by Con Lehane
Ntango nodded slowly; his long face and drooping eyes made him look sleepy and slow, but I knew otherwise. He relaxed back into a small chair with round wooden arms and a padded seat and backrest covered in a floral pattern that was a replica of a chair my mother used to sit in to sew. His eyes darkened with sadness. “Once I looked for my father,” Ntango said quietly. “I was eleven. My father was a teacher, an important man in our village. Almost every evening, he went to meetings, of the cooperative, of the village council, sometimes to Asmara to a convention of the union. One day, the government troops came into town, so my father went to a meeting. When he didn’t come home that night after the meeting, my mother went before breakfast the next morning to ask, and she found he had not been to the meeting. She was afraid, but she came back home to us. When she fed my sisters and my brother, I left to look for my father. I walked through the village and asked everyone who knew him. The soldiers stopped me once and told me to go home. But I kept at it all day and went to every single person I saw in the village. Late in the afternoon, I walked out into the countryside. I would have followed the road as far as it went, hundreds of miles to Asmara, to find my father. I knew he was somewhere. I knew he would not leave me. I kept to the road, jumping off whenever I heard or saw anyone, and watching from the brush. When it got dark, I remembered I had not eaten all day. I was afraid of the dark. But I kept thinking my father was somewhere, needing me. Finally, I was so tired, I just sat by the road until I fell asleep. I forgot to hide myself, and I was found by the soldiers, who took me back to my village and delivered me to my mother’s house.” Ntango stopped speaking; he watched the billowing white curtains. I could no longer see his eyes.
I imagined my own father gone, and my search for him; I imagined Kevin searching the city streets and back alleys, looking for me. During most of my waking time, I hid from myself the knowledge that in places all over the world children searched for their parents along dirt roads.
How do you put yourself into someone else’s life? I couldn’t imagine Ntango’s life. I wondered if I could imagine Greg’s. He might be in a room like this one—the walls closing in—wondering what he should do next. He might be a few blocks from me right there in Atlantic City. It’s a good place to hide, this resort city, where the average vacation lasts four hours. When I woke up in the morning, Ntango was dressed and sitting in the same chair, looking out the window toward the ocean. “The meter is running,” he said softly. His mask was back, not an unkind face, not a game face like Robert Parrish’s, but impassive, as if nothing concerned him.
In the Atlantic City public library, my first discovery was that someone had stolen the city directory. There was no listing for Linda in the phone book. She could have left town years ago. This was enough investigating for me, so we headed toward the Atlantic City Journal and my father’s protégée, its managing editor, Sue Gleason.
Ms. Gleason was around my age, not particularly tall, on the stout side, wearing a loose-fitting skirt and blouse, so she looked comfortable and seemed exactly the size and shape she should be. Her movements were quick, whether answering the phone, which rang the moment we approached her desk, or typing into her computer, which she did with the phone receiver tucked up under her chin, saying “Um-hmm” a lot. She gestured with her eyes toward chairs in the cluster of desks around her, so we sat down and waited. Before we’d left the guesthouse that morning, I’d called to tell her who I was, so she smiled at me often during the phone call, as if I were more important than the other things she was doing, even though I had to wait for her to finish them.
When she hung up the phone, we all shook hands. She asked about my father but seemed too involved in the present to be especially wistful for whatever past they’d shared. I told her I’d come back to Atlantic City after a long time away and was looking for people I’d known a long time ago. She wrote the names down as I gave them to her. “Greg Phillips? Linda Moroni? Any of them gamblers? Might any of them work for a casino?” She referred again to her list. “Dr. Charles Wilson? Walter who?” I was afraid she was a little put out as the list got longer, so I didn’t even mention Ernesto or Big John. Unperturbed, she acted as if every day someone came in looking for half a dozen people for no particular reason.
