The Family Hightower (22 page)

In
1933
you don't know any of that from reading
The
New York Times
because its Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty—who's won the Pulitzer for his coverage of the Soviet Union the year before—has decided to ignore it all. The Western intellectual left loves communism right now. Malcolm Muggeridge from
The
Manchester Guardian
visits Ukraine and calls it like he sees it. He loses his job and can't find another one. Gareth Jones, on his own dime and against Soviet law, goes to Ukraine for three weeks and reports, in the Hearst newspapers, on what he calls famine on a colossal scale.
Everyone is swollen from starvation,
people tell him.
We are waiting to die.
Duranty attacks that report.
A big scare story,
he writes.
There is no actual starvation. There is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.
It's just what the Soviet press censor told him to write, after a night of vodka and celebrations.
But there are still reports if you know where to look. William Henry Chamberlin in
The
Christian Science Monitor
reports on it. And so does
Svoboda,
the UNA's paper, maybe more than any other publication in North America. They publish letters from people in Ukraine.
Here in the village there is not a chicken, nor a duck, nor a pig, nor a cow, only hungry people. They have cleaned us out, as if with a broom.
It's the headline story for months.
Ukraine on the brink of death from famine. Bolsheviks execute hungry people.
There's an editorial in December
1932
that once again sees right through what Stalin is doing.
Even the Bolshevik sympathizer from
The
New York Times—they mean Duranty—
admits that this winter two-thirds of Russia's population will have nothing to eat. Today they are not blaming the government but the peasants. Is it possible to blame here the serf living in Soviet slavery? Who can possibly believe that?

A lot of people do. But Peter and Stefan don't, and in that shared understanding of where their people came from, for just a moment, Stefan sees the South Side boy, the older brother he grew up with, lean and strong, who protected him not with his money, but with his hands. He smiles, then. But Peter doesn't return it.

“I didn't mean to turn this into politics,” Stefan says.

“You didn't,” Peter says. “We're brothers. We can talk about anything.” He chuckles. “I just might not answer you.”

Now Stefan's angry, because Peter can and will always talk to him like that, and Stefan can't do it back. They'll never hit each other again like they did when they were kids, because there's too much money now. It's all about money, it always will be about the money. It's all right that Peter has so much more than him. Stefan can live with that; he's comfortable, he has nothing to complain about. These days, he feels lucky. And he's seen enough of the business world to know that what you have to do to get that rich isn't worth it to him. But it's also that Peter gave him so much for so long. Stefan thinks, again, about how Peter's the reason, the only reason, that he could go to school all the way through, go to college, get a job better than the one his father had. It was a gift, the biggest Stefan's ever gotten, but because Peter's the kind of man he is, it's also a muzzle. Peter tells Stefan they can talk about anything, but they both know that's not true. If Stefan pushes back too hard, he'll just be acting ungrateful, disrespectful, to the man who changed his life. But Peter can push as hard as he wants, and does.

The truth, dear reader—and Stefan can feel it a little, in the edge on his brother's voice—is that Peter now hates his brother a little. He doesn't resent giving Stefan the money; he resents that what Stefan has is enough for him. He's not married, doesn't have much in the way of prospects for a wife. He can hear, in his mind, the way the women in Tremont talk about him.
He's a little on the feminine side.
Their brows furrowed, one hand lifted, the fingers wiggling. But he has the little house, the job with the UNA, a ton of friends in the neighborhood, who he and Peter grew up with and who are like family to Stefan now; Stefan's making them into the horde of cousins people always say they must have back in Ukraine, if they only knew for sure where their parents came from, though their parents never told them. Peter can see how all the decisions Stefan's made about his life are coming together now into something cohesive, something real. Where he lives, who he works for, who he knows. Stefan is Ukrainian; in the past few years, that word has gained a lot of power, and it makes Stefan powerful, too. Peter imagines Stefan strolling down Professor and running into twenty-five or thirty people he knows. It takes him a half an hour just to walk a few blocks, and it's a few blocks of constant conversation, asking for and doing favors, catching up on small talk.
I'm so glad your sister's feeling better. Please say hello for me. Listen, I was wondering if you could help out a friend of mine. He has four children and needs a job and he's a really dependable worker, I can vouch for that. Oh thank you, he'll be so grateful. Yes, yes, I think there's a chance a loan can be arranged. How much do you need? Let me talk to the office and we'll see what we can do.
He's even reclaiming the language, which Peter almost can't remember, so that he doesn't talk like a child, but the man he is. It all makes him wanted, needed—Peter's thoughts go all the way to the word
loved
—a part of the community that you can't take away without losing something. If Stefan were to die tomorrow, the funeral would be gigantic. The wake would last for two days. They'd fill St. Peter and Paul for the service, and afterward the party would go for hours. And if Peter were sitting there in the house, he'd hear nothing but great things about his brother. The jokes he told. His kindness, his willingness to help. His faithfulness. All the great things he did for the neighborhood, for the community, for Ukrainians. There'd be talk, maybe, of putting his name on a bench somewhere, or on a plaque in the church. Something so that fifty, a hundred years from now, people would see his name and know it, even if they didn't know what he did. They'd talk like that in the living room and the kitchen, on the front porch, in the street in front of the house. And Peter would be sitting there on one end of the old couch, wearing shoes that cost more than all the furniture in the room, one of the most powerful businessmen in Cleveland, and nobody would know or care who he was. That is, until they knew he was Stefan's brother, and then they wouldn't care about anything else; it's all they'd need to make him part of the family, too.

