“I’ll tell him. Now come home, you and Dom.”
“Vinnie?” I said. “Thank you very much.”
“Come on, for what?” he said, and hung up.
When I told Dominique about the phone conversation, she said, “So you killed him for nothing.”
I should have picked up on the word you.
But, after all, she hadn’t killed anyone, had she?
“I killed him because I love you,” I said.
“Alors, merci beaucoup,” she said. “But money would have done it just as well, eh?”
A week after we got back to the city, Dominique told me that what we’d enjoyed together on the way to Chattanooga had been very nice, bien sûr, but she could never live with a man who had done murder, eh? However noble the cause. En tout cas, it was time she went back to Paris to make her home again in the land she loved.
“Tu comprends, mon chéri?” she said.
No, I wanted to say, I don’t understand.
I thought we loved each other, I wanted to say.
That night on the train...
I thought it would last forever, you know?
I thought Legs Diamond would be our costar forever. We would run from him through all eternity, locked in embrace as he pursued us relentlessly and in vain. We would marry and we would have children and I would become rich and famous and Dominique would stay young and beautiful forever and our love would remain steadfast and true — but only because we would forever be running from Legs. That would be the steadily unifying force in our lives. Running from Legs.
We kissed good-bye.
We promised to stay in touch.
I never heard from her again.
Happy New Year, Herbie
We were living on North Brother Island at the time.
It was, and is, a tiny island in the middle of the East River, adjacent to a miniscule uninhabited island called South Brother. When we lived there, and I suppose the same is true of it now, the Riker’s Island prison was visible in the distance from one end of the island, and from the opposite end, the Bronx mainland. There was a lot of river traffic passing North Brother. From our windows in one of the converted buildings we could see tugs and barges and transports and tankers and once even a Swedish luxury liner.
The buildings we lived in had once been part of a hospital for tuberculars, the hospital rooms converted into apartments shortly after the war. When Joan and I were first married, we lived in McCloskey Hall, which was on the end of the island opposite the tennis courts and the handball court and a sort of outdoor teahouse overlooking the edge of the river and Hell’s Gate on the horizon. Later, just before our first son was born, we applied for and moved to a larger apartment on the other end of the island in a building called Finley Hall. If all of the buildings sounded like part of a college campus, it was with good reason. The island had initially been leased by Columbia, N.Y.U., and Fordham, I think, and was euphemistically called Riverside Campus or Riverside Extension or some such, the idea being to provide housing for World War II veterans who were attending these colleges. The unmarried students lived in a dormitory in the center of the island, the old administration building. The married veterans and their wives lived in the converted hospital buildings. Later, the accommodations were extended to include veterans from other colleges in the city and, toward the end, the island accepted veterans who were attending any school approved by the Veterans Administration — which is how Herbie came to live on North Brother. I say “toward the end” not because the island went up in smoke or anything like that, but simply because the buildings eventually reverted to what they’d been originally: a hospital. In the old days, before the students invaded it, the island had housed such medical phenomena as Typhoid Mary. After we left, it became the Riverside Hospital for drug addicts. We, the interim students, were only a part of its brief, non-medical history.
Our apartment in Finley Hall was at the end of a long corridor on the fourth floor. The original hospital rooms had been revamped so that there were five apartments on each floor, the apartments varying in size according to the families occupying them. The smallest apartment on each floor was a single rectangular room that had once been the old hospital elevator shaft. On our floor it was shared by Peter, who was a dental student, and his wife Gerry, who listened to the radio wearing earphones so as not to disturb her husband while he studied.
Our own apartment was slightly larger than the converted elevator shaft. It consisted of two rooms and a John. The door opened on an enormous living room-dining room-kitchen combined, with windows facing the river north and south. Joan and I slept in the living room on a bed that doubled as a sofa during the day. The other room was smaller, with windows facing the river on the west, and Timmy — our newborn son — slept in that room. The bathroom was tacked onto one end of Timmy’s room. We decorated the bathroom with covers from Collier’s Magazine pasted to the wallboard, even though someone told us we’d lose our original security deposit if we papered the walls. But aside from this single effort, there wasn’t much else we could do to improve the apartment. It had been hastily reconstructed in a time when new housing was practically nonexistent in New York. The paint was thin; the plasterboard showed through in uneven patches, and even the nails holding plasterboard to stud were clearly visible. The floors were presumably the original asphalt tile that had run through the old hospital. You could still see marks on the tile where entire walls had been ripped out in the transformation. The river moisture kept the apartment constantly damp, and the closed cupboards over the sink were a haven for cockroaches, no matter how many forays Joan and I made into their territory with insecticide powders and sprays. The view was magnificent, of course, and perhaps if we’d had any money we could have framed the view elegantly. But we were students living on my G.I. allotment and on what Joan and I could earn with part-time jobs. Joan had dropped out of school just before Timmy was born, and I was in my senior year and working after school each day at the World Student Service Fund on West Fortieth Street and on Sundays at the Y as a counselor. On Saturdays, Joan went to her job in the music department at Macy’s while I stayed home to wash and wax the old asphalt-tile floor, change Timmy’s diapers, and continue my sworn and unceasing guerrilla warfare against the goddamn cockroaches. Joan had been a music major at Hunter College, which is how she’d got the job at Macy’s. We’d been engaged for two years when we heard about North Brother Island and decided to get married immediately. I guess we’d both thought of marriage as having friends in for coffee, or of putting our laundry into a washing machine together, or of planning menus for the week. At least, our idea was to continue living in McCloskey Hall until we were both graduated and then go to Paris for a year where I would learn to write and Joan would continue with her studies at the Conservatory or someplace. But we were married in October, and on New Year’s Eve of that first year on the island Timmy was conceived. And suddenly we were married in earnest and not on an extended honeymoon, and shortly after that we were parents to boot. It was our second New Year’s Eve on the island, when we were living in Finley, that the thing happened with Herbie.
In a sense, despite our new responsibilities, our stay on the island was an extended honeymoon. We were surrounded by students or recent graduates who were just as broke as we were. The island was reached by a ferryboat that shuttled back and forth at unpredictable times, often carrying handcuffed convicts to Riker’s Island as its second stop. There were hardly any automobiles on the island; you could walk from one end of it to the other in less than five minutes. On a still autumn night, even after Timmy was born, we would go outside with other married college students and play charades or even hide-and-seek. The island was peacefully quiet, and you could hear a baby if he so much as turned in his crib. On Sunday nights they would show old movies in the rec hall, stuff like Citizen Kane and Pinocchio and The Philadelphia Story. Admission was twenty-five cents a head, and Joan and I would take turns running up to check on Timmy every time the projectionist stopped to change a reel, unless we’d arranged for Peter and Gerry to look in on him. We used to keep our money in a little tin box divided into compartments, so much a week for rent, so much for transportation, so much for entertainment. I can remember a night when Joan wept herself to sleep because she’d backed a straight flush in a poker game and lost our three-dollar entertainment allotment to someone with a royal flush. The island was literally an island, but it was also a figurative never-never land that was a part of the city and yet removed from it. It was, in a sense, a country club for paupers.