THIS IS A SHORT STORY I began in 1976 -- and finished in 2005. It takes a newspaper article which appeared in The New York Times, on Saturday, Feb. 7, 1976, with the headline, "Passers-by Pick Over Woman's Past, without a byline, and constructs a fictional account of how the story came to be written.
As a nation, as we confront decisions about our military options in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and in wake of the tragic rampage at Ft. Hood in Texas, the story will resonate with readers.
The characters and the story are fictional, the newspaper story is real.
People picked over Josep-
hine Oliengo Paglieri’s be-
longings Thursday night. Her
books, furniture and clothes
were strewn about the side-
walk and street, lying in the
snow.
Mrs. Paglieri, who operated
Enrico and Paglieri Restau-
rant after her husband, Paulo,
had died in 1950, lived
in a small flat over the res-
taurant at 64 West 11th Street
for 50 years.
The restaurant, which
opened in 1908, went out of
business last year. But Mrs.
Paglieri continued to live in
the apartment with the same
desk, bureau and bed she had
had for 60 years, until she
died last November, at the
age of 95.
JOSEPHINE KEPT DREAMING she was asleep, never to wake up. The clock on the wall needed to be rewound, the face read 10 o’clock, but Josephine couldn’t decide on night or day, eyes opened or eyes closed. She saw herself strain to get up and relieve herself, her gaunt figure barely raising a shadow in the hallway. It must be evening.
The room hadn’t changed much in 60 years. The oak bureau stood against the wall where the morning sun had streaked its left side. The flowered wallpaper still wore its faded reminders of tiny roses. A wooden bed with ornate carving, bought in 1908, the year the restaurant opened, filled most of the small bedroom, leaving just enough space in the corner for a maple desk, the drawers overstuffed with papers. I must clean this up tomorrow, Josephine promised herself, thinking how she would sweep the floor, and wash the curtains. They get sooty so quickly.
The restaurant underneath her flat was boarded up, but in the afternoon sun, peering through a broken plywood panel from the sidewalk on West 11th Street, one could see empty Chianti bottles still hanging from the ceiling. The tables and chairs had been auctioned off, the stoves and ovens had been disconnected, and the freezers and refrigerators had been sold to Dominique’s, a new French bistro on the Upper West Side.
Josephine thought about Paulo, wondering when he would be coming back. But his face kept moving in and out of focus, like a child’s game, with different noses, chins, eyes, foreheads and mouths, and none of them seemed to fit. She saw herself hobbling to the desk and pulling out the old photographs, finding Paulo’s faded smile, feeling his arms wrap around her once again.
In her flowing black woolen skirt, the high-cut white silk shirt with long sleeves, her black hair pulled back in a bun, an embroidered blue shawl covering her shoulders, she stood arm and arm with Paulo. They posed beneath the canopy over the restaurant entrance, with the newly painted sign, Enrico & Paglieri, gleaming in the window.
And, in Central Park, years later in 1924, Paulo balancing their son, Giuseppe, on his shoulders, Paulo’s bowler derby comically dipped down over the infant’s head.
Giuseppe, nineteen, in his new white Navy uniform, his brown eyes full of pride, stationed at Norfolk, Virginia, with that slight curl on his forehead that would never stay in place.
It had been raining all evening, a late November downpour. The sky was as dark and as cold as the late spring day when the telegram arrived. Missing in Action, the Coral Sea, 1942.
Her fingers found a newspaper clipping, yellowed and flaking, from Page 37, The New York Herald Tribune, giving the restaurant three and half stars “… a delight of delicate sauces from Northern Italian cuisine in a cozy atmosphere, made especially memorable by the charming and very beautiful hostess, Josephine Paglieri….”
In Trieste, a two-week vacation during August 1949, her sister Maria squeezed between Paulo and herself. Paulo’s ruddy, sunburned face squinting towards the sea, Josephine’s shoulder-length black hair flowing like a sail in the wind, streaked by gray and the sun.
Paulo complained he didn’t feel well, it was two days before Easter, he went upstairs to lie down. He had a sharp pain in his chest, he couldn’t breathe, she called the police, they called an ambulance, Paulo was dead on arrival at Bellevue. The restaurant closed for two weeks. In the casket was the only time, she thought, I didn’t see Paulo smiling.
