Cause of Trouble

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—

I wrote this letter thirty years ago. I wrote it in pencil in a jail cell in Goshen in the summer of 1913. I did not tell myself the truth that I knew. It is 1943. I am at a kitchen table in Middletown, and there is a war outside the window, and I am trying to set down the summer of 1913 correctly. Last week I heard a military aircraft pass over, going north toward the base at Newburgh, and I understood that the valley I grew up in was no longer indifferent to what happened in the world beyond it. Neither, it turns out, am I. It has taken thirty years to write the true one.

—

The train from Middletown took forty minutes on a good day, which this was not. When I stepped onto the Maybrook platform the afternoon was already giving way to evening, and the sound of the place came at me before the smell, and the smell came before the sight. The sound was metal: the scream of wheels on the curve south of the platform, and under it, from somewhere in the yard, the repeated clank of cars being coupled, each one arriving like a statement.

I smelled the creosote first — the ties still holding the heat of the day — then coal smoke, then peppers frying from the direction of the main street. Under it, from somewhere down the avenue, the sound of music and drinking that unfolds from certain kinds of places late on a Friday afternoon.

Hattie was beside me, empty-handed. I read this as travelling light. I would come to understand, over several Fridays, that this was not quite right.

I saw the ten saloons as I descended from the platform to the street.

Ten saloons. I counted them because I was the kind of person who counted things, and I arrived at ten before I reached the end of the block and understood I had not yet reached the end of the saloons. The Yellow Dog. The Green Turtle. The Cold Storage. The one with no sign. The avenue ran north and the yard ran beside it and there were more saloons than I would have been able to count in the light that was left, and I stopped counting and started walking.

Five hundred men, Hattie had told me. The yard employed five hundred men and most of them lived in the rooming houses on the cross-streets or in the boarding houses that ran off the avenue. Most of those five hundred men were not from Maybrook. They arrived on the morning train from Newburgh and left on the evening one, or they boarded in the rooming houses and sent money home to the places they had come from, which were sometimes Calabria and sometimes Campania and sometimes places with names I did not know. The yard had been here for fifteen years. In fifteen years it had consumed the hamlet and produced the village and the village was this: ten saloons on one avenue and five hundred men who did not come from here, and the specific kind of Friday that results.

Hattie moved through it with the ease of someone who had been here before. I moved through it the way I moved through most things: by paying attention and filing what I found.

Mrs. Russo’s store was on the north end of Tower Avenue, where the avenue ended and the valley fields began. It was a dry goods store that also sold coffee and had a counter and several chairs, and in the late afternoon of a Friday it held a specific population: the men who had finished their shift and were not yet ready for the saloon, or who had no money for the saloon, or who preferred coffee to whiskey and had found a place to have it that was neither a saloon nor a boarding house dining room. It was presided over by a woman who moved with the authority of someone who had been here before the yard and intended to be here after it.

Hattie walked through the door as though she owned something in it. I followed.

There were four men. One at the counter, better-dressed than the others, who looked up when we entered with the expression of someone who has been expecting someone and is calibrating whether the arrival matches the expectation. Two others in conversation near the door who shifted without pausing to accommodate us. And one on a crate by the window, looking at his hands.

He was perhaps thirty, with the build of someone who worked on machinery — not large, but with the specific density of someone whose weight was evenly distributed from long labor. He did not stand when we approached. He looked up and nodded, the nod of a man who is comfortable where he is.

Hattie said: this is Pasquale Testa.

He looked at me. Not with the appraisal men give women in public, which is not really looking — it is a kind of checking. This was actual looking.

I said: you have grease on your hands.

He looked down at them, then back up. He said: yes.

Beside them were two other men from the yard — Bruno and another whose name I did not catch. The conversation moved around us in Italian and English and the specific mixture of both that develops in places where the two languages live beside each other long enough. I caught perhaps a third of it. I filed what I caught and let the rest go.

Mrs. Russo set coffee down in front of Hattie without being asked. She looked at me once — something between assessment and recognition — and I understood that she had seen women come here with Hattie before, and that she had decided, for her own reasons, to keep whatever she knew about those women to herself.

I respected this. I filed it.

The afternoon was ordinary. The yard was audible over everything. The saloons were loud. The light moved.

On the train home, Hattie was quiet in the way she was quiet when she had decided not to share something. I had known her long enough to know the difference between her silences. This one had content.

—

By the third Friday the grammar of the day had established itself.

This was information. Things that become grammar this quickly are things someone has been arranging — or things that have arranged themselves out of a mutual convenience so well-suited to everyone involved that no one has needed to arrange them explicitly. I was not yet certain which kind this was.

The grammar: Nicoli at the front of the store when we arrived, better-dressed than the men around him. Testa on his crate. Mrs. Russo’s coffee appearing in front of Hattie without being asked. The afternoon sliding from bright to amber to the specific quality of evening light that settled over the avenue when the shift change was done and the men came out of the yard to use the street the way they used the street on a Friday.

