The Mafia might have backed away from Louis but Hortensia said you couldn’t trust them and anytime she and Louis went for a drive they rode with two guns between them, his and hers, and he told her if anyone came with trouble and put him out of commission she was to take the steering wheel and yank it toward the sidewalk so that they’d hit a pedestrian instead of traffic and the insurance company would take care of things and if they didn’t and gave Hortensia any trouble he’d leave her with a set of phone numbers of a few guys, PRs, the goddam Mafia wasn’t the only game in town, and these guys would take care of the insurance companies, the greedy bastards, excuse the language, Alberta, is there any rum left, Frankie?
Poor Louis, she said, the Kefauver Commission was bothering him but he died in his bed and I never go for a ride no more but he left me a gun downstairs, you wanna see my gun, Frankie, no? well, I have it and anyone comes into my apartment without an invitation gets it, Frankie, right between the eyes, bang, boom, he’s gone.
Neighbors smiled and nodded and told us we had bought a gold mine, that everyone knew Louis had buried money in the basement of our new house where Hortensia still lived, or over our heads in the false ceiling of the living room. All we had to do was pull down that ceiling and we’d be up to our armpits in hundred-dollar bills.
When Hortensia moved out we dug up the basement to install a new waste line. No buried money. We pulled down false ceilings, exposed bricks and beams. We tapped on walls and someone suggested we consult a psychic.
We found an old doll with tufts of hair, no eyes, no arms, one leg. We kept it for our two-year-old, Maggie, who called it The Beast and loved it over all her other dolls.
Hortensia moved to a small street-level apartment on Court Street and stayed there till she died or moved back to Puerto Rico. I often wished I had spent more time with her and a bottle of rum or that I had introduced her to Virgil Frank so that we could have rum and Irish whiskey and talk about Louis Weber and the gold flow and ways of reducing your telephone bills with an egg timer.
51
It’s 1969 and I’m substitute teaching for Joe Curran, who is out for a few weeks with the drink. His students ask if I know Greek and seem disappointed that I don’t. After all, Mr. Curran would sit at his desk and read or recite from memory long passages from The Odyssey, yeah, in Greek, and he’d remind his students daily he was a graduate of Boston Latin School and Boston College and tell them anyone who didn’t know his Greek or Latin couldn’t consider himself educated, could never lay claim to being a gentleman. Yes, yes, this might be Stuyvesant High School, says Mr. Curran, and you might be the brightest kids from here to the foothills of the Rockies, your heads stuffed with science and mathematics, but all you need in this life is your Homer, your Sophocles, your Plato, your Aristotle, your Aristophanes for the lighter moments, your Virgil for the dark places, your Horace to escape the mundane, and your Juvenal when you’re completely pissed off with the world. The grandeur, boys, the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome.
It wasn’t the Greeks or the Romans his students loved, it was the forty minutes when Joe droned or declaimed and they could daydream, catch up on homework for other classes, doodle, nibble at sandwiches from home, carve their initials on desks that might have been occupied by James Cagney, Thelonius Monk or certain Nobel Laureates. Or they could dream of the nine girls who had just been admitted for the first time in the school’s history. The nine Vestal Virgins, Joe Curran called them, and there were complaints from parents that the suggestiveness of his language was inappropriate.
Oh, inappropriate my ass, said Joe. Why can’t they speak simple En-glish? Why can’t they use a simple word like wrong?
His students said, Yeah, wasn’t it something to see the girls in the hallway, nine girls, nearly three thousand boys and what about the boys in the school, fifty percent for Chrissakes, who didn’t want the girls, what about that? They had to be dead from the waist down, didn’t they?
Then you’d wonder about Mr. Curran himself up there shifting into English to talk about The Iliad and the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, he couldn’t stop talking about those two old Greeks, and how Achilles was so furious with Hector for killing Patroclus he killed Hector and dragged his body behind his chariot to show the power of his love for his dead friend, the love that dare not speak its name.
But, boys oh boys, is there a sweeter moment in all of literature than that moment when Hector removed his helmet to calm the fears of his child? Oh, if only all our fathers removed their helmets. And when Joe blubbered into his gray handkerchief and used words like piss you knew he’d left the school at lunch hour for a little tot around the corner at the Gashouse Bar. There were days he returned so excited from thoughts that had come to him on the bar stool he wanted to thank God for leading him to teaching so that he could forget the Greeks for a while to sing the praises of the great Alexander Pope and his Ode on Solitude.
Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
And remember, boys and girls, is there a girl here? raise your hand if you’re a girl, no girls? remember, boys, that Pope was indebted to Horace and Horace was indebted to Homer and Homer was indebted to God knows who. Will you promise on your mothers’ heads to remember that? If you remember Pope’s debt to Horace you’ll know no one springs full-blown from his father’s head. Will you remember?
We will, Mr. Curran.
What am I to tell Joe’s students who complain that they have to read The Odyssey and all this old stuff? Who cares what happened in ancient Greece or Troy with men dying right and left over that stupid Helen? Who cares? Boys in the class say you wouldn’t catch them fighting to the death over some girl that didn’t want them. Yeah, they could understand Romeo and Juliet because a lotta families are dumb about you going out with someone from another religion and they could understand West Side Story and the gangs but they could never believe grown men would leave home the way Odysseus left Penelope and Telemachus and go off to fight over this stupid chick who didn’t know enough to come inside. They have to admit Odysseus was cool the way he tried to dodge the draft, acting crazy an’ all and they like the way Achilles fooled him because Achilles is nowhere near as smart as Odysseus but like they can’t believe he’d stay away twenty years fighting and fooling around and expect Penelope to like sit there spinning and weaving and telling the suitors get lost. Girls in the class say they can believe it, they really can, that women can be true forever because that’s the way women are, and one girl tells the class what she read in a Byron poem, that man’s love is of his life a thing apart, ’tis woman’s whole existence. Boys hoot at this but girls applaud and tell them what all the psychology books say, that boys their age are three years behind in mental development though there are some in this class who must be at least six years behind and they should therefore shut up. The boys try to be sarcastic, raising their eyebrows and telling each other, Oh, law de daw, smell me, I’m developed, but the girls look at each other, shrug, toss their hair and ask me in a lofty tone if we could please get back to the lesson.