Walking the Perfect Square

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “I walked him downstairs and kissed him. He said he’d be right back. Moe, he had five dollars in his wallet. He didn’t run. He was finally ready.”

  “Yeah, like with his dad,” I sneered. “That was such a positive experience he just couldn’t wait to tell everybody else, huh?”

  We went round and round like that for about an hour before I walked out. If Jack was right, Patrick hadn’t run. But I needed to.

  August 6th, 1998 (late evening)

  THE RUSH BACK from the pizzeria was to no avail. Tyrone Bryson had slipped back into a coma. Fearing the worst, Sister Margaret let me have a look at the man who had reached across two decades to bring me here. What was the harm? she thought; if Bryson couldn’t see me, I could, at the very least, see him. To Sister’s way of thinking, a look from me may have been all God required of us. Who was I to argue?

  Funny, when I set my eyes on this stranger, all I saw was my father, lying silently in bed waiting for death to take away the pain. When the memory washed out of my eyes, I saw the nearly inert, cancer-decimated body of a small black man. I tried imagining him as a younger, fuller man, but couldn’t. I was exhausted and confused and could work only with the information my eyes were supplying me.

  “Here,” Sister Margaret said, placing something in my palm, “I can’t imagine Mr. Bryson would mind. Come with me into the lounge and have a look under better light.”

  “Will you stay with me, Sister?”

  She checked her watch. “My shift is over. I’d love to.”

  “I wrote this twenty years ago,” I said, unfolding the business card-sized piece of lined paper I’d torn off Jack’s sheet. “See here, that’s my old number in Brooklyn before they changed all the area codes.” I unfolded a very old copy of Conrad Beaman’s article from Gotham magazine. “Nice picture, huh? Did I ever look like that?”

  “You’re not so very different now.” Sister was kind.

  “I was interviewed on a Sunday afternoon. I lied through my teeth, Sister Margaret. I thought I knew better.”

  “You did? How’s that?”

  We sat there for hours as I explained. She seemed genuinely fascinated by the most insignificant detail. It was good for me. I hadn’t ever told anyone before. There were parts I hadn’t even admitted to myself. Oh, various people knew various aspects of my involvement with Patrick Michael Maloney, but I’d always had a good reason for protecting people from the whole truth. It was odd how those reasons no longer seemed to make any sense.

  “So,” Sister Margaret said, “he never did turn up on Saturday morning.”

  “No. No one ever saw or heard from him again. When I left Jack’s apartment that night, I really believed he’d gotten scared again and run. But over the years . . . I’m just not so sure anymore.”

  Sister kissed my cheek: “Don’t give up on Mr. Bryson just yet.”

  My cell phone rang and the nun excused herself, promising to return after checking on Mr. Bryson’s condition.

  “Hello.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Sarah? Hey, happy birthday, kiddo! Sorry, I know you hate when I call you that.”

  “That’s okay, Dad. You all right? You sound tired and kinda far away.”

  “I’m in New Haven. Hamden, really. Don’t ask, it’s a long story. Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to get you all day.”

  “I had things to do. Listen, Mommy says it’s okay with her if it’s okay with you.”

  “What is?”

  “I wanna go to school.”

  “Are you crazy? Of course it’s all right with me.”

  “But I’ve got to like be there in two we—”

  “We’ll work it out, honey. Don’t worry. I’ll call your mother about it tomorrow.”

  “I love you, Dad. You’re the bomb.”

  “The what?”

  “The bomb. The best.”

  “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me and your mom. Did I ever tell you that I only pretend to be happy for you on your birthday? It’s really me I celebrate for.”

  “You’re so weird. Aunt Miriam was right about you. You’re a big mush.”

  “So does this mean you and—”

  “No, Dad, we’re not breaking up. He’s the one who thought I should go to school.”

  “Then kiss him for me. Happy birthday, again. I love you, kiddo.”

  I folded the little phone away, burying it in my pocket. Suddenly, my vision wasn’t very clear.

  “Are you feeling well, Mr. Prager?” Sister Margaret came up behind me.

