The Leap Year Boy (2 page)

And so Abe turned away all petitioners—save one, Davy O’Brien, a burly ironworker permanently disabled with a mangled hip. Davy had been leveled sideways during the collapse of a 12-foot section of The Hot Metal Bridge, a span J&L was building to connect the blast furnaces on the South Side to the rolling mills across the Monongahela. Davy’ singing voice was sweet, especially when he was well into his cups, but he hadn’t sung much since his accident. The first time he saw Alex, however, his voice rose anew, and he cooed to him a lullaby his grandmother had sung to him when he was boy in Ulster:

Blow, blow, breath and blow, wind of the Western Sea,

Blow, blow, breath and blow, wind of the Western Sea

Over the rolling waters blow, down from the dying moon and glow

Blow him again to me

While my little one, while my pretty one sleeps.

As Davy sang, the rough men fell silent. Even the smoke from their pipes and cigars seemed to hang still in the air as Davy’s sweet tenor filled the room. Alex curled up in the crook of Davy’s thick forearm and slept like a kitten sated with cream. The boys at the bar kept their faces downcast toward their drinks, fearful that another man might see the tears in their eyes.

Abe looked at the men and looked at his son, and as Davy’s notes floated over the hushed drinkers, he wondered how such a wondrous little creature had sprung from a tough, surly Jew like himself. He touched the baby’s forehead with a callused finger. With his eyes still closed, Alex smiled.

*

After four months, Alex had gained but four ounces. Dr. Malkin scratched his balding crown. He examined him for signs of all the afflictions he knew—jaundice, diphtheria, smallpox, shingles, the gout, cholera, hoof and mouth, whooping cough, palsy, neuritis, neuralgia, phlebitis, canker, the fits—yet the child, in Malkin’s pseudo-professional opinion, had “no-think” wrong with him, and sure enough, according to Irene, Alex smiled, cried, ate, burped, peed and shat as regularly as the shifts changed at the steel mills.

At first, other mothers from the neighborhood came by often, out of curiosity or neighborly obligation, but as April, May and June went by, their visits grew less frequent, and for them at least there wasn’t all that much to see. The pace of the boy’s growth was so snail-like as to be virtually unrecognizable.

In quiet late afternoons while Alex slept, while Abe was at work lathing tubes at Shields Metals, while Arthur and Benjamin were still in school, Irene would snatch a moment of peace for herself as rocked her littlest boy. She would wonder, what will become of you, what was the good Lord thinking when He cooked you up so small? Not to question the Lord’s blessings, but on these afternoons by the kitchen window, fading sunlight highlighting the dust and dead insects on the windowsills, she couldn’t help but ask herself where in the divine scheme of things this small gift or strange burden fit in. But then the Lord doesn’t mete out to us more than we can handle, as Father Kiernan, a man given to answering in clichés when confronted with an issue temporal or of the faith beyond his ability to fathom might say. And so, in these moments of uncertainty, with an iron gray headache in her forehead and rusty bile rising in her throat, the Big Picture and her purpose in it became increasingly oblique. She wanted to believe that living in her six-room brick house on Mellon Street, with its elms and oak trees and small backyard, with enough sun so that she could grow tomatoes and green beans and some pumpkins for the boys, and a grocery store just two blocks away, where the Jew grocer let her run a weekly tab until Abe got paid on Fridays was just fine, that this life was at least a decent life. Her girlhood dreams of ponies and petticoats and princes and husbands that wore shined shoes and bow ties and worked with their minds and brought her perfume and pecans and wrote poetry were silly after all, weren’t they?The truth was, instead of a fairy tale, she’d ended up with hairy, cheating Abe. And in those moments, as the flowers on the wallpaper blurred with tears of regret, well, what if she were to quash little Alex with her milk-heavy breasts and snuff out the little gnat, what would it matter, really? Two boys had been enough. This one was nothing more than the issue of an unwanted midnight coupling by her cheating pig of a husband, wasn’t he? At least she could have been given a normal-sized child, a girl, for her troubles. It would serve Abe right if she squished the little imp he so doted on. But just when her thoughts were at their most infanticidal, Alex would squeak or burp or reach toward her with his tiny paws or nestle his head against her heart and Irene would flush with hot remorse and cover him with gentle kisses.

