Bronx Noir Page 5

  “Mike!” my mother said. “She doesn’t need to know about such evil—”

  “She’s a tough kid. She can handle it.” He gave me a straight look. “You’ve heard of the camps, right?” He poured himself more beer from the Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle.

  “You mean, like in the Catskills, where Jessica goes?” “Jeez—what’da they teach you in that school? The concentration camps, I mean. Auschwitz. Dachau.”

  He told me, but I didn’t want to believe it. “They really did those things?” That’s how dumb I was.

  “Yeah, and worse.” He spooned canned peas next to the potatoes. “That’s what we fought for in the war, to beat those Nazi bastards. If they won, who’da been next? First the Jews and the Polacks and the qu—”

  “Charlie!” My mother clamped a hand over his mouth.

  He pushed it away and gave a short laugh. He drinks a lot of beer when he’s going on night shift. “Maybe the Irish were next, for all we know. Jews. Micks. This whole neighborhood woulda been wiped out.” He laughed again and took another drink.

  I put my fork down. I’d lost my appetite.

  * * *

  That night there were Nazis in the closet by my bed. I didn’t know what they looked like, not exactly, but I could feel them there. Maybe my father was wrong. Maybe we didn’t win the war. Maybe…

  Mrs. Blaustein called the next day. My mother frowned. “Rachel Cohen must be lonely. She seems to have taken a liking to you. You want to go have cake with her?”

  “Okay,” I said. I don’t know why. I didn’t really want to.

  Mrs. Blaustein had set the table with a lace cloth and some nice china dishes with gold rims. Very la-tee-dah, my father would have said.

  “I don’t like cake,” Miss Cohen said. “But you go right ahead.” She drank cup after cup of the blackest coffee I ever saw from what looked like dolls’ cups, while I ate two slices of coconut cake. The filling was so sweet I almost couldn’t taste the lemon, so sweet it made my teeth ache. I loved it.

  Miss Cohen talked almost the whole time. About knives and needles. About acid and electric shocks. About cattle cars full of Jews. About barbed wire. About ovens that weren’t for baking cakes in.

  “The day they took us away, I put on my white linen dress with the eyelet embroidery. I thought if I looked nice, they’d know I was a nice girl,” she said. “Stupid. I was twenty when I went in…a pretty girl. When I came out seven years later I was a hundred and twenty. Can you imagine it?”

  I could. All too well. It was time for me to go home.

  “You come see me again,” she said, “and I’ll read you some of my poems.”

  “Okay.” But I didn’t think I could stand it, to go back again.

  There were two more slices of cake left, on a yellow china plate. How could she not like cake? Poor Miss Cohen.

  When I got home, I looked all over for my communion dress, white with eyelet embroidery, and then I buried it in the very back of the closet where nobody, not even the Nazis, would ever find it, behind my father’s old wedding suit that didn’t fit anymore. All night long something tried to drag me through thick, hot air into the dark depths of the closet.

  “You been up to 4-C, ain’t you?” Katy-Ann Cooper skated around me in circles, her wheels rolling thumpeta-thumpeta over the sidewalk cracks.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “My daddy says just because that lady’s famous doesn’t mean she’s not a Jew and a Commie. He knows. He alla time used to listen to Father Coughlin. You should stay out of 4-C—she’s nutso.”

  “Is not.”

  “Is so.”

  I wanted to grab that chain around Katy-Ann’s neck, the one that held her St. Christopher medal and her skate key. I wanted to grab it and twist. Katy-Ann’s big mouth was the one thing that made me decide to go back to 4-C.

  Or maybe it was the two leftover pieces of coconut cake. Or maybe it was just because Miss Cohen said I should come, and I was a good girl who did what I was told.

  They were horrible, Rachel Cohen’s poems, two books of them, and some in magazines. We sat in the library by a table covered with medicine bottles. Tall brown ones with skinny necks. Small fat green jars. But the poems were beautiful/horrible, if you know what I mean. Like—fascinating. That’s another good word, fascinating. Blood. Bone. Shoes and wedding rings and greasy smoke.

