Wrong Information is Being Given Out at Princeton

“We are poor little lambs who have lost our way. Bah, bah, bah.”

Pulling up in front of the Biltmore Hotel. Depositing ourselves out of the Bentley. Max peeling off a couple of dollars from his thick bankroll to give the doorman. “Park right here, sir.” A blind man kneeling nearby upon a rug on the sidewalk and playing the saxophone. A passage from Haydn’s Horn Concerto No. 1 in D Major. Executed with a degree of distinction. Shudders the heart to come upon such accomplishment and such impoverishment. Old Max seemed neither to see the poor gentleman nor to hear me drop a quarter coin clank into his tin cup as the musician murmured, “Thank you.”

“Hey come on pal. Don’t dawdle.”

Max behaving as if it were his own private hotel announcing as he led me in a tour of its grandiose lobby that it was the Democratic party headquarters, pointing out the drugstore, the barbershop, beauty salon, travel bureau, florist, ticket agency, Turkish bath, cocktail bar, and, with a bow, inviting me to survey the splendor of the Palm Court. He seemed specially to be taken with an elegant brass clock. Two semiclothed figures stretching upward to support the round white dial. Max breaking out a couple of cigars.

“Here pal, have a Bolivar. Now pal, right here, right under this clock, is where people for better or worse, meet and make their assignations.”

Max guiding me back to the door to the “Men Only” bar. The wood-paneled room hung with oil paintings. Its comfortable red leather chairs. We sit up at the bar on stools, elbows on the shining mahogany. Tinkle of ice. Three other drinkers in the dim light. Two with their newspapers. The other in silent attendance, staring out over his drink into empty space. It’s said it’s a place where some men come to be in solitude to delay catching the train back to their wives and children. Or decide not to go at all.

“What can I do for you, gentlemen.”

Crew-cut bartender in his white jacket and bow tie attending and smiling upon this customer Maximilian Avery Gifford, who was puffing his cigar and who could pass, if this were a Saturday evening, for a rah-rah boy just arrived back at Grand Central after a college football game. At first nonplussed to be asked for a war-vintage bottle of Pol Roger champagne.

“Well sir, I don’t believe I know of that brand or if we have that available.”

“Well we’re just a couple of old buddies celebrating a bit of a reunion and it sure would be nice if we had the appropriate grape to do it with.”

The bartender gently humored by Max, and adjusting his bow tie, warming to his task, instituted a search down in the cellars of the hotel. Old Max ready to award those who give cheerful service, smiling his appreciation and putting his foot up on the bar rail, waiting with perfect patience over his vintage soda water and relighting his cigar which had gone out while reciting the minutiae of our surroundings.

“Hey, old pal, didn’t I tell you it was really something. Known to its customers as ‘the sanctum.’ Oyster stew, roast beef, sirloin steak, and apple pie. Four dollars at lunchtime, seven dollars and fifty cents at night. You see, old pal, this is where a guy could get away somewhere in peace on his workdays. Boy, I could have used a refuge like this back in ole Houston. To take a breather from the thoughtless, monumental, selfish meanness of that ole gal when she wanted to be mean. And over such goddamn trivial things. Impulsive irrationality was her middle name. Spoiled rotten by her father especially. Lavished every goddamn thing she ever wanted on her. I don’t think there was, but there were times you could almost think something funny had been going on there. She cleaned out everything she could, even the least little trinket or piece of crap of mine. Then poured gasoline on two of my best English suits and burned them up in the barbecue. Even mangled my tie pins. Gee, she sure wasn’t like the same girl you met back in my little ole apartment on West Thirty-fourth Street.”

“Here we go, gentlemen. As ordered. Pol Roger, vintage 1947, which I am told was a superlative year.”

The bartender deadly serious with his success, producing the bottle of Pol Roger champagne just beginning to gather dust. From the second year of peace after the war. Of three the hotel had left. Ten minutes to wait to chill. Glasses filled. Max ordering another bottle to be on the way and chilling and raising his present glass in a toast.

“Old pal, down the hatch. And to the future. And why don’t I now do a little organizing of your life for you. I sort of got a real goddamn beauty on the go right at this moment. A hatcheck girl in a good restaurant. But that’s only temporary work for her while she’s between modeling jobs. Used to be an air hostess. I know she’s got a couple of good-looking friends. What do you say I take us all on a double date. Come on, next Saturday. Motor uptown in the old chariot. We’ll have a workout together at the Athletic Club, play some squash and then dine in one of the most beautiful dining rooms in all of New York. From the eleventh floor looks right out and over the whole of Central Park.”

“Max, I don’t know right now. I might have enough on my plate for the moment as it is.”

“Pal, don’t miss opportunities. All you got to do is date the right girls and go to the right places.”

“Well I sure don’t mind knowing who the right girls are and what are the right places.”

“Well, it’s obvious. We’ll smell around a little in the Social Register. I know a few names and that little old volume got the telephone numbers listed. And even where some of these little old gals, the daughters, are matriculating at college.”

“Are you sure, Max, these matriculating girls at college are the best people.”

“Hey come on pal, don’t be obstructionist and a killjoy. And hey, and I don’t want to overcome you with flattery, old buddy boy, but you got what it takes. Charm. Talent. And let’s face it, how many people take you for a lighter shade of old Rudolph Valentino. Look where his looks got him. There’s a chance for everybody. I’ve seen the girls turn around to look when you go by. Hey, what about you take up a modeling career. Get your picture in the magazines.”

“Max, I’m a composer.”

“Sure, I know that. But the real facts are that this is a rough, tough city for artistically dedicated people. Unless you’re one of the lucky. Those who can fall back on big money and coast along on their enormous private incomes from inherited wealth. But nothing is stopping you, old buddy boy, from keeping your music composing going on the side. But now like me, you’re a free agent. Or at least I’ll remain one till they clamp me in alimony jail. Which if they do, that’s where I’ll stay. No kidding. You can be treated pretty well in there. I don’t see why I should have to support a previous poor wife and now on top of it a rich divorced wife. And buddy boy, I haven’t told you the whole story yet. But I will after another bottle of ole Pol Roger champagne from down in this good hotel’s cellars. Pal, this is the champagne old Winston Churchill drank winning the goddamn war when the sirens of the air raids were wailing over London and the goddamn bombs were falling. When the spirit of the British people was being severely tested. Ah, and here we go with this next bottle. Hold up your glass. Attaboy. Drink a toast. Hey bartender. Have a glass. Hey, we’re having a goddamn reunion. It must be getting to be at least five goddamn years after the end of the war. A toast to the U.S. Navy. Anchors now, goddamn away. You see, pal, someone in this city cares. To your good health, sir.”

Max sending a second drink down to the gentleman at the other end of the long oval bar, who was staring out into space but who now smiled, raised his glass, and said, “Skol” back up at Max, who toasted him in return. Max was getting gently merry. And as he did so, attempting as one remembered from the navy, to become a comedian and insisting with a sudden English accent that the barman join us in yet another toast.

“I say there, my good chap. It’s time off from hard work. This time a toast to my good buddies and my buddy here next to me, who served on the old Missouri. That’s right, fifty-seven thousand five hundred tons slicing through the waves at thirty-five knots. Go through a hurricane like a knife through butter. And those nine sixteen-inch guns, bam, bam, with my pal here in the turret, could hit a floating orange crate the other side of the horizon at a range of twenty-two nautical miles. Ain’t that right, ole pal.”

“That’s right, Max, you’ve got the range perfectly.”

“You know pal, old buddy, boozing and even the pain of a hangover floats one’s spiritual ship away from the real shit’s creek for a while. Remember that ole liberty we had ashore with that couple of great ole gals from Goucher, big old nights in that big ole mansion in Baltimore. Roast duck dinners. Champagne flowing. And the night we went with those gorgeous gals to see the play Christmas Season with Ethel Barrymore.”

“Yeah, I remember, Max. It was New Year’s. And I kissed the girl I was with while we sat on the stairs.”

“Boy, Steve. Yeah and you were giving her a big line you were a poet and she asked you if you were going to keep up your bantering of clichés indefinitely. But the music was playing, streamers, mistletoe. That was a good old couple of nights. Boy, I guess as for women, one man’s meat is another man’s poison and one man’s poison is another man’s meat. And like the guy announced at the neighborhood jamboree, ‘Welcome, folks. Everyone gets a feel at the community chest, provided, ha ha, you don’t keep your hands to yourself.’ Now before we pull up our own little anchor, let’s sing a song. A good old naval song.”

“Tell your troubles to Jesus

The Chaplain has gone over the stern

And is floating away

On the waves”

Max’s eyes were glistening with tears. It was hard to imagine how someone could have become so fond of the navy and the smell of vomit from seasickness that could pervade the ship in heavy seas. And the bells and tannoy. “Now hear this.” And general quarters in the middle of one’s sleep, jumping down out of a bunk and into one’s battle gear. And reminding as could happen ashore in a barracks bunk, that if your testicles were dangling, you could leave them caught behind in the wire springs as you jumped. Of course, Max as a yeoman shifting papers, could and did wield a shipboard power that could help or hinder. And he did indeed smooth one’s life more than somewhat. And here he was, the same old pleasant friend, optimistic, smiling and peeling off bills from his wad to give the attentive bartender a tip and reminding me of my ineptitude with this girl, accusing me of practicing social small talk and sophistry.

“Now there you go, my good man.”

“Thank you sir. Hope we will see you again soon. Pleasure to serve you. The Biltmore ‘Men Only’ is open from eleven A.M. till midnight Monday through Friday.”

Max peeling off further notes to pile on the astronomical check, and leaving the bartender an astronomical tip, on which I could have survived a month. Out in the lobby, Max pausing to make a general announcement to the evening clientele checking in.

“Welcome folks, to this famed good ole hotel. And a damn good hotel it is too. They got bottles of Pol Roger in the cellar. But we drank it all. Sorry about that.”

Max waving good-bye and clicking heels and bowing to an amused arriving lady, sweeping her way up the steps as a figure at the check-in desk turns, smiling.

“Damn good champagne, sir.”

“And you sir, know your champagne just as ole Winnie did.”

Max taking up again his so-oft-sung old naval tune, his attempt at dulcet tones and phrasing fading through the somber carpeted peace of the Palm Court. His voice wasn’t that bad, but nothing like old Enrico Caruso who once upon a time at the Met was a star attraction in this town.

“So nice to see you again, sir.”

“Well me and my pal here are having a jolly good time in your jolly good hotel.”

“Well sir, if I can be of any assistance at any time, may I then give you my jolly good card.”

“Jolly good.”

The assistant manager giving Max his card, we were now in the nicest possible way being gently encouraged out of the Biltmore. But there was no doubt that his slight affectation of being English smoothed Max’s way. Bows and scrapes to Max joyously asmile at the door as he stopped to lift up the flap of his blazer and dig into the trouser pocket of his gray flannels to pull out his ever-ready roll of bills. Steps aside to hover over the saxophone player, now rendering a work of Charles Gounod’s later years, a passage from the Petite Symphonie in B-flat Major.

“Here we go, old maestro, ole buddy. Better I stick this for you in your breast coat pocket in case someone tries to steal it out of your little ole cup and dish you got there. Five dollars for the good music, my friend. And for your dedication shown to your chosen profession. Because along with me here is my old composer pal, who says you play that charming work with verve and distinction, rendering it in a witty manner and although I don’t know what in God’s name the hell he’s talking about, it is truly soothingly good for the spirit to hear.”

Despite his “ole pal, buddy” behavior, one felt a strange degree of comfort to be again in Max’s company. That somehow could dignify and add aplomb to one’s life as he chose what had to be stylish, if discreet, public places to visit in this city. And far from the atmosphere sometimes felt in the Automat, where more than a few of the customers, who trying to make a cup of coffee out of the dregs of everybody else’s cups, sat huddled over their desperate hopes to stop them fading into dying dreams. Not all in one’s life had to be doom, deprivation, and damnation. And Max encouraged one to think that despite the ending of our marriages, there still remained a purpose in our lives. To get the hell up and back out of the doldrums caused by women. And it was much rewarding to my own spirit to witness Max helping out a fellow musician. Plus, I was admitting to feeling a not-unpleasant little bit merry myself.

“Max, I would like to say that you truly are a gentleman.”

“Well pal, why not be kind to the wandering minstrel. We’re on our way pal, old buddy. Come on. Let’s go stop in at the old Plaza. In the Oak Room there resides some of the best elegant dignity this city’s still got to offer. And you know, despite the early inroads women have made on us, we’re going to grow up into a pair of very rich and successful guys. Hey, what am I talking about. You’re already hobnobbing with old Drusilla, ain’t yuh, boy.”

“Max, I’m not hobnobbing with anyone.”

“Hey boy, believe me, you could have it made. Money to burn. Get yourself some good guns over there in Mayfair. Holland and Holland, to be precise. What’s more important than shooting and fishing. Serious gentleman’s work. The two most essential pursuits in a man’s life. And you know, this composing of yours, now that I understand it a little bit, I’m all for it. I have kind of got to like in you that quality the general public refers to as an ‘artistic temperament.’ Now you take that ole guy Ludwig Beethoven’s life. Wasn’t pain, debilitation and deafness, providing the background for his best work. Like tonight good ole champagne is providing the background for our reunion evening. And we’re on our way to contribute a little something more to it. And look at this guy the saxophone player over there, down on his luck. Can’t see the notes he’s playing or a goddamn thing. Faces goddamn blackness in his life. But yet produces beautiful music.”

The doorman opening the Bentley door and with a whisk brushing the floor and with a cloth wiping the seats. Max climbing on the running board, smiling about him as people pass, admiring this machine. And ready to start the engine, turning to bow his head back to the hotel with suddenly a look of consternation overcoming his face.

“Hey, wait a second, Steve, did you see that. Goddamn. Holy good goddamn. Hey look. That son of a bitch the saxophone player. I have a good mind to take the goddamn five dollars back. Took it out of his goddamn pocket and was looking at it. Son of a bitch can see as good as you or I. Boy, if that don’t half-take the cake and make you lose your faith in people.”

Max putting on his driving goggles and helmet, slamming his foot down on the accelerator and the four and a half liters of engine pulling away with a gnashing of gears and explosive exhaust. Horn honking out into and up Madison Avenue and past men’s emporiums of fashion. And already doing fifty miles an hour before we reached a red light several blocks north at Forty-seventh Street. Max’s conversation turning back as it did these days, to the war days as we sailed forth farther north to Fifty-ninth Street.

“You know pal, an incident like that phony blind musician would remind you of that old motto you heard recited on board ship in the navy. When you find a friend who is good and true, fuck him before he fucks you.”

People’s heads turning to look as the great machine throbs by and with a squeal of tires and one bumping up over the cub, turns into Sixty-fifth Street.

“Remember that old apartment pal I had in the Garment District. I was kind of goddamn glad to get out of there. And glad too, I took over the lease at Waverly Place from Ertha when we went to Houston. I said ‘Let’s keep it, nice to have a bolt-hole in New York? Boy, prophetic words. And you know pal, the truth of the matter is coming out. I would have liked to have a good marriage and children like my own parents. Guess you must feel the same. But I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to throw away my life again on some goddamn woman who has no personal principles. Christ, you remember that sinking when all the guys were clinging to rafts out in the Pacific and just waiting to be eaten by sharks one by one. Jaws tearing off a leg and coming back to tear off another, some guys torn in half.”

“Gee Max, the war’s over. What do you say we kind of get on another subject.”

“Sure, pal, no problem. But it’s just how I feel sometimes. But there, right there, we’re passing the external architecture of my other club. There it is, pal. In that nice Georgian mansion building. That’s where you go where you can sit with a good old bourbon and branch water. Absent yourself from the world and all the stress and strain and be at peace with yourself in the collectively discriminating atmosphere you can enjoy with the kind of good ole boys they got as members. Take you to dinner there sometime. You’d like it. Now we’ll give this little old four and a half liters something to make noise about right down Fifth Avenue.”

The big motor turning down Fifth. Past the steps down to the zoo. And slowing outside another redbrick mansion on the corner where a policeman stands on guard. Max swerving and horns honking as he drives, ushering the Bentley to a halt at the Plaza Hotel under the elegant ornateness of its porch. Max taking off his goggles and helmet and along with a five-dollar bill, enough to rescue me from penury, handing them to the doorman. Climbing the steps, stopping at the top and with his sense of occasion, bowing to the fountain across the street. Following him into the lobby and past the Palm Court’s marble pillars and potted plants, a piano tinkling a Strauss waltz. More marble along a corridor of jewels. Display cases of diamonds, pearls, emeralds and rubies gleaming behind the glass. And into this somber paneled interior. A romantic mural of Central Park behind the bar. By a window, Max inviting me to take a seat at a table and stretching out his legs and proferring and then lighting a cigar. Puffing out the smoke as he adjusts his purple silk handkerchief in the breast pocket of his blazer. A waiter hovering near.

“Krug, my good man. Krug. Vintage 1947 would be appreciated. A bottle.”

“Coming right up, sir.”

“Now Steve, did you hear that. No ifs ands and buts. But ‘Coming right up.’ Well pal. Here we are. And I particularly like the Umbra. And you see, old bean, a first-class place, a first-class waiter and exactly what we want on its way.”

“Max there is little doubt that this is ambience of the highest order but this is going to be three bottles of champagne.”

“It’s four in fact, pal. But who’s counting or cares if you’re just that little bit inaccurate. And goddamn. Here we are back at the old Plaza. Where we’re going to go get something to eat soon in the subfuscus somberness of the old Oak Room. But bloody hell, whenever I think of that goddamn phony blind musician, it gets my goat.”

“And I don’t mind telling you Max this is really a totally wonderful way to spend an evening, never before having set foot in this most attractively sumptuous place. Nor I suspect shall I ever afford to be able to do so again. And especially to be able to get tipsy on champagne.”

“All my pleasure, pal. That’s why I was a little miffed about that girl with real smart brains called Joy. And she wasn’t giving you much Joy in return for all that bullshit you were giving her. But old buddy, for all your ole high-falutin flowery bullshit of the past, it really is good to see you. And be encouraged by a remark you just made about music. And you know the one thing I always have admired you for was your goddamn downright honesty. Remember aboard ship that’s how we met. You found my wallet in the head. Dropped out of my pants while I was taking a crap and left it behind on the deck. You wouldn’t even take a reward. Or tell me your name. Took a dickens of a time checking all over the ship to find you again to really thank you.”

“Well Max, at least for the time being, I appreciate your turning me into a saint.”

“No problem, friend. No problem, believe me.”

Delighted waiter smiling, lifting bottle from its ice bucket, displaying the label, dark crimson and gold: KRUG & CO, REIMS, PRIVATE CUVÉE EXTRA SEC. Slowly filling glasses with this saffron-hued effervescing liquid as Max holds his goblet up to the streetlight out the window and toasts the waiter.

“Here’s to you, good gentleman. Your swift expertise and to the year 1947. And to my composer pal Stephen O’Kelly’O, right there across the table, popping a peanut in his mouth. And you know pal, how you can get pressed down into the deepest dumps and depression, and talking or nobody or nothing can get you out of it, and then you make a break for it. Get in touch with an old pal. Get the old Bentley out. And like the little bubbles do from the bottom of this glass, the gloom lifts from the spirit. And while it does old buddy, just let me give you a little more idea of the whole story, pal. The sons of bitches down there in Houston are trying to get a case together to charge and sue me for embezzlement.”

“Gee Max, embezzlement.”

“Yeah. Imagine.”

“That’s pretty serious.”

“Yeah, it is, old pal. No one likes to be accused of cooking the books in old spaghetti sauce. Said I married Ertha for her money. I mean, all right, it was an incentive if other negative things were strongly taken into consideration. But you’d admit pal, that she stood out fairly well in the competition and I might have married her for herself. A damn attractive girl. Wouldn’t you admit it.”

“Yes I would, Max.”

