The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (168 page)

Jimmy needed to gas up the Chrysler and he knew that the small gas station in his neighborhood wouldn’t be open yet, so he didn’t take his usual exit toward home. Instead, he kept on driving around, looking for a twenty-four-hour service station, and that is how he eventually ended up on Route 95.

He was familiar with that highway. Back in the middle of the 1980s, he’d worked for a while as a delivery driver for a small gourmet vegetable wholesale company called Parthenon Produce, run by two Greeks. This was the nicest job he’d ever had. He used to deliver quality greens—mostly arugula and watercress—from the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, up Route 95, to all the fancy stores along Long Island Sound and up into Connecticut as far as Ridgefield. It was a long drive but pleasant, and he used to get into Ridgefield (a place he and Gina used to call “Rich-field”) around eight or nine in the morning, when the wealthy men were just heading off to their jobs.

He had liked that delivery job. He had been happy with that job, but the two Greeks had sold their business in 1985. They’d offered him a chance to buy that particular delivery route as his own, but Jimmy Moran just didn’t have that kind of money at the time.

Jimmy Moran drove past New Rochelle and Mount Vernon and into Connecticut. It was very early in the morning, and a clear day. As he drove, Jimmy thought that if he could have made more money at the Bronx Terminal Vegetable Market, he would have moved his wife and all his kids up to Connecticut long ago. They still talked about it all the time: the broad lawns, the quiet schools, the tall wives. Jimmy Moran’s brother Patrick, ironically enough, had married Gina’s sister Louisa, and those two had moved to Connecticut right away. But Patrick and
Louisa, of course, didn’t have any kids, and it was easier for them to move. They had moved to Danbury, and they had a pretty nice little place, with a patio.

Gina’s sister Louisa used to be a genuinely sexy girl when she was a teenager. She was famous around the neighborhood for being no good in a very fun way, and Jimmy Moran’s brother Patrick had always been crazy about Louisa Lisante. But Jimmy had always preferred Gina. In the summer of 1970, when Jimmy had his first job as a porter at the market, he would see Gina and Louisa Lisante waiting for the bus together every morning when he got home from work. They always wore shorts and sandals. They were setting off for their summer jobs as waitresses near the beach. Jimmy used to steal beautiful ripe Holland tomatoes from the market and leave them on the Lisantes’ doorstep as paperweights for little love notes to Gina:
I love Gina . . . Gina is pretty . . . Gina has pretty legs . . . I wish Gina would marry me
.

Jimmy thought about Gina and Patrick and Louisa as he drove all the way into Ridgefield, Connecticut. Although he had not planned it this way, his timing on this particular morning was the same as his timing with the Parthenon Produce delivery route, and he arrived in Ridgefield just as the men of the town were leaving for work. It was nearly ten years since he had been to Ridgefield. In the old days, when he was finished with his route, he used to drive around the most affluent neighborhoods, studying the houses. These homes had all seemed so confidently undefended to him, and he had felt traces of a young man’s desire to rob them. Of course, it was not the contents of the houses he had wanted but the houses themselves. Particularly the large stone houses.

The house that Jimmy Moran had always particularly really wanted was absolutely huge. It was a half-mile from the center of Ridgefield—a great slate-roof manor on top of a steep hill, with a circular driveway and white columns. He used to drive up
to this exact house some early mornings when the gourmet greens were all delivered. His three-ton Parthenon Produce delivery truck would rumble obnoxiously up the grade each time he downshifted. In all those mornings, he never once saw anybody, or any car, anywhere near that house. It always seemed like such a crime to have such a huge house sitting there empty. It was such a well-kept empty house, and Jimmy used to consider simply moving in. What if he could do that? What if he could simply take it over? He would think:
Imagine what all my kids could do with all the room in that big house
.

On this morning, he parked his Chrysler across the road from the house, which had not changed as far as he could see. He had stopped in Stamford to fill the tank with gas and had purchased a bottle of aspirin at a convenience store there. Christ, his back hurt! How was he supposed to go back to the docks in only two days? Honestly, how?

