Carnovsky's Retreat Page 7

  Not to mention she will then go after him louder than before and furthermore forbid him from visiting such a dirty old man. How else would she feature me, and what is the kid going to say in my defense? “Oh no, Oscar’s real nice, he shows me how to play the ponies down in Florida.” Terrific. A good reference. So best let him keep pitching and build up his arm.

  Purchased a union-suit plus wool stockings for the nights in Canada. Also picked up a new notebook—who could guess I would fill one up?*

  I am a little hesitant about traveling out of town, however—I remembered I don’t like hockey. But the truth is I’m socked in here pretty good, rooted, and I’m nervous to abandon the nest. Two whole days gone! And so I must worry who will feed hot cocoa to Jimmy Myers in my absence? Who will bring in my mail, as if it mattered? And who will keep an eye on my girl in the window? It’s a good thing I ain’t got a plant to water or I would never step outside at all.

  Now Jimmy has his feelings hurt because the old man reads a bedtime story to sister Bea. Not that he can’t hear it too but he knows it is aimed elsewhere and he has his pride. And Jimmy never got these stories in the past either, he says, never the big bad wolf or the three little pigs. The schneid for Jimmy.

  Myers is a nice man, just locked out at night. Why would he discriminate between his own two children? He made an assumption (and I would assume the same) that Jimmy doesn’t go in for a fairy tale but that the little girl does. I’m sure this is the explanation and I told him as much. Maybe he bought it, too.

  For the hell of it, I brought something home from the library and tried out my own voice, reading aloud in my chair, and I was happy to have no one in earshot. It’s not so easy out loud. You must pronounce certain words that you are familiar with yet never have spoken, and so naturally you might pronounce it wrong. Then the throat weakens, the tongue dries up, and you make chopped liver of a few nice lines. You should be hamming it up a little, give it a little english, and this I am too shy to attempt even without an audience.

  But I believe it’s true Jimmy wouldn’t like it. He knows too much and plus which he knew it from birth. Why else did Myers never read him? Look at the Beanstalk. Up and down the pole they go until it’s all settled—splat goes the giant. Jack is safe with mama, they come by a little cash, and that’s The End. But it’s a phony, clearing off this giant who wasn’t even there in the first place when they went down the road to sell the cow. It’s not The End, it’s The Beginning. Nice to have some money, sure, but it tells you nothing. The mother might want a husband and something to do with her time, and Jack must go to school or work, life for him is just barely underway.

  Or take the other one. Jimmy is also aware you don’t marry a princess, you marry human. (Or subhuman.) In life on earth you get two people yelling at each other through a door, that’s what he knows. You get hot sticky summers and cold slooshy winters. It’s a long haul, and 10 Battersea Street is no place for a fairy story.

  Big excitement, I am filing my first dispatch from foreign soil. I am sitting in the Dominion of Canada, where I must nevertheless record that the streets are filled with cars, and people, and a cup of coffee tastes just like itself. I expected the Yukon, not this fancy city, don’t ask me why. I expected I would be seeing wolves and frozen rivers with penguins walking over the ice.

  It did have a different look coming in. Like Siberia or something, flat and bleak and empty. We came on a bus and I slept a lot of the way, till they pulled us off at the border and frisked us, then I got back on and lit a cigar. The sweetest Havana money can buy and the pair behind me said put it out. These two are smoking the whole time, popping cigarettes like after-dinner mints one by one into the mouth, and they have the nerve to protest a Gonzales! I will if you will, I informed them. So we both did, and now they despise me. Figure it.

  Anyway the travel people gave us one half-hour to clean up in our rooms, then shoved us right back on the bus to tour the city. I should have had the brains to say No Thanks—or the guts—but naturally I didn’t so we went off to visit a big cross on a hill and shopped in the souvenir stand up there. (Picked up a birchbark canoe for Jimmy.) Then we took in a few churches, Notre Dames, in the old part of town.

  We’re a mixed bag, with couples, some younger, a little club of old men in red hats, and the single men and women. One of the women came over to say hello to me. Wearing Rangers’ sweater number 9 (because she is president of Bathgate Fan Club, Yonkers branch) and assures me Bathgate will score a goal for her in tomorrow night’s game. Fine, fine, here’s hoping. She greeted everyone else with the same prophecy, by the way, and also the same offer—to join up, Yonkers branch.

