The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel Read online

  Willie’s eyes rolled around, appealing to each of them, but no one moved or said a word. He reached up carefully and tugged at Ben’s arm, which relaxed.

  “Hey, shit, don’t worry about me. Jeez, don’t worry about me.”

  “I’m not worryin’ about you, Willie. You don’t worry me one little bit.” Ben gave the boy a shove. “Get lost.”

  Willie backed away from them, shoved his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders, tried to keep from shaking.

  “Hey, Danny, you tell ’em. I’m okay, right? Don’t worry.”

  “Wait a minute, Willie,” Danny said, speaking then to all of them. “We have to agree on this. No one, not anyone, says anything about this to anyone. I mean nothing, and I mean not ever.”

  He made eye contact with each of them. They all glanced toward Eugene, who had turned away.

  “Gene?”

  “Whatever is between my confessor and myself, Danny, goes no further and involves only me.”

  Danny put out his hand, nodded, and demanded a handshake from each of them. One after the other, they gave him the same promise Megan had given him earlier.

  Willie Paycek shook Danny’s hand last. It was a compact, a vow, an inclusion. He was one of them now, bound together by what had happened on Snake Hill.

  Of all those who made the promise of silence that night, only Megan Magee kept her vow for the rest of her life.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHEN HE HEARD THE VOICES OF THE detectives in the hall outside the janitor’s apartment, Willie Paycek wet the bed in terror. His brother Mischa, a nine-year-old with the mind of a dull child of three, but with a sunny nature, awoke in alarm. He thought he was responsible for the wetness all round him. He began to whimper and whine, automatically caressing the tiny penis which was his only claim to specialness. When he was born, the doctors and nurses gathered around the infant, studying him with amazement. The diminutive testicles were fully descended and normal size, but the penis sat like a minuscule bud, which, as the years passed, never flowered. Mischa knew nothing of the bitter, violent fights that took place over his paternity. When Stanley Paycek disclaimed a child with such a deformity, Walter Stachiew laughed insultingly and drew physical comparisons. The infant was examined, studied, and disowned by both men. One drunken night of speculation, when the child cried from exhaustion at the poking and probing and incomprehensible attention of the two huge men who hovered over him, one of them, deciding the kid to be the bastard of some unknown sonofabitch, grabbed the child by the ankles and swung him around. When Anna, the mother, rushed into the room, the child’s head crashed into a wall, leaving a thin, bloody splash down to the floor.

  The doctor accepted without comment that the eight-month-old infant had fallen from a table as the mother turned and reached for a diaper.

  There was no way to determine whether Mischa’s retardation dated from that night, or whether it was a genetic malfunction. Whatever caused his slow, plodding development, he was a quiet child who endured the taunts of both adults and children when his small pink bud was exposed and examined. He took delight in their laughter and could not understand why it was then wrong for him to undo his pants and show his treasure to others, on the street. He had learned, through many whackings and shakings and smackings, that it was a terrible thing for him to do. All right for them to show—for his older brother Willie to charge other children a penny for a quick look—all right for his father and Uncle Walter to fondle and speculate on. But not all right for Mischa, for whatever reason. He accepted this as fact, and fondled his minuscule treasure secretly at night. But he held on in terror now as the wetness spread across the bed.

  He reached out to touch Willie’s face, to tell him how sorry he was.

  Willie shoved his brother hard enough to bounce him onto the floor, then held a hand over the boy’s mouth to muffle his cries.

  “Shut up, you fuckin’ freak, shut up!”

  It occurred to Mischa that Willie wasn’t all that interested in him. Even though his brother’s rough hands held him hard, fingers digging into his cheeks, Willie just wanted him to be quiet so that he could hear what was going on in the other room. He held his breath and was silent so that Willie would know he would do whatever was wanted of him.

  Willie sat absolutely still, listening. How could they know? Who had talked? Should he run? To where? There was no way to get out of the apartment past them. He heard them moving around outside in the courtyard, going into the coal room where Stachiew slept.

