The wind began blowing harder, twisting its way around corners of the downtown buildings.
“Yeah,” Chuck Danko said, “but even more amazing is that you know the name of the driver who killed James Dean.”
The Good Listener
Roy’s Uncle Buck and his friend Tony Grimaldi, who owned the Abeja Bank in Ybor City, played poker with two or three other men on Thursday nights. This was in the 1960s when Tampa, Florida, was still a relatively small city, a shrimp and cigar town, as Grimaldi called it. Ybor City was the center of the Cuban-American community, which it had been since the mid-19th century. Tony Grimaldi wasn’t Cuban but, having grown up there, spoke Spanish like one.
“C’mon, Gus, you want cards or not?”
“Tony, you know how much time it takes you to okay or refuse a loan?”
“No time. You need a loan or cards?”
“One.”
“Buck?”
“I’m good.”
“Art?”
“Dos.”
“Ralph?”
“I’m out.”
“Speakin’ of loans?”
“Art?”
“What about Don Kay? You know he’s goin’ away for torchin’ the Riviera Terrace.”
“Don Kay don’t worry me. You worry me, always takin’ two cards.”
Buck, Art, Tony and Gus showed their hands. Buck scraped up the pot. After the game ended and only Tony and Buck were still seated at the table, Buck asked Tony about Sam Lowiski.
“He’s in Dallas with that puta, the counterfeit rubia makes stag films.”
“You like her, Tony, don’t you?”
Tony lit a Chesterfield, puffed on it a few times, then said, “Mary Duckworth is her real name.”
“Lowiski calls her Deronda LeMay. Anyhow, he come through?”
Grimaldi stubbed out his cigarette.
“I could use another beer.”
“Gus killed the last one.”
“If he don’t show by tomorrow, we’ll go get him. I can send Izzy.”
“You mean Lefty, whose left arm got shot off by that runt Martinelli?”
“Israel Izquierda, yeah.”
“Funny he’s called Lefty when it’s his left arm’s the one missing.”
“To remind him be more cuidado how he goes about his business. Unless you want to go. We could drive up together Saturday.”
“Can’t. Taking my nephew fishing.”
“Roy’s a smart boy. How old’s he now?”
“Twelve.”
“Good you’re there for him. His mother’s still got her looks but she’s a wreck.”
“My sister’s never recovered from the break-up of her second marriage. She had a nervous breakdown, plus she has a skin condition puts her in the hospital.”
“You teachin’ Roy the construction business?”
“He wants to be a writer.”
Tony laughed. “He’s just a kid, he needs to learn how to make a livin’. Writin’ what?”
“Stories.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“He’s got his own mind, like his father.”
“When my old man died, I was fifteen,” Tony said. “He was from Trapani, in Sicily. He had old country rules. They still apply.”
Two days later, when Buck and Roy were on Buck’s boat in the Gulf of Mexico, Buck said, “You ought to go see Tony Grimaldi, he likes you. You could get some good stories from him.”
“I like Tony, too. He lets me sit in the chair behind his desk when I go in the bank. One thing I know already is that to be a writer it’s important to be a good listener.”
“Your dad had plenty of stories.”
“He told me some things that happened in Romania when he was a boy, about people who lived in his village that believed in magic. There was an older boy who talked to pigs and the pigs talked to him. One of the pigs predicted everybody’s future, how some of them would have accidents like falling off a roof or drowning when they were drunk, or being stabbed by their wife. But somehow the way my dad told the stories, even though the fortune-telling pig predicted someone being torn apart by wild dogs or run over by a train, they were funny. Those are the kinds of stories I want to write, funny tragedies. If death is the worst thing that can happen to a person but there’s something funny about it then it might not be so bad. What do you think, Unk?”
“Well, I’ve seen men die with smiles on their faces. Not many, a few. When I was with the Seabees, stationed on an island in the South Pacific, Vanua Levu, we built Quonset huts to house the men. It was my idea, modelled on Narragansett tribal construction, that I studied in engineering school. One of the men fell off a ladder and broke his neck. He died, but not right away. His name was Bentley, from Alabama. Bentley asked me why we were building Quonset huts and I told him the Indians built them for protection from freezing cold winters. ‘There’s no winter here, Commander,’ he said. I explained that the long, high ceilings not only kept heat in during the cold months but kept the temperature down in the hot months. ‘The Indians figured that out, did they?’ he asked. I said yes, in Rhode Island. ‘My granny Calwallader was right,’ Bentley said. I asked him what she was right about, and he said, ‘If you got some curiosity in you, you can learn something new near every day.’ Then Bentley died, smiling. Calwallader must have been his mother’s family name.”
