Claude tipped his head back and drank all his glass. He said with a smile, “You know I know you’ve taken a few things from me. It couldn’t matter to me less. I’m glad you wanted to take them, in fact.” He shrugged.
“What things? That’s not true, Claude.” Winston laid his sprawling hand over the conch shell on the bookcase. He stood upright now, and there was something even militant about his tall figure and the affronted stare he gave Claude.
“Winston, have a drink.” Claude wished now that he hadn’t begun it. He should have known Winston wouldn’t be able to take it. Maybe he had destroyed their friendship—for nothing. Claude wondered if he should try to take it all back, pretend he had been joking. “Have a drink,” he repeated.
“But you can’t accuse me of being a thief!” Winston said in a horrified tone. And suddenly his body began trembling.
“No, no, you’ve got the whole thing wrong,” Claude said. He walked slowly across the room to get a cigarette from the box on his desk.
“That’s what you said, isn’t it?” Winston’s voice cracked.
“No, I didn’t. Now let’s sit down and have a drink and forget it.” Claude spoke with elaborate casualness, but he knew it sounded patronizing just the same. Maybe Winston hadn’t stolen the spoon: after all, it belonged to Margaret. Maybe Winston was reacting with guilt because he had taken other things, and he now knew that Claude realized it.
That was his last thought—that he had sounded false and patronizing, that the spoon might have disappeared by some means other than Winston—before the quick step behind him, the brief whir of something moving fast through the air, and the shattering impact at the back of his head caused his arms to fling up in a last empty, convulsive gesture.
Broken Glass
Andrew Cooperman felt in a cheerful mood on a certain Wednesday morning, because he had a date. He was to ring Kate Wynant’s doorbell a little after ten, and they were going to shop at the supermarket together. They did this once a week, avoiding Saturday because of the crowds, and they shopped together, because these days you couldn’t buy one pound or six of anything, you had to buy five pounds of onions or ten pounds of potatoes, as if one had an army at home to feed, and Andrew lived alone, as did Kate. Andrew’s wife Sarah had died nearly six years ago, and Kate’s husband Al, who had been a subway guard, had passed away with bronchitis and pneumonia the year before Sarah. The Coopermans and the Wynants had been good friends and neighbors for more than thirty years. The Wynants had no children, but Andrew and Sarah had one son who had lived in New Jersey with his wife and son until ten years ago, when the family had moved to Dallas. Eddie was a good boy—Andrew’s son—but not much for writing letters, two a year were about it, and one of those around Christmas. Andrew admitted to himself that he felt lonely sometimes.
And he had to admit that it was absurd to feel elated at the prospect of a date with old Kate, who would very likely have a new tale of horror for him, something else “atrocious” or “inhuman” that had happened in their Brooklyn neighborhood. Kate was on her phone half the time, people calling her or she calling them. She knew everything that was happening. Well, the neighborhood had gone down, to put it mildly. People on welfare were moving in, along with the kids that went with them. The neighborhood had used to be one of the best, lots of privately owned houses, well kept with trees and bushes and polished brass door knockers to brighten the scene. Everybody knew everybody, helped with the snow shoveling, visited at one another’s birthday parties, weddings. Now with more people, and the owners dying out, the houses had had to be broken up into apartments, you couldn’t do anything about that. Andrew and Sarah had always lived in the apartment Andrew had now, but once they had known the owners, the Kneses, older than he and Sarah, and long dead now. Andrew knew the owner of his four-apartment house only by name, couldn’t even remember what he looked like . . . Andrew’s thoughts trailed off. He glanced at his watch—five past ten—and wondered if he had forgotten anything. Money and keys, always the essentials, plus his shopping list. Yes, he had them.
