3

A WEEK AFTER SCHOOL was out the next summer, my mother began spending her afternoons going from doctor to doctor. When she wasn’t making rounds of their offices, she’d lie on the living room couch, a cold washcloth over her eyes. When I’d ask if I could do anything for her, she’d turn her head away from me, into the cushions, and repeat my name over and over again.

By this time my father had been working as a collection man for Abe for more than a year. His route took him along Flatbush Avenue, from Empire Boulevard—across the street from the entrance to the Botanic Gardens, near Ebbets Field—all the way to the Albemarle Theatre, past where the new Macy’s was being built. He seemed happier than he’d been during the war, and it helped that my mother was ill, I sensed, because he could do things for her. He cleaned and cooked and shopped and took clothes to the wetwash man and picked them up and hung them out on the line we had on the roof.

On the Friday before July Fourth weekend my mother went into Beth Israel Hospital for tests. She came home two days later and the first thing she told me was that Abe was going to California on business and that he’d invited her to go with him. Would I mind if she went?

My father got excited and talked about how the two of us could cook and clean together, and about us going to ball games and restaurants, and then he made the three of us hold hands and dance around while he sang “California, Here I Come!” the way Al Jolson did, in a raspy voice. When he got down on one knee for the last part, his hands clasped upwards towards my mother as if he were praying, she told him to stop making her laugh, that her stomach hurt where the doctors had tested her. I could see that her eyes were shining, though, and when he put his arms around her she let him kiss her on the lips for a long time.

My mother and Abe left from Grand Central Station eight days later on the Twentieth Century Limited. We went there early in the morning to see them off—Lillian, Sheila, my father and me. Little Benny and Turkish Sammy came too. Turkish Sammy, an enormous man with dusty, potato-colored skin and an oblong-shaped head that seemed too big for his body, was Abe’s new bodyguard, and he and Benny shared a compartment next to the one Abe and my mother were in. My mother had on her favorite dress—the chiffon one with the purple irises—and a beautiful wide-brimmed lavender hat she’d bought for the trip, with two long white silk streamers that flowed down along the back of her neck. My father teased her about how she looked like a movie star, asking if she was going to be interviewed on the Twentieth Century Limited radio show, where they spoke with famous people who were taking the train from New York to Chicago.

Abe was dressed in a beautiful cream-colored summer suit, a Panama hat tipped down at a slight angle over his right eye. He looked handsomer than ever, and all the porters and guards along the platform smiled and tipped their hats to him. When one of the policemen said “Good morning, Mr. Litvinov—taking a long trip?” my uncle nodded to the policeman, touched the brim of his hat with two fingers, then winked down at me.

He had champagne and oysters waiting for us inside their compartment, and a big orchid corsage for my mother. Benny and Turkish Sammy stayed in the room with us, eating and drinking and making jokes, and my mother kept asking us, over and over, if it was really true that she was there instead of in the hospital.

I was twelve years old. For the first time in my life my father and I were alone in our apartment together for more than a few days, just the two of us, and I was surprised, not just at how peaceful things seemed with my mother gone, but at how different my father was. He didn’t put on any acts or pester me to do things the way he did when my mother was around, and he spent more time with me, playing boxball or hit-the-penny in front of the house, or talking with me about sports, or taking me with him on his route, or just sitting with me in my bedroom and smoking cigarettes while I read or drew or we listened to a Dodger game together on the radio.

I loved going with him on his route. I was big for my age, taller than most of my friends—five-foot-five, only an inch shorter than he was—and he liked to have me walk beside him, on his good side, and to tease me about it only being a matter of months before he’d be looking up to me. He kept seven or eight different composition books in a black briefcase, and at each stop he wrote things down in one of the books. In the afternoons or evenings he worked at the breakfront in the living room, transforming his notes from pencil to ink. He showed me how he had the name of each one of Abe’s clients printed out at the top of a different page, along with the person’s address and phone number. Below, in neat columns, he wrote in the date of each transaction, how much money the person bet, and if the person won or lost. For cross-reference he kept separate books for each kind of bet people made: one book each for baseball, basketball, football, boxing, horse racing, and the numbers.

He explained to me how the numbers worked—that for a nickel or a dime or a dollar you could bet on any number from 0 to 999. He opened the sports pages in the Journal-American and showed me how the number of the day was taken from the pari-mutuel bets at the racetracks. If the winning horses of the first three races paid a total of $347.67, and those of the first five races paid $462.78, and of the first seven $981.64, you’d take the third digit from each total and you’d have your lucky number. My father was very patient while he explained things to me. If you won, you got paid at a 600-to-1 rate—600 dollars for every dollar, 30 dollars for a nickel. When I asked if he’d let me bet some of my own money, instead of answering he replied that a lot of the Negroes and Puerto Ricans and some of the Irish and Italians bet the numbers a lot, and he taught me about odds—how they were 999 to I against picking the right number, while the payoff itself was only 600 to 1. In addition, he said, there was no control—no way to use your experience and your knowledge, no way to lower the odds in your favor. Jewish men didn’t bet on the numbers much, he stated when he was done explaining, and that ended the discussion.

He also worked with a set of buff-yellow legal-size pads that had crisscrossing brown and green lines, like those on graph paper. He kept the pads in a gray metal box behind the hats in the foyer closet on a shelf above the coats, and once a month, at night, he would put the pads into his briefcase and take them to Abe’s apartment.

There were four compartments inside his briefcase, and at every stop, in addition to writing things down in his notebooks, he would collect envelopes. None of the envelopes had money in them. My father said he never knew who collected the money and paid off the winners and that he was just as happy not to know, that he was safer that way. The envelopes were filled with slips of paper on which people wrote things, or sometimes my father wrote things for them, and before he left each place he would lick the flap of the envelope, seal it, glance at his wrist-watch, then write the place, date, and time on the outside, sign his initials, and put the envelope into his briefcase. “Now you’re all set,” he would say, rapping the side of his briefcase with his knuckles. And then—this surprised me the first time he did it—he would put his arm around me, draw me close to him, and add, “And all I can wish for you is that your luck should be as good as mine, right?”

It made me happy to see how much people liked my father. He made stops at forty-three different places on his route—luncheonettes, barber shops, clothing stores, candy stores, service stations, beauty parlors, bowling alleys, hat stores, stationery stores—and in almost every one of them, even if the people had been losing money steadily, they always brightened up when he walked in. They never seemed to hold their bad luck against him and if they had a big win they would sometimes tip him a few dollars.

Our last stop of the day was back at Church Avenue, next to Erasmus Hall High School, to a set of four rooms on the third floor of an office building. The front was the real estate office that Abe ran for Mr. Roth-enberg—Mr. Rothenberg owned a few apartment houses, a small construction company and three restaurants—and in the other three rooms there were lots of telephones and blackboards, with men calling out numbers to one another, and even though a few of them stopped their work and made a fuss over me because I was Abe’s nephew—they called me the Prince—my father didn’t like going there. He didn’t like going into the restaurants Mr. Rothenberg owned either. In the restaurants, I knew, after the last customer had gone and the shades were drawn, Abe’s men would just keep punching the cash register. This, and paying the construction company for renovations on the apartment houses that never got made, was how they made all the gambling income seem legitimate.

