Lying in the vast dormitory, hearing his breath melt into the collective sigh of so many boys asleep, Eddie was shamed by his own meagerness: narrow hips; a sharp, unremarkable face; hair like dirty straw. Even more than the orphans’ annual excursion to the circus, he thirsted for the moment each month when the protectory barber’s hands would touch his scalp briefly, indifferently, yet capable of soothing him almost to sleep. He was of no more consequence than an empty cigarette packet. At times the brusque mass of everything that was not him seemed likely to crush Eddie into dust the way he crushed the dried-out moths that collected in piles on the protectory windowsills. At times he wanted to be crushed.
By nine or ten, the boys were expected, after lessons, to earn their pocket money at one of the myriad occupations advertised with BOY WANTED signs: delivering messages and packages; sealing boxes in one of the many Bronx piano factories. The more enterprising boys sold gum or buttons or candy at Van Nest Railway Station, working up sales pitches in groups of two or three involving songs and dance steps. Boys were watched closely near the protectory, everyone in the neighborhood aware that these were the very same boys who swiped caramels from their jars and sweet potatoes from their pushcarts. Eddie was not exempt from this thievery; no one wanted to be empty-handed when the spoils were divided. But he felt degraded by the crimes he was moved to commit, soiled by the suspicion that followed. He looked for work in other neighborhoods, clutching the rear of the West Farms Road trolley and riding it across the Bronx River past Crotona Park, where the houses were stone and brick. Although visibly poor in his orphanage-made breeches and shoes, when away from the scrum Eddie found he was able to straighten his spine and peer directly into the eyes of whomever he addressed.
One afternoon in early fall, when Eddie was eleven, an elderly gentleman in a wheeled chair called out to him as he crossed Clermont Park toward a bakery on Morris Avenue he’d been making deliveries for. The man asked to be rolled into the sun. He wore a double-breasted suit and a crisp orange feather in his hatband. Eddie pushed the gentleman’s chair as directed, then fetched him a cigar and a Mirror from a newsstand on Belmont. He hovered nearby, awaiting dismissal, as the man read and smoked. At last, sensing he’d been forgotten, he declared himself, striving for the orotund speech of the charitable ladies’ reading voices: “Alas, sir, the sun has forsaken you. Would you care to be moved yet again?”
The old man met his eyes, perplexed. “Can you play at cards?” he asked.
“I haven’t any deck.”
“What games?”
“Knuckles. Blackjack. Chuck-a-luck. Stutz. Poker.” Eddie tossed out names as though pitching pennies—then knew, with poker, that he’d struck. The old man rustled under the plaid blanket covering his knees and handed Eddie a brand-new deck. “Seven-card stud,” he said. “You deal. Honestly.”
They introduced themselves and moved to a sunny bench so Eddie could sit down. They placed bets using small sticks he collected and broke into equal lengths, and their table was the blanket pulled taut across Mr. De Veer’s shrunken thighs. The cards felt like glass. Eddie smelled their newness and had an urge to lick them, or slide them over his cheeks. He lost every hand, but he hardly cared—the sensation of those cards, of sitting in the sun, was transporting. Eventually, the gentleman fished a heavy silver watch from his pocket and announced that his sister would be coming soon to fetch him. He gave Eddie a nickel. “But I lost,” Eddie said. Mr. De Veer replied that he was paying for the gift of Eddie’s time and companionship, and asked him to come again the next afternoon.
That night Eddie lay sleepless, his whole body thrumming with certainty that something grand and new had begun. And he was right, in a way, for much of what had happened in the years since could be traced to that acquaintance. “Two men at poker ain’t much of a game,” Mr. De Veer told him on their second meeting, and proposed to give Eddie a stake to play as his proxy in a game where he was known. But his imprimatur had less weight than Mr. De Veer had hoped, and Eddie was turned away brusquely from the first several games he tried, once by a lady in curlers who swatted him with a broom. At last, in a cigar store across from the freight yard, he was grudgingly admitted by Sid, a chain-smoker of Old Golds who blinked at Eddie through a cumulus lazing under his green visor brim.
In the weeks that followed, weather permitting, Eddie joined Sid’s game for an hour and a quarter—less, if he lost his stake before that time had elapsed. Afterward, he returned to Mr. De Veer and relayed the action card by card, bet by bet, a feat of memorization and recall that Eddie improved at with time. The old gentleman hung on his descriptions, interjecting at each error—“No, a high card won’t do against Polsky, he can’t bluff. You’ll lose that one”—until Eddie began withholding outcomes until the end in order to further his employer’s suspense and joy. On the rare occasions when Eddie came out ahead, Mr. De Veer gave him half the winnings. When he lost, he merely returned what was left. Eddie could have lied, of course—said he’d lost when he’d actually won, kept all the profits, but this thought occurred to him only in the negative: as something other boys might have done.
Mr. De Veer had been a “sporting man,” which apparently meant a gambler and a connoisseur of horses. He’d played at Canfield’s and the Metropole Hotel against Goulds, Fisks, and Vanderbilts, before “do-gooders” like Reverend Parkhurst had hounded the best places out of business and closed the race track at Brighton Beach. Gentleman gamblers were a thing of the past, he told Eddie bitterly, drummed out by gangsters and crooks like Arnold Rothstein, the young sheenie who won by cheating. “Don’t ever cheat, not even once,” he warned Eddie, regarding him through faded eyes fringed with silver lashes. “Cheating is like a girl’s maidenhead. Doesn’t matter if she’s done it once or a hundred times; she’s ruined just the same.”
These words lodged in Eddie’s ears with the preternatural weight of a truth he’d already known. Cheating was a way of life at the protectory, but Eddie was different, had always been. Mr. De Veer saw that difference in him. He taught Eddie ways to spot loaded dice, crooked decks, signs of collusion between apparent strangers—anything that undermined the mystical activity of Lady Luck.
Mr. De Veer had a Civil War injury, but it was his “bum ticker” that had confined him to the chair two years before, and to the care of his maiden sister, Miss De Veer, who had put an immediate end to his gaming. She claimed it had ruined his health, but he suspected she’d designs on his military pension to augment her collection of porcelain dolls, which already numbered in the hundreds. One afternoon, having just resumed after a winter suspension, Eddie returned late from a card game. Mr. De Veer ordered him away harshly. Wounded, Eddie watched from inside the park as a heavyset lady in a wide-brimmed black hat moved toward Mr. De Veer with boxy determination. The old gentleman looked bowed and frail in her presence, and Eddie understood that he was afraid of his sister.
“Haven’t you a timepiece?” he asked Eddie the next afternoon. When Eddie admitted he hadn’t one, the gentleman unclipped his watch chain. “Use that,” he said, pressing a silver pocket watch into Eddie’s palm. It was heavy and engraved.
“I can’t, sir,” Eddie stammered. “They’ll think I—”