Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  “Seems like you boys are doing just great up there in Canada. If you can’t live in America,” he commented, “Canada’s sure the next best thing!” I saw Michele wince, but Uncle Tony didn’t notice. “Law school. Social work,” he went on. “Wow! I bet my big sis is darn proud of you guys!”

  Michele smiled. He was a hit with our two cousins, gorgeous girls who’d been fat little toddlers when I’d last seen them fourteen years before. Catholics don’t marry cousins, but the two teenagers were flirting with my brother openly. Michele was encouraging them without intending to, simply by being his serious, socially committed self.

  “You slept on the sidewalk in front of the American Consulate?” one cousin gushed. “Far out!”

  “You picketed against the Vietnam War? Neat-o!” the other enthused. “Did you get busted?”

  My uncle, like most American workers in those times, was right-wing in his politics. I engaged him in conversation to steer his attention away from Michele and the girls. My aunt Linda, our hostess, was in the kitchen preparing some extravaganza she said was French. She pronounced it “Krapes Suzette” and said the recipe came “straight from Paris.”

  “So, Angelo, are you busy up there right now? As a law student, I mean,” Uncle Tony asked.

  “I’m at a place in my studies where I have to decide on a field of concentration,” I answered.

  He listened with polite attention as I explained about seeking the internship. “You do things different in Canada,” he said. “My kids got summer jobs lined up already, that’s for sure.”

  When he asked me what projects I was working on exactly, I had to bite my tongue. I didn’t think he wanted to hear about Billy Johnson, the prospective draft dodger, or Gleason Adams, either. So I gave Uncle Tony some speech about helping the underprivileged. I saw one of the little cousins glance my way and offer me a pretty smile. “People who just need a little help to get on the road to a better life,” I added for good measure.

  “I got just the place to show you tomorrow,” Uncle Tony said enthusiastically. “What time do they get up in the morning in Canada?” he asked.

  I laughed. “Any time that’s necessary.”

  “Good. You get Aunt Linda to wake you up when she wakes me up tomorrow. That’ll be six-thirty. Then I’ll show you something not everybody gets to see.”

  “IT’S WHAT YOU would call a yacht in Canada,” Uncle Tony said. Then he laughed and playfully punched my shoulder. “Just kidding, son. Climb in. It’s clean as a whistle. Hosed it down twice just for us. Trust me.”

  From the deck of the garbage scow anchored off the Battery, the southern tip of Manhattan, a man in a dark green uniform printed with “NYC Sanitation” reached his hand out to me. I grabbed it and teetered for a precarious moment, one foot in the city and the other suspended over the Hudson River. The boat shifted and I tripped onto the deck, followed by Uncle Tony who hopped aboard effortlessly, as if he did it every day. “Which I do do every day,” he explained.

  As the thirty-foot-long boat pulled away from the shore, I felt exhilaration of an immensity I had never felt in Toronto. My sense of the complex geography of greater New York, with its five boroughs, its two rivers, its bridges and islands, East Side, West Side, up, down, Long Island, Jersey . . . was incomplete and confused, but I swore when I boarded that garbage scow, I could taste the salt of the Atlantic and feel the fresh ocean breezes as we sped away from Manhattan and westward toward and then past the Statue of Liberty.

  With the wind in my face and the sun off the sparkling water dazzling my eyes, I savored the moment, not asking Uncle Tony where we were going. But when the boat took a sudden turn and I looked up, I was shocked at what met my gaze.

  Occupying its own island and appearing to cover it totally, a palace like that of the Doge of Venice rose above us. Identical two-story wings flanked a central portion that was twice as tall. The building itself was pink, but every curved lintel, every massive arch, every corner and crevice and crook was outlined in stark white, which looked like Italian marble, carved and scrolled, curlicued and crenellated. At each of the four corners of the main section, a domed tower rose and at the apex of each dome, a spire as thin as a spear pierced the deep blue sky. The towers reminded me of the palaces of the sultanates in the books of my boyhood. In those imaginary lands, each tower faced a point of the compass and these did, too. One dome and one spire for each realm of the earth.

