Streets of Gold (32 page)

The thing that interested me most about Susan’s autobiographical meanderings as we meandered the length of the gymnasium and back again in time to Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” (which I’d heard on one of my brother’s Duke records as “Never No Lament,” before lyrics were added to it) was the incidental information it provided on her mother’s occupation and hours of employment. Her mother had never remarried, and she now worked as a saleslady at Macy’s downtown. Normally, she worked only five days a week, Monday to Friday, from 9:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M., except on Thursdays, when the store was open till 9:00 P.M. But Thanksgiving had come and gone, and the annual Christmas rush was on, despite the fact that a war was raging in Europe and the Pacific, and her mother had been asked to work a full day on Saturdays as well, until the holidays were over. Counting off a steady four/four beat, shuffling around the gym floor, sniffing in Susan’s
Je Reviens
and pressing against her as discreetly as I knew how, I made a lightning calculation: on Saturdays her father was in Germany, her mother was in Macy’s, and her brother was on a censored atoll. This meant that Susan would be alone in the Koenig apartment any Saturday I decided to drop by to discuss jazz and the weather while inadvertently and accidentally taking off her pants. This was a discovery of no small importance to a seventeen-year-old blind boy. For whereas normally sighted youngsters of my age were being granted licenses to drive in 1943, and thereby had access to mobile bedrooms, we underprivileged blind adolescents, possessed of the same overriding sex drives, could find no appropriate spaces for the unleashing of those furious urges, it being December and quite cold in Bronx Park, where if you took down a girl’s drawers, she might suffer frostbite rather than defloration.

Two weeks after the Friday dance at which I’d learned that Susan was alone in the apartment virtually all day every Saturday, I found my way to White Plains Avenue and asked a mailbox whether the approaching trolley went all the way to Mount Vernon or stopped at the Bronx border, as many of them did; Susan lived just a block over the city line. The mailbox turned out to be a short, fat lady, who told me it did indeed go all the way. Determined to do the same, I hopped onto the trolley and rode it uptown, and then walked down the short street to Susan’s block, and found Susan’s address with a little help from a kindly neighborhood yenteh who led me into the lobby of the building, and summoned the elevator for me, and told me it was the fourth floor, and wanted to know if she should come up with me and show me the exact door; little did
she
know what was on the mind of the Mad Blind Rapist, Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo!

“Who is it?” Susan asked when I knocked on the door.

“Me,” I said.

“Iggie?” she asked, recognizing my voice at once.

It was exactly twelve noon.

I lost my virginity an hour later.

I started by telling Susan I just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in. This was an outrageous lie that might have been swallowed had Susan herself not been blind. Being blind, she knew that none of us just
happened
to be
anyplace
. We took ourselves where we wanted to go, and normally we prepared ourselves in advance with detailed mental maps of the exact transportation systems we would use, and the exact number of streets we would traverse after we got off a trolley, train, or bus, and the exact number of doorways to the dentist’s or the fishmonger’s. (Actually, we could
smell
the fish store and didn’t have to count doorways.)

But she let the he pass, which I thought was an encouraging sign, and she told me she was delighted I’d dropped in, or stopped by, or whatever it was she said, because she found it terribly lonely sitting here all alone in the apartment from eight in the morning when her mother left to sometimes nine or ten at night when her mother got home. It was so cold this month that she hardly went outdoors anymore, and just sitting here listening to the radio or reading Braille got terribly boring, though now that her brother was gone and there was no one to help her with the selection of her clothes, she had begun occupying herself by marking them according to color and style, using little French knots on the red dresses and sweaters, or cross stitches on the blue ones, or a single bead sewn into a green skirt, where it wouldn’t show when she was wearing it, and hanging color-coordinated belts with their proper skirts, and making little Braille labels for drawers containing different shades of nylon stockings or different-colored panties and brassieres. I cleared my throat at the very mention of these unmentionables, and said that I myself paid little attention to my appearance, sometimes going to school wearing different-colored socks, or a green tie with a blue suit, or black shoes with tan trousers. My mother kept telling me I looked like Coxey’s army, whatever that was. Susan giggled. She didn’t know what Coxey’s army was, either, but it sounded very funny. She told me it was different for a girl, a girl had to look attractive even if she
was
blind, and I told her 
I
thought she looked very attractive, and she said Why, thank you Iggie.

