Queens Noir (16 page)

Naima, the day-shift nurse, was late. Normally my wife dealt
with any kind of overlap problem before going off to her museum job. But she was absent at the moment, as she was more
and more these days.

"Where's the Swamp Rat?" asked Dad, as if reading my
thoughts.

Nulty Jr. eyed Nulty Sr. I wondered just how senile the old
man really was.

"Some art shindig in St. Petersburg," I replied. I wondered
why I bothered.

"Home to the swamps," said Dad.

"No, the other St. Petersburg, the Russian one."

That seemed to silence him, or else his thoughts wandered off to something else. He dubbed my wife the Swamp
Rat as soon as he heard she came from Tampa, Florida. At the
time, I was offended for her. I was in love with this dark little
hustler-she reminded me of Edith Piaf. I called her La Piaf.
Then. But little by little the very things that pleased me at first
made me hate her later: her bustling ass, the way she crimped
her thin frizzy hair, a moue thing she did with her mouth as if
to strengthen up facial muscles. I soon saw her thrifty housekeeping as meanness. She was prepared to spend money on no
one but herself. She even squeezed enough for little facelifts
and gold wire here and there over the years. This was on top
of sports clubs, gyms, dance classes, and trainers. The house
was feng shui-compliant, another recent source of trouble
and expense.

By now, I approved the nickname. She'd been in it for the
money from the start, and I had been reeled in, hook, line,
and sinker. I suspect the facelifts and staying in shape were
preparation for getting away from me in the best possible circumstances. Women always went away-my mother took off
without a by-your-leave.

I left the old man alone for a minute and went down
to collect the mail. Although I received my business mail
in the bar we owned on Broadway, The Two Way Inn (because there are two ways in), the family's private mail arrived here. Sometimes Naima or Old Jessica left personal
mail lying around for days. I disapproved of such a risk. Dad
trained me to structure my day around things like that: "Get the unpleasant stuff out of the way first. Leave nothing lying
to fester."

There was a postcard from the Swamp Rat singing the
praises of St. Petersburg. I knew she was there with the big
Armenian, her latest conquest, but I could prove nothing and
was waiting for something to come to a head. There was junk
mail for my son Sean and more for my daughter Maureen,
who had just moved out for the second time with a second
man. Rectitude hadn't made it to the third generation.

At the bottom there was a letter with a Canadian postmark from a lawyer's office in Quebec. My heart gave a lurch.
Suddenly Naima was behind me. I smelled her perfume before
I turned to face her. She was flushed.

"Musing again?" She had a light, assured voice. I envied
her calm contentment. In another life I would have loved her
and this would have done me good.

I looked at the letter then looked at her.

"Come on, I'll make you a decent coffee before you go."
She took my elbow.

I walked to the bar each morning as Dad once did. This always
cleared my head. There was no spring in New York this year.
There never is. I left the house huddling against a cold wind
blowing off the river, but by the time I reached Mt. Carmel
Cemetery, the summer had arrived. Here it was, late, when
we'd almost given up hope.

I paused for a moment to look at the broken, half-buried
headstones of Irish-born immigrants from famine times, people who'd worked in the factories, greenhouses, and homes of
the nearby rich. Every dog has his day, I could hear Dad say,
although I knew the old man always felt a bit of a fraud in
the mansion on 12th Street. It was the house which had so impressed La Piaf at first. I heard my father again: Not a house
for a humble tiller of the soil. Somehow it was bearable because
it wasn't ours. It belonged to Dad's brother, Uncle Eddie, Canadian millionaire. The Two Way Inn belonged to him as well.
No one knew exactly how Eddie Nulty had made his money.
Fact is, he was the eldest of ten, had come out around the
time of the Irish Civil War, worked in bars at first, then got on
the ladder and sent for his little brother.

The further I walked, the more my step steadied and took
on a rhythm independent of my thoughts. I could hear the
reassuring rattle of the El.

"And that's when the difference between the two brothers showed," my mother told me, way back. "Eddie went to
get your father off the boat. He was crumpled, dirty, and sick
after all that time at sea. But Eddie pounced! On what? Your
dad's boots. They weren't polished, and were laced with binder
twine."

