Billy Bathgate

PART TWO
NINE

We stood the first morning on the courthouse steps and looked over the town past a bridged mountain stream to the fields and pastures and hills around us, everything green and lilac on the hillsides and the field crops a darker green, the sun was shining in a deeply blue sky, and there was a lowing cow at some distance that sounded to me like a song of the great unconscious gladness of nature, and Lulu Rosenkrantz muttered, “I don’t know about this, what do you do when you wanna go for a walk?”
I had never been in the country before except if you counted Van Cortlandt Park, but I liked the smell of it and the light, I liked the peace of all that sky. Also I was instructed in the purposefulness of human settlement. Out there in the distance they grew what was needed, they farmed and kept dairy herds, and this town, Onondaga, the county seat, was their market. It was built onto the side of the hills overlooking the farmland and the stream came down from the mountains right through it. Nobody told me not to so I made an excursion to the old rattly wooden bridge and watched the water flowing fast and shallow over the rocks. It was wider when you were right on top of it, more like a river than a stream. Then a few blocks up along the river I found an abandoned lumber mill, the sheds leaning over like a good wind would flatten them, the place was long since closed but showed clearly someone’s past ambition and an enterprise with natural resources that I had read about in school geographies but never fully appreciated. I mean you don’t really appreciate a phrase like natural resources, you have to see the trees on the mountains, and the stream, and the lumberyard beside the stream to begin to get the idea, to see the sense everything made. Not that I would want such a life for myself.
A lot of people had lived and died in Onondaga and what they left behind was their houses, I could tell immediately the houses had been around for a long time, they were of wood, people in the country lived in wooden houses, one next to another, big boxy things stained dark brown or peeling gray paint and with pitched roofs and gables and porches loaded up with firewood, and there was an occasional weird house with a corner tower topped with a kind of dunce cap roof and with curved windows and shingles nailed on in different patterns and iron grillwork decorating the roof edges, as if they had a pigeon problem. Anyway this was America too I said to Lulu Rosenkrantz, though he was dubious. At least the public buildings were of stone, the courthouse was made of blocks of red stone with granite trim that reminded me of the Max and Dora Diamond Home except it was bigger and had arched windows and doors and was rounded at the corners as justice sometimes is, and the four-story Onondaga District School, the same ugly red stone as the courthouse, and also the Onondaga Public Library, a tiny one-room affair faced over in stone blocks to make it look as if people took their reading matter more seriously than they really did. Then the gray stone gothic church, modestly named the Church of the Holy Spirit, and so far the only thing in town I had found not named after this Onondaga, this Indian, who had apparently made quite an impression. There was a statue of him on the lawn in front of the courthouse shading his eyes and looking west. When Miss Lola Miss Drew came outside for the first time and saw that statue she seemed quite taken with it, she stared at it till Mr. Schultz grew irritated and pulled her away.
The grandest structure in town was the hotel, The Onondaga, of course, six stories of red brick, right in the heart of the commercial district if it could be called that, because many of the stores were closed with FOR LET signs in the windows, and the few cars parked front wheels into the curb were old black tin lizzies, Model A’s and T’s or farm trucks with chain drives and no doors, there was not much going on in Onondaga, in fact with our arrival we were what was going on, which came home to me when the old colored man who was the bellboy carried my bag with genuine delight to my very own private room on the top floor and didn’t even wait for the tip I was figuring out to give him. This was where we were all to stay, on the sixth floor, which Mr. Schultz rented in its entirety. Each person had at least one room to himself, otherwise it wouldn’t look right, Mr. Schultz said glancing at Miss Lola Miss Drew, so she had her own suite, and he had his own suite, and the rest of us had single rooms except that Mr. Berman had a second room for which he ordered a special direct phone line not using the hotel switchboard.
The morning of our arrival I bounced on my bed. I opened a door and lo! there was a bathroom with an enormous tub and several thin white towels hanging on the bar and a full-length mirror on the inside of the door. The bathroom was as big as our kitchen at home. The floor was small white octagonal tiles, just like our halls in the Bronx, except a lot cleaner. My bed was soft and wide and the headboard was like half of a big spoked wheel of maple wood. There was a reading chair with a lamp sticking out of a table right beside it, and a bureau with a mirror, and in the top drawer were little concave sections for pocket change and small items that might otherwise get lost. There were gauzy white curtains that could be drawn with a string and behind them black shades, the same as at my school, where you pulled them tight to watch slide shows or movies, with a little pulley wheel attached to the sill. Next to the bed was a table radio which crackled a bit but didn’t seem to bring in any stations.
I loved this luxury. I lay back on my bed, which had two pillows and a white bedspread with a pattern of tufts, rows of little cotton nipples, each one under my fingertip making me think of Becky. I lay with my hands behind my head and poked my pelvis into the air a few times imagining she was there on top of me. Private hotel rooms were sexy places. I had noticed in the lobby downstairs a writing table with hotel stationery free for the taking and I thought in a day or two I would write her a letter. I started to think what I would say, whether to apologize or not for leaving her without saying goodbye, and so on, but was interrupted by the stillness. I sat up. Everything was very hushed, unnaturally quiet, which at first felt like part of the luxury, but then seemed to me like another presence which was making itself known. I don’t mean that I felt I was being watched, nothing like that, more like there were certain expectations of the society that were trying to represent themselves to me, in the pattern of the wallpaper, for example, endless rows of little corsages of buttercups, or the pieces of maple furniture standing there so silently like elements of a mysterious rite waiting for me to perform it correctly. I sat up. I found a Bible in the drawer of the bedside table and thought someone had left it there by accident. Then I realized from the resolute neatness and orderliness of the room that it must be there as a furnishing. I looked out the window, my room was at the rear, I had a good view of the flat roofs of stores and warehouses. Nothing was moving in Onondaga. Up behind the hotel was a hillside of pine trees that managed to block out the sky.
