Shadow of Ashland, A Witness to Life, and St. Patrick's Bed

by Terence M. Green

  The bottle passed to Jack. He had it to his lips when I said, “I know about Toledo.”

  He stopped, lowered the bottle.

  The men in the dank underworld studied him. Jack looked both bewildered and sheepish.

  I shrugged. “We all learn. It’s okay.”

  Jack didn’t look at me.

  “Who’s right, who’s wrong … What to do … Sometimes it isn’t so clear …” I thought of my own life, of things that I didn’t want to discuss, decisions I had made, things that embarrassed me when I remembered them.

  Jack looked up, his face puzzled.

  I stared hard at Stanley Matusik. “Who’ll be hurt? Anybody in town? Neighbors?”

  “No,” he said. “We ain’t gonna drill safety deposit boxes. Nothin’ personal like that. Just cash. All insured. Nobody’ll be hurt.”

  I nodded. It was madness. All of it. The idea. The tunnel. The Scott Hotel. My presence here.

  All of it.

  “I’m in,” I said.

  Stanley smiled.

  Jack looked at me in wonder.

  George was sitting on an overturned orange crate in the middle of the mud. “I once walked twenty-five miles looking for a job. Made it all the way to Portsmouth. Stopped at every store, every house, knocked and asked. Mostly, nobody’d talk to me.” He shook his head. “Had to hitch home. Lost twelve pounds. Gettin’ too old.”

  “Back in thirty-two,” said Henry, “I was with a crowd of folks in Charleston. Men and women. We raided a grocery store near City Hall. We was all arrested. Twenty-six of us.”

  “My little boy died,” said Emmett. “Scarlet fever.” His lips moved, but nothing else came out. He fell silent.

  “Somethin’s wrong,” said George, frowning. “Something’s bad wrong.”

  “Money’ll come in Friday, the twelfth. Bank’ll be full all weekend. Leaves on the Monday. It’s the same every month. We seen it, like clockwork,” Stanley said.

  “I’m not following.”

  “Comes in by train,” he explained patiently, “from Huntington, Charleston, Bluefield, Roanoke. Stays the weekend. Goes on down to Lexington, Louisville. Ends up in Cincinnati, in a big goddamn bank. Bigger’n this one.” “How much?”

  Stanley shrugged. “Depends. We got folks tell us some months it gets as high as four hundred thousand. Others, bad months, two-fifty, maybe three.”

  “Whose money is it?”

  Jack smiled. He looked at Stanley.

  “Barbara’s,” Stanley said.

  I know my lips parted because I found myself closing them quickly.

  “Barbara Hutton. Woolworth heiress.”

  I pictured Jeanne, then Teresa, behind the counter.

  “Poor little rich girl,” he said.

  “She’s got more stores than you or I got hairs on our head,” said Stanley. “There’s a Woolworth’s in every town in America. Some got two, three of ’em. Ashland’s got five.”

  “More’n a thousand throughout the country.” Jimmy wiped his hand across his brow as he spoke, streaking the dirt. “Even up there in Canada, I hear,” he said, looking at me closely.

  I remembered the one at Yonge and Eglinton. I remembered the one at Queen and Yonge. Carlton and Yonge. The Danforth.

  “Newspapers say she inherited forty-five million dollars,” George said.

  “I heard sixty-five million,” said Emmett.

  I looked at Jack. “She won’t miss it,” he said. “Nobody’s hurt.” Then he added, meeting my eyes: “Ain’t like Toledo.”

  “Is this it?” I asked. “How many are in on this?”

  “There are others,” said Stanley. “They give us information, tools, lumber.” He was silent for a moment. “You don’t need to know, Leo.”

  I looked into the tunnel. It went in sixty, eighty, a hundred feet. I couldn’t tell. “How close are you?”

  “We’ll be there by the fourteenth,” said Stanley. He stepped in front of me. “We could use another strong back, just to be sure.”

  “This is crazy,” I said. “You’ll never do it. It’s too much digging. Too far.”

