7

WHEN I CAME into the kitchen the next morning Abe was already there, sitting at the table, my mother’s hand on top of his, the two of them laughing together so easily and happily that I wanted, at first, to disappear. A copy of The Brooklyn Eagle lay next to the toaster, open to the sports section.

“Sorry about the game,” Abe said.

My mother kissed me, touched my lower lip with her finger.

“Did somebody hit you there? Your lips look all bruised—”

“I heard that during the game people made some nasty remarks,” Abe said. “You shouldn’t listen to other people. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

I sat. My mother put a glass of orange juice in front of me. Abe wore the same double-breasted gray pinstripe suit he’d worn to my father’s funeral.

“I thought it might be good for you to get away from things for a day,” he said. “I have to get out of town and I stopped by to see if you wanted to come along.”

“Sure.”

“It’ll be nice,” my mother said. “My two favorite men going off by themselves together.”

“You don’t mind being left alone?”

She kissed me, said something to Abe about how thoughtful and sweet I was, then went back to the stove to make me bacon and eggs, to fry my toast in the bacon grease, the way I liked. The phone rang. My mother answered, raised her eyebrows, said it was for me.

“It’s a girl.”

My heart bounced.

“Davey?”

“Yes.”

“This is Regina. I’m sorry to call you like this and I hope it don’t make trouble, but Tony was afraid to call himself, in case the wrong person answered. He asked me to call you and find out if you’re okay, after yesterday.”

“I’m okay. What do you want?”

“Just to give you Tony’s message. He said if you’d like to get together, just the two of you—away from everybody—that I should arrange things, for where you two could meet.”

“Forget it. I’m going with my uncle today.”

“All right. I’ll tell him. And Davey?”

“Yes?”

“As long as I got you on the phone I wanted to tell you, for myself, that I’m real sorry about your father. I know how it feels, with my mother dying last year and my father sick a lot with his lungs. I mean, I’m sorry.”

“Sure.”

“Also that I’m glad you keep telling Tony he should go to college someday. I tell him the same thing all the time and he tells me I’m crazy. But he listens to you, I think.”

“Sure.”

“I get the feeling you can’t talk. Your uncle must be there.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Davey. I really am. About the game and your father and things. Don’t hold things against Tony, though, okay? I mean, he tries as hard as he can. I think he’d like to be your friend still, no matter what.”

“Sure,” I said, and hung up.

My mother rolled her eyes. I was wary, tight. I tried not to think of Gail. I tried not to remember how I’d felt the night before. What good would that do me now? My mother liked to joke about how the girls were all after me but that I was their silent one too, she supposed. Abe said nothing. Could he guess that the call was from Tony? Would he grill me about it later on? Abe and Fasalino had been at peace for years, but none of us believed it would last forever. The only thing Fasalino understands is motion, Abe had said. He thinks motion is progress. When his organization stops moving he thinks it’s dying. My mother caressed my cheek with the back of her hand, said that it would do all of us good for me to be away for a day, that she had been saying to Abe that what she wanted most of all, after the last few days, was just to be left alone.

“Sometimes I dream about getting away all by myself,” she said, setting down my bacon and eggs and toast. “Do you know what I mean? I dream about going to some faraway place—not California, I gave up on that a long time back—but just somewhere where the sun shines all the time and it’s like I still got my whole life ahead of me.”

“It can be arranged,” Abe said.

“Do you think your mother’s crazy to have a dream like that?”

“No.”

“If we don’t have dreams, then what do we got?”

“I told you before, Evie, I’d like to treat you and Davey to a real vacation if you’d let me. You deserve it.”

“Nah.” She waved his offer away. “I know you mean well, but what I’m talking about ain’t some hotel in Miami or Havana. What I want is to be like on a beautiful ocean liner where nobody knows you and nobody knows nothing about you and everything in your life is brand new—that it can all still happen. Where nobody can phone you or send you letters or be ringing your doorbell.” She touched my hand. “Your father, with his brain, he used to talk about these giant ships that would go back and forth across the ocean someday, that would take maybe ten or twenty thousand people at a time, and I don’t mean rich people or poor people or immigrants but just plain people like us. He talked about how there would be these enormous cafeterias and giant movie theaters and lots of classrooms—they could let schoolteachers go for free, see, if they gave classes for an hour a day—and sleeping rooms like dormitories in colleges. He worked out all the arithmetic, about how big the ship would have to be and how many people they’d have to carry and how many years it would take for the companies to make a profit. I kept telling him to write it down in a letter to one of the big shipping outfits. He had a terrific brain when he wanted to, your father.”

“I thought I’d take Davey to meet Mr. Rothenberg,” Abe stated. “It’s where I’m going today.”

“No!”

My mother stood, backed up against the refrigerator, hands crossed at her throat, pulling her robe tight.

“Mr. Rothenberg sends his condolences and asked if he could meet Sol’s son, if he could meet Momma’s grandson.”

“No, Abe. Please! We should leave the children out of these things. I mean, did they ask to be born?”

“No, Evie. But they were, and if you’re born into this world, like it or not, there seems to be an admission price.”

“Listen, Davey.” My mother turned to me. Her voice was soft and sweet, but her eyes were large and crazy. “Just make believe Abe never said nothing, okay? Listen to your mother for once, because this is the way it all starts, see? Listen to your mother. Maybe there’s an admission price. Sure. But if you pay once, why should you keep paying your whole life long?”

“Mr. Rothenberg is an old man.”

“Oh he ain’t a bad man, Davey,” my mother said, taking my hands in hers. “I ain’t saying that. Nobody was good to us like he was good to us once upon a time, only don’t get started, all right? Stay home with Momma today. You stay with Momma and keep the neighbors away—tell them I got one of my migraines so we can be alone here together, just the two of us. Please, darling?”

“You’re still upset because of Sol,” Abe said. “The boy said he wants to come with me. Right, Davey?”

“Yes.”

My mother drew back from me. “Sure,” she said. “Sure. Only I’ll tell you something else I’ve been thinking about that I didn’t want to say, but maybe with the phone call he got before, maybe it’s time I said what’s on my mind, because do you know who I pity most of all? I pity any girl who gets stuck on him, that’s who. You know what this one will do if he ever catches her with another guy. He’ll kill her.”

