April in Paris

by John J. Healey

  Copyright © 2021 by John J. Healey

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Jacket design by Brian Peterson

  Jacket photo credit: Getty Images

  Print ISBN: 978-1-951627-74-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-951627-75-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  For Soledad

  Contents

  – Part One –

  – 1 –

  – 2 –

  – 3 –

  – 4 –

  – 5 –

  – 6 –

  – 7 –

  – 8 –

  – 9 –

  – 10 –

  – 11 –

  – 12 –

  – 13 –

  – 14 –

  – 15 –

  – 16 –

  – Part Two –

  – 17 –

  – 18 –

  – 19 –

  – 20 –

  – 21 –

  – 22 –

  – 23 –

  – 24 –

  – 25 –

  – 26 –

  – 27 –

  – Part Three –

  – 28 –

  – 29 –

  – 30 –

  – 31 –

  – 32 –

  – 33 –

  – 34 –

  – 35 –

  – 36 –

  – 37 –

  – 38 –

  – 39 –

  – Part Four –

  – 40 –

  – 41 –

  – 42 –

  – 43 –

  – 44 –

  – 45 –

  – 46 –

  – 47 –

  Author’s note

  – Part One –

  A violent act is an epicenter; it shakes everyone within reach and creates other stories, cracks open the earth and reveals buried secrets.

  —Sarah Perry

  – 1 –

  A young girl in a dress. She’s ten or eleven. I’m observing her, and at the same time, I am her. She holds a pair of scissors. An older, balding man with round glasses and a bow tie stands at her side. Both of them are looking down at a wire, a thick, taut, mercury silver wire. It’s wrapped around the girl’s ankles. She leans over and cuts it with the scissors. Although the older man does nothing to prevent it, the implication is that by cutting the wire she has done something wrong.

  She runs out of a house. It’s my maternal grandfather’s home on Woodycrest Avenue in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, a brown, cedar-shingled, three-story house with yellow window frames. Terrified, she/I runs down the gray wooden front stairs and heads north. She/I is still holding the scissors, but now they’re in two pieces, like kitchen shears that come apart, like two knives.

  The terror comes from the fear someone is going to emerge from the house and pursue me. I’m trying to get to the corner and disappear before anyone can see where I’m going. I run along the sidewalk passing other, smaller houses. Each one has four cement steps and a narrow yard. Just as I reach West 165th Street and am about to go down toward Anderson Avenue, I wake up.

  – 2 –

  The panic persisted for a few seconds until relief took its place. I was in my apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis—far, thank god, from the Bronx. Spring rain pitter-pattered on the panes of the tall, partly opened windows. The bedroom looked down at a cobblestone courtyard and a small fountain. I could hear the rain falling into it. Soothing sounds. It was the eighteenth of April, the day my mother died half a century ago, and the day my wife died, five springs past.

  Why was I a young girl in the dream? Who was the balding man in the bow tie? Why did I escape by taking the long way? If I’d gone south on Woodycrest Avenue instead, there would only have been a single house between my grandfather’s and the corner of West 164th Street. What were the wire and the scissor-knives all about?

  I got up. I showered and dressed. I went out with an umbrella and got a baguette at La Boulangerie on the Rue Saint-Louis en L’île, and bought the papers at the Tabac and then some freshly squeezed orange juice at Les Vergers on the Rue des Deux Ponts. These and a handful of other establishments, French to the core, continued to provide the island with authenticity, bulwarks against a tide of otherwise commercial ventures aimed at tourists. I came back to the apartment along the Quai de Bethune and made breakfast. When the sun emerged, I opened all the banquette to ceiling window-doors in the living room facing the river, pulled up one of the heavy armchairs to take in the view, and sat down with my laptop.

  A barge went by, then the day’s first tour boat. I couldn’t work. The dream wouldn’t let me. Why that house? Embodying the young girl, what had I done wrong? It seemed all I’d done by cutting the wire was to free her, free myself.

  The grandfather who owned the house was known to many as “the Judge.” He had earned a small fortune in liquor distribution, and due to a large red nose, an ironclad liver, and dainty taste buds, he developed a knack for classifying whiskies. The skill had earned him the nickname. But given the context of the dream, the word “judge” probably reverted to its more legalistic meaning.

  Years of analysis during my third decade had convinced me to accept the premise that, being prey to magical thinking and raised within a family averse to explanation, I blamed myself for my mother’s death. She died of cancer when I was six years old. She had grown up in that house, had celebrated her marriage to my father there. After she died, I spent many nights sleeping in the room that had once been hers. So all of that was in play.

  But there was something else. I could feel it.

  – 3 –

  The Judge married young and had four children: a son who came nine months after the wedding, whom everyone called Paddy; then, years later, my mother, Aunt Moira, and my Aunt Jane. Paddy moved away and never married, Moira and my mother did marry, and Jane stayed home, single and stylish, taking care of her father. After my mother died, she took care of me for a time as well. I sent her a letter once expressing curiosity about what their mother had been like, a woman who had died long before I was born. Her reply, posted from a retirement home in East Hampton, was unexpectedly frank. I carried it around for years afterward, unaware that it contained clues. This is what it said.

