“Put your hand under my skirt … that’s where it is. You’ll reach the right fish.”
He’d have to ignore the gibberish about her genital parts. “Was that castle inside a hotel?”
“Prick,” she said, “who’s the Rose of Connemara? Me or you?”
He felt ugly gorging her with wine. But he couldn’t break her riddles unless she drank some more.
“Did the Fisherman try to hurt you?” he said.
“You crazy? An old gent like that. Father Isaac, you ask funny things.”
A waiter sneaked up to them with two of those long retsina bottles. “Get out of here,” Isaac muttered. He didn’t need a waiter’s tongue to open his wine. Isaac bit into the cork and pulled.
“Mister, see my boots?”
Isaac looked. Annie was wearing sandals today.
“I only buy boots at Switzer’s. None of your shitty stores. My man won’t let me touch Irish paper money. It’s got germs. Bulges in your pocket. It’s indecent for a lady to carry so much cash. But how can you pay for an ice cream cone with a banker’s check? Unless you bring the donkey.”
“Is that O’Toole? Was Jamey your protector? Then why did he turn on you?”
“The donkey doesn’t turn. He’s too big.”
“Annie, did you live in that hotel with the king? Were you up in the Shelbourne? Was Jamey there too?”
He was beginning to grow frantic in his need for clarity. Why didn’t he pursue smaller things, go for the nibble, like that Fisherman, whoever he was.
“I don’t like yellow drapes,” she told him. “And they always say, madam this, and madam that. Why do I have to eat with seven forks? A fork for salmon. A fork for lettuce. A fork for soup. It’s only silverware. You think he was happy being like that? I know Derm. He likes to stick his finger in the fish. He didn’t care if I had my period …”
Could he talk about the scar now, the magical D?
“Annie, who …”
“Show me a barman who can pull a good pint, and I’ll give you some of my kish … my man is particular. Don’t you ruin the cream line on his Irish coffee. The donkey will have to drink a bad glass.”
She got up from the table. But she made Isaac sit where he was. “Annie, I could walk you home …”
“Mister, don’t think of following me. I’m wise to what you’re after. The fish stays in my pants. So forget it …”
The girl had fish on the brain. Was it some lovetalk between Annie and the king? She hobbled out of the restaurant, the Syrians peeking at the folds in her ass, drawing Annie in with faces hard as fish hooks. His “angels” didn’t move from the chairs they were in. They wouldn’t even acknowledge Isaac. He had to introduce himself to his own fucking men.
“I’m Isaac,” he said, feeling like an idiot. They didn’t jump, those blond lads of his. “You’re supposed to stick with her.”
He didn’t like the harsh neutrality under their eyes. His “angels” should have been more passionate about Annie Powell.
“Isaac, it takes her half an hour to cross the street. We have plenty of time.”
“That’s not the point,” he said. “You’re supposed to make sure she gets across the street.”
They were slow in getting off their rumps. He asked them about Jamey O’Toole.
“Isaac, that quiff couldn’t be in Manhattan. We would have spotted him ages ago.”
They left with toothpicks in their mouths and napkins on the table. He’d have to call his office and push them off the case. He wanted livelier boys on Annie Powell, lads he could trust. But he never called. Annie’s obsession with fish had taken hold of Isaac. Was there a trout pond in St. Stephen’s Green? Could Dermott fish from a window? The king would have had to concentrate all his magic and all his luck. Isaac was demoralized. His primitiveness had failed him here. Once he was a man who could sense the pedigree of any situation. Isaac had the gift. But he’d crawled into the Guzmann family and come out with a worm. The worm had blunted him.
Part
Four
19
ROSE, Rose of Connemara. Miss Annie Powell. She had to take an awful leak. Enough wine and beer in her to drown a Dublin pony. Father Isaac. She loved to torture that bum who came to her in clean and dirty pants. She wasn’t going to be anybody’s daughter. Not his. She was selling pussy. Nothing less. She didn’t have to eat French dinners with a guy who wouldn’t pull off her clothes. She’d had a thousand dinners with her man. He took her to places a bum couldn’t afford to go. Steak tartare. She could read all the menus in the world. He let her swipe towels and doilies from the biggest hotels. She could powder her tits with pure Irish lace. Nobody owned her anymore.
