lost! She tugged on Joe’s arm.
So what else is new?
He took off with the baby!
Giuseppe had been getting lost on a routine basis. Penny told Joe about an afternoon spent with Aunt Francesca and Cousin Susan hunting all over Little Italy, down Columbus Street to Washington Square and the boccie courts, to the liquor stores in Chinatown, and finally finding him at the wharf staring at the water. Joe wanted to know why in the hell this young mother had left the baby with an old drunk whose brain had one foot on a banana peel, but he couldn’t navigate her Spanish. They jogged through the carnival crowd, under the Ferris wheel, which turned slowly and disappeared in fog, among the dart-throwing and ring-tossing booths, then into the huge arcade. Joe remembered putting a penny into one of the old machines many years ago, cranking the handle until he saw, in a jerky, magical dance of white flesh against a black background, his first glimpse of a naked woman.
They crossed the highway to the beach. The fog lifted, swept to the south like wind-tossed hair, and the sudden gleam of sunlight made Joe squint. Penny saw them first and pointed, across the slick plane of sand which disappeared in fog, at the tiny, smoky figures of a man in a fedora and a toddler holding his hand. The old goat was moving stiffly, and the child’s shiny black hair bounced in the wind. Penny and Maria stepped over the garbage and driftwood and kicked off their shoes while Joe sat on the seawall and looked at his watch. He yelled to Penny that he needed to make another phone call pretty soon, and she called back that they’d be on the beach with Grandpa.
Don’t get your clothes wet, he yelled. Something stank, a dead seal or some bum’s turd buried in the sand, and he stepped down to the beach and walked over to a log upwind. He imagined that his brothers were probably drunk and laughing while a bunch of sleazy bastards put their business in the shitcan. He imagined his father having sex with a teenaged whore, the woman dancing around in the surf with his daughter. The girls raised their skirts high above their knees while the water foamed around them.
He crushed a crab shell under his heel and hurled a stone at a log. He picked up a shell and observed it among the tabulations he’d made on his palm in the house of mirrors. Joe imagined some hermit crab had once lived in it, and wondered how the hell a crab could build a house like that, then realized that the crab had probably just found it and taken it the way his old man had snagged neglected land from lazy investors for next to nothing. But something built it, he said to himself, some little shellfish, and as he studied the perfect spiral he thought how somebody might explain its design with a series of triangles, a progression of right triangles, the hypotenuse of one becoming the base of the next. He held the shell, closed his eyes, and as he took in the scent of the briny air he returned in memory to the arcade from childhood, the secret peep-show world in the machine. That distant afternoon when he’d chased friends up and down this same beach and seen the woman in the box was linked somehow to looking into the heart of the shell today.
His daughter was still lifting her knees in the foam, her black hair tossed back and bouncing, and his father and the baby were trudging in the opposite direction now, along the water’s edge, their distant shapes silhouetted against the radiant mist. Joe turned and brushed the sand from his trousers.
The arcade was dark after the shore’s brilliance, and it took a moment for his eyes to read the signs. He got change from a cigar-smoking boy in a booth and scanned the dark recesses for a phone. Sammy answered and said that his brothers were still out with New Jersey. The carousel started up as he spoke, and it was hard to hear him. Joe watched the horses moving up and down. Could they do any damage without his signature? Sammy didn’t see how they could, and Joe agreed.
Several kids were at pinball, but none at the ancient penny arcade machines (which now demanded a nickel), and as Joe strolled among them he realized that the boy had given him twenty nickels for his buck, and he had eighteen left, and his brothers probably couldn’t do anything without his signature, so what the hell. He glanced up and down the aisles of dusty machines, sighed, and dropped a nickel into one of them.
A little man with a bushy mustache was crank-starting a car. Joe could adjust the speed of the jerky black-and-white images with his arm, and he found it amusing that he and the man were cranking handles simultaneously, the ghost of an actor who died years ago and Joe moving their right arms in perfect sync. When the man hopped into the jalopy, the fenders fell off. Joe shook his head and peered up and down the aisles sheepishly. He wondered if he could find it or if it had long since been replaced.
He peeped into a few more machines. On some the metal visor above the eye sockets was worn smooth and shiny. The actors in the little films were obscure, the scenes taken from all manner of unsuccessful projects and experiments with the moving picture craft. Physical comedy, pratfalls, smoke and combustion were the main fare, but there were several very odd pieces: men rowing boats and lifting dumbbells, soldiers marching like wind-up toys. He had three nickels left when he found it.
The tiny figure in profile was running in place, the muscles of her hip moving to the rhythm of Joe’s arm, her small breasts bouncing with the sway of Joe’s shoulder. She was so small and naked, so white and vulnerable jogging before the pitch-black backdrop, her long hair pinned on top of her head. Her eyes looked frightened or startled, and Joe’s heart pounded as he cranked the handle. The screen went black.
He dropped another coin and moved more slowly this time, and still again more slowly with his last nickel. When he finished and started out of the semi-open, cavernous building he felt beads of sweat dribble down his dress shirt. He stood above the gleaming ocean feeling a bit foolish and ashamed.
Penny and Maria were in almost the precise place they’d been when Joe had left, silhouettes moving in the radiant mist, wading in the surf. Joe shuffled toward them and peered down the beach for the old man. A good fifty yards south of the girls the toddler crouched and bounced atop a log, but Giuseppe was nowhere in sight. Damn that old goat, Joe said to himself, leaving a child alone by the water. He started for Jesús. Obviously, the girls hadn’t seen the old man disappear. The toddler walked on the log and pulled something off one end of it. Then he ran west, across the smooth expanse of sand, clutching something round and floppy. Kelp? Jellyfish? No: the object left the boy’s hand and rode the wind a moment like a cartoon spacecraft before it landed on the wet sand. It was a fedora.
Joe ran, too, but he slipped in soft sand and bit his tongue. He knew it was his father who lay motionless, looking from this perspective more like driftwood washed ashore than a man, and that the child was heading for the receding water. The girls heard him yell and stared at him. Joe hadn’t run for years, not since a charity ballgame, and as he lifted his legs he thought of the little naked woman running in place, how the muscles of her hip flexed. He thought how she’d been filmed in some clinical setting and possibly against her will, like a Jewess studied by Nazi doctors, and he realized that he had always held a secret love for her, for her beauty as well as her vulnerability. Baby Jesús ran with his arms out, as if to embrace the water, and Joe could see that a large wave was coming, green and gleaming like a polished stone, just starting to crest and tumble toward the child, and Joe lifted his knees and pumped his arms and legs as hard as he could.
The toddler disappeared underwater a moment before Joe ran into the frigid ocean. A black ball, more like a sea palm than the head of a child, popped above the foam. Jesús’s beautiful brown face rose above the surface of the wave, as if the sea were debating whether to take the baby or deliver him. The water knocked Joe down once, but he regained his feet. His good suit dripped and poured from the pockets, his best loafers got sucked off his feet and swallowed. He stumbled and crept in waist-high surf, and the boy floated into his arms.
The water hissed up to Giuseppe as well and soaked his old flannel shirt and khaki trousers. Joe, still up to his thighs in water, saw Maria struggling toward him, her dress soaked and clinging to her body, and in the distance Penny turning the old man onto his back because the water had covered his face. The baby wheezed and spewed seawater, the mother shrieked and staggered with arms outstretched, and Joe could see his daughter stooped beside his father. He handed Jesús to Maria and held her elbow as they trudged to shore.
Penny leaned above her grandfather the way she’d stand while examining