by Pete Hamill
At that point, Millie arrives with the eggs and bacon.
“Whad you say?” she says, pulling the plates closer to her ample breasts, as if holding them hostage.
“Aw, gee, Millie, sorry, pardon my French, man.”
“Don’t call me ‘man,’ Healey. I’m a girl.”
“Of course, man.”
She puts down the plates and wrinkles her brow, staring at Healey.
“What were you talking about, anyway?”
“The mayor, of course. I’m telling this Irish hoople I’m feeling sorry for the mayor these days—”
“Careful, he’ll have ya indicted.”
“And I was saying how I’d like to just put my arms around him, I swear…” Here his voice cracks into a counterfeit sob. “And just say to him, RUDY, LET’S GO GET A BLOW JOB!”
The coffee shop goes dead silent. Millie looks at Healey for a second and then laughs out loud and whacks Healey’s hat with her hand, sending it flying toward the kitchen.
“You’re RIGHT!” she says. “You’re absolutely RIGHT! That’s what he NEEDS!”
“I mean, can’t you see it?”
“I don’t wanna see it.”
“I mean—”
“Good-bye, Healey!”
She walks briskly away. Two other waitresses are giggling, and when Millie reaches them, she starts telling the story. The coffee shop is again filled with the sound of murmuring voices and clattering china. Cormac sees the waitresses in dumbshow.
“You ever notice,” Healey says, “that Millie’s got a beautiful ass?” “A BLOW JOB!”
Millie’s voice.
Reaching the punch line.
Healey’s eyes widen.
“PUT IT ON MY CHECK!” he instantly bellows down the full length of the coffee shop.
Shouts. Applause. Fists pounding on counters.
Cormac doesn’t care if Healey ever writes another word.
91.
The telephone keeps her present in his life as he waits for their night at the theater. Sometimes they speak twice in a day, at noon and at night. She talks about how she hates working at the drugstore, and he says she must find another job where she can use her brains, just look in the Times and go for the interviews and fill out the forms. She says she has no references, except Rite Aid. He says just be straight. Tell them you were raising a baby. Silence for a beat. Then more talk about where she’d want to work and how she could use Spanish and how bilingual secretaries are in demand. Then she tells him she is taking a day off from Rite Aid to apply for three jobs. One in a bank on Forty-eighth Street. Another at a dotcom outfit on Greene Street. Another in a law firm in the World Trade Center. He wishes her luck but says she should be careful about the dot-commers, there is a collapse under way.
“Hey,” she says, “are you what they call a mentor?”
On Saturday morning, she calls and her voice is bubbling and high-pitched.
“I got it,” she says. “I got the job! The one at the World Trade Center! An outfit named Reynoso and Ryan—they hired me. I got home last night and the message was on my machine and… I start Monday, can you believe it? Can you fucking believe it?”
She comes downtown and they celebrate in Chinatown at a place called Oriental Gardens on Elizabeth Street. They order leek soup and dim sum and rice with vegetables and separate mounds of cool shrimp and hot chicken. Her mood shifts from girlish excitement to nervousness to determination, each shift reflected in the way she uses her chopsticks. When Cormac can eat no more, she continues. Her eyes sparkle. Her breasts move under her black T-shirt. She is like a prisoner released from jail.
“Thank you, Cormac,” she says, and reaches across the table and squeezes his right hand. “If it wasn’t for you…”
“Stop,” he says. “This is all you. You did it. I didn’t.”
She sips green tea. He wants to ask her to come home with him, to plunge with him into the dark nest of Duane Street. To begin. She senses this too. But then glances at her wristwatch.
“I’d better run,” she says. “I’ve got to buy some clothes. Or at least clothes for Monday morning.”
She asks the waiter to wrap what is left of the food. He pays the bill with cash. They go out together into bright sunshine. They walk together toward Canal Street, passing the old police station marked 1881. The year of the gunfight at the OK Corral and the year Henry James published Portrait of a Lady. He thinks: What a marvelous country.
