Billy Bathgate

TWENTY

Mr. Schultz had been mortally wounded and he died at Newark City Hospital a little after six the next evening. Just before he died a nurse’s aide brought his dinner tray into the room and left it there, having had no instructions to the contrary. I came out from behind the screen where I’d been hiding and I ate everything, consommé and roast pork and cooked carrots, a slice of white bread, tea, and a trembling cube of lime Jell-O for dessert. Afterward I held his hand. He was by then in a coma and lay quietly with his broad, bare and badly sewn chest rising and falling, but for hours, all afternoon, in fact, he’d been delirious and talked constantly, he shouted and wept and issued orders and sang songs, and because the police were trying to find out who shot him they sent in a stenographer to put his ravings on record.
I found to hand behind my screen a nurse’s clipboard with some pages of medical record forms attached, and in the top drawer of a white metal table, which I slid out very slowly, the stub of a pencil. And I wrote down what he said as well. The police were interested to know who killed him. I knew that, so I listened for the wisdom of a lifetime. I thought at the end a man would make the best statement of which he was capable, delirious or not. I figured delirium was only a kind of code. My version doesn’t always match the official transcript, it is more selective, being in longhand, there are words misheard, mistakes of my own emotion, I was also constrained not to be noticed by anyone who came at various times into the room, it was busy in there at times what with the stenographer, police officers, the doctor, the priest, and Mr. Schultz’s real wife and family.
The stenographer’s transcript made its way into the newspapers and so Dutch Schultz is remembered today for his protracted and highly verbal death, coming of a culture where it tends to happen abruptly to men who never had that much to say in the first place. But he was a monologist all his life, he was never as silent as he thought he was or as ill-equipped in speech. I think now, as one who linked my life to his, that whatever he did was of a piece, the murdering and the language for it, he was never at a loss for words, whatever he pretended. And while this monologue of his own murder is a cryptic passion, it is not poetry, the fact is he lived as a gangster and spoke as a gangster, and when he died bleeding from the sutured holes in his chest he died of the gangsterdom of his mind as it flowed from him, he died dispensing himself in utterance, as if death is chattered-out being, or as if all we are made of is words and when we die the soul of speech decants itself into the universe.
No wonder I got hungry. He went on for over two hours. I sat there and got to know that screen well, I think the material was muslin and it was laced taut on a green metal frame that could be rolled about on four little rubber casters, and his words seemed to paint themselves there on the translucent light of the cloth, or perhaps it was on my own unwritten mind, and I wrote them down, interrupted only by the wearing-down of the lead of the pencil, which I then had to reexpose by picking at the wood with my fingernails. Anyway I’ll enter this here as I heard it delivered between the hours of four and six P.M. of October 24, until the moment before he finally but not for all time fell silent.
“Oh mama, mama,” he said. “Oh stop it stop it stop it. Please make it quick, fast and furious. Please, fast and furious. I am getting my wind back. You do all right with the dot dash system. Whose number is that in your pocketbook, Otto: 13780? Oh oh, dog biscuit. And when he is happy he doesn’t get snappy. Please, you didn’t even meet me. The glove will fit what I say. Oh Kay Oh Kaioh, oh cocoa, I know. Who shot me? The boss himself. Who shot me? No one. Please, Lulu, and then he clips me? I am not shouting, I am a pretty good pretzel. Ask Winifred in the department of justice. I don’t know why they shot me, honestly I don’t. Honestly. I am an honest man. I went to the toilet. I was in the toilet and when I reached—the boy came at me. Yes, he gave it to me. Come on, he cuts me off, the beneficiary of his will, is that right? A father’s son? Please pull for me. Will you pull? How many good, how many bad? Please, I had nothing with him. He was a cowboy in one of the seven days a week fights. No business, no hangout, no friends, nothing, just what you pick up and what you need. Please give me a shot. It is from the factory. I don’t want harmony. I want harmony. There is none so fair, beyond compare, they call Marie. I’ll