Sutton (26 page)

A match made in economic heaven, Bess says. If Daddy could’ve married me off to old Mr. Rockefeller, he would have.

She might have said no. She nearly did. But she felt beholden to her father after the scandal with Willie and Happy, which was the start of his health problems.

She went into the marriage with no illusions. Every bride and groom are strangers, she says. But on my wedding night my husband was literally a stranger. Still. The yelling, the beatings, that I never expected.

Bess.

I thought it would stop, she says. When I got pregnant.

Pregnant?

She touches her stomach. It didn’t, she says. It got worse. So I went to the police. Then came here. Coney Island was always a special place for me.

For us.

She rubs his arm. Happy memories, she says.

They sit on the sand and watch the moonlight spill like milk across the water.

How are the other two merry fishermen? she asks.

Eddie’s still in Dannemora. Happy got out of Sing Sing a while ago but no one’s seen him.

All my fault, she says.

Nah.

They talk until the wind turns colder, then retreat to the bungalow. Along the way Willie tells her about his time at Sing Sing, the horror of Dannemora, his job with Funck.

Bess warms a can of soup, opens a bottle of bootleg wine. Willie lights a fire using driftwood and a
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
. There’s a suitcase open on the sofa and beside it a canvas bag filled with books. He looks through them. Tennyson, he says. Still?

Always, Bess says. Once I’m in love, it’s forever.

He reads:
And ah for a man to arise in me, That the man I am may cease to be
. He sets down the book, picks up another. Ezra Pound?

Bess comes toward him, swirling wine in a glass. She hands the glass to Willie, closes her eyes:
You came in out of the night, And there were flowers in your hands, Now you will come out of a confusion of people, Out of a turmoil of speech about you
.

Willie stares at the book. A confusion of people, he says.

They put pillows on the floor and sit by the fire. When the embers turn to ashes, when the clock on the mantel says three, Willie has to go. He’s due at Funck’s in two hours. Bess walks him outside. They stand, shivering.

Run away with me, Bess.

She throws back her head. We both know that’s not possible.

Why not?

No money.

There are places where that won’t matter.

Places where money doesn’t matter? Make me a list.

Poughkeepsie.

She gives a pained smile. My husband’s family is powerful. They’ll see to it that your parole is revoked. They’ll have you locked up forever. I won’t be the cause of that. I’ve done enough damage to your life.

He looks at the sky. He tries to think of something to say that will change her mind. He tries to put his feelings into words. She stops his thoughts with a touch, tracing her finger down his sideburn.

He takes a pad and pencil out of his breast pocket, writes the number of the telephone in the lobby of his flop. I’ll be back tonight to check on you, he says. Until then be careful.

I’d feel a whole lot safer if the newspaper hadn’t printed my address.

He nods. Damn newspapers, he says. On the other hand, if they hadn’t printed your address, I never would have found you.

She kisses him on the cheek, then steps back and aims a finger gun at his chest. She smiles. Your money or your life?

My life, Bess. Always.

Her smile fades. Oh Willie.

That night, as soon as the Funck truck returns from Greystone, Willie leaps off, dashes to the subway. Still wearing his gray coveralls, he rides to Coney Island and finds the door to the bungalow flapping open. The empty wine bottle is on the floor. Bess’s things, her books, are gone. He picks up the bottle, sets it on the table. He walks down to the Half Moon and watches the honeymooners come and go.

Oh no, Photographer says. Guess who’s crying again
.

No
.

Look
.

Reporter walks toward Sutton timidly. Mr. Sutton? You okay?

Sutton, leaning against the lion: Do you know the Half Moon Hotel kid? In Coney Island?

Where that mob hit happened? Back in the forties?

Yeah
.

That nut job, Albert Anastasia, killed some informant?

Yeah. Abe Reles. Rat of all rats
.

Anastasia tossed Reles off the hotel roof, didn’t he?

Right, right. Imagine—the Half Moon used to be
the
place to honeymoon in New York
.

Did you know Anastasia?

We had—mutual friends
.

What brought the Half Moon to mind?

I was bumped off there too. In a manner of speaking
.

