“If Waldhausen is happy, the other V-S guys will be too,” I broke in.
“Yeah, but what is she doing?” Beales argued. The taxi was stuck in traffic now and the driver was getting nervous.
“You’re acting like they’re in a hotel room fucking this very minute,” I said with disgust.
“They very well could be, that’s my point.”
“Wrong,” I told him, reaching for the roll of antacids in my pocket. “Samantha knows exactly what she’s doing. I know her better than you do. She’s about a million times more interested in seeing this deal go through than in being humped by some short German guy. She’s looking for an avenue of conversation, Ed. Isn’t that obvious? She realized quickly that the chemistry wasn’t so great. Maybe there are too many people in the room. Nobody else seems to have hit it off with any of them. We need to find that sympathetic relationship, Ed. So, if there’s any advantage that—”
“I completely disagree,” Beales interrupted, his craggy face reddening. “It makes us look small time, uncoordinated—”
“Driver!” hollered Morrison, slapping his good hand on the seat. “Stop the cab!”
The car lurched to a halt next to the curb.
“Ed,” Morrison spat hotly over the front seat, “if you had an ass like Samantha’s you’d do the same thing, and we all know it, so long as I approved. So don’t get high and mighty. And you—” He turned to me. “You’re supposed to be whispering in the Chairman’s ear that we have to do this deal, not riding in taxis arguing with Ed.” He looked back and forth between us. “Now, both of you get out of my fucking cab and give me some peace.”
And we did, right there, without speaking to one another. Morrison threw my umbrella out the window after me and the taxi sped off. Beales and I looked at each other. I popped a couple of antacids in my mouth.
“Too much tension, Jack?” Beales grinned.
When one’s enemies think they can insult you without danger, that is when they’re after you.
“Yes, Ed,” I replied. “I have tension. People cause me tension. But at least I know where it is—in my stomach. It’s not in my head, it’s not in my chest, it’s not in my lower back, and, luckily, Ed—don’t you think?—it’s not in my asshole.”
He started to say something, thought better of it, and turned on his heel toward the Corporation building. I picked up my umbrella and felt a kind of righteous pleasure as I watched Beales walk away. But, I see now, I was only making mistakes, confusing enemies. Beales wasn’t going to be my problem.
Later that afternoon, as I wrote a memo to the research department requesting some numbers on what it might cost to build fifty movie theaters in Cuba, Helen told me a Mrs. Rosenbluth was on the phone, insisting she speak with me.
“I don’t know anyone named Mrs. Rosenbluth.”
“She says—oh, I don’t know what she says, really.”
“Put her on.”
“Are you a Mr. John Whitman?” came an older voice, after Helen made the transfer.
“Yes.”
“And this is your place of business, Mr. Whitman? This is where you work?”
“Yes. May I ask why you wish to know?”
“Can you tell me the address of your place of work?” she continued suspiciously.
I told her.
“Yes, that’s right. Now, Mr. John Whitman, may I ask how old are you?”
“I’m thirty-five,” I said.
“May I ask if you are married? Have any children, Mr. Whitman?”
“These are personal questions.”
“Well,” she sang through her nose, an aging Jewish mother who was secure in her place in the universe, “I have a good reason to ask them.”
“My wife was killed about four years ago,” I answered, hearing my own voice from far away. Whenever I said the words, I saw Liz’s gray face in the morgue and remembered the plain truth of her body laid out in the steel cadaver drawer. “We didn’t have any children,” I added. The phone was silent for several seconds. “Mrs. Rosenbluth, I don’t understand why you’ve called. What can I do for you?”
“I have a young woman and her daughter here and—”
“Dolores and Maria?”
“Yes, those are their names.”
“Are they all right?” I demanded anxiously.
“For the moment.”
“Where are they?”
“Why would you want to know?” she asked, her voice guarded again.
I quickly told her that I first met Dolores and Maria on the subway, then mentioned my effort to get Dolores a job and a place to live. I explained what had apparently happened at Ahmed’s building, to the best of my understanding, and how that was the last place I had known Dolores and Maria to be.