  She read them out loud, one first and looked at me, and then another and looked at me, and then just when I wanted her to stop she wouldn’t stop. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but my mother taught me to be polite. I wanted to run out of the apartment. I got up to leave, but she kept me standing by the door while she read one about a red-haired guard named Heinrich.

  Helpless. Helpless.

  I was his brown-eyed

  Dolly. His daily treat.

  He gobbled me up in slices,

  In blood and bone and ashes.

  I was his nobody.

  His nothing.

  His sweetie, sweetie, sweetie.

  Oh, shame. Oh, shame.

  No mercy left to me.

  No anodyne.

  It was the worst of the poems and I had my hand on the knob of the library door, but that last word kept me there. I was…snagged…by it. “What’s an-o-dime mean?”

  “Anodyne. It means painkiller. I studied to be a pharmacist before the war. I learned all about the drugs you could take to ease pain. And cause it. Now I’m good for nothing but to sit in this damned chair—” she smacked the armrest. “Sit in this goddamned chair—and remember.”

  “What happens to people’s souls to make them do such…bad…things?” I really wanted to know, and I thought if anyone could tell me, she could. In spite of how much her poems terrified me, I kind of admired Miss Cohen. She knew all about words.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” she replied.

  “But not you and me, right? We could never do anything evil, right?”

  “Maybe you’d better go home now, girlie.”

  I peeked in the kitchen on my way out. One slice of cake left, sitting under a glass dish. The red cherry tempted me, but I got past it okay. The faucet on the sink was dripping bad.

  Outside, the sky was as hard and gray as the cracked sidewalk. Someone had drawn a potsy, but I didn’t feel like hopping the squares. The red bricks on the walls of our five-story walk-up stared across the street at the yellow bricks of the elevator building. The mommas were talking Yiddish on their folding chairs, Mrs. Yellin rocking the big black carriage back and forth. I looked at them different. The Jewish mommas knew about the camps, for sure. Was that what they talked about in their weird foreign language? Oy veh. Oy gevalt.

  Oy gevalt—my mother said only the Jews could come up with such a useful cosmic summary. Cosmic. Summary.

  Oy gevalt.

  I said hi to Mrs. Bradford, my father’s bookie, and walked past her—right in the middle of the sidewalk as usual. No one could ever get me that way. Terrible things could happen to a little girl on her own. If I walked in the exact center of the sidewalk no one could grab me into a car at the curb or pull me into the cellar of a building. I was religious about it. Mrs. Bradford’s peroxide hair was pinned up in curls underneath that ratty green wool scarf of hers, and she was carrying a string shopping bag with a tissue box in it. Everyone knew what the box was for—she hid the betting slips underneath the tissues. Mrs. B. was breaking the law. My father said it was no big deal, but I wondered: Would Mrs. Bradford burn in hell? Would Adolf Hitler?

  Usually, running to Daitch Dairy for my mother, or to the butcher or the fish store, I stayed on the far side of the street from the huge brick Veterans Hospital with its green lawn and big trees behind the iron-spiked fence. My father said the soldiers in the hospital were ones that got hurt in the war. You saw them sometimes, in wheelchairs or wandering around the paved walks with whacked-out looks in their eyes. Usually I don’t pay the place much attention, but that day I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I don�
�t remember crossing the street, but next thing I knew I’d grabbed an iron fence spike in each hand and was just standing there, staring in. My father said there was nothing to be scared of—the guys in that place were heroes. Some of them even went into the camps and liberated the Jews. He was in the war too, but I guess he wasn’t a hero because he’s not in a hospital and the shrapnel in his back only hurts when it’s raining out, and he never, ever, talks about it. I watched a dark-haired man on crutches move toward me across the grass. He looked like a tall boy in a robe and striped pajamas. He was walking on one leg—the other one…just ended. No knee, no nothing. The man in the pajamas was inside the iron fence, I was outside. I couldn’t stop staring at him. I couldn’t let go of the bars. “Hey, girlie,” he said. “What’re you doin’ here? God, look at you—aren’t you a little sweetie?”

