The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3

by Mark McNease

  “I’ll be leaving early this evening, Jarrod,” he said. Normally he would stay until the store closed at 8:00 p.m. His uncle Leo used to stay open much later, always hoping to catch one more sale for the day, but D thought it made them look cheap. Souvenir shops stayed open till midnight, not fine men’s clothing stores.

  “Someone special?” Jarrod asked. He was careful to keep his few personal inquiries gender neutral. Mr. K had never spoken of his romantic life, if he had one, and Jarrod knew not to pry. But every now and then he would ask this sort of question. He liked his boss and hoped he would someday meet someone special, whether a man or a woman.

  D looked at him and said, “The only special person in my life died in Berlin, Jarrod. I’m still grieving.”

  “But of course, my apologies for asking.”

  “No need to apologize, I know you mean well. But no, no one special. I just have plans, Jarrod. Even lonely, single men have plans.”

  Jarrod blushed. He regretted having asked about it. It was none of his business, none at all.

  D glanced at his watch again. Ten minutes had passed since the last time he checked it. Time had slowed to a crawl. He decided to use some of it to practice what he would say to Scott, how he would get him to the townhouse, and what he would do if Scott, too, was not the right one. He doubted that would happen. He needed Scott to be the right one, and he was sure he was. He knew from experience that sometimes you had to settle. He wasn’t expecting that, but if it happened, he would take what he could get.

  Chapter 13

  The lunch crowd at Margaret’s Passion was thinning. It was never especially busy, given the restaurant’s location in Gramercy Park—there were no office buildings to supply a stream of executive assistants and the bosses whose every whim they catered to. There also weren’t many tourists, except the ones on walking tours of the area.

  Gramercy Park was a historic district that was once a swamp. A developer named Samuel B. Ruggles proposed the idea for a park in the early 1800s, when Manhattan was just beginning to push northward. The property was called “Gramercy Farm” and Ruggles spent the then-vast sum of $180,000 to drain the swamp and landscape it around a square, deeding 66 parcels of land to various owners. Today Gramercy Park is held in common as one of Manhattan’s two privately owned parks and the park itself is gated, with keys given to the owners of each of the 39 surrounding structures. The Lexington Avenue subway had even been forced to re-route to Park Avenue so as not to go beneath the park and upset the privileged tenants.

  Among the residents of Gramercy Park are The Players and the Gramercy Park Hotel. The Players was founded by Edwin Booth, brother of James Wilkes Booth, best known for assassinating Abraham Lincoln. To walk the streets of Gramercy Park is to travel back in time, to see New York City as it once was. Small groups of tourists listen breathlessly, snapping pictures, as tour guides tell them stories of who lived in which building and what moments in American history were acted out along its streets. It’s not the sort of neighborhood where you’ll find throngs of gawkers looking for neon signs, cheap souvenirs and Broadway celebrities.

  It is where you’ll find Margaret’s Passion, there on a corner where Margaret Bowman first opened the restaurant in 1983. Like the neighborhood, little has changed about it—and Margaret always knew her customers liked it that way. A Who’s Who of New York City society has dined there for three decades—mayors, fashion designers, even the President of the United States on several occasions. But just as importantly, it has served the local residents of Gramercy Park all that time. They like its familiarity and its comfort. They like its elegant, old-looking interior. And they love Margaret Bowman. Danny could not imagine Margaret’s Passion without Margaret, and even though she seldom made the trip downstairs from her apartment to visit table to table as she’d done for years, they knew she was around, watching over them. Danny knew once she was gone they would rely on the restaurant staying the same. It was a bone of contention he had with Kyle’s mother Sally. She didn’t want to completely change the place, but she thought it needed “refreshing,” as she put it. He disagreed and was planning to have a long talk with her—soon.

  The restaurant closed at 2:00 p.m. and reopened for dinner at 6:00 p.m.. Chloe was getting things ready for the daily transition, changing out the menus and making sure the setup was done meticulously, with the help of Trebor the bartender. Danny had hired them both, and they had repaid his decision with loyalty and professionalism. He was sitting at the bar, having a cup of coffee, watching them. He remembered being new to the restaurant himself, hired by Margaret. Poached, really, from another restaurant, but she’d seen something in him she liked and wanted at Margaret’s Passion. She had not been wrong.

  “She knows you’re coming,” Chloe said.

  “Of course she does,” Danny replied. He made the trip upstairs to visit with her almost every day now. Her decision to move to Florida had been made, but Danny and Margaret had not yet talked about it in more than the abstract. The way people talk around things they would rather not discuss in specifics. Specifics are very real. Specifics say, this is happening, there’s no turning back.

  Danny finished his coffee and headed into the kitchen where the staircase was leading up to Margaret’s apartment. He nodded at Chef Cecily, who’d been brought on to replace Chef Jeff several months ago. Another excellent but hard decision (Jeff had been with the restaurant longer than Danny, but his father was ailing in Denver and he’d left to take care of him). He nodded at the dishwasher and the busboy, whose wives’ names he knew and whose children’s birthdays he remembered every year with gifts. It had been Margaret’s way, and now it was Danny’s. He climbed the back stairs, slowly, his eyes on the door at the top, wishing he would never get there.

