Fishtown
Megan stepped out of her fashionable red door in the trendiest part of Fishtown, drinking in the cold, clear afternoon air. She stood on the stoop, locked the door behind her, and turned, putting her keys in her handbag, juggling her Kenneth Cole overnight bag. She walked down the first of the three steps that led to the sidewalk and stepped on a woman’s hand.
Megan shrieked. The woman shrieked. Megan stumbled and, for a moment, thought she might fall.
“I’m so sorry. So sorry,” she said, apologizing reflexively as she righted herself. Luckily, she was wearing snow boots instead of her strappy high heels or she would certainly have fallen. And why she should apologize she didn’t know, since the woman, old and dirty, had no business lounging on Megan’s well-kept steps. She shrugged to settle the Michael Kors cashmere coat on her shoulders, pulling it together against the cold.
“That dress is too young for you. You’re not that young,” snarled the old woman malevolently, rubbing her injured hand, having caught a glimpse beneath the coat of the bronze metallic sheath that Megan had bought for an extravagant price the week before.
“Excuse me,” Meg muttered, losing all sympathy with the old crone. “I’m in a hurry.” She went down the rest of the steps, giving the woman a wide berth.
“You won’t be the prettiest one there. Or the youngest,” the old woman called after her.
“Jesus,” Meg breathed. “What a bitch.” But she shook off her irritation. Nothing was going to spoil her mood. Today was the high point of her year.
The Daggers’ New Year’s Eve extravaganza was, for Megan, the party to end all parties. First, it was a truly great, well-planned gathering. Drinks at seven, buffet dinner at nine, desserts and coffee at eleven for a little jolt of caffeine and sugar, watch the ball drop at midnight, karaoke and drunken dancing after that. The party ended with a hot breakfast the next morning, where bedraggled women avoided meeting the eyes of the friends whose husbands they had made out with in dark corners of the enormous suburban house. Second, it was a social coup to be invited to the best New Year’s eve party on the Main Line. Most important, for Megan, it was a taste of the life she wanted, the life she was working toward, the life she was destined for.
Megan had prepared like an athlete, sleeping in this morning, eating a big lunch, laying down a base. When she jumped on the subway at Girard Avenue and Front Street bound for 30th Street Station and then the Paoli local to Bryn Mawr, she was ready. It was only a one-hour trip but it was a journey to another world.
Megan had inherited her family’s home in Fishtown, a former blue-collar ghetto that was being steadily gentrified. She was renovating it, bit by bit, to improve its value, watching the real-estate market for the right time to sell. Many young professionals would love to live in increasingly fashionable Fishtown, but Megan dreamed only of an address on the Main Line.
Megan was one of Bess Dagger’s best friends. Bess, having spent the day in Bryn Mawr helping her sister Anise prepare, picked Megan up at the Bryn Mawr train station. As they drove through the lovely town to Anise’s large, comfortable house, Bess chattered away about the guest list. Both Anise’s daughters were home. Glamourous Carrie had brought home a girl, a classmate from Yale, while her slightly mousy sister Celia had brought home a boyfriend from law school. Anise wasn’t sure which of her girls she was more worried about. Celia’s boyfriend from Georgetown Law was tall and good looking. Her sister Carrie had already wondered aloud why Celia could get such a prize and she couldn’t. Of course, Celia wasn’t unattractive. She was a Dagger, after all. Beauty was an acknowledged family trait among the Daggers. Beauty and loyalty, Meg mused, really defined them.
Among the older set, Anise’s neighbor and best friend Paula and her faithless husband, the cute French bond trader Henri, had split up. Again. Paula was coming, naturally, but everyone wondered if Henri might just turn up too, since he had always been invited before. They were trying to decide what to do about it if he did. The ugly next-door neighbors were already there, of course. They didn’t have a life of their own, with their ramshackle house and ghastly, troubled children-they virtually lived through Anise and Thom.
As they drove from the station, Bess went on and on, pausing only to admire Megan’s low-cut gleaming dress and her newly botoxed forehead that matched Bess’s own. Megan listened, looking out the car window, drinking in the snowy town. Bess, who had grown up in nearby Ardmore, was nonchalant, but it still took Megan’s breath away. Philly’s best address. One of the East Coast’s most exclusive moneyed enclaves. The fabled Main Line.
Bess and Megan were both a little over forty, although each admitted only to thirty. Bess was lovely, blond like all the Daggers, smooth-skinned, perfectly made up, dressed in vintage Versace. Megan herself was still quite attractive, no matter what the old hag had said, with her gym-toned body, her chic auburn shag, her bronze sheath, her Judith Lieber lioness minaudiere.
Bess worked in corporate marketing, Megan in Philadelphia’s top ad agency. They both made good money, lived well, took care of themselves. They didn’t really date anymore-there were no straight, single, solvent men between forty and sixty-five left in Philly, as everyone very well knew-but they went out with each other or various friends and colleagues several nights a week, and frequently drank a bit too much.
At New Year’s, though, Megan knew how to pace herself. She had a system. You start slow, have plenty of hors d’oeuvres, enough dinner to count, and only drink champagne. Her first flute was handed to her by Anise, who greeted them at the door. “My other sister,” she declared as she always did, hugging Meg warmly. “You look gorgeous, darling.”
It was a greeting that never failed to delight Megan, herself an only child of cold, judgmental parents, sparing in their love and praise. As Meg was trading her boots for high-heeled sling-backs, Michelle, the third blond Dagger sister, swept her up in yet another bear hug. Laughing, Meg held her champagne aloft with difficulty to avoid a spill. She fairly purred with pleasure.
“Sisters,” Meg murmured. “The divine Dagger sisters.”
Thom also hugged her and took her overnight bag up to a guest room he called “your room,” which made her laugh even more. If only it were true.
As the party kicked in, she got buzzed enough to enjoy herself. She remained gracious in the presence of the unendurable ugly neighbors, listening to the sad story of their surly daughter’s latest drug-fueled escapade.
Meg exchanged air kisses with Paula and tolerated her whining about her faithless French husband, the delicious Henri. And then there he was. Henri. He did indeed show up-how dare he?
There was a breathless pause as every conversation stopped. Then Anise strolled over and, after the briefest moment, standing before him-would she kiss him or slap him-kissed him on both cheeks. “Henri.”
“Chère Anise,” Henri murmured, holding her hand to his lips. He was darkly handsome with his perfect stubble, kissable mouth, and single diamond earring. The Dagger sisters couldn’t resist him. He enhanced their blond beauty with his own dark European charm. He took a flute of champagne and prowled around the party, providing titillation and frissons of mock horror wherever he circulated. He looked every bit the dissipated Eurotrash he was, lured back, no doubt, by the realization that all the money was from Paula’s family and was still in Paula’s name.
Megan gave a warm hug to Anise’s lackluster daughter Celia and shook hands with her tall, damp-palmed boyfriend. Then she made a point of bonding with the more beautiful daughter Carrie and her college friend Lulu, a blond look-alike from Boston. Meg prided herself on remaining hip-dropping pop culture references and pertinent song lyrics from the latest Grammy winners and catchphrases from hip TV shows like Gossip Girl.
Carrie, tall and glamourous, was particularly striking tonight in a low-cut, short, creamy silk Grecian tunic, which showed off her considerable cleavage and long, tan legs. With her father’s lanky grace and the Dagger blond beauty, Carrie was a remarkable girl and she had always loved Megan. Her friend Lulu, every bit her match, wore a white angora minidress, which had to have been planned to coordinate with her friend.
The college kids were amused by Megan and stayed with her for some time, laughing and making sly comments about the other guests before trailing down to the large family room to warm up the karaoke machine for later. Megan smiled with satisfaction. The Daggers were a large, close-knit WASP clan so unlike Meg’s own small, disaffected, heathen brood. She adored them all and would do anything for them, anything at all.
Meg got some more champagne from the jeroboam of Moët that Michelle Dagger’s brash alcoholic husband insisted on bringing every year. He never tired of hearing the women coo and squeal about how big it was. Meg never tired of drinking good champagne so she endured his usual size-really-matters jokes with aplomb.
Then came the scream. Because Meg observed her stringent party regimen, she was sober, or sober enough, to respond quickly when she heard it. She was the first to arrive in the doorway of the darkened den off the living room, lit only by Christmas lights and candles and typically functioning as a sin bin for guests’ brief, illicit, champagne-fueled encounters.
Meg stopped abruptly in the doorway, causing other party guests to pile up behind her. Anise Dagger was sitting in the center of a velvet-upholstered sofa, her tall, gorgeous daughter Carrie sprawled, on her back, over Anise’s lap, head dangling like a broken doll. Carrie’s long bare arms and legs hung on either side of her mother. Anise held her and looked up at Meg with an expression of pure anguish.
It took a minute to register the tableau, as still and composed as any Renaissance sculpture. Then Meg realized that the scream, more of a howl, really, had been Carrie’s and that the girl was limp but breathing, weeping extravagantly in her mother’s arms.
“The Bryn Mawr Pietà,” Meg whispered involuntarily, and guests behind her took up the phrase and repeated it in low tones. Bess pushed past Meg and crouched before her sister and her stricken niece.
Anise’s husband Thom shouldered his way into the room and scooped up Carrie, who hung on him, upright but limp, still weeping into his starched white shirt. He shot Anise a look and she returned it with a shrug. Bess was still crouching beside Anise, holding her hand.
Carrie started mumbling and slurring about how life was hell and she couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear it, it was so difficult, so hard, she couldn’t, no, no, no, she just couldn’t. Thom, full of concern a moment ago, stiffened and held her out from him, her head still wobbling on her long neck, her expensively layered hair tousled, eyes red and rolling.
“Carrie, you’re drunk,” he announced sternly in a loud and serious baritone.
“Life is hell, just pure hell, and I can’t.” His daughter paused to hiccup. “I can’t, can’t, can’t bear it. I can’t.”
“Carrie.” Thom shook her slightly, this tall, gorgeous creature, limp and sodden but still beautiful in her lavish distress. “You are going to your room. Right now.”
Megan suppressed a smile. Would the drunken, nearly adult Amazon-like Carrie go to her room like a disobedient child? Poor Thom was clueless. He shook her again until she straightened up enough to walk and nudged her to the door to send her upstairs. She broke loose and turned back to her mother with another bone-chilling wail.
Anise opened her arms and Carrie flung herself back on her mother’s lap, burrowing her face in Anise’s shoulder and blubbering into her neck. Anise shrugged again at Thom and wrapped her arms protectively around her large, distraught daughter, rocking her in her arms. Bess reached up and tenderly rubbed Carrie’s back, exposed in the backless silk tunic. Michelle, the third Dagger sister, squeezed by Megan and rushed to help console her niece.
Poor Thom. He opened his mouth to protest again, but evidently realized he could never prevail against the massed determination of the Dagger sisters when they closed ranks. He stood for a moment, helpless, until Megan took his arm. He let her lead him from the room, the other guests scattering in front of them, muttering and giggling. Megan heard the phrase “Bryn Mawr Pietà” repeated a number of times. She wished she’d never said it.
Thom rallied then, and called out, “Let’s have more champagne, shall we? It’s almost midnight.” And that, Meg thought, was that.
The party rolled on inexorably. The ball dropped. Kisses were exchanged. Anise circulated again, her composure restored, laughing charmingly about young women and their angst. Even Carrie reappeared, her face freshly scrubbed, tossing her blond hair and looking only slightly embarrassed.
Henri and Paula were evidently having a rapprochement in the butler’s pantry, breathing heavily, startled like deer when Megan discovered them. They were kissing in a dark alcove beside the Sub-Zero, his hand inside her sweater, her pale face reddened where his stubbled chin had rubbed it, his leg between hers, her skirt hiked up around the tops of her thighs. Paula gasped and he laughed darkly when Meg, in search of some ice water, walked in.
Meg, who had herself spent some time in Henri’s arms an hour earlier, her own face still smarting from his fashionable stubble, her own thighs aching where his leg had thrust between them, smiled benignly and closed the refrigerator door, darkening the tiny pantry again. Her smile disappeared as she returned to the dining room, reflecting on the faithless, feckless ways of men, particularly the French.
The college kids emerged from the family room downstairs to announce that the karaoke machine was ready for action. Pulsing rock music beckoned, drowning out the Christmas carols on the iPod upstairs. Most of the revelers who were still standing trooped unsteadily down the steps, ready to continue drinking and watch each other strutting and mugging and stumbling over complicated lyrics sung alarmingly off-key.
With very little prodding, Carrie gave her patented rendition of Cher’s “Believe” in her perfect, sexy, adenoidal alto, complete with reverb on the chorus, “After love, after love, after love, after love.” It was a tough act to follow.
Carrie’s college friend Lulu took up the challenge with an overheated version of Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy.” Meg thought she saw something smug and proprietary in Henri’s dark admiring look as he watched the young woman shimmy up and down the structural pole that pierced the makeshift dance floor like a ship’s mast.
Meg followed, jumping in with a Gwen Stefani number that allowed her to wiggle her well-toned ass while soothing her overheated thighs by clamping them around the pole. “I know I’ve been a real bad girl,” she cooed as suggestively as Gwen ever did. She gave a nod of sympathy to Paula, who was disheveled after her clinch with her husband, but who nevertheless looked pleased with herself.
Henri had eyes only for his wife as he vamped to a Kanye West number, almost making Meg believe he had reformed. Then he disappeared, no doubt upstairs kissing someone else’s wife and congratulating himself on his renewed conquest of his own poor spouse. Paula, the pathetic victim of his many indiscretions, was now passed out in a chair in the corner.
An hour later, Meg was moving from pleasantly buzzed into the more dangerous territory of completely torched. Her patented system, she had to admit, was failing. She was on a sofa in the family room trapped between the ugly neighbors. She listened halfheartedly to the ugly wife whine about her dissolute teenagers; on her other side, the ugly husband surreptitiously trailed his pinky along Meg’s thigh. Did he really think that was sexy? she thought irritably. Did the ugly wife really think that dressing for a New Year’s Eve party meant a pilled Fair Isle sweater? Meg raised her glass only to find it empty.
Bess was wrapping her supple leg around the pole, growling like an improbable Justin Timberlake that she was going to bring sexy back. “I’m bringing sexy back. Just like a heart attack.”
Meg was pretty sure those weren’t the actual lyrics. She got up abruptly, interrupting the ugly wife in mid-whine and the ugly husband in mid-whatever. Ignoring their surprised expressions, she headed up the stairs.
Walking fairly steadily, Meg made a fairly complete circuit of the house, from the karaoke-singing sirens downstairs to the trash-strewn buffet table where men like Michelle’s dissolute husband had turned into pigs. Congealed meatballs dribbled from his mouth as he leered at her lasciviously. Another porcine guest saluted her with a chicken wing dripping sauce in one hand, a scum of dip across his sweatered chest.
Hearing a groan as she passed a powder room, dark as a cave, she nudged open the door to discover the ugly neighbor, one hand clamped to his eye, mumbling that someone had hit him and knocked out a contact lens or maybe knocked it in and scratched a cornea. He beckoned her in to help him. But Meg shook her head and kept moving.
She watched as various mini-dramas played out. On the sunporch, the beautiful daughter Carrie, evidently almost sober, talked intently to someone on her cell phone. Upstairs, the mousy daughter Celia sat weeping hopelessly outside a closed bedroom door, crooning her boyfriend’s name.
In the living room, she saw Michelle’s husband again-was he everywhere?-drunk as a monkey, suddenly smile wolfishly and lean in to lick the face of the startled ugly neighbor. The ugly man pushed him, and Michelle’s husband fell against the mantle, laughing manically. He laughed even louder when the ugly husband roughly pushed his own ugly wife, as she tried to wipe the spittle off her husband with her sweater sleeve.
Megan stepped neatly between the two men, the Scylla and Charybdis of the party, both dangerously drunk, staggering, both reaching for her with sticky, amorous hands. The grotesquely ugly man, groping toward Megan, was deaf to the angry scolding of his monstrous, homely wife. Meg left the sorry spectacle behind her and kept going.
Anise in the kitchen talking seriously with her sister Michelle. Lulu laughing huskily as she tottered down the stairs in impossibly high heels, wiping her mouth on the back of her manicured hand. Upstairs, Henri furtively leaving a darkened bedroom in which Megan glimpsed someone-Carrie?-on the bed. Henri sidled past Megan, tucking in his shirt, favoring her with his handsome, slightly sneering Gallic smile. Downstairs, Bess stalking angrily out of the den, her botoxed forehead unwrinkled but her eyes flashing her displeasure. Thom almost surreptitiously collecting glasses and ferrying them to the kitchen to be tucked into the capacious dishwasher.
Meg kept circulating, watching, stopping only occasionally, like some restless voyager searching for home.
It must have been four a.m. when a scream again rent the air, parting the haze of candle smoke, potpourri, and the mild fug of sweating, tired revelers. Again, Meg reacted, galvanized, as though she had somehow known it was coming.
Again, she drew up short at the doorway to the dimly lit den, adrenaline making her feel suddenly sober. Anise was sitting as before in the center of the velvet sofa, surrounded by candles and Christmas lights, her anguish evident on her lovely face. Again, the tall, gorgeous young woman was draped across her lap, head dangling, blond hair streaming across her face, arms and legs hanging limply.
Meg stepped into the room. It was the same as before, but also completely different. She knew that this time it was Anise who had screamed, not her daughter. Anise howled again, more animal moan than scream.
This time the doll was really broken. A thread of red blood trailed from the corner of her mouth. Anise shifted her grip, almost as if to offer the girl to Megan. The girl’s head lolled grotesquely and her hair spilled to one side.
Megan gasped, realizing that it was not Carrie who Anise held, but Carrie’s college friend Lulu. And Lulu was quite, quite dead.
Anise’s face, pale and ravaged by a terrible grief, told Megan, even without a word, that Anise thought the girl across her lap was her beloved daughter.
“Oh no, Anise. It’s not Carrie. See?” Meg knelt beside her, her impulse to curb Anise’s dreadful suffering blotting out everything, even the awfulness of Lulu’s death. “See?” She touched the girl’s head, sickeningly wobbly on her neck, brushing aside the razor-cut blond shag. Anise, evidently in shock and not far from fainting, slowly, slowly looked down. She slowly, slowly focused her gaze of bottomless pity and terror on the dead girl’s ghastly, waxen face.
Anise stood up abruptly, unceremoniously dumping Lulu’s corpse onto Megan. Meg toppled backward, panicked, scrambling to right herself and get out from under the dead girl, a primitive fear kicking in.
Strong hands helped Meg. Bess pulled her up and steadied her. Thom picked up the girl’s body and laid it tenderly on the sofa where Anise had been sitting. He took a minute to straighten the clothes, pulling down the short angora dress, putting the arms straight at her sides, tilting the head, lolling on the broken neck, so that the thread of blood did not mar the upholstery.
Thom then turned to Anise, but she was already moving, staggering out of the room, shouldering aside anyone in her way, looking for her daughter. Bess followed close behind her.
Meg registered all these details as pandemonium broke out around her. Guests, summoned by Anise’s howls but slowed by alcohol, appeared in the doorway, reacting to the tragedy. Megan heard weeping, at least one person vomiting, someone calling 911. She turned to Thom.
“Help me, Meg,” he said quietly. “We’ve got to get everyone out of this room.”
She nodded and together they started herding out the curious, nudging, even pushing, until the dimly lit room was empty of the living. They stood together, shoulder to shoulder, looking in at the lovely room. Chintz sofas, comfy chairs, warm Aubusson carpet, silk shaded brass lamps, the traditionally decorated Christmas tree in one corner, the dead college girl on the couch.
It seemed like only moments until a rush of cold air from the foyer and gruff men’s voices heralded the arrival of the Lower Merion police.
The investigation was a blur, managing to be intrusive, hyper-real, boring, unfocused, and intense, all at once. Most of the time Meg felt as though she were underwater. Technicians took over the living room. The immediate family was sequestered downstairs in the family room. Guests were asked to wait in the dining room, guarded by two uniformed officers who coped with a barrage of requests to use forbidden cell phones, to go to the bathroom, to leave and come back in the morning.
One by one, they were each brought to the kitchen for an interview with the two detectives, who put their questions quietly and took notes. A steady stream of uniformed officers and technicians came and went, each leaning down to whisper information or request instructions from the seated detectives. Someone had made coffee.
Among the last to be interviewed, Meg told the detectives what she could. It was a party like many others, confused, eventful, inconsequential. Soon forgotten, except, of course, for the murder.
