Bank Robbers (15 page)

Unmarried sex was simply out of the question. And certainly adultery was just unthinkable. Both sins Dottie had managed to commit. And she felt sincerely bad about this. She was ashamed of the fact that she enjoyed it immensely, Arthur's touching her and loving her. She couldn't stop herself from what she considered was utter perversion.

She chuckled to herself.

These days Dottie would turn on the television and see people talking about all sorts of truly perverted things right out loud, and it always struck her as funny that she'd been so ashamed of what now seemed like a healthy relationship. But then, no, she couldn't cross the boundaries and run away with him.

A doctor appeared, and in a heavy Portuguese accent explained that they were going to put her inside the machine so they could get a clearer picture of whether her bones had improved over the past months.

She lay on the table as the thing whirred around her, and began to shake with absolute fear. She felt a small current running through her, as if she were on the verge of being electrocuted.

Maybe she was just reacting to the sound.

She was in the thing a good ten minutes before she was slid out again, and told to dress and wait in the waiting room.

She looked at all the damaged young people and all the old people who were just sick from living.

“Mrs. Weist?” the nurse said, and she got up and dutifully followed her into the office.

There it was, the black-and-white of her bones.

“Ah, Mrs. Weist, you having very good news. Your bones are much, much stronger,” the doctor said.

She nodded.

“Not I'm saying you go ice-skating next winter, but there is much more bone mass. You have been lifting the weights?”

She nodded.

“And using the ankle weights?”

She nodded.

“We are going to add swimming to your routine. Do you have access to a pool?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Good. Excellent. I want you to swim twice a week, if you can.”

“All right.”

For some reason he felt the need to write that down, as if her memory were faulty. He handed it to her.

She hated being patronized.

“See you in a month,” he yelled after her as she left.

In your dreams, she thought.

In one month she was going to be sitting in a nice infirmary.

And yes, if there was a pool, she would swim in it.

It was three-thirty when she left the hospital.

Arthur was sitting against a parked car reading the sports section of the
News
when she came out of the same door she'd gone in through.

Creatures of habit.

He lagged back as she walked along Eleventh Street toward Sixth Avenue. She crossed diagonally to the downtown side of the street. And kept walking.

She didn't like the fact that this fat guy from the bank was behind her.

With her luck he was some kind of creep.

She continued down Sixth Avenue, stopping every so often to pretend to look in windows, and glance back at this guy, who she was now sure was following her.

Arthur hung back very far.

He'd been made.

He could tell from the way she was acting. All the way over to the bank that morning she hadn't stopped to look in one window. Now she was suddenly interested in window shopping?

He had to give her more leeway.

He watched her turn on Third Street and he slowed and looked over a table of used magazines a street guy was selling in front of a video store. By the time he'd gotten to the street she was gone. He crossed over to a McDonald's and looked inside. His stomach began to growl. He was hungry.

She wasn't in there. It was beginning to become clear to him that Dottie either never ate or didn't have the money.

His bet was that she didn't have the money.

He was walking along Third toward Washington Square Park when something caught his eye, and he stopped in front of a thrift-shop window. He exhaled hard as he watched her.

Inside the shop was Dottie, staring at herself in a full-length mirror. She was in a beige-and-white polka-dotted silk dress with a matching belt.

The dress fit so nicely, and made her look tiny and trim, the way she had last night. Jeez, she looked good, he thought. A pang went through him as it sank in that this store was probably where the outfit from last night had been bought.

He began to feel his temper go on him again.

This time it was directed at Nathan. Hadn't he had any brains? Hadn't he put aside anything so if this woman was left alone she would not have to live buying guns in the Bronx and used dresses in thrift stores?

He would've taken so much better care of her. And the life they could have had …

All right, it wasn't as if he'd lived the life of a monk, he'd had women, plenty of them. But seeing her last night, and now following her around—it was making him a little crazy. No other woman had ever been allowed to get as near to him as Dottie O'Malley.

He turned away from the shop window and crossed the street and went into some kind of furniture store. He could observe her leaving from this vantage point and not be seen.

Oh, he was married to Moe's mother, but very briefly, and really didn't even live with her. In fact, her pregnancy was the only reason he married her at all. He'd come back from the Midwest to find her out to here. What could he do?

He was a bank robber, not a louse.

But other than the connection of a child, they were two people from different worlds.

At first he'd tried; to appease her he bought the pawnshop. It wasn't so unusual, a bank robber owning a business. One of his partners, Paul Fischbein, had taken his cut from their heists and bought himself a liquor store in Queens and retired wealthy with a whole chain of them. And now the pawnshop gave Arthur a life of ease.

But he knew the first day he walked into that windowless office in the back of the place that in a couple of months he'd get edgy and start looking around for another job to pull.

And that was exactly what happened.

A fortune-teller once told him that there was some activity that he had always done, and which he'd always do because it was a part of his soul.

So that seemed to cinch it. The monkey on his back was robbery.

*   *   *

H
ER SHOES
and bag would be fine with the dress, she wasn't going to sink any more money into this. It was getting late, and she had to go see Teresa on her way up to the Bronx. She was going to wear the dress out of the store.

That made her stomach burn.

Yesterday it had excited her, getting a new outfit. Today she hated it. She paid the money and left the store, pausing in front of the door. She looked up and down the street, and breathed a sigh of relief that the fat man was nowhere to be seen.

She looked at her watch. Well, she might as well get this visit with Teresa over with, she thought. She turned and headed for the subway.

It made her angry, being followed by that creep.

