“Nah. These men were all members of St. Anne’s Church, forty years ago, when Father Hogarth was alive. You know St. Anne’s Parish?”
“No,” I admitted.
“On Forty-fourth Street. It was in a movie once. They used to call it the longshoremen’s church. But that was when the docks were a place to work. That was a long time ago.”
He handed the cards back to me, shrugging. He had no idea why Wild Bill would make and keep such a list. Unhappily, neither did I.
“Did my grandfather have any close friends?” I asked.
“Just one,” Mr. Reardon replied, “if you can call a rummy a friend. His name is Coop. You’ll find him at the Emerald Bar, on Ninth. He cleans up there. And for all anybody knows, he lives there.”
The Emerald was a long, narrow place sandwiched between a thrift shop and a bodega. A single small glass window looked out onto Ninth Avenue.
At the bar sat eight old white men drinking Bud from long necked bottles in synchronized swigs. I watched them for quite a while, waiting for one of them to mess up. But nobody did.
There was a jukebox at the rear of the place. Tony Bennett was singing something, Stranger in Paradise, my pop had once had the sheet music for. I distinctly remember seeing it in the flip-open piano bench.
At the end of the long bar the room turned left, into an L. There at one of two tables was another old man, reading the News in the dim light. He was the only black man in the bar. I assumed this was Coop.
Not one of the drinkers turned around as I walked past. Only the bartender glanced my way, probably deciding whether I looked like a genuinely distressed down and outer who needed to use the ladies room or a junkie looking for a place to fix.
“Mr. Cooper?”
He looked up from the paper but didn’t speak.
“Mr. Cooper, I was related to Heywood Tuttle. I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes and answer some questions about him. Someone told me you were his friend.”
I pulled out a chair and sat down across from him, even though he had yet to speak a word to me.
“Mr. Cooper, I said—”
“Don’t know no Heywood Tuttle.”
“Oh. Well, his friends called him Wild Bill.”
“Then why didn’t you say Wild Bill?”
“Sorry. I’m saying it now. You were a friend of Wild Bill’s?”
“Bill’s dead.”
“I know.”
“He dropped dead, on the street. Just fast as that. Stroke, they said. On his way here, I reckon. Said he just fell down dead. Just like that. It just go to show you, when you think you on top of the world, that bastard’ll lay in wait for you, throw a big ole brick down from the roof on you. Fore you know it, you dead.”
“You mean someone threw a brick at Wild Bill?”
“No, girl. I mean God. I’m just usin’ ah example.”
“Listen, Mr. Cooper, did you know Wild Bill long?”
In answer, he let go of the newspaper and held up his two hands, at a great distance from one another, presumably to mean the friendship had stretched over many a year.
“Did Wild Bill ever mention a Rhode Island Red?” I asked.
“A red what? … Oh, yeah. He mention it.”
“Can you tell me what he said?”
Coop leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
I repeated my request, but he remained as he was, eyes closed.
At length, it occurred to me what he was doing. Waiting for me to offer to buy him a drink. I got up and went to the bar. The bartender didn’t wait for me to order. He placed a bottle of Amstel Light on the bar. Next to it he placed a glass and filled it halfway up with rotgut wine from a gallon jug. I paid for the drinks and brought them back to Coop.
He sipped daintily at the wine but finished the beer in practically a single gulp. Then he smiled and gestured for me to come closer. I moved right next to him.
He put his mouth against my ear and screeched: “Burrk! burrk! burrk!”—an earsplitting rendition of barnyard fowl. Then he added, “Girl, you think Bill ain’t had nothing better to talk about than chicken.”
I controlled my anger and wiped at my ear.
Then I pulled out the index cards and spread them over the table.
“Did he ever talk to you about these men?” I asked.
He drank more wine, surveying the names, shaking his head.
I stood up and started to leave.
