Billy Bathgate Part 4

I didn't want to talk about it any more than I do now but I did and so I will, this was the time I told it so now I have to tell it again.

"He sang 'Bye Bye Blackbird.'"

She stared at me with the water roaring and the rainbow shimmering below us. She didn't seem to understand.

"'Pack up all my care and woe, here I go, singing low, bye bye blackbird,'" I said. "It's a famous song." And then, as if I thought I couldn't make it more clear, I sang to her: "'Make my bed and light the light, I'll arrive Late tonight Blackbird, bye bye.'"

ELEVEN.

He begins humming it early on while Mr. Schultz is down below with her, and I stand halfway between the upper decks hooked by my heels and my elbows on the bolted ladder, which rises vertically and falls vertically as the tugboat rides the waves or drops between them. And it is as if Bo has heard it in the throbbing of the engine or a phrase of the wind, in the way that mechanical or natural rhythms around us take on the character in our minds of a popular song. He raises his head and tries to square his shoulders, he seems to have found strength from the distraction of singing, the a.s.sumption of your control in song, as when you hum while you are busy with some work of quiet concentration, and his wits were somewhat recovered, he cleared his throat and sang a bit louder now but still wordlessly, and he only stopped in order to look as much behind him as he could, and not seeing but feeling I was there he called to me, hey kid, c'mere, talk to old Bo, humming again while he waited confidently for me to appear in front of him. And I didn't want to become any closer to this situation than I already was in the same deckhouse as this dying man, his state seemed to me contaminating, I did not want any part of his experience, neither its prayers nor appeals or plaints or last requests, I did not want to be in his eyes in his last hour as if then something of my being would go down with him into the sea, and that is not a pretty thing to confess but it was the way I felt, entirely estranged, being no saint, nor priest of absolution, nor rabbi of consolation, nor nurse of ministration, and not wanting to partic.i.p.ate in any conceivable way with anything he was going through, not even as a looker-on. And so of course I had no alternative but to come down from the ladder and stand on the rolling deck where he could see me.

He nodded his head peering up at me from under his brow, he was uncharacteristically messy, everything awry, his dinner jacket, his pant legs, his shirt half pulled out, his jacket bunched up behind him as if he had a hunchback, his thick black shining hair fallen off to the side, he nodded and smiled and said, the word's good on you kid, they have high hopes for you, you know that, anyone tell you that? You've a runty little f.u.c.ker aren't you, you'll never be fat your whole life, you grow another couple inches you can fight in the featherweight cla.s.s. He smiled with his even white teeth from that swarthy face, the high cheekbones elongating his Siberian eyes. Little guys make good kills in my experience, they go up on it, you see, it's an upward stick, he said lifting his head sharply for a moment to represent the knife, you use a gun it kicks up so that's to your advantage too, but if you're as smart as they say you will get to where your nails are manicured and a pretty girl sits by your chair and cleans under them every day. Me I am six one but I always killed smartly, I did not torture and I did not miss, the guy has to go? boom boom, you put his lights out, tell me who it is Dutch, boom boom, it's done, that's all. I never liked anyone who enjoyed this work apart from the pride of doing something very difficult and very dangerous very well. I never liked the creeps, I'll give you some advice from the old Bo. This man of yours ain't gonna last long. You see his behavior, he is a very emotional man, an untrustworthy maniac f.u.c.k who doesn't give a s.h.i.t for other people's feelings, I mean people who matter, people who are as tough as him, and have better organizations and I'll tell you just between us better ideas for the future than this wilda.s.s. He is obsolete kid, you know what that means? He's all finished and if you're as smart as they say you are you'll listen to me and look out for yourself. This is Bo Weinberg talking. Irving upstairs knows and he's worried but he won't say anything, he's too far along he's ready for retirement he's not going to change his colors now. But he has my respect and I have his. What I've done in my life, my achievements, the quality of my word, Irving respects these things and I bear no brief against him. But he'll remember, you'll all remember, you too kid, I want you to look on Bo Weinberg for your own sake and understand the terrible usage of such a man, look him in the eye if you can so you will never forget this as long as you live because in a few minutes, in just a few minutes, he will be at peace, he will be over it the ropes won't hurt he won't be hot or cold or scared or humiliated or happy or sad or needful of anything anymore, this is the way G.o.d makes up for the terrible death, that it comes in time and the time goes on but the dying is done and our persons are at peace. But you kid are a witness and it's tough s.h.i.t but that's the way it is, you'll remember and the Dutchman will know you remember and you can never be sure of anything again because you are doomed to live in remembrance of the foulness done to the man Bo Weinberg.

He looked away. And now I was startled to hear the song in a strong baritone, hoa.r.s.e with defiance: Pack up all my care and woe, here I go, singing low, bye bye, blackbird. Dum de dum de dumdedum, yah dah dee, yah dah dee, bye, bye, blackbird. No one here can love or understand me, oh what hard-luck stories they all hand me. Dum de dum, light the light, I'll arrive, late tonight, blackbird, bye-and he shook his head with his eyes squeezed shut to reach the high note at the end-byeeee.

