[Author's Note: I think life is a lot like this. We don't see everything that's going on. We only see a small part of it all. If we could see more of it, things might make a lot more sense.
And, yes, the characters in this story are a blend of a lot of people from my extended family. And the places are a blend of where they used to live on Federal Hill in Providence.
Put it all together and you get yet another unsellable story.]
The Missing Loot
“Markie, I seen something once,” my Uncle
Lou whispered to me.
This was in the 1970s, and I was at a
birthday party for my cousin Carmen at her family’s house on Federal Hill in
Providence. Like all parties in Rhode Island, it was a surprise party, and
Carmen had been surprised, even though in Rhode Island all parties are surprise
parties.
I wasn’t into these family gatherings much.
My mother had eleven brothers and sisters – giving me thirty-three first
cousins – and hardly a week went by without somebody having a birthday,
anniversary, wedding, christening, or first communion. Living away at college,
I managed to duck a large percentage of these, but I had gotten roped into this
one because my mother was sick and somebody just had to bring Carmen her
present. I had escaped the escalating din that my relatives called
conversation, and retreated to an empty room where I was paging through a
twenty-year-old magazine on perennials, the only reading material I could find.
That’s where Uncle Lou tracked me down.
“You seen something once?” I repeated.
“Yeah,” he admitted sheepishly, “and I done
something once, too.”
I don’t know why, but people are always
confiding their darkest secrets to me. Maybe it’s my face, or the fact that I’m
a scientist and therefore unlikely to spill the beans to anyone they know.
Once, while my roommate was out getting us a pizza, his girlfriend had seized
the opportunity to confess that she'd once robbed a 7-Eleven with a former boyfriend
she'd shacked up with when she was only 15. It had made for an awkward pizza
party when my roommate got back. With Uncle Lou, I braced myself for the worst,
and hoped he’d keep it clean.
“You’re smart, Markie,” he said. “Maybe you
can figure it out.”
“Figure what out?”
“You heard about the big robbery over at
the bank?”
“Yes,” I replied guardedly. The Big Robbery
had occurred about thirty years ago, way before I was born, something like
1947. Three guys with a real brain-bender of a plan – guns in their fists and
handkerchiefs over their faces – had held up the main bank branch in Hoyle
Square. Miraculously, no one had been hurt, and the thieves got away with three
leather satchels packed with cash, quite a haul for those days. They took off
in their getaway car and careened straight through this neighborhood. To the
folks around here, the moon landing and the Kennedy assassination were small
potatoes compared to the Big Robbery.
“You know, they never found the third bag
of money,” Uncle Lou said meaningfully.
I had heard this part, too. Their driving
skills apparently lagged their robbing skills, because the thieves had plowed
their car into a telephone pole. One went through the windshield and was killed
instantly. Another broke his leg and managed to limp two blocks before the cops
caught him. The third was knocked out cold. The live ones had gone to prison,
of course. Once, when we were giving my old grandmother a ride home, she had
pointed out the very telephone pole and counseled me sagely, “Never rob a bank,
Markie.”
However, the big mystery was precisely as
Uncle Lou had said: they had left the bank with three bags of money and cracked
up minutes later. The police found only two bags of money. The third bag had
vanished.
I stared hard at Uncle Lou and pointed to
the chair next to mine. “Sit down,” I commanded, and he sat down. “Do you have
that money?”
He shook his head. “No, of course not,” he
insisted vehemently.
I let out a breath of relief. “Okay.”
“But I did,” he added, like a kid admitting
to cookie larceny.
I laid down the perennials magazine. “Maybe
you’d better start at the beginning.”
*****
Yeah, okay. Well, you see, I was on my way
home from work a little early that day. This was maybe a year after Carmen was
born and we lived in a tenement up the block. Anyways, I was crossing the
street when this car comes out of nowhere and squeals around the corner, almost
flipping over. I watched them drive off and I think I swore at them. Driving
around dangerous like that, I mean. You know, you get married, have a kid, you
want the world to be a safe place. You don’t appreciate stuff like that.
So I turn back to cross the street again,
and I see this bag rolling along the street. I look back at the car but it’s
gone already. But I figure the bag must have fell out of the car when they
turned that corner so sharp. I look both ways and there’s no traffic, so I go
over to the bag and pick it up. It was a brown leather bag, like a lawyer might
carry. And I’m standing in the middle of the street trying to figure out how I
can get that bag back to those clowns, when I hear all these sirens coming
closer.
You’re not kidding, wow. I run back to the
sidewalk to be out of the way. Then I look at where that car went, and I look
at the bag in my hand, and I look up at all these cop cars heading toward me,
and I get the picture. This musta been a robbery, and the bag dropped out the
car window by mistake. So I figure I’ll give the bag to the cops and be done
with it. But then it occurs to me that a bunch of cops chasing robbers and
seeing me standing there with the bag – well, I got scared. They might shoot me
or something, throw me in jail or something.
So I think I better hide it, and then maybe
turn it in later or something. All this goes through my head in like a second,
before they even get near me. I look around, and I’m near the Giusti’s house.
