Christy liked the idea. She’d never seen a Philadelphia city block with only one house. A wild notion that she’d had before about 401 came back. It could be her signature project. She could explore that craziest of all inner-city ideas: trying to turn the 400 block of St. Irenaeus Square into a private street. Or a gated area like one of those suburban enclaves she’d long admired. Isaac’s prominence as an Inky writer might get her coverage as an innovator.
“Okay, let’s do it,” Christy replied after a long pause. “I mean, the project—the house!”
“You can’t tell Irina,” Isaac said.
“Of course not,” agreed Christy.
Isaac gave Christy a set of keys—he traveled half the time anyway, and trusted her. Christy arranged for Eric Busby, who’d worked on some of the town houses that replaced the imploded Southwark Towers, to do the initial research, checking city records on underground lines and obstacles, checking out the yard. Isaac would be off in Europe for three weeks right after the semester ended in May. She might get things off the ground by then. She told Isaac as much.
It didn’t turn out as Christy planned. Most of the time, when she thinks of Isaac and 401—and, occasionally, when she sleeps there (deals often leading to other deals)—she’s glad about that. The sixteen trees make it feel like someplace else, not Philadelphia. Isaac’s sudden avaricious side—the instant developer eager to make a profit and let nature be damned—didn’t become him. When they both realized they had to stop cold on the second-house idea, Isaac seemed vulnerable again, even sexy, as he had when they first met. Just a writer, and a dreamer, in a house full of books.
Christy broke it to him pretty quickly after he came back from Europe in June. They were sitting in Isaac’s living room, on the old Imperial couch.
“There’s not going to be a second house,” she began. “It can’t happen.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Eric dug down into the yard about forty feet back from the sidewalk.”
“So?”
“So, he hit something. An obstruction.”
“An obstruction?”
Christy got up, walked over to her travel bag, and took out something wrapped in old pages of the Daily News.
It was a matryoshka doll.
“That’s what Eric hit in the yard?” Isaac asked, his eyes riveted on it.
“That’s not all he hit,” Christy answered, with an efficient air that suggested—this thing is over: game, set, match.
“Try part of a rib cage next to it, not quite separated from its accessories.”
Isaac looked at Christy as if she’d just told him that she’d gotten pregnant by him years ago, given birth, and now it was time for Isaac to meet his daughter. Christy looked at Isaac with an expression that said: You owe me for the rest of your life.
“Don’t worry,” Christy said quickly, “Eric was just as scared and worried and in shock as I was. He’s totally trustworthy on this—he’s fine. He filled up the hole again, and spread the weeds and leaves over it. You’d have to look really close at it, standing right there, to even know it’s been disturbed.”
“I want to show you something,” Isaac said. He got up and went to the attic, where he kept the papers and souvenirs of his three years reporting and teaching in Russia. When he returned, he showed Christy the larger matryoshka doll he’d brought back from Russia—a gift from one of his students there, the daughter of a prominent St. Petersburg businessman.
“Doesn’t the whole doll-inside-a-doll thing stand for the, uh, endless similarity of the human spirit?” asked Christy, repeating something she thought she’d once heard.
“It does,” Isaac replied. “Katya, my student, told me all about them when she gave it to me. Apparently, Russian mafia sometimes bury one of them with a body.”
“What does it mean?”
“According to Katya,” Isaac said, looking impassively at Christy, “it means there are more bodies nearby.”
They peered at each other. Isaac shook his head. He started to say something, but Christy spoke first.
“It never happened. Eric and I never saw anything. So don’t worry.”
Isaac nodded.
“Isaac Lalli,” he said, in a self-mocking tone, “sole master and resident of the 400 block of St. Irenaeus Square.”
Christy gave him a look of solidarity. She came over to the couch, sat beside him, and leaned against him as she hadn’t for years.
“It’s an amazing yard, beautiful just the way it is,” she said.