  “That was my daughter on the phone. Today is her eighteenth birthday. Did I tell you that? She wants to go to school,” I said, wiping my eyes with my sleeve.

  “That’s wonderful. I think you’d better come with me. There’s someone else who wants to talk to you.”

  Bryson stared me right in the eyes the way Joe Donohue had stared into Rico Tripoli’s eyes twenty years ago. I will never get over how he looked at me. I think he saw his salvation in my face. I shook his hand and, weak as he must have been, he would not let go.

  “When I was a boy I used to push bags of weed for Elephant Eddie Barker,” Bryson whispered. “Eddie used kids cause wasn’t no chance we was gonna get prosecuted. He’d drive us into the Village from East New York. That’s in Brooklyn, you know.”

  “I’m from Brooklyn.”

  Bryson smiled weakly. “So one night, Dee, he one of our crew, was working a schoolyard over on the Westside by 8th Avenue and a fag—’scuse me, Sister—Dee says this guy touched him where he shouldn’ta and took his product, if you know what I’m sayin’. Well, the Elephant goes crazy, man. He packs us all back into his ride and we goes cruisin’ for the fag—the man that done what Dee said he done. ‘Fags got to respect a man’s property,’ the Elephant kept on. ‘Got to teach somebody a lesson.’

  “We drivin’ and Dee don’t see nobody looks like the man who done what he said. But Elephant, he gotta teach somebody a lesson, right? So we goin’ down this one street and the Elephant spies these two men be kissin’ on the stoop of a buildin’. One goes back inside, but the other one he come down the steps. We follow him a little ways till he get to the corner, then, let’s jus’ say Elephant offered him a ride. You know like in The Godfather, it was like an offer he couldn’t refuse. You hear what I’m sayin’?”

  “Where’d you take him?” Sister Margaret asked.

  “Back to Brooklyn, a place on Livonia Avenue where nobody be botherin’ us.”

  “You killed him,” I guessed.

  His eyes got wide and he gasped for breath: “Not me! I never killed nobody. Elephant, he done it. First he cut him up pretty bad, you understand?” Bryson could see by the horror in my eyes that I understood all too well. “Elephant made us wrap him up in a shower curtain and we took the body over to a empty lot by Cypress Hills Cemetery.” A smile flashed across his face. “All sorts a old famous people buried in Cypress Hills. What’s the name of that escape guy?”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed, smiling myself, “Harry Houdini’s buried there.”

  “That’s him.” Then the smile ran away from Bryson’s face. “First, Elephant was gonna jus’ leave him there, you know. Then he got scared somebody mighta seen us, so we buried him. Don’t know what kinda lesson that was gonna be to anyone, buryin’ him like that. Elephant jus’ kill the man cause he was mad, that’s all.”

  “You took his wallet.”

  “There was a few dollars and that slip a paper with your name on it. I shoved them into my pocket cause I didn’t want nobody else to see. Later that night when Elephant drop us off, Dee tol’ me ain’t no man be touchin’ him. He was jus’ mad at Elephant for makin’ him work that schoolyard. He threw his take and the weed down a sewer hole. That man died for nothin’. That’s why I kept the paper with your name on it, to remind me. I didn’t know who you was then. Then when I was livin’ on the streets, I was sellin’ old books and magazines for nickels and shit. I read the magazines sometimes. I
can read, you know.” He was becoming agitated. “I’m a good reader.”

  Sister Margaret came around me and began stroking Tyrone Bryson’s face, but he would not be consoled. “I never killed nobody. I want you to know that. I never killed nobody. You got to tell that man’s family there wasn’t nothin’ I could do ’bout it. I was jus’ a boy.”

  “I am that man’s family, Tyrone. I married his sister,” I said, fumbling for my wallet. “Look, this is his sister, Katy. And this is our girl, Sarah. She looks a little like Patrick.”

  Bryson calmed down. “She’s a pretty girl.”

  “Thank you, Tyrone. It’s her birthday today. And thank you for telling me about Patrick. There’s a lot of people, including me, that will rest easier now.”

