The Absconder

By Kenneth Crowe

Synopsis of The Absconder

Chris Dunne is a bright, cheerful, poetry-spouting 56-year-old bartender, who could have been so much more with the right education and the right breaks. Once his prospects seemed unlimited. He grew up in Woodside, an Irish working-class neighborhood in Queens, one of New York City's five boroughs. He enjoyed a solid prep school education from the Jesuits with an emphasis on Latin, Greek, German, literature and self-discipline. He graduated from College Point Jesuit High School where he was an All-City end on a championship team. He chose to go to Colgate on a football scholarship.
In the summer of 1952, Chris' world turned upside. Instead of college, he went to prison convicted of a robbery-murder (he didn't commit) of a Manhattan banker. He stayed inside for 28 years.
He was fortunate in being six-foot-two, an athletic 200 pounds, and from a working class neighborhood where violence is part of the culture. Those are assets in fending off the sexual predators in prison. He was fortunate too in having two mentors: the headmaster of his high school who encouraged him to develop his mind by reading and memorizing Virgil's Aeneid, which led to a continuing study of poetry through the long years; and a Chinese tai chi master, who schooled him in the soothing martial art, which both gave him control over his emotions and built his self confidence with the knowledge that he could disable or kill with his bare hands through a simple, crushing grip on an opponent's throat.
Chris spent an extra eight years in prison—beyond his minimum 20 year sentence—because of his refusal to admit his guilt in the murder of the Manhattan banker, the contrition demanded by the parole board.
Chris' parole officer is Martin Zelotovich, a nitpicking bureaucrat, who is intent on finding an excuse to return him to prison. Zelotovich holds Chris on a short leash, checking up on him at all hours of the night, requiring weekly visits to the parole office, forcing him to quit a lucrative Teamsters job, taking in its place a boring, factory-like position as a computer inputer. After two years of this torturous existence, Zelotovich is able to charge Chris with a minor parole violation—meaning he will be returned to prison for at least two years and possibly for the rest of his life.
Chris decides to run. He becomes the absconder of the title
Zelotovich, as Chris' nemesis, will impose two major crises on Chris forcing him to flee in each instance to avoid prison and to leave behind the lives he had built. The jealousy and greed of a woman poet will create the third and final major crisis for Chris turning him into a fugitive at a time he had achieved a level of success he never believed possible.
In his final bid for freedom, the protagonist travels to the site of ancient Troy, intending to fulfill his lifelong dream of following Aeneas' course across the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas to Greece, North Africa and Italy. Spending a few days at a hotel in a small fishing village overlooking the Gulf of Edremet, he meets Isabella Rubino, a wealthy Italian widow with an interest in poetry. The book ends several months later on the day Chris and Isabella split up. She goes home to Rome. He goes down to the beach below her house. Instead of fulfilling his dream of following Aeneas' path across the Aegean and Mediterranean seas on a chartered yacht, he is so tired of running and the fear of being returned to the agony of prison, that he sets out to find the answer to the two part question on every human being's mind: Is there a life hereafter and what is it like? He hoped he wasn't going into an eternal hell; the end of awareness would be preferable. He stripped, plunged into the cold water of the Gulf of Edremet and swam towards whatever God, if he was on the other side, had in store for him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kenneth Crowe
• Release date: Jul 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452411927

Kenneth Crowe

Kenneth C. Crowe was a labor reporter at Newsday and New York Newsday from 1976 to 1999. He is the author of COLLISION/HOW THE RANK AND FILE TOOK BACK THE TEAMSTERS. Published by Scribner's in 1993, COLLISION tells the story of the Teamsters' rank and file reform movement, culminating in the election of Ron Carey as president of the union. Crowe won an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship in 1974 to study foreign investment in the United States. In 1978, Doubleday published AMERICA FOR SALE, Crowe's book on foreign investment in the United States. Crowe was a member of the Newsday investigative team whose work won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

OCTOBER 10, 1990

He went up the escalator rising past two flights of unrelieved crème-colored walls. After walking by the Quing Dynasty vases and bottles, he turned left through the hallway lined with prints then paused to look down on the sculpture gallery, a favorite place where he often sat on a bench to rest and watch the women. He savored the lovely ones. The East Side women, slender and well dressed, tasting culture before lunch. The French tourists. The ripe young college students with sketchbooks. The suburbanites in expensive cotton sweaters; the weather was still too warm for cashmere.

