Park Lane South, Queens (2 page)

“Really, Zinnie,” Carmela snorted. “You talk as though you'd never heard of homosexuality when you married Freddy.”

“That's just what I mean. I knew it existed in Greenwich Village, but no one ever spoke of it in normal terms. Everyone around here whispered about things like that while we were growing up. I never imagined it happened in normal people, too. What I say is, the more matter of fact you are about something, the less it can hurt you.”

Mary Breslinsky cupped her face and shook her head. “Well, if anything, this family has become more matter of fact. More coffee, Stan? Stan? Arsenic in your coffee?”

“Hmmm? Uh. Uh huh.” Stan was lost in Jimmy Breslin's column.

“See what I mean?” She filled his cup.

“Who does this Breslin think he is?” shouted Stan. “He's got it in for the entire NYPD!”

“Just the corrupt ones, Dad,” Carmela spoke with elaborate patience, “and there are enough of them.” Carmela had exchanged three words with Jimmy Breslin at a press party. Now she was keeper of his every motive and intention.

“No,” Stan grew agitated. “He accuses the whole force!”

“He's practically right,” Carmela said.

“Oh, no he's not. You're not, Zinnie. And Michael sure as hell wasn't.”

Mary Breslinsky didn't look up then, because Michael was dead and had been for ten years, and it hurt just as much now as it had then. He was Claire's twin and he had died at the hands of a young killer he'd tried to talk into surrendering. He'd looked at the thirteen-year-old, tear-stained kid huddling in the stairwell and he'd taken off his gun and walked right into the arms of death. Rookie good-hearted, valiant, stupid Michael.

The Mayor walked into the kitchen.

“I gotta go to work,” Carmela stood.

“Me too,” said Zinnie, but she didn't move, she sat there, because she knew that if the Mayor was here, Claire was coming in, and she loved Claire, loved to look at her face. Claire had Michael's clear blue eyes, pure as sea glass, and Zinnie hadn't had them to look into since she was fifteen. Zinnie had thought she'd lost the both of them back then, because Claire hadn't been able to stay home after Michael died.

“If you're going to put on something cooler,” Mary told Stan, “you'd better get cracking.”

The Mayor, glad to see breakfast coming to such an abrupt halt—there would be that much more leftovers for the picking—jumped into Stan's chair to oversee what Mary might unthinkingly discard. There was no sense in being wasteful. He whimpered at the sight of Carmela's three quarters of a piece of buttered toast heading for the bin.

“What, you want that, too?” Mary looked at him skeptically. “I don't know how you can enjoy it in all this heat. All right. Take it.” She finished up most of the dishes (Mary had a dishwasher but was rarely known to use it), left the coffee on for Claire, took her apron off irritably, and went out into the yard with Michaelaen. He'd help her water the strawberries. He was the only one who could do it without wetting the leaves.

Mary was annoyed at Stan for bringing up Michael. She knew she shouldn't be, but she was. She didn't want them upsetting Claire so soon after she'd come home and she might very well have been listening. That was the type she was. Michael had been the talker and she the listener. Gravy and bread. Claire had all but died herself when Michael was killed, and Mary knew inside herself what kind of suffocating pain Claire felt when she bumped into some old thing of Michael's that they still had lying about. A picture. Or Michael's old copies of
Motor Trend
that no one had seen fit to throw away. What if Claire took off again? What then? A nervous breeze unsettled the trees. Mary looked up and narrowed her eyes. The white sky glared. With any luck they'd have a thunder storm.

“Gram?” Michaelaen wrapped his hand around her thumb.

“Mmm?”

“What's a kicker?”

Claire, in her father's knee-length undershirt, bleary-eyed and mouth still parted from her dreams, came into the kitchen, tripped quietly over the vacuum cleaner, and dunked her whole face under the faucet. Was the cloth she dried off with the same as one she remembered from years ago? It smelled the same. Ivory Snow and Cheerios.

“We have bathrooms here in America for that sort of thing,” Zinnie said.

