Running From Legs and Other Stories

Happy New Year, Herbie

We were living on North Brother Island at the time.

It was, and is, a tiny island in the middle of the East River, adjacent to a miniscule uninhabited island called South Brother. When we lived there, and I suppose the same is true of it now, the Riker’s Island prison was visible in the distance from one end of the island, and from the opposite end, the Bronx mainland. There was a lot of river traffic passing North Brother. From our windows in one of the converted buildings we could see tugs and barges and transports and tankers and once even a Swedish luxury liner.

The buildings we lived in had once been part of a hospital for tuberculars, the hospital rooms converted into apartments shortly after the war. When Joan and I were first married, we lived in McCloskey Hall, which was on the end of the island opposite the tennis courts and the handball court and a sort of outdoor teahouse overlooking the edge of the river and Hell’s Gate on the horizon. Later, just before our first son was born, we applied for and moved to a larger apartment on the other end of the island in a building called Finley Hall. If all of the buildings sounded like part of a college campus, it was with good reason. The island had initially been leased by Columbia, N.Y.U., and Fordham, I think, and was euphemistically called Riverside Campus or Riverside Extension or some such, the idea being to provide housing for World War II veterans who were attending these colleges. The unmarried students lived in a dormitory in the center of the island, the old administration building. The married veterans and their wives lived in the converted hospital buildings. Later, the accommodations were extended to include veterans from other colleges in the city and, toward the end, the island accepted veterans who were attending any school approved by the Veterans Administration — which is how Herbie came to live on North Brother. I say “toward the end” not because the island went up in smoke or anything like that, but simply because the buildings eventually reverted to what they’d been originally: a hospital. In the old days, before the students invaded it, the island had housed such medical phenomena as Typhoid Mary. After we left, it became the Riverside Hospital for drug addicts. We, the interim students, were only a part of its brief, non-medical history.

Our apartment in Finley Hall was at the end of a long corridor on the fourth floor. The original hospital rooms had been revamped so that there were five apartments on each floor, the apartments varying in size according to the families occupying them. The smallest apartment on each floor was a single rectangular room that had once been the old hospital elevator shaft. On our floor it was shared by Peter, who was a dental student, and his wife Gerry, who listened to the radio wearing earphones so as not to disturb her husband while he studied.

Our own apartment was slightly larger than the converted elevator shaft. It consisted of two rooms and a John. The door opened on an enormous living room-dining room-kitchen combined, with windows facing the river north and south. Joan and I slept in the living room on a bed that doubled as a sofa during the day. The other room was smaller, with windows facing the river on the west, and Timmy — our newborn son — slept in that room. The bathroom was tacked onto one end of Timmy’s room. We decorated the bathroom with covers from Collier’s Magazine pasted to the wallboard, even though someone told us we’d lose our original security deposit if we papered the walls. But aside from this single effort, there wasn’t much else we could do to improve the apartment. It had been hastily reconstructed in a time when new housing was practically nonexistent in New York. The paint was thin; the plasterboard showed through in uneven patches, and even the nails holding plasterboard to stud were clearly visible. The floors were presumably the original asphalt tile that had run through the old hospital. You could still see marks on the tile where entire walls had been ripped out in the transformation. The river moisture kept the apartment constantly damp, and the closed cupboards over the sink were a haven for cockroaches, no matter how many forays Joan and I made into their territory with insecticide powders and sprays. The view was magnificent, of course, and perhaps if we’d had any money we could have framed the view elegantly. But we were students living on my G.I. allotment and on what Joan and I could earn with part-time jobs. Joan had dropped out of school just before Timmy was born, and I was in my senior year and working after school each day at the World Student Service Fund on West Fortieth Street and on Sundays at the Y as a counselor. On Saturdays, Joan went to her job in the music department at Macy’s while I stayed home to wash and wax the old asphalt-tile floor, change Timmy’s diapers, and continue my sworn and unceasing guerrilla warfare against the goddamn cockroaches. Joan had been a music major at Hunter College, which is how she’d got the job at Macy’s. We’d been engaged for two years when we heard about North Brother Island and decided to get married immediately. I guess we’d both thought of marriage as having friends in for coffee, or of putting our laundry into a washing machine together, or of planning menus for the week. At least, our idea was to continue living in McCloskey Hall until we were both graduated and then go to Paris for a year where I would learn to write and Joan would continue with her studies at the Conservatory or someplace. But we were married in October, and on New Year’s Eve of that first year on the island Timmy was conceived. And suddenly we were married in earnest and not on an extended honeymoon, and shortly after that we were parents to boot. It was our second New Year’s Eve on the island, when we were living in Finley, that the thing happened with Herbie.

In a sense, despite our new responsibilities, our stay on the island was an extended honeymoon. We were surrounded by students or recent graduates who were just as broke as we were. The island was reached by a ferryboat that shuttled back and forth at unpredictable times, often carrying handcuffed convicts to Riker’s Island as its second stop. There were hardly any automobiles on the island; you could walk from one end of it to the other in less than five minutes. On a still autumn night, even after Timmy was born, we would go outside with other married college students and play charades or even hide-and-seek. The island was peacefully quiet, and you could hear a baby if he so much as turned in his crib. On Sunday nights they would show old movies in the rec hall, stuff like Citizen Kane and Pinocchio and The Philadelphia Story. Admission was twenty-five cents a head, and Joan and I would take turns running up to check on Timmy every time the projectionist stopped to change a reel, unless we’d arranged for Peter and Gerry to look in on him. We used to keep our money in a little tin box divided into compartments, so much a week for rent, so much for transportation, so much for entertainment. I can remember a night when Joan wept herself to sleep because she’d backed a straight flush in a poker game and lost our three-dollar entertainment allotment to someone with a royal flush. The island was literally an island, but it was also a figurative never-never land that was a part of the city and yet removed from it. It was, in a sense, a country club for paupers.

