Sheldon handed the brass house burner to his uncle, who lit up and—if not feeling better for it—at least he was able to step into the only conversation available.
“Well. Hell, Sheldon.”
“Yeah.”
Nate had already passed through such a range of emotions and so many prepared speeches on the long drive up to Whately that by the time he opened his mouth he was already spent.
“You’re gonna live with us now,” he said to his nephew.
“Yes, sir.”
“I got two kids of my own and now you on top of it. My wife. Your mother. Now my brother. While this is happening, I’ve got people breathing down my neck at work and I’m in a pinch you’ll never understand,” he said to Sheldon. “So, don’t be thinking you’re the only one with problems.”
“No, sir.”
“What’s with the clock?” Nate asked, after letting out a long breath of pure smoke.
“It was my dad’s. It goes where I go.”
Nate turned and looked at the Ford and considered the space.
“You’re bunking up with Abe. If he doesn’t want it in the bedroom, you’ll have to work it out between you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Nate folded his arms and looked around at the hillbilly town he had escaped from all those years ago. He still didn’t understand why his brother had stayed.
They’d had the talk in 1922. Nate worked at one of the remaining wool mills. He hated everything about it and said so. “I hate the smell. I hate the pay. I don’t like the feel of the wool on my hands. I hate the chemicals. And there are no women here, Joe. No women I haven’t known since elementary school. That pool’s exhausted, you get me? I either don’t want to see them naked or I don’t want to see them naked again. I want to go to Hartford. It’s swinging now with the economy turning around. There are speakeasies. There’s dancing and short-hemmed dresses, and they all think I’m Italian. Those are the kinds of girls I need in my life. And they smell good and you can get away with things in cities that you can’t in small towns.”
“Who do you know in Hartford?”
“Nobody, which is the best thing about it. There’s a synagogue there. It’s Conservative, but I can play along. I’ll see the rabbi and tell him I’m moving to town. I figure he’ll hook me up. The Jewish community’s big down there. It’s connected.”
“He’s not a pimp, Nate.”
“I’ll find you one too. You know . . . the kind who can handle your moods and likes a guy with a history.”
Joseph said nothing.
“I’ll visit,” Nate said. “But it would be better if you came to me.”
Joseph stayed with the cottage and the woods and the quiet. Nate found Lucy in Hartford and he married her, and then Lucy introduced her friend Lila to Joseph and inexplicably she liked him. It rankled Nate, because Lila was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen not projected onto a screen, and while Lucy was lovely, Lila was a stunner. He didn’t understand how Joe had managed it. But these questions didn’t matter anymore. The theater was closed, and the cast was dead.
Sixteen years later, Nate looked at Sheldon. “That’s it, then? The clock, the suitcase, and the rucksack?”
“Couple of things are left in the shed,” Sheldon said, pushing the clock into the back seat of the car. It made noises. The Krupinski brothers had handled it roughly; it was going to need care. “Some stuff in the hunting shack. But that’s all.”
“What’s your friend’s name? The comedian your dad says you pal around with?”
“Lenny.”
“Whatever’s left, you tell him he can have it. We don’t have the space. You write him a letter.”
“OK.”
“Get in,” said Nate, looking around at his own past for what might be the last time.
Inmates
HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT, GLOWED LIKE a magic lantern beneath the low clouds of that autumn night. Sheldon had never approached a big city after dark before. He’d been in Boston a few times. Springfield a few more. But not at night. He half expected to feel the edge of the light when he reached Hartford as though it were a physical barrier he had to penetrate. For all their glimmer and promise, though, the city’s lights were cold and he knew the place to be a crematorium.
Sheldon and Nate had not spoken during the car ride. The weight of circumstance overwhelmed any impulse to talk. With all that had happened and was yet to come, there was surprisingly little to say because of how little there was to decide. The path was forewritten. Sheldon was to mourn and go to school, much like last year. Nate was to provide food and shelter and abide by state laws directing the education of children until they were of age and employable and could graduate and move out. Abe had a year to go and would be out in 1939. Mirabelle had two.
