Brooklyn Wars

by Triss Stein

  By then, a couple of other people were talking to an officer. The ambulance arrived. EMS workers jumped out, swiftly did their job, and moved him to a stretcher. They were gone in minutes, siren screaming again. I suspected it didn’t matter. I’d seen him shot point-blank. What were his chances?

  They asked me again where the shooter had gone. “It was too dark. I could not see.” I wanted to go home. On this cool fall night, wearing a fleece jacket, I was shaking with chills.

  Finally an authoritative person in ordinary clothes said to someone else, “She couldn’t know where he went. Figure it out from the broken foliage. Get some more lights before you try. And be careful!” He turned to me at last. “You can go home. We have all your information. Would you like a ride?”

  “Oh, no, no, I can just hop a bus.” Then I started trembling again, and he looked at me with some concern.

  “Yes, please. A ride.”

  Afterward, I could not remember one thing about the ride home, not how I got into the car, not how long it took, not how I got out and up my front steps.

  My daughter was waiting there. “Mom, what happened? I heard the police car. You looked wrecked.” She had her arms around me, helped me to the sofa, and wrapped an afghan around me.

  “What can I do? Should I make a cup of tea for you? Or a glass of wine? Call Grandpa? Or Joe?”

  “I don’t…” I shook my head. My eyes closed, and I felt tears rolling down my cheeks. Was I in shock?

  I forced myself to sit up. “Tea. Lots of sugar. And, no! Don’t call anyone.” My father would have things to say about my walk in a dark wood tonight. I didn’t want to hear them. I didn’t know how Joe would react. I didn’t want to find out.

  Chris went into the kitchen and came back with a box of cookies. They were stale and factory-made, but I appreciated the thought and needed the sugar.

  She called from the kitchen, “Tea in a minute,” and I heard her voice murmuring on her phone. I did not have the energy or focus to argue with her about who she might call. How unlike me, I thought, as if observing myself from a long distance.

  Five minutes later I had a mug of scorching hot tea in my hands, syrupy with sugar, and there was a knock on the door. No, no, no, I thought as I tried to crawl under the afghan.

  It was my friend, Darcy, a stroke of brilliance on the part of my daughter. She’s growing up, I thought vaguely. A year ago, she would have been mad at me for scaring her. Now, at almost sixteen, she is helping.

  Darcy handed me a frosted doughnut from the bag she carried and tucked the afghan around me more firmly before saying, “What happened to you? Tell me all.”

  “Chris called you?”

  “That smart kid? Of course she did. Feeling up to talking now?”

  So I did. And when I started shaking again, Chris warmed the tea and Darcy handed me a second doughnut.

  They were appropriately shocked. Chris suggested looking online so see if there was any more news, but I could barely glimpse Darcy putting a finger to her lips. Right. I didn’t want to hear any more news right now.

  “I think a hot bath and maybe a sleeping pill. Or a stiff drink.” Chris giggled and Darcy added with severity, “You did not hear me say that. Go start the bath. Plenty of bubbles.”

  Between them, they got me warm and relaxed and into bed with a spoon of nighttime cold medicine to insure rest. I think I managed to say thank you before I fell into a deep sleep, but maybe I dreamed it.

  The morning was much different. I felt fine, though I was mysteriously unclear about what day it was. And what time. School day? Chris home? Did I have work at my part-time job?

  It was noon. Chris had left me a note:

  Let you sleep and went to school. Home about 3:00. Darcy told me to call—she said it was an order!—if you needed any help. Grandpa called. I didn’t tell. Joe called. I didn’t tell. But you need to handle them. And look here:”

  She had typed in a URL. So I looked. Of course I did.

  Conti had died. He was probably already dead when they drove him to the hospital. Deep down I’d known it all along. The NYPD spokesman said they had no leads as yet but it was early days and they expected success.

  I only had enough patience to skim the rest, absorbing nothing, but I got that he was a big shot in the regional governance of the harbor.

  That could be interesting to read. Some other day.

  For today, I was done. I was not, then, ready to admit that last night might haunt me for quite a while. I had given my information and now I could return to my life. In fact, I’d better. I had an appointment with my dissertation advisor this afternoon. That ended my plan to crawl back under the afghan for a long nap. What I needed was respectable clothes, enough time to walk to the nearest subway station and allow a twenty-minute ride—no, thirty, in case of delays—to reach City University’s Graduate Center, inconveniently placed in mid-town Manhattan.

  Inconveniently for me, anyway. I thought it belonged on the Brooklyn College campus where I’d earned my BA.

  I dreaded the meeting, and would have even on a normal day. I had a touchy relationship with my new advisor. I missed Dr. Wallace, the warm woman who inspired me to pursue an academic career, mentored me, and always pointed me in the right direction. This one, Dr. Adams, I couldn’t figure out at all. To be honest, she scared me, and I did not scare easily.

  She was not a New Yorker, and I didn’t know how to read her. I’ve never lived anywhere but New York. In fact, I’ve never lived anywhere but Brooklyn. Different parts of Brooklyn, which might as well be different worlds, but hey, they are still New York, not San Diego or Bozeman, or wherever the heck she is from. Actually, from Minnesota. I didn’t get her, the outward politeness with a hidden agenda, or so I suspected.

