“Columbia Street. The Court House is up a block, the Kenmore’s down a block, and I live there, right up that stoop.”
“God bless you. Columbia Street is a wonderful street. I was born on this street.”
“Say good night to Vivian, Pop,” Quinn said.
“Good night, Vivian.”
“Good night, George. I had a lovely time.”
“That’s wonderful.”
Quinn got out of the car and opened Vivian’s door and took her hand. He walked behind her up the stairs. She found her keys.
“He was on his way to Beauman’s dance hall when I met him near the Court House,” she said. “Beauman’s closed years ago. We both went there when we were young and dancing our way toward romance, maybe even marriage. I could see George was young again and a bit of the sheik, like the old days. But he had that cracked memory. Then at the Kenmore he was hit on the head by flying glass and you should’ve heard him talk.”
“I’ve been hearing him all night,” Quinn said. “It’s a miracle. He resurrected memories that were gone forever, that he had no license to bring back. He got lost on State Street and was navigating among strangers, and then he bumped into you. Whatever you did, Vivian, it thrilled him. He doesn’t know my name or his mother’s name—‘I’d have to go to the book for that’s how he gets around it. But his mind cleared and there he was, walking the streets with a lovely woman, which indeed you are, Vivian, and he was again the old George Quinn out on the town.”
“That’s so nice, Daniel, but it wasn’t me who did it.”
“You had a great deal to do with it.”
“He seems to be losing it again.”
“He’s had quite a bit to drink and that may be it. Or not. But what happened was spectacular—that singing and dancing George of yesterday was back, a resurrection, and nobody can tell me that it didn’t nourish his soul, whether he remembers it or not. You can’t write him off. If he can sing he’s still up to snuff someplace in that threadbare brain of his. He’ll have a new angle of vision on life tomorrow, whether he knows it or not, thanks to what he went through with you today.”
“Oh, I hope so,” Vivian said. “He was so alive. We were both very happy.”
“We’ll get you together again, Vivian, but however much he learned today, he might not know you next time.”
“I’ll make him remember,” Vivian said.
“I’m sure he looks forward to that, even though he doesn’t know what he’s looking forward to.”
George opened the car door and stepped onto Vivian’s sidewalk. Renata opened her door. “Do you want something, George?”
“Look at that,” he said, and he pointed at the Court House and traced a line across the night sky full of stars.
“What, George? The street? The sky? What?”
“What,” George said, “what.” He looked at Quinn and Vivian on the stoop, and he sang:“What’s that, who am I? Don’tcha know that I’m the guy,
I’m the guy that put the foam on lager beer.”
He poked himself in the chest with his thumb:“I’m the guy that put the salt in the ocean,
I’m the guy that put the leaves on trees.
What’s that, who am I, don’tcha know that I’m the guy,
I’m the guy that bites the holes in Switzer cheese.
I’m the guy who put the hole in the donut,
I’m the guy who put the bones in fish.
What’s that, who am I? Don’tcha know that I’m the guy,
In the wishbone I’m the guy who put the wish.”
“Good night, Georgie, dear,” Vivian said.
“Good night, young lady. The breath of me heart to you.”
“Oh, my,” Vivian said. “Oh, my.”
Quinn pulled the car into the garage and opened the side door to the house with his key and let George and Renata enter, up the stairs to the kitchen. He locked the door after them and padlocked the garage. He went to the front door to check the mailbox, tucked the letters between the pages of a magazine, picked up the Knickerbocker News inside the vestibule door, and opened the inner door with his key. George was standing in the living room with his hat on.
“Home the same day,” George said.
“Actually it’s the next day,” Quinn said. “It’s after one o’clock—already tomorrow. Take off your hat and stay awhile.”
George took off his hat and set it atop the bridge lamp. Quinn lit the lamp and took the hat off it. He put the mail on the coffee table and hung his coat and George’s hat on the coatrack in the dining room. He saw George’s bandage and asked, “Does your head hurt?”
“Not at all. Should it?”
“Not if you don’t think so. How are you feeling, are you ready for bed?”
George nodded. “Early to bed, early to rise, your girl goes out with two other guys.”
“Wisdom on the hoof.”
Renata came from the kitchen. “You want anything?” she asked.
“I’ll have a nightcap, rum on the rocks with a splash,” Quinn said. “Have one yourself.”
“Did you enjoy your day on the town?” she asked George.
“There was a facsimile about it that was very comfortable.”
“I’m glad you liked it. It was nice having Vivian as part of it.”
“Vivian.”
“You remember Vivian?”
“I’d have to go to the book.”
“She was your dancing partner tonight.”
“That was Paggy. Pog.”
“You’re thinking of Peg,” Quinn said.
“Peg.”
“Peg Phelan. Margaret. You married her. Your wife, Peg.”
“Peg was a wonderful girl. She danced every dance. She was strong but not tough.”
“What does that mean—not tough?”
“Good and honest. She wouldn’t let anybody cut in.”
“Do you remember how you asked her to marry you?”
“Why do you ask such a question?”
“I never heard you talk about marrying her. I always wondered how it happened.”
“Don’t you love your girl, for chrissake?”
