Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

by William Kennedy

  “I’ll see her. I’ll have Ursula take a cab and stay here tonight. She won’t have to do any work, just take care of him. He does what she tells him. She can make a pot of tea with one arm. I’ll pay her double. It’s more important for you to be there if anything needs to be done, things I wouldn’t know how to do. I’ll join you as soon as she gets here.”

  “That’s good on Ursula.”

  “You should do something with that money. You can’t ride around with it.”

  “I’ll do something.”

  Quinn, using a flashlight in his dark garage, its door closed, opened Max’s suitcase in the trunk of his car, separated a hundred and fifty thousand of wrapped cash, and put it in the cloth sack where he kept his road maps. He went down the garage’s interior stairs to the cellar and put the sack on a low shelf beside his electric saw. He found two soft rags and went back up to the garage and rubbed all fingerprints off the exterior and interior of the suitcase. He then did the same to the two top layers of the bundled cash. He had never touched the bottom layers. Max had. He closed and locked the suitcase and the car’s trunk, opened the sliding garage door, and backed the car out into the driveway. He got out and padlocked the garage, and then he got back behind the wheel and headed down Pearl Street toward the war zone.

  He turned onto Van Woert Street to see the burned-out house. The once-Irish street was now mostly black. Two walls had partially collapsed into rubble and spilled into the street, which was wet and blocked by traffic cones. The ruin was three houses away from where George Quinn had been raised by the Galvins, cousins from Clonmel, after his parents died in the ’95 train wreck. The Galvin house was a three-storied twin of the burned house, the Galvins long gone from Van Woert.

  Quinn had met them as a child, making the rounds with George as he collected or delivered numbers money; but George fell out with them in the late ’30s over an unpaid gambling debt. Quinn last visited the house in 1945 when he was a high school senior and went to pick up belongings George had left there in a steamer trunk thirty years earlier.

  Quinn called Ben Galvin, who worked in the paint gang at the West Albany railroad shops, and was the only cousin left on Van Woert Street. Ben found the trunk in the attic, where George thought it might be, and there it sat in Ben’s parlor, open and empty.

  “What’s he want with the trunk?” Ben asked Quinn.

  “He doesn’t want the trunk. He wants the trophies he won in dancing contests, six of them. We talked about them last night. He said his patent leather dancing shoes and a tuxedo were also here.”

  “None of them things were in it,” said Ben. “Only this stuff,” and he pointed to two books lying on top of a packet wrapped in brown paper and tied with cord, and a thick scrapbook jammed with folded newspapers. “Paper is all it is. Paper. That’s the lot.”

  Quinn untied the cord and opened the packet: a manuscript written in ink on linen rag paper. He read the first line. “I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns . . . ” The scrapbook was fat with newspaper clippings about Civil War battles, about Fenian troops on horseback moving from Albany toward Canada in 1866, about Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn. The cloth bindings of both books had been slit and hung loose when Quinn picked them up: The Personal Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, 1888, and Going to See the Hero by Daniel Quinn, 1872. Ben bent over to watch Quinn’s hands closely as he handled the books.

  “You knew about these?”

  “Pop thought there were books here but he didn’t remember what they were. My grandfather was a writer. This is his,” and he held up the Hero book.

  “Can’t be worth much,” Ben said. “Sixty, seventy years old.”

  The dance trophies couldn’t have been worth much either and were probably pawned long ago, along with the tux and shoes. Quinn smoothed the cloth binding of the Hero’s spine. He could glue it.

  “I heard of this book but I never knew we might have it,” he said.

  Quinn guessed Ben had cut the bindings, searching for hidden money. And he thinks it may still be in there someplace and that I know how to get at it.

  “So that’s it?” Quinn said.

  “I should charge him rent for keepin’ it here thirty years.”

  “How much rent would that be?”

  “I’m not that kind of guy,” Ben said.

  Quinn, behind the wheel, stared at the Galvin house, measuring the odyssey that the Hero book had set in motion: a career in news and fiction that would deliver him into the Hemingway orbit, which would lead to the perpetual revolution and Renata, Max, Fidel, Tremont, Matt, others, and ultimately, now, back to George Quinn and the Galvin house. Next stop: the hospital burn unit, and the two latest casualties of this perpetual revolution.