  She didn’t get me either. She didn’t get my sarcastic humor or my upfront comments or my overwhelming life. In fact, she had no interest in my life at all.

  I picked up an extravagantly overpriced latte on the way to the subway. I also picked up a trashy tabloid with screaming headlines about the murder last night. For real news I read the august New York Times, but for a quick read on the subway? The tabloids, news source of choice in blue-collar Brooklyn, my home turf, did the job. You can take the girl out of Flatbush but…

  I ditched it before I entered the halls of academia but I held on to the coffee. I needed the moral support.

  The office used to be Dr. Wallace’s. I waited in the hall, remembering the day she told me she was leaving. She could not be my dissertation advisor long-distance, but Dr. Adams would take me on.

  The office door opened at exactly one minute after the hour. Time to woman up. I sighed, remembering how I used to look forward to meetings in this office.

  “Now, Erica, I called you in because I am concerned with how slowly you are progressing. You do know you are scheduled for graduation in May? This year? I finally caught up with all my additional advisees and I saw from your records that you have postponed for two years now.”

  I started to respond but she held her hand up to say stop.

  “Yes, I see you are working steadily, but very slowly. You will end up as an ABD and I do not allow that to happen to my advisees.”

  The dreaded ABD? All But Dissertation? Someone forever stuck between student and employable historian? She was not kidding. There was not even a glimmer of humor in her face. But ABD would not be me, lady, I thought but did not say. You don’t know me at all.

  She rolled right on.

  “I know you have the department form that lays out a timetable.” She looked at me for confirmation and I nodded. I knew I had received it. I also knew that I had not looked at it lately.

  “You should be writing the conclusion and summary chapters now. This month. And you are…?”

  “Something has come up. There is one more chapter I should add, about the Brooklyn Navy Ya
rd. It’s kind of an example…and changing even as we speak…” I was struggling with my own words. “It’s history in the making….”

  “Oh, Erica.” She shook her head. “It is so easy to get lost in the research, and the actual moment of saying ‘enough’ gets pushed back again and again. That is fatal.

  “I am giving you a schedule. Weekly meetings with me until the winter break.” She turned the computer to I could see the screen. “By then you should be polishing a completed draft. You have to be, if you will meet deadlines for defense in time to graduate.”

  “But Dr. Adams…”

  “Yes, it is unusual to work this way with a mature graduate student, but apparently you need a push.” She spoke cordially, smiled faintly.

  I was so angry I could barely speak. I need a push? What nerve.

  “So now,” she went on, oh-so-smoothly, “tell me where you are as of today. Do you really need a Navy Yard chapter? Perhaps it doesn’t fit into the overall plan and you can attack the conclusion instead.”

  How could I tell her I didn’t always know how information would fit into the overall plan? How it seems necessary to follow research to see where it would lead? And sometimes I got sidetracked? She said she understood but I didn’t believe it for a minute. Plus, after last night? My mind really was scattered all over.

  “I saw change in real time last night,” I said, grasping for a coherent thought. “I went to a community meeting. It became very heated and I took notes.”

  She did not seem too impressed, which made me want to chatter on, trying to convince her. I stopped, a full stop, jaw clenched.

  “And what will you do with these notes and this meeting?”

  “There was a man there.” The words tumbled out. The idea followed. “He seems to have spent a long lifetime working in and around the harbor, Navy Yard, and then other things. I thought I could follow his career and see what it says about all the changes.” I gulped, then continued as inspiration came. “I’d use it like a narrative thread through the data? How did he sustain a career when his world kept changing?”

  “As long as you don’t get lost in it. Focus on the changes, not the man.” She tapped her pencil on the desk. “Tell you what. One week to get that written and move on.” She tapped some more. “You’re planning to interview him, I suppose? Get his read on all he did? Did you meet him?” I could feel my heartbeat speed up.

  “I can’t interview him.”

  She frowned. “Why? Certainly it’s worth a shot.”

  “I can’t interview him.” I took a deep breath. “No one can. He died. Last night.”

  “He isn’t that man who was murdered?” She looked shocked. “You should stay completely away from the situation. You’d need to include his death if you write about him, and that won’t be solved in time for you.” She saw me ready to disagree. “This is not your topic and not your job. Your job is to finish.”

  She stood up. “One week to get back to me, right? Same time and day.”

  I nodded and fled but I thought about our meeting all the way home. By then I’d convinced myself Conti’s career was the perfect lens to view this topic. If I could do a good enough job researching it I knew I could convince her too. I thought I could.

  It wasn’t until I was on the train, that I counted up how many years I had been doing this, writing my dissertation. Too many. Well, hell. Unlike most of my classmates, I had other responsibilities. A daughter to raise, alone. An old house to keep standing, alone. A part-time job at the Brooklyn History Museum. Constant money worries. Okay, most of my classmates did share that one.

  I assumed I would finish it when it was ready to be finished. It’s just that I kept encountering new ideas and developments that should be added to the research. I wasn’t prolonging it unnecessarily, no matter what Dr. Adams implied.