Josephine yearned to be held in Paulo’s embrace, feeling his strong arms wrap around her one more time. “But Paulo,” she protested, “your hands are so cold. You’re hurting me, Paulo,” as the hands tightened around her chest. “I can’t breathe,” she whispered.
On Thursday, Mrs. Paglieri’s
friends cleared the apartment
of her personal possessions
and left them on the side-
walk to be picked up by the
Sanitation Department. Pre-
sently, a young hippie came
by, grabbed one of her bat-
tered suitcases and began to
stuff her old books into it.
He hastily selected the few
leather-bound ones.
You’re a fast worker,”
said his female companion.
She lived next door, near
Fifth Avenue, and was
dressed in a fur coat.
Somebody else rummaged
through Mrs. Paglieri’s worn
dresses. “These are great for
old clothes,” she said. Other
people peered inside the
drawers of Mrs. Paglieri’s
plain wooden bureau.
IT WAS NEARLY 6:00 a.m. Thursday when The New York Times reporter Jack Randolph sat down at the all-night counter on Eighth Avenue to drink coffee and peruse the early edition of the day’s newspaper. Alone and alert after working the graveyard shift, Jack enjoyed watching as the city awoke from another fitful sleep. The diner’s windows served as Jack’s private screening room. Each morning he watched the movie of life beginning anew in the city – from a safe distance. He sipped his coffee, the newspaper ink on his fingers smudging the white porcelain mug, and listened to the rhythmic songs, both human and mechanical, that marked the arrival of the new day: A wild, improvised trio of police sirens, squawking and wailing like avant-garde saxophones; an impromptu soliloquy by a late-night drunk, gesturing with his hands, his legs moving spastically as if he had dropped a lighted cigarette down his pants; the hushed tones of new lovers huddled in a nearby booth, sharing a cigarette as if they were still in bed; and the diesel roar of a delivery truck shifting gears, drowning out the chronic conversation of the short-order cook and the waitress, who, like wannabe actors rehearsing lines, kept repeating the same dialogue over and over. “You don’t wanna go out with me?” “No.” “Why?” “Because you’re ugly.” “You’re no Marilyn Monroe, either.” “She’s dead.” “You’re not. [pause] …So, you wanna go out with me?” “No.”
It had been almost two years since Jack had returned from Vietnam, where he had served as a war correspondent and photographer for Time-Life. His wife, now ex-wife, had found him remote, distant, and unable to talk with her most of the time. He would start to say something, and then lapse into silence, while she waited for him to finish. The awkward pause could last a minute or all afternoon. Jack tried to explain to her that he had too many thoughts, all happening at once in his head, and he couldn’t figure out which thread to follow. He desperately wanted to tell her one particular story, but he had a hard time knowing where to begin. “There was a small village north of Saigon, hooches surrounded by pigs and kids and mamasans,” he began again on the night of their last fight together.
“Haven’t you already told this story 400 times?” his wife, Jeannie, interrupted, her voice filled with frustration. “It was a dark and stormy night. Many people were killed. You watched. Is this story any different? Is it any different than what you do now on the city desk, writing about victims of crime?”
He wanted to shout: “I had to watch the VC kill Tron, his sisters and his mother. They were killed because of me. I was too scared to do anything but watch.” He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out; he was struck dumb, silenced by her anger.
“You’re stuck, Jack. You need help. Your life doesn’t begin and end with Vietnam. You need to let go, to move forward. I’m dying on the vine, and you don’t seem to notice. I’m leaving you. Do you hear me? I’m leaving you.”
But Jack was lost again in the jungle, watching. He had befriended Tron, a 15-year-old Vietnamese boy, who had often worked as Jack’s interpreter when he traveled into the war zone. In gratitude, Jack had given him one of his beat-up Nikons, and Tron latched onto Jack as a provider/father figure.
When the rains broke and the steaming jungle heat returned, Jack took off his American flak jacket and, camera in hand, explained he wanted to climb a nearby ridge and photograph the village. In the heat, it took nearly 45 minutes for Jack to reach the top of the ridge, which was only several hundred yards from the village as the bullet flies. When he looked back at the village, he was startled to see commotion and dust rising up.
