“Nothing really bad, only impure thoughts.”
“Did you tell him about the time you said you wished your boyfriend Phil Rogers would rot in hell because he went back to his wife? Was that an impure thought?”
“No, that doesn’t count.”
“Do I have impure thoughts?”
“Of course not.”
“And the priest forgave you for thinking them?”
“He did.”
“How do you know if something you’re thinking of is wrong?”
“If you feel in your heart and soul it’s not good, then it’s not. What the priest does is grant absolution, so you don’t have to feel bad about it anymore.”
“I thought only God can make things right.”
“A priest is an agent of God, His emissary. God speaks through him.”
“Why doesn’t God do it Himself?”
“Oh, Roy, you know He can’t be everywhere. He needs help.”
“I thought God is everywhere.”
“I can’t explain it any better, sweetheart. You’ll understand more about how God works when you’re older.”
“I heard Mrs. McLaughlin say that her Great-Uncle Declan in Ireland is older than God.”
Roy’s mother laughed. “That’s just an expression. It means she thinks he’s very old.”
“There’s a lot I don’t understand about how religion works, Mom.”
“I know, Roy. There’s a lot I don’t understand about it, either.”
“Did your mother continue going to confession for the rest of her life?” Peter asked.
“No,” said Roy, “at least not that I know of. Only when I was a kid, and then not consistently.”
“I don’t ever remember her going,” said his sister.
“She remembered the last words of the Lamentations from the Old Testament, though,” Roy said. “‘But thou hast utterly rejected us.’ Kitty quoted that line every once in a while when something bad happened or she’d been disappointed by one of her husbands or boyfriends.”
“She figured God had given up on His people,” Roy’s sister said, “so why should she bother talking to Him? After all, He was just another man.”
The Goose
Roy’s mother’s fourth and final husband, Barney Roper, was a member of the Brotherhood of Ganders Lodge, a secret and fraternal organization. Wives of those members were referred to as The Gathering of the Geese. Privately, however, many of the Ganders jokingly called them “The Waggle Gaggle Gals.” Four times a year, to celebrate the seasons, the Ganders had balls, which were really more on the order of drunken parties. Formal wear was required to attend, and Barney insisted that Kitty accompany him on these occasions.
It happened that Roy, who was eighteen years old, was visiting his mother and sister, Sally, who was six, in Rock City, Illinois, a town of 150,000 in the central part of the state, when one of the seasonal balls was held. Barney Roper worked for his two older brothers, Ben and Bradley, as a plant foreman at Roper & Roper Dry Ice. Kitty’s husband, the third Roper, was an employee, not a partner, a position, he assured Kitty, that he would at some point achieve. This never happened due to Barney’s eventual mishandling of certain accounts receivable for which his brothers decided to terminate his employment but declined to prosecute him.
During Roy’s brief visit, his mother and her husband attended the Ganders event honoring the winter solstice. Kitty wore her best dress and jewelry given to her by Roy’s father, her first husband. Barney Roper, as was customary, wore a tuxedo.
Roy and Sally were seated on a couch in the livingroom where Roy was reading to her a Nancy Drew mystery story when Barney and Kitty arrived home. Barney Roper was at the wheel of his 1962 Pontiac Bonneville when it smashed into the garage door, shaking the house and shocking both Roy and Sally. Kitty came rushing through the front door, shouting and crying, her hair and clothing awry.
“That’s it!” she yelled. “It’s over! I’m through! I’m getting a divorce!”
She passed through the livingroom without looking at her children and went directly into her bedroom, slamming the door shut behind her. Kitty continued ranting and raving, scaring Sally. Roy embraced his little sister, expecting Barney to appear momentarily, but he did not. Roy heard the car back down the driveway and be driven away.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he told Sally, and went outside to inspect the damage.
The garage door had a large hole in it and was dangling from one of its hinges. Pieces of splintered wood were strewn on the ground, along with the outdoor lamp that had been mounted above the door.
