Baker Towers (29 page)

Local 1450 voted to strike.

T
hey lay in the lavender room, the radiators hissing, the early dark gathering around them. It was late January; outside, the snow radiated blue twilight. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the days were getting longer.

Angie lit a cigarette. His body was still magnificent. Naked, he was sleek and heavy as a lion. A few silver hairs sprouted among the black thicket on his chest.

“Cut them out,” he told Dorothy, laughing.

Kneeling beside him, her tiny nail scissors poised, she did. His laughter caused a spastic rumbling deep in his chest. He was forty-six that August, and his lungs were bad.

Angie examined one of the white hairs she’d clipped. “Old grayback,” he marveled. “How the hell did that happen?” He reached for her. “What’s a nice girl like you doing with an old bastard like me?”

“I missed you,” she said. That morning Lucy had taken the bus back to Pittsburgh; for three weeks she’d been home from college on Christmas break. At first Dorothy had been happy to see her, but three weeks was a
long time without Angie. Over the years they had settled into a routine. Every Friday she had lunch waiting for him—pots of minestrone and tomato sauce, the dishes her mother had cooked. They spent a long time eating, talking and listening to the radio. Afterward they retired to the lavender room.

“Lucy has another vacation coming up in March,” said Dorothy. “Maybe she can stay with Joyce and Ed.”

“Sure,” said Angie. “Have a talk with your sister.” Joyce was a married woman, he pointed out. She would understand about these things.

“I will,” Dorothy said, knowing she wouldn’t. Married or not, Joyce was still Joyce. The morning after the wedding, Dorothy had studied her for some sign of transformation, some evidence that Joyce and Ed had done the things she and Angie did. She’d watched her sister carrying armloads of wedding gifts out to the car—a toaster, a stockpot, stacks of dish towels and bed linens and embroidered dresser scarves.
Did you?
she wanted to ask.
Were you? Truly, Joyce, wasn’t it?
But the words had not come.

Angie rose and stepped into his trousers. Beneath him the bed creaked.

“I won’t see you tomorrow. The rehearsal dinner, remember?” His oldest daughter, Shirley, was getting married that weekend.

“Isn’t that in the evening?” Dorothy curled into the warm spot he’d left. She wasn’t ready to move.

“Six o’clock. But I should stick around in case Shirl needs anything.” He pulled on an undershirt.

Dorothy had never met Shirley, but she had her own opinions about the kind of girl who’d accept an expensive wedding from a father she barely spoke to, a father who hadn’t drawn a paycheck in a month. The rehearsal dinner was a Friday, the wedding Saturday afternoon. Angie
always ate Sunday dinner with his ex-wife and the children, so Dorothy wouldn’t see him until the following week.

She sat up in bed and slipped on a housecoat. “Let me go put on some coffee. Warm you up before I send you outside.”

Downstairs, she busied herself in the kitchen, distracting herself from the knowledge that he would soon leave her—a thought that, if she dwelled on it, could make her physically ill. She understood that leaving was normal, that husbands left their wives every day to go to work. The difference, she knew, was that Angie left her in secret. She could not, like her neighbor Madge Yurkovich, spend the morning washing his miners and hanging them out to dry. Lately Angie kept a few things at her house—a comb and toothbrush, an extra shirt and trousers. She found their presence reassuring; they were all she had. She couldn’t comfort herself with the sound of his name, dropping it into casual conversation. She never mentioned him to her sisters, so that even in their company she felt horribly alone.

“Whatsa matter?” Angie came up behind her and wrapped her in his arms. “Did I say something?”

“Oh, no.” She leaned into him—a head taller, his shoulders broad. She wanted to disappear inside him. “I’ll miss you this weekend. That’s all. I’m being selfish.”

“You? Never.”

They stood there a long moment, his breath warm on her cheek.

“I never gave you a wedding,” he said. “Here I am marrying off my kids, and you haven’t had your turn yet. That doesn’t seem right.”

“I don’t care about a wedding,” she whispered, and that much was true. The thought of walking down the aisle in front of all her neighbors and relatives was enough to make her sweat.

“I’ll stop by on Sunday morning,” Angie said. “Bring you some bread from Bellavia’s before church.”

