City of Hope (24 page)

So I took her aside and we came up with a plan. Away from ears that might be offended, Bridie and I were able to agree that if we started giving away food, we would become a charity serving every­body but ourselves. We could give away leftovers from the back kitchen door at the end of the day, but we agreed it was humiliating for people to take the scraps from another man's table, like common dogs. I had truly learned that people always prefer not to take charity when they can prove their independence in some way. For that reason we decided to run a “five-cent” counter in the shop and cafe.

Bridie and Anna came up with ingenious ways to make delicious food for almost nothing. Using ends of meat and crusts, they made up piles of sandwiches. They sold corners of lasagne, and slices of “poor man's spaghetti omelets.” Slightly burned cookies and cakes and day-old loaves were all sold for five cents. We opened the five-cent counter between three and six every day. It was first come, first served. When the food was gone, it was gone, and nobody's money was turned away. We were not a soup line or a charity—and there was no dress code. You could eat your food in the cafe or you could take it away; it made no odds to us.

The fancy, upmarket housewives often lined up for bargains alongside the homeless, and sat side by side at crowded tables eating their sandwiches and spending their money. Some of our regular customers were so taken with the atmosphere of our shop that they offered their services to us as volunteers. We explained that we were a business cooperative, not a charity.

Bridie reckoned that the five-cent line was paying for itself. I asked her to put the money from it aside, so that we could account for it separately. We were taking money from the poor, after all, and if we got the opportunity it would be nice to give some of it back someday. Maybe start up a new charitable venture with it.

All these things were possible because we worked together. There were so many of us, and because we lived and worked as a community there was always somebody there to help—always an extra pair of hands to make a new project happen. There was bickering from time to time: Anna wanted the walls of the cafe painted yellow, and was offended when Maureen replaced her red gingham tablecloths with new blue ones. Johnny was angry because he had helped Mario build the smoking shed, and felt that entitled him to a cut of the food business. There was always somebody who felt they should be earning more, or that somebody else should be earning less than the next person. But in reality everything was divided equally.

Charles delighted in pointing out to me that we were living in a Communist utopia. In those early months, however, there were still so many mouths to feed, so many houses to finish, that it was hard to keep a track of everything. Charles turned out to be a godsend, able to arbitrate disagreements, as he had a way of making everything seem fair. Where Matt was afraid of confrontation, and I was too fond of it—always pushing back the compulsion to remind people to be grateful for the roof over their heads and food in their stomachs—Charles was able to charm everybody and keep them all on the path of working toward helping one another.

I believed, cynically perhaps, that it was only a matter of time before the petty sniping developed into a full-scale war. Sooner or later people would tire of helping one another and would want to help themselves. I didn't know how that would happen, or when. I knew that the labor and money would have to be divided more equally, but for the time being I just ran the show as best I could.

I worked in the shop myself most days. Giving myself no set task meant that I could set about doing whatever needed to be done, from hour to hour, day to day: waiting on tables, sweeping up, wiping around the kitchen and, when things were running smoothly, simply sitting at a table out front, puttering through the paperwork, listening to the ping of the new till and soaking up the convivial atmosphere of flying trade and friendly chat.

When I had no desire for company, I sat at the same corner table for one.

It was early one morning and, while the door was unlocked, the Closed sign was clearly up. I had been in there since six with Bridie, helping her in the kitchen, as Nancy's baby was unsettled, so the old woman's scullery maid (as she insisted on calling Nancy!) was off. With the first batch in the ovens, and two more ready to go, I was enjoying a break by reading the morning edition and drinking a strong black coffee at my favorite table, when a sleazy-looking man came to the door. He briefly studied the sign, then gave it a little flick of his hand and marched right in, bold as brass.

“We're not open for another hour, if you'd like to come back then?”

He was in his mid-thirties with a badly shaped, thin mustache and a cheap suit. The kind of undesirable character you'd see peddling their wares outside speakeasies and nightclubs. It was early for the likes of him to be out.

He pulled over a chair and sat down at the table opposite me, spreading his lanky legs out on either side of the narrow table.

“You're the boss?”

Operators like this were two-a-penny, petty criminals making money on the black market from other people's misfortunes. He was probably trying to sell me something. But even as I raised a disapproving eyebrow at him, I knew he wasn't. There was a nasty slant in his eyes.

“What do you want—as you can see, we're closed for—”

“Coffee would be nice, black and strong, with plenty of sugar.”

He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the thin chair, crossing his long, spindly legs over each other at the ankles, settling in as if he owned the place.

I knew what this was.

I went behind the counter and poured him out a cup of coffee from the pot, then I put it in front of him and nodded at the sugar bowl. “You can sweeten it yourself.” I held out my hand and said firmly, “That will be five cents, please.”

He smiled at me and shook his head in amusement. Patronizing me. He put the cigarette between his curled lips and reached into his pocket, pulled out a dime and left it on the table. Then he held the lit stick between his forefinger and thumb and, pointing it at me, said, “You're a clever lady, I can tell—but you're not from the Bronx.”

He stubbed the cigarette out in the saucer of his coffee cup and took a noisy slug.

“Where you from?”

“Ireland,” I said, curtly. I knew exactly what was coming. I walked back over to the counter and started to go about my business.

“The Bronx is a rough place, lady. Even up here, in this nice area, you got some nasty characters running around. It's a dangerous world, lady—bad people running about with guns and such like, niggers riding up on the train looking for trouble, you get my drift. All sorts of bad things happening about the place, which nice ladies like you don't wanna worry your pretty little heads about.”

He stood up and walked toward the counter, giving me a thoroughly charmless, grimy grin. There was only Bridie and me in the shop. The street outside was quiet. My hand was resting on the long-handled sandwich knife.

