The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Then he realizes he can’t move his right arm. He tries to get up and walk, but his right leg is paralyzed too, and he crashes. His right wrist breaks when he hits the floor and he hollers. Tries to form words but they won’t come out. His voice goes raaahhh, raaahhh, like an engine that won’t start. Sylvie rushes in and scares him; he can’t put together that she’s there because she heard him fall. He looks at her and her mouth is moving, he can hear her voice, but he can’t understand what she’s saying. He panics and flails on the ground, smacks his left shin into the table seven times until Sylvie drags the table away from him, gets the chairs out of the way, too. Then the floor feels like an ocean, the walls a million miles away, and he’s alone in a tiny boat, until the ambulance comes and takes him away. That’s when all his energy leaves him and he gives up. He’s out. Did you hear that, Pa? At last, at last, I’m out.

  From then until the second stroke kills him in 1966, nobody’s sure if he’s there anymore. The right side of his body stays paralyzed. He stops talking and only murmurs in his sleep. It’s never clear that he understands what’s said to him. Sylvie and Stefan move his bed to the first floor of the house, get him a wheelchair. She parks him on the sunporch, where he seems to like it best, for most of the day. She bathes him, changes his clothes, helps him in the bathroom after she learns to read the signs. Tries to give him his favorite things to eat. He doesn’t seem to know what to do, seems to like being told. It’s time for lunch now. Time for your bath. We need to get you dressed because your brother’s coming over. We need to get you in a tie because Michael Rizzi’s coming over. Yes, Michael Rizzi, their contact with the Italian side of Peter Henry Hightower’s criminal activities. Lou Rizzi’s nephew, Joe Rizzi’s cousin. They have their meetings in the living room, Michael on the loveseat, Sylvie on the couch, Peter in his chrome wheelchair. Coffee’s in a French press on the table in front of them. Michael’s there about once a month, explains what’s going on. Peter’s eyes are on him when he talks, but he never says anything. So Sylvie speaks for him. At first she’s all deference. I know my father had told me he wanted to do what you’re describing, so I think it’s okay if we do it now. If it’s all right with you, Dad. They both give him a couple obligatory seconds to respond, even though they know he won’t. He stares at his daughter when she speaks and nods his head, maybe because he likes what he’s hearing, maybe because his neck muscles are tired. It’s impossible to say. After a few months of it, Sylvie starts to speak for her father with more confidence. I know my father would want this. I don’t think he’d think that’s a good idea. Peter’s still in the room, still nodding. Michael starts smiling more, being more supportive. He’s impressed with her; he can already see what she’ll become. When she takes over, he thinks, look out. Decides that he wants to make sure he’s on her side when she does; the love between them, the marriage to show that everything between their families is forgiven, will come later. In early 1965 she says it at last—I think we should do it—without mentioning her father at all. If she notices what she’s done, she doesn’t let on. Michael looks at Peter, still in his wheelchair, staring at his daughter and nodding. Your father would be proud of you, he says, and notices that Peter Henry Hightower’s eyes don’t shift toward him at all; they’re still fixed on Sylvie. He knows the score, Michael Rizzi thinks. We’re talking about him like he’s already dead. He feels a twinge of guilt for the disrespect, but there’s no way around it. There’s business to get done.

  Chapter 15

  Do you see it now? Where the spine of the story begins and ends? It runs along the length of the rise and decline of the family, the city, the country, because the system, the animal, runs its course and then keeps running, longer than it should. Call it capitalism. Call it American. Call it what you want. There isn’t an animal born yet that doesn’t get sick someday, and it gets sick in Cleveland in 1966, because too many people have been left out, and decide they’ve had enough.

