The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (28 page)

When they finally closed the door behind them, Millie would often comment that in just another year or so, when the housing project was finished, she’d be able to move back to her old neighborhood across from Central Park.

“And the place will have a balcony where we can sit down,” she speculated one day.

“And don’t forget the elevator!” he added.

She smiled.

In early 1961, Paul read that stage one of Manhattantown was complete. The first group of houses were accepting applications. So the two of them headed uptown, stood in a long line, and they each filled out applications to the New York City Housing Authority for a two-bedroom apartment.

“Can I ask,” Millie said timidly to a short Mediterranean clerk, “how long will I have to wait for my new apartment?”

“Well, we have a lot of applications to review.”

Millie mentioned that she had been evicted from one of the buildings to make room for the new project.

“She was told she’d be getting priority,” Paul chimed in.

“I see that,” the clerk said, pointing to a checked box on one of her forms. “Are you a married couple?”

“Not technically.”

“Do you have any children?”

“No.”

Peering down at the form, the woman let out a loud sigh. “May I ask why you need a two-bedroom apartment?”

“We were hoping to live together,” Paul replied.

“Well, for starters, it would improve your chances if you were married, but it would also help if you applied for a studio apartment.”

“My old place extended from the front of the street to the back of the building. It was the equivalent of two bedrooms, and I had full use of the garden.”

“Lady, we have thousands of applications from hardworking families.”

“But she lived on the site previously and was promised priority housing,” Paul insisted.

“I know, but many, many people were displaced by the slum-clearance work. We’re trying to prioritize for the neediest.”

“It wasn’t a slum!” Millie shouted. “It was a nice house on a nice street! And the only reason I left was so that other families could have a home.”

“I understand.”

“Look, she lives in a fourth-floor walk-up that takes her twenty minutes to climb, and she has a bad heart!” Paul was starting to get agitated.

“There’s no need to raise your voice,” the clerk responded.

“Paul, let me handle it,” Millie said. He sighed and stepped aside. “When I received my notice to vacate, I also received this letter.” She removed a folded piece of paper from her purse and recited from memory:
“We at NYCHA promise to rehouse you once new facilities are built on this site.”

“Look, I don’t decide policy or choose the order in which people get their apartments. All I’m trying to give you is a reasonable expectation based on the information I’ve been given.”

“Can I get the name and phone number of your supervisor?” Millie asked. The clerk handed her a mimeographed slip—apparently this was a common request. Over the ensuing weeks, Millie left phone messages and sent a steady stream of letters to various NYCHA offices requesting an apartment assignment, to no avail.

In this period, Paul would sometimes head up to East Tremont and discreetly watch Bea leaving high school. She had grown from a little girl to a tall, beautiful young woman. She looked happy, joking and kidding around with others.
Lucretia would be so happy if she could see this,
he thought. Afterwards, he’d walk by the scrapyard.

For the first six months after Leon died, he’d drop by and feed the dogs twice a week, but he felt too depressed to sleep there. When he saw that several of the dogs had been injured, he figured that kids from the neighborhood were throwing rocks at them. They were also growing increasingly high-strung at being left alone. He brought the two most injured dogs to the vet, but the bills were more than he could afford, so he had them put down. Paul taped up signs offering the other dogs up for adoption, but there were no takers. The animals were just too old and surly. Finally, he gave in and put them all on leashes and walked the entire pack to the ASPCA. When the dogs were gone, kids started climbing over the fence, vandalizing the old yard. Before Paul could sell off the larger scrapping machines, the kids had broken them. After a while, he ceased paying taxes; gradually, more and more time elapsed between visits.

When Uli awoke a short time later he felt a bit stronger—perhaps it was the protein from the snake. He devised a game with himself, seeing how far he could walk with his eyes closed before either feeling like he’d collapse or walking into something. About an hour or so later, maybe a mile from where he had begun, he saw the outline of a large mesa off to his right and thought it might provide protection from the sun. But then he quickly decided he could still squeeze in another few hours of hiking before dawn; plus, he somehow sensed the water station was nearby.

