The Leap Year Boy (16 page)

By one o’clock, the coal and iceman, Mr. Traficante, was halfway in the bag and looking to go all the way. He began to sing Italian folk songs, which thinned the crowd a little. Someone yelled at him to put a lid on it, but he kept on singing, albeit toned down a touch.

During the third chorus of
O Solo Mio
, a crew of a dozen men arrived from The Squeaky Wheel, led by John and Davy O’Brien. They carried platters of food, and John’s barman wheeled in a keg of beer. The remaining neighbors decided they could put up with Traficante’s singing now that reinforcements had arrived.

More than twenty people stood stuffed around the dining room table, where the food was set up. Cigars were out in full force, generating a low-hanging cloud of smoke. Alex sat in Davy’s lap. Soon the conversation moved away from the sadness of Irene’s passing into a retelling of Alex’s dart-throwing exploits. According to Emil Kozich, who’d lost a dollar on Edward Peck, it was the strangest damn thing he’d ever seen—no wait, it was like a dream, wasn’t that right, fellas? Yet and still, he asserted, the whole deal was bogus, John should have made Davy throw himself or forfeit the match. John told him to shut up, it was over and done with, but then even John couldn’t help himself, he retold the story and turned to Alex. “Listen, kid, show everyone again how you threw them darts.”

Alex looked at Davy, who was sipping Malkin’s tonic from a silver flask. His complexion was greenish gray. He said, “Leave the child be, will you. His mother just passed.”

“Never mind, I’ll show you, “ said Edward Peck. He did his best to imitate Alex’s herky-jerky catapult motion, but Kozich told him, no, you got it all wrong. He palmed an orange from a fruit basket sent by Plotkin’s Grocery and went into Alex’s delivery. When he reached the apex the orange flew out of his hand and hit Mrs. Traficante squarely between the eyes, which caused Mr. Traficante to hit Kozich in return, and full-scale mayhem may have broken out between The Wheel crew and the locals had Davy not bellowed out a powerful chorus of “Amazing Grace.” The pushing and shoving gradually subsided, and as Davy crooned, Alex hummed along in a sweet, high-pitched voice.

As Davy sang, all eyes were on him except for Abe’s. His gaze was firmly planted on a tall, pretty woman with dark bangs and a feathered hat standing just inside the door.

Delia motioned to Abe. With a furtive glance back at the crowd, which was imploring Davy to sing another, he slipped away to join her.

They stood outside, a couple of steps from the front door. “So,” Delia said. “I’m sorry about your wife.” She touched his arm. “Really I am. Maybe it ain’t the same thing, but I was pretty shook up when I lost my mother, so I guess I know how you feel.”

“Thanks.”

Mr. and Mrs. Traficante edged by them. Halfway down the walkway, Mrs. Traficante peeked back over her shoulder.

“Anyway, Abe, I hope she didn’t suffer too much.”

“I don’t know. I mean, she was pretty bad off, you know, the fever had her all confused.”

“Malkin didn’t show his face today, did he?”

“No, and if he does I’ll break it for him.”

“The son of a bitch.”

Abe glanced down at his shoes, still splattered with mud from the cemetery. Irene would have made him take them off on the porch. “She was a good woman, you know.”

“Sure.”

“She didn’t deserve this.”

“This? You mean The Dip? Or do you mean, you-and-me this.”

“Either. Both.” He sniffed and wiped his face with a handkerchief. “Before the boys was born we had some good times, Irene and me. You wouldn’t know it, but she was some dancer. Made me look like a cripple next to her.”

Delia sighed. “No kidding.” She turned her collar up against her neck. “Feels like it could snow some more.”

“But then the boys came along and it seemed like our life together was over, at least the part of it where we were young.”

“Yeah, well, we were all young once.”

“I used to think, I got a good woman that wasn’t afraid to marry a Jew, and now I’m a family man and, you know, I never had no family of my own, no brothers and sisters, no parents, grew up under my uncle’s roof, so I figured a family would be nice and all. But by the second boy, a lot of things, they just went flat for me.”

“And then I came along.”

“You. And Alex.”

“Yeah, Alex.” Her eyes brightened for a second, but then she looked away. “Listen, Abe, I’d love to listen to your life story some more some time, but you got guests and I’m freezing my ass off.”

Abe touched her hip. “You gotta go?”

