Evan Hunter - The Paper Dragon

"Look it up," Brackman said, and Arthur climbed in and closed the door behind him. "The Helen Hayes Theatre," he said to the cabbie, "Forty-sixth and Broadway."

It had turned into a bleak, forbidding day, the sun all but gone, dank heavy clouds hanging low in the sky and threatening snow. Through the taxi windows, he could see pedestrians rushing past on the sidewalks, hurrying to cross the streets, their heads ducked, their hands clutching coat collars. Behind them and beyond them, the store windows beckoned warmly with holiday tinsel and mistletoe, colored lights and ornaments, wreaths and sprigs of holly. This was only the twelfth of December, with Christmas still almost two weeks away, but the stores have begun preparing for the season long before Thanksgiving, and the city wore a festive look that unified it now as it did each year. He could remember the long walks to the library from his home on 217th Street, the store windows decorated as they were here but with a shabby Bronx look. They had moved to the Bronx when he was twelve years old, the decentralization, was beginning, the second generation was starting its exodus to what then passed for the suburbs. The trip to Grandpa's house each Sunday would be longer and more difficult to make, discouraging frequency, trickling away at last to family gatherings only on holidays or occasional Sundays, disappearing entirely when his grandfather died. The street they moved into was another ghetto, smaller, cleaner, with a rustic country look (or so it seemed after Harlem) trees planted in small rectangular plots of earth dug out of the sidewalk, mostly two-family brick houses, Olinville Junior High School across the street, its fence stretching halfway up the block from Barnes Avenue, they used to play handball in the schoolyard. He tried out for the handball team when he entered high school, but did not make it. He was a good student, though, his marks always up in the eighties and nineties, and an omnivorous reader. He would go to the library on 229th Street and Lowerre Place maybe two or three times a week, even before it got to be a gathering place for the high school crowd.

There was a feeling of prosperity to the new apartment (he recognized now that it was hardly less shabby than the four rooms they'd had in Harlem) with its new furniture and its new linoleum, the three-piece maple set his mother bought for him, with the dresser that had a hidden dropleaf desk full of cubbyholes, and the pink curtains in Julie's room. She was nine at the time, and had already begun to hang all kinds of crazy signs on her door, genius at work and BEWARE VICIOUS DOG, he got such a kick out of her, she was really a great kid. His father had become a "regular" by then, and was working out of the Williamsbridge Post Office on Gun Hill Road. He would set the alarm for four-thirty every morning, waking up the whole damn house, and clamoring for his breakfast, a real ginzo with ginzo ideas about the woman's place and so on. He could have let Mama sleep, instead of making such a big deal about breakfast, racing around the apartment in his long Johns. "There he goes," Julie would yell, "they're off and running at Jamaica," and Arthur would lie in his bed under the quilt Aunt Louise had made for him, and quietly snicker, he sure was a nut, that old man of his.

There was, too, the same feeling of belonging in this new ghetto, though now there weren't aunts and uncles to meet on the street or to drop in on during the afternoon. But there were Italians all up and down he block, half of them barely able to speak English, and there was a funny kind of intimacy, a feeling of safety, an instant understanding that was not present out there in the White Protestant world, though at the time he was not aware such a world even existed. He knew only that he felt comfortable on his own block, with people who were easily recognizable, like the business with all the women named Anna, for example. His mother's name was Anna, but there were also four other women named Anna on the block. So instead of using their last names, which is what any decent New Canaan lady would have done, instead of referring to them as Anna Constantine or Anna Ruggiero or Anna Di Nobili, the women had a shorthand all their own, Naples-inspired he was sure, instant ginzo communication. His mother was Anna the Postman, and the other women were respectively Anna the Plumber, and Anna the Butcher, and Anna the Bricklayer, and also Anna From Wall Street, he smiled even now, thinking of it. But he was comfortable then, comfortable in his growing body, and comfortable in his new home, where in the silence of his bedroom (unless Julie was practicing her flute in her own room next door) he would take the little maple lamp from the dresser top, the lamp shaped like a candlestick with a little shade on it, and he would put the lamp on the floor and play with his soldiers in the circle of light it cast. The dining room table had been sold before they left Harlem, they now had a three-piece living room suite and a big floor radio that looked like a juke box, but there were worlds to discover on his bedroom floor and he searched them out with his faithful Magua and his intrepid Shorty, his imagination looser now, fed by the books he withdrew from the library each week.

Every now and then he would take Julie to the library with him, leaving her in the children's section while he roamed in his mature twelve-year-old masculinity through the adult section, taking a book from a shelf, scanning it, deciding whether or not he wanted to read it. He never bought any books then, and he did not know there was such a thing as the bestseller list of the New York Times Book Review . He had not ever, in fact, even read the New York Times , although kids used to come around to the classrooms selling the Times and also the Trib . He grew up with the News and the Mirror and the Journal-American (he later felt betrayed when even these friendly and well-known newspapers killed his play). He wondered now when he had last gone to see a play that had not received rave notices, when he had last read a book that was not on the bestseller list. It had been much simpler then, the long walk to the library along White Plains Avenue, the library snug and warm, the aroma of books, the feel of them in his hands. And at Christmas, the tree opposite the main desk, decorated with popcorn, the Dickens novels bound in burnished red leather, tooled in gold, spread on the floor beneath the tree, more appropriate at Christmas than at any other time. The librarian was a nice German lady named Miss Goldschmidt. "Merry Christmas, Arthur," she would say. "What are you reading this week?" — the cherished copy of The Talisman with the jacket picture of the knight on horseback, he slid the book across the desk and Miss Goldschmidt beamed approval.

"You sure that's on Forty-sixth?" the cabbie asked.

"I'm sure," Arthur said. There were not too many things he was sure of, but he was dead certain that the Helen Hayes was on Forty-sixth Street because Catchpole had opened at that identical theater when it was still known as the Fulton in 1947, to be mercilessly clobbered by all ten gentlemen of the press the next day — back then, PM , the Mirror , the Sun , and the Brooklyn Eagle also had a say about what would be permitted to survive. He thought it supremely ironic that his new play was holding readings at the same theater, but he fervently wished it would open someplace else, anyplace else, where he would be safe from the evil eye. Evil eye, my ass, he thought, but hadn't his grandfather come to America from an impoverished mountain village called Ruvo del Monte, and wasn't there still enough to this heritage in Arthur to cause suspicion and doubt? In fact, hadn't his Aunt Filomena been hit by the iceman's runaway horse on First Avenue the very night after his mother had dreamt it? Any place but the Fulton, he thought. You can change the name, but the jinx remains. And yet he knew his fears were idiotic, God, look at what the wind was doing out there, papers blowing in the gutter, hats skimming off heads, look at that woman trying to control her skirts, God this was a city, what a city this was.