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Blaine obviously had the law enforcement sources telling him that Brady had been snared in a sting. Carla had the names of the guests stored in her computer. She easily could have given Willis access to her files from outside the building. There had to be countless city power brokers—perhaps even the Mayor—on those lists to make the story even juicier. But Willis and Blaine obviously had one target in mind: the rogue publisher who had made a mockery of their newsroom.
Jamie didn’t have to be much of a sleuth or even a quasi-competent reporter to figure this one out. But neither would Brady. What if Brady admitted his sin and cited human frailty like some television evangelist caught with his pants down? What if he begged forgiveness in the eyes of God, his wife and his advertisers? What if he denied the alleged impropriety and dismissed the story as the hatchet job of embittered and easily identified old-timers still pining for the past? And marched into the newsroom, police in tow, and had Willis and Blaine—hardcore lifers from the halcyon days of print tabloid supremacy—escorted into the street?
“Dad, have you thought about what could happen if Brady follows the story’s trail to you?” Jamie said. “I mean, won’t it be pretty obvious that you had something to do with it?”
Morris shrugged. “Sometimes you don’t think, you just do,” he said.
“But you guys went through all this just on the chance that he’ll have to sell the paper and the next guy will be better?”
“That’s the unknown,” Morris said. “The feeling was that we needed to do something. Maybe on some level we’re just kidding ourselves—who knows? But Brady has shown no respect for the people who have put a lot of years in here, who have sacrificed a lot for the paper. We don’t ask for much. But the one thing we do deserve—and demand—is respect.”
Jamie nodded. He mumbled, “That took balls.”
“What’d you say?” Morris said, eye on the screen.
“No, nothing,” Jamie said.
For so many years he had resented his father’s immersion in his work, his being tethered to the union. Now here he was getting all emotional about the stand Morris had taken. Jamie couldn’t help but feel pride. He had come here wanting to taunt him, but now he wished he could do something to help him. Blaine and Willis as well.
He could picture them sitting at a bar somewhere, planning the counterattack, going after Brady with the only weapon they had left—the journalism itself. In his mental snapshot, Willis was looking over the story, marking it up. Blaine was lighting a cigarette and taking a long, contented drag.
Risk versus reward. Jamie seemed to have an opportunity to play that game now. He wanted to believe he had the courage.
“I need to get this page and the jump to the pressroom,” Morris said.
Jamie put a hand on his shoulder.
“Can you wait a minute?”
He picked up the telephone on Morris’ desk and dialed Cal Willis’ extension.
Day Six: Saturday, November 12, 1994
Chapter Thirty-one
Kelly Murphy’s clear blue eyes dazzled like flash photography in the dim pub lighting. They fronted a winning bartending persona that could not be acquired, imitated or taught.
“Happy work night, guys,” she said, setting down long-necked Buds and dismissing the twenty Morris pushed at her. “This round’s on me.”
“How’re you and the husband going to pay off that mortgage on the Island if you keep buying rounds?” Morris said.
He extended an elbow onto the bar and let the soggy twenty sit.
“Mo, you know if I pay for a couple, I get the twenty anyway.”
Kelly winked as she breezily moved away, whisking an empty shot glass and a scatter of dollar bills from a nearby setting.
“You guys want to look at something else maybe?”
The television mounted high in the far corner was tuned to a replay of the Knicks game from the Garden earlier in the night.
“The news, that would be good,” Morris said. He turned to Jamie and said, “Unless you prefer…”
Jamie appreciated the acknowledgment of his basketball fixation. He had heard the Knicks had won while he was driving down from Pleasantville.
“Fine by me,” he said. He knew Morris would have preferred a blank screen to the game.
“One of the guys told me the drivers were ready to riot when the trucks were loaded with the first edition, but there are so many cops out there tonight,” Morris said.
“No riot, no reporting,” Jamie said, repeating one of the many Willis-isms permanently lodged in his brain. “But I guess the strike did end today so they’ll have to show something on the news.”
It was half past midnight. Twenty-four hours earlier, Jamie had had Carla in his arms, stroking her thigh as their conversation faded to half-conscious whispers. He still couldn’t get over how well he’d slept.
It already seemed like days ago. But here he was, with Morris at the bar, after newly forged connections with Carla and even Karyn had completed a trifecta of the implausibly unforeseen.
In the spirit of détente, Jamie and Morris hunkered down at a neutral site. Some of the printers, Louie included, were at their customary table. The first wave of editors and reporters following the completion of the last edition were celebrating their return to the ranks of the employed in the renovated section behind the far wall.
“Uncle Lou’s here, I see,” Jamie said.
“He worked this afternoon, the first shift after we went back in,” Morris said. “I guess he’s been hanging around all night. He’s still a little, you know…”
Morris pursed his lips and nodded in admission that Steven was a subject better left alone on this impromptu father-and-son night out. The mood was as awkward as it was amicable, Jamie and Morris not unlike one-time neighbors bumping into each other years later at the mall. The pace of their drinking—both were more typically inclined to nurse a beer until it was warm—was accelerated.
