxury hotels, the usual paraphernalia of all-night drugstores, gambling, a string of nightclubs that permeated the downtown proper and the beach itself. The proper contained the guts of the city’s businesses, the sleazy hotels and motels and the Negro section. Jay set his heart on the beach, and he hoped Douglas would let him in on his plans soon. As they drove, he had an image of Rhoda sitting on the maroon davenport, her stockinged feet extended on the ottoman, smoking endless cigarettes and staring bleary-eyed at the ceiling: trapped in a haze of lost, purposeless existence. He saw the melancholy droop of her mouth, and the rolls of fat around her stomach and neck, and he wondered if she took the pills to lose weight, or put on weight in order to take the pills. Their life together was an endless cycle of boredom and petty quarrels conducted in a vacuum; a world without a common denominator, a deadening, empty world, which had never been alive. His hand brushed lightly against Terry’s leg when they got out of the car, and his body throbbed with excitement.

He had waited a long time, a lifetime, for the sensation.

Jay had never worried about separating from people. With the exception of Neal and a wistfully tangential emotion he harbored for his mother the idea of
missing
a human being had about as much meaning and relevance in his life as the fact that planets moved in elliptical paths around the earth: an abstraction. But during the taxi ride from La Guardia Airport to Brooklyn on a leaden sunless afternoon he began to miss Terry and he felt about the separation the way he would about a glandular malfunction or the loss of an extremity. In the space of a week, the concentric movement of his emotional existence had altered its course, and now it revolved around her. She had given herself to him as no one else had, with a generosity of spirit and a consuming passion that reawoke the dormant fires in his heart. He couldn’t believe that he deserved her, or deserved to be happy. He had caused too much strife, torn into too many lives, almost destroyed his child, and now the possibility of his own happiness would wreck two more lives. He remembered his mother once telling him when he was very young that his father got pleasure only from other people’s misery. Had he
become
his father?

Only Maggie and Neal were at home when he arrived late in the dying, gray afternoon. He learned that Rhoda had gone up to Peekskill to see Myrna and would be returning the next day. He had a sudden flash of a rainy evening years ago, and of the sound of clarinet music interweaving itself in a nightmare. Myrna had been out of her mind, teetering on a dangerous ledge long before then. He hadn’t pushed her: she had fallen by herself. The prospect of Rhoda hearing Myrna’s account on that evening frightened him.

“
She’s gone to Peekskill you say?”

“Yeah. She left day before yesterday. They called her from the hospital, ‘cause her sister’s gittin’ worst.” Maggie, neat in her white apron, stood before Jay, her face a mandolin of creases. “You like somethin’?”

“Just a drink.” He removed his shoes and stretched out on the sofa. The doorbell rang for what seemed to be hours, then abruptly stopped, and Neal rushed like a whirlwind into the apartment.

Neal threw himself on top of Jay. “Ray, hooray. You’re home. Oh, Daddy, I missed you so much. A million times,” Neal shouted. He dropped his briefcase and his coat on the floor.

“You know Mommy doesn’t like you to make a mess in the living room. Now put your things away.”

Neal took his father’s hand and said:

“Come with me to my room, Daddy.”

Jay passed the kitchen where Maggie was emptying the ice tray and asked her to bring his drink to Neal’s room.

“You be home for dinner?”

“Please stay with me, Daddy.”

“Okay, you made a sale.”

“Southern fried chicken, please, please, please.”

“You’re not s’posed to eat fried things, Neal.”

“Just tonight.”

“Broiled,” Jay said. “You don’t want to be up with another attack, do you?”

Jay picked up his suitcase in the hallway and carried it into Neal’s room. Neal excitedly opened it and fished around under the shirts and suits.

“You bought me something!”

There was a box of candied oranges, packed in a miniature crate, a polo shirt that said “Miami Beach,” a penknife that he had bought in the Seminole Indian village after he and Terry had seen alligator-wrestling, and a baby coconut. Neal examined his possessions carefully and kissed Jay.

“You’re the best Daddy in the world. Oh, I love you so much.”

