The Roy Stories (7 page)

 

Dark Mink

Pops, my other grandfather, my mother's father, and his brothers spent much of their time playing bridge and talking baseball in the back room of their fur coat business. From the time I was four or five Pops would set me up on a high stool at a counter under a window looking down on State Street and give me a furrier's knife with a few small pelts to cut up. I spent whole afternoons that way, wearing a much-too-large-for-me apron with the tie strings wrapped several times around my waist, cutting up mink, beaver, fox, squirrel, even occasional leopard or seal squares, careful not to slice my finger with the razor-sharp mole-shaped tool, while the wet snow slid down the high, filthy State and Lake Building windows and Pops and my great-uncles Ike, Nate, and Louie played cards.

They were all great baseball fans, they were gentlemen, and didn't care much for other sports, so even in winter the card table tended to be hot-stove league speculation about off-season trades or whether or not Sauer's legs would hold up for another season. Of course there were times customers came in, well-to-do women with their financier husbands, looking as if they'd stepped out of a Peter Arno
New Yorker
cartoon; or gangsters with their girlfriends, heavy-overcoated guys with thick cigars wedged between leather-gloved fingers. I watched the women model the coats and straighten their stocking seams in the four-sided full-length mirrors. I liked dark mink the best, those ankle-length, full-collar, silk-lined ones that smelled so good with leftover traces of perfume. There was no more luxurious feeling than to nap under my mother's own sixty-pelt coat.

By the time the fur business bottomed out, Pops was several years dead—he'd lived to eighty-two—and so was Uncle Ike, at eighty-eight. Pops had seen all of the old-time great ballplayers, Tris Speaker, the Babe, even Joe Jackson, who he said was the greatest player of them all. When the White Sox clinched the American League pennant in 1959, the first flag for them in forty years (since the Black Sox scandal of 1919), he and I watched the game on television. The Sox were playing Cleveland, and to end it the Sox turned over one of their 141 double plays of that season, Aparicio to Fox to Big Ted Kluszewski.

Uncle Nate and Uncle Louie kept on for some time, going in to work each day not as furriers but to Uncle Louie's Chicago Furriers Association office. He'd founded the association in the '20s, acting as representative to the Chamber of Commerce, Better Business Bureau, and other civic organizations. Louie was also a poet. He'd written verse, he told me, in every form imaginable. Most of them he showed me were occasional poems, written to celebrate coronations—the brothers had all been born and raised in London—and inaugurations of American presidents. In the middle right-hand drawer of his desk he kept boxes of Dutch-shoe chocolates, which he would give me whenever I came to visit him.

Uncle Nate, who lived to be 102, came in to Uncle Louie's office clean-shaven and with an impeccable high-starched collar every day until he was a hundred. He once told me he knew he would live that long because of a prophecy by an old man in a wheelchair he'd helped cross a London street when he was seven. The man had put his hand on Nate's head, blessed him, and told him he'd live a century.

Uncle Louie was the last to go, at ninety-four. Having long since moved away, I didn't find out about his death until a year or so later. The fur business, as my grandfather and his brothers had known it, was long gone; even the State and Lake Building was about to be torn down, a fate that had already befallen Fritzl's, where the brothers had gone each day for lunch. Fritzl's had been the premier restaurant of the Loop in those days, with large leather booths, big white linen napkins, and thick, high-stemmed glasses. Like the old Lindy's in New York, Fritzl's was frequented by show people, entertainers, including ballplayers, and newspaper columnists. Many of the women who had bought coats, or had had coats bought for them, at my grandfather's place, ate there. I was always pleased to recognize one of them, drinking a martini or picking at a shrimp salad, the fabulous dark mink draped gracefully nearby.