“You’re talking crazy,” Abe said. “Stop.”

“Sure. Go off with your uncle and let Mr. Rothenberg suck you in the same way he did Abe, and when you got money spilling from your pockets and a bunch of floozies reaching in with their dirty hands—”

“I said to stop.”

“Who’s gonna make me, huh? You, big shot? Or one of your goons? So why shouldn’t the boy get started with the killing and the rest of it? The truth is that all you were waiting for was till Sol was gone. Didn’t I know it? Didn’t I know all along you’d start up with Davey even more once Sol was out of the way?”

Abe grabbed her wrist. She pulled away. “Only what am I made of, after all these years—stone? What do you want from me, Abe, huh? What do you want from my life? Can you answer me that?”

“I want you to be happy.”

She laughed. “Tell me another one. Sure. Tell me another one.” She walked in circles, from the window to the sink, from the sink to the window. “Am I made of stone or am I made of stone? First they take away Momma and now they take away Sol and in between Poppa’s dead for you and you’re dead for him and for twenty years guess who’s in the middle? Little Evie. So how do you think I felt the whole war, waiting every day for a telegram from the President telling me they took you away too and I could put my star in the window if I wanted to….”

I imagined Gail entering our apartment, watching my mother. Would she laugh? Would she cry? Would she embrace my mother? What would she feel towards me? I thought of calling Regina, of apologizing to her for how severe I’d been.

“So if the telegram didn’t come, maybe the phone call will, right? When the phone rings, do I know if it’s the police or if it’s one of your goons so he can tell me you got caught in a bad accident like Spanish Louie or Avie? Ha! You think I don’t know all about that, that everyone in the neighborhood don’t know. Sure. I know where it all begins, Abe—only where does it end, can you answer me that? Where does it end?”

She put the telephone receiver to her ear.

“Hello?… Yes, this is Eva Voloshin…. What? You got news for me about my big-shot brother Abe Litvinov, but you need somebody to identify the body down at the morgue?… Listen, as soon as I put on some makeup I’ll be there, only as long as I got you on the line, maybe you can tell me how many years you think I got left with my son Davey…?”

Abe took the phone from her hand, put it back in its cradle.

“You made your point, Evie. Now cut it out.”

“Why? I didn’t cry enough already?”

“You cried enough,” I said.

“Wise guy. Now we’ll get our two cents from the peanut gallery, yeah? On how I did the wrong thing after his father died, that I didn’t cry with him. You think I don’t know you hold a grudge against me for that? You think I don’t know how you can’t wait to get out of this house—with Abe today, and then in another year it’ll be thanks a lot, Momma, but goodbye and good luck and I’m off to college. And in between if some nice little tramp should come along and open her fuzzy little purse for you—”

“Leave the boy alone.”

“What’s the matter, he can’t fight his own battles?”

Abe grabbed her by the chin, forced her to look at him.

“When we needed help, Mr. Rothenberg was the only one, and don’t you forget it. Don’t forget what they would have done to Momma if not for him. You remember that and then you think twice before you open your mouth to the boy.”

“Whatever you say.” She glanced at me. “Whatever he wants.” She pushed him away. “You want to be with your uncle, darling? You go with your uncle. You want to get killed now when you’re young? You go get killed now. It will save us grief later. You want to know if I care anymore, if I’ll be here after you’re both gone, you send me a telegram, yeah? You want me not to open my mouth no more, I won’t open my mouth.”

She left the kitchen.

“Was she always like this?” I asked a few seconds later. “I mean, when you were growing up together, was she like this then?”

“No.”

I heard her grunting, behind me. I turned. She stood in the doorway, the bottom half of her face covered with adhesive tape. Abe tried to laugh. My mother went to the phone, wrote a message on the note pad: “I CAN’T OPEN MY MOUTH, NOW ARE YOU HAPPY?”

Abe stood up and I was scared for a second that he was going to tear the tape from her face, but instead he just put his arm around her and kissed her cheek, told her that she’d made her point, that she could say anything she wanted to us, that we both loved her. She cocked her head to the side. Did she know how much he loved her, that he still loved her like nobody else did, like when they were kids?

We were on the highway outside the city, heading upstate, before I remembered that I’d forgotten to telephone Gail. I tried to imagine the inside of her house—carpeted rooms, expensive furniture, bookcases, porcelain vases, thick draperies, painting and prints on the walls—and Gail walking around, getting ready for school, eating breakfast, watching the phone. Why hadn’t I kept my promise? I imagined us in the rain, her hair rubbing against my chin. We kissed. I told her how sorry I was that I’d forgotten to call. She smiled. Was it really possible that two people could make one another so happy, so soon, merely by being together, by touching?

“Will we be back late tonight?”

“Why? Got a date?”

“No. Not really.”

“Got a girl?”

“Sort of. I don’t know. How could you tell? I mean, the call wasn’t from her this morning.”

“I know.”

“I met somebody I like, though. That’s true.”

“Is she worthy of you?”

“Is she what?”

We laughed. I looked out the window, at trees, houses, barns, and I felt easy suddenly, as if I could ask him all the questions I’d always wanted to ask him, as if—it had been the same with Gail the night before—there was nothing that two people who liked each other could not say to one another.

“Did you have a girlfriend when you were my age?”

“Me? Sure. I always liked the women, Davey.”

“With your hat down that way, you look like Robert Taylor a little bit, except that your mouth is larger.” I stopped. I thought of the picture I’d drawn of him and wondered if he still had it. His lips were full the way Gail’s were. Could I draw her picture and give it to her for her birthday? Would I be able to do her portrait from memory? “Why did you marry aunt Lillian? Can I ask that?”

“Sure.” He laughed. “That’s an easy one, Davey, because the short answer is that when I was young I was what your mother said you’re going to be: a sucker for women.” He touched his hair. “Sure. I liked skirts, and in my business that was a liability. The way I looked at it was this, see: you have a choice with women—you can get to know what they’re all like by knowing lots of them a little bit, or by knowing one of them well. Does that answer your question?”

“But you don’t love Lillian, do you?”

“No.”

“Did you ever love her. I mean the way—”

“—the way your father loved your mother, for example? I doubt it. It’s too far back to remember. Lillian is good for me, though. She protects me. By sticking with her and getting to know her well, life is safer. She enabled me to develop a distaste for other women. She cured me.”

