My mom, as it turns out, got this idea that my dad was sweet on Vilma. More than just sweet on her. Not the sort of thing you called a family meeting about in 1933, but I heard them fight. I couldn’t make out everything through the walls, but I picked out enough to know (a) my mom could have married any one of about ten thousand handsome, successful Ashkenazi in Manhattan, (b) my dad planned to poison Mom, run off with Vilma, and leave little Joseph an orphan, and (c) my mom was nuts. Just fucking nuts. First off, Vilma wasn’t exactly Miss Rheingold; she was chubby and huggy and sweet, yes, but my mom was a svelte, well-put-together woman who looked good in a tweed peacoat, got plenty of looks in the park, blistered feet, crazy eyes, and all. Second of all, my dad, Edwin Davison Peacock, was a rock. Worked all day in a fever of Presbyterian capitalistic mysticism, yes, expected roast beef and mashed potatoes with lots of butter on the table at seven sharp, nothing unusual about that back then. Kept us treading water in the crash of ’29 without help from the in-laws because he was suspicious of the market—that whole buying-on-margin thing smelled like rotten meat to him long before it gave the whole country a bellyache. Pops invested in real estate, sold his Lower East Side pushcarts before La Guardia outlawed them, and modernized his three clothing stores so they looked airy and full of light when everybody else’s discount stores looked like you were looting somebody’s basement. But having an affair? I’d have been less surprised to hear FDR won a silver medal jumping hurdles.
Then it happened. My dad, respected by employees and feared by competitors, chickened out before his raving wife. He up and fired Vilma. Did it while I was at school so there’d be no tearful good-byes, but there were tears all right. I didn’t sleep for a week, just punched my pillow while Solly soldier-crawled on his belly squinting and licking his nose, trying to get close enough to lick the tears off of my cheeks, which I finally let him do. He was good at that. We just don’t deserve dogs, do we?
Leah Peacock wasn’t about to cook her husband’s meals just because that “liver-colored Magyar cow had gone back to Budapest,” so the cook interviews began immediately. Based on one plate of Salisbury steak, an enthusiastic recommendation from her last employer, her strict Catholic values, and her thin, un-Vilma-like frame, Margaret McMannis won out over the other applicants. I think, too, that her Irishness appealed to some charitable impulse of Leah’s without fully rousing her under-the-surface bigotry, as the dark faces of the two colored candidates doubtless had. The maid, Elise, was colored, but she didn’t touch food. Yeah, racism’s like that. It wasn’t the bus seats that got all the rednecks worked up in the ’50s. It was the water fountains. As for the situation in the Peacock house, however, Mother actually seemed to like Margaret Evelyn McMannis.
And for that reason above all others, Joseph Hiram Peacock decided she had to go.
* * *
It really isn’t tough for a kid to get a domestic fired, particularly in a house where the mother thinks of the kid as a swatch of wallpaper that occasionally needs food and school.
I was too smart to think one theft would do it, and I was too smart to take something they might think a boy would be interested in. I knew where the money was kept. That was out of the question.
I started with earrings, a pair of modest pearls. Nothing so expensive Mom would make Dad call the cops; something small and losable. Something she wore a lot so she’d notice and it would bug her and put her on notice that something was wrong. I hit the bull’s-eye.
“Edwin?” she said; it was always Edwin when she had a demand and Ed when she wanted to make sweet. “Would you please keep your eyes open for those pearls I got in Chicago? They seem to have grown wings.”
“They’re not in the box?” he said from behind his newspaper. Of course they weren’t in the box, nobody says their earrings are missing if they’re in the box. It was a bullshit question so he could snatch another paragraph off the New York Times before he had to pay attention to what she was saying.
“No,” she said, more quietly. More quietly meant she was going to handle it herself. Louder would have meant he’d better get in there. She put just enough pout in it so he’d know she knew he was more interested in the paper, but really it was just for herself since he wasn’t fucking listening.