After the first few times we went to Abe’s office, my father would have me wait downstairs in front of Bickford’s cafeteria. He’d go upstairs by himself, and when he returned, unless they had errands for him—sometimes he’d have to deliver large sealed envelopes to other offices, in Brooklyn or Manhattan—he’d be free for the rest of the day.

Then we’d go out for lunch, and that was my favorite part of the day. Usually we’d eat either at Garfield’s—the big cafeteria at the corner of Church and Flatbush, which I always thought of as being the center of our neighborhood, where everybody met—or, more often, at one of the luncheonettes where he was the collection man. Until that time I’d hardly ever eaten in a restaurant, and it made me feel very grown up to sit at a table across from my father, the waitress standing there with a pad in her hand, my father saying to me, the way he always did, “Well, what’ll it be today, Davey? I want you to order anything you want, you understand? Anything at all.” He liked to tease the waitresses. Sometimes he’d take a waitress’s hand just as she was about to leave and ask her if she made home deliveries—he’d explain about my mother being in California—and the waitress would laugh and tell him not to be fresh.

I liked eating in restaurants, yet no matter where we ate I almost always ordered the same thing: a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich with french fries, a vanilla-Coke, and either lemon meringue pie or a hot fudge sundae for dessert. I loved the way the grilled cheese sandwich tasted from being pressed down hard on the grill, the odors of hamburgers and sausage and bacon and onions cooked into the bread, the cheese and tomato melted into one another, and I loved the way my father would always say, “He’s some kid, my boy—you offer him the whole menu and he winds up choosing the same thing every time. He’s one steady kid, my boy—a guy you can count on, right?”

After we were done eating, if he didn’t have any errands we would stay on in the luncheonette for an hour or two and I would make sketches of some of the people—waitresses or cooks or owners or one of the regulars—and when everybody crowded around and patted my father on the back and told him how talented I was, he would glow.

One afternoon when we’d finished lunch early and were walking back home along Church Avenue—my mother and Abe had been gone for more than two weeks and she had written that they might not start back until mid-August, that Abe had to take care of some business for Mr. Rothenberg in Las Vegas—some of my friends called me from inside the Holy Cross schoolyard to come in and play with them. Tony Cremona was there, and for a second, knowing that part of the reason Abe was staying away was because there’d been some threats from Fasalino’s organization, I wondered if it would seem disloyal to my uncle to play ball with Tony. But when Tony called to me, my father smiled.

“You go enjoy yourself,” he said.

I went in and started shooting with the guys—they were between games—and when we were lining up at the foul line to shoot for new sides, I noticed that my father had entered the schoolyard and was leaning against the fence. His jacket and tie were off, his shirt sleeves rolled up.

“Can an old man get a few shots?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

He bounced the ball on the concrete a few times, using both hands the way the girls did at school. I cringed. He stood to the side of the basket, about twenty feet away, his cigarette stuck in the corner of his, mouth, cocked his head to one side, took a step and a half, and shot the ball with two hands, using an old fashioned set-shot with a lot of backspin, but letting the ball go more from his waist than from his chest. The ball smashed off the backboard without even touching the rim.

“C’mon. C’mon,” he said, gesturing impatiently. “I gotta get the right angle.”

Tony tossed the ball to him and he lunged for it too soon, so that it hit him in the chin. He bounced it a few times, tilted his head, shot again. The ball zoomed toward the backboard in a straight line and this time it went right through the hoop. I was amazed. He smiled and took two steps backwards. “C’mon, c’mon,” he called. “Gimme.” I tossed the ball to him. He caught it, shot again, his right foot going up in the air backwards, almost as if he were skipping. The ball rattled the metal backboard and fell through the hoop again. I couldn’t believe it.

He started going around in a circle, from the right side to the left, the way we did when we played Around-the-World, and he made eleven shots in a row before he missed, all line drives.

“Not bad for an old man, huh?” he said. “Can I shoot or can I shoot? You answer me that.”

Behind his glasses, enormous magnified droplets of sweat dripped down along either side of his nose. Under his armpits his shirt was soaked. He waited a few seconds, listening to my friends tell him how great he was and asking him what teams he’d played for when he was young, but instead of answering he just looked at me, smiled, and repeated what he’d said before. “Can I shoot or can I shoot?” He told me to have a good time but not to come home too late because he had a surprise for me.

When we were done playing, Tony asked me to go to his house with him. He said he had a surprise for me too and that there was still plenty of time until supper. We walked up Church Avenue and then along New York Avenue to the Italian section on the other side of Linden Boulevard, and I felt a little nervous, being in Mr. Fasalino’s territory. But I told myself to act the way Abe acted—as if nothing were the matter and we were all at peace with one another. If you acted as if something were so, Abe said, sometimes everyone would believe it was so.

I liked being with Tony. He had straight, sandy-colored hair that fell over his forehead and into his eyes, and just before he asked a question he always gave a flick to his head that made the hair flap back on top of his head. He had small, sharp features and a smile that seemed to slant the same way his hair did, and sometimes he’d tease me about how, because of my dark curls, I looked more like a Wop than he did. While we walked and he asked me things I explained about how my father was blind in one eye since he was a kid and had almost no vision in the other and Tony agreed with me that if my father had had two normal eyes he would probably have been good enough to make it in the pros. Tony said that his priest explained to him how if you were a good person God made up for things—if you lost a leg, God might give you strong hands, or if you had rotten teeth, say, He might give you beautiful hair, or if you lost an eye He could give you good hearing, and when we came to Tony’s street we talked about athletes who’d had diseases when they were young or who got wounded in the war, and of how they’d overcome their handicaps. We talked about guys like Monty Stratton, who pitched for the White Sox with a wooden leg, and Lou Brissie, the Athletics pitcher, who had a steel plate in his head from the time he got hit while chucking hand grenades into a Japanese bunker, and Three-Finger Mordecai Brown and his great fork ball, and Ed Head of the Dodgers, who was wounded on the beach at Okinawa and had switched from being a right-handed pitcher before the war to a lefty after the war, and Pete Gray, the one-armed outfielder who’d played for the St. Louis Browns.

When we were done discussing ball players and were at Tony’s house—it was a small two-story private house with a porch and a green roof and a big garage and lots of pictures of Jesus and Mary on the walls—I repeated things my father said about President Roosevelt and how he was the greatest president our country ever had even though he’d had polio as a kid, and when I talked about how Roosevelt had worked like a maniac, swimming and exercising, and about how terrible it was that he hadn’t lived to see the Japanese and Nazis surrender, I got tears in my eyes the way my father did when he talked about him.

Tony asked if I’d ever drawn a picture of Roosevelt and I said I hadn’t. Then he took me to his basement, and from a box under his workbench—Tony was good with tools and could make benches and birdhouses and doorstops and things—he took out a big package and handed it to me. Inside were five packages of different kinds of drawing paper: nice thick creamy white paper made from rags—the kind I’d look at in the art store but couldn’t afford to buy.

“I figured a guy who could draw like you should have quality merchandise to work with,” he said.

“How’d you get it?”

“I got my ways, you know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Ah. C’mon, Davey,” he said. “Things fall off trucks sometimes, right? Only you gotta be there at the right time, that’s all.”