“But then they said I was planning to forge Ertha’s signature on checks. And friend, the trouble is, it’s true, I did practice writing her autograph. I collect the goddamn things. Even the old captain’s of the ole Missouri. I mean, handwriting has long been my well-known goddamn hobby to study for Christ’s sake. She caught me — her words, not mine — as I sat there in my monogrammed silk pajamas at dawn one morning in the library, and looking over my shoulder, when I thought she was still upstairs asleep in bed. That’s the kind of subterfuge I had to contend with, tiptoeing downstairs in her bare feet and sneaking up behind me as I nearly had a whole page covered with autographs. I was comparing copies I had of President Roosevelt’s and Harry Truman’s. But about ten times, I had written hers. All right, I knew it was an ill-advised crazy thing to do. But it wasn’t because I was in any way desperate and trying to do anything underhanded. It was because she had such crazy illegible handwriting. Which I thought would be impossible to imitate. It ended up I could write her signature better than she could. And who knows, she could have become incapacitated or something, broken her wrist or gone gaga in her old age. I mean, if she couldn’t speak, who was going to translate her handwriting. I mean, Christ, how many times in the navy did I have to end up doing that, executing a favor for the deserving.”

“Gee, Max, have you got a lawyer.”

“Sure. But even to get falsely accused of such a thing in the kind of confidential trusted work I do in a prestigious brokerage house. It’s like they’re blackmailing me.”

“Max, stand fast.”

“Pal, I sure am. But I got to stay loose, too. Options open, keep on the move. Motto is, don’t dawdle, don’t delay. If I had, not that long time back, I could have been killed. Or maybe the better word is murdered. Right at the front gates of the old house in Houston, which in fact had only just been built. We’re driving out to a black-tie dinner party in the sky blue convertible Cadillac her father bought us as a wedding present. Or correct that. Bought her as a wedding present. The gates are closed when usually they’re always kept open. She didn’t want to spoil her finery so I had to get out of the car to open them. And then as I was loosening the latch I happened for some reason to turn around. You could hear the car’s back tires sending pebbles up into the sky and Ertha behind the wheel, in the driver’s seat and the goddamn car less than twenty feet away seemed like it was already doing fifty miles an hour as it came at me. I jumped, and wham, she hit those gates not only open but flattened them right off their hinges of solid steel and the car shot right out into and across the road and ended up on the front lawn of the big mansion across the street. And gave the poor old ornery bastard who lives there a permanent fibrillation, he claims, of the heart.”

“Gee Max. I mean couldn’t it all have been accidental.”

“Yeah, that’s what she said — her high heels slipped off the clutch or something. Except that an heiress’s butler with whom she was having an affair and who was supposed to be trying to embezzle and blackmail her, was killed like that just a few months before. Plus, the goddamn Austrian cook we had and who I didn’t trust, was watching out the window. A whole conspiracy could have been going on. Nearly fell over, I got so sick to my stomach.”

“Holy cow, Max.”

“Yeah. The cook, sort of a family retainer they had, was on her side. And yeah, holy cow, I started to watch my food. Powdered glass or arsenic or something like that in the soup to flavor it.”

“But hey, come on Max. What wife from a good family and reputable ladies college, would want to do to a good-guy husband like you something as seriously heinous as that.”

“Who said the family was any good, pal.”

“Well, their lives must have been fully financially satisfied out of the petroleum industry. Didn’t you tell me her father had an oil find that was so big that when it gushed, they thought it was an earthquake.”

“Oil wells can fast go dry too, pal. Happens all the time. So does murder. Because for a start, I carried three-quarters of a million dollars of life insurance with Ertha as the sole beneficiary.”

“Holy cow, gee Max, that’s an awful lot of insurance.”

“Yeah pal, makes you kind of careful of making sure none of your beneficiaries is close behind you as you look down over a cliff into the Grand Canyon. You think you team up in marriage for the greater good. March up an aisle. Bouquets of flowers on the altar. Big grand reception. That’s why you didn’t get an invitation to the wedding. Made a big fuss. Said you married Sylvia for her money. And I guess it was in honor of my being in the navy that we ended up sailing out of Galveston on a chartered yacht, for the honeymoon. Glamour and glory. But boy, both can be here one second and gone the next. Replaced by an ole starved diamondback someone’s put in your car, with its rattles muffled.”

“Holy cow Max, do you mean a rattlesnake.”

“Yeah pal. Zoologically Croatlus adamanteus. It’s a little goddamn different to an ordinary rattler, with its massive head and fangs. Big goddamn thing. And what it does when it bites you is give you a hell of a lot less time to live before you die.”

“Holy cow, Max.”

“You bet. Here, let’s replenish our goddamn glasses with the old Krug. Right. But here’s what’s worse, pal. I learn what’s all behind it. I used to go off on the weekends to do a little duck shooting. And I suspected something was going on. One coming weekend, she asked if I was going and how long I’d be away. I said yeah, the usual. I packed up my kit, including a little ole baseball bat and got into the ole Bentley. Now I know this sounds a little like plotting. But I had surveillance sound equipment already laid out in the cellar, where I had it rigged up to the bedroom so I could hear every goddamn thing going on in there. Then conspicuously driving away with a wave and a few beeps of the horn, outside town, I park the old Bentley to be minded by a garage I got friendly with, and I hang around a bit, waiting to head back in a taxi at what I calculated would be the crucial time after nightfall. I get out down the road a little on foot and reach the house. Then watch through the window. And I’ll be goddamned if the son of a bitch wasn’t smoking my cigars and the both of them playing my records, dancing for Christ’s sake cheek-to-cheek, and goddamn well drinking my port which I had shipped over and laid down from London. Well, I wait till our bedroom light goes on and sneak in and go down into the cellar. There, I’m waiting for the strategic time to arrive while I’m listening on my equipment. Boy, you don’t want to hear people talking about you. But at least I knew when the time was right for going upstairs. Sorry to laugh, pal. But goddamn, as I slowly opened the bedroom door, if you could have seen the look on her face, it should have been framed in gold leaf. I had the goddamn baseball bat raised. I was smiling as I tiptoed in. The two of them are naked on the bed and there he is on top of her, humping away and she’s struck dumb, looking over his shoulder as I’m approaching with the baseball bat. The timing was perfection. She’s more than struck dumb. She can’t believe it. He’s groaning on the verge while I was on the verge of an inconsolable paroxysm of laughter. His bare ass faster, up and down, up and down as I get closer, bat up higher in the air. Louisville Slugger. I thought, when the hell is she going to scream, ‘watch out, Buster.’ But she knew that if she didn’t give me the opportunity to land the bat across his bare ass, I’d have to cream him one with it right on the skull. Whamo, old friend. Buster was the bastard’s real name. But then I’m thinking, maybe she really is struck dumb. Women are unbelievable, aren’t they, pal. I think it was kind of turning into a frisson for her. I don’t mind telling you old buddy boy, that baseball was my sport. I was sort of a Lou Gehrig in high school. This was my favorite bat. I had held the record for single home runs with it. Gee, it was great. I brought it down on the bastard’s ass so hard it must have seemed like a three-thousand-year-old sequoia fell on him. Or that he was having the greatest orgasm in history. Anyway, he was a big son of a bitch and I wanted to be sure both hip joints would be fairly well out of action. Plus, I had brought up my shotgun and had it leaning by the door and had on my cartridge belt full of number-six shells. And just so everyone understood my mood, I took up my ole Holland and Holland and let off one barrel to demolish her dressing table mirror. Ertha let out a sizable ole yelp at that. I marched him out stark naked into the night, under the trees and still with a goddamn erection. But he lost that by the time we got down the drive and out into the street. I had already blown out his car windshield and his four tires to pieces. Told him to walk home. And walked behind him a way. And you could hear me singing the national anthem of Texas loud enough for the neighbors to hear. ‘The eyes of Texas are upon you. All the live long day. The eyes of Texas are upon you, you can not get away.’ Boy, he sure was one ole poor scared hombre.”

“Gee, Max, isn’t trying to get you for alimony and embezzlement a little bit anticlimatic, but understandable. I’m beginning to think that my life with Sylvia has really been blissful. Do you think there is anything positive peeking up out of the grim horizon.”

“Well pal, I guess instead of life being lifelong all lovely, it can be all hatred. But just to be humanely treated is all one wants from a woman. Who after they dig what they want out of you, leaving you a husk, then desert to go back to being masters of their own fate to maybe go dig something of further benefit to them out of some other poor guy’s life. Like in the spider kingdom. But pal, let’s let Krug get rid of the present concentration on my insoluble old problems. Here’s looking at you, old bean.”

Glasses tinkling in yet another toast. And the waiter delivering the remainder of the champagne to the wood-paneled vastness of the Oak Room. The evening clientele collected at the array of white tables gleaming with porcelain and glassware and polished knives, forks and spoons. And where a cheered-up Max and I dined within the somber splendor of its walls. Oysters with the remainder of the Krug and filet mignon, creamed spinach and salad with a booming Burgundy, as Max termed it. To then, as the hour before midnight approached, sacredly address, as Max also termed it, wild strawberries flown in from France and with a fine native whipped American cream to further glorify the tarnished gold glory of Château d’Yquem. My ass even felt a shiver of sympathetic pain that must have been felt by Max’s wife’s boyfriend as the baseball bat landed. And now on all sides the reassuring voices and faces and the swiveling eyes of those saved from poverty. Even a famed movie actor and actress basking in the furtive attention of all the other diners. And across this vast high-ceilinged room, all were neither sad nor glad knowing they could pay their check for dinner. And like Max, be able to retire to clean sheets to wake up on yet another day to do the same again. But the emotion of the evening taking all the turns and twists of a Tchaikovsky overture. And all I wanted to know was why it was that movie actors and actresses achieved such public idolatry when such should be reserved for the great composers.

“Well pal, I guess none of them get anywhere till they’re dead.”

“Well Max, guess you’re right. Anyway, this is a real fine evening I won’t soon or ever forget.”

“Pal, that makes me glad. Plus, in this smashingly splendid room is where you belong. Anyway it’s an appropriate place from which to contemplate my ending up in alimony jail.”

Max raising the golden liquid, a blissful smile across his lips, closing his eyes and placing his nose over the rim of his glass and inhaling.

“Pal, just put your ole proboscis to this pure nectar.”

“It sure is, Max. And I’m sure costing a fortune.”

“That’s what money’s for, pal, to aggrandize the spirit by elevating the perception of the senses to pleasure. But not to ignore all the other most important things in life of sentimental value.”

“Well Max, while I’m contemplating buying a baseball bat I’m also enjoying this wine and turning over the wisdom of your remarks in my mind.”

The first real meal since the evening out with Dru, and famished as I was, I could feel the champagne and wines and now the food bringing back energy flowing through my veins, my body suddenly reviving in a most miraculous way from what seemed a long term of tiredness. And one realized these wisdoms which were of a culinary nature, were profound. And tonight there could be no more triumphant host. But poor Max, even as a high school home-run king, could go down as an embezzler. And through my mind went a flash of dread and then I could hear choral voices singing and a bugle blowing taps at dusk and the Stars and Stripes flowing in the wind as it was being lowered in the breeze and the sad words of “Now the Day Is Over” being rendered. And I felt that Max needed some encouragement and maybe even a suggestion as to where he could run to ground, to use one of his own expressions.

“Max, maybe you need somewhere to be for awhile out of the limelight, so to speak. Maybe back to Chicago where Benny Goodman, the great clarinetist was born.”

“Yeah, pal. The feel of being somewhere home would kind of keep the ghost of disquiet at bay. I always remember that while we were still in the navy my greatest fear was not sharks or torpedoes or bombs or Jap kamikaze pilots, but going ashore on liberty with all the pent-up frustration accumulated incarcerated for interminable days belowdecks, behind steel bulkheads at sea and then, for what you think is going to be relief, ending up in some same godforsaken sailor-saturated port where the streets were black in winter with swabbies and suddenly overnight going white when summer uniform was the order of the day. It sure demonstrated a spectacle of regimentation that could end you up getting drunk. And then — and this was my real nightmare — ending up going to a tattoo artist to have a girlfriend’s name tattooed with a heart conspicuously on your shoulder or arm, with an arrow stuck through it. Or worse, to be overcome by the drunken temptation to do what old Chief Bosun Mate Lomax did, long before he ever became a chief, who had a tattoo of a fox chased by hounds running to ground right up his anus. I suppose my sense of dignity kept the more undignified seafaring temptations at bay. And you know, old buddy, in a like-minded way, after tonight I don’t ever want to see you having to frequent Horn and Hardart or in straitened circumstances having to go sit at the counter of that Nedick’s food stand place down in the subway on the middle level at Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue where I used to incognito go. And where on the bottom level just below, if you wanted to be even more incognito, you could take the BMT to Queens.”

“Gee Max, I in fact did occasionally go there and sit.”

“Well pal, at least they had the best baked hot dogs, if sometimes a little overcooked for one’s liking, but then you could apply plenty of relish and mustard if you wanted to overcome the taste. Boy, in the first few days I got back to New York before I got my job and I was so damn homesick to get back west to Chicago and the Loop, I used to wind up there on the station platform with the feeling I was hiding away from the whole city, hunched at the counter over a coffee bought with next to my last dime. Here, old buddy, a little more of this old Château d’Yquem.”

“Max, as much as New York is an unforgiving place, it is heartening to know that this most wonderful wine is here to be found. And I suppose one must presume that even in a harsh urban reality, sometimes humanity and understanding are encountered where you least expect.”

“Well, so far, outside of my good ole city Chicago, pal, I haven’t found much understanding and I don’t expect to find too much humanity. But I’ll fight the good fight against all those who assail me.”

An almighty sadness overcame me as Max’s muted words of defiance to this city were uttered, that perhaps things were even worse than he had described. And it was strange how the comraderie one had in the navy where you would trust your life, and had to, to a buddy, once back out in the civilian world it was erased. Every man for himself. Disheartening despair appearing on old Max’s face, his chin falling forward on his chest. Sudden look of fear flashing across his eyes. My own fears, deeper sown. And always lurking. In the navy, it was the terrible loneliness going ashore on ole liberty and getting drunk in some god-awful place like Norfolk, Virginia, with nothing, as Max said, but sailors everywhere. And with no ship heaving under your feet and feeling homesick and thirsty and just looking for a meaningful way to waste one’s time, you could end up getting so desperate that you’d go to the local library, pretending you were literary, to try and proposition the librarian behind a stack of books.

As we left the Plaza there was a little group of admirers around the Bentley as Max made a sidewalk ceremony of donning his helmet and goggles and the heavily tipped doorman opened the Bentley door and saluted. There were more than a couple of cheers as we circled around the Pulitzer Fountain and drove off down Fifth Avenue. Past the great glass display windows of women’s jewels, gowns, leathers, and fashion goods. Farther downtown came darker buildings. A man stretched prostrate asleep on the steps of the New York Public Library, its massive elevation looming into the sky. Then the Empire State Building from which a suicide had jumped the day before. Max signaling with a jerk of his thumb.

“Always look upward here, pal, in case someone is coming down.”

Back in the Village we went into a basement where they were playing jazz. Sloshing back unidentifiable brandy and dancing with two girls, one of them trying to get Max to take her to Bermuda. The other one accusing us of sounding ritzy and that we were there slumming, until I explained we were two deep-sea divers ashore recovering from the bends. And that Max had dived much deeper than me.

“Hey gee, is it dark down there under the ocean.”

“You betcha.”

Although the quality of brandy was poor, the music was of a quality of serious musicians. And while the girl danced off with someone else, telling me with her first captivating words that if I wouldn’t buy her another drink, she couldn’t see any long-term future in my company, I passed my alcoholically influenced compliments to the musicians and was invited to sit at the piano to knock out a few jitterbug beats of my own. Perceiving I had an appreciative clientele, I played a passage accelerando from my minuet and could sense the cascading notes reaching deep into my listeners’ guts. My fingers producing fifty lightning notes a second, I knew I might turn the entire nightclub audience into jibbering emotional wrecks as I did once drunkenly sitting at the piano in a previous nightclub while in an animated alcoholic state. And now came a voice over my shoulder.

“Holy Christ, fella, where did you learn to play like that. It sounds like it’s a full orchestra.”

On the spot I was offered a job by the management playing jazz piano five nights a week at twenty dollars a night and thirty dollars on Saturdays. Nobody wastes time in this city hiring you at a low salary if you’re really good at something. But I was turned down when I offered a Saturday evening of Scarlatti.

“Well fella, thank you very much. We don’t know this guy Scarlatti, but you think about it, twenty bucks, and call us tomorrow.”

But Max was both shouting and clapping, euphoric and unstinting in his applause, his cravat now wound around his head to make him look like a pirate. And it was balm to my ears to hear the previous voice over my shoulder again.

“Hey maestro, I’d sure like to hear the two Scarlatti slow F Minor sonatas, but boy, what was that before you were playing. Beautiful, but wasted on the people frequenting this joint.”

It was reassuring to be reminded yet once again that there was always someone somewhere in this city who out of its vast sea of chosen ignorance, would emerge with fine sensibilities to let his intelligent, appreciative voice be heard. And I tinkled the ivories up and down the octaves a couple of more times till the joint closed up at four and it wouldn’t be too long before the coming dawn would have the sun blazing up out of the Atlantic Ocean. Max with one of the two girls in tow, at last depositing me on the nonritzy foot pavement in Pell Street. And I somehow had a strange premonition that something terrible could happen to Max in his generous and friendly pursuit of pleasure in this town. The girl’s arms hanging around his neck as he shouted, “Hey, here’s the scuttlebutt, pal. Next weekend, Sagaponack, out on Long Island. Nude-bathing party in this cute girl’s swimming pool. I know her parents who have this kind of nice estate on the ocean. On the way maybe we’ll stop off again at the old Oak Room for another bottle or two of Krug.”

“Well Max, thanks. I’d like to respond affirmatively to such a distinctive stimulus and high spirits but I may attend upon the prophet and preacher Father Devine’s memorial parade up in Harlem.”

“There you go pal, eccentric exotic, as always.”

“Well, people of an African origin are naturally possessed with a beautiful sense of music sadly missing in the white man.”

“Well, we’ll talk more about that later, old pal. And hey old pal, hasn’t it been some great night. And you were great. And hey what about the naturally possessed sense of philosophy the Chinese have. Hear any good proverbs lately. You’re practically living right in Chinatown.”

A smell of rancid cheese in the hall increasing as I climbed the stairs. The lock broken on the door. Papers and music sheets strewn on the floor. Chairs knocked over and crockery smashed. Someone in the apartment while I was out. Fear and sadness. Depending upon who it was. Too tired to stay awake to find out or to clean up the mess. Chain the door. Take the carving knife and go fall asleep in the broken bed. Close eyes to the despicable of the world and another vision of discontentment awakes somewhere else in the brain. That Sylvia was having a nightmare next to me as she usually did. Her teeth grinding as they would in her sleep every night. Asking her, Annie, “get me out of hell.” Her voice mumbling in the darkness, “Annie,” the name of the mother she craved to find. And I woke in a sweat, wiping tears from my eyes, having dreamt the words she said when once, packing to leave on one of her searches and wanting to know when she would be back, she suddenly screamed, “How the hell should I know when. When I want to find my fucking mother. To know what her face is like when she’s crying. To know what her face is like when she’s smiling. I want to be able to thank someone for telling me where my mother is. So that I can know that I had a mother. And it’s none of your flicking business when I’m coming back. Especially to this dump, when you know more people are bitten by other people than they are by rats in this city. Good-bye.”

That was one of the doors Sylvia slammed closed between us. Resenting that I knew my mother and had watched her work peeling potatoes in our kitchen for her large family. And in my dream, Dru came. She seemed to be approaching me down the center aisle of St. Bartholomew’s Church which suddenly changed to a great lawned vista where now we walked hand in hand toward a glowing marble temple in the distance, choral voices humming to the tune of the taps one had so often gone to sleep by in the navy. Her slender figure swathed in flowing white veils. Small beads of diamonds in bracelets she wore around her wrists and in a many-stranded necklace crisscrossed upon her throat. She said, “Let us two lie down.” Her blond shining hair coifed back from her brow. And in my dream, rolling, groaning and grasping at her body. It was a rude awakening from such a dream. For she had just huskily whispered in my ear words that sounded like some hackneyed song. But worthy enough to hear for those extremely hard up.

Lover boy. O lover boy.

Strength of my desire.