The VC had entered the village and found Jack’s flak jacket in the hooch. Looking through his telephoto lens, Jack could see that the VC had lined up Tron, his mother, and his two sisters in the center of the village. As best Jack could tell, the leader of the VC squad was demanding to know where the American was. Tron steadfastly denied there was any American, that it was his jacket. The VC squad leader made Tron put on the flak jacket, which dwarfed his slight frame, for Jack was six-foot, four inches. The VC squad leader pulled his pistol and shot Tron in the head. In rapid succession, he then shot Tron’s mother and sisters, too.
Jack stifled a sobbing, “Nooo!” He was alone, unarmed, and scared. There were about 20 VC. His only choice, if he wanted to live, was to stay silent and watch.
Like a piece of shrapnel that took years to work its way out of flesh, the event had stayed inside him, and he had still never shared it with anyone. Yet, the pain was with him all the time, whenever he worked on a news story.
Two days ago, he had accompanied a mother and father to identify the body of their daughter, who had been raped and murdered in Morningside Heights. She had been a first-year student at Columbia University, and her parents, from Westchester, were still in denial that it could be their daughter. In his story, he had described the way the mother had clung to the father’s arm, her fingers clasped so tightly the knuckles had turned white, when they saw the bruised body. But the copy editor cut it out, sending a note back: “This is the newspaper of record, not a supermarket rag.”
It was now almost eight in the morning, the harsh winter sun illuminating the remains of last week’s snow storm as he walked down Fifth Ave towards his apartment in the Village. His ex-wife had called yesterday, leaving a message, saying she had seen the story and what a wonderful piece of reporting it was. It had been the first time in months he had heard from her. He often had tried to write Jeannie a letter, telling her how sorry he was that he hadn’t been able to make her happy. But he always seemed to get stuck. As he walked along, he tried again and again to compose the letter in his head. “I wanted to tell you about Tron, a young Vietnamese manchild, who took me to his village to meet his family….”
“Young man!” Jack reacted with a start when an older woman called out to him: “Young man! Could you help us, please?”
There were two older women, dressed in winter coats with scarves around their heads so that they looked very much like Russian peasants from an old black-and-white foreign film. They were dragging a wooden bureau up onto a snow bank. “Young man, could you please give us a hand?”
“Where are you taking it?” Jack asked.
“We aren’t going anywhere with it. We’re dumping it in the street. We’re cleaning out Mrs. Paglieri’s apartment. We’re neighbors. She died last November,” the first woman said, as if it were all the explanation needed.
“The Sanitation Department said that they would pick this up today if we put it out on the street,” the other woman said. “We’re so glad you offered to help us move the furniture,” she said, smiling.
Jack started to protest, “I’m not sure that I can….”
The second woman interrupted, pretending not to hear any reluctance. “Sophie and I were praying that a strong young man would come and help us. And, here you are. It’s not easy for two women our age to move furniture up and down stairs. She stuck her mittened hand out: “I’m Marie Sermolina, and this is Sophie Greenblatt.”
Jack shook each of their hands, and introduced himself with a laugh, “I’m Jack Randolph, the newly hired moving assistant.”
That night a large sanita-
tion truck rumbled up the
street to pick up the goods.
An old olive-green velvet
couch crumbled under the
tongs of the truck’s crusher
The desk fell apart when
the garbage men tried to pick
it up. A lifetime of personal
papers, letters, souvenirs and
stationery swirled all over
the sidewalk outside the res-
taurant that Mrs. Paglieri
used to own.
jthe sanitation men shov-
eled and swept, and threw
them inside the truck. But
one photograph remained on
the street behind the vehicle.
It was a picture of Mrs. Pa-
glieri as a young girl, with
her family.
