Just as my father wore his summer's hot success with open white silk shirt and brand new diamond pinkie ring, my mother wrapped herself in last year's chilly winter petulance, though tail-end August blessed our beaches with a temperature of 90+ and bright blue skies. Did it seem tenuous, his bray of winner's laughter? Just seven months before he'd beaten out the marshall by a step, our furniture in hock once more. And yet there was a deference from Lou and Lena, friends of his, who shared our bungalow in Rockaway, they on the second floor, their brand-new recognition of this somebody, one of them so recently, now risen higher than an intimate.
Not quite thirteen I wasn't yet persuaded to take that leap of faith, identical to theirs, that would deny he was the hotspur five-foot sleight-of-hander I'd taken him to be, putting us forever in harms' way. "What's up, my pants?" he'd crow, expecting a response. We never laughed, five-year Ruth too young to understand and my defeated mother with her angry, acid face, waiting for the next catastrophe along with me. But in the pyrotechnics of summertime exploding sales Lou and Lena thought the turn of phrase hysterical although they'd heard it fifty times.
In 1928 geography was just the neighborhood in which you lived your life -- economics, had you hit it big. My father had, this year. Instead of manufacturing as usual a line of coats both cheap and dear he'd risked everything he had and more on winter whites. Miami shops still bought as fast as he could ship, even though the season was now dead. He had a fifty thousand dollar line of credit at the bank, used up because collection efforts couldn't start until the shipping stopped. He'd whisked us quick from Southern Boulevard, our long-time slum, leaving every stick of ratty furniture behind, to new upgraded social standing, an apartment on the Heights, where we walked in bare to geometrically constructed parquet floors and ordered from the best department stores. We even bought a radio on the installment plan, along with all the rest. My mother wept when they installed the console in its impeccable oak rectangularity. "This minute they can never take away from me," she said, her unbelieving tears cascading down.
I was a runt, not sixty inches tall, and had my father's coloring, swart in January, deeply brown from May to Labor Day. My mother's stricken eyes had known despair and emphasized the pallor of her skin, the little rouge she used like rosy bruises on her hollow cheeks.
My father wasn't there when Ruth and I awoke. He spent whole days and nights away, sometimes in our rent-paid-up-on-time apartment on the Heights or on the road somewhere. At night when I had failed to read myself to sleep I listened to the thrust and parry of their whispers through the pale blue plaster walls, him pleading while he dominated her, she deeply injured, obdurately holding out as if she had the upper hand. Ruth slept on a wood and canvas cot across the room from me.
One kitchen did for all of us and tension, always underneath, flared up when Lena and my mother had to use the stove. Or figure out who'd dirtied up the table last.
"I'm in the middle," my mother would complain. "So pushy, you should be the first, and I have two and you have just yourself."
"What's new?" Lena rasped, her breathing clogged with chain-lit Camel cigarettes. "Same at night. A meal to put together one, two, three. A Federal case from it you make. Me - in and out, like lightning, quick. My Lou enjoys it, good enough. Husbands like - they never look again. Born yesterday, you watch your Dave. A word, that's all, a word."
My mother thinned her lips to equal signs. "What business with my Dave?"
"He's got an eye. Versteh?"
I ran errands many times a day, sometimes plucked from playing gambler's solitaire, my father's game, in a corner of the porch when the afternoon was windless. I won more often than I lost. We spent mornings at the beach, less dangerous for those like little Ruth who might, my mother feared, get stroke from too much sun. Lena sat apart from us. I swam inexpertly, never out beyond the ropes, and walked along the sand, scouting kelp and driftwood that maybe was the flotsam of some wreck for all I knew. Nights I'd read Frank Merriwell. I had twelve of them. They formed the bulk of my small library right then. Frank was everything I could aspire to, open to adventure, courteous, athletic. He was handsome, six feet tall, and sang in baritone. Everyone looked up to him, no matter who.
"Milty!" It was my mother summoning from where I sprawled with Frank, who was about to save a life, a girl who'd fallen overboard. I stood before her, duty-bound.
She took a quarter from her purse and handed it to me. "I need some Maxwell House," she said.
