THE WALLS

by Jay Fox

  “I don't remember.”

  “Let's see…Freda. Freda the poet. Whitman. Ah, yes, Freda is introduced to a man in publishing, who takes her under his wing and manages to get her work into the hands of some very powerful individuals.” He has not missed a beat. “And once she starts making some money from her poetry, she starts trying to push it on her father—the money, that is, not the poetry. Unfortunately, the man's too stubborn to take any of it. Remember the era with which we are dealing. But Freda, intransigent even in her youth, starts planting the majority of her earnings in her father's coat. He doesn't notice at first because she's not really making enough to bother about. And she takes this to be a silent acceptance, a proverbial wink of the eye; she believes the act is permissible so long as the family and the neighbors don't know about it. This turns out to be far from the case.

  “When Freda catches a relatively big break, she decides to take things a step further.”

  “What? Did she buy them a new house or something?” Tomas asks.

  “No. She pays the rent. Now, her father is a very traditional man. His wife doesn't work out of the house, his daughters marry before the age of eighteen, his sons stay under his roof until they find a wife of their own—you know, traditional. Suffice to say, Freda's father does not appreciate the gesture. In fact, he sees it as an act of emasculation. And when a reactionary man feels as though he's been humiliated like that, he does not typically respond with clemency or, in this case, mercy. So, as you both can probably imagine, a violent argument ensues, which results in a rather ferocious beating, and ends with Freda being exiled from the house. The man of tradition was too pious to drink on a Sunday—pro pudor!—, but he was apparently fine with pummeling and disowning his teenage daughter because she simply wanted to help.

  “Her situation, luckily, was not as dire as one would presume, though I hardly wish to make light of what transpired. She was of course devastated, but she had established something of a network of friends who were willing to take her in. She also had a reputation as a very capable poet, so she was able to publish her work fairly consistently. Not that you could tell. While her lyricism is exquisite, she never spoke of what transpired between her and her father—and, as far as I know, she never reconciled with her family. I do know that her oldest brother was killed during the conscription riots of eighteen sixty-three, but this, of course, took place before she was banished from the home.

  “Anyway, she continued writing and ended up taking a job at some school for women somewhere around Fort Greene Park, though I believe it—the park—went by another name back then. She never became particularly famous, but she was introduced to a number of well-known writers from the day. She led a comfortable and industrious life: she was active in the church, she traveled quite a bit, and most of her poetry continued to find its way into publications.

  “Now, if you were to read her poems in chronological order, you would probably not see any severely socialist undertones in her early work. After eighty-five or so, however, it becomes extremely leftist in theme and content. As a consequence of this, the work ceases to appear anywhere besides radical newsletters. But this was fine with her. She even started writing essays for these publications, and eventually founded her own weekly, the Brooklyn Worker, which, as I'm sure you can imagine, was overtly Marxist. As a side note, she was somewhat close with Kennan; she republished some of the essays he had written concerning the exile system to galvanize American support for the Nihilist movement. Yes, my friends, gone were the days of poems about bucolic America and the anticipation of a lover’s caress; Freda Keens was concerned only with revolution. I've even heard that she was a pen pal of Mother Jones, though I've never seen any evidence of this.

  “What caused this massive change, you may ask? Well, turns out Freda had gotten herself knocked up by an organizer for…I think the Brooklyn Central Labor Union. I’m not sure, though. Regardless, as you may well know, a union organizer back then had the life expectancy of a housefly. And so, before the baby was born, the father found himself on the wrong side of a pistol. I don't remember if Freda blamed Gould or if she thought Rockefeller had a hand in it, but she never accepted it as a robbery, which was the conclusion the police came to. Not that you could blame her. His flat was broken into, but nothing was stolen. He was just dead, shot execution style. As you can imagine, the majesty of the Brooklyn Bridge and the autumn leaves in the Berkshires failed to be all that interesting.

