Chapter 22

   

 

                "Wake up," Jack said, shaking Maxwell's army, Maxwell blinking as he looked up and found himself day-dreaming at the Greasy Spoon's counter, his cup of coffee already cold. "I know you didn't get enough sleep, but can't you hear the telephone?"

                On the wall across the room full of tables and chairs, the public telephone jangled, an instant sharp voice echoing its complaint, as if Maxwell knew from its ringing that someone important waited on the other end.

                "Are you going to answer it?" Jacked asked. "Or do I have to come around this counter because you're too lazy to..."

                Maxwell rose, stumbling over the legs of the misplaced chairs, staring at the telephone rather than the path, shoving this chair and several more aside before he reached the receiver and silenced its ringing with the jerk.

                "Hello?" he said, half expecting to hear the gruff, pragmatic voice of Mr. Harrison, howling over some discrepancy in the supply order. Instead, he got Patty.

                "So you are there," she said. "Doesn't your friend give you messages? I've been calling all morning and waiting here ever so patiently..."

                "You called before?" Maxwell asked, his voice still heavy with sleep.

                "Aren't you listening to me? I said I called."

                Maxwell glanced over his shoulder at Jack, who busied himself with scrubbing one small corner of the counter, too busy to look up, though his shoulders seemed to take on a hitch.

                "No," Maxwell said. "I didn't get the messages. Is there something wrong?"

                "Wrong? Don't tell me you've forgotten?"

                "I guess I have. What is it?"

                "You said we'd get together for a drink."

                A chill spread through Maxwell, rippling across his chest. He gripped the receiver harder with his one hand and the black phone box with the other.

                "You want to see me again?" he asked.

                "You're still not listening," Patty scolded. "That is what I said."

                "When?"

                "Does six thirty sound good?"

                ************

                Charlie sputtered slightly as Maxwell pulled the car to the curb, the whole metal frame shivering as if from cold or fright. The street had already closed down for the night, metal awnings drawn across store windows, gates drawn across store doorways. Even though the lights showed in the windows above these stores -- old Italian families settling into arm chairs before glowing televisions -- silence dominated all, with the scramble of an alley cat and the bark of a yard dog, the only sharp reports against its dull curtain.

                Maxwell stepped out onto the street, circled the car, checked its doors, then paused, gaze drawn up to the lighted window above, Patty's window glowing like a single staring eye from the highest floor. Jack had protested vehemently against Maxwell's coming, saying he should stay as far away from Patty as possible.

                "The Boss always gets what he wants, Max," Jack argued, "and you've already pissed him off more than anyone I've ever seen. You keep pushing things, he'll have you killed."

                "She's another thing we can talk about when you set up our meeting," Maxwell said.

                Then, caught by a wedge of descending street light, a wrinkled hand emerged from Patty's downstairs doorway, an empty hand, stamped grey from dirt, its palm turned upward. A moment later, an equally dirty and wrinkled face appeared, grim with grim eyes and a mouth perpetually puckered from lack of teeth.

                "Spare change?" the man asked.

                Maxwell stared, and shuddered, his own shaking hands riffling through his pockets for change before he could stop them, producing a quarter, two dimes and four pennies -- which he thrust into the out stretched hand. Flashes of memory from the graveyard so many years earlier flickered before his eyes like an hallucination: the old man crumbling with his head shattered, Maxwell vomiting on the ground, vomit and blood mingling over the graves.

                Again, he shuddered, then bushed passed the man, plunging ahead into the dark hall, his sneakers kicking up news print circulars as if dry leaves, until he thudded up onto the bottom step. Maxwell had to feel his way up the first flight, then he followed the beam that fell from two floors above.  The echo of his shuffling footsteps moved ahead of him as he climbed, soles scraping the dust of the unswept floors. Up top, music filtered down, loud yet not deafening, more siren than assault: James Taylor, Jonie Mitchell, carlie Simon, Judy Collins, each reminding Maxwell of other places he should have been like Colorado or West Jersey, Portland, Oregon, or Nashville, Tennessee.