“But that’s terrible.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It just seems a waste—somebody like you not to have somebody to love, to love you back your whole life.”

“Love isn’t everything. I had enough to last me a few more years.” He reached over, touched my hair. “You’re a sweet kid, Davey. A real romantic. Your mother would be happy if she could hear you talking like this.” He nodded. “But I’m glad you have a girlfriend. It’s good to have somebody at your age, somebody you can stick it into when you get the urge.”

“It’s not like that.”

“It never is at first.”

We were quiet. Was he being this way on purpose, trying to protect me by making me hate him?

“You said that just to hurt me, didn’t you?” I moved closer to him. He turned his Army ring so that sunlight bounced off the red stone. “Why is it you have to get so cold and mean sometimes? My mother says it’s not your fault, that you weren’t always this way, that you had no choice.”

“Not true,” he said quickly. “We always have choices.” He licked his lips, waited, and when he spoke again it was as if he’d said the same words to himself, over and over, a thousand times: “The rich have more choices than the poor, and the strong have more choices than the weak, and the powerful have more choices than those without power. But we all have choices. Always.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I didn’t choose to have you for an uncle.”

To my surprise Abe showed no anger. Instead he smiled, reached across, ruffled my hair. We turned off the highway onto a two-lane road.

“You’re a smart boy, Davey. Sure. They’ll try to visit the sins of the uncles on the nephews, right? For a while—a year maybe—the scouts won’t come sniffing at your door, but don’t worry about it. One way or the other, you’ll have your chance.”

“How?”

“When things blow over. When the investigations end without them pinning anything on me or Mr. Rothenberg. We’re clean, Davey. We have better things to do with our time than hang around locker rooms.”

Could I believe him? Did I want to believe him? He tipped his hat back, touched his left jacket pocket with his right hand, as if to feel for a gun. But there was no gun there, I knew. He seemed very happy, and I wondered for an instant if this wasn’t so because he was already thinking about the strings he could pull in order to get me into college—because he was already imagining talking with Mr. Rothenberg about me and what deals they could make to fix things.

“We’ll be at Mr. Rothenberg’s in about twenty-five minutes. You’ll like his house.”

“Do you mind my asking questions?”

“You have more?”

“Lots.”

“Such as—?”

“What things were like when you and my mother were kids. What you feel about the colleges not talking to me because of you—because of the scandals. Why you always turn your ring around on your finger when you get upset. Why you won’t speak to your father. Why he hates you the way you hate him. What Mr. Rothenberg did for you and Mom. What he stopped people from doing to your mother…”

In my head, Gail was smiling at me, encouraging me to go on, telling me that life was too short not to say the things we wanted to the people we cared about. I gazed out the window. In front of a small run-down gas station a young boy, sitting in a wheelbarrow, waved to me.

“I want to know things,” I said. “Sometimes I want to know everything, Uncle Abe! I want to know why things happened, why you’re the way you are, how you got to have the life you have. Sometimes I think you don’t want anyone to know what you feel, though. That you want to shut everybody out.”

“Sometimes I do.”

“But it matters to me—what you feel. When you were overseas I used to wonder a lot about what you were thinking and feeling. Were you scared?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are you ever afraid now—since the war ended, I mean?”

“Not much, though I don’t like pain. I’ve always been frightened of physical pain if you want the truth, and yet when it’s come it hasn’t bothered me much. Strange. It’s always been as if I could simply close a valve to the part of my brain the pain was in. Then I’d be there, as alert as I could be, and it would be as if what was happening was happening to somebody else. Does that make any sense?”

“My mother says that your father used to beat you a lot. Did he?”

“Probably.”

“Probably?”

“It wasn’t the pain that hurt, Davey. It was being humiliated. Degraded. All I ask for, see, is a little notice, a mild amount of respect. I thought about that a lot when I was overseas and I decided that my one wish, really, was simply to know ahead of time. I didn’t want to die in my sleep or in a coma or on my knees, and I didn’t want to die with a bullet in the back of my head either.”

“Did you ever want to die?”

“No.”

“I’m glad. Do you ever want to now?”

“There’s not much that gives pleasure in life, Davey. Still, I figure I’ll stick around. To see how you turn out, right?” He touched my shoulder. “The truth is, I was pretty happy when I was over there and could kill a few Krauts. I felt good when I was able to save some of my boys. I was sorry the war didn’t last longer. I still write to some of them.”

“To the guys in your platoon?”

“No. Why would I do a thing like that? I write to the women who lost sons or husbands or brothers.”

“But why? Why does that mean so much to you, when nothing else—”

“Because I couldn’t save them all.”

“But how could you? I mean, why would you think you were supposed to? I don’t understand.”

“Sometimes I don’t either.”

“Do you think of me that way too sometimes? As if you’re responsible for my life, as if you don’t know whether or not you’ll be able to save me?”

“They were going to throw acid in Momma’s face. That’s the answer to your question. They were going to throw acid in Momma’s face. They were going to teach our father a lesson, but a guy warned me and I went to see Mr. Rothenberg and asked for help and he told me that he would take care of things and he kept his word and it never happened. All right?”

“That’s the whole story? That’s all I get?”

“You are persistent, aren’t you?”

“Sure.” I thought of Gail. “I want to know, Uncle Abe. I want to know everything I don’t know.”

To my surprise, Abe was smiling at me as if he was pleased to see this side of me—how much I could talk, how much I cared about his life. I tried to look at him as easily and lovingly as I could, so that he wouldn’t change his mind, so that he wouldn’t become frightened. I waited. I wished we weren’t so close to Mr. Rothenberg’s house because I felt that if only we could keep on driving—just the two of us, away from the city, away from our apartment and families and our other lives—he would have felt free to tell me everything.

He touched his jacket pocket again, nervously. When I’d asked him once about why he didn’t carry a gun, I remembered, he had answered by saying that there were many stupid people in the world who thought that if they killed him, they could sit in his seat and have his power and live his life. I’m the only one who can lead my life, he said.

“Your mother was a very beautiful woman, wasn’t she,” I offered.

