“Did you ever meet them?”
“No, the island, which was situated off the coast of Tahiti, was quite remote, but Polynesian natives visited on occasion and brought back outrageous stories.” He nibbled on a cookie and washed it down with the sweet liquid. “The nature men subsisted on raw fish - they seldom bothered to cook the meat - coconut, breadfruit, wild bananas, mangoes and papayas. Though many were well educated, they chose to throw their former lives away for what?”
The room grew silent. Harry wasn’t sure if the question was rhetorical. “What about women?”
“Interesting question.” The priest offered another sugar cookie and took one for himself. “Most of the nature men lead celibate lives and, even the few who did have sexual relations with native woman, were never licentious. Theirs was essentially a spiritual quest. Co-existing in sublime harmony with their tropical paradise, they ran about buck naked or with little more than a loin cloth and perfumed frangipani blossom tucked behind an ear.”
“Adam minus Eve before the fall.”
Father Flynn tapped him on the knee. “Clever analogy!” Suddenly his eyes clouded over. “That was then and this is now. Do you understand?”
Harry nodded. “People have obligations. They don’t rush off on a whim to join the nature men of Tahiti.” The priest’s demeanor abruptly sobered. “They marry, pay taxes, join civic organizations,… lead structured, orderly lives.”
Harry cringed. The Abernathys also attended Saint Marks and, in all probability, Father Flynn had officiated at Bernice’s abortive first wedding! Quickly draining the last of the chocolate, Harry rose and moved to the doorway. The priest grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down energetically a half dozen times. “Where’re you honeymooning?”
“Acapulco.” The tight panicky feeling in his chest had returned with brutal insistence. An anesthetized torpor pervading his brain was gaining the upper hand. “We rented a bungalow on the water.” Sort of like the nature men of the South Sea Islands but with none of that skinny-dipping, mystical claptrap.
“Sunday.” The priest accompanied Harry through the kitchen to the back door. “I’ll look forward to seeing you and your lovely bride on Sunday.”
*****
Sauntering into the lobby of the Providence Train Station, Harry Sylvester, a man who had never so much as lifted an extra sugar packet from a coffee shop, felt like an inveterate thief, who had just committed the perfect crime. His heart was racing but not from fear. Rather, he was engulfed in an ecstatic sense of triumph. Of course, he still had to get clear of the musty city, but the worse was behind him.
A bank check for twenty-three thousand dollars—his life savings—nestled comfortably in his right pants pocket beneath a clean handkerchief and car keys—he would throw the keys away once the train reached the seaport town of Westerly and eased over the state line into Connecticut. An overnight bag held several pair of clean underwear plus his shaving gear. He was traveling light, unencumbered. Yes, things were off to a very auspicious start!
“Final destination?” The silver-haired clerk behind the ticket window rested his hands over a computer keyboard..
“San Francisco. I firmed up reservations last night.” From California Harry would fly direct to Hawaii and then arrange a connecting flight to one of the South Sea Islands closest to where the nature men pursued their idyllic existence. What happened from there was up for grabs.
Harry glanced over his shoulder. The waiting room was virtually empty except for a few businessmen and a woman with dirty blond hair sitting next to a young girl, presumably her daughter. The woman was pretty in a matronly way. “Sylvester. Harry Sylvester,” Harry mumbled turning his attention back to the clerk.
The clerk ran his pudgy fingers over the keyboard. “Yes, here we are.” A moment later a machine spit out a ticket, which the agent pushed across the counter. “You parked in the station garage?”
Harry, who had already turned away from the counter, felt a gentle tug of anxiety. Don’t panic! Act normal or at least as normal as a person who is about to drop off the face of the earth can possibly look. “Why yes, I am.”
“Then you’ll want to validate your parking ticket over there.” He pointed to a gray metallic device perched on a shelf at the far end of the counter. “Otherwise you’ll end up paying the standard parking fee which is twice the rate for paid passengers.”
