Kaleidoscope (3 page)

“Gotcha.” Jack felt as though he’d taken another punch in the stomach. “And what exactly do you mean by ‘disturbed’?”

Water slid warm and bubbly down legs shaved smooth and hard as marble. Arno Becker was relaxing in a newly-drawn tub. He placed the razor on a wide windowsill and took in the view. It was a pleasant morning. The window looked down to an open market of the sort favored by residents of Over the Rhine. Their familiar accents wafted up to Becker along with the smell of beer and sauerkraut and freshly-baked bread. It seemed an irritant to interrupt his bath with its attendant pleasantries just to answer the door.

Arno Becker rose from the tub dripping water, the narcissistic product of blonde parents or their gods. The knock at the door sounded again and impatiently, but Arno remained unhurried in his naked perambulation across the hall, through a sitting room, past a coffee table, a drawer littered with forget-me-nots and a rocking chair seeped in blood.

A woman slumped in the rocker. An old woman, frail. Her wrists were bound with wire to the arms of the rocker. There were mutilations at regular intervals on her arms, her torso, her face. Her throat gaped open, blood soaking her cheap shift, and even in death her eyes held the terror of one who knows that her end will not come without ordeal.

She had just warmed the tub for a bath.

A fist pounded now on the door.

“EMMA!”

That Kraut accent. Low German. Jewish.

“Gott damn, frau! Kommen sie!”

“Ich komme, ich komme,” Arno warbled a falsetto reply and opened the door.

An old man, bent and stunted with arthritis and ague panted in the hall outside his lofty rooms. A wrapper of sausage in one hand. A wedge of cheese in the door-banger.

“Mein Gott!”

Becker gathered the old man to himself like a fluttering bird, sweeping the fallen sausage and cheese inside the apartment with one well-turned foot.

“I have taken a liberty. As you see.”

Directing the husband’s attention to his butchered wife.

“I pay you!” the old geezer croaked. “God damn, I swear! I will!”

“Shhhh, I don’t want another mess.”

Arno clamped a pale hand over the fart’s sour old mouth.

“I’ve just had a bath.”

“Cut Up Jackpots”—
an exaggerated rendition of past events.

A
shroud of smoke hung nearly motionless in stale, late-afternoon air that had settled in the valley below the mansions high above the river. Not many suits or vests in this crowd. Most of the men in Jack’s neighborhood worked on the docks or in factories or the slaughterhouse. They came home in catalog clothes, heavy overalls and trousers, Buster Browns and brogans and slouch caps, toting tin lunchboxes, wending their way through tribes of barefooted children playing stickball or chasing hoops beneath webs of electric wires and washlines that stretched between rows and rows of tenement housing.

Everywhere were posters and signs to entice the purchase of some good or service. Billboards beckoning from walls and rooftops to offer locals things they could not afford—refrigerators, electric razors—while reminding them of things they could not do without. Every home and sweatshop used Mr. Singer’s sewing machine. Look in any kitchen and you’d find a cylinder of Old Dutch Cleanser; “Cleanliness Brings Good Cheer!” the copy promised. Of course, since The Dutch Lady herself was permanently hooded and facing the corner it was hard to test that proposition.

Jack’s coldwater flat sweltered with thousands of others in this Appalachian enclave of the city. The Salvation Army had taken over a church across the street, reminding him daily that God did not give his children more trials than they could bear. With that great comfort and assurances of well-cleaned cheer, Jack skirted lackluster women crowding stoops littered with garbage to find the stairs leading to his flat.

In that one-room rental, an old woman bent over a steaming pot at a kerosene stove. With no separate kitchen in the flat, the stove and icebox looked out to a cot and pallet rolled up beside a broken couch. A sink doubled as tub for wash and bath. Aside from the bums lining up for a room across the street, the large pane window offered a view of the sun setting over the rooftops, that swollen fire filtered dark through coal-burned smoke. A skyline of tenements offered an uneven horizon.

“Mart’ahn—” the old woman addressed a dark-haired youngster at the window. Martin turned a page of his book, another one from
The Motor Boys
series, Mamere noticed. Any number of books and magazines were stacked along the wall beneath the window, Zane Grey westerns and
The Saturday Evening Post
taking their place with
The Motor Boys
and
The Radio Boys
and God only knew what other serial attractions.

“Mart’ahn, come to supper.”

The nine-year old stifled a cough as he carried his adventure to the apartment’s solitary table. Dark eyes to go with hair like his father’s, raven-black and straight. A striking face, gaunt, prominent features. The cough came again—and again, this time not to be restrained. His grandmother took a square of cheesecloth off the top of the pitcher resting on their small table, poured water into a battered tin cup.

“Put that nonsense away.”

“Yes, Mamere.” He dropped his book to the floor.

Mama Erbet would have been at home in Napoleon’s empire. A scarf covered the old woman’s head, black skirt falling below her booted ankles. She wore a wool sweater, even in the heat, a woman gnawed to the rind. Bent. Desiccated.

