The Belvederes of Brooklyn: A Family's Struggle to Conquer the 1930s

ILLUSTRATIONS

FRONT COVER

The Eighth Wonder of the World: Civil War Memorial Arch designed by Architect John Duncan in 1889, with reliefs of Heroic Union Soldiers Embroiled in Battle on left column titled The Spirit of the Army and reliefs of Heroic Union Sailors Embroiled in Battle on right column titled The Spirit of the Navy. Quadriga designed by sculptor Frederick MacMonnies in 1896 with Lady Columbia representing the victorious United States of America over the Confederate States of America, erected in Grand Army Plaza designed by architects Olmstead and Vaux in 1867 at north entrance to Prospect Park for the City of Brooklyn, New York.

INSIDE THE BOOK

The Arturi Family of 1075 Pacific Street

Adelaide Grillone Arturi

Francesco Arturi

Corner of Patchen and Van Buren

Civil War Memorial Arch, Grand Army Plaza

Quadriga

Map of Battle of Long Island (in Brooklyn)

Map of Prospect Park

The Long Meadow

Entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery

Boating in Prospect Park Lake

The Arturi Family Victrola

The Invincible Alpinists of Italy

25 Patchen Avenue

Hadrian

Antinous

Crowded Coney Island's Famous Wonder Wheel

Crowded Coney Island and Ice Cream Vendor

Crowded Coney Island View from Boardwalk

Crowded Coney Island View from Sea

Map of Italy

IN MEMORIAM

I wrote this book to honor the memory of my mother Adelaide, who passed away young while she was under the care of the doctors of the now-defunct Jewish Hospital and Medical Center of Brooklyn, 555 Prospect Place, Brooklyn, New York.

Also for my father Francesco. My brother admitted him to The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, 525 East 68th Street, New York, New York, for tests and observation, while I was out at sea. My father died, but not of his cancer. Instead, he transpired in bed in a coma—and in my arms after a hurried flight from Tampa, Florida when my ship docked—after suffering third degree, hot water burns in the bathtub. Unattended.

If you live in Queens, are of the same mind as my family after you read this story, please stop by their gravesite in St. John's cemetery in Maspeth, and say a prayer for them. They would appreciate a commiserative greeting. The location of the burial plot is on page 455.

The scaffolds are not safe, for the rich must ever profit more.

—Pietro Di Donato,

Christ in Concrete, (1939)

Stand upright, speak thy thought, declare

The Truth thou hast, that all may share

Be bold, proclaim it everywhere,

They only live who dare.

—Editorial Masthead of DAWN, the English Language Daily Newspaper of Karachi, Pakistan, Thursday, November 9, 1955.

The Arturi Family of 1075 Pacific Street

Back row: Joseph - Evelyn - Vincent - Salvatore

Center: Father - Mother

Front row: Jennie - Antoinette - David - Rudolph

Adelaide Grillone Arturi

b. 1887 d. 1933

Age 46

Francesco Arturi

b. 1880 d. 1963

Age 83

Corner of Patchen Avenue (r.) and Van Buren Street (l.)

Chapter One

The Beginning of it All

I was not there at the massacre of the Petrazzis on Rulers Bar Hassock in the marshes of Jamaica Bay. I was not there to see what happened to Peggy Shaw on a different night. Nor was I there when Monique ran into her mother's bedroom and saw…something, which made her scream.

Nevertheless, this is what I do know. Some of it I witnessed firsthand; not all of it, of course. I confess that I know only what happened after that, and here it is, for better or worse.

***

Frightened, Adrian Belvedere ran out of the house that his father had told him not to enter again. He flew off the porch, heedless of Monique's cries for help. Limping due to a clubfoot, he ran to the Kosciusko Street Station of the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, hoping that none of the neighbors saw him. That did not seem possible, however, because he ran on the sidewalks of Van Buren Street and Patchen Avenue in broad daylight.

Housewives in the former Dutch town of Boswijck, now called Bushwick, in northern Brooklyn, leaned out of windows greeting friends while others watched the passing parade. Customers went in and out of stores. Pedestrians were everywhere. Laborers, grouped on the driveway of the lumberyard, jumped out of the way, as an agitated neighborhood kid bowled through them.

Of the many survival tricks his big brother had taught him, like kicking a bully in the balls when he picked on you, one became his escape route now. The challenge was to hop the El if you did not have a nickel for the fare.