“Would you like to live with me, Neal?” Jay asked, putting out a feeler.

Neal’s brow ruckled in some perplexity.

“But I do. I always want to live with you, because you’re wonderful.”

“What I have to tell you is very hard to tell.” He took a long pull from his drink to bolster his courage.

“I’m not afraid.”

“You’re a little man, aren’t you? Very brave, and you know that Daddy loves you more than anything else in the world.”

“Sure.” Neal looked worried suddenly, his eyes brooding over the suggestion of bravery. He could not imagine what would be expected of him to prove this, and he shrank back and sat on his window box. In the last light he
resembled
a little angel, a doomed, dark angel.

“You’re Daddy’s best boy, and we’re really pals. The best pals.”

“Yes,” Neal said tentatively.

“Always will be, no matter what happens.”

“Happens? Daddy, you’re not going to die?”

“No, don’t be silly.”

“Is somebody going to die?”

“No, what made you think of that?”

Neil dropped the coconut carelessly, and his eyes shifted uneasily on the floor.

“I’m afraid, Daddy. Honest, it won’t hurt?”

Jay drained his glass and shouted for Maggie to bring him another drink.

“It might, just a little.”

Neal put his hands on his ears, and Jay pulled his arms down.

“You’re a man, aren’t you?” he asked with severity.

“No, I’m not. I’m only a little boy. Please don’t let it hurt, please Daddy. I’ll be very good, I promise. I didn’t mean to break the trains. They fell out of the closet. Maggie said it wasn’t my fault.”

“Why didn’t you ask Maggie to get them for you?”

Neal smirked with relief; it wasn’t as serious as he had feared.

“I will next time.”

He jumped off his window box and flew around the room like an airplane out of control and landed in Jay’s arms.

“I want to be a flyer when I grow up.”

“Wouldn’t you like to go into Daddy’s business?”

“Ummmm, no. I can’t make dresses for ladies.”

“But Daddy has other businesses too. He’s going to start a new one in Florida.”

“You are? What kind?”

“Property.”

“What’s property?”

“Well, it’s almost like when we play Monopoly. I try to buy a street to build hotels on, and if you land on me, you have to pay.”

“
That’s fun.”

Maggie brought in a tray with a whiskey decanter, ice, and a glass of milk for Neal, sweetened with honey. He and Jay chinked glasses and Jay said: “Here’s looking at you.” Neal stripped off his sweater and put on the new polo shirt. He strutted around the room proudly, throwing his chest out.

“Will you take me to Florida next time? So I can get brown and go swimming?”

“Sure I will. I’m thinking of living in Florida . . . part of the year, anyhow.”

Neal stopped in midsentence and pondered, attempting to fit this new fact into the present scheme of their lives. His sense of uneasiness returned. He had worried about his father’s absence during the past week, and had had an awful dream in which his father had died. The prospect of life without Jay was too terrible for him to contemplate. His mother had mooned about for several days, then gone to the aunt he had never met who was in the hospital. He smelled something peculiar in the air: unrest. From the time that he could first remember, his parents had argued viciously; it seemed to him that his mother spent all of her time crying. He wasn’t certain whether she loved Jay, for she always said terrible things about him, things he was afraid to repeat, fearing confirmation or a denial that would result in yet another quarrel. He hated the quarrels, the angry voices, the tears. His asthma always got worse after they had an argument. Occasionally the attacks became so severe that he thought he would choke to death, and Dr. Rosen would be called in the middle of the night to give him an injection. None of his friends’ parents shouted the way his did, and he preferred to spend whatever free time he had in their homes, even though his was nicer and had more things. Bea Zimmerman and her husband didn’t argue. Why did his parents?

“Neal, you’re dreaming. I’m trying to explain something to you.”

“Why did Mommy go to Aunt Myrna if she knew you were coming home?”

“A good question. Maybe it was because she knew I’d be home.”

“
Daddy, don’t you like Mommy?”

“
I like her but I don’t love her.”

