by Joanna Scott
After my mother passed away, my father came to live with us— against his wishes. I put him in charge of Scarooms’ maintenance. He was an expert at taking things apart. Not putting things back together, though. A single cabinet hinge could keep him busy for weeks. I’d station him at the table by the register and there he’d go at his task with his assortment of tools, chattering to whoever would listen.
Toward evening, back in our apartment, Daddy would grow irritable. I knew better than to try and reason with him then, so I’d continue washing the dishes, making the beds, dusting, or plumping the cushions on the sofa while he grumbled. Eventually Ted would appear and yell at my father to shut him up, which of course incited Daddy further. Their shouting would rattle the glass in the windowpanes, and within minutes Ted would storm from the apartment. As soon as the door slammed Daddy would fall abruptly silent, take a deep drag on his pipe, and grin.
THE BOY WAS NAMED JACK, I decided. Yes, he looked to me just like the boy named Jack in a novel I’d read part of and misplaced before I could finish it. Jack Vizzone, who’d been sold by his mother to a childless woman, a woman named Catherine, if I recall correctly, who took him to live in Canada with her aunt. And then because it’s the way things often happen in novels, the woman named Catherine died suddenly, and the aunt died a few months later, and a man who identified himself as Jack’s uncle appeared and took Jack away to live with an elderly couple on a sheep farm, where he stayed for about a year. When the uncle came to pick him up a year later, he found Jack riding around on the back of a sheep as though it were a shaggy pony.
From then until the point where I’d stopped reading, Jack lived in many different homes. No one mistreated him. No one raised a hand against him. The women called him their little popover and fed him roast beef and chocolate pudding. The men chewed tobacco and watched while he drew pictures, studying the boy as though trying to figure out what to do next with him.
In real life he had a heart-shaped face, his eyes separated by the bridge of a nose that dipped in a concave curl and then turned up so sharply at the end that you could see the dark interiors of his nostrils when you faced him straight on. But from my position on the roof I could only see, at best, his profile, the line of his nose pinked by the neon of the hotel’s rooftop sign, his upper lip bunched in a pucker as he sucked the tip of his thumb. The men were talking in such low voices that I couldn’t make out a word of their conversation. They were at ease with each other, I could tell that much, and the wariness of the man who’d led the boy up to the roof had given way to casual interest. He perceived no danger; he’d done his part of the job, now it was the second man’s turn. Together they could take the time to consider the cityscape around them, the scarlet blaze from the Shannonso, the depths of space, the joy of a fine cigar, the vulnerability of mankind.
Huddled behind the chimney, I absently fingered the matchbook my father had left in a pocket of his raincoat. I edged my thumbnail along the tinder and thought of the hours I’d spent as a child rubbing sticks together, generating heat but never a spark. I felt the urge to sprout wings and fly away from there, and then a leaden feeling of hopelessness. I wondered if this was what a soldier felt in the midst of battle. And out of this confusion emerged a single, sharp urge to scream.
And then what, Velma Dorsey?
Then I didn’t know. I drew my hands up through the pockets, bunching the raincoat near my chin. The men abruptly stopped talking, and I could hear the squish of their shoes on the tar paper. Somehow I managed to keep quiet. I pressed myself against the bricks and waited. One of the men lumbered right past me to the stairway door and tried the knob, which turned easily in his grasp. He opened the door, holding it as though he meant to let the darkness escape from the building’s interior—and so it did, a faint whoosh of shadow that stretched across the surface of the roof to the tips of my slippers.
My only chance was to reach the door before the man grabbed me, but just as I prepared to lunge past him, he let the door swing shut, flicked a stub of ash from his cigar, and wandered back to his friend on the other side of the chimney. I heard him catch his foot on a metal object. With a clatter and flurry of curses he freed his shoe and sent the whole contraption sailing in the air across the roof.
