Brush Back

“Not just you, your whole family.” Her lips were tight, but I didn’t like the way her eyes looked, too much white showing around the irises. “You Warshawskis always had to be number one, and when it looked like Frank had the same chance that Bernard got, you ruined it.”

“What?” I was genuinely baffled. “My uncle never had any special chances; he worked the docks his whole life. If Frank had wanted a job there instead of—”

“Shut up, numbskull,” Stella spat at me. “Young Bernard. You couldn’t stand—”

“Oh, you mean Boom-Boom. Frank didn’t play hockey, but if he had, Boom-Boom would have welcomed him like a brother.”

“Of course Frank didn’t play hockey.”

Stella’s exasperation was turning her skin a mottled red. She probably looked like this the night she killed A

“Baseball. He was going to have his chance, they promised it, they promised he’d be at Wrigley Field where the top brass could see him, but it fell apart. That’s because you Warshawskis didn’t want it to happen. You’ve tormented us for as long as I’ve lived here. Your mother seduced my husband. Your cousin didn’t want Frank to have the same success as he got, your father”—she gave the word a horrible sarcastic inflection—“could have helped me, but he couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger. Little A

“No, Stella. You’re making this up. There is no evidence, there’s no conspiracy, there’s only you, hating my mother and wanting to blame her for your troubles.”

She lunged at me so suddenly that I fell off the armchair to get out of her way. She tried to kick me but hit the chair instead. I scuttled backward on my butt and got to my feet as she lunged again.

I shoved the armchair into her path. “No, Stella, I told you no hitting. Frank said you want an exoneration. Are you going to tell the lawyer that Boom-Boom blocked Frank’s chances to play baseball and this made you so angry you killed A

“I didn’t kill my girl,” she panted. “It was an intruder. When I left the house to go to the bingo, A

Even across the armchair I could smell her sweat: bath soap and talcum mixed with the rankness of the hatred coursing through her.

“Why didn’t you bring that up at the trial?”

“I told that useless baby they gave me as a lawyer. I told him it was an intruder, but he didn’t know enough about the law to use it. Or maybe Boom-Boom bought him off. He had plenty of money, all those endorsements, all those girls going flat on their backs for him. Maybe A

I edged around the chair and headed from the room. “If this is what you believe, you need a psychiatrist, not an exoneration lawyer. Don’t ever repeat any of this in public, or I will sue you faster than you can spit.”

She jumped across the room and socked me. I ducked in time to take the blow on my shoulder, not my throat, and ran to the door. I had the dead bolt undone and was outside a nanosecond before she caught up to me.

She stood in the doorway, screaming, “People have been playing games with me my whole life, making fun, but I don’t take that shit anymore. You watch out, Missy, you watch your step.”

The punks on the curb stared, mouths agape. No wonder Stella was safe in the middle of Insane Dragon territory.

OUT AT THE PLATE

I was shaking when I got back to my car. I should have listened to Jake and stayed far away from here. The dogs jumped up, whining and nuzzling me, responding to my distress, but what I wanted was my mother. She’d lived across the alley from Stella all those years, but the ugly words never seemed to bring her down. She worried about me and my father, but not what an unhappy, unhinged woman might be saying or thinking.

I saw the curtains twitch in the Guzzo front room. No point in letting Stella think she’d upset me.

My route north took me past St. Eloy’s, the church where Stella and my aunt Marie and hundreds of steelworkers used to worship—Eloy was the patron of metalworkers. On an impulse, I pulled over to the curb and got out.

I’d gone to funerals here as a child. The foul air we all breathed, the smoking all the men and most of the women did, and the unforgiving heavy machinery created a lot of orphans.

It was a plate rolling machine that had killed A

The old priest, Father Gielczowski, had ruled his parish with an iron fist. He’d set up one of the infamous block clubs, an effort started by a priest named Lawlor to keep Chicago’s South Side parishes all-white. Gielczowski and my mother had had some memorable clashes, particularly because he wanted me baptized. Gabriella, who’d grown up in a country where Jews could be declared unfit parents for failing to baptize their children, had been scathing in her responses:

“A god who cares more about a little water on the head than my daughter’s character is not a deity I want her to spend eternity with.”

On my way up the walk to the office door, I stopped in front of the statue of St. Eloy. Steelworkers had created it out of scrap, so that it looked like a daring avant-garde piece of sculpture. I took a picture to show my lease-mate, who mauls big pieces of metal into giant abstractions of her own.

“You don’t have a good track record down here, you know, Eloy,” I said to the statue. “Mateo Guzzo is dead, along with his daughter, and so are the steel mills. Even your church building is falling to bits. What do you have to say about that?”

The metal eyes stared at me, unblinking. Like everyone else around me, the saint knew secrets I couldn’t fathom.

It was a heavy brick Victorian complex, church, rectory, school, convent. I knew the school was still active—Frank had told me his kid was playing baseball for the high school team, and anyway, I could hear children’s voices drifting faintly from the playgrounds on the far side of the building.

As I walked up to St. Eloy’s side door, I wondered what I’d say to Father Gielczowski, but of course he was long gone. The man in the church office was younger, darker, more muscular.

Unlike Gielczowski, who always roamed the neighborhood in a cassock, this man was on a ladder in jeans and a T-shirt, spackling a hole in the ceiling. He didn’t interrupt his work to look at me, just grunted that he’d be finished in a few minutes, to have a seat.

The hole in the ceiling wasn’t the only damage in the room, but it was the worst, exposing part of the lath near the windows, and spidering down from there in a series of large cracks. I figured the Spackle would hold for a month, or until the next big storm sent water into the building. The room should be gutted, probably the whole building, and fresh plumbing and wiring put in before anyone tried repairs, but I didn’t imagine the archdiocese put South Chicago parishes high on its budget list.