Harry smiled sickly. Damp rings of sweat were pooling under his armpits and wilting his shirt collar. “Yes, I’ll do that immediately.” He wandered over to the machine. Groping about in his pocket he located a crumpled piece of cardboard. Slipping the ticket into the metal machine, he heard a dull thud as the date and time were stamped onto the ticket. Harry glanced over his shoulder, but the silver-haired ticket clerk had already turned his attention to the next customer.
Okay. Get your nerves back under control. Everything’s going according to plan. In twenty minutes the southbound Amtrak train would be chugging into the station. Harry spied a mailbox next to the coffee kiosk. “What good luck!” he mused. Pulling two letters from the overnight bag, he crossed the parquet floor and dropped them in the navy blue metal box. More accurately, he jammed the letters into the hopper, flapping the lid a half dozen times to insure that, like a jagged fishbone stuck in the throat, the mail wasn’t regurgitated back in his hypocritical face. In a day or two both letters would reach their destination. Everything would be explained though, in all likelihood, nothing would ever be forgiven. It didn’t matter as no return address was attached to either envelope.
back to Table of Contents
Five Hundred Forty-three Parishioners
Mortimer Goldfarb was replenishing a bin of 3-inch molly screws in his uncle’s hardware store when a heavyset black man with a sour expression lurched through the door. “Abraham Lefkowitz?”
Morty’s uncle, a gaunt, sallow-faced man with a mop of thinning hair that he seldom bothered to run a comb through, stepped out from behind the counter. “What can I do for you?”
The black man yanked a thick wad of papers from his back pocket. “You’re hereby summoned to appear in district court on the eighteenth of September.” He jiggled a pen in front of the hardware store owner’s nose. “Sign here.”
The old man’s’ face blanched. “What, I committed a crime?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Paperwork explains everything.” Retrieving the clip board, the black man disappeared out the door.
Morty removed the papers from his uncle’s trembling hands and scanned the document. “Florence Catelli, that divorcee who worked here a month and a half, ... she’s suing you for sexual discrimination.”
The old man shook a fist in the air. “I never laid a hand on that frumpy witch!”
“Apparently, you didn’t have to.”
Florence Catelli came to work at Lefkowitz Hardware the middle of August doing bookkeeping three days a week. A month into the job, she approached Abe Lefkowitz and announced she was leaving early for a doctor’s appointment.
“You sick?”
“Pregnant.” The woman, who was well into her second term, walked out the door and promptly dropped off the face of the earth. No notice. No nothing. Abe called Florence’s house a half dozen times and left messages on an answering machine but she never returned his calls.
“You asked her to bring you a note from the obstetrician.”
“Yeah, what’s the harm in that?”
Morty thumped the legal brief with his index finger. “Asking pregnant women for a doctor’s note is against the law without a written company policy.”
“Such stupidity!”
A contractor entered the store and requested ten pounds of roofing nails. Still clutching the court papers, Morty went off to the back of the store to fill the order. While his uncle was ringing up the sale, he drifted out the front door. Across the street at a diagonal, a new office building loomed – a mishmash of high rent, executive business suites. A sign on the front lawn read Garre
t, Meyers and Morales, Attorneys at Law.
Louisa Morales’ name was prominently listed on the summons. Morty shook his head in disbelief. Florence Catelli probably waltzed across the intersection as soon as she left Lefkowitz’ Hardware Store on her last day at work.
Emotional damages. Psychological abuse. Loss of income. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching! The woman, who frittered her weekends away stroking the one armed bandits at Foxwoods Casino just over the state line in Connecticut, must have thought she died and flew straight up to heaven when Ms Morales told her what Abraham Lefkowitz’ indiscretion might be worth.
At four-thirty, while his uncle was talking to a contractor, Morty ducked into the back room and called the law firm. “Ms. Morales, please?”
“Who should I say is calling?”
“Mort Goldfarb. I need to speak with her regarding my uncle, Abe Lefkowitz.”
After a brief pause a woman came on the line. “Yes, can I help you?”
“Your firm is representing Florence Catelli.”
“Are you a lawyer?” The voice was frigid.
