The Lightning Keeper (4 page)

It was, as Stephenson had said, only a machine, and after a few attempts at engaging the motor—attempts that provoked encouragement from Bigelow and Stephenson, and mirthless deprecation from MacEwan—Toma perceived the reciprocity between clutch and throttle, and the car lurched off through the snow to the delight of Flora Hanratty, who stood on the curb and clapped her hands. It is not unlike a horse, Toma thought, depressing the throttle and producing an impressive backfire. Very like a horse.

Although he had no experience in driving an automobile, he knew well how one should sound, and the Packard, making erratic progress on the slippery cobbles, sounded anemic. He dared not take his eyes from the street, for there was a heavy pedestrian traffic of workers bound for home or for the saloon, and their footing, too, was unsure. He put his hand out like a blind man, grazing the knobs and levers with chill fingers, careful to disturb nothing, trusting that the desired one would announce itself to him. It was then that he felt the touch of her hand guiding him to the lever that would advance the spark, for she had a keen memory of the sequence of MacEwan's ritual. The car leapt forward with a full-throated roar, causing a horse-drawn dray to veer off, and its driver hurled his oath after them.

Amos Bigelow, in the back seat, seemed so thoroughly absorbed in his reflections on the afternoon's business that he took no notice of the Packard's slewing and lurching, and his only advice was that the young
man should turn north on Fifth Avenue when they reached it, that being the surest route to Delmonico's and dinner. He settled back then, the collar of his coat turned high, and counted his wheels.

Toma was scarcely aware of the knots of pedestrians and the challenge of other vehicles. The cold stench of axle grease gave way, by degrees, to the perfume of the young woman, crouching, who fumbled with the control of the heater hanging beneath the dash on the passenger's side, and he was reminded, suddenly, of how she had smelled in that one moment of intimacy in the echoing baths of Herculaneum.

“What is this street, boy? Are we lost already?” Having bent forward to deliver this question to Toma, Amos Bigelow sat back again, knowing he could not hear any answer over the din of the motor.

“Tell him, please, that I must not leave my things. I cannot travel to…”

“To Beecher's Bridge.”

“…to Beecher's Bridge,” he said very slowly, “with these clothes only. We are almost at the place.”

They had now entered the tangle of streets west of Seventh Avenue, following the route that Toma took every evening from the Stephenson works on the East River across the tip of Manhattan to the place where he slept, a long narrow room heated only, in winter as in summer, by the bodies of other men sleeping in serried ranks.

Toma brought the car to the curb and Harriet's head was outlined by the glow of a lantern in the saloon window. Had her face changed? Or was it the light? The planes and angles were more defined, but the eyes, large and expressive, were still the dominant feature, and the unbroken line of her eyebrows reminded him, as it always had, of the look of his own people.

“This is your home?” she asked, looking at the buildings and briefly at the slack faces pressed to the glass of the saloon front. He smiled but did not answer.

“Please to wait. I have not many things, but I must speak with the landlady about the money. I would not have paid for the month if I had known.”

“I'll speak to Papa. Toma, why do those men stare at me so? I can feel their eyes, even though my back is turned to them. Have they never seen a woman before?”

He smiled again at the naïveté of her question. “They have seen many women. It is the automobile that confounds them. What is it doing in West Eleventh Street, they are asking themselves. Perhaps they are thinking this is some man of influence from Tammany Hall. You will wait here, please.”

He took his hands from the wheel, eased his feet from the pedals, was interested to note that the motor ran on imperturbably. He would leave it so: she would need the heat and if he did not have to restart this machine in the dark, so much the better. Already he was beginning to imagine how this thing worked, the gathering of fuel, air, electrical impulse; the sudden compression of volatile gas in the cylinder was like the clenching of muscle in his belly, and the explosion, over and over.

The hallway seemed narrower, the staircase more forbidding, and he nearly fell across the outstretched legs of the man who had been bedded down on the first landing for days, waiting for his place in one of the dormitories. You're a lucky man tonight, Toma said under his breath.

