by Thelma Adams
“How’d you find me? I don’t even know how I got here.” Her path had been random; she couldn’t retrace her own steps. Still, Abie’s arrival meant she wasn’t completely alone.
“Larry told me you skipped Hebrew lessons,” Abie said, snapping his fingers at the bartender, who had poked his head outside. Ordering for them both, he withdrew a roll and peeled off a bill. “I met him at Midnight Rose’s Candy Store. My nephew was running phone calls for Kid Twist at a nickel a pop.”
“Not quite the alef-beys.” She’d left him alone on the street, hoping that Adele was nearby but not checking. She’d been full of cares and careless. While she’d lacked the pennies to front her kid a paper sack of caramels, she could scrape together enough for booze. She’d become the horror her sister had warned her about, Annie with her three ducklings in a row. Thelma wouldn’t cry now. Not if she hadn’t last night on her knees.
“That’s how the fellas rope a boy in. A little pocket change for candy your own mother’s too cheap to buy you. It ain’t hard to get a kid hooked on sugar.” Abie dug a half-smoked cigar out of his breast pocket and lit it. “Larry’s quite the character—got a lot of brass for a skinny kid. But he’s more mouthy than smart.”
“The family curse.”
“He’d tell a stranger everything about you for a nickel,” Abie said, then shut up when the barman delivered two shots. Abie made a twirling motion with his index finger directed at the table. “Another round.”
Once the Irishman disappeared, Abie continued, “I gave him a quarter. He told me he’d waited for you but you’d skipped. He was mad as hell. He called you a few names. Naturally, I agreed. Who knows you better than me? After that, finding you was easy. I knew a guy who knew a guy who saw you in Luna Park.”
“Jesus.”
“Mary, Mother of God, and Joseph, too, for all the good they’ll do,” said Abie. “Bottoms up.”
“Up your bottom.” She gagged and then smacked the glass down on the table. Her brother scratched at his stubble and then rubbed his square chin. He looked like she felt. She saw him young, sitting like a prince of thieves in the orphanage with Louis beside him. And she anticipated what he’d look like old, when those worry lines cratered and his teeth yellowed—if he were allowed to age that long. He wasn’t in the longevity business. “We’re in deep, right?”
“Up to my neck.”
“That was some grisly pudding last night.” The siblings leaned back.
“And you missed the main course,” Abie said, sucking on his cigar.
“I saw plenty.” There’d been so much gore, swirling in circles beneath the sponge, under her fingernails, dyeing the bucket water red. It nearly made cleanup impossible. That was how it had to be. It shouldn’t be easy to kill a man. It should be messy and tough, because no one had that right to snuff a life, not even Pretty’s.
Abie tossed the cigar. Fishing for cigarettes, he tapped out two and lit them. Brother and sister smoked in silence. Abie was visibly uneasy, not just with the overall situation but with her. She could tell he hadn’t sought her out to hold her hand.
“Okay, Abie, spit it out. What’s the bitter pill I have to swallow?”
“You saw too much, Temmy. You can’t be hanging around the clubhouse.”
“That’s a fancy name for that basement flytrap.” Even though she was numbed by booze, his brush-off gradually sank in, magnifying her paranoia. She turned away to hide her sorrow, ashamed and gutted. Forget hope. Forget comfort. Even Abie, her knight in tarnished armor, was joining Annie and Mama. He was telling her she was unwelcome at the one place she knew she could find him when she needed him.
And she always wanted him. They’d been conspirators in life. She’d been his defender in chief, his ally. Overnight, she’d become a liability. Having seen death up close, she fought the rising terror that her end was near, too. She stood up, furious, spun around and began to walk in circles on the boardwalk, frightening pigeons into flight. When she pivoted to confront Abie, she couldn’t read his features, because he’d shut her out. She felt like screaming at him until her vocal cords snapped, but that would only supply more evidence of her weakness. She couldn’t control herself, her rage, her grief: Hadn’t that been what got them here in the first place?
“Sit down, Thelma, before you bring down the cops.”
“I don’t want to sit down.” Yet she collapsed back in the chair, obediently. In a voice strained by emotion, she said, “So now I can’t see my own brother?”