I said I had to get home to see what my father’s surprise was and he said that the paper wasn’t the real surprise. The real surprise was out in the garage.

“C’mon,” he said, and I followed him up from the cellar. The side door of his garage was locked with a combination lock, and when he had rolled the tumblers and opened it and turned the light on inside, he motioned me in.

“Take a gander, Davey. You take a good long gander.”

I stepped inside and gasped. The garage was filled with dozens of pinball machines, soda machines, candy machines, and juke boxes, all new and shining.

“Jesus!” I said.

“That ain’t all.”

He led me past the machines to the back, to a corner where there were still a lot of oil-soaked rags and sawdust and nuts and bolts and pieces of metal. He pushed aside a few window screens, and came up with a little machine that looked something like my mother’s meat grinder, except that where you would put the meat in, the opening was narrower, like a slot for letters.

“Watch this,” Tony said.

He reached up to one of the rafters, pulled down a sheet of thin metal, fed it into the machine, cranked the handle, and suddenly little round pieces of metal were dropping to the floor. Then he took a quarter out of his pocket, showed me that the slugs of metal were the same size as the quarter.

“Listen,” he said. “I ain’t shown this to nobody else and if my old man knew he’d kill me, but I figure you’re a guy I can trust, right?”

“Sure.”

“You got brains, Davey. Everybody knows that. You ain’t gonna be like the rest of us. Me, I’ll probably wind up like my brothers and my old man, running dirty trips for Fasalino and taking a rap once in a while, but you—I got the feeling, even though your old man works for your uncle—that you ain’t gonna wind up as dumb as the rest of us.”

“You’re not dumb,” I said.

“Well, I ain’t smart like you.” He laughed. “You want proof?”

“Sure. Give me proof.”

“The proof is that you’re here and I’m showing you all this stuff my old man got stored for Fasalino.” He grinned and I grinned with him. “I mean, how dumb can a guy be? See those big cartons over there?”

“Yes.”

“Got enough fags in there to keep your old man happy for the rest of his life. They fall out of trucks too, them cigarettes, only they ain’t got their tax stickers on them yet. My brother Victor, that’s his deal, peddling the cigarettes. Phil, he works the juke boxes and pinball machines. And my old man, what’s his racket? He’s the doorman, see? He opens and closes the door for his sons. What a drip!”

I moved back a step. “Why are you showing me this, Tony, if it can get you in trouble?”

“I don’t know. When I saw your old man, and the way you looked down when he started shooting, I just kind of felt like it. Only he surprised you, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah. Let’s face it, Davey. You and me, we got drips for fathers mostly, only your old man might have been better with two eyes, so you can’t blame him completely, and I got these fucking brothers too who like to beat up on me. They found me in here with you, they’d pound the shit out of me till you could hear me in Canarsie. Only what’s the fun of having all this stuff, I say to myself, if you can’t show it to somebody, you know what I mean? C’mon—you and me are gonna have some fun.”

Tony got a paper bag and filled it with the slugs. Then he put the machine back under the screens.

“You’re lucky you ain’t got brothers,” he said when we were walking again, away from his house. “The thing of it is, even if I wanted to be different from them—more like you—they’d fry my ass. They’re bigger than me and when I try to say no to them, all the shit they want me to do, my father sticks up for them, and you know why?”

“No.”

“Glad you asked,” he said, laughing. “Because they pound the shit out of him too, see? They’re bigger than he is and it’s really something—I wish you could be there to watch, to see the way they slap him around sometimes, him whimpering and begging. Nobody would believe it, the way it is in my house sometimes.” He stopped. “Listen. You won’t tell on me then, will you—to Abe or your father?”

“No.”

“Yeah. Good for you, Cremona.” He slapped me on the back. “I figured I could trust you, that you and me could be buddies, no matter what happens in the rest of our lives. I mean, when we’re on the same team in the schoolyard, is there any two guys can beat us? It’s like when I’m about to make a move toward the basket, you always know it ahead of time and get the ball to me. We’re a good team, you and me.”

“Sure.”

“So that’s why I figured I’d choose you to go in partners with me.” He jingled the bag of slugs. “What we do, see, is we go somewhere where they got candy and soda machines, and then we put a slug in, and that way we get ourselves a soda for a nickel and twenty cents change too. Got it?”

“But won’t your father and brothers get mad when they open the machines and find all the slugs?”

“You think I’m some kind of idiot? I know which machines are theirs and which aren’t, and I know which ones are your uncle’s. What we do is we work different territories. C’mon.”

So Tony and I got on the subway at Church Avenue, rode to Atlantic, and went into the big station there, where people took the trains out to the racetracks and Long Island. Then we started in on the different machines, trying to act as nonchalant as we could. Tony let me put the first slug in. A cup dropped down and filled with Coke, and four nickels came spitting out of the change compartment. I drank the soda and put the nickels in my pocket. Tony put a slug in and the same thing happened for him, and then we did it again—I couldn’t believe it—and when we got twenty nickels each we went to a change booth and asked the woman there to give us dollar bills for our nickels, and then we ran out of the station, laughing like crazy and pounding each other on the back and telling each other what a great team we made! We walked a few blocks, went down into another train station—Tony said it was best to use train stations because of the noise and how people were coming and going and not hanging around—and we filled our pockets with change and our mouths with soda and food: Clark bars and Oh Henry bars and Baby Ruths.

“Jesus,” I said, banging on my belly. “What if my father wants to take me to a restaurant?”

“Then you stick your finger down your throat first and barf.”

“Like the Romans, right?”

“Yeah. Only you come to my house and do it all over my brothers, okay?”

It was still light out when we’d used up all our slugs, so we decided to walk off our eating by heading back along Flatbush Avenue and cutting left at Parkside. It surprised me that Tony could talk so easily about trusting me, about how I was the only guy at school he considered a friend. During recess sometimes he would get one of the Italian girls up against a car fender outside the schoolyard and everybody would yell to come and see, that Tony Cremona had his finger right up somebody’s pussy, and we would all come running. It would be true that he was fingering one of the tough Italian girls, but Tony confessed that he only did it because he felt he had to, because it was the kind of thing his brothers bragged about having done when they were his age and that if they didn’t hear he was doing it too they would knock him around even more. In the classroom he was quiet in the same way I was, and even though he didn’t get the best grades, you could tell from the brightness of his eyes—the way he listened to things—that he was a lot smarter than he let on.

When we got to the corner of Nostrand and Linden—we stopped at his house to pick up my drawing paper—we separated. I told Tony that I’d hide the money and tell my father I found the paper next to a trash can near the art store. Tony said he hoped we could do more things together in the fall when school started. He said we could use the money from the slugs to go downtown to movies at the Paramount or the Fox or the Albee. We could pick up girls together if we wanted and sit in the balcony and neck, or we could go for walks in the park. He figured that if he was with a guy like me he could meet girls with more class. I thanked him again for the paper and for showing me his father’s garage.

“Yeah, we’re kind of like blood brothers now, I guess, don’t you think? I mean, like in the movies when the white guy and the Indian slit their wrists and cross them and mix the blood, except that instead of us cutting our wrists, what’s gonna keep our secret bond is that if either of us tells on the other we’re gonna get our wrists slit, right?”