Then his head slumped and he hummed the tune to himself more softly, as if he was thinking again, almost not aware of humming through his thoughts and when he left off and began to talk again he was no longer talking to me but to some additional Bo sitting beside him perhaps in perfect elegance at the Emba.s.sy Club, drinks in front of them, while they reminisced: So I mean the guy is up there behind locked doors in the Grand Central Building, what is it, the twelfth floor? people everywhere and you know he has to have a roomful of guns and an outer office and an inner office, in this very legitimate well-cared-for building that straddles Park Avenue at Forty-sixth. So these are the conditions. But they know that and they know it is difficult, the man Maranzano has been in the business his whole life, it is not a sucker's proposition we are talking about and the Unione knows for this job they need the ace of spades. And Dutch comes to me and he says look Bo you don't have to do it this is their special Italian thing they like to clean out their generations every once in a while, but as a favor they have asked for you, and it wouldn't hurt us to be where they owe us a very big one so I say of course, I mean I was honored, of all the guns it's my gun they want, it was like I did this and I was in glory for the rest of my days, this one thing, like Sergeant York. You know I love to be reliable. I mean I like wining and dining and laying pretty women, I like the ponies I like the c.r.a.p table, I like to come into a room cut an indolent swath, but under that I like best of all to be reliable, that is the purest pleasure, the pleasure of my purest being where someone will say not this one not that one, but Bo Weinberg, where someone will ask me and I will nod yes and it will be done as smoothly and quickly and easily as that nod, and they will know that and consider it done, as it will be, so when they read about it in the newspapers a day later, a week later, it's another unsolved mystery of a self-ordering world, another sweet tale of the tabloids. So I go to the meeting and I won't say his name but he's there and he says in that voice of a healed cut throat what do you need, and I say get me four police badges that's all. And his eyebrows go up but he says nothing and the next day they are in my hands, and I get my guys and take them to the haberdashery and we all dress ourselves like detectives in those raincoats and derbies and we walk right into the joint and flip open our wallets police you're under arrest, and they all go to the wall and I open the door the guy is behind his desk rising from his chair very slow on the uptake the man is seventy seventy-five he doesn't move too good I stand and brace myself on the front edge of the desk and I place the shot cleanly in the eye. But here is the funny part that building has marble halls and it sounds like no-man's-land it sounds through the open doors down the halls the stairwells the elevator shafts the shot heard round the world and everyone scrams, my guys, the hoods against the wall, everyone is running like h.e.l.l and grabbing elevators and leaping down the stairs three at a time. And by the time I get out of there with this hot piece in my pocket doors are beginning to open up and down I hear those panics you know when people know something terrible has happened and they start shouting, and I lose my head I run down the stairs, I run up the stairs, and I get lost in this f.u.c.king building winding around corridors looking for exits walking into cleaning closets, I don't know I get lost, and somehow, somehow, when I get to the bottom I am not on the street I am in Grand Central Terminal and it is five six o'clock in the evening the place is like grand central, people in every direction making trains, standing waiting for the gates to open, the train announcements echoing in all that noisy mumble, and I attach myself to the crowd waiting for the five thirty-two and I slip the piece in some guy's pocket, I swear that's what I did, in his topcoat, he's holding his briefcase in his left hand he's got his World-Telegram World-Telegram folded for reading in his right hand and just as the gate opens and everyone presses forward in it goes so gently he doesn't even feel it and I saunter away as he gets through the gate and rushes down the ramp for his seat and, can't you see it, h.e.l.lo dear I'm home my G.o.d Alfred what's this in your pocket eek a gun! folded for reading in his right hand and just as the gate opens and everyone presses forward in it goes so gently he doesn't even feel it and I saunter away as he gets through the gate and rushes down the ramp for his seat and, can't you see it, h.e.l.lo dear I'm home my G.o.d Alfred what's this in your pocket eek a gun!

And he is laughing now, tears of laughter in his eyes, one precious instant in the paradise of recollection, and even as I'm laughing with him I think how fast the mind can move us, the way the story is a span of light across s.p.a.ce. I know he certainly got me off that boat that was heaving me up and down one foot at a time through an atmosphere rich in oil, I was there in Grand Central with my hand delivering the piece into Alfred's coat pocket but at the same time with my hands on the starched white tablecloth fiddling with the matchbook in the Emba.s.sy Club of the smart life, and the skinny girl singer doing "Bye Bye Blackbird" and outside in Manhattan the idling limousines at the curb sending their thin exhaust into the wintry night.

I became the object of his baleful stare. And what are you laughing at, he said, you think it's funny, wisea.s.s? The story was clearly over, as in juggling when the ball you throw up finds the moment to come down, hesitates as if it might not, and then drops at the same speed of that celestial light. And life is no longer good but just what you happen to be holding.

You think it's funny, wisea.s.s? He was a man who in his day took care of a great many people. May you last that long in your season till the last minute of your life at threescore years and ten. Then you may laugh. He was a greaser of consequence, Maranzano, not some piece of crazed slime like Coll who you couldn't ever put enough bullets in. Not like Coll that mick f.u.c.k of a child-killer for whom one death was not enough. But I killed Coll! he shouted. I turned him to spit and s.h.i.t and blood in that phone booth. Brrrrupp! Brrrrupp! Up one window. Up one window. Brrrrup! Brrrrup! Down the other. I killed him! These are facts, you miserable wretch of a kid, but do you know what it is to do that, Down the other. I killed him! These are facts, you miserable wretch of a kid, but do you know what it is to do that, do you know what it is to be able to do that? do you know what it is to be able to do that? You're in the Hall of Fame now! I killed Salvatore Maranzano! I killed Vincent Mad Dog Coll! I killed Jack Diamond! I killed Dopey Benny! I killed Maxie Stierman and Big Harry Schoenhaus, I killed Johnny c.o.o.ney! I killed Lulu Rosenkrantz! I killed Mickey the driver and Irving and Abbadabba Berman, and I killed the Dutchman, Arthur. He stared at me his eyes bulging as if he was about to break the ropes that bound him. Then it was as if he could not look at me anymore. I have killed them all, he said bowing his head and closing his eyes. You're in the Hall of Fame now! I killed Salvatore Maranzano! I killed Vincent Mad Dog Coll! I killed Jack Diamond! I killed Dopey Benny! I killed Maxie Stierman and Big Harry Schoenhaus, I killed Johnny c.o.o.ney! I killed Lulu Rosenkrantz! I killed Mickey the driver and Irving and Abbadabba Berman, and I killed the Dutchman, Arthur. He stared at me his eyes bulging as if he was about to break the ropes that bound him. Then it was as if he could not look at me anymore. I have killed them all, he said bowing his head and closing his eyes.

