April in Paris

by John J. Healey

  He made us drink some kind of cheap whiskey. It tasted awful and was hard to swallow but none of us refused. “Take your weapons,” he said, “and stab them in the heart.” He pointed to where their hearts were. Jim and I were scared. We hesitated. “Don’t be afraid,” Father said. “They’s dead anyhow. I hit them with this until they confessed and then finished the job,” he said, lifting up a length of bloody chain. “What they deserved for the crimes they did against Ingrid and you Edwin and poor Eugene MacBride and god knows how many others.” Then, suddenly, Gino went at them. He leaned forward and stabbed both of them quickly and decisively, and not just once. He stabbed the priest first and then the detective. He stabbed the detective so hard the scissors came apart in two. Neither of the men responded, so we knew they were dead. Then Jimmy followed. I went last. Father patted us on the back.

  We helped him drag the bodies out of the shack. He disappeared for a moment and came back with a conveyance he’d made from planks resting on a frame that moved thanks to a pair of bicycle wheels. We put the bodies on the planks and followed him as he wheeled them down to the water’s edge. At one point the thing hit a rock and the priest fell off and we had to lift him back onto it. Touching dead men was harder than stabbing them.

  The bridge connecting Manhattan with the Bronx, Inwood with Riverdale, loomed above. It was real dark by then. No moon or nothing. Father had us throw our weapons far into the water and wash our hands there. Floating in front of us, tied to a tree, was a skiff I’d never seen before. Inside it were all kinds of chains, some of them wrapped around large rocks. We helped him get the bodies into the skiff. The weight was such that the sides of the skiff barely cleared the water. He shook Gino’s hand. He shook your Jimmy’s hand and asked him to look out for me. Then he pulled me to him and put his strong arms around me and he kissed my head repeatedly. He asked me for forgiveness.

  He untied the rope and shoved off. The currents between the Harlem and Hudson rivers are strong and dangerous. The Dutch called them the Spuyten Duyvil, the Devil’s spit. We could barely see him as he rowed the skiff out toward the middle of the roiling water. We heard him doing something with the chains. Then we heard splashes. In too short a time there was nothing left to see but a vague outline of the empty skiff. Like Charon crossing the Styx, Father had chained himself to the vile bodies and taken them down to the underworld.

  We walked all the way home in a daze and got to Ogden Avenue a little before dawn. We kept our secret ever since and never regretted it. Later in life Jimmy told me he decided to study the law because of it.

  Love,

  Edwin

  I got up and opened a set of the window-doors overlooking the river and pulled up an easy chair. I rested my feet on the sill. The Seine was dark. There were no lights on in the houseboats moored to the quay on the other side or in the buildings on the street above them. John August Anderson, the Swedish metalworker, brother and father, had possessed an Old Testament sense of justice, and the will to carry it out. He’d given the boys a curse and given them the gift of a dark secret. The experience pushed my father into becoming a lawyer, my father who’d been sweet on Ingrid and then ended up marrying her half-sister who gave birth to me. My father who became a prosecutor, thus qualifying to be considered a worthy enough husband for the heiress, Caroline Cuddihy-Woodward, which in turn facilitated my meeting Scarlett and inheriting her and Bunky’s fortunes. The basic course of my life, the reason I’d been so fortunate, was put into motion by the rape and murder of Ingrid Anderson, the execution of Eugene MacBride, and the bloody killings of a nasty priest and a corrupt police officer by a chain-wielding Swede.

  – 47 –

  And as it had happened to Abraham, an angel appeared at that moment to remind me that I had seen the three friends together. Call it a recovered memory. It would have been some years before my father married Caro, and it took place, of course, at the Judge’s house on Woodycrest Avenue. My Aunt Moira, the one with whom I stayed in Parkchester when my mother died, was married to a man who worked for 20th Century Fox. On that day, some cousin’s birthday, he had brought a large projector and a print of their film South Pacific. We sat on cushions in the living room, the same room where the girl in my dream had cut the wire about her ankles.

  We sat and watched the film ripple upon a white sheet affixed to the ceiling with black tape. Ever since my grandmother died of drink—because of the Judge’s involvement with Elsa Anderson—and even though alcohol was his line of business, it was forbidden to imbibe in that house, and three of the adults had gone to the backyard for a beer. Edwin, handsome, tall, shy and solitary; Gino, short, dark, and quick to laugh; and my father the district attorney, the golden boy with deep blue eyes who’d survived the Allied landing in Normandy. There they were, reunited, drinking Budweisers while my cousins and I were entranced with the play of light in the living room.