  Dear Shaun,

  My mother, your grandmother, Elizabeth Monaghan, was born in 1886. Her father was born in Galway. Her mother was a good little Protestant girl from Onsala, Sweden. The Monaghans were gentle folk, very soft spoken and quiet. Grandpa worked in insurance and spent his final years in Riverdale. He was deaf by then but could read lips beautifully.

  Mom was much like your mother. Good humor, easygoing, preferred peace to bickering. But soon after I was born, she went
through a rocky time with the Judge, became depressed, and developed a drinking problem. In 1916 she died of pneumonia in a rehab hospital. Your mother was ten and I was eight years old.

  Your father and your mom grew up around the corner from each other. He and Paddy played together and your father’s father, Grandpa Kerry, umpired their baseball games. Your parents didn’t start dating until your mother was attending Teacher’s College at Columbia University and your dad was in law school. They were married at Sacred Heart and the reception was at the house on Woodycrest Avenue. The Judge had a tent erected in the back yard, with a walkway constructed to connect to the dining room. The furniture was removed and there were flowers everywhere. It was lovely.

  Your parents tried to have a child for twelve years. By the time you came along your mother had suffered many miscarriages. She took ill after you were born, and you were cared for by a nurse the first few months of your life. She was diagnosed with an ulcerated colon and treated with Sulphur, which was a new medicine. She was also advised not to have more babies.

  Before you were born your parents lived at Nana’s house at 1075 Ogden Avenue. I used to stop by every afternoon. I was at Mount St. Mary’s then. After you were born, they moved to Undercliff Avenue. The summers in Southampton were special at Fair Lea and by then we had joined the Beach Club. Years later your mother complained of feeling lousy off and on. The doctor thought she was probably pregnant again but having experienced six pregnancies she didn’t agree. The rabbit test was negative, and the doctor decided on an exploratory. Ovarian cancer was the immediate problem and the possibility of a damaged liver. That was in October.

  In December she was admitted to St. Vincent’s in Manhattan. When they operated, they saw the main artery to the heart was involved. About all that could be done in those days was to insert a drain to the liver. It was before the transplants were invented. A cousin of your dad’s stayed with you for the last couple of weeks while your mother was at home. She returned to the hospital about the 10th of April and died on the 18th. You stayed with Aunt Moira in Parkchester during the last week of your mother’s illness and returned home after the funeral.

  Love,

  Aunt Jane

  – 4 –

  For a long time, I played down my upbringing in the Bronx. It was a topic I avoided. I clung to the fact that my actual birth took place in Manhattan and that my mother and I went directly from the hospital to Southampton, Long Island. For my first thirteen summers the Judge and my father rented big houses near the beach. When Dad married again, Caro, his new wife, had her own house, an enormous “cottage” behind the dunes of Water Mill. I spent every June, July, and August I can remember at the Southampton Beach Club. But until my father remarried, I lived each fall, winter, and spring in the Bronx.

  Irish and raised on Ogden Avenue, Dad became the borough’s district attorney. His office was in the Bronx County Courthouse, which bordered the Grand Concourse across from Joyce Kilmer Park. I went to a Catholic school at the park’s northern edge and was driven there each morning until the fifth grade by my father’s chauffeur, a man named Gino Colossi who worked part-time cutting hair at his family barbershop that was also on Ogden Avenue.

  After school I’d walk through the park to the courthouse and wait for Dad to finish his day. I’d do my homework at a desk next to his secretary, an elegant African American woman who lived in Harlem. She had beautiful hands and tried to teach me stenography, with little success. You could see the infield of Yankee Stadium out the window. Criminals in handcuffs paraded through the office regularly. The detectives adopted me as a mascot, fingerprinting me and showing me holding cells.

  Dad was a friend of John F. Kennedy, Joe DiMaggio, and Gary Cooper. He also hung out with prizefighters, showgirls, and lawyers who defended gangsters. Sometimes before going to school I’d have breakfast with him at a coffee shop that had a soda fountain, tables and booths, and a brown stamped-tin ceiling. There was a wooden phone booth in the back. New York Yankees also breakfasted there before day games, which were the norm then and which my father always found time to attend, regardless of work. It was a place frequented by men: politicians, cops, detectives, lawyers, reporters, and ball players. I remember thick white plates of eggs, fried kidneys, hash browns, and bacon, mugs of coffee with spoons sticking out of them, guys with wide ties that stopped well short of their belt line, ruddy waiters behind the bar with long aprons. It was a place imbued with Irish testosterone, filled with weapons secured in scuffed leather holsters, briefcases with fading initials, thick-soled cordovan shoes, and university rings; men thickly built but light on their feet.

