The Christmas Kid (16 page)

THE BOY WAS COMING
home from Coney Island one summer evening when he saw lights burning in the empty store. The store was across the street from the Minerva Theatre, where the gang called the Tigers lolled through all seasons in their zoot suits and pegged pants. The store had been empty all winter. Now the door was open, and the boy could see a one-armed man and an old Italian carpenter hammering away.

They were building a large slanted structure that filled the store, and the one-armed man held nails in his mouth, forced them into wood with his hand, then flipped a hammer that was tucked under his elbow and drove the nails into the wood. The boy, who was then twelve, watched this for a while, and then went home to climb into the bunk bed with his Brooklyn dreams.

The next day, the framework was covered with great sheets of plywood, and Seamus Grady, the one-armed man, was in business. He was a sign painter, and on the slanted plywood drawing table there were now large rolls of paper. Sheets of poster board were stacked on shelves under the tables, and a taboret was thick with jars of paint, cans of water, brushes of all shapes and sizes. The man worked with precision and delicacy, making signs for butcher shops and toy stores, bars and dry cleaners. Things for sale. Prices. The boy felt an odd excitement, watching the first artist he had ever seen.

A week later, while the Tigers were singing songs across the street, he saw that the shop window was now filled with some amazing things: large blown-up photostats, mounted on cardboard, of comic strips.
Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant
. And, most astonishing of all:
Terry and the Pirates,
the comic strip he loved more than any other. It was drawn by Milton Caniff, who the year before had given it up to begin
Steve Canyon
. Tentative, afraid, as if crossing this threshold might change his life, the boy walked into the studio of Seamus Grady.

The one-armed man turned and peered at him through thick glasses; he was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and a headband to hold back the sweat.

“Yeah?” he said. “Can I help you?”

“Uh, I was, uh, looking in the window, and I was wondering…well, you see,
Terry and the Pirates
is my favorite and I…”

“Yeah, that Milton Caniff, he’s the best,” Grady said. He had a heavy Brooklyn accent and pronounced the name “Canipp.” He flicked his brush, loaded with red paint, and made a dollar sign in front of a 29. “You know why? He’s an
artist
. He tells stories, good as any movie. He got great characters, great dialogue. Everything. The best, the best…You take Alex Raymond. He draws
Rip Kirby
now, used to draw
Flash Gordon
before the war. Beautiful artist. But no
characters,
know what I mean? No
story
. Canipp, he does it all. Hey, kid, do me a favor, all right? Go over the deli, get me a Pepsi. Ice cold, tell ’em.…”

So it began. That summer, the boy served a double apprenticeship: to Seamus Grady, who lived two blocks away, and to Milton Caniff, who lived in the distant world of fame and accomplishment. The boy learned that Grady had been a letterer for comic books all through the war and had to quit when his eyes weakened. And one night, he showed the boy his secret treasure, what he called the Collection, stored in an old wooden chest in the back of the store. These were original drawings, twice the size of a published comic book page, in black and white, with light blue pencil lines showing where the drawings had been roughed in. Grady had lettered these pages: some of them had been drawn by a nineteen-year-old named Alex Toth (“He might end up better than Canipp”), some of them by a master of the brush named Joe Kubert, and some by Will Eisner, who drew
The Spirit
. He also had photostats, and scrapbooks, and his own collection of comic books and newspaper strips. He also owned work by Roy Crane, the greatest master of the Benday grays, made of dots, and by Noel Sickles, who had helped Caniff when he was starting. He owned Alex Raymond’s old
Flash Gordon
strips, and
Tarzan
pages drawn by Burne Hogarth. “These guys are the masters,” Grady said. “Nobody ever did anything like these guys did before.”

For three dollars a week, the boy delivered signs, swept the sidewalk, washed brushes, went for soda and sandwiches. He started showing Grady his own cartoons, copied from Caniff and Crane, and Grady fixed the drawings and showed the boy tricks with brushes. He let the boy pore through the Collection now, reading all the
Terry
strips from their beginnings in the 1930s. Soon the boy’s head was teeming with characters: Connie and Big Stoop, the Dragon Lady and Burma, Tony Sandhurst and April Kane, and a weird character named Sanjak. They became part of the boy’s life, following him to school in the fall, peopling his imagination just before sleep. The Dragon Lady made him feel funny, and he would look for a woman like Burma the rest of his life.

“What kind of a guy do you think he is?” the boy said one snowy Saturday afternoon that winter. Grady was working on a sign for Gutter’s Shoe Store. “Milton Caniff, I mean?”

“I hear he’s a great guy.”

“You think if I write him a letter, he’d answer?”

“All you can do is try,” Grady said. “Nothin’ to lose, right?”

A month later, the boy came running into the store, waving a brown envelope, unable to get the words out of his mouth. Caniff had sent him an original drawing of Steve Canyon.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Grady said softly, holding the drawing up to the light. “Isn’t
that
something?”