  First the men’s voices: cop voices. And then his mother’s scream, over and over again in a rising and falling sound of anguish. The door to the small alcove that Willie shared with Mischa burst open and a detective, a big, red-faced mick, Healy or Heeny, stood over them.

  “Hey, what ya doin’ onna floor? C’mere kid.” He gestured to Willie. “Come inside and stay with your mudder.”

  A strong hand pulled him to his feet. The detective wrinkled his nose, shook his head.

  “Put on some clean clothes, kid. You the oldest?”

  Willie nodded as he dug through a mound of dirty clothes on the floor, pulled out a pair of dry shorts. He turned his back as he dressed, shoved his bare feet into his shoes. The detective stared at Mischa, who sat bolt upright, his eyes bulging, his mouth open, his hand working frantically at his crotch.

  “This kid all right, or what?”

  Willie nodded. Yeah. Yeah, he’s okay.

  He began to think, to slow down. Say the Jew did it, that’s who, the big sonofabitch Jew kid, Herskel, because Stachiew all the time stole rolls and bagels and milk from the front of his old man’s luncheonette in the morning, before opening time. Yeah, that’s why he did it. Benny, the big Jew kid.

  The detective steered him across the hallway into the other half of the separated janitor’s apartment. His mother stood in the middle of the kitchen in her stained house dress, her feet bare and swollen, her heavy arms thrown over her head, which had fallen back so that he couldn’t see her face, just the tears and snot running off her chin as she howled. Two detectives stood watching her, and Willie saw the disgust in their faces.

  His mother was a disgusting woman, fat, with lardlike arms and shoulders; the flesh on her face seemed to be melting down in heavy pouches. She smelled of garbage collections and cooking and her own intense female odors. She reached her rough, red, strong hands to her head, fingers raked and pulled at her wild graying hair. The detectives glanced at each other, eyebrows raised, and then at the collection of children. Willie’s other younger brothers and sisters, four of them, all pale, thin, blue-eyed, blond children with faces vacant of fear or distress, silently watched their mother. They had seen this before. It usually took place after their father had beaten her up or stolen the house money for booze.

  Finally the Irish detective said, “Calm your mother down, kid. We gotta take her to the precinct house.”

  Willie stared at the detective. We gotta take her. No one seemed interested in him except as someone to handle his mother. What the hell was goin’ on?

  “Ma, Ma, c’mon, willya, cut it out. What’s goin’ on anyway, wadda ya yellin’?” He switched to Polish and spoke softly. “Ma, talk to me in Polack, what’s going on?”

  His mother wiped her hand across her mouth, over her wet eyes and cheeks, then down the side of her dress. She blinked and leaned toward him, squinting, as though the tears had blinded her.

  “Willie?” she said, “Willie?”

  He whispered, to quiet her, to level her. “Yeah, Ma, Willie.” He glanced at the detectives and repeated his instruction. “In Polish, Ma. What do they want? Them cops.”

  His mother’s body shook with one great spasm that ended with a loud gust of wind. The detectives glanced at each other, grimaced, poked Willie.

  “Tell ya mother to put some clothes on, kid. Some shoes. Hurry it up.”

  They were anxious to be out of there.

  He led his mother inside to the bedroom she shared with h
is father, some of the kids, sometimes with Walter Stachiew.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, put on the sweater he brought to her, slid her feet into the broken shoes, pulled the laces.

  “Tell me what’s goin’ on. Tell me, now.”

  She looked at him, surprised at his tone but responding to his demand—his masculine right to demand.

  “Well, he killed him,” she said softly, following his return to English. “He killed him. He said he would someday. They was gonna kill each other and now ya father killed him. Walter.”

  “Pa? Pa killed him? Pa killed Walter?”

  She stared at her son and shrugged. “Who you tink he killed, Jesus Christ? The Jews, they already killed Jesus Christ. He killed Walter. Wit’ a shovel, he hit him on the head and the cops seen him do it. They seen him do it and they took him to the precinct house.”