“I suppose,” I said, and when I did he laughed and pounded me on the back and told me that I was all right in his book, he could tell it from the way I didn’t hesitate about going to his house, even though we both knew it might make Abe or my father angry if they found out. “You got real courage, Davey,” he said then. “That’s why I’m glad I was smart enough to choose you to be my friend. I mean, we’re in the same boat, you and me—except the boats are separate, right?”

“I suppose.”

He took out his roll of dollar bills. “Wow!” he said. “We really did it, you and me, didn’t we? We really did it, partner!”

“We really did it.”

“You wanna do it again soon, now that you lost your cherry and we got the jitters out of us? My old man, what he does, see, is he goes into the city and sells bags of the stuff in kangarooland to spics and niggers so they can do what we did, but if he found out I was doing it, he’d cream my ass. You watch your own ass, partner. With Abe and Fasalino and my brothers and all, we gotta make like nothing happened, right? Like we hardly know each other, see—like we maybe just like to play ball together sometimes on account of we go to the same school and we’re the two best athletes there.”

I was scared my father would ask me where I’d been and why I was late and how I’d gotten the new drawing paper, but instead he just smiled when I got home and handed me an envelope. Inside were two box-seat tickets to the Dodger-Giant game that night—Abe had left them for us—and I threw my arms around my father’s neck and hugged him.

During the game my father bought me everything I wanted—a program and a yearbook and a pennant and hot dogs and a Dodger hat—and when Jackie Robinson doubled in the bottom of the ninth to drive in the winning run, it made the day seem perfect. It was Jackie’s rookie year with the Dodgers and he was playing first base and leading the league in stolen bases. On the way home, for the first time I could remember, my father was willing to go over the game with me, inning by inning. He teased me about how articulate I was when I wanted to be and how I’d make a good lawyer someday—a fine public speaker—if that was my choice, and how he would give my mother a full report so that she’d stop calling me her silent one. We held hands too, which we hadn’t done for a long time, and I liked the way his skin felt against mine—soft in the middle, but hard and calloused along the edges from all the years of breaking off twine.

We stopped at Carsten’s, on Flatbush Avenue, for ice cream sodas, and when he gave me a small speech about democracy and how terrific he thought it was that the Dodgers were the first team in baseball to hire a black man, I almost told him how proud it made me feel too, that Jackie was a Dodger. But I was afraid that if he knew how much I cared about Jackie—how scared I’d been that Jackie might have a hard time under all the pressure and get sent back to the minors—he might use it against me sometime later on, when things weren’t going so well for the two of us and my mother was home again.

The air was nice and cool when we left, and we talked all the way to our block about the Dodgers, with me asking him questions about the crazy players he’d seen play for them in the twenties and thirties—Babe Herman and Casey Stengel and Van Lingle Mungo and Dazzy Vance. In front of our building two men stepped out from behind a parked car. One of them was a thin black man wearing sunglasses and a flowered yellow shirt. The other man was fat and wore a dark double-breasted wool suit.

“Mr. Voloshin?” the fat man asked. “Mr. Solomon Voloshin?”

“That’s my name.”

“And this is your son David, yes?”

My father didn’t answer, and the fat man smiled and reached toward me. I pulled back and stared hard into his face so that I could memorize his features.

“He’s a nice-looking boy. Looks a little like his uncle, wouldn’t you say? You must care a lot about him, Mr. Voloshin. I got sons too. Three boys. So believe me when I tell you that you yourself don’t got a thing to worry about. I ain’t here to make no trouble. I’m only here to say that if you get word from your brother-in-law you tell him that maybe he shouldn’t come home. That maybe he should consider settling in California.” He laughed. “They got no winters in California, I hear, so it should be much better for his health out there. Okay, Mr. Voloshin? I can count on you to deliver the message?”

“Get out of our way,” my father said. “Get out of our way, do you hear me? You just get out of our way.”

The black man stepped forward, but the fat man put a hand on the black man’s arm.

“I told you once, Mr. Voloshin. I ain’t here to make no trouble. I’m just a messenger making a delivery, yes?” He laughed again. “You make deliveries. I make deliveries. We all make deliveries. So we should understand one another, yes?”

“Come on, Davey,” my father said, and he pulled me with him. I held back a bit, trying to see through the black man’s sunglasses.

“You’ll deliver my message? You’ll tell your brother-in-law that Mr. Fasalino wishes him a long and happy life?”

My father tried to get the key to our building out of his pocket, but his hand was shaking so much he couldn’t grab onto it. He jerked his hand away angrily and his key ring and coins spilled out. I got down on my knees and started picking up the change. I looked back at the two men and whispered to my father, asked him if he wanted me to ring Beau Jack’s bell. My father’s hands were shaking so much now that I knew he wouldn’t be able to hold onto anything, so when I found the right key I put it into the lock myself.

My father stepped into the lobby and grabbed me, his nails digging into my muscle, above the elbow. Then, with the door still open, he started screaming with all his might.

“If you goons touch a hair on my boy’s head I’ll kill you, do you hear? Do you hear me? Do you?”

The black man started toward us and I helped my father shove the door closed. The lock clicked. My father kept screaming, his hands in the air, his fists opening and closing the way they did sometimes when he argued with my mother.

“You’re scum of the earth, that’s what you are! Do you hear me? You ain’t nothing but lousy scum of the earth! You ain’t nothing but dumb goons. You ain’t nothing but scum of the earth! Scum of the earth is what you are!”

The black man’s nose was squashed flat against the glass. I heard I doors opening behind us, people shouting at my father.

“Come on!” I said.

He stopped screaming. He looked dazed.

“What?”

“Just come on. Don’t be a fool, okay? Just come on before they get in after us. All they gotta do is ring and get somebody to buzz the door open.”

“Of course.”

He let me lead him up the stairs. I opened the door, locked it behind us, took my father with me into the kitchen.

“Should I call the police?” I asked.

“Don’t do nothing.”

He leaned on the sink with one hand, breathing hard, and I was afraid he was going to faint. His skin was a pale ivory white. He looked as old as some of the men in my grandfather’s home.

“I could call Aunt Lillian,” I offered. “She’d know what to do. Abe must have left her instructions.”

He sat and took off his glasses. Without them he looked young and helpless again, the way he did in the wedding picture my mother kept on her vanity table. I brought him a glass of water and he sipped it, bending over, tilting the glass toward his lips. The skin around his eyes was puffy, as if it had absorbed warm water, and the lid on his bad eye hung down almost all the way, the dead eyeball floating toward the outside corner.

I tried to figure out what I would do if he had a heart attack. I imagined lifting him, laying him out gently on the floor, covering him with blankets, telephoning for help. I thought of how I’d felt, lying on the dirt behind the hedges in front of our building, my eyes closed, while my friends talked about my wounds, about field surgery, about plastic land mines. I thought of how wonderful it was when they caressed my forehead with their cool hands and put an imaginary last cigarette in my mouth. I was glad Mr. Fasalino hadn’t used Tony’s father as his messenger this time.

