Seventh Avenue Page 2

  “You’re not well?”

  “Grippe.”

  “Oh . . . well go over to the bar and tell him to give you a rock and rye. That’ll kill those lousy germs.”

  Jay sidled over to the bar and glanced around apprehensively. Then, with sudden decision, he walked behind the bar.

  “Okay, I’ll take over,” he told the barman.

  “Yeah? On whose orders?”

  “Mr. M’s.”

  “Fine. There’s another six bottles of Carstairs over there and remember what Mr. M says” - he pointed a long solemn finger at a brown bottle – “that no one and I mean no one can have any Canadian Club unless he’s got a note from the bride’s father.” The bartender gave him a final scowl as if to enforce this point and was swallowed up in the crowd.

  In order to test the efficacy of the mythical M’s instructions, Jay immediately seized a glass, swished it around in some clean water - poverty had made him crankily fastidious - and poured himself a four-inch shot of the forbidden elixir, which he mixed with ginger ale. He took a sip of the drink, fingered a lonely meatball, hummed in time to the music, which took a bit of doing, as the musicians were in the midst of a polyphonic conflict, and smiled glowingly at the guests. As he was about to repeat his previous action - the bottle in his right hand, perpendicular to the glass - a voice froze his arm, giving him the aspect of one of those timeless urchins trapped in a Hellenic frieze that depicted Dionysus at his pleasures.

  “What are you doing?” asked a rather plump girl with a moon-shaped face, long wavy hair with a hint of red, a warm naïve smile, and cat-green eyes. Under fire, Jay quickly assessed the situation: an easy hump.

  “Ummmmmmm . . . pouring a drink.”

  “You don’t work here.”

  That should have been a question, Jay reasoned.

  “What makes you think . . . ?”

  “I’ve followed you since you came in.”

  Very definitely an easy hump, but where?

  “You’re not a relative . . .”

  “Not a close one.”

  “And you don’t work here,” she said again.

  “I’m an assistant.”

  “Relative or bartender?”

  “Both . . . have a drink.”

  She nodded . . . thank God. Jay lifted the bottle of Carstairs.

  “C.C., please.”

  “Got a note from Mister . . . ?”

  “Berkowitz, that’s the bride’s father for your information. Neither have you.”

  He placed the bottle of whiskey recklessly on the top of the bar and chucked the girl under the chin. Then suddenly he spied Berkowitz wagging a threatening fist at him from across the room - he was trapped between Aunt Hennie and some ancient matriarch. He performed a strange little mime, his fist jerkily moving to his mouth, until it occurred to Jay that he had been using the wrong bottle.

  “You better have the other rye, or he’ll be over in a minute with the sheriff.”

  “Okay . . . but when he’s not looking switch bottles.”

  “Sold.”

  “My name’s Rhoda Gold.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “No, no kidding.”

  “I believe you. You’ve had your drink so . . .”

  “What’s your name? Honest, I won’t tell anybody.”

  “Jay Blackman. And you can shout it from the rooftops.”

  “I live in Borough Park.”

  “I’ll pin a medal on you.”

  “Gee, you’re really a smart aleck, aren’t you?”

  “Are you asking me, or telling me?”

  “Aw, c’mon, be nice. You’ve got a nice face.”

  “I wish I could say the same about you.”

  “Why are you this way? Actually I’m sure you’re very kind. Do I scare you?”

  “I came for a free meal. So far I’ve had only hors d’oeuvres, two drinks, a kiss from the bride, which I could’ve lived without, a discussion with Mr. Berkowitz about the fact that the groom, Hy Schmuck, is a nothing law student, and no hot food. Conversation I get, but roast chicken I’d prefer. Answer your question?”

  “They’ll serve dinner after the emcee does his act.”

  “So I’ve been promised . . . by millions.”

  “Do you have a job?”

  “Why?”

  “I just wondered . . . that jacket isn’t yours.”

  “That’s the nicest thing anybody ever said to me.” Jay laughed.

  “So I broke the ice? You’re human,” Rhoda said, placing her hand on top of Jay’s. “You can’t be married, with that mouth.”

