“Well, my ex, he used to commute to the city, but that was back in the 60s and 70s, before the money poured into town and you could actually afford to live here without being a banker or doctor,” the waitress said. “We had a nice little place over on Beaver Creek Road, behind the high school. He worked in this print shop, all the way downtown, by Wall Street. It took him a couple of hours, one-way sometimes, because the train was so slow. Winters, forget it.”
Trying to avoid the subject of Aaron’s usual order, Jamie said, “So, your husband, he still commutes?”
She coughed up a loud, derisive heh. “Oh, he stopped a long time ago, and that’s a story right there too. Started with him calling a lot and saying the train was late, or he was delayed with some order the boss had thrown at him, last minute. Then he started not coming home for two or three days, said the commute was killing him and we should even think about moving to—I don’t know—maybe the Bronx. And then he called one night to say he had met someone, it just happened, he’s real, real sorry but he’d be coming home by the end of the week to pick up his things.”
“I’m sorry,” Jamie said, consciously shielding the vacant ring finger on his left hand.
“Gill-tee, dah-dee,” Aaron said, turning over the peppershaker. “Gill-tee.”
“Never even saw him again, not once. The whole divorce thing was done by mail. I got remarried to a nice fellow who made a living running a landscaping business out of Katonah. We moved all the way up to Putnam County when we found out that the taxes there are, like, half. Two years ago, actually almost three, he passed away. Skin cancer. Melanoma. All those years, outdoors in the sun, he never put on a spot of sunscreen. Stubborn fool. But what are you going to do? You got to make a living, right? Got to put food on the table. We didn’t have kids, mind you, but I had a lot come through this place that I got to know pretty well. Just like this little guy.”
She reached a hand across Jamie’s face to tousle Aaron’s hair.
“My little buddy.”
“Gill-tee, dah-dee. Gill-tee,” Aaron said, stuck on his mantra.
Jamie ordered himself a well-done burger and a Sprite. By the time the waitress had turned to Aaron to say, “And that’ll be a grilled cheese sandwich with the crust cut off for you, sweetie,” Jamie was lost in thought, back in time more than two years, to when the bills piled up for him and Karyn at their idyllic suburban retreat. And he, like the waitress’ philandering husband, found reasons to not come home.
Chapter Thirteen
“We need to think about upgrading this kitchen,” Karyn told Jamie two minutes after he walked in the door from work one night. She was four months pregnant and showing. He was getting lighter in the wallet with each passing week.
“What’s wrong with it?” Jamie said.
“The counters and cabinets are ancient,” she said. “The wallpaper looks like my grandmother’s. The linoleum is gross and warped. When the baby comes, people are going to visit—don’t you think it’ll be a little embarrassing?”
“I’d be more embarrassed to not be able to feed them because I spent thousands of dollars updating a kitchen that is working just fine,” Jamie said.
Karyn rolled her eyes, shuffled into the living room, turned on the television and ignored him the rest of the night.
The old kitchen stayed—a rare victory for Jamie. But while the pregnancy advanced, Karyn made liberal use of their credit cards in preparation for the baby. Jamie compensated by working every extra hour he could squeeze out of the Trib. Lucky for him the city never slept or stopped making news and the night desk was understaffed.
As he worked later and later, the less appealing the drive north became and the more frequent Jamie’s commutes to his parents’ place in Brooklyn became. The drive took about half an hour and was a study in the borough’s diversity—from the affluence of Brooklyn Heights to the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods along Ocean Avenue to Caribbean Hispanic to African-American on the way to the outer sanctuaries of middle-class whites.
Jamie would turn left off Ocean onto Foster Avenue, take it all the way past the Flatbush Junction and Brooklyn College. Soon he would come upon the neighborhood of neat, identical two-family homes where he was born and lived until he was sixteen. Now it was one more area abandoned by whites, who after the exodus would invariably refer to it as bad over there.