“So I am to understand that you are not the cause of their problems?”
“Absolutely not. Did Dolores tell you to call me?”
“No.”
I thought a moment. “Then that means she still has my business card.”
With this, Mrs. Rosenbluth seemed greatly relieved that she could trust me. “Yes, that’s right She, Dolores, the mother, is very tired, I think. She said almost nothing when I told her she could lie down on the spare bed. So I was looking around for some sort of information about her and I found your card. The little girl has a cough but otherwise looks healthy. Oh, but they can’t stay, you see. I’m very sorry I can’t keep them. I’m due to go see my sister today. But I can’t just send them back onto the street. I’m a Socialist, I believe in involving myself in society’s problems. These two aren’t street people, if you know what I mean.” Her voice was accelerating into an emotional rush. “I found the poor child this morning in Washington Square, where I walk each day at eight o’clock. She came up to me. Her mother was asleep on the next bench. I just took them home with me, I just decided that I would do it. But I need to know the name of the responsible party. And Dolores didn’t say anything about a family or friends. She didn’t say anything about you, either—”
“Mrs. Rosenbluth—”
“—they’re both asleep now. They ate and then fell asleep by nine o’clock this morning.” Her voice was rising toward hysteria. “I can’t be the responsible party in this situation. It breaks my heart. I was in the park and the little one came up to me. She’s adorable. Children need love. I don’t know what to do, I took them in because . . . but I can’t keep them, you see, I’m living alone, I—”
“Mrs. Rosenbluth,” I interrupted firmly. “Now you must give me your address.”
The choice was to wait until the end of the day, when I would not have any office work to worry about, or to go immediately. Morrison wanted to see me later during the afternoon, but I figured I could slip away for an hour with no trouble. If I waited too long, perhaps Dolores and Maria would again disappear into the maw of the city. The subway dropped me near a prewar building a few blocks from NYU. When I rang the apartment doorbell, there was some scrabbling at a chain and a woman whom I guessed to be in her late seventies opened the door and peered at me fiercely.
“Mrs. Rosenbluth?”
She put a bony finger to her lips. “Both still asleep. I just had to give the little girl a bath. She was very quiet and cooperative . . .”
I followed the woman into the living room of an urban intellectual’s apartment, decorated circa 1958, with several framed diplomas on the walls and a number of outdated leftist treatises on American politics and early hardcover editions of Roth, Mailer, and Bellow on the bookshelves. Junk mail was piled everywhere, from every liberal cause imaginable. On the mantel stood yellowed high school pictures of three sons and a daughter, all pimples and braces and high school graduation gowns, no doubt adults now and successful in everything they did, and newer photos of high school-age children, grandchildren, most likely. On the wall was a framed black-and-white photograph of a tall, bespectacled man shaking hands with a young Dr. Martin Luther King.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s my husband.”
We headed into a kitchen. “I inspected every single inch of her body, I looked for scratches or bruises or lice or”—Mrs. Rosenbluth’s old eyes looked at me meaningfully—“or any mistreatment, if you know what I mean.” She waved an arthritic hand. “There, please sit down here in the kitchen, would you like a cup of coffee? The little one was hungry, but we fixed that up. She does have a cold, congestion, but steam and soup and plenty of sleep should do the trick. Now, I have been wondering—there, I had the water boiling already, cream and sugar?”
“Yes,” I said, settling back in a wooden chair in Mrs. Rosenbluth’s fusty kitchen, which featured a battalion of cat magnets on the refrigerator, a wall clock in the shape of a rooster, well-thumbed Good Housekeeping cookbooks, and a cookie jar on the counter. Children had grown up in this apartment. On the refrigerator was a volunteers’ schedule at a soup kitchen run by a local synagogue. Socialism may have faded away along with the old American left, but here was Mrs. Rosenbluth, still making her contribution. I felt a sudden rush of gladness that Dolores and Maria had landed so safely. Mrs. Rosenbluth bustled about on the ancient yellowed linoleum on swollen ankles, putting coffee and cookies on a plate before me.