Toma knew that Mrs. Pringle, the warden of this place, would be in her kitchen, the door open a crack so that she could hear anything from the dormitories above and below that required her attention. There's only the one o' me, she was fond of saying when some problem was brought to her attention, and when the sun went down, after a long day of lugging her pails of disinfectant from one twilit room to another, the time for complaints, suggestions, and even conversation was over. Mr. Pringle, in Toma's experience, never left the apartment, but perhaps it was he who added the drop from the bottle to Mrs. Pringle's tea, and who closed the door by degrees upon her immobile seated bulk until by eight o'clock the door was shut fast, and the Italians and the Poles could murder one another in their beds for all she cared.

“Mrs. Pringle,” said Toma, directing his voice through the sliver of light between door and frame, “may I come in?”

It was Mr. Pringle who came to the door, spoke without opening it. “Mrs. Pringle is resting.”

“Sir, it is for my money. I must leave tonight, and I do not know when I can be coming back. My deposit is—”

“Mrs. Pringle is resting. Ye'll have to come back in the morning if
it's a question of money.” Before Toma could reply or move his foot, the door closed in his face.

Sounds from the stairwell: the rustling of silk, a sharp in-drawn breath, a murmured exclamation. “Sweet Mary mother of Jesus.” And now hurried footsteps on the stairs.

“Did I not tell you to stay? Women do not come here. Not even the others.”

“I wanted to see the place where you live, that is all. The man on the stairs surprised me, and I was not paying attention to where I stepped. You are not angry with me, I hope?”

He was not angry but ashamed, and so he said nothing.

“You are angry, then. You will not even look at me.”

“There is nothing to see here. It is simply the place where I sleep, that is all.”

Her eyes roamed the ochre walls and the cobwebbed recesses of the ceiling. “I wish I had seen your real home. It is not very clean here.” So saying, she gathered her skirt an inch higher and then added as an afterthought, “Will I be disturbing anyone else if I see where you sleep?”

He took her wrist and led her like a prisoner up the stairs and down another corridor, where two doors faced one another under a smoking lamp. He put his finger to his lips and opened the right-hand door.

The room stretched away left and right, so shallow that Harriet's skirt grazed the foot of the bed opposite the door once she had stepped inside. By the light from the hall she could see how many beds there were, and how closely set, and her imagination multiplied that number. In the far corner of the room in the deep shadows she could make out what appeared to be wide shelving, or platforms, each level punctuated by its row of boots. One of the boots moved. The door closed behind her and she was sightless, enveloped by the stale smell of the sleepers and their sounds: snoring, an unhealthy shallow cough, and an indistinct, disturbingly wet noise from that far corner of this human warehouse.

Toma found her hand and led her toward the front of the room, toward that odd bright shape, which turned out to be a tear in the
hanging cloth. He pulled the curtain to one side and the eddying snow reflected light onto the bed below the window. He knelt now to reach under the bed and spoke to the sleeper in a harsh whisper of unfamiliar sounds.

The sleeper opened his eyes without stirring, nodded once in agreement to whatever Toma had said, and demonstrated no curiosity about his guest. Turning to the window, he pulled the blanket over his head while Toma foraged under the bed. When he had his suitcase and an irregular bundle of his belongings ready at the foot of the bed, he removed from the wall a painting there, whose dark colors, shot with gold, had held Harriet's attention in the meantime. She put out her hand so that he would not have to carry three things at once. She did not look at the picture, but the image resonated in her eye, investing the darkness with its colors. She tucked it under her arm, leaving her hands free to hold her skirt tight to her body. A likeness to what? she wondered. Something not of this world.

When they had reached the door, when the sharp air of the street allowed her at last to take a proper breath, she asked: “Wasn't that your bed?”

He smiled without humor, startling her with the whiteness of his teeth: “It is my bed, and it is his bed also. In two hours my friend will go to his work, which is making steam. Tomorrow he will have to share it with him you met on the stairs. It is not so bad as you think. There are other lodgings where you pay for eight hours only. I have slept there too.”