Later he whispers to me take care of my girl don't let him do it to her get her away before he does her too, do I have your promise? I promise, I tell him in the first act of mercy in my life. For now the engine is idling and the tug rocks wildly in the wash of the ocean waves, I never knew they made a point of being out here too even bigger more ferocious with their own life in the middle of nowhere. Irving comes down the ladder and Bo and I both watch him in the economy of his movements swing open the double doors at the rear of the cabin and step outside and hook them fast. Suddenly the clean rage of air has blown out the smell of the oil and cigar, we are outdoors in here, I see the height of the heavy seas like gigantic black throats in the dim cast of our cabin light and Irving is at the stern rail, which he unhooks and lifts and stows neatly to the side. The boat is yawing in such a wallow that I have gone back to my position on the side bench, which I affix myself to by bracing my heels against a steel deck plate and clutching the bulkheads on either side of me. Irving is a true sailor mindless of the rising and falling deck and no less of the splashing he has taken about the legs of his pants. He is back inside, his thin gaunt face is splotched with sea spittle, his thin hair glistens on his shining scalp, and methodically without asking my help he jimmies up one end of the galvanized tin tub and jams a dolly under it and shoves and bangs the dolly further and further under the tub to where he can use the leverage of his whole weight to hold down the dolly with one foot and pull the tub up on it, an oddly dry sc.r.a.ping sound reminding me that if it were a sandpail and n.o.body's feet were in it, it could be turned over and tapped and leave whole a perfect cement sculpture of an overturned laundry tub perhaps even showing the embossed letters of the manufacturer. Bo's knees are now raised to a painful angle and his head is even lower, he is just about folded in half, but Irving fixes that next, after he jams wood shivs under the four rubber wheels of the dolly, he opens a steel tool kit and removes a fisherman's knife and cuts Bo's ropes, and la.s.soes them off and helps Bo up off the kitchen chair and stands him up in the tub on the dolly on the deck of the tugboat here at the very top of the Atlantic Ocean. Bo is shaky, he moans, his legs are buckling he lacks circulation and Irving calls to me, tells me to support Bo's other side, and oh this is just what I prefer not to do in my criminal training, exactly this, feeling Bo's palsy arm around me, smelling his hot breath, the sweat under his arm all the way through his black jacket on my neck, his hand fluttering grabbing my head like a claw, clutching my hair, his elbow drilling into the flesh of my shoulder, the man in his heat and animation resting his weight on me moaning over my head and his whole body in tremors. Here I am supporting the man I am helping to kill, we are his sole support, he holds on for dear life, and Irving says it's all right Bo, it's okay, and as calm and encouraging as a nurse, he kicks out the right stern shiv, we are facing the open deck you see, and commands me to do likewise with the shiv on my side, which I do quickly and accurately and we roll Bo on the dolly quite easily with the sea's help to the open hatch, where he lets go of us and grabs the framework standing now there alone his cement tub vehicle shooting back and forth like roller skates he can't quite manage yelling ohh ohhoooooo ohh ohhoooooo, his body twisting from the waist as he struggles to keep himself vertical and Irving and I stand back and watch this and all at once Bo learns the control, and manages to diminish the roll of the rubber wheels and with his legs locks his cement tub in some relatively governable slightness of motion and he trusts himself to look up and finds himself facing an open deck and a sea higher than he is and then lower than he is in a night of raging black wind, and his straining arms are being pulled out of the sockets and he takes great deep breaths of this awful wind and night and I see the back of his head moving and his shoulders and his head is up facing into this world of inexplicable terror and though I can't hear it for the wind I know he is singing and though I can't hear it I know the song, it is blown away by sea wind, his farewell chant, the song in his mind, all anybody ever has, and so Bo Weinberg was on his own in catastrophic solitude when the pilot engaged the engine and the boat suddenly shot forward and Mr. Schultz in his shirtsleeves and suspenders appeared and came up behind him and lifted one stockinged foot and shoved it in the small of Bo's back, and the hands broken from their grasp and the body's longing lunge for balance where there was none, careening leaning backward he went over into the sea and the last thing I saw were the arms which had gone up, and the shot white cuffs and the pale hands reaching for heaven.

TWELVE.

When I was through she didn't say anything. She handed me the wine bottle. I tilted my head up to drink from it and when I looked again she was no longer sitting beside me but had slid over the mossy bank and was by means of creva.s.ses in the rocks and the small pine saplings growing from them lowering herself down the side of the gorge. I lay on my belly and watched. When she was two-thirds of the way down the mist enveloped her.

I wondered if she was going to do something really stupid. If I had told my story too well. I had not included everything, that for instance when Irving and the pilot were talking in the wheelhouse Bo Weinberg begged me to go below and see what was happening to her. I had done that and heard a little, not much, because the boat's engines were so loud down there. I listened for a few minutes outside the door of the cabin where Mr. Schultz had taken her and then I had gone back up to the deck and told Bo she was all right, that Mr. Schultz was pacing back and forth and explaining his point of view. But I had just wanted to make it easy for him.

"You wanted life?" I had heard Mr. Schultz shout. "Here, Miss Debutante, this is it, this is what it looks like!"

And then I couldn't hear anything for a while. I hunkered down in the pa.s.sageway and just before I was about to give up I put my ear to the door and I heard his voice again: "You don't care for what's dead, do you? I'm telling you aside from the actual details he's dead. Can you understand that? You can forget the dead, can't you? I think you've forgotten already, haven't you? Well, I'm waiting, it's either a yes or a no. What? I can't hear you!"