There was electricity fed to the apartment, but except for a single plug-in dedicated to the radio that buzzed uncertainly beside the fire escape, the outlets were capped. The young boy took the chair nearest the radio.

“Supper first, Mart’ahn,” the grandmother ladled the evening’s meal into a modest bowl. It was a triumph, of sorts, the stew she served, a beignet improvised from the peelings of potatoes. The old woman ladled another portion. “You need to eat.”

Martin Romaine spooned the gruel mechanically.

“Papa’s ’sposed to be home by now.”

“Your father is working.”

“He said we’d play ball. He promised.”

“He has to make a living,” she offered without conviction.

The door opened at that moment, practically burst off its flimsy hinges, startling the boy and his grandmother to their feet.

“Papa!”

“Son.”

“Can we play? You said—!”

“A minute, Martin, justa minute.”

Jack Romaine tossing his hat to the table on a rush past his son to the radio.

“Papa?”

“Shhhh.”

A squawk of static turning into discernible language: “…but it all ends when Joe Dawson—Dawson, can you believe it—? Comes up with a home run in the bottom of the eleventh inning…”

“That can’t be!” Jack pounded the fragile table.

“…to win the game, Pirates 7, Reds 6 in extra innings!”

Jack sank into a chair, oblivious to his son and mother-in-law.

“Goddamn Dawson, I can’t believe it.”

The boy reached down and snatched the radio’s cord from its socket.

“Martin! The hell, boy?”

“You said we’d play ball!”

“Mamere, tell him to plug that thing back in.”

Mama Erbet rolled a frugal smoke from a tin of tobacco beside the sink.

“You said you’d be back!” Martin insisted. “You said you had a day off work and we’d play ball!”

“Oh, Christ, Sport, what can I tell ya? I was on my way. I got held up.”

“You’re lying.”

“Don’t call your father a liar,” Mamere said by rote.

“You were drinking,” the boy declared. “Or gambling—it was the game, wasn’t it? You bet on the Reds!”

“Forget the Reds. I got work. A new job.”

“But you promised—!”

“I KNOW WHAT I GODDAMN PROMISED! JESUS AREN’T YOU HEARING ME? I GOT WORK!”

The boy trembled suddenly, as if with a sudden chill.

And then came the coughs, wracking, persistent.

“Oh, jeez, Martin!” Jack reached clumsily for his son.

Mart’ahn darted past his father and into the water closet.

“Martin…”

“Leave him alone,” the old woman ordered.

“Don’t you start,” Jack turned on his mother-in-law. “Don’t you goddamn start!”

“You broke a promise.” She held her cigarette from underneath, in the European fashion.

“Hey, I got collared by a gorilla, all right? I didn’t have a lot of choice.”

“And this is for your son to understand?”

“Gotta grow up sometime.”

“Not with gorillas. My daughter would not want to see her son in the company of apes.”

“Don’t bring Gilette into this, awright? DON’T.”

“She was your wife. The mother to your son, God rest her soul! She would want her son’s father coming home when the sun is still up. Playing ball with his boy. Reading books! Not drunk and gambling and rubbing elbows with animals!”

“I’m getting a thousand smackers rubbing elbows. How would she like that?”

The crone sniffed.

“I believe it when I see it.”

Jack reached into his second-hand trousers and threw a wad of cash onto the table.

“That’s five hundred bucks. Minus a couple of beers. And that’s just up front.”

Her hand trembled at her throat.

“Mary and Joseph who will you kill?”

“…Nobody.”

“These are not honest wages!” She backed away from the table. “This is not good money, you cannot tell me it is!”

“Buy a lot of baseballs, though, won’t it? Or what about a glove? Martin’s been wanting a new glove.”

“What Martin wants is a father.”

Jack clenched his fists. “You’re busting my hump, you know that, old woman?”

“Who paid you this money?” she demanded.

“The hell does it matter?”

“Hah. A criminal.”

Jack threw up his hands. “What am I supposed to do? Tell the man to take a hike? Kiss my ass?”

“Whatever is right,” she replied. “That is what you must do.”

“Bladehorn’s not just some shill, Mamere. He’s got me by the balls.”

“Because you
gave
them to him! You and your drinking. Your cards!”

Jack reached for his fedora.

“I’m going out.”

“Not with these!” She gathered the wad of bills off the table. “At least if we take blood money it will not go for gin!”

Jack displayed a twenty in his suit pocket.

“It’s all right. I got change.”

Twenty dollars will buy you a good time and by the time Jack Romaine made his way back to his uneasy roost it was well past midnight. He stumbled through the unlocked door, bottle in hand, to find his mother-in-law snoring on her pallet beside the window. Martin tossed fitfully nearby, laboring for an easy breath in his cot. That hair, so rich, so dark.

Jack saw the worn baseball glove that doubled for the boy’s pillow. He placed his bottle carefully onto the floor, fumbled deep into a trouser pocket, and pulled something out.

