Beware the Solitary Drinker (4 page)

He usually relieved Duffy the doorman at midnight, but tonight was his night off. Carl had trouble keeping track of what day it was because his shift started at midnight. The first week on the job he was off on Saturday, so he got drunk in Oscar's with me Friday night. When he went into work Saturday night, Duffy was mad as hell.

“What are you doing here now?” Duffy bellowed at him. “And where were you yesterday?”

“You sure this is your night off?” I asked Carl.

“No. But I don't give a shit.” He took a sip of his drink and grimaced. He was in one of his Captain Haddock moods. “We're all being investigated.”

“You, too.”

“All the doormen on West End Avenue. We're watchdogs for the community.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw Angelina.”

“Did you tell the police?”

“No.” He looked defiantly at Nigel.

Nigel had a higher opinion of law enforcement than the rest of us since he seemed to think of himself as a member of respectable society, so I, too, expected him to complain. But he didn't, just played with the lime section floating in his ginger ale.

Sam the Hammer, hunched into his Yankee windbreaker, drank coffee at the end of the bar next to Oscar, who was doping out the races for the next day at Belmont.

“They busted Boss,” he told no one in particular. “They're closing his numbers joints.”

We all sympathized in the way the neighbors might if Mrs. Murphy's plumbing went awry.

“Did he forget to pay someone?” Carl asked.

“The girl getting murdered,” Sam said, still not looking up, as if he might not be talking to us after all. “They got to do something.”

Everyone clammed up and looked at his drink when he said this. We hadn't talked much about Angelina, but she was on my mind, not far from the surface most of the time. I figured it was like that for everyone else, too.

Sam didn't have much to say beyond that; he was a guy who kept his own counsel, anyway. Distinguished in a certain New York City ne'er-do-well style, Sam wore his hair in a slicked-down, fifties DA, even though it was turning gray, as were his eyebrows and his salt and pepper walrus mustache. He knew about crime, Sam did. That is, he knew who did it most of the time—knew them personally. He might know who killed Angelina. But Sam was closed-mouthed; he would say what he wanted to say. If you asked him anything beyond this, he'd snort, hunch up further into his jacket, and might not speak to you again for a couple of days.

One of the reasons Sam came into Oscar's was because he liked Carl van Sagan. Carl was a writer, a poet who worked midnights as a doorman to support his muse. Sam told stories to Carl that I got to hear because I was the bartender. He wanted Carl to tell him how to write a book.

“A book about characters,” Sam told Carl. “I know some real characters.”

Carl raised an eyebrow.

“You're a writer, right?”

Carl nodded.

“Can you make any money at that?”

“I'm hoping to sell one of my poems to the movies,” Carl said.

Nodding his head, pursing his lips, Sam looked Carl over. “I suppose not…”

Carl hitched up his glasses, wrinkled his forehead, which he did when he was interested in what was being said, and which gave him that owl-like look, and bought Sam a drink. The only time Sam drank was under such auspices.

“I just want to know how you write it down,” Sam said after sipping his beer, the foam decorating his mustache as he turned to look at Carl with some earnestness. “I mean, do you got to start when the guy's born?”

His first character was Nick. “I told him they're going to build a statue of him in Greece. When those guys get off the plane there, he'll be right in front of them.” Nick, it turned out, was a handicapper who went to the track with Sam, but who only gave tips to Greeks. “They love him,” Sam said.

Carl wrinkled up his forehead, cleaned his glasses, and ordered another scotch. Sam wanted coffee.

When I got back with the drinks, they were talking about capital punishment.

Sam was in favor of it. “If I go back again, it'll be the third time,” Sam said over his coffee cup. “That means for keeps. I'd rather be dead.”

Listening to Sam talk to Carl, I found out how he'd gotten to jail in the first place. It was back in the Fifties when he thought he was a hot shot and went to work running numbers for Boss.

“Three guys jumped me in an alley behind the Terminal Bar down on 10th Avenue. They were going to kill me. They threw me against a loading dock. I looked down and there was a hammer. God must have put that hammer there. I picked it up and clobbered the guy closest to me.