Roy reentered the house but Sally was not in the livingroom. The bedroom door was open so he walked over and looked in. Sally was sitting on the bed watching her mother throw the contents of a closet and then belongings from a dresser onto the floor. As she was madly flinging shirts and socks and underwear out of the drawers, she suddenly stumbled and collapsed on the piles of clothing. Sally screamed and Roy bent down and attended to Kitty. She had fainted so Roy tapped her cheeks and spoke to her.
After several seconds Kitty regained consciousness and looked up at Roy. Her brown eyes were bloodshot and there was no light in them. The top half of her dress had fallen off, exposing most of her breasts. A strand of pearls had broken, leaving only a few still attached to the string.
“I’m not beautiful anymore, Roy,” she said. “I used to be, you remember, when you were a little boy, how I looked then, how everyone stared at me, how the other girls envied me, my complexion, my hair, my figure.”
“Yes, Mom, I remember.”
“It’s gone now, I’m gone.”
“You’re not gone, Ma, and you’ll look fine again. You’ve got to get out of this marriage, that’s all. Move back to Chicago with Sally. You’ve got to be well and take care of her.”
Kitty closed her eyes and fell asleep.
“Is mom all right, Roy?”
“Yes, Sally. She just needs to rest for a little while.”
Kitty laughed, softly at first, then louder but gently, without opening her eyes.
“My goose is cooked,” she said. “Isn’t that funny, Roy? It’s me, I’m the goose.”
She fell back to sleep but her breathing was labored and a whistling noise came from her nose.
“Are we going to move back to Chicago?” asked Sally. “I want to.”
Spooky Spiegelman and
The Night Time Killer
Roy remembered an old guy named Rooftop Perkins who ran a radio repair shop in the neighborhood and sold dirty books under the counter. Spooky Spiegelman, a kid Roy had played ball with a few times in the schoolyard, brought customers to Rooftop who kicked back to Spooky a quarter or fifty cents for the hustle. Spooky approached Roy one day and asked him if he was interested in being a puller. Roy said he didn’t think so but agreed to accompany him to Rooftop’s place of business where Spooky wanted to collect what the old guy owed him.
“He owes me five bucks,” said Spooky. “This way you can meet Rooftop, I’ll get the gelt, then we can go to The Pantry and get a couple burgers and fries, my treat.”
Spooky’s real first name was Spencer. It was his mother who hung his nickname on him because of what she described as his strange behavior, his habit of lurking silently in empty hallways, doorways and otherwise deserted rooms of their house, “doin’ nothin’ but waitin’,” Mrs. Spiegelman said, “standin’ around, like waitin’ on a bus. He’s a spooky kid, he disappears but don’t really go nowhere, you don’t see him but you know he’s there, like a ghost.”
Spooky was a year older than Roy but they were both in fifth grade, which Spooky had flunked the year before.
“Mrs. Clancy told me she was puttin’ me back on account of my spellin’ and penmanship ain’t good enough. Penmanship! Only ship I’ll be on is when I join the navy.”
&n
bsp; Rooftop Perkins was sitting on a high stool behind the counter in his shop on Washtenaw Avenue when the boys entered. The old man was reading a paperback book the title of which, Roy noticed, was Night Time Killer. The illustration on the cover depicted a snarling, drooling, wildhaired man dragging a blonde woman wearing a torn green dress into an alley.
“Still bonin’ up on the classics, I see,” Spooky said.
“This was a best seller,” said Rooftop, without lifting his eyes from the page. “Whadda you know about literature?”
“I know you owe me five pins.”
“Four and a half. Al Prince didn’t buy nothin’.”
Using only his left hand Rooftop opened a cigar box that was on the counter, reached in and fingered four dollar bills, laid them down, then fished out two quarters and placed them on top of the singles.
“I’m gonna ask Al Prince if he didn’t.”
Spooky scraped up the money and stuffed it into his right front pants pocket.
