by Renée Rosen
“I get it.” He leaned in closer to me. “I’ll talk to Hymie. It won’t happen again. Okay?”
We looked at each other, but his eyes were empty. He was someplace else and I felt a chill in his fingertips as he traced them across my shoulders.
• • •
The next morning, even before the baby awoke and the housekeeper had arrived, I was up, cleaning. I swept up the broken china pieces and the plaster dust, trying to salvage my buffet setup. Since half a dozen cups and saucers had been casualties of the previous night’s ruckus, I had to fill in with my everyday dishes. My cake was ruined and I didn’t have the ingredients to make a new one. All I had to serve my guests was coffee in mismatched cups.
After getting the house ready, I went upstairs to freshen up and get dressed. Fifteen minutes before the women started arriving Shep wandered downstairs in just his BVDs, with his bathrobe flapping open, the belt hanging from the loops, dragging behind him.
“Shep!”
“What?”
“My meeting. Remember? They’ll be here any minute.”
He raised his hands in surrender and went back upstairs.
By the time the women arrived, I was thankful that Shep was properly dressed and tucked away inside his study.
It took Adele Markey all of thirty seconds to ask about the ceiling.
“Oh,” I said, trying to lead her away from the scene of the crime, “we just had a little accident, that’s all. It was nothing. . . .”
I must have fielded another dozen similar inquiries by the time everyone arrived. The bullet hole had upstaged everything I was so proud of: my beautiful Jean-Michel Frank carpets, my velveteen rococo settees and the Chippendale chairs. The women paid no attention to my favorite pieces. Instead they helped themselves to coffee while I apologized, explaining that I’d dropped the cake that morning. They didn’t seem to mind half as much as I did.
A good twenty minutes into it, Adele started the meeting. The topic of the day was a book drive for the needy.
“Forgive me for asking,” said Esther, “but can the needy read?”
Adele and Harriet were debating the issue when Hymie Weiss, Bugs Moran and Vincent Drucci, in all their pinstripes and brawn, barged through the front door, letting in a rush of frigid January air along with a trail of snow and slush behind them. It gave the women quite a start and I apologized as the men let themselves into Shep’s study.
“Well”—Adele Markey cleared her throat—“as I was saying, we need to stress that all the books must be in good condition. . . .” Adele continued, gradually raising her voice to compete with the commotion coming from the men down the hall. “Are you getting all this down, madam secretary?”
“Absolutely,” said Harriet, taking copious notes.
Filtering through the walls we heard, “Goddamn motherfuckin’ greaseballs! Those fuckin’ slimeballs!”
I spoke up, trying to deflect their attention. “We’ll need to organize them in some way, either by author or by—”
“Cocksuckers!”
The word hung in the air, reverberating like a bell, ringing out over and over again. I shifted my eyes about the room. The women looked like they’d been assaulted.
“I’m sorry, ladies. Excuse me.” I got up, my cheeks burning red as I rushed down the hall.
“Will you guys knock it off! Jesus! We can hear everything you’re saying!”
I had barely made it back into the living room when the telephone rang. Not a minute later Shep’s office door swung open and the men moved into action. They stormed into the living room, oblivious to the twenty women staring with their mouths agape. The men were whooping it up, slapping one another on their backs, squaring their fedoras on their heads as they spit out a few more obscenities and bolted out the door. From the picture window I saw them pile into Shep’s automobile and drive away.
“Shep doesn’t usually work from home,” I said, forcing a laugh. “I hardly even know those other men—thank goodness. They work down at the nightclub,” I said, hoping they looked more like the nightclubbing sort than a group of mobsters.
“Oh . . .”
“I see. . . .”
“Uh-huh . . .”
The women seemed understanding enough, considering that the only disruptions we’d ever had during our meetings were an occasional child waking up from their nap, a rare telephone call, or the time Thelma Glick suffered a migraine and we had her lie down on the sofa with cold compresses applied to her forehead.