“You know,” he said slyly, “you look like Bill about as much as old Eleanor Roosevelt do. Least the police and the white man come around here ain’t tried to lie and say they related to Wild Bill. Least they don’t try to play me for a fool.”
I sat down quickly. “I didn’t mean to play you for a fool, either,” I said. “The police have talked to you—a black cop? Big and mean looking. And a white man who wasn’t with the police?”
“That’s right.”
“When? When did this white man ask you about Bill?”
“About a week before Bill die, maybe less.”
“Do you know what his name is? Did he give you his address or his phone number?”
“He give me some of that good brandy is what he give me. And tell me there’s a hundred dollars in it if I can tell him where to find Wild Bill.”
“And did you?”
“No. Couple of weeks before Bill die ain’t nobody much see him. He was acting mighty peculiar. Might as well have been a shadow for all the time he spent around here. And then, next thing we hear, he dead.”
“What did he look like?”
“You don’t know what Bill even look like?”
“Not him, not Wild Bill,” I said, almost out of patience. “The white man!” I signaled the bartender to fix Coop up again.
So Henry Valokus—and, it sounded like, Leman Sweet—had been looking for Wild Bill a week or less before he died. Valokus and Wild Bill had more than Providence in common. That was for sure. But who really had been hunting who? And which one knew the secret of Rhode Island Red?
I headed north and west, toward St. Anne’s Church.
It was easy to find: half the block had been razed. The gray stone church, its steeple rising high and alone, stood sad watch over the street, brooding and yet somehow hopeful. Next to the church was the decrepit building, now all boarded up, that had once been the school.
The youngish, flaxen-haired Finn who turned out to be the current priest at St. Anne’s couldn’t have been nicer to me. But he could be of very little help.
He took the index cards from my hand and went through them slowly, asking me at one point if I was planning to write a parish history.
“Why do you ask that?” I replied.
“Well, some of these names sound vaguely familiar. But it’s probably from the records I’ve been going over lately. Probably their children went to school here, when we had a school, that is. But this generation is all gone.”
The father had no recollection of ever seeing a man who fitted Wild Bill’s description either. And no, there had been no gentleman, about so high, with a European accent, inquiring about old parishioners lately.
Everybody in this scenario was mighty interested in ships, in the docks of New York, way back when. That strange roster of longshoremen intersected with a talented jazz trumpeter who ended up a desperate drunk, a mobster who had informed on and then become a laughing stock to his confederates and a crooked undercover policeman. But I had no idea why.
I’d been sitting on the church steps for a good twenty minutes, weary and craving a cigarette, when I noticed the white van across the street. At the wheel was the woman who’d held the gun to my head.
I stood suddenly and beat it back into the doorway of the church. But that prompted no movement from the van. They continued to sit there.
How long, I wondered, had they been following me. All day? And if they were going to try to snatch me again, what were they waiting for? Clearly, if they’d wanted to kill me they could have done so at any time du
ring the last twenty minutes. But they’d chosen to do nothing. Why?
We had a real stand-off going. I wasn’t budging from the doorway. And they weren’t budging from the curb.
And then, without ceremony, they left. Just drove away.
I spotted the van again near the supermarket. The folks inside never said a word and never made a move toward me.
I walked into D’Agostino and bought three prime lamb chops, some fresh spinach, and a head of garlic. I went home and put the groceries on the kitchen table. But the moment I opened the bag I realized that I didn’t want to eat. I just wanted to sleep. I walked out of the kitchen and collapsed on the divan.
CHAPTER 12
Monk’s dream
Paris.
I am down in the Metro. The Les Halles stop. I am blowing my heart out. I never in my life ever sounded so grand.
There is not another soul around. Yet my high white silk hat is overflowing with gold coins.
Suddenly the cops show. They are all ferocious Senegalese wearing impenetrable aviator shades. They’ve come to get me, take me away. And they aren’t being gentle about it.
I’m thrown into the back of a van, screaming, protesting my innocence—of whatever the charge may be.
The handcuffs go around my wrists.
