The Christmas Kid

That was at 3:58 p.m. At 4:20, Frankie Bertinelli got undressed, put on a pair of blue pajamas, and went to bed. Two days later, some kids found bags full of baseball cards in the garbage cans downstairs, along with old copies of the Sporting News, shredded photographs, torn scorecards. Cora continued to move in her dim way around the neighborhood, shopping at Jack’s, picking up fish at Red’s and meat at Semke’s, and black-and-whites at the Our Own bakery. But nobody saw Frankie.

“He’s not feeling well,” she would say if anyone asked. “He’s got the bad heart, you know, from the scarlet fever.…”

After a while, nobody asked anymore. The years went by. Cora got old. Delivery boys from the grocery stores said that the apartment was very strange. A man was always sleeping in the bed off the kitchen. There was no sound in the place, no radio, no TV. The shades were drawn. Sometimes, late at night, neighbors in the building could hear a man weeping.

More than thirty years later, Cora Bertinelli died. She was waked at Mike Smith’s, and late on the first night of the wake, I dropped by the funeral parlor. The large room was empty. Cora Bertinelli was dusty and white in the coffin. There was no sign of Frankie. I went out to the sidewalk and a small, fat, bearded man was standing there, staring at the church across the street. It was Frankie. He looked at me blankly, and I introduced myself, and said I was sorry about his mother. He looked tentative and lost.

“What about you, Frankie?” I said. “How’ve you been?”

He looked at me, and blinked, and said, “They shoulda walked Lockman.”

I followed him back into the funeral parlor.

Up the Roof

SHAWN HIGGINS, AGE SIXTEEN, 5 feet 11 inches and still growing, stepped into the kitchen of the railroad flat on the top floor right. He laid two wrapped sandwiches on the table. It was about six o’clock and he was finished with his deliveries from the corner grocery store, where he worked. The source of free sandwiches and tips. He could hear a voice coming from the new television set in the living room. He hurried in to see his Uncle Jimmy, who was parked in a ratty armchair, staring at the solemn black-and-white face of an announcer. The news was, of course, about Korea. That was all anybody talked about over the last two weeks. The new war. More guys being drafted. Others being called back, five years after the last war. The war was on the front pages of the Daily News and the Brooklyn Eagle. The war was on the radio each evening.

“’Lo, Uncle Jimmy,” Shawn said.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, curling the fingers of his good right arm, but staring at the small set. Patting the white-haired man’s stooped back, Shawn saw tears running down his face. They had to be tears about the war. The new war. The old one. The boy didn’t know what to say and so said nothing. On the mantelpiece behind the television set, down at the left, there was a picture of Shawn’s father, killed at Anzio in 1943, when his only son was eight. He was smiling, wearing his army uniform. Beside it was a second framed photograph, this one of his father with his mother, all dressed up at their wedding. She was gone now, too.

Shawn eased into his room, the only one with a door, the tiny room where his sisters shared a bunk bed until each got married, three months apart, and vanished into Long Island. The room was tiny and hot and smelled of his own dried sweat. The shade was drawn to keep out the heat. Beyond the shade was the rusting iron fire escape. His clothes were hanging off the rack below the top bunk, his shirts and underwear and socks folded on the old unused mattress. His books were stacked on the floor, beside his comics. A Daily News color photograph of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese was Scotch-taped to the wall. Two days earlier, the Eagle said that even some of the ballplayers could be called up for the new war.

Shawn removed his sneakers, khaki trousers, and underpants, then pulled on a gray bathing suit. He was tying his sneakers again when he heard Uncle Jimmy say “oh” once, then again, and he wanted to hug him. Out at the VA hospital in Bay Ridge, the doctors told Shawn last year that his uncle was okay, except for the shell shock. Christ. When Shawn’s mother died just after the war, of heartbreak, his sisters said, he and his sisters had moved in here with Uncle Jimmy, who would take care of them. They learned quickly that they had to take care of Uncle Jimmy. One sandwich in the kitchen was for him.