"Yes," she said, or must have. Because then Mr. Schultz said: "Ahh, that's too bad. That's too too bad for Bo," and then he laughed. "Because if I thought you loved him I might have changed my mind."

I grabbed her skirt and shook it out and tossed it over the side and watched it float into the mist and disappear. What was I expecting? That she would find it, put it on, and climb back up? I was not acting sensibly. I dropped over the side and turned my back to the gorge and went after her. It was harder than it looked, I found that out almost immediately with my head barely below the edge when the root I put my foot on broke away and I almost fell. I didn't like staring at rock face three inches from my nose. The rocks were scratching the s.h.i.t out of my elbows and knees. I was in a panic of descent, I don't know what I feared, that she would just leave me there forever, that someone would find her, take her, do something bad to her. Some woods maniac just waiting for the opportunity. But it was more than that, that she would find him, that oblivious to the uses that could be made of her she would somehow hone in on him wherever he was skulking, in whatever foul den. Some of the pine saplings had stick.u.m on them which glued up my hands and helped me to hold on. I felt the heat on my back, the farther I descended the hotter it was becoming. In one place there was a ledge and I stopped to rest: the sound of the water was mountainous, like coal pouring down a chute. Getting off the ledge was harder than getting on. Below it there were fewer and smaller saplings to hold on to. Soon there were none and I held on by sticking my sneakers in cracks and clutching outcroppings with my fingers. Then all at once it clouded up, it was chilly, and I realized there were boulders to stand on, and so, bit by bit I climbed down these piled boulders to the bottom and stood in a white mist with the sun high above me diffuse and pale.

The waterfall was to my right about twenty or thirty yards, it was the last and longest fall of the water and had not been visible from the top. It came home to me that falling water is what makes gorges, I mean this could not have been news to anyone but it was practically the first bit of nature I had ever seen in operation. I have read about dinosaurs too but that would not be the same as finding the bones of one. The water coursed swiftly past where I stood on a steeply tilted bank of sand and rock, the channel couldn't have been more than six or eight feet wide but it was the widest here of any place that I could see right or left. Her skirt lay on the ground where I had flung it. I rolled it up under my arm and I headed to the left away from the waterfall, and soon I was on boulders again, jumping from one to another with the water boiling beneath and around them, this was all in a generally downhill direction, I felt as if I was descending into a pore of the planet, and then I came around a bend and was looking down at a cantilevered ledge shaped like an enormous arrowhead, and piled on it were her clothes and shoes and socks. I leapt down and ran to the edge, I saw below me a clear black pool of water entirely still except for a silver rim of spill off at the far side.

It seemed to me I looked at this water until anybody under it would have to surface or drown. I was terrified, I pulled off my sneakers and shirt and prepared to jump in, I don't swim very well but I felt I could dive down in the water if I had to and at this moment the water shook and she broke into the air, her head and shoulders rising, and shouted or drew a great gasping breath that was like a cry of pain as the water poured off her shoulders, and then she threw her arms behind her and settled and floated on her back with her arms outstretched and lay there in the water with her chest heaving and her legs seeming to attenuate and wither as they floated downward in the black water.

After a while she was upright, shaking her head and smoothing her hair. She swam sidestroke out of my sight and appeared a minute later where I was not looking, climbing up onto the ledge with her body pale and wet and her teeth chattering and her lips blue. She looked at me without recognition. I rolled my shirt into a wad and rubbed her as she stood with her knees pressed together and her arms across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, I rubbed her shoulders and back, the backs of her legs and after a moment's hesitation her backside and then the front of her legs while she stood and held her hands at her mouth and shivered herself warm. Then, for the second time in my life, I watched Mrs. Preston get dressed.

She said little on the walk back. We followed the gorge to where it went dry, and then widened on smaller rocks, and finally flattened out with the land. I was overwhelmed and could not speak on my own initiative and waited for her, and waited upon her, I felt we had an alliance of sorts, but it was conditional, as if I still had to grow up, I felt ignorant, I felt chastened and foolish and like a child. We walked again through the brown pine-needle forest and found the logging trail and came out into the meadows. She said, "Did he really ask you to protect me?"

"Yes."

"How very strange," she said.

I didn't answer.

"I mean that he would think I couldn't take care of myself," she said by way of clarification. She stooped where the sun shone through the trees to pick a small blue flower drooping over like a bell. "And you promised him you would?"

"Yes."

She came up to me and hung the flower over my ear and I found myself holding my breath till I no longer felt her touch. She sent out a very secret and indiscriminate beaming attraction, Mrs. Preston, as if it was always there whether you were or not.

"Oh don't move it," she said. "You're such a pretty little devil, do you know that?"

"That's what they tell me," I said and a few minutes afterward we scooted down a wooded embankment on our heels and came out to the dirt road and so eventually to the paved road leading down the hill to Onondaga. I walked backward to look at her in the sun. Her hair had lost its wave and was dried sleek and off the forehead with the tracks of her fingers showing her careless attention to it. She had not a bit of makeup on her face but those full lips were their natural color now and her skin had regained the blush of her life. She was still not smiling though, and she had reddened, swimmer's eyes. Before we got back to the hotel she asked me if I had a girlfriend and I said I did, and she said whoever that girl was was lucky, but the truth was when she asked I felt guilty because I was no longer thinking of little Becky, who seemed to me now no more interesting than a child, but only of her. I was frightened by her, this woods guide, oh what she had shown me, like some counselor with a whistle on a lanyard, for the first time I understood what a match she made with Mr. Schultz, she took her clothes off to gunmen, to water, to the sun, life disrobed her, I understood why she went with him, this was not like mothers and fathers of ordinary existence, there was no consideration of love, it was not a universe of love they livedin, f.u.c.kingand killing as they did, it was a large, empty resounding adulthood booming with terror.

