Exile on Bridge Street (20 page)

CHAPTER 14

Hope for Summer

H
ARRY
IS
STONE
-
FACED
LOOKING
AT
THE
third-floor room as next to him I stand in shock at the shape of the place.

“Well my mam and sisters can't live here.”

“He said it needs work.”

“He did say that, but there's a huge hole in the floor,” I say, looking down to the second floor kitchen where three dirty-smiled toddlers look back up at me, an older child slumped in another chair. “Broken window over here and the walls look like the inside of a whale.”

Harry turns on the faucet but only a brackish sludge comes out. “Can't see how they're flushin' the jake in this buildin'. Pipes're rusted out.”

“This place is a horror. Fireplace is blocked up and I can hear rats up there.”

“One block from the park, though,” Harry says, nodding out the kitchen window. “Can see the treetops from here. Look at 'em all.”

I look, but only see branches frozen and swaying hungrily in the winter-gray backdrop. Brown ice and muddy snow accumulate at the edge of rooftops and cornices, but just beyond I can see the tops of the trees, their beauty distant and only made true by imagining them. Hibernating in the darkness of now with nothing but hope and flights of fancy to make them real. Better days ahead, but stuck in the present, I doubt them. Feel that they're not to come and yet wonder at the idea that what makes people keep drudging through the muck of now is the chance at better times ahead. Drudging and drudging and most times dying before ever able to reach that summer day when the trees are blooming with color and the heaven we all hope for shines on our loved one's faces, warm and generous. If it hadn't been for so much winter that I see and the impotent struggles of bettering ourselves, then I wouldn't be so filled with the doubt. So much of it. The real truth of things is that hope is always in the distance. In the future. Forever in the distance and many times we never reach it, like Tommy Tuohey. He wanted a family. He wanted a wife and sons and he died unknown.

I take a deep breath. Exhale outward as Harry looks at me, “It's just work's all,” he said. “Work is everythin'.”

When I look back on it now I'm a bit unsure how I survived at all. A miserable adolescence of course it was. Your happy adolescence hardly being worth your while. I sit back from the typewriter for a moment. Push the pen and paper to the side. An old man with nothing left to him now but prayers for forgiveness, another form of hope for the future. I hold my head in my hands. There were things we had to do to survive. Hard and pragmatic decisions. Good and normal people in bad predicaments, we were. Our art was not based on rejecting our parents' way of life or born out of spare time—no, our art was that of need. Need to survive. I tell myself this and hold my beads, pray. I wasn't ready to make the sort of decisions demanded of me back then in my adolescence. But they had to be made.

To this day I still think of auld Tommy Tuohey standing up to anyone, ready to fight the whole world and getting himself butchered for his bravery. He taught me to fight with my fists, Tommy did. A valuable thing in those days. And he taught me to be strong, too. Dinny sent him to me for a reason, but I'd be incomplete if it was only Tommy that taught me about life. It is at this point in the story when things begin to turn. With Tommy Tuohey gone, Harry Reynolds steps in. Begins watching over me. Influencing me too, under Dinny's watchful eye. Always in his vision.

“Ya ready?” Harry asks as he walks past me and toward a broken-glassed window.

Standing there in that wretched hole of a room, I haven't a choice but to talk myself out of quitting it all. From just running away. Just going away with myself. “Don' quit,” Dinny's words ring in my head. “No one can beat the man outta ya.”

I want terribly to feel bad for myself, but I just grumble toward Harry, “The people around here in this neighborhood seem humble and kind at least.”

On one knee by the hole in the floor, Harry starts listing off things, “We gotta go to the lumberyard for four-inch-wide slabs, two inches thick. And studs to support the flooring, some plywood for the walls and ceiling. Then to the plumber. We gotta get measurements of them pipes, fittings, new jake for the lavatory, sink in the kitchen, sand the floors, paint the walls. . . . I got wood glue and a saw, hammers and things,” Harry says looking up to me. “Then when it's all done, we go to the furniture store.”

I rub my hand across my face and hair, “I need a mattress.”

“You can stay wit' me off Atlantic Avenue 'til we get this place sealed up.”