I understood what Lulu Rosenkrantz must be feeling, the absence of life as we knew it, raucous and loud and mechanically driven, with horns and bell gongs, and grinding wheel flanges, and screeches of brakes, all that rude variousness of too many people in too small a space, where you could really be selfish and free. But he at least had Irving or Mickey, and years of loyalty to the gang to comfort him, whereas none of them had any particular fondness for me. At this moment nobody had told me what I was supposed to be doing in Onondaga. I thought I was past the point of going for coffee, but I wasn’t sure. I knew things that it was deadly to know if you were not trusted. I found myself not for the first time measuring my reasons for confidence against the depth of the danger I was in. It would always be this way, every time I felt good about the way things were going and that I was living my charmed life unerringly, all I had to remember was how small a mistake was sufficient to change my fortune, maybe even without my knowing it. I was an habitual accomplice to murder. I could be arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. But that was not enough to ensure me my place. I thought of Bo Weinberg and opened the door to the dimly lit wide carpeted hall and looked up and down for a sign of life. All the doors were closed. I went back to my room and closed my own door so as not to disturb the quiet and this so oppressed me that I decided to do something so I unpacked my new I. Cohen suit with the two pairs of pants and hung it in the big dusty closet and put my shirts and things and gun away in the bureau drawer and then put the empty suitcase in the closet and then sat on the side of the bed and felt worse than ever. Part of it may have been that when you Ye going somewhere it is always mysterious when you arrive. Or perhaps, as I told myself, I was not used to living alone, I had only been living alone for five or ten minutes and I was not yet used to it. In any case my optimism of the early part of the day had now totally deserted me. The only thing that cheered me up was the sight of a cockroach walking up the wall between the sprays of buttercups, because then I knew The Onondaga Hotel was not all it was cracked up to be.
The first couple of days I was mostly by myself, Mr. Berman gave me fifty dollars in small bills and told me to spend it in as many different places as I could. This was not as easy as it sounded, Onondaga was not rich in the fruits of the earth like Bathgate Avenue. The stores were unnaturally quiet dark establishments with bare shelves and they were separated from one another by stores that were closed up and boarded. I went into the Ben Franklin five-and-ten and it was pathetic, I had stolen from some of the best five-and-ten-cent stores in New York and knew what they should be and this little place was so dismal and poor the owner kept only one light bulb on in the back and the country kids who came in barefoot got splinters from the rotted-out floor. There was hardly any stock. I bought a handful of metal toy cars and motorcycles with policemen molded to them and gave them away. I found a clothing store for women and bought a straw hat with a big brim for my mother and then I took the hatbox to the post office and had them send it the most expensive way. I found a jewelry store and bought a pocket watch for a dollar.
Through the window of the drugstore I saw Lulu and Mickey the driver sitting at the fountain drinking malted milks through straws. They would take sips and then look at the glass to see how much more had to be swallowed before their ordeal was over. I was very pleased to see they had gotten the same assignment from Mr. Berman as I had. When they left the drugstore I shadowed them for practice. They stood irresolutely in front of a window where a tractor was on display. They found a news store and went in but I could have told them there were no New York papers. They came out and lit cigars that were so stale they flared up like torches. Lulu was disgusted, Mickey had to calm him down. They bought a fifty-pound sack of onions and left it in a trash can. They went into the army-navy store and through the window I saw them choose shirts and hats and then lace-up work boots that I knew I would never see on their feet.
By the second day of this spending spree my imagination was taxed. Then it occurred to me something of the same purpose was served by making friends, so I bought ice-cream cones for some kids who were following me, and then in a little park across from the courthouse I did some juggling with three pink rubber balls. Kids were everywhere in Onondaga, they were the only human beings I saw in the afternoons, the only ones out in the sun with nothing to do in their overalls with no shirt underneath and bare feet and squinty faces of freckles, they made me think of my street and the homeful of orphans there, but there was less humor in them, they were not inclined to smile or jump around, they took their pleasures stolidly, giving my juggling feats the most serious attention, but hanging back when I offered to show them how to do it.
In the meantime of all the people not to be seen Mr. Schultz and Miss Lola Miss Drew were the most prominent, day and night there was a running route of room service to his suite. I wondered what she did to make her own suite look occupied. Then I wondered if she bothered. I tried to keep from thinking about her but it was difficult, especially at night in my room as I lay on the bed and smoked my Wings and listened to the faintest dance band music from the crackling radio. I was sorry I had seen her nude, I knew too much to be imagining her in my mind at this particular time, in fact it made me queasy to think of her. Then I became angry. She had certainly taught me how little I knew about women, I had thought first she was this fine innocent blue-blood victim of a terrible cross fire of gang life, then up in her Savoy-Plaza apartment it was clear she had flung her ass around with the best of them, I had thought only women from the wrong side of the tracks were tramps, but there were rich tramps too and she was one of them, she had some kind of marriage that was so advanced in sophisticated license as to be degenerate, she was entirely wild, she liked a kind of primordial action, I mean sitting in a Packard in the early hours of the morning and being driven you don’t know the hell where while drinking champagne with the man who’s just murdered your boyfriend might be considered by some to be a sordid situation with a degree of risk attached to it, but that was not the thought I saw in her eyes in the privacy of her bedroom when as you know a woman preparing to go out is her true self in shrewd preparation of her commodity, without the need to sit with her knees pressed together or stand with one foot slightly forward of the other and pointing outward.
