The Iron Will of Shoeshine CatsBy Hesh KestinDzanc Books |
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From what I could see, either Shushan Cats lived in hotel rooms or where he really lived was a secret. Both turned out to be true. For the mourning period he took me to a three-bedroom suite in a residence hotel on East Sixty-Third Street, where the staff seemed to know him.
The Westbury was one of those old fashioned places that have gone the way of cars with fins and family magazines like Life and Look and the Saturday Evening Post—over the next decade all three weeklies would bite the dust. It was the beginning of a period of change in America. Vietnam was a gathering cloud on the horizon, Castro had consolidated his power in Cuba as a Davidian rival to America’s Goliath, the threat of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union hung in the air like stale smoke, and the Dodgers—having left Brooklyn to stew in its own bitter juice—were in Los Angeles: a footnote to an historical footnote, but a landmark to Brooklynites, who for once were at a loss for words. We had called them Bums when they were in Brooklyn, so it was difficult to think of an epithet. Someone suggested “the former Bums,” which at least had a finality to it. About the players diehard Dodger fans never faltered. We knew the move was not the fault of the heroes we had rooted for and loved: Carl Furillo, Duke Snyder, Sandy Koufax, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Peewee Reese. Things were changing, and the Dodgers were just a part of it. The month before the Saturday Evening Post trumpeted a story on its cover entitled: A Distinguished Negro Reporter Asks: ARE MY PEOPLE READY FOR EQUALITY? That week Life ran a photo of Bob Hope on its cover, plus headlines of stories to be found inside: INCOME TAXES—Why they must be cut now, IQ TESTING—A scandal in our schools, and HOW THE MOB CONTROLS CHICAGO, the fourth in a series called Crime in America.
If this sounds like another time, it was. In New York most of the West Side was still raffish, downtown down-at-the-heels, and the Upper East Side an island of tranquility. Among the townhouses and high-rises were still residence hotels like the Westbury, where the tiny lobby led to a couple of small elevators opening out to narrow corridors carpeted in beige and rose, which in turn led to rooms of such size, even grandeur in some haute bourgeois way, that they might be considered the other side of the telescopic lens from the city’s palatial hostelries, where grand lobby flowed into grand lobby, banks of huge elevators standing to one side like brass-lined bank vaults, these letting out to endless broad corridors until the ultimate let-down of tiny rooms, scaled down furniture and bathrooms you could not turn around in without shutting the door. The Westbury later was turned into a condominium. Shushan did well with it.
He had inherited the place by paying the gambling debt of the hotel’s owner. For this individual—the father of a much-married and combed-over real estate developer who these days likes to put his name on buildings—this was not a good deal but the only one. With interest on the loan mounting at two percent a week—the lenders in fact may have been at Shushan’s mother’s funeral—in a year he would lose all of what he owned. When Shushan came in as white knight, both buyer and seller profited. Shushan invested in redoing a couple of floors, and set up a plan for upgrading the rest. Shushan was not a hotelier, but he was a businessman. And he liked having the use of the hotel.
The suite itself was furnished attractively but impersonally, the rooms elegant but neutral. The residents were mostly people from the nearby United Nations or businessmen being rotated in and out of New York for several weeks or months. The furniture was what was then known as Danish modern, inoffensive teak and mahogany, and there were no zebra-skin rugs or outrageous paintings on the walls—though a close look at the only painting, a black-on-black abstract over the fireplace, would have shown that it was by Max Ernst’s son Jimmy, in its understated elegance itself a statement about the man who resided here: you could not tell precisely what it was. In the large living room two green-leather sofas faced each other, dominating the room, the carpeting a deeply patterned tan and eggplant wool, the walls putty, and the drapes sheer. When Shushan showed me to where he had chosen to receive guests for the shiva period I expected his sister would be installed in the second bedroom, but I learned that Esther—she liked to be called Terri; her brother demurred—preferred staying at her own place ten blocks uptown, where she also maintained her practice.