I thank him with a lowered head.

“We'll need access to their place to fix their ceiling too,” Harry says, looking down through the hole. “Do a little bit every Sunday. You still don' know when they're comin'? Ya ma an' sisters?”

“No idea,” I say. “Did Dinny tell you to help me?”

Harry doesn't answer that, “ Y'ever done work like this?”

“Repairs? A little on the farm.”

“We can get Dance to help us out here and there, and James Hart'll let us use the automobile truck to load up supplies. When ya mother an' sisters get here, it'll be like new. I mean,” Harry says, still kneeling down to the hole in the flooring and looking up to me. “I'd like to help, if ya want it. Get it ready for 'em an' all. I never had a fam'ly o' my own. Don't even know what it's like, but . . .”

“Dinny says we are a family.”

“Yeah, not a real fam'ly though. If we had our own fam'ly, we probably wouldn't be in a gang, right?”

“Well, that's not really true . . .”

“Ya know what I mean, William,” Harry says, standing up and walking toward the kitchen window. “I don' even know if I'm Irish. Ya know my last name? Reynolds? That's not mine. It's the name of the nun that adopted me.”

“Well you can be a part of my family. I uh . . . I just don't want anyone knowing about this room that doesn't need to know about it. I don't want it getting around where I live. . . . If Lovett and the Lonergan crew find out . . .”

“No worries. No one knows anything right now except Dinny an' Sadie an' the inner circle, but you can trust 'em.”

“Vincent?”

“He'll never say nothin' to nobody.”

“Lumpy?”

“Nah, I don' think he even knows who you are,” Harry says with a slight smiling. “He can't keep up wit' nothin' except numbers, anyway. And he knows. He knows never to say nothin' to nobody anyhow.”

And looking out the window to the barren treetops, I give in entirely. To the treasure of hope, and imagine my own mother living here like it's a dream. The safety and the calm it might bring. Far from that war and the Brits.

Out back at the bottom level there is a small courtyard where children could play, if it wasn't so cold. And although my two younger sisters Abby and Brigid are getting too old for games, I know that they'll enjoy the other children from this and adjoining buildings. There is also a stable house about a half block away where four or five horses reside, steam coming from their long heads leaning over the sidewalk. I can't wait to see what the park will be like during summer. Left to imagine it only. Left to overcome doubt. Hope lands in the summer and if we're lucky, my mother and sisters will land here too.

I look to Harry, “I just want you to know how much this . . .”

“Don' worry 'bout it,” he interrupts. But there is much to be thinking on. So much in the way of their arrival.

* * *

I
T
IS
LATE
J
ANUARY
WHEN
H
ARRY
and I start spending Sundays in the Prospect Park room and the months drag on. Dinny Meehan—the man that has pulled us all up out of the darkness and given us our lives—is himself dying inside. Without The Swede, who is slowly recovering under his sister Helen's care, Dinny slowly fades into silence. But worse yet is the silence on his face. The blank look. The distance in him. Something had been taken from him, yet no one knows exactly which thing it is that's drained him of his color and vigor that so defines him. Some days he sleeps in, even. When he doesn't show in the morning under the elevated tracks to meet myself and the dockbosses, we are forced to make our own plans for the day. In these days I gravitate more toward Harry Reynolds, who carries on with things and is so generous to me. And he pays me extra too, which is a great help as I spend much of my time planning for the future.

Red Hook, though, it has gone from Dinny's territory to seceding entirely. It is gone and no one speaks of it. Least of all Dinny. Here we had for so long fought against the Italians who people the neighborhood tenements down there. Fought against the unions too, and right from under us our own man slips away with it. Lovett and his crew had bided their time well, kept quiet and made their move. At the Dock Loaders' Club whispers are sent from ear to ear, things like, “Dinny's always been too good to some” and “He was soft on Bill and it came back on 'em.”

But I don't know of any man in our midst that could've handled Lovett better than Dinny. Some things are inevitable, and although Lovett is a powerful dockboss that deserves respect for the number of men he can rally and for the dangerous environment he took over, it is no doubting now that his betrayal is complete.

