In the Night Café Read Free Page A

“Well, tell your mama I said ‘Hello, beautiful.’ Don’t forget.”
    â€œAl says hello,” he’d report when he got home. He could never manage the word beautiful ,though somehow it seemed the most important part of the message and the one his mother might like best.
    Frank said Marie and Al had been seen. They’d been spotted coming out of a house one afternoon in another neighborhood. He said lately Marie had been serving meat all the time. When he warned her they couldn’t afford it, she said she’d been getting it at a new place at bargain prices. Frank said, “You know where it comes from, don’t you?”
    The kid kept crying and saying he didn’t know anything.
    Frank pushed him down and forced his face into the snow. “The present’s too good for you!” He seemed to think it was loyalty to Marie that was making the kid hold out on him. But in his own mind he seemed convinced of the very thing he needed so urgently to find out.
    Finally, he said, “Right. I can see you want to stay up here.” When he left, he padlocked the door from the other side.
    Hours passed on the cold roof. The snow and the sky both turned gray. Lights went on one by one in kitchens across the street, and shouting boys miles below pelted a car with snowballs.
    The weird thing was, you said, that kid could not imagine being looked for. It was as if the skin around the ordinary world had cracked apart, and no one noticed that a boy had fallen through. It wasn’t worse in this new place, only colder. If Frank ever came to get him, maybe he wouldn’t come down.
    The sky grew as dark as the ink they made him write with in school, and the snow turned white again. He saw that light never stood still but must always be moving. He thought about this and stopped being afraid, and lay down against the warm bricks of the chimney.
    At some point Frank returned and he was hauled to his feet. The man shook him out like a rag and kept yelling, “Had enough?” He made the air smell like the inside of a bottle.
    It was as if a radio had gone on in the middle of the night and the words you heard were meaningless because you didn’t know the beginning of the program. And you could say back equally meaningless things because nothing mattered, nothing was to be won. You could fill up the air with any old words, any old words that came to you, so he made up a black car that he saw one day on Tremont Avenue and some man at the wheel and his mother getting in fast, looking over her shoulder. And suddenly the man in his mind startled him by saying loudly, “Hello, beautiful,” and it wasn’t Al the butcher who spoke but his own father. And as the black car screeched away from the curb and roared toward its getaway in the distance, for a moment he saw himself in the backseat.
    Frank took the ball bearings out of his pocket and threw them into the snow. The kid went back the next morning and managed to find one of them. He had it a few days, then lost it.
    The Italian went on living and selling his meat.
    As for Marie, Frank gave her such bad bruises on her face that she didn’t leave the house for a couple of weeks.
    â€œAnd I did nothing,” you said to me once, weeping. “I did nothing.”
    I covered your eyes with my hands. “Don’t, oh don’t.” I held on to you in the dark, frightened, waiting for morning.

II
Little Whitey
Winter 1964

3
    I REMEMBER CAROLINE Murphy saying, that time I met her in ’sixty-four, that it had been very hard to explain death to the children. You had to put it in terms they would understand, she said. “What I finally told them was, Daddy’s all gone—just like ice cream.”
    She was proud of that explanation. I was careful, I said nothing negative. “Of course,” I said. “It must have been very difficult.” Later I thought about the meaning of ice cream. A Popsicle was