Recently graduated from Our Lady of Good Counsel, Adrian paused to catch his breath on the landing that housed the cashier's booth. The turnstile was a flight of stairs above the trolley tracks of Broadway. He ran up the Manhattan-bound side with some passengers, and then held back as they paid their fares, out of sight of the woman in the cage whose back was to him. The last paying passenger went up the stairs to the platform, leaving the landing deserted.

Adrian waited, scared and sick, until he heard the clamor of the steel wheels of the train over his head. Because it was the afternoon doldrums and not the morning rush hour to the city, the train was only four cars long and stopped in the center of the platform. When it did, it left a long empty stretch between the top of the stairs and the last door of the last car.

It was easier hopping the El during rush hour because the train had enough cars that reached from one end of the platform to the other, the last door coming to a stop at the top of the stairs. Owing to it not being the rush hour, Adrian had to act an extra few seconds ahead of time to cover the empty distance. In order to time his moves perfectly, however, he would have to arrive on the platform just as the train was ready to close its doors and pull out, not pull in. In addition, this had to be done out of sight of the train. He had to do it by instinct and sound alone.

Adrian rose from his crouch and, summoning whatever athletic ability his mismatched limbs could give him, ran when he heard the sound of air brakes stopping the train. He vaulted the five-foot-high railing that separated him from the paying passengers and his flight from shame. One shoe tip did not make it, causing him to crash to the concrete floor on the other side. He landed on his right shoulder.

Aching, limping, and sobbing, he ran up the stairs to the second level while the woman shouted at him. He ran as fast as he could to the last door of the train. Just as the rubber-edged twin doors were closing, he jumped into the car.

There were not many persons in the car because it was early afternoon on a hot summer day. It was not a good time to go into the muggy city for anything. At the next station, a corpulent, middle-aged man, neat and clean with smooth-shaven jowls and thick pink lips, entered the car. Looking around cursorily, he sat next to Adrian, at his right, though there were enough unoccupied seats in the car to hold the brown-haired boy's entire graduating class. Adrian smelled alcohol and cologne while he busied himself drying his tears with his bare hands. The man smiled at him.

I can hardly believe my good luck in meeting up with such a beautiful boy, he said. Then he bent his head and added, Why are you crying?

Adrian checked his pain for a second. Who you talking to, mister, huh?

The B-MT stalker, whom the neighborhood kids had heard about but dismissed as the cops' spooky story to scare them from hopping the El, offered Adrian a dollar if he would get off at the next stop with him.

Say, kid, let's do something nice. We'll get off at Marcy and have ice cream sodas in a place I know on Broadway. How about it? To ingratiate himself further, he pushed his leg against Adrian's and dropped his hand on the boy's crotch.

Immediately, Adrian swung his left fist and whacked the man in the mouth. Angered and frightened yet again, he ran forward through the car just as he had done when he had run from Maureen who had lashed out at her daughter. He opened the door to the next car and the two cars in front of it. He kept going to the very front.

With the motorman's locked booth to his right and rubbing the ache in his shoulder, he leaned against the front door of the first car. He wanted to scream because the throbbing pain was approaching his limit. Adrian looked angrily through the safety plate glass window at the onrushing tracks and wondered if he had the courage to fall on them and let the steel wheels squash him like a bug in punishment for his crime. At the very least, he thought, choking back sobs again at the continued assaults upon his innocence, it would end the suffering of his broken shoulder.

Then, he recalled Brother Dominic telling the class that only a decade earlier a wooden train that was in use at the time on this very line crashed into the rear of a new steel car. The train had left Marcy Avenue Station and sped across the East River in a fog. The accident killed a three-year-old girl and injured forty three others, including the motorman. Almost on that same day, New York City banished all wooden trains from operation in its transit system and replaced them with steel cars, such as the one he was riding in now.

He stepped away from the front door to avoid seeing the fearful, massive steel girders of the Williamsburg Bridge fly by. If this was a steel car and there was no fog today, he was still afraid that the train would smash into them. Then he stepped back into his footprints, face pressed against the cool glass of the door of the first car as it rushed across the bridge, headed west. For doing what he had done to Monique's mother, Adrian expected God to punish him, if He so willed it.

Escaping Brooklyn still alive, unfortunately, Adrian changed at Canal Street in the dungeons of Manhattan, trotting through the subterranean passageways in a daze. He caught the first train that pulled in, which was the Sea Beach that crossed the East River, headed east, on the Manhattan Bridge. Now he was reentering Brooklyn over the same river. Then the train sped generally south, in the subway tunnel under the length of Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue. He did not know how long he would delay once he arrived at the seashore.