Jimmy opened the bottle and ate a handful of aspirins—chewed and swallowed without water. It was a well-known fact that a chewed aspirin, while disgusting to the taste, would act faster than a whole aspirin, which would sit intact and useless for some time in a person’s stomach acid. He ate several aspirins and he thought about his wedding night. He was just nineteen years old then, and Gina was even younger.

She had asked him on their wedding night, “How many kids do you want to have, Jimmy?”

He’d said, “Your boobs will get bigger whenever you’re pregnant, right?”

“I think so.”

“Then I’ll take ten or eleven kids, Gina,” he had said.

In fact, they ended up having six, which was ridiculous enough. Six kids! And Jimmy in the produce business! What had they been
thinking?
They’d had three boys and three girls. The girls had Italian names and the boys had Irish names, a cornball little gimmick that was Jimmy’s idea. Six kids!

The pain in Jimmy’s back, which had started as stiffness and turned to cramps, was stoked up even higher now. It was a terrible pain, localized at the point of his recent surgery, emphasized periodically by a hot pulse that shook his body like a sob. He emptied some more of the aspirins from the bottle into his palm and he looked at the big house. He thought about his grandfather who had shot through the engine of a company coal truck, and he thought about his uncle who’d got assassinated by company detectives for organizing, and he thought about the black lung. He thought about his doctors and about Joseph D. DiCello and about the mushroom man and about Hector the Haitian distributor and about his brother Patrick, who he rarely saw anymore at all because Connecticut was so far.

He chewed the aspirins and counted the windows of the great house across the road. Jimmy Moran had never thought to count the windows before. He worked the bits of aspirin out of his teeth with his tongue and counted thirty-two windows. Thirty-two windows that he could see, just from the road! He thought and thought and then he spoke.

“Even for me, with six kids and a wife . . .” Jimmy supposed aloud. “Even for me, with six kids and a wife, it must be a sin to have such a house. That must be it.”

Jimmy Moran thought and thought, but this was the best he could figure. This was all he could come up with.

“Even for me,” he said again, “it must be a sin.”

I
N HUNGARY
, Richard Hoffman’s family had been the manufacturers of Hoffman’s Rose Water, a product which was used at the time for both cosmetic and medicinal purposes. Hoffman’s mother drank the rose water for her indigestion, and his father used it to scent and cool his groin after exercise. The servants rinsed the Hoffmans’ table linens in a cold bath infused with rose water such that even the kitchen would be perfumed. The cook mixed a dash of it into her sweetbread batter. For evening events, Budapest ladies wore expensive imported colognes, but Hoffman’s Rose Water was a staple product of daytime hygiene for all women, as requisite as soap. Hungarian men could be married for decades without ever realizing that the natural smell of their wives’ skin was not, in fact, a refined scent of blooming roses.

Richard Hoffman’s father was a perfect gentleman, but his mother slapped the servants. His paternal grandfather had been a drunk and a brawler, and his maternal grandfather had been a
Bavarian boar hunter, trampled to death at the age of ninety by his own horses. After her husband died of consumption, Hoffman’s mother transferred the entirety of the family’s fortune into the hands of a handsome Russian charlatan named Katanovsky, a common conjurer and a necromancer who promised Madame Hoffman audiences with the dead. As for Richard Hoffman himself, he moved to America, where he murdered two people.

Hoffman immigrated to Pittsburgh during World War II and worked as a busboy for over a decade. He had a terrible, humiliating way of speaking with customers.

“I am from Hungary!” he would bark. “Are you Hungary, too? If you Hungary, you in the right place!”

For years he spoke such garbage, even after he had learned excellent English, and could be mistaken for a native-born steelworker. With this ritual degradation he was tipped generously, and saved enough money to buy a supper club called the Pharaoh’s Palace, featuring a nightly magic act, a comic, and some showgirls. It was very popular with gamblers and the newly rich.

