Queens Noir (17 page)

The phone in the kitchen rang. One of the Indians answered it. "007!" he said, and giggled. "Bond, James Bond!"
He was laughing so hard the other Indian had to take the
phone from him.

Above our heads hung photos of George's parents and
grandparents on the whitewashed terrace of a modest house
in Cyprus. The men were dressed as popes, the women in
black. They'd heard that the house had long since made way
for a pink Turkish villa. None of them had ever tried to go
back, even when it became possible.

"Eat."

George forced food on me like I remembered my mother doing before she vanished. He raised his glass and said, "Elefthe-
ria i thanatos."

I nodded, repeated the words, and drank deeply.

Freedom or death.

Me and George took a stroll in Astoria Park to walk off the
wine. We stopped to lean on the rail and look at the garbage
floating in the water below. I wanted to drop into the Noguchi
Garden Museum. I loved the smooth control and order of the
marble and granite pieces. It reassured me.

George refused. "The fuck? All that cold stone giva me
the creeps."

"Some Greek you are," I said.

"Malaka. Irish fucks only let gays and lesbians into their
parade this year, for the foist time! St. Pat's for all, my ass!"

"Greeks'd know all about gays."

"We're all getting old," said George.

We picked divine olives from tubs in about three emporia, then stopped off at Noureddine's for mint tea before the evening crowd arrived to smoke hookahs loaded up with honeydipped sheesha. I'd heard the Pole say Noureddine's place ran
women behind closed steel shutters in the afternoon. I supposed it was possible. I supposed she'd know.

Noureddine was talking about an old lady who'd been
robbed on her own stairs as she returned from the bank. The
robbers were said to be local.

"You don't do that on your own turf," Noureddine said.
He looked like he knew what he was talking about. Then he
told us about a younger brother he was educating, who'd managed to get a job teaching Spanish in Texas.

"Sounds like sand to the Arabs to me," I said.

"We're from northern Morocco," he explained. "Spanish
is like a mother tongue to us. We go where it pays."

We left Noureddine and headed off, George to Danny McGrory (my dad's name for Nana Mouskouri and now our code
name for George's wife, also known as La Callas or La Diva)
and me to the Swamp Rat, due back that evening.

"Bet you're sorry now you didn't finish your doctorate and
get a chair of philosophy," George said. "Never get off your ass
at all." His phony accent had disappeared. My problems were
affecting him even more than me.

"Hit me now with the child in me arms," I replied.

"Till the white rose blooms again," he said as we parted.

Back on 12th Street, I surveyed the signs of Old Jessica's
daily visit-more spray-on polish, more quick-fix polluting
solutions. Jessica was a failed Irish immigrant ten years older
than myself. She needed the money, I couldn't in all conscience fire her. The shine in the house was getting higher, but everything else was going downhill, except for the feng
shui compliance.

Old Jessica appeared from the kitchen quarters. "You'd
want to straighten up," she said. "Yer gettin' a dowager's
hump."

"Don't shit a man who's already down," said Sean, skipping down the stairs and out the front door before either of us
could react.

Jessica shook her head indulgently. "I'da made two pairs a
pants outta his one," she said.

We mounted the stairs to Dad's room, where Naima was
bedding him down for the evening. Mitch Miller was playing.

"I'm goin' plantin' spuds tomorrow, will ye help me?" Jessica asked Dad.

"I will," he said.

"Have ye the tools?"

"I have." He counted on his fingers: "I have two spades,
two graips, and a shovel."

"Right so," said Jessica. "Be ready at dawn."

I wasn't sure I liked this kind of fooling with a man's already fucked-up mind.

"Once a man, twice a boy," Jessica said as she went by
me.

"I want to be taken to the Astoria Sanatorium," Dad said
distinctly as soon as Jessica left.

Naima smiled down at him. "They gave it a new name
now. Mt. Sinai."

"You should never paint bricks," said Dad. "They do it all
the time here." Then: "The sanatorium must've laid an egg."
Then he spotted me. "Priest or minister? You're doing everything wrong today."

"What did I do now?"

"You sailed up the broad expanse of Killala Bay. Give me
me box."

