I booked the cheapest flight that I could find, and got into JFK shortly before 9:00 A.M., then took a cab to Bensonhurst. Ever since I was a boy, I had struggled to associate Jimmy Gallagher with Bensonhurst. Of all the places that an Irish cop, and a closeted homosexual to boot, might have called home, Bensonhurst initially seemed about as likely a choice as Salt Lake City, or Kingston, Jamaica. True, there were now Koreans, and Poles, and Arabs, and Russians in the neighborhood, and even African-Americans, but it was the Italians who had always owned Bensonhurst, figuratively if not literally. When Jimmy was growing up, each nationality had its own section, and if you wandered into the wrong one, you were likely to get a beating, but the Italians gave out more beatings than most. Now even their age was passing. Bay Ridge Parkway was still pretty solidly Italian, and there was one mass said each day in Italian at St. Dominic’s at Twentieth Avenue, but the Russians, Chinese, and Arabs were slowly encroaching, taking over the side streets like ants advancing on a millipede. The Jews and the Irish, meanwhile, had been decimated, and the blacks, whose roots in the area dated back to the Underground Railroad, had been reduced to a four-block enclave off Bath Avenue.
I was still two hours early for my meeting with Jimmy. I knew that he went to church every Sunday, but even if he was home he would resent it if I arrived early. That was another thing about Jimmy. He believed in punctuality, and he didn’t care for people who erred on the side of early or late, so while I waited I took a walk along Eighteenth Avenue to get breakfast at Stella’s Diner on Sixty-third, where my father and I had eaten with Jimmy on a couple of occasions because, even though it was nearly twenty blocks from where he lived, Jimmy was close to the owners, and they always made sure that he was taken care of.
While Eighteenth still bore the title of Cristoforo Colombo Boulevard, the Chinese had made their mark, and their restaurants, hair salons, lighting stores, and even aquarium suppliers now stood alongside Italian law firms, Gino’s Focacceria, Queen Ann’s Gourmet Pasta, and the Arcobaleno Italiano music and DVD store, where old men sat on benches with their backs to the avenue, as though signaling their dissatisfaction with the changes that had occurred there. The old Cotillion Terrace was boarded up, twin pink cocktails on either side of the main marquee still bubbling sadly.
When I got to Stella’s, it too was no mo B aoo was nore. The name remained, and I could see some of the stools were still in place in front of the counter, but otherwise the diner had been stripped bare. We had always sat at Stella’s counter when we ate there, Jimmy to the left, my father in the middle, and I at the end. For me, it was as close as I could get to sitting at a bar, and I would watch as the waitresses poured coffee and the plates moved back and forth between the kitchen and the diners, listening to snatches of conversation from all around while my father and Jimmy talked quietly of adult things. I tapped once upon the glass in farewell, then took my New York Times down to the corner of Sixty-fourth and ate a slice at J & V’s pizzeria, which had been in existence for longer than I had. When my watch showed 11:45 A.M., I made my way to Jimmy’s house.
Jimmy lived on Seventy-first, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth, a block that consisted mostly of narrow row houses, in a small, one-family semidetached stucco house with a wrought-iron fence surrounding the garden and a fig tree in the backyard, not far from the area still known as New Utrecht. This had been one of the six original towns of Brooklyn, but then it was annexed to the city in the 1890s and lost its identity. It had been mostly farmland until 1885, when the coming of the Brooklyn, Bath and West End Railroad opened it up to developers, one of whom, James Lynch, built a suburb, Bensonhurst-by-the-Sea, for a thousand families. With the railroad came Jimmy Gallagher’s grandfather, who had been a supervising engineer on the project, and his family. Eventually, after some shuffling around, the Gallaghers returned to Bensonhurst and settled in the house that Jimmy still occupied, not too far from the landmark New Utrecht Reformed Church at Eighteenth and Eighty-third.
In time, the subway came, and with it the middle classes, including Jews and Italians who were abandoning the Lower East Side for the comparatively wide open spaces of Brooklyn. Fred Trump, the Donald’s father, made his name by building the Shore Haven Apartments near the Belt Parkway, at five thousand units the largest private housing development in Brooklyn. Finally, the southern Italian immigrants arrived in force in the 1950s, and Bensonhurst became 80 percent Italian by blood, and 100 percent Italian by reputation.
I had visited Jimmy’s house on only a couple of occasions with my father, one of which was to pay our respects after Jimmy’s father died. All I could recall of that occasion was a wall of cops, some in uniform, some not, with red-eyed women passing around drinks and whispering memories of the departed. Shortly after, his mother had moved out to a place on Gerritsen Beach to be closer to her sister, who was ill and looking after her two grandchildren after their father was killed when his truck overturned somewhere near Nogales, and whose mother struggled with an alcohol addiction. Since then, Jimmy had always lived alone in Bensonhurst.
The exterior of the house was much as I remembered it, the yard tidy, the paintwork recently refreshed. I was reaching for the bell when the door opened, saving me the trouble of ringing, and there was Jimmy Gallagher, older and grayer but still recognizably the same big man who had crushed my hand in his grip so that I might earn the dollar that was on offer. His face was more florid now and, although he had clearly had some sun while he was away, a roseate tinge to his nose suggested that he was hitting the booze more often than was wise. Otherwise, he was in good shape. He wore a freshly pressed white shirt, open at the collar, and gray trousers with a razor pleat. His black shoes were buffed and polished. He looked like a chauffeur who was enjoying his final moments of leisure before ad B are beforeding the finishing touches to his uniform.
“Charlie,” he said. “It’s been a long time.” We shook hands and he grinned warmly, patting me on the shoulder with a meaty left paw. He was still four or five inches taller than me, and I instantly felt as if I was twelve years old again.
“Do I get a dollar now?” I asked as he released his grip.
“You’d only spend it on booze,” he said, inviting me inside. The hallway boasted a huge coatrack, and a grandmother clock that still appeared to be keeping perfect time. Its loud ticking probably echoed through the house. I wondered how Jimmy could sleep with the sound of it, but I supposed that he had been listening to it for so long he hardly noticed it anymore. A flight of carved mahogany stairs led up to the second floor, and to the right was the living room, furnished entirely with antiques. There were photographs on the mantel and on the walls, some of them featuring men in uniform. Among them I saw my father, but I did not ask Jimmy if I might look more closely at them. The wallpaper in the hallway was a red-and-white print that seemed new, but had a turn-of-the-century look that fit in with the rest of the decor.
There were two cups on the kitchen table, along with a plate of pastries, and a fresh pot of coffee was brewing. Jimmy poured the coffee, and we took seats at opposite ends of the small kitchen table.
“Have a pastry,” said Jimmy. “They’re from Villabate. Best in town.”
I broke one apart and tasted it. It was good.
“You know, your old man and I used to laugh about that booze you bought with the money I gave you. He’d never have told you, because your mother thought it was the end of the world when she found that bottle, but he saw that you were growing up, and he got a kick out of it. Mind you, he used to say that I’d put the idea in your head to begin with, but he could never be angry at anyone for long, and especially not you. You were his golden boy. He was a good man, God rest him. God rest them both.”