I stopped in front of Testa. He looked up from his hands with the expression of a man who had been hoping for exactly this and was not certain he deserved it.

I had seen this expression on the first Friday and filed it. A man who did not understand being attended to. The history behind it was not visible from the outside but I thought it was long.

You still have the grease, I said.

Yes, all week.

I took the rag from where it lay draped over the crate and started working at the back of his hand. The graphite was deep in the creases of his knuckles and at the base of his thumb where the skin had been worked hard and was darker than the rest. It was not going to come out with one rag on one Friday afternoon. I kept working anyway.

He let me. The slightly dazed quality was still there — the quality of someone receiving a kindness they had not learned to expect. I kept working. The rag was not going to fix the problem and we both understood this and neither of us said so.

Beside us, Bruno said something to the man whose name I still had not caught. They were amused by something. I caught a word in the Italian — not enough to be certain, but enough to have a direction — and looked up in time to see that Hattie, six feet away in conversation with Nicoli, had caught the same word and filed it without appearing to.

She had Italian. I had understood this on the first Friday, from the way the comprehension arrived slightly before it should have, the slight adjustment of attention when the men spoke among themselves. She was choosing not to display it, for her own reasons. I had not asked directly — a direct question to Hattie produced a surface rather than a fact. I sought facts. I had filed it: present, significant, explanation to follow.

I went back to the graphite, which was not going to yield.

Inside: Testa and I at the two chairs near the window. Nicoli and Hattie at the counter.

The store had the smell of a place that had been doing the same work for a long time: coffee and dried herbs and the specific dusty warmth of goods shelved in an enclosed space since before the yard arrived. Bundles of oregano hung from a beam near the ceiling, dark and dry. The window gave onto the avenue and the light through it in the afternoon had a quality that was different from the light outside — slower, more settled, the light of an interior that was not trying to be anything other than what it was.

I had noticed that this arrangement happened without being negotiated. One Friday it had been different — all four of us at the counter, the conversation moving in a single current — and then it had separated itself into two conversations, which had then established their own positions in the room. I noted this without concluding anything from it. I was still assembling.

Testa was explaining the turntable. He had been explaining it in instalments across several Fridays — a mechanical problem that was developing somewhere in the ring bearing, a fault the foreman was ignoring. He explained things the way he did everything with the machinery: as though the facts were inherently interesting, which they were, which I kept discovering to my own mild surprise.

I watched Nicoli and Hattie at the counter while Testa talked.

The quality of Nicoli’s attention to Hattie was unusual. I had noted it on the first Friday and again on the second and it remained the same on the third: he listened as though what she said was information worth having accurately, not as performance. Most men listened to women the way they read a map they had already memorized — quickly, to confirm what they already knew, not to find something new. Nicoli was reading the map as though the territory might have changed since the last time he was there.

This told me something about him. I was not yet certain what.

Testa said something and I returned my attention to him. He was looking at me with the slight amusement of someone who has noticed that you have stopped listening, and is not bothered by it, because he was doing the same thing.

He glanced toward Nicoli and Hattie and back.

He said: they are old friends.

I said: how old.

He considered. He said: old enough that it is not a new thing. New enough that it is still a thing.

I received this. It was more than he had said about Nicoli before. I filed it alongside everything else.

On the platform that evening, the train late as usual, I stood beside Testa in the lamp-lit dark and watched the yard through the fence. The night shift was assembling a freight in the far yard — the specific sound of cars being sorted, each coupling a decision. Testa watched it the way he watched all machinery: with the focused appreciation of someone who understands what he is looking at.

I found I was watching it through him. The sound of the coupling arrived differently when I understood that someone beside me knew what each sound meant.

Next Friday, he said.

Next Friday, I said.

On the train, Hattie was quiet. I watched her face in the dark window glass. Something in it I was still trying to name.

I let it wait.

—

What follows is not what I observed. What I observed on the fourth Friday was the exterior — the counter, the coffee, the specific quality of Nicoli’s attention. What follows is what Hattie told me, eventually, and what I have assembled from the edges of what I knew.

I have not always been certain where observation ended and inference began.

Nicoli spoke to her in English. He was good at English. When he switched to Italian it was because what he wanted to say was meant to be remembered and to stay between them.

He had understood, from the third Friday, that she had Italian. He had seen it the way you see something you were already looking for: a half-second of comprehension before it should have arrived, the slight stillness that came over her when the men said something among themselves that was not meant for her and she decided not to appear to have caught it. He had looked at her with the expression of a man who has just confirmed a hypothesis. She had looked back with the expression of a woman who had decided to let him.

Not directly. He had said something in Italian to Testa about a detail of a job — a term from the yard — and then turned to her and asked: do you know this word. The way you might ask anyone. Not a test. Genuinely asking.

She had said: yes. In Italian.

He had waited. He did not make an expression. He did not perform surprise or pleasure. He simply waited, in the way of someone who has opened a door and is giving you time to decide whether to walk through.

She had told him: Mulberry Street. Her mother. The train to Middletown when she was eight. The name she had stopped using on the train and had not used since.

