I Pity the Poor Immigrant Read online

  She left the nickel Meyer had given her in the attendant’s basket and went back into the dining room. At her place on the table was a small velvet box. The whole night so far had felt illicit—American, unfamiliar, not Jewish. Now he was giving her a ring, as in the movies.

  She looked at him and his eyes changed and she looked back down, trying to smile, imagining the way it ought to appear. He prodded her to open the box. She didn’t know whether to sit or keep standing, so she sat clumsily back in the chair. The ring’s small size surprised her—the smallness made it less dreamlike. It was a round crystal set in what she imagined at first was silver. Only gradually did she understand that it wasn’t silver and it wasn’t a crystal.

  He looked at her with his mouth parted, eyes mistrusting. She was worried now in a way that was almost superstitious.

  “Is it paste or is it real?” she asked.

  “That’s a diamond.”

  “Meyer.”

  “That’s a real diamond.”

  There was something flummoxed about how he adjusted himself in his chair. “I shouldn’t have surprised you like that.”

  He had reached across the table and taken back the box. He snapped it closed with a quiet movement of his index finger, then secreted it away in the lower pocket of his jacket.

  “Does it mean what I think it means?” she asked.

  “That’s a real diamond. You think about it for a couple days, then you tell me what you think it means.”

  On the table between them were stemmed glasses, white dishes, silverware arrayed on the white cloth—whiteness and high spaces full of air. He wished she would sit up straighter, not be so dour and scared. The waiter brought over two cut-glass dishes filled with diced melon and pineapple—fruit cocktails, they were called. It was Prohibition, so there was no wine.

  “I heard you drove all the way to Florida,” she said later in the backseat of the dark car. They were in a garage on Cannon Street that he and Ben Siegel owned, among a fleet of other cars that he and Ben owned.

  “I never drove to Florida,” he said.

  “Were there storks there?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Not storks, pelicans. Flamingos.”

  “I never drove to Florida. I never drove anywhere near that far.”

  He felt the neckline of her dress against his wrists, her face in his hands, the length and fineness of her hair. She was warm on top of the opened coat. He had worried at first that it would be strange that she was taller than he was, but instead there was a sense of abundance. He kissed her and moved his hands toward her breasts and she pushed them away, over and over, as slow and repetitive as the waves on a lake.

  The crowd filed out and they stayed seated, the soft light on the theater’s Moorish columns, her hand on his coat sleeve. The movie’s spell was tenuous and she knew it, and she wanted it to last longer. It had been a college movie: an America of football, a dog rolling on the grass, a blond boy with a row of white teeth scoring the winning touchdown, his cheering friends in V-neck sweaters and ties. The lightest froth, so silly and glowing that the actors spoofed themselves, opening their eyes a little too wide at the camera, screwing up their smiles with a devious slant, but she could see by looking at Meyer in the dark that he didn’t scoff, that he’d been infected by it. Donald Keith, aroused by girls but unable to articulate anything; Clara Bow, “The Hot Potato,” a wild girl with a dark bob and teasing eyes. You watched the callow boy grow into his infatuation and the girl echo each of his changes with her own. If there’s a moon tonight, do you want to take a walk? Moonlight indicated by a blue filter, daylight in sepia. The lovers went to a speakeasy with checkered tablecloths, the hall jammed to the rafters with dancing couples, a funny old black woman flipping pancakes on a griddle, stealing a bottle of gin when the cops raided. A college movie—“Prescott College.” The sadness of graduation. How Donald Keith had changed so much in his four undergraduate years, from an awkward boy to a hale, confident man. He slapped down some cad who tried to kiss Clara Bow against her wishes, and in this way, as well as in his awkwardness, Donald Keith was like Meyer.

