Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (27 page)

Roy was alone on the corner of Westerlo and Green streets at 5:45 on the clear, twenty-four-degree morning of Election Day when Quinn and Matt Daugherty arrived in Quinn’s car. Cardboard signs with
POLLING PLACE
had been nailed to telephone poles on the block, and one was pasted onto the window of Tony Romildo’s storefront clubroom, where old-timers who couldn’t speak English gathered to drink coffee and grappa. Store lights were on and men were moving a table. One man saw the group outside and came out. He was a white-haired pudge with a facial flush and razor nicks.

“You people here to vote?”

“We’re waiting for a friend,” Matt said.

“Tremont Van Ort,” Roy said. “He’s your poll watcher today.”

“You’re all waiting for a poll watcher?”

“I’m from the
Times Union
,” Quinn said. “I’m doing an all-day story on the election.”

“We don’t need any poll watchers. What are you gonna watch, people pullin’ the lever?”

“That’s it,” Roy said. “See it’s done the way it’s supposed to be.”

Another man came to the door.

“They’re poll watchers,” the first said.

“Listen,” said the second, “I’m a Republican and I been livin’ in this ward forty years and I never saw anything down here that wasn’t legit.”

“I run this district,” the first said. “Anything funny I’d hear of it. Nothing at all. Nothing.”

“Then it’ll probably be a nice, quiet day,” Roy said.

“Here comes Tremont,” Matt said.

The two politicians watched Tremont approach with his game-legged strut. Gloria was with him, carrying two paper bags, and Tremont wore the new white shirt and blue tie Claudia bought for his big day at the polls.

“You’re the poll watcher?” the first man asked Tremont.

“Yes, sir,” Tremont said.

“Go home. There’s nothing to watch.”

“I got credentials to give to the man in charge.”

“That’s me,” the man said. “Fred Malloy, president of this ward.”

“Can we go inside?” Gloria asked. She pulled open the clubroom door and set the bags on an empty table. Quinn followed and asked her, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

“School? You think I’d miss this for school? Show him your credentials, Tremont.” Tremont handed his accreditation to Malloy and Gloria said, “Here’s his list of duties from the attorney general. Check that the voting machine counter is set at zero, check the voting machine curtains. There’s more.” She offered the paper to Malloy, who didn’t take it.

“Curtains?” he said. “Whataya don’t like the color?”

“Make sure they’re not transparent, and that they close properly,” Gloria said. “And the counter.”

“You wanna see the counter, see it,” he said, gesturing to the machine.

Tremont closed and opened the curtains, then looked at the voting levers with the candidates’ names and parties. “I don’t see no zero,” he said.

“In the back,” Malloy said.

Tremont went to the back of the machine. “I still don’t see it.”

Malloy opened the counter’s cover. “Zeros. See that? All zeros.”

“Zeros,” Tremont said.

Gloria passed out coffee and donuts.

“Whata we got here, a coffee klatch?” Malloy asked.

“This isn’t done,” the Republican said.

Malloy handed the credentials back to Tremont. “You can stay,” he said, “but that don’t mean the rest of you. You’re lookin’ for somebody gonna pay five dollars a vote, is that what you wanna see? I been here all my life and never saw any of that stuff.”

“Anybody gonna do that,” the Republican said, “common sense they’d have done it last week.”

“Nobody said anything about any five-dollar vote,” Matt said.

For the first time Malloy saw Matt’s collar.

“You’re a priest?”

“A Franciscan, at Siena College. Matthew Daugherty, OFM.”

“What’s the Catholic Church doing in politics?”

“Hey, Pope Paul went to the U.N.”

“For peace,” Malloy said.

“And justice,” said Matt.

“You oughta be ashamed chasin’ politics, a priest.”

“God made us all sinners, and he included politicians,” Matt said.

“Shame.”

“I ain’t ashamed,” Tremont said. “It’s all legal. We got our rights to be here. You seen those papers.”

“Coffee klatchers outside,” Malloy said. “This guy wants to stay the chair’s right there. The rest of you get lost.” He motioned to the Republican and together they moved the metal fence behind which voters would line up to vote. The move pushed Tremont’s chair into a corner, as far from the registration desk as it was possible to be.

“I also got credentials,” Roy said.

“Is that so?” Malloy said. “What’re they doin’, passin’ ’em out with bubble gum?”

Roy offered his AG papers to Malloy who glanced at them but didn’t touch them. “One at a time is how it goes,” Malloy said.

“I’ll wait outside,” said Roy. “If Tremont has to leave I’m here.”

“You people got a regular army. Big stuff. But you ain’t gonna find squat. This is all on the up and up.”

The front door opened and a man walked in waving two letter-sized pages. “I got the dead list,” he said to Malloy.

Malloy snatched the pages from him and pushed him back out the door. “You fucking moron,” he said in a failed whisper. He turned to the others, holding the door open. “Everybody out.”

Tremont’s cheering section moved out onto the sidewalk into the frigid morning. Tremont sat in the corner with his coffee and donut and at 6:03 two voters came in and voted. They looked legal to Tremont.

At 6:40 Roy was on the corner alone, two policemen in a patrol car idling across the street. Quinn and Matt had gone to another polling place, and Gloria had left to drive Claudia to vote. She told Roy she’d be back. At 6:50 Tremont came out and told Roy a man had identified himself as Mortimer Monroe to the woman registering Democratic voters.

“He ain’t Morty Monroe,” Tremont said. “He’s white and Morty’s black. Not only that, Morty was shot in a card game. Morty’s dead.”

Roy went in and confronted the voter and Malloy.

“We’re challenging this man’s identification,” Roy said.

“On what authority?” Malloy asked.