“What do you think happens to a person after he dies?”
“Nothing. There’s just no person anymore.”
“Dead people live in other people’s memories, Unk, like my dad. He’ll always be there in my mind.”
Years later, after Tony Grimaldi, Roy’s Uncle Buck and Roy’s mother were dead, Roy refused to forget them. Instead, he wrote about them as they were, as he imagined they were, and as they never were or even could have been. He figured if he had known them as well as he thought he’d known them then what he wrote would be as close as he would ever come to the truth.
The Garden Apartment
Roy was eight years old when he and his mother moved from Key West, Florida, where they lived in a hotel, to an apartment in Chicago, Illinois, where his grandmother had lived until she died a few months before. It was a large, high-ceilinged, six room apartment on the first floor of a three-flat building. There was also what was called a “garden” apartment on the basement level, even though there was no garden attached to the building. Roy was unhappy about having to move from the hotel, which was located at the confluence of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic ocean. In Key West he spent his time swimming and fishing, playing with the Cuban kids who lived in the houses around the hotel, and attending school irregularly. His mother, who suffered from a nervous condition that doctors determined caused her chronic eczema and other, mostly unspecified ailments, explained that the move was for financial reasons, given that her mother had been half owner of the apartment building, which his mother inherited. They could now live rent free and share income derived from the third floor and garden apartments. Cousins of theirs, who were co-owners of the building, occupied the second floor apartment.
The garden apartment comprised a livingroom, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom, with ground floor windows in the livingroom that looked out at the front lawn and sidewalk. The tenants were a childless married couple, a man and a woman, both in their late twenties or early thirties, who always wore black clothes, most often turtleneck sweaters, black trousers and jackets or coats. The man had a neatly trimmed beard, a short haircut—his thinning hair was dark brown—and wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses. His wife had shoulder-length black hair with bangs that covered her forehead, and wore heavy blue-black eyeshadow. According to Roy’s mother, the man worked as a librarian at Loyola University, and the woman as a typist in a law office. They were quiet and clean, said his mother, had lived in the building for two years, paid their rent on time and had
never caused his grandmother any trouble.
Roy often heard music coming from the garden apartment, mostly jazz, sometimes classical. He learned that the tenants’ names were Joyce and Michael, and that they were originally from Canton, Ohio. One day after school Roy came home at the same time Joyce was arriving. He said hello and told her he liked hearing the music she and Michael played, especially the jazz.
“That’s cool, Roy,” said Joyce. “Would you like to come in and listen to some records?”
“Sure,” he said, and followed her down the stairs.
Roy had been in the garden apartment only once before, during a visit to his grandmother when he was five years old. An elderly lady had lived there at that time. The first thing Roy noticed were long strands of beads that hung in the doorways between rooms. The beads were red and black, Joyce put on a record.
“Have a seat,” she said. “Would you like something to drink?”
“No, thanks, not right now. Who’s that playing piano?”
“Thelonious Monk. John Coltrane’s on tenor saxophone, Shadow Wilson on drums. Keen, huh?”
“I guess,” said Roy. “It’s pretty different from what my mother plays.”
“I’ve heard her, she’s good. This tune’s called ‘Nutty’. Michael digs Monk the most, so do I.”
Joyce went into the kitchen, brushing aside the beads, which clacked together loudly before settling back into place, then came back out with a glass in her right hand containing something red.
“What’re you drinking?” Roy asked.
“Wine. It’s sweet. I’d offer you some but you’re a little young. Maybe if we were in France it would be all right, but we’re not. You might not like it anyway, and neither would your mother. My giving you some, I mean.”
“That’s a strange picture,” said Roy, pointing to a large, framed painting on one wall.
