Walter kept them at bay, and the project was brought in under cost. It was hailed as a model for other low-rent, high-density developments badly needed in many of the decaying older cities on the East Coast.
Walter was given a bigger office and a staff of five, and in short order his responsibilities grew. First there was the Douglass Project, named after ex-slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. Two years later, it was the Harrison Project in the Third Ward, honoring Negro actor Richard Berry Harrison.
From then on, it was bigger things, including bridges. When the war broke out, Walter Spratlin, vice president, became Army Major Walter Spratlin, Corps of Engineers. Air fields, training camps, and new naval facilities were needed, and he was put to work immediately. He followed the war across the Pacific, and with Japan’s surrender, Okinawa became American booty. It had to be rebuilt in order to support the huge military complex the United States planned to build there. After it was completed, he’d be on his way home.
Walter would be coming home to a neighborhood that would bear little resemblance to the one he left behind. Margaret never mentioned it in her letters to Walter that an alien world was closing in around Court Place. Nor did she mention that she had made inquiries on how best to unload a Victorian relic that had been the Covington home for three generations. There was no guilt when she decided that the time was ripe to get rid of it.
Margaret had done her homework. She found three large houses near the Seton Hall College campus in South Orange that would be suitable. With Sylvia in her corner, she was certain Walter would approve.
It pained Margaret that she didn’t photograph well. Besides her wedding portrait with Walter, there were few photos of her around the house. Instead there were two large paintings, one in a dominant position at the end of the entrance hall, and the other over the fireplace in the living room.
Each was a gift, actually a payment of sorts, from an artist friend of the family who had been down on his luck during the Depression, and had asked Margaret to model for two of his commercial art commissions.
She got to keep the originals.
Visitors entering the Spratlin home were treated to a brown-haired, bare-shouldered beauty in a satin burgundy nightgown who gazed from her bedroom window at a rolling green landscape. The soap people liked it so well, they used it to kick-off a three month nationwide magazine advertising assault for their new product, LUSH.
Above the living room fireplace was the second portrait of a disheveled beautiful woman sitting up in her rumpled bed. Snowflakes could be seen falling outside the bedroom window. This was the image that the Radiance Corporation hoped would entice well-heeled prospects to purchase their heating system.
Walter and Margaret got a big kick when friends began mailing them the magazine ads. Margaret kept two of them under the glass top of her dressing room table. They were the first things to catch Commander Jacob Feinberg’s eye after he and Margaret completed their first sexual bout. They agreed it was a draw, with each of them giving and taking as much as the other. To her surprise, there was no remorse or shame, only a sense of well-earned satisfaction. After all, it had been more than a year since Walter had left for the Pacific.
Billy could hear the soft sound of his mother’s bedroom slippers as she glided toward him across the kitchen floor. He braced himself for what he knew was coming. His mother reached the sink just as he was turning off the water and reaching for a towel.
He did not want his mother’s attention.
Billy had known about the Navy commander and his Pontiac staff car for some time. His initial reaction to the first night, the night he couldn’t force himself up the stairs to see for sure, was self-pity.
He had returned to his room and sobbed into the early morning hours. He wished his grandmother had been there to hold him.
His pity gave way to rage. He thought of killing them both. He would then write to his father. Tell him that everything was okay. That they could begin fresh—father, son, and grandmother.
Why was his mother doing it? This question tortured him for weeks. It was his grandmother who flushed out the answer, the morning after she came home unexpected from New York and surprised the lovers in bed.
That Saturday, Sylvia and Eugenie Kerrigan, a Bryn Mawr classmate and her best friend, had gone to New York for the opening of an off-Broadway comedy. The show was feeble and they left after the first act. Departing as they had arrived in the Kerrigan chauffeur-driven Packard, they retraced their route under the Hudson River, over the Pulaski Skyway, and through the Passaic River stench to Newark.