“Your friend wanna have a look at the merch?”
“He can’t read.”
“I got some don’t need readin’.”
As the boys walked toward The Pantry, Roy asked Spooky why the old guy was called Rooftop.
“He fell off a garage roof after burglarizin’ an apartment what I hear. Broke both legs, got caught and did a nickel for B and E. It was a light sentence cause he’d dropped the goods, so technically they weren’t in his possession. Chicago’s Finest found him crawlin’ in the alley.”
“What’s his real name?”
“Baumholz. Don’t know his first.”
“Could be he’s related to Famous Frankie Baumholz played outfield for the Cubs.”
“You ever met someone famous?”
“I don’t think so,” said Roy, “but my Uncle Buck told me and my mother he and his new wife, Odile, who’s French, were on an ocean liner comin’ back from France and they met Ernest Hemingway, the writer, who was also a passenger. My uncle said when Hemingway found out Odile was a singer he asked her to sing a song for him in French and she did, so they got friendly and had dinner with Hemingway and his wife a couple times during the voyage.”
“This guy ever wrote a best seller?”
“Lots of ’em, I think. My mother said his picture was on the cover of Life magazine.”
“Maybe he’s the author of Night Time Killer.”
Just as the boys entered the diner rain started coming down hard.
“My older brother Ben’s friend Skinny Fazzoletto says the best time to rob houses is when it’s rainin’ because rain makes it easier to get away without bein’ seen or identified. People are too busy tryin’ to get where they’re goin’ without gettin’ wet to notice you.”
“Is Skinny Fazzoletto a burglar?”
“Not at the moment. At present he’s sittin’ out a jolt in Indiana. Got nabbed bein’ in a truck full of stolen furniture after the driver lost control and went off the road durin’ a rainstorm.”
Roy lost track of Spooky Spiegelman after fifth grade when the Spiegelman family moved away from Chicago. Roy always remembered when Spooky moved because it was the year the White Sox traded Chico Carrasquel to Cleveland and Luis Aparicio took over at shortstop. Thirty years later Roy watched a movie on late night television called Night Time Killer. It was crudely made and the plot was simple: a deranged man, played by the hunky but sullen-faced actor Steve Cochran, stood half-hidden in doorways at night waiting for an unaccompanied female to pass by, then following and attacking her from behind before dragging her into an alley where he strangled her to death. No attempt at an explanation for the strangler’s aberrant behavior was made except for a cop’s comment to another cop that “The world is full of maniacs whose only excuse is that when they were a kid their mother didn’t pay ’em enough attention. Well, I couldn’t wait to get away from my old lady, she was always gettin’ on me for somethin’ I done wrong.” The other cop grunted and said, “Yeah, me, too. Maybe that’s why we’re cops.” In the end the killer assaults a female cop wearing a sexy dress who struggles out of his grasp, pulls her revolver and shoots him dead. Roy scrutinized the credits and saw that the movie was based on a novel by a woman named Juanita Mimoso, and the screenplay had been written by S. Spiegel.
Roy was surprised that the author of the novel was supposedly a woman but he was convinced that S. Spiegel was really Spencer “Spooky” Spiegelman. Roy never saw the movie again, nor did he ever notice another screenwriting credit attributed to S. Spiegel, about whom Roy did some research but failed to unearth any information other than that one credit for Night Time Killer. A few years later, however, Roy saw an episode of a cops and criminals tv show about a man who burglarized houses on rainy days whom the newspapers dubbed The Rainy Day Robber. The writing of the episode was credited to Rooftop Perkins.
Constantinople
Roy was eight years old when he learned from his mother that her grandfather, Roy’s great grandfather Boris, had been a violinist in an orchestra in Constantinople, Turkey, during the penultimate decade of the 19th century. Originally from Russia, Boris had gone from there to Constantinople with his wife, Hattie, Roy’s great grandmother, in the 1880s, then emigrated to Chicago, Illinois, in 1890. Roy’s great aunt, Sophia, was born in Constantinople, and his grandmother, Rose, the family’s first American, was born in Chicago in 1892.