She was leaving the kitchen, gratefully clutching her mug of coffee, when an officer brought Henri in for his interview, his head down, disheveled, looking even more broodingly handsome than ever. Meg glanced at him, passing, then stopped. Henri had already begun to speak in his charmingly accented voice, roughened by alcohol and a hint of something else. Megan stood stunned to hear Henri confess.
“I did it, you know? I murdered that poor girl. I didn’t mean to, you know? But I did it. I’m sorry. Désolé.”
His anguish was genuine. Tears streamed from beneath his long lashes. He ran a hand through his tousled hair, then over his stubbled, cleft chin. “I’m sorry. You know? I didn’t mean it. It just happened, you know?”
Meg gaped at him. He was almost as broken as Lulu had been, a monster, a chimera assembled from parts of his former self. His life was over too, and he knew it.
“I wanted her, you know? Sex, it’s what the party is all about, no? Sex. She wanted it too, but then she changed her mind, pushed me away.” A trace of a smile crossed his face, a remnant of his old roguish charm. “Me. She pushed me away. I knew she wanted it, you know? I took her shoulders and shook her, hard, to make her see reason, you know? But she passed out. I was sure it was only that.” He drew himself up a little. “I make love to a lot of women, you know? But never when they are passed out. So I left the bedroom, my beautiful little chérie untouched on the bed. But I must have killed her. Shook her too hard. Her neck must have snapped, you know? I am… I am désolé.”
His voice broke, his shoulders shook, he dropped his head into his arms on the counter and wept. Meg’s mind reeled. She watched until, at a signal from a detective, an officer put his hand on her arm and led her out of the kitchen.
As she left the room, Meg heard the detective ask Henri how the body had ended up in the den. She knew without looking that Henri only shrugged.
After a long while, the guests were released, shocked, tired, bedraggled, and grief stricken, to make their way home. No one met anyone else’s eyes. An officer asked Meg if she wanted to return to Philadelphia at once, but Thom told them she had planned to stay overnight and was considered family. Meg smiled at him gratefully. She would stay.
Brought back through the living room, Meg stood at the entrance to the den and saw the body was gone. Most of the family was now gathered there, sitting on the sofa where the dead girl had lain. Carrie was hunched over, hugging herself, crying. Anise was sitting beside her daughter, looking stunned, reaching out to stroke her arm occasionally, reassuring herself that she was still there. Celia and her boyfriend, their spat evidently forgotten, cuddled in a large chair, her eyes puffy and red, his hand unsteady as he stroked her head.
Bess stood by the fireplace, a glass of champagne, incredibly, in her hand. She smiled at Meg and raised her glass a fraction of an inch, a vestigial toast between friends. In her look there was a trace of something more, a hint of a question, a challenge. Meg, her eyes clear, calmly nodded back. Friends. More. Sisters.
Michelle and her drunken husband had evidently gone home. Most of the police were gone as well. Henri, shattered, had been led out in handcuffs, his leather coat draped raffishly over his shoulders. Henri’s wife Paula, distraught and incoherent, had been bundled out by a female officer before Henri was led away.
Poor Paula. Poor Henri. Megan knew that Henri had not killed this girl. Henri, guilty of many unsavory things, had killed no one.
Oh, he believed he had. His confession had been genuine and it would be accepted as fact. He would receive his punishment, his marriage over, his life, and Paula’s, in ruins. But actually he hadn’t done it, Meg knew. Meg didn’t care. She knew it was callous of her, but she just didn’t.
Her heart was with her friends, the Daggers. The Daggers of Bryn Mawr. The beautiful blond Dagger sisters and their families. Her sisters. Her friends. Bess. Dear Bess, standing by the fireplace, drinking champagne, looking so soignée.
Meg had known it wasn’t Henri from the moment she heard his touching, sad, rambling, French-accented confession-“So I left the bedroom, my beautiful little chérie untouched on the bed. But I must have killed her. Shook her too hard. Her neck must have snapped, you know?”
But it hadn’t been Lulu on the bed. He had left his beautiful little Carrie there. Not chérie, Carrie. Passed out, or just pretending, teasing him. He shook her, yes, but when Meg had glanced in she was sure she had seen the girl stirring. And while Henri might have been drunk enough to confuse the two beautiful college girls, Meg wasn’t. It was Carrie on the bed, alive and well. And although the police had probably asked Henri repeatedly how the body ended up in the den, Henri would only demur, shrugging, maintaining that he didn’t know. Had no idea. It didn’t matter. They had a confession.
Meg knew that Henri hadn’t done it. But who had?
Standing there watching the family, Meg carefully replayed the evening in her head. It passed before her eyes like stills from a movie. Celia outside a bedroom sobbing, calling her boyfriend’s name. Why? Someone had surely lured the hapless college boy into a dark bedroom. Lulu, smug and tipsy, wiping her mouth, heading downstairs. Had Celia killed her in a drunken, jealous rage? She stared at Celia, mousy and red-eyed. Hard to believe.
She thought of Bess coming out of the darkened den, angry at something or someone. The den. Lulu was killed in the den right where she was found. She had fallen to the floor beside the sofa and lay there until Anise found her and scooped her onto her lap, in a mother’s anguish for her lovely daughter. She had indeed been shaken by someone quite angry. Shaken until her neck snapped.
Meg looked at Bess. She could see how it had happened. Bess, protective of her nieces, furious that Lulu had come on to poor Celia’s handsome, spineless boyfriend, had confronted the drunken college girl in the den. Angry that a gorgeous little interloper would come in to the fabulous Dagger family and hurt even the least of its members, the weakest sister, poor little Celia.
No one spoke for a long time. Finally, Thom roused himself. “I’ll make breakfast,” he announced flatly.
And so, life goes on, Meg thought, reaching up to brush her hair away from her eyes. She wished she could brush away what she knew, which seemed to be pressing, almost physically, on her skull.
Bess threw back her head and downed the champagne, then headed after Thom, slipping her arm through Megan’s on the way, pulling her gently along past the law students cuddling, almost cowering in their armchair.
“We’ll help,” she said brightly, irrelevantly, since Anise and Carrie were still lost in their cocoon of grief, guilt, relief-a girl was dead but it wasn’t Carrie. Gorgeous, glamourous Carrie, full of life and hope, momentarily shattered by the proximity of death, but soon to rally. She was too full of gusto to mourn too long. Joie de vivre. That’s what Carrie had, Megan thought. Joie de vivre. Funny that the perfect phrase to describe her should be French.
Megan squeezed her friend’s arm as they followed Thom to the kitchen. The last silent policeman was leaving with an armload of notebooks and evidence bags. A good start to his new year. Justice had triumphed on New Year’s Day.
Of course, Meg knew that justice had not triumphed. Justice had not triumphed at all.
Bess stopped in the doorway to the kitchen. Thom had already pulled on his chef’s apron and they could see him rummaging in the refrigerator for the casserole of eggs and cheese and ham that had been resting overnight and just needed to be slipped into the oven. Bess touched Megan’s face and met her eyes.
“It’s okay,” she told Meg quietly. “I’ll keep your secret.”
“My secret?” Meg was startled.
Bess looked closely at her. “It wasn’t you?”
Meg shook her head. “I thought it was you.”
Bess stared at her and shook her head.
“Then who?” Meg asked.
Megan and Bess stood and stared at each other as they both silently thought through the suspects. Thom. Anise. Carrie, herself. Michelle, even. Any of the Daggers. Meg was suddenly, strangely proud to have been suspected.
“But I saw you coming out of the den,” Meg blurted out. “You looked so angry.”
Bess just stared at her.
“You looked like you could kill someone. I thought you must have confronted Lulu over poor Celia’s boyfriend.”
“Confronted her?” Bess laughed mordantly. “I wish. No, she wasn’t there. I was angry with her. Very angry. I was talking to Anise. I told Anise.”
“Anise?”
Bess and Megan were standing there outside the kitchen, staring at each other, and they both jumped a little when Anise came up behind them.
“Anise,” Bess murmured.
“Anise,” Meg echoed. And for a moment, Meg flashed back to the old hag on her steps, telling her she wouldn’t be the youngest one. Nor the prettiest. True, but she was one of them, the Daggers. That’s what counted.
Anise hugged them both. Anise, who could never have mistaken another girl for her beloved daughter. Anise, who could never have mistaken the feel of an angora dress for a silk one as she held the dead girl in her arms. The mythology was all wrong. It wasn’t the Pietà at all. It was Penelope among the dead, unwelcome suitors, her knitting all unravelled.
“My sisters,” Anise whispered, hugging them hard, then breaking free to look from one to the other.
“Sisters,” Bess said.
“Sisters,” Meg said firmly.
Anise released them and they entered the kitchen.
“Tell you what, let’s empty the dishwasher and fill it up again. Give Thom some room to work.”
“I’ll do the glasses by hand,” Meg offered.
Thom shot them a smile.
Anise kissed Megan lightly on the cheek. Then she pulled an apron down from the hooks near the door and tied it on, and passed another to Bess, laughing as Bess rummaged through an army of bottles, all empty.
“I’ll open more champagne,” Bess declared, heading for the refrigerator. “We can’t work without champagne.”
They bent to their tasks. Meg looked forward to breakfast on a sunny New Year’s Day morning in a sparkling clean kitchen on Philadelphia’s Main Line. She belonged here. She had arrived. She was home.
Fairmount
Friday night, and Nicky Krios is getting dolled up for Nostradamus of all places. These biker boots are made for ass-kicking, he thinks, and tries the eyeliner he borrowed from Janet the bartender’s purse. He hams it up in the mirror, imagining the two of them in another lazy romp, picking up where they left off after work the other night, before passing out on his couch. The darkened eyes bring out the family face-his brother’s, his father’s. He smirks. A veritable Night of the Living Dead.
Nicky spends most of his days wishing he were anywhere but Nostradamus, or at least doing anything else. Three years experience, and he’s still a busboy, despite his pleas to Victor Gold, who treats him like a fucking retard. Still, Nostradamus is the hottest place in Philly, so where else is he going to go on his night off? Plus, he and his workmates have made a game out of sneaking drinks to spite Victor, who parks his yellow Maserati right outside and cocks around, convinced he’s got the world licked.
Such is life for Nicky at twenty-four, living rent-free, at least for now, in a nearby brownstone, thanks to his older brother Chris Krios, the lawyer, whose face is everywhere in this city-in the subways, on the sides of busses. No recovery, no fee. This week Chris said it’s time for Nicky to pony up, be his own man-this in spite of busboy tips he knows don’t even cover living expenses. “You don’t want to end up like Dad,” Chris let slip. “Hopeless, I mean.” Not dead, which goes without saying. “A man needs to move forward in life.” Tough love. You should be happy, Chris always tells him, working at any one of Victor Gold’s restaurants-it’s a great company, he says, as if Nicky’s poised for some rags-to-riches story of his own. We’re brothers, Chris says, to remind Nicky that they share the same DNA; that if the one son can make it, so can the other; that he’s not a chip off the old block. People’s lives can change for the better, Chris insists, just as quickly as they can change for the worse.
Nicky doesn’t want to get too high, so he takes one last hit, pinches the tip with moistened fingers, and tucks the half-joint, the last of his dwindled stash, back into Moby Dick, which he swore he was going to finish this summer. He flips up the collar of his black silk shirt and fakes a roundhouse kick at the mirror, his eyes looking badass.
Chris got Nicky in the door with Victor Gold. The rest is up to you, Chris always says. I can’t ask him to make you a bartender. You create your own luck. Chris and Victor were college roommates, and they both have the Midas touch. Chris bought the brownstone for peanuts, now uses the rent he collects from three downstairs units to pay the mortgage on the condo he just picked up on Spring Garden. Victor’s a whole other story. He must have opened Nostradamus on a dare, Nicky jokes, to prove once and for all to the city, or just to his own world-class ego, that he could create another gastronomical goldmine out of the least appetizing concept-this time serving up Gothic fare in a renovated church a block south of Eastern State Penitentiary.
Night after night, unimaginably lovely creatures, local celebrities, sports stars, and wannabe hipsters in their thirties and forties, and maybe even fifties for all Nicky can tell, find this veritable morgue hiding in residential Fairmount; many of them have the requisite wit, donning sexy vampiric getups-tight leather, flared collars, ruffled shirts, spiked jewelry-downing drinks with names like Edgar Allan Poetini and Exorcism on the Beach. Ordinarily Nicky lies low, winding invisibly through the crowd, carrying plates soiled with remnants of blackened this or deviled that, head down, in the standard black-T-shirt-and-jeans busboy uniform, but tonight he’s playing along, monster shades and all, at least until the sun goes down.
“I saw you snake my fucking eyeliner yesterday,” pale-eyed Janet says the second Nicky snags the corner spot at the half-full bar, best view in the house, where Victor usually sidles up late-night. “I thought you were just playing around, but you snaked it.”
“Shit.” Nicky hops off the stool and pats down the pockets of his slim-fitting cargo pants. He pulls out his cell phone and sets it on the bar. When he proceeds to check the lower pockets puffing at his knees, Janet rolls her eyes.
“Maybe it’s in your sock,” she says. “Bullshitter.”
“Come over to my place later and get it,” he says, and straddles the stool, grinning.
“Yeah.”
“We had fun,” he reminds her.
He can see she’s already shaking up his Inquisition Fizz. Drink to excess before Victor gets here, is their strategy, bartenders included. The extra Fizz goes into a shot glass, which Janet clinks, cheers, with Nicky, and throws back in a fluid move, turning toward the cash register, as if she’s going to ring him up.
“You look good with no makeup,” Nicky calls out.
Janet flashes him a smile, then slinks up to him, elbows on the bar. “I’m wearing makeup, sweetie. Lose the shades and see for yourself.” She hooks the frames with a finger and sets them down next to his cell phone. “I just don’t look like a raccoon for once, unlike you.”
He forgot about the shades, and squints now, adjusts his vision. Waning sunlight illuminates the tabletops by the windows. Throughout the shadowy room, dim candles flicker in wrought-iron candelabra.
And then he spots his favorite patron, famously sexy anchorwoman Stacy Fredericks, whose sliver of a profile he recognizes despite the lineup of beer taps and the distance from here to there, not to mention her uncharacteristic Black Widow getup and the familiar swarm of blunderers already stuck in her web. Apparently, like Nicky, Stacy decided to get into the spirit of Nostradamus tonight, to lose the anchorwoman skirt suit and play along, in the fashion, neo-medieval style. By her side, and forever unable to extricate himself, is her network sidekick, Lester Dent, who evidently doesn’t see his own combover in the mirror when he leaves his house, or doesn’t yet appreciate the fact that his thin orangey coif is just one of the reasons that Stacy always maintains a polite distance-his nearly senior-citizen status, baggie pastel suits, and wife and kids rounding out the list of other reasons.
Nicky drains his drink, and Janet is there with a fresh shaker of Fizz.
She follows Nicky’s gaze. “Well, that didn’t take you long.”
Lester Dent lets out an awful laugh as he wraps an arm around Stacy.
“They are so fucking,” Janet says.
“No way,” Nicky says.
“Never underestimate a woman’s love for power and money.”
Nicky lets his jaw drop in mock astonishment. “Not Stacy Fredericks.” Janet sneaks her shot, and Nicky follows suit with a good slug, secretly eager to get the scoop, egging her on: “She already has power and money.”
“Especially the ones with power and money, honey,” she says.
“I guess I’m out of luck,” Nicky says.
“Hardly, sweetie. You’re cute. Cute trumps everything.”
She fills his glass, and his heart swells. Still, his eyes return to Stacy Fredericks, who in one splendid motion twists at the waist, finishes her drink, and sets her martini glass on the bar. Before she turns back to the dull network crew, Nicky can swear she locks eyes with him, but his mind is playing tricks, of course. He feels as if he knows her, ever since last year when she spilled her guts at the end of that broadcast, tearing up, still battling a broken heart, she said, grateful for the city’s welcoming embrace. Welcoming embrace, his ass. Still, Nicky fell for the whole bit, hook, line, and sinker. Two divorces. A woman in a man’s business. From the South, no less. He remembered what it was like to be new in the city. He defended her against the cynics who thought the performance a ploy, a false confession, meant to dupe hard-hearted Philadelphians who’d dubbed her Ice Queen.
After that, Nicky started TiVo-ing the news, fast-forwarding through the Lester Dent parts. He studied her expressions. He imagined her at home with her dogs, kept his eyes out for her on Spring Garden, caught a glimpse of her a few times on the sidewalk, heading from the network building to the parking garage, always appearing sad and alone, despite her buoyant gait, that gleaming smile as she clapped her cell phone shut, the white Land Rover sailing out from the shadows in a kind of triumph over her broken heart-it was all a mask.
A month ago, when she went national, gushing with Oprah about her abusive deadbeat exes, commiserating about the dearth of men capable of loving a strong woman, it was as if she were appealing directly to him, confessing her shyness, her hope that some such man would emerge from some unlikely place, as Nicky went on hiding in the shadows, his encounters limited to flybys as he hauled a bus tub to the kitchen. And yet, he has always maintained the belief that she could go for a low-life like him-or a nice guy with a shit job and no prospects. After all, her two husbands had been a hack disc jockey and some strapping clod stuck in the minors-not exactly high-class millionaires. In those brushes in the barroom, he swears he sensed a subtle leaning, a longing to shake these studio geeks and let loose.
“I see you all the time,” she says, the familiar voice electroshock silky in his ear. “I mean, where have I seen you?”
The majestic swoop of hair falls into view, elbow lands, a finger floats, and now she might as well be slipping into Nicky’s Inquisition Fizz.
“Yeah,” he says, dizzy, but not stupid-drunk enough to look up and give away his low-class identity too soon. Milk this moment to the end of heaven, he thinks. There’s a part of him-beyond his own shame-that wants to spare the girl her own embarrassing moment when she realizes he’s the busboy on his night off. Still, Stacy Fredericks walked over here on her own, Nicky reminds himself, just as Lester Dent barks, “We’re outta here, Stace,” hovering nearby. “You comin’?”
Nicky utters, “I see you all the time too,” and in a flash he can hear her glossy grin, smell the metallic glint of her silver-skull earrings, taste the waxy scent of this whole leather masquerade-just as he feels Lester Dent huffing and fleeing into the altered night.
“1-800-INJURED!” she blurts, and now it’s too late-he’s looking right at her, giving her the full view. “You are everywhere. Oh my God, every SEPTA bus-the billboard on 17th, near the studio.” She smiles, awaiting some confirmation, which Nicky is too stunned to offer. “Stacy Fredericks,” she introduces herself.
Nicky shakes her hand.
“You seem surprised. Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you for free legal advice,” she says, beaming. “You must get that all the time.”
Nicky nods. “I’m not sure I’m the kind of lawyer you need.”
Her smile sinks.
“Sorry,” he says. “It was a compliment-a ridiculous one. I just mean you don’t appear to be injured.” There isn’t the slightest thing wrong with her physically. “You’re even more beautiful in person.”
He’s hit a soft spot, apparently-to think, a blushing anchorwoman. She seems genuinely moved, her hand fluttering at her brow, as if about to swoon.
“Are you okay?” Nicky says. He feels a rush of confidence. “Here, sit.”
“Just a little drunk, is all.”
Nicky offers Stacy the adjacent stool he’s been saving for himself, knowing he’ll have to evacuate the corner spot once Victor arrives-and, speak of the devil, here’s Victor now, an enormous beast of a man in an orange polo shirt, lumbering across the barroom, muttering to himself, it seems, until he adjusts what looks like the chrome husk of a locust in his ear and barks a familiar threat to one of his fourteen managers stationed throughout the city, each prepared for at least one such nightly call-and one such personal visit. Before Nicky can relinquish his seat, Victor is already bearing down on him, stabbing his thumb in the air, delivering his graceless eviction notice.
“Good boy,” Victor mutters to Nicky, his wad of keys spraying on the bar top. He reaches for the bulging back pocket of his madras pants and plants his sixteen-ounce wallet next to his BlackBerry, which his immense finger resumes pounding.
Heart in his throat, Nicky rotates and stands, now, over Stacy Fredericks, who doesn’t seem to have heard a thing, and in fact appears charmed by his spontaneous generosity. “A lawyer and a gentleman,” she says-the compliment penetrating like a poisoned arrow.
Janet delivers Victor’s sparkling water with lime, along with a refill on the Inquisition Fizz and a smirk Nicky can’t help interpreting as more baffled than impressed.
“I’m done with lawyers, by the way,” Stacy says.
