The Americans

by John Jakes

  Do the Pennels really own that filthy place?

  He didn’t want to believe it, but he knew it was possible.

  And if Laura’s family owned one tenement, wasn’t it likely that they owned others? The basis of the Pennel fortune was New York City real estate. Was Maison du Soleil built on the money Thurman Pennel collected from slum rental agents? If so, how much did Marcus know about the business? And Laura?

  The questions led on and on, like conjurer’s boxes that opened one after another to reveal one more box each time. The result was continuing wakefulness, and a decision about what he must do.

  ii

  The next day, Tuesday, was Drew’s day off. At breakfast he announced his intention of going across town to a pharmaceutical supply house. There he planned to purchase a long list of drugs the partners needed for compounding medicine.

  He and Will and Jo walked to the office. Soon Dr. Clem arrived from his bachelor rooms in the Bowery. He unlocked a cheap tin box kept on a shelf, and removed all the bills but one. Drew took the money and left.

  The older doctor easily took care of the morning’s few patients. Will read a text from the small collection in the surgery. He found it hard to concentrate. Around a quarter to eleven, he gave up and asked whether he could be excused for an hour or so. Dr. Clem replied with a nod, concentrating on the mortar in which he was preparing a purgative for a patient waiting outside.

  Jo was folding sheets for the examination table. She’d boiled the sheets first thing that morning and hung them up in the passage outside the improvised window. When Will asked to leave, she gave him a quizzical look, then followed him out to the courtyard. There she asked, “Is anything wrong?”

  He mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. The sun was hidden by dirty gray clouds, but the temperature still felt like ninety or better. There was no wind to disperse the odors of cabbage and fish and offal.

  He shook his head. “I’m going over to the police station.”

  “Whatever for?” She took hold of his hand. “You haven’t had more trouble with Corso, have you—?”

  Spots of color brightened her cheeks as she realized she’d been forward. She pulled her hand away quickly.

  “No,” he said. “I just want to go back to that tenement we visited last night. I want to see the upper floors by daylight.”

  The harshness of his voice made her frown. “Drew said reaching the place was like traveling through a maze. Do you know how to find it?”

  “I know someone who does. Banks. I’ll see you in an hour or so.” He started away.

  “Will—”

  Her tone of concern brought him back. Blue-green eyes held his a moment before she said, “Do be careful.”

  He smiled. “I will.” He took pleasure in knowing she worried about him.

  iii

  He found Eustace Banks at the precinct house on Elizabeth Street. The sergeant questioned the advisability of a return visit to the tenement.

  “You don’t exactly look like one of the renters. I don’t want Dave McCauley smelling a rat before we come down on him.”

  “I can pretend to be looking for one of Vlandingham’s patients. If anyone questions me, I’ll tell ’em I got lost and wound up in the wrong building.”

  “Are you sure you have to see that particular tenement? Wouldn’t another one do just as well?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “All right,” Banks grumbled. He reached for a sheet of paper and a steel-nib pen. “I’ll put down the directions. Just stay away from the cellar.”

  With the directions in hand, Will started back into the Bend. He’d gone no more than a block when he encountered Mrs. Grimaldi. On her arm was a hamper containing a cauliflower, two carrots more brown than orange, and a large, fragrant onion. Perspiration shone in her dark mustache. She greeted him with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  “Are you enjoying your visit to the Bend, Signor Kent?”

  “There’s certainly a lot to see.”

  “Maybe you’ll want to leave sooner than you planned. ’Sep Corso’s doing a lot of talking.”

  “About what?”

  “About you. I wouldn’t go too many places as you are—” Her eyes flicked past his shoulder. “Alone.”

  Will’s stomach began to hurt. Drew’s warning hadn’t been an idle one, then.

  “Thanks for telling me. I’ll keep my eyes open. How’s that baby you found?”

  Matter-of-factly, she said, “The poor little thing died. It happened last night around midnight. We did the best we could, Grimaldi and the children and I. But the little girl lacked strength. I’ve already paid for a mass for her soul.”

  Suddenly, instead of the uncomplaining stoicism he’d come to associate with her, there was bitterness. “You should be thankful you are only visiting the Bend. You can escape its miseries whenever you wish. The rest of us—we aren’t so lucky. Good day to you, signor,” she said, marching around him with the dull gray daylight shining in her tear-filled eyes.

  She clearly didn’t like the weakness the tears represented. Before she’d taken three steps, her knuckle was in her eye and her shoulders were squared again; ready to receive whatever burdens the Bend would put on them.

  iv

  In the daylight, and guided by the written directions, Will had no difficulty finding the tenement. He climbed its dark, crowded stairs. The familiar squeak of a pump handle followed him upward—as did the eyes of the old men and women and children he passed. Those eyes were suspicious, even hostile. He was well dressed. The tenement dwellers couldn’t be sure he wasn’t some official from the city.

  But no one bothered him. He paced the halls. With every step, he grew sicker and angrier.