Many years later research into family genealogy revealed a photograph of Roy’s great grandfather with his violin seated among other members of a little orchestra in Constantinople. He was thrilled. This small orchestra consisted of men on tuba, flute, clarinet, bass fiddle and three violins (of which Boris played one), and two children, boys, one on drum, the other on trumpet.
When Roy was in the fifth grade, in 1955, during the course of a class discussion about family histories, he mentioned that his great aunt Sophia had been born in Constantinople. Several boys in the classroom laughed at him, certain that he was lying in order to make his family sound more exotic and colorful. After these students stopped laughing, Roy added that his great grandfather had been a violinist in an orchestra in Constantinople, which provoked more derisive laughter. After class, in the schoolyard, a boy named Eddie Koslov, one of the kids who had doubted Roy’s claims, repeated his accusation that he had invented this story, so Roy punched him in the face. Koslov cried and ran away. When decades later Roy saw the photograph of his great grandfather Boris with the orchestra in Constantinople holding his violin, he wished that he could show it to Eddie Koslov and punch him in the face again.
The Same Place in Space
“There’s a bunch of guys followin’ us,” said Chuck Danko, “black guys.”
Three other boys, including Roy, all of whom were thirteen or fourteen years old, turned and looked behind them as they walked.
“They’re pretty big,” Jimmy Boyle said. “Older than us.”
Roy and his friends were walking on Lake Street in The Loop on a freezing cold and windy late Saturday afternoon in February. They had just come from seeing the movie Giant at the State & Lake theater.
“If they start somethin’,” said Richie Gates, “we should split in four different directions.”
“No,” Jimmy said, “if they get one of us then the rest of us can help him. There’s six of them.”
One of the black kids ran up and shoved Richie.
“Where you goin’, punk?” he said.
Richie turned around and shoved him back. The kid was three or four inches taller than Richie. The other black guys walked up and stared hard at Roy’s back. Everybody stood still.
“Y’all in a hurry?” said the kid who’d shoved Richie.
“How much money you got?” another kid said. “Prob’ly all you boys got your allowances, huh? How much allowances you get?”
“Chester!” said Roy. “How are you, man?”
Th
e tallest and most muscular-looking one of the black kids looked at Roy, then smiled and said, “Hey, Roy, what you up to?”
Roy and Chester both came forward and shook hands.
“Just saw Giant, the new James Dean movie.”
“Any good?”
“Yeah, long, though. James Dean looks kind of funny made up as an old guy.”
“He was killed in a car wreck, wasn’t he?” asked Chester.
“Yes, drivin’ a racing Porsche on a highway in California. Farmer in a pick-up truck named Donald Gene Turnupseed ran into him from a side road.”
“You know this kid, Chester?” said the boy who’d asked about allowances.
“We played ball together last summer,” Chester said.
“Chicago Park District All-Stars,” said Roy. “Chester was the catcher, I played third.”
“How old are you now, Roy?”
“Fourteen.”
“Roy was the youngest player on the team. He can hit.”
“You gonna play again this year?” Roy asked.
Chester shook his head. “Too old, I’m seventeen now. Playin’ football, basketball and baseball for Lost Sons of Egypt.”
“You’re a great catcher, Chester, and a real power hitter.”
“A coach from Notre Dame come to see me play football, says I can be a good linebacker, maybe make All-American.”
Roy’s friends huddled behind him and Chester’s boys backed off.
“You guys just hangin’ out?” said Roy.
“Omar here only messin’ with your friend. Nobody be botherin’ you.”
“Great to see you, Chester.”
They shook hands again.
“Let’s get goin’ fellas,” Chester said. He and his bunch turned and walked away. Omar lingered for a few seconds and sneered at Richie before joining Chester and the others.
“Wow, good thing you recognized that guy, Roy,” said Jimmy Boyle.
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