I thought about her from the moment we went to our separate rooms and I lay on my bed in the late afternoon as dull-witted as the weather which hung hot and heavy in the Onondaga Hotel with the gauzy white curtains motionless in the open windows. The curtains grew gray, darkened, and were lit by a broad flashing and after an interval there was a m.u.f.fled distant thunder. I now liked her far more than I had and knew in fact I might even be sweet on her, as how could a poor boy not after what she had put me through. Of course I had not entirely lost my wits and knew that whatever feelings I had I would suffer them in silence if I wanted to live on Earth a little while longer. I closed my eyes and watched her again climbing out of the pool at the bottom of the gorge with her nipples all crimped and blue and her pale pubic hair stringy with dripping water. I thought this time I was seeing someone who had tried to die, though of course I couldn't be sure because she lived an enlarged existence, it was not her nature to be contained by judgments. I wondered what would happen if her intimacy with Mr. Schultz prevailed over my confidences and she told him the things I'd reported. But I had the feeling she would not, that she had the character of independence, that she lived alone in some sort of mystery of her own making and that it was her integrity to be self-driven and self-communicating only, however alluringly close she might drift toward anyone at any given moment. I told myself that she had finally expressed some appropriate human grief and thought maybe that was a large part of my new liking for her, or tried to persuade myself of that anyway, even though it didn't quite jibe with the heavy tool I found in my hand with its own made-up mind existing, as she did, in the demonstrated inadequacy of my thought. I was resolved by the time I had had a cold shower in the big white bathroom all my own and had dressed for the evening in my suit and tie and gla.s.ses that no matter what my feelings they would not deter me from the justice my life demanded. I really had promised Bo Weinberg I would look after her and protect her, and now that I had told her, I would have to, but I hoped for my sake as well as hers that it wouldn't ever come to that.

THIRTEEN.

By now in our stay at the Onondaga Hotel, as in any billet occupied for any length of time, the troops had been provided with a supplemental bill of fare that was more like home. Mr. Schultz had established a supply line from New York and once a week a truck came up with steaks and chops, racks of lamb, fish on ice, delicatessen, good booze and beer, and every couple of days someone went down to Albany, where an airplane landed with fresh New York rolls and bagels and cakes and pies and all the newspapers. The hotel kitchen was kept hopping, but n.o.body in there seemed to mind, as I thought they would, the implied judgment in all of this seeming to have escaped them. Everyone was without undue pride or umbrage or sensitivity, only too willing to cook and serve Mr. Schultz everything he provided them with, and in fact seemed to pick up in their own qualifications just being proximate to the big time.

Dinner became a ritual occasion as if we were all a family gathering at the same hour, though at different tables, at the end of the day. The dinners tended to go on awhile and were often the occasion for extended reminiscences on Mr. Schultz's part. He seemed relaxed at these times unless he drank too much, in which case he became surly or depressed and glared at one or another of us if we seemed to be having too good a time despite him, or eating too happily the food on our plates, which he liked to ask us to pa.s.s over to him for spite so that he could spear this or that morsel for himself before giving the plate back, he did this to me several times, which never failed to enrage me or cause me to lose my appet.i.te, once he went over to the other table and took a steak from their platter, it was as if he couldn't be generous and hospitable without feeling at the same time that people were getting the best of him, and on these nights dinner was most unpleasant with Miss Drew excusing herself when she didn't like what was going on, it really took the heart out of you to think he begrudged the very food going into your mouth, it was demeaning to have your portion violated, and these evenings were not good evenings at all.

But as I say for the most part if he stayed sober he was even-tempered at dinner as if the days he spent showing Onondaga New York his sunny disposition and altruistic nature somehow actually made him feel right with the world. And on this particular evening I knew definitely I would get to eat everything I put on my plate because we had two guests at our regular table, Dixie Davis, who seemed to be staying past the hour of his return to New York, and the priest from St. Barnabas Catholic Church, Father Montaine. I like it that when the father arrived he stopped first at the table by the door to greet Mickey and Irving and Lulu, and Dixie Davis's driver who was seated with them, and to chat for a few minutes with a lot of jovial priestly banter. He was pretty lively for a man of G.o.d, he rubbed his hands with enthusiasm when he talked as if only good things could happen, he was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with ambitions for his small and not terribly well-off parish, St. Barnabas being a modest neighborhood church down by the river, where the streets were narrowest and the houses small and close together, and it was made of wood rather than stone like the Holy Spirit up on the hill, although the inside was just about as large and even more decorative with its painted plaster Christ and attendant saints hooked up along the walls.

On the menu was roast beef, served well-done the way I liked it, and fresh asparagus I was not wild about, and homemade french fries, big thick cuts of them, and salad greens, which I don't touch on principle, and there was real French wine I was learning to develop a taste for but did not indulge in for the same reason that Drew Preston was seated as far away as possible across the table from Mr. Schultz. I sat on Mr. Schultz's left and this Father Montaine on his right, and to my left was Dixie Davis, and Drew Preston sat between him and Mr. Berman. Dixie Davis chattered uncontrollably, perhaps he had been worked over a bit during the afternoon meeting, perhaps he had brought the wrong intelligence or his legal opinion had not met with favor, but whatever it was he couldn't stop talking, maybe it was just the fact of being seated next to the most beautiful aristocratic woman he had ever seen, who wore a plain black dress that set off her elegant neck, which was wound with a single string of pearls in each of which glowed a pinpoint of the light of the hotel chandelier, but he was telling Mrs. Preston how he'd gotten started in the legal profession, from what humble beginnings, reminiscing with hysterical self-satisfaction while she nodded her lovely head to keep him going and resolutely packed away everything in sight on her plate and downed several gla.s.ses of wine, which he poured happily for her while he continued to bask in her presence and entreated to impress her with the facts of his craven life. I know I wouldn't have boasted about hanging around the greasy spoons near magistrates court sucking up to bail bondsmen so that they would tip me off when some poor slob was arraigned and needed a lawyer. That's the way he'd got started, building up a practice from the daily court traffic of numbers runners at twenty-five bucks per rap of the gavel. "The rest is history," he said with his toothy, downturned smile. I noticed too he sat with a hunch and his head pushed forward toward its pompadour, so that all his grooming and fine wardrobe was wasted on the posture of unctuousness. I don't know why I had taken such a dislike to the man, I hardly knew him, but I felt sitting next to him and watching him trying to look down Drew Preston's dress that I should be sitting at the other table with Irving and Lulu and the boys, not with this intellectual who did not once address a remark to me or even appear to notice that I was sitting there to his right.

