The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  *

  ‘I knew Callie. We all did,’ Arch Sanasarian explained to Adam Zignelik over sixty years later as he took a sip of iced water in the lounge beside the Chi bar in the Chicago Sheraton. Adam couldn’t afford to stay there but he decided it was better to meet people there than in the hotel in which he could afford to stay, especially since it looked like he was going to need to travel to Chicago quite a few more times even after this visit. Arch Sanasarian was the first of Border’s graduate students still alive when Adam had been able to track down. A list of the graduate students who had written their dissertations on Border’s ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’ had not been too hard to come by, not with Eileen Miller’s assistance. But in addition to this, Adam had managed to find contact details for three of the survivors Border had interviewed in DP camps in the summer of 1946. He didn’t know if the contact details were still current, if the interviewees were still mentally coherent or even if they were still alive, but just finding them gave Adam the feeling that it might be possible to come to know something more about the man who had pioneered oral history, this man who seemed to need to record these people’s stories at great cost to himself at a time when barely anyone else wanted to know.

  Adam caught himself feeling a certain excitement about his work that only a short time earlier he had relinquished hope of ever recapturing. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had experienced any emotion that was remotely positive. The best he had been able to achieve since Diana had moved out was numbness, usually alcohol induced. In the weeks, even months, leading up to her leaving, it seemed to him impossible that he would ever again feel any pleasure from anything short of the temporary absence of pain. But more recently it had dawned on him that it was possible, from time to time, to feel some stirrings of hope but only as long as he thought solely of pursuing his interest both in the possible role of black troops in the liberation of Dachau and in Border and those whom the Chicago psychologist had known or interviewed. His own personal life remained the disaster he’d engineered.

  Arch Sanasarian was the first person Adam had met face-to-face who had known Henry Border. Border was now very slowly coming back to life and this encouraged Adam even more. A gentle, thoughtful man, a distinguished psychologist himself, now in his eighties, Arch Sanasarian’s long fingers moved slowly when carefully attaching the tiny microphone that went from the lapel of his shirt to Adam’s digital audio recorder.

  ‘We didn’t know Callie at that time because none of us knew Dr Border then, not in 1946. Not even Wayne knew him then. He went to Europe in 1946 to conduct the interviews but we didn’t meet him till about 1950 or perhaps late ‘49. Elly was sixteen or seventeen by the time we met her and I Did Not Interview the Dead had already been published. As I understand it, Callie started working for him when he went to Europe back in ‘46. That’s how she became involved with the Borders. Do you want to make sure you’re picking me up on this thing?’

  ‘Thank you, no, we’re good. Who was Wayne?’

  ‘Wayne Rosenthal, he was one of the other graduate students. Didn’t they give you his name too?’

  ‘Yes, but I wanted to make sure I knew which Wayne you were referring to. You seemed to single him out.’

  ‘I think Dr Border singled him out.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I think that of all of us – the five or six or was it seven of us – Wayne was the closest to Dr Border, even closer than Amy was. He reserved a special – what should I say – tenderness for Amy. But it was probably Wayne; I mean I think they had the closest relationship. You had to look carefully to see it because Dr Border was a very proper man. He had a way about him that was warm while still being formal, in that way of a European teacher, a little strict, sometimes even intimidating. What was I saying? Oh, Wayne, right. Dr Border would have hated anyone to think he was showing favouritism to any of his students but I think Wayne was his favourite.’

  ‘Eileen Miller at IIT gave me the impression that you were his favourite.’

  ‘Really? I don’t know why she would say that.’

  ‘She said when he finally finished at IIT and moved house –’

  ‘He didn’t just move house. He left Chicago.’

  ‘When he retired he left Chicago?’

  ‘Eventually, he did.’

  ‘She said that you helped him pack up his house.’

  ‘That’s right, I did. But that was right at the end.’

  ‘Is that how you came to know his housekeeper, Callie, and his daughter, Elise?’

  ‘No, I met them, we all met them, when we started work on our Masters dissertations on “The Adjective–Verb Quotient” back in 1950. Or we might have started talking to him about it in 1949. You see, it was the same year I Did Not Interview the Dead came out and there was a certain celebrity around campus that attached to Dr Border because of it.’

  ‘That celebrity, it didn’t last, did it?’

  ‘No, but …’ He thought for a moment about things that came to him too fast for words. ‘Yes, it was only on campus and it didn’t last long at all but it lasted just long enough for us to hear about it, about Dr Border and about his work. That’s probably why we all wanted him to be our thesis adviser.’

  ‘Can I ask you, if he was strict in manner, almost to the point of being intimidating, if he was formal in an old world sense, how did you and the other Masters students come to know him so well that you knew his daughter Elise and even knew his housekeeper Callie?’

  ‘Sure, I can explain that easily. We were often at his house.’

  ‘All of you?’

  ‘Yeah, the six or seven of us. He would hold evening seminars for his Masters students at his home.’

  ‘At his home … in the evening … why?’

  ‘Well, most of us, perhaps all of us … oh no, not Evie Harmon, but most of us had jobs, at least part-time ones. So it was a great help to us that he agreed, no he offered, to hold our seminars at night at his house.’

