The Leap Year Boy (28 page)

*

Earlier that day, Belle and Lillie were saying it was the hottest summer they could remember, which is what they said every summer when the temperature approached ninety, along with ninety percent humidity, which was not unusual for Pittsburgh in late June. They wore loose-fitting housedresses, rolled their stockings below their knees and finished cooking for the day by ten in the morning, before the kitchen became sweltering.

Even Hannah, who usually dressed in sweaters regardless of the temperature, had rolled up her sleeves. She let Alex run around in just his shorts—no shirt, no socks and shoes. She did make him wear his orange hat to protect him against the hazy sun as he tended his garden.

After lunch on Friday, Belle, Lillie and Hannah napped on the shaded back porch. The sisters slept upright, side-by-side on the porch swing, and Hannah lay out on the hammock. Alex pretended to sleep in a chair until he was sure the three of them had drifted off.

He crept off the porch, into the house, climbed the stairs and went straight to the desk in the hallway where he’d found the black album weeks before. He was eager to read the story about Florence Carson. He reread the cover and the inscription on the inside and flipped to the next section. There were two documents pasted on the pages. They had curly designs in the corners and embossed seals on the bottom, accompanied by scribbled signatures he couldn’t make out. He read the first one:

After delivery, Miss Hannah Gerson does of her own free will hereby consent to and place for adoption MALE CHILD, born August 21, 1911, weighing seven pounds six ounces, for placement in such a home as can provide substantial means and moral upbringing as determined by the executive staff of the Florence Carson Home.

Sworn to me on this day, August 24, 1911, Cornelius Bennett, Deputy Director.

He skipped to the second:

As appropriate adoptive parents have been identified by the executive staff of the Florence Carson Home, hereby with this signature below does Hannah Gerson (birth mother) cede all parental rights in perpetuity regarding MALE CHILD in accordance of the rules and tenants of the Florence Carson Home and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in regards to adoption, sworn to me on this day, September 9, 1911.

On the bottom of the next page was a receipt for $300.00, issued from the Florence Carson Home and made out to Mr. Morris Gerson, with his signature at the bottom. Written on top of the receipt, in red crayon, were the words “Blood Money!” He turned the rest of the pages but found nothing else except for a pressed blue flower on the last page.

He wondered about MALE CHILD. He was a male child, too. The papers had Hannah Gerson’s name in them. Maybe Hannah could explain about MALE CHILD, but something was telling him that she wasn’t the one to ask.
Adoption
and
substantial means
and
Deputy Director
and
in perpetuity
and
adoptive parents
, and especially
blood money!
confused him, too, and his instincts told him this wasn’t a happy story, or a funny story, not like Hansel & Gretel or Peter Rabbit or Little Red Riding Hood, or even the ones about Jesus in
A Child’s Life of Christ
.

However, he was sure the story was about MALE CHILD, because of the big letters. MALE CHILD was an odd name for a little boy. Everyone he knew was named John or Joseph, names like that. Where did MALE CHILD live, in the Florence Carson Home, and did he have brothers and sisters, and what was he like, and was he a big boy or did he stay little like he was? He hoped MALE CHILD’s mommy didn’t die like his did.

The dog barked. Alex froze. He heard Belle say, “Quiet, mutt.” He held his breath, listening for the porch door to open. After a few moments, all was quiet again.

Maybe he could ask his father, or maybe Benjamin, about the story. But how could he explain it? He turned back to the page with the two documents. He ran his finger over them, and, because they were attached only at the corners, he was able to slip his pinky finger underneath. If he took the papers, Daddy or Benjamin could read them and explain them. But that would be stealing, and he remembered how his grandmother had told him stealing was a sin—“thou shalt not steal, Alex”—and Arthur had told him not to steal anymore, too, that it wasn’t honorable. He wouldn’t have to steal the papers forever, though; he just take them and show them to his father or Benjamin, and then he could put them back, so it wouldn’t be the same as stealing.

If he did take the papers, where would he put them? He could fold them up: maybe they would fit in his pocket, or he could put them down the front of his pants. He lifted a corner of one of the certificates. The whole paper came right off.

