The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (27 page)

He had seen it on the sign of Water Station 27. He figured it must be pointing to the next station. But then he froze.
They’re probably all in a direct line!
Uli had been too distracted by Paul’s grief and the Armenian guide to recognize the clue. He had to go back. Only from Water Station 27 could he hope to find 28.

45

S
itting on a wheeled cart at the library, Paul noticed a bound collection of back issues of
University of Pennsylvania Alumni Quarterly.
While perusing through several recent editions, he spotted an item from three years back. Under the heading
Class of 1915,
it read,
We’ve established a fund to assist one of our dear colleagues who is in special need. Millicent Sanchez- Rothschild worked tirelessly on behalf of the poor in Mexico and now needs our help. Please donate to …

There was a name listed that he didn’t recognize,
Irena Martinez-Smith,
along with an address on the Upper East Side. At first he was going to write a letter. But since it was a nice day and the woman lived only a mile or so from the library, he headed up to her apartment on 69th Street and First Avenue. He stopped at a diner along the way to comb his hair and straighten out his ruffled suit in the bathroom. Then he located the building and rang the bell. A handsome young man answered.

“I’m looking for a Mrs. Martinez-Smith,” Paul said.

“What about, may I ask?”

“I saw that she posted a notice for funds for a Millicent Rothschild—”

“Mom!” the man shouted upstairs. He quickly vanished and an older woman came to the door.

“Can I help you?”

“I used to be good friends with Millie years ago, and I saw your notice. Since I live nearby,” he lied, “I thought I’d just knock on your door and ask how she was doing.”

“You knew Millie in Mexico?”

“No, here. I went to Princeton though I ended up going down to Mexico with her. That was over forty years ago.”

“What’s your name?”

“Paul Moses.”

“Yes, Pablo, I remember her writing about you.” She invited him inside, offered him a cup of tea and scones, then told him, “Millie was disinherited by her family.”

“You’re kidding.”

“They completely turned their backs on her when she went down there to join the revolution. She was fighting against people her own father had put in power.”

“I remember. Is she okay?”

“She came back from Mexico a number of years ago. She had problems there. She got arrested in the ’30s and spent a few years in jail, where she lost her sight.”

“She’s blind?” Paul felt numb at hearing this.

“Yes. After a while she was finally getting along, but then she had to move …”

“Where is she?” Paul was trying to hold back tears.

“She just got a new place, but it’s all the way down in the Battery. On Bond Street.”

“Is there a phone number?” Paul asked eagerly. “Can I call her?”

“She doesn’t have a phone yet. That’s one of the reasons I’m trying to raise money for her. She was so popular and beautiful back then. There were so many boys chasing after her. I remember one of the Rockefellers was gaga over her. He was good looking too. Would’ve given her the world, all she had to do was take it.”

“I know,” he said, almost ashamed to be among them.

“Did you know she scored number one in her sophmore class?”

“I didn’t know that.” At least if he did, he had forgotten.

“Smart, attractive, she could’ve really been something,” the woman said sadly.

Paul knew that she meant Millie could’ve been married to a powerful man, because he also knew that Millie couldn’t have lived her life any other way than she had.

Millie now resided on 98 South Bond Street. He thanked the woman for her time, then walked over to Lexington Avenue and caught the 5 train down to the last stop in Manhattan. Forty-five minutes later he was walking around the Battery looking for her address.

When he finally found her building, which had no downstairs doorbell, it was already 5 o’clock. It was located behind Fraunces Tavern, one of New York’s oldest pubs. The ancient warehouse looked like it had been built back when the English ruled. Staring up, he wondered how he could get inside. He considered yelling out her name, but if she was on the top floor he didn’t want to make her come all the way downstairs, particularly if she was blind. Wall Street workers were just leaving their offices. Paul waited as the rush hour crowds passed by, hoping someone might enter the old building. After an hour or so, he approached the chipped and warped door. When he pushed it, it rattled. With a sharp thrust of his shoulder, the door popped open.

Paul slowly climbed the long, steep, splintery wooden steps. Halfway up the exhausting ascent he began remembering the last time he had seen her. He had left her in anger in revolutionary Mexico and was returning to New York to take his rightful place as the prodigal son of a privileged New York family. Now, other than the fact that he was still alive, he had nothing to offer her.

When he knocked on the door, he could hear someone rumbling around inside.

“Who is it?” a rusty female voice called out.

“Millie, it’s me!”

“Who?”

“It’s Paul, Paul Moses.”

Oh my God!
” He heard her fumbling with the locks and “the door swung open. Besides her dark glasses, she hardly looked older, just more dramatic.

“Millie, I can’t believe it.”

“Paul!” She reached out and grasped him. He hugged her so hard he realized he was hurting her, but she didn’t utter a peep.

“I’m so glad you’re still alive,” he said cheerfully.

“It took me years to understand that I took you for granted!” she replied, tears streaming down her face.

“I can’t believe you’re back in New York.”

Her hand grazed along his face to feel his expression. As he smiled, her fingers danced along his lips and cheeks and he kissed them.

“Do you know how many times I prayed that I had left with you all those years ago?” she said, hugging him. “Almost every day since you left.”

She brought him inside and made some tea. In the fifteen years after he left Mexico, various revolutionary governments had abused the sacred trust of the country’s people and were quickly replaced. She had attempted to keep a foothold, working with different regimes who supposedly shared common goals.

“Tens of thousands died during those years of infighting,” she explained. “At some point you realize that you’re no better than those you’re fighting against.”

Eventually, a coalition government was established. She thought the worst was over and was soon appointed to the government as one of the three Under-Ministers of Education. Everything seemed to have stabilized for a short while. In 1932, however, one of the more ruthless generals who she had briefly collaborated with was brought to trial.