It was a baseball.

“Won it on a bet,
mon petit
,” Jack whispered to his son and slipped the ball beneath the boy’s leather pillow. “Got it autographed, too. Joe Dawson.”

Romaine weaved unsteady as he slipped his broken watch off its fob. He tapped the crystal impatiently.

“Papa’s gotta sleep,” he announced to the heedless room, and dropped like a loose suit onto the couch.

First light. A rising sun caught the ramparts on what anyone would be excused for believing to be a castle. Cincinnati’s workhouse was an impressive stretch of architecture. Three tiers of cells housed inmates behind iron-barred windows that ran one-and-a-half football fields down the street. Corner towers rose to break up that long expanse, along with a mansarded center section. The walls were corbelled like ancient fortresses, and machicolations were cut at intervals as if hot tar or boiling water were to be poured down upon some unwitting invader.

Sally Price had not expected to leave the workhouse alive. She had spent a year-and-a-half looking over her shoulder, fearing a garrotte or knife. But the forbidding walls had proven safe, and now Sally was free, a woman of thirty, small, unattractive, with an adolescent’s perennially blemished complexion, narrow eyes and poverty of hair.

A sour German matron behind a metal grille required Sally to sign for the same portmanteau she’d brought to prison; all her earthly possessions were lumped in that bag. Well, almost all. Sally had already changed out of the striped muslin which identified her as a thief. A plaid skirt and sweater had replaced her prison garb.

“Make sure it’s all there,” the clerk instructed.

A change of underwear. A pair of eyeglasses, broken. A woolen handbag that Sally did not open.

“That’s everything.”

A pair of guards lingered as Miss Price received her final dispensation through a porthole in the chickenwire grill. Three dollars and seventy cents. Earned during time served.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” a screw mocked her.

“How ’bout my letter?”

The guard smirked. “Oh, Sally always gets her letter, don’t she? Every month, hah, Sal? Like yer period.”

Sally just waited. Silently.

The clerk scowled, “Awright,” and shoved a manila envelope through the wire along with a pen and clipboard.

“Sign here. And again for your copy.”

Sally signed the receipts slowly, elaborately.

“Gotta hand you one thing, Price. You keep it buttoned better than most.”

Sally did not reply. It seemed, still, the safest thing to do.

The whitewashed wall opposite the Romaines’ home beat back a rising sun. Mama Erbet stirred sleepily. Martin slumbered over the baseball he did not yet know nestled inside his glove. Jack woke up still dressed and holding his head. He looked at his son, his son’s grandmother, and the cheaply framed photograph hanging on the wall above his sofa and bed.

It could have been a movie marquee. A striking young woman with raven hair and Hollywood eyelashes smiles buoyantly in the arms of a handsome American corpsman beneath the Arc de Triomphe.

Jack lingered over the photo a long moment. “Jill,” he appealed through a mouth dry as clay. “Jack and Jill.”

He left the sofa, wobbled over to the water pitcher handy on the sill and slurped water straight from its metal lip. Only then did Jack glance outside to notice—

The wall of the tenement on the other side of the street glowing pink with a well-risen sun.

“Shit!”

Sally Price emerged from prison to find an open street milling with people. What might at first have seemed to be a curb-side celebration was in fact a congress of citizens gathered to protest conditions inside the workhouse.

REHABILITATION, NOT INCARCERATION, a well-lettered banner fluttered damply. WORK WITH DIGNITY, urged a placard alongside.

Some of Cincinnati’s wealthiest were turned out in a public display of progressive fervor to urge a change in the situation Sally had so recently endured. They seemed so earnest, these nouveau riche, so flushed with painless purpose, the women dressed in summer skirts and cloche hats, their necks draped in wreaths of beaded necklaces. The husbands congregating casually in Oxford baggies, or jodhpurs, their eyes shaded by derbies or motor caps.

Sally forged past the well-intended party, keeping her eyes on the ground just beyond her feet. It was hard after being imprisoned not to be distracted by so much activity. Ladies and gents were everywhere, tapping bunting onto booths erected in the landscaped park across the street, raising voices in warbled exhortation, or song, or prayer.

Adding to that congestion were leisure seekers and hangers-on. There were at least a dozen cyclists, real pests, showing off their ridiculous contraptions, drawing protests from trolleybus jockeys as they played chicken across the tracks. And vendors hawked their wares from all points of the compass, their wheeled stalls a barrier along the street.

Sally inhaled deeply. Food! The smells of sausage and chilli and cinnamon! But first the letter. Sally rummaged inside her fabric bag to find the manila envelope. She opened it carefully, almost reverently. And with the expected letter she found as well a handful of ten-dollar bills. Sally counted them quickly—

Fifty dollars!

It wasn’t hard to find a private cranny behind a vendor’s cart. Within moments she was gorging down the first real food of a year-and-a-half, the letter pressed smooth over her skirted knee as a Coney dog oozed chilli onto a napkin fashioned from the latest
Enquirer
.