When dawn arrived, the landscape was particularly barren. He spotted occasional cacti but none of them cast a large enough shadow to offer relief from the sizzling heat. As he increased his pace searching for cover, he could feel a slight prickling around his face and neck. Tiny insects were still tapping against him. Tiredly, he just kept dropping one foot in front of the other. The temperature rose steadily, and just after noon, as he staggered forward staring at the ground, he noticed something very odd. He dropped to his knees on the burning sand. A massive spider had spread some kind of webbing on the scorched earth. When he reached down to touch it, he saw that it was too big for an insect. Someone had delicately etched a complex pattern in the sand, a series of small wavy lines. It took him several minutes in his dehydrated state, but he finally realized he was looking at tire tracks.

47

O
n November 3, 1962, Paul opened the
New York Times
and read that a group of housewives in Central Park had effectively stopped Robert Moses from bulldozing a small playground to turn it into a parking lot for officials. Unlike in East Tremont, this group had top-notch legal representation and their plight was plastered all over the city newspapers. Cover photos showed lines of young mothers pushing their baby carriages in unity, blocking massive earth-moving machines. After so many years, Robert’s tyrannical hand had finally been stopped. His brother was being revealed as the fascist he truly was.

Paul’s sense of triumph was short-lived, however, as he soon read that the fucker had retaliated against the organized mothers and the rest of New York by going after Pennsylvania Station. With expansive skylights allowing natural light to bathe its vast interior, the station had been modeled on Rome’s ancient Baths of Caracalla. That granite and travertine train terminal designed by McKim, Mead & White just fifty-two years earlier was in Robert’s path of destruction. He was going to rip it down and replace it with a tightly compressed, hyper-efficient conglomeration of shopping center, office building, sports stadium, and railroad terminal.

Sitting together in Washington Square Park one afternoon, Paul read an editorial in the
New York Times
to Millie:
“Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and ultimately deserves. We want and deserve the tin-can architecture in a tin-horn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build, but by those we have destroyed …”

“I used to wonder why old people were such curmudgeons,” Millie said. “Now I know it’s cause it takes a whole lifetime to see that it’s all just getting worse.”

During their walks through Greenwich Village, Paul would try to paint a verbal picture for her of the things he saw. More and more frequently, he found himself describing an epidemic of flaky kids born in the ’50s with long stringy hair and bushy mustaches. Paul read about them as well: Rock and roll music was their anthem; sex and drugs were their pasttimes. Though they were lazy, he grew to admire their disdain toward authority. They were organizing against the war in Southeast Asia.

Paul read one article aloud to Millie about their new breed of civil disobedience.

“Good for them,” she said.

“I don’t entirely agree with them,” Paul replied. “I mean, the people of Indochina deserve the same breaks the rest of us get. If American G.I.s have to teach them that—”

“Where do you think these G.I.s come from? Some warehouse in Washington? Are
you
willing to die to free French Indochina?” she snapped.

“Calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down. I saw thousands of good men and women die in Mexico—for what?”

“The only thing I’d be willing to die for is getting us one of those goddamned project apartments you got cheated out of in Manhattantown.”

One afternoon in early December, Paul went up to the Bronx to pay a visual visit to his daughter. He saw her leave school late and then eat a slice of pizza with some cute young boy. When he arrived back at home just after 6, he opened the door to the lobby, climbed the long stairs up, and found a note on the door:

Your wife Nelly had a heart attack and is in Saint Vincent’s Hospital. Please call her there.

Chuck Womack (ambulance driver)

Paul dashed down the steps and caught a cab up to St. Vincent’s, only to discover that Millie had passed away.

The following day, the super’s son dropped by to say he was sorry about Millie’s death.

“Thanks.”

“We were just wondering if you’ll be moving out.”

“No, I’ll be staying awhile.”

“The rent is the same.”

“Who discovered Millie?” Paul asked.