“Let me out here; my legs are stiff from all that sitting and I need to stretch them out a bit,” Sylvia said as the Packard slowed to a halt at the big wrought-iron Court Place entrance. “Let’s hope we do better next time. Give William my best.” With a brief hug and a blown kiss, she stepped onto the street. She was home almost four hours earlier than usual.
Sylvia’s pace, as always, was brisk as she walked through the gate to her home at the far end of the privileged sanctuary. She barely noticed the gray Pontiac with the military plates parked near the entrance. Sylvia wore a black felt Lilly Daché hat, eye-catching but discreet, perfect for the theater. Her black kid-leather clutch bag, midheel pumps, and peacock blue silk dress were from Bergdorf’s. The dress was unadorned; a subtle gold necklace and finely crafted Gruen wristwatch completed the ensemble. As she neared her home, she looked forward to having a drink to ease her disappointment.
Margaret would still be awake, if not downstairs in the library then upstairs in her room listening to one of those Saturday-night radio mysteries she loved, Sylvia thought. Once inside, Sylvia found the downstairs dark and empty. Billy, of course, would be sleeping in his room above the garages. She wanted to get into a gown and relax, and as she climbed the stairs to her bedroom she decided to look in on Margaret, quietly opened her bedroom door, and stepped inside.
In the bed, her daughter-in-law’s sex-flushed face deepened to crimson. The man who was mounting her turned and stared over his left shoulder. Both were silent, not wanting to prompt any words from the enraged face of the intruder. It took less than three seconds for Sylvia to focus and frame a mental snapshot, develop and enlarge it, and then paste it into the family album.
Not a word had been spoken. Sylvia backed into the hall quietly, closed the door, and with her hand on the doorknob, eased the latch into its anchor in the doorjamb. There was not so much as a click. Since her preschool days with her nanny, Sylvia learned that a lady never raises her voice in anger or cries in pain. This night she passed both tests.
“I’m bored, Sylvia,” Margaret said the next morning. The words hissed across the kitchen table. Billy was in the hall. No one knew he was there.
“There’s nothing metaphysical about it. No great mystery. I’ve just been in a mood for a good fuck and I’ve been getting it.”
“Shut your filthy mouth!” Sylvia’s soft, measured voice dripped with venom. “My son, your husband. Let’s think about him. What happens when he gets back?”
Billy did not want to hear any more. He ran out of the house and picked up speed after turning on High Street, not stopping until he reached St. Mark’s.
That was two weeks ago. His confusion got worse with every passing day. So what do I do now, he thought as he finished drying his hands. He could feel his mother’s warm breath on his neck as her arms reached around his chest.
Margaret fondly enveloped Billy with her eyes. He was already over five feet tall, just a few inches shorter than she. Her son had his father written all over him—the square, well-formed face with its light skin and freckles, and the thick reddish-brown hair.
“You must be starving. How about a raid on the icebox? A little talk over some cake and milk, how about it?”
“Sure. I am kinda hungry.”
Billy went through three glasses of milk, two pieces of layer cake, an apple, and three slices of ham. His mother had some tea. They chatted abou
t school, the new priest, and his friends. Nothing important. Just normal stuff.
During their talk, Billy had completely forgotten what he had come to hate in his mother. Perhaps, without him knowing it, he had even come to understand her a little.
When it was over, Billy and his mother linked arms as they so often did and strode in perfect step until they reached the stairs. Margaret kissed Billy on the forehead and went up to her bedroom, Billy headed to his room—his own private carriage house, his grandmother called it.
In a hurry to get the paint off his hands, Billy had rushed to the kitchen without turning off the garage lights. He checked his father’s workshop to see if everything was in order, then walked over to his Schwinn racer propped on its kickstand in the rear of the garage. He felt the tires. They were soft from disuse. He wondered how long it would be before his mother said it was okay for him to start pedaling again. After all, it wasn’t his fault that the other kids couldn’t afford bikes. He couldn’t imagine how rapidly things could change, nor did he know that bikes were the inducement that sucked Richie and Joey into the frontline of a menacing mob war. He turned off the light and headed up the stairs to his bedroom.
