Marilyn the Wild (11 page)

When soft-spoken men from the District Attorney's office tried to scare information out of him, Philip would bray into the telephone, “I'll talk to Isaac and nobody else.” But Isaac wouldn't come. The Chief had disappeared from Philip's life after a single visit. And Philip was left alone to slink in his kitchen and contemplate the madnesses of his boy.

Philip closed his eyes; he wanted to shake off the briny calculations in his skull. Thinking could ruin him, rub his nose nto the painted squares of a chessboard. He wasn't able to áll the barking outside his door. The moment he surrendered to these noises and slumped against the wall, the barking had definite appeal: it drew him out of the kitchen. The yelps were growing familiar. He pressed his ear to the door.

“Papa, let me in.”

“Rupert?” he said, struggling with the chain guard. Even if Tony Brill were some kind of sound magician, how could he lave known the exact tremors of Rupert's voice? Philip put his hand out the door, clutched a jacket, and hauled Rupert inside. The fat cheeks were gone. Rupert looked emaciated. He wore the jacket of a housing cop. This was his only disguise. With a hard pull, the jacket could have reached to his ankles. Bound in dark, billowing cloth, Rupert had no fists, no throat, no chest. Philip unraveled him. Except for old, disheveled sneakers and pants, he was naked under the jacket, he first manly hairs, almost blond, sprouting over his nipples. A squeal escaped from Philip's throat; his mad love for the boy turned to an incredible rage. He had Rupert's ear in his fingers. He would have gone for a nose. Rupert knocked him down. Philip sat with his knees in his chest. A simple push had stunned him, not a wicked blow.

“Papa, don't touch my ear again. I'm too old for that”

Rupert didn't sneer; he hugged Philip under the arms and straightened Philip's knees. He was delicate with his father, picking him up. Then he walked into the kitchen. Philip had to stare at his back; half of Rupert was inside the refrigerator. He tore into the flesh of a tomato, marking the refrigerator walls with red spit. He swallowed sour pickles. He crammed his face into a container of cottage cheese. Philip was appalled by his son's appetite. He'd never encountered a boy with such greedy jaws. Rupert was all tongue and teeth. Philip had lost his way with him. How could he confront this child of his, who was trying to shove the universe into his mouth?

“Rupert, did you notice a journalist in the hall, a man named Brill?”

Rupert emerged from the refrigerator, cottage cheese falling from his eyebrows. “The fatass in the trench coat? He saluted me.”

“But he saw you standing by the door.”

“So what? What can he do, papa? Let him blab to Isaac. Who gives a shit.”

“Isaac was here,” Philip declared with a pull of his shoulder, as Rupert dove into the cottage cheese again. “I said Isaac was here.”

Rupert mumbled with his lips inside the container.
“
I heard you, papa.” He came up for air, flicking cheese off his nose. “Why did you supply him with pictures of Esther and me?”

“Rupert, he would have torn out the walls. Isaac doesn't give you much room to breathe. But he wants to help.… Rupert, has he done bad things to you?”

“Papa, you're a woodenhead. Isaac's been fucking you blind. You and Mordecai can't stop paying homage to him. He's your king. At least Mordecai gets some satisfaction. He brags about Isaac. He talks about the Jewish god who presides over New York City, the kosher detective who can solve any crime. And you, papa? You eat your liver without saying a word. Where's your terrain? Isaac's left you his droppings. He's made you prince of the Essex Street project. You walk around in your three good shirts wishing you were Isaac.”

“That's crazy,” Philip said. “I don't envy his success.”

Rupert sucked with wolfish teeth. “Success, papa? That's it Success to do what? Blow people away? To prance in front of Puerto Ricans and poor Jews. Isaac shits in peace because he has his worshipers and his props. He can enter any church or playground on both sides of the Bowery and be guaranteed a smile. Even the horseradish man bows to Isaac. Papa, if you could learn to despise him, he'd run uptown with a handkerchief over his ears. He'd disintegrate. He'd cry in Riverdale.”