  I was shy with this crowd and wanted all day to take a nap. So I am happy to retreat back here at last, unload a few thoughts on my dear diary, and hit the lights.

  Begin the new day with our Continental Breakfast, which is French for a roll and a coffee. It sounded fancy so I was looking for them to waltz in with dead birds lined up under a silver dome and some frilly eggs, cheese on toast. In comes a roll and a coffee.

  Yet they are trying hard, these travel people, they want to give good weight, so they put us back on the bus once more and stand us to a day of skiing. A few could do it and a few, including the old men in the hats, did not want to give it a crack. Everyone else stumbled around and called it fun. You got to get your money’s worth—if you paid for two broken legs, you must go break them. So I tried.

  A very nice girl sat with me by the fireplace inside, named Linda, from Jersey. I discovered that I have lost the knack of conversation. Nothing that passed through my brain seemed worth saying out loud, so I didn’t, and then soon enough I couldn’t. Linda is shy too, however, and I can tell she doesn’t hold it against me. In fact the reverse—pretends that my most asinine remarks are of great interest to her, helps me along. A Good Samaritan crosses my path. She even asked can she sit with me tonight at the restaurant.

  And I wanted to ask right back, Am I so bad off? Am I such a charity case, Linda from Jersey, that you are inspired to nurse me through life? What shows? What is so terrible about Oscar Fish?

  Back here I checked in the mirror, to see how the world at large might see me, and there’s nothing obvious. No warts on the tip of my nose, no gray hairs—I’m fit for my age. Many people have thought I was nice-looking, by which they meant that they liked me, a nice person. Only Tanya thought I was handsome (talking about my beautiful eyes) but there is no law that says you must be handsome.

  To nobody’s surprise excepting Our Lady of the Andy Bathgate, Rangers took it on the chin tonight. 5 to 1, and they were lucky to get the one, a Harry Howell squib that hit someone’s foot and bumped into the goal.

  Number 9 got a goal all right, but Number 9 for Montreal, Rocket Richard. This was a play worth seeing. He crashes through the two Ranger defensemen like a madman breaking down a door and when he finds himself on the other side, extricates himself from the debris, locates the puck at his feet, and shovels it past the goaltender while still spinning sideways. They say he does this regularly but I thought the noise would bring down the roof of the building on us.

  It did not have far to fall, either, because the “best seats in the house” were way upstairs right under the pigeons’ perch. Same as with the “Continental Breakfast” but we have no complaints. A closer score we might have hoped for, otherwise no problem—we exit in nice high spirits into a nice clear frosty night and all at once I become a leader among men. I have learned to hate the bus, so I announce I will stroll back up St. Catherine’s Street to the hotel, at my leisure with a Gonzales. And though I never meant it as an invitation it sounds good to all concerned, or most, and we stroll together beneath the winking stars.

  Not far from the hotel some of us elect to have a nightcap, in a lively looking spot with copper pots and greenery in the front window. I try a belt of rye while Linda drinks two glasses of red wine, sufficient so that she takes my arm on the last leg home. I can actually smell her youth,
a sweet smell like a child. She is not drunk or propping herself up on me, just letting me know we are friends in this group.

  “Is Peterson watching?” she says.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Number 9, in the hockey shirt.”

  “Oh her. Bathgate. Yes I think so, she’s looking right at you. Better let go. I’ll tell her you’re my niece.”

  “That’s nice, your niece. Let’s tell her that.” And now she is getting loud enough for the others to hear. “Tell Peterson I’m your niece!”

  Maybe she is a little tipsy. I fear she will be embarrassed in the morning, when we all board the bus for New York and cannot smoke a cigar, so I untangle her arm from mine—gently so she knows I would never answer her kindness with anything less—and send her up in the elevator.