When he did arrive at the salty and humid seashore at Stilwell Avenue, the amusement area's main El station, he was caught like a log in a mudslide. It swept him along with the crowd when the throng poured down the station's stairway and into the streets. The whirling, invisible energy carried him past Nathan's, the Bumper Cars, Carousel, Wonder Wheel, sideshow curiosities, and other attractions.

He sat with throbbing head in his hands on the hot sand surrounded by thousands of persons. In silence, he endured the teeth-grinding pain of the agony in his right shoulder; the bones of which he was certain were broken.

The afternoon began to cool off from the oppressive heat of the day as he squirmed on the crowded beach. This was the spot where Maureen would take Reggie and Monique, and he and his sister Linda. Lying on the blanket, he would rivet his gaze on Monique's thighs. He could not hold on to the image and fantasy any longer, however, blissful as it was. He could not, because now it hurt like blazes to think of her.

Dressed in street clothes, he sat up and looked at the families spread out on blankets or sitting under beach umbrellas. A teenage girl stared at him with a smile forming on her features, unsure whether to invite him over. She wore a black cotton bathing suit with wide straps across her sunburned back. Her thighs were spread open somewhat, on purpose, he was sure of it; enough, he thought, to see something. When he raised his sight to take in all of her features again, he saw a more inviting smile. The glow in her pale sea-blue eyes contrasted with Doris's tiny eyes, which sparkled only because of the eyeglasses she wore, not because of joyfulness or good health. Humble Doris with the sunset-red hair, plaintive Doris with the million freckles, poignant Doris with her adolescent, deadly cancer.

She ate a hot dog. Adrian's stomach growled in hunger in reply to her flirtatious gestures, reminding him that he had not had anything to eat except a cup of coffee and a piece of buttered bread this morning. Guilt-ridden and vexed, he turned away from the seductress and tried to doze off into oblivion where the shame and the embarrassment, the hunger and the agony, could not touch him. Perspiration was drying in the folds of his neck and dampened shirt, making his body as uncomfortable as his soul. Wind picked up a little, blowing sand on him and rumpling his hair. He smelled his own sweat.

Adrian heard people leaving; their shuffling mingled with the roar of the ocean. Family by family, they deserted the beach as the sun set. He continued to seek oblivion; half conscious, half dead, until night arrived and he found himself still stretched out on his back, alone. Where was the girl with the sea-blue eyes, the spirited, cheerful Doris? He wanted to talk with her. He wanted to ask who had given her the right to be so vibrantly alive and Doris so gravely dead.

She and her family were gone.

He pushed himself up off the sand. Walking aimlessly, he eventually headed for the noisy crowd and the lights of the amusements. The cacophony and multicolor lights of mechanical gadgetry that whirled and spun around in geometric and random patterns awakened his senses, then assaulted them. He felt rather than heard the metallic screeching of the Cyclone roller coaster and the cries of the frightened but jubilant riders. Plunging to the nadir of the ride, the roar of the cars buffeted him as he stood only a few feet in front of the fence.

The noise and sights of revelry caused heartache because of the memories the scene recalled. He had ridden on it with Reggie, Monique, Linda, Tommy, Ted, Howie, Rick, and his girl friend Renata, with Benny who wanted to marry his older sister Paula, and with other friends whom he would no longer see.

Leaving the Cyclone ride and the cyclone fence, he witnessed other activities that were taking place on Surf Avenue but mainly in the midway seaward to it called Bowery. Children ran around and he heard their mothers scolding them or laughing with them. Their fathers complained over the effects of the stomach-sinking rides on which their children had coaxed them. Boys and girls of all ages and sizes were munching on candy apples, corn on the cob on a stick, and big puffs of pink cotton candy. Some carried painted chalk dolls that they had won at various games. The sight and sound of normal family life that he witnessed made him feel more alone than ever, more dejected and detached than ever, because the experience brought back memories of a wanting childhood.

They should never have taken him out of the Home. He had been safe in there, protected by six-foot fences. Out here in the world, he had been thrown to the wolves and been hunted down by predators like that thick-lipped fat man. Thrown also to Maureen, whose lips were also pink, except that they were not thick and slimy like that of the B-MT stalker's lips. Yet, there was no getting away from the fact that she, too, was a rapacious monster who ate him up for breakfast, lunch, and supper, but who did it all in the name of love, said she.

