Dry Bones

by Peter Quinn

  Eventually, the joint became the anchor of the “Bird Circuit,” the string of watering holes in the forties and fifties, on or right off Third Avenue—the Swan Club, White Gander, Blue Parrot, Yellow Cockatoo, et al. Red’s heyday came at war’s end and right after. “I’ll meet you at Red’s” became the unofficial motto of the men—soldiers, sailors, and civilians, birds of a feather—who frequented the Circuit.

  The best time to find Van Hull was after five, Bassante emphasized, when cocktail hour arrived and the afternoon crowd of neighborhood widows, pensioners, and laborers ceded the premises to a white-collar, middle-age crowd made up exclusively of men, most of whom worked in the office towers on the other side of Lexington.

  Dunne told the cabbie, “Red’s, Fiftieth and Third.”

  “Yeah, sure, I know the place.” The cabbie chuckled to himself.

  They pulled up in front of Red’s. Dunne paid the fare. The rearview mirror framed the driver’s insinuating leer. “Want me to wait?’

  He shook his head. The defensiveness he felt made him uncomfortable, as if he owed anyone in this city an explanation of his relationship with Dick Van Hull. He got out and slammed the door.

  Unshackled from the shadows of Third Avenue’s elevated railway that had rattled above for three-quarters of a century, the ravaged facade of Red’s found its only consolation in the equally sad condition of the structures on either side. Marble pediments and sills had been torn away. Fumes from coal, oil, and gas formed a toxic mix with rain, ice, and snow, dripped down decade after decade, cracked and eroded limestone slabs, mottling them into morbid shades of black and gray.

  At either end of the block, the much-ballyhooed redevelopment and construction boom promised in the wake of the El’s demolition was under way. Modern high-rise, high-rent office buildings were replacing tenements and saloons. The recent recession had slowed but not stopped the inevitable changes. The Bird Circuit was fast becoming a flock of wild geese in flight, south and west. Red’s impending fate seemed foreshadowed in the electrical malfunction in the neon sign that hung above the door: RED’S BAR & ILL.

  A dozen men were at the bar in hushed conversations. No one took note of him as he entered. A row of high-backed booths ran along the back wall. The jukebox played Rosemary Clooney warbling “Come on-a My House.”

  He ordered a scotch, plenty of ice. He stuck a cigarette between his lips.

  The bartender put down a glass, dropped in a handful of ice cubes, and poured the scotch directly in. A generous dose. He held out his lighter. Short, with a handsome, angular face, he had the thick forearms of a boxer.

  Dunne inhaled. “Thanks.”

  The bartender stayed where he was. “Looking for somebody in particular?”

  “What makes you ask?”

  “That’s the way it is around here.” The bartender gripped the bottle by the neck and rested it on the bar. A blue anchor and “U.S.N.” were tattooed on the back of his hand.

  “What way is that?”

  “Customers know each other or been recommended by somebody who does.”

  “Sounds like a private club.”

  “Not private. Just careful.” His face was expressionless.

  “My kind of place.”

  “You a cop?”

  Dunne dragged on his cigarette, exhaled, sipped.

  “Just so you know, the local precinct captain don’t abide freelancers.”

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “I’d say you were once. I can tell.”

  “I’ve been a lot of things.”

  “What are you now?”

  “A customer.”

  “I bet you’re a private dick.”

  “I bet you’re good at playing poker.”

  “Look, enjoy your drink. Red’s has a reputation as a friendly place. A man can meet old friends, be introduced to new ones, and not worry about being harassed or bothered. My job is to keep it that way. So no prying. No interrogations.”

  “It’s all right, Terry.” The voice came from behind Dunne. “He’s an old friend.” A hand rested on his shoulder. “Give me the usual, only make it a double.”

  “Your usual is a double, TR.”

  Dunne didn’t recognize the voice, didn’t detect a trace of the upper-crust Hudson Valley accent it once had. Yet he was certain who’d spoken. Turning around, he thought he’d been mistaken. For an instant, he didn’t recognize the wasted, hollow face, white hair atop—not gray, white as cotton. “Been a while, Dick.”