  Insects crawled in cracks in the floor. Roaches ran along broken baseboards. The air was hot, still, and foul. Doors stood open in the hope of catching a puff of breeze, but there was none. Through those doorways he saw quarters hardly fit for animals, let alone human beings. None of the rooms measured more than ten feet on its longest side. Only one in every seven or eight had a tiny window. Although it was the middle of the day, oil lamps were needed for light. They added to the heat and spread a faint, smoky haze.

  In one room he counted nine straw pallets. In another, two infants lay fretting in wooden boxes, and a four-year-old boy swung in a large shawl hung in a corner to supplement the mattresses on the floor.

  There was almost continuous conversation, plus a good deal of shouting—all in Italian. Infants cried. Dogs barked. He even heard a goat bleating in one apartment. The narrow corridors and confined spaces amplified the sounds to a din. Finally, unable to take any more, he ran down to the first floor and outside.

  He approached an old man seated on a crate near the steps leading down to the stale beer dive; its door had a heavy padlock this morning.

  “Do you speak English?”

  A frown of suspicion wrinkled the old man’s face. He took a black clay pipe out of his mouth. “Si—a little.”

  “How many people live in each room in this building?”

  “The sanitary police—they ask the same question.”

  “I’m not a policeman. I’m a doctor. Dottore. Medico.”

  “Ah.” Some of the wrinkles disappeared.

  “Can you tell me how many?”

  The old man thought about it. “The least I know of is six, the most twenty.”

  “In one room?”

  “Si.”

  “How much is the rent?”

  “It depends on the size of the room. Seven, eight, nine dollars a month.”

  Red-faced, Will said, “Jesus Christ.”

  He turned away, trembling so hard, he barely knew where he was going. He still had to marry Laura, of course. But in exchange for the performance of that duty, Marcus or her father had to give him some assurance that they weren’t responsible for the misery and squalor he’d just seen.

  Abruptly, he realized he hadn’t thanked his informant. He turned
around. The crate was gone and so was the old man.

  v

  The sights and sounds of the tenement had so unsettled Will, he could hardly keep his mind on the patients who came to the office that afternoon. To make things worse, a couple of ragged boys kept racing up and down the passage outside the window of the surgery. They peeked through the curtains several times, startling Jo and the two men, and embarrassing the patients.

  The last time the boys did it, Jo was busy removing some hardened wax from a woman’s ear. One of the boys yelled. Jo started, and the tip of the syringe scraped the ear canal. The woman cried out. Vlandingham ran to the window, flung the curtains back, and cursed the fleeing boys. Then he stormed over to Jo and criticized her carelessness with a ferocity all out of proportion to the offense.

  For the rest of the afternoon, the older doctor was in a bad mood. When the waiting room was empty and they were closing up, he apologized to Jo and explained why he was upset. The man with cancer hadn’t returned. Vlandingham looked defeated as he shut the door and bid Jo and Will good night.

  An hour earlier, a rumbling thunderstorm had dispersed most of the clouds. But it hadn’t relieved the heat. If anything, the rain had made things more uncomfortable. Steam rose from the sidewalks. Will felt as if he’d bathed in machine oil. Jo kept dabbing her cheeks with a bit of lace-edged linen.

  They walked slowly across the Bowery and into the Jewish section. Behind them, above the tenements to the west, a huge, dark orange sun dominated the sky. The storm’s passing had brought the pushcarts out again. Women were haggling over the price of tin cups, neckerchiefs, peaches, eyeglasses, even eggs with broken shells.

  Over the squawking of several not-quite-dead chickens hung on the metal hooks of a cart, Jo said, “What did you see in the tenement?”

  “Nothing I care to remember.” That wasn’t quite true. When next he spoke to Marcus, he’d remember well enough.

  In response to a customer’s gesture the chicken peddler seized one of his birds by the neck and pulled it off the hook. He flung the chicken on a bloody chopping board and decapitated it with one stroke of a cleaver. Then he began to section the bird.

  “As I recall, Mr. Riis took a photograph of a hallway in that building,” Jo told him. “I hope his pictures will help convince people such places do exist.”

  “By God, I hope so too.”

  The slow-sinking sun only seemed to intensify the heat and humidity. Will suggested dinner. Jo said she wasn’t hungry. She seemed edgy, which was exactly how he felt. His head was aching again—another by-product of the insufferable weather.

  They walked the last block to the tenement. Conversation lagged. They climbed the stairs and parted with only an exchange of good evenings. He found his room broiling. He slammed the door and peeled off all his clothes. He lay down, fell into a doze, and was soon dreaming.

  In the nightmare he saw infants squalling and suffocating in shawls strung in corners. He saw cockroaches crawling over mounds of dirt. He gagged on the smells of waste and yesterday’s cooking. He heard the weeping and cursing of people penned in a tenement whose rooftop carried a huge sign blazoned with the name Pennel.

  And then he saw Roosevelt’s scornful face silently condemning him for doing nothing about any of it.

  CHAPTER VIII

  JO’S CONFESSION

  i

  HE WOKE ABRUPTLY, STRUGGLING for breath. The room was pitch black and hot as a furnace.

  He lit a lamp, consulted his watch. Only a quarter after ten.

  He pulled on a singlet and his oldest pair of trousers, then went into the hall. There was a light under Drew’s door. He knocked. No answer.

