Without Prejudice by Andrew Rosenheim Page B

on TV.
    ‘How’s our little guy doing, V?’
    ‘He’s okay, Mr Danziger. Time helps, you know.’
    ‘It will be four years next fall.’
    ‘Yes, sir, though he’s still got to be missing his mother.’
    ‘I know.’
    Vanetta said, ‘He be doin’ okay. But that’s one deep boy, Mr D.’
    His father laughed but there was a melancholy strain to it.
    ‘I tell you one thing,’ Vanetta offered. ‘He could do with some company his own age.’
    ‘I know, but he’s got Lily and Mike. They’re nice to him, aren’t they?’
    ‘They’re okay. But they’re so much older that they won’t play with him, except when I ask them to.’ Vanetta said ‘ask’ like the word ‘axe’; Bobby had corrected her once, and she had said thank you. But she continued to say ‘axe’.
    His father must have been frowning, for Vanetta added, ‘It’s only natural, Mr D. Kids like to play with kids their own age.’
    Had anyone but Vanetta said this, Bobby would have felt betrayed. What she didn’t understand was that he was happy with the way things were. He knew his mother was gone for good, he did his best quite faithfully to remember her, staring at the photograph his father kept on top of his roll-top desk, trying to match the picture with some image in his head, and he knew too that something hard, and awful, and enduring had happened to them all.
    But the terrible thing he couldn’t admit even to himself was that he didn’t actually miss his mother much; he had trouble enough just remembering her. And with this secret came another one he kept to himself. As far as Bobby was concerned, Vanetta was his mother.
    There was actually plenty of company in the apartment, even if it wasn’t of his own age. Like Mike D’Amico with his grocery deliveries twice a week; he’d sit down sometimes and have a cup of coffee, especially if Vanetta needed time to go around the kitchen and sort out what they needed – the potatoes were in the pantry, but the fruit was on a shelf near the icebox, and the veg was in the icebox itself.
    Or Mr Tipps, a white Southerner who at Merrill’s instigation (according to Mike) repainted the entire apartment, and would take a break in the kitchen in the late afternoon, where he would explain to Vanetta and Bobby how man had descended from the coconut. ‘Just look at one,’ he’d say, tugging on a strap of his painter’s overalls. ‘Two eyes and hair just like a man’s.’
    On the ground floor, below their apartment, lived the Edeveks – Eddie, the janitor, and his wife. You had to be careful about jumping around in the living room or dining room, since they were directly below. But in the back bedroom there was no problem, since it was just the cavernous basement beneath. Once when Mike had broken a window in the back yard their father had paid Eddie to replace it, singing, ‘I write a cheque/ for Eddie Edevek’, which Bobby had thought absolutely hilarious but was forbidden to sing himself. A couple of times a year his father would do more than nod hello to Eddie, stopping in the vestibule to talk about their army days. Eddie never said much, but Bobby’s father described him as an amiable Polack, and said he had more common sense than all the academics of the neighbourhood put together. His father liked to tell how once, after a big storm, Eddie had pointed out at the street where snow lay unploughed and uncollected for the fifth day running in the sub-zero sun, and declared, ‘What this ward needs is a crooked alderman.’
    He was big enough now to walk part of the way home from school, and he’d go up the leafy block of Kenwood, until he reached the news-stand at Steinways. Then Abe, the old man who owned the news-stand, would take him by the hand, flag down the cars, and walk him across the street. It seemed unnecessary and humiliating to Bobby, and he hated the way Abe would envelop his little hand in his own sweaty one, his thumb black from newsprint. But his father insisted, and once