• • •
The next morning it was all over the newspapers. Deadly Gunfire Opens on Alphonse Capone. I glanced at the photograph on the front page. It featured the remains of an automobile, polka-dotted with bullet holes from the hood to the trunk. The windshield was shattered like confetti, and a body was slumped over the steering wheel.
I shoved my coffee aside and reached for a cigarette as I sat at the kitchen table reading about the unidentified assailants who blasted Capone’s car. Those unidentified assailants had congregated in my home just moments before. A witness claimed that a black sedan closed in on Capone’s Packard at State and Fifty-fifth streets. He said he saw the tommy guns sticking out the windows of the car just moments before he heard the first shots. The real news was in the next paragraph: “The driver was killed instantly; however, Mr. Capone himself escaped uninjured. . . .”
I couldn’t finish the article. I crumpled up the newspaper and stuffed it in the garbage pail.
As hard as I tried, I couldn’t straddle both worlds. What happened to the man I married? When did he become this cold-blooded hit man who’d run out the door at the drop of a hat to chase down Capone?
SMALL WORLD
I looked out the window as my streetcar swept along the track. Trees were in bloom, the grass was green again and spring was alive and thriving. We’d made it through the bulk of the winter without incident, and I was beginning to think the North Side Gang’s obsession with killing Capone had run its course. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard Shep mention Capone’s name.
Covering my nose and mouth with my handkerchief, I continued to watch as my streetcar hummed past the familiar brick buildings and the long stretch of railroads. It was my third visit to the stockyards that month. Ever since Hannah was born, I found excuses to see my mother. It was hard leaving Hannah, even for a few hours. I’d miss her and worried that I was missing something: her putting new words together, learning to play by herself with a toy. But if I didn’t get away I was no good for her. Exhausted from lack of sleep, I’d grow irritable and short, bursting into tears over the slightest little things. So, reluctantly I’d leave my baby with the housekeeper or Dora, who was forever volunteering to stay with Hannah. My mother always wanted me to bring Hannah along, which surprised me at first. I hadn’t expected her to embrace her “illegitimate” granddaughter, but apparently she liked being a grandmother more than she liked being a mother. As for me, I wasn’t about to expose Hannah to the stockyards. She was only fifteen months old, and she’d already seen enough things I wished she hadn’t.
Maybe it was guilt that brought me back to my mother’s, or maybe it was because I understood her more now that I was a mother myself. My mother had to have had her share of sleepless nights, raw, chafed nipples, fatigue and frustration, and yet all of that would have been set aside for the needs of me, her child. I understood that now and it choked me up. She may not have known how to show it, but how could I have doubted that she loved me as much as I loved Hannah?
I got off the streetcar along with a cluster of other passengers and waded my way through the main gate of the Union Stock Yards. A young girl wearing a babushka and tattered shoes lumbered her way alongside me. She had the posture of an old woman, and when I caught her eye, she gave me a smile without a speck of resentment for my cloche hat or my new Mary Janes. But still, I couldn’t look at her again and was relieved when she veered off the path, heading in the opposite direction.
I walked past a g
roup of men unloading flatbed wagons full of cowhides piled on top of one another, stacked up like carpets. Flies swarmed everywhere, huge ones, buzzing around my head, loud as bees. In between each cowhide there was a layer of salt. Four men grabbed hold of a skin, two at one end and two more at the other, and together they lifted it above their heads, shaking the hide like they were airing out a blanket. Pellets of salt flew in all directions, landing on the sidewalk at my feet.
As I walked by, someone called to me, “Vera? Hey, Vera?”
“Buster? What are you doing down here?” I was surprised to see him and relieved that he was still alive. Instead of that flashy suit he always wore, now Buster was in a pair of dusty bib overalls and a graying undershirt. His fedora was replaced by a soft cap and he was missing a couple teeth and two fingers on his left hand. I glanced at the knobby stubs, stopping at his knuckles.