  His whole body seemed to untense and, looking away, he finally let go of my hand. I asked if he could remember where Elephant had buried Patrick. He said he did and gave me the location. Sensing our business was done, Sister Margaret nudged my shoulder to leave. She came out to the lounge a few minutes later. I asked if Mr. Bryson had passed on.

  “No, Mr. Prager, nothing so dramatic. I think getting that weight of his chest has given him a last rush of energy. But I don’t think he’ll last till morning. Cancer can be considerably less forgiving than God’s children.”

  “I’d like to pay for the funeral, if that’s okay with the diocese, Sister.”

  “I’m sure we can work that out. It’s very kind of you.”

  “Not really,” I confessed. “You see, the weight he’s been carrying around all these years, I’ve been carrying, too. He saved me as much as he saved himself. It’s the least I can do.”

  “It’s still a very charitable gesture,” she said, taking my hand.

  “I better go, Sister Margaret. There’s a lot I have to do now. Will you call me about the arrangements?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you, Sister.” I kissed her hand. “Thank you for getting me here.”

  “I suspect I had very little to do with that. You were meant to be here.”

  I began to walk out of the lounge. Then, turning back, I called to Sister Margaret: “If Patrick is where Mr. Bryson says he is, will you please come to the funeral? I want you to meet my family.”

  “You just try to keep me away.”

  Looking up at the stars outside the hospice, I remembered what my high school physics teacher used to say: “Time travel is possible, no matter what anyone tells you. When you look at the stars, it’s the past you see.” When I got to my car door, I felt as if I’d forgotten something. My cane, I thought. But no, I hadn’t used a cane in nearly twenty years. I guess I was just time-traveling.

  Epilogue

  Twenty Years Gone

  I DID NOT tell Katy. What was I going to say? “Your brother wasn’t really missing, but now he really is? Oh, and by the way, he was gay and the father that you love is a homophobic sodomist who asked Patrick if he’d like to kill himself.”

  There were moments when I felt as Rico must have that day at Villa Conte: words of explanation, sentence fragments, pleas for forgiveness formed in the back of my throat but were never given voice. The guilt of my complicity gnawed at me constantly. Then, after several months, at about the same time the doctors told me to ditch the cane, I convinced myself that I had shed Patrick’s ghost forever.

  I fooled myself about many things, but never about my love for Katy. On the night we went to see A Chorus Line, I asked her to marry me. Miriam and Cindy, fat with baby, had helped me pick out the ring a few weeks before. I had everything arranged with the bartender at the Rainbow Room. When I gave him the sign, he screamed in pain.

  “What’s the matter?” I wondered, innocent as a lamb.

  “Nothing, I’m okay.” He chewed the scenery. “I seem to have cut myself on something here in the ice. Geez!” he bellowed, “will you look at that.”

  “Let me see,” Katy asked, as if on cue.

  The bartender handed her the ring.

  “It’s yours,” I said, “if you want it.”

  Without any encouragement from me, Katy decided to convert to Judaism. I told her she was out of her mind, that it was like volunteering for being hated. She said that God had failed her as a Catholic. It wasn’t God who failed her, but she insisted. For the sake of my parents’ memory, I was happy.

  “You know,” I warned her, “they don’t give out big prizes when you’re done. In some places all you get is a yellow felt star and a number tattoo.”

  She did it anyway, but there wasn’t enough time to complete the process before the wedding. We got married at the United Nations Chapel in late July of ’78. A sort of generic minister performed the service: I mean, if the UN can’t handle a Jew marrying a Catholic converting to Judaism, who can? Like my grandfather used to say, that should only be their worst headache. Aaron was the best man and Katy’s old best friend, Sue, was the matron of honor. My brother-in-law Ronnie got to live out his dream as he was paired with Misty walking down the aisle. Miriam and Kosta were the yin to their yang. Cindy’s pregnancy wasn’t going smoothly, so she just sat with her kids cheering from the first pew. We held the reception at a neighborhood Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. Lots of red sauce, lots of lasagna and lots of cheap red wine.