H
E’D BEEN DIVORCED
for eight years, nearly as long as he’d been married. His ex-wife, Julia, lived with their four children in West Branch, in a house Dorothy had walked past many times. Angie had bought the house when they married, and he still made the payments every month. His two younger daughters were in high school, his son in seventh grade.

Once, at the beginning, she had asked:
Why did you get divorced?

Oil and water,
he explained.
Every stinking day there was something to butt heads about.
Julia had fought like a cat with his mother and sisters. She resented the time he spent playing baseball; in ten years of marriage she hadn’t come to a single game. She complained bitterly about how his uncle ran the business, said Angie helped out too much and got nothing in return.
She’s a person who thinks everyone is robbing her,
he said.
You give her the world, it’s still less than she deserves.

The rest of his family had witnessed these struggles. His own mother told him, in so many words, that his marriage had been a mistake. But all that changed the day he got divorced. Now Julia came to his mother’s each year at Christmas. Wherever Bernardis gathered—at weddings, baptisms, First Communions—she was invited. She was treated like a saint in the family, while his own presence was merely tolerated. It had been that way for years.

Dorothy had never met his children, but she had seen pictures. On Sunday afternoons she pictured them sitting around a dinner table, eating
the meal Julia had prepared. Every Sunday morning they attended mass at Mount Carmel: Angie and Julia at either end of the long pew, the four children placed between them. Both continued to take Communion; according to the priest it was allowed. Divorce itself was no impediment to grace. As long as neither remarried, there was no sin.

A
month into the miners’ strike, Sandy Novak came back to town. In recent years his appearances had been rare and brief, like a comet shooting across the sky. He hadn’t been seen in Bakerton since Rose’s funeral.

He arrived on a Sunday night in a lemon yellow convertible, causing a stir in Joyce and Ed’s quiet subdivision. At Polish Hill he might not have been noticed, among all the crying babies, the barking of hunting dogs, the screen doors slamming late into the night. During the strike there was no need to whisper, no miner upstairs sleeping off his shift. East Branch was different: strike or no strike, its modest ranch houses contained their noises. Pets and children were kept indoors. On hot days, air conditioners hummed quietly in bedroom windows. In summer, in winter, East Branch was quiet as the grave.

Joyce answered the door in her housecoat. In the den, Ed was watching
The Ed Sullivan Show.

“I’m home,” Sandy announced, lifting her into his arms. His face was
deeply tanned; he wore a wrinkled linen suit. He had driven for six days, nearly two thousand miles.

Across the street, the neighbor’s porch light came on.

“Well, aren’t you something?” Joyce’s face was flushed with pleasure. “I’ll bet Dorothy had a bird.”

He set her down. “I haven’t been over there yet.”

She blinked, oddly touched: he had come to see her first. “Then how’d you know where to find me?”

“I asked some smart-aleck kid hanging out at the Esso.” He grinned. “Every juvenile delinquent in town knows where the principal lives.”

“You should have called to tell us you were coming.”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

Bad idea, pal,
thought Ed, joining them on the porch. His wife hated surprises, a lesson he’d learned repeatedly in their first year of marriage.

Joyce clapped delightedly. “Let me put on some clothes. We’ll go surprise Dorothy. She’ll have a
bird.
”

H
E TOOK OVER
Joyce’s old room, pressed his own shirts on the ironing board she’d kept in the closet. The shirts were fine cotton, expensively monogrammed. Dorothy offered to launder them, but the old wringer washer made him nervous. Finally he took them to the dry cleaner in town.

In the evenings he ate the meals Dorothy prepared; afterward he washed their two plates. Lucy had gone away to college that fall. The house was emptier than it had ever been.

He rarely used the telephone. “If anyone calls for me, I’m not here,” he
told Dorothy. “Got it? You never heard of Sandy Novak. There’s no one here by that name.”

He was vague when Joyce asked how long he could stay. “A week or so. Maybe two.”

“That’s wonderful,” she said, “but don’t you have to get back to work?”

Where and when he worked was a subject that puzzled her. When he called (infrequently, at odd hours), he was usually between jobs. This time he was a fry cook in a diner. A few months ago, he’d been a valet parking attendant at the Biltmore Hotel.