“I didn’t mean anything by that,” Nicky huffs, trying to forget about Victor, who coughs and growls, his back to the world. Nicky imagines himself mid-flight, roundhouse kick about to split that pumpkin head in two.
“Divorce lawyers, I mean-though I don’t plan on needing a personal injury lawyer anytime soon either.”
“Let’s hope not.” Nicky takes a deep breath and tries to mirror Stacy’s smile. “What are you drinking?”
She shakes her head. “I almost didn’t recognize you with the spiky hair and makeup.”
Nicky nudges his full glass. “Try mine.”
Her eyes expand as she sips. “That’s good.”
There is silence for a moment, and he is spellbound-not just by her obvious beauty, but by her vitality; her luscious flesh, bound in black leather, seems imbued with optimism, her taut skin humming with intelligence. Beyond her, Victor Gold has transformed-Nicky sees him as not just monstrous, but miserable, doomed. A mere minute in the presence of Stacy Fredericks, and for the first time in his life Nicky believes that the world is nothing but what one makes of it, and that he is, or could be, a man of extraordinary potential.
“So tell me about a case,” she says, setting down the glass, “your most interesting one, or one you’re working on now.”
“Sure,” he says, with a confidence he doesn’t feel. But then, in a flash, he sees himself at a table with a dozen Amish men in Lancaster County, he in an Armani suit, they in straw hats and beards, all there to discuss a fair settlement on the case of the kid whose head was rammed by the hoof of a horse that smashed through the windshield of his father’s car on a certain rainy Wednesday night last March. He paints the picture for Stacy. “See, the Amish don’t buy insurance,” he explains. “They don’t believe in damages for pain and suffering. So I have to go in there and make them understand that this kid was in the hospital for a month with his skull literally sawed off so that his swollen brain could return to its normal size. I show them pictures, and I explain that any jury who saw these pictures would award a million, minimum. I’m asking half a mil. And this old Amish guy starts saying how pain and suffering is part of life, God’s plan for the human race.”
“This is amazing. They really sawed off his skull? It sounds like a million-dollar case to me.”
“Problem is,” Nicky says, “the kid’s practically retarded to begin with…”
On the bar, Nicky’s vibrating cell phone moves in place. He sees that it’s Chris calling, just as Stacy says, “Is that a problem?”
He should answer the phone, tell Chris he’s ready to be his own man-or that he’s not ready, that he’s a hopeless case after all.
“I mean, isn’t that good for your case?” she asks. “Doesn’t that add sympathy, if he’s, you know, mentally challenged?” She’s looking at him as if he has something to say worth listening to.
“See, you have to prove real loss,” he says.
Stacy sips, her eyes unflinching. “The whole thing is unbelievable. I could never do what you do.”
Again, Nicky’s cell phone vibrates. He turns it to silent mode.
“So I say to the father, ‘Go get your son,’ and at first he refuses, but then he comes back in twenty minutes with his kid, who’s smart enough to know he can’t fake being stupid. So we’re all standing there, and I ask the kid, ‘Who’s the president of the United States?’ and the kid just stares at me, clueless. Then I ask the kid, ‘Who’s the football team in Philadelphia?’ and the kid says, ‘Eagles!’ I say, ‘Who’s the quarterback of the Eagles?’ and the kid says, ‘Donovan McNabb!’ and I say, ‘That’s right.’ The old Amish guy interrupts and says, ‘We don’t know football. We wouldn’t know if these are the correct answers or not. What does any of this prove?’” Nicky stops. He can’t remember where his brother was heading with all of this.
“So?”
“So? Well, I say, ‘You’re right. They are the right answers, Mr. Stoltzfus, and what it proves is that I’m not a liar, and I’m not lying when I tell you that this case is worth at least the half-million we’re asking for, because your horse went through this man’s windshield and his son was in the hospital for a month with his skull sawed off so that his brain could return to normal-and it’s only right that your people take responsibility for what happened.’”
Stacy is grinning, anticipating the jackpot finish. Nicky wishes that there were more to the story-or that he could remember the rest of it. He remembers Chris explaining how the Amish collected the money from the community, how, when Chris asked why they didn’t buy insurance, the old Amish guy told him, We believe in two things: God and each other.
“So did you win?”
“Yeah,” he blurts, takes a deep breath. “Five hundred thousand dollars.”
The bluish face of Nicky’s phone lights up a third time.
“Someone’s trying to track you down,” Stacy says.
“My brother,” Nicky says, shaking his head. He turns the phone over.
“You have a brother?”
Nicky goes silent, his thoughts tangled.
“Older or younger?” She’s nearly finished the drink. She offers him the rest before polishing it off.
“Younger.”
“Is he as cute as you?”
Behind her, Victor Gold sets his glass down. The drone of his furious rattle goes on. Stacy seems suddenly flushed again, perhaps embarrassed for her compliment, which has gone unanswered. Nicky wants to say something, but he’s lost in the space of her exposed neck, pinkish in the shadow of her flared collar.
“Is everything all right?” she says.
“Of course, no, it’s fine,” he stutters. “My brother, that’s all. He’s, uh, he’s a bit of a fuckhead. Good-looking, yes, cute, handsome as hell, actually, but a fuckhead. He calls a lot-or I call him, check in on him a lot, make sure he’s not doing anything stupid.” He can hear his brother’s sympathetic voice in his own, and he chokes up. “A man needs to move forward in life. He doesn’t get it.”
“I’m sorry. You want to call him back? I don’t mind-”
“No, no. He’s just-it’s hard to explain-or, it’s actually kind of easy to explain. He smokes a lot of weed and has a shitty job. That’s his life. He wasn’t always that way. He was a good kid, smart. He could have been whatever he wanted. And then my mom died, and then a few years ago my dad shot himself. And he just stopped. And started being a fuckhead. I’m afraid, you know…”
Victor Gold hisses, “Fucking shit,” as he rises from his stool and heads for the kitchen, his shoulder brushing Nicky’s.
Stacy says, “I’m so sorry,” and bows her head into her hand. Nicky is surprised by this sudden display of pity. She reaches for his elbow, offers her tenderness, which is not for him, Nicky understands, but for Chris, who must endure the burden of this faceless brother.
Nicky contemplates the empty stool, the brazenly discarded items on the bar.
He wants to fly from his body. He doesn’t want to be Chris or Victor-just anyone but himself, anyone but the fucked-up son of the ultimate fuck-up.
“You want to go?” he says.
She takes his arm and the moment they hit the sidewalk takes his face into her hands. “I’m so, so sorry,” she says.
“Fuck it,” he mumbles to himself, just as he spots the yellow car whose insides glow when he presses the button on the key he’s aiming toward the street, the silver bunch jangling.
On cue, she turns. “Is that your Maserati?”
They drift toward the brightness under the canopy of birches across the street.
“You have to let me drive,” she says, beaming now.
With a last glance back, he says, “Why not?”
Inside, he imagines the two of them united on a mission to create some new future for themselves. Her smile grows increasingly luminescent, as if draining the light from the overhead lamp. They are ensconced in black leather. As she feels for the ignition, he taps his foot, glares out the window. He flicks open the glove compartment to find the mother lode of dope, rolling papers and all, sealed in a Ziploc bag. At first he doesn’t recognize the blunt silver barrel of a gun, until he reaches for the twinkling Zippo and a finger hooks the trigger guard.
The engine rumbles. The glove compartment door clicks shut. Stacy leans forward, then settles back with arms outstretched and hands gripping the wheel. With a few deft, seemingly practiced maneuvers, she manages to exit the curbside spot and enter the open lane, which appears, in a suspended moment of pure potential, to lead straightaway toward a positively magnificent, if shadowy, future, lined with inferior automobiles.
There is an explosion of force, and they are sailing forward. It is not long before the car veers vaguely right and Nicky leans left, as if to counteract this unfortunate detour. A faint, feminine yelp-followed by the snap, like a mushroom cap, of a sideview mirror-signals the beginning of the end.
The rest feels patently catastrophic, these seconds an eternity of unending metallic screeching. It is as if Nicky is poised at the crotch of a giant zipper, its teeth off kilter, some stubborn force willing these two discordant halves to unite, only so that they can be free of each other once and for all. It makes no sense that they haven’t yet come to a stop, in spite of this ribcurling resistance. How many have they already sideswiped? Three? Ten? She must be gassing it, in spite of the mounting disaster, as if to race toward the inevitable, or from it.
At last, they have come to the T at the end of the road, an instinctive foot on a brake, with the help of the curb, having saved them from the profile of the oblivious brownstone straight ahead. They are heaving in unison, taking in the common air. “I’m bleeding.” Her eyes are locked on her reflection in the rearview mirror. She dabs a fingertip to her forehead. Outside, the world has stopped, while inside, their hearts and thoughts become entwined in mutual terror-albeit born of independent fears.
“I can’t get a D.U.I.,” she utters.
“I have to go back,” he says.
The sidewalks are empty, the windows of the surrounding houses dark or, if lit, free of shadows.
“I make $750,000 a year.” She seems to be in a trance. “I’m the lead anchor on a major network in the fourth largest market in the country.” She sets her hollow gaze on Nicky and asks, apparently in earnest, “What the fuck am I thinking?” After a pause, she screams, “I’m asking you! What the fuck am I doing here?”
“In Philly, you mean?”
“No! With you! Here! Now! Why do I keep letting asshole men ruin my life?”
“I don’t know,” Nicky says. “Just-go.”
In this merciful moment in time, there is no one in sight, not even through the rear windshield.
“What do you mean?” Her voice softens. “Walk away?”
“Run.” He means it. “I’ll take the heat. Forget this. Me.”
Her lips quiver. She blinks out waves of tears that tumble down her cheeks. It’s too late. In the distance, light spills from doorways, onto stoops, as slumped silhouettes make their way toward the wreckage.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean what I said-about you.”
“Get in the back,” he hisses.
Her grace has returned. She understands the plan. In one swift, elegant gymnastic feat, she becomes one with the leather, heaving herself through the narrow gap between seats, hips twisting, legs and heels and toes all pointed in their mission to clear the way for Nicky, who with undramatic haste removes them from the scene of the crime.
Even in these dark streets, there is no way for this car to be discreet. Curious, envious eyes flash from the sidewalk, as Nicky wraps around a corner or two before quietly pulling over.
“Why are you stopping?” Stacy whispers nervously.
“We won’t get far in this thing,” Nicky states. “We’ll go to my brother’s. It’s right around the corner.” He gets out and offers his hand, scanning the empty sidewalk, as one stiletto boot follows another onto the concrete.
When she takes his arm, crossing the street, a shiver of recognition shoots up his spine, his chivalry tainted.
She looks back, puzzled. “What about your car?”
He forgot that the car is his. “I’ll call it in as stolen.”
She seems to consider this. “Okay,” she says softly.
He nods and remembers what a real thief would remember. “Wait here.”
The passenger side is wounded with depressed streaks of ugliness and, at the shoulder, an awful black spot-an absolute absence of something that once existed, severed at the root-marking the trajectory of that brief ride. Inside, the light dissolves around him. He glances at the beautiful woman waiting by the trunk of a tree, cupped hands at her elbows. She could run, as he’d urged her, but she is waiting for him-and this is something good, he tells himself. There may be hope. He stuffs the bag of dope into the puffy pocket at his knee, a perfect fit, slips the gun into the slim pocket at his hip, along with the keys-he adds the Zippo and alights.
When he reaches her, a distant siren pops and goes silent. She squeezes his arm and pulls herself close. “Did you call?” she asks.
“That car is officially stolen,” he assures her.
Two more blocks, and they ascend the stoop and stairs to his apartment. Inside, she heads straight for the living room. When he comes from the kitchen with a damp washcloth, she’s facing the window, legs tightly sealed, poised steadily on those two impossibly tall, thin pedestals he hadn’t noticed give her at least an inch on him. She appears unsure at first, until he gestures toward her forehead. Her whole body sinks, softens, under the warm pressure, and just like that the thin line of dried blood has vanished.
“It’s gone,” he says, and for a moment pretends he has erased their troubles. He can see a million miles in her eyes, infinite stretches of sun-baked highways and yellow-ribboned roads that go on forever. She must feel discovered. Her eyes close and lips descend. When her tongue meets his, he finds the bare small of her back and pulls her against him. He travels to her neck, her shoulder, the hidden downy hair behind her ear. There is a line, he imagines, joining his two hands, and that line is the golden zipper he delicately fingers. As they shift toward the couch, he thinks, I can die now, just as she whispers, “Stop.”
“What is it?”
They sit, fingers entwined on their adjoining thighs.
“What about your brother?” she says.
He shakes his head. “God knows where he sleeps every night.” He frees a hand and touches her cheek, her forehead.
“I can’t,” she says, and turns away. “Not like this. Not tonight. I should go.”
“You can’t go out there.”
“I don’t live far.” She’s already up. “Please don’t get the wrong idea-I am so grateful. You saved my life tonight.”
“I’ll walk you.” He follows her to the door, where she pauses.
“Please…” She touches his face, takes his hand. “Thank you.”
“You want to get high?”
“No,” she laughs. She must think he’s joking-one last crack for the road. “I’ll call you,” she grins, dabs bashfully at her forehead, “1-800-INJURED, right?” and slips from his fingers.
Her smile lingers in the room, the memory of it tangible, like molecules of goodness dissipating in the air, as dingy reality returns and he sinks into the couch. 1-800-INJURED. He contemplates the implications of a single phone call. God knows how Chris will work his magic once the sordid tale unfolds.
Nicky hits the lights, lies back on the couch, unloads the weighty goods from his pockets. He rolls a fat one, sparks the Zippo.
In a dream, it’s Nicky’s office. She’s in her anchorwoman skirt suit; he’s in Armani. They are just back from lunch, from a real restaurant, one with no theme. He closes the door. She pulls him by the tie toward the big desk. This is their routine.
A knocking wakes him. The light from his phone glows. Sirens ring out. Windows and walls flash. He sits up, stares at the door.
Phone in one hand, gun in the other.
“Open the door, Nicky!”
“They’re coming for me,” he mumbles.
“Everything’s gonna be fine.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“Don’t be stupid, fuckhead. Listen to me. It’s your brother, who loves you.”
In his mind he can see him out there, pounding, head against the door, and then it’s as if he’s out there himself, feeling what it might be like to be left alone. “I love you too,” he blurts, and when he leaps for the door, to let his brother in, it’s as though he’s racing to save them both.
University City
If every block in Philadelphia had only one resident, Isaac figured, lots of things would be different. Parking would be easier. Mail carriers would stop screwing up. Next-door neighbors too dumb to pack their garbage in plastic bags might disappear, because you wouldn’t have a next-door neighbor.
Isaac saw the downside too. Infrequent block parties. A pathetic neighborhood association. Ratcheting up of that lonely feeling Isaac used to get when he lived in Vermont and wondered how people in isolated houses survived the big snowstorms.
One-person blocks might even stir up aristocratic leanings, a sense of “to the manor born” that might lead people to consider getting their streets closed off, and their fiefdoms turned into separate municipalities.
Anyway, it was just empty, abstract theorizing, because so far as Isaac knew, he was the only person-at least in University City-with a block of his own. And even the neighborhood historian couldn’t tell him exactly how St. Irenaeus Square-not that it was a square-had turned out that way.
“There used to be a stable there, where your house is, in the late nineteenth century,” ventured Mildred, the old woman with semi-encyclopedic knowledge of Spruce Hill, at the last block event to which she’d limped her way. “I think that put some potential builders off.”
Another theory, ventured by Irina Butova, the realtor who’d first showed the structure to Isaac years ago, was that his unique, detached, slope-roofed oddity of a house had been built in defiance of neighborhood logic.
401 St. Irenaeus Square, after all, sat surrounded by backyards. To Isaac’s right, when he exited his house, lay the well-maintained yards of the celebrated Queen Anne homes on Spruce Street, the area’s architectural gems. To his left, beyond his own impressive yard with sixteen trees, loomed the leafy expanse formed by the backs of Pine Street’s solid row houses, the first two being the lovingly manicured creations of Derek Gombrowicz, the friendly architect who owned them.
In front of him, as he opened his door, sat the back of the mighty twin that ended the string of Queen Anne houses along Spruce Street as it headed west. Behind him, outside his bedroom window, lay the backyards of South 42nd Street, several of them regular venues for frat parties, on which Isaac sometimes eavesdropped during slow nights.
“Is quiet and full of peace like cemetery,” Irina had joked when she’d shown it to him three years before, right after it had been cleared of its student tenants. They’d messed up the house so badly, Irina explained, that it remained on the market for a year before Christy Greenfield, one of Isaac’s old lovers (he’d always liked realtors), referred Isaac to Irina as a match made in heaven. Irina had been in one of Christy’s courses at Temple’s Real Estate Institute, and then been a trainee at Plumer when Christy was still there. They’d kept in touch.
Christy knew both her client and colleague well. Isaac, a former foreign correspondent for the Inquirer in Russia, came with no wife, no kids, lots of boxes, papers, and books, and a complete indifference to interior design. His ideal look was used bookstore, circa 1950. He wanted a house with a porch or veranda so he could, like literary heroes from the past, sit on it in a chair made of natural materials and look literary. He preferred weeds and overgrowth to a regularly landscaped yard, thinking (incorrectly) that onlookers would mistake its choked anarchy for a lush Italian garden. He refused to do housework or gardening of any kind, remarking once to Christy that such impulses had died with his father’s generation.
Irina, for reasons Christy didn’t understand, had ended up with the 401 St. Irenaeus listing even though she mainly worked Russian neighborhoods in Northeast Philadelphia. It had something to do with the owner two back being Russian before it had been sold to the University of Pennsylvania. As listing arrangements went, it struck Christy as a bit of an odd match.
Most buyers in Spruce Hill fell into two categories. First came the mid-thirtyish academic couples new to junior teaching posts at Penn, eager to get into the catchment area so their not-yet or barely bred kids could go to Penn’s appealing new community school. For them 401 looked like a major fixerupper, the expense of which might be funded by converting 401’s unusual side garden-one of the largest in University City-into the site for another house.
The second category of buyers was the older Wharton or med-school types, often full professors or moneyed professionals who’d settle for nothing less than Architectural Digest perfection and were willing to pay for contractors to accomplish it. One couple of the sort had purchased the first Queen Anne west of 42nd Street a few years back for about $700,000, torn it up inside, created a huge atrium perfect for a glossy-magazine shoot, then put it back on the market for $950,000.
Both types seemed perfect for 401 St. Irenaeus. But Irina, to Christy’s surprise, couldn’t unload it that first year. According to Irina, Christy told Isaac, something had gone wrong every time it looked as if she had a buyer-financing that fell through, cold feet, fear of crime, whatever.
Christy, of course, knew it had to be more complicated than that-it always is when selling houses. One couple that had bid on 401, before Isaac came into the picture, told Christy that Irina grew belligerent when they asked about the legality of building a second house on the side yard, which was wider than 401 itself. “You buy sixteen fantastic trees to kill sixteen fantastic trees?” Irina had said to them. “Believe me, for you I can find house without trees! Not this house!”
That’s the story that first made Christy think of Isaac, who she knew was house-hunting. True, he’d been house-hunting for more than twenty years, since he’d come to Philly from New York. And Isaac had long since admitted to Christy that while he was, in principle, looking for a house, house-hunting was also one of his tried and true methods for picking up new lovers. Isaac knew how to charm real-estate agents, even the crusty cynics, and, Christy had to admit, his stratagem had worked with her.
From Isaac’s point of view, visiting open houses always beat Internet dating or bar-hopping (though it came a distant second to chatting up women at academic conferences). First, all real-estate agents had their photos and first and last names right there in the Sunday ads. You could research them, narrow the field to the most appealing, then go to their open houses and see how they stacked up in the harsh setting of real life. You couldn’t do that with the Internet unless you had a spare decade to spend on coffee dates.
Nothing beat an open house for inviting friendly conversation, self-revelatory or inquisitive, free of all activity clumsily designed to bring boys and girls together. When Isaac felt he’d clicked with an agent, he followed up by making some excuse about the house itself, while dangling an overture about a meal or coffee sometime. And so something would or wouldn’t begin. And every affair that did begin, he explained to Christy, far outweighed-on the scale of pure pleasure-any number that didn’t.
Had Christy known Isaac’s MO the day he came to see a trinity she was handling on Waverly Street years ago, their seven-month thing would never have happened. She’d thought he liked the house, not her headshot in the Sunday Inquirer real-estate section. But he let on only years later, long after they’d climbed back from the breakup to be solid if irregular pals, able to talk about his or her latest romantic disasters.