“She’s not what you’d call a traditional girl,” Shushan said. He had taken a seat on a low wooden crate facing both green-leather sofas, the crate a symbol of mourning within what struck me as a stage setting: refined, unostentatious, clearly expensive but quietly so. “I wanted her to stay here, make a united front. We don’t have much family. There were people in Europe but they didn’t make it. My mom couldn’t get them out. They couldn’t get out. Who knows what happened? Well, you’re a smart boy. You know what happened.”
“I know.”
“Esther, she’s a modern girl. I don’t even think she’ll get married. Maybe when she’s older. I’d like to be an uncle.”
“You’re not married either.”
“In my line of work it’s not a pleasure for the wife. The dagos they keep their women in the kitchen and spend their nights with all kinds of bimbos, some of them a long time. I mean decades with the same goomah. A habit from the old country. A man who didn’t have a belly and a mistress he wasn’t a man. The black guys and the Chinese I couldn’t tell you. They got their ways. You know that Royce. Thirty-six years old and he’s a grandfather. Give him credit he takes care of the family. But mostly they’re not nesters, you know. Must be some African thing, or from slavery. The Chinese they’re a whole puzzle inside a mystery inside a...” Here he paused, as though either unsure of the word or unwilling to say it.
“An enigma,” I said.
“Yeah, a enigma.”
“Winston Churchill,” I said. “You’re quoting Winston Churchill.”
“Tough man,” Shushan said. “Without him Hitler would be sitting in that palace...”
“Buckingham Palace.”
“Yeah, but he stood up and got counted.”
Despite my curiosity I restrained myself from asking what a two-bit bum the tabloids liked to call Shoeshine Cats was doing quoting Churchill. I doubted anyone at the funeral, except maybe the more cerebral members of the Bhotke Society, knew enough to quote Churchill. “If you don’t need anything I’d better be going.”
“What’s the rush?”
The rush was this: I didn’t work for Shushan Cats, had done enough as shanghaied representative of the Bhotke Society, and had a life. I had to clean up what was left of my apartment, decide what to do about my car, which since it was already pretty smashed up on Eastern Parkway was probably stripped of wheels, radio, battery and anything else of value, and I had to be at school the next morning for a conference with the professor who had excused me from class on the basis of a promised paper on Huckleberry Finn. Aside from that I was still in bad shape from Celeste’s brothers. And aside from that this was getting a little claustrophobic. “No rush,” I said. “But I think my work here is done.”
“You hungry?”
“We just ate Chinese.”
“Well, you know what they say,” Shushan said, clearly straining. “Ten minutes after you eat a Chinese girl you’re hungry again. How about a drink? I could use one. There’s a bar in the kitchen. Whatever you want, help yourself. I’ll have a vodka from the freezer. Just as it comes. You like vodka?”
“I do, sir.”
“Forget sir. Shushan. You know it’s the name of a city?”
“The capital of Persia at the time of— ” For the first time I got it.
“Purim. That’s how we got named. For the holiday. I got the city. Esther got the queen’s name. My mom and dad, they didn’t know much English, but they knew their Jewish stuff. She always said if they ever had another kid he’d be named for Mordecai. That’ll make a tough kid in Brooklyn. But the old man was out of the picture before it could happen.”
“My father too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I mean, he died three years ago. He’s actually buried near your mom, my mom too. Practically neighbors.”
“I didn’t see you go over to another grave,” Shushan said. “You’re supposed to put a pebble on it, to show you visited.”
“I was busy,” I said. “And I don’t like graves.”
“Me neither.”
We sat in silence for a while, he on the crate, myself on the couch, until I got up and found a bottle of Stolichnaya, then an unknown brand, in the little fridge. I poured a slug into a water glass. It came out half frozen, slow and thick. What the hell. I poured myself one as well.