In their silence, Nate was considering that the kids would have to pull their weight and make their way in an unfair world. Their predicament was painful and Sheldon’s doubly so—Nate was not oblivious to this—but it was not unprecedented, and the world had thrown far more at people with far less. Many of them were in Europe.
“You’re going to stay out of trouble, right? Make this easy on me?” Nate said to Sheldon as they entered Hartford.
Sheldon turned and looked at him. He wanted to say yes almost as much as he wanted to push Nate out of the car for asking. Instead, he said nothing and looked out the window at the tall buildings and streetlamps, the black cars and elegant people walking down the streets as though Christmas were around every corner.
* * *
The Horowitz-turned-Corbin family lived in a three-bedroom brownstone that nicely blended in with all the other brownstones nearby. It had three floors with a bay window in the front parlor. Sheldon had been here maybe a dozen times over the years, mostly for holidays because they had more space and a formal table.
What Sheldon felt first, on entering the house, was the absence of a woman, of a mother. Though tidy, the house felt unruly. There was no one to define the mood and temper the people inside, and so they were left adrift.
Without a woman, everything felt unpredictable. It was a place of emotion without direction.
Sheldon didn’t notice her at first, but once he looked around, he saw Mirabelle leaning against the bannister of the staircase with her arms crossed over her chest and her dirty blonde hair tied up neatly in a bun. She wore a simple black dress with a white collar, but the expression she wore was far less monochrome. There was red in her face and it wasn’t makeup. Whether it was anger or grief or sadness, Sheldon couldn’t tell. She seemed to be tolerating everything and everyone. Despite it all—or because of it—she was terribly pretty; grace against a storm.
“Hello,” she said, resigned to the fact of him.
“Hi,” Sheldon replied.
She blinked at him over stiff lips, and though her welcome was harsh, he was grateful she was here. He hadn’t lived in a house with a woman for more than a year. She was a little scary, though. Beautiful but definitely scary.
For Mirabelle, it was obvious that Sheldon’s invasion was another change in a litany of changes that only added more trouble to the trouble she’d been having. For the moment, she was keeping everything to herself.
Abe sat halfway up the staircase on the red runner wearing a black suit, a white shirt, a black tie, and a fedora. To Sheldon, he looked halfway between a Hasidic Jew and a gangster. With the fedora tipped forward and his elbows on his knees, Abe looked more like the latter. Despite being a teenager, Abe folded beneath the weight of life like a grown man. There was a sadness in his face that robbed him of a youthful humor.
“Welcome to hell,” said Abe.
“It’s not my first visit,” said Sheldon.
Abe nodded his head. “They say bad news happens in threes. Uncle Joe makes it three. Guess we’re all in the clear now.”
“Yeah, smooth sailing,” said Sheldon.
“That all you got?” Abe nodded at the rucksack, the clock, and the woman’s suitcase.<
br />
“That’s all there is.”
“I heard about the house.”
Sheldon didn’t reply to that.
“You planning to put that thing in my room?” Abe asked, looking at the clock. “ ’Cuz I’m not thrilled about sharing a room. Jerking off in peace was the only good thing around here.”
Sheldon looked at Mirabelle, who was not shocked by this nor, it seemed, insulted by it.
“Can I please?” Sheldon asked.
“Jesus Christ,” said Abe, tilting his hat up and rubbing his face. “Don’t go all soft on me. Come on,” he said, standing up.
Sheldon walked up the stairs one step at a time and then hauled his history up behind him at what seemed like a slower pace. At the top, with a sigh, Abe led him to their room.
* * *
Twin beds were pressed against separate walls with one window in between that looked out on the street, the brownstones across the way that were a mirror of the Corbins’, and the passing black cars and wood-paneled trucks. There was a dresser at the foot of each bed, and Abe’s woolen blanket was folded to military perfection on the one to the left. The other bed on the right was unmade. A folded pile of sheets and a gray blanket awaited Sheldon.