Willie punching the time clock at Funck and Sons. February 1930. From Funck’s office he hears maniacal laughter. He walks down the hall, finds the frosted door standing open, Funck sitting with his feet on his desk, cradling a bottle of something. Well well, he says to Willie, if it isn’t Mr. Blackmailer! Come in, come in. Guess what, Mr. Blackmailer, you can be blackmailing me all you want, it don’t matter. We’re out of business. You want to call my wife? It don’t matter neither. She’s going to divorce me anyhows.

But why?

The market, genius. Half our clients is canceling. When bad times is coming, gardens is the first to be going. No azaleas in recessions. Fuck the daisies in Depressions. Motherfuck the peonies. Cocksuck the daffodils. Nice knowing you. Here’s your last check, Mr. Blackmailer. Hope you’re having a nice life. I should’ve stayed in Amsterdam.

Funck puts his head on the desk, starts to cry.

Willie walks straight to the library, holes up in the reading room, opens the wants. But there are no wants. Just pages and pages of people looking for work, advertising themselves, their skills. The few available jobs listed are for specialists, professionals, people with spotless pasts. Willie lights a cigarette. Banished from another garden. He wishes there had been time at least to say goodbye to Mr. Untermyer. Then he thinks—maybe there is.

The next morning he takes a bus to Yonkers. He walks from the bus stop to Greystone, asks the guard at the gate if he can see Mr. Untermyer.

And who might you be?

I’m a—friend.

Aint you one of the landscaping crew?

Yeah. But also a friend.

Fuck off.

If I could just see Mr. Untermyer for five—

Look, pal, everyone’s hurtin. Everyone’s workin an angle. But I’m not gonna lose
my
job pesterin Mr. UN-tuh-my-uh about some fuckin gardener. Screw.

Willie rides the bus back to Manhattan. He walks from the Port Authority to his flop. Along the way he sees a newsboy waving an extra.

HOOVER URGES CALM
.

He grabs the paper from the newsboy’s outstretched hand. President Hoover insists that the American economy is solid. The fundamentals are sound. Willie would like to buy the paper, but he knows it will only make him angrier. Besides, he needs to save his nickels.

In his room Willie stands at his bureau and counts his savings. He stacks the coins, puts the bills in neat piles. One hundred and twenty-six dollars. Enough for four months’ rent and food. If he eats sparingly. He sits down, writes a letter to Mr. Untermyer, explaining that he tried to see him, that he’d like to continue at Greystone, even at reduced pay.

He never will get a reply.

Starting at sunrise he hits the streets. He visits landscaping firms, factories. At every gate and loading dock he finds one hundred, two hundred men already waiting. He goes to employment agencies. The buildings in which they’re housed are so mobbed, so crammed full of people begging for work, he can’t get inside.

Every few days he swings by the library to check the wants. Chauffeur-mechanic—must have best of references. Paint salesman—only those with first-class experience need apply. Junior bank clerk—fair wages, luncheon provided, high school degree a must.

He asks himself why he keeps checking.

One foggy morning, walking in a daze down the library’s front steps, Willie trips, nearly faints. He hasn’t eaten in two days. But he can’t bear the thought of rummaging through a trash can—again. He sits heavily under the lion, puts his head in his hands, prays.

He hears his name.

He looks up. A familiar face floats out of the fog. A triangular face. Waterbug eyes. It’s Marcus Bassett—from Dannemora. He’s running up the steps with a book tucked under his arm.
Now you will come out of a confusion of people
. Willie stands, surprised how glad he is to see someone, anyone he knows.

How’s tricks, Marcus?

Willie! How you doing, old pal?

Willie takes the book from under Marcus’s arm.
The Decline of the West
.

It’s due today, Marcus says.

Sorry, Marcus. Library just closed. You’ll have to pay the fine.

That’s about how my luck’s running.

Same here.

Marcus invites Willie back to his place uptown. He has a pint of bathtub juniper juice he’s been saving.

Another time, Willie says. I’m not feeling well.

Marcus isn’t taking no for an answer. He drags Willie up Fifth Avenue.

