We picked divine olives from tubs in about three emporia, then stopped off at Noureddine’s for mint tea before the evening crowd arrived to smoke hookahs loaded up with honey-dipped sheesha. I’d heard the Pole say Noureddine’s place ran women behind closed steel shutters in the afternoon. I supposed it was possible. I supposed she’d know.
Noureddine was talking about an old lady who’d been robbed on her own stairs as she returned from the bank. The robbers were said to be local.
“You don’t do that on your own turf,” Noureddine said. He looked like he knew what he was talking about. Then he told us about a younger brother he was educating, who’d managed to get a job teaching Spanish in Texas.
“Sounds like sand to the Arabs to me,” I said.
“We’re from northern Morocco,” he explained. “Spanish is like a mother tongue to us. We go where it pays.”
* * *
We left Noureddine and headed off, George to Danny McGrory (my dad’s name for Nana Mouskouri and now our code name for George’s wife, also known as La Callas or La Diva) and me to the Swamp Rat, due back that evening.
“Bet you’re sorry now you didn’t finish your doctorate and get a chair of philosophy,” George said. “Never get off your ass at all.” His phony accent had disappeared. My problems were affecting him even more than me.
“Hit me now with the child in me arms,” I replied.
“Till the white rose blooms again,” he said as we parted.
* * *
Back on 12th Street, I surveyed the signs of Old Jessica’s daily visit—more spray-on polish, more quick-fix polluting solutions. Jessica was a failed Irish immigrant ten years older than myself. She needed the money, I couldn’t in all conscience fire her. The shine in the house was getting higher, but everything else was going downhill, except for the feng shui compliance.
Old Jessica appeared from the kitchen quarters. “You’d want to straighten up,” she said. “Yer gettin’ a dowager’s hump.”
“Don’t shit a man who’s already down,” said Sean, skipping down the stairs and out the front door before either of us could react.
Jessica shook her head indulgently. “I’da made two pairs a pants outta his one,” she said.
We mounted the stairs to Dad’s room, where Naïma was bedding him down for the evening. Mitch Miller was playing.
“I’m goin’ plantin’ spuds tomorrow, will ye help me?” Jessica asked Dad.
“I will,” he said.
“Have ye the tools?”
“I have.” He counted on his fingers: “I have two spades, two graips, and a shovel.”
“Right so,” said Jessica. “Be ready at dawn.”
I wasn’t sure I liked this kind of fooling with a man’s already fucked-up mind.
“Once a man, twice a boy,” Jessica said as she went by me.
“I want to be taken to the Astoria Sanatorium,” Dad said distinctly as soon as Jessica left.
Naïma smiled down at him. “They gave it a new name now. Mt. Sinai.”
“You should never paint bricks,” said Dad. “They do it all the time here.” Then: “The sanatorium must’ve laid an egg.” Then he spotted me. “Priest or minister? You’re doing everything wrong today.”
“What did I do now?”
“You sailed up the broad expanse of Killala Bay. Give me me box.”
This was a tin box containing mementos that he pored over from time to time. He pulled a collection of objects out of it and spread them over the bed: a silver dollar wrapped in tissue paper, a Rockaway Playland token, postcards, beaded Indian leather (Native American). He indicated the display to me:
Eoin Roe O’Neill
Treads once more our land
The sword in his hand is of Spanish steel
But the hand is an Irish hand
“Wanna take a leak before I go?” Naïma asked.
“You only want to see my dick, that’s what you’re after.”
I told her to go ahead and lifted Dad back into bed. He was light as a feather.
“Ain’t you the big heavy lad,” I said.
“What good is it to you when you’re gone?”
We sat in silence. Then he said, without opening his eyes, “When did Da die?” I never heard Dad use that word before, and realized he thought he was talking to his brother Eddie.
“Long ago,” I said.
“What’d ya kill her for?” he asked, opening his eyes, now noticing me. “I think I’ll go to bed now,” he said, then seemed to doze.
The Pole arrived, still threatening to quit. The weather had already turned heavy.
“A storm is brassing,” she said. Sometimes I wasn’t sure what language she was massacring.
Dad said, with his eyes closed, “You’re a bitch and you never were anything else.”
After that, the house settled for a while. I tend to sit in front of the TV when I want to think. People leave me alone. I haven’t read a book in years, once my favorite occupation. My attention was drawn by an item on the World Cup about to be played out in Germany. Several players from the winning 1974 German team were paraded out, one a smart older business-exec version of his younger self with a name like Baking Powder, which is what me and George had dubbed him at the time. The other was a thicker-set man who left football in 1974 and opened a newspaper kiosk. “I wasn’t cut out for all that,” the man explained.
Perhaps this was what Dad should have done, long ago: something simple, no overreaching. There were horses for courses and that was all. It would have meant no Irish education for me and my sister, but what did that change? And perhaps Mom would still be with us. I recalled vacations from university when Mom seemed to be having an early “change of life,” as she called it to her friends (nurses with real problems and families to deal with). She talked of going into a convent, where she would have peace and quiet from them all. By then, Dad had settled down to controlled drinking, a cup with milk and whiskey under the bar at all times. As if trying to numb himself. At times I think she might be with some Little Sisters, atoning in peace and quiet, not far away. Unless she’s dead. Who was the woman Uncle Eddie killed? Was this a reference to the Civil War, or something more recent?