Herbie moved into the apartment alongside ours just before Christmas. His wife’s name was Shirley, and they had a son and a daughter, both under three years of age. Herbie was studying to be a television repairman. It is perhaps difficult to imagine snobbery among paupers, but the old-timers on the island strongly resented the new rules that allowed the admission of men going to upholstery schools, or television-repair schools, or even barbers’ colleges. Many of the old island residents were men and women working for their master’s degrees; some were going for their doctorates; most considered it beneath the dignity of the island to accept people who were not, by their standards, bona fide students. I wish I could say that Joan and I were unaffected by such petty considerations, but the truth is we felt as put upon as any of the others. The island was our neighborhood, our private retreat from the city. And now our neighborhood was getting run-down. We discussed it with our friends often and vehemently, and when Herbie and his wife moved into the apartment alongside ours and across the hall from Peter and Gerry, we unanimously felt there was now more to cope with than the indestructible cockroaches. And yet I don’t think this resentment had anything to do with what happened on New Year’s Eve. Or maybe it did; I simply don’t know. I do know that Joan and I could have continued living on the island for many months after New Year’s Eve and before it was reconverted to a hospital, but we applied for rooms in a city housing project instead. We left the island in March and never again saw any of the people who had been at the party that night.

I don’t remember whose idea the party was. I think it was Jason’s. It seems reasonable to assume this, because most of the ideas in Finley Hall, if not on the entire island, seemed to originate with Jason. I think he mentioned it casually just before Christmas while someone was serving eggnog laced with rum. I think it was only a drunken suggestion at first, “Let’s have a New Year’s Eve party,” and then someone else said, “Why not?” and then Norman picked it up wholeheartedly — but yes, I’m sure the original suggestion was Jason’s. And it must have been in his apartment at the other end of the fourth floor, facing inland, yes, and Mary had just put one of the kids to bed. They had at least a dozen kids in that small apartment. Well, actually they had only three, but even this was considerable when you realized Jason had only been out of Columbia for a year. He’d begun working at an advertising agency almost immediately upon graduation but was still taking some night courses, a dodge many of the married students used to maintain their eligibility for the low-rent island apartments. Mary didn’t look like the mother of three children, or for that matter like the mother of even one child. In fact, Mary seemed to echo the fantasy that was North Brother Island, walking around with a three-year-old by her side, a two-year-old on her hip, and an infant in a carriage, and looking freckled and innocent and virginal in her sloppy sweaters and scuffed loafers, as if she had just wandered out of Julia Richman High School. Joan told me that Mary had called her to the window one afternoon shortly after we’d moved in, when Joan was in her eighth month and as big as a house, and had said, “Joan, will you come down and play with me?” She thought it odd that a woman with three children should be asking another grown woman — we all thought of ourselves as grownups then — to come down and play with her, but it seemed to me thoroughly appropriate for the woman who was married to Jason.

It was, in fact, impossible to imagine Jason in any conceivable world outside North Brother Island. The concept of him leaving the island to enter a city full of people earning their daily bread was almost laughable, and yet he did it every weekday morning, and with an earnestness that bordered on fanaticism. It was Jason who once leaped over the metal railing onto the deck of the ferry as it pulled away from the island. It was Jason who, on another morning, ran down to the dock in his pajamas, his working clothes slung over his arm, and then washed and dressed in the men’s room before the boat reached the mainland. It was Jason who knew everyone on the island by his first name, Jason who first suggested we play hide-and-seek one night, Jason who discovered and used the outdoor barbecue near the teahouse looking out at Hell’s Gate.

I had seen Jason often on the ferry while we were still living in McCloskey Hall. He was a tall, strikingly handsome man with black hair and blue eyes that seemed always smiling. His closest friend was a fellow named Norman who lived on the third floor of Finley Hall, a tall blond man with an excellent build and the same laughing look in his gray eyes. They would walk onto the ferry together, talking and joking, and then would go to sit in the bow of the boat where they were immediately surrounded by a half-dozen people who seemed to be having the time of their lives each morning. Sitting on the bench with an open book in my lap, hearing the sounds of laughter from the bow, I felt the unconscious pang of the outsider and longed for a moment to be a part of such obvious good fellowship.

I did not become a part of it until late August, when we had already moved into Finley Hall and were awaiting the birth of the baby. The first hurricane of the year came about three days before Joan expected to go to the hospital. I had been a New Yorker all my life and was used to the hurricane season, but I had never lived through a hurricane on an island in the middle of the East River with my wife momentarily expecting a baby. There was a cyclone fence around the entire island, and the water rose above that until the fence was no longer visible, and then the water covered the outdoor wash lines, and then it flooded into Finley Hall and began rising in the basement of the building. The radio was warning all residents of the city to tape windows and lash down anything that might be blown away, and the Coast Guard advised all residents of North Brother that it was standing by to take people to the mainland. The big question for everyone living in Finley, considering the fact that this was only the prelude to the storm, with the worst expected later in the afternoon, was whether or not to leave with the Coast Guard. The question was enormously magnified for me because I had visions of Joan suddenly going into labor at the height of the storm. We were debating whether or not to accept the Coast Guard’s offer when we suddenly heard a drum beating somewhere in the building. We both went into the hall.

