"Whites take muscle," Paul said. "I wake up some nights with that bee sting you get between the shoulder blades when you put in ten hours, that chain drive rattling in my ears like dragging a rosary through your teeth."
"So right away we had something in common. Pair of gear mashers."
Paul laughed out loud at the supermarket story, sobering when she mentioned her father's illness.
"Is your father still living?"
"He died. Mama sold the truck and we moved here. She had a touch of the TB, too, and my brother recommended a warm climate. It cured her. She's in Tampa, working the switchboard in a hotel."
"Old bat's got no use for me."
"She's got nothing against you except she thinks you're too old for me. I told her, 'Mama, he comes home every day.' You can't maintain a marriage on V-Mail." She took Paul's beer from his hand, sipped, and gave it back, an intimate gesture unlike any his son had ever witnessed between his parents. He felt a strange resentment, and chided himself for it.
"Are you liking Florida, Peter?"
"It takes getting used to. There's still snow on the ground in Cicero."
"It gets old. You can't appreciate summer when there's no winter."
"Speak for yourself," Paul said. "You never had to start a cold engine at four ayem when it's six below. I heated up a teakettle to pour hot water into the radiator and it froze on the way downstairs."
"Where is your brother now?" Peter asked.
"Army Medical Corps. The Aleutians, can you believe it? He's got nothing but winter. Last letter I got, he asked me to seal up some sunshine in an Ovaltine jar and send it to him air mail. He said he had to thaw out a bottle of iodine to treat a cut."
He simply could not hold onto a grudge in her cheerful presence. His mother had been a serious woman, if not grave, with flashes of unexpected sardonic humor at what had seemed inappropriate moments but in retrospect he remembered those moments were invariably brightened by what she'd said, after the initial shock wore off. Two half-orphans, Peter and Sharon.
"Can you stay for supper, Peter? I hope it's okay that I call you Peter ... I'm older than you and Father just seems wrong."
"I could eat again." Paul seldom paid attention to conversations in which he wasn't involved. "It's always the skinny guys that win pie-eating contests."
Peter ignored the comment. "We're practically family," he told Sharon.
"See, I told you for a sky pilot he flies close to the ground."
"I think he's sweet. I wish I'd known Maureen. They must have been very alike. You know, Peter, our religions aren't so different. Jews confess, too, at Yom Kippur. The only difference is we do it in public: Everyone stands up in Temple and shouts after the rabbi, 'I have been adulterous,' and so on and so on, whether or not they ever were. We share the sins of all the worshippers. Only"—she leaned forward a little, her black eyebrows assuming the upward-slashing angle of incendiary rockets—"you can always tell who committed the sin under examination, because they're the loudest."
Peter laughed. Twice in one sitting. Sharon Baumgartner, he decided, was good for what ailed him.
SIXTEEN
Supper was brisket—what else?—with heaps of lima beans swimming in butter, boiled potatoes and beef gravy so deeply brown it qualified as black, cottage cheese, strong coffee, and a roasted peach in wine sauce for dessert. Peter had no great head for figures, and the beginning of the meal had not contributed to his ability to total the number of ration points it all represented without a paper and pencil to hand. Paul's black market connections were sterling.
They dined in the kitchen, larger than the living room, with an old-fashioned gas stove that required pumping up a contraption on the side to fuel the burners and oven, a white-enamel sink with zinc drain boards, and a square refrigerator squatting on cast iron bowlegs with compressor coils on top that wheezed and clicked like an old man with a sinus infection. An oilcloth with a windowpane pattern covered the table and they sat in chairs made of shiny aluminum tubes and molded yellow plastic. A sunny room, even after dark. The radio in the living room played a steady program of dance music interrupted occasionally by news of the war. American planes were outfighting the Luftwaffe nearly two to one. It sounded like a sports score.
"I gotta off-load." Paul snatched the napkin from his collar and left the room. "He's good for ten minutes. There's a stack of Field and Streams in there as high as your knee." Sharon rattled crimson nails against her coffee cup, thick porcelain with a green stripe around the rim. "I'm sorry the brisket was overdone. I had to crank up the oven or we'd starve till midnight."