“Daddies only love children?” he asked in puzzlement. There was something enigmatic about all this, and he had to find out how these things worked.

“
They love mommies too. It’s just that I don’t love yours.”

Neal suddenly felt very sorry for Rhoda because his father’s love was the most powerful security anyone could have. He wondered what his mother had done to lose his love and concluded it must have been something uniquely evil.

“
Won’t you forgive her, the way you do me?”

“
There’s nothing to forgive, Neal.”

“
You love me?”

“
More than anything!”

“Then give Mommy a little bit of the love you have for me. I won’t mind, honest I won’t, if you take some of mine away.”

“It doesn’t work that way. You only love people because you want to, not because they ask you for it.”

“
I don’t understand.”

“When you’re older . . . What I’m trying to say, Neal,” he said in a voice that was uncontrollably exasperated, “is that I may have to go away.”

“
To Florida?”

“
No, here in New York. Find another apartment to live in.”

Neal threw his arms out desperately.

“Why? We all have a lot of room here. Maggie could get out.”

“Oh, God.” Jay sighed and poured himself another drink. “No, it’s not a question of needing more room. I’m going to live with somebody else.”

Neal began to cry. He stretched his mind to receive all that Jay had told him, but he could not grasp the meaning - only the significance of life without his father, and he was paralyzed with fear and an incandescent grief that lit his face like a candle. He grabbed Jay’s sleeve and pulled him.

“
I won’t let you go. You can’t leave me.”

Jay made the child release his sleeve and sat down at the edge of his bed. A cowboy with a lasso in his hand was painted on the wooden headboard.

“
When you’re older . . .”

“
I’ll die before I get older if you go.”

“You’ll thank me for telling you - man-to-man - when you’re a big boy.”

“
Daddy, please tell me why you’re going?”

“
Because I love somebody else. Another woman.”

The room started to revolve. Neal sank to his knees and squatted in the middle of the carpet. He had never seen his dresser move so rapidly, and he watched it spin. His father’s head seemed to recede into the background and his body drifted up in smoke into the ceiling.

“It’s spinning,” he shrieked, “stop it, stop it. Help! I’m falling.” He rolled over and over on the floor, and Jay got up quickly to prevent him from banging into the bed. Jay held him by the shoulders and shook him. “The curtains, aach, they’re going to eat me.”

Jay looked at the lions and tigers colorfully printed on the light yellow curtains and propped Neal on his lap.

“No, they’re not real. You were never afraid of them.”

“Oooh, Daddy, I’m afraid, I’m cold . . . My head hurts; I have to go to the toilet, please.” He began to gasp for breath, and Jay held him tighter.

“It’s all right, don’t be afraid. You’re all right.”

“You don’t love me. You told lies. You lied to me. You don’t.”

“No, I haven’t. I’ve told you the truth. I’ll always love you more than anything.”

“Then don’t go, please, please, please. Daddy, don’t leave me alone.”

“Neal, you don’t understand. I’ll see you all the time. It’s just that it’s time for me to leave Mommy.”

“But none of the other Daddies are going, are they?”

“Some do, some don’t. You’ll come and stay with me, and we’ll go out as much as you like. Baseball games, Coney Island, Florida.”

Neal stopped crying, but his face was streaked with tears, and the promises that Jay had made did not have the desired effect on him. Jay leaned over to kiss him, and he pulled away, knocking the drink tray over.

“You don’t love me,” Neal said. “You love the other lady. I hate her, and I hate you.”

“Oh, Neal, you’ve got it the wrong way around. If I love her that doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It only means that instead of Mommy I love her. But whatever I feel for you stays the same. It never changes, I swear.”

“What’ll I tell the other kids when you go, and they ask me where you are?”

“We’ll think of something.”

“Tell them a lie?”

“
Not exactly.”

“
Daddy, why do you have to go?”

“
I just explained why.”

“Does the lady have little children that you’ll love more than me?”

“
No, she has no children.”

“
Why do you have to go?”

“
Stop asking me the same question over, will you!”

“
I don’t understand.”