The Block

By Stefan Draughon

This collection of short stories is set within a single block of an ethnically diverse, working-class neighborhood in Yorkville during post-WWII Manhattan. In one generation, the characters unknowingly lose the inescapable intimacy of their community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: egibooks
• Release date: Mar 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780999669983

Book preview

cover-image, THE BLOCK v6

THE BLOCK

by

Stefan Draughon

egibookslogo-filtered.jpg

EGIBOOKS

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

THE BLOCK

Copyright © 2019  by Stefan Draughon

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law. This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue are either drawn from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First Edition.

egibooks

P.O. Box 20432

New York, NY 10011

www.egibooks.com

ISBN (print): 978-0-9996699-3-8

ISBN (e-book): 978-0-9996699-8-3

Original Art: Stefan Draughon

Cover Design: Stefan Draughon & Nellie Beavers

E-pub Design: Nellie Beavers

To

Jozsef, Olive, & Betty

Table of Contents

1. The Block

2. Jimmy and I

3. Blue Jeans on the Stoop

4. Sweet Sixteen

5. Beside the River

6. The Little Brown Gabardine Skirt

7. Cathy in D.C.

8. Mrs. Mann

9. Uniforms and Hollywood

10. A Trinket from China

11. The Accordion

Acknowledgements

About the Author

THE BLOCK

The Scene

This collection of short stories is set within a single block of an ethnically diverse, working-class neighborhood in Yorkville during post-WWII Manhattan.

In one generation, the characters unknowingly lose the inescapable intimacy of their community.

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1. The Block

The brownstone stoop had four steep steps. On both sides, along the steps, was a wide railing made of the same claylike concrete as the steps. At the sidewalk level, the railing ended in a pillar form on each side. This particular brownstone stoop was right under a large decorative street lamp with a similar design. The lamppost was home base for hide and seek, which all the children played virtually every night during the summer.

Living in apartments without air-conditioning, people spent many late nights outside. Not only the children were there, but their parents and neighbors as well. This whole block-life formed a part of the identity of each person living there. Yes, there were also neighborhoods of perhaps four or five square blocks in the city. But the deeper identity of each child and adult was that of the block, their block, quite different from what was around the corner.

Adults brought chairs to sit on during the particularly hot nights. But the kids, when they were not running around, would sit on the stoop steps. Sometimes they rested, sometimes they played house. But as time went on, and they became teenagers, their stoop constituted a meeting place for them to talk with each other. They still played sitting games, they told jokes, but increasingly, they talked to each other.

Now, when I say block, I don't necessarily mean both sides of the street. Because across the street lived a few kids who were different from the rest of us, not of the block. They were rich and went to private schools. One was very wealthy. On the block side of the street, my side of the street, we were working- class Catholic kids mostly.

But that's where the similarity ends. We were as different from each other as we were from the kids across the street. Those differences increased with time. Yes, with urban renewal some families moved away from the block. Others just changed and grew differently with time, education, and experience so that, by the time they were eighteen or twenty, each child lived in a different world.

On this block, none of the families had many children, perhaps one or two. They were poor and they were careful.

This story focuses on families from different cultural backgrounds including Hungarian Catholic, English Protestant, as well as Slovakian, Irish, German and Italian Catholics. Several families lived in adjacent brownstones while the others were farther down the block.

Historically, I guess that's the right word, the neighborhood was Hungarian. That meant that around the corner there were many Hungarian restaurants and, in the other direction, there was a butcher, the bookstore, a church, Catholic, another church, Reformed. People walking on the street regularly could be heard speaking Hungarian to each other, without any sense of their being uncomfortable or out of place.

All that changed once the developers came in, tore down the brownstones, the Garden restaurants facing their large backyards, the local bakery shop, and destroyed everything on a human scale. Instead they built tall, square, block-long apartment buildings which were, without exception, unaffordable to those who had lived there before. In fact, they were overpriced, even for others who might want to move into such a place. Spaces remained empty for years, despite offers of three-months-free rent a year. It wasn't just that nobody wanted to live there. Nobody who lived there before, wanted to live that way. But that's getting ahead of the story

This all sounds almost idyllic. But the world, even the very small world of this block, was far from heaven. Just one block north and one block east, the children's experiences were very different. One was murdered. Another was a murderer. The poorest children were never given the opportunity to be children at all—to lead even ordinarily stressful lives.

Getting back to the stoop, and the many occurrences there, one in particular stays with me.

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2. Jimmy and I

Jimmy and I were the last ones to be out that evening. He lived right next door to me. As you already know, this is very near the street lamp. I was comfortably placed in the crook of the handrail and pillar at the end of the stoop. He was sitting on an upper step near the doorway of his house, the house with the stoop.

The others had left already. Or maybe there weren't any others. I don't fully remember. But he and I got to talking—talking about relationships between boys and girls, talking about going to college, talking about what we wanted in our lives. Talking about serious things. Things that we both cared about, although we were coming from very different positions with regard to them.

I had pretty much tread the careful path, toeing the line. Doing what people wanted me to do, being a good girl. For me, college was an expected consequence of finishing high school. Although, since we were poor, my family would need me to win a scholarship or go to a public college. But that was a couple years in the future. Not right now. Now, I was most immediately concerned about being attractive to boys. Not that I neglected my studies. I paid them their due. I might not be the best in the class, but I maintained an overall A- average and allowed myself other activities that meant a great deal to me in my life. At the time, that meant dancing at least fifteen hours a week.

Jimmy's path was by no means direct, nor linear and headed straight for college. Three years before this, who would've thought he was going to college? Instead, people on the block thought he probably might wind up in jail. Not that he was threatening or hurtful to anybody. But he had a marked—what should I call it? He had a mischievous, energetic nature. He might take an apple from the grocer’s shelf. Or go with some of his friends and get into a fight, a brawl between them and the Irish kids on the next block. After all he was proud of his English heritage and felt he had to defend himself against slurs to his background. In any case, with these minor offenses, he got involved with the police. Unfortunately, not the rock group that came along later.

In the 1950’s, the relationship between the kids on the block and the police was not an unfriendly one. I would say that it was cautiously friendly. Not because we were afraid of them, but because sometimes the boys and girls committed minor transgressions like playing ball in the street, or parking a bicycle where it shouldn't be, or bouncing a ball against the wall of the store whose owner didn't necessarily like that.

Jimmy didn't hang out with