And each night Rose begged her not to do it. “The Cossacks vill get you!” she said. “We come to zhis country to get away from zhis Jewish business, and here you go with zhis prayink all zhe night long, every day?”
But every time Frances watched the flame flicker from the draft that always made its way in through the kitchen window, she was confronted by her father and then by the loss of him.
For many years Frances paid off the burial—she would not have her father buried in Potter’s Field, where the poor of the earth met again beneath it. Lucky for her, the funeral director also happened to be in need of a letter writer—he wanted all of Europe to know of his grand success as a mortician in America. A deal was struck between them. He wanted the letters to be written in English so all would know he was a real American. And if they had to pay someone else to read the letter for them? So be it.
“An eye for an eye?” the mortician said in Yiddish, winking at Franny. And then: “You don’t want to let your father go under without a shining Star of David on the coffin, now do you? And, Frances,” he said, “you want it to be bronze, yes?”
In losing the two people closest to her, Frances’s already split-apart self began to divide further, a fork in a country road. Slowly, slowly, after the nightly minyan, the stories upon stories, slowly Frances Verdonik veered away from herself and headed into the horizon, toward Franny Gold.
At the end of that year of grief, eighteen-year-old Franny lit a yahrtzeit for her father, put the plaque down on the earth in memoriam, and stood up from placing a stone on the cold marble. She went to the candy store and sat at her station, watching cruel Etta torment her clients. She smiled at her own patrons, keeping her head down low, not knowing that the moment she looked up, the next person in line she smiled at would alter her life forever.
Chapter 8
Caught: Seymour Bloom, 1929
AS JOSEPH BRODSKY WAS struggling on the road, and Frances Verdonik was making a name for herself as the Gold Letter Writer, Seymour Bloom was making heaps of money in the Terrier’s liquor distributing organization.
Even after having their first child, Dulcy, a pleasant enough girl who Seymour thought would surely divert his wife’s melancholy, Sarah still seemed to be slipping away. Slipping away from him and also from herself, he worried on one of the nights Mary came to him with another of many of his wife’s unsent letters, this one found crumpled beneath her writing desk.
According to Mary, who spent most of her hours with the Blooms’ first child in that brownstone on Seventy-first and East End, Sarah painted her lips strumpet red, grabbed her long cigarette holder, and sneaked down into the basement to dance. Just as Seymour had entered his own underworld, Sarah too was spending an inordinate amount in her own place belowground.
Seymour wasn’t home much by day, and there were many nights that the Terrier insisted Seymour accompany him out.
“Now, Sy,” the Terrier would say, when Seymour paused for an instant. “It’s why I brought you in. As polished as Rothstein, you are. They love you! If you only enjoyed yourself, my friend, you could be one of the cheeses.”
But there was little Seymour liked about being involved in the Mob aside from the money. Would it be more enjoyable to be higher up, to be the one to delegate? Sure, but Seymour didn’t see himself in it for life, at least if that choice was still his. Those evenings after playing cards with the boys, all of them scheming to get more money to expand operations, each overtipping the cigarette girls to be remembered as a hero, he’d be anxious to return home only to be met by a closed, dark house. Sarah would already be in their room with the door shut tight. Seymour would make his way up the shadowy stairs, hovering outside the door, deciding whether or not to enter. In pool halls and smoky rooms and clubs and casinos, in all of Manhattan, people sought Seymour out just to shake his hand. He snapped his fingers and the world was his world. And here he was, terrified to enter his own bedroom.
As he hesitated at the door, without fail Seymour would think of Sarah and how she had stretched out her hand to that fortune-teller’s on Coney Island, before they were married. They had laughed their way from the boardwalk into this woman’s tent, and she had instantly stilled them both with her terrible black gypsy eyes. Your life line is long but it is barely visible, she had told Sarah. This is the worst kind. Who wants to live like that? she had said. Sarah had been unable to look at Seymour, and he had watched her throw her head back and laugh, pooh-poohing her fortune. I am sad for you, the gypsy had said as Sarah ducked out of the tent, pulling Seymour right behind her. He had not known to whom the fortune-teller had been speaking.
