The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  *

  A number of people had trouble sleeping that night in the city of orphans. Surrounded by the boxes containing her life that followed her from the living room to the bedroom of her absent friend’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment, Diana stared at the ceiling in numb disbelief. In Co-op City Lamont Williams lay in his bedroom in his grandmother’s apartment thinking about a set of small numbers he’d seen on an old man’s arm at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In Morningside Heights Adam Zignelik, on his way to the pantry to pour himself another drink, tripped over a space that once held something he already couldn’t remember. On his way back to bed he stopped off in the bathroom to pee and saw a comb she had left. He picked it up, held it, saw her hair and then put it back down. Michelle McCray was woken by her husband’s tossing. He was thinking about his father. William McCray got up in the middle of the night. He switched on a small table lamp. He walked over to a chair by the window and sat down. He looked out the window. He rocked slightly. Then he began to howl.

  True, untrue, likely to be true, unlikely to be true or there just isn’t enough known to say? Under Chief Justice John G. Roberts, a majority of the United States Supreme Court had reversed the decision in Brown versus Board of Education making it again permissible to segregate schools on the basis of race. After fifty-three years it was very unlikely to be true and yet it was true.

  part five

  SHE HEARD THE KNOCKING at the door of her apartment. It was tentative and slightly muted by the sound of the television and she was at first able to convince herself it was for another apartment. Then came the voice on the other side of the door. It belonged to a man who knew her name. The knocks grew louder and more insistent but she wasn’t going to open the door.

  The trouble was, and always had been, that despite the thick electronically operated glass doors, anyone could get into the building. There were so many tenants legitimately coming and going, such a constant stream of children, young mothers, maintenance workers, cable installers, pizza delivery guys and repairmen that an unauthorised visitor barely needed any guile or even any patience to slip inside.

  For all that, when she heard the knocks at the door she was startled and when she heard the voice on the other side of it she was frightened, not because she didn’t recognise the voice but because she did. She knew he would come sooner or later.

  ‘It’s Lamont … Lamont Williams,’ he said after knocking.

  His grandmother had advised him against going there. Michael Sweeney’s mother is a fool, she’d said. No, he had countered, she’s just one of those people who are afraid of everything. Lamont explained quietly that he had only to convince her she had nothing to fear, and she would talk to him. Lamont didn’t want anything from her or from either of her sons, Michael or the younger brother, Kevin. He didn’t even want anything from Chantal. All he wanted was to find his daughter. Perhaps Michael’s mother could help? Perhaps she knew something? Lamont was fairly confident that Michael’s brother Kevin had spent some time with Chantal, the mother of Lamont’s daughter. He didn’t know the precise nature of the relationship nor its duration but Kevin and Michael’s mother could be the first link in a chain that might lead him to his daughter. He told himself each day that to find his daughter he would need to take one step at a time and not be daunted by obstacles. The thing to remember, he told himself, was that at any one time he needed to take only one step. This was one of them.

  Lamont stood on the linoleum floor in the alcove formed by the three adjacent apartments. He could smell competing cooking smells and hear the muffled sounds of television through and under the door of each apartment. From under one door he heard that ‘Zoloft is not for everyone. Talk to your doctor about Zoloft. Because no one should have to feel this way.’ There were side effects but they were mentioned too quickly to hear. From another door he heard Ryan Seacrest trying to keep things moving, and from the third door he heard that somebody had just saved a bundle on car insurance. What were the side effects? His mouth was dry. His palms were moist. Most nights he woke some time between three and five. During the day at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center he would be sleepy and afraid his supervisor might notice it and take it as a lack of enthusiasm for the job. He knocked again. No one should have to feel this way.

  ‘It’s Lamont … Lamont Williams, Mrs Sweeney.’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you. Can I come in?’

  ‘He ain’t here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Neither one of ’em.’

  ‘I know Michael’s … He’s still inside, right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And Kevin?’ She didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t hear him. The televisions were talking to one another.

  ‘He ain’t here neither.’

  ‘Mrs Sweeney, I don’t want nothin’ from them … or from you. I’m tryin’ to find my daughter is all. See, I thought Kevin might be able to help me locate Chantal and … Mrs Sweeney, do you think you might wanna open the door? You known me since I was a kid.’

  He stood there for a while with his hands in his pockets. He had visited this apartment so many times as a child. Michael’s mother had welcomed his friendship with Michael. She had trusted Lamont to take care of her son even though they were the same age. Now, many years later, Mrs Sweeney and Lamont stood on opposite sides of her apartment door. Neither of them spoke and the televisions ravaged the air. Zoloft was not for everyone. Side effects may include dry mouth, insomnia, sexual side effects, diarrhoea, nausea and sleepiness.

  Lamont hadn’t known that his grandmother had tried to contact Michael’s mother several times while he was in prison to try to help him locate Chantal and find his daughter. That woman, Mrs Sweeney, was a fool. When Lamont came to her door she was terrified and she wouldn’t let him in.