You’ve always liked cars,
she’d told him once.
Have you considered a trade school? You could study automotive repair.

I don’t care what’s under the hood,
he’d answered, laughing.
Just put me behind the wheel.

“That’s quite a ride you’ve got there,” Ed said, pointing out the obvious: How did a fry cook afford a car like that?

Anyone else would have felt the need to explain, but Sandy only smiled.

“Thanks, Ed,” he said.

E
ACH MORNING
he shaved and put on a suit. He wore no winter coat, despite the January freeze. Smartly dressed, he drove uptown. Ed saw him there several times a week: standing beside his car on Susquehanna Avenue, shooting the breeze with the firemen; at Keener’s Diner, reading the paper over a plate of ham and eggs. Every evening the convertible was parked outside the Legion or the Vets, though Sandy was no
veteran. Asking around, Ed heard he’d been drinking with the Bernardi boys.

“What’s he doing for cash?” Ed asked Joyce. “I don’t know what kind of savings a fry cook has, but he must have drunk it away by now.”

“I have no idea,” Joyce said crisply. “I haven’t loaned him any more, if that’s what you’re asking.”

So far it had been the only argument in their young marriage. Once, twice, he’d caught Joyce writing checks to Sandy—fifty dollars here, a hundred there. “It’s a loan,” she’d explained. “He’s between jobs.” The money was never repaid, which didn’t surprise Ed. The surprise was his thrifty wife—she’d worn the same winter coat for six years—buying sharp suits for the best-dressed fry cook in Los Angeles.

“I saw him uptown this morning,” Ed said. “If he’s got time on his hands, Dorothy ought to put him to work. Her porch could use a coat of paint.” He spent his own summer vacations doing repairs on Polish Hill; he was the only one who gave the old place any attention. Left to Rose’s sons, the house would have fallen to pieces long ago.

T
HE STRIKE DRAGGED ON
. The union offered a month of strike pay, enough to buy a few groceries. Wives put in applications at the dress factory.

A bitter cold settled in the valley. Good news for the union, Gene Stusick said: heating coal was in demand. How much money was Baker willing to lose? It was just a matter of time.

Businesses shut down for the winter: the shoe store, Spangler’s hat shop. No one was buying, and until the strike ended, nobody would.
Friedman’s Furniture closed its doors for good. Izzy Friedman, who’d delivered Stanley Novak’s coal stove in the middle of the night, held a gigantic sidewalk sale. After that the store stood empty. In the dark window hung a hand-lettered sign:
FOR SALE NOW
.

A few businesses did prosper: the Vets and the Legion, the Sons of Italy and the Slovak Club. On snowy afternoons, the taverns were full. Men congregated at the fire hall, the pool hall. The bowling alley opened at eleven in the morning. They did a brisk trade in games, sandwiches and beer.

In February, strike pay ran out. Still Baker Brothers wouldn’t budge.

Angie Bernardi grew tired of the fire hall. More and more, he spent the afternoons on Polish Hill. He didn’t mind the presence of Dorothy’s brother. Sandy was good company; he laughed at Angie’s jokes, and he knew when to make himself scarce for an hour or two. When he returned, he’d join Angie for a beer while Dorothy cooked their supper.

On one of these afternoons, Sandy suggested a game of cards.

“Sure,” Angie said. His free time weighed on him. His lungs kept him from hunting, and he’d never been much for reading or television. He could spend just so much time in his apartment, two cramped rooms above Travaglini’s barbershop.

Fridays became their regular game. Angie invited his brother Jerry; Sal, too, when his wife would let him out of the house. Sandy asked his old buddy Dick Devlin, who’d moved back from Cleveland to marry and mine coal and who was now out of work like everyone else. It being Polish Hill, there were always some Poblockis knocking around. The kitchen filled with cigarette smoke, cursing and men.

Dorothy didn’t seem to mind, though she told Angie, once, that she missed what they usually did on Fridays. He laughed and kissed her; he liked how she never complained. At the beginning she had watched them
play, but it bothered Angie, her hearing that language. “Go over to your sister’s,” he suggested. And Dorothy did.