  I screamed and ran, and he called after me, “What did I say? What did I say?” I zigzagged across Kingsbridge Road, still screaming and almost getting clobbered by a big cream-and-red bus. The sidewalk swarmed with people. Outside a Kosher bakery I dodged three baby carriages and Julian Levine from school. “Hey, meshuggeneh,” he yelled, “what’s the matter by you?” Sister Mary Michael from Our Lady stuck out her arm to stop me, but I slapped it away and kept going. I’ll pay for that, I know, hitting a nun—even a gazillion “Hail Marys” won’t atone. So many people on the sidewalk and they were all gonna die. Could it happen again? Like the Jews in the camps? Was Julian Levine gonna burn in an oven? Was Sister Mary Michael? Was I? I whipped past the big stone armory to Jerome Avenue, then up Jerome around the reservoir, past the colleges. It was all I could do to keep from howling the whole time. My legs pumped like those wheel rods on a freight train with cattle cars. What was I running from? From the man with the leg? From Miss Cohen’s poems? I didn’t know, but I couldn’t stop. It was like something was sick in my stomach that I didn’t want to vomit into my head. No, that doesn’t make any sense. I ran like I had the Gestapo at my heels. I tripped on broken concrete and fell and skinned both knees, and it didn’t slow me down one bit. When I turned onto the far end of Sedgwick, I knew I’d never get away from whatever was chasing me so I might as well go home.

  In front of our building an ambulance idled, ashy smoke puffing from the tailpipe, revolving lights turning the neighbors’ faces red and white. Blood and bone. Blood and bone. Ashes, blood, and bone. Two men in white carried a stretcher out from the courtyard. A sheet strained to cover a huge belly but missed the top of a red-bristled head. A couple of policemen followed the stretcher. One of them was my father.

  I grabbed his hand. “Is that Mr. Schmidt?” I heard my voice rise to a screech.

  “Yeah, it’s Henry, all right—poor son of a bitch.” He pulled the sheet from the gray face. “Looks like someone poisoned him. Vomit all down the stairs. Funniest thing—there was a big red maraschino cherry smack in the middle of it.”

  But I didn’t need him to tell me that. Flecks of coconut were stuck to Mr. Schmidt’s stubbly chin with lemon goo. It looked like the unbaked scones my mother painted with egg and sprinkles. His chin was like a raw lumpy coconut scone. I never wanted to eat again.

  The kids were crowding around now. “That crazy killer lady in 4-C did it,” Katy-Ann Cooper said. “Remember, you got her that coconut cake? I just know she did it.”

  “Shut your mouth, Katy-Ann,” I hissed. “You don’t know nothing.”

  That was two years ago. I was a kid. This morning, when I looked for the Daily Mirror, my mother lied to me. She said the papers didn’t come. Then I saw them at the candy store on the corner. Big headlines—the Mirror, the News, the Herald Tribune.

  Concentration Camp Victim’s Appeal Fails.

  Bronx Killer Gets Chair.

  Rachel Cohen, Poet, to Die.

  I’m looking for Katy-Ann Cooper right now. When I find her, I’m gonna give her the worst Indian burn of her whole entire life.

  I think she’ll burn in hell forever.

  Somebody ought to.

  THE WOMAN WHO HATED THE BRONX

  BY RITA LAKIN

  Elder Avenue

  Linda Blue came from nothing and wanted everything. With the small amount of money she inherited from the last of her soul-numbing foster parents, she was able to go to nursing school. She became a nurse so she could marry a doctor. She would marry a doctor so she could become a doctor’s wife. She didn’t have the confidence to nab one who was already established, so she played the odds; she picked an easygoing, nice-looking young resident.

  Frank Lombardi, who saw himself as just an average guy, thought Linda looked like the movie star Grace Kelly, aloof and unattainable. Grace was soon to become the Princess of Monaco and he felt he’d found a princess too. He was amazed at his good luck.

  Linda chose Frank Lombardi as the answer to her prayers. He would save her.

  The problem was, Linda picked wrong.

  She didn’t go to heaven. She went to hell.

  He took her to back to the Bronx.

  They’d had a whirlwind courtship. During their short engagement, she spelled out her dream, many times, in great detail. She would live in the country, perhaps near Scarsdale, in a pretty house with a little garden, and maybe one child.

  He didn’t hear her.