The uncle was waiting for her under a lamppost. Mr. Martin McBride. He didn’t look very grand. He’s got a disease, they say. His lungs are turning to paper. The uncle was scared of something. He’d threaten Annie, then he’d offer cash. It was a disgrace for Dermott to have his lady working in the streets. She wouldn’t accept money from this old knish.
“Jesus,” he said, “you’ll get us all killed. Woman, can’t you see? Everywhere you go there’s a cop. It means nothing to pay them off. They’re after blood. How many times do they have to kick you in the face?”
“I’ve been kicked before. By uglier people.” She ran a finger over that invisible scar. “How’s the man?”
“Are you crazy? Dermott won’t talk to me. You can’t reach the lad. It takes a month to get a call into Ireland. And Dermott never picks up the phone. I have to talk to one of those bulls he keeps around him. ‘Sorry, Mr. McBride. But the king isn’t here.’ Sending a telegram’s no good. How do I know who’s going to read it? We’re in the dark, woman. I take instructions from that nigger, Artie Greer.”
“What does he say about Derm?”
The uncle wrinkled his nose. “Merciful God, how can you trust a nigger gombeen man? He swears Dermott’s playing golf in his rooms. Woman, do us a favor, please. Walk out of here. I’ll get you an apartment in Forest Hills. You can have your own beagle. Six cats if you like. Move, I’m telling you. Shuffle off. We’ll all die if you stay too long.”
“Dermott knows where I am. Let him come for me.”
“Jesus, don’t you learn? The nephew’s a dead man if he lays a foot in Manhattan. That’s the lousy deal they made.”
“I didn’t put my name on that pact, Martin McBride, so stop bossing me around.”
“But you’re his. You’re Dermott’s. That’s the way they’ll look at it. And they’ll reach out for you again and again and again.”
Annie smiled for uncle Martin. “Not to worry your head about it. I have me a benefactor. A real live beauty. Tough as they come.”
“Who?”
“What’s the difference? He buys me champagne. In baby bottles.”
“Tell me who it is?”
“That high commissioner. Father Isaac.”
A grayness overtook uncle Martin, and he rocked on his heels. “That bandit … he’s the worst of the lot. Woman, he kidnapped me, swear to God. Brought me to a phony precinct. Isaac. He makes his own police stations. He has killers under him …”
“So what? He wants to marry me.”
Uncle Martin developed a hacking cough; he hugged the lamppost and tried to catch his breath. Annie had to console him.
“I’m only fooling. He’s too big a fox to marry. Me with a husband and all. Though I hear Irish weddings aren’t too legal in America.”
“Woman, eat your tongue. This Isaac, he’s got ears in every window.”
He trundled away from Annie, bumping into lampposts to regain his strength. Annie went upstairs. She lived in a rooming house that attracted outcasts like herself: rummies, Army deserters, whores unbridled by any pimp. It was cheaper, lower, more slovenly than Isaac’s hotel. But at least it had a name. Lord Byron’s Rooms. Most cops wouldn’t invade the premises. The stairs might collapse under their feet. They could lose their holsters in a darkened hallway, or their whistles and thei
r memorandum books. Annie felt secure. She was safe from unwanted company.
She wouldn’t think of locking her door. The rummies would only have swiped her doorknob together with the lock. They liked openness at the Lord Byron. But they didn’t poke in Annie’s room for a bottle of milk. A man with tremendous hands and feet was resting on her mattress. Jamey O’Toole. He could have been Robinson Crusoe. He’d stopped shaving at the end of August. Now he had a crooked beard. He wore the same thing: pants, shirt, and socks that clung to him like pieces of bark. Jamey sweated under his clothes. He was afraid to come out from Annie’s room. She’d hidden this Irish donkey, stuffed him away at the Lord Byron. It was strange to watch such a big man shiver. She couldn’t desert Jamey O’Toole. The donkey had been good to her. He’d mothered Annie in Ireland, kept her out of harm, saved her from a tribe of gypsy thieves.
No drunkenness could ruin Annie Powell. Dermott’s “bride” had been slippery and shrewd at that Greek restaurant. She shoveled bread and cheese under her skirts while she ate with Isaac. Now Jamey had a meal for himself. He ripped the bread with long fingers and gobbled lumps of cheese. Poor man, he couldn’t take a bite without Annie. Bread would drop out of his fists. Most of the cheese landed on her mattress. She wasn’t too proud to stoop for the donkey. She had to feed Jamey O’Toole. She was grateful for the teeth in his mouth. He still remembered how to chew.
