38

The Bronx, 1953

He spent the day before he left for Mexico with Ellie’s family up in East Tremont, a long-delayed dinner to meet the parents. It was a Sunday afternoon, but even so he could hear the booming the moment he started to walk down the stairs from the Third Avenue el. It was coming from the east, like the sound of rock being smashed by something harder than rock, over and over again. Punctuated every few minutes by a high, ominous whining sound, followed by a gabble of excited shouts and then an explosion. As he walked south on Marmion Avenue, away from the sound, a thin, silicate-gray cloud drifted slowly over him, making him cough and swear before he was able to cover his face with a handkerchief. The few women and children on the street hurrying past stared at him wordlessly, holding their own handkerchiefs or the lapels of their coats or the sleeves of their dresses up over their mouths.

Ellie’s parents lived on the third floor of a five-story walk-up, indistinguishable from the other five- and six-story walk-ups that filled both sides of East 176th Street. It was a large, high-ceilinged, scrupulously clean apartment, humid and steeped in the rich smell of cooking meat when he entered. Her parents greeted him in the apartment’s L-shaped foyer. Her mother, Judith, small and birdlike and effusive, wrapping an arm around his neck and giving him a loud kiss on the cheek. Her father, Nat, a tall, stooped, somber man with kindly eyes behind his black-framed glasses and the steely arm muscles of the presser he had been for most of his life. He shook Tom’s hand enthusiastically, until Ellie made him stop before it turned to jelly.

“Let him go now, Daddy,” she said, beaming, from farther back in the long foyer, trying to look amused but more pleased than she could readily hide. “He gets worn out enough chasing the bad guys all week.”

“It’s like a war zone out there,” Tom said, before Ellie came to take his coat and kiss his cheek, and quietly hush him.

“Don’t—or we’ll never talk about anything else!”

They ate in the dining room, decorous and genteel, and more carefully preserved than any crime scene he’d ever been at. The shiny wooden table was covered with a lace tablecloth that anyone in County Mayo would have envied. A curtained glass cabinet held ceremonial candlesticks and silver serving dishes, and a bottle of Slivovitz and one of kosher wine from Schapiro’s, with its distinctive trademark on the label: “the wine you can almost ‘cut with a knife.’”

Ellie had made sure he’d brought a good bottle of burgundy from Manhattan, and she insisted on opening that. The four of them laughing and talking easily together, with Ellie’s mother alternately regretting that her other daughter was away at college and bombarding him with questions about the office, and what it was he did for Mr. Hogan. They ate a lamb shank cooked so tenderly, the meat nearly fell off the bone, and broccoli steamed until it was as limp as a dishrag, and some sort of potato dish that was delicious but seemed to possess the density of industrial concrete. The whole time the booming continued, the sound pounding relentlessly through the windows open against the unseasonable fall heat outside.

“Do you hear that? It’s the road—Mr. Moses’s great big road, coming to get us!” Ellie’s mother told him when they had finished. Sitting in their sunken living room, with its matching couches and chairs around a proud new coffee table. Eating slices of the seven-layer cake Ellie had baked for dessert, and sipping the Slivovitz from tiny, ornate, white-smoked brandy glasses.

“Ma, I thought we were going to have a night off from the road for once,” Ellie gently chided her, putting a hand on her leg.

“Who can ignore it?” her mother protested. “It’s shameful. To clean and clean all day for company, and look what it still brings in!”

She pointed at one of the broad, white windowsills, where Tom could see, even from a distance, a mound of fine black powder, growing steadily even as he watched.

“All day long! It’s like living in Appalachia!”

“You can’t fight City Hall,” Nat said dolefully from across the coffee table, holding the brandy glass as delicately as an eggshell in his immense, flattened hands.

“I remember the day I first heard it. It was the summer after the war,” she told them. “There was this boom, way off in the distance. Just one big noise, just like that. Like it was some sort of signal. I was afraid it was a gas main. But no, that was just the starting gun! Then there was another, and another, and you’re thinking it’s got to stop soon. But it never did. It just kept coming closer and closer, all these years.”