Against his will, Peter thinks of his father:
Pa would be so proud of Stefan, I know it. What would he think of me?
It forces him to dwell the things he's done and why he's done them—and not the little why, but the big why. For Peter, the question of why is almost always a question about strategy, about what can be gained, in money, power, influence. His brain, it seems, is very good at doing that kind of math. He makes decisions fast and doesn't look back, and it's served him well, well beyond what most people dream that they're capable of. But when he steps back from it, at the thing he's made, he doesn't like what he sees. It's a creature, a predator, made of lies and disguises, with murder at its heart, so terrible that he has to hide it from everyone who's not caught up in it themselves—most of all his family, even though he uses it to give them everything they have. His stomach flips when he thinks of it. He wonders what would happen if the thing ever got loose. Whether it would eat his family whole. He wonders how he could ever kill it without losing everything he has. And he thinks then about his own funeral, the precious few people who would go. How would they have anything to say about him afterward? No one's ever seen the beast, not even Caroline. No one knows what he is. And then the final awful thought:
Do I know?

“I brought some things from Ma,” Stefan says.

“I was wondering what's in the box,” Peter says.

“It's just a few things. Some photographs of us as children. Some of her and Pa. A few other things from around the house, from growing up.”

“Are you sure you shouldn't keep them?” Peter says.

“No, no,” Stefan says. “She told me you should have them. Made me pack the box in front of her.”
So you won't ever forget who your mother is, or where you came from,
he wants to say. But won't, ever; he knows that it's cutting too close, too far in. “Are Caroline and Henry here?”

“No. They're out with her family,” Peter says. He can't help but push that last word a bit, hopes it hurts a little. But Stefan doesn't seem to notice it.

“Listen, Peter? I wanted to tell you something,” Stefan says.

“Anything.”

“I want to be a bigger part of Henry's life. Henry and any other children you have. I'm their uncle, after all, and I want to be an uncle to them. Do you understand?”

“Of course.” Though the way Peter says it makes Stefan think his brother has no idea what he's talking about.

“Could I talk to Caroline about it? Maybe find a time when I can come visit Henry?”

“That sounds like a perfect plan,” Peter says, and gives him a quick nod. With that, the last meaningful conversation Stefan will have with his brother is over. Stefan knows it even then, that when their mother died, the last bond between them was broken. He wonders if Peter knows—if he'll never know, or always knew. If he cares enough to worry about it. Stefan worries, though, and so a few months later, on a day when he's sure Peter's away, he comes to the house to call. Caroline answers the door with Henry, still small enough for her to carry him on her hip.

“Good morning, Stefan,” she says. “How can I help you?” Pleasant and wary.

“I was wondering if I could talk to you,” Stefan says.