They were in there together two whole full days without coming up for air. Late the third morning I happened to see them emerge from the hotel lobby. They were holding hands. I was worried that Mr. Schultz would notice me standing around juggling for a bunch of hick kids on the sidewalk. But he noticed nothing except her, he handed her past Mickey, who was holding open the door of the Packard, and ducked in himself. The expression on his face suggested that Mr. Schultz’s two days and nights in bed with Miss Drew had somewhat elevated her in his regard. After they drove off I thought, well, if she was going to survive her deadly knowledge of that boat ride, this was indeed the way to do it, which was a laugh because she was clearly so heedless as to make mere survival the last possible thing on her mind.
But I was cheered at the end of the second day by an invitation to dinner at a big round table in the hotel dining room, and everyone was there, Mr. Schultz with Miss Lola Miss Drew on his right, and Abbadabba Berman on his left, and the rest of us, Lulu, Mickey the driver, Irving, and I fanned out facing him. Mr. Schultz was in excellent spirits and it seemed to me everyone in the gang was glad to be together, that maybe I wasn’t the only one a little homesick.
There were elderly couples at two or three of the tables who kept glancing at us and then leaning toward each other to talk, the faces of passersby framed themselves in the dining-room windows and were replaced by other faces, and appearing in the doorway every other minute to smile and watch us and maybe make sure we were still there were the man from the front desk and the elderly colored bellboy. Mr. Schultz loved all this. “Sweetheart,” he called to the waitress, “tell me about your cellar,” which I thought was a bizarre request until she said all they carried was Taylor New York State in screw-cap bottles, which made him laugh as if he had known it all along, she was a plump young girl with blotchy skin and wore a uniform like the waitresses I had seen in the Schrafft’s on Fordham Road, black with white trim, and a little starched cap on her head, but despite this she was so nervous she kept dropping things, pouring the water in our glasses to the brim, things like that, and I thought any minute she would rush out of the room crying. Mr. Schultz didn’t mind, he ordered two bottles of Taylor’s New York State red. I could tell Lulu and Mickey would have preferred beer if they couldn’t have the hard stuff but they didn’t say anything. They were not comfortable in neckties, either. “To justice,” Mr. Schultz said lifting his glass, and touched the glass of Miss Lola Miss Drew, who looked at him and laughed a lovely throaty laugh, as if he was kidding, then we all clicked glasses, even I with my milk.
Our table was in the middle of the room, right under a chandelier of clear glass light bulbs that made things dim and glary at the same time so that it was hard to tell how anyone looked, I wanted to see what people looked like who had spent forty-eight hours screwing each other silly, I wanted some evidence, something tangible that I could use for my imaginative life of abstract jealousies, but it was not to be had, at least in this light, it was particularly difficult to see Miss Lola Miss Drew’s face, she was so blindingly beautiful under that cut gold hair, her eyes were so green and her skin was so white, it was like trying to look into the sun, you couldn’t see her through the brilliance and it hurt to try for more than an instant. She was totally attentive to Mr. Schultz and stared at him every time he opened his mouth, as if she was deaf and had to read lips.
Dinner was meat loaf with string beans and mashed potatoes and a basket of packaged white bread and a hunk of butter and a bottle of ketchup in the middle of the table. It was good hot food and I was hungry. I ate fast, we all did, we went at it with a vengeance, Mr. Schultz asked the girl to bring another platter of the meat loaf, and it wasn’t till the first edge of my hunger was rounded off that I noticed Miss Lola Miss Drew hadn’t touched her dinner but was leaning with her elbows on the table and intently regarding the wolfish crew of us holding our forks in our fists, chewing with our mouths open, and reaching out to spear slices of bread. She seemed quite fascinated. When I looked again she had lifted her own fork and folded her hand over it till she had made a fist around the shank. She held it one way and then another to see how it felt, and then forked the slab of meat loaf on her plate and hoisted it slowly into the air to her eye level. At this point everyone grew quite still, she had the attention of the entire table, although she no longer seemed to be aware of us. She lowered the fork and left it standing upright in the portion of meat and as if she was quite alone and thinking about something far away took her napkin from the place setting, unfolded it, and laid it across her lap. Then she looked at Mr. Schultz with a sweet distracted smile and then down at her glass, which he hurriedly refilled. Then she proceeded to dine, taking the fork in her left hand and her knife in her right, and cutting and accepting in her mouth from the fork tines, after she had laid the knife down and switched the fork to her right hand, small bites of the meat loaf and tiny dabs of mashed potato. It was an operation of pronounced gentility performed at ritual speed, just as teachers in school write words across the blackboard while enunciating them syllable by syllable. As we all watched, she took her wineglass and put it to her lips and drank without making any sound, though I listened hard, not a sip or slurp or gulp or gurgle, so that when she replaced her glass on the table I wondered if any wine had gotten into her at all. I had to conclude this was one of the most depressing displays of daintiness I had ever seen, as beautiful as she was, she momentarily forfeited her allure as far as I was concerned. Lulu Rosenkrantz frowned the frown that could terrify a hit man, and then exchanged glances with Mickey the driver, and Abbadabba stared at the tablecloth with a sad expression on his face, and even the impassive Irving lowered his eyes, but Mr. Schultz was nodding his head with his lips pouted as if a necessary point was being made. He leaned forward and, looking around the table, said in his idea of a modulated voice, “Thank you, Miss Drew, for your thoughtful comments, which I believe are offered in the best interests of watching our asses for our own good.”