Rupert scooped up his jacket off the floor and began stuffing the pockets with food. After scavenging his father's refrigerator, he climbed into the jacket and waddled to the door. The pockets hung below his knees.

“I'll hide you,” Philip said. “You can stay here.”

“What happens when Isaac sweeps under the bed?”

“He'll find twenty years of dust, and a few missing pawns.”

“Thanks, papa, but I have to go.” Rupert pulled up his sleeves so he could hug his father. Then he rushed into the hall, jars smacking in his pockets. Tony Brill appeared from behind a fire door. “That's him, Mr. Weil, isn't it? Rupert himself. I can spot a fugitive by his walk.”

Tony Brill didn't go after Rupert. He lunged at Philip's door. Philip locked him out “I can save him, Mr. Weil … trust me.”

Philip returned to the kitchen, ignoring the babble. He was interested in weather reports. Did the television predict snow? Rupert would catch pneumonia in his sneakers. Philip shouldn't have let him out of the house without a proper undershirt. The boy had no mind for cold weather. His thumbs would have to freeze before the idea of frostbite entered his head. How could Philip signal to him? Should he fly scarves from his fire escape? He laughed bitterly at his own incompetence. He had just enough energy in him to become a father. His wife, a Russian girl with handsome bosoms am a fiat behind, stared him in the eye for eleven years and ran away before Rupert was six. Sonia, the Stalinist, must have found other causes than a man who would die for Trotsky and chess and a boy who looked more like her husband than her self. She was supposed to be in Oregon, living with a band of apple pickers, a gray-haired Russian lady.

Philip berated himself. A father should have the right to make a prisoner of his son, if only for a little while. He mean to jab the boy with questions, brutal questions, not a dialecti cal checklist that would give Rupert the chance to invent a shabby scheme, a rationale for frightening old grocers an sending Isaac's mother to Bellevue. But Philip was powerless his own questions would glance off Rupert and bite Philip behind the ears. If Rupert had a dybbuk in him, a demon sucking at his intestines, who put it there? Such a dybbul could only be passed from father to son. The violence Philip had done to his body, the gnawing of his own limbs, the sell lacerations that came a nibble at a time, the rot of living in doors, the poison of chess formulas, degrees of slaughte acted out on a board, the insane fondling of wooden men pawns, bishops, and kings, must have created a horrible scratchy weasel that crept under Rupert's skin, grabbed hi testicles, tightened his guts, and caused conniptions in hi brain. The dybbuk was Philip. No one else.

Rupert was on the run. He had to fight the weight in his pockets, the shifting, sliding bottles and jars, the wind that slapped the enormous collars of the jacket he stole out of a grubby bungalow that belonged to the housing cops. His belly gurgled from the pickles he swallowed in his father's apartment. He couldn't dash across a housing project with burgeoning pockets and also digest pickles and cottage cheese. Hiccoughs broke his miserable stride. He avoided the shoppers huddling out of the bialy factory on Grand Street with their bags of onion bread. They might have recognized him, in spite of his jacket. They would scream, splinter bialys in his face, and call for the big Jewish Chief, Isaac Sidel, or the nearest housing cop. He didn't have the patience to dodge bialys and pick onions out of his eyes. He was going to Esther Rose.

Rupert couldn't grasp all of Esther's fervors. She'd come out of a Yeshiva in Brownsville that would only accept the daughters of the Sephardim of Brooklyn. Stuck in a neighborhood of Puerto Ricans, blacks, and rough Polish Jews, it had gates on every side. The Yeshiva was impregnable. None of the Polish Jews could gain access to its prayer rooms and library. The girls were rushed in through a door in the back. They had little opportunity to examine what existed outside the Yeshiva's front wall. They understood the hypnotic candlepower of a 25-watt bulb. They could feel bannisters in the dark. They had a gift for reciting Ladino, the gibber of medieval Spanish and Hebrew that was used exclusively at this Yeshiva. The Sephardic priests who ran the school took it upon themselves to push every girl towards hysteria. The girls had to consider what worthless creatures they were. They became despondent over the largeness of their nipples, the untoward shape of their breasts, the sign of pubic hair, the bloody spots in their underpants. Nothing on this earth except the lowly female was cursed with a menstrual flow, their teachers advised them. Husbands had already been selected for the girls by a system of bartering inside their families. Only a girl with the resources of her family behind her could command a proper husband, usually twice her age.

