Were they going to have to go on comforting the rocking man? Things were worse for him than Sonia knew. He had lost the person who had brought him up, who had felt emotionally responsible for him for as long as he could remember. He owed her so much and now he would never be able to pay her back. His grandmother died just two weeks before he finished his six-month probation period as an employee at the hospital. He was going to get benefits. She wouldn’t be there to see him leave every morning to go to a job with benefits. They send employees to college, he’d told her. First things first, he was going to find his daughter. Now his grandmother would never get to see his daughter, no longer a toddler any more but an eight-year-old, almost nine. He’d imagined showing the little girl his room, the room where he grew up, the room where you could still see the pencil marks his grandmother had made on the wall to chart his height. At ten he was already as tall as his grandmother. At thirty-eight he was back sleeping in the same room. He didn’t know whether he would be able to go on living in the Co-op City apartment and