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  “I thought you had a permit?”

  “We didn't need a permit. We had the precinct captain.”

  “The captain who died?” My mother assured me that Steingut had left that funeral arm in arm with the dead man's successor, who just had to “go through the motions” before offering the shul any favors.

  Fuming, I packed my work knapsack. Had I not been so busy covering the action-bereft Huntington Town Board and sundry school boards too numerous to mention, I would have realized that Ida Fischkin as a B'nai Israel trustee was a disaster waiting to happen.

  “Las Vegas Saturday Nite” was her baby, her maiden project. She'd sent out dozens of multicolored brochures touting this new weekly event as “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York.” Like most false advertising, it worked, and within months B'nai Israel had the most lucrative assemblage of roulette wheels, poker, blackjack, and, yes, crap shoots of any Jewish institution in Flatbush-Midwood-Flatlands.

  “They needed to arrest someone,” my mother had explained. “So I suggested your father, since he is retired and could use a hobby.”

  She was the only woman in the world who could envision an arts-and-crafts program at the precinct lockup.

  “So come,” she'd repeated. “We'll have fun.”

  “I have other plans,” I'd told her, feeling only slightly guilty. Already I'd had enough of my parents. I'd also had enough of this strip-mall excuse for a newspaper. It would be good to get into Manhattan and look for trouble or, at the least, for some better male specimens than western Suffolk County had to offer.

  As I wound my way through the last of the Soviet-style hallways of Newsday Ronkonkoma, my stride was broken by a swirl of coffee-stained plaid. I stopped dead in my tracks.

  The last thing I needed.

  Comrade Mulvaney back from Moscow.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  I had not seen him since my tryout, but I had rehearsed cleverly combative retorts to the pronouncements I'd imagined him making. No way was he going to leave me speechless again, not even momentarily.

  “Actually, I was just thinking about her,” I said.

  “Something wrong with your mother?”

  “Nothing's wrong with my mother. She's just having my father arrested.”

  As soon as I said it, I was sorry.

  “Gosh.” His blue eyes turned soft like a girl's and, for a brief second, until I caught myself, I thought they were extraordinary.

  How could he imagine I would fall for this, the quintessential reporter's trick? Feigned sympathy. Do it right and people will spill their guts, tell you things they wouldn't tell their best friends.

  “He's not really being arrested,” I said, lying. “It's all over Las Vegas Nite at my parents' temple.”

  If I was trying to link my family to the Rothschilds, I had just failed miserably. Mulvaney's eyes widened. He thought I had a father who gambled too much, and this seemed to intrigue him enormously.

  “It's not that big a deal,” I continued, wondering why I didn't stop. “My mother started this gambling fund-raiser at her temple and everybody came and lost a fortune, figuring the money would go to a good cause anyway. Then the cops started looking at it. If you ask me, Kol Nidre Night is worse.”

  “Isn't that when they shake down people on the holiest night of the year?”

  How did he know this?

  “The Irish are the lost tribe of Israel,” he explained, his blue eyes full of himself.

  I found myself running on about the precinct captain who had protected B'nai Israel from law enforcement snoops.

  “But he's dead,” I said.

  “That's right,” Mulvaney replied. “Wasn't Steingut at the funeral?”

  The funeral that took place on the week of my tryout. The week, I reminded myself, when Mulvaney wondered aloud, very loud, if I could possibly be the stupidest human being on earth.

  He examined me up and down. “Ya gonna go watch?”

  “Nope,” I said, looking away. “I've got better things to do.”

  “My father's a criminal lawyer. . . .”

  His father, I'd heard, also knew Leisure Suit. “Steingut will get him out,” I said.

  “You believe that?” He shook his head. “This is the guy who tried to make money by creating a panic over Shoreham.”

  He never heard of Three Mile Island?

  “Besides, Steingut owes my father.”

  Mulvaney tilted his head, and I realized I'd said too much.