  *

  The telephone rang in Charles McCray’s office in Fayerweather Hall on the campus of Columbia University. Adam Zignelik sat slumped in a chair on one side of the desk, the supplicant side, and watched his old friend, his one-time mentor, now the chair of the department, take the call. Charles made a gesture with the flattened palm and straightened fingers of his left hand as though taking an oath of some kind and apologised for having to take the call. The words of the apology were the last words Adam really heard for a while as he took the opportunity afforded by Charles’ phone call to let his mind wander from the day he was stumbling through.

  There were photos on Charles’ desk and a few on one of his bookshelves. The ones on his desk were of his wife Michelle, his daughter Sonia and of his parents, the latter taken not long before his mother’s death. There was also an old black-and-white photo of a group of people, most of them men, whom Adam recognised. It was a photo of the LDF, what had been known as the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, taken at the time when Thurgood Marshall was still running things. At the centre was Thurgood flanked by Charles’ father, William McCray, Constance Baker Motley, Franklin H. Williams, Robert L. Carter, the sociologist Annette Peyser, Adam’s father, Jake Zignelik and some others. He squinted to try to see better the expression on his father’s face as his boss continued the phone call. The photograph had once sat on Charles’ desk, Adam registered, but it had been moved to one of the bookshelves. Desks get cluttered and, from time to time, often at the start of the academic year, they have to be cleared.

  Adam and Charles had just about come to the end of a conversation that for some time they had each been dreading. The phone call had allowed them to delay its conclusion. Notwithstanding that they had known each other for several decades, notwithstanding that Charles had years ago steered a younger Adam towards a career as an academic historian, had employed him and then championed him within the department, and notwithstanding that what had looked like a promising career had now come to a standstill, the conversation had been easier than either of them could have expected. Adam wasn’t looking for any favours and Charles explained bluntly
that the biggest help he could offer was to make sure Adam understood, fully and immediately, that there was nothing Charles could do for him. Once they had agreed that Adam would see out his teaching obligations for at least the next semester at a minimum, Charles felt as though the burden that came with the superiority of his position had been lifted and that they then were free to talk as friends. But talking to your friends in the middle of a busy work day was a luxury, especially for somebody so diligent. And how much time can anyone in a position of responsibility spare a friend in the middle of a weekday before the friend’s vulnerability is transferred to the carer?

  How had it happened that Adam’s research had just stopped, that he hadn’t even been able to come up with a topic to research? And how had it happened that he and Diana had ended their relationship of so many years? They had looked so good together, so comfortable with each other, not at all like a couple on the verge of splitting up. It had all the hallmarks of a midlife crisis, Charles remarked, but Adam was too young for that. This was when the telephone had rung.

  At another time, Adam observing himself with Charles in that office under those circumstances might have asked a few questions himself, at least to himself. How had Charles, a friend of over thirty years, failed to intervene, failed to enquire about Adam’s professional stagnation? How had he let things for Adam go so far off the rails without showing much greater interest? It wasn’t that Charles’ feelings for his friend had diminished. Rather it was that they were swamped, overwhelmed, by other needs, even sometimes other passions. He had the department to administer now, he had his own teaching obligations and, most importantly to him professionally, he had his research to prosecute. Had he known the extent to which his research would be hijacked by university politics and departmental administration, he might never have accepted the position of chair of the department. His research, his writing, was everything to him. There hadn’t been enough time for his writing before his promotion. Now the demands on his time had become intolerable.

  But in accepting the promotion and by being the first African American Chair of the History Department he was giving his father immense pride and that counted for a lot. He was also, consciously or otherwise, competing with his father. It was a competition he could never win. A World War II veteran and a veteran civil rights lawyer, William had participated in his own times in the making of history. He had done this twice, with barely enough time between the two endeavours to draw breath. As exalted as Charles’ academic career might be, he would only ever write about history, he would not participate in it. At least he hoped not. He did not have his father’s taste for it. And anyway, good sons, really good sons, don’t make history. They’re more inclined towards making families and carving careers that require less ambition than that possessed by those with a disposition to make history.

  But as far as Charles could read himself, it was enough for him to write history or, as historians would say, to ‘do’ history. He didn’t need to make it. He didn’t want to make it. To be as highly recognised as he was for what he did and to know as much as he knew about his chosen area – the Reconstruction – he thought would satisfy him enough for two lifetimes. There were times when he had thought himself every bit as fortunate to have the job he had as his father William had considered himself to have been back when William first started working for the LDF not long after the war. This sense of his own good fortune was perhaps one of the reasons why Charles hadn’t properly registered the extent to which his friend, the young untenured professor Adam Zignelik, was in the process of derailing his own career. Charles had genuine difficulty imagining not having more to write about than time permitted. How does this happen to a real scholar? At another time Adam might have wondered whether Charles honestly considered him a real scholar any more. Perhaps he never really had. Adam was not up to pondering this at this time in his life, at this time on this day, the day the consequences of his decline began to be formally, institutionally, planned.

