The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel

by Dorothy Uhnak

  The Ryer Avenue Story

  A Novel

  Dorothy Uhnak

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  A Biography of Dorothy Uhnak

  In memory of my mother:

  Josephine O’Brien Goldstein. She was short, funny, and the smartest lady I’ve ever known.

  For my father:

  J. P. (Philip) Goldstein, who taught me, by example, the dignity and honor of hard work.

  For friends gone too soon:

  Joan “O’Rourke” Alpert

  Harold Smith

  Tom Victor

  And friends who cheer me on:

  Nora Kelly-Polinsky, who has taught generations of children to love reading and writing. Dr. Irv and Blossom Handelsman Kathie and Darren McGavin

  Bob Markell

  Hillary Handelsman

  Dr. Dick Ward, who has shown me other worlds.

  Doug Froeb, my designated “favorite uncle.”

  The Sunday Afternoon Irregulars—specially Janet Culbertson

  Special thanks for help and encouragement to Hollis Alpert

  Sam Vaughn

  Len Leavitt

  And, as always, to Tony and Tracy, my anchors, my lifelines.

  PROLOGUE

  ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28, 1935, AT ABOUT 10:35 P.M., Walter Stachiew was murdered. His body, lying in the icy gutter where it had fallen on the dark winding hill along 181st Street between Valentine and Webster avenues in the Bronx, was a mess.

  There were thick gouts of blood around his head, which had been battered with his own heavy coal shovel, with which he had sought to raise whiskey money by shoveling snow. Walter Stachiew was not a practical or serious man. He carried his inappropriate shovel more to show his good intentions than to perform a service.

  When a police car heading up the hill toward the Forty-sixth Precinct came along, the patrolman saw Stanley Paycek whacking away at Stachiew, the shovel in both of his hands.

  It later developed that the two men had spent some time together—as they generally did when one or the other had a couple of dollars, or any amount of loose change—in the neighborhood serious drinkers’ bar. It was a place without a name, where you came not for companionship or sympathy or warmth but for the simple purpose of getting drunk. You could do this fast and cheap. No one stopped the headlong rush into oblivion as long as the money held out. When you were out of coin, you were out on the street. This was a simple and effective rule to which no one objected because what was the point? The owner was a huge man who made strange noises rather than speaking in words. He was understood completely. He made and enforced the rules. It was a desperation place and only the most desperate men frequented it.

  The argument between the two lifelong friends that night was the usual incomprehensible bickering of two drunks who knew too much about each other and about the emptiness of life. It was bitter and loud and filled with threats. It was the boastful nonsense of two ineffectual men who lived their lives as bullies toward the weak, and of toadies toward those they perceived as having power over them.

  All that was remembered was that Walter Stachiew left the bar first, after having jammed the handle of his shovel into Stanley Paycek’s throat. Paycek, taken by surprise, couldn’t catch his breath for a moment, but when he did, he bellowed in a clear and deadly voice: I’m gonna kill that bastard for this. I’m gonna bash his skull in for him with his own goddamn shovel.

  The police investigating the case were not surprised that this information was passed on to them. The owner of the bar, articulate when he had to be, didn’t want any trouble with the cops. He’d made it through Prohibition, he didn’t need trouble now. And he had no loyalty whatsoever to the scum who drank in his establishment. They knew it and he knew it: you don’t make no trouble for me.

  Besides, the police were told by a somewhat dazed Paycek, still holding the death weapon as he stared at the corpse, “There. I done like I tole him I would do.”

  The trial was for murder in the first degree, since it was perceived as a calculated, premeditated crime. The story of this Christmastime killing dominated the Bronx Home News for a period of time. The News and the Mirror and the afternoon papers ran with it, then dropped it until the trial.

  Stanley Paycek was convicted, without ever testifying, because he never was exactly sure of anything beyond the fact that he probably did bash in Walter’s skull, so what else could he say? Because of his record as a man of violence, a drunkard, a brawler, a wife and child beater and now, finally, a murderer, the judge decided, after due consideration, that the Bronx would be well rid of this particular rat-bum, and so Stanley Paycek was sentenced to the electric chair.

  On the night before his execution, the family of the convicted murderer visited him. First his wife alone, then five of his children, were allowed to join their parents for a somewhat hysterical prayer together, during which the father told them not to follow his bad example. Go to church, love God, and listen to their mother. And pray for me. A lot.

  The oldest son, Willie, was permitted, at his earnest request and upon his mentioning that he was now to be the man of this large family, to have a few minutes alone with his father.

  It was during this meeting that Willie, fourteen years old, told his father what really happened to Walter Stachiew on the night of December 28, 1935.

  And who was involved.

  And how someday, far in the future, he would tell the true story. When he knew how each person involved had turned out.