She gave a little shiver.

“Mr. O’Kane—”

“Tom, ma’am.”

“Mr. O’Kane, I just want to say how much I admired the work that yourself and your brother have done on behalf of the colored people and the Puerto Ricans,” Ellie’s mother told him, sitting stiffly at attention, as if to pay proper homage to the seriousness of the subject. “It’s right that someone should help them. We’ve had many more of them moving up from Morrisania in recent years, and I can tell you, they’re perfectly lovely.”

“Ma—”

Ellie was blushing now, and rolling her eyes, but her mother remonstrated with her.

“What did I say? It’s true! We even have a mixed couple in this building. The Smiths, up on the fifth floor. He’s colored, she’s Jewish—nicest people you can imagine! We got no problems, everybody gets along. But just because there are some colored now, they try to make out this is a slum! I’m not joking, that’s what they’re calling it—slum clearance!”

“It’s what they have to call it, Mrs. Abramowitz, to get the money from Washington,” Tom told her.

“They call these buildings tenements. Tenements!” she exclaimed, pushing forward to the edge of her couch. “My husband and me, we know from tenements! That’s what we came here to get away from.”

She shook her head in frustration.

“We raised our girls here, gave them the life we wanted for ourselves. And now they want to say we live in tenements and slums, and they get to pave a highway over us!”

“An . . . an expressway!” Nat stuttered in disgust. “Like a fancy new word makes it all right!”

“All these years, we could see it coming, but we did nothing,” Ellie’s mother said softly now, as if she were talking about some dreadful secret. “Mrs. Edelstein, in the building here, she tried to get people together to do something, but they would rather not think about it. Who can concentrate on trouble so far away? Then, almost a year ago, just in time for the holiday season, we get an eviction notice!”

She bit off the word with contempt, having to stand up and walk around the sunken living room in her indignation.

“Everybody did, all up and down the street. Eviction notices! Like we were drunken bums who can’t afford the rent! Like we were drug addicts! But not from the landlord, even. From the City of New York! All written up on official stationery, and envelopes: ‘Hello, you have ninety days to get out!’ Like something out of Russia! We lived here twenty years, now we got three months to get out!”

“It’s what Mr. Moses likes to call ’em—‘shake ’em up and get ’em moving’ notices,” Tom told them grimly. “There’s no force of law behind the deadline. He’s just trying to intimidate you—”

“That’s what we said!” Mrs. Abramowitz told him triumphantly, retaking her seat. “Thousands of people, ordered out of their homes, so they could build a . . . a, a big road!”

“For what?” Nat asked, his eyes brimming with anger between the thick black glasses. “So people can get to New Jersey fifteen minutes faster?”

“We knew our rights. Mrs. Edelstein, she was a marvel, organizing everything. Me, I did what I could—”

“You were great, Ma,” Ellie put in, the pride in her voice piercing Tom to his core.

“Ach, you can’t fight City Hall,” Nat said again, shaking his head.

“But we did. We got lawyers to help us, and an engineer, and traffic planners. They drew up a whole map, showed how this big road, they could run it down along Corona Park North. Take it two blocks south, all you have to knock down is five apartment houses. Not throw fifteen hundred families out of their homes, the way they have it now.”

“They mapped it all out,” Mr. Abramowitz said. “You’d get to Hackensack just as fast.”

“Then we went over there and took a look at what’s coming,” Judith said with a small shudder. “They kept telling us, ‘Don’t worry about the eviction, the City Real Estate Bureau will find you a new place to live.’ So we went over to see where the road was already.”

She looked around at them all before continuing, an expression of real horror on her face.

“What we saw, I can’t even tell you. They turned the City into a giant dump. We went into some of the buildings over there, the ones that were still standing? Garbage all over the place. Garbage—and worse!—filling the lobbies. Animals living in there. Bums living there, pulling out all the copper plumbing. Broken glass everywhere, the stairs broken.”