SEEING NOTHING
BY DIANE AYRES
Bella Vista
I don’t know what shocked me most: the way my foulmouthed neighbor screamed and cursed his hoary mother to the grave—when she already appeared to have gone and returned from it—or the way she screamed back. Especially when she was holding the meat cleaver, standing at the kitchen table whacking the wings and legs off a chicken, always with a cigarette stuck to her lower lip.
I actually heard a mob hit one evening while working in my home office, which I found less disturbing than the sound of that woman—somebody’s grandmother—shrieking the F-word at the top of her two-packs-a-day-for-fifty-year lungs. Hardcore.
The side of our house overlooked the back of their house, where they fought in the kitchen in front of a picture window with blinds they never closed, yellowed by tobacco smoke and splattered grease. When windows were open in this corner of old row homes, voices blasted from below, amplified, between brick and stucco, directly into the window beside my desk as I was trying to work.
My husband and I lived on a side street off a side street, off a side street, which brought to mind a feudal town in Tuscany with passages through a maze too narrow to drive. On a map, our neighborhood, lovely Bella Vista, looks like the border between gentrified Center City and the old-time neighborhoods of South Philly. But at the street level, it felt like a funky residential oasis between noisy, once-hip South Street, where nobody told the kids from Lancaster that Sid Vicious and his haircut were dead, and the inimitable Italian Market, where Rocky Balboa once ran, oozing sweat and punching meat to a really loud and rousing song. And, mostly, Bella Vista life was quiet, except for the Freudian nightmare next door.
I wasn’t one to spy on my neighbors. I only glimpsed them down there, at an extremely sharp diagonal, inadvertently, when I got up to adjust the window, depending on the season and the volume of their noxious spew. When I spotted them, my instinct was to avert my eyes because I found them hideous—like some incarnation of the monster Grendel and his mother, in their lair down below. But I was no Beowulf to slay them, or even to ask them, nicely, to use their indoor voices. I was unnerved by the prospect that they would even spot me up here.
Grendel was a walking case study of vitamin D deprivation, termite-white in a dingy white sleeveless undershirt, sprouting black body hair like a mass of horseflies crawling all over his back and shoulders and up his neck, where they got trapped in his coarse black, greasy hair. He had a matching unibrow, and a Fu Manchu that had taken root in the 1970s and never been weeded. Revolting.
He frightened all of the Bella Vista womenfolk and small children who passed him on the sidewalk as he went to or from his job at our friendly neighborhood corporate chain-store pharmacy, wearing a logo-emblazoned uniform and visor. Though what the visor was for was anybody’s guess. He walked with an elongated stride, as if he were imitating Homo erectus—and badly—swinging his brown bag lunch stiffly, grinning weirdly to no one in particular. There wasn’t a woman who wouldn’t shudder instinctively at his sight, assuming he was a serial killer until proven innocent. Imagine our spine-crawling response when we found out that he was the guy behind the counter who developed our personal family snapshots. For us, the Digital Age couldn’t come too soon.
Grendel’s Mother was almost as strange to behold when she emerged from the back door on shopping day, barely a head taller than the grocery cart she stole from the Superfresh on 11th Street. A sturdy woman
, she wore the black widow’s housedress of the Old Country, with her white hair pulled straight back in a bun. The crone drove that rusty piece of junk to and from the market with such road rage that innocent bystanders could only pray she wasn’t packing her meat cleaver. The top-heavy wire basket nearly tipped over at times as she pushed on, having no respect for obstacles she couldn’t see, oblivious to the unpredictable cobblestones, crooked sidewalks, and crumbling curbs, making such an unholy racket I could hear her two blocks away.
It was hard enough trying to concentrate while she was threatening to chop up her son like poultry—I kept thinking, Eeewwww … she’ll have to pluck him.
One day their homicidal promises were so convincing that I actually picked up the phone to call 911.
I’ll stab you in your sleep!
Not if I smother you first—you crazy old bitch. Gimme the money. I know you got it, Ma.
I could hear him rifling through kitchen cupboards, popping the lids off of old tin flour canisters, throwing cereal boxes and canned goods hither and yon.