  “George,” said Renata after Quinn’s departure and her call to Ursula, “take off your hat. We’re not going out anymore. It’s a handsome hat. Very stylish.”

  “I had a hat when I came in.”

  He set his hat on top of the bridge lamp. Renata lifted it off and hung it on the coatrack. They sat on opposite ends of the sofa.

  “I loved what you said to Daniel when he asked you about Peg. You said, ‘Don’t you love your girl, for chrissake?’”

  “I said that?”

  “You did. It was a wonderful answer.”

  “All compliments gratefully accepted.”

  “I’ll bet you had a lot of girls in the old days.”

  “There were a few in the shirt factory.”

  “You said Daniel was your only child. You said he was the only one who came to you.”

  “Daniel. Is he the one who owns this place?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “He’s a very nice fella. He could lick his weight in gold.”

  “You said he was your doll.”

  George considered that.

  “My doll.” He paused. “The boy.”

  “Daniel Quinn. Your son.”

  “He was a wonder, smart as a cracker. Shot a hole in one when he was twelve with the driver I gave him.”

  “He’s my husband.”

  “Is that so? I didn’t know. He’ll be a good husband.”

  “Yes, he will. But we haven’t had any children. We’ve had no dolls of our own.”

  “Children come when they want to.”

  “Daniel wants to be a father, but we haven’t been able to make that happen.”

  “If at first you don’t give up.”

  “Yes. That’s good advice. We tried again tonight. I did.”

  But Renata knows she doesn’t have to be a mother of anybody. She was ordained to be a wife, or a lover, and the life she leads is opportune. She goes with what she intuits. She had a chaperone until she was nineteen and three lovers before twenty.

  “I do have a niece who is like a daughter. My sister’s child, Gloria. You know Gloria.”

  “Gloria?”

  “The lovely young blond girl who lives here. You see her every day.”

  “Yes. I think I’ve met her.”

  “She’s in the hospital. She was in a fire on Van Woert Street.”

  Renata’s girl is now scarred because she has Renata in her. The two are alike, out of Margarita, born to ride the wave of willful and passionate change, that wave that was about to separate her and Quinn. But now it throws them together on the shore with Gloria and they will enfold her, and she will be reborn to them in the oddest way. If she doesn’t die.

  “I used to live on Van Woert Street,” George said. “I lived there with my cousins after my parents died.”

  “I know you did. That’s why I mentioned it.”

  “I remember the Fitzgeralds had a fire several doors down from us. The firemen saved the cellar.”

  “Gloria was seriously burned tonight. So was Roy.”

  “Roy who?”

  “Roy Mason. The son of Cody Mason. Cody played the piano tonight.”

  “Cody Mason’s a good fella.”

  “So is
Roy. The fire was deliberately set in Roy’s house. Somebody wanted to hurt him. Or kill him. They didn’t kill him but the fire killed a man upstairs.”

  “Who would do a thing like that?”

  “People who fear Roy because he’s angry about what happens to black people. He talks about it publicly, gives people a voice.”

  “Black people have problems,” George said. “They try to do their stuff and those fossie-fossies pick them right up and take them around.”

  “Fossie-fossies,” Renata said. “You mean forces? Bosses? Falsies? Fossils? What does that mean?”

  “Fossie fossils, that’s it, the boys with the money,” George said. “People who don’t have any money don’t have any luck. They hit the number once in a while but it’s stacked against them. Sometimes they don’t even collect when they do get a hit. The boys refuse to pay them off. They’ve got to change their luck. When you’re lucky you can strike oil in the attic.”

  “Very true, George. You know we’ve got money now.”

  “We do?”

  “Much more than we’ve ever had in this family. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but it could be almost a million dollars.”

  “If you’ve got a million dollars you could be my best friend.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Would you like a cold beer?”

  “After the dog a cold beer is man’s best friend.”