"It was perfect. The first homemade meal I've had in years." His coffee was strong without being bitter; genuine ground, no adulteration. "Why Dad?"
She seemed prepared for the question. She couldn't know he was skirting a promise based on a damnable falsehood. "He's faithful. Oliver; well, a girl in every port, like the song. I'm guessing, naturally. A man needs what he needs. Women are stronger when it comes to such things. I don't blame him. But I don't have to make excuses for Paul. I guess this isn't proper table conversation with a priest."
"Sometimes I think this collar is a stop sign. I hope we can pretend it's just an article of clothing."
She set her cup in its saucer. He thought if the table were more narrow she'd take both his hands in hers. Her face was spade-shaped, pointed at the chin, with streaks of rouge on her cheeks that accentuated the sharpness of the bones. Her eyes were a smoky shade to which he couldn't quite assign a color; black was too severe, gray too far on the other side. Semitic seemed to cover it, with all the Old Testament mysteries that entailed. "Your father is a better man than you know."
For a long moment, the girl singer on the radio seemed to pause overlong between the chorus and the bridge ("Every time we say good-bye, I die a little ... then the woodwinds chirruped and everything was as it had been before, the wheeze and click of the refrigerator, the sizzle of the electric clock plugged into the outlet above the range, the brisket settling into the cooling grease in its clay-ware pot like an old man lowering himself into a tub of scalding water. Peter hadn't realized how much he'd missed the prosaic chords of the domestic life until that moment. Was there a Sharon out there for him? He thought of Mae Capone, loyal beyond all reason; even Helen Gandy, J. Edgar Hoover's disciple in the war against All Things Harmful to Law and Order. For some reason he thought of Rose, the Capones' maid, and resisted the impulse to cross himself. Powerful stuff, that sugary kosher wine in its square bottle; the Jews made no ceremony of it, but it was all caught up in religion just the same, a kind of transubstantiation from cold calculating sobriety to a mellowness of spirit and the power to arrive at observations without benefit of logic. Your father is a better man than you know, such things came from this.
She excavated a pack of Parliaments from the mysterious regions of her blouse and lit one from a book of matches from the same source. The cover bore the name of a hotel in silver on red lacquer. Florida, or what little he'd seen of it, had more hotels than Chicago had churches. A state of transients, Florida. Mae Capone had identified Parker Henderson as a native in the same tones she might have used to refer to a duckbilled platypus or some other genetic freak.
Sharon returned the items to her blouse without offering him a cigarette. "Paul says you have no vices." She made it sound like a disappointment.
"I have my own set. They're not exclusive from the job."
"I like the way you talk. You must've had a good education. They say the Purple Gang enrolled their children in Catholic schools because they did a better job than public school. Even Jewish gangsters are more broad-minded than most people."
The bartender who had served him ginger ale and then rye in the club car aboard the train from the District had mentioned the Purple Gang. What was it about mob legend that transcended talk of war, global war? Nostalgia for a harrowing body count now reduced to a trifle by mass slaughter? He pushed away his wineglass, a pressed goblet masque
rading as cut crystal. The past was not less counterfeit.
"I don't think Paul ever got over your decision to become a priest. He had his heart set on grandchildren."
"He told you that?"
"He did and he didn't. He talks all around the things he really cares about. You have to piece it together from what he didn't say. He thinks he let you down as a father, all that time away working while you were growing up. The day you started school, he was lugging barrels of malt from a ferry on Lake Michigan to his truck. He didn't say it like he regretted anything, but a woman knows. He wanted another shot."
"I always thought he was just cynical about the Church."
"You don't have my insight. I miscarried in '33. It was a boy. Not a day goes by I don't think, he'd be in fifth grade now, he'd be studying for his bar mitzvah, I'd be teaching him how to do the box step for his first school dance. Sappy stuff. You have all these memories of things that never happened."
"I'm truly sorry."
