Evan Hunter: Streets of Gold

My grandfather came out of the anesthesia at twenty minutes to nine. He was groggy, but he recognized my mother, and said to her, “Madonna, che mal di testa!” and then drifted off to sleep again. He awakened again at nine-fifteen. My mother, my father, and I were still in the room with him. We asked him how he felt. He told us he still had a headache, and then asked if he could have a cigar. The nurse told him no cigars, not yet. He chatted with us for about ten minutes, and then seemed to drift off to sleep again. At twenty minutes to ten, he began talking incoherently. The nurse summoned the doctor on duty, who recognized immediately that my grandfather was in a semicomatose state. The doctor could not say whether his condition was a reaction to the trauma of surgery, or whether internal oozing had started again. My grandfather’s vital signs were perfectly normal. There was nothing they could do but watch him very carefully. At ten minutes to ten, the doctor and my parents left the room, and I took up my vigil beside my grandfather’s bed.

A great many people came into that room during the next fourteen hours. Some of them were real. Some of them were ghosts recalled in my grandfather’s rambling narrative. Some of them were conjured by me, as I told him stories I was not quite sure he heard or understood. Some of them rushed only fleetingly through my mind as I listened for his breathing in periods when he was silent.

My three sons came to the hospital. Aunt Cristie and Uncle Matt came to the hospital. Their three children came, too. I hardly recognized their voices anymore; I had not seen them for more than twenty years. Uncle Dominick came in from Brooklyn with his wife Rosie and their married daughter. Aunt Rosie kept asking me if I remembered her sister Tina, and then went on to say she’d married a lawyer, too, and was living in Seattle. I told her I remembered Tina. My grandfather must have known I was sitting beside the bed because he kept addressing me by name as he told me, in scrambled chronological order, all the things he remembered. I don’t think he knew he was dying, but he was summing up his life nonetheless, and trying to make some sense of it. And like a good jazz piano player feeding chords to a horn man, I filled the silences with reminiscences and thoughts of my own, and tried to sum up my life as well — and make some sense of it. My grandfather kept wondering aloud where Pino or Angelina or Aunt Bianca or Umberto the tailor or Grandma Tess or his sister Maria were. He was waiting for dead people to come to the hospital to visit him.

I kept expecting Rebecca to show up. I don’t know why I expected her to show up.

I guess he expected her, too.

At one point, in the middle of the story he was telling me or telling himself about the day he had met Grandma Tess, he suddenly said, “Rebecca? Dov’è Rebecca?” and I told him again we were divorced now, Grandpa, we had been divorced since 1972, when an Italian boy had gone down to Haiti to sever all ties with a Jewish girl, and he said, “Ah, Ignazio, che peccato, ” and then went on to describe the girl coming to him across a picnic lawn, the girl with hazel eyes and chestnut hair.

And again, when he was recalling the day he had marched into Honest Abe’s showroom to extend his personal welcome to the family, he interrupted his wandering narrative to say, “Ma dov’è Rebecca. She no comesa?” and then immediately asked, “Where’sa Abe-a Baumgart?” And I thought of the last conversation I had ever had with the Mad Oldsmobile Dealer, in September of 1970, three weeks after I’d left Rebecca. He called me from Miami, and I picked up the telephone in the living room of the house I had rented on the water in Rowayton, and he said, “What’s this I hear about you and Rebecca?”

“I don’t know what you’ve heard,” I said. I had told Rebecca to keep the news of our separation secret until Andrew got back from India; a cable had informed us he was in Amsterdam, and we’d assumed he was on the way home. Now Honest Abe was on the phone.

“I heard you left her,” he said.

“That’s true,” I said.

“You want my advice?”

“What’s your advice?”

“Go back to her on your hands and knees, and kiss her ass. That’s my advice.”

I told my grandfather now, told him in a lull during his own untiring monologue, still not certain that he was hearing anything I said, told him I might have done just that, might have crawled back to her on my hands and knees and kissed her ass, if only Rebecca hadn’t been so willing to forgive even what had happened with Davina. Grandpa, I said, I know what I did was terrible, but was it any worse than what I’d been doing all along? The first time I went to bed with another woman, forgive me, Grandpa, was in Malibu in 1960, she wouldn’t take off the tiny gold cross a lover had given her, I couldn’t understand it, forgive me, please. She told me I just missed looking shabby, and I laughed, and then in bed she wouldn’t take off a crucifix I couldn’t even see. Ah, Grandpa, that was the true death, the rest was only cremation. If I’d had the courage then, I would have told Rebecca about that woman whose name I can’t remember, all I can remember is the crucifix, the way I told her about Davina ten years later. Christ. Ten years! Ten years of living a lie.

“Are you crazy?” my mother had asked on the telephone when I broke the news to her. “What do you mean, you’ve left Rebecca? Are you crazy? Jimmy, do you hear this? Did he tell you this? Are you crazy, Ike? You have everything! ” she shouted, and she began to cry.

“Grandpa,” I said, “everything was a lie.”

He began talking again, he was telling me now of what had happened when he and the men walked into Charlie Shoe’s shop, and I thought of that day in the Catskills, the day of my belated confession, thought of having told Rebecca I did not love her, thought I loved her still and loved the memory of what we once had been. And she suggested as she wept that perhaps we could make some sort of arrangement, lots of married people had different kinds of arrangements — but what the hell were we living already, if not an arrangement? Could I allow her to forgive me forever, until one day I took between my hands an actual stiletto, no symbolic phallus plunging deep inside a weak and willing sister, but an actual honed piece of steel, and plunged it into her breast and ended it that way? I did not want forgiveness from her, I did not want absolution, I wanted freedom. I wanted myself back, whoever that person was in the year 1970.

“I am thirta-four years old,” my grandfather was saying, “it is enough. I promise you, Ignazio, this time I go home because I have been no more I wish to have this terrible things that happen, where in Italy, no, it does not, I will go home, I will tell Tessie, I will tell you grandma, I will say no , Tessie, we go home, you hear me, Tessie, I take you home now, I leave here, this place, we go home now , we go .”

And then, abruptly, he began laughing and told me about the time the barrel of wine broke in the front room, and I fell silent with my own thoughts again, and only half listened; I had heard this story before, I had heard it as a child when I was growing up and learning to be an American. I had learned quite well. On the telephone last December, Rebecca had said to me, “I don’t care if the children spend Christmas with you. Christmas is yours.”

Ah. And I had thought it was ours.

I had thought, in my silly sentimental notion of us and America, that everything was ours to share together. I had thought the gold in the streets was there for all of us to pick up, to pulverize, to toss over our shoulders like magic dust so that we could soar up over the tenements — Christ, her voice on that Pass-A-Grille beach as she read Peter Pan aloud to my sons, that Jewgirl voice I had first heard in a smoky toilet on Staten Island, and can still hear now in the dead of night when I awaken with a start and stare sightlessly into my bedroom and hear below the murmur of water against the rotting pilings of the old house.