The Christmas Kid

His own face peered at him from the leaflets as he passed, some pasted on walls, others taped inside the windows of shops. In a way, he thought, they looked like “Wanted” posters. He felt a sudden…what was the word? Not fear. Certainly not panic. Unease. That was the word. An uneasiness in the stomach. A flexing and then relaxing of muscles, an unwilling release of liquids or acids, all those secret wordless messages that in California were cured by the beach and the surf or a quick hit of Maalox. He told himself to stop. This was no drama. It was just a trip through a few streets where once he had lived but that he had not seen for decades. After seventeen novels, this would be his first signing in the borough that had formed him. But the leaflets made clear that here, in this neighborhood, his appearance was some kind of big deal. It might draw many people. And Carmody felt apprehensive, nervous, wormy with…unease.

“How does it feel, going back to Brooklyn?” Charlie Rose had asked him the night before, in a small dark television studio on Park Avenue.

“I don’t know,” Carmody said, and chuckled. “I just hope they don’t throw books at me. Particularly my own books.”

And wanted to add: I’ve never really left. Or, to be more exact: those streets have never left me.

The buildings themselves along the avenue were as Carmody remembered them. They were old-law tenements, with fire escapes on the facades, but they seemed oddly comforting to Carmody. This was not one of those New York neighborhoods desolated by time and arson and decay. He had seen photographs of the enrubbled lots of Brownsville and East New York. There were no lots here in the old neighborhood. If anything, the buildings looked better now, with fresh paint and clear glass instead of hammered tin on the street-level doors. He knew from reading the New York Times that the neighborhood had been gentrified, that most of the old families had moved away, to be replaced by younger people who paid much higher rents. There was some unhappiness to all of that, the paper said, but still, the place looked better. As a boy he had walked these streets many times on evenings like this, when most people retreated swiftly from the bitter cold to the uncertain warmth of the flats. Now he noticed lights coming on in many of those old apartments, and shadows moving like ghosts behind drawn shades and curtains. He peered down a street toward the harbor and saw a thin scarlet band where the sun was setting in New Jersey. That was the same, too. The day was dying. It would soon be night.

If the buildings were the same, the shops along the avenue were all different. Fitzgerald’s bar was gone, where his father did most of his drinking, and so was Sussman’s hardware and Fischetti’s fruit and vegetable market and the Freedom meat store and the pharmacy. What was the name of that drugstore? Right there. On that corner. An art supply store now. An art supply store! Moloff’s. The drugstore was called Moloff’s, and next door was a bakery. Our Own, they called it. And now there was a computer store where a TV repair shop once stood. And a dry cleaner where men once stood at the bar of Rattigan’s, singing the old songs. All gone. Even the old clock factory had been converted into a condominium.