  It might be time for a letter to my old advisor, asking for, well, for advice. Before I said something extremely inadvisable to my new one.

  Chris was home from school and unusually bubbly, once she was sure I was now all right.

  “So Grandpa says he will drive us to Buffalo when we go see Grandma.”

  “What did you say?”

  My father and my dead husband’s mother in one visit? I could not have heard that right.

  “You heard me.”

  Chris had one of the long weekends her private school seemed to throw around at random and I had promised a trip to Buffalo to see her paternal grandmother. That part checked. She had a big school project on family history, and wanted to interview the grandmother she had not seen in more than year. That part checked.

  “Grandpa?”

  My father and my husband’s mother never had a thing in common. Not religion. Not ethnic background, which still counts for something in Brooklyn and did even more back then. Not age. My youthful parents. Jeff, my late husband, was the last child in a large family—they were almost a generation apart. And both of them difficult people in all the ways that mattered. Stubborn. All-knowing. Always right. Those ways.

  “Grandpa said he would drive.” She explained it precisely, as if talking to a child. I could choose to call her out on that, or listen to what she was saying. I somewhat reluctantly made the mature choice. “He said our car wasn’t reliable enough for a road trip and he would worry,” Chris said. “He knows we can’t afford to fly and he had nothing else to do.”

  “Uh, okay, I’m following so far.”

  “And wait for this! He said we’d drive at night and have more time there! No traffic to slow us down. You and I sleep in the car. How cool is that?”

  There were so many ways none of this was cool I did not have energy to list them all.

  “How did it come up?”

  “Uh, well.” Now she was less bubbly. “We were chatting—well, Mom! Don’t look like that. You know we chat!—and I told him about the school break and our plans.” She jumped up and hugged me. “It will be fun. Seriously.”

  She had been close to my parents, but she never described visiting her other grandmother as “fun” before. She was always bored in Buffalo. Her cousins were all much older, Grandma was so old-fashioned. True, kids kept changing all the time, but I was curious about what provoked this particular change.

  I could call my mother-in-law and probe a bit. Not gonna happen. I could talk to my dad. Sometime. Joe might know. Chris confides in him, turning him into a substitute uncle. Or a dad?

  Or I could ask my sister-in-law, Judy. She was the oldest in her large family, practically a third parent to Jeff. Grandma Donato had lived with her in Buffalo since Grandpa Donato died. If I could manage to stay awake after dinner, I would call then.

  “Dinner in ten,” I shouted upstairs. Suddenly, exhaustion knocked me into a chair. Last night was hitting me and I didn’t know if I needed food, a glass of wine, a nap, a funny movie. A hug. Or all of the above and not in that order.

  Chris took her plate to watch some TV before returning to homework, and I called Judy.

  “Hi, hon, how are you?” she asked.

  I lied and said I was fine, no news, we were looking forward to our visit. Lying on all counts.

  “Chrissie told me your father would drive. Now that takes some pressure off you, right? And it will be so nice to see him, too. Now that the kids have moved out, we have room for everyone.”

  Nice to see Dad? Really? Jeff’s family and mine had agreed about only one thing, that we were too young. Underlying that perhaps-reasonable objection was the one they never exactly admitted. Italian Catholic boys shouldn’t marry Jewish girls of Eastern European ancestry. And vice versa. If we waited, both sets of parents hoped we’d return to our tribes.

  Was that now water under the bridge in the Donato family? My own parents had come to love Jeff and were grief-stricken when a drunk driver ended our brief and happy life together.

  All those co
mplicated thoughts raced through my mind in seconds, but I only said, “Chris told you our plans?”

  “Yes, and Mom is so excited about this visit. She’s been digging into boxes in the attic that have been there since she moved in. She’s looking for photo albums, family papers. Of course she shouldn’t be up in the dusty attic at all with her COPD, but try to argue? You know Mom. Save your breath!”

  So she hadn’t changed much. And Judy still sounded like a nice Brooklyn girl after decades in the vast upstate. Suddenly I was looking forward to seeing her at least.

  I didn’t know Chris had been calling, though. I guessed it was a good thing, being fired up about a school project. I guessed.

  “And she’s cooking of course. I hope you’re ready to consume lasagna. And veal parm. And a few Sicilian pies!”

  I laughed. “Anything I don’t cook sounds good to me!”

  “So we’ll see you soon? Call from the road to let us know about what time?”

  “Certainly. And what can we bring you from New York?”

  “Honestly? Your presence will keep Mom entertained and that’s a gift in itself.”

  “I think you mean Chris’ presence.”

  She laughed. “Any new face is helpful. And good bagels would be nice.”

  An endless day after a shocking night. I was yawning. I would leave the dishes until tomorrow. I could hear my mother’s ghostly voice on that subject but I ignored it. My housekeeping standards (“What standards?”) were, truthfully, pretty slack, but I remembered what else Mom used to say. “My house, my rules.” And this was my house.

  I think I fell asleep in my clothes. A ringing phone woke me? I squinted at my clock as the phone kept ringing. It was ten o’clock, not the middle of the night. I finally floated up to consciousness and made a lunge for it. Joe.

  “When were you planning to tell me what’s going on?”