The City When It Rains

by Thomas H. Cook

  “The edge is all there is,” Victor concluded finally. “It’s the thing you have to nurture.” He waited for Corman to respond.

  Corman took a sip of coffee and said nothing.

  “So, how’s Edgar?” Victor asked after a moment.

  “The same.”

  “Frances still the typical neurasthenic?”

  “More or less.”

  Victor shook his head. “Pure bathos, those two.”

  Corman’s eyes drifted toward the table where two sets of initials were carved inside a jagged heart. It struck him that if the world made sense, only the most courageous natures would risk such public declarations. The rest would move about as Victor did, never tying their lives with such exquisite jeopardy to anyone, victimized by nothing but the cowardice of solitude.

  “So what do they do, Edgar and Frances?” Victor asked, with a slight laugh.

  “They manage,” Corman said.

  Victor laughed again. “Manage? Is that the goal? To manage? Christ. The last time I saw Frances, she was boiling. I mean it, a blink away from humping the doorman.”

  Corman turned away slightly.

  “And she’d be better off if she did, too,” Victor added flatly.

  Corman looked back toward him. “Do you ever think about Mississippi?”

  Victor stared at him wonderingly. “What?”

  “The way you lived in those days,” Corman said.

  Victor’s face softened slightly. “Sometimes,” he said quietly. Then he smiled. “In fond remembrance.”

  “I remember all your stories.”

  Victor looked pleased. “Really?”

  “Yes,” Corman said. “I think they made a difference.”

  “In the world?”

  “In me.”

  Victor studied Corman’s face silently, his eyes narrowing very slightly before he spoke. “What’s the matter, David?” he asked solemnly. “I can tell something’s wrong.”

  Corman shrugged.

  Victor leaned forward and touched his hand. “I’m your brother. What is it?”

  Corman drew in a long, slow breath. “Lexie wants me to let Lucy live with her and Jeffrey out in Westchester,” he said.

  Victor brought his hands together on the table. “When did she tell you?”

  “She told Edgar. He passed it on to me.”

  “Is he representing you?”

  “If it goes to court.”

  “Will it?”

  “I don’t know,” Corman said. “That’s up to Lexie.”

  “So she’s just asking you, is that it?”

  “That’s what Edgar thinks.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “I’m not sure I have much to say,” Corman told him. “My work is off. Trang’s going to evict me. Lucy’s school is lousy. I know what they could give her.”

  Victor started to speak, drew back, then began again. “I don’t know what to tell you, David. You know how I live. On the lam, more or less. I stay with a woman for a month, two on the outside. Kids are things I see on milk cartons. You know, the Missing.”

  Corman nodded.

  Victor shook his head slowly. “Mississippi. Why’d you bring that up? Christ, that was another world.” He picked up a fork and raked his index finger across the prongs. “It should have lasted. You could have come down when you got old enough, left the old man, worked with me in the Great Cause.”

  Corman smiled. “I dreamed of that.”

  Victor drew in a deep, faintly resigned breath. “But it died before we did,” he said, then smiled knowingly. “Most things do, right?” The smile withered. “And nothing stinks like a dead cause, you know?”

  Corman nodded. “How long will you be in New York?”

  “A few days,” Victor said. “I was thinking of taking Lucy out tonight. Maybe pick her up at school. Dinner and a show, something like that. Any objections?”

  “No.”

  “Still don’t think I’m a bad influence?”

  “No more than most.”

  Victor laughed sharply, then grew serious. “I wish you luck on this one, David. I know what she means to you.”

  Corman said nothing.

  Victor let his eyes linger on him for a few seconds, then he took a final sip of coffee and motioned for the check. “I guess you’d better get to work.”

  “Yeah,” Corman said, then quickly drained the last of his coffee, too.

  They walked out of the diner together and got into the car.

  “Where do you want me to drop you?” Victor asked as he hit the ignition.

  For a moment, Corman wasn’t sure himself, then he remembered the picture he’d taken in the basement of Midtown North, the small crumpled receipt. “A blood bank on the Bowery,” he said.

  Victor’s eyes shot over to him. “Christ, David, you’re not …”

  Corman shook his head. “No, not me,” he said. “Just something I’m working on.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE BLOOD BANK operated out of a cramped storefront off the Bowery on East 3rd Street. Several men were scattered among the short, jagged rows of metal chairs that crisscrossed the front of the building. Some of them munched the plain sugar cookies distributed after the blood had been taken. Others were still waiting, their fingers holding idly to small cards with hand-lettered red numbers.

  “Thirty-seven,” someone called from the back of the room.

  Corman turned toward the voice and saw a tall man in a slightly soiled lab coat. He wore large, black-rimmed plastic glasses and cradled a clipboard in the crook of his left elbow.

  “Thirty-seven,” he repeated. His eyes darted left and right, surveying the crowd. “Thirty-seven.”

  A very thin old man eased himself to his feet, then walked shakily past Corman, nudging him slightly with his shoulder as he made his way down the aisle toward the tall beige curtain that divided the room. He had an oddly crumpled look, as if his body had been snatched up, crushed in a large hand then tossed back to earth.

