Riggs Park (13 page)

Seeing his mother so distraught, Wish finally caught his breath and stood, and in the same motion I stood with him. “I’m all right,” he told Pauline. It was to me he whispered, “I think there’s something wrong with my shoulder.”

Implicit in that confidence made against the dazzle of brilliant snow and drying blood was that we had found each other and formed the sort of complete and unyielding bond that offers itself only once in a lifetime, an awesome and permanent thing. Yet we must have known we were too young for it, too; must have felt its strength and feared its power to tear us from our youthful moorings, leave us clutching at air. We were always together after that, yet not together at all. Wish’s father wanted him to be a doctor. My sister Trudi was in college, and my parents expected me to follow. That day in the snow, Wish and I had moved apart, knowing we had to wait, be patient, until that moment of consummation, still several years off, that would turn out to be every bit as grand as we had imagined there in that raw January light.

Driving away from Essie’s, I wanted desperately to talk to Jon again, hear his voice. We’d spoken last on Sunday, and now it was Tuesday. It seemed forever. His absence was almost like physical pain. If he called again, at least he would help me decide what to tell Marilyn until I could get Essie to talk. We’d be together, even if only on the phone.

With a mounting sense of dread, I dug out Marilyn’s cell phone and called Bernie to make sure she’d been released from the hospital. “No complications, for once. We’re home. She’s taking a nap.” That meant she’d soon be awake, waiting for my news. Why had I been stupid enough to let her know I’d found Essie and was going to see her? Why couldn’t I have waited?

Killing time, I stopped at McDonald’s. The first bite of greasily satisfying cheese-coated beef calmed me. The second brought inspiration. Given the desperation of my circumstances and the likelihood of Marilyn grilling me for information I didn’t have, I had no choice. I had to appeal for help from the one person most likely to melt Essie’s heart and loosen her tongue: Marcellus Johnson himself. I reached into my purse, extracted the phone once more, and dialed before I lost my nerve.

M
arcellus answered on the first ring. I didn’t expect it, thinking he’d probably be at work and I’d get an answering machine. But there he was, bright and lively on the other end, sounding amused to hear from me and not at all surprised. When I told him I’d like to meet with him, he gave me his address in Adelphi. “I got two jobs to check on this afternoon. You got the time, you can come along.”

“Fine.” Now I’d have to spend hours trapped in a moving vehicle with the man. Nothing I knew about Marcellus made that seem appealing—not the story of how he’d met Essie when he was a teenager and had later moved in with her, even though his own mother lived on the next block, not Essie’s proud assertion to former Riggs Park neighbors that as an adult, Marcellus had “gone into business for himself.” I’d always assumed “business” in Marcellus’s case meant bookmaking and drug deals, the kind of entrepreneurship his young years had promised. I only hoped Essie had browbeaten him long enough to assure that his current “business” was something legal.

As I followed the directions Marcellus had given me, I wasn’t sure if I was actually afraid of him or just curious. All I knew about him were oft-told stories, and I had no idea which of them, if any, were true.

By 1965, the old Riggs Park homeowners had fled into the suburbs in such numbers that what had been a Jewish, working-class neighborhood was almost entirely black. Essie was one of the few who claimed she’d stayed on because she could see no reason not to.

Marilyn’s mother, Shirley, probably the most faithful among the women Essie had played canasta with for so many years, was genuinely worried. She called Essie from the Ginsburg’s new home in Maryland at least once a month, to warn Essie that the city was no place for a woman alone anymore. Affordable, but certainly not safe.

“Why should I change now just because you did?” Essie snorted. If the white youngsters who’d occupied her time were grown and gone, she claimed, eventually black ones would replace them.

But no such thing happened. When Essie’s new neighbors ventured onto their porches, they nodded and exchanged a few words with her, but never really tried to be friends. The woman next door, who chatted with Essie almost daily, invited her in once for coffee and then never again. The children, with whom Essie had always had such rapport, averted their eyes when Essie greeted them and giggled after she turned away. One night in the middle of the summer of 1965, Essie went to bed and dreamed about her husband and son, which she hadn’t done for twenty years. She woke up so shaken that she put on a dress and high heels and took the K-4 bus downtown and applied for a job at every store on F Street. By the end of the week, she was clerking in Woodie’s men’s department, selling shirts and trousers, regular daylight hours except on Thursday, when she stayed until nine.

One Thursday night, the air was so hot and sticky that it seemed to coat the city like a shroud. Essie got off the bus at the District Line and started walking home at a good clip, feeling more unsettled than tired. She never heard the footsteps approach from behind, only felt someone grab the strap of her purse. Instinctively, Essie hung on. She rocked back and forth, having a tug of war with her attacker. Finally she slung her whole weight at him and, to her surprise, knocked him flat. On the dark sidewalk, she couldn’t see him well, so she lugged him to his feet.

