Where the Dark Streets Go (9 page)

“Father McMahon has pointed out the inadmissibility of hearsay—that’s a nice word for it—hearsay on the street, in your home building, in the bar in question—hearsay. So all I can do for you, Mrs. Phelan, is ask a question. Without a lawyer, you don’t need to answer it. You were unfaithful to your husband: did he attack
you
for it?”

“He screwed me!” she shouted. “Yes, you bastards, so don’t try to give me that fag crap about Dan. Now get out of here and leave me alone.”

“I wish we could do that, but we can’t. We all have to wait—except Father, if he wishes to go—but we can pray the man lives to speak for himself.” Traynor stretched his legs, put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes.

McMahon stayed. Three hours in hell. The detectives smoked, Priscilla Phelan chain-smoked. The detectives talked about their families, about baseball, about war and draft dodgers, about the kids today, and their own kids, most of them ashamed to say their father was a cop. My old man was a cop and I was proud of it. Dropouts and freakouts, but nobody mentioned fallouts. Then word came that Phelan had been taken to the intensive-care ward. There was a good chance that he would live. The detectives matched coins to see which of them would take the first four-hour shift at his bedside.

McMahon went as far as the ward door with Mrs. Phelan. She would be able to look in now and then on the trussed and tubed and taped figure of the man who had not been allowed to die, and she would take up the vigil meanwhile on the hard bench among the other watchers at the swinging door between life and death. Here was the documentary to the night’s violence, and here among the watchers was a brotherhood of man that leapt all barriers, color, language, money. There was but one further reduction to the common denominator of humanity: the dead knew no prejudice.

After baptisms the next day, which was Sunday, Father McMahon commenced his search for the girl who had known Muller. Poverty and an Orthodox church, an old, forgotten church.

On Monday afternoon, having abandoned the classified phone book for an outdated map of the city, and Greek Orthodox for Russian or Ukrainian, he walked down from Tompkins Square to Fifth Street and then east. Poverty was assuredly served by the street market on Avenue B. Used shoes hung on stands in clusters, there were bins of battered pots and patched-up toys. Mickey Mouse T-shirts and lingerie, chipped glassware and gaudy pottery. The vendors looked like gypsies but they spoke a voluble Yiddish, and Spanish if they had to. There were fruit stands and vegetables with Lexington Avenue prices. A woman might haggle the price of a washcloth, but she counted out twelve cents for a pound of potatoes and never said a word. McMahon walked on, his hands in his pockets, his eyes to the windows which always measured a neighborhood for him: the state of the curtains (that Irish core in him again); there were not many curtains at all now, but where there were, there were often window boxes as well, and he could see the red bloom of geraniums stretching their growth toward the sun. He looked in on a youth center: there were more boys on the street than inside, and children clamoring over old cars, spittling the dust and making faces on the windshields. And the flower children were here, bearded and beaded, and baited by the squares. He stopped a girl with an infant strapped on her back and inquired if she knew of a Greek or Russian church nearby.

“I know where there’s a synagogue,” she said, pointing, “and the mission house on the corner. We’ve started a nursery school there. It’s cooperative and doesn’t cost much—if you know of anyone who wants to join.”

“I’ll remember,” he said, pleased, in slacks and sweater, to be taken for a native.

“He won’t like it much.” She gave a hoist to the child saddled on her back. “But he’ll get used to it. He’ll have to.”

McMahon knew by her speech, the modulation of her voice, that the home she had come from was far from a city slum.

“He looks pretty sophisticated to me,” McMahon said. And the child did, gazing solemnly around him for something worthy of his attention. That his nose leaked like a faucet seemed to disturb neither him nor his mother.

The girl, and she was only that, smiled broadly. “Man, he’s so sophisticated he won’t even talk.”

McMahon thought about that as he walked on, the sophistication of not talking. The voice of silence. Something was happening to him in these hours of search he stole from the day’s routine. He stole them chiefly from music, and therefore from himself. But walking the streets, he listened for another music, other sounds, and permitted unfamiliar thoughts to dangle in his mind: in a way, it was like listening for the voice of God instead of drowning it out with prayer. And save for the wine at the altar, he had not had a drink in two days.