When Hoffman was in his late forties, he permitted a young man named Ace Douglas to audition for a role as a supporting magician. Ace had no nightclub experience, no professional photos or references, but he had a beautiful voice over the telephone, and Hoffman granted him an audience.

On the afternoon of the audition, Ace arrived in a tuxedo. His shoes had a wealthy gleam, and he took his cigarettes from a silver case, etched with his clean initials. He was a slim, attractive man with fair brown hair. When he was not smiling, he looked like a matinee idol, and when he was smiling, he looked like a friendly lifeguard. Either way, he seemed altogether too affable to perform good magic (Hoffman’s other magicians cultivated an intentional menace), but his act was
wonderful and entertaining, and he was unsullied by the often stupid fashions of magic at the time. (Ace didn’t claim to be descended from a vampire, for instance, or empowered with secrets from the tomb of Ramses, or to have been kidnaped by Gypsies as a child, or raised by missionaries in the mysterious Orient.) He didn’t even have a female assistant, unlike Hoffman’s other magicians, who knew that some bounce in fishnets could save any sloppy act. What’s more, Ace had the good sense and class not to call himself the Great anything or the Magnificent anybody.

Onstage, with his smooth hair and white gloves, Ace Douglas had the sexual ease of Sinatra.

There was an older waitress known as Big Sandra at the Pharaoh’s Palace on the afternoon of Ace Douglas’s audition, setting up the cocktail bar. She watched the act for a few minutes, then approached Hoffman, and whispered in his ear, “At night, when I’m all alone in my bed, I sometimes think about men.”

“I bet you do, Sandra,” said Hoffman.

She was always talking like this. She was a fantastic, dirty woman, and he had actually had sex with her a few times.

She whispered, “And when I get to thinking about men, Hoffman, I think about a man exactly like that.”

“You like him?” Hoffman asked.

“Oh, my.”

“You think the ladies will like him?”

“Oh, my,” said Big Sandra, fanning herself daintily. “Heavens, yes.”

Hoffman fired his other two magicians within the hour.

After that, Ace Douglas worked every night that the Pharaoh’s Palace was open. He was the highest paid performer in Pittsburgh. This was not during a decade when nice young women generally came to bars unescorted, but the Pharaoh’s Palace became a place where nice women—extremely attractive
young single nice women—would come with their best girlfriends and their best dresses to watch the Ace Douglas magic show. And men would come to the Pharaoh’s Palace to watch the nice young women and to buy them expensive cocktails.

Hoffman had his own table at the back of the restaurant, and after the magic show was over, he and Ace Douglas would entertain young ladies there. The girls would blindfold Ace, and Hoffman would choose an object on the table for him to identify.

“It’s a fork,” Ace would say. “It’s a gold cigarette lighter.”

The more suspicious girls would open their purses and seek unusual objects—family photographs, prescription medicine, a traffic ticket—all of which Ace would describe easily. The girls would laugh, and doubt his blindfold, and cover his eyes with their damp hands. They had names like Lettie and Pearl and Siggie and Donna. They all loved dancing, and they all tended to keep their nice fur wraps with them at the table, out of pride. Hoffman would introduce them to eligible or otherwise interested businessmen. Ace Douglas would escort the nice young ladies to the parking lot late at night, listening politely as they spoke up to him, resting his hand reassuringly on the small of their backs if they wavered.

At the end of every evening, Hoffman would say sadly, “Me and Ace, we see so many girls come and go . . .”

Ace Douglas could turn a pearl necklace into a white glove and a cigarette lighter into a candle. He could produce a silk scarf from a lady’s hairpin. But his finest trick was in 1959, when he produced his little sister from a convent school and offered her to Richard Hoffman in marriage.

Her name was Angela. She had been a volleyball champion in the convent school, and she had legs like a movie star’s legs, and a very pretty laugh. She was ten days pregnant on her
wedding day, although she and Hoffman had known each other for only two weeks. Shortly thereafter, Angela had a daughter, and they named her Esther. Throughout the early 1960s, they all prospered happily.