You know the way they have those stairs that go down under the porch? I just
stick my arm under there and shove the bag in.
I stand up, and there go six cop cars right
by me. Some of them went straight, some turned. I just stood there watching
them. Then they’re gone, and like five seconds later, there’s this awful crash.
That musta been the robber’s car hitting that telephone pole.
Anyway, I look around and here’s the strange
thing: there’s nobody around but me. It’s like 3 o’clock on a Friday afternoon,
but there’s nobody around. The Giustis are still at work. You’d think there’d
be a car on the street, or someone walking, or kids playing – although it was
February, so maybe it was too cold to play – but nobody around. Nope. Just me.
Nobody saw anything.
And then I start thinking, you know, what
if I don’t turn it in? I got a wife, a new baby, what if I just hang onto that
bag, you know? Hey, I ain’t proud of this, I’m just telling you. So I leave it
there, under the Giusti’s porch, nobody can see it, and I walk home.
Soon, everybody’s talking about the
robbery, Mary, everybody. But that night I keep thinking about it and thinking
about it and I couldn’t do it. I mean, I just didn’t feel right about keeping
the money.
So, the next morning, I told Mary I was
going for a walk and I went down to the Giusti’s to get the bag. I figure I’ll
take the money to the police, tell them I found it by the side of the road.
That could happen, right? The crazy way they was driving? Actually, that is
what happened. Where was I? Right, I’m thinking I’ll turn in the money: who
knows? Maybe there’s even a reward or something!
Then what happens? I go to the Giusti’s
house and the bag’s gone! I look all around: nowhere. It’s just gone. And I
think, well, somebody else must have found it there, and we’ll soon hear about
it. But nothing. The police never get it. I never hear about anybody coming
into a lot of money. It just vanished.
*****
I sat looking at my Uncle Lou in amazement,
feeling kind of proud of him. “You did good,” I told him. “You did the right
thing.”
He leaned close. “I never told nobody about
this. Don’t you tell your Aunt Mary, either.”
I shook my head. “No, I won’t tell anyone.
There’s no reason to. It’s a good story, though.”
He nodded. “Sure, but what I want you to do
is help me figure out what happened. Where’d that bag go?”
I squinted at him. “Are you serious? This
happened thirty years ago. How am I supposed to know what happened to it?
Besides, you said it yourself, somebody else must have picked it up.”
He was shaking his head. “Markie, I been
thinking about this for thirty years, and it don’t make sense. For one thing,
nobody saw me. There was nobody there but me, I’m sure of it. For another, how
would anybody find a bag stuck under somebody’s porch by accident? You can’t
see it from the outside. You’d have to see it being put there, and there was
nobody there to see. Besides, you know this neighborhood. Everybody knows everybody’s
business. If somebody found a lot of money, it would be all over the place. But
no one’s ever heard a word about this.”
He sat back, satisfied that he’d made his
case.
I turned it over in my mind. The way he
said it, it really didn’t make sense. Things don’t just disappear. Conservation
of mass. Someone had to have taken it. But to take it, they’d have had to know
it was there. But if no one saw it, how could they know it was there? And if
they did take it, what happened to it?
I stood up and reached for my jacket. “Come
on,” I said. “Let’s go for a walk.”
*****
The Giusti’s house was on the next street
over from Uncle Lou’s. I knew the Giusti’s house. I knew, for example, that a
Giusti hadn’t lived in “the Giusti’s house” for twenty years; they had all
moved to the suburbs. The family that lived there now was named Hancock, but
everyone in the neighborhood still referred to it as the Giusti’s house. Even
the Hancocks called it the Giusti’s house when they described where they lived.
I thought they should just change their name to Giusti and make it easier for
everybody.
Like every other house on the block, it had
a wooden staircase that led from the sidewalk up to the porch. However, it also
had a funny stone staircase that ran down, under the porch, where there was a
basement door that I had never seen open. When I was a kid visiting my
grandmother’s, that staircase was a great hiding place, and we used to use it
during hide-and-seek games. Being such a great hiding place, it was the first
place the seeker always looked, so it wasn’t such a great hiding place, but it
was still a great hiding place because it was fun to hide down there.
Uncle Lou showed me where he had tried
crossing the street, where the getaway car had come from, where it had gone,
where he had picked up the bag, where the cops came from and went, and,
finally, where he had put the bag. He was right. It was impossible.
To get it, or even see it, you had to go
down that stone staircase. I looked up and down the street, trying to imagine
it in February of 1947. Fewer cars, probably fewer houses. No place where a
person could really hide and see what he had done.
Thinking of hiding reminded me of those
hide-and-seek games. “Keep a lookout,” I said, and ducked down the staircase.
It was just like I remembered it. When you were at the bottom, you couldn’t see
anything but sky, and no one could see you. Great hiding place.
I cocked my head. If you were an adult
instead of a kid, you’d be more visible. I stood up to my full height at the bottom
of the staircase and turned slowly around. You still couldn’t see anything but
sky, and some telephone wires. I stopped turning. I could see one window of a
three-story house on the other side of the street.
