Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories

In a sense, despite our new responsibilities, our stay on the island was an extended honeymoon. We were surrounded by students or recent graduates who were just as broke as we were. The island was reached by a ferryboat that shuttled back and forth at unpredictable times, often carrying handcuffed convicts to Riker’s Island as its second stop. There were hardly any automobiles on the island; you could walk from one end of it to the other in less than five minutes. On a still autumn night, even after Timmy was born, we would go outside with other married college students and play charades or even hide-and-seek. The island was peacefully quiet, and you could hear a baby if he so much as turned in his crib. On Sunday nights they would show old movies in the rec hall, stuff like Citizen Kane and Pinocchio and The Philadelphia Story. Admission was twenty-five cents a head, and Joan and I would take turns running up to check on Timmy every time the projectionist stopped to change a reel, unless we’d arranged for Peter and Gerry to look in on him. We used to keep our money in a little tin box divided into compartments, so much a week for rent, so much for transportation, so much for entertainment. I can remember a night when Joan wept herself to sleep because she’d backed a straight flush in a poker game and lost our three-dollar entertainment allotment to someone with a royal flush. The island was literally an island, but it was also a figurative never-never land that was a part of the city and yet removed from it. It was, in a sense, a country club for paupers.

Herbie moved into the apartment alongside ours just before Christmas. His wife’s name was Shirley, and they had a son and a daughter, both under three years of age. Herbie was studying to be a television repairman. It is perhaps difficult to imagine snobbery among paupers, but the old-timers on the island strongly resented the new rules that allowed the admission of men going to upholstery schools, or television-repair schools, or even barbers’ colleges. Many of the old island residents were men and women working for their master’s degrees; some were going for their doctorates; most considered it beneath the dignity of the island to accept people who were not, by their standards, bona fide students. I wish I could say that Joan and I were unaffected by such petty considerations, but the truth is we felt as put upon as any of the others. The island was our neighborhood, our private retreat from the city. And now our neighborhood was getting run-down. We discussed it with our friends often and vehemently, and when Herbie and his wife moved into the apartment alongside ours and across the hall from Peter and Gerry, we unanimously felt there was now more to cope with than the indestructible cockroaches. And yet I don’t think this resentment had anything to do with what happened on New Year’s Eve. Or maybe it did; I simply don’t know. I do know that Joan and I could have continued living on the island for many months after New Year’s Eve and before it was reconverted to a hospital, but we applied for rooms in a city housing project instead. We left the island in March and never again saw any of the people who had been at the party that night.