  Stunned, I watched this vision approach. But the nearer we got, the more it appeared that this magnificent edifice was now a crumbling wreck. What must once have been brickwork worthy of the most skilled muratore was grimy and broken, chunks fallen away wherever we looked. A ragged, rusted barbed-wire fence enclosed the whole structure, but it was so bent and broken that any intruder foolish enough to venture across the river could merely step over it and gain easy entry. Dozens of arches soared above carefully crafted windows, each surrounded by white stone, but all the panes were smashed, the decorative wooden moldings rotted and chipped. Old wrought-iron light fixtures, dark green metal sconces, pitted by decades of raw wind and unrelenting sun, dangled from electrical wiring long since disconnected from any source of power. Here and there, a frayed rope or a tattered flag or a piece of cloth, captured and held by a random sharp object, waved in the breeze and made the building look as if it were gasping for breath.

  “What is this?” I asked my uncle.

  “This,” he said, “is the gate to America. Ellis Island.”

  “Ellis?” I repeated, amazed.

  “Yeah,” my uncle said. “An English name. The guy that owned this island way back when was Samuel Ellis. He tried to get rid of it, but no takers. He died in 1794. A hundred years later, this place was built—or a place like it, which burned down. The second one—” he gestured toward the massive ruin before us “—opened for business around 1901 when everybody and his brother wanted to come to America. Especially Italians. More Italians came through here than anybody else, two and a half million in thirty years. By 1931, though, most people, including our family, were inspected before they even left Italy.”

  My American uncle seemed so much less Italian than the folks on Clinton Street in Toronto that I marveled at his bringing me to see this wreck where my ancestors first set foot in America. I looked around once more. The depressing stillness of a place that hasn’t served any purpose for years seemed to have permanently settled over the island. My uncle’s voice sounded hollow, strange, as if he were talking in church. I expected him to tell the boatman to turn back, that we would return to the mainland. Instead, he asked the man if he’d come back for us in half an hour.

  Our feet crunched on gravel and broken glass as we took a short, wide path from the river to the main entrance. I glanced overhead, wary of falling bricks and dis-integrating limestone, which I could now see formed the building’s white trim, but Uncle Tony seemed oblivious to these dangers. If there had ever been a lock, it had long since rusted away. Uncle Tony pushed and a shrunken door, crooked in its frame of scaling wood and paneless windows, swung effortlessly inward, as if the ghosts of the sad old place welcomed him.

  I stayed close behind as we navigated a dim corridor lit only where stray rays of sun found chinks in the wall. Rusted scraps of metal, shattered pottery, splintered furniture, yellowed papers, rags and rat droppings hindered our steps. A rank smell of mold, old plaster and dust mingled with the pervasive dampness from the river.

  The narrow corridor seemed to go on forever and I was beginning to feel claustrophobic, when we came to an intersecting passage. As I turned the corner, my eye came level with a place on the wall where layers of plaster and paint had worn away. There, beneath the peeled plaster, I saw the type of florid handwriting I remembered seeing on papers belonging to my grandfather. I edged closer. I realized some of the writing was in English and that I could make it out. A few lines said: “1907. Antonio D’Amico. 12 years old come here from Limonzano, Italia to America. God bless my new home. I hope I s
tay.”

  Across nearly sixty years, the simple hope of this boy so moved me that I reached out to trace his words with my fingers, but my uncle’s hand stayed mine, as though he were anxious to protect this testament from any harm. “It’s really something,” he commented. “The more the paint and plaster falls off, the more old sayings come out on the walls. It ain’t New York without graffiti,” he laughed. “I guess it never was.” More seriously he added, “Looks like people who came here wanted to make their mark on America any way they could, right from the start.”

  “I guess so,” I replied. We turned from the wall and walked on down the corridor, mercifully for only a short time. Ahead of us, a vast light-filled space suddenly opened to our view. We climbed up a long flight of stairs and stepped fully into the light.

