A Welcome Haunting - Part Twenty
TUESDAY NIGHT SHIFT INTO OLD SMOKE
The El Greco grew blurry in a haze of cigarette smoke not allowed and not there. The walls went soft. Smells became sharper. Ashtrays mixed with exhaustion and anxiety. A train rumbled overhead on phantom tracks.
We were being watched, Pete Cacchione and I. But this coffee shop on 86th Street in Bensonhurst was always watched in 1944 since it was a known meeting place for Communists.
Pete was a City Councilman, a Communist and near blind. He had fellow travelers meet in shifts at the coffee shop to read documents to him throughout the night. Personal and official correspondence, city documents, zoning maps and bill memos were stacked inches high on my grandfather’s right side and Pete was sitting on his left at the counter. I could tell that my grandfather’s eyes were tired and he was starting to sound hoarse. Sheets of paper with scribbled notes were ripped from notebooks and attached with paperclips to reviewed documents.
Responsibility for the inevitable conflict everyone in the room was working to hasten rested heavily on their shoulders but there was a buoyant optimism present, tempered by well deserved paranoia, which kept a hopeful background energy buzzing from the counter stools to the front booths to the tables in the back.
Smoking wasn’t unhealthy yet and the orange glow at the tip of cigarettes held between parents’ lips provided comfort to restless children throughout New York City, especially the red diaper babies who, now old enough to pick up on some of what organized their lives, worried about mothers and fathers being taken away. So the kinder stayed awake until the grown-ups came home and some never got over being worried for the rest of their lives.
“Just two more letters, Moishe, and we’ll stop. Milt is coming in soon so we’ll do these two and then eat something,” Pete said to my grandfather.
I was sitting at a table behind them with a cup of coffee and a soft pack of cigarettes in front of me. Soft packs hold better cigarettes. I had a lit one between my fingers and was drinking coffee from the same hand, like everyone else in the room. Nobody put their cigarettes down, not when drinking or talking or reading or doing nothing.
“Sure Pete, two more, or more. Whatever you need. I’m fine. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“Yeah. You and me both. So what do we have next?”
And then I couldn’t hear anybody talking anymore. I was one step out of time, moved into a space a moment off. People were speaking with each other, that I could see, and I knew there was noise in the room. I saw coffee cups being put back into chipped saucers and spoons dropped onto the counter, but a pressure building behind my eyes was generating a loud pushing buzz that blocked everything out. Motion trails attached to everything and everyone in the room. Deep breaths focused me a bit and I mentally anchored myself to my chair. Slowly I felt myself settling back into the coffee shop and the pressure abated.
Then my grandfather turned his body slightly towards my table, and looked back at me at an angle.
“You don’t belong here.”
The pressure returned worse and sharply and spread quickly and painfully down to the base of my neck and the front of my head. Everything faded away as I watched my grandfather turn back in his seat and talk to Pete.
I was back at the El Greco.
“Don’t ever do that again,” said a tired looking man with a blackened bloody eye, a split lip and a sloppily bandaged hand.
“Don’t. Ever. Visit. Like. That. Again,” he repeated slowly. “You can die coming back if you’re not careful. What if I hadn’t been there? What if I had told Pete I was too tired to do more letters and went home before you slid in?”
“I didn’t mean to do anything. I won’t...I don’t even know what happened. You’re hurt – what happened to you? Where were you?”
“What does it look like? I was beaten up bad. A lot of us were. It was that kind of day,” he said, offering a wry and bloody smile. He reached across the table to take some napkins from the silver dispenser, folded several in half and blotted at his lip with them.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Doesn’t matter. Peekskill. Read about it, if they wrote about it.”
“Pete seemed like a nice guy. Whatever happened to him?”
“Died about two years from when you saw him tonight, close to the end of 1946 I think. Young too, not even fifty years old.”
“Funny thing for you to say,” I said, looking out to where Jackie’s car had been parked not too long ago. “You died young.”
“Yeah, Sorry about that. But not so young for the time.”
“Don’t be sorry, you’re the one who died.”
“Dying was easy. Sticking around is the hard part. That’s why not too many do it.”
“I hope you’re not expecting an apology,” I said, probably too quickly. “This isn’t easy for me either. There’s no rock opera explaining you to me.”
“I never wanted one,” my grandfather said firmly as he lifted himself up carefully from the booth, grimacing and obviously in pain. “I have to get some rest. I forgot how much this hurt and I’m not sure why I went back there.”
I took one last bite of my dinner, stood up and walked double time to catch up with the wounded Jew. He took my arm.
“Penance,” I said. “You went back to a beating to make up for putting me in harm's way in the coffee shop with Pete. You feel guilty about that but you shouldn’t. It’s all my doing, not yours. I’ll take whatever comes.”
We walked past the cash register where Jackie had already paid the bill. My grandfather gave a look when nobody stopped me for leaving without reaching into my wallet.
We were standing in the parking lot next to my car. The lot was cool and filled with salty mist.
“You have any idea how this is going to end?” I asked.
“I’m the wrong guy to ask, boychik. The dead don’t provide answers. They just reflect what the living already know. I’ll tell you this though, I really hope you’ll be alright with what you’re going to need to accept in order to get through this.”
The dead don’t provide answers.
Yes they do. Or rather, they can.
And then I figured it out. I knew. I felt the grateful relief of those who applauded the lights coming on at England’s Brighton pier in the years after World War Two.
“You’re not entirely right,” I corrected. “The dead may not provide answers but they can provide evidence.”
My grandfather came in close to put a rough kiss on my cheek. Then he turned his back towards me and looked out to the bay.
“I’ve always liked being near the water. It’s a Russian thing. Maybe when you’re older you’ll figure out what that’s all about.”
Then he walked slowly up into the mist and out into the bay, his right hand massaging his left shoulder until he just stopped and fell down dead.