You stole those coins! one of the flics shouts to me in his barking dog French. And he upends my hat and pours all the money into my lap.
I look down at the coins. Embossed on each one is the head of a fierce looking rooster.
Suddenly all the coins begin to bleed profusely. Within seconds, I have a lap full of warm, sticky blood.
And then the telephone rings!
I had never been so happy to be roused from sleep.
I picked up the ringing phone and heard “Hey, what are you wearing?”
“Ah, come on, Walter. You’re making obscene phone calls now?”
He laughed heartily. “No. But I am planning to be obscene with you in person. Which I hope is gonna be in a few minutes.”
“Are you coming up?”
“Not exactly. I want you to come down. You’re hungry, aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. There’s a hip place on First and First. The steaks are great and this Creole brother behind the bar’s got a martini with your name on it. Get on down here. And I want you to wear something nice.”
Martini? What was I—a businessman? “Walter, are you sober?”
“Not completely. I just feel good.”
“Did something happen at work?”
“Just get dressed and get here, Nan. Take a cab. And don’t wear no overalls, okay?”
So I grabbed a taxi, driven by, thankfully, a brother who was downright eager to get me in his backseat. He beat out two other cabbies who were heading toward me like ICBMs. We were at First Street—in hippie renewal territory—in no time.
Ooo la la. My lucky night. The French hostess in the leopardskin leotard was glad to see me too. Maybe management would be willing to pay Walter and me a few bucks a night to lend a little dark ambience to the joint.
“Hey, baby.” Walter took me in his arms and kissed me, reluctant to let me go, it seemed.
I finally broke from his embrace and took a seat next to him at the bar.
“Walter …”
He kissed me again, lightly, on the ear.
I had once accused him of behaving like a jealous housewife, but now it occurred to me that he was doing the classic guilty husband routine—overplaying the love bit because an infidelity was weighing on his conscience. If he pulled a box of chocolates out of his briefcase, I was going to deck him.
The bartender, Creole or not, was seriously cute. I’d take a ’tini from his tapered brown hands any day of the week. He smiled at us and left a little dish of olives next to my glass.
“Mind if we eat at the bar?” Walter asked. “It’s private up here.”
I looked past his shoulder into the hopping main room. A wave of high pitched conversation and laughter floated toward us.
“No problem,” I said.
“You look good, sweetheart.”
“Thank you, Walter. But what’s your story? You’re a little overstimulated, aren’t you?”
He chuckled. “I suppose you’re right. I just—I came to some decisions today, that’s all.”
“What decisions?”
“Number one, I’m quitting the job. Real soon. Another guy at the office—Morantz—Morantz and me, we’re starting our own company.”
“Well, congratulations … I guess. But isn’t that going to be a pretty big deal? I mean, money and offices and staff and all that stuff.”
“It’s gonna be covered. We’ve got an appointment tomorrow in Philadelphia. We sign up this client and we got it made. Snatching him right out from under the nose of the firm. And we are going to snatch him. Trust me.”
I raised my glass, and my eyebrows, in a wordless toast to him. “And that’s why I had to put on a dress?”
“No …”
“Walter, you’re acting dopey, you know that?”
“Nan, let me ask you something.”
“Yeah.”
“How many times we split and come back together?”
I looked into his eyes. Maybe I was about to be dumped. But that’s not what the eyes were saying.
“Too many to count,” I said. “Five—maybe six.”
“Gets kind of old, don’t it? I mean, we must belong together or something, or we wouldn’t keep doing it. Right?”
I didn’t know how to answer that.
“Why’d I have to put a dress on, Walter?” I asked softly.
“Because I didn’t want to ask you to marry me while you were wearing overalls.”
Lord!
“Can I have another drink, Walter?”
“So what do you think about it?” he said as he signalled the bartender.
“Shit, man. I don’t know. What do you want to get married for?”