  To anyone, but especially to the son of a bricklayer, the three-hundred-foot-long room would be a marvel. Despite all the years of disuse, nothing had marred the stunning expanse of its vaulted ceiling two stories above us. Intricately intertwined rows of pale yellow tiles soared upward from pillars between massive semicircular windows. Sun spilled from these windows, filling the huge space with the welcoming gleam of morning. Though cracked and dirty, the concrete floor retained something of the smooth patina made by millions of immigrant feet.

  “In this room,” my uncle said, “the people sat on pipes lined up all across the floor while they waited to go through the procedures. Even though they’d just made a terrible trip across the ocean, they had to sit there until hundreds of people ahead of them went first. They had to be examined by doctors who put chalk marks on their backs if they were sick. They had to have their eyes popped open with a hook for inspection. They had to answer questions and talk to officials who sat on a big, high platform, like kings, looking down on them all. But nobody could do this stuff without the interpreters. They were government workers hired to help the immigrants. One of the best interpreters was Fiorello La Guardia, who one day got to be a mayor of New York. These interpreters, they knew all the right answers to the questions. They were patient. They were kind. Without them, the millions of people who waited in this room, including that boy who wrote on the wall, would not have been allowed to stay. Sometimes I think about what one person can do to help a whole lot of people. I think about those interpreters. And then I think about today’s young men, like the boys willing to fight for their country halfway around the world . . .” He paused. His eyes swept the vast, empty hall. At first, the place seemed absolutely silent, then a sound like a whisper seemed to fill it. The breath of ghosts. The wind from the river. “You know, Angelo, if you’re looking for what kind of lawyer to be—what kind of man, really—why don’t you remember this place and what the interpreters did for the grandparents of people like us, poor campaesani looking for a better life.”

  “IT’S THE VILLAGE !” Michele nudged me with enthusiasm. “Not Gerrard Street or Yorkville, but the real thing. Greenwich Village!”

  I stood with him on Bleecker Street, which I could only assume was, unlike the street Kee Kee and Billy lived on in Toronto, the real Bleecker Street. My brother could hardly stand still, he was so excited at the prospect of sitting in a real U.S. coffeehouse and poking around in real U.S. boutiques run by new immigrants from India, Mexico and other disadvantaged nations that Michele was eager to assist by purchasing their exotic wares.

  I could hardly stand still, either. Everywhere I turned I saw a skirt shorter than the one I’d just been looking at. An up-and-coming mayoralty candidate named John Lindsay had recently described these as skirts that were short to allow girls to be able to run, which they’d have to if they wore one.

  After several hours of coffee and entertainment that I found fairly indistinguishable from that which Michele enjoyed in Toronto, we met a young man who told Michele that he would take us to see something that no “politically aware” social worker should miss.

  Of course I was dead set against our going off into the streets of New York with a total stranger. Visions of thugs who would beat and rob us flashed into my imagination. “Cool it, Gelo,” Michele admonished when I managed to get him into the rest room to privately warn him away from clear danger. “The guy’s only going to take us around the corner and down the block. Don’t make such a big deal out of everything.”

  Reluctantly, I followed Michele and the long-haired Bohemian to whom we’d just foolishly entrusted our lives.

  It was past midnight, but the street was alive with people and music. From one of the many little clubs came a coarse, whiny voice, accompanied periodically by a har-monica—“Bob Dylan,” the sign by the club’s door read. Thank God, I thought, I don’t have to listen to that on a regular basis.

  As we rounded the corner of Tenth Street and Greenwich, I heard a sound that wasn’t music, though it had a weird and compelling rhythm all its own. It was the sound of hundreds of women and a few men shouting simultaneously in a raucous cacophony of English, Spanish and the particular accents of the American Negro.

  “Come in here,” our escort said, inviting us into a coffee shop directly across the street from the grim twelve-story building on the corner where all this noise seemed to be centered. No fortress was ever more forbidding, more apparently impenetrable. Yet, an unlikely army was assailing it from the sidewalk, appearing to believe they could fell it with purses, scarves, brown paper bags and white paper notes shaped like the jets Lyndon Johnson was increasingly sending to Vietnam.