“I’ll see you at the theater,” she says, getting into a taxi. “And Cormac? Thanks again.”
92.
Cormac waits for Delfina under the marquee of the Royale Theater on West Forty-fifth Street, searching the crowds for her face. The wind off the river is raw for May, and there are gusts of rain driving most people into the shallow lobby or directly to their seats. Cormac wonders how many times he has walked under this marquee since the theater opened on New Year’s Day in 1927. He was at the opening, sent there by a features editor from the Daily News. The architect’s name was Krapp. Herbert J. Krapp. “I got a real crappy assignment for you,” the editor said. “Irresistible.” And off Cormac went. He remembers the name of the architect but can’t retrieve the name of the play. The theater was handsome and the street was busy all night with theater people and whiskey joints, and if you stayed up late enough and watched the entrances to the speakeasies, you might even get to see Babe Ruth.
For three months that year of Ruth’s sixty glorious home runs, Cormac had a secret affair with a glorious dancer named Ginger Everett. She was in an Earl Carroll show up the block toward Times Square, and he met her under this marquee where she was sheltering from a rainstorm. She had the Jean Harlow white-blond look before anyone ever heard of Jean Harlow, and like most dancers in those days she was short and a bit chubby, with a bosom that moved when she did, which was most of the time. Ginger Everett seemed to move when she was sitting down. Or sleeping.
She had come to New York on a train from Lorain, Ohio, in 1926, seventeen years old, brown-haired and zaftig and desperate to be a star, and somehow found her way to the arms of a bootlegger named Sonny Rivington. He made her a blonde and found her a gig in a chorus line and a suite at the Dixie Hotel. His suite. Cormac had seen him around the speakeasies: a small dapper man with shiny black hair combed straight back in the Valentino style. His face was so closely shaved that it glistened. He had eyes like a rattlesnake’s.
Sonny Rivington was only about twenty-five but seemed older than the other bootleggers, except when he was dancing. He loved to dance. And watching him from the bar or a corner table, Cormac was always envious. Sonny could do the Charleston without looking ridiculous. He was the best tango dancer in town until George Raft showed up. And every night after the show, he and Ginger Everett bounced from speak to speak. Dancing and drinking and dancing some more, until she could barely move. In the Rivington suite at the Dixie Hotel, she would usually go right to sleep. Poor Sonny: Though his eyes were as old as the lairs of rattlesnakes, he was still too young to know that dancers work so hard at night they can only make love in the morning. This annoyed him, because he never woke up until noon and therefore had no mornings. So he threw her out. She came back. He gave up on her a week later. They got back together. But Cormac’s mornings were always free, and sometimes before noon, she would slip away for a late breakfast in his studio, racing downtown on the subway, and make love to him as if working out in a gym. He was certain that the thing about him she most admired was that he could not dance. One other thing was absolutely clear: She was never in love with Cormac Samuel O’Connor. She was mad for Sonny Rivington.
Finally, one night in 1928 (around the time Mae West was doing Diamond Lil at the Royale, a show he does not remember), Cormac was sitting at the bar in Billy LaHiff’s saloon when Sonny and Ginger came in together. She glanced at Cormac in a nervous way, but then Sonny Rivington started hauling her around the dance floor. She left after two lindy hops to go to the ladies’ room, probably to steal
five minutes’ sleep standing up. Then two gunsels walked in wearing gray hats and black overcoats, went straight to Sonny’s table, shot him twelve times, and walked out. In the uproar, Cormac went to the ladies’ room and told Ginger Everett to get the hell out of there, and she dashed out the back door, while he called in the details to the Daily News city desk without mentioning her. She showed up at his studio three hours later, cried for five minutes for poor Sonny Rivington, and then slept for eighteen hours. Two days later she left by train for Hollywood, where she got two small parts in Harold Lloyd movies, married a real estate operator, and disappeared forever.
