Underwood
AT NIGHTFALL, AS THE RAINS continued, Sheldon and Abe and Mirabelle sat together at the kitchen table picking at the chicken, carrots, and potatoes that Mirabelle had half-heartedly roasted for them. But the food had dried out by the time she’d removed it from the oven. Nate was not home. Abe had decided to light a fire to dry out the house even though it wasn’t especially cold. The dining-room fixture above them was the only one lit downstairs. The radio was off and the house felt forlorn.
As Abe finished off his meal, Sheldon told them about the men he’d seen and insisted they were gangsters.
“Pinstripes, hats, the whole nine yards,” Sheldon said.
Throughout the day, Sheldon had kept the news to himself, rolling the fact of it over and over in his mind and trying to make sense of it. Mr. Henkler had promoted Uncle Nate specifically to find out who was smuggling the guns out of the armory. That meant he wanted the smuggling to stop. Abe said that the black car had shown up shortly afterward to intimidate them into not solving the mystery because they wanted the gunrunning to continue. That car was filled, Abe believed, with a mobster who wanted Nate scared. That’s how the vise worked: Nate had to solve and not solve the problem at the same time.
If he didn’t solve it, he’d be fired. If he did solve it, something even worse could happen. So why in the world would the people who wanted it to continue be in the office of the person who wanted it to stop?
“I think they showed up to threaten Mr. Henkler directly,” Sheldon said. “And maybe some of those workers carrying the crates were taking them to higher ground, if you catch my meaning.” He ate a carrot. It was limp. “No one would have noticed in a hurricane. Personally, I think they should have shown up wearing undershirts and jeans like the rest of us, and no one would have given them a second thought, but for reasons I can’t figure out, they decided to come in their gangster suits. Maybe they don’t have any other clothes. Anyway, I don’t think anyone noticed they were there.”
“You did,” said Abe.
“I peed for twenty-eight minutes,” Sheldon said. Maybe it was an answer. Maybe it wasn’t.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Mirabelle said, making two of the limp carrots dance like Charlie Chaplin did with the dinner rolls in The Gold Rush. “Unless,” she added, without a smile, “the gangsters gave up trying to intimidate Dad and decided to go right over his head and intimidate his boss instead. So maybe this is good news because Dad won’t stress about the problem anymore.”
“Unless Mr. Henkler caves to the threats and fires Uncle Nate,” Sheldon said.
Mirabelle danced the carrots offstage.
“That’s not what’s happening,” said Abe quietly. Having worked hard during the day, he’d eaten more than half the chicken and potatoes. Neither his father nor Mr. Henkler had seen him work, but the other men had. They’d watched the strong young Corbin kid body-slam the bags, and they’d seen his sweat mix with the rain like theirs had. That was worth the pain in his shoulders and back.
“What is happening?” Sheldon asked.
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Where were you today, anyway?” Abe asked Mirabelle.
Mirabelle had been with her friends. And some of those friends had been boys. Boys Abe would not have approved of; non-Jewish boys who watched Mirabelle like she was a baked Alaska spinning around the cake display at the diner. Boys who made her feel alive and desirable and not at all an outsider. Like a Jewess.
“I was with Alice. I went to her house and we put on sad faces and watched the rain.”
“Sure you were.”
“Where do you think I was?”
“One step closer to being tied up in a basement in Sicily, I imagine.”
“Do you think we should tell Uncle Nate what we saw?” Sheldon asked, not understanding the implications of the conversation.
“He won’t believe you,” said Abe. He put his utensils down and folded his arms across his chest. “He’ll say you made a mistake.”
“I didn’t. I know what I saw. I’m totally, totally positive.”
“We believe you, Donny,” Mirabelle said. Abe blinked slowly in confirmation.
“Stop calling me Donny!”
“Why? Uncle Joseph used to call you that.”
Sheldon drew in his lips and looked at her sternly without saying anything.
“Because Uncle Joseph called you that, that’s why. And you miss him,” said Mirabelle.
“What do you know,” Sheldon said. It wasn’t a question.
“I know you were crying in your sleep last night. I woke you out of it. Why do you think I was there? To tell you about the sandbags?”
“I was not!”
“Were too.”
“Was not!”
“Sheldon,” said Abe, more calmly than Mirabelle. “Your mother died a year ago. Your father less than two weeks ago. You’re twelve years old and you’ve barely said a word about it. Of course you were crying in your sleep. You’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about. You should be glad you did. It means you aren’t so broken that you can’t.”
“You two never talk about Aunt Lucy,” Sheldon answered as quickly as possible, trying to change the subject by drowning them in it. He knew it was a bitter thing to say. That’s why he said it.
“No, we don’t,” Mirabelle admitted.
“Why not?” Sheldon said. “Aunt Lucy was nice.”
“Yes, she was,” said Mirabelle. “She was very nice.”
“Because,” said Abe, “your uncle Nate is banging some whore every Tuesday and Thursday night to make himself feel better while leaving us all alone to feel miserable, and we like to stay away from the topic so our food stays in our stomachs. Now you know.”
“There’s more,” Mirabelle said quietly.
