The Lion's Share, page 7
part #10 of Jimmy Flannery Series
"Fay Wray," she says.
I act surprised though I ain't all that surprised.
"You mean like that actress what played in the original King Kong?"
"The one who lost her dress when the gorilla picked her up and gave a generation of boys and men night dreams."
I think she's having a little fun with me, testing the waters, being just a little risque here.
"What do you want to know, Mr. Flannery?" she asks, putting kidding aside and getting right down to brass tacks.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You didn't bring me out here for a private picnic," she says, still smiling sweetly.
"Well, you nudged me and I knew you wanted a private chat. I got to admit I been wondering about you."
"You've been looking around like a hawk trying to figure which one of the many women present was the lady who spent Frank's last hour in bed with him."
"You can understand a person would have a natural curiosity."
"Of course I can. In fact it's a little bit of my stock-in-trade. Natural curiosity. A man brags to a friend about being friendly with me." She hesitates just a tick over the word friendly, putting a spin on it, every other word out of this lady's mouth an innuendo, an invitation to a dance. "The friend grows very curious and, sooner or later, more often than not, I get a phone call."
"So, is coming here like merchandising the product?"
"That wasn't kind, Mr. Flannery, and I'm surprised at you for making a remark like that. I don't sell myself on the hoof."
She's got me dead to rights because what I was doing here was I was reacting to what she was saying about men acting on this curiosity about her and women like her and I wanted her to know I wasn't so inclined. Which she's got every right to resent, since I made a judgment on her. Also since I got defensive, in a manner of speaking, it could be that I entertained such thoughts about some woman more than once or twice. Which what man ain't?
"I came here because I had a deep affection for Frank," she says. "He was a good man. And, from all that he confided in me, a very lonely man, these last several years."
"I'm sorry for the wisecrack."
She accepts my apology with a nod of her head, the forgiveness of a queen.
"He reminded me of my own father very much," she said. "A man of old-fashioned values."
"I understand," I say, and the fact is I do understand.
"Why don't you ask the question, Mr. Flannery?"
"Which one is that?"
"What's a nice lady like me doing in a life like this."
"What's a nice lady like you doing in a life like this?" I say.
"I'm sure Mr. Cleary told you the one about the good mother with the invalid child or the maiden lady school teacher fallen on hard times or the newly made widow who discovers that her husband has gambled away their annuities."
"He give me a different one altogether," I say. "He give me the one about the widow and the gentleman in the cocktail lounge."
"They're all much the same."
"Which one are you?" I ask. "If I ain't being too personal."
"I'm the divorced lady, tossed aside for a young body half her age, who wasn't smart enough to fight for her rights. Who hired the wrong lawyers and got the short end of the financial settlement. Who let the house be sold and walked away with the oldest of two cars and a fraction of the assets her husband and herself had accumulated over twenty-five years of marriage."
"Children?"
"No children. Maybe that's part of why I didn't try to fight so hard for what was mine. Shame for being barren. Trying to make up for not giving him children and not wanting to adopt. Maybe I believed him when he said he wanted a chance for a family with this other woman. This young woman with the hard body. Oh, hell." She made a gesture like she was brushing away ghosts or demons. "How retarded can you get?"
I just sat there, nibbling at the potato salad, not wanting to pick up the leg of cold chicken while she was telling me her sad story.
"I wasn't living in a refrigerator carton," she goes on. "I wasn't pushing a shopping cart around. I had a very nice little sublet flat over on the North Side and a job at an upmarket boutique and I drove a little Honda. And then the you-know-what hit the fan."
"You lost your job?"
"No, I even got a promotion and a small raise in salary. But Harry, my ex, lost his job in middle management. He was too far back in the stick when they kicked him out of the plane and he wasn't given a golden parachute. Then his little wife ran off with a foreign motor mechanic—that is, a mechanic who repaired foreign cars—and whatever money she hadn't already spent, leaving him with enough credit card debt to bring a mule to its knees."
I'm wondering if I'm being worked a little bit here, though she's got no reason to sing any sad songs for me. The way she tells the story and the way she don't check me out with little glances to see how it's selling convinces me that what I'm hearing is the truth, even if it ain't the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which is more than anybody can expect of anybody, even somebody you know for a hundred years.
"Eat your chicken," she says, like she knows I want a bite.
"So, what then?" I say, taking a nibble. "What decided you to start moonlighting at another trade?"
"Harry begged me for another chance, claiming everything including temporary insanity. But I wouldn't have it. I was enjoying his suffering too much. Also I didn't trust him. That's always the worst of infidelity. It isn't difficult to forgive the sin and embrace the sinner—except you know the old saying?"
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
She laughs sharply. It's got an edge of self-mockery to it. "That's the one," she says. "It would have been more than I could bear if I'd taken him back and he turned around and cheated on me again. But then he tried to take his life."
I made a fool of myself making a judgment call on her and I don't want to stumble twice in one conversation, but I would've liked to say that doing something like that to yourself, just to make somebody else feel guilty, is one of the worst things a person can do and she certainly ain't got nothing to be sorry for. I also don't say it because I know there's more to come and I don't want to add to her distress.
