the size of a house.
Jimmy used to say, Here's some money. You have carte blank how you spend it. I don't even want to know, he'd say.
She heard a woman in the hall yelling down to her kid. Her head out the door yelling to the kid who's galloping down the steps.
'I'm making gravy,' the woman yelled.
How is it we did so much laughing? How is it people came over with their empty pockets and bad backs and not so good marriages and twenty minutes later we're all laughing?
They started a legend that he memorized every bet. But he didn't. They still tell stories about his memory, how he moved through the loft buildings taking bets from cutters, sweepers and salesmen and recording every figure mentally. But he didn't. He had pieces of paper all over his clothes with bets scribbled down.
She heard the women talk about making gravy, speaking to a husband or child, and Rosemary understood the significance of this. It meant, Don't you dare come home late. It meant, This is serious so pay attention. It was a special summons, a call to family duty The pleasure, yes, of familiar food, the whole history of food, the history of eating, the garlicky smack and tang. But there was also a duty, a requirement. The family requires the presence of every member tonight. Because the family was an art to these people and the dinner table was the place it found expression.
They said, I'm making gravy.
They said, Who's better than me?
It did not happen violent. This was a thing she would never believe, that they took him away in a car. The man went out for cigarettes and just kept walking.
She didn't want her children to see her dragging, slumping, thinking too much, brooding, angry, empty.
Conceal, conceal. But it was hard.
They told her to change her hair. The women in the building. They told her she had a Mother Hubbard hairdo.
No, she wasn't empty. Just tense much of the time, hearing a voice inside that she'd never heard before, her own voice, only edgy and angry and one-track.
She listened to Mr. Bronzini in the living room. He spoke about the truth of a position. The radio was doing a serial drama called 'Bright Horizons' or 'Bright Tomorrows' or 'Brighter Days' and every position has a truth, he told Matty. A deep truth is what you want, not a shallow truth. You want a position worth defending to the death.
This food, this family meal, this meat sauce simmering in a big pot with sausage and spareribs and onions and garlic, this was their loyalty and bond and well-being, and the aroma was in the halls for Rosemary to smell when she climbed the flights, rolled beef, meatballs, basil, and the savor had an irony that was painful.
He used to come home and get undressed, Jimmy, and pieces of paper would fall out of his clothes, scraps of paper, bets in code, his own scrawled cipher of people's names, horses' names, teams and odds and sums of money.
They said, See what you're gonna do.
How is it she could laugh all night at his stories about a day in the garment district, or a day when he went to Toots Shor's famous restaurant, out of the district, the famous Toots Shor, out of his jurisdiction completely, but Toots Shor met him and liked him and wanted to give him some action and he was a heavy bettor, very, and Jimmy made occasional trips to West 51st Street to take limited bets from Toots Shor, a big lumbering man with a face like a traffic accident, and he told her stories about the well-heeled bums around the big bar drinking until four in the morning.
I'm making gravy, they said.
The wife of Mr. Imperato, the lawyer she worked for in her regular job, called a couple of times a week and said, Tell him I'm making gravy.
She did her beadwork off the books. The pigeons climbed and wheeled and the long pole swayed above-the ledge.
Some women have one man in their life and he was the one, that bastard, in hers.
Mr. Imperato liked to joke about our famous forefathers. Abraham Linguin' and George Washingmachine.
In warmer weather Matty sat at the board in his beeveedees, how little he looked, so thin and pale, but his eyes were fixed on the pieces so hard and hot she could easily think there was someone else in there, sent to possess the boy.
The trick was, the thing was he was not the center of the family when he was here. She was the center, the still center, the strength. Now that he was gone, she could no longer make herself feel still, or especially central. Jimmy was central now. That was the trick, the strange thing. Jimmy was the heartbeat, the missing heartbeat.
It was a promise that was also a call to duty. Tell him I'm making gravy.
They said, See what you're gonna do.
This was a threat to a son or daughter who was not behaving. Straighten out. Change your attitude. See what you're gonna do.
They said, Who's better than me?
This was a statement of the importance of small pleasures. A meal, a coat with a fake-fur collar, a chair in front of a fan on a hot day.
It did not happen violent. It was the small thing of a weak man walking out the door. It was not big. It was not men with guns who tie paving stones to someone's ankles and put a bullet in his head. It was small and weak.
If you could feel the soul of an experience, then you earned the right to say, Who's better than me?
Jimmy knew some dialect.
They called her Rose. They had assurance and force, most of them, they had nerve and personality and loud voices, not all but most.
She did her beadwork, her piecework, working off the books just like Jimmy.
He slept continuous. Never got up in the night. Drank coffee and slept right through. Didn't seem to feel the cold. Walked barefoot on the cold floors, slept in his shorts on those winter nights when she'd finally hear the heat whistling in the pipes, her signal to get up for mass.
Somebody put serious money on a horse called Terra Firma and he began to worry when it finished first.
She listened to Matty analyze a position. They stopped the game occasionally and talked out the moves.
He was not a braggadocio. He told sly quiet stories late at night.
Conceal, conceal. But it was hard.
The baseball man Charlie Dressen was a horseplayer. Jimmy took his bets. He took bets from Toots Shor. He left seven hundred dollars in a coat that she took to the dry cleaner. The coat was his private bank, only he never told her, and she took it to the dry cleaner and went back when she found out about the money and they said, What money, lady? There was an inside pocket she didn't know was there. What money, lady?
She applied the beads with a wood-handled needle, following the design printed on the fabric.
But how is it we did so much laughing? How is it we went dancing the night of the seven hundred dollars and we laughed and drank?
He was not a harum-scarum guy who took crazy chances but the long shot came in and he began to feel the pressure to pay off.
Who's better than me, they said.
This was a statement she couldn't make, partly out of personality but also because she could not feel the ordinary contentment of things the way she used to. She could not feel favored or charmed.
He'd replaced her life with his leaving. The voice running through her head was not the voice she used to hear before he left.
But how is it we ate a German meal on 86th Street and went dancing at the Corso down the block, seven hundred dollars poorer?
