Hannah would let Jimmy’s answering machine pick up the phone. Then she’d listen and decide if she wanted to talk. Her mother had already called three times. The second and third times she started off by saying, “Hannah, I know you’re there,” so Hannah just turned down the volume.
If there’d only been a volume switch like that my whole life, she thought to herself.
It was seven o’clock. She was going to watch Marty Perez’s show, Chronicle, and then Entertainment Tonight.
Now the phone rang, and when the machine picked up she heard him saying, “This is DiMaggio.”
She pictured him leaving his message, serious in his blue suit, with those sort of sleepy-looking brown eyes and black hair with some gray getting into it, ready to smile but not giving in. Harvey and Jimmy had told her to stay away from him. Except that all of a sudden, Hannah didn’t care what Harvey and Jimmy said.
DiMaggio was saying something about New Jersey, having spent his afternoon over there when Hannah picked up.
“Mr. Second Opinion,” she said.
“Guilty,” he told her.
“Somebody has to be,” Hannah said, and smiled to herself. Sometimes she surprised herself, getting off a one-liner right away and not having it come to her later.
“What are you doing right now?”
Hannah said, “Reading.” Then, not waiting, she said, “Where are you calling me from? You said you were in New Jersey today?”
“I’m back now. I’ll tell you all about it if you have dinner with me.”
Hannah tried to picture him in something other than a blue suit, couldn’t.
“What do you say?” he said, trying to sound casual about it.
“I’m not even supposed to be talking to you.”
“Have dinner with me. We won’t talk about anything you don’t want to talk about.”
Hannah said, “I hear you’ve been talking to my friends.”
“A few.”
“The cops talk to them first, then you come along. Or you talk to them first. They don’t have time to talk to me anymore. They’re too busy talking to you and the cops.”
“It’s a living,” he said, making it sound like a joke somehow.
“They say you know everything about me except what time I walk my dog.”
DiMaggio said, “You don’t have a dog.”
Hannah laughed. It felt good. Maybe he was funny. It seemed like she was surrounded now by people who were never funny, who were always grim these days. A grim brother. A grim lawyer. Even Beth—a grim shrink.
Hannah thought: Who am I kidding? Even me. A grim me.
“Can you give me half an hour?”
“I’ll meet you downstairs.”
“Dress casual?”
“Whatever.”
Hannah said, “No lawyering.”
“I promise.”
She said, “Mr. Second Opinion.”
DiMaggio said, “You don’t know the half of it.”
“I wanted to see where they came from,” he was saying to her, “but that wasn’t all of it. I wanted to spend some time with Collins, not just see what he was like cut off from Adair, but in a place where he might not be on every minute.”
They were sitting in the back room at Antolotti’s, one of his favorites. On Forty-ninth, between First and Second. DiMaggio had called Sonny Antolotti, the owner, and told him they didn’t want to be bothered. So there was nobody else back there.
He sipped a Corona. Hannah Carey had a Diet Coke in front of her with a lime in it. She was wearing a camel blazer. Her turtleneck was either navy or black, DiMaggio couldn’t tell in the light.
She didn’t do anything with the opening about Richie Collins.
“What’s it like?” she said. “Over there, I mean.”
“Here’s what it’s like: I rode around over there and walked around and wondered if I would have been tough enough to get by, much less get out.”
“It’s bad,” she said.
“Don’t get me wrong,” DiMaggio said. “There’s nice places, too, where you can see the city across the river. But the projects where Adair and Collins come from might as well be another country. Or on the goddamn moon.”
The waiter brought a plate with bite-sized pizza slices on it and set it between them. “On Sonny,” he said. Sonny Antolotti was a big ball fan DiMaggio had met when he was with the Yankees. The season he got those hits on the last day to get over .200, Sonny was hip to the significance of not ending up under .200 and treated it as if DiMaggio had won the batting championship. He bought DiMaggio and his flight attendant dinner on the house.
“So you spent the day with Richie Collins,” Hannah said, bringing it back to him on her own. Surprising him.
“You don’t have to talk about him if you don’t want to.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” she said. “Tell me more about Jersey City.”
“Why are you so interested?”
She said, “I’m interested in them, too.” He studied her hands, palms flat on the table in front of her. Big hands for a big girl, but with slender fingers and nail polish just a slightly darker shade than the pale hands themselves. DiMaggio thought about tracing them on the white tablecloth the way you did when you were a kid. Taking his time.
