Tillie and the Tailor Read online

  Time and again for one whole long summer the caterwauling sirens summoned me, lured me, to the window. And there, half-hidden, eyes narrowed to plumb what was taking place in the gloom behind those softly shifting curtains, I waited, utterly shameless.

  But nothing, not even a fleeting shadow of the chimera she was. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  xxxii

  I’m in the lawyer’s office, on Hanover Street. Law books in uniform bindings line one whole wall, and I sit at the big mahogany conference table, chatting with the lawyer, who is also a member of the Boston City Council.

  In walks a woman, client or just a friend I do not know. She’s in her forties, a hairdresser, bleached blonde hair piled up high on her head. The lawyer, an affectionate type, squeezes her face in his hands.

  ‘Hey, watch out,’ she says, ‘you’re just like my boyfriend always with his hands in my hair.’

  The lawyer introduces me to her.

  ‘Watch out for him, Celia, watch out, he’s a dangerous man.’

  ‘Him dangerous?’ scoffs Celia. ‘I wish I could find a dangerous man. It’s been nine weeks. Nove settimane, imagine that.’

  ‘How come you count the weeks?’ I asked.

  ‘Huh,’ she said, ‘when you’re used to getting it two, three times a week …’

  Poor Celia. The boyfriend must have been a petty hood doing time. That’s what I figured but I didn’t want to ask.

  xxxiii

  What was there about twice-glimpsed Gladys and the elusive Swede that tugged insanely at my loins? Blind longing – but longing for what? The impossible, the unattainable? Must have been. Because at the time I was feasting quite happily, or so I thought, on a veritable bevy of attainables.

  Among them was Eve. A year or two younger, she and I had been to the same high school in the suburbs but I did not know her at the time. We met years later, when we were neighbors living several houses apart on the same leafy street the far end of which skirted an unlit grassy slope by a lakeside.

  Eve was girlish, younger than her years, hopelessly enthusiastic and hopelessly naive. Eve’s father was a university professor. She was unbookish, unintellectual, but a capable, efficient manager. I thought she was overprotected but I was wrong. The whole family – father, mother, grandmother, and a younger brother – were identical in their youth and naiveness. All they saw in life was the bright side of things. After a while, after a short while, I found this wholesome outlook a strain.

  But Eve was ripe. She was also keen on me, and that was a quality never to be discouraged. She had a job managing the office for a large firm of car dealers on Commonwealth Avenue, in Boston. Eve had a never-failing cheerful disposition, with a Doris Day twinkle in her eye and matching smile on her face. Words steeped in uplift tripped effortlessly off her tongue. Charm without an edge. She oozed it. The garage mechanics where she worked were putty in her hands. She proved this to me on one occasion when I’d badly dented a fender on my car and she got them to fix it ‘for her boyfriend’ for nothing. That’s charm.

  Eve got riper but I did not really fancy her. She had a gap between her two front teeth that made her seem even younger and more naive. But then, when she got dressed up in something black and tight-fitting, she was nothing but womanly curves. The girls I knew at the time, the ones from my midwestern university – my previous run – all seemed to be living an eternity away in New York.

  One night Eve and I went for a walk at dusk down to the lake.

  xxxiv

  I knew she wanted to be kissed, and I obliged her. I wondered where, how far, I should take it. I expected a modicum of resistance, a bit of a tussle on the grass, but I didn’t get it. I took it slow and when I felt ready I told her what I wanted. Oh, yes, she said, she wanted it too, she’d wanted it for a long, long time, only it couldn’t be then, not on that night. Feeling my displeasure, she said, ‘Just wait another day or two.’

  That weekend the rest of her family went off to Rockport, accepting some little white lie she told about wanting to stay behind. And so in her room, in her narrow single bed, the event took place.