Fire of my fire.

Love me some more, lover boy.

But what more could one ask for but to have a reverie of ecstasy about someone whom Max described as one of the richest women in the world. And who, if that a dilemma be, can be accused of no crime but who, in being rid of the struggle to financially survive, might be found far richer in her soul. Yet who, on that evening when the East River was flowing by below us and Brooklyn’s lights twinkled in the distance and I played my minuet for her, said she felt haunted by what seemed a curse growing up, which made her, through tragedy and by trusts and wills, richer and richer. Her closest little cousin girlfriend with whom she played, died of scarlet fever. Her father when she was thirteen, got electrocuted by lightning on their private golf course while he was throwing the switch for the sprinkler system. Two years later, her mother was killed in a head-on collision coming around a bend on a coastal road at Cap d’Antibes on the Riviera and her favorite uncle one day later went out on his estate in Virginia and blew his head off with a shotgun. And a more distant relative hearing of the shocking news, then went and stood on railway tracks in front of a train along the Hudson, near a train stop named Camelot. And none of this did Sylvia ever reveal. As if she expected something worse to happen to her.

I couldn’t tell Dru my own deeper devastations but I told her my most haunted story of having, as a small boy, to kiss a dead aunt at an Irish wake. And then related about the clairvoyance of one of my closest boyhood friends who lived in an area called Irishtown in a big spooky gray house surrounded by verandas, in the shadow of which we used to sit on rainy days singing songs inside their big chauffeured limousine parked permanently in the drive. And my friend was haunted by his mother who could by telepathy scare the shit out of him wherever he was. Even off somewhere miles away and usually spending money his mother gave him to pay off some urgent bill like his school tuition and which he was spending on our underage drinking pleasure of Tom Collinses in the Astor Hotel downtown, pretending that instead of being delinquents out on a spree we were big-time playboys. He would, after our first couple of Tom Collinses, always panic and interrupt our philosophical speculation and say he could hear his mother calling him. “Hey,” Fd say, “how can you, more than twenty miles away, hear her.” “Because,” he said, “she knows I’ve spent the money for my school tuition getting drunk — that’s how I know she is calling. And she’s going to beat the hell out of me when I get home. Box my ears. That’s how I know she’s calling.” And finally I believed him, because he would disappear into the big gray house with all its verandas shrouded in the trees and I wouldn’t see him again for weeks until he would finally appear, thinner, having emerged from incarceration locked somewhere in an attic or cellar, his food passed into him through a flap in the door. And although he never said so, I was certain it was bread and water.

Despite the long night out with Max I felt strangely full of energy this next day, my head slowly clearing. Propping a chair against the broken front door I made a feeble attempt to clean up the apartment but the goddamn cockroaches rushing for cover every time I lifted something up sent me instead with a desperate urge to sit at the piano and compose. My fingers itching to race across the keys and to mark new notes in the manuscript of my minuet. And placing the score in front of me on the piano, I sat in the manner of Rubenstein, fingers poised to lower them on the keys. Then as my fingertips touched, there was a strange silent sensation. No note sounded. I propped open the piano top. And drew in my breath in horror. There inside, except for a few of the heaviest bass chords, were all my piano strings, curled and wound upon themselves and cut and chopped to pieces. And the phone rang.

“Hey, hi. God, I at last got you. I phoned several times yesterday. It’s Dru.”

“Hello ma’am.”

“Stephen, what’s the matter. You sound awful.”

“Well, I am presently digesting a matter presently assailing my spirits.”

“Oh dear. We’re not, are we, like two ships passing in the night.”

“No ma’am, I hope not.”

“Well, my ship’s signaling, sending you some semaphore.”

“What’s it saying, ma’am.”

“It’s saying, Stephen, you’re my sunshine. And I need some badly right at this time.”

“Well gee, ma’am, I could do with a little ray or two myself at this time.”

“Well in that regard, perhaps you can in two hours meet me.”

“Yes ma’am. You bet I can.”

“Wait outside the Yiddish Theatre at Seventh and Fifty-eighth Street.”

“Sure thing ma’am.”

Upon the prospect of seeing Dru, my sense of crushing defeat and abysmal futurelessness wasn’t yet totally absolute. But with the unpredictability in one’s life rampant, even ole Dru might be getting ready to bust me one right on the kisser. Take that, you inferior impostor. How dare you ill-treat my beloved adopted daughter, and blatantly marry her for her money. Now find a shirt. Something silk and refined. Dress for the occasion. Search amid Sylvia’s dozens of discarded brassieres and leotards. Get out my gray flannels. Wear a carefully striped tie of quiet distinction. Select a light green plain sports jacket that I might have last worn on the prep school boat ride. But avoid one that annoyed the school prefect of discipline who said, “Do not. Ever again. Wear that. In this school.” And in these garments I will look out of uniform in this part of town. Jam the apartment door closed. Walk out and down this Oriental street to Mulberry and cross over to the West Side. Try to do as I often have tried. Walk away the burden of sadness mile by mile. Step by step. Head up Hudson to Ninth Avenue. Eardrums assaulted by the modern symphony of the flow of backfiring, horn-blowing, gear-grinding trucks and cars. Pass the lunch-rooms, saloons and pushcart vendors. Hoping that as one gets farther away from the cut piano strings, it will ease the pain and drive it out of the soul. And yet, there, just sounded, is a most beautiful bass, base reverberation. The deep throb of a ship’s whistle blasting on the river, pulling out of dock. Slow, stern-first to midstream. Faintly hear the echo of the throbbing sound coming back across the Hudson from the sheer rock cliffs of the Palisades. Bound to be one of the great liners off to Europe. Upon which I would so much like to sail. To that older world where the musician and composer can so much better avail of their dignity. Even in Vienna, where the whole audience is waiting to hold you up to ridicule. Ready for even some poor little bastard violinist in the back of the strings to miss a single note or play a wrong one. In order to boo and hiss the whole orchestra. But as things are now I shall never be able to get to that distant but civilized shore. And am instead reminded of the only trips I can afford to take, by the hoots of ferries back and forth to Hoboken, Jersey City, and Weehawken. And in this city, obscurity perpetuates on great men. As they, their fierce fury spent, recluse themselves from the eternal indifference of this city. Somewhere not far from here, Herman Melville was a customs inspector. And no one gave a hoot or cared. In that side street, there is the Straubenmüller Textile High School. And maybe plenty give a hoot and care that it’s there. And here I am now in Hell’s Kitchen. Where you can never tell if they have, in the back of liquor stores, a policeman crouched behind boxes, a gun in his hand. He waits for a stickup. A cross marked on the bullet so that when fired and hits, he doesn’t have to shoot twice. Bang. And the holdup man, a big hole blown in him somewhere, drops dead. Kids roaming the streets with zip guns, firing bullets out of pieces of pipe. Hypodermic needles shooting stuff they buy on the street corner into their limbs to get a few hours of mindless reverie. In this world where the hoodlums abound and where I’ve been caught frequenting my family’s bar, of which no one is allowed to know about or to go to because of the disgustingly undignified things that have happened there. A girl giving a blow job to a drunk customer in a back hallway leading to the men’s room. But where, still under drinking age, I ventured on a few dawn occasions to meet this same girl with a pockmarked face who had to support her out-of-work father and younger brother by giving blow jobs for two dollars. Holy cow, she was like a millionairess on a busy day. And to whom I enjoyed to talk and who told me that she, once on her knees giving a guy a blow job, got socked in the face because he said she was doing such a dirty, disgusting thing, and didn’t pay her. And that’s how she got her broken nose and spoke so sonorously and told me not to wear a striped tie with a striped shirt. I was for awhile unrecognized till this son of a bitch who didn’t pay for his blow job picked a fight and started to call me “pretty boy,” and before he could draw his gun, I kicked him in the balls and busted him one in the chops. Bullets later, or knife, or whatever he had, flying, the bartender spirited me out the back door. Soaked to the skin in the pouring rain, I hid in an empty garbage can before I finally got a chance to run away. But nothing now, and no knowledge I have of this city, is lessening the pain. Even here in the Garment District. And only words come to mind that could be construed as pedantic speak, which I repeat over and over. That I utterly utterly condemn the cruel inhumanity wrought upon me by persons of grievous intent. And I swear I will with every ounce of my one hundred and seventy-six and a half pounds bust into the next century the next rude, inhumane son of a bitch I come across.

Stephen O’Kelly’O climbing shadowy steps up into the bus station. The roar of diesels as these great land cruisers come and go, seeking and returning from destinations. And my own destination only a little more than half an hour left to go. Already suddenly three o’clock in the afternoon. Detour these last minutes away through the bus station. In this endless stream of people. Over the tannoy announcements for distant places. Rochester, Albany, Princeton, Mount Kisco. This man approaches with a sad mystifying look on his face as if all the world’s conundrums were all at once being dumped on him, and talks to me as if I were to blame.

“Hey, pass the word. Wrong information is being given out at Princeton.”

“Thank you sir, for telling me.”

One does not want to expostulate to a perfect stranger and in reply say, as I was tempted to in the good old-fashioned New York vernacular, hey bud, why should I pass the word when I don’t give a good goddamn flying fuck that wrong information is goddamn fucking well being given out at Princeton. So shove it up your ass, will yuh. And hey, what’s Princeton, some kind of bologna sandwich. But the seemingly crazy individual was much in earnest and said the same thing to the guy walking behind me. Who as it happened, was extremely grateful to hear the information. As I stopped to listen to a brief ensuing conversation I at least had the pleasant distraction of focusing my eyes on a girl who was looking at me and whose quite marvelous face I had just previously caught as she was passing me by. She was an inspiration of womanhood. And now following her slowly walking in front of me, her leather coat sweeping about her beautiful legs, and her long flowing brown hair halfway down her back. Her calves just as were Sylvia’s, splendidly athletic in her flat-soled shoes. She slowed and suddenly stopped and turned to me, as if knowing I was behind her. Except for a sadness in her eyes, her face had an inspiringly healthy look of an autumn apple just plucked shining at dawn’s early light from a tree in New Hampshire.

“Excuse me, sir. Could you please tell me, sir. Do you know when the next bus is to Suffern.”

“Sorry, I don’t know. Only wish I did, to tell you. But I did hear that wrong information is being given out at Princeton.”

With the vaguely familiar beauty of her face and a strange pleading in her lovely big pale blue eyes she seemed to wait for me to say more. Somehow I realized my facetiousness was inappropriate and I apologized again. She stood there in my way, her lips seeming to struggle to speak, moving but silent of words, as if she wanted me to stay and talk with her and didn’t know how to fully convey the invitation. She must have been aware, even as I was out of sight walking behind her, and picking up the scent in the air, that I was admiring her. Her eyes searching my face as if for some recognition and somehow asking for companionship which she must have sensed would have been forthcoming. And it would have been. But as it was now getting late to meet Dru, what could I do but apologize.

“I am sorry.”

“So am I. And that I’m not going to Princeton.”

And I found myself tempted to say I had to rush to meet somebody but to tell me how I could contact her again, an address, a telephone number. But so discouraged she seemed, and before I could ask anymore, her face cast down, she turned away, walking back in the direction from which we had come. Watching her go I was hoping she would come back. For she stopped just as she was about to disappear in the crowd. She turned and looked back at me. With the most shattering look I have ever seen. Her lost-looking eyes, that made you want to run to her. Throw your arms around her. Squeeze comfort, calm, and peace into her soul. And whisper to her that everything was going to be all right.

I was in a dilemma as whether to stay or go. She was, as she turned away, vanishing into the crowd, pausing to reach into her large cloth gypsy bag. And then moved on. The moment gone for all eternity. As I, too, go. Count my steps again. On parade, marching. A cadence forever branded on the mind. Your left, your left, your left, right, left. My mother kept a picture of all her three sons who were in the war at her bedside. Just as she would wait through the night, sitting in the dark on the front sun-porch, until all the children who had gone out had come home. The sound of a gunshot. Just behind me. A shiver down the spine. Duck. Hurry another couple of steps out of the line of fire. Waiting to smell the suffocating smoke and cordite, sweat and stench, as if I were back in my ship’s turret instead of a bus station. Look around. People gathered. Voices raised.

“Call an ambulance.”

“You mean a hearse, fella.”

At the edge of the crowd of onlookers, a claw ripping across one’s heart. On this concrete floor, amid the filth of gray blots of chewing gum and crushed cigarette butts, there she was. Through the legs of the crowd. The girl with the look of an autumn apple. Fallen to the floor, a pistol in her hand. White bloody bits of brain showing through her long flowing brown hair and blown out all over the little space she lies in. In her wonderful simple clothes. As if she were going to walk the autumnal hills of Vermont as the leaves were turning in their color that she so resembled alive in life. Nothing now but her wholesome beauty prostrate on the ground. Blood spattered everywhere. One outstretched hand. Fingers reaching lifeless at her possessions. A small notebook, a pen, tiny mirror and ring fallen from her bag. Voices. And my own loudest of all.

“Hey you son of a bitch, put that right back, it belongs to the girl. Or I’ll wrap your goddamn guts around your backbone.”

Immediate upon death in this city is theft. And her hand reaching as if to cling to that she most cherished, and not till my last-uttered violent words did this bastard put the ring back. Belonging to this girl who in her wandering of this world carried within her little cloth bag of pretty colors all her tiny treasures. Said “Excuse me, sir. Could you please tell me, sir.” And she must have been asking how she could ever go from sadness and despair to joy again. And all I could tell her was that wrong information is being given out at Princeton. Which maybe she didn’t know was also the other side of the deeply flowing Hudson River, in the same direction as Suffern. Turn away now with my own sigh and heave of sorrow. Filled with tears. More broken strings. There was music in her voice. Magic in her brief words. Their sweet apple sound. As if I had known her all my life. Childhood sweethearts. And we loved each other. Born and grown up in the same valley. By a river. Near the same hill. Or on the next street in the same town. “Excuse me, sir. Could you please tell me, sir. Do you know when the next bus is to Suffern.” And not needing anymore to know. And perhaps had I known, she wouldn’t now lie so still, pale blue eyes staring nowhere. Surrounded by this swarm of loveless strangers. With only their curiosity. And now police come. One with his gun drawn, pushing back the insistent crowd. His partner picking up the shell and taking her pistol. Asking questions. Who saw this. And pressed as I had been to get to the Yiddish Theatre, I couldn’t, couldn’t leave her. Not like this, all dead and all alone. She was someone I’d met and knew, even if only for seconds. Wait the minutes away until the stretcher bearers come. And they came. Gently lifting her form. Placing her lifeless arms across her chest. A shoe off. Her couple of trinkets and cloth bag beside her. Her face half-covered with strands of her long brown hair. And carry her out of sight, leaving only a darkened red stain over which feet pass now. At just after three o’clock in the afternoon, this terrible occurence. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings in all its somberness flooding through my mind. The high screams of the violins ringing in the ears, announcing this tragedy. And I went to see. The bus she wanted had already left before she spoke to me. And I could have saved her life.

Stephen O’Kelly’O standing in the crowded front of the bus station. The figures moving around him. Amid the arriving and departing in this shouting and screaming city. Where it seems I’ve walked this day the longest of miles. Taxis pulling up. People with their luggage getting out. People with their luggage piling in. Destinations. Take me to the Taft Hotel. To the Dixie. To the Edison. Park Central. Algonquin. To the St. Moritz, where old Max stayed overlooking Central Park when briefly in from Chicago. And take me, too. To escape from death and hell.

“Where to, buddy.”

“Seventh and Fifty-eighth, please.”

Sit stopping, starting, speeding and honking through all this tawdriness as tears fall from my eyes. Slow to a halt for a red light. Taxi driver glancing in his mirror. Turns to speak over his shoulder.

“Hey, are you all right, buddy.”

“Yes I am, thank you.”

“Well you ask when you know in a city as big as Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan tragedy is happening every second around the clock. And things are happening out on Staten Island, too. You kind of keep your eye out for somebody who might be in trouble. I was four years in the war. Eighth Army. You ain’t wearing a Ruptured Duck, but I know by just looking, guys who’ve been in the war.”

Stephen O’Kelly’O alighting from the taxi in front of the Yiddish Theatre. Taxi driver, the side of his face covered in a scar, handing back the change one told him to keep.

“It’s okay, buddy. My policy. I don’t take a tip from veterans or when I carry what I think is sorrow in my cab. Had a guy yesterday, no hands, just hooks like the ends of wire coat hangers coming out of his sleeves. Iwo Jima. Sorry about the little accident. I’ll say something else, too. Not many of my passengers ever say please, or thank you.”

Stephen O’Kelly’O under the canopy of the Yiddish Theatre. Late. Twenty minutes. In this city never predictable. While my good friend the taxi driver from the Eighth Army was turning around to tell me of his considerateness, he nearly killed us driving up on the back of another taxi stopping for a red light. The driver in front, getting out to view the damage, dismissed it and forgave him with a disdainful wave of the hand. A rakishly stylish-looking gentleman on the sidewalk pausing to watch. And, in Max’s brokerish way, announcing to the two taxi drivers, “I say there, you two. Assert your mannish instincts. Find fault and fight. Go ahead, hit him. Ask him if he wants to be an advert for a casket company. And I agree to referee.”

As always in this city, the next moment is invariably an unexpected surprise, never giving you a chance to learn about the metropolis. Just when tragedy submerges the spirit and the harshness one encounters seems to overwhelm, a thoughtful kindness erupting seems to beget another. Or a savant joker to intervene. And benevolence emerges. As might, in the midst of mournful cello chords, come the cheer of grand orchestral blasts. Just as, after all the violence and death of the war, camaraderie is still to be found. Together with maybe an eternal world-weary sadness left in the eyes. Such a young girl couldn’t have been in the war. And yet what whirlpool of despair could have sucked her spirit down enough to make her want to die. To be swept up and taken away with the human debris of this city as are the pieces of bodies taken up piece by piece out of the subway tracks. Glittery-eyed thousands come aspiring from the corn-growing plains, from Kentucky gulches and gullies, and out of the potato fields of Idaho and westward all the way to the California shore of the Pacific Ocean. To dare their lives here on this deep stone emplacement of Manhattan Island where the drills and dynamite dig to send the tall spires up into the sky. Where stardom awaits in so many dreams. To then be crushed by the endless friendless indifference. Smothered under the doom of loneliness. And here I have rushed and wait outside a venue for the language of an ancient world to be heard. For a Dru who may have already been. Found me not here, and now is gone and will never come back because I am late. Stare up at the soaring gray edifice of Max’s athletic club across the street. Three giant windows where inside Max said they had a swimming pool. A palace dedicated to the manly sports. Frequented by many prominent social and political figures who could afford the membership fees. How ya doin’. I’m doin’ fine. In this city where I was born. Grew up. Was early indoctrinated. Knowing girls like the pock-marked girl, and the desperate effort she made giving the potbellied blow jobs so that it enabled her to take groceries back to her hungry father and brother. She finally admitted she had her nose busted when she spat the sperm of the Irish Roman Catholic man who wouldn’t pay her right back into his face.

And here I am, Stephen O’Kelly’O outside the Yiddish Art Theatre and across from Max’s athletic club, whose gray elevations go soaring into the sky and only with a quarter left in change that the taxi driver wouldn’t take as a tip. Asked the pocked-marked girl what would happen if she raised her price to two dollars and fifty cents. She said she thought business would suffer. When she first started out, she took what anyone would give her which she was glad to get. And the demand grew so she named a price. Took her customers up to the roofs of buildings. And blew them too in elevators before they reached the top. Where she held out her hand ready to say thanks. And here I wait for someone who can buy and pay for anything she wants. And knowing she’s not going to come makes the minutes passing terrible. But wait just in case she does come. Walk to the corner and back. And take one last look at the Yiddish Theatre program. At least these are a people by whom music is seriously regarded and from whose race great composers and instrumentalists come.

A long and opaque-windowed gleaming black chauffeured limousine pulling up to the curb. A black-uniformed, peak-capped chauffeur getting out. Crossing the pavement and tapping Stephen O’Kelly’O on the shoulder. Who swings around, making the chauffeur jump back in shock.

“Excuse me sir, but Mrs. Wilmington is waiting for you in the car.”