  “Come on, join me over here. Terry will bring our drinks.”

  Dunne followed him to a booth. The bartender delivered their drinks.

  “Put them on my tab, Terry.”

  “Will do, TR.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got yourself a new handle.”

  “I ditched Richard, tossed Thornton, and vanquished Van. I’m TR Hull now.”

  “I guess that’s why I couldn’t find you in the phone book.”

  “It’s more likely you couldn’t find me because I don’t have a phone. Here’s to what?” Van Hull held up a highball glass, no ice, half filled with rye. “What’s worth toasting these days, besides marshmallows?”

  Dunne tapped glasses. Slight as it was, the sliding consonant in that last word—“marshhhmallows”—gave away the jump Van Hull got on cocktail hour. “Here’s to us.”

  “I’ll drink to that!” Van Hull emptied half the glass in a single swallow. He shook his finger, reprovingly. “Look at you, Fin. You’ve hardly aged at all. You look as fit as the last time I saw you.”

  “The last time you saw me I was in the hospital.”

  “You know what I mean. Most of us have gone to seed since we left the service, but you—you’re still trim, hardly a gray hair.” He finished his drink and called over to the bar: “Terry-o, give us another round!”

  Dunne waved his hand. “Not for me. I’m still working on this.” He crushed his cigarette in the ashtray.

  A steady tide of quietly stylish men in business suits—mix of young and middle-aged—filled the room. The bartender dimmed the lights. He went over to the jukebox and raised the volume a notch or two as Judy Garland sang “The Man That Got Away.”

  The bartender delivered a fresh drink. Van Hull twisted the glass in his hands. “You’d think I’d be shocked out of my pajamas to see you after all these years—and in Red’s, no less—but I’m not. I’ve thought about you a lot. Pully often brought up your name. He said you were in New York a good part of the year.”

  “You hadn’t changed your name, I’d have found you a lot sooner.”

  “What I always admired about you, Fin, was your honesty. For a minute I was afraid you were going to lie and say how good I look. In that case, I’d have thrown my drink in your face and told you to get out.” Van Hull gazed into his glass, raised it, and took a long, slow draft.

  “You’re the one said we were a ‘sad-ass version of the Bobbsey Twins.’ Which was I, Rack or Ruin?”

  “I don’t remember.” Van Hull smiled. “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “Guess.”

  “Bassante?”

  “None other. Our den mother from Bari.”

  “Poor Turlough, with that labyrinthine brain of his. It’d be funny he got labeled a Red if the outcome hadn’t been so hard on him. Pully said Bassante had ‘the most independent intellect’ of anyone he’d ever met. I thought I’d see him at Pully’s memorial service, but he was nowhere in sight. Thought I might see you there, too.”

  “My wife and I were in Havana.”

  “He was a sad man.”

  The bartender lowered the lights. A woman entered. She strolled passed Dunne to the far corner of the bar. Her face called to mind one of those “Mad Mugs/Silly Faces” fun books found at newsstands next to comics and puzzle digests: four horizontal slips each with a quarter of a face—hair and forehead, eyes and eyebrows, nose and lips, chin and neck—that could be combined and recombined to form mugs of all shapes and sizes, lovely, ugl
y, absurd. Except for the bottom quarter of her face, a chin more square than oval, the other three-quarters gave her an uncanny resemblance to Joan Crawford. None of the other patrons took notice.

  “To be honest,” Van Hull said, “I wasn’t entirely surprised he took his own life.”

  Dunne focused his attention back on Van Hull. “Why?”

  “Look around. You know what type of man hangs out here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you?”

  “Live and let live. It’s a pretty simple proposition.”

  “Not really. Not for Pully. Not for all those threatened with public exposure, disgrace, blackmail, jail. Pully married once, briefly and unhappily. He went back and forth. I told him it happens. That’s the way it is for some people. It just is. We are what we are. Accept it and get on with your life. He couldn’t. He was tortured. Believe me, he has a lot of company.”