“My mother was a very beautiful woman,” he said. “Sure, Davey. Sure she was.” He touched my hair again, as if to reassure himself that I was actually in the car with him. “She was so beautiful that men and women used to come to our house from all over the city—rich men and women—just to see her face. Can you imagine?” He smiled at me in a way that told me he was happy to be answering my question, to be talking about her. “When your mother and I were kids growing up on the Lower East Side, our father had a small fur store on Howard Street where people would come to buy their coats. We lived in back of the store, in two small rooms—plus there was the room our father worked in, where he did all his work—the sewing and cleaning and tipping and dyeing and pointing and repairs—and we had half the cellar downstairs too, which the landlord rented to my father for storage.

“There was a gorgeous silk curtain from China I loved to stare at—blues and reds and silver and gold threads, with birds and flowers and mountain peaks covered with snow—and it hung between our apartment and the storefront. Momma and Poppa slept in the kitchen near the stove, see, and Evie and I slept in the one bedroom, which had no windows, and downstairs Poppa had this enormous kind of icebox—bigger than our whole apartment—where he kept coats stored for customers in the summer. Cold storage. That’s what they called it. People would bring him their coats in the spring, or he’d go around and pick them up and he’d keep them there through the summer, then take them out in the fall and get them ready for the winter. He built the room himself out of sheets of tin and wooden slats, with chambers between the inner and outer walls for the slabs of ice and sawdust, and with drains to let the melted water run off. He could make a fur coat from scratch—scraping and soaking and fleshing and tanning and stretching and drumming and dressing and bleaching and the hundred other operations the skins had to go through before they became coats. When I was a kid he’d show me the whole process, his part of it, let me use his knives and emery wheels, let me try to get the thin membrane of flesh away from the pelt without cutting into the fur, let me pluck the top hairs of the beavers and seals so we could get at the soft underfur. Sure. In the summertime Evie and I would go down and stay inside the room, sucking on ice chips—I’d knock them off with a screwdriver—and we’d put the chips in paper cups and pour blackberry syrup on them, and speculate on how much money you had to have to be able to afford the sables and ermines and minks, the astrakhans and sealskins and the different kinds of foxes.

“Evie would model the coats for me the way Momma modeled them for customers—that was what she did, see—and I’d act as if I was some rich guy from Park Avenue, tapping on the floor with a cane, and I’d keep making her take off one coat and put on another, and sometimes she would sit next to me and act like one of the ladies who was buying the coats. A lot of rich German Jews bought their coats from our father, and I hated them most because they acted as if they thought their crap didn’t stink. Mostly we’d make fun of them. I’d mimic the way Poppa would whisper to us, as if revealing state secrets. ‘Now children, I want you to remember that these are very wealthy people.’ And when he’d come to the word ‘very,’ he’d always close his eyes, and suck in his cheeks.

“I liked being down below with the furs when it was real hot, so I could cool off, pet the coats, run my hands over the silk linings, run my fingers across the monograms on the inside labels. He worked hard on those because he said it was the mark of ownership that mattered most to his customers. Evie and I would talk about what it would be like to be able to buy whatever you wanted, to have servants, to be able to go wherever you wanted in the world if you suddenly just felt like it. The world exists for money. Sure. Wasn’t that what all of us believed then? Me and Evie and Momma and Poppa and everyone in our neighborhood? That the world existed to serve and protect the people with money? When there was trouble on the street, between a guy dressed fancy and a bum, who did the cop grab first?

“Upstairs, whenever the customers would come, Poppa would seat them next to the front window so that the neighbors could see, and he would get them something to drink, tea or wine or sherry or Turkish coffee. He had special engraved silver trays and little demitasse cups and saucers edged in gold, and sometimes if we were dressed right he’d let me and Evie serve them. He taught us to bow and curtsey and how to answer questions politely and how not to look goggle-eyed at their clothes and jewels. He would have long conversations with his customers before he showed them coats, see—making fun of how poor and stupid everyone in the neighborhood was, telling them about the other wealthy people who’d been in and what they were buying. He had these fancy leather-bound books with photographs of models in coats, and he’d open them and, while he showed them the photos, he’d ask about trips they’d taken and about their houses and then—”

Abe stopped and blinked, as if surprised to find that he’d come to this part of his story. His eyes seemed to frost over, to go dead.

“He was just teasing them, though, because what they were there for, see, was for the moment when he’d stand, put his cup or glass down on the tray, and clap his hands sharply so that Momma would come out of the back room for the first time, wearing one of the fur coats. She’d push the curtain aside very tentatively, clutch the silk almost as if she needed it for balance, then let it slide between her fingers slowly so that the creases disappeared, and step forward toward the customers. And the crazy thing was that she loved it all. Why, Davey? Why did she love it so much? Can you tell me that?”

I didn’t try to answer his question, and I knew he didn’t expect me to. I imagined Abe letting me off in front of the house later and instead of going upstairs I was going to the corner candy store, calling Gail. I imagined us walking together along Bedford Avenue, near Brooklyn College, and I was telling her the story Abe was now telling me. I was feeling her press my hand when I came to the sad parts, and I was hearing her tell me that what we had to remember most of all was that it wasn’t just a story, that it was their lives, that these things had actually happened, that here was a difference between a person’s life and the story of that life.

“Momma would sit in the kitchen by the stove, not doing anything at all except getting the tea and stuff ready for him and chewing at her fingernails until she heard him clap for her. Then she’d light up.” He laughed. “I’d forgotten,” he said, turning toward me. “The way she’d hold her nails up to the lamp to see through them. She didn’t really chew at them, just kind of nibbled at the air around them, clicking her teeth lightly while she did. Evie and I teased her about this way she had of biting her nails and not biting them. But she doted on him and did whatever he wanted, mostly. Except for his customers she rarely got dressed up fancy. He bought all her clothes for her—he’d bring them home in big boxes and take them out of the tissue paper very carefully and she would make a big fuss over how good he was to her. She only wore the clothes when she modeled for customers, though. It was crazy. You’re like a diamond in the mud, he would say to her, and they’d both laugh. He had one extraordinary Russian Crown sable—it was the most expensive coat there was, a deep blue-black like you’ve never seen—that he would have her model only once in a while and that he never sold. It was hers, and he would promise each customer that if he ever found another like it, that customer would have first chance to purchase. Momma only wore the coat in the house.