Stephen O’Kelly’O crossing the pavement. Bumping into a pedestrian. “Excuse me. I am most heartily sorry.” But she has come. Under an assumed name. Climb in. The soft-upholstered, glass-enclosed interior. The dim light. The city shut out. A chinchilla rug across her knees. God she can be stunning and even more beautiful than ever. Her hair swept back tight on her head as it was in my dream. A smile on her face. The very tiny division between her front teeth. Patting the seat beside her with a wink of her eye. A big glass arises to cut us off from the chauffeur. Her welcoming affection so eases the pain that I come to her with. And one hears “The Great Gate of Kiev” in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

“Hi ya, Stephen kiddo. Glad to have you aboard. If that’s what they say in the navy.”

“Gee, how you doing Dru.”

“I’m doing much better, thank you, upon seeing you. This is the fifth time we’ve driven around the block and through the park and nearly ending up in Harlem. But heavens, you do look pale as a ghost.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’ll forgive that ‘ma’am’ just this hundredth time more. What’s wrong.”

“Well, I’m a little better for seeing you, Mrs. Wilmington.”

“Well, I’ll take you at your pleasant word. And do forgive my little precautionary disguise. I’m afraid necessary. Which is, as you may have noticed, the vehicle we ride in. If I do not have a particular person always scrutinizing my movements, then I have those whom I don’t know about. At least when the former is around, which happily he isn’t at the moment, I can ignore those snoopers I don’t know about. And I’ve had the very wildest idea. Remember when you played Rachmaninoff. Well I thought that we could make a pilgrimage to Valhalla and visit his grave. Then perhaps later we could have dinner. Is that all right.”

“Gee ma’am. I mean Dru. That would be nice.”

“I can see we’re going to have to be tolerant. Perhaps very tolerant. I think, in fact, I might quite like it if you do call me ma’am. But I would prefer if it didn’t make me feel a little staid and stuffy and perhaps just even a little bit illicit, considering our relative positions.”

Dru speaking into a small microphone. Chauffeur nodding his head as we travel west on Central Park South. Slow down. Stop for a red light at Columbus Circle. Spacious enough for this open-air forum dotted with a few speakers attended with even fewer listeners. One on a soapbox wielding his fist to an empty street. Another patrolling with a sandwich board.

DOWN WITH

WRONGDOING

UP WITH RIGHTEOUSNESS

SAYS THE TRUE

AND ONLY ZORRO

Nearby, a shoving and pushing fight in progress. An old lady beating the protagonists with her umbrella. Nobody looking like they are going to change the world in this little oasis of discontentment. The gray stone ancient hotel there. And a warehouse. And we speed through the traffic to the elevated highway along this great noble river of the Hudson. Dru smiling, pointing through the thick glass of the windows.

“Up there atop that building, a newspaper magnet lived. Had an apartment with a swimming pool in it. He built himself a palace in California with a much bigger pool.”

Under the soaring silver sweep of the George Washington Bridge, the highway weaving its route along the shore of this solemnly deep river. Staring out the window and holding this hand giving a reassuring squeeze that I was told growing up, transmitted a message of true love to come. Listening to this voice as it tells me more. That beyond all this solid rock is Fort Tryon Park. The Cloisters. Lawns, terraces, and where they have the most secret of wonderful rock gardens. The remains of a Romanesque twelfth-century church. And dissolved over this voice telling me of these rocky cliff sides, the prostrate girl, her leather coat spread each side of her like the broken wings of a bird. Her face turned aside, twisted upon her neck. A hole blown through her skull. The blood on her hair. White specks of her brain. As if now strewn dotted across the beautiful passing wooded green contours of countryside.

“Stephen, you’re awfully silent. I won’t of course pry, but you must tell me if something is wrong.”

“Nothing is wrong, ma’am, and you sure do know New York.”

“Well of course one shouldn’t speak of it as being anything important but one’s family have over the years done various things in various parts of the city which I suppose, out of curiosity, one would sometimes investigate, making it familiar.”

Farther north, the highway curving past the hillsides with their strange distant amalgam of buildings, each isolated like the beginnings of abandoned empires. Then just as Dru knows what she does about the island of Manhattan, all growing familiar as places where I walked and knew were passing by. Where my best friend had a trapping line in the swamp in the valley of the Saw Mill River. Catching muskrats to sell to the Hudson Bay Company. And right in this, the area of a borough insisting to be known euphemistically as Riverdale but in reality the Bronx. That word, just like Brooklyn, conjuring up boorish accents and behavior. That makes one in unambiguous affirmation want to brag about where one comes from. As we pass another hillside. Over which the ghosts of childhood hover. Race through my memories. Of what happened beyond in those suburban streets. The artfully chastising, if not horrendous things we did to the neighbors. Especially at night, and most of whom were highly deserving real grumpy bastards with similar wives. Point now upward and toward houses in the trees.

“Dru, that’s where I grew up.”

“And someday it will be immortalized.”

Words such as Dru’s were glowingly pleasant to hear. Even as untrue and impossible as my humility made me feel them to be. But at least such sentiments could get you through another couple of hours of life believing there was reason to live. And not die brain destructed, facedown in a bus station. As go by now the little conurbations from Heather Dell to Hartsdale. My soul quieted a little from the turmoil of the spirit and my accumulated restless nights, I nodded off to sleep. Dreaming I was a salesman in a jewelery store and just having failed to make a sale, I woke. My head resting on Dru’s shoulder, her fur rug up over my knees and the limousine parked on a cemetery road. A chill in the air as I got out to follow Dru in her flat walking shoes. And just like the dead girl’s, her wonderful legs. Her calf muscles flexing in front of me to where we stood in front of the Russian cross on Sergey Rachmaninoff’s grave. Standing there in silent reverence on the grass, paying our respects. And I could hear the fervent poetic eloquence and intensity and the melodious sweeps of the strings in his Symphony No. 2 in E Minor. Then walking and wandering not that far away, there was the final resting place of a baseball player. The same one Max said he emulated.

“Stephen, didn’t that baseball player hit a lot of home runs.”

“Yes he certainly did, ma’am.”

“I suppose more people know who he is than know of Rachmaninoff.”

“Yes ma’am. But he hit forty-nine home runs in a single season. And had a batting average of three seventy-nine over his best ten years. And he lived in my neighborhood, Riverdale. I guess you might say he was a hero, knocking balls instead of musical notes, out into the ether. Folks called him Lou.”

“Ah, at last you’re talking a little. Stephen, you don’t mind if I comment that you’ve been so quiet, as I know you usually are, but then even quieter than that.”

“Well ma’am, it is a rewarding feeling to stand like this out here in the fresh good air of the countryside and to find these two gentlemen, both outstanding in their professions and achieving so much in their lives, now both resting here in peace.”

“You’re staring at that stone there.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What are you thinking about.”

“Epitaphs.”

“Such as.”

“Men are slow to gain their wisdom and faster to become fools.”

“You know Stephen, sometimes when you say something, I feel I am meeting you for the first time. Do you believe in God.”

“Well ma’am, I guess there’s got to be somebody like that somewhere. A guy comes into Horn and Hardart on Fifty-seventh Street saying he is. Do you believe in God.”

“Having been self-sufficient unto myself I have never felt I had any need of a God but often wonder if with no one to turn to in terrible trouble, I would become religious. But you do, don’t you, in so loving your music, have a religion. But recently you have you know, rather made me feel that one has been listening to Tchaikovsky’s Sérénade Mélancolique. Ah, that at last has put a smile on your face. You see, I am boning up on my musicology. Tchaikovsky, he did didn’t he, write so much.”

“He did ma’am, and by the way, Tchaikovsky’s Sérénade Mélancolique does have some very forcefully exuberant passages.”

“Well, I suppose my accumulating musical knowledge is bound to leave me occasionally feeling like I’m plunging over Niagara Falls in a barrel, hoping my ignorance is not to be revealed with the barrel breaking up in the turmoil of water below.”

“I should be glad, ma’am, to save you from drowning and swim with you to shore.”

“And if I were like a bottle full of fizz with the stopper jammed in, would you pull it out.”

“I should be most glad to, ma’am.”

“Come on. We’re going back to New York.”

Her smile radiating from her face as one eye winked and the other stayed brightly sparkling under her wonderful eyebrows, as if they sheltered the gleam that came glowing warm out of this woman’s soul. As her hand grabs mine and leads me now out of glumness down this little grassy incline. To the long black shining sleekness of this limousine. The door clunking closed with its heavy thud. As we go bulletproof back to the silvery towering skyscrapers. People say they like New York because there are people there. And here we sit side by side, at opposite economic poles of the universe, our minds married by the faintly heard music of all these wheels humming along on the highway. Everywhere and everyone in New York, it seems, are grabbing and stabbing at immortality. Scratching names in cement as we did as kids on the street-corner sidewalks. Carve John, Jerry, Joe in brass. Or Alan, Dick, Ken, or Tommy drawn on a wall. It could last a day, week, or a whole month before, worn by footsteps, washed by rain, or faded by sunshine, another name or a new building comes to wipe it away. But ole Dru’s name, out of the sunshine, away from the rain, is writ in brass on a pew in the cloistered elegance of St. Bartholomew’s Church. Which still adorns there so peacefully on Park Avenue. Attesting to religion, wealth, and power. And permitting pure beauty and sentiment to pervade the spirit. The pocked-marked-faced girl who tried not to ridicule her fat-bellied clients said once to me to always tell everyone how great and wonderful they are, in case they ever get that way. And then you’d be telling the truth. And better late than never.

The massively heavy limousine with its clunking doors pulled up again at the Yiddish Theatre. Under the lights of the marquee, we step out. Dru handing the chauffeur an envelope. And judging by his friendly voice, it could contain a lot of money and he could be a hick hayseed in search of his fortune and blown in from the West. Or maybe one of the more pleasantly pastoral people you’d find up a gulch in West Virginia, where rougher cousins might, if you trespassed on their land, or looked at them sideways, stick a shotgun up your ass and blow your bowels out.

“Thank you kindly, Mrs. Wilmington.”

Diamond bracelets sliding back on Dru’s wrist as she waved down a taxi. To take me speeding along Central Park South. And this part of town makes me wonder how is old Max, who could always make one quietly chuckle at his dilemmas and the meticulous ways in which he oriented his life. And to recall his description, for which I must write a musical score to dramatize marching a naked football player out of his Houston house and down the elegant rich suburban public street and to which the national anthem of Texas can be sung.

Son of a bitch

I’m going to make you pay

The eyes of Texas are upon you

All the live long day.

As now we turn into the winding roadway north through the park. Evening light descends through the tree branches and over the stone outcroppings. Dru lowers a window. A faint roar of a lion comes out of the zoo. A horse and rider cantering along a bridle path. And into this sylvan peace at night come marauders who will stalk the honest citizen who now hurries heading for peaceful safety outside the park. While we go uptown on Fifth and crosstown on Eighty-sixth Street.

“Stephen, you must know Yorkville. Plenty of Germans, beer, plenty bratwurst, plenty sauerkraut.”

“Yes ma’am. Plenty Czechs, plenty Slovaks, and plenty Hungarians.”

Near the East River and the peace and quiet of another park, taxi stops. A large town house behind tall railings. Gray stone facings. Gargoyles. A gleaming black anonymous door. The shaming embarrassment of waiting for Dru to pay. Whose terror is to spend a dollar. Tips the driver. Might have given him a quarter. And I haven’t got much more than that left in the world. Watch her legs. Which go curvaciously every year to Colorado or even to Europe to ski down some Swiss mountain. With the wonderful sure movements of her finely boned hands takes a key from her purse and unlocks the heavy barred gate. Her easy steps up to the door. Another key opens it into a spacious black-and-white marble-tiled entrance hall, across which we could waltz together. Stone busts on plinths and in niches. Commemorating guys bound to be big-time but not one single composer or face familiar enough that I can recognize. As I follow this lady up this sweep of curving staircase. Who speaks back over her shoulder.

“Stephen, when you fell asleep in the car on the way to Valhalla, I wanted to wake you up to see the quite beautiful sweeping massiveness of the Kensico Dam but you were so deeply, somnambulantly talking in your slumber.”

“Was I.”

“And I did think I had better not interrupt you. That’s how considerate I can be.”

“What was I saying.”

“Of what little I could understand, nothing incriminating. You were saying, ‘Wrong, wrong. Wrong information is being given out at Princeton.’”

“Was I saying that.”

“Yes you were. Not something the college authorities would like said.”

“Well, I think it could refer to a bus timetable.”

“Ah, but at last some color seems to be coming back into your face. You were so pale. And I know everything is going to be all right with your work. And also your whole future.”

“I hope so. So many would wish me ill and would stand in my way and let me down. Things seem to insist to happen that seem to hinder me in my aspirations and effort to achieve my goal which is to create and conduct.”

“Dearest — I may, mayn’t I, call you that. Especially as you can’t seem to always remember to call me Dru. It’s all these old fogies sitting on their laurels and coasting on their reputations who should perhaps with the kindliness of time be swept away into the luxury of their retirement homes, there to comfortably await their secure niches in the history books.”

“And give ciphers like me a chance.”

“How can you say that when your work is so beautiful. At least I think so.”

“And ma’am, I am entirely charmed that you do.”

“You do you know, sometimes sound as if you’re not entirely from the Bronx. And appropos of your exerting a certain Gallic savoir faire, would you be open to an invitation if I were to ask you to come with me racing. October, that wonderful month in Paris where the chestnuts are dropping from the trees in the Jardin des Tuileries and also the time the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe is at Longchamp, where I have a dear mare running.”

“Do I, ma’am, take my not sounding as not being from the Bronx as a compliment or possibly a mild rebuke.”

“Take it merely as an observation my dearest. From someone whose thoughts are entirely in your interest.”

“I shall, Mrs. Wilmington.”

“Touché. We do, don’t we, dig for ourselves entrenchments of deviousness out of which extrication becomes difficult, if not ultimately impossible. But that is reserved for others. With you, I never feel that I am in tainted company in which future betrayal portends and when you sense someone is lying to you.”

“And I should be delighted to head to Paris. And we might together while there pop into the church of St. Sulpice and if lucky, hear Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass.”

“Done, my dear.”

On the staircase landing, gilded bronze jardinieres. Reminders of one’s lace-curtain origins of an onyx sort, when one enjoyed in childhood to push these over to marvel with pleasure as they smashed upon a tiled sunroom floor. My refined Irish parents’ efforts to maintain elegance in the face of their progeny, who treated all such things as junk. And this residence festooned with riches. Past which Dru leads me by the hand along a corridor. Crystal chandeliers everywhere. Furniture shapes unseen under white sheets. Where a key hangs hidden on the back of a chair and opens up a door. Dru turning the gilt handle, diamonds aglimmer on her wrist. While I don’t have a thing to wear to Longchamp. And follow into this darkened shadowy chamber this woman who can go anywhere in the world and do what she wants. Dru striking a match. The flame illuminating a golden coronet atop a massive canopy bed.

“This candle to burn while we make love.”

“Holy cow, Dru. Holy cow.”

“Next, dear boy, you’ll be saying gee jiminy winikers, or is it winkus or something vaguely akin.”

“This is all so sumptuously beautiful that it’s made me become what I believe is usually referred to as being nervous.”

“Well, this is my closest girlfriend’s house. Or rather, ‘cottage in the city,’ as she calls it, which at the moment is entirely empty. In any event, servants do play havoc with the privacy of one’s life. And I hope that you’re not going to suddenly go shy on me.”

“No ma’am. I’m trying to stay as brave as possible. But we could be committing adultery.”

“I assume you’re kidding.”

“Yes I am, ma’am.”

“I see we’re quite firmly back to ‘ma’am’ again. And you’re behaving like a virgin. But of course adultery and worse is exactly the kind of illicit sin we are, or rather at least I am, committing.”

“Well ma’am, maybe I didn’t mean for our association to go this far so fast.”

“Well, in exactly another second it can pretty quickly disappear into a taxi and head down First Avenue. I shall call one.”

“Gee, please don’t. I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, whatever it is that you don’t know what to say, you’d better say it. And if I may suggest further, without undue delay. For putting it in the parlance of the outspoken, I do not intend to aimlessly fuck about. In platitudes, clichés, or otherwise.”

“Well, I guess if it’s not a platitude, I want to be with you. And I guess I think about you.”

“Well, how nicely halfhearted of you.”

“I think you’re wonderful.”

“Well, that at least might be considered as a mild improvement. And perhaps it’s better that you know that my involuntary winking can at times be voluntary, as it was at Sutton Place that evening when we all went out for dinner. And also, if I may put it so bluntly, when your hard-on grew so enticingly large. When we first met up, you were blushing and indeed as I believe you described yourself to someone who shan’t now be named that it had you crouched over like a cripple in a hopeless effort to disguise the predicament that your engorgement presented. And now need I say, my dear boy, that that shown to me then was the biggest green light in the world. Or am I deluding myself and am now to hear you deny that such tumescence was inspired by me.”

“No ma’am. I don’t deny it. I openly admit it.”

“Good. At last we seem to be getting somewhere. Now show me where it hurts. Because from what I can see of your posture, you again seem crouched over in such pain.”

“I guess I’m also nervous with the lack of scruples. Gee, I think I feel a little bit guilty. Sorry, I mean chilly.”

“Of course the words guilty and scruples do rather go together, but I am absolutely sure you meant to say chilly. It is, after all, somewhat unseasonably cool in this house. Now dear boy, as we are prolonged standing here, do I keep the candlelight alive. Or do I blow it out and immediately turn on my flat heel and saunter straight out of here.”

“I guess I am traumatized by some recent events.”

“I’m assuming I’m not one of them.”

“No, ma’am, you’re surely not.”

“Well, am I to blow out the candle or not. Blow, I presume.”

“No, no, don’t.”

“Well then, as I am not quite yet old enough to be your mother, please forgive me if I don’t speak in pedantic euphemisms in order to request to see that cock of yours already bursting the seams of your trousers.”

“Ma’am, you don’t mince your words, do you.”

“No. I don’t. Why should I.”

“I agree, ma’am. Why should you.”

“We all, don’t we, seek to reach a plateau of pleasure upon which we think we can glide indefinitely. And I suppose some of us accept the risk of doing so dangerously.”

“Dru, I guess I’ve had a couple of things happen today that have dismayed me. But please. Don’t blow out the candle.”

On the gray marble chimneypiece amid a collection of Islamic looking pots, one candle out of a dozen in their tall tulip glasses glowing in the mirror. Softly flooding its single flame of light across the room and spreading shadows within the shelter of the great canopied bed and beyond.

“Holy Christ, Dru. Get back.”

“What is it.”

“Behind you.”

“Oh that. It’s dead and stuffed. I meant to warn you.”

“Holy cow. It’s a rattler. Diamondback.”

“Oh dear boy you are, aren’t you, a nervous wreck, but at least you remembered my name. Next perhaps, you’ll call me sweetie pie. But that’s an eastern diamondback. I suppose, alive, our most deadly of snakes.”

“That looks at least seven feet long and in the dark it looks alive with its fangs ready to strike. Hey what kind of a place is this. Could be black widow spiders everywhere you put your hand.”

“I suppose the Irish, not having snakes in Ireland, have an exaggerated dread of them.”

“You betcha, ma’am.”

“Better not bring you into the next room where my friend has two stuffed black mambas that extend as high as you or I up off the floor and which are wrapped around objets d’art. The world’s most feared snake alive, but I assure you my friend preserves them harmlessly dead.”

“Oh boy, this is getting to be some day.”

“To make it better, may I presume as I’m doing that I undress for you with the intention that it may distract you from your troubles and, as it seems, your fear of snakes. And perhaps then allow me to become stuffed or at least penetrated. And please do keep calling me ‘ma’am.’ Do you like what you see.”

“Oh boy, you bet, ma’am. My God, surely ma’am, you’re a Venus.”

“Well at least a protectoress of gardens which I believe Venus symbolizes. But perhaps I am a little taller and perhaps slightly thinner than the statue. I swim half a mile every day at that Georgian redbrick rendezvous for women on Park Avenue. And now good sir, I should like to be at your mercy. Does that not, in anticipation, give you just a trace of smug satisfaction.”