Hensley Parker Bancroft was still pissed off by the news that he would have to start earning his money as the Clarion Vice President for Circulation. He had just given his early autumn pep talk to Jim McDuffie and dozens of other circulation managers in the paper’s ninth floor conference room. The holidays were coming up and increased circulation meant higher ad rates.
The Bancrofts and the family of Clarion publisher, Herbert Bix, went back a long way. Bix and Bancroft were roommates at Princeton, crewed together during regattas on the Delaware, were groomsmen at each other’s weddings, and compared honeymoon snapshots from France and Italy.
Bancroft believed that he had nailed down an important slot on the Clarion. His buddy Herb tried his damnedest to accommodate him, but it turned out that the tall, blond, blue-eyed Bancroft was, to put it simply, dumb. The coffee break guffaws increased as he bounced from the editorial pages to the city desk, down to the police beat, and finally the obituaries, failing at all of it.
Given the newly minted title of Vice President for Circulation, Bancroft oversaw a department that ran itself. He gave little thought to Goldman’s Beacon, a morning rag that patronized the great unwashed. That was until yesterday when he sat in with the top brass and learned that David Goldman had the Clarion in his sights.
“The audacity of that sheeny son of a bitch,” Bix said in a rare burst of temper as he arranged and rearranged several four-by-six index cards on the conference table.
“Who the hell does he think he’s fucking with, the Bayonne Record, the New Rochelle Gazette. It’s all right here gentlemen,” he said as he tapped the index cards he had shuffled into a neat stack in front of him. “Goldman’s renting store front offices in and around our circulation strong points.”
“And that’s not all,” the livid publisher sputtered. “George, take over, fill everyone in.”
George Richards wasn’t use to all this attention. A third generation printer, he oversaw a pressroom operation that pumped out four editions a day, an award winning Sunday magazine, and special editions when needed. The Clarion was distributed throughout the state and read with interest in New York and as far as Washington. He was the only man at the table without a tie and jacket, and who actually worked with his hands.
“Well, to start, there’s no doubt Goldman’s got big plans for the Beacon,” the wiry, gray haired Richards said. “We’ve seen his cutthroat tactics before. This time it’s the Long Island Spectator. He’s closed it down despite the fact that its press, a pre-war Koenig & Bauer, had been completely renovated three years earlier. It’s already loaded on freight cars and on its way here.”
“Where did you hear that?” City Editor Malcolm Brewster asked.
“From the horse’s mouth,” Richards said. “The Spectator’s press boss is an old friend. His last paycheck was for chaining down that beautiful press on an Erie flatbed. He’s looking for a job.”
“Where’s that bastard Goldman going to plant it? There’s no room in that squalid piece-of-shit operation of his,” Bancroft said.
“He’s already knocked out part of the back wall,” Richards said, “and to make more room moved circulation into a building he bought next door.”
“This is fucking serious,” Bix said. “And there’s not much we can do about it. Any ideas?”
“Short of hiring a hit man?” legal counsel Wilford Copley said, and what for him passed as humor. “It’s no longer a piss-ant David against Goliath. Let’s keep in mind the Beacon’s non-union, and we’ve got two big contracts coming up. Timing couldn’t be worse.”
“So what the hell do we do?” Bancroft figured that asking rather than suggesting was the safe way to go.
“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” the publisher said as he resumed tapping his index cards on the table and looked squarely at his circulation manager. “Hensley, I’ve decided you’ll be our point man.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Your minions are on the front line. Get to know them, most of all, get to know what they know. That means getting out in the field, especially to our gold-chip bureaus here in the city. They’re most likely where Goldman will have his circulation thugs moving in first.”
“That’s a big order, I’ll have to give some thought to where I start.”