  “My daddy was part of a crew cut a tunnel ten miles long one way, then twenty-three miles t’other,” said Stanley. “Had to get ’round a ridge. He traveled ’bout five miles a day on his knees.”

  I studied the firm set of their faces again.

  Crazy, I thought, completely exhilarated.

  Then my head was dizzy with other faces: my mother, my father, my grandfather, Nanny, Jack Radey, my brothers and sisters. Jeanne and Adam.

  Aidan.

  TEN

  Wednesday, October 10, 1934

  The next morning, Stanley, Jack and I sipped coffee on the veranda of the Scott Hotel. It was only eight o’clock, but the sun was already warming.

  “You know much about Barbara?” Stanley asked.

  “Some. Not much,” I said.

  “She got the inheritance last November. ’Bout a year ago.”

  “You read about her comin’-out party?” asked Jack.

  “Don’t remember,” I said.

  “When she was eighteen.” He thought for a moment. “Would be nineteen thirty. Was in all the papers and magazines.”

  I shrugged, smiled.

  “Was at the Ritz-Carlton in New York. A thousand guests. Maurice Chevalier, Rudy Vallee, three other orchestras.”

  “For her, there weren’t no Prohibition or Depression,” said Stanley. “Was thousands of bottles of champagne, the papers said.”

  I began to realize the degree of people’s obsession with her as I listened.

  “Had flowers and trees flown in special from both coasts.”

  “Eucalyptus trees, from California,” said Jack.

  I had read once how farmers there during the Depression planted mile-long windbreaks of eucalyptus to keep the plowed topsoil from blowing away.

  “One night only,” said Stanley, emphasizing the point with his index finger. “Party for a little girl. Cost fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Two hundred fifty million dollars in sales in nineteen thirty-two for the company,” Jack said. “She got married last year. Wore jewelry worth one million dollars. They say her lace lingerie for her weddin’ night was made by a dozen nuns. Cost twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Speedboats, Argentinean polo ponies, the White Russian choir, European honeymoon,” added Stanley. He paused. “All we wanted was union wages.”

  “Nobody’ll be hurt,” said Jack, his blue eyes sparkling, a missionary zeal spreading across his face. And he smiled that smile. “Drop in the bucket,” he said.

  “Only problem we might run into is rain,” said Stanley.

  I looked at him, listened.

  “Rain and tunnels, they don’t mix. Get a lot of it, could weaken the ground. Too much of it, could flood.” He sipped his coffee, thought for a minute. “Been lots of flooding in this town. People in Ashland still talk about the big one of nineteen thirteen.” He nodded toward the north. “River rose up. Happened in eighteen eighty-four, too, they say. Whole town went underwater two or three feet.”

  We all looked into the east, looked at the sky.

  Later that evening, I dug with them, in the mud beneath the streets of Ashland. The shovel in my hands was real, but the sensation of being beneath the earth, buried treasure and Rosetta Stone lying in wait somewhere ahead of us, was not.

  “My little girl, Jenny, she got typhoid last year,” said Henry. “All her hair fell out. She’s just turned eight years old this summer. Went through the school year bald-headed.” He wheezed a load of dirt to one side. “Couldn’t afford no wig for her. Leastways, no wig worth wearin’. Place in Louisville wanted fifty dollars for one made of human hair—blond, like her own.” He paused, straightened, thinking. “Can’t remember the last time I had fifty dollars all at one time.” He placed his hand on the small of his back, working the muscles there with his fingers. He continued to think. “Don’t think I ever had fifty dollars all at one time
.”

  I straightened beside him.

  “She got used to it,” he said. “We all did.”

  There in the tunnel, the sound of men working about me, another filament of memory dangled down from my childhood. There had been a sidewalk construction pit a block or so from where I grew up—a hole at the southwest corner of Duplex and Eglinton. I was eight… perhaps ten years old … I watched them work, saw how the tunnel some twenty or thirty feet down went out under the street.

  I have no idea what it was all for.

