by Hesh Kestin
Of course he continued to make money, the losses in Cuba covered handily by shrewd purchases of huge tracts in Orlando, Las Vegas and the Dominican Republic. He spent an hour each day investigating opportunities in the stock market, early on diversifying to foreign shares because he suspected, rightly, the dollar would fall. Most of his time was devoted to charity.
He supported reading programs in the public schools and backed politicians in both parties who agreed to promote laws providing grants for underprivileged university students. He wrote checks with a consistency that was unique even then, thoroughly researching each field. But he was also a soft touch—according to Terri, an easy mark—who could never turn away a panhandler or a former colleague down on his luck or a medical researcher with a sure cure for cancer, heart disease, diabetes or even illnesses of which Shushan had never heard. When Jack Ruby died it was Shushan who paid for his stone at Westlawn Cemetery in Chicago.
He paid for the alteration of my mother’s monument as well, thus obliterating the engraved lie I had lived with since I was five. All remained the same but for a single date: my mother died the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
“I didn’t hear of it,” Shushan told me on the way to the cemetery in the back of a long slate-gray limo, Ira following in the Eldorado with Myra, Justo, Terri and Darcie. “I was in Dallas. The people from the place, the private hospital whatever, upstate, they were under orders never to talk to anyone but me. Not even Ira. Justo knew, but Justo is a one-way sponge. Justo wouldn’t tell your friend Professor del Vecchio the guy himself was a fag if I told Justo it was a secret. Your mom’s thing, it was confidential. I probably wouldn’t have known for a while except that when it happened I called Justo from Dallas. We were both shocked, Justo that I was alive and kicking and me that your mom, you know, she wasn’t. I’ll tell you, your mom was put away for fifteen years. Every month after your old man died I paid the bill, and every month they’d give the same report, word for word: Sheila is in excellent health. You know, except for being not right in the head. So I never expected she’d just... die.”
“How not right?”
“It’s like she was burned out in the brain. Sealed up. You could talk to her and she wouldn’t answer. Then when you were in the middle of something, tipping a nurse to take special care of her or just getting ready to leave, she’d start talking a mile a minute.”
“You went up to see her?”
“Twice a year. Maybe I should have gone more. But that was your father’s schedule. I kept to it.”
“He went hunting.”
“Is that what he said?”
“Twice a year. But he never bagged anything. Never caught as much as a rabbit. I always thought it was odd, because he was a good shot. A terrific shot. Very steady hand. When I got older I figured it was some woman. Officially he never dated. I figured he didn’t want me to know.”
“He had a date with your mom.”
“Some date, Shushan.”
“Yeah, she wasn’t exactly a live wire.”
“You said she talked.”
“Nobody could ever figure it out. It was all unconnected words, like she went into a dictionary at random and picked out unrelated words. I knew when she got worse because after a while it wasn’t even words, just syllables like, then just sounds, not speech at all.” He looked away. “She used profanity. In the midst of all these nonsense sounds you’d hear fuck and bullshit and cocksucker. I’m no nun, but it was unsettling.”
“Tell me about my father.”
“What do you want to know? He was a good man.”
“Was he on the take?”
“You have to understand the circumstances.”
“You’re saying they were right, that he was crooked?”
“Crooked, shmooked,” Shushan said, suddenly interested in something outside the car, then turning back. “Your mom was sick.”
“That’s a very intimate word, mom.”
“Your mother was sick. He couldn’t leave her alone, not with a little kid. He put her in Bellevue, it’s a public hospital, but when he went in there he knew he had to get her out. He found this place upstate. They have deer that come right up to the porch to eat out of your hand. The people up there they don’t even talk about unemployment—there’s no jobs period, no industry, no business to be unemployed from. Believe me, they get a paycheck at this hospital they stick. They’d be crazy to be anything but wonderful to the patients. They call them guests, if you can believe. A solid move on your father’s part. But it wasn’t free. Suddenly your father, as straight a shooter as there ever was, he finds himself all jammed up for cash. Monthly. For a civil servant, this was a heavy nut. He did what he had to do.”
