The Christmas Kid

Up the Roof

SHAWN HIGGINS, AGE SIXTEEN, 5 feet 11 inches and still growing, stepped into the kitchen of the railroad flat on the top floor right. He laid two wrapped sandwiches on the table. It was about six o’clock and he was finished with his deliveries from the corner grocery store, where he worked. The source of free sandwiches and tips. He could hear a voice coming from the new television set in the living room. He hurried in to see his Uncle Jimmy, who was parked in a ratty armchair, staring at the solemn black-and-white face of an announcer. The news was, of course, about Korea. That was all anybody talked about over the last two weeks. The new war. More guys being drafted. Others being called back, five years after the last war. The war was on the front pages of the Daily News and the Brooklyn Eagle. The war was on the radio each evening.

“’Lo, Uncle Jimmy,” Shawn said.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, curling the fingers of his good right arm, but staring at the small set. Patting the white-haired man’s stooped back, Shawn saw tears running down his face. They had to be tears about the war. The new war. The old one. The boy didn’t know what to say and so said nothing. On the mantelpiece behind the television set, down at the left, there was a picture of Shawn’s father, killed at Anzio in 1943, when his only son was eight. He was smiling, wearing his army uniform. Beside it was a second framed photograph, this one of his father with his mother, all dressed up at their wedding. She was gone now, too.

Shawn eased into his room, the only one with a door, the tiny room where his sisters shared a bunk bed until each got married, three months apart, and vanished into Long Island. The room was tiny and hot and smelled of his own dried sweat. The shade was drawn to keep out the heat. Beyond the shade was the rusting iron fire escape. His clothes were hanging off the rack below the top bunk, his shirts and underwear and socks folded on the old unused mattress. His books were stacked on the floor, beside his comics. A Daily News color photograph of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese was Scotch-taped to the wall. Two days earlier, the Eagle said that even some of the ballplayers could be called up for the new war.

Shawn removed his sneakers, khaki trousers, and underpants, then pulled on a gray bathing suit. He was tying his sneakers again when he heard Uncle Jimmy say “oh” once, then again, and he wanted to hug him. Out at the VA hospital in Bay Ridge, the doctors told Shawn last year that his uncle was okay, except for the shell shock. Christ. When Shawn’s mother died just after the war, of heartbreak, his sisters said, he and his sisters had moved in here with Uncle Jimmy, who would take care of them. They learned quickly that they had to take care of Uncle Jimmy. One sandwich in the kitchen was for him.

Shawn dug out his hand weights from under the bed, a pair of eight-pounders that had once belonged to his father. Now the news was finished in the living room, and he could hear gunshots and horses galloping, as his Uncle Jimmy entered the Wild West. And thought: I have to get us out of here. Leave high school. Get a real job, not just delivering groceries, but real work. And make real money. Get a place on the first floor of some new building. Let Uncle Jimmy sit in a garden, and smell grass or roses, or go walking without help. Gotta do that. Gotta do it soon.

He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, told Jimmy he was going up the roof. Then climbed the stairs two at a time.

Shawn loved the roof in summer. The tenements were on the avenue between 11th and 12th Streets. They had no backyards. No gardens right outside a door. But on the roof, there was always a breeze blowing from the harbor, and he could stand there and see the skyline of New York, off to the right, and remember that night in 1944 when the lights came on again, on D-day, when the armies landed in France to kick Hitler’s ass. All the women of the block seemed to be on the roof, and their kids, and a few old men, and someone began singing “The White Cliffs of Dover” and he heard those words about peace and laughter and love ever after. Something like that. Knowing it was already too late for his father. Knowing that Uncle Jimmy was there in that France and guys from all over the neighborhood were with him. Not one of them was up the roof that night. They were fighting the war. Shawn didn’t know until a few years later how many of them did not come home.

He took off his T-shirt and faced west. The sun was slowly descending into New Jersey, and the sky was full of new colors, blue and purple and red, all mixed together, changing every minute. Beautiful. He did fifty curls with the hand weights. Paused. Did fifty more. Then faced the remains of the abandoned pigeon coop, where the birds once fluttered and murmured behind wire walls and now were gone forever. He did moves he had seen the boxers doing at the gym on 8th Street. Jab, jab, jab, bend, left hook. Jab, right hand, hook. The rooftops of the block’s six tenements were all different. Different kinds of chimneys, some bare, some cowled. Some had clotheslines, some did not. Some were covered with gray pebbles, a few with raised wooden planks, others with tar paper. In the summers, they called those rooftops Tar Beach. People would get home from work, too late to grab the trolley to Coney Island, and try to spend an hour or two in the fading sun. On weekends, some of them would spread blankets and cover themselves with suntan lotion, all the while drinking iced tea or soda or beer. Tar Beach. For Shawn, it was just the roof. All of it.