“Alex! Where are you?”

He ran down the hallway, went into her room and slipped under her bed. He tucked the certificate into a corner of the box spring where the fabric had pulled away.

*

Delia had worked until eleven that Friday night, and she’d been so busy she hadn’t had time to grab a sandwich. She ran her fingers along her ribs and calculated that it had been almost twenty-four hours since her last meal, which had been rye toast and a cigarette.

A quick survey of her cupboard and icebox revealed a stick of butter, a pint of souring milk and a heel of rye bread. She emptied her purse on the dresser. At least the tips had been decent the night before, thanks mostly to that pig Horshushky, who was too drunk to count his change.

After a quick trip to Detwiler’s Market, she sopped up the remains of her bacon and eggs over easy with a piece of fresh bread. She put her feet up on the windowsill and looked out over the city. Convoys of barges filled with coke and scrap iron slid up and down the river far below. A robin fed bits of worm to two chicks in a nearby tree. “Good momma,” she said.

She rubber her aching knees and feet. She sighed. In a few hours she’d be back at it again. However, she wasn’t depressed. Writing to Lotte had put a bounce in her step and hope in her heart that a change was going to come.

She rinsed her plate in the sink. She caught her reflection on the mirror above it. Not bad for an old broad of 29, going on 33. She pressed her fingers against the fledgling crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. Where the hell was her cold cream? She turned on the hot water in the tub.

With a towel wrapped around her wet hair and her bare feet up on a radiator, she read a little of a two-day-old newspaper. They were talking about building a statue to the late George Westinghouse. She shook her head. Building statues to rich bastards while men stood in breadlines in the middle of downtown Pittsburgh. And if he were so high and mighty and wonderful, why had 10,000 Westinghouse workers gone on strike a couple of months ago? The politicians and the rich folk, they were in bed together, and the workingman emptied the bedpan.

Her thoughts drifted to Abe’s lukewarm response to her idea for Alex. Oh, well. The kick of being with big Jew had toned down over the last few years. She still admired his strength—no one could ever say he wasn’t a real man, not like that New York pansy Devon Jenkins—but it was hard to imagine being with him, or any man, forever.

But the boy. She needed Alex. If Abe still had cold feet when the circus came to town, well, she’d have to work around him. Kids, though, they were temperamental, and Alex was no exception. It hadn’t been easy to get him to throw the knives, so what was to prevent him from shutting down altogether when it was his time to do his stuff? She believed that Alex liked her all right, but she needed to get his trust, to be sure she could handle him, so he’d do what she wanted him to do. She kind of liked him, too. The little thing had a smile that grabbed you, you couldn’t help but be charmed by him, but then, maybe she was getting soft. Maybe what she really wanted was a child of her own, but that wasn’t in the cards, not for a woman like her.

Thank God she Sundays off, now that she was through with that snooty mansion. Sunday would be the perfect time to take Alex off Abe’s hands for the day, give him a break, let Abe spend some time with his older boy or do whatever he wanted. She’d figure out something special for Alex.

She was nodding off at the kitchen table as she thought about Lotte’s letter. The girl was pulling down seventy a week, plus room and board. Hell, she could live nice and easy on that, with or without Abe. She yawned.

It was midafternoon when shouts from the street woke her up from a long nap. She stuck her head out the window. Three stories below, men were jumping up and down, yelling and waving their arms. A man in a brown hat caught her eye. He waved a newspaper in the air and yelled, “Hey sister! It’s war!”

That night it was bedlam at The Wheel. Germany had declared war on Russia, and the boys argued, prophetically enough, that it was only a matter of days before France, Belgium and England would be in it, too.

It wasn’t long before uninformed opinions turned into heated arguments. Fueled by ignorance and alcohol, men became increasingly hostile and at times violent as the evening wore on, passionate regarding which state was right, and which state was more right, who stood to win the war and who had little more than a snowball’s chance in hell. The dialogue, such as it was, became particularly vociferous when the issue as to whether the U.S. ought to enter the fray arose, and there was unanimous agreement that America could kick all their asses combined and straighten the whole mess out lickety-split.