Now on this street where Cormac met Ginger Everett on a rainy night while Sonny was out of town, here comes Delfina Cintron. Head down, raincoat collar high, cheeks rouged by the wind. She sees him, whispers a hello, takes his arm, and they go in to see Copenhagen. A few men turn to look at her. She removes her coat as they find the seats. She’s wearing a low-cut black sheath and a string of fake pearls and matching fake-pearl earrings and she glows with golden beauty. The houselights dim. She folds her coat over her knees with the Playbill on top. She takes Cormac’s rain-chilled hand. Her own hand is very warm.
“I’m so excited,” she says. “A play! A Broadway play.”
As they watch the first act, he hears her make several gasping sounds. Her hand gets wet and she removes it in an embarrassed way and tamps it dry on her coat. He glances at her. Her face is totally concentrated on this drama about the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and the morality of using their science to build an atomic bomb. The writing, by Michael Frayn, is excellent, but Cormac can’t follow the technical language and imagines Mae West walking in from stage right and causing a riot. At the interval, the lights come up and Delfina’s eyes are welling with tears.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know.” They stand to let others pass to the aisle. “I’ll explain later. Do we have time for a smoke?”
The area in front of the theater is packed. Delfina is composed now, coat draped over her shoulders, and they each smoke Marlboro Lights.
“You see, at Hunter, I had this physics class, and—”
Lights begin blinking, ordering them to return to the seats. She stamps out the cigarette.
“We’ll talk later.”
In the dark, she disappears into the play, or into memory, or both. The rest of the audience seems as absorbed as Delfina Cintron. In the last days of the giddy boom, they are actually paying attention to a moral dilemma. At the end, he and Delfina join in the standing ovation and then move slowly back up the aisle toward the street.
“Thank you so much, Cormac,” she says. “That was—it meant a lot to me.”
He tries not to sound like a stiff but does anyway: “I’m just glad you could come with me.”
The lame sentence goes past her. She says: “I could feel things popping in my brain. You know? Like tiny little dead things suddenly coming to life. It was like—if you didn’t use certain muscles for a long time? Then you do, and pop-pop-pop.”
They walk out into the cool street. The rain has stopped. They hurry toward Frankie & Johnny’s on Forty-fourth Street off Eighth Avenue. One flight up. Delfina has never been here before, but Cormac remembers a night when Owney Madden threw a police lieutenant down the stairs for trying to double the payoffs. He and Delfina go up the same flight of stairs, and he’s at eye level with her golden thighs, and now he remembers Madden’s enraged gangster face. The restaurant is filling up with the New Jersey people coming out of the theaters. They check their coats. Men look up when Delfina walks in her street swagger behind a waiter to a table against the wall, with Cormac behind her. She sits down, scraping the chair as she pulls it forward. She wants a glass of wine and Cormac orders a glass of the house red and a large bottle of sparkling water. She lifts the menu.
“Steak,” she says, grinding her jaws in an exaggerated way. “Steak, steak, steak.”
“I guess you want steak.”
“With cottage fries and tomatoes and onions and then some amazing dessert.”
“I’ll have the same,” Cormac says. “I can walk it off tomorrow.”
She looks at him in an amused way, as if she has other ideas about working off the calories. The waiter arrives with the wine. Cormac orders. Every table is now full and there are people standing near the door.
“What a great place this is,” she says.
“Used to be a speakeasy.”
“A what?”
He has forgotten how young she is, and explains about Prohibition and what speakeasies were and how the modern Mob was invented in places like this. She finds the notion of Prohibition hard to understand.
“You mean they banned all drinking? Like with drugs today?”
“Yes, and with the same kind of success.”
“Holy shit.”
“That’s what New York said too.”
They touch glasses, and she sips, then twirls the glass by the stem.
“That’s good.” Her tongue passing over her upper lip. “Here’s to the end of Prohibition.”
She glances around, her brow furrowing. A chill washes over her.
“Listen,” she says, “I’m sorry I got so upset back there in the theater.”
“What was that all about?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Sure you do.”