  “The cops seen him do it? The cops seen him do it?”

  For the rest of the night, Willie Paycek felt as though he were standing outside of his own life and watching a movie. It was a surprising movie and he couldn’t even begin to guess what scene would come next.

  When his father saw his mother enter the detectives’ office, he rose from the chair beside the cop’s battered old desk, let out a terrible cry, then collapsed back into the chair. His mother responded immediately. Between them, their voices filled the room.

  The mick detective put his hand on Willie’s arm as though to hold him up. The boy’s face was gray, his mouth twitched spasmodically, his small eyes blinked furiously. Although he was an ugly little punk, known to the detectives, as were most of the neighborhood kids, Heeny couldn’t help feeling fleeting sympathy. The kid’s body was trembling, but there was something peculiar about him as he turned from the sight of his hysterical parents to the momentarily solicitous detective. There was something sly, something sneaky and knowing, something about the kid that turned off any warmth or concern.

  “Ya okay, kid?” Heeny asked, curious. The boy shrugged, a little surprised. Why wouldn’t he be okay?—that was what Heeny read in the boy’s attitude.

  Jesus, what a life they must have been living in that janitor’s back-alley apartment.

  Willie listened casually to his mother as she spoke with animation and agitation to the detectives who fed her coffee and cake, who lit her cigarettes, who leaned forward politely, egging her on.

  “Sooner or later they kill each other, one kills the other, who knows about these men? From children, they were like brothers, fighting, fighting. All the time, from the old country, always together, drinking. No good, them two, no good.”

  Then suddenly, reality would overtake her. It wasn’t just another Saturday-night brawl, one or the other beaten and dragged roaring drunk into the courtyard, doors slamming and fists pounding, her room and bed and body invaded by one or the other. One was dead, the other in the next room.

  “Walter is really dead?”

  There was an endless procession of men in and out of the two rooms. Men from the district attorney’s office, taking statements from his father, who sobbed and cried and beat himself in the head with clenched fists, banged his arms on the wall in sudden bursts of emotion.

  “Walter, Walter, sonofabitch, look what you made me do, see, you made me do this, I kill you for what you made me do!”

  They took down all his words, in notebooks and on clattering typewriters.

  Reporters came from the morning newspapers and photographers flashed lights in his father’s face, and aimed at his mother. Willie ducked away. He wanted no part of this. He was a spectator, a watcher through the night.

  Finally his father came from the inner room, his hands shackled in front of him, a detective on either side. Willie knew his father’s head was beginning to ache. He knew the first signs of a massive hangover. His father stopped in front of him, surprised. Although Willie had drifted close to him during the night, Stanley Paycek had been too self-involved to notice his oldest son.

  “What you do here, you?” his father demanded, his hands automatically rising.

  Willie took a step back and watched as the detectives tightened their grip on his father’s arms and moved him along to the waiting car. His father turned, looked over his shoulder, directly at his son.

  No one caught the expression on Willie’s face. It was a look of deep and bitter and long-awaited triumph.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT RAN THROUGH HIS MIND, SOMETIMES slowed down and sometimes speeded up. The focus was on himself; the others were shadowy spectators. He could smell the heavy, sweaty physicality of the man, the whiskey-beer aura that seemed to come from the pores of his face, glistening on the dirty stubble of his cheeks. He could see into the small, predatory eyes, narrowed and piercing, but he was not sure what was revealed. Each time he began at the beginning and remembered it to the very end, when he turned, his brother’s hand on his arm, steering him away. Finally, Eugene realized that what he was doing was dangerous. He was distorting reality, and it was with reality that he had to deal.

  Eugene knew that Charley was aware of him, rising in the predawn cold winter darkness. He had slid without a sound from the bed they shared, and dressed in silence, casting quick glances at his brother. His sleep-breathing was steady and deep, each exhalation ending with a soft sigh. His legs, sprawled out, never moved. One arm was thrown across his forehead; the other, along his side, was bent so that his hand rested lightly at his groin.

