The Whip Man was a beefy dark-skinned fellow in a billed cap who said little and smiled less, although he did not seem unfriendly. He would relieve you of your change and then help you up three steel stairs to the interior of the cage where the Whip’s six cars waited, alternately red or yellow, arranged on a hidden track in an elongated oval. Sometimes the cars reminded me of tulips and sometimes of painted hands upturned to cup a pair of children. The cars wobbled around the oval, trundling along the straightaways, then picking up speed at each end in a burst that smashed you against the outside of the car or the person beside you. During the slow parts you recovered, and then you got smashed again, and when the ride was over you went back down the stairs. Just before you exited his cage, the Whip Man would reach up to take a piece of Bazooka bubble gum from a shelf over his head and press it into your hand with a murmured benediction.
One day as I came down the stairs from the back of the Whip truck, I was surprised to find my father waiting for me in his suit, tie, and white coat. The rubber-tipped antlers of a stethoscope protruded from a hip pocket. There was a fleck of red on his shirtfront that looked like blood but was more likely to be his lunch: tomato soup, ketchup. I knew that if I asked him, he would say it was blood. I had recently begun to understand that my father only rarely meant what he said and that usually he meant precisely the opposite. If he said it was a gorgeous day, that meant it was snowing or raining. If he said something couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, then something bad had happened to someone who deserved it. When he was imparting information of a factual nature, you could generally take what he said at face value, but even then you had to be careful. I had endured a painful day of teasing by the older kids on the block, after I cited my father’s authority in claiming that the “crunch berries” in Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries cereal were made from actual dehydrated strawberries.
“Does Mommy have a stomach flu?” I said.
The only time I could remember my father having come home in the middle of a workday had been a few months earlier, when my mother fell ill and was too weak from vomiting to look after me. She had seemed fine at breakfast this morning, but I had been at my friend Roland’s house since then, and in the meantime she must have succumbed.
“She had to go to the hospital,” my father said. He unlocked the car on my mother’s side and held open the rear door. I got in. “Mrs. Kartakis drove her.”
“Does she have to have an operation?” I said.
“Yes, but you don’t have to worry, Mike. She’s going to be fine.”
My father was wanting as a father, still less of a businessman, and as a crook he was grossly incompetent, but he seems to have been a very good doctor. Among the gifts he could bring to bear was a fine bedside manner; I don’t think I’ve ever seen finer. Like his mother-in-law telling a story, my father became a different person when he wanted to comfort you. His voice grew deeper and more gentle, and he seemed—uniquely at such moments—to relax. He looked you right in the eye. He knew you had questions; he understood your concerns. In the years that he spent practicing medicine, his patients always loved him. No doubt this manner had its effect on creditors and investors, too. Up to a point.
“It isn’t serious,” he said. “A minor procedure.” He crouched beside the car and buckled my seat belt, even though I had known how to buckle my own seat belt for some time. “Don’t worry, honey.”
“Okay.”
He put his hand with its manicured nails on my shoulder. A clean smell between peppermint and leather escaped the cuff of his lab coat. His class ring with its gemstone and cryptic inscription radiated strength like the ring of Hercules in the cartoons; if you held it to the sky, it might call down lightning. I looked at the glittering stone and the moons of his fingernails. I felt like crying about my mother having to go to the hospital, but I arrested the feeling at the back of my throat and managed to work it down. I asked my father what kind of operation my mother would be having.
“What kind of operation do you think she might be having?” he said.
He closed the door and I was surprised to notice on the seat beside me a small suitcase, ivory leather, with spring-action brass clasps and hinges that creaked when you opened it. Scuffed as an old white oxford shoe, it had been my father’s when he was a boy and was therefore always referred to as my valise, because that was what they had called a suitcase in my father’s family. I took it be a Yiddish word. I was not sure why my father wanted me to guess what kind of operation my mother was having. I wondered if I would be judged on the quality of my answer. I remembered that one of my valise-toting relatives, his late mother’s sister Dottie, had recently gone into the hospital for a foot operation.
“Maybe her feet?” I tried.
“You’re right,” he said. “Very good.”
He switched on the radio, tuned as usual to WQXR. Someone was hitting the keys of a piano hard, in fitful handfuls. My father turned up the volume. We drove down the street, past the Whip. The angry piano tangled momentarily with the drunken trumpet pouring from the speaker horn over the Whip’s cab. My friend Roland and his brother, Pierre, stood at the Whip’s bottommost step, squinting hopefully up at the Whip Man. I realized that I was still holding the piece of bubble gum.
I unwrapped it and put my jaw to work on it. I puzzled over the gag in the Bazooka Joe comic strip, which I was newly capable of reading. I didn’t ask my father about the valise. I assumed that I was going to stay with my mother in the hospital. I wondered if I would have a bed of my own or if I would be sharing a bed with her. I envisioned a room in New York Hospital, where my father had done his residency in orthopedics—the only hospital I really knew. After a while I understood that we were going the wrong way for NYH and must be headed to a different hospital. I knew, of course, that New York City was full of hospitals—Montefiore, Presbyterian, St. Luke’s. Mrs. Kartakis must have taken my mother to one of those. There were Jewish and Catholic hospitals; maybe there were Greek hospitals. Maybe Mrs. Kartakis had taken my mother to the Public Health Service hospital on Staten Island, where my father was currently posted.
The piano was under heavy attack now—it must have been a Liszt waltz, maybe Rachmaninoff. It was so loud that I would almost have to shout to be heard over it, and my father didn’t like it when I shouted over his music. It annoyed him, and sometimes if I did not shut up, annoyance slipped into anger. He would reach back and uncoil his right arm, slowly at first and then with a sudden snap. His Mighty Hercules ring would crack against my skull, making a sound that I could see, a thunderclap behind my eyeballs. Therefore I did not ask him if we would be riding the Staten Island Ferry to visit my mother. It was only when it became clear that we were headed across the Bronx to Riverdale that I opened my mouth. Even then I waited until the piece ended and a commercial came on before saying what I had to say. “I don’t want to sleep over at Grandpa and Grandma’s.”
“Oh, come on, Mike!” It came out as irritable, halfway to yelling. He lowered his voice. “The puppets are not going to hurt you,” he said, in a controlled tone. “They are toys. You know that.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m just afraid of them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mike . . .”
“I just am.”
A new piece began to play on the radio. My father turned down the volume but drove on for a while without saying anything.
“Well, I don’t know what to do about that,” he said.
He sounded more sad than irritated; he sounded disappointed. I was very sorry to disappoint him, but it was hardly my fault that in a hatbox at the top of the closet in the guest bedroom of my grandparents’ apartment, a dozen hand puppets (a rubicund King, a sour-faced Queen, a leering Shepherd, two white and one black Sheep, a sneaky-eyed Fishwife, four Musicians, and a masked Robber with a black beard made horribly from human hair) lay plotting in darkness to kill me while I slept. They had sewn bodies and painted wooden heads carved by a master craftsman in Lille, France. I knew that they had cost my grandparents “an arm and a leg,” which intensified my shame and guilt over being terrified of them and of course merely helped the puppets’ case against me. I tried to think of something I could say to mitigate my father’s disappointment.
“I’m just afraid of them at night,” I said. “In the daytime they don’t bother me at all.”