  It’s Monday, July 18, 1966. In the afternoon, a prostitute walks into the Seventy-Niners’ Café, a bar on the corner of 79th Street and Hough Avenue. She’s there looking for money; she needs to get some together for the children of another prostitute who just died. Owner Dave Feigenbaum tells her to leave. She balks. Soon they’re swearing at each other. She storms out, and Feigenbaum says something under his breath about serving Negroes. It’s about five o’clock in the afternoon. A little while later, a guy walks in and gets a pint of wine, asks for a pitcher of ice water and a glass to go with it. It’s ninety degrees out. Feigenbaum says no; someone says he overhears him talking to his waitress, too. Don’t serve no niggers no water. Maybe he’s thinking back to the winter, when someone tried to burn up his car. Maybe he thinks the people in the neighborhood don’t like him and has decided to be hateful and return the favor. Maybe he’s a virulent racist. Or maybe it’s just too hot and things are too tough in Cleveland, not enough is going well for anyone. Maybe it’s everything all at once, the race, the poverty, the sense that it’s all coming apart. But that’s how it starts. The guy who doesn’t get his water gets angry. He tells all his friends in the place what happened, and he’s nice and loud about it. Then he’s out of there. Minutes later there’s a brown paper bag stuck to the door of the place with writing scrawled on it: No water for Niggers. Now there are a bunch of people gathered around it, and they’re not happy. The Feigenbaum brothers call the police and then step outside themselves. They’ve got a pistol and a rifle. Then the police show up, and everything explodes.

  Three grocery stores are on fire, a drugstore, a clothing store. Then the fires are everywhere. The police set up blockades, cut off twenty blocks from the rest of the city to try to contain it. The firemen go in and get bottles and rocks thrown at them. The fire hoses get slashed, along with police cruisers’ tires; the cars’ windows get broken in. The police set up a command station at East 73rd and Hough, and soon they’re taking fire from snipers nesting in the apartments around them. The police captain there says later that it’s like a western. A woman named Joyce Arnett dies in the crossfire that night, trying to get home to her baby daughters. Three other people are shot. Eight people go to the hospital with wounds from rocks and bottles. A policeman who served in World War II says it reminds him of London during the blitzkrieg. The next day the looters are selling what they stole as fast as they can. The mayor thinks about Watts and Chicago and calls in the National Guard in the afternoon. The shooting starts before they arrive. A stray bullet gets a man named Percy Giles right in the head, they say, while he’s trying to help a friend board up his store. He dies in the hospital. The National Guard arrives and things settle down, but there’s still plenty of looting the next day. The third night, Hough is quieter; there are three National Guardsmen at every intersection, soldiers accompanying the police. There’s a fire just south of the place and the police shoot up a family in their car who are trying to get to safety. On the fourth day, there’s an outbreak of over a hundred fires, half of them started by Molotov cocktails. It doesn’t settle down until the end of the week, and by then, the damage has been done.

  A year later, Hough Avenue’s still destroyed buildings and streets full of garbage. The kids walking it don’t have enough clothes or enough to eat. There are more murders, more firebombs. They say later that the only thing keeping the entire neighborhood from going up in flames in the summer of 1967 is Carl Stokes’s run for mayor—Stokes, Cleveland’s only black candidate for mayor who stands a chance of winning. Cool it for Stokes, they say. They do, and Stokes wins. But Stokes can’t save Hough. Thirty years later, they’re calling it an urban prairie because most of the houses and apartment buildings are gone. There are just the streets and the sidewalks, the telephone poles, a house or two left on an entire block next to an apartment building that’s boarded up and falling over. The rest of the block is weeds turning into forest. From the air, you can see the dark outlines of the foundations where all the other buildings used to be, and it breaks pe
ople’s hearts. They argue, then, about what happened in 1966, about whether the riots bled Hough out or whether they happened because Hough was already bleeding. Fifteen years later the city makes a move, and houses get built in Hough again. The empty blocks get filled in. But then it looks like a suburb, and people are angry about it. The city’s giving up on being a city, some people say. No, say others. The city sees the writing on the wall. All those people left, all those jobs left, and they’re not coming back.

  They’re having an argument about the future, and the public version of it is all sparks, thrown off from the friction between practicality and ideology. The nostalgia for the past, the push for progress, the American stubbornness in insisting that everything always gets better. But it’s getting harder and harder not to see how the big wheel’s turning. How they’ve been on a long arc going up, and now they’re on the other side going down. Some of the people, in America and elsewhere, want to turn around; there must be a way back, they think, a way to climb up the rim as it’s moving downward beneath them. Some of them are turning and facing it, trying to save what they can, to prepare their children for the harder world that’s coming. And a few of them are checking out the approaching chaos, speculating on just how things will fall apart. How the laws will weaken, and how the market—the market for everything—will rise to fill the space. How the people around them will become more vulnerable, more desperate. And then they think about where they need to be to profit from it.