“Hey…let go of me!” he yelled in a voice newly deep and frightened.

“Not on your life. You’re coming with me.” She reeled him in and pulled him toward her house.

“What the hell, lady…”

“Watch your language,” she scolded. To his credit, the boy shut up. Five minutes later, she had him inside her living room. She shoved him onto her sofa.

Her first good look at him stunned her. A pretty kid, but so young. “Good lord,” she said. “You can’t be more than twelve.”

“Fourteen,” he told her, growing surly.

“What’s your name?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Look—you want me to call the cops?”

“You will anyway.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Boozer,” he spat.

“Ten years from now maybe you’ll be a Boozer. Let’s hope not. What’s your real name?”

“Marcellus.”

“Marcellus what?”

“Johnson.”

“Nothing wrong with the name Marcellus.” She still couldn’t believe he was fourteen. “A Marcellus could grow up to be somebody. A Boozer can only case the place.” Which of course he was, now that she’d let him off the hook about the police: eyeing the stereo and the console TV.

“You bring me here for a lecture, lady?”

“Where do you live, Marcellus?”

He inched up from the sofa, edged toward the door, didn’t answer. She grabbed his arm, dug in her fingers.

“I’m talking to you, Marcellus.”

“What’s wrong with you, anyway?” he asked, trying to shrug her off.

On the second try, she let him go. “Where do you live, Marcellus?” she asked again.

“Quackenbos Street,” he whispered.

“I didn’t know people were so poor over there that they had to rob little old ladies of their purses.”

“You ain’t that little,” he said.

“A sharp observation, Marcellus.” She allowed him to contemplate her size in case he was thinking of escape. He sank back onto the couch and endured her.

“You’re at Paul Junior High, right? Eighth grade?” His lip curled and she knew better. “No, seventh. They kept you back and you’re still in seventh.”

“You don’t know nothing about it,” he said.

“What don’t I know anything about? Hard times? Failing math? I’ll get my violin out and play you a little tune.”

The boy shifted uncomfortably, looked at the carpet. “What you bring me here for?” he mumbled.

“To get a look at you. You tried to take my purse.”

Marcellus took a deep breath, sank deeper into the couch. “Listen, you gonna call the cops or what?”

“Maybe,” Essie said.

He stood up again. She pushed him down and all at once knew what his problem was. Too small for his age. Compelled to play tough. She’d seen it before. Morty Landau. Lenny Kirsch. She began working herself up the way she’d done with the white teenagers when circumstances demanded. “Listen,” she said, bringing her face close to his. “You plan to snatch purses and smack people around until they catch you, then spend your life serving time?” she shouted. When they were small for their age, they thought being in trouble made them bigger. “I had a kid myself once that got killed, and I never stole anybody’s purse to get back. You think I’m sorry I didn’t?”

Marcellus looked up, shocked into attention. “You had a kid get killed? What happened?”

“He got chewed up by a coyote,” she said.

“Yeah, sure.”

“He did.” The words rolled off her tongue. Later she told Shirley Ginsburg it was the first time the scene had come back clear to her in twenty years: Her young self with hair black as Marcellus’s, pacing the frayed carpet of her living room near San Diego, colicky baby in tow, hot Santa Ana wind blowing in, sweat rolling down her chest. The baby fussed until she carried him outdoors, set him on his blanket under the eucalyptus tree in the yard—a tiny backyard with brown hills behind it, rising dull-edged and dry from the California dust. She dangled a rattle at him and his crying stopped. He liked it out there and couldn’t get far, only seven months old. She left him and went inside to clean as she often did, watching through the sliding door. She turned on the vacuum, a big loud Hoover. When she turned off the machine, she looked to the yard to check on her son, but saw the coyote first. It was tearing away at something, a dead thing; she did not see what—did not understand what—for the first moment. Later, she went screaming into the brown-and-blood-colored yard, facing down the beast that had come from the hills because it had nothing left to hunt. It heard her and fled—eyes angry, deprived of its meal, but too frightened to stay. She turned to what a moment before had been her son, screaming. But he wasn’t a baby anymore, only a dead thing, pieces missing, smeared.

Essie said all this, in a straightforward way, to the boy.

“Christ,” he said. His eyes had grown wide, not defiant.

She’d looked at the body for a long time. The skin white against darkening blood. The face set, grotesque. She’d understood at once: that she was responsible for her son’s death, a murderess. That simple. And months later, when she’d stopped screaming and her husband had given her enough money to go East and live the rest of her life, if she would just stay away from him forever, she’d understood she was responsible for all sons.

“Christ, lady,” Marcellus said again.

“After that, I decided I was never going to let any wild animal take anything that belonged to me again,” she said. “That includes you.”

“I’m no animal,” he said.

