Coney Page 2

  “I go to school,” Harry said.

  “After school and weekends. And once you work off the bike, I’ll start to pay you cash. Ten cents an hour.”

  Aba said: Go wherever there is to go.

  Harry said: “Sure.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  HARRY LEFT THE STORE. THE WINTER SUN WAS EDGING INTO THE Atlantic. He zipped up his brown corduroy jacket to the last notch. Bending his chin to his chest and hunching his shoulders, he lengthened his stride to challenge the immobilizing wind, which retaliated by knifing into his exposed raw knee. The streetlights had not yet come on. Twilight settled on the rows of two-family houses, masking with neat silhouettes the distressed structures.

  The few people in the streets walked briskly, purposefully, anticipating, Harry was certain, home and warmth. At his home there would be a note on the kitchen table: Here’s a quarter for supper. Don’t eat hot dogs at Nathan’s. Go to Kaplan’s delicatessen.

  He decided to visit his grandparents, who lived in a small bungalow a five-minute walk from his home. He rang the bell. His grandmother leapt on his neck like a football player crunching a clothesline tackle. Her lips wet his cheeks and forehead. She smelled of the carp she ground by hand for the Friday night gefilte fish. The odor’s intensity waxed and waned, but never completely deserted her or her house.

  “Kim arrine, Kim arrine.” Her Yiddish offer of hospitality was delivered in a voice more appropriate for yelling “Fire!”

  Bama, as two-year-old Harry had called her (the only name thereafter she would answer to), had arrived in the United States in 1919 and immediately sniffed a mean, godless country: a medinah to be ignored. She learned no English, guarding her illiteracy like a jewel. When Harry had asked her why she did not speak English, she summoned a tone of irrefutable logic:

  “For what do I need English? Did they speak English in Warsaw?”

  In the house, his grandfather, who insisted on Harry calling him Zadeh so the boy would not forget Yiddish, stood before a mirror adjusting his brown felt hat. When the brim was cocked over his right eye at precisely the correct rakish angle, he turned to Harry and asked:

  “How many bowel movements have you had today?”

  “Three,” Harry lied, satisfying the minimum, immutable daily number prescribed by Zadeh for guaranteed longevity.

  “Good,” Zadeh said. “Do four or five. It’s good to have some in the bank.”

  Zadeh turned back to the mirror for a last look, then walked to the door saying:

  “I will be back in four hours, during which time I will have shown that amateur, Manny Edelberg, how a master plays chess.”

  He tapped his hat, confident that when Edleberg, his adversary in weekly chess marathons, beheld its jaunty confidence, he, Zadeh, would have gained a telling psychological advantage.

  Bama zipped down Harry’s jacket and removed it. Had he been wearing galoshes she would have pushed him into a chair and pulled them free. Bama’s role in life was to turn men into invalids. She spotted the tear.

  “Oy, the hurt of it. What happened?”

  “I fell off my bike.”

  “A thousand curses on your mother for giving you one,” she said on her way to the bathroom. Returning, brandishing a bottle of iodine, she knelt and removed his shoes, undid his belt and began to unbutton his knickers.

  “Wait,” she said, “you catch cold. I’ll get you a bathrobe.”

  Stinging at the knee, Harry sat wrapped in his grandfather’s stained tan wool bathrobe, which smelled of the Prince Albert tobacco he rolled into Zig-Zag cigarette paper, which when lit, flared, often singeing his nose.

  “You do not bleed too much. That is because you are healthy, like I have made you,”

  A shiver rode Harry’s memory of the one American exception to Bama’s Warsaw-enclosed world: the Polar Bear Club, whose members dived into the Atlantic each winter Sunday. In Warsaw, she similarly had defied the Vistula River.

  Three-year old Harry, a conscripted cub, had been cradled in her arms and dunked. His body rapidly numbed, but not before he was cut by floating objects which, he realized years later, were chunks of frozen sewage, probably shit.

  When he had turned sufficiently blue to ward off diseases for another week, he had been wrapped in a fiercely scratchy wool blanket and force-fed pumpernickel bread smeared with chicken fat. The regimen, she assured, guaranteed him longevity of at least one hundred years. Between them, Bama and Zadeh were raising Methuselah. The immersions ended when he was four and could outrun her.

