25

New York, 1953

Tom left the hospital with Ellie and walked her the few blocks left to the boardwalk, into the wind off the ocean. There were a few people strolling the boards, despite the hour and the season. Men with lunch pails coming back from the subway and work, walking quickly toward home. Older women wrapped up in layers of shawls and walking slowly, staring out at the breakers. A couple of schoolkids laughing and thumping the boards as hard as they could as they ran off to dinner. Out on the old Dreamland pilings a single fisherman sat perfectly still near the end of the pier, his line swaying in the water as he turned into a silhouette.

Off to the east, they could see where the Gut once stood, the old year-round neighborhood—most of its wooden bungalows and its low brick tenements now pulverized into rubble by Robert Moses’s crews. Among the wreckage three big yellow bulldozers sat stilled for the night, like burned-out tanks Tom remembered in ruined Italian villages.

“The lousy bastard,” Ellie said ritually, with no real vehemence.

They walked on in silence, arm in arm, until they reached Lulu’s, the only place still open off-season. It was no more than a long bar, a hot-plate counter, and a collection of salt-battered wooden chairs and tables, with a few carny games off to one side. It was completely open to the sea, and every time a new breeze swept in, the bartender looked apprehensively at the ketchup bottles and the napkin dispensers where they jangled along the tabletops.

He sat her down at one of the tables as far back in the joint as he could find and went to get two coffees from the bar. There were only a couple of other patrons, pounding diligently through their beers while standing at the rail, as if they were being made to drink as a punishment. To the side, a pair of teenagers were fooling sullenly with the Skee-Ball games, the thunk of the ball the only sound in the bar the wind didn’t make.

She looked up at him when he brought their coffees over, her eyes wary and expectant. There was still a hint of mischief in them, he noticed—the exuberance of a woman still in the first throes of love. He knew that he would never see that look again after he told her what he was going to tell her, and already he regretted it more than anything he had ever done.

“So, we’re alone. If we get any more alone, we’re going to be swept out to sea,” she said, her every joking word tearing him up inside. “What’s the big news? Something the Old Man told you?”

He took a first, slow sip of his coffee, still too hot, letting it scald his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Shivering anyway in the wind at his back.

“I slept with my brother’s wife,” he said, telling it all at once, the only way he could get it out. Making himself watch her face fall as he said it. The eyes uncomprehending at first, the glint in them frozen there, then stunned, then falling in disappointment. The small smile that was on her lips vanishing.

“I see,” she said.

“No, you don’t,” he told her. “Because I still can’t see it myself.”

 

It started down in Florida. Late in Charlie’s first term, when the sheen of the office was gone and he was being worn down by the job more every day. By how everything was an emergency, all the time, and the strikes and the threats to strike, and the endless budget meetings and speeches. The papers hounding them all around town, even when he tried to take Slim up to Saratoga for a weekend. Charlie screaming at the reporters from the porch of the Grand Union Hotel, “It’s the end of this circus! We’re cutting short our stay!”

Actually, Tom knew, it had started long before that. It had started the first time he saw her, in that rose-colored suit at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central station. A stupid boy’s crush, he’d told himself, and he’d tried staying away to get over it. Busying himself out at his law offices in Brooklyn, and with his “children’s crusades,” as Charlie liked to call them. Not trusting himself even to speak when he was around her, beyond the most perfunctory noises—so much so that she joked about it during the depleted Sunday dinners they still had in Bay Ridge, just frequently enough to keep the tradition going.

“I think your brother Tom hates me,” she’d tease him, and Charlie would laugh and tell her, “No, no, he’s just tongue-tied by yer beauty,” and then she would laugh, too, and Tom would smile, wanting to say that it was true. Her green eyes shining, blond hair drawn back behind her in a ponytail, maybe still in her tennis whites after an afternoon spent trying to teach Charlie the game. He’d watch Charlie watching her, and he knew that he was thinking the same thing, unable to fathom how anyone could be so confident in her own skin.

“It was lust, pure lust, that was all,” he swore to Ellie. “And all the more shameful for it.”

“But lust for what?” she asked, looking at him closely above her coffee cup.

He knew she was right—knew that it was always more than just the beautiful, green-flecked eyes, or the blond hair, or the slender, aristocrat’s body that drew both him and Charlie. It was the past, as well. Everything that she was, and that she had been molded and shaped to be, through three hundred years of her family’s history.

The golden girl of the golden land. Her forefathers’ empire reaching all the way to the Western Sea, at last—and beyond. Selling the kerosene to light the lamps of China. Carrying the flag forward, and a cash box under one arm . . .

