Snow in August Read online

  “Whatta you got in your pocket, kid?” he said to Sonny.

  “Nothin’, Frankie.”

  “You’re lyin’ to me, kid,” he said, turning to Michael. “He’s lyin’, ain’t he? I seen yiz shovel the sidewalk in front of Joe’s. I seen Joe put somethin’ in this guinea’s hand.” He smiled in a chilly way. “And it set me thinkin’.”

  Michael turned away from the slush-eyed gaze. Mister G looked up from his newspaper, peering over his glasses.

  “What I’m thinkin’,” Frankie McCarthy said, “is this. I’m thinkin’ you should buy me a soda, kid. And a pack of Luckies too. I’m thinkin’ you’re a nice, generous kid and would be only too happy to do this for a neighborhood guy just come outta the snow.”

  Mister G cleared his throat.

  “Hey, leave the kid alone,” he said in a reasonable voice.

  “What?” Frankie McCarthy said. “Wha’d you say?”

  “I said leave the kid alone,” Mister G said, annoyed now. “Kid broke his ass shovelin’ snow, let him keep his money.”

  “This is none of your fuckin’ business, pal.”

  “It’s my candy store,” Mister G said. “I don’t like extortion going on in my store.”

  “You Jew prick,” Frankie McCarthy said, ignoring Sonny and moving to the counter. “How’d you like me to turn this place into a fuckin’ parkin’ lot?”

  Michael moved away, toward the rear of the store, his back to the pay phone. Something bad is about to happen, he thought. I wish I could stop it. I wish I was bigger and stronger. I wish I could step over and grab Frankie McCarthy by the neck and throw him into the goddamned snow. I wish.

  Jimmy Kabinsky was near the door now, and Sonny gestured with his head for Michael to follow them out into the snow. Michael started to ease behind Frankie McCarthy.

  “Stay right there, kid,” he said to Michael, his nostrils flaring. “I wanna show you how to deal with a Jew prick like this.”

  Mister G slammed the counter. “Don’t you dare call me a Jew prick, you… you Irish son of a bitch!”

  Frankie McCarthy exploded. With one hand he swept the tiered rack of candies off the glass-topped counter. Pivoting, he used the other hand to sweep the cigar boxes onto the floor. Then he stomped on the cigars, his lips curling, the broken tooth showing. He turned and jerked the comic rack off the wall, littering the floor with Blue Bolt and Sheena and Captain Marvel. He kicked at the comic books, driving them into the air. Michael tried to say a word, but it would not come.

  Then Frankie saw Mister G lifting a telephone and he leaped for him, grabbed the phone, and smashed the top of the counter, splintering the glass. He wasn’t finished. He turned and hammered Mister G with the phone. The eyeglasses dangled from one ear. Blood spurted from the old man’s nose, and he held his face in pain, hunching before the next blow. Sonny and Jimmy opened the door and rushed out. The door slammed behind them. Michael didn’t move.

  “That’s how you deal with a Jew prick like this,” Frankie McCarthy said, smiling through tight lips.

  Then his eyes widened again in a kind of frenzy, and in the tight space behind the counter, he kicked and stomped at the fallen man, who made small whimpering sounds of futile protest while Frankie screamed: “You cocksucker, you Jew cocksucker! You motherfucker!” Then Frankie jerked the ornate cash register from its shelf, grunted as he raised it over his head, and hurled it down on Mister G. The cash drawer sprang open with a jangled sound and change rolled on the wooden floor.

  In a calm way, Frankie picked up some bills and change and then turned to Michael.

  “You didn’t see a fuckin’ thing, did you, kid?”

  Michael said nothing.

  “Did you?”

  Michael shook his head no. Then Frankie McCarthy smiled and reached over for a pack of Lucky Strikes. He hefted them and went to the door.

  “All I wanted from this Jew prick was some cigarettes, for chrissakes.”