 

Nanny

From the time I was four until I was eight my grandmother lived with us. She slept in the big bedroom with my mother (my father had remarried by then) and was bedridden most of the time, her heart condition critical, killing her just past her sixtieth birthday. I called her Nanny, for no reason I can remember, and I loved her, as small boys suppose they do. My mother was often away in those days, and while I don't remember Nanny ever feeding me, (too sick to get out of bed for that) or dressing me, or making me laugh (there was Flo for that, my black mammy who later “ran off with some man,” as my mother was wont to disclose; and then a succession of other maids and nurses most of whom, again according to my mother, either ransacked liquor cabinets or ran away à la Flo—anyone who left my mother always “ran off”), I do remember her scolding me, and once my mother was in Puerto Rico, for some reason I'm sure Nanny considered adequate (sufficient to pry her from bed), she backed me into a corner of my room against the full-length mirror on my closet door (thus I watched her though my back was turned) and beat me with a board, me screaming, “My mother'll get you for this!”; and when my mother returned my not believing it was really her (she being so brown from the sun), and my momentary fear of her being an impostor, some woman hired by my grandmother to beat me because it was too hard on her heart for her to do it herself.

This repeated paranoia, persistent tension, allowed no relief for me then but through my toy soldiers, sworded dragoons, Zouaves, and Vikings that I manipulated, controlled. Hours alone on my lined linoleum floor I played, determinedly oblivious to the voices, agonies perpetuated dining room to kitchen to bedroom.

And there was the race we never ran. Nanny and I planned a race for when she was well, though she never would be. Days sick I'd sit in my mother's bed next to Nanny and devise the route, from backyard down the block to the corner, from the fence to the lamppost and back—and Nanny would nod, “Yes, certainly, soon as I'm well”—and I'd cut out comics or draw, listening to Sergeant Preston on the radio, running the race in my mind, running it over and over, never once seeing Nanny run with me.

 

Island in the Sun

“Oh, Roy, this poor thing!”

“Who, Mom? What poor thing?”

Roy was eating breakfast in their room at the Casa Marina in Key West, Corn Flakes with milk and red banana slices on it. His mother had a cup of Cuban coffee and a small glass of freshly squeezed orange juice on the table in front of her. She was reading the
Miami Herald
.

“This sick man in a big city up north who was beaten to death by teenagers. How terrible.”

Roy looked out through the open French doors to the terrace and beyond to the Atlantic Ocean. The water was very blue and he knew it would be cold despite the bright December sun. If they decided to swim today, Roy thought, he and his mother would go to the other side of the island and swim in the Gulf of Mexico, where the water was always warmer.

“Why would they beat up a sick man?”

“He was mentally retarded and weighed three hundred pounds and wore a homemade Batman costume. The neighborhood kids liked to pick on him and call him names.”

“What was his real name?”

“Jimmy Rodriguez.”

“How old was he?”

“Forty-two. Listen, Roy: ‘Mr. Rodriguez lived alone in the city's most crime-ridden district. Neighbors told police that he would often shout at drug dealers and prostitutes from the sidewalk outside the apartment building in which he lived.'”

“Does it tell about how it happened?”

“Two fourteen year old boys and one thirteen year old girl hit him with soda pop bottles until he fell. Then they kicked him and poured soda on him while they shouted, ‘Fatman not Batman! Fatman not Batman!'”

“Even the girl?”

“Mm-hm. The kids kept beating and kicking him even after he was dead, a neighbor, Feliciana Domingo, told police. Oh, Roy, this is really sad.”

“What, Mom?”

“Batman had bought the bottles of soda pop for the kids who killed him.”

Roy had never lived in a real neighborhood. He was eight years old and had grown up in hotels. His mother put down the newspaper, picked up her cup and took a sip of coffee.

“What happened to the kids who did it?”

“I don't know, it doesn't say. They'll probably be sent to a reformatory.”

Roy's mother put down her cup, lit a Pall Mall, inhaled deeply, then blew the smoke toward the terrace. White curlicues floated in the air for a few seconds in front of the dark blue water, then vanished.

“What does retarded mean?”

“Slow, Roy. Batman's brain didn't work fast.”

“Mom, I'm full.”

“Okay, baby, don't eat any more. As soon as I finish my cigarette, we'll go to the beach.”

“Probably Batman never went to a beach.”

Roy's mother puffed and turned halfway around in her chair to stare at the ocean.

“Why did he live alone? Somebody should have taken care of him.”