  There they were, chatting in the old neighborhood while my paternal grandparents still lived around the corner at 1075/77 Ogden Avenue. There I sat watching a group of muscle-bound gay men parading along a paradisiacal beach singing “There is Nothing Like a Dame.” There I watched the musical unfurl, composed by two savvy New York Jews, inspired by James Michener, a progressive Quaker, surrounded by my mother’s anti-Semitic, racist family. Much as my father had romanced Caro and I Carmen, there was the graying Rossano Brazzi seducing young Mitzi Gaynor.

  There they were together that day in Highbridge, and I was with them. As palm trees swooned upon the swaying sheet, as the Pacific glittered before my eyes with Woodycrest Avenue stark outside behind it, I took into my being the image and voice of an aging swain, telling me what I now must do. Once you have found her, never let her go . . .

  I put everything back in the box and stored it once again. I got myself a glass of wine, came back into the living room, and breathed in the river. I was in the Paris I loved, the banlieues hidden far behind me. I was in the Paris Fred Astaire sang about, “where all good Americans should come to die.” An Irish kid from Highbridge lucky beyond his wildest dreams.

  I took a deep breath. Carmen was asleep in my bed thirty feet from where I stood. Emily and Corru were asleep down the street. I realized I was happy. I knew it wouldn’t last—but I was feeling it then, and I savored it. I knew that part of the earth would face the sun again in a few hours’ time and kindle activity, needs, and conflicts. I knew Carmen would continue to fret about her mother. Emily would approach adolescence and give us worry. I knew enough about biology and physics to appreciate the mind-boggling absurdity of the universe. I knew the once-thriving bodies of my parents and grandparents, of Scarlett and Bunky and Caro, of the Andersons, of Ingrid, MacBride, and Edwin, of everyone connected to me who’d lived along Ogden and Woodycrest Avenues, were macerating in coffins. But there, in that moment, I was happy. I knew it more than anything. If I had possessed some divine power to stop time, I would have done so then and there.

  For the next few minutes it was still the eighteenth of April. I continued to stare at the river. I remembered how I watched my mother die when I was little, how I watched my wife die thirty years later. I thought of how I would be dead myself not too far in the future, and how, shortly after, it would be as if I’d never been. I knew how mean life was. I’d studied history. I’d read the books. I’d spied upon my father once making passionate love to a woman in our Bronx apartment. I’d seen him laugh, seen him kibitz with JFK on the beach, hit baseballs on the lawn in Southampton, swim in the sea. And then I watched him making a wallet, ineptly, after a stroke, sitting next to catatonic generals with unlit cigars in their mouths at Walter Reed Hospital. I had a rough idea of where this planet and its galaxy were in space. So, whether I had four billion or four dollars, I simply didn’t give a damn about much else besides my own happiness and that of the loved ones I hold close to me.

  Gerald Murphy got it right. Rich or poor, living well is the best revenge. My father’s dirty secret was that he had stabbed Detective Morrison
and the perverted priest before John August Anderson pulled them into the murky depths of the Spuyten Duyvil. My dirty secret was a devotion to the late paintings of Pierre Bonnard. For that was how I wanted the rest of my life to be, filled with tranquil and intimate scenes in beautiful homes looking out on gardens and the sea. Being able to contemplate Carmen in the bath. Waking up next to her at night with the windows open to summer thunder. Having toast with olive oil and honey in the morning with her. Watching Emily grow. Taking Corru for walks undisturbed.

  And so as the clock approached midnight I thought, let’s raise a glass to intelligent women and charming rogues, to children with manners, to people bored to tears by spiritual chicanery. Let’s hear it for science and the arts, for humor and good food, for wine and sex. Let’s celebrate empathic doctors and nurses and dedicated pilots, those who help the poor and underprivileged. Let’s hear it for Mediterranean and Atlantic beaches. Let’s hear it for dogs. Let’s hear it for style and eloquence, for room service and dry martinis. Let’s hear it for shadows, for Caro’s riding crop and Belgian loafers. Let’s hear it for the south fork of Eastern Long Island before all the arrivistes arrived, and for the five boroughs of New York City. Let’s cut the wire that binds our ankles, and go back to Ogden Avenue when Ingrid and Adranaxa were alive, playing on the stoop with Jimmy and Gino, as the afternoon turned into evening, when it was almost time to climb the stairs for supper, before all the pain set in.

  PARIS, MADRID, WILLIAMSTOWN 2018–2021

  Author’s note

  Much of the trial testimony appearing in this novel is taken verbatim from the 1912 New York State Court of Appeals trial: The People v. Joseph J. McKenna. The names and dates have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.