  “Here,” Bama said, handing him a needle and thread, “make it for me.”

  Harry threaded the needle while Bama released awed sounds to celebrate Harry’s needle-threading ability. He handed her the needle and she began to sew.

  “Nu, Heshele, you learn good things in school?”

  He decided to tease her.

  “I learned about America. How good it is to live in such a free country among nice people.”

  Her America bristled with enemies: deliverers of catastrophic news like the mailman, who was in the pay of anti-Semites, as were the thieves at the electric and telephone companies. The unsavory band led by a master culprit named Meyer La Guardia.

  She waved off education, a new enemy.

  “Heshele,” she said, “talk politics.”

  She leaned forward in her chair, her yellow-flecked, brown tartar eyes riveted on him as if he were a lone actor caught in a spotlight. He orated:

  “Now that the British and French have deserted Czechoslovakia, Hitler will take what he wants. Already, he is doing it with Franco in Spain. The Poles have taken Tetschen from the Czechs. Jewish shops in Germany have been destroyed. The situation is bad. Sweet America is asleep.”

  Bama understood none of this except that it was bad for the Jews, as always. It also made little sense to him. Most was verbatim Aba sprinkled with Gabriel Heatter’s radio commentary. Harry tried to interest himself in the world and how, according to Aba, a poet who boarded with the Catzkers, it was going to hell, but he couldn’t get a handle on it. Too many performers; too many rings. Like Shnozz, the old spieler, dismissed the circus: Lots of nothing.

  Bama inhaled his words through an open mouth, stretching her taut, leathery facial skin. High, thick cheekbones banished all wrinkles to her forehead. Harry thought she resembled the Indian on the buffalo nickel. With her lips parted, she became the “Indian Brave” coin bank sold at the five-and-ten.

  “Heshele,” she said, nodding her head in solemn agreement with his discourse, “you are out of the ordinary. And why should it not be? Are you not descendent from the genius of Vilna?”

  Praise embarrassed Harry. He could not believe it. In class, he blushed. With Bama, as with his father, praise was automatic, meaningless, except as an expression of love. Harry also had trouble with love. As he hugged Bama before leaving, he hoped she could feel him straining for love.

  The temperature had fallen. The few other pedestrians seemed on the verge of sprinting to escape the tormenting air. Harry moved slowly, in no hurry to reach home.

  CHAPTER

  3

  AN HOUR AFTER HARRY HAD LEFT WOODY, A 1939 BLACK PACKARD (the latest and most expensive model) driven by a chauffeur wearing gray livery pulled away from the Half-Moon Hotel and stopped at the bike store. Woody climbed into the backseat beside Victor Menter, who wore a double-breasted, blue pin-striped suit, white-on-white shirt, gray silk tie seeded with tiny red crowns, black patent leather pumps and gray spats. A box-backed camel’s hair overcoat lay on his lap. Woody, in sweater, frayed shirt, wrinkled khaki pants, olive-drab army field jacket and black sneakers, secured by dirty white laces, feared that he had missed a command.

  “Vic, I’m sorry. Did you say this was a dress-up thing?”

  “It is and it ain’t. So I is and you ain’t,” Menter answered, smiling at his own wit. “I don’t know who we’re going to meet. I know one, but there might be others. Don’t sweat it. Nobody expects you
to dress up. When you do, you look like a circus act. Tom Thumb or something.”

  The car turned onto Surf Avenue and moved past rows of tar-shingled bungalows that lay like Kafka’s village under the heaven-seeking rides of the amusement area. Grime-specked yellow windowshades seemed dreary symbols of common purpose, perhaps a luckless fraternal order. The streets were abandoned to the Atlantic’s sadistic wind, save for the outdoor counters of Nathan’s Famous, a frigid oasis where a few men, turned turtle inside upturned collars, wolfed down hot dogs in two bites and bolted.

  “What a shithouse,” Menter said. “Ain’t nothing here worth a shit, except maybe Dr. Couney’s premature baby hospital. And I ain’t sure they ain’t some kind of freak show neither.”

  His voice, tinged with a hint of a brogue, was high-pitched, as though yet uncracked by adolescence.

  Woody nodded, saying:

  “I was there once. You pay a quarter and they lift up those preemies behind a glass to show you. Christ, they don’t weigh more’n a pound. Look like cigars with hair. You can’t believe they’re alive. Nobody can tell me they won’t grow up to be freaks. Some chance.”

  Menter shook his head vigorously.

  “Couldn’t agree more. Don’t know why you’d want to fuck with something that nature said should be dead. It’s unnatural. Fact is, they’d be better off dead than growing up to be freaks.”

  The car glided past the borders of Coney and Brighton Beach and onto Ocean Parkway, a wide boulevard lined with tall trees, six-story apartment houses and neat two-family wooden and red-brick homes that ended at Prospect Park. Following the park’s serpentine road, they exited at the Grand Army Plaza’s replica of the Arc de Triomphe. From there, the red, green and white lights of the shops and movie palaces of Flatbush Avenue Extension marked a wide runway to the Manhattan Bridge.

  Halfway across the lower deck of the bridge, the car skidded slightly on the snow-slick metal grating.

  “Wheee,” Menter laughed, “take us on the Bumper Car, Vince.”

  The chauffeur squared his back.

  “Sorry, Mr. Menter,” he said.

  “It’s OK Vince, I like it. Might even be fun to have a little accident so we could kick some kike’s ass.”

  Woody put his hand on the chauffeur’s shoulder, saying, “The right still dynamite?”

  Vince lifted his right hand from the wheel and bent his arm back, flexing his biceps. The dwarf hopped off the seat and stretched to feel the muscle.

  “Wow. It’s as hard as Papa Dionne’s cock.”

  They all laughed.

  “Papa Dionne’s cock,” Menter said, “that’s pretty good. Where’d you hear it?”

  “Made it up myself.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I swear I did!”

  “Woody, don’t get too big for your short-ass britches. Nobody likes a smart-ass.”

  They drove on in silence through the gray-smudged late afternoon and parked in front of the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street. The chauffeur unlocked the trunk and lifted out a wheelchair. Setting it beside the car, he opened the rear door, cradled Menter in his arms, eased him into the chair, and pushed him through the lobby to an elevator. Woody trotted to keep pace.

  “Fourth floor,” Menter said to the acne-ridden operator.

  They stepped into a long, narrow corridor lined with identical wooden doors, halved by opaque glass. Wide black characters identified room numbers and sometimes the enterprise. The cracks of the narrow-slatted pine floor guarded years of miscellaneous dirt. Splattered ink stains suggested sooty snowflakes. The stagnant air smelled like a room which, opened after years of disuse, releases a hoarded mix of rancid odors.

  Menter said: “four-oh-eight.”

  The chauffeur knocked on the door of Acme Inc.

  “It’s open,” said a voice within.

  The chauffeur and Woody pushed Menter into a dimly lit room containing a large mahogany desk and five scattered folding chairs. A tall man whose muscular body threatened to burst the seams of a double-breasted midnight blue suit stood in front of the desk. His flattened nose invoked the ring. His eyes, the color of a green traffic light, encouraged the ease of familiarity. Yet he displaced much air, leaving little for others.

  “You stay,” he said, pointing to Menter. “They wait in the hall.”

  “The dwarf stays. He’s my muscle.” Menter replied, motioning Vince out.

  “I heard about you and your dwarf.”

  The man spoke carefully, like a stammerer ever wary of his affliction’s spiteful maliciousness. He smiled, revealing a chipped front tooth.

  “You think you’re some kind of ancient potentate with a royal jester. Does he do tricks?”

  Menter feigned sleep. The pose accentuated his mongoloid features. Only at the last moment had fate veered away from inflicting Down’s syndrome. Nature’s arsenal of errant genes was evident in the ruddy face, egg-shaped head, and half-open, pig-pink eyes. Above these, mundane heredity had triumphed, shaping a canopy of fine, blond curly hair.

  “I’m Victor Joseph Menter. And he is Mr. Woodrow Winston. And you must be Tom Noonan. You want to talk or can I nap some more?”

  Noonan pursed his lips and said:

  “Don’t push too hard.”

  “It’s your nickel.”

  “As you say. The subject is Coney Island. But first I’ll show you something.”

  He lifted from the desk a poster-sized scroll and unfurled it against his chest. It showed two sketches of Orchard Beach in the Bronx. The left was captioned Orchard Beach then, the right Orchard Beach now. Then put Orchard Beach in its geographical context, a dot on Long Island Sound, alongside Rodman’s Neck and Hunter’s Island. The now portion enlarged it as the focal point of the area. A boardwalk, parking facility, play and game areas and a picnic grove were identified in large letters. Noonan’s index finger traced the facilities.

  “Commissioner Robert Moses did that. He created clean, white beaches, ample bathhouses where families change in comfort and then swim. He gave kids room to play, wholesome places where families picnic under beautiful trees. I had the privilege of working with him.”

  “Hooray for him and you,” Menter interrupted.

  Noonan ignored him.

  “Recently Commissioner Moses has turned his attention to Coney Island. He wishes to create a park there. I believe this is only the beginning and that eventually he will want to do for Coney Island what he did for Orchard Beach. When he does, my principals wish to own the real estate that the city will be obliged to purchase.”

  “Sounds good to me. Where do I come in?”

  “You are President of the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce and Coney Island Businessmen’s Association. An outside buyer would arouse too much attention. Prices would rise. Therefore you will be the buyer. Everyone will get a fair price for selling. You will receive a fifteen percent commission for each sale.”

  “And if they don’t want to sell?”

  Noonan lifted the back of his hand to his lips and kissed a clear diamond set in a wide gold band.

  “You are here because I have been told that you have great powers of persuasion. Use them. If persuasion doesn’t work, there are other options. I don’t care what condition the property is in when we get it. It’ll be razed anyway.”

  Menter nodded and winked. Noonan continued.

  “The bank I represent will handle all the financial arrangements. Besides commission there will be bonuses. The less money we spend, the more for you. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “It is my estimation that Commissioner Moses will want to move soon. I want the property by September.”

  “By September it is.”

  In the hallway, Menter rubbed his hands in glee.

  “Some sweet deal!”

  He crossed himself and, with a continuing flourish, goosed the air.

  In the car, Menter screwed a cigarette into a silver holder and lit up. He clamped the holder b
etween his teeth, elevating it to the jaunty angle favored by President Franklin Roosevelt

  “Remind you of someone, Woody?”

  “Sure Vic, like I always say, FDR.”

  “I wonder where he got his infantile paralysis. For sure, not like me, from swimmin’ in the Gowanus Canal. And he didn’t have no kike doctor who stopped coming round when he sniffed no more dough.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen. You shouldda’ seen me before. I was the best shortstop in Brooklyn.”

  “Tough.”

  “Yeah, now I’m like you, lookin’ at the world through assholes.”

  “Livin’ in fart air.”

  “Smell much pussy?”

  “All the time.”

  Menter smiled.

  “Woody, you think FDR screws his old lady?”

  “They got a shitload a’ kids.”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re a dummy,” Menter said, patting Woody’s head lightly, then increasing the force until he drew sound, “they had those kids before he got the paralysis.”

  “Oh.”

  Menter cupped his hand under his genitals and said:

  “I don’t know about FDR, but this can still do plenty damage.”

  Woody knew different. The whores at Rosie’s (owned by Menter) had told him that Menter would have them up to his apartment, sometimes two and three at a time, working for hours on his limp piece of meat.

  “Sure thing, Vic,” he said, forming a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

  “You understand what Noonan told us, Woody?”

  “Sure. Buy the Midway property and then some.”

  Menter grimaced.

  “Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. You got a dwarf brain. He covered his ass in case anything fucks up, but he told us to burn it, then pick up the ruins for nothing. That way, him and we make the most money and he figures it will give Moses the idea to step in quick, like a prince, to save Coney.”

  “Geez.”

  “What geez! Ain’t you never seen a Coney fire before? The kikes set them all the time to collect insurance.”

  “Sure, but the whole Midway …”

  The car passed a truck that had been pulled over by a police officer.