The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (15 page)

Forty-five minutes later, he finally deboarded the IRT at 174th Street. From what he remembered, East Tremont was the Bronx’s equivalent of the Lower East Side, working-class Italians who couldn’t find anything on Arthur Avenue and Jews who couldn’t afford the Grand Concourse. As he schlepped along, he tried to dream up subjects to talk about with this young girl. Should he tell her about his failed marriage? Or perhaps his failed career? He could describe his rootless life of reading newspapers and living off charity. Or he could talk about what everyone else talked about—Robert’s tremendous success.

After crossing through beautiful Crotona Park—another of his brother’s recent renovations—he searched for her address. He was delighted when he arrived at the elegant old house with a worn wraparound porch that he had last seen twenty years earlier.

As he knocked on Lucretia’s door, a small dog started barking. A moment later, when she opened the door, his heart stopped. With her hair bundled up, wearing a beautiful dress, the young woman was truly ravishing. A tiny Yorkie barked incessantly as he stepped inside her spacious house. She put the animal in the yard and quickly made Paul a gin and tonic—his favorite drink from twenty years before.

“I once came up around here with my ex-wife to attend her cousin’s wedding in Pelham Park.”

“Oh, the rich part of town.”

“So what’s this part?” he kidded.

“The further south and east you go, the worse things get,” she said as she served him a Waldorf salad. “This is the middle, where the rich meet the poor. But at the rate things are going, I think in the next ten, twenty years even the South Bronx will improve.”

Instead of revealing the miserable truth of his life, Paul served an appetizing lie: The pool club had been a modest success. He had sold it after ten years. He and his brother were the very best of friends. Though his marriage had failed, he was still close to Teresa and the kids.

Soon dinner was ready, a terrific grilled fish and mango platter. He had to cover his mouth as he ate, because they spent the entire time talking without a single awkward pause. She asked many questions, about his mother, about growing up wealthy, about his time in revolutionary Mexico—things he no longer mentioned to anybody.

“When I was a kid,” he confessed after dinner, “I had such a crush on your mother.”

“Well, that’s a coincidence,” she replied, staring softly into his eyes. “Because I’ve always been head over heels about you.” He coughed as she giggled.

The first miner to exit his tunnel was the short balding Italian from cave fourteen who was working on one of the slower eastern routes. They refixed his guidewire so that it trailed into the more efficient tunnel fifteen, just a short turn away. Root pointed out that the closer they kept the diggers to their original tunnels, the less likely the men were to doubt themselves or cause a fuss.

Something else occurred to Uli and he hastily squirmed on his belly down cave fourteen. Sure enough, the Italian had left some things behind—a small crucifix, several cutting tools, and two empty jugs, one for urine and the other with water. Rolled in a corner was the stolen vest with the Day-Glo stripe. Uli then climbed down tunnel fifteen and found that six boxes of shattered stones had been shoved in there—a detail that would’ve blown their scheme. Uli cleared it all out and placed the miner’s possessions at the very end. Then, to disorientate him further, Uli and Root piled large stones in front of his former tunnel.

The next tunneler to break for sleep was his buddy, the black guy, another eastward tunneler. Again Uli raced in to grab his personal effects, while Root altered his wires to one of the targeted upward caves. Root was a little worried because the rock he would be cutting into was much harder than that of his former tunnel, but she agreed that it was a risk worth taking. The third tunneler already inhabited one of the selected caves, so they left him alone. Soon, all tunnelers had been rerouted to new caves except for one digger in a southwestern tunnel. Root suspected that the poor man’s brain had turned to mush, as he seemed to sleep, eat, and crap around the clock in his dusty hole.

Before long, Root slipped back in her chair and nodded off. Uli let her sleep, but he noticed that a stick of gum had slipped out of her pocket. He hadn’t seen any gum in the stock area, and he didn’t ever remember her chewing it, so he assumed she was secretly hording it. When she awoke later, he didn’t mention it.

“Want to take a nap?” she offered once she was up and about.