"He did a lousy job of it," she says. "He ran a car into a tree. Totaled the car but didn't kill himself. Left him a cripple from the waist down. He's in a wheelchair."
She's staring at me, the awful thought trembling there between us like she was shouting out loud, Well, he isn't going to have much of a chance to fuck around on the side now, is he?
The unspoken words drain the energy from both of us and we sit there like a couple of rag dolls for a long time until I finally break the spell by clearing my throat.
I'm still staring at her, listening to this story she's telling me, waiting for the punch line.
"That's right, I took him back."
"Even after what he done?"
"What he did was act like an aging ram chasing one last ewe through the clover."
"But—"
"I never said he stopped loving me or me him. If I'd been smarter when he first told me he'd fallen in love with another woman, I'd have told him to take a thousand bucks and a long weekend, or maybe spend the thousand bucks on a top professional lady in some hotel on the Loop where she might teach him the difference between love and lust."
"That sounds a little cynical."
"Which is because this society's more than a little hypocritical. The French are romantic. The Italians are hot-blooded. Even the English know how to be naughty and discreet. But American men have to throw over wife, home, family, lifestyle—the whole shebang—and marry someone else just because it's more honorable to tell a wife that you've fallen madly in love with another woman than that you want another piece of ass now and then."
The way she mixes genteel speech with gutter language, which somehow ain't even offensive coming from her mouth, has me rocking.
"Madly in love," she says. "Isn't that a crock of you know what?"
Apparently shit is the one word she don't like to say.
"Wouldn't anybody say, the way you're acting, taking care of your crippled ex-husband the way you're doing, that you're madly in love?"
"I'm not madly in love, Mr. Flannery—"
"Jimmy," I say, butting in, figuring with all these intimate revelations she's giving me, it's about time she calls me by my first name the way practically everybody does.
"I'm sanely in love, Jimmy. I'm in love because of the good times, the old times. We're back together a year now and that's that. Harry's in therapy and doing pretty well, though the doctors don't hold out much hope that he'll ever walk again. I'll take care of the poor sorry sonofabitch until he dies or I die. One or the other."
She still ain't told me how she got into the life and I suppose she figures it's none of my business. She's laid out her story and where the pressures would've piled up. Expenses every time she turns around.
"I was already in the life part-time, Jimmy," she says, like she's reading my mind. "I got used to the money and you've got to remember, I never walked the streets or worked the bars. I saw no reason, with all the added expense, to give it up."
"How'd your husband take that?"
"Pride comes in a hundred flavors, Jimmy. Maybe Harry's ready to accept what I do so we can live a decent, even comfortable life, more easily than he could accept the necessity of asking for welfare and food stamps. As long as I don't rub it in his face. As long as I make up lies about promotions, raises, overtime and bonuses. Who'd expect him to believe it if whispers ever reached his ears? I'm a respectable, attractive, middle-aged, middle-class, college-educated whore. My husband knows but pretends not to know. My clients are all very nice men and Frank Delvin was one of my dearest."
Somebody comes out on the little porch at the back of the house and calls out, "Fay!"
I look up and it's Lou Cleary standing there. "There's somebody I'd like you to meet."
"You'll excuse me for asking, but do you work for Cleary?"
"He doesn't own a contract. He acts as a nonexclusive agent. I pay him a fee per client, just like an actress pays her representative," she says.
She gets up and kisses me on the corner of the mouth where there's a little smear of chicken grease.
"Mmm," she says, "spicy," and walks away with her hips shifting one way and the other, slow and easy. A sexy, compassionate, respectable lady of a suitable age to pleasure an older man.
ELEVEN
"Ain't it funny," my old man says.
We're sitting around the dinner table, Mike and Charlotte, his wife, my mother-in-law, and Aunt Sada, who's back living with them temporarily because of some argument she had with her landlord, who proceeded to evict her from her apartment, and Mary and me and little Kathleen.
"Ain't it funny how here I am, lived most of my life in the Fourteenth, now living out in the suburbs, living in Mount Pleasant, and Jimmy, here, born and raised in the Fourteenth, lived most of his life in the Twenty-seventh, is going home to the Eleventh, ward of the mayors."
"I don't see what's so strange," I say. "Twenty years ago you advised me to move over to the Twenty-seventh because anybody with political ambitions wouldn't have a chance to run for alderman in the Fourteenth, George Lurgan being sure to pass it on to his son."
"I remember giving you that good advice," Mike says.
"But young George ain't the alderman," I say. "Hilda Moskowitz has got the job, stole it right out from under the nose of the Irish the same year Janet Canarias copped the seat in the Twenty-seventh. So look at it one way, I could've stayed back there in the Fourteenth, just like you stayed back in the Fourteenth, and still worked as a precinct captain for the party in the Twenty-seventh, just like Delvin was the warlord and alderman from the Twenty-seventh even though he lived in the Eleventh."
"He had an accommodation address in the Twenty-seventh and a long history of service to the party. Also I thought it best that you should get to know your neighbors and as many people as you could in the ward and there ain't no better way to do that than live in it. Where else and how else could you have got the attention of a Chinaman as powerful as Chips Delvin? Where else could you've got a job like the one you've got?"