  They sat at joined tables—the Lanskys and her family, the Citrons—her brother Jules in a silk tie and beige suit, across from him Meyer’s mother staring absently through thick lenses. Waiters in vests brought blintzes, sour cream, whitefish, borscht. She watched the plates go by without appetite. She knew so many things now. How the garage on Cannon Street was more than just a garage. How Meyer and Ben owned property like it all over the city and in New Jersey and Philadelphia. How they imported whiskey from Scotland on ships they chartered themselves and then distributed it across the United States to wealthy businessmen, even politicians. Her friend Esta, Ben’s girl, had told her this. Esta, the brassy one, her lips clenched in the moment before she burst forth with the secrets, what Ben had told her after their date at the French Bakers or Manny Wolf’s restaurant, the movie, or the pleasure drive in the Gardner coupe or the Dodge Brothers sedan.

  She watched her father frown his way through two plates of food, a squat man in a scuffed hat. Meyer bowed his head and didn’t speak, the lunch a duty to be gotten through. When it was over, he reached into his pants pocket and discreetly gave one of the waiters money without asking for a bill, placing his hand on the man’s shoulder as he bent down. Everyone saw, had been waiting for it. Her father endured the moment with a scheming stare at the dish of cream that still remained on the table. She had never imagined her father capable of jealousy. As they were getting up to go, he took Meyer aside and they talked in the tiny space between the table and the bathroom, Meyer’s topcoat draped over his arm, a young man with money, an old man giving him trite advice.

  “He asked if I wanted a job,” Meyer told her afterward. “Out in Hoboken at the store. I said of course, sure, I’d be honored.”

  She turned, holding him in her squint. They were parked outside the tenements they’d both grown up in, bedding slung from the fire escapes. A thick crowd parted passively around the car with their bundles and sacks, none of them looking in the windows, Anne in her old Butterick dress, Meyer in his coat and hat and gloves.

  “I’ll help him with the accounting, the books. A couple days a week. He’s your father.”

  She looked down at the ring on her finger. For a startled moment she’d pictured Meyer standing at the counter in an apron. Already she’d begun to imagine an apartment far uptown with high windows, carpets, chandeliers. Not just to imagine it but to think of it as rightfully hers.

  Buds on the trees as they crossed the Hudson and followed the highway north into Westchester, Rockland, Orange. The cliffs sheared down to the river, the great pale trees growing in the ledges of the rock. She had never seen so much space, so much light. They drove all the way to the Canadian border, through a wilderness without buildings. America—a honeymoon. A girl from a tenement with a damp latrine in the hall, a common sink, floorboards shiny with kitchen scraps and muck.

  II

  A fifth of Dewar’s, bought for two dollars, sold for more than thirty—a fifteen hundred percent profit when just the year before the Dewar’s had been legal. A fifteen hundred percent profit on something more and more people openly wanted, and you were eighteen and you had left school to work in a tool-and-die shop for ten cents an hour, fifty-two hours a week. Three thousand speakeasies in New York City alone. In Grodno, his mother had taken music lessons. They had lived in a stone house in the center of town. Bright lights in the machine shop, the thud of the punches, men in coveralls at the lathes.

  III

  He stood and took the call in the suite’s bedroom, pressing his free ear shut with two fingers, looking at the dark blue of the windows on the south side of Central Park. He made a visor of his hand against the glass and saw the damp streets in the lamplight. It was Anne again, saying she thought the baby was coming.

  “It’s very early,” he said. “It’s three months early.”

  “You don’t under
stand. It’s coming now.”

  “You’re not bleeding, are you?”

  “Meyer.”

  He lit a cigarette and scanned the nightstand for the ashtray. He told her he’d be home in a few minutes, then he hung up. In the next room, they were all seated among the furniture, the pale linen wallpaper, the silver service trays on the sideboard and the low table. He looked past the men in their hats to the front hallway with its chandelier and vases, like the foyer of a town house.

  “You look pale,” his friend Charlie Luciano said. His white shirt was ample, brilliantly clean, and with the sleeves rolled up and the collar open without a tie it implied an abundance of other shirts just like it or even finer.

  “She’s having a rough time,” Meyer said.

  “What other kind of time is there?”

  They went back into the bedroom to speak in private. They spoke almost entirely in numbers, the floor lamp in the corner casting its stale halo of light over the wing chair.