I knew immediately something momentous had occurred but I didn’t trust myself to think what it was until later, when I was alone in my room again in bed with the lights out and the crickets in the fields of Onondaga beating away like the night’s loud pulse, as if night were an enormous body, like the sea, with things living in it, making love in it, and lying dead in it. Miss Lola Miss Drew disdained memories. Technically she was a captive, her life was at risk. But she had no intention of being a captive. She had something to contribute. Of course what Mr. Schultz had said was correct in that we did have to watch our asses up here, like travelers in some dictator’s foreign country. But what stunned everyone at the table was that he had sided with her, she had done this crazy pantomime, presuming to act in that way of privilege of instructing those less fortunate than she, and instead of whacking her across the face, which is probably what everyone else there would have done, he had accepted it and found value in it. It was as if they felt an announcement was being made, that she was being cut in in some way and that was how it was going to be.
Of course, I didn’t know if I was right, if that was what everyone thought, but I knew from my own career with him that Mr. Schultz liked to be pursued, he was vulnerable to people who were attracted to him, followers, admirers, acolytes, and the otherwise dependent, whether show-off kids, or women whose men he killed. She was a spoil of war, after all, she had been given her delicious value by Bo Weinberg’s love for her. I had to wonder if when he took her to bed Mr. Schultz enjoyed the hard-on of triumph, making love to the lady but giving it to the dead Bo.
The next morning bright and early, Mr. Berman knocked on my door and told me to get dressed in my new suit and to wear my glasses and meet Mr. Schultz down in the lobby in fifteen minutes. I did it in ten, which was enough time to run around the corner for a doughnut and a cup of coffee. I got back as everyone was coming outside. Mickey was there with the Packard, Lulu Rosenkrantz was getting in beside him, and Mr. Schultz and Miss Drew were seated in the back. I jumped in.
It was a short trip, in fact only around the corner to the Onondaga National Bank, which was a narrow limestone building with two long skinny barred windows and columns holding up the stone triangle roof over the front doors. Mickey pulled up across the street and we all sat there looking at it with the motor running.
“I once’t chanced to meet that Alvin Pincus who ran with Pretty Boy Floyd,” Lulu said. “A very excellent safecracker.”
“Yeah, and where is he now,” Mr. Schultz said.
“Well they did good for a while.”
“Think about it, Lulu,” Mr. Schultz said. “Going for the dough the one place it’s under lock and key. You gotta be stupid. That outlaw shit ain’t in the economic mainstream,” he said patting the briefcase on his lap. “Okay, ladies and gents,” he said, and he got out of the car and held the door for Miss Drew and me.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. When I got out of the car Miss Drew said, “Wait a minute,” and straightened my clip-on tie. I instinctively drew back.
“Just be a nice boy,” Mr. Schultz said. “I know it’s hard.”
I could tell my black wing-tips were already raising a blister on my heel, and the wire hooks of my plain glass steel-rim glasses were pinching me behind the ears. I had of course forgotten to buy a book as Mr. Berman had told me and so as a last resort carried the Bible from my room in my left hand. My right hand was held by Miss Drew, which she squeezed as we crossed the street behind Mr. Schultz. “You look handsome,” she said. I resented it that even when I wore my Elevator Shoes she was the taller of us. “That’s a compliment,” she said, “it doesn’t call for a scowl.” She was very gay.
We were shown right past the tellers’ barred cages to the back office, where the president came from behind his desk and shook Mr. Schultz’s hand heartily, though his eyes flicked over us all with cool appraisal. He was a portly man with a fleshy tubular underchin that looked like a hydraulic pump under his jaw when his mouth moved. Behind him was this open door and steel gate, and an inner room that was really a big safe with its thick door open and lots of drawers inside the room like mailboxes in a post office. “Well, well,” he said after the introductions were made, Mr. Schultz having described me as his prodigy; and Miss Drew as my governess, “please sit down, everyone, we don’t often have famous people in our little town. I hope you’re finding it to your liking.”
“Oh yes,” Mr. Schultz said, beginning to undo the straps on his briefcase. “This is a summer in the country for us.”
“Well, country is what we can offer. Swimming holes, trout streams, virgin forest,” at this his eyes darted for a moment to Miss Drew’s crossed legs. “Some pretty fair vistas from up the top of the hills, if you like hiking. Good fresh air, all you can breathe,” he said, laughing as if he’d said something funny, and he went on with this mindless booster small talk his eyes coming back again and again to the briefcase which Mr. Schultz now leaned forward to place on his desk, the top flap folded back, so that when it was given a quick shove and then pulled back, packs of greenbacks slid out on the big green blotter. And with that, words abruptly ceased to come from the banker’s mouth although the hydraulic pump didn’t lift it shut for another moment or two.
