The Family Hightower (25 page)

The last fight is near the end of
1949
. The parents scream at each other until their children can't recognize their voices, and they all end up in Henry's room, scared.
Are Mom and Dad going to hurt each other?
Muriel says.
Is Dad going to kill Mom?
She's heard it too many times now, that her father's a killer, and she believes he's capable of anything. Sylvie's wise beyond her years even then.
No, Mom and Dad are both going to be okay,
she says. Telling Muriel what she needs to hear. Rufus is angry.
Why can't they just stop fighting already?
he says.
Will you all just be quiet?
Henry says.
I want to hear what they're saying.
He opens the door without a sound and goes out into the hallway.
Stay here,
he whispers, and closes the door behind him. In the hallway, he hears everything. Who it was that had his sister in the front yard. What he was there for. It will never leave him. For the other kids, there's a lot of language they can't quite decipher through the door, because their parents are talking so fast.
You sold us out, Peter,
Caroline says.
Every time. You sold us out. Over and over again.
Then they hear her say this:
I hate you so much. So much more than I ever loved you.
The kids all look at each other. Muriel starts crying. If they were different children, the others might have hugged their sister then. But they're too much like their parents to do it.

By January
1950
the marriage has been shot in the head, torn limb from limb, dumped in the lake. But it's
1
950
, and people don't get divorced; not people like them, anyway. So they all go on living in the same house, or at least sleeping there, until the death of their marriage is enough of an open secret that Peter can take a small apartment downtown, close to his office, the kind of apartment the young Caroline always believed he lived in when they were courting. There are rumors of affairs, that Peter's taken up with a younger woman from somewhere on the West Side, that Caroline has a lover somewhere in Shaker Heights. These rumors are unfounded. The truth is that as much as they despise each other, they miss what they had. Maybe each of them could find something as good again, but despair keeps them from trying.

When Caroline's diagnosed with cancer in
1962
, Peter pays for everything. The treatments that don't work, the painkillers that don't work well enough. She won't see him, but she will see Stefan, and they talk for hours, though she never tells him what occurred to her back in
1947
. Only that she's always so glad to see him.
You should see Peter, too,
Stefan says.
Even if it's just for me. He's my brother.
In February
1963
, she relents and tells Peter to come visit her while there's still enough left of her to visit. They hold hands for two hours and don't say a word. She dies toward the end of May and he pays for the funeral, suffers the nasty things her family says about him, and they don't know the half of what he's done, because Caroline never sold him out; all they know are the rumors. It's been a long time since Peter's been to church, but he's still Catholic enough to know that he didn't deserve someone as good as Caroline was, and deserves her family's loathing now. Deserves much worse than that. By then, Henry's been in New York for years. Rufus is just out of college and has no permanent address. Muriel's in college and restless. Jackie's halfway through her second stay in a hospital. Which leaves Peter, sixty-four years old and feeling older than that, alone in the big house with Sylvie. He has three years left to live, though the left-hemisphere stroke comes sooner than that.

And he can't hide anything from his daughter. Even before the stroke, she hears him on the phone, sees how he comes and goes. Starts asking questions.
Who are the Rizzis? Who are the Ukrainians?
And when Peter starts to explain, starts to give her the history, she just has more questions:
Why did you start with the Italians instead of the Ukrainians, anyway?
Peter's proud at how hungry she is for the details, how good she is at putting them together. The various little organized-crime concerns in town all have their own little rackets going, the protection and loan-sharking that's tied to neighborhood, to ethnicity, language, food, home. It's the logic of the family applied to an economy; values on everything are bargained for and agreed.
You love me? How much? You say you trust me? How much?
But when the money gets big, it breaks the family logic; the calculations need to be colder, the partners not as connected. That's where Peter lives, has lived for Sylvie's entire life. There's camaraderie, of course: Peter and just about every crime boss in town can have a drink together, and the congeniality smooths the edges of every transaction. But everyone makes sure it doesn't get too friendly, because one day, they know, they're going to have to screw each other over. It's all right if they think of that as part of the deal, a decades-long game of poker, millions of dollars whirling around their heads while they sit at the table, hiding their cards, looking at each other and smiling. At that level, it's when things get too close that they get ugly. The honor killings, the stabbings, the shootings, the drownings, the explosions.
That's why families should never be rich,
Peter says to Sylvie, in spite of himself, and then stops there, because to keep going would be to unravel his entire life, his life and Caroline's and the lives of all his children. He'll never admit the crimes he's committed against them. But by mid-
1964
, Sylvie's handling her father's books, knows where all the money is, what to record in one ledger and leave out of the other. The structure of her father's organization is right there in front of her, all the names of everyone involved, though she's never been to a single meeting. There's no need to do that; Peter's still as sharp and able-bodied as ever. Until, on October
24
, he isn't.