                Finally, he reached Patty's floor, where the volume made it difficult for him to hear his own rasping breath, or the sound of his rap on the door. He knew no one inside could hear, and yet, the door snapped open revealing Patty, still dressed in t-shirt and socks.

                "You're late," she said, coldly.

                "Is something wrong?" Maxwell asked.

                "What makes you say that?"

                "I expected..."

                "Expected what?"

                "Well, a warmer reception, I suppose."

                "Reception? Do I look like a hostess? Does this look like the Ramada Inn? I'm just home from work. I'm not in the mood to be friendly. If that bothers you, leave, or find yourself a Goddamn drink until I unwind."

                "Are you like this everyday?"

                "Absolutely. I hate my job."

                "Why don't you get a new job?"

                "Why don't you mind your own business!" Patty snapped, then went to the other room to get dressed.

                Maxwell sighed, stepped across the kitchen to the wide window sill, then sat, staring out over the city below, at the a dark land and crawling shadows of people he had not noticed when parking his car. From here, the land had the shape and texture of road kill, with the people crawling over its dying carcass like maggots, each collecting subsistence from its demise.

                "Okay, let's go," Patty said, dressed in her New York Giant's jacket. She switched off the stereo and headed out the door, leaving Maxwell to follow.

                The black Trans Am sat at the curb with its engine running, looking and sounding like a panting beast, its windows so shaded Maxwell could not even see the head of the driver.

                "Now that's someone I'd like to have a talk with," Maxwell said and made a move from patty's door towards the car, only to have Patty grab his arm.

                "No," she said, her voice nearly shrill.

                "Why not?"

                "Because we'll be late," she said, trying not to look at Maxwell or the car, but fore some means of escape along the long, empty sidewalk.

                "This will only take a minute," Maxwell said.

                "Please!" Patty pleaded. "Not now. It's bad enough he's here without pushing things. I like you. I want to be with you a while before he pushes you away."

                "What makes you think he'll do that?"

                "He always does. He wants me and he hates anybody else getting in his way."

                "All the more the reason he and I should talk."

                "Later, not now," she said. "Let it go on as it is for now."

                "As it is? It isn't anything yet," Maxwell said. "We're here on our second -- date. That's all."

                "It could be something. But not if you let him ruin it."

                "All right," Maxwell said, glancing sharply at the grumbling Trans Am, and at the driver side door that made no move to open. "My car is up the street."

                ***********

                "So where the hell are we going anyway?" Maxwell asked as he pulled his car onto the street, again, watching the Trans Am's headlights wink on in his rearview mirror.

                "I'll tell you when you get there. Just drive where I tell you to drive."

                "I hope we won't be making any last minute turns."

                "Just drive."

                So Maxwell drove east, the shards of Paterson's formerly wealthy east side popping up around them like grave stones. Maxwell had wandered among them years earlier, when these great mansions still shone, though lately, they'd suffered most with Paterson's decline -- the aging Jewish families dying off or moving out. Over time, these mansion turned into housing for the less than wealthy white families who parked El Doradoes and Chevy pickup trucks in their drive ways, and littered the lawns with empty beer bottles from their Friday night drinking bashes.

                All the awe Maxwell felt her as a kid had vanished. He no longer found his eyes growing wide as he passed through -- though he still caught glimpses of crimson glass on the upper stories and admired the shapes of the widows walks as they showed against the sky. But only in silhouette did that old magic remain from when the Colts, Vanwinkles and Vreelands lived here.

                Maxwell chuckled.

                "What's so funny?" Patty asked.

                "When I was young, I always wanted to live in one of these houses. I figured that would really be a sign of success."

                "So?"

                "So if I moved into one of them now, I would actually be taking a step down on my ladder of success."

                "They're not that bad," Patty said. "My mother lives in one of them."

                "Oh," Kenny said. "Is that where we're going now?"

                "For a minute," Patty said. "I just need to run in and out."

