New Yorkers (59 page)

Downstairs, they had the luck to catch a train for which a group had already collected on the platform, old women made baby-faced by babushkas, all wearing strong black coats.

“The cleaner’s train. Some of them get on here. My mother and I once used to catch it from a job further down. We’re lucky. Last one down until six.”

In the train, he sat her across the aisle from them. The same crowd, it could have been, rocking with the car like the pros they were, full of the same sturdy, unionized talk.

“What did you and she clean?”

“Bars.”

She looked across the aisle, at the line of black oilcloth bags. “Didn’t know there were that many bars to clean.”

“There aren’t. This is the aristocracy you’re looking at. But we had a bag like theirs. Maybe we still do. She doesn’t like to throw away.”

“What do they clean?”

“Offices.”

Across the aisle, one of the women sat apart, intent, in her hands the power of the rosary.

“Clean is my mother’s God.”

“I only met her that once.”

“She’s all there,” he said. “The aunts’ll tell you no. People as stupid as my aunts never can believe there’s anybody stupider.”

“I could never stand the Halecsys.”

“Because she didn’t tell them, you know. When it happened to her.”

“When what?”

He turned. She
had
remembered Pitt and Gouverneur. “Me.”

“Oh yes,” she said at once. “‘Dead, divorced’—what was the other?”

“‘Disappeared.’”

The train rocked.

“Used to be tribes,” he said. “That didn’t understand the connection.”

“The—?”

“Between having kids and—you-know.” It had slipped from him without thought, that earliest euphemism of the schoolhouse stairs, dropping like a penny into the well of his older intelligence, starting up bright, concentric ripples between that world and this. She’d taken off the gloves again, in one of the fake subtleties they swallowed in place of living; her hands were bare. He didn’t touch them. “Fornication,” he said.

Her face didn’t change. “Where were they, those tribes?”

“Some archipelago.”

He watched the sisterhood across the aisle get up and file out as the train stopped, in the rear the one who had prayed. “My mother’s all there. It’s just that what you see—that’s all there is.”

“Just like—” The train was roaring on again. He’d never seen her face like that. Surely she’d said it. “—like mine!”

They were drawing through one of the longest station approaches, a no-man’s-land in which pole after pole crept by.

“We wait here. It always waits here, doesn’t it?” she said.

“You’ve been before.” He had meant to show it to her first—the monstrous death’s head of
his
city. But the city was open to all. “With Austin? That settlement house? You don’t have to tell me.”

She didn’t. Her expression was the one they all knew. She hid behind it. None had ever realized that except himself.

The train drew into the halt, fans whirring. As minutes went by, the few passengers exchanged rigid stares in the non-language which was the proper code for the bowels of the earth. Nobody got up and beat at panes or broke tongue; this was the city too.

“Lots of intelligent people too”—her eyes were half closed—“never can believe how many others are stupider than them.”

“Not Austin.” He gave his rival careful justice, half wishing Austin could hear. “Austin knows the scale. He was born to it. That’s half his intelligence. Or—did you mean me?”

She bent her head, a sudden noncommittal curve of the body professional. “No.”

Who then? The train began moving. “
Anna
is intelligent,” he said. “Why is she afraid?”

The train shadows took up her profile, enlarging it.

“Oh, not just of me,” he said. “I know why that.”

“Servants are always afraid.”

“Not of you.
For
you. Like a—bodyguard.”

The flickering light passed over her face and over.

As they stepped from the train, he found his hand under her elbow, and felt a spasm of pride. Manners were instinctive with him now.

Under the steadier lamps of the deserted station, he held her still, and studied her.

“
I’m
intelligent,” he said. “He’s always telling me. I kept a little notebook, telling myself. I only threw it way today. That picture. The big one, in the big room—Anna caught me studying it. There’s one of her in almost every room, isn’t there. Kept there. Because none of them really look too much like her, do they.”

“Almost every. She was a difficult subject. Everybody said.” She didn’t whisper.

He passed a hand over her face. They stood there on the platform’s edge, oblivious, courting danger, or each other.

“
You
do. You look like her,” he said. “That’s why Anna’s afraid, isn’t it.”