Esther was taught the rituals of marriage at the Brownsville school for Sephardic girls, the veils she would wear, the menstrual charts she would keep to warn her husband of the exact days of her impurity. Esther had seven years of this, muttering prayers whenever she touched her nipple or her crotch by accident, dreaming of her life as a workhorse for her future husband and his family, trading pubic hairs with a sinful schoolmate, feeling razors in her womb at the onset of her periods, despising bowel movements, sweat, and the color of her urine. A month before she was scheduled to marry a merchant with hair in his nose, Esther ran away. She drifted through Brooklyn, working for the telephone company. Then she joined the JDL. Her parents, who lived in an enclave of Spagnuolos (Sephardic Jews) between Coney Island and Gravesend, included Esther in their prayers for the dead. They couldn't tolerate the existence of a daughter who would shun a marriage contract to embrace the Jewish Defense League. Zionism meant nothing to Esther's people. Israel was a place for Germans, Russians, and Poles, barbarians to most of the Sephardim, who remembered the kindness of the Moors to Spanish Jews. The ancestors of Esther Rose, mathematicians, prophets, and moneylenders, had flourished under Arabic rule; it was difficult for the south Brooklyn Sephardim to hold a legitimate grudge against Egypt and Saudi Arabia, or the Syrians and Lebanese of Atlantic Avenue.

Rupert first bumped into Esther Rose outside the Russian embassy in Manhattan half a year ago. She was carrying a placard denouncing Soviet intransigence towards the State of Israel. She harassed policemen and the citizens of Fifth Avenue, wearing an old, smelly blouse and a wraparound skirt that exposed her unwashed ankles and knees; she flew at her adversaries with uncombed hair and fingernails that had all the corrugations of a saw. Rupert couldn't take his eyes off Esther Rose. He had never known a girl who lived at such a raw edge. Esther noticed the chubby boy staring at her. She didn't bite his eyebrows. She looked beyond the pedestrian nature of fat cheeks. This wasn't a boy she could frighten with placards or a rough fingernail.

She had coffee egg creams with him at a dump on Third Avenue. He blurted his age: fifteen. She'd picked up a child (Esther was two years away from being twenty). The fat cheeks had an erudition that could touch a Yeshiva girl under her brassiere. This baby talked of Sophocles, Rabbi Akiba, St. Augustine, the Baal Shem, Robespierre, Nikolai Gogol, Hieronymus Bosch, Huey P. Newton, Prince Kropotkin, and Nicodemus of Jerusalem. He had the delirious, twitching eyes of a Sephardic priest, the sour fingers of a virgin boy. She would have climbed under the table with Rupert, licked him with coffee syrup on her tongue. The egg cream must have made him reticent. He was suspicious of lying down in a field of cockroaches and candy wrappers, under the gaze of countermen.

Esther relied on ingenuity. She picked Atlantic Avenue, where she knew of a mattress they could rent by the hour. Rupert wouldn't go. It violated his sense of purity. He brought her to an abandoned building on Norfolk Street. They un dressed in the rubble, Esther's knees sinking through the floorboards. The boy was passionate with her. He fondled Esther with a sly conviction, and soon they were eating dust off one another's body. Esther was a Brooklyn girl. Norfolk Street remained a mystery to her. But she could love a building with missing staircases, rotting walls, and windows blocked with tin. She gave up the question of Palestine for Rupert's sake. She two-timed the JDL, staying near Norfolk Street to become Rupert's permanent “mama.”