The Christmas Kid

The Man with the Blue Guitar

LATER, AFTER THE TERRIBLE thing had happened, people in the neighborhood remembered the day that Andreas Vlastopoulos had arrived among them. Marie from the dry cleaner’s remembered that he wore faded jeans and a crisp white shirt, and that it was early summer and the sun gleamed on his yellow hair. Mrs. Caputo remembered that he asked her for directions to the Griffin house, and that his accent was thick and strange, because it wasn’t a German or a squarehead accent and he was so blond. George, the bartender at Rattigan’s, remembered seeing the young man staring up at buildings and street signs as if he were lost. Some remembered his blue eyes, others his battered brown canvas suitcase, tied shut with a rope. They all remembered the blue guitar.

“He finally went into Mary Griffin’s,” George said later. “I remember thinkin’ there was somethin’ wrong with the way he looked. It wasn’t just he was a big handsome guy; hell, there’s lots of big handsome guys in this neighborhood. No, this guy was, I don’t know how to say it. Beautiful?”

The young man — he was nineteen that summer — took a room in the back of Mary Griffin’s house, which was the first building on the street below the avenue, one of two wedged between the tenements and a large garage. Since the tenements along the avenue had no backyards, their clotheslines stretched across the space above Mary Griffin’s yard, and that of the Chinese house beside hers, to hooks drilled into the wall of the garage. The clotheslines were always full, blocking the sun.And on the top floor of one of the tenements, living alone with her six-year-old son, was the Widow Musmanno.

“She shouldn’t live like that, alone,” Mrs. Caputo used to say. “It ain’t right. She married a bum and the bum got killed. But why should she pay the rest of her life? His family says she can’t go out, she gotta wear black like an old lady. Hey, this ain’t the old country. This is America. It ain’t right. A young woman like that. A pretty girl like that…”

But for two years, Widow Musmanno had lived her sentence of solitude, worrying about her son as he played in the street, scrubbing the apartment, mumbling prayers in church each morning for her husband, and washing clothes. She ate too much. She added pounds. And then one day, that first week after the young man’s arrival, she was hanging clothes on the line and glanced down into the yard and saw Andreas Vlastopoulos.

He was sitting alone on the wooden back steps and he was playing the blue guitar. The guitar was the blue of spring skies, the blue of postcard skies, the blue of the Aegean. The sounds he made were sorrowful and melancholy, and when he began to sing to himself, his voice ached with loss. Widow Musmanno did not understand the words, but she felt that somehow they were aimed directly at her and they made her ache, too. She stepped back from the window, and from the shadow behind the curtain looked down at the beautiful young man. She watched for almost a minute. And then she began furiously to scrub the table, to clean the refrigerator, to polish glasses and dust bureaus. When, a few hours later, her son came up from the street, he found her lying on her vast bed and when her eyes opened to look at him, they were sore and red.

“He’d come in every Monday morning,” said Marie from the dry cleaner. “Always six shirts, medium starch, and a suit, always nice and polite. One day, one shirt. One week, one suit. He didn’t flirt. He was the kind didn’t know how good-lookin’ he was. He told me he worked nights in a restaurant over New York, and he used to laugh at his bad English. He was a Greek, the kid. And tell the truth, it was hard to keep your eyes off him.”

On the morning of her thirty-first birthday, after her son left for Coney Island with his Uncle Frank, Widow Musmanno was hanging wash while Vlastopolous played in the yard below. She heard the aching notes. Her thick body trembled. Suddenly, a piece of wash slipped from her hands and fell three stories into the yard. Vlastopolous glanced at the fallen piece, then up at Widow Musmanno, frozen in her window frame, and he smiled. He walked over and picked up the fallen piece. It was a woman’s slip. He waved it like a wet silky pink flag at Widow Musmanno and explained with a gesture that he would bring it up to her. She shook her head no, almost desperately pointing to herself and then to him, meaning that she would come down. But Vlastopolous just smiled and went into the back door of the Griffin house with the wet woman’s slip and his blue guitar. He went out into the street and found her building on the avenue and went up the hot dark stairs to the top floor and she came to the door, her hair swiftly brushed, her cheeks swiftly powdered, and she looked at him and that was the beginning of that.

There were few secrets in that neighborhood, and soon many people knew about Widow Musmanno and the beautiful young man with the blue guitar. They knew from the look on her face, the freshness of her color, and the way she began to dress again as she had before the death of her husband, in mauve and pink and yellow summer dresses. They knew when she stopped going to Mass. They knew from the drawn shades in the afternoon while the six-year-old was off at a ball game with his uncle. Somebody saw them in the hills above the Long Meadow in Prospect Park. Sitting under a tree, eating sandwiches while the young man played the blue guitar. And one hot night, Sadie Genlot climbed to the roof for air and saw them a few tenements away, leaning on a chimney, holding hands and staring at the glittering towers of Manhattan.

Of course, the old women gossiped about Widow Musmanno; it was too bad, they said, that she had gone “that way”; she sure wasn’t showing proper respect for her poor husband. But most of the younger women approved, and a few were envious. There was nobody in any of their lives who announced himself with a blue guitar.

“The trouble was, how long could it go on?” Mrs. Caputo said. “It was the husband’s brother was the problem. Frank. He took over when the brother died. He paid the bills. He was like a father to the kid. That was the trouble.…”

Late one Saturday night, Vlastopoulos came out of Widow Musmanno’s building. At the corner, as he turned toward Mary Griffin’s house, he saw two men in gray hats sitting in a Cadillac. They were staring at him. A few days later, he came up from the subway and saw the same two men peering at him from behind the café curtains of a bar called Fitzgerald’s. One of them nodded. Late that night, after the boy was long asleep, Vlastopolous mentioned the two men to Widow Musmanno.

“Oh, my God,” she said, the words more prayer than exclamation. And then, after a long silence, she told the young man that it was all over between them and she could never see him again. He protested; she insisted. He said that she was grown up, she lived in a free country, she could do what she wanted with men. He said that if marriage was the problem, then they would get married. But Widow Musmanno turned her face and whispered that there were some things he would never understand. And Vlastopoulos answered that no matter what she said he would be around to see her again the following night. She took his beautiful face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth.

They found him the next morning on his back in the yard, as broken as the blue guitar beneath him. The police decided that he must have fallen from the roof of the tenement, and nobody in the neighborhood offered any other theory. But when the ambulance came from Kings County to take him to the morgue, Mrs. Caputo began to cry and so did Marie from the dry cleaner’s and Mary Griffin, too. They waited around and after a while a short mustachioed man came to Mary Griffin’s and said he was the uncle of Vlastopoulos and would pick up the young man’s belongings. He was inside for about an hour, and came out with the brown canvas suitcase, and the broken pieces of the guitar. He put the broken pieces in a garbage can on the corner, sighed, and started trudging heavily toward the subway.

Late that night, when the bars had closed and the last buses had gone to the terminals and everybody in the neighborhood was asleep, Widow Musmanno came down to the street. She was dressed in black. She wore no makeup and her hair was blowsy. She pulled a shawl tightly over her shoulders, and then began to shuffle to the corner. The pieces of the blue guitar jutted from the wire garbage can. She looked at them for a long moment, and then removed them, all fractured wood and twisted wire strings. She held them to her breasts, the way a mother hugs a child, and then with a dry sob, she entered the country of the old.