It was an entirely different world — East 9th Street in the old days. Sometimes it seems so long gone that I find it hard to believe it even though I was there: the last horse-drawn vegetable trucks and milk-wagons in America, an "old-clothes man" shouting his cry in the street, an itinerant knife-sharpener with his pushcart. On the street, a few, very few, rusting 1930s automobiles (it was the war, and all the factories were turning out tanks). And me, in first grade, wearing hand-me-down knickerbockers with long socks as if I were some turn-of-the-century waif.
Next door to us was a two-family house. On the first floor, the very ancient Mr. and Mrs. Pynn, who tended their gladioluses in the tiny backyard. He was a retired merchant marine. (How did an old Cornish sailor come to live in our neighborhood?) On the second floor were the Pynn's tenants the Rhodins, Thor and Pearl, who were at least a generation or so older than my parents and who had three adult children (Thor Jr, Yammie [actually Hjalmar] and Peggy) none of whom I ever met and whose existence I was aware only because Mrs. Rhodin would boast of their exploits — Thor Jr. was a physicist who, she said, worked on The Bomb. The Rhodins were very quiet people. He, a tall, thin, aloof man who never spoke, was either unemployed or retired; he emerged from the house twice a day to walk his poodle. Mrs. Rhodin "went to business," as the saying was in the neighborhood.
One hot summer day, I was reading in the back bedroom. Windows (ours and the Rhodins) were wide open. Across the narrow driveway, I heard Mrs. Rhodin launch into a furious tirade. All the promises Mr. Rhodin had made to her. How little he had accomplished. The kind of place they lived in. Stuck in Brooklyn. She supported him while he lazed around at home. And other complaints that I couldn't understand or don't remember — but there could be no doubt about her fury. Her litany of objections was loud and it seemed to go on for hours. A one-way street, though; I never heard Mr. Rhodin's voice. Stunned, I shamelessly eavesdropped.
Was it days, or weeks, or months later that Mr. Rhodin was run over by a bus on 18th Avenue and instantly killed?
Was there a connection between the tirade and the accident? And was it an accident? Even in my childish naivete, I thought suicide. And because I knew Pearl and Thor's secrets, I felt as though I were a bit of an accomplice.
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