“You gotta stay away from me,” Abie said. He swiveled his chair to face the water, giving her his profile. This was how he treated everybody else, but not her. He’d always let her in, and she’d never judged. “I’m begging you. There’s going to be trouble.”
“What else is new?” Thelma laughed. Abie didn’t. She changed her tone, pared the sarcasm. “When did you get into the bump-off racket?”
“When you’re running the Williamsburg Boys Club . . .”
“Don’t bullshit me, Abie. You’re no big shot.”
“And I’d like to keep it that way. Things are changing around the neighborhood, Tem.” Using her nickname softened her. She felt him coming around. Who else could he trust? He wasn’t a kid anymore. He was over forty, older than Papa had been when he’d passed. “Those Brownsville boys have ambitions, shpilkes. They can’t sit still. They call the tune. Either we Williamsburg guys dance or we lie down. I’ve seen lying down. I don’t want to be on the floor when the music stops.”
“Why did Pretty have to die? Couldn’t they have just given him a beating and a ticket out of town?”
“He stomped into Midnight Rose’s making big-man threats, beating his chest. He was going to kill everybody. It was an engraved invitation.”
“You didn’t have to accept, did you?”
“We were either in or we were out.” Abie appeared to drop his tough-guy mask. He’d always talked to her eventually. Everyone had to have at least one confidant, someone with whom the voice in their head matched their conversation. Abie was surrounded by animals, but even a man with a crooked past needed to unburden himself. “I knew Amberg, all right. He wasn’t afraid of me. I invited him over to Marcy Avenue for a shot, maybe a little powder. But the party wasn’t friendly. The boys tied him up in the kitchen. They gave me the first cut. I didn’t like Pretty, but still, I didn’t have any heat in me. He was my guest, an immigrant son of a bitch like me. But we had orders. And we had orders to do it slow.”
Hunching deeper into his coat, he lowered his voice to a rasp. “They were over shooting Dutch in Jersey. It was going to be a long night. We were just supposed to get the party started. So I sliced his arm with a knife so sharp it took him a minute to squawk. Then we took turns. The bastard talked the whole time, as if we wanted information. He would have given us his kid’s bar mitzvah funds, his wife’s panties. But he didn’t have anything to tell us we wanted to know. He just had to be wiped out of the picture. Things are changing, Temmy. It’s the American way. Even killers are incorporating. The big guys have the syndicate. We shleppers are subcontractors. We’re disposal experts filling orders, only it’s not for bootleg hooch but body bags. We steal cars, we snatch guys, and they disappear. If you’re not in, you’re out. The Brownsville boys say it’s the cost of doing business.”
“Maybe you should unionize.” She cracked wise to defuse the tension, but it didn’t work, so she asked, “Why are you telling me all this now?”
“Because, Temmy, I’m poison for you now. You gotta keep your distance. I can’t protect you.” He coughed in a way that seemed to bounce around his lungs. “I’m a fixer. You know me. Someone wants something, I get it. Two guys don’t get along, then I sit down and try to reshuffle the deck. Now I’m fixing this and that, holding my finger in the dike—they should call me the Dutchman—but I don’t want a big name like Dutch Schultz. That’s for suckers, small guys in big hats. I want to be Little Yiddle with a fiddle. I want to stay in the shadows in the neighborhood
and collect my rent.”
When he said “rent,” she realized what worried her brother in the first place: money. Poverty was at the root of all his fears. He took a cut of the club and all the schemes that flowed in and out, including this new enterprise. In the process, he paid a lot of people off. She wasn’t his accountant, but she knew that much—and that he was trying to negotiate a takeover and end up profiting. He was the victim of his own success, but he wouldn’t see it that way. She prompted him to continue by asking, as if she were a doctor, “So where does it hurt?”