marry you in church, please, let me just put it in a little way. Let me into the district fire factory. No no, there are only ten of us, and there are ten million somewhere of you so get your onions up and we will throw in the truce towel. Oh please let me up, please shift me, police, that is communistic strike baloney! I still don’t want him in the path, it is no use to stage a riot. The sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up. Put me in control, I’ll throw him out the window, I’ll grate his eyes. My gilt edged stuff, and those dirty rats have tuned in! Please mother, don’t tear, don’t rip. That is something that shouldn’t be spoken about. Please get me up, my friends. Look out, the shooting is a bit wild, and that kind of shooting saved a man’s life. Pardon me I forgot I am plaintiff and not defendant. Why can’t he just pull out and give me control? Please mother, pick me up now. Don’t drop me. We’ll have the blues on the run. They are Englishmen and they are a type I don’t know who is best, they or us. Oh sir, get the doll a roofing. For God’s sake! You can play jacks and girls do that with a soft ball and play tricks with it. She showed me, we were children. No no and it is no. It is confused and it says no. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim. And you hear me? Get some money in that treasury we need it. Look at the past performances, that is not what you have in the book. I love the boxes of fresh vegetables. Oh please warden, please put me up on my feet at once. Did you hear me? Please crack down on the Chinamen’s friends and Hitler’s commander. Mother is the best bet and don’t let Satan draw you too fast. What did the big fellow shoot me for? Please get me up. If you do this you can go and jump right here in the lake. I know who they are they are Frenchy’s people all right look out look out. Oh my memory is all gone. My fortunes have changed and come back and went back since that. I am wobbly. You ain’t got nothing on him and we got it on his hello. I am dying. Come on Missy, pull me out I am half crazy about you. Where is she, where is she? They won’t let me get up, they dyed my shoes. Open those shoes. I am so sick, give me some water. Open this up and break it so I can touch you. Mickey please get me in the car. I don’t know who could have done it. Anybody. Kindly take my shoes off there is a handcuff on them. The pope says these things and I believe him. I know what I am doing here with my collection of papers. It isn’t worth a nickel to two guys like you and me, but to a collector it is worth a fortune. It is priceless. Money is paper too and you stash it in the shithouse! Look, the dark woods. I am going to turn—turn your back to me please, Billy I am so sick. Look out for Jimmy Valentine for he’s a pal of mine. Look out for your mama, look out for her. I tell you you can’t beat him. Police, please take me out. I will settle the indictment. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. You want to talk, talk to the sword. Here is French Canadian bean soup on the altar. I want to pay. I am ready. All my life I have been waiting. You hear me? Let them leave me alone.”
Simultaneous with the shootings in the Palace Chophouse there had been attacks on known Schultz gang members in Manhattan and the Bronx, two were dead, including Mickey the driver, whose real name was Michael O’Hanley, three were seriously wounded, and the rest of the gang was presumed scattered. I had read about it in the morning papers while waiting for a train to Manhattan in the Newark station of the Pennsylvania Railroad. I was not mentioned in any of the accounts, the bartender’s statement had not included reference to a kid in a Shadows jacket, which was good, but I put the valise in a pay locker and rolled up my jacket and disposed of it in a trash basket on the theory that not everything the bartender told the police might have found its way into the newspapers, and then I went out and got a taxicab to take me to Newark Hospital, having persuaded myself that Mr. Schultz’s room was at that moment the safest place to be.
But now that he was dead, I was on my own. I looked at his face, it was the deep red color of a plum, the mouth was slightly open and the eyes staring up as if he had something else to say. For a moment I was fooled into thinking he did. Then I realized my own mouth was open as if I had something to say too, so that my mind flashed with an entire normal conversation between us, the one it was too late for, his confession and my forgiveness, or perhaps the other way around, but in either case the conversation you only have with the dead.
