Everybody Loves Somebody (10 page)

Ordinarily, I mind my own business. I shake my head and cluck my tongue and go back to sleep. That’s easy enough to do when
it’s my husband dancing at a downtown hotel with his mistress or the Simms sisters fighting over the radio. But when the problem
appeared right outside my bedroom, I figured it was time for me to get involved. So that’s what I did. That’s why my tea shop,
Scarooms, is no longer. That’s why you’re not sitting by the window looking out on traffic and sipping peppermint tea as you
read this.

I slid each foot into a pink slipper and grabbed my father’s raincoat from the rack in the hall, draping it over my shoulders.
When I stepped out of my apartment, I stupidly let the door swing shut and lock with a click behind me. That click was my
first warning, a sign that I should have left destiny alone. But I just headed for the stairs, telling myself that if I couldn’t
wake Daddy by pounding on the door, then I could climb down the fire escape from the roof and enter our apartment through
my bedroom window.

The second sign I chose to ignore was the stairwell lightbulb, which burst with a pop when I pressed the switch. I persisted,
climbed stair by stair through the pitch-black to the rooftop door.

The third sign was almost enough to dissuade me: the metal door was locked, as usual, but in the darkness I couldn’t find
the key ring hanging on the wall. I poked around blindly, searching with my hands, and felt the nail where the ring usually
hung but didn’t find the key ring there. I slumped onto the top stair and wondered what I’d been hoping to accomplish. Velma
Dorsey in her pink cotton nightgown to the rescue?

The sound of my breathing was absorbed by the thick air. A distant, inexplicable
ping,
the sound of glass against metal, rose from the floors below. I thought about my husband dancing with his mistress. I thought
about the previous afternoon, when my crazy old dad had threatened my husband with a shoehorn. I thought about the look in
the boy’s eyes as he stood outside my bedroom window, and I realized right then that I was sitting on the key, which must
have fallen free from the ring.

After a fair amount of struggle, I managed to fit in the key and turn the lock. I eased open the door and stepped outside
onto the roof.

I
GREW UP
in a village at the bottom of Chariot Mountain in the Alleghenies. My father worked as a handyman; my mother was best known
for her tendency to daydream. Her friends resented the fact that she didn’t bother to go to church or to stanch the rumors
that her husband was an atheist. My father, who insisted that people should believe whatever they want to believe, argued
that anyone with any sense must recognize the world to be pitiless, disappointing, raw, without intention, and life no more
than a series of mistakes and inadequate reparations. In his opinion, it was a mistake for me to marry Ted Dorsey, whom I
met at a party while visiting a cousin in Philadelphia, and it was an even bigger mistake to move with Ted to New York City.
But Daddy didn’t try to stop me. He just wrote me weekly letters cataloging the dangers of the big city and advising me to
be careful crossing the street.

I found work as a hostess at a Broadway coffee shop, but I kept my eye on the failing delicatessen located in our apartment
building, and when the deli finally went out of business I leased the space. Three months later, I opened Scarooms. In the
years since then, I did just enough business to turn a small profit. My tea shop didn’t attract the guests from the Shannonso
as I’d hoped it would, but between the occasional customer wandering in off the street and residents of the building stopping
in, Scarooms was seldom empty, though just as seldom bustling.

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.

T
HE 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.

O
N 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!”

I
N 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.