  I went back after dinner, in the early evening, when everyone had gone home. Red flare lanterns had been placed around its perimeter, and it had been covered over with long construction planks. I played about it for quite a while, peering down between the planks, trying to see the mysteries below. At some point I realized that there was a ladder below the planks, and assuring myself that no one was about, I pulled one of the boards aside, boldly lifted one of the red lanterns, and descended into the pit.

  To this day, I have no idea what made me do such a rash thing.

  Alone, I explored far out under Eglinton Avenue. No one knew I was there. Had there been an accident or cave-in, it would have been days perhaps before anyone discovered me.

  It seems like madness to me now.

  I played down there for about an hour. When I got home, my mother was frantic—a combination of maternal anger and fear.

  Where were you? I was asked.

  Playing, I answered.

  Where?

  Around the block on Duplex Avenue, I answered.

  I was not allowed to cross the street.

  No, you weren’t… I’ve been around the block twice looking for you! Where were you? Where did you get all the mud on your shoes?

  I couldn’t answer.

  I never told.

  I knew, even then, that what I had done was foolish. I knew I would be in trouble. And I had not the guile to construct a more intricate story.

  My mother’s eyes were wild, and she was breathing heavily. She didn’t believe me.

  But I was back. That was enough. Her relief overcame all else.

  We let it drop. Neither of us ever mentioned it again. Perhaps she forgot about it. I never did. My cave has been my secret ever since.

  Just as everyone’s childhood is such a secret.

  I still remember the smell of the earth.

  The earth below Ashland was soft and wet.

  The tunnel cut through occasional springs, which ran into puddles that needed to be channeled back into a pit in the basement of the hotel. The pit was only a few feet deeper than the basement floor, and the sound of water running into it, into the pool at the bottom, was something that became a constant.

  If one dug too low, Henry told me, one would inevitably meet the Ohio River. It was always there, he said. Just beneath us.

  ELEVEN

  Thursday, October 11, 1934

  I slept until noon. when I woke, the stiffness of the muscles in my back, arms, legs all told me what I already knew—that I had done more than I should have. Jack was gone.

  Gazing at the window ledge above me, I touched the wall beside me where I lay on the floor. Solid. Real.

  The shower attachment that would be fitted around the bathtub in the years to come had not appeared yet. I filled the tub, lowered myself into the steaming water, soaked in it, grateful for the luxury.

  I watched the steam drift up and out the window.

  Watched it disappear.

  I wandered down to the Woolworth’s on Winchester. Candy, postcards, toys, bars of soap, chewing gum. Gold-filled rings that a baby could wear sold for a dime.

  At the food counter I saw Jack sitting, talking to Teresa. I was several aisles away, unnoticed.

  I watched him touch her hand. I watched her let him leave his hand there. I watched her smile, saw the way she looked at him.

  I left before they saw me.

  I had seen what I had suspected that first time I had seen them together. I had seen another of Jack Radey’s secrets.

  In the late afternoon, I was sitting on the veranda steps of the hotel when Jack came strolling down the street. He smiled and sat down beside me.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, letting our Canadian skin feel the Kentucky sunshine coming through the October clouds.

  “You really go to work at the hospital?” I asked finally.

  He nodded. “I go there. Do my job.” He pulled a package of Lucky Strike cigarettes from his pocket, shook one loose, put it between his lips, lit it. “You don’t smoke, right, Leo?”

  “Right.”

  “Smart. Fifteen cents a pack. I must be nuts. I smoked Player’s or Gold Crest back home. When you went to the States, everybody wanted you to bring back a pack of Luckies.” He blew the smoke out in a stream into the sunlight. “The hospital,” he said. “When the job’s done, I leave. Do it as quickly as I can. Come back here. Then I do my real work.” He leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees. Then he looked at me. “What do you know about Toledo?”

  I looked back at him. “I know what happened.”

  He waited.

  “Drove through myself,” I heard myself saying. “Heard the stories. Stan said you were there.”

  He inhaled on his cigarette.

  “Fellow was either on one side or the other,” I said.

  “The right side or the wrong side,” he finished.