"So Eddie was pissed?"

"Watch your language. Eddie was mixed up in something,"
said Mom. "I heard talk of guns. Your father told me a story
about when he was a boy, going to the market with their father
in the early morning. They came across Eddie doing lookout
on the road. `What's up?' your grandfather asked. `Court martial,' Eddie said. `They're in the field, decidin' whether they'll
kill himself or not.' `Have nothing to do with all this,' the
father told the young boy."

She was convinced Eddie was still mixed up in something.
Nobody could get that rich by legal means. Yet occasionally,
when Dad was on a bender, he got so out of hand that Mom
called Eddie, regretting it afterwards. Somehow Eddie knew
how to whip Dad into line. And things would continue for
another while. When it was over, Mom banged on about con versations she'd heard, money she'd seen handed over in cabs,
and about a bar being the best place to launder money. "What
do you know about laundering?" I often replied. "You got Jessica to do it for you!"

I regretted such remarks now, and wondered where she
was.

In no time at all I reached Broadway, with its crowds and traffic and fruit displays. I liked it better here. This was home.
Men on the sidewalk spoke Chinese and Slav and Arabic into
cell phones. Visit Queens and see the world. Here was where
the Nultys started out, in a small apartment over a busy junction. Young parents, two small children, plenty of stress, and
plenty of fun. Dad drove a bus and binge-drank. One day he
parked the bus full of passengers and went into The Beer Garten (there was no garten) and got drunk. There was hell at
home and Eddie was sent for.

It was an icy winter's day when Eddie came up the steep
narrow stairs wearing a black coat with some kind of fur collar,
like a rich man in the movies. Mom wrung her hands. Dad was
strangely obeisant as if to his own father, and it was all settled.
The German wanted to sell up The Beer Garten. Eddie would
buy and Dad would run it. He had to make it work and live on
the proceeds. The word autonomous was bandied about.

From there on, Dad appeared to play the game, fitting in
quite well with the bar routine and keeping our little family
from the poor house. For years we lived over the bar. Later on,
Eddie bought its the mansion and persuaded Dad to move. I
never knew exactly how the accounts were handled, but Eddie
engaged a hot-shit accountant from Manhattan and even a tax
accountant in case Dad messed that up as well. For a long time
Dad was strict as a sergeant major, rising before dawn, polish ing his shoes himself, eating a raw egg before breakfast: all stuff
Uncle Eddie favored or advised. Even then, I knew there was
no way Eddie was shining his own shoes. But I said nothing,
knowing The Importance of Shoe Shining in the Family. Back
in Monaghan, nobody shined their shoes, if they had any. A
school photo of Dad showed most of the kids had no shoes at
all-only Dad in the front row had a good pair of black boots,
black socks, short pants, and a black turtleneck. I reckoned he
was taken out of school shortly after that to work in the fields,
until Eddie sent him the ticket for Canada.

On certain sections of the streets there were signs of the
usual fracas of the previous night: bottles and cans and overturned garbage. In recent times, crowds of young local men
gathered at night to drink and carouse, as if they belonged
to a different species, married to the night. Sometimes they
didn't even bother going to a bar. Sometimes bar owners use
the tobacco ban to keep them out. Visitors slumming the bars
at night made a helluva noise while they were there, then
again as they revved up to leave. Residents complained about
them as much as they did about the youngsters, who sold and
smoked weed and giggled a lot, then kicked the garbage out
of the cans and around the street. I had known most of them
since they were kids-they were Sean's age. I wondered if
Sean spent time with them, but didn't dare ask. So far they'd
left me and the bar alone, and although there was increasing
talk of hate crimes and savage attacks in the night, I couldn't
see them being the perps. For the moment, anyone kicked
down subway steps had been openly gay or Muslim-or even
black-but I knew that could change.

"So you rich fucks get up for a little while every day?" My
friend George was standing in the doorway of his restaurant.

"Gid adda here," I grinned.

"Whadaya like, I gad it," said George, waving me in.

"Check the shop and be right back."

