The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  “One last question, Mr. Cats.”

  “I don’t date cops.”

  Quinones ignored it. “Mr. Cats, have you ever met, personally I mean, President Fidel Castro of Cuba?”

  Fritzi’s chauffeur was holding open the door of the limo.

  “Of course not,” Shushan said, and got in, I after him.

  47.

  This time Shushan made the funeral arrangements, and he was good at it. I hadn’t thought of limousines and masses of flowers; Shushan laid them on. At my request the service was at the graveside. Shushan found a new rabbi, who carefully tore the collar of my beautiful black mohair suit along the seam; still it took Miguel the tailor two days to repair. It was a proper funeral. Shushan made sure all was done by the book as, he assumed, my mother in her right mind would have wished.

  From the little my father had talked about her—mostly all he said was: “Russ, your mother was a wonderful woman”—in her better days she was the spiritual leader of our household, very concerned—perhaps rigorously so, though I will never know if at some point she crossed the line into obsession—with keeping a kosher kitchen and with the overarching Jewish questions of the day: the violent birth of the State of Israel, the welfare of the surviving remnant of Jewish victims of the Nazis in Europe, and the mass resettlement in Israel of close to a million Jewish refugees who had been booted out of the Moslem nations of the Middle East. As in Shushan’s home, a blue-and-white Jewish National Fund tin box had a prominent place in our kitchen, and as a child every day I would make sure to drop in a penny or two because “mommy believed in charity.” Every so often an emissary from the JNF would come around to collect the proceeds, never more than five or six dollars in coins, and after counting it would carefully inscribe a receipt in my mother’s name. Neither my father nor I ever bothered to correct the record. Somehow it sounded crude, arrogant, final: “Mrs. Newhouse is dead.”

  Besides, my father knew it was a lie.

  According to Terri, who had visited her at Shushan’s request, my mother was a manic depressive with paranoid delusions that neither drugs nor shock therapy would ameliorate. Shushan suspected my father had removed her from our home because he no longer trusted her with his son. Was there cause? Had he found me somehow brutalized, or was my mother’s growing paranoia threat enough, a radical form of post-post-partum depression that would only eventually have placed me in peril? I spent a solid hour talking to Terri about this, becoming intimate with Shushan’s sister in a way I had never imagined.

  “Bottom line,” she told me, “Your father had to send his beloved wife away to save his son. He never forgave you for it.”

  “Wouldn’t you say that was unfair?”

  “What I’d say has no bearing. It’s what happened. Must have really fucked you up.”

  “I love it when you talk all clinical,” I said. “Let me put it this way: it was like being locked away in a benign prison, where you got three square meals but your jailer never talked to you.”

  “Never?”

  “Seldom.”

  “Seldom isn’t never, Russ. Self-pity doesn’t become the new you.”

  I sighed. “I rarely get a chance to wallow in it.”

  “Do I look like someone who gives a shit?” she said. “In fact, if you want to talk further, and you should, I’ll have to refer you.”

  She gave me a piece of paper with a name on it. I tossed it in a municipal wastebasket on the way home.

  This remained the Westbury, where I spent long hours talking with Shushan and hearing his plans. For me. He knew people who could open the door to the Naval Academy, after which he thought I might want to make a career of the Marines. Marine Aviation, that interested him. Also intelligence. He thought intelligence was right up my alley. It was eerie to get all this fathering from a man who had avoided even the risk of creating a family. All the women he went with were paid for.

  “My sister says I won’t accept a broad to replace my mom,” he said. “So that’s why my love life is limited to whores. Can you believe? Typical Esther psycho-bullshit.”

  As if to prove he had no feelings in the matter, he dropped Darcie, and let me know he had no problem with my continuing in his stead. For a while I did, but between her former relationship with Shushan and the ongoing affair with Terri, several weeks after the funeral I ended it. Predictably she did not hold it against me. That she did not I held against her. In terms that Terri would understand, Darcie had simply become another woman who had let me down.