  He looked in. The room was empty. But the coat Drew had worn that morning lay on the cot. He shut the door and moved on.

  Jo’s door was dark. He took the stairs to the roof. The red sun had gone, replaced by blurred stars. He walked around the small, shedlike structure that enclosed the head of the stairs. His foot collided with something soft.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Will?”

  “Jo?”

  He crouched down. “I didn’t see you sitting there. I must have tramped all over you. I apologize.”

  “I should have brought a light. But even a tiny flame seems to raise the temperature ten degrees.”

  As she spoke, he heard rustling sounds. He balanced beside her on the balls of his feet. At last he realized the significance of the rustling; she was slipping into a blouse she’d discarded.

  Soon his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. He could see her push her hair back over her shoulders. She fastened the lower buttons of the blouse but left the upper ones undone.

  He sat down next to her, his back against the wall of the stairwell and his eyes on the lamplit tenement windows in the distance. His shoulder was only an inch from hers. That proximity and the evening heat conspired to produce a physical reaction. He was surprised but not altogether displeased.

  “I’ve been up here for an hour,” she said. “Did Drew get back yet?”

  “Yes, but he isn’t in his room. He must be out to supper.”

  “Did you eat?”

  “No. I still don’t feel hungry.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Sorry I wasn’t very talkative on the way home. I was just damned depressed by that tenement. What’s the name of Jake Riis’ book—?”

  “How the Other Half Lives.”

  “Yes. I never knew. I never imagined. I’ll say one thing—” He tried to see her face in the starry darkness, but it was little more than a pale oval. “Now I understand why your brother decided to practice in this part of New York. I only began to understand it at Castle Garden, when I helped him deliver a baby. Did he ever tell you about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that was when I first admitted that he really knew what medicine was all about. But I tried to deny that he was right.”

  “You don’t now?”

  He shook his head. “And that’s something new. Up at Harvard, I thought he was crazy. The more he scoffed at my ambitions, the more I resented and laughed at his. I don’t think our disagreement was all my fault, though. Drew’s my friend, and a wonderful doctor. But sometimes he can be pretty self-righteous.”

  “How well I know. I’m guilty of the same thing. It must run in the family. Will you accept an apology for both of us?”

  “It isn’t necessary.”

  “I think it is. Because I’m going to ask you a blunt question about your feelings. When Drew talks about his work, do you feel guilty?”

  “Of course. That’s the reaction he’s looking for, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps it was at Harvard.”

  “What do you mean? Nothing’s changed. He still dwells on the importance of his work—”

  “Not to shame you. There’s a different reason, I think.”

  The conversation was beginning to make him edgy, perhaps because he couldn’t prevent guilt feelings. His annoyance showed when he said, “Oh? What is it?”

  He sensed rather than saw her shift her shoulders against the wall, then draw her legs up closer. She sounded melancholy when she answered, “Drew’s been working with Dr. Clem since graduation. Do you know how much the two of them have earned in fees in that time? Two dollars and eighty cents.”

  “I thought Drew didn’t care about profit.”

  A bitter laugh. “I’m not talking about profit. I’m talking about survival.”

  “Maybe the Kents could donate some money to the practice.”

  “That’s nasty. Charity is the last thing anyone wants from you.”

  His annoyance drained away. “I’m sorry. I guess the heat’s getting me down. You were starting to explain why Drew talks the way he does.”

  “I can’t be certain, of course. But I have a theory. At best, a slum practice is depressing. You make so little progress. And there are so many barriers. You’ve seen some of them. Language. Ignorance. Fear. And you saw what ha
ppened today. Rather, what didn’t happen. A man who desperately needs medical help refused to come back.”

  “Do you mean Drew is starting to ask himself whether he made the right decision?”

  “He doesn’t say so, but I’m afraid he’s doing just that.”

  “And when he tells me how noble the work is—how important—he’s really trying to convince himself?”

  A sigh. “Yes.”

  Far away, a gun fired. Someone screamed. A dog began to bark, the sound quickly muffled by a hubbub of voices. Then those too melted away, and the hot night was quiet again.

  There had been a note of vulnerability in Jo’s voice a moment ago. Touched by it, he spoke gently. “And how do you feel? Is working here less satisfying than you let on?”

  “Oh, I’m learning things I couldn’t learn otherwise. I could be content to spend my life in this kind of neighborhood. Very content in—in the proper circumstances.”

  “What might those be?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she countered his question with another. “When do you plan to be married, Will?”

  He jerked his wrists tighter against his legs. “No date’s been set.”

  “But you are engaged to that young woman Drew told me about?”

  “The engagement isn’t official. There’s one matter to be settled first.”

  “But you love her, don’t you?”

  “Would I think of marriage if I didn’t?”

  Then he thought, Yes. Marrying her has become my responsibility. That had changed everything, somehow—that and all he’d seen and heard since Saturday.

  He started when her hand stole across to his forearm. “That isn’t an answer, Will.”

  A brusque laugh. “You’re pretty forthright, Miss Hastings. And, might I say, pretty damn nosy, too.”