Just past the sign: Nineteenth Century European Painting and Sculpture, he turned right. He barely glanced at Rodin’s Pygmalion and Galatea, the perfect woman in marble. He went the length of the gallery crowded with quick scanners and serious art lovers to Salome. He walked around a woman working a pencil in a sketchbook; he had seen her here last Wednesday. Same woman, same spot. In her 50s, like him. A hard-faced woman, the corners of her mouth turned down, in a white turtle neck and denim casual shirt worn like a jacket over faded jeans. Her brown hair was pulled back, tied with a red ribbon, giving her an artificially high forehead. She walked with a limp. Her reappearance made him uncomfortable. He knew he was too insignificant a fish to rate an elaborate trap in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The cops would be more likely to try to pick him off the street or grab him in his bed in the middle of the night with as little fuss as possible. He scanned the gallery. No one suspicious. No fearful vibes passed through him.

He stepped to the woman’s left, positioning himself near the doorway just in case. He took out his small leather-bound notebook, a birthday gift last March from Phil, to record his impressions of the painting. Salome, her lips set somewhere between a near smile and a smirk, is seated on a folded oriental rug atop a green trunk inscribed with gold atop a leopard skin. She is draped in a golden diaphanous skirt and blouse, her left breast with a well-defined pink nipple and her heavy thighs showing through. These clothes, held in place by a golden clasp, could fall easily away leaving her dressed only in the snake bracelet on her upper right arm. Her right hand is on her hip. Her golden blouse is pink on the left side.

He wrote, Why? A reflection of the setting sun or the blood from John the Baptist’s severed head?

On her lap is a large golden bowl. Her left hand rests on an ivory-handled knife in an elaborately-decorated scabbard lying in the bowl. He was pleased with himself. The knife in the bowl hadn’t registered on him when he began studying the painting last week. He looked for more details. Her heels are raised high above her toes, which are lodged in slippers, black outside, red inside. Her cheeks are rosy.

Rouged or flushed with the excitement of the dance and the deed? He scribbled the question in his notebook.

The painting is signed HRegnault Rome 1870.

The woman with the sketchbook glanced at him catching the shift in his eyes from deep concentration to pleasure. A thrill passed through her. He had the most expressive eyes that she had ever seen. She had spotted him last week as she was leaving the museum and he was climbing the broad concrete steps, weaving through the tourists sitting and standing in conversational lumps. He wore a blondish handlebar mustache and long hair gone to gray, pulled back in a pony tail. On an impulse, she turned and followed him back into the museum, to a ticket booth, up the grand staircase to the second floor and to Regnault’s Salome. She studied him that day, wanting to approach him, but unable to step across the precipice of first contact with a stranger. She decided to let fate decide for her. Seven days later at approximately the same time, she had returned to the museum, and here he was. She turned on a smile, stepped towards him. With a noticeably deep breath, she offered him her gambit: Has anyone ever told you that you have wonderfully interesting eyes?

He looked at her, a quick examination. What did this dame want? Nothing of the cop about her, but he was poised to react.

They just went from happy fascination to deep suspicion.

Yeah.

She laughed extending her hand, I’m Mary Hudson.

Chris. He shook her hand.

I saw you here last week and I said to myself, ‘Mary, this could be the right face. The mustache, the long hair, but most of all those expressive eyes.’ I came back again to be certain. I decided if you were here, we were destined to meet.

And here we are. He nodded at her sketchbook. You an aspiring artist?

No. I am an artist. Are you an art student?

He chuckled holding up his notebook. I’m a perennial student. He snatched her sketchbook away from her. Could I see your work? A way of checking on her. He had his back against the wall. His eyes roamed across the throng of people. Some of them noticing him and the woman with a flicker of curiosity. No sign of danger. No tension anywhere but in Mary Hudson, who obviously didn’t enjoy having him grab her sketchbook.

Her words were laced with a controlled anger. I would rather you saw the end product rather than the process.