  He went out, leaving the door open to the cold air. For a long, heart-thumping moment, Michael did not move. He wanted Sonny and Jimmy to return, to help him decide what to do. They didn’t come back. Slowly, Michael walked around the counter and saw that Mister G was weeping, his face to the wall, wet blood on his hands. The cash register lay on its side on the floor beside the scattered pages of the New York Post. Mister G’s eyes were shut. The boy touched his elbow.

  “Mister G, I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I help you? Maybe—”

  Mister G moaned, but did not speak. Michael backed away. Then he took the rabbi’s nickel from his pocket, went to the pay phone, and dialed the operator for an ambulance.

  5

  That evening, as his mother ladled tomato sauce over two bowls of spaghetti, Michael Devlin tried to explain what had happened in Mister G’s candy store. The words spilled out of him. He described what was said, leaving out the curse words, and the way Sonny and Jimmy ran outside, and how Frankie McCarthy wrecked the store and tried to destroy Mister G. She smiled thinly when he told her about calling for an ambulance, but the smile faded when he told her how he ran out of the store, panicky, afraid the police would think he had something to do with hurting Mister G. Jimmy and Sonny had vanished, he said, but Michael stood in the doorway of 378 Ellison Avenue and saw the ambulance coming slowly through the boulders of frozen snow, followed by the first of three police cars. All of them parked far from the doorway of Mister G’s candy store because of the huge piles of snow. Men came out of Casement’s Bar to watch, and Michael joined them. They smoked and talked about the way this kind of crap was ruining the parish, and Michael felt safe in their company. The men wouldn’t let Frankie McCarthy harm him.

  Then he saw Mister G’s wife coming along the snow-packed sidewalks from Garibaldi Street, a small, thick woman in overcoat and boots, with a large bag of groceries in her hands; saw her pause a block away, as she squinted at the ambulance; saw her suddenly hurrying, slipping and jerking on the packed snow. And then, as Mister G was carried out on a stretcher, the attendants straining and heaving to lift him over the snowbanks, Michael could hear her scream and saw her run, and the grocery bag fell from her hands and broke open and cans of Campbell’s soup and a box of Wheaties and two rolls of toilet paper spilled across the snow.

  He told his mother all of that, and she pressed his shoulders to her warm body, then took a small glass from a shelf and poured herself some of the sweet wine she liked, a dark purple wine called Mogen David.

  “Holy God,” she said. “That poor woman. That poor man.”

  Michael did not tell her about his own confusion.

  On the street and in the schoolyard, he’d heard all the stories about Jews being greedy and sneaky Christ-killers. But when this man, this Jew, poor Mister G, had been beaten so savagely, Michael had felt no elation. If Jews were bad, then Frankie McCarthy should be a hero. But in that candy store, it was Mister G who had spoken up to defend Sonny. And in return Frankie had been as scary and vicious as any gangster, while Sonny ran away. Michael struggled with that confusion. He also couldn’t express his own fear, the shameful cowardice that had stopped him from trying to help the old man. He could not get around one awful fact: while Frankie McCarthy was battering Mister G, Michael said and did nothing. Sonny ran; he thought, but I froze. And when it was over, and Mister G lay bleeding, and Frankie had told me to forget what I’d seen, I just nodded my head.

  “He’s a bad fella, that McCarthy,” Michael’s mother said. “He comes from bad people and he’ll end up in the gutter.”

  “I think he’s a little crazy, Mom.”

  “He might be,” she said. “Stay away from him.”

  “But why would he do it?” the boy asked. “Why would he hurt Mister G so badly?”

  “Bad people do bad things,” she said, curling her spaghetti on a fork, using a large spoon to control it.

  “Was it because Mister G is a Jew?”

  “I hope not.” She paused. “But from what you say, son, it sounds like tha
t was part of it.”

  She talked about Hitler then, and how he hated Jews so much he killed millions of them. The Nazis were crazy Jew-haters, she said, and before they were finished, millions of other people were dead too. Not just the Jews.

  “But why did they hate Jews?” Michael said.