That settled it; the boy would be a cartoonist. Caniff had sent him a little booklet, telling young cartoonists to read Robert Louis Stevenson, and Kipling, and Dumas. Grady told him that he would have to go to art school. “Learn to draw
everything!
” he said. Through the winter, the boy read his way through the local public library, and by the following spring was making large drawings on newsprint during the hours when Grady left him in charge of the sign shop, while the older man did big window signs in a downtown department store. He always kept the door locked when he was drawing. All the boy’s women looked like the Dragon Lady.

Then one evening in that second summer, while Grady worked at the A&S department store, the boy was drawing in the store. The heat was wilting; great splotches of sweat fell on the newsprint, and the charcoal pencil cut holes in the paper. He opened the door to let a breeze in. About one hour later, two of the Tigers paused at the door. Junior and Cheech. Their faces were bleary, and each was carrying a quart bottle of beer. The boy was suddenly afraid.

“Well, lookit dis,” said Junior. “An ahtist! We got ourself an ahtist, right here in da neighborhood. The boy ahtist!”

“Whyn’t you draw
our
picture?” Cheech said. They moved into the store, and the boy couldn’t bring himself to move. Then Cheech saw them open the top of the chest, revealing the treasures of the Collection.

“Well, how about this!” he said. “Comics! They got
comics
in here.”

“Leave them alone,” the boy said. “They’re Mr. Grady’s.”

Junior switched to a singsong voice:
“They’re Mr. Grady’s. They’re Mr. Grady’s.…”
They started tossing comics back and forth, over the head of the boy, who ran back and forth from one to the other. The more upset the boy became, the more they laughed. Then they started tearing pages out of the precious books, balling them up, pitching them to each other, while Cheech echoed the old radio show: “Terrrreeee an’ da pirates!” They found the precious originals, neatly stacked on the bottom of the trunk, and started scaling them through the air. Then Cheech put his thumb over the top of his bottle, shook it up violently, and let the hot beer fly at Junior. The beer cascaded over Junior’s head and spattered across some unfinished signs. The colors ran like blood.

The boy flew at Junior, frantically throwing small punches, crazy with rage and grief, and Junior shoved him toward Cheech, and Cheech kicked him, and then Junior knocked him down. They were in a snarling fury now, and they pulled over the taboret, spilling poster colors and water over the floor and onto the ruined comics. They sprayed the signs one final time with beer, and went laughing into the evening.

The boy sat there crying harder than he ever had before.

He was still there when Grady came in, and he tried to explain, but Grady exploded in injured anger: “Why’d you leave the
door
open? Why’d you
come
here, anyway? Lookit this place! You know how long it took me to save this stuff? Why’d you
come
here? Why? Why?”

The boy ran out to the darkening street. He never went back. That winter, he took another route to school because he couldn’t look at the sign shop ever again without thinking of that terrible summer evening when he’d opened the door to blasphemy. He didn’t become a cartoonist, either, but he had learned things in that shop that he carried with him for the rest of his life. In that place in the gardens of Brooklyn, a one-armed man had given him art.

LATER, AFTER THE TERRIBLE
thing had happened, people in the neighborhood remembered the day that Andreas Vlastopoulos had arrived among them. Marie from the dry cleaner’s remembered that he wore faded jeans and a crisp white shirt, and that it was early summer and the sun gleamed on his yellow hair. Mrs. Caputo remembered that he asked her for directions to the Griffin house, and that his accent was thick and strange, because it wasn’t a German or a squarehead accent and he was so blond. George, the bartender at Rattigan’s, remembered seeing the young man staring up at buildings and street signs as if he were lost. Some remembered his blue eyes, others his battered brown canvas suitcase, tied shut with a rope. They all remembered the blue guitar.

“He finally went into Mary Griffin’s,” George said later. “I remember thinkin’ there was somethin’ wrong with the way he looked. It wasn’t just he was a big handsome guy; hell, there’s lots of big handsome guys in this neighborhood. No, this guy was, I don’t know how to say it. Beautiful?”

The young man—he was nineteen that summer—took a room in the back of Mary Griffin’s house, which was the first building on the street below the avenue, one of two wedged between the tenements and a large garage. Since the tenements along the avenue had no backyards, their clotheslines stretched across the space above Mary Griffin’s yard, and that of the Chinese house beside hers, to hooks drilled into the wall of the garage. The clotheslines were always full, blocking the sun.And on the top floor of one of the tenements, living alone with her six-year-old son, was the Widow Musmanno.

“She shouldn’t live like that, alone,” Mrs. Caputo used to say. “It ain’t right. She married a bum and the bum got killed. But why should she pay the rest of her life? His family says she can’t go out, she gotta wear black like an old lady. Hey, this ain’t the old country. This is America. It ain’t right. A young woman like that. A pretty girl like that…”

But for two years, Widow Musmanno had lived her sentence of solitude, worrying about her son as he played in the street, scrubbing the apartment, mumbling prayers in church each morning for her husband, and washing clothes. She ate too much. She added pounds. And then one day, that first week after the young man’s arrival, she was hanging clothes on the line and glanced down into the yard and saw Andreas Vlastopoulos.