  In the Ronkonkoma lot, I got into my Nova, which sputtered, then started. For the first time that day, I examined the dirty blue jeans I had on. If I wanted to get into any of those clubs in the city, I'd have to go home and change. It would take me forty minutes to get there from Ronkonkoma and another hour before I finally hit Manhattan.

  Off the L.I.E., I skulked up Route 110, down various side streets too boring to mention, raced into my oversized walk-in closet—an important Long Island architectural detail—and put on a short black dress, one I had paid for myself.

  Back on the darkening and eternally clogged Long Island roads, I kicked myself for not taking the train, spotted the entrance to the Interborough Parkway and merged onto it, reasoning that I would get to Manhattan quicker if I went through Brooklyn. That in all my adult life I had never been able to drive through Brooklyn without stopping at my parents' house on Avenue I did not occur to me until I had backed into their narrow driveway.

  From there I surveyed the tree-lined block of brick houses and, across the street, the shul, basking in the glow of more streetlamps than it needed. An old man drove up, dropped off his wife, parked his cream-colored Cadillac, got out. He stepped onto the wide patio and slowly pulled one of the building's heavy wooden doors open. He seemed to have some bounce left to him. Or was it merely the anticipation of Las Vegas Saturday Nite? I tried to imagine winding up with a man like that.

  The next car, a beat-up BMW with what in the darkness looked like duct tape holding down the hood, skidded to a stop. A man in a plaid shirt got out, waved to me.

  This was a bad dream. Clyde Barrow did not attend B'nai Israel.

  Not without Bonnie, anyway.

  It's an old joke, but people say they are surprised to hear that Mulvaney has a mother.

  He does, though. He even speaks to her. More, perhaps, than she might wish, sparing no detail of his life and its complications, too many of them of his own making.

  After he announces to her that I will be writing The Jim Mulvaney Story—although all I am doing is making notes in case I change my mind—she calls me. She wants to be mentioned minimally, if at all.

  “You should put your own mother in the book,” she says. “It's not polite to write a book about someone else's mother.”

  Mulvaney's mother did not let him watch any television programs that were not on Channel 13, otherwise known, in the days before PBS, as Educational Television.

  “There,” I say. “Finished with your childhood.”

  “You kidding?” Mulvaney replies.

  Well, if he wants more . . .

  CHAPTER 7

  Las Vegas, Brooklyn

  “Mulvaney!” I said in a whisper that had the intensity of a scream. “What are you doing here?” The temple door was warped but it had slid open quickly, as if oiled for an onslaught of gamblers.

  “Why ya whispering?” he asked.

  “Because, Mulvaney, you just walked into my parents' shul!”

  “I bet your grandparents went here, too.”

  “They didn't just go here. They built it!” Volume returned to my voice. “They survived a pogrom, escaped Eastern Europe, immigrated to America with three small children, and built this shul so that they would always have a place where sneaky Christian men couldn't find them.”

  “Shush, darlin'.”

  I felt sweaty, so I took off my coat.

  “Nice dress,” Mulvaney said, looking me up
and down the way he had the first day we met, the encounter he didn't remember.

  “Yeah and it's not on anybody's expense account.”

  A few of my parents' friends turned around and waved happily.

  He leaned against the red velvet wall and looked across the small, chandeliered room. His blue eyes dewed with fake religious fervor. A garish green New York Police Department press pass hung on a chain around his neck. In Suffolk County all we got were small, cheesy white ones.

  I wanted to kill him. “Would you please get out of here?”

  “What, and miss a great story?”

  “It's not a great story. My father getting arrested at his shul is not a great story.”

  I climbed the steps to the sanctuary. “Don't you dare follow me in.” I turned and caught his eyes, fixed on my rear.

  “Mulvaney! We're in a religious institution!” At the top, through the open door, he peered over my shoulder.

  “How can you tell?”

  A screen, red velvet like the walls, hid the wooden ark and its Torahs. Rows of bridge tables displaying roulette wheels and the remnants of poker, blackjack, and crap games—each now guarded by an NYPD cop—stood where the prayer benches usually did. Cops, in fact, flooded the place, looking as if they had raided the entertainment segment of a bar mitzvah.