When it starts, Peter's alone at the kitchen table. There's a throbbing behind his left eye, a hammering pain, like the eye's trying to pop itself out of its socket. He looks down at the cup of coffee he's holding and doesn't recognize his own hand. Doesn't see how his hand is separate from the cup, how his clothes are separate from his body, his feet not part of the floor. He's losing himself—Peter Henry Hightower, Pete the Uke, Petro Garko—and expanding, growing, rising, flowing into the house, into the lawn outside the window, the trees turning orange and red near the shore. Into the lake. He's in an infinite present, forgetting who he is and what he's done; he can't say whether he's there or not anymore. It's euphoria, to feel it all fall away, and in that second—maybe it's a second, maybe it's an hour, he's not sure—he's never been happier in his entire life.

Then he realizes he can't move his right arm. He tries to get up and walk, but his right leg is paralyzed too, and he crashes. His right wrist breaks when he hits the floor and he hollers. Tries to form words but they won't come out. His voice goes
raaahhh, raaahhh,
like an engine that won't start. Sylvie rushes in and scares him; he can't put together that she's there because she heard him fall. He looks at her and her mouth is moving, he can hear her voice, but he can't understand what she's saying. He panics and flails on the ground, smacks his left shin into the table seven times until Sylvie drags the table away from him, gets the chairs out of the way, too. Then the floor feels like an ocean, the walls a million miles away, and he's alone in a tiny boat, until the ambulance comes and takes him away. That's when all his energy leaves him and he gives up. He's out.
Did you hear that, Pa? At last, at last, I'm out.

From then until the second stroke kills him in
1966
, nobody's sure if he's there anymore. The right side of his body stays paralyzed. He stops talking and only murmurs in his sleep. It's never clear that he understands what's said to him. Sylvie and Stefan move his bed to the first floor of the house, get him a wheelchair. She parks him on the sunporch, where he seems to like it best, for most of the day. She bathes him, changes his clothes, helps him in the bathroom after she learns to read the signs. Tries to give him his favorite things to eat. He doesn't seem to know what to do, seems to like being told.
It's time for lunch now. Time for your bath. We need to get you dressed because your brother's coming over. We need to get you in a tie because Michael Rizzi's coming over.
Yes, Michael Rizzi, their contact with the Italian side of Peter Henry Hightower's criminal activities. Lou Rizzi's nephew, Joe Rizzi's cousin. They have their meetings in the living room, Michael on the loveseat, Sylvie on the couch, Peter in his chrome wheelchair. Coffee's in a French press on the table in front of them. Michael's there about once a month, explains what's going on. Peter's eyes are on him when he talks, but he never says anything. So Sylvie speaks for him. At first she's all deference.
I know my father had told me he wanted to do what you're describing, so I think it's okay if we do it now.
If it's all right with you, Dad.
They both give him a couple obligatory seconds to respond, even though they know he won't. He stares at his daughter when she speaks and nods his head, maybe because he likes what he's hearing, maybe because his neck muscles are tired. It's impossible to say. After a few months of it, Sylvie starts to speak for her father with more confidence.
I know my father would want this. I don't think he'd think that's a good idea.
Peter's still in the room, still nodding. Michael starts smiling more, being more supportive. He's impressed with her; he can already see what she'll become.
When she takes over,
he thinks,
look out.
Decides that he wants to make sure he's on her side when she does; the love between them, the marriage to show that everything between their families is forgiven, will come later. In early
1965
she says it at last—
I think we should do it—
without mentioning her father at all. If she notices what she's done, she doesn't let on. Michael looks at Peter, still in his wheelchair, staring at his daughter and nodding.
Your father would be proud of you,
he says, and notices that Peter Henry Hightower's eyes don't shift toward him at all; they're still fixed on Sylvie.
He knows the score,
Michael Rizzi thinks.
We're talking about him like he's already dead.
He feels a twinge of guilt for the disrespect, but there's no way around it. There's business to get done.