  Eve lived in a big, shaded, rambling house. One of those great wooden New England porches wrapped itself halfway round the place, and her room, with its two screened windows, opened onto the deck. It was all so convenient. I’d often happen by late at night when I knew she was asleep, scratch on the screen by her head and whisper her awake. If the others had retired, she would slip into the hall and open the front door for me. If her father was still reading in the living room, she’d carefully and silently lift the screen high enough for me to crawl through and we would make silent love on the floor. Her innocence, her complete surrender and compliance excited me. I always left through the window and scuttled over the porch railing at the side of the house before emerging onto the lighted street.

  I wanted to corrupt her but couldn’t. No matter what thing I did to Eve or made her do to me, the Pollyanna in her won out and she never resisted, never objected, never complained. So I kept raising the bar. Eve had a friend, a neighbor named Mary, who’d just returned from a year in Brazil. She was mildly attractive, so I bided my time – for close to ten whole minutes – then asked her out. She assented but when she didn’t show up at the agreed time and place I wondered whether she and Eve hadn’t conspired to teach me a lesson. Late that night at Eve’s when I scratched, the screen flew open and we made wild, silent, passionate love there on her bed.

  Temptation soon came my way again, when another of Eve’s friends happened onto the scene. This one, also called Mary, had a long, unpronounceable Polish surname. She and Eve had been room-mates at the Boston university where Eve’s father taught. Mary Two was a knockout of the sort that sends an immediate shudder through you. In an instant Mary’s face, her body, her perfect legs turned me to mush. I couldn’t be in the same room with her because I could not take my eyes off her. I didn’t dare speak to her because I knew I would only burn up in speechless fever. To overcome my helplessness I scratched on Eve’s screen every night for a month.

  Then, to cool it, I began paying long weekend visits to friends in New Haven. It was at this time that I made my break from home, found rooms in the North End, and began working for Uncle Dave.

  xxxv

  It was not that easy to give up Eve. I tried everything but nothing drove her away. She came to my place in the city whenever I wanted her, never overstayed her allotted time, and never expressed unhappiness when I ignored her. I was getting desperate. I wanted love, I wanted to be in love, and with Eve all I got was sex. For her part, she wanted love and the Pollyanna in her made her think she was getting it; she wanted to be in love, and she was. As for the sex, she loved it when she got it and didn’t seem to mind when she didn’t.

  I raised the bar one last time. Eve had a crazy friend named Miriam. One look at the two girls told you that they were total opposites, so total that you wondered how on earth they ever knew each other in the first place or managed in the second to keep a friendship fueled. Eve was all sweetness and light and a model of helpfulness; Miriam radiated meanness, selfishness, and a dark side that bordered and sometimes spilled over into self-hatred.

  Need I say that I was drawn to Miriam like a magnet? Need I say that I found the core of darkness and whatever was gnawing away in her refreshing, her untrustworthiness attractive? She was the antidote I was seeking. I was under no illusion. What I wanted from Miriam was the fifteen minutes of her time that I knew she could and would give me.

  I never questioned Eve closely about her friend. I did not want to show I was interested. Eve volunteered that she had met Miriam’s father before she ever set eyes on Miriam. The father was a rich widower, whom Eve had met at a bar mitzvah. A bar mitzvah. That should have unleashed a whole stream of questions. What was Eve doing at a bar mitzvah? Her lot were Ulster Protestants. Who did she know who attended bar mitzvahs or for that matter got bar mitzvahed?

  I was interested in Miriam. I held my tongue. The f
ather had bought and installed Miriam in an apartment of her own in Cambridge. He knew his daughter was dangerously wild. In Eve he immediately spotted that wholesome streak and hoped he could engineer things to get some of it to rub off on Miriam. The poor bastard. Talk about clutching at straws.

  It was Miriam’s wildness that had me bewitched. And one look into her seething black almond-shaped eyes assured you nothing good was going to rub off on her. Ever.

