My God, he said to himself, temporarily oblivious to the seriousness of the moment. This is one beautiful woman.
She never found her mother, she said. Perhaps she died. Perhaps not. But Linda Morales did discover who her mother was and along with that revelation came the knowledge she had an older brother and two older sisters-all of whom had been abandoned as well. Chita spent years tracking them down. She found her brother first and then one sister. Both have been well taken care of and she remained close with each of them, she told Walter. The last one Conchita Crystal finally located was her oldest sister, Elana Morales.
“She died,” said Chita. “Actually, that’s what made it possible for me to find her. That’s how we found her. When she died one of the people helping me came to me with the information. I never got to see her, to meet her. And she was my sister.” Once more there were tears. This time Walter reached into his pocket and handed her one of Billy’s bar napkins he had there.
“Thank you,” she said. “Elana never married, but she had a son. She took the father’s name, for her son too, of course. Levine. Not easy for me to find. Levine. Lots of them and they’re not supposed to be Puerto Rican, if you know what I mean.”
“I do,” Walter said.
“He’s a nice young man, a wonderful person. He’s my sister’s boy and I love him as I would have loved her. Now, he needs my help. That’s why I’ve come to you.”
Walter did not ask how she found him. They all found him the same way. Who she reached out to was of no interest to him. They knew he was here for them. Until he retired, that is. Conchita Crystal was not the richest, certainly not the most powerful person to ever seek him out. And, as well known as she was-worldwide-even she might have been surprised to learn, not the most famous either. But Walter was sure she was the most beautiful.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
With that most simple of invitations, Conchita Crystal proceeded to tell Walter a story so absurd and incomplete, so filled with holes he had to remind himself several times not to completely dismiss its credibility before she finished. Her nephew, Harry Levine, had the written confession, she said, of the man who killed John F. Kennedy.
Sadie Fagan had a moustache. Not a thick one, dark and heavy, but noticeable nonetheless. It didn’t bother Harry Levine, until he was a teenager. Then he found it kind of creepy. Later, as a grown man, keenly aware and eagerly appreciative of the intrigues a woman’s body offered, Harry no longer concerned himself with Aunt Sadie’s mildly hairy upper lip. She was his father’s older sister, a squat woman, a fireplug not much more than five feet in her shoes. She was fat, but not like a lot of middle-aged women Harry saw around town. Not like the ones who always seemed to smoke menthol cigarettes. Not like the obese ones with huge asses and truck-tire thighs. And not like the ones who drove ten-year-old Pontiacs, wore oversize t-shirts emblazoned with NASCAR logos, and inevitably blocked the aisles at Wal-Mart. Aunt Sadie was solid and carried her weight well distributed. She had a big head, big ankles and a big everything else in between.
From what Harry could see, his father and Sadie shared only the same dark complexion. All resemblance ended there. In the photographs, the ones his mother and Sadie loved to show him, she always smiled. His father never did, not in any of them. And all the while Aunt Sadie never had any expression on her face except a happy smile.
As a kid, Harry thought his aunt’s grin was permanently pasted on her face. She awoke smiling and went to sleep the same way. And it was there all the while in between, even when she was angry. When Harry was eleven he happened across a picture of the old Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella. Immediately, he recognized his aunt. Of course, she was neither black nor a man and hardly a ballplayer. She was, instead, very much a middle-class, suburban, New York Jewish woman, one who just happened to live in Roswell, Georgia.
Like so many southern white women, Jews and Christians alike, Sadie had what could only be politely called big hair. To Harry, the scent of hairspray meant his aunt was nearby. No matter what she wore-a bathrobe on a Sunday morning, Bermuda shorts and one of her husband Larry’s old shirts while she worked in the garden, or a shiny, gleaming, rhinestone-studded floor-length evening gown like the ones she always wore to wedding receptions and took with her on Caribbean cruises-Sadie’s hair was always perfect and very heavily lacquered. Stiff to the touch.
Harry was born in May 1974, six months after his father disappeared in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos or someplace else. Who really knew? His mother, Elana Morales, never believed the government’s story, but what could she do? She wasn’t his wife. The unfortunate David Levine drew a low number, got drafted in February, last saw Elana in August and disappeared, MIA, the second week of December 1973. He was never found.
Harry’s mom, Elana, was Puerto Rican, a real Puerto Rican, not a New York Puerto Rican. She was a law student in New York City when she met David Levine, fell in love and moved in with him. They talked about getting married, talked about it, that’s all. David fancied himself a poet. He worked at the Post Office and wrote long poems, that rarely rhymed, in small notebooks, sitting with Elana in coffeehouses and bars in Greenwich Village. Both of them were antiwar-who wasn’t? It was the seventies. He really got screwed by his draft board. By then it was too late to get married and when Elana turned up pregnant, the Army couldn’t care less.
Sadie and Larry Fagan moved from Brooklyn to Atlanta in 1966. Larry had made a business trip there a few months earlier-he sold medical equipment-loved it and worked himself into his company’s southeastern office. Sadie was reluctant to leave New York, her family and friends, but she kept her misgivings to herself. Soon after arriving in Georgia, she realized her fears were unfounded and was more than happy to admit it. Sadie made new friends. So did Larry. They both loved living in Atlanta. Larry found his way to a senior management job with a major manufacturer of cardiac surgical supplies and the two of them settled in for the long haul.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t have children. They never said exactly why not, but years later Harry discovered it was his uncle’s fault. A low sperm count can give many women second thoughts, but Sadie stayed, sacrificed and saved her motherly love for her nephew. When Elana gave birth she gave Harry his father’s name, Levine, and took it for herself too. She was alone in New York with a baby and another year of school before becoming an attorney. She needed money and she needed friends. Sadie and Larry invited her to come to Georgia, not for a visit but permanently. They implored her. “We’re family,” they said. Elana accepted. She transferred to Emory University Law School and brought herself and her baby son to live with the Fagans.
That’s the way Harry grew up. He and his mother lived downstairs on the lower level. They had two bedrooms, a living room, a small office for Elana and a bathroom. They had a separate entrance from the backyard, one that Elana never used. In high school, when Harry sneaked out after curfew and came home late, way late, he came and went via that special door. His mother knew. His aunt and uncle knew. It never crossed Harry’s mind they had any idea. He thought he’d pulled one over.
They had a wonderful life in that house, all four of them. After her graduation, Elana passed the Bar and took a position with one of Atlanta’s big, downtown law firms. Six years later, she realized she would never be made partner. Why? Although a Levine, she was Latino. While some Jews made partner, no such rewards awaited Latinos. She was unmarried. She was a mother. Who knew why? She quit. Elana Levine opened her own law office in Roswell, near home, all by herself. She did everything a lawyer could-wills; evictions; pre-nuptial agreements; divorce and custody; civil suits of all shapes and sizes; and minor criminal offences, DUIs and drug busts for rich suburban kids. As a Spanish speaker, she was sought out by Atlanta’s growing Mexican population, usually for matters pertaining to immigration. Her practice thrived. Very soon she earned more money than Larry Fagan did. She paid half the family’s expenses and could easily have afforded a home of her own but Elana never-not once, not ever-considered moving out. Sadie would not have allowed it anyway.