They were beautiful hands.
Now she said, “I’m just not interested in spending any more time with them.” Hannah Carey took the swizzle stick out of her Diet Coke and held it the way you would a cigarette.
DiMaggio said, “The funny thing with him, Collins, was he seemed so proud of all the places he was showing me. But then telling me over and over, every few minutes, how happy he was to be away from there.”
Hannah Carey said to DiMaggio, “You sound like you might feel a little bit bad for them.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not it.”
“Are you sure?”
DiMaggio noticed a tiny scar over her right eye. You could almost miss it. A tiny pockmark. And he noticed that in Antolotti’s dim lights, her blue eyes seemed almost gray. She was locked in on him the way she had been on Hollywood Bob.
Like the pretty girl in the front row of class staring up at the professor. She was looking at him that way and getting him to do the talking when DiMaggio wanted it to be the other way around.
DiMaggio said, “I don’t feel bad for them because of the projects or Jersey City. You start explaining things away that way, you can explain away every cheap crackhead punk with a gun and an attitude. I just think I understand them a little better is all. I’ve got a frame of reference now, especially with Richie Collins.”
“Why him and not—?”
“Ellis? Because he’s black and Richie isn’t.”
“It matters?”
“In those projects I saw, yeah, it matters. There’re other places, lots of places, where I’d say the black guy had to be tougher, not just to survive, but to go on and do something. Just not at Lafayette and Booker T.” He paused. “Richie Collins is probably every lousy thing people say he is as a human being. But he’s tough enough.”
“It always comes back to that,” she said. “With you guys.”
“Which guys?”
She smiled and said, “All guys.”
DiMaggio said, “You know, I’d rather talk about you.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Where you came from, I mean.”
“It’s like Mother always said,” Hannah Carey said. “Take a look at the Official Airlines Guide.”
He said, “Tell me about it.”
Keep her talking.
The best Sheila Carey ever did was Top Ten twice, Hannah said. Ahead of Betty Stove, that big Dutch girl, one time. She made the quarterfinals of Wimbledon once, the quarterfinals of the Open. That was it. Her tennis never made her a celebrity.
It was being on the circuit and having kids that made her a celebrity.
“My mother likes to tell people now that she was the first nineties woman,” Hannah said. “Only it was the seventies.”
She had started out on the tour as a teenager, decided she wasn’t going to make it, dropped out, got herself a teaching job outside Philadelphia, married the head pro at the club. She had Hannah when she was twenty, Jimmy fourteen months later. The head pro died in a car accident. Sheila Carey got herself back in shape and decided to take one more crack at the tour.
“She packed up a dozen Wilson rackets, Jimmy, and me,” Hannah said.
So in the winter they traveled the circuit that Billie Jean King built, then it was to Europe for the spring and early summer, then Wimbledon and then to tournaments in Switzerland and Sweden and Austria. Sheila Carey told them they were seeing the world. At Antolotti’s Hannah said, “Every once in a while we’d see a castle or a museum even. The rest of the time I got to see the backseat of the courtesy car or the women’s locker room. Or Mother’s match.”
DiMaggio said it didn’t sound like much of a way to be a kid, and Hannah said, “I never felt like a kid. I always felt like a spectator with a locker-room pass.”
Hannah started playing tennis at thirteen, learning the game from all the big names, taking to it much more easily than Jimmy did; Jimmy’s part was being the darling of all the players, the straights and the lesbians both. He was the prettier of the two of them. “He was prettier even then,” Hannah said, lifting her shoulders and then letting them drop. They all loved Jimmy. The attention neither of them got from their mother, they got from all the other players. Jimmy, she said, seemed to need it more.
“My pretend game was that I wasn’t even there,” Hannah said. “Where’s Hannah? Oh, there she is.”
DiMaggio thought: Ellis Adair wasn’t the only one who wanted to be invisible.
Hannah said her mother fell out of the Top Ten after a year. Then she was out of the Top Twenty, and then she was out of the rankings completely and they were living in Roslyn, Long Island. She remarried, a plastic surgeon. “Dad Number Two,” Hannah said. Jimmy was packed off to Phillips Exeter. At sixteen, Hannah was a good enough tennis prospect to be the best girl at a place called the Port Washington Tennis Academy.
And she hated it.
