The Accidental Pallbearer (8 page)

“I’m grateful, Robert.”

“Call me Bobby, what the fuck.”

“Let me know what you think of the
Ballo
.”

“Definitely. Anything I can do down the road with regard to this piece of work, let me know. I have a personal method for dealing, which doesn’t involve the death penalty, which he obviously deserves it, but I don’t go that far. Because as an upholder of the so-called law I have actual compunctions. The jury is out on you, Eliot.”

“I’m grateful, Bobby.”

Conte stands. Gives him his card and tells him his new cell won’t be active for a day or so. They shake hands.

Rintrona says, “You didn’t touch your croissant.”

At the register, Conte winks at Loretta as he puts fifteen dollars on the counter and goes to the door. She calls out, “Handsome, that’s way too much for the two of you.”

He responds, “So?”

Of course, he had feared that she’d turn him down, but the phone call to Catherine Cruz the day before had gone easily his way. He told her the white lie that he would be in Albany on business and “wondered” (trying hard for casualness) if she’d have time for coffee or lunch. She replied that she’d be working in the squad room all day, but would be happy to
join him for lunch on the early side, “if that’s convenient for you.” When he said that he had no idea about Troy eateries, she laughed gently and replied, “We don’t really have eateries in Troy, in the sense I think you mean, Detective – we’d have to go down to Albany for something fancy – but there’s a barbecue place I like, if that’s okay with you” – anything is okay with Conte – and gives him the address. He was certain that Catherine Cruz had seen through his story. Her tone was cool, but also somehow inviting. The combination excited him. Saying her whole name in his mind,
Catherine Cruz
, excited him.

He arrives at the Q Shack fifteen minutes early, the rain at its heaviest, visibility virtually zero. Under an umbrella that is too small, comically out of proportion to his impressive frame, he walks swiftly from the parking lot, head down, and when he reaches the awning, finds her already there.

“Detective Cruz.”

“Detective Conte.”

They shake hands. His shyness makes it difficult to keep his gaze focused on her … that face. Her gaze, on the other hand, is unflinching, laser-like, unnerving. No criminal would have a chance. He won’t, either.

The Q Shack is a small cinder block building with a shamrock painted on the door, crammed with picnic tables and featuring a long, steaming cafeteria-style counter. Thirty to thirty-five men – hearty, burly, dressed for hard labor – fill all available tables. As they await their turn in line in awkward silence, it crosses Conte’s mind, only half facetiously, that Troy, New York, must be the leading edge of America’s Gay Liberation movement and the Q Shack its latest All-American
expression, a lunch place catering to working class homosexuals. The Queer Shack.

He breaks the silence, “A lot of men here, Detective. Aside from you, no women.” She tells him that it’s a favorite of Troy’s plumbers, electricians, carpenters, house painters, and cops. He asks for the meaning of Q. She answers, “Short for barbecue – let’s get some Q – not Q for queer, Detective.” (
Mind reader
.) She adds, “Don’t you think we should call each other by our first names, Detective?”

“A pleasure, Catherine.”

“Likewise, Eliot.”

“Do you prefer Kate or Catherine?”

“Catherine, though no one calls me that.”

“Catherine with a K or C?”

“C.”

“It makes a difference in my mind, all the difference in the world, when I hear it with a C, rather than a K.”

“Is that a fact, Eliot?”

“Yes, Catherine with a C.”

(This kind of flirty banter is a shocking first for Conte.)

It’s their turn to order: “Detective Katie Cruz herself!” “Jesus Mary and Joseph! I ain’t seen her in two days!” “Kiss me, Kate!” “Who’s your great fella there, my Kate?” “Oh, her fella has a mighty presence, he does!” “I don’t think he’s Irish, Seamus, I don’t see it at’all.” She replies in the spirit of things, “Sure, and another word outa ya and you are all bound for the slammer.”

He orders what she orders: an overflowing pork barbecue sandwich, potato salad, and lemonade. The cashier tells him his money is no good in Troy, “It’s on the house, lad,
because you’re the lucky man to be spendin’ time with the ravishin’ Miss Kitty O’Cruz.” Conte’s about to say there’s no place to sit when the cashier says, “Your place is secured as usual, Kitty,” and Conte follows her down a short hall to an office with a desk, a table, and sudden privacy.

They sip their lemonade and before either can start on the sandwiches and potato salad, Conte – unable, unlike Catherine Cruz, to bear the silence – launches a story about his paternal grandparents because the “Q Shack,” he says, only half-believing the analogy, “with its male domination brings it to mind.”

“Really?” she says, with a twinkle in the eyes.

“Back in the day, Catherine, there once was in Utica an establishment called Donnelly’s, and a grand Irish saloon it was, the Q Shack of its time” – warming to the narrative now and sounding like an Irish tale-teller – “where no women were ever allowed.”

“Could that have been legal, Eliot?”

“They didn’t have the right to vote, so I guess it was. My grandfather was a serious anarchist –”

“A bomb thrower?”

“Metaphorically, and a poet. It was a fine summer night and he was out for a long post-dinner stroll with my grandmother. A ritual of theirs, even in the winter months, and on this particular night their journey took them beyond the east-side Italian ghetto to Utica’s central district and Donnelly’s, an institution that Umberto had never set foot in and knew not its gender policy. He was a moderate drinker of red wine who rarely partook of the hops, but it was hot and he was thirsty and the prospect of a cold one was irresistible, and
so he said to Amelia – the meekest and sweetest of women and a teetotaler – Let us stop here,
cara mia
. And so they entered Donnelly’s, where no woman, or Italian, had ever set foot, and all the many men turned and stared, but only briefly because they were gentlemen, despite their Irish hostility to Italian immigrants. Umberto drank his tall cold beer and with his free hand held Amelia’s hand and said, in Italian, It is tranquil here. And no one said a word except the waiter, who had taken the order and asked if the lovely Mrs. would like something, too, but the Mrs. required nothing, not even a glass of water. (Long pause.) End of tale. I fear that I made a bollocks of it, Ms. O’Cruz.” They’re both grinning ear to ear.