* * *
At 9 p.m. the Swamp Rat was poured out of a cab, laughing. The Armenian gallery owner helped her out, laughing also, wearing a beige cashmere coat that was too warm for the weather. Then he took himself off in the cab.
I lit the lights and poured us a drink. The storm was beginning to crackle outside. A door opened upstairs, releasing a few bars of Al Martino, then closed again.
My wife’s breath smelled of olives and feta and all kinds of Balkan fare, something she complained of in others in the past. She was excited, smoking. She’d clearly been fucking the Armenian satisfactorily all week. It was Setrak this, and Setrak that.
“The Matisses were breathtaking. I never realized they were so big.” She pulled out a notebook with names written in Cyrillic in a baby hand, pronouncing them as if she spoke Russian fluently. They’d obviously discovered plenty of new, cheap talent to flog for their new gallery project.
I found myself getting angry, but this was nothing compared to what I felt when I discovered that the Armenian’s parents had gone with them.
“He’s a hotelier, he got a special deal, why not take advantage?”
I felt a pang for the demented man upstairs in the bed, and my lost mom. I was spoiling for a fight.
“It’s a long way from coffin ships,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“That was your sales pitch when you met me, wasn’t it?”
She said nothing.
“Your stock-in-trade. Up from Florida with a Scots name, you quickly got the hang of things here and decided you were Irish. Only the strong survive, you used to say.”
“So?” She was icily still.
There was silence. I wanted to bring something to a head. I got up to get another bottle from the fridge. I was still in
the kitchen when the question jumped out like a genie from a lamp. “Am I getting a hump?”
“You always had one,” I heard her laugh out from the next room. “I thought it was from all the reading and thinking you used to do. Big thinker.”
I came back, the cold bottle in my hand.
“Didn’t you know that?” she laughed again, throwing her head back.
I wanted to shove the laugh down her throat. Both of us had taken plenty of drink but I felt stone-cold sober as I swung the bottle. It caught her on the side of the head.
She slumped down on the sofa slowly and quietly.
In a panic, I felt her pulse, almost afraid to touch her skin. There was no sound from upstairs.
She was alive, breathing clearly, inclined to snore. Nat King Cole sang, “I thought you loved me, you said you loved me . . .” as I sucked air into my lungs and ran out of the house, forgetting to code in the alarm. It was raining to beat the band.
* * *
Old rancors and memories boiled up as I walked. Cars hissed by in the wet. My father’s first car was an old Falcon, whereas even the shabbiest Two Way Inn customer could surprise by turning out in something decent like an ageing Cadillac for the odd expedition to Far Rockaway. My Dad loved those words, Far Rockaway. “Goddamnit!” The Falcon stalled at every red light, and before it did I went into an agony of apprehension feeling a giggle build up inside, knowing there was no way to stop it rumbling up and out to hurt Dad’s feelings and make him swear even more, or even lash out and hit me. Saving Face for Ireland.
That was the “up-and-up” era. “We’re on the up-and-up,” Dad often said. That same year we went “home” to Ireland as a family, to thatched cottages and women in aprons and cardigans with anxious looks. I was put to sleep in a room full of bunk beds for students of Irish.
The males of the family laughed at jokes they didn’t share and at Dad’s hat. Nobody wore hats over there, at most they pushed a cap or beret around their heads when answering a question, as if it helped them think. I heard one of them say, “See any dollars fall outta the hat, boys?” We were overcharged everywhere we went. A vendor refused to tell Dad the price of an ice cream until he admitted we were “Yanks.” Dad was oblivious, delighted with everything.
I could still feel this anger somewhere inside now, untreated. I walked and walked.
There’d been a trip to Nevada as well, to another relative. Mom and Dad took us to shows of people I couldn’t stand, like Carol Channing and Buck Owens and Fats Domino. They watched these shows with the half-attention of people waiting for something more important to arrive, who expected better things of life and had the impression the real action was happening elsewhere. Me and Sis sniggered as Carol Channing threw imitation diamond rings into the audience, and Dad hissed, “Will you cut that out?”
* * *
A while later I found myself near the river, somewhere between the two big bridges. My clothes were sodden and the earth was muddy and smelled fresh. The world was washed down.
I heard my own voice quote A.E. Houseman aloud: “Yonder lies the gate of hell.”
“What’s that, Daddyo?” a voice said, and I saw the outlines of eight young men in hoodies against the evening sky. “Didn’t we see yo’ down hea’ the other day with yo’ friend?”
I realized the urgency of the situation, slid and lurched onto the street, dropping my cell phone. I ran until I reached a late-opening grocery store but was stopped at the door.
“Sorry,” the man said, “no can do.”
“There’s eight of them. I need to phone for help.”
“If we let you in, they’ll smash the place up.” He shut the door.
They soon caught me again, forced me to the ground, then kicked me as I lay. They broke my eyeglasses and took my wallet. They’d already smashed my phone.
