Blue Money

by Janet Capron

  In fact, for a little punk con man only in his twenties who never did much of anything but beat his friends out of a couple of dollars, the crowd was large indeed. Everyone showed up: a full roster of fringe characters from below Fourteenth Street; all the resident lowlifes on City Island; and several madams led by Corinne wearing a floppy black hat. In fact she had been the first to arrive. Evelyn’s family huddled together in one corner. Later Eddie’s high school chums arrived, including several ex-girlfriends. Finally, a few musicians from the clubs turned up at the last minute to solemnly pay their respects.

  I had never been to a wake before. Maggie was there with me. I couldn’t go alone. When we first arrived, we stood hesitating just inside the door. It was still early in the day and there were rows of folding chairs, many of them as yet empty, facing a bare stage with the coffin on it. Baskets of flowers flanked the stage. Off to one side, there was a metal tree that looked like a music stand with pictures of saints hanging from it. It was all very strange. Evelyn came over. She looked like someone else in her conservative black suit with her hair up in a bun. I introduced her to my mother. They embraced. Then Evelyn held me tight. She started to cry.

  “It was just his time. That’s all. We’ve got to accept it. Do you want to say good-bye to him with me?”

  She took me by the hand and led me to the coffin on the low stage. The coffin was lit from above. Evelyn shoved me gently.

  “Go ahead, Janet, say good-bye.”

  I went up and looked in the casket. Eddie lay there, with his hands folded, in a gray suit, white shirt and striped tie. He was wearing black wing-tipped shoes. His curly hair was much darker because it was slicked down with styling gel and combed in a side part to cover the wound at his temple. He looked waxen, of course, not luminous, not touched with moonlight as in life, but he was the same shade of junkie white. The suit made him look like a small, well-groomed, and attractive young man, someone you would trust to handle your portfolio or sell you insurance. I imagined the life we might have had together if he had been that person he was portrayed as in the coffin. We would have lived in Queens, Forest Hills if we were lucky, and had babies.

  “Good-bye, I love you. Where are you now?”

  Evelyn came and knelt down, so I did the same. She made the sign of the cross; I did, too: up and down, then left to right. She and I bowed our heads and lifted our hands in prayer.

  A short while after that, Donna came in with Arthur, who appeared to be a natural-born mourner in his elegant, dark three-piece pinstriped suit. First he came over to where I had rejoined Maggie.

  “You look lovely,” he said to me. (Maggie had taken me to Lord & Taylor the day before, where I had found a flattering black crepe dress and heels.) Arthur introduced himself to Maggie and offered condolences to both of us for my father. He said how difficult it must be to have to miss Eddie’s funeral the next day, as I was going to my father’s funeral instead. “Your heart must be torn with grief.”

  Then he took my hand and looked me right in the eye. “Listen, Janet. There’s no point in my telling you I’m sorry. Of course I am. But I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep over what happened, because the chances are pretty good I would have to do the same thing again given the circumstances.”

  He kept holding my hand, giving me that doleful look he had. I wanted to scream, ‘And now Eddie’s dead.’

  Arthur pulled a little silver flask out of his pocket and offered Maggie and then me a swig. “Grand Marnier, excellent balm for the nerves,” he said.

  Maggie looked slightly tempted, and I’m sure I looked very tempted, but we both politely refused. I hadn’t had a drink since I’d been hauled off to Bellevue.

  Arthur put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. “I always believed in you, kid.”

  “Good to finally meet you,” he said to Maggie before he moved away.

  Then Arthur walked right over to Evelyn. I was surprised. I would have thought Eddie’s killer might have kept his distance from his victim’s mother; instead I saw the two of them embrace. They both seemed to be impersonating straight people as they stood together talking in their respective black suits. Evelyn would say something and he would nod. Then it looked like he would tell a story, maybe a funny Eddie story, and she would smile, a little of her former gleam appearing for an instant before the shroud of bottomless grief descended again. I remembered Arthur always did indulge Eddie like an impossible prodigal, the cross he had to bear.

  I kept looking at Arthur and Evelyn, trying to make some sense of it all. Eventually I watched them go before the coffin, each one making the sign of the cross as, in one fluid motion, they knelt, bowed their heads, and prayed. Their rhythm and economy of movement impressed me. ‘Catholics really know how to exit this world,’ I thought.

  Michael came with Ava. I wouldn’t have believed Michael had it in him. He even wore a jacket over his black turtleneck and real shoes, black loafers. Ava had pulled her massive hair up into a bun. She wore a long black skirt that accentuated her height. Michael and Ava went over to Evelyn and Arthur, who both stood up from where they were kneeling in front of the coffin. Ava knelt down right away in front of Eddie. Michael made the sign of the cross but remained standing. I watched Evelyn introduce him to Arthur. It was all so civilized. Especially Evelyn. I would have expected her to be lashing out with grief. But she was so entirely miserable, all she could do was love and forgive.

  Maggie nodded respectfully to everyone. She summoned her theatrical training to play the role of the young widow’s mother, as if this were an antebellum affair and the collective dignity of the local gentry was being gathered up to honor the pride of the southern countryside.

  I introduced her to Evelyn’s longtime boyfriend, Daniel, who smiled his benevolent, toothless smile. Then he produced a flask, which he waved at me. I could have used a drink. I hated this saying no to a drink.

