Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

Susan Koenig made me dizzy.

We did not talk very much as we danced our way around the world, preferring to sniff each other and rub against each other, and derive whatever small erotic pleasures we could while the eagle-eyed nuns watched our every fumbling move. But in our brief, breathless conversations over the course of countless Fridays spent in that room lingeringly reeking of dirty socks and jockey shorts, I learned that Susan’s father had been born in Munich, and that he’d gone back there in the fall of 1934 because he wanted to be in on the big resurrection Mr. Hitler was promising. Mrs. Koenig, an Irish-American lady born and raised in Brooklyn, chose not to accompany her brown-shirted mate on his return to the fatherland, and so the two were separated when Susan was eight and her older brother was ten. Her parents were legally divorced in 1938, by which time Herr Koenig was probably smashing the plate-glass windows of Jewish merchants — “Good riddance to him!” Susan said. She had no idea where he was now, and no desire to find out. Her fear, before her brother was drafted, was that he might be sent to Europe, where he would meet his own father on a battlefield and put a bullet between his eyes. Not that she cared about her father. But suppose the reverse happened? The thought had been too dreadful to contemplate, and she’d been enormously relieved when her brother was sent to the Pacific, even though she was terribly afraid of all the awful things the Japs did, like burying prisoners up to their necks in ant hills, and then covering their faces with honey and letting the ants eat them to death — urggh , it was disgusting. She could not wait for her brother to get home from the war. They had had such good times together.

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.