I limped away before the nurses came in and discovered him. I reclaimed my suitcase at the station and rode the train into Manhattan. It was a chilly night for a boy having no jacket. I took the crosstown trolley to the El, and I got back to the Bronx by about nine at night and did not go home directly but came around through the backyard of the Diamond Home for Children, and made my way into the basement where Arnold Garbage was listening to “The Make-Believe Ballroom” on the radio while looking through old Collier’s magazines. Without going into details I told him I had to stash something and he found me a small space in the back of his deepest darkest bin. I gave him a dollar. Then I went back the way I had come, circled around to Third Avenue, and walked home the front way.
For weeks afterward I sat in the apartment, I couldn’t seem to move, it was not that I was sore and aching, I could take aspirins for that, I felt as if I weighed a thousand pounds, everything was an enormous effort, even sitting in a chair, even breathing. I found myself looking at that black phone, waiting for it to ring, I even picked it up from time to time to see if anyone was on the other end. I sat with my Automatic stuck inside my belt, it was just the way Mr. Schultz had carried his gun. I was fearful that when I went to bed I would have nightmares but I slept the sleep of the innocent. Meanwhile the autumn began flying through the Bronx, winds rattled the windows and the leaves from God knows what distant trees came wheeling down our street on their crisp edges. And he was still dead, they were all still dead.
I kept thinking about Mr. Berman’s last words to me and whether they meant anything more than the numbers of a combination lock. They were words to keep going, I could say that much, he was preserving something, he was passing it on. So they were trustful words. But trust could mean either of two things, not knowing any better or knowing full well, knowing all the time and never having let on, with those little looks over the tops of his glasses, the teacher, every act a teaching.
It was a strong powerful ghost they made in me, my dead gang. What happened to the skills of a man when he died, that he knew how to play the piano, for instance, or in Irving’s case to tie knots, to roll up pant legs, to walk easily over a heaving sea? What had happened to Irving’s great gift of precision, his just competence in everything, that I so admired? Where did that go, that abstraction?
My mother didn’t seem to notice my state but she began to cook things for me that I liked, and she began to really clean the apartment. She snuffed the candles and threw out all her tumblers of lights, it was almost funny—now with someone really dead she was no longer in mourning. But I was only half aware of all of this. I was trying to figure out what to do with myself. I thought about going back to school and sitting in a classroom and learning whatever it was you learned in classrooms. Then I took it as a commentary on my sad state of mind that I would even consider such a thing.
I would from time to time take my transcript out of my pocket and unfold the pages and read again what Mr. Schultz had said. It was a disheartening babble. There was no truth of history in it, no message for me.
My mother found a store on Bathgate Avenue that sold sea-shells, and she brought home a brown paper bag full of these tiny ridged shells, some were no bigger than a pinky nail, and she began another one of her mad projects, which was to paste them to the phone using airplane cement she had found from an old balsa model I had never finished constructing. She dipped a toothpick in the bottle of dope and spread a glistening drop around the rim of the tiny shell and glued it to the phone. Eventually the entire phone, receiver and base, was covered in shells. It was rather beautiful, generally white and pink and tan, and rippled and gnarled, as if it was losing its form, as if the form of all things is lost in our attentions. She even attached shells to the cord, so that it seemed like a string of underwater lights. I found myself crying for my crazy mother when I thought of her as James J. Hines recalled her, a young and stately and thoughtful and brave young immigrant. I thought she must for a time have ennobled my father and that he had enlightened her in their undeniable love for each other before he had taken a powder. I had the money now never to have to send her away. I swore she would stay with me and I would take care of her for as long as she lived. But I couldn’t seem to get going on anything, not even to the point of persuading her to quit her job. I suppose it was not a very gladdening prospect I saw before us. I was made very lonely by her strange use of objects, candles or pictures or remnants of clothing, broken dolls, and shells. One evening she came home with a fish tank, it was very heavy and she had trouble carrying it up the stairs, but her face was flushed and her expression happy as she put it on the end table beside the couch and filled it with water and then gently submerged the phone. How I loved my mad mother, how beautiful she was, I felt so bad, I felt I had failed her, I thought she had not changed because I had not gotten the final justice for us. The money in the valise across the street in the basement wasn’t enough, I couldn’t believe all the efforts of my intuitive scheming were fulfilled by it, of course, though I didn’t know how much there was, even one month’s weakened earnings of Schultz enterprises was enough to live on for several years, good God if I just drew from it twice my mother’s salary from the laundry we would have everything we could possibly need, but I was terribly worried by it, we wouldn’t be able to take it to a bank, I would have to think about it how to protect it all the time and use it in such dribs and drabs that it wouldn’t draw attention to us and this seemed to me part of its skimpy insufficiency. I thought if it was going to change anything then it should have already, just the possession of it. But it hadn’t. Then I realized that even though he was dead I felt about the money that it was still Mr. Schultz’s. I had picked it up on instructions from Mr. Berman and now I found myself waiting for further instructions. I did not feel the calm I knew should come to me from the resolution of all my dreaming. I had nobody to talk to, nobody to know, in any event, to tell me I had done well. In fact only the dead men of my gang could ever appreciate as much as I had done.