“Of course,” she says. The same tone of voice as her husband.
So that's where Petro got it,
Stefan thinks; God help him, he just can't think of his brother any other way, after all this time. Peter and Caroline have been swapping each other's phrases for a while now. Caroline just happens to mean it. They end up talking for three hours. It begins and ends with the baby, who's already standing and is working on walking. But it goes everywhere in between. Caroline learns more about her husband's family right then than Peter's ever told her. The death of the father, the nonexistent stepfather. And Galina, Galina, so much about her.
I should have gotten to know her better,
Caroline thinks. The regret threatens to overwhelm her; then she pushes it back, clears her head, because Stefan is telling her something else, about the time he and his brother went to Whiskey Island when they were kids. They were going to dive for bottles—or steal them from the men who lived in the shantytown there—to sell back to the bootleggers. The story takes Caroline all over the island, from the loading docks and the cranes to the ships coming across Lake Erie, to the houses made from scrap lumber and pieces of old billboards. Two chases, first from the men who lived there, then from the police who thought they were thieves, or working for the bootleggers—
now they're contracting out kids, the police must've thought,
Stefan says, and laughs. Caroline laughs too, incredulous all over again that her husband grew up that way.

On the carpet, Henry stands, takes a step, and falls; stands, takes two steps, and falls. Walking is still two months away.

“I'm so glad we talked,” Caroline says.

“Me, too,” Stefan says. So the wife and children start to see more of Peter's brother, at holidays, weekends, more in the summer. Stefan takes Henry for a few days when Sylvie's born, shows him the neighborhood where his dad grew up, without saying anything beyond what they see, hear, smell, taste, though it's hard not to impart the lesson that almost nobody in the world lives like the people of Bratenahl do. The uncle looks after all the kids whenever Caroline needs him. Years later, when she tells him she needs to escape, he understands, and then is the closest thing to a parent Jackie will ever know.

But Peter won't know any of that. When the trouble starts, he'll feel like he's all alone. By the time it's over, he really will be.

 

 

Chapter 12

I
t's
the evening of June
24
,
1947
. More than twelve thousand people are packed into the Cleveland Arena on Euclid Avenue, filling all sixty rows of the place, cramming themselves into the floor seats, until the place can't fit another soul. At home, in bars, they're gathered around the radio. They're talking about it on the street. It's all for the fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Jimmy Doyle, the first championship boxing match Cleveland's seen in a while. Robinson's held the world welterweight title for just a few months. He gets it in December
1
946
after he goes fifteen rounds against Tommy Bell; he wins by unanimous decision.
He should have been champion a long time ago,
some people say then, because going into that December fight, he's got seventy-three wins, one draw, and only one loss, against Jake LaMotta—you know, Raging Bull—but they've fought five bouts already, and Robinson's beaten him in four of them. The draw is with José Basora; they go ten rounds in Philly in
1945
, but when they have their rematch in
1950
, Robinson knocks out Basora fifty seconds into the first round. The rumor going around is that it takes so long for Sugar Ray to get to be champion because he won't deal with the mafia, because of racism. But after a while, Robinson's just too good for all of that.

So, the packed arena. It's hot and getting hotter, and loud. Peter Henry Hightower's in the third row of the floor seats, on an aisle. He's there by himself. Caroline's home with the children; Jackie's only two, and is turning out to be anxious, emotional, while Muriel, who's five, just wants to talk all the time. Sylvie and Rufus—nine and seven—are the opposite: so quiet, calm, always heading off somewhere, vanishing together. Henry, fifteen, is a serious kid, tall and strong. In the spring he plays baseball for his school, and it's pretty clear he'll be the team captain by the time he graduates. He has a discipline, a focus about him, that makes him seem older than he is. Because Henry's athletic, Peter suggests just before he leaves that maybe he could take his oldest boy with him ringside, and Caroline just glares. She hates boxing, Peter knows that. But it's something else, too: She knows Peter will end up conducting business at that fight one way or the other. There'll be too many knowing handshakes, too many pats on the back. Way too many sentences with vague nouns in them.
Henry's not stupid,
Caroline's look says.
Do you really want him to know you're a criminal?

Things change between Peter and Caroline. In the early years of their marriage, there's a part of her that can't get enough of the crime, the deals, the conniving. It teaches her how to manipulate her own family, the Andersons, even through her first falling-out with them. In
1936
her brother William finds out at last just how much better off Peter has become than he is, and there's a night when he's angry about it. But it's so easy to smooth over, just a matter of months. A generous gift over the holidays, a promise of a retainer in one of Peter's business ventures, an apology from her husband that sounds authentic, and soon they're laughing at Anderson family gatherings again, patting each other on the back, wishing her the best. Caroline notices that the days of William confiding anything to her have ended; a trust has been broken, and it'll never be restored. But she decides that what's left of the affection between them after that is enough for now.
After all,
she thinks to herself,
I love my brother; I don't need him.
She's twenty-nine then, old and smart enough to see how callous she's being, but still thinks the sincerity behind it matters, and that it'll let her fix the damage later.