Jason was standing on the ground-floor landing, the water already up to his knees. He was wearing a yellow rubber rain cape and sou’wester, and he was beating a huge drum and shouting, “Hear ye, hear ye,” while Norman read off a proclamation. The proclamation stated that the residents of Finley Hall refused to be intimidated by the elements but instead chose to defend their homes in the teeth of the storm. It went on to imply strongly that anyone who left the building was, in effect, a rat deserting the sinking ship. There was, I must admit, an element of adventure to what Jason proposed. He wanted every able-bodied man to come immediately to the ground floor, where the furniture of the occupants there would be moved to a higher level just in case the water continued to rise. He then wanted a task force to go through the entire building, taping windows, making sure that cribs were protected from possible shattering glass, seeing that flashlights and kerosene lamps were available to each and every person who chose to remain.

I turned to Joan. “What do you think?” I asked.

There was a worried look on Joan’s face. I now realize she was scared to death of having her first baby, terrified by the prospect of not being able to reach the hospital should she go into labor. I mistook her fear for the indecision of a nineteen-year-old. She turned to me; she turned to the strong guidance of her twenty-one-year-old husband. “Whatever you think,” she said.

“Well, how do you feel?”

“I feel all right.”

“Then let’s stay, okay?”

Joan nodded doubtfully. “Okay,” she said.

Under the leadership of Jason, we worked tirelessly all that afternoon, moving furniture, taping windows, and then sitting through the silence that came with the eye of the storm. The funny part was that the storm dissipated entirely. We were all awaiting the onslaught with a cheerful adventurousness that belied the actual danger. Looking from the fourth-floor window, it was impossible to tell where the island ended and the river began. Finley Hall rose like a tall white finger out of the waves, its basement and ground floor already flooded, the water halfway up the steps to the first floor. We had worked hard, and afterward Jason rewarded us with drinks in his apartment while we waited for the real storm to strike.

Instead, it blew out to sea.

I can still remember the slightly embarrassed faces of the people who had left the island and who returned the next morning, carrying their precious belongings. By then, I felt I was becoming one of Jason’s friends, and I was able to share his laughter and his pointed gibes. The next day I took Joan to the hospital and Timmy was born.

I don’t know how other people feel when they are presented with their first son. I now have three sons, and Timmy is almost thirteen years old, but I was twenty-one when he was born and a senior in college, and my pride at the time was mixed with a sense of unreality. I was a father; I could look through the plate-glass window at the hospital and see the red-faced infant they said was mine, but I honestly did not feel like a father. I felt instead as though I were only going through the time-honored motions of passing out cigars, of inviting Jason and Norman in for drinks, in an attempt to convince myself — without real conviction — that I was honestly a father. Jason, on the other hand, was my idea of what a parent should be. He was, after all, the father of three children, and yet he had never lost his youthfulness or his joy for living. I would watch him running through the hallway with his two eldest, firing toy guns at them, entering their world wholeheartedly, falling dead over the banister when one of his sons fired an imaginary bullet. I would watch him parading around the island with his infant daughter perched on his shoulders, pointing out the boats on the river, or the sunset, talking to her in a childish prattle that I’m sure to this day she understood. It seemed to me that this was the sort of relationship I wanted with my son. It seemed to me that Jason had managed to hang onto a marvelous capacity for finding fun in everything, and I was determined to follow his good example.

In October we had our Peeping Tom. In the middle of the night we heard a scream from the other end of the hallway, and then Jason was yelling something, and I leaped out of bed and ran to the door. Jason and Mary were already in the hallway, and Norman was running up from the third floor in his pajamas, shouting, “Jason? What is it? What’s the matter?” Mary was wearing a baby-doll nightgown and no robe, but there was nothing provocative about her as she stood in the hallway behind Jason; she looked instead like a twelve-year-old who had been startled out of sleep by a bad dream. The dream, it seemed, was real enough. She had been nursing her daughter when she chanced to look up at the window and saw a man’s face looking in at her. She had screamed and then covered her breast, and Jason had begun shouting at the man, and here we were now, standing in the chilly hallway in our pajamas, confronted with what looked like a very serious situation. We all knew there were unmarried students on the island, and it seemed to us now that one of them was possibly a pervert. It was four o’clock in the morning, and time for Timmy’s bottle, so we all went into our apartment and Joan made some coffee while I warmed the bottle, and then while I fed Timmy we discussed what we were going to do about our Peeping Tom.

There was a feeling of warmth and unity in our kitchen that early morning, generated by the close friendship between Norman and Jason, the concern Norman showed for poor Mary. We sat drinking hot, steaming coffee, not at all frightened by what had happened to Mary, sweet Mary who looked like a high-school girl in her sweaters and skirts, but determined instead to find the intruder. We had no idea what we would do with him once we captured him, nor do I think any one of us was thinking in terms of punishment. The important thing was to catch him, and it became clear almost immediately that the chase, rather than the capture, would hold all the excitement.

There was no fire escape outside the window where the man’s face had appeared. The windows on the inland side were high up on the wall, like elongated slits in a turret. Mary was sure the face had been hanging at her window upside down, so it seemed likely that the man had simply crawled to the edge of the roof and then leaned far out and over to peer in at her. To confirm our suspicions, Norman went for a flashlight, and we climbed the six steps from the fourth floor to the roof. We found that the lock on the roof door had been broken open. In our pajamas we walked to the edge of the roof directly above Mary’s window. We found a discarded candy wrapper there, a sure sign to us that someone had recently been there.

Jason was bursting with plans. It never occurred to any of us to wonder how our Peeping Tom had known Mary would be nursing her baby at exactly four o’clock in the morning. We listened as Jason — who had been an ensign during the war — outlined a watch schedule for every man in Finley Hall on a rotating basis throughout the nights to follow. Norman loved the idea, and he devised an intricate alarm system, with each man in the building assigned a post to which he would hurry should our lookout sound the call.

