Snow in August (6 page)

“Whatta you got in your pocket, kid?” he said to Sonny.

“Nothin’, Frankie.”

“You’re lyin’ to me, kid,” he said, turning to Michael. “He’s lyin’, ain’t he? I seen yiz shovel the sidewalk in front of
Joe’s. I seen Joe put somethin’ in this guinea’s hand.” He smiled in a chilly way. “And it set me thinkin’.”

Michael turned away from the slush-eyed gaze. Mister G looked up from his newspaper, peering over his glasses.

“What I’m thinkin’,” Frankie McCarthy said, “is this. I’m thinkin’ you should buy me a soda, kid. And a pack of Luckies too.
I’m thinkin’ you’re a nice, generous kid and would be only too happy to do this for a neighborhood guy just come outta the
snow.”

Mister G cleared his throat.

“Hey, leave the kid alone,” he said in a reasonable voice.

“What?” Frankie McCarthy said. “Wha’d you say?”

“I said leave the kid alone,” Mister G said, annoyed now. “Kid broke his ass shovelin’ snow, let him keep his money.”

“This is none of
your
fuckin’ business, pal.”

“It’s my candy store,” Mister G said. “I don’t like extortion going on in my store.”

“You Jew prick,” Frankie McCarthy said, ignoring Sonny and moving to the counter. “How’d you like me to turn this place into
a fuckin’ parkin’ lot?”

Michael moved away, toward the rear of the store, his back to the pay phone. Something bad is about to happen, he thought.
I wish I could stop it. I wish I was bigger and stronger. I wish I could step over and grab Frankie McCarthy by the neck and
throw him into the goddamned snow. I wish.

Jimmy Kabinsky was near the door now, and Sonny gestured with his head for Michael to follow them out into the snow. Michael
started to ease behind Frankie McCarthy.

“Stay right there, kid,” he said to Michael, his nostrils flaring. “I wanna show you how to deal with a Jew prick like this.”

Mister G slammed the counter. “Don’t you dare call me a Jew prick, you… you Irish son of a bitch!”

Frankie McCarthy exploded. With one hand he swept the tiered rack of candies off the glass-topped counter. Pivoting, he used
the other hand to sweep the cigar boxes onto the floor. Then he stomped on the cigars, his lips curling, the broken tooth
showing. He turned and jerked the comic rack off the wall, littering the floor with
Blue Bolt
and
Sheena
and
Captain Marvel
. He kicked at the comic books, driving them into the air. Michael tried to say a word, but it would not come.

Then Frankie saw Mister G lifting a telephone and he leaped for him, grabbed the phone, and smashed the top of the
counter, splintering the glass. He wasn’t finished. He turned and hammered Mister G with the phone. The eyeglasses dangled
from one ear. Blood spurted from the old man’s nose, and he held his face in pain, hunching before the next blow. Sonny and
Jimmy opened the door and rushed out. The door slammed behind them. Michael didn’t move.

“That’s how you deal with a Jew prick like this,” Frankie McCarthy said, smiling through tight lips.

Then his eyes widened again in a kind of frenzy, and in the tight space behind the counter, he kicked and stomped at the fallen
man, who made small whimpering sounds of futile protest while Frankie screamed: “You cocksucker, you Jew cocksucker! You motherfucker!”
Then Frankie jerked the ornate cash register from its shelf, grunted as he raised it over his head, and hurled it down on
Mister G. The cash drawer sprang open with a jangled sound and change rolled on the wooden floor.

In a calm way, Frankie picked up some bills and change and then turned to Michael.

“You didn’t see a fuckin’ thing, did you, kid?”

Michael said nothing.

“
Did
you?”

Michael shook his head no. Then Frankie McCarthy smiled and reached over for a pack of Lucky Strikes. He hefted them and went
to the door.

“All I wanted from this Jew prick was some cigarettes, for chrissakes.”

He went out, leaving the door open to the cold air. For a long, heart-thumping moment, Michael did not move. He wanted Sonny
and Jimmy to return, to help him decide what to do. They didn’t come back. Slowly, Michael walked around the counter and saw
that Mister G was weeping, his face to the
wall, wet blood on his hands. The cash register lay on its side on the floor beside the scattered pages of the
New York Post
. Mister G’s eyes were shut. The boy touched his elbow.

