City of Dreams (28 page)

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, tearin’ up rough floorin’ is easy, ’cause the boards is face-nailed. Just find a line of nails, then . . .” He jammed the pinch bar down between two boards and levered.

Nails and wood gave out with a yelp.

Then he moved to the next line of nails, levered and lifted, then a third and fourth time, and the board came free. Beneath was a latticework of lathe and ceiling plaster.

And from somewhere downstairs came a voice: “Hello! Hello!”

“Your uncle.” The father rolled his eyes. “Pray that he’s finished his beer fartin’ for the mornin’.”

The boy laughed. He liked it when his father let him in on a joke.

The father handed the boy the pinch bar. “Use the straight end.”

The boy slid the bar along the top of the newly exposed floor joist until it ran into a row of nails. He twisted and pivoted, and another board lifted.

“Funny,” said the father, “that board’s only been nailed in at the ends, like somebody didn’t want to bother renailin’ the middle. Give ’er a pull at the other end.”

So the boy did, and with barely any levering at all, the board popped up, revealing more lathe, more plaster, and fitted neatly between two of the joists, a wooden box about ten inches by seven inches by four inches high.

“What’s that, Pa?”

The father crouched down. “
That
, Timothy Riley, is why I love my line of work.”

“Hello! Hello!” The voice echoed up from the second floor.

The father glanced over his shoulder, then lifted the box. It was dark wood, mahogany, hinged, held shut with a little padlock clasp. The father probed the clasp with his screwdriver. The little nails holding it pulled away, and the box popped open: empty.

“Too bad,” said the boy.

“Not so fast.” The father tapped the bottom of the box. “You hear that? Sounds solid. Too solid.” Then he turned the box over, looked at the sides, ran his fingers along the little molding strip around the bottom. And then he found it, a fitted piece of molding that moved, and he slid it all the way off the side of the box.

“Hello! Hello, Six-Pound! Where the hell are you?”

The father glanced again toward the sound of his brother-in-law’s voice, then gave the boy a grin. “Many’s the box I’ve found with a false bottom. Now . . . watch.” He slid the bottom out through the space left by the molding to reveal—

“What the hell is this? Paper? Paper notes?” The father picked one of them up. It was a small thing covered in small print on paper yellowed from the heat of decades beneath the attic floorboards.

The father read the words at the top: “‘One hundred dollars.’ It says ‘One hundred dollars.’” Then he held it up to the dormer light. “And a watermark.”

“Watermark?”

“A kind of shadow writin’ that tells who made the paper.” The father squinted. “It says, ‘Confed . . . eration.’”

“
Confederate
money?” The boy looked closer. “But ‘State of New York’ is printed right under the ‘Hundred Dollars.’”

“Well, New York wasn’t in the Confederacy. We know that.”

“Are you up there, Dick? Who’s with ya?” The uncle was climbing to the attic.

The father made a gesture to the boy: Quiet. Don’t say anything. Then he took off his derby, put a few of the notes into the crown, and put the hat back on. He closed the box and slid it far under the floorboards.

“I got some bad fuckin’ news for you, Dick.” Uncle Billy Donovan’s brogue entered the room, followed by his beer belly, then Billy himself, all out of breath.

Dick Riley stood and turned. “The bad news is you’re late, and jobs is gettin’ tougher to come by.”

“Ah”—Billy made a wave of his hand—“you mean that panic thing the papers is talkin’ about? I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”

“I would,” said Six-Pound Dick, “and watch your language.”

Uncle Billy looked past his brother-in-law at Timothy. “Come to work with the men, have you, boy-o?”

“Yes, sir,” answered the boy.

“Now what’s this bad news?” asked Six-Pound.

“I’ll keep it under me hat, so’s I don’t scare Timmy.” Billy smiled. He had one of those pushed-up noses that always seemed to be pulling on his upper lip, so that a smile revealed his front teeth and gave him the look of a rodent . . . a large, beer-drinking rodent.

Six-Pound looked into his eyes. “I’d say you was drunk last night. Are you still?”

Billy farted. “As sober as a judge I am. And it was with these two sober eyes that I seen Strong McGillicuddy in his mother’s saloon.”