We put the schedule into effect the following night.

There were twenty-two men living in Finley Hall at the time, five on each floor, and two on the ground-floor landing. We exempted from watch Peter, the dental student, because he was studying for exams — he was, it seemed to me, always studying for exams — and also a man named Mike on the second floor because he was holding a nighttime job as well as attending classes during the day. That left twenty men among whom to divide the ten P.M. to six A.M. watch schedule. We decided that a two-hour watch would be long enough for men who were expected to be bright and attentive the next morning. With twenty men available, this meant that each of us would stand watch once every five days. Actually I only got to stand two watches, one from midnight to two A.M., and the other from two A.M. to four A.M., before we called the whole thing off.

We never did catch our intruder; I’m not sure we were trying very hard. Besides, word of our vigilance spread all over the island, and our man would have been a fool to pay a return visit. But Jason’s idea was a rewarding one nonetheless. We had all been subjected either to watches or guard duty during our time in the service, but this was somehow different. It was October, and not too cold, and there was something almost pioneerlike about setting the alarm and waking in the middle of the night, touching Joan’s warm shoulder where she lay asleep in the sofa bed, and then going up to the roof where Norman was waiting to be relieved. Each night Mary provided a thermos of hot coffee for the men standing watch. Norman would hand over the flashlight, and I would pour myself a cup and then lean against the parapet wall, alone, looking up at the stars or out over the river. There was a lot of sky over North Brother Island. The stars were sharp and bright against it; the air was crisp. The factories on the mainland burned with activity all night, their long stacks sending up pillars of gray smoke tinted with the glow of neon. The prison on Riker’s Island was dark except for probing fingers of light that occasionally pierced the blackness. There was hardly any river traffic, no hooting of tugs, no pounding diesels. Out on the dark water you could hear only the solemn gonging of the buoy marking South Brother Island and beneath that, if you listened very carefully, the gentle hiss of waves slipping almost soundlessly against the walls of the island.

I thought a lot of things alone on the roof of Finley Hall. I wondered about the future and about what was in store for Joan and me and our newborn son. I thought ahead to graduation; I thought of our canceled Paris sojourn, perhaps lost to us forever. I thought a lot about marriage and about what my responsibilities were supposed to be. The night encouraged speculation. I was twenty-one years old, and the world lay ahead of me, and I searched the darkness for answers it could not and did not contain.

That was in October.

In December, Herbie and Shirley and their two children moved into the building. I must describe them now as they first seemed to me and not as I came to see them later, after New Year’s Eve. They were, to begin with, much older than most of the people on the island. Herbie was perhaps thirty-eight, and his wife was at least thirty-five. We were not still young enough to believe that anyone past thirty was middle-aged, but Herbie and Shirley were certainly beyond us in years, and this made them strangers to us. Then, too, they were from someplace in the Middle West; he had chosen to be discharged in New York City so that he could go to television school there before going back home with his family. So, in addition to their age, they spoke with an accent that was unfamiliar to most of us and grating on the ears. But, most important, Herbie and Shirley were not attractive people. He was short and stout and always seemed to have a beard stubble, even immediately after he had shaved. He was nearsighted and wore thick spectacles that magnified his eyes to almost Martian proportions. He was balding at the back of his head, unevenly, so that he always seemed in need of a haircut. He wore brown shoes with a blue suit, and he moved with a lumbering, ponderous gait that seemed designed to infuriate speedier people. His wife seemed to be a perfect soul mate. She called him “Herbert,” and she looked at him with adoring eyes that were a pale, washed-out blue in a shapeless plain face. She had borne two children and apparently never bothered with post-natal exercises; her figure, like her face, was shapeless, and she draped it with clothes in the poorest taste. She made only one concession to beauty, and that was in the form of a home bleach job on her hair, which left it looking like lifeless straw. Watching them walk to the ferry together was like watching a comic vaudeville routine. You always expected one or the other of them to take a pratfall, and when neither did, it only heightened their comic effect.

The walls on North Brother Island were hastily erected and paper-thin; Herbie and his wife lived in the apartment immediately next door to ours. It was impossible not to hear them in the middle of the night.

“Herbert,” she would say, “do you think I’m beautiful?”

“I think you’re very beautiful,” Herbie would answer in his thick Midwestern voice.

“Do you think I have a good figure?”

“I think you have a beautiful figure, Shirley.”

There would be a pause. Joan and I would lie motionless on our sofa bed. The night was still.

“Herbert, do you love me?”

“I love you, darling. I love you.”

Joan got out of bed one night and whispered, “I don’t want to listen. Please, do we have to listen?”

“Honey, what can we do?” I whispered back.

“I don’t know. I’m going into Timmy’s room. I don’t want to listen. I think...” She shook her head. “It makes me feel that maybe we sound that way, too.”

We went into Timmy’s room. He was sleeping peacefully, his blond head turned into the pillow. We sat together in the old easy chair near his crib, Joan on my lap, her head on my shoulder. We sat quietly for a long time. The December winds raced over the river and shuddered against the windows in the small room.

Her mouth close to my ear, Joan whispered, “Are you very angry with me?”

“About what?”

“Paris. About not going.”

“No,” I said, but I suppose my voice could not hide my disappointment.

“I didn’t want a baby so soon, you know,” she said.

“I know, darling.”

“But I do love him. He seems so helpless. Doesn’t he seem helpless to you?”

“I suppose so.”

“Do you wonder about us?” Joan asked.

“Sometimes.”

“I do. A lot. I sometimes feel... I don’t know... I feel we never talk to each other much any more, the way we used to when we were single.” She paused. She was silent for a very long time. Then she said, “I don’t want to get lost.”

