Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue Read online

  "Why did you kill him, Daddy?" she asked, pen poised over notebook as though ready to write down his answer.

  "Because he can't live here, and you cannot just ask a mouse to leave."

  Sarah drew three irregular but concentric circles on a page in the notebook. "How did you kill him?" She was growing bolder, poking the white belly with a small, pale index finger.

  "Don't touch him. I killed him with poison."

  They could hear police on Avenue A with loudspeakers. It took Nathan only a strange half second to realize that the police were not looking for mouse killers.

  "Uncle Mordy said that we are all being poisoned. That the general electorate is poisoning us. Is that right?"

  "What?"

  "Is it true that the general electorate is putting poison in the water and it gets in the food because the food is wet?"

  "No, it's General Electric. But Uncle Mordy gets a little nutty"

  "Then why did you use poison? Are you a little nutty?"

  "Maybe. I poisoned him because I thought it would be quick. Kinder than Pepe Le Moko."

  Sarah's eyes opened round and cartoon expressive. "Does Pepe Le Moko kill?"

  "Yes, he does."

  Sarah put several exciting vertical lines through the circles. "Why?"

  "It's nature. Everything kills in nature. Cats kill mice."

  "Am I going to kill?"

  "No. Of course not."

  She turned the page in her notebook and drew a long, wavy line. "Does Pepe kill as much as General Electric?"

  "He only kills mice."

  "I like mice. Why do we have to kill them?"

  Nathan listened to the sounds of Avenue A as though there were answers to her questions out there in the horns, the sirens, the clanging of some makeshift construction project, cars thudding over steel plates in the street, someone shouting, "Hey!," the police loudspeaker: "Anyone on First Avenue and Fifth Street between ten and eleven last night..." He thought he could even hear his father on the floor above whistling Irving Berlin.

  "Daddy, why does Uncle Mordy have little nuts?"

  "What? Listen, do you want to come with me to the shop? We can feed Pepe Le Moko."

  "Are we going to feed him the mouse?"

  Nathan thought about it for a second and decided against it. Instead he swept it up into a dustpan. The sight of the rubbery little stiff was a little sickening. She didn't seem to mind. Was the idea of death upsetting to her? She didn't look upset, but she didn't always show these things. The sight of a dead animal was a great curiosity to her, but she seemed to be troubled only by moral, not aesthetic, implications. As he dumped the dustpan into the plastic trash bag, she said, "Shouldn't he be buried?"

  Ritual, too. Moral conundrums and the law. She was Jewish, after all. For as long as he could remember, his parents had worried that he would "marry a shiksa and your children won't be Jewish." Why had they always talked about this? Nathan wondered. He had rarely even conversed with a non-Jew. In high school he went out on two dates with Luisa, the beautiful Puerto Rican from Avenue C. That alone was enough for Nathan's father to say to his own brother, Nathan's uncle Nusan, "Nathan's children will not be Jewish."

  Was that why he stopped going out with Luisa? Was it pressure from his parents? He couldn't remember. In fact, he couldn't really remember Luisa—only that she was Puerto Rican and that at the time he thought she was very beautiful and that when his father told Uncle Nusan that their children would not be Jewish, Nusan had responded, "Baruch hashem," and let slip an ironic smile. God willing. Uncle Nusan's invocation of God's will was always intended as the darkest of ironies, his curse at God. Nusan seemed to have a close but troubled relationship with God, the same kind of relationship that he had with his brother.

  Nathan was named after Nusan. At the time, no one foresaw the burden, because Nusan was supposed to be dead. As Ashkenazic Jews, they named babies only after the dead. Nusan, like the rest of the family, had vanished during the war. But unlike the others, Nusan reappeared years later with a bitter voice, a number tattooed on his forearm, and dark eyes that could see through everything. According to Nathan's father, Nusan used to have light blue eyes and they had changed color during the war. This was hard to believe, but Nusan did have the kind of broad, Slavic looks that seemed intended for light blue eyes.

  Nathan was Nusan's favorite, a position that no one envied him. The family supposed that it was because Nathan was named after him, even though he was given the name only in the belief that Nusan was dead. Nusan often said to Nathan, "You are the living proof that I am dead." And with that he would reach up to put his arm fondly on Nathan's shoulder.