“All over,” he said. “Slicing a guy, some guy I know? Pretty? Of course he’s mad. They killed his brother. He’s crazy with it. It’s hard to raise a blade like that, against a guy you’ve beat at cards, who pulls out his schlong when he gets drunk. It’s not my style. You know me, Temmy, I don’t have trouble with knives, like that kid on Fourteenth Street who gave me grief and begged for it. But this is different. This is icy Italian reptilian shit.” He shrugged and sucked his teeth. “And they know where your family lives, so it’s not like you have much choice. What am I going to do? Move to Jersey?”
“Over my dead body,” she said, feeling a chill unrelated to the wind, like someone had walked across her grave before she’d paid all the installments. She feared for herself and Larry.
“Things have to change, Temmy. I’m not running the show,” Abie said, watching the breakers. “I love you, but we can’t keep playing this hand. You gotta fold.”
“What do you mean?” Thelma asked, agitated, her voice rising.
Abie scanned the boardwalk. “Don’t play dumb. You got blood on your hands. I should’ve kicked you out, but you were such a mess I couldn’t turn you away. Not my own sister. But you’re not their sister. You’re a loose end.”
“Forget them. Am I a loose end for you, Abraham?” She glared at him as if he were a specimen she’d never seen before—a random thug in a police lineup. The realization that with their two skins on the line, he’d save his own, shattered her.
“What: So they sent you to kill me?” Rising, she felt both terrified and outraged. She slammed her empty glass on the ground just to hear something break. It was so thick it only thudded and rolled. She’d felt alone before, but now she felt hunted by the man who knew her best. She’d knelt and scrubbed up Amberg for him. She would have gone to the end of the earth for him—and, now, they were at the end of the earth and only one of them would be returning. “You’re kvetching to me about some work crap so I can forgive you for making my kid an orphan?”
“I’m not going to kill you, Temmy. Don’t go meshuge.”
“You threaten me and say, ‘Don’t go nuts’? What is it, Mr. Big Shot with a knife?”
“Things change for me, they change for you.”
“I get it: you’re the fixer and they said to come and fix me or else.” Despite the booze, her mind began to clear. “Was that why you bumped into Larry at the candy store? You were sniffing around the Brownsville Boys for your reward now that you’d crisped Pretty?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“You keep your voice down, you backstabber.” She balled up her hands in anger. He’d seen her since she was a baby; he knew every bit of generosity in her heart and the scars of every cut. All the times she’d been kicked to the curb, Abie had been there for her. Was it all so that he could shove her aside?
Annie would get the last laugh, seeing them in the gutter together. Their sister had always predicted this dire end. “Spit it out, Abie. What’s the fix? How do we get out of this mess without digging me an early grave? You don’t want me to go out dancing anymore? I’ll cut off my right leg. You don’t want me to pick up men? I’ll become a nun. You want me to make up with Annie and crawl back on my knees? I’d rather clean blood for you than kiss her fat ass. What, Mr. Respectable, are you going back to Rodney Avenue with Tillie?”
“Never gonna happen,” Abie said. “Get me my straitjacket and commit me to Brooklyn State Hospital.”
She jerked her head away from her brother. The comment was a wisecrack too far. Just shoot me now, she thought. Let’s walk across the sand and you can hold my head under the waves.
The Brooklyn State Hospital was where old man Schwartz had committed Philip. Her husband’s biggest fear had been to be caged, stripped of his individuality, and detached from his daily newspapers and books. His father had locked him away to shuffle in pajamas and slippers during the day, hydrotherapy in the afternoon, with lights out at nine and insomnia’s black pit. He’d begged her not to let them take him away, but Papa Schwartz had called her a tramp and a gold digger and, in the end, sent her packing to Montauk Avenue.
Philip had been harmless the way he was. Maybe he wasn’t earning a living, but he had an active mind. Sure, he had dark days, retreating to his room to brood and puff. But that wasn’t every day. He just needed more love, and patience to let the moods pass. The treatments hadn’t fixed her husband; they’d just crushed his spirit and cleaved him from the real world. In the end, the place had killed him. He was as dead as Amberg.
Breaking the silence, her brother snapped his fingers at the bartender. He ordered another round. The Irishman plucked the fallen glass from the boardwalk and searched it for cracks. Abie rolled off a bigger bill. “There are worse places than Montauk Avenue.”