“It isn’t even probably a surprise, though, that my mother looked at my tennis completely differently than I did,” she said. “But then Mother has always looked at everything completely differently than I did.”
DiMaggio asked, “Stage mom?”
Hannah said, “It was even more than that. All my life, she didn’t know what to do with me. Like she didn’t know who I was supposed to be? Now it was easy for her. I was going to be her.”
Sheila Carey decided she didn’t need some Aussie kid nobody’d ever heard of to teach her kid tennis. Sheila took over, and then when she thought Hannah was ready, she shipped her down to Melbourne, Florida, and now Hannah wasn’t just the best girl at the Port Washington Tennis Academy; she felt like she was in the tennis army.
She was seventeen by then, taking a few high school–equivalency courses in the morning and living in a dorm with girls who had come to Melbourne from all over the world.
Hannah hated them all. “Talking backhands.” She started sneaking out at night and getting drunk.
“I was seventeen but looked older,” Hannah said. “I was as tall as I am now. I didn’t have too much trouble getting guys to buy me drinks.”
There were a couple of warnings from the guy who owned the tennis academy, Billy Ranieri, and then a trip down to Melbourne by her mother. Hannah would go a few weeks being a good girl, and then finally she borrowed a coach’s car and mis-timed the automatic gate in front of Billy Ranieri’s Tennis Academy and totaled the car and was out of there.
“I came back to Long Island and finished high school and tried college for a couple of years and Europe for one year,” Hannah smiled. “I’m running out of gas here. Before long, I was one of a million girls in the big city going from aspiring model to aspiring actress and to waitress and then I had too much to drink again one night and got raped. I’m trying not to drink anymore, or get raped. And that is all the talking I care to do about me tonight.”
DiMaggio said, “No follow-up questions?”
Hannah said, “I’ve already told you more than I should have.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you found out about me.”
“Why don’t you let me ask a few questions.”
“No.” Someone dimmed the lights behind them. Now Hannah’s eyes looked blue again. She was smiling again. DiMaggio couldn’t tell whether she was playing with him or not. He felt it again, the way he did when he watched her from Ted Salter’s secret room at the Garden: The conversation was all over the place, but she was the one moving it around.
“I’d rather talk about you,” she said. “What’s the matter with your hands? I look at you sometimes and it’s like they’re hurting you so much you want to scream.”
“I have arthritis,” he said. “They get a little stiff sometimes, that’s all.”
She stared at his hands until he slid them off the table and put them in his lap.
“Liar,” she said softly.
“Let’s order,” DiMaggio said.
It was after ten when DiMaggio paid the check. He had spent most of dinner telling her about his baseball career. She was a good listener. So he told her about Tony DiMaggio and the pink flamingos and learning to play the piano.
It was more than he usually told.
When they got outside to Forty-ninth, Hannah said, “Well.”
There was some wind up off the East River. It was as if DiMaggio felt the first breath of winter, even as autumn was just beginning.
“You want to take a walk?” he said.
“I’d like that,” Hannah Carey said.
They walked over to First and took a left and started uptown.
“It was different with you and the piano,” Hannah said. “I mean, different than tennis was with me.”
“How so?”
“I couldn’t stand my mother and couldn’t stand tennis. You don’t seem so crazy about your dad, but you love the music.”
“I think it was a way of asking him to take me with him,” DiMaggio said. “Before I really got to know him.”
Hannah said, “You haven’t talked about your mother at all.”
They were on the west side of First, waiting for the light at Fifty-first.
“You did have a mother, didn’t you?” Hannah said, trying to make a joke of it.
“I’ve talked enough,” DiMaggio said.
“Something happened to her, didn’t it?” Hannah said. “You don’t have to tell me—”
Why not? DiMaggio thought. What the hell.
“She got raped,” he said.
His mother always drank, even when Tony DiMaggio was still playing in local bands on Long Island—he actually had his own for a while, “Tony DiMaggio and the Yankee Clippers”—before he hit the road for good.
“I’d come home from school,” DiMaggio told Hannah. “I mean when I was eleven, twelve, in there, and my mom would be asleep in front of the television set, watching some soap opera, The Guiding Light or The Edge of Night, and the ashtray would be full of Viceroy butts, she smoked Viceroys, and there’d be an empty bottle of Four Roses, sometimes tipped over on the rug next to her chair.”