  It’s August 1966. The second stroke, the one that kills Peter Henry Hightower, gets him in his sleep. For Peter, it’s like a switch is flipped, a plug gets pulled, and the dreams and memories left in his head are gone. Lights out. Sylvie comes into his bedroom in the morning to check on him because she doesn’t hear him stir. She can tell from the doorway what’s happened. The covers are off him and his right leg is bent, his foot tucked underneath his body. His left arm is out straight, hanging over the edge of the bed. Sylvie doesn’t make a sound. Maybe for her siblings, the line between their father alive and their father dead is bright and clear, a crack in the sidewalk. But Sylvie’s been living with no one but Peter for years now. She’s seen how there’s a gray country between life and death; her father’s taken his sweet time walking across it, and Sylvie’s been standing on the edge of it, watching him go. She’s had a long time to prepare. She goes to him, arranges the body like he’s still sleeping to give him some dignity. Puts his pillow beneath his head and tucks the blankets around him. Then makes the calls, to the hospital, to the police. To Stefan, who sighs and thanks her for the news, agrees to break it to Jackie. She calls the rest of her siblings, first Henry, then Rufus. Muriel last, and only after the authorities have arrived to take the body away; she knows that Muriel would have rushed over, lost it a little bit, made the necessary parts of dealing with a corpse harder. There’s some ruthlessness in that decision, to deny Muriel the chance to see her father by herself before he’s packed away. But there’s compassion in it, too; she knows that their father’s body isn’t going to give Muriel whatever sense of completion she’s looking for. It’ll never end, Sylvie thinks. Never be done. And something moves in her, a sense of acceptance, of where she finds herself. Of what she has to do.

  So she’s quiet, quieter than usual, when Henry comes a few days before the funeral to sort out the paperwork for their father’s estate. He gives Sylvie a good look when he finds out just how orderly it all is. I know you’re smart, Sylvie, he says, but I still underestimated you. Sylvie just smiles. Let me know if you need anything else, she says, and gets her first taste of the power her mother felt when she married Peter Henry Hightower. Sylvie knows something Henry doesn’t, a big thing. To her, it’s like Henry’s going through everything in a grand house, and as thorough as he prides himself on being, he never finds the switch under the shelf of a bookcase in the library that would make the walls part, show him the wing of the house he didn’t know was there. She doesn’t say anything even during the fight in the dining room. Raise your hand if you think equitable doesn’t mean equal, but fair, Rufus says. He thinks he’s saving her from poverty. What’s wrong with you, Henry? Don’t you ever see regular people anymore? She’s still mum even to Rufus hours later, when he explains to her in the garden what he’s going to do. I’d do anything to keep you in this house, he says. I don’t need the money. She feels a little guilty; it would be so easy to tell him what reins have been handed to her, the direction she’s going in. But nothing is certain yet, her transition to power in the underworld isn’t assured. So she just gives him a hug. I owe you one, she says. I owe you everything. Someday I’ll pay it back. And after the family departs and the house is quiet again, she meets with Michael Rizzi. Tells her how much Rufus gave her and what she’s planning to use it for. I don’t want to take my father’s place, she says. I want to be bigger than he ever was.