“You was drinkin’ in Mother Mag’s? I told you to stay out of there.”

“Ah”—Billy made another wave of his hand—“I go where I want, when I want.”

“And you mean
Slick
McGillucuddy, don’t you?”

The boy sensed a change in his father’s voice.

“Not
Slick
. Since you took the hammer to Slick, he’s good for nothin’ ’cept washin’ beer mugs or drainin’ ’em. Strong’s the older brother. He’s bigger and meaner, which is the reason for why he been up the river these last ten years. He—”

Six-Pound put up a hand. “Enough.”

“Just a word to the wise, Dick. You know you can count on me.”

“They won’t touch me, Billy. Been too long.”

“Ah, but some of these boys has long memories, Dick. So keep an eye out, and I’ll watch your back.” Then Billy looked again at Tim. “What you got there, lad?”

The boy held up the pinch bar.

“Not that. You two was kneelin’ down there like you just found the crown jewels in the floorboards of an old tavern.”

“There’s nothin’ here,” said Six-Pound Dick. “Not a thing.”

“Nothin’ valuable, then?” asked Uncle Billy suspiciously.

“To a man who likes beer as much as you do, Billy, the most valuable thing in this old place is the fumes in the taproom. So”—Six-Pound Dick turned his brother-in-law toward the stairs—“let’s go down and take a deep breath. It’ll be as good as the hair o’ the dog.”

T
HAT NIGHT, THE
Rileys ate dinner to the sound of firecrackers.

Boiled beef, boiled potatoes, boiled carrots, and explosions, some like cannon blasts right under their windows, others like the familiar sound of far-off gunshots.

It was the night before the Fourth, and kids all across Hell’s Kitchen were firing off bottle rockets or cherry bombs or Chinese stringers.

As soon as the boys were excused, Eddie and Timothy went to the front window. Eddie looked down into the street. Timothy peered into the windows of the third-floor tenement diagonally across the street.

That was where Doreen Walsh lived.

And there she was, standing beside the piano in her front room. Her voice rose along a simple scale—
do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do
—as her mother played. Her strawberry blond hair shimmered in the evening light.

“Ma, Timmy’s peekin’ at Doreen again,” said Eddie.

“I ain’t peekin’. I’m listenin’. When the teacher asked us kids what we wanted to be when we grew up, Doreen said she wants to sing in Tony Pastor’s show.”

“Vaudeville”—the mother gave a snort—“a fine dream for a young girl.”

Timothy pretended not to hear the sarcasm. “I told her if she sang by the—”

“She sings like a rusty gate,” said Eddie.

The mother ignored Eddie and asked Timothy, “If she sang by the
what
?”

“By the window, Ma. If she sang by the window, I’d be her audience.”

The mother craned her neck to see out without being seen.

Doreen Walsh was launching into a Tony Pastor song, “The Fourth of July.”

Once more fellow freemen, we’ve met on that day,
That reminds us of times that have long passed away
. . .

“I recognize that air,” said the mother. “‘Sprig of Shillelah.’”

“But different words,” said Timothy.

“She has a nice voice, just the same,” said the mother.

“I say she sings like a rusty gate,” said Eddie, then he turned to his father. “Hey, Pa, can we buy some firecrackers?”

“In a few minutes, Eddie. Your mother and me needs to have a talk.”

“A talk?” The mother turned to her husband.

In most families, having
a talk
meant trouble.

See Jefferson’s pen Independence declare
.

Dick Riley raised the lid of his wife’s sewing machine, took out the mahogany box, and set it on the table.

“What’s this, then?” asked Mary Riley.

Meanwhile to support it our forefathers swear,
In Seventy-six on the Fourth of July
. . .

Timothy had not seen his father take the box from under the floorboards or carry it out right under Uncle Billy’s nose. But there it was, polished and shining.

Dick Riley nodded for his wife to open it.

She wiped her hands on her apron.

And Washington, prompt at his country’s call
,

Timothy drew closer.

Both parents shot glances at the boy, then at each other, and an agreement passed between them.
He’s old enough
. The father pulled out a chair and told him to sit.