This was a tin box containing mementos that he pored
over from time to time. He pulled a collection of objects out
of it and spread them over the bed: a silver dollar wrapped in
tissue paper, a Rockaway Playland token, postcards, beaded
Indian leather (Native American). He indicated the display
to me:

Eoin Roe O'Neill
Treads once more our land
The sword in his hand is of Spanish steel
But the hand is an Irish hand

"Wanna take a leak before I go?" Naima asked.

"You only want to see my dick, that's what you're after."

I told her to go ahead and lifted Dad back into bed. He
was light as a feather.

"Ain't you the big heavy lad," I said.

"What good is it to you when you're gone?"

We sat in silence. Then he said, without opening his eyes,
"When did Da die?" I never heard Dad use that word before,
and realized he thought he was talking to his brother Eddie.

"Long ago," I said.

"What'd ya kill her for?" he asked, opening his eyes, now
noticing me. "I think I'll go to bed now," he said, then seemed
to doze.

The Pole arrived, still threatening to quit. The weather had
already turned heavy.

"A storm is brassing," she said. Sometimes I wasn't sure
what language she was massacring.

Dad said, with his eyes closed, "You're a bitch and you
never were anything else."

After that, the house settled for a while. I tend to sit in
front of the TV when I want to think. People leave me alone.
I haven't read a book in years, once my favorite occupation.
My attention was drawn by an item on the World Cup about
to be played out in Germany. Several players from the winning
1974 German team were paraded out, one a smart older
business-exec version of his younger self with a name like
Baking Powder, which is what me and George had dubbed
him at the time. The other was a thicker-set man who left
football in 1974 and opened a newspaper kiosk. "I wasn't cut
out for all that," the man explained.

Perhaps this was what Dad should have done, long ago:
something simple, no overreaching. There were horses for
courses and that was all. It would have meant no Irish education for me and my sister, but what did that change? And
perhaps Mom would still be with its. I recalled vacations
from university when Mom seemed to be having an early
"change of life," as she called it to her friends (nurses with
real problems and families to deal with). She talked of going
into a convent, where she would have peace and quiet from
them all. By then, Dad had settled down to controlled drinking, a cup with milk and whiskey under the bar at all times.
As if trying to numb himself. At times I think she might be
with some Little Sisters, atoning in peace and quiet, not far
away. Unless she's dead. Who was the woman Uncle Eddie
killed? Was this a reference to the Civil War, or something
more recent?

At 9 p.m. the Swamp Rat was poured out of a cab, laughing. The Armenian gallery owner helped her out, laughing also, wearing a beige cashmere coat that was too warm for the
weather. Then he took himself off in the cab.

I lit the lights and poured its a drink. The storm was beginning to crackle outside. A door opened upstairs, releasing
a few bars of Al Martino, then closed again.

My wife's breath smelled of olives and feta and all kinds
of Balkan fare, something she complained of in others in the
past. She was excited, smoking. She'd clearly been fucking the
Armenian satisfactorily all week. It was Setrak this, and Setrak that.

"The Matisses were breathtaking. I never realized they
were so big." She pulled out a notebook with names written
in Cyrillic in a baby hand, pronouncing them as if she spoke
Russian fluently. They'd obviously discovered plenty of new,
cheap talent to flog for their new gallery project.

I found myself getting angry, but this was nothing compared to what I felt when I discovered that the Armenian's
parents had gone with them.

"He's a hotelier, he got a special deal, why not take
advantage?"

I felt a pang for the demented man upstairs in the bed,
and my lost mom. I was spoiling for a fight.

"It's a long way from coffin ships," I said.

"What does that mean?"

"That was your sales pitch when you met me, wasn't it?"

She said nothing.

"Your stock-in-trade. Up from Florida with a Scots name,
you quickly got the hang of things here and decided you were
Irish. Only the strong survive, you used to say."

"So?" She was icily still.

There was silence. I wanted to bring something to a head.
I got up to get another bottle from the fridge. I was still in the kitchen when the question jumped out like a genie from a
lamp. "Am I getting a hump?"

