“It is a loan, not a gift,” Mr. De Veer said shortly.
In late May, Mr. De Veer failed to appear four days in succession. On the fourth, a Friday, Eddie waited all afternoon, checking the silver pocket watch at one-minute intervals. At last he entered Topping Avenue, from which Miss De Veer had emerged, and approached some girls carving potsy squares in the dust. “That old man in the chair, have you seen him?” he asked. To which a tiny girl with faded yellow braids said shrilly, “They took him in his coffin up to heaven.”
“Or hell. We don’t know his heart!” said a crafty-looking older girl, and all of them laughed at Eddie without mercy, exactly as his own scrum mocked any unknown child who bumbled into its midst. He felt the pocket watch against his thigh and knew he must find Miss De Veer, to return it. But that thought drew an internal rebuke: No! Not to her, and Eddie remembered the porcelain dolls and began walking back toward Clermont Park, keeping his pace at a saunter until he passed the iceman’s dray, at which point he broke into a run. He’d turned twelve, tall and scrawny, fastened together with muscles like leather thongs. As he sprinted past the old Clermont casino and the elevated tracks, he realized that by maintaining this headlong pace, he could stay just ahead of the knowledge that he would not see Mr. De Veer again. He charged through Crotona Park and across the Bronx River, startling boys fishing on a bridge; he careened through empty farms divided into ghostly future streets, and finally across the railway tracks to what once was the faded town of Van Nest. In a state of near collapse, he gasped toward the Unionport nickelodeon, where the protectory boys were lined up for the cowboy flicker. It was an ordinary day. His friends knew nothing of Mr. De Veer. Eddie slumped in among them, and while they hissed and bawled at the train robbers with their devious mustaches, he allowed himself to sob. The boys’ boisterous oblivion absorbed the racket of his grief and finally blunted the grief itself. Nothing had changed or disappeared.
After that, Eddie stayed close to his protectory brothers even when he drifted from them. He was the one who came and went, whom they never could quite figure, and their willingness to accept this partial version of him increased Eddie’s tenderness toward them. They grew up and went their ways: several of the older ones to the Great War, where Paddy Cassidy died at Rheims; and a great many to the West Side docks, where they became stevedores or laborers (depending on how much they drank), police, saloonkeepers, aldermen, union officials, and outright hoods. It was possible to occupy more than one of these roles on the waterfront, and many did. Bart Sheehan, the boy whose life Eddie had saved along with Dunellen’s, managed to complete high school, then college, then law school: drastic achievements that led to his being discussed in the same hushed tones as angelic Kevin Macklemore, sliced in two by a loose railway car on Eleventh Avenue. Sheehan worked for the state attorney’s office now, although Eddie hadn’t seen him in many years. Dunellen had it from the kite—a web of rumor and innuendo more omniscient than the Shamrock—that Bart was investigating the Wop Syndicate. Eddie suspected this was wishful thinking on Dunny’s part.
To the bewilderment of his friends, Eddie gravitated to vaudeville, where he danced, sang badly for comic effect, hung like a bat from theater rafters, and tricked his body into Houdini-like escapes. He booked a season with the Follies, where he fell in love with a chorus girl newly escaped (as Agnes put it) from a barley farm in Minnesota. After they married, he managed a theater and studied to be a stockbroker. He planned to buy a seat on the Curb Exchange, which was more affordable than the New York Exchange. Not that money was a problem. Eddie had found his perfect game of chance and was buying stocks on the margin, selling only to buy more—and to acquire the trappings appropriate to his new wealth. He bought Agnes a Russian sable fur and a string of pearls from Black, Starr & Frost. The kitchen sink of their Fifth Avenue rental was afloat with Prince de Monaco cigarettes they’d stubbed out into unfinished meals in their rush to the bedroom. Eddie hired a maid to clean up in the afternoons. He engaged a tailor and ordered suits from England and bought champagne for Agnes and a dozen others at the Heigh-Ho and the Moritz after her shows. He’d no idea how to be rich—so little, in fact, that he thought he was rich. They brought Anna to parties and set her to sleep on mountains of fur coats. Lydia was different, of course. They hired an Irish laundress to care for her in the evenings while she did their washing.
Yet even in the pink of his delight, when Eddie barely noticed ships hovering at the ends of Broadway side streets, he did just enough to maintain his position in the scrum: attended Communion breakfasts with the union brass at Guardian Angel and Knights of Columbus meetings; bought costly tickets to the annual dinner dances where homage was paid to those who had ascended highest. Partly he wanted to show off Agnes, her starlet curls and lithe dancer’s body. Irish girls turned dowdy on the wedding recessional, so the joke went, and Eddie enjoyed watching his brothers’ faces pop a little with envy and shyness.
And thank God he’d maintained those ties—thank God! After the crash, when the accoutrements of a wealth Eddie discovered he’d never possessed vacated him one by one—sable, pearls, apartment, matching Cartier cigarette cases—when he lost his job (the theater closed), Dunellen had welcomed him back, bought the Duesenberg off him, and given him a union card. When Eddie joined one of the two daily shape-ups—a practice wherein those seeking work arrayed themselves before a hiring boss—Eddie placed a toothpick behind his left ear, which guaranteed he would get in the ship’s hold, at the very least, and more likely one of the better loading jobs. His family would have starved otherwise. And when the shipping dried up in ’32, Dunellen kept him on as a union lackey in pinstripes and lent him the Duesenberg to run his errands. Driving on Wall Street one afternoon, Eddie spotted a familiar-looking man selling apples on a corner. Only when he’d passed did he realize who it was: his stockbroker.
*