Exile on Bridge Street (29 page)

Though Dinny waves it off, “We don' need their help.”

But we do. We really do, as there are more and more stories of babies and the aged becoming sick, even dying from maladies related to the freezing temperatures.

As has become our only way of hearing the words of our enemies, it is to the newspapers that we turn.

“This long and apparent deadly winter, as it's termed, is proving to be an effective mechanism in reducing the surplus of workers who've grown slothful and inefficient,” Wolcott says in one editorial. “This overgrowth of inefficiency causes the working man to grow weary of his employer, whereas he once was happy to have his job. With so much time on his hands, the working man takes to his saloon and drinks himself useless. A curse for disobedience and fecklessness, I'd say with this deadly winter, at least, less time is spent in the gin mills, more on their work.”

CHAPTER 25

Gale Day and the Grippe

S
PRING
–F
ALL
, 1918

T
HE
WORST
OF
IT
IS
YET
to come, but some good news still makes it through all the bad.

“Bill Lovett's dead, I heared,” Paddy Keenan whispers one afternoon.

“Really?” I say.

“That's what they're sayin'. Uniformed man entered the Lovett home yesterday with a letter, hat in hand.”

“Are you sure he's dead?”

But within a few hours Richie Lonergan and Abe Harms are upstairs with Dinny, then come down with Vincent Maher, grab Dago Tom, shoulder through the saloon, and leave together, all four.

“Where are they going?” I ask.

Beat McGarry watches them move across the front window south on Bridge Street. “Prove themselves again. Their loyalty.”

A few days later Richie and Abe are in the City Workhouse, charged in the death of some Italian, but from Beat I hear that the dead man is an enemy of Yale and the Stabiles down at the Adonis Social Club. Of course Dead Reilly appears on their behalf and soon they are let out. Free to work with The White Hand again.

Out the front window I see Mrs. McGowan and her three daughters on the windy sidewalk. The four of them fighting against the cold and shivering, but still standing as if waiting.

I open the door, “Hello, Mrs. McGowan, how are you?”

“I apologize son, I truly do . . .” her teeth chattering.

“Don't apologize, Mrs. McGowan. How are the little ones and your son's widow?

“She's fine,” she waves her hand. “I mean they're fine, the lot of 'em. T'ank ye so much fer arskin'.”

“What can we do for you, Mrs. McGowan?”

“Eh . . .” Mrs. McGowan turns. “Emma, do ye remember the man William here?”

“I do, Ma.”

“Good then,” Mrs. McGowan says, a bit rattled. “Eh . . . we've a problem with our room. It's been cold for so long, and without any coal, there's not been a moment's warmth. First a window broke, but we covered it in cardboard, so that's fine but . . . eh . . . then part of the ceiling fell in and there's an awful draft. We're on the third floor, so . . .”

“Why not ask the landlord to fix it?”

“Well there's the problem in it,” she says, now a bit perturbed. “The man says we made the damages and we need to pay to have them fixed, so he says. But we've been werkin' and savin' every dime up at the Clock Tower where Dinny got us those jobbers an' . . .”

“So he won't do normal maintenance? What's his name?”

“Oh, I never see the landlord, only his agents. But I think the man's name is Vandeleurs.”

“Of course it is.”

“Eh?”

“Let me talk to Dinny about it and we'll see what can be done.”

“I don't think there's any way of getting in touch with the man . . .”

“Dinny will do anything in his power for you, Mrs. McGowan, you know that.”

“I do,” she says solemnly, as if renewing the vow that had married her to the ways that had both pulled her family out of homelessness and taken her only son. And I look at her. And though I hadn't realized it fully yet, I begin to see her as what my mother could be. Married to our violent ways, a woman without a say in it. Wed to that which could take my mother's son too: myself. Standing out on the sidewalk I watch Mrs. McGowan, sad and slumped and showing her age. And even as she is only in her forties, it seems she's much older. Worn and tired, just as I'm sure my own mother is.

“Let me talk to him and I'll come and see you about it,” I say.

As they are walking up Bridge Street I see Emma smile as she whispers to her older sister, then sneak a look back at me. A tight and cold wind washes across the woman and girls and in unison their long dresses extend and flay to one side like ship sails as they hold their hats with one hand while their Hanan boots are revealed below. I turn to the side and dig my hands in my pockets against the wind's assault, but at that moment I am full of myself and run back up to them on the sidewalk in front of the Pfeiffer Color Works factory. “Mrs. McGowan?”