I ran quickly up the steps and pointed with
my head at the house. “That house – ” I began, but I knew before the words were
out of my mouth.
Mrs. Benecino. Scourge of my childhood, at
least in that neighborhood. No matter what you tried pulling, Mrs. Benecino
would see you. She had once spotted me taking a leak behind a tree a hundred
yards away and had called my grandmother.
“Does Mrs. Benecino still live in that
house?” I asked suspiciously.
Uncle Lou looked where I was looking. “Of
course,” he said, as if she were a permanent part of the landscape. “What does
she have to do with it?”
I was still staring at the house. “She
could have seen you,” I declared.
He snorted. “But she couldn’t get the bag,”
he pointed out, and gave me a meaningful look.
Mrs. Benecino was an invalid, which is to
say she couldn’t walk too well. She used two canes, and almost never left her
third-floor apartment. I remembered masses at Christmas and Easter when she
would appear at the church and there would be a hush as she made her slow way
down the aisle to the very front row, which she claimed by right of the
difficulty it caused her. It took a squad of her children and grandchildren to
ease her down the tenement stairs and back up again afterwards for her twice
yearly descent to earth.
Her inability to actually get the bag
didn't seem so important. According to the physicist Heisenberg, merely
observing an event could alter the event. He'd been talking about electrons,
not Mrs. Benecino, but I felt that the principle was the same.
“One step at a time,” I said. “Let’s go visit
Mrs. Benecino.”
*****
The staircase to her third floor apartment
was steep and twisty. Plus, there was an ancient and persistent smell of soup.
I felt claustrophobic by the time we reached the triple-locked door. Uncle Lou
rapped lightly.
“Who is it?” croaked a voice that would
have scared the childhood me into a month of nightmares.
“It’s Lou Amitano, Mrs. Benecino,” he
began, a little uncertainly, and I waited for him to explain his visit. But he
was spared having to dredge anything up, because there was a rattle of locks
and the door opened inward.
Mrs. Benecino was nearly five feet tall, in
black from steel eyeglass frames to rubber shoe sole, the fashion statement
favored by Italian widows. Eighty, if a day. She held sleek aluminum canes in
her hands, and she knew how to use them. She adroitly backed up and made room
for us to enter. We did, quickly, and she slammed and locked the door behind
us.
“This is my nephew, Markie, my wife’s
sister’s oldest boy,” Uncle Lou told her.
I was about to say hello and shake hands
when she turned away pointedly. She moved cane-step, cane-step, like a natural
quadruped, and dropped into an armchair with a little puff of air. We sank
tentatively onto two rickety wooden chairs facing her.
She was scrutinizing me closely through her
glasses. “I know you,” she pronounced at last.
I smiled at her encouragingly.
“You peed behind a tree.”
So, she wanted to play hardball? I folded
my arms across my chest and leaned back. The chair creaked ominously. “You have
a terrific memory, Mrs. Benecino,” I began. “And terrific eyesight. I’ll bet
you can tell me exactly what my Uncle Lou was up to the day of the big bank
robbery.”
She swiveled her head to Uncle Lou, then
back to me, like some animatronic robots I had seen once in Disneyland. “Lou?”
she asked.
“The day he picked up the bag,” I prompted.
Uncle Lou was staring at me, aghast that I
had spilled his beans.
But she knew. I would never accuse her of
smiling, but she kind of wrinkled her face at me. Her eyeglasses gleamed as she
leaned forward, her hands motionless on the canes like on the armrests of a
throne. “Oh, that,” she said.
*****
“You know, it’s not like I’m always
watching out the window, either. Hey, I mind my own business. I’m not one to
butt into other people’s affairs, like some I could name, that Grace Tartaglia.
She’s one to talk.
“Sure, I remember that day. I wasn’t even
looking out the window, I was cooking at the stove, and I hear this car come
skidding around the corner. Crazy drivers, I says. People drive crazy around
here. But I don’t even look then. Why do I want to see some crazy driver? And
they’re probably gone anyway, the way they drive.
“Then I hear sirens coming and I think,
Good. The cops’ll fix them. Driving crazy around here. So I wipe my hands on
the dishtowel and go over to the window. It takes me a while, I’m not so fast
with these things. And I look out the window, but there’s no car and no cop
cars there yet, but I see Lou take this leather bag and shove it up under the
Giusti’s porch. And I’m thinking, What’s he up to there?”
She gave Uncle Lou a look and he shifted
uneasily in his chair. She seemed pleased to have made him squirm, and resumed.
“Just then, my grandson Francis shows up,
of all times. I used to mind him after school some days, until his mother got
home from work. Always, ‘Gramma, can I listen to the radio?’ All the time, the
baseball games, the radio shows. What a headache. So anyway, I come away from
the window and I don’t see what he’s doing with that bag.
“Then I start to thinking about Francis.
Sometimes I’d send him on little errands, you know. Half the time he balls
things up, but he’s not a baby, 11 or 12 he must have been then, he can go
places for me.
“So I says to him, “Francis, I need you to
go do something for me.” And he says, “What, Gramma?” And then I think, What
can I tell him so he’s going to get this bag for me?”