 

 

 

Chapter 15

D
o
you see it now? Where the spine of the story begins and ends? It runs along the length of the rise and decline of the family, the city, the country, because the system, the animal, runs its course and then keeps running, longer than it should. Call it capitalism. Call it American. Call it what you want. There isn't an animal born yet that doesn't get sick someday, and it gets sick in Cleveland in
1966
, because too many people have been left out, and decide they've had enough.

It's Monday, July
18
,
1966
. In the afternoon, a prostitute walks into the Seventy-Niners' Café, a bar on the corner of
79
th Street and Hough Avenue. She's there looking for money; she needs to get some together for the children of another prostitute who just died. Owner Dave Feigenbaum tells her to leave. She balks. Soon they're swearing at each other. She storms out, and Feigenbaum says something under his breath about serving Negroes. It's about five o'clock in the afternoon. A little while later, a guy walks in and gets a pint of wine, asks for a pitcher of ice water and a glass to go with it. It's ninety degrees out. Feigenbaum says no; someone says he overhears him talking to his waitress, too. Don't serve
no niggers no water.
Maybe he's thinking back to the winter, when someone tried to burn up his car. Maybe he thinks the people in the neighborhood don't like him and has decided to be hateful and return the favor. Maybe he's a virulent racist. Or maybe it's just too hot and things are too tough in Cleveland, not enough is going well for anyone. Maybe it's everything all at once, the race, the poverty, the sense that it's all coming apart. But that's how it starts. The guy who doesn't get his water gets angry. He tells all his friends in the place what happened, and he's nice and loud about it. Then he's out of there. Minutes later there's a brown paper bag stuck to the door of the place with writing scrawled on it:
No water for Niggers.
Now there are a bunch of people gathered around it, and they're not happy. The Feigenbaum brothers call the police and then step outside themselves. They've got a pistol and a rifle. Then the police show up, and everything explodes.

Three grocery stores are on fire, a drugstore, a clothing store. Then the fires are everywhere. The police set up blockades, cut off twenty blocks from the rest of the city to try to contain it. The firemen go in and get bottles and rocks thrown at them. The fire hoses get slashed, along with police cruisers' tires; the cars' windows get broken in. The police set up a command station at East
73
rd and Hough, and soon they're taking fire from snipers nesting in the apartments around them. The police captain there says later that it's like a western. A woman named Joyce Arnett dies in the crossfire that night, trying to get home to her baby daughters. Three other people are shot. Eight people go to the hospital with wounds from rocks and bottles. A policeman who served in World War II says it reminds him of London during the blitzkrieg. The next day the looters are selling what they stole as fast as they can. The mayor thinks about Watts and Chicago and calls in the National Guard in the afternoon. The shooting starts before they arrive. A stray bullet gets a man named Percy Giles right in the head, they say, while he's trying to help a friend board up his store. He dies in the hospital. The National Guard arrives and things settle down, but there's still plenty of looting the next day. The third night, Hough is quieter; there are three National Guardsmen at every intersection, soldiers accompanying the police. There's a fire just south of the place and the police shoot up a family in their car who are trying to get to safety. On the fourth day, there's an outbreak of over a hundred fires, half of them started by Molotov cocktails. It doesn't settle down until the end of the week, and by then, the damage has been done.

