dealt with his mounting anxiety as his father might have, by goofing around. He peered out the window, raised his finger and shouted: ‘There! There! It’s coming out, it’s spouting out! The pollute is coming to get us!’
If Addie could have smacked him she would; instead she punched Ben, who was giggling away.
‘Both of you shut up. It’s not funny!’
There was moisture! Everywhere the walls were wet, drops ran down them. Addie hunched down in her seat and held her breath, Becca began to cry. Your lungs would fill with water, you wouldn’t be able to breathe.
Ben tried to explain once again. Outside the walls was dirt, not water. It went under the riverbed, not through the river itself.
That was pretty stupid.
Ben resumed humming his arias, to soothe them. When they emerged on the other side and began making their way crosstown to the Queens Midtown Tunnel, Addie said she’d had enough and threatened to get out at the next red light. They should go uptown, she said, and take the Triborough Bridge. She trusted bridges: the water couldn’t sneak up on you.
She was rather surprised when Ben refused.
‘It will take an extra hour almost,’ he said. ‘It’s a schlep, you’re going in the wrong direction! And you’ve already done the hard bit: the East River is drek compared to the Hudson, you can get right under it in a minute!’
Addie looked at the children, who nodded weakly, accepting their fates.
‘OK . . .’ she said.
‘Anyway,’ said Ben, ‘if we drown I will take full responsibility.’
Becca put her hands over her ears, closed her eyes and hid on the floor.
Though a man’s man in most respects, Maurice was genuinely interested in women’s clothes, kept abreast of fashion, studied the designs of Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli – none of your American schmatas – and instructed his designers and fabricators to make inexpensive versions of haute couture classics, strong on style and low on quality. He talked fashion with the girls, and unlike his fellows was more interested in getting them into clothes than out of them.
He made a great market for Chanel-style clothes (with Chanel labels!) which he produced off site and off the books. He was a fashion bootlegger, and patrolled the clubs and bars stealthily, insinuating himself into conversations and cliques, making his market. The girls loved him, and they loved his clothes, so airy, so dreamy, so light, they made you feel free. To be, to move, to dance: thanks to Morrie! He hugged them, took their cash, watched their tuchuses sway and their bubbies bounce, freed from the constraints of stays, heavy bras, girdles, garters, their bodies released, no dread demarcation of top, waist, bottom, just one organic unit, freed at last.
There was less to the new dresses than met the eye: they may have been sheer and free-flowing, nothing to them at all, but they were lies, like their owners. Sheer fabrications, he would joke, but nobody ever got it. His bootlegged versions never looked quite the real thing. But their new owners weren’t the real thing either, it was a fair deal, everyone gained, especially Morrie.
He talked about fashion with such enthusiasm that some of the girls supposed him a homosexual. In fact, he cared about flapper’s finery as much as he cared about pogo sticks or flyswatters. If he’d been selling either he would have done so just as knowledgeably and enthusiastically, citing statistics about jumpability and squashability, producing references from satisfied customers. Two feet in the air! Dead flies galore! His enthusiasm was for the process, not the product.
He was always paid in cash. He believed in paying tax – the country needed schools and roads and hospitals – but you could take such rectitude to excess. He got away with it. It was the gangsters and bootleggers who attracted the eyes of the IRS – tax evasion brought down Al Capone, you can steal and murder your heart out, but the government has to get a cut – and no one was going to enquire about Maurice Kaufmann and his little sideline.
It saw him through the Depression. When he later bought the bungalow in 1939, he pretended to Perle that it was going to be a stretch. He’d have to work extra hours, burn some midnight oil drumming up business. In fact, he paid cash and spent those extra days and nights on the town, anxious for the next drink, and deal.
He met some swell people. Babe Ruth was round town most evenings during the home stands, tanked up, surrounded by well-wishers and floozies, heedless, with a talent so immense that even a man of his indiscriminate appetites couldn’t abuse it. Maurice spent some evenings in his company, even got in a few words one night at the Cotton Club with the Bambino, who never had much to say for himself: ‘Hey, kiddo, good to see ya, have a drink!’ He was an immortal, but Maurice soon left him to his whores and sycophants. The Babe. Perfect! He was a big baby.
Maurice had a hero amongst those Yankees, but it was the catcher, Wally Schang. He wasn’t a big shot, you didn’t see him drunk and surrounded by girls. You could learn a lot watching him. Sure, he made some errors, but he had a great arm and called a shrewd game. Maurice would sit in a box behind home plate, head cradled in his hands intently, eyes fixed on good old Wally.
Maurice was a catcher too, a good sandlot player, squat and durable, with a reliable glove and a quick arm, a decent hitter, though ponderous round the bases. His teammates called him Sparkplug after the horse in that catchy song that Eddie Cantor sang. ‘Barney Google’. It was one of those darn tunes you couldn’t get out of your head.
He would be humming it as he reversed the car down the drive, jaunty, already in city mode, remembering his youth. His own man. Sparkplug! Sparkplugs got things started, were the basis of the power to come. And he was faster than a lot of them gave him credit for!
In the car, things went fast, then slow. Not because of the traffic but because of the odd paradoxes of time – time passing quickly and sluggishly, time enjoyed and time dreaded. Addie was no philosopher, she rather despised abstract thought, but there was something fascinating and frustrating about their ride. At first with the kids asleep, as she nodded off with her head against the window, time seemed hardly to exist, the first three hours passed in a jiffy, pleasingly enough so that her bad mood was threatening to evaporate. She could sense a feeling of well-being coming on, tried to stifle it – what did she have to feel good about? – yawned, collected herself.
As soon as the kids were awake any lifting of her bad mood was impossible; she felt worse for having felt better. The ceaseless fidgeting in the back seat was intolerable, the whinging, arguing, the inanity. Children! What a lot of crap they talked, with their Howdy Doodys and Mickey Vernons, how self-referring, how needy of attention they were!
‘If you two don’t sit still and shut up,’ she said firmly, ‘there’s going to be trouble!’
‘What trouble, Addie?’ asked Jake slyly. ‘You going to confiscate our jellybeans?’ He felt invulnerable in the back seat, well provisioned, territorially secure.
‘Yeah,’ added Becca, catching the drift without knowing what confiscating consisted of but aware that jellybeans could be problematic. ‘What sort of trouble?’
Perle watched Maurice reverse down the drive, waved a limp hand and turned back to the front door. Hers was not a marriage in which she was in the back seat, she was lucky to get in the car at all. Maurice chose the cars, paid for them, polished them over the weekends. He only bought Cadillacs (used), the present incarnation (Ben made that into a pun: that was where Morrie lived!)