He had seen her in the papers, bits and pieces here and there, more of course after Charlie started squiring her around. Out on the town with her sister, a matching, sloe-eyed, black-haired beauty to Slim’s blonde—Those Fabulous Sadler Girls at 21! Her companions the likes of Grace Kelly, Wallis Simpson, foreign princes, and Hollywood producers. Laughing, smiling, gazing with alarming frankness right into the camera. Never vulgar, never drunk or overexcited, but carrying herself always with perfect aplomb in the highest of high society.

It was the one thing he never found mysterious about his older brother. He understood perfectly why he had to have her. The only trouble was that he did, too.

 

He swore he would stop accepting invitations to the Sunday dinners at the Bay Ridge house, and for a time that worked. They weren’t the same, anyway, haunted now by the absence of Jimmy, and Claire, even in her wheelchair. But then Charlie went into the hospital for the second time for heart palpitations, after the debacle in Saratoga. It was then that he finally got Slim to agree to marry him. She was at his bedside every day while he complained, telling him finally, “Look, if you want some privacy, why don’t you make it? You’re the mayor.”

“There’s nothing so private as a married couple,” he told her.

The plan was for Tom to take her down to Florida in secret, on the plane, while Charlie went alone by train to draw away the press, telling them he just wanted to rest and recuperate. Tom was supposed to stash her away before the wedding, at a place on Hobe Sound owned by a retired doctor and his wife Charlie knew from back in the City—a mossy old Spanish villa surrounded by a small state’s worth of lush, green lawn on every side.

Their hosts gave them a motor launch to use, and they would pack a lunch and take it out every morning while they waited to hear that the last reporter had given up and it was safe to come out now. Cruising slowly in and out of the inland waterways around the Sound, staring at the sheer fecundity of the world around them. The huge, primeval trees. The swift black and white and brown birds with long orange beaks that darted over the water and the high marsh grasses. Sometimes he even noticed an alligator move grudgingly into the black, algaed water and trail noiselessly after them for a little while, with only its hooded, reptile eyes above the water.

She treated him like a little brother at first when they were together, although they were almost the same age. Driving him wild with the clothes she’d wear, high-fashion trousers as soft as pajamas, taffeta skirts so light they’d lift in the faintest breeze, constantly revealing a glimpse of leg. Teasing him over the stiff city clothing he was wearing, and how little he knew about boats, even though he insisted on driving.

“Charlie would never forgive me if something happened with a woman at the wheel,” he told her, titillated though he was to find himself with a woman who knew of boats—and tennis, and no doubt horses and high tea, as well. He let her take him into town to buy him some proper boating whites and deck shoes, blushing furiously as she marched him up and down the sleepy little department store in front of a bemused clerk, insisting that he try on the pants in the curtained dressing room.

“Can I come in and see?” she asked, and stepped in through the curtain before he could reply. The clerk was off across the store at the moment, and he was very aware of how close they were in the little room. Her hand on his belt, pulling up the pants a little, both of them looking him over in the mirror.

“Now, there’s a sight for ya—the Irish navy!” he told her, though he could see only her at his side, svelte and tanned in a pair of white shorts and almost as tall as he was. Holding a hand to her mouth while she giggled and poked at him—but both of them still looking at each other in the mirror.

“You look wonderful. Like a regular commodore,” she told him, though the next morning when they went out to the launch again, she surprised him by tripping him, then jumping on top and rolling him over across the wet green lawn and the loamy dirt.

“Hey! What about my beautiful new boat clothes?” he said, laughing.

“Don’t you know that being rich is all about not looking the part?” she said, mashing a handful of grass into his shirt. Laughing as she straddled him, her long bare legs against his hips—then jumping up just as quickly and running for the boat, Tom jogging sheepishly after her.

“You know, Charlie’s the same way,” she told him when they were deep into the sluggish, winding creeks and rivers that made up most of the waterway. “I know it sounds fantastic, but he’s never even set foot on a pleasure boat.”

“There wasn’t much call for them around Bohola, we being landlocked an’ all that.”

She slapped his shoulder playfully.

“You laugh, but it’s true! I don’t think he’s ever worn a pair of shorts in his life. He’s never had a real fishing pole in his hands, never so much as tried to swim. He’s a man who has known only work.”

“What else is a man supposed to know?” he said, keeping his eyes ahead for half-sunken trees and vines.

“A lot. We’re borrowing a yacht for the honeymoon, from another friend of his. I want him to get to know what pleasure is. I’m scared he’s going to work himself to death in that job.”

“I am, too,” he said, looking at her gravely. “It’s a good thing you’re doing for him. You’re a good thing for him.”