  As with most of the people who turned up at the funeral, I kept tabs on her over the years. She continued on with Terri even after marrying a widower with three children who had started out as her client. She gave up being a paid companion to become, as she proudly told anyone who would listen, a real mom. As Mrs. Franklin Robinson she lived a stable and satisfying life in a house on Kings Highway in Brooklyn, and so far as I know never called her husband Feivel, which must have made him happy. Feivel/Franklin’s practice was so-so, but he eventually made a small fortune from the invention of a chemical compound that restored the whiteness of teeth stained by coffee, tobacco and time. One of his patients was Arnold Savory, who learned to smile again after having his mouth redone at a Manhattan clinic licensed to apply Rubashkin/Robinson’s product. Like the actors and directors who remained Arnold’s clients as betting on football and basketball replaced the horse-racing business that was taken over by state-run off-track betting, he was not shy in declaring that his mouth had been Franklinized, a life-altering event.

  Auro Sfangiullo had been right about the state’s entry into legalized gambling, but he lived barely long enough to see it happen. When he died—the Daily Mirror gave him a front-page send-off: R.I.P. DOCTOR RESPECT—Dickie Tinti replaced him as managing director of what Shushan and il dottore both liked to call “disorganized crime.” This was almost inevitable. With Sfangiullo’s passing went all constraints on drugs. The Tintis became the major player in cocaine—both the refined white-collar variety and the crack that would decimate Harlem and other black areas of New York, including my own home turf of Brownsville. They turned over billions, left a lot of headless bodies scattered around the metropolitan area—a trademark of sorts—and eventually became such a public menace that Dickie was convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice (in this particular instance on dubious evidence). He was put away for twelve years. The prosecutor in his case—in the words of the Daily Mirror, which often seemed to have more sympathy for the hoodlums than for their hunters—was “anti-mob mom Dolores Grady,” who had borne twins late in life and took time out from the trial to express breast-milk in the judge’s chambers. Though there were whispers about such a close relationship between lawyer and judge, there was nothing sexually inappropriate. The judge was a woman.

  Her Honor Myrtle Went was criticized however for instructing the jury to “destroy the vermin that infects this city,” just as she had been similarly criticized for her instructions to an earlier jury in the case of Shushan Cats. Though the same prosecutor was in place and the district attorney’s office mounted a strong prosecution—things came out in the trial that made me shudder—Judge Went told the jury to “deliberate on the facts in context. Many times in American history individuals have been compelled to act when the authorities refuse to. I share with you the concept of the Underground Railway, when Harriett Tubman acted outside the law to free Negro-Americans from the shackles of slavery, and I also note the work of Dr. Martin Luther King and his followers, who even today are beaten and jailed by the authorities for attempting to secure and protect the rights of their fellow Americans. Defense of the fearful and downtrodden is in itself not a crime but a virtuous act.” All but one of the jury members were hyphenated Americans: four Afro-, three Latino-, one Chinese-, an Italian- and two Jewish-. They deliberated all of three minutes. Shushan walked.

  Went became a federal judge in the Northern District of New York, where her decisions opposing school-busing, affirmative action and r
acial preferences were so regularly and predictably overturned that she became known in legal circles as Judge Went That-a-Way. When it became public knowledge that she headed a charitable foundation funded by Shushan Cats—a profile in the New Yorker brought the connection to light—she managed to avoid the formal censure that would have struck down a white judge in the same circumstance, a clear case of the racial preference she otherwise opposed.

  Fritzi died of a massive heart attack in 1982 while at a weight-loss spa in Utah. This may have been for the best: as he grew slimmer the less he succeeded in court. It was as if his physical presence had been his trade secret. When he ceased appearing to be a force that could squash the opposition, the opposition squashed him. It was Fritzi who so unsuccessfully defended Dickie Tinti, and it was in the midst of a final appeal that someone put Tinti out of New York’s misery with a crude blade in a shower at the New York State Correctional Facility at Otisville.

  Justo stuck with Shushan until the day of his sixtieth birthday, when he retired to Puerto Rico, where he had been buying up beachfront property for years in Vieques, site of a former naval bombing range.