She pressed his hand against her. “Honey, I’m taking a chance being here as it is. What if one of the boys from The Wheel seen me out here yapping it up with you? It don’t look right, with your wife still warm in the grave. Don’t look like that, I ain’t trying to be mean, but she is. So anyway, I’ll see you when I see you—how about a couple of Saturdays from now, at The Wheel, all right? I’m working Friday nights and Saturdays there for John now. I just come by today to pay my respects, to say I’m sorry.”

Someone inside the house shouted Abe’s name. He looked back, then at her. “Well, thanks.”

“So anyway.” What was she supposed to say now? That she loved him? That she wanted them to have a life together? Did she? She kissed him on the cheek and walked away.

He watched her go. It was all he could do not to follow after her.

Peck’s shout hit him in the back of the neck. “Abe? What are you doing out in the cold? Everybody’s waiting for you.”

*

By five o’clock, the booze and food were gone and so were the visitors. Abe sat in a chair holding a cigar, but he didn’t want a cigar. Here one moment, gone the next. How did you figure it? Why was it Irene and not him? No reason at all. No sense trying to figure it out, either. Leave all that to the rabbis and the priests. God’s gonna do what He’s gonna do, and that’s it, and there not a goddamn thing a preacher or a doctor on an Indian chief can do about it. The best thing to do is get drunk. Maybe there was some beer left in that keg. His thoughts drifted to Delia and what she might be doing at the moment.

Alex’s scream came from the living room.

Arthur yelled. “Dad, Alex fell off the sofa.”

Alex said, “Arthur pushed me.”

“Did not.”

“Did, too.”

Abe sighed. So this was what he was in for. “Come in here, the both of you.” Arthur trailed Alex, so Abe knew he’d started it. “Boys, it’s been a long day. Don’t fight now, your mother wouldn’t like it.”

That shut them up. He’d have to remember to use that line again. “Do you miss your mother, boys?”

Alex said, “No, Daddy.”

“You don’t?”

“I can talk to her whenever I want.”

Arthur said, “Don’t be stupid, she’s dead. I told you she was gonna die last week, didn’t I?” He began to sob.

The neighbors had washed the dishes, put the food away and taken the trash out, so the downstairs was as clean as if Irene had done it. But without her, the house seemed preternaturally quiet. Every so often, Arthur looked up toward the second floor as if he heard something, too, like Benjamin had. Alex slept on the sofa, a little island of peace, and he looked so beatific Abe wished Irene were there to see him.

The sun was almost gone. “Boys,” Abe said, “it’s been a long day. It’s time we all went to bed.” He stretched and wondered what it would be like tomorrow, when the reality of Irene’s death began to sink in, both to the boys and to him. He was thankful that Alex was so young. He’d probably be the first to get over it.

Arthur surprised him when he said, “Dad, can we sleep with you tonight?”

Abe had sleeping on the living room sofa, fearful of getting into the bed where Irene had died so miserably. But with his sons along, well, he had to start sometime. “All right. Bring your blankets and pillows and wake Benjamin.”

They were all asleep at eight the next morning, until Alex woke up and announced, “Where’s Momma?

Chapter 13

Billy Sunday was no stranger to Pittsburgh. From 1888 to 1890 he had manned center field for the soon-to-be defunct Pittsburgh Alleghenys. Although he was a poor to mediocre hitter—during his Pittsburgh years, his batting averages were .230, .240 and .257—the crowds loved his derring-do on the base paths and his hawk-like patrolling of center field. One sports reporter gushed, “The whole town is wild for Sunday.”

Twenty-four years later, the town was wild for Sunday again. The former ballplayer now was the Reverend Billy Sunday, and in January of 1914 he set up his evangelical ministry in a tented tabernacle in the Oakland section of town, fittingly enough less than a mile from the city’s new baseball stadium, Forbes Field. Over the next few months, Billy would deliver 124 services, drawing nearly 1.6 million townsfolk—way more than the Pirates would draw that year—eager to hear his pitch.

Ida had gotten an earful about the magical Mr. Sunday from her neighbor across the street, Delores Hertzel, who urged her to accompany her to see the man and the miracle. However, Ida wasn’t much for the miraculous. “I needed a miracle four years ago, when my poor daughter died, only twenty-seven, with three boys and everything to live for.”

Delores wasn’t about to take no for an answer. “Perhaps the miracle you’ve been overlooking is your grandson Alex, and the fact he’s alive, that The Dip didn’t take him along with your Irene. Perhaps the good Lord has a plan for him. Perhaps his arms are part of the plan, too.”