“No?” She moved to the door and opened it. “If anything happens to this house, Marcellus, I’ll know who did it. I wouldn’t let anybody else mess around here, either, because it would still be Marcellus on Quackenbos Street who got blamed.”

“You telling me I have to guard your house?”

“If you’re not too gutless.” She knew what that word did to them: gutless. She pointed out the door toward the night.

The boy got up slowly, stiff-legged. He paused at the edge of the porch. “I’ll see you,” he muttered uncertainly.

“If you have the guts,” she said. And by the way he’d moved off, in no hurry now, she’d thought maybe he did.

Now, thirty-five years later, I found the grown Marcellus in a cluttered office that had once been the garage of his house. His front yard had been turned into a parking lot. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d pictured when I tried to imagine him, but this wasn’t it. Marcellus Johnson was short and wide and powerful-looking except for a round and very tame-looking potbelly that ballooned beneath his shirt. His weight lifter’s shoulders were massive, and he had a thick, muscular neck, but his face was a narrow surprise, high-cheekboned and intelligent, with an aquiline nose and large, slanted eyes that showed where Taneka had gotten her good looks. Though he was not yet fifty, his tight-cropped hair was salted with white, and he wore a thin black mustache that by contrast looked dyed and artificial. It rather disappointed me that he looked no more like a hood than a movie star. Not that I was any expert on what a hood ought to look like.

“I’m Barbara Cohen,” I said offering my hand.

He nodded but didn’t take it. “The ex-neighbor,” he said.

“Yes.” I stuffed my hand into my pocket.

“Looking for help with Essie,” Marcellus said. “Found her more trouble than you expected.”

“Yes.”

He uttered a dry, humorless chuckle. “Like I said on the phone, I got jobs to check on.” He gestured toward the door. “You coming?”

Two minutes later, we were bouncing along in an old Ford pickup, a well-worn relic with shocks that had known better days. Instead of discussing Essie, Marcellus was making and receiving one call after the other on the cell phone that sat between us.

Johnson’s Enterprises, I soon learned from these conversations, included a rug-cleaning outfit (“Tell her you’ll spot it but there’s no guarantee”); a handyman service (“Sure we can stain instead of paint, but it’s extra”); and, remarkably, a company that installed and sanded hardwood floors.

“A lawn-mowing service in summer, too,” Marcellus informed me between calls, sure of my captive attention.

We went to three different jobs. I would have waited in the truck, but Marcellus beckoned me out, seemed to want me to observe him at work. His employees greeted him with deference. He responded to one in street talk that sounded straight off a rap record; the others he greeted in slightly black-accented lingo; and for the white homeowner having his yard cleaned up, he adopted such formal, standard grammar that I waited for him to break out in an English accent. I found it so remarkable that Marcellus was perfectly trilingual that I almost forgot my mission. We didn’t get back to the subject of Essie until the return trip to his office.

“So, you saw her,” he said. “Whatever it was you wanted, Essie didn’t give it to you, otherwise you wouldn’t be coming to see me.”

“I guess not,” I agreed.

“You ain’t seen her for what? Thirty, forty years?” He slid into the second of his three languages, nongrammatical but clean, and wrestled the truck out of first gear.

“Essie looked different, but she seems sharp as ever,” I said. “I was surprised.”

The phone rang, but instead of answering, Marcellus turned it off. “So what you want from me?” he asked bluntly.

Given the opening, I tried to give my story the best possible slant. Steve had told his sister about Penny’s baby. Marilyn wanted to find the now-grown child, but Essie balked at giving more information unless Marilyn was there to hear it. The catch was, Marilyn was just out of surgery (I did not say “face-lift”) and couldn’t travel. It was important to Marilyn, given her illness, to find her niece. As Marcellus could surely imagine.

We bounced over a railroad track and onto a road so full of potholes that my bottom promised to be sore for days. “Did Essie ever talk about Penny to you?” I asked. “Do you know what happened?”

“I know the name.” Cautious now, reluctant to give me anything I didn’t work for. “It was before my time.”

“Not really. Not much. I’m not asking this for myself,” I said. “I’m asking you to help me help a friend.”

“I see. To be a friend to you, to ‘help you help a friend,’” he mimicked. “For old times’ sake, right? Inasmuch as we lived in the same neighborhood once.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah, but let’s be clear. We lived in the same neighborhood at different times. We never met each other until right now. You and Marilyn might be friends, but not you and me. Don’t make like I owe you.”

Marcellus actually smiled. I drew a breath. “You like jerking me around, go ahead,” I told him. “All I asked for was a simple favor. Big mistake.”

Turning on his blinker, Marcellus swung onto East-West Highway near his office. “Essie’s old, but she’s her own woman,” he said. “Even if I know something, if she don’t want me to tell you, I won’t.”