The Roy Stories (3 page)

 

The Red Studebaker

Roy was twelve years old when his mother and her third husband, a jazz drummer named Sid “Spanky” Wade, told him that they were going to move out of Chicago to a suburb north of the city. They had already paid for the beginning of the construction of a new house and the foundation had been laid. The next day, a Sunday, the four of them—Roy's mother, her husband, Roy's one-year-old sister, and Roy—drove out to see it.

Roy had no desire to leave the neighborhood, and when he saw the property in Winnebago Gardens, a new development in the middle of nowhere, only sidewalks and streets and other houses under construction, no people, not even a kid on a bike, he knew immediately this place was not for him. The thought of being stranded like a lost Legionnaire in the Sahara made Roy shiver. He disliked Sid Wade and Sid disliked him; and Roy's mother, as always during her marriages, was either on the verge of a nervous breakdown or in the throes of collapse. His mother's marriages—of which there would eventually be five—inevitably and rapidly deteriorated into disappointment and fear which found expression in the form of hysteria and vicious vitriol, behavior that terrorized not only her husband of the moment but Roy and anyone else who had to deal with her. This proposed move to the suburbs, to “somewhere quiet and less stressful,” as Sid Wade said, would surely salve her condition. City life made her nervous, agreed Dr. Martell, a heart specialist and old friend of Roy's grandmother's, who provided pills for his mother even in the middle of the night.

Several days after their excursion to Winnebago Gardens, Roy was having dinner with the family when Sid Wade began telling Roy what he could and could not take with him when they moved.

“I'm not moving,” Roy said. “Don't worry about me, I'll take care of my own things.”

Sid Wade dropped his fork onto his plate, his heavy-jowled face turned crimson, and he said, “Of course you're moving. We all are.”

“No, I'm not. I've already made arrangements to live next door with the McLaughlins. Mr. and Mrs. McLaughlin said it's all right with them. Jimmy's going into the army next month, so I'll have his bunk in the room with Johnny and Billy. I told Mrs. McLaughlin I'd contribute money to the household out of my pay delivering for Kow Kow. I'll be fine there.”

Roy's mother stood up from the table and put her dishes into the sink. Her face was green and her lips were trembling. Her body shook and she was crying.

“Look what you've done to your mother!” Sid Wade shouted.

Roy's little sister, upset by his loud voice, began crying, too.

“If your father were here,” Wade snarled, “he wouldn't put up with your insolence.”

“I'm not being insolent,” said Roy. “And don't talk about my father. You didn't know him and he's dead. You don't know what he'd say or do. If he were alive, I'd go live with him. Johnny and Billy are my best friends and Mr. and Mrs. McLaughlin are good people.”

Frank McLaughlin worked as a doorman at the Drake Hotel and his wife took in laundry. They were from Ireland and spoke Gaelic in their house. They let their sons drink coffee in the morning and Margaret McLaughlin made great peach and strawberry pies in the summer. Roy couldn't wait to go live with them.

Sid Wade and Roy's mother began arguing. She closed her eyes and fell down on the floor. The baby was screeching and Sid Wade wouldn't stop yelling, carrying on about how Roy should be sent to reform school, that he'd never be any good just like his gangster father.

“He did time and you'll do time!” Wade said. He snorted like a buffalo and his little eyes disappeared.

Roy could hear his mother moaning.

“You're killing your mother!” screamed Wade, though he made no attempt to pick her up off the floor, where she was now writhing like a Moroccan fakir's cobra being replaced in its basket.

Roy rose from the table and walked out the back door, down the steps, through the yard and into the alley behind the garage. It was windy and cold and he was wearing only a T-shirt. Mr. Anderson's old red Studebaker was parked in the alley between his house and the McLaughlins'. Roy knew that Mr. Anderson never locked it, so he walked over, opened the passenger side door and got in. He sat there looking through the windshield. The sky was almost dark, there was a thin, pale yellow ribbon running through the gray. At the far end of the alley two men came out of the rear door of The Green Harp tavern. They were smoking and laughing. One of them was wearing a blue zipper jacket and the other was wearing a brown one. Both men were hatless. Roy watched them standing and talking and smoking, their hair waving in the wind. Mr. Anderson had left an opened pack of Lucky Strikes on top of the dashboard. Roy took one, put it between his lips and punched in the lighter.