“Yes, William?” she shuffles to a stop and slowly turns her stiff neck toward me, a rhythmic hand-hammer pounding on hot steel every few seconds within the Plymouth Street foundry across the cobbles.

“I was wondering if you would allow me to see your daughter sometime,” looking through the wind to her and stumbling with my words. “I know that I made a mistake in not speaking to you or her for so long and I, uh . . . I'm sorry. . . . But if you would allow that to me, I would be very grateful. I mean, I'll still talk to Dinny . . . I . . . uh . . . I didn't mean like I'd talk to Dinny only if you allow me to see Emma . . .”

“No, no, I understand,” Mrs. McGowan says. “I think it's a wonderful idea. You may see the girl, yes.”

Emma looks at me with her mouth half-open, then looks away. Almost angrily.

“I'm sorry, Emma, I was wrong.”

“It's all right,” she says, embarrassed, but her older sisters look at her happily.

And I am proud to humble myself to her because she is a good person. She deserves people to humble themselves to her because she has humbled herself in this life too. Going to school during the day, babysitting her nieces at night, working at the Clock Tower building on the weekends—this is all she ever does. Even if she doesn't like me, I don't care because she is the type of person I would always be proud to be with, for not only does she have the humility that I appreciate, but she is more beautiful every time I see her. And when I do see her, I study her thin waist and bust. Her slender neckline and full lower lip and hazel eyes and the natural curl to her chestnut hair and her overall shape so I remember what she looks like since we spend so much time apart.

When I tell Dinny about the cold McGowan home, the window, and the ceiling, he quickly dispatches Harry to fill the holes. I offer to help, and when Harry says it may not be needed, I offer to run for the new piece of glass and the materials needed for the ceiling.

“Well that'd be helpful,” he says.

“Good then, I'll go now.”

“You don't have the measurements.”

“Oh yeah, all right, let's go get the measurements then.”

Harry glances at me sideways, but there is nothing in the world that I want more than to see Emma McGowan again, and to be around her generally.

* * *

“H
ELLO
, E
MMA
,
HOW
ARE
YOU
?” I say as Harry and I walk in their room.

“I'm fine,” she says with a half-smile, though I notice that her nose is red and her eyes are a little heavy looking. She holds a handkerchief over her face and turns away, sneezing.

“I haven't been inside here for like three years,” I say looking around, then up to the fallen ceiling. “We're going to fix this place up a bit.”

She smiles awkwardly, “It's been so cold in here.”

“Please, don't hesitate if there's anything you need. Harry and Dinny and I are happy to help. There's no reason for any of you to suffer when we can easily take care of these things.”

“That's true,” Harry says in the background.

Getting to work, Harry and I begin taking the rubbish from the ceiling that had fallen to the floor and carrying it downstairs in armloads. Emma brings us tea and within moments there is soot and dust in mine. I drink it anyhow as Emma retires to the kitchen where Mrs. McGowan and the sisters stay, whispering. One of the older sisters seems to take interest in Harry, though he doesn't notice. He just keeps working.

“Isn't she beautiful,” I whisper to Harry.

He hears me but doesn't answer.

“Do you think she likes me?” I ask him.

He continues working until a few moments later when he turns to me and whispers in my ear, “You need to tell her how you feel. She doesn't know how you feel about her. She wants you to be honest and forthright. Do it.”

I look at him with my mouth open, “I will.”

Just as I resolve to speak with her, a runner from 25 Bridge Street appears and Dinny sends me to do another job elsewhere, unwittingly taking me away from her.

As I am leaving, she clasps her hands in her lap as she stands in her doorway upstairs. Smiling at each other as we had the first time we spoke in this same doorway when I gave her flowers some two years earlier, I try to speak, but nothing comes out.

There are a thousand things I want to say to her right now, though I can't organize anything in my mind well enough to articulate my feelings for her. I am overcome with nerves and on the verge of bursting, yet all I do is smile at her. I wish to kiss her on the cheek, or at least shake her hand, but we do not touch at all. I simply nod my head and smile again before walking down the stairwell. Sensing my excitement for her, she smiles back and slowly closes the door.