  “Hello, Danny,” Margaret said, opening the door before he reached the top step. She always did, and he’d wondered many times how she knew he was coming just then. The stairs didn’t creak, he didn’t pound his feet. His ascent was silent, yet Margaret always knew he was coming and she always opened the door before he knocked.

  “Good afternoon,” Danny said.

  The stairs led into Margaret’s kitchen and she waved Danny in, closing the door behind him. There were two cups on the small kitchen table he’d sat at a thousand times, one with coffee for Danny, one with tea for Margaret. They were silent as Danny took his seat at the table. Silence was not something they shared often, but they both knew what was coming … and who was going.

  “I was thinking this morning,” Margaret said, “how many times you’ve greeted me with ‘Good afternoon’ over the last eleven years.”

  “It used to be downstairs,” Danny said.

  Until the last two or three years Margaret had gone down to the restaurant every day, often during the lunch service to say hello to her customers, and always to greet the staff.

  “A lot of things used to be, Danny.”

  She was right and he knew it, and it only made his heart heavier.

  “That’s what life is.” She sipped her tea and smiled at him. “One day you wake up—in my case at eighty-two—and you realize pretty much everything you’ve experienced in your life ‘used to be.’”

  Margaret had adopted Danny, not legally but emotionally. She and Gerard never had children, and when she hired Danny she soon discovered he was exactly the kind of man she would like to claim as her son.

  Danny took a sip of his coffee and cleared his throat. “I’ve been working on the list,” he said.

  “The list?”

  “The list for your party a month from now.”

  Could it really be coming that soon, he wondered. Her life in New York, her years with the restaurant, her decade with him coming up those stairs to talk about menus and waiters and guest lists.

  “Be sure to invite your parents,” she said. “And Kyle’s mother, if she’d like to come. And anyone else you’d like to have there.”

  He looked at her. “Seating’s limited. If I invite t
he politicians and the celebrities and ...”

  She cut him off with a shake of her head. “No, no, no, Danny. This one’s for you more than it is for me. I don’t care if any of those people are there. Unless you want them to come.”

  He stared at her. This one’s for you, Danny. He knew then she understood just how hard this was for him and that she had asked for this going away party to give him the sense of an ending. It wasn’t for Margaret. She could easily pack her bags and walk out the door tomorrow, but she wanted Danny to have this chance to say goodbye, and say it in a big way.

  “Listen,” she said, sliding her hand across the table and placing it over his. “I have something for you. Stay here a moment.”

  She got up from the table and shuffled into the living room, leaving Danny to look around the kitchen he’d seen so many times. Was there anything he’d missed? Had he ever heard the cuckoo strike time on the wall clock? He couldn’t remember. Did he know what her view was through the small window above her sink? Had he ever stood there and looked to see?

  Margaret came back in with a manila envelope. She sat down and handed it to him.

  “What’s this?” he said, afraid to open it. Was it her will? Was it a photograph of some moment in their lives together?

  “Open it and see.”

  Danny pulled the flap back on the envelope and slid out a single piece of paper. It was a deed. He read it quickly, then said, “I don’t understand.”

  “I have the money you gave me to buy the restaurant,” she said. “It’s more than I’ll need to live another few years.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Okay, Danny, maybe ten. Is that long enough?”

  “Never is not long enough.” He felt his eyes sting.

  “I won’t tell you not to cry. I don’t know why people do that, it’s wrong. We all need to cry.”

  He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and looked at the paper again. She was giving him the building.

  “I don’t want the building,” he said. “You have tenants. I’m not a landlord.”

  “And neither were we. Gerard had no idea how to be a landlord. So we hired a management company. You can do the same. Or you can sell it and do something else with the proceeds.”

  “I would never sell Margaret’s Passion.”

  “But you might have to, if someone else owned the building. You see? This way that can’t happen.”

  “I should talk to Kyle.”

  “So talk to Kyle. But the deed is done.” She laughed at the pun. “And just think, my dear Danny, you’ll be able to afford to buy out Sally Callahan soon.”

  Margaret knew Danny did not like being in business with his mother-in-law. If he owned the building, with the rent and even a line of credit against the equity, he could pay Sally back and have her return to being just Kyle’s mother.

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. I can’t take the building with me, you know! And I don’t need some albatross hung around my neck a thousand miles away.”

  “Is that how far Florida is?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “Well, now you’ll have a reason to come.”

  And he would. Margaret was leaving in high summer and already Danny had imagined spending Christmas in Boca Raton. He and Kyle would be learning more about Florida with Margaret moving there than he’d ever wanted to know.

  “Now let’s go over this guest list,” Margaret said.

  “I didn’t bring it with me.”

  “That’s okay. We’ll start a new one, and no one we once felt obligated to invite will be on it. This one’s for us.”

  Margaret went to the kitchen counter, opened a drawer and took out a small writing pad and a pen she kept there for making grocery lists. She came back to the table and sat down.