St. Chrysostom Church stood out for him by its very inconspicuousness. A narrow building of gray stone, it hunched in the shadows of the soot-blackened fortress which was a public school built, according to the cornerstone, in 1896. McMahon tried the front door of the church. It was locked but he could hear voices within. He went to the side door. The smell of incense, to which he had thought himself inured, came at him like something alive rushing to get out the door.

There was no vestibule. The door opened directly into the church. Several older women and a few men arose from the benches along the walls just as he entered. The bearded Orthodox priest, fully robed, came from the sanctuary, censer in hand. He censed first the icons and then, one by one, each man and woman and McMahon too when he reached him. McMahon resisted the impulse to bow low in response as in the solemn high Mass of Rome. The priest moved on to those along the other wall. The church was lighted by small amber-glassed windows near the ceiling, and by the lamps hanging from the rafters on delicately wrought chains of varying lengths. Such had Rosenberg described from his conversations with Muller. The celebrant priest vanished from sight behind the gates of the sanctuary: ecumenism had not yet invaded this shrine of orthodoxy.

McMahon slipped out of the church. He wondered what the occasion was for the afternoon service. How little he knew of any calendar except his own. He had studied Greek in his seminary days, but the smattering of it left to him now was scarcely more than sufficed to tell him that the church inscription was in a different alphabet.

He began looking for “Nana Marie” on the hallway letter boxes of the building on the corner of Avenue A. A forlorn search, for while there were several names on most boxes, they were last names only. Mostly Spanish, some Slovak, one Irish name in the first two buildings. He stopped a square-faced sturdy policewoman, whose white belt and strap proclaimed her special duty at school crossings. She did not know anyone by the name of Nana Marie or Nim. By sight, maybe. She knew almost everyone by sight except the Puerto Ricans. Three quarters of her own people had moved away in the past ten years, respectable people with trades—bakers, upholsterers; her brother was a bricklayer who had moved to Staten Island. “Hunkies,” she said with a kind of pride. “That’s what they called us in the old days. We didn’t like it, but we didn’t beat up people for it, and the way this neighborhood used to be, you could eat off the street it was so clean.”

While she spoke McMahon saw the girl and recognized her even in the distance, the wide skirt and a jacket open, and an overstuffed bag at her waist, the strap to which she shifted from one shoulder to the other as she came. He liked her walk, the jauntiness of it.

The policewoman, seeing that she had lost his interest, moved on. McMahon called out his thanks but he dared not take his eyes from the girl for fear she might vanish into a building on the way. But she came on, saying a word here and there to the children, to a boy polishing a car. She stopped, turning into the building where McMahon waited on the stoop, with the uncertain look on her face of having seen him somewhere before.

“I’m Joseph McMahon,” he said. “Remember?”

She came up the steps. With a sidelong glance and a sly little smile, she said, “Hello, Joe.”

She slung the strap from her shoulder, disentangling it from her hair, and gave him the woven bag, taking for granted that he would carry it and follow her into the building. She opened the mailbox marked “Lavery.”

“I wondered who the Irishman was in this lot,” he said. “Miss or Mrs.?”

“Nim,” she said, and took two or three pieces of mail from the box.

“Nana Marie,” McMahon said.

“Just Nim.” She led him up one flight of dust-encrusted stairs after another. There were books in the bag and what he took to be a drawing pad.

“That’s quite a climb,” he said, waiting while she put her key in the lock of the front apartment on the top floor.

“Even for the cockroaches,” she said.

She opened the door on a room that was as bright as the halls were dingy, one huge room, the walls broken through, but pillars had been left and painted like barber poles. An easel stood alongside the front windows. A floor to ceiling rack contained many canvases standing on their sides. Everything was pin neat, although to be sure, everything was not much.

She took her bag from him and hung it on the back of the door. “Would you care for a drink?”

“No. No thank you. Why did you run away when I asked if you were Nim?”

“Why have you come after me?”

“I wanted to know more,” he said.