“Perhaps you should keep it to yourself. I’m not interested.”

In fact, during the four years following Irene’s death, the two things that interested Ida the most were medicating herself with gin or Irish whiskey and caring for her tiny grandson Alex. He lived at Ida’s house Monday through Friday, and at Abe’s on weekends, an arrangement that Abe had contentiously yet reluctantly agreed to, figuring that even though it broke up his family, what choice did he have? He was in no position to give the boy the attention he demanded, and the older boys were in school all day, at least when Arthur wasn’t playing hooky.

Delores finally wore Ida down. On a windy Saturday night toward the end of January, as the full moon intermittently flashed through the clouds of soot that wafted up from the Second Avenue rolling mills, the two women stepped down from the Negley Avenue trolley and into the throng pressing toward Reverend Sunday’s makeshift house of worship. Despite her skepticism, Ida felt herself getting swept up in the fervor.

The sidewalks overflowed with some 20,000 or so parched souls, come to look for sustenance from Reverend Billy—men on crutches, women in wheelchairs, the deaf leading the blind, the able-bodied leading the crippled, the daft, the doubters, the poor, the soon-to-be-poor, and everyday hardworking people, all politely pushing and shoving their way in closer, as close as they could come to the reverend, in their heavy coats and boots, sneezing and coughing and smoking and screaming and laughing, thrilled to be in that number marching to salvation.

Although they had arrived early and they could get no closer than twenty yards of the man, Delores and Ida could hear Billy loud and clear as he cavorted across the stage. Defying the chilly air as much as the forces of evil, Billy had discarded his white linen suit coat, and beads of sweat poured down his face. He preened and gestured like a fighting rooster, locked in a one-sided conversation with the Devil, as if the Antichrist were sitting cross-legged on a stool in front of him. He went so far as to threaten to punch the Devil in the nose and kick his teeth down his throat, to the roars and laughter of the crowd.

Ida thought she’d never heard such malarkey in her life, and was ready to leave, Delores or no Delores, but during one of Billy’s dramatic pauses there was a gap in the crowd in front of her, and she happened to lock eyes with the reverend. In that instant, it was revealed to her via his blue-eyed intensity and toothy smile that she was meant to be there, that she was meant to believe. The rest of the crowd and the world melted away. She thought she heard him say, “Sister, you must be saved by the blood of the lamb.” She clutched Delores’s arm for balance; with the sudden lightness that came over her, she felt as if she might float away, and in that moment, she was Billy’s, hook, line and sermon.

Leaving Alex in the care of Margaret Conroy, her next-door neighbor, she and Delores went back to hear Billy preach every day that week, and every day Ida dropped a dollar and change into the hat that circulated around the room. She wished she could have given more to support such a pious, driven man who’d chosen to bring God’s message to the multitudes free of charge. She needn’t have worried. The Pittsburgh campaign was very good to Billy. By the end of his eight-week stay, the reverend had pocketed nearly $35,000.

She stopped going to mass completely. All that kneeling and praying, the vagueness of the Latin, the solemnity, the confessions, the rituals, the guilt, the alabaster statues of an agonized Christ, it all seemed so stodgy and dreary and cold compared to the vibrancy of Reverend Sunday and the spark he had kindled in her life. A thought hit her like a line drive from Billy’s bat: Reverend Sunday just might be Alex’s salvation. She imagined herself and her grandson, hand in hand, his long right arm reaching up toward the heavens, walking the sawdust trail in front of the stage, and perhaps a mere touch from Billy would cure him once and for all, even him out, make him grow like a normal boy.

Almost six now, Alex was the size of a well-proportioned 18-month-old boy, except for his arms, which at rest hung down a touch over two inches below his knees. His brothers called him Stretch, which he hated.

It had taken him weeks to accept living away from the house on Mellon Street, since he insisted over and over that his mother would be coming back and he needed to be there when she did. On the first morning he was scheduled to go to Ida’s house, he held onto the frame of his mother’s bed so tightly, Abe had had to pry his long arms away.

Alex missed his father, especially in the evenings before bedtime, when Abe would hold him in his lap and let him read the newspaper to him, the comforting smell of cigar smoke on his father’s fingers. He hated to be away from his brothers, too, from the joking and teasing and game playing, and the snores and farts at night in their bedroom.