“We weren’t at all poor, see—he did well enough to move us out of the neighborhood into a snazzy place uptown if he’d wanted to, but he knew it was better for his business to stay where we were. He was shrewd, all right. He knew what kind of image gave the rich people their kicks. The thing that seemed crazy to me, though, was that he himself used to dress like the rich men who bought from him—in silk shirts and derbies and fancy underwear and gaiters and this incredible black broadcloth coat he had, fur-lined with nutria. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, see, all the fur coats had the fur on the inside, and even after they discovered a way to remove the coarse guard hairs so the furs would look beautiful on the outside, the men’s coats kept the fur on the inside. Close to the vest, right? ‘My own Beau Brummell,’ Momma used to call him, because he was the one, not Momma, who spent hours getting dressed, fixing himself in front of mirrors with tweezers and creams and lotions and pomades and colognes and all kinds of crap. And she’d smile and help him. Jesus, it made me sick, Davey, the way he carried on, the way he treated her—the way she worshipped him and did everything for him, and then he went and…” His voice trailed off, his knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. “All I’d dream about sometimes would be the day I’d be big enough to take him, okay? To bash his perfumed head against the stove, to knock his shiny teeth through the back of his throat, to break his manicured fingers one at a time, to—” He laughed suddenly, sharply. “But he wasn’t the one, was he?”

“The one?”

“The one I got my chance on.” Abe licked his lips. “Okay. You asked me, right? So I’m telling you. He wasn’t the one I had to do my first job on. Sure.” He shrugged slightly, seemed to relax. “Anyway, it all seemed very real back then—how small the rooms were and how much I hated him and how beautiful Momma was. She was a tiny woman. Even before she got sick at the end and went down to under sixty pounds, she was tiny—she never weighed more than ninety, ninety-five pounds. About Little Benny’s size, if you think about it, only she had these giant brown eyes with long dark lashes, and a sweet set of lips—what we called a bow mouth in those days—and when she’d wrap herself up in one of those elegant minks or sables or silver foxes, or, best of all, in one of the beautiful black capes or long evening coats, she’d take your breath away. Like glowing coals, my father would say to his clients when they remarked on Momma’s eyes. Like glowing coals.

“If Evie and I were around after school or on weekends, we’d wait with Momma in the kitchen, and then when Poppa came in and told her which coat to put on we’d take off down the cellar, out the back door, into the alley and back around to the front so we could be there at the window when Momma made her entrance. She was terrific, Davey. When she’d come out of the back, pushing the curtain aside like some timid schoolgirl wearing store-bought clothes for the first time, and turn and pose and look back over her shoulder shyly and smile for the clients, it was incredible. Magic. And when she’d glance over at Poppa and get a wink from him, to show her she was doing fine, her face would glow. I never saw anything like it. I—”

He looked at me, as if puzzled.

“Tell me Davey—is there anything else in the world like the smile of a beautiful woman? Is there anything else in the world like a smile that says just to you that you’re the most important guy in the whole world, that you’re the only thing that matters, that all the love and tenderness behind that smile is for you, that—”

I said nothing because I didn’t really think he wanted an answer. I tried to see Gail’s face, smiling at me, but instead I saw my mother, sitting on my bed while I slept, staring down at me. Do you know what my trouble is, Davey? My trouble is that I love you too much. It’s no good to love somebody too much….

“She smiled like that for Poppa, and when he wanted her to she did it for his customers, and afterwards when me and Evie would go back around and in again through the cellar and she’d come into the kitchen and ask us, ‘How was I?’ and we’d tell her that she was wonderful, she’d hug us and kiss us and smile at us in the same way, and give us each a piece of her special chocolate, the ones with sweet, dark cherries inside that she kept hidden and would eat whenever she knew she’d helped Poppa sell a coat. She’d let us sit on her lap, and when she held me—this was when I was really little—I tried to touch her hair and curl it around my fingers and tug on it so that she’d make believe she wanted to bite my fingers. Her hair was dark and curly, like yours and mine—like the astrakhans, only softer. She liked to tell me about the softest and most fragile of the lamb pelts—the ones from a newborn or one-day old Caracul lamb or sometimes from those born prematurely, that came in a watered silk pattern—what we called moiré then—and it was nice to sit on her lap and let my hand go back and forth from the fur of a coat to the softness of her hair and then back again.

“She didn’t always smile right away, of course. Sometimes she’d take on this cold, sophisticated I-don’t-give-a-damn look—she and Poppa had a set of signals for how she performed—and once in a while she’d go through a whole showing without smiling at all. Evie and I tried to figure out their signals and what he made her save the special smiles for, but who knows? She looked like some of those gorgeous movie stars from the silent films, like Janet Gaynor if you could have seen her then, only darker and more fragile, I guess. She wanted to be an actress too, did you know that? Did Evie ever tell you that?”

“No. But my father used to say that she should have been one—my mother, I mean. Like this morning, with the tape over her mouth—”

“Sure. Because if she had—” He stopped. “Anyway, that was what she wanted. To be an actress up on the stage, with a bouquet of flowers in her arms and hundreds of people clapping for her, and sometimes if she got too upset about how my father wouldn’t let her—he’d pull the shades on the store window and give her a coat and gesture to the showroom as if he was Jacob Astor himself, and say, ‘Here, my darling—here is the only theater you will ever need! Here is where your star will shine!’ But even in the old country, see—in Odessa, where they came from—she wanted to be an actress. She’d recite lots of poems and parts to us in Russian. Who knows why? Who knows where these things get started, Davey? Sometimes I used to think that if I could have known her when she was a girl, the way I knew Evie—the way I knew you—if I could have spent a day or two with her when she was growing up—if I could have been there invisibly—that I could have understood everything. Do you ever think that way? That all you need is a few minutes or hours in somebody’s home—to see how things were when they were growing up—and you’d understand them forever after?”

