The Christmas Kid

Now, on this frozen night, decades later, Carmody’s unease rushed back. Ah, Molly, my Molly-O…The fire escapes still climbed three stories to the top floor, where the Carmodys lived. But the building now looked better, like all the others on the avenue. On the top floor right on this frozen night, the shades were up and Carmody could see ocher-colored walls and a warm light cast by table lamps. This startled him. In memory, the Carmody flat was always cold, the windows rimed with frost in winter, he and his sisters making drawings with their fingernails in the cold bluish light cast from a fluorescent ceiling lamp. His father was cold, too, a withdrawn, bitter man who resented the world and the youth of his children. His mother was a drinker, and her own chilly remorse was relieved only by occasional bursts of rage. His parents nodded or grunted when Carmody told them about his ambitions, and his mother once said, in a slurred voice, “Who do you think you are, anyway?”

One Saturday afternoon in the Mulrane flat, he and Molly were alone, her parents gone off to see Frankie and his small child. Molly proudly showed him her father’s winter police uniform, encased in plastic from the Kent dry cleaners, and the medals he had won, and the extra gun, a nickel-plated.38-caliber Smith & Wesson, oiled and ready in a felt-lined box. She talked to him about a book she was reading, by A. J. Cronin, and he told her she should read F. Scott Fitzgerald. She made him a ham-and-Swiss-cheese sandwich for lunch. They sipped sweet tea thick with sugar. And then for the first time, they went to bed together in her tiny room with its window leading to the fire escape. She was in an agony, murmuring prayers, her hands and arms moving to cover breasts and hair, trembling with fear and desire. “Hold me tight,” she whispered. “Don’t ever leave me.”

He had never written any of that, or how at the end of his first year of college, at the same time that she graduated from St. Joseph’s, he rented the room near New York University to get away from his parents and hers, and how she would come to him after work as a file clerk at Metropolitan Life and they would vanish into each other. He still went back to Brooklyn. He still visited the ice house of his parents. He still called formally at the Mulrane apartment to take Molly to the Sanders or the RKO Prospect. But the tiny room in Manhattan had become their true place, their gangster’s hideout, the secret place to which they went for sin.

Now on this frozen night he stared at the dark windows of the first floor left, wondering who lived there now, and whether Molly’s bones were lying in some frozen piece of the Brooklyn earth. He could still hear her voice, trembling and tentative: “We’re sinners, aren’t we?” He could hear her saying: “What’s to become of us?” He could hear the common sense in her words and the curl of Brooklyn in her accent. “Where are we going?” she said. “Please don’t ever leave me.” He could see the mole inside her left thigh. He could see the fine hair at the top of her neck.

“Well, will ya lookit this,” a hoarse male voice said from behind him. “If it ain’t Buddy Carmody.”

Carmody turned and saw a burly man smoking a cigarette in the doorway of a tenement. The face was not clear in the muted light but the voice told Carmody it was definitely someone from back then. Nobody had called him Buddy in forty-six years.

“How are ya?” Carmody said, peering at the man as he stepped out of the doorway. The man’s face was puffy and seamed, and Carmody tried to peel away the flesh to see who had lived in it when they both were young.

“Couldn’t stay away from the old neighborhood, could ya, Buddy?”

The unease was seething now. Carmody felt a small stream of fear make its move in his stomach.

“It’s been a long time,” Carmody said. “Remind me, what’s your name?”

“You shittin’ me, Buddy? How could you fi’get my name?”

“I told you, man, it’s been a long time.”

“Yeah. It’s easy to fi’get, for some people.”

“Advanced age, and all that,” Carmody said, faking a grin, glancing to his left, to the darkening shop windows, the empty street. Imagining himself running.

“But not everybody fi’gets,” the man said.

He flipped his cigarette under a parked car.

“My sister didn’t fi’get.”

Oh.

Oh, God.

“You must be Seanie,” Carmody said. “Am I right? Seanie Mulrane?”

“Ah…you remembered.”

“How are you, Seanie?”

He could see Seanie’s hooded eyes now, so like the eyes of his policeman father: still, unimpressed. He moved close enough so that Carmody could smell the whiskey on his breath.

“How am I? Huh. How am I…Not as good as you, Buddy boy. We keep up, ya know. The books, that miniseries, or whatever it was on NBC. Pretty good, you’re doing.”