Bank Robbers Page 4

  There was the sound of a throat clearing, and Arthur looked up from the desk.

  “You ready to go, Pop?”

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” he snapped gruffly.

  He watched Moe turn and pull on a windbreaker at the same time. Moe had good shoulders and well-formed legs. But his son was soft around the middle from what he called “the good life.” Arthur had been hard as a rock when he was Moe’s age. He remembered where he was when he was Moe’s age.

  He’d just done the first year at Auburn. And the more he thought of it, the funnier it seemed, that he was looking on a prison term as “the good old days.”

  He was going crazy.

  He flicked off the light on his desk.

  * * *

  DOTTIE hung up the phone before she had to talk to him, or hear his voice say her name.

  It was cowardly, she knew.

  She flicked off the television set for the first time in years and allowed the quiet of the apartment to try and soothe her as she paced back and forth. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the edge of the big armoire.

  She couldn’t stand it anymore.

  There was no reason for her not to look at it.

  She stomped into the dusty bedroom and pulled a chair over to the dark wooden thing. Tottering slightly, she grabbed on to the handle of the armoire to steady herself. That would add consummate insult to injury, if she fell getting the bloody thing, she thought to herself.

  On top of the old armoire, covered by a greasy film of dust, she took down a ragged manila envelope. She brought it out to the kitchen, placed it on the table and stared at it.

  In one sudden movement she swept the envelope up, opened it, and shook out the contents. Yellowed newspaper clippings fluttered down onto the tabletop. Torn magazine pages, folded into squares, and several letter-sized envelopes dropped down after them, sounding small whacks against the tabletop as they hit.

  She sat still, as his face, oh God, the way she remembered him, met her eyes, in mug shots—she winced—reprinted grainily in the newspapers. Terrible photos they were of him, too. She carefully unfolded several magazine pages and laid them out in order on the table.

  There was a picture of Rivington Street, the way it had been with the laundry and filth. Dottie saw the building he used to live in and found her eyes glued to a window almost dead center on the third floor. She stared and stared at it, as if, by staring at it long enough, she could see inside. Then there were other pictures of Arthur at various times during his life.

  A picture of his father appeared on the third page of the magazine layout. Her eyes looked again at the black-and-white photo of Arthur MacGregor, Sr. The fierce look on his face still made Dottie shiver. His father had scared her. He had been a lunatic.

  She let her eyes gaze back at Arthur, Jr.’s, face, her Arthur.

  She read some of the copy, snickering here and there. It made him out to be some kind of genius, as if robbing banks took any real brains.

  Her eyes glazed over for a moment, and she remembered that when she’d made her plan, the thought had crossed her mind that Arthur MacGregor, ironically, would have been the one person to ask about this …

  She began smoothing out the newspaper clippings. There were many from his last big trial. She looked at the pictures of him sitting next to his lawyer in court and frowning.

  She knew that look.

  Her eyes scanned some of the copy. She suddenly felt stupid about having kept this record of him all these years.

  Her eyes hovered over one of the envelopes. She stared for a long time at the brownish ink, and the almost shaky letters that formed her name. Her eyes looked up to the corner, at the horrible return address: Ossining Federal Correctional Facility, Ossining, New York.

  Slowly she opened it up, slipped the pages out of the envelope, and began reading.

  “Dottie,” it began in his squiggly handwriting. She remembered at the time being furious when she read the letter, thinking that he was swaggering and boasting about being in jail, but now, as she reread it, she was struck by the language and hints of terror and the tenderness of how young he’d been. It suddenly dawned on her that she’d been wrong. This letter had been written by a very young man who was very frightened and trying desperately not to let on.

  At the end was a long passage about getting out and being with her again at “home.”

  Home. Her eyes blurred and the tiny room came into her head.

  It was a dirty little room in an SRO just where Little Italy turned into Chinatown. There was an old Murphy bed that wheezed when it was pulled out, and made a clanging, squealing racket when you lay on it. A cheap rug, so filthy you could barely make out the large tea-rose pattern, was spread out over most of the floor. The rest was an odd floral linoleum, cracked in places where wooden floorboards shone through.

  A half-pint refrigerator that never worked sat in a closet. On top of that was an old Waterman stove and oven which had no controls on it and smelled of leaking gas. You just lit the stove with a match and prayed there’d be no explosion.

  The oven had two settings, burned and raw.

  Mostly she remembered a window with a yellowed pull-down fabric shade that overlooked a rectangle of backyards. The rectangle was divided up into boxes by gray wooden fences, some half-falling down. Streamers of laundry hung across the entirety of it, and from the window, especially during the summer, you could hear the noises from all the buildings. Opera played, women shouted gossip across the buildings, children played and hollered in the dirt below—occasionally there was the sound of a saxophonist practicing.

  In winter, when the window was shut, all was quiet except for the hiss from a radiator that sat beneath the sill. She used to lie across the Murphy bed and stare out that window, for when the bed was opened, there was really no room to walk, and so she liked to imagine that it was a large, luxurious window seat, or a boat. And when she imagined it was a boat, she would roll up a newspaper to use as her telescope, and she would roll back and forth, just enough to hear the springs creak beneath her, and she’d imagine the boat was rocking.