  “My mother tells me the same story.”

  “I’d like to meet her, she sounds like a clever woman.”

  The lights darkened in the hall, giving it the atmosphere of a cavern where a Black Mass was about to begin. A feeble spotlight, pregnant with dust motes, illuminated the stocky figure of Barney Green.

  “Evening folks . . . it’s a pleasure to be . . .” - he removed a card from his breast pocket and glanced at it - to be at Maison Moszynski.”

  A heckler shouted: “Shaddup.”

  “If that gentleman would be good enough to take a bow.” The man stood. “Sir, if I were you I’d lance that pimple growing between your shoulders.” The crowd laughed. “Thank you, thank you, ladies and germs. Any more comedians in the audience without a license are welcome to try their hands. No takers? Good. Y’know, I don’t have to do this for a living, but I’m too nervous to steal. Please don’t applaud, you’ll interrupt the bride and groom . . . Ha-Ha. Haven’t had so many laughs since my mother-in-law got her tittie caught in the car door.”

  A swarthy dark little man, just above five feet with piercing angry eyes, and elevated shoes, appeared at the doorway - the legendary M.

  “Evening, Mr. M,” Barney said. “Taking five minutes off from your chopped liver?”

  Even Jay laughed. Most of Barney’s persiflage was vintage East Side - heard in every bar, poolroom, and candy store from Delancey Street to Williamsburg.

  “. . . So this Mr. Ginsberg and his wife decided to go to Monticello for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Ginsberg gave her a few dollars to buy herself a new dress and to get rid of her for a few hours so that he could operate.” Squelched titters from some pseudo-Ginsbergs in the audience. “I mean, after six hours on the Derma Road, listening to his wife’s stories about operations - not to mention her face, how much can a man take? He strolled down the street and a gorgeous redhead comes up to him, looks him up and down and says: ‘Five dollars.’ Ginsberg looks her up and down and says: ‘Not a penny over two dollars.’ He’s a dress manufacturer. The girl turns up her nose and walks away. The same evening Ginsberg gives the Missus an airing. They walk down the main street, look in all the shops and the Missus has a new dress on, a new bag she’s carrying. Frankly she looks fifty. Suddenly out of the shadows comes this gorgeous redhead and pointing a finger at Ginsberg’s Missus says: ‘That’s what you get for two dollars.’”

  “He’s pretty cute,” Rhoda said to Jay, who had moved in front of the bar when he spied M.

  “I’ve heard it before. Not bad.”

  Barney was winding up his act with a song, and now it was the musicians’ turn. The trio of men on stage with him, to judge by their instruments, rather than the soporific, practically unconscious expressions on their faces, were an accordionist, drummer and clarinetist, and called themselves the Murray Meltzer Minstrels. Meltzer, the clarinetist, also sang, when not in a coma. Barney, realizing that he was an obvious foil, woke him from his customary stupor, and pulled him into the spotlight. Six thousand weddings and bar mitzvahs were written, like the tail end of a stillborn epic, on his face.

  “Do you play requests?” Barney asked.

  Astonished by the stupidity of the question, Meltzer raised a swollen lip and said:

  “Course we do. What’re you, a crazy?”

  “Then do me a favor, take the other two zombies and play poker.”

>   Meltzer sniggered: “What do you think we been doing all night?”

  “Okay, Benny Goodman, then show me that thing you been licking all night isn’t a licorice stick.”

  Barney then went into his own unique rendition of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” which brought a gurgling sob from the expectant bride; it was apparently her song.

  When the lights went back on, the crowd once again began to dance to the lazy uncertain melodies of the Minstrels, and Jay looked about him a bit awkwardly, fearing that he might have been recognized by the hawk-eyed M.

  “Don’t worry, will you?” Rhoda said, taking about three inches of sleeve before she reached his arm. “You can eat at my table. There’s someone who didn’t come.”