Next to Andrew’s apartment door, pushed against it, stood a big pine crate full of books and old magazines. That was Kate’s idea, to have not only three locks plus a bolt and chain on the door, but a heavy object or two against the door. Anybody could open locks these days, said Kate, and cut through a chain quick as a wink, but if they had to do all that plus push something heavy out of the way, it would give Andrew time to use his telephone. Kate could of course tell a story or two about a woman or man whose life had probably been saved and whose possessions certainly had by this precaution. Andrew tugged at his crate, got it just far enough away that he could open his locks and squeeze out himself. Then he relocked his door, turning his keys twice. At the end of his shopping list, he had a pleasant item to acquire, a rectangular piece of glass of which he had noted the measurements. Andrew was quite a good framer, and sometimes his neighbors, like the Vernons and the Schroeders, brought him photographs and drawings to frame, and of course he didn’t charge anything except the cost of his materials. Occasional framing and his own watercolors occupied much of Andrew’s time. He had two portfolios of his watercolors, mostly what one might call landscapes of local parks and houses. He showed them to Kate when she asked to see his latest efforts. Two or three were framed in his apartment. Andrew frequently went through his portfolios and threw out the ones he considered not so good. No use hanging on to everything, as a lot of old people did.
Andrew had remounted his favorite photograph of Sarah, had bought a frame secondhand and spruced it up—nice bird’s-eye maple—and this evening he intended to fix the glass in the frame and seal the back with brown paper, and hang it in his living room. Andrew had used to be a typesetter for a Brooklyn newspaper, and he appreciated precision, the loose but reliable bang and flop and jangle of huge printing machines. Sometimes in dreams Andrew heard the machines, almost smelled their oil, though even when he had stopped working fifteen years ago, the presses had been modernized and much quieter.
“That you, Andrew?” Kate’s voice shrilled down the stairs seconds after he had pushed the bell.
“Me, Kate!” he called back.
“Down in a minute!”
The door behind Andrew, the unlocked front door, suddenly burst open and two, no three children bumped past him. One of them had a key, and they went screaming in, one black and two white, Andrew noticed. There was another apartment besides Kate’s on the first floor.
Kate opened the door, nearly as wide as the doorway herself, her pinkish face framed in the black fur of her coat collar. Kate’s chubby hands clutched one shopping bag of blue plastic, plus her carrier which rolled on two wheels but was now flat and collapsed. “What a morning! Did Ethel call you about the Schroeders?” she asked in an unusually upset whisper.
“No, she didn’t.” Ethel was a neighbor, another great telephone user. Andrew supposed that the Schroeders had suffered another house robbery.
Kate descended her front steps and got her breath back. She planted a hand on Andrew’s jacket sleeve. “They were found this morning in their apartment—both dead from sleeping pills. They left a note. Suicides!”
“No!” said Andrew, shocked. “Why?”
“They said—” Kate looked around her as if any ears might be enemies “—they couldn’t take another robbery. They were too unhappy to go on. They’d had three or four, you know—”
“That’s sad news, sad.” Andrew felt that he was not taking it in as yet.
“Two burglaries just in the last six months. Remember, Andy? And Herman’s back killing him since that last rip-off—when was it? December? It was cold then, anyway, I remember.”
“Yes.” Herman Schroeder had been taking some sun on a bench a couple of streets away—against Kate’s advice, Andrew remembered, because few people were around on cold days—and a couple of boys had taken Herman’s mon
ey plus his wristwatch and his winter coat. It wasn’t so much what they took as the shock of it, and the boys had sat Herman down on the pavement. The benches might as well be traps, for the elderly, anyway. Once they’d all gone to the little park there, played chess and checkers in summer, but no more. Andrew could remember Herman sitting with his white pipe in the sun there, reading his newspaper. Gone now. The Schroeders were a decent couple and had been neighbors for decades, like himself and Kate. It was sinking in. “Killed themselves.” He and Kate were moving in the direction of the big avenue and the supermarket.
“They couldn’t afford to move anywhere else. I remember Minnie saying that to me—oh, a couple of years ago.” Kate had already slowed her walk to spare her bad arches.
