The Christmas Kid полностью

Then, one hot afternoon in the summer of 1969, he ran into her on 57th Street. She called his name, and for a moment he stood looking blankly at this short, heavyset woman, until she said: “Eddie, it’s me. Dorothy…” He embraced her and they went into a coffee shop next to Carnegie Hall, and told each other how their lives had turned out. Eddie was a lawyer now, divorced, with two sons, living alone on the East Side; Dotty had three daughters, one of them a junior in high school. Her mother was dead, her father had gone home to Beirut with her sister. Dotty’s husband ran a large grocery store in Washington Heights and they lived in New Jersey. She said all of this in a cool way, as if reciting a résumé. Then Eddie asked her if she loved her husband.

She smiled, and glanced into the crowded street.

“Love is for children,” she said. And then looked at him frankly and added: “Maybe you get one good summer. If you’re lucky.”

They went to his apartment and made love, in a sad, grieving way, for the first time together in bed. And when they were finished, she began to cry uncontrollably, saying that they must never ever do this again. It was wrong. She was married. She had children. It was a sin. She’d never done this before, and would never do it again. She was back the following Thursday afternoon, dressed more elegantly, more carefully made up; and the Thursday after that; and every Thursday that summer. She lost weight. She wrote poems for him again. He gave her, with a laugh, a copy of Caesar’s Gallic Wars. And they lived again the tangled emotions of that old summer. It ended again in the fall.

“He knows,” she said that final Thursday. “He doesn’t know who it is, but he knows. And he’ll find us. I don’t want that. For me, or you, or my daughters. Or for him. I hope you understand that.”

And that was that. Until five years later. Sitting over coffee one morning with the Daily News, he saw her picture, her face contorted in anger and protest. She was standing outside a grocery store, a cop beside her. The story explained that her husband had been shot dead in a holdup. Two nights later, Eddie Leonard went to the wake. The room was packed with wailing mourners, and Eddie Leonard found Dotty in the front row of folding chairs. She was all in black, her face covered with a veil. He uttered the conventional words of sorrow and asked her about her plans.

“I’m taking him home,” she said, staring through the veil at the coffin. “To Beirut. And all of us are going with him. It’s finished here. Killers everywhere. Junkies. Murderers. We’ll sell the store and the house. And just go away. Away from killers. Away. Away.” She paused. “Goddamn New York.”

A week later, she sailed for Beirut. The following year, the civil war began, and in the evenings, watching the terrible films on the news, Eddie Leonard would remember summer evenings in the placid hills of Brooklyn, when he and Dotty Haddam were young. He never heard from her again.

THAT SUMMER, GERRY GROGAN was the greatest dancer among the neighborhood girls who shared our summer evenings. She was not conventionally beautiful: her nose was too violently sharp, her chin prominent, her legs too short. But none of that mattered. Geraldine Grogan was smart, bawdy, and fierce with energy. When she danced her intricately executed Lindys or hard-driving mambos, you couldn’t look at another girl.

On those summer evenings, we assembled early at the foot of the two giant stone columns that guarded the entrance to Prospect Park. Someone long ago had dubbed those columns “the totem poles” or “the totes,” and “the totes” were our clubhouse. One Friday night in August, the usual crowd had assembled to drink some Rheingold, listen to a portable radio, and discuss the destinations of the night. This was not always simple: we made decisions as some loose collective; a casual suggestion was made, debated, rejected, or embraced. Should we go to the Caton Inn or Diron’s? Moriarty’s or “over New York”? And, most important, what about Saturday? Coney Island? Or somewhere else?

Duke was there that night, along with Vito and Betty Gahan and Jackie Mack and the others. Gerry Grogan was with her boyfriend, a tall, red-headed Swede named Harry Hansen, from Bay Ridge. She’d met him dancing somewhere, and they were an unusual couple: she was vivacious, a talker, a beer drinker; he was tall, quiet, even morose, a ginger ale drinker among the barbarians. Vito nicknamed them the Mutt and Jeff Bandit Team, because the newspapers in those days were full of such partnerships, and we all forgave Hansen his dour silences because Gerry Grogan was so full of life.

“Let’s go out Sunset tomorrow,” Duke said. “I ain’t been out there all summer.”

“Sunset Pool?” Vito said. “You know, I almost forgot the place was there.”

Duke said, “I like that sixteen-foot diving board. The girls’ bathing suits come off when they hit the water.”

Betty Gahan said, “You’re disgusting, Duke.”