Brooklyn Bones (14 page)

In the hushed, carpeted, oak paneled lobby Mr. O’Hanlon was already waiting for me. He was a middle-aged, middle-sized man in a discreet suit and he shook my hand warmly, expressing his sympathy in a soft voice. We went on to a comfortable office, vaguely cozy in a neutral way, where he offered coffee or juice and we went over the plans.

He quickly realized I had no context for the discussion and explained that Rick, though raised religiously as Catholic and socially as Irish, had specified no traditional wake or visiting hours. He wanted an immediate businesslike cremation without a service, and a large memorial later, a real celebration, nothing sad. He had left a page of details.

“Sinatra and Ellington are unusual music choices, but of course we are happy to carry out his wishes. He has a message to be read at the event and a list of people he wanted to speak.”

One of them was my dad. One of them, I thought, seemed familiar. A cop friend I met sometime, perhaps. I said I would contact him and fill in for Dad myself and the director said he could handle the rest.

He walked me to another room with rows of comfortable chairs and a podium. This is where the speeches would take place, with a reception in the adjoining room. Here was an easel for a photograph of the departed. They could blow one up to portrait size if I had one to give them. I told him I would hunt one down.

With no funeral, there would not be an open coffin. Raised in the Jewish tradition of a closed coffin, I must have looked as relieved as I felt, because he said quickly, “It would have been, if he had wanted it. We make them look perfect.”

The last time I had been to a funeral with an open coffin was Jeff’s. And he did not look perfect. He looked dead.

Then we were done. There were keys to Rick’s house in the fat envelope of papers I had with me. If I could get in, I would look for a picture to display at his funeral, a picture of the Rick we knew, not the Rick who would be in the coffin. And if it was still a crime scene and I could not go in, I could talk to the cops on duty. With luck I would get an inexperienced, bored one who would want to talk to me. I was sure I had a right to be in the house. Pretty sure.

Now I had to go do battle on the Long Island Expressway. I had a date with Nettie Rogow, widow of a Brooklyn real estate millionaire.

The first twenty miles of the Expressway, not so fondly known as the world’s longest parking lot, took an excruciating hour, but once I had escaped the tentacles of city traffic I barreled along, rock and roll blasting from the radio. I had fulfilled my immediate responsibilities, I would force Rick out of my mind for a few hours, and reclaim a piece of the rest of my life. At least that was my plan. My interest in Mrs. Rogow was what she could tell me for my project. And if I should learn something further, about my own house or my own block, that would be an interesting bonus to share with Chris.

That’s what I told myself.

When I responded to her call, I had told her Chris had to go away. Well, she did have to, because I said so. As I explained what my work project was, and that I would love to meet her myself, she said “Of course, dear. I’m happy to have a chance to set the record straight about my Harry, may he rest in peace. I don’t drive anymore. Would you like to come out here? I’m free tomorrow morning. Let’s make it noon. We’ll have lunch. Now, you’ll need directions. Do you have a pen? Yes? Listen carefully.”

That quavering old voice gave exhaustive information, down to landmarks at every turn and distances in half miles. I had a feeling that this would be an interesting meeting.

Here was the exit. I held her directions in one driving hand, looking nervously from the road to the paper and back again, and had my Mapquest directions on the passenger seat next to me. I always get lost in suburbia’s gracefully curving parkways. Give me a city grid any time.

It was immediately apparent that this was not the Long Island I knew, the land of neat bungalows and split levels, with above-ground pools and quarter-acre plots. That’s the Long Island where my cousins and my parents’ friends lived. I drove down a landscaped parkway, then roads that wound their elegant way past stone and brick houses with spacious lawns, manicured gardens, and many shiny cars in each driveway.

After a few wrong turns I arrived at last at the address I had been given. I could see the tennis court from the road. I didn’t see the pool—in-ground and landscaped, of course—until later. Chez Rogow.