  “Och, Michael, most of it’s plain old jealousy, if you ask me,” she said, taking a sip of wine. “They’ll give you a lot of malarkey about killing Jesus and all that, but the same idjits don’t even go to church. Hitler didn’t go to church. Neither does Frankie McCarthy, I’d bet.” She paused, picking her words carefully. “The Jews get educated, that’s one thing. Maybe that’s what makes ignorant people so mad at them. Their kids do their homework. They go to college. A lot of them, their people came here without a word of English and they ended up doctors and lawyers. I wish to God our people would do that.”

  “I heard Mister G has three sons in college,” Michael said. “You know, the ones who work in the store in the summer?”

  “There you go,” she said. “You’ll never hear about any of the McCarthy’s going to college. They’re a worthless lot.” She looked at him. “Don’t, for God’s sake, be like them.”

  They finished the spaghetti. His mother sipped the last of the wine, then rose, took the plates, and laid them in the sink. In a quick, busy way, she fixed tea, with milk and sugar, and some Social Tea cookies, humming an Irish tune that he didn’t know. Michael thought she looked relieved to be finished with the discussion about Jews and what had happened to Mister G and he did not go on with it, even though pieces of the scene in the candy store still scribbled through his mind. When she asked Michael what else his friends were talking about, besides the blizzard, he was relieved too. The subject was all too confusing and scary. He mentioned that the Dodgers were thinking about bringing up a minor league player named Jackie Robinson, who was colored. But everybody down on the avenue said he could never make it in the major leagues.

  “They say colored players aren’t as good as white players,” the boy said. “They don’t work as hard, or something.”

  His mother knew little about baseball; she glanced at the photograph of Private Tommy Devlin as if wishing he were there to talk to Michael.

  “Well, they wouldn’t be giving him a chance,” she said, “if he didn’t work hard to get it.” She sipped her tea and restrained him from dunking his biscuit into his own cup. “You can be sure he wasn’t standing on some street corner, making remarks, when they signed him up.”

  They did the dishes together, her face very tired. As Michael dried the plates and glasses, and stacked them in the cabinet, she walked slowly into the living room. For weeks, she had been reading a fat book by a writer named A. J. Cronin, and when Michael was finished with the dishes he followed her into the living room. She was sitting in a large gray armchair with a standing lamp beside it, lost in the book. The kerosene heater made the room feel hot and close. The windows were opaque and filmy. Michael drew faces in the steam with his fingers and stared down at the snow-packed streets and wished she would tell him some Irish stories, the way she did when he was small.

  Those stories were even better than the comics, better than the books at the library on Garibaldi Street. Magical tales of Finn MacCool, the great Irish warrior, who in the midst of some bloody battle had reached down, grabbed at a hill with one mighty hand, and heaved it at his enemy. Finn was so big and powerful and the hunk of earth so gigantic that when it landed in the Irish Sea it became an island, the one now known as the Isle of Man. Or Usheen, his son, who followed a woman with golden hair to the Land of Youth, where he lived for three hundred years, never growing old, until at last he grew homesick for Ireland. He was told that his white horse knew the way home but if he once dismounted, he could never return. Trying to save some poor men who were about to die under the weight of an immense flagstone, he fell from the horse and instantly became a withered, blind old man. It was like that movie he’d seen at the Venus, Lost Horizon, where everybody lived in a valley called Shangri-La and stayed young forever but got old if they left.

  Or she could tell him again the story of Balor, who had an evil eye so huge that it required eight men to pry it open; when it was open the eye paralyzed every enemy warrior who dared to gaze upon it. If Balor had only been at Mister G’s, he could have paralyzed that goddamned Frankie McCarthy. And Finn MacCool could have thrown him to New Jersey. When Michael was five and six and learning to read, his mother told him of giant pots in ancient Ireland where the food was never exhausted, of silver trees with golden apples glistening in the sun, of spells cast by wizards that made men sleep for forty years, of magical swords that always found the enemy’s neck, of rainstorms turned into fire by druids and women transformed into mice, mice into warriors. There was a magic cauldron, found in a lake, into which dead warriors could be plunged to emerge alive, though unable to speak. Or she told tales of the great CúChulainn, who had seven pupils in each eye and seven fingers on each hand and seven toes on each foot and had the power to move one eye to the back of his head to watch his enemies. Or she told him about the great bull of Cooley that could carry fifty boys upon its back. All of this in Ireland, where she came from, across the foggy seas.