  Had she really been that young? So young that she was still playing childhood make-believe games as she was lying naked, waiting for him?

  She closed her eyes at the memory of the warm feeling of fullness in her hips as she rode the bus home to her parents’ apartment on the afternoons she had made love to Arthur.

  Arthur.

  They had been happy.… Until Dottie spent an afternoon at her younger cousin’s wedding. She had listened to the toasts and talk of babies, and a honeymoon, and suddenly it seemed of the utmost importance, to stand up in front of a church full of people and let everyone know that this was the person for you. It made it important. It made it honest, so you didn’t have to sneak off after work and walk past all the winos and the derelicts, and slink up the stairs of some sleazy SRO, avoiding the manager’s lecherous grins and winks. They deserved better than that, for what they had. It was the first time she let it matter to her, not having a wedding ring on her finger.

  And when she was back in Arthur’s room, she’d ripped the fancy wedding clothes off, crawled into bed, and wept. She had ached to bring Arthur around to have dinner with her family—her parents, her brothers, their wives and children—but she knew what would happen. The first thing they’d ask is what Arthur did for a living. What could he say? I’m locksmith’s assistant? At his age? That was another thing she’d brushed under the rug. How come someone as smart as Arthur was nothing more than a shop assistant?

  She knew her brothers and father would glance back and forth at one another and shake their heads. That would be just the beginning; it would get worse. Then would come the questions about his education.

  She could just see the look on her mother’s face when he told them he’d dropped out of school in the ninth grade. And even though Dottie thought that what Arthur had accomplished was admirable, her family wouldn’t see it that way. All the
y’d see was someone with a very limited education, very limited ambitions, whose father was a child-beating drunk. One of the men her father said gave all Irishmen and Scots a bad name.

  Almost every characteristic she’d ever been warned against was, on the surface, at least, embodied by Arthur MacGregor.

  And they’d all be as polite as they could, and shake his hand at the door. And once the door was shut, they would fall on her. Her brothers would obnoxiously ridicule him. Her mother would tell her that whatever she did in life, she had to marry someone who could take care of her, who had a good education, who had a clear goal in life; not some uneducated locksmith’s assistant from the Lower East Side who appeared to have no idea what to do for a living.

  Her father would flat-out refuse to let her see him again.

  And that was how Arthur found her, huddled under the covers, crying and crying into the pillow.

  That was when they had their discussion about marriage and ambition … and Arthur had been hurt and offended and stormed out of the room. When he hadn’t come back by seven o’clock, she’d gotten dressed and left.

  Days went by and she didn’t see him or hear from him. Then it was a week, and then a week and a half. She went over it and over it in her head, arguing with herself until dawn each day what she could say to him or do, or if she should take it all back. But she couldn’t …

  Two weeks later, Arthur finally reappeared. He was sitting on the stoop of her building. It was late afternoon. In a tense tone he announced that he had talked his boss, Hymie Schwartz, into letting him and his two new partners sell some new security systems. And that, if he worked hard—and that meant weekends and evenings—and if she didn’t give him grief about the hours, he might be able to have enough money for a place for them and a nice church wedding within the year.

  She threw her arms around him in front of everyone for the first time, because it was going to be all right. They were going to have a life together. And everything went fine … until the day Arthur and his “partners” were arrested for a string of jewelry-store robberies on Canal Street. And Arthur was led out of Hymie’s shop in handcuffs in front of the whole neighborhood.

  She remembered getting sick behind the courthouse when she went to bail him out. And she remembered being ashamed and horrified at having to sit in a courtroom each day watching him and the lawyer, who had just about told them from the word “go” that Arthur was going to do time.

  But what hurt the most was that he’d so successfully hidden all this from her. The lie had been perfect. She’d never suspected a thing. And that was what cut through her soul. How could he lie to her? She didn’t lie to him. God! She’d bared her whole soul to him. Hell, she’d bared her whole body and her soul and … and how dare he do this to them!

  And that was why she got sick behind the courthouse.

  BANG. Right between the eyes. It was like being shot.

  By the time the judge handed down the sentence, she knew she couldn’t trust him again, or wait for him or live this kind of life.

  So, Arthur MacGregor did 24 months and Dottie O’Malley married the first person who looked at her—Nathan.

  She met him the first night she’d started as a dancer at the club. He was off stage right, arguing with the man who’d hired her, demanding to know where the girl he’d sent in had gone to. And Dottie came on and started a series of kicks, and out of the corner of her eye this skinny little man of about forty, who looked a little like Frank Sinatra, stopped arguing in mid-sentence. His eyes just about popped outside of their sockets and his jaw dropped.

  Her family approved. He was older, he was mature, he was part owner of the nightclub. Sure, he gambled now and then, but … Dottie’d had enough trouble, and no, Nathan was never going to be the great love of her life. That had been Arthur. But she thought Nathan was steady, and honest and consistent, so she resigned herself to the trade-off of passion with peace. She wrote Arthur a good-bye note and set up her life as a housewife.

