Weinstein was about to turn around and say something, but Eddie Hernandez said, “I don’t want them for nothing.”
“Eddie,” Teenager said.
“So long,” Eddie said to the man with the shaved head.
“No, you stay here a minute,” Teenager said.
“No, you go,” Eddie said to the guy.
With a smirk, the man with the shaved head walked out. Eddie Hernandez began arranging a pile of shirts. “If you let them in here once,” Eddie said, looking at the shirts, “then they think it is you they own. They start hanging around. They are no good for business. People do not come in a store if they see bums hanging around. Who buys his son a confirmation suit if he sees a junkie in the store window? I work here seven days a week. Now this son of a bitch, who takes five minutes to steal something, wants me to give him money that I must make by working. I don’t want him or his lousy jeans in my store.”
Weinstein grunted. He saw that his monument stood on an even firmer base than he had realized.
Teenager smiled and walked around the store, looking at the clothes. A speech such as Eddie’s was meant for others. Yet Teenager saw truth in what Eddie had said and he admired it. A man who runs things and works hard should not have to share so much of what he earns, Teenager told himself. This is how I will run my business. He bought three shirts for sixty dollars.
“Thank you,” Eddie Hernandez said.
“I will be back in this store,” Teenager said.
When Teenager left the store, Weinstein pointed at his back. “So him we have again.”
“He’s been in here a couple of times,” Eddie said. “You told me to sell clothes to the devil as long as the clothes are honest and the devil pays.”
“That’s right,” Weinstein said.
“Well, I was just nice to the devil.”
6
MYLES CROFTON CROUCHED DOWN in the debris and picked up a brick. He thought of taking two of them, but he told himself, no, this one brick would be better; he would place it atop the television in his playroom and say to everybody that it was the last brick from the apartment house in the Bronx where he had been born and raised. As he looked around the empty lot where the apartment house once had stood, he could see that someday soon the brick in his hand actually would be the last. Already the piles of bricks and charred timber were nearly covered with auto tires, plastic Clorox bottles and broken glass blinking in a light from some distant place; the Bronx itself no longer has a sky. What once was an Irish proving ground, twenty-five apartments, a hundred and thirty-five tenants, nearly all practicing the religions of Catholicism and slander, now was becoming an Atlantis under garbage.
The place had carried the address of 508-510 Sycamore Avenue. When it was erected in 1930, the building’s scale, taking up the entire block of Sycamore from 139th to 140th streets, caused the local Bronx postmaster to decide that two address numbers were required.
Now Myles was surprised at the true size of the neighborhood. The walkups, thrown against each other, were narrow, and the larger apartment houses that were still standing, which were of the same style as the one in which he had lived, had apartments that were so small that he could imagine people raising their feet high as they walked about, in order not to step on the legs of somebody sitting. He had grown used to a parched lawn and split-level house in Barton, in Suffolk County, an outer suburb. He had driven down today with his wife and mother-in-law in a 1972 Chevrolet Impala to pick up Myles’ six-year-old Le Sabre, which was being fixed at a transmission shop on Southern Boulevard.
With a finger, Myles measured the air to a spot a little to the left of where fire-blackened springs sat. Once, his apartment had taken up this area.
“Myles!”
His mother-in-law’s voice caused him to look back over his shoulder. His wife and mother-in-law, sitting in the locked Impala, motioned toward the corner, where a group of Puerto Rican men suddenly had materialized. Myles’ mother-in-law worked her index finger back and forth to indicate that Myles should get out his gun.
“It’s nothing,” Myles called to them.
“Well, I don’t want any of them sneaking up on you,” the mother-in-law said.
“Never happen,” he told her.
Myles returned his attention to the debris. He listened for footsteps echoing in the stairwells in the late afternoons, as the kids he was growing up with carried grocery orders up to their apartments.
“Myles!”
His mother-in-law was waving her arm in distress. One of the Puerto Ricans up at the corner had just taken a step, or perhaps two, and now was almost two flagstones closer.