  "Daddy," came the sweet, high-pitched, insistent voice. "Why did you kill him?"

  "You can't have mice in the house."

  She drew several little ovals and gave them squiggly tails that made them almost look as though she were about to explain "the facts of life" to her father. "Why not? We have Ralph."

  This, Nathan thought, was a very good point. Ralph was the pet hamster, and it always seemed to Nathan that having a pet hamster made as much sense as having a mouse or a rat.

  "Well, Ralph is a pet."

  "Why couldn't the mouse be a pet?"

  Nathan didn't know. In fact, these white-bellied, gray little creatures were more pleasant looking than Ralph. Why did you always kill mice? Why are some animals our friends, others our meals, and others simply pests to be exterminated? How were these things decided? Did we have the right to willfully extinguish life? Was this an important question to get right? Did young Eichmann ask a similar question and his father told him it didn't matter and so it began? Probably not. Most people don't become mass murderers no matter what their parents tell them. But you cannot take this kind of question lightly. She was asking for some moral definition. God, thought Nathan, it was just a goddamn mouse. "Mice are unhealthy. They carry diseases."

  "Diseases?"

  "They make you sick."

  "So we make them sick first!" She smiled. She liked this idea, and she drew wild dark spirals all over the page.

  He took his daughter's small hand, and her little fingers curled tightly around his smallest fingers—a sensation that briefly overcame him with a small inexpressible joy as they walked past his wife's workroom, where he heard the pleasing thud of flesh being pounded. It was a woman client. Tan pointed slender shoes had been left by the door. There was something vaguely erotic about the thought of it, some unknown woman lying naked on a table at the mercy of his wife's long and powerful fingers. He liked the way their shoes were left in his hallway He would have liked them to leave all of their clothes in the hallway. But sometimes they were men's shoes.

  It had been a hard year for Sarah. New people were moving into the neighborhood, and she had befriended one—a girl born on the same day in the same year and named Maya. She had awarded Maya with that most important title children are empowered to bestow—"best friend." To Nathan, Maya and her parents were new people in the neighborhood, they were smarts. But for Sarah, they had lived there all her life. They had moved in about the time the girls were born, buying an entire three-story house on Tompkins Square. Buying property in the neighborhood was a startling new concept to the Seltzers, who had owned neighborhood property since the 1920s and for a very long time had regarded their holdings as a burden. Maya's parents were undeterred by the squatters' camp in Tompkins Square, a little tent city of scraggly suburban kids having an East Village experience. They were certain that the police would soon drive the squatters out, whereas the Seltzers feared that the police would drive all of them out.

  Maya's parents were not like the neighborhood people, and last year Maya had surprised her best friend, Sarah, by starting school, and though it was only a few hours a day, it came between them. Maya awarded best friend status to a different girl who went to her school.

  When Sarah had asked why she didn't go to school also, Nathan had said, "But you are only three years old." Nathan and a
lmost everyone he knew had started school at age five. But his wife, Sonia, who had gone not through the New York City public school system but instead to private schools in Mexico City and Guadalajara, was more sympathetic. Then they discovered that the "preschool" would cost them $10,000 for the year.

  "What do they teach?" Nathan had asked, and Sarah relayed the question to Maya, and the answer came back, "Things."

  But it was summer now, and Sarah was happy because there was no school and soon she would have her best friend back.

  Nathan took his little girl's hand on the old, streamlined art deco elevator and through the polished black-and-white art deco lobby and out into a less polished world, where Sarah took her seat on his shoulders, grabbing his curly mane with her tiny fingers.

  It was a sunny day early in the summer of the Michael Dukakis presidency That summer, Michael Dukakis and the New York Mets both looked undefeatable. The Mets had untouchable starting pitching and powerful hitters. And Dukakis had a recent poll showing that he would beat Vice President George Bush by a margin of $2 to 38 percent. The long nightmare of the monster with the Disney smile was about to be over. Michael Dukakis, whoever he was, had the simple task of being better than Ronald Reagan.