She moved her head from side to side. Into a yoke, out of it. As long as she kept moving—the motion itself seemed to say—she looked like no one in her family, only herself. Her mouth closed, opened again. “I mean to live. I mean to
live.”

A rush of the unknown welled up in him. He felt it—the unknown. Or it was hot in here—and he had his mother’s eyes. “Let me show you my place.” The personal wasn’t filth, down here. He eased himself into it; down here nothing was personal. Tenderly, wielding her like a trophy, he went up the familiar stairs.

Nothing had changed in these slumped barrows along which he had toiled with his ikon, the hours growing on their joined backs like a spine always testing upward for the scope of that day’s food. Orchards of night-bruised fruit; he could smell its dark mauve. Nothing had changed in these grand banks of his beginnings. He could always depend on it.

He wasn’t surprised that it was all still here. In the nameless merge of its seasons, nothing much was separate except the light from the dark, the empty bowl from the not quite filled, chill cellarholes of time when the bugs were silent, bustles of heat when the rats were brave. How beautiful it had been. There were no visits here. In the small center of their round, he had carried his ikon, she had carried him.

“Nothing,” he said aloud. “Here’s the school.” They passed it, in a golden shower of 5x8’s.

“But it’s not there,” she said.

Only a scoop in the earth, with a crane hung on the sky behind it like a huge, idle spoon. “No, it isn’t. But nothing’s lost.”

The church was still here. And the spoiled priest who wouldn’t leave the all-night bar until the first bell for Mass had rung. “‘Puts a little religion into the morning,’ he used to say…There’s the door where they used to give out the shoes.” He didn’t turn his head as they passed it.

“‘Keeps the rats down and blessed,’” she said. “I never forgot.”

When the twin lamps came in sight again, solemn here and dangerous, she put her hand in his and made him keep it. The cellar door, familiar to him as their holly-wreathed knockers to them, was just around the corner. He stopped her before it. “Here’s our stoop.”

“So near? To the police?”

“The less wanted.”

“Edwin.” She dared a laugh. “Even then, you were political.”

They always dared to laugh. That was their style. He could have it in time. In exchange for a rat.

He lifted the cellar door; it was always open. “I was here last year. Checking my property.” He dared to laugh. “Nothing surprises you, does it—not even down here. Is that you yourself?—or in all of you? You’ve never surprised.”

“We used to walk near here. I tried to tell you.”

He held the door for her, leaving it propped open behind them. But he already knew, as they went down the steps of the correct number, into the pissy, wood-and-rag quiet and the crockery murmur of the pipes, all correct—now in subtraction we add back and verify—that no one should have been brought here.

“Some old bum’s been sleeping here. Always are. Smell.” In the corner, there was still a table. Scarcely more than boards, it could be anything. “Could be ours.” There was no tin box. Opposite was the newspaper pile. While they sat on them, he refurnished the place for her. “He burns candles too,” he said. “See there.”

“What was in the box?”

“Scissors. Couple of spoons. Knife I bought.” Plus some scavenged items, including the tube he’d been sure was a thermometer until he’d learned it came with contraceptive cream—and an eggbeater they never got to use.

“Hall toilet’s that way…Listen.” Intent, he held her close. “You hear a rat?”

“Maybe there is.” She got to her feet. “But I have to go.”

“Take a candle.”

She had to climb a flight, but she’d find it. She was gone quite a time, but he didn’t worry about her, sitting here, seeing this place first through her eyes then through his own, with the shutter effect of those card movies in the oldest penny machines. The dark was moving, arranging itself as it had used to do—but nothing any more was nameless. He had his legend now, if he wanted it. It had been here all the time.

“You all right?” he said.

“I had something in my bag. Kleenex.” She crept back close to him. She hadn’t got up, then, in order to get away.

“Guess I’m the cleanest here,” he said. “At that.”

“How do you know the—the
person
who lives here—is a man?”

He marveled. They were formal with people to the end; not even a bum huddling in a corner to scratch and push at himself was one of a legion to them; they personified to the end. As they had done with himself.

“Because of the smell,” he said harshly. “That fishy smell.” Let her figure it out for herself.