They nibbled at a bowl of pretzels. They stared vacantly at the television screen as one crime scene blurred with another. Jamie experienced a pleasant buzz from the beer and conjured up the tender image of Aaron curled in the fetal position, Ruffy nestled against his chest.
“You heard about your sister?”
His meditation interrupted, Jamie shrugged.
“You didn’t hear the news?”
“What news?”
“That she’s pregnant?”
Jamie’s jaw dropped so quickly that a piece of pretzel nearly dislodged from his mouth.
“No shit! That’s great, unreal. When did they find out?”
Morris christened the second beer with a pronounced gulp, foam spilling over the bottle mouth and down the side. En route to the bathroom, Louie gave them a wave, his sheepish smile unmasking his embarrassment about Steven. A couple of city room editors strolled past, their journalistic antenna pulsating at the sight of Morris and Jamie.
“She called from the doctor early this morning, beside herself. You should have heard your mother after she got the news, crying like a baby.”
“Wow. I mean, they’ve been trying so long.”
“The thing is, she’s pregnant but we’re not sure if it’s, you know, a done deal.”
“Dad, you are or you aren’t,” Jamie chided playfully.
“I know but this procedure they did, now what the hell is it called, in-vee-something…”
“In vitro fertilization?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“I didn’t even know they were still seeing the specialist,” Jamie said. “The last time I spoke to Mickey, he said that they couldn’t take it anymore.”
Morris fidgeted on his stool, slid his beer bottle forward and back on the bar. He lifted a pretzel from the bowl and bit off one side.
“I didn’t know they were doing it either,” he said. “This thing has been dragging on so long that I think Becky got to the point where she only wanted your mother to know. They talk all day. I think Becky even calls her
during her lunch break at school. I only found out today that she had an in at some clinic in Manhattan because of that guy on the block.”
“Which guy?”
“The one you wrote about, the doctor. You know, the black guy. He hooked them up with some big specialist, a guy he’d worked with as an intern.”
“Thad Greene? No kidding.”
Morris’ phrasing—“the black guy”—was at least a step up from the Yiddish pejorative. It was still an unpleasant reminder that Thad and family hadn’t exactly gotten the benefit of the doubt from his father or anyone else on the street. But at least, Jamie reasoned, the Greenes had made some social progress since Jamie’s real estate intervention. This made him feel good, certainly better than he had in the days following the publication of his story.
“I didn’t know he worked at Brookdale Medical until your mother told me today,” Morris said. “To be honest, I didn’t even know he was a doctor.”
Many times, Molly had recounted to Jamie during occasional spells of motherhood nostalgia that Brookdale had been named Beth-El not long after Jamie was born there. The hospital sat at the edge of the Brownsville section, long abandoned by blue-collar Italians and Jews, and subsequently blighted by poverty, crime and sometime later a young street thug named Mike Tyson.
Hence the fear that neighboring Canarsie had embarked on a similarly downward spiral and the overreaction on Ninety-Fifth Street, among others, to any freshly minted household of color. Tyson and associates could be holed up in any one of them.
“Your sister did some research and found out the specialist was some miracle worker in the field,” Morris said. “They told her the wait for him to do this procedure would take a while but the next day—this was sometime last month, I guess—they got a call and were told there was a cancellation. The other night at the house, when I said that thing about you having a baby and her not—and I apologize for that—she was waiting for the results, probably all stressed out. But your mother called me today…”
He checked his watch and corrected himself.
“Yesterday now, I mean. And then there was a meeting about ending the strike, and I had to rush straight down to the paper. Your mother was so excited she forgot how mad she was about what happened—you know, with us. She said Becky and Mickey even took the day off from school and were planning to take the doctor and his wife out to dinner last night.”
“The Greenes, you mean?”
Morris nodded. “To thank them for the contact and all.”
What great irony, Jamie thought. As much as anyone, the schvartzer had assisted in the conception of a second grandchild. Thad Greene had solved the Kramer family’s worst source of misery. Jamie couldn’t have written a better and more paradoxically gratifying postscript to the story.
“There’s also the possibility of twins, because of this treatment,” Morris said. “They’ll find out soon. But—and this is what I meant before about her being completely pregnant, what Mickey told Mom when your sister was taking a nap—there could also be higher odds of a miscarriage. She’s pregnant, but Mickey is worried that if it doesn’t hold, it’ll be even worse than usual for her. Becky’s floating on a cloud, she’s so damn happy. Of course, you know your mother. She didn’t want to hear it. She’d be shopping for clothes already if Mickey didn’t tell her not to get too far ahead of herself.”
Jamie could understand Mickey’s apprehension, having experienced Karyn’s life-altering fears of miscarriage—no caffeine, commuting and, above all, canoodling. Becky would no doubt be equally vigilant.
“If anyone has a right to be happy under any circumstances, I’d say it’s Becky, you know?” Jamie said. “She’s been through so much. And there’s no point in expecting the worst. She’s pregnant. She’s going to have a baby. I’m going to be an uncle.”
