“Before my time, ma’am.”
“I begged him to take me dancing there.”
“Mr. Papageorgious?”
“Orlo.”
“Yesterday you wanted to dance?”
“No,” she said, an edge to it. “Back when they had orchestras on the roof.”
“Did he take you?”
“When was the last time you saw your husband?”
“Yesterday morning. He was going down to the hall to wait on a ship.”
“On New Year’s Eve?”
“On the way out, he stuck his nose in the pot,” and she pointed to a dented stew pot on the drain board next to the sink.
“And?”
“And he didn’t like what he saw.”
What George Papageorgious saw was awful.
It seems that our Mystery Woman had been up cooking before dawn, and when her old man rolled out of the house, he stepped into a kitchen steamed up with garlic and salt and…
“Clove,” she said, “I had it on the back burner. Out of the way.”
The poor son of a bitch lifts the lid and puts his face to the bubbling water. It don’t smell half-bad to him, I guess, so he gets a little closer, shooing away the steam with his hand.
When it clears…
“Christ, that’s all he was yapping about,” said the bartender at the Lorraine Tavern, not five blocks from the bus stop where his wife was having her little picnic. “‘Crock of shit-milk blue.’ A broken record: ‘Crock of shit-milk blue…’”
“What?”
“The eyes. The boiled-up eyes of the pig staring at him from the pot.”
The Lorraine was on the first floor of the Seafarers Union hall over on Gay Street; between the Great White Way bowling alley and “Your Old Friend Simon Harris” Sporting Goods. All three businesses catered to seamen.
Witnesses said that George had been drinking at the bar since it opened at 6 a.m. and let more than one ship go without throwing in for a job.
“Guess his old lady was making up a batch of head cheese,” said the barkeep. “Man, the way he run it down, we could’ve fixed up a shitload of it ourselves. Didn’t have the heart to tell him you’re supposed to throw the eyes away.”
They said the Greek put away eight or nine shots of vodka and got uglier with each one; shouting questions that didn’t make any sense.
“How long?” he bellowed. “How long that goddamn pig in my face?”
Scalded pink snout; pale, sunken eyes; a gun on the bar.
“Everyone’s edging out the side door and I told him to put it away. ‘Look pal,’ I says, ‘a sugar ship’s gonna tie up Locust Point in a couple hours. Ain’t nobody gonna put in for it on New Year’s Eve. Why don’t you run upstairs and grab it?’”
“Why don’t you mind your own business?” said George, bringing the barrel to his eye.
And I got a cuckold face-down in the sawdust of the Lorraine Tavern with a hole in the back of his head the size of a Kennedy half-dollar.
“When the bread and cheese was gone, we sipped hot tea from a thermos and Orlo asked if I knew how his father died.”
“Did you?”
The lovers had shared a long string of delicacies and deceit from the moment the frustrated teenager carried a bowl of steaming pig feet to the King of the Junkmen in her family’s diner nearly forty years ago. All that time together-a day here, half a day there-and still their tongues searched out every pebble of cartilage of their mythology.
Leini did not know how Orlo’s father had died.
“They had him up on the third floor, eaten up with cancer and crying for his mother,” he told her. “I was hiding in the hallway and saw him point to the window and say his dead brother was perched on the sill outside. They told me to go outside and play.”
When Eleini Leftafkis was a child of nine on the island of Samos, her parents shipped her to a couple with a prosperous diner at the end of Clinton Street, crying farewell with every intention of following just as soon as they could.
“Before you know it,” said her
“Lickety-split,” said her
“We love you,” sobbed her
And they meant it.
Today, all she knows about the deaths of her grandmother and her parents arrived in envelopes bordered in black, first one and then another. She has never seen their graves.
“A bus stopped in front of us but no one got on and no one got off,” said Leini, complaining about the fumes, saying how she missed the streetcars. “The driver couldn’t get the doors closed, like something was forcing them open. He’d yank the lever and they’d bounce back. He tried to force them but they just hung open.”
Staring into the space between, Leini saw herself on the altar of the Orthodox church, barely eighteen years old, saying yes to the man who’d been selected for her and “I’ll see you soon” to the man she loved.
I’ll do this, she’d told herself, the heart of her absent mother beating in her ears, I’ll do what they want and God will give me a life I can bear.
“Orlo wanted me to ride the bus home but the driver kept banging the doors, and before I could get on, a hinge snapped. The sound it made. Awful. It gave me a chill. It was twenty-nine degrees outside. So I started walking. The cold had worked its way inside the sleeves of my coat, right up to my collarbone. I just wanted to get away.”
She asked if she were guilty of anything and I told her the question was irrelevant.
“Well I am,” she said.
Orlo watched Leini hurry away but did not chase after her.
You cannot play the games this woman has played all her life-from the time she was traded to a barren couple in America for a couple dozen sewing machines-and be skittish.
Prim, perhaps; the world loves a mask.
But not skittish.
The bus and its broken doors had spooked her more than anything she could remember; more afraid, she said, than the heaving voyage that brought her over as a kid.
I took her story down like a court reporter, page after stenographic page of minutia that had nothing to do with the case.
“I walked fast,” she said. “When I hit Pratt Street I stopped to catch my breath, sorry I didn’t hop that bus. My knees were aching. Not a cab in sight.”
She stopped to watch a couple of tugboats nudge a Norwegian ship up against Pier 5 and moved on, pushing east against a cutting wind, head down, making time.
“I was hoping to catch George before he shipped out and tell him I was sorry.”
“For what?”
“For everything.”
Between the Inner Harbor and Little Italy, where organ grinders once kept their hairy beggars in an alley of sheds called Monkey Row, Leini turned toward a rough warren of warehouses and machine shops where heavy springs are forged and hawser line is coiled to the rafters.
A saloon on every corner; pig feet on every bar; a story in every jar.