Blind people, if you haven’t realized it by now, accept the words “see” and “look” without any feelings of self-consciousness or embarrassment except when some well-meaning dope says, “Just
look
at that rain, will you?” and then immediately and fumblingly adds, “Oh, for
give
me, please, I should have realized you can’t... I mean, I
know
I shouldn’t have... that is, I meant...” as if we hadn’t heard the rain, and smelled the sudden scent of dust riddled on a summer street, as if we hadn’t
seen
the goddamn rain. Susan said if I was truly serious about becoming a jazz piano player (and I assured her I was), well, then, wouldn’t that mean I’d have to perform before audiences? Sighted audiences? So maybe I
should
begin paying a little attention to the way I dressed, because whereas a suit with an egg stain on it didn’t mean very much to
us
, it did offend people who could see, and evoked the sort of pity none of us encouraged and all of us resented.

I told her maybe she was right (actually I did nothing at all about the way I dressed until Rebecca made it a real issue years later), and since Susan had provided the perfect opportunity for further conversation, having mentioned jazz, I told her about all the exciting discoveries I’d been making, all of which I’m sure thrilled her to the marrow. I had figured out all by myself, for example, that a great many of the songs I was listening to and trying to learn had the identical sequence of chords in the first two bars and that the progression, in the key of C at least, was C six, A minor, D minor, and G seven. Susan would probably recognize these as the underlying chords of “We Want Cantor” — if she tried it she’d see what I meant. Susan tried “We Want Cantor” in her husky, breathless voice, and admitted she’d never realized such an amazing thing about that particular tune. Well, it’s not only
that
tune, I said. Songs like “I Got Rhythm” and “These Foolish Things” (Oh, I
love
that song, Susan said), yes, I said, and “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and dozens of other songs I’d been learning,
all
started with those same chords in the first two bars.

That’s really interesting, Susan said, would you like to see how I’ve arranged my things?

She led me into her bedroom, and told me that because all her bobbysocks were white, she had them all in this drawer here, but when it came to stockings, they were difficult to tell apart because there were her
best
ones, for example, which she wore to the socials on Friday, and her everyday ones for less special occasions like when somebody was coming to the house to visit, and also they came in so many different’ shades (though she tried to buy neutral shades that went with any color), and she usually identified the pairs by tying them together after she’d rinsed them out and let them dry, and immediately putting them into drawers marked with Braille labels — here, Iggie, these are my good stockings, feel them, they’re much better than the ones in the other drawer.

When it came to garter belts, she had only two of them, a white one and a black one, and she identified the white one with a tiny button sewn here near the catch, can you feel it, Iggie? The brassieres were another problem, because if she wore a dark brassiere under a white blouse, it showed through the fabric, and if she wore a white brassiere with a black dress, say, and one of the straps showed, it looked positively horrible. She’d never had any trouble with her clothes when her brother was home because he’d helped her choose colors and styles and was kind enough and honest enough to tell her when something looked dowdy or shabby. Well, as a matter of fact, he’d begun helping her dress when she was eight years old and her father left the family and her mother had to take a job and left for work early each morning. Here’s one of my drawers for panties, she said. These are my favorite ones, they’re a pale blue with lace around the leg holes, can you feel the lace, Iggie? They’re rayon, I don’t usually wear rayon panties for every day, I’ve got a drawer full of cotton panties, those are here, Iggie. Like, for example, when I’m just wearing an old skirt and a blouse, like today, I’ll just wear a half-slip and cotton panties under it, that’s what I’m wearing today. My brother used to kid me a lot about wearing cotton panties, he said only snotnosed little kids wore cotton panties, if I was as grownup as I
thought
I was, I’d be wearing rayon, he always used to kid me that way. Well, I’m sure you’re not interested in my underthings.