Three months later, Roy's mother told him that Sid had defaulted on their installments for the house in Winnebago Gardens and forfeited the down payment, so they weren't going to move there. A week after that, Roy came home from school one day and found Sid Wade picking up his clothes and other belongings from in front of the house where Roy's mother had thrown them. Later the same day Sid moved out and Roy's mother said she was divorcing him and going to work as a receptionist in Dr. Martell's office.

Jimmy McLaughlin came home from the army on leave for a few days after completing basic training. Roy and Johnny and Billy were sitting on Johnny's bunk listening to him. Jimmy was lying on his bed in his uniform smoking a Chesterfield, telling them about life at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. Johnny had taken over Jimmy's job washing dishes at the Chinese restaurant, Roy had taken over Johnny's delivery days, and Billy, the youngest McLaughlin brother, a year younger than Johnny and Roy, who were five years younger than Jimmy, now worked at Kow Kow, too, sweeping up and taking out the garbage.

“It's good to be back home,” Jimmy said, “even if it's only for a week. You don't know how much you miss it until you can't be there.”

“What did you miss the most?” asked Johnny.

“Strange things, little things, mostly.”

“Yeah? Like what?” said Roy.

“Oh, I don't know,” said Jimmy. “Just seein' Mr. Anderson's red '52 Studebaker parked in the alley is one, I guess. It gives me a good feelin' knowin' it's still there.”

 

The Trumpet

Marty the T worked at the Sinclair service station on the corner of Rosemont and Western when Roy lived in St. Tim's parish. Marty's last name was Sullivan but everybody in the neighborhood called him Marty the T or just T because he played a trumpet while he sat around when he wasn't pumping gas. Old man Poznanski, who was about fifty but was bald and always had a grizzled, gray, six-day beard, owned the station and did the mechanical work and tire patching. All Marty the T had to do was wait on the Two Dollar Bills and Bettys, as Poznanski called those motorists who stopped only for gas. T was sixteen when he began working there, right after he dropped out of high school. The first time Roy met him, Marty the T told Roy he had decided that he was going to be a jazz trumpet player. Poznanski didn't mind that T practiced the trumpet all day because he was half deaf and spent most of his time under cars on the garage side of the station. As long as Marty the T's playing didn't interfere with his taking care of the customers, the old man left him alone. T was a medium-tall, skinny guy with green eyes, crewcut red hair, a nose that would have been a comma but for a scar below the bridge that made it resemble a semi-colon, and a prominent chin with a few wispy, straw colored hairs sticking out from it. “All the jazz cats got chin hair,” he said.

It was a drizzly, chilly March afternoon in 1962 when the station was robbed by two men wearing bandanna masks, one red, one black. Marty the T was working on Dizzy Gillespie's tune “Con Alma” when a gray and blue 1959 Chevrolet Impala pulled up to one of the pumps. T noticed the car out of the corner of his left eye, played a few more notes and put down his trumpet. By the time he'd stood up and begun to head out the office door, the two men were walking quickly toward him. Both of the men were of average height and weight and carried guns in their right hands, which they held at their sides, not pointed at T. They wore dark brown Fedoras and black car coats and were inside the office before Marty the T could do anything. As soon as T saw the guns, he put up his hands.

“Open the register,” ordered one of the men.

Marty the T hit the No Sale key on the 1920 National and the cash drawer slid out. The man who had not yet spoken elbowed T out of the way, removed all of the bills and stuffed them into a pocket of his coat, then took out the drawer and dropped it. Coins scattered all over the room even before the drawer hit the floor. The man scooped out the larger bills, tens and twenties, that had been hidden underneath and crammed them into the same pocket.

The other man said, “Show us the safe.”

“There isn't one,” said T.

“Where's the old man?” asked the bandit who had cleaned out the register.

“In the garage.”

That man left the office; the other one stood still and kept his eyes on Marty the T. T noticed that they were blue; the other man's eyes were brown but T didn't really look at them until the man returned to the office marching old man Poznanski in front of him.

“The boy's tellin' the truth,” Poznanski said, “there's no safe.”