“The cops came in the Terminal an hour later. They said, ‘Hey, you with the hat on.' I did nine years for manslaughter.”

Now he sat beside Oscar, who tried to ignore him. Sam was one of the many customers, like Reuben and all the Eritrean and Namibian refugees, Oscar didn't like. But he left them alone when they came in to see me. Oscar wouldn't fire me, even though he didn't like me either. He believed in the pre-eminence of the bartender, having been one himself, so he was afraid he'd lose all of the customers if I left.

This night, as I refilled Sam's coffee cup, he reached into the pocket of his Yankee jacket and handed me a napkin with “Briar Patch 2nd” written on it.

Oscar, looking over my shoulder, said he lost his shirt on the last tip Sam gave him. His dark eyes filled with sadness. He was in a mood to lament. “Someone being killed is the worst thing that can happen to a bar,” he told us all.

Sam said there were shirts for sale at 96th Street, and crying towels too.

All of this was on the surface. No one said how sad it was that Angelina was dead. We didn't try to comfort one another. These were hard guys; they'd already suffered through the holes in their hearts. But, every few minutes, talk would stop. The men would stare into their glasses or at the bottles lining the back wall. Oscar would rattle the pages of
The Racing Form
. These moments, I knew, were for Angelina. We did miss her after all.

Later, after I'd done last call, I poured a final coffee for Sam and some for me and took a chance. “What do you think happened to Angelina?” I asked. It wasn't a question to ask Sam, and, up to this point, I'd been working pretty hard on pretending to myself I didn't care who killed her, so I was a little bit surprised at myself.

“She was crazy,” Sam said. “You can't do those kinds of things.”

“What things?”

“The weirdos.”

I walked away from him to the other end of the bar. I felt that pang you get when you discover something terribly embarrassing about someone close to you. Sam seemed to think I knew what he meant, and I was too embarrassed for Angelina to ask.

At the end of the bar near the door, Nigel and Carl talked quietly. I heard Carl say she must have a family.

They're sending her body back to Springfield,” Nigel said.

“That's gruesome,” said Reuben across the semi-darkness from a couple of bar stools away. “It's just a fucking body now. What difference does it make what you do with it?” He was drunk and ugly, trying to provoke Nigel.

“Cut it out, Reuben,” I said.

“That's what we all are. Nothing special—rot in a couple of days. In a week no one will remember her. You,” he said to Nigel. “When you die, no one will remember the next day.”

I sent Reuben home.

“Maybe we should send flowers,” someone said from the darkness. Whoever it was, his words were slurred, so it took us a while to get his meaning. But, despite this heroic effort at community, it wouldn't work. The winos came anonymously to the bar precisely because there were no obligations. They wouldn't send flowers; they wouldn't go to her funeral if it was down the street. They wouldn't go to my funeral.

Carl van Sagan was thoughtful. He'd liked Angelina, too. Sometimes, after the bar closed, she and I stopped off to visit him in his little booth off the lobby in the big West End Avenue building where he worked.

“I think we should go to her funeral,” Carl said.

“What did you say?” I asked, my first response to words that take me by surprise, even when I've heard them perfectly.

It took quite a while, until well after closing, till everyone was gone except Carl, for me to give in. I thought, at first, Angelina would go away from my life now that she was dead. Nothing connected me to her. But I couldn't get rid of the feeling that I owed her. I thought maybe I was supposed to have loved her after all and taken care of her—that my hard heart had helped kill her.

The next afternoon, Carl and I, both wearing borrowed suits, went to Springfield on a Peter Pan bus. We took a cab from the bus depot to a funeral home just outside the city in a town called Chicopee that looked like a set from a 1950s movie. I recognized a bank and a gas station, a liquor store and a bar. I saw a used furniture store, then a street of storefronts with drab displays behind foggy plate glass windows. In a men's apparel store, the mannequins wore fedora hats and loose fitting double breasted worsteds, as if they had been dressed shortly after World War II and hadn't changed since. This was what Chicopee felt like—frozen since World War II.