We sat on the edge of her bed, and I told Susan I’d known her for, gosh, how many years was it now?

Six, Susan said.

Yeah, six years, I said,
wow
, that’s a long time to know somebody. And whereas I had
some
idea of what she looked like because, you know, we’d talked a lot and all, and naturally I knew a lot of things about her... I’d never in all that time explored her face with my hands, which was possibly the only way I’d ever
really
get to know what she really looked like, ever get to form a mental image to augment the other impressions I’d...

You can touch my face if you like, she said, and very softly added, Iggie.

I touched her face. Gently, lingeringly, with both hands, I touched the wide brow below the delicate hairline, and then gingerly explored the arched eyebrows, and then lifted the dark glasses onto her forehead, away from her sightless eyes, and touched the lids and the lashes, and while the glasses were still raised I touched the bridge of her nose and felt along it to the delicately curved tip, a fine film of perspiration on it, and then moved my hands outward toward her cheekbones, I have freckles, she said, and I answered You never mentioned that, and she murmured Yes. And then I gently lowered the glasses over her eyes again, and ran my hands lightly over her cheeks and the line of her jaw and her chin, and explored her mouth, touched the bow of her upper lip where it curved away from her teeth, and the fleshy lower lip, and then the moist inner membrane as she parted her lips and I said You’re beautiful, Susan.

Sitting on her bed, my hands in my lap again, we began talking about the nuns at school, the ones we particularly loved or despised, and about kids we’d known for God knew how long, and how we would miss them after we graduated next June, though I said it wasn’t necessary to lose track of people you really liked or admired, it would be a shame, for example, if she and 
I
lost contact after we’d known each other such a long time. Susan quickly said Oh,
no
, we mustn’t let
that
happen, and I agreed
No
, we certainly mustn’t, not now that we were really getting to know each other even better. Susan said there were some kids, though, she wouldn’t
mind
seeing the last of. Kids like Donald Hagstrom, who was always using being blind as an excuse to go feeling around, did I know what she meant? No, I said, and Susan said You know, he puts his hands out in front of him and goes feeling around, you know, hoping he’ll, you know, bump up against someone, you know, like in the coat closet or someplace, just feeling
around
, do you understand what I mean, Iggie?

Oh, I said.

He’s done that to me a few times, Susan said. I slapped his face for him one time. I
know
he can tell I’m there, and it’s not only me, it’s lots of the other girls, too, he knows we’re there, he just makes believe he’s groping around, it’s really humiliating and embarrassing. Girls don’t like to be
grabbed
that way, Iggie. I mean, if they’re going to be touched at all, especially there were it’s so personal and private, they want to be touched gently. The way you touched my face. That way.

This way? I asked, and I reached out and touched the soft skin of her neck, and she said Yes, that way, but of course
he
touches lower. Donald, I mean. When he touches. And not as gentle as that. A little lower, though.

Here? I said.

Yes, she said, but you’d better stop, Iggie, because we’re all alone here and my mother won’t be home till very late tonight, so I don’t think you should be doing that, do you?

I guess not, I said.

Though it feels very nice, she said, you have nice hands.

Thank you, I said.

You’re welcome, she said, but please stop, okay? My brother has very gentle hands, too, did I tell you he used to dress me when I was very small? Well, actually, he used to help me dress right until the time he left for the Army. He’d sit right here on the edge of the bed, right where we’re sitting, and I’d be putting on a pair of stockings and fumbling with the damn garters, Iggie, I really don’t think you should be doing that, do you? and he’d say he hoped I wasn’t planning on wearing
those
stockings with the red dress or the green one or whatever it was, he was really very helpful, I miss him a lot.