L a 46, p.4
L.A. 46, page 4
There were weeks when for days at a time she hardly thought of the children or the grandchildren. The half-smile faded from her lips. But being called bubbee could wait. These next few years belonged to Ernie.
She looked up at the second floor balcony where he was playing gin with Captain Johnson. Ernie thought she didn’t know, but she did. Her sister Bessie’s boy, Milton, had told her.
“Uncle Ernie made me promise not to tell you,” he’d confided as he showed her the X rays and the laboratory reports, “but as long as you’re moving so far away from the family, I think you should know. Two years, three years at the most.”
Marta studied her husband’s face. So Ernie didn’t want her to know, she didn’t know. Maybe he wasn’t the best man in the world. Maybe he’d made mistakes. But when you were born with two strikes on you before the doctor even spatted your tokus, you did the best you could. And Ernie had always been a good husband to her.
The half-smile returned to her lips. Like when she’d found out she was carrying Phillip. That had been twenty-six years ago, back in the depths of a depression the young people didn’t even remember, and Ernie had been hard put to hustle enough to pay the rent on a cold-water walk-up and feed them. She’d been almost afraid to tell him. Not that she’d needed to worry. When she had, Ernie had grinned his slow grin and offered to make book that their first child would be a boy. Then, instead of saving it toward the rent, he’d spent his last twenty dollars on a gardenia corsage and a dinner at Luchow’s, with wine, and a taxicab both ways.
Mrs. Katz crossed the lanai to the self-service elevator and rode up to the second floor. “So who is winning?”
Her husband answered her question by picking up the card Captain Johnson discarded, then laying down his hand. “Gin and game.”
Marta smiled and walked on to their apartment “Tell me, Ernie?” Captain Johnson asked.
“Tell you what?”
“How do you do it?”
“I cheat.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d believe you. But you know something?”
“What?”
“If I had it to do over, I would.”
“You’d what?”
“I’d cheat.”
“Not with me watching you.”
“I don’t mean with the cards. I mean I’d go on the take.” The retired captain of police continued. “All right. So I draw a fair pension, plus a small annuity and the little I was able to put by. Grace and I can live well. We can even afford to live in a joint like this. But when I think of what some of the boys I used to work with got away with—Jesus!”
“They took plenty, huh?”
“Everything that wasn’t nailed down. Believe me. If I had it to do over again, I’d steal the steeples off the churches.”
Katz shuffled and dealt the cards. “Maybe. Maybe not. A man is what he is.” He approved of the hand he’d dealt himself. “On the other hand, who knows? With times the way they are, you’d probably get away with it. Who’d miss the steeples off the churches? Who looks any higher than a pair of pretty boobies?”
Watching from the comer of his eyes, Katz saw Romero climb out of the pool and walk toward the front stairs, and excused himself.
“I’ll be back.”
He walked down the balcony to the stairs and down them and intercepted the fighter on the landing.
“Just a minute, fellow.”
“What’s with you?” Romero asked.
Katz told him. In so many words. “I saw what you did to Marta in the pool. And from now on, leave Mrs. Katz alone or I’ll beat your goddamn brains in. And if I can’t do it with my fists, I’ll use a baseball bat.”
“Hah,” the fighter scoffed. “You and who else?”
“Just me,” Katz said quietly.
Romero started a flip reply and thought better of it and continued on up the stairs. Katz stood a moment looking after him. Then, deciding he’d had enough cards for the day, he walked down to the lanai and through the stone arch and stood in front of the building, looking out at the city.
Marta was crazy about L.A. He wasn’t so certain he was. But what Marta liked was all right with him. Katz was amused at himself. Age and the malignancy eating at his guts had mellowed Ernie Katz. There was a time when he wouldn’t have bothered to warn Romero. He’d have used whatever was handy, or a forty-five.
Nor was it only Romero. Nowadays when he spoke of his boyhood and young manhood to others, or had enough to drink to be nostalgic, he almost always forgot the bad times and spoke glowingly of playing stick ball in the streets or swimming, urchin-naked (who had a bathing suit in those days?) in the East or the West River.