“We won’t get lost.”

“I don’t want to get lost in people.”

“We won’t.”

“I feel so... so terribly afraid that...” She shook her head.

“What is it, darling?”

“I have the feeling I never finished being a girl,” she whispered, “and now I have to be a woman. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I feel like sitting on the dock where the ferry comes in and just let my feet hang in the water, and then I remember I’m a mother now and can’t do that, but at the same time everything here seems so... as if, well, as if I could do that and nobody would mind very much or even notice it.” She paused again. “I’m going to say something terrible.”

“What?”

“I wish we hadn’t had the baby.” She took a deep breath. “I wish we could have gone to Paris.”

“We’ll go one day,” I whispered.

“Will it matter then?” she said, and she began weeping softly against my shoulder, and I could feel her trembling in my arms. In a little while we went back to bed. The apartment next door was silent.

My first real encounter with Herbie came shortly after Christmas. Joan’s mother had given us a television set as a present, and I was busy at the pay telephone on the second-floor landing of Finley when Herbie came lumbering up the steps. I guess he couldn’t help overhearing my conversation, which was with a television man, and which concerned the price of putting up an antenna and installing the set. He lingered awhile at the top of the landing, and when I hung up, he asked, “How much does he want?”

“Too much,” I said.

Herbie smiled. There was a sweetness to his smile that contradicted his absurd appearance and his horrible speech. He offered his smile the way some men offer their hands for a handshake, openly and without guile.

“I’d be happy to do it for you,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Put up the antenna, take care of the installation.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, “but I think...”

“I know how,” Herbie said.

“Well, I’m sure you do, but...”

“I mean, in case you didn’t think I knew how.”

“I just wouldn’t want to impose on your time, Herbie.”

“Be no imposition at all. I’d be happy to do it.”

I was trying to figure how I could possibly tell Herbie I would prefer paying for a professional job, even if it meant paying more than I would have to pay him for the installation, when he suddenly said, “I didn’t mean to charge you, you...”

“What?”

“All you’d have to do would be pay for the parts, that’s all. I’d be happy to put it up for the experience alone.”

“Well...”

Herbie smiled gently. “None of us have too much money to throw around, I guess.”

“I couldn’t let you do that,” I said.

“You’d be doing me a great favor,” Herbie answered.

So that Saturday I went up to the roof with Herbie to put up the television antenna. It took me about five minutes to realize I wasn’t needed at all, but I went on with the pretense of helping anyway, handing Herbie a tool every now and then, holding the antenna erect while he put the straps around the chimney, generally offering needless assistance. We’d been up there for about a half-hour when Jason and Norman joined us. They were both wearing old Navy foul-weather jackets, the wind whipping their hair into their eyes.

“Well, now, that’s a pretty good job, Herbie,” Jason said.

Herbie, tightening the wire straps around the chimney, smiled gently and said, “Thank you.”

“How long have you been going to that school of yours?” Norman asked.

“Oh, just two months.” Herbie shrugged apologetically. “This isn’t too hard to learn, you know.”

“Do you like doing it?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, I love it,” Herbie said.

Jason looked at Norman with a smile on his face and then turned to Herbie again. “Were you involved with electronics in the service?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” Herbie said without looking up. He was retightening each wire strap until I felt sure the chimney brick would crumble. “I was a small-arms instructor at Fort Dix.”

“That right?” Jason said, a curious lilt to his voice.

Herbie laughed. “I think I was taken by mistake. My eyes are terrible, you know.”

“No!” Jason said, in mock surprise. “Your eyes? I don’t believe it.”

I looked at Jason curiously because I suddenly realized he was riding Herbie, and I couldn’t see why, nor did I think it was very nice to ride a guy who was doing me a favor and saving me money. But Herbie didn’t catch the inflection of Jason’s voice. He went right on tightening the wire straps, and he laughed a little and said, “Oh, sure, I’ve been wearing these thick glasses ever since I was a kid. But, I don’t know, the doctor who examined me said I was okay, so they drafted me.” He shrugged. Cheerfully he added, “They used to call me Cockeye when I was a kid.”

“How’d you like the Army?” I asked.

“I thought I was going to be a hero,” Herbie said musingly. “Me, a hero. Wiping out German machine-gun nests, things like that, you know? Instead, the minute I got in, they took one look and realized just how blind I really was. They figured if they sent me over to fight, I’d be shooting at the wrong army all the time. So they made me an instructor.” He shrugged. “After a while I began to enjoy it. I like taking things apart and putting them together again.”

“Then television ought to be right up your alley,” Jason said.

“Sure,” Herbie agreed. He stepped back from the chimney and surveyed his work. “There, that ought to hold it. We get some pretty strong winds on this end of the island.”

He walked away from the chimney and began paying out a roll of narrow wire to the edge of the roof. He worked with an intense concentration, a faint smile flickering on his mouth, as if he were pleased to see that things he’d learned in theory were actually capable of being put into practice.

“So you never got to be a hero, huh, Herbie?” Norman said, and his voice carried the same peculiar mocking tone as Jason’s.

“I guess not,” Herbie said, smiling. He shrugged. “But it’s just a matter of coming to grips, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t what?” Norman said.

“All of it. All of life. Coming to grips, that’s all.” He shrugged. “When I was a kid, I used to cry in my pillow because they called me Cockeye. One night I threw my glasses on the floor and then stepped on them and broke them in a million pieces. Only that didn’t change anything. I was still cockeyed in the morning, only worse because I didn’t even have my glasses.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with being a hero,” Jason said.

“Well, some guys never get to be heroes. I’m not so sure it’s important.”

“It might be,” Jason said.