And then late one night I was buying the papers at the kiosk on Third Avenue under the El when a De Soto pulled up and the door opened, and I was surrounded by men, two had come out of the cigar store at the same time as two came out of the car, and they had the impassive expressions on their faces of the criminal trades. All one of them had to do was nod toward the open door of the car and I folded my papers under my arm and got right in. They drove me all the way downtown to the Lower East Side. I knew it was important not to panic, or to imagine what might be happening to me. I thought back to all my movements of the past year and couldn’t understand how he could know about me, I hadn’t even let him get a good look at me in front of the church steps. I saw now that I had made one terrible mistake in not writing a letter to my mother with instructions to her only to open it if I didn’t come home and didn’t come home and died of not coming home to my mother.
They pulled up in a narrow tenement street, though naturally they didn’t give me a clear look at it. I felt across my face the barred shadows of fire escapes in the dimly lit street. We climbed a stoop. We walked up five flights.
All at once I was in a kitchen under a bare ceiling-bulb and facing, as he sat at a little table covered with oilcloth like a rich visiting relative, the man who had won the gang wars. Here is what I saw: two mildly inquisitive eyes of no great intelligence and one of them drooped under a heavy hanging eyelid. And he really did have bad skin, I saw that now, and the scar under his jaw was whiter than everywhere else. All told he had a kind of lizardy look. His best feature was a good head of slicked-back wavy black hair. He was wearing a well-tailored topcoat over his businessman’s ensemble. His hat was on the table. His nails were manicured. I smelled an eau de cologne. His was altogether a different style of malignity from Mr. Schultz’s. I felt as you feel when you walk a few blocks into another neighborhood though it is not that far from your own. He gestured with an open hand very politely so that I would sit down opposite him.
“First of all, Billy,” he said in a very soft voice, as if all conversation was regrettable, “you know how bad we feel what happened to the Dutchman.”
“Yes sir,” I said. I was appalled that he knew my name, I didn’t want to be in his registry of names.
“I had the greatest respect. For all of them. I knew them how many years? A man like Irving, you don’t find his quality.”
“No sir.”
“We are trying to find out the cause of this thing. We are trying to get his boys back and put something together, you know, for the widows and children.”
“Yes sir.”
“But it is turning out to have difficulties.”
The tiny room was crowded with the men standing behind me and behind him. Only now did I see, off to the side, Dixie Davis, the mouthpiece, slumped in a wooden chair with his knees pressed together and holding his hands locked between them to keep them from shaking. The underarms of Mr. Davis’s expensive pinstripe suit had big dark sweat stains and his face was covered by a film of sweat. I knew these as signs of the extreme unction. I acknowledged him with the briefest of glances because I understood now who had identified me, which meant all I was giving away was the truth they already knew and I thought it might suggest I wasn’t smart or devious enough to try to hide anything.
Then I turned back to my interrogator. It seemed important to me to sit straight and look at him clear-eyed. He would learn as much from my attitude as from anything I said.
“You were coming along nicely in their eyes is my understanding.”
“Yes sir.”
“We might have a job for a bright kid. Did you get out of it at least with something to show?” he said as casually as if my life wasn’t in the balance.