                She directed Maxwell through the maze of streets that surrounded East Side Park, dead ends and cul-de-scacs that had once guaranteed the wealth their privacy but now seemed like private ghettos full of dilapidated abandoned furniture, rusting 1970s cars and over grown lawns slowly yellowing into seed. The building at which Patty directed him to stop, however, was not one of the mansions, but a brick and mortar apartment complex the Jews later built, grand-arched buildings of six or seven floors who interior windows peer out onto narrow gardens once filled with flowers now stuffed with weeds, and gravel paths whose gravel had scattered and metal benches long seduced into rust. While these buildings did not have the opulence of the mansions, they also had a dignity and grandeur of their own, constructed when Paterson had already started its decline, as fortresses against the oncoming changes.

                "Park the car," Patty said, when Maxwell pulled up to the car curb.

                "I thought you said you’re only running in and out?" he said.

                "Don't hold me to every Goddamn thing I say. Just park the car. We might be longer than a minute and I wouldn't want you to get peeved waiting for me."

                "You mean I'm coming in?"

                "That's the idea. You have a problem with meeting my mother?"

                Maxwell glanced into the driver side mirror, noting the dual set of square headlights just then winking off, one light slightly titled, like a weak-muscled eye.

                "Well?" Patty asked, a little more sharply.

                "I've got no problem with meeting your mother or anyone else," he said.

                "Then park the car, Longfellow. I don't want to be here all night."

                **********

                Mother greeted Maxwell with a grimace, one of those "No, not another boyfriend," kind of looks Maxwell had seen before -- pained, yet patient, studying him quickly, superficially before letting out a resigned sigh.

                Maxwell also studied the woman, sensing something sharply wrong about her the moment she opened the door. She seemed to breathe trouble, the smell of it mingling with the scent to nicotine and alcohol. First of all, she dressed the way Maxwell might have expected Patty to dress, wearing spandex pants and a button down shirt and silver rings on every finger. These clinked when she picked up a glass and shimmered with reflected lights when she waved her hands. She had phony red finger nails longer than the perpetual ash of her cigarette, nails with shards of diamond imbedded in each, which she said again and again came from an admirer.

                "My friends call me Em," she said, holding out her handful of rings and nails for Maxwell to take.

                The flesh was cold and clammy, and Maxwell let go of the hand as quickly as possible, struck by another oddity: the woman's face. This was trapped in a fame of bottle-blonde hair, silver earrings as large as saucers and a matching necklace below. But it was the mean look in her eyes that bothered Maxwell most, as if these had been shaped from the same metal as her earrings.

                "My daughter has told me a lot about you," Em said.

                "Mother, PLEASE," Patty growled, tugging at Maxwell's sleeve to draw him deeper into the house, her voice and her mother's echoing down the long marbled hall along which they had just come, echoing along with the numerous other seemingly inappropriate sounds, sounds of babies crying, of women crying, of men and women shouting, laughing cursing, of radios and TVs. Such sounds seemed to violate the sanctity of the place, lacking the kind of dignity and grace for which the place had been built, too much the stuff of the poor house -- like the kind that had occupied Chamberlain Avenue during the 1930s and 1940s, or the homeless shelters of Broadway in the 1980s, sounds of the Alexander Hamilton or Christopher Columbus projects.

                "What exactly did Patty have to say about me?" Maxwell asked after Patty had maneuvered him inside and closed the door from the rest of the world.

                "You know," Em said, giving Maxwell a nod and a wink. "That little package of yours was a sly move, a better way to get in her pants than I'd seen most men do -- and I thought I'd seen everything."

                "I don't understand," Maxwell said, glancing at Patty.

                "Don't you?" Em said. "You mean you're not like the rest of the men my daughter sees? Better than the rest, eh? Purer at heart and all that? Come off it, Buddy. It's Em you're talking to here, not some stupid bimbo from the bar."

                "Mother, stop," Patty said. "How many times do I have to tell you, he's not like that."

                "I heard what you said, Patty," Em said. "I just don't believe it. But I sure would like to him say it, how he doesn't get a hard-on for you every time he sees you dance."

                "I said stop it," Patty shouted. "Why do you have to tear down every man I bring here?"