With the two women mostly watching, it took Jack all morning to haul everything down the stairs to the street. There were beautiful leather books, cookbooks, battered suitcases, silverware, dishes, lamps, bundles of letters and photographs, souvenirs from Italy, and two closets full of dresses that had been all well-kept in cleaner’s plastic bags. In the beginning, Jack was careful, tossing the belongings as politely as he could on the sidewalk, out of respect to Mrs. Paglieri and his two women companions. But, the oak dresser had been very heavy, and Jack, growing irritable, had given it a final shove toward the street, where it split open with a loud crack, spilling the colorful contents onto a snow bank
For a moment, Jack was back in Vietnam. He was watching as a VC suspect, tied to a stake, was disemboweled by his South Vietnam captors. The intestines spilled out, the flies buzzing around the captive, still alive, crying out. Jack had gagged, the bile rising from his stomach, clenching his mouth shut as he took photos and sent the film on to Saigon. The editors at Time had chosen not to run any of his photos. It was 1973, during the time of a brief truce, and the editors had sent their photographers humping around the country to capture images of the truce. Jack’s disemboweled VC did not fit into the proper “frame,” the editors told him, much to Jack’s disgust. Back in Saigon, his buddy, Neil Davis, an Australian cameraman, had taped an image of the disemboweled VC over Time’s “Man of the Year” cover as a joke. But to Jack, it captured the real story of the war, and he kept Neil’s “joke” issue, framed it, and hung in his small Saigon apartment where the frame buckled in the damp heat. Now it hung in his Village apartment, the black-and-white print faded into murky, yellowish gray tones. The occasional visitor to Jack’s apartment would almost always walk by the image, then stop, unable to tell exactly what it was, and so move closer, peering at the disemboweled figure, until recognition dawned, and utter an epithet in disbelief: “Oh my God!”
“Are you OK, Mr. Randolph?” Sophie asked, startling Jack out of his reverie. Jack had been muttering to himself, coughing. He nodded, lighting another cigarette, and together, they watched as two or three people rummaged through the Mrs. Paglieri’s belongings, searching for treasure.
A young man with his long hair tied back in a pony tail grabbed one of the suitcases, and with an expert eye, greedily stuffed all the books with leather covers into his new-found satchel. His companion, a young woman in a full-length mink coat, amused by the scene, laughed: “You’re a fast worker.”
Out of instinct, Jack quickly took out his reporter’s notebook and began taking notes, moving quickly from participant to spectator. “I’m Jack Randolph, a reporter with The New York Times,” he introduced himself to the woman. “What’s your name?” The woman eyed him suspiciously. “I’m Patty Hearst,” she said, laughing. “And that’s Abbie Hoffman.”
“Where do you live.” She pointed to the apartment building next door on Fifth Avenue, where the young man was carrying away his horde of books, as the doorman helped open the front door. “Do you do this often?” he asked.
“Every day,” she said with a laugh. “We always cruise the streets looking for found treasures. We’re redistributing the wealth of America,” pulling her fur coat tighter around her as a cold gust of wind blew down the avenue.
“Did you ever know Mrs. Paglieri?”
“Who?”
“The dead woman whose belongings you’re picking through?”
“No. Was she your mother or something?”
“No.”
“Then fuck off.” And she gave him the finger.
He watched as a growing crowd picked through the mound of discarded items. He took more notes. One woman, pawing through the dresses, stopped, uneasy that he was watching her. “These are great for old clothes,” she said, almost as an apology, snatching a few more dresses and stuffing them into a Macy’s shopping bag.
“If there’s something you want, young man, you should help yourself. You’ve certainly earned it,” Sophie Greenblatt told him.
“It’s too sad for me,” Jack said. “Imagine that this is what your life becomes, a free-for-all of all your possessions and memories.”
Sophie tugged on his sleeve. “Better that it should be recycled. The meaning of life is in the living, not in the saving. Memories are like photos, they fade, and then after you’re gone, nobody can remember who’s in the picture. Go ahead, take something.”
“No.”
Soon, a policeman came by, and he eyed the scene with bemusement. He sidled up to Jack and said: “Fucking hippies. Look at them.” Jack offered him a cigarette. The cop lit it, inhaled deeply, then blew out slowing, inhaling the smoke again through his nose. “A bunch of fucking hyenas. But, hey, if they didn’t do it, somebody else would. Dog eat dog.”
Jack nodded his head. “Still, it’s sad to think that all that remains of your life becomes a grab-bag on the street.”
“You a reporter?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you in Nam?”
“Yeah. Were you?”
“Nah, I got a deferment, thanks to my old man.”
“Why’d you ask?”
“I don’t know. You had that look about you, as if you weren’t really here talking to me. My partner’s like that. He did two tours with the Marines. Got a couple of purple hearts and a huge chip on his shoulder. His mind’s kinda cracked up, you know, fubar, fucked up beyond all recognition.”
“I feel dirty watching this,” Jack told him, his voice unexpectedly choked up. “It reminds me of the war. I get roped into helping two old ladies move some furniture to the street, and then, as my reward, I get to watch as it is torn apart by scavengers.”