“Now me and my friends, we run a little business . . .”

“I see,” I said. I wouldn't be threatened like this, not in my own shop. “And this little business of yours,” I asked, “does it require you to carry a gun yourself?”

“Sometimes,” he said, slightly wrong-footed, but rather pleased at the same time.

“Do you have one on you now?”

He pulled back his jacket to reveal his skinny torso in its striped shirt. Then he slithered toward the counter hatch and leaned on the gate toward me, saying, “What would I need a gun for, visiting a pretty thing like you?”

He drummed his fingers quickly along the counter as I chopped a tomato for no reason. As I pretended to work, my eyes glanced quickly over at the flimsy latch, the only thing that stood between him and me. He saw me looking. The drumming speeded up along the white-painted wood, his filthy nails running up and down like cockroaches.

“No gun today, lady—at least not one that's made of metal.” He put his hand to the latch.

“Good,” I said, pointing the long, sharp blade of the bread knife at him. “Then you'll be interested to know that we don't need protection in this shop, from you or any of your friends.”

He raised his hands, still smiling that dirty, sleazy smile.

“Whoa—hey, pretty lady, careful now who you point that knife at.”

“I'll do a lot more than point it, mark my words, if you don't get out of my shop this instant.”

I walked toward him and put the tip of the knife as close to his face as I dared. He leaned back, laughing nervously.

“Okay, okay.” He skipped backward out of the shop, waving his hands and still laughing at me. He seemed not so much frightened as a little deranged—drugged perhaps? When he was gone, I ran and locked the door after him.

Bridie called out from the kitchen and I told her I'd be with her shortly.

I decided that if he had been a genuine mobster looking for protection, he would surely have come armed. He was just some cowardly fool, chancing his arm.

In either case my heart was pumping with fear or rage, I was not sure which. I felt something drip from my hand and realized that I was holding the handle of the knife so tightly that the blade had dug into my thumb without me having noticed.

“Mother of Christ, Ellie, you're bleeding all over the clean floor!”

“I was . . . chopping tomatoes.”

“Well, that's a fine cut, you silly girl—run it under the tap and I'll get a bandage. Why is the door locked? There are deliveries due . . .”

I didn't tell her. I didn't want to worry her. I could handle this myself—in any case, Charles would surely know what to do for the best.

When I arrived back home later that afternoon I was relieved to see Charles' bicycle parked on the porch. I guessed that everyone else was working and that we would have the house to ourselves for a few hours. He was the only person I could talk to about the mobster's visit; the only person who would be able to tell me what to do.

I found him sitting in the dining room with his head in his hands. On the polished table in front of him was a torn envelope and an opened letter. It looked like bad news.

“What is it?” I asked straight away.

“It's my wife,” he said, “she's going to remarry.”

“Oh,” I said. I had not asked Charles about his marriage because I had not wanted to answer questions about my own.

“She wants me to take Leo.” He blurted it out suddenly.

“Leo?” I said.

“Our son.”

I didn't know Charles had a son—a child. My knees buckled slightly with shock, but I did not sit down. I did not want to commit to this conversation. I did not want to think about what it might mean.

He did not look at me, just put his hand to his mouth in a gentle fist and then, leaning on his elbow, stared thoughtfully out of the window. Perhaps he was waiting for me to respond; to say that I would take his son in, that I would welcome them both and create an instant family for them. Seeing how I was taking in all and sundry, feeding and housing the poor and hungry, he could surely rely on me to step in and take responsibility for his child.

“I didn't know you had a son,” I said.

“There never seemed the right time to tell you.”

Perhaps he was right, but it felt like a deception. Children changed everything.

It was up to me now to respond. But it was too huge a thing to either take the child or refuse him. If I refused, I would be rejecting them both. But to take him?

“Oh dear,” I said, “well, I'm not staying—I'm only running an errand for Bridie.” And I quickly left the room.

I never ran errands, and I had left the house as suddenly as I had come in and was empty-handed. Charles knew I was lying; he knew what I was avoiding and certainly would have intuited why—he was a clever man.

Over the coming days we carried on, both of us, as if the letter had never come, and I didn't mention the mobster's visit. Life was an exchange of favors and kindnesses. In not offering to help him with his family predicament, there was no way I could now ask for his help.

That night, after we made love, I lay with my head on Charles's chest and thought:
Charles has a child. I have no child.

“I love you,” he said, murmuring it into my hair. It was the first time he had actually said it out loud, although I felt I had heard it many times before.

I pretended I had already fallen asleep.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
SEVEN

Matt had barely come near me since he had moved out of the house. With building work starting, and new living arrangements being made because of the new houses we had leased, it was easy to tell myself this was because we had both been busy. In reality I knew that Charles' presence had changed things between us. As my right-hand man, Matt seemed to have laid some claim to me before Charles had come back, and in truth there had been a warm friendship developing between us, although never anything that I might have described as love, as I understood it. I know he regretted bringing Charles into our lives, and although it was never spoken of, his dislike of Charles was obvious to everyone, and I assumed that jealousy lay at its root.

For this reason Matt had been avoiding me, taking his meals with the Balduccis rather than with us. So when he arrived mid-morning and called me into the dining room to talk, I knew there was something wrong.

He was holding his cap in his hand and nervously rolling the edge of it around and around with his coarse, square fingers. “The men have gone on strike,” he said.

“What?” I squealed.

He moved his large hands up to his face and stroked his chin.

“They are refusing to work today. They say they want to be paid.”

How had this happened? Where was Charles? Then I remembered that he had said he was going to see his wife, to make arrangements for their son. He must have left already.