“Not strange, Roy, it’s an abstract. Michael’s grandfather did it before the war, twenty years ago, in 1938. His name was Mikhail Nev. He’s quite famous.”
“Was?”
“He and his wife were murdered during the war, in a concentration camp in Poland. Michael’s parents took this painting with them when they came to America in 1939. Michael was fifteen then.”
“It reminds me of an octopus I saw caught in a wire fence below the surface of the water in the Gulf, only the painting’s got different colors in it. Why was he killed?”
“He was Jewish. The Germans tried to kill all the Jews in Europe. The title of this painting is ‘Schreck’.”
“I don’t know that word.”
“Schreck is German for fear or horror. Michael says his grandfather meant it to represent what the Jewish people were feeling at that time.”
Roy looked around the room. There were other paintings and drawings and photographs on the walls but none of them were anything like Michael’s grandfather’s painting.
“What’s the name of this tune? I like it.”
“‘Functional’. I like it, too. Monk can be way out there sometimes, but this one makes me feel there’s a reason for living.”
“Not like that painting,” said Roy.
“No, not like that painting.”
“Why do you have it on the wall?”
Joyce did not answer right away. She took a long sip of wine before she did.
“It’s important to not forget, Roy. To not forget there are other people who don’t think the same way you do. Mikhail Nev knew what could happen, what was already happening, that it was unspeakable, so he painted it.”
Roy sat and listened to ‘Functional’ until it was over and the record ended. He stood up and told Joyce he had to go.
“Come visit any time,” she said.
Later, when Roy and his mother were having dinner, he told her he’d been with Joyce that afternoon in the garden apartment.
“She’s very nice, I think,” said his mother, “and smart, too. Of course I don’t know her well. What did you talk about?”
“Music and painting.”
“They’re very arty people, Roy. You can probably learn a lot from them.”
“Michael’s grandfather is a famous painter.”
“Really? Perhaps you’ll meet him sometime.”
“No, he’s dead. He was killed in the war.”
The telephone rang. Roy’s mother got up from the table and went to answer it. Roy tried to remember the title of the painting, the German word, but he could not. He wondered what the painting would sound like if it could be turned into music.
Kitty’s World
Several years after their mother died, Roy’s sister, Sally, told him that she had recently had dinner with Kitty’s former sister-in-law, their aunt Isabelle, whose first husband had been Kitty’s brother, Buck. During their conversation, Sally said, Isabelle remarked that Buck had warned her when they were newly wed that his sister was only out for herself, that Isabelle should be cautious in her dealings with Kitty, who was twelve years younger than he.
Hearing this made Roy angry, given that Isabelle, now in her mid-eighties, was, in his experience, one of the most cold-hearted, ungenerous, selfish persons he had ever known. He’d not seen Isabelle in more than thirty years, but her behavior when he was a child had made an indelible impression on his memory. Not that Kitty hadn’t been vain, self-absorbed, even neurotic, but she had not been a snob, an arriviste, as was Isabelle.
“Isabelle has no right to disparage Kitty,” Roy told his sister. “Our mother had a very different history than Isabelle. Being raised in a convent insufficiently prepared her for the world, married off at nineteen to a man two decades older, having to suffer from a chronic, misdiagnosed illness since adolescence. Kitty had her faults, we know that, serious psychological as well as physical problems. She was a very beautiful woman who learned early on how to use her looks to get what she thought she needed or wanted. Isabelle must always have been envious of Kitty’s natural beauty, how most men were instantly attracted to her even well into her middle age.”
“Isabelle was pretty when she was young,” said Sally.
“Yes, but she couldn’t compare to Kitty. And despite her failings our mother had a good sense of humor, which Isabelle never did. It bugs me that Isabelle still can’t let it go, that she said this to you now.”
The night after Sally related to Roy her conversation with Isabelle, he had a dream in which he was a very young boy accompanying his mother, she was driving and Roy was seated next to her on the front seat of her midnight blue 1953 Oldsmobile Holiday convertible. The top was down and the car was zooming down the old seven mile bridge on Highway A1A in the Florida Keys. For a moment Roy was again in Kitty’s world, she was in her late twenties, telling a joke and then laughing, flashing her perfect white teeth and tossing her long auburn hair as the wind caught it. There were no other cars on the road.
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