‘What really happened Friday, Boone?’
He squeezed his big hands. ‘Mostly like I told the first time. She come early, the whole thing with Vega’d gone bad. We was all going down to Carolina, for a while anyways. She was sick of everything, all them men. Not before Monday, though, ’cause she had to take care of the way she was. I guess I’d kind of figured the kid maybe was mine, so I got mad. She got mad back. The kid was Vega’s, she wasn’t having it no matter. Vega wouldn’t do nothin’ for her, not even help her fix it. Her partner in that theatre of hers was fixin’ her up with some kind of special Doc he knew about for Saturday. So I walked out and got drunk. Maybe if I’d stayed…’
He left it hanging, and so did I.
‘Ted Marshall arranged it, paid for it?’ I said. ‘You did know about Marshall?’
‘I knew. I guess he paid; she didn’t have money.’
‘You didn’t know where she had it done?’
‘She never said.’
‘Then how did Emory Foxx find out?’
They both shook their heads, sat silent. I stood up.
All right, go in to Captain Gazzo, Boone. On your own, and to Gazzo at Centre Street. Take the money.’
Boone Terrell nodded. ‘He gets off, that Vega. He didn’t even help her. Maybe if he pays for it, she don’t die. He got the money for a real doctor. He could of helped.’
‘Maybe he won’t get off, Boone,’ I said.
His head went all the way down, and he was crying. His clenched hands against his forehead. Sarah Wiggen was up, came at me with her hands out to push me from the room.
‘You got what you wanted,’ she said, her face white. ‘We were wrong, now go away! He can’t stand any more. The money for the children, that’s what kept him going, a purpose. He’s not nothing to think about now but Anne.’
I went.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Manhasset is on the North Shore of Long Island just outside the city limits. I took a cab from Steiner Street to Flushing Main Street, and caught the Long Island Railroad. From there it was twenty minutes on a slow train. Most of the trains are slow, and I had time to look out of the window at the neat suburban houses on their manicured plots of small land. I had time to think of Boone Terrell who had been sustained by the need to act for his children, but who had now lost that need to act, and so had only Anne Terry to think about-his loss and his emptiness. Any life was better than no life, and a weekend wife better than no wife at all.
I had time on the slow train to think of Anne Terry, too. Somehow, she was fading in the inexorable twists of events. Her death usurped by the stronger hates of Emory Foxx and Ricardo Vega, as her life had been ruled by their power. She was fading among the neat houses outside the train window-the homes of people she had not known, and who did not want to know her.
Manhasset was exclusive once, a place of the rich. It’s middle-class now, but still a nice place to live. Part of the exodus from the cities, the middle-class migration to a narrow safety that is not particularly Protestant, and not necessarily Anglo-Saxon, but that is very much white. A sterile landscape behind an invisible stockade of fear and power and advantage, built to keep out the poor and crude, the dirty and disadvantaged, the communal and bleeding. In these homes of the comfortable, the people want no intrusion, no competition. They want to keep the advantages they have, and Anne Terry could count for nothing here-alive or dead.
Anne Terry had had no dream of privilege, but only of work, of finding somewhere a reason to live. In this dark landscape they could only hate her for the wind she brought to shake their comfort, and she was fading from me among the Vegas and Foxxes and manicured lawns. I didn’t want to lose her. I needed her with me among these houses that sat like impervious toads. I needed her honesty and her laugh: ‘I wanted something big, Gunner, you believe it. I made a bad play, a mistake, but I wanted it alive, Gunner man, not small and wrinkled and flat.’
She was my reason, Anne Terry, and at Manhasset station I took a mini-bus taxi that dropped me at a red brick house with a lawn and lighted windows. The lawn wasn’t especially large, and the backyard was fenced. A middleclass house on a well-behaved street in the quiet suburbs. If there were private quirks, they were firmly inside. Not even a careless gardening tool marred the proper order.
George Lehman opened the door himself. His suit coat was off, but he still wore his tie. A napkin in his belt, a black yamalke skullcap on his bald head that gave his fleshy face a kind of ancient dignity. He nodded to me before I could speak.
‘Fortune, sure,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
A small entrance hall was crowded, spotless, and smelled of rich food. The living room had that mixture of German and Russian heaviness of the New York Yiddish culture-dark, thick furniture; ornate silver menorahs, faintly oriental tapestries like ikons. In the dining room six people sat silent around a long oak table that gleamed white and silver, and an ornate samovar steamed on a side table. The six people were three male, three female. The males wore the same black yamalkes.
‘My family,’ George Lehman said.
His fleshy hand moved a few inches. As if that was a command, all six people at the table stood and formed a kind of line in front of the table. The three males stood stiffly, the women with more diffidence. Lehman looked at me with what I could only call a soft pride.
‘Mr Fortune came to see me on business,’ Lehman said. It was a statement and an explanation, as if in this house George Lehman made the decisions, but everyone was entitled to know the basis of those decisions.
He indicated the family ranged in front of me one at a time with his thick hand. His voice different here, that gentle pride, firm but kind.
‘My son Saul, he goes to Brandeis University.’
A tall, thin youth with a dark beard, who bowed his neck.
‘My son David. David is at Colombia University.’
Fatter and shorter, like his father, David grinned.
‘My daughter Sylvia. Soon she marries her rabbi.’
The girl was petulant, but she hid it carefully. Her father not all she wanted, but she didn’t say that in this house.
‘My brother Maurice.’
An older man, short, who smiled from a friendly face.
‘My sister-in-law Sophie, who lives with us.’
The poor relation, grateful, and admiring Lehman.
‘And my wife Florrie. My best luck.’
The wife blushed. ‘George, you embarrass your friend.’
Lehman smiled, and I nodded to them all, managed a mumble. Only the oldest boy stared at my arm. Lehman dropped his napkin onto the table.
‘You all finish dinner,’ he said. ‘Save some tea.’
‘I’ll bring down two glasses,’ the wife said.
‘That’s fine, Florrie,’ Lehman said.
He nodded me from the dining room. Not even the wife had asked who or what I was, or why I was there. In this house George Lehman was the patriarch, benign and respected, never questioned. He led me down into the basement. It was a finished basement-playroom with pool table, refrigerator, television, record player, posters, the trimmings of young people; and an office with desk and leather chairs.
‘Okay, Fortune, sit down,’ Lehman said.
He sat behind the desk, I took a chair. I still wore my duffle coat. He hadn’t asked me to take it off. He had closed the office door. Upstairs, the patriarch with his family in his home. Down here, alone with me, the visitor from another world, he was Ricardo Vega’s business manager.
He took off the yamalke. ‘We say prayers at meals.’
‘A nice family,’ I said. ‘Does Vega come here much?’