Because Isaac couldn’t commit to anything beyond his next piece or foreign trip, Christy knew he’d never commit to building on 401’s side yard. He fit Irina’s oddly proprietary criteria for 401. Irina wanted someone who wouldn’t endanger the overgrown yard. She quickly discouraged would-be buyers who eyed the property as a twofer-one unique detached house, one enormous lot where you could build a second structure and make a killing.
“Is like Russian forest,” Irina had joked to Isaac the first time she showed him how 401’s side yard, and Gombrowicz’s backyard, combined to form a veritable mini-park of soaring evergreens and overlapping foliage. The only difference was that Gombrowicz’s yard had neatly cut grass on its ground. The vines and weeds to the side of 401 made it look like a house that had landed, Wizard of Oz style, on a jungle floor, with terra firma at least six inches below the sight line.
Christy knew her biz. The sale and closing happened fast. Christy even suspected that Isaac and Irina might have slept together preclosing, despite Irina’s being a few years older than Isaac, which put her about twenty years outside his routine demographic. The only time the three of them had drinks together, she’d seen the flirtation between them, Isaac dropping more than necessary of the fifty words that had gotten him around Russia, and Irina looking overamused at his anecdotes about St. Petersburg.
In the two years since the closing, Christy had seen Isaac about six or seven times for one of their friendly meals or coffees. The conversations took their usual pre-401 course. First they’d gossip about the Inquirer (where Isaac now found himself bored as the paper spiraled downward to irrelevance), City Hall sorts they both knew, what was in the news.
At some point, Isaac would send a signal that he’d still happily sleep with Christy and Christy would gracefully rebuff him. Then they’d share recent romantic wins and losses. The new part, which Christy disliked but also found professionally flattering, were Isaac’s questions about his rights and possibilities as the sole owner and resident on the 400 block of St. Irenaeus.
At dinner the previous Friday, Isaac, oddly, seemed ready for a commitment.
“Seriously,” he’d said, “I know Irina would kill me, but would it really be so hard to get the permission and variances to build a small house in the yard, one that would still leave some greenery and trees?”
“I told you already, Isaac,” Christy replied, “it’s not a big deal. You own that lot. There are no covenants or restrictions on it. Your neighbors and Irina might go apeshit, but it’s a pretty clear path.”
“I’m more afraid of Irina than Derek,” Isaac said. “I’m beginning to think real-estate women have a harder time pulling away from houses they sell than from men they, so to speak, handle-”
“Nice try,” Christy cut it. “But I hear a new form of whining just around the corner. Let’s not go there.”
“The last time she dropped by,” Isaac said, taking Christy’s cue and dropping the “Poor me” tone, “I was watching Larry King do his latest Michael Jackson show, about the endless wait for the funeral. At first Irina was funny. She listened to it for about a minute, then uttered one of those Irina-isms I love.” Isaac shifted into his heavily Russian Irina impersonation and accent. Poor Michael Jackson! Cannot easy normal die!
“So I was feeling obnoxious,” Isaac continued, dropping the accent, “and said, ‘Right, Irina, you can only easy normal die in Russia. You just sit in your car after offending someone powerful, or write the wrong story, and pow-you’re gone.’”
“That was nasty!” Christy said. “You know she loves that whole Russian tough-guy thing, and Putin. Plus she really doesn’t like anyone even noticing her accent, let alone making fun of it.”
“I know, I know,” Isaac said, a little too knowingly for Christy’s taste, “and, yeah, she did act strange, weird, after that. She just looked at me in a way she never has before. Really cold, as if she didn’t recognize me.”
“Have you slept with her?” Christy asked with a chirp in her voice.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Isaac shot back. “I’ve told you before-no.”
“Yes, but you’ve also told me ‘No’ about other women in real estate, then changed it to ‘Yes.’”
“What’s the point?” Isaac asked.
“The point is,” Christy said, her sarcasm getting the best of her, “if she wants to share that unique feeling of being with you, and you haven’t gotten there yet, don’t jerk her chain.”
“I guess I can’t say I’ve never slept with my realtor,” Isaac offered, hoping for a smile.
“No, you can’t,” Christy replied, not granting one.
A week later, Isaac made clear to Christy that he wasn’t kidding about the side yard. His 401K had dropped 40 percent in the recession. His bridge loan on 401 would come due in two more years. Isaac wanted to know if, at least, the second-house idea was feasible.
In the eleven years since they’d stopped sleeping together, Christy had never made a dime off Isaac. Now, she thought, she should.
“Look, Isaac, if you’re really serious about this,” she told him on the phone, “let’s deal. The first thing you have to do is to see if it’s even possible to lay a foundation and build there. If you’re serious, for a $5,000 retainer, with you bearing the costs, I’ll arrange for the initial testing.”
“Five thousand is pretty steep,” said Isaac. “How much would the testing cost?”
“Probably a couple of thousand.”
“Five thousand is too high,” Isaac said. “What would you think of doing it as a team, with you taking a commission if I build the little house? You said all along that this was a unique property and situation-sort of ‘Own your own block right smack in University City.’ You could sell both together for over a million. I’d give you 10 percent on the whole thing.”
Christy liked the idea. She’d never seen a Philadelphia city block with only one house. A wild notion that she’d had before about 401 came back. It could be her signature project. She could explore that craziest of all inner-city ideas: trying to turn the 400 block of St. Irenaeus Square into a private street. Or a gated area like one of those suburban enclaves she’d long admired. Isaac’s prominence as an Inky writer might get her coverage as an innovator.
“Okay, let’s do it,” Christy replied after a long pause. “I mean, the project-the house!”
“You can’t tell Irina,” Isaac said.
“Of course not,” agreed Christy.
Isaac gave Christy a set of keys-he traveled half the time anyway, and trusted her. Christy arranged for Eric Busby, who’d worked on some of the town houses that replaced the imploded Southwark Towers, to do the initial research, checking city records on underground lines and obstacles, checking out the yard. Isaac would be off in Europe for three weeks right after the semester ended in May. She might get things off the ground by then. She told Isaac as much.
It didn’t turn out as Christy planned. Most of the time, when she thinks of Isaac and 401-and, occasionally, when she sleeps there (deals often leading to other deals)-she’s glad about that. The sixteen trees make it feel like someplace else, not Philadelphia. Isaac’s sudden avaricious side-the instant developer eager to make a profit and let nature be damned-didn’t become him. When they both realized they had to stop cold on the second-house idea, Isaac seemed vulnerable again, even sexy, as he had when they first met. Just a writer, and a dreamer, in a house full of books.
Christy broke it to him pretty quickly after he came back from Europe in June. They were sitting in Isaac’s living room, on the old Imperial couch.
“There’s not going to be a second house,” she began. “It can’t happen.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Eric dug down into the yard about forty feet back from the sidewalk.”
“So?”
“So, he hit something. An obstruction.”
“An obstruction?”
Christy got up, walked over to her travel bag, and took out something wrapped in old pages of the Daily News.
It was a matryoshka doll.
“That’s what Eric hit in the yard?” Isaac asked, his eyes riveted on it.
“That’s not all he hit,” Christy answered, with an efficient air that suggested-this thing is over: game, set, match.
“Try part of a rib cage next to it, not quite separated from its accessories.”
Isaac looked at Christy as if she’d just told him that she’d gotten pregnant by him years ago, given birth, and now it was time for Isaac to meet his daughter. Christy looked at Isaac with an expression that said: You owe me for the rest of your life.
“Don’t worry,” Christy said quickly, “Eric was just as scared and worried and in shock as I was. He’s totally trustworthy on this-he’s fine. He filled up the hole again, and spread the weeds and leaves over it. You’d have to look really close at it, standing right there, to even know it’s been disturbed.”
“I want to show you something,” Isaac said. He got up and went to the attic, where he kept the papers and souvenirs of his three years reporting and teaching in Russia. When he returned, he showed Christy the larger matryoshka doll he’d brought back from Russia-a gift from one of his students there, the daughter of a prominent St. Petersburg businessman.
“Doesn’t the whole doll-inside-a-doll thing stand for the, uh, endless similarity of the human spirit?” asked Christy, repeating something she thought she’d once heard.
“It does,” Isaac replied. “Katya, my student, told me all about them when she gave it to me. Apparently, Russian mafia sometimes bury one of them with a body.”
“What does it mean?”
“According to Katya,” Isaac said, looking impassively at Christy, “it means there are more bodies nearby.”
They peered at each other. Isaac shook his head. He started to say something, but Christy spoke first.
“It never happened. Eric and I never saw anything. So don’t worry.”
Isaac nodded.
“Isaac Lalli,” he said, in a self-mocking tone, “sole master and resident of the 400 block of St. Irenaeus Square.”
Christy gave him a look of solidarity. She came over to the couch, sat beside him, and leaned against him as she hadn’t for years.
“It’s an amazing yard, beautiful just the way it is,” she said.
Bella Vista
I don’t know what shocked me most: the way my foulmouthed neighbor screamed and cursed his hoary mother to the grave-when she already appeared to have gone and returned from it-or the way she screamed back. Especially when she was holding the meat cleaver, standing at the kitchen table whacking the wings and legs off a chicken, always with a cigarette stuck to her lower lip.
I actually heard a mob hit one evening while working in my home office, which I found less disturbing than the sound of that woman-somebody’s grandmother-shrieking the F-word at the top of her two-packs-a-day-for-fifty-year lungs. Hardcore.
The side of our house overlooked the back of their house, where they fought in the kitchen in front of a picture window with blinds they never closed, yellowed by tobacco smoke and splattered grease. When windows were open in this corner of old row homes, voices blasted from below, amplified, between brick and stucco, directly into the window beside my desk as I was trying to work.
My husband and I lived on a side street off a side street, off a side street, which brought to mind a feudal town in Tuscany with passages through a maze too narrow to drive. On a map, our neighborhood, lovely Bella Vista, looks like the border between gentrified Center City and the old-time neighborhoods of South Philly. But at the street level, it felt like a funky residential oasis between noisy, once-hip South Street, where nobody told the kids from Lancaster that Sid Vicious and his haircut were dead, and the inimitable Italian Market, where Rocky Balboa once ran, oozing sweat and punching meat to a really loud and rousing song. And, mostly, Bella Vista life was quiet, except for the Freudian nightmare next door.
I wasn’t one to spy on my neighbors. I only glimpsed them down there, at an extremely sharp diagonal, inadvertently, when I got up to adjust the window, depending on the season and the volume of their noxious spew. When I spotted them, my instinct was to avert my eyes because I found them hideous-like some incarnation of the monster Grendel and his mother, in their lair down below. But I was no Beowulf to slay them, or even to ask them, nicely, to use their indoor voices. I was unnerved by the prospect that they would even spot me up here.
Grendel was a walking case study of vitamin D deprivation, termite-white in a dingy white sleeveless undershirt, sprouting black body hair like a mass of horseflies crawling all over his back and shoulders and up his neck, where they got trapped in his coarse black, greasy hair. He had a matching unibrow, and a Fu Manchu that had taken root in the 1970s and never been weeded. Revolting.
He frightened all of the Bella Vista womenfolk and small children who passed him on the sidewalk as he went to or from his job at our friendly neighborhood corporate chain-store pharmacy, wearing a logo-emblazoned uniform and visor. Though what the visor was for was anybody’s guess. He walked with an elongated stride, as if he were imitating Homo erectus-and badly-swinging his brown bag lunch stiffly, grinning weirdly to no one in particular. There wasn’t a woman who wouldn’t shudder instinctively at his sight, assuming he was a serial killer until proven innocent. Imagine our spine-crawling response when we found out that he was the guy behind the counter who developed our personal family snapshots. For us, the Digital Age couldn’t come too soon.
Grendel’s Mother was almost as strange to behold when she emerged from the back door on shopping day, barely a head taller than the grocery cart she stole from the Superfresh on 11th Street. A sturdy woman, she wore the black widow’s housedress of the Old Country, with her white hair pulled straight back in a bun. The crone drove that rusty piece of junk to and from the market with such road rage that innocent bystanders could only pray she wasn’t packing her meat cleaver. The top-heavy wire basket nearly tipped over at times as she pushed on, having no respect for obstacles she couldn’t see, oblivious to the unpredictable cobblestones, crooked sidewalks, and crumbling curbs, making such an unholy racket I could hear her two blocks away.
It was hard enough trying to concentrate while she was threatening to chop up her son like poultry-I kept thinking, Eeewwww… she’ll have to pluck him.
One day their homicidal promises were so convincing that I actually picked up the phone to call 911.
I’ll stab you in your sleep!
Not if I smother you first-you crazy old bitch. Gimme the money. I know you got it, Ma.
I could hear him rifling through kitchen cupboards, popping the lids off of old tin flour canisters, throwing cereal boxes and canned goods hither and yon.
Where’d ja hide it, damnit?!
Holding the phone, I hesitated, wondering if callers were required to identify themselves. Hmm. I had to think about this. After all, it’s a big deal to call the cops on your neighbors. Did I really want to get involved? Obviously, some families just yelled a lot and said awful things. That’s just how they “communicated.” And I had never actually witnessed any physical abuse.
I decided to defer to the collective wisdom of my Bella Vista elders, whose official word on the street was invariably: I didn’t see nuthin.
But I sure did hear a lot: and it was mostly from colorful characters who charmed the hell out of me. The Happy Guy who strolled down our street every day at lunchtime, for instance, belting out a respectable version of “Volare.” Or the trio of highly seasoned bookies who worked our block and the local convenience store, assuming their positions every day on this or that corner, in rotation. Aging wiseguys with chewy old skin like the Italian dry sausages hanging on strings from the ceiling of Claudio’s in the market. The way they made themselves laugh at their own jokes never failed to crack me up from afar.
When I passed these bookies on the street, they were flirty, but always respectful, and they took to greeting me playfully with a nickname: Hey, Smiley.
Between these guys and the nosey neighbor ladies (of which I soon became one, being home all day), I felt relatively secure. Not to worry, hon, one of the native grandmas reassured me when we first moved in as newlyweds. They only kill each other.
Good to know, I humbly thanked her.
And then she asked me why I wasn’t pregnant yet-a question she continued to ask every time she saw me for the rest of her life, which she lived out mostly sitting in her folding lawn chair in front of her house. I would just play the blushing bride-Smiley-although after several years she eyeballed me suspiciously, and then sympathetically, and finally in complete senility, at which point I could only pat her hand gently and say: Not to worry, hon.
I had to wonder at my own tendency to be blasé about the wiseguy-on-wiseguy crime that made our neighborhood legendary. We got our slices at Lorenzo’s on the corner of 9th and Christian, and ate them just down the street under the two-story mural of the late Mayor Frank Rizzo looking vaguely off. It didn’t disturb my appetite for splashy red tomato pie to know that mob boss Sal Testa almost got his arm blown off in this same spot, eating a bucket of raw clams.
And then there was the night Nicky Scarfo, Jr. got hit at Dante & Luigi’s, a beloved old family restaurant two small blocks away from us. I actually heard that one. October 31, 1989, a balmy Halloween evening, perfect for trick-or-treating, and the kids were skipping and squealing in the streets below, all hopped up on sugar, while my husband was downstairs manning the candy bowl at the front door-also hopped up on sugar. I was in my office when I heard an unusually loud: Pop pop… Pop pop pop… Pop pop pop.
I assumed some older kids-hooligans!-were setting off firecrackers over in Palumbo Park. But within a minute I heard the sirens descending from all directions, their strobes overreaching the rooftops.
Urban dwellers are nonchalant about sirens, as long as they keep on moving-Nothing to see here-farther and farther away. We live for this Doppler effect, and only drop whatever task at hand when we hear the sirens stop, followed by that dreadful sound of police cars, ambulances, and, scariest of all, the fire engines coming to a breakneck halt. It’s way too close to home if you can hear the static-y radio dispatchers talking about your neighbors.
Nicky, Jr., a big baby-faced kid in his mid-twenties, was dining at Dante & Luigi’s, enjoying a plate of his favorite white clam sauce (always the clams-what’s with the clams?), when he was approached by a grown man in a Batman mask, carrying a plastic trick-or-treat bag emblazoned with a fiendish pumpkin. Batman reached into his candy bag and pulled out a MAC-10 machine pistol, shooting Nicky, Jr. eight times about the head and neck.
Batman took flight, eluding capture.
And Nicky, Jr. was lucky he had a very thick neck. Nine days later, he walked out of the hospital, shrugging off the assassination attempt for the local TV cameras.
As for my neighbors, everybody saw nothing.
Curious, considering so many people were always watching: mostly grandmas and great-grandmas looking out their windows and doors, or tending to their pretty flower boxes or elaborate seasonal decorations, when they weren’t sitting in their lawn chairs in yards of concrete.
Some Saturdays these ladies-in their floral-patterned house dresses, rolled Supp-Hose, and sensible nun shoes-would appear in the street with buckets of soapy water to clean their stoops and sidewalks.
The wiriest grandma, who lived in one of the houses across from us, would wash her front window standing on a stepladder, making me nervous, afraid that she would fall “on my watch.” I couldn’t concentrate on my work when she was out there. I would carry my phone around the house, peeking constantly out my own front windows just in case I had to call 911.
And yes, of course, I offered to help her. But she appeared to take this as some kind of insult, because she gave me the stink-eye. I figured it was probably because I didn’t feel compelled to give my house a bath every month. I like to think that’s why Mother Nature provided us with weather.
But I did sweep occasionally, and the first time I ventured out with a broom, I was love-bombed by the whole lot of them. Ladies I had never even seen before poked their heads out their front doors to wave and wish me a good morning. One grandma actually crossed herself. Another kissed the crucifix on her rosary beads in my general direction.
The solidarity I felt with them as a result, not to mention my appreciation for the spontaneous benediction, increased my empathy when I heard the horror story about the last young couple that had moved into the neighborhood, around the corner on 9th Street. The husband, an untalented stockbroker who wasn’t much better at dealing drugs, stabbed a guy to death-twenty-seven times-in his row house during a cocaine deal gone bad. The panicky killer rolled the profusely bloody body in a drop cloth and dragged it outside, in the darkest hours, down our block-only yards from our front stoop-to deposit it in Cianfrani Park on the corner of 8th Street, where dozens of residents would be walking their dogs at dawn. So it was immediately discovered.
When the cops arrived at the park, they literally just looked down at the sidewalk and followed the bloody trail on foot, back to the murderer’s house, right up the marble steps to his front door, where they rang the bell and the homicidal imbecile answered. Case closed.
But it wasn’t the shocking murder that disgusted my neighbors-since the victim was dealing cocaine, he got what he deserved. It was the thought of that unholy mess the murderer left all over the sidewalk, and who the hell was going to clean it up? And what about the killer’s own stoop around the corner? Did he have a wife who would get out there and put a scrub brush with Clorox and Lysol to those blood-stained steps?
The sound of my neighbor ladies’ collective outrage rebounded off the houses.
Fortunately, their cleaning concerns were washed down the storm drains thanks to a deluge that lasted for days. I refrained from saying I told you so.
But it was only because I got out there with a broom that I heard the illicit history of our own house, which had been a front for a still during Prohibition. This explained why the center of our basement was walled in with concrete. For some inexplicable reason, previous owners had decided to brick in the whole contraption instead of removing it. The walls were so excessively reinforced you would have thought they contained a radioactive core. I couldn’t help but think that maybe it also served as the final resting place of a bootlegger or two, who got what they deserved in a booze deal gone bad.
During the fifteen years we lived in that house, I was always looking for “the body”-or some hidden treasure. Upstairs, I found a secret hiding place in the floorboards, and used it to stash a small metal lockbox of valuables. While installing the air-conditioning ducts, our contractor discovered an amber beer bottle still sealed with an old-fashioned wire and rubber stopper, sunk into disintegrating cheesecloth, the beer having evaporated down to dust. Holding that bottle up to the light, I had to wonder at the idiots who made alcoholic beverages illegal. Imagine being compelled to hide a bottle of beer in your wall because it could get you arrested.
When spring came one year, I was anxious to let in some fresh air, and during that first week of mild days, working by my window, I became aware of a creeping uneasiness. And then I realized, bolting upright from my desk and going to the window-listening.
Nothing. I heard nothing.
Not even a snarl from Grendel’s lair. I looked down at their house, taken aback to see that their kitchen blinds were shut tight.