“Jamey, I’ve got thirty dollars in my pocket. You could jump on a bus, you know.”
“They’re watching the buses,” he said, with cheese stuck on his tongue.
“I could walk with you. I’ll scream if they come around.”
“Never mind, Annie girl. We’ll sit. They’re dumb. You can bless the saints for that. They couldn’t figure I’d be in your room.”
“Why do they want you so bad?”
“Ah, it’s a pitiful story. We had the leverage on them. Then Dermott made the peace. He told himself he could spread the waters and hop over the Irish Sea. I begged him not to go. He’s nothing but a prisoner over there, Dermott is. They ‘yes’ him, they bow to the king. But let him try to disappear.”
“Is the Fisherman holding Dermott?”
“Yeah, the Fisherman. And other guys.”
“Isaac, is he one of them?”
“Who the fuck knows? You can’t trust the commissioners or the cops. Isaac has his blue-eyed boys. They’d shoot my ears off if they could. But it’s the other cops that worry me … old ladies with white hair they are. Retired sergeants. They work for the big McNeill.”
She sat with him on her mattress, a loving girl, putting crumbs in Jamey’s mouth. What else could she do? When she brought a john into her room, Jamey had to stand in the hall. Customers were suspicious of Robinson Crusoe. They clutched their wallets before and after they made love to Annie Powell. She didn’t care. Business was slow. She’d rather fish for crumbs than go out looking for a john.
Miss Annie was a native of Queens. Monday to Friday she took the BMT. She worked in a jewelry store on Fifty-seventh Street. A display girl she was. She didn’t handle the expensive goods. She had a lovely figure, you see, and the manager, a Mr. Giles, stationed her near the window. She was meant to draw the customers in. That’s how she met the king.
He had a passion for books, old books, first editions, things like that. Faulkner and Mr. James Joyce. It was an odd habit for a crook. But he hadn’t forgotten Columbia College, and he could afford any book he liked. He had several dealers in town. The best of them, Eichenborn, was next door to Annie’s window. He was coming out of Eichenborn’s with a copy of Ulysses, Paris, 1922, when he saw Miss Annie Powell. Giles had told her to blush if a man looked in. But she didn’t blush at Dermott. She noticed the sockets of his eyes. He was coatless in February. And he had the blackest hair. He didn’t seem like a man who would trifle in a jewelry store and let himself be used by Mr. Giles. Oh, but she had the wish: not in terms of silver and gold. She wasn’t Giles’ mercenary. If only that dark man would come in and talk to her and forget about the jewels. Giles could scream. No. He would have been timid around such a man.
Dermott didn’t knock on the window. He never smiled. But he did visit Annie on his next book-buying trip. He marched out of Eichenborn’s scowling hard. The lad had paid a stupendous price for a set of galley sheets that must have been living with the worms. The sheets were from Soldier’s Pay, Faulkner’s second book. They were in miserable condition: streaked, with ratty edges and cigarette burns. But Eichenborn knew his man. Dermott had a madness to collect. The dealer had been saving these galleys for months. When the bug bites, the lad will buy. Dermott had to have his Soldier’s Pay. He could have hired a gimp to murder Eichenborn and get back most of his money. But he didn’t mind being swindled by a man who loved books. He stood outside Annie’s window with a twisted yellow rose. That was as much courtship as Annie could bear. She was sick of baiting men for Giles. She put on her coat to meet with Dermott. “I’m quitting,” she told Giles, who couldn’t understand why a single rose should propel Annie out of his store.
She had no idea what to do about Dermott. Say hello or goodbye? He didn’t rush her into anything. He had a quietness that Annie liked. They sat in a bistro. He talked of books. She wasn’t a complete idiot. Ezra Pound meant something to her. It was a name, wasn’t it? And William Faulkner’s reputation had come to Queens. He showed her the galley sheets. My luck, she said. I had to fall for a professor with dark hair. There was no monkey business. He brought her home in a taxi cab. He didn’t leave her stranded at the door. He had doughnuts with her mother and her two young sisters. Her mother felt a strangeness in the house. “How’d you get out of work so early?”