He didn’t wait for my answer. “I still think that way sometimes,” he said. “Whenever I need to figure out some guy I’m dealing with, what I do is imagine the way he was when he was five years old, say, or eight or nine. I imagine that—I send the guy back in time to what he was like hanging around some small apartment, and what his face looked like when he watched his mother and father speaking to him, what he felt, and when I do that it helps me to know how to act. I saw it all overseas too—saw it proved—when guys were dying, when they came back in on stretchers, when the shit was running down their legs. Because the two words that came out were always the same: ‘God’ or ‘Momma.’ Momma most of all. Please Momma, save me. Please Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Please.” He glanced at me. “It’s a good thing to remember, Davey—no matter who somebody is, no matter how rich and powerful, that once upon a time they were just little boys who weighed maybe forty or fifty pounds and who wanted their mothers to smile at them and to hold them.” He shrugged. “Though I have to admit that in my business I’ve come across a few characters, through the years, who might be different.”

He laughed, as if he’d told himself a joke. “Oh yeah, Davey, I have come across a few who might not be like the rest of us. Pretty scary. To look in a guy’s eyes and feel he could just as easily never have had a mother or father. Turkish Sammy is that way. It makes him useful to me for the work he might be called on to perform one day soon.” Abe clicked his teeth together, lightly. Was Abe taking me to Mr. Rothenberg because they were expecting trouble from Fasalino? The word around the neighborhood was that the Italians had not had anything to do with the basketball fixes—Italians don’t love sports the way you crazy Jews do, Tony said to me—but that men like Abe and Mr. Rothenberg and Harry Gross were trying to finger them for it with the D.A. Why? “Anyway,” Abe went on, “Momma dreamt of being an actress—that’s the story I started out to tell you—but in those days for a Jewish girl to be an actress was like her wanting to be a prostitute. I never got the whole story straight, but the best I could figure was that in Odessa he made some kind of deal with her father to marry her so that she wouldn’t run away and join a traveling show. Crazy, huh? To try to imagine all that. Her father managed forests for a rich Gentile, and she was his youngest daughter, his favorite—they had eleven altogether, and three more who died young—and from the time she was born, when her old man was in his sixties, everyone doted on her for her beauty. Her father made out okay for himself, managing the land, and he had a good business going on the side, selling liquor to the peasants who lived there. And sometimes he’d go around banging on trees with a hammer.

“Jesus! I hadn’t remembered that for a long time! That was the story she’d tell us about going around with him when she was a girl, and do you know why he banged on trees? Because the violin-makers would come to the forests to pick out trees for their instruments, and he had the knack of knowing which ones would be best just from banging on them with hammers and putting his ear to the bark and listening to them vibrate. Sure. She told me and Evie lots of stories about her father, about all the things he could do—how he played the fiddle and sang like an opera star and rode a horse like a Cossack and danced like a prince and how all the women followed him around and left letters for him in tree trunks. Her own mother died when she was eight and he never married again, and she met Poppa when she was fourteen years old and married him two months later. So what chance did she ever have? Can you tell me that?

“All he really was, see, was a small-time gangster who supplied her father with some of the liquor he needed and who also went into the forests to get furs from the peasants. Which wasn’t legal either. You ask your mother for details—she’s closer to him than I ever used to be. She made her choice too, right? The two of them probably liked each other and went to the same whore houses together, for all I know. Sure. They were the kind of men I always classify as the ones who are born wanting to be big shots. That’s the way it is, if you ask me—that some men are born wanting more than anything to grow up so that everybody else in the world thinks they’re important. It’s what drives them, right? So Momma tried to run off one last time, and when they dragged her back, the story is that she was shouting out words in the street—from Uncle Vanya, that she’d been secretly memorizing—and she didn’t make it out of Odessa and Poppa offered to marry her to keep her from such a life and her father agreed and it happened. Okay?

“And then they came to America. He took a lot of money off the old man from what I can figure. The old man adored her—who wouldn’t?—and he wanted most of all to protect her from harm. He figured Poppa was the guy for the job and in some ways he wasn’t all wrong. Poppa spent his life protecting her from harm, and from everything else too, pretty much. There were a lot of gangsters in Odessa then, and Poppa came to the old man one day after they were married and said he was in bad trouble with a guy who was bigger than either of them, that they’d caught him in some kind of double-cross having to do with the liquor—the old man could pay them off and they wouldn’t touch him, but that if Poppa didn’t leave they would kill him and my mother. The old man believed him, and who knows, maybe he was even telling the truth. All I know is they got on a ship and came to America, and Poppa picked up right where he left off.

“Most of the coats he sold, see, were stolen goods. At night I’d watch him at work—he didn’t seem to mind—removing labels from coats and putting his own labels in, or dyeing the skins, or bleaching them, or feathering in new colors with a turkey feather, or pointing the pelts by adding hairs, or changing the styles completely so the owners would never recognize them—making them longer or shorter, or putting more padding in the shoulders, or taking out padding, or changing the collars or the sleeves or the linings. On the mink and the sable and the marten and lynx and most of the stuff he dealt in, the pelts were so tiny, and you needed so many of them to make a coat, and the insides were hidden with silk and taffeta and satin, that nobody knew how to trace the stuff once he’d worked it over. He’d take mink coats and slash the pelts into narrow diagonal strips and resew them into longer shapes, into what they called let-out mink in those days. And sometimes, if he got worried, he’d just ship the stuff out of town—he took less money that way, but it was safer. An artist, Momma called him, and she’d sit next to him for hours, him passing her furs, her stitching or brushing or feathering, or putting the furs on horsehide cushions and tapping them with little canes to soften them up, and her telling us that no matter how long she lived or how many times he showed her what he did, she would never have his gift.

“He had a good racket, all right, and after a while he didn’t even wait for the coats to come in but just gave guys addresses of his clients. Sometimes he’d sell the same coat, in different incarnations, three or four times over, even sell the same skins back to the original owner. That gave him his biggest charge. When a coat would come back a third or fourth time he would stroke it and put it over his forearm and say that this was the true cat with nine lives.

“He played around with the women here too. If he got the itch, at nine in the morning even—I could always tell by how he would drink his coffee more quickly, by how much time he spent in front of the mirror, and by how, if Momma tried to touch him, to give him affection, he’d get angry with her—but if he needed it, he’d say he was going off to see a client for a few hours, and when he’d come back later he’d stink of wine and perfume and cigar smoke, and then Momma would stand up to him and they’d go at each other for a while. Once she threw boiling water at him, but it missed his face and only did in one of his shirts and scalded his arm some. Another time she got her nails into his cheeks and I felt pretty good about that. But he was too strong for her mostly and whatever it was he had, she seemed to want it too much.