“You think so? I don’t know. I keep asking myself what does Nappanee, Indiana, really need? A hero or a television repairman?” He grinned. “I think they need a television repairman.”

“Maybe they need a hero, too,” Jason said, and it suddenly seemed to me he was taking this all very personally, though I couldn’t for the life of me see why.

“Maybe,” Herbie admitted. “Listen, I think it would be very nice to be a television repairman and a hero. All I’m saying is that I’m happy to be what I am.”

“Which is what, Herbie?”

Herbie looked up from the roll of wire, surprised, turning his face toward Jason. The glasses reflected the sky overhead, giving his eyes a curiously opaque look. “Why, me” he said. “That’s all. Me.” He cocked his head and continued to look at Jason in puzzlement. “Look, I’m going to be cockeyed for the rest of my life, there’s nothing going to change that. But I look at my kids’ faces, I look into their eyes, I say to myself, Thank God, you’ve got good clear eyes and can see for twenty miles.” He shrugged. “That’s all.”

“I think I’m missing your point, Herbie,” Jason said.

“I’m not trying to make any point,” Herbie said amiably. “I’m only saying that part of living is sooner or later you come to grips. You look around you and decide what’s important, that’s all. It’s important to me that my kids have good eyes. That’s more important to me than all the German machine-gun nests in the world.” He walked to the edge of the roof and looked over. “Let’s go down and hook this thing up, okay?” he said.

Jason hesitated a moment, glanced at Norman, and then smiled. “Herbie,” he said slowly and evenly, “the tenants in the building are having a party on New Year’s Eve. It’ll be fun. Would you and Shirley like to come?”

Herbie turned from the edge of the roof. The sky was still reflected in his thick glasses, and the smile that covered his face was curiously eyeless.

“We’d love to,” he said softly. “Thank you very much.”

I suppose the party began to go wrong while it was still in its planning stages, though none of us seemed to recognize it at the time. We were all living on very tight budgets, and whereas we wanted to have our party, we didn’t want to have it at the expense of going hungry for the next month. It was decided almost immediately that everyone would bring his own bottle and that the party fund would provide setups. There was no disagreement on this point because it meant that each guest could bring and consume as much liquor as he desired without putting undue financial stress on the light drinkers in the building. Joan and I had hardly progressed beyond the two-drinks-an-evening stage of our social development, so we naturally were all for such an arrangement.

But all agreement seemed to end right there, and the party committee, of which I was a member, must have met at least four times between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in an attempt to find a solution acceptable to all. The biggest areas of disagreement concerned food and decorations. There were members of the committee, and they presumably spoke for others in the building, who maintained that neither food nor decorations were necessary elements of a good party and that it would be foolish to waste money on them. The strongest proponent of this line of thought was Norman, whose wife was pregnant and who was undoubtedly trying to save every penny he could. If we’d gone along with his reasoning, the party would have cost him only the price of his own bottle, plus whatever we decided to chip in for setups. But Jason argued, with my firm support, that it wouldn’t be New Year’s Eve without food and balloons and confetti and noisemakers and hats. Norman countered by saying a good party was only a good collection of people, and Jason squelched him by suggesting we didn’t even need liquor if a good party was only a good collection of people.

“We’re paying for our own liquor!” Norman said heatedly.

“Yes, which is exactly why we should all chip in for decorations and food.”

“No,” Norman said. “In the first place...”

“Ah, come on, Norman,” I put in. “If everyone drinks all night without any food, we’ll get sick.”

“We’ll get drunk,” Norman said, “not sick.”

“We’ve got to have something in our stomachs,” Jason argued.

“Then eat before you come to the party!”

“The thing’ll go on for hours. We’re bound to get hungry again.”

“Then bring your own food.”

“That’s ridiculous. It’ll be cheaper if we all chip in for it.”

“Why should we?” Norman said. “All I want to do is drink and celebrate New Year’s Eve, so why should I chip in for food?”

“I think we ought to put it to a vote,” Jason said.

We voted, and it was decided that each couple coming to the party would chip in five dollars for food, setups, and decorations. Norman was in a rage. He was Jason’s closest friend, and this must have seemed like outright villainy to him. He had voted vehemently against the motion, and now he sulked in a corner for several moments and then said, “Well, I’m not chipping in for all that stuff.”

“What do you mean?” Jason asked.

“Just what I said. If that’s the price of admission, count me out.”

“It’s not the price of admission. We just want to make sure—”

“Then can I pay for the setups alone?”

“Well...”

“Oh, don’t worry. I won’t eat any of your food or touch your noisemakers or hats.”

“You want me to lend you five dollars?” Jason asked.

“I don’t need your five dollars, thanks. It’s not the money, it’s the principle.”

“What are you going to do?” Jason asked. “Just sit there with your wife while we all stuff ourselves?”

“We won’t be hungry. We won’t touch your food,” Norman said with dignity.

With equal dignity Jason replied, “You are entirely welcome to come to the party, and to use our noisemakers and hats, and to eat our food. You are entirely welcome, Norman, whether you choose to pay the five dollars or not.”

“If I don’t pay, I won’t eat,” Norman said.

“And you won’t make any noise, either, right?”

“I don’t need noisemakers to make noise. God invented voices before he invented noisemakers.”

“God invented tightwads, too, before he invented—”

“Now look, Jason,” Norman said angrily, “don’t go calling me a—”

“I apologize,” Jason said angrily. “Are you coming to the party or not?”

“I’m coming to the party!” Norman shouted.

