Three black kids were sitting on the front steps...
Three black kids were sitting on the front steps eyeing me in the carI explained to them, "A friend of mine used to live here When I got no answer, I added, "Back in the forties And then I drove awayI drove to Morristown to look at Merry's high school and then on west to Old Rimrock, where I found the big stone house up on Arcady Hill Road where the Seymour Levovs once had lived as a happy young family; later, down in the village, I drank a cup of coffee at the counter of the new general store (McPherson's) that had replaced the old general store (Hamlin's) whose post office the teenage Levov daughter had blown up "to bring the war home to America I went to Elizabeth, where the Swede's beautiful Dawn was born and raised, and walked around her pleasant neighborhood, the residential Elmora section; I drove by her family's church, StGenevieve's, and then headed due east to her father's neighborhood, the old port on the Elizabeth River, where the Cuban immigrants and their offspring replaced, back in the sixties, the last of the Irish immigrants and their offspringI was able to get the New Jersey Miss America Pageant office to dig up a glossy photo of Mary Dawn Dwyer, age twenty-two, being crowned Miss New Jersey in May of chanel cambon handbag 1949I found another picture of her--in a 1961 number of a Morris County weekly--standing primly before her fireplace mantel in a blazer, a skirt, and a turtleneck sweater, a picture captioned, "MrsLevov, the former Miss New Jersey of 1949, loves living in a 170-year-old home, an environment which she says reflects the values of her family At the Newark Public Library I scanned microfilmed sports pages of the Newark News (expired 1972), looking for accounts and box scores of games in which the Swede had shined for Weequahic High (in extremis 1995) and Upsala College (expired 1995)For the first time in fifty years I reread the baseball books of John RTunis and at one point even began to think of my book about the Swede as The Kid from Keer Avenue, calling it after Tunis's 1940 story for boys about the Tomkinsville, Connecticut, orphan whose only fault, as a major leaguer, is a tendency to keep his right shoulder down and his swing up, but a fault, alas, that is provocation enough for the gods to destroy him
Yet despite these efforts and more to uncover what I could about the Swede and his world, I would have been willing to admit that my Swede was not the primary SwedeOf course I was working with traces; of course gucci women's watches essentials of what he was to Jerry were gone, expunged from my portrait, things I was ignorant of or I didn't want; of course the Swede was concentrated differently in my pages from how he'd been concentrated in the fleshBut whether that meant I'd imagined an outright fantastical creature, lacking entirely the unique substantiality of the real thing; whether that meant my conception of the Swede was any more fallacious than the conception held by Jerry (which he wasn't likely to see as in any way fallacious); whether the Swede and his family came to life in me any less truthfully than in his brother--well, who knows? Who can know? When it comes to illuminating someone with the Swede's opacity, to understanding those regular guys everybody likes and who go about more or less incognito, it's up for grabs, it seems to me, as to whose guess is more rigorous than whose
"You don't remember me, do you?" asked the woman who had sent Jerry scurryingSmiling warmly, she had taken my two hands in hersBeneath the short-cropped hair, her head looked imposingly well made, large and durable, its angular mass like the antique stone head of a Roman sovereignThough the broad planes of her face were deeply scored as if with an engraving stylus, the gucci new bag skin beneath the rosy makeup looked to be seriously wrinkled only around the mouth, which, after nearly six hours of exchanging kisses, had lost most of its lipstick; otherwise there was an almost girlish softness to her flesh, indicating that perhaps she hadn't partaken of every last one of the varied forms of suffering available to a woman over a lifetime
"Don't look at my name tagWho was I?"
"You tell me," I saidI had a pink angora sweaterOriginally my cousin'sShe was three years ahead of usShe's dead, Nathan--in the groundMy beautiful cousin, Estelle, who smoked and dated older guysIn high school she was dating a guy who shaved twice a dayHer parents had the dress and corset shop on ChancellorMy mother worked thereYou took me on a class hayrideBelieve it or not, I used to be Joy Helpern
Joy: a bright little girl with curly reddish hair, freckles, a round face, a girl with a provocative chubbiness that did not go unobserved by MrRoscoe, our stout, red-nosed Spanish teacher who on the mornings when Joy came to school in a sweater was always asking her to stand at her desk to recite her homeworkRoscoe called her DimplesAmazing what you could get away with back in those days when it didn't seem to me anybody got away d & g fashion with anything
Because of an association of words not entirely implausible, Joy's figure had continued to tantalize me, no less than it had MrRoscoe, long after I last saw her springing up Chancellor Avenue to school in that odd but stirring pair of unclasped galoshes obviously outgrown by her older brother and handed down to Joy like her beautiful cousin's angora sweaterWhenever a couple of famous lines from John Keats happened, for whatever reason, to fall into my head, I'd invariably remember the full, plump feel of her beneath me, the wonderful buoyancy of her that my adolescent boy's exquisite radar sensed even through my mackinaw on that hayrideThe lines are from "Ode on Melancholy": "him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine
"I remember that hayride, Joy HelpernYou weren't as kind on that hayride as you might have been
"And now I look like Spencer Tracy," she said, breaking into laughter"Now that I'm no longer frightened it's much too lateI used to be shy--I'm not shy anymoreOh, Nathan, aging," she cried, as we embraced each other, "aging, aging--it is so very strangeYou wanted to touch my bare breasts
"I would have settled for that
"You were fourteen and they were about rolex vintage women's watch one