The City When It Rains (35 page)

“Even with the baby,” Corman said.

Rosen's face darkened. “Yes, even that.”

“You wanted to eliminate the risk.”

“All risk,” Rosen said. He looked at Corman pleadingly. “Isn't that what every father wants to do?”

Corman saw the rain sheeting in windy blasts across the dark windows of the fifth-floor landing. She was leaning against the wall, the doll held loosely, dangling from her hand, the rain slapping mercilessly at its bare plastic legs. “Is that what broke her?” he asked. “The baby?”

Rosen shook his head. “Only the last thing. She was already slipping away.”

“Why?”

“She was never well, Mr. Corman,” Rosen said. “There were tendencies. In her mother's family.”

“Toward what?”

“The general term?” Dr. Rosen asked. “Schizophrenia.” He smiled mockingly. “It's just a word for something no one understands. It means ‘broken soul.'”

Corman recalled her short paper, knew now that her scattered sentences had been an effort to draw her soul back together through a rope of words.

Rosen looked at Corman as if he were explaining himself to a tribunal of ancient gods. “And so, given all of this, I felt that I had to control her environment as much as possible.” He took a pair of glasses from his pocket and wearily drew them on. “I thought about some kind of institution for her,” he said. “Especially after the baby.” His face took on a terrible conviction. “We have to have what our souls require, don't we?” he asked passionately. “No matter how strange it may seem to some other person, we have to have it.”

Corman looked at him evenly. “What did your soul require?' he asked.

“That she be safe,” Dr. Rosen said desperately. “Isn't that what we all want for our children, just to keep them safe?”

Corman studied Dr. Rosen's face and understood the terror that drove him. In him, the passion of fatherhood had taken on a mystery beyond what could ever be described to someone else. It had become heroic in its refusal to accept what all fathers had heretofore accepted, that they could not rid the world of its dark snares, nor provide safe passage through them for their children. It was an effort that had lasted all the years of Sarah's childhood and adolesence, and which she had resisted only once, perhaps in dreams during one long night, her small white teeth tearing fiercely at her bottom lip.

“You were there the night she died,” Corman said matter-of-factly, with no sense of accusation.

“Yes, of course,” Dr. Rosen answered without hesitation.

“How did you find her?”

Rosen's eyes fell toward his hands. “By chance. I was down at the library annex, the one on Forty-third Street. I'd been working there all day. It was late in the afternoon. I started home, and there she was. Across the street.”

“You followed her?”

Rosen nodded slowly. “To that … place … that …”

“Did you talk to her?”

Rosen shook his head. “No. I didn't know how. I didn't know where to begin. I just went home.” His eyes darkened. “After the baby, I realized what I'd done, so, when she disappeared, I didn't try to find her. I had learned by then that she had to get away from me, make a life of her own, regain, if she could, the sanity she'd lost. But when I saw her that day, the way she was, I knew I had to intervene, so I went back that same night.” He seemed to tremble at the thought of it. “The rain was terrible,” he said. “There was no one on the streets.”

Corman nodded. He didn't have to imagine the rain, the streets, only Dr. Rosen moving through them, glancing fearfully at the wet, unpeopled stoops, then up toward the dripping metal fire escapes, down again to where the gutterwash swirled toward the steadily clogging drains.

“It seemed unreal,” Rosen said. “That she was in a place like that.”

Corman's mind moved through it again, saw the littered alleyway, the naked ceilings, the empty cans of Similac, the pictures he'd taken as she lay on the street, her arm reaching desperately for the doll. “What happened the night she died?” he asked.