“I do.”
“I let her down, but she still comes around to love what’s left of me. I have no room in my heart for the blues.”
“That’s a fine attitude. Do you remember that Peg was my mother?”
“Was she? God bless you.” He stared at Quinn, a long silence.
“Do you remember?”
He nodded. He looked at Renata and back to Quinn. “You were the one and only one that come to us. You were my doll.”
“I’m glad I got here.”
George looked around the room. “You can’t beat this hotel. Everything here is very katish.”
“We do our best. We’re pleased you’re staying here. I think it’s bedtime.”
“Bedtime,” George said. “There’s always room for one more.” He found his hat and went up the stairs. Renata went to the kitchen.
Quinn turned on the television and found a Bobby Kennedy retrospective, but no new news about his condition on any station. He went back to the retrospective—Bobby having his clothes ripped off like a rock star in the campaign for president. The crowd loved every inch of him. “We want Kennedy,” they screamed. Quinn turned off the volume and let the images continue.
He sat on the sofa and looked at the mail: a letter from his publisher suggesting a schedule for publicizing his novel, signings at two local bookstores, a radio interview in New York, three local radio interviews, all of which add up to no push, no weight. So the book will develop momentum by itself, or it won’t. Also, a letter from the Albany County Sheriff to George Quinn, dated yesterday. In terse sentences the sheriff notified George that as of May 15, 1968, he had been taken off the payroll and his service in the Sheriff’s Office and the courts was terminated. George had not gone to work since his two cataract operations three months ago. He’d been in his slow fade for some months, who can count,
but Quinn blamed the general anaesthesia the doctor gave him for its acceleration. The operation had begun with a milder sedative but it didn’t sedate, and George kicked a nurse when someone touched his eye. The operations were a success but the patient went senile.
His weekly paycheck had arrived punctually until two weeks ago, a harbinger, and not really unreasonable after three months; but this belated letter had an edge to it: after the ejection of Martin Daugherty from the Ann Lee Home we have the ejection of George Quinn, both coinciding with the decision by the Democratic politicians to punish Matt and Quinn, a pair of pains in the ass, by punishing their fathers. The district attorney had smiled at Quinn yesterday in a corridor at the Court House and said cryptically but jovially, “You forgot your father.” Quinn the reporter should have considered the fallout before publishing all that slum blather against the Mayor and the Party.
Renata came into the parlor bearing solace, two rums on the rocks, extra ice, and the bottle of Bacardi dark from Puerto Rico, where the distillery had relocated after Fidel won the war. Quinn watched her move and saw in her all the elements he had always loved; also saw another creature with no resemblance to the original: a chameleon, duplicitous, schizoid. But you bought into it, Quinn. Yes, but how could I have understood such shape-shifting when I was under the influence of the simple declarative sentence? The simple declarative sentence is an illusion.
“Did I put too much water?”
“Not at all,” said Quinn, tasting.
“What’s the mail?”
“I have a useless book tour ahead of me, and George has been fired.”
“Why?”
“Why is the book tour useless or why George?”
“George.”
“He’s overdue at the office and he can’t think or function or even find the Court House without a guide. It was inevitable. They’ve been kind to George even though they think they’re punishing me by firing him. We lose his $34.50. How can we possibly live without it?”
“They did the same thing to Matt’s father.”
“You are perspicacious. We hurt them, they hurt us. I decided to write a novel about it.”
“About George being fired?”
“About him, Matt and Martin, Tremont, Roy, Zuki, you, me, the Mayor, Gloria and Max, and on it goes. No end to the cast of characters.”
“Do you want a refill?”
“The last time I refused a drink. Did you hear Martin and Pop talking about World War One tonight?”
“Bits.”
“Pop always told World War stories, also his father’s stories—from the Civil War, and riding with the ragtag Fenians, and with those ex-slaves fighting Spaniards in Cuba. But he was only eight when his father died, and he never sorted out the specifics of any of those wars.”
“So your new novel is about George?”
“More about you than George.”
“I’m not worth a novel.”
“You’re worth two or three novels. I have to put Tremont in it too. He’s worth two or three novels. If I wrote your story would you be afraid of it?”
“You don’t know my story.”
“I know quite a lot.”
“I’m not afraid of what you know.”
“You should be.”
“Your own imagination is all you know.”
“It is a novel, after all. I’d have to write about our reunion at the Fontainebleau, that lovely mobbed-up luxury.”
“That was Alfie. Max asked him about a hotel on the Beach and Alfie made a call to one of his friends.”
“I knew that. Alfie also set up your flight out of Havana—your cousin Holtz again to the rescue. But back then I knew nothing about what was going on.”
But when Quinn walked into the suite at the Fontainebleau, he knew everything. He called the front desk and asked for another suite; can’t have your honeymoon on somebody else’s hot mattress. Max had abdicated and Renata was now a bleached blonde (under that occasional blond wig), free of Batista and Robles, and reunited with this new arrival, the husband Quinn, but unable to hear anything he said. She stepped into her bridal lingerie, crotchless, and from the moment they touched in the new bed she delivered every element of passion in her repertoire, spoke to him in the language of love she had been learning since puberty, and convinced him that he was all there was in the world for her, that they’d be together forever, nothing could separate them, she would die before leaving him, and yes, he felt blessed in reclaiming her, possessing her in their new bed was a union beyond loving—it was consummation.