“Well, thank you, sir.” She laughed, but to his surprise he saw that she was blushing.

They stopped at an abandoned old pier for lunch, the only sign of the house it had belonged to a pair of crumbling brick chimneys up the hill. There she spread the contents of the picnic basket genteelly out along the rotting, gray-green planks. Making an entire meal of it, laying down a checkered tablecloth first, then delicate china plates, and cloth napkins, and finger sandwiches of cucumber, and chicken and lettuce. They ate and drank a little white wine, and he watched her across the pier where she sat in another perfect, organdy blouse and her white shorts again, long, tanned legs folded beneath her. She caught him staring at her and smiled as if to say it was all right, and this time it was his turn to blush, and turn to his sandwich.

They talked about this and that—Charlie, and mutual friends back in New York, and their hosts, and Charlie again, and after that they were out of conversation and could only look at each other in the quiet of the green world around them. There was nothing for it, then, but to get back onto the boat and head for home. Both of them saying less now, aware that this interlude together was coming to an end.

“I just want this one to work,” she said at last.

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“The last one didn’t.”

“Why was that?”

“It’s a cliché. We were both too young. We didn’t know what we wanted. Or rather I did know what I wanted, which didn’t include being married to him.”

“Why did ya marry, then?”

“Because we were supposed to. Because we knew each other our whole lives. His father and my father charged up San Juan Hill together, you see.”

“You’re pulling my leg,” he said, turning from the murky green channel ahead to frown at her.

“I’m not, I swear. His father was a Rough Rider.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a polo player, from Teaneck, New Jersey. Carleton Carstens Hopp. That was his name, I swear.”

“God help us,” he said, chuckling, and she laughed with him—a nice, full-throated laugh, and he was very conscious of her next to him, her long, bare legs, and the smell of her hair and her neck very close.

“He wasn’t so bad. But I had only been working for a little while, and I didn’t want to give it up,” she said, looking off ahead of them where a bird suddenly burst out of the underbrush. They were headed into the late-afternoon sun, and she put a hand up to shield her eyes, standing radiant beside him in the glow.

“You were able to support yourself?” he asked, surprised she had ever really worked at all.

“I was the best damned millinery model in the City,” she said proudly. “I made twenty-five dollars an hour, working for John Robert Powers.”

“Jesus. I wouldn’t a given that up, either!”

“Mr. Powers used to say that I wasn’t just a beautiful statue, I was always playing a part—that I was a true actress.”

“Was it true?”

“Sure. I’d go out to some charity benefit, or some lunchtime showing at the Waldorf-Astoria, and I’d put on the best show I could for the ladies there. Trying to think how they’d like to see themselves in the clothes I was wearing—”

“And you liked all that?” he asked.

“I loved it,” she said defiantly, looking straight at him. “I loved being on my own in the City. I loved the openings every season, when they brought out the new lines, and all the press were there, and the buyers from out of town. They let me keep the outfits, just so long as I’d wear them out in public, and I loved that, too. I loved going everywhere dressed in the best clothes in the world, and I loved making my own living, and I know I wasn’t supposed to, but I can’t help it, I did, I loved it.”

“He never stood a chance.”

“No. Poor guy. But we went ahead and got married because everybody assumed that we would. It lasted five years. I’m not proud of it. Nobody in my family ever got divorced. Thank God it was a civil ceremony, so we didn’t have to have it annulled, and go through all that.”

“Yes,” said Tom. “Frankie Spellman would only have asked that Charlie turn over Central Park to the church for that.”

She gave a small laugh and blew out a last ring of smoke before throwing her cigarette into the water.

“Was it the war?” he asked.

“What?”

“Was it the war that ended it?”

“Oh, no. I think if he had gone away, we would be married still. I would never leave a man who went off to war,” she said with surprising force. “I never understood the women who did. I would have worried over him like crazy, maybe convinced myself that I loved him.”

“Good girl.”

“Unfortunately, the farthest away he got was Fort George on Staten Island, doing some sort of thing with logistics.”

“What were the grounds?”

“‘Mental cruelty.’ On the idea, I think, that it was cruel for two people to completely ignore what their poor brains were telling them all along.”

He laughed out loud at that, and she smiled back at him, putting an elbow on his shoulder to support herself. Her arm was sun-soaked and warm, with just a trace of her perspiration and her perfume.

“And then?”

“I took the train out to Reno, the usual story. Then I came home and went back into modeling.”

“And back to the society pages.”

“That’s not what I am, Tom,” she said, her voice serious.

“No?”