Though I couldn’t see the thing, which landed close to the roof’s western perimeter, I immediately knew what it was: the Latvian bachelor’s kerosene stove. On hot nights he came up here to cook his supper, and later he’d be joined by the Webber and Peet children, and sometimes by the captain, all of them preferring the bright expansive dark to their airless rooms. They would stake out areas as their own, and they’d spend the night there, the children tucked away on the opposite side of a trellis erected by Mr. Webber two summers earlier and laced with grapevines, the captain and the Latvian bachelor lying close enough so they could share a bottle of vodka but not so close that they could have much of a conversation. With my window open I’d hear them belching and snoring, and in the distance I’d hear the muted giggles of the children.
So now, thanks to the misstep of a stranger and to an unusually warm week that had brought my neighbors to the roof the previous night, the Latvian’s stove was somewhere on the other side of the roof, upended, spilling fuel.
ON THE AFTERNOON of my last day as the proprietress of Scarooms, I had watched Therese Poulee wagging her spoon around in her cup. “...out in Great Neck,” she was saying. “A reception hall, a marble staircase, steel cabinets in ze kitchen, and also, how do you say eet, a garbage disposer!”
Her friend had snapped shut her makeup case and asked Therese how she came to know such men, gentlemen with money and style. Therese said that working at her company’s reception desk had its rewards.
Judy Simms leaned over from her table and apologized for interrupting, but she wanted to know where Therese worked and if the company had any openings. Nancy Simms suggested to her sister that she mind her own business. “How else will I ever find work again?” Judy Simms barked.
“There’s a war on. There are plenty of jobs to be had!” said her sister, pulling the classified ads, curled in a tube, from her red leather purse and slapping the table with it, accidentally knocking Judy’s teacup, spilling the milky tea onto the table.
I remember noticing Therese Poulee glance coldly at the sisters. I remember Glenn McDuff limping across the room, rocking off his stronger right leg onto the braced left, dragging the left leg forward and pushing off with some effort onto the right leg again. He shook out a dry rag and blotted the surface of the table around Judy’s saucer.
“Oh, Mr. McDuff, you don’t need...” It was Nancy Simms who said this. Nancy Simms, the one who at least made an effort to be polite.
“Did you see what my sister did?” Judy burst out. “Attacked me with the classifieds! Just because I lost my job last week.”
“McDuff!” called the captain. “We want our bill!”
“Come and pay me, sir,” I directed, moving to the cash register. “Sandwiches, was it?”
“Cucumber,” said the captain’s wife. “Cucumber and a pot of tea.” Glenn McDuff dragged himself back behind the counter and squeezed the rag into the basin.
I remember that day the Peacock Bread and Muffin man came in with his delivery two hours later than usual. I paid him with cash from the register. My father looked up from his newspaper and said, “You should cut back your orders, Velma.”
“Better to have too much than not enough,” I said.
“That’s the way it is in this city, everyone always wanting more more more. What do you think, Mr. McDuff?”
“I think we should trust the missus.”
“You hear that, Daddy?” I said, arranging corn muffins on a tray in rows.
“The missus, the missus,” Daddy muttered as he tried to flatten the crease of his paper. “Looky here, will you?” he said after a minute. “‘The motorized machine has made man not a soul but a hand.’ Tell me what you think about it, Mr. McDuff. The Reverend Dr.
William Ward Ayer said yesterday morning in his Calvary Baptist Church, West Fifty-seventh Street...here, let me read it to you word for word. ‘I cannot picture Jesus, the carpenter, in an automobile factory on an assembly line. People were happier in our grandfathers’ day.’ What do you think, Mr. McDuff? I’ll tell you what I think. I think those are the wisest words ever spoken by a zealot, Mr. McDuff. Our great motorized machines. It’s the machines that make this terrible war possible. The breakneck speed of life in our machine age, the flywheels spinning, the shafts turning, no time to sit back and consider what we’re doing. Why, Mr. McDuff, we’re a species suffering from grand delusions, pretending we share a likeness with some mysterious divinity when in fact we’re just what we are and no more!”
IN A MOMENT the two men and the boy would be gone, spiraling down the fire escape. I could think of nothing better to do than follow through with my impulse to scream. So this is just what I did, or tried to do, but the scream got stuck halfway up my throat so the sound that did escape was no more than a grunt.
“What the hell!” exclaimed one of the men.