She’d wake up crying sometimes when she heard him getting a snack or going out to play ball and beg him not to tell his father. But even as a kid, he remembered wondering why his father would care about his mother’s drinking when he didn’t care about anything else that happened in the house.
When his father hit the road for good, his mother stepped up the drinking. When DiMaggio was a junior at Commack High School, she started bringing guys home from the saloons.
“They were just guys,” he said. “Cops sometimes. Gas station guys. Didn’t much matter. She’d try to wait until after she knew I’d gone to bed, but sometimes I’d be out late. The year I got my driver’s license, I’d saved up enough in the summer to buy an old Volkswagen convertible, and I’d run into her. Then I’d go to my room. And everything would start the same way. I’d hear the bastards slamming this shitty ice tray we had on the kitchen counter. Then my mother would put a record on. Old stuff. The stuff I like to play now. After a while, I’d hear them moving some of the living room furniture around. My mother loved to dance.”
There was one night when she didn’t come home. DiMaggio, all this time later couldn’t remember why he woke up early the next morning. He’d been a late sleeper as a kid, even alarm clocks couldn’t do the job with him, and half the time his mother, hungover but getting herself together enough to fix him breakfast, would have to shake him awake to get him off to school on time.
Except for this morning.
DiMaggio woke up a little after six and his mother was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, drinking a cup of coffee.
DiMaggio said to Hannah, “Yuban.” Thinking to himself as he did: Richie Collins was right, it was funny the shit you remembered.
His mother’s mascara was all under her eyes. Her stockings were bunched around her knees. It took him a minute to notice that it wasn’t just mascara with one of her eyes. She’d been hit. He saw that her best print dress was ripped on one side, down at the bottom, at the hem. He asked her what happened, and that was when she noticed him standing there.
She looked at him for what he remembered as being a long time. She had boiled some water in a soup pan, boiling an egg, and it was still bubbling; before she said anything, he walked over and moved the pan to another burner.
Then she said something and DiMaggio said, “What?” and his mother said to him, “I said, he made me.”
“Who made you?” he said, and she named a guy he had met at the house one time, a cop.
DiMaggio said, “She looked up at me, I remember this the best, and I saw how old she’d become. Not thinking about the bruise even. Or her makeup. Just how old and sad she looked. And she just said, ‘He made me.’ ”
She had thought they were coming back to the house to drink and dance. But this time the cop drove to this spot he knew, not too far from one of the Commack exits on the LIE, Long Island Expressway. He was drunk already. He told her he wanted to do it here, like the kids he always had to roust did it.
DiMaggio and Hannah crossed First at Fifty-seventh and walked toward Sutton Place, then crossed the street again. There was a small park there, overlooking the East River. They sat down on a bench.
“You know what my mother told him?” DiMaggio said. “ ‘It isn’t nice.’ Imagine that? ‘It isn’t nice.’ Then he raped her. Then there was somebody else getting into the backseat, and she found out that one of his buddies had followed them. He was next.”
She wouldn’t see a doctor. She wouldn’t file charges. They both told her that if she made trouble, they knew she had a son. They knew he drove his little Volkswagen. They knew he wanted to be a baseball star.
So DiMaggio waited outside the bar for a week, trying to screw up his courage. He was set to go home one night when the cop who did it, the one she knew, came stumbling out. DiMaggio got out of the Volkswagen, walked up and hit him twice, knocked him down, before he knew what was happening.
DiMaggio said, “Then he got up.”
He ended up breaking DiMaggio’s nose, and cracking a rib. He was wearing motorcycle boots. He finished him off by stomping on his hands until he broke them.
“Before he left, he knelt down next to me,” DiMaggio said. “And he said, ‘You got your ass kicked for nothing, kid.’ I said, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ And this guy says to me, ‘It means she wanted it.’ ”
That was what started it with his hands.
They sat in silence when he finished, both of them staring across the river at Queens. Finally, DiMaggio said, “Listen, I’m sorry.”
She said, “For what?”
“If it was too close.”
“It was close enough,” she said. “But I had the feeling it was harder for you to tell than it was for me to hear it.”
“I doubt it.”
“No, really.” She turned to face him. She had pulled the collar of her blazer up against the night. “Is that why you’re here? Why you took this case?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Hannah Carey stood up. “She wanted it,” she calmly said to DiMaggio. “That’s what they always say, isn’t it?”