“New York was obsessed with her. Sal was obsessed with her too.”
“Sal?” I asked, taken aback.
“Sal,” Pop answered, grave. I just shook my head.
“He has a way of making things go bad,” I muttered.
“Don’t say that, Benny.”
I shook my head again, but let it go.
“Maude liked him too, for a while. He was handsome. Powerful. Persuasive. I think she was flattered. Women like Sal . . . and she liked that he was trouble. I don’t know why women like trouble. Giuliana didn’t like trouble.”
“She married you, Pop,” I reminded him, my voice wry.
Pop frowned at me, like the irony was just occurring to him.
“Keep going. The Alexander woman liked Sal. Sal liked her . . . then what?”
“She didn’t like that Sal had a wife. She didn’t want to sneak around. If she was going to be a mobster’s girlfriend, she wanted to be on his arm, on the front page, not tucked away in his bed.”
“She told Sal no?” Nobody told Sal no. Not even my father.
“Not in so many words. She flirted with him, but she had her eye on someone else.”
“Bo Johnson?” I asked.
“Yeah. Bo Johnson. Poor son of a bitch. He shoulda run. Bo was a star in his own right. When he wasn’t in the ring, he dressed in the best suits, tailored to show off his strength. He carried a cane and wore a bowler hat. He mixed with men and women that would have barred him from their soirees if he wasn’t a celebrity. Bo loved to take what he wasn’t supposed to even touch. He loved the white girls for no other reason than it made everyone nervous. And the white girls loved him. Maude loved him. Maude Alexander’s world was all about glitter, glamour. She didn’t think the rules—unspoken and spoken alike—applied to her. And they didn’t. Not for a while. You got enough money and fame, you can do what you want. The rags called her set the glitterati. But New York’s upper crust didn’t much like the mobsters or the movie stars, and they really didn’t like Bo Johnson hanging around one of their own.”
“What could possibly go wrong?” I said, sarcastic. I already had a pit in my stomach, and the tale had nothing to do with me. I pushed my empty plate away and sat back to hear the rest.
“Sal was jealous. Bo and Maude flaunted their relationship. They both liked the press, and they got lots of it, most of it bad. I tried to stay out of it. Bo was my friend before I ever met Sal, but Sal was my boss. Sal was family.”
Sal was family. How many times had I heard that growing up?
“But there were bigger consequences than just Sal Vitale, if you can believe that,” Pop said. “Some people don’t like mixing the colors.”
That was an understatement if I’d ever heard one.
“The Alexanders were embarrassed by it all,” Pop said. “Bo and Maude left New York, and the next thing I heard, Bo was locked up for transporting a white woman across state lines for ‘immoral purposes.’ They call it the Mann Act.” Pop waved his hands helplessly. “I didn’t understand it. Something about kidnapping and white slavery. The authorities put the both of them through hell. Bo was in jail for a year even though Maude Alexander refused to testify against him. I didn’t help him then. I had too much on my own plate. Your mom died while he was locked up, and I lost track of the mess until he showed up here that night. You remember?”
“Yeah. I remember.”
“Maude had a baby while Bo was in the slammer. A little girl. She’d gone back to New York. Her family kept it out of the papers. No one saw her or the baby. I didn’t know anything about it until Bo told me.”
I was starting to see the pieces of Pop’s disjointed retelling falling into place. I don’t know why I was so surprised. I’d thought of Bo Johnson when I’d heard Esther sing, like my ears recognized what my eyes never would.
“Bo got released, came back to New York, and saw his daughter for the first time. He and Maude were making plans to go to Europe. They thought they could live there, and he could fight and she could sing. But three days later he arrived at Maude’s house, all the arrangements made. He said the baby was asleep in her crib, but Maude was dead.”
“What happened?” I asked, stunned.
“Some say she killed herself. But Bo wasn’t convinced. He was afraid they’d pin it on him, and he would be back in jail forever. He brought the baby to me with instructions to take her to a woman named Gloria Mine in Harlem. I don’t know how they knew each other, or if they were related, or what.”
“So you did,” I said, remembering the night, my father’s absence, and the mewling sound.
“I did. I did what he asked and washed my hands of it.”
“So Esther Mine isn’t a Mine at all.”
“Nope,” my father said, his gaze heavy. “Mine is the name of the woman who raised her, but Esther is the daughter of the greatest fighter who ever lived and Maude Alexander, one of the best voices I’ve ever been privileged to hear, including your mama’s. Esther should be treated like entertainment royalty. But instead, she gets whispered about and avoided, because nobody knows the truth for sure, and nobody wants to open old wounds or get on Sal’s bad side.”
“A woman like Maude Alexander, pregnant. She dies, and her baby is gone. How do you cover that up? People ask questions.”
“None of the papers even mentioned a child.”
“You just told me you washed your hands of it,” I said. “This happened more than twenty years ago, but you’re still keeping tabs on Bo Johnson’s daughter.”
“I’ve kept an eye on her. That’s all.” He sighed again and rubbed a hand over his tired face. “Bo didn’t have nobody else. Neither did she.”
“Does Sal know?” I had a million questions but settled on the one that surfaced first.
“What have I always told you, Benny?” my father said, wagging his finger at me.
“Sal knows everything,” I answered, grim.
“Yep. You always assume Uncle Sal knows everything. Then you won’t do nothin’ stupid.” We were face-to-face over the kitchen table, but his voice grew so soft I had to hold my breath to hear him. “If he knows I helped Bo Johnson that night, he never let on. He was wrecked over Maude’s death, but if he’d asked me, I woulda told him. Just like I’m telling you.”
My father had rules; he never hit me, and he never lied to me. He wouldn’t volunteer information, but if I managed to stumble on the right question, he would tell me. I don’t know why. A kid shouldn’t know the things I knew. I had learned to stop asking about the things I didn’t want to know.
When Albert Anastasia, a known mob boss, was gunned down in the Park Sheraton Hotel barbershop a couple of years ago, I asked my father what he knew about it. Albert Anastasia was a no good, rotten son of a bitch. I didn’t know all his dirty deeds, but I knew that much. Sal hated him. When he wound up dead in spectacular fashion, swaddled in hot towels and riddled with bullets, not many people were upset.
“Who killed Anastasia, Pop?” I’d asked him.
He’d looked at me, the way he always did. And he said, “Is that something you really want to know, Benny? ’Cause once you know, you know.”