She leaned forward, to speak even more confidentially of the things she had seen. “Worse yet, there were people still living there! Whole families, living out of their suitcases like gypsies! They told us, the ones who would talk to us, the City moved them there once they tore down their old buildings. Every night, they could hear the bums outside in the hall, scratching at the locks, trying to get in. And guess what? The City charges them rent to live like this! Worse—every time they move them someplace ahead of that highway, they charge them more rent!”

Real tears of frustration, of bewilderment welled up in her eyes now.

“Not that we gave in,” she said. “That only made people more determined to fight, because we had no place to run. Finally, last spring, we got a big meeting down at City Hall, with the Board of Estimate.

“Half the neighborhood went down. We had to rent school buses to take us, there were so many people. Mostly the women, because it was in the daytime, the men couldn’t miss work, but there were hundreds of us. It was such a good turnout, we thought they’d have to give in! The mayor was there, the city council. James J. Lyons, the borough president, he said he was with us . . .” Her voice trailed off, mouth twisting cynically.

“It didn’t matter,” she resumed. “None of it mattered. We got down there, and we brought out all our charts and diagrams. We brought our lawyer, and our traffic engineers, and our city planners. Then, halfway through, Moses comes strolling in. Walking right down the aisle like the big I am. Nobody was listening anymore to anything we had to say. That excuse for a mayor, Impellitteri? He was scrambling around to get him a chair. I thought he was going to bring him some water next.

“Right away, you could see that Moses was the boss. He went over and talked to each one of the borough presidents, laughing and whispering with them. They weren’t paying attention to a word we said anymore. They didn’t even have the courtesy to pretend to be interested. Like we were nothing to them.

“After that, it was all over. I knew it, even if I didn’t know it yet. They weren’t even listening anymore; they just waited until we made our presentation and sat down. Then Mr. James J. Lyons stood up and said he had changed his mind, and they had to run the expressway where Moses wanted it.

“Mrs. Edelstein, she jumped right up and said to his face, ‘Mr. Lyons, you’ve double-crossed the people.’ Lyons, he started yelling, ‘Demagogue!’ at the top of his voice. Impellitteri started yelling for her to apologize. But she wouldn’t do it. She just looked at Lyons, and at the mayor, and she said, ‘You’re both a couple of rotters. You double-crossed the people.’”

“What will you do?” Tom asked quietly.

“Thank God, Nat took the training course on how to x-ray plane parts. It’s a good job. He starts out at the defense plant in New Jersey next week. He’s going that way anyway, we might as well move. I suppose we’ll have to get a car, find a place somewhere.”

“We’re both taking the driver’s ed course now,” Nat said brightly, his voice again full of the optimism of a man who had always made his own living. “You wouldn’t believe how cheap houses are out there, how much room you can get. We’ll be all right—”

“But it won’t be like this,” his wife said, dejected. “The whole neighborhood gone, and everything it was, and everything it could be. What kind of a city is it, that lets a wonderful neighborhood, a neighborhood full of good people, get ploughed under for a road?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Tom said sadly, looking over at Ellie, who was rubbing her mother’s back, her own eyes sparkling with tears.

“I’ll say one thing,” Judith told him, a kindly smile forcing its way through to her face. “This never would’ve happened with a great mayor like your brother, God bless him.”

 

After dinner, he walked out with Ellie in the dying light. Ellie held tight to his elbow with both arms, head nestled neatly into the curve of his neck.

“They like you a lot,” she told him quietly.

“Did they? That’s nice,” he said.

“So do I,” she said softly, looking up at him with her wry smile.

“That’s even better.”

He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, and afterward her smile was wider, and not wry at all.

“I like them, too. No, that’s not the right words for how I feel about them,” he told her. “They seem like the best people on earth.”

“They are. How perceptive of you.”

“I’m very keen that way. Although, I must say, I think I swallowed a bowling ball somewhere along the way.”

“Yes, Ma goes a little overboard on the kugel,” she said, and chuckled.

“Either that, or it was the cake,” he said, and she slapped him with her pocketbook.

“Well, don’t worry. You’ll only have a few thousand more opportunities to get it right,” he told her, trying to make his voice sound jocular, although he knew it didn’t.

