Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

“They seem to be fine,” Rebecca said.

“What?”

“The children.”

“Yes,” I said.

The last letter from my mother was waiting for us at the Meurice in Paris. As we stood by the desk, Rebecca read it aloud to me. My mother informed us that Luke had disappeared. My grandfather had hired private detectives, and Uncle Matt had asked all his friends to be on the lookout. “I hope we can find him,” she wrote. “I worry about him, Iggie.” This was the first time she’d called me Iggie in years.

That afternoon, when Rebecca went to have her hair done, I took a taxi into Pigalle and wandered the streets alone, and at last stopped at a small bar, and ordered a double Scotch on the rocks, and sat sipping at it. The girl who took the stool beside me reeked of perfume reminiscent of what Poots had been wearing the night I first sat in with a band and was told to chop off my left hand. “Vous désirez, monsieur?” she asked, and immediately rested her hand on my knee. We chatted for a while, my Santa Lucia French was clumsy, she switched in desperation to English as we settled upon a price.

At the hotel she led me to, she whispered discreetly that the concierge expected a pourboire , and I fumbled in my wallet for the unfamiliar bills, and was not quite certain how much I handed her. In America, I carried only tens, and I took my change in singles, and kept the smaller bills in a separate section of my wallet. There were days when I came home with as much as fifty dollars in singles. Now I blindly paid the concierge, and then the girl, and she led me to a bidet in one corner of the room, where she washed first me and then herself. The bed was narrow and set against the wall. I touched the wall with the spread fingers of my right hand, and realized there was a mirror fastened to it beside the bed. I told the girl I wanted only soixante-neuf . She worked long and hard, she was a thorough professional, but at last she straddled me and brought me to reluctant climax inside her. I was vaguely dissatisfied when she left me on the street outside the hotel. I lifted the lid of my Braille watch. It was still early. Rebecca would be busy at the hairdresser for at least another hour.

I did not know what I wanted.

I wandered through Pigalle again. A breathless voice implored me from a doorway, and I hesitated and then approached. There was the aroma of perfume, the rustle of silk, the click of high heels as the girl shifted her weight. We bargained for several moments until I realized with a shock that I was talking to a man in drag. I backed away in horror. “Mais il y a des filles aussi,” he explained, but I hurried to the curb, and held my cane aloft, and hoped a taxi would stop for me.

We arrived home during the second week in June. The children scrambled out of the house and rushed into our open arms. I held little David close, I stroked his hair.

“Did you have a good time, Daddy?” he asked.

“Yes, we had a marvelous time,” I told him.

My grandfather called that night. He welcomed me home and then told me he had finally heard some word about Luke. According to the detectives, Luke was living in a hotel on the Bowery. I asked my grandfather if he wanted me to go down there, but he assured me this wasn’t necessary.

The next day, he went down alone to talk to Luke, and tried to persude him to come home again.

Luke told him to go to hell.

Rebecca is shrieking, shrieking. I rush out of the studio, I trip on the rough stone steps leading up past the pool to the house, cross the patio, find her screaming still. “What is it?” I ask. “For God’s sake, what is it?”

“Andrew,” she says.

He is moaning near the pile of logs stacked alongside the storage shed. I search his face with my hands. There is an open wound over his left eye. I feel his blood hot and sticky on my fingers. Hysterically, Rebecca tells me he’d been trying to split the logs with an ax when a huge splinter hit him in the face. She goes suddenly limp in my arms and though I try to support her, her dead weight collapses her to the ground. My son is crying in pain now. I rush into the kitchen. Harriet dials the hospital for me, and it is she who drives Andrew and me to Stamford. He is bleeding profusely as she leads us into the emergency room. The doctor takes five stitches over Andrew’s left eye, and bandages it, and asks me if I carry Blue Cross. I can only think what might have happened if this had been Harriet’s day off.

My thirty-seventh birthday fell on a Tuesday. Honest Abe personally went to Harlem to pick up my grandparents, shrugging aside the very idea that I should send a Carey limousine for them. “What’s the matter with an Oldsmobile? An Oldsmobile is no good? An Oldsmobile, if you want to know, is a better car than a Cadillac.”

Abe was performing a familial duty. In October of 1963, we were one big happy family, you see. On Passover that year, my grandfather had read the four questions in the Seder ceremony to my youngest son, David, and if that had not been a fine demonstration of the melting-pot theory, then I have never understood the theory at all. (I sometimes think I never have.) From the page printed in English, my grandfather had read (quite dramatically, in fact), “Why issa this night of a Passove differ from all the odder nights of a year?”

And David, reading from the Hebrew side of the page, had answered, “She-b’chol ha-lay-los o-noo och-leen cho-maytz u ma-tzoh, ha-lai-loh ha-zeh ku-lo ma-tzoh,” and so on.

Even Honest Abe laughed.

The quintet was between engagements on my birthday. That is not a euphemism. My career did not take its nose dive till 1965, and I owe its longevity to the boys in Detroit. News of my “accident” had made modest headlines in most of the country’s newspapers, and I’m sure the public’s curiosity (“Is his hand all gnarled, or what ?”) accounted for the increased attendance wherever we played, and extended a career that should have ended in 1962, just as Biff had prophesied. Five, six years, he had said. Seven the most. By 1962, the rock shlocks were already making inroads. By 1964, when the Beatles made it all respectable with their film A Hard Day’s Night, jazz musicians, with a few rare exceptions, had all but had it. Listen, who can kick? I got ten years out of it. Remind me to send the boys in Detroit a bunch of roses. Or a case of crabs.

We sat around the rosewood dining room table in the house on top of the hill. My grandfather, as befitted a patriarch, sat at the head of the table, though he knew, as I knew, that he was no longer the patriarch; his own family was scattered to the four winds, Dominick in Brooklyn, Cristie in Massapequa, my mother on the Grand Concourse, and Luke only Christ knew where. With neither pomp nor ceremony, my grandfather had passed the scepter on to me, ignoring those next in the line of succession. His son-in-law, Jimmy, was affable but ineffectual. His eldest daughter Stella, was formidable (especially during inquisitions) but nonetheless a woman; he was Italian, you know, though by 1963 he had been a citizen of these United States for eighteen years. I was now the actual if not the titular head of the family, and though my grandfather occupied that chair at the head of the table, not a soul sitting around it doubted that we were here to honor the reigning potentate. Rotating clockwise from where my grandfather sat with his back to the draped sliding Thermopane doors, my kinsmen, my compaesani , my landsleite , and my devoted followers were:

1. Davina Baumgarten Lewis, blond and beautiful, thirty-one years old, who was wearing (according to the testimony of Reliable Rebecca, her doting sister) “a green jersey dress slit to her navel.”