It was a good question. I didn’t know how
I’d get somebody to do something for me without them asking questions about it.
But I’d bet Mrs. Benecino could.
“So I says, ‘You know Mrs. Giusti? She has
some underwear for your cousin Gina. You know, Gina’s getting to be a young
woman and needs different kind of underwear. Mrs. Giusti had to go out, but she
left the bag under her porch for me. Go get it for me.’ See, I told him that so
he wouldn’t look in the bag. He wouldn’t be interested in girl things. All he
was interested in was baseball, baseball.”
Lucky Francis, having a fun grandmother
like her.
“Anyway, he says, “Sure, Gramma.” But he’s
looking at me kind of funny. Still, he goes down and I watch him cross the
street and get the bag. But then he keeps going around the corner! Where’s he
going, I’m thinking. Then it comes to me: he’s taking it to his cousin Gina’s
house instead of up here! You see what kind of stupido?”
I was seeing something else. A boy carrying
a satchel full of stolen money he didn’t know about. I leaned forward.
“So I’m waiting for him to get back and the
phone rings and it’s Gina’s mother. And she says that Francis left a bag with
her and he said it was underwear for Gina, but the bag was empty. I got to
think fast again, so I says, ‘Francis made a mistake, Celia. I was going to buy
some new underwear for Gina, and I had the bag for it, but Francis thought I
already put it in the bag and brought it over.’ So now I gotta buy Gina
underwear, like I have money for that.”
I leaned back and frowned. An empty bag?
Did that make any sense?
“Francis finally comes back and says he
brought her the bag and I say, ‘Stupido! I wanted you to bring the bag to me.’
And he says, ‘You didn’t say that. You said it was for Gina.’
“Hey, what can you do? ‘Go listen to the
radio,’ I told him. What a kid, you know? Never gets anything right. Even his
coat that day. I bought him a nice coat that Christmas and he’s still wearing
his old coat. It’s February! It’s all torn on the inside! ‘Go get your new
coat,’ I tell him and he starts arguing with me, but I made him get his new
coat. Wearing that old coat! I give it to that Bunny Donato to give to the
church. She’s another one. Don’t get me started on her.”
*****
We didn’t get her started on Bunny Donato.
I’d had about enough of Mrs. Benecino, and it seemed as if we had the
explanation anyway. Or her part of it, anyway.
Before I could say anything, Mrs. Benecino
fixed Uncle Lou with a glance and said, “So that bag was empty, eh? I bet you
thought it was from that robbery, thought you was gonna get rich.”
Uncle Lou fidgeted, and I cut in, “It was
just something he’d found and he stuck it under the porch and it seemed like it
disappeared. We just happened to be out walking now and he told me the story,
and I thought you might know what had happened to it.”
She leaned forward. “Sure, I know a lot
about what happens.”
*****
I was glad to get back outside again. Uncle
Lou shook his head. “So all this time it was empty. Think of that.”
I tilted my head to one side. “It wasn’t
empty. Did it feel empty when you carried it?”
He crinkled his brow in puzzlement. “No, it
didn’t feel empty. It wasn’t that light.”
I nodded. “It still had the money when
Francis picked it up. Somewhere along the line, it got empty. Now, I wonder
where Francis lives?”
Uncle Lou pointed back at the same house.
“First floor.”
*****
Francis Carcielli turned out to be a
squirrelly kind of guy, skinny, with an Adam’s apple the size of a baseball. He
was probably in his forties by the calendar, but stuck somewhere in junior high
by his manner. “Gee, hi, Mr. Amitano. How you doing?” he said.
“Hi, Francis. This is my nephew, Markie.”
“Hey, Markie,” said Francis, leaning out
the storm door. “How you doing?”
“Nice to meet you, Francis,” I said. “Can
we ask you something about something?”
He looked fuddled then said, “Sure, sure,
come on in.”
He led us inside and into a front parlor
where nearly every flat surface had stacks of newspapers on it. The one useable
chair had a tray table in front of it with half a cheese sandwich and a glass
of milk. The TV was on and the Red Sox were losing.
“Just watching the game,” he said, as if he
was getting away with something. He picked up a couple of piles of newspapers
from the couch, and Uncle Lou and I fitted ourselves into the space.
Francis sat back in his chair. “So what’d
you want to ask me about?” he said with an uncertain smile.
I leaned forward. “This is something from
about thirty years ago,” I began. “One day, when your grandmother, Mrs.
Benecino, was taking care of you, she asked you to go across the street and get
a bag for her that Mrs. Giusti had left.”
Francis looked like a squirrel facing
oncoming traffic. “Yeah?” he said softly without moving a muscle.
“You remember that?”
He bobbed his head. “Yeah, sure.”
“Tell us what happened,” I said, knowing we
were not about to hear the truth.
He coughed and bobbed his head again.
“Yeah, my grandmother, she asked me to go across the street and get this bag
Mrs. Giusti had left for her. I brought it to my cousin Gina’s.”
I nodded. “I hear you caught hell for it.”