  ‘And why at his house? Why not on campus?’

  ‘I think he thought it was safer than going down to the south side at night. And it was more convenient.’

  ‘For him.’

  ‘Certainly it was more convenient for him. Also for me. I lived right near him, two blocks away. In that respect I was luckier than the others. This might be why Eileen Miller told you I had the closest relationship with him, because of the proximity of my place to where he lived but …’ Arch Sanasarian looked wistfully above his interviewer’s head for a moment. ‘I think Wayne Rosenthal was the closest with him. Not that he wasn’t terrific to me. He was, right from the first time I went to talk to him about doing my Masters under him.’

  ‘How did you first hear about him, about the possibility of doing that kind of work?’

  ‘You know, I can’t quite remember. Perhaps one of the others told me.’

  ‘Told you what?’

  ‘Well, he was actively recruiting.’

  ‘Border was?’

  ‘Yes, he wanted students to work on “The Adjective–Verb Quotient”. I remember his office and his lab too; they were both in the Main building. They were next to each other with adjoining doors. You know the Main building? It’s the red-brick nineteenth-century one. I think it’s the oldest on campus.’

  ‘And that’s where you first went to see him to talk about the prospect of your dissertation assisting his research on “The Adjective–Verb Quotient”?’

  ‘Yes, it’s not just that I was nervous, of course. But I remember I even had trouble finding his office. That might sound crazy because the Main building houses – or at least it used to house – the university administration.’

  ‘I think it still does. No, it’s not hard to find.’

  ‘No, it’s not, and was then even less so. Fewer buildings then, you see. But I had trouble finding him because he was the only faculty member from Psychology with an office in that building.’

  ‘Oh, why was that?’


  ‘Originally the Department of Psychology and Philosophy had been housed there but they had all moved. They needed more room and they moved. Everybody but him.’

  ‘Why didn’t he move?’

  ‘I don’t know. I could speculate but I don’t really know why.’

  ‘Speculate then.’

  Arch Sanasarian smiled. ‘Where do I start? If you’re thinking of intradepartmental politics or ructions of some kind, yes, though he would never discuss them with us, not with me at any rate, I suspect there were some. But they wouldn’t have been severe enough, not significant enough to him for him not to move with everybody else. The thing you really have to remember about Dr Border was that his work was everything to him. I mean it really was everything. Of course none of us knew him till after he’d interviewed the DPs in Europe and I Did Not Interview the Dead. Why didn’t he move with the rest of the department?’ Arch Sanasarian smiled again in his chair in the lounge beside the Chi bar in the Chicago Sheraton Hotel thinking of his teacher of over half a century ago. ‘I suspect he didn’t have time.’

  *

  Lamont Williams’ grandmother was, as usual, home before her grandson. This would have been the perfect time to speak to her granddaughter Michelle. She had left a message for Michelle and was hoping she might call back at that time. That was why she kept looking at the phone as though simply by looking at it, by an act of will, she could impel it to ring. But the phone wasn’t ringing so she had to come up with another strategy to get it to ring. She put the television on so that the phone might be distracted and not see her waiting. Michelle had always been a dutiful granddaughter and she wondered now if it wasn’t her imagination or was Michelle of late taking increasingly longer to return her calls? Or was it that Michelle knew what her grandmother would want to talk about and had become tired of her concern for Lamont?

  But to Michelle’s grandmother the concern made sense. She had thought that if Lamont didn’t make even the smallest progress with respect to finding his daughter, if he didn’t have so much as a plan or even a first step, sooner or later something in him would give. He would snap, lash out, do something against his best interests and lose that job. Or he might implode; he might be overwhelmed with despair and stop trying to make a new life for himself. The sad truth was that she didn’t really believe he had much chance of finding his daughter. Chantal, the little girl’s mother, seemed to have taken steps a long time ago to keep her from Lamont and if that was really what she wanted, Lamont’s grandmother admitted to herself there would be little Lamont could do about it.

  For Lamont’s grandmother, finding his daughter wasn’t really the point. What he needed, all he needed, was just to have a plan, have steps to take, at least just long enough for him to get past the six-month probation period at the cancer hospital. This might just be enough for him, enough to keep him on the right track towards his reintegration into mainstream society. If he had a good job with benefits, money coming in every week, if he started to make some friends at work, friends who had never been to prison, who didn’t have to know he’d been to prison, he might be in a position to meet a woman. He might be in a position to start a family, a new family, a proper one where the child had a mother and a father who were married to each other. He would never stop longing for the little girl Chantal was keeping from him but, if he had a job and another family, the sharp pain of losing her might turn into a dull ache. Lamont’s grandmother knew all about turning sharp pain into dull aches and felt that the capacity to do this determined who among the people she knew were successful and who slipped through the cracks.

  The telephone rang just as a man from a small South Carolina town on Antiques Roadshow was explaining to the antiques expert that his great-grandmother had bequeathed his mother a spinning wheel. The call was not from Michelle but from a telemarketing company. Was Michelle slow to call because she had given up on her cousin? At the very least, she could offer some practical advice to help him search for his daughter, advice that might extend his hope beyond the six-month probation period. Was that too much to ask? their grandmother found herself thinking.