“That’s you,” Abe said, pointing.
There were two trophies on Abe’s dresser. Sheldon didn’t inspect the inscriptions. Otherwise, there were no pictures, no photos, and little else that was personal aside from a stack of books, a stack of newspapers, and a typewriter.
“It’s like an insane asylum in here,” Sheldon said.
“What makes you think it isn’t?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
“Close the door.”
Abe flopped down onto his bed while simultaneously tossing his fedora across the room onto the hat rack like Sheldon had seen in the movies, when he used to go to movies. With his back to the wall, Abe crossed his legs and motioned for Sheldon to take a seat opposite him on his own bed after the door clicked shut.
The springs squeaked when he sat on them. Sheldon sat back and crossed his arms, trying to look grown-up even though he knew that the effort showed and the gesture failed.
“Someone ran us off the road,” Sheldon said to Abe. “A guy in a fancy suit and a mustache. My dad was murdered. I’m going to find out who did it.”
Abe’s face didn’t change. He nodded toward the window. “There’s a car across the street with a wiseguy in it. He’s been here for months. Go look. Was it that guy?”
Sheldon didn’t like humor like this.
“Fuck you, Abe.”
“I’m not kidding around. Go look at the window. Black car across the street. He’s been watching us for almost three months now.”
“Someone really did kill my dad,” Sheldon repeated.
“And I’m saying,” said Abe in an eerily calm voice, “go look out the window. Because there’s shit going down here in Happyland and I believe you.”
Sheldon didn’t know Abe very well. He was six years older but the distance between twelve and eighteen was a lifetime. Abe was almost done with high school, and Sheldon wasn’t entering it for another few years. Abe had a girlfriend named Marjorie, a driver’s license, and he worked part-time after school at the G. Fox & Co. department store downtown selling men’s shirts and suits. What Abe might find funny was a mystery.
“If you’re messing with me on a day like this, it would make you a grade A asshole.”
“I agree with that,” Abe said, his voice low and flat.
Sheldon walked to the window and looked out. Like Abe said, there was a black sedan parked on the street. Inside was a man wearing a hat. The car was across the street, and Sheldon saw the driver’s elbow sticking out. He couldn’t see the man’s face, and from his suit and body language, he could have been anyone. Sheldon didn’t see any smoke coming out of the exhaust.
“Who is he?”
“Who is he? That’s my question. I asked my dad. He said he had no idea and that I should mind my own business. I know he’s not a cop. He’s never knocked on our door. He’s never stepped out and walked into another house. So, that narrows things down a bit. My guess is he’s with the Mob and he’s watching Dad for some reason. I do think, though, it’s got something to do with the missing guns at the armory.”
Sheldon looked at the man. He couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t really look like his guy. The thickness of the guy was off.
“My guy had a mustache.”
“He doesn’t have one. Then again, men shave.”
“It was one of those bushy ones. People with those don’t shave them off. They name them.”
“You’re probably right. Too bad. Would have tied everything off in a nice, neat wrapper and we’d know exactly what to do.”
“What’s going on, Abe? What missing guns?” Sheldon asked, still looking out the window. The man in the car, sensing that he was being looked at, looked up at Sheldon. Sheldon didn’t look away. They stared at each other until the man lost interest in a twelve-year-old boy trying to stare him down.
It wasn’t his guy.
“It’s got something to do with my dad. You know he works for the Colt Armory, right? He’s an accountant?”
“I guess.”
“You know what an accountant is?”
“Not exactly.”
“Businesses have money coming in, and they have money going out because it costs money to make money, and they need to keep track of how it’s all moving around. There are more than ten thousand people employed at Colt. The place is an industrial-era miracle. That’s a lot of moving parts and a lot of moving money. Dad helps keep the numbers straight.”
“OK,” said Sheldon, informed but uninterested.
“You know what the armory is, right? You and your dad know all about guns?”
“I don’t know that much about guns. What I know is how to shoot. And I know animals and the woods and tracking and skinning and stuff like that.”