I didn’t want to tell her about Aaron being murdered. But I soon realized she didn’t have much enthusiasm for the chase, so I leveled with her. “A guy was murdered in New York a couple of days ago,” I said. “He used to be my boss down here in Atlantic City—at the old Dockside. And then someone shot me in the leg when I went to talk to this optometrist who knew Greg … . Greg worked at the Dockside, too. I forgot about Walter … .” Here, I got hung up because I didn’t know how she’d handle the drug part, so I skipped over it. “Walter’s Greg’s roommate. We followed him and Wilson to Atlantic City last night … . Wilson’s the optometrist.”
She listened patiently; there was even a spark of interest in her eyes. “What about this Linda Moroni?”
I felt myself blush. “She’s someone I used to know.” I stammered like a fourteen-year-old. “I thought she might have seen Greg or—”
“Why?”
“I don’t know … . I just thought she might have.” Realizing this might sound evasive to someone not right up on my line of thinking, I said, “Let’s just forget her for now.”
“You may have hit a lucky break. The security director at the Claridge used to work at the Dockside—and I know him pretty well. Fortunately for you, he’s obsessive; I don’t think he’s ever thrown anything away.” Sue Gleason reached for the phone again, spoke to the man, and found out he’d kept some files from when the Dockside went out of business. The Dockside had changed owners and then went bankrupt, she explained. The owners skipped town, so Paul kept all the files in case any legal trouble cropped up. He still has them somewhere and he thinks they include a lot of old employee ID pictures. “I gave him the names and he’s going to check. He said to drop by later and he’ll give you what he has. The photos might help if you make the rounds of the casinos looking for any of these people, especially for the girl. You can’t tell about the name; she might have married.”
This gave me pause. The idea of Linda being married knocked me back on my haunches, though I don’t know why it should have. Did I really think she was waiting back there on the porch?
“You could to go to the Cape May county courthouse; look up marriage records for her and property records for her parents. That would take quite a bit of time but might get you going in the right direction.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s not so important.”
Ntango and I watched Sue Gleason go to work again, dialing the phone, typing now and again on her computer, riffling through a Rolodex on her desk. It was as if she had compartmentalized herself so different parts of her could work simultaneously and independently. Still smiling in my direction, she searched through her notes in preparation for something else.
“Uh,” I mumbled.
She replied, “Um” quite distinctly to show she was listening attentively, but she didn’t look up from her notebook.
“My father said we should check the police records.”
“Good idea.” She went for the phone once more. Again, she spoke to a person she seemed to know well. Again, she began writing—writing quite a lot, actually.
She hung up and looked over her list, which, because of the pictures, now included John. “A Wolinski here seems to have made quite a name for himself,” she said. “But not John. Charles, who would be almost seventy now. Maybe a father or uncle?”
She looked at me. I shrugged. It might very well be John’s father Charlie.
“Greg Phillips appears once for assault and battery. Coincidently, I know the man he assaulted—Ralph Ettinger.”
“Ralph?” I said. “He assaulted Ralph?”
She looked up from her notes; for the moment, I had her full attention. “You know Ralph?”
“Do you?”
�
��I did a story on him a few years ago. There’s a building at the far end of Park Place, in the inner city. It has a soup kitchen, a used-clothing store, a radical bookstore, and some offices. He runs an organization called Jobs and Justice for Atlantic City. From there, he launches quixotic sorties against the impregnable casinos and jousts with the city government.”
I knew Ralph from the sixties. He was a red-diaper baby, like me, and a community organizer, who disapproved of my high-roller life around the hotels of Atlantic City. I used to go to some of the demonstrations he organized and was a halfhearted participant in some community-organizing drives. I introduced him to John and Greg and the other hotel people, trying to get them involved in the movement, such as it was, but they didn’t hit it off. Like too many radicals I knew, Ralph was puritanical and disapproving. It sure was curious that he’d get into a fight with Greg.
