Whiskey River (31 page)

We were in a narrow foyer with buff paper on the walls that had turned the color of tarnished gold. The room beyond had been a parlor before someone had carried out the furniture and carried in two thick glass cases with nutwood frames, set at right angles with a bronze rococo cash register holding down one end. The shelves were lined with green plush. Upon them gleamed circles of gold and silver scrolled all over—antique pocket watches, thick as teething rings, with stems the size of marbles. Tapestry curtains over the front windows put the room in twilight. The place smelled of brass polish and yellow oil and the odor of genteel rot that I was coming to associate with its owner.

My resolve shriveled. I felt like a gate-crasher at a funeral.

I held up my left wrist with the Timex strapped to it. “It loses five minutes a day.”

He had me take it off and held it up to his ear. “Clocks, they are the only things that tell you what is wrong with them. But you must know their language. This one is saying, ‘I have a gear with a broken tooth.’ I can fix. You come back tomorrow.”

“I’m Connie Minor,” I said. “We met at your son’s wedding.”

He nodded. “This I know. You write about John in the paper.”

“I didn’t think you’d remember me.”

“My eyes are bad. My head is fine. My ears too.” He stood stroking the watch.

“I’d like to ask you some questions about Jack.”

“For the paper? You will mention the shop?”

“If you like.”

“Sometimes John is reading to me what you write. It doesn’t sound like John. Maybe I won’t sound like me.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Business is bad. No one wants to spend time with old men and watches on a nice day.” He closed the main door and locked it and flipped the OPEN sign so that it read CLOSED through the window. He turned and went around the glass case with the cash register on it, his heels scuffing a little, and then through a door at the back. After a moment I followed.

I don’t know what I expected from my first glimpse of the rest of the house. A stale Victorian room, probably, with a horsehair sofa and mismatched wingback chairs—the house my father died in. The room Jerome Danzig led me into contained a pair of chromium-and-leather director’s chairs and a davenport of the same material, assembled from four pieces like an erector set. A glass table with a shiny frame sneered at the homely upright telephone it was supporting. I wouldn’t see anything like it until I visited the Chicago World’s Fair two years later. The House of Tomorrow went like hell in that room with its tarnished-gold wallpaper and dust-motes spinning in a shaft coming through a window with flouncy faded curtains. It would have been a dining room before the parlor was moved there from the storefront.

“John bought the furniture.” Danzig opened a drawer that hung suspended by some mystical device under the top of the telephone table. “He said the old room looked like Madame Glyn lived in it. I said I don’t care, I live in the shop. Ah.” He swept something off the top of a thick album bound in dirty blue cloth and carried it to the sofa. The weight of it bent him over. It would run about a pound.

“Does Jack—John—give you money?”

“I don’t take it. Later, always, I find it in the cash drawer. I open up a bank account, I don’t touch. He might need it. This is John and Tom’s mother. She died.”

I joined him on the davenport. The woman in the wedding picture, mounted on stiff yellow cardboard with the name of the studio engraved in extravagant script on the border, was grave and large-boned in a gown of ivory lace. The bridegroom was Danzig, without glasses and with dark hair and a razor collar. Tom had his father’s eyes, thoughtful and brooding. Jack had his mother’s jaw and build and his eyes were his own. He had inherited his curly hair from his father and nothing else, and in such an obvious way that he seemed to have rejected it deliberately. Mr. and Mrs. Danzig made a solemn-looking couple, even for the time when the picture was taken.

A putty-colored hand, scarred and calloused at the fingertips from decades of handling cogs and wheels and jewelers’ implements, turned the brittle black pages. Picture postcards tinted by hand. Snapshots with serrated edges. Brown newspaper clippings that disintegrated before the eyes. The old man provided commentary. Tom at ten, holding up a medal for penmanship. John at six, posing with a stick and hoop, one black stocking drooping below his knickers. Danzig standing in the doorway of his first shop on Kercheval with his thumbs in his vest pockets. Uncle So-and-So with one foot on the running board of his new Edison electric. A flood in someone’s basement. The Littlefield house with a horse and phaeton parked in front of it. Grainy, fading, poorly composed pictures taken looking down through the viewfinders of Kodaks, Brownies, Arguses. Step back. A little to the right. No, left. There.