“Sometimes I used to think that maybe he only felt important and loved her when he saw the way other people looked at her. Some things aren’t worth much to people until somebody else wants it, I guess, because what happened was this: Momma finally fell in love with this little Irish guy who came to the store all the time delivering the stolen coats to Poppa. His name was Dennis Mooney, and Poppa used to make jokes about him because that was what he’d do all the time around Momma—he’d moon around and try to steal glances at her.

“He looked like a little jockey, or a prizefighter, only too pretty—a short, wiry guy with a shock of strawberry blond hair, fair skin and a broken nose that made him handsomer than he would have been without it—and he was no more than twenty-one or twenty-two. Momma was almost forty by then. I was nineteen, a little younger than Dennis, and Evie was twenty and working uptown as a secretary for a shirt company, where Poppa got her the job, so we weren’t home as much as we used to be. I hung around with guys from the neighborhood who liked to live it up—the other Jews cursed us and prayed we wouldn’t cast eyes on their daughters, right?—and their daughters spent most of their time dreaming about when we would. I liked the high life then, Davey. I liked skirts. I liked fancy clothes and fancy women. I made my money by working for Poppa’s friends—driving trucks and picking up stuff and running things here and there. Prohibition was over, but there was still a lot of stuff, out of bond, that needed trafficking and nobody got hurt most of the time. Did I think of doing anything else with my life? Who knows? Momma thought I should go to some kind of school, to get something safe, but I never did well in school, even though the teachers said I had the brains. I always watched the skirts too much. I liked to get bashed on good bourbon and roll around in silk sheets and wake up the next morning and have my buddies brag to me about the crazy things I did. I had a reputation.

“Anyway, while I was dipping my stick uptown, Dennis was having a good time with Momma downtown, only we didn’t know about it for a while. It turned out he wanted to be an actor and singer in vaudeville, see, and he’d get down on one knee, with Momma sitting on a chair, her hands in her lap, and he’d sing these Irish songs for her, like John McCormack, and come with scripts in his coat pocket and they’d act out the parts together and Poppa thought it was all a gas. He even had Dennis come around once or twice for his clients, and he dressed him up in a tuxedo and had him sing for them while they sipped tea. It was crazy, believe me.

“Until he caught them at it one day when he got home, before he was supposed to—Evie and I weren’t there either—and he beat the guy up so bad that no woman would ever want to kiss him again, he told Momma. Afterwards he took his knives, from working on the furs—the ones he used for making let-out minks—and said that next time he’d use them on the guy’s pretty face. The cops came, but Poppa had them pretty much in his pocket and they just took Dennis away to get him stitched up, and for a day or two—except for the effect on Momma—I guess we figured that was the end of it. She’d had her fling. She was heartbroken. My own idea was that she’d gotten even with him in her way, even though he caught her. Did she want him to catch her? Did she want him to know after all those years that she could still experience love, that she could still give herself to someone else the way she’d first given herself to him?

“He tried to cover up the way he felt by bragging to everybody about the job he did on Dennis, but he didn’t fool me, and when he wasn’t around I gave a lot of attention to Momma, not pushing her, but encouraging her, telling her that I could set her up in her own place, that I’d even get her together with Dennis if that was what she wanted. What did I care that she was twice his age? I never minded if things worked out crazy in this life, Davey, if the combinations went against the odds, because who ever said anything good followed the rules? Sometimes, I guess, I even figured the stranger and crazier the combination, the more likely it could make you happy. But Momma didn’t want to hear me. She just sat around crying a lot and not making a move to do anything else.

“It mixed your mother up pretty good too. She always had a thing for Poppa, and now he went to town on her. He got her a bunch of new clothes, gave her one of his silver fox coats—a gorgeous smokey-blue one that was worth a small fortune—and took her out to restaurants a lot, giving her a sob story about how much he loved Momma, about how he’d never get over the hurt she did to him, about how he was going to change, and she lapped it up. Well. She wasn’t so unlike her brother, was she? I mean, she liked the fancy clothes and I guess she liked pants the way I liked skirts.

“She and I didn’t talk much then—she was ashamed of me too, I guess, because the old man made her think I was involved with Dennis, that I’d fixed the whole thing up to start with. I couldn’t get through most of what was going on, to figure out what he said to her that I had to make up stories to cover, but the real truth is that there wasn’t time either, because a guy I drove for, a fat Irishman named Dunn who took a shine to me, took me aside a few days later and told me that Mooney was the nephew of a big shot named O’Shea, who was Dunn’s boss, and that O’Shea had hired some guys to take care of Poppa.

“‘Good,’ I said. ‘It’ll save me the trouble.’ Then—would you believe it?—this big guy put his hand on his heart and got tears in his eyes and told me they were going to get Momma, that O’Shea heard how beautiful she was and decided to teach Dennis a lesson too. O’Shea said that if Momma wasn’t beautiful anymore, then she would never give any man trouble again, so he hired a guy to throw acid in Momma’s face.

“That was the main story, then and now, and I didn’t waste time. I went straight to Rothenberg and almost got myself killed barging in on him where he lived with all his bodyguards, but I’ll get to the crucial part, which is that when he heard about what was going to happen—he’d bought coats for himself and his wife from us—he didn’t hesitate. ‘I like you and your mother very much, Abe,’ he said, ‘and I will see to it that such an atrocity does not take place.’ That was all he said at first, except that he could see how shaken I was. So he put his arm around me and took me into his sitting room—he lived near where Belmont’s mansion used to be then, on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street—and he asked me if I realized exactly what I was doing by putting myself in his debt. He was pleased to do me a favor, and—it might never happen, but I should be prepared—he might need to call upon me to return the favor one day. I said I understood.

“How can I explain it all to you, Davey? If Dennis hadn’t hung around Momma, maybe I’d have a different life today, but he did and what happened happened, and here I am. I try never to think of the life I don’t have, right? Mr. Rothenberg and I talked a long time that afternoon and we discovered that we liked each other, that we thought the same way about most things. He asked me why I free-lanced so much for the Irish and the Italians and some of the Jews who ran our section—Shapiro and Ribalow mostly—and would I consider becoming associated with him at some future date. I said I’d consider it but that I wasn’t eager, and he liked that—that I deferred things, that I didn’t jump at his invitation.

