Inherit the Mob

T
he phone on the nightstand jolted Gordon out of a sad dream, and he awoke, as he always did, with a quick check of his vital signs. Beer hangover (mild), piss hard-on, pulse, cigarette wheeze—all the old reliables.

He picked up the receiver on the third ring. It was Flanagan, the deputy city editor.

“Hey, pal, I got news,” he said. “Your uncle Max just croaked.”

“What time is it?”

“Six-fifteen,” said Flanagan. “I’m down at the paper. Want me to read you the obit?”

“I’ve already seen it,” Gordon said. His uncle had been dying slowly for more than six months, and one night at the
Tribune
Gordon had read through the obituary, which was first written in 1929 and updated every few years for the next half-century. “It looked all right to me. What’s the headline?”

“ ‘Max Grossman: The Last Gangster,’ what else?” said Flanagan
happily. “Max was the real thing, pal. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”

“Look, Flanagan, I’ve got an industrial-strength hangover,” Gordon said. “Let me sleep another hour or so, and I’ll call you back, OK?”

“Jews aren’t supposed to have hangovers, pal. Besides, you’ve got a big day. Funeral’s at one, and I want you to give us something. Thousand words of color on the widow, the old cronies, maybe a little something from the shivah. You can do it first person if you want, I-was-the-nephew-of-the-Zeyde–type thing. All right?”

It was a request, not an order; Gordon was two Pulitzers past taking orders from deputy city editors. But Flanagan was a friend, and he’d have to go to the funeral anyway. “What the hell,” he said. “But no first-person stuff, just straight color. And no slug about my being the nephew either.”

“If he was my uncle, I’d want the whole city to know about it,” said Flanagan. “The man was a fucking national monument, a titan—”

“Why don’t you go to the damn funeral if you love him so much?”

Flanagan laughed. “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss it for the world. We’re going together, boychik. I’ll meet you at your place at noon.”

The phone clicked, and Gordon was alone in bed. Being alone reminded him of Jupiter Evans. Forty-two years old and in love with an actress. A lesbian actress. Proof that experience only makes you dumber, he thought; it’s no accident that old age ends in senility.

Gordon wondered what his uncle Max would have thought of Jupiter. Nothing, probably. The old man had been married for fifty-one years, and Gordon had never heard any gossip about him playing around. His aunt Ida was a different story. He already knew her opinion. “Jupiter? The name sounds like an automobile,” she once told him. “A journalist with a Nobel Prize ought to be able to find a girl with a little more class.”

Aunt Ida didn’t know that Jupiter was gay (“bisexual,” he corrected himself automatically), but it wouldn’t have shocked her. The wives of old Jewish gangsters were supposed to be simple homemakers, but Ida, well past seventy, was still a chachka who had, she once admitted to Gordon, married Max for thrills. She told him this
at his mother’s funeral, several years before. When she saw the surprise on his face she winked and said, “Death makes old people feel sexy.” Gordon wondered if she would be in a sexy mood today at the funeral.

He climbed out of bed, showered and fixed himself a cup of coffee. The hangover was subsiding, the wheeze was under control and the hard-on was in temporary hibernation. Gordon picked up the phone and called his father.

“Grossman,” a gruff voice answered. There was, as usual, an implicit, wadda-ya-wanna-make-of-it in his tone.

“Pop, I just heard about Uncle Max. I’m sorry.”

“Me, too, Velvel,” he said. “You know what time’s the funeral?”

“Yeah, they called from the paper. They want me to write a a story about it.”

“A funeral’s a funeral,” said Grossman. “Thirty years ago it would have been a real event. Big bouquets from Chicago, shiny cars, the whole shmeer. Today—another old Jew bites the dust. Don’t expect anything special.”

Gordon wasn’t surprised by his father’s matter-of-fact attitude; Albert Grossman was not a sentimental man, as his son had learned through hard experience.

“They’re going to run his obituary on the front page,” Gordon said. “ ‘Max Grossman: The Last Gangster.’ It mentions you.”

“My name’s been in the papers before,” Grossman said in a dry voice. In the late fifties, after Appalachian, when the McClellan Committee was investigating organized crime, Gordon had often read about his father. He was usually described as Max’s partner, or sometimes as his front man. Grossman had neither hidden these articles from his son, nor explained them; and since then, he had alluded to that period only once. It was during the Watergate hearings. Gordon was in the States on home leave and before dinner he and his father were watching the evening news. There was a clip that night of John Dean testifying before the Ervin committee. Grossman had listened angrily to the young lawyer’s contrite confession. “There’s nothing worse than a goy feeling sorry for himself in public,” he had snorted. “These potato-heads ratting out their boss make me sick.”

“Not like you, huh?” Gordon said, looking for an opening, but his
father didn’t go for it. “Do I look like a goy to you, Velvel?” was all he had said.