He talked about the annual excursion up the Hudson to Bear Mountain, or of sitting on a curb under a streetlamp on a hot summer night, swapping yarns with Martinski and Tony Burnelli and Tim Kelly and Bob Schultz and Jack Ardell and Marty Page.
Or, later, when they’d grown older, of going out to Coney with Marta and drinking beer and waltzing all night at Feldman’s, or just standing on a comer watching the girls go by thirty years before someone had been smart enough to write a song about it.
It had been a quieter, simpler era. Before Americans had learned they were ugly. Before foreign aid and excessive federal and state income taxes. Before space and moon shots. Before Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung and Castro. When sex was just something you did with a girl you liked. When a man had been able to take his girl to the Palace, then blow her to a seven-course dinner at one of the little Hungarian restaurants along 45th Street and still have change from a ten-dollar bill.
Katz found his cigarettes and lighted one. Part of his memories were fact, part fiction. When he was alone and honest with himself, he had to admit both his boyhood and young manhood had been rather grim. As far as his memory went back, at least to the night his father had died when he was nine and had become the head of the family, he’d always had to dodge and turn and scheme, to take calculated risks—to make a buck.
At the time, he’d hated his father, hated him because they were poor. They’d been too poor to even be orthodox and his mother had been a practical woman. He could still remember the time his brother Benny had hooked a standing six-rib roast from old man Swartz’s market. His father hadn’t wanted to eat it because it wasn’t kosher. But his mother’s reasoning had been simple. So the steer hadn’t been killed the way it should have been. A six-rib roast was food on the table. Kosher meant clean. All right. Put the roast under the tap and wash it. Growing boys had to eat.
The only good thing about those days had been that everyone on the street, Jew and Italian and Irish, had been equally poor. And whether they’d put on a prayer shawl and a yarmolke or knelt in front of an altar and crossed themselves when they’d prayed to a God who’d forgotten them all, everyone had shared. Prejudice was for the rich. The poor had to like each other.
Take when his father had died. As usual, they hadn’t had any money and in the end it had been the neighbors who had chipped in for the cheap burial plot and the even cheaper pine box that had rested on the two sawhorses in the living room. And it had been Mr. Burnelli and Mr. Kelly, paying tribute to their friend, who had sat through the long last night with Jacob Katz, a Wop and a Mick, two good Catholics, spending his last night on earth with a Jew.
As he stood looking out at the city, Katz thought of something he hadn’t thought of for years, the bottle of sacramental wine. His father had bought it when Ernie was born, to be put away and consecrated to the day when he became bar mitzvah. Through years of moving from one cold-water flat to another, his father had guarded the bottle religiously. While he and his brothers and sisters and ids mother had moved their other meager possessions, his father had carried the bottle of wine securely wrapped in a piece of green felt torn from a discarded pool table. The bottle had become a fetish, a symbol. By the time Jacob Katz’s son became a man everything would be different. They would sip the wine in their own home from crystal glasses.
Then, the night before they buried his father, when he’d been forced to become a man four years short of the prescribed time, knowing that the Irish drank when a friend had died and so did Italians, with his mother’s permission he’d gotten the bottle from its resting place, but when he’d unwrapped it the cork had crumpled away and the bottle had been as empty of wine as the man who bought it was drained of life.
That he should have failed in his first act as a man had grieved him almost as badly as his father’s death. Katz dropped his cigarette on the walk and ground it out with the toe of one of his forty-dollar shoes. But his mother, Yahweh rest her and give her peace and let her spirit walk with Esther’s, had understood. She’d taken the few coins she had, the silver with which she’d meant to buy a small spray of flowers for the man she’d lost, and sent Ernie down to the comer to buy a pint of cheap whiskey and a bucket of beer, and Mr. Burnelli and Mr. Kelly had been able to drink to their friend after all.