“You’re shitting me.” She clenched her fists, feeling her resentment rise with the mere mention of that house. “Is that your brilliant fix?”
“My dough bought that house. You have just as much right to be there.”
“Keep telling yourself fairy stories, Abie. You bought it and they changed the locks.”
“Locks don’t stop me.”
“You talk big. You know Annie won’t let you near those precious monsters. The future of the family—I should live so long! You can run with professional killers but you can’t handle Annie?”
“Different weapons.” He shrugged. “What, you want me to stab her?”
“I’ve considered doing it myself, but I lack your talent,” she spat.
“It’s no talent. I just take my anger and turn it out, not in.”
“Thanks for the lesson. Put it on my tab.”
“I won’t charge you,” he said. “I bought that house. I bought that respectability. I got them work when there wasn’t any. No good deed . . .”
“. . . goes unpunished.” She felt her anger rising as her options narrowed. She sensed a finality in their conversation that she couldn’t quite express. It was as if they were already remembering this moment together, not living it forward.
Maybe she was still in shock. “So I’ll go back, play the Cinderella sister act again, is that what you want, Abie? Will that save my skin? No sex for the rest of my life, Larry and I sharing the little bedroom at the top of the stairs until he enlists?”
“That’s not a bedroom. That’s a broom cupboard.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. That roof isn’t big enough for Annie and me. It can be done, but I don’t want to do it any more than you want to sleep with Tillie.”
“If only she’d let me rest.”
“What’s wrong with these women, Abie? Annie wants me to roll up my life like a rug and sleep on it, lumps and all. No more nights dancing. I can see it: smoking on the stoop in my housecoat, drinking on the sly, a grown woman playing the spinster, sitting around with the insomniacs, plotting our escape in whispers. Can you imagine Uncle Moe still mooning over me with apologetic eyes but still begging for a touch? You want that for me?”
“It’s not a life, Temmy, I know that. But now you got a kid.”
Chapter 33
Thelma stared at the boardwalk, empty now except for the raggedy birds. This was Coney Island, shabby in its autumn coat. She realized she couldn’t pry love from her mother and sister. But what ached was how hard it was to find that generosity in her to give Larry.
“Would it have been so hard for them to love us just a little, Abie?”
�
�Stop kicking a dead horse. The love isn’t there, only blood. You and me, Temeleh, that’s something else,” he said with a softness that caressed the Yiddish nickname. For the first time that afternoon, he looked into her eyes and she saw them, tears. But he would never perform the tell of wiping away the drops.
She half smiled, wryly, the light they shared in the darkness. She was still furious, but she couldn’t hate him. She’d followed her brother down this path that landed them at this very table. “I made this bed with the dirty sheets. I get it. It’s my turn to lie in it.”
“We had a rough start, little sister.” Abie pulled her hand close to him and kissed the burn-scarred thumb. She’d never forget the horror of Annie saying, “You’ll crisp like chicken skin.”
Like Amberg.
The lesson to avoid fire had escaped her. Instead, that day on East 106th Street ignited a never-ending feud. Her first memory was of Annie’s treachery and Abie’s defense. But what did Annie know from child rearing? She was a teenager fascinated by her own breasts. Her older sister didn’t want to be taking care of any kids, much less a mother hardly able to fold socks.
“We had a rough start, Abie, and the finish hasn’t been much of a picnic, either.” She considered Philip. “Every day I wake up, there’s the empty pillow where Phil’s head used to be.”
“You loved him.”
“For all the good it did him.”
“Or you.”
“Me? Who cares?” She shrugged. “I had Phil’s kid, and it put that beautiful man right over the edge.”
“He already had a front-row seat on that ledge, Temmy. That whole family is thick with crazy.”
“His doctor told me: Get pregnant, have a kid. It’s just the tonic to mend him. I sensed it was a lie, but I wanted to believe. I hoped to get my old Phil back, the one who danced, the one who loved this, me.” She raised her hands and gestured at her scrawny body. She’d stopped eating. She walked miles at night alone. It was enough that she no longer cried on the street, on buses among strangers, in comedies with happy endings.