  The era of Ronald Reagan had been an isolating experience for the neighborhood, watching Reagan go from national joke to popular leader in the rest of the country, while here in the neighborhood his joke status remained. No one in the neighborhood had ever actually met anyone who voted for Reagan, but statistically he was very popular, and the only ones in the country who seemed to still know that he was a joke—except for Reagan himself, who always had a silly smile suggesting the ridiculousness of it all—lived in this part of New York City. But now it was finally over and George Bush was too silly even for the people out in America. To people in the neighborhood, the fact that Dukakis was popular and not Bush was a signal that the madness had passed and it was once again safe to leave the neighborhood. The new, short, dark-eyed president, a Greek, was practically a landsman. Well, that was an exaggeration, but he looked like someone who could have been from the neighborhood. George Bush looked like one of those people who were increasingly venturing down for a quick "Friday night in the East Village," whose children might buy apartments in the neighborhood, the smarts.

  When the votes were counted, it always showed that a few people in the neighborhood had voted Republican. They had voted for Reagan, and now, no doubt, they would vote for Bush. It was a frightening thought that somewhere in these dark-colored brick tenement buildings a few Republicans lived in silence. Though Nathan had spent his entire life in the neighborhood, he had never met any of them.

  The closest Nathan had ever come to meeting a Republican was Mrs. Kleinman, who lived in his building. Mrs. Kleinman had voted for Ronald Reagan because she believed Jimmy Carter had mismanaged the postal service. But it was no better under Reagan, and this year she was back to Dukakis.

  Mrs. Kleinman had met a man, a Yiddish-speaking man, at the social agency on Second Street where she worked. He left New York, moved to Boston, and when she received no letters from him, she was convinced that something was wrong with her mail. She would complain regularly to the landlord, who was Nathan's father. "Oh, Mr. Seltzer, have you seen anyone tampering with the mailboxes?"

  "No, everything looks normal," Harry Seltzer would say.

  "I can't understand it. Something must be wrong."

  "Are you missing all of your mail?"

  "Yes, I have not received one piece of mail in weeks. Something is wrong."

  "I'll look into it," Harry would say, and walk away knowing he would receive no rent from Kleinman again this month. Harry owned a lot of property It had belonged to his wife's family and it made very little money.

  "Harry," Ruth would say, "I don't want to knock Socialism, but it would be helpful if we collected rent from the tenants from time to time."

  "We're doing all right," Harry argued.

  "Oboyoboy," Ruth muttered with a sigh.

  "Anyone who heard or saw anything last night on Fifth Street announced the police bullhorn. At the corner was Arnie, at home on his wooden pallet, cuddled up with old blankets he was storing for next winter. He wore a woolen beret, which may have been an homage to either Che Guevara or the international brigades of the Spanish Civil War. But the way he wore it combined with his gaunt appearance made it look more like an homage to Field Marshal Montgomery, except that on it he wore a black-and-white pin that said, VIVA LA HUELGA! from a farmworkers' strike twenty years before on the other side of the continent that he had supported by refusing to eat grapes. Technically, Arnie had been boycotting grapes for two decades, though in recent times he would have had few opportunities to eat grapes unless someone threw some in the garbage. Arnie was in a total boycott these days. He bought nothing. Viva la huelga, the meaning lost in time, had become his greeting.

  "Viva la huelga, friends," Arnie greeted.

  "Viva la huelga to you, Arnie. What are you reading?" Nathan asked with Sarah above him, leaning forward to view the steep drop down to Arnie.

  Arnie turned the thick, curled old paperback to reveal the cover, Dostoyevsky's The idiot. Sitting up on one arm, he explained to Nathan, "I found it on Avenue B," as though Dostoyevsky had a special, different meaning when it came from Avenue B. "Do you think there is such a thing as a purely good man?"

  "Partially good would be a find, wouldn't it? Here's a question for you, Arnie: Why do we kill mice?"