“All useless here,” said Abe, reaching up for a newspaper. It was the Boston Daily Globe. The massive headline from a few weeks back read, ITALY ORDERS JEWS TO GO. “You see this? They revoked Italian citizenship from foreign Jews. They’ve got six months to clear out of Italy, Libya, and the Aegean Isles—wherever the hell those are. Says here”—Abe pointed to a spot in the paper—“that they might be headed for Italian East Africa because apparently there’s no mention of that place in the edict and because Jewish refugees are being denied entry by all other European countries. The entire continent wants them gone. All of them.”
“Where are they supposed to go?”
Abe shrugged.
“What has that got to do with us?” Sheldon said. He went back to the bed and sat across from Abe.
“It means Jews are getting squeezed. You see, my dad got promoted a couple of months ago. To my dad, this is the biggest deal in the world. A Jew getting promoted at Colt? It’s the most goyish industry you’re likely to find outside a mayonnaise factory. He takes it as proof that we’re climbing the big ladder of America. But I smell a rat.”
“I don’t understand,” Sheldon said.
Abe put away the paper and tried to explain. “The Colt Armory makes guns. Lots and lots of guns. They’ve been here in Hartford since before the Civil War. The guy who runs it is called Samuel M. Stone. One of the men under him is Carl Henkler. He’s American but he’s German, and he thinks he’s entitled to the East Coast itself. He’s also a numbers guy and Dad says he’s smart. I think he might be too smart. Because, the thing is, guns started going missing from the factory sometime earlier this year. Not a lot of them, but enough to get noticed. Stone put up security at the doors and had bags checked and started having dogs wander around at night, but so far nothing’s worked. No one can figure out how they’re being smuggled out of the building. A place that big isn’t going under because a few hundred guns get swiped, but Stone isn’t one to get robbed, so he’s on the warpath. Not to mention that if it got out that Colt was be
ing robbed—right when there’s a war on the horizon—it might make the big buyers skittish and that could kill any kind of deal. So Henkler hired my dad to start combing the accounts to narrow down where the losses are coming from and, I suppose, make them stop. This came months after the big fire, and Dad took the job because he thought that any change, any chance for something good, was worth taking. Shortly after that, that asshole in the car started showing up. Comes back all the time.”
Abe motioned to the window and everything outside it.
“You think this is connected to my dad too?” Sheldon asked.
“Do you?” Abe asked him.
They didn’t feel connected. Sheldon was pretty sure his theory about the Krupinskis pissing off the wrong guys was a good one, and it didn’t need any complicated connections to Colt. Sure, the Mob might be involved in both cases, but they’ve got their hands in everything according to the papers.
“Not especially. But who the hell knows?”
Abe removed a Lucky Strike from a half-crumpled pack and packed it with an expert hand against his palm. “ ‘Who the hell knows’ is the correct answer to the question. And I believe the answer to that question is Carl Henkler.”
Sheldon uncrossed his arms and placed his palms on the blue-ticked mattress. The cotton was rough. He looked at the clean folded sheets.
“So, you believe me? About my dad?” Sheldon said.
“Yes. I do. I might not have believed it if that car wasn’t there, but it is. So, yeah, I believe you.”
Abe put the cigarette at the edge of his mouth, where it stuck like a magnet. He removed a brass Zippo from his pocket and started snapping it open and whacking it shut. Sheldon’s feet twitched back and forth off the side of the bed.
“We gonna do something about all this or are we supposed to just sit back and take it?” Sheldon asked.
Abe smiled at him.
“What do you think?”
* * *
Dinner was a bean-and-chicken soup with chunks of tomato served with two slices of dark bread. Mirabelle delivered it to the table without an apron or a word. The new family of four sat in the kitchen at a round table, a yellow light illuminating the proceedings from beneath a red glass, which cast the ceiling in the color of warning. The Jack Benny show was playing on the Zenith. On the program, Jack had bought a horse and clearly knew nothing about it.
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 5