  So I had the lobby to myself, to sit and blow smoke and to ponder the fact I was sitting in Canada. Also thought about my friend Linda Stanley from Fort Lee, a schoolteacher as it happens, smart girl and not bad looking. Hazel eyes with long dark lashes and a nice clean face, pretty smile. Doesn’t overdo the makeup, the way the women do up here. (Worse than in the City. They wear masks, fright-faces, they roll down the block like Indians on the warpath at eight a.m. This is scary stuff.) Linda dresses simple: green coat, green dress, a few tiny pearls around her neck.

  And that was it. Big oldfashioned frilly couches in the lobby, and flowerpots, but also brass spittoons all around the room, as though they are expecting Queen Victoria and Leo Durocher both on the same day. No one shows up, however, neither Durocher nor the Old Lady, so I polish off my Gonzales and ascend to my room to record these very words and now snooze.

  Saturday. Back here, and time to say that was not that, dear diary, I did not snooze after all. Let’s get the rest of it into the record, better late than never.

  I put on my robe and pajamas and looked out the window (what else?) at St. Catherine’s Street—nightclubs blinking lights, the people hustling into taxicabs, the party still going strong down there and I’m feeling restless myself. So maybe get dressed and join them for another nightcapper. It’s not me, I am never a drinker, and yet there is a principle here too: you’re thirsty, then drink. Why not? Because Mrs. Bathgate might catch you at it?

  And just then comes a knock on my door. Right away I know what’s up, that this isn’t the chambermaid with an armload of sheets, or someone looking for his lost dog. I know it is going to be Linda Stanley. It is and it is not a surprise to me.

  Put it this way—until it occurred I would never dream it, but the second I heard the knock I knew what it was. That’s my natural smarts, I guess, because I never heard such a knock before. And my initial instinct was go hide in the bathroom and wait for it to go away. Open up the door? Never. And that’s where my smarts leave off.

  She had a glass of wine in each hand. One for me. And I am always the practical man, so I had the presence of mind to ask her,

  “How did you manage to knock?”

  She lifted up her leg to demonstrate the knock-knee and says, “I thought you might come visit me.”

  “I wouldn’t presume—” said I, the gallant one.

  “I thought that too, so here I am. May I enter your chambers?”

  I am not such a big fool as I may sometimes pretend. That night in Montreal I had no idea why it was the case, yet I knew this girl was after me, I knew she wanted to play around. I will also make note of the fact that we did so, nor am I feeling any remorse. Maybe she was tipsy and maybe not, but in any case I was the one who got raped.

  After which we were lying in bed like old folks and talking.

  “I’m so glad you were on that bus.”

  “Me too, believe it. But you didn’t see me on the bus. I didn’t see you.”

  “I did, though. I watched you for hours.”

  “What?”

  “While you were sleeping.”

  “What?” (Still lacking the knack of conversation!)

  “You snored like crazy. Everyone was laughing about it, and I thought it was just so sweet.”

  “You must be joking. I never snore. And I would certainly never snore in public.”

  “I bet you’ll be snoring twenty minutes from now, as a matter of fact. Want to bet?”

  “I’m not a gambling man,” I told her and that’s true, gambling and handicapping are two different matters. I am making talk at any rate, that’s all it amounts to. How should I know if I snore? Tanya never mentioned it.

  “That’s why I wanted to know you better. Because you snored for two hours and didn’t give a hoot. You were so comfortable with yourself.” She knows me better all right, but not so well as she seems to imagine.

  “But not at all! Not at all comfortable. If I thought I was snoring on that bus I would die on the spot. I never dreamed it, and that’s the truth.”

  “Of course you didn’t—you were sound asleep!” And this memory, of Fish in his slumbers, inspires her to emotional heights, whereupon she covers my face with baby kisses.

  We talked some more and we finished out the night, and then next morning we played the part of strangers, or friends, on the return journey. A long quiet ride, snowing all the while. I walked up to my room here and filled the tub with hot water and thought to myself, Okay, not too bad. And that was that. I should take a trip more often.