The cop looked at him, spat in disgust, and started to walk away. He stopped, and turned back, placing himself directly in Jack’s face, his nose a few inches from Jack’s nose, and grabbed his arms.
“Listen up, bud. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Let me tell you a story. My old man, he served in World War II. He was a fucking grunt who fought his way through the Battle of the Bulge. He was with the Army when they stumbled upon Buchenwald. All these starving Jews in their striped uniforms, the bodies piled up all around. He emptied his pockets of all the chocolate he had to give to these Jews. You know what happened? They died, shitting their guts out. The chocolate was too rich, their digestive systems couldn’t handle it, and it killed them. My old man told me the story when I became a cop. He said, ‘Remember, Eddie. Don’t try and help nobody. Don’t be a fuckin’ good Samaritan. You’ll only hurt them and hurt yourself. Just do you job. Keep your nose clean. Don’t get involved.’ Imagine, you give them chocolate, you think you’re helping, and instead, you kill them. Ain’t life a bitch. So, a scene like this, I don’t get involved. It never happened. I never saw it. You understand. I certainly won’t read about it in tomorrow’s paper.”
The cop’s outburst, like a monsoon rain, was sudden, intense, and then just as quickly, over. He let go of Jack’s arms, threw his cigarette butt on the sidewalk, and as an afterthought, added: “Hey, it’s the speech I’ve been meaning to lay on my partner. You just happened to catch it first.”
“Well, maybe you will,” Jack said, and offered his hand to shake.
“Huh?”
“Read it in tomorrow’s newspaper.”
The cop smirked, slapped Jack’s hand, then walked off, shaking his head. “Sure. Sure. Sure.”
The driver of the sanitation
truck picked it up. He
glanced at it while the desk
was splintering under the
weight of the garbage.
He hopped into he cab and
roared off, leaving a few pa-
pers fluttering in the wind
behind him.
“She was a fabulous wo-
man, you know,” said Marie
Sermolino, a good friend of
Mrs. Paglieri, who lives
across the street, “ a beautiful
and matriarchal type if there-
ever was one. She was a
great hostess, and very gene-
rous with the food and
wine.”
THE EVENING SHADOWS began to fall upon the buildings, painting a coat of darkness on the brick and brownstone. Marie Sermolina invited Jack up to her apartment for a cup of tea. It was almost four, he was due at work in an hour, and he hadn’t slept since yesterday, but Jack accepted, curious to talk with her about Mrs. Paglieri.
Marie Sermolina’s apartment was across the street from Mrs. Paglieri’s, and it was decorated in 1960’s style of modern – with lots of square, sharp corners, a vinyl couch that had once been bright orange, and lamps bent into steel trapezoids. “My husband worked for a furniture store,” she explained. “He got everything half-price.”
There was a knock on the door and Sophie Greenblatt entered, without waiting for Marie to come to the door. The two women, now both single in their late 60s, had been a generation younger than Mrs. Paglieri. She was old school, old country, a woman of manners and tradition and grace.
“It was hard for me, you know, sometimes to be with her, because I grew up in Queens, and at my family dinner table, there wasn’t much that passed for manners,” Sophie began. “For Mrs. Paglieri, it mattered that the place was set with salad forks and salad plates, and that you used salad forks for the salad. She could be intimidating, like royalty.”
The women called Mrs. Paglieri a good friend, but after an hour of talking with them, Jack still had very few facts about Mrs. Paglieri. She had been 95 when she died last November, which meant that she had been born in 1880. They couldn’t remember the name of the small town in Italy – “something like Sparrow.” Her husband, Paulo, had died in 1950, “a tragedy.” The restaurant had opened in 1908, and it closed just last year. “She was a fabulous woman, you know, a beautiful and matriarchal type if there ever was one. She was a great hostess, and very generous with the food and wine,” Marie said, slurping her tea.
It might have been the tea, or the sudden change from damp cold to an overheated kitchen, but fatigue overcame Jack, he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Despite the banter of the women and the calliope of grunts, knocks and wheezes emanating from the forced hot water heating pipes, he fell asleep as he sat at Marie’s kitchen table, his head sideways on the table, his hand clasping the reporter’s notebook. The two women ignored him, occasionally tsk-tsking at his snores, as if he had been one of their late husbands.