“Well,” I said, “I was just catching on. I was put on salary the week before and he gave me a month’s advance because my mother’s been sick. Two hundred dollars. I don’t have it with me, but I can get it from the savings bank first thing in the morning.”
He smiled, the corners of his mouth turned up for an instant, and he raised his hand. “We don’t want your wages, kid. I’m talking about business affairs. They managed their business not always in a business way. I was asking if you could help us figure out about assets.”
“Gee whiz,” I said, scratching my head, “that is more in Mr. Davis’s department. All I did was run out for coffee or if someone needed a pack of cigarettes. They never let me in meetings or where anything was going on.”
He sat there nodding. I could feel Dixie Davis’s eyes on me, I could feel the intensity of his stare.
“You never saw any money?”
I thought a moment. “Yes, once, on a Hundred Forty-ninth Street,” I said. “I saw them counting the day’s collection while I was sweeping. I was impressed.”
“You were impressed?”
“Yes. It was something to dream about.”
“Have you dreamed?”
“Every night,” I said looking him in the drooped eye. “Mr. Berman told me the business is changing. That they will need smart quiet people with good manners who have been to school. I am going back into school and then I’m going to go to City College. And then we’ll see.”
He nodded, and grew very still and gazed into my eyes for a moment as he made up his mind. “School is a good idea,” he said. “We may look in on you from time to time, see how you’re doing.” He lifted his hand, palm up, and I rose with it. Dixie Davis had put his hand over his face.
“Thank you, sir,” I said to the man who had ordered the killings of Mr. Schultz, Mr. Berman, Irving, and Lulu. “It is an honor to meet you.”
I was returned safely to Third Avenue, driven right back and dropped off in front of the cigar store. Only then did I become terrified. I sat down on the curb. My hands were black where they had moistly picked up the newsprint of the papers I had been holding. I read fragments of headlines in my palms, pieces of words. I had no idea what might be going to happen to me. Either I was free or my days were numbered. I just didn’t know. I jumped up and began to walk the streets. I found myself shaking, but not with fear, with anger at myself for my fear. I thought: Let them kill me. I waited for the sound of the engine of the specific killing car screeching around the corner with the windows rolling down. And then I tried to figure out what they would think I had done to make them kill me. They wouldn’t kill me, they would watch me. That’s what I would do if I didn’t know where the money was.
The fact was I had learned something very interesting: The newspapers had estimated Mr. Schultz’s fortune as anywhere between six and nine million dollars. Very little of it had been put in banks. The Combination hadn’t found it, they were looking for it, they had the business but they wanted the money too, they wanted the business from its beginnings.
And it was odd but from one moment to the next I was exhilarated by the attentions of another great man, dangerous as they were, I thought it was indeed possible my days were numbered but my competitive spirit was reawakened, I realized I had been sharing the defeat of the gang in a morbid way, I had been dwelling on their deaths. But nothing was over, it was all still going on, the money was deathless, the money was eternal and the love of it was infinite. I waited a few days and then went down to Arnold Garbage’s basement while he was out foraging, and I made a private space for myself in case anyone came in, and in the ashen air, with the footfalls of children over my head, I counted the cash in the alligator suitcase. I was a long time counting, it was far more than I had thought, I will mention the precise amount, it took me several hours to count it, it was three hundred and sixty-two thousand and one hundred and twelve dollars I had taken for my portion and stashed there under carriage parts and old newspapers and broken toys and bed slats and stovepipes, and paper bags of shoes, and clothing in bales, and pots and pans and panes of glass and machine gears and acetylene torches and screwdrivers without handles and hammers and saws without teeth and shoeboxes of bubble-gum cards, and bottles and jars and baby bottles and cigar boxes of rubber nipples and typewriters and parts of saxophones and the bells of trumpets and the torn skins of drums and bent kazoos and broken ocarinas, and baseball bats and ships in cracked bottles and bathing caps and Boy Scout hats and badges and campaign buttons and piggy banks and bent tricycles and molding stamp collections and tiny flags on toothpicks from all the nations of the world.