“I don’t see any other photos of Mrs. Danzig.”

“She passed away in nineteen twelve. This is Tom at his graduation. He made a speech.”

No graduation shot of Jack. I would have been surprised to see one. If any were taken, it would have been about the time I met him at Hattie’s place on Vernor. I couldn’t picture a photographer getting him into the gown and mortarboard even if he’d earned them.

In his carefully de-ethnicized tones, the old man recounted family history. His father had been a watchmaker with a five-syllable surname in Danzig. After his parents were killed in a pogrom, relatives pooled their money and sent Jerome to America. An exhausted civil servant at Ellis Island, unable to spell his name or misunderstanding his English, had rechristened him after his home city, and it was as Jerome Danzig that he became a citizen in 1910, by which time he had married and come to Detroit with his pregnant wife and small son Tom. Anna Danzig never fully recovered from her second pregnancy and died when John was two.

I knew then, with a sickly sinking sensation, why I’d put off coming there so long. It was all so suffocatingly ordinary, and nothing in it explained Jack Dance.

Danzig turned pages as he spoke. At one point, more to interrupt his drone than to feed my curiosity, I asked him to go back one. It was a picture of the boys in trunks and swimtops on a beach. John, two inches shorter than his towheaded brother and chubby, was resting his hand on the shoulder of a girl of twelve or thirteen with a big bow in her dark blonde hair, wearing one of the ridiculous puff-sleeved swimming dresses that were hardly ever worn anymore outside of Mack Sennett comedies. She was squinting into the sun behind the photographer, distorting her features, but she looked familiar. Something nudged me and I looked out the window. I asked Danzig who she was.

“That’s Emily, the boys’ cousin. That was taken on Belle Isle, summer of nineteen twenty-four. John spent a lot of time with her then. He was going to marry her when he turned sixteen, but I told him he couldn’t. She was Mrs. Danzig’s niece and his first cousin. It was the law.”

“Was it serious?”

“No. Well, I caught him throwing his suitcase out of his window one night; he was going to meet her and take the train to Toledo and get married there. I took away the suitcase and locked him in. Emily went to Muskegon and married a man in the cement business. She had a girl last year.”

“Eloping sounds serious.”

“They were children. He said if he couldn’t marry Emily he wouldn’t marry anyone. You were at his wedding.”

I let it go then, reluctantly. I’d had a headline—JACK THE RIPPER’S FIRST LOVE—but it evaporated. Burnt-out passion never sold a newspaper. The story told me something, however. If I was any judge of proportions, the chunky kid in the photograph could have broken his diminutive father in two without putting down his suitcase. Yet he’d meekly allowed the old man to lock him in his room. Whatever had swept him off the path of church and community, it hadn’t been permissiveness.

“You said John had a room?”

“He shared with Tom. I changed nothing. In case one of them wants to stay. So far …” He shrugged.

“Could I see it?”

“Wait, there are more pictures.”

So I sat through the rest of the album. Tom’s first bylined article for the
Times,
Jack and Vivian cutting their wedding cake, photographed at a different angle from the similar shot that had run in the
Banner,
Andrea St. Charles’s account of the reception. A lot of strangers in long skirts and mail-order suits, identified as Aunt Inez and Uncle Ignatz, or names to that effect. A blurred clipping from the legals of the old
Evening News
announcing a list of new citizens, with
Jerome Danzig
underlined in faded brown ink. Anna’s obituary, sparsely worded; each “beloved” would have cost extra. There was no chronology to the order in which the items appeared, as if they had been pasted on whatever page happened to present itself when the book was opened. Unusual for a watchmaker. Or perhaps not. He was the first watchmaker I had ever spent any time with.

At last he put the book, down and I followed him up a narrow enclosed staircase without a runner or paint on the plaster walls to the second story. A small metal cylinder of the type that usually contained a
mezuzah
was attached to the hallway wall at the top. It was the only religious artifact I saw on the premises. In most Jewish households it was nailed to the front doorframe for luck. Maybe Danzig thought he needed more luck upstairs.

