I made her comfortable on the sofa and cleaned her face. Her ribs were a mess — guys like Bruno always go for the ribs and even if they don’t crack them, they hurt for weeks. A cigar smoker had ground out a butt on the sole of her left foot. She was wild-eyed with fright, but after a while I calmed her down, told her who I was, that she was home free.
So was Gloria. About seven she drove up in a cab bringing nothing but the clothes she wore, a pair of designer jeans, heels, and a plain white blouse. Dressed like that she reminded me of someone’s daughter from school, which, in a sense, she was.
Ovid and Nancy Johnson showed up later still. And after the usual tearful reunion, the big guy took me aside and gave me a hug that reminded me I had rib trouble of my own. “I’ll pay you for what you did,” he said, “but I don’t have much money.”
“The freight’s paid,” I grunted. “We’re even.”
He shook his head. “I’ll owe you for what you’ve done till the day I die. That’s the way folks are where I come from.”
So I thought about it. He considered it a debt of honor? OK. “You ever paint a house?” I asked.
“A house?” He grinned from ear to ear, and he had wide ears. “Why, I’ve been known to paint a whole barn in three days!”
Actually, it took him four for my house. But that was because while I nursed my ribs, Kimberly nursed hers, and Nancy nursed us both. Gloria went home to Jackson but promised to write. My lady friend Ellen dropped by each evening, and after stuffing ourselves on Nancy’s down-home cooking, we all sat on the porch and sort of played family till long after dark and the neighborhood dogs came out to prowl.
’Ead All About It
Sol Newman
Sol Newman has published stories and poetry in such American and English publications as Esquire, Midstream, Canadian Forum, Wascana, Fiddlehead, and Ambit. His play Picasso’s Mind Was a Junkyard was recently showcased at the Quartz Theatre in Ashland, Oregon.
Mr. Newman comments on “ ’Ead All About It”: “Arnold Rothstein and the Black Sox of 1919 have long been messing around in my mind. Then one wintry day in Charlotte, North Carolina, the line ‘Finkie could fix anything: ballgames, prizefights, horse races, even tennis blurted out of my mouth to my son and his family and shortly thereafter ‘ ’Ead All About It!’ just typed itself down in, say, two hours.”
’Ead all about it!
’ET YUH JOURNAL, WHIRL, TELE, GLOBE, MAIL, SUN
In 1917 on East Broadway the smart money said, “Never mind the army, if the President just send Finkie, in five the kaiser takes a dive.” Because Finkie could fix anything: ballgames, prizefights, horse races, tennis even.
When before the war with the kaiser he is growing up, Finkie, in ribbed stockings from start to finish and redamed and patched-up pants nobbled just below the knee, losing himself in a clutch of white bewhiskered elders sawing the air in vehement disputation, filched supper from the vegetable and fruit stands and peddler carts, movie and cigarette money from the newstands; then, like Atalanta her golden apples, the elders one by one he dropped in the path of pursuers. For such a goniff the High Holy days were especially rewarding: with everyone in the Synagogue he had time to pick and choose; being everyone’s Shabbas candlelighter he would know where the valuables were.
If nervous old ladies spat when he passed, so ishka-bibble; if no madel would look at him twice, so couldn’t he lay out like for the undertaker their Charlie Ray, Wallie Reid movie heroes one after the other with the left hook had everyone calling him the new Abe Attell who was the featherweight champ? Already he had offers. A second Benny Leonard for sure, said people knew what they were talking about; but why should such a brainy kid such as himself get knocked punchy like sooner or later happens to the best when just sitting on his toches he would make so fast that he couldn’t keep track?
To the day she died Mrs. Finkelstein complaining Finkie in such a hurry that he sucked every drop of milk out before even one of her always so painful teats she could shake loose. Finkie dropping first, Mrs. Finkelstein claimed, meant not a drop of blood left for poor Julius. Out from her belly how could God in heaven have ripped out such a Cossack?
When not spitting blood, the father of Finkie and Julius sat like the gravestone he soon would be under reading his Yiddish newspaper. In season ten hours seven days a week in the cloak factory, any wonder he was not one for idle chatter? “America the Promised Land!” he said each time Mrs. Finkelstein smacked and whipped Finkie and for what? That he should like his father before him kiss the boss’s potz for a job in his consumption factory? Finkie’s in a hurry? So hurrah for Finkie, for anybody smart and strong enough to spring himself from this clapped-up consumptive garbage and dreck from the windows plopping on the stinking boulevard was Jewry’s Main Street, off which in alleys and hallways right under the snot-dripping noses of the pious elders if by thirteen years old your daughter don’t get the syph and knocked up in the bargain it was because she was cross-eyed.
That this did not happen to Julius’s Rosala could only mean that Yahveh watched out. To save her for himself like Jove-Jupiter-Zeus? Always her head in the air when home from school she danced and that she never once into the house brings on her shoes the dog dreck from the street doesn’t prove who was watching out? How dreamily she listens to Julius spell out how joyous their life when he is the doctor and she his good wife-nurse, dear God should only speed the day. All his life, Julius promised his Rosala, never to look at another madel as upon her he looks; and who could blame him when like his Rosala, if you could believe all the grandmothers from East Broadway to Delancey Street, they looked each one of them when back in the old country they ate only borscht and peaches and sour cream?
While on her feet ten hours waiting on Woolworth’s customers, besides of her joyous life with Julius when at last he hangs out the shingle, what does his Rosala dream? When too foul the weather for Central Park or Coney Island or even walking, you went on Sunday afternoons to the nickleodeon, during the week after supper to the library, didn’t Mama, Papa complain she was reading herself blind, so what doctor, lawyer would look at her then? Doctors or lawyers being what good girls on East Broadway aspired to; or rather their mothers for them: catch a doctor quick before the nurses turn his head, Mama admonished Rosala from the first time she opened her big blue eyes; if not then a lawyer who could afford an apartment without bedbugs, cockroaches on Seventh Avenue where already lives Benny Leonard the great prizefighter. Rebecca of Ivanhoe’s Sunnybrook Farm she was; Mary Pickford, Julius being Mary’s brother Jack until the last reel when Julius it turns out is not so they could marry; poor Julius who legs tucked under him in a tailor shop sews, all night goes to school and around the clock studies, a textbook under his arm even Sundays in Central Park or at Coney Island with his Rosala-Rebecca from Ivanhoe’s Sunnybrook Farm.
Even upstairs in their dismal two rooms on Hester Street Rosala’s mother and father had to watch their step because always underfoot a young reb or a widowed butcher or a college boy from uptown begging they should please make him already their son-in-law; and God knows day and night they urged now this suitor now that one on Rosala who hands clasped over ears, eyes flashing, rebuked them for their disloyalty to her Julius. Did she mean to wait forever? her father asked. “Look in the mirror, already the bloom is departing.” Papa despaired. Flesh and blood she wasn’t. He and Mama! Before fifteen! They had to marry! Even a reb was not good enough for this nose-in-the-air tochter who waits all her life for a doctor who all his life don’t make what the butcher came last night takes in in one day.