  “Not much discussion in the other room,” Charlie said. “Even if they’re talking out there now, they’re not really thinking about anything but that closed door, us on the other side of it.”

  “I’m not worried about them,” Meyer said.

  “They’re making money.”

  “Even Anastasia. Genovese.”

  “They’ve got their qualities. It’s just that they’re not good ones.”

  They were all Italians in the other room. Unlike Charlie, most of them never denied how much they liked the taste in their mouths of the word “kike.”

  She was standing in her nightgown at the stove. He watched from the doorway in his hat and coat, having called out her name and received no answer. A bare bulb hung from a coil in the ceiling and shone down on her back, her feet swelling over the edges of her slippers.

  She shivered and convulsed against his chest, his hands on her shoulders. Holding her now was unsexual, confusing, hopeless. The milk on the stove was starting to boil. He didn’t know how to get through to the moment when he could let her go and shut off the flame. Instead, she turned away from him and threw the pot across the kitchen at the wall.

  She’d thought the baby had died that August, ten weeks in. Her breasts weren’t tender anymore, she wasn’t queasy—in the bedroom she’d looked at her bare stomach and started weeping, afraid at first to even touch it. She’d called him home and he’d taken her to the doctor and the doctor said it was common, everything was fine, but then the worrying began. In the humid August days, she would lie in bed with a damp cloth on her face and a fan set on a chair, falling in and out of sleep, the plate of toast on the sheets beside her, the fan watching like a metal eye. The nausea returned. He didn’t know what to do for her. She would sit on the edge of the bed as if she was trying to imagine standing up.

  A small temporary place in Brooklyn. He was superstitious in this way—you couldn’t set up a baby’s room until it was born and safe and you knew it would be all right. He went even further. Until the baby was born, they would live in a two-room apartment in Brooklyn with plaid chairs and a broken radio and someone else’s books on the shelves.

  He’d fallen asleep in the sitting room and so he was still dressed when the door buzzer went off around 3:00 a.m. He met Ben Siegel in the stairway and Ben looked up, his tie pulled to one side between the lapels of his double-breasted suit. A thin blond beard showed in blotches at his sideburns and cheeks, almost an adolescent’s beard.

  “They didn’t call you?” he said.

  “No.”

  “They said they called. I said if they called, why didn’t they talk to you?”

  Meyer shook his head and indicated that they should go back downstairs to the foyer to talk. When Ben got too loud, Meyer nudged him toward the door and they went out on the stoop in the cold air. Nothing about what he said sounded true—as he told the story even Ben began to realize this. Charlie Luciano had disappeared. Someone should have called Meyer hours ago but they hadn’t called him. Vito Genovese should have called.

  They went into the apartment so he could get his things. Anne was stooped forward in the kitchen with her crossed arms at her breasts, still hardly awake, tangled hair rising above her head. The spattered milk had almost dried on the wall. He looked at her and walked into the sitting room. The lamp with its tasseled shade cast a pale glow on the curtains, the plaid chairs, the Daily Mirror stacked on the floor. He put his tie back on and smoothed his hair with his hands, then he took the homburg off its block and put it on. He was working the combination of the safe when he turned to find her in the archway. She was staring at him, only faintly confused now. Ben came up behind her.

  “Never leave an Irishman in charge,” he said. “This Scanlon goes out for a pleasure drive, two o’clock a.m., the shvantz forgets the keys to the garage.”

  She pushed him away, turning to Meyer. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t have time right now.”

  “Meyer.”

  He told her to go to bed. He had one hand on the small of his back, the half-opened safe door in his other. He was tired and so he brought the Colt right out into the room, tucking it into his belt. He hitched his trousers, then secured the gun again, then he drew his coat shut by jerking both lapels.

  “We’re going to a dark garage in the middle of the night,” he said. “You wanted an answer and I’m giving you an answer.”

  She stood there receding into vagueness. People you knew began to fade in this way, like angels or ghosts.

  The bridge was empty and gleaming in the dark, and Ben had his pistol on the seat between them as they crossed the river into Manhattan. Pale globes lit up the steel cables and the huge pointed arches of the far tower. All he could see of Ben in the dark was his silhouette, his hat, the shoulder of his camel-hair coat.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ben said. “I’m in there talking about Scanlon locking himself out of the garage.”