It was almost six p.m. when Jack awoke suddenly, and sat up with a start. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said too loudly, and then, looking at the shocked faces of the women, “Oh shit, I’m sorry. Pardon my French. Can I borrow your phone? I’m late for work.”
The phone, a pink Princess model from the 1960’s, with an old rotary dial, had the musk of Marie’s perfume all over the receiver. It was disconcerting for Jack to try and talk to the assistant night editor on the city desk, Tony Schwartz, while inhaling the strong stale scent.
Schwartz, who had gone to a fancy private school and Princeton, tried to hide his pedigree with a thick – and fake – street-smart accent, to make him sound tougher than the horn-rimmed 28-year-old nudnik that he was.
“Hey, Jack-o, whah da fuck gives? Ard-chou special or sum-think? We gotta outbreak of stabbings on 125th Street. Ged jour ass up dhere.”
Jack couldn’t resist a sarcastic needle: “Do you have a cold, Tony? Or do you have relatives visiting from Rhode Island.”
Schwartz switched to his more normal voice. “Serious stuff, Jack. Rosenthal was done here asking where you were.”
“Abe was looking for me?” Jack said in disbelief. In his two years back from Nam, Rosenthal, who ran the Times newsroom, had managed to grunt at him once or twice in passing. Once, they had shared urinals next to each other; it was the closest Jack had come to an intimate conversation with Rosenthal. One night a few weeks back Jack had gotten drunk before work, and then complained too loudly on the newsroom floor that he was really the ghost of a dead Cambodian soldier, a trinket Buddha in his mouth, charging into combat chanting shibboleths. This made him invisible, and big macher editors, such as Rosenthal and Gelb, would never be able to see him. A long-time copy editor, offended by Jack’s drunken tirade, had proceeded to take Jack’s byline off his piece about the murder of a homeless woman, and buried the story inside. “Listen, Schwartz, just tell Abe if he asks again, I’m working on a great story. I’ll stop by the precinct on my way in.”
He left the two women in a hurry, unlit cigarette in his mouth, bounding down the stairs. Outside, on the street, a sanitation truck was making quick work of Mrs. Paglieri’s belongings. Within fifteen minutes, most everything was gone. The olive green velvet couch crumbled under the truck’s crusher. The desk split apart when the workmen tried to load it, splintering in half, spilling letters and photographs all over the street, to the curses of the garbage men, who then swept and shoveled the detritus into the truck’s hungry maw. The driver jumped off the truck, and picked up a one remaining photograph from the snow, examined it like a Playboy magazine pin-up, then tossed it down atop a dirty snow bank. He hopped back into the cab, the truck roared off into the city night, trailed by papers fluttering into the street, his co-workers hanging on the sides of the truck.
In the wake of the remnants of Mrs. Paglieri’s life being hauled away, Jack bent down and picked up the photograph. It was of a young Josephine Paglieri and her family, now blotched from melting snow. He put it into his coat pocket and hailed a taxi uptown.
Beneath the story, in “Metropolitan Briefs,” there was a small item about a stabbing in “From the Police Blotter.”
Charles Trowell, 24, of 2930 West 30th Street,
Brooklyn, was fatally stabbed in a dispute with another
customer in a restaurant at 1527 Surf Avenue, in the
Coney Island section of Brooklyn. The assailant escaped.
At his cubbyhole of an office at the Times building on West 43d Street, Jack banged away, in hunt-and-peck style, at the manual Olympia, putting together a 1,500-word piece, 10 typed pages, triple-spaced, in less than an hour, more than double the normal length for a news story. Cigarette dangling from his lips, coffee mug on the desk, Jack was a throwback to the B.C. era – before computers. He wrote and rewrote the scene of the young man pawing through the belongings while his companion in the fur coat watched. He described the young man as having a ponytail, hoping it would make it through the copy desk. He xxxxx’ed out the clause, “who called herself Patty Hearst,” describing the young woman, knowing it would never make it past the copy editors and into the paper. He left in her praise of him, “You’re a fast worker,” and the fact that she is wearing a fur coat.
By nine, the first deadline for city news, Jack has filed the story with the copy desk.