Across the street Andrew saw the reassuring figures of two policemen, burly fellows, swinging their sticks, and at the same time he noticed four Hispanic boys coming towards him and Kate on the sidewalk, yelping in Spanish, jostling one another, and one had the glazed look of someone drugged—or was Andrew mistaken? One boy shouted a dirty phrase in English, shoved another who bumped into Andrew, and Andrew caromed into Kate. Andrew righted himself, touched Kate’s arm apologetically, but didn’t bother saying “Sorry.” It was as if he and she were observing a respectful silence for a few minutes in memory of Herman and Minnie Schroeder, even as they made their way to the supermarket.
Andrew said he had to buy a piece of glass, and stepped into the hardware store near the corner. He knew Kate would be content to follow him and look around at kitchen gadgets. Andrew read out his measurements, which the young man noted on a scrap of paper.
“ ’Bout fifteen minutes,” the young man said.
“I’ll be a little longer. Going to the supermarket. Thank you.” Andrew made his way towards Kate. The shop glittered with chromium toasters, grills, electric machines of all kinds.
In the supermarket they separated as usual, having established that Andrew would buy the staples, potatoes, coffee, bread and such like, while Kate got the meat and chose whatever fruit and vegetables looked good. Andrew was thinking about the Schroeders. Lots of times he and Kate had seen Minnie’s small figure here, often in a dark purple coat, shopping alone on a midweek morning, and they had always paused a minute to chat and to ask how everybody was. Herman had never given up his walks, though of course he’d taken them only in daylight hours, but even so—“They prey on the elderly, because they know we can’t run or hit back,” Kate had said many a time. As Andrew reached for a cardboard box of a dozen eggs, he imagined Minnie and Herman—maybe lying fully clothed on a double bed—in the apartment where Andrew had been several times. Dead. Couldn’t stand the strain any longer. Was it right to feel so pessimistic, so hopeless, Andrew wondered. Or was it fair to ask that? They must have been too tired to try any longer. Andrew supposed one had to understand and forgive that.
The fingers of the checkout girl flew over the adding machine with an amazing quickness. Andrew didn’t bother peering to see if all the figures were correct, though he knew Kate did.
Kate had already checked out and was waiting this side of the glass front doors. They added some items from Andrew’s sacks to the carrier. They still had a sack each to carry.
“Bought a nice coffee ring,” Kate said. “We can have some at my place, if you’d like.”
“That sounds nice,” said Andrew. He and Kate each climbed the stairs twice at Kate’s house (one flight up) in order to transport all the sacks, while they guarded their purchases in turn in the downstairs hall. You could never tell who might dash in the front door, with a key even, and dash out again with some loot. Kate was convinced some of the kids had passkeys. Kate made Nescafé and warmed the coffee ring in the oven. Then she said, as Andrew had thought she might:
“This coffee ring reminds me of dear Minnie’s, only she made better herself. I’m going to miss them, Andy—”
By then they were seated at Kate’s oval table in the living room, their groceries divided in the kitchen, but the bill not yet reckoned up.
Andrew nodded solemnly. “I hope I won’t have to go like that.”
“You’ve had only two house robberies, isn’t that it? I’ve had four. What’ve I got left?” she asked rhetorically, rolling her head back so her eyes swept the walls, the sideboard on which a green vase stood (Andrew did remember a silver tray and teapot there years ago), the old secondhand television set where—was it four or even more years ago now?—Kate had had a big new set that she had been quite proud of. Andrew did not know what to say. She had been robbed, yes, but all in all maybe her apartment looked more like a home than his own. “It’s harder on a man if the wife dies first than the other way around,” Kate had said to him after Sarah died. That was perhaps true. Women were better at the little things, making a house look nice. At the same time Andrew warned himself (as he always had since Sarah’s death) not to start feeling sorry for himself, because that was the beginning of the end, shameful even. Yet the idea, the image of the Schroeders appeared to Andrew more strongly as he sat there sipping Kate’s coffee and eating the cinnamon-flavored cake. They had been about seventy-six, Andrew thought, both of them. Not really ancient, was it? Andrew would be eighty-one next month.
“How were they found?” Andrew asked.
“Who?”
“The Schroeders.”
“Oh. I think a neighbor on the same floor knocked a few times, then told a super or somebody—because their super doesn’t live in the house. I guess the neighbor just said she was worried, because she hadn’t seen them in days. They’d been there about four days, Ethel said, because one of the interns said that to somebody.”