Now he turned to face north, beginning his bends, touching his left ankle with his weighted right hand, the right ankle with his left. Doing each bend very hard. Grunting. Feeling the sweat on his face and shoulders and back. Feeling muscles tightening in his gut. Turning from north to east to south.

Then he saw a woman on the roof of the last house on the 11th Street end. A woman with long black hair, wearing a pink bathrobe. She was smoking a cigarette.

When she saw him staring, she smiled.

When Shawn first met Marilyn Carter on the roof, he was a virgin. Three weeks later he was not.

She lived in the apartment just below the roof and went down to fetch him a glass of cold water, introduced herself, and just started talking. That day, and on the afternoons that followed. She wasn’t some beautiful kind of movie star. In the real world, who was? She was on the chubby side and her hair was often tangled in a frantic kind of way. But she had a beautiful smile, and good white teeth, and talked very clearly, without an accent. She definitely wasn’t from the neighborhood.

“I grew up in New Jersey, way down, below Atlantic City,” she said one afternoon that first week. “Whatever you do with your life, Shawn, never move to New Jersey.”

He learned that she was a teacher at PS 10, the public school six long blocks away, teaching English. In the mornings now, she taught summer school. One afternoon she asked Shawn the name of the last book he had read, and he told her The Amboy Dukes, by a guy named Shulman.

“Hey, Shawn,” she said with a laugh. “You could do better than that.”

And brought him a copy of The Red Badge of Courage, which he read across three nights on the bottom bunk in his room. A book about a young soldier who was afraid. He wondered if his father had been afraid when he landed at Anzio. He wondered if Uncle Jimmy felt fear, too, but didn’t ask. Uncle Jimmy never talked about his war.

On the evening he returned the book, they talked about the characters and the writing, and what it was like in the Civil War, and then her voice abruptly dropped and her face darkened.

“My husband, Danny, is in the army,” she said softly. “In Japan.” She turned her head and stared at the darkening harbor. “I’m real worried now,” she said. “Korea’s right up the block.”

She turned away from the harbor, looking now at nothing.

“I can’t call him,” she said. “He can’t call me. We write every day, but the letters take forever.… I told him not to go in the army, but no, he knew better. He wanted to go to college, get the GI Bill, get a degree. Like I did. That was a year ago. He—”

She turned to Shawn and smiled in a thin way. “Why am I telling you all this? Don’t worry. I’m okay.” A pause. “I just hope my husband’s okay.”

That evening she invited him down to her place for a cup of tea. They sat facing each other at the kitchen table, and in the muted light he thought she looked beautiful. Her husband watched them from the photographs on the walls. His name was Danny Carter. Blond and handsome in the photographs from civilian life. Looking like a soldier in the photographs from Fort Dix, where he did his basic training. Marilyn saw Shawn stealing looks at the photographs.

“Danny’s such a wonderful man,” she said. “A man with a good heart. A very good heart. My parents wanted me to marry, oh, I don’t know, a doctor, a lawyer, a school principal, at least. They barely talk to me anymore.” She looked again at Danny Carter in his soldier’s uniform. “I can’t imagine him killing anyone.”

She stood up and started into the other rooms, flicking on lights as Shawn followed her. There were paintings and photographs on most walls. One room had two walls packed with books. He had never seen so many books in a person’s house.

“Let me find you another book,” she said.

Two days later, on a Saturday morning, a pair of uniformed soldiers came to her building.

Shawn was in the basement of the grocery store, unpacking cans of Del Monte peaches, when he heard her screaming.

He didn’t see her leave, and didn’t see her, or hear her voice, for five more days. He rang her bell. No reply. He tried the roof door. Locked from the inside. At night, no lights ever burned in her top-floor apartment. As he worked at the grocery store, leaving with deliveries, then returning, he watched her front door. Other tenants came and went. But there was no sign of Marilyn Carter.

On the sixth day, Shawn brought Uncle Jimmy two slices of pizza for dinner, and then went up the roof with his hand weights. He worked out with a kind of fury. Then, his bare hands gripping his knees, facing the sunset, breathless, he heard a door creaking open. When he turned, she was there. She looked forlorn. She gestured for him to come to her.

He did. An hour later, they were in bed. She was his teacher, helping him to do what he had never done before. He entered her wet, gasping warmth, into a kind of grieving heat and closeness he had never known until then. And then she rose to a pitch, gripping him tightly, digging fingers into his flesh, erupting into a deep, aching moan. One prolonged name.