  She and Jay glided over to a corner table already occupied by six hungry relatives. She examined the place card next to hers, and Jay was instantly transmogrified into mr. Isidore goldfarb, an expatriate tailor from Bosnia, lately settled in the Bronx and unable to make the pilgrimage to Second Avenue because of an ailing mother. Jay settled down to eat with a silent, methodical rapacity that resembled some obscure manufacturing process in which yarn is fed into a machine that swallows it whole and fails to disgorge it.

  Conversation? If Rhoda had expected any, she had engaged the wrong supper partner, for Jay was committed to a policy of single-minded consumption of everything served within an arm span. A certain Plotnik, seated along his right diagonal, “a surveyor of situations,” followed his trail right up to the fish course before making a cautious appraisal.

  “You’re not Goldfarb - he limps.”

  Sensing danger through his mouthful of boiled carp, Jay replied.

  “I never said I was.”

  “Then who . . . ? May one ask?”

  Fingering his seventh roll and with flowing sleeve, Jay said:

  “I’m a Ratkin, but there wasn’t room at the family table.”

  “Aha, that explains it,” Plotnik said.

  If only the chicken would come, then I can go, Jay thought.

  “From where originally?”

  “Well, yes . . . certainly.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Essen . . .”

  “Essen? I thought you people come from Pinsk . . .” Plotnik turned to a woman who was obviously the chronicler of the Ratkin dynasty.

  “Pinsk,” she pronounced with ethnic certainty, “all from Pinsk.”

  Reinforced, Plotnik continued: “Sophie says Pinsk!”

  “Maybe she’s made a mistake,” Rhoda said.

  “Sophie?” Plotnik was already writing out the order to certify Rhoda. “How can she make a mistake when she’s a third cousin on Ratkin’s - God rest her soul - mother’s side.”

  “I’m not really my father’s son,” Jay said, confounding even Sophie, who glared at Rhoda.

  “Enjoying?” a whispering voice behind Jay asked; M himself doing a poll of the guests before retiring to his lair.

  Get rid of him quickly before they start asking him questions.

  “Mr. M, how can you of all people ask such a question? We’re eating food prepared in your kitchen, Kischka stuffed by your own hand. How could it be less than magnificent?”

  Mr. M took a step back, patted Jay’s shoulder affectionately, bowed his head like a king before the pope, and his facial muscles tensed, approximating a smile . . .

  “Good . . . so long you’re enjoying,” he said, backing away.

  “Not your father’s son? What a thing to say! Sophie?” Plotnik demanded justice.

  “What a thing to say!” Sophie rejoined.

  “I’m the son of my father’s sister-in-law, who lived in Essen, and when my father came to Essen from Pinsk for my mother’s funeral, he adopted me.”

  Plotnik drummed the table for several minutes, and then with a nod from Sophie said: “That explains.”

  “That explains,” Sophie seconded him. “But from Pinsk they come.”

  Having performed major surgery on half a chicken that would have done a jackal proud, Jay saw Barney coming towards him and got up from the table.

  “Stuffed your guts, huh?”

  “There’s still dessert.”

  “Well, I’m cutting out.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ll come too.”

  “Hey, what about me?” Rhoda said indignantly.

  “Who’s your friend?” Barney asked.

  “Miss Borough Park, 1934.”

  “I want to come too.”

  “I’ll kill the first one who stops you,” Jay said.

  “With you, I mean.”

  “Look, honey. I’m a man of few words: yes or no? If yes, have you got a room, and are your parents sleeping?”

  “The answer’s no, but I’m still coming with you.”

  “Suit yourself. But I’m not interested.”

  “But a wedding’s a . . .”

  “A wedding.”

  “It’s an omen.”

  “Yeah, like the electric chair.”

  As they passed the cloakroom, Rhoda took out her coat check.

  “It’s got a black fur collar,” she said to the attendant. “Have you got a nickel, Jay?”

  “A dime . . . my last one.”

  “Well, give it to me and I’ll get change. What’re you waiting for? Give it to me. Be a gentleman. It’s not so much to pay for the meal you’ve just had. The people who work the checkroom don’t get any money. They live on tips.”

  Reluctantly Jay handed her a dime and held out his hand for the change that never came.

