“I’m telling you.”
Rusty crossed his arms. “Look for yourself.” He and his wife, Beatrice, had been arguing lately, according to Marie. Carney figured this defiance echoed new household postures.
Back when Carney drove his father’s truck he made the occasional delivery of a used sofa or bureau. He remembered the dingy marble steps of 370, the splintered black-and-white tile on the floor and the mismatched light fixtures. He had paid one of the neighborhood guys five bucks to help carry a quite pristine Collins-Hathaway couch up to the second floor. He’d forgotten the name of the customer but recalled the sunlight pulsing through the living room windows and the vista of the park. A year or two later, he had to chase the first-floor tenant around when the guy fell behind on his installment plan, Argent lounger. He was well acquainted with 370. On his way over he practiced his rant. “Make me get up from my chair and drag my ass down there…”
But the old tenement with the tight and tormenting stairwell was gone. This yellow-brick building had replaced eight townhouses, certainly big enough to have a 3C, even a 3M or N. Rusty produced a satisfied smirk when Carney returned. His pissy new orientation was regrettable. Beatrice had always been such a quiet little creature. Georgia peach. This place will help you find your voice if it doesn’t break you first.
371, 370. The old city sat on one corner, opposite the new city. How did Carney used to put it: Churn, baby, churn. Atop the unchanging schist, the people replaced each other, the ethnic tribes from all over trading places in the tenements and townhouses, which in turn fell and were replaced by the next buildings. The city will condemn 371 and the other three distressed properties down the line, raze them, and throw up new housing, like they were doing all over now. “Urban renewal”： You have to clear the dead stuff before the fresh growth can prosper. Sure, shady landlords get their big payouts from the crooked insurance adjusters while the law looks the other way, and then the construction firms grease the palms of city officials for contracts, nice paychecks for everybody out of the misery, but people need places to live. Right? Mrs. Ruiz’s boy is in the hospital, who knew if he was going to get out, but the clever men got paid. How fat were the envelopes when Oakes worked in the DA’s office?
Come a long way from what, motherfucker?
There was no big, bright Homes 4 Harlem seal by 371’s front door, so it belonged to a different community-improvement program. Carving up the blighted blocks, everybody getting a piece. Who got the bigger envelopes, prosecutors or community hustlers? Next fundraiser, he’d ask Oakes that very question. Of course you’ve got the bid, for a little consideration. Carney was starting to sound like his father, making everybody into a crook. He imagined Mrs. Ruiz’s boy waking up alone in the dark apartment—Carney had been there, kicked out of sleep by a siren, or violence in the alley, or a rat skittering across his feet, overtaken by the sick awareness that no one was coming to help him.
He hadn’t come a long way at all if the apartment on 127th remained so close; now instead of him living in it, it lived in him. What kind of man torches a building with people inside? Big Mike coming home those nights, stinking of kerosene and rotgut. How many kids and mothers had he burned up, burned out? Carney knew the kind of man who did such things. They were never called to account.
Perhaps it was time.
TWO
The next day he took his nephew Robert to Gimbels for some shirts. Ellen, the boy’s mother, always rebuffed Carney when he tried to help out, so he told her the polo shirts were part of the Carney’s Furniture uniform, and that as such, Carney was responsible for them. He had a side play to throw in two pairs of nice Levi’s while they were in the boys department, and it came off without a hitch. The boy was a beanpole, like his father at that age, which made Carney smile. They took the 5 train up from Eighty-sixth and Robert kept reaching inside the Gimbels bag to touch the soft cotton shirts.
Robert was not a talker; he had inherited his mother’s reserve. In general Carney preferred a silent companion, but he’d never broken through with the boy and in his eagerness for connection he made nonsense conversation. Like a lock man trying to spring a combination by spinning random numbers, no kind of lock man at all.
“Catch the Mets last night?”
“Mets? No.”
The movement of the car shook the passengers. “Doing that basketball program again this summer?”
“Nah.”
A poster for Midway flickered between girders in the 103rd Street station. “You ever see a movie with that Sensurround?” Carney said. “Where they shake the seats?”
“I saw Earthquake,” Robert said.
“That was a good one.”
Robert nodded. Carney left the kid alone. Big Mike used to call Carney out for being “so quiet,” when he was just thinking his thoughts, so he let the kid be.
The first time Carney saw Robert was at his father’s funeral. Freddie had a lot of friends Carney had never met—smooth-talking hoods and broke-ass alto sax players and Caucasian beatnik scam artists and socialist chicks from Garden City—so the thin, nervous-looking woman with the young boy did not stand out particularly. Ellen was Freddie’s type, full-lipped with long black hair and black shadows under each eye, just like Janet Brown, whom Freddie had chased all through junior high, and daffy Penny Lewis, who had tolerated his cousin’s mischief for a few months back in ’52. The boy was two years old. He did not speak or fidget, he held his mother’s hand and moved his head, chicken-like, taking it all in. Had his father’s eyes even then, and Carney kicked himself later for not putting it together. He had not been himself in those days after Freddie died. They left early.
When the boy turned six, Ellen invited Aunt Millie to the party and she brought Carney along. Ellen had written to her the previous winter and laid it out, not asking for anything, just thought she’d like to know she was a grandmother. According to Ellen, she and Freddie had been together for a brief spell in ’61. She never told him about their son.
“He’s a nice boy, and she’s trying,” Aunt Millie said. Carney asked about a paternity test. She said, “For God’s sake, look at him.” Elizabeth berated him when she found out he hadn’t brought a gift and that was the start of birthday toys and Christmas sweaters.
Ellen got married to a bus driver named Booker, an older man, a widower with two kids; the five of them lived over on Edgecombe next to the park. Booker treated Robert okay from all accounts, didn’t hold anything against him. Booker made a good living, but there’s nothing wrong with a new shirt or two from a close relative.
Aunt Millie had been trying to expand her grandmotherly duties for years. Ellen refused any overture that crossed her invisible line. Recently Carney discovered the same urge to reach out. With Robert growing more into his father’s image, with the same jittery hand gestures and laugh—even though they had never met!—Carney found himself telling Freddie stories. Sharing his cousin’s favorite movies, go-to sandwiches, the variety of mischief he’d conned Carney into. Robert pretended to be interested, affecting the familiar expression of a broke customer who’d drifted into a more expensive corner of the store and had to fake interest until he could make a getaway.