At approximately nine o’clock, Albert Bauer waved a handkerchief-sized German flag, at which point he was cold cocked by Horshushky, who, despite being Polish, had decided to align his loyalties to his fellow Slavs, not really knowing if Russians were Slavic or not. It took three men to hold Horshushky from stomping him in the face.

Edward Peck gave two to one odds that the war would be over by November. Neither he nor anyone else would have imagined that the end wouldn’t be until November, 1918.

Abe sat at Davy’s table and told him that both sides were equally crazy. It wasn’t that he was a pacifist. He’d just received a letter from Arthur saying that both he and the Walsh boy had successfully enlisted, and even though the United States was out of it for the time being, he feared that the outbreak of fighting had brought his son one step closer to combat.

Delia was so busy hauling liquor for toasts to the French, the Russians, the Germans and America that she didn’t manage to stop by Davy’s table until nearly ten o’clock. “Abe, I need to talk to you about tomorrow.”

A lump rose in his throat. How could she have known about his so-called date with Hannah? He hadn’t told Alex, or had he? He managed to blurt out, “O.K.”

“What’s the matter with you? You worried that I’m knocked up?”

That’s all he needed now, a knocked-up mistress. He tried to keep his voice even. “Are you?”

Delia laughed. “You don’t think I’m that stupid, do you?” Before he could answer that one, she told him she’d like to do him a favor and take Alex off his hands and out for the day on Sunday, give him a break from the daddy routine. Maybe she’d take him to the zoo—the kid is always talking about animals and she ain’t been to the new zoo yet, but she heard it’s a doozy, and Alex will get a kick out of the elephants, he’s always going on about them, so what do you say?

Either she had something up her sleeve or he was one lucky bastard. What the hell, his problem was solved. “Yeah, well that’s pretty nice of you, thanks.”

“So it’s settled then, she said, and told him she would pick Alex up at ten and have him home for dinner. She patted his shoulder. “Listen, I got orders. These maniacs are so hopped up on the war, they’re making toasts left and right.”

A group of men stood with arms linked and sang “American the Beautiful.” At a table near the back door, a circle had formed around an older man named Timothy Crimmins, a housepainter who’d fought in the Civil War at eighteen on the side of the Confederacy. A diagonal scar started just above his right eyebrow, ran across the bridge of his nose and ended below his left earlobe. His breath whistled from his nose as a handful of men badgered him—hey old-timer, what was it like back in them olden days when you was fighting in a real war, did you ever bayonet anyone, can you still do the Johnny Reb yell? “Come on, Uncle Tim,” Edward Peck said, “give us all the gory details. We can take it.”

Crimmins sipped his whiskey. He coughed into a blotchy handkerchief. “Why do you want to know?”

“Hell, I don’t know, I may want a taste of it. Maybe I’ll join up with the Brits, go over there and shoot me a German or two.”

Crimmins closed his eyes. “You do that.”

“Come on, Uncle Tim, tell us how you got that scar. Was it a bayonet, or an angry whore with a switchblade?”

Crimmins lit his pipe. He drew on the tobacco until it glowed. He closed his eyes, and the smoke curled around his hat.

Aw, he’s probably forgotten about it, one of the men said. He’s too drunk to remember, said another, and then one by one they drifted away, all except for Peck. After a few minutes, Crimmins opened his eyes. “You still here?”

“Yeah, Tim. Tell me something.”

The old man leaned toward him. “I fought at Gettysburg. For three days.” He leaned back and didn’t say another word for the rest of the evening.

*

Benjamin and Alex played checkers and ate graham crackers with butter and jelly at the dining room table. Benjamin had stopped at Plotkin’s Grocery on his way home from the playground that afternoon and found a newspaper in the trash that had “War in Europe!” in huge letters on the front page.

Alex wanted to know what it meant, now that the war had begun, was Arthur going to fight, did he have a gun, when is he coming home, to which Benjamin replied, “I don’t know.”

After a few moves, Alex said, “When’s Daddy coming home?”

Benjamin did a double jump. “Late, probably. Why do you keep rubbing your head?”

“Sometimes I get a hurt on the inside.”