  “She worked with radicalized unions, though the only one I know of by name was the Wobblies—the Industrial Workers of the World, who, ironically enough, now appear to spend most of their time attempting to unionize corporate coffee houses in a few American cities. This was to be her calling for pretty much the rest of her life, though she was active behind the scenes. I mean, she had a daughter to raise, and the last thing she wanted was to be responsible for having that kid locked away in some orphanage while she rotted in jail. Once her daughter came of age, however, she became far more active on the street-side of things, and eventually did go to jail for protesting Wilson's decision to enter into the Great War. She died before that absurd chapter in history closed.” Before either Tomas or I can ask, he responds: “Cholera—one of the few things today's incarcerated don't have to worry about…unless they live in Maricopa County, of course.

  “Beatrice, her daughter, grew up to be quite beautiful. She was radical like her mother—as I said before, she worked as an organizer for the stevedores and all of the other workers along the shores of Brooklyn. She wasn't particularly popular in terms of the media—in the sense that she was not well known; she wasn't famous and she certainly wasn't infamous. I think there are a few pictures of her from the Times. She was certainly known within more than a few circles, but the public at large had no idea who she was. Dick said it was because union women were supposed to be old maids, you know, real hags. Think Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  “Yikes,” from Tomas.

  “Speaking of which, Beatrice later came to know Mrs. Roosevelt quite well—and not 'came to know' as a euphemism for sex—though the two had a falling out in the late-forties. But we'll get to that in a little bit. As I was saying, however, Beatrice was something else. Absolutely gorgeous. Between you and me, she was a real—”

  “Just get on with it, Pat,” Tomas says as he begins to regain some semblance of sobriety.

  “Well,” Patrick almost pouts, “This is where the other Balaguez comes into the picture—not Jose, of course, but his son Raphael. Raphael was a playboy, really liked to stroll the boulevard to exhibit his foppery. He courted the most illustrious ladies of the day, frequented the poshed clubs—you know, he was a real dandy. Well, I don't know exactly how it all came about, but something about Beatrice really called to the young-ish man. He was really quite taken by her. Maybe it was some romanticism that materialized out of a novel or a film—you know, that he could be her knight in shining armor. But, for all I know, he may have just been a young man drawn to a beautiful woman.

  “He probably thought it'd be easy enough to seduce her; whatever plans he had after that…well, that's anyone's guess. Problem was, she didn't think too much of him. I won't go into the details, but, like any aristocratic progeny, he was under the impression that some, if not most, of the nation’s laws didn't apply to him. Rape, unfortunately, fell into this category.”

  “Holy shit,” says Tomas.

  “Now, I'm cutting this a little short because I want to finish these (holding up one of the beers, shaking it, and then placing it back down), I guess this (as he raises the other beer) drink, and get out of here.” He pauses. “I forgot I picked this song (“Sunshine”). Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the Balaguez family was able to pay off Beatrice without batting an eye before the police or the press discovered what had taken place. This is nineteen eleven or twelve. Dick was born in twelve, though I couldn't tell you the date. Anyway, Beatrice didn't do too much with the money at first. She moved into a place in Bro
oklyn Heights. She ate better. All in all, however, most of it she just gave to her mother, who kept it in a safe place. I don't know the whole story behind it; I just know that it never went into a bank. Regardless, Beatrice, like her mother before her, continued to raise hell, as they used to say back then, and even managed to stay out of jail in order to avoid losing custody of Dick.

  “When the depression hit, she took that money and started buying up properties all along the Brooklyn waterfront. From Greenpoint to Bay Ridge, there wasn't a neighborhood in which she didn't have at least one or two buildings. She kept rents low so as to give working people a break, and she managed to make enough on the properties so that she never lost any money due to repairs or taxes or anything like that. As for profit margins…well, they weren't all that important to her. The point is that she wasn't trying to be a martyr, and she sure as hell wasn't about to be consumed by avarice.