Daaaaaaannnnnyyyy…

After that night, and for a dozen nights afterward, Sean was there with her. She cooked him small meals, even preparing food for him to bring to Uncle Jimmy. She told him about books he must read and gave him copies from her own library. She told him he should never drop out of high school and should try to get into City College, where there was no tuition. She urged him to buy a notebook and when he saw a word he didn’t understand, he should look it up in a dictionary and write it down. “Just writing it down,” she said, “will help you remember it.” She even gave him an extra dictionary. And he started writing down many words from the newspapers. Mortars. Casualties. Shrapnel.

She never mentioned her own future. When he told her the latest jokes he’d heard at the grocery store, she laughed out loud. Sometimes, lying in bed, they watched a movie on her television set, but never looked at the news. She said nothing at all about Danny and how he had been killed in Korea.

Above all, their time was devoted to the joys of the flesh. They pleasured each other in every part of the flat, in darkness or lamplight. In bed. In the bathtub. On hard wooden kitchen chairs and the soft couch and armchair in the living room. On a dark blue exercise mat on the floor beneath the cliffs of books.

Each fleshy embrace ended the same way: with the moaning of her dead husband’s name. Full of regret, longing, desire, and memory.

Then one Saturday afternoon in late August, as the skies darkened with the threat of a storm, Shawn arrived from the roof. Marilyn was in her pink bathrobe. The exercise mat was draped over a chair. There was an urgency in her eyes, and then in her voice.

“Let’s go up the roof,” she said.

“It’s blowing hard up there,” he said. “Someone at the store said there might even be a hurricane.”

“I know,” she said, and grabbed the mat and led the way to the roof.

She laid the mat on the roof and told him to get undressed.

“Here? What if—”

“In this storm, Shawnie, nobody’s heading for the roof.”

The first fat drops of rain began to fall. Trembling with urgency, Shawn pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it away. Marilyn removed her bathrobe and laid it upon the mat. She was naked. Then she kneeled, her body trembling, her arms stretched to Shawn. He squatted beside her. They kissed gently. She pulled away and smiled.

Then the rain came at them angrily, in huge, powerful drops, and they lay out flat, side by side, holding hands, facing the angry sky. Rain poured upon their bodies as they surrendered to the howling power of the storm. And then it changed to hail. Small, fierce pellets of ice. Like shrapnel. The waves of hailstones hammered the rooftops, creating a wordless roar. Shawn turned to protect her body with his own. He heard her making sounds, but not words, held her hair with both hands, kissed her fiercely, felt her amazing warmth, while the endless rounds of ice stabbed at his own flesh.

Then she pulled away from his mouth, her eyes closed, and he heard her high-pitched voice, rising into the roar of the storm. Screaming one long extended name.

Shaaaaaawneeee…Oh, Shaaaaaaawnneeeeee…

He woke late on Sunday morning. Flashes of the storm scribbled through his mind, and he rose, dressed quickly, gazed out the window, and saw that the storm was finished and gone. He quickly prepared some cornflakes and a sliced banana for Uncle Jimmy. And headed to the roof. The door to her house was locked from inside. He went home, then downstairs, and hurried to 11th Street. A small battered moving van was being stuffed with furniture that he knew. Chairs and a couch and cardboard boxes heavy with books. His heart was pounding as he entered the open front door and hurried up to Marilyn Carter’s top-floor apartment.

She was not there.

“She left this morning,” one of two burly moving men said. “Early. Said she had to go someplace. Already paid us, plus the tip.”

“Where are you taking her stuff?”

“Somewhere in Jersey,” the man said with a shrug.

Shawn turned away. He went down the stairs slowly, then out into the street. He noticed bands of small kids scampering in all directions, splashing puddles beside the curbs. Trash cans were overturned on every corner. A tree had fallen on 11th Street, its smashed limbs now blocking traffic. He counted three wrecked umbrellas outside the grocery store. A flowerpot had been blown off a fire escape. Yes, Shawn thought: there really had been a storm. He didn’t dream it.

For more than an hour, he walked around the neighborhood, looking at damage, and trying to make his mind blank and empty. Like the mind of Uncle Jimmy. Men waited for the corner bars to open. He saw a crowd outside Saint Stanislaus Martyr church on 14th Street, but he did not go in. He saw a fallen tree that had crushed the top of a car. When he arrived home, Uncle Jimmy was facing the TV set, with the sound turned off. Shawn told him he was going up the roof.

When he stepped out the door, he saw that the old pigeon coop was smashed flat. Some clotheslines were down. Then he looked the other way, toward her rooftop. He saw something pink and his heart stopped. He hurried to the small, soaked bundle jammed against the base of a chimney and lifted it. He shook the bathrobe open, and then held it to his chest. Then, at last, he began to weep.