And then he took a snapshot out of his wallet, it was of a woman in a halter and sun shorts squinting into the sun with her hands on her ample hips and her feet in their high-heeled shoes pointed outward, one before the other, and he placed it in front of Drew Preston, who peered down at it without touching it as if it was some object of natural curiosity, like a cricket or a praying mantis.

"That's my fiancee," he said, "the actress Fawn Bliss? Maybe you've heard of her."

"What?" Drew Preston said. "You don't mean it-Fawn Bliss?" she said enunciating the name in tones of such incredulity that the lawyer a.s.sumed she couldn't believe her good fortune in sitting next to him at the dinner table.

"That's the lady," Dixie Davis said, grinning and gazing at the snapshot with insipid adoration. Drew Preston caught my glance and her eyes glazed over and then crossed and I started to laugh, I didn't know she could do that, and it was at this moment I became aware of Mr. Berman, directly opposite, regarding me over the tops of his gla.s.ses, and he didn't have to say a word or even tilt his head, I knew that I had been listening to the wrong conversation. For all my resolve to stay alert I had been unable to take my eyes off Mrs. Preston, a truth I felt in the bones of my neck which actually creaked in their reluctance to swivel me around in the direction of Father Montaine and Mr. Schultz.

"Ah, but you must make the spiritual journey," the father was saying in his vigorous way, eating and drinking as he spoke so that the words were like what he was eating, "you must ask for the catechisme, you must hear the Gospel, you must purify yourself and prepare for election and undergo the scrutinies. Only then can you undergo baptisme and have the confirmahshun, only then can you receive the sacramahnt."

"How long does all that take, Father?"

"Oh well, this depends. A year. Five years, ten? How quickly you open your heart to the mysteries."

"I can move faster than that, Father," Mr. Schultz said.

I didn't dare look at Mr. Berman because he would immediately see that I had been caught unawares. Since meeting the father that time on the sidewalk in front of his church we had gone one Wednesday to St. Barnabas's Bingo Night, and Mr. Schultz actually ran a few games, calling out the magic numbers from the b.a.l.l.s that popped into the cup, and making a big deal of it when someone won a dollar or two. Oh yes, and then he spoke into the ear of the father, who announced with great excitement Mr. Schultz's blessed generosity in putting up a special grand prize for the end of the evening of twenty-five dollars and there was a big round of applause, Mr. Schultz receiving it with a modest hand held in the air and a big sheepish smile, while all this time Mr. Berman and I sat in the back and thought about bingo cards, and he took a card and gave numerical values to each letter and showed me a possible way to handicap the lines after each number was called out, and then described to me several different ways an honest game could be rigged. But I didn't think how I could be faulted for not knowing the game of bingo was the first step in the conversion process.

The father put down his knife and fork and leaned back in his chair still chewing. He looked at Mr. Schultz, his heavy eyebrows raised in compa.s.sionate priestly skepticism. "From the Jewish to the Holy Church is a great revolution."

"Not so great, Father, not so great. We are in the same ballpark. Why else would all your big shots wear yarmulkes? I notice also you keep talking about our guys and reading our Bible. Not so great."

"Ah, but this is the point exactement, how we read, what we accept, this is the point, is it not?"

"I know guys, Catholic guys I grew up with, business a.s.sociates, am I right, Otto?" Mr. Schultz said looking over to Mr. Berman, "Danny Iamascia, Joey Rao, guys like that. They think the way I think, they hold to the same virtues of right and wrong, they hold the same respect for their mothers, I have depended on Catholic businessmen all my life, Father, and how could I, and they on me, if we didn't understand one another like blood brothers."

With a deliberation matching these solemn sentiments he refilled the father's winegla.s.s. Everyone had grown quiet.

Father Montaine gave Mr. Schultz a glance of Gallic reproach and then picked up the gla.s.s and drank it off. Then he patted his lips with his napkin. "Of course," he said very softly as if he was speaking of something better left unsaid, "there is in the special cases of the religious mature, another way."

"Now you're talking. The short form," Mr. Schultz said.

"In these case, I don't know, we must 'ave the confidahns that it is truly a beginning of the submisshun to the Lord Jesu Christe."

"I give you my word I couldn't be more sincere, Father. I brought it up, didn't I? I live a difficult life. I make important decisions all the time. I need strength. I see men I know take their strength from their faith and I have to think I need that strength too I am just a man. I fear for my life like all men. I wonder what it's all for. I try to be generous, I try to be good. But I like the idea of that extra edge."

"I understan', ma son."

"How about Sunday," Mr. Schultz said.