  This is that story.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  SISTER MARY FRANCES WAS HAVING A BAD day. The class knew it the minute they entered the room. All the signals they had come to recognize were evident: the squinting, the constant shoving of the rimless eyeglasses up to the ridge of her small nose with a rough knuckle, the sudden stopping in the middle of a sentence, looking around for a culprit, for someone to blame for her pounding headache and obvious agitation.

  She was a short, heavy woman who moved in a whirl of flying, floating black, the high stiff white wimple rising from invisible eyebrows high over her head, the starchy surplice advancing before her. Her target could be anyone. In Sister Mary Frances’s class, good behavior was suspect. It was merely bad behavior hiding behind subterfuge. Oh, she knew these eighth-graders so well.

  Teaching the eighth grade was just one of the many crosses Sister Mary Frances had to bear. Many years ago she had taught the t
hird grade. It was her best time. The third-graders were the ideal students. They were over the first-grade tears and jitters and attacks of babyhood. They were ready to settle down and listen and learn, and she had reveled in teaching them. The reading and writing and arithmetic were all secondary to the real purpose of the education of these young souls. It had been her responsibility to initiate them into the mysteries of their true Mother, the Church, and from time to time, when some bolder parent complained that a child was nervous, sleepless, crying out in fear and terror of the pains of hell, Sister Mary Frances spoke with righteous authority.

  “Would you rather they not know,” she would ask the mother, “and be unaware of what eternity holds for the unrepentant sinner?”

  The earlier you got them, the younger they understood. Let them be frightened and nervous and sleepless. Let them remember stories of the holy saints and their tortured martyrdom. The piercings and roastings and hackings were true historical events, suffered for and offered to Our Lord in perfect love. Let the little ones hear these true things now, let the history of the Holy Mother Church be impressed on them at this young age, when their minds were relatively pure and they had yet to be corrupted.

  Twice in her tenure with the third grade, students were withdrawn and sent to public school. One little girl was a mess of tics and shrugs and movements and should have spent life in a straitjacket, as far as Sister Mary Frances was concerned. She felt she had acted properly, bundling the child into her coat and suspending her from a hook in the clothing closet. She only put the mittens in the girl’s mouth when she began screaming. She was well out of the class. There was no room for one of those children who craved attention constantly. There had been more than forty other third-graders to deal with, and this bundle of nerves demanded too much time.

  The other child would end up in the electric chair, no doubt about it. He had been more than an eight-year-old rogue. He was clearly and surely on the road to damnation with his cruel mischief, his laughter, and, above all, his filthy mouth. Sister Mary Frances did no more than was called for in the situation. She shoved half a cake of brown laundry soap into the vile mouth, forced the dirty words back down his throat, fought off his surprisingly strong hands (he actually struck out at her!). When she finally released him and headed him toward the door and the principal’s office for more drastic punishment, the boy fell facedown on the floor. When she rolled him over, he was foaming at the mouth, which after all was natural, given the amount of soap he had bitten off. She grabbed him by his small shoulders and stood him up, but the minute she let go, the boy deliberately let himself fall backwards. He hit his head against the edge of a desk, knocked himself unconscious, and caused a terrible commotion in the class.

  St. Simon Stock parish school was well rid of these two. There were plenty of others who were lost causes, and it seemed to Sister Mary Frances that a large number of them now present in this room should have been more harshly dealt with earlier on. Through the years, she had watched former third-graders enter her eighth-grade room. They knew her and she knew them and the class ran more smoothly for this mutual knowledge.

  She set the class an assignment in reading, a geography lesson they had not expected. They would be tested on their reading within a half hour, and Sister Mary Frances sat at her desk, head tilted to one side, listening, watching, wary and suspicious. Did they think for one moment today was to be a special day? Last day before Christmas vacation, a day for acting up, for defying her. She had heard the low groan when she told them there would be no class party. The small boxes of hard candy provided for each of them would be distributed at the end of the day. Today was a workday, like any other. The soft moan that drifted toward her reverberated inside her head. She had her suspicions but she wasn’t sure. Before the day was out, she would find which of these terrible thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds persisted in defying her.

  She moved around the room, floating down the aisles, cracking a knuckle down on an unprepared head: a boy with his face practically making contact with his book. If he needed glasses, let him tell his mother or father, but do not sit like an old blind man, nose touching the printed word. She stood at the back of the room and surveyed her students.

  It was in the very air around them. It permeated and spoiled and poisoned the atmosphere, this dangerous age of awakened physical changes. Some of the boys were still slender and smooth-cheeked, involved in childish mischief, but others … ah, the others, with their darkening voices, broadened shoulders, hair beginning to gleam over upper lips, and the girls, as restless now as the boys, perfectly aware of the physical changes taking over their bodies. Small breasts swelling, waists narrowing, hips widening, and she knew—knew—some of them sneaked lipstick when they were out of the class. She could see the evidence; lips that had been pale were mysteriously pinker, touched by cosmetic.