A year later, Hough Avenue's still destroyed buildings and streets full of garbage. The kids walking it don't have enough clothes or enough to eat. There are more murders, more firebombs. They say later that the only thing keeping the entire neighborhood from going up in flames in the summer of
1967
is Carl Stokes's run for mayor—Stokes, Cleveland's only black candidate for mayor who stands a chance of winning.
Cool it for Stokes,
they say. They do, and Stokes wins. But Stokes can't save Hough. Thirty years later, they're calling it an urban prairie because most of the houses and apartment buildings are gone. There are just the streets and the sidewalks, the telephone poles, a house or two left on an entire block next to an apartment building that's boarded up and falling over. The rest of the block is weeds turning into forest. From the air, you can see the dark outlines of the foundations where all the other buildings used to be, and it breaks people's hearts. They argue, then, about what happened in
1966
, about whether the riots bled Hough out or whether they happened because Hough was already bleeding. Fifteen years later the city makes a move, and houses get built in Hough again. The empty blocks get filled in. But then it looks like a suburb, and people are angry about it.
The city's giving up on being a city,
some people say.
No,
say others.
The city sees the writing on the wall. All those people left, all those jobs left, and they're not coming back.

They're having an argument about the future, and the public version of it is all sparks, thrown off from the friction between practicality and ideology. The nostalgia for the past, the push for progress, the American stubbornness in insisting that everything always gets better. But it's getting harder and harder not to see how the big wheel's turning. How they've been on a long arc going up, and now they're on the other side going down. Some of the people, in America and elsewhere, want to turn around; there must be a way back, they think, a way to climb up the rim as it's moving downward beneath them. Some of them are turning and facing it, trying to save what they can, to prepare their children for the harder world that's coming. And a few of them are checking out the approaching chaos, speculating on just how things will fall apart. How the laws will weaken, and how the market—the market for everything—will rise to fill the space. How the people around them will become more vulnerable, more desperate. And then they think about where they need to be to profit from it.

It's August
1966
. The second stroke, the one that kills Peter Henry Hightower, gets him in his sleep. For Peter, it's like a switch is flipped, a plug gets pulled, and the dreams and memories left in his head are gone. Lights out. Sylvie comes into his bedroom in the morning to check on him because she doesn't hear him stir. She can tell from the doorway what's happened. The covers are off him and his right leg is bent, his foot tucked underneath his body. His left arm is out straight, hanging over the edge of the bed. Sylvie doesn't make a sound. Maybe for her siblings, the line between their father alive and their father dead is bright and clear, a crack in the sidewalk. But Sylvie's been living with no one but Peter for years now. She's seen how there's a gray country between life and death; her father's taken his sweet time walking across it, and Sylvie's been standing on the edge of it, watching him go. She's had a long time to prepare. She goes to him, arranges the body like he's still sleeping to give him some dignity. Puts his pillow beneath his head and tucks the blankets around him. Then makes the calls, to the hospital, to the police. To Stefan, who sighs and thanks her for the news, agrees to break it to Jackie. She calls the rest of her siblings, first Henry, then Rufus. Muriel last, and only after the authorities have arrived to take the body away; she knows that Muriel would have rushed over, lost it a little bit, made the necessary parts of dealing with a corpse harder. There's some ruthlessness in that decision, to deny Muriel the chance to see her father by herself before he's packed away. But there's compassion in it, too; she knows that their father's body isn't going to give Muriel whatever sense of completion she's looking for.
It'll never end,
Sylvie thinks.
Never be done.
And something moves in her, a sense of acceptance, of where she finds herself. Of what she has to do.