Her shoulders lifted and dropped, a world of communication. She filled her mouth with smoke and let it spill out. She was a puffer, not an inhaler. His mother had smoked Paul's L&M's that same way, usually while wearing a gully in the linoleum waiting for him to come home; a pack-a-year habit. Paul had said she burned more than she smoked. It occurred to him then he hadn't seen his father light a cigarette in Florida. Beer, pasta, Sharon, and the Atlantic seemed to have eliminated the need.
"I did all my crying at the time," she said, "like when Oliver lost his sea legs and went over the side. He was a good swimmer, but they say the ocean was on fire, from all the oil. What's the point? I'm sorry if I made you feel bad. Paul's proud of you. The priesthood is a profession, and he came from a long line of men who couldn't scrub the fish stink out of their hands if they worked at it from Passover to Rosh Hashanah. I'm translating. I don't know much about the Catholic faith."
"I thought I'd failed him. I just didn't know how."
"That's a son's job. You can't live your father's life and yours too."
Children are put on this earth to disappoint their parents.
Had everyone been let in on that secret but him? "You're a thoughtful woman, Sharon. You're wasted in the shipyard."
"It's honest work. No, it's better than that. I'm a soldier with a drill press instead of a deck gun."
"Also a poet."
She laughed, coughed smoke, sipped wine to settle the spasm. He wondered with a touch of alarm if she'd inherited her family plague. But smokers lived with congestion. "I sent political verses to The Masses when I was sixteen. All I got was the poems back, but someone kept a record. I had to sign a loyalty oath before they'd let me poke holes in steel plate, like if I went a quarter-inch off on purpose, a destroyer would sink in the China Sea. Stalin's our ally, but I think some people are getting ready for the next war." She paused to peel a shred of tobacco from a scarlet lip. "Bolshevism's bullshit, though. You grow out of it if you've got brains."
He hadn't heard her curse before; it was the wine. The word sounded more innocent coming from her than from Paul. He wondered how much she knew of his past. Obviously she was aware of it, from the story about unloading barrels of malt. But Peter wouldn't ask. However tainted the vow he'd made on the basis of his monstrous imposture, he was determined to honor it. There would be no pressing questions this night.
The toilet flushed, roaring like heavy surf. A faucet ran, the two-fingered pass of a man who made the simplest obeisance toward hygiene, and Paul rejoined them. "My ear's burning. You two been telling tales out of school?" There was a troubled note in the banter. The father did not trust the son, nor the woman of his companionship.
Sharon blew a plume of smoke at the blue fluorescent ring in the ceiling. "You might as well know it now. I'm running off with your son the priest. We're going to Boca and raise a litter of monks and nuns."
"Well, they have to come from someplace. You got a train to catch."
"Paul!" She tapped an eighth of an inch of ash into her plate of congealed grease.
"What? He's got a boss, same as all of us. Except me. I only answer to time and tide."
"Another poet," Sharon said. "Can you see how we found each other?"
"It would be tragedy otherwise." Peter rose. "Thank you for a wonderful evening. He's in good hands."
"You don't know the half of it." Mogen David glittered in Paul's bright eyes. "Paul, for gosh sake. Peter isn't one of your buddies down at the Crab Castle." Astonishingly, Paul's weathered face smoothed out into a mask of contrition. "Sorry, Pietro. Sharon. That hebe wine's full of the devil."
"We don't malign the grape of Israel in this house," Sharon said. "It may not be the Blood of Christ, but you can't blame it for making you stupid. That's an accident of birth."
"All's I know is I never got into no trouble over a jug of dago red. You know your way back to the streetcar?" He stuck out his hand.
Peter took it. "Thanks, Dad. I'll be very disappointed if you let Sharon slip through your fingers."
"Yeah. Well, one thing you can count on in this life is disappointment."
A curious valedictory. He would never figure out his father the way he feared his father would figure out him.