I expected a butler, or at least a maid—yes, I watch Masterpiece Theater—but the door was opened by a plump old lady with perfectly coifed white hair and penetrating blue eyes. She wore a smart silk pants suit in bright turquoise and a lot of rings and necklaces. Some matched; some didn’t. I suppressed a smile when I saw she was wearing bedroom slippers on her feet.

“Mrs. Donato? Come right in! What a treat to have a young visitor. I am Nettie Rogow. Come in, come in, don’t stand on ceremony.”

I hoped my startled double take was invisible. Coming from the mouth of this expensively dressed woman was the famous Brooklyn accent mocked throughout the English-speaking world. On the phone, she had used a phony, oh-so-genteel “telephone answering voice,” learned from secretaries in old movies, I guessed, but here was the real Nettie Rogow. I knew who she was from the moment she opened her mouth—a stranger in a strange land, an immigrant all the way from the tenements of Brownsville to the land of five-acre zoning. And she had never had elocution lessons to hide it, either.

“I’ve set up lunch in the sun room, so lovely this time of year.”

She led us through some heavily knick-knacked rooms to a glassed-in porch overlooking a perfect garden.

“Do you see?” She pointed to the bird feeders. “We might get a visitor or two. Look out for cardinals—they’re the bright red ones. I love to sit out here and watch them flit around. And we have deer! Such a nuisance. My daughter rages about how much they cost us, when they eat the shrubbery, but I kind of like them. We didn’t have too many deer, or cardinals either, when I was growing up.

“Now young lady, you take that chair. It has the best view.” She waved her hand over the table. “It’s only a light meal.”

Her idea of a light meal seemed to be going to the nearest delicacy emporium—what we New Yorkers call an “appetizing store”—and ordering half a pound of everything. The table was covered.

I couldn’t resist smoked salmon and whitefish, flavored cream cheeses, blintzes. Fresh bagels and fragrant soft onion rolls. Fancy cookies and two kinds of coffee cake. Why even try? Mrs. Rogow kept adding more to my plate, refilling my coffee cup and generally urging me not to hold back.

“You’re young yet,” she said. “Dieting is for old people. The food is here to enjoy. Would you like some more cookies?”

Finally I paused for breath. She beamed at me and said, “What can I do for you?”

I offered up a well rehearsed, heavily edited version of my museum project and assured her we would ask her permission if we wanted to quote her directly
.

She patted my hand and said, “I have waited a long time for this, a chance tell our true story. Those lousy newspaper reporters always got it wrong.”

She jumped up and cleared a space on the table. “I pulled out my albums to show you.” She came back with an enormous stack and said, “Now don’t be frightened. We don’t have to look at all of them. I thought it would help my memory, which is definitely not what it used to be.”

She proceeded to prove just the opposite. As she opened album after album, she walked and talked me through her life: the girlhood, as I had guessed, in the Brooklyn of cold water walk-up flats and phone messages taken at the candy store on the corner, because no one could afford a phone at home. Going to work in a neighborhood store at sixteen because her family needed what little she earned.

“But I did graduate first,” she said, displaying the page with her diploma. With honors, I noted. “And we sewed our own graduation dresses in home economics, too,” she added, turning to the photo of her class, all in ruffled white.

“And your husband?” I prompted. I was actually charmed by her stories, but they were not unique. I needed to get us back on track.

“Well, there he is. And wasn’t he handsome?” she said, pointing to a stiffly posed, sepia-colored wedding picture. “Of course it was a modest little wedding, in my parents’ apartment. I was only eighteen. No one had money for a big party, but there was a real wedding cake, and schnapps, and the relatives brought food. I wore my cousin’s gown, but my Harry bought me lovely flowers.”

“You have to understand,” she said earnestly. “He wasn’t any neighborhood boy, not one of the no-goodniks from the streets, even though he started with nothing, just like me. But he was one with plans. I could see that even then, and that’s how he swept me off my feet.” She made a gesture that encompassed the whole house. Her whole life, I thought. “Was I smart?”

“And how did he get started?”