Soon a call came in on the police squawk box – which The Times, like all newspapers, monitored – about a fatal stabbing in Coney Island. Jack grabbed his coat and headed out, singing out loud to himself, as if it were an advertising jingle: “Crime is my beat, murder is my business.”
Two hours later, around midnight, from a pay phone, he called in the story to the night desk. His lead sentence: “Charles Trowell died hungry,” was cut by the copy editors. So, too, was his description of the “tiled restaurant floor slick with blood, as the victim tried to crawl out the door.”
“The incident,” Jack told the night editor, “according to one witness, a waitress, concerned the assailant cutting in line ahead of Mr. Trowell, who had cursed him out. The assailant stabbed Mr. Trowell four times in the chest and stomach, then fled.”
“Do you have the waitress’s name?” the editor asked.
“Louise.”
“Louise what?”
“Louise, who didn’t want to give her last name, because the killer is still on the loose.”
“You know we can’t use it without a last name, Jack.”
“If she gives her last name, she’s as good as dead, too.”
“Then we can’t use it.”
“Don’t bust my chops. I’ll be lucky if this piece makes the newspaper in the ‘Police Blotter.’ Life and death in less than 35 words.”
ANGRY AND EXHAUSTED, Jack finally got home to his apartment at around 3 a.m. Without taking his coat off, he poured himself three fingers of Jack Daniels and slumped into a decrepit armchair he inherited from his grandfather, letting the alcohol numb his mind and body. He had almost reached oblivion, letting go of the images of the sanitation truck carting away 95 years of living in less than a half-hour. He mumbled to himself about how sad it was to write a young man’s life and death into one paragraph that could be read in less time that it took for him to bleed to death as he crawled across the restaurant floor. He put his hand into his coat pocket, reaching for his cigarettes, and instead pulled out the crumpled, water-stained photograph of Mrs. Paglieri. For a moment, the image he saw was that of Tron, his mother and his sisters.
Jack sat up, pulled off his coat, and marched off to the pantry, where an old metal filing cabinet with five drawers crowded out spices, cooking and cleaning supplies. In the bottom drawer were his negatives from Vietnam, some carefully arranged in binders, the others thrown together in manila folders, what his ex-wife once called his “garden of bad dreams.”
It took a while to find the shots of Tron, his mother and his sisters in the hooch, because with each photograph there was a memory to walk through and discard, but there they were, filed in the binder, and dated. From another drawer he grabbed an unopened box of photo paper, hoping it was still good, and wound his way to second bathroom, converted to his darkroom when he returned from Vietnam.
It took almost until dawn for Jack to be satisfied with the quality of the print. He stared at the photo as it hung drying, feeling the angry eyes of Tron’s mother upon him. She appeared very upset that he would invade their home and insist on taking a photograph. Tron’s sisters, so shy, looking away, unwilling to make eye contact. And, Tron, proud, smiling, happy, but less than an hour from his death. On the way to his mother’s village, Jack had mentioned to Tron that he wanted to adopt him as his son.
It was almost daylight when Jack left his makeshift darkroom and, sitting at the kitchen table, began to write a letter to his ex-wife. It is hand-written, in a reporter’s notebook, stream of consciousness, because Jack feared that if he ever stopped to re-read it or edit it, he would get stuck and never send it.
It began: “I have so many things to say to you and I don’t know if you will ever hear them. Of all the letters I sent you from Vietnam, you never saved any, which told me before I came back that we had no future, because you couldn’t hold onto to me any longer. You always said that we should have had more time, dated more, instead of rushing in to our marriage. But the world isn’t planned and meted out, like slices of wedding cake, it is always spinning and it’s hard to hold onto without losing your sense of direction.
Today, I watched as an old woman’s belongings were dumped on the street and then picked over by everyone walking by. It was one of the saddest things I have ever seen, but one of the old ladies who was her friend told me something that still resonates, like a great song lyric, “The meaning of life is in the living, not in the saving. Memories are like photos, they fade, and then after you’re gone, nobody can remember who’s in the picture.”
My problem is that I can remember who’s in the picture, still.
I went home after filing the story and dug through my old negatives, it took me four hours, and I often got stuck in my own world of memories. But I found it, the negatives from February 1973, of my friend Tron, a 15-year-old boy, his mother, and his sisters, in their hooch, right before I watched them killed by the VC. I know I may have once written to you about it before, from Vietnam, calling it “pictures at an execution,” but I never told you the full story, that I was responsible for their deaths. When I came back, you told me you had thrown away everything I wrote. Why?