In the kitchen Andrew reckoned up their bills as best he could, looking over the two sales slips and the divided wax paper–wrapped package of two loaves of bread, the pounds of potatoes. Kate liked him to do the figuring. He arrived at nearly eighteen dollars for Kate and a little more for himself, because he was vague about one item. He reloaded two sacks for himself.
“They’re inhuman,” Kate was saying, even the slightly frayed hem of her skirt twitching now with her anger or upsetness. “You saw that piece in Time a couple of months ago, remember, Andy?”
He did. Kate had passed on the magazine when she had finished it, as she often did. It had not been their Brooklyn neighborhood described in the one-and-a-half page article, but one much like it. It told of people barricading their doors at night, not daring to go out after nightfall to buy anything or to visit a friend. Roving bands of teenagers, ninety-seven percent black or Hispanic, Time said, made people captive in their own homes, followed people back from the bank on the days when government checks came in, in order to mug them inside their own doors.
“When civilized people like the Schroeders have to kill themselves to escape—” Kate was at a loss for words and sat down, banged her reddish wig squarely on top to make sure it was in place. “The police can’t offer enough protection. How can they be everywhere? They can’t!”
“But don’t forget,” Andrew began, happy to recall a cheerful detail, “in that same Time piece they showed a picture of a tall black girl escorting some old people—just like us—around their neighborhood to shop. Or maybe back from the bank, I forgot.”
Kate nervously picked up a pecan from her plate and pushed it between her lips. “All right, one example, one photograph. All right if we had fifty decent young people like that around here who’d escort all of us . . .”
Andrew knew he had best take his leave. Kate could go on another half hour. “I thank you for the delicious coffee and cake, Kate.”
“Call me tonight. I feel uneasy, Andy, don’t know why. Just today especially.”
He nodded. “What time?” he asked, as if making another date, and in a way it was. He liked to have things to look forward to, little duties.
“Just before eight. Five minutes to eight, all r
ight? Because I want to watch something on TV at eight.”
Andrew departed, and was all the way home, his sacks emptied and the things put away in his own kitchen, before he realized that he had forgotten to pick up the piece of glass. Now if that wasn’t stupid! Sign of old age, he thought, and smiled at himself. Andrew put on his jacket again. Again he unlocked, then relocked his apartment door, thinking he had only himself to blame for this extra exertion. He walked towards the big avenue again with his rather short-stepped gait, right foot a bit slower than the other.
“Morning, Andy,” said an elderly woman who had her white dog tied to her wheeled grocery carrier, now full.
“Morning—” Andrew replied, not recalling at once her name. Helen, of course, now that it was too late to say it. Helen Vernon.
Andrew entered the hardware shop and claimed his glass. Two dollars and eighty-eight cents. The glass was neatly wrapped in brown paper, Scotch-taped. Andrew started home with the glass under his arm. He looked forward to a happy evening of puttering in the little spare room which had used to be Sarah’s sewing and ironing room and where Andrew had always had his workbench, which was a flush door on a trestle. The sun had come out brighter now. Andrew glanced up and saw a helicopter pulling a streamer with something written on it that he could not read. A twist of smoke rose from someone’s back garden: twigs being burnt. The air promised spring.
He heard rather quick steps behind him, and instinctively moved to the right to let someone pass him on the street side, then got a forceful jolt against his left arm under which he carried the glass. Andrew was knocked to the right, knocked off his feet, and he heard the glass strike the sidewalk with a clink, and at the same time Andrew’s right hip gave a crack.
Andrew saw blue-jeaned legs, heard gasping as his jacket was wrenched backward, as a button leapt under his nose, and his arms were suddenly pinned to his sides. Now his hat was off, and Andrew expected a blow on the head, but instead a black hand tore his wallet out of the inside pocket of his jacket. Andrew blinked, saw big sneakered feet, long legs in blue jeans, blue denim jacket above, loping away up the sidewalk, turning right at the next corner.
Slowly, Slowly in the Wind Page 16