On their two pallets, he and his mother had turned their backs to each other, in dumb continence. Since babyhood, he had tended himself in all fleshly things; she liked the touch only of the soap, the water and pail. From their memory rose a manger smell, ammoniac and straw. He could smell it now, the hard metal scent that sweat became after days of cold. But like all innocents, those two had never smelled themselves. In the dark, without fathers, a son was made.

“I never met any woman bums. Mostly they have a doss somewhere.” Old hags, with a den to scream at the kids from. Or—you-knows. “You all have a doss-down somewhere,” said the spoiled priest to his mother. “Even you.”

He got to his feet. “Come on, let’s get out. How do you stand it here.”

“We can’t go back yet,” she said. “You have to keep me out.”

“We can sit upstairs! We used to do that.”

On the middle step he turned, waiting as he had so often done, bracing the metal trapdoor on his bent neck.

“Aren’t we going to blow it out?” she said. “His candle?”

“Let it burn.”

She went back and did it anyway. “The old john will never know we’ve been here,” he said. “We have no scent.”

“Haven’t we?” She stopped beside him. “How can you
do
that. On your
neck.”

Holding it, a proud Atlas-weight grinding his shoulders, he let himself be kissed. Then she went up, before him. Outside, just above pavement level there was a ledge broad enough to sit on. He let the trapdoor fall, looking down on the clang. “We did nothing wrong,” he said.

In the sky, roughly northwest from where they sat, a line evidenced itself, scarcely light, more a wearing through of the dark. “The market line, we always called it. That’s how we told time.” When working at the stalls, it had been the time he rose. An ozone always came with it—chlorophyll. His mother still got up to it, in the electric-veined dark.

“So your father toured the city with you,” he said. “I can imagine, those ‘Here’s Fraunce’s Tavern, and here I was born’ walks. Now you’re going on tour by yourself, he intends to take me.” But his voice was almost tolerant. She had already paid for that.

Going to be a lot of traffic before long—the cursing trucks that would take the wrong turn into these narrows, against foot traffic of the earliest trade-hours, the chicken-slaughterers on their way to the synagogue first, and others en route to the more Christian rituals of the river—chandlers with shaved heads and leather jerkins, bums who still thought they were longshoremen, helpers with the wide, cutpurse mouth that often signified the handlers of fish. But for a half-hour yet, it was still all roach-shadows, scuttlers passing anonymous.

“Not him,” she said. “Her. She walked me everywhere. Talking, always talking. From the time I was little. He never knew.”

“Speak up,” he said.

“You think we’re all talk.”

“Not when you speak of her.” He was watching her face. “Don’t hide. When you don’t speak of her…how you hide.”

She opened her purse. The gloves, crumpled, were in it. “He sometimes took us to the park when we were little. For the park. She never bothered with that.”

A rusted garbage can lay on its side near him. Using the toe of a sneaker, he began dislodging it from the refuse pile behind. “Where did you and she go?”

“Anywhere—she didn’t care where. She only lived when she was moving, acting—she said it herself. Action, she meant. She couldn’t
pretend,
not at all. She always had to speak out. Diddy and I overheard them once, quarreling about it.”

“Can you?” he said. “Pretend?”

“I dance.” She gave a sudden, tender laugh. “So did she a little, once, whatever they did in those days—flamenco, Isadora Duncan Greek. She taught in a settlement house once, the old Meinhard, uptown—Grandfather Mendes knew old man Meinhard. First time she went—she was sixteen—she gave the kids a talk first, about ancient Greece. When she got through, one of them said, ‘Ain’t any Greeks around here, miss. Can yer do the split?’ So she stood up and did it. After that, she had them in the palm of her hand.”

“Palm of her hand.” He kicked the garbage pail upright. “My mother told me about a pig-sticking once.”

“I was just—telling.”

“So she told you all about life,” he said. “What else?”

She looked at him steadily. “Life.” Even in this light, on this ledge, her face was no different from the way he and they always saw it. “Fornication.”

The market line was widening. He could smell it now.

“She told me everything,” said the girl beside him. “Her side of it. But it’s never enough.”