“Mister G, I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I help you? Maybe—”

Mister G moaned, but did not speak. Michael backed away. Then he took the rabbi’s nickel from his pocket, went to the pay
phone, and dialed the operator for an ambulance.

T
hat evening, as his mother ladled tomato sauce over two bowls of spaghetti, Michael Devlin tried to explain what had happened
in Mister G’s candy store. The words spilled out of him. He described what was said, leaving out the curse words, and the
way Sonny and Jimmy ran outside, and how Frankie McCarthy wrecked the store and tried to destroy Mister G. She smiled thinly
when he told her about calling for an ambulance, but the smile faded when he told her how he ran out of the store, panicky,
afraid the police would think he had something to do with hurting Mister G. Jimmy and Sonny had vanished, he said, but Michael
stood in the doorway of 378 Ellison Avenue and saw the ambulance coming slowly through the boulders of frozen snow, followed
by the first of three police cars. All of them parked far from the doorway of Mister G’s candy store because of the huge piles
of snow. Men came out of Casement’s Bar to watch, and Michael joined them. They smoked and talked about the way this kind
of crap was
ruining the parish, and Michael felt safe in their company. The men wouldn’t let Frankie McCarthy harm him.

Then he saw Mister G’s wife coming along the snow-packed sidewalks from Garibaldi Street, a small, thick woman in overcoat
and boots, with a large bag of groceries in her hands; saw her pause a block away, as she squinted at the ambulance; saw her
suddenly hurrying, slipping and jerking on the packed snow. And then, as Mister G was carried out on a stretcher, the attendants
straining and heaving to lift him over the snowbanks, Michael could hear her scream and saw her run, and the grocery bag fell
from her hands and broke open and cans of Campbell’s soup and a box of Wheaties and two rolls of toilet paper spilled across
the snow.

He told his mother all of that, and she pressed his shoulders to her warm body, then took a small glass from a shelf and poured
herself some of the sweet wine she liked, a dark purple wine called Mogen David.

“Holy God,” she said. “That poor woman. That poor man.”

Michael did not tell her about his own confusion.

On the street and in the schoolyard, he’d heard all the stories about Jews being greedy and sneaky Christ-killers. But when
this man, this Jew, poor Mister G, had been beaten so savagely, Michael had felt no elation. If Jews were bad, then Frankie
McCarthy should be a hero. But in that candy store, it was Mister G who had spoken up to defend Sonny. And in return Frankie
had been as scary and vicious as any gangster, while Sonny ran away. Michael struggled with that confusion. He also couldn’t
express his own fear, the shameful cowardice that had stopped him from trying to help the old man. He could not get around
one awful fact: while Frankie McCarthy was battering Mister G, Michael said and did nothing. Sonny
ran; he thought, but I froze. And when it was over, and Mister G lay bleeding, and Frankie had told me to forget what I’d
seen, I just nodded my head.

“He’s a bad fella, that McCarthy,” Michael’s mother said. “He comes from bad people and he’ll end up in the gutter.”

“I think he’s a little crazy, Mom.”

“He might be,” she said. “Stay away from him.”

“But why would he
do
it?” the boy asked. “Why would he hurt Mister G so
badly
?”

“Bad people do bad things,” she said, curling her spaghetti on a fork, using a large spoon to control it.

“Was it because Mister G is a Jew?”

“I hope not.” She paused. “But from what you say, son, it sounds like that was part of it.”

She talked about Hitler then, and how he hated Jews so much he killed millions of them. The Nazis were crazy Jew-haters, she
said, and before they were finished, millions of other people were dead too. Not just the Jews.

“But
why
did they hate Jews?” Michael said.

“Och, Michael, most of it’s plain old jealousy, if you ask me,” she said, taking a sip of wine. “They’ll give you a lot of
malarkey about killing Jesus and all that, but the same idjits don’t even go to church. Hitler didn’t go to church. Neither
does Frankie McCarthy, I’d bet.” She paused, picking her words carefully. “The Jews get educated, that’s one thing. Maybe
that’s what makes ignorant people so mad at them. Their kids do their homework. They go to college. A lot of them, their people
came here without a word of English and they ended up doctors and lawyers. I wish to God our people would do that.”