“Ma,” Annie said when she had a minute alone with her mother. “He’s Irish, I swear. And a professional man. Dermott Bride. He teaches books.” Her mother refused to believe that a dark-haired Irishman could exist. “Anybody can call himself Dermott Bride. He has a Puerto Rican nose. Can’t you tell?”
Annie wouldn’t look for another job or lose her faith that Dermott was descended from the Irish. “Mama, we all broke out of the same potato. Me, Dermott, and you.”
She was ashamed to take money from him, but she did. Mothers and sisters have to eat. And Annie’s father was long dead. But it was a slow kind of loving they had. He didn’t make a mistress out of Annie Powell. They went to the Rockaways. Walked in freezing sand. They had three-hour lunches in Little Italy. She rolled pasta on a fork. She burped into her napkin and said, “Excuse me.” She was always home by six o’clock.
What kind of work did her professor do? Available seven days a week he was. Must be a landlord on the side. Dermott had apartments all over the City. After a month he took off her clothes. They were in a flat on Murray Hill. How many maids did Dermott keep? You couldn’t find dust under the chairs. Oh, she’d had other boyfriends. But no one had licked her armpits before. He didn’t mutter filth in her ears. Or make idiotic marriage proposals. He could touch a woman’s body without coming in his pants. He wasn’t like her Canarsie beaus, who went in and out of you so fast, you couldn’t tell if you had a man inside, a rabbit, or a rush of wind. He had a delicate body that wasn’t brittle or soft. It fit into hers like the cardboard teeth of a Chinese puzzle. And she thought, what does it mean to take your pants off in somebody’s car? I’ve been going out with monkey boys. Dermott had magic everywhere, in all his parts. He could make her come with his finger and his mouth. She would twist around and grab pieces of that black hair. She’d never be able to sleep with a Canarsie boy again.
He loved to swipe her underpants, stuff them in his pocket, and sniff them from time to time. It didn’t matter where the panties came from, how cheap they were, how flimsy, how many holes they had. She would have carried his underpants too, but her sisters might have gone through her things, spied on Annie, and snitched to her mother. She could imagine how mama would react. “I’ve raised a whore in my house. Annie, what are you doing with a man’s jockey shorts?”
<
br /> Then Dermott announced to her in a quiet voice, “I’m going to Ireland? Will you come?”
She spoke up like a good Irish girl. “Dermott, my mother would kill me.”
“I’ll handle that,” he said. And it hurt her a little. Because he had to barter with mama, as if Annie were a cow. Mama cursed every misfortune the saints had thrust upon her and accepted Dermott’s five thousand dollars. Annie was embittered. Mama should have cried harder and clutched less. It poisoned Annie’s lovemaking for a week. But she figured to herself: I’m nobody’s cow. That five thousand has nothing to do with me.
Oh, it was a merry life for a girl with a dead father, living in Dublin on a rat’s honeymoon. Because wherever Dermott went, that donkey went too. They were the married pair, Dermott and Jamey O’Toole. Like brothers they were. Big and Little. And Annie couldn’t snuggle between them to locate her man. But she learned to appreciate O’Toole. He would poke drunken men out of her way, choose a nice path for Dermott and Annie. She was a bit unclear about her own Irishness. Mama had never been to the Old Country. Some granddad of Annie’s had arrived starving in America after one of those long potato blights. It could have been a thousand years ago. The girl had no sense of history. Irish she was, but she didn’t look like any of the freckles she saw on Grafton Street. God, it was a land of freckle-faced people. Her own complexion was kinder than that. Not lumpy, gray, and red. It scared her. She didn’t want to become a boiled potato.
You could see row after row of gray heads on the bus to Dalkey. The buildings were gray, or a bloodless brown. But she adored the street signs that were in Gaelic. It was like a fairy’s tongue. FAICHE STIABHNA. Stephen’s Green. SRAIDIN MUIRE. Little Mary Street. LANA NUTLEY. Nutley Lane.
The town seemed populated with elves. She ran into a soldier four feet high, with a cap and boots and a green, green shirt. The soldier dipped his cap and said, “What do you think?”
Annie struggled for an answer. “Not very much.”
Secret Isaac Page 9
