Now things had come full circle. It wasn’t just me I was protecting now, it was Sally and the Lowensteins. Under the gun and silencer there was the wedge Bert had used to jimmy the doors way back then. I saw there was a piece of paper under that.
There were three addresses listed on it. Two apartments were listed at the same general address.
The other had a place listed outside of town, almost out in the country. It was near the railroad tracks. For all the high roller talk those guys blew out, they were just like my father had been. Living on the margins, the rest of it going for booze and women. Big time in the lies, small time in their lives, as Bert once said.
I put the gun in my front pants pocket. The grip stuck out. I covered it with my shirt and stuck the silencer in the other pocket. I put the wedge in my back pocket, where I usually carried my wallet. I wouldn’t need the wallet that night.
When I walked the gun, silencer and wedge were heavy in my pockets.
The first address was not far from where I was, not far from the theater.
Outside, I started to turn down the walk, and then I stopped. A car was parked at the curb. I knew that car. A man got out.
It was Bert.
“I decided maybe I ought to come,” Bert said.
The apartments were easy and quick. Bert took the wedge from me and opened the doors. I went in and they were in bed together, naked, two guys. I had heard of such. I shot both of them in their sleep, Bert holding a flashlight on them so I could see it was them. They weren’t the two who had come to see me, but they were part of the five, Bert said. The scammers, the thugs. It was over so quick they never knew they were dead.
At the other apartment we got in easy as before, but no one was there.
That bothered me, but there was nothing for it.
We drove out to the place on the edge of town and parked in a grove of pecan trees that grew beside the road, got out and walked up to the house. There was a light on inside. There were no houses nearby, though there were a couple within earshot, dark and silent.
We went to the windows and took a peek. There was a guy sitting on the couch watching TV. We could hear him laughing at something. The voices on the TV had canned laughter with them. He wasn’t one of the two that had come to the theater, but Bert said he was one of the five.
Through an open doorway we saw the two who had threatened Mr. Lowenstein step into sight. They came out of the kitchen, each carrying a beer.
We stepped back from the window.
“Alright,” Bert said. “That’s all five, counting these three. They’re together. That’s all right. You don’t have to worry about rounding up the one that wasn’t at the apartment. He’s the one on the couch.”
“You’re sure?”
“I know who they are,” he said. “They been around awhile. It’s the ones I was told about, ones bothering the block. Until recent they just been guys walking around after other guys, now they’re trying to carve some territory. This is all of them.”
“What do we do?”
“Well, it’s easier to kill them in their sleep when they can’t fight back. But I got an old saying. You get what you get.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning there’s one more than I expected, and I got to go back to the car, kid.”
We went back to the car. Bert got a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun out of the trunk. The stock was sawed down too. He opened it and slipped in two shells from a box in the trunk, and then he grabbed a handful of shells and stuck them in his pocket.
“Hoping I wouldn’t need this. It goes boom real loud.”
We walked back.
We waited out there in the bushes by the house for an hour or so, not talking, just waiting. I thought back on how it had been with Dad, me pushing that gun against his head, his eyes looking along that barrel at me. It was pretty nice. And those guys earlier that night. Didn’t know them. Never talked to them, but considering they were all and of a same, I was alright with it. Maybe I was more like Dad than I wanted to be.
After a while, Bert said, “Look, kid. We can come back another time when they’re sleeping, maybe the other guy is back in his apartment then, splitting their numbers, or we can be bold and get it over with.”
“Let’s be bold.”
“There’s a door on either side of the living room, and if we go through the back, one of us coming out on either side, we can get them before they got time to think. Another thing, anyone else shows up, more of them there than we think, we got to finish things. Hear what I’m saying?”
I nodded.
“Don’t get us in our own crossfire,” Bert said. “That would be bad form, one of us shooting the other.”
Slipping around back, Bert took the wedge and stuck it in the door and pulled and the door made a little popping sound. Nothing too loud. Nothing you could hear over the blare of that TV set.
Inside he went right and I went left.
Only the guy on my side saw us before we cut loose. He was the tall guy that came to the theater. He had tried to pull the gun out from under his pants leg, strapped to his ankle. He should have found a better place to keep it. I fired the silenced .45. It made that big tuberculosis cough and part of his face flew off.
That’s when Bert cut down with the shotgun. One barrel, then the other. Both of those guys were dead. A lot of them was on the wall. The sound of that shotgun in the house was like two atomic bombs going off.
Bert glanced at the TV. “I hate that show, that canned laughter.”
I thought for a moment he was going to shoot the TV.
We got out of there quick. Going out the back way. The canned laugh roared on the TV.
The only thing that had touched the door was the wedge, so no fingerprints to worry about.
I expected to see lights on in the houses down the way, but nothing had changed. Two shotgun blasts in the night must not have been as loud as they seemed to me. Maybe no one cared.
Bert put the shotgun on the seat between us and we drove away. He wheeled farther out of town, on down to the river. He drove down there and we pulled under the bridge, got out, wiped down the guns just for good measure, then threw them in the river, along with the wedge and the silencer.