“You betcha. Holy cow.”

“So, why not take off your clothes.”

“Oh boy.”

“And don’t forget to say gee winikers.”

“No, ma’am. Gee winikers. Forgive the state of my undergarments.”

“And, my good chap darling, don’t leave on your socks. And you do don’t you, need darns in the toes. And my, you are aren’t you, well endowed. And to cut a continued description short, you’re an Adonis. Please. Don’t move. Just stand there as you are while I lick my chops.”

“Well ma’am, truth be known, I’m merely a reasonably healthy light heavyweight twenty-six-year-old male, nearly twenty-seven, and past my prime, plunging inexorably on my way to the infirmities that surely shall soon devolve upon me upon hitting thirty. Or at least by thirty-one.”

“Oh my God. You must think then that I am well and truly over the hill.”

“No, never, ma’am. For certainty never. A body such as yours is a dream.”

“Such flattery of course, will get you somewhere. Ah, but you are, aren’t you, really extremely well endowed. Indeed to the degree that one might more likely expect to encounter along some of the coasts of Africa, where one goes to play sometimes. But don’t you ever tell anyone that.”

“No ma’am. For sure. Mum’s the word.”

“This is so wonderful. Just so good to look at you and contemplate without touching what will happen when we touch. Such gorgeous delight. I love the way a belt goes around a man’s trousers. Take yours off. You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this. Like being brought as I was as a little girl when we’d return from Europe, to be taken to see the phenomenon of the big face up on the billboard blow gigantic smoke rings out over Broadway and to have demonstrated to me how great America was.”

“Holy cow. I’m no smoke ring. I don’t smoke.”

“Well, come on lover boy. I’m hot enough to smoke. Don’t be shy. I’m giving you a target as I bend over. Belt me with that belt.”

“Gee Dru, I’m not shy; I’m just amazed at what we’re getting up to here.”

“We’re getting up to good things. Ouch. That was nice. And just a little harder. Ouch. Ouch. Now, lover boy. I adore to be submissive. For a few seconds. And then to be dominant. Grrr. Do you like that sound.”

“Boy, you bet.”

“Now lie down and let me talk to you and tell you more. You are my prodigy. Groomed for stardom. Heralded as the great young hope. Hailed as the most exciting young conductor composer since last week. Sorry, I meant to say in all America. Stunning even the most critical audiences with your repertoire. On the podium, his baton swaying so marvelously. Let me talk to it. Hello there, you. Yum yum. What is it they call syncopation.”

“It is when a tone is started on an unaccented beat and continued through the following accented beat. Ragtime is an example.”

“Stephen my darling, although I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, can we syncopate. We do then, both have beautiful bodies, don’t we. We will, won’t we, while we’re here like serpents, enmesh in a sinewy embrace.”

“Yes ma’am. But let’s keep well away from that snake. Stuffed or not. I don’t trust that goddamn thing.”

“Now please, don’t panic again, dear boy. Truth of the matter is, I adore to be in the presence of danger and of those doing unspeakable things.”

“Holy cow. Like what.”

“Can’t tell you. Even though I would love to. I said it was unspeakable. So I won’t tell you now. Maybe soon. Maybe sometime. Did you know this was going to happen to us.”

“Yes ma’am. No. Or let me correct that. The truth is, I didn’t. I didn’t dare.”

“You’re so sweet. But just stay there as you are. Don’t move. And you actually like me. Don’t you.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You gave me the only unmistakable signal. And you do at times exhibit a galantry far beyond your years. And you’re not like everyone else. Who all over this world are always after something.”

“Well, I’m not too sure ma’am, that I’m not after a few things.”

“Well, if that ever gets to include me, I don’t mind. And can only hope I’ve got what you’re after. At least while I’m alive. Or who knows, perhaps even after death. Think of enough things to do with it. Even think of the possibilities of cryogenics. One does ask one’s psychic questions, such as, will there be a resurrection of the dead. And as we shake off our icicles, does that mean, then, that we all stop dying. She doesn’t seem to really know, so meanwhile I rely on the wisdom of life being always to pursue something. Or at least hope to find something to pursue. And I never fully can. Even with a whole litany of deserving good causes which for distraction ends me up buying so much antique junk at auctions that it has to end up stuffed in warehouses I’ve never been to. Stopped buying when I found you to seduce. No. I’m only kidding. But anyway, here you are. With me. And having this little naked talk like this. Now closer. Touch me.”

Drusilla, her tall, white slender body stretched in the candlelight on this large canopied bed. Oil portraits on the walls. Out of someone’s American past. Early settlers putting on airs. Their eyes staring at us. As well as the malevolent, deadly, glinting eyes of the rattler, mouth agape, head as big as a hand, fangs as long as a finger, coiled to strike. And in these seconds swiftly passing, touch her, feel her lips on my skin. What is unspeakable. Of which she speaks. Tied to a post and beaten. Fucked while laid out in a coffin or hanging from a tree.

“You have such a worried look, darling, my dear. You’re wondering, aren’t you. Have you ever done anything as quaint as made love to anyone in a coffin.”

“Gee Dru, that, believe it or not, just went through my mind.”

“Ah, now that the cat’s half out of the bag. It’s a black cat. With nine lives. And my precious one, at least one life is left to live.”

“Holy cow. I feel as if I’m dreaming.”

“You are darling. And relax. I ask only that you call me sweetie pie. Lie back on your back. I shall kneel beside you, let my hair hang long and loose, loose and long. The lovely silkiness of your hair does make one envious, angel.”

“Sweetie pie.”

“O God, call me, call me that again please.”

“Sweetie pie.”

“You know I always always wanted, instead of being chaperoned by some governess down some big gloomy hall of some big gloomy old house, to imagine I lived in some cozy little place down some shady street of maples in a small town and would be called sweetie pie by someone nice. As if someone like you were the boy next door and walked every day past our little lawn and white picket fence maybe on your newspaper route. And flicked the latest local town news up on our porch and stood a second or two to look at my house where I lived with my mother and father and our dog named Esme or Putsie or something and our cat named Snooky Wooky. And when you went past, you wondered what I was doing inside. And I’d be washing my hair in beer because it would make it shine. Then on Friday night, you’d have your hair brushed, pants pressed and maybe, with even a bow tie, you would come up the little paved path to the front door. And when you pressed the bell, chimes would ring ‘God Bless America.’”

“Holy cow, Dru. You’re kidding.”

“No. No, I’m not. And don’t you laugh.”

“I’m not, and I sympathize with an enlightened form of socialism where perhaps life could be like that. But maybe we could have a little Stravinsky in the chimes.”

“Well, I’m not kidding.”

“Okay. Sweetie pie.”

“And let me finish. You’d arrive for our date at seven o’clock. And then sitting with my dad, telling him you made first-string quarterback on the high school football team, while I, upstairs, brushed my hair for the final umpteenth time. Then as I came slowly down the stairs into the drawing room, you saw me and smiled.”

“Dru, I think it might be called the living room.”

“Okay, living room. So who cares about architecture at such a beautifully romantic point. And then we go out under the maple trees down the street, holding hands on our second date because you got to like me so much on the first, when we went together to the movies, that this night we maybe would even have our first kiss. And I’d give you my sorority pin to wear. And you’d give me your fraternity pin. Isn’t that what they do in high school.”

“Gee, Dru, I ain’t never been in a fraternity.”

“Oh, who cares. I’ve never been in a sorority. But we’d then be having strawberry sodas at the local candy store on Main Street. Or should that be pineapple. And you’d suck on your straw and make noise at the bottom of the glass and I’d suck on mine and wouldn’t make noise because I was a little lady well brought up and then you’d look at me, a pretty ribbon in my hair and say, ‘Sweetie pie.’ Oh God, that gets me so horny and I do have, don’t I, such simple wants. To want only you to call me that. Now I shall blow you. Know you. Taste you who tastes so good. And know you will always, when I want you to, always call me sweetie pie.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Slowly touch me softly. Touch me gently, sweetly. Touch my skin with yours.”

“Surely I will, ma’am. Sweetie pie.”

“Now sink your magnificent Irish cock into me, dear boy. And fire your big gun.”

Under the great canopy of this bed. Stare up into an infinity of darkness as one does into the infinity of the rest of one’s life. Lying embraced with these strong long slender limbs. Her lips pressed lusciously on my neck. Her teeth closed on my skin. In the amazingly exciting wonderful world of music as it has been down through the ages, sexual deviations have always been the norm, if not the rage but Dru has presented something new. Provided one hadn’t already jumped into a coffin with her, one would walk by her picket fence. Saunter up her front path. Hold hands and maybe even kiss in the movies. Scoff back my favorite pineapple soda. But I’d be the rude one making noise at the bottom of my glass. She did say once her childhood was painfully lonely. Incarcerated.Always with a governess. Her mother away traveling, so she became a sad little creature. Such a rich little girl upon whom few could look with any fond pity. Led by the hand along long corridors of big houses. Taken everywhere couched in the soft upholstery of big cars. In Paris, the chauffeur would briefly stop along the Chemin de Ceinture du Lac so that she could watch other children play in the park and sail their little sailboats and she could try to pat their little dogs. And warned not to because they might bite and have rabies. Then going back to Avenue Foch, she would count the dandruff flakes fallen on the chauffeur’s back. And now I feel the tips of the diamonds of her bracelet pressed on my back, enough gems to support me for the rest of my life. Aided and abetted by the twenty-five cents I still have left. This the sweet depth into which one sinks. Seeing her again as I first ever saw her. Smiling. Her lips just parted. That I kiss. One eye opened just that little bit more than the other. Candlelight gleam on the soft waves of her hair fallen to her shoulders. A twist of her soft, pliant body. Huskily she whispers, “I madly desire you dear boy. Can you feel my hardened nipples now against your chest.” Yes. As I commit this betrayal of a mother to her adopted daughter. And my own betrayal to a wife. This woman, who now it seems can with just a flicker of an eye, send me running out to my own death. Vulnerable to anything. Threatening my integrity. Maybe making it possible to conduct my own symphony. Have my own orchestra. Plenty of violins, oboes and percussion. Forty for a start in the brass. Fifty in the wind. Seventy-five in the strings. Five on drums. Two on xylophone, or maybe three. There are not enough xylophones these days. Two concert grand Steinways. A whole chorus of great contraltos.

“Jesus Christ, Dru, did you hear that rattle. I just thought the goddamn rattler moved.”

“An electric button in the bed we must have just touched. Just a little joke my friend has to scare the shit out of boyfriends who she feels need the stimulus.”

“Thanks a bunch for telling me after my heart failure.”

“Nothing honeybunch is failing. Nothing. Aim. Fire.”

“Dru. Holy cow. Dru.”

“Squeeze your cock tight in my cunt. So you can’t get away. My honeybun sailor boy in his turret. Boom, boom.”

An echoing hoot of a boat out passing on the river. And the lives that make not a sound in this city anymore. The world assaults you with tragedy and anguish when least you have anger to fight back. “Excuse me, sir. Do you know when the next bus is to Suffern.” Still see her stopping, turning to look her last look. One so handsomely healthy beautiful, desiring death. “Excuse me, sir. Do you know when the next bus is to Suffern.” Thought she said I’m suffering until I found Suffern on the map. Across the Hudson River. Through it the Erie Railroad runs. North to Sloatsburg and Tuxedo Park. The adagio from Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor sounds slow, like all freight trains that go by lumbering click clack on the rails of the tracks, whistles blowing in D Major.

“Oh honeybunch, Stephen, fuck me, fuck me into the beyonds of the eons.”

“Doing my best, ma’am.”

“And you are dearest, even doing better than that. As I take, if I do say myself, a singularly selfish interest in screwing.”

The rattler rattles again. Sending a shiver of the sharp fear of death up the old roosel. The black mambas coming alive in the other room. Said to be a snake that with its head held as high as a man’s face, attacks without provocation. Maybe just what this lady who lives here entertains in her imagination and enjoys for a frisson. But that other death. That destroyed face. Her eyes still open, staring as she lay on the bus station floor. Left there nameless and lost in the passing swarm. To whom does one go to get the right information from Princeton. Or to find her grave. To put a flower there. Will my music ever be heard before I die. Brahms with his second piano concerto, was hissed at by the Viennese people. Who so shabbily treated so many of the great composers who lived there struggling in their midst. Shake my fist at them. When Brahms died in Vienna, at least all the ships in the harbor of Hamburg where he was born, lowered their flags to half-mast. Oh my God, Dru. You’re surely the cat’s pajamas. I’m standing on your front porch, my hair washed and combed, my fraternity pin shined, to take you for a Saturday-night soda. I must play for you Brahms’s heroic orchestral sounds. The piano erupting forth to intercede in passages such as does a brook babbling through the silence of a forest. Then the piano notes thundering. Oh fuck me lover boy, Stephen. Kiss my tits. Kiss yours. Give me all that you’ve got. I’ll give you everything that I’ve got to give you. That Max suggested came from the profit of oil, tobacco, soapsuds, coffee, chocolate, soda pop, and renting out electricity. Do I dream her voice can be heard singing. Darling, your music is going to be heard. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’ll buy the goddamn orchestra for you. They’ll be glad to have a job. Get a whole warehouse and fill it up with instruments. And you can conduct. And the dirty bastards who have kept you down will shrink sneakily back into their feeble shells. No one is ever going to be able to ignore you again. Not in this town, they ain’t. And I know you’re wondering. Of what I said was unspeakable. It’s other’s carnal knowledge of corpses. Watch the living fuck the dead. A form of necromancy as you might say which puts one into erotic turmoil. And to hell with all the hubris, Zeitgeist and the ditsy eponymous. Sorry about those nutty words. They make as much sense as saying that it is good to be rich. And your own goddamn parents’ fault if you’re poor. But boy, if you think it over, can anything be more true than that. And that only women with money can afford not to be whores. But can be whores anyway if they want. Call me ma’am again. You gorgeous man. And let me call you angel.

Listening to her whispering voice. Calling me angel. Sweet bliss on this wistfully sad day of unfavorable omen. Like snakes that strike. Demons come from nowhere. And are by the symphonic strains of Boccherini driven away by a rhythm I do believe may be entirely too fast to fuck to. Invited to France to go top-hatted racing. Whereas I am too broke even to go to a hot dog stand for a mustard-encrusted and sauerkraut-smothered frankfurter. But without a bean I am at least crowned with the joy of this woman’s beauty and body, whose husband like ole Max is away shooting and fishing. And then she said as I listened.

“Dear boy angel, there will be one day in your life when you need not worry about the mundane anymore. Even if great wealth from commissions doesn’t devolve upon you or appointments materialize to conduct the great orchestras of the world. And, oh God, I am sated.”

In the candlelight, Stephen O’Kelly’O by the bed, bending to kiss Dru on the brow as she lies, arms outstretched, staring up into the ornate folds of the canopy. Strains of Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in G. Allegro, adagio, allegro. As one navigates around the rattler. And steps into the splendor of this bathroom. Toiletries abound. Bath salts. Emollients for the skin. Caswell-Massey sandalwood lotion. The oldest chemist’s and perfumers in America since 1752, it says on the bottle. But not a sign of any soothing balm for the brain or I’d help myself to some. Glass-enclosed shower. A sunken marble tub. A whole afternoon disappeared into evening and sudden disillusion. A plaything for someone who can afford to play. Dru said she had to rush.

“Oh darling. Would you take a rain check on dinner. I’ve got to get ready to go to Montana. I’ll telephone. Will you be there. Jonathan’s back in the morning. And Sylvia’s gone, as she usually is, God knows where.”

Dru suggesting we leave the house one at a time and send me first. Warning of newspaper columnists who hang about the Stork Club to witness café society idling away their nights and that their prying absence could never be assured. Even though she’d only once gone to the Stork Club. She links her arm in mine as we go down the stairs, kissing me on the forehead as we stand in the middle of the black-and-white-tiled vestibule.

“Lover boy angel, illicit liaisons require meticulous planning, total discretion, and unwavering nerve, cela est seloncirconstances.”

“As for me, sûrement va qui n’a rien.”

And I wanted to fuck her again where we stood. But where, backing away to the door I nearly knocked over a bust of Archimedes, whom I at least finally recognized and could remember had once run through the street naked screaming “Eureka” upon his discovery of something to do with the weights of a metal and the volume displacement of water. And plenty about precious metals was on my mind as I was abjectly broke and had no money for a taxi and would walk instead of taking the subway back downtown.

“Lover boy, still waters flow deep.”

“Well, Mrs. Wilmington when can I open the flood-gates again.”

“Now that I look, I have rather a lot of appointments to keep tomorrow. Up early, nine-thirty A.M. pedicure, ten-thirty A.M. hypnotherapy, then my swim at the Colony Club and lunch with the lady who loves her stuffed snakes. After lunch, my current psychic. Then four P.M. to five P.M. the osteopath and massage. After that, I must catch up with some business correspondence. Then I must shower and get ready for a dinner party. Then home to pack to fly to Montana first thing in the morning. But let me telephone you.”

“Ma’am, I believe my telephone has been disconnected.”

“Oh dear. Not, I hope, for nonpayment of a bill. Well I’ll send you a telegram. But you know you have given me an awful lot to think about. And while I’m gone, I’ll think.”

A squeeze together of bodies. Kiss on the lips. Tip of her tongue darting to touch mine. Opening the gleaming black door on its shiny brass hinges. Walk down the four steps outside into the night, aglow in the gonads. The mayor doesn’t live far away. Knock on his door. Inquire if he’d like to commission a special mayorial New York City anthem to be sung at all official happenings. A celebratory cantata for the rich. And a special march with plenty of syncopated drumming to be played for the poor as he goes in the parade up Fifth Avenue on St. Patrick’s Day. But on the mayor’s doorstep, I’d be arrested as a nut. Better to turn left on East End Avenue. Start my long journey along the East River as rain begins to fall. Pass the Welfare Island Ferry Slip. Walk under the roaring traffic over the Queensborough Bridge to Queens. A panhandler ahead.

“Excuse me, sir. Would you have fifteen cents to have a cup of coffee and to get to Queens. To visit my dying mother in the hospital.”

“Here you are, friend.”

“Sir, you are a real gentleman.”

“At least a coin for a beer.”

Farther on now, cut west on Fifty-seventh Street. Get a look at least at all the windows of luxury along this stretch down Fifth Avenue where Dru pops in and out, shopping in these buildings whenever she has time between appointments. And she could give fifteen cents to several million panhandlers. Be called a gentlelady. But at this moment she’s somewhere warm and fed and not on the point of starvation. Arriving wet, sneezing and coughing and cold at a dump of an apartment in Pell Street.

In desperation, I paid a late-night visit to the forbidden family saloon in Hell’s Kitchen for a free roast beef sandwich two inches thick and then traveling north to meet her in the distant northern Bronx, borrowed money from my second-favorite sister in order to buy groceries. And on a depressingly gray grim rainy Monday early afternoon, returned to Pell Street laden with lamb’s kidneys, fruit, two cans of beans, bottle of sauerkraut, an eggplant and a small can of olive oil along with a pound of cod from the Fulton Fish Market. And now after days of desperation, learned that Dru had just returned from Montana. Which news came as I was opening the door to the apartment, to hear Fauré’s Requiem. For there seated inside in the living room, attired in her most sedate of finery, a suit of black raw silk, was Sylvia. And it was as if a flash of pain shot across my chest. Seeing her there, sitting back in the broken armchair, listening, with her marvelous legs crossed, black patent-leather low-heeled shoes on her feet. A black cloak lined in purple satin folded across the piano stool. Reminding that her elegance could vie with even the most chic of women in New York. And I waited for the words. Hey, you no good dirty Irish bastard, you went and fucked my adoptive mother behind my back. But her words came matter-of-factly and nearly cheerful.

“Hi, I got the landlord to let me in. You have a new lock.”

“That’s right, someone busted in.”

“Well, you’ve often enough heard me say I want to find my real mother.”

“Yes, I have heard you say that.”

“To know what her face is like when she’s smiling and when her face is sad.”

“Yes. I’ve heard you say that.”

“Well, I found her. I have her address. And I’m really truly sorry for what I did to the piano.”