It was a lot of money, more than I had ever seen, but I showed more restraint than the banker, giving no indication that I saw anything out of the ordinary. Mr. Schultz said he wanted to open a checking account for five thousand and put the balance in a safe deposit box. A moment later the banker’s old secretary was summoned in and in a fluster of attentions she and the banker went off to count the haul while Mr. Schultz sat back and lit a cigar fresh from the humidor on the banker’s desk.
“Kid,” he said, “you notice how many tellers’ cages are open for business?”
“One?”
“Yeah. One teller with gray hair sitting there reading the paper. Lulu’s friends walk in they won’t even find a bank dick at the door. You know what this guy’s reserves must be? Holding a lot of dirt-farm mortgages? Spends his days foreclosing and selling off the county of Onondaga for ten cents on the dollar. I’m telling you. He’ll lay awake at night thinking of all that cash in my safe deposit box. What it represents. Give him a week, ten days. I will get a call.”
“And you will go in on whatever it is,” Miss Drew said.
“Goddamn right. You’re looking at the patron sweetheart of the boondocks.” He buttoned the jacket of his dark suit, and brushed imaginary dust off the sleeves. He put the cigar in his mouth and leaned over and pulled up his socks. “Get through here I could run for Congress.”
“I would like to mention something on a different subject but not if you’re going to get all pouty and sulk,” Miss Drew said.
“What. No. My words again?”
“Protégé, like proto-jay.”
“What did I say?”
“You said prodigy. That’s something else, like a child genius.” At this moment the banker returned all happy and hand-rubbing and put out some forms for Mr. Schultz to sign and took the cap off his fountain pen and slipped it on the end and handed the pen across the desk chattering all the meanwhile. But upon the scratching of the signature he went quiet and the documents were duly executed in a hush, as if a state treaty were coming into effect. Then the old lady secretary came in with her receipts and a book of blank checks and there was more fussing and heartiness, and in a few moments we were standing for the goodbyes and thank-yous and let-me-know-if-there’s-anything-I-can-dos, it is a fact that money exhilarates people, it puts them in hysterias of good cheer, they suddenly care about you and want the best for you. The banker had hardly taken notice of anyone but Mr. Schultz but now he said, “Hey, young fellow, what’s the younger generation reading these days?” as if it was really important to him. He turned the book up in my hand so he could read the title, I don’t know what he had expected, a French novel maybe, but he was genuinely surprised. “Well good for you, son,” he said. He gripped my shoulder and looking at my governess said, “My respects, Miss Drew, I’m a scoutmaster myself, we don’t really have to worry about the future of the country, do we, with youngsters like this?”
He walked us to the front entrance, all our heels ringing on the marble floor, it was like a procession, with the single teller standing up in his cage as we passed. “Goodbye, bless you,” the banker said, waving at us from the steps.
Lulu held the car door open and we settled into the back and after he took his seat up front, Mickey started the engine and put it in gear, and we drove off. Only then did Mr. Schultz say, “What the f*ck was that all about?” and reach over Miss Drew to grab the Onondaga Hotel’s Holy Bible out of my hands.
There was absolute silence in the car except for the flipping of pages. I stared out the window. We were going slowly downhill now along the nearly deserted main street. Here in the country they had things like feed stores. I was sitting in a new suit with long pants and my Elevator Shoes and my thigh touching the thigh of the beautiful Miss Drew right in the back seat of the luxurious personal car of the man who had existed for me only as an awesome dream a few weeks before and I couldn’t have been more unhappy. I rolled the window all the way down to let out the cigar smoke. There was no question in my mind that something unimaginably terrible was about to happen.
“Hey Mickey,” Mr. Schultz said.
Mickey the driver’s pale blue eyes appeared in the rearview mirror.
“Stop at the church up the hill there where you see the spire,” Mr. Schultz said. He began to chuckle. “The one thing we didn’t think of,” he said. He put his hand on Miss Drew’s knee. “May I add my respects to the guy’s back there?”
“Don’t look at me, boss,” she said, “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Mr. Schultz leaned forward so he could see me on the other side of Miss Drew. He was smiling broadly, with enormous teeth, a very big mouth of them. “Is that right? This was your brainstorm?”
I didn’t have the chance to explain. “You see,” he said to Miss Drew, “I know what words I’m talking about when I pick my words. The kid’s my f*cking prodigy.”
And that was how I came to be enrolled in the Sunday Bible study class of the Church of the Holy Spirit, in Onondaga New York the interminable summer of the year 1935. To undergo orations on the subject of the desert gangs, their troubles with the law, their hustles and scams, the ways they worked each other over, and the grandiose claims they made for themselves—that was my sacred fate in the church basement with sweat dripping from the stone walls and the snivels of summer colds dripping from the noses of my fellow students in their overalls or their faded flowered dresses, always a size too big, and their feet swinging under the benches, shoed or bare, every goddamn Sunday. For all I had accomplished and as far as I had come, I might just as well have been back in the orphans’ home.