  “As for Richard, Dick, he was provided with the best education that money could buy. The Balaguez family made sure of that, even after a lot of the money simply disappeared once the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. He went to a private school in Manhattan, got sent to Columbia, and then went to Harvard Law even with the Depression on. Graduated in thirty-eight, I believe. The family cut him off at that point, but he was armed with enough knowledge to help his mother with the property management business. Not to go too far off topic here, but the Balaguez Empire Jose had constructed had completely collapsed by then. Raphael committed suicide after driving all of the papers into the ground. The eldest daughter married into some political family based in New England—not the Kennedy family, but one like them—and the youngest son went out to California. I don't really know what happened with him, but I'm fairly certain that he got involved in the pictures. As for the three other sisters…well, let's just say that they were as virtuous as the daughters of Charlemagne.”

  “What?”

  This is ignored. “Some people claim that Beatrice began to sell out before the war started. I don't really buy into that. I will admit that she did begin to make more money off of her properties, but I think it had more to do with getting more buildings to help more people as opposed to simply making more money for the sake of a greater profit. She certainly did begin to get frustrated by the amount of work that was demanded of her company in order to comply with building codes and the well-being of her tenants,” he admits. “So maybe they are right to a certain degree; maybe she did cross over that line, and maybe she stopped seeing life through the eyes of those who are struggling to make it. Maybe she found herself incapable of abandoning the vantage wealth provides. But that's only speculation.

  “When the war broke out, Dick told his mother that he was going to enlist in the navy should the country enter the war on the side of the Allies. She was pretty steamed about it, or pissed as you fellows say here, but she changed her tune after Operation Barbarossa—you know, when the Nazis launched their assault on the Soviets. After Pearl Harbor, Dick joined up, set out to war, and came back from the Pacific about three years later without these two fingers,” he says as he grips the middle and index fingers of his right hand. “Sad story really, but at least he didn't lose an arm or anything like that.

  “Once he got back stateside, he found that things had changed. Beatrice had apparently gone to the other side, as he used to say, and she was scooping up every property she could get her hands on. In order to pay for these myriad acquisitions, she began increasing rents, kicking out tenants who were behind, and charging exorbitant late-fees. When she married Yaniv Abram in the spring of forty-five—something not unlike a political marriage—things took a further turn for the worse.

  “While I'll be the first to tell you that most Jewish people are decent and industrious people, there are those elements in any population that make everyone else look bad. It's like the drunks for the Irish,” he says as he takes down another swig. “Now, where I'm from, Americans, as a rule, tend to be considered the exception: it's not looked down upon to think all of you guys arrogant fucks. Of course, as I've found out from my time here, this is just because we don't see working class people from the States all that often. We see the wealthy and the nouveau riche, who come into our country expecting to be treated like fucking royalty just because their last name begins with an ‘O’.

  “But that's immaterial. The point is that Abram was the Anti-Semites paragon of the Jew, a shrewd, horrible little man who looked like the lovechild of Cato and a gargoyle. He had acquired a lot of properties, particularly in the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint regions, and he was notorious for the most downright exploitative practices in which a landlord can partake. Someone once told me that Amiri Baraka, back when he was LeRoi Jones, actually spit on him, but I don't know how true that is. Anyway, my point is that the man was good at one thing—and that was business. Suffice to say, the couple, once together, became one of the most dominating forces in Brooklyn real estate.

  “Two days after the marriage, the newlyweds founded Abram-Keens. I guess that was the honeymoon—a trip to the court to file the certificate of incorporation. The company did well; it expanded and became more profitable than either Yaniv's company or Beatrice's company had been prior to the union. The two eventually relocated from Brooklyn Heights to the Upper East Side, the Clivus Victoriae of Manhattan. They hobnobbed with celebrities, aristocrats, and all of the other scum attracted to scenes where status and popularity are determined by the make of your car.”

  “Get to the fucking point, man,” Tomas says.

