Sutton

by J. R. Moehringer

  On the other hand he also can’t warn Hughie. As he told the parole board, he knows who Willie Sutton is, and who he isn’t. He thought briefly that he might be a killer, but he knows he’s no rat.

  A few light snowflakes fall as the Polara pulls away from Yankee Stadium. Photographer turns on the wipers. Reporter turns on the AM radio. News. The announcer sounds as if he’s had too much coffee. And a line of cocaine. His jangled nerves can’t be helped by that Teletype machine clacking in the background.

  Our top stories this hour. Willie the Actor Sutton is a free man today. Governor Rockefeller pardoned the sixty-eight-year-old archcriminal late last night. No word where the most prolific bank robber in U.S. history is spending Christmas. Checking holiday traffic …

  Reporter and Photographer look at each other, look in the backseat. Sutton smiles sheepishly. Archcriminal, he says. He looks out the window—the Bronx. In the distance he sees a building on fire. Flames pour from the top floor. Where are the firefighters? In a vacant lot along the highway he sees a dozen boys tossing a football. Collarless shirts, ragged shoes. Not sneakers, not cleats—but old dress shoes? A bum lies sleeping in the end zone.

  Dark clouds move in from the north.

  When I got out of Dannemora, Sutton says, almost to himself, that summer of ’27, I couldn’t find a job.

  Even in the roaring twenties?

  Everybody thinks the twenties were roaring. People getting rich overnight, all that F. Scott Fitzgerald bunk, but you boys listen to Willie, the decade started with a Depression and it ended with a Depression and there were plenty of white-knuckle days in between. A few people were living high, but everyone else was circling the drain. Times were hard, and you could see worse times dead ahead. A crash was coming, you could feel it. Of course, that’s always true. You want to be a prophet? You want to be fuckin Nostradamus? Predict a crash. You’ll never be wrong.

  Reporter spreads the map. Our next stop is Madison and Eighty-Sixth. What happened there, Mr. Sutton?

  That’s where Willie finally found one of the two sweetest things a man can hope to find.

  In a phone booth at Penn Station, Willie calls Boo Boo. Collect. He says he won’t be able take that job they discussed. Suit yourself, Boo Boo says. Godspeed.

  Click.

  Willie hits a newsstand, buys all the papers, folds them into a thick wad under his arm, walks to Times Square. He gets a room in a flop, spends two days combing the wants. Bus driver—experience. Griddle man—experience. Child caretaker—experience, references, background check.

  In the margins of one classified section he drafts a letter to Bess. He runs out of room, out of words. He tosses the newspaper aside.

  On the third day, when he goes out for food and the evening papers, he steps into a speak. Orders a beer, opens the paper. GANGLAND SHOOTING IN PHILADELPHIA. Police say Hughie McLoon, local saloonkeeper, was gunned down outside et cetera. Willie shudders. He imagines Hughie’s machine-gun laugh being cut short by the real McCoy. He feels a moment’s pang of conscience, but he reminds himself: nothing he could do.

  He flips to the wants. Dishwasher—experience required. Fry cook—references. Landscape gardener—hmm. Small Upper East Side firm seeks man. Must be knowledgeable about shrubs, flowers. Funck and Sons. Ask for Mr. Pieter Funck.

  Willie goes to the drugstore on the corner, buys a tin of shoe polish. He shines his one pair of shoes to a high gloss, hangs his release suit neatly over the chair, hits the sack.

  At first light he rises, breakfasts on water from the tap, walks uptown, forty blocks. The address is 42 East Eighty-Sixth. An old redbrick building. On the third floor he finds a frosted door stenciled with the name FUNCK. He discovers the apparent proprietor behind an industrial desk that holds an adding machine, an ashtray, several skin magazines. Examining one magazine through a magnifying glass.

  Pieter Funck?

  What do you want?

  I’m here about the job?

  Sit.

  Funck stows the magazine. Willie takes a wooden chair. The office smells pleasantly of potting soil and hay. I’ll tell you straight, Funck says—no sons.

  Excuse me?

  Funck and Sons, I got no sons. I thought and Sons gave the business class, but Mrs. Funck is not fertile and so now you’re knowing and I don’t want you later asking me where are the sons and calling me liar. I can grow anything, anywhere, except a baby inside Mrs. Funck.

