Hells Kitchen

with the producer on the final cut. PBS airing was planned for early next spring. Simultaneously he’d have the tape transferred to film, re-edited and shipped for limited release in art theaters in the U.S. and on Channel 4 in England next summer. Then submissions to festivals in Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Berlin and to the Oscars.
    Of course that had been the plan. But now?
    The motif of West of Eighth had been the tenement at 458 West Thirty-sixth Street and the residents wholived there. But Ettie Washington was the centerpiece. With her arrest he wondered if he was now the proud owner of two hundred hours of fascinating interviews that would never find their way to TV or silver screen.
    Outside he bought a newspaper then flagged down a cab.
    The clattering vehicle wove right and left through traffic, as if the cabbie were avoiding hot pursuit, and Pellam tightly gripped the handhold as he tried to read about the fire. The story was dwindling in news value and today’s paper reported only that Ettie’d been arrested and confirmed what he’d known—that the only serious injury was Juan Torres. Pellam remembered the boy clearly. He’d interviewed his mother and recalled the energetic twelve-year-old, standing in his apartment, by the window, left-hooking a package of Huggies like a punching bag and saying to Pellam insistently, “My daddy, he know Jose Canseco. No, no, no. Really. He does!”
    The boy’s condition was still critical.
    A picture of Ettie, being led by a woman cop out of Manhattan Hospital, accompanied the article. Her hair was a mess. Light flares sparked off the chrome cuffs on her wrists, just below the cast that Pellam had signed.
    Etta Washington, formerly Doyle, neé Wilkes, was seventy-two years old. Born in Hell’s Kitchen she’d never lived anywhere else. The 458 W. Thirty-sixth Street building had been her home for the past five years. She’d resided for the prior forty in a similar tenement up the street, now demolished. All her other residences had been in the Kitchen, within five square blocks of one another.
    Ettie had ventured out of New York state only threetimes for brief trips, two of them funerals of kin in North Carolina. Ettie had been a star student in her first two years of high school but dropped out to work and try to become a cabaret singer. She’s performed for some years, always opening for better-known talent. Mostly in Harlem or the Bronx, though occasionally she’d land a job on Swing Street—Fifty-Second. Pellam had heard some old wire recordings transcribed onto tape and was impressed with her low voice. For years she’d worked odd jobs, supporting herself and sometimes lovers, while resisting the inevitable proposals of marriage that a beautiful woman living alone in Hell’s Kitchen was flooded with. She finally married, late and incongruously: her husband was an Irishman named Billy Doyle.
    A handsome, restless man, Doyle left her years ago, after only three years of marriage.
    “He was just doing what a man does, my Billy. They got that runaway spirit. May be their nature but it’s hard to forgive ’em for it. Wonder if you’ve got it too, John.”
    Sitting beside the camera as he’d recorded this, Pellam had nodded encouragingly and reminded himself to edit out her last sentence and her accompanying chuckle.
    Her second husband was Harold Washington, who drowned, drunk, in the Hudson River.
    “No love lost there. But he was dependable with the money and never cheated and never raised his voice to me. Sometimes I miss him. If I remember to think about him.”
    Ettie’s youngest son, Frank, had been caught in a cross fire and killed by a man wearing a purple top hatin a drunken shoot-out in Times Square. Her daughter, Elizabeth, of whom Ettie was immensely proud, was a real estate saleswoman in Miami. In a year or two, Ettie would be moving to Florida to live near her. Her oldest son, James—a handsome mulatto—was the only child she had by Doyle. He too caught the wanderlust flu and disappeared out west—California, Ettie assumed. She hadn’t heard from him in twelve years.
    The elderly woman had been, in her youth, sultry and beautiful if somewhat imperious (as evidenced by a hundred photos, all presently burned to gray ash) and was now a handsome woman with youthful, dark skin. She debated often about dying her salt-and-pepper hair back to its original black. Ettie talked like a quick, mid-Atlantic Southerner, drank bad wine and cooked