“About him?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think he’d have told you if he wanted you to know?”

“There wasn’t time. He died too soon.”

“Everybody does, except those who die too late and they’re already dead.”

“You’re a very judgmental young lady. That’s supposed to be my department.”

“I guess I am,” she said. “I don’t have many chairs. That’s the comfortable one. Please take it.” She motioned him toward a rattan rocker and then took off her jacket and hung it over the bag on the door hook.

He took the moment to look around the room, at the posters, the paintings. But he wanted more to look at her.

“I like the floor myself,” she said and sat on a rush mat, folded her legs and spread the wide skirt over them. “What did he tell you about me?”

“That once you said he would shake hands with the devil. Only that.”

She leaned her elbows on her knees and her chin on her folded hands. There were marks of trouble or just possibly of dissipation that should not have lined the face of one as young as he thought her to be. The eyes filled with sadness. She tried to throw it off. “Do you think he did? Go like that, I mean: ready for anything—or nothing?”

“Let me tell you what those few minutes were like,” McMahon said. “Sometimes I think I dreamt them, they’re so vivid, surrealistic in the way things stand out in a dream, the hands, the shadows, the sounds. The smell of the place: all the incense in that church across the street this afternoon won’t take the smell of that cellar from my memory. But it was what he said to me that makes connection, Miss Nim, that breaks through the dream. Or maybe strengthens it.” He rocked back in the chair and wondered just for an instant why he felt so right in being in it, in being where he was. Within the compass of his gaze was a painting in grays, browns and ocher, a cubistic city with shapes like half-lidded eyes cornered in the windows. “You’re a window-watcher, too,” he said and pointed to the picture.

“You don’t want to tell me what he said.”

“I’m holding back, amn’t I? I wonder why. It wasn’t so much
what
he had said either, but the sheer bravura of saying it at a time like that. He lived till he died. Do you know what I mean?”

She closed her eyes and nodded vehemently. It was what she had wanted to hear.

“You loved him, didn’t you?”

“There hasn’t been anyone since, and that’s not like me.” She gave a dry little laugh. “I wish I had his child, and that’s not like me either.”

“What is like you?”

She shook her head. “You were going to tell me…”

“This?” he said, indicating the room. “I’ve never gone into a house so clean, so neat.”

“That’s me on the outside,” she said. “Please tell me!”

“I was writing a sermon,” he said. “That’s how it begins and I’ve got to tell it that way, because he asked me what I was doing when the youngster came for me.”

“You were writing a sermon. What about? He’d want to know that too.”

“Brotherhood,” he said defensively, feeling that she also would have little affinity with sermons.

Her smile was flashing, brief. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s what religion is about,” McMahon said, even more defensively.

“I’d like to think so.” She drew a quick, deep breath. “Father McMahon was writing a sermon, and my poor runaway lover was dying in a stinking cellar.”

He told her then, re-creating the scene down to the smallest detail he could remember, from the words on the sidewalk to the way the man had turned his head in on himself to die.

At that picture, she covered her face and wept, letting the sobs come out as they would. McMahon got up and went to the east windows, avoiding the easel where it stood by the windows overlooking the church, roughly north. He walked softly on the bare red-painted floor. He could see the river, a barge coming into view as it passed the new housing complex between Avenue A and the Drive. On the tarred rooftop two stories below him were old whisky bottles, beer cans, and things he recognized as contraceptives just before she spoke.

“Don’t look down,” she said. “In this part of the city, we always look up. That’s where the sky is.”

“A little bit of heaven,” he murmured, turning back to her.

She blew her nose violently. “What?”

“That’s one of the monsignor’s favorite songs. A non sequitur, but it ran through my mind. I’ll explain.” He found himself then telling her in almost a stream of consciousness about his parish life, then about the tenement where Muller had lived and the Phelans, not about Mrs. Phelan’s confidences of course, but of the police inquisition and then at the end, because it relieved him to tell it, of the way he had betrayed Phelan, identifying him in the Village bar.

“A homosexual bar?” Her intuition was quick. Or perhaps it was his own naïveté.