The Christmas Kid (15 page)

THE HADDAMS WERE SYRIANS
and they ran a small grocery store on the corner of Eddie Leonard’s block. It was not unusual to be a Syrian in that neighborhood in Brooklyn; there were Syrians at Holy Virgin School, and Syrians running other shops. Most of them were Catholics, and many of them had moved to the neighborhood after the war, when Little Syria in Lower Manhattan had been cleared to make way for the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel. But some, like the Haddams, had come directly from Syria.

To Eddie Leonard and his friends, Syria was itself a mysterious place; they knew that if you went to Ireland and Italy and kept going east, you’d find it. But it was not clearly defined on the old roll-down prewar maps. It was like Lithuania, where Eddie Waivada came from. A lost country. Atlantis.

Eddie Leonard always felt this mystery when he went  into the Haddams’ dark, cramped store. The father was a gray, bony man, with desolate eyes; he spoke in his own language to his small, gray wife, and sometimes in another language, which Eddie Leonard later realized was French. Mr. Haddam’s weariness infected his older daughter, a thin, pale young woman named Victoria. She had a large nose, large hands and feet, and seemed always to be chewing the inside of her mouth.

Dotty Haddam was her opposite, and when Eddie Leonard was fourteen, she started making him feel strange. She was two years younger and a foot shorter than Victoria, with clean straight features, hard white teeth, small hands, and the blackest hair Eddie Leonard had even seen. She rode a bicycle everywhere, pedaling furiously on a shiny blue Schwinn, and as a result, she had legs like a man’s legs: hard and defined, with a ball of muscle at the calf. Those legs added to Eddie Leonard’s uneasiness when she waited on him diffidently in the store. She was a year behind him at Holy Virgin School, but she seemed much older.

Through the winter of his first year in high school, Eddie Leonard didn’t see much of Dotty Haddam. He was trying to translate Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
into English and deal with the baffling abstractions of algebra. From time to time, he saw her moving through the snow, bundled up against the cold, head down, legs encased in boots. He saw her in the back of the store, watching a small black-and-white television set, or studying for school. But he didn’t truly see her again until spring, when the stirring of the earth in the park and the broadcast of the Dodger games from Florida combined to tell him that the winter was over. Suddenly Dotty Haddam was back on her bicycle, taller now, her breasts fuller, her black hair longer. She smiled at him when he came into the store, and then he met her at a party in Betty Kayata’s house, and asked her to go to a movie, and she said yes, and after that they were inseparable.

Across the thick, ripe summer, he explained Latin to her; warned her about algebra; taught her some Irish songs. She told him she wanted to be a poet, although her father objected; she showed him her poems, shyly at first, then with greater confidence. She had discovered Keats and Byron, and made him read them out loud to her in Prospect Park. She showed him where Syria was, too, pointing to maps that showed Damascus and Beirut. She had a postcard from her cousin Frankie, who lived in Beirut; it showed a lovely city on green hills, spread in a semicircle, facing the sea. Eddie Leonard pointed out that the map called the place Lebanon. She said it was really all Syria. Her father said so. The French had decided the borders, but it was all really Syria, although her father said that Damascus was an ugly city.

That summer, the war broke out in Korea, but they didn’t talk about the war; it was in a remote place; it had nothing to do with them. But they were aware that the world was changing around them. People were locking doors that had never before been locked. A boy from 17th Street was found dead in the park, and for the first time Eddie Leonard heard the word “overdose.” The word “they” began to appear in the common narrative of the neighborhood. “I hear they stuck up Barney Quigley’s last night.” Or: “They stabbed a kid outside the Y this afternoon.” Or: “They robbed the Greek’s.” Another new word was “heroin.”

Late in August, after a Saturday night movie, Eddie Leonard and Dotty Haddam climbed the hill above the Swan Lake in Prospect Park, and when they came down, they were no longer virgins. The rest of the summer was a blur; joy, fear, and amazement were combined with a sense of intimate conspiracy and, of course, the heart-stopping knowledge of sin. Moving among the others, on the beach at Coney or at the dances in the park, they felt special, certain of their shared love and damnation, guarding their dark secret.