  Arnie looked up with the smile of a man who had just won a contest. "Because we think it is a threat to our property It is all about owning property." He gestured sweepingly around his small wooden pallet stacked with blankets, books, yellowed and wilted copies of the Times, the News, the Post, a few magazines, and a few cans. "I own no property, I have no home to protect, and I kill nothing," he declared triumphantly

  "But what do you do on Saturdays?" Sarah shouted down from above Nathan's head, instantly erasing the victory grin from Arnie's face. Nathan was pleased. He sometimes called Sarah "the Silencer."

  "Why Saturdays, sweetie?" Arnie asked.

  "Because you can watch television on Saturdays. It's allowed. So what do you do?"

  "Hey," said Arnie, "you hear about that guy Rabbinowitz?"

  "Eli? The blintzes guy on Houston?"

  "They just found him." Arnie stopped and looked awkwardly at Sarah. "On the street. From last night."

  "Heart attack?"

  "No, somebody did him."

  "Geez," said Nathan. "Who?"

  "They don't know."

  "Geez."

  "Geez," Sarah repeated. "How did he get lost?"

  Nathan handed a $1 bill down to Arnie. "You ought to lay low today or you will end up questioned by the police."

  "They've already stopped by. That one over there."

  He pointed at a plainclothes officer, thickset and powerfully built. Why did they have plainclothes policemen? The gray suits they wore were as identifiable as uniforms and too hot for summer weather. At least uniformed patrolmen got a lightweight blue uniform, but there was no summer-weight suit for plainclothesmen. It was the time of year that plainclothesmen were beginning to sweat. But this one was different. He had a summer suit, a vanilla-colored linen. And despite this fine summer wear, he still looked like a cop. Maybe that was why most of them didn't bother about their clothes.

  The officer was across the street, questioning the man everyone called Sal A. There were three Sals. They all sold homemade mozzarella and opinions. Sal A was on Avenue A, and he had the smallest shop, furnished with a counter, a cash register, a tub of unsalted mozzarella, a tub of salted mozzarella, a rack of long seeded bread, and a few trays of delicacies he had prepared for the day. Every morning he baked sfogli-atella, and Nathan, who loved sfogliatella, could smell them from his apartment the instant they came out of the oven, the fine leaves of the pastry turned amber and the hot ricotta cheese inside heaving like lungs. But Nathan, now that he was ent
ering his late thirties, had started noticing changes in his body, including two flabby, rounded bulges above the hips on either side. He would lift up his shirt to stare at them in the mirror, trying to push them back in with his hands. But they would balloon back into position. Sarah, noting the morning ritual, had taken to calling the bulges "Daddy's tellas," and Nathan did not need an explanation. It was short for sfogliatella.

  Besides baking his own sfogliatella, Sal A was different from the other two Sals in several other ways. To begin with, his name was Guido, but he called himself Sal when he opened the store because he could see that in this neighborhood Sicilian shops were run by people named Sal. He was soft-spoken and had thick, silver gray hair. The other two Sals always shouted and were desperately and futilely trying to preserve the few remains of their youthful black hair.

  But the other two Sals would have said that the important difference was that they were from Palermo, the tough, crime-ridden Sicilian capital, whereas Sal A was from Catania, the tough, crime-ridden Sicilian second city at the foot of a live volcano.

  "Hey, Joey."

  "Eh, Sal."

  "Eh, Joey, you want some mozzarell'?"

  "No, gazie, I'm working," Joey, the cop in linen, told Sal A as though there were a specific rule about mozzarella while on duty. In fact, he was saving his appetite for Sal First, who had a bigger shop on First Avenue and whose mother made caponata. In Sal As caponata, the eggplant, olives, and capers were turned dark with a little unsweetened cocoa powder, bitter and intoxicating, like coffee. Sal A always sprinkled chopped almonds on top because their whiteness glowed against the dark vegetables. Sal First said that this way of doing caponata was "Spanish" and would not be acceptable in Palermo. That might have been true because the use of chocolate was from Spain, but Sal First's use of the "S" word as a curse seemed to be implying a distasteful Puerto Ricanness, and that was what tilted Joey Parma toward the First Avenue version. But he did dip two thick fingers into an oily tray of Sal As olives.

  "Try one," Sal A said politely as Joey placed the olive in his mouth. "They're oil cured."