“Forget it,” Myles said.
His wife got out of the Impala and tip-toed through broken glass covering the gutter and stood alongside Myles. “What do you want me to do?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Myles said. He had taught his ear to quarantine his wife’s voice, but direct questions always cut their way in.
“We’re here,” she said. “I wish you’d tell me what you want us to do.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Myles said.
“That’s just it,” his wife said, “you keep us hanging.”
He didn’t answer. He ran his finger up to where the fourth floor had been. He traced the hallway to the right, to where the last door had been. That was his wife’s apartment. When the father, great old guy, would sit at the dinner table, Myles remembered, he would wait until the mother was just sitting down, fanny just about to touch the chair, and then he’d say, “Before you sit down, Mae.” He’d catch her just right with all her weight coming down and now having to be reversed, the backs of the knees suddenly having to push the whole works up again. And then the father would say, “Bottle of beer, eh Mae? Good girl yourself, Mae.” Otherwise, the husband and wife almost never spoke until the night they carried the father downstairs on a wooden kitchen chair, doubled up with a heart attack, knees right up against his chest. The wife was right behind him on the staircase. Hand over her mouth. At the hospital, the father gasped for the mother, the mother wailed when he died. The mother went to live with the sister in Oradell, New Jersey, but she wound up spending half the time at Myles’ house in Barton. At both places, the first thing the mother now did in the morning was to dust off the shrine to her husband that she maintained on the top of each dresser.
Myles thought that this perhaps might be the answer to his own married life. He had been married to Cathy for sixteen years, the last ten of which had been numbed by children, economics and an adherence to history. At thirty-seven Myles Crofton, graduate of St. Benedict’s Roman Catholic grammar school and Cardinal Collins high, lived by the rules branded into him by these schools. They were ancient rules; the Catholic Church changes only in books or movies. Always, it is a religion of cold churches and windy cemeteries and the admonishment that you are not put on this earth to be happy. From age seven onward, he had been taught that there could be no adjustments therefore. He could be with his wife through limitless hours and not say as much as a sentence to her: for the length of a three hundred eighty-mile drive to a sister’s house in Buffalo; through an obligatory night out, from car ride to dinner to drink at the bar and ride home, and he knew that it was futile for him ever to look hard at the darkness. Change was unlawful. Besides, he reasoned that the reaction of Cathy’s mother to her husband’s death meant that he, too, probably had some great emotion for Cathy somewhere inside him and the shame of it all was that it would take a tragedy to bring it out.
His wife’s voice again intruded. “So what do you want us to do?”
“Why don’t you go home? Let me stay here a while.”
“Stay here? How could you stay here? It’s bad enough you have to work here now, without staying on your own time.”
“I’ll be home on time for supper.”
“Sure now?”
“What else am I going to do?”
She paused, and when he said nothing, she went to t
he car. As it pulled away, Myles saw his mother-in-law banging the door locks down. He was left with a brick in his hand and his beginnings in the air in front of him.
Myles went to his own newly repaired car, dropped the brick onto the seat and started off. Then for no reason he walked to the corner of 140th Street and halfway down the block, a street of burned-out buildings with junkies on the stoops, to the rear entrance of St. Benedict’s. Its old gray stones belonged on a hill, with rain and mist, not on a block like this. Myles had not been inside the church in five years.
Inside, the church was empty in the Sunday afternoon. He walked to the last row, pulled out a kneeler and dropped onto it. A few steps away, the confessional booth he always had used was gone, replaced by a statue of a saint, St. Martin de Porres. I never heard of a nigger saint, Myles said to himself. They must have gone blind searching for a nigger they could put in church instead of jail.