  There was a nervous sexual energy surrounding all of them, and it was her job, her vocation, her determination to save them from the evil into which they were slipping. She did this with vigor and dedication. There was no flirting, no whispering, no brushing of hands in her classroom. She filled them with enough stories of children gone wrong, struck by lightning or by mysterious disease: a childhood heart attack, the victim dead before arriving back in the state of grace that baptism had bestowed.

  She glanced around the room, then focused on William Paycek. He was a thoroughly repulsive boy, with his greasy hair, his narrow, small, and bony body. He never looked clean because he never was clean and God alone knew the source of the terrible pimples and sores and bruises on his thin ferret face. He had little pebble eyes of no particular color that Sister Mary Frances could determine. No one liked him. The boys bullied him and the girls avoided him completely. He was devious and sly and a liar and a cheat. He came from a family of pigs, and the boy smelled of garbage. Polacks.

  Dante D’Angelo was the biggest boy in the room: tall and heavyset, a dark complexion and nearly black eyes. He was turned out clean and fresh every day, which was a wonder to Sister Mary Frances, what with his mother having been so sick for so long before dying and his oldest sister going crazy and being carted off to an insane asylum somewhere. Probably one of the boy’s aunts—the Italians seemed to have more aunts than other people—moved in and helped out. Well, that was good, Sister Mary Frances supposed. At least it was one thing in their favor: they took care of their own. She knew the boy helped out in his father’s shoe-repair shop after school, and she checked his hands and nails carefully each day, but could find no evidence of the oil and black polish that had stained his father’s hands permanently. He was not a particularly friendly boy, but the others seemed to look to him for leadership out in the schoolyard. Probably because he was bigger than the rest of them. Why else would they include the only Italian in all their games. He hadn’t given her any particular trouble and, thought Sister, he’d better not.

  Her eye kept going back to Megan Magee, the brightest girl ever in St. Simon Stock. She was a year younger than the rest. The child in Megan was still very much in evidence. She had the openness and innocence of a much younger girl, and Sister Mary Frances loved Megan in many ways. She realized that her first attraction to Megan was because of her startling resemblance to a girl named Margaret Forbes. The same dark red hair and orangey eyes, the same pale skin with collections of freckles over the small, slightly uptilted nose. The same dark red lips, turning up in the corners. The same dimples. The same competence as the girl approached any assignment, never freezing at the blackboard, ready to answer any question or complete any assignment.

  The snow was beginning, just as it had been forecast.

  Margaret Forbes was dead. This was a different girl altogether. As if anyone else could ever be Margaret Forbes. If only she could stop remembering the hurt, the pain, the awful sinfulness of loving that long-ago friend. She had to be very careful to remember that Megan was not Margaret. There was a different situation here. Not that Sister Mary Frances ever showed favoritis
m in any way. What she did with a child who moved her in some mysterious way—as did this girl—was to be twice as hard on that student. Demand much, expect little, but do not let her own weakness be evident, ever. She stood for another moment, turned and surveyed the class, deliberately avoiding even the slightest glimpse at Megan. She would ignore her completely for the rest of the afternoon. She would not think of Megan or Margaret again for the next twenty-four hours. With the help of the Lord she would banish all such thoughts, or at least keep them locked up so deep inside her brain that she would be free of memory and of remembered temptation.

  Sister Mary Frances clenched her hands together tightly and turned for a quick moment to look out the window at the darkening day.

  She was about to hand out the test papers when the door burst open and there stood Father Thomas Kelly. Sister Mary Frances would never, in her entire life, be able to accept with grace the presence of Thomas Kelly as assistant pastor at St. Simon Stock. She had been his teacher twice, first in third grade, then in eighth. To Sister Mary Frances, he would always be the overactive, smirking little boy who answered her back in third grade and mocked her in eighth. He stood there, as all heads turned, as her children grinned and answered his greeting in unison: Good afternoon, Father. Pushed aside their reading assignment, forgot about the importance of the impending test, played up to him and his boyish, smiling presence.

  With his movie-star good looks, his calculated charm, he won them over as always. The girls beamed and blushed, more aware than ever of their own changing bodies. He joked with the boys as though he were one of them, an older brother, filled with their own excitement and turbulence.

  The discipline in the room collapsed, as he knew it would. He strode to the front of the room, smiled, greeted her with that false, friendly, insinuating voice.

  “Good afternoon, Sister.” His voice went low and dangerous. “Any of these rogues giving you any trouble? If they are, just send them along to me.”

  “There is nothing in my classroom I can’t handle, Father.”