“No need to worry about that,” the publisher said. “I’ve checked the map and see that two of your bureaus are in the Third Ward, and four of them are on the fringes. Visit the fringes first, before moving into the Ward.”
The meeting lasted another hour, during which it became increasingly clear to Bix that everyone in the room was clueless. Goldman earned his reputation by going for the jugular. The publisher searched the faces around the table and saw there was not a single cutthroat in the bunch.
“Well, that’s it for now,” Bix soft-pedaled the urgency he was feeling. “We all know that Goldman has bitten off more than he can chew. We’ll be ready. Bancroft, I’m sure we won’t be seeing much of you for a while. I expect to hear from you regularly.”
To be told that he would be on the front line of a circulation war was more than Bancroft had ever imagined. His sour stomach had kept him awake all night.
“Hensley, what in the world is bothering you?” Maude Fahey Bancroft said as she raised her head from her pillow and stared down at her wide awake husband. “You’ve been keeping me awake with all your tossing and turning, even heard some groaning. It’s not like you.”
“I’ve got something to tell you.” Bancroft’s eyes twitched as he spoke without turning his head. It was as though he were addressing an unseen audience in the dark recesses of their large bedroom. “Starting this week you’ll be driving my Morgan, and I’ll be taking the Packard.”
“Like hell I will. You know how I hate that toy of yours.”
“Can’t be helped. Got the word only yesterday from Herb himself that I’ll be inspecting all my circulation offices, and reporting in directly to him.”
“You’ve never had to do that before. And explain to me why you can’t take the Morgan?”
Maude fluffed her two pillows, propped them against the headboard, and reached over to turn on the lamp on her nightstand. She picked up a box of Benson & Hedges and a Ronson lighter, handing the Ronson to her husband as she closely studied the face of the weak man beside her. She had learned early that the charmer who’d swept her off her feet eight years earlier was an empty suit, and that his job at the Clarion was no more than a sinecure. Against her wishes, Bancroft had used a sizeable chunk of the cash wedding gift from her father to acquire the powerful two-seat sports car during their honeymoon in Europe.
“Where I have to go, it would be crazy for me to be driving a beautiful machine like the Morgan,” Bancroft said as he lit his wife’s cigarette, and took one out of the box for himself. “So it
’s the Packard for me, the Morgan for you. Can’t say for how long.”
“I’ll bear it alright, but I’ll be god damned if I’ll be grinning.”
They spent the remainder of the early morning hours awake, but in silence broken only when Katie, their black cook and housekeeper, brought in their coffee tray. Two hours later, his stomach began to churn when he got behind the wheel of his wife’s Packard and headed downtown for the annual meeting with his district managers to kick-off the pre-holiday circulation campaign.
This morning he had to convey a sense of enthusiasm to a rough bunch of streetwise strangers with whom he could hardly be expected to identify. After droning on for almost thirty minutes, he concluded by throwing out the morsel, “Who knows, there might even be a little something extra in your pay envelope.”
“The same old bullshit,” Jim McDuffie said as he crammed into the elevator that would take him and his cohorts down to Market Street and a world that Bancroft could hardly imagine.
“Call me crazy, but once, just once I’d like to see that fancy son of a bitch show up some Saturday and help stuff the Sunday paper,” Bud Morsby, who ran twenty-two carriers in West Newark, chimed in.
“What a fucking joke that guy is,” McDuffie said.
Once down on Market, McDuffie and the others who had squeezed into the elevator with him headed back to their cars and the real world.
Al Sweeney, Tommy Spencer and Gino Sharkey had been waiting for McDuffie for almost half an hour when he pulled his green, four-door Chevy sedan to the curb in front of his Avon Avenue office. The three seventeen year old carriers were muscular and mean, the backbone of McDuffie’s operation. They had keys to the office, and were lounging lazily on a beat-up brown couch when he walked through the door. The steady rain and dark clouds lent to the gloomy atmosphere.
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