  “It’ll pay for the carfare back to Borough Park.”

  “But I’ll need a nickel to get me back.”

  “It’s okay, sport, I’ll treat you,” she said, handing him her coat to hold.

  Borough Park was neither a borough nor a park. The borough was Brooklyn and the only park of note or size that supported anything remotely verdurous was called Prospect, and this was located in a precinct - so fanciful is the Brooklyn gift for place-name fabrication - known as Grand Army Plaza. These names must have been devised by an illiterate madman given unlimited access to an unabridged version of General Cornwallis’s Brooklyn telephone directory. Undaunted and unburdened by anything resembling a sense of history, Jay padded down Rhoda’s street on Twelfth Avenue, a prisoner of her self-deluded ecstasy. His shoes were wet through to the newspapers that lined them. The street was tree-lined, and the heavy snow that fell caused a vellication of bare, lifeless limbs that made him think he was on his way to a funeral.

  “Much farther . . . ?”

  “It’s the house after the lamppost. You’ll have to take your shoes off because they’re all probably sleeping.” She stopped in front of a largish, conjoined structure that had its chimney over the roof of one house, its water pipe narrowly missing the bay window of another, and its doorway in peripheral alignment with the place they were actually entering; a perfect example of the architectural mutations ably produced at the turn of the century by a firm of cement contractors. Unaccustomed to this type of grandeur, Jay thought he was on to a good thing.

  “You can’t go home now,” Rhoda said.

  Jay agreed without pressing the point.

  She led him into a darkened room that had the aroma of a year’s sleep bottled, endemic to people who despise fresh air and conduct most of their activities in bed. Rhoda pointed at a sleeping figure in a bed by the door.

  “My kid sister, Miriam,” who at that precise moment passed some wind. “It’s her tonsils and adenoids . . . that’s why we can’t open the window.”

  “Uh, I see,” replied Jay, not seeing and least of all understanding.

  Rhoda picked up her nightdress and opened the door. “Where you going?”

  “To change.”

  “What? You kidding? I schlep all the way to Oshkosh . . .”

  “Borough Park . . .”

  “To have you change in another room?”

  “Shush, you’ll wake Miriam.”

  “What is this? I could’ve stayed
home if I wanted to go to bed wit the papers.”

  Charmed by the directness of his approach, Rhoda still, however, refused to yield.

  “It’s only the first date. We’ve got to get to know each other.”

  “Get to know?” incredulous. “What’re you talking about?”

  “You can’t get blood from a stone.”

  “Who ever said anything about blood from a stone? I think maybe you don’t understand me. I’m not here for conversation . . .”

  “Isn’t the snow beautiful?”

  “Or weather reports. I want to know about the weather I listen to a radio.”

  “Calm.” Rhoda’s voice was firm.

  “I am calm.”

  “You’re losing control.”

  “Look, give me a nickel and let me go home.”

  “It’s a blizzard.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know where I am. I’ve never been to this part of Brooklyn.”

  “I’ll make you breakfast in the morning. I’ve got the day off work.”

  “You’ve got a job?” She was definitely a catch.

  “I’m the manageress of Modes Dress Shoppe.”

  A flash of insight revealed to Jay that she was like a set meal that he had to eat in sequence - without jumping courses.

  He wanted his fears confirmed.

  “Aren’t we going to sleep in the same room?”

  “Course not.”

  “I might grab your sister.”

  “She’s only nine and she bites people.”

  “Second thought, forget it.”

  Rhoda came up close to him and gave him a lingering kiss on the mouth; when she felt Jay about to grab her in a headlock, she gently moved away. Her breasts on his chest felt marvelous; her body was heavy and warm, and it excited him. By way of a compliment he said: “You weren’t made with a finger, sister.”

  “Oh, gee, what a dirty mouth you have. You should get yourself a job in a burlesque house in Jersey, they can use your kind of talent.”

  “I say something wrong?”

  “No, it’s all right. You’re just a pig, a good-looking pig.” A terrible fear infected Rhoda. “You are Jewish . . . ? I mean with your dark hair and dark skin you could be . . .”