The realization that she's wrong takes years to sink in, but hits her at last on a Saturday morning in March
1942
. She's sitting at a table on the long sunporch over the lawn that rolls down to the lake, a cup of hot water in her hand; she's a tea drinker, but she's six months pregnant with Muriel, and something about tea makes her want to throw up. She looks out to the horizon, toward Canada. There's a light rain over the water. The newspaper's folded on the table next to her, but she hasn't read it. It's full of news from the war, though you could say there's still not enough, because we seem to get through the entire thing without knowing just how bad things get for the soldiers fighting it—anywhere, let alone east of Germany. Rufus and Sylvie are playing in the living room. Henry's upstairs. Her husband is still sleeping, from a very late night; she's not sure, but she thinks he didn't get back until dawn.
He's getting too old to be out like that,
she thinks. It's an idle phrase, one she's thought before, and often, even though she knows why he's out like that: It's when the other side of his business gets done. But this morning, it irritates her more than usual. It occurs to her that this criminal thing has been bothering her for a while. No. A long while. Maybe years. Now her brain is off and running, and it goes all the way back to their courtship. The first time she saw the house.
Someday I'll be clear of them,
he said to her then, and she knows he might have meant it as an aspiration—Peter, for all his directness, never speaks in absolutes—but the young Caroline heard it as a promise, a condition for marriage. And the older Caroline realizes that she's been waiting ever since for him to give it all up, to cut those ties. At Henry's birth. At his mother's death. At Sylvie's birth, the first girl. At Rufus's birth two years later. There's always been that hope, that one day he'll come home, wait until everyone else is asleep, take her in his arms and say it:
We're safe. We're free.
Because what made the crime thrilling when she was younger was the certainty—buried so deep she couldn't see it then, even though it affected her—that someday it would end. But now it's been sixteen years, and they have three children, soon to be four. And she keeps reading in the papers about the violence gangsters inflict on each other. It's not thrilling anymore. It just seems dangerous. And she thinks, then, of what she's lost: her brother's trust, and her parents' with it. Even Cecily's.
Was it worth it?
she thinks.
To live like this?

That Saturday morning, Peter wakes up to find her just a little bit more distant. Over the next five years, there are fights, every eight months or so.
When are you going to get out? Why do you still do this?
Sometimes she's screaming at him. His calm is infuriating.
It's complicated,
he says.
We need to wait for the right time.
This line is the worst thing he can say to her in
1945
, when she's pregnant with Jackie, and fighting even more.
It's been nineteen years,
she seethes,
and there has never been a right time.
He's reduced to his last defense then.
Keep your voice down,
he says.
Do you want the children to hear?
As if he's the one trying to protect them from her. From then on, that's the weapon they use against each other. The first one to accuse the other one of hurting the children wins, and they accuse each other of it often enough that, by
1947
, each of them is starting to believe it about the other.

In the Cleveland Arena, the bell goes off for the first round. The crowd sucks in its collective breath when the people see how fast Sugar Ray Robinson is. They know he's the champion; some people are already saying that, pound for pound, he's the greatest boxer who ever lived. But it's another thing to see it. He keeps his distance a little,
like a man admiring the cut of another man's suit,
as his biographer will write about him later, and then moves in, throwing punches faster than Jimmy Doyle can keep them off him. Doyle's a real fighter, too. He's from Los Angeles and he's been pro since
1941
, with the busted nose to show for it. He gets a reputation when one fight of his becomes a
fight,
the two boxers falling through the ropes of the ring and onto the floor, Doyle still going at it.
He wasn't afraid of nothing,
another boxer will say years later. He's single and lives at home with his mother, and he has this idea that he can make enough from boxing to set her up: buy her a house, some nice things. Enough that she can be comfortable. If he hits it big enough, he says, maybe he'll stop fighting, too. But right now, he's boxing. He gets through the first round, the second, the third, and Robinson's still coming. In the fourth round, a good hit from Sugar Ray shuts Doyle's left eye, and it stays shut.