But Sunday was only the worst of the days, all week we went at it, there was nothing to do but good. We made visits to the hospital and brought magazines and candy to the wards. Wherever there was a store open with something to sell, as long as it wasn’t tractor parts, we went in and bought whatever it was selling. A mile out of town was a broken-down miniature golf course, I drove out there with Mickey and Lulu on several occasions and the three of us putted the ball through little wooden chutes and barrels and pipes and I got pretty good at it and took a few dollars from them but decided not to go out there anymore the day Lulu in a fit of bad sportsmanship broke his club over his knee. In town a small crowd of little hick kids collected whenever I set foot out of doors, they followed me down the street and I bought them candy and whirligigs and ice cream while Mr. Schultz was having receptions for their fathers and mothers under the auspices of the American Legion, or taking over the church socials, buying up all the homemade cakes and then throwing a party for everyone to come have cake and coffee. Of all of us, he was the one who seemed actually to enjoy these long boring days. Miss Drew found a stable with riding horses and she took Mr. Schultz out horseback riding every morning and I could see them from the sixth-floor corridor window trotting down the country roads to the fallow fields where she was giving him instruction. The post office delivered things she had ordered by phone from a fancy store in Boston, riding outfits for both of them with tweed coats with leather patches on the elbows and silk neck scarves and dark green felt hats with little feathers stuck in the brim and sleek soft leather boots and jodhpurs, those peculiar lavender pants that bloomed out at the hips, which was fine in her case since she tended in her long-waisted way to be a bit flat back there, but not really suited to the stolid build of Mr. Schultz, who appeared unathletic in them, to say the least, not that any of us, even Mr. Berman, wanted to bring this to his attention.
The only time I enjoyed was the very early morning. I was always the first one up and I took to buying the Onondaga Signal from the news store so that I could read it with my breakfast at a little tea shop kind of luncheonette I had found down a side street. The woman there did her own baking and made very good breakfasts but I kept this intelligence to myself. I think I was the only one of us who read the Signal, it was undeniably dull with farm news and almanac wisdom and home canning advice and so on, but they carried The Phantom comic strip and Abbie and Slats, and that gave me some small connection to real life. One morning the front page had a story about Mr. Schultz buying a local farm from the bank and giving it back to the family that had lost it. When I got back to the hotel there were more old cars parked with their wheels against the curb than usual, and sitting and hunkering all over the little lobby were men in overalls and women in housedresses. And from then on, there was a constant watch at the hotel, inside or outside, one or two farmers and farmers’ wives or as many as a dozen, depending on the time of day. I noticed about these people that when they were skinny they were very skinny and when they were fat they were very fat. Mr. Schultz was always courteous when he came through and would take a couple of them to a corner table in the hotel dining room as if it was his office, and listen to them for a few minutes and ask a few questions. I don’t know how many foreclosed mortgages he recovered, probably none, more likely he gave them the monthly payment money or a few dollars to keep the wolf from the door, as he put it. The way it worked, for the sake of their feelings, he would maintain a businesslike pretense, take their names and tell them to come back the next day, and then it would be Abbadabba Berman who issued the actual cash in a little brown envelope from his office room on the sixth floor. Mr. Schultz didn’t want to be lordish about it, he showed great tact that way.
It was very mysterious to me how a countryside could be so beautiful and yet so invisibly in trouble. I wandered down to the river and across the bridge and out on the country roads every now and then, a little farther each time as I got used to it and discovered no harm would come to me from an empty sky, from hills of wildflowers, from the occasional appearance back from the road of a house and a barn and an animal or two standing around. It was clear here upstate that every city came to an end and an empty road began that required faith to travel. Encouraging were the evenly spaced telegraph poles with electricity wires dipping from pole to pole, I was happy to see also the painted white line going assiduously down the middle of the road over every little rise and fall of the land. I got used to the strawy smell of the fields and the occasional inexplicable whiff of dung coming up out of a roadside patch of heat, and what I first heard as silence turned out to be an air of natural sounds, winds and breezes, startled whirrs, slitherings through brush, pipey yelps, bugbuzz, clops, kerplunks, and croaks, none of which seemed to have any visible origin. So that it occurred to me as I made more of these excursions how you hear the life and smell it before you learn to see it, as if sight is the clumsiest of perceptions in the natural world. There was a lot to learn from the mysteriously unfolding landscape, it offered no intervening comfort between unadorned earth and a large and potent sky, so the last thing I would have expected of it was that it would suffer the same ordinary rat shames of tenements and slums. But I had by now taken to venturing off the paved roads and down this or that dirt lane and one day I was kicking along a wide rocky path when I heard an uncountrylike sound with an alarming breadth to it, and as I walked it became identifiable as a continuous rumble, like a motorized army, and I came over a rise to see a cloud of earthen dust rising from the distant fields and then saw in front of me, parked by the roadside, the black cars and trucks of the country poor, what must have been a good part of the population of Onondaga was walking out across the land in the plumes of dust made by a battery of tractors and harvest machines and trucks taking up acres and acres of potato plants, the machines pouring the potatoes down these moving belts into the truck beds, and the people following, bending down to cull the potatoes missed by the machines and putting them in burlap sacks they dragged along behind them, some even hurrying on all fours through the furrows in the urgency of destitution, men women and children, one or two of whom I recognized from Sunday school at the Church of the Holy Spirit.