“Well, someone repaired it. Only needs more tuning now.”

“I know. And it’s all paid for. I don’t know what overcame me. But I shouldn’t have done it. And I do owe you an apology. Which goes beyond the cut piano strings. Your minuet, maybe not brilliant, but I think it’s pretty good. I took a copy of the score and was going to tear it up but instead had it played. But now I’m here to ask you to do me a large favor, which you don’t have to even consider if you don’t want to.”

“What is it.”

“I want you to come with me to see my mother. I don’t want to go alone. She lives in Syracuse. There’s a train today at two o’clock out of Penn Station.”

“How did you know I’d be here.”

“Dru seems to know where you are all the time. At least I can take my dream now, and if it gets finally ripped to shreds, bury it. As for a father, and after what has been vaguely hinted of my mother, once a beauty queen, how can I ever dream that my father was anything much.”

“What does ‘much’ mean.”

“It means more, I guess. More than my mother. And I suppose if you come right down to it and dispose of all the bullshit in most people’s minds, it mostly means money. And since I don’t have much of that at the moment, I don’t guess I’m anything much myself. I exhausted all my girlfriends’ largesse, which wasn’t much, either. And leading them on, I compromised myself with a few ex-boyfriends. But I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you with your Irish Catholic morality, that making a living is no problem for a girl with my figure and looks in this town. But I don’t want you to strain your imagination or jump to conclusions. Dru of course, is back from Montana.”

Ominous news. Thought once when she was supposed to be in Montana that I caught her face looking up at the windows from across the street. Amazing what women will do to you and then present themselves again to apologize if they want you to do something for them. As she says she’ll pay the fare, I try to think of an excuse not to go. To have to sit a few hours on the train. Could fall asleep and say things like I did about wrong information at Princeton and instead say, hey, Dru, what a fantastic delicious fuck you are. But had already vowed that after the girl in the bus station, if it were in my province to do so, I would avoid if ever I could, to disappoint anyone. Even to giving the panhandler lurking under the Queensborough Bridge nearly my last dime which I knew would disappear down his throat in beer. But found another quarter and an Indian head and buffalo nickel in the corner of my dressing table drawer. I always find myself making sure the coin says “Liberty” on it. And on a quarter dollar, that it says “E Pluribus Unum.” An eagle in flight over three stars. And added up, it was thirty cents. And fifty cents was the biggest amount I ever got as a child to go visit the Museum of the American Indian. And now, to forgive this distraught girl her trespass against me. And find her alone in her vulnerable helplessness. My prick suddenly gone rigid. My face flushed with embarrassment. To suddenly have the most appallingly overwhelming desire to fuck Sylvia on the spot.

“Okay, I will go with you.”

“You don’t mind, do you, Stephen, changing your clothes.”

“What’s wrong with my clothes.”

“Nothing, except perhaps not entirely suitable for meeting my mother, whom I’ve never met and who doesn’t even know I’m coming. Would you mind wearing a white shirt and if you have some kind of old sort of striped school tie. That is, if your school ever had one.”

“Holy Christ.”

“Well just in case we were invited to stay to dinner or something. How do I know she doesn’t have someone like Gilbert looking down his nose as he has occasionally dared to do to me wearing something he considers too casual for the room he refers to as the drawing room.”

“What about the holes in the toes of my socks.”

“Well, you’re not taking off your shoes, I hope.”

It was as if all was en fête. Two smartly dressed people getting resentful looks heading around the corner of Pell Street into Mulberry where Sylvia had one of the family’s Pierce Arrows parked, with its special arms that adjusted downwards for elbows and footrests that adjusted upwards for your feet. The Triumphington chauffeur in tow, called Jimmy, and terrified, eyeing the passing pedestrian traffic in case someone tried to open up his locked car door and jump on him. But he was as safe as any of the big Mafia dons, who weren’t that far away, also with their big black limousines parked with their chauffeurs.

“Stephen, I’m scared.”

“Sylvia, it’s all going to be all right.”

Up past Union Square, Madison Square and all the hotels, where in each I wonder who it is who lonely lurks. The Flatiron Building like the prow of a ship sailing north on Broadway. Turn west on Thirty-first Street. St. Francis of Assisi Monastery right in the middle of the block. And arriving safely. The Travelers Aid Society, whose office is in this massive station housing the Pennsylvania, the Long Island, Lehigh Valley, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroad lines.

With her cloak aflow and a slender bouquet of red roses and a white-beribboned aqua box from Tiffany’s tucked in her arm, Sylvia bought and paid for parlor-car tickets. The train moving slowly off through the darkness of the tunnel under the Hudson. Stare out into the passing bulbs of light and the snaking wires, pipes, and conduits. Sylvia pulling off her black kidskin gloves. Leafing through her pile of magazines and newspapers. Quickly reading as she turned the pages with her manicured fingernails. A faint trace of lipstick on her lips and a white silk scarf held at her throat with the long gold pin that she wore in her stock while foxhunting. Any second I thought she might turn to me and say, You’re fucking my adoptive mother. Or, That son of a bitch Max friend of yours, who married my best friend for her money and ruined her life. But she leafed again and again through the fashion magazines and even fell asleep for a while between the towns of Poughkeepsie and Albany.

Outside the station at Syracuse, I got increasingly nervous as I somehow sensed that Sylvia’s mother did not have a long driveway up to her mansion and a Gilbert administering her household. And Sylvia’s hand trembled showing the taxi driver an address on a piece of paper, as if she didn’t want to say it out loud. And I could see why by the questionable first reaction of the taxi driver and his further suspiciousness as we progressed through Main Street to what was clearly the wrong side and shabby part of town. Stopping on a potholed unpaved road of warehouses, shacks and an engineering works parallel to the railway tracks. Sylvia anxiously leaning forward in her seat, glancing at the slip of paper in her hand.

“Driver, this couldn’t be the place.”

“Ma’am, this is the road you showed me on the paper. And there’s the number forty-eight right there plain as can be seen.”

“Jesus Christ. Well then, wait.”

“You betcha, ma’am. It sure looks like rain.”

Sylvia leaving her cloak behind her, climbing out of the taxi and standing on the roadway in front of the closed garage doors of a car-repair shop. And hesitating at the foot of a flight of ramshackle stairs up the side of a dirty paint-peeling brown clapboard frame building backing onto the railroad tracks. Shades drawn on two windows on the floor above the garage door. A sign. DRINK MISSION BELL SODA. Behind the building, a great monster of puffing steam passing, pulling a freight train. The taxi driver turning to speak over his shoulder.

“That old freight could take its own good time going by on its good way to Chicago via Buffalo and Cleveland.”

The grinding squealing wheels as a pair of hoboes lope alongside the open doors of a big boxcar, hopping on board. One missing and stumbling, the other grabbing him up by the coat and hand. At least loyalty somewhere, friend to friend. Sylvia still waiting on the roadway, her bag on a strap over her shoulder, her white-beribboned aqua box from Tiffany’s couched in the crook of her arm. The wail of the train’s whistle in D Major. Then the elegance of this black figure suddenly climbing up the worn and broken wooden stairs to a landing at the top, and pausing at a rusting screen door. Move to where I can see in case some unknown hostile hand drags Sylvia in. Get out of the car and step up on the broken sidewalk. A passing vagrant stopping. Seems to be one wherever I go, always asking for the same dime. And got to give him something. Who knows, he might have been in the war.

“Hey, mister, got a dime. For a cup of coffee. Or maybe you could spare a quarter for something to eat.”

Reach into my pocket and flip what will soon be my last quarter toward this wanderer who, missing the catch, picks the coin up out of a small puddle of water. Wipes it on his sleeve, puts it in his pocket. But for the solemn sadness in the man’s face, you could envy him his freedom, with no one taking the trouble to denigrate him. Someone’s father, brother, could even have been in a gun turret on the old Missouri.

Sylvia standing still as a statue. The last cars of the train passing. The caboose with it’s rear red lights disappearing with another faraway lonesome wail of the train’s whistle. Sylvia maneuvering her Tiffany box and bouquet of red roses to peel off one of her black kidskin gloves. Pulling open the outside rusted screen door and pressing a bell. A dog barking. The faint tune of chimes ringing. The first bars of “Home on the Range.” The shadow of a figure inside the screen door as it opens, slightly ajar. Sylvia stepping back. A woman, wisps of dyed blond hair in curlers, one hand holding closed her pink dressing gown at her throat. A growling, gruff woman’s voice.

“What do you want.”

“Annie, I’m Sylvia, your daughter. And I know you are my mother.”

The sound of the waiting silence. This slattern and slovenly coarse woman in her soiled pink dressing gown suddenly lunging out the half-open rusting screen door and spitting into Sylvia’s face.

“I know who you are. Get the hell out of here, you bitch, all dressed up to the nines, and leave me alone and don’t come back.”

First drops of rain beginning to fall out of blackening skies. A tight constriction in the throat. A shudder in the breast. How could the sorrow ever be greater that you can feel for someone so distressed in a grief so deep. To offer to take their hand and lead them away from hurt. As once was offered me as a little boy when big tears welled and rolled out of my eyes and down my cheeks when someone said I was bad.

Sylvia descending the wooden steps, a purple silk handkerchief wiping the sprinkle of moisture from her face. Her bag slung askew across a shoulder, tears bulging in her reddening eyes. Her gloved hand holding the glove from the other hand and her shiny aqua box from Tiffany’s and the bouquet of red roses under her arm. On the last step, her ankle twisting as she slips. A wounded animal cry. As she turns. Raises an arm. Throwing away the red roses on top of a pile of old tires stacked underneath the stairs. And dropping the Tiffany box to the ground, kicking it away with the toe of her black patent-leather shoe to join the grimy debris of the gutter.

“My mother. Jesus, that was my mother.”

The next train back down to New York was in another hour. Sylvia, in a defiant gesture of extravagance on top of the modest fare tipped the taxi driver ten dollars.

“I sure thank you kindly, ma’am. Hope to see you again sometime.”

“You won’t. But thanks.”

In the station Sylvia sat on a bench as I walked back and forth on the platform. A guy trying to pick her up soon retreated away from her absolute silence. As she stared up at him, through him. And away from him. On the train, as I sat on the aisle Sylvia looked out the window. I tried to comfort her with a gentle pat on the arm.

“You, you’ve had a family. You know what it’s like to have a father and mother. You knew real sisters and brothers. Well I found my real mother through the Red Cross tracing service. And exactly as I used to think she was. In a shack by the railway tracks. And I won’t ever know now what her face is like when it’s smiling. Or when it’s sad. But I sure as hell know what it’s like when it’s mad.”

Sylvia putting her black-gloved hands up to her face. The towns going by. The conductor punching tickets, reciting off their names. Rome, Utica, Schenectady. This was America. A vast land of the brave and the free. Free country to be rich in. Free for a goddamn sight of a whole lot more to be poor. Free for anybody to tell you to go to hell. And sometimes, like a few of the Mafia kids I played with growing up, they were friendly till you told them to go to hell, and you always knew they’d wait patiently till it was a good time to try to kill you for it. And that’s why if you were Irish you would always try to wade in swinging and kill them first on the spot. And Sylvia was told to go to hell. And had already to stand as she did, waiting till that train went by. And then stood for just those few seconds, for someone to spit in her face. A door slamming, to leave her so utterly forlorn on the landing of her mother’s slatternly abode. A child who sought the loins she came from. To be with that flesh again. To touch it. To take her hand. Be held close. Be comforted in her skirts. And all dressed up to be desecrated. Told to go away. Never to come back. Another soul shot down in cold blood. Wrong and terrible information is being given out at Syracuse.

“Albany next. Albany next.

All get off for Albany.” The conductor singing out up and down the carriages. Till we stop and wait in the station. In the hiss and throb and steam of the trains. Then head out of this capital of New York State and towards the majestically flowing river. As the rain streaks by across the window. So much beautiful passing countryside passing. Then through the towns and the grim industrialization, the factories and the rail sidings. That road in Syracuse. Potholed. Strewn with debris. Will now have a surprise to be found in a Tiffany box. A loving cup. Maybe the taxi driver who saw it, will go back to see. And read engraved on the silver:

To my dearest mother

Annie

From her loving daughter

Sylvia

And where in the same city of Syracuse there’s a university where my closest childhood friend, who hunted and trapped and explored the lore of wildernesses and who was killed in the war, had planned to go to study forestry. He taught me Indian games of swinging down to the ground from the tops of sapling trees. He knew how to tie knots and make and follow trails through the woods. He’d give me a ten minutes head start and track me to anywhere I would try to hide. Another life ended that promised so much. To inspire another generation. And his memory kept me alive to the wonderful principles he practiced. In all matters but girls. All of whom sought his company and loved him. And not till we reached Poughkeepsie did Sylvia again speak.

“I’m so exhausted. And feel so alone. And I am so, so shamed.”

To reach now to take her hand to comfort her. Wrap my fingers around her fingers just tightening for a moment until she gently drew her hand away. Her indifference to me confirmed and supreme. And my consolation proffered rejected. But when I insisted that I go back with her to the apartment at Sutton Place, she didn’t demur. Said she wanted to collect something. Something that was all that was left of her life. She disappeared to her bedroom, while Gilbert, as if for my benefit alone, announced that Mrs. Triumphington was out. When Sylvia returned, she sat and smoked a cigarette and asked Gilbert to make her a daiquiri. And I asked for a beer. More than anything I wanted to go into the music room and strum out some Beethoven. Feel and listen to the notes tumble soft and tenderly upon each other. But sat there where we’d all sat before. Noticing now the same tulip glasses for candlesticks that were on Dru’s friend’s chimneypiece. Christ, a diamondback rattler could come squirming out right now from under this sofa. Where sits so near the body which once presented so many agonizing jealousies. She who through all those years of childhood suffered a desperate nagging mystery in her rich life. Searching everywhere for a mother to rid herself of the emptiness she felt inside her.

“Stephen. Thank you for coming with me. I suppose I’ve discarded guys like you all my life and I guess I should have discarded you a month or two sooner than a month or two later. But I didn’t. I guess only because at least you’re an artist doing something that has value. Anyway. I’m going to give you a divorce. Of practically the cheapest kind it is possible to get. And forgive me if I now drink my daiquiri in one gulp. I’m going. I presume you’re staying. You don’t have to pretend. I know all about it.”

“About what.”

“I said you don’t have to pretend. I’m going if you’re staying.”

“I’m not staying.”

“Okay then, let’s save electricity on the elevator and both go. But don’t you ever say anything to anybody ever about what happened today. And don’t watch me as if I were going to fall in front of a truck or jump out of a window.”

Back on the street, it was still raining. The doorman running out under an umbrella to get a taxi. Sylvia with a much-worn gladstone bag, put out her hand for me to shake.

“So long, Stephen.”

“Sylvia. I’d like to at least know where you’re going.”

“What the hell do you care. If someone doesn’t love you, it doesn’t matter where you’re going. But I’m going somewhere. Where to have no one who loves you, it doesn’t matter. This bag belonged to my real father and I don’t even know who he is. Good-bye. Anyway, free of me, nothing should stop you now maestro from fucking my pretend mother all you want.”

Most of all, I didn’t want her to go anywhere it could be cold and winds make her shiver. Or loneliness make her silent and more alone. Her silhouette through the rain-spattered back window of the taxi, telling the driver where to go. Wait in case she turns around to wave and I can wave back. But the cab pulling away, the shadow of her head hunched forward. The leather of the gladstone bag with the initials J.C.H.D., was creased and cracked with wear. Whoever owned it at least had some pretensions to elegance. And it is a cruel thought, but I hope that, Holy Christ Almighty, she doesn’t go off now searching for her father.

Next morning at eight o’clock in Pell Street waking to the eccentric alarm clock. Which at first seemed to be an insistent ring of the downstairs doorbell. But couldn’t be, because the buzzer in the apartment didn’t work. But it was a dream and a nightmare so real that I woke in a sweat. Having dreamt of Sylvia’s death and burial and that I had gone down to the front door where a policeman standing there asked if I were Stephen O’Kelly’O. And informing me that Sylvia fell from a Biltmore Hotel window, and her remains were removed to Bellevue Hospital morgue where if I could make a positive identification, I could collect my wife’s effects. I kept asking the policeman at the door did it really happen. And it seemed that he said all the guys from the “Men Only” bar rushed out to see her broken body on the sidewalk where she landed in front of the phony blind musician who so outraged Max. And then in the morgue I was asking was that really her body on the slab looking astonishingly beautiful and uninjured. And I found myself thinking that although she bitched at me and had her own independent agenda which meant, Go fuck yourself if you want me to do anything for you, that perhaps she wasn’t such a bad old skin.

Not much lifted in spirits, Stephen O’Kelly’O sitting this day watching out the window the traffic of Pell Street. Where the motor vehicles slowly cruise past looking for space to park. Old habitués go by with whom no word is spoken but whose faces have become familiar to know. This is now my lonely home. A percolator bubbling. A hot cup of coffee in my hand and munching on crumb cake and a Danish pastry. Wearing a dressing robe, a birthday present from Sylvia, that once jeering sneering voice which finally took on a kindly sound and now is vanished. And a day unfolds when everything looks so solemn that a deep deep gloom hovers into Pell Street. Despite all the kindnesses, forgiveness, friendship, and consideration that is felt and shown to others, still you wonder what bad things there are that the world will do to you next. There goes by down in the street a familiar Oriental gentleman of noble mien, pushing his barrow loaded with boxes and a Caucasian son of a bitch in an automobile behind him blowing his horn. The story of America told in one simple message. Get the fuck out of my way I am in a goddamn hurry. Just like the guy in the bus station who was telling everyone wrong information is being given out at Princeton.

The morning fading away. Noontime coming. The afternoon descending. Premonitions looming of never seeing Dru again. Such different worlds we live in. Yet I was in hers as close as you can get. Her words wonderfully astonishing being conferred upon me as I sank my cock into her for the third time. And she screamed like a wounded animal and the rattler rattled. And my world seemed all in radiant glory as a great cascade of chorus came from Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass as I cried out with my own scream of joy. We lay there enraptured, legs and arms enveloped, the moisture of our bodies she said had become one.

Stephen O’Kelly’O turning to look out at the sound of a beeping horn down in the street. And there suddenly below as I open the window for a breath of differently polluted air is Maximilian Avery Gifford Strutherstone III, waving his bright cap held in a hand wearing a lemon yellow driving glove. And dressed in a hacking jacket, cavalry twill riding britches, and grinning up from his open Bentley, beckoning me down. And of course leaning out I knocked a carton of milk off the windowsill and it went plop in front of the landlord, the splash turning his shoes white just as Max shouted.

“Hey pal, old buddy boy. I’m on my way to take a little canter in the park. Why don’t you come along and join me for a bit of a spin. And later take you to a meal and swim at my club.”

There was considerable gladness to see and hear this friend. The spiritually corrosive element of the city had made itself felt upon me as I attempted to go to sleep last night, when I had a ringside view of a fight erupting down in the street. A drunken man distributing ten-dollar bills and the guy slapping his hand on the back of a passing taxi to distribute his largesse. Taxi stops. Guy gets out. And to the proffered ten-dollar note, instead of taking it and saying, Thanks pal, the taxi driver punches him on the jaw, knocks him down and his head hits the curb. So much for outright giving people money. Like a good and true New Yorker, the taxi driver jumps back in his cab and drives away in a smoking blaze of tires. I was about to venture out to assist the vanquished citizen but a police patrol car happening down the street intervened and soon had an ambulance coming along. Then the junk searchers came patrolling down the street to see what they would take as they examined the best garbage in the world. Which more than half-furnished everything in this room and which was collected off the sidewalks of the surrounding streets. Now I hear Max beeping his horn again as I put on a tie and feel horny for Dru. Where is she in her daily itinerary. At the chiropodist, hairdresser, psychic, or swimming at her club. Her lithe body undulating through the water. The shiver I feel whenever I remember the rattling rattlesnake. Maybe like one used to try and kill ole Max in Texas. And even in its stuffed variety scaring the shit out of me. Dru asked if I were ever scared in the war. I said plenty and especially once or twice manning twenty-millimeter guns, firing at kamakazi that flew straight at you and kept coming through the tracer bullets while you tried, with all the aircraft crisscrossing the sky, to make sure you hit the bandits instead of the angels. My gunner’s mate third class nearby, got hit and blown to pieces and his blood and parts of him were splattered and stuck all over me. Now go down these stairs. The dust on the carpeted steps comes up as a fume to asphyxiate you. Like you’d feel loading sixteen-inch guns behind massive armor plate and being driven crazy with claustrophobia. Go out the vestibule. Past bills stuffed in the mailbox. Better there than a worry on my brain. Climb up into the old Bentley.