  Forty, gone to fat, the shape and color and texture of a mushroom, Funck rambles on and on in something like English. He says he came to America eight years ago from Amsterdam, and he’s still not fluent. No fooling, Willie wants to say. When he’s not bunching words in strange clusters, Funck is planting them upside down in sentences, their roots showing. And yet sometimes they thrive. He says he learned landescaping back in Holland. He says he knows everything worth nosing about tulips.

  Eventually the interview goes the way Willie feared. Funck asks about Willie’s recent experience. Willie takes a cleansing breath. On the level, Mr. Funck, I’ve spent the last four years in prison.

  Hurrying to bridge the inevitable silence, Willie swears he knows landescaping, knows it well, learned it from a fellow inmate, Charles Chapin.

  The editor? Funck says.

  Willie nods.

  Funck leans back in his creaky wooden desk chair. A row of cigars pokes from his shirt pocket, all different sizes, like a cigar skyline. Say now how do you like that, he says. I followed the Chapin case real close.

  Well, I can tell you, he’s a very interesting man. His gardens are—

  I’m all the time wondering how many men dream of doing what Chapin does. It’s taking real guts, no? To bump off the missus? How many thousands of husbands you think watch their wives asleeping and fantasy about putting in the brain one little bullet? And then the crabbing is stopping forever, no? Heb ik gelijk? How wives crab, am I right? All the time wanting something, but when you are wanting something, say a little affectioning, they can’t be bothering? Too busy crabbing!

  Willie straightens his necktie, tugs his earlobe, focuses on a spot in the wall just behind Funck’s head. Mrs. Funck, he thinks, should not buy any green bananas.

  Funck flips through a card file, says he’s got just the thing for Willie. Samuel Untermyer, he says. Big-shot lawyer. You ever heard of his house up in Yonkers?

  No sir.

  Greystone it’s called. This place you never seen nothing like. It’s the Eden Garden. Dozens of men it’s taking to keep this place shape ship, so Untermyer is using lots of firms, us including. I’m sending a crew every two days and this day I’m short. One of my mens is having a rupture. So. You take his place. Tomorrow morning, four o’clock, if you’re late you’re being fired.

  Photographer is looking out the back window, changing lanes, trying to exit the highway. He checks the clouds. Hey, Willie? Couldn’t we just swing by the scene of the Schuster murder real quick? While the light is good.

  You and your light.

  The light right now is ideal, Willie. Look. Look at that sky, brother.

  Haven’t you learned anything so far from Willie? You make your own light in this fuckin world.

  Willie is an hour early for his first day. He carries a kerchief, an apple he found in the trash, a dog-eared copy of Cicero. He’s still wearing his release suit.

  Funck smacks his palms against his cheeks. A suit? Jezus the Christ! Greystone is not formal gardens!

  These are my only clothes, Willie says.

  Funck loans Willie gray coveralls, gardening boots, a hat. Willie climbs into the back of Funck’s truck, which seems made of cardboard and pie tins. There are four other workmen sitting along a wood bench. None says hello. An hour later, just as the sun is rising, the truck rolls through the front gate of Greystone and Willie can’t help himself—he gasps. Funck lied. This isn’t the Garden of Eden. This makes the Garden of Eden look like Irish Town. There are Grecian temples, Roman statues, marble rotundas, fountains of burbling
silver water and brightly colored tile. There are dark green ponds dotted with lily pads and calm ponds of limpid blue. There must be one of every flower and tree in existence, and every variety of hedge and bush, trimmed and planed into all manner of sizes, shapes. And containing it all, lending it all a touch of drama, is a sheer cliff that plunges straight down to the majestic Hudson.

  The foreman is a tall man with a neck goiter the size of a radish. He starts Willie mulching, raking. Willie quickly breaks a sweat. It feels good to be using muscles, breathing hard. He whistles under his breath, lost in the joy of having a real job. Until the workman on his right interrupts.

  Foreman’s a prick, the workman says.

  Oh? Willie says.

  Don’t get on his bad side. He’ll fire you for nothing. Less than nothing. Sick wife? Sick kid? He don’t care.

  Okay. Thanks for the warning, friend.

  Some place, eh?

  Yeah. Beautiful.