He grinned. “Yeah, my grandmother wanted me
to bring it to her first, but I brought it right to Gina’s and she didn’t like
that.”
“What was in the bag?”
His eyeballs traced little paths around the
ceiling. “I think she said it was clothes. For my cousin or something.” He
blushed a little.
“You didn’t look in the bag?”
He shook his head vehemently. “No. Who
cares about girl clothes?”
I shrugged. “Well, that’s that, then. We
were just curious.”
I stood to go, and Uncle Lou followed my
lead. Francis walked us to the door. Uncle Lou stepped outside. “I’ll be out in
a second,” I told him.
I pushed Francis’s door shut and turned to
face him.
*****
“You wanted to see the underwear, right?” I
said.
Francis’s mouth dropped open. “What?” he
said softly.
“That’s why you looked in the bag. To see
girl underwear.”
He blushed crimson and dropped back into
his chair. He tried to look me in the eye, but couldn’t quite make it.
“You’re not in any trouble,” I reassured
him. “I just want to know what really happened.”
He wiped a hand over his mouth, and glanced
around looking for an escape route. Finding none, he started talking.
“Yeah, when I got to Gina’s house I stopped
in the hallway outside their apartment and looked in the bag. I was just
curious, you know, just curious, but there was no underwear in it.” He leaned
forward eagerly. “It had all this money in it! More money than you ever seen. I
couldn’t believe it. It was like finding treasure. I thought I was rich. And
then I thought how mad my grandmother would be if she knew I opened her bag.”
He paused with a serious expression, then
resumed excitedly. “But then I thought, ‘She doesn’t know there’s money in
here. She thinks it has underwear in it. So if I take the money, she’ll never
know.’ ” He nodded to himself. “But I didn’t know where to hide it. Then I
thought of this old coat I was wearing. The inside lining was ripped and
sometimes I put my whole arm through it by accident. I took all the money outta
the bag and stuffed it down inside the lining of the coat, all around the
bottom. It made the coat heavier, but you couldn’t even see it. Then I took the
bag to Gina’s mother.”
I was staring at him spellbound. “What
happened to the coat?”
His hands squeezed into fists and he glared
back at me. “She gave it away! She started yelling that I wasn’t wearing this
stupid new coat she got me for Christmas and made me give her my old coat, the
one with all the money in it. I argued with her, but she made me. What could I
say, ‘Gramma, I hid a bunch of money in it’? I was too scared. The next day I
asked her for the coat back, to play in, I told her, like I didn’t want to get
my new coat dirty. She said she gave it to the church. I ran all the way to the
church and told the priest that she’d given away my favorite coat and could I
please get it back. He was real nice and we searched through all the clothes
people had brought, but we never found it.”
“That must have been frustrating,” I
remarked dryly.
He snorted. “Tell me about it. There was
nothing I could do. I couldn’t tell her and I couldn’t tell the priest. I
couldn’t tell anybody. And I couldn’t find the coat.”
He suddenly looked at me fixedly. “Do you
know what happened to it?”
I shook my head. “No. The whole thing is
brand new to me.”
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “I never did
anything wrong again. When other kids wanted to get into trouble, I just walked
the other way. The whole thing just scared me so bad. I never forgot it.”
I moved to the door. “Well, you just told
someone else. Maybe now you can forget about it.”
*****
Outside, I found Uncle Lou on the sidewalk
walking back and forth and muttering to himself. “Come on,” I said. “Have I got
a story to tell you.”
He listened while we walked, and displayed
all the amazement I had. Finally, he said, “So what happened to the coat?”
I kicked at a pebble. “Well, as I recall,
Mrs. Benecino said she gave it to Bunny Donato to bring to the church. Francis
never had the nerve to find out that part. So I think she’s our next stop.”
*****
Bunny Donato was legendary in that neighborhood.
When her husband of only a few weeks was killed at Anzio in World War II, his
death unexpectedly elevated her to a unique status. Although still young, she
was no longer a single girl. Although widowed, she was not the elderly
mummified-in-black type. She had accidentally become an independent woman, and
she leveraged it to the hilt. She dated regularly, but she never did marry
again. Instead, she invested her energies in her work and, starting as a clerk
at some government office, her intelligence and drive had carried her to a
high-ranking position in some state agency whose name I never did get straight.
She had connections, though, and she used
them. When a husband lost a job, she found something temporary in the state or
city system. She pulled bus routes, snowplows, and playgrounds into the
neighborhood with her behind-the-scenes magic. She was what scientists call a
catalyst, an element essential for making things happen. I hoped she'd have the
same effect with this tangled chain of events.
When Uncle Lou knocked on her door, she
opened it wide and cried, “Lou Amitano!” She planted an exuberant kiss on his cheek,
which he immediately pulled out his handkerchief to erase. She was still an
attractive woman – tall, with raven-black hair, flashing eyes, and just the
right touch of makeup – dressed stylishly in black Capri pants and a hot pink
velour top. A slight lengthening of her upper lip was apparently the source of
her nickname.