“He came to you.”
“A good thing. I mean, he could have gone to the Tintis, or worse. I heard him out and told him, Mike, I got a little foundation that can help out. He tells me, Mr. Cats, with all respect for your generosity, I don’t take charity. It was a Mexican stand-off for a while, like two guys arguing over a restaurant check. In the end what could I do? I put him to work.”
“As?”
“Whatever came up.”
“For instance.”
“For instance if somebody got out of line.”
“My father was five-five in his elevator shoes.”
“I’m five-seven. So what. You think people are more scared of me or Ira? Ira is a bruiser. Us little guys, we compensate.”
“What else?”
“What else what?”
“What else did my father do for you?”
“This and that, no special thing. Whatever came up. I trusted him pretty much from the start.”
“You don’t want to tell me.”
“Details? Kid, it’s ancient history. I can’t even remember myself. Nothing bad. Just normal activities. When your father passed, I kind of took over the responsibility upstate.”
“You took over.”
“What was I going to do, look away? They would have dumped her out to a state institution. You don’t want to know about places like that. People laying in their own filth. It was nothing for me. I mean, what am I supposed to do with all this money, buy more cars? I got a dozen suits.” He looked down at mine. “Well, minus three. How many do I need? I live in a fucking hotel for crying out loud. Top-of-the-line Caddy. Eat in the best places. Vacation wherever I like. I want a book I buy it. I even got the best lawyer, or at least the most expensive.”
“But you went up twice a year.”
“A drive in the country. Nothing strenuous. Anyway, Ira did all the work.”
“But he doesn’t know.”
“Ira knows what he’s supposed to know. Justo knew because he paid the bills. Terri, I talked about it with her. But outside of that, zip. What am I supposed to do, take out an ad in the New York Times? Let me tell you something, kid. There’s some things I did, in my early days especially, I’m not so proud of. That’s when I made my reputation as someone not to fool with. So those things I’m not so proud of, I figure they actually put me in a position to help other people, maybe they didn’t have the advantages I had, like it says in that book when you made fun of me, The Great Gatsby. But from the beginning I realized that if I did good things and told people I was doing them it wasn’t pure. It was advertising myself. Promotion. Believe me, I know that when you’re in the same position, and I expect you may be because you’re smart and ambitious and people trust you, then you’ll probably do the same.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“For what?”
“Taking care of my... mom.”
He waved it off, then let out a long, slow sigh.
“You knew it was me,” I said.
“Hmmm?”
“At the Bhotke Society. You knew it was me.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“But you never made contact before that. You didn’t come to my father’s funeral, or visit me during the shiva.”
“What was I going to do
, show up at the cemetery? Hello, kid. I’m a friend of your father’s. All that stuff he told you, that they threw him off the force because he was too straight, that the cops on the take wanted him out, all that was a lie? Your father’s friend turns out to be the so-called notorious Shoeshine Cats.” He lit a Lucky out of his pocket. “You want one?”
“No.”
“Better you didn’t know. I’ll tell you. Like you never had a mother I never had a father. So like all kids in that kind of situation I made stuff up. I said my father was the bravest, strongest, best father before God took him away. You know who took him away? I found out in my mother’s things. She kept a diary on paper scraps. In Yiddish. I got it translated. I went to this stranger, a rabbi in Jersey I never met before in my life, and said here’s my mother’s diary. I’ll give a contribution to anything you name, but if you tell anyone what’s in it I’ll cut your dick off and stuff it in your mouth and they’ll find you that way on the street in front of your synagogue. God didn’t take my father. A broad did. Some whore. Or maybe not. Maybe she was the image of virtue. For me the same. Anyway, I heard he died out west, Albuquerque or something.” He rolled down the window and tossed out the butt. “So what was I going to do, spoil your dreams? What kind of man would do that to a...?”
“To an orphan.”
“Yeah, so what. We’re all orphans, eventually.”
