The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (38 page)

Everything in the years since 1963 seemed to move to the margins. It wasn’t so much that the center would not hold—no one knew where it was.

Celeste began studying to become a nun, then reversed course, had her lovely apple breasts augmented to melonic proportion and for over a decade under the name Cin More made dozens of adult films. When the Internet got going she leveraged her following and her cleavage into digitized erotica, eventually running several companies catering to a menu of well-defined pornographic tastes. According to
Time,
which did a cover story called
Naked Internet
, “Ms More is to the incest taboo what Washington was to the Delaware and to jingoism what John Wayne is to the Green Berets.” Though Celeste was estranged from them after her descent into porn, all the Callinans must have shared a moment of deep unease at the comparison. Their baby brother, Duncan, was among the first Special Forces personnel to die in Vietnam.

The three surviving brothers became known in their respective professions for their charitable endeavors. Patrick the cop rose to captain and spent most of his spare time and money on expanding the Police Athletic League, which offered sports as a hopeful antidote to such inner-city standbys as drugs, impersonal violence and casual sex. Monroe the fireman was lost in 9-11 a month before his scheduled retirement—he and his wife had adopted twelve children, most of them in some way deformed, crippled, retarded or all three: one daughter was deaf, dumb, blind and autistic. Father Bill was involved peripherally in the church child-abuse scandal when, as executive assistant to the bishop of Garden City on Long Island, he was discovered to have serially transferred abusive priests. Embarrassed in the press, he remained in the church. What the journalists did not know, because Father Bill did not disclose it, was that for forty years he had dedicated himself—raising money from wealthy laymen—to a private effort to force out errant clergy, sometimes with bribes, sometimes with threats, while at the same offering counsel and aid to their victims.

Royce Wilmington was for a time Dick Tinti’s man in Harlem, but on an evening at Palm Gardens in New York in 1964 Royce met a charming ex-con called Malcolm X who convinced him to examine his soul in the light of salvation in Islam. As Ahmed 24X, Royce became a power in Harlem politics and a force to be reckoned with by his former associates in the drug trade. Ever the smooth operator, Jimmy Wing left crime as well. With his silent partner Tommy he opened high-end Hunan-style restaurants in New York and Los Angeles, then sold these to open the immensely successful chain of fast Chinese food places known as ChopStix. Pepsi owns them now.

Jack Ruby’s conviction on “murder with malice” of Lee Harvey Oswald was overturned in 1966 on the grounds he could not have gotten a fair trial in Dallas. Shortly after a new trial date was set, he died of cancer in Parkland Hospital, where John F. Kennedy had been declared dead three years earlier and where Oswald himself died after the shooting. All through his incarceration he claimed there was a conspiracy he could not talk about because even in prison he was not safe. “Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface,” he declared in a televised interview. “The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives. The people who had so much to gain, and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in, will never let the true facts come aboveboard to the world.” Yet on his deathbed he seemed to recant. A shrunken hulk, he was barely able to gum the words, “There is nothing to hide—there was no one else.”

The assassination of John F. Kennedy and its aftermath remained an open sore in America for decades. Fidel Castro categorically denied he had anything to do with it. Dozens of books were written pointing the finger at one or more of the usual suspects—organized crime, the CIA, right-wing loonies, the National Rifle Association, Aristotle Onassis (he is said to have lusted that much after Jacqueline Kennedy, who became his bride) and that ever-present bugaboo of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union. As with Ruby, nothing would ever be known for sure. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when documents in the newly opened KGB archives unquestionably proved the Soviets had had no part in either the murder of the president or of his alleged assassin, experts immediately came forward to call the documents faked.

After the tide of conspiracy books came an antithetical bulkhead of print claiming to demonstrate beyond a doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone and that Jack Ruby was an unconnected nut case. Yet polls continued to show that most Americans believed something larger, better equipped and smarter than Oswald had killed the president, and that Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald was proof.