I know that every man leaning on the bar hopes for revenge, but nothing is said beyond the whisper. And we try to move on, quietly. As always, under the shade of the Manhattan Bridge with the sun setting beyond its overpass, Paddy Keenan drops drinks in front of the men who've earned a spot at the Dock Loaders' Club mahogany trough. Connolly, Donnelly, Gibney, Morissey and Howard and McGarry at one end of bar by the stairwell; Dance Gillen and Philip Large taking the seat of the missing Lovett and his crew by the crook in the bar. Maher, too, sitting with them now, as Dinny wants to be left alone upstairs. Many are missing due to the treasonous act by Lovett and those that follow him. Always strong due to our numbers, this makes us concerned as well. Knowing too that Tanner Smith's actions weaken us, there are grumblings from Gibney and Morissey, “He ain' even Irish American, really.”

“Dinny'd give Tanner the gun to shoot him wit',” Cinders says soberly, interrupting them. “The man's loyal to the marrow for those that helped him when he was in need. Better dig that right an' now, boyos, 'cause that ain' gonna change just 'cause Tanner stiffed 'em. Ain' gonna change. Tanner helped Dinny and his father get out o' Greenwich Village years ago. That means a lot to 'em.”

* * *

T
HE
MONTHS
ROLL
ON
THOUGH
,
INTO
the spring. The best news is that Mickey Kane will live. Shot twice, but mere flesh wounds. They tried to break his spirit and send him back to Dinny a whimpering pup, but Kane comes round practically unchanged.

Though Dinny has changed. And the look on his face tells us of his down-turned thoughts. February into March and then April and still Dinny doesn't speak to us. Stares away out into the distance where Manhattan stands above, across the river and out the window of his second-floor office. Sitting at his empty desk and listening with glazed eyes as dockbosses complain of the problems in their terminals with nary a suggestion from him.

“Can't we send someone down to the Baltic, Dinny? We need help,” Gibney The Lark says with Big Dick sitting behind him. “Like we can't keep havin' these Polacks show up drunk in the mornin', even though they got a few dollars to shine their way into a job, when they can't do a damn thing if they're passed out in the pier house at noon.”

“Ya can't run ya area, ask Harry what he does,” Dinny says, then turns his chair round to look out the window.

Gibney holds his hands on his knees with one hand missing three fingers. He turns red in anger, yet keeps his tongue to himself.

“C'mon, Lark,” Big Dick says standing up and slapping Gibney with the back of his hand. “We'll take care of it.”

Vincent and I look at each other from across the room. He shrugs at me, opens the door for Gibney and Morissey. It is quiet in the office. I look over to Lumpy, but there is never eye contact with him, and as usual, he is fast in his computations of the day's earnings but after a few more moments, he turns dumbly to Dinny, “Lovett's not coming anymore, right? Because I don't have his . . .”

“Right,” Dinny interrupts.

Pushing his glasses up, Lumpy then rests his arm on the desk with his job completed.

“Well we're making about twenty-three percent less without the Red Hook section . . .”

“He ain' comin' back, I said.” Staring out the window, then turns and looks to Vincent and I as if to make sure we'll not share that information with others.

“Dinny?” Lumpy asks.

“Don' fookin' ask me nothin',” he responds.

Looking out the window again, he says nothing more. Nothing. Not a word. I think maybe he is looking over to the right for The Swede because that's where The Swede usually leans, but his eyes stay on the Manhattan Bridge in the foreground and the city beyond it, stretching long across the shutter windows.

What he is thinking, I can't know. All I know is what's missing. I blame myself, of course. Blame myself for using him like so many of us do. And maybe that's why he is so quiet. As punishment, since he doesn't seem capable of doing anything to those he loves. Knowing how to fight. Knowing how to kill too, but not knowing how to hold us to account when we take him for granted. The people close to him. The people he loves. Instead, his silence and distance is there to make us think on things. Like maybe if I would have been grateful for the place he paid for with his own money for my family, then maybe he wouldn't be so cold to me. And maybe he was doing that to all of us too for not seeing him for what he is, instead of seeing him for what we can get from him.