How many times had Jamie heard that thinly veiled commentary from his father or Uncle Lou? Everybody’s gone, all schvartzers now. At various times during the second half of the twentieth century, few once homogeneous Brooklyn strongholds could withstand the tide of demographic change. The minority encroachment continued and there went the neighborhood—house by house, block by block.
Jamie never understood why his parents had to leave Fifty-Eighth Street in the first place. He loved living dribbling distance from the courts inside the projects—now it would take him twice the time to walk over. Weeks before the move, he befriended a couple of black kids who had just moved onto the block; he took them into the courts and introduced them around. He was embarrassed to say his family was moving. He couldn’t tell them it was for the same reason as everyone else. They would know anyway, he figured.
He wondered what it must have been like for their families to be welcomed with the news that nobody who was white wanted to remain on the street, much less next door.
But Morris and Molly fled with everyone else. They bought a newer two-family brick home on Ninety-Fifth Street, between Avenues L and M, where they much later would grant the ground-floor space to Becky and Mickey, rent-free, as a wedding gift. By the early autumn of 1992, when Jamie called one evening to say he’d be working late and sleeping over again, he got Becky instead of his mother. Jamie could hear Morris and Molly arguing nearby. He could see them in his mind at the kitchen table—Morris in his coffee-splotched V-neck T-shirt and Molly in a housedress with an apron around her waist.
“What are they carrying on about?” Jamie asked.
“Oh, just about what’s happening down the street, with the Kravitz house,” Becky said.
“What’d they do,” Jamie snorted. “Sell to blacks?”
“How did you know?”
“I didn’t,” Jamie said, thinking at first that Becky was teasing.
“Well, that’s it, give yourself a prize,” she said. “Everyone on the block has already heard and they’re up in arms. You’d think Al Sharpton is coming.”
“To them, every black may as well be Sharpton,” Jamie said. “Including you know who.”
“Oh, cut Dad a break,” Becky said. “He doesn’t mean the things he says. It’s just what he heard growing up. He’s actually one of the few who doesn’t really care. To him, anyone but drug dealers and newspaper publishers would be an improvement over the Kravitzes. He doesn’t want to move.”
“Did anyone force him the last time?”
“Don’t start,” Becky said, “or you’ll start sounding like your holier-than-thou but full-of-shit cousin. You know it’s about the real-estate value.”
It occurred to Jamie that if his parents were going to sell, Becky would have to relocate too. No doubt she was in a foul mood herself, though it seldom took much for her to disparage Steven, whom she had branded an “instigating brat out of hell” when they were all in their teens.
Nonetheless, since Steven was the journalist of note in the family, Jamie dropped by his desk later that week and mentioned what was happening on Ninety-Fifth Street. He and Uncle Lou lived two blocks away but as renters in a smaller apartment. Jamie could tell right away that Steven’s interest was piqued.
“Could be a piece about what it’s like being the first black family on an all-white block,” he said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Jamie said.
“Not a column but it might be something I could do for a Sunday read,” Steven said.
“I was actually thinking about pitching it myself,” Jamie said.
“What do you mean—you’re a clerk?”
Jamie’s face reddened. “Clerks have gotten bylines. They get promoted.”
“Do you know how much time a story like that would take? You’d have to set up camp on the block and Karyn is due in—what—a few weeks?”
“Two months,” Jamie said. “She’s also made it clear she’s not going back to work full-time and I’ve got to figure out a way to make more money. The only way I can think of is to get promoted to reporter.”
“Who told you to buy a house in Amityville?” Steven said.
“Pleasantville—and, believe me, I am going fucking crazy there,” Jamie admitted. “There’s plenty of space, trees, yards, just no people on actual sidewalks. They just wave as they go by in the car. I’m waving to people I never say a word to and pushing the damned lawn mower into a tree.”
Steven shook his head in a pitying way. He had never professed great love for Karyn in the first place. He’d become especially antagonistic after the move, correctly predicting that Jamie would be miserable. He took to sarcastically referring to her as “Karen with a y,” and later shortened that to “K with a Y.”