Sometime later, I heard a noisy old diesel truck with squeaky brakes parking over on their street, followed by the sound of yo-dudes hollering to each other as they jumped out. Hmm. Seemed like a furniture delivery to me. When it went on longer than a typical delivery, I grabbed my trusty broom and stepped outside to do some investigative sweeping.
I swept beyond our section of sidewalk-affecting the aspect of an exceptionally good neighbor-all the way to the corner, about forty feet, where I could see the front of the Grendel house.
A medium-size truck belonging to a junk-hauling business was parked there, and two beefy yo-dudes were hoisting a beat-up old washing machine from the basement through the bulkhead doors opening up onto the sidewalk. No sooner did they set down their unwieldy load than another old appliance came floating eerily upward, like a spooky stage apparition through a trapdoor, elevated by a couple more yo-dudes from down below.
Since I was standing in front of my friend’s house, knowing she was at work, I decided to tidy up her sidewalk too, going about it quite methodically so I could keep an eye on the scene, exchanging greetings with passersby. My neighbors were especially curious, looking puzzled regarding the sheer number of discarded washers and dryers lining up on the sidewalk, a half-dozen or more, all of which were wrapped excessively with duct tape.
The appliances were also covered with sticky contact paper designating four decades of decorative patterns and styles: dainty Williamsburg prints of the ’50s, psychedelic op art of the ’60s, metallic disco dazzle of the ’70s. Good Lord, I muttered to myself, laundry day at the Grendels must’ve been confusing.
Why in the world would somebody have so many broken washers and dryers? It didn’t seem possible any one family could go through so many of them, not even in a lifetime. And why get rid of them now? Why not just wall them up in the middle of the basement like the nitwits did with our still? Were they moving? Were they dead?
Later that day, I strolled over to the market to get some provisions and saw that the truck was gone. Grendel’s Mother was out front with a bucket of soapy water and a scrub brush, scouring her stoop.
I couldn’t believe my ears at first, but as I got closer I confirmed that was she was, indeed, listening to Louis Prima. I had never heard a pleasing sound emanating from that house before, and felt myself grinning at her when she looked up. She was squinting against the setting sun and the smoke of a cigarette that was jammed in her crinkly, chubby cheek.
Remarkably, she kind of grinned back, as if she had forgotten for a moment to appear freakish, and I felt triumphant for having overcome my revulsion. Those bookies didn’t call me Smiley for nothing.
A week later my husband heard from a neighbor that Grendel had left his job sometime back in winter, and soon after, skipped town. One theory had him hopelessly beholden to a loanshark for gambling debts. Another had him caught red-handed trying to sell snapshots of kids he had stolen from customers.
I had my own theory, of course, but I didn’t share it with anyone-just minding my own Bella Vista business-because what do I know anyway?
I didn’t see nuthin.
Frankford
January 6, 1924
Somewhere out there, in the dark, was a noise. Lonergan twitched and tried to roll over but something blocked his way. He rolled the other way then stopped, sensing a huge void. Don’t fall in, he warned himself. He jerked back-
And woke up on the Frankford El.
The train thundered down a set of rails one story above the street, the whole works supported by a green skeleton of steel. Lonergan was in a middle car, sitting on the end of a bench near the center door. There were about a dozen passengers with him, almost all of them reeking of beer and cigarettes and gin. Everyone spaced themselves apart on the bench so they wouldn’t have to stare at a stranger across the way. Or watch a stranger vomit.
Lonergan briefly wondered where the El was now, how long he’d been asleep.
Outside the tops of dark buildings sped by, the sun having long vanished behind them. Best Lonergan could guess, it was around eleven p.m. The El slowed and began to screech. He recognized the sound. This was where the green skeleton curved from Front Street to Kensington Avenue. The Dauphin-York station. He was halfway there.
When the El first opened a little over a year ago, it was the eighth wonder of the Quaker City. Imagine-riding a new, arch-roofed Brill car from City Hall to the outskirts of Frankford in less than twenty-five minutes-a trip that ordinarily took close to an hour by other means! Thousands lined up to try it out, squeezing onto the benches and clutching the leather straps that hung from the ceiling.
Lonergan had been one of them, along with Marie and the boy one bitter Saturday in early December ’22. They didn’t mind the lack of heat, or the way the cars tossed their bodies around like dice in a cup. Riding the El was a thrill like no other. The boy’s eyes were wide the entire trip.
“Papa, look! There’s a giant milk bottle on top of that building!”
“Papa, what if the train tips over and falls off the track?”
“Where will this take us, Papa? Can we ride it again?”
Lonergan had no idea that in less than a year he’d be riding the El all the time. And now he actively hated the damned thing.
It froze him, the night wind chilled by the Delaware before it blasted into the cars. It carried him past neighborhoods he didn’t know, and didn’t care to know. It jolted his body before and after each stop. Worst of all, the Frankford El constantly reminded him how badly things had gone since the elections.
The El pulled away from Dauphin-York. Lonergan’s body tipped to the left. He wasn’t fully awake yet. Where had he nodded off? Somewhere under City Hall? Jesus, he was tired.
A hard chill cut through his coat. He should have worn a warmer shirt. Lonergan’s city-issue bluecoat was warm, but he wasn’t wearing it. The City liked their cops in uniform as they made their way to their stations-the more bluecoats, the more citizens enjoyed the illusion of a well-protected place. Well, Lonergan decided he wasn’t wearing it any longer than the required seven hours. That’s all the City deserved for its $5.50 a day.
Huntingdon now. The same stops, day after day, night and morning. He had them memorized. Sometimes it helped make the trip go faster, sometimes it didn’t. He should have picked up a pulp at the newsstand. He’d forgotten. The doors opened. A gust of frigid air whipped through the car. Rush hour was long over. The only people who rode the El this late on a Sunday were returning from a night at the cider saloons, the gambling dens, and the rowdy houses in the Tenderloin. The lack of body heat made the cars even colder.
Officer John Lonergan, out in the cold, now and forever after.
Political exile had come swiftly. The Vare boys had won in November, but by that time Lonergan had already broken with the Vares in a very messy fashion. One minute he was their prize enforcer; the next, their ultimate betrayer. At the time, Lonergan thought he’d played it smart by aligning himself with the competition. Not so smart, after all.
Ward leaders don’t have the authority to fire cops, but they can strongly recommend to your captain that a transfer is in the best interests of the Department. It took less than forty-eight hours to have him reassigned to a station so far across the city it almost qualified as Bucks County.
Lonergan used to be able to make it to work at the West Philadelphia station in seven minutes flat-or three minutes on a streetcar when he didn’t mind spending the nickel. Now his trip meant a streetcar to Market, a long haul on the Frankford El beneath Center City and out past the river wards, and then a second streetcar out to the hinterlands of Northeast Philly just in time to make midnight roll call.
Ninety minutes, one way. Three hours round trip. Three hours wasted out of twenty-four, every working day.
That was how they punished cops in this city.
Somerset now. As the El stopped Lonergan tumbled slightly to the left, and threw out a hand to support himself. After he stabilized, Lonergan rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. He shouldn’t be on this freezing train. Not this late on a Sunday night, breathing other people’s gin fumes. He should be home in a warm bed with Marie. He was already exhausted and his shift didn’t even begin for another hour. It would be a struggle to stay awake through the night.
And then he had the return trip. The same stations, in reverse, early-morning sun stabbing him in the eyes. Pitying looks from the buttoned-up people making their way downtown to real jobs. Another small piece of his life erased.
Lonergan wanted to quit the force. But he couldn’t do that to Marie and the boy. They were all trapped, just like he was trapped on this damned freezing El car.
Just after Allegheny, Lonergan noticed that the green-eyed girl was on the car too.
He saw her often, and wondered about her. She was pretty, but her clothes were worn and frayed. She wasn’t a flapper or a hooker. But clearly she worked for a living. Her hands were gloveless and rough. Lonergan never saw the station she used to enter the train. He hoped it wasn’t the Tenderloin. There were very few good reasons for a young girl to be out riding the El this time of night.
Lonergan pretended to glance at the advertisements above the girl’s head and saw that she glanced at him-briefly. Had she recognized him too, from previous trips? Maybe she saw the blue slacks with the yellow stripe and realized he was a cop. Maybe she felt safer making a night journey with a cop sitting nearby.
A short while later the El pulled into the Torresdale station. Lonergan steadied himself and this time anticipated the jolt. When the train stopped, he was able to keep his body perfectly still.
Lonergan stole another glance at the girl and wondered if they’d ever talk, or acknowledge each other’s presence. Or maybe they’d just keep each other company in polite silence.
He decided he’d be her guardian angel. He’d protect her, even if she never spoke a word to him. She wouldn’t have to ask him, or thank him. He’d be looking out for her, though, from now on. Lonergan would stay awake and find out where she got on the train. She’d ride the El unmolested.
At the very least, it was something for an off-duty cop to keep his mind occupied with in a rumbling car full of drunks.
The doors opened. The green-eyed girl looked to her right. Lonergan followed her gaze to the concrete platform. No one there. The door closed. The El jerked forward and began making the steep incline to the Church Street station. The green-eyed girl looked to her left and nodded.
Maybe that wasn’t a nod. Maybe it was just the jolt of the El.
Lonergan heard movement further down the car. A man in a black duster stood up from the bench. Something heavy fell at his feet, like a length of rope. Lonergan followed its length up to the man’s hand and realized what it was. A whip.
“Wallets and purses,” the man barked.
Lonergan stared at him, unbelieving.
The man handed a small sack to the bleary-eyed passenger sitting closest to him. “Put them in there. Nobody do anything or I’ll cut your face open.”
Was this man trying honestly to pull a hold-up on the Frankford El with a blacksnake whip?
Then Lonergan thought about it. Relatively few people on the train, but one or two of them might even be flush from a night in the Tenderloin. And they were all captive. The incline to Church Street was probably the longest stretch between stations-there was enough time to do what he wanted, and nobody could run away. And then at Church Street, he could run down the stairs to street level and disappear into Frankford.
“Don’t you hear me? I will cut your faces open!”
For a few long seconds nobody moved. The passengers were either too drunk or stunned to react. It probably seemed like a lousy fusel oil fever dream. The El chugged its way up the incline. The entire world seemed to tilt a few degrees.
Lonergan instinctively reached for his hip and felt the space where his holster should be. He stopped carrying his gun too-Marie had forced him to keep it locked up at the station, against regulation. She didn’t want the boy to find it. Too many stories in the newspapers about children shooting themselves with their fathers’ guns.
“Shall I show you?”
No gun meant that Lonergan should just sit tight. Let this man take what he wanted and leave.
The bandit pumped his arm. The whip was a dark blur as it traveled a quarter-length of the length of the car and ripped into a passenger’s chest. His body convulsed. The Stetson fell from the top of his head. He screamed, and then the girl sitting next to him-the green-eyed girl-slid a few inches away. The whip had almost hit her.
Everyone got busy opening wallets after that. The man who’d been whipped was holding his hands to his torn coat, rocking and moaning incoherently.
The El was close to Church now.
“You.”
The bandit was staring at Lonergan. He had hard little black points for eyes and a soft mouth.
“You too, big fella. Your roll in the bag-now.”
The next passenger, a small man in a crooked bow tie, shoved the bag forward, waiting for Lonergan to take it.
Lonergan said nothing. They’d be at the Church station soon. There were two dollars in Lonergan’s front pocket, and he’d be damned if this son of a bitch was taking it. If he tried to use the whip Lonergan would get up and knock him on his backside.
“Now!”
He glanced over at the green-eyed girl, who was staring at him with a puzzled expression. She seemed to be wondering, Why aren’t you giving him what he wants?
Lonergan thought: I’ll show you why.
He stood up and reached toward his hip, mimicking a draw. “Police officer,” he said. “Drop the whip or I’ll shoot you down.”
The bandit shook his head as he took long steps backward. “I’ll cut off your head before you even-”
Before the bandit could finish, Lonergan pumped his legs and started to lunge. Then a violent jolt as the El pulled into Church Street made Lonergan stumble. The bandit retreated a few steps. The center door slammed opened. Lonergan looked up just in time for the bandit to give him a face full of the whip.
Someone screamed-it may have been Lonergan. He didn’t know. All he felt was searing numbness followed by the intense heat of the slash. Around him the shock-sobered passengers gathered themselves together and fled the car, crying out for the operator to stop the train. Either he didn’t hear them or didn’t care, because soon after the center door slammed shut again.
Lonergan heard the bandit cry: “MY MONEY!”
The little man with the crooked bow tie-he must have walked off with the sack. Maybe bow tie would do the right thing and return the stolen items to his fellow drunken passengers. Or maybe he’d toddle down to the street level and do his own disappearing act.
The El jolted forward. Lonergan watched as drops of his own blood began to streak across the floor of the car.
“I’m going to cut you apart,” the bandit said.
A woman’s voice cried out: “Clayton, no!”
Lonergan glanced to the right. It was the green-eyed girl, still here, perched on the rattan bench. Why hadn’t she left with the others?
Then all at once he knew.
The bandit was coming at Lonergan now, cracking the whip across the seats. Lonergan didn’t have a strategy. He merely reacted. Whip be damned-he lunged for the bastard.
The two of them stumbled backwards into the center door. Made impact. Glass spiderwebbed behind Lonergan’s body. Lonergan could smell beer on the man’s fevered breath. He was skinny but strong. The El start to slow down again. Orthodox-Margaret station, coming up.
Lonergan gathered a fistful of the bandit’s duster, put his foot against the wood, and pushed forward. They spun until they collided with the center door opposite. The glass, again, cracked-and the bandit went partially through it. Shards rained down on the track. Lonergan drove a fist into the bandit’s face. Then again. And again. And again. The train stopped, jolting both of them to the left. The center door opened.
The bandit pulled himself free, crashed to the ground, and then scrambled backwards on the platform, leaving the whip in Lonergan’s hand. Lonergan took two steps back then fell to the floor of the car. His face was no longer numb. The pain was starting to appear in deep, angry throbs. He felt nauseous and dizzy.
By this time the conductor had gotten the hint something was wrong. Maybe he saw the bandit scrambling for the concrete steps leading to the street. The El idled at the station, doors open. Night air blast-freezing the interior of the car.
Lonergan glanced up at the green-eyed girl, who’d been left behind. He felt hot blood run over his jaw and down his neck.
“Seems Clayton’s left you,” he said.
The girl appeared afraid now.
“So you’re the lookout, I suppose. Did you follow someone from one of the gambling houses? Did one of them hit it big tonight?”
She wasn’t looking at Lonergan. She was looking at the whip in his big hands. If Lonergan peeled off her shirt and saw her bare naked, what would he see? You ride that train or I’ll hide you again, you bitch.
“What are you going to do?” she asked softly.
It was a good question. What should he do? He wasn’t wearing the bluecoat. He didn’t have his gun. He wasn’t in his district. He still had his two bucks in his front pocket. He didn’t have to do a thing.
After a while the operator, a florid-faced man, came rushing into the car, asking what had happened. The green-eyed girl made a small cry as she rushed out of the car and ran across the platform. Lonergan said nothing. He listened to the rapid clicking of her shoes on concrete as they faded away.
But he wanted to tell her, Stay with me.
He wanted to tell her: You don’t understand. I’m your guardian angel.
Old City
I should explain that I write historical dramas, so as I wander the streets of Philadelphia I ponder how they looked before the curse of the internal combustion machine, and what vile secrets lurked behind the brick façades that now appear so H &G perfect. My theory (unproven) is that stone, being porous, is capable of retaining energy from the souls of the damned and despairing in the same manner that sponges hold water. Concentrate hard enough, and long-buried crimes will leach out.
I take my dog on these exploratory jaunts. I figure she adds an air of respectability to what otherwise might be mistaken for a stalker’s prowl-my beady glance measuring eyebrow windows hidden under the eaves, or mismatched brick work where once were doors.
Our route is simple: 6th Street (6th and Lombard was a red-light district a century and a half ago, the “fancy houses” now converted to upscale residences-or so local realtors insist), through Washington Square (frisbees zooming over the unmarked graves of Revolutionary War soldiers-Americans planted feet-first, Brits buried head-down in retribution), past the rear entrance of Independence Hall (oft-promulgated tales of Colonial derring-do). After that I cross 5th Street toward the Second Bank of the United States where I customarily pause to parlay with Nicholas Biddle, ancestor and financial wizard, before continuing my journey into the alleys and courtyards the tourists avoid. Nick died in 1844, so it’s a one-sided conversation, but I envision him standing there lordly and a trifle vain (Byron would have admired the long, wavy locks) amidst the marble columns that mark his particular temple to Mammon.
Now isn’t the moment for a diatribe against that snake-in-the-grass Andrew Jackson and the fiscal ruin he visited upon the nation, but let’s just say I bear the ex-pres a colossal grudge. The root of my wrath is lucre, not the noblest of motives for revenge, but there you have it. At any rate, as I stop, I ask old Nick (or old Nick’s spectral self) to find a miraculous means to shower me with money-which would permanently cure my writer’s block. I figure an ex-banker should have ready access to the celestial till. I do this while the dog noses around looking for the perfect place to pee. At least her prayers are answered.
I’ve digressed.
It was during a late afternoon at the end of September, a day that had been unremittingly dreary and depressing, and while I was nearing the Second Bank I heard them-the reenactors, that is. If you’ve ever strolled the city’s landmarks, you’ve encountered these ubiquitous street performers. They dress exclusively in period garb and bombard passersby with tales of eighteenth-century moxie. Don’t misunderstand; I have nothing against idealism, or spunk either, but I become suspicious when the Founding Fathers are portrayed as action heroes. It makes me want to canvass the Founding Mothers for their opinions.
These particular actors weren’t the predictable for-God-and-country types, however. For one thing, despite the advanced hour and waning light, they’d attracted a large, enthusiastic crowd, big enough and noisy enough that I couldn’t get near the players who stood on the pebblestone road fronting the bank. For another, the script was more trenchant than the usual family-style (read: Disney-fied) entertainment. The change of pace was a welcome variation to the traditional bell-ringing and saber-rattling. I decided to listen in. Besides, old Nick needs the cold shoulder treatment once in a while. Most captains of finance and industry do.
“He keeps slaves on his Southern plantation-which doubtless you’re aware. The crimes perpetrated upon them are demonic: floggings until their flesh comes away in bloody strips, children snatched from their mothers and sold-”
“You tell ’em, sister!” a female audience member yodeled at the actress delivering the lines. Other voices sprang into action, attempting to shush the interruption.
“I’ve a right to my opinion,” the provocateur shot back. Naturally, this was met with more orders to cease and desist.
“Let the gal finish, why don’tcha? The wife and I didn’t come to Philly to listen to you.”
“This is a free country, bro. In case you haven’t heard.”
“Just shut up, okay?”
“You gonna make me? You and the wife? Doesn’t she have a name?”
“What’s that crack supposed ta mean?”
“Whaddaya think?”
“Hey, c’mon, you two. Take it elsewhere.”
As additional members of the crowd joined the enlightening argument and then settled into a tenuous peace, they-and I-pressed closer to the improvised arena. I couldn’t see the performers yet, but the initial actress’s vocal quality and range was impressive, a professionally trained instrument that could hit the back of any theater. I wondered what she was doing hustling tourists for tips.
“This isn’t merely abolitionist fervor. My entire life is affected by his shameful philosophy.” She paused to let the dramatic tension build. As I mentioned, she knew her stuff. “For I must also consider the mulatto bastards his seed has produced-”
A gasp from two protective parents arose. The crowd opened to let them and their children scurry through, the boy and girl lagging behind, eyes glued to the ground lest anyone assume the totally dorky choice to vamoose was theirs.
“I thought these dramas were supposed to be clean and wholesome,” the mother muttered while the son, who looked to be about eight, demanded: “What’s seed? It’s not like grass stuff, is it? I know what a bastard is.” In the silence, his falsetto voice boomed.
“Hush, Anthony, we’ll talk about it later-”
“That’s what you always say, Mom!”
“At least the play’s educational,” the father offered with a wary chuckle. “That’s what we wanted, wasn’t it? American history made fun-”
“Paul, how can you?” Having registered her disapproval, Mom spun away from Dad and bent down to her son. “Don’t use the word bastard, honey.”
“Dad does-”
“What your father says and does isn’t always suitable. You may as well learn that right now.”
“Like when he-”
“That’s enough, Junior.” This time it was Dad who did the scolding. He was now carrying the boy’s sister, a yellowhaired girl of four or five who clung to his neck and stuck out her tongue at her earthbound brother. As the father held his daughter aloft, a grin of false indulgence spread across his face. It didn’t begin to conceal his dismay at being the focal point of a bunch of tittering strangers.
