“Oh no! Really?”
“Really. I was born in 1946, right after my mother saw him in The Best Years of Our Lives.”
“When in 1946?”
“Was I born, or did she see the picture?”
“Born.”
“December. Two days before Christmas.”
“So what did you find out about him?”
“Dana Andrews?”
“No, Plague. On the white horse.”
“I told you, there was no Plague. Only War, Famine, Death, and Jesus.”
“Then all your research was for nothing.”
“I didn’t mind. I like libraries.” She smiled again. “Besides, it gives me something to talk about on trains.”
“Listen,” I said, “I’m really sorry I asked you to move your bags.”
“Don’t be silly. I was being a hog.”
“Would you like a beer or something?”
“I don’t think there’s a bar car.”
“Has to be a bar car.”
“Had to be a Plague, too, but there wasn’t.”
“You watch the seats,” I said. “I’ll check it out.”
In the next to the last car on the train, I ran into Scott Dundee who was now a freshman at Tufts and who was sitting with a girl he introduced as “Gail Rogers, Simmons ’67,” the same asshole he’d always been. He asked if he could give me a lift home from Stamford, but I lied and said I was being picked up, preferring a taxi to his Great Swordsman company, and then hurrying into the last car, knowing by then of course that Dana Castelli had been right, there was no bar car. I lurched and staggered my way forward again, the New Haven Railroad performing in its usual glassy-smooth style, and when I got back to where she was sitting I nearly dropped dead on the spot. The guitar, the duffle bag, and both suitcases were piled onto the seat again, and Dana was turned away from the aisle, legs up under her, one elbow on the window sill, staring out at the goddamn telephone poles. I felt, I don’t know what, anger, rejection, embarrassment, stupidity, clumsiness, everything. And then, suddenly, she turned from the window, whipping her head around so quickly that her black hair spun out and away from her face like a Revlon television commercial, and her grin cracked sharp and clean and wide, confirming her joke, and we both burst out laughing.
That was the real beginning.
We talked all the way to Stamford.
She told me her father was Italian and her mother Jewish, this WASP princess of the western world. They had met while he was still a budding psychoanalyst in medical school, an ambition that cut no ice at all with her mother’s father, who objected to the marriage and who threatened to have this “Sicilian gangster” castrated or worse by some gangster friends of his own, he being the owner of a kosher restaurant on Fordham Road in the Bronx and therefore familiar with all kinds of Mafia types who rented him linens and collected his garbage. Joyce Gelb, for such was her mother’s maiden name, was then a student at Hunter College and running with a crowd the likes of which had only recently signed petitions for the release of the Scottsboro Boys. She wasn’t about to take criticism of her Sicilian gangster, who in reality was descended from a mixture of Milanese on his mother’s side and Veronese on his father’s and who anyway had blue eyes which she adored. Joyce told her father he was a bigot and a hypocrite besides, since he hadn’t set foot inside a synagogue since her mother’s death eight years ago, when he had said the Kaddish and promptly begun playing house with his cashier, a busty blond specimen of twenty-four. The couple, Joyce Gelb and Frank Castelli, eloped in the summer of 1941, fleeing to Maryland, where they were married by a justice of the peace in Elkton, Frank constantly glancing over his shoulder for signs of pursuing mohelim. In 1942, the Castellis bought a small house in Hicksville, Long Island. Secure from the draft (he had been classified 4-F because of his asthma) he began analyzing the neurotics in Hempstead and environs.
“Do you know the kind of town Hicksville was?” Dana said. “When I was still a kid, the suggestion came up that they should change the name of the town to something better, you know? Like there are some towns on Long Island with really beautiful Indian names — Massapequa, Ronkonkoma, Syosset — and even some very nice, well, suburban-sounding names like Bethpage and Lynbrook and, well you know. So guess what? The town fathers objected! They actually preferred Hicksville, can you imagine that? Which is just what it is, of course — Hicksville, U.S.A., I lived there until I was thirteen years old; the most thrilling thing that happened was the erection of a shopping center, you should pardon the expression.”
At the age of thirteen, as she was entering puberty (“and beginning to blossom,” Dana said, and winked and gave me a burlesque comic’s elbow), Dr. Castelli moved his practice and his family to Park Avenue...
“In the mid-Eighties, right?” I said.
“Seventy-ninth,” Dana said.
“Close,” I said.
“No cigar,” she said.
... and Dana began attending the Dalton School, no mean feat for a kid whose Italian grandfather still ran a latticeria on First Avenue, and whose Jewish grandfather made a good living keeping the fleishedig plates from the milchedig. She was now, she told me, an English major at Boston University, and she hoped one day to write jokes for television comedians, which I might think a strange and curious ambition for a girl, but after all some of the funniest people in America were women, witness Lady Bird Johnson, she said, without cracking a smile.
We began talking about Kennedy then, both of us realizing with a sudden shock that he had been killed just a year ago, and then doing what people inevitably did when talking about that day in November remembering with almost total recall exactly where they were and what they were doing when the news broke (“I could hear them saying, ‘The head, the head,’ and i listened in bewilderment and fear because I was sure now that something terrible had happened to me, that they were all talking about my head, that maybe my neck was twisted at a funny angle, maybe there was a line of blood trickling from under my white helmet.”). Dana had been in her father’s office, necking on his couch with a boy from CCNY, Friday being Dr. Castelli’s day at Manhattan General, where he worked with addicts on the Narcotics Service. The radio had been tuned to WABC, Bob Dayton spewing machine-gun chatter and canned goodies from The Beatles, when the announcer broke in to say that Kennedy’s motorcade had been fired upon, the news causing Dana to leap up from the couch not a moment too soon, being as she was in a somewhat vulnerable position just then.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You know,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, and felt violently protective all at once, ready to strangle the snot-nosed, pimply-faced City College rapist who had dared put his hand under her skirt or whatever it was he’d been doing.
“Well, you know,” Dana said.
“Sure,” I said.
Which led us into talking about the MIT sweatshirt she was wearing, and how she had come into possession of it so early in her college career, the fall term at B.U. having started only in September.
She told me that she had met this dreamy boy at the Fogg Museum one rainy Saturday (Oh, please, I said, where are the violins?) and he’d turned out to be a very sensitive young man who had managed to get out of East Berlin immediately after the Russians lifted their blockade in 1949. (A German, I said, that’s real groovy. What was his father during the war? A baker?) His father, Dana promptly informed me, was Jewish and in fact a survivor of Auschwitz, which, I might remember, was a German concentration camp, in fact the camp where four million Jews were annihilated, in fact. His father had chosen to continue living in Germany...