Headstone City Read Free Page A

merchants pursued their brazen luxuries in the new era of abundance. They'd ride their carriages from Manhattan to Outlook Park and attend masquerade balls thrown along the Mile, where the wealthy built their extravagant Victorian mansions. You could see it if you put your mind to it. The fashionable elite strolling the vast gardens and embracing the celebrated performers of the day.
    Politicians and businessmen wanted a hub for cultural pursuits, where the masters of fine art could lord it over the laborers who greased their axles or fetched their tea. Local entrepreneurs constructed Grand Outlook Hall, an Italian Renaissance gallery. Five lavish stories and 150,000 square feet, a shrine to the arts that became the jewel of the Meadow Slope community. Back in the day it was considered the equal in beauty to the Academy of Music, Botanic Garden, and Grand Army Plaza.
    The marble corridors, rich oak and mahogany paneling, ballrooms, opera house, chandeliers, and terrace nurseries brought the rich and prominent flocking. They'd come in their top hats and tails, ladies dressed in Parisian gowns, to hear the star entertainers.
    During prohibition, opera connoisseur Al Capone frequented the Hall and had his own balcony seat in the ballroom. One of Al's cronies from Chicago, guy with the stupid name Peachy Fichi, tried to whack him in the loge, but Al hid behind one of the brass statues until he could get his pistol out and return fire. You could still see the bullet holes in the garlands of gold-leaf molding. Neither Al nor Peachy could shoot worth a shit. After reloading three times each, they both ran for it.
    The bus let Dane off at the corner in front of the Grand Hall. The mid-October wind braced him, leaves skittering against his ankles. He allowed two teenage couples coming out of the parking lot to precede him onto the street. Guys in tuxes and the girls in silk dresses and mink stoles. Dane asked, “Who's on tonight?”
    “Kathryn Mondiviaggi,” one of the kids said, his bow tie just a little askew. His cheeks sprouted crimson from the chill. “In the revival of
La Traviata.
”
    “I heard Sophia Campescio sing it on her last tour, about twenty years ago,” Dane told them.
    “Really?”
    “Michael Finelli played Alfredo Germont.”
    “Oh, he's so handsome,” the kid's date said, moving closer and speaking with a hushed tone, as if to a conspirator. This was how the real fans talked about opera, in close, like it was somehow gossip. She had a smile that caught Dane low and almost made him flinch. Her hair flowed back and forth, reaching for him. “Even more so now, with the white patches in his beard. Truly debonair.”
    “He was still new on the scene back then, before he'd made any movies.”
    “I saw
Venice in the Morning
seven times.”
    “He threw a rose to my grandmother in the fourth row. She rushed the stage and nearly tackled him.”
    “I would've too. Did she save the flower?”
    “Yeah. It's pressed in the front of her Bible, where the family history is filled out. All the vaccinations my father had back in the fifties, stuff like that.”
    The guys turned a deaf ear, put off by the intrusion. Dane understood, so he watched them escort their girls off without another word. You never knew who might be moving in on you, even in the opera house parking lot. Dane called out, “Have a good night!” He grinned, turned, and began to walk home.
    The neighborhood had been going to hell on the inside track for the last four decades and looked like it'd just about gotten there. Even the graffiti lacked style, none of that old, cool flair of the seventies. Now it was just a lot of fuck you's and Freddy + Boopsie on the brickwork. Kids didn't know what to do with themselves, no creative expression at all. More bars on the windows, but the small lawns still perfectly manicured and just as many people in the street, walking store to store. The old Italian ladies in black heading to the cemetery.
    Wisewood