by Jeffrey Lent
Abby stopped then and turned her eyes from her father in a slow scroll over the room behind him without moving her head. Then looked to her hands lying flat in her lap. She was quiet, finished but not done. They sat silent.
Norman inclined his head so it rested against his breastbone. He closed his eyes and sat motionless a long time. There was no movement but still she felt the tremors rise off him with his breathing, breathing so shallow she could not see it. After a while he raised his head with his eyes open upon her, those eyes bright with recognition, a resignation beyond grief. After another while of indeterminate time he spoke. “That man Peter. It wasn’t just that he helped your mother run off. It was what she was running off from.”
She waited.
“It’s the part of your story that confuses me. The other man she was talking to. The half brother. The one you felt she addressed as if living. He was not. But I can see how from what she was saying you’d think so. Blaming him for what happened to Peter. Because in his way he surely caused it. But see, he’s dead too. In fact, he’s been dead longer than Peter. Though likely not by much.”
She shook her head. “If you’d heard her.”
“You’re not paying attention. It was on account of the half brother, on account of his death, that she had to run off in the first place. It was because of that death that Peter helped her.”
“She killed him? The one called Alexander?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
She studied his face and then looked away. Took her lower lip between her teeth gently, as if cradling herself in that one soft curl of flesh. Looked back at him and now he saw the hard shining glint of grief in her eyes, sorrow free of self, sorrow not for the mother but for the woman, now greater within her than before and also, although he didn’t think she knew this yet, lesser.
“You didn’t tell Pru that part.”
“I didn’t see the need for it. I was thinking only to save that grief from her, from the both of you.”
She was quiet a time, looking off. Then she looked at him and nodded, her voice low and said, “It scares me. It all just scares me. That idea of what happens to people and how they live with it, go on, go on so long and then have it come all the way back around on top of them. And take them over, just like it was yesterday. Twenty-five years ago. She killed herself over things happened twenty-five years ago.”
“There’s more to it than that. Although you’re right. Funny how time collapses on us. That happened to her when she went south. I almost said home but it wasn’t ever home to her. I think not. I think this was her home. I think those twenty-five years meant something to her. So I don’t think it was home she went back to but where she came out of. Sometimes there’s no difference, others it’s all the world. But there was something happened there. I’d like to know. I wish she’d felt she could tell me. She always told me everything else. Far as I know and I think I know pretty good. But there was something, somebody. It wasn’t just whoever told her about that old Peter man, although it could’ve been the same person. But it was something more than that telling. I’m thinking, if she was talking out loud to ghosts what else was there then that was so bad she wouldn’t talk out loud about it? Or maybe not a ghost to tell it to? Or both? Maybe neither. I wish I knew.”
“You thought about going down there?”
“No. Even I found something out, learned something, it wouldn’t give me more answer than I’ve already got.”
“It might.”
“No.”
“Because it wouldn’t change anything.”
“That’s right.”
Then both quiet. The room quiet, joined now back again to the rest of the house. The one small eight-over-eight window laid in above the desk whickered against a sprung-up northeast wind. Both not moving, looking at each other as if newfound, without curiosity but as if cousins long separated but met now and knowing one another without even the burden of a handclasp. And for the only time in his life and he old enough to know it both eyes poured over with equal heartsaching to one another. And elastic time stretched and he thought he might die of love and thought that would be fitting. And in that moment his life as a melancholy man ended although none who knew him would ever know it or be able to claim it for him. But there then he left all that and began a new life, no less sad or sorrow-etched than the one before and so invisible. But he turned his back on God altogether and if any god noticed there was no way for Norman to know. Nothing was to change and all things were as they were before but he was to regard them from some minor and key distance from within himself. With the tolerance of knowing nothing may be changed and that what pattern lives does so outside of human desire or effort to afford change. He did not seek but still found pleasure in this and if no smile ran over him again it was because he needed none. All that fell around him was perfection and all that occurred was not. He expected nothing and so was pleased with many and diverse small things. Sitting that night in his small inconsequential office with the wind rising against the panes and his elder daughter across from him he sensed all this. And perhaps it was not this yet at all, perhaps it was only the first time in months that he found himself sitting fully in his chair, simply tired. Perhaps that, then, was enough. After a while he broke his gaze from her and took up his pipe and held it cold in the corner of his mouth and spoke to her.
“You ever going to tell me what happened with you and that boy?”
She cocked her head at him. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe I need to.”
This time he did not nod. Slowly he struck up a match and drew on the bowl. Then he said, “Well. There will be other boys.”
“No,” she said. “There won’t be.”
He said nothing.
After a time she said, “I’m a colored girl. Pretty and smart, but still.”
For longer this time he had nothing to say.
Finally she stood from her chair. She went to the window to study the blank squares and turned back, raised her arms above her head and stretched herself, then dropped her hands to join before her groin, the fingers laced. He sat wrapped in smoke, she at the edge of it. She lifted one hand and ran it across her brow as if wiping sweat or fatigue away. She took breath, as if she hadn’t had any for hours. Then said, “There’s maybe not much I can control, what happens to me. But I can control myself. I have every intention of doing that.”