When Bert pulled up at the curb in front of my place, I started to get out. “Hold it, kid.”
I took my hand off the door lever.
“Listen here. You and me, we got a bond. You know that.”
“The closest,” I said.
“That’s right. But I’m going to tell you something tough, kid. Don’t come around no more. It’s not a good idea. I done for you what I could. More than I meant to. I got my past in that river now, and I want to leave it there. I love you, kid. I ain’t mad at you or nothing, but I can’t have you around. I can’t think on those kind of things anymore.”
“Sure, Bert.”
“Don’t take it hard, okay?”
“No,” I said.
“It ain’t personal, but it’s got be like that. And throw away that gun box. Good luck, kid.”
I nodded. I got out. Bert drove away.
Next night I walked Sally to her apartment, and every night after that because she was scared. Walked her home until the day before the thugs were supposed to come around.
Sally and the Lowensteins were worried, but Mr. Lowenstein had put aside the money for them. He couldn’t see a percentage on his side. Sally said she hated it, but was glad he was paying.
Mr. Lowenstein had read the papers, read about the murders in the apartment house and in the house outside of town, but he didn’t put it together with those guys we had talked to. No way he could have. He talked about it, though, said the world was getting scary. I agreed it was.
On the last night I walked Sally, she said, “I’m not going to come back to work tomorrow. After Mr. Lowenstein pays them, I’ll come back, so I won’t need you to walk me for awhile. I think after he pays them, I’m going to be all right on my own.”
&nb
sp; “Okay,” I said.
“I don’t want to be there when they come around, even if he is paying. You understand?”
“Understood.”
I stood there for a long moment with my hands in my pockets. I was glad she was safe.
“Sally, putting that ugly business aside, what do you think about you and me getting some coffee next week? You know, before work. We can even go to the movie on our day off, and for nothing.”
I tried to say that last part with a smile since we see the movies all the time. Me up in the booth, her over by the seats.
She smiled back at me, but it wasn’t much of smile. It was like she had borrowed it.
“That’s sweet,” she said. “But I got a boyfriend, and he might not like that.”
“Never seen you with anyone,” I said.
“We don’t get out much. He comes around, though.”
“Does he?”
“Yeah. And you know, I got the college stuff in the mornings and work midday and nights, then I got to study. My time is tight. We get the one day off, and there’s so much to do, and I got to spend some time with my boyfriend, you know?”
“Yeah. Okay. What’s this boyfriend’s name?”
She thought on that a little too long. “Randy.”
“Randy, huh? That’s his name?”
“Yes. Randy.”
“Like Randolph Scott. Like that movie we showed last week. The Tall T. You said you liked it.”
“Yeah. Like that. His name is Randolph, but everyone calls him Randy.”
“All right,” I said. “Well, good luck to you and Randy.”
“Thanks,” she said, like I had meant it. Like I thought there really was a Randy.
Sally never did come back to work after that. And of course the thugs didn’t show up. Mr. Lowenstein got to keep his hundred dollars. All along the block, those businesses, they got to keep their money too. Guess someone else like those fellows could come along, but what happened to those five, it’s pretty discouraging to that kind of business. They don’t know what kind of gang there is that owns this block. There was just me and Bert, but they don’t know that.
I like it pretty good up there in the projection booth. Sometimes I look out where Sally used to stand, but she isn’t there, of course. Mr. Lowenstein never hired another girl to take her place. He decided people would come anyway.
I saw Sally around town a couple of times, both times she was with a guy, and it wasn’t the same guy. I’m pretty sure neither of them were named Randy. If she saw me she didn’t let on. I wonder what she’d think to know what I did for her, for all of us.
What I do now is I show the movies and I go home. I used to walk by Bert’s place every now and then. I’m not sure why. I read in the papers that his wife Missy died. I wanted to send flowers, or something, but I didn’t.
Just the other day, I read Bert died.
I like my job. I like being the projectionist. I’m okay with it, being up there in the booth by myself, feeling mostly good about things like they are, but I won’t kid you, sometimes I get a little lonely.
GAIL LEVIN is Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, Women’s Studies, and Liberal Studies at The Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. The acknowledged authority on the American realist painter Edward Hopper, she is author of many books and articles on this artist, including the catalogue raisonné and Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (both 1995). She has edited two anthologies on Hopper, Silent Places: A Tribute to Edward Hopper, for which she collected existing fiction that referenced Hopper (2000), and The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper, for which she collected and introduced poetry about Hopper (1995). Gail Levin also worked as a curator, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where, from 1976 to 1984, she created landmark exhibitions on Edward Hopper and other topics. The present anthology is the first to publish fiction by Levin, who seconds Doris Lessing’s observation in The Golden Notebook: “I have to conclude that fiction is better at ‘the truth’ than a factual record.”
Levin has also published and exhibited her photography, collages, and other artworks. A show of her collage memoir, “On NOT Becoming An Artist,” was shown in May 2014 at the National Association of Women Artists in New York City and in 2015 in Santa Barbara, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. She is currently working on several books resulting from her Fulbright grants in Asia, exploring links between Asian and American culture.