My father licked his lips and moaned. He held his eyeglasses in his right hand now. I reached across, flattened his palm, took the glasses away from him. I thought of running upstairs to Stevey Komisarik’s apartment and getting his father to come and give my father an injection. Stevey’s father was a dentist and Stevey had once shown me the black emergency bag in their hall closet. I saw myself telephoning to California. If my mother answered I would ask her to put Abe on so I could tell him and he could break the news to her. I saw myself racing down the staircase, jumping five or six steps at each landing, swinging around the turns, knocking on Beau Jack’s door and taking him back upstairs with me. Beau Jack would know what to do. During the first World War he had been stationed in France with an all-Negro unit, digging up American soldiers and burying them again.

“See?” my father said. “Do you see now? Now do you see?”

“Are you all right?”

He pressed against the inside corners of his eyes with thumb and forefinger. He reached across to me with his other hand.

“Give me my glasses.”

He held his glasses up to the light, then stuck the right lens into his mouth, fogged it, wiped it clean with his handkerchief.

“I was scared,” I said.

“Sure you were—bums like that—who knows what they wouldn’t do? Even for women and children they got no feelings.”

“I mean I was scared for you when you were shaking so much. When you got all pale.”

“Come,” he said.

I followed him to the living room. He took a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass from the side cabinet of the breakfront. He drank the whiskey in one swallow.

“You want a taste?” he said. “You’re okay?”

“I’m okay.”

The telephone rang.

“Don’t answer it. It’s those bums. But they won’t get nowhere with me.”

I tried to smile. “You really screamed at them,” I said.

“I screamed at them.”

“I mean, I never thought you…” I stopped, shrugged. “I don’t know.”

He cocked his head to the side and sniffed in.

“You mean you didn’t think your old man had it in him to stand up to them, right?”

“I guess. I don’t know. You were screaming like a maniac.”

“I wouldn’t say I wasn’t scared,” he said. “But that don’t mean I gotta let bums like that run my life, do you see?” He sat down in his red easy chair, under the window. He stared at me, sucking on the right corner of his lower lip the way he did when he was shooting set shots. His voice was stronger. “So listen. I’ve been wanting you to know something, okay? That what I used to say about your uncle when he was overseas, I want you to know that I changed my opinion. That first night he got home, didn’t I say that the war changed him, that he was different?”

“Yes.”

The telephone rang again and we sat there and waited until, after sixteen rings, it stopped. In my head I made up pictures of Abe dying in front of my building, of him saying to me that it was so crazy, wasn’t it, to have lived through the war in Europe in order to die in the streets of Brooklyn.

“If not for your uncle Abe, do you see the kind of trash that would take over the neighborhood? Do you see? People don’t want to know how bad it would be if Abe surrendered and let them muscle into his territory. They don’t know how good they got it.”

“Does Abe hurt people?”

“What—?”

“At school sometimes I hear stories that he hurts people.”

“Does Abe hurt people.”

My father rubbed his chin, pretending that he was trying to figure out my question.

“All right,” he said. “Listen. I can honestly say to you that to the best of my knowledge Abe himself has never laid a hand on anybody. Not counting Lillian and Sheila, I mean, and what he had to do in the Army.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to answer me. I was just wondering, is all.”

“You got a right to know these things, Davey. Only let me ask you a question. Did you get a look at that fat Italian with the shvoogie behind him? And the shvoogie with a knife or a razor in his pocket probably? Sure.” He pointed his cigarette at me. “That’s the kind of stuff they use, those types. Rough stuff is all they know. What’s so terrible if people make a few bets? Who gets hurt? When the state of New York gyps people at the track, that’s legal, but when a hardworking fellow like Abe, who risked his life for his country, gives people honest odds, that’s illegal. Why? You answer me that, sonny boy, and you’re a genius. And Abe ain’t no loan shark either, like he could be if he wanted, do you hear me?”

I told him I heard. I could tell he was pleased now, to have me for an audience, and he kept talking about Abe and how Abe let people have credit when they owed him money and found jobs for them when they couldn’t make ends meet. I wondered if the fat Italian was related to Tony’s family. I imagined myself asleep, the windows open, a breeze coming through, the sheet to my chin. I reminded myself to put my baseball bat under my bed and I imagined what I would do if somebody tried to crawl into my room from the fire escape. Would I lie still until he was past me, and then attack? What if he had a gun or a knife? What if there was more than one person?

“They won’t let you live,” my father was saying. “Sure. I don’t remember what the Black Hand did, the way Momma and Poppa were frightened so they would hardly leave the house? I don’t remember the way those momzers used to walk around the neighborhood like they owned us? So what’s Abe’s big crime—that he saved us from being lamp shades so that now their bums should tell him where he can and can’t live?”

“What’s the Black Hand?”

“Murderers,” he said. “Gangsters. When I was your age, if you got a note in your mailbox with a black hand on it, it meant you were dead.”

“Did anyone you know ever get a note?”

“Sure. The Italians and the Jews, we lived near each other then, first on the Lower East Side, then when we came to Brooklyn, in East New York. Like now.”

“Did anyone you know get killed?”

“Stop with the questions. Always the questions, this one. You just listen to what I’m saying, do you hear me? People like that with no education, they don’t value life the way we do.” He tapped the side of his head. “That’s why they’re so scared of Abe and Mr. Rothenberg. They know Abe don’t gotta use rough stuff the way they do. If all you got is muscles and guns, see, then as soon as somebody gets more muscles and guns than you, you’re dead. So why did God give us brains?”

My father didn’t answer his own question. He walked from one side of the room to the other, as if he didn’t know where he was, and when he looked at me again after a while, he seemed surprised to find me there. He bent down, kissed me on the forehead.

“It’s late. You should get some sleep. We’ll talk more in the morning if you want. Only you don’t ever tell your mother about what happened tonight, all right? You just let that be something between the two of us.”

My mother came home from California during the last week of August, and from the moment she walked through the door all she could talk about was how wonderful California was. In California she had picked lemons and oranges right off the trees; in California the air was clean and there were no winters; in California Abe had found a job for my father that would enable us to move there and buy a home of our own.

We were in the middle of a broiling heat wave and the air hung on our bodies, so damp and heavy that I felt as if it was falling through my skin and muscles, softening my bones. My mother moved around the bedroom in slow motion, unpacking, putting things away in drawers. She had on nothing but a brassiere and panties—her skin was brown and shiny, glistening with sweat—and each time she passed the open window my father yelled at her that she was giving the neighbors a free show. She yelled that she didn’t care, that she couldn’t wait to get out of this stinking city, that she couldn’t wait to get to California where a human being could breathe. Her lips were tingling already—she hadn’t had a herpes once during the six weeks in California, she said—and she began rubbing them with ice cubes and crushed aspirin. I thought of the jars our science teacher kept at school, alcohol and chicken bones in them, and of how soft the bones would get, so that you could bend them.

My father sat on the edge of the bed, hunched over. Gray hairs curled around the nipples of his breasts. Sweat slid down his face and neck, ran along the folds of his stomach. My mother explained to me how easy the job would be, how all my father would have to do would be to stand in a booth all day and give out keys to cars. He would be a parking lot attendant in downtown Los Angeles. In hot weather the booth would be air-conditioned.

“But do I got a brain or do I got a brain?” my father asked. He said that to spend the rest of his life in a booth giving out keys would be like moving into a coffin.

My mother laughed, said we were living in hell already, so what was the difference.