And then of course I went back to my handwritten statements of what he had said and studied them and found there my vision of living in flowering reward, I had been too impatient, a great charmed fate unfolds, unfolds, unfurls in waves, and floops out to the sun like the planet in flower, I heard Mr. Schultz’s voice say a capable boy, a capable boy and oh I was! because I found stashes of money in his sentences, the money of his delirious passion locked away there like an insane man’s riddle, I studied that transcript in my own handwriting and I learned from it what he had told me, he told me there would be money for Mrs. Schultz and his children somewhere they would know about, but the meaning of his life and his genius, why he would salt it about as his years went on so that you could find it in the periods of his criminal career as in his neighborhoods. And to test this proposition I went one night with Arnold Garbage after I had sat for weeks in schoolrooms to prove myself not worth watching, and we broke open a lock in the old abandoned beer drop on Park Avenue where I used to stand around and juggle, and in the shudder of a passing train we went down into a darkness black as if the fires had gone out in hell, and with rats brushing against our ankles and in the dankness of the history of the old beer runs, found there in the shit and refuse of Arnold’s dreams, by his faint flashlight, an unbunged barrel stuffed to the coops with the currency of the United States, and Arnold lugged it and rolled it home on a pushcart over the cobblestones while I went ahead of him and stood in the shadows of doorways, and from that midnight hour we became partners in a corporate enterprise that goes on to this very day.
But I don’t mean to suggest I was satisfied that was all there was, the more he was beset the more he would gather it to himself, didn’t I know him? I studied that transcript of his ghost’s voice and I learned from it what he had told me, he had told me that as the world closed in he would pull his fortune to him, that the worse things got the more he would gather himself unto himself, he would call it in, like stocks like bonds like chips from the gambling table, keep more and more of it near him from day to day as he made the ever more perilous journey. And at the end he would stash it where no one ever dreamed he had been and if he never got back to it it would die with him if no one was smart enough to find it.
So now I knew everything, and everything brings with it an exacting discretion, I went back to school to stay, hadn’t I been told it was a good idea? and though it was ordeal enough to quash the most resolute heart, I sat there in those classrooms alone with my education and for good measure worked prominently in a fish store after school for five dollars a week, and wore a white apron ornamented with normal daily splashings of blood, and managed to bide my time simply by assuming that all of it was being watched.
Within a year of Mr. Schultz’s death the man with bad skin was himself indicted and tried by Thomas E. Dewey and sent away to prison. I knew enough of gang rule that as it accommodated itself to change, priorities shifted, problems were redefined, and there arose new issues of criminally urgent importance. So it would have been possible right then to go upcountry in safety. But I was in no rush. Only I knew what I knew. And something like a revelation had come to me through my school lessons: I was living in even greater circles of gangsterdom than I had dreamed, latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom. The truth of this was to be borne out in a few years when the Second World War began, but in the meantime I was inspired to excel at my studies as I had at marksmanship and betrayal, and so made the leap to Townsend Harris High School in Manhattan for exceptional students, whose number I was scornfully unastonished to be among, and then the even higher leap to an Ivy League college I would be wise not to name, where I paid my own tuition in reasonably meted-out cash installments and from which I was eventually graduated with honors and an officers’ training commission as a second lieutenant in the United States Army.
In 1942, the man with bad skin was pardoned by Governor Thomas E. Dewey, who as district attorney had sent him up, and deported to Italy in thanks for the assistance he was thought to have provided in making the New York City waterfront secure against Nazi saboteurs. But by then I was myself patriotically employed overseas, and so, what with one thing and another, I was not able to claim the treasure until I got home from the war in 1945. That is almost all I will say of this matter although the larcenous reader will be able figure things out for himself, for herself, in fact anyone can put two and two together, it’s all right with me, because of course I did go and collect it, it was just where I knew it would be, Mr. Schultz’s whole missing fortune which to this day and until now people have believed was never recovered. It was in the form of bundled Treasury certificates and crisp bills in the noble denominations of Mr. Hines’s love and it was stuffed in a safe, packed in mail sacks. My veteran’s self was moved by the prewar quaintness of it, it was like pirate swag, monument to an ancient lust, and I had the same feelings looking at it that I get from old portraits or the recordings of dead though still fervent singers. But none of these feelings discouraged me from taking it.