“I heard Mister G has three sons in college,” Michael said. “You know, the ones who work in the store in the summer?”

“There you go,” she said. “You’ll never hear about any of the McCarthy’s going to college. They’re a worthless lot.” She looked
at him. “Don’t, for God’s sake, be like them.”

They finished the spaghetti. His mother sipped the last of the wine, then rose, took the plates, and laid them in the sink.
In a quick, busy way, she fixed tea, with milk and sugar, and some Social Tea cookies, humming an Irish tune that he didn’t
know. Michael thought she looked relieved to be finished with the discussion about Jews and what had happened to Mister G
and he did not go on with it, even though pieces of the scene in the candy store still scribbled through his mind. When she
asked Michael what else his friends were talking about, besides the blizzard, he was relieved too. The subject was all too
confusing and scary. He mentioned that the Dodgers were thinking about bringing up a minor league player named Jackie Robinson,
who was colored. But everybody down on the avenue said he could never make it in the major leagues.

“They say colored players aren’t as good as white players,” the boy said. “They don’t work as hard, or something.”

His mother knew little about baseball; she glanced at the photograph of Private Tommy Devlin as if wishing he were there to
talk to Michael.

“Well, they wouldn’t be giving him a chance,” she said, “if he didn’t work hard to get it.” She sipped her tea and restrained
him from dunking his biscuit into his own cup. “You can be sure he wasn’t standing on some street corner, making remarks,
when they signed him up.”

They did the dishes together, her face very tired. As Michael dried the plates and glasses, and stacked them in the cabinet,
she walked slowly into the living room. For weeks, she had been reading a fat book by a writer named A. J. Cronin, and when
Michael was finished with the dishes he followed her into
the living room. She was sitting in a large gray armchair with a standing lamp beside it, lost in the book. The kerosene heater
made the room feel hot and close. The windows were opaque and filmy. Michael drew faces in the steam with his fingers and
stared down at the snow-packed streets and wished she would tell him some Irish stories, the way she did when he was small.

Those stories were even better than the comics, better than the books at the library on Garibaldi Street. Magical tales of
Finn MacCool, the great Irish warrior, who in the midst of some bloody battle had reached down, grabbed at a hill with one
mighty hand, and heaved it at his enemy. Finn was so big and powerful and the hunk of earth so gigantic that when it landed
in the Irish Sea it became an island, the one now known as the Isle of Man. Or Usheen, his son, who followed a woman with
golden hair to the Land of Youth, where he lived for three hundred years, never growing old, until at last he grew homesick
for Ireland. He was told that his white horse knew the way home but if he once dismounted, he could never return. Trying to
save some poor men who were about to die under the weight of an immense flagstone, he fell from the horse and instantly became
a withered, blind old man. It was like that movie he’d seen at the Venus,
Lost Horizon
, where everybody lived in a valley called Shangri-La and stayed young forever but got old if they left.

Or she could tell him again the story of Balor, who had an evil eye so huge that it required eight men to pry it open; when
it was open the eye paralyzed every enemy warrior who dared to gaze upon it. If Balor had only been at Mister G’s, he could
have paralyzed that goddamned Frankie McCarthy. And Finn MacCool could have thrown him to New Jersey. When Michael was five
and six and learning to read, his mother told him of giant pots in ancient Ireland where the food was never
exhausted, of silver trees with golden apples glistening in the sun, of spells cast by wizards that made men sleep for forty
years, of magical swords that always found the enemy’s neck, of rainstorms turned into fire by druids and women transformed
into mice, mice into warriors. There was a magic cauldron, found in a lake, into which dead warriors could be plunged to emerge
alive, though unable to speak. Or she told tales of the great CúChulainn, who had seven pupils in each eye and seven fingers
on each hand and seven toes on each foot and had the power to move one eye to the back of his head to watch his enemies. Or
she told him about the great bull of Cooley that could carry fifty boys upon its back. All of this in Ireland, where she came
from, across the foggy seas.

But Kate Devlin was tired now, her shoes off, her feet swollen and sore. He tried to remember whether his mother was there
when his father told his stories of Sticky, the magic dog. No. We were in the park. It was summer. On a bench. He saw his
mother nod and then snap suddenly awake. She looked at him and smiled.

“Was I asleep a long time?” she asked.

“Maybe ten seconds,” he said.