“It’s okay for me to drink,” Shushan said. “I read up on Jewish mourning. You got to cover mirrors so you won’t look at yourself after a death. And you don’t greet people. I mean, when they come in you don’t say hello. You just take them in stride. You talk with them, about anything. There’s no limit. But you don’t say hello and goodbye. A greeting is supposed to be joyous. They’re supposed to bring food. Also no music. And you’re not supposed to change your clothes or wash more than so you don’t make people uncomfortable. And someone is supposed to be with you, take care of things like.”
I almost choked on the cold vodka as it reached my throat. “Mr. Cats...”
“It’s just till Wednesday. I’ll pay for your time.”
“It’s not a matter of money,” I said, though I could have used it. Orders from the Park Avenue urologist had been slowing down. Maybe my sperm were slowing down. Maybe after what the brothers Callinan did to me they’d be slowing down even further. I hadn’t thought about sex since it happened, even when I saw Shushan’s sister. Well, I’d been busy.
“Like, someone’s got to cover the mirror in the bathroom. And when people come in open the door. That kind of thing. Walk in the park for a smart kid like you.”
“Mr. Cats... Shushan. I really like you. You’re a fine man, and I know you’re in need. But maybe you’d be better off with Ira-Myra’s, or somebody else that’s employed by you. I’m just a college kid with a lot to do.”
“Like go after the guys who layed into you?”
I looked at him. His mouth was set in a straight line across his face, his small hard jaw looking like it was made of rock. I noticed for the first time that his nose was somewhat off-kilter, just enough. His eyes, which could sparkle when he wanted you to like him, looked dead, a kind of North Atlantic blue. When he smiled they were light and clear, Caribbean. “Ah, no,” I said after a while. “That’s not my thing. My thing is forget about it. The only way I could back at them is with a gun. Even if I were that kind of guy I’d be dealing with the Archdiocese of New York, the Fire Department and the entire NYPD. There’s no percentage in that.”
Shushan pursed his lips, causing his eyes to go even darker. “That’s what the Jews in Europe said. Forgive and forget. Maybe the Nazis will go away. Let me tell you something, kid. They keep coming.”
I finished the vodka in my glass. It burned as it went down, cold at first and then searing. Now that the pressure was off with Shushan’s funeral I could feel it again: it was my body but like someone else’s, like wearing another man’s ill-fitting clothes. Here was too much room, here too tight. I don’t remember the brothers hitting my throat, but it was sore. My stomach hurt too. And my lungs, particularly on the right side, where my ribs had cracked. “They’re not Nazis. I fucked around with their baby sister, that’s all.”
“You knock her up?”
“No,” I said. I suppose I could have told him about the rubbers and the Park Avenue urologist—the last thing I’d wanted was to lose those sperm. “She’s not pregnant.”
“So let me get this straight, kid. You and this girl have intimate relations. Once?”
“Many, many times.”
“Which tells me maybe she was not exactly forced into it.”
“No, she wasn’t forced. She was pissed off I didn’t want to continue.”
“Ah,” Shushan said. “The green-eyed monster.”
“What?”
“I thought you was educated. O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!/ It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on.”
“Othello,” I said.
“Act III, Scene III. See that, I was right. You know your stuff.”
“You read Shakespeare, Shushan?”
“Ah, you know, sometimes.” He smiled. I’d seen that smile before. The little boy with a secret. The smile changed, straightened, the lips compressed, his jaw again hard. “There’s also that bit about a woman scorned. Never pleasant. They really worked you over, eh?”
“I’ll live.”
“You’ll live, eh? You’re such a tough guy, Russy. One day you won’t.”
“Neither will you,” I said. “None of us will. That’s what cemeteries are for.”
“Yeah, but I don’t let nobody do that to me.”
“It was three nobodies. Three big nobodies.”
“So fucking what, kid? You couldn’t do something then, but you can now.”
“Now?”
“You got to punish them,” Shushan said. “Like you read about my mom. Hit them back ten times. Bust them up bad.”
“I got to go,” I said.
“Because you’re scared?”
“Because they were only protecting their sister.”