After coffee Drew Preston excused herself and a few minutes later the party broke up and Mr. Schultz invited Father Montaine to the sixth floor in the hotel, where they sat in his suite and drank from a bottle of Canadian whiskey on the table and smoked cigars and enjoyed themselves like fast friends. I thought looking in on them they even looked alike, both of them stolid and neckless and sloppy with their ashes. Dixie Davis was in there with them. The rest of the gang was in Mr. Berman's office, sitting around looking glum and not saying much. Finally the father went home and everyone moved to Mr. Schultz's suite, no one called a meeting or anything like that we all just wandered in and sat down, and everyone was very quiet while our boss paced back and forth and gave us his thinking. "Mickey, you understand, don't you, Mickey would understand after all, I've got to be ready, I can't take chances, I need all the help I can get. Who knows? Who knows? Years ago I remember being very impressed by that Patrick Devlin, you remember the Devlin brothers they ran most of the Bronx beer at the time, so we was just getting started and I wanted to teach him a lesson, he was the tough one, we hung him up by the thumbs, you remember, Lulu? but he didn't know what we had in mind he thought we were killing him and he screamed for a priest. Well that impressed me. Not his mother, not his wife, not n.o.body but his priest when he thought he was dying. It gave me a pause for thought. I mean you look to your strength in moments like that, am I right? Actually alls we did was smear some guts and s.h.i.t from a dead rat on his eyes and tape it down with adhesive tape and we left him hanging there in his own cellar so's they would find him, although by the time they did, the stupid f.u.c.ks, he'd lost the use of his sight. But I never forgot he wanted the priest. Those things stay with you. I like that little french-fried Canuck, I like his church, I'm gonna put a new roof on it so it don't leak during the sacred moments, it gives me a good feeling, you know what I mean? I get a good feeling every time I walk in there, I don't understand Latin, but I don't understand Hebrew neither, so why not both, is there a law against both? Christ was both, for christsake, what's the big deal? They push confession, I can't pretend I'm wild about that, no offense, but I'll deal with it when the time comes. This mustn't get to my mother-Irving, your mother neither, the mothers shouldn't know this, they wouldn't understand. I never liked the old men davening in the synagogue, rocking swaying back and forth, everyone mumbling to himself at his own speed, the head going up and down the shoulders rocking, I like a little dignity, I like everyone singing something together, everyone doing the same thing at the same time, I like the order of that, it means something everyone goes down on their knees the same time, it puts a light on G.o.d, is this too deep for you, Lulu? Look at that, he is so unhappy, Otto, look at his expression he's gonna cry, tell him I'm still the Dutchman, tell him nothing is changed, nothing is changed, you dumb Hebe!" And he gave his gunman a big bear hug, laughing and pounding him on the back. "You know how it is with a trial, don't you, you know we get a little nervous when we're on the docket. That's all. That's all. It's not the last rites for christsake."

n.o.body said anything by way of reply except Dixie Davis, who kept nodding and smiling his vacuous uh-hums of encouragement, everyone else was stunned, all in all it had been a stunning day. Mr. Schultz kept talking, but when I judged the moment proper I quietly slipped out and went to my room. Mr. Schultz was excessive, anyone who worked for him should know that, he couldn't stop, he took things to extremes, so that what might have started out as business, like everything else up here, he would want to do to the limit, he would go overboard in these feelings just as he did in his angers. I hardly thought we were in any danger of losing him to the priesthood, he just wanted a little more coverage, like another insurance policy, he'd all but said so, and unless you were a religious person yourself who thought there was just one denomination of G.o.d, that G.o.d came contained in one denomination and one only, he made a kind of superst.i.tious sense, he always wanted more of everything, and if we were up here much longer he'd probably become a member of the Holy Spirit Protestant church too, G.o.d knows he could afford it, this was his usual blithe everyday voracity, Mr. Schultz's urge to appropriate was stronger than his cunning, it was the central force of him, it operated all the time and wherever he happened to be, he'd appropriated speakeasies, beer companies, unions, numbers games, nightclubs, me, Miss Drew, and now he was appropriating Catholicism. That was all.

FOURTEEN.

But now, not only was Mr. Schultz's trial due to start in the first week of September, his conversion was to precede it, in one blow he had doubled the critical ceremonies of his life for us all to think about. The following days were very busy, another lawyer appeared whom I had never seen before, a dignified portly white-haired gentleman clearly not a familiar of gangsters or their mouthpieces, as I could tell by his stately and solemn demeanor and his old-fashioned gla.s.ses, which were supported solely by his nose and were tied to a black ribbon, from which they dangled when not in use, and also the fact that he brought with him a young a.s.sistant, also a lawyer, who carried both their briefcases. These new arrivals entailed an all-day closed-door conference in Mr. Schultz's suite and a visit by everyone the next morning to the courthouse. The matter of preparations for Mr. Schultz's religious induction entailed meetings with Father Montaine at the church. In addition there was all the usual business, which seemed to send everyone off in every direction except Drew Preston and me.

So I found myself one morning on top of a living horse of the countryside holding very tightly to the reins, which seemed to me not enough in the way of structured support, and trying to communicate reasonably with this very tall and wide-backed beast who pretended he didn't understand me. I had thought horses were supposed to be dumb. When I said something to slow him down he broke into a canter, and when I urged him to go faster to keep up with Miss Drew on her gray filly, he stopped and dipped his head and began to eat the sweet and luxuriant gra.s.ses of the field. His back was my realm but it was his back. I either bounced along hunched over him so that I wouldn't fall, while Drew Preston beside me told me what I should be doing with my knees and how my heels should be hooked into the stirrups, fine points I wasn't quite ready for, or I sat there in the sun looking past this grazer whose neck sloped down at a precipitous angle until his head disappeared entirely and listened to him tear bunches of gra.s.s with his big teeth and grind the stuff up in his molars while the field opened up between me and the only other living human in sight. This horse was an ordinary-enough-looking bay going to black between the eyes and across the rump, but in perversity he was a champion. I thought it was cruel of Mrs. Preston to arrange it for me to be humiliated by a horse. I achieved a new respect for Gene Autry, who not only rode so that it looked easy but managed to sing pretty much on key at the same time. My only consolation was that n.o.body from the gang was around to see me, and when we put the horses away in the farmer's stable and walked back to town I loved the feel of the earth under my own two feet and thanked G.o.d and His sunny day for being alive, though slightly lame and sore-a.s.sed.

