Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! Page 2

  “Never mind,” Tucker said. He was in his robe, making his way down the hall toward them.

  His mother was still sitting at the kitchen table.

  “May I have some breakfast?” Tucker asked. “Please.”

  “Yes, you may, dear.” She got up and went across to the stove and Tucker’s father poured himself more coffee and said, “There’s an old Chinese saying: Man is what man hears he is, at keyhole.”

  “What you hear is what you get,” said Tucker, pulling out a chair.

  “That expression’s practically an anachronism now,” his mother said.

  His mother prided herself on being up on everything, including the youth scene. Last month for Stirring Romances she had helped write a confession story called “I Lost My Son at a Pot Party.” It wasn’t what it sounded like; confession stories never were. It was about a woman whose little boy had wandered away from a party where a demonstrator was showing housewives how to cook with new nonstick pots. The title was supposed to pull in younger readers.

  “Anyway, I’m not in love,” Tucker said.

  “Good. Then you’ll be able to eat,” his mother said. “I’m fixing you three eggs and some sausage.”

  “When I was fourteen,” his father said, “I was in love with a girl named Marcia Spriggs. Our song was something about stars on high, winking why.”

  “It sounds really moving,” Tucker said.

  “In those days you could still make out the words to songs,” his father said.

  “Some words,” Tucker answered. “Really passionate.”

  “No, you’re not in love,” Tucker’s mother said. “Love makes you sweeter, and you sound pretty sour to me this morning.”

  “‘Stars on high, winking why,’” Tucker’s father sang, “‘in the sky, why O why.’”

  “What does Natalia Line look like?” Tucker’s mother said, cracking eggs into the frying pan.

  “That’s hard to say,” Tucker said. “There’s something old-fashioned about her.”

  Tucker’s father sang, “I saw an old-fashioned moon’—Hey, that song was popular circa Marcia Spriggs, too. I saw an old-fashioned moon; I heard an old-fashioned tune,’” he sang.

  So much for communication, with Tucker’s father in a mood to make an old song out of anything anyone said.

  Tucker finished his breakfast while his mother and father swapped hit songs from the dark ages. Then he dressed, changing his clothes three times until he decided on jeans and a blue workman’s shirt, and his eight-inch lineman’s boots with the bright yellow laces.

  After that he called the Hockers and learned that Natalia was still wherever she’d gone for Thanksgiving, and Dinky was down at Woerner’s Restaurant, picking up pies for Mrs. Hocker’s Encounter Group that evening.

  Mrs. Hocker was a do-gooder. She was lately concentrating on young people who used to be dope addicts.

  She once told Tucker, “In a way, my young people are all strays, just like your Nader was, only they aren’t cute and cuddly like Nader, and no one wants to take them in.”

  “On the other hand,” Dinky had butted in, “Nader wouldn’t punch you in the face and grab your purse, either.”

  “Neither would any of them anymore,” Mrs. Hocker had retaliated, “and you should be a little kinder toward people who don’t have the chance in life you have.”

  Tucker put on his wool-plaid-lined blue-denim utility jacket and prepared to head down toward Woerner’s, in search of Dinky.

  “Don’t forget to be back by five o’clock,” his mother said. “At five o’clock your father and your uncle are going to unfold their new business scheme.”

  Tucker should have known that Dinky would still be at Woerner’s, eating. To ask someone like Dinky to go into Woerner’s Restaurant just to pick up pies for her mother was to ask a wino to drop in at a vineyard just to watch the bottling process.

  Woerner’s had the best food in Brooklyn Heights. All the lawyers from the courthouse and the Supreme Court building ate there at noon, and the restaurant had little sections called things like “The Caucus Room” to make the lawyers feel right at home. The talk in Woerner’s was all about writs and judges and defenses and adjournments, while the lawyers wolfed down big plates of beef stroganoff, goulash with noodles, Königsberger klops, and sauerbraten.

