Loneliness?
Annie asked herself.
Is he doing this because he’s lonely?
‘Is there anything more you can tell me about the man who wrote it? Did he know my father?’
Forrester shook his head. ‘Not well I don’t think. Like I said, he was just one of the people who was with us at the time. I knew very little about him, very little at all.’
‘He writes of someone else’s life as if it was his own,’ Annie said.
Forrester nodded. ‘He does, but you must read on … read all of it and perhaps you will understand more about the man who wrote it than I could ever tell you.’
‘And you will leave these two chapters with me now?’ she asked, hope in her voice, because somehow – suddenly – it had become important to know what had happened to Haim Rosen when he left the Lower East Side and crossed the river into Queen’s in 1952. What was it he had become that Rebecca McCready would never have recognized? Perhaps – and this as an afterthought – there was something in these pages that
would show her the kind of person her father had associated with.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave these with you now, and then we will meet again next Monday at the same time.’
Forrester spoke directly and without hesitation. There was nothing uncertain in his tone. He would be here next Monday at seven and there was no doubt in Annie’s mind that she would be here also.
He started to rise from his chair.
‘You’re not staying?’ she asked, questions about her father clamoring for attention at the forefront of her mind. For some reason she could not bring herself to ask them. Forrester seemed carefully to pace everything he did, everything he said, and she did not wish to risk any possibility of offending him. To offend him would be to lose his confidence, and to lose that would be to watch her only connection with her father disappear.
Forrester shook his head. ‘They were never long meetings,’ he said, and started to put on his coat.
Annie rose from her chair.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘Thank you for the letter … I really appreciate it Mr Forrester.’
‘And I appreciate your humoring an old and lonely man,’ he replied, and he smiled, and once again nodded his head in that polite European manner. ‘Until next week then?’
Annie held out her hand. ‘Until next week.’
Forrester took her hand, held it gently, looked at her directly as he did so, and though he did not smile with his mouth there was such warmth in his eyes that Annie felt she should reach out and hug him. She did not, for such things were not done. Not by Annie O’Neill.
Forrester walked towards the door, paused momentarily as Annie opened it for him and then, turning once more, he surveyed the store. He was remembering something. She could see that in his eyes.
‘It was a different world back then,’ he said. ‘People had
more time. There was less importance in being somewhere. People would dress for dinner, we would drink whisky sours and sloe gin, smoke cigars afterwards, and always we would find time to talk …’
Forrester took one more look around the shelves and then turned towards the street.
‘Take care Miss O’Neill,’ he said, and stepped out through the door.
Annie closed the door behind him as Sullivan came from the kitchen to join her. Together they stood in silence and watched the old man make his way towards the junction of Duke Ellington and West 107th.
It could be my father. It could be him walking away
, Annie thought, and again she was invaded by the slow, cool, quiet sensation of nostalgia and loss that always accompanied such thoughts. The wind caught Forrester’s hair, the tails of his coat, and for a moment it looked as if he would be caught by a gust and carried up into the sky. He disappeared around the corner and Annie turned to Sullivan.
‘Let’s read it at home,’ she said.
Sullivan nodded, and fetched his coat.
America, 1952: a different world. The war was over, had been for seven years. Truman was president, but would retain his mantle only until November when Eisenhower would win the largest ever popular vote other than Roosevelt’s landslide in 1936. The election also served to bring two young politicians into the public arena. A senator called Richard Milhous Nixon, thirty-nine years old, would become the youngest-ever vice-president. Best known for his dedicated and ‘patriotic’ support for McCarthy’s anti-Communist tirades, Nixon would not feature a great deal in the public’s collective mind until some years later. And then it would be for something quite different. Perverse prophecy perhaps, but in September of 1952, four months before Eisenhower and Nixon took office, Eisenhower would already have to defend his vice-president’s conscience and reputation. Nixon – accused of misusing eighteen thousand dollars of a political fund – was publicly exonerated, and Eisenhower found him ‘not only completely vindicated as a man of honor, but, as far as I am concerned, he stands higher than ever before.’ Eisenhower, dead in March 1969, did not live to see Nixon’s spectacular fall from grace, and thus never had to eat crow regarding his beliefs. On the Democratic front, a young man of thirty-five called John Fitzgerald Kennedy upset everyone by winning the Senate seat in Massachusetts against the Republican, Henry Cabot Lodge. John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State; he was a man who encouraged the mass production of nuclear weapons, but perhaps his most infamous attribute was his relationship with his brother, Allen Welsh Dulles, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1953
to 1961. These were men who thought nothing of destroying the entire island of Eniwetok in the Pacific in a hydrogen bomb test in November of that year: these were the men in charge of America.