Unsheathed the bright sword and urged on one and all

Like her husband, Mary Donovan Riley was nearing forty. But where Six-Pound was skinny and solid, Mary carried extra weight through her hips and across her chest. And where he was a talker, she had little to say, so that what she said carried extra weight, too. And it was tinged with the brogue she had brought from Donegal as a girl. Six-Pound, for all his Irish sentiment, was all New York with a New York accent.

The mother raised the lid, and there were the small paper notes.

Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!

“Wow!” cried Eddie. “A whole string, right down on the street. Let’s go, Pa!”

“In a minute, son.”

While we chant in full chorus on the Fourth of July
. . .

Timothy listened to his parents talk their way toward understanding what they had found: twenty thousand dollars worth of old bonds, bearer bonds, which meant that whoever held them could cash them, if they were still good. The bonds had been issued during the Revolution with five-year maturities at 5 percent interest.

The father asked the boy, “What’s twenty thousand at five percent for five years?”

“Twenty-five thousand.” Timothy didn’t need a pencil. “Simple interest.”

“Did you tell Billy about this?” asked the mother.

“No,” said the father. “He’d blab.”

“True enough,” she said.

“But if there’s somethin’ here,” added the father, “he’ll get his share. Whether he banks it or drinks it is his own business.”

She fingered the bonds. “This looks like a considerable lot of money.”

“If it
is
money,” said the father, “and even more considerable if it’s what they call compound interest.”

“Well, I don’t know nothin’ about compound interest,” she said. “My bank has a snout on its face and a slot in its back.”

Columbia will honor the Fourth of July
.

Timothy had all but forgotten the angelic sound of Doreen’s voice, which was still shimmering in the air above Forty-eighth Street.

The father said to him, “Do the compound interest for five years.”

Timothy took a pencil and paper and wrote a few figures. “Twenty-five thousand five hundred twenty-five dollars and sixty-three cents.”

“You know, Dick,” said the mother softly, “with this kind of money, we could move to a first-floor flat with runnin’ water.”

The father pulled out a red handkerchief and mopped his brow.

The mother picked up a bond. “But how could things so flimsy be worth so much?”

“Don’t get all excited just yet,” said the father. “They could be as worthless as—”

The mother raised a finger. “Don’t say it, Dick!”

Timothy had often heard his father call something “as worthless as Billy Donovan.” And while his mother generally agreed with the sentiment, she did not like it spoken aloud.

“I was going to say they could be as worthless as a Continental. Ain’t you ever heard that expression about money from the Revolution?”

“No, I ain’t.” She put the bond back, studied the box, drummed her fingers on the table, and finally said, “I think you should talk to himself.”

“The sachem? I could. I could do that. I could talk to him tomorrow.”

“On the Fourth?” she asked. “Can you get close to him on the Fourth?”

“I’ve been wantin’ to introduce him to Timothy—”

“You’re bringin’ the boy to Tammany Hall? To hear all that windy speechifyin’ and witness all that hard drinkin’?”

Timothy immediately said he’d love to go.

“See that,” said the father. “He’d love to go. And it’s good for the local boss to see that your son’s growin’ straight and tall.

By the Union we live, for the Union we’ll die;
We’ll remember our sires of the Fourth of July
—

iii.

Father and son dressed in their Sunday best—jackets, celluloid collars, ties, clean trousers. The boy was wearing mostly hand-me-downs from his father, so his tie was stained and his trousers did not reach to his ankles. He refused, however, to wear knickers and kneesocks to his first Fourth of July at Tammany Hall.

And the father agreed. “He’s a workin’ man now. And he’s got Doreen Walsh on the brain.” The father winked at his son and poured coffee. “So I’d say he’s growin’ up. And Doreen is . . .
developin
’ . . . quite nicely.”

Eddie gave out with a guffaw. “Timmy says she’s growin’ nice bubbies, too.”

“None of that talk, now,” said the mother. “Not at the kitchen table.”

She fed them bacon and eggs and after a warning about imbibing too much Tammany spirit or saying the word “bonds” too loudly in public, she sent Dick and Timothy on their way.

The father asked Eddie to come, too. But Eddie said he would stay home to keep his mother company and play his harmonica, because Eddie hated going into crowds.