Claire turned and looked at Zinnie, all grown up and sharp as a tack. When Claire had left New York, Zinnie had still been wearing braces. Now here she was: married, a mother, divorced. There and back and no scars on the outside to show for it. But then Zinnie had been the kind of kid who would take a tumble off her bike and laugh out loud. Hard. Zinnie used to tag along with Claire and Michael all the time back then. She'd been their favorite. Claire suddenly felt too old for so early in the morning. She poured a cereal bowl half up with coffee and the other half with milk. Then she lit a cigarette.

Zinnie watched the cool blue smoke surround Claire's tousled head. “Whadda ya takin' pictures in the woods for?”

“Oh. It's the people.”

“What people?”

“The old people who promenade up there. Half the survivors of Dachau and Auschwitz seem to be living right up here in the apartments at the end of Park Lane South.”

“And you like that, eh?”

“I like them,” Claire admitted, enjoying her coffee. No one who'd lived in India could ever take a luxurious cup of well-brewed coffee for granted. “They fascinate me because they survived what was impossible. They're very sad and matter of fact and somehow not bitter at all. Numbers tattooed on their arms as though they were cattle. They have faces that shrug.”

“So you photograph them.”

“Well, I'm starting to. They're opening up a little more now that they think I understand Yiddish.”

“Now you speak Yiddish. My sister the Jew.”

“I don't understand it, really. But it's not too different from Schweitze-Deutsch—Swiss-German. Between High German and Swiss, you can pretty much understand.”

“High German, Low German—it's all Greek to me.”

“Anyway, they have extraordinary faces for black and white.”

Zinnie rolled her eyes. “If you think they're good, I oughta take you with me on my four to midnights. You want characters, I'll give you characters.”

Claire looked stung. “I couldn't do that.”

“Why not?”

“I'm having a hard enough time getting used to the idea of you being a cop … let alone drive around with you in uniform … and you deliberately conjuring up all sorts of dangerous possibilities just to make my day … even though I would give anything to photograph the authentic types you must meet up with.”

“I don't get it. I mean, how can you get so excited about these normal creeps when you've been all over the world? You've seen just about everything, and you act all hepped-up and goggly-eyed to photograph the local riffraff.”

“You'd be enthused, too, if you'd been gone for ten years.”

“I doubt it.”

“Ah, but you would, Zinnie. You'd come back with new eyes. You only can't see what you're so used to you can't see it.”

“I dunno. You're the artist in the family. I'll let you ‘capture' the neighborhood while I go capture the mutts.”

“The who?”

“The mutts … perps. The inmates from our very own concentration camp: Ye Olde Ghetto.” She stood up and retrieved her gun from the fridge, slipped it into her arm holster, and covered it with her very best seersucker jacket.

The Mayor was rummaging through his toy box. He had a worn out grocery carton that housed his decade of a lifetime's accumulation of bones and doggy toys, silly things that people give to animals to chew on: plastic frogs and purple pussy cats and, in the Mayor's case, a fine figure of a gnawed up Barbie doll. The Mayor never gave up on a toy. He might stick it away in the box and forget about it for a year or two, but he was a sentimental old sod, and out he'd haul the smelly thing, sooner or later, give it a friendly chomp, and rest his snout on it for old times' sake. Then he'd fall asleep, its reminiscent odors transcending him to dreams of long ago and far away. This morning it was a little french fries container, shredded and almost colorless, but a favorite just the same at times like these, when no one paid him any mind.

Claire leaned back in her chair and watched him. How easy it was, she thought, to love someone or something that could never hurt you. How wonderful it would be not to know that—to be innocent and still think that the world offered nothing more than what you wanted to take. She longed, for a moment, for the innocence she'd lost. Growing up hadn't solved all of the mysteries. It just pushed them to the back shelf.

Out the window and across the street, an elderly figure in red tottered across her backyard lawn. Even at that distance, her gash of lipstick was visible.

Claire sat up straight. “Is that Iris von Lillienfeld?”

“Huh? Oh, sure, that's her. Who else wears Japanese kimonos and emeralds at seven o'clock in the morning?”

“I can't believe she's still alive!”

“Oh, she's alive all right. To the great dissatisfaction of every real estate agent in town.”

“I'll bet. That house looks like Rhett Butler will be home any minute. I wonder if she'd let me photograph her?”