“It’s ironic—we all celebrated when we heard the son of a bitch was arrested.”

But in an effort to gain his own freedom, the general had implicated Millie and three others. He was ultimately executed, but she was indicted as a coconspirator in a complicated debacle that had led to the slow death of thirty orphans. Millie ended up spending five years in a women’s prison outside of Mexico City. It was there that she started going blind, developing something called macular degeneration, which went untreated. She was also under constant attack as a convicted child killer, and after one of the many prison riots, she was brutally beaten and raped by several guards. When she was released in 1938, she was so sick she was unable to walk.

She discovered that many of the other oligarchs who she had worked so hard to rid from the country had resumed their former places in the government. Without alternatives, she attempted to get in touch with her mother and brothers, but none of them responded. She was dead to them.

“All the pain and the thousands who died—and little had changed. All that work and sacrifice was for nothing.”

She detailed how she ended up falling on the mercy of the church, an institution she had spent her entire life hating. They helped rehabilitate her, teaching her how to walk again with a cane. She learned how to read braille. They even hired her to work around the church. When she found someone who would write for her, she sent letters to old friends, members of the committee she had been a part of years earlier, to addresses she only vaguely remembered. Most of the letters came back stamped
Address Unknown
. Finally, though, a merciful letter arrived from her old girlfriend Irena Martinez. Her husband, Paul Smith, was a successful Wall Street broker. Millie requested assistance in getting back to New York, promising she’d reimburse the cost of the ticket. Irena immediately wired her money and Millie arrived back in the city just after the war, in 1946.

Irena helped her get a job through the American Foundation for the Blind giving private Spanish lessons to high school and college students. She also helped situate Millie in a comfortable rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side just off of Central Park.

“I looked for you as best as I could, but your family home in Midtown was gone. I tried tracking you down through Princeton, but after you quit working at Con Ed, they didn’t know anything.”

“Irena said you just moved here.”

“Oh yeah, my old place was … well, unless you spent years in a dark jail you probably can’t appreciate this.” She smiled. “I was able to sit in the backyard most days and just be happy feeling the sun on my face.” She had almost gotten her life back together when she was forced to move. The entire block of buildings was being evicted due to the new slum-clearance program. “They were turning the place into a housing project called Manhattantown.”

“Awful,” he said, neglecting to add that his own brother Robert was now the head of the slum-clearance program.

“Not necessarily,” she replied. “They promised to give us priority housing when they’re finished constructing it, so hopefully in the next few years I’ll get a new apartment and other needy families will have affordable housing too.”

“How’d you find this dive?” The sound of foghorns was constant.

“Irena’s son is a friend of the owner.”

“Any further south and you’d be in the harbor.”

“For some reason, most landlords are prejudiced against blind, impoverished seniors. This guy took me in and I’m very grateful.”

“Well, the place looks big,” Paul said, glancing around. The apartment was one large ramshackle room with a beautiful view of New York Harbor.

“How about you?” she asked. “What became of you?”

Paul smiled. It was almost as if the two had died and were comparing lives from heaven. He related everything that had happened—his disinheritance, the failing pool club near Philadelphia, Teresa and her kids. Just when he had thought his life was over, he had found a fleeting joy with a young wife and a beautiful daughter, with a second child coming. Suddenly—perhaps due to a slip on the ice—it had all been taken away.

It was soon dark and Paul and Millie were both exhausted, so they moved to her single bed and fell asleep hugging each other tightly, just as they had forty years earlier. Her place was so big and cheap that within a month he once again gave up his room at the Longacre and moved in with her.

Uli desperately tried to find his way back to Water Station 27, but nothing looked familiar. As he began feeling utterly confused, he spotted a dust cloud just past a small hill—a jeep!

He stumbled up the hill and along the nooks and contours of the rocky landscape, where he glimpsed a man’s head behind the windshield moving toward him in the distance. With the rising sun at his back, Uli figured that the driver was probably blinded by the low rays.

“HEY!” he shouted out, and waved.

The vehicle paused almost a hundred feet in front of him, and Uli couldn’t imagine how the driver wasn’t hearing him. It didn’t matter, in a moment he’d be in that jeep. But as he neared the vehicle, it slowly turned around.

“Wait a second!” Uli yelled as the jeep sped away. “Fuck!”

Instead of hunkering down in the shade somewhere as he usually did before the day heated up, Uli feverishly continued searching for the water station. By 10 o’clock, the burnt skin along his back and arms started throbbing. Around noon, unable to keep moving, he collapsed.

He awoke in darkness to the sensation of something slithering on his neck. It was some kind of small snake. He wasn’t sure if it was poisonous or not, it didn’t matter. He grabbed it tightly, stuck its head into his mouth, and bit down with his incisors. The body whipped and convulsed around his face.

Uli chewed as much of the snake as he could, spitting out pieces, trying to extract blood or oil or any other moisture for his dried-out mouth. He closed his eyes as insects buzzed along his ears and lips, pecking at the blood splattered everywhere. He curled into a ball, so cold now that he could see his own breath in the enchanting moonlight.

46

A
t seventy, Paul was finally living with Millie again. Though they were poor, they were very happy together. When weather permitted it, they’d stroll over the Brooklyn Bridge or buy a cheap bottle of red wine, a wheel of brie, and apples and take the “five-cent luxury liner” to Staten Island. The worst part of their days was the vertical trek back up the long, splintery stairs to their apartment. Millie didn’t have a strong heart so he’d rest with her on the climb instead of speeding ahead. Each landing was like a small base encampment. On bad days, when she was cold and feeling arthritic, it would take up to twenty minutes to ascend to the apartment. Occasionally she had to abandon the climb, moving all the way back down the stairs to visit the bathroom at the Chock Full o’ Nuts on Broadway before trying a second time.