I'm about to say I could've done without working down in the sewers for all them years, wading through the muck and mire, but Mary coughs into her hand and then Kathleen imitates her with a little cough and everybody laughs. Another quarrel between Mike and me has been averted.
"Anyway, it's an omen, you moving into Delvin's old house in Bridgeport," Mike says.
I don't have to ask him what he means, though this is the first time I ever knew that my old man might have ambitions for me concerning higher office, even the chair on the fifth floor of City Hall.
"What do you think of the house?" Aunt Sada asks.
"It's beautiful and it's old. Those nine-foot ceilings and cove molding. The hardwood floors are grand," I say.
"The heating system is going to need upgrading. The plumbing could do with a little work as well, I'm sure," Sada says.
"It needs painting and wallpapering," Charlotte chimes in.
There's a lot of work to be done, the women agree.
I'm thinking that there's going to be many, many weekends when I'm going to be working on that old house.
I guess Sada sees that I'm already in a little distress, talking about moving into Delvin's house with his bones hardly cold in the ground.
"What do you think about Leo Lundatos showing up at the funeral?" Aunt Sada asks, changing the subject but not changing it to anything else but politics. Which is okay with me. She's as much a political creature as my old man or me, maybe more, her late husband, Manny Spice, having been a major figure in the Socialist Party. Since Manny and the party was closed out in a two-party town, she ain't forgot and takes every opportunity to ridicule the administration, the parties, and to drag up old grudges.
"Well, why shouldn't he?" Mike asks. "Didn't he know Delvin? Hadn't they come up together as young men?"
"Lundatos is almost a generation younger than Delvin, you figure twenty years to be a generation," Sada says. "Lundatos is more like your age."
"I ain't as old as Leo the Lion," my old man protests. "Well, he's like seventy, maybe seventy-one or -two, is all I'm saying. He was never on a local career track anyway."
"The old mayor had his eye on him."
"But Lundatos had his eyes on federal office right from the start."
"What are you trying to say here, Sada?" Mike asks.
"I'm saying that Lundatos didn't have any reason to go to the funeral of a man a generation older than him and he didn't have any reason to go because he was running for office. His running days are over after this last congressional defeat."
"You're hitting a very long ball here," Mike says. "What makes you think the Lion's hung up his guns?"
"The man's got—what—sixty-two counts of fraud, theft, abuse of power, malfeasance, and misfeasance in the indictment against him."
"Which they ain't totally thrashed out as yet," Mike says. "There's sixty-two counts against him but most of them are minor matters, practically breaches of etiquette."
"There's an even thirty felony counts," Sada says.
"You know how the lawyers work," Mike comes right back. "They want to sue somebody for leaving a rake hidden tines-up in the grass along a public right-of-way? So they sue the homeowner what left it there, the store what sold the rake, the company what manufactured it, the city what failed to send an inspector out to every empty lot to check for such dangers, and so on and so on."
Aunt Sada raises a finger, indicating she's got something to say here, but Mike barrels right on.
"So what they done here was they got these catchall charges like how many times Lundatos used the mails or the telephone to execute this alleged scheme to defraud Congress and the United States by calling crystal lions paperweights—"
"At a hundred and sixty bucks a pop," Sada snaps.
"—mistaking ballpoint pens—"
"Fancy fountain pens—Mont Blancs—at a hundred and fifty bucks each."
"—as Bics at twenty dollars a gross for office use."
"Also you've got a couple of obstruction-of-justice charges," Sada says.
"Like what?"
"Like tampering with a witness, by which is meant that he asked this retired congressional employee not to tell investigators about some work he did for Lundatos around his D.C. apartment for which he was paid out of office petty cash and this other ex-employee who was paid to engrave the bases of the crystal lions with suitable sentiments."
"The man wanted to show his appreciation to friends and neighbors."
"Also he's accused of putting certain people on the staff payroll, some of whom never bothered coming to work, which brings up the corollary charge of conversion of public funds for the salaries of ghost employees. So, perhaps there's one crime but two charges here, the way lawyers work, but that doesn't make the crime any less."
Charlotte and Mary have already lost interest in the conversation, and have gone off into the living room with Kathleen, to talk more about the new house. But I'm enjoying every bit of the match between my father and Aunt Sada, of which Aunt Sada is way ahead on points.
"Howsomever, you'll admit," Mike says, "that sorting out what could be considered felonies and all the charges resulting from the execution of those felonies, it boils down to they got maybe four legitimate charges against him.
"One. He used office money to buy about twenty crystal lions which he had engraved and give to friends and associates.
"Two. Over a period of seven years sixteen thousand dollars—"
"Sixty thousand," Sada says, correcting him.
"—was spent, unaccounted and unvouchered, out of the allowance given to his office for petty-cash expenditures.
"Three. Apparently he'd used campaign funds to pay the leases and garaging expenses on vehicles which might've been for him and his family's personal use.
"Fourth and last. He'd put two, possibly three friends and relatives—"