Mary had tried to warn Seymour, but he had not wanted to listen. As far as he was concerned, what Sarah did all day and where she was getting her liquor—from his own stash in the basement saved for the times when the ship sailing across the Atlantic would not make it to shore—was only hearsay.
Thank you, Mary, he’d say calmly when she told him she was worried about how Mrs. Bloom was spending her time. That will be all, Mary, he would tell her.
Seymour found out precisely what Sarah had been doing with her time on a brilliant autumn day when the ship hauling liquor from England didn’t make it to Long Island. Seymour had made promises; he had orders to fill. One of these orders was going to an Italian restaurant in Murray Hill with a rather mean proprietor named Manny Mannicelli, who hated using the Jews to get his liquor but, because of the strange affinity between the Jews—the brains—and the Italians—the brawn—was forced to use the Greenberg-Terrier-Rothstein operation. That day Manny received several bottles of cut whiskey, shipped directly from the Bloom basement, where Sarah had only days before been kicking up dust as if she were at a country dance on a Saturday night. When Manny Mannicelli served the watered-down spirits to some very special patrons, the shit truly hit the fan.
Seymour was called many names that evening by both the Italians and the Eastern Europeans, and his life was threatened in Italian and Yiddish, mostly for what he would not admit to, which was that he had cut his liquor and had not served one of his best clients the real stuff.
“I did no such thing, Terrier,” Seymour said into the receiver, holding his head high in his own defense. “I am sorry to hear that this has happened,” he said in the slow and measured way he always spoke. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll see you tonight.” When Seymour hung up the telephone, his fingers lighted on the receiver for a long pause.
Sarah, who had stood in the dark hallway, trembling, listening in on the conversation, crept into the light. “Dearest,” she said, which startled Seymour, as he had rarely—had he ever?—heard this groveling tone in his wife’s voice. “Perhaps I can clear things up for you.”
She told him about her afternoons in the basement. “I like to go down there all dressed up and be alone,” she said. She explained the way those crates waited for her, calling when she was merely brushing out her hair, sitting at the vanity. She told her husband how she sipped at the liquor tentatively, all dressed up and strung with long strands of fake pearls, enjoying the burn of the liquor as it traveled through her, as if it left a path of fire in its wake. But what would begin for Sarah in the late morning as the jitterbug would turn by early evening into a wash of silence and grief.
“I pretend.” She told her husband not only about what she did but about what she had been meant to do. “I thought I was going to be an actress. I thought I would act on the stage, Seymour!” she said, her lips trembling. “Since school this is what Celia and I told ourselves. That we would be actors.”
Seymour listened patiently as his wife recalled her years in college.
“Gosh, I remember the leaves turning, that lovely smell of school starting, girls out in the quad, books pressed to their chests, running off to Latin and the Victorian Novel and Astronomy. And in the evening, the chaos of the dorm, all of us signing out on our way to mixers, Amherst boys downstairs in queues that seemed to reach all the way to the moon. My life was going to be
beautiful,” Sarah told him. “It was going to contain everything.”
Seymour had had enough. Fine, she had wanted to be an actor, and her talent was not exactly being utilized here, in this house, but the bit about the college boys was just plain cruel. Seymour did not have an education, he knew, but his wife had been tricked by hers, it seemed to him. It had made her believe her dreams were possible. For a brief moment, he felt sympathy for her: Why send a girl to school? he thought now. For what? To show her who she’ll never have the chance to be? It was criminal really. The Terrier should wave his gun around somewhere about it.
Dreams? Until he’d married Sarah, Seymour had not even had the opportunity to have them, let alone try to make them come true.
But why he had married a woman with so many thoughts was beyond him. He had not signed on for all this neurotic business. And though he knew exactly what had transpired—he had known it from the moment he received the call from the Terrier—Seymour wanted to hear it, once and for all. “That’s all well and fine, Sarah,” he said, “but what does it have to do with what has happened to the liquor?”