“Yeah. I do.”
A pause. The diners are murmuring, laughing, leafing through Playbills for the names of actors.
“It just, I mean, the whole thing, the play, the subject, it just reminded me of what I threw away,” she says. “At Hunter, I was a whiz at physics. I don’t know why. It sure didn’t come from genes. I just got it from the beginning, it was a kind of center of things for me. And the professor knew I got it. He paid me a lot of attention. Too much attention. I was just a kid, eighteen. But I guess he never had a Latina in his class who got it the way I got it. Physics was for Jewish kids or Chinese kids or Korean kids. Not for kids from the D.R. But I got it. And I thought, Hey, maybe I’ll major in this, keep learning, keep growing, go to graduate school, MIT or Cal-Tech, discover some new principle, the way Bohr did and Heisenberg did. I knew about these guys, from my teacher. Shit, I had a photograph of Einstein on the wall of my room in Queens. You know, the one where he’s sticking out his tongue? You know that one?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I guess you knew this was coming, right? I got involved with the professor. It’s such a cliché. Student Falls for Professor. Puh-leeze. But, anyway, I did. By then I was nineteen. He was forty-two. And married. Hey: Are you married?”
“No.”
“But you’ve been married?”
“Yes.”
“So you know it’s never easy, I guess. Not for anybody.” A pause. “Anyway, I came on to him just before the end of the term. I didn’t have a plan or anything. I just felt, hey, I’ve got to have him. The details don’t matter. We saw each other all that summer. He rented a house on the Jersey shore for his wife and two kids and went down after class on Friday and came back Sunday night. Sometimes he had to take his boy to Yankee Stadium, or the Planetarium, or something, but the rest of the time we were together. He kept teaching me about physics, making my head explode, and he did his best in bed. Until finally his wife caught on. She made him choose. And he chose her, okay?” She sips the rest of her wine. “Oh, well, fuck it. Fuck him. Too.”
“Did he kill physics for you?”
The salads arrive. She eats and talks.
“No. I went back in the fall and took courses with another professor. One that my guy recommended, a nice old Austrian. And in a way, the Austrian helped me get over my guy, just by challenging me to be better, to go deeper and deeper. I finished my course with him. He told me in that Austrian accent that I had a great future. And then I threw it away.”
Another pause. Cormac waits.
“I just felt, this is all wrong. I’m in a world whe
re I don’t belong. It’s only gonna hurt me. I’ve gotta get out. What did I think I was, anyway? That’s what they always ask in the street. What did I think I was, white? Ghetto bullshit always wins. I walked away. I found my man, had my baby, all that sad song I already told you.” She looks up and smiles in a wounded way. “When I met you, I was the only cashier in the history of Rite Aid who understood quantum theory.”
“Can you use it in the new job?”
“No, it’s a law firm, import-export, NAFTA, all that. My Spanish helps with calls to Monterrey.” She grins. “But the guys there are pretty good guys. Reynoso is a Mexican who came here in 1968, after all his friends were shot in some massacre. He went to Columbia, gave up Marx, became a business major, then took a law degree. He can be very funny.”
“What about Ryan?”
“I don’t even know if he exists,” she says. “He’s always off in Europe or someplace, making deals. Or that’s what Reynoso says.”
She smiles in a pleased way, all regret about physics now vanished. The salad plates are carried away by a Mexican busboy (“Mil gracias, joven,” she says); the steak arrives. She seems grateful for the interruption and begins slicing meat.
“Oh, wow—this is good.”
She glances around the room, and then giggles.
“Why do I feel like I’m in New Jersey?”
“Because New Jersey is here at all these other tables?”
“What do you think their lives are like?” she says. Cormac can’t tell her that since the night he washed up on its shores after killing the Earl of Warren, he has never been in New Jersey.
“Nasty, brutish, and long.”
She smiles, chews, swallows. He realizes she hasn’t used “fuck” all evening long. The noise of the diners is rising.
“So, anyway, that’s why I was upset.”