He released smoke once more and laid down the pipe. “It’s late,” he said, and stood. He did not doubt her and could not wish her otherwise.
“It is late.” And she held the door into the hallway open while he bent and blew out the lamp and they went one after the other down the dark hallway, she turning at the newel to climb the stairs and he continuing on into the kitchen to draw on boots and mackinaw and out then into the night, to check the barns, the wind raging through his hair like a summer meadow of tall timothy. Finished, he stood a long moment with his head tilted back, his eyes wide to the maw of night. Then turned to the dark house.
Part II
Bethlehem
Four
In a predawn early in the summer of 1904 Jamie slipped from the house while the others slept and went down the hill wearing his best clothes with forty dollars of his own money earned hard and saved over three years and another sixty dollars stolen from his father during the same time. He caught the milkrun train north through the valley fogged thick with mist off the river. He rode looking straight before him, meeting no eye and not watching out the train window as the train ran through the blank morning. At nineteen he was small-limbed with thin muscles, lithe, with a sense of motion about him even when still. He was attractive to women while most men did not like him on first meeting. Something ethereal in his honeyed skin and large dark eyes, prominent above high cheekbones and a head of soft dark curls. His fingers were long and slender with nails clean and pink. His mouth was sharply defined as if cut out from his face. He was priapic
and intent, clever but lacking just enough confidence to be charming. In one coat pocket he had a folded straight razor, in the other his cash in a money clip. The sun was up now, a burning ball of rose in the mist. When the train came into the Barre platform he got off, not James or Jim, still Jamie, but otherwise ready for all things new.
He went through the station yard as if he’d seen it all before—oxcarts of six and eight yokes with crated monuments and some with loads of faced and unfaced building stone, draft teams with wagons of coke and coal for the furnaces and others of pig iron for the forges and foundries that ran day and night to support the quarries; loads of goods and foodstuffs for the city; overhead strung with the wires and lines of the new century, electric and telegraph and telephone; outside the passenger depot canopied hotel wagons with boy drivers and other boys in sandwich boards strolling the crowd crying out for restaurants, rooming houses; men working in shirtsleeves or threepiece suits and from them came the filter of unknown tongues—and he passed through this with rising excitement, as if he’d found a place where he could begin.
On Merchants’ Row he found a tailor and bought a readymade nine-dollar suit off the rack and paid two dollars to have the alterations done while he waited. Once the pinning and chalking was done he crossed the street and bought a pair of shoes with a hard bright finish and went then to a barbershop and had his hair cut and was shaved, knowing that thus far nothing had been finer than the hot towels laid over his face and the smooth sweet brisk strokes of the razor and the deft shears, the fingers working pomade through to his scalp, the final whisk of the powdered brush against the back of his neck. Then he claimed his suit, bought new socks and carried out his old clothes and shoes tied up with string in a paper bundle. In a paper sack he carried two additional collars and two sets of cuffs. He dropped the bundle inside an alleyway on a pile of rotting debris.
He walked up through the town and came into the row of old riverside tenement houses with small restaurants and even smaller sundry stores, pawnshops, junkshops, and barbershops on the ground levels, the buildings interspersed with scrap yards and rag-pickers sheds. He took a mean yellow room three flights up for three dollars a week, the room with a sprung bed and stained mattress and a straightback chair and a washstand with a chipped pitcher and bowl. He paid for two weeks and went immediately back out. By now it was early afternoon and a quiet of sorts was over the street. Flies worked in swarms over offal in the gutter and a pack of five- and six-year-olds swarmed by him, boys and girls both. A woman leaned from a window and hung laundry on lines strung between buildings. His stomach ached now with hunger and he walked past three cafés, unsure of what to eat, how to order. More than anything he did not want to be the fool.
He only thought he wanted food. He found what he truly needed right away. Later he realized she’d found him. She was old, at least twenty-five, perhaps thirty. She had thick ropes of black hair to her waist and her breasts were large and low beneath her simple white blouse. She was everything he wanted and he ached against the scratch of his new trousers. She simply walked to him and brushed her hand against him and said, “You need help with that?”
She named a price and he offered half that and she took his hand and led him into a doorway and up a flight of stairs and even as he followed the intentional flounder of her skirted buttocks and hips he’d already learned something. At the first landing she stopped and ran a hand down the buttons of his flies and took him out into her hand and he thought she’d misunderstood. Then she turned and lifted her skirts, leaning forward to grasp the railing. He’d expected a room, a bed, her face, and so stood understanding but not, looking down at the puckered breadth of her rear, the thrust of rasped hair rising into her cleft. She looked back over her shoulder at him once and then turned her head away again but reached back between her legs to grasp him hard and bring him in. He stumbled against her and a cry of pleasure or pain came from her and she pushed back against him and he came just as she was raising her voice again. When she realized he was coming the cry stopped, her work done. She stepped off his steady erection and smoothed her skirts down, turned and pressed him back into his trousers, doing up the flies. She patted his crotch and said, “You remember me.” Then she was down the stairs, leaving him there. When he went back down onto the street she was nowhere in sight.