“Want me to talk to Willis for you?” Steven said.
Jamie considered the offer. Allowing Steven to run interference was tempting. Cal Willis wasn’t big on features, especially long ones that required a jump from one page to another. He claimed Trib readers on page sixteen were pathologically incapable of remembering what they’d read on page four. But it also occurred to Jamie that if Steven went to bat for him, Willis might just like the story and tell Steven to do it. Jamie thanked his cousin for offering, but said he would do it himself.
For a while, he was content to relish his plan for professional advancement. But he took Steven’s advice and practically moved in with his parents after a few weeks. He stayed in his old room, where nothing much had changed, including the Magic Johnson posters.
Morris mumbled under his breath about him leaving Karyn pregnant and alone. In her quiet, unthreatening way, Molly asked Jamie about that too. “I need the overtime for when the baby comes,” he said. “We need to fix up the house.”
“The kitchen could use it,” said Molly, who had visited once. Jamie glared at her suspiciously, wondering if she could possibly be in cahoots with Karyn.
He watched closely for activity around the Kravitz house. One morning, he peeked out from behind the living room blinds and spotted a red moving van, boxes stacked nearby. Jamie casually wandered across the street and introduced himself. Thad Greene was beginning residency in the maternity ward at a nearby hospital. His wife Brenda had a new job there too, as a nurse. They had one child, a five-year-old girl.
No one else on the block was quite as welcoming. Two For Sale signs appeared on the street a few days after the Greenes moved in. Both signs belonged to the broker, Brookwell Associates. One was on the small patch of lawn of Molly and Morris’ neighbor, Sam Grabstein.
Sam and his wife owned several storefronts in the neighborhood. He had lived every day of his seventy-two years in Brooklyn, always wearing the Dodgers cap his father had tossed in the trash the day his beloved Bums quit Brooklyn for Los Angeles. Jamie liked Sam, who was gregarious and loud. Like Mickey, he liked to tease Morris for being too serious. He called him a stick in the mud.
On the day that Sam’s house went on the market, Jamie returned from buying a newspaper and spotted him at the corner, walking one of those yappy terriers that practically induce self-strangulation while leaping at every pedestrian within ten feet.
“I’m a little concerned about my parents, this housing thing,” Jamie said.
Sam nodded. He cupped his hand around the left side of his mouth, as if they were about to speak confidentially—or conspiratorially.
“To tell you the truth, we’d been thinking of going in about two or three years, but decided it’s time now after the Kravitz house sold. People here begged them not to do this, but the old man couldn’t take the cold anymore, said he wanted to be in Florida by this winter. Said his mortgage was paid off and a few dollars here or there didn’t matter to him. Said the family answered the ad in the paper, nice people, and he didn’t give a shit what anyone else thought. Said there’s a housing recession going on, you take what you can get. If you ask me, the guy’s always been a stubborn SOB. Remember when his kid was living at home years ago? They’d go away in the winter for a couple of weeks, and there’d be parties until three, four in the morning. Loud music, kids getting drunk, pissing in the street—you name it.”
Jamie didn’t recall that or his parents ever complaining. He nodded to keep the conversation going.
“Then the old man would come home and blame everybody else for calling the cops. ‘What’s the big deal? They’re kids, having some fun!’ What the hell did he care? He was sound asleep in St. Petersburg. Anyway, once the word got out they sold to a black family, we start getting calls from the broker. See, it’s just business. They call up and say they have a lot of nice families who want to buy now. The longer you wait, the less you’re going to get because the neighborhood is changing. But with so much housing stock, the prices are bound to go down. They sell a bunch anyway and make a killing on broker fees. We get our money and get out. And they get the block.”
The Greenes, he meant, and the unnamed black families to follow. It didn’t take long for Jamie to realize the time had come to pitch his idea to Willis—now or never. At work that night, he followed Willis into the bathroom. Standing side-by-side at the row of urinals, he took a deep breath and let it spill out—the Kravitzes, the Greenes, the Grabsteins, the calls to the neighbors from Brookwell Associates.