Katz preferred not to think of the next ten or fifteen years. He’d had to do things he hadn’t wanted to do. He’d done things he shouldn’t have done. But one way and another in the end they’d all survived. Not that he’d ever become big time, at least big enough for the syndicate to muscle in on him. But he’d never welched on a bet or run out on a friend, and when word got around that Ernie Katz ran a square book, he’d done all right. Whoever heard of a bookie standing in a breadline? He would leave Marta moderately well fixed. He looked out over the city again. Still, there was so much he was going to miss.
The fragrance of burning tobacco . . . the pleasant tingle of good whiskey . . . the whoosh of traffic . . . the grass on the far side of the fence . . . the boot of a long shot coming in with all of the sucker dough on the favorite. . . getting to know his children’s children . . . breathing in and breathing out . . . living.
Katz tried to be practical about it. He didn’t want to die. He’d never known any man who did. The doctors out here told him he might postpone the inevitable by an operation, or series of operations. But all they would say was “might.” Against that, they admitted it was possible he’d die on the table. And all that would mean was more pain and less money for Marta. So he’d come to the short end of a bet. It had to happen sooner or later. There had been times, a lot of times, when he would have given odds he’d never get this far.
He turned to reenter the building and had to stop short from bumping into the teen-ager who lived with her sister and brother-in-law in Apartment 34.
The girl’s red hair was piled high on her head in one of the new hairdos that looked like a cross between a bird’s nest and a dust mop. She was wearing too much makeup. Her dress was too old for her. It was also too tight and too short and cut too low. To his knowledge, instead of going to school she’d hung around the building for a week, returning every morning after she was certain her sister and her sister’s husband had left for work.
If she was his Shirley, and Shirley was sixteen again, Katz knew what he’d do. “Sorry,” he apologized.
Ruby fluttered her eyes at him. “It was my fault.” The words came in a breathless, affected gush. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.” She smiled her vacuous smile again, then minced on down the walk and down the hill.
Katz watched her through the haze of heat. Halfway down the hill she stopped beside a waiting white sports car and a youth wearing a Marine uniform got out and opened the door for her and they kissed and strained together before she got into the car. Katz shook his head as he continued on through the arch of the Casa del Sol. Ruby seemed an intelligent child. She was quite attractive. But what she needed right now was a little guidance, a lot of guidance, at least a lot more than her sister and her brother-in-law were giving her. What she needed was a firm hand vigorously applied to the rounded curves of her pretty behind.
5
The more she thought about it, the more hurt Grace Arness was. The least Patty could do was pretend she was jealous. But did she? No. She’d let her yak away to Bill and Charlie for two hours without even poking her head out of the apartment.
The model looked from the pilots sleeping on the chaise longues to the closed door and Venetian blinds of her second floor apartment. And it was her apartment. She paid the rent. She bought the groceries. The car was in her name. She’d even paid for the negligee in which Patty was probably sulking.
She realized that Mr. Melkha was looking at her over the rim of his inevitable highball glass. She glowered at him. Of all the tenants in the building, she liked Mr. Melkha least. Just because he’d been in the production end of motion pictures for years, he thought he knew everything. He thought he could sit in judgment on the mores and foibles of his lesser fellow mortals. And her personal life was none of his goddamn business. It was no one’s business but hers.
In an attempt to regain her self-control, she slipped into the pool and swam the length of it. It didn’t help. After the sun had beat down on the pool all day, it was like swimming in a lukewarm bath. What she wanted, what she needed, was a tall, cold drink.
There was a half case of Dubonnet in her car. She hadn’t been able to carry it and the groceries up to the apartment when they’d shopped. And because of their quarrel in the supermarket, Patty had refused to help. Grace firmed her lips. All because she had mentioned, casually, she didn’t think it had been very nice of Patty to spend so much time with the buyer from Nieman Marcus at the party the night before. She could remember every word of their quarrel. All she had said was: “I don’t think it was very nice of you, or fair to me, for you to act that way.”
Then Patty had said, “So what if I did let the guy kiss me a couple of times and cop a few feels?”
“You don’t need to be so vulgar about it.”
“It’s part of our job to entertain buyers.”