“The local bank foreclosed on a crummy little building with a store and a few apartments. He saw his chance and he took it, my smart Harry.

“It wasn’t easy at first, I can tell you. I went without a new dress two years to pay off that first building. But bit-by-bit, he added to his holdings. After the children came, we moved out of that Brownsville walk-up to a nice new apartment building on Ocean Parkway—with elevators!—and then, in time, we came out here. Look at what he was able to do for us—lovely home, the best schools, a country club. He gave me the life of a queen.”

“It sounds like he was a good husband.”

“The best. I was a lucky woman. He was a doting father too.”

I took a deep breath.

“Weren’t there some tenant organization issues right around that time, too? Were you—I mean—your company—ever affected by that?’

She looked away, and when she looked back there were tears in her eyes. “My Harry, may he rest in peace, he was a wonderful man. He worked so hard to make something of himself. He did not deserve what they did to him, those crooked politicians and those lousy, lying reporters.”

She struggled to regain her composure, and then said abruptly, “Have you had enough? Another slice of lox? Or more coffee cake?

“So, you’re interested in Park Slope, where you live? Hand me that book over there—not the green one, that’s the family pictures—that black one—these are our buildings. We started picking up cheap buildings there in the early sixties, I suppose. Maybe even late fifties. People who used to live there were dying to sell and move out to the suburbs then.”

She flipped through the pages as she talked. “Well, of course they were. Drugs, gangs, oh, Brooklyn got bad then. And they wanted green grass, too. Ah, here they are,
see what you recognize.”

I was having trouble stemming her flood of talk so I could learn more about her husband and his questionable business practices, but I could get back to it. I could not pass up a chance to learn more about my own personal information quest. And Chris would never forgive me if I did.

“I know that one. There’s a dance school now, and Slope Books.”

“Bookstore? Dance school? Well! They do tell me the neighborhood has changed a lot. This was a locksmith, I believe, and that was a bar. And I’m not talking about a nice club, either, where nice young people go to meet and hear music. I’m talking about the kind of place where there were fights every Saturday night. My Harry wouldn’t let me go near the place. Still and all, those bars paid good rent, like any other business.”

I kept turning the pages and then stopped. “That’s our block. Did you own all these houses?”

“No, dear, of course not, but we did own several. Which one is yours? Can you tell?”

“The first of the row of little houses. Right there.” I put my finger on a photo of the familiar block, with very unfamiliar cars in the street.

“Why, yes, I believe that one was ours. The whole row was.”

“Mrs. Rogow, when was this? And what was it like on our block then? That’s what I really want to know.” It wasn’t close to being all I wanted to know, but it was a start.

“Let me see.” She slipped the large photo out of its plastic sleeve and looked at the back. “This is from around 1970. What was it like? A lot of the buildings were chopped up into tiny apartments before we ever bought them. Low rents and very unreliable, low-class tenants. And sometimes we tried renting out the whole house to groups of young people. We figured they couldn’t be worse. And we were in business, after all—a large group could pay more than one family. Were we ever wrong about them!”

“They couldn’t pay more?” That didn’t sound right to me.

“No, dear, of course they could. My Harry was never wrong about something like that. But they were terrible tenants, even the ones from nice families. They always said they were students. Dropouts, that’s what they were, lazy hippies and draft-dodgers. Filthy habits, skipped out on the rent, had all kinds of friends staying there with them. And who knew what they were doing? Wild parties, we heard, and selling dope, no doubt. The other people on the block hated them and the police—don’t ask. They were there again and again.

“Sometimes they just disappeared in the middle of the night.” She paused. “Goodness, it’s been years since I thought about this, but it is coming back to me.

“Of course they owed us money when they did that, and if that wasn’t bad enough, one time at least, they left garbage piled up in all the rooms. We didn’t find out for weeks. Why did they have to do a thing like that? And what a mess it was! Smart aleck little spoiled…well, I don’t use the kind of language they deserve. And then they called Harry names. Those s.o.b.’s.”