“No, we’ll be fine.”
“We always have empty rooms in February.”
“We’ll let you know if we need one, Mrs. Larusso. Thank you.”
“Natalie,” I said, “why are we going up to your room?”
“Just shut up for once,” she said. “Please. Just stop talking.”
“Natalie…”
“I swear,” she said, taking my hand in hers, “if you say one more word, I’m gonna hit you right in the mouth.”
She hit the elevator button, waited exactly one second, and then opened the door to the stairwell.
“I always hated elevators,” she said, and pulled me into the stairwell. Vinnie followed. As we went up the stairs behind her, I couldn’t help but think of the last time we had been in a hotel together, and everything that had happened since then. Her room was on the third floor. It was small, dominated by a queen-sized bed with an elaborate iron frame. She took her coat off.
“Natalie,” I said. “Will you please tell us what’s going on?”
“Take that stupid snowmobile suit off,” she said. “You, too, Vinnie.”
“All right,” I said. “If that means you’re finally gonna talk to us.” I unzipped the suit.
“Sit down,” she said, “and watch this.”
There was a television on top of the dresser. She turned it on. A commercial was just ending, then Monday Night Football came back on. Before I could say anything, she picked up an overnight bag from the floor and pulled out a video cassette.
“Will you both sit down, please?”
When we were both sitting on the edge of the bed, she put the videocassette into the VCR port that was built into the bottom of the television. The football game was replaced by a hospital room. A man was sitting up in a bed, his hands folded in his lap. He was looking at the camera.
“What is this?” I said. Then I recognized the man. He was a slightly younger Simon Grant.
Another man appeared. It was Marty Grant. His face loomed huge in the frame as he adjusted the camera angle.
She hit the fast-forward button. The two men stayed in place, Simon Grant in the bed, Marty in the chair next to him. Their heads and hands moved in a blur as Natalie scanned through the tape.
“Martin, I know why you’re doing this,” Simon Grant said as soon as the tape speed went back to normal. “You think I’ll be dead by the end of the week.”
She hit the fast-forward again. “Simon Grant had a heart attack about ten years ago. Marty wanted to get a tape of him talking about his life, in case he wasn’t around much longer.”
“How did you get this?” I said.
She looked at me. “Marty gave it to me.”
Before I could ask her anything else, she put the tape back to normal speed again. “Okay, this is about where we want it,” she said. “Listen.”
Marty was laughing hard at something his father had just told him. “You gotta be kidding me, Pops. She actually fell for that?”
“Only for fifty-five years. God bless her.”
“Okay, if that’s the best thing you ever did in your life,” Marty said, “then tell me the worst thing you ever did.”
Natalie moved away from the television. She went to the window and looked out at the darkness as the tape kept playing.
“That’s a tough question,” the older man said.
“It’s just between you and me,” Marty said, sneaking a wink at the camera.
“I lived a long life, son.”
“Come on, Pops. How bad could it be? It’s not like you ever killed somebody.”
There was a long silence.
“Yes, son, I did.”
Marty stopped smiling.
“Pops…”
“I’ll tell you about it, Martin. I think it’s about time.”
“You’re serious?”
“Let me tell you something about hate, son. I’ve learned a lot about hate in my life. Hell, I lived on it for years. It’s what kept me going, every day, when I was a young man. I hated how poor I was when I was growing up, how I didn’t have a father. How I had to go out and work from when I was ten years old. This was during the Great Depression, you understand. You don’t know what it was like back then. I’m glad you don’t. I’m glad you never had to see times like that. A man would do anything just to earn a little money, so he could feed his family. I hated having to live like that, and seeing what it was doing to my mother, how it was making her an old woman when she was forty. Later on, when I was working on the docks, I hated the men I was working for. I hated the way they took advantage of us whenever they could, like we were nothing more than animals.”
Marty Grant was leaning forward in his chair, his elbows on his legs. He didn’t move an inch. He sat there and listened to his father.
“I suppose, looking back on it, all that hatred in my heart, it was sort of like a fuel, if you know what I mean. It kept me going. I don’t know if I would have been able to survive, or work so hard, or later, when I was in the union… We had to fight so hard, son. Maybe I needed that hatred. But damn, what it did to me. What a price to pay. All those years…”
Natalie kept looking out the window. She was as still as Marty’s image on the tape.
“There was one man in particular, son. This goes back to 1929, when they still had Prohibition. People used to bring liquor across the border all the time. I bet you didn’t know that a lot of the rum-running happened right here on the border between Michigan and Ontario. Most of it was down by Detroit, of course. That’s where the gangs were. Capone’s men and Bugs Moran and the Purple Gang… God, you can’t even imagine, son. It was a different country back then. Anyway, my father and his brother, they got involved in this. They knew these other men in Canada who would bring good whiskey across. My father and uncle would meet them and pay them for the whiskey, and then they’d sell it. In the summer, they’d come over in these wooden boats. Then, when the river froze, they’d bring it over on a sled.”
Mrs. DeMarco’s words came back to me. The ice run.
“There was one night…”
Simon Grant stopped. He cleared his throat.
“It was New Year’s Eve, the last night of 1929. The Ojibway Hotel was still brand-new. They were having this big party. I guess the manager there had been asking my father if he could get some whiskey for him, but the weather had been so bad… The men from Canada couldn’t get through, not until the weather broke on New Year’s Eve itself. I don’t know how much my father felt like doing it that night, but the money must have been good. He and my uncle went over to get it…”
Grant stopped again. He coughed a few times and then kept going.
“I was just a little kid, you understand. I didn’t hear the real story until later. Apparently, what happened was, some of the gangsters down in Detroit finally got wind of what was going on up here. They hadn’t been bothering with it way up here in the U.P. But now with the new hotel and the big parties and everything… Somehow they heard of this big load of whiskey coming across. They knew exactly where the meeting would be, out on the St. Marys River. They took the whiskey and the money and they killed everybody. My father and my uncle, they never came home. That was December of 1929, remember. The stock market had just crashed a couple of months before that. The next few years… The next few years were tough, son.”
Grant shook his head slowly.
“My little sister…”
Marty finally looked up at him.
“Her name was Victoria. She would have been your aunt. You never got to meet her. She died of pneumonia when she was eight years old. I was ten. She was…”
He had to stop for a while.
