Agnes washed hastily, using the water left in the tub. Eddie leaned over the settee and kissed Lydia’s downy cheek. Whatever had broken inside him at church seemed, for the moment, to mend.
When the girls were asleep, he sat on the front stoop—they’d a ground-floor apartment in Hell’s Kitchen—and smoked, oblivious to the cold. He had heard of children who were clubfoots, Mongoloids, halfwits, and gimps; who’d fallen out windows, been trampled by horses, brained themselves diving off Hudson River piers onto submerged piles. Why was this worse? He could not explain why. The alloy of beauty and contortion in Lydia suggested some gross misstep of his own. She was not as she should be, not remotely, and the shadow of what she should have been clung to her always, a reproachful twin. Often, when alone, Eddie revisited the moment when the doctor had first come to him from the delivery room: the dark look, the offer of a cigarette, Eddie’s terror that the baby—a son, he’d hoped—was dead. Now, in his reimagining, the doctor delivered the very news he’d dreaded to hear that day: I’m so terribly sorry. Your baby is stillborn. And for a moment, Eddie catapulted into a life remade by this adjustment: they would move to California, where everything was supposed to be better! Agnes would go back to being the lazy vixen he’d wed, who’d teased him in bed with feathered fans and stabbed out her cigarettes into piles of mashed potatoes. But Eddie paid dearly for this flight of fancy when the grim facts of his life tumbled back over him. There would be no move, no change, no end to this.
He went indoors to check on the girls and add more coal to the stove. Lydia slept in a cradle in the kitchen, where it was warmest. Even breathing was a trial for her. In . . . out. In . . . out. The pause between her breaths seemed longer than natural, as if, having managed to exhale, she had to muster the energy to begin anew. The curious detachment Eddie had felt at Mass returned, its numbing remoteness bringing relief from his despair. He was an observer, no more, watching a man lift a pillow and set it lightly upon the face of his sleeping daughter. Her breathing slowed as she struggled to contend with this new weight. Eddie watched the man press down upon the pillow. The child’s small chest bones flexed and worked above the collar of her nightdress. Her head began to move as she tried to turn her face. The man pushed harder. Eddie was astonished by her frantic efforts to find air. She would never walk, never talk, but still she groped for life—fought for it. The ferocity of her instinct forced Eddie back inside himself with the violence of a door slamming into its frame. He dropped the pillow and scooped Lydia from the cradle. He wanted to howl, but that would frighten her, so he kissed her tiny face, wetting it with tears until her eyes fluttered open and she smiled up at him. He held her, weeping softly, and rocked her back to sleep. In his mind’s eye, he threw himself from a roof or under the wheels of a trolley—punishments he deserved, even craved. Suicide was a coward’s choice, as much a sin as the other, yet the fantasies were rapturous. He couldn’t make them stop.
When Agnes came home late that night, she glanced at Eddie and ran to the cradle as if she’d felt the brush of a wing of the angel of death. He told her calmly that he couldn’t stay at home with Lydia anymore. That was the last show Agnes danced. She never returned, despite Mr. Z.’s pleas that she finish out the week. Overnight, she abandoned the work she adored—that had brought her to New York eleven years before, at seventeen, and brought them together. And Eddie, without savings or prospects, walked to the West Side piers to find the scrum of his youth.
*
After the morning shape-up, when the hiring boss had made his foregone choices of who would work, scores of luckless gees stubbed out their cigars and drifted dejectedly into a gauntlet of saloons, loan sharks, dope peddlers, and games of chance. Thanks to Dunellen, Eddie was guaranteed a slot from the afternoon shape if not the morning. Often he chose to pass the time in between drifting among the crowd of have-nots: Poles and Italians, Negroes, even Americans, or white men who were born here. The variety of awaiting enticements obscured their common purpose: to wring money from men who’d been unfairly denied a chance to earn any. It amazed him that Negroes showed up at all on these piers, where the only jobs they’d a hope of getting were the ones no one wanted: deep in the hold unloading bananas, for example, which bruised at a touch and were riddled with biting spiders.
It didn’t take Eddie long to discern that the games of chance near Dunellen’s piers were all rigged: a funny deck, loaded dice, or even—especially common with African golf, as craps were known—an apparent loser who was really in cahoots with two or three other “losers” to fleece the rest. Eddie’s shock at this discovery attested to an idealism he hadn’t realized he still possessed. A man who borrowed from a loan shark knew what he was getting into, and men who took dope or drank themselves stupid deserved what they got. But a man who elected to try his luck in hopes of bringing something home to his wife deserved a chance at winning. Luck was the single thing that could rearrange facts. It could open a door where there was no door. A crooked game was worse than unfair; it was a cosmic violation.
Eddie began warning Negroes away from Dunellen’s games. “You’ll find the play fairer elsewhere,” he would say cryptically, or “Strangers don’t win in that room.” Always with a vertiginous sense of great risk—he was defying not just Dunellen, at whose behest he’d any work at all, but the men behind Dunellen whom he didn’t know. Eddie’s shifty agitation likely explained the wary reactions his warnings provoked. “I guess I’ll play where I please,” he’d been told, and “I suppose we can take care of ourselves.” But occasionally, the men he warned would avoid the game rather than go inside. At these times Eddie was euphoric, as if he’d saved a soul.
When the shipping dried up completely, in ’32, he became Dunellen’s full-time lackey. Anna came along after school and on weekends, and Eddie mixed Dunellen’s “errands” with trips to the Hippodrome, the Central Park menagerie, the Castle Garden aquarium. Only in Anna’s company was he truly at ease. She was his secret treasure, his one pure, unspoiled source of joy.
“We’re stopping here quickly, to do a favor. I’ll need you to behave.”
“Will you behave?”
“I’ll do my best, toots.”
“Who will be mad if we don’t behave?”
“We mustn’t stand out, that’s all.”
“What favor?”
“We’re passing a hello from one man to another. But it’s a secret hello.”
The notion excited her. “I want to say a secret hello!”
“You can. If you give me a kiss, I’ll give the kiss to Mama, from you.”
Anna considered. “I want to give a secret kiss to Lydia.”
“Lydia won’t understand, toots.”
“Yes, she will.”