  You know how many rhododendron they got in this joint?

  No.

  Thirty thousand. You know how many tulips?

  Nope.

  Fifty thousand.

  That a fact?

  You know how many fireplaces?

  Nuh-uh.

  Eleven. One’s made of rubies and emeralds.

  Really?

  You know how come Old Man Untermyer built these gardens?

  Can’t say as I do.

  For his old lady. He was crazy in love. But then she croaked before they was done. Old Man Untermyer lives here all by his lonesome.

  Sad.

  That’s life.

  The workman points to a winding path that leads to a gazebo at the edge of the cliff. Mr. Untermyer calls that the Temple of Love.

  Now the workman on Willie’s left chimes in. Don’t listen to this mug, he’s talkin through his hat. These gardens aint just for Mrs. Untermyer. Old Man Untermyer also wanted to one-up the Rockefellers. They live just north of here. Mr. Untermyer hates Rockefellers worse than he hates rabbits.

  At noon the foreman hands out onion sandwiches, bread, a cup of thin vegetable soup. Willie takes his lunch and climbs to the Temple of Love. He sits on a green metal bench. To his left are the gardens, to his right is the river. At his feet, painted on the floor of the Temple, are pale pastel nymphs and naiads, sporting and calling to sailors. Beyond, at eye level, are the palisades of Jersey. He looks at the water, watches a yacht gliding upriver. He makes a note to send Eddie some cigarettes and magazines when he gets his first paycheck.

  He lies back, opens Cicero. An essay on happiness. What is it about the great men, all they can think about is happiness? A line jumps off the page. But no one can be happy if worried about the most important thing in one’s life. Willie mulls this line, trying to see how it applies to his experience, and suddenly a clammy feeling comes over him. He’s being watched. He lowers the book, sees a second foreman thirty feet away, staring. Where the hell did that second foreman come from? He must live here on the estate. Willie sits up. He has twenty minutes remaining on his lunch break, but he wads up his bag and shuts his book and hurries back to work.

  The first foreman sends him to help plant boxwoods along the front path. Before long he feels a prickling gaze on his neck. He turns. The second foreman again. He barks at Willie: Careful, those boxwoods are a century old.

  Yes sir.

  Gentle with that one.

  Yes sir.

  Cicero had boxwoods on his estate, you know.

  Willie stops, peers from behind a boxwood. He sees the trace of a smile on the second foreman’s face. At least Willie thinks it’s a smile. Hard to know exactly what’s going on behind that mustache, which is so wild and furry that it must have its own full-time gardener. Above the mustache sits a massive nose, sheer as the cliff that forms Greystone’s western border.

  Can I ask sir, is this by chance your boxwood?

  My boxwood. My house.

  Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Untermyer.

  I must say—we haven’t had many gardeners reading Cicero during their lunch breaks.

  Brilliant man sir.

  Indeed.

  Wish I could have known him.

  Why is that?

  They say he was the best lawyer who ever lived.

  He was.

  In which case, he might have kept me from getting sent up that river down there.

  Willie can’t believe he said it. Something about Mr. Untermyer’s gaze made him forget himself. He waits for Mr. Untermyer to flinch, maybe call over the first foreman and have Willie fired on the spot. Instead Mr. Untermyer smiles with his eyes.

  If I may ask—what was your crime?

  Bank robbery sir. Attempted.

  Mr. Untermyer stares. When was this?

  Nineteen twenty-three sir. Ozone Park.

  When did you get out?

  This month sir.

  What’s breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?

  Sir?

  It’s a line from a new play. Bertolt Brecht.

  I haven’t been to the theater in a while, Mr. Untermyer. Though I was Regan in a production at Sing Sing. Jesters do oft prove prophets.

  Mr. Untermyer tugs his mustache, not unlike Mr. Endner. What’s your name son?

  Sutton sir. William Francis Sutton Jr.

  Photographer double-parks on Madison, just off Eighty-Sixth. Sutton looks out the window at the former home of Funck and Sons. I’ll be damned, Sutton says. It’s still there.

  What is?

  I got a job with a landscaping firm in that redbrick building. Forty-two years ago. The boss sent me to Greystone, a famous estate. Terrible soil. We had to dig out and blast out truckloads of rock. I don’t know how much poop we had to mix into the topsoil.

