Murder in the Neighborhood by Ellen J. Green

Author:Ellen J. Green
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781800198067
Published: 2022-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

RAYMOND

Camden wasn’t Philadelphia. It didn’t even want to be Philadelphia. We were sort of like Brooklyn, across the river within eye view of the greatness, but trying to make our own way. We were much smaller but better in the ways that mattered. We thought so anyway. Philadelphia had Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the like, the Liberty Bell. But we had Walt Whitman. And all through grammar school we had his poems shoved into every class in some way—didn’t matter if it was math or social studies or physical education, Whitman was in there with his old Leaves of Grass.

I remember Mrs. Smith making us sort through the Calamus Poems, all about adhesive love and comradeship, she said. I hated it until John Borton whispered to me one day at recess that the poems were really about men loving each other. I didn’t know what he meant exactly until he explained it to me in detail. That wasn’t something that was ever talked about. But Walt Whitman was way ahead of his time, I guess. We went into fits of giggles after that in class, wondering if Mrs. Smith knew about Walt Whitman liking men, or if it was our secret.

Yes, Whitman was the most famous resident who ever lived in Camden, and he said somewhere that those were the happiest days of his life. He didn’t live near Cramer Hill. His house, a little two-story rowhome, was downtown on Mickle Street, a few blocks from the piers. I don’t think anyone lived in it after he died, but every time we drove by, there was a light on in the little foyer, as if his house was sitting there waiting for him to come back. I’m not sure he ever really left.

I couldn’t help but think of those Calamus Poems after Howard told me what the Zegrinos yelled to him when he was just walking by. It happened all the time, people calling him a Nancy boy, a Mary, fairy, pansy, and not just the Zegrinos or Sorg. I even heard Mrs. Cohen call him something one day when he left the pharmacy. He’d been asking for change to use the pay phone, and Mrs. Cohen whispered “It’s the queer” to her husband on the other side of the counter. Howard heard it and his face went red.

It was the thing about Howard that hung in the air. It was blatantly said, but never really discussed. Those sorts of things never were. Living in Cramer Hill, going to school, it wasn’t even a half second of a thought that there was any other kind of lifestyle than the one I lived. But after the shootings, something shifted a little. The whispers were louder or maybe the whispers were now coming from people who never whispered or muttered before at all. It was just rumors, or grist for the mill—something else to be thrown at Howard.

That’s what I thought until my father asked me to take a walk with him one Saturday morning.

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