Sharon insisted on wrapping a survival package of brisket and beans in waxed paper for his sustenance; she seemed to think Christians lived on stale bread and water collected from the walls of catacombs. She kissed him again, Paul shook his hand a second time, and he struck off for the streetcar stop drinking in great lungfuls of Fort Lauderdale air to combat the effects of heavy food and wine and someone else's smoke. He'd offered to drive Paul there from the waterfront in the Ford, but his father had said he'd finished with all that; he preferred to depend on strangers to get him around. Peter would never understand him. But he felt he knew Sharon after just one evening as if he'd known her all his life. Was God erecting obstacles or opening gates? More and more he was convinced He had invented the devil, horns, tail, and all, just to furnish Himself with an ironclad alibi.
He put his package of food in the rectory icebox with a note inviting Kyril and Thomas to help themselves, and slept in his monk's cell without dreaming. He had used up all his dreams in fear and speculation. But sleep brought no rest. He wondered, in the semiopaque isinglass vision of reality, if Purgatory took place on earth, in installments, like the layaway plan for a deluxe Philco radio or a Hotpoint range.
The next morning he waited in front of the Miami branch of the Everglade State Bank while an employee in a three-piece suit unlocked the door. The inside differed from the branch in Fort Lauderdale. Dillinger had not been expected to raid this far south—even the core of the Barker Gang had been on vacation when federal agents shot them to pieces in Ocklawaha—and the tellers' cages were faced in ordinary glass, with the massive round door of the vault standing wide open behind the counter, a fifty-pound sack of pennies acting as a doorstop, and not an armed guard in sight. A pretty blond teller who plucked her eyebrows like Marlene Dietrich's took his withdrawal slip and counted out a hundred in twenties and tens for operating expenses. The cost of living was significantly higher there than in Washington.
The library was open when he got there, a large room with yellow-oak tables and bookcases and card catalogues, steel-shelved stacks in back, reading carrels, and the day's newspapers hung on wooden racks like drying laundry. A male librarian with a clubfoot that had kept him out of the military hobbled into a back room and returned carrying three huge elephant-folio volumes bound in sturdy black cloth; Vasco had not been sure of the date Frank Nitti had been shot in his office at Capone's old Lexington Hotel headquarters, only that the incident had taken place after Capone went to prison in May 1932 and before Mayor Cermak of Chicago was slain in Miami in February 1933, in what had been widely reported as an attempt on the life of President-Elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with whom he was exchanging words.
Cermak had given the order to arrest Nitti—or to kill him while "resisting arrest," if one liked his
theories cloak-and-dagger—and the boys who gathered in pool halls and barbershops to share their street wisdom said the mayor was the target all along and that Nitti or Capone or both had staged the affair to demonstrate to the world that when the Outfit hung a price on your head it would be paid regardless of how public the venue or how high-placed the company.
It had seemed far-fetched to Vasco. Why give so important an assignment to a blithering anarchist who could barely string ten words together in English, when clearly it called for a professional? Hoover had stressed the point in press conferences. But Hoover himself had blithely endorsed the conspiracy angle in conversation with Vasco, as if that were the official account known to all. Then again, Cermak's murder was a Secret Service black eye, and the Director of the FBI was never coy about his resentment that rival government intelligence agencies were permitted to exist. Embarrassing one of them by rumor and innuendo was more insidiously effective than a public statement that couldn't be proved.
One never knew how much was bureaucratic infighting and how much was genuine intelligence. Hoover had taken the Director's job vowing to keep politics out of the Bureau, but had exempted himself. But he wasn't corrupt or a killer, which satisfied Vasco's sense of right and wrong.
Still, he hoped if he earned full-time status as a special agent, his assignment would take him far from Washington.
The bound newspapers were as large as plat books, and piled up three months at a time from hefty dailies. The Miami Public Library had no more storage space than anywhere else in a state without basements, so had concentrated on local papers like The Miami Herald, with The Chicago Tribune—Jake Lingle's old sheet—the only exception, to accommodate all the side-of-the-mouth Chicagoans who had flocked South after the authorities abandoned their desperate attempt to discourage Capone from taking permanent residence.
The Confessions of Al Capone Page 22
