chapter 6
1932–45
Rhubarb Vannucci and Sean Power set up a pigeon coop on the roof of Vannucci’s Lower East Side tenement building, a wooden coop with two sliding doors and a chicken-wire roof. There have been some recent robberies, so Vannucci has dipped his pigeons in vats of bright dye bought from a clothing factory. He soaks every part of the pigeons except their heads. Even the underside of the wings sucks up the dye. The birds flap, rudely orange, through the sky. Anyone in the neighborhood can instantly point out a Vannucci pigeon. They look like winging orange peels breaking the skies of Manhattan.
Sean Power decides to paint his birds bright blue. The shed feathers make a fabulous collage on the rooftop.
On a July morning the two men challenge each other to a pigeon race. They make a bet of a dollar each.
Nathan Walker and Eleanor O’Leary have agreed to carry the pigeons over the Brooklyn Bridge and release them on the far side of the river. They weave along on bicycles. Eleanor’s hair flows in a stream behind her. Walker balances the pigeon cases on his bicycle basket. They move in strange tandem; there is a quality of waltz to the journey. Whenever she can, Eleanor directs her bicycle along a length of shadow, keeping the tires within its width. Walker plays the game of avoiding the same shadows. He watches as she takes both hands off the bars and stretches her arms wide, tottering slightly but still keeping her bicycle true to the long lines of dark.
When they reach the far side of the bridge, Eleanor leans her bike against Walker’s. They spread a blanket on the concrete to share a picnic before they release the birds: a bottle of Coca-Cola, a bar of chocolate, some bread with cheddar cheese.
Eleanor touches Walker’s wrist, points at the pigeons in the cages—one orange and one blue—and they both laugh.
Halfway through the picnic, a passing pedestrian spits in Walker’s face and shouts at Eleanor, “Nigger lover!”
She thumbs her nose at the pedestrian and Walker wipes the spit away with a handkerchief. He drops the handkerchief off the bridge toward the water. They watch it spiral away. He says nothing, but they pack the last of the picnic back into the basket, take out two jars of paint, and later they release the pigeons into the air.
The couple pedal furiously back across the bridge, watching the pigeons vying for the lead.
Walker is way out in front, the empty cages still balanced on the front of the bike. “Wait for me!” shouts Eleanor. The pigeons disappear in the sky.
When the two cyclists arrive back at Vannucci’s home, both of the gambling men are furious. In their hands each holds a pigeon that has been newly painted, half orange, half blue.
They are fighting over which one belongs to whom and who is the rightful owner of the two dollars. Walker and Eleanor stand on the tenement rooftop, doubled over with laughter.
The two men give the couple strange glances, then tuck the multicolored pigeons back into the coop.
“Frig me,” says Power.
“What is frig?” asks Vannucci.
“A frig is…”
And then Power, too, starts to chuckle.
“A frig,” he says, winking at Walker, “a frig is somewheres ya keep things cool.”
* * *
Eleanor places a picture of her mother and father on her bedside table. It was taken at a summer carnival in Brooklyn in the early years of the century, a Ferris wheel in the background static against the sky like a cheap bracelet. Con O’Leary has the beginnings of a mustache smudged above his lip. Maura’s dress is buttoned high at her neck, but the third and fourth buttons have popped open, unnoticed, revealing cleavage. They are standing by the strong-arm machine. The bell on the machine is at the very top—where it says STRONGMAN EXTRAORDINARY!—and Eleanor is sure that her father is the one who has just slammed down the hammer. He is smiling, his belly is full and proud, and his cheeks are puffed out. Eleanor likes to think of him in that same position when she takes the subway out on weekday mornings to the Brooklyn Heights haberdashery where she works. She salutes her father’s sleeping form as she travels back and forth underneath the river. She doesn’t think of him as agonized or frozen in a strange ascension—rather, he is upright, proud, standing by some muck-bed strong-arm machine, held in tableau, grinning.
* * *
Familiar and trembling, they meet in darkness. One evening on a park bench she asks Walker to comb her hair. He steps behind the bench. Her hair is heavy, pendant. When he is finished, she turns and kneels on the wooden slats and leans toward him. In his hands he can still feel the weight of her hair. She says his name out loud: Nathan. He looks at her, and it seems to him that her voice bends back the nearby grasses.
* * *
Eighteen years after the blowout, Nathan Walker emerges from a railway freight tunnel on the West Side of Manhattan.
Quick clouds cast shadows, and the streets are thatched with ribbons of sunlight. There is a spring in his step, although he has been digging all day. Working the railway tunnel is easier than working underwater, although just as dangerous, men dying when boxes of dynamite explode in their fingers, their bodies ripped apart and their thumbs blown so high they could be hitching a lift to heaven. At the age of thirty-seven Walker’s body has changed a little, just a slight slide out at the waist and a new scar above his left eye from a Great Depression riot when a policemen mashed a billy club into his head. He’d emerged from a diner one night into a dark sea of faces. The protesters carried placards. They were shouting about job losses and low wages. Walker had gone alongside the protesters silently and stoically. His wages had been cut too—the tunnels were full of desperate men ready to work, and he kept his job only because Sean Power was head of the union. He had moved with the flow of eyes. Screaming was heard further down the street, and then the billy club came from behind. It landed first in the soft part of his skull and then whipped around to his forehead, smashing against his eye. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the cop before he went down, and then there were horse hooves all around him. A hoof landed on his groin. Pain shot through him. Winded, Walker crawled across the street and lay under the awning of a cigar shop, feeling the blood run past his lips. At the hospital he had to wait five hours for the stitches—the doctor pried open the scab with brusque fingers—and the suture was done drunkenly, leaving a wormlike wiggle through Walker’s eyebrow.