“You didn’t have to let him go that far. For all I know, you made a date to sneak out and meet him.”
“For all you know,” Patty had told her. “And I can tell you another thing right now. If you keep on being so possessive, I’m going to move to another apartment. After all, you aren’t my husband.”
“How can you say such a thing to me?”
“Because it’s true.”
“But we love each other.”
“Love. Hah. Maybe if we both went to bed with a man for a change we wouldn’t be ashamed to look at ourselves in a mirror.”
Grace climbed out of the pool and dried herself. She couldn’t go on this way. She didn’t want to go on, feeling the way she did about Patty. Perhaps if she carried the Dubonnet upstairs and apologized while she made them both a nice cold drink, Patty would be willing to make up. At least it was worth the try.
She put her towel in her bag and reached for her bottle of suntan lotion and the plastic bottle slipped out of her hand and skittered across the tile and up against the inflated beach pad on which Colette was taking a sun-bath.
The girl opened her black eyes sleepily and looked at her without comment.
“I’m sorry,” Grace apologized as she retrieved the lotion. “It slipped out of my hand.”
Colette shrugged and closed her eyes again and Grace transferred her venom to her. If she hadn’t signed a lease, she’d move. That’s what she’d do. The Dupar girl was as bad as Mr. Melkha. Worse. Mrs. Malloy ought to put her out of the building. Colette was nothing but a nasty self-perpetuating little animal who lived off the juices of her own body.
Grace snatched her beach bag from the table, slipped her feet into her scuffs, rode the elevator down to the subterannean garage and got the half case of Dubonnet from her car. When she returned to the elevator, someone on the third floor had claimed it
She waited impatiently watching the indicator. When the car returned to the garage, Marty Romero got out dressed for the street and carrying one of the big black and white stuffed pandas that a nightclub on the Strip gave to any customer who ran up a tab of fifty dollars or more.
“Hi,” he greeted her.
“Hello,” the model said coldly. She tried to enter the cage and the fighter blocked the way with his free hand. “Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Did I ever tell you you weren’t a bad-looking dame.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
“What has heaven to do with it?” Romero pulled her to him as she tried to push past him. “I mean it. How about me coming up to your apartment some night?”
“Are you certain Mrs. Katz would understand?” Romero grinned. “You know how it is. That was just for laughs.”
Her hands immobilized by the half case of fortified wine, Grace stood rigid with anger while Romero kissed and fondled her.
“Whenever you’ve had your fun.”
Romero released her and studied her face. “It’s like that with you, huh?”
“Like that.”
“It happens.” Romero shrugged and walked to his car.
“But if you think that’s a homing pigeon you have in your coop, you’re whistling Dixie in a tom paper bag. As far as she’s concerned, it’s a two-way street.”
Grace set the wine on the floor of the elevator and punched the second floor button viciously. Romero was lying. He had to be. Patty wouldn’t do such a thing to her.
Mama Romero considered the immediate future. She’d thought of little else since the deputy sheriff had tacked the notice on her front door that meant she would have to vacate the home in which she’d lived for forty years.
A tall, heavyset woman, dark complected, with iron gray hair, she continued to think about it as she added another pinch of saffron to the rice she was cooking to go with the garlic chicken frying in the other pan. Some cooks put the rice in with the chicken. She never had. When rice was cooked with anything else it had a tendency to become soggy. It was much better to cook it separately, then combine the two for the last twenty minutes in the oven.
She returned the cover to the pan of cooking rice, then leaned her elbows on the peeling paint of the kitchen windowsill and looked out at the tall white spire of the Temple of Justice rising above the multilevel downtown Los Angeles freeway interchange. Justice. Hah. Bad enough that Mauricio had happened to her, now this. She’d told Papa. Forty-one years ago she’d begged Papa to buy in Chavez Ravine. If he had, she could have sold out to Mr. O’Malley and his ball club for a fancy price. But no. Papa had insisted on putting their small nest egg in the banco and renting a house on Bunker Hill. Because he liked the view.
