An hour earlier he’d been at Juke’s Joint in Harlem with Cork and Nico. An hour before that he’d been at a speakeasy someplace in midtown, where Cork had taken him after they’d lost almost a hundred bucks between them playing poker with a bunch of Poles over in Greenpoint. They’d all laughed when Cork said he and Sonny should leave while they still had the shirts on their backs. Sonny’d laughed too, though a second earlier he was on the verge of calling the biggest Polack at the table a miserable son-of-a-bitch cheater. Cork had a way of reading Sonny, and he’d gotten him out of there before he did something stupid. By the time he wound up at Juke’s, if he wasn’t soused he was getting close to it. After a little dancing and some more drinking, he’d had enough for one night and was on his way home when a friend of Cork’s stopped him at the door and told him about Tom. He’d almost punched the kid before he caught himself and slipped him a few bucks instead. Kid gave him the address, and now he was slumped down in some worn-out truck that looked like it dated back to the Great War, watching shadows play over Kelly O’Rourke’s curtains.
Inside the apartment, Tom went about getting dressed while Kelly paced the room holding a sheet pinned to her breasts. The sheet looped under one breast and dragged along the floor beside her. She was a graceless girl with a dramatically beautiful face—flawless skin, red lips, and blue-green eyes framed by swirls of bright red hair—and there was something dramatic, too, in the way she moved about the room, as if she were acting in a scene from a movie and imagining Tom as Cary Grant or Randolph Scott.
“But why do you have to go?” she asked yet again. With her free hand she held her forehead, as if she were taking her own temperature. “It’s the middle of the night, Tom. Why do you want to be running out on a girl?”
Tom slipped into his undershirt. The bed he had just gotten out of was more a cot than a bed, and the floor around it was cluttered with magazines, mostly copies of the Saturday Evening Post, and Grand, and American Girl. At his feet, Gloria Swanson looked up at him alluringly from the cover of an old issue of The New Movie. “Doll,” he said.
“Don’t call me doll,” Kelly shot back. “Everybody calls me doll.” She leaned against the wall beside the window and let the sheet drop. She posed for him, cocking her hip slightly. “Why don’t you want to stay with me, Tom? You’re a man, aren’t you?”
Tom put on his shirt and began buttoning it while he stared at Kelly. There was something electric and anxious in her eyes that bordered on skittishness, as if she was expecting something startling to happen at any moment. “You might be the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he said.
“You’ve never been with a better looker than me?”
“Never been with a girl more beautiful than you,” Tom said. “Not at all.”
The anxiousness disappeared from Kelly’s eyes. “Spend the night with me, Tom,” she said. “Don’t go.”
Tom sat on the edge of Kelly’s bed, thought about it, and then put on his shoes.
Sonny watched the light from a cast-iron lamppost shine off the parallel lines of railroad tracks dividing the street. He let his hand rest on the eight ball screwed atop the truck’s stick shift and remembered sitting on the sidewalk as a kid and watching freight trains rumble down Eleventh, a New York City cop on horseback leading the way to keep drunks and little kids from getting run down. Once he’d seen a man in a fancy suit standing atop one of the freights. He’d waved and the man scowled and spit, as if the sight of Sonny disgusted him. When he asked his mother why the man had acted that way, she raised her hand and said, “Sta’zitt’! Some cafon’ spits on the sidewalk and you ask me? Madon’!” She walked away angrily, which was her typical response to most questions Sonny asked as a kid. It seemed to him then that her every sentence started with Sta’zitt’! or Va fa’ Napule! or Madon’! Inside the apartment, he was a pest, a nudge, or a scucc’, and so he spent all the time he could outside, running the streets with neighborhood kids.
Being in Hell’s Kitchen, looking across the avenue to a line of shops at street level and two or three floors of apartments above them, brought Sonny back to his childhood, to all the years his father got up each morning and drove downtown to Hester Street and his office at the warehouse, where he still worked—though, now, of course, now that Sonny was grown, it was all different, how he thought of his father and what his father did for a living. But back then his father was a businessman, the owner with Genco Abbandando of the Genco Pura Olive Oil business. Those days, when Sonny saw his father on the street, he charged at him, running up and taking his hand and jabbering about whatever was on his little kid’s mind. Sonny saw the way other men looked at his father and he was proud because he was a big shot who owned his own business and everyone—everyone—treated him with respect, so that Sonny, when he was still a boy, came to think of himself as a kind of prince. The big shot’s son. He was eleven years old before all that changed, or maybe shifted is a better word than changed, because he still thought of himself as a prince—though, now, of course, as a prince of a different sort.
Across the avenue, in Kelly O’Rourke’s apartment over a barbershop, behind the familiar black latticework of fire escapes, a figure brushed against the curtain, parting it slightly so that Sonny could see a strip of bright light and a white-pink flash of skin and a shock of red hair, and then it was as if he were in two places at once: Seventeen-year-old Sonny looked up to the curtained second-floor window of Kelly O’Rourke’s apartment, while simultaneously eleven-year-old Sonny was on a fire escape looking down through a window and into the back room of a beer joint by the piers. His memory of that night was vivid in places. It hadn’t been late, maybe nine thirty, ten o’clock at the latest. He’d just gotten into bed when he heard his father and mother exchange words. Not loud—Mama never raised her voice to Pop—and Sonny couldn’t make out the words, but a tone unmistakable to a kid, a tone that said his mother was upset or worried, and then the door opening and closing and the sound of Pop’s footsteps on the stairs. Back then there was no one posted at the front door, no one waiting in the big Packard or the black eight-cylinder Essex to take Pop wherever he wanted to go. That night Sonny watched from his window as his father went out the front door and down the front steps and headed toward Eleventh. Sonny was dressed and flying down the fire escape to the street by the time his father turned the corner and disappeared.
He was several blocks from his home before he bothered to ask himself what he was doing. If his father caught him he’d give him a good beating, and why not? He was out on the street when he was supposed to be in bed. The worry slowed him down and he almost turned around and headed back—but his curiosity got the better of him and he pulled the brim of his wool cap down almost to his nose and continued to follow his father, leaping in and out of shadows and keeping a full block between them. When they crossed over into the neighborhoods where the Irish kids lived, Sonny’s level of concern ticked up several notches. He wasn’t allowed to play in these neighborhoods, and he wouldn’t have even if he were allowed, because he knew Italian kids got beat up here, and he’d heard stories of kids who’d wandered into the Irish neighborhoods and disappeared for weeks before they turned up floating in the Hudson. A block ahead of him, his father walked quickly, his hands in his pockets and the collar of his jacket turned up against a cold wind blowing in off the river. Sonny followed until they were almost to the piers, and there he saw his father stop a moment in front of a brick building with a battered wood door. Sonny ducked into a storefront and waited. When the door opened and his father entered the building, the sound of laughter and men singing rushed out onto the street and then hushed when the door closed, though Sonny could still hear it, only muted.