He strolls way uptown, along the landfill by Riverside Drive, past the shanties, then east toward a shop full of tuxedos.
A bell sounds at the shop door and a small black man with granite-colored hair comes from behind a curtain, a pencil at his ear. He looks down at the mud on Walker’s boots, gives a derisory eye-flick at his filthy overalls and the red hat strung under his chin, and goes immediately to a row of cheap rentals, but Walker directs the clerk to the expensive rack. Under a faint yellow light he tries on a large black jacket with a shiny velvet collar. It is so long unused there is a mothball in the pocket, but it’s the only one left in his size, since there’s a dance in Harlem that night and a skein of men has been in and out of the shop all day. Walker counts out money for the suit rental and a new shirt.
At home he washes his body in the porcelain sink and tries on the frilly white shirt. The buttons seem tiny and foreign. Arthritis has already begun to nibble at his hands. Walker can predict a rainy day by the pain in his fingertips. He doesn’t button the neck of his shirt but lets the bow tie cover the gap.
He can’t help chuckling at the way the shirt frills rumple at his chin, at how exceedingly white the cloth is. “You are so goddamn handsome, Nathan Walker!” he says to the dusty mirror, and then he leaps across the room in delight and nervousness, swinging around a broken stovepipe, his knees protesting at the sudden violence of dance, a silver cross bouncing at his neck.
The cross was bought for two dollars from a woman downstairs, a fortune-teller who always wears a long red dress and two feathers in her hair. She tells the future by the pattern of spit that tobacco makes in a spittoon. Men, and wo
men too, lean across the metal cup and spit into it, the men in big gobs, the women in shy dribbles. She stares down into the tobacco grains and prescribes remedies for future despair. Everybody is due despair in their lives, she says, and therefore everybody needs a remedy—it’s a fact of life and it only costs two dollars to cure, a guaranteed bargain.
The cross, she has told Walker, will keep his heart from ferrying its way into his mouth when he is nervous. He must wear it against his skin all day long, no matter what.
Walker stands by the piano that has been given to him as a gift. A white ribbon has been tied around the instrument, so he doesn’t open the lid. He touches the smooth ribbon, and then he rubs his fingers along the piano lid, drags a stool across, and sits—in underpants and white shirt and silver cross—pretending to play, running his fingers through the air, inventing ragtime, until he gets so sweaty he takes off the shirt. He rubs his lips together for a tune and his music grows louder and louder until he hears a foot stomping on the ceiling above him and a roar: “Shut up already, down there!”
The following day he and Eleanor are turned away from four restaurants and refused admittance to a cinema despite their clothes. On the streets people mutter about them. Cars slow down and taunts are hurled. At home, in the apartment on 131st Street, Walker must bend his body to duck under the doorframe. Eleanor puts her hand in his jacket pocket as he carries her over the threshold.
Her waist is wren-thin and adolescent, and he whispers that he could carry ten of her and she says, “Don’t you even think about it, I’m the only one of me you’re ever going to get.”
She takes the mothball from his pocket and shakes her head in amusement, thumping him playfully on the chest. The long white taffeta of her wedding dress swishes as she walks down the corridor to the common bathroom. She flushes the mothball down the toilet.
“Get ready for me,” she shouts along the corridor over the gurgle of water.
“I’m ready, hon.”
Back in the room, she latches the door. She has translated her face by removing her makeup. Just seventeen, she looks even younger. Walker is out of the jacket and standing by the piano, motioning for her to play. She shakes her head, no, and drags him away from it, onto the single bed, where they fall in a rehearsal of many nights of dreams.
“Ready my foot,” she says, and her hands disappear inside his shirt, around to his back, and she pulls him very close.
They move like two chiaroscurists above the covers, black and white, white and black, then sleep under foreheads wet with sweat. They lie on their sides, arms around each other, one hip a hill of bony pink, the other muscular brown. Eleanor wakes and kisses the scar above Nathan’s eye. The clock on the wall cuckoos for eight o’clock in the evening. Desire lies on her tongue like morning breath, and she wakes him with a playful jab to the stomach.
“I love you.”
“I love you too,” he grunts.
“Don’t fall back asleep.”
He opens his eyes. “Did y’all ever see a crane dance?”
“No.”
“One foot first, then the other.”
“Show me.”
“Sandhill cranes,” he says. “Like this. I saw them all the time in Georgia.”
She laughs as he rises from the bed and dances on the mattress.
