“She’s cleaning the house out little by little,” said my dad, “hence the multifarious bags.”
“—not to mention the insults and the smell of his excreta,” she went on.
I stood up, hoping she’d get the hint. I had no desire to discuss Dad’s excreta — or anyone else’s — with a sweaty and exhausted Pole.
“Get someone to relieve me a few nights,” she ordered, heading for the door. “I gotta lotta werk on.”
She was mixed up in illegal sweatshops, and perhaps even illegal aliens. A true wart on the heel of humanity, she even had her own off-off-illegal sweatshop, in which the most desperate of Eastern Europeans put together for her benefit little trinkets and zippered bags made from the offcuts of the real thing.
“When you kill a pig, nothing goes to loss but the squeal,” Dad pronounced as she flounced out the door.
We were alone. My son Sean hadn’t come home last night, an increasingly frequent occurrence. The big house was silent but for the ticking of old clocks, Dad’s only hobby and luxury. Every room had several of them. “Are them things gonna be bongin’ all night?” my wife had said the first night we slept there after the honeymoon.
Naïma, the day-shift nurse, was late. Normally my wife dealt with any kind of overlap problem before going off to her museum job. But she was absent at the moment, as she was more and more these days.
“Where’s the Swamp Rat?” asked Dad, as if reading my thoughts.
Nulty Jr. eyed Nulty Sr. I wondered just how senile the old man really was.
“Some art shindig in St. Petersburg,” I replied. I wondered why I bothered.
“Home to the swamps,” said Dad.
“No, the other St. Petersburg, the Russian one.”
That seemed to silence him, or else his thoughts wandered off to something else. He dubbed my wife the Swamp Rat as soon as he heard she came from Tampa, Florida. At the time, I was offended for her. I was in love with this dark little hustler — she reminded me of Edith Piaf. I called her La Piaf. Then. But little by little the very things that pleased me at first made me hate her later: her bustling ass, the way she crimped her thin frizzy hair, a moue thing she did with her mouth as if to strengthen up facial muscles. I soon saw her thrifty housekeeping as meanness. She was prepared to spend money on no one but herself. She even squeezed enough for little facelifts and gold wire here and there over the years. This was on top of sports clubs, gyms, dance classes, and trainers. The house was feng shui — compliant, another recent source of trouble and expense.
By now, I approved the nickname. She’d been in it for the money from the start, and I had been reeled in, hook, line, and sinker. I suspect the facelifts and staying in shape were preparation for getting away from me in the best possible circumstances. Women always went away — my mother took off without a by-your-leave.
I left the old man alone for a minute and went down to collect the mail. Although I received my business mail in the bar we owned on Broadway, The Two Way Inn (because there are two ways in), the family’s private mail arrived here. Sometimes Naïma or Old Jessica left personal mail lying around for days. I disapproved of such a risk. Dad trained me to structure my day around things like that: “Get the unpleasant stuff out of the way first. Leave nothing lying to fester.”
There was a postcard from the Swamp Rat singing the praises of St. Petersburg. I knew she was there with the big Armenian, her latest conquest, but I could prove nothing and was waiting for something to come to a head. There was junk mail for my son Sean and more for my daughter Maureen, who had just moved out for the second time with a second man. Rectitude hadn’t made it to the third generation.
At the bottom there was a letter with a Canadian postmark from a lawyer’s office in Québec. My heart gave a lurch. Suddenly Naïma was behind me. I smelled her perfume before I turned to face her. She was flushed.
“Musing again?” She had a light, assured voice. I envied her calm contentment. In another life I would have loved her and this would have done me good.
I looked at the letter then looked at her.
“Come on, I’ll make you a decent coffee before you go.” She took my elbow.
I walked to the bar each morning as Dad once did. This always cleared my head. There was no spring in New York this year. There never is. I left the house huddling against a cold wind blowing off the river, but by the time I reached Mt. Carmel Cemetery, the summer had arrived. Here it was, late, when we’d almost given up hope.
I paused for a moment to look at the broken, half-buried headstones of Irish-born immigrants from famine times, people who’d worked in the factories, greenhouses, and homes of the nearby rich. Every dog has his day, I could hear Dad say, although I knew the old man always felt a bit of a fraud in the mansion on 12th Street. It was the house which had so impressed La Piaf at first. I heard my father again: Not a house for a humble tiller of the soil. Somehow it was bearable because it wasn’t ours. It belonged to Dad’s brother, Uncle Eddie, Canadian millionaire. The Two Way Inn belonged to him as well. No one knew exactly how Eddie Nulty had made his money. Fact is, he was the eldest of ten, had come out around the time of the Irish Civil War, worked in bars at first, then got on the ladder and sent for his little brother.
The further I walked, the more my step steadied and took on a rhythm independent of my thoughts. I could hear the reassuring rattle of the El.
“And that’s when the difference between the two brothers showed,” my mother told me, way back. “Eddie went to get your father off the boat. He was crumpled, dirty, and sick after all that time at sea. But Eddie pounced! On what? Your dad’s boots. They weren’t polished, and were laced with binder twine.”
“So Eddie was pissed?”
“Watch your language. Eddie was mixed up in something,” said Mom. “I heard talk of guns. Your father told me a story about when he was a boy, going to the market with their father in the early morning. They came across Eddie doing lookout on the road. ‘What’s up?’ your grandfather asked. ‘Court martial,’ Eddie said. ‘They’re in the field, decidin’ whether they’ll kill himself or not.’ ‘Have nothing to do with all this,’ the father told the young boy.”
She was convinced Eddie was still mixed up in something. Nobody could get that rich by legal means. Yet occasionally, when Dad was on a bender, he got so out of hand that Mom called Eddie, regretting it afterwards. Somehow Eddie knew how to whip Dad into line. And things would continue for another while. When it was over, Mom banged on about conversations she’d heard, money she’d seen handed over in cabs, and about a bar being the best place to launder money. “What do you know about laundering?” I often replied. “You got Jessica to do it for you!”
I regretted such remarks now, and wondered where she was.
In no time at all I reached Broadway, with its crowds and traffic and fruit displays. I liked it better here. This was home. Men on the sidewalk spoke Chinese and Slav and Arabic into cell phones. Visit Queens and see the world. Here was where the Nultys started out, in a small apartment over a busy junction. Young parents, two small children, plenty of stress, and plenty of fun. Dad drove a bus and binge-drank. One day he parked the bus full of passengers and went into The Beer Garten (there was no garten) and got drunk. There was hell at home and Eddie was sent for.
It was an icy winter’s day when Eddie came up the steep narrow stairs wearing a black coat with some kind of fur collar, like a rich man in the movies. Mom wrung her hands. Dad was strangely obeisant as if to his own father, and it was all settled. The German wanted to sell up The Beer Garten. Eddie would buy and Dad would run it. He had to make it work and live on the proceeds. The word autonomous was bandied about.