“Boy pal, it sure is good to see you. How are you.”

“I’m okay Max. How are you doing.”

“Well ole buddy boy pal, let’s answer that by saying we’re on our way to take in some riding. Can’t really hold your head up socially unless, when the season comes, you aren’t already socked in with a good hunt in New Jersey. Isn’t that where ole Sylvia hunted before you married. And you objected to the chasing of the fox as a cruel sport. Rumor has it that ole Sylvia has a trace of Iroquois Indian blood.”

“Well Max, there are rumors now of so many sorts that all I believe is what I see with my own eyes. The truth is she found her natural mother, and she spat in Sylvia’s face.”

“Hey, pal, old buddy boy. That’s awful. Worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

As we roared off down the street, chill air blowing upon our faces. It was astonishing how Max’s appearance could in a second or two transform one’s life from verging on an unheralded session of manic depression into at least a milder form verging on a feeble spark of hope in the distance. Even the landlord seemed impressed by Max’s car and remained noncomplaining about the milk on his shoes or two months owed rent but I suspected he preferred my not lowering the tone of the building any further if I kept my milk off the windowsill. It was as if moving in such stylish company gave the landlord the notion that affluence the like of Sylvia’s clothing and behavior and Max’s elegantly flamboyant appearance, largesse was not far away and coming up with the rent was only a matter of a short delay, with family lawyers and trustees ladling out funds from an office near Wall Street which, with Sylvia was in fact the case in receiving her monthly emolument, alas no longer being injected into her bank. And I told Max to say nothing about Sylvia’s mother.

“Well old buddy, I won’t and at least we’re taking you up to a better part of town up there around the park.”

It was in itself cheerful to find how in Max’s company one’s mood could change so fast and a sense of purpose prevail. Even though it be for a superficial pursuit. With every part of this city that you passed still reminding you of something which instantly could become inspiring for one’s aspirations. In a metropolis you didn’t always realize you lived in as if it were a dream. For unless you did, its lonely sadness could tear you apart.

“Max, my mother used to say, who before she got married worked as a ladies maid for a rich household on Fifth Avenue, that nobody who was anybody lived north of Fifty-seventh Street.”

“You don’t say. Well pal, things have sure changed. But sorry to hear that about your mother having to do something servile like that. But go back far enough I guess in social lineage in this country we all had to come from the wrong side of the tracks. And rely on the good example of others who made it over to the right side of the tracks. Where one refers to oneself as one.”

“Well my mother, as a matter of fact, didn’t come from the wrong side. She came from a green field in Ireland and didn’t refer to herself as one. But even when she had her own maid and cook in America, she nearly spent all her time in her kitchen anyway, brushing her hands on her apron.”

“Hey, that was a pretty kind of menial existence she chose, wasn’t it.”

“She was domestically dedicated, I suppose. Setting an example for my sisters, who were sometimes helping.”

“That must have been nice for your father.”

“Well my father stayed downtown a lot minding his bars but I saw him more than once in the dining room, his head in his hands, wracked with worry with his large family to feed, clothe, and educate.”

“Hey, tough. Gee, really tough. But I mean, things like bootlegging must have been profitable in the past for him to have built up a nice little equity. But I guess you had to fight against the moral indignity of it.”

There were times when I thought I should give ole Max a severe kick in the ass. There were plenty of families with far more exalted names and reputations than mine who were bootleggers. But there was no question that without ever wanting them to appear any grander than their circumstances, one always attempted to uphold the reputation of one’s family. And do as Max suggested refer to oneself as one. But now I also hoped the conversation would slow Max’s speed as we roared up Broadway toward Fifty-ninth Street. Max waving back to approving pedestrians who were shouting encouragement at the passing leviathan which was only just miraculously avoiding accidents with screeches of brakes, swerves, and quick acceleration which deaccelerated pronto as a policeman’s whistle blew and pulled us over. And Max, with his usual charm, apologized to Patrolman Richard J. Gallagher, ex-Marine Corps, who after a lecture on the exercise of good manners and civil behavior in a big city let us ex-navy types go.

“Gee pal, old bean, how do you like that. Now there’s a man who’ll advance in the force, unlike some persnickety bastards. Nice to meet a gentleman member of New York’s finest. But he couldn’t be doing serious police work if he found time to bother to blow his whistle at us.”

“Well Max, you were doing fifty miles an hour. He should have arrested you. And I’ve still got a little something to live for.”

“This old baby can do a hundred and fourteen miles an hour, pal. Here we go. Watch.”

“Max, please, Don’t. I’ve got to maybe see Sylvia’s mother tomorrow and be in one piece.”

“Hey old buddy boy, why didn’t you say so. You’re going to maybe have a séance with the richest woman in the world. Jesus Christ, that can’t be bad. I’ll slow down for that, pal. We’ll slow down to a crawl. Hey old buddy boy, don’t be coy. You haven’t have you, maybe slipped the old veal to ole Dru. I know mum’s the word. But boy, if that news don’t beat all.”

“Max, I didn’t say I had.”

“You don’t have to say anything, pal.”

In the park, Max mounted on his nag riding away under the trees. In his breeches and leathers, a pink carnation in the buttonhole of his cavalry twill hacking jacket and a white silk cravat secured with a gold pin at his throat. One had somehow to laugh that despite his old warrior-style mahogany topping to his gleaming riding boots he had got made for himself in Paris, one felt he wouldn’t be getting the kind of warm-up equestrian exercise needed for foxhunting while tiptoeing on an ancient swaybacked hack trotting around Central Park. But in the company of a couple of aristocratic Europeans disposed to horse riding, it was obvious he loved the dressing up in the kit. As I agreed to come back and meet him later, he saluted from the peak of his hunting cap, waved and grinned as he rode off and I waved back and headed towards downtown in the park to spend a peaceful time wandering the zoo.

As the light of the afternoon was fading, I was waiting back at the stables for Max’s return on his nag. He seemed in a distracted mood and one sensed his effort to project his usual bubbling geniality. After driving along Central Park South to his club, a dutiful doorman parked his Bentley leviathan and as we passed through the club doors there was a question raised as to his being properly dressed for admittance. Max showing a surprising degree of irritation at a club contingent of officialdom arriving to pronounce upon his attire as possibly contravening the house dress code.

“Look here my good fellows, this is in fact my stock I wear at my neck when pursuing the fox. It was recently being worn as a cravat while cantering in the park. But I earnestly assure you, will in fact, as you now see me retie it, become a tie to be worn when this very evening I change into the suit in my locker to dine with my good friend here. Count Alfonso Stephen O’Kelly’O.”

As other club members were now pausing in the lobby to listen to the sartorial difficulty, the spokesman for the contingent ruling on house dress rules finally agreed that Max was dignified enough to be allowed to enter in order to cross the lobby to the elevator in order to rise to change into other clothes kept in his locker. And so booted and accoutred, Max marched clicking his heels, to the elevator where the grinning white-gloved operator welcomed him aboard to ascend. Everywhere we went up and down and through the vast halls of this palace dedicated to great achievement in sport, there came a litany of greeting for Max. “Hi ya there fella, old sport. How ya doin’, pal. Play any badminton lately…. Yeah pal, had a great game.” In the baths, a marble empire of tile and dressing booths housing the swimming pool, it was an oasis from the city where we steamed, showered, and swam. Sun-lamps, hot rooms, spout rooms, and massage chamber. Stacks of sheets to wrap in, and towels to dry on.

“You see pal, ole buddy boy, this is where you can daily escape from your troubles. Find yourself an ole deck chair here. Wrap up in a few sheets and towels. Go out like a light, asleep for a while. I’ll get us a couple of cooling drinks to slake the ole thirst while we lie back and luxuriate.”

While Max went for a rubdown, I nodded off into sleep in a steamer chair to the sound of splashing water and a couple of nearby club philosophers discussing Nietzsche. When I woke, Max was standing there wrapped in a towel, staring down at me. Then his name paged, Max disappeared for a long time to the telephone as the water-polo team plunged through the waves and then did a strange waving arm dance back and forth in the pool. When Max returned, he seemed wreathed in worry and continued distracted as we descended by marble stairs to an oak-paneled room for beers and had slabs of roast beef as our evening appetizers. A mural of a fox hunt behind the bar to which Max brought notice.

“Well pal, there may not be much of that ole foxhunting anymore for yours truly. This tonight could be the last supper. Judas Iscariot is doing his worst. But come on. Let’s go get dinner. Later, I’ll take you on a tour.”

We took the elevator up to the splendor of the chandeliered dining room with its great windows looking out over the park’s trees all the way to Harlem fifty-one city blocks away. Over big rare porterhouse steaks, we quaffed Burgundy along with baked potatoes and the club’s homemade bread, apple pie and ice cream. Then Max brought me visiting the endless sporting facilities, from the basement bowling alleys to the rooftop solarium, twenty-four stories up in the sky. Together we stared out into the downtown distance at this city’s bright lights illuminating its dark shadows. Come to New York where no one knows you. The mystery within the thousands of anonymous windows. Then descending on the elevator to the hall of athletic fame. Each time the white-gloved elevator operator saluting Max.

“There you go Admiral, second floor.”

Max in his gray pinstripe Savile Row suit, silk shirt and dark blue striped tie, saluting back as we step out into this grand hall of athletic honor. Photographs of the legendary in track and field. Oarsmen, boxers, fencers, wrestlers and even badminton players. After viewing the glass cases of medals and trophies, we ascended again to have our brandy and cigars in the billiard room. And it was only when we were parting that I got the first hint of why Max was so deeply preoccupied.

“Well pal, drop you off downtown. You know, sometimes these lawyers get you down. Pal, what does an honorable man do when he is surrounded by those dishonorable. Sons of bitches close in on you with a bunch of goddamn fabrications and falsehoods, trying to traduce one’s character and slice up what’s left of one’s assets. What do you say I leave it that I give you an ole tinkle real soon.”

The tinkle from Max never came, as I could not afford to get the phone reconnected. But I learned, calling his Wall Street office that a few days later Max was arrested, arraigned and incarcerated in alimony jail. After a few hours of trying from the nearest local bar, I was finally able to talk to him on the telephone and I felt it were as if I were listening to voices singing the line “O hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea” from the navy hymn.

“Gee Max, they got you.”

“Yeah pal, but I wouldn’t quite put it like that, as if I were a fugitive or something. I come from a tough city of graft, corruption and with a fine history of bootlegging and I think I can hold my own in here with television, Ping-Pong and door instead of bars on the rooms where you sleep. Better than being in the navy, pal. Can even play handball on the roof. In fact, I’ve never met a nicer bunch of human beings in my life. And great to listen to all these guys swearing that not even over their dead bodies would they pay their wives a cent. But as reasonable as this place is where they’ve got me and these warders treat you pretty good, I do get my down moments. But I tell you this, I am goddamned if I’m going to be sentenced to a lifetime of paying alimony to two goddamn cheating women and be accused of being a fortune-hunting crook by one of them.”

“Gee Max, is there anything I can do to help. Maybe see if everything is all right in the apartment.”

“Thanks pal, but that Chinese family that does my laundry just down the street — I did them a few favors and they have the key and are taking care of it.”

There was something deep and awfully unconditional in Max’s words which were like those said to the surrendering nations in the war. Meanwhile I suggested I went to make sure the key was in good hands and that Max’s plants were watered and his collection of seashells dusted. But later that day, talking again to Max, he said Ertha’s lawyers had got repossession of the apartment. I made arrangements to visit Max in the alimony jail which he said was a four-story redbrick building at 434 West Thirty-seventh Street and stuck between a loft and garage. I also phoned Dru from a Bowery bar and in some concern that I would have the husband, instead of Gilbert, the butler answering. She seemed more than matter-of-fact and cool. Said she was concerned as to where Sylvia was and if I had seen her and I could hardly make sense of what she next said.

“Having learned some manners and honorable behavior while briefly at Miss Hewitt’s on Seventy-fifth Street as well as that Manhattan Island is built on jagged gneiss, I fear one finds one must work far too hard to avoid giving the impression of a frivolous, carefree existence. Or, in this case, of an illicit one. Sylvia knows about you and me, and I do hope you haven’t, as someone has, been indiscreet.”

“No, ma’am, to no one. Can I see you.”

“I’m afraid that I’m not so sure you can.”

Dru having mentioned honorable behavior and manners, I thought of Syracuse and my long-lost friend of childhood who said it was bad manners to go to someone’s house and stay as a guest and blow your nose in their sheets. It was also dishonorable to take away small mementos which could rank as theft. Or to put a final shine on your shoe tips with one of their towels. But Dru’s frosty voice held some other message she had decided not yet to tell me. The phone clicked off as all kinds of agonizing jealousies awakened. The memory of that room and her wonderful body. Her ass could smile at you. Her delicate touches of kisses. Her proffered warmth and affection. Even the goddamn snakes and the veiled suggestion I fuck her in a coffin. Which I earnestly assume was not meant to be closed. How many other men have been there with her brought in that black door and across that tiled floor and up that curving staircase. Taking off their clothes, pulling off their belts swatting her on the ass as she enticed with compliments their pricks into her. Rolling over on the buzzer that rattles the rattle of the rattlesnake and sends a shiver of fear through you and maybe even rattles your bones. And thousands of miles away on the coast of Africa there must have been black gentlemen fucking her on the beach. Or who knows, deep in the jungle, writhing around in the undergrowth with black mambas and crocodiles. I looked up gneiss in the dictionary and found it was metamorphic rock of coarse grain. And at least it was nice to know what held up all the skyscrapers of New York so that they wouldn’t suddenly all keel over on each other or start to lean like the leaning tower of Pisa. Hanging up the phone in this bar with sawdust on the floor and two other customers, I bought a beer. And nearly had a fight with a barfly accusing me of being unfriendly when I didn’t speak when spoken to. And in exasperation, I said, “Fella, if I were unfriendly, I would have already knocked you off that fucking stool into next week.” The bartender then got unfriendly and ran out from behind the bar. And reaching out to grab me, I grabbed him. And with my thumbs sinking into his biceps, paralyzed his arms. When he agreed that I was strong and could kill him, I let him go and walked out. Max’s company gone. Dru frosty and remote. Sylvia vanished. Step over these alcohol-sodden bodies stretched out across the sidewalk. Wondering who might have been a college president or a stockbroker. Return to Pell Street. Through these ancient pathways of this city. Past the oldest pharmacy in America, where, when I can afford to, I buy their toothpaste. Could, when my own days are numbered, be one of those downtrodden. Without a dream nor hope left. Instead of white-haired, standing on a podium into a venerable old age. Adored by the audience. Who, hushed, await my baton raised to signal the orchestra to begin. Let the music of great composers banish away the treacherous gloom. Elevate, cheer and glorify the wonder of sounds that exalt the soul.

Into this familiar doorway of Pell Street. This musty stale smell. Collect the unwelcome mail. Not a single hint of a friend on a single envelope. Push open the door into the staircase hall. A crouched form looming up. The glint of a knife blade. A black visage in the darker dark. The navy taught you to look in the nighttime a few degrees above what you were trying to see.

“You white motherfucking cocksucker, fuck my woman. I’m going to kill you.”

A shadow coming into the light. Sidestep a flick knife jabbed out at my solar plexus. Draw in the stomach. Blazing hatred in the eyes of this black face. Aspasia’s boyfriend. Last heard of as a prisoner on Rikers Island. Former dumping ground of refuse and dirt from subway excavations. Subterranean fires smoldering in the rubbish, overrun by rats. Has the city’s largest venereal disease clinic. This son of a bitch now released or escaped. Could have, before any shark got him, swum across the bay, knife between his teeth. And on the map when I was looking to see how safe I was from the marauder, if he swam north, he would have landed on a piece of shore, a peninsula of land called Casanova. Get a hold of his goddamn wrist. Twist the knife out of his hand. The fucker’s strong. But my piano-playing exercised fingers are stronger. Just like the Gothic arches of masonry of the Brooklyn Bridge which hold its great cables. As I make you, you son of a bitch, drop this goddamn knife. Kick it along the hall as I get hit on the jaw. Heave a left into this bastard’s ribs. With all the fluent force practiced in all the amateur nights in which I boxed. Send a straight right into his face for good measure. The soft warm taste of blood. My teeth cut into my jaw. Hit him again. Tough son of a bitch won’t go down. Wham, bam. Hit him again. And again. He’s down. Got me by the legs. I’m down. Son of a bitch like a snake. Around my back, trying to get an arm across my throat and hold me in a scissors with his legs. Reach my leg over his crossed ankles. Arch my back in the wrestler’s grapevine. Make his ankle ligaments stretch and snap as he screams in agony. Tear away the arm around my throat. Get loose. Elbow him in the guts for good measure. Grab the knife off the floor. He’s up. Limping and making for the door.

“You white mother fucking cocksucker. I’m going to come back and fix you.”

“I’ll kill you if you do.”

The front door slams. Time to get the hell out of here. And miles away. Before I get a bullet or blade into my guts. Mayham on every side. Escape away into all the anonymity I can muster. Feel for stab wounds and loose teeth. Choking dust in my lungs. Should go after him with the knife. Kill him now, before he comes back, along with a gang. And guns. Plead self-defense so that I don’t go to Sing Sing to the electric chair. The electrodes strapped on as you sit staring in the direction of an audience that maybe you can’t see but who goddamn well want to see you contort and fry. Smoke come up out of your head. And the smell not be as appetizing as toasted bacon. No one rich has ever gone to the electric chair. Means I’ll always be first in line to get my spinal cord melted. And hear them say, Well, bud, you’re paying the price of being poor, so we’re pulling the switch. Marvelous as Aspasia was as a fuck and singer, I can’t feel, without further sampling and verification, that she’s worth dying for, except that there’s no question this guy thinks she is. The sooner I get to somewhere like Montana with only grizzly bears, wildcats, rattlesnakes and mountain lions to worry about, the better.

Stephen O’Kelly’O slowly climbing back to the apartment. Up the stairs creaking one by one. Pain in odd places. The door splintered and jammed. The bastard must have tried to break in. Push it open with a shoulder. Close, lock, and latch it. After the battle. Sit down and rest. All the symphonies that I might now never write. Instead of soaring passages of musical triumph, nothing now but risks of death and awful despair. Just as I was once, unwanted, turned away from joining the school choir. Because of a lack of serious intent. Which wasn’t true. Sat on the steps outside the door where they practiced and rehearsed. Tears falling on the back of my hands as I listened to their voices. The same hands now with a knife cut on the side of my thumb. Blood spattered. As this city now begins to haunt. With Max arrested. Sylvia gone. And she said once when leaving, “One of these times we say good-bye will be the last time we say good-bye. Good-bye.”

And I felt a gloomy shudder the way she said her last good-bye. Her presence now could at least give me something to be irritated by. Watch her pull on her stockings on her long beautiful dancer’s legs. The muscles that could faintly be seen across her stomach. Her shiny clean hair like the hair of the girl in the bus station. This city without warning. Even with all its red lights, sirens, and signs. Catastrophe comes from anywhere in the flash of a second. Take a walk. Thousands pass you by. Alone with yourself. A world that wants you to show your teeth shining out of your glad face.