*

July 4
th
, 1908, broke hot and steamy, 80
o
at 8 a.m. Irene woke in sheets clammy from troubling dreams of screaming skeletal horses to the snap of firecrackers on the street. Abraham slept on, unaffected by the racket, his blocky chest rising and falling, his snores deep and resonant from four bottles of ale the night before, his genitals exposed from beneath the twisted sheet. For several fleeting moments, Irene considered how easy it would be to kill him as he slept, with the stroke of an iron skillet across his head, and when they asked her why, she would say she was sickened by the sight of his yellowed big toe toenail, and wasn’t that reason enough? But instead she slid out of bed, pulled on her graying nightgown and went to check on Alex, only to find his miniature bed empty, his cigar-singed blanket strewn on the floor next to Abraham’s pants and suspenders.

“Alex!”

She dropped to her knees, digging through the flotsam, swiping under the bed with outstretched arms.

The grandfather clock in the hallway, a wedding gift from her mother, read 8:13. Irene rushed into Arthur and Benjamin’s bedroom, screaming for her older sons, but there was no sound, save her desperate breathing against the backdrop of firecrackers. She staggered back into the bedroom, pounded on Abe’s back. “Abe, for the love of God get up, the baby, the baby,” her fists puny against his broad buffalo flesh.

“What? By God let a man sleep in for one stinking holiday morning. Have you lost your mind?”

“Abe! Get up, Abe, the boys. The boys, they’re all gone. All of them.”

“What, what are you saying, what, where?”

“The boys, listen to me. Alex and Arthur and Benjamin, they’re not in their beds. They’ve been taken, oh my God, get up, please help me.”

Abe the Hung Over Avenger rushed down the steps in his nightshirt and bare feet, trouser cuffs flapping against the threadbare runners, yelling for his sons through the beer and cigar aftermath in his mouth, rage and fear frothing his saliva.

He flung the door wide open. Up and down Mellon Street front porches were festooned with American flags and red, white and blue bunting. Hanging from a second-floor window on the house across the street was a hand-lettered banner that read
Remember the Maine
! Even at the early hour, people were up and about—boys throwing and catching baseballs, with visions of Honus Wagner, The Flying Dutchman, dancing in their heads; little girls with red, white and blue ribbons in their hair playing Red Rover Red Rover; wives sweeping their porches as their husbands slept in on their one day off from the mill or the sanitation department or the artificial limb factory, a booming local industry and a natural for Pittsburgh, thanks to the plethora of appendage-consuming accidents in the mills. Arms and legs for the world, that was the motto.

Abe burst into the street. He stepped directly onto a glass-specked cinder but barely felt it. Mrs. Angela Sanflippo, who’d lost her husband in an explosion at the J&L #4 Open Hearth some three years earlier and still dressed in widow’s black, sat on her stoop with her only child, 14-year-old Phillip. The boy had a mustache many a grown man would have been proud to wear, as did his mother, although she kept hers well-trimmed so as to be nothing more than a hint of a shadow on her upper lip. Mrs. Sanflippo waved at Abe and pointed to the left, toward Jackson Avenue.

Abe ran down Mellon Street, shirttails flying behind him. When he got to the corner of Jackson Avenue, two blocks away, he found Arthur and Benjamin, standing next to their wagon, shouting like carnival barkers. On the wood fence behind them hung a hand-painted sign: “See Tiny Alex, 1

.” Inside the wagon was their baby brother.

Their marketing effort had attracted quite a crowd, even at this early hour, with several children and a few adults lined up behind the wagon. At the front of the line were two boys in shorts and baseball caps, the Walsh brothers, classmates and sometimes mortal enemies of Benjamin and Arthur. Behind them stood their two younger Walsh sisters, born eleven months apart, known as the Irish twins. Next in line was the mildly mentally impaired August Daly, age 36, from nearby Portland Street, holding the hand of his mother Gertrude. August, nearly six and a half feet tall, gawked over the children in from of him, eager to see the show, and he might have pushed ahead had Gertrude not tethered his hand tightly. Behind the Daly family was Giuseppe Traficante, ice and coal deliveryman and self-proclaimed mayor of Mellon Street, smoking his ever-present Perodi and wiping his brow with a dingy white handkerchief. He waved a politician’s hello to Abe.