“Nothing happened to Momma. Two of O’Shea’s men met with a bad accident in the East River, though. I didn’t hear from Mr. Rothenberg for eight months, and then I got a message one day that he wanted to see me. I went. He asked me if I owned a gun. I said I didn’t. He gave me a Smith and Wesson .38 and instructed me in its use. He explained very carefully how he worked and why, how he tried never to use force unless he had to because he believed that no matter how many guns you had someone would always come along with more guns and bigger guns, and how force itself didn’t create power or influence.

“Could you beat everybody up? Could you kill them all? There was always somebody who could come along who was stronger. What you had to do was to be able to offer people something they couldn’t get anywhere else. The brain that knew how not to use guns or force or threats, the brain that had a talent for persuasion, for organization—that, he said, was the most powerful weapon a man possessed. That and the imagination to think of possibilities others hadn’t thought of yet. Mr. Rothenberg was big on imagination. He himself had been blessed with the brain and the imagination, he said, and he sensed that I had also. Alas, though, neither of us were named Rockefeller or Harriman or Vanderbilt or Morgan. We weren’t rich German Jews like Rothschild or Belmont or Lehman. We couldn’t count on the police or the Army or the politicians to advance or protect our business interests the way they could.

“He talked for a long time that day and in all the years since he never repeated what he said to me then. He was a very intelligent man—not what he is today, what’s left of him—and if he hadn’t been born the way he was, and a Jew, he could have gone to the top of anything, in business or government. He was mostly into gambling then, into the numbers and the horses. He had this little guy named Abbadabba Berman working for him—The Human Adding Machine, we called him—and he kept him in a back room with lots of paper, pencils, and gumdrops. Berman would go through the thousands of policy slips the runners brought in and by the time the first seven races were run he’d figure out the number on which the most money had been bet, the one they couldn’t let win. Then Mr. Rothenberg would relay the information to a guy at the track where we were taking our daily number from, and the guy would make whatever adjustment was needed in the pari-mutuel handle.

Abe laughed. “I hadn’t thought of him for a long time—Berman. I loved that guy. Did your father ever tell you about him?”

“No.”

“He died young—younger than your father. Rothenberg kept him in this bare room where he was all scrunched over, wearing a hat, a bunch of pencils in his left hand like a quiver of arrows. Lepke had him killed a few years later, when Abbadabba had gone to work for Dutch Schultz. They shot him in the bathroom of the Palace Chop House in Newark while he was on the pot.

“But that all happened later on. And what did Mr. Rothenberg do wrong? Sell liquor to people when everyone was doing the same? Sure. Why was it legal when the state took your bet at the track but illegal when someone else did it away from the track? ‘I am only an American businessman in a land of opportunity,’ he would say to me, and I believed he was right, Davey. Except that the difference between him and the heads of the big banks and corporations was that he never took money out of poor people’s mouths and he never ran sweatshops and he never busted unions and he never had good people knocked off and he never lied to himself.

“Hypocrisy was the great enemy in life, he taught me. He took me for who I was, and not for somebody else. He understood me, Davey—the way I thought and worked.” Abe squeezed my shoulder, hard. “All right then. I’ll tell you the rest—to the end—because I want to, not just because you asked. All right?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Rothenberg told me I was not to concern myself about who the person was. I was to take his word that the man was at least as worthless as my own father. There were times in a man’s life when certain choices were put upon him, he said, and when none of them were good—when, no matter which way he chose, he lost. I was caught in such a situation, and I’d come to him, which was, he said, the smartest thing I could have done.

“He was very old-fashioned, he added, because he still believed in good and evil, and in free will—that we were responsible for the consequences of choices and actions freely made—and he tried to impress upon me his belief that when certain individuals vanished from the face of the earth, nothing was lost. So I took the gun and I went to the guy’s apartment—he had a suite in the Hotel Saint George, near the Brooklyn Bridge—and I followed instructions and said I was there with a message from O’Shea, that my name was Jack Healy, and when he opened the door I shot him twice in the chest and, while he was falling, once in the head.

“He wore an undershirt with black-and-red-striped suspenders over it. I had a silencer on the gun. He never had time to say a word or to scream. He’d never seen me before. I pushed him back into the room so I could close the door and I stood over him for a few seconds and thought how thin the line was—how he was there a second ago, with everything he’d done and thought, all his ideas and memories and habits—and now he was gone and would never come back. But it was no problem to him, I told myself, because he wasn’t there. I thought how easy it was to kill a man, to make no life where life had been before, and from too many movies, I guess, I expected for a second to see some girl in a silk slip start screaming from the bed behind him. But nobody else was there.

“The next day there was a big story in the papers, with photos of the guy dead and of the guy when he was alive. His name was Harold Bernstein and he was a lawyer. He had a wife and two kids living in Newark, but the papers said he hadn’t lived with them for five years and they couldn’t get much more information from anyone, except that he had worked for Mr. Rothenberg briefly and for others with worse reputations—Lepke and Schultz—and that he was rumored to be a stool pigeon, to have been one of Dewey’s key informers, when Dewey was a special D.A.

“Dewey was hot shit back then, see, and had all the boys scared, even Lansky and Luciano and Costello. He put Waxey Gordon behind bars and got Schultz knocked off and sent Lepke to the electric chair. ‘Well,’ Mr. Rothenberg said when we read that headline, ‘Abbadabba would be pleased. He would have said that Mr. Dewey had Lepke’s number, yes?’

“I went to work for Mr. Rothenberg after that. Momma never knew anything about it all, the acid or O’Shea or what happened to Dennis. She got sick about a year later and died within a few months. She was only forty-one, the same age your mother is now. But the word did get back to Poppa and Evie somehow. Who knows? Maybe it was Mr. Rothenberg himself who made sure they knew so he could keep his hold on me. We liked each other, but in our line of work that didn’t mean there was trust. We never made an association without making sure we had something we could hold over the other guy. Just in case. Mostly what you learned was that you couldn’t trust anybody in this life—ever—though there were a few you could trust more than others.”

Abe touched his ring. He seemed angry suddenly. Was he sorry he’d answered my questions? Did he resent having told me why all the years had been the way they were?

“So now that you know, kid,” he said, “are you happy?”