Though exhausted, he declined, anxious until he was sure all the miners had returned and this phase of the plan was working somewhat smoothly. The miners would reach up in the blackness and finger their particular strings, almost like harpists, to guide them into their caves. He and Root listened attentively as the rested diggers vanished inside their new tunnels. A moment later they would hear the hammering resume and hug each other excitedly. For the next few days, it became a complex juggling act of men and tunnels. Uli was elated …

25

… as though he had won some incredible lottery. Not only was the food that night the best he had eaten in years, but his former maid’s beautiful young daughter felt like the antidote to a painful venom that had poisoned his heart and soul. It was the first time he could recall the weight of so many failures lifting from his shoulders. As he rode the IRT back down to grungy Midtown, he felt like a child again. It felt like fifty unsuccessful years were being miraculously rewritten. But as soon as he arrived back at his little room at the Longacre—his minimum-security prison cell—his life suddenly seemed all the more painful.

When Lucretia rang him a few days later, it was the first call he had received from outside the hotel.

“I really enjoyed our dinner together,” she said.

“Me too.”

“Well, why don’t you get back up here and we’ll have supper again tonight?”

Induced by his guilty conscience, he replied, “I just got a big job so I won’t have any time for the next few weeks, maybe a month.”

“Well, you can’t be busy forever.”

“I’ll call when things slow down.”

Three weeks later she called again. With tremendous difficulty, he said he was still busy. Hanging up the phone, he felt his heart break. He spent the week walking around in a haze. When she called once more a week later, it felt like hope and possibility were on the phone.

Instead of flatly turning her down this time, they talked late into the night. Finally he asked, “Do you believe some people are cursed?”

“No, just dumb.”

The comment stuck like an ice pick, and Paul decided it was time to come clean. He didn’t want to do it on the phone since it was apparent she was not easily put off. He finally consented to a second dinner.

It had been muggy and overcast all day, and rain just started falling as Paul stepped off the train. He walked six blocks with a newspaper folded over his head. When he arrived, he was winded and soaked. This time he made no effort to disguise his true self: His wet shirt was yellowed with sweat. He was unshaven. His threadbare suit was too loose on him and filled with holes, and his shoes were worn in the soles. She handed him a towel to dry off as he sat in the living room. Toto, her Yorkie, sat in her lap.

He wasted no time: “I lied to you before and, frankly, I want to set the record straight.”

“Why would you lie about anything?”

“Because I was embarrassed.”

“What can you possibly be embarrassed about?”

“Everything: I don’t have a job. My pool business went belly-up. My marriage fell apart. And I’m basically broke.”

Lucretia rose from her couch and moved to sit next to him. She wrapped her fingers around his and said, “The you that I liked was the oldest scion of a prosperous family who treated my mother and me like queens.”

“Maybe that’s why I lost everything,” he said with a smile.

“I didn’t know you
had
everything.”

“I don’t have a job. I don’t have a family. I don’t even have a life.”

“All you have, all any of us have, is ourselves,” Lucretia said, “and I think you’re a good person.”

“You’re not going to quote the Bible, are you?”

“Why, do you need religion to be good?”

“Whatever I am, I’m worthless,” he lamented.

“If you’re a good person, you’re not worthless.”

Paul chuckled in frustration. “I don’t think I’m getting through.”

“You’re sitting here telling me you’re worthless, and I do believe what you say about not having any money, but most of all I’m wondering why you’re trying to get me to think poorly of you.”

“Because I’m bad luck. Everyone who comes into contact with me lives to regret it.”

“You could’ve told me all this on the phone,” she said. “I think you’ve come all the way up here because you like me. And I know I like you. I was never after your money, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t have it. I still like what I liked about you all those years ago.”

He found it difficult to make eye contact. Outside, the rain was still coming down. In a moment, thunder filled the darkened sky. As Lucretia moved through the house closing windows, Paul thought about her situation: With her mother’s demise, she was all alone. The interest she was showing in him was nothing more than an infatuation, a search for a father she never knew. In him, she found a man her mother had once looked on trustfully and approvingly. If Maria were here now, he thought, she would want him to be fatherly toward her only daughter.