                "Because you've never brought a real man in here, girl," Em said. "You keep bringing these pathetic worms, trying to pass them off as men. Not one of them measures up to your father, and not one has anything in mind for you, but a quick fuck and then to dump you out onto the street. They all think you're a whore, because they all found you in a bar. Why can't you find a nice young man at the other place you work. Why can't you bring someone home whose wearing a suit and tie, rather than this rag tag lot of hippies and bums? Any day now I expect you to come walking through this door holding the hand of a nigger, telling me you're going to have his child."

                "I'll walk out if you don't stop," Patty warned, then turned towards Maxwell. "I need a drink. How about you?"

                "I don't think I do," Maxwell said, studying the marble motifs that marked the banister to the stair, and the wainscotting that divided the walls in half. For that moment, he seemed to have stepped back in time, and half expected the place to have gas lamps instead of electric. Indeed, the original brass ornaments jutted out from the walls.

                "Don't tell me you're going out with someone who doesn't drink?" Em said.

                "Of course, he drinks mother. I met him in a bar, remember?"

                Patty lifted a bottle from a table and poured herself a hefty helping.

                "Am I allowed to ask what this man's plans are for you tonight?" Em asked. "Or are you going to tell me to shut up about that, too."

                "We're going to see a movie," Patty said.

                "A movie?" Em said.

                "Yes," Patty said, emptying her glass nearly as quickly as she had filled it. "And if we don't go, we'll be late for the first show."

                                                                                ************

                Maxwell weaved Charlie through the light traffic as Patty gave directions. Darkness hung over the back street his headlights could not dent. Behind him, the double set of square headlights floated. It was a shadow staying behind Charlie as Maxwell drove, following him onto the two land highway before it crossed the river into Elmwood Park.

                Even before Maxwell reached the far side of the concrete bridge, he saw the police cars tucked into the trees on either side, the officers peering out into the passing cars to pick out the color of their drivers. Maxwell slowed as he neared them, forcing the double set of headlights behind him to slow down as well.

                "What the hell are you grinning at?" Patty asked, stirred out of her own reverie.

                "Nothing," Maxwell said, but watched the red and blue police lights flash on, bathing the black Trans Am with sudden color. "I'm confused about something."

                "So?" she asked.

                "Why do you bring men over to see your mother if you know she's going to treat them badly?"

                "To hurt her," Patty said.

                "What?"

                "I want her to see what she's driven me to."

                "Thanks a lot," Maxwell mumbled.

                "It has nothing to do with you, Longfellow," Patty said. "She simply hates me picking men up at the bar, so I rub her nose in it."

                "You dislike your mother that much?"

                "Sometimes I hate her."

                "Why?"

                "Because she hates me -- she's hated me since I was a little girl."

                "I can't believe that."

                "I don't care what you believe, but it's true. I was an unexpected intrusion into her otherwise perfect life, the child that came way too late to save her marriage, a child she got stuck with after that fact became clear. Then, of course, we had those dozen or so temporary reunions -- for the child's sake -- that created more hate and caused more scenes, and managed to give them both more ammunition to shoot at each other in the future."

                "You said you had a sister. Is she hated that much, too?"

                "A much older sister, who -- by the time I was born -- was already fending for herself, leaving the house when the ugliness started, eventually settling with my father after the divorce. Mother wanted me to go with father, too, but he wouldn't hear of it. He said a girl as young as I was needed a mother. So mother started to see me as a millstone around her neck. More than once she stared across the breakfast table at me and said she'd wish I'd died."

                "Wasn't that nice of her," Maxwell said.

                "Wait, it gets better," Patty said. "She routinely told me I was alive only because abortions weren't legal and she couldn't afford the price of a certain doctor on Lakeview Avenue."

                "She could have put you up for adoption."

                "And have to admit everything was her fault, that she was a terrible mother, and that my sister's going with father was the right thing to do? No, she had something to prove with me. But it wasn't easy. I fought back. I ate only what I wanted to eat, went to sleep only when I felt tired. I refused to dress up like a fairy princess for her, forcing her to beat the shit out of me."