“No. That’s the image; that’s how you get jobs. But it’s not me. I can’t tell you how boring the nightlife is. That’s the part of it I never liked.”

A cloud passed across her, a hint of melancholy he hadn’t suspected in her before.

“That was my mother. She never forgave my dad for going off to the First World War. How could he take her to all the cotillions, if he was in some trench over in France?”

“That would present a dilemma.”

“He was gassed over there, and when he came back he had tuberculosis. While he was trying to get well, the business fell apart, and then she divorced him while there was still something left,” she said, letting the words fall out into the heavy air between them, as if they tasted too rotten to keep in her mouth. “I went back to live with him in Highland Park, Texas. Just the two of us, in a nice little brick house on Abbott Avenue.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad.”

“It was the best. Because we didn’t have money anymore, I had to forego being sent to some awful finishing school in Switzerland, or Connecticut.”

“Quite a hardship.”

“Instead it was Highland Park High School, just like any other fortunate girl. I joined a sorority, went to dances at the local country club and the American Legion hall. Stood in the bleachers and cheered my boyfriend every Friday night.”

“Was he good?”

“He wasn’t a benchwarmer.”

“But the bright lights beckoned.”

“That was Daddy.” She sighed. “He wanted me to have something of my own. He used to sit about at night, still unable to believe he lost all that money. I used to laugh at him. ‘Don’t worry,’ I would tell him. ‘There will always be more money.’ That’s how much I knew.”

She gave a small, embarrassed laugh, about having been young.

“I would’ve gone to some Texas cow college, or just gotten married, it didn’t matter. Or stayed with him in that little brick house. But he knew he didn’t have much longer. He was the one who told me to go the Powers agency. And that led to everything else.”

“And now you want to marry my brother.”

“Yes. Yes, I do, Tom,” she said, and to his surprise her face began to quiver, her delicate lips trembling.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you love him, then?” he asked.

“Oh, I do, Tom, I do. Sometimes I even feel like I’m madly in love with him,” she said, the tears coming now, and she put her hands up to her face, rubbing her palms into her eyes like a little girl. “It’s just that he’s so much older than I am, and a serious person, and I don’t want to disappoint him.”

“You could never disappoint—” he started, but then his mouth was on hers. He was never sure just who reached for whom first, but he could feel her arms around his neck, and he was leaning down into her, kissing her fervently.

“Oh, Tom, oh, Tom,” she was saying, running her hands down over his head while he kissed her again and again, just as he had been wanting to do for all those months. Kissing her on her soft, pink lips, then on her neck, her cheek, her eyelids, anywhere he wanted to.

He took off her clothes while she still stood before him—first the fine lacy blouse, then her adorable white shorts, and her underwear, too—just wanting to look at all of her there, for a moment, in the light of the sinking Florida sun. They made love slowly, with her sitting on his lap on the boat’s bench, facing him. She would push back to look at him for a moment, then embrace him and pull herself to him again, coming finally with her arms around his neck as he ran his hands up and down her ribs, and her small, high breasts, and kissed her mouth again.

She didn’t say anything for a long time after they were finished, and he could have sat there all evening, with her skin against his, listening to her breathing. But one of those swift, orange-billed birds dived low over their boat, squawking raucously and startling them back to life. They started to get dressed then, because there was nothing else but to go back. She cried some more, but then she got ahold of herself and went to stand next to him again at the wheel, putting an arm around his waist while he steered them home to Charlie’s friend’s house in the gathering darkness.

It was the last time they went out in the boat. Two days later word came from Charlie, and they were married in an old Spanish chapel in Stuart. There was only Tom, and Slim’s sister and mother, and the doctor and his wife in the whole wedding party, but there was a small local choir that sang an Ave Maria beautifully. Charlie looked tanned and ebullient, and more rested than Tom had seen him in months, and Slim wore a perfect, navy-blue designer suit. At the end of the Mass she looked at him teary-eyed, and Charlie grinned and pumped his hand, and told him, “Wish us luck, Tom!” and so he did, and meant it, and went off to the long train ride home.

 

“But that wasn’t it,” Ellie said, looking at him, their coffees gone cold and mostly untouched.

“No. How did you know that?”

“Because I know you—a little, anyway. If that had been it, you’d have gone and done a hundred penances, or whatever it is you do as a semi-lapsed Catholic, and never said a word, to protect her reputation and his.”

“You’re right,” he said with a bitter smile. “You do know me.”

“So it didn’t stop then.”

“No, it didn’t stop,” he said after a long sigh. “I saw her again, back in the City, and not just once, either, and it went on and both of us hated it.”