  Ira and Myra finally had a baby—apparently they had been trying for years. In respect of this, Shushan fired Ira as his wingman and set him up running a limo company, where his hours were strictly nine-to-five. In gratitude the couple named their daughter Shushana, and in reciprocal gratitude her namesake visited her once a month bringing so many toys Myra had to put her foot down. It was not a light foot. She had grown obese—Ira remained besotted—but now she could enter a room knowing men could gaze upon her because they were no longer smitten.

  Miguel the tailor, so self-effacing it was hard to know he was in the room, was struck by a bus on Madison Avenue and, though doctors could find nothing seriously wrong, declared he was unable to stitch again. Shushan provided for Miguel and his family for the next forty years.

  Recruited with a full professorship to Columbia, Eugene del Vecchio grew increasingly radical. When the civil rights struggle transmogrified into nationwide rioting after the murder of Martin Luther King, Del moved on to become one of the major tacticians of the Gay Liberation Movement—in his memoir, Mauve, he claimed to have invented the word “gay” itself—and was a leader of the crowd that had fought a police invasion of the Stone Wall Inn, a homosexual bar in Greenwich Village, the Boston Tea Party of the gay movement. He became known as a kind of left-wing gun for hire. In 1964, he came to prominence as the principal faculty backer of the Columbia Free Speech Movement, in which students took over the chancellor’s office and trashed it; eventually they were expelled by police, Del with them. At some point he gave up poetry entirely, but wrote regularly for radical publications. By the turn of the century he had become a resident talking-head on cable news, and for a period of months engaged in a rancorous but ratings-positive debate on “permissiveness” that covered everything from politics to parenting.

  In all the flash and fire, no one pointed out that neither Del nor his right-wing opponent, a pop psychologist named Dr. Terri Cats, was an actual parent. Terri’s first book, Stop Acting Like A Child!, had been a bestseller. Despite one critic calling it “Dr. Spock for Republicans,” or because of that and similar pans by the liberal press, Terri became a fixture on television and eventually host of her own advice show on cable.

  Everything in the years since 1963 seemed to move to the margins. It wasn’t so much that the center would not hold—no one knew where it was.

  Celeste began studying to become a nun, then reversed course, had her lovely apple breasts augmented to melonic proportion and for over a decade under the name Cin More made dozens of adult films. When the Internet got going she leveraged her following and her cleavage into digitized erotica, eventually running several companies catering to a menu of well-defined pornographic tastes. According to Time, which did a cover story called Naked Internet, “Ms More is to the incest taboo what Washington was to the Delaware and to jingoism what John Wayne is to the Green Berets.” Though Celeste was estranged from them after her descent into porn, all the Callinans must have shared a moment of deep unease at the comparison. Their baby brother, Duncan, was among the first Special Forces personnel to die in Vietnam.

  The three surviving brothers became known in their respective professions for their charitable endeavors. Patrick the cop rose to captain and spent most of his spare time and money on expanding the Police Athletic League, which offered sports as a hopeful antidote to such inner-city standbys as drugs, impersonal violence and casual sex. Monroe the fireman was lost in 9-11 a month before his scheduled retirement—he and his wife had adopted twelve children, most of them in some way deformed, crippled, retarded or all three: one daughter was deaf, dumb, blind and autistic. Father Bill was involved peripherally in the church child-abuse scandal when, as executive assistant to the bishop of Garden City on Long Island, he was discovered to have serially transferred abusive priests. Embarrassed in the press, he remained in the church. What the journalists did not know, because Father Bill did not disclose it, was that for forty years he had dedicated himself—raising money from wealthy laymen—to a private effort to force out errant clergy, sometimes with bribes, sometimes with threats, while at the same offering counsel and aid to their victims.