                "You're father didn't stop it?"

                "I didn't tell him. I was too ashamed. After all, I was young, and stupid, and deep down I thought I deserved the punishment."

                "Didn't anybody else notice?"

                "No, mother was clever. She always hit me where the marks wouldn't show, hiding those few black and blue marks with a scarf or my hair. Sometimes, in summer, I had to wear high collars and long sleeves, just so no one would see how bad I was."

                "When did all this stop."

                Patty laughed. "On my 15th birthday," she said. "We were having a party and my mother told me to cut the cake. I told her it was too pretty to cut. So she came around the table and yanked me up by the hair. She nearly bit through her lower lip beating me. She was so angry, she forgot herself, forgot all the other people."

                "And?"

                "At first, everybody was too shocked to stop it, then finally, father yanked her off, telling her to let go of my hair or he would kill her. Mother's fingers slowly eased away, and then father warned her never to do it again."

                "Did it stop?"

                "No way, not just then anyway. No sooner had the last guest gone than she was at me again, beating at my face with both hands, kicking my ankles and my legs. She managed to kick me down the front stairs when I ran out into the hall to call for father. Then, she came down the stairs after me and beat me for not getting up off the floor, kicking me again as I crawled toward the front door, kicking me harder when we got outside because she said I was making a scene and the neighbors would complain. Then, it occurred to her I might really be hurt. So she dragged me to her car, dumped me in the front seat and drove me to the hospital."

                "What did she tell the doctors?"

                "That I had been hit by a car."

                "And they believed her?"

                "It was convenient."

                "Was that the end of it?"

                "Oh yes," Patty said. "I was in the hospital for two weeks and the whole time, Em thought I would die -- even though the doctors told her I wouldn't, despite my broken neck. It was enough to put the fear of God in her. After that, she's left me alone until I was too big for her to beat. By then, she had developed other, perhaps more cruel ways to torture me."

                "Like what?"

                "Like nothing," Patty said. "Don't you ever get tired of asking questions, Longfellow?"

                "That's how I learn things."

                "You might learn more than what's good for you," Patty said. "You'd better step on it or we'll miss our movie."

                **************

                The black Trans Am sat at the curb when Maxwell and Patty came out of the theater two hours later. Its tinted windows glittered with the reflection of the marque lights, looking a little like the multiple reflections in a fly's eyes. Patty, still bitching about how much she disliked the movie, didn't notice the car, allowing Maxwell to steer her towards the parking lot.

                "Whimp stuff," Patty complained.

                "I sort of liked it," Maxwell said, glancing over his shoulder at the Trans Am.

                "You would. You're a poet. But anyone else knows love does not conquer all."

                "But it does," Maxwell said.

                "PLEASE!" Patty moaned. "Let's get away from here. Romantic claptrap like that always gives me a headache. I wish I hadn't left my aspirin at home."

                "Are you really in that much pain?"

                "I'm holding my head because I have nothing better to do."

                "Does this happen often?"

                "Often enough."

                "Have you seen a doctor?"

                "Here we go with twenty questions again. Don't you ever get tired of pestering people?"

                "I'm concerned, that's all."

                "Don't be. It doesn't pay. Just drive me home, or better yet, stop off at the 24 hour Rite Aid. Aspirin will help me more than your questions will."

                **********

                The road back seemed shorter -- each traffic light turning green as they coasted through Elmwood Park towards Paterson. The highway was largely empty in the hour before bars closed as people waited on last call before jockeying home. Maxwell glimpsed several clocks along the highway, each advertising a different time: one said 12:20 a.m., another said 11:40 p.m. To Maxwell, it felt as if he had traveled back in time, and in the back of his head he imagined that if he continued West long enough he could begin the evening again, and further on, the week, and far enough, maybe come to a time before Charlie went to war.

                The thought of Charlie startled him. He had thought so little about the man over the previous few days when for years after Charlie's death, Maxwell had thought of little else. Charlie seemed to grow inside Maxwell's head, whispering warnings about his current activities the way he had whispered about hanging out with Puck when Maxwell was a kid.