And here I realize I have come almost to the end of this story of a boy’s adventures. Who I am in my majority and what I do, and whether I am in the criminal trades or not, and where and how I live must remain my secret because I have a certain renown. I will confess that I have many times since my investiture sought to toss all the numbers up in the air and let them fall back into letters, so that a new book would emerge, in a new language of being. It was what Mr. Berman said might someday come to pass, the perverse proposition of a numbers man, to throw them away and all their imagery, the cuneiform, the hieroglyphic, the calculus, and the speed of light, the whole numbers and fractions, the rational and irrational numbers, the numbers for the infinite and the numbers of nothing. But I have done it and done it and always it falls into the same Billy Bathgate I made of myself and must seemingly always be, and I am losing the faith it is a trick that can be done.
I find some consolation, however, in having told here the truth about everything of my life with Dutch Schultz, although in some respects my account differs from what you will read if you look up the old newspaper files. I have told the truth of what I have told in the words and the truth of what I have not told which resides in the words.
And I have now just one more thing to tell, and I have saved it for last because it is the fount of all my memory, the event that doesn’t exonerate the boy I was but may delay for a moment reading him out of heaven. I drop to my knees in reverence to think of it, I thank God for the life He has given me and the joy of my consciousness, I praise Him and give all reverent thanks for my life of crime and the terror of my existence. In the spring following Mr. Schultz’s death my mother and I were living in a top-floor five-room apartment with a southern exposure overlooking the beautiful trees and paths and lawns and playgrounds of Claremont Park. And one Saturday morning in May there was a knock on the door and a man in a chauffeur’s uniform of light gray stood there holding a straw basket by the handles, and I didn’t know what I thought it was, laundry or something, but my mother came past me and took the basket as if she had been expecting it, she had great authority and confidence now, so that the chauffeur was very relieved, he’d had on his face an expression of the utmost anxiety, she was dressed in a real black dress that was appropriate to her figure and in fashionable shoes that fit her, and hose, and her hair was cut and combed in a comely manner to frame her serene lovely face, and she just took the baby, because that’s of course who it was, my son with Drew, I knew the minute I looked at him, and she brought him into our apartment of morning sun and laid him in the holey brown wicker carriage that she had brought with her from the old apartment. At that moment I felt a small correction in the just universe and my life as a boy was over.
There was some confusion after that, of course, we had to go out and buy bottles and diapers, he didn’t come with any instructions, and my mother was a little slow remembering some of the things that had to be done when he cried and waved his arms about, but we adjusted to him soon enough and what I think of now is how we used to like to go back to the East Bronx with him and walk him in his carriage on a sunny day along Bathgate Avenue, with all the peddlers calling out their prices and the stalls stacked with pyramids of oranges and grapes and peaches and melons, and the fresh bread in the windows of the bakeries with the electric fans in their transoms sending hot bread smells into the air, and the dairy with its tubs of butter and wood packs of farmer’s cheese, and the butcher wearing his thick sweater under his apron walking out of his ice room with a stack of chops on oiled paper, and the florist on the corner wetting down the vases of clustered cut flowers, and the children running past, and the gabbling old women carrying their shopping bags of greens and chickens, and the teenage girls holding white dresses on hangers to their shoulders, and the truckmen in their undershirts unloading their produce, and the horns honking and all the life of the city turning out to greet us just as in the old days of our happiness, before my father fled, when the family used to go walking in this market, this bazaar of life, Bathgate, in the age of Dutch Schultz.



About the Author
E. L. DOCTOROW’S novels include The March, City of God, The Waterworks, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World’s Fair, and Billy Bathgate. His work has been published in thirty-two languages. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. E. L. Doctorow lives in New York.