  Meyer shook his head. Madison Street, Pike, Allen. Ben opened the trunk and Meyer held up the flashlight and they got their things and went into a card game in the basement of a grocer’s on Rivington. Maybe he was too tired to evaluate any of this. Maybe Vito Genovese hadn’t wanted to disturb him at home. He should have called.

  He brought the pipe down on the dealer’s wrist and Ben flailed at everyone’s heads with an iron bar, the lamp swinging on its chain. Shadows flashed and tilted on the shop walls, hats aslant, the players bucking back in their folding chairs. They all went to the ground, the money scattered among the broken glass and blood. The dealer wore a seaman’s cap and a shirt rolled to the elbows. He lay on his hip where the game had been, his legs slowly peddling, braying. A damp stain spread down the inseam of his pants. Meyer planted a foot on his collarbone, then struck the wrist again where it was already broken. He could feel the scream travel up his leg, childlike and shrill. The splintered bone jabbed out through the skin in a dark smear. He held his foot in place and watched the roll and jerk, about to hit him again, not doing it, not kicking him.

  He dropped the pipe and breathed. He looked Ben in the eye and Ben glared back, hamstrung, knowing it was over but not wanting it to be over. His face was handsome but distorted. He let the bar fall to the floor and told them where Vito Genovese could find them, and then they left.

  “He should have called,” Meyer said.

  “Next time he’ll call. I’ll take you up to the hotel.”

  “We need to find Charlie.”

  His hands felt greasy from gripping the pipe. The baby would have all of this history now before it even came into the world. The baby would have a stunted mind. You put tiny mitts on a baby’s hands so it wouldn’t scratch its own face.

  IV

  Adhesive tape covered [Luciano’s] mouth. His face and head were bruised, his eyes swollen almost shut. A knife wound had opened his right cheek, the cut stretching from his eye to his chin. There was blood on his shirt and tiny holes as if he had been pricked with an ice pick.

  As Lansk
y bent over his friend, [Luciano] groaned and tried to open his eyes. It was difficult, but he recognized Lansky and managed a grin….

  “Nobody’ll believe I got taken for a ride and lived. It just ain’t natural.”

  “You’re just lucky, I guess,” said Lansky….

  Lucky, as everyone now called him, was quickly back on the street.

  The doctor broke the news gently. Bernard, as the boy had been named before birth, was a cripple….

  “It’s a judgment,” [Anne] screamed. “A judgment from God.”

  —Hank Messick, Lansky

  5

  Criminology

  BROOKLYN, 2010

  In 2010, after Gila had told me of her affair with Lansky, I took the 3 train to Brownsville, the only white person in the car until a few Hasidim got on and then off again somewhere where the tracks rose aboveground. The 24-hour deli was shut on all sides, the steel doors tagged with graffiti. Lott Avenue, Rockaway Avenue—beyond weeds and ailanthus trees stretched a vast asphalt lot, empty except for a row of electrical boxes near the chain-link fence. I took a photograph. I took another photograph of an old building with four garbage cans chained in front of it beside the Olutunu Cherubim & Seraphim Church. “Can it be saved?” asked a man in an army coat, speaking about the building or perhaps the world. On Pitkin Avenue people loitered and smoked and shopped—Fish Sandwich, Burger, ATM—but the side streets were almost empty, lined with row houses, a storefront church, a group of Caribbean men playing dominos on the hood of someone’s car. There were once seventy Orthodox synagogues in Brownsville. There were still dairy cows in that part of Brooklyn then. My grandparents on my father’s side had lived there, people I hardly knew. Number 33 Chester Street was where Meyer Lansky and his family had first lived after coming from Grodno, before they moved to the Lower East Side. All that world was gone now. Now 33 Chester Street was a vacant lot full of construction debris and weeds. Across from it was a juvenile detention facility that took up an entire block, a pink brick structure with almost no windows, concertina wire atop the high walls, catching plastic.