“But you do, Dad. When we watch the Phillies, you-”
“Anthony, that’s enough.”
“Bastard, bastard,” the little girl sang out.
“Look what you made your sister do, Junior. I want an apology. Now.”
“What do you expect, Paul, if you set the kind of examp-?”
“Drop it, Sheila.”
“I’m not allowed to tell the truth, is that it?”
“Now. Drop it now.”
With the audience torn between eavesdropping on a family meltdown and watching professional performers, a space became free for me to slip forward (dog in tow) until the actors were in sight. Two women and a man, dressed not in homespun and breeches and tricorne hats but in full Victorian regalia: the women draped in silks and expensive paisley shawls, the man in a fitted coat and tall beaver hat. He had his back to me; the women were also turned away, their faces concealed by their bonnets’ wide beribboned brims. All three might as well have stepped from the fashion plates in Godey’s Lady’s Book, the period’s answer to an amalgam of Cosmo and Redbook. I shouldn’t have been surprised at their outfits; reenactors are obsessive people. They don corsets and crinolines, tight wool trousers and tighter cravats, whether the heat index measures a hundred degrees Fahrenheit or sleet is slinging itself sideways. In my opinion that’s odd.
“All the while, he struts around the metropolis, esteemed by his peers as if the gentleman farmer from the Carolinas were unconnected to the God-fearing churchman dwelling in Society Hill,” Actress Number One continued. Her tone had grown more strident; her posture (or what I could see within her voluminous clothes) was rigid. “How can this be? Wasn’t the transatlantic slave trade abolished in 1808? Then why does the government allow this evil to persist?”
The argument hit a chord with the audience. There were cheers; several people clapped. It seemed a likely time for an educational interlude, a Q &A during which the cast traditionally breaks character and engages in a group discussion, encouraging onlookers to air their views on whatever political message is up for debate. I took this as a cue to vacate my spot. Besides, I figured the dog was growing bored standing in one place while a lot of human types made noises that had nothing to do with food. However, the actress who’d taken the lead wasn’t about to relinquish her soapbox. I opted to linger a bit longer.
“It’s not merely the Southerners who are to blame. Here in our own city the textile mills supply fabric, so-called cot-tonade, for those despicable slave owners-”
“Haven’t I experienced that abominable situation myself?” the second actress interjected, her tone also incensed, although her interpretation was subtler than Actress One. “And our calico is traded for human cargo along Africa’s Niger River. But, I repeat, what’s to be done in your case? Your husband’s within his rights. As demonic as it-”
“Within his rights? Oh, where’s your sense of decency and equality? What about the burning of Pennsylvania Hall during the Anti-Slavery Convention, or the rioting that ensued? Entire blocks of houses set on fire. Men and women dying in the conflagration and their homes reduced to ashes. And this the City of Brotherly Love!”
Louder applause followed the bellicose speech. A few people whistled and stamped, their shoes drumming a tattoo against the stones. The instructive vignette was taking on the rowdy passions of an Eagles game. I began worrying for my dog’s safety. The team’s reputation as being pooch-friendly is a sullied one, but that’s another story.
“What you say is true,” the male actor picked up the cue. “Now we face riots over laborers’ rights, which increase the civil unrest. But men and women-and children-must be paid fairly for their work.” There was authority in his delivery, and sorrow that sounded genuine. I was sorry I couldn’t see his expression. I was also impressed at the amount of research the playwright had done. I know this period well. The facts were solid.
“But what about your husband?” Actress Number Two persisted. I watched her lay a gloved hand on the man’s sleeve, an indication that the scene was about to shift focus. Attentive though the audience was, the encroaching dusk, combined with the siren call of Geno’s Steaks, would soon take its toll. It was time to address another topic. “I assume you haven’t mentioned your critiques to him.”
“Oh, I have. Naturally, he repudiates my arguments. No matter. I intend to divorce him, and desert his bed and wicked habits forever. Indeed, I should never have wed him, but I think you know that well enough.”
“Well, duh!” two female audience members whooped in unison, although their advice might as well have been whispered. The performers never reacted to the commotion.
“You say nothing in response,” Actress One eventually sighed. “But what other choice have I? I can’t continue as I have been. Turning a blind eye to his numerous peccadilloes. Feigning devotion when what I feel is abhorrence. I see no other solution but to sunder our marriage bonds. Speak, please. I know you’ll support me in my plight. I must divorce him, mustn’t I, Martha?”
“Martha?” This time I was the one who attempted to interrupt the proceedings. Martha…? It couldn’t be. Or could it? Had the unimaginable happened? Had people I believed I’d never encounter miraculously materialized? No. No, it was inconceivable. Fictional characters don’t leap out of the pages of books and confront their authors. I studied the actress called Martha: the narrow waist and fashionably full sleeves, the cameo eardrops and brooch, the reticule held in a gloved hand. Of course, she was a reenactor. A good one, certainly, and wearing more costly accoutrements than most, but that didn’t mean she was the genuine article, a resident of 1840s Philadelphia transferred to the modern city. Probably the name was pure happenstance. Or perhaps I’d misunderstood. And yet… And yet, what if truly it were she? What if fantasy had turned into fact? “Martha… Beale?”
She made no sign of having heard my words, but she turned and faced me. Despite the fading daylight, I knew in an instant that this was no counterfeit. It was Martha Beale in the flesh. Her aquiline nose and proud jaw, her pensive eyes, the tall, stoic frame: who else could it have been but she? Practical, resolute Martha who’d finally broken free of her dictatorial father’s troubling legacy. And there she was, gazing in my direction as though the encounter was a commonplace occurrence.
How to explain what I felt seeing her standing before me after all these years? Shock is too pallid a word; I was utterly confounded. It simply wasn’t possible that she was living and breathing, but somehow she was. I stared at the broad steps leading up to the bank; pollution had cut runnels in the marble; the columns were streaked and crumbling, so I knew the time wasn’t 1843 but the present. And then there were my fellow audience members: exposed bellies bulging over hip-huggers, facial piercings, flip-flops despite the season, the sartorial trappings of the twenty-first century. This was no figment of my imagination. Martha was alive. Now. I reached out my hand. I couldn’t help myself. “I’m-”
“Hey, no touching the actors,” a nearby participant ordered. “That’s like harassment or something.”
“But she’s my-”
“Gab all you want after the show. For now, ya shut yer yap, capisce?”
“She’s not an actr-”
“Lady. Shut the hell up.”
I examined the other supposed performers. Of course, it was Thomas Kelman and Becky Grey Taitt, two other personalities from my newest novel. How could they have been absent if Martha was present? Kelman with the scar that traced a silver line diagonally across his cheek, and the somber expression that turned to joy whenever he looked at Martha; Becky, quixotic, effusive, temperamental, and a celebrated beauty.
You’ll wonder why I hadn’t recognized them immediately. These three are the products of my brain, after all. Without my fingers and keyboard they wouldn’t exist. When I tell their stories, I don’t write them, I live them. Each of my fictitious persons has its doppelganger in me, and I in them, and in the other characters in my books too. Villain or victim, they and I share one soul, one heart, one mind. Think what you will about the consequences of multiple personality disorder; I embrace the condition.
“Oh, my friends.” Tears filled my eyes; I dispensed with all doubts. How Martha and the others had conjured themselves out of fiction and into reality was too stupendous a question to pose. Besides, I’m no scientist. I stretched out my arms.
“Shut. The. Hell. Up,” a burly guy with thick, hairy forearms snarled. His calves, visible beneath hip-hop length shorts were hairy too. Hirsute might be a better literary description. Or simian, perhaps. His legs bowed like an orangutan’s. “You made the actors clam up. My kid was really into this. You like that, spoiling things for kids?”
He was right about the lack of conversation emanating from the impromptu stage. The boon companions of my days and nights had fallen silent, although I was certain the cause was Becky’s declaration that she intended to divorce William Taitt. I decided to rectify the situation. There, with evening fast approaching, with the background rumble of horse-drawn tourist carriages and the drone of the drivers spewing out farfetched data about the birthplace of liberty, I would do my part as a patriotic citizen. I would welcome each and every stranger, and give them the benefit of my insights into our city and its customs.
“That’s because Becky-Mrs. Taitt-announced she was going to leave her husband. Martha and Kelman are mulling over her words. Divorce is commonplace now. It was scandalous in the mid-1800s. Unheard of, actually.”
The man glowered, moving his mouth in wordless spasms as if he were trying to lip-read. I realized a dissertation on Victorian-era mores was reaching a trifle higher than desired.
“Let me back up and explain the situation. I’m an author, their author. These are my characters. I specialize in historical novels. You may not read that genre, but it’s what I write. And I’m guessing you’re here because you enjoy learning about history, isn’t that correct? You like drama blended with fact.” I smiled at the confrontational creep and all the other playgoers who were now viewing me with a mixture of hostility and confusion. Despite their antipathy, I beamed. Showing off your creation(s), even when the moment is improvisational and the audience unreceptive, is a heady experience.
“This is Martha Beale, a Philadelphia heiress, and Thomas Kelman, her suitor. He wasn’t born into her social sphere, but never mind about that at the moment. More important is the fact that he has a special political appointment to the city’s mayor. I should explain that there was no centralized police force at the time in which my novels are set. Kelman solves crimes. That’s his raison d’être. And Becky, well, she really is an actress. Or she was. A famous one. From England. She’s retired from the stage at the moment; her husband’s a member of the aristocracy. As you just heard, he owns a plantation in the South, which wasn’t uncommon. Many upperclass Philadelphians were married into Southern families. Our commerce was also closely intertwined. That’s why the city was bitterly divided at the onset of the Civil War. You have only to read S.G. Fisher’s treatise on race to appreciate how impassioned sentiments were, though I warn you his views are alarming. I’m getting ahead of myself. I apologize. The period in question, which Becky, Martha, and Thomas are presently discussing, is twenty years prior. You heard mention of the riots in-”
“Christ, lady, you’re a regular nut job.”
I studied the faces peering at me through the gloom. That seemed to be the general consensus. I also got the impression everyone wanted me to pipe down, so they could get back to watching the scripted drama instead of a disagreement between two audience members. The problem was that it wasn’t scripted. Not by me, at any rate.
At that moment, Martha turned her back on us all, took Becky’s arm, and began to stroll away. Kelman brought up the rear of the trio, keeping a slight distance between himself and the ladies so they could discuss Becky’s future in private. At least that’s the way the tableau appeared.
“You bitch. See what you done? All this woo-woo shit? The actors think you’re a loony-tunes too. They put court orders or somethin’ on weirdos like you. You better hope they’re not headin’ off to find a cop.”
I would have argued with the jerk, but I was worried he might take out his anger on my dog. Besides, he had a child with him. He began to trot after Thomas Kelman.
“Hey, buddy, I’ll make it worth your while. All of yous. The kid likes this stage-type shit, what can I say? Just finish up what you started before that kooky dame started bustin’ your chops. I’m no sensitive Sally; if your friend wants to off her hubby, that’s fine by me. Hey, maybe I could help yous out with that… Audience input, you know? I know some guys… Hey, what can I say? Connected. Know what I mean?”
Kelman didn’t answer, which tickled the hairy charmer to no end. “Yous guys are good! It’s like you don’t even hear me. I could use that on the missus. I can’t yak now, hon, I’m acting.” He chortled as he and his kid chugged to keep pace. Then the boy, who was half as tall as his father and a quarter his heft, began to complain about being hungry. “All right already. So we’ll quit. You wanna quit? Let’s do it.” There was kindness in his voice. Playfully, he cuffed his son on his skinny shoulder. “Who’s the boss?”
It wasn’t a question, but the boy replied with a pleased and chirpy: “Me, Pop.”
“You bet.”
The pair started to amble south toward Walnut Street while the remainder of the audience dispersed, rebuking both me and the cast with varying levels of indignation. There’s nothing like canceling a free performance to get people’s dander up. My failed effort at city boosterism made me want to slog home and return to the pitiless computer screen. It may be a harsh critic, but it’s a silent one. Despite my bruised ego, I stuck close to my mystical pals, waiting for an opportunity for a private dialogue. Which, if you think about it, could have turned into a ventriloquist’s monologue/pantomime.
I didn’t get the chance for a confab, though, because William Taitt rushed onto the scene, charging in from 4th Street and almost barreling into the parent-child duo. The electric streetlamps hadn’t yet winked on, so visibility was reduced. Fortunately, Dad spotted Taitt as he strode forward, oblivious to anyone but himself. It was clear that Becky’s husband was infuriated, and that decorum had been thrown to the winds. As he drew closer, it was equally apparent that he was inebriated. I’m sorry to say that’s sometimes the case with William Taitt. I blame myself.
Becky, my brave Becky, blanched and turned her head away as if expecting a blow. Martha squared her shoulders, preparing to give Taitt a piece of her mind. Kelman stepped forward to block the man’s approach.
“Kee-rist,” the father gushed while his son burbled an impressed: “Cool.”
“Didja see the guy’s shoes? High heels. Like a dame’s. I’m tellin’ you, this is somethin’ you’ll never forget. Them dopes that left early are missing a real good show. NYC don’t have nothin’ like this. You’d pay big bucks up there for an act like this.”
Parent and child returned to the center of the action while Taitt bore down upon his wife. As always, he was dressed in the latest style: the shoes that had caught the dad’s attention as well as a plum-colored jacket and trousers the hue of a fawn’s soft hide. The piping around his coat’s lapels was syenite-blue. Were he a few years younger, Taitt would have been viewed as a dandy. His hair beneath his hat was wild, however, and his shirt and cravat askew.
“You make a mockery of me, wife,” he seethed. “I won’t permit it. And hiding behind your Amazon warrior. Mistress Martha Beale’s no mythic queen who’ll guard you from-”
“Have done, Mr. Taitt,” was Kelman’s quiet command, which drew immediate ire from Becky’s drunken husband.
“Do you dare to countermand me, sir? This is a private matter. I insist you-”
“And I insist you behave in a civil manner toward your wife and Miss Beale-”
“Civil, Mr. Kelman. I doubt you understand the meaning of the word. You, a mere Johnny-jump-up who hopes to pluck golden coins from your heiress while laying her in your feathered nest. Here hen, hen, hen. Produce some shiny eggs for me, pray do.” He attempted to push past Kelman, who stood his ground. The scar on his left cheek twitched; his hands curled themselves into fists.
“William, please. Desist. I’ll come home presently-”
Naturally, Martha objected. “Becky, what did you just tell us? Besides, remember the pain he has inflicted in the past under similar circumstances. I won’t allow you to be battered again.” She put a protective arm around her friend’s shoulder, which further enraged Taitt.
“You three can go to the devil! I’m William Taitt. My family built this city. I won’t be denied my conjugal rights.”
“Your rights don’t include assault, sir.” This from Martha, which drew a sneering condemnation from Taitt: “How would you, a spinster, know anything about marital rights, madam? Or fornication, unless it’s with a-?”
“Taitt. Silence-”
“Lay a hand on me, Kelman, and I’ll make certain you’re hounded from the city. I am aware that you are in the mayor’s employ, but his relationship with me is one of friendship and camaraderie.”
You may wonder where was I while this altercation unfolded. The truth is that I stood stock-still and slack-jawed. My characters speaking for themselves? Carried along by their own volition? Like the father and son, I watched the scene in silence.
“I’m waiting, wife. You have a child at home, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I haven’t, William. How could I?”
“Ah, contrition, Becky… A new guise. But I think not spoken with sufficient sorrow.”
“My sorrow is in seeing you under the influence of drink. You make a spectacle of yourself in front of our friends-”
“You call these people friends? Well, I do not. And I won’t have my spouse hectoring me.” He held her arm tightly as he spoke.
Martha snatched at his sleeve when he attempted to lead Becky away; Kelman grabbed Taitt’s shoulder. Kelman’s fingers may be as long and tapered as a pianist’s, but he’s accustomed to using force when necessary. He’s also tall; when roused he appears taller and even more imposing. Becky’s husband looked puny beside him, as if his fine garments were sturdier than his limbs.
“Let her go, Taitt. Your threats have run their course. She told you she’d return in due time.”
“I ordered you not to touch me, Kelman.” At that, William Taitt yanked a pistol from his jacket, a new derringer manufactured in the Northern Liberties. If you’re a history buff, you’re familiar with the weapon and its eponymous inventor. If not, this is no time for an aside on the Gold Rush of ’49, or the romance of the Old West. Deringer, Henry. Look him up.
When the gun was whipped out, everyone except Taitt froze. This included the dad and kid. I was already doing my zombie impression.
“Not quite the cock-of-the-walk, are you now, Mister Kelman? Unhand me at once, or I’ll do some damage.” Taitt waved the shiny weapon aloft, pointing randomly at the purplish sky. “This is no fowling piece, I assure you. Oh, I know, gentlemen don’t arm themselves on our city streets, but you see, I’m in the vanguard of taste. I set style, I don’t follow it. Who knows, someday derringers like mine may become de rigueur accessories like hats or walking sticks or ladies’ parasols. I intend to have my wife obey me.” He lowered the gun to shoulder height and smiled. “Don’t think I’m not sincere. The pistol’s loaded.”
With that he discharged it, the retort so loud that even the pigeons accustomed to backfiring motorcycles and belching city buses flapped upward in alarm. Above the bank, the starless air filled with the frantic flutterings of their wings. I watched them circling, as black and swift as bats; then I heard a groan and the thud of a body falling while Becky implored: “William, don’t.” Her voice was now whisper-soft, an echo of what it had been. “I’ll do as you say.”
My focus returned to earth, but she and my embattled creations had vanished. In their place was nothing, no muzzy wavering of ectoplasmic matter, no faint entreaties from on high. Night had descended, but it wasn’t darkness that hid my friends from view. They were simply gone, as if they’d never stood on the soil in front of me.
“Don’t leave,” I whispered, but my plea was too late. However those four had managed to materialize, they’d chosen the same means of escape.
“Coo-ool,” the boy said. “Dad, that was waaay cool.” He stood beside his father, who was now lying on the pebblestones, facedown, his head inches from the entrance steps to the Second Bank. The child’s expression as he gazed at his father’s prone form couldn’t have been prouder. Reflecting the glow of an exterior floodlight, the boy’s eyes shone white and enormous.
“Blood and everything. Wow. Just like on TV. It’s on the dirt too. How’d you guys do that? Like, how’d you know he was gonna shoot you, and not the other dude? Wait’ll I tell the kids on the block. Wow. Mom’s gonna be pissed about your shirt, but hey, it’s like reality TV. Or something, right? I’ll tell her the badass dude with the gun did it. All right? That’s what we’ll tell her, okay? I mean, she won’t care if it’s like a famous person who made a mess. Dad? You can get up now. The other actors left. It’s just the crazy lady and me. Dad? Hey, Dad.”
South Street
Finlayson blinked in the sun. He would normally be asleep at close to ten in the morning, but old Mitford had told him to make the sacrifice. Whoever it was that wanted him was willing to pay, and as Finlayson needed to pay Mitford, he was keeping the appointment in both their interests.
Standing outside the Hippodrome, Finlayson realized he had never been inside it, or any other theater. But then, entertainment cost money and there wasn’t much of that in his line of work. He figured that any week he could keep his belly from talking and get drunk enough to stand his life, he was on velvet. Play-actors and Chautauqua speakers were for Rittenhouse Square ladies and fairy boys, anyway. Besides, he did his business at night when they did theirs, and his quarry wasn’t about to wait around while he sat through the last act of Alice Sit-by-the-Fire.
Until today, Finlayson’s routine had seldom varied: he woke at three in the afternoon, made up his pallet on the floor of Mitford’s stable, and ate a buttered roll purchased from Kelem’s delicatessen the night before. Then he grabbed his canvas duck bag and headed for the Franklin Refinery docks. This was, in his opinion, the place to find the city’s best rats, fed on the sugar that came in from Cuba until their small eyes fairly crusted over.
Last night had been good. His traps contained four large brown captives, all alive and fit to kill. The average Norway weighed about a pound, but you could always count on a Franklin rat to go four to eight ounces more than that. They were lively fellows too: full of sugar for energy and fresh vegetables for strength and stamina. He always said that a Franklin rat was the king of the Delaware, able to jump right from the river to a ship’s deck or swim across to Camden using only its tail as an engine. Putting one end of each trap into the bag, he tripped a spring to open its gate and dumped the screaming occupants inside. The sack vibrating like a saloon on election night, he walked down Delaware Avenue to Pemberton Street and turned left into Pier 34. Once inside, he made his way to the office of Jimmy O’Mara.