New Year’s Eve that year was a cold and dismal night. The windowpanes in Timmy’s room were frosted with ice, and we hung blankets over them to keep the cold away from his crib. Both Joan and I dressed in the kitchen near the radiator on the south wall. I wore my blue suit, and she put on the black dress she had worn to her college junior prom. I had mixed a plastic container full of orange juice and then poured some gin into it, and we expected that to last us the entire evening. We were about to go out of the apartment when Joan stopped me. She put her hands on my shoulders and reached up and very tenderly kissed me on the mouth and then whispered, “Happy new year, darling.”

“It’ll be a good year,” I said, and Joan smiled and took my arm and we went out into the hallway. Herbie and Shirley were just coming out of their apartment next door. He was wearing a gray pin-stripe double-breasted suit that looked as if it had belonged to his father. Shirley was wearing black, and there was an orchid pinned to the waist of her dress. She smiled a bit shyly and said, “Herbert brings me an orchid every New Year’s.” Joan and I nodded in approval, and the four of us walked together to Jason’s apartment at the end of the hall. The door was open, and the record player that Peter, the dental student, had provided was going full blast. We had worked in the apartment all that afternoon, moving furniture into the other room, leaving behind only chairs, a stand for the record player, and a long table, trying to clear the small room so that people could dance if they wanted to. Jason’s three kids had been deposited in an apartment on the third floor — it would have been Norman’s apartment had they not argued so vehemently before the party — and so were in no danger of being awakened by the revelries. We had strung crepe paper across the room and draped it with confetti streamers and balloons. Joan hadn’t seen the results of our labor until we walked into the apartment, and she smiled now and squeezed my arm and said, “It looks marvelous.”

There were perhaps twenty people in the apartment when we got there, with another ten expected, the rest of the tenants having made other plans for the night before the idea for the party presented itself. No one was dancing as yet, but there was a lively buzz in the room, and drinks were being poured freely, and the long table was set with the ham and turkey we’d bought, and several loaves of bread, and potato chips and pretzels, and celery and carrots, and it all looked very nice and warm and I began to have the feeling this was going to be one of the best New Year’s Eves I’d ever spent. I poured drinks for Joan and myself from the plastic container, and then I set the container down on the table and asked Joan to dance, and Jason yelled, “There they go, they’re breaking the ice!” and everyone laughed. But we were indeed breaking the ice, because Herbie and Shirley followed us onto the floor almost immediately, and several other couples joined us, and pretty soon everyone was dancing with the exception of Jason and Mary, who stood in the doorway to the other room, watching us with pleasant smiles on their faces, and Peter and Gerry, who seemed to have discovered each other after a long siege of struggling with teeth and were talking and laughing as if they’d just been introduced. It took me several moments to realize that Norman and his wife weren’t in the room. I looked at my watch. It was only ten-thirty, which wasn’t too late, considering this was New Year’s Eve, but I began to wonder whether or not Norman would show up. And then, as if in answer to my question, Norman and his wife Alice appeared in the doorway, smiling and carrying a bottle of scotch, and they walked immediately to a pair of chairs opposite the long table set with food, far away from the table, clear over on the other side of the room, and promptly poured themselves drinks and began drinking.

“Well, let’s eat,” Jason said suddenly, and I turned to look at him, because it was only ten-thirty, and many of the guests hadn’t shown up yet, and besides, most of us had had late dinners in anticipation of the evening. But there he was, moving toward the table and beginning to slice the ham.

“It’s a little early, isn’t it, Jason?” I said, smiling.

“I just want to keep up my strength,” Jason answered. “It’s going to be a long night,” and he continued to pile ham and turkey into a sandwich and then bit into it hungrily and smacked his lips and said, “Mmm, that’s good,” while Norman watched him from the other side of the room with a tight little smile on his mouth.

I don’t think Norman or Alice budged from their chairs all night long. They sat opposite the table piled with food, and they made their keen displeasure felt by their presence, sitting like a pair of shocked chaperones witnessing an orgy. I didn’t go near the table, and neither did a lot of other people, simply because Norman kept watching it with that small smile on his face, his eyes getting more and more glazed as he drank more and more Scotch. Jason, on the other hand, kept visiting the table as if it were a free lunch counter, eating like a glutton and smacking his lips with each bite he took, urging Mary to eat, pressing food on anyone who danced by, and then finally picking up the tray with the turkey on it and carrying it across the room to where Norman and Alice sat, getting quietly and angrily drunk.

“Won’t you have some turkey, Norman?” he asked sweetly. “Alice?”

“Thank you, I’m not hungry,” Norman said.

“It’s eleven forty-five,” Jason answered. “Come on, have a bite.”

“Thank you,” Alice said sweetly, “we had a late dinner.”

“Why, Norman,” Jason said, “you’re not wearing a party hat. This is New Year’s Eve. Mary, bring Norman a party hat.”

“I don’t need a party hat,” Norman said.

“Everybody needs a party hat,” Jason said.

“Not me,” Norman answered firmly.

“Then have a balloon,” Jason said, and he put the turkey tray down on a chair and reached up for a balloon and then suddenly pushed the balloon against the lighted end of Norman’s cigarette. The balloon exploded, and Norman pulled back with a start and then leaped out of his chair, reached up for a balloon himself, held it close to Jason’s face, and then touched it with his cigarette, exploding it. Jason laughed and reached for another balloon. Someone on the other side of the room, caught up in the excitement, pulled a balloon from the ceiling, dropped it to the floor, and stepped on it. And then someone else reached for a balloon, and before any of the dancers realized quite what was happening, the room was resounding with the noise of exploding balloons, and Jason and Norman were laughing hilariously.

“Oh, get me one, please,” Joan said, “before they break them all. I want to give it to Timmy in the morning.”