  “Good. Ursula will be here in fifteen minutes. Drink your beer and when Ursula comes you can go up to bed. She’ll stay over and take good care of you.”

  She brought him an Irish Cream Ale and a glass and then opened the phonograph and put on a Mitch Miller sing-along, because it had some waltzes, “You Tell Me Your Dream” and “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Daniel had bought half a dozen Mitch Millers for George and played them randomly and often to ease his anxiety—the music of his day, lyrical suggestion to soothe the ravaged memory. Sometimes George sat and listened, or hummed along. Sometimes he left the room. Renata had the impulse to give him some of their new money, let him buy what he wanted; but he wouldn’t know what to buy, or where to buy it. He was off the money standard. He’d leave torn bits of newspaper or maybe a folded tie on the kitchen table after breakfast as a tip for Renata, the waitress. Mitch and his chorus were singing “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.”

  “That’s a waltz,” George said,

  “Yes, and you’re a prize waltzer.”

  “I do waltz. Yes, I do.” He put down his beer and stood up. “Would you do me the honor?”

  “Certainly,” she said, “but I’m not in your league.”

  “As long as you can move your feet.”

  He buttoned his suit coat, embraced her, and moved her forward into a pivot in the open space between the parlor and dining room. She followed him, a very strong leader, with ease, and she felt she was moving in her mother’s footsteps. She really should be at the hospital with her Gloria but here she was dancing with her father-in-law. Was this at the edge of some sort of primal scene? She drew back slightly from the embrace so she could look at his face. He was smiling, not at her but reveling in his own artistry as he moved her with astonishing control. He is dancing me back in time, she decided, he’s dead to this day but alive in history: you are dancing with a ghost, Renata.

  Mitch sang:“A garden of Eden, just made for two,

  With nothing to mar our joy . . . ”

  She tried to picture what Matt told her about George with the bat, hitting the man who was beating up Roy, because Roy looked like George’s black friend of sixty years gone, another ghost. George had moved with speed and purpose as he whacked the man’s head just once, which crumpled him, and his grip on Roy fell away. George dropped the bat and crossed the street, then off he went into the ridiculously dangerous night.

  “You had a big day today, George,” she said.

  “Did I? Maybe I did.”

  “You certainly did. You got lost in the city, you got cut and went to the hospital, you had a romance, you were in a fight, a race riot, and a shooting, you went to a house of prostitution and a concert, you danced a waltz, and you serenaded a very lovely woman who seems to be in love with you.”

  “I wouldn’t go into those places.”

  “Of course not, only in emergencies.”

  “I don’t fancy romance. Romance isn’t qualified.”

  “But it does happen. We all know that romance is wonderful, George, and it’s a great adventure.”

  “It has some inferences.”

  On they danced, George holding her in a way that some might consider ardent, his traditional style, obviously absurd, yet there it was—the music the nostalgic lyrics, the movement itself arousing in her what was unseemly and must not even be contemplated. But it was in her as it had been after the shooting in the Montmartre, as it had been when she relieved her grief over Diego in the arms of the stranger Quinn. What was also rising was her intense hatred of the would-be assassins of Roy and Gloria, the racist killers, the politicians, the provocateurs, whoever they are, the faceless enemy. She thought of Oshun and of going to Gloria’s apartment to find the Oshun necklace Gloria had left behind when she fled. Renata had given her that necklace for her twenty-first birthday, affinities of beauty. Beauty save beauty now—and she conjured Oshun to join her and George in this peculiar dance. When she closed her eyes she could see the beautiful Orisha and the dance became a ritual: keeping together in time—life, love, and death moving to a three-quarter beat.

  The invoked presence of Oshun truly moved her and she clutched George tightly. He reacted by whirling her into a dizzying cycle of turns, the movement generating an excitement in her that she had felt driving into danger with Diego; and such angry defiance she had not known since after the Selma March; she would do anything to neutralize the haters. But her unconditional embrace of the movement had been rejected in the following months in the name of black power, whites no longer welcome. Conditioning worthiness to serve the cause on skin color was not her kind of revolution. In Cuba revolution had always been racial. Diego looked white but he believed he had black blood. She felt new pressure now to do something against the enemy. She and Quinn could find some way to send the message. Maybe they could do it with the new money. You can do anything with money. As the song ended she saw Ursula step out of a taxi and walk toward the front stoop. She broke from George, kissed him on the cheek, then kissed him again, almost on the mouth. She went to the phone to call a cab. In the hospital she would find a corner, or an empty room, and make love with Quinn.