She could think of no word or gesture, everything she had said or done having served only to further his humiliation, and so he finished the conversation for her. “You were wanting to know if this was my home. Now you see that it is not.”

 

T
HE SIMPLE FACT OF
turning north onto Fifth Avenue ignited in Amos Bigelow a slow fuse of conversation that flared up occasionally into loquacious monologue. Perhaps his good humor had to do with being pointed generally in the direction of home and the ironworks; perhaps it had to do with the anticipation of his dinner. An ordinary
lamp-lit street corner might prick his memory; he had a clear recollection of each landmark, even of some now vanished. The strangeness of the scene itself—silence, whiteness, and the thinning of all traffic—heightened his powers of observation and association, for the ordinary boundaries of this world were dissolving in the snow, each building or monument was released from obligation to its visible surroundings and submitted now to the influence of time or history as perceived by Amos Bigelow.

At the corner of Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, with the gaudy illumination of Madison Square Garden to the east lending a lurid tint to the snowfall, Amos Bigelow tapped Toma's shoulder and said: “Stop just here if you will.”

He gave the side window a swipe with his coat sleeve and pointed at the vast construction site on the northwest corner. Harriet leaned closer to Toma so that she could see better, put her hand carelessly, confidently, on his to balance herself. “What is that, Papa?”

“It is not much to look at now, and I've no idea what they've a mind to do, but there was a fine hotel, Mr. Astor's, standing there only a couple of years ago, and I remember it well because it was my father's favorite, and more than once I stayed there with him. Think of that, your grandfather and your father, when he wasn't even as old as you are now. And do you know, it's not even that I miss the hotel so much, though it seems a shame to be tearing down a perfectly good one. No, what I miss is what was here before that, Franconi's Hippodrome, which they tore down to make the hotel. I don't think there was ever a place like it, not that I heard anyway. Part circus you'd say, and a pleasure dome besides. Covered in canvas, it was, but painted too, and in the ring—a whole city block, it seemed, or most of it—the horses and riders would perform, sometimes just the one and sometimes dozens, or hundreds, performing in formations, almost like dancing, or a parade. And the costumes. Well, I never saw anything to beat it, and I've lived long enough to see a lot of strange and wonderful things. I don't know, maybe it's for the best that it's gone. And the music—why, they had two or three bands playing at the same time—and people, some of 'em very grand, and some just ordinary folk, walking around the gallery upstairs, eating oysters and drinking champagne, or beer if they wanted
it. It wasn't a bad place, d'you mind, but you could spend hours there just looking and not have anything to show for it at the end, and your money all spent. Ah well, I was young then and had all the time in the world. I'd like to see it again, though, and I can't say otherwise.” He drew a deep breath here and expelled a sigh that sealed the windows again in mist.

“And the painting, Papa?” she asked in a very loud voice over the noise of the motor. “What was the painting on the canvas, the roof of that place?”

“The painting? Oh, I don't remember rightly, just colors I think, but colors as you don't see every day. Well, I tell you what it was, it was like that place we saw with your mother, in Italy. What do you call it? Hercules?”

“Herculaneum. The baths at Herculaneum,” said Toma.

“That's the very place. Stones, they were, but the same colors as I think now. She loved that, your mother, though I'm sure she never saw the Hippodrome here, more's the pity. You, young man, is that where you come from?”

“No, sir, not from Herculaneum. But I was there with you.”

“So you were, so you were.”

Harriet, at the mention of Herculaneum, sat back in her own seat, her eyes fixed straight ahead at the trackless white of the avenue. She relinquished Toma's hand. They wondered, separately, at this sudden turn in the conversation.

“Well then, young man, I think we'd best drive on.”

The Packard moved away from the curb, and the snow had now reached a depth and consistency that caused the driving wheels to spin until they found the grit on the cobbles. Toma, sensitive to the limits of any machine, knew that their journey was nearly at an end. Bigelow felt it as well.

“A pity we haven't that weight of iron back here still. We might get all the way home and we did.”