  Dinky was sitting at the counter finishing a plate of hot roast beef with home fries and fresh peas. She acknowledged Tucker’s presence with little more than a raised eyebrow, and went right on eating and reading a book. Tucker waited five minutes for a place beside her at the counter. He ordered a piece of chocolate pie with whipped cream when he sat down, and Dinky told Agnes, the waitress, “Make that two, with a side of chocolate ice cream on mine.”

  Then she said to Tucker, “What are you doing here? If you’re looking for Natalia Rhyme, she’s still away for the holidays.”

  “Where does she go for the holidays?” Tucker asked.

  Dinky shrugged. “Who cares?”

  Tucker didn’t want to say that he cared, because Dinky was an unpredictable scenemaker. If Tucker had said, “Well, I care,” Dinky would be just as liable to yell out, “OH, I SUPPOSE NOW YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH NATALIA LINE,” and Tucker had had his fill of that kind of talk already.

  Tucker decided to just hang around Dinky for a while and hope she would drop something into the conversation about when Natalia was returning. Or where Natalia had come from … or how long Natalia was going to stay with the Hockers … or anything about her, because Tucker really knew nothing about her.

  “What are you reading?” he said.

  “A book for a book report,” she told him. “It’s a book about John Merrick. I bet you’ve never even heard of him.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “I knew it,” she said. “No one’s heard about him. He was grotesque. Whenever he went out he had to wear a black cloak and a cap the size of a basket, with a curtain falling to his shoulders, showing nothing but eyeholes.”

  “You’re right. I never heard of him,” Tucker said.

  “He lived in Victorian England,” Dinky said. “He had so much bone on his face and head that it pulled his mouth out of line and he couldn’t make human sounds. He only had one eye, and his whole head was covered with these big cauliflower sacs which gave off a really putrid odor, and he didn’t have hands.”

  “How can you read that and eat?” Tucker said.

  “They wouldn’t even take him in the circus,” Dinky said. “He had to go everywhere in a carriage with drawn blinds.”

  She slammed the book shut. It was called The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity by Ashley Montagu.

  “I’m going to the library after this to find out more about him,” Dinky said, as the waitress served them their pie. “He wasn’t even bitter about it.”

  “He was probably psycho,” Tucker said.

  “Psychos aren’t happy,” Dinky said. “This guy was happy. He once said, ‘I am happy every hour of the day.’”

  “Then he had to be psycho,” Tucker said. “No one’s that happy.”

  “What you know about psychos would fill an ant’s mouth,” Dinky said, and then she began yelling at Agnes, the waitress, because she had forgotten to put the chocolate ice cream on the pie.

  Earlier in the week, when Tucker had been over at the Hockers’, Natalia had pinched his elbow to get his attention, and whispered, “Want to know a secret?” The three of them were sitting in Dinky’s room watching color T.V., and Dinky was petting Nader and talking to her about Tucker and Natalia.

  She was saying things like, “Well, Nader, Tucker says he’s here to see you, but I don’t think he’s here to see you at all, do you think he’s here to see you, Nader?” and things like, “I’ll tell you something, Nader. When Tucker leaves, it seems Natalia doesn’t have much to say to us. I guess we bore Natalia, Nader. Dinky Dull and Nader Nowhere—that’s us, all right.”

  Tucker leaned toward Natalia to hear the secret.

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; “There’s nothing wrong with Dinky’s glands,” Natalia said. “She’s fat because every afternoon she goes to every restaurant in the Heights and eats something in each one. No one ever sees all she eats, because she never eats all she eats in one place.”

  “She’s not supposed to eat out,” Tucker said. He had heard Dinky’s mother say that often enough.

  “She does all her eating out,” Natalia said. “She’s sly. I like that.”

  Natalia was always surprising Tucker with tag endings like that. He’d go along thinking Natalia was just gossiping like any other catty female, and then it would turn out that she was secretly admiring the very behavior Tucker thought she was criticizing.

  Once when she was telling Tucker about this boy in Mrs. Hocker’s Friday night Encounter Group, she said, “And do you know what Mrs. Hocker found out about him? He’s a recidivist.”

  “What’s that?” Tucker had asked.