“At least that’s what you told yourselves,” she said, an edge to her voice for the first time—something he was almost relieved to hear.

“It diminished us. It took more and more away from how we thought of ourselves, and there wasn’t enough to replace it,” he said sadly. “Not all the thrills in the world would’ve been enough.”

“But you were in love,” she said.

“What? No—”

“You were. Otherwise it wouldn’t have gone on.”

He sat looking at her for a long few seconds. “I suppose . . . I suppose we might’ve thought . . . yes. Yes, I guess we were,” he said finally, the words moving like mud through his mouth. “I guess we thought we were. But no more.”

She was silent for another minute, looking past him and out to the boardwalk, and the long bar where the last remaining drinker braced himself and took another mournful pull at his beer.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked when he couldn’t stand it any longer.

“I think it’s more wrong than ever that you’re on this case,” she said, looking at him somberly. “I think it’s my duty to go to Mr. Hogan and tell him what I know. But you know I won’t do that.”

“No.”

“But I hate the fact that you knew that.”

“Sorry.”

She stood up then, and he stood up with her, and the two of them walked out of the open bar and back onto the boardwalk. They made for the hospital parking lot and the car, walking with their hands in their pockets, while the riled night sea pounded the beach behind them. In the ruins of the Gut, the yellow bulldozers looked like sinister creatures, huddling over a moonscape now—everything altered beyond recognition.

“So the Old Man knew,” she said abruptly.

“Yep. He picked it up,” he told her.

“Or he said he did. Maybe he just took a wild shot, but you fell for it.”

“Maybe,” he conceded.

“Damnit, Tom, you should’ve had me stay,” she said, sounding angry at last. “He would never have dared to bring it up with me in the room.”

“No. But he wouldn’t have said anything else, either.”

“Oh? And what did he say that was so important?”

“Mostly, he just warned me off it,” he said sheepishly.

“So he put you on your heels, then said just what he wanted to say to you.”

“He played me like some rookie cop,” Tom admitted, and had to laugh and shake his head despite himself. He looked over at her, and to his surprise Ellie was smiling ruefully, too. They had reached the car, almost alone now in the visitors’ section of the lot, and he reached out his hands and held hers, looking into her face.

“So, now you know the worst thing about me,” he told her. “I’m more ashamed of it than I can say. It was a rotten thing to do, it was a betrayal, and if you want to have nothing else to do with me, I can’t blame ya. All I can say is that I didn’t know you, and I can’t feature ever having done it if I had.”

“I know that.” She sighed. “Or at least I’d like to believe it. I know I’m not your first girl, Tom, and you’ve been to a war, and lived half a lifetime before you met me. I just wish it hadn’t been an affair, and I wish it wasn’t your brother, and I wish I didn’t think you were still half in love with her.”

“I’m not. I’m not, and I’ll prove it to ya—”

“No, Tom, that’s not—”

“I’ll prove it to ya. Marry me, Ellie. Say you’ll marry me, right now.”

“Ah, Tom. That’s not it! That’s not what I was trying for—”

“Marry me. I mean it.”

He pulled her to him and kissed her on the mouth, and she resisted at first.

“Marry me, marry me,” he murmured to her, and stroked her hair, and after a moment she gave in and embraced him, and kissed him back.

“Ah, Tom, how’s this supposed to work? With her your brother’s wife still?” she said unhappily, her hands against his chest, pushing him back a little but allowing him to fold her in his arms.

“It’ll work. You’ll be there.”

“We’ll see,” she said, kissing him quickly, then pulling away again. “He’s going to send you down to Mexico, you know.”

“He is? The boss?” Tom said, jubilant. “When?”

“When we have enough. One way or the other, he’ll send you—if you’ll go.”

“I’ll go.”

She looked at him sharply. “You go and come back without falling for her again, we’ll talk about marriage.”

He grinned at her. “God bless you, Ellie.”

“Just come back.”

In the car she asked him, “So did he say anything?”

“Who?”

“The Old Man. Besides how you better drop it, I mean.”

“He strongly implied the other rats might’ve had something to do with Mr. Reles’s demise,” he said, wheeling the car back onto Ocean Parkway, now dimmed and peaceful and quiet, a thousand lights shining in a thousand kitchens.

“That’s not exactly a revelation,” she said.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “They’re about the only ones left. But even if they did it, they wouldn’t try anything like that on their own.”

“So, go talk to them,” she said.

“The other squealers?”

“Why not? It’s where the Old Man wants you to go. So, go there and find out what he wants you to find out. It will be taking away one more piece, hiding what he doesn’t want you to find out.”