Where’d ja hide it, damnit?!
Holding the phone, I hesitated, wondering if callers were required to identify themselves. Hmm. I had to think about this. After all, it’s a big deal to call the cops on your neighbors. Did I really want to get involved? Obviously, some families just yelled a lot and said awful things. That’s just how they “communicated.” And I had never actually witnessed any physical abuse.
I decided to defer to the collective wisdom of my Bella Vista elders, whose official word on the street was invariably: I didn’t see nuthin.
But I sure did hear a lot: and it was mostly from colorful characters who charmed the hell out of me. The Happy Guy who strolled down our street every day at lunchtime, for instance, belting out a respectable version of “Volare.” Or the trio of highly seasoned bookies who worked our block and the local convenience store, assuming their positions every day on this or that corner, in rotation. Aging wiseguys with chewy old skin like the Italian dry sausages hanging on strings from the ceiling of Claudio’s in the market. The way they made themselves laugh at their own jokes never failed to crack me up from afar.
When I passed these bookies on the street, they were flirty, but always respectful, and they took to greeting me playfully with a nickname: Hey, Smiley.
Between these guys and the nosey neighbor ladies (of which I soon became one, being home all day), I felt relatively secure. Not to worry, hon, one of the native grandmas reassured me when we first moved in as newlyweds. They only kill each other.
Good to know, I humbly thanked her.
And then she asked me why I wasn’t pregnant yet—a question she continued to ask every time she saw me for the rest of her life, which she lived out mostly sitting in her folding lawn chair in front of her house. I would just play the blushing bride—Smiley—although after several years she eyeballed me suspiciously, and then sympathetically, and finally in complete senility, at which point I could only pat her hand gently and say: Not to worry, hon.
I had to wonder at my own tendency to be blasé about the wiseguy-on-wiseguy crime that made our neighborhood legendary. We got our slices at Lorenzo’s on the corner of 9th and Christian, and ate them just down the street under the two-story mural of the late Mayor Frank Rizzo looking vaguely off. It didn’t disturb my appetite for splashy red tomato pie to know that mob boss Sal Testa almost got his arm blown off in this same spot, eating a bucket of raw clams.
And then there was the night Nicky Scarfo, Jr. got hit at Dante & Luigi’s, a beloved old family restaurant two small blocks away from us. I actually heard that one. October 31, 1989, a balmy Halloween evening, perfect for trick-or-treating, and the kids were skipping and squealing in the streets below, all hopped up on sugar, while my husband was downstairs manning the candy bowl at the front door—also hopped up on sugar. I was in my office when I heard an unusually loud: Pop pop … Pop pop pop … Pop pop pop.
I assumed some older kids—hooligans!—were setting off firecrackers over in Palumbo Park. But within a minute I heard the sirens descending from all directions, their strobes overreaching the rooftops.
Urban dwellers are nonchalant about sirens, as long as they keep on moving—Nothing to see here—farther and farther away. We live for this Doppler effect, and only drop whatever task at hand when we hear the sirens stop, followed by that dreadful sound of police cars, ambulances, and, scariest of all, the fire engines coming to a breakneck halt. It’s way too close to home if you can hear the static-y radio dispatchers talking about your neighbors.
Nicky, Jr., a big baby-faced kid in his mid-twenties, was dining at Dante & Luigi’s, enjoying a plate of his favorite white clam sauce (always the clams—what’s with the clams?), when he was approached by a grown man in a Batman mask, carrying a plastic trick-or-treat bag emblazoned with a fiendish pumpkin. Batman reached into his candy bag and pulled out a MAC-10 machine pistol, shooting Nicky, Jr. eight times about the head and neck.
Batman took flight, eluding capture.
And Nicky, Jr. was lucky he had a very thick neck. Nine days later, he walked out of the hospital, shrugging off the assassination attempt for the local TV cameras.
As for my neighbors, everybody saw nothing.