“If it’s so wonderful out there, let Abe go first,” my father said. “Sure. And if he loses his connections and we get stranded out there, who’s gonna get me another job? You answer me that. Your big-shot brother fills your head up with his lousy dreams, but I’m the one who gets left to pay for them.”

“And what about the boy? What kind of life is there for him if we stay here? Can you answer that?” My mother turned to me. “You wanna be like him, Davey? Come on and answer me. You wanna grow up to be a nothing like your father, then you just go on and take lessons from him. If Abe didn’t take care of him, he wouldn’t have a pot to piss in and you wouldn’t have clothes on your back, him and all his talk about brains. Where’d his brain ever get us?”

“You’re hot and bothered,” my father said. “You should of waited to come home until after the heat wave, is what I think. But I’ll tell you what—how about a nice movie, where it’s air-conditioned, all three of us together? They got a good double feature at the Granada and maybe by the time it’s out things’ll be cooled off and we’ll all feel better.”

He stood and tried to put his arms around her. She pushed him away, pulled a stack of postcards from her suitcase, and came toward me.

“Let Momma show you how beautiful it is, Davey! Let Momma show you, so you’ll see the new life you can have, with new friends and fresh fruit and palm trees and beaches…”

“I gotta go,” I said. “I promised the guys I’d meet them downstairs.”

“Hey—don’t you be walking away from your mother like that!” my father shouted at me. “You get back in here.”

“Leave him be, Sol.”

“Leave him be? Is that fresh or is that fresh, to walk out on you when you’re in the middle of talking to him?”

Downstairs people were sitting on chairs, listening to radios, cooling themselves with paper fans. Rosie sat on a wooden stool, her skirt up over her knees, her feet in a bucket of ice.

On Rogers Avenue the older kids were leaning against cars. I saw Sheila necking with a guy. She wore red shorts and a green halter, and I couldn’t understand how she could let a guy’s body press against hers in such sticky weather. I turned right on Linden Boulevard, ducked down the alleyway between the first two apartment houses, thinking I might find some of my friends out back in the courtyard. It was usually I cooler there at night, where there had been grass and shadows all day long.

“Hey Davey. C’mere a minute—that’s you, right?”

Avie Gornik was standing in the doorway to the cellar, holding a bowl.

“You wanna suck on some ice chips? I got plenty.”

I reached into the bowl and took some chips.

“Your uncle got back today, yeah?”

“Yes. But I haven’t seen him yet.”

“Yeah. Me neither. He got lots on his mind these days. Things got out of hand some while he was gone, but you know all about that, right?”

“No.”

“I thought you did. I mean, you and the Cremona kid being such buddies. He didn’t tell you that we lost two trucks?” He laughed. “I mean, if you think about it, it ain’t easy, to lose a truck. You got no idea where we could find what was in the truck?”

“No.”

He patted me on the shoulder. “You’re okay, Davey. I mean, you’re like Abe—you got so much ice water in your veins you don’t need old Avie’s chips. Only you should be careful who your friends are, get what I mean? You wouldn’t want your uncle to get mad on you—to know things you do when he ain’t here. You get my drift?”

“No.”

Avie leaned toward me and I could make out his features now. He looked as old as his mother—big-nosed and thick-lipped and pasty-skinned, with small, mean eyes set too close together. He wore a sleeveless undershirt like the kind my father used.

“So tell me—where you going down here at night?”

“Nowhere. Just looking for my friends.”

“They ain’t here, but listen. I been hoping to meet you sometime, you know what I mean? Not because of the trouble we got, which ain’t your fault—just some of our boys seem to trust some of their boys when they should know better—but because I been hearing a lot about you from your friends.”

I sucked on the chips, let the freezing water glide down the back of my tongue.

“You know what all your friends say? They say you got a real big cock—that you got the biggest cock of all the guys your age.”

“I gotta get going.”

“Let me ask you a question first.” He held my arm. “When you grow up, what are you gonna be—a big shot like your uncle or a little pipsqueak like your father?”

I turned to walk away—it was too hot for trouble—but he grabbed onto the back of my neck and forced me around. He laughed at me, his teeth yellow like old lamb bones.

“Ah, don’t get mad on me, Davey. I didn’t mean nothing. Your old man’s okay. He don’t bother nobody, I guess. Only c’mere a minute with me where nobody can see us, yeah?” I didn’t move. “Hey—you ain’t scared of me, are you?”

“No.”

“Sure. I mean, why should a big kid like you be scared of an old fart like me, works for your uncle? I mean, if I did anything bad to you, I’d be in big trouble, right?”

“I suppose.”

“I knew your uncle when he was in diapers, right? I knew his old man and his old lady.” He made a sucking noise with his lips. “Ah, the old lady was really a knockout. He ever tell you about her?”

“She died before I was born.”

“All the men had the hots for her. All them fancy clothes and fur coats.”

He pushed the cellar door open with his shoulder.

“C’mon in with me—it’s real nice and cool in here. It’s always cooler where it’s been dark all day, so you come on inside, yeah?”

He kept pressure on the back of my neck with his thumb and forefinger. I could smell the damp coal dust, the garbage cans full of winter ashes.

“Now listen. If you don’t trust old Avie, you just let me know, only I figured from what your friends told me that you got the most courage of them all, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“This’ll only take a couple of minutes, so if you don’t want to do it, you say so now.”

“Do what?”

“All I want is to see if the guys are right, if your little fire engine is really bigger than theirs. They all showed me theirs—to brag, yeah?—but if you wanna be left out, that’s okay by me. Only I figured a big kid like you ain’t scared of much.” He was unbuttoning my fly. “I mean, anytime you want me to stop, all you gotta do is say the word.”

He let go of my neck, but I didn’t move.

“Let me ask you something. You do it yourself yet?” He reached inside my shorts and touched my penis very lightly, as if to see if it was there. “Hey, that’s nice—I mean, your friends all bragged to me that they do it to themselves already fifteen or sixteen times a day, only between you and me, Davey, they ain’t big enough yet. They just wanna impress people, you know what I mean?”

He started stroking my penis and what surprised me was that the huskier his voice got, the more gently he touched me.

“Hey, I think your friends were right, did you know that? For a kid your age you got a terrific pecker, Davey. I mean, how old are you already? You’re gonna make the ladies very happy someday, just like your uncle does. So how old did you say you were?”

“Twelve. I’ll be thirteen in September, after school starts.”

“Oh yeah? Thirteen, huh? I would of figured fourteen or fifteen from your size. See how nice and hard it’s getting? That feels good, don’t it? I mean, if you don’t trust old Avie, you just say the word and I’ll stop, yeah? All you gotta do is say the word.”

The cellar was pitch black, no light leaking in, and in the blackness he kept rubbing me and talking to me, telling me that if I didn’t beat my meat yet I should take a tip from him and not start, because once you started you had to do it all the time, every few hours. In my head I saw myself running away and I saw him falling on top of me before I could get the cellar door open. He was twisting my arms back behind me and spreading my fingers apart and breaking them, cracking them one at a time with his bare hands. I’d seen a photo of an artist once who had so much pain in his hands that he strapped them to boards so that he could keep painting. I thought of the men in my grandfather’s home, lying on their beds, the lights out. I wondered if anybody had ever done this to Tony and what his brothers would do to him if they found out. I felt sick. I wanted to go home. Avie scooped up ice chips, moaned, and then started talking again.