  The floors, walls, and tables glittered with blue and white confetti. Some specks had made it as high as the chandeliers, crystal like the ones in the lobby, except larger, as if this were the Versailles of Brooklyn, not a bastion of one of the most decidedly working-class Jewish neighborhoods in the borough.

  The chandeliers had all been donated by the Fortunoffs, former members who got rich and moved their furniture store to—where else?—Long Island. Illuminated beneath the nearest, a group of polyester-trousered women, my mother's mah-jongg partners, chatted ambitiously. One of them batted her false eyelashes at Mulvaney. The rest gossiped about their husbands, all of whom were in golf shirts, although none actually played. Their voices were animated, delighted. As shuls go, Congregation B'nai Israel of Midwood was Orthodox but not too Orthodox.

  A founding member of the Board of Trustees held up a megaphone decorated with a Star of David.

  “Folks!” he announced in an ancient voice. “Coffee and Danish are on the house!”

  If the cops didn't close them down forever, Las Vegas Saturday Nite would be even more popular when word got around that it had been raided.

  “Just not with my own wife!”

  Through the din I heard my father asking for conjugal visits at the lockup.

  A circle of cops loosened to reveal a balding, ebullient man in black horn-rimmed glasses and a navy sport jacket over a pink polyester golf shirt, a garment only my mother could have selected.

  Unfamiliar, no doubt, with Henny Youngman, they all guffawed.

  “Funny guy,” Mulvaney said.

  “So, Mulvaney,” I asked, unable to stand it any longer, “how'd you wind up with the religion beat?”

  “This is a cop story.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, a little cop told me.”

  “A little cop? Short, you mean, like you?”

  “I'm five foot ten and a half.”

  “Yeah, but you think you're short,” I said. “What cop told you?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Forget to read his name tag?”

  He flashed me a smile. But it was more eyes than teeth.

  I watched as my father held up his bound hands in mock supplication.

  “Jeez,” I said. “Did they have to cuff him, too?”

  Mulvaney put his arm around my shoulder. I squirmed out of it.

  “Big-time gambler, darlin'. Wouldn't want him to get away.”

  “My father isn't a big-time anything. You know very well what this is. Las Vegas Nite at the shul. And that's all it is.”

  “No. It's more than that. It's also a great story.”

  “Mulvaney!” I said. “You write about this and I will arrange for whatever balls you have to be surgically removed if I have to do it myself.”

  I looked up and saw the rabbi.

  “You kiss your mother with that mouth?” Mulvaney asked.

  “You are repeating yourself. Worse, you're a creep. I told you something in confidence and you came here to milk it for a story.”

  “How do you know that's why I came?”

  “Because you're telling me that's why you came.”

  “How do you know it's the only reason?”

  I paused. Took a breath. Recovered.

  “Mulvaney, don't try to pull that crap on me. Don't you dare flash those blue eyes at me and try to convince me that you came here to see me. I told you that I wasn't coming tonight. You came here because you wanted to write a cheap, easy story making fun of two old people and their shul. How low can you get?”

  He shrugged, reached over, and brushed confetti from my shoulder. “This crap is as annoying as parsley.”

  “I mean it, Mulvaney. Write about this and I will never speak to you again, even if I have the world's greatest mob story that can only be written with your help.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  I tried not to look at him. “If you write about this . . .”

  “It's a great bright.”

  “My father is not a bright,” I said. “He is not some short little feature story about the foibles of human nature, the cute corruption of local politicians, or creative uses of leisure time. He's just doing the shul a favor, taking the rap so nobody else has to. He's not even a Long Islander.” I paused for effect and had my own turn looking Mulvaney up and down, as if I was assessing his journalistic qualifications. “The desk won't take the story.”

  “They will from me.”