“So, are you seeing anybody?” Paul asked Lucretia paternally.

“Yeah, you,” she said with a smile.

“Look, I’m divorced and old, and I know it’s a difficult process, but you have to stick with it and keep looking.”

“Paul, I have just one question: Do you find me attractive?”

“You’re very attractive, but you’re too young for me.”

“Are you dating anyone else right now?”

“I’m virtually a bag man living in a Times Square hotel, so the answer is no.”

“If you don’t want to date me, that’s fine,” she said. “But if you think you’re standing in the way of some Prince Charming, or that I’d be dating someone much younger than you, you’re very much mistaken.” She rose and headed into the kitchen with her Yorkie at her heels. Paul assumed she was preparing to serve dinner. Instead, she returned with a dozen pots and pans, all piled inside one another. Paul just sat there while she walked around the house placing the cookery under various leaks that were starting to sprinkle down.

“Why don’t you hire a roofer?” Paul asked.

“I’ve been saving up. But my first money is going toward the plumbing and electricity.”

Paul asked Lucretia to give him a quick tour of the place, during which he recalled his own inspection two decades earlier. Very little had been repaired; small problems had become big ones.

“Have you ever considered selling this house?”

“I could never sell it,” she said emphatically.

“Lucretia, you live alone. Why do you need all this space?”

“Because someday I plan to have a family and this will be our home.”

“How much money have you saved so far?”

“Just a little over fifty bucks.” She grinned. “Not enough to do anything yet.”

“Actually, fifty bucks should be enough to fix your roof.”

“I had it estimated for seventy-five dollars.”

“We can do it together,” he said. “I’ll show you how.”

“I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

“You don’t have to. I wanted to help out when I first came here with your mother, but I was too busy. Now I only got time.”

“You really want to fix my roof?” she asked with a big smile.

“This is our last date together,” he said as he grabbed his jacket. “I’ll be back early tomorrow to start work.”

The rain began to taper. Lucretia watched as Paul walked out and up the block.

The next morning when he didn’t show, she wondered if he had simply decided to vanish. At noon, though, he arrived in a Checker cab and started unloading things on her front porch. She dashed out to help him. Ten rolls of tar paper, two buckets of tar, a linoleum cutter, a five-pound bag of nails, and two hammers—he had made the purchases at Jack’s, a local hardware shop on East Tremont Avenue. For the next eight hours, Paul rolled and cut the tar paper, nailing it down and then tarring the seams.

The following day he resumed his work. He was surprised by how many people passing in the street waved up at him, or called out something like, “Glad to see Lu-cretia’s finally getting her roof fixed!” Apparently she was very connected to her community.

He left his tar-smudged clothes on the porch along with his old shoes. Not wanting to track dirt inside, he sat in the living room in his boxers and T-shirt. Lucretia made a wonderful codfish stew for dinner, which he hungrily forked down.

“I should be finished later this week,” he said tiredly.

“Then you’re spending the night.”

“No way.”

“Look, I accept that we’re not going to be romantically involved, but it’s ridiculous for you to go all the way downtown and then have to wake up and come all the way back up here. Especially when I have two empty bedrooms upstairs.”

It took the remainder of his strength just to climb back upstairs after dinner and flop into bed. The next morning, she brought him a cup of coffee and a buttered bialy. He took a bite, slurped down the java, and went back out to the porch to put his work clothes on and climb out onto the roof. He kept at this for the next three days. In the evenings they’d listen to the radio, chat, or read the papers. She’d often sit at her desk with a manual adding machine and her accounting work, punching in numbers from a stack of ledger sheets. When he told her he knew where to find an affordable electric counter, she said she had one in the basement but it kept shorting out fuses.

After he was done with the roof, Paul checked out her electrical system. The cables were coated with a frayed fabric and connected to a haphazard array of circuit boxes with wooden backs. The place barely had enough amps to keep the lights on. Paul went to the local library to brush up on some fine points of household electricity, then proceeded to unscrew all the old fuses and pull the ancient wires from the walls. He took two days carefully upgrading her whole system with a centralized fuse box.