He thought about how Molly would react when he told her that Karyn was taking Aaron to Seattle and how she would carry on if he really did decide to go with them. He wasn’t ready to make that decision yet. He pushed those thoughts away.
“It’ll be great for Mom to have a newborn downstairs,” Jamie said.
He raised his beer a couple of inches off the bar and waited for Morris to respond.
“To Becky,” Jamie said.
“Becky.”
Their bottles touched. On the television screen, NY1 was reporting on the return of the eight Trib unions, trucks carrying away the first edition, steered by scabs with a sizable police escort. There were close ups of the drivers’ faces contorted in anger and eggs splattering against the side of the trucks. Debbie Givens interviewed an exhausted-looking Gerry Colangelo.
Morris harrumphed and stuffed more pretzels into his mouth. They sat in silence. The bar had filled, every seat taken. Kelly became a whirlwind of drink-serving activity.
“Listen,” Morris said, still chewing, eyes fixed on the screen, now filled by the five-day forecast. “I should tell you—and this is all just talk so far, everything is so new—but it could be that we, your mother and me, actually won’t be living in the same house as Becky and Mickey by the time the baby comes.”
“Why not?”
“Well, first of all, we didn’t—we don’t—have plans, not yet. But your mother said the first thing your sister said after she got home from the doctor today was that she doesn’t want to raise the baby in Brooklyn. She has her eye on the Island, always has. She says she’s not bringing her child into the world in a cramped two-bedroom apartment. Your mother said they could have the upstairs, which is a little bigger, but then Becky started going on about a yard, a playroom, the whole suburban thing. She said she and Mickey could get teaching jobs out there. Like you said, she’s waited a long time, suffered a lot. She should get what she wants. They’ve got some money saved for the down payment and she says she wants to buy something before the baby’s born, have the room and everything set up. Your mother’s already worked up about that. But it got me to thinking that maybe this is also a chance for us to look ahead, make some changes. Maybe take a look around out there too.”
“You, move to Long Island?”
Jamie couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Whenever relatives or friends, Jamie included, left the city for some nowhere hamlet, Morris would visit reluctantly and immediately pronounce the place as uninhabitable. He would brag that he was born in Brooklyn, would die in Brooklyn and would only be caught dead and buried on Long Island because union membership entitled him and Molly a cemetery plot in Suffolk County.
And only because, at that point, the lack of a legitimate kosher deli and a properly baked bagel would probably be easier to ignore.
“You’re going to commute all the way downtown from out there?”
Morris shrugged. “For a while, maybe a year or two, but I’ll be sixty-five in a couple of months. I can collect full pension and social security in another year. And who the hell knows what’s really going to happen around here?”
He leaned closer to Jamie. “Maybe after tonight, I wind up getting shit-canned altogether.”
To Jamie, Morris without a job, this job, was unfathomable. What would he do? Who would he be?
“Well, technically, couldn’t you just say that you are not in the position to make editorial decisions?” Jamie said. “All you did was to send the re-plate to the pressroom, just like you do every night. You did your job.”
“I’ve been doing it, whatever it was, for a long time. And you know what? Even after they brought in the computers, I always thought I’d stick around, that I’d be the last one of us to go unless they had to carry me out, feet first. But this whole thing, with all the crap that’s gone on the last few days, I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve been thinking a little. The time comes for everyone to make a change.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Jamie said. The beer seemed to be making him braver about the possibility of Seattle. But he was also uncomfortable with his father’s reflective angst and was happy to have re-routed the conversation back to him.
Jamie didn’t want to make his own skepticism too obvious. He preferred for Morris to believe he was making a responsible decision, if and when he ever got around to making it.
“I have to say this guy was really convincing,” Jamie said. “He made a strong case that a lot is going to change in the next few years. He also didn’t exactly paint a pretty picture for the future of the newspaper.”
“Ah, they’ve been talking about the death of newspapers for years since they put the news on TV,” Morris said. “I remember they used to say there’d be no more radio.”
“But look at how many papers have folded in the last fifteen, twenty years,” Jamie said. “And he’s not saying the news is dying, just that people may eventually be getting it and a lot of other things on a computer.”
Morris flapped his hand. “And what else are they going to do on it? Scramble their eggs? Walk their dogs? Try on their clothes?”
“I’ll be honest with you, I’m not sure I get it either,” Jamie said. “But changes happen. You should know that. What you just showed me upstairs, the job you do now compared to the old days—how is that different from what this guy is saying?”
Morris’ silence conceded the point. His eyes reflected the long tumultuous week. He took a deep nasal breath before exhaling.
“Listen, whatever happens…”
Jamie waited, the pregnancy of the pause drifting into a second trimester.
“If Becky…well, if she has the baby, and she and Mickey are living in the same house, or we both wind up moving to the Island, your mother, she’s not going to love that one more than Aaron. That’s not her way.”
There was conviction in his voice, a sincerity Jamie could not recall coming from his father, at least on any subject that directly concerned him. Then again, he had broached the subject speaking on behalf of Molly.