*   *   *

A
RTHUR
made sure five or six minutes went by before he made his escape from the furniture store. He hopped up Sixth Avenue and looked at Dottie crossing the next street. He slowly, doing his hobbled walk, made it to the middle of the street. He watched her walk down into the subway. He turned and walked back to Third Street, crossed over to the downtown side of the street, and made his way toward Sullivan Street.

Arthur opened Dottie's door as if he lived there. He walked into the small railroad apartment. He hadn't been in one of these for many years. He remembered how little space there was compared to his house in Rye. He walked into the kitchen, the first room in the apartment.

It was small but neat. Dottie's coffee cup was still sitting on the old white porcelain kitchen table. He ran his hand across it.

His mother had had the same table. She had died young, giving birth to a stillborn sister. He had a memory of a warm smiling face, of her warm arms picking him up out of the kitchen sink and toweling him off on the drainboard. And humming. Low humming. And the smell of clothes and skin washed in Fels-Naptha, and the smell of her sweat, which was not unpleasant to him.

He must have been no more than three, in that memory. And four years later, after she was gone, that was when his father started drinking.

The first beating had occurred not long after the wake.

His father had sat at the kitchen table drinking vodka from a juice glass and Arthur, who hadn't had a meal in a day, was sitting on the couch drawing a picture, trying to not look at him. And when at last he did look up he was startled to see the look on his father's face. There was such hatred in his eyes.

As if he were somehow responsible for his mother's death.

He hated his old man for that.

And his father poured himself some more of the vodka and a look of disgust came across his face.

“Whadda you looking at?”

Arthur had looked back down at his drawing.

“I said, whadda you looking at?”

Arthur cringed and stared hard at the paper.

“You look just like your mother.” He glowered.

And Arthur remembered the sound of smashing glass above him on the wall and vodka raining on him from where the bottle had hit the wall and then suddenly being lifted off the couch, and just punched and punched.

So he made himself scarce, living mostly on the streets, stealing what he could to get by.

Once in a while he'd be sent to live in Brooklyn, out near Coney Island, with his mother's mother. That was a treat, usually brought on by the DTs, or a jail term for brawling. So he looked forward to his father being in trouble.

His grandmother was a wonderful woman, too ill to take on the responsibility of a boy full-time, but willing in emergencies. Then, for a few cherished weeks or months, Arthur'd be treated to sunny afternoons at the beach, a quiet, spotless apartment, clean clothes, and wonderful hot food; kreplach and kugels and apple strudel, roasted chicken and golden, crispy caramelized potatoes she called tsimmes or something like that …

And then his father would show up again and he'd be dragged back to Rivington Street, to the noise and the filth and days of no food, and living on the streets and stealing to get by.

Those were the hardest times, the first weeks back. He'd get himself to school in the mornings, and there, at least until three o'clock, he'd be preoccupied. Even after school, when the weather was warm, he'd play on the streets and just be a kid—until sunset. Then, longingly, he'd watch his playmates one by one run to their homes for their baths and dinners. Miserably he'd climb up the stairs of his own building, sometimes pausing in front of the Spinozas' door. Silently he'd listen to the sounds of the family and smell the hot food, knowing that he'd go upstairs to his own apartment, and he'd be grateful beyond measure if his old man wasn't there.

For dinner he'd eat a candy bar or a scooter pie he'd pinched from Nicholson's store, and then he'd lie alone in bed, staring out the window into the warm light of other windows across the street and he'd ache to be back with his grandmother …

The fact he actually continued to show up at school until the ninth grade was a tribute to his mother. But nine grades was all he could take of living with his old man, and he managed to see him only rarely the last couple of years he lived on Rivington. His father was so far gone at that point, he probably wouldn't have recognized him.

Someone told him once that his father, who had immigrated from Scotland several years before Arthur's birth, had killed a man there. Arthur'd always believed that. He'd heard his father died ten years after Arthur'd left Rivington Street, but he was far away at that point and couldn't have cared less in any event.

All these thoughts from a kitchen table, he thought, and continued his snooping.

The cupboards were poorly stocked.

The contents of the refrigerator nearly broke his heart.

She had so little.

He wondered how much of a dent in her money the gun had made.

He opened the kitchen drawers, half hoping to find some sort of bankbook with a nice fat balance. He knew that would make her crazy, but it would lighten his conscience about selling her the gun.

All he found was silverware and expired coupons, cut carefully out of the paper.

And the gun. She'd chosen the metal-utensil drawer for it, he noted with a certain amount of amusement.

The orderliness of women.

He walked out of the kitchen and into the connecting room.

She was sleeping on the couch.

With the television on, he knew it in his heart.

He knew the loneliness that makes you run the television day and night, so it gives the illusion you are not alone.

He knew that trick.

He walked into her bedroom. The king-sized bed, squeezed into the little room so there was barely any floor space left, annoyed him badly.

He turned to the dresser. A snapshot of a skinny, droopy-nosed Nathan smiled back at him. It was in a five-and-dime frame.

You self-centered bastard, Arthur thought. Anytime you were ahead of the game you probably took it all to the track and blew it.

The next photo stopped him.

It was the son in uniform, barely more than a child in the photo. And it was eerie, there was no trace of Dottie in him. He looked around the bedroom and realized that there was no trace of a son, period. So, Arthur concluded, either the kid was dead or he'd turned out to be just like the father. He stared at the boy's face and somehow knew he was dead, and probably had been for a while.

He walked over to the closet, opened it and stared at the ragged old dresses, neatly cleaned and pressed and hung on hangers, and sizes too big.

He closed the door. He'd seen more than enough to give him a clear picture of what had happened to Dottie.

He walked back into the living room and stood for a long time trying to decide if he should just take the gun with him.