The cry of a sideshow pitchman caused Adrian to halt in front of his pulpit, near a wall where he was looking at a poster of a freak. Was it real? he wondered. The Alligator Boy with the body of a reptile and a human head—had Jesus turned His back on the deformity as the Lord had, in fact, on Adrian who was himself an aberration? Why had the Lord allowed these two boys to be born in the first place if all those boys could live for was perpetual suffering and unending ridicule? On the other hand, was all human abnormality nothing except a cruel joke played on unsuspecting humanity by a capricious deity? Were Adrian Belvedere and the Alligator Boy (an ominous coincidence that their initials matched, he believed) doomed to the same ultimate end?

He left the horde, headed for the empty and darkened boardwalk, then under it to the edge of the wave-washed shore. Exhausted, he fell on the sand again. The loud sibilance of the surf impinged on his ears as he stared into the black watery depths and hissing spray made white by a full moon. Trying to interpret the intelligence that he believed was being sent to him, he looked up to the stars where he knew his mother and Doris lived and wondered if either of them was talking to him. Moreover, if they were, were they saying, Shame on you, Adrian. Shame, shame!

The image of the person who shared in the disgraceful behavior loomed large and outrageously indecent in Adrian's mind. Every limb and haunch of the extraordinarily sexually charged woman raced through his mind and exploded like firecrackers. He put his hands covered with sand to his temples and pressed them against his head in an attempt to douse the flames that the image generated.

If he could—but he knew he could not—but if he could, he could look straight out over the black ocean to Sandy Hook Bay and Keansburg, New Jersey, a distance of ten miles. On that beach, the wanton and erotic woman had once played with him, teased him, and taunted him while lying on the burning sand in her brief European bathing costume. She would open her thighs when her daughter was not looking so that he could glimpse what she wanted to offer him. Oh, how she would twist and turn under the hot sun. She afforded him views of her plump and curvy rump, her breasts, daring him to do with her what he wished.

On the beach with his sister, and Monique and her brother Reggie, he could resist.

In the seductress's bed, he could not—and did not. However, he did eventually try resisting again.

Hold my breasts, Adrian. Squeeze them. Do as I tell you! Tighter. Please, sweet boy.

He tore off his worn shoes in anger at his weakness, a weakness that led to the situation he was in. His father had stuffed cardboard in one shoe to help his left leg match the length of his right leg. He flung them as far into the salty night as he could—one to the left of him and one to the right of him. Now the pieces fell out and fluttered to the sand.

I don't love you, Mrs. Vandermeer! I love Monique! I love Monique! Let me go, will you!

Never, Adrian! Never!

Two seaward-marching lines of huge rocks turned black by exposure to the elements, and at some distance on either side of him on this beach, formed a bay, numbered east to west. Adrian was sitting squarely in the center of Bay 13 of those twenty-six bays.

The B-MT stalker. The picture of the oily-mouthed man popped into his head. What luck! Now he could tell the gang that the person actually existed. He could run to the cops, describe him, and then swear to them on his mama's grave that he would believe anything they told the gang from now on. After they caught him, they would put Adrian's picture in the papers and call him a hero.

Adrian felt more forlorn than ever when he realized he would not return to his friends, or Linda, or Monique, or anyone else— for the moment had arrived to finish what he had come here to do.

The hissing white spray lapping at his feet beckoned. He decided that he had dallied long enough and had revisited the scene of his purgatory long enough, and, having found no salvation or any way out of his dilemma, there was nothing more to ponder.

He rose and ran crying into the sea. A current swept him up and pulled him out immediately. A wave crashed on top of his head and carried him to where more waves broke on the farthest rocks of the artificial cove.

He swam due south, using only his left arm, dragging the deadened right arm with the broken shoulder under the surface. Then, not quite conquering his fear of death but determined to die anyway, he surrendered to the same mysterious power that had claimed his mother and Doris prematurely.

The frothy seas rolled in one after the other. Waves tossed his body about like so much kelp as if he were adrift in the Sargasso Sea. Then, appearing out of a scary dream, the mythical creature that roamed those ghostly, weed-choked waters of the mid-Atlantic pulled him down and held him below the surface.

Strangely, fleeting thoughts of his Uncle Sebastiano, the wounded, Italian World War I mountaineer-soldier, entered his consciousness. Adrian wondered what he thought of him now, not having scaled the cliffs, not having shown courage in the face of adversity, which Sebastiano had insisted Marius instill in his two American nephews.