Dr. Rosen drew in a deep breath and began to speak very rapidly, as if trying to get it all out before drawing in another one. “I brought the diploma, something to show her, something to remind her of her life. But when I saw her again, in that place, the way her hair was so wet with the rain, I couldn't imagine that it was Sarah at all. She was a ghost, a spirit waiting to die. She hardly spoke while I was there. She just looked at me while I tried to get her to come with me. I handed her the diploma, but she tossed it away. She kept holding to that doll instead. She even tried to feed it. That's when I grabbed it from her. She got it back and ran upstairs. I went up after her.” He stopped for a moment, lowering his voice when he began again. “She kept clutching to that doll while I kept trying to get her to hear me. Finally I pulled it away from her. She tried to get it back. That's when I threw it out the window.” His eyes opened wide as he stared piercingly into Corman's face. “She looked at me at that moment in a way no one ever had. Then she turned toward the window. I grabbed at her dress, but she pulled away. And then she was gone.” He bent over slightly as if a hand had pressed his head forward, readying it for the axe. “I knew she was dead,” he added quickly, his eyes focusing intently on Corman. “Are you a father?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know what I mean,” Dr. Rosen said. “That I didn't have to look, that no one had to tell me. I absolutely knew what had happened to my daughter.”

At that instant, Corman realized that there would be no book on Sarah Rosen, no exposure on film or otherwise. At the same moment, he saw Lucy in Sarah's place, standing at the window, staring down as Sarah had, as all daughters did, poised on the excruciating ledge while their fathers watched them helplessly, watched as they retreated further and further from their care until finally they could grasp no more of them than the small white button of a dress.

Corman walked home to his apartment very slowly, often stopping to peer into a shop window or, more often, into the yellowish interior of a bar. The old city was no more. Like all things held too dear, it had become a phantom. Now there was only Lucy. He felt her like a wreath of smoke around his head, dense, powerful, and yet beyond his grasp, a presence he could neither hold on to nor bat away, and as he continued toward home, he wondered if he would always have to live with her in this new way, love her at a distance, visit only on recommended days.

She was standing at the window when he came in and turned toward him slowly, her face very solemn. He felt himself quake and shiver, swallowed hard, and gained control.

“You got a call, Papa,” she said.

Corman pulled the camera bag from his shoulder and let it fall into the chair beside the door. “Who from?” he asked in a whisper.

“That home where Mr. Lazar is.”

Corman looked at her and waited.

Lucy hesitated a moment, then spoke. “He died, Papa,” she said tenderly. “They want to know what to do with him.”

Corman's thought came immediately. “Do with him?” he asked himself silently. “What could anyone ever do with such a man?”

CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR

T
HEY NEEDED
a suit to bury him in, as Corman found out early the next morning. As he dressed himself he tried to decide what would look best on Lazar. It was the kind of highly limited detail his mind could concentrate on, and he felt grateful for the way it kept everything else at bay.

“I guess there'll be a funeral,” Lucy said quietly as she strolled into the living room.

“Yes,” Corman said, “but not today. You can just hang around here. I have to get some things before they bury him.”

She rubbed her eyes wearily. “He was a nice man.”

“Yes, he was.”

“Remember when he gave me that toy typewriter?”

Corman nodded, pulled on his jacket and headed for the door.

“I still have it,” Lucy said as she followed behind him. “I don't play with it anymore.” She considered it for a moment. “But maybe I'll keep it anyway,” she said at last. “Because he was a nice man.”

Corman bent forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead, carefully resisting his need to pull her fiercely into his arms and rush away with her, as animals sometimes did when their young were at risk, holding them like tender morsels within their open mouths.

“See you this afternoon,” Lucy said as she opened the door for him.

He nodded crisply, then stepped into the hallway.

She drew him down to her again and kissed him very softly on his cheek. “ 'Bye,” she said as she slowly began to close the door.

He watched her disappear behind it as he usually did, but differently too, in the way he thought must inevitably accompany the dwindling of life, when everything counts more in number than degree, and each sensation asks how many times are left to see, hear, feel or taste it.

It was only a short walk from the Broadway to Lazar's apartment on West 44th Street. It was in a rundown five-story building where some of the older tenants, unable to live on Social Security, rented out their rooms for thirty minutes at a time to the small army of Eighth Avenue prostitutes who swarmed over the neighborhood. They were mostly old Broadway types, bit players in the long spectacle, who chatted casually on the stoop while their rooms were being used upstairs.