“Is that right?” She laughed. “I’ll be at home, perfecting my baking? While you’re out, chasing down the criminals.”

“Something like that.”

“And what if I don’t want that?” she asked, her eyes teasing but her voice serious.

“I don’t know if Mr. Hogan will put up with it, a married couple working for him.”

“So you’ll have to stay home with the baking.”

He held her hands in his and smiled down at her. The evening had begun to grow cool. The wind from the east whipping up again, blowing the fine, stinging dust through their hair. He stood looking at her, just because he wanted to, her sweet face and her deep brown eyes looking steadily back at him.

“I’m serious,” he told her. “I can’t imagine spending the years with anyone else.”

“It’s not, you know, that sometimes I don’t think I would like to have exactly what they have,” she said slowly, tilting her head down. “A home, a family of my own—of our own. Jesus, what am I saying? We’re already talking about children! But other times, I think I would just go crazy, sitting around with the girls at their mahjongg game.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll work it out, one way or t’other,” he told her. “After I get back from Mexico, I’ll have a proper proposal for ya, and a proper ring, and a plan.”

“After you get back from Mexico. And him, and her,” she said. “Then we’ll see.”

“That’s all in the past, I told you—”

She stopped him with a look. “All right. We’ll see.”

“We will,” he said—and almost told her right then and there about the note he’d found on the medical examiner’s report. Withhold information by order of DA. About all that Neddy Moran had told him about who had been in the room with his brother, and what they’d said, and everything else that he’d begun to fear and suspect. But he didn’t.

“I’m going to stop in Atlanta first,” he told her instead. “On the way.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Tick-Tock Tannenbaum—”

“One of the rats!” Ellie exclaimed.

“I got a lead on him from the feds. That’s where he’s holed up these days.”

“What do you think he’s going to tell you?” she asked, already trying to figure out what it could be.

“Just what went on in the Rats Suite that night. Or, more important, just who was there that night.”

“And assuming that he tells you anything, how good do you think it’s going to be?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I can trust anything he’ll say, a murdering bum like that. But whatever happened, I need to know everything I possibly can before I go down to Mexico.”

He stopped and turned to face her again on the sidewalk.

“I don’t know what I’m going to find out down there. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when I find it.”

Ellie only nodded, as if she already understood everything he was thinking.

“I know you’ll do what’s right, whatever you find.”

They kissed again, and she put her hand in his as they started walking toward the construction works.

They didn’t have far to go. The building of the road was less than ten blocks from her parents’ home by now, and a scene of devastation unlike anything he’d ever seen before, even in Italy during the war. All of a sudden, the cityscape melted into a pile of pure, mindless wreckage, for as far as they could see. Uprooted trees tossed atop heaps of clothing, and piles of bricks and smashed-up wood, and sinks and toilets, and loose doors and busted-up furniture. Littered all over the top of it were heaps of real garbage: coffee rinds and eggshells, and empty fifth bottles, and fish heads and old newspapers, and open sewage—whatever else the bums and the winos and the retreating, desperate people Ellie’s mother had seen had thrown on top of it all, in their shame and their despair.

“Jesus,” Ellie breathed, as they watched it all. “Jesus Christ.”

Over the nightmarish landscape scuttled teams of indomitable workmen in yellow vests and hardhats. Men possessed of the same confident, wiry strength Ellie’s father had. Grinning and shouting despite the lateness of the hour, and the grime that covered their faces and their work clothes.

As they watched, a crane operator maneuvered a wrecking ball against the wall of another walk-up, as carefully as a man tapping a soft-boiled egg for his breakfast. He tapped it once, twice, then all of a sudden the whole wall gave in, a shower of bricks cascading down into the ditch and a great cloud of dust speeding rapidly toward them.

Ellie and Tom turned simultaneously and tried to hurry back, but it was too late. The dust overtaking them even as Tom put his arm around her shoulder and guided her quickly back through the gathering darkness. The streets deserted now, save for a stray knife sharpener, gray-bearded, in his thick, dark clothes and black hat. Hurrying his pushcart past them, his eyes wide, as if he had been caught up in this hellish place by mistake, far from home.