The seat next to Peter is empty because he bought it for Henry, and he's got his hat on it while he sits, impassive. The boy in him wants to put two fingers in his mouth and whistle, loud, every time Sugar Ray lands a solid hit. But that boy hasn't had a chance to speak in a very long time.

“Do you mind if I sit down?”

Peter looks up. There's a man in a yellow suit standing in the row. Young, maybe twenty-six, Peter thinks. But trying to look older with that mustache. He points at Peter's hat.

“Do you mind?”

“No, of course not,” Peter says, and takes his hat, puts it in his lap.

The man nods, sits. Watches Jimmy Doyle catch a blow to the side of the head that makes beads of sweat fly out of his hair.

“He's some fighter,” the man says.

“Sugar Ray Robinson?” Peter says. “Yes, he is.”

“I mean Jimmy Doyle.”

Peter nods. “It's a good match.”

“Excuse me for asking,” the man in the yellow suit says, “but you're not Peter Henry Hightower, are you?”

Peter looks at him now, much longer, and the man has a sense of Hightower's brain memorizing him. The lines on his face. The tangled whiskers in his mustache.

“I'm sorry, do I know you?” Peter says.

The man gives him a broad smile. “Joe Rizzi,” he says.

“Lou's son.”

“That's right.”

“I knew your father very well, Joe.”

“You did? I didn't see you at the funeral, Mr. Hightower.”

Peter blinks once, and Joe wonders if he can already see where all this is going.

“I didn't know he had died,” Peter says.

“Yeah. Throat cancer. You must not have called much in the last couple years.”

“No, I hadn't. I'm sorry I didn't.”

Things are awkward for a couple minutes. The fourth round ends and the fighters go back to their corners, then come out swinging again.

“I'm very sorry to hear about your father, Joe.”

“Well, thank you.”

“I did think of him often.”

“Well isn't that nice. He used to talk about you all the time.”

“Did he, now?”

“He did. He mentioned this little routine you could do. A shtick, really. You know, talking like me.”

Peter smiles. “Yes, I could.”

“You don't mind if I hear a bit of it, do you?”

“Oh, no. I haven't done it in years.”

“Come on. It's got to be in there somewhere.”

“Oh, it is, it is,” Peter says. “But I don't think I could summon it now.”

“Why?” Joe says, and looks around. “Because of where we are?”

“Yes, that's part of it.”

“But it's part of you, too, isn't it? Pete the Uke?”

Peter smiles again. “I haven't heard that name in years.”

“That's funny, because I heard it
for
years. My father was real proud of you, you know. How big you got, and so fast.
That boy's got a head on his shoulders,
he used to say. He respected you so much.” He licks his lips. “Even though—maybe because—he knew what you had to do to get there.”

“He exaggerated,” Peter says. “I was just lucky.”

“I don't think
lucky
is the word Rinaldo Panetti would use. I know for sure it's not the word his wife and kids would use.”

“Who's Rinaldo Panetti?” Peter says.

The tone of voice, the rhythm, is perfect, suggesting nothing but benign ignorance.
I'm sorry, I haven't met the man.
As if Pete the Uke didn't pull a razor across Rinaldo Panetti's throat and get three guys to dump him in the lake. Joe Rizzi's father told him that in confidence. It wasn't information he was supposed to use; it was only to know, to understand the man. If anything, it was a warning, and a warning Joe Rizzi's getting again right now, that Peter Henry Hightower is not a man to mess with. But Joe Rizzi's come a long way to get here. He's been asking around, going through his dad's old things to find a cooked book or two. He's linked it all up, the chain of crimes that starts in Tremont and ends in a giant shackle around Peter Henry Hightower's ankle. The money laundering, the tax evasion. The payoffs, the kickbacks. The financing of a dozen or so operations over the years that turned a couple guys into corpses. And at the very beginning, the murder itself, the story that's an open secret among the wiseguys of Cleveland, that Peter Henry Hightower is one of them. They respect him enough, know the system well enough, to never tell. But Joe Rizzi's not quite smart enough and a little too ambitious to pay attention to respect. So something that could have been done anytime, by anyone in Cleveland's criminal underground, Joe Rizzi is at last doing: He's going for blackmail.

“Oh, you know who Rinaldo Panetti is,” Joe Rizzi says. And then twirls his left pointer finger as though it were a knife and drags it across his own throat. Smiling the whole time, staring Hightower down.

“Joe,” Peter says. “Do you mind if I call you Joe, Joe?”