“Good,” she went on, “that’s real cream. Fresh. So, where was I? Now—yes, this poor child is terribly polite, but she seems to know that her world is upside down. I can’t blame the mother, because I don’t know the particulars. These things can be very touchy . . . certain family situations, but when children are involved . . . these situations are heartbreaking, just heartbreaking! I saw that dirty, beautiful child and I was ready to cry. I raised four children, Mr. Whitman. My husband was a very eminent professor of sociology here at the university. Now I’m alone and haven’t—”
At that moment we heard the padding of feet in the hallway and Maria peeked her curly dark head into the kitchen doorway, dressed only in underpants and carrying a pillow with both hands, her hair mussed from sleeping.
“Maria?” I suffered a stab of love for the sleepy, innocent child.
She was silent and looked from Mrs. Rosenbluth to me and back again.
“Maria, I’m glad you and your mother are okay. Can you tell me what happened?”
The child looked at me and said nothing.
“Remember the big building where you were sleeping with your mother? Did somebody find you there?”
Mrs. Rosenbluth stepped over and absentmindedly smoothed the child’s hair. “I think they must have slept in the park or a shelter or somewhere dreadful.”
Then Dolores appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a bathrobe too small for her, her face haggard and discouraged. She had lost weight in the days since I’d seen her. But even without makeup, even in her exhaustion, there was that ripe something about her, that heat. “C’mon, Maria.” She reached out her hand. “Mrs. Rosenbluth, excuse me, do you have the wash now?”
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Rosenbluth said. “Your clothes.”
“Dolores?”
She looked up at me in confusion. “Why—wait, why are you here?”
“I found his card, in all of your things when I was washing them,” Mrs. Rosenbluth said quickly, “and I didn’t know who, you understand, I had to call someone who might be able to help you—”
“But I don’t even know him. He’s just—”
“Dear, he seems to care about you and your daughter. He left his office immediately when I called.”
Dolores looked at me indecisively, her expression glazed. “You found out about the apartment?”
I nodded. “Your husband do that?”
Her eyes seemed to replay the danger. “Hector, yes.”
“He killed two watchdogs, you know.”
“The poor things!” Mrs. Rosenbluth said.
“Did you hear them?” I continued. “I mean, Jesus, I saw the dogs, I saw what—”
“They were barking!” Maria said with sudden breathless excitement. “And we ran up the stairs and we ran on the roof.”
“You went down the fire escape?” I asked Dolores.
She nodded tiredly. “The barking woke me up in the middle of the night. He came up the stairs and I took some stuff and Maria and went up to the roof. We got out before he got too close. I could hear him smashing the windows in the apartment below us and everything. It was dark. I was lucky, I got to the fire escape. That bigger dog slowed him down. I think it was attacking him. He was on the roof with the dog after him and that’s the last I saw.”
Dolores looked at me intently, with great vulnerability in her face. Her toughness was gone; now she was simply scared and exhausted and trying to figure out who the hell I was.
“We should get the two of you dressed,” Mrs. Rosenbluth prompted her.
While the three of them disappeared into the laundry room, I called Helen at the office. Morrison wanted to meet me in thirty-five minutes.
“Can you put the meeting off?” I asked. “A half hour perhaps?”
“No, he’s got a flight at six. It seemed important, that’s all. I’d really try to make it on time,” Helen added. “He seems pretty tense, actually.”
“Tell him he’s an asshole, would you do that for me, Helen?”
“C’mon, Jack. You’re just—”
“Tell him I don’t want any more of his shitball assignments, would you do that for me? I’ve worked loyally for years and years and he does this to me?”
“Jack.” “Tell him I quit,” I said. “I’ll quit and drive around the country for a couple of months, Helen. I’ll send you a postcard from Wall Drug, South Dakota.”
“Jack.”
“That’s a real place, Helen.”
She laughed. “See you here at four, okay?”