  “Danny, Kyle,” she said, scribbling their names. “What about that sweet detective friend of yours? Would you like her there?”

  “Yes,” Danny said. “Linda Sikorsky. And she has a wife now, Kirsten.”

  “Oh does she? How lovely.”

  They began going over names then, Danny listing people he truly wanted at Margaret’s going away party, and Margaret adding her own as she wrote the names down.

  The weight of it began to lift slightly for him. He wanted the afternoon to stretch out endlessly, to spend every second he could sitting at Margaret Bowman’s kitchen table, watching her elderly hand write names in a shaky scrawl. He glanced at the envelope. Oh, Margaret, what have you gotten me into? Everything stays the same, he thought, until it all changes.

  Chapter 14

  When most people think of the New York City subway they imagine a vast underground labyrinth. Kyle had been no exception, and for his first year living in the city, some thirty years ago, he’d taken buses rather than descend beneath the earth to barrel through tunnels dug a century before. It had reminded him of Poe’s “The Premature Burial.” There was something about being alive down there that had frightened him, until he realized it was a much faster and more efficient way to travel, especially from his then-home in Brooklyn to the various jobs he held in Manhattan.

  Not all the trains that snake around the boroughs are subterranean. The N train, on which Kyle and Linda rode to Astoria, glides under the river past its last stop in Manhattan and emerges in Queens to continue along elevated tracks. Once upon a time you could look out from the train windows and see the World Trade Center before it came tumbling down in a morning of terror. Kyle remembered the days immediately following, when a plume of smoke rose from the hole in the ground that had been the Twin Towers. He couldn’t believe nearly thirteen years had passed since then.

  Kyle and Danny went to Astoria almost every weekend to visit Danny’s parents in their row house on 28th Street. He knew the neighborhood well. He knew the Kaufman Astoria Studios. He knew the Museum of the Moving Image, housed in the same complex. He knew Steinway Street, named after the world famous piano makers. And he knew the Greek feeling of the area, still populated by Greek families who had lived here for generations and who still gave Astoria its flavor. They were mixed now with Iranians, Pakistanis, pockets of other Middle Eastern immigrants, and not a few gay people. Astoria was once known for being both affordable and quite nice, and as Manhattan became ever more expensive and out of reach for the average person, Astoria became a favorite refuge. You could get a large one-bedroom, maybe even a two-bedroom, for what you would pay for a studio in Chelsea. The migration brought higher prices, and Astoria was no longer the hidden gem it once was, but still a very nice place to live just a stone’s throw from Manhattan.

  “I love the skyline,” Linda said, looking out the window as the train eased along the tracks, turning and running parallel to the East Side.

  “Everybody does,” Kyle replied. And it was true. No matter how often he’d thought of leaving New York City, he never stopped being thrilled by the sight of it from a distance. “It may not be the greatest city in the world—don’t tell New York that—but it’s the greatest skyline. It calls to you.”

  Four stops in they pulled into the Broadway station. Broadway is a main artery in Astoria, running east to west. It’s where you’ll find grocery stores, shops, restaurants, real Greek diners, and all the other small businesses that make up a neighborhood. It’s also three blocks from Vincent Campagna’s apartment. Kyle had called and gotten the address from Joseph the doorman. He’d bent the truth and said he wanted to send a food basket to Vinnie (which he would, just not now). Joseph had no reason to suspect anything and had given Kyle the information. He said quite of few of the tenants had been asking. Word spread quickly about the tragedy of Vinnie’s brother.

  They walked east a block, turned and walked another two blocks south, and found themselves in front of a large brown apartment building with six stories. Astoria was full of them. Row houses and apartment buildings made up most of the dwellings here
. And Kyle knew from friends who lived here that the apartments tended to be large. The buildings were what’s called “pre-war” and came at a premium price across the river in Manhattan. It meant they were built before World War II, between 1900 and 1940, when space was plentiful and architecture still had a flare. They were also known for being very sturdy, just in case a hurricane decided to stop by.

  “He’s in 4C,” Kyle said. They were standing in front of a buzzer box with dozens of apartment numbers on it, each with a name and button beside it. He buzzed Vincent’s apartment.

  “What if he’s not home?” Linda asked.

  “Joseph told me he was. Apparently he’s the only one from the building Vinnie’s been talking to.”

  Kyle waited a moment, pressed again, and they heard the front door buzzer go off, giving then entrance. Kyle quickly pulled the door open and held it for Linda.

  The entryway was massive, as they often are in these buildings. It appeared large enough to hold fifty people, but it was completely empty except for the mailboxes along one wall. A wide staircase led up to the floors above them, and an old elevator stood along the back, next to an apartment Kyle guessed was the super’s. Almost every apartment building in New York City has a super—the man (for it is inevitably a man), often with his family, who lives in and takes care of the building.

  They took the elevator up to the fourth floor. Vinnie had not called down through the intercom to ask who was there and Kyle assumed the building didn’t have one, or didn’t have one that worked.