  The doorbell rang.

  Quinn entered the hall, his very black hair thick in a torsion to the right, giving him the air of a casual savant with warrior tendencies. He smiled at the group, mostly men, a few women among them. The audience seemed to be diminishing, but so imperceptibly that he wasn’t sure it was happening. He had his text in hand but did not look at it as he spoke.

  “All wars are similar,” he said. “We have just witnessed the battle intensifying from matriarchal complaint to anarchic threat. With four unfinished, unfinishable books the warrior Hemingway hung the sign ‘Former Writer’ on the door of his room at the Mayo Clinic, where he was receiving shock treatments.”

  No one seemed to understand the connection Quinn was making.

  “Money is the evil the poor cannot do without. La buena vida es cara. The good life is expensive. There are other ways of life that are not expensive, but that’s not life.” Then he added, rhythmically, “Doosaday sosadah spokety spone.”

  The audience erupted with raucous laughter and Quinn grew confident, even though only a handful remained in the hall. He spoke about political duplicity and how we need it to survive, which was a gaffe, for everyone in the audience was dead.

  “We treat our political divinities like pets,” he said. “Without the resolute will to enter into significance, there can be no access to the heroic.”

  He expected major applause from this remark but the two remaining wom
en in the room silently left their chairs.

  “Ours is a cosmos in motion,” he said, “moving relentlessly in an arc of justice.” He smiled, fully aware his remarks were menacing. The room was now empty.

  “In an arc of justice,” he said.

  What a line.

  “In an arc of justice,” he said again.

  Always leave ‘em laughing.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel is full of true stories of both revolutions it addresses, and of the people in them. I have changed dates and names, and telescoped time and events to control the story; any real people have been reimagined.

  I am indebted to many Cubans for providing me with personal or historical memories of the revolution, most notably Natalia Bolívar Aróstegui, who gave me abundant access to her remarkable life story; I have drawn on it, but she should not be held accountable for the behavior of any Cuban women in this novel, unless she wants to be. I am also profoundly grateful to Norberto Fuentes, a longtime friend and chronicler of the revolution in fiction and nonfiction. His counsel on Cuban political and cultural history has been invaluable to this book.

  Among the many witnesses to the revolution who told me stories I must mention Manuel Penebaz, the late Amadeo Lopez Castro, the artists Aldo Menéndez and Ivonne Ferrer, Rafael Del Pino, Patricia Gutiérrez, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, the late filmmaker Tomas Gutiérrez Alea, Helmo Hernández, Pablo Armando Fernández, Gabriel García Márquez, Richard Burton of Miami, William Irizarry, Max Lesnick; also Joanne Dearcopp, the late artist Peter Taylor of Troy, who knew Hemingway; also Omar Gonzalez, Alfredo Guevara, and Fidel Castro.

  There are too many books to list but I must note an important few: El Asalto al Palacio Presidencial by Faure Chomón; Asalto, edited by Míriam Zito; The Mambi-Land by James J. O’Kelly; Diary of the Cuban Revolution by Carlos Franqui; Cuba by Hugh Thomas; Episodes of the Revolutionary War by Ernesto Che Guevara; Salida 19, Operación Comando by William Gálvez Rodriguez; Fidel Castro: My Life with Ignacio Ramonet; The Autobiography of Fidel Castro by Norberto Fuentes; Fidel by Tad Szulc; Behind the Burnt Cork Mask by William J. Mahar; Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Writings of Daryl Pinckney, Julian Mayfield, and Caryl Phillips were of particular importance, as was a Florida State University master’s thesis by Scott Freeland, Kinking the Stereotype: Barbers and Hairstyles as Signifiers of Authentic American Racial Performance.