Every Saturday that winter, Wally and Ham went to the St. George pool to horse around and splash, and for Wally to attend swimming lessons. A local boy had drowned in the East River at the end of the previous summer, and even though his antics weren’t anything Wally was likely to repeat, Stella was concerned that her daughter be confident in the water by the time the next summer’s swimming season began.
Ham was paid a quarter by Stella every time he minded Wally at the pool or anywhere out of the house, and part of their deal was for Ham to keep this employment a secret. As far as Wally knew, swimming with her was what Ham wanted to do with his weekends.
“Tell me again about what happened to Beaver Muniere,” Wally said, as they walked down the street, breath puffing white like smoke, on the way to the pool one cold Saturday morning. She’d heard it a million times, it seemed, but she always wanted to hear it again, every time they went swimming, as if Beaver’s death were some talisman that would ward off any danger from befalling her.
Ham hadn’t been there, but he knew kids who had, which made him an expert in Wally’s eyes. There was a certain debate about how exactly it had happened. Some said Beaver had been diving after a silver dollar another kid had stolen from him and thrown into the water. Others put it down to a dare — he’d been trying to stay underwater for a whole three and a half minutes and had grabbed on to the first thing he could to keep himself down — a rusty old milk can. The currents did the rest. Whatever the start of it, the finish was that Beaver had gotten his head jammed in that milk can. Shuddered at the description Ham gave of Beaver’s bare heels kicking and struggling while several of the boys had tried to help free him, and then, slowly, his legs had gone limp in the dark gray water.
They entered the bustling hotel lobby with its shops and subway entrance, and headed straight toward the pool entrance.
“Did Esther Williams ever wear this one?” Wally asked as she was handed one of the scratchy black woolen bathing suits that were standard issue at the pool.
“Never mind what Miss Williams wears, little missy. You won’t be swimming with her,” said Miss Finn, the scowling attendant who took the entry fees and handed out suits and towels. Wally and Ham had developed a super-villain persona for her: the Evil Finn had a woman’s head and torso with an eel’s jaws and tail, and her costume was damp, black wool. She lurked in the pool after hours and devoured any guest who dared take an illicit dip.
“That’s fifty cents,” she croaked unnecessarily to the children, as if they weren’t regulars. “And you, young man, the Negro changing area is to the left.”
“Why does she have to say that every time,” Wally asked Ham, too loudly. “Don’t you think she knows you by now?”
“I see a lot of people, Missy, and that’s the policy, so I state it. And you better mind your elders and move along.”
“Come on, Wally,” Ham said. “Forget it. You’re gonna get us kicked out.”
Ham veered to the men’s locker room, Wally to the ladies. She had seen the Negro changing area there: a cement-floored mop room with a row of stinking buckets and a small bench and several cubbies against the wall as well as a shower head with a single knob: cold.
“Do you have to change in a mop room, Ham?” Wally asked, when they met up again, poolside.
“Naw. I don’t actually listen to the Evil Finn. What do you take me for? Most everybody thinks I’m Puerto Rican, anyway, or Jewish. Nobody’s ever said a thing, except the Evil Finn, and she ain’t allowed in the Men’s, is she?”
“Fire bomb!” shouted Ham, when he’d climbed to the top of the high dive, and dove out into the air above the water, spreading his limbs like a cross and dropping, belly flop, onto the water. “Yeowch!” he wailed when he resurfaced, and then, seeing that Wally still stood hesitating on the pool deck, he called, “Don’t be a chicken, Wally. BUC-buc-buc-buc-BUC!”
Elizabeth Gaffney is a native Brooklynite. She graduated with honors from Vassar College and holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College; she also studied philosophy and German at Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich.
Her first novel, Metropolis, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, was published by Random House in 2005. Her stories have appeared in many little magazines, and she has translated three books from German.
Gaffney has been a resident artist at Yaddo, the Macdowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center. She also teaches fiction at the New School and serves as the editor at large of the literary magazine A Public Space.