“Come on in,” she smiled at us and we
entered. “And who might this be?” she asked Uncle Lou as she looked me up and
down with deliberate exaggeration.
“Hi, Bunny. This is my nephew, Markie.”
I held out my hand. “Mark Napoli.”
“Bunny Donato,” she said, giving it a quick
squeeze. She reached up and pinched my cheek playfully, then, turning back to
my Uncle, said, “How about a highball, Lou?”
Before he could speak, I replied, “Could
you make it two, please?”
She smiled broadly, ushered us into her
living room, and tossed another pleased glance back at us as she vanished into
the kitchen.
“Highballs?” Uncle Lou asked in a whisper.
She was back moments later, presenting us
with brimming glasses.
I took a long swallow, and said, “Great.” I
hate highballs.
She arranged herself in a comfortable chair
with her arms spread broadly in welcome. Cocking her head to one side and
resting her intelligent gaze on us, she said, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
I set my glass down on a coaster. “It has
to do with the old days.”
“Old and dear, eh, Lou?” she replied.
“About thirty years ago, in fact.”
Her eyes strayed to a framed
black-and-white photograph of a handsome soldier, and a wistful look crossed
her face. Then she looked back at me with a roguish expression. “Okay, but I
was only nine,” she said with a wink.
I smiled at her joke. “One day, you may not
even remember it, you were kind enough to visit Mrs. Benecino, and she gave you
some old clothes for the church.”
Bunny nodded gently. “Poor soul. I do try
to stop in now and then and bring her a little something. Loaf of bread, pot of
soup, bottle of soda. You know. She’s all alone up there.”
“That’s thoughtful of you,” I said
sincerely.
She shrugged, dismissing the compliment. “I
don’t think she really likes me, but she can’t politely refuse a gift. Besides,
if we only help the people who like us, we’re not really doing much, are we?”
The simple sincerity in her voice was startling. I liked her, and I trusted
her. And I felt a little uncomfortable about using her to get information.
“So, the clothes,” I prompted.
She shook her head apologetically. “Gee,
I’m sorry. Nothing comes to mind. It was a long time ago.”
“Yes.” I nodded, disappointed. I guess I
had known that the chain had to end somewhere. We had certainly gotten farther
than I ever would have thought possible, thirty years after the fact. But it
was a let-down just the same.
“Was there something special about the
clothes?” she asked helpfully.
“There was this boy’s coat,” I suggested.
She sat up excitedly. “Well, there was a
coat one time, now that you say that. Listen to this, it’s just the cutest
story.”
I perked up and leaned forward, eagerly. I
was almost holding my breath. Maybe this wasn’t the end of the chain after all.
She paused, her eyes unfocussed, trying to
recall. “Let me think how it happened now. I guess I went there once and she
asked me to take a box of clothes to the church. Yes, it must have been on a
Friday night, because I was going to Stations of the Cross anyway, so I just
took it with me.”
She looked at us, smiling broadly, and
holding out her hands as if carrying something. “There was a coat in the box
and here’s why I remember: I was on my way to church, when I saw little Benjy
Eisenberg.”
The name meant nothing to me. I shook my
head blankly, and she turned to Uncle Lou. “You remember, Lou. Max the Jew’s
son.” She rolled her eyes and settled them on me again. “Sorry. Nice talk. Max
Eisenberg, I should say. He owned the furniture store on Broadway for years.
Everyone in the neighborhood bought their furniture on time from Max. They were
practically the only Jewish people in the neighborhood then, so people called
him Max the Jew. Like Tony the Greek and French Louie.”
“Okay,” I encouraged her. “Max’s son?”
She nodded. “Right. He was walking along
the street in front of me, and he didn’t have any coat on. It was dark already,
and freezing out. So I stopped him under a streetlamp and said I was a friend
and asked him where his coat was. He said that he had forgotten it, he was in a
hurry to get to the synagogue or something. So I remembered the coat in the
box, gave it to him, and sent him on his way. He was so happy,” she finished in
warmhearted remembrance.
“So the coat never made it to the church.”
She shrugged and shook her head. “No. I
assume that he kept it. He needed it more than the church did, right then. Good
heavy coat, it was.”
I blinked. “Very nice of you,” I said,
standing. “That’s really all we wanted to know.”
She twisted her face up quizzically. “Oh,
no, you don’t. There has to be more to it than that. Nobody comes asking about
an old coat after thirty years without some reason. What’s it all about?”
I looked from Uncle Lou to her. “We’ve
almost got it figured out, I think. We’ll tell you the whole story when we know
it.”
“Well, okay,” she said with a reluctant
pout. “Come again when you can visit longer. Where are you off to now?”
I shook my head bemusedly. The principle
here seemed to be that money in motion tended to stay in motion.
“I think we go to synagogue,” I said.
*****
“So she gave the coat with all the money to
Benjy Eisenberg?” Uncle Lou summarized when we were on the sidewalk once more.
“Apparently.”
“I don’t see it,” he said. “Max Eisenberg
could never have gotten that money. He worked like a dog in that furniture
store until the day he died.”
“Exactly,” I agreed.
“So what happened to it?”