Myles blessed himself and started to pray. He always said an Our Father and ten Hail Marys to pull his mind into the current where prayer ran, but halfway through the Our Father his thoughts drifted and he had to start the prayer over. He decided to get up and light a candle for his mother. When he walked over to the bank of candles by the Blessed Virgin’s statue, he found tops on the red glass jars and that, upon removing the top, the light inside the jar was being made not by candles but by small electric bulbs, cheap twisted Christmas tree bulbs, the twists causing the light to appear to flicker. Bulbs from Cheap John’s store, any avenue. A sign in English and Spanish said a person was to push the button on the top of the glass jar to turn on the light, then drop the offering into the slot at the base of the jar. Myles wondered why the old candles had been replaced by light bulbs. Perhaps the pastor had no one around to change the candles and clean the wax that dripped over the sides of the jars and onto the floor. No. The reason the pastor had to put bulbs was that he had his bellyful of Puerto Ricans setting fires.
Whatever, Myles wouldn’t push the button. Electricity was too abstract to deal with the soul of his mother. He knew he could feel no warmth from lighting a light bulb, and part of the reason for lighting a candle is to warm the heart of the one lighting the wick, just as much as it is to create a light that asks God to ease the stay in Purgatory of the soul of a most faithful departed. Here, however, the connection between the living person and his God has been broken by the introduction of electricity. Next, he told himself, they’ll take down the Cross and put up a picture of an auto accident and claim Christ died in a hit-run.
Myles had been back working in the Bronx for two weeks now, as a member of the Twenty-ninth Homicide squad, a position he got by using a hook strong enough to tow the Queen Elizabeth II. At thirty-seven, Myles still held a patrolman’s badge and salary, but he had been moved to the Twenty-ninth Homicide, with the promise of a detective shield and pay soon, by a man he drove three weeks each summer, Martin Scannell, a supervising acting chief inspector. When Scannell’s regular driver went on vacation, Myles was pulled from his precinct, the Ninth, out of a booth in front of the Panamanian consulate and given the opportunity, as he drove, to put his career furtherance as prominently as possible into Scannell’s mind. He wanted Scannell to put him into the detective division, which would mean an immediate pay raise of nearly three thousand dollars.
Myles lived a life of financial torment; he was about three hundred and twenty-five dollars short each month, and his nerves chafed each time the phone rang, for there was the chance of the caller being a finance company clerk who would take enormous pleasure in humiliating a cop. Scannell was easy to talk to, for he knew several of Myles’ cousins from St. Raymond’s parish in the Bronx. Ability to retain what he heard was limited, however, because at fifty-three he had fallen deeply in love with a woman who sold sweaters at Macy’s. In his mind, Scannell was conducting an invisible romance, one that only he and the woman knew of, and Scannell denied her to himself so much that during the warmest part of sex he assured himself that it wasn’t happening at all. Yet he had his car and chauffeur parked in front of Macy’s so often that all the policemen in the area called him “Strauss,” after the first owner of Macy’s.
Discovery that Scannell’s love was in sweaters was made on the day Croatians bombed the Yugoslavian embassy. Reached by beeper, Scannell used the phone extension at the sweater counter. In the midst of his hurried discussion with the office of chief of operations, Scannell had a saleswoman, not his true love, pick up an extension.
“You’ve got to get off, I got a bombing,” Scannell said.
“No, you’ve got to get off. I’ve got a full-figured woman needs a thirty-eight cardigan up here right away,” the salesgirl said.
“What are you so worried about being a detective for?” Scannell asked Myles one day.
“The money,” Myles said.
“At least you tell the truth,” Scannell said.
“I couldn’t lie to a man like you,” Myles said.
“I appreciate that,” Scannell said.
“I couldn’t lie to anybody you put me with, either,” Myles said.
“You’re supposed to get to the detective division by narcotics or anticrime,” Scannell said. “I don’t know, what do you want? You have a nice spot now. They put you in a squad, you’ll be someplace where you could get hurt.”
“I’d rather get shot than stay the way I am,” Myles said.