It certainly wasn’t for me. She didn’t know if I was in the house, in the garden, in the park, or at the bottom of the East River. I actually put my hand in my pocket and rolled the earrings in my fingers while she stomped and huffed around upstairs, making the floorboards creak. For a woman with size-six feet she had quite a huffy stomp.
The only person looking at me was the maid, Elise, who was tickling the bookshelf with a feather duster. She caught my eye just then, not that we were chummy, but her look seemed to say she knew something had been set in motion, that she would come under scrutiny, that my words for or against her would be the finger on the scale. She was only four years older than me, but we couldn’t have lived in more different worlds. Doing her very best every day, never stealing, never lying, she might or might not be able to keep her reputation intact. I was a rotten little bastard, but because my face was white and my name was Peacock, it would have taken an act of Congress to put me under suspicion.
Another complicating factor was my attraction to Elise. She had the dubious good fortune to live under the same roof with me at the very dawn of my adolescent sexuality. You know what teenaged boys are famous for doing? Of course you do. I had just discovered that very thing the previous year, while holding a heavy encyclopedia on my lap and simultaneously nervously twitching my leg up and down. Soon I gave up my hunt for John Wilkes Booth and started fanning the pages for anything female, finally settling on Joan of Arc. I imagined her sweating under all that armor, then, God help me, I pictured her in a cell like in a dungeon getting ready to get burned at the stake. This whole thing took like three minutes; I didn’t know what dizzying, rapturous thing had happened to me, I had an idea, but I had better sense than to tell my parents about it. I just cleaned myself up and resolved to investigate the situation further. It actually took me a week to figure out a book on my lap wasn’t necessary.
But Elise. She went from being sort of an older fellow child from a less fortunate family to being Cleopatra, Bathsheba, Jezebel. I loved watching her polish the silverware, clean the glass, make the beds; I lived for floorboards day. I tried to talk with her a few times, and she was polite without being overly friendly. I think she saw through my interest, understood this was normal for boys and that it was best not to encourage or offend me. I think she was perfectly neutral toward me, no love, no hate, and as guilty as I felt for the unlikely situations I imagined us in together, I was grateful for that neutrality. I expected that neutrality to end any day; any day she would sense the secret and anatomically naïve relationship we were having inside my skull and begin to despise me as a peeper and a sex pervert.
But that’s not what happened. If she knew, really knew how much I thought about her, she never let on. And now she would need me.
Help me, Joey, her look said, dust motes in the air lit up by the sun. You know I’m good.
I let myself almost smile, which she took to mean yes. She almost smiled, too. This all took less than three seconds. Then Solly started yapping because a key slotted into the front door and it opened, and Margaret came in with her big tatty coat and the paper sacks of groceries she would turn into Saturday dinner. A bunch of cold air came in with her.
She said, “Good afternoon, Joey,” to me, but I just looked down.
Rolled the earrings in my fingers.
Tried not to smile.
* * *
Mom did ask Elise about the earrings but seemed mostly to believe her when she said she hadn’t seen them. She was on guard, though, and now so was Elise. Runners on first and third. I went for the base hit the following Saturday. Not earrings this time, but a cameo. Valuable, but not send-you-down-the-river valuable. Just pre
tty, something a woman would love. A white Grecian lady with snaky hair on a coral background the color of good salmon. I had always liked that one, had asked Mom about the pinkish stone when I was a kid, had loved the idea that it came all the way from the sea. Coral is still one of my favorite words, even after everything. But I hadn’t paid it any mind since I was little; she’d never think I took it.
She’d certainly never think I would put it in the purse of an Irish cook who had done me no harm. The idea was so shitty, so cowardly and rotten as to be beyond belief; her Ashkenazi blood was too noble to produce such corrupt stock, right? But Irish thieves crawled off the bogs in droves and freighted themselves west across the Atlantic; what was Brooklyn, where the McMannises had their hatchery, but a weigh station between Ellis Island and Rikers Island? That cameo would land in Margaret’s purse with an audible thud, David’s stone hitting Goliath right on the Xs-for-eyes button. Only I was Goliath. I knew I was going to win this one. But how to get it in there? And how to see that it was found?