  The girl was randy, exuded randiness, and in no time we were thrashing it out in her Cambridge bed. Sometimes we’d thrash for a couple of sweltering hours in the afternoon and I’d come back for a second helping after dark. I loved spending the night with her. She was musky and insatiable, with raven hair, raven eyes, raven armpits, and a raven pubis. You knew she was after the same fifteen minutes that you were after; you knew it could never go anywhere; you knew you had to mine all the ore you could as fast as you could because you knew it was going to end as abruptly as it had begun.

  So the minutes ticked away, and each one was wonderful. And then the curtain came down. Around five o’clock one afternoon as we were hard at it, she heard a key turn in the latch and sprang from the bed with a scream. ‘Oh, God, it’s my boyfriend,’ she said.

  There wasn’t even time to think boyfriend? What boyfriend? He was there in the room. She shrank back, frightened or perhaps she was trying to please him by pretending to be frightened. He ignored me. When he reached out to grab her wrist, she cowered and let out a stagy whimper. He told her to get dressed and as soon as she’d done so he dragged her away.

  The apartment door slammed. What was I to do?

  She was crazy but vulnerable. I couldn’t just slink off like a coward. I waited for an hour. When they didn’t come back, I left.

  A couple of nights later I returned. He was there. He was not unfriendly but he mocked me for not having waited around longer on the evening he had whisked her off. I studied Miriam for clues. She seemed frightened, unsure what he was going to do. He ordered her to get undressed. She said no and cowered. ‘Get undressed,’ he repeated. This time she said nothing. Was she frightened or was she pretending? He raised his voice and she began to peel – slowly, one garment at a time, as though wanting to be prodded. ‘Now get on the bed,’ he said. Again she said no but she did what he ordered anyway. He stripped off and then he was on top of her, ramming and hammering away at her and then talking to her, commanding her to gobble it up, to gobble it up. She was beside herself whimpering, as if afraid of him, of his power over her, and yet at the same time loving it.

  I sat there not five feet away, mesmerized. Then he stopped, withdrew, and told me to take off my clothes and join in. Her eyes pleaded, which made me think she had never gone this far before. I did join in. We took turns and then we had her together. She was in ecstasy. So was I.

  That was the last time I saw Miriam. That night’s threesome drove me straight back to the undemanding, predictable Eve. I was sure she knew the whole fifteen minutes blow by blow but she never let on. Nor did I trouble myself with any feelings of remorse or guilt.

  xxxvi

  A ten-dollar bill spirals down from a fourth-floor window, and a mother instructs her young daughter on the pavement below.

  ‘Go to Charlie the Bookie and put it on “Many Harvests”.’

  Above the racket of the bustling street the child yells back, ‘What horse did you say, Mummy?’

  xxxvii

  I kept writing, tapping out short pieces, but I found it hard going and my progress was slow. One day, I knew, if only I kept at it, something might happen, a seed might catch.

  Growing up in Thompsonville, I had long been fascinated by the strange double migration that had been the fate of a number of my neighbors and even some of my own family. The Abruzzi to Massachusetts, thence to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and – for a certain number – a return to eastern Massachusetts. The draw had been work in the iron mines.

  That whole country, a forested stretch of the Gogebic Range, lay just south of the shores of Lake Superior and a short distance from the Wisconsin state line. My mother was born in this remote part of Michigan in 1906 in a place called Wakefield. Her father mined the red hematite ore in Iron Mountain, where they lived on the outskirts of the town among their own kind and also among immigrants from Finland and Sweden. It was an odd little world – the Amicangelos and Vespas cheek by jowl with Bjorkquists and Olsens, Eskolas and Kauppilas. At the age of five, when she entered school, my mother did not speak of word of English.

  A number of our family remained in that lawless backwoods. Some were even engaged in the saloon business in nearby Hurley, Wisconsin. It always horrified my mother to know that these saloons, run by uncles of hers, also doubled as whorehouses. Periodically, lumberjacks came out of the north woods for women and drink, blowing their wages and getting fleeced by the saloon-keepers. My poor mother was so ashamed of this activity that in our family circle in Thompsonville the very name Hurley was anathema.