“No, I’m Abe Lefkowitz’ nephew, but I thought -”
“If your uncle wants to negotiate a settlement that’s fine,” the woman brought him up short, “but otherwise Mr. Lefkowitz needs to hire an attorney. Under Massachusetts state law, neither he nor a family member can represent the corporation.”
“It’s a family-owned hardware store hardware, not some goddamn Fortune Five Hundred conglomerate!”
“That’s irrelevant. Is your uncle ready to settle?”
There was an uncomfortably pause. “You can’t be serious,” Morty blustered.
By way of a reply, Louisa Morales hung up the phone.
Ten thousand dollars for emotional damages and lost wages plus legal fees—that’s what the suit was demanding. And the language was brutal:
“With total disregard for Ms. Catelli’s modesty, Mr. Lefkowitz demanded my client provide him with medical information of a most private and confidential nature. .... Ms. Catelli felt violated, degraded, humiliated by the store owner’s insensitivity to her condition as a pregnant woman well advanced into her second trimester.”
“From the outset of her employment at Lefkowitz Hardware, Ms. Catelli was treated in a most condescending and patronizing manner, as the several examples listed below will attest.”
The examples were hogwash, a figment of Florence Catelli’s deviant mind and Louisa Morales’ creative writing skills. With a master’s degree in literature, Morty Goldfarb knew perfectly well that the lawyer had embellished Florence’s verbal diarrhea. Abraham Lefkowitz, a devout, orthodox Jew who would carry a lady bug outside on a Kleenex rather than harm the insect, was demonized, vilified and transformed into the employer from hell! Every pregnant working woman’s worse nightmare!
From the outset, Morty had a bad feeling about the woman and tried to talk his uncle out of hiring her. Florence Catelli’s employment history resembled Swiss cheese. A week here. A month and a half there. Endless holes. The red head talked too fast in a loud garish voice and, during the job interview, her eyes flitted about the hardware store in a distracted manner. But his uncle prevailed. “Give the woman a chance. Maybe she’ll surprise you.”
Surprise! Surprise!
“Where’re that legal papers?” Abe asked around five o’clock as they were getting ready to lock up for the night.
“Let me read it over at home later tonight,” Morty deflected the request, “and we can review it in the morning.”
His uncle shrugged. “So, how does it feel having a bona fide sexual pervert for an uncle?”
“Pretty much the same as it did before we knew the sad truth.” His nephew turned the lights off and locked the front door. When his uncle drove away, Morty put the car in gear, but instead of bearing right out of the driveway as he usually did, he snaked his way across the street to the new office building and took the elevator to the sixth floor.
“Is Ms. Morales in?”
“Do you have an appointment?” the secretary asked. “We spoke on the phone briefly earlier today,” he replied vaguely. “I only need a moment of her time.”
The receptionist went off down the corridor. In a room off to the right, Morty could see a mahogany conference table with a set of matching faux leather chairs. Row upon row of legal books lined the shelves. The artwork which decorated the walls was an eclectic mix of post-modern Jackson Pollack and the organic minimalist, Paul Klee.
“Third door on the right.” The receptionist had returned.
“Mr. Goldfarb?” Louisa Morales looked up from a stack of legal briefs she was perusing on her desk. Inordinately large, charcoal-colored eyes lay deep-set like precious jewels in buttery smooth, pecan-colored skin. Decked out in a sky blue, ruffle-hem jacket dress with vented cuffs, the woman was voluptuously stunning.
Morty, on the other hand, had put on considerable weight since college and, at five feet six, a hundred and eighty pounds, was a physical wreck. A victim of male pattern baldness, all the hair covering the top of his head had fallen away. A few tufts still clung to the temples and skin around the ears, but the general impression was that of a relatively young, flaccid man going utterly and indisputably bald.
Beyond the first disdainful once over, Louisa Morales averted her eyes and assumed an air of bored indifference. “You’ve got five minutes and then I’m throwing you out and calling the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination to have Mr. Lefkowitz’ case officially calendared.”