He went away from the way he’d come. Two doors up on the top step of a stoop was a girl his own age wearing a navy waisted dress with white piping at the collar and hip pockets and hem. She sat with her knees together and her hands over them, watching him come. She had the same thick black hair, this time wound around her head in a loose blur but her skin was very pale, bright white against the dress and her hair As he passed she grinned and cocked her eyebrows at him and shook her head. He nodded at her once firmly, dismissing her, not shamed, and turned his head. At the corner he went into a café and ordered spaghetti only because he’d heard the word earlier. He’d not seen or eaten a noodle in his life. The meatballs tasted strange to him, but he ate two platefuls and mopped it with the hard crusted bread. It cost him a nickel.
Back outside his penis was stuck against his trousers. He turned back toward his room. The girl was not on the stoop. At his room he carried the pitcher to the pump and back upstairs where he stripped and washed himself. The room was hot and stank of urine, sweat, blood, rotting wallpaper, cheap plaster, decay. He forced up the window and the air over him was hot, fetid from the street. All around him in the building and out was the sound of movement. He lay naked on his back on the mattress and laid the wrung washing cloth over his eyes. He spread his arms and legs wide, spread-eagled against the heat. A contentment came over him. He was not happy but did not yet expect to be so. The contentment was that of an animate stone finally dislodged and rolling downhill. After a time he slept.
It was dark when he woke. He dressed and went out. Far uptown he could see the bright flare in the sky of electric streetlights. Along this street the only light was what came from the steamed murked storefronts but the sidewalks were clumped with people, some strolling, some moving with purpose. The stoops were also filled, families and single men and women motionless as the night threaded away at the last of the day’s heat. Up the hill above the town the great lights of the quarries bloomed and he felt the rumble of machinery through his feet and body as much as heard it. He was hungry again and went along the street toward the restaurant where he’d eaten earlier. Tomorrow, he figured, he’d branch out.
A woman approached and spoke quietly to him. He didn’t believe it was the same woman from earlier. It was not the girl from the stoop either. He told her thank you, no, but she’d already read that of him and moved away. He didn’t look after her.
The restaurant had thick paper shades rolled down inside the windows but was lit within and he saw figures move silhouetted behind the dirty yellow paper. A man sat on the one-step stoop, his knees drawn up near to his chin. He wore a small-brimmed derby hat and was smoking a thin cigar, the smoke a rancid twist in the air. He watched Jamie approach and then caught his arm and spoke to him in Italian.
“I’m just looking to get food. Eat.” He made motions with his hand toward his mouth and stepped around the man as he opened the door and went in. The man came in behind him. Unlike earlier the room was full, each small table ringed with men. There were no women. No one was eating but the tabletops were filled with small squat glasses, most empty but for one before each man. The empty glasses were separated each clump from the others to make a record. On a table at the back of the room were carboys of glass covered with woven straw and racks of glasses. The man who had fed him earlier crossed the room even as Jamie was entering with his escort. Thick-bodied and with gray strings of hair wrapped over his skull he followed his belly, speaking not to Jamie but the man behind him, who answered back. Up close now, Jamie grinned at him. The man did not smile back. He said, “What you want?”
“Something to eat.”
“We don’t serve no food. Pr
ivate club.”
“I was here earlier. Had a good dinner. Was looking for some kind of supper.”
The man was shaking his head. “No food. Lunch only. Private,” he said. “Private facility.”
“All I’m looking for. Is a sandwich or something. I know you got something to eat back there somewhere.” Then for the first time took his eyes from the man and panned the room. He said, “Or maybe even a little something else. Something else to fill me up.” And grinned.
The man frowned at him. Lifted one hand and wiped it over the top of his head, smoothing the oiled-down hair or wiping away sweat. At the same time he did this two men at a nearby table stood, both in suits with chains and fobs spread over their stomachs. The only men besides Jamie in the room not dressed in rough workclothes tattered over with granite dust, the only men with eyes not brilliant red from the same dust. They stepped up to one side of the proprietor. Who spoke once more. “I told you. No food. So. Time you go.”
The two men stepped forward and one caught Jamie by the shoulder harder than he’d expected and spun him and then the four hands came over him and lifted him by the arms and thighs, their grips deep into his muscles. The pain was near euphoric in intensity. They carried him forward. The doorman held open the door. They carried him just to the door and then threw him up and forward. While still in the air he tensed himself and landed upright, swayed and caught his balance. Someone on the sidewalk clapped. He turned. The door was shut. The man in the derby hat stood outside watching him. When Jamie turned the man grinned at him, the thin cigar still clamped between his teeth. Jamie set his clothes back right upon him and approached the man.