“Well, how have you been, Mith Vera?” he asked, walking over to me. He spoke with a lisp on account of his missing teeth.
“What are you doing here, Buster?”
“I’m working at the thockyards now.” He took off his cap and put it back on riding backward on his forehead. He chomped hard on a piece of gum and it struck me that, aside from that night when Dion knocked his teeth out, I couldn’t remember when he wasn’t chewing gum.
“Yep,” he said, “working real hard down here at the thockyards.”
“No fooling, huh?”
“Yeah, I got out of the rackets.” He stared out at the livestock pens. He asked about Shep and before I could answer, he said he’d recently gotten married himself. I pretended not to notice when he glanced down at what should have been his ring finger.
“Did you now? Well, that’s real swell, Buster.”
“Yeah. I married Thally.”
Sally? I was blank for a minute but then I remembered Sally—Big Red, the redhead he’d brought to Dion’s party.
“She’s a good girl. Her father’s worked down here for years. He’s the one who got me a job here.” He pointed toward the Abramowitz sign.
“Here? You work here?”
“Yep. Been here ’bout thix months now.”
“Six months, huh? Doing what?”
“I drive a truck. Make deliveries. Mostly I run hides over to the thanneries. Make a few runs to the butcher thops around town, that thort of thing.” He reached in his pocket for a stick of chewing gum and offered me a piece of Juicy Fruit.
I shook my head and looked at the delivery trucks with Abramowitz Meats stenciled along the back and side panels. There were two of them, parked by the loading dock.
He folded a fresh stick, and before he shoved it into his mouth, he spit out the wad he’d been chewing. I glanced at the ground and noticed Buster’s shoes. Brand-new, expensive-looking. More than he could have ever afforded on a deliveryman’s salary. Those were rich men’s shoes, and only someone like Buster would have been stupid enough to wear them around the stockyards with his overalls. I looked up at Buster, noticing the gold chain on his watch dangling down from his pocket.
Buster was a nothing in Dion’s outfit. Nothing but a Little Pisher. They used him as a driver, had him load and unload cases of liquor and barrels of beer, but not much more. He wasn’t making the kind of money at that point that he could have afforded shoes like that, not to mention his watch. He was getting his money from someplace now, though. And if he was married to Big Red, then his connection had to be with Capone. I glanced back at the trucks parked along the side of the building.
“What brings you down here, anyway, Mith Vera? Or should I say Mithess Green?”
When he said that, I got a funny feeling. He’d called me Mrs. Green with such disdain. Could he have possibly seen me standing on the stairwell that night, watching everything that Shep and the others had done to him? “Visiting a friend, that’s all.” I forced a smile and shrugged. For some reason I didn’t want Buster knowing that my mother was his boss. Buster never knew my maiden name, and he wasn’t going to find out now.
“Well,” he said, turning back toward the others, gesturing to the flatbed of bloody cowhides, “I’d better get back to work.”
We said our good-byes and I went inside.
My mother sat at her desk, talking on the telephone. A stack of papers had collected at her side and the day’s mail was fanned out before her. Four men stood around, talking softly among themselves, waiting to speak with her about a salt order, how many head of cattle they needed to purchase, how much ice they needed for the cooling rooms. She’d been complaining that business was slow, but it didn’t look slow to me.
I stood back watching while she finished her phone call and issued orders to her men. “And don’t come back here without that contract signed, you hear me?” she called to one of them as he was leaving. “Jessie,” she said to another worker, “remember I want that cattle pen fixed before you leave here today.”
As I observed my mother, something struck me at my core. I realized that she must have been about my age when she took over my father’s business. I tried to imagine what she must have gone through back then. My mother, like me, had been an only child. She’d married my father, twenty-three years her senior, just three months after his first wife died, which set off a scandal. His family didn’t approve of the marriage and by the time I was born, they wanted nothing to do with me—even after my father was killed. My mother had no family to help her, and I’m certain she was terrified that the Black Hand would come back looking for more money.