  “Your name Sanderson?” the man in the lab coat asked him.

  The old man grunted, shifted on his feet, then reached listlessly for the clipboard.

  The man in the lab coat drew it away from him. “Just a second, please,” he said sharply, then adjusted his glasses. “Have you been hospitalized recently, Mr. Sanderson?”

  “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  Sanderson shrugged. “Somewhere ’round sixty, I guess.”

  The man in the lab coat looked doubtful, but wrote it down on the form anyway. “Are you on any form of medication?”

  Sanderson grinned. “Just my old standby,” he said.

  The other man scribbled something on the form.

  Sanderson waved his hand impatiently. “And it’s ‘no’ to all the rest of them questions.”

  The man in the coat nodded, made a few checks on the paper, then escorted Sanderson behind the curtain.

  Corman walked to the front row, shoved his camera bag beneath one of the chairs and sat down. For a moment, he stared about, trying to get a fix on the room by concentrating on the details: a Coca-Cola wall calendar, its pages a month behind, the soda machine next to it, a small table filled with uneven stacks of medical pamphlets, the poster of an earnest physician urging regular checkups on the listless men who muttered obliviously a few feet away. One by one, Corman envisioned the individual frames, trying to find a way to get beyond the obvious social ironies and clichés.

  “Excuse me.”

  Corman glanced around and faced the man in the lab coat.

  “May I help you?” the man asked.

  Corman reached into his pocket, brought out the small yellow receipt and handed it to him.

  The man glanced at it peremptorily and gave it back. “What about it?”

  Corman pocketed the receipt. “Do you recognize the name?”

  “Yes.”

  “She died last week,” Corman said.

&nbs
p; “Was she a relative of yours?” the man asked.

  “No,” Corman said. “I’m a photographer. I’m working on a story about her.”

  The man thought for a moment, his eyes squeezing together slightly. “I do remember her,” he said finally. “Probably because she was white, a woman. We don’t get that down here.”

  “Did you ever talk to her?”

  The man nodded. “We try to be cordial to people,” he said. “We usually talk to them a little during the procedure. Like a hairdresser would, at about that level. We don’t give counseling or anything like that. That’s not our function.”

  Corman took out his notebook. “Do you remember anything she said?”

  The man shrugged. “Not really.”

  “Do you remember when you saw her the last time?”

  “Whenever that receipt was dated,” the man said. “Not since then.”

  “How often did you see her?”

  “No more than once a month,” the man said firmly. “We can’t accept blood more often than that. It’s against the law.”

  Corman remembered the outstretched arm. “She had a lot of needle marks.”

  “Maybe she was a junkie.”

  Corman shook his head.

  The man didn’t argue the point. “She could have been selling blood all over the place. We’re not the only one, and some of them don’t keep very good track of who’s been in and out.”

  “Do you remember anything in particular about her?”

  “She had a doll with her,” the man told him, as if suddenly recalling her with more detail. “She treated it like a real baby.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “Yes, always,” the man said.

  “Did you notice if she talked to any of the other people?”

  “As far as I can remember, she always sat alone.” He nodded toward the left corner of the room. “Over there, in that chair by the window. That’s where she sat until we called her number.”

  Corman glanced at the chair. It was made of gray metal and one of the hinged supports was bent, throwing it off balance. “And you never saw her with anybody?”

  “No.”

  Corman felt the little notebook go slack in his hand, like a small bird that had just died. “Do you know anything at all about her?”

  “Only what she wrote on the form.”

  The bird’s eyes fluttered. “What form?”

  “The one they have to fill out.”

  “Do you still have it? Would you mind showing it to me?”

  “No,” the man said. “Wait here.” He turned and disappeared behind the curtain.

  Corman waited, his hand pumping rhythmically at the notebook as his eyes circled the room once again, looking for shots, noting a few more details, an old shoe lodged between two chairs, a plastic spoon on the windowsill, the fact that someone had started to paint the radiator blue, then abandoned the project halfway through. More cliché images. As pictures, they would fit perfectly in a light blue, tear-shaped frame. The chair the woman had always sat in would do the same. He took a few pictures of it anyway, hoping that after he’d developed them, Julian would not be able to see their grim melodrama.

  “Here it is,” the man said as he came out from behind the curtain a few minutes later. “It’s just a simple form, not much on it.”

  Corman took the paper from the man’s hand and stared at it intently. The woman had answered its few questions in a tiny, cramped handwriting that used up only a small amount of the space provided. The longer words were broken up into their syllables as Corman remembered being taught to do in elementary school. The spelling was crudely phonetic.

  “Strange, I know,” the man said, “but she still fit the test for informed consent.”

  Corman looked at him. “Which is?”

  “That she was correctly oriented as to space and time.” The man answered matter-of-factly, as if he were reading it from a script.

  “And that’s all she needed to know?” Corman asked.

  “It was all we needed to know about her. All the law requires.”