The cab entered a traffic circle of the every man for himself variety. Beyond it, a bridge crossed a quiet river; next to the bridge, a red brick mill, a vestige of the New England textile era, stretched out along the riverbank. We turned right and passed the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union office. It, too, was in a storefront, next to a store that sold surgical equipment. The funeral home was a large, old house a short way up a hill. When the cabbie dropped us off, he promised to pick us up again in an hour and take us to a restaurant in walking distance of the bus depot.

A directory with a black background and gold borders listed Angelina's name. When I read it, I wished I hadn't come. I had to just stand there thinking about her being dead. I couldn't make the idea of it go away anymore. Carl walked ahead of me into the viewing room and up to the casket. He stood with his head down. I stood beside him, holding myself still to keep from running away. I didn't want to pray, and I didn't want to look at Angelina's dead body.

On our way in, we'd passed two women, one young, one older, sitting in the front row of chairs. All of the other chairs were empty. I didn't know how long we should stand in front of the casket. I didn't know what to do when I stopped standing there either.

Carl shifted on his feet beside me; finally, I turned and walked over to the older woman and asked if she was Angelina's mother.

“I knew Angelina in the city,” I told her. “She was a good person. I'm sorry she's dead.”

“Thank you,” the woman said. Her eyes were expressionless; they seemed almost cold. I wondered if she felt responsible for her daughter's death.

“My other daughter, Janet,” she said turning to the young woman next to her.

“Brian McNulty,” I said, shaking her hand. This sister wasn't anything like Angelina. Very businesslike in her tailored suit that seemed very obviously not borrowed, she shook hands like a salesman. But her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, her face pale and drawn.

“Did you know Angelina well?” she asked.

“Not very well,” I said, while Carl mumbled his name to Mrs. Carter.

“Nice of you to come all the way from the city,” the mother said.

Carl nodded, smiling, then thought better of it and wiped the smile off his face.

“She used to come into my bar,” I said.

“Oh,” said her sister in a tone that made me feel unwholesome.

“She sang there with a band sometimes,” I mumbled.

“And you, Mr. —”

“Carl.”

“Mr. Carl.”

“Not Mr. Carl,” Carl said. He was more flustered than I was.

“How did you know my sister, Carl?”

“From the bar…We were friends…She was really talented.” Carl spoke earnestly and meant what he said, but it was lost on her.

Distaste dripped from sister Janet's words; brooding anger smoldered in her eyes. Yet I couldn't help noticing that, though this sister wasn't at all like Angelina, she was attractive in her own right. Nicely built, shapely, nice legs. But she didn't do anything with it—at least not for us. She carried herself with a mixture of elegance and aloofness, as if she'd been bred for respectability, her tone and manner suggesting she knew we were part of the seamier side of her sister's life. Her politeness was vague. I felt like a delivery man.

The mother, short and stocky, her hair tied in an efficient looking bun, her dark blue suit serviceable and nondescript, kept the empty expression on her face. I knew from Angelina that she was an office clerk, and she looked like one—the kind who goes by the book and can't bend the rules and takes it personally if you haven't paid your electric bill on time.

Some other, mostly younger people began arriving then, probably high school friends of Angelina's. Later, as Carl and I sat in the back row on cushioned folding chairs staring straight in front of us, guys in suits came in and with them women who looked accustomed to wearing high heels. These were friends of the sister. Janet hugged each of them in a way that suggested she was glad they came but felt funny about the hugging. None of them seemed the hugging sort either.

We shook hands with mother and daughter once more before we left. The mother smiled tightly. But something had changed in the daughter. She seemed more interested in me. Her eyes, still red and puffy, were almost friendly. “I'd like to talk a minute,” she said. “I'll walk out with you.”

She walked with Carl and me out onto the porch of the funeral parlor. A black car with a taxi light on the roof idled at the curb. Carl and I glanced at each other, then looked longingly at the cab.

“I'm coming to New York in a few days to pick up whatever might remain of Angelina's things,” Janet Carter said. “Might I call you?”