I reached up for a balloon and pulled it free and handed it to Joan, who began walking toward the bedroom with it, to put it on the bed for safekeeping. But Jason suddenly stepped into her path with a lighted cigarette and he thrust it at the balloon. Joan backed away from him, whirling so that the balloon was out of his reach.

“No!” she said, smiling. “I want this for my son.”

But Jason lunged at the balloon again, and Norman came at her from the other side, as if all this explosive action had somehow washed away whatever ill feelings they were harboring, as if they were now united once more in having fun, the thing Jason knew how to lead best, the thing Norman knew how to follow.

“Stop it!” Joan said, holding the balloon high above her head, the smile no longer on her face. I started across the room toward her just as someone turned off the record player and turned on the radio. It was getting close to midnight, and the noise from Times Square was deafening, the announcer shouting over it in an attempt to describe the scene. Joan whirled again, but she was caught by Norman and Jason, who poked at the balloon with their cigarettes as I reached her side.

“Come on...” I started to say, and suddenly Jason’s cigarette touched the balloon and it exploded in Joan’s face, and she said in a small, incredulous voice, “Oh, why’d you do that? I wanted it for my son,” and then Jason and Norman danced away from her, reaching up with their cigarettes to burst every balloon in the room, and suddenly the announcer was counting backward, “... nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one...” and there was a pause, and he yelled, “Happy New Year! Happy New Year, everybody! It’s a new year, everybody!” and the room went silent as we heard the words and turned to our wives.

I took Joan in my arms. I was surprised to feel tears on her face. I kissed her gently, and then I kissed her again, and then I simply held her in my arms and looked around the room where everyone was kissing his wife, and Joan whispered blankly, “I wanted it for Timmy,” and suddenly Jason began laughing again and shouting, “Happy New Year! Happy New Year! Happ—”

His voice stopped abruptly. I turned to look at him and saw the grin starting on his face and then followed his gaze to where Herbie, lipstick-smeared, was moving away from Shirley. I smiled because I knew what Herbie was about to do. He was reaching for Mary’s hand, and I knew he would kiss her for the new year, a custom we had always followed in my boyhood home, a custom we had followed at adolescent parties, and college parties, a custom that so far as I knew was followed everywhere in the world on New Year’s Eve, even among young marrieds on North Brother Island. Grinning, Herbie reached over to kiss Mary on the cheek, and she pulled away from him.

I don’t think he realized she was ducking his kiss at first. He thought, perhaps, that she didn’t understand what he was trying to do, so he reached for her cheek with his lips again, and this time Mary giggled and definitely pulled away from him and said, “Oh, Herbie, no!” and I saw the puzzled look cross Herbie’s face because he couldn’t understand what was quite so objectionable. I had begun to shake my head, ready to tell Mary that all he wanted to do was kiss her for the new year, when suddenly I heard Jason’s voice yelling, “Herbie wants to kiss the ladies!” and then Norman shouted, “Go ahead, Herbie, kiss all the ladies!”

Herbie stopped dead in the center of the room.

“Isn’t...” He shrugged helplessly. “Back home, we...” He shrugged again.

“Sure, Herbie,” Jason said, “go ahead, kiss them! Kiss them all! Mary, Herbie wants to kiss you!”

“No, that’s all right,” Herbie said. “You see, back home, it’s what we...”

“Kiss him!” Jason said angrily, and he shoved Mary across the room and into Herbie’s arms. Herbie was blushing now, a deep blush that started on his thick neck and worked its way over his face. He kissed Mary on the cheek quickly and then turned with one hand outstretched, embarrassed, reaching for the reassurance of his wife. But Jason yelled again, “That was fun! Kiss them all, Herbie!” and he grabbed Herbie’s outstretched hand and dragged him across the room.

The room was silent now. Jason clung to Herbie’s hand and led him from woman to woman as if he were forcing him to run a gantlet. With each kiss Herbie blushed more furiously. His eyes behind the thick glasses were blinking in confusion, as if he wondered how such a simple thing had suddenly become so monstrous. Beside me, I could feel Joan trembling. I watched in fascinated horror as Jason led Herbie around the room, holding his wrist tightly, shouting, “That was fun! Now the next one!” after each kiss. There were fourteen women besides Shirley in that room. The silence persisted as Herbie kissed each one of them. He turned away from the last woman in a blind sort of panic, searching for Shirley, seeing her, and then rushing across the room as Jason shouted, “How’d you like that, Herbie? You like kissing the girls, huh?”

“I like kissing them, too,” I said suddenly, surprised when the words came from my mouth. I squeezed Joan’s hand quickly and briefly, and then I walked to where Shirley stood against the wall, her eyes frightened and confused, and I said, “Happy New Year, Shirley,” and I kissed her gently on the cheek. I went around the silent room wishing each of the women a happy new year, and then I took Joan’s hand, and I picked up the container of gin and orange juice, and I walked to the door and without turning I said, “Good night.”

In the hallway Joan said, “I love you.”

I didn’t say anything. I felt as if I’d lost something in that apartment, and I didn’t know what the hell it was. We undressed quietly. Before we got into bed, Joan said again, “I love you,” and I nodded and turned my head into the pillow.

In a little while I heard the sound coming from the apartment next door. I got out of bed and walked to the wall. The sound was deep and soul-shattering, the sound of a grown man crying.

I stood near the wall listening, and then I bunched my fist and I banged it against the plasterboard, banged it with all my might, and I yelled, “Herbie!” as though I were yelling to a man who was drowning while I stood on the shore.

The sobbing stopped.

There was a silence.

“Yes?” Herbie answered in his thick Midwestern voice.

“Herbie,” I yelled, “Happy New Year. You hear me, Herbie? Happy New Year!”

There was another silence.

Then Herbie said, “I hear you.”