“Get on the floor, both of you,” said the man who'd herded Poznanski. “Face down.”

“Close your eyes and stay put,” said the other man.

Poznanski and Marty the T did what they were told. The robbers took a fast look around the office, one of them kicked over a waste basket that was next to the desk, then they left. Marty the T and old man Poznanski stayed down until they'd heard the men open and close the doors of their car, the engine start and the car pull away.

Poznanski stood up first, looked out the door and said, “It's okay, Marty, they're gone.”

T got up and looked out.

“We're pretty lucky, I guess,” said the old man. “They didn't shoot us, they only took the cash.”

“No,” said T, “they took my trumpet, too.”

Poznanski looked at the top of the desk, which was where Marty the T always put the trumpet down when he left the office to pump gas.

“They'll pawn it for two bucks,” he said.

When Roy and his friends found out that thieves had stolen Marty the T's instrument they chipped in and gave T nineteen dollars and seventy-five cents.

“That's great of you guys,” he said. “Old man Poznanski gave me ten. Now I can buy a better horn than the one I had.”

The next day, Marty the T bought a used trumpet at Frank's Drum Shop on Wabash Avenue for thirty bucks. He was playing it in the office at the Sinclair station three weeks later when the police called and told old man Poznanski they had found the '59 Impala that had been used in the hold-up abandoned in an empty lot on Stony Island Avenue. It had been stolen, then dumped. Marty the T's trumpet was on the back seat.

T went down to the precinct house across the street from City Hall to claim it. Roy and Tommy Cunningham went with him. When the claims officer handed the trumpet over to T, he laughed and said, “Look what they done to it.”

The bell had been bent up at a forty-five degree angle.

“This is how Dizzy's horn looks,” said Marty the T. “Whichever one of the stick-up men did it must know that.”

“Can you still play it?” asked Cunningham.

Marty the T put the trumpet to his lips and squeaked out a few notes.

“No trumpet playin' in here,” barked the claims officer.

“That's the intro to ‘Night in Tunisia',” T told him.

“Yeah, well, it's late afternoon in Chicago,” said the cop. “Take it outside.”

Years later, when Roy saw Dizzy Gillespie perform in a nightclub in New York, he told this story to the people he was with.

“Did Marty the T become a professional musician?” asked one of them.

“I don't know,” said Roy. “I never saw him again after I graduated from high school and left the neighborhood. But Tommy Cunningham told me he heard that T had married a girl from Africa named Happiness Onsunde. I said that would be a good title for a song, ‘Happiness On Sunday', and Cunningham reminded me that Marty the T told us when we were outside the police station that he was going to write a tune called ‘Late Afternoon in Chicago' and send it to Dizzy.”

 

Unspoken

Walking home together on Ojibway Boulevard, Roy and his grandfather passed Litvak's Delicatessen, and Roy, who was twelve years old, said, “I like the young guy, Daniel, who works behind the counter in Litvak's. He's always telling jokes and makes the best sandwiches.”

“Do you know where the name Litvak comes from?” asked his grandfather.

“No, Pops. Where?”

“It was a name given to certain Jews from Lithuania, in Eastern Europe. These Jews were inclined to doubt the so-called magic powers of the Hasidic leaders, so Litvak came to connote shrewdness and skepticism.”

“Who were the Hasidic leaders?”

“The Orthodox Jews.”

“Tommy Cunningham told me that Daniel's father hanged himself.”

“Nathan Litvak, yes. Two years ago.”

“Why'd he do that?”

“It's a long story, Roy. An unhappy one, although there is a good ending, too.”

“Can you tell it to me?”

“I didn't know Nathan Litvak but my friend Herman did.”

“Herman who wears the hearing aid and always has a runny nose?”

“Yes, the jeweler on Minnetonka Street. He told me that Litvak came to Chicago after the war ended, almost seventeen years ago, in 1945. He was a Jew, of course, a survivor of the Holocaust, when the Nazis attempted to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. He and his wife, Sarah, were arrested in Lithuania. She died in a concentration camp.”

“What about Nathan and Daniel?”

“Daniel was five years old when his parents were able to get him out of the country, just before the Nazis invaded. He was sent to live with relatives here in Chicago. Nathan managed to stay alive and was eventually liberated by the Allies. He emigrated to America and was reunited with his son.”