He was sitting alone on the wooden back steps and he was playing the blue guitar. The guitar was the blue of spring skies, the blue of postcard skies, the blue of the Aegean. The sounds he made were sorrowful and melancholy, and when he began to sing to himself, his voice ached with loss. Widow Musmanno did not understand the words, but she felt that somehow they were aimed directly at her and they made her ache, too. She stepped back from the window, and from the shadow behind the curtain looked down at the beautiful young man. She watched for almost a minute. And then she began furiously to scrub the table, to clean the refrigerator, to polish glasses and dust bureaus. When, a few hours later, her son came up from the street, he found her lying on her vast bed and when her eyes opened to look at him, they were sore and red.

“He’d come in every Monday morning,” said Marie from the dry cleaner. “Always six shirts, medium starch, and a suit, always nice and polite. One day, one shirt. One week, one suit. He didn’t flirt. He was the kind didn’t know how good-lookin’ he was. He told me he worked nights in a restaurant over New York, and he used to laugh at his bad English. He was a Greek, the kid. And tell the truth, it was hard to keep your eyes off him.”

On the morning of her thirty-first birthday, after her son left for Coney Island with his Uncle Frank, Widow Musmanno was hanging wash while Vlastopolous played in the yard below. She heard the aching notes. Her thick body trembled. Suddenly, a piece of wash slipped from her hands and fell three stories into the yard. Vlastopolous glanced at the fallen piece, then up at Widow Musmanno, frozen in her window frame, and he smiled. He walked over and picked up the fallen piece. It was a woman’s slip. He waved it like a wet silky pink flag at Widow Musmanno and explained with a gesture that he would bring it up to her. She shook her head no, almost desperately pointing to herself and then to him, meaning that she would come down. But Vlastopolous just smiled and went into the back door of the Griffin house with the wet woman’s slip and his blue guitar. He went out into the street and found her building on the avenue and went up the hot dark stairs to the top floor and she came to the door, her hair swiftly brushed, her cheeks swiftly powdered, and she looked at him and that was the beginning of that.

There were few secrets in that neighborhood, and soon many people knew about Widow Musmanno and the beautiful young man with the blue guitar. They knew from the look on her face, the freshness of her color, and the way she began to dress again as she had before the death of her husband, in mauve and pink and yellow summer dresses. They knew when she stopped going to Mass. They knew from the drawn shades in the afternoon while the six-year-old was off at a ball game with his uncle. Somebody saw them in the hills above the Long Meadow in Prospect Park. Sitting under a tree, eating sandwiches while the young man played the blue guitar. And one hot night, Sadie Genlot climbed to the roof for air and saw them a few tenements away, leaning on a chimney, holding hands and staring at the glittering towers of Manhattan.

Of course, the old women gossiped about Widow Musmanno; it was too bad, they said, that she had gone “that way”; she sure wasn’t showing proper respect for her poor husband. But most of the younger women approved, and a few were envious. There was nobody in any of their lives who announced himself with a blue guitar.

“The trouble was, how long could it go on?” Mrs. Caputo said. “It was the husband’s brother was the problem. Frank. He took over when the brother died. He paid the bills. He was like a father to the kid. That was the trouble.…”

Late one Saturday night, Vlastopoulos came out of Widow Musmanno’s building. At the corner, as he turned toward Mary Griffin’s house, he saw two men in gray hats sitting in a Cadillac. They were staring at him. A few days later, he came up from the subway and saw the same two men peering at him from behind the café curtains of a bar called Fitzgerald’s. One of them nodded. Late that night, after the boy was long asleep, Vlastopolous mentioned the two men to Widow Musmanno.

“Oh, my God,” she said, the words more prayer than exclamation. And then, after a long silence, she told the young man that it was all over between them and she could never see him again. He protested; she insisted. He said that she was grown up, she lived in a free country, she could do what she wanted with men. He said that if marriage was the problem, then they would get married. But Widow Musmanno turned her face and whispered that there were some things he would never understand. And Vlastopoulos answered that no matter what she said he would be around to see her again the following night. She took his beautiful face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth.

They found him the next morning on his back in the yard, as broken as the blue guitar beneath him. The police decided that he must have fallen from the roof of the tenement, and nobody in the neighborhood offered any other theory. But when the ambulance came from Kings County to take him to the morgue, Mrs. Caputo began to cry and so did Marie from the dry cleaner’s and Mary Griffin, too. They waited around and after a while a short mustachioed man came to Mary Griffin’s and said he was the uncle of Vlastopoulos and would pick up the young man’s belongings. He was inside for about an hour, and came out with the brown canvas suitcase, and the broken pieces of the guitar. He put the broken pieces in a garbage can on the corner, sighed, and started trudging heavily toward the subway.

Late that night, when the bars had closed and the last buses had gone to the terminals and everybody in the neighborhood was asleep, Widow Musmanno came down to the street. She was dressed in black. She wore no makeup and her hair was blowsy. She pulled a shawl tightly over her shoulders, and then began to shuffle to the corner. The pieces of the blue guitar jutted from the wire garbage can. She looked at them for a long moment, and then removed them, all fractured wood and twisted wire strings. She held them to her breasts, the way a mother hugs a child, and then with a dry sob, she entered the country of the old.