“Idiot,” I say to myself and vow that next time I see her I will tell her just how I feel about her, as Harry advised. That I don't want anyone else in my life but Emma McGowan, and maybe one day when we are older we can be married and move away from the city to start a family together. Her and I. But all of this is childish dreaming, I know, but I do dream it as I walk down the stairwell alone in the dark toward the gray sunlight streaming out of the tenement windows below. I do dream, like all of us in our day. For the summer of life when need and necessity is not our only calling. Striving for the gentlelife that keeps us waking early in the morn, fighting through today's gravelly, arduous existence for a better life. I do dream like all Americans, and I'm ready to work hard for it, and to share it with my family. And hopefully, with Emma McGowan, too.

What Dinny wants me to do is find out what I can of the Vandeleurs man, which I do. He tells me to follow the two agents that travel to fourteen buildings in Brooklyn. They are large men and they don't look very kind either. After going to my building last on Eighth Avenue in Prospect Park, they take the trolley back to the Bridge District and over the Manhattan Bridge they go and into a clubhouse a few blocks south of Cooper Square.

“Did they see you following them?” Dinny asks.

“I don't think so, but,” I say raising a finger, “they told the Burkes that they'll need to pay ten dollars more next month.”

Dinny nods, but I continue, “Listen Dinny, while researching this landlord Vandeleurs in the city directory and the newspapers, I found out that he is a member of the Waterfront Assembly. Vandeleurs is a small-time player in it. He's not a major landowner but he's involved.”

Dinny looks at me from his desk with a look on his face. I recognize that look from the look he had when Anna and the Lonergan crew kicked us out of Tiny Thomas's wake. The same look on his face when he didn't speak to anybody for four months.

Dinny looks at me again. “Good work. Real good, but let's go after this Vandeleurs guy.”

“Oh there's no finding that fellow in Brooklyn,” I say. “He is well protected, Vandeleurs is.”

“Well,” Dinny says. “We'll talk to his guys then, about this raisin' the rent.”

The conversation ends there, but it makes me think. About Wolcott, the WASPs that keep banging the drum about a prohibition on alcohol, the Waterfront Assembly taking control and turning our territory into their property, Italians wanting to act like businessmen instead of the thugs they truly are. And it's not until that moment that I recognize how true The Swede's words really were just before shooting himself. They truly are closing in on us.

A month later, though, ten of us are waiting a few houses down from my Eighth Avenue building.

“Ya gonna live around here, William?” Dago Tom says to me.

“I am.”

“So many trees,” Mickey Kane says with Richie and Abe behind him. “And the park's just a block away, looky that.”

“There were a lot more trees before this long winter came about. Firewood, you know?”

We are leaning against automobiles that we don't own and drays too, but nobody says anything to us. Up and down the streets are long sidewalks and stoops that protrude from buildings. Of course, it's cold. Again with the cold weather and again shivering outside. It never seems to end, regardless of it being day or night. Cold. Always cold and windy.

Dinny and I are among them, but when we see the two agents enter my building, he and I duck out of sight, as we don't want to be identified by them. Each of our men have weapons in his belt or coat, and as Dinny and I turn the corner, we watch the eight of them enter the building to confront the agents.

An hour after, Dinny and I walk upstairs at the Dock Loaders' Club, we hear the banging of boots on the stairwell and the carrying on of Vincent Maher and the rest of the boys. They walk in the door and drop three huge wads of money wrapped in rubber bands.

“Wow,” I say.

“No shots right?” Dinny asks them.

“Nah,” Vincent says. “We just gave 'em a little show so as they don' forget never to raise the rent no more, right? They was real professionals, though—got work ID cards an' all. Look.”

“Joseph Roston, 22 Baxter Street,” Dinny says aloud, picks up the second one. “Michael Benner, 43 Mott Street.”

“That neighborhood?” Vincent says. “They prolly work for Vaccarelli.”

“Eddie?” Dinny says. “Take out twenty percent of this and split it between the all of us. William, you start backtracking and hand the money back to all the tenants these two guys stole this money from. Tell 'em that it's for repairs and whatnot. Don't tell 'em anythin' else.”

“Got it.” I take the wads from Lumpy and start running down the stairs. I can't wait to get to the McGowan home and give back the family their month's rent. Or at least the majority of it. Emma will really be proud of me then and I can have that talk with her.