  Dressed in clothes still damp from the night before, holding his shoes so that he could slip soundlessly from the apartment, Eugene hesitated. He studied his brother. Nothing gave him away, no slight modification of breath, no pucker of his slightly parted lips, no gentle movement of his hand against his sex. He stood at the foot of the bed and reached out gently, touching the uncovered foot with a slight pressure.

  “It’ll be all right, Charley,” he said in a voice so soft it hardly left his mouth. “My confession is mine. It has nothing to do with anyone else.”

  He stood motionless for a few seconds, watching his brother, then silently left.

  Father Kelly was not surprised that Eugene O’Brien was present at the six o’clock. He knew the dislocated feeling of a young seminarian home for his first visit. The boy was still on seminary time, and his presence in the darkness of St. Simon added a glow of youth and light.

  Clearly, Eugene was upset about something. Father Kelly understood: the boy was back home. It was probably his first real struggle, the first real questioning of his calling. That was the purpose of the home visit. He smiled and nodded and, with a jerk of his head, invited the boy into the robing room.

  Automatically, Eugene helped with the discarding of the priestly vestments, much to the relief of the dazed altar boys who had served the early mass as part of their rotation. No one volunteered for six o’clock, and they disappeared gratefully at Father Kelly’s nod.

  Father Kelly was not that far removed from the seminary. He remembered the first weeks, the first months, the doubts, the terrors, the astonishment of his own arrogance in thinking he had been called. It was something each of them went through. Some left and others, finding their own inner strength through a mystical intervention, continued on. He had never, for the slightly fleeting moment, thought Eugene O’Brien was anything but called.

  Lighting his first cigarette of the day, pouring his first cup of coffee from the hot plate, Father Kelly gestured to a chair.

  “You drink coffee, Gene?”

  “No, thank you, Father.”

  The priest took a long, deep, satisfying drag from the cigarette, held the smoke against the back of his throat, then exhaled. He drank the coffee hot and black, felt the combination of nicotine and caffeine enter his bloodstream, clear and quicken his brain.

  “Okay, then, Gene. You want to talk. Here I am. Let’s talk.”

  The boy, who was normally pale, seemed faded to the whiteness of alabaster. His light eyes looked glazed and without focus. Even his lips seemed whitened by ten
sion. The white hair, lank and shiny, added a glow, a nimbus. Gene touched his long, slender fingers absently across his lips, rubbed his sharp jawbone tentatively. He was having trouble, so Father Kelly helped him.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it, son? To be there, with the whole force of the seminary, the rules and the structures imposed on every minute of your day. And then to come back to your family and friends and neighborhood. Everyone feels the same way, especially on their first trip home. Everyone.”

  “Father, I have a confession.”

  It didn’t surprise the priest. Of course the boy had to make a confession: his doubts, his feeling of unworthiness, that he’d made a terrible mistake, that it had been pride which had made him claim a call.

  “All right, Eugene.” He started to rise. “Shall we go to the confessional?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “It isn’t what you think. And I have to talk to you face to face. I need to see you when I tell you this.”

  Father Kelly nodded.

  “Your choice. But it is a confession, right?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  They went through the familiar rote, and the priest felt his curiosity rising. This tension, this emotionalism, seemed out of proportion to what he expected.

  The young seminarian sat bolt upright, his spine not touching the back of his chair. He breathed in quick, short, sibilant breaths, like a runner. He glanced around the room for a moment, and then, with evident resolve, he looked directly into Father Tom Kelly’s eyes and his gaze never wavered.

  “Father, last night I killed a man.”

  There was a sudden stillness in the room, disturbed by a slowing down, a quieting, of Gene’s breathing. Father Kelly blinked, felt a smile pull irrationally at his lips. This was not a boy given to jokes. Whatever Gene was talking about was deadly serious—at least to him.

  The boy was so rigid that every part of him looked breakable. The only life blazed from his eyes.