                "He's evil, Maxwell," Charlie said after bailing Maxwell out of jail. "And if you continue to hand around with him, you'll be evil, too."

                "I don't mean to see him," Maxwell argued. "I just wind up in the same place at the same time. Sometimes I feel as if I'm meant to run him to him again and again."

                "Fight it," Charlie said. "If I didn't have to ship out soon, I'd take you away for a while -- go west or something where you could recover from his evil influence. But I'm lucky I got off post this time, and you're lucky, too."

                Then, Charlie went away, and Maxwell did what he could, putting up with the rest of his family to stay home and behave. Ed checked on Maxwell daily, catching Maxwell each time he cut school, dragging him home each time he caught Maxwell on the street. Ed's theory's for raising kids properly was to put them to work, and he put Maxwell to work at the store. And Maxwell endured each indignity, telling himself Charlie would make things better when he got back.

                Then a uniformed man appeared at the front door.

                At first, Maxwell thought it was Charlie and ran to open the door, wondering in the back of his head why Charlie would need to ring the bell to his own home.

                It was not Charlie, and the moment the door opened, Maxwell knew something had gone wrong.

                "Can I talk to your father, boy?" the sergeant said, his crisp uniform the kind Maxwell had seen in parades.

                "I don't have a father," Maxwell said.

                "Then someone older I can talk to," the sergeant said.

                Maxwell called Ed from the back door, and the lumbering figure paused in his work to curse and complain, eventually bumbling his way back to the house and up the stairs of the rear porch to ask what Maxwell wanted.

                "There's a soldier in the front hall who says he wants to talk to you," Maxwell said.

                Ed's face took on a puzzled expression, as he made his way into the house, through the kitchen, extending his large hand towards the sergeant -- streaks of grease still showing on his fingers despite wiping them with a rag.

                "I bring sad news," the sergeant said. "You brother Charles has been reported Killed in Action."

                No short sentence ever spun through Maxwell's brain so viciously, like a bullet ricocheting around inside his skull, short circuiting every thought. The details got lost in the confusion, though Maxwell later sorted them out: a fire base overrun, Charlie rushing out in a firefight to drag back the body of a wounded comrade. Medals would be awarded. Charlie would be buried with the highest honors.

                Maxwell went crazy, telling Ed and the others where they could stick their job, house and school, and then, he went looking for Puck, searching each and every street of Paterson for signs of his former friend -- a friend that had held up a liquor store, shot its clerk and used Maxwell to drive the getaway car.

                Patty said nothing, though the package of aspirin rattled on the dash board as Maxwell drove, the easing intensity of her expression telling Maxwell the drug had worked to relieve some of her headache. Behind them the whole time -- coasting like a shark waiting for blood -- the black Trans Am matched Maxwell's speed, only its double set of highlights testifying to its persistence -- pulling to the curb miles later when Maxwell pulled to the curb in front of Patty's apartment building.

                "Well," Maxwell said, as Patty pushed open her door. "It has been interesting..."

                "You mean, you're not coming up?"

                "Are you sure you want me?" he asked.

                Patty didn't answer, she just got out of the car and headed towards the building.

                ***********

                "Hold me," Patty said, reenacting the scene from two nights earlier, wearing the same, weary innocent face and the same skimpy clothing. "Just until I fall asleep."

                Maxwell felt a shudder pass between them as he did, uncertain as to which one initiated it, feeling her consciousness slip away over the next few moments -- the combination of alcohol and the night sweeping her back into that regions of dreams, out of which her cries again emerged.

                "NO!" she screamed. "Don't hit me!"

                Maxwell clung; she shoved him away, then clutched him back, her sharp red nails biting into his back as if they made love -- with him still fully dressed.

                Finally, real sleep back over both of them, and later, Maxwell woke to find Patty coiled in a corner of the bed, whimpering. He rose, found his shoes, and carried them out, waiting until he was in the hall to put them on.

                Outside, he found the dark street empty of black Trans Am. Only the protruding legs of the sleeping street bums shows, each shivering against the cold in store front doorways.

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