Jimmy ran what was probably the last rat-baiting operation in Pennsylvania, maybe the last in America. On Wednesday nights, he would welcome between fifty and sixty diehards to his pit in an unused storeroom. The first hour was devoted to beer and whiskey, so by the time the trainers arrived, they were greeted with whistles and applause. As the men cursed and cheered, each trainer would place his dog on a cargo scale to be weighed. Jimmy would then step to the edge of the pit and deposit a corresponding number of rats onto its dirt floor. If the dog weighed fifteen pounds, he would fight fifteen rats; twenty pounds, twenty rats, and so on. Based on each dog’s reputation and breeding, the spectators would place bets on the amount of time it would take for the dog to kill all the rats. The man who came closest won.
Finlayson’s rats were highly prized for their size and ferocity and Jimmy could always count on them to go down fighting, lunging at an eye or tearing at an ear.
Ordinarily there was not a word exchanged between O’Mara and Finlayson. The ratcatcher unloaded his prisoners into a large barrel and Jimmy counted them. He paid twentyfive cents for each one, thirty-five if a rat was particularly large and aggressive.
His earnings in his pocket, Finlayson nodded and left. He crossed Delaware Avenue and walked up Kenilworth Street to Front, arriving at the Schooner Tavern just as Henry Kulky was opening up. He sat down at the bar, downed two double whiskeys and a beer, and ate whatever sandwich Kulky felt like making. He paid, walked up Bainbridge to 3rd, and returned to the stable. Mitford usually just grunted at him and collected the twenty cents that was his night’s rent. But today, the old man actually spoke to him.
“You know where the Hippodrome the-a-ter is?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Don’t crack wise with me, Fin,” Mitford said. “I’ll shovel you out of here with the rest of the horseshit.”
“Yeah, I know where it is,” Finlayson said, “up 6th and South.”
“Well, that bum Bobby Monoldo was in here last night. I figured he was gonna try and put the bite on me so I was ready to chuck him into the street, but he said he had some info for you. That you was to show up at the Hippodrome ’round ten in the a.m. and that if you did, a guy there would make it worth your while.”
“He say who this guy was?”
“Didn’t I just get finished tellin’ ya what he tol’ me? That’s what he said. No names, no numbers, no angels singing alleluia. And if that’s not enough, mebbe you should hire a secretary.”
“Okay,” Fin said. “I guess I ain’t got time to clean up.”
Mitford laughed. “Ten o’clock’s in ten minutes. Cleaning you up would take until St. Patty’s. No, I’d say you ain’t got time to get dainty. I’d say you should get the fuck out of here.”
Now, Finlayson looked up at the huge marquee. It was the kind that had giant letters bolted to a framework attached to the building’s archway. He figured that the letters spelled out Hippodrome, but the only word he could read was printed boldly on all of the exterior posters: RATS.
He walked up to a tired-looking woman sitting inside the box office. She was reading a copy of Aunt Sally’s Policy Player’s Dream Book.
“My name’s Finlayson,” he said. “Somebody here wants to see me.”
The woman glanced up from the book and immediately remembered the days when someone like this would never have been allowed near the Hippodrome, not even to haul away the garbage. Her mouth turned down in disgust at the torn coat and blackened shirt collar, the matted red hair and filthy hands. She could smell him through the glass of the booth.
“Yeah,” she said. “You’s expected. Go t’ru the lobby and where it says Lounge, head downstairs. Make a right and you’ll see another sign says, Artistes. Walk t’ru that and it’s the first door. Don’t talk to none of the patrons.”
Fin did as instructed. He walked quickly past the few customers milling about, waiting for the eleven o’clock matinee. When he got to the bottom of the steps he spotted the sign and opened the heavy iron door.
The first thing he saw in the corridor was a rat. It was dressed in what looked like red and gold silk. Almost by instinct, Finlayson jumped toward it. In the old days before he could afford traps, he caught hundreds of rats with his bare hands. Terrified, the rodent scurried through the first door on the left. Fin followed it into what appeared to be a dingy dressing room, just in time to watch it vault into the lap of a man sitting in an old caned chair.
Had he been standing, the guy probably would have measured only five-three or -four, but he had the confident air of a man twice his size. He wore a splendid suit of brown gabardine intersected with thick chalk stripes. His pale blue waistcoat was of silk floral brocade and his dark blue necktie was stuck with a good-sized sapphire. Black patent leather shoes peeked out from gray buttoned spats and his left hand rested on a silver-headed cane. Sitting on his shoulder, his arm, both his thighs, and the crown of his cream-colored Stetson were rats; each one attired similarly to the first, in shining silks of multiple colors. On closer inspection Finlayson noticed that every tiny outfit bore a number on its back.
“Ah, thank you for coming. I see you’ve already met Commodore Dutch. My name is Professor Alois Swain. If you are indeed Mr. Finlayson, then I am the one who sent for you.”
Commodore Dutch peeked out from beneath Swain’s jacket and then turned and ducked inside.
“You, sir, come highly recommended,” Swain continued. “I have been told in every saloon along this fine thoroughfare that you are Philadelphia’s finest rat man.”
“Thanks, mister, ” Finlayson said, “but it looks like you’re doing pretty well along that line.”
Swain frowned. “As of now, yes. But these few little fellows may not always be sufficient for the daily practice of my art.”
“Art? What, do you draw them or something?”
Swain laughed. “No, Mr. Finlayson, I am not that kind of artist. But even though I do not sculpt or paint, the adage remains true-one picture is worth a thousand words. So if you will be kind enough to accompany me onto the spacious stage of the Hippodrome, I will be only too happy to illustrate for you that which has made me and my little charges a household name amongst those who demand the unusual in their entertainment.”
Fin nodded and Swain rose from his chair. As he did, the gaily dressed rats scampered up his suit and onto his shoulders and arms. They clung with their claws to his back and one even dangled by its teeth from his tie. Finlayson could no longer see Commodore Dutch and guessed that he had taken refuge in one of the professor’s interior pockets.
Fin could hardly see through the gloom of the theater’s wing. He could hear grit crush beneath his boots as he followed Swain through a long black corridor. When they passed through an archway the professor flipped a large switch attached to a gun-metal box. The stage illuminated.
“Electricity,” the professor said. “The greatest boon to the performer since the theatrical brothel.”
Finlayson squinted at the sudden brightness and looked out at the many rows of worn seats. He was amazed at the sheer size of the auditorium and the grandeur of its pilasters and carvings. Women’s heads, men’s heads, and the heads of various animals were sprinkled across the two long balconies, and the stained carpet was in the pattern of a fleur-de-lis. In the far corner of the orchestra section a man was snoring in his seat. Fin recognized him as Stewie Barnes, the fry cook at Bolc’s Tavern. If he knew anything about Stewie, the guy had been here all night. Fin didn’t blame him for wanting to sleep in such a magnificent place.
Swain took Finlayson by the arm and led him to the center of the stage. There, beneath a huge canvas cover, sat an enormous object, flat on the sides and top. Swain grabbed the cover and with a single yank, pulled it to the floor.
As if on cue, the rats jumped from his arms and shoulders and on to what looked for all the world like a miniature version of a racetrack. It was oval, had a flocked “lawn” at its center, and was surrounded by tiny banners representing many nations. In the middle of the greenery and largest of all was an American flag, stiffened by glue into an eternal wave.
Swain reached beneath the track and began to remove a series of small wooden cages, six in all. From each, he produced a large cat. Like the rodents, they were bedecked in silks of varying color and number. On their backs were tiny leather replicas of English saddles. At the appearance of the cats, the rats each took up positions equidistant around the ring and stood on their hind legs.
One by one, Swain placed the cats in the center of the ring; then he snapped his fingers.
At the sound, each rat ran for the cat whose colors and number matched its own and leaped into the saddle. Swain snapped again and the cats began to race around the track in single file. After a few moments the professor clapped his hands and the cats turned toward the center of the ring. They zoomed past each other at top speed and then began running around the track again, now occupying each other’s positions. Swain clapped twice and the cats reared up. As they did, each rat leaned in toward the neck of its mount like a cowboy whooping it up on a western plain.
Swain struck the side of the track with his fist and the rats dismounted, returning to their original positions. The cats turned toward the little grass “lawn,” bunched together, and lay down, stock-still. The professor turned to his guest and grinned.
“It’s better with an orchestra.”
Finlayson stood quiet and amazed.
“I see you cannot speak,” Swain said. “Your reaction is a common one and typical of those who first experience our little exhibition. It has taken me many years to produce the zoological marvel you have just witnessed. As a result, we have topped the bill across this great land and in the capitals of Europe. I daresay that nowhere in the world is there an amusement remotely similar to Swain’s Rats and Cats.”
Fin tried to speak but his mouth was dry. Swain took a pitcher of water from a nearby stand and poured it into a thumb-marked glass. The ratcatcher took a long draught and wiped his mouth on his dirty sleeve.
“What’s this got to do with me?”
Swain’s brow knitted tightly. “Way back when, I had time to haunt the wharfs and alleys, seeking out the finest specimens. I found number six there, Romulus, in an infested theater in Brooklyn when he frightened Miss Fanny Brice into leaping on to the nearest chair.”
He reached beneath the platform again. From a large paper bag, he produced several handfuls of dried corn and sprinkled it on the floor. Immediately the rats leaped from the platform and began to gorge themselves. The cats remained in place.
“As an expert, you likely know that, even with the finest of care, the lifespan of Rattus norvegicus rarely exceeds four years, and I am far too occupied with travel and performance and training to seek out new members of my cast. Like the rest of my small charges, Romulus is aging, and in a year, perhaps two, certainly by 1915, he and his colleagues will enter our Lord’s own sewers. This, sir, as they say, is where you come in.”
“You want some rats?”
“Mr. Finlayson, I am asking far more than that. I am proposing that you become the official ratcatcher for Swain’s Rats and Cats. In this capacity, you will perform the duties such as have been your living, but that living shall be far more comfortable. I will pay you the sum of thirty dollars per capture, up to forty dollars for a swollen female of fine size. Once our business is established and mutual trust confirmed, I propose to rent a facility here in which you will breed new stars for me. New Romuluses! New Dutches! New Esmeraldas and Kittys and Whiskers!”
Fin eyed the little man suspiciously. “Thirty dollars for a rat?”
“Thirty dollars for the right rat, sir. He must be young and strong and of sufficient proportion to be seen from the rear of the mezzanine. He must be hale and smart and fecund, well able to reproduce himself ad infinitum in the cause of family diversion.”
Finlayson looked pained. “Do you want me to sign a paper? I can’t read or write.”
“No, no, my boy. All I want is for you catch me big, fat, healthy rats. Rats that will honor your skill as they delight and amaze theatergoers the world over.”
Swain whistled the first six notes of “Liebestraum” and the rats immediately stopped eating and took up their positions on the track. Then he reached into his watch pocket.
“Our first performance begins in five minutes. Here’s a ducket for the show. What you have seen is only a portion of what my little friends can do. I’m sure that once you’ve absorbed the complete performance, you’ll wish to be a part of their success. Afterward, we’ll repair to Wexler’s for the poison of your choice and a toast to your fortune and mine own.”
Jimmy O’Mara jammed his cigar in his mouth, puffing on it hard. Finlayson had only just come in from his nightly rounds and Jimmy was ready to pour some arsenic in his ear. His customers had begun to complain.
Only last night, Fatso Eagan, the owner of a particularly nasty fox terrier named Billy, had bitched him out royal over the declining quality of his bouts.
“May’s well pick posies as bring Billy here,” he said. “These rats what yous’ve been getting act like ladies at a icecream social. It’s six weeks in a row Billy’s kilt ’em all in under one-thirty. Nobody’s layin’ down shit for wagers and I’m losin’ money. Now I know they didn’t close down the refinery. Where’d all them nice, big sugar rats go, Baltimore?”
“Mebbe they croaked a’ the diabetes,” Jimmy said.
Fatso’s eyes narrowed beneath his huge brows. He shifted the chew in his cheeks from left to right and hocked. The spittoon rang like a new telephone.
“G’head and laugh,” Fatso said, “but I can count. Last week they was twenty guys in here. Week before was thirty, week before that, near fifty. You’re shrinkin’ like balls in a blizzard, palsy-walsy. And until you get some rats in here wanna kill my dog, guess I’ll hie me over the Camden side. I hear they got a pit there, one dog fights the other.”
Jimmy’s hollow cheeks lengthened in disgust. “Fuckin’ barbaric.”
Now he nearly bit through the cigar as Finlayson stood before him and emptied his sack into the pit. Twenty-odd rats spilled out and ran squealing for the ring’s edges. They were small and thin, cowards each not more than six months old. O’Mara surveyed them for a few seconds.
“Mice,” he said.
“I’m real sorry, Jimmy,” Fin said. “I don’t know if they’ve shut the sugar lockers tighter or they finally brought in their own catchers, but it’s like I’ve told ya-these past few months the pickins has been slim.”
“Mebbe,” Jimmy said, “or mebbe anymore, you’re not a proper ratcatcher.”
Finlayson’s face became a wound. “Whadaya mean, Jimmy? Ain’t I spent most my life bringin’ you the best?”
“Yesterday and a nickel rides the horse car, m’boy. Look at you. You used to be the pitcher of your occupation-dressed in rags with that stable’s manure attached. Same shirt and collar every day. Never could tell if it was gray from dye or dirt. And the stink! I could always tell you was comin’ before you ever hit the door. That popcorn smell of rats mixed with your own sweat and the blood from where you’d been bit. It did a man’s heart good to inhale that smell and know there was a true professional about the premises, a man you could trust. Now look at you.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“I was up Big Hearted John’s on Tuesday to buy a shirt and John tells me you been in. He says you bought that new coat and tie you’re wearin’ and what a bargain it was. Then I go to pay my bill at Mitford’s and the old man tells me you lit out and were holed up at the Caledonia Hotel. Now, the Cal’s a flea circus and them clothes are just what some guinea didn’t pick up after alteration. But for a ratcatcher, it’s like rentin’ out Vair-sye and wearin’ soup and fish. You ain’t dressin’ the part no more, bucko, nor actin’ it neither.”
Jimmy took the cigar from his mouth and crushed it on the floor. Then he turned to the poor excuse for vermin Fin had spent the night collecting.
“I can’t use these,” he said. “You can either drown ’em or I’ll set Blackie on ’em just for practice. Besides, it looks like the game’s dead. I’m sure as hell outta business.”
Finlayson made to say something but the words stuck sideways like fish bones. He certainly couldn’t tell O’Mara that twenty of the refinery’s finest specimens were presently in training to replace and enlarge Swain’s current troupe, or that thirty more were at this moment rutting in a series of breeding cages in the basement of Knox’s Triangle Saloon. In the preceding six months, Swain had paid him nearly one thousand dollars for his rats: more than he usually earned in five years. As for his clothing, it reflected his new station, as would the clothes of any man who’s come up in the world. Yes, he was still a ratcatcher, filthy and despised by the decent. But now, instead of being a supplier to a dying sport, he was a man of show business, a talent scout as it were, bringing new performers to a public blessed by a six-day work week and a hunger for amusement in the leisure time between factory and church. Finlayson took the canvas bag and turned toward the door. Jimmy O’Mara had already lit another cigar and turned to his ledgers.
Outside, autumn had come. The clouds gathering all night had broken into a gentle rain. Fin turned up his collar and crossed Delaware Avenue. He made a right onto Kenilworth and found the Schooner already open.
Without a word, Henry Kulky placed two shots on the bar and then pulled the tap for Fin’s Esslinger. Except for the two men, the bar was empty. It wouldn’t begin to fill until eleven when the dockworkers came off graveyard. As Fin downed the whiskeys he measured Henry’s silence. After all these years he knew his good quiet from his bad.
“Hey, Kulk. Wanna see something new?”
“I already seen your suit,” Kulky said.
“No, this ain’t the suit. This is something so new, nobody except me’s ever seen it. So when you see it, you’ll be the second.”
“Take much time? I’m busy.”
“A minute.”
“Cost me anything?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
Finlayson reached into his inside coat pocket. From it, he pulled a good-sized rat.
“Get that fuckin’ thing outta here!” Kulky snapped. “Ya want me to lose my license?”
“Just wait a second, Henry boy, please.”
Kulky reached beneath the bar for his bat but before he could grab it, Fin placed the rat on the worn wood and clapped his hands. The rat stood at attention like a rookie cop.
“Hut!”
With a squeak, the rat ran over his right hand, up his coat sleeve, across his shoulders, and down his left arm. Finlayson again shouted, “Hut,” and the rat stopped cold.
Kulky brought the bat from beneath the bar but didn’t raise it.
“Hut, hut!”
Fin held his arms a few inches above the bar and the rat jumped over them both and then returned, jumping to and fro until he whistled for it to stop. He took an old baseball from his pocket, placed it on the bar, and clapped again. The rat leaped onto the ball, rolling it across the bar like an elephant in the circus. He double-clapped and the rat turned, rotating the ball back toward him. Finlayson opened his coat and whistled once more. With a powerful spring, the rat leaped from the bar and back into the pocket, where it disappeared.
“Hey,” Kulky said, “that’s pretty good.”
“It’ll be better,” Finlayson said, “with an orchestra.”
Chestnut Hill
September 1899
In a basement in a stone house in Chestnut Hill, Frances Watkins, aged seventeen, and her mother are treated to a tour of an unusual collection: a group of preserved bodies owned by Vaughan Beverly, who is the widowed Mrs. Watkins’s fiancé.
Vaughan gestures to a glass-topped casket and says, “This woman turned to soap.”
Frances feels sick. The dinner at the restaurant where Vaughan took them was rich and heavy, and she drank too much champagne. She wishes her mother had never met Vaughan Beverly on his mysterious trips to Baltimore, where Frances and her mother resided. Tomorrow, her mother will marry Vaughan Beverly, and this is the house where they will live together. I won’t stay here, Frances vows. Not with dead people in the basement. She and her mother have known about them: Vaughan boasted of them at the party where Frances and her mother first met him, at the home of wealthy relatives. Vaughan is a man of science, everyone says.
Her mother acts as if it’s a grand joke, these bodies. Maybe after the wedding, her mother will come to her senses and have them taken away. Surely it is wrong to have them here, as if they are of no more consequence than Vaughan’s display cases of butterflies and beetles, with their carefully printed labels. Vaughan collects many things-guns, knives, and trophies of exotic animals. Last night, Frances stayed up late in his extraordinary library, reading about birds.
The basement is furnished as beautifully as the rest of the house, with electric lights, upholstered couches, and paintings on the walls. Frances can’t help but be intrigued. “She turned to soap?” she asks, peering through the glass. The cadaver is naked except for strips of cloth over its breasts and loins, and it appears whitish-gray.
“Tell us about her, Vaughan,” says Mrs. Watkins gleefully. She sips from a glass of wine and places a hand confidingly on her fiancé’s arm.
Vaughan pats her hand and says, “She died of yellow fever, probably in the epidemic of 1792, and was buried near the river. Some of those old cemeteries filled up with water. This woman, being rather rotund, well, her fat combined with chemicals in the wet earth. The substance is called adipocere. It’s much like lye soap.”
Frances’s mother repeats, “Adipocere. What a lovely word. It sounds French. Like an exclamation, au contraire. Adipo-cere!” she says in mock dismay, waving her hand.
To look at a dead body is shocking, Frances thinks. To look at a person dead more than a hundred years is astonishing. She asks Vaughan, “How do you know she’s soap?” She imagines Vaughan in a bathtub, humming and lathering. She heard him humming last night, while she searched for towels in a cupboard in the hallway outside his lavatory. Strange that in a house so ornate and well-appointed, there are no servants.
“I have washed with her,” says Vaughan. He laughs, and Frances’s mother joins in. Vaughan adds, “If you mix a bit of this body with some crushed lavender, it’s the finest soap you’ll ever have. I can open the case, Frances, and you can pinch off a piece.”
“Oh, no, that’s all right,” Frances says.
Frances feels light-headed, and she assumes it’s from the company of the dead. Vaughan’s collection includes a mummified woman and baby, a pickled horror of indeterminate gender floating in formaldehyde, and a remarkably fresh-looking boy about Frances’s age.
Vaughan thumps the glass cover of the casket holding the boy. “Meet the Young Master,” he says. “He was almost certainly a soldier. He turned up near the site of the Mower Hospital, a Civil War hospital in this neighborhood which was torn down after the war.”