And, yes, they would continue forever, beginning here and into a second day, sixteen hours of love and food and sleep and rum and more love. He would repeat in memory every phone call to airlines, police, hospitals, friends, the investigation that failed. But Max hadn’t failed. He’d found her through a Brazilian diplomat and launched the rescue without calling Quinn or Renata’s family (who knew where she was and told no one—out of fear for her). Quinn had actually called the Brazilian embassy and two dozen others: My wife is lost, are you giving her asylum? No, señor, call the police. Max sent her an exit package: foofy blond wig, white dress, white heels, white sunglasses (did Max know how partial the adepts of Santeria were to white clothing?) and told her to wear them tomorrow. He arrived at the embassy with Alfie’s friend Inez, who was wearing the same wig, white dress, heels, and shades, and ten minutes later Max left the embassy with Renata, the white simulacrum, while Inez changed into black for her departure.
“It may be I’ve been seducing Max since I met him, my dress too low with that young cleavage. I can’t blame him for coming at me if I did that, but I don’t love him, I repeat, I do not love Max. He’s gone to Cuba forever and we have his money and I don’t want his love. I’m sorry it wasn’t you who rescued me from villains, Daniel. I’m sorry.”
Quinn mixed a second nightcap for himself and Renata. She exuded calm, poise, a notable achievement in restoration after the Albany Garage, where they had gone at each other in a bout of brief, savage, self-vindicating sex and ended breathless, sweating, and temporarily purged.
“When did you first think about leaving me?”
“I got bored, Daniel.”
“I asked you when not why.”
“You were bored too. El ladrón juzga por su condición. Takes one to know one. We had never talked about ending it.”
“Easy. You pack your lingerie and go. I keep the house, you take the nine hundred thousand.”
“But that was yesterday. Today we have a second chance.”
“What happened today?”
“I decided you were behaving like an Orisha.”
“Changó?”
“Something like that. Subverting things. Throwing bombshells.”
“Who, me? I’m a reporter.”
“Matt said you were writing a bombshell tonight. And you wrote one about him yesterday.”
“I was doing a serious, far-out story on Tremont, but they wouldn’t print it.”
“That was the assassination plot, no? Matt told us.”
“The editors said they didn’t believe it, but really they were afraid of it.”
“Then that was a Changó story.”
“If so then Tremont was Changó. He was the one with the thunderbolts. I watched it happen and took some notes I can’t use. I’ll have to put them in the new novel.”
“Then it will be a Changó novel.”
Quinn saw new activity on the television screen and he turned up the volume. Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s press secretary, spoke into a microphone: “Senator Robert F. Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968. With Senator Kennedy at the time of his death were his wife, Ethel, his sisters Mrs. Stephen Smith and Mrs. Patricia Lawford, his brother-in-law Mr. Stephen Smith, and his sister-in-law Mrs. John F. Kennedy. He was forty-two years old.”
Mankiewicz stepped away from the microphone.
The phone rang. Quinn looked at Renata who did not move. He answered in the dining roo
m and Renata turned down the TV.
“Dan?”
“Doc.”
“Your niece Gloria’s in the burn unit at Albany Hospital, so is Roy Mason. Very bad fire.”
“Wait a minute, Doc.” Quinn gestured with the phone for Renata to listen. She stood beside him. “Go on, Doc. Gloria and Roy you were saying.”
“They were in Roy’s apartment on Van Woert Street. The whole house is gone. Man on the third floor died, firemen couldn’t get inside to save him. His room didn’t have any windows. Joe Crowley told me heavy flames were already going up the front and back stairs when they got there, and the Engine Two firehouse is only three and a half blocks away. Gloria and Roy went out a second-floor window with blankets, and the fall hurt them both. Dan?”
“I’m here.”
“They’re burned pretty good. Roy couldn’t talk. And they got some smoke.”
“Doc, the fire was set?”
“Too soon to say. And you know I can’t say that out loud.”
“But that’s what you think. You.”
“When you find fire in two separate places in one house . . .”
“Are you at the hospital?”
“I just got here.”
“Wait for me if you can. I’m out the door right now with Renata.”
“Listen, Dan, I saw them both. They’re hurt and they’re burned, but they’re not dead. I’m telling you what I saw.”
“Does Cody know about this?”
“No.”
“You got his number?”
“I’ll get somebody on it.”
“Things have changed, Doc.”
“Yes, they have. Look both ways at the crosswalk.”
George came down the stairs wearing his navy blue gabardine suit with a gray felt fedora, a solid gray tie, and his gray shoes with the black cap toe: the full dude.
“I heard the bell ring,” he said. “Are we ready?”
“That was a phone call, Pop. We’ve got to go out.”
“We’re going to the club?”
“Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. I have to go somewhere, but I can’t take you along.”
“I’ll stay with George,” Renata said. “We can’t leave him.”
“You’ve got to see Gloria.”