“I did, I called the cops.”

“Was she unconscious?”

“No. She just called down the stairs that she couldn’t catch her breath.”

“So she didn’t fall?” he asked, feeling some relief.

“Oh no, she was okay. I came up and found her sitting right there.” He pointed just a few steps below the top landing. “She almost made it.”

The kid said he had to take out the garbage and excused himself. Paul walked over to the step Millie had reached and sat down.

Not wanting to die alone, Uli searched around for her—the raven-haired hallucination, the eternally grieving Armenian widow who had abandoned him. All he could see was a single tall cactus on a distant mesa.

He stumbled forward about a hundred feet until the ground shifted and he fell to his knees. The earth was black and hard, like smooth igneous rock. Seeing the clean white lines running up the center, he realized he was on a highway. Suddenly, he was hit by a tremendous rush of wind—a car soared right by him without even slowing down.

48

A
s soon as he opened his eyes every morning, all he wanted to do was join her in death. Still, a survival instinct compelled him to pull on his clothes and hurry out of the old building. He knew that only when he got outside would he be safe. He was simply too self-conscious to kill himself in public.

At a nearby coffee shop, he’d get a cup and flip through the day’s
New York Times
. After all these years, the mayor had finally managed to push Mr. Robert out of his sacred spot as Parks Commissioner—but not before the old prick had managed to hijack the World’s Fair and turn it into a major debacle. The only real control he still exercized over the city emanated from his sacred Triborough Bridge Authority. The new mayor, John V. Lindsay, resented Robert almost as much as Paul did, yet despite his plea to the New York State Assembly, he couldn’t pry the man loose. But it was just a matter of time.

Paul now believed that the only thing keeping him alive was some kind of extraordinary drive to see his younger brother banished completely from public life.

One morning, about six months after Millie’s death, he spotted something on page thirty-six of his morning paper. It was a small, grainy black-and-white photo of a group of diplomats leaving a meeting at the White House. While staring at one of the figures in the photograph, just three-quarters of the man’s face, he was surprised he had even noticed him. It was his old friend Vladimir Ustinov, who had taught him to build bombs over fifty years earlier in Mexico. The caption read,
Attaché to the Russian Embassy
.

“And I thought you were dead!” he muttered aloud.
I still have his pocket watch somewhere.

When Paul returned home, he located a picture of Millie and then one of Lucretia—it was the first time he had looked at his wife’s image in several years. He pondered a casual conversation he’d had over half a century ago with Vladimir that could possibly become a genuine plan.

The more he thought about how to inflict maximum harm with the 103 cylinders of pitchblende, the further away the idea got from him. What was initially intended as an extreme act of civil disobedience evolved into a question:
Do I actually have the power to make Manhattan uninhabitable, and is this the best way to achieve my goals?
The crimes his brother had inflicted upon him—a career lost, a birthright stolen, loved ones who had died or shunned him—gradually eclipsed his concerns for the people of New York.

Like a nervous tic, his hesitation kept twitching through him over the next couple of days and nights. He began regarding it with a kind of intellectual curiosity, the very notion that he could create something significant by wiring together a couple of throwaway objects—an abandoned X-ray machine and a simple triggering mechanism. He almost believed that merely thinking about the process would purge him of the desire to follow through with it. But the temptation and allure of retribution stayed with him and eventually prevailed.

Within a few days he became giddy and restless from the notion that
he alone
—a poor elderly man, a dismal failure, forgotten by others and nearing the end of his life—could rig together a device that had the potential to bring down the greatest city of the greatest country in the world. By the time Paul finally decided to go through with the project, it had morphed into an intensely personal mission: While he felt that he had perversely squandered his own talents—being born of privilege only served to accentuate the catastrophe of his adult life—this act of political violence might very well be the closest to greatness he would ever come. Paul’s thirst for importance in his twilight years rekindled a sense of power that he hadn’t felt since his youth, when he still had a bright future before him, a reason to live.