  “He ever talk business?”

  “He didn’t mix business with pleasure, so to speak. He knew if word got out, his career was kaput.” Van Hull finished his drink and called to the bartender for another, which was promptly delivered.

  “He mention anything about a Swiss couple?”

  “In what context?”

  “An investigation he was conducting.”

  “Why would he?”

  “He trusted you.”

  “We trusted each other with the troubles of the heart. He never brought up that ISC crap and, well, I didn’t bring up my job. Not that there’s much to bring up.”

  Dunne caught the bartender’s eye. He signaled for a check.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what I do?”

  “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “I teach English at St. Genevieve’s, an all-girls academy run by French Ursulines. The girls’ parents imagine the Gallic touch will help ease their daughters’ entry into ‘society.’ I’m a kind of one-man English department. The head nun is thrilled to have a male teacher uninterested in seducing her charges. She leaves me alone in my quixotic quest to arouse the slumbering minds of my pubescent beauties to ecstatic enjoyment of Yeats and Frost and William Carlos Williams.”

  Dunne looked at his watch. “I just wanted to stop by and say hello. See how you were doing. Pully’s death stirred a lot of memories.”

  “Death usually does.”

  The bartender came over and placed the tab facedown on the table.

  Van Hull poised his almost-empty glass in the air. “A final toast before we go: L’chaim. Remember?”

  “Dr. Niskolczi. Long ago and far away.”

  They clinked glasses. Dunne grabbed the check, hurried to the bar, and slapped a five-dollar bill on top. “Keep the change.”

  “Come back soon.” The bartender extended his hand to Dunne. “Next time, I’ll know who you are. Friends of TR’s are always welcome at Red’s.”

  “This should be my treat.” Van Hull stood up, swayed, took hold of the back of the booth, and steadied himself.

  “Next time.”

  “Let’s not wait thirteen years.” Van Hull tottered toward the door, taking the small, careful steps of a child learning to walk. Several men called out, “Good night, TR.” He gave a generic wave.

  Dunne held the door open. From the jukebox came Billie Holiday singing “God Bless the Child.” The Joan Crawford look-alike dashed past, oblivious to Dunne.

  “I noticed her earlier,” Dunne said.

  Van Hull laughed. “You mean him.”

  “Him?”

  “Michael Arlington Beresford, Wall Street banker, philanthropist, chairman of the mayor’s Committee on Municipal Finances. That’s during the day. On nights like this, Mildred Pierce comes into Red’s for some Dutch courage before heading off to join the other female impersonators at the Backstage Club on Charles Street.”

  Dunne stepped into the street. “I’ll get you a cab.”

  “No need. I’m only a block away.” Van Hull held on to a fire-alarm box. He twisted his head and gazed up at the neon sign. “Red’s isn’t long for this world. But none of us is. We learned that the hard way, Fin, didn’t we—the real final lesson of war?”

  “If you’re not going to take a cab, I’ll walk with you.”

  Van Hull stayed propped against the stout red alarm box. Instead of helping clear his head, the night air, humid and close, seemed to aggravate the effect of the booze. “Michael and I spent our last hours together right here. I’d received my orders. I took a cab from here to Penn Station. ‘Life’s handed us a rain check,’ Michael said, ‘that’s all.’ Trouble is, when the time came to use the check, après le deluge, the rain had washed him away.”

  “Come on, Dick. I’ll see you home.”

  “And Pully—he was a good man, too.”

  Dunne gently peeled Van Hull from the alarm box.

  He held Dunne’s elbow for support. “I hope you’re not spotted escorting a faggot home—and one who’s blotto as well. Couldn’t be good for a career at IBM.”

  “It’s ISC.”

  “A weed by any other name is just as rank.”

  “It’s nothing next to humping a buddy on your back up a cliff and bringing him home alive across several hundred miles of enemy territory.”

  Van Hull’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a five-story walk-up. The marble steps were worn and veined with cracks. Dunne fished the key out of Van Hull’s pants pocket, turned the lock, flicked on the light switch.