At first glance, the room told me more about the parent than it did about the sons. It didn’t look like a place where boys had lived. There were no pictures of Babe Ruth or Red Grange on the walk, no litter of baseballs and pocket knives and movie theater ticket stubs on the bureaus; just a Spartan neatness about the two single beds and steelpoint engravings hung in plain wood frames of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and Lord Cornwallis’s surrender and George Washington’s farewell to his troops. I knew without looking that no copies of the
Police Gazette
lay hidden under the mattress Danzig had pointed out to me as John’s. The future bootlegger would have found a better way to smuggle his impure thoughts past his father. For all the old man’s air of shriveled depletion, unless he had lied about not changing anything in the room, his authority had reached from the barren storefront on the ground floor to his sons’ most private corner. Inside those quiet walls I saw emerge a family tyrant on the European order.

The nightstand on Tom’s side of the room had two shelves containing schoolbooks. There were books on the small table on John’s side, too, but these were of the Tom Swift variety and probably hadn’t been opened in many years. A picture in a standing frame on John’s bureau was turned toward a corner. I had to step between the bed and the bureau to look at it.

It was another shot of John in his middle teens with his cousin Emily. Both were fully dressed, he in a suit that might have been the same one he was wearing when I met him, she in a dark sailor dress with white piping. She had the big bow in her hair and was looking up at John, who was grinning at the camera and hugging her tightly with one arm.

I knew then why she’d seemed familiar. I had seen that rapt, upward-tilted profile, dripping with devotion, in every place Jack Dance had lived since his honeymoon. The artist might have used Emily as his model had he not died when she was still a little girl. From the hair bow to the slightly plump cheeks to her worshipful expression, she was the girl in
The Pious Heart.

A married man couldn’t carry around a picture of a strange girl without raising too many questions, but a painting that reminded him of her could pass as just another of his many idiosyncracies. And he would go on breaking laws as long as he continued to remember the law that had taken away the girl he had chosen.

I thanked Danzig for the tour through things past and left. I found something else to write about that day, and the next and the next. The
Banner
wasn’t right for Jack’s story. Neither was any other paper, and I haven’t told it to anyone before this.

I never went back for my watch, either. Six months later Jerome Danzig was dead, and for all I know, they buried it with him. At that, he outlived Jack by three months.

M
EANWHILE THE MACHINE TAX
evasion trial ground on and on. Joey’s gross earnings for the seven-year period covered by the indictment, however much of their impression was lost by the dry adding-machine tone in which the government’s accountants read the figures into the record, were staggering: Liquor, $224,000,000; gambling, $175,000,000; prostitution, $53,000,000; protection, a paltry $14,000,000, but coming up fast in the stretch. Henry Ford, running a poor second to such enterprise, had no comment for the reporters who reached him, but was said to have remarked in private that even the Jews could learn a thing or two from that man Machine. But they were just meaningless strings of zeroes to Detroiters who had to scratch to come up with two pennies to read them. Public interest in the proceedings didn’t pick up until the defendant took the stand on his own behalf. The
Banner,
thanks to court reporter Chuck Kobler’s business-school shorthand, maintained a faithful transcript, a portion of which I provide here, from United States Prosecutor Melvin I. Chouser’s cross-examination:

C
HOUSER
:     You admit that you willfully refused to pay any income tax for the years 1924 to 1930 inclusive?

M
ACHINE
:     Not willfully, no. It was a mistake.

C
HOUSER
:     You forgot to file a return seven years in a row?

M
ACHINE
:     No sir. I was told I didn’t have to.

C
HOUSER
:     Told by whom?

M
ACHINE
:     A lawyer I talked to once. He said I didn’t have to pay taxes on illegal earnings under my Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

C
HOUSER
:     When did you find out this advice was incorrect?

M
ACHINE
:     When I was arrested four months ago.

C
HOUSER
:     Who is the attorney who told you you didn’t have to pay taxes on illegal earnings?