  “That’s someone who’s gone back to an old habit. This boy had promised Mrs. Hocker and the group that he’d swear off pills. He was taking uppers before he joined the group. And Mrs. Hocker found out he started taking them again. He’s a recidivist.”

  “Too bad,” Tucker had commented.

  “Why?” Natalia had said. “He needs those uppers. If Mrs. Hocker had been doing him any good, he wouldn’t have gone back to taking uppers, would he?”

  “I don’t know,” Tucker said. “Dope addicts are too complicated.”

  “But you shouldn’t have to need to do something,” Natalia said. “If you have to need to do something, and you don’t do it, then you’ll only do something worse.”

  It sounded reasonable to Tucker and not reasonable to Tucker. He decided one reason he was not sure whether or not Natalia made good sense was that he never fully concentrated on what she was saying. He was always sitting there wondering things like: did he smell of perspiration because he had on a heavy wool sweater indoors? if he took off his shoes like everyone else, would his feet smell? and was his breath all right? He had never had such thoughts before, but now he had them, and he felt like all those characters in television commercials swapping anti-odor tips with each other, except he had no one to compare notes with. Sometimes he would go into the Hockers’ bathroom and raise his arms and smell his armpits, and often when he came back out he sat with his arms glued to his sides.

  After Tucker left Woerner’s with Dinky, they walked down to Court Street on their way to the library. In front of Chock Full O’ Nuts, Dinky said, “Do you want to try out their new barbecue sauce? It has onions in it, and it’s really neat.”

  “You try it out,” Tucker said. “I’ll come with you.”

  “I’m not going to sit at the counter if you’re just going to take up space beside me. They don’t like that in Chock Full O’ Nuts.”

  “I don’t know what I’d order,” Tucker said, trying to find a comfortable way to carry Mrs. Hocker’s four pies.

  “All right!” Dinky said, as though she were going to have to make a big sacrifice on account of him. “I’ll order two franks and you can pretend one is yours.”

  “How did that guy eat, anyway?” Tucker said as they went inside.

  “Who?”

  “The one with the cauliflower sacs on his head, whose mouth was out of line.”

  “Who cares how he ate?” Dinky said. “There was more to him than how he ate. Everybody thinks about how much someone eats and not about what makes someone tick!”

  Tucker didn’t say anything.

  “Three franks,” Dinky told the waitress, “and a heavenly coffee.”

  Then Dinky turned to Tucker and said, “She’ll be back Saturday afternoon. She’ll be going to St. Marie’s with me. I guess she’ll be around for a while.”

  When Tucker got home, at ten minutes to five, the martini pitcher was on the table in the living room. His uncle handed him a glass of milk.

  “Come on in, Tucker, we’re about to start the toasts.”

  His uncle’s name was Guy Bell, but everyone called him Jingle, and he was not the type who minded. He was around forty. He had been divorced three times. He drove an old Rolls-Royce he called Betty Boop, and Tucker’s mother claimed he owed half of New York City money. He had once been an actor and now said he was a playwright, and he called people who weren’t connected with theater “civilians” and spent a lot of time worrying about grants coming through to “subsidize” him.

  Tucker took off his coat, after putting the milk down on the coffee table. Once he sat down, Jingle handed him the milk again.

  “Isn’t there any Coke?” Tucker said.

  “Not for this toast,” Jingle said. “Coke rots your teeth.”

  “Gin rots your liver,” Tucker shrugged.

  Tucker’s mother said, “You’re in that same sour mood you were in at breakfast, honey. Now try to get into the spirit of things. Your father and Jingle have an announcement to make.”

  The martinis were poured then. They all raised their glasses and drank to the forthcoming announcement. Then Tucker’s father talked for a while.

  What he said was all news to Tucker.

  He started off by saying he had never really respected himself for being a professional fundraiser, and that as a professional fundraiser, he had led a dull, unrewarding life.