“No, there isn’t,” Abe said, and gave her a look that Sheldon had never seen. For the first time ever, Sheldon saw Mirabelle take a hint.
* * *
After dinner, Mirabelle and Sheldon listened to the radio downstairs while a fire burned in the fireplace. Abe didn’t join them, though, because he wasn’t in the mood.
Upstairs in his bedroom, he pulled his wooden office chair up to his desk and sat in front of the Underwood typewriter. It had been his mother’s. He’d moved it into his bedroom after she died. She liked to write poems and often typed letters to her friends rather than handwriting them. He had asked her why one time, and she’d said it was fun, that maybe she’d get a job as a secretary. “I’m a good typist, actually. My spelling is superb. I was always good at school,” she’d added distantly.
Abe was still angry at Mirabelle for what she had been about to tell Sheldon. Being a tough rebel was one thing, but there was a line, and she needed to learn not to cross it.
She ought to know better too. When Lucy died, Mirabelle sobbed into her pillow. Abe had to go into her room and lie down with her until she became too exhausted to cry. Once in a while, she did the same for him. They didn’t talk about it, but something had become clear to both of them: They were both cutting their father out of the equation entirely. Without him for support, they only had each other. And now Sheldon.
Neither Abe nor Mirabelle knew if Nate had been unfaithful before the fire. What Abe did know was that it definitely started happening a month afterward. Nate may have been weak or already in love or needy, but none of that mattered to Abe or his sister. They hated him for his betrayal and his abandonment of them even though they weren’t kids anymore, even though they knew people died sometimes, even though their family had weathered the Depression better than most largely on account of Nate and his willingness to do whatever was needed to keep food on the table.
His father was blind now. Abe could see it. Nate had fallen into the trap of thinking that the world that hated him for what he was had accepted him for who he was, and that this was going to change things for everyone else in the long run. It was the same trap that had him believing he had healed the wounds of the family by keeping
them busy and fed, and that he had secured their future among well-meaning and benevolent gentile benefactors, and that he was beyond the pain of losing his wife and his brother because he’d found some arms and legs to hide in. All of this, for Abe, was a failure of imagination, a condition that invites disaster.
All around him Abe saw these failures. A failure to see what was beyond the horizon or immediate sight.
The failure to see effect follow cause.
A failure to anticipate the consequences of one’s own actions.
His father had fostered an inability to look into the future and imagine the probability of civilization being ripped away with the same careless regard that this hurricane was taking of New England, this hurricane that still battered his windows and that the newspapers were already calling the worst natural disaster in American history. More than six hundred people were dead from the storm and the numbers were rising. Two billion trees had fallen. More than nine thousand homes had been flattened. Hartford’s own Katharine Hepburn—Mirabelle’s model of feminine perfection—had lost her beach house, washed away like a stain.
Imagination was necessary, but it wasn’t enough to survive. Jews had imagination aplenty but that didn’t always help. Abe needed to know. He needed to know for sure what Henkler was up to because he wasn’t going to get hoodwinked by being too timid to face the facts; he needed to know who that man was who’d been watching their house; and he wanted to know with certainty what this all had to do with his family. Because his father was in a dream, and Abe knew he’d never wake up.
* * *
Sheldon had burned down his own house to avenge his father, recover what was his, and neutralize a threat. The kid was only twelve years old. And now he was out there gunning for the man who drove them off the road. Impossible. But he was trying. How could a man on the edge of eighteen like himself do any less than his kid cousin?
Knocking over a pawn shop out of anger wasn’t enough. That was child’s play. He needed to crack this and there was only one way to do it.
* * *
Abe reached into a dresser drawer and removed the pistol and placed it next to the typewriter for inspiration. He put a cigarette at the edge of his lips, rolled a sheet of paper into the Underwood, and began to type. He was going to show up at the armory, put the gun against Henkler’s temple, and get the answers. At that point, things could go only one of two ways. Abe was prepared for both.
* * *
He was finished with both letters by the time Sheldon came up to bed. Maybe he’d heard Abe typing away and decided to leave him alone or else he and Mirabelle had occupied themselves downstairs with chess or the radio or books. It didn’t matter. Abe had had the time he’d needed. Sheldon wasn’t chatty when he climbed into bed in his blue-striped pajamas. He turned away from Abe after uttering “good night” to which Abe said the same. He was a good kid. A soft kid in some ways—soft at heart and sentimental—but tough and capable too.
He was still young, though. He didn’t know what forces were out there working against him every day from the shadows—though these forces were increasingly now in the light. He’d learn in time. For now, though, Abe had to save the family all by himself.
* * *
It was 10:30 at night by the time Sheldon was fast asleep and Abe was able to slip out of the house with the gun and the two letters in a brown lunch bag. It was raining but it was more of a steady and normal rain now, the back end of the storm that was now in Maine or Canada as far as he knew. Nate was still out with his diversion—a blonde who worked at a sales desk at G. Fox & Co. who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—and Mirabelle was presumably sleeping too. Abe’s walk through the city streets felt like the night they’d hit the pawn shop, when they crept from shadow to shadow and every streetlamp was an enemy sentry. But tonight, it was easier to navigate. The power grid was down. Millions were in the dark, with a few candles or gas lamps burning. Trees rested on cars as Abe walked through knee-deep water in the street on his way to the armory.
* * *
Henkler was still in his office when Abraham Corbin walked in and closed the door behind him. The rest of the staff was long gone as the sandbagging had ground to a halt around nine. The sheer scale of the future cleanup was inconceivable for the moment. The estimates Mr. Henkler had heard on the radio were only estimates; a full audit of damage was going to be needed; discussions with insurance companies and banks were going to be interminable; and even returning the factory to full production levels was going to be time-consuming. The business, after all, depended on a constant flow of raw materials followed by the distribution of product, more or less like any other production. With the roads blocked, the electricity down, vehicles unable to come or go, and the workers in a state over whatever matters they had to attend to . . . it was going to be a juggling act. That Mr. Henkler knew. But this—Corbin’s kid showing up in the middle of the night—he didn’t expect.
“Your father isn’t here,” Mr. Henkler said, rubbing his eyes.
“No,” said Abe. “I didn’t come to see him.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Abe had seen no one outside. No one on the floors on his way up. No other offices lit. This lonely office was a glowing fishbowl at the far end of the solar system.
“I came to see you,” Abe said.
Abe unwrapped his paper bag and placed his hand inside it but did not remove the Colt 1917. Sheldon had called it a double action and said that pulling the trigger would send the hammer back and release it into the bullet. This was different from the old guns of the Wild West where the cowboys had to pull the hammer back first. “That’s why they did that fanning thing,” Sheldon had said. “My dad said it was all for show, though. You couldn’t hit a barn that way.”
Mr. Henkler removed his oval reading glasses. Abe couldn’t decide if that made him look more German or less.
“Why would you come to see me close to midnight? You should be home. When your father hears about this, it is not going to bode well for either of you. Leave my office, please.”
“I want to know who those two mobsters were. The ones here in your office this morning. I want to know what your business is with them and how my father is related to it. I want to know who the guy is outside my house watching us. I want to know if you’re setting up my father to take the fall for the missing guns that you’re stealing from Colt to sell to the Mob as a sideline. I want to know if you’re setting up the one guy everyone will naturally pin it on. And when I say that I want to know, I mean you’re going to tell me. And you’re going to do it now.”
Mr. Henkler stood up. His face was going red with anger. He was not used to being talked to like this, especially from a child. Especially from . . .
“Sit the fuck down,” Abe said, pulling out the gun. “And leave your hands on the desk.”
“You just got your father fired and you just went to jail,” said Mr. Henkler. He was admirably calm on the outside. Abe had to give him that.
“You’re going to tell me the truth. And if you don’t—”
“If I don’t . . . what? You’re going to shoot me? Please.”
“If you don’t, I’m going to create a new truth. A truth that works for me.”
“I have no idea what—”
Abe looked at the gun and thought again of Sheldon burning his own house down. Now that he was here, holding the thing in his hand, having crossed the proverbial Rubicon, he suddenly felt a surge of respect for his little cousin. The balls on that kid to do what he did. The will. The notion filled him with pride. Uncle Joseph had been a war hero. His cousin was a slayer of dragons. If he got out of this and made it to eighteen, Abe decided that he was changing his name back to Horowitz.
“The one with the mustache,” said Abe, playing a hunch. “He wasn’t here today with the other two guys. But the other times. Thick bushy mustache. Mobster. Tell me his name and I’ll leave.”
Mr. Henkler sat there clutching his desk. He ran a gun
factory. He was surrounded by an inventory of no fewer than a thousand guns on the floor this very minute, not counting the Colt .45 automatic that was chambered and in his top desk drawer. Mr. Henkler had no doubt he could reach in and get it and put a round in the boy’s chest. Who was this boy anyway? Nothing. A nobody. He came from a race of weak and pale people who were little more than Negroes. At least the Negroes had some virtues. At least they won some medals in Berlin back in 1936. What do these people do?
They can count.
Not this one, though. This one was bad at math and couldn’t run the odds.
Still.
Shooting a seventeen-year-old local Hartford boy in the middle of the chest wouldn’t look good. And the Jews were gaining quite a foothold in the city. Sure, the doors were still closed to them at proper institutions like the Protestant Hartford Hospital and the Catholic Saint Francis Hospital. Harvard, of course. And Yale. And Princeton. Other places had set quotas to keep them out. Still, they were gaining ground like vermin whose natural predators had been killed off. So, where did a snot-nosed brat from a tribe like that find the gumption to pull a Colt-made weapon on a proper American man like himself? One of proper heritage at that. It boggled the mind. It really did.
Mr. Henkler told Abe the man’s name. He was obviously the man the boy was referring to. He was the muscle in the area and Mr. Henkler had been threatened by him in the past. A brute with a single name. Not that he’d been at Colt more than once or twice. Mr. Henkler had no loyalty to that man. Passing his name on might move this all along, and it was certainly better than having to shoot a child in his own office. Besides, what could the boy do with the information?
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 11