Gazing out the window six stories down, Morty could just barely recognize Lefkowitz Hardware Store across the street. By comparison, the building looked shabby and unappealing. “Morales,” Morty said, “that’s Hispanic?”
“Your question’s irrelevant.”
“We’re Sephardic Jews,” Morty parried the sarcasm. “My family can trace our ancestors back to 14th Century Portugal. My Uncle Abe speaks both fluent Spanish and Ladino, which, as I’m sure an educated woman such as yourself would know, is a romance language derived mainly from Old Castilian with many borrowings from Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and French.”
Louisa Morales scowled and cracked her knuckles one at a time. “Why are you telling me this?”
Morty pulled a tattered news clipping from his breast pocket and laid it on the woman’s desk. “My Uncle Abe teaches English as a second language, mostly to immigrants from Latin America. Twenty years now he’s been doing it. The city honored him with a citation last year.” Morty pointed at one of the legal briefs littering the woman’s desk. “He’s not the callous and depraved monster you described in the court papers.”
Louisa Morales leaned back in her chair causing her breasts to jut suggestively. The erotic display was a playful taunt. There on the sixth floor of the swanky law offices, Louisa Morales was a legal star on the rise, a gorgeous, well-educated Latina; Morty Goldfarb was a low rent shlemazel, a regrettable forgettable nobody. “Your uncle’s generosity is commendable.” She handed him back the clipping without bothering to look at the picture. “Now, Mr. Goldfarb, let me tell you how the legal game is played.”
Louisa Morales was demanding ten thousand dollars, not a penny less. The sum was nonnegotiable. If the suit before the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination failed, Louisa Morales would simply bump the case up to the next highest civil court and so on and so forth. Like a diabolical, perpetual motion machine, she would pursue Florence Catelli’s sexual discrimination case all the way to the Supreme Court (Morty thought she might have been posturing but wasn’t completely sure). Over the long haul, court costs and legal fees would become astronomical—in the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Truth, justice, fairness—such noble virtues and sentiments never factor into the equation. This was the American judicial system at its finest - a blood sport bordering on blackmail! The moment Abraham Lefkowitz told Lenore Catelli to bring a doctor’s note the game was on.
In the morning, a steady stream of roofers
, general contractors, handymen, painters and plumbers kept Morty busy straight through until eleven o’clock. Then a shabbily dressed Hispanic woman carrying a broken pane of glass trudged into the store and spoke with Abe in her native tongue. Her gaunt face smeared with a maze of wrinkles, the gnarled old woman could have been sixty or a hundred and sixty. “Cut Mrs. Lopes a replacement for her kitchen window and give her lift back to Wickendon Street.” Abe handed him a plastic tub of glazing compound and a putty knife. “And while you’re there, you might as well install the new glass.”
Morty’s mouth fell open. “I know the family from the Literacy Center,” his uncle explained. “Husband died of lung cancer last year. She lives with a granddaughter. They can just barely afford the glass much less paying someone to fix it.”
“I wanted to talk to you about the legal problem.”
Abe waved a hand impatiently over his head. “When you get back. Go fix the window.”
Morty grabbed some additional tools and went out to the car with Mrs. Lopez bringing up the rear. He arranged the new glass in the bed of the trunk. “How did you get here?”
“Boat,” Mrs. Lopez replied.
“No, I don’t mean the country. How did you get to the hardware store this morning?”
They were cruising down Thayer Street in the direction of the East Side. “Walk.”
“You walked a mile and a half carrying a broken pane of glass?”
There was a long pause. The woman peered out the window with a relaxed, self-absorbed expression. “Walk.”
The woman lived on the third floor of a wooden tenement that smelled of black beans and cilantro.. A half-eaten taco—homemade not the Taco Bell variety—sat on a plate by the sink. Pulling on a pair of rawhide gloves, Morty cleaned the broken shards of glass from the window frame. Twenty minutes into fixing the window, a pudgy, round-faced woman came into the apartment. The granddaughter, who was carrying a Spanish paperback, said something to Mrs. Lopez who answered her in their native tongue then left the room with a load of laundry.