Since I’ve been back, I’ve wanted to tell you all about Tron, a young Vietnamese manchild, who took me to his village to meet his family, and how he died, it was my fault. But I didn’t know how to tell you, your anger always silenced me. Or, I would start to tell you and you would say you had to brush your teeth, come talk with me, while you brushed your teeth, as if what I had to say was as important as the mindless song on the radio you hummed along with as I talked.
Here is the image of Tron, his sisters and his mother, a half-hour before they were murdered, as I watched through a telephoto lens. You can throw it away, as you threw away my letters from Vietnam, the same way that our country threw away so many lives, both American and Vietnamese. We are responsible for everything we see, as well as everything we do.
You were always so angry with me, you were always enraged with me. As if our life were a movie that you could rewind and stop the action, before things went wrong. There were always so many things that went wrong with our marriage.
Here Jack got stuck, and put the notepad down, and stumbled off to bed.
He woke up in the late afternoon to a ringing telephone. It was work; he was late. After a quick shower, Jack put his wrinkled pants and shirt back on, grabbed his coat, and headed back to the office.
TWENTY-NINE YEARS LATER, Jack’s ex-wife found the letter and photograph in a manila envelope pinned to a bulletin board next to the refrigerator in Jack’s apartment. Jack had been dead for two weeks, a victim of prostate cancer that came back with a vengeance after a six-year remission. Jack had blamed it on his exposure to Agent Orange. Jeannie hadn’t talked with Jack for almost a decade; she didn’t go to the funeral.
When Jack’s lawyer had called for the fourth time, asking her to go through Jack’s apartment, arguing that in had been in the will, Jack had specifically left her all his belongings, she finally gave in and agreed. The lawyer said he felt very uncomfortable throwing everything into the garbage without her at least looking through Jack’s things.
“Yeah, well, I’ll do it, but on these conditions. You bring the garbage bags, you haul the trash out the street, and I’ll go through his shit,” she said.
The envelope had her name and address, written out in Jack’s half-printed, half-written script, and was stamped, but it had never been mailed. After a moment’s hesitation, she ripped it open and sat down to read it at the kitchen table. She looked at the photograph, then re-read the letter again.
The lawyer asked: “What does it say? What’s the photograph?
Jeannie thought for a moment, and answered slowly: “Just a bad memory. A family photograph he must have thought I would want. I don’t.”
Jack’s ex-wife tossed the letter, photograph and envelope into an half-filled trash bag, tied off the top, and, brushing past the pot-bellied lawyer, took it out to the hallway, where she tossed it atop a dozen similar bags, dull greenish black, like body bags, with red plastic ties.
The lawyer was briefly tempted to rip open the bag, to see what had been tossed out, but repressed the urge. It was her property to dispose of.
For the next half-hour, the pace of work of Jack’s ex-wife quickened. Without looking at things, she tossed them into the plastic bags, and the lawyer brought them to the hallway.
“That’s it,” she said suddenly, sitting down at the kitchen table. “I’m going.” She put on her coat, and walked out the door, before Jack’s lawyer could say anything in protest.
Jack’s lawyer sat down, took out his cell phone, and dialed the number of a cleaning service he used for such occasions. Yes, they would be there within the hour, and yes, they would take care of the furniture. As he waited at the kitchen table, he noticed a very yellowed newspaper article, cut out, with a faded black-and-white photograph, blotchy with water damage, that had apparently fallen on the kitchen floor when Jack’s ex-wife had removed the envelope with her name on it. It was an old New York Times article, with the headline, “Passers-by Pick Over Woman’s Past,” with no byline.
Jack’s lawyer picked it up, glanced at it, then crumpled it up in a ball and tossed it back on the kitchen floor. “Ashes to ashes,” he said to himself.
For my friend, Barr Ashcraft, who lost so many things in his life – including tens of thousands of negatives, and two decades of his writing when his house burned down. In response, he became a hoarder, trying to preserve what he had lost. After he died, most of his belongings were auctioned off – hundreds of cars, trucks and motorcycles he kept on his property in Shutesbury.
Richard Asinof Copyright 2009. All Rights Reserved.