  Corman glanced back down at the form. She’d signed her own name and listed the name and address of someone to contact in the event of an emergency: “Burneece Taylur Ate Nyn Grow-ve” He studied the writing for a moment, then glanced back up at the man. “Bernice Taylor? Eighty-nine Grove Street?”

  The man gave a quick look at the form. “Probably,” he said.

  Corman copied the name and address down in his notebook, then scanned the form a final time, his mind concentrating on the oddly shattered words, the spelling of sounds. He remembered something one of his professors had once told him, that writing was the voice of the absent person. If that were true, then this was as close as he had gotten to Sarah Rosen’s voice. In a picture, her handwriting on this single form would have to represent its final days, cracked, disjointed, primitive, as if she had been striving for something beyond the words themselves, the meaning in pure sound.

  Corman glanced at his notebook, checked the address, then walked into the building’s cramped vestibule. A line of small black buttons crawled down the wall to the left of the door, each just ahead of a name and apartment number. There was a B. Taylor listed beside the buzzer marked 3–B. Corman pushed the button, waited, then pushed again. There was no response, so he walked across the street, took out his camera and snapped a few pictures of the building.

  It was a rundown brownstone, one of the few left in the West Village, but still elaborated with those soft touches the builders of the old city had insisted upon, a bit of carved stone here and there, flower boxes at each window. Corman concentrated on the large windows on the third floor and wondered if Sarah Rosen had ever sat behind them, or whether she’d simply scribbled Bernice Taylor’s name and address from a phonebook according to her own mad scheme.

  He took a few additional pictures, focusing on the street, the glistening wet pavement and bare dripping trees. The rain would drench the photographs nicely, give them a mournful, watery fatalism, hinting symbolically at some kind of death by drowning or burial at sea. If the light was just right, they might even go a step further, suggest oceanic tragedies, tearful destinies, a picture worth a thousand banal words.

  He took a final shot, this time of the line of shutters on the fifth floor. Then he returned the camera to the bag, tugged his hat down further over his face to protect it from the rain and headed toward the train.

  At the end of the block, he noticed a small delicatessen, felt his late-morning hunger and decided to go in.

  An old man rested on a metal stool behind the counter. He watched Corman listlessly and smiled only after he bought a muffin. “Nothing but rain,” he groaned.

  Corman glanced out the window while he waited for his change.

  Across the street, an old woman emerged from her building, tugging a small brown dog behind her. As she stepped out onto the sidewalk, the dog flinched violently, drew back and flinched again, snapping its head back and to the side.

  “It’s blind,” the old man said, his eyes watching the dog. He shook his head. “It can’t see the rain, so it don’t know what’s hitting it. I told her to put it to sleep.” His lips curled down disapprovingly. “‘For Christ’s sake,’ I told her, ‘you can’t have much of a life if you don’t know what’s hitting you.’”

  Corman picked up his change and walked outside. The rain was beating down heavily, tapping loudly against the store’s striped metal awning. He took out the muffin and ate it slowly, his eyes drifting back toward the brownstone. The window boxes on the third floor hung heavily in the gray air, and for an instant, Corman thought he saw something move just behind the shutters, and reached for his camera, then realized it was only the finger of a limb as it raked its bony tip across the closed white slats.

  It was almost an hour before he saw someone go up the stairs of 89 Grove Street. She was a tall, slender woman with close-cropped blond hair, and she moved very quickly through the rain.
r />   Corman headed toward her quickly, making it to the bottom of the landing just as the woman got to the top.

  “Excuse me,” he said, then offered a quick, uneasy smile the woman did not return. “I was wondering if you were Bernice Taylor, by any chance.”

  The woman eyed him silently, with a certain icy wariness, as if already calculating her moves if he should suddenly lunge toward her. “I’m Bernice Taylor,” she said in a voice that sounded as if it had slid off the blade of a knife.

  “My name’s David Corman. I’ve been looking into someone’s life, and your name’s come up.”

  She seemed to guess his business. “Candy’s not here,” she said. “She moved out a month ago.”

  “I’m not looking for Candy,” Corman said. “Somebody else. Maybe you’ve heard of her. Sarah Rosen.”

  Her small eyes squeezed together. “Sarah Rosen? You mean Dr. Rosen’s little girl?”

  “Her father’s a doctor? Do you know his full name?”

  Bernice shrugged. “I always just called him Dr. Rosen. Maybe I knew his name one time, but I can’t recall it now.” She waved her hand. “Anyway, he wasn’t a real doctor,” she added. “Just one of those teacher-type doctors.”

  “A professor?”

  “Yeah. College professor. Columbia,” Bernice said. “Why are you asking about Sarah?”

  Corman saw no reason to blur the issue. “She’s dead,” he told her. “I was hoping I could talk to you about her.”

  “When’d she die?” the woman asked.

  “Last Thursday.”

  Bernice’s face remained passive. “You a friend of hers?”

  “I never knew her,” Corman said. “But I’m trying to find out what she was like.” He anticipated her next question. “She was selling blood at this place on the Bowery. She listed you as her next of kin.”

  The woman’s eyes widened. “Me? Next of kin?” She shook her head. “I haven’t even seen Sarah since she was five years old.”