  Was the man on the other side of the desk holding the telephone the same man who had held Adam in his arms when Jake Zignelik had died? Sometimes Charles’ wife Michelle called at work either from home or from her own chaotic workplace and thought her husband sounded different from the way he used to sound. She thought he sometimes sounded like a man who had forgotten he was talking to his wife, like a man who, whenever she called, was at a meeting at that very moment. His father, obliquely but not infrequently, had complained that Charles didn’t have enough time to spend with him. More than anything this had the capacity to make Charles feel guilty because he felt William was responsible, through the way he had brought him up, through his concerted, conscious, pedagogic effort and also by his own example, for much of his success. It was in part this success that saw a quiet bookish academic able to attract a quite beautiful well-educated woman some ten years younger who would eventually agree to marry him. His contemporaries had married much earlier but Charles had waited patiently for a woman he had called his ‘jewel’, a woman who now sometimes felt her calls to him were interrupting a perpetual committee meeting.

  Though Charles and Adam had never had anything remotely amounting to a falling out, their friendship had ebbed and flowed over the years as was natural, especially given the age difference between them. It had helped them, though, over the last several years when Diana and Michelle had got along so well and when Sonia had been so fond of both Diana and Adam. The two couples and Sonia and William had been like a small but extended family. Adam and Diana’s friendship had sometimes even served to distract Michelle and Sonia when Charles, as he frequently did, lost himself in his work. But they were now all entering a new era. In fact, they had already entered it. Unrecognised by any of them, except perhaps Diana, their many group interactions had come to an end, which they would soon be mourning.

  ‘Sorry, Adam, but if I don’t take these calls I have to return them later. Then the list mounts up till I can’t face it. Same with email. It’s a curse.’ Charles scrawled a note to himself on a pad beside the phone.

  ‘How’s your dad?’ Adam asked. ‘After the Supreme Court decision, I mean.’

  ‘I’d be lying if I said I didn’t worry about him … which he doesn’t like. Frankly, he’s been pretty shaken by it. Terribly shaken, actually. We’re going to try to see more of him for a while. I know you’re going through a rough time yourself, obviously, but if you can spare any time –’

  ‘Of course, I was worried about him too.’

  ‘Well, one good thing to come out of it … you can see how mentally acute, how sharp, he is. He’s been on the internet reading all about it, reading the decision. It’s all he wants to talk about. He wants to write letters.’

  ‘I can only imagine how he must feel.’

  ‘He’s so angry at the Supreme Court. Don’t get him started on Clarence Thomas. I’m worried someone in the media’s going to find him and get him to defame somebody. He’s good copy when he’s angry.’ The telephone rang again. Charles looked to the ceiling, apologised again and took the call.

  ‘Sorry, Adam,’ Charles said, putting the phone down and scribbling another note to himself.

  ‘It’s fine … really,’ Adam half whispered to Charles, to Diana and to himself.

  ‘Have you had much to do with anyone from MEALAC?’ Charles asked.

  ‘What’s MEALAC?’

  ‘Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I know anyone from there. Why?’

  ‘There’ve been some … complaints …’

  ‘From MEALAC?’

  ‘Complaints about MEALAC.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’ve been complaints from students – complaints of harassment … of anti-Semitism. Jewish students have reported being harassed.’

  ‘By other students?’

  ‘No, by faculty.’

  ‘Oh shit. Is there any validity to it?’

  ‘I don’t know
… but I’m going to have to find out.’

  ‘What does it have to do with you?’

  ‘I’m the President’s go- to guy on stuff like this, one of them, anyway. I’m on a committee, yet another one.’

  ‘You’re the black one, right, the black go-to guy for stuff like this?’

  ‘You got it, boy wonder!’ Charles stood up. ‘That’s why I’m going to have to wrap this up. Sorry, Adam, I really am. The meeting I have to go to now …’ Charles exhaled.

  ‘That’s about MEALAC?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Charles, shaking Adam’s hand. ‘We got to have you for dinner again … soon. Thanks for looking in on Dad. We really appreciate it.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. You know how much I … It’s … No … really no … problem.’

  Adam had planned to call William. He promised himself he would call him just as soon as he was able to do anything. But he couldn’t predict when that would be. Even doing his laundry seemed to require a capacity for organisation that was beyond him and he couldn’t imagine a time when it would not be this way. The author of his PhD thesis, of his successful book on the lawyers of the civil rights movement, the person who had spoken on public television documentaries and who had successfully applied for a position in the History Department at Columbia, who had years before worked as a journalist for several newspapers and magazines in Australia, that had to have been somebody else.

  ‘I know you always said I shouldn’t ball my socks when they come out of the dryer. I know it stretches the elastic and shortens the life of the socks,’ he told Diana, who was not there, ‘but it keeps the socks together better than tying them. Laziness exists along a continuum. You always knew that. And we always knew that lazy is my default position but it’s not laziness now. I can’t go looking for the strays any more and as for their lifespan, well, they’re going to outlive me anyway.’ No one else was ever again going to care about the state of the elastic in his socks so why do anything about it, or about anything?