Later, there is a loud knock at the door. Walker, in his underpants, ritually bends his head at the doorframe. He scratches his belly as his eyes adjust.
Vannucci, Power, and the fortune-teller stand, grinning, with four bottles of champagne in their hands. The fortune-teller breezes in, clicking across the floor in gold lamé heels, her butterfly sleeves hanging down. Power limps after her, his teeth already pulling at the champagne cork.
Vannucci’s balding head peeps around the open frame, then backs away, embarrassed.
But the fortune-teller sits on the bed beside Eleanor and pulls back the covers to reveal the girl’s white toes. Eleanor flushes and draws her foot back. The fortune-teller chuckles and grabs again.
Walker, leaning against the piano, struggles his way into a pair of trousers, one foot in the air, while Power tries to push him over and spray champagne down his underwear.
Only Vannucci waits outside the door until the couple is fully dressed, and then the party begins, the handle on the Victrola wound up ferociously by the red-faced Italian. He stands above the machine as the needle travels over the grooves. It gives out solitary, beautiful notes. He smiles at the rhythm, clicks his fingers, drains a glass. Power puts an empty bottle to his lips and imitates a trumpet with it. The fortune-teller lifts her dress way up high to reveal two very red garters and seamed stockings. She scissor-kicks toward the ceiling, singing with the music, the songs slowly dropping down from her throat toward her hips, where they swivel.
“You’re a classy dame,” says Power.
“Thank you, sugar. You been at the laudanum, then?”
“Why’s that?”
“Either that or you’re drunk.”
“No I ain’t.”
“Then why ain’t you dancin’?”
“You just said the word.”
“He’s drunk as a stewbum!”
“No I ain’t!”
A hush descends when Maura O’Leary appears at the door. Still in mourning black, hair in a bun, lace at her neck, she says she hasn’t come to stay. She sighs and looks around the room, sees the piano in the corner topped with bottles and a lit cigar propped over the edge, smoke curling up from it.
“Well, well, well,” she says.
“Ma’am?”
“No more ma’am. No need to call me ma’am.”
“Yessum,” says Walker.
“Maura is easiest. Call me Maura.”
“Yessum. Yes.”
She sighs. “I never thought I’d see a day like this, never thought I’d see anything like it.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m not saying it’s the best thing.”
From the far side of the room Sean Power belches and says, “Nothing wrong with it.”
“I didn’t ask you,” says Maura.
“And ya didn’t not ask me, neither.”
“I mean,” she says, “in some places it’s not legal.”
“Not New York,” says Power.
Maura touches the lace at her neck, fingers it for a long time. “In some places you go to jail. In some places they’ll kill you.”
“Illegal don’t mean it’s not right.”
“Well, that’s true,” says Maura.
“So we agree?” says Power.
“Perhaps we’ll agree to disagree.”
“I knew we’d agree on something,” mutters Power.
“Shut up, Sean!” says Walker. “Let the lady say what she has to say.”
A silence permeates the room. Power slugs at the bottle of champagne and passes it to Vannucci, who doesn’t drink. The fortune-teller goes to the window, looks out.
“We love each other, Mom,” says Eleanor eventually.
“It’s not always enough.”
“It’s enough for us.”
“You’re young.”
“Walker here ain’t exactly sprung chicken!” says Power.
Looking around again, Maura says, “And I don’t know how Con would feel about this either, but I guess I’ll just have to wait for heaven and see then. I’m not so sure he’d be happy. I’m not so sure I’m happy. I’m not so sure anybody’s happy.”
“I’m happy!” shouts Power.
Walker darts a look at his friend, then shifts his stance. “We ain’t out to make you unhappy, ma’am.”
“You gotta remember,” she says, “it’ll be hard times for you even when it’s good times.”
“We know that. Thank you, ma’am. Maura.”
“Well. I said what I wanted.”
“Thank you.”
“Now I’d like a little drink, please.”
“Forgetting my manners,” says Walker.
Maura wet
s her lips at the edge of a glass of champagne. “Good luck to you both, I suppose.” Putting down the glass, she turns to leave, but at the door she hangs her head and says, “Maybe you’ll be good together. Maybe you’ll be okay.”
“You think she means it?” asks Walker, when the door is closed.
“Of course she does,” says Eleanor. “She gave us the piano, didn’t she?”
“She’s a fine woman. The finest of fine women.”
“All right, then,” says Power, swinging his cane. “Let’s dance!”
“You the dancingest cripple I ever seen!” says the fortuneteller, moving away from the window, swirling her hips.
“You bet ya.”
And then Power roars, “Let the jelly hit the fan, boys!”
The group raises a toast to long life and happiness, and, to the beat of Sean Power’s imaginary trumpet, the newly married couple flaps a crazy dance, all arms and legs, on top of the piano late into the night. Walker winks at Eleanor as he stands on one foot and stretches out his arms.
* * *
A series of bricks greet them through the bedroom window, leaving shards of glass on the floor and a hole in the frame until they simply just tape up a sheet of plastic to slap in the wind. One of the bricks is wrapped in a note that reads NO PENGUINS ALLOWED. Another says SILKS OUT. Another says, simply, NO.