I hung up.
“You have to leave, right?” I said to Mrs. Rosenbluth.
“I told my sister I’d get there by dinnertime.”
Dolores and Maria appeared in the doorway, dressed now.
“Listen,” I told Dolores, “I have to be in my office in about half an hour uptown and it’s a good sixty blocks. I have to leave really soon. So we need to get this resolved. Now, Dolores, am I right that you have no money?”
“I got maybe a few dollars. I was saving that for food. But I can’t go back to my old neighborhood. Hector, my husband—” She looked at Maria. “It’s no good, he knows all my friends there, too. It’s a neighborhood, you know, and everybody knows everybody in the building. He knows where to look.”
“Family?”
She shook her head. “I don’t have any family.”
“Mr. Whitman,” said Mrs. Rosenbluth, “as I told you and as I told Dolores, I just can’t be the responsible party. I have to leave now. My sister lives out on Long Island in Manhasset and I’m too old to try to get the train at rush hour. They step on me.”
“Maybe if I could just get a ride to one of the good shelters,” Dolores said. “We got to sleep, Maria is gonna get sick.”
“Absolutely not,” Mrs. Rosenbluth said. “The shelter is no place for a child.”
The old woman looked accusingly at me, her old, redrimmed eyes unflinching in their silent expectation.
“All right.” I pulled out my house keys. “Dolores, you don’t have anywhere to go and I have to get out of here. I know you too well now to tell you to go to the shelters or back out on the street. But I don’t know who the hell you are, I don’t know if you’re a crack addict or a drunk or if your husband is waiting around the corner to kill me or what. I mean, he really messed up my friend’s building. Right? Your whole situation is more desperate this time around. So I’m going to send you to my own home. I’m not saying you can stay there indefinitely, but just for the time being, for now, at least.”
She was watching me carefully.
“If I give you this key to my house and cab fare to get there, will I regret it?”
Dolores shook her head. “I promise.”
I wrote down my Park Slope address in Brooklyn and handed it to her. “If I come
home and find my house burned down or something—”
“No, no. We’ll just sit. Won’t touch a thing.”
I found a twenty in my wallet and handed it to her for the taxi ride over the bridge. She took the bill politely. “How did your husband find you, by the way?” I asked. “I thought you were trying to avoid him.”
“I called my friend Tina a couple of days ago and she came in from Brooklyn to see me,” Dolores explained. “Hector must have heard about it and asked Tina’s husband to find out from her. That’s the only way I can think of.”
“Well, I don’t want Hector to find out where you’re going this time.”
“You can be sure of that.”
“I don’t need any trouble,” I said firmly. “You got that?”
“You already got trouble with me. You shouldn’t have given me your card.”
I had to smile. “You’re right,” I told her. “You’re nothing but trouble.”
A minute later, after Dolores had gathered her few remaining belongings, Mrs. Rosenbluth clicked the three locks on her door and we all rode the little caged elevator down to the sidewalk. I hailed a cab for Mrs. Rosenbluth and she climbed in. Then, luckily, another came along. “I’m going to take this one, because I’m late,” I told Dolores, searching her face for some indication that we were no longer strangers, that I was trusting her. “You get the next one. But you understand that this is my own home?”
“Please,” Dolores said wearily, nodding her head and reaching for Maria’s hand. “I’ll promise anything.”
Sixty blocks north, twenty-five minutes later, Morrison followed me into his office and shut the door with his good hand. Two men stood there, one older and lean as a stick, the other with an unruly black beard and hugely fat, a kid almost, who looked uncomfortable in his suit.
“Jack, this is Mr. Shevesky and Mr. DiFrancesco.”
We shook their hands and sat down. I was wondering what Dolores and Maria were doing that very moment, whether they had actually taken a cab to my house. The fact of it seemed fantastic, and it excited and frightened me both. More than anything, I wanted to go immediately home and be with Dolores and Maria. But I was obliged to pay attention now. “What outfit you guys from?” I asked.
Bodies Electric Page 13