Cape May Courthouse is twenty or thirty miles south of Atlantic City, back on the mainland. Ntango drove there at a leisurely pace along Route 9, the main north-south road in that neck of the woods before the Garden State Parkway opened in the 1950s. The area hadn’t been much disturbed since, except for an occasional self-storage compound, gas station, or convenience store. The trees were tall and broad, the houses, set back from the road, looked well cared for and comfortable in their setting.
We found the courthouse without much trouble. Leaving Ntango to nap in the cab, I hobbled off. Armed with clear directions from Sue Gleason that I was within my rights and not to take no for an answer, I withstood the bullying of a couple of clerks and began pouring through their records. Linda Moroni was the first name I looked for.
I tried voter-registration records and found Moroni’s on the first shot. Her parents lived on Sixty-seventh Street in Sea Isle City. I didn’t find Greg or any other Phillips. I tried birth certificates and found Linda again, born February 19, 1952, but no birth certificate for Greg. In the marriage-license records, I found Linda once more—on an application for a marriage license, along with Ralph Ettinger.
Alone at a small wooden table next to a large wooden counter, in a large room of dull gray file cabinets and mustiness, I stared at the names for a long time, trying to weather the jolt of disbelief and disappointment that shot through me. Linda loved me. Even though I’d left her, and even though I’d had no plans to see her again until last night, somewhere in the great ocean of foolishness—my unconscious—I’d harbored the expectation that she would be there, still in love with me, when I came back. Ralph? Why would she marry Ralph?
chapter ten
Ntango dropped me off at the Atlantic County Opportunity Center, a three-story rectangular brick buildins—a dead ringer for the parochial school I’d gone to in Brooklyn until fourth grade. Then he went to check with the security director at the Claridge to see if he’d come up with any photos. The front wall of the building listed a number of organizations, each on its own small wooden plank. Jobs and Justice for Atlantic City was on the second floor—a precarious trip for the hobbled, up the worn wooden stairs, but I made it.
In a shabby office with metal desks and filing cabinets, worn wooden floors, curtainless, unwashed industrial-size windows, and faded green walls, I found Ralph Ettinger sitting at a computer. I’d expected a mimeograph machine. His expression, pleasant enough and interested when he looked up from the screen at the thumping of my arrival, clouded with suspicion when he recognized me after a few seconds. Ralph never had much warmth or passion. Steady and unvarying, he kept to his work, without the righteous anger against injustice or the joy of belief that most of us felt in the halcyon days of our vigils for peace and freedom. He’d been an up-and-coming party leader in those days; I didn’t know if he still was. I didn’t know if anyone was anymore.
“Brian McNulty, Ralph,” I said.
He smiled anemically, holding out his hand. I shook it. Having expected a friendly reunion, I felt uncomfortable—the feeling you get when you overstay your welcome and are sober enough to realize it. So I got to the point: I wanted to find Greg and Linda. I didn’t say why.
“I haven’t seen Greg in years,” Ralph said. “He was your friend, not mine. The last I knew of him, he worked at the Sands with Linda when it first opened. Now Linda’s at the Claridge.” I wondered if the flutter of happiness I felt when he mentioned her name was apparent to him. I had a feeling it was.
Trying to make conversation with Ralph was like making small talk with my ex-father-in-law, but I kept trying. He gave me a cup of stale coffee from a stained and discolored Mr. Coffee machine near the wall, sat down on the corner of the desk, and pushed his own chair out for me to sit on.
I asked again when he’d seen Greg last. He didn’t remember. Then I asked him about the assault charge.
This pissed him off. “That was a long time ago,” he said curtly. “I’d rather not go into it.” So he didn’t. I didn’t press him, realizing that, although we’d pretty much kept it under wraps in the old days, Ralph and I disliked each other. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got that Linda had married him. He never asked why I was looking for Greg. And he didn’t tell me that he and Linda were married. But he did give me an address and told me she’d be home. I was glad to leave him behind, and still curious about what had happened between him and Greg.