“Why does the lady have snakes in her hair?” I had asked my mother years before.
“Because the gods were angry at her and turned her into a monster.”
“You mean God?”
“No, Joey, back in olden times the ancient Greeks believed in lots of gods. Some were nice and some were mean.”
“Like the devil?”
“Something like that.”
“Why did they put snakes in her hair?”
“You know, Joey, I forget. Go ask your father.”
I don’t know if she forgot or she just didn’t want to tell me, but I know what the snake lady did. Medusa. She got raped. The god Poseidon went and raped her in the temple of Athena, and Athena was pissed. She couldn’t punish Poseidon, her uncle, but Medusa? Just a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just an Irish girl off the bogs.
My plan was to slip the cameo into Margaret’s purse and then tell Elise I had seen Margaret take something from my mom’s jewelry box. Remove myself one step from the crime, enlist an ally with skin in the game, it was perfect. You see why I’m such a good vampire? We’re all lying, devious bastards, not like werewolves, if there are werewolves, whose MO is, “Hi, I’m a werewolf, surprise! And fuck you!” No, we lurk. We’re lurkers. And I was off to a good start.
But not perfect.
I went upstairs to Elise’s room. Elise lived with us every day but Sunday when she trained it north to some crumbling shitbox in the 130s where they took her money but no longer had a bed for her; here she slept in a sort of glorified, skylit closet on the top floor. One closet within this closet was where the cook kept her affairs. Margaret went home at night, but worked from six thirty A.M. until eight P.M. six days a week, with a two-hour break in the middle of the day, just enough time for her to get home, slap her children, and clean the whiskey bottles off the stairs, or whatever poor Irish women do in Brooklyn. Anyway, there I was all quiet in my sock feet, opening the cook’s closet door with nary a creak. Medusa was in my hand and only inches from slipping into the cheap canvas handbag. And then I stopped. Cold sweat on my temples and upper lip. I know how much this sounds like trying to make myself look better after the fact, but given the other rotten things I have told you, and will tell you, why would I tidy this up? Anyway, whether you believe me or not, I stopped. I was suddenly aware that this was a big moment for me, that who I was as Joseph Hiram Peacock was getting decided exactly then, not in trench warfare, not in some deal with the devil with a fancy contract and an offered pen to dip in my own blood, but right there. On the fourth floor of a narrow town house in Greenwich Village with a stupid little cameo in my hand. I shook my head a little. It was too rotten. I couldn’t do it. I started pulling my hand back.
“Mr. Joey,” she said. I almost jumped out of my skin. Elise. Only she called me Mr. Joey. She said it breathy, a stage whisper, she knew something bad was happening. I turned around to look at her. All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe. I looked at Elise and she at me and just like that I failed. I ran from the trench my buddies ran into. I dipped the pen in the blood and signed, the devil twirling his waxy black mustachio and chuckling at his windfall, or maybe at the irony of all this ceremony for such a wormy little soul.
I held up the cameo on its chain, Medusa spinning in the dim light, my eyes begging Elise to believe me as I said, “I found this. I mean I saw her. Margaret. She put this in her purse, from the dresser.” Something very complex but quick happened in Elise’s eyes just then, something I only fully understood later: the arithmetic of the real world carried out by a young woman of fragile circumstances, an expert in such calculations.
She didn’t believe me any more than the man in the moon. But she knew her best chance of staying on here was to side with me. If she tried to rat me out, I might say she was the thief. Even if they believed her, she’d have a permanent enemy in the house that could never, ever be fired. She knew all this in a second.
“Missus Peacock,” she said, tentatively, looking me in the eyes as if asking, Are you sure? Are you sure this is who you are? Because we can do it this way if you want, but you’re starting on a long road now and you might not like where it goes. Or maybe she was just a scared kid from Harlem learning yet again how bad the world sucks.