“The attorney general, I’m a poll watcher. You know it. I showed you my credentials.”

“I never saw ’em,” Malloy said.

“Yes you did.”

Roy took his credentials out of his pocket and flashed them at Malloy, then moved toward the white Morty Monroe who was backing toward the door without having voted.

“Wait a minute, Morty,” Roy said. “You got a driver’s license?”

“You ain’t Morty,” Tremont told the man. “Morty’s dead.”

A uniformed policeman came in and he and Malloy converged on Roy, who countered with an elbow that put Malloy on his back atop the voting ledger in which Morty had almost registered from the grave.

One month later Roy was a public example of swift electoral justice in Albany: fourteen months for disorderly conduct and third degree assault. He served three months and, when his conviction was thrown out for insufficient evidence, Baron Roland welcomed him back to Holy Cross as a civil rights hero and put him to work with the Community Action group Better Streets. He shared a desk with Gloria.

After the election Alex found Gloria an apartment in an upscale Pine Hills housing development, in the same building where his seventy-three-year-old mother, Veronica Fitzgibbon, lived with an on-call chauffeur and a live-in maid. Alex visited Veronica almost daily, a dutiful son; and so any proximity to Gloria was unremarkable. He luxuriated in the frequency of love with Gloria. My gorgeous virgin, he would whisper.

“Don’t say that,” she said one day. “I was a virgin too long.”

“All your life you were a virgin waiting for me.”

“Somebody will catch us.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you being my mother’s neighbor. And it’s perfectly normal for your godfather to visit you.”

“What if they catch my godfather in my bed?” she said, thinking of Alex catching Roy in her bed, where he had been only twice, but twice is dangerous. The first was the afternoon she drove home to change for a fund-raising dinner at Holy Cross. Roy was with her, and leaving him in the car would have been rude, even racist. She should have dropped him someplace and come home alone, but there he was, so she said, “Come in.”

Whenever they were alone in the office Roy would touch her arm, or rub the ends of her long blond hair between finger and thumb, or run a fingernail lightly up her spine through her white cotton shirt, always backing off with a smile and an upraised hand, testing the wind, which proved to be fair. Now, as they went into Gloria’s apartment he ran a finger up her back. She turned to face him and found him unbelievably attractive. And there was the bed.

“I worry about your wife,” she said to Alex. “Doesn’t what we do affect her, even if she doesn’t know?”

“Don’t ever talk about my wife,” he said.

So she did not. But through the society pages she tracked her—Marnie Herzog Fitzgibbon, ash blonde from Boston whose grandfather had made a fortune in coal, who had gone to Smith, no nuns in
her
life, owned and rode show horses, golfed at Schuyler Meadows Country Club, handicap 15, raised funds for children of an African famine, and traveled often, unlike her husband who was moored to City Hall. Gloria clipped photos of Marnie in her lush gowns at balls, galas, and the famed parties she gave at Tivoli, the Fitzgibbon family estate. In early May Marnie came to visit Veronica and glimpsed Alex going into a first-floor apartment. She found that the apartment was rented to Gloria Osborne, about whom Alex sometimes spoke; something about Cuba. Marnie hired a private detective who discovered Alex’s repetitive, hour-or-more-long visits to Gloria. Also, when Alex took a week off to go trout fishing in Maine with his army buddies, the detective noted a visit to Gloria by a black man who arrived by taxi at mid-evening and stayed till dawn.

Gloria was naked in her shower when the doorbell rang. Roy, without calling? No. Alex? Never at this hour; he likes the afternoon, and afterward a whiskey before he goes back to City Hall. She called out, Just a minute, stepped out of the tub and wrapped herself in her terrycloth robe. Rubbing her hair with a small towel she opened the door to the face from the newspapers, Marnie Herzog Fitzgibbon, always three names.

“I’m the wife of your godfather,” she said. “May I come in?”

“Of course,” and Marnie entered the living room, bouncing slightly on her toes, feisty, her half-smile as aggressive as Mother Superior. Gloria followed, tension in her chest. MHF looked younger than forty-eight, tenaciously Junior League in a simple off-white summer dress, bodice stylish over those tiny breasts, but the short skirt doesn’t cover her knees and they’re not quality. Her hair was freshly coiffed—for this visit?—those waves much too tight, scold your hairdresser. MHF raised her hand toward the bedroom door, which was ajar.

“That’s the cozy corner, is it? I really don’t want to see it.” She touched the arm of the sofa. “I’ll bet anything you do it here too. It’s where he first did it in college.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gloria said.

“Of course not. You
are
cute. So young, and a lovely figure.”

Gloria pulled her robe tight, accenting her formidable breasts. “This conversation is over,” she said.

“What a perfect thing to say. Lovely poise. I see what attracted him. I could give you the days and times he arrived and left, I could give you photos and tapes of your talks. I didn’t listen very long, but you do seem well educated for a little convent cunt.”

“I won’t listen to this tripe. Get out of my apartment.” Gloria, amazed with herself, opened the apartment door and raised her voice: “Out.”

“No, no,” Marnie said softly, and she did not move. “You’re the one who’s out. Didn’t you ever anticipate this? Probably not, innocent little puss.”

Vindictive bitch. Would she cut me? Hire somebody to do it? Disfigure. If Alex knew about this he’d have called. Gloria closed the door.

“Did you think you could just carry on and on without consequence?” Marnie said. “You’re finished at Holy Cross. The board of directors does not abide sluts. Was it those sweet little nuns who taught you how to succeed as a slut? You are quite achieved. I never did it with a Negro. I suppose I should have. Is your Negro larger than Alex? Alex would hate that. Oh, and he’s finished at Holy Cross, too, your Negro. No sluts, no pimps.”