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plenty from Mendel and the two nut sons: Sonny, who at fourteen
was nearly arrested for lowering an armchair out of the eleventh story
to an accomplice on the ground in full view of Eighty-sixth Street.
He'd been hauled into Nagel by Lester, the cabbie, who looked
up from examining one of the pigeons he liked to grab by the throat
and threaten with his pen knife. Just last year, Sonny, now known as
Harvey, had proved his early promise by being jailed for three months
in Phoenix, Arizona, on a charge of taking pornographic pictures.
The second nut was Burton, the railroad buff, who spent hours in the
lobby memorizing the time-tables but couldn't figure out change for a
quarter. Ina lasted six years, then went on the operating table to be
knifed to death by some Lester of a surgeon. With her passing, and
Oppenheim's, the reign of half-decent Jews ended, and the Mendel–
type took over.
They were too mean-spirited even to travel, too cheap to live.
Once she'd called him the monk of Eighty-sixth Street. "Are you
related to Gregor Mendel, the monk?" she asked him.
He never smiled. Baby lips
in
a cranium the
size
of a great
soupbowl. Between it and abnormality- water on the brain-was
scarcely a hair's breadth of dispute. "What monk?"
"Invented genes," said Miss Swindleman.
"A monk in skirts invents jeans. Crazy," said Mendel.
He was a designer of men's
suits,
and knew nothing else. An odd
man; an odd looker. Under the perisphere of a head, was a fat little
body, maybe five feet five, and then two midget's feet. He wasn't a
black-looking Jew. In fact, with eyes so blue they were sometimes
hard to see and a nose like a soap bubble, he looked as Irish as the
policemen who patrolled the streets and held their annual brawl in
the Peacock Room. Mendel had once been involved in their brawl
and fitted right in. Involved because he was, as usual, staring at
people from the lobby armchair where he spent half his life. Staring
with those snow-blue eyes, this time at one of the Irish cops who'd
staggered out of the brawl, highball
in
hand, and, seeing Mendel, in
overcoat and fedora, staring up at him, had removed the fedora
and poured the highball on the great white head. Mendel had risen,
sixty-six years old, five feet five inches tall, wrenched the standing
lamp out of its socket, raised it over his streaming head, and started
after the cop. The cop ran, Mendel followed, the old ladies screeched,