“The Nazis were only protecting the fatherland,” Shushan said. “That’s such bullshit it stinks before it hits the floor. She was pissed at you. She sicced them on you. They enjoyed it. Let me ask you, was she raped?”
“I told you. If anybody was raped it was me.”
“So where’s the beef? I’ll tell you where it is. The beef is they hurt you for the simple Irish pleasure of it. I know these guys. The dagos, at least with them it’s business. It’s just for money. Same for the rest. The chinks and the niggers, that’s not their style. The micks, they just like to do it.”
“One was a priest.”
“Yeah, especially them. Now tell me something. I’m going to ask you once. You stick with me tonight.” A statement, not a question. “Maybe those bruisers are coming back.”
“I don’t think so. They had their fun.”
“Yeah, see what I mean? Fun. But you’re right. They’re through with you.”
“I guess I can go to school from here, in the morning.”
“Sure you can. You got a whole bedroom for yourself. There’s a television in there. Color. I’m not supposed to watch, but you’re not in mourning. Just me.”
“I’m sorry for your mother, Shushan.”
“It’s nothing. Death, it happens. She had a long run. Maybe she was poor, but she was proud. You gave her a good send-off, all those people. I was proud.”
“Me too,” I said.
“So what I want to know is this.”
“Sure,” I said. “Anything.”
“You know when Mr. Sfangiullo....”
“Who?”
“Sfangiullo, the old gavone in the dark glasses.”
“That was Auro Sfangiullo? No wonder the cops and the press were there.”
“Be hard to find a guy as ugly as him for the impersonation, kid. Guy’s got pits in his face you could hide bodies in. Of course that was him. Who’d you think, Robert Frost was coming to pay his respects. Bob Wagner?”
Robert F. Wagner Jr. was mayor of New York at the time. “I had no idea.”
“Just another dago crime boss, Russy. They’re interchangeable. One goes, another steps up. They’re not dangerous individually, but you want to watch out when they’re together.”
“Right,” I said. “You wanted to know...”
“When Sfangiullo was standing there and I was asking if they knew of an Italian place nearby, he said something in their language.”
“I remember.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said—” I cocked my head. “How did you know I speak Italian?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then....”
“But when he was talking I happened to look at you,” Shushan said. “I could feel you paying attention. Like an animal does when he’s concentrating. You ever have a dog, Russy?”
“No.”
“Me neither. But I’m interested in animal behavior. You can walk down the street and there’s a dog you can almost understand from the way he stands what he’s thinking. You were like that. Concentrating.”
“Their Italian isn’t very good. It’s thick, and they drop consonants, even syllables. For instance, they would say: They Ita int v’good. It’s not Sicilian. They must be from Naples.”
“Napolida,” Shushan said, smiling. “That’s how they say it.” Now he cocked his own head. We must have been looking at each other that way, half sidewise, like a pair of monkeys. “So what’d he say, our dottore?”
“Dottore?”
“They call him that. A sign of respect.”
“He said, ‘Would you believe this? Not only do we have to come to this Jew’s funeral, but now he wants us to break bread with savages.”
“The dagos, they have no respect for other races. What else?”
“‘For two cents I’d put bullets in all their heads.’”
“Yeah? Sfangiullo said that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Then he said, ‘Except that I like the Jewboy, even if he is a Christ-killer.’”
Shushan laughed. It came rumbling up from inside like bile. His mouth was laughing, but not his eyes. “More?”
“That was it,” I said. “Not exactly Shakespeare.”
“Not Shakespeare,” Shushan said. “Not even fuckin’ Congreve. Two things I want you to do. Number one. Go to the phone over there and tell the desk clerk to order us some pizza. You like pizza?”
“Sure.”
“Anchovy?”
“Why not?”
“The other thing, whenever you and me we’re in the presence of goombahs, never but never let on you know what they’re saying. Unless you need to. You got that?”
“Sure,” I said, but all I could think was: Congreve?