And now the scope of Mr. Schultz’s strategy became apparent to me. I had wondered how anyone could be fooled, because what he was doing was so obvious, but he wasn’t trying to fool anybody, he didn’t have to, it didn’t matter that these people knew he was a big-time New York gangster, nobody here had any love for New York anyway and what he did down there was his business if up here he showed his good faith, it didn’t even matter that they knew why he was doing what he was doing as long as he did it on a scale equal to his reputation. Of course he was obvious, but that’s what you had to be when the fix was in with the masses, everything had to be done large, like skywriting, so that it could be seen for miles around.
He said at dinner in the hotel one night, “You know, Otto, I was paying the Chairman of the Board as much a week as all this is costing. There’s no middleman up here to jack up the price on you,” he said enjoying the thought. “Am I right, Otto? We’re dealing direct, eggs fresh from the farm.” He laughed, everything seemed to be going off in Onondaga just as he hoped it would.
But I could tell Abbadabba Berman was feeling less sanguine. “Chairman of the Board” was the code name for Mr. Hines, the Tammany man. Until the Feds had messed things up Mr. Hines got cops who were too smart for their own good assigned to Staten Island and magistrates who didn’t understand their job retired from the bench and, for icing on the cake, bought the election of the gentlest and most peaceable district attorney in the history of the City of New York. It had been a wonderful way to do business. Here, the reality was that they were trying to extricate themselves from a grave situation. Also, the gang was out of its element, they lacked experience in legitimacy and could not be counted upon always to do what was right. And the other thing was Miss Drew. Mr. Berman had never been consulted about Miss Drew. There was no denying she was classing-up the act and thinking of things which her background had taught her, how to work charity, the forms it took, the dos and don’ts of it. And she seemed to be good at giving the Dutchman a little touch of style, so that it was harder for the people up here to think of him as without the shadow of a doubt a man of the rackets. But she was an X. In mathematics, Mr. Berman had told me, when you don’t know what something is worth, not even if it is plus or minus, you call it X. Instead of a number you assign a letter. Mr. Berman had no great regard for letters. He was looking at her now as with a dead pan Miss Drew picked at her salad with her right hand and with her left out of sight under the table touched Mr. Schultz’s privates which couldn’t have been more apparent because Mr. Schultz started up from his seat and knocked over his wine and coughing into his napkin and turning red told her as he started to laugh that she was a crazy f*cking broad.
Sitting at the far end of the dining room, in a corner by themselves, were Irving, Lulu, and Mickey the driver. They were not happy men. When Mr. Schultz cried out Lulu had not been looking in that direction and was so taken aback he rose to his feet and reached into his jacket staring around wildly before Irving put a hand on his arm. Miss Drew had split the gang, there was a hierarchy now, the four of us sat at one table each night and Lulu, Irving, and Mickey sat at another. Given the demands of life in Onondaga Mr. Schultz spent much of his time with Miss Drew and me but mostly Miss Drew, and I know I felt ill-used and muscled out so I could imagine how the men felt. Mr. Berman had to have understood all of this.
Of course once the New York press got wind of what Dutch Schultz was doing here, our situation would change rapidly, like a fever breaking, but I couldn’t know that, everything seemed very weird and dizzying to me, as for instance that Miss Drew could be my mother and Mr. Schultz my father, a thought that came to me, no not even a thought worse than a thought, a feeling, when we attended a mass at the St. Barnabas Catholic Church one Sunday nice and early so I wouldn’t miss Protestant Sunday school at the Church of the Holy Spirit. And he took off his hat and she pulled a white lace shawl over her head and we sat all solemn and shining in our rear pew listening to the organ, an instrument I hate and detest, the way it blurs the ears with intimidating chordblasts of righteousness, or worms inside the ear canal with little pipey slynesses of piety, and that father in silken robes swinging a smokepot up there under a poor painted plaster bleeding Christ on a golden cross, oh I tell you this was not my idea of the life of crime, but that there were things even worse than I knew, because afterward in this church at a table near the door Mr. Schultz lit a candle in a little glass for Bo Weinberg, saying what the hell, and then on the sidewalk the father came after us, I hadn’t thought priests on the pulpit in their colored silks saw who was in the audience, but they do, they see everything, and his name was Father Montaine, he spoke with an accent, he said he was hoppee to see us and shook my hand vigorously, and then he and Miss Lola Miss Drew spoke French, he was a French Canadian with a limited amount of wiry black hair which he combed sideways over his head so that he wouldn’t look bald, which of course he did. I felt dumb, thick-tongued, I was getting fat eating pancake breakfasts on the expense account and ham steak and applesauce dinners, I wore my fake glasses and went calling on churches and combed my hair and kept clean and neat in outfits Miss Lola Miss Drew had found for me, and that was another thing, she had taken to ordering clothes in my size from Boston, I was becoming a project of hers, as if she really was responsible for me, it was weird, when she turned her intense gaze in my direction I saw no depth of assignable character, she seemed incapable of distinguishing pretense from reality, or perhaps she was rich enough to think everything she pretended was true, but me, I didn’t know what it was to flat-out run anymore, I felt I was not reliably myself, I was smiling too much and talking like a sissy and I was reduced to devious practices, doing things I would never have imagined myself doing in my Shadows jacket, like eavesdropping, listening in to conversations like some cop on a wiretap just to try to get some intelligence of what was going on.