But as the nights became chilly, Eddie Leonard started to dread the coming of winter. In that neighborhood in those years, no young people had cars or apartments or the price of a hotel room. They had the park and the beach. Nothing else. Eddie began to talk to Dotty Haddam about running away to Florida, about how amazing it must be to sleep between sheets in a bed, and wake up together in the morning. She resisted, retreated into silence, or told him that such ideas were foolish. They were too young. They would end up in jail.

And then one night, such talk became academic. Eddie Leonard and Dotty Haddam went to their hill. They murmured, kissed, collapsed on the grass. And then from the shadows, screaming in his language and flailing at them both with a broom handle, came Mr. Haddam. His eyes were wide with anger, and when he tried to strike his daughter with the broom handle, Eddie Leonard stepped in and knocked him down. That was the end of it. Two days later, Dotty Haddam was taken from the neighborhood to live with an aunt in New Jersey. Eddie Leonard never went into the store again.

He heard from her while he was in the army in Germany. The letter was brief, almost businesslike, and it told him that she was marrying a Syrian guy whose family came from Beirut. But she thought of Eddie often and would always remember him. When he looked at the date, he realized she was already married, and he crumpled the letter, threw it in a corner, and went into Wiesbaden to get drunk.

Then, one hot afternoon in the summer of 1969, he ran into her on 57th Street. She called his name, and for a moment he stood looking blankly at this short, heavyset woman, until she said: “Eddie, it’s me. Dorothy…” He embraced her and they went into a coffee shop next to Carnegie Hall, and told each other how their lives had turned out. Eddie was a lawyer now, divorced, with two sons, living alone on the East Side; Dotty had three daughters, one of them a junior in high school. Her mother was dead, her father had gone home to Beirut with her sister. Dotty’s husband ran a large grocery store in Washington Heights and they lived in New Jersey. She said all of this in a cool way, as if reciting a résumé. Then Eddie asked her if she loved her husband.

She smiled, and glanced into the crowded street.

“Love is for children,” she said. And then looked at him frankly and added: “Maybe you get one good summer. If you’re lucky.”

They went to his apartment and made love, in a sad, grieving way, for the first time together in bed. And when they were finished, she began to cry uncontrollably, saying that they must never ever do this again. It was wrong. She was married. She had children. It was a sin. She’d never done this before, and would never do it again. She was back the following Thursday afternoon, dressed more elegantly, more carefully made up; and the Thursday after that; and every Thursday that summer. She lost weight. She wrote poems for him again. He gave her, with a laugh, a copy of Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
. And they lived again the tangled emotions of that old summer. It ended again in the fall.

“He knows,” she said that final Thursday. “He doesn’t know who it is, but he knows. And he’ll find us. I don’t want that. For me, or you, or my daughters. Or for him. I hope you understand that.”

And that was that. Until five years later. Sitting over coffee one morning with the
Daily News,
he saw her picture, her face contorted in anger and protest. She was standing outside a grocery store, a cop beside her. The story explained that her husband had been shot dead in a holdup. Two nights later, Eddie Leonard went to the wake. The room was packed with wailing mourners, and Eddie Leonard found Dotty in the front row of folding chairs. She was all in black, her face covered with a veil. He uttered the conventional words of sorrow and asked her about her plans.

“I’m taking him home,” she said, staring through the veil at the coffin. “To Beirut. And all of us are going with him. It’s finished here. Killers everywhere. Junkies. Murderers. We’ll sell the store and the house. And just go away. Away from killers. Away. Away.” She paused. “Goddamn New York.”

A week later, she sailed for Beirut. The following year, the civil war began, and in the evenings, watching the terrible films on the news, Eddie Leonard would remember summer evenings in the placid hills of Brooklyn, when he and Dotty Haddam were young. He never heard from her again.