  And it was fine until the day Arthur showed up again.

  She hated who he was and what he did and the fact that, regardless of what he claimed, she did not believe that he was going to turn into a solid, voting, tax-paying citizen for her or anyone else. But what she hated most of all was the fact that he slid in one afternoon and took her to bed so easily, as if the marriage didn’t exist or the baby, or the time he’d spent in prison. And she hated herself because for some reason, Arthur MacGregor could have her anytime, anyplace, and anywhere.

  But she’d been strong and ended it.

  It had been a warm night out, so warm she was wearing a sleeveless dress, that last time, and she was being pressed against a parked car, in a dark, tiny street on the Lower East Side.

  Not really a street, but an alley.

  There was that deep, whispery voice in her ear, making her shiver up and down, his breath and the slight brush of his lips, and his roaming hands, gently caressing the outsides of her arms, her waist and hips, reaching under her skirt and up her thighs. He’d always been very free with her body. She’d gone weak in the knees. So weak she couldn’t do anything about it.

  He’d made sure he kept his eyes on hers, so when she’d try to look away from him, he’d move his face again, so she’d have to look at him. That face … those deep eyes, with lids that drooped slightly at the outer edges, those heavy eyebrows … His nose sloped down razor-sharp and then gently formed two pillows of flesh at the nostrils. His jaw was square, leading into a strong chin which, at the center, was formed into two small mounds of flesh echoing his nose in perfect symmetry. His cheeks were separated from his mouth by two slashes of skin that turned into dimples under the cheekbones when he smiled.

  Pleading with her.

  Oh, God. She stopped thinking. After all this time Arthur MacGregor still took her breath away.

  But after a month of seeing him behind Nathan’s back she had had an attack of the Morals.

  And that night she’d found the strength to push him away, and tell him that she was not going to see him anymore.

  Or talk to him, or touch him.

  “Don’t turn me away, Dottie. You don’t mean it. You can’t do what we do to each other and not mean it. Oh, how I love you. I’m going to take care of you.” His voice was whisper-low and he’d pulled her back against him.

  They began to talk to one another at the same time, in pleading whispers, for and against running away together.

  But she won in the end.

  Won, she thought, and it struck her that it was an odd way to look at it. Yeah, she’d won.

  She now had a son. And she couldn’t just up and leave her own child, and she couldn’t take him—no matter what Arthur said—and she couldn’t go around thinking that seeing Arthur on the sly would be all right.

  She grimaced to herself.

  That wasn’t the reason she hadn’t run away with Arthur, and she knew it. And she was too old to lie to herself about it.

  The truth was that deep down she knew she’d never be able to trust him. She’d have been a nervous wreck every time he left the apartment, worrying about what he was up to, when he was coming back, or if he was coming back, or how many years he’d be in jail this time.

  She remembered Arthur laughing at her.

  “You’re never going to be able to keep it up. Dottie, you’re never going to be Donna Reed. Nathan might be safer, but he’s just not that smart—”

  “Oh, and you’re so smart? This, coming from a man who just did twenty-four months in jail?” she’d snapped.

  “What does that have to do with anything? Either you’re smart or you’re not, but I’m the one you should be with and you know it. I swear, I have something honest I can do—”

  “Like what?” she cut him off.

  He was silent, and, teasing, gave her a ponderous look.

  “Well?” she said, her eyebrows raised.

  “Well what? You can’t expect me to answer right off the bat, can you, woman?”
he said in that half-Scottish, half–New York accent of his.

  “Right off the bat? Right off the bat! You’ve had twenty-four months to think about it, for Christ’s sake!”

  His eyes had grown wide and twinkled at her, and his mouth, when she got angry with him, turned up into an amused grin, like a small child watching some wonderful and mysterious thing.

  “—Maybe I could go into forgery.” His eyes danced.

  “There, you see!” she bellowed and actually reached up and hit him on the shoulder.

  “Come on, Dottie, you have to give me a chance…”

  She’d looked away from him, stepped back, and crossed her arms in front of her so he couldn’t touch her.

  “I can’t do this anymore. I am married—”

  “To Nathan Weist?” He chuckled incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll never last—”

  “Oh, yes, it will, he’s a good man—”

  “He’s twenty years older—”

  “No.”

  “How much older is he then?”

  “… Eighteen,” she lied.

  “Oh, well, I can see where those two years would make a whole hell of a lot of difference—”

  “It doesn’t matter what age he is, Arthur, he’s steady—”

  “He’s a gambler, for Christ’s sake, Dottie.”

  She could tell by the grin on his face that he wasn’t taking this seriously, and that made her blood boil.

  “He’s a nightclub owner—”

  “He won it in a poker game.”

  “So? He works at it. He’s there every night—”

  “And how many hours is he in that backroom with Ben Zimmerman?”

  That had given her pause.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Ben’s brother’s doing five in Sing Sing. Come on, Dottie, I don’t believe you’re any more in love with this man than—”

  “I have a child with this man.”

  His face had hardened in a flash at the mention of the child. And he’d looked harsh and impatient and angry.