For instance one night in my room I smelled cigar smoke and heard voices, so I went into the corridor and stood in the hall just outside the slightly open door of Mr. Berman’s room that he had turned into an office and I peeked in. Mr. Schultz was in there in his bathrobe and slippers, it was very late and they were talking softly, if he’d caught me there was no telling what he would do but I didn’t care, I was one of the gang now, I was running with them, I told myself what was the point of living on the same hotel floor with Dutch Schultz if I didn’t take advantage of it. At least my senses were still sharp, and that was something, I stepped back out of sight and I listened.
“Arthur,” Mr. Berman was saying, “you know these boys would go to the wall for you.”
“They don’t have to go to the wall. They don’t have to do nothing but keep their eyes open tip their hats to the ladies and don’t goose the chambermaid. Is that too much to ask? I’m paying them, ain’t I? It’s a goddamn paid vacation, so what are they complaining about.”
“No one has said a word. But I’m telling you what I know. It’s hard to explain. All these table-manners kinds of things are getting to their self-respect. There’s a madhouse about twenty miles north of here. Maybe you should let them blow off steam once in a while.”
“Are you out of your mind? All this work, what do you think happens they get into a goddamn bar fight over some whore? That’s all we need, a run-in with the state troopers.”
“Irving wouldn’t let that happen.”
“No, I’m sorry, we’re talking about my future, Otto.”
“That is correct.”
There was silence for a few moments. Mr. Schultz said, “You mean Drew Preston.”
“Until now I had not been introduced to the lady’s full name.”
“I’ll tell you what, call Cooney, tell him to get hold of some stag films and a projector and he can drive them up.”
“Arthur, how shall I say this. These are serious grown men, they are not deep thinkers but they can think and they can worry about their futures no less than you worry about yours.”
I heard Mr. Schultz pacing. Then he stopped. “Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Nevertheless,” Mr. Berman said.
“I’m telling you, Otto, it doesn’t even take money she’s got more money than I’ll ever have, this one is different, I’ll grant you she’s a bit spoiled, those kind always are, but when the time comes I’ll slap her around a little and that is all it will take, I promise you.”
“They remember Bo.”
“What does that mean? I remember too, I am upset too, I am more upset than anyone. Because I don’t go around talking about it?”
“Just don’t fall in love, Arthur,” Mr. Berman said.
I went very quietly back to my room and got into bed. Drew Preston was in fact very beautiful, slender and with a clearly unconscious loveliness of movement when she was thoughtless of herself as she would be when we went out into the countryside, like the drawn young women in the children’s books in the Diamond Home broken-down library of books no newer than from the previous century, kind and in communication with the little animals of the forest, I mean you’d see that on her exquisite face in moments of her reflection when she forgot where she was and who she was with, and that raised generous mouth curved back like the prow of a boat, and the clear large green eyes that could be so rude with intense curiosity or wickedly impertinent lowered under a profound modesty of lashes. All of us were subject to her even the philosophical Mr. Berman, a man older than the rest of us and with a physical impairment that he would have long since learned to live with and forgotten except in the presence of such fine-boned beauty. But all of this made her very dangerous, she was unstable, she took on the coloration of the moment, slipping into the role suggested to her by her surroundings. And as I thought about this I thought too that we were all of us very lax with our names, when the pastor had asked my name to enroll me in Sunday school I gave it as Billy Bathgate and watched him write it that way in the book, hardly realizing at the time I was baptizing myself into the gang because then I had an extra name too to use when I felt like it, like Arthur Flegenheimer could change himself into Dutch Schultz and Otto Berman was in some circles Abbadabba, so insofar as names went they could be like license plates you could switch on cars, not welded into their construction but only tagged on for the temporary purposes of identification. And then who I thought was Miss Lola on the tugboat and then Miss Drew in the hotel was now Mrs. Preston in Onondaga, so she was one up on everyone, although I had to admit I had probably gotten the wrong impression when I took her back to the Savoy-Plaza and the lobby clerk had greeted her as Miss Drew not necessarily because that was her maiden name, although for all I know in that walk of life the married women keep their maiden names, but because as an older man in professional service he might have known her since her childhood and though she was now too grown-up to be called simply by her first name, she was too fondly known for too long a time to be called by her last. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to get anything straight, not even monickers, maybe that was my trouble that I needed to know things definitely and expected them not to change. I myself was changing, look where I was, look what I was doing, every morning I put on glasses that magnified nothing and every night I took them off at bedtime like someone who couldn’t do without them except to sleep. I was apprenticed to a gangster and so was being educated in Bible studies. I was a street kid from the Bronx living in the country like Little Lord Fauntleroy. None of these things made sense except as I was contingent to a situation. And when the situation changed, would I change with it? Yes, the answer was yes. And that gave me the idea that maybe all identification is temporary because you went through a life of changing situations. I found this a very satisfying idea to consider. I decided it was my license-plate theory of identification. As a theory it would apply to everyone, mad or sane, not just me. And now that I had it I found myself less worried about Lola Miss Drew Mrs. Preston than Mr. Otto Abbadabba Berman appeared to be. I had a new bathrobe, maybe I should put it on and after Mr. Arthur Flegenheimer Schultz went back to bed I would go knock on the Abbadabba’s door and tell him what X meant. All I had to remember was what had gotten me to this point in the first place, the innermost resolve of my secret endowment. That must never change.