We had a late breakfast in my tea shop. n.o.body else was there and the woman was back in her kitchen, so we could talk quite freely, Mrs. Preston and I. I was awfully happy to be alone with her again. She had not once laughed at my struggles atop the horse, she had seemed seriously interested in my instruction and thought I would be a good rider after a few more lessons. I agreed. She looked very fine in her pale silk shirt with its big collar and open neck, and with her blue velvet riding jacket with the elbow patches of leather; we ate our cereal and eggs and toast in leisure and drank two cups of coffee and smoked my Wings while she asked me questions about myself and looked at me with the most intense concentration and listened to my answers as if n.o.body in all her life had ever interested her so much. I knew she looked at and listened to Mr. Schultz in this same manner but I didn't mind. I thought having her attention was a great privilege and excitement, we were friends, intimates, and I couldn't imagine anywhere else I'd rather be than with her at this moment, in this shop out of sight of everyone, having breakfast together and talking in this natural way, although it wasn't that natural since the situation impelled me to perform at my brilliant best.

I told her I came from a criminal background.

"Does that mean your father is a gangster?"

"My father disappeared a long time ago. It means my neighborhood."

"Where is that?"

"Between Third Avenue and Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx. And north of Claremont Avenue. It's the same section Mr. Schultz comes from."

"I've never been to the Bronx."

"I didn't think you had," I said. "We live in a tenement. The bathtub is in the kitchen."

"Who is we?"

"My mother and me. My mother works in a Jaundry. She has long gray hair. I think she's an attractive woman or could be if she took care of herself. She's very clean and neat, I don't mean that. But she's a little bit crazy. Why am I telling you these things? I've never talked about her to anybody and I feel bad now saying this about my own mother. She's very kind to me. She loves me."

"I would think so."

"But she's not quite right. She doesn't care about looking her best, or having friends, or buying things or getting a boyfriend or anything like that. She doesn't care what the neighbors think. She sort of lives in her head. She's got the reputation of being a nut."

"I think she has had a hard life. How long has your father been gone?"

"I was very little. I don't even remember him. He was Jewish, I know that much."

"Isn't your mother Jewish?"

"She's an Irish Catholic. Her name is Mary Behan. But she'd rather go to temple than to church. That's the kind of thing I mean. She goes upstairs and sits with the women in the synagogue. She takes comfort from that."

"And what is the family name? Not Bathgate."

"Oh, you heard that."

"Yes, when you enrolled in Sunday school at the Holy Spirit. Now I know where you got it." She was smiling at me. I thought she meant where I got the name, from Bathgate Avenue, the street of plenty, the street of the fruits of the earth. But she meant the habit of ending up in the wrong church. It took me a moment. She was trying not to laugh at her own joke, looking at me askance, hoping I wouldn't take offense.

"You know that never occurred to me," I said. "That I was following in the crazy family footsteps." I laughed and then she did. We had a good laugh, I loved her laughter, it was low and melodious, like a voice under water.

Afterward, outside, with the sun burning down hot on the empty street, and without making a point of it, we naturally turned to stroll in the opposite direction from the hotel. She took off her jacket and slung it over her shoulder. I watched our reflections wavering in the empty store windows with their TO LET TO LET signs. Our reflections were black, very little color in them. Yet the street burned in light. I felt I knew Drew Preston this morning as she seemed to be in herself, without pretending anything or being afflicted with one of her large emotional wine-induced introspections, I felt I knew her under her brilliance of beauty, almost so that I forgot it, as she herself must looking out from it, and I thought I understood her as she must have understood herself, as someone maintaining her being while in the grasp of others. It was the kind of thing that would appear to the gang as slumming, which is why they had taken such offense, but was really more dangerous than that, more vulnerable of spirit, and I think what interested her about me was that I was in my way doing the same thing. signs. Our reflections were black, very little color in them. Yet the street burned in light. I felt I knew Drew Preston this morning as she seemed to be in herself, without pretending anything or being afflicted with one of her large emotional wine-induced introspections, I felt I knew her under her brilliance of beauty, almost so that I forgot it, as she herself must looking out from it, and I thought I understood her as she must have understood herself, as someone maintaining her being while in the grasp of others. It was the kind of thing that would appear to the gang as slumming, which is why they had taken such offense, but was really more dangerous than that, more vulnerable of spirit, and I think what interested her about me was that I was in my way doing the same thing.

We walked for several blocks. She had fallen silent. Every once in a while she glanced at me. Then all at once she took my hand and held it as we strolled along. Just as I had been giving her credit for a kind of real basic sensibleness, she had to hold my hand in broad daylight like a girlfriend. It made me very nervous but I couldn't offend her by pulling away. I did look behind us to see if anyone we knew was on the street. I cleared my throat. "Maybe you don't appreciate the position you're in," I said.

"What position is that?"

"Well you're my governess."

"That's what I thought, but apparently all this while you've been looking after me."

"I have. But to tell you the truth," I said, "so far you seem to have done all right on your own." The minute I said this I thought it sounded snide. "But I guess I would keep my word if you got into a jam," I said by way of expiation.

"What kind of a jam."

"Well for instance it's not good if you aren't in this walk of life to have seen anything, to know anything," I said. "They don't like witnesses. They don't like it for people to have something on them."

"I have something on them," she said as if the idea was hard to understand.