How dare I complain about anything! I didn’t work. I went to lunch and shopped. I went to meetings with a bunch of women who believed a cookie could solve the world’s ills. And while I may have been learning to cook, I had a housekeeper who did most of the cleaning and helped with the baby. The two days each week she wasn’t there, I could barely get the beds made. But here my mother had stepped into a man’s world, learned how to run a business and mastered all the ins and outs of an ugly industry.
I’d seen her negotiate a heard of cattle for an unheard-of price. I’d seen her throw many a salesman out on their ear because they came in thinking they could swindle a woman. I’d seen her scold a grown man, reducing him to tears. My mother could be every bit as tough as a man and God knows she was a hell of a lot smarter than most of them.
After her workers had left and she’d sent Ida down to the kill floor, I wanted to tell her I was proud of her, but instead I said, “Since when do you hire bootleggers?”
“Bootleggers?” The corners of my mother’s mouth turned downward as she gathered the papers strewn across her desk. “What are you talking about?”
“That guy, Buster, out there”—I gestured toward the front door—“he used to make liquor runs for the North Side Gang.”
“Oh, that’s nonsense. He’s a nice young man. His father-in-law’s worked here for years.”
“Yeah, well, I’d keep an eye on him if I were you. And your trucks, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s using one of them for bootlegging.” I sat on her desk, letting my legs dangle down in front, my heels knocking against the side panel like I used to do when I was little. Thinking about Buster’s shoes and his watch, I said, “Looks like Buster’s lining his pockets pretty good, Ma.”
She checked some totals on her ledger. “At least someone’s getting rich down here. All I’m doing these days is losing money.” She opened a file drawer, dropped the ledger inside. “If your friend out there wasn’t such cheap labor, he’d be out of a job.”
“Are things really that bad? You seem so busy.” I leaned back and looked at her.
My mother went into a full stretch and yawned. “At least the bank gave me another extension on my loan—that’ll buy me some time.”
“An extension? Ma, if you need money, why don’t you come to me? I’ll ask Shep for it.”
My mother sat up straight and shot me a look like she just ate something rotten. I should have known better than to make that kind of an offer. Usually Shep’s money made me
feel superior; now it made me ashamed. My mother knew Shep’s money was dirty, and I felt dirty for having it.
THE BALANCING ACT
Judging by the half dozen cigarette butts in the ashtray, Basha must have been waiting at the café for half an hour or so. She uncapped her flask and poured a splash of bourbon into her teacup and then mine. It was a gorgeous summer day and it was just the two of us, seated outside at a garden café, surrounded by ladies who probably had never added anything to their teacups other than a wedge of lemon or a teaspoon of sugar.
“So what is this all about?” I asked. She’d called earlier, saying it was urgent. She needed to meet with me privately.
“I need your help.”
“With what?” I opened my menu.
“I’m gonna do it.” She nodded as she examined her cigarette holder, rolling its bejeweled stem between her fingertips. “I’m gonna off her.”
“Oh, Basha.” I shook my head and laughed. “So what’s it going to be this time? Are you going to throw a bomb through her kitchen window? Or maybe just set her house on fire?”
Lighting up a fresh cigarette, she leaned back and exhaled. “There’s this poison I can get.”
“Uh-huh . . .” I closed my menu, setting it aside.
“She’ll never even taste it. It’s this white powder. It dissolves right away. Costs a damn fortune but it’ll be worth it. They said it takes about four hours to work. All I have to do is find a way to get it in her coffee or her food. And I need you to—”
“Wait a minute. Hold it.” I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “Are you serious?” I looked into her eyes. Her long dark lashes didn’t flutter; her heavily lined lids didn’t blink. “Oh, good lord. You are serious, aren’t you!”
“I can’t take it anymore. I can’t stand the thought of Squeak being with her. He doesn’t love her.”
“But he loves his children.”
“But he loves me more.”
