14

The time jumps went on for the next five years, and always coincided, it seemed, with critical moments of moral decision, like that time in early June of 1942 right after I’d graduated from St. Stephen’s. Pop had checked the cupboard that night after dinner and he gave me some money and a list of groceries to go buy. It could have waited until the next day but we’d run out of orange juice and Pop was anxious I should have it in the morning with my breakfast. He would have gone himself but he didn’t want to miss Inner Sanctum, his favorite radio show with that creepy creaking door at the beginning and then that shivery voice, “This is Raymond, your host…”

A new little grocery store had just opened in the nabe called ABSOLUTE LOWEST PRICES! and as there wasn’t any WHATYOUTINK at the end of it, and even though Pop had said, “Go to A and P,” I thought I’d save him some money and I went there instead. I arrived as they were locking up for the night, but I put on my most adorably pleading Mickey Rooney checking-into-Boys’-Town wistful face and this older white-haired guy just shook his head and sighed and let me in. While they were pulling together Pop’s list, I was waiting at the counter when one of the grocery clerks eyed me and quipped to the white-haired guy, “Well, they’ll never get him in the draft,” at which the white-haired guy turned his head and looked at me sadly, then turned back and said softly, “Yeah, they will.” Someone in a hurry placed a bag with Pop’s order on the counter right next to another one that had been sitting there next to the store’s cash register when I’d first come into the shop and then he quickly moved on while another guy rang up the charge, took my money, and gave me the change. He said, “Here you go, sonny,” sliding and pushing a bag into my arms. “Tell your folks we appreciate their business.” Going home, as I turned the corner on 31st I tripped over something and I fell and skinned a knee. I still had a grip on the bag of groceries, but as I fell I heard this clinking sound, so when I got up I unfurled the top of the bag to see if anything had broken inside. Then my jaw dropped and my mouth did a Martha Raye:

The bag was full of coins and bills, the grocery’s take for the day!

I spent the next twenty seconds staggering around in a daze just like Edward G. Robinson at the end of Brother Orchid after taking six slugs to the chest, and I wound up sitting down on the bottom step of a brownstone with my arms tightly wrapped around the bag atop my legs as I tried calculating the height of a pyramid made out of World’s Fair hamburgers that the money in the bag would probably buy me! Are we getting the message that I wasn’t yet entirely St. Joey of New York? I knew very well what Kurt Vonnegut would do but I wanted a second opinion, and at the thought the Big Loser flew in from Winnetka and he whisked me to the top of the Chrysler Building, at first handing me some stupid apology that it wasn’t the Empire State Building, which was taller, because he’d “lost a Big Friend up there” who’d gotten killed by machine-gun fire from airplanes piloted by “basically decent but incredibly misinformed Christers,” and it made him “too sad anymore” to go up there, but the creep didn’t even get to make his pitch because I waved him off right away, which of course you think means I was resisting temptation, and that could certainly be true, I suppose, except actually it wasn’t, as all it meant was I didn’t want a partner, my Basic Wicked Mind having already formulated with astounding feral cunning a devious scheme for keeping the money whereby I would go to the A&P, buy all of the groceries on Pop’s list and then carry both the money and the groceries home. What was causing me a smidge of concern about the plan was the part where I would have to tell Pop that I’d taken so long because I’d stopped for a minute to pray at St. Stephen’s, where I was kneeling and alone in the church when out of nowhere—though it seemed like it was coming from a holy water font—I heard this voice saying, “Joey! Walk to the corner, turn right for exactly twenty paces to a doorway, open it and there on the ground of the entrance to the recently shuttered and partially destroyed Japanese Martial Arts Academy you will find a paper grocery bag. Take it! Take it and give it to your father!” As I sat there on the stoop and mentally polishing my first rough draft—I was thinking of adding to the end of it: “A plenary indulgence will be granted for compliance”—when I saw these two coins on the ground. I thought they must have spilled from the bag when I fell. I got up and went over and picked them up and as I stood looking down at them in my hand I felt my heart begin to thump very lightly, but also much quicker, and then came this glow in my chest and that very same feeling of excited anticipation as I relived myself running back from Woolworth’s with my cheapo little gifts for Pop and Lourdes.

I was looking at a nickel and a dime.

I went back to the grocer’s and tapped on the glass of the door and when they saw who it was and I was holding the bag, my God their faces lit up like rockets in a Fourth of July night sky! I saw joy! Joy and relief! The older white-haired man just stared at me, stunned, with his mouth in an O and his hands to his cheeks, and then he rushed to the door, pulled it open and hugged me, saying fervently, “Thank you! Thank you!” and seeming even happier than Lourdes the day I told her the Armenian ABTINKWHATCHYOUTINK tailor had moved to Arizona. Before leaving, I asked them to recount the money. The white-haired guy said, “No no no no, that’s not necessary,” but I asked him again and he counted it. I wanted to find out whether fifteen cents was missing. It wasn’t. Walking home both my steps and the bag full of Pop’s list of groceries felt lighter than a pocketful of four-leaf clovers.

“Joey, you take very long. I was worry.”

“Yeah, Pop, it did take me awhile. But I got there.”

Yes. I got there.