“I’ve been taking small tastes,” his wife said. “Little, itty-bitty ones, over time. And I’ve been topping the bottles off with water. That’s all,” she said.
Seymour knew she had taken more than delicate sips; he knew that a third of the liquor in some of the bottles had been replaced by water. A little cutting was always expected, but this had been dramatic. Had she done this because she’d been too high to think clearly? he wondered. Or was his wife trying to sabotage him?
“Do you know this could get us killed, Sarah?”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “What kind of work do you do that a little water in the liquor can get you murdered? Huh, Seymour?”
He clenched his jaw but was silent.
“This isn’t the life I had planned, Seymour,” she told him. “You have not given me the life I’d imagined.”
He looked at her blankly. “I can see you are very sorry,” he said.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“Me too,” he said, looking out the window to the street, where one of the Terrier’s drivers was pulling his town car up in front of the brownstone.
Seymour leaned over the driver’s seat. “Where are we headed?” he asked calmly.
The driver looked straight ahead, turning off Seventy-second and onto Park.
If Seymour had been anxious about what a night spent out with the Terrier would hold before this incident, he was filled now with total dread. He sat back and placed his fedora over his face as they made their way through town, to Brooklyn, Seymour was sure. The nights he hadn’t been out with the boys, the infamous incidents they all talked about over craps and cigars now turned in Seymour’s mind into cautionary tales: Luciano, left for dead on the docks last month waiting for his heroin to come in. Heroin, Seymour thought now. Christ. How had he gotten into this? Luciano had been pistol-whipped, ice-picked, his face cut to hamburger meat. But he survived, Seymour thought. Lived to tell it, which is why we call him Lucky, right? Would he want to survive such a thing? Which would be worse for his daughter, Seymour found himself weighing: to have a damaged father or no father at all? And then there was Joe Bernstein, who’d run the “bottling” company where the liquor the Terrier brought in was really cut, where all the fake labels were manufactured. Bernstein had been hijacked while driving to a vacant warehouse, a prospective new factory, just last year, and still no one had found his body.
Seymour didn’t even know what Bernstein had done. Had the Terrier been behind poor Bernstein’s disappearance? It would be difficult to imagine otherwise. Everything was connected, as intertwined as family, as ivy, as roses: punch someone in the gut here, over there, across the river, someone else bends over from the pain.
The ride was far shorter than Seymour expected. The driver stopped at Forty-seventh Street, in front of the St. Francis Hotel. The short ride in itself was a good sign, he thought as he made his way slowly through the crowded lobby, downstairs, and into the back room, where he had played craps on countless nights. Seven members were gathered around the craps table, the Terrier facing the door, when Seymour walked in. His heart banging like a succession of gunshots in his chest. And yet Seymour was greeted as if nothing had happened. “Hello, hello, no Broadway show tonight?” they teased. “Make you feel better if we do a little soft shoe for ya?” Mad Marty Mendel said, sticking his leg out from under the table and pulling up an invisible skirt. Seymour laughed uneasily, his eyes darting around the room. He waited for a door to open, and for chopper-wielding henchmen to storm in and take him out in high drama.
But it didn’t happen, not when they invited him to sit down, not after the cigars were cut, the cards dealt, the whiskey poured, the chips stacked. Not when the dawn crept in through the tiny basement windows. That’s when the Terrier scooted his chair out from under the table and called it a game, gathering up the slips of paper with all the money owed him.
He turned to Seymour. “Goy,” he said. “Did you take the booze for yourself? Did you double-cross me?”
“No.” Seymour looked around the table, from one man to the next. “I did not,” he said. His heart was racing, and he surprised even himself when he heard his own cool voice.
The room was silent but for the sound of Fender Face puffing his cigar.
The Terrier nodded at the sagging faces; they all nodded back at him. “Everyone is entitled to one honest mistake.” The Terrier held up a pudgy finger, dirt or blood beneath the nail—which, Seymour couldn’t tell. “One.”
Seymour shook his head. He waited in the terrible silence that always preceded the sounds he recognized: a knife sliding open, the slow cocking of a gun. Outside a car door slammed. Who else was coming?