It hit me just a block away. On the Boardwalk was a booth that had a numbers wheel. I remembered that one prize was Maxwell House. A nickel played. It was a risk, but wasn't everything? Saving someone's life was risk. Betting rent and table money all on winter whites. I'd work it scientifically. If I won I'd keep the twenty cents. I never contemplated what I'd do if I lost all five nickels never having hit.
I watched a solitary old man play. A young man spun the wheel, calling to the passers-by. "Win it big here, win it big. Prizes. Easy. Win it big." I stood close in, my both eyes peeled. I jotted the results of every spin on a scrap of paper I had rescued as it blew on by. When all the numbers had come up except the 5 I put my nickel down. I had no doubt the pointer would stutter to a stop on 5. I eyed the can of coffee waiting there for me. He spun the wheel which clicked inexorably on until it slowed and quit. He called out "5." "I'll take the Maxwell House," I said.
When I received the prize from him I crossed the line. It demonstrated, so it seemed, that I controlled my fate. People could now look to me to get things done, even if I had to manage risk. I rejoiced because I'd figured out the odds. Was that the secret that my father knew? But if my father had a genius for the odds why was it we had been so poor? Frank Merriwell was not dependent on the odds. Right and wrong and inner strength directed him. That didn't dim my pride that I'd outfoxed the wheel.
When Ruth was put to bed that night Lena made a meatloaf for the five of us, her heavy breasts and arms agile as a dancer, one, two, three. My mother made the coffee on a hot plate.
"Still shipping, Dave? It's almost Labor Day." Lou waited on my father's words, his winner's pregnant words.
"Why not? Orders rolling in. Every beach front store I stocked. All of them. Next year I open up my own."
With awe. "Your own? A store? Miami on the beach?"
"Why not? Someone orders me I have to live here in the snow?" Beneath the naked bulb his tiny eyes rejected the presumptiveness of anyone's commands. His puffy cheeks were summer-brown, but not as brown as mine.
Lou shook his head, as if astounded at such vast audacity. "Imagine that."
Lena served the mashed potatoes in a giant bowl and the meatloaf on a tray. Gravy in a soup dish. Kaiser rolls. I wondered when it was my father had perceived the possibilities of opening a store, or was it only then, by chance? Why not? Not everything could come by plan. Sometimes you had to force the opportunity.
Lou suggested poker when the meal was done and I had cleared away.
"Only if it's pennies," my mother said.
"Friedl, nickels you're afraid?" my father asked, lordly with his pinkie ring. "Some dollars you could lose, I've got."
"Pennies, nothing more."
"For pennies four's no good. No action. We play dollar ante at the shop. Milty, you want in?" he turned to me. "If it's pennies only how much can you cost?" My father chuckled in a higher register.
"I have some money, pop," I said, newly confident. "I'll use my own."
He looked at me surprised. "Hoo-hah. You're not afraid? When grown-ups play we play for keeps. Versteh? You know to play for keeps?"
"I know," I said. He'd taught me after all.
The game was five-card stud, a penny ante. My heart gave just one warning lurch when I stacked up my nickels and the first one left my hand. Four pennies change. How quickly it could disappear, security, that seemed so durable while it was yours.
My father bluffed a lot and drove my mother out. I always called his bluff. While I would rake the pennies in he'd laugh and laugh, way up in register, as though he had a pact with someone watching over him and all would come out right, his hot, impatient eyes waiting for the shuffle and the hand to come. Massive Lena made her presence felt beside my skinny mother, joking with the men, pinching at my father's spongy cheek when she had beaten him. My concentration couldn't have been more intense if we'd been playing there for millions underneath the light. By ten my father was down four bucks and I had stacks of coins in front of me. My mother barely held her own.
"Let's raise the stakes," my father cried expansively as I dragged the last pot in. "Let's get some action going here."
"Pennies only, Dave," my mother said, subdued. "Pennies only."
"Pennies are for pishers -- like Milty here." It seemed to me quite suddenly that when he said my name he hated it. Was that because he'd lost to me?
"I'll go to bed," she murmured, half-threat, half-relieved.
"All right, you scaredy-cat. Wet blanket over everything. Always hold me back. Deal cards."