“You really like your uncle, don’t you, Davey? I mean, he’s the big man, yeah? He’s the really big man…the big man….”

If I wanted a thrill my friends didn’t know about I should do what he did, he said—that when I felt the stuff about to explode I should shove ice chips under my little acorns. He opened the door, told me it was best for us to leave separately. He told me my erection would go down by itself in a few minutes and that I shouldn’t say anything to my friends about me being the biggest because it would only make them jealous.

“Your uncle was big like you when he was your age.” He held me by the shoulder. “Listen. You don’t believe old Avie, you ask your uncle sometime about how he did the same thing with me when he was your age. He liked it too.”

You’re a liar, I wanted to shout. You’re a dirty liar! I tightened all the muscles in my face and neck and chest, to make sure tears wouldn’t come bursting forth, and from the way he forced a laugh I knew it bothered him that I wouldn’t show him how angry I was.

“Here,” he said, shoving coins into my hand and crunching my fist closed around them. “You go treat yourself to a movie or a malted or something, yeah? You’re okay, Davey. I mean, you’re a real man now, you know what I mean?”

In the morning, I was the first one awake. There were no sounds in my parents’ room or from the courtyard below or from the other buildings. I took out my paper and pencils and drawing board and sat in front of my window and stared at the apartment house across the way. The world was wonderfully quiet and still, and I felt again what I’d often felt when I was younger—that in the room next to mine my parents were lying in the bed, dead. For miles and miles, in every direction, there was no sound because all living things were dead. I was the only person left alive in the whole world, and that feeling—of being able to live inside total silence in a world where nobody would talk to me or want things from me or do things to me, where people could never be mean to one another again—comforted me.

My mother was right. I loved to stare, and the longer I stared, the more I saw. A warm breeze came in across the fire escape. I heard sparrows. I saw pigeons lift silently into the air from the roofs of apartment buildings. If I strained, I could make myself hear cars and trucks in the distance.

Why did I love the face of the building across from mine so much? In my drawing there was no sky, no ground, no sidewalk. There were no birds, no dogs, no cats, no people. Nothing moved, nothing lived. I concentrated on a section of the building that ran from just above the first floor windows to just below the fifth floor windows, so that all you saw on my paper were bricks and windows and fire escapes—squares and rectangles and diagonals—so that from my drawing there was no way of knowing where the building began and where it ended.

What I wanted was for somebody looking at my drawing to feel he could reach into it and rub his hands across its surfaces, along the iron slats of the fire escapes, the smooth glass of the windows, the pocked clay of the bricks. If you looked at my drawing long enough, I wanted you to be able to feel the difference between each brick, to feel the tiny pebbles caught in the mortar, and I was frightened that I would never be able to, that I would never get it right. I was afraid that no matter how long I stared, or how hard I worked, or how well I learned to draw, I would never be able to make people see what I saw when I looked at the world.

I sat perfectly still, waiting for the sun to rise just a little higher so that, coming from behind, it would use our apartment building to cast a long horizontal shadow across the bottom half of the other building—a line that cut straight through the fourth row of bricks between the second and third stories.

The shadow moved up slowly from the middle of the second-story windows. I let my eyes move from window to window, from apartment to apartment, amazed, as always, by all the different things people kept outside on their sills and fire escapes: flower pots and jars and shoes and bread boxes and toasters and cereal boxes and scatter rugs and brooms and mops and chairs and shower caps and egg cartons and telephones and radios and clothespin bags, litter boxes for cats and small iceboxes for milk and juice, and old farmer-cheese boxes to grow radishes and parsley in, and toys and wigs and underwear and lamps and stacks of newspapers and even enema bags. I left most of these things out of my drawing. I put in a few flower pots and wooden boxes and clothespins. But the clothespins held up no clothing and the flower pots contained no flowers and the wooden boxes had nothing growing in them. I liked sketching in the curtains behind the windows, as if through fog, and then layering the reflections from my own building—bricks and ladders and drainpipes—over that.

When the sun was almost up to where I wanted it, I began working, a piece of blank paper under the right edge of my hand so that as I moved along I wouldn’t smudge things. I used my kneaded eraser, twisting the putty to a fine point to create highlights along the edges of a clothesline that went out from a window on the third story, looping down from its pulley in two long widening lines of pale gray that were cut off by the right edge of the paper.

The heat hung in the air like thin sheets of damp gauze. It was only when my father burst into my room, making my door crash open against my bookcase, that I realized I’d been hearing noises behind me.

“What’s the matter with you, you’re deaf or something? How many times do we gotta call you to get out here?”

He stood in the doorway, hands on hips, his face red. He wore only his underpants, a pair of green-and-red flowered boxer shorts, stained at the fly. I slipped my drawing under the cover of my pad and I put the pad on my desk. I moved deliberately. When I started to pick up my pencils, he grabbed my arm and yanked on it.

“When I say to move, you move, do you hear me? When I call you, you listen to me the first time!”

I jerked my arm free and the pencils went flying. They rolled along the linoleum, clicking. I bent down to collect them. I couldn’t believe how angry I felt. I was ready to burst, to spring at him, to claw at his face with my hands. Could I hold my anger back, the way Jackie Robinson did?

“You don’t touch my drawing,” I said. I moved back, my fist clenched around pencils, and I wondered what I would do, really, if he came at me again. I thought of Tony, watching his brothers beat up their father.

“Oh does that one have a temper!” my mother said. “Sol—get in here and leave the boy alone, okay? We got troubles enough as is.”

I looked past my father and saw Abe. His skin was very brown and smooth. He looked handsomer than he had when he’d left for California.

“Hi uncle Abe,” I said. I felt embarrassed. “I didn’t know you were here.”

“Did you see Sheila last night?”

“Yes.”

I gasped. Abe had pulled me from my room and was holding me up against the living room wall so that my feet were off the floor. “Yes. You say yes to me? That’s all?” His eyes were blazing. “You talk and you talk fast.”

“He’s only a kid,” my mother said. “So listen, darling. You shouldn’t do anything to the boy that you’ll be sorry for later. I love my brother and my husband, but if it’s only my son who wants to be saved, I’ll take the boy. I mean, just because you saved Momma, does that mean I gotta do what you want for the rest of my life? Did I ask you to save her?”

“Shut up.”

Abe set me down, told me to tell him what I knew.

“I saw her down on Rogers Avenue, near where she always hangs out, in front of Lee’s luncheonette.”

“And—”

“I don’t know.” I swallowed hard, to keep from crying. My mother was smiling at me as if she was glad to see Abe hurt me—as if this would prove that she was right about him. Abe let go of my arm. I could hear myself screaming at him that I didn’t know anything, but no words came from my mouth. I wanted to be back in my room. I wanted to be staring at the fire escapes on the apartment building across the way. I wanted to be in the schoolyard with my friends. I wanted to have a different mother and father, to be living some other life than the one that was mine.

“Listen,” my father said. “You tell Abe what you know. What happened is people did things to Sheila last night—she’s home now and she’ll be okay, so you don’t gotta be scared—but Abe is trying to find out who the people are. Do you understand me?”

“No.”