He had listened as though what she was saying was information worth having accurately. Not as a story to be responded to. As a fact about a person he was interested in knowing correctly.

When she finished he said, in Italian: it does not go away, the thing that is in you before you are eight.

He said it as a fact, not a consolation. She received it as a fact. He named what was true and left it there for her to do with as she chose.

She had not said anything. She had put her hands around the coffee cup and looked at the steam. The dried herbs hung near the ceiling — bundles of oregano, something she could not name — and she was aware of them without thinking about them, the way she was aware of the yard. Through the window: the coupling of cars, the bang and shudder of it, the whole street not pausing because it never did.

Then he asked: what do you do in Middletown.

Not as a pleasantry. In the tone he used for things he wanted to know.

I told him: I keep accounts for my father’s work. I told him about the aldermanic council, the cases that came before it, the methodology my father had taught me without meaning to — establish the facts, distinguish what is certain from what is likely, do not decorate. I told him I found this useful.

He said: it is the same as the metal. You find the fault in the reasoning before the reasoning fails.

I said: yes. That is exactly what it is.

He looked at me the way he looked at a joint that had been repaired correctly — not with warmth, exactly, but with a recognition that what was there was sound. I had not previously understood that being assessed for soundness by someone who knew what sound looked like was a form of being seen. I filed this observation without deciding what to do with it. I was not ready to do anything with it yet.

The light had moved while I was not watching it.

I turned from the window and found that Hattie was watching me.

Not Nicoli. Not the store. Her.

There was something in Hattie’s face that I filed without immediately naming. It would take me weeks to name it. By the time I had the name for it, I would be in a jail cell in Goshen, and naming it would not help with anything.

On the platform that evening the four of us stood in the ordinary arrangement of the end of a Friday — Nicoli and Hattie at the near end of the platform, Testa and I by the fence that looked into the yard. The night shift was coming on. The lights in the yard were the yellow of work-light, practical and indifferent.

Testa said nothing. He watched the yard the way he always watched it: with the specific attention of someone who is also resting, which I had come to understand was a particular quality of men who were good at their work — they could attend and rest simultaneously, which was not the same thing as not attending.

I said: do you know every joint on this line.

He said: I know the ones that are going to fail.

I thought about this. I thought about what it meant to walk the same lines every day for years with a notebook and a pencil and a quality of attention that did not diminish. The men I had known in Middletown noticed what was in front of them and not much else. Testa noticed the shape of what was coming.

Next Friday, he said.

Next Friday.

On the train Hattie was beside me, looking at the window. Not through it. At it — at her own reflection in the dark glass, the small dark-haired woman giving nothing back. I watched her watching herself and thought: she is checking something.

I did not know what she was checking. I filed it.

On the train home Hattie counted what she knew. I know this because she told me, eventually. I know it also because I was sitting beside her on that train, watching her face, and some knowledge does not require words.

It was a habit. She had developed it young, in the circumstances of a childhood that required her to maintain, at any given moment, an accurate inventory of what she was working with. Her father’s mood. The state of the money. Whether the knock at the door was something to open or not. She had learned to assess quickly and without sentiment — to distinguish between what was actually present and what she wished were present, and to make her decisions from the former.

She had what she had: the shape of the thing between Nicoli and the man, the word she had set aside three Fridays ago, and the agreement she had made by staying. She had declined to examine any of it more closely than this.

This was not, she told herself, the same as not knowing.

She had known women who believed this — that not asking was the same as not knowing, that if you did not pursue the information you were not responsible for the absence of it. She had watched these women and she had understood, with the analytical clarity she brought to other people’s situations that she did not always bring to her own, that they were incorrect. Not asking was a choice. It had consequences like any choice. The absence of the information was not an accident but a decision, and decisions were things you were responsible for.

She understood this. She was applying it selectively. This was also a thing she understood about herself, that she applied her intelligence selectively, that there were situations in which she chose to be less precise than she was capable of being, and that Nicoli was currently one of those situations.

She could examine this or she could not. She was choosing not.

Beside her, Clara was looking out the window at the dark with the expression of someone carrying something new. Hattie saw this expression before, on other people, on herself in the year after she married George Myers — a man ten years older, a foreman at the mill, who had wanted a wife and had not thought carefully about what a wife might want — and before she understood what she had done. The expression of a person who has acquired information about themselves that they are still in the process of digesting.

She thought: Clara heard what Testa said on the platform.

She thought: Clara understood it.

She thought: this is going to complicate things.

She did not say any of this. She said: next Friday. Clara said: next Friday. The train moved through the dark toward Middletown, which was where they lived, which was where they were returning, which was not where either of them was.

She looked at her own reflection in the window: small, dark-haired, giving nothing.

She thought about Friday. About what she had agreed to. About the pistola and the jaw and Mazzo going back inside the rooming house door and the quality of Nicoli’s attention when he looked at her across the counter at Mrs. Russo’s store.

She thought: I can live with something happening.

She thought: I do not know what something is.

She thought: I have decided this is enough information to proceed on.