You want to take me some place private to see your sketchings? he said. There was amusement in his eyes now.

In a way, this place is my place. I have a painting right here in the museum.

Yeah. A word spoken with contemptuous disbelief. He paged through the pad. Several rough outlines of his face and eyes. He looked at her, anger in his eyes. No one gave you permission to draw me.

She tried to smile, suppressing the temptation to say, ‘Do you realize who I am?’ This clod would have no idea. You’re interested in art. Let me show you my painting.

You really have a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

She smiled. She took her sketchbook back. Come on. She led him past the collections of European paintings to a crowded gallery in the American Wing. The poster advertised: New York Nudes of the Twentieth Century. They threaded through the crowd to the very end of the exhibit. They looked over the heads and shoulders of several people at a large painting, entitled Self Portrait, of a woman with a broad, soft body, a thicket of pubic hair, flabby breasts, and the remains of a waist. She holds a paintbrush in her left hand, a pallet smeared with a kaleidoscope of colors in her right hand. They waited until they could move close to the painting. She pointed to the signature on the painting. Mary Hudson. Me.

You in the painting?

Me in the painting. Me the artist. One leg shorter than the other. Big nipples. On a high wooden table behind me within easy reach an open bottle of single malt Scotch, the cap lying beside it along with a low-ball glass containing a tiny pool of the golden liquid. American realism in action. Mary Hudson unveiled.

Chris went through his process of examining the painting. First a fleeting look, then a search for details, considering the colors, the light, the expression on the artist’s face. He was about to say, You’re looking into a big mirror aren’t you, when he turned to see a grinning Martin Zelotovich coming towards him. He flinched. She had led him into a room that was a box. Trapped if Zelotovich had backups covering the one way in and the one way out of the room. The vein in his left temple throbbed. Sweat oozed from his palms.

Mary Hudson, Zelotovich said theatrically. He turned to the dozen people behind him, mostly middle-aged and elderly women. Ladies and gentlemen, you’re lucky today. Right next to her own portrait is Mary Hudson, one of America’s greatest living artists.

Chris stepped behind Mary and moved through the gathering of smiling faces out the door. Zelotovich obviously hadn’t recognized him. The 60’s hair style and the mustache gave him a different look, besides years had gone by. He weaved between clumps of museum visitors, husbands and wives, mothers and children, Japanese tourists with multilingual guides, into the lobby and out of the building.

Mary caught up to him as he was hurrying down the broad gray museum steps. Chris, she called, and he turned. She was breathing hard from the effort of chasing him. You see, I’m not only an artist, I have a fan club.

Who was that guy?

A docent. Told him he had caught me at a bad moment. And I ran right after you. You’re a fast-moving man. I hope I didn’t embarrass him in front of his tour. But then, I hate wasting my time on people who know nothing about art and for the most part really care nothing about it.

Then who do you paint for?

The select few like you. She put on a phony smile, an effort at appearing pleasant, a cover for the pain in her leg. Let’s have lunch, shall we? I have a proposition for you.

Mary said she had access to the Directors’ Dining Room, but neither of them would pass the dress code.

He wanted to get away from the museum and Zelotovich. I know a place on Madison, Chris said. They crossed Fifth Avenue under the warm October sun and passed into the shade of 81st Street.

You live on the East Side? she asked.

No.

Where do you live?

He stopped, considered her for a moment, and said: Wherever I am.

Oh, a philosopher. She continued walking with her mixed hobble and step.

He led her to into the Madison Bar & Grill set in the basement of a walkup. There was an old man, bald and skinny, reading the Daily Keys at a table in the back of the narrow wood-paneled room whose walls were lined with signed photos of baseball players and boxers from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Four men in suits were laughing and talking on barstools at the old wooden bar. While they were taking off their coats, they told the bartender that Mary wanted a scotch, straight up, with a hamburger, and Chris an Irish whiskey on the rocks, a hamburger and steak fries. Coming right up folks. I’ll put the order right in.

Let me ask you something, Chris said when they settled at a small table, waiting for their drinks and food.

Oh, she said widening her eyes. I hope my answers are more forthcoming than yours.

What’s it all about? Art? You’re a woman who should know.

I could give you an easy answer and say art’s a three-letter word.

Some beatnik said that.

I’m very, very impressed. There’s more to you than your eyes.

The bartender put their drinks in front of them. Couple of minutes for the burgers.

Here’s to you, Chris said, touching her glass with his.

And to you. She sipped her drink. What is a work of art? It is something unique. For a painter, a vision transferred from her eyes through her brain through her brush onto a surface. Could be canvas or paper or wallboard. And that work changes you when you study it whether you know it or not. The impact I’m describing isn’t delivered to tourists walking through museums at ten miles an hour, then giving their focused attentions to the trinkets and reproductions in the gift shops.

I have the same notion. That’s why I decided to study Salome. I wanted to see what I could get out of a painting if I really put myself into it. Took notes. Thought about it.

Think of an onion when you look at a painting. The obvious meaning is the sweet, pretty lady, dressed in gold. Then start peeling away the layers and get into what the artist was thinking and what she did that was beyond her intent straight out of her subconscious. I’ll give you a layer of Salome to think about: Don’t judge a woman’s potential for danger by her looks. She winked at Chris. There is a passive innocence to her face; a pleasant set to her lips; her eyes are almost hidden by those waves of thick black hair you can almost feel. She makes me think of Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

She had moved into Chris’ arena. He recited: I met a lady in the meads, full beautiful. A fairy’s child. Her hair was long, her foot was light. And her eyes were wild.

She reached across the small scarred oak table to place her hand on his. You are marvelous. There are so many layers to you. I’ve just got to have you. She paused. As a model of course. She laughed and the bartender, with a bottle of ketchup tucked under his arm, put their hamburgers on the table. Do you have any mustard? she asked.

Coming right up. He fetched a jar of mustard from a sideboard. Enjoy, he said to her.

Give us another round, Chris said. He waited until the bartender had departed. Was this a con? he wondered. No. He saw her self portrait in the museum. His immediate reaction of suspicion was replaced by the pleasure of the chosen.

This will be an adventure for you. I’m going to take you to places you’ve never been. She bit into her hamburger.

You’re going to take me traveling?

She laughed. I meant psychologically. Spiritually. You’ll have fun doing it. She took one of his steak fries, dipping it in his ketchup. Enjoying the Scotch, enjoying the hamburger slathered with mustard and ketchup. The narrow room was warm and friendly. The men at the bar were laughing. I’m having a really good time, she said, pausing then saying emphatically, For the first time since Monday.

What happened Monday?

My fifty-fifth birthday. I realized that John Keats was 26 when he died, and Henri Regnault was 28. Each of them produced masterpieces in their short lives. I’ve lived longer than the two of them put together, and while I’ve done some pretty good work, I have yet to paint the best I can.

I’m 56. I’m a year older than you and I haven’t produced a goddamn thing.

Why you interest me Chris is because for the longest time I’ve wanted to do a pair of paintings, maybe the work should be called a duad or a dichotomy certainly too big for a diptych, centered on radically different facets of the same face. A work of art is a journey, Chris, and a masterpiece is an epic journey. When you begin you never know what your final destination will be. In a quagmire. Or on top of the mountain. This is Everest I’m talking about.

And all I have to do is stand there while you’re climbing the mountain to glory?

You want to understand art. Model for me and you’ll see the process from the inside. Besides, I’ll pay you. I’m not asking you to give me your time free.

He looked into his glass. Only the remembrance of the whiskey on the ice and in the melted water. He was enjoying the life he lived, not wanting to change anything at the moment. I have a motto. Carpe Occasionem. Seize the moment. When I’m ready for the moment that you’re offering me, I’ll give you a call.

She fished into the big bag holding her sketchbook, coming up with a small silver case decorated with a butterfly. Do you have a business card? she asked.

He smiled at that. He shook his head, no.

She slipped two cards from the silver case. One is for you. Write your name and phone number on the back of the other. She gave him a pen.

He hesitated, then wrote his number at the Bog. He slid the card across the table. Thanks for lunch. He left her sitting in the booth, with the check.

CHAPTER TWO

Mrs. Baltic was sitting at her table under the discretely-lit oil portrait of Daniel O’Rorke, the founding father of Burty’s Bit o’ Green. Her two dogs, a Japanese Chin and a Shishatsu, were lying at her feet. She was passing time bent over the New York Post, her scalp showing through her thinning, wiry, red hair. Chris spotted her as he walked through the front door. She was early; usually the car service dropped her and the dogs around 8, a few minutes after he arrived for work. He went right behind the bar, snatched her favorite bourbon off the shelf, scooped ice into a shaker, poured in the Gentleman Jack, a little sweet vermouth and just a touch of bitters. Swirled the contents with a glass wand then dropped three maraschino cherries into one of Mrs. Baltic’s personal crystal glasses. He put the shaker and the glass on a small tray.

Take off your jacket at least, Burty the Third said to him. He was fuming, hating the presence of the dogs in the dining room, fear boiling in his gut that a city health department inspector would appear. That would cost him a $20 bill.

Chris said, Don’t come down on me because you’re unhappy. Tell Mrs. Baltic to keep her dogs home. He slipped off his bulky LL Bean parka then picked up the tray. He knew why Burty wouldn’t say anything to her. Mrs. Baltic had been coming to the Bog, as the regulars called Burty’s Bit o’ Green, twice a week for at least 50 years and when Burty the Third’s father, Burty the Second, ran into trouble with a loan shark sometime in the 1930s, the Baltics, Dr. and Mrs. Baltic, bailed him out with a no-interest loan. Those roots gave her privileges that couldn’t be denied, including her favorite table and the dogs. When Dr. Baltic was alive that was their table for a cocktail as a prelude to dinner at a nice restaurant or a Broadway show. Since he passed on in 1985, she came alone or with her dogs every Monday and Thursday for two hours, arriving around 8 and leaving around 10. She insisted that Chris prepare her two bourbon Manhattans, one when she arrived and the other halfway through her stay.

Burty’s lips tightened into a thin line. Give your girlfriend her drink and get back here so I can go home.

He smirked at Burty. His girlfriend! She was a lonely old lady with all of the afflictions of the old: slightly stooped from osteoporosis, hard of hearing, tending to drift into sleep--even in public--forgetful, a thickened body, wrinkles. They had become friends. She enjoyed his banter, and often told him that she wished her divorced daughter in Vermont could find a man like him. A real man.

Mrs. Baltic folded the newspaper as he approached. Are you okay, hon?

He smiled erasing the bleak expression of his leftover anger at Burty. He leaned close to Mrs. Baltic: Love has gone and left me. And the days are all alike.

Her name is on the tip of my tongue. The candle burns at both ends poet.

Very good, Mrs. Baltic. Edna St. Vincent Millay.

She raised her Manhattan to him: ‘But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends. It gives a lovely light.’ Dr. Baltic loved her. He used to recite that all the time.

Gotta get going, Chris said.

She knew from the rough edge to his voice and his crude language that he had missed the polish of college despite his repertoire of poems and impressive skills in reciting them. He reminded her of a young Irish thug she met in Greenwich Village when she first came to New York from Vermont with her dream of being a Broadway musical star. She could close her eyes and see him laughing standing naked over her or fully clothed in a pin-striped suit and spats at the bar of the speakeasy where they ate and drank on almost every night of their month-long courtship that ended when he left and never came back. She sipped her Manhattan. You’ve got a great presence, Chris. I could imagine you whispering romantic lines to a mature, beautiful woman in a play or a film. Why are you still a bartender? A question that she repeated to him periodically forgetting that she had asked it until he responded with his usual answer.

I’ve ended up where my life has carried me, Mrs. Baltic.

She overcame the surge of embarrassment at her faulty memory to say, I see so much potential in you and I know what I’m talking about Chris. Mrs. Baltic was fizzy with good cheer. Chris was glad for that. He dreaded the occasions when she ruminated about her stage career, an early start and an early retirement. She was on the stage at 17 in the Greenwich Village Follies of 1921 snared Dr. Baltic’s heart when he saw her in Artists and Models in 1925, and was married to him within a year. Retired from show business at age 22. The doctor arranged for private tutors to get her a high school diploma then sent her to NYU for a degree. She later got a masters. Her life was spiced with theatre-going, museums, lectures, reading, and good restaurants. When the children came, she had help to ease the burdens of motherhood and domesticity. Yet sometimes she spoke with regret over failing to take Ginger Rogers’ path from New York musicals to Hollywood.

Gotta get going, Chris said. I’ll be back to talk to you later.

He worked pouring drinks, mostly whiskey on the rocks or pints of beer with occasional martinis and Margaritas, for the waitress covering the small dining room and for the customers at the bar, a mix of men and women, half of them regulars, filling every stool, leaving some standing. At 9 o’clock, after making sure everyone at the bar had a drink, he brought Mrs. Baltic her second shaker of Gentleman Jack Manhattan with three maraschino cherries and a fresh glass to her table.

Thank you, dear. This will help me sleep tonight, she said. He sat for a while to tell her about his second trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art the day before. Mrs. Baltic had taken Chris to an off-off Broadway production in the East Village of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. The teenage Salome on the stage of the tiny theater, danced with her sweet young breasts, nipples erect, tantalizingly exposed and hidden by turns under whirling translucent purple veils. Temptation personified. Mrs. Baltic had been aroused by the dance of this wonderfully-talented nymphet, whose image replayed over and over in the air around her, on the street and in her bedroom. She would have been splendid in that role when she was a slender girl with a narrow waist and flawless skin. She regretted that Chris hadn’t seen her then. That thought prompted her to buy him a membership in the museum and to suggest that he use it to study Regnault’s Salome for insights into two very different artists dealing with the same subject.

Chris talked of his first impression of the painting, seeing a pretty innocent girl with a fulsome head of thick black hair, who looked like a gypsy in her loose, transparent skirt and blouse. Then he became aware of the knife and the bowl for transporting John the Baptist’s head and he understood the title, Salome. He told her that he had met an artist who had a painting in the museum, a nude of herself, and seemed as fascinated by Salome as he. Seeing a flicker of jealousy pass across Mrs. Baltic’s face, Chris said the artist was thick bodied and austere. No lipstick or makeup. A washerwoman hairdo. No great beauty. A fresh customer strolled into the bar giving Chris the excuse to break away from her.

At 10 o’clock Chris walked Mrs. Baltic to the waiting car, giving her a kiss on the cheek as she slipped him her usual $10 tip.

Back inside the Bog, one couple lingered at a table in the dining room and the bar was down to half a dozen men. The writers from the New York Daily Keys would begin filtering in about half an hour to bring the Bog back to life with laughter and stories about the stories they had written.

CHAPTER THREE

Chris woke from his doze, warm and comfortable in his bed, to the sound of rain beating on the window. He heard the door open and close, then Phil’s theatrically loud squeal of delight in finding the gifts. A bouquet of red roses on top of two packages, wrapped in lavender with white satin bows. He picked up the remote on the night table to turn on the stereo. A Phil Coulter tape. Minutes dragged by. He was tempted to get up, but wanted her to come to him.

Phil danced through the bedroom doorway, swirling the sheer golden silk scarf around her naked body, waving the flowers gracefully, high above her head. She was wearing the cultured pearl necklace. The scent of her perfume filled the room. And just as he had imagined, Phil was using his three gifts to bring him pleasure. The flowers and the necklace were suggestions from Trish Cavallo, the Daily Keys columnist. They were easy. He went to Macy’s for the pearls. They were on sale. He went out this morning to a florist on 31st Street under the el for the roses. He searched for the scarf through Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and half a dozen small shops until he found the perfect golden cloth at a surprisingly low price in a store on Second Avenue selling imports from India. Salome had inspired that gift.

Happy birthday, he said, throwing back the covers.

Oh, is that for me too?

He laughed. She knew exactly what to say, what to do. He had a desire, Phil anticipated it and satisfied it. Trish had asked him whether the gifts were for a woman he was just screwing or a woman he was making love with. He hesitated, never before considering the difference. I’m asking do you love her?

Yes I sure do, he said after another long pause.

Trish laughed and knocked back her scotch. "Whether you love a woman or not, the answer would be the same. Pearls and flowers are always a sure bet. You’ll get an extra good