“When did they discover they had integrated Donnelly’s?”

“Much later. Years.”

“Amelia was the anarchist’s bomb?”

“Never thought of it that way. Sure. Do you happen to know the saying, You’re the bomb? It means –”

“I do know it, Detec – Eliot.”

Desperate, casting aside all shyness, and again shocking himself, he says, “I’m too old to play games, Catherine. I confess I have no business in Albany. I couldn’t bring myself to say I wanted to drive eighty miles just to see you because I think you’re the bomb.”

“I believe you just said it, and I never for a moment took your Albany story seriously.”

“You knew all along?”

“I did.”

“And you –”

“I’m here. Are you?”

“This is unrealistically quick.”

“It is.”

“Now what?”

“Shall we downshift to first gear?”

“I’m fifty-five and I guess you’re about –”

“Forty, exactly, a week ago.”

“A belated happy birthday.”

“Thank you.”

“Our age difference is …”

“Significant.”

“Meaning, Catherine?”

“Who knows? Shall we downshift?”

“We really should. This is unrealistic.”

“You’ve been married and divorced, as you told Bobby and me. I can’t help asking what you meant by saying that you had children, formerly. Just your dark wit?”

“I couldn’t resist the wordplay. You know, formerly married, formerly had children. Actually, I haven’t seen my two daughters in twenty years, since I left California and moved back. The alienation is irreversible – and no longer as painful as it used to be.”

He excuses himself. Goes to the men’s room, splashes cold water on his face. Leans awhile on the sink, shaking. Returns, pulled almost together.

“Are you okay, Eliot?”

“I’m fine, really. And you? Were you ever married?”

“I have a twenty-one-year-old daughter from a very rash, very stupid, and very brief marriage. Twenty-one years ago.”

“See her frequently?”

“Not enough for me, but enough for her. I’m mostly grateful for what I have.”

“Let’s try to eat,” he says. He’s fairly sure now that he won’t break down. “It might be a good thing. To eat.”

They do, in a silence magnified many times by the sounds of voices from the dining area, of men who seemed to be riding wave after wave of good feeling. He’s thinking that the conversation has hit a wall.

He says, “I wish we had the time to, but you need to get back soon, don’t you?”

“I do. Time to what, Eliot?”

“To have a more traditional what-movies-have-you-seen-lately, so-you-like-opera-too type of conversation as a possible …”

“Possibly as a prelude to?”

“You wouldn’t mind getting together again?”

“I’d like that.”

“Maybe a leisurely dinner, maybe?”

“Why not?”

“I could drive down again.”

“I could come up to Utica.”

“You’d do that?”

“Yes.”

Under umbrellas in the parking lot, he says, “It’s supposed to clear up tomorrow.”

“So I heard.”

“Catherine.”

Like the sunshine that would break through the next day, she smiles and says, “Call me or I’ll call you.”

“I’ll call.”

“Or I’ll call.”

“When shall we two meet again?”

She replies, “It doesn’t have to be in thunder, lightning, and rain.”

“Macbeth,” he says. “What a darkness.”

She puts her hand on his shoulder. He places his hand over hers for a moment.

He gives her his business card, tells her all information is accurate, though his cell, “as you know … I’ll have a new BlackBerry tomorrow.”

He watches her walk to her car. Doesn’t move until she’s driven away.

He’s relieved that Catherine (with a “C”) hadn’t pursued the subject of names – how a Conte, whose grandparents escaped the absolute poverty of southern Italy, with his father in tow, got to be named Eliot. If only he’d been called Anthony or Frank. His mother wanted Richard, but Silvio vetoed “Richard Conte” because it was already taken by a movie star. When his wife offered what she assumed would be the irresistible “Silvio junior,” her husband responded that his son deserved a name with “American power,” because he was certain that an Italian-American boy armored with “Eliot” would cut a course through to a place barred to a Silvio, a Carmine, a Domenico, a Francesco.

Eliot never told his father about the grade school teasing, or how the heirs of proper Americans at Hamilton College, and later in graduate school at UCLA, called him T.S. Eliot and were eager to inform him that in his case T.S. stood not for the poet’s Thomas Stearns but for Tough Shit. So it was that a name no one would link to Silvio’s dark world of ethnic politics became the trigger of his son’s painful self-consciousness, which he wore like a pair of trousers with suspicious stains at the crotch.

Home from Troy by midafternoon to find a message on his answering machine – it’s Robinson:

He does. Two messages. Rintrona, informing him that he’d played sick and left work to listen to the Bologna
Ballo
, “which surpasses all my sex experiences.” The second, from Robinson:

E-mails Rintrona:

E-mails Robinson:

Considers contacting Nancy about Joan Whittier’s phone call, but what would be the point? The kids are dead. What good would it do her to learn that Ralph Norwald may have abused them when they were little? If he felt anything at all about the fate of the kids, it was an unacknowledgable relief that they were physically gone, who had been gone for him for so long. Easier to think of them as the kids, rather than Rosalind and Emily, if he had to think of them at all. “The kids,” not “my kids.”