We rode in silence for a while until we reached the gates of Beth David. In a matter of moments I would once again stand before the conjoined graves of my parents. I considered not asking, then did. “A question. It’s... serious.”
“About Dallas?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not interested in Dallas.”
He smiled, a wan almost bitter smile, part appreciation, part regret. “Okay,” he said. “Fire away.”
“Why does someone fake his own kidnapping, his own apparent murder? The blood on the seat. The bullet holes. You were coming back, so why do that?”
He laughed so hard the limo driver turned around, hearing it even through the glass partition. “You got a good head on your shoulders, kid. I’ll say that.”
“It just doesn’t make sense.”
He looked past me to the orderly ranks of the dead as the limo made its way slowly to the Bhotke plots, reached into his pocket, pulled out another Lucky, stuck it resolutely into his mouth, then removed it. He rolled down the window and tossed it out. “I didn’t expect to come back,” he said quietly. “I probably wouldn’t have. I got some property in Mexico, beachfront. Some time I’ll take you down. Cuba I like better. But Mexico, I could live there quietly. I got a Mexican passport even. You can just buy them. And I was tired. Really tired, kid. Money, I got plenty. I’m forty-two years old. I could be your father. I didn’t want to die doing what I was doing. I wanted a fresh start. Very few men can have that. But I could. What do I have? Friends? Justo could live without me. Ira the same. Professional associates? Don’t make me laugh. No wife, no kids. Just Terri. And I’ll tell you, I didn’t even know if I’d let her know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Then I got word.”
I saw it in his eyes. “My mother died.”
“Yeah,” Shushan Cats said. “She sure did.”
“You came back for me.”
“Look at that crowd. Must be everybody we know. Plus the press. One thing I wouldn’t miss, the press.”
“You came back for me.”
“Russy,” he said, looking out through the limousine’s tinted windows at the small piece of real estate that was all that remained of Bhotke, where my family and Shushan’s had originated—Floris in his case, but close enough. Through the glass I could see the society members, Shushan’s professional associates, maybe three hundred people. Behind us the Eldorado pulled up, its wide doors opening to let out Justo and Terri and Darcie and Myra and Ira. “Russy, I was alone in this world a long time,” he said finally. “Nobody should be alone.”
The rest of that morning had all the implausible clarity of a dream, and as with a dream its details faded fast while its effect managed to be both imponderable and clear, something lost that remains forever, its absence more permanent than its presence—tactile, palpable, real. I can recall every face, even those who are now themselves passed on, but nothing of what was said, by me or by anyone else, remains. Except this.
At the end of the service, after I had shoveled in the first spade of dirt and stood aside to watch the others as they filled the raw pit, a young woman approached. She was wheeling a baby in a small carriage on the grassy, uneven ground. Short, dark and full-breasted, she reached out and touched my sleeve. “You don’t know me?” she said, not a question but a fact.
“I...”
“Marie-Antonetta Provenzano,” she said shyly. “Bork now. We sort of dated, in high school.”
So she was. The Italian goddess of my youth who had moved away, leaving me with adolescent heartbreak, unmitigated longing and a solid appreciation for the language that may have saved my life. “Wow,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, rocking the carriage. “Wow.”
“And you have a kid.”
“Three,” she said. “Actually.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“Eddie, my husband, he’s watching Eddie Jr. and little Anthony. I saw about the funeral on TV. I’ve been following your career. Actually.”
“Career?”
“You know, what you’ve been doing. How you became a gangster and all.”
I gave her a smile, the best I could do. “It’s nice of you to come.”
“I don’t live far,” she said.
“It’s been great seeing you, Marie-Antonetta.” Then I compounded the lie. “You haven’t changed at all.”
“You neither,” she said, drifting off into the crowd as though she had never lived, while I remained, my past transmuted, my future marvelously unwritten, my present turbulent, uncertain, yet for all of that rock-steady, anchored, secure. The first twenty years of our lives shape who and what we are. Call me lucky: these were mine.
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Table of Contents
The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats
