Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Oh, it sure is something,” the leader said. “It’s too powerful for anybody. You need an awful lot of help and support. No one-man-gang act can save you.” The leader looked at Owney again and Dolores sat down and now she simply poked him. He stood up with his eyes down. He said softly, “I’m Owney. I pass.”

  “Fine,” the leader said. He nodded to a man of about forty, dressed in a dark business suit, who got up. “I’m Cliff and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi, Cliff!”

  “I can’t tell you how relieved I am to be here tonight. I find that when I miss coming to meetings, I get frightened. When I was drinking, I had a lot of trouble controlling myself. One night, I went into my eighteen-year-old daughter’s room and beat her up …”

  “He was looking to do more than beat her up,” Owney muttered. Dolores was irritated. Now he talks.

  “… You know how I found out what I did? When the cops woke me up in the cell and told me. I’ve been in the program for five years now. I’m doing fine. The other day, I had this little scrape with the police, but it wasn’t my fault and I’m confident that it will be resolved.”

  “He’s a cop fighter, blames it on whiskey,” Owney said, and Dolores said, “Bullshit.”

  “What do you mean?” Owney said

  “Just what I said. Bullshit. Why didn’t you talk when you were up?”

  The red sleeve of a woman sitting in front of Owney went into the air. The leader pointed. “My name is Alice and I’m an alcoholic,” she said, waving a cigarette.

  “Hi, Alice!”

  “I want to thank you very much for recognizing me. Like Cliff, I have been in a highly nervous state for the past couple of days. I find myself looking at darkness. I needed to come to this meeting today. You see, I’m having my first date in two years tonight. I couldn’t go out for the two years because I was afraid. Tonight, I’m going out with a man who drinks. Right now, I’m standing here terrified of the moment when he asks me to have a drink. I honestly tremble when I think of having to face that question.”

  The man running the meeting said, “Why don’t you just say that you don’t feel like drinking tonight?” The other people nodded. They smiled, placing a tone of gentleness into the room. The woman sat down.

  Owney put a hand on her arm and spoke quickly. “Let me tell you something. Why don’t you just look this guy in the eye tonight and say that you are an alcoholic and that you can’t have a drink, and that’s it? Tell him, ‘Don’t even ask me to have one.’ Don’t be afraid of what anyone thinks.” Her smile had the gentleness of the room. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. Just do it.”

  “But if I did what you say, I’m afraid he would say to me, ‘Hey, you’re no alcoholic. You can take a drink.’ I know I can’t.”

  “Listen to me. Just tell the guy.”

  “Thank you. But you’re new, aren’t you?”

  “First time here.”

  “Then perhaps I could help you.”

  Dolores nodded vigorously at the woman.

  “Thanks no,” Owney said.

  The meeting was over and people stood up and held hands and bowed their heads and prayed for the strength to go through another day without drinking. Dolores took the hand of the woman next to her. Owney, terrified of the man who had been crocheting, kept his hands stuffed in his pockets. He edged out of the room as the prayer ended. He was the first one out of the room.

  In her car on the way back to Queens, Owney said, “Where are we going?”

  “I’m going to the library,” she said.

  “You spend your life there.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I’m doing good with it,” he said.

  “It didn’t look like it in there,” she said.

  “Why? Because I didn’t say anything?”

  “Could be.”

  “That’s you.”

  “No, that’s you,” she said.

  “I don’t make a fool out of myself.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “And what was that thing you had to say? You’d think you’d help sometime.”

  “I think I just did. Try to, anyway.”

  She said nothing else. When she stopped in front of the cemetery, he said to her, “There was something in the paper today.”

  Whatever you do, please don’t use that, she said to herself.

  “No, it was nothing,” he said. “Forget it. I’ll see you. Thanks for the ride.”

  As she drove away, she glanced back once to see him walking, framed by headstones, and she suddenly wished that she had been more forceful with him at the meeting, and made him talk. Then she began to realize that this was the only feeling she had had about him all day: responsibility.

  “You realize,” the lawyer said to the assistant district attorney, who was annoyingly young, “that these kind of people don’t talk. And I, of course, have nothing to do with people who do such a thing.”

  “I’m familiar with that,” the young assistant said.

  “Therefore, he has nothing to say to you,” the lawyer said.

  “You realize that with twelve other defendants it is going to be a long trial,” the assistant said.

  “I do,” the lawyer said. He tried desperately not to sigh, but of course he did.

  “I hope your client pays you well enough to tie up your services for four months.”

  “That’s my business,” the lawyer said.

  “I’m just bringing it up because we’re in the same field. And I’m looking at this case, where your client stuck his nose in because he was trying to collect six hundred and ten dollars from a man selling pills on the street. Strikes me he may not be such a sport.”

  The lawyer went to the door and beckoned. Old Jack entered the assistant’s office. He looked at the municipal green walls, the leather chair with cracks all over it, and the untidy stacks of paper everywhere. This kid lives in a slum, Old Jack thought.

  “We were just saying that there’s a chance that I can cut you loose from this trial,” the young assistant said.

  “What can I tell you?” Old Jack said.

  “You can tell me that you don’t want to go on trial for extortion, drug selling, and conspiracy and then go to state prison for twenty-five years.”

  “What can I tell you?” Old Jack said.

  “State prisons are about ninety percent black,” the young assistant said. “No, excuse me, they are seventy percent black and twenty percent black Hispanic.”

  “You know us, we don’t say nothin’,” Old Jack said.

  “He would never talk and I would never stand here and become a part of an arrangement whereby somebody does talk,” the lawyer said.

  “Then why am I supposed to let a man out of a trial that would take as much as four months out of my life, and out of yours, counselor?”

  “We can’t trade our way out of here,” the lawyer said. “I would never do such a thing.”

  “The prisons are all black,” Old Jack said.

  “I didn’t say that. I said they were seventy percent black. I said the other twenty percent are black Hispanic. That means they’re not only black but they don’t speak English. They play Puerto Rican music loud all day in the cell blocks.”

  “What can I tell you?” Old Jack said. In a whisper.

  “I don’t know. You tell me,” the assistant said.

  The lawyer coughed. “I think I have to go to the men’s room.”

  Old Jack, not looking at the lawyer, said, “Go to the men’s room.”

  “You’re not going to speak in my absence?” the lawyer said.

  “Of course not,” Old Jack said.

  Fifteen minutes later, the assistant walked into his superior’s office. “I cut that mumser from Queens loose.”

  “You cut him loose? There goes your megalomania again. We got no real case against him. The judge was going to throw it out of court on Friday.”

  “He didn’t know that today. So I took something
out of him on the way out anyway,” the assistant said.

  “Took what?”

  “Just a little piece of him. He gave me some homicide. Actually, he couldn’t wait to do it. It was obvious he thought he was getting even with somebody. I wish I could’ve pushed him for more things, but I was afraid he would stop altogether. I settled for the homicide. Whatever it’s worth.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about him,” the superior said. “He has a federal strike force case coming against him that will bury him in January. Want to get lunch?”

  Two days later, a supervisor of detectives in the station house on West 54th Street in Manhattan hung up the phone, looked at the notes he had just made, and then bawled, “Give me the file on this O’Sullivan.”

  A detective named Webster brought a folder, with black marking pen on the cover proclaiming that Charles O’Sullivan had been shot dead near the Music Box Theatre on West 45th Street.

  “How many witnesses do you have?”

  “None,” Webster said.

  “Why don’t you have any witnesses?”

  “Because nobody saw it.”

  “How come I got something and you don’t?” the supervisor said. He handed Webster the notes.

  The supervisor stood up and left the room. Some time in the next ten days, Webster knew, the supervisor would go on vacation. By the time the supervisor returned, he, Webster, would be in Pompano Beach, Florida, for three weeks. The O’Sullivan case, which was never going to get solved anyway, would be under a stack of fresh and more easily solved cases. Webster was a gaunt man with a brown toupee that was so obvious that the others at work called him Rughead. A policeman for seventeen years, he was so busy counting the days to his twentieth year, and pension, that he rarely spoke about anything else. His partner, Eagen, was young, but the job itself, and then being around Webster, had soured him so quickly that he thought like a man of sixty.

  Webster looked at the notes. “Three of them got beat up. Two sandhogs and a barmaid. They were in hospitals.”

  “I hate hospital offices,” Eagen said. “People work in them are a pain in the ass.”

  Webster kept looking at the notes. “Hunh. Something here with an Owen Morrison.”

  “From where?” Eagen said.

  “Queens.”

  “All the way out there?” Eagen whined.

  14

  WTEAM FILLED THE BATHROOM until she could not see the mirror. Good. Helps get the hair a little fuller. She wrapped an orange towel around her and thought about a silver necklace to wear with her shirts in the fall. Sure, that was a long way off, but not that long when you think of the time it takes to find what you want: they might have necklaces like that on Austin Street in Forest Hills, she thought, but the sure way was to take a Saturday and go to St. Mark’s Place on the downtown East Side of Manhattan. Jewelry from New Mexico. What could it cost, seventy-five dollars? Whatever it is, I deserve it, she assured herself, and the money had to come from her husband and not as something left on the kitchen table as a contribution, some sack of coins tossed to the ground by a knight riding through a hamlet of huts.

  Then she thought of Christine’s feet. The wonder of miniature toes had turned into pink shoots that now barely fit into their socks and shoes. If I don’t take the time to get her new shoes this weekend, I’ll have a child walking barefoot, she thought. She began brushing her hair fiercely; at each moment such as this, as she thought of some stark failure to attend to her daughter, she became so susceptible to guilt that her body moved in dashes rather than with the ease of full lines. Now she saw herself as a little girl again as she walked the streets behind a woman she felt was her real mother, following the woman down the streets with a hope trying to burst out of her chest, and then standing on an empty sidewalk in the cold late afternoon as the woman went up to her own house and pressed her flesh against that of her children and Dolores had to turn again and carry her weeping insides home. Now she shivered in the steamy bathroom. She had to press her baby against her right now.