  Royce Wilmington was for a time Dick Tinti’s man in Harlem, but on an evening at Palm Gardens in New York in 1964 Royce met a charming ex-con called Malcolm X who convinced him to examine his soul in the light of salvation in Islam. As Ahmed 24X, Royce became a power in Harlem politics and a force to be reckoned with by his former associates in the drug trade. Ever the smooth operator, Jimmy Wing left crime as well. With his silent partner Tommy he opened high-end Hunan-style restaurants in New York and Los Angeles, then sold these to open the immensely successful chain of fast Chinese food places known as ChopStix. Pepsi owns them now.

  Jack Ruby’s conviction on “murder with malice” of Lee Harvey Oswald was overturned in 1966 on the grounds he could not have gotten a fair trial in Dallas. Shortly after a new trial date was set, he died of cancer in Parkland Hospital, where John F. Kennedy had been declared dead three years earlier and where Oswald himself died after the shooting. All through his incarceration he claimed there was a conspiracy he could not talk about because even in prison he was not safe. “Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface,” he declared in a televised interview. “The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives. The people who had so much to gain, and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in, will never let the true facts come aboveboard to the world.” Yet on his deathbed he seemed to recant. A shrunken hulk, he was barely able to gum the words, “There is nothing to hide—there was no one else.”

  The assassination of John F. Kennedy and its aftermath remained an open sore in America for decades. Fidel Castro categorically denied he had anything to do with it. Dozens of books were written pointing the finger at one or more of the usual suspects—organized crime, the CIA, right-wing loonies, the National Rifle Association, Aristotle Onassis (he is said to have lusted that much after Jacqueline Kennedy, who became his bride) and that ever-present bugaboo of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union. As with Ruby, nothing would ever be known for sure. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when documents in the newly opened KGB archives unquestionably proved the Soviets had had no part in either the murder of the president or of his alleged assassin, experts immediately came forward to call the documents faked.

  After the tide of conspiracy books came an antithetical bulkhead of print claiming to demonstrate beyond a doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone and that Jack Ruby was an unconnected nut case. Yet polls continued to show that most Americans believed something larger, better equipped and smarter than Oswald had killed the president, and that Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald was proof.

  Though it was he who had gotten the nation involved in a land war in Vietnam, the cult of John F.
Kennedy as a great president continued to grow, especially in light of the dismal record of his successors: JFK’s war, pursued with fatalistic resolve by Lyndon Johnson, made the Texan so unpopular he declined to run for a second term; a documented racist paranoid, Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency to escape criminal charges; Jimmy Carter proved himself not only incompetent but a self-righteous prig; by his own admission a lying adulterer, Bill Clinton became the first modern American president to be impeached. Though Ronald Reagan was widely respected, the two Bushes who claimed his legacy were and are widely considered to be moronic. Excluding Reagan, who was considered a lightweight when elected and left office in a halo, not one ended his term of office with his reputation intact.

  Shushan Cats remained Shushan Cats, though he mellowed over time. At my mother’s funeral he bonded with the officiating rabbi and gradually became involved with the religion he had all but ignored. To his library he added hundreds of books on Judaism—I know he never shelved a book without reading it—and from time to time even attended synagogue, always on the anniversary of his mother’s death. He became an easy touch for Jewish charities, and began supporting various causes in Israel, especially orphanages. After the Six-Day War he flew to Tel Aviv where he was gratified to discover that Israel Defense Forces training was based almost to the letter on United States Marine Corps doctrine. In 1970 he took me with him for the dedication in the resort town of Netanya of the Goldie Cats Center for Lone Soldiers, a residence for Israeli conscripts who had no homes to return to on leave.

  As though it were no longer worth doing because the challenge was gone, when Shushan was declared not guilty of providing legal protection to illegal businesses he seemed to lose interest in his core enterprise. The Fulton Fish Market remained lucrative, but he had grown out of it. Eventually Shushan set up a security firm manned by ex-cops (among them a couple of retired NYPD detectives who had once fed me pizza) and hired an ex-FBI special agent to run it. He knew how to pick people. Anita Quinones aggressively expanded the business with security contracts for Kennedy Airport, the Port of New York Authority and Amtrak. By now a mere passive investor, twice a year Shushan showed up for board meetings, but that was all.