City Roofs, 1932
29 × 36 in. (73.7 × 91.4 cm). Private collection
THE PREACHER COLLECTS
BY GAIL LEVIN
They call me “Reverend Sanborn.” I was born Arthayer R. Sanborn, Jr., in 1916, in Manchester, New Hampshire, son of Arthayer and Annie Quimby Sanborn. I graduated from Gordon College, a good Christian school in Wenham, Massachusetts, and then from Andover Newton Theological Seminary. I served American Baptist Churches in Woodville, Massachusetts, and in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, before I went to Nyack, New York, where I led the First Baptist Church, located on North Broadway. My job came with the security of a home, just next to the church, where I lived with my wife, Ruth, and our four children.
Before long I met at church our neighbor and long-time parishioner, Marion Louise Hopper. An aging spinster, she lived alone in her family’s old house next door to the church. She liked to boast that her younger brother, and only sibling, was a famous artist, named Edward. Edward Hopper, however, appeared to want as little as possible to do with Nyack and his sister.
In early April 1956, Marion became ill and called Edward for help. He and his wife, Jo, had to rush up to Nyack from Manhattan. The doctor diagnosed Marion as having gallstones and a dangerous blood condition. She was then seventy-five and living in an old house with a decrepit furnace and water pipes that could scarcely do their job. The house was depressingly dark since Marion scrimped by using only twenty-five-watt lightbulbs. Her cat was emaciated and sick.
Her brother, just two years younger than his sister, found the role of rescuer disturbing. He complained that his ears had begun to ring; he ran to New York to see his own doctor, leaving Jo to deal with Marion. Jo found her sister-in-law disagreeable, complaining to me, “She and I make each other ill, we disturb each other so much.” Nothing serious was wrong with Edward, so he had to come back to Nyack to help Jo, check on Marion, and make sure that her furnace was working as a late spring snowstorm struck. Jo, however, informed me that henceforth she expected Marion’s “noble” friends at church to prove their idea of worthiness. That is where I came into the picture.
Marion’s dependence on the church grew as she aged and became more feeble and reclusive. I saw to it myself that the church ladies’ auxiliary looked in on her as needed. But I also made a point of getting to know her myself. I had Marion give me the key to her house—just in case of an emergency. I got the idea to buy the poor shut-in a television set and soon she was hooked on watching soap operas. That got her off my back. While she was glued to the television set, I took it upon myself to explore the old house from top to bottom. I thought that I should check up on the condition of the roof and so one day went up into the attic.
Looking around, I was surprised to find not leaks, but stacks and stacks of early artwork by Edward Hopper: piles of drawings, oil paintings, and illustrations. After I returned several times and rummaged around, I found valuable historical documents including the letters young Edward had written to his family during the three trips he made to Europe just after completing art school. The more I learned the more I became concerned about what would happen to all these treasures after Marion’s death. Indeed, I could not get their fate off my mind. Marion’s only heirs were her brother and sister-in-law, and they were just a few years younger than Marion. None of them had produced any children, who could look after their estate.
I began to reflect that to save these artworks from oblivion could not only be ju
stified, but that the savior would be a hero. So I stepped up to prevent harm from coming to Hopper’s artworks. I knew that vagrants might occupy an abandoned house. An empty house could be set on fire. The antique furniture and precious artworks could be stolen, damaged, or destroyed. Marion certainly would not give me permission to remove these artworks. They belonged to Edward. But he had all but abandoned them years ago, moving to New York. I alone cared for these artworks more than anyone else in the world. I saw their value. I went to the library and read about Edward Hopper. I studied and made myself an expert. I researched the Hopper family’s genealogy, dating back to its arrival in 17th-century New Amsterdam.
As time went on, I found ways to make myself useful to Edward and Jo Hopper. For them, coming to Nyack from Manhattan was an unwelcome chore. It was nearly impossible during the half of the year that they spent living in South Truro on the far end of Cape Cod. When the old couple returned to New York City, late each October, they drove via Nyack, where Edward left their car at the family home. Only at this time and when they came to retrieve the car in the spring did they plan to see Marion. They were not close to her. She remained out of sight and forgotten.
Marion had little understanding of her brother’s life in New York. When he had a retrospective show at the Whitney Museum in 1964, she asked to attend the opening party and to bring her friend Beatrice and me. I was eager to go. But Edward, then eighty-two, could not be bothered by his sister’s request. He wrote to her: “This is the one time in the year when I can meet museum directors, critics and collectors of importance and I shall have to devote all my time to them (and will have no time for you, Dr. Sanborn and Beatrice.)” He was most ungrateful.
Still less did Edward have time to worry about the abandoned artworks in the attic of his boyhood home. At first, I just rescued a few of the smaller drawings and paintings, taking them home to study. I especially loved a drawing he had done of that same attic and some early self-portraits that he had painted in oil. Marion never even noticed. In the beginning, I had no idea of the monetary value of Hopper’s art. In fact, the works of Hopper’s early years, made long before he became famous, had never been on the market. At the time he made these things, he could not sell anything, since no one wanted his art.
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