Corman rang Chico's buzzer and waited the few seconds it took for him to come up from his own basement apartment.

“I need to get into Mr. Lazar's apartment,” Corman told him.

“Sure, no problem,” Chico said. “How's he doing? He doing okay, or what?”

“He died.”

Chico's face remained oddly cheerful, despite the news. “My mother, the same. Sometimes, you know, it's the best thing.” He smiled quietly. “You his son, right?”

“Just a friend.”

“You the only one I ever see him with,” Chico said. “So I figure you was his son.”

“No. We worked together.”

Chico nodded quickly. “So, what you want? The key?”

“I need to get a suit to bury him in,” Corman explained.

“Yeah, sure, no problem,” Chico said hastily. He pulled a huge ring of keys from his pocket, pulled one off and handed it to Corman. “What's going to be with the apartment? You going to clean it out, or what?”

“I don't know.”

“It's decontrolled now, you know,” Chico said. “So, the land-lord, he's going to want to take it back, okay? I mean, right away.”

“He can have it tomorrow,” Corman said.

Chico looked unsure. “You sure that's okay? The old man, he didn't have nobody?”

“Nobody.”

“So, okay if we clean it out?” Chico asked. “You give me the okay to do it?”

“Yes.”

“That's good, then,” Chico said happily. He slapped Corman gently on the shoulder. “You take whatever you want. The rest, we'll dump it.”

Corman nodded quickly and made his way upstairs, then into the apartment.

It was a one-room apartment which overlooked the street. Long, dark blue curtains hung over a tangle of battered Venetian blinds. The sink was stained and rusty, the toilet ran incessantly, filling the air with a soft gurgling rattle. The bed sat in one corner, its covers rumpled, the torn sheets piled up along the floor beside it like a drift of faintly yellow snow. In a photograph, Corman realized as he walked to the window and raised the blinds, it would look like a stage designer's idea of a loser's apartment, a dusty little room in a pathetic has-been of a building full of people who had nothing left to turn a trick with but their beds.

He walked to the single, nearly empty closet at the back of the room. The door was already ajar, the upper hinge pulled nearly free from the wall so that it slumped to the right. There were two suits, five shirts and four pairs of trousers. A cracked leather belt hung from a wire hanger, along with a scattering of ties. Corman picked the dark blue one, then added a white shirt and a black suit. The world could hardly contain the vast irrelevancy of his shoes.

A large suitcase rested on the upper shelf of the closet, and as Corman pulled it forward, he felt its unexpected heaviness suddenly shift toward him, then stood by helplessly as it tumbled over the edge and slammed into the floor below, the top springing open as it fell, spilling hundreds of photographs in a wide, black-and-white wave across the bare, wooden floor.

Reflexively, he dropped to his knees and began sweeping the scattered pictures back into the gutted suitcase. At first he returned them in large handfuls, then slowly, one by one, taking a long, lingering moment to stare appreciatively at each of them. These were what the old man's soul had needed, and as Corman continued to look at them, staring longer and longer at each one, he knew that this was his way of paying homage to a life he'd only come to know in its final years. All through the morning and then into the afternoon, he sat on the floor and looked at the photographs Lazar had saved through his long career. While the air grew steadily darker, he peered at pictures of children playing in the park, women leaning from their windows, men slumping against parking meters, cars and brick walls, and over and over, in one picture after another, in a theme that seemed to have developed slowly throughout the old man's life, pictures of people huddled beneath awnings, in doorways, under the fluttering batlike wings of a thousand black umbrellas, but all of them staring out toward unseen open spaces, as if still searching for some break in the unrelenting rain. And as Corman returned the last picture to the suitcase, it struck him that this was what had been missing from Groton's apartment, that there'd been no photographs hanging from the walls or stuffed into his bag, not one picture after all those years to stand forever as something he did right.