  “This is a slap on the wrist,” I repeated. “It won't amount to much.” But as I spoke I knew this story was all that Mulvaney said. In the world of newspaper brights, my father was the Montauk Lighthouse. As a nuclear moment, he'd put all of Shoreham's disaster potential to shame.

  “This could blow up bad, too. It could be bad for your father,” Mulvaney said. “I'm thinking I should hang around.”

  I looked at my father. He gazed longingly at the cigars in his golf shirt pocket. A cop picked one out, unwrapped it, lit it, and put it in my father's mouth. I could smell the Phillies Panatela from where I stood. A barbeque gone awry, a dump burning to the ground. The cops, though, didn't seem to mind. I just hoped the ones at the precinct would be that nice.

  One of my mother's mah-jongg partners walked over and asked if I was engaged to anyone yet. Mulvaney snickered.

  The rabbi was next. “Evenin', Father,” Mulvaney said, and I gasped. The rabbi grabbed his confetti-dotted beard and stormed away.

  “Mulvaney!” I was whispering my screams again. “He's not a priest!”

  At dawn one morning, the Short Paperboy discovered The Modern Farmer and it became his favorite television program, one he never missed. He'd wake up by himself, don a straw hat—a Mr. Green Jeans hat, but he didn't know it—tiptoe downstairs, turn the set on, and LET THE SHOW BEGIN!

  “How could anyone not like Modern Farmer?”

  Jim Mulvaney, defender of early morning agricultural programming.

  “Mulvaney,” I say, “it's not the show. It's your lack of normalcy.”

  He is actually taken aback by this comment.

  “A normal kid who didn't get to watch enough television would sneak off to a friend's house for a dose of Howdy Doody. A really creative normal kid would go to an appliance store, someplace where they had rows of televisions for sale, all tuned to different channels! But you! You got up early in the morning to watch something nobody wanted to see.”

  “Best sex show on television.”

  Did I tell you that he went to Catholic elementary school?

  CHAPTER 8

  Dueling Ancestors

  “Barbara, my darling daughter, who is your
nice little friend?”

  It was my mother in full polyester regalia: striped pants with a flowered tunic.

  For my father's arrest, she'd had her hair done.

  She gave it a pat and it didn't move. Diligently teased and sprayed by a hairdresser in red capri pants—a male, I think—at the beauty parlor on Schenectady Avenue. “His matador look,” my mother called it.

  “Nice outfit,” I told her. She only got sarcasm about other people.

  “Thank you, dear. The patterns blend.”

  Mulvaney swaggered up, extended his hand, and looked at her with the kind of blue eyes she had never seen in shul. “Jim Mulvaney from Newsday.”

  “Ah, you work with my Barbara.”

  “That would require cooperation,” I said.

  “As a matter of fact,” Mulvaney said, “she's one of our most talented rookies.”

  I gave him a look. He had, according to Claire, been hired only a week before my tryout.

  “Dave,” my mother called out, waving to my father, her red manicured nails flapping in the breeze, “we've got a real reporter here.”

  “And what am I?” I asked.

  “Chopped liver?” Mulvaney offered.

  My father, still in cuffs, happily held his arms up like a champ.

  “Well, Jim,” my mother said. She put her hand on his shoulder. “What is it you do at Newsday?”

  “I cover the Mafia,” he said.

  “Oh, how exciting! That sounds so much more interesting than Huntington.”

  “I'm investigating gambling rings. But from the gamblers' point of view. Really, it's a victimless crime.”

  “I couldn't agree with you more,” my mother saidsweetly.

  The love fest was interrupted by cops transporting their “perp.”

  We followed the rings of cigar smoke outside.

  “Don't worry, toots,” my father called out to me. “Stanley said he'd be down in an hour.”

  As her husband of forty-three years disappeared in a squad car, my mother invited Jim Mulvaney home.

  • •

  I stormed across the street, flung open my car. Mulvaney grabbed the door and crooked his head toward my parents' house. “You probably need to call in. Copy-desk jerks. Can you believe some of their questions?”