The corpse of one of them, now, tumbled and drifted with the ebb and flow of sub surface currents. These concealed rivers roiled the sandy bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York, where Adrian Belvedere joined his mother in death's embrace.

Civil War Memorial Arch

Grand Army Plaza at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Quadriga atop Memorial Arch

A Chariot Drawn by Four Horses Abreast

Chapter Two

The Eighth Wonder of the World

Casey McClintock's residence in Park Slope afforded a full and unobstructed view of Brooklyn's stunningly beautiful eighty-foot high Soldiers and Sailors Monument in the Grand Army Plaza, which sparkled like a crown jewel at the north entrance to Prospect Park.

This tribute to the Civil War military dead held a particular significance for his clan. Less than three years after receiving the holy sacrament of confirmation, a young boy named Garret Daniel McClintock, much abused by his alcoholic parents, ran away from them. He stowed away in a creaking old freighter, hidden by the crew and cared for during the long, bitterly cold voyage across the North Atlantic. Once ashore, Ireland's rousing old seamen, to their everlasting credit, sent him happily and drunkenly on his way with five dollars in his pocket.

Garrett met a longshoreman in a lunch counter who told him he would have better luck finding a job in the bustling and booming City of Brooklyn, which was across the East River. There, dock walloper jobs were available more frequently than in New York. Garrett took a ferry across the river to Red Hook in Erie Basin, found a job in a week and a girl friend in a month.

In less than a year, civil war broke out between the northern and southern states of his new country, which pained Garrett greatly. Soon, he joined the volunteers who went to war against the rebels of the new nation that he had embraced with all of his expansive chest muscles, pounding heart, and emerald soul. He vowed to vanquish those traitors who had dared fire their cannon at the American flag flying proudly over a southern coastal fort named Sumter.

He was killed in combat in a place called Bull Run, but not prior to impregnating his young wife. From that newborn son, the McClintock clan rose to its present eminence.

Adorning the memorial arch to which Casey McClintock now paid reverence was an exquisitely cast statue of a glorious and victorious Lady Columbia. Four mighty and flaring horses pulled the chariot of this magnificent female representation of his nation. A pair of winged Victory figures blowing into trumpets, one on each side of her, accompanied Lady Columbia. Many years ago, when he'd first heard the word, he had to look it up in his wife's dictionary and found this: Quadriga: A chariot drawn by four horses abreast. He had been startled at the English-language epiphany that had come over him now. So that's what that damn Latin word means. He actually had looked up and counted the horses again.

The Grand Army Plaza itself, a remarkable traffic oval with streets radiating in all directions, marked the spot of the first Battle of Long Island (in Brooklyn) of the American Revolutionary War. In August of 1776, British Generals William Howe and Lord Cornwallis's infantry routed the Continental Army under General Charles Lee, as George Washington looked on from a hill in Brooklyn Heights. Generals Lee and Washington retreated across Gowanus Creek and at night successfully crossed over the East River in boats. While this took place, Cornwallis, Howe, and their men rested in their camp south of the line of hills that formed the Brooklyn Heights of Guan, which stretched northeast three or four miles to Jamaica Pass, where nearby today is located Aqueduct Racetrack.

Washington found that Manhattan Island itself was also untenable, since the British were deeply entrenched in the city and surrounding towns, and in fact did not surrender New York until the Paris Treaty of 1785. With skill and adroitness, he saved the Continental Army by evacuating his men north into Westchester County and then across the Hudson River to New Jersey and into Pennsylvania to fight another day. A few years later, fortuitously, Washington accepted the surrender of the British Armies from one of the generals who defeated him in the first battle of the Revolutionary War. It is a contest that historians insist on calling The Battle of Long Island, but patriotic Brooklynites append the factual and undisputed real name in parentheses—(in Brooklyn)—as a gentle reminder to our illustrious history teachers and professors not to generalize too much.

Battle of Long Island (in Brooklyn) August 1776

Scenes in this novel take place under the word

Bushwick (upper right).

Olmstead and Vaux Company's Prospect Park in the City of Brooklyn showing the Grand Army Plaza and Memorial Arch (upper right); The Long Meadow, present site of half a dozen baseball diamonds (western third); Prospect Park Lake encircled by woods and roads (lower section); and Parade Grounds (lower left).

British and American armies clashed for two days during the battle over entire area of park.