Not the world’s most gracious response to a proposal, is it? I was sorry the minute the words came out of my mouth. But he went on, undaunted.
“I’m tired of fucking around, Nan. I want us to have a house. I want us to have kids. It’s just … time.”
Kids? Kids? I’d never told Walter my thoughts, fears, about having children. I guess, like a lot of other women, or at least I assumed there were many others like me, having children had never been a desire of mine, though I’d always assumed that if I were to hook up with a man who really wanted them, I’d be able to do my part.
Truth was, I was sure I wouldn’t make much of a mom. And I’d always counted myself lucky for having a mother who was so unlike me. I’m self involved, mercurial, emotionally unstable, don’t get any gold stars for patience, something of a loner, apt to take off for ports unknown at a moment’s notice, if that, and really don’t appreciate people I can’t reason with. In short, a child’s nightmare. Poor thing would be logging hours on the school counselor’s couch before it turned seven, all because of me. But if this theoretical man insisted on babies, at least I could tell him what the deal was going in. Hell, I was better about it than Aubrey. She hated children—with a pure, unalloyed hatred—and would say so to just about anybody.
But I said none of that to Walter. Instead, I took his hand and held it for a long moment.
“Here’s what we do,” he said eagerly. “I’m renting a car in the morning. Driving to Philly for the meeting. You catch the train at Penn Station and wait for me at Thirtieth Street Station. I’ll pick you up at twelve. We drive up to Bucks County. I know this inn you’re gonna love. Matter fact, we might spend a few days there once we get married. Anyway, we drive up there, just you and me, have lunch, take it easy, stay the night, just talk about things. Doesn’t it sound good?”
Yes, it did. Looked at as nothing more than a little respite from the city, or as a romantic getaway during which we’d plan our wedding (ha ha), it did sound good.
W
ild Bill was dead. Henry Valokus had vanished, probably for good. And the trail of Rhode Island Red was dead cold. I’d been played for a fool, pushed around, threatened, assaulted, fucked and abandoned. And so what was the big issue in my life? Getting married. To quote Fats Waller, “One never knows, do one?”
Walter’s proposal had genuinely knocked me on my ass. I had never really known whether I loved him. And I suppose I had never believed he loved me.
So why did we keep coming back together? He’d asked a good question.
I tried to visualize myself dusting the living room of some two-bedroomer upstate. Waiting by the garden gate for the little one to come home from school.
Not.
I tried to be a little more realistic: Walt’s at work, I’m still in my nightgown at three in the afternoon, listening to Monk records while the pork roast defrosts, maybe noodling a little on the sax or with some spiral bound notebook full of over-ripe verse.
Would Walter want to go to the Loire and sample wines on our vacation? No. We’d wind up in some pricey time share in Jamaica.
“So you gonna marry me or what, girl?” He kissed me again.
I was glad Mom couldn’t see me now. She’d have a heart attack from the suspense. I kind of smiled at the image—not the image of her clawing at her chest but the one of her rising off her barstool with the girl, are you crazy? look on her face.
“Walter, Walter, Walter,” I said, feeling at one and the same time aroused and sad. “I’ll tell you what. I’m not going to marry you—tomorrow—but I am going on that honeymoon. And we can talk about it, as you said.”
Yeah, “talk” was right. There was an awful lot I hadn’t told my little fiancé.
I took the nine-thirty to Philadelphia the next morning. I’d brought four paperbacks along to read on the 90-minute run: a novel by an expatriate American writer with whom I’d spent about ten minutes in bed the last time I saw Paris; a couple of poetry anthologies; and the same unread Gertrude Stein volume I’d been toting on and off trains for most of my life. I didn’t crack one of those books. I was much too distracted.
I saw a sign just outside Trenton that seemed to tap on some long buried memory. TRENTON MAKES/THE WORLD TAKES, it read. It made me wonder if perhaps my parents had taken me to Philly when I was a kid. Where could we have been going? Probably someplace exciting, like an interstate spelling bee.
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