Although Abe grudgingly admired his sons’ P.T. Barnum-ish display of all-American entrepreneurship, his rage had reached the boiling point. He snatched Benjamin and Arthur by their necks like two chickens. It took all of his willpower not to knock their heads together. He announced his intention to lock the boys in the coal cellar for the remainder of the holiday, maybe longer.

Irene, who’d managed to throw on a robe and catch up with the family, intervened on the boys’ behalf, arguing that the baby was none the worse for wear, and though they’d had given her the shock of her life and should have known better, they meant Alex no harm. In her heart she wanted to strangle both of them, and in due time they would pay for their misguided effort at free enterprise. But at least the baby was unharmed. She lifted Alex from the wagon and kissed his forehead.

The Walsh brood yelled for their money back. August Daly bounced up and down, yanking his mother so hard her hat fell off.

As the Millers turned up the walkway to their house, in a voice as high and crisp as the cracking of a bird’s egg, Alex said, “Momma. Dadda. Arthur. Benjamin. Alex. Home.”

“Alex?” What in God’s name was going on here, Abe thought, a child this young shouldn’t know how to talk, this wasn’t normal, but not a damn thing about this boy
was
normal. He pulled Irene against his chest and, as if to check his own sanity, he said, “You heard him, too, didn’t you?”

Irene gawked at the boy, too. “By God, I did.”

Alex didn’t speak again for nearly a year. Neither his brothers nor his parents could get him to talk, despite a variety of inducements—Alex want a cookie, Alex want a candy, show Momma what a smart boy you are, come on, sonny boy, I bet a quarter with that bastard Walsh from across the street that you could talk. Day after day, until they grew tired of asking, Alex gave them nothing but smiles and silence.

Chapter 2

On March 1, 1909, a year to the day after Alex Miller was born, Delia Novak’s mother died in her sleep from complications due to a variety of maladies, the final manifestation of which was congestive heart failure. One month later, a mildly bereaved, mostly relieved Delia sold her mother’s house for $1,850, cash, to Reverend Jeremiah Johnston, the new pastor at The Church of the Holy Shepherd in Youngstown, Ohio. Since there was no will and she was the only living member of the immediate family, all of the house money went to her, as did the $255.45 in her mother’s passbook account at Youngstown Dollar Bank. For the first time in her life, Delia was flush.

With nothing to keep her in Youngstown—not her 71-year-old Aunt Tilda; not her sometimes friend Dolores Wozniak, who at 24 was married with three sons and a boozehound for a husband; and certainly not the hawk-nosed, sooty-fingered coal and ice man, Richard Stutz, who had on several occasions tried to convince her to go for a Sunday drive in his delivery wagon—Delia took a series of trains from Youngstown to the most exciting destination she could imagine: New York City. She was determined to live high for once in her life.

Feeling free as an orphan—her father had abandoned the family when she was six, so technically she
was
an orphan——Delia rode in first-class births all the way to Manhattan. She booked a room at the Waldorf Hotel, which she’d read about on the train and which offered electricity throughout and, to her amazement and delight, a private bathroom. She ordered room service breakfast the first morning. Her waiter called her “My Lady Delia.” Flattery got him everywhere, and the newly titled Lady Delia tipped copiously.

Without any particular agenda in mind, other than to see how the other half lived, Delia started to explore the Old Town. On her third day, during a leisurely springtime stroll along Fifth Avenue, she saw a hat exactly like the one she’d admired in the
Harper’s Bazaar
she’d thumbed through in the hotel lobby. She absolutely had to have it. It featured two longish feathers plucked from a snowy egret, a Florida bird close to extinction. The hat cost more than her weekly salary at Gross Hardware, but, she reasoned, who cared?

In her first two weeks on the town, she took in several Broadway plays and heard Sophie Tucker sing “Some of These Days” at the American Music Hall. She marveled that she and Sophie were almost the same age, but there was Sophie and here she was, somewhat well off but now pretty much at a loss as to how to fill her hours. At night, as she lay in her feathered bed, she had to admit she was lonely. She missed her friends from Gross Hardware and the risqué camaraderie of the rooming house girls. She also missed Abe Miller and his husky laugh and rough hands and the “big boy in his pants,” as she called it, and she was curious about what happened to that cute, tiny bump of a child he brought with him Saturday afternoons to The Squeaky Wheel. She couldn’t imagine the boy was still alive, but then, she never could have imagined herself here in New York.