The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (39 page)

“Thank you,” I said.

“For what?”

“Taking care of my... mom.”

He waved it off, then let out a long, slow sigh.

“You knew it was me,” I said.

“Hmmm?”

“At the Bhotke Society. You knew it was me.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“But you never made contact before that. You didn’t come to my father’s funeral, or visit me during the
shiva
.”

“What was I going to do, show up at the cemetery? Hello, kid. I’m a friend of your father’s. All that stuff he told you, that they threw him off the force because he was too straight, that the cops on the take wanted him out, all that was a lie? Your father’s friend turns out to be the so-called notorious Shoeshine Cats.” He lit a Lucky out of his pocket. “You want one?”

“No.”

“Better you didn’t know. I’ll tell you. Like you never had a mother I never had a father. So like all kids in that kind of situation I made stuff up. I said my father was the bravest, strongest, best father before God took him away. You know who took him away? I found out in my mother’s things. She kept a diary on paper scraps. In Yiddish. I got it translated. I went to this stranger, a rabbi in Jersey I never met before in my life, and said here’s my mother’s diary. I’ll give a contribution to anything you name, but if you tell anyone what’s in it I’ll cut your dick off and stuff it in your mouth and they’ll find you that way on the street in front of your synagogue. God didn’t take my father. A broad did. Some whore. Or maybe not. Maybe she was the image of virtue. For me the same. Anyway, I heard he died out west, Albuquerque or something.” He rolled down the window and tossed out the butt. “So what was I going to do, spoil your dreams? What kind of man would do that to a...?”

“To an orphan.”

“Yeah, so what. We’re all orphans, eventually.”

We rode in silence for a while until we reached the gates of Beth David. In a matter of moments I would once again stand before the conjoined graves of my parents. I considered not asking, then did. “A question. It’s... serious.”

“About Dallas?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not interested in Dallas.”

He smiled, a wan almost bitter smile, part appreciation, part regret. “Okay,” he said. “Fire away.”

“Why does someone fake his own kidnapping, his own apparent murder? The blood on the seat. The bullet holes. You were coming back, so why do that?”

He laughed so hard the limo driver turned around, hearing it even through the glass partition. “You got a good head on your shoulders, kid. I’ll say that.”

“It just doesn’t make sense.”

He looked past me to the orderly ranks of the dead as the limo made its way slowly to the Bhotke plots, reached into his pocket, pulled out another Lucky, stuck it resolutely into his mouth, then removed it. He rolled down the window and tossed it out. “I didn’t expect to come back,” he said quietly. “I probably wouldn’t have. I got some property in Mexico, beachfront. Some time I’ll take you down. Cuba I like better. But Mexico, I could live there quietly. I got a Mexican passport even. You can just buy them. And I was tired. Really tired, kid. Money, I got plenty. I’m forty-two years old. I could be your father. I didn’t want to die doing what I was doing. I wanted a fresh start. Very few men can have that. But I could. What do I have? Friends? Justo could live without me. Ira the same. Professional associates? Don’t make me laugh. No wife, no kids. Just Terri. And I’ll tell you, I didn’t even know if I’d let her know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Then I got word.”

I saw it in his eyes. “My mother died.”

“Yeah,” Shushan Cats said. “She sure did.”

“You came back for me.”

“Look at that crowd. Must be everybody we know. Plus the press. One thing I wouldn’t miss, the press.”

“You came back for me.”

“Russy,” he said, looking out through the limousine’s tinted windows at the small piece of real estate that was all that remained of Bhotke, where my family and Shushan’s had originated—Floris in his case, but close enough. Through the glass I could see the society members, Shushan’s professional associates, maybe three hundred people. Behind us the Eldorado pulled up, its wide doors opening to let out Justo and Terri and Darcie and Myra and Ira. “Russy, I was alone in this world a long time,” he said finally. “Nobody should be alone.”

The rest of that morning had all the implausible clarity of a dream, and as with a dream its details faded fast while its effect managed to be both imponderable and clear, something lost that remains forever, its absence more permanent than its presence—tactile, palpable, real. I can recall every face, even those who are now themselves passed on, but nothing of what was said, by me or by anyone else, remains. Except this.

At the end of the service, after I had shoveled in the first spade of dirt and stood aside to watch the others as they filled the raw pit, a young woman approached. She was wheeling a baby in a small carriage on the grassy, uneven ground. Short, dark and full-breasted, she reached out and touched my sleeve. “You don’t know me?” she said, not a question but a fact.

“I...”

“Marie-Antonetta Provenzano,” she said shyly. “Bork now. We sort of dated, in high school.”

So she was. The Italian goddess of my youth who had moved away, leaving me with adolescent heartbreak, unmitigated longing and a solid appreciation for the language that may have saved my life. “Wow,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, rocking the carriage. “Wow.”

“And you have a kid.”

“Three,” she said. “Actually.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“Eddie, my husband, he’s watching Eddie Jr. and little Anthony. I saw about the funeral on TV. I’ve been following your career. Actually.”

“Career?”

“You know, what you’ve been doing. How you became a gangster and all.”

I gave her a smile, the best I could do. “It’s nice of you to come.”

“I don’t live far,” she said.

“It’s been great seeing you, Marie-Antonetta.” Then I compounded the lie. “You haven’t changed at all.”

“You neither,” she said, drifting off into the crowd as though she had never lived, while I remained, my past transmuted, my future marvelously unwritten, my present turbulent, uncertain, yet for all of that rock-steady, anchored, secure. The first twenty years of our lives shape who and what we are. Call me lucky: these were mine.

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