“See?” my mother said. “The boy’s like his mother. He don’t understand none of this stuff.”

“Because he don’t want to understand!” My father came at me, his hand in the air, to slap me. I still had a few pencils in my fist and I let the points press into my thumbs. If you touch me I’ll stab your good eye! I heard myself say. If you lay a single finger on me…

“It’s too bad we didn’t have another child,” my mother said. “Because what I was thinking, Sol, was that even if I couldn’t save Davey, maybe I could have saved his brother or sister when Abe wasn’t looking, one out of two, so at least I wouldn’t come out of this life with nothing. What I was thinking was—”

“Shut up,” Abe said, softly. “Your father is right. Sheila is home, scared but unharmed. Only there’s going to be trouble. Do you understand?”

I started talking. “I saw her when I went downstairs at about nine-thirty. I know it was nine-thirty because Mr. Lipsky had his radio on in front of the house and he was listening to the ‘Lux Radio Theater.’ I heard the commercial. Then I went around the corner and Sheila was where she usually is at night, in front of Lee’s, with her friends. They were leaning against cars and smoking. She had her back against Mr. Waxman’s blue Ford and she was letting a guy neck with her. The guy’s name is Marty Reiss and he’s in a gang called The Flashes and he was there with his friends. He goes to Erasmus with Sheila and he’s on the football team. He plays wingback. He hangs out in the Pigtown section usually, by Empire Boulevard, except he and his gang have been coming over to visit Sheila and her friends at night this summer. They come here looking for guys to beat up and girls to make out with. They don’t fight much if it’s hot. Sometimes they stop you and ask you to loan them money and if you say you don’t have any they grab you and say, ‘Then all I find I keep.’ So I didn’t stop to talk with Sheila and they didn’t bother me. That’s all I know. I came home through the courtyard on Linden Boulevard instead of going back around Rogers Avenue, so I didn’t see her again.”

“See?” my father said. “Didn’t I tell you the boy got a voice when he wants to? Didn’t I say so?”

“I’m sending Sheila and Lillian to the country for a while, for a little rest,” Abe said. “In the meantime I want the three of you to keep out of sight. I’ll have a man posted downstairs. If you need to go to the store, you tell him and he’ll get somebody to go with you. No movies, is that clear? You go nowhere where there are crowds. You stay away from open windows.”

“In this heat?” my mother said. “Thanks a lot. So why did we come back then? Tell me that. Maybe now, my brilliant brother, you’ll tell me why did we have to come back to this stinking city. A goddamn oven is all it is, a goddamn stinking oven for us to bake in.”

“Be quiet, Evie,” Abe said. “I’m not through.”

“Sure,” my mother said, and she slumped down in my father’s chair. “When you’re through you send me a telegram, yeah?” She closed her eyes, reached across her chest with her right hand, let it slip inside her housecoat to touch her left breast the way she did when she was drowsy. Was that where she was sick?

“If you follow my instructions, you’ll be safe.”

My mother leaned forward. “But you promised me,” she said. “Goddamn you, Abe, you promised me! No more rough stuff, Evie, you said. I give you my word. No more rough stuff.” My mother stood and shook her fists at the air. “I’m begging you, Abe—I’m down on my knees except it’s too hot—but in my heart I’m down on my knees and I’m begging you not to start up again. Please. For me, Abe. For Lillian and Sheila. For Davey. Please! Like Poppa used to say—if you touch shit, your own hands smell from it. You’re too good for them, darling. You don’t—”

“What do you mean, start up again?” my father said. “They’re the ones who started, ain’t they? If you don’t stand up to bums like that, they walk all over you. Didn’t Roosevelt do his best to keep peace in the world? But when the Japs and the Nazis went too far, then he stood up to them. So I want you to know I think you should keep your trap shut, because I agree with Abe.”

My father turned and grinned, looking for Abe’s approval.

“I meant to ask you, Sol,” Abe said. “While I was gone, did you have any trouble?”

“Trouble? What kind of trouble should I have?”

“Just answer the question. Did you have any trouble? Did anyone leave messages for you to give to me?”

“No, Abe. None.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why wouldn’t I be sure? You ask Davey here if you don’t believe me.”

“How many times do I gotta tell you to leave the boy out of it,” my mother said. “This ain’t none of his business, all this crap. The same goes for you, Abe. Do you got a brain or what to come in here scaring the kid this way? Look at him—look at how pale he is.” She came towards me, arms extended. Was my father lying to Abe to protect me—so that Abe wouldn’t get after me for not having told him about the message? “My little baby Davey—let Momma hold you, all right? Let Momma—” She stopped, turned on Abe again. I felt dizzy because what drove me craziest of all was not being able to figure out when my mother would be for Abe and when she would be against him, or when my parents would switch around in deciding to protect me. I slipped away from my mother, stood apart from all of them, in front of my bedroom.

“Can’t you see what you do to him?” my mother said. “You want I should bang my head against the wall first so then you’ll see what it is you’re doing? Here!”

My mother turned her back to us and began banging her forehead against the wall. “Now are you satisfied?” she asked. “Is this what you want?” She reached sideways, grabbed onto the moldings around the door—she was facing the narrow width of wall that separated their room from mine—and whacked her forehead against the wall again.

“That’s very brilliant, Evie,” my father said. “Oh that’s really smart. I mean, you’re really helping the situation a lot.”

There was a small red circle on my mother’s forehead, as if she’d been hit by a baseball.

“So why should I wait for somebody else to break my head? You tell me that. Why should I wait for somebody else?”

“You’re exaggerating, Evie, the way you always do. If you follow my instructions there’ll be no trouble. I’ll speak to you at least once a day. If there’s a problem, you buzz the downstairs door four times. That will be the signal. I give you my word that I didn’t look for trouble.”

“Not much. Sure. Tell me another one.”

“If I don’t take care of things they’ll only get worse for us all. They made a mistake, you see, and they have to be shown what the mistake was, so that they don’t repeat it. They should not have touched a member of my family.”

My father brought in a washcloth and my mother lay down on the sofa. “The problem is that everyone’s already dead for you, Abe, don’t you see?” she said. “First Momma and Poppa and then your friends in the Army and now Sheila and soon yourself, if you keep going in the same direction. But when they call on the phone to tell me you’re dead too, it won’t be a big surprise, see? All it will be is a chance for people to say what a big shot you are now, below ground.” She lifted the wash-cloth. There was a tiny piece of white paint stuck to her forehead. “If you were really smart, you wouldn’t give them the satisfaction, that’s all I been trying to tell you. Sometimes you win by losing, yeah? Only you’re too stubborn to see that. Like always. So why be against California? In California we could start all over. In California we could live without being scared for our lives all the time. Only you’re too pigheaded to do it, even though you know I’m right, that it’s our only chance. Even though…” Nobody spoke. “Don’t anybody see that I’m right? Don’t anybody care?”

“California,” my father said. “That’s all she got on her brain since she’s back. California. The Promised Land. Sure.”

“So tell me something, Abe darling—is there a law that says we can’t be happy too while we’re still alive?”

Abe didn’t answer. Instead he bent down and kissed me on the cheek.

“I’m sorry about before,” he said.

“That’s okay.”

He went into the foyer and opened the door. Turkish Sammy was on the landing, waiting for him.