“Yes, Roy, somebody should have. The poor thing.”

Roy watched a horsefly land on one of the sugar cubes that were crowded in a small green bowl next to his mother's cup and saucer. He remembered his father once saying that he knew a guy named Art Huck who would bet on anything, even which cube of sugar a fly would land on.

“Mom, do you know a man named Art Huck?”

“No, I don't think so. Who is he?”

“A friend of Dad's.”

His mother sat still, looking toward the water.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I'm not sure which is worse, Roy, an act of cruelty or an act of cowardice.”

“Maybe they're the same.”

“No, actually I think cruelty is worse, because it's premeditated.”

“What's that mean?”

“You have to think about it before you do it.”

“You're always telling me to think before I do something.”

“You're not a cruel person, Roy. You never will be.”

“Do you know any cruel people?”

Roy's mother stood up and walked out onto the terrace. She threw her cigarette away.

“Yes, Roy,” she said, without turning to look at him, “unfortunately, I do.”

 

An Eye on the Alligators

I knew as the boat pulled in to the dock there were no alligators out there. I got up and stuck my foot against the piling so that it wouldn't scrape the boat, then got out and secured the bowline to the nearest cleat. Mr. Reed was standing on the dock now, helping my mother up out of the boat. Her brown legs came up off the edge weakly, so that Mr. Reed had to lift her to keep her from falling back. The water by the pier was blue black and stank of oil and gas, not like out on the ocean, or in the channel, where we had been that day.

Mr. Reed had told me to watch for the alligators. The best spot to do it from, he said, was up on the bow. So I crawled up through the trapdoor on the bow and watched for the alligators. The river water was clear and green.

“Look around the rocks,” Mr. Reed shouted over the engine noise, “the gators like the rocks.” So I kept my eye on the rocks, but there were no alligators.

“I don't see any,” I shouted. “Maybe we're going too fast and the noise scares them away.”

After that Mr. Reed went slower but still there were no alligators. We were out for nearly three hours and I didn't see one.

“It was just a bad day for seeing alligators, son,” said Mr. Reed. “Probably because of the rain. They don't like to come up when it's raining.”

For some reason I didn't like it when Mr. Reed called me “son.” I wasn't his son. Mr. Reed, my mother told me, was a friend of my father's. My dad was not in Florida with us, he was in Chicago doing business while my mother and I rode around in boats and visited alligator farms.

Mr. Reed had one arm around me and one arm around my mother.

“Can we go back tomorrow?” I asked.

My mother laughed. “That's up to Mr. Reed,” she said. “We don't want to impose on him too much.”

“Sure kid,” said Mr. Reed. Then he laughed, too.

I looked up at Mr. Reed, then out at the water. I could see the drops disappearing into their holes on the surface.

 

The Piano Lesson

I bounced the ball against the yellow wall in the front of my house, waiting for the piano teacher. I'd been taking lessons for six weeks and I liked the piano, my mother played well, standards and show tunes, and sang. Often I sang along with her or by myself as she played. “Young at Heart” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” were two of my favorites. I loved the dark blue cover of the sheet music of “Bewitched,” with the drawing of the woman in a flowing white gown in the lower left-hand corner. It made me think of New York, though I'd never been there. White on midnight dark.

I liked to stand next to the piano bench while my mother played and listen to “Satan Takes a Holiday,” a fox-trot it said on the sheet music. I was eight years old and could easily imagine foxes trotting in evening gowns.

I was up to “The Scissors-Grinder” and “Swan on the Lake” in the second red Thompson book. That was pretty good for six weeks, but I had begun to stutter. I knew I had begun to stutter because I'd heard my mother say it to my father on the phone. They ought just to ignore it, she'd said, and it would stop.

“Ready for your lesson today?” asked the teacher as she came up the walk.

“I'll be in in a minute,” I said, continuing to bounce the ball off the yellow bricks. The teacher smiled and went into the building.

I kept hitting the ball against the wall. I knew she would be talking to my mother, then arranging the lesson books on the rack above the piano. I hit the ball once high above the first-floor windows, caught it, and ran.