The Collected Stories (33 page)

The baby was born and named Dennis for his father. Of course his last name was Granofsky because of Alexandra's husband, Granofsky the Communist.

The Lepers, who had changed their name to the Edible Amanita, taped the following song in his tiny honor. It was called “Who? I.”

The lyrics are simple. They are:

Dennis himself sang the solo which was I! I! I! I! in a hoarse enraged prophetic voice. He had been brave to acknowledge the lyrics. After a thirty-eight-hour marathon encounter at his commune, he was asked to leave. The next afternoon he moved to a better brownstone about four blocks away where occasional fatherhood was expected.

On the baby's third birthday, Dennis and the Fair Fields of Corn produced a folk-rock album because that was the new sound and exciting. It was called
For Our Son.
Tuned-in listeners could hear how taps played by the piccolo about forty times a verse flitted in and out of the long dark drumrolls, the ordinary banjo chords, and the fiddle tune which was something but not exactly like “Lullaby and Good Night.”

This song was sung coast to coast and became famous from the dark Maine woods to Texas's shining gulf. It was responsible for a statistical increase in visitors to old-age homes by the apprehensive middle-aged and the astonished young.

A group of mothers from our neighborhood went downtown to the Board of Estimate hearing and sang a song. They had contributed the facts and the tunes, but the idea for that kind of political action came from the clever head of a media man floating on the ebbtide of our Lower West Side culture because of the housing shortage. He was from the far middle plains and loved our well-known tribal organization. He said it was the coming thing. Oh, how he loved our old moldy pot New York.

He was also clean-cut and attractive. For that reason the first mother stood up straight when the clerk called her name. She smiled, said excuse me, jammed past the knees of her neighbors, and walked proudly down the aisle of the hearing room. Then she sang, according to some sad melody learned in her mother's kitchen, the following lament requesting better playground facilities.

She bowed her head and stepped back modestly to allow the recitative for which all the women rose, wherever in the hearing room they happened to be. They said a lovely statement in chorus:

Then she stepped forward once more, embarrassed before the high municipal podiums, and continued to sing:

Raising her arms toward the off-white ceiling of our lovely City Hall, she cried out.

No one on the Board of Estimate, including the mayor, was unimpressed. After the reiteration of the fifth singer, all the officials said so, murmuring ah and oh in a kind of startled arpeggio round lasting maybe three minutes. The comptroller, who was a famous financial nag, said, “Yes yes yes, in this case, yes, a high 16.8 fence can be put up at once, can be expedited, why not …” Then and there, he picked up the phone and called Parks, Traffic and Child Welfare. All were agreeable when they heard his strict voice and temperate language. By noon the next day, the fence was up.

Later that night, an hour or so past moonlight, a young Tactical Patrol Force cop snipped a good-sized hole in the fence for two reasons. His first reason was public: The Big Brothers, a baseball team of young priests who absolutely required exercise, always played at night. They needed entrance and egress. His other reason was personal: There were eleven bats locked up in the locker room. These were, to his little group, an esoteric essential. He, in fact, had already gathered them into his arms like stalks of pussywillow and loaded them into a waiting paddy wagon. He had returned for half a dozen catcher's mitts, when a young woman reporter from the
Lower West Side Sun
noticed him in the locker room.

She asked, because she was trained in the disciplines of curiosity followed by intelligent inquiry, what he was doing there. He replied, “A police force stripped of its power and shorn by vengeful politicians of the respect due it from the citizenry will arm itself as best it can.” He had a copy of Camus's
The Rebel
in his inside pocket which he showed her for identification purposes. He had mild gray eyes, short eyelashes, a smooth and perfect countenance, white gloves of linen, barely smudged, and was able, therefore, while waiting among the basketballs for apprehension by precinct cops, to inject her with two sons, one Irish and one Italian, who sang to her in dialect all her life.

When I went to the playground in the afternoon I met eleven unwed mothers on relief. Only four of them were whores, the rest of them were unwed on principle or because some creep had ditched them.

The babies were all under one year old, very funny and lovable.

When the mothers stuck them in the sandbox, they took up the whole little desert, throwing sand and screeching. A kid with a father at home, acknowledging and willing to support, couldn't get a wet toehold.

How come you're all here? I asked.

By accident, said the first.

A couple of us happened to meet, said the second, liked one another, and introduced friends.

We're like a special-interest group, said a third. That was Janice, a political woman, conscious of power structure and power itself.

A fourth came into the playground with eleven Dixie cups, chocolate and vanilla. She passed them around. What a wonderful calm unity in this group! When I was a mother of babies in this same park, we were not so unified and often quarreled, accusing other children of unhealthy aggression or excessive timidity. He's a ruined wreck, we'd say about some streaky squeaker about two years old. No hope. His eyelids droop. Look how he hangs on to his little armored prick!

Of course, said Janice, if you want to see a beauty, there's Claude, Leni's baby. The doll! said Janice, who had a perfectly good baby of her own in a sling across her chest, asleep in the heat of her protection.

Claude
was
beautiful. He was bouncing on Leni's lap. He was dark brown, though she was white.

Beautiful, I said.

Leni is very unusual, said Janice. She's from Brighton Beach, a street whore, despite her age, weight, and religion.

He's not my baby, said Leni. Some dude owed me and couldn't pay. So he gave me the first little bastard he had. A.D.C. Aid to Dependent Children. Honey, I just stay home now like a mama bear and look at TV. I don't turn a trick a week. He takes all my time, my Claude. Don't you, you little pancake? Eat your ice cream, Claudie, the sun's douchin' it away.

The sixth and seventh unwed mothers were twin sisters who had always dressed alike.

The eighth and ninth were whores and junkies and watched each other's babies when working or flying. They were very handsome dykey women, with other four- and five-year-old children in the child-care center, and their baby girls sat in ribbons and white voile in fine high veneer and chrome imported carriages. They never let the kids play in the sand. They were disgusted to see them get dirty or wet and gave them hell when they did. The girls who were unwed on principle—that included Janice and the twins—considered it rigidity, but not hopeless because of the extenuating environment.

The tenth and eleventh appeared depressed. They'd been ditched and it kept them from total enjoyment of the babies, though they clutched the little butterballs to their hearts or flew into the sandbox at the call of a whimper, hollering, What? What? Who? Who? Who took your shovel? Claude? Leni! Claude!