  But Kate Devlin was tired now, her shoes off, her feet swollen and sore. He tried to remember whether his mother was there when his father told his stories of Sticky, the magic dog. No. We were in the park. It was summer. On a bench. He saw his mother nod and then snap suddenly awake. She looked at him and smiled.

  “Was I asleep a long time?” she asked.

  “Maybe ten seconds,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “I started drifting off,” she said. “I thought I was in Ireland.”

  She looked again at her book.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “The stories about Ireland,” he said. “You know, Finn MacCool and CúChulainn and Balor and all. Are they true?”

  “Of course.”

  “Seriously?”

  She chuckled. “Well, when I heard them from my father, God rest his soul, I was told they were true.”

  “So where did they all go, Finn and Usheen and all of them?”

  “I asked just that question,” she said, “and my father said they didn’t go anywhere, they were still there, hidden, invisible, and when Ireland needed them, they’d be back.”

  “So why didn’t they come when the English invaded?”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to get their hands dirty,” she said, and laughed.

  He was glad to see her happy and left her with her book and retreated to his room. He gazed out the window facing the snowy fire escape, wondering how Mister G was doing in his hospital room, and where Frankie McCarthy was at that very moment, and whether the rabbi up on Kelly Street knew what had happened in the candy store on Ellison Avenue. He imagined CúChulainn on a mighty horse, a steed, as they called them, his eyes all red and his beard like fire, a sword as thick as a door in his belt, coming through the snow on Ellison Avenue to find Frankie McCarthy and punish him.

  Then he sat on the floor, with his back to the bed, thinking about the Captain Marvels scattered on the floor of Mister G’s candy store, and how, when a real man was being hurt, he could utter no magic words to ward off evil. He started reading Crime Does Not Pay, wondering if someday they’d run a story about Frankie McCarthy. Written by Charles Biro. Drawn by Norman Maurer. The story would start in Brooklyn, and they’d show him stomping a drunk outside Unbeatable Joe’s, then hitting Mister G with the telephone, the blood spurting, calling the old man a Jew prick, then towering above the stricken man with the dead weight of the cash register. Then Frankie would graduate into the rackets, and have big cars and sharp clothes, surrounded by dames in New York nightclubs. And then he’d go too far: the cops would chase him down and catch him, and he’d go weeping to the hot seat.

  Yeah.

  Except they never used the word prick in com
ic books.

  Or the word Jew, either.

  He lay there thinking about this and saw through the window that the snow was falling again, very softly. And he remembered the rabbi, calling to him that morning through the snow and wind. He couldn’t believe now that he had been so scared about entering the darkened vestibule of the synagogue and switching on a goddamned light.

  Abruptly, Michael got up. He stepped quietly into the living room. His mother was asleep in the chair, the book on her lap, a thumb wedged in the pages where she’d stopped reading.

  He went past her to the bookcase where they kept the blue books of the Wonderland of Knowledge. This was an encyclopedia his mother bought by sending coupons away to a newspaper, enclosing a dime for each volume. He picked out the volume marked Jes-Min, with a drawing of construction workers on the cover, one welding steel beams, the other carrying stones in a basket on his bare back, with pyramids in the distance. He turned to “Jews” and found the entry on page 2080.

  Persecution, hardship, and war have marked the long story of the Jews, a Semitic people who trace their ancestry back to the days of Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations. The 16,000,000 Jews in the world today have retained a purity hardly equaled by any other division of man, but their valuable contributions to the world have been of an international character. Greatest of these contributions is in the realm of religion. As the oldest people to believe in one God, the Jews laid the foundation of Christianity and other faiths based on this principle….