“Pop, I’m bringing Flanagan to the funeral,” Gordon told him now. “You think that’ll be all right?”

“The one who looks like an FBI agent? Yeah, sure, the more the merrier. He gonna write a story, too?”

“No, he’s just an admirer. He says Uncle Max was a national monument.”

Grossman laughed, a solitary bark. “Yeah, Max was a regular Benjamin Francis.”

It was one of their few jokes. Once, when Gordon was in junior high school, his father had attended a basketball practice. Gordon remembered him sitting in the empty bleachers, wearing a vicuña topcoat and fedora, chewing a Cuban cigar. Coach Kelly kept giving him nervous glances, as if he suspected that Grossman was there to fix a game.

Afterward, Grossman took the starting team out for hamburgers. During the meal he referred to his son as Velvel, a Yiddish version of William unknown to his teammates. When they laughed at the nickname, the old man, typically, had counterattacked.

“Nothing wrong with Velvel,” he told them gruffly. “You shvartzers are all named after wristwatches and electric trains.”

“Hey, Mr. Grossman, my mamma named me after Benjamin Francis,” protested one of the players with great dignity. “He the man invented the kite.”

“Yeah, I heard of him,” said Gordon’s father. Thirty years later, it was still one of his favorite lines.

“Listen, Pop,” Gordon now said. “I’ve got to get some things done this morning. I’ll meet you at the funeral home. Maybe we can have an early dinner, OK?”

“We can eat at Ida’s,” he said. “Afterwards, I’ll take you to the Knicks game. They’re playing the Celtics.”

“Well, we’ll see. I may be meeting Jupiter tonight.”

“The hell with it, then. I’ll go with Harry,” he said. “I’m not playing second fiddle to a dyke Sara Heartburn.” Gordon realized, not for the first time, that telling his father about Jupiter had been a serious mistake. “I’ll catch you at one, Velvel. And don’t forget to
bring a yarmulke. Those loaners at the funeral home can give you ringworm.” Without ceremony he hung up.

With the whole morning on his hands, Gordon sat down at his word processor to work up some notes on a recent trip to France. He was just starting to make sense of Mitterrand’s economic policy when the phone rang again. This time it was Jupiter.

“Hallo,” she said, using their special tone of greeting. “I just heard about your uncle on the radio. How you feeling?”

“As James Brown once said, ‘I feel good, da da da da da da da.’ If you were here, I’d feel better.”

“Well, as the Stones said, you can’t always get what you want.” He could hear her smile over the phone; Jupiter’s voice was so melodic that it turned statements into songs. “Seriously, you need anything?”

“Nothing that about two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of analysis can’t get,” he said. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling all week.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you, but I’ve been busy.”

“God I hate you,” he said. “You want to have dinner tonight?”

“Sure. I’ll come by and we’ll go someplace in the neighborhood. OK?”

“I’ll see you around nine,” said Gordon, feeling at once appeased and foolish. She must love me if she’s willing to have dinner with me, right? Jesus.

“Give my love to your family,” she said, and hung up. He hit himself on the head with the receiver, one good crack, and went back to his notes on the future of the French franc.

At noon the doorman buzzed, announcing Flanagan. He was dressed in funereal black, and he already wore a dark silk skullcap on his red hair. “I look like a yeshiva bucher, no?” he said happily, turning for Gordon’s inspection.

“Just like Elie Wiesel.”

Flanagan laughed. He had grown up in Brooklyn, and he had a thing about Jews. He called them SATs, after the college entrance exam. Gordon was still wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and Flanagan looked at his watch with alarm.

“You better get dressed,” he said. “We don’t want to keep your uncle waiting.”

“Pour yourself a drink,” Gordon told him. “I’ll be about two minutes. By the way, my father says you look like an FBI agent.”

“We never drink on the job,” said Flanagan, splashing three fingers of Wild Turkey into a tall glass. “You think I really look like a fed?”

“Are you kidding? You’re a walking J. Edgar Hoover wet dream,” said Gordon. Flanagan was six foot two, with a square jaw, pug nose and clear blue eyes. Clear, at least, until the cocktail hour, which often began at lunchtime. Daytime drinking was something the two journalists had in common.

Gordon went into the bathroom to shower and Flanagan, bourbon in hand, followed. “What else did your father say?” he asked. “Was he broken up?”

“He invited me to a Knicks game,” Gordon hollered over the pounding water.

“They’re playing Boston,” Flanagan said automatically. He was not a sports fan, but he kept up for the sake of barroom conversation. Once, years before, he had whimsically founded an organization called Athletes Anonymous. “Anytime you feel like exercising, you call up another member and he comes over to have a drink with you” was the way he explained it.

“Are you sure he wasn’t kidding about the ‘b-ball’ game?” Flanagan shouted. “I mean, it’s his only brother.…”