Free Bitter Bronx by Jerome Charyn Page A

bride, or I’ll never marry.”
    She had never seen such imbecilic stubbornness, except in her father. She considered moving away from Arthur Avenue, abandoning the Bronx. This lord wouldn’t have much sway outside the borough. Manhattan wasn’t so fond of Albanians, who couldn’t seem to flourish without the hills and highlands of the Bronx. But why should she run away? She’d lived here all her life, except for her own hard time in the prison farm. Her mother had been the janitor at an apartment house on Crescent Avenue before she went mad. The landlord had given them a ground-floor apartment in that building. The neighborhood had adopted little Angela. She’d worked behind the provolone stand at the Arthur Avenue indoor market when she was twelve, loved to watch the cigar makers, the widows with their little stash of stationery or their pots and pans. She remembered the chicken slaughterer who used to be at the end of the block, with feathers and squirts of blood in the window. Her papi would earn a few dollars wringing the chickens’ necks. And he could never rid himself of the chicken scales on his hands, or that horrendous smell of death.
    He still had that smell, years after the chicken slaughterer vanished from Arthur Avenue. He sat in their small apartment like a man whose own madness had set him on fire but who didn’t have enough substance to really burn—one day he would shrivel up and shrink into the atmosphere, shoes and all. But when she returned home after her trip to Bathgate Avenue, Papi wasn’t there. Neither was the furniture, nor Angela’s narrow bed. The apartment could have been swept clean by locusts.
    Had the landlord reclaimed the apartment after all these years? But where the hell was Papi? And then the landlord appeared with a nervous grin. He couldn’t even look into Angela’s eyes. He’d rented the apartment to a plumber and moved Angela upstairs to the fifth floor. He wouldn’t even raise her rent.
    So she climbed to the fifth floor, and there was Papi sitting like a potentate. The new apartment looked out onto the red behemoth of St. Barnabas and the jagged landscape of the Bronx, cut in half by an expressway, which had turned everything around it into a vast moonscape of flattened warehouses and empty lots. She had been born after the expressway was built, and that’s why she clung to the little oasis of Arthur Avenue, which was just beyond that moonscape and did not preside over its ruin.
    But Angela wasn’t a Bronx moocow. She was clever enough to know who the landlord’s “plumber” was—Lord Lekë. He hadn’t bought the apartment house, which belonged to the little kingdom of Arthur Avenue. He’d finessed the Italian chieftains by renting Angela’s apartment at a million times what it was worth, she imagined, and thus allowing the landlord to “lend” his prize apartment near the roof to a scruffy old man with his dyke of a daughter.
    She couldn’t ask the landlord to give her back the apartment on the ground floor. She’d never even had a lease. Angela was caught in some kind of crazy wind. It was like the chess pieces the Albanians tossed into the air. No one knew where the pawns and knights would land.
    The wild man left begonias outside her door—begonias, bracelets, and diamond rings. She couldn’t accept such gifts. It would have meant that she belonged to Lekë, even if he hadn’t come to claim her. She didn’t have the slightest desire to return to Little Albania. So she scribbled a note to Lord Lekë and left it on his table at Dominick’s.
    My Lord, you must take back your presents.
    I am not in love with you and never will be.
    It didn’t take long for the wild man to respond. Several of the clan’s wives appeared in head scarves, took Angela by the hand, and accompanied her to Lekë’s stronghold, which wasn’t even in