I almost nodded at her, the way I had almost smiled before. She almost nodded back, and then she called for my mom again. Louder this time.
“Missus Peacock!”
I looked at Medusa.
Turning on her fine chain, turning.
* * *
The next cook was colored. My father overruled my mother on that, stopped her from hiring a mealymouthed sixtyish Russian crone I’m reasonably sure was a witch, and insisted on a cocoa-skinned, smiley Tennessee negro named Susie, though it wasn’t a week before we were calling her “Sugar,” as she said everybody else did. In addition to the permanent, genuine smile and pearly teeth, the gods had gifted Sugar with perhaps the largest bosom I had ever seen; it made a sort of geological shelf above her smallish waist. It wasn’t a point of sexual interest, not for me anyway, but it was definitely a novelty. Sugar’s audition consisted of her cooking us six fried eggs in a row without breaking one yolk, making jokes with my dad the whole time. Mother wasn’t hungry, she was never hungry, so Solly got her second egg. It was a good day for Yorkshire terriers. It was even a pretty good day for me, despite my guilt for what I had done to Margaret.
* * *
Margaret.
Yeah, let’s go back to that Saturday.
I had asked Dad not to call the police, trying to sound persuasive while remaining aloof. My dad was quiet but shrewd, very shrewd. You don’t steer a business through the Great Depression by being a sucker.
“Why do you think we should be lenient with this kind of behavior, son?”
“Because. She has a family?”
I made myself look at him. He would notice if I didn’t look at him.
“Most people have families, Joseph. And most people don’t steal.” His eyes were cannons, ready to fire a broadside that would knock my head clean off.
Margaret sat stiffly in a dining room chair, her chin high, her arms folded in a pose of suffering righteousness as old as accusation.
“Call the police if you’d like, Mr. Peacock. I’m an honest woman, and I’d like to see this sorted out as much as you.” She looked at Elise then, which was a relief, but then she cut her eyes to me, dragging Elise’s gaze my way with her. She knew. She knew, but had no proof, and hoped I would panic.
Yes sirree, she was going to eyeball me straight into a cold sweat.
Those outsized blue gorgon’s eyes of hers went through me, her gaze worse than my father’s, tempered by neither love nor doubt. Her look was not a question mark, it was the drip, drip, drop of Chinese water torture, but I couldn’t look away.
Suddenly, my mother walked over and stood between us,
standing closer to Margaret.
“I would appreciate it, Mrs. McMannis, if you would stop staring at little Joseph as though it were his fault you’re a thief.”
“There’s a thief in this house, and no question,” she said.
“If you’ve got some ridiculous accusation to make, well, you just go ahead and make it, but I’d think twice if I were you,” said my mom.
Now the gorgon’s eyes swung up to her.
“I’ve no interest in seeing you arrested,” my mom went on, “but neither will I stand for your lies. Your position here is terminated—”
“And good riddance.”
“Do. Not. Interrupt. Me. Your position here is terminated. I will not call the police, and I know that’s a great relief to you whatever you want me to think, but only if you admit what you did. I cannot conscience a liar.”
My mother was doing the finger-pointy thing that made you want to sock her; I could see Margaret was thinking about it.
“Leah,” my father started.
“No, Edwin, I want to hear it from her mouth.”
“If I say I stole that thing, I walk out of here and never have to look at any of youse again?”
“Yes,” my mother said, using the word like cheese wire.
“Then I stole it,” Margaret said, standing up. “I reached my filthy little hand into your drawer . . .”
“You know good and well it wasn’t in a drawer.”
“No. I don’t know that. And you just think on that later. But I reached my filthy little hand into whatever you say, and I slipped that ugly necklace into my handbag. Never mind the diamonds and pearls you own, I wanted that tawdry little pendant, to match the collection of gold and necklaces you always see me wearing. And I lied about it all. And sure an’ I’m going to hell if I don’t confess it all to a priest before I die.”
The Lesser Dead Page 5