“Bunny says that Benjy Eisenberg was on his
way to the synagogue that night. But, as you said, the money never made it
home. So somewhere between Bunny and his home, something happened. That’s why
we’re on our way to the synagogue.”
Congregation Sons of David was a large but
simple brick building you passed on the way to the church. To me, it had always
been a mystery, because I had no idea what was inside. I did guess that it
wouldn’t be too busy on a Sunday afternoon, though.
I rang the bell at the side door, and
presently an older woman with a pleasant round face and iron gray hair opened
the door to us. “May I help you?” she asked.
“We’d like to see the Rabbi, please,” I
answered.
She opened the door wider. “Please come
in.” We did so, and stood inside the vestibule while she called, “Maurice. Some
gentlemen to see you,” and left us.
I cocked my head at my Uncle. “You hear
that? ‘Gentlemen’.” He grinned.
Soon, a short stocky man with a gentle face
came down the stairs. “I am Rabbi Feldstein,” he said with a faint question in
his voice, shaking our hands.
“I’m Mark Napoli,” I said. “This is my
Uncle, Lou Amitano. He lives around the corner from here.”
Rabbi Feldstein smiled at us both. “Please,
let us go to my study.”
As he guided us, he glanced back at me.
“Would you be Mrs. Napoli’s grandson?” he inquired.
I nodded. “Yes, that’s right. She died
about five years ago.”
“I remember her well,” he said. “She was a
fine woman. She used to pass by here on her way to church every day. Whenever I
saw her outside, we would have our little joke together. I would say, “Where
are you going today, Mrs. Napoli?” And she would say, “To church, to pray for
you.” And I would say, “I’m going to pray for you first,” and hurry inside.”
I smiled at the story. Sometimes, it seemed
that everyone had known my grandmother.
He motioned us into two large armchairs
while he sat behind a desk. His bookshelves were filled to bursting with books
and papers. A large world map occupied one wall, and a prism at the window
splashed colors around the room.
He folded his hands in front of him and
asked, “Now, how may I help you?”
“First, could you please tell me how long
you’ve been here at this synagogue?” I asked.
He considered. “It must be almost
thirty-five years. Yes, thirty-four years, in fact.”
I nodded. “And do you remember a Benjy
Eisenberg?”
He smiled. “Of course. A good boy. An
excellent student. He graduated from Brandeis University, you know. He’s a
lawyer now and lives in Newton, Massachusetts. He’s kind enough to remember us
each year.”
“And do you remember Benjy Eisenberg’s
coat?”
His smile was replaced by a dreamy,
wondering look. He gazed from me to Uncle Lou and back again. “This is
remarkable,” he said softly. “I must say that I always expected such a meeting
someday, but, even so, I am surprised that it has actually occurred. May I ask
what your interest is in this?”
I shifted in my seat and glanced from Uncle
Lou to Rabbi Feldstein. “Well, I think I can let you know where that coat came
from, if you'd be willing to share where it went. I can guarantee you’ll find
our part interesting.”
He nodded. “Very well.” He regarded the
ceiling for a moment and then began his story.
*****
“How to begin? I have mentioned that
Benjamin was an excellent student at Hebrew school. One evening at service,
however, he seemed to be distracted, a million miles away. I noticed it, but
didn’t remark on it. To be honest, my own mind was occupied with other matters
that night.
“You see, my brother Martin was here
visiting with us then. Martin was quite active in arranging ships for war
orphans, children of those killed by the Nazis, to resettle them at an orphanage,
where we hoped that they would be safe. At that time, one ship with nearly a
thousand children was ready to depart, and already fully provisioned for the
voyage, but they lacked the money with which to bribe the British patrols in
the Mediterranean so that they could land the ship successfully. Martin was in
a frenzy. I’m afraid that he had already worn out his welcome with usually
sympathetic contributors, and he had no idea where he might get the necessary
money. All of this was weighing on my mind on that night.”
The word “money” had grabbed my attention.
I stared at the rabbi, who was clearly back in the past, reliving that night.
“Young Benjamin stayed behind after the
service when everyone else had gone, and he asked if he could speak with me
privately. I said, Certainly, and asked what it was that he wanted to discuss.
You see, sometimes young fellows of this age want to talk about girls or
growing up, but it turned out to be nothing like that. Nothing like that at
all.
“When we were alone, in this very office,
in fact, he asked me, ‘Rabbi, do you believe in angels?’ ”
I narrowed my gaze and looked at Uncle Lou,
who also seemed bewildered. What was all this about angels?
The Rabbi continued. “Naturally, this type
of question surprised me, but I recovered myself and told him that I did
believe in angels, and I wondered why he had asked me. He then related an
amazing tale. He said that he had been late in leaving home for the service,
and that in his haste he had come out with no coat. He had been very cold, and
he wished that he had brought his coat, but he didn’t want to return home for
it. Then he said that someone had called to him, and he had turned to see a
beautiful lady with a bright light around her head. She had given him another
coat and told him to go on to synagogue. He thought that she must have been an
angel, first, to know what it was he wanted and, second, to appear on the spot
with a coat for him as she had.”