This was the America, Haim Rosen told me, that he found vacant and wanting when he arrived in Queens in July. Fifteen years old, wide-eyed and hungry, he began by making his mark in a small community seemingly populated by brash working men with money to lose and over-painted, beehive-haired wives with bad skin and loud mouths. Into this melee of sounds and smells and colors he blended quickly and quietly. Changing his name to Harry Rose, he became a courier for an illegal gambling joint, running tickets and small bundles of cash between the idle wise-ass losers and their bookies. He worked them at their level, he learned the language and the signs, and those that he could not sway with the force of his personality, he swayed with humor and charm. He watched the business flow, the tens and hundreds of dollars exchanging hands with no more than a wink or a nod or a knowing smile. He kept track of how much money passed between the gamblers and the makers in a day, a week, a month, and he saw what that money could buy. He watched the cars and the dames and the kickbacks and the bribes. He watched it all like a hawk, soaking up everything around him like a sponge. He ran a sideline on the small-circuit boxing tables, gathering a few dollars here and there, renting a two-room broken-down apartment on Charles Street, never once crossing the lines, always on time, always exact to the cent and the dime.
He earned trust, and he deserved that trust. And when one of the older bookmakers was hit by a stroke in the spring of 1953, Harry Rose, bold as brass, stepped into the old man’s shoes and no-one had a mind to complain. He was always ready with their winnings, consolatory in their losses, and at the end of each month he would send a quart of cheap rye to each of his clients with a little card.
Always another race. Best of luck. Harry Rose
. They appreciated the rye, they appreciated Harry’s
honesty, and though he was only fifteen he was treated as an equal, a contemporary, a confidant. He knew who was losing what, how often, and why. He knew which gambler’s wife was screwing which bookmaker’s flunkey. He had his eye on the ball, his ear to the sidewalk, and his heart set on millions.
A month before his sixteenth birthday, taking his balls in his hand and his heart in his mouth, he gambled everything he possessed on Rocky Marciano keeping his world heavyweight title against Roland LaStarza. He took the winnings he made on the fight and threw them at Carl Olsen winning the world middleweight against Randy Turpin. Harry Rose cleaned up good. Came away with more than seven thousand dollars in cash, and with that money he set himself up in a five-room apartment on St Luke. He was king of the country, a teenage prodigy, and his reputation for honest dealing and odds-on favorites was soon known throughout Queens and the surrounding boroughs. Honest Harry Rose he was called, and no-one seemed concerned that he was all of sixteen, fresh-faced and youthful, for they’d look in his eyes and see a man of forty who’d carried the business end of things for two decades.
As Marilyn Monroe married Joe DiMaggio in January of 1954, Harry Rose – a little known Jewish kid from the Lower East Side, a kid who’d successfully hidden his past from anyone who’d cared to know – took a hooker called Alice Raguzzi to his apartment on St Luke and she taught him how to be a man. Alice was a girl out of the backwoods of nowhere, twenty-two years old, brunette and brassy and bold as sunlight. Her mother had been a hooker, her father a pimp, and had she been a boy she would more than likely have followed right into her father’s line of work. She was not, and so she followed her mother, and her mother taught her all she knew. And she knew a great deal, Alice did, and she could hold her hand across her hardened heart and swear to God and country that never had a man walked away from her arms unsatisfied. Girl like that could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, Harry would tell me, give a ninety-year-old guy a blue-steel boner, and
when she was breaking a sweat she never forgot to say the guy’s name a few times. Made it personal, made it mean something for him, because her abiding philosophy was that no matter what you did you did it as a professional. That was Alice Raguzzi, and she stayed with Harry Rose for two days, and when she left him she took three hundred dollars with her and a small window of soul through that hardened heart of hers. Harry would speak of her later, and he would smile with that wry, sardonic twist to his mouth that said everything without saying a word.