  Sutton opens the car door, puts one foot outside. He smiles. The place was so beautiful, I begged the boss to put me on permanent. I actually got down on my knees.

  Get off your knees, Funck says. I’m not putting you on permanent.

  Why not?

  I don’t need you there. My man with the rupture is back.

  Please sir. This is the right job for me. The grounds, the air, the owner. After prison a man needs to heal—they should send prisoners straight to the hospital—and Greystone is a place where I can do just that.

  Heal on your own time.

  Willie doffs his cap. If that’s how you feel sir.

  It is.

  Willie gets off his knees, walks toward the door. So long, Funck. I hope the missus doesn’t make too much trouble.

  So long … Wait. Why trouble?

  When I shoot her a wire—relating our conversation about Chapin? When I tell her that her husband thinks it’s a swell idea to blast a wife in her sleep?

  Funck turns the color of a poinsettia. You wouldn’t.

  Willie leans against the door’s frosted panel. Wouldn’t I?

  She won’t believe.

  Probably not. She sounds like a very sweet woman.

  He’s laughing, Photographer says to Reporter. He’s just standing in the middle of Madison Avenue, laughing.

  Mr. Sutton, why are you laughing? And would you please be careful—there are cars coming.

  I was remembering how I got the boss to put me on full-time at Greystone. Ah boys, score one for Willie. Finally things were turning around for me. A job I loved. A job I was good at. Money in my pocket. I started getting in shape, putting on weight, and on my day off I’d spend hours and hours at the library. Reading. What bliss.

  Reading what?

  Everything.

  Photographer holds the map against the wind. Oh brother, holy shit, is that why our next stop is—the library? Seriously? Willie—we’re going to the library?

  The first chance Willie gets, he pulls newspapers, magazines, business journals, everything he can find in the library about Mr. Untermyer. He’s shocked by what he learns. Willie and Eddie thought they were pretty slick, breaking into a bank, but Mr. Untermyer breaks up banks. As a s
pecial prosecutor, Mr. Untermyer became the all-time bank buster, the scourge of America’s most notorious robber barons. During tense hearings before the United States Congress, hearings that riveted the nation, Mr. Untermyer, a fresh orchid from Greystone in his lapel, called one banker after another to the stand and exposed them as conspirators, liars, thieves. Over a span of several years, through a secret money trust, the bankers had hijacked the financial system. They’d appointed one another to the boards of their various banks and corporations, essentially merging them all into one secret superbank. Mr. Untermyer had the audacity to expose this skulduggery, to publicly interrogate the perpetrators, who happened to be the richest men in America, among them J. P. Morgan and one of the Rockfellers. What was more audacious to Morgan than the questioning itself—Untermyer was a Jew.

  The hearings didn’t end in criminal charges, but they did ruin Morgan’s health. Shaken, humiliated, he fled to Europe. Weeks later, in a lavish hotel suite in Rome, he breathed his last. His heirs and partners openly blamed Mr. Untermyer. While Mr. Untermyer never accepted the blame, he never denied it either.

  Whenever Willie sees Mr. Untermyer on the grounds of Greystone, he tries to catch his eye. Now and then Mr. Untermyer comes over and chats. Willie can’t believe a man so important, a man busy slaying Morgans and shaming Rockefellers, makes time. But Mr. Untermyer seems amused by Willie, intrigued by his stories about Irish Town, Sing Sing, Dannemora, Eddie. When Willie runs out of real stories, he makes up new ones. In the middle of just such a story, a querulous look comes over Mr. Untermyer. Willie, he says, I think you’re a modern seanchaí.

  Willie, kneeling in the shadow of the Temple of Love, planting delphiniums, looks up. He can see the nymphs dancing behind Mr. Untermyer. My grandfather used to talk about the seanchaí sir.

  I don’t doubt it. Your grandfather was from Ireland of course.

  Yes sir.

  The seanchaí was a holy man in Ireland. He made the long nights shorter. And he didn’t always care if his stories were true.

  Is that bad?

  Not necessarily. Truth has its place. In a courtroom, certainly. A boardroom. But in a story? I don’t know. I think truth is in the listener. Truth is something the listener bestows on a story—or not. Though I wouldn’t recommend you try that argument on a wife or girlfriend.