  “What is it?” Michele and I both asked.

  “It’s the Women’s House of Detention,” said our host, whose name was Boomer, I later learned. “It’s remand only.”

  “What?” Michele asked.

  “Pretrial custody,” I answered. “You mean it’s a gigantic holding cell for women awaiting trial?”

  “Innocent until proven guilty,” Boomer replied, his voice dripping with a peculiar irony that was becoming the tone of social outrage everywhere. “Freedom of speech!” political protestors would soon be ironically declaring when growing numbers across the continent would begin to be routinely scraped off the sidewalk by police. But if there were any police pigs in the crowd across the street, they certainly weren’t visible to me.

  Boomer led us to a table by a window. In those days restaurant windows still opened, and he cranked the one by our table to the width of about an inch. That was enough for the screaming across the street to be clearly audible. The homogeneous crowd began to separate into individuals whose small dramas now played themselves out before my astonished eyes.

  I saw, for example, a grandmotherly woman with three small girls, each dressed as if for church. The four, arranged in decreasing order of height, stood holding hands. The two free hands, the left hand of the grandmother and the right hand of the smallest girl, who was little more than a toddler, pointed in the same direction, toward a window far above them, from which a pale figure frantically waved.

  I saw girlfriends, sisters and mothers of the accused winding up like baseball pitchers to hurl some forbidden object toward the few windows that the prisoners had managed to open or break. And for every person who attempted to toss something up, there seemed to be another person in another quadrant of the melee who clawed the air in anticipation of something being thrown down, most often notes that, when they finally floated down to the sidewalk, were immediately pounced on.

  There were nowhere near as many males in the crowd as females. The boyfriends, brothers or husbands, whatever they were, seemed to fall into two categories: the bereaved and the enraged. The former stared up at the fortress with big, sorrowful eyes, with hands over the places they thought their hearts were, with spoken promises that were no more audible to me across the street than to the women behind bars. As for the latter, the enraged lovers, they were perfectly audible, even from across the street. “You bitch!” one cried. “How could you do this to me?”

  “This scene is so bad it makes me ashamed to be human,” Boomer said. The popularity of such sweepin
g statements about the human condition had not yet reached Toronto that spring, but they seemed to be the latest trend in New York. “But guys like you, you’re going to change all this.”

  I glanced once more across the street. A fistfight had broken out between two women vying for an enviable position near a street lamp. A person who managed to stand beneath one of the three light standards on that side of the building could be distinctly seen by her loved one inside the jail.

  “Guys like us are going to change everything?” Michele repeated skeptically. “You mean Canadians?”

  Both my brother and I burst out laughing, but Boomer didn’t think it was funny.

  “Canadians willing to take in men who refuse to be co-opted by the military-industrial complex. Social workers who refuse to assist in the replication of tool-died capitalists. Lawyers who are champions of the poor and not pawns of the rich . . .”

  It was late at night. No, it was early in the morning. My eyelids began to grow heavy as if gradually weighed down by Boomer’s rich rhetoric, the way a buoyant tarpaulin can be weighed down by a small number of strategically placed stones.

  But I thought I forced my eyes to stay open. I thought I looked across the street again. I thought I saw a tall, thin woman in scuffed black pumps, a gray straight skirt, a slightly yellowed nylon blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a red cardigan. I thought I saw her raise her slim hand and let fly from her long, lean fingers a note, a white bird that soared up into the air’s free current, then circled the Women’s House of Detention like a patched and secret ring.

  “Wake up, Angelo,” I heard Michele say. “It’s time to get back to Uncle Tony’s.”

  I roused myself, but the dream lingered.

  Who was that woman in the morgue? What had she known or done that Gleason Adams had, because of her, thrown his fate to the wind?

  Chapter 14

  “While you were with Antonio in New York, a man came from the government and brought you this.”