  In time, she is. Big enough that she needs to tell Henry how she’s still living in that giant house in Bratenahl, because he’s sensitive enough to the money to know that the legitimate numbers don’t quite add up, even as she doesn’t need to tell any of her other siblings anything; she lets them think she’s just being careful with what she has. Big enough that she can’t launder the money she makes fast enough to spend it; she has piles of cash in the bedrooms, in the basement, under the stairs, but she can’t hire anyone to fix the roof without drawing the authorities’ attention to her. She has her hands in everything in town, in all that’s left of Cleveland’s criminal heyday—the Irish, the Italians, the Eastern Europeans, the Jews. She does the financial stuff, the loan-sharking, the money laundering. She’s the bank for some of the drug trade, for gambling circuits, for real estate swindles, for human trafficking. They always tell her she doesn’t need to know what she’s investing in, where the money’s coming from, but she always finds out, she always knows. They don’t know how she does it; her own husband goes to his grave in 1986 not knowing how she’s always four steps ahead, even of the FBI, which is aware only of the fact of her existence. When the criminals don’t call her the White Lady, they call her the Goddess: She’s the all-seeing eye, knows what everyone’s up to. And in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union implodes, her eye turns east, to the criminals rising up there, and she buys in. What are you doing that for? Kosookyy says to her, over coffee in the living room. They’re bad news over there. And Sylvie gives him a little smile. For protection, she says, I want to know who they are. She sees how the criminals in Eastern Europe are just capitalists run amok. The governments and the borders between the countries are dissolving, there’s no one in charge; there’s only the logic of the market, putting prices on cars, factories, houses, towns. People. What are you made of? How much are you worth? It’s all for sale, and the price is so low, for everything, everyone. No wonder it’s so brutal. But then Sylvie looks out the window, thinks about what her city, her country, is becoming, and thinks she sees the future on the other side of the ocean. The new gangsters are coming here, she tells Kosookyy. And when they arrive, either they’ll eat us alive or we’ll become them. Though I’m not sure I see the difference. Even before her nephew Peter, Rufus’s son, shows up at her door, she’s figuring a way out, and she’s learned from her father’s mistakes. Right before she goes, she has to try to kill it all and set it on fire. Not just one man. All of it, all that she’s built since her father’s death and all her father built before she was born. She has to slaughter it and light it all up, make it burn quick and hot, until there’s nothing left but ashes. That part is easy, though there’ll be so much blood. The trick, the hard part, is in escaping the bullets, the knives, the flames. In making sure that the blood that flows doesn’t belong to her or the people she loves; and that no more flows again.

  Part 3

  1995

  Chapter 16

  Our family is destroyed, Muriel thinks, and I’ll never see my son again.

  It’s August 1995. Muriel doesn’t sleep at all after she drops Pete
r off at Sylvie’s, and the way he and Sylvie are acting when she picks him up the next day scares her. Muriel, honey. We’re already ruined, Sylvie says, and Muriel’s too upset to ask her what she means. She and Peter don’t say more than a couple words on the ride out to the airport, because Peter looks shell-shocked, and Muriel thinks she knows why. Or maybe it’s better to say it this way: thinks she does. All of Peter Henry Hightower’s children know their father was a criminal. They all know he had a man killed. But after he dies, for Muriel, it’s as if there are rings around their family secrets, rings of knowledge and power, and she and Jackie are on the outermost edge, knowing the least. She’s aware that Henry knows more, and Rufus must, and that Sylvie knows the most. In the past, before their falling-out, she might have worked up the courage to complain to Henry about it. You’re always keeping me in the dark. Except that she thinks of it the other way around: At the center of the ring, it’s pitch-dark, so dark that she can’t see her older sister, who’s standing inside the shadow, and she can only just make out the faces of her brothers. She has seesawed for years between hating them for leaving her out and being grateful to them for letting her live in the light, to meet Petey’s father and then marry Terry, to live her life of relative normalcy on Edgewater Drive, without having to answer for the rest of her family, succumbing to it like Sylvie did, or running away like Rufus did, or struggling with it like Henry always will. She knows she doesn’t have the stomach for any of what they did, and her gratitude swells in her whenever she thinks of Andrew and Julia, who she thinks are so safe. But now and again she’s wanted to call up Henry or Sylvie and talk to them, really talk. I know more than you think I do, she wants to say. I see more than you give me credit for. She doesn’t do it, though, because she’s afraid. Not of what she might learn—she can handle it, she knows she can—but of what it might do to her family. It has all seemed so precarious to her, like since their father died, they’ve all been held together by spiderwebs, and a push from the smallest breeze would send them all floating far away from each other. She can’t see how strong the connections still are, the tendons between them all, of commerce and history, loyalty and regret, and it’s the great tragedy of her life. Because if she knew the family could take it, she would have pushed harder, and maybe her oldest son would have been saved.