“Turned up?” asks Frances, determined to challenge him. “Did you dig for him?”
“He was brought to me,” says Vaughan, “and I have given him a home. He was already embalmed. Someone did a first-rate job. All I had to do was clean him up and put clothes on him. He was naked. I found this uniform in the attic, and it fits as if made for him.”
Frances dares to ask, “Does the constable know these people are here?”
Frances’s mother frowns at her.
“The authorities have enjoyed this same tour,” says Vaughan. He points to a table pushed into a corner. “We’ve played poker here, with the soap lady and the Young Master looking on.”
Frances feels Vaughan’s fingers on her back, just the lightest pressure. She has felt the fingertips before, and has assumed the touch was an accident. Does her mother see? No, her mother is absorbed by the Young Master. Vaughan takes the empty wine glass from her mother’s hand and slips an arm about her shoulders.
He says, “He’s one of those people who just don’t rot.”
“Who brought him to you?” Frances asks.
“An old fellow who used to be a guard at the hospital. I’ll introduce you to him, if you like. He has wonderful stories. The hospital was the best in the nation. If you got shot or got sick, it was where you hoped to go. We’ll stroll over to the grounds some time.”
Frances returns to the soap woman and gazes at the mute face, its closed, webbed-looking eyes, the dark pit of the slightly open lips. The glass is cloudy over the mouth, as if the soap woman breathes now and again. Frances feels she’s in the presence of a marvel. To think that this woman lived and spoke and ate, perhaps loved a man and bore children, then fell ill and suffered and died. And her body, without her soul in it, went on to have a separate life of its own, somehow being brought to this mansion in the northwestern part of the City of Brotherly Love.
For the past three days, Vaughan has entertained them. They rode in his carriage through the leafy avenues of Chestnut Hill, with Vaughan calling out in a clarion voice: “Shawnee Street! Mermaid Lane!” They explored the cool splendor of Fairmount Park. Vaughan’s horses pulled to the edge of a ravine, and Frances held her breath as she looked down into Wissahickon Gorge.
It is the end of summer, the last year of the century. Frances felt a keen nostalgia as she breathed in the unfamiliar scent of the northern forest. Today, they took the trolley down Germantown Avenue, fast, faster than Frances ever moved before, flying over the Belgian-block cobblestones of the swerving street, while pedestrians ran pell-mell out of the way. Down and down the trolley plunged, with the passengers holding their hats during the steep careening slide, as if from the top of the world. Vaughan pointed out great houses that belong to friends of his, mansions where they will dine and dance, where Frances will meet young people “who will be congenial,” he promised. Frances couldn’t help but thrill to the thought, even though she knows she must run away from Vaughan’s house, away from these bodies that Vaughan waited until tonight to show them, as a pièce de résistance.
She and her mother are being saved by Vaughan, and all three of them know it, saved from a wretched district of Baltimore where laundry flaps on lines and streets smell of garbage. Frances’s mother has never allowed Vaughan to visit them there; in the three months they have known him, he has courted her mother in the homes of the prosperous Watkins relations who have kindly pretended that Frances and her mother are closer kin than is the case. Frances can’t remember her father, who died when she was young. She feels like an old woman, as if she and her mother have switched places in a fairy tale. It should be Frances marrying a prince, not her mother marrying strange, compelling Vaughan Beverly.
Yes, Frances is in love with him, she admits to herself as she regards the soap woman’s ravaged face. Frances keeps a tiny photograph of Vaughan in a locket around her neck, and when she is alone, she examines it, admiring his dark golden eyes, his Roman nose and high cheekbones, the slight puffiness of his lips. In Frances’s fantasies, something happens to her mother-oh, not anything bad, but something clean and painless that simply takes her mother away-and then it’s Frances whom Vaughan falls in love with, and they marry and live happily in this cavernous house on West Evergreen Avenue, and when she steps into this basement as Mrs. Vaughan Beverly, it’s like any other basement, holding only damp bricks and piles of ashes. She would make him wait until they were actually married-unlike her mother, who has occupied his bedroom these past three nights. It was not only Vaughan humming in the lavatory last night, it was her mother too: Frances heard them both. In the mornings, there have been plates piled high with eggs that Vaughan scrambles in his enormous kitchen in a great iron skillet, and the three of them in dressing gowns have eaten the eggs with butter and thick slices of toast that Vaughan pulls from his blazing oven. Maybe there are servants after all, because Frances never sees a dirty dish from one morning to the next.
Frances consults the soap woman silently about her dream: Can it be? Will I be with him? The glass of the casket fogs a little, as if the soap woman has answered. No, it’s just her own breath, condensing there. She takes out her handkerchief and rubs at the spot. How can she long to stay with him, yet know that she must run away? Where will she go? Back to Baltimore? No. She’s in a new place now. In Chestnut Hill. The very name rings in her mind like a bell. When I was seventeen, I came to Chestnut Hill, she imagines telling the soap woman. Then the story in her head stops, because she can’t imagine what might be next. Probably nothing will ever happen to her, and she will always be her same plump self, with freckles.
When she looks up again, her mother and Vaughan are kissing.
“But the question is why?” Frances demands. “Why would someone bring you a dead body? Why would you take it, and keep it? And why do you have so many?”
“Francie,” her mother scolds, from within the circle of her fiancé’s arms. “Vaughan’s a man of science. You know that.”
Science seems to represent all that Frances will never understand. She bursts into tears.
“Would it make you happy, Frances,” Vaughan asks, “if I buried them? There’s a cemetery at Gravers Lane and Bowery, the Old Free Burying Ground. I’ve spent enough time there to learn names on tombstones: Frederick Detwiler, Alexander Parks, Catharine Antieg.”
Frances stares at him. Will it be this easy? To object, to cry, and thus to get her way?
“There’s no need, Vaughan,” her mother says, but he lifts a hand to silence her.
“Yes,” Frances declares. “They ought to be buried.”
Vaughan looks from Frances to her mother. “Then they shall be,” he says.
Frances feels her tears dry on her cheeks. Her face was wreathed in smiles-she read that line somewhere, and it comes back to her as she beams at Vaughan.
“Any objection to the dead butterflies, Frances?” her mother asks sarcastically.
“No,” Frances says. What has come over her mother? This woman in the lacy white dress-Thank heavens for this dress, her mother confided during the courtship. One nice dress and my good complexion. Is this the same woman who struggled to keep their house clean, who sewed clothing for the rich relatives, who made Frances say her prayers every night?
“They can go to a museum, Vaughan,” her mother says. “Aren’t they valuable examples for science?”
“Yes, and I’ll miss them.” Vaughan strolls over to the soap woman to stand beside Frances. “This one, of course, we could just use her up,” he says and laughs.
“Keep her, at least,” Frances’s mother urges him.
Vaughan says, “No, I’ve had their acquaintance long enough. I’ll see that each one is decently interred.”
“Thank you,” Frances says. Generosity has always embarrassed her. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go to bed.”
“Of course,” replies her mother coldly, and Vaughan nods.
Then Frances realizes something else that is amiss, aside from a basement full of bodies. With a wedding tomorrow, shouldn’t there be neighbors and friends calling to wish them well? She and her mother don’t know anyone here, but Vaughan has lived in Philadelphia all his life. Where is his own family? He is not old; he is possibly younger than her mother. Is he alone in the world? She is overcome by the sudden conviction that the wedding will not take place, that this is all some ruse.
“Goodnight,” she says and turns. She hurries up the stairs, to the first floor. She flings open the door that connects the basement with the rest of the house, runs across the deep carpet of the central hallway, and dashes up another staircase and another, to reach the guest room with the high feather bed and the cheval mirror.
There she opens the mullioned windows and breathes in the fresh air that smells of pine and spruce. The window overlooks a dark terraced garden. She hears little peepers that must be tree frogs, insects buzzing, and some low, croaking call from an animal or a bird of prey. Their songs and cries are old familiar ones of summer ending, of autumn beginning. The nighttime emits a glow, as if starlight is catching on blades of grass.
She is alone, like the soap woman. She has no friend to tell her fears to, no one to write a letter to. Since leaving school two years ago, she has kept close company only with her mother, assisting with the sewing, anticipating and dreading the invitations from relatives, when she and her mother would go forth bravely, in hopes that someone like Vaughan would rescue them. Her mother, donning the lace dress, once asked in anguish, How many times must we do this?
“And here I am,” says a voice behind her, and Frances whirls from the window.
There stands Vaughan. In the light of the wall sconce, he looks taller than ever, his face ruddy, hair golden, brow smooth. He asks, “May I sit down?”
She nods, and he takes a seat on a slipper chair. She remains standing, awkwardly. She wonders whose room this was, who chose the rose-colored damask for the chair, whose face has been reflected in the mirror.
Vaughan says, “You’re scared, Frances. How can I set your mind at ease?”
“Do you love my mother?” she asks.
“I love you,” he says. “You knew tonight. Didn’t you?”
She has longed to hear these words, yet now she feels only alarm. He rises from the chair and reaches for her hand. His fingers are warm and strong.
“It’s not too late,” he says. “You and I can be married.”
“What of Mother? Would she live here, with us?” Frances’s head spins. She can’t believe she’s saying these things.
Vaughan says, “I’ve been trying to figure it out. Things have moved rather fast. And just now, I’m sorry to say…” His voice trails off.
“What happened?” Frances asks. She pulls her hand out of his grasp. “Where’s Mother?”
He looks at her with an expression of great gravity. After a pause, he speaks softly and urgently about her mother, saying she felt ill, then began clutching at her heart, then collapsed. “She seemed to recover a little, and staggered. She got as far as the Young Master, and then she, well, died. She’s dead.”
Terror ripples along Frances’s spine. She tries to scream, but only a sigh comes out. Vaughan pulls her to him and settles onto the slipper chair with Frances on his lap. He says, “A young woman and her mother travel north. The mother is to marry a scientist. On the eve of her wedding, she suddenly dies. The man marries the lovely, innocent daughter instead. It was just as well, since he’d begun to find the mother tiresome, with a ghoulish streak.”
“She was angry with me,” Frances murmurs, stunned. “This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t made her mad.”
“You wanted to do the decent thing,” he says. “Bury those bodies. A man wants a woman who’ll make him do the proper thing.”
“Is this a horrible joke?” Frances asks.
“This house knows no jokes,” says Vaughan.
She leaps from his lap and runs for the door. He says, “Think it over, Frances.”
She hurtles down the stairs, into the basement, and spies the still form of her mother.
“Mother,” she cries, and touches her mother’s cheek, which is already cool. She pulls at her shoulders, but the body sags in her arms.
She takes the steps again, two at a time. If she can reach the door, she can get outside, to some safe place. She can almost feel the dew on the grass, the distance she’ll have to cover.
“So that concludes the Ghost Walk,” Annie says, as her tour group applauds. “The Beverly mansion used to be right here. It was torn down a long time ago, but that’s a true story.” She adds the capper: “And Frances was my great-great-grandmother.”
The group gasps, and Annie savors the effect of her tale. Where the Beverly mansion used to stand, there’s only a depression in the ground. Across the street, there’s a massive Victorian-style apartment house, where Annie herself lives, with towering sycamores out front. Annie has heard the tree frogs, just like she said. Besides, this is the perfect place to wind up the Ghost Walk, because the Irish-themed bar where Annie works is a five-minute walk away. She went on too long about Frances and Vaughan, though. She doesn’t have time to return her oil lantern to the Chestnut Hill Welcome Center.
“I think he murdered Frances’s mother. He was a serial killer,” a woman in a trench coat says. “Is that what we’re supposed to believe?”
Annie’s legs hurt. It was a mistake to wear platform sandals to traipse around these sidewalks in the dark. She says, “Frances died before I was born, but the story was handed down. She did escape, and she married somebody else.”
“Did she tell the police?” asks the trench-coated woman. “If she didn’t, then she let him get away with killing her own mother.”
Annie feels her authority fading. It would be so much better if the house were still here. “I don’t know all the details. The Beverly mansion stood empty for years, and people claimed to hear screams coming from the basement.”
“It’s a legend,” a bearded man tells the woman. “Ghost stories are supposed to leave you hanging. They’re not about closure.”
“Well, I’m disappointed,” the trench coat says flatly. “If it’s true, she ought to know the rest of it.”
Annie is chilled to hear herself spoken of in third person. And she wants to say, It’s not just a legend.
A child pipes up: “I saw leeches at the other place.”
The child’s mother, a young woman in a pink tracksuit, says, “We went to the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion. He’s talked about leeches all day.”
“Have you ever eaten eyeballs?” the child asks Annie.
“No,” Annie says. “How do they taste?”
The mother says hastily, “They were gumdrops, with M &Ms stuck in.”
“And there was brains!” the child gloats. “All red and squishy.”
“Cold spaghetti,” the mother explains. “They turned off the lights and let the kids stick their hands in it.”
“Well, I want a latte,” the woman in the trench coat says. “Join me, anyone?” and she looks pointedly at the bearded man, who edges away.
Annie says, “You can get apple cider and cookies at the Welcome Center. It’s free.”
She feels a tug of regret as her little group disperses, heading for cars or hiking north to Germantown Avenue. She forgot to ask their names. What’s the matter with her? She was with them for an hour, ever since they gathered at the side entrance of the Chestnut Hill Library and paid five dollars each to benefit a youth group. She volunteers because she loves to tell the stories of these old streets, the old churches, and especially the tale of Frances and Vaughan. She grew up with it; her mother remembered seeing the Beverly mansion as a child. The story makes Annie proud. It’s her heritage.
It’s practically all she has, she admits to herself. She grew up in the neighborhood, on Highland Avenue, went to college in Altoona for two years, came back, and allowed the job at the bar to become her career.
For one spooky, lively evening every October, she’s a star.
She hurries toward Germantown Avenue, wondering if anyone ever guesses that pieces of her own life, not only her great-great-grandmother’s, are embedded in the story. An old boyfriend had seen a soap woman at a museum. Captivated, Annie worked her into the spiel. She has no idea what Vaughan Beverly looked like, so she made up a description. Her own widowed mother can be maddening and oblivious, like Frances’s mother. Yet Annie feels she has not found the right ending. It’s not enough, somehow, that Frances gets away.
Annie and her mother used to entertain each other by embellishing the few known facts. Then her mother left Chestnut Hill for a retirement home in Jenkintown. The last time Annie brought up the Frances story, her mother gave a sheepish smile and said, “It’s bunk, for all I know. I’ve forgotten what’s true and what isn’t.” Annie went cold, for if the story is bunk, then her whole life feels like a lie.
When Annie reaches the corner, one platform sandal twists loose. She trips, falls, and skins her knee. The lantern flies out of her grip and smashes on the sidewalk. Its light sputters out, and she smells the spilled kerosene.
“Are you all right?” someone asks.
She looks up. A streetlight illuminates the bearded man from her tour.
“Here,” he says, taking her hand and helping her to her feet.
“Thanks,” she says, feeling shaky. “These stupid shoes.”
How quickly he vanishes. Her knee stings, and there was that brief panic of losing her balance. She gathers the shards of the lantern and tosses them in a trash can. Another Ghost Walk group passes by. Annie doesn’t recognize the guide, a woman with a booming voice and silver eye shadow. This group looks jollier than Annie’s was.
The bearded man is gone, but Annie’s hand still tingles from his touch.
She has given the Ghost Walk for ten years, and she suddenly feels too old, at thirty-nine, to speak in the exaggerated cadences she uses for drama, and to wear navy-blue nail polish and a tight black dress: her witch outfit. Did the man even recognize her? She hurries along, her ankle aching. Trees and restaurants along the avenue twinkle with strands of tiny white lights. Every store, every bank, has a glowing jack-o’-lantern out front, or cornstalks and baskets of gourds. She smells the raw squash of pumpkins and the potpourri of candles. Fake cobwebs drape the doorway of the Irish bar. She lifts them up and ducks inside.
It’s a busy night, but Dale, the manager, seeks her out to talk.
“It’s like this,” Dale says. “Everywhere we go, people give my wife pigs. Knickknacks and stuff. Always pigs. She don’t even like them. She don’t know how it all got started.”
Dale never talks to her, not like this. Annie can’t get rid of him, because he’s her boss, so she has to listen and keep busy, cleaning the bar, wiping it down with a towel until it shines.
Dale says, “It started when she was little. She had a birthday party, and all the kids brought toy pigs. My wife thought her mother told them to, but her ma said no, she didn’t. So my wife grows up and meets me, and we get engaged, and her friends give her a shower.”
A customer signals for another beer, and Annie gets it.
Dale goes on: “And at the shower, everything’s pigs. Salt and pepper shakers. Pig bookends. A clock that’s a pig’s face, and a curly tail going tick-tock underneath. She busted out crying, and they said, What’sa matter? Don’t you collect ’em? That was in Pittsburgh. So we move to Philadelphia, and we don’t tell a soul about the pigs. And then yesterday was her birthday, and the people she works with, they give her a party. And guess what.”
Dale slaps his hand on the bar and Annie jumps.
“How far do we have to go?” Dale asks. His mouth opens, but it’s not a laugh, it’s a soundless, slack droop.
Suddenly, Annie is frightened. This is her life. She lives alone; there’s a screamer in the neighborhood-somebody who shrieks in the night for no apparent reason, as if there really is a captive in a basement, as if Frances never got out. A screamer, the police say when she calls to report it. She has sat up clutching the covers, heart pounding, fingers slippery on the phone. There have been burglaries in adjacent apartments; she has smelled cigarette smoke and heard gravel crunch in the alley behind her bedroom window, as if some intruder is staking her out. Robbery she can deal with, but please God, keep rape and murder away.
“You look scared, Annie. What’s the matter?” Dale asks.
She shakes her head.
“Come outside,” he says.
She follows him out the back door, into the humid evening.
There, they are surrounded by sounds of invisible revelers. Laughter, chatter, ring tones. She hears with keen uncanny clarity: dogs’ nails scraping the sidewalk, a sneeze from the direction of the old water tower. Yet she and Dale are alone. A weathered fence separates the backyard of the bar from the parking lot of the farmers’ market.
Inhaling, Dale says, “Tell me what you smell.”
Annie breathes in and out. “Garlic, shrimp, wine, leather, perfume.”
“It’s the smell of happiness,” Dale says. “People who live here, they go out to eat every night, buy stuff in all these stores. Me, I came up the hard way. Still coming up.” He shrugs. “But tell me what’s wrong.”
They might be in a movie, Annie thinks. A harsh bulb over the bar’s rear door backlights Dale’s head. They’re a man and a woman having the first real conversation they have ever had.
“I’m scared of getting old,” she says, “and there’ve been break-ins close by. Nothing feels safe anymore. I don’t feel safe.”
“What if I gave you this bar?” Dale says. “What would you do?”
She pauses, considering. “I’d take the Irish stew off the menu. It sucks.”
“Okay,” he says. “What else?”
“Keep the windows open during the day. Air it out.”
“How would you manage the rowdies?” he asks.
“Same as I do now. Cut ’em off.”
“What do you do when you’re not working here?”
“I just gave a Ghost Walk,” Annie says. “Have you ever gone on that?”
“No,” he replies, moving closer.
“You’re not going to give me this bar,” she says, meaning: What would your wife say?
Then he kisses her, planting his lips on hers slowly, so that she has time to think the word lingering, and all she has to do is stand there and feel how much taller he is, how big, and how she must feel like an escape to him. If this were a movie, she’d lay her head on his shoulder, curl into the embrace. But she can taste Dale’s worries on his lips, the dry breath of another’s fear. She steps away.
“Do you give good ghost?” he asks.
“It’s funny,” she says, “the way people want to be scared. The Ghost Walk, horror movies. Why? When there’s so much real stuff to be afraid of?”
Something like anger flickers in his eyes. He says, “That pig stuff. That’s what’s scary. My wife’s going out of her freakin’ mind.”
“Get her to collect something completely different,” Annie suggests, “to throw people off the scent.”
“You think we didn’t try that already?” Dale snaps.
He jerks open the door and goes inside, and Annie follows.
Costumed celebrants stream into the bar for food and drink: devil, clown, cowboy, pirate. Annie takes their orders. The pirate grins when she hands him a plate of fried mozzarella, and hope shoots through her. His teeth and his earring catch the light. She imagines lying in bed with him, telling him about the woman who turned into soap.
Her twisted ankle throbs, and she kicks off her shoes. The floor of the bar feels ice cold, and every passing car on the cobblestones outside sends a tremor beneath her feet.