  She wiped the steam off the mirror and inspected her hair once more and then turned to start out of the bathroom and walked into Owney, who stood in the doorway holding the baby, who was silent and then wailed as Owney suddenly held her up over his head. His eyes were clear and his blue shirt smelled of fresh air. He was annoyed that his daughter didn’t trust him and Dolores, taking the baby away from him, said, “She hardly knows you.” She calmed the daughter as she carried her out to her mother, who was not there.

  “She said she was going out,” Owney said, and this caused Dolores to holler louder than the baby. “She wasn’t even dressed when I got into the shower. How could she do this?”

  “I told her I’d take the kid for a couple of hours.”

  “And she left just like that?”

  “I think she thought we could be alone if she went out.”

  “At seven-thirty in the morning? You’re catching me in the middle. I have to keep moving.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “No, because then somebody from school would have to drive me home. And maybe I wouldn’t be able to find a lift.”

  She put the baby in the highchair in the kitchen and pointed to the coffee for Owney and then went into the bedroom to get dressed and the emptiness of the apartment suddenly became ominous. Without turning around, she said, “Just stay where you are. I have to get dressed.” The small sound of his foot in the hallway just outside the bedroom told her that her timing was of the sort that wins wars. Then she counterattacked. “Why aren’t you working, anyway?”

  “They had an accident last night. The wires caught fire. Nobody can work today until the electricians get through. The whole place got knocked out. Five o’clock in the morning we had a meeting downtown at the union. Four, five guys were caught in there for a while last night.”

  “You can’t keep working there. You’ll get killed.”

  “I’ve got a couple of moves figured out with Kellerman and then we’ll see what’s what. The big thing is, look at this.” He stood in the doorway and held his hand straight out.

  “Great. Now let me get dressed.”

  He walked in and put his arms around her and she could feel the desire in them, and she had no reaction to it except to strain to get away. “Take the day off,” he said, and this caused her to push harder. “I’m going to school. Would you mind letting go of me? I have to get out of here in five minutes.” He did not let go. Where is that fucking Marissa on the phone? she said to herself. That gave her enough energy to force his arms to drop away. She reached into the closet for a blouse. “Would you mind? I have about five minutes.” She dressed in a white blouse and jeans, picked up fake pearls, and, without bothering to look at herself, went into the kitchen. Why be standing in front of the mirror as a temptation? Owney was at the table, placing his hand over Christine’s face and then pulling it back, which each time first frightened and then delighted her.

  “This is no good,” Owney said. Dolores was busy looking into her purse. “She doesn’t have me and she doesn’t have you. What kind of a life is this for her?”

  The pain rose so rapidly that before she had finished a breath she was stricken. There was not a day, an hour, a moment that she was away from the baby, that she was not conscious of enormous guilt that she attempted to keep battened down somewhere inside her, and never successfully, for it always rose and consumed her at the odd moment. This time, the only method of expelling it was to attack immediately.

  “We have to talk about money. You’re going to make me go to court the way it’s going.”

  She knew that she was appropriating the thing she liked least in her husband—when cornered, attack—but she assured herself that she was correct in what she was doing because he most certainly was dreadful with money.

  “I get my vacation bonus early this year. I get it next week. They hand it out now in case somebody wants to put up money ahead of time for a vacation. When it comes, I’ll give you the whole
thing.” His hand went into his pocket and placed folded bills on the kitchen table. “That’s all I have.”

  She sighed. “We’re back to this. I don’t want money that way. It has to be on a more orderly basis. I would take a job if I could. But I can’t. You’re going to have to do better.”

  “I’ll do the right thing with the money. Where does that leave her?” He was looking at the baby, holding her hand.

  “With her mother.”

  She leaned down and hugged Christine and then left with the guilt now at its fiercest.

  At noon in the cafeteria at school, she scolded Marissa for not calling. “You told me not to bother you,” Marissa said, and Dolores answered, “I said that yesterday. I didn’t mean today.” She went to the phone and called the house and when nobody answered she became nervous, and it wasn’t until the third call, an hour later, that she got her mother and found that she merely had gone for a walk with the baby. When Dolores got home that night, she found that Owney had left $315 on the kitchen table. If he can leave that much once, then he best do it every week, she muttered. She then found that Owney had spoken to her mother about taking the baby on Sunday. “I told him maybe the two of you could have her together,” Dolores’s mother said.

  That Sunday morning, Dolores was up before seven and put on clothes that gave her a dull feeling: a brown vinyl jacket over a yellow shirt and purple skirt. Ugly colors, she thought. As she drove into the cemetery she spotted Owney’s father walking up the roadway toward the house. He turned his head once and saw her and then picked up his stride. Dolores rushed the car past him, waving once, and at the caretaker’s house she let Christine climb up the staircase on hands and knees. Owney’s mother stood in the doorway and looked with elation as Christine squeezed past her and went into the living room and had to be followed. Dolores went upstairs with the father right after her and Dolores swung into the kitchen and found a can of beer alongside the ashtray, where the father reluctantly took his seat. Caught dead.