Curious, considering so many people were always watching: mostly grandmas and great-grandmas looking out their windows and doors, or tending to their pretty flower boxes or elaborate seasonal decorations, when they weren’t sitting in their lawn chairs in yards of concrete.
Some Saturdays these ladies—in their floral-patterned house dresses, rolled Supp-Hose, and sensible nun shoes—would appear in the street with buckets of soapy water to clean their stoops and sidewalks.
The wiriest grandma, who lived in one of the houses across from us, would wash her front window standing on a stepladder, making me nervous, afraid that she would fall “on my watch.” I couldn’t concentrate on my work when she was out there. I would carry my phone around the house, peeking constantly out my own front windows just in case I had to call 911.
And yes, of course, I offered to help her. But she appeared to take this as some kind of insult, because she gave me the stink-eye. I figured it was probably because I didn’t feel compelled to give my house a bath every month. I like to think that’s why Mother Nature provided us with weather.
But I did sweep occasionally, and the first time I ventured out with a broom, I was love-bombed by the whole lot of them. Ladies I had never even seen before poked their heads out their front doors to wave and wish me a good morning. One grandma actually crossed herself. Another kissed the crucifix on her rosary beads in my general direction.
The solidarity I felt with them as a result, not to mention my appreciation for the spontaneous benediction, increased my empathy when I heard the horror story about the last young couple that had moved into the neighborhood, around the corner on 9th Street. The husband, an untalented stockbroker who wasn’t much better at dealing drugs, stabbed a guy to death—twenty-seven times—in his row house during a cocaine deal gone bad. The panicky killer rolled the profusely bloody body in a drop cloth and dragged it outside, in the darkest hours, down our block—only yards from our front stoop—to deposit it in Cianfrani Park on the corner of 8th Street, where dozens of residents would be walking their dogs at dawn. So it was immediately discovered.
When the cops arrived at the park, they literally just looked down at the sidewalk and followed the bloody trail on foot, back to the murderer’s house, right up the marble steps to his front door, where they rang the bell and the homicidal imbecile answered. Case closed.
But it wasn’t the shocking murder that disgusted my neighbors—since the victim was dealing cocaine, he got what he deserved. It was the thought of that unholy mess the murderer left all over the sidewalk, and who the hell was going to clean it up? And what about the killer’s own stoop around the corner? Did he have a wife who would get out there and put a scrub brush with Clorox and Lysol to those blood-sta
ined steps?
The sound of my neighbor ladies’ collective outrage rebounded off the houses.
Fortunately, their cleaning concerns were washed down the storm drains thanks to a deluge that lasted for days. I refrained from saying I told you so.
But it was only because I got out there with a broom that I heard the illicit history of our own house, which had been a front for a still during Prohibition. This explained why the center of our basement was walled in with concrete. For some inexplicable reason, previous owners had decided to brick in the whole contraption instead of removing it. The walls were so excessively reinforced you would have thought they contained a radioactive core. I couldn’t help but think that maybe it also served as the final resting place of a bootlegger or two, who got what they deserved in a booze deal gone bad.
During the fifteen years we lived in that house, I was always looking for “the body”—or some hidden treasure. Upstairs, I found a secret hiding place in the floorboards, and used it to stash a small metal lockbox of valuables. While installing the air-conditioning ducts, our contractor discovered an amber beer bottle still sealed with an old-fashioned wire and rubber stopper, sunk into disintegrating cheesecloth, the beer having evaporated down to dust. Holding that bottle up to the light, I had to wonder at the idiots who made alcoholic beverages illegal. Imagine being compelled to hide a bottle of beer in your wall because it could get you arrested.
When spring came one year, I was anxious to let in some fresh air, and during that first week of mild days, working by my window, I became aware of a creeping uneasiness. And then I realized, bolting upright from my desk and going to the window—listening.
Nothing. I heard nothing.
Not even a snarl from Grendel’s lair. I looked down at their house, taken aback to see that their kitchen blinds were shut tight.
Philadelphia Noir Page 17