"You always had one," I heard her laugh out from the next
room. "I thought it was from all the reading and thinking you
used to do. Big thinker."

I came back, the cold bottle in my hand.

"Didn't you know that?" she laughed again, throwing her
head back.

I wanted to shove the laugh down her throat. Both of its
had taken plenty of drink but I felt stone-cold sober as I swung
the bottle. It caught her on the side of the head.

She slumped down on the sofa slowly and quietly.

In a panic, I felt her pulse, almost afraid to touch her skin.
There was no sound from upstairs.

She was alive, breathing clearly, inclined to snore. Nat
King Cole sang, "I thought you loved me, you said you loved me..."
as I sucked air into my lungs and ran out of the house, forgetting to code in the alarm. It was raining to beat the band.

Old rancors and memories boiled up as I walked. Cars hissed
by in the wet. My father's first car was an old Falcon, whereas
even the shabbiest Two Way Inn customer could surprise by
turning out in something decent like an ageing Cadillac for the
odd expedition to Far Rockaway. My Dad loved those words,
Far Rockaway. "Goddamnit!" The Falcon stalled at every red
light, and before it did I went into an agony of apprehension
feeling a giggle build up inside, knowing there was no way to
stop it rumbling up and out to hurt Dad's feelings and make
him swear even more, or even lash out and hit me. Saving Face
for Ireland.

That was the "up-and-up" era. "We're on the up-and-up,"
Dad often said. That same year we went "home" to Ireland as a family, to thatched cottages and women in aprons and
cardigans with anxious looks. I was put to sleep in a room full
of bunk beds for students of Irish.

The males of the family laughed at jokes they didn't share
and at Dad's hat. Nobody wore hats over there, at most they
pushed a cap or beret around their heads when answering
a question, as if it helped them think. I heard one of them
say, "See any dollars fall outta the hat, boys?" We were overcharged everywhere we went. A vendor refused to tell Dad
the price of an ice cream until he admitted we were "Yanks."
Dad was oblivious, delighted with everything.

I could still feel this anger somewhere inside now, untreated. I walked and walked.

There'd been a trip to Nevada as well, to another relative.
Mom and Dad took us to shows of people I couldn't stand, like
Carol Channing and Buck Owens and Fats Domino. They
watched these shows with the half-attention of people waiting
for something more important to arrive, who expected better
things of life and had the impression the real action was happening elsewhere. Me and Sis sniggered as Carol Channing
threw imitation diamond rings into the audience, and Dad
hissed, "Will you cut that out?"

A while later I found myself near the river, somewhere between the two big bridges. My clothes were sodden and the
earth was muddy and smelled fresh. The world was washed
down.

I heard my own voice quote A.E. Houseman aloud: "Yonder lies the gate of hell."

"What's that, Daddyo?" a voice said, and I saw the outlines of eight young men in hoodies against the evening sky.
"Didn't we see yo' down hea' the other day with yo' friend?"

I realized the urgency of the situation, slid and lurched
onto the street, dropping my cell phone. I ran until I reached
a late-opening grocery store but was stopped at the door.

"Sorry," the man said, "no can do."

"There's eight of them. I need to phone for help."

"If we let you in, they'll smash the place up." He shut the
door.

They soon caught me again, forced me to the ground,
then kicked me as I lay. They broke my eyeglasses and took
my wallet. They'd already smashed my phone.

I heard a saxophone peal out clearly, cutting the air like a
knife, before I eventually lost consciousness.

I woke up in Mt. Sinai with stitches on my face. "Those kids
feel threatened," the nurse said. "They feel they're being
forced out by neighborhood change. They're afraid of losing it
to people from Manhattan, from anywhere."

"We're all going to lose it," I said to George when he arrived to take me home. I gave no info to the cop who came,
refused to file a complaint.

At the house, all was quiet. The front door lay open as I'd
left it.

George refused to come in because I'd told him I socked
one to the Swamp Rat.

When I went in, she was nowhere to be seen, although I
knew there'd be trouble tomorrow. I looked in on Dad. The
Pole was dozing in an armchair in his room.

"Someone rattled your cage," he said, his eyes open. "I
never saw a more miserable creature."