“We should go this year,” Elizabeth said, referring to Miami, which she had been lobbying for. “There are some new hotels going after the Negro market.”
“We’ll see. I’d like to,” Carney said. Christmas was busy, with people spending end-of-year money on practical items they’d put off. He was trying out I’d like to as a response to put her off, as opposed to the customary I wish we could.
Elizabeth took it as a yes and said she’d find the perfect place. “I had to give my father an earful today,” she told him.
Leland had been visiting a client near the Black Star office on Broadway and stopped in to say hello. He mentioned, among other things, that he was investing in Liberty National, and compared it to getting a tip on a winning horse. As if he’d do something as common as bet on a horse race. She hadn’t brought up the Dumas Club thing with him but he provoked her. “I asked him why he’d give money to the man who had humiliated his son-in-law—”
“I wouldn’t say—”
“Treat his family so shabby. And you know what he said? ‘The Dumas Club has a reputation.’ So I let him have it.”
“Okay.”
“I kicked him out of the office I was so mad. Mommy called me to smooth it over but I was mad all day.”
Carney told his wife it was nice of her to go to bat for him, but he didn’t need it. He changed the subject: “It tastes better the next day.” He’d allowed that Leland had taken a small delight on hearing of his rug-peddler son-in-law’s rejection, but he had refused to admit the obvious—that his wife’s father had actively undermined him. To permit that thought was to accept that Leland would never be his father-in-law in any other sense than a legal one.
Elizabeth cleared the table, a signal that she was going to get the kids ready for bed. He told them to hold on a minute: It was time to finally try out the Polaroid.
He’d snuck a peek inside the box a few times and retreated; the instructions were daunting. But he’d put off talking to Munson and that had gone as well as it could, so why not go for a streak? John reached for the Polaroid when Carney set it on the coffee table and he told the boy to stop in a voice so sharp it made them both flinch. It wasn’t cheap, the camera.
He opened the back of the Polaroid and slid in the roll of film while his family arranged themselves on the Argent sofa. The upholstery was the color of faded mint, a fine setting for their brown skin, but the camera only took black-and-white photos. John on Elizabeth’s lap, May beside them. May didn’t know how to smile yet—all instructions to do so summoned an unsettling, gum-heavy display that would not have been out of place on a Bowery bum sleeping it off in a vestibule. “Sit still,” Elizabeth said.
“I can ask Rusty to take one of all four of us,” Carney said. On 125th Street, with the store behind them, classy. He also wanted one of the store. Get a nice frame for it and put it on the wall of his office. They looked good, the three of them sitting there. A wave of worthlessness sent him sagging. It was good he wasn’t going to be in the picture because he didn’t deserve them. Aunt Millie had a few of the pictures of his mother, he remembered. Carney didn’t have a single one—his father had taken them, who knew where they’d ended up when he died—and lately his mother’s face withdrew into shadow in his memory. Next time he was at his aunt’s, he’d ask if she could spare one.
What kind of a man didn’t have pictures of his family?
The shutter mechanism and lens moved back and forth fluidly on the wheel. It wasn’t as fragile as it appeared. “Ready?”
“Before they start fussing,” Elizabeth said.
He botched it. There was a red button on the back to start the developing process and according to the instructions you were supposed to wait sixty seconds. He didn’t. Next time he’d get it right, but they were done for tonight once John started howling again. Christ, if Carney’d cried like that, his father would have smacked him across the face—and at that thought he felt the blow, reverberating through the years. Ringing in his ears, his cheek pulsing with heat. He shook it off.
Carney tore away the backing and the four of them crowded around the rind of wet film. They waited, but nothing doing. The photograph remained a light brown square with three thin silhouettes where his family should have been. They looked like ghosts.
FIVE
The woman who lived in the third-floor apartment of 288 Convent was not on the lease. The tenant of record was one Thomas Andrew Bruce, known in grubby corners and underlit byways of the city as Cheap Brucie. When the landlord found out what he did for a living and made a fuss, Cheap Brucie threw him an extra fifty bucks a month. That shut him up.