I entered the dark interior of The Two Way Inn. It was quiet
but for an Abba song coming at low volume from the jukebox: I don't wanna talk ... about things we been through ... The
usual lineup of men drinking silently in the late morning never
failed to remind me of a scene from an O'Neill play. There was
no green, no shamrocks, no Irish beers, no black-and-white
pictures of small villages, whiskey mirrors, leprechauns, shillelaghs, no objects made of bog turf, nothing Irish visible. The
occasional token of a German past remained undisturbed,
for here the Swamp Rat had no influence and didn't like the
atmosphere. No fucking compliance here, feng shui or otherwise. For a long time a German firm continued to provide German songs for the old jukebox until we updated. One of these
songs survived: "Oh Mein Papa," due to popular demand, had
been remastered and now kept company with the Carpenters,
Abba, Maureen McGovern, Roberta Flack, the O'Jays, John
Denver, and-as they say-much, much more. The bar had
remained untouched for so long that it was becoming popular
with the yuppie crowd out from Manhattan. It was mentioned
in one or two hip magazines in search of "awthennic" places
to spend their money. The barmen were instructed to charge
more in the evenings. I invested in chairs and tables for the
sidewalk, and after being fined twice for putting them out,
eventually paid for a licence. These days I pay smoking fines,
although we try to stop 'em smoking till the cops have gone
to bed. Because what interests the yuppies is the interior, and
the music. If it's like a stage set for me, how much more must
it be for them?

I waved through the open kitchen door to our Mexican
factotum (Dad's title for him). He navigated between the
kitchen here, the corridors of the apartments above, and the
garden on 12th Street.

"Buenos dias, Pepe," I said. "Que pasa?"

"Land of the free and the brave," replied Pepe.

I nodded to the young man behind the bar, an ex-seminarian
from the old country, solid as an Aran Island, robbing only
exactly enough so as not to make it obvious and rock the boat
for the other bartenders doing the same.

"Gimme a shot from the real bottle you keep under the
bar," said one of the O'Neill characters. "The curate isn't
cooperating."

I nodded again at the young man. "Go ahead," I said,
"what they have there wouldn't fill a hole in their tooth."

The young man ran a round down the bar: He had instructions to give them every third drink free, but to go easy
on the non-fiddled bottle.

"Come on, lads, put yer hearts into it." This was another of
Dad's goads. "Ye'll never get cirrhosis the way ye're drinkin'."

The young man handed me the morning mail, which reminded me of the letter from Canada. I reached into a pocket,
fished it out, and sat at a table. No one sat at a table except
in the evenings.

The letter was typed. This didn't look good. It was from a
lawyer. My eyes shot to the bottom paragraph: It is with regret
that we must inform you of the intention of Mr. Edward Nulty to
dispose of his properties in Astoria.

Alerted, no doubt, by press references to a property boom,
I thought. More warehouse conversions and hoardings bearing the legend, Jesus hates this building.

Do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions, the letter finished. It gave the coordinates of some fancy broker in Manhattan who would contact me instanter.

I hated the British tone of it all. I even hated their tight
vowels up there. I wondered what had stung Eddie into action. I folded the letter and put it in my pocket. The O'Neill
characters who had been studying me turned back to their
drinks again.

I got up, nodded to the company, and made my way next
door to George, who had lunch ready.

"You donna looka good."

"No."

"You dyin'?"

"No."

"Yo' family die?"

"No."

"So then!" George handed me a glass of his special heavy
aperitif wine.

"Ya mass," he said. I said nothing. "You looza all yor money?"
George had been imitating his father's accent for so long and
spending three months a year in Greece that it was second
nature. He looked anxious. Money was serious.

"Maybe."

George was all attention. "Money is not love," he said
slowly.

"I got neither."

"First, you eat."

It seemed to me there were more of the little white plates
than usual. I told George my woes, as I often do. What had
once been a place serving hero sandwiches had become a
high-class restaurant. Through the kitchen door I could see
two Indians hard at work. And I'm not talking about Native
Americans. Behind a little desk sat George's brother Lazarus, once short-order cook and pea soup expert, and his sister
Hermione. They were all getting on in years.