  I worked away at several pieces that had their roots in brutal stories I’d gleaned about that bygone, faraway Michigan. This was one of them:

  For a piece of chocolate you did it. They’d say, ‘Va vidè che fa Gildino,’ and you’d run to see what he was doing. I’d run all the way from Benzo’s Hall, where the dances were held, to that broken umbrella of an apple tree in the side yard of their house.

  ‘Wey, Gildino,’ you called in the dusty twilight, and if he wasn’t asleep and he knew you he’d moan that little moan of his. He knew me.

  That was all you had to do. But I used to stay maybe a minute more and with a couple of waves of the hand swish the swarm of flies from his face and from the slaver that dribbled down his neck. But I couldn’t take as much as a step before the flies returned, thicker and blacker and noisier than ever. Then I’d run back to Benzo’s. They’d give me the chocolate then.

  He was kept tied with a rope to one of the kitchen chairs they’d placed outside in the dark shade of the stunted apple tree. All he could do was cry and, if he recognized you, make his moaning sound. But when he got older – around sixteen – he would start the chair rocking and eventually tip it over, sometimes forward, sometimes back, and end up sobbing.

  They always yelled their heads off and liked to use their hands on him. The slaps they gave his face sent the flies scurrying but didn’t keep him from tossing the chair the first chance he got. They finally had to nail long planks to it for feet. That worked. Alone, though, he was never able to shake off the flies that covered his face like in the pictures you see of beekeepers. Even the kitchen chair was specked black. And there was nobody who could do anything about the clothes on his chest that were always wet and sticky from the saliva that hung in strings from his mouth.

  One time they got him crutches. They untied and propped him on these new wooden legs. Gildino made his sound, and when they told him to walk and let go of him he hung there for a second or two, then curled and slowly collapsed to the ground with the crutches knocking together and falling against his head. Then they picked him up and told him to walk and once more he fell.

  ‘Walk!’ they shouted.

  This time his face struck the back of the fly-specked chair. Again they made him try.

  ‘Walk! Walk!’ they demanded.

  Gildino only twisted and went down in a heap. They screamed and threatened and cursed all the saints of the calendar. But he never walked. They finished by beating him because he wouldn’t learn. They beat him with slaps, then punches, and they left him on the ground whimpering until later they came back and tied him onto the chair again.

  xxxviii

  Delicacy in a Hanover Street coffee bar:

  ‘What are you having, please?’

  ‘I’ll have a plain Vienna roll, please, and coffee.’

  xxxix

  Dave’s sister owned a grocery store in North Street directly opposite her brother’s. I never set foot inside the premises so can’t describe what it looked like or say
anything about what took place there. The shop was run by Frankie’s older brother.

  The sister too had a small portico out front where a number of bulky wares were displayed. In fact, their front was a mirror-image of ours – or perhaps, if I knew for sure which sibling had settled in North Street first, ours was a mirror-image of theirs. Both stacked on the sidewalk the same cases of tonic and soap powders and toilet paper. The same sort of customers who bought from us bought from them. Italian-Americans, hordes of them, streaming in from the suburbs on Fridays and Saturdays for their weekly shopping.

  On occasion, when things were slow on either side, Frankie’s brother and Dave, identically kitted out in long white aprons, stood on opposite sidewalks exchanging pleasantries over the roofs of parked cars. But Dave and his sister had long been engaged in fratricidal warfare. Dave did not speak to Blondie, as I have described, but the nature of his enmity with the sister was of another magnitude. He spoke to her. For her he had words – or, at least, a word. Whenever he saw her approaching her shop, if the moon was right – that is, if he were in the proper mood – he would dash to the curbside and call out to all and sundry.

  ‘Look, look,’ he would announce. ‘Here she comes. The whore.’ Only he never said the word whore. He used the Yiddish word, kurva. ‘Look, everybody, look. Here comes the kurva.’