  Michael retreated to a corner alone, where he stood also nipping from a flask. He had pulled his black hair back in a ponytail, and he looked wonderfully forlorn. He was a frail soul, I realized, not for the first time. I was playing the familiar game with myself in which I tried every way I could to dismantle the appeal he still held for me. But whatever I came up with backfired. All his faults were treasures to me. What kind of person was I that at poor Eddie’s wake, right in front of his cold body, I could be lusting after an old flame? Life makes beasts of us—it’s base, this desire in the face of death. Which is precisely what had always revolted Eddie about the whole deal.

  Meanwhile, Michael continued to stand there alone, managing to appear awkward and poised at the same time. God, he was tall and majestic—splendid, really. He looked like a frosty quart of beer on a hot afternoon. Finally I hit on something that allowed me to detach from my Svengali. I had heard through the grapevine he and Ava were just about through, and this had the peculiar effect of liberating me. I don’t think it was gloating exactly, because I felt for Ava. It was more that I had a new understanding: Michael, the once and future king of one-night stands, could only enjoy at most one inspired weekend with a woman, after which he felt obliged to spend the next two to ten years letting her down easy. Seeing Ava across the room, her body drooping with grief and depression, I could remember the chronic pain of enduring Michael’s protracted rejection. I remembered it was like watching someone gracefully disentangle himself from a messy web. Except I was the web.

  Michael could not have brought himself to approach anyone, but once I took Maggie over to him, he responded with his characteristic diffident charm. He took Maggie’s hand, shook it, and nodded his head slightly at the same time.

  “Your daughter is a true love of mine,” he said.

  “One of them, I understand,” Maggie said, ever the cynic on this subject.

  “Yes, but it’s a very small club, and I have a feeling there won’t be any more new members.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, you’re still a very handsome young man. In fact, you look mor
e sensitive and artistic than I would have thought. Anyway, hunker down, kid, because love keeps at you for a long time, and it’s a bloody nuisance.”

  Michael smiled. “Thank you. I can take heart now.”

  The way they were romancing each other with their wry disillusion. They were both so full of crap. I wished Eddie were there to tell them so.

  Epilogue

  Evelyn never sold another piece of tail again. Instead, she opened a no-frills packaging store off Main Street on City Island. It was a forerunner to Mail Boxes Etc. She liked it because the inventory required a minimum of upkeep. I also heard she never left City Island if she could help it.

  Meanwhile, I joined an outpatient clinic downtown.

  “I wouldn’t have given a plug nickel for your sobriety,” Laura, my alcoholism counselor, told me. “In swaggers this punk in rags with matted hair—manic and unreachable is what I thought.”

  Nevertheless, Laura must have suspected something, because, to keep me occupied, she composed for me a long reading list. That got my attention. I discovered later that my counselor had herself written several well-received plays, one of which made it to Broadway in the late fifties. Laura was a writer and an intellectual. But more important, she was a sober drunk.

  No matter which acute crisis I brought to her—and there was nothing else but in the weeks that followed—Laura would circle a name and address in the meeting book and say, “Go to this meeting.”

  “The landlord’s trying to evict me” or “I just lost another waitressing gig!” I’d say.

  Real life or death stuff.

  “Go to a meeting,” Laura would always reply with stony composure.

  At first, I hated those church-basement meetings. I hated those creepy, smiling faces so painfully visible under the harsh fluorescent lights. I sat cringing and hiding in the back of the room. But then one day, WE CAME TO BELIEVE A POWER GREATER THAN OURSELVES COULD RESTORE US TO SANITY” leapt out at me from the scroll on the wall where it hung. ‘That’s a remarkable claim,’ I thought, ‘sanity.’ I was reminded of those times during my psychotic episodes when the handwriting on the wall had read get well. Sanity. Imagine the possibility even of such a state. Sanity beckoned like a grail, and I began to attend those meetings every day. But a part of me still believed for months that in doing so I was caving in. Surrender is never easy precisely because it feels like defeat. Laura suggested I go on welfare. “You’re unemployable right now” is how she put it.

  The welfare office on West Fourteenth Street is a curious place for someone brought up on Park Avenue. I sat hour after vacant hour on one of the numberless hard chairs that stretched row on row like bleachers against the wall of the main room. I did some thinking. On all sides, other women sat packed in with screaming babies, their arms outstretched in the usually vain attempt to retrieve restless, wandering toddlers. Here and there solitary men waited quietly. A few of these men might have been classified as fit enough to work, but for the most part they were a forlorn, sickly bunch in obvious need. I realized sitting there I would never know what it is like to be born poor. If I spent the rest of my life depriving myself, I would not be able to entirely stifle hope or even opportunity.

  After I finally succeeded in making the welfare roll, Laura suggested I move back in with my mother, with Maggie, one last time. “You can’t take care of yourself yet” was how she put it.

  Maggie and I made amends. She became a model mother, and I, an exemplary daughter. Every evening I would return from my AA meeting, and there would be a hot meal waiting. She did my laundry. She bought me a down pillow and a new pink comforter for the chaste single bed in my old pink-and-cherry-red bedroom.

  Then I went back to school. When I found out I could get a lot of loans and grants, I decided to go uptown after all and “hustle the intellectuals,” as the madam Corinne had suggested in another lifetime. I sat up front, hung on every word, and took copious notes. So it was, still too damaged and afraid to love the living, I wholly embraced the distant and the long dead. I began to understand that a relentless series of tests of survival in the street is not the only education worth having. The hot blast of the life I was running from did serve me well in one respect—it propelled me to study.

  Since then, I’ve stopped running. The past is here with me. I respect it, even fear it a little. Otherwise I tell myself I no longer need be afraid—either of me or the rest of this mystery.

  About the Author

  Janet Capron is a writer based in New York City. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Blue Money is her first book.