As I dealt we men all folded leaving Lena and my mother to fight it out. On the last card my mother showed a pair of deuces. She bet a penny. "Too bad for nickels not," Lena smirked and raised. My mother looked as though she'd been done in, studying the spots on Lena's cards as if imagining the pairing card that Lena held face down. My mother protected her hole card tightly with her skinny hand and peered beneath, making sure I guess that twos was all she had. "I pass," she said and turned her cards face down.
Lena swept the money in. "I pass," she mimicked her. "With nothing, look," she shoved her cards three inches to the right where my mother's elbow touched the table tentatively as if afraid she'd leave a point.
My mother hesitated, flushed, and with her left hand turned over Lena's hole card, peering at the whole five cards to see which pair had beaten her.
"Nothing!" Lena barked explosively. "Hoo-hah! And how do you like that!?"
My mother's cheeks grew red as though she'd been betrayed or had betrayed herself. "With nothing!" she exclaimed in shock, "nothing! How can you raise with nothing!?" Her eyes grew wild. Suddenly she scrambled for the coins in Lena's pile that had been hers. "You cheated me! You stole my pot," her fingers trembling to scoop the pennies up.
"Hands off!" Lena encircled her money with her sturdy forearm. "My pennies, Mrs. Hundred Pounds. Watch it where you put your yellow-belly fingers I don't chop them off. Falling for a sucker bluff." She fended off my mother's hands.
"Don't push," my mother yelled, and grabbed up several coins, Lena with her sausage fingers fastened to the slender hand as if she'd wring the pennies out. My mother tried to pry the heavy fist away with her right, and suddenly there was blood on Lena's hand.
Lou rose like a shot, tipping back his chair which fell, came around and grabbed my mother from behind, lifting her straight up as though she had no weight before he plumped her down, his big, hard hands wrapped well about her wrists. "My wife! You scratched my wife! You bully, with your nails!"
I waited for my father's move to rescue her, to save her from this foe, doing violence against her frailty.
"Friedl -- have you lost your mind," my father said, still sitting in his place. "You dip in someone else's pile? What kind of mishugas?"
My mother wrestled silently against Lou's grip, her lips mashed into lines. I started to get up and then he let her go or she got free. Lou and Lena took their coins and went upstairs. My mother pushed her few remaining coins to me and hurried to the bathroom. I headed for my room, my pocket full.
A week later, the season's crowds now ebbing fast, I was on the porch rereading Frank. There was a loudmouth, pestering some girls. Frank tried to reason with him first, as usual. I was amazed to see my father coming up the walk. It was a Friday, wasn't much past two. He pinched his Daily News between his fingers like a bug, the paper fluttering, hanging from his hand as though stuck tight, and him not able to dispose of it.
The headline told it all with no one there but us around the table, Lena'd gone in to the city for a musical with Lou. "Hurricane and Flood Destroys Miami Beach." The simple black and white of it. "Dave -- what means?" my mother whimpered. "Dave?"
"I'm dead. They did to me." He washed his face with his perspiring hands. "The morning I called all my stores. I can't collect. Every one will file for bankruptcy, I'm ruined. Flat." He closed his eyes as if to feel it or to make it go away.
"Ruined? Flat? How can that be? What happens next? What next?" She scanned the lines, beachcomber, looking for a clue.
"Next? Hah! We pack and leave, it's good they're out tonight. We owe the rent, they'll pay alone. They'll sue me -- so? What then? I'll figure out. We'll have to move, of course. The furniture's on credit so they'll take it back."
We seemed so fragile, standing on the platform in the dusk of nine o'clock, fleeing to the unknown night, Ruth asleep against my mother's laden arms, our five grips ringed around like prairie wagons, worldly goods, my father pacing, waiting for the train, scheming up who knew what sneak attacks behind his lids. He stopped at last, quite still. He was our general, his narrow, opaque eyes let trouble neither in nor out. How did he plan to rescue us?
I wondered could I help and turned to Frank for counselling. Frank Merriwell would not have gotten into this. His path was as the crow flew, orderly. He never dealt with sunless tenements or working Sundays in a tiny loft, or manufacturing a nest from lint and scraps of hay, he never had to make the leap of faith to pledge his family to winter whites. Would Frank survive if he was ruined, flat? Somehow then I knew my father would.
At least the train came in on time.
This story was published by Fiction, February 1995.
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