Scannell, remote, in love, shrugged. Myles talked about being a detective so much that he began to act like one. During Easter week, he was driving Scannell and wound up waiting at a table in Clark’s, in Macy’s basement. A woman brushed Myles as she bent over to reach for something on the floor next to his table.
“I’m going to make a phone call and I dropped my dime,” she said.
Myles stood up. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m looking,” the woman said.
“Forget about it,” Myles said. He went to the phone booth, dropped in a quarter, dialed the operator and then grabbed the quarter as it dropped back. He motioned to the woman, a dark-haired woman of his age.
“Operator, this is a police call,” Myles said loudly. “Shield number 1174. Detective Crofton of the Organized Crime Special Security Squad. I’m calling …”
“499-6272,” the woman said.
“499-6272,” Myles said into the phone. “Thank you.” He stepped away from the wall pay phone and handed the woman the receiver. “There you are.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“Forget about it.”
Myles let his jacket fall open so that the woman could see the gun. She was enthralled. When she was through, she sat with Myles and gave her name as Barbara Berger. She was thirty-eight and dreadfully alone. Myles was thirty-seven and with three kids. His will power was a cotton wall when Barbara Berger smiled at him. He fell in love with her on Holy Thursday and at home on Easter Sunday he had to invent a reason, expecting a call from the inspector, for not attending mass with his wife, mother-in-law and kids. If he had attended, he would have been unable to receive communion, for his soul was black from sin with Barbara Berger.
Who also tore the heart out of his financial system. The first night he took her out, on a Thursday, they went to an Italian restaurant on the West Side that looked cheap until Myles and Barbara began drinking wine and ran up a check of ninety-five dollars. One date a week later and Myles no longer had money for his car payment.
At home that week, the phone rang at eight o’clock in the morning.
“This is Mr. Peters from Beneficial Finance,” the voice said. Myles owed a personal loan he originally had taken out five years before.
“I can’t talk now,” Myles said.
“We’re interested in cash, not conversation,” Peters said.
On Thursday, when Myles walked out of an eight-to-four tour at the Ninth Precinct, the air was so soft that the streets seemed like a public garden. Still, he was gloomy as he walked into the subway. He pulled out his patrolman’s badge, which was on
a chain as long as a lawn hose, and held it high so the toll booth man would know that it was a cop and not a turnstile jumper going through the gate. Police rules forbade off-duty men from riding the subways free, but Myles did not understand the purpose of any badge that did not gain at least small perks for the bearer. His badge was on this long chain so that when held high in a crowded subway, nobody bumping into Myles could cause him to drop the badge and lose it, a tragedy for which the police department penalty was five days’ pay. Myles could not afford to lose an hour’s pay. He had eleven dollars with him, and was fortunate to have that, and he was therefore in need of a plausible reason for not taking Barbara Berger, whom he was to meet in front of her office at five, for as much as a beer. He had settled on the word emergency by the time the train reached 34th Street. As he emerged onto Seventh Avenue, he saw Inspector Scannell’s car parked in front of Macy’s main entrance. The regular driver sat reading a newspaper. Myles walked behind the car, went into Macy’s and took the escalator up to the fourth floor, where he found Scannell, leaning on the sales counter as if it were a bar, talking with Italian animation to a saleswoman with enough loose skin under the chin to indicate that once she had been fifty. Upon seeing Myles approach, Scannell jumped away from the counter and intercepted Myles.
“What are you doing here?” Scannell demanded.
“I had to come up and see you.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“I just figured.”
“Did you talk to my driver?”
“No, sir.”
Scannell’s eyes widened. “Are you sure you didn’t talk to my driver?”
“You could ask him. He didn’t see me. And you know I don’t lie.”
Scannell was silent. His voice lowered. “All right, what do you want?”
“I thought I have to tell you this. The other night I was working in a bar on First Avenue. I got this second job. I can’t make it on my pay.”
Scannell’s face reddened. “You’re here to give me this?”
Forsaking All Others Page 8