So she's quiet, quieter than usual, when Henry comes a few days before the funeral to sort out the paperwork for their father's estate. He gives Sylvie a good look when he finds out just how orderly it all is.
I know you're smart, Sylvie,
he says,
but I still underestimated you.
Sylvie just smiles.
Let me know if you need anything else,
she says, and gets her first taste of the power her mother felt when she married Peter Henry Hightower. Sylvie knows something Henry doesn't, a big thing. To her, it's like Henry's going through everything in a grand house, and as thorough as he prides himself on being, he never finds the switch under the shelf of a bookcase in the library that would make the walls part, show him the wing of the house he didn't know was there. She doesn't say anything even during the fight in the dining room.
Raise your hand if you think equitable doesn't mean equal, but fair,
Rufus says. He thinks he's saving her from poverty.
What's wrong with you, Henry? Don't you ever see regular people anymore?
She's still mum even to Rufus hours later, when he explains to her in the garden what he's going to do.
I'd do anything to keep you in this house,
he says.
I don't need the money.
She feels a little guilty; it would be so easy to tell him what reins have been handed to her, the direction she's going in. But nothing is certain yet, her transition to power in the underworld isn't assured. So she just gives him a hug.
I owe you one,
she says.
I owe you everything. Someday I'll pay it back.
And after the family departs and the house is quiet again, she meets with Michael Rizzi. Tells her how much Rufus gave her and what she's planning to use it for.
I don't want to take my father's place,
she says.
I want to be bigger than he ever was.

In time, she is. Big enough that she needs to tell Henry how she's still living in that giant house in Bratenahl, because he's sensitive enough to the money to know that the legitimate numbers don't quite add up, even as she doesn't need to tell any of her other siblings anything; she lets them think she's just being careful with what she has. Big enough that she can't launder the money she makes fast enough to spend it; she has piles of cash in the bedrooms, in the basement, under the stairs, but she can't hire anyone to fix the roof without drawing the authorities' attention to her. She has her hands in everything in town, in all that's left of Cleveland's criminal heyday—the Irish, the Italians, the Eastern Europeans, the Jews. She does the financial stuff, the loan-sharking, the money laundering. She's the bank for some of the drug trade, for gambling circuits, for real estate swindles, for human trafficking. They always tell her she doesn't need to know what she's investing in, where the money's coming from, but she always finds out, she always knows. They don't know how she does it; her own husband goes to his grave in
1986
not knowing how she's always four steps ahead, even of the FBI, which is aware only of the fact of her existence. When the criminals don't call her the White Lady, they call her the Goddess: She's the all-seeing eye, knows what everyone's up to. And in the early
1990
s, when the Soviet Union implodes, her eye turns east, to the criminals rising up there, and she buys in.
What are you doing that for?
Kosookyy says to her, over coffee in the living room.
They're bad news over there.
And Sylvie gives him a little smile.
For protection,
she says,
I want to know who they are.
She sees how the criminals in Eastern Europe are just capitalists run amok. The governments and the borders between the countries are dissolving, there's no one in charge; there's only the logic of the market, putting prices on cars, factories, houses, towns. People.
What are you made of? How much are you worth?
It's all for sale, and the price is so low, for everything, everyone. No wonder it's so brutal. But then Sylvie looks out the window, thinks about what her city, her country, is becoming, and thinks she sees the future on the other side of the ocean.
The new gangsters are coming here,
she tells Kosookyy.
And when they arrive, either they'll eat us alive or we'll become them. Though I'm not sure I see the difference.
Even before her nephew Peter, Rufus's son, shows up at her door, she's figuring a way out, and she's learned from her father's mistakes. Right before she goes, she has to try to kill it all and set it on fire. Not just one man. All of it, all that she's built since her father's death and all her father built before she was born. She has to slaughter it and light it all up, make it burn quick and hot, until there's nothing left but ashes. That part is easy, though there'll be so much blood. The trick, the hard part, is in escaping the bullets, the knives, the flames. In making sure that the blood that flows doesn't belong to her or the people she loves; and that no more flows again.