Ntango was waiting for me in front of the Opportunity Center. The security guy did have pictures, it turned out, of Greg, Linda, John, me, and even Aaron. Ntango gave me the pictures, then dropped me off at the corner of Linda’s street, a few blocks from the ocean, not far from the house that Greg and John once lived in, about a mile over the Margate border. He said he was going to hit the casino again and would meet me back at the rooming house—if I could get there myself, which I assured him I could. Propelling myself down the quiet street on my crutches, I pretended I was the wounded war hero limping home. The houses on the street looked the same: small single-story bungalows, white, blue, or yellow, all of them cozy—the real estate term for cramped.
Linda’s house sat on a plot of small round polished white stones, which is what passes for a lawn in that part of the country. There were few trees along the street, and those were scrawny and weirdly shaped by the elements; in Linda’s front yard, one twisted scrub pine on one side and one bayberry bush on the other served as shrubbery. The sparse terrain was nature’s way of reminding the inhabitants that barrier islands belong to the sea, not to them.
She was waiting at the door. Her eyes as bright and her smile as beguiling as I remembered. Whatever it was that had captivated me years before hadn’t faded. To stop myself from gawking, I put out my hand to shake hers. She took it and held it. Then she came into my arms and kissed me on the lips. The kiss was quick and light, but lingered for just a second.
Her eyes sparkled, her lips were faintly red with lipstick, her cheeks flushed. She wore a blue summer dress and was as slim as she was as a girl. Being near her felt the same as when I first knew her, during the nights we talked for hours on the boardwalk and the days we walked on the dunes. She loved me then without illusion and with no pretense. Because I had come from the radical movement, she saw me as someone who, like her, rejected falsity, though I’m sure I wasn’t as honest with her—or myself—as either of us thought then.
“Oh, Brian, I always knew you’d come back.”
“I wish I’d known,” I said.
She held my hand; her eyes were as blue as the sky. “I want to know all about you.” She tugged at me, almost pulling me off my crutches. “Come in. What happened to your leg?”
“Nothing serious.” I followed her inside to a boring brown-and-beige living room, the kind you might expect to find in this one-story bungalow. What gave the place life was that it was cluttered with the paraphernalia of infancy: a stroller, a plastic walker, a playpen—nowadays called a play yard, in an attempt to belie its true nature—various oddly shaped, brightly colored objects of no particular purpose—and, in my limited experience, of no particular interest to infants—a
contoured seat of a size to fit the baby, and a number of rubber ducks and rabbits that squeaked when I either stepped or sat on them.
“The baby’s asleep,” Linda advised me as she led me to the couch and took my crutches. She spoke the word baby adoringly, despite her attempt to be offhanded.
“You married Ralph.” I said, more accusingly than I’d expected to. Already, I felt as if time stood still and I’d never gone away.
Her eyes twinkled as she looked at me through her long eyelashes. “What’d you expect me to do? Wait for you?”
I stared at her.
Sitting down next to me on the couch, she stroked my hair. “Oh, Brian, we could have had four or five babies by now if you’d only stayed.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. My heart was pounding. I didn’t know why I hadn’t stayed with her. I was crazy during that time. Just divorced, with a kid in Brooklyn whom I hadn’t seen in months, I didn’t know why I did anything. Things I wouldn’t do now had seemed right then.
“Ralph waited for me for a long time. He was as patient as you should have been.”
We fell back into talking as easily as we used to. We were attuned in a special way. If we hadn’t seen each other for twenty years, we still would have been perfectly at ease together.
“You seem happy.”
“I am,” said Linda, her eyes glowing. “And you?” She sounded mildly sympathetic. “Are you still unhappy?”
She touched my arm. The openness of her affection confused me. It was as if we were beginning a romance. But I should have known better. Linda wouldn’t stop caring for me once she’d begun. She wouldn’t hide her caring, either. I’d spent three months with her, and she’d engulfed me with such passion that I’d run away.