  All Tucker could think of was the excitement that used to fill the house when Tucker’s father was on the track of a “signer.” In professional fund raising, the whole trick was to rope in someone very important and respectable to be the signer of all the letters which went out to people, asking for money. A Rockefeller, a Ford, someone like Edward Kennedy—these were all logical signers. People would see one of their names on a letter asking for a contribution to a hospital or a college, and they would know that it was a worthy cause.

  A lot of work that didn’t look like work went into getting just the right signer: golf games and lunches and telephone calls here and there, and little Sunday supper invitations, and everything Natalia would probably call “sly.”

  Tucker’s father was always at his best in pursuit of a signer. He’d come home and give blow-by-blow descriptions of his progress to Tucker’s mother. When the signer was finally in the bag, Tucker’s father would take Tucker and his mother to dinner at a swanky restaurant.

  “I never had any elation about what I did!” Tucker’s father was saying as he poured himself another martini. “I never had any joy about the job.”

  Tucker’s mother made no comment, but sat with this broad smile cemented across her face, waiting for the new scheme to unfold.

  Jingle said, “What Cal is trying to say is that fund raising didn’t do anything for Cal. Sure, it did a lot for Lenox Hill, and The Lighthouse, and American Cancer, and Backwater College for Girls, but it didn’t help Cal!”

  Tucker finally said, “What’s the new business going to be, then?”

  “Health food!” Tucker’s father said, raising his glass again. “Tonight we are christening a new baby called Help Yourself, Inc.”

  “Help Yourself!” Jingle raised his glass again, too. “Here’s to a new business, a new philosophy, a whole new way of life, all wrapped up in one little combination store-restaurant.”

  “Where do you plan to open this place?” said Tucker’s mother.

  Jingle said, “Right here in Brooklyn.”

  “Right here in Brooklyn Heights,” Tucker’s father said.

  THREE

  ON SUNDAY, TUCKER, DINKY, and Natalia took the IRT 7th Avenue subway to the Eastern Parkway–Brooklyn Museum station. From there they walked to the high path along the Overlook of Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. They found a bench, and the moment they sat down, Dinky took a turkey sandwich, in a Baggie, from her coat pocket.

  No one said anything about the fact Dinky had just finished Sunday dinner, which was turkey with gravy, yams, string beans, biscuits, Waldorf salad, and pumpkin pie.

  “This place,” said Dinky, “is really something in the spring and summer.” Sh
e pointed her sandwich down at the gardens and said, “In the spring and summer there are roses, lilacs, tulips, and flowering cherries. I like to bring a picnic here. We’ll bring a picnic here in the spring.”

  Dinky was wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt which belonged to her father, and her father’s red-and-black-wool hunter’s jacket. Tucker was in old clothes, too. But Natalia was in a black velvet dress with a white lace collar, a black wool coat, and a black fur hat. She wore black patent-leather shoes, and stockings, and a white angora scarf with matching mittens.

  “I was glad to get out of the house, anyway,” said Dinky, “even if this isn’t the ideal time of year to come here.”

  “I like it here this time of year,” Natalia said.

  “So do I,” said Tucker.

  Dinky said, “That’s because neither of you know better. You can see anything here in the summer, even more than the spring. I saw a woman nursing a baby here last summer right in the middle of the Cranford Rose Garden, and you always see kids making out on blankets down near Cherry Walk. This isn’t a good time of year for the Botanic Gardens.”

  “People live in the past,” Natalia said. ‘“In the carriages of the past you can’t go anywhere.’”

  “That’s neat,” Tucker said. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “It was on our bulletin board at school,” Natalia said. “Maxim Gorky said it.”

  “What school is that?” Tucker said.

  Dinky said, “I don’t live in the past. I just happen to know more about the Botanic Gardens than you two, and I’m telling you this is the wrong time of year to see them!”

  “It was your idea to come here,” Tucker said.

  Natalia said, “She wanted to get out of the house because her parents were having a disagreement.”

  “They were having a fight,” Dinky said, “at the top of their lungs.”

  “Dinky’s mother wants her father to defend this heroin addict,” Natalia said. “The court assigned him a lawyer, but Dinky’s mother said he isn’t a good lawyer, not as good as Uncle Horace, anyway.”