Эд Макбейн - Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories

Our apartment in Finley Hall was at the end of a long corridor on the fourth floor. The original hospital rooms had been revamped so that there were five apartments on each floor, the apartments varying in size according to the families occupying them. The smallest apartment on each floor was a single rectangular room that had once been the old hospital elevator shaft. On our floor it was shared by Peter, who was a dental student, and his wife Gerry, who listened to the radio wearing earphones so as not to disturb her husband while he studied.

Our own apartment was slightly larger than the converted elevator shaft. It consisted of two rooms and a John. The door opened on an enormous living room-dining room-kitchen combined, with windows facing the river north and south. Joan and I slept in the living room on a bed that doubled as a sofa during the day. The other room was smaller, with windows facing the river on the west, and Timmy — our newborn son — slept in that room. The bathroom was tacked onto one end of Timmy’s room. We decorated the bathroom with covers from Collier’s Magazine pasted to the wallboard, even though someone told us we’d lose our original security deposit if we papered the walls. But aside from this single effort, there wasn’t much else we could do to improve the apartment. It had been hastily reconstructed in a time when new housing was practically nonexistent in New York. The paint was thin; the plasterboard showed through in uneven patches, and even the nails holding plasterboard to stud were clearly visible. The floors were presumably the original asphalt tile that had run through the old hospital. You could still see marks on the tile where entire walls had been ripped out in the transformation. The river moisture kept the apartment constantly damp, and the closed cupboards over the sink were a haven for cockroaches, no matter how many forays Joan and I made into their territory with insecticide powders and sprays. The view was magnificent, of course, and perhaps if we’d had any money we could have framed the view elegantly. But we were students living on my G.I. allotment and on what Joan and I could earn with part-time jobs. Joan had dropped out of school just before Timmy was born, and I was in my senior year and working after school each day at the World Student Service Fund on West Fortieth Street and on Sundays at the Y as a counselor. On Saturdays, Joan went to her job in the music department at Macy’s while I stayed home to wash and wax the old asphalt-tile floor, change Timmy’s diapers, and continue my sworn and unceasing guerrilla warfare against the goddamn cockroaches. Joan had been a music major at Hunter College, which is how she’d got the job at Macy’s. We’d been engaged for two years when we heard about North Brother Island and decided to get married immediately. I guess we’d both thought of marriage as having friends in for coffee, or of putting our laundry into a washing machine together, or of planning menus for the week. At least, our idea was to continue living in McCloskey Hall until we were both graduated and then go to Paris for a year where I would learn to write and Joan would continue with her studies at the Conservatory or someplace. But we were married in October, and on New Year’s Eve of that first year on the island Timmy was conceived. And suddenly we were married in earnest and not on an extended honeymoon, and shortly after that we were parents to boot. It was our second New Year’s Eve on the island, when we were living in Finley, that the thing happened with Herbie.

In a sense, despite our new responsibilities, our stay on the island was an extended honeymoon. We were surrounded by students or recent graduates who were just as broke as we were. The island was reached by a ferryboat that shuttled back and forth at unpredictable times, often carrying handcuffed convicts to Riker’s Island as its second stop. There were hardly any automobiles on the island; you could walk from one end of it to the other in less than five minutes. On a still autumn night, even after Timmy was born, we would go outside with other married college students and play charades or even hide-and-seek. The island was peacefully quiet, and you could hear a baby if he so much as turned in his crib. On Sunday nights they would show old movies in the rec hall, stuff like Citizen Kane and Pinocchio and The Philadelphia Story. Admission was twenty-five cents a head, and Joan and I would take turns running up to check on Timmy every time the projectionist stopped to change a reel, unless we’d arranged for Peter and Gerry to look in on him. We used to keep our money in a little tin box divided into compartments, so much a week for rent, so much for transportation, so much for entertainment. I can remember a night when Joan wept herself to sleep because she’d backed a straight flush in a poker game and lost our three-dollar entertainment allotment to someone with a royal flush. The island was literally an island, but it was also a figurative never-never land that was a part of the city and yet removed from it. It was, in a sense, a country club for paupers.

Herbie moved into the apartment alongside ours just before Christmas. His wife’s name was Shirley, and they had a son and a daughter, both under three years of age. Herbie was studying to be a television repairman. It is perhaps difficult to imagine snobbery among paupers, but the old-timers on the island strongly resented the new rules that allowed the admission of men going to upholstery schools, or television-repair schools, or even barbers’ colleges. Many of the old island residents were men and women working for their master’s degrees; some were going for their doctorates; most considered it beneath the dignity of the island to accept people who were not, by their standards, bona fide students. I wish I could say that Joan and I were unaffected by such petty considerations, but the truth is we felt as put upon as any of the others. The island was our neighborhood, our private retreat from the city. And now our neighborhood was getting run-down. We discussed it with our friends often and vehemently, and when Herbie and his wife moved into the apartment alongside ours and across the hall from Peter and Gerry, we unanimously felt there was now more to cope with than the indestructible cockroaches. And yet I don’t think this resentment had anything to do with what happened on New Year’s Eve. Or maybe it did; I simply don’t know. I do know that Joan and I could have continued living on the island for many months after New Year’s Eve and before it was reconverted to a hospital, but we applied for rooms in a city housing project instead. We left the island in March and never again saw any of the people who had been at the party that night.

I don’t remember whose idea the party was. I think it was Jason’s. It seems reasonable to assume this, because most of the ideas in Finley Hall, if not on the entire island, seemed to originate with Jason. I think he mentioned it casually just before Christmas while someone was serving eggnog laced with rum. I think it was only a drunken suggestion at first, “Let’s have a New Year’s Eve party,” and then someone else said, “Why not?” and then Norman picked it up wholeheartedly — but yes, I’m sure the original suggestion was Jason’s. And it must have been in his apartment at the other end of the fourth floor, facing inland, yes, and Mary had just put one of the kids to bed. They had at least a dozen kids in that small apartment. Well, actually they had only three, but even this was considerable when you realized Jason had only been out of Columbia for a year. He’d begun working at an advertising agency almost immediately upon graduation but was still taking some night courses, a dodge many of the married students used to maintain their eligibility for the low-rent island apartments. Mary didn’t look like the mother of three children, or for that matter like the mother of even one child. In fact, Mary seemed to echo the fantasy that was North Brother Island, walking around with a three-year-old by her side, a two-year-old on her hip, and an infant in a carriage, and looking freckled and innocent and virginal in her sloppy sweaters and scuffed loafers, as if she had just wandered out of Julia Richman High School. Joan told me that Mary had called her to the window one afternoon shortly after we’d moved in, when Joan was in her eighth month and as big as a house, and had said, “Joan, will you come down and play with me?” She thought it odd that a woman with three children should be asking another grown woman — we all thought of ourselves as grownups then — to come down and play with her, but it seemed to me thoroughly appropriate for the woman who was married to Jason.