“That’s your story,” Willis said.
“What is?”
“The broker is panicking whites into selling, probably only showing the houses to blacks. Racial steering, it’s called. It violates some civil rights legislation. It was a big deal about twenty years ago. Look it up. Get back to me.”
Willis shook loose the last drops and zippered up. Jamie had no chance to discuss his empathy for the Greenes, the courage they had to have to be the first blacks on the block. How that would make for a poignant read. Willis’ suggestion wasn’t quite what he’d bargained for, but now he had gotten his attention. He had to follow up.
Fortunately, Jamie had become something of a wizard with microfilm and clips. It took him thirty minutes to discover that the Civil Rights Act of 1968 had outlawed any form of racial discrimination in housing, including the steering of races into a particular area. A 1976 New York Times article on a landmark racial steering lawsuit brought against real estate brokers in Bergen County, New Jersey was especially helpful. A group of open-housing advocates had caught the brokers in the act by sending out black and white couples, who had been steered to different towns. He was startled to learn that one of the young lawyers involved in the lawsuits against the brokers was David Stern, who eventually became the NBA commissioner.
Jamie suggested to Willis that the Trib send out its own people to set a trap for the broker. If the advocates could use that strategy, why couldn’t a reporter? Willis liked the idea. Within days he had helped Jamie recruit four fake couples from the newsroom. Two were black. Two were white. The following week—Jamie would never forget the date, Wednesday, November 11th—the couples were dispatched to inquire about the houses for sale on Ninety-Fifth Street.
Jamie stationed himself in a booth at a neighborhood diner. He nervously read the paper. He ordered a burger. He drank refills of Coke. He thought about checking in with Karyn at home, but he didn’t have change for the pay phone in the diner’s vestibule and was soon distracted by one of the couples rushing in to find him with good news.
The Brookwell broker had taken the bait. The minority couples were shown the houses in a neighborhood that was in transition. The white couples were encouraged to look on all-white blocks a few miles away.
Jamie took copious notes when the couples reported in. He called Willis that night.
“Go with it,”
Willis said. “Make sure you get reactions from the broker, a fair housing attorney and the Brooklyn DA.”
The headline on the front page of the Sunday Trib, with an “Exclusive” red banner, read: BROKERING THE RACES. Jamie’s nuanced lead about the uproar created by one black family’s purchase of a home on an all-white Brooklyn block was rewritten to brag of an exclusive Trib investigation that had exposed the illegal practice of racial steering by one of the largest real estate firms in Brooklyn.
The Greenes were only mentioned as the lone black family to have recently purchased a home on Ninety-Fifth Street. Below the story a sidebar with Jamie’s tagline offered reaction from city officials, who vowed to investigate. The real estate company’s records were subpoenaed. Housing activity on the block ground to a halt. The Times interviewed the Greenes for a story in its Metro section that read more like the one Jamie had originally intended. But Jamie had the scoop. It was a coup for any Trib reporter to force the Times to follow up.
Back at the office, Jamie was drinking coffee in what passed as the Trib’s cafeteria—vending machines that carried sandwiches, drinks, candy and coffee. Willis came up from behind.
“Do you realize you look like crap?” he said. “And that’s something coming from me.”
The truth was that Willis looked remarkably good for a man his age. He had the most unlined skin Jamie had ever seen for a man over sixty. His waistline had made only minor concessions. His chest and shoulders looked like the football player he had been at the historically black Howard University.
“If I do, I actually feel worse,” Jamie said.
“You sick?”
“Yeah, to my stomach.”
“Then you probably shouldn’t be drinking the swill they sell in that effin machine,” he said.
Willis turned away to cough up phlegm in the way people who smoke too much do.
“It’s about the story, right?” he asked.
Jamie hesitated, not wanting to whine to Willis of all people. But he needed to tell someone.
“It’s just that it wasn’t what I set out to do. I wanted to write about what it was like for that family to move onto that block. Something, you know, in depth.”
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