“That’s that,” the Terrier said, brushing his hands together. Then suddenly, he smacked Seymour on the back of his head, hard.
Seymour’s ears rang, and he closed his eyes for a moment. He thought of his mother walking out the door in Brownsville into the screaming, violent street; he thought of Sarah rolling back and forth on her silk sheets. Seymour opened his eyes. “Okay then,” he said, bowing to the table he’d just lost two thousand dollars on, and, cutting his losses, he turned to go home.
Seymour fixed it with Mannicelli, assuring him that diluting the product was an honest mistake and not something of which he made a practice. He waived the fee and arranged for double the order from everyone else’s basement the next day. And the following day, Seymour special-ordered a liquor from southern Switzerland, where the juniper berry was abundant. He decided on gin for Sarah because it was a more feminine drink than those dark bourbons, but also because it was a clear liquid that could be imperceptibly diluted with water. And if he couldn’t see it disappear, well then, it hadn’t disappeared. If how much she consumed was in direct relation to her unhappiness, then Seymour wished not to see those proportions.
Seymour would never know if the reason Sarah started drinking outside the house was that she had been discovered drinking in it or that, as Dulcy grew older, it got far more difficult to sneak downstairs without the little girl howling her way out of Mary’s arms and toward her mother’s resistant embrace. Though Seymour had not asked, he had been told by Celia’s husband, Ed Wolfsheim, that the two took their martinis at the Plaza in the afternoons. Ed was an attorney who had once represented Rothstein and had made a name for himself by telling the boss to say not a word in his own defense. No one had ever pleaded the Fifth before, and the case had gone straight to the Supreme Court.
Despite his good fortune, Ed, like Seymour, had married an unhappy Smith girl. Though the two men rarely spoke of their wives, once in a while bits and pieces of information filtered through. “I think they go to the Plaza on Wednesdays,” Ed told Seymour. “A special room in the basement they’ve got over there. I don’t really give a damn, but what if someone sees them?”
“So what?” Seymour said. “Who would see?”
It seemed to him that Sarah spent an inordinate amount of time belowground.
“Sy,” Ed said. “You gotta get more savvy, you wanna stay in this business. They get caught drinking in this town, you’ll lose your backing. Trust me.”
Seymour shook his head in disbelief. This was why he could never be a businessman in earnest. He never saw the glitches that were sure to occur around each bend in this endless road. He foresaw the problems only as they presented themselves. “If you say so,” he responded.
“I do,” Ed said. “I say so. You’re crazy if you don’t think the Feds are after the Terrier and Greenberg for anything and everything. Drinking is not legal, remember? This is why you’re making so much jack. And this is why I hang around with you, just in case you might need my services.”
“So should we have them followed?”
“Followed?”
“Yeah. Scare them up a bit?” Seymour said.
Ed laughed. “Why not?” he said.
Seymour Bloom would never be able to explain to himself why he did not hire someone else to follow his wife. He could even have paid the concierge—who he did not know was already paid by Sarah to guarantee her and her friend anonymity in the secret bar beneath the Plaza Hotel lobby—or one of Rothstein’s shotgun riders, even some nobody just dying to pitch one of his brilliant ideas, anyone to tell him when his wife arrived, when she left, and to scare her out of ever doing it again.
Instead, something he didn’t recognize in himself—love, revenge, anger, violence, it all felt the same to him now—brought him to the Plaza that following Wednesday, five months after Sarah had almost gotten him killed for siphoning off the bourbon.
When the car dropped him in front of the Plaza Hotel, Seymour crossed Fifty-ninth Street to Central Park. The carriages beckoned him, the horses stomping their feet and snorting, shaking their heads to try to free themselves from their bridles. It was sad, really, how these horses were now used mostly for people’s enjoyment. He remembered back in Brooklyn, how the horses pulled carts through the street, carrying ice and dry goods. They pulled the fire wagons. And Jesus, did they crap everywhere. Seymour remembered whole streets devoted to the manure, and the stench of urine on humid days. But the horses were useful then. Now, to work them this way for pure entertainment seemed cruel.
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