  Cleaned the bathroom (a first) and added a chair to my collection here, just to tone up for Linda Stanley who comes by tomorrow for “dinner and a movie and your place after.” It’s a new idea, my first date in over two decades and the funny thing is nothing changes—I will visit the barbershop in honor of the occasion, and worry if my clothes look well, etc. Of course I know that a girl who professes to like me because I sleep in a rumpled suit and snore in public is not going to care about such matters. It doesn’t come from the other person, the bay rum behind the ears. It comes from yourself, as part of getting ready.

  Meanwhile had the opportunity to present James Myers Esq. with a Canada birchbark canoe made by redskin Indians and found the courage to try a story out on him. (I am still a leader among men until further notice.) And I had a couple of surprises from this sterling effort. One, I made it through clean as a whistle—better than my private reading—and two, the kid ate it up. He loved it. And this was the Beanstalk, aimed at a younger child I would think, yet it was the one he requested first.

  He sweated it out, worried for Jack, fretted over the poor mother, hated the slimy giant—and insisted that if Jack was half sharp he would just poison him (easily accomplished in several ways he pointed out for me) and in The End enjoyed every kind of joy and relief. All according to form! He knows it ain’t life, it’s a story, that’s all. Just what he wanted.

  Linda Stanley departed at the witching hour last night, and drove herself back to Jersey in the snow. I invited her to stay but both preferred otherwise because (I believe) you want your breakfast in peace. No roll and a coffee here, either. When I eat in, it’s Pep and raisins, and the coffee is instant.

  What else to conclude but that I have got myself a girlfriend? She’s nice, I’m nice, and we have a nice time doing what comes naturally. Maybe she takes too much wine but that’s her business. I won’t keep up with her. After a few glasses it makes me pee and I don’t want to need a pee at the wrong moment.

  One other possibility occurred to me. The thought came after we had completed the act and she wanted to move my new curtain and watch the snow falling past the street lights. (A bad moment, until I recalled this was a Saturday and my bare girl would be elsewhere, praise the Lord.) She watched and I agreed it was a pretty sight, yet she appeared withdrawn and maybe even sad at a time when I thought we were riding pretty high. Could be her red wine settling to the bottom but the other thought occurred to me it could also be this: she is doing this to get back at somebody she loves, someone who has made her jealous, and so she takes me on. And I am a harmless slob who can’t complain when discarded (when her point is made) since after all I got mine. />
  A hunch, that’s all, yet one from the master of hunches, Carnovsky, so it cannot be ignored. This is not something I would mention, of course, with no evidence and no desire to spoil it, whatever it is. Instead I’m primed for a little flirting.

  “Linda means pretty girl in Spanish, am I wrong?”

  “It means pretty.”

  “Not girl?”

  “No. What does Oscar mean?” (Now I have got her grinning.)

  “Oscar means fool, in Yiddish.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Yes of course I’m kidding. Really it means bossman, the top dog, in Russian.”

  “You’re still kidding.”

  “Now you’re on to me. You cracked the code.”

  Oh yes I am the great kidder. So far as I know, Oscar means absolutely nothing. And Linda I looked up at the library so I could flirt pre-meditated.

  Jimmy at Bulkitis’ today after school, spending his bottle money on the quest for Silver Hoppies and picking out the latest funnybooks. And the nervy midget has the gall to give me a needle!

  “My ma says you got a girlfriend.”

  “What? She says?”

  “Yeah, a blondie.”

  “Yes? I didn’t know your mama knew me, that she noticed.”

  “She noticed the blondie,” says Mr. Worldly-Wise and who can argue the point, she did obviously notice. Just one time Linda Stanley comes through the front door, one time she goes back out (and this at the witching hour) yet Mrs. Myers stops her screaming long enough to register these events. Sharp tongue, sharp eyes.

  And do I mind? Am I supposed to be ashamed, a lawbreaker? The truth is I’m happy she noticed. Oscar’s got a blondie! Her noticing makes it real, to me too, and incidentally earned a new respect on the spot from Bulkitis, the family man.

  Today (Friday the 16th of December, 1955) I walked the length of the Brooklyn Bridge—halfway across and then the same distance back. No temptation to go further, although I confess I felt a little frisky being invisible up there. Really I just wanted to be out over the water, and high as possible. I like the feeling, even on the bridge of the ferry-boats or on a long wharf in Erie Basin.