It was fun. Uncle Pedro built a bunk bed for Freddie’s room. He was around more then and did fatherlike things, like take them to the park or the pictures. Aunt Millie was a good cook, and Carney didn’t have that blessing in his life again until he married Elizabeth. The best part was Freddie and him living like brothers. Freddie’d kick the top bunk to wake him: Hey, you up? Can you believe the look on his face? I got another idea…They had devised a jokey shorthand and way of looking at the world. When they shared a room it was like that private mythology was carved into stone tablets, by dancing fire, like in The Ten Commandments.
Carney cried the day his father came for him and took him those two blocks home. The same building and same apartment layout, but two floors lower. Same crummy everything else.
Carney and Aunt Mille took their old places at the kitchen table. Freddie’s seat was piled up with magazines, last week’s Amsterdam News on top. Aunt Millie wore a simple blue dress and her hair was pulled back in a bun, which meant that Pedro was away. She only fixed herself up when her husband was home for a visit; who else was there to look pretty for? Lately he spent most of the year in Florida, where he had another woman and a young daughter.
Aunt Millie had made a butter cake with a cherry glaze. Carney complimented her energetically.
She asked after the children and he gave her a May and John update. Elizabeth’s father had made a demeaning comment at their wedding, and now it was hard to get his aunt and his wife in the same room. The four of them, him and Elizabeth and the kids, had run into Aunt Millie on the street on July 4th, which was nice. “You at the hospital tonight?” he asked.
“Six o’clock.” She’d take day shifts for a long stretch, then switch to night shifts. A few years ago she’d been promoted to some supervisory role, but most of her job was still nursing.
“I liked talking to that Marie. She comes in all the way from Brooklyn?”
“Every day.”
“Raymond! With employees who take the subway in from Brooklyn!” She told him his mother would be proud—of his education, his store, the way he took care of his family. By implication: as opposed to how his father had conducted his life.
His mother died of pneumonia in ’42, and the next year these birthday get-togethers started, at this kitchen table, Millie and the boys. Nothing fancy, nothing long, sometimes they didn’t even mention Carney’s mother at all. Jawed about movies. Freddie was the first to miss one, four years ago. Last year Carney missed it because of bronchitis. This time he’d forgotten it altogether.
Shamed, he said, “Freddie?” To divert attention to the one who hadn’t shown up at all.
“He doesn’t call me back,” Aunt Millie said. “I’ll run into someone, they’ve seen him at this place, they’ve seen him at some other place. He doesn’t call me back.”
“He looked okay when I saw him.”
She exhaled. Once they got Freddie out of the way, Carney and his aunt did what relatives and friends do sometimes—pretended that time and circumstance had not sent them down different paths, and that they were as close as they had ever been. The performance was easy for Carney; he was scheming so much these days. For his aunt, it was likely a welcome refuge. She told him that a Puerto Rican had taken over Mickey’s Grocery and filled it with these Spanish foods and drinks; Miss Isabel from upstairs had moved into the new public housing complex on 131st, where Maybelle’s Beauty used to be; and don’t eat at that new place across from the Apollo, Jimmy Ellis had a bad meatloaf there and had to get his stomach pumped.
Things she would’ve told her husband, her son, her dear little sister, if they were around. But there was just Carney.
To sell his enthusiasm for the annual get-together, he asked to see the photo album. Aunt Millie rummaged but couldn’t place it. When she called later that night, he thought it was to tell him she’d found it. Instead she said Freddie had been picked up. The police came for Bismarck Dixon, and he’d been there and mouthed off, you know how he does. So they took Freddie, too.
* * *
*
Pepper was the first person Carney brought in on the Duke job. Early June, three days after the furniture salesman’s unsuccessful attempt to retrieve his five hundred dollars. Pepper occasionally used the store as an answering machine. This time he got a job out of it.
What happened was, Pepper called Carney’s Furniture to get rendezvous instructions for his last job, a warehouse rip-off. The job had gone off without a hitch. A rug wholesaler on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn, Royal Oriental, received a shipment from a particular overseas supplier twice a year. Ship comes into port, sits at customs, they off-load the rugs and carpets and what have you, and Royal Oriental forks over the dough. The night before they pay for all that inventory the warehouse safe is full of cash, foreign rugs being a notorious way to wash money.