I heard a saxophone peal out clearly, cutting the air like a knife, before I eventually lost consciousness.
* * *
I woke up in Mt. Sinai with stitches on my face. “Those kids feel threatened,” the nurse said. “They feel they’re being forced out by neighborhood change. They’re afraid of losing it to people from Manhattan, from anywhere.”
“We’re all going to lose it,” I said to George when he arrived to take me home. I gave no info to the cop who came, refused to file a complaint.
* * *
At the house, all was quiet. The front door lay open as I’d left it.
George refused to come in because I’d told him I socked one to the Swamp Rat.
When I went in, she was nowhere to be seen, although I knew there’d be trouble tomorrow. I looked in on Dad. The Pole was dozing in an armchair in his room.
“Someone rattled your cage,” he said, his eyes open. “I never saw a more miserable creature.”
The Pole opened her eyes or woke, depending on what she’d been doing. “All quiet,” she said too quickly, not mentioning my face. She stood up. “I’m going to get something to drink.”
“See the ass on that one—it’s far too big,” Dad sighed.
I knocked lightly on my wife’s bedroom door. We’d had separate rooms for years. There was no reply. I opened it as quietly as I could.
She lay on the white bed. The duvet (as she always liked to call it) had soaked up a lot of the blood, although I knew there was positively none when I’d left her downstairs. I approached, calling her name softly. She looked as youthful as the young Piaf I once loved.
This time there was no pulse.
* * *
I headed for the phone. As I shouted for an ambulance, I heard the Pole on the stairs and my father asking, “Am I dying?”
* * *
The police weren’t as sympathetic as I might have expected. This was perhaps due to my face, which was beginning to bruise up nicely. My story was disjointed, with periods that I couldn’t account for. They refused to let me call George, then changed their minds and called him themselves. He came, white-faced, but was of little help, as he hadn’t entered the house with me. He was escorted out, promising me that he’d send someone straight away.
“Bail or bond?” he tried to crack wise as he left. It didn’t work.
* * *
The Pole was bossy and informative, giving remarkably precise times and details of my comings and goings.
Naïma was hurried out of bed for questioning and arrived looking worried and hollow-eyed.
They even visited Dad’s room, where Tony Bennett was warbling, “If we never meet again . . .”
“What are yis havin’?” Dad asked the cops. Then: “Have you a light on that bicycle?”
They went away and left him alone.
They took me with them.
* * *
Two days later I was home again. George went bail, with nothing proved or decided either way. The eight hoodies couldn’t be found, obviously, although George and Noureddine were working on it. If those guys were from Astoria, they were dead meat. If they were from elsewhere, I was.
I was just thinking about lots of fresh coffee when I heard the door chimes and saw Jessica hobbling toward the door. I could see Pepe pretending to trim something with shears in the garden. Sean was slumped in a sofa, not sure whether he was more angry with me than he was sorry for himself. I spoke to him little. I didn’t know how.
Jessica ushered four people into the hall, all looking like Jehovah’s Witnesses on the way to a ball. They said they were real estate brokers, sent by Eddie to visit the house, swore blue that someone had given them an appointment.
It was certainly beginning to look like a plot. I felt more like Hamlet by the minute.
They checked out the house, came back to the hall again, and asked to see the cellar. I said there was no cellar. They informed me there was an extensive cellar. I changed my tune and asked Jessica to get the key. She shuffled off to the kitchen and returned after a while looking purple and perplexed. There was no sign of the key.
“Surely you have a second key,” said
one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I hate people who use the word surely.
“No surely about it,” I answered. “The door is reinforced, for the wine, and Dad lost the key before he lost his mind, or shortly after. There was one key left, in the kitchen, always in the same place. Nobody’s been down there for a long time, the wine was my father’s baby.”
I didn’t tell them about my own (poor) taste in wine, or the fact that Pepe thought the marquis on the bottles was my father.
* * *
>George arrived just then, got the measure of the scene, and hooshed them out the door to their fancy car, saying, “It’ll take a locksmith, it’s reinforced. We’ll call you already.”
Jessica joined in then, and Sean. “This house is in mourning!” they shouted. “Get outta here!”
The suits were so astonished, they just left, saying they’d need an appointment to visit The Two Way Inn.
“Visit it,” said George. “Anyone can. It’s open from dawn to dusk.” Then to me, he said, “What harm can it do? You’re not married to ’em. Yet.”
George spent the rest of the day calling the locksmith, calling Noureddine, keeping me on the wagon, and driving me to my bank, where a young man in a bad suit and eyeglasses told me the Swamp Rat had cleared out all of our accounts. I thought I caught a glimpse of the bank manager observing me through sanded glass somewhere, but George said I was paranoid. “Ye goin’ perrenawd on me,” was what he said.
The young man looked at me as if to say, Ya ain’t the first and ya won’t be the last.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” said George, which wasn’t how I’d describe it.
Back home Jessica fed us, then I tried to reach Eddie in Vancouver. It took me awhile to hunt up the number, and it cost me a great deal to dial it. Sean sat and watched. I’d never have managed it if George hadn’t been there. Now I knew how my mother used to feel.
New York City Noir Page 94