  My school days were spent in fear of the Irish Christian Brothers, who taught me how to read and how to tell time. Whenever I made a mistake, they hit me on the hand with a leather strap or a ruler. When I did something that pleased them, they gave me holy cards. After school I played with toy soldiers, knights, and damsels in distress, watched TV, and was shuttled back and forth between the Judge’s house and our apartment. And there were afternoons when I rode around the city in Gino Colossi’s black Chrysler Imperial that smelled of White Owl cigars despite a sticky pine thing that hung from one of the radio knobs.

  But the summers were different. Long before I was born, the Judge befriended Thomas Cuddihy. The Cuddihys were rich and one of the few Catholic members of the Southampton Beach Club. When I was three Mr. Cuddihy died and the Judge got close to his widow. She endorsed the Judge’s entry to the Beach Club, and we became members as well. The Judge and my parents rarely went there. Along with Mrs. Cuddihy and the rest of the older Cuddihy generation, they preferred their own beach between Old Town Road and Phillips Pond. But I went to the Beach Club on my bike every day of every summer. I had lunch there. I swam in the ocean there. I swam in the pool. I played tennis with my summer friends on the grass courts at the Meadow Club up the road. Then when Dad married Caro, years after my mother’s death, the Bronx was left behind. We moved from Undercliff Avenue in Highbridge into Caro’s Fifth Avenue duplex facing Central Park. My father resigned his post and entered a law firm near Wall Street and worked there until he died.

  But no matter what country or city I lived in afterward, the old neighborhood in the Bronx returned in my dreams. The dream that disturbed me in Paris that morning was not unusual in this regard. Given the date, perhaps the cutting of the wire was some sort of attempt to escape the guilt I felt about my mother’s death, the fear I felt of being discovered and accused, the guilt and fear compounded by the relief I felt when my wife died after months of illness.

  – 5 –

  I’d recently finished reading Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder. Perhaps the girl in the dream came from there. But Dora was an orphaned adolescent, and the girl I’d been in the dream was no older than eleven. I googled Woodycrest Avenue. What came up first was the gothic orphanage down the hill from the Judge’s house, a creepy place I’d walked by countless times as a child. So that was one for Dora.

  Then I remembered that as I was getting ready for bed the night before, I had heard a siren, a Paris siren, a sound I always associated with Nazis because I first heard it watching George Stevens’s movie version of The Diary of Anne Frank. Was the young girl in the dress Anne Frank, waiting for the Nazis to grab her? The bald man with the round glasses and bow tie in the dream was a dead ringer for Ed Wynn, who interpreted the role of Mr. Düssel.

  I thought about the scissors. Though they came apart like kitchen shears, they were actually more akin to the kind of scissors barbers use. In the context of my Bronx childhood, this led to a single source— Gino Colossi. He was practically considered family, a dapper little man with a pencil mustache who often told me I’d forget him one day, a prediction pretty much borne out until that morning.

  On a lark, I googled “Colossi Barbershop.” Only a few entries surfaced, but two caught my eye immediately. One actually included the name: Luigino Colossi. I clicked on it and found myself in the midst of a transcript of a mur
der trial in which Luigino Colossi had been a witness. But when I saw the trial date, 1916, I realized it must have been my Gino’s father. There was also an eBay result, offering a 1934 photo of the barbershop. Seeing it there on my screen in the Paris apartment was unsettling. I recognized a very young version of the Gino I’d known, standing next to his namesake and brothers.

  Then I googled the trial. Moments later I had a pdf of the whole thing. Instinct told me not to read it.

  4:10 p.m. Trial Resumed

  Luigino N. Colossi called as a witness on behalf of the People, being first duly sworn, testifies as follows:

  “I am a barber, at 1066 Ogden Avenue, Highbridge. I have been in business there for thirty years. I remember the night of June 6, 1916, the night the body of Ingrid Anderson was found in the cellar of 1077. About 7:30 p.m. that night I was standing in front of my barbershop. I saw MacBride there. He came up to me and said, ‘Gino, please lend me ten cents.’ I said, ‘Don’t be shaming yourself asking me for ten cents. I have five children and a sick wife in the house. Why don’t you have ten cents in your pocket?’ I had been in the habit of lending him five and ten cents before that and he did not return it so well. I next saw him at the police station because I was called down there to testify to such things as I testify now.”

  I’d never met Gino’s father. He died long before I was born. Nevertheless, I was riveted by the testimony. The trial went on.

  “I am Albert Boulder, the janitor of the premises 1075 and 1077 Ogden Avenue. This is at Highbridge, in the borough of the Bronx, in the County of New York. I have been janitor there for fifteen years. They are double tenement houses, five stories each, with ten families in each house. Under these houses there are basements. In that basement there are storerooms. The janitor’s apartment is also on that floor that connects both houses and there is an entrance to my apartment from both the houses.