Along the way they pass a silver-haired man in a bespoke suit selling apples. They pass a group of soot-faced kids selling pencil stubs. Penny apiece, mister? They pass a woman in a stained housecoat and bedroom slippers, talking to her slippers. They pass a conclave of men at a taxi stand, newspapers spread across the hood of a cab, deep worry lines etched in the corners of their eyes.

They come upon an ambulance parked outside a rooming house. Willie asks a roly-poly man with cauliflower ears what’s going on, though he already knows. He can smell the gas.

Nother suicide, the man says. Thoid this month on this block.

They see furniture stacked on curbs, nests of toys and clothes, the belongings of families who couldn’t make the rent, couldn’t hang on. It looks like the detritus that washes ashore hours after a ship sinks.

I’m almost on the street myself, Marcus says. I was doing okay till a few months ago. I was a proofreader at an ad agency. My boss was a rummy, the work was dull, but I loved that job, Willie. It was decent pay, honest work, and it was the only thing standing between me and the edge.

What happened?

Business fell by forty percent. It came down to me and another guy. The other guy had never been in the joint.

When Willie sees the basement apartment where Marcus lives, at Eighty-Third and Broadway, he thinks Marcus might be better off on the street. The front walk is covered with trash, the halls smell of urine. Old urine. Marcus’s one lightless room is a rabbit cage, its walls papered with newspapers. Old newspapers. Over Marcus’s hot plate are headlines about President Taft.

On the other side of the wall a woman or wild animal is wailing. The walls are so thin, the wailing so loud, she sounds as if she’s right there in the room with Willie and Marcus. She sounds like Big Ben.

Make yourself at home, Marcus says.

Willie looks around. Home? There’s no furniture, just a couch that looks like a park bench, an unmade Murphy bed, a card table bowing under the weight of an Underwood. Scattered around the Underwood are rejection letters from all the slicks. Willie unrolls the page in the typewriter. It’s covered with x’d sentences.

How’s the writing coming, Marcus?

I’m working on a story about a guy with no job who lives in a rathole. I need an ending.

Willie is about to say something sympathetic when the door bangs open and in walks a shockingly plain woman. No waist, no breasts, cheeks specked with so many dark moles that she looks splashed with mud. Her hair is set in a kind of finger wave, but the fingers that did the waving must have been arthritic. Willie’s heart goes out to her. She must be the wailing neighbor. Then he hears the neighbor send up a wail. Big Ben. Convicts on the loose. Confused, he watches Marcus rush to the woman’s side and plant a kiss on her mole-splashed cheek.

Willie, I want you to meet my bride. Dahlia, say hello to my old pal Willie Sutton.

This is where it happened, Sutton says, stepping away from the lion, gazing up at its broad nose, which always reminded him of his own. Talk about your crossroads, boys—I bumped into Marcus on these steps, with these lions watching, in the spring of 1930. How many times I’ve looked back on that moment and thought, What if? What if I hadn’t decided to sit in the shadow of this lion at the very same moment Marcus was returning a book? What if Marcus had decided to finish
The Decline of the West?
What if I’d stopped in the library men’s room, or spent a few extra minutes combing the wants, or said hello and goodbye and gave Marcus the air? The things I might have said. The things I shouldn’t have said. So much would be different
.

Sutton glowers at the lion. You saw it happening, he says. Patience, or Fortitude, whatever the fuck your name is. How come you didn’t warn me? One little roar?

FOURTEEN

Willie sits on the steps of the library, waiting for it to open. In the last few months he’s managed to scrounge a few temporary things in the wants. A job mopping floors in an office building—then the boss had to cut back. A job cleaning toilets at the bus station—then the regular guy returned. He’s nearly out of money. He has no family, no friends, besides Marcus, who’s in even worse shape than Willie. He needs to find something permanent, right now, or else.

The library unlocks its doors. Willie runs upstairs to the reading room, grabs an armful of newspapers, settles into a chair. He goes through the wants slowly, hopefully, twice. Nothing. He rubs his eyes, massages his temples.

He turns briefly to the news pages. Four million out of work. Thirteen hundred banks belly-up—this year. Next year the number is expected to be two or three times higher. He crumples the newspaper, tosses it on the floor. The librarians give him a look. He storms out.