‘Girl like that,’ he’d say, ‘girl like that should run this country. She knows more about the way folks work than any politician or businessman I ever met.’
That told me a great deal about Harry Rose: that he was, above all else, a real human being. Where I came from men were one of three things: they were as stupid as the day was long; park them in an Easyboy, stick a can of beer in their hand, feed them mystery meat three times a day and send them out with a broom to sweep the yard and they never wanted for anything else. Second kind of guy was the one that never grew up. Had been, and would always be, nothing more than a child. Wide-eyed innocence, a belief that all the world was on their side, and then when the shit hit the fan they would look at you with an expression of such dismay, and then they would convince themselves it was all a figment of their imagination and grant the world its perfection once more. And then there were people like me and Harry Rose. We worked the edges and crossed the lines. We lived for the sake of living itself. Where other men wanted one or two of something, people like us wanted half a dozen. Half a dozen girls, half a dozen cars, half a dozen paychecks, even if they happened to be earned by someone else. Life was not cheap, don’t get me wrong, but life – like everything else in the world – could be traded.
Harry recognized in Alice Raguzzi something of himself. She was a live one, a real human being, and when she talked Harry
listened, and when she listened Harry opened his mouth and his heart and his mind. There was something between them, something other than the sweat they broke on the sheets of his crowded little bed. There was an understanding that if there was something you wanted – well, if there was something people like Harry and Alice wanted, it was up to them, and them alone, to go out and get it. That was the way their world worked, and as far as they were concerned that was the only kind of world there was.
And Alice? She had found this teenage Harry Rose irrepressibly charming, a little slanted when it came to his view of the world, but nevertheless endearing and generous and respectful. No trick had ever called her
Ma’am
before, and she kinda liked it. Made her feel she was providing a necessary public service, instead of just taking it in the ass for a few bucks.
Her mother would have told her to take care of a young man like that. Young man like that had stamina for sure, and there were years of business ahead of him. Young man like that would make it good, and he wouldn’t forget those who had taken him seriously despite his age. When he went up in the world, well, she would go up with him, and it wasn’t very far from Alice’s mind that she would make sure she saw him again. One thing about her industry, it was all repeat business. Whatever it was that made a man’s balls fill up, darned, if they didn’t keep on filling up despite the number of times you emptied them. Such a thought made her smile, and when she smiled she looked like a million dollars. With some work on her hair, with a little expensive make-up, Alice Raguzzi could have held a candle to all of those Hollywood sweethearts. But Alice was smarter than that. Alice knew the streets and she knew people, and people – real people like Harry Rose – was where you found real life.
Two hours after Alice Raguzzi left that apartment on St Luke she was robbed of her three hundred dollars. Whoever took her money took most of her beauty as well, pounding into her face with a piece of wood until she was barely recognizable. She
would never work again, she knew that, and a week later – still confined to a bed in the St Mary Mercy Hospital on the corner of Van Horne and Wiltsey – she broke a small compact mirror in her purse and cut her own wrists. She was found dead two hours later by a hospital orderly called Freddie Trebor. Freddie was a gambler, he knew of Harry Rose, and though he had sworn to Alice Raguzzi that he would never divulge the name she’d given him when she was admitted, he felt such a sense of horror about what had happened that he went to see Harry, told him what Alice had said regarding her attacker. He gave Harry a name – Weber Olson. Harry knew Olson, had dealt with him many times on the racing pitches, and when he told Freddie Trebor to forget anything and everything he had seen and heard, when he pressed a hundred bucks into Freddie’s hand and asked if Freddie truly understood what he was asking, Freddie saw something in Harry Rose’s eyes that was not – and never could have been – the expression of a sixteen-year-old. Freddie, as nervous as Capone’s bookkeeper, gave his word, swore on the deathbed of his mother, gave a promise to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost that he had never heard of Alice Raguzzi, Weber Olson or Harry Rose, and left that apartment on St Luke with his heart in his mouth. He never did say a word, even when the police asked questions about Weber Olson’s disappearance a little more than a week later, even when they found Olson in a disused basement beneath a tenement on Young Street with his severed penis in his mouth and his eyes in his coat pockets. Freddie Trebor didn’t know a thing, and two months later left Queens for Brooklyn in case Harry Rose ever got concerned that Freddie might say something out of turn.