Though it was he who had gotten the nation involved in a land war in Vietnam, the cult of John F. Kennedy as a great president continued to grow, especially in light of the dismal record of his successors: JFK’s war, pursued with fatalistic resolve by Lyndon Johnson, made the Texan so unpopular he declined to run for a second term; a documented racist paranoid, Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency to escape criminal charges; Jimmy Carter proved himself not only incompetent but a self-righteous prig; by his own admission a lying adulterer, Bill Clinton became the first modern American president to be impeached. Though Ronald Reagan was widely respected, the two Bushes who claimed his legacy were and are widely considered to be moronic. Excluding Reagan, who was considered a lightweight when elected and left office in a halo, not one ended his term of office with his reputation intact.

Shushan Cats remained Shushan Cats, though he mellowed over time. At my mother’s funeral he bonded with the officiating rabbi and gradually became involved with the religion he had all but ignored. To his library he added hundreds of books on Judaism—I know he never shelved a book without reading it—and from time to time even attended synagogue, always on the anniversary of his mother’s death. He became an easy touch for Jewish charities, and began supporting various causes in Israel, especially orphanages. After the Six-Day War he flew to Tel Aviv where he was gratified to discover that Israel Defense Forces training was based almost to the letter on United States Marine Corps doctrine. In 1970 he took me with him for the dedication in the resort town of Netanya of the Goldie Cats Center for Lone Soldiers, a residence for Israeli conscripts who had no homes to return to on leave.

As though it were no longer worth doing because the challenge was gone, when Shushan was declared not guilty of providing legal protection to illegal businesses he seemed to lose interest in his core enterprise. The Fulton Fish Market remained lucrative, but he had grown out of it. Eventually Shushan set up a security firm manned by ex-cops (among them a couple of retired NYPD detectives who had once fed me pizza) and hired an ex-FBI special agent to run it. He knew how to pick people. Anita Quinones aggressively expanded the business with security contracts for Kennedy Airport, the Port of New York Authority and Amtrak. By now a mere passive investor, twice a year Shushan showed up for board meetings, but that was all.

Of course he continued to make money, the losses in Cuba covered handily by shrewd purchases of huge tracts in Orlando, Las Vegas and the Dominican Republic. He spent an hour each day investigating opportunities in the stock market, early on diversifying to foreign shares because he suspected, rightly, the dollar would fall. Most of his time was devoted to charity.

He supported reading programs in the public schools and backed politicians in both parties who agreed to promote laws providing grants for underprivileged university students. He wrote checks with a consistency that was unique even then, thoroughly researching each field. But he was also a soft touch—according to Terri, an easy mark—who could never turn away a panhandler or a former colleague down on his luck or a medical researcher with a sure cure for cancer, heart disease, diabetes or even illnesses of which Shushan had never heard. When Jack Ruby died it was Shushan who paid for his stone at Westlawn Cemetery in Chicago.

He paid for the alteration of my mother’s monument as well, thus obliterating the engraved lie I had lived with since I was five. All remained the same but for a single date: my mother died the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

“I didn’t hear of it,” Shushan told me on the way to the cemetery in the back of a long slate-gray limo, Ira following in the Eldorado with Myra, Justo, Terri and Darcie. “I was in Dallas. The people from the place, the private hospital whatever, upstate, they were under orders never to talk to anyone but me. Not even Ira. Justo knew, but Justo is a one-way sponge. Justo wouldn’t tell your friend Professor del Vecchio the guy himself was a fag if I told Justo it was a secret. Your mom’s thing, it was confidential. I probably wouldn’t have known for a while except that when it happened I called Justo from Dallas. We were both shocked, Justo that I was alive and kicking and me that your mom, you know, she wasn’t. I’ll tell you, your mom was put away for fifteen years. Every month after your old man died I paid the bill, and every month they’d give the same report, word for word: Sheila is in excellent health. You know, except for being not right in the head. So I never expected she’d just... die.”

“How not right?”

“It’s like she was burned out in the brain. Sealed up. You could talk to her and she wouldn’t answer. Then when you were in the middle of something, tipping a nurse to take special care of her or just getting ready to leave, she’d start talking a mile a minute.”

“You went up to see her?”

“Twice a year. Maybe I should have gone more. But that was your father’s schedule. I kept to it.”

“He went hunting.”

“Is that what he said?”