“Not likely. That old broad is a recluse from the get go. She thinks she's Garbo. Ooo, this was funny. Her dog—she's got this really themey poodle—well, this dog was in heat and you know how uh … virile the Mayor here is—”

“Ha.”

“Yeah, he practically lived over there. Wild. She won't be bothered with people, but the dog didn't seem to put her back up too much. At least she didn't complain. Although how is she gonna complain, when all she bothers to speak in is German? Hey! You speak Kraut. Naw, she'd never let you in. She wouldn't even let the city tree pruners in—”

“Do you remember, Zinnie,” Claire interrupted, “how Michael used to love that woman? He used to tell me she could read the future. Remember how he was the only one not afraid to go into her backyard? We all used to call her the old witch and throw stones and run away, and Michael used to crawl through the hedge and visit her? Remember?”

“I don't know,” Zinnie turned her head away moodily. “I was too young, I guess. No, wait. I do remember him going over there. There was a nest of baby robins knocked out of the maple in a storm and everyone said that the cats were sure to get them and that it was too bad because you couldn't put them in a cage or they would die in captivity. Michael went over there—I remember he did, because I was scared to death she'd put a spell on him. Yeah, and then he came back … went into the garage, put the ladder smack in the middle of the backyard, in the shade but not too close to the trees, made a nest at the top, and popped them in, and he covered, I mean completely covered, the ladder steps with thorny rose branches so the cats couldn't climb up.”

“And Mom was furious that half of her rose bushes were destroyed.”

“Right. But those robins, they lived. Remember they lived? He left his little nest open at the top so the parent robins could go on feeding them from above, and they all lived. Every one of them. And Iris von Lillienfeld gave Michael that idea.”

They shook their heads fondly at the memory. Claire bubbled with laughter. “I can still see Pop putting bacon bits on a pole with scotch tape and hoisting it up to them.”

“They ate it, too, the carnivorous little devils. I wonder where Mom and Michaelaen went,” Zinnie bolted back to the present. “Probably up to the woods to see what all the sirens were about.” She put the ceiling fan on low. They could hear the strains of
Pagliacci
from upstairs.

“Zinnie, I wanted to speak to you about Carmela.”

“Oh, yeah? How come?”

“I don't know. Is she all right?”

“Whadda ya mean? Carmela hasn't been all right since I've known her.”

“Yes, but besides that. She seems so sour.”

“Yeah, well, her divorce was pretty bloody. And he took the house 'cause he supported her while she was getting her masters.”

“But why did they break up?”

“They fought all the time.”

“So does everyone.”

Zinnie looked left and right. “Promise you won't tell anyone? Especially not Mom?”

“Certainly I promise,” Claire crossed her heart. She liked the idea of a secret with Zinnie. Particularly since Zinnie had come across her twice talking to herself since she'd come home.

Zinnie lowered her voice. “Right when Carmela was working on her finals, she got pregnant. And she got an abortion. Without telling Arnold.”

“What?”

“Sure. You know nothin's-gonna-stand-in-my-way Carmela. The only reason I found out was because she started hemorrhaging afterward and she called me up to take her back to the clinic. He wound up finding out about it anyway. She hit him with it during one of their famous shouting matches. You know, top of the ninth and the bases are empty? She just laced it into him 'cause she had nothing else left to hit him with, I guess. Anyhow, that was the beginning of the end. Now she's all wrapped up in this therapy shit. Even the people she hangs out with are these intellectual, overanalytical uptown types.”

“Too much Freud, not enough roast beef?”

“Yup. Exactly. Now she writes about ‘winter- or summer-palette people' and ‘hemline psychosyndromes' and she calls herself a columnist. She makes me sick. I mean, she has such a good mind and it's all off in the wrong direction. The divorce just sent her off the deep end, Claire, I swear it did.”

“You and Freddy went through it. And you had Michaelaen. You seem all right.”

“Do I? I was pretty shaken up at the time. But with Freddy and me it was different. We were friends growing up. I still love him, you know it? I always will, the sap. I mean, behind all the fresh-out-of-the-closet fruitcake, Freddy's a stand-up guy … and he pays all of Michaelaen's bills, without being asked to. He's got a steady boyfriend already, can you imagine? They're opening a restaurant on Queens Boulevard.” She laughed ironically. “May they live happily ever after.”