  ‘Well, I’d say you come from one lucky family,’ the antique spinning-wheel expert said on television to the man from South Carolina. ‘Would you care to take a guess how much your great-grandmother’s spinning wheel is worth?’

  Then she started to worry that maybe Michelle had problems of her own. Maybe she should worry more about Michelle? Even were Michelle to call right now there wouldn’t be much time left for them to talk freely, not now. Lamont was due home soon.

  *

  Professor Henry Border was looking into a small mirror that sat on top of one of the many filing cabinets in his office. He was trimming his beard when he heard a knock at the door. He put down his trimming scissors, looked at his watch and called, ‘Come in.’

  The young man who entered the room trying to hide his nervousness was Arch Sanasarian. Seeing the professor seated at an old roll-top desk, he walked over to him and stretched out his hand to introduce himself.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me, Dr Border. I’m Arch Sanasarian.’

  ‘Please take a seat, Mr Sanasarian,’ Border said, turning his chair and gesturing to the seat nearby, which, once the student relieved it of a pile of papers, creaked when he sat down on it. The room was filled with books both on shelves and in piles on top of the rows of filing cabinets that hugged every inch of wall that did not have a wall-to-ceiling bookshelf in front of it.

  ‘Arch?’ said Border, considering the name. ‘It’s an abbreviation of some kind, Mr Sanasarian?’

  ‘Yes, my full name is Archibald.’

  ‘It’s an American abbreviation, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you born here?’

  ‘Yes, Professor, I was.’

  ‘Archibald becomes Arch. I see. I wasn’t born here so I’m always needing to learn these things. You want to write your Masters dissertation on “The Adjective–Verb Quotient”?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I’ve read your book and –’

  ‘You know, Mr Sanasarian, even if you have read the book, even if you think you are interested in the analysis of speech patterns, this is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think I’m following you.’

  ‘I mean that this kind of material, the interviews from distressed people, it’s distressing itself and … well, it’s not for everyone.’

  ‘No, no, of course, but I think it’s for me. Frankly, Professor, I can’t think of any other topic that’s of greater interest to me. In fact, having read your book I can’t stop thinking about the material, about the experience of these people.’

  ‘I see,’ said Border.

  ‘Sir, if this is about my academic record, if you’ll allow me to go through it with you there are certain grades that I think I might be able to put into some kind of context that –’

  ‘I haven’t looked at your academic record.’

  ‘Well, if this is about –’

  ‘What is the “this”? Why do you think there is a “this”, Mr Sanasarian?’

  ‘Professor Border, I … I can’t think of anything more important than the work you’ve been doing and if you’ll just hear me out, sir –’

  ‘Arch is an American abbreviation of Archibald,’ Border interrupted. ‘Sanasarian, that’s an Armenian name, is it?’

  ‘Yes, sir, it is.’

  ‘Your parents were born overseas?’

  ‘Yes, Professor.’

  ‘When did they come to the United States?’

  ‘In the early twenties.’

  ‘The twenties? From where did they come?’

  ‘My father from Van and my mother from –’

  ‘Your father was from Van?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Both your parents are from Armenia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Henry Border looked at the young Armenian American man
who sat on the other side of his desk. ‘Do you have any family left there now?’

  ‘No, none that my parents are aware of. They were all killed.’

  ‘I see,’ said Henry Border, cupping his right hand around his goatee. The two of them sat in the room in silence for a moment. Only the workings of a grandfather clock covered their breathing.

  ‘There’s course work too and seminars, you know that. Do you want to ask me anything about the course work, Mr Sanasarian?’

  ‘Well, nothing I can think of, I mean not at the moment, Professor, but I thought perhaps … Don’t you … want to see my academic record?’

  ‘No, Mr Sanasarian.’ Henry Border stood up from behind his desk and shook the young man’s hand. ‘Take this form away with you, fill it in and return it. It’s not for me. It’s for the departmental office. I already know enough.’

  *

  When Callie Ford first saw James Pearson it was at a rent party on the third floor of the Mecca Flats, the floor on which she lived in a room with her son, Russell. Though the hosts of the party were, at least technically, for a time her neighbours, Callie hadn’t known them at all. She had gone there seeking company and inexpensive entertainment. It was not uncommon for recently arrived Bluesmen to play, sometimes solo, sometimes in ad hoc groups in the nearby tenements and also in the Mecca. Since the party was going to keep you awake you might as well join it, if you could. James Pearson was there not because he couldn’t afford more expensive entertainment. He had a good job at one of the meatpacking houses. She already knew of him by reputation. A quiet man, not tall but broad-shouldered and clearly strong, he was known to certain people in the Mecca as ‘Mr Anything-You-Want’. Some time later it transpired that Mr Pearson moved into the room next door to Callie’s room within the same apartment. Tommy Parks was another single male neighbour of hers from the same apartment, also a packinghouse worker but of an entirely different temperament, a vulgar, short-fused, irascible man. When Tommy Parks saw Callie Ford smile at her new neighbour as James Pearson was bringing in his cases, he made a show of welcoming him for Callie’s benefit.