Sheep Grazing in the Long Meadow

Prospect Park, Brooklyn, N.Y. 1930s

***

Casey's house contained eight bedrooms and six bathrooms, little more than similar homes in the area. A family member of Wall Street's JP Morgan had built it in the early 1880s. Casey, nouveau riche, bought it in 1917 for one reason alone: a short stroll would take him to the Grand Army Plaza. There he would stroll leisurely in the Park and reflect upon the spunk of his adventurous forebear. There he would gaze up in reverence at Lady Columbia, imagining that the heroic Garrett Daniel McClintock was at her side in the victorious chariot.

The floors in the house were mostly of bare parquet except in the front parlor on street level. Pakistani and Moroccan rugs, and deep-cushioned armchairs and sofas covered the floor in this room. Golden-tasseled, red satin drapes adorned the windows, and a large painting of The Education of Marie by Rueben hung on a wall.

Casey had persuaded the former owner to leave the flamboyant painting where it was for a reasonable price, including the heavily gilded frame. The subject matter at first unnerved his wife. Brenda, however, graciously let it remain. The voluptuous nudes in the picture no longer had a negative effect upon her. The painting was of the Three Graces in the presence of Minerva, Apollo, and Mercury teaching the arts to the French flirt, Antoinette.

Now, shifting his eyes from the frontal inspection of two of the nudes, he let them come to rest on his three daughters. He spoke in a loud voice in an attempt to put down a growing rebellion.

He told them that, having studied the ways of the rich, they would be wise to adopt the same lifestyle. That would be a studied manner of genteel shabbiness and a down-at-the-heels facade to insure they would not wake up one fine morning with a Bolshevik revolution in the streets and knives slashing their throats.

Margaret, the middle daughter, continued filing her fingernails with an obvious air of boredom. Oh, Daddy, how corny can you get?

Mary, the youngest, yawned wide as if she were in a dentist's chair. I want to spend our money, not hide it, or hoard it, Daddy, she said.

Maureen, the eldest, graduating from St. Francis, an academically renowned Catholic high school, added her opinion. I intend to wear diamonds and pearls to lunch at the Ritz, minks, and sables to the beach to lie upon, and have a chauffeur-driven car all to myself.

Casey poked a finger at her. Not in Brooklyn you're not! Don't flaunt your wealth! Keep it concealed as the Four Hundred do. One should walk around handing out dimes and saying 'I'm just as poor as you, Brother.' So be good little girls and go to college in rags, will you, my darlings?

He thought he was being intellectually up on the news and extremely witty by alluding to John D. Rockefeller's alleged cheapskate-philanthropy. (A dime to an unemployed panhandler is a dollar to a working factory man, the oilman allegedly said, according to recent news stories).

"Then I'm going to write a tell-all article for The New Yorker on how lousy rich you are and how crooked you had to be to get there—you, the Vandermeers, the Carnegies, and that cheap little dime-dispensing old fart."

Good for you, my darling! Casey slapped his daughter on the back in a show of great affection. It had the unexpected result, however, of sending her tripping a few feet across the shiny parquet floor.

Maureen left the house in a feigned rage. Her kid sister Mary who tingled with excitement whenever her big sister drove the car for a reckless ride followed her. They jumped into the open roadster and sped off. She drove exuberantly south on West Drive inside the Park and past the Park Circle entrance. A motorcycle cop chased her on East Drive and stopped her by the Peristyle, near the lake's southern edge. He put away the book of tickets as he approached.

Christ sakes, Maureen. Pissed off at daddy again?

Maureen smiled at Kevin Leary, passed the time of day with him, and then drove home serenely, having agreed to a tryst tonight. She parked the car on Plaza Street in front of the brownstone mansion, then she and her sister freshened up for dinner. She was starved—and wondered how her secret paramour would react when he found out she was menstruating.

So that's it, Mary said.

What is?

Your annoyance with Daddy. Did it ever occur to you that that's what caused you to foment a civil war just now? I thought you were more in control of yourself, Maureen.

I can no more control my urges than I can the phases of the moon, little sister.

Hear, hear! said Mary McClintock.

Chapter Three

Henry Meets Maureen

At a charity ball in the St. George Hotel, Maureen met a son of one of those wealthy families that she had ridiculed. Her father sponsored the dance in which the guest of honor was the Bishop of Brooklyn. There was always some diocesan construction going on, or in the planning stages. Casey had learned that this activity required the use of another person's money, not