  Patrick looks to Tomas with a bit of ire. Tomas sips his coffee begrudgingly. “So, they died—car accident sometime in fifty-four or fifty-five. For whatever reason, Dick inherited the company. Problem was, he couldn't change the direction that it, the company, had taken. He wanted to cut rents, but, by that point in time, most of the people who rented from Abram-Keens were not the type of people who needed their rents decreased. The couple had sold off most of the properties in working class neighborhoods in order to buy properties in the nicer parts of the city—Manhattan in particular. He fought with the shareholders for a few years, but they ended up winning every time. The feats of Hercules and David are still well known for a reason, after all.

  “He recognized that his hands were tied, so he did what seemed to be the most rational thing: he sold his shares in the company and resigned. This was fifty-nine.” He pauses. “You have to love this song,” he says as the Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose serenade the bar. “Anyway, some say he was bought out for fifty million dollars, but I don't think that's quite right. Maybe it would have been something like fifty million dollars by today's standards, but I don't think that's right, either. Regardless, the amount isn't all that important; the point is that he came out of the deal with more money than he knew what do with.

  “Dick wasn't the communist type, but he certainly was a liberal man. Whereas his grandmother had been an anarchist, and his mother a socialist-turned-capitalist, Dick was more of a philanthropist, but not in the superficial sense. He was more in line with Godwin's man of virtuous disposition—he didn't see the poor as some vague entity in need of pity or eleemosyna—”

  “What was that?”

  “Alms,” with something akin to frustration. “I take it you don't know any Greek, either?”

  “No,” in unison.

  “Well, once you've found Janus, please let him know that Polyphemus did indeed die in vain.”

  “What?”

  “Anyway,” Patrick begins dismissively, “Dick saw a lot of people who couldn't get ahead in this world because they simply never got the opportunity. You have to remember that even Carnegie wouldn't have amounted to much had it not been for a few lucky rolls of the dice. Also, if a man is defined by his environment, the idea of the autodidact seems a bit misleading, doesn't it? Not to go too far off topic here, but it seems silly to believe that a social creature such as a human can be wholly self-made. To quote Erasmus, ‘It’s absurdities like t
hese that sway the mighty, powerful monster that is the common people.’

  “Anyway, Dick gave most of his money away to various charities throughout the city and the world, but kept enough so that he never had to work again. He did a lot of traveling throughout the sixties, mostly in this country. In seventy-one, he came back to the city and bought a place on Fiske—a small street contained within Garfield and President, I think. Maybe it's First.” He pauses to scratch his ear, takes a small sip from this beer, and then continues. “Anyway, one day he's on acid tooling around the area, and he comes across this poet, who says this one line that changes Dick's life forever: No one smiles anymore. Now, whether the subsequent revelation was merely chemically induced or if it could qualify as a genuine spiritual awaking…well, that's one of those things people still debate. Regardless, Dick decides to start smiling again. He abandons the veil [not to be confused with vale] of tears. And this, ladies and germs, is the day of the A-R-E's inception.”

  “Was all of that necessary?” I ask. “I mean, you could have just told us that Dick Keens started the group. That would have been entirely sufficient.”

  “Once you get to the party, you'll understand. Then again, I'm not even done yet.” Tomas groans. “Okay, so I have to backtrack a little because I jumped over the sixties. I forgot to mention that Dick was suffering from despair—Sartre's sense, that is; he was a very wealthy man who saw the world as a very depressing place, and, without much need to go into details, he was certainly correct. Miserable people were—and are—about as prevalent as omens in Lucan. Suffice to say, Keens did not succumb to the quixotry of the sixties. The direction of the world, he thought, had the potential to go in one of two directions: corporate oligarchy or a system based upon nepotism, elitism and fascism. He was fond of a quote in Ecclesiastes. I'm probably going to screw this up, but it goes something like this: I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed—they had no comforter; power was on the side of the oppressors. And I declared that the dead are happier than the living. But better than both is he who has not yet been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.” He takes on a plaintive countenance and adds: “'Who knows what is good for a man in life, during the few and meaningless days he passes through like a shadow?' The Bible would respond in fairly obvious fashion: God. Keens, of course, was not one to acquiesce to religious faith. He preferred to look for a more terrestrial purpose.