Two days staying in the apartment. I lay down to sleep with a tiredness so overwhelming. Between moments of tinkling the keys of the piano, staring out into the Oriental street and reminding myself to call Max but waiting to be cheerful before I did, I washed and cleaned the knife, practised pushing the button that flashes out the five-inch-long blade. Kept it handy through the nights and then tried throwing it, sticking it into the back of the bedroom closet door. Feeling lonely for company but remembering that coming back with Sylvia on the train to the city and passing by so many places that you don’t want to be, you realize that nobody in New York has anything to say to each other after all their current jokes are told. And when I did go out on the street to buy something for breakfast, my familiar Chinaman said to me, it is a nice day overhead. And in a desperate lonely disillusion and with the swiftly dwindling money my sister gave me in my pocket, I went back to the Biltmore “Men Only” bar. Same man outside playing his music, pretending he’s blind. Missed three notes from Prokofiev’s Overture Russe, opus seventy-two. Anyway, not one of Prokofiev’s greatest works, but an insult to a composer nevertheless. Inside, a new waiter called Angelo. Had cheese and crackers and a beer. Illuminated by lamps, stared at the painting of the nude reclining girls against their green background. Then, working up the nerve at the telephone in the bar, put my nickel in to dial that Butterfield 8 number, and spoke to her. But before I could utter an endearment, a shock of a frosty voice came crashing into my ear.

“Do you mind if we have for a moment a serious discussion.”

“No ma’am, fire ahead.”

“When I was a little girl someone said to me, you can afford, can’t you, to be of a high moral character. And those others whom you may find throughout your life who are not of high moral character, you may avoid and dispose of.”

“Ma’am forgive me, but I don’t believe I know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about having my privacy invaded. It’s being deemed entertaining to others to describe me as ‘the richest woman in America.’”

“Ma’am, I’ve never said a thing to anybody about your money or about you ever having any.”

“Well, you have a friend who did. And said such a thing to my bankers.”

“Ma’am, maybe it was your bankers who said such a thing. And if my friend did, he meant no harm in such a coloration.”

“Meaning no harm does not stop the unwelcome attentions of all the lowlife in America.”

“Well ma’am, there’s no need to worry that it will be repeated, for he’s in prison.”

“What.”

“Sony, I meant to say he’s gone west to Chicago.”

The phone line went dead. Cut off at a point when you try to say a word and another word jumps in too soon. Dru will be thinking my friend Max will be consulting with his coconspirators behind bars and is already plotting to embezzle or kidnap her. All I needed now was just one more blow. And I got it. Of rejection. As I then in desperation immediately telephoned back to Sutton Place and Gilbert answered the phone.

“May I please speak to Mrs. Triumphington.”

“Who’s calling, please.”

“Alfonso Stephen O’Kelly’O.”

“I’m afraid Mrs. Triumphington is not available.”

“I’ve just been talking to her.”

“I’m afraid madam has just left for Montana.”

After some prompting and knowing I already had it, Gilbert gave me the number out in Montana. Where if it were to be believed she had gone, I would ring her. But maybe she had really departed there. But with some other guy. Fucking someone else. She did say once, although I pretended not to be one of them, that she liked to have guys available on tap for fucking and just gobble them up. Listen a little to their bullshit and take them on and take them off one after the other. Now on top of it all, a dreadful premonition suddenly seizing me over Max’s arrest and incarceration in alimony jail. And I immediately rang to plan to visit him. A voice coming on the phone saying they had terrible information that he had hung himself and his remains were being shipped by train back to Chicago. My fists clenched in a sudden raging anger at the female species. And remembering what Max had said as we lay back on our couches in the hot room of his club.

“How modern can life get, pal. Here we try to keep it a little old-fashioned. Except to come dine and have a cocktail, that’s the real wonderful thing about this club, no women. And one should have only conducted one’s associations with them on wise Muslim principles. Purdah and all that. Because boy, they have recently sure done me down.”

As I felt this numbing news from the “alimony club,” as Max now called it, spread to all parts of my body, I had nearly dropped the phone. But the report of hanging was immediately followed by laughter and Max’s voice.

“Old pal, I’ve executed a power of attorney, and deed of sale for a dollar, and all the other things you can do with a flourish of the pen. Go get my ole Bentley quick, soon as you can, out of the garage. I’ve given them your name and they’ve got the key. Be a sport and park at fifteen o’clock as near as you can get to Freeman Square. If I don’t show up by quarter past fifteen o’clock, you beat it with the Bentley. It’s yours, pal, ole buddy. I glow with joy when I think of what I’m going to do. Pure joy. Anyway, no matter what happens, wait for me to be in touch again. This is your lifelong friend, best man at your wedding, signing off.”

I couldn’t figure out what Max was up to, but I wanted to do him any kindness or favor he might ask. And one thing was for sure. Ole Max aboard ship in the navy was one of the greatest fixers and connivers of all time. I found I was already fully insured and got the Bentley, but trying to figure out how to drive it out of the garage, I almost crashed a couple of times. And when I finally did figure out how to drive it, I found it a nightmare trying to park it. Waited half an hour near where the traffic passed to enter the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson and Max did not show up. Then after a search, I found a friendly garage a couple of blocks away to park the leviathan. The enthusiastic owner of the garage rubbed a spot of soot off a fender.

“Hey, we could charge admission to come look at this car.”

Two days later, a telegram was waiting for me back at Pell Street, stating that further news of Max could be had from a funeral home. I chuckled at Max’s magnificent ability to create such an elaborate hoax and fakery. I phoned the funeral directors and then was asked to identify myself. And a chill began to creep through me at the sound of this matter-of-fact but solemn voice announcing that Max’s body was being shipped that night and put onto the train at Penn Station at about 9:30, and the train leaving at ten minutes past ten, destination Chicago, from platform eleven. I waited as the voice finished to repeat who I was and waited again to hear some denouement of the charade. But when I phoned the alimony jail to talk to Max, I was told no information was available from the Civil Jail of the City of New York except to his next of kin upon identification. There was one thing now that was seeming more and more certain. That this was no fakery. No hoax. Max was dead.

I changed my clothes, got out the ole Bentley, and traveled up to Riverdale. I couldn’t believe what I was doing, but it seemed the most important thing I would ever do in my life. As the throbbing leviathan pulled into the drive of this my childhood home, the curtains at the side of the house opened and there were smiles on everyone’s faces as I parked and my old dog, who sang out of tune to my piano playing, tail wagging, barked and friendly snapped at the tires. There was one thing for certain that I was finding out fast. It was not who you were in America, but what car you were seen driving in. Even dogs noticed. And mine was adding to his appreciation by lifting a leg and peeing on a wheel. The general admiration for the Bentley at least stifled my gloom and sadness while I feigned to be matter-of-fact and drove my favorite sister around a few local potholed streets, beeping the horn a couple of times passing in front of those houses where I knew the inhabitants flew the American flag and had hated me while growing up.

“Gee, Stephen, what a nice car. Is it really yours.”

Explaining my complications as best I could and after taking tea with my mother and sisters, I borrowed some more money and then went up into the attic to get my old navy sailor hat out of a musty steamer trunk. Back downtown I tipped the concierge at the Plaza the way Max did and splurged on a bottle of Krug. Recalling all the better and funnier times we had in the navy. Half-crocked, I parked the precious Bentley back in the garage and then took my time sobering up to walk to Penn Station. Nearly financially broke again after my bottle of Krug at the Plaza, which in my solemnity became easier and easier to drink as I drank it all.

Arriving into this massive cathedral of space, where I had so often come and gone on the train, ditty bag slung over my shoulder and on my way back to Norfolk, Virginia where my ship was moored at the Naval Operating Base. And it became the first time I knew who would win the war. Walking along the docks past the brooding, massive, looming prows of these vessels. One after another. Cruisers, battleships, destroyers, aircraft carriers, as far as the eye could see. And once with Max, as we walked under all the assembled bows to our own gangway, returning from liberty, I heard him chuckle and announce, “Pal, it’s America the almighty and boy, don’t get in her way.”

I got permission to go down on the train station platform. Steel pillars holding up the weight of other steel pillars. The clatter and din. The dimly lit cars. Early passengers arriving to take their seats for the long trip west halfway across America. A girl waiting, standing alone like a statue in the shadows. Her hair blond. And her face, as she turns now hidden by the brim of her cloche hat. Caught sight of her flickering glance. Must be waiting for someone. As I wait. Expecting Max’s arrival. Which still has me half-thinking that it will be on a horse clattering down the platform, his shotguns blazing away. Till suddenly a van comes pulling up to the platform and opens up its black doors alongside the train. Two railroad porters and two men from the van maneuvering out a box. I stood aside as they approached, then as the box passed, placed my old sailor hat on top and saw the name and address of a Chicago funeral firm. And now I had to believe he was within. Saluting as the container was gently pushed onto and parked amidst other goods and baggage on the train.

“Go well now, old salt and good friend.”

I still thought I would see breathing holes and hear laughter. But all was silent within that box. To be taken west. Out to where Max always maintained the real American gentlemen still existed. The word gentleman such an important word in his life. Could see him hesitating to brush back the lock of sandy hair that fell over his left eye in case it presented him as ungentlemanly. But also the slightly mischievous smile on his face he nearly always wore while rifling through his papers. Super efficient yeoman. He could put some son of a bitch’s name on a draft for permanent kitchen duty or a friend to be flown home on compassionate leave to see his recently unfaithful girlfriend. So many plans he made for his own life. Equestrian pursuits. His shoes, ties, and guns. So alive and living only a day or two ago. It is not possible to believe he is here in death. Planned in just the same way he organized and prearranged his existence. Now ten past twenty-two hundred hours. Porter announcing, “All aboard.” The sliding door of the baggage car closing. Train beginning to move. At first adagio. And gathering speed. Presto. Click clack on these steel wheels on the steel tracks. Good-bye old pal, buddy. Old salt. Bon voyage, anchors aweigh. Go home now. Back to the Loop and the Windy City. That great old town on the lake. Which you used to tell me was the most wonderful on earth. And to which one day you said you would return. Where they would build a building that would be the tallest building in the world, at least for a while.

As it pulled away down the platform into the darkness, the sound growing fainter. The train lights disappearing. To go out under the Hudson deeps, that river that was always flowing not that far away from Riverdale in my years growing up. Where we were children running through the streets, away from other kids trying to give us a charley horse. A bang of a fist on a shoulder or thigh that could leave you laughing as well as temporarily paralyzed. And playing games of squeezing breath out of our lungs so that we would slump into unconsciousness and look dead on other people’s lawns. And now I still expected ole Max to come up behind me out of the dark and put a hand on my shoulder. Well pal, ole buddy, I’m out of the alimony jail. Now here’s my plan. There’s the Riviera, Biarritz, London and Paris to go to in the tradition of the great previous Americans who sought an ancient culture to thrive in. And when life is lived to the full over there, shooting, hunting and fishing, resplendent in the sartorial dignity of sporting Europe, just hope old bean, they won’t forget to put a sailor hat on my coffin when my time really comes. And they inter me in one of those artistically embellished sepulchres they’ve got in the old Cimetière Père Lachaise. But so long for now, good pal and friend.

Looking down into the empty track where another train will soon come to take others away. I knew now that this night would for the rest of my life always possess a simple silence, just as it did when growing up when the midnight approached listening to the music of the great composers on the radio as I did alone in my back room in the house in Riverdale. The leaves of the big cherry tree sometimes rustling against the windowpanes as the gusts of wind of a storm approached. And I would, warm and secure between my walls, wait for the announcer to speak as a preamble a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And for him to say, “This is your station, WQXR, ending our broadcasting for the night. And the cares that infest day shall fold their tents like the Arabs and silently steal away.” Just as you go Max, old pal, buddy and friend. Flesh cold upon your bones. Who came out east from the west. Now goes west again back home. Trundling past all the one-horse towns. Crossing the plains covered by those cornfields to the horizon. Where there’s a sound I can forever hear. Of the distant whistle wail of a train across the night. Turning the woes of life into a haunting memory. By which to rest in peace.

“Excuse me. But you’re Max’s friend, aren’t you.”

On the back of his hand, Stephen O’Kelly’O wiping a tear from an eye and turning to this voice behind him. The blond-haired girl in the cloche hat who was standing like a statue. A sallow-faced, beauteous girl. A flash of memory of another voice. Which said, “Excuse me sir.”

“I’m Amy from Knoxville. You don’t know me but I know all about you. You’re Stephen. You were Max’s friend in the navy. I’d been speaking to Max every day in jail. Like you, I came to see him off on the train. I just didn’t feel he should be alone. And you must have felt about him as I did to have put that sailor hat on his coffin.”

Out of courtesy in this dismal dark darkness, I stepped down a step from the siding and she came closer into the light. And that perhaps I was not expected to speak but to wait until spoken to. I could see from her reddened eyes that she’d been weeping. We shook hands. And together climbed back up the stairs into the vast ticket hall and past the giant stone pillars holding up its ceiling which seemed like a massive brooding sky. The few travelers all looked smaller and lonelier. We walked up the wide stone steps which led out onto Seventh Avenue. Back in the busy world of the city again. Just across and up the street we went into the Hotel Pennsylvania where she was staying. The lights of the lobby too bright, we went into the darker bar. She insisted the drinks we had be put on her bill. Cocktail music from the piano. This wan blond-haired, blue-eyed girl whose skin seemed peach-soft like a child’s and whose thin wrists might be too weak to carry her hands. She seemed as if she might freeze or the wind might blow her away. Over her months in New York, she kept in touch with Max. And when we said good-bye, shaking hands, her hand was firm on mine and for a moment I thought she might not let go unless I did.

“Max so many times said that his life was going to be lived the way he would live it or he didn’t want to live. When he spoke of you, he always seemed so proud of knowing you and that you composed music.”

I had only soda water with a slice of lemon in the bar of the Hotel Pennsylvania. And apologized to Amy that I could not bring her to Max’s favorite place in New York, the “Men Only” bar of the Biltmore. She smiled and said she didn’t mind but that she’d be glad to take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry with me instead. I thought of her as I walked back to Pell Street where I had changed the lock and battered a new chain across the apartment door. Next day between efforts to compose, I lay somnambulant. Scavenging for bits of food. Sitting staring at my knees, thinking of the girl from Knoxville. Her kindly strange and so pale blue eyes. I needed courage to be in touch with her. With not even a telephone now to get another voice to come near to your ear and be a sympathetic friend as you sit in your dilemma. Knowing that even the smallest, mildest words voiced of affection, even as distant away as they might have to come, could be a life-saver. To stop you throwing in the towel. As Max must have done in his final moment of waning defiance. The more you have left of life to live, the more hopeless the vastness of survival ahead becomes. Three square meals a day served on round plates. For which everyone but Dru is looking. When all she needs is exotic oil massages and to be wrapped in seaweed. And then have her privacy to look for pricks. Be in the barrel with her screwing. We could have then been dead together, plunging over Niagara Falls after our last orgasm. Go to heaven together, morals all aglow, with her money and my music.

Resurrecting myself from dejection in the late afternoon I took the radio with me under an arm and unstrapping my watch from my wrist, pawned them both on Ninth Avenue. Collected a total of nine dollars and fifty cents. The watch alone cost sixty-one dollars, bought at a reduction in a naval commissary store. I walked off some of the misery and gloom going uptown and crosstown to the Biltmore. The blind musician who could see was not to be seen. Had a beer in the “Men Only” bar. Angelo the bartender said hello. Every tiny word of greeting comfort is hard earned in this city. Especially when it prevails against the cruel indifference of the infidel hordes. Then went to Grand Central, stood on the balcony looking out over this vast temple of travel. Where I try to distract my mind. And can’t. Away from pain. From all that would be death. And listen to life, the sound of voices as a pair of guys go by.

“So Christ, there she is. After all the goddamn hoopla, I finally meet her. Has a face looks like it came out of a truck transmission shop. Only she thinks she’s God’s gift to mankind.”

With just enough money again jingling in my pocket, I telephoned Amy at the Pennsylvania Hotel but she was out. Left a message that I would telephone again. Walking down the slipway to the lower level, I stared into the Oyster Bar. Customers hunched over their martinis and shellfish, scoffing away. And here I am hungry but frightened to go in and spend any money. When the woman whose flesh I last touched could buy the whole world. Or at least a few dozen oyster bars. If only I could hear her sweet voice again. Instead of cold vowels. Her face, that of a goddess. Instead of coming out of a truck transmission shop, could only have come out of the most wonderful heavenly dream. But who in our brief romance had abruptly taken out and put on a pair of glasses I’d never seen her wear before. Changing her face and demeanor like a nightmare into the face and countenance of a schoolmarm staring at me. As if I’d committed every classroom misdemeanor in history. Her voice penetrating my ear as hard as her diamonds around her wrists and neck.

“Although if I ever care to, I’ll throw away all the money I want to throw away. But while I have what I have, I want to be charged the same price that everyone else is charged for the same thing.”

I thought, Holy cow honey, hell I’m not selling you anything you’re paying for. Or charging you. Therefore and wherefore please don’t look at me like that through those eyeglasses with those suddenly gimlet eyes. And I remembered leaving the restaurant where we had first dined and she had no money with her and wanted to tip a waiter and hatcheck girl and asked me if I had some change. And my wallet produced, her two fingers came like a flashing white shark in between the black leather folds and expertly tweezed out a searing sheaf of my last dollar bills. Made worse by the wallet being a present from my parents on graduation from prep school, which only my favorite sister attended and could conspicuously be heard clapping for me. Although I can’t afford to throw away an old shoelace I feel the same way you do, Dru, about price. Only worse. The vanishing little sheaf of dollars leaving a vast meteorite hole in my spirit as big as the hole rumored to have wiped out the dinosaurs. Right now I worry about what I might be charged in the garage for Max’s Bentley. The leviathan sitting there alone, waiting for him alive or his ghost. Its great engine ready to throbbingly burst into life. The brake unleashed and the accelerator slammed down. Would go again like a bat out of purgatory out into the city of New York, endangering lives on the streets. Or even in here in the middle vastness of this great room. Stars painted on the ceiling. Twinkling above. Which as I look up still make me wonder if Max was really in that box. Even attending as I had upon the incontrovertible fact. As was his secret girlfriend from Knoxville. But also remembering words he said of the law that I wondered if he could get around. And he said no. “Because, pal, it states that in all cases a decree awarding alimony is issued to the husband personally and failure constitutes contempt of court.” And here I am, possessed of his beloved Bentley. Even his driving gloves so neatly folded in the dashboard compartment. Yet hoping to be able to say, as I was saying it, that Max is still alive. I know where he is. On the high seas. Pulled out of Pier 52 on the Hudson. Dressing for dinner aboard a transatlantic liner. Going to hole up in a London hostelry while he’s fitted for suits and shotguns and getting his horse fit to hunt with the Quorn. And ole Max if he did throw a seven, at least did leave a legacy of laughter, which I found myself even enjoying in the bad doom hours of dawn. When the soul is reeling on the ropes. And I could recall his description of the day catching his wife in flagrante delicto and prodding his naked victim down that Houston suburban street where it went past one of the closer houses to the road in which lived a gentleman who sat almost all day drinking beer in the middle of a front room and endlessly reading detective stories out of magazines he kept piled up by his chair while his ex-beauty queen wife shopped for baubles and had facials on the proceeds her husband enjoyed from one of the biggest oil finds in Oklahoma. And as the man heard the singing approaching and the words “The eyes of Texas are upon you. All the live long day,” he thought he was somehow being serenaded and that it was his moment in the limelight as a Texas patriot and a devout believer in the biggest and the best. Whereupon he got up from his chair to go to his window and as the procession of the naked man at the business end of a shotgun came into sight and began to pass by his front lawn, he began to laugh until convulsed in mirth, grasping his stomach with both hands and teetering backwards he fell over a cocktail table, cracking his pelvis in a couple of places. Even on the ambulance stretcher as they took him to the hospital he still could not stop laughing. It turned out he knew all about the affair Max’s wife was having and had as a result, long ago assigned a detective to follow his own wife while he went on, otherwise undisturbed, reading his detective stories. But now I don’t even know why I’m here in Grand Central Station halfway across this vast floor, amid all the traffic of rush-hour people hurrying in all their directions. All seeming to head toward the information booth center floor, with its clock on top, asking about trains to anywhere or somewhere. And suddenly stop in my tracks. Standing rigid. As if an arrow had just plunged between my shoulder blades and deeply into my back. A strange foreboding enveloping. Something dreadful has happened. Making me immediately go into the subway and back to Pell Street. And I found the arrow. Stuck in my mailbox. A telegram. Addressed to Alfonso Stephen O’Kelly’O.