I leaped backward to escape the men, though they were so startled by my strange behavior that they didn’t try to grab me. I made no sense to them and had no obvious intention. I was just there, all of a sudden there, hopping about in my pink slippers and raincoat, a crazy lady—ah, now this made sense, yes, a crazy beggar lady camping out on the roof because I had no home of my own. I was just one of the city’s castoffs, that’s what they were thinking. I was someone who deserved to be ignored.
One of the men tossed away his cigar stub. The other stifled a laugh. They were about to leave me to my madness when the rooftop was suddenly split in two by a glare of red. A trail of sparks hissed in a zigzag at our feet, spurting away from one of the cigar stubs and across the roof, and instantly broke into roaring turbulent cone-shaped flames, which, by spinning wildly, forced themselves deep into the cracked surface in search of combustible material.
We all grew still and watched in wonder, transfixed by this spectacle that had replaced the lesser spectacle I’d been, forgetting the danger as we considered the beauty. Miracle of fire. From a glowing cigar stub and spilled kerosene to this: animate, ravenous fire. Through the flames I saw the men shielding their faces with their hands, their blue suits given a metallic sheen in the glare. The boy stood farther away from the fire, and as the blaze spread toward the wall he leaped back, landing on my side of the flames.
I pulled him toward the stairway. If he’d resisted I probably would have given up and fled without him. But he was strangely compliant. Down I ran, pushing him ahead of me, down the top flight to the fourth floor, down farther to the third, down to the second, where I finally halted on the landing and listened for the sound of the men pursuing us. I heard nothing and so nudged the boy forward again and we continued down to the ground floor and into the hallway, where I flung the door open right into my husband, who had finally decided to leave behind the fun at the McAlpin and come home.
“Christ’s sake,” he moaned, rubbing his sore forehead. “What do you think you’re doing, Velma, at this time of night...”
“You idiot,” I murmured, pushing past him with the boy. But I stopped in the middle of the small lobby, for in front of the building, through the wrought-iron cage over the front door, I saw one of the men rush up the stoop, the same man who had led the boy to the roof, and tug at the handle of the locked door. When our eyes met, he released the handle and ran off.
Ted tried to grab my arm but I pulled free. “Vel, sheesh, just tell me”
“You win the prize for stupidity, Ted, you really do, now go, just go!” I pushed the boy against him and then herded them both toward the rear hall, crying out, “Fire! Fire!” pounding on the Peets’ door as we passed. “Fire!”
“What fire?” Ted gasped. “Fire? Where? Do you mean fire?”
“Fire, you thickhead! Fire! Ted, get out of here. Keep the kid with you and get help.”
“What kid, what are you”
“You’ve been taking those imbecility pills again, Ted, you’ve got to stop that. All you Webbers, get up! Everyone, get up!”
The Peet door opened and the oldest Peet boy stood there, blinking sleepily. Then the families started to emerge, comprehension set in, voices shouted into back rooms, children cried, doors slammed, and my husband finally understood what he had to do and disappeared out the back door. With the occupants on the first floor warned I ran up the stairs to the second floor and out into the hall, where I pounded and shouted until the captain rushed out wearing nothing but bright yellow-and-red-striped boxers that flared open as he moved forward and revealed his stiff and ruddy member ready for action.
“Sir!”
“Fire, you say?” He was sober, dignified, quietly pleased to have an adventure to experience.
“On the roof. Evacuate the premises, sir,” I said, suppressing a sudden urge to laugh.
He saluted. I saluted in return and started to run up to the third floor but stopped, swung around, and cried, “The girls, wake the girls!” meaning Judy and Nancy Simms and Therese Poulee.
“I’ll attend to them,” said the captain, waving me away. “Go on, do what you must do, Mrs. Dorsey.”
“And the Latvian!”
“Go on, Mrs. Dorsey.”
As I ran up to the fourth floor I smelled smoke and could see a faint veil hanging in the air. I pulled the raincoat around me and pressed forward into the hallway, expecting a blast of heat, a rush of acrid smoke, flames breaking through the walls. But the air was clear, the hallway quiet. I wondered whether I’d been wrong about the power of the flames—perhaps the fire had already burned itself out, the danger was past, and I’d been a fool for stirring up a panic.