THAT SUMMER, GERRY GROGAN
was the greatest dancer among the neighborhood girls who shared our summer evenings. She was not conventionally beautiful: her nose was too violently sharp, her chin prominent, her legs too short. But none of that mattered. Geraldine Grogan was smart, bawdy, and fierce with energy. When she danced her intricately executed Lindys or hard-driving mambos, you couldn’t look at another girl.

On those summer evenings, we assembled early at the foot of the two giant stone columns that guarded the entrance to Prospect Park. Someone long ago had dubbed those columns “the totem poles” or “the totes,” and “the totes” were our clubhouse. One Friday night in August, the usual crowd had assembled to drink some Rheingold, listen to a portable radio, and discuss the destinations of the night. This was not always simple: we made decisions as some loose collective; a casual suggestion was made, debated, rejected, or embraced. Should we go to the Caton Inn or Diron’s? Moriarty’s or “over New York”? And, most important, what about Saturday? Coney Island? Or somewhere else?

Duke was there that night, along with Vito and Betty Gahan and Jackie Mack and the others. Gerry Grogan was with her boyfriend, a tall, red-headed Swede named Harry Hansen, from Bay Ridge. She’d met him dancing somewhere, and they were an unusual couple: she was vivacious, a talker, a beer drinker; he was tall, quiet, even morose, a ginger ale drinker among the barbarians. Vito nicknamed them the Mutt and Jeff Bandit Team, because the newspapers in those days were full of such partnerships, and we all forgave Hansen his dour silences because Gerry Grogan was so full of life.

“Let’s go out Sunset tomorrow,” Duke said. “I ain’t been out there all summer.”

“Sunset Pool?” Vito said. “You know, I almost forgot the place was there.”

Duke said, “I like that sixteen-foot diving board. The girls’ bathing suits come off when they hit the water.”

Betty Gahan said, “You’re disgusting, Duke.”

“What was disgusting? The water? What?”

Gerry Grogan giggled, and Hansen gave her a look. Someone said the pool at Red Hook was better, and someone else said they’d rather be at Ocean Tide in Coney and eat sandwiches at Mary’s. But the argument over Sunset Pool and Red Hook went on for a while.

“They both stink,” Gerry Grogan said. “You gotta go in that locker room and take off all your clothes and—”

“I’ll go with you, Gerry,” Duke said.

“And then they have that key on that gray elastic band, with who knows what kind of diseases in it, and there’s too many people and all those jerks from down the Hill, they’re always throwing you in the water. Nah…”

Betty Gahan said, “He just wants to watch bathing suits come off, the slob.”

“I just want to see some new faces,” Duke said. “Every week it’s the same old faces.”

“You could get polio at Sunset Park, Duke,” Gerry Grogan said. “It spreads in the water. Even Roosevelt got it swimming.”

“In Sunset Pool?” Duke shouted.

Gerry punched Duke on the arm, and he backed away, laughing, and she said, “Duke, you get it in swimming pools. From all the degenerates like you that go there and swim.”

Then Hansen said, “You worry too much, Gerry. You always think something’s going to go wrong.”

She looked at him and laughed. “It usually does.”

Then Betty Gahan said, “Well, let’s talk about it down at the Caton.”

That’s how we decided to go to the Caton Inn. There were about fifteen of us, crowded together in the cigarette smoke at the far end of the horseshoe bar. We started a dollar pool. Everybody drank beer, except Harry Hansen. On TV, Joe Miceli was boxing a muscle-bound black guy while Don Dunphy sold Gillette Blue Blades. Tony Bennett was singing “I Won’t Cry Anymore” on the jukebox, and the place was filling up. That summer I was in love with a girl who didn’t love me back, so I was alone, and this made Gerry Grogan uneasy. She thought every girl should have a guy, and vice versa. She also thought that everybody should get married as soon as possible, and she was determined to be the first one in our crowd to do so. And Harry Hansen was the man. I asked her if he was going swimming with us the next day.