“Twice a year. But he never bagged anything. Never caught as much as a rabbit. I always thought it was odd, because he was a good shot. A terrific shot. Very steady hand. When I got older I figured it was some woman. Officially he never dated. I figured he didn’t want me to know.”

“He had a date with your mom.”

“Some date, Shushan.”

“Yeah, she wasn’t exactly a live wire.”

“You said she talked.”

“Nobody could ever figure it out. It was all unconnected words, like she went into a dictionary at random and picked out unrelated words. I knew when she got worse because after a while it wasn’t even words, just syllables like, then just sounds, not speech at all.” He looked away. “She used profanity. In the midst of all these nonsense sounds you’d hear
fuck
and
bullshit
and
cocksucker
. I’m no nun, but it was unsettling.”

“Tell me about my father.”

“What do you want to know? He was a good man.”

“Was he on the take?”

“You have to understand the circumstances.”

“You’re saying they were right, that he
was
crooked?”

“Crooked, shmooked,” Shushan said, suddenly interested in something outside the car, then turning back. “Your mom was sick.”

“That’s a very intimate word,
mom
.”

“Your mother was sick. He couldn’t leave her alone, not with a little kid. He put her in Bellevue, it’s a public hospital, but when he went in there he knew he had to get her out. He found this place upstate. They have deer that come right up to the porch to eat out of your hand. The people up there they don’t even talk about unemployment—there’s no jobs period, no industry, no business to be unemployed from. Believe me, they get a paycheck at this hospital they stick. They’d be crazy to be anything but wonderful to the patients. They call them guests, if you can believe. A solid move on your father’s part. But it wasn’t free. Suddenly your father, as straight a shooter as there ever was, he finds himself all jammed up for cash. Monthly. For a civil servant, this was a heavy nut. He did what he had to do.”

“He came to you.”

“A good thing. I mean, he could have gone to the Tintis, or worse. I heard him out and told him, Mike, I got a little foundation that can help out. He tells me, Mr. Cats, with all respect for your generosity, I don’t take charity. It was a Mexican stand-off for a while, like two guys arguing over a restaurant check. In the end what could I do? I put him to work.”

“As?”

“Whatever came up.”

“For instance.”

“For instance if somebody got out of line.”

“My father was five-five in his elevator shoes.”

“I’m five-seven. So what. You think people are more scared of me or Ira? Ira is a bruiser. Us little guys, we compensate.”

“What else?”

“What else what?”

“What else did my father do for you?”

“This and that, no special thing. Whatever came up. I trusted him pretty much from the start.”

“You don’t want to tell me.”

“Details? Kid, it’s ancient history. I can’t even remember myself. Nothing bad. Just normal activities. When your father passed, I kind of took over the responsibility upstate.”

“You took over.”

“What was I going to do, look away? They would have dumped her out to a state institution. You don’t want to know about places like that. People laying in their own filth. It was nothing for me. I mean, what am I supposed to do with all this money, buy more cars? I got a dozen suits.” He looked down at mine. “Well, minus three. How many do I need? I live in a fucking hotel for crying out loud. Top-of-the-line Caddy. Eat in the best places. Vacation wherever I like. I want a book I buy it. I even got the best lawyer, or at least the most expensive.”

“But you went up twice a year.”

“A drive in the country. Nothing strenuous. Anyway, Ira did all the work.”

“But he doesn’t know.”

“Ira knows what he’s supposed to know. Justo knew because he paid the bills. Terri, I talked about it with her. But outside of that, zip. What am I supposed to do, take out an ad in the
New York Times?
Let me tell you something, kid. There’s some things I did, in my early days especially, I’m not so proud of. That’s when I made my reputation as someone not to fool with. So those things I’m not so proud of, I figure they actually put me in a position to help other people, maybe they didn’t have the advantages I had, like it says in that book when you made fun of me,
The Great Gatsby
. But from the beginning I realized that if I did good things and told people I was doing them it wasn’t pure. It was advertising myself. Promotion. Believe me, I know that when you’re in the same position, and I expect you may be because you’re smart and ambitious and people trust you, then you’ll probably do the same.”