I went to open the door to my apartment, remembering only as I struggled with the knob that I’d let the door lock behind me.
“Daddy!” I called, pounding on the door. “Daddy!” I looked around for something to use to force my way in. I grabbed an empty bucket left by Mr. Gonzales. “Daddy, wake up!” I beat the door, cracked the bucket, bruised my knuckles, but could not rouse my father. He was an old man, partially deaf, and he slept in a windowless room at the back of our apartment. “Daddy!” When I stopped to listen I heard only the rushing sound of my own inhalation. The pressure of silence made my skin tingle. I thought I smelled smoke now—or was it the stale smell from my father’s pipe? I stood there panting, trying to inhale through my nose and identify the scent. Tobacco? Wood? Kerosene? A roach emerged from a crevice in a wall and scooted down the wall and across the floor. Another roach scuttled from beneath the door. I became conscious of a new sound, a sound I recognized immediately—the crackle of a light rain falling against a canopy of new leaves. Rain? I looked up to see the white paint of the ceiling bulge in a plump blister.
Wake up, Daddy! Wake up!
He was awake. He was always awake. He never did more than drift toward sleep and turn around and drift away from it. Well, he wasn’t drifting now. He was wide awake, thanks to that racket in the hall, a lively party to which, as usual, he was not invited. He couldn’t have cared less. He’d rather lie in bed and smoke his pipe. Where was his pipe? He coughed gently, then inhaled, tasted the bitter smoke on his tongue and wondered who had sold him such foul tobacco. Judging from the sensation in his bones, dawn was still hours away, though he couldn’t tell much from the quality of light in his windowless room; he’d left the door ajar, but the hall light had been turned off. He didn’t mind. Night should be dark—moonlight outside, pitch-black inside. Pitch-black night, and the revelers were going at it. Or maybe the noise was coming from the old one-tube Crosley 50 in the living room. No one cared a smidgen about his comfort. His daughter ran a tea shop on Amsterdam Avenue, his son-in-law was a rascal, his wife was dead, and his country was at war. These were facts. Facts bled like cheap dye until people who should have known better weren’t sure what was true.
He coughed again, more
emphatically this time, in an effort to call attention to himself. Hello there, Velma. Where was his pipe? Could someone find his pipe for him? Was it morning yet? Was it winter? Look at him, silky white beard curled beneath his chin by the force of the wind as he skimmed along the dirt road from the summit of Chariot Mountain, picking up speed with every rotation of the wheels. Old daredevil, surging on his sturdy Schwinn, the one he’d sold to a neighbor and then bought back when the neighbor moved away.
Daddy!
I was waiting at the bottom along with the rest of them—his wife, his brothers, his cousins, his own ma. We were all waiting at the bottom of the mountain for the reckless old charioteer to descend from Olympus, his beard wound around his neck, his white hair surrounding his skull like the white cloud of breath blooming in front of his wife’s face on a cold autumn day or like the smoke surrounding him in the black box of his room, smoke from his pipe, he’d forgotten to tamp his pipe and now—
Vel, where are you, Vel?
Look at him go, speeding downhill as though on the crest of a flood, his beard tightening in a noose around his neck, his eyes tearing, his lungs burning, his wife out in the kitchen mindlessly dipping tripe in batter while I sewed a new wool patch on his winter coat, willfully ignoring him as I so often did, though he was an old man and I a hardy young woman who could have lifted him on my shoulders and carried him to safety.
I’D ALWAYS KNOWN FIRE to burn steadily. Before that night I’d never seen fire pretend to lie dormant and then without warning explode through the walls and ceilings and then shrink back into the crumbling plaster and then explode again so I couldn’t tell where it would appear next and my mind was seized with such panic that I could think of nothing but escape.
I have no recollection of deciding to leave the fourth-floor hallway. All I remember is a flare of intense heat, and the next thing I knew I was running down the stairs, descending so fast that at one point I lost my footing and fell to the landing. I picked myself up and kept going, and within moments I found myself out on the street standing in a crowd, and Therese Poulee was asking me what had happened to my eyebrows, and I was screaming at her, demanding this delicate young French Canadian woman, who represented no less to me than my last desperate hope, to help my father, help him, damn you!