“I hate that Sunset Pool,” she said, and I agreed. “But that horny pervert Duke has everybody hot to go.”

“So go to Ocean Tide with Harry.”

She turned and watched Harry make his way through the crowd to the men’s room. “Let me ask you something: How come the guys don’t like Harry?”

“It’s not that the guys don’t like Harry,” I said. “I think it’s Harry don’t like the guys.”

“Jeez, I never thought of that.”

Harry came back and Gerry sipped her beer. Pérez Prado’s “Mambo No. 5” was blaring. Harry said, “You know I don’t dance.” And she turned to me. I looked at Harry, and he nodded okay, and Gerry and I pushed through the crowd to the dance floor in the back room. She danced furiously, amazingly, never losing the rhythm or the beat, but weaving a dozen complicated variations in and out of the basic steps. She made me feel as if I had a fire hydrant in each shoe.

Then the tune ended, and she laughed, and glanced out toward the bar, and then Tommy Edwards began to sing “It’s All in the Game.”

“Oh, I love this,” she said, and took my hand again, and we began to dance slowly, the floor filling with other dancers. “Why do you think he doesn’t like you guys?” she said. And I mumbled something about how hard it was to be an outsider around our crowd, how we had our own jokes and words and how we’d been together since grammar school. “Jeez, that could be trouble, couldn’t it?” she said. But I never answered. I saw Harry Hansen under the arch that separated the dance floor from the bar. He looked bitterly angry. Gerry saw him, too.

“I better go,” she said. “I’ll see you down Sunset.”

With that, she walked to Hansen, who said something I couldn’t hear, turned away, and started for the door with Gerry behind him. I went back to the crowd. Miceli had flattened his opponent in seven rounds. Left hook, of course. Vito wanted to know if I was trying to break up the Mutt and Jeff Bandit Team. Duke was complaining to Betty Gahan that all the Irish girls he knew were plainclothes nuns. Billy and Tim arrived from somewhere. The beer flowed. The smoke thickened. I danced with a dark-haired girl from Flatbush and went off with her into the night.

When I woke up, it was almost noon. I ate breakfast quickly and went up to the totes, but there was nobody around. I saw Colt, the cop, and asked him where everybody was. “The bums all went out to Sunset,” he said. “To swim with the other bums.” I went into the Sanders and sat in the cool Saturday afternoon darkness and watched
The Caine Mutiny
and then went home and took a nap. When I came back to the totes that night, everybody was sunburned. Gerry Grogan was not around.

“She isn’t feeling too good,” Betty Gahan said.

“Sound like a bad case of Harry.”

“No,” Betty said. “She really doesn’t feel good.”

By Tuesday, we knew that Gerry Grogan had polio. Of course. The news raced through the neighborhood, and it’s difficult to explain now what the word “polio” could do to people in those days. The fear, the horror. Just the word. Polio. At the hospital, they wouldn’t let us see her for a while, and her family seemed confused, as if possibly ashamed that this had happened to one of them. We sent flowers. We wrote notes. But I didn’t get to see Gerry Grogan until the following Saturday afternoon. When I walked into the ward, she was alone in a bed against the far wall. She turned and saw me and started to cry. I tried to console her, feeling stupid and clumsy. But then I learned why she was crying. Harry Hansen had not come to visit her. Not even once.

“The son of a bitch, at least he could come and say good-bye,” she said. “That’s all I want. A good goddamned good-bye.”

She never saw Harry Hansen again. But one chill night in autumn, after Gerry Grogan had left the hospital, and after we had thrown her a welcome-home party, and after she’d begun the exercises for her ruined legs, Colt, the cop, walked over to us at the totem poles. He wanted to know if we knew a Harry Hansen. Tall, red-haired, Colt said. He was in the Lutheran Hospital in Bay Ridge with both of his legs broken. No, nobody ever heard of him.

“He’s not from around here,” Duke said. And after Colt left, we went to pick up Gerry Grogan to take her down to the Caton Inn.