“Daniel is a real friendly guy,” Roy said. “I like his wife, Ruth, too, although she doesn't talk much, just smiles a lot.”

“It's an amazing thing, what happened to Ruth. She and her parents also were taken by the Nazis to a death camp, the same one as Nathan and Sarah. Ruth was younger than Daniel, three or four years old at the time. Her father, Mendel, died in the camp, but her mother, Esther, survived. How anyone survived in those circumstances I don't know, but she did, and saved her daughter, too.”

“And they also came to Chicago after the war.”

“Yes. For years, Ruth did not speak at all. She had been severely traumatized by her experience in the concentration camp. When she grew up she went to work as a seamstress with her mother. Then, as fortune—or misfortune—would have it, Esther and Ruth came to live in the same apartment building as Nathan and Daniel.”

“Daniel and Ruth live in an apartment above the delicatessen,” said Roy.

“They all lived there, right across the hall from each other. It happened that Esther's sister, Golda, had known Nathan in their home city of Vilnius, and she told Esther that Nathan had survived by cooperating with the Nazis; first in Vilnius, by identifying Jews in hiding, and then by supervising a brothel comprised of Jewish women for the exclusive use of German soldiers.”

“What's a brothel?”

“A whorehouse, where men pay women to have sex with them; only in these places run by the Nazis, the soldiers didn't have to pay.”

“What happened to Golda?”

“She was murdered by a Nazi officer. Naturally, Nathan was hated by the other Jews. Esther confronted him after she and Ruth moved into the apartment here and she realized who he was. I suppose that's how Daniel found out about his father's betrayal of his own people. Esther later had a stroke and she was paralyzed for quite a while before she died, but not before Nathan, who could no longer live with his shame and guilt, hanged himself. It was Daniel who discovered his father hanging by a rope from a meat hook in the back room of the delicatessen.”

“What's the good ending, Pops?”

“Well, Daniel had always had a crush on Ruth. As you know, she's quite pretty and he'd fallen in love with her even though she'd never spoken to him. After her mother had a stroke and couldn't work any more, Daniel paid their rent and gave them food. Ruth realized that Daniel was a good person, not like his father, and eventually she agreed to marry him.”

“She talks to him now,” said Roy. “I've heard her.”

“Yes, of course she does. But it took a very long time to overcome the terrible memories she had. It's a miracle that Ruth is finally able to have a decent life.”

“It's sad that Daniel's mother died in the concentration camp.”

“He told Herman that he doesn't even have a photograph of her. Daniel said that whenever he used to ask his father about Sarah, Nathan would tell him, ‘The best way to speak about the dead is to remain silent.'”

“That's an unhappy story, all right. I heard Jimmy Boyle's mother say once that what the Nazis did to the Jews was the world's worst crime.”

His grandfather nodded and said, “An Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in a story called ‘Death and the Compass,' has a character named Lönnrot say to the editor of the
Yiddishe Zeitung
newspaper, ‘Perhaps this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions.' To which the editor replies, ‘Like Christianity.'”

“A superstition is something that isn't really true, right?”

“Correct. It's a belief that has no basis in fact.”

“So is Christianity a superstition?”

“All religions are, Roy. Sometimes it makes people feel better to believe in one, and that's all right. It's when religion makes people mean and provokes or emboldens them to use their religion as an excuse or reason to harm those who don't believe as they do that it turns bad.”

“Is that why the Nazis tried to kill all the Jews, because they had a different religion?”

“They did, but the Nazis thought the Jews were a tribe of troublemakers and wanted to get rid of them.”

“Earl Borg, the one-armed guy who rents shoes at the bowling alley, says the Jews think they're better than everybody else.”

It began to rain and Roy's grandfather said, “Come on, boy, let's walk a little faster.”

“They're not better than everybody else, are they?” asked Roy.

“No, the Jews are pretty much the same as everyone. They made a lot of enemies, though, by calling themselves the Chosen People.”

“Who chose them?”

“God, they said.”

“You mean God spoke to them?”

“Anything is possible, Roy. Ruth spoke to Daniel, didn't she?”