  Frank shared his goal—giving back to all those who made it possible for a poor kid to get so far. He was talking about his family who supported him through med school and his friends and neighbors who encouraged him. So he intended to heal the sick in his old neighborhood. To take care of those who took care of him.

  She was tuned into her own fantasies, and didn’t listen.

  She talked him into eloping. He wanted a wedding with family and friends. “I want to see my princess in a white gown.” She told him she had no one to invite and that he should save his money for setting up his practice.

  The first thing brand new Doctor Lombardi did before they left Newark in June was to buy a slightly used ’50 Buick LeSabre—he thought the tail fins were nifty, and it was perfect to carry his adored wife to their new home. During the drive up from Jersey, Frank had been secretive about their destination. He couldn’t wait to see her response to the place he’d picked out. Linda could hardly wait to see her dream house.

  On route, he told her they had to start out modestly until he made some money. She told him she didn’t care about money. She thought White Plains would be pretty too. She’d even thought about the new Levittown she’d read about in Life magazine. As she told him many times, she just needed peace and quiet.

  On the Cross Bronx Expressway, she’d been dozing. When he turned at Bruckner Boulevard, she woke up and found herself looking at ugly brick buildings and vacant lots filled with trash and scruffy children playing in the streets. What shortcut was he taking? Was he lost? But in moments he stopped at a corner and parked. She read the two intersecting street signs, Elder Avenue and Watson Avenue.

  “Where the hell are we?” she asked.

  “The Bronx,” he said proudly. “The East Bronx, to be exact. On the Pelham Bay elevated line.”

  She turned her face to the window and pressed her throbbing head against its coolness. Oh God, no. Not the Bronx again.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  She wouldn’t look at him. “This place will be the death of me.”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re gonna love it here.”

  He helped her out of the car and grandly showed her around like a docent at a fine museum. “Welcome to my neighborhood. Look across the street.” He pointed to a brick two-family house directly opposite. “I grew up in that house. Mama and Papa are on the left. My sister Connie and her husband Al and their kids live in the other. You’ll meet them tonight.”

  So close? No, not so soon. I’m not ready for any of this…

  He fondly recollected for her. “I played stickball in these streets. I rode my sled down that hill. I played immies in these gutters. God, it’s great to be home.” She turned away
and he assumed she was ready for the rest of his tour.

  “Here’s our building. Six stories high.”

  What she saw were over-filled garbage cans. Dogs running loose. People. So many people. So much noise.

  Practically shaking with excitement, Frank turned right and walked her to a door, the only break in the brick structure. “My office! My patients will use this entrance. And…” He led her again, this time into the three-sided courtyard. “Look at our great brick courtyard.”

  What she saw were little boys riding bikes dizzily around small patches of wire-enclosed dirt that looked like scraggly attempts at flower beds. The flowers were all dead. The boys shouted at one another, unmindful of anyone but themselves. Linda looked up. The sun was blocked by crisscrossed clothes lines filled with hanging laundry.

  “Come on inside.” Now he navigated her through the large lobby, where he hurried her to another door. Tarnished brass letters indicated it was apartment 1A. “Ta da! Our very own private entrance. Isn’t it great?”

  He took out a set of keys and opened the door. As Frank bent over to lift Linda and carry her over the threshold, they heard clapping.

  “Put me down, Frank,” she said. He did.

  She looked around the lobby. It was very large, and had seen better days.

  The floors were black and white tiled squares. With imitation Greek columns and metal ceilings and a long bank of mailboxes against the wall next to the elevator.

  There were people in the lobby staring at them. A couple of old guys were playing chess at a card table with a third man watching them. Two women with baby strollers sat on a marble bench. A woman with groceries had just removed mail from her box. They were all grinning as they clapped.

  “Hey, Frankie, you’re back!” This from one of the chess players. To Linda he said, “I’m Irving Pinsky. 5F. You must be Frankie’s new wife.”

  Frank waved. “Hey, Irv, it’s Doctor Frankie now. Show some respect.”

  The lady with groceries said, “Welcome back from the Schwartz family too. Apartment 3D. I’m Helen,” she said to Linda. To Frank she said, “So what’s the bride’s name?”