  We kept the crowd pretty small. Nicky and Pete Parson were there, a few of my friends from the job and a couple of relatives. Same for Katy. Her parents came without a word of protest or fuss. Though her mom wasn’t thrilled with the idea of Katy’s conversion, I think tragedy had schooled Angela Maloney to cling tightly to what she had left. She was good to me and my family until the day she died. Francis Maloney was categorically civil to me in front of his daughter, but he’d always smile at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. Even during those times when circumstance made cellmates of us, he never brought up the ugliness between us, nor did he once ask why Patrick had failed to reappear. Over the years, however, he did occasionally ask me if I believed in ghosts. It would be years before I would understand his unnerving smile or his affinity for the spirit world.

  At the restaurant, only Miriam asked where Rico was. “Not here,” was what I said. There were many absent faces and neither Katy nor I felt compelled to explain. Of course many of the absent faces needed no explanation at all. I invited Dr. Friar, but she politely refused. “It would be like eavesdropping,” she said. I never heard from her again. Jack came to the party and left after a few drinks. We’d kept in touch, but the conversation inevitably degenerated into an argument over whether Patrick had run or not. That was the last time we saw him. Pete Parson told me Jack moved back to Ohio in late August to run a drama program at a high school for troubled teens.

  In October of 1986 I received a package in the mail from a Mrs. Mary White of Dayton, Ohio. Mary White was Jack’s older sister. Jack, she was sad to inform me, had died of AIDS in early September. She had taken it hard and was only now able to bring herself to disburse Jack’s things according to his wishes. She wrote:“Jack was very clear that you were to have this. He told me about Patrick and what happened back there in New York. He understood your anger, Mr. Prager, but to his dying day insisted you had not misplaced your trust. He was sure Patrick had not run. If you ever do find out what happened, please let me know. Jack told me he was happy to have known you and your wife. I’m glad there were people he liked back then . . .”

  The package contained Patrick’s illustration of the Chinese character with the red rose running through it. I was touched that Jack should have wanted me to have it, but since I couldn’t share it with Katy, I was forced to keep it in storage for too many years.

  In March, when all my holiday time, sick time and disability ran out, I borrowed against my pension. The loan put Aaron and me over the top and we purchased the wine shop on Columbus Avenue. Needless to say, our license was approved in record time. In tribute to our father, the corporation name was Irving Prager and Sons, Inc. I think Aaron finally buried Dad that day. Since then we’ve o
pened up five other stores in the New York metropolitan area. We also do a thriving internet business. I’d still rather be a cop.

  To keep me from going completely out of my mind, I filed for and received my private investigator’s license from New York State in 1979. I work cases now and again, missing persons mostly.

  On October 9th, 1978 at 10:50 P.M., a seven-pound, six-ounce girl was born to Cindy and Aaron. With Katy’s blessing and eternal thanks, they named their daughter Laurel Patricia Prager. We were asked to be her godparents. I think it took us less than a second to take on the responsibility.

  Sarah F. J. Prager was born to us on August 6th, 1980. She used to hate the F. J. part of her name until Grandma Angela showed her all of Francis Jr.’s shiny medals and pretty ribbons. Katy’s mom gave Sarah Francis Jr.’s wings. To this day, she displays them proudly in her room. When she first got them, she used to tell everyone she was going to be a pilot like her Uncle Francis in heaven.

  “Yeah,” Katy joked, “Sarah Flying Jew Prager.”

  Unfortunately, Sarah hates flying. She loves painting. Her cousin Laurel, much to the dismay of Cindy and Aaron, is in the Air Force Academy in Colorado. Names, I guess, are nice tributes, but what do they mean, really?

  Miriam and Ronnie now live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He teaches at the medical school and oversees the trauma center. His time at Kings County in the emergency room turned out to be a godsend. Ronnie came to appreciate that the people who show up in the ER are the neediest, poorest, most neglected among us. He always wanted his medical training to have some significance beyond a Mercedes and a big house in Sands Point. He sleeps well at night.

  Miriam got her degree in occupational therapy and works with developmentally handicapped children. She and Ronnie have a girl of their own, Hope. She’s having her bat mitzvah this year. Everyone says she kind of looks like me. I guess she does, but I always claim not to see it. They’ve also adopted a boy, Jimmy, of Apache heritage. And now they’re thinking of adopting a girl from China.