  I did the waiting this time.

  “I was on the wrong side.” The smoke drifted from his nostrils. “Took a man’s job ’cause I wanted a job of my own. I didn’t understand. Went into work one morning and this guy comes up to me and stands in my way. Little guy. Smaller than me. Thought there was going to be a fight. Thought maybe he was goin’ to hit me. Guy says to me, ‘You’re either one stupid son of a bitch, or you’re one mean fucker to do what you’re doin’.’ I had to decide which I was. I like to think I was just stupid.” A silence. Then: “Biggest mistake of my life. Learned everything I needed to know from the experience.”

  “Nothing like making a mistake to make you smart.”

  He smiled. “I must be the smartest man on earth, then.”

  “Tell me about Marg,” he said. “How’s she doing?”

  It’s 1934, I thought. She’d be twenty-five years old. My sister Anne would be four. Ron was two. “Doing well,” I said. “Kids keep her busy.” I thought for a moment. “She’s good at what she does. Being a mother. Loving her family.”

  He nodded. “She’s like a little girl in a lot of ways, too.”

  I couldn’t answer that.

  “Naive.” A pause. “But nice naive. Even though the worst shit happened to her—to all of us—she always thought everyone was really decent underneath. Had trouble believing bad things about people.” He inhaled on his cigarette, exhaled. “Don’t know how you get like that.” Another pause. “Told me once when she was pregnant with Anne that she didn’t understand how the baby was going to get out of her. She asked the doctor. It wasn’t clear in her head.” He looked at me. “Can you imagine?”

  I was speechless. Another revelation. Something I could never know about my own mother unless she told someone, and I was somehow privy to it. Another of the secrets we all carry around within us, unknowable to others. Unknowable to our own children.

  “She once found a twenty-dollar bill on the floor of the local dairy when we were teenagers. Wouldn’t keep it. Said it was probably some person’s entire weekly pay. Turned it in to the girl behind the counter. Said the person would probably come back looking for it. I couldn’t convince her that the girl was just gonna pocket it—that she’d just given away twenty dollars.” He shook his head. “Good old Marg.”

  It rang true.

  “I’m not like that,” he said. He held the butt of the cigarette tightly between his thumb and index finger, inhaling sharply.

  I thought of his easy acceptance of me, his trust in taking me to his room, his support of me in front of the ot
hers, just like his sister.

  “Not like that at all,” he said.

  Jack looked at the sky. He looked to the east. The sun was clouded over. “Rain,” he said. “It’s comin’.”

  “Marg got married fast,” he said.

  “Sometimes things happen fast.”

  He thought about it. Then: “How’s Tommy?”

  “Works hard. Works for the Globe during the day. Gets up when it’s still dark. He’s in charge of all the boxes all the way up Yonge Street, past the city limits.” I had heard the stories many times. “Evenings, he plays jobs with his guitar, banjo. Romanelli’s Orchestra. The Royal York. Palais Royale on the Lakeshore. Plays on the boats that go across the lake and back. Money’s good. Dead tired, though, from what I hear.”

  “Marg must be alone a lot.” He looked at me strangely, inquisitive.

  I thought of Jack with Teresa.

  “It’s not like that,” I said.

  He smiled, a bit embarrassed, but relieved.

  “She’s just a special person who’s nice to everybody. Like you said.”

  He looked down.

  “Your father,” I said suddenly. “You should write to him.” Jack looked at me with surprise. Then he said, “We had a falling out. Don’t get along too well.” He paused. “Marg tell you about that?”

  “Didn’t exactly tell me. Just bits I picked up, listening.”

  “Like we were talking about. Marg can’t see him for what he is. Only sees what she wants to see.”

  “Maybe she sees him perfectly.”

  He looked at me.

  “You, too.”

  He was quiet.

  “He’s your father.” I shrugged. “We don’t get to pick our family. Our family happens to us.”

  He said nothing for a long time before he spoke. “I’ll think about it,” he said finally.

  “You should keep writing to Marg. She loves your letters. Saves ’em.”