An image came to my mind, of an angel in
black Capri pants and a hot pink velour top, unwittingly transferring a small
fortune to little Benjy Eisenberg.
“As you can imagine, I rather smiled to
myself and thought privately that there was undoubtedly some more prosaic
explanation for his otherwise remarkable experience. Of course, I didn’t tell
that to him. Instead, I said that it was certainly an extraordinary encounter
and that he should consider himself a very fortunate boy.
“Then he said, ‘And Rabbi, look what I
found in the coat.’ ”
I leaned forward, scarcely breathing.
“At this point, he thrust his hand down
inside the lining of the coat” – Rabbi Feldstein mimed the action with his hand
– “and brought out a handful of money: paper bills of large denomination. He
then pulled out another handful, and another and another, until my desk was
nearly overflowing with money. This very desk.”
He indicated the desktop with both
outstretched hands, and I could picture a small pile of money scattered across
it.
“Needless to say, I was stunned. I could
not imagine where all this money could have come from. Of course, when I tried
to question Benjamin more closely about the woman who had given him the coat,
it was clear to me that he didn’t think that it had been a woman at all, but an
angel.
“Finally, I decided that questioning him
further could serve no useful purpose. I did not want to upset the boy.
Instead, I reassured him that he had done the right thing in telling me about
the money. I gave him a note requesting his father to meet with me the next
day, and sent him home happy.
“When he had left, I looked at the pile of
money on my desk, and I called out for my brother, Martin. When he arrived, he
stared at it, astonished. I told him Benjamin’s singular story, and he sank
into a chair touching the money with amazement. ‘This is a sign,’ he said. Now,
my brother had never been a very religious person to that time. Helping people
to safety, yes, a good man, though not religious. But this shook him. We talked
for most of the night about what it might mean and what we should do.”
I glanced eagerly at Uncle Lou. It seemed like
we might get the last link in the chain after all.
“The next day, Mr. Eisenberg, Martin, and I
met to decide what to do with the money. Mr. Eisenberg agreed with his son that
the money had been delivered by an angel, and he would not accept it. I confess
that I still had my doubts as to whether it was an angel who had provided the
money, but I felt that I knew how it should be used. Martin was overjoyed and
left at once with the money in a suitcase.”
I raised a hand, as if I were in school.
“Excuse me, Rabbi, but didn’t you know about the bank robbery?”
His shrug was eloquent. “At that time, I
hadn’t heard a word. We had been busy all that Friday afternoon preparing for
the Sabbath. It was a different world, then, you know, not like today when news
spreads around the earth in seconds. Of course, later that week I finally did
learn about the bank robbery, and realized that – in some manner that was still
unclear to me – this must have been the original source of the money. However,
by that time, Martin had gone, the ship had departed, and I could not have
recovered the money even if I had tried. I did feel some guilt over this, yes.”
He nodded his head slowly. “Still, we all had done what we thought was best
with what we knew at the time. And, I must say, the eventual outcome seemed to
justify our decision.”
I shook my head, puzzled.
“You see, the people on that ship did use
the money to bribe their way past the patrols and disembark successfully. That
money saved the lives of almost a thousand children.”
*****
Rabbi Feldstein sat back in his chair. I
don’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. I was speechless. I looked
at Uncle Lou and he was speechless too.
The Rabbi nodded to me. “I believe that you
also had a story that you wanted to tell me,” he prompted gently.
So I related the whole chain of events, as
I understood them, from the bank robbers to Uncle Lou to Mrs. Benecino to young
Francis to Bunny Donato to Benjy Eisenberg. Now, it was Rabbi Feldstein’s turn
to be speechless. He shook his head and stared at the map on his wall.
Finally, I said, “You know, I think that we
were never here. We never spoke about this. It never happened. Am I right?”
Uncle Lou agreed, as did Rabbi Feldstein,
who added, “I must say that I find it remarkable. All of these people, who were
each apparently following their own path and acting according to their own
motivations, were actually part of a complex dance that He had choreographed.”
We all stood and the Rabbi walked us to the
door. He shook hands with us again, and we left.
*****
Out on the sidewalk, I said to Uncle Lou,
“Well, what do you think?”
He shook his head. “Unbelievable.”
“Your picking up that bag helped rescue a
thousand kids.”
“I guess.”
I clapped him on the back. “Good job.”
Back at his house, I hesitated outside.
“You go in,” I told him. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
It was more than a few minutes, but I did
get back. The party was still in full cry. No one had noticed our absence. I
found my Uncle in the same room, also paging through perennials. I dropped a
cardboard box on the floor.
“A souvenir for you,” I explained.
He opened the box and pulled out a beat-up
brown leather satchel. He looked up at me, his eyes wide.
“Gina’s mother had kept it in the basement
all this time, as I thought she might. I gave her a few dollars for it.”
Uncle Lou hefted it, then couldn’t help
opening it and looking inside. It was empty. He smiled. “I can use it to keep
my gardening tools in.”
I nodded. “I can’t think of a better use
for it.”
THE END
