Somewhat flustered, Hilda stepped in. “Where’s Marilyn?” she repeated. Abe stepped in, too.
“She’s out,” I said. “She’s with some friends. She’ll be back in an hour or so, I’d imagine. Would you like to sit —?”
“I wouldn’t sit on anything in this dirty house!”
“Hilda,” Abe said.
“Are you keeping Marilyn from me?”
“Come on, Hilda. He said she’s out.”
“You’re welcome to wait for her, if you like,” I said. I was only beginning to pick up on Hilda’s shaky despair. And I was also beginning to feel invaded and somewhat put out.
“I don’t want to wait,” she said. “I don’t want to wait here.”
“Hilda,” Abe said, as though he might have said it before, “you know the kids are married. You said they’ve both got jobs — ”
“Oh, I don’t believe he’s got a job,” Hilda snapped, turning in her cloth coat on the wet kitchen floor.
Since I’d been working all day at Barnes & Noble, I laughed.
“Well, at least he’s mopping the floor,” Abe said.
“Why isn’t Marilyn here?” Hilda demanded once more. “I want to get Marilyn. And I want to go home!” She was close to tears.
It went on like this another ten minutes. They came inside.
But after Hilda rebuffed two or three more of my attempts at civility (one that stays is her refusal to sit in the red chair that, just days before, she’d sent down to us. “It’s too filthy! I won’t sit on it! Everything here is too filthy!” In the living room, with her hands in her pockets, she held the coat tight about herself. Abe’s London Fog hung widely open over his tie and checkered jacket), I let Abe handle it. Then, as precipitously as they’d come, they left. “Good night,” I said. “I’ll tell Marilyn you were here.” Shaking my head, I closed the door and went back to mopping.
I learned later that Abe was rather impressed that I was cleaning the house and became something of an advocate, if not of me, then at least of sanity in dealing with what had to be dealt with. A family who’d come to this country as immigrants, they knew what it was to be poor and live in a slum.
And I was a polite kid.
But as Hilda made her slow, always more or less unhappy adjustments to having a married daughter, I was often more discommoded by the relation between Marilyn and her mother (in which, out of only that politeness, I became more and more a middleman) than I was with any strains between Marilyn and me.
And Friday night dinners in the Bronx continued as though nothing had happened.
7.01. To return to Fifth Street, at least from the west, you walked east on Fourth Street a third of the way along the block beyond Avenue B, then turned up an alleyway between the back of the schoolyard’s handball court and the red brick wall of the window-frame factory. “D.T.K.L.A.M.F.” was the only graffito scrawled in black paint over the handball court’s wall in those days. An extraordinarily handsome fifteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy named Rusty, whose mother ran the aforementioned shooting gallery, explained to us that the “D.L.A.M.F.” part meant “down like a mother-fucker.” The T and the K, however, remained a mystery.[9]
Perhaps they were angel letters.
7.1. The most disturbing incident in those early days of marriage — for me — happened in my first days of work at Barnes & Noble. I don’t remember where I learned that B & N was hiring for the September textbook rush, or why I even considered working there. I think I wanted to get any job I could. I remember going in to fill out a preliminary application, being told to return the next day at ten; and when I did, with a dozen other applicants I was ushered upstairs into an office floored with black-and-white tile, with a few full-to-overflowing aluminum-stand ashtrays of the sort you used to see sometimes in doctors’ waiting rooms, where we filled out the more complicated bonding application. If none of us turned out to have criminal records or proved otherwise unacceptable to the bonding company, we would start work on Wednesday at nine — and eight-thirty every day thereafter.
Back home, I told Marilyn I had a job. She seemed pleased. And I suppose I’d vacillated between wondering why she hadn’t also applied at B & N herself to deciding it was just as well we weren’t working at the same place. Both opinions, I’m sure, I had been very vocal with. But now, Marilyn commented sensibly enough, since one of us was working she could take a few days to look through the Times want ads for something a bit more substantial. It sounded sensible to me. We probably took a walk that night over to the Village, where we looked into the Fat Black Pussycat, or stopped in the Cafe Feenjon for a mug of overpriced espresso, and finally walked back to the Lower East Side.
On Wednesday morning, I got up, made coffee, asked a sleepy Marilyn if she wanted breakfast — “Okay,” she said — and I fried some bacon and scrambled some eggs. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Marilyn in an orange robe, me in my slacks and a T-shirt, we ate together. I wondered aloud if, to be a book clerk, you should wear a tie on your first day.
“I don’t think so,” Marilyn said.
We ate more eggs.
“Do you think you could clean up the house while I’m at work?” I asked, as we were finishing. “There’s not very much to do. You know — spread up the bed, wash the breakfast dishes, pull some of the things out from the wall, and get behind them when you sweep the floor? I don’t think it could take you two hours at the outside.” Looking around the living room, I figured it was more like forty minutes’ work. “I’ll pick up something for dinner on the way home. We’ll have something nice.”
“Okay,” she said.
I got into my shoes, my shirt. The night before, Marilyn had started the first chapter of Middlemarch. When I left, she had picked up the chunky Modern Library volume and moved to the easy chair. “I’ll see you later,” I said at the door.
Marilyn turned another page and glanced up. “Bye.”
I walked up to Eighteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. In the textbook area at the rear of the old, then rather dismal store, we were shown the hive of the textbook stacks; how to fill out various receipts; how to help customers fill out call slips; we were told things we should never say, were shown who we should go to for help, and what to do about checks, etc. Some of the clerks asked stupid questions, others intelligent ones. It was a young, friendly group, and in the long run, it was more interesting that not.
That evening, when I shouldered through the kitchen door, I noticed the breakfast dishes were still in the sink where I’d put them before I’d left. Well, I thought, I wasn’t in love with dishwashing either. Maybe Marilyn hadn’t gotten to it. It would just mean — though I found myself frowning as I set the groceries down on the counter — it would take another ten or fifteen minutes to get started on dinner.
When I looked into the living room, I saw that the bed was in the same rumpled state, to the wrinkle, as when I’d left. “Hello,” I called.
“Hello,” Marilyn’s voice came, cheerily.
I stepped inside.
Still in her robe, Marilyn was still in the easy chair. Middlemarch was open in her lap. It looked as though she had about thirty pages to go. The room gave the overwhelming impression that not an object had been moved since I’d left this morning.
I was a bit perturbed. But I also thought it was a kind of silly thing to make a fuss over. I mentioned what I’d brought for dinner.
“That sounds good,” Marilyn said.
“How’s Middlemarch?” I asked.
Whereupon Marilyn, getting up from her chair, launched into an astonishingly detailed account of the doings of Dorothea Brooke, Mr. Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, and Dr. Lydgate. She followed me into the kitchen, telling me about the story while I washed the dishes and fixed dinner. I was wondering, of course, when she would say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t get to the housework. I got too involved in the novel,” but that was as absent from whatever she spoke about as were any questions on what had happened to me in my first day at work.
9
Familiar with the street culture of those years and encountering the above passage in the first edition of this book, a contemporary reader, John Del Gaizo, informs me that the “T. K” stood for the words “to kill”—so that the entire acronym expands to “Down to kill like a mother-fucker.”