  In the middle of the single room, atop a thin, worn rug, was a leather easy chair, a stack of books beside it, standing lamp behind. Two walls were lined with shelves sagging from the weight of the books crammed in them. In the right far corner was a sink, small refrigerator, cabinet, and two-burner stove; next to the single window, bed, unmade, and small desk. Above was a framed oil painting of a handsome, youthful, blond wavy-haired man. There were lieutenant’s bars on the lapels of his uniform.

  Shuffling his feet as he worked to keep his balance, Van Hull saluted the painting. “There was only one Lieutenant Michael Jahn in the whole world. Only one. That’s the problem.” He staggered toward the cabinet. “How about a nightcap?”

  Dunne caught him before he fell. He guided him into the easy chair. “The night’s already capped.”

  “That’s why I quit and went home, Fin. Because of Michael. I didn’t care about my reputation and less about my old man’s. When he heard what I might be accused of, he sent a letter advising the honorable thing to do was to shoot myself. Nothing like a father’s love, is there? What I cared about was Michael. I couldn’t let them sink Michael’s name in the slime and mire, so I resigned.”

  “How about you get into bed?”

  “You know what George Orwell said about drunks like me?”

  “What?”

  “We drink because we failed and fail all the more because we drink.”

  “You didn’t fail.”

  “You’re kind, Fin. But look around. Your kindness is contradicted by these surroundings. I can’t imagine what my father would say about them—and what they say about me.”

  “Come on, Dick. Bedtime.”

  “This is fine.” Van Hull wiggled out of his jacket, unknotted his tie, leaned over and plucked at his shoelaces. “But at least I don’t deny my failure or pretend my failure is success.”

  “Sit up,” Dunne said. “Raise your legs.” He quickly undid the laces and pulled off the shoes.

  The rising banshee shriek of a siren flooded the room. It peaked and receded as a fire engine surged through the street below.

  “That’s the difference between Bartlett and his ilk and drunks like me. At bottom the Bartletts of this world are nothing more than word whores. They take fine phrases like ‘free world’ and ‘liberty loving’ and prostitute them into excuses for self-promotion. Whatever they touch they corrupt because truth to them is fungible, interchangeable with untruth, so long as it serves their purposes.” Van Hull burped.

  “You need to go to
sleep.”

  “I need Pepto-Bismol. The bottle is in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, if you wouldn’t mind fetching it.”

  “Sure. Then lights out.”

  Dunne switched on the light in the closet-size bathroom. A roach scampered into a crack above the tub. He opened the cabinet and removed the pink Pepto-Bismol bottle. A metal vial was tucked into the corner. He unscrewed it. Inside was a plastic-coated lozenge. Ecce Victor. He dropped it into his pocket.

  He went to the kitchen sink, rinsed out a glass, and half filled it with water. He delivered it along with the bottle and a tablespoon to Van Hull.

  “No need for the spoon. I take my Pepto straight.” Van Hull held up the bottle as if to toast the portrait in the corner. “I wouldn’t have that portrait if it wasn’t for you.” He swigged from the bottle, then took a drink of water. “You saved the photo I had it painted from. Do you remember?”

  “Sure.” Dunne put the glass in the sink.

  “And the inscription?”

  “Yeats, right?”

  “Your favorite poet.” Van Hull wiped the pink traces of the Pepto-Bismol from his lips. He picked up the top book on the pile beside the chair. “The Collected Poems. Here, they’re yours.”

  “That’s all right. I’m still working on The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.”

  “Take it.” Van Hull handed him the book. “Do you know how it ends?”

  “The book?”

  “The poem—‘When You Are Old and Grey.’”

  “No.”

  “Like this.” Van Hull closed his eyes. “‘And bending down beside the glowing bars, / Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled / And paced upon the mountains overhead / And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.’”

  “A lovely poem.” Dunne took the sheet off the bed and draped it over Van Hull’s stomach and legs. “Now get some sleep.”

  “And Pully was a good man, too.” Opening his eyes halfway, Van Hull lifted up another book. “He sent me this.”