The Amboy Dukes Read Free

movies. Now with Alice, for the first time he saw the wealth about him and he saw it through Alice’s eyes, in its grandeur and magnificence, its opulence and majesty. But while her appreciation was almost a religious rapture, his reaction was one of bitterness and venomous irritation. In the quiet assurance of the handsome people riding in the limousines, standing under the canopies of the apartment houses, strolling with sedate dignity along the Drive, he saw only an affront to him. Somewhere, indistinctly, so far removed from his understanding that it was like a dim, vague dream that he had never had, he remembered the harangues of the Communist and Socialist speakers on Pitkin and Hopkinson and Pitkin and Bristol. Somewhere in their talks to which he had never bothered to listen, he thought he remembered references to the joy and splendor which resided in certain streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and to the misery, poverty, and squalor that had rotted Brownsville, East New York, and Ocean Hill.
    Why it was unfair, he did not know, but it was. Because his father had been unemployed and poor was no reason why they had had to live in a stinking, rotten tenement of carrion brick in a putrescent neighborhood, where he had known nothing but the despair that was attendant upon hopelessness and an enervating poverty. Now that they could get out there was no place to go, and the Drive stood clean, proud, and inviolate, an hour on the subway from Brownsville, a street upon which he was privileged to ride for a dime, but carefully guarded from him by doormen, massive draperies, and wealth. April was warm, and soon it would be June, July, and August. Soon the heat would make the oppressive rooms of their flat suffocating and stifling, and he would have to build once again a little makeshift fence around the open space on their fire escape so that Alice and he could sleep out of doors. In the morning he would awaken, stiff and cramped from sleeping in the small space, his back and hair damp. He would lie with his eyes shut to keep out the first rays of the sun which were welcomed as they entered the wide glass windows of penthouses and solariums but which meant to Frank another blistering day in Brownsville, another day of sitting in the movies or sweating it out on the crowded beaches of Coney Island, another day of drinking iced liquids that neither cooled him nor eased his thirst, another day of pushing back his plate at supper, unable to eat because of the small beads of perspiration that stood out on his forehead and the vile, evil cooking odors that seeped through the walls and entered the open windows of their flat.
    Things were different on the Drive. There the sun and June, July, and August were no problem, for it seemed as if the sun were aware that this was residence of people who stood for no nonsense from their employees, the stores in which they shopped, and the elements. There were no odors of cooked cabbage, cauliflower, and onions, of garbage cans, of moldering trash in the cellars and dark recesses of halls.
    Alice tugged at his sleeve. “You’re not listening to me, Frank. Look at the sailboat on the river.”
    “I was thinking.” He obliged Alice by looking at the boat and nodding approvingly. “You sure would like to live here.”
    “I’d rather live here and die at the end of a year than live to be a hundred on Amboy Street.”
    “Don’t say that,” he said sharply. “These people ain’t no better than we are.”
    “What does it cost to live here?” Alice stared at the river.
    Frank’s laugh was without mirth. “More’n we got. Stop knocking yourself out, baby. We haven’t got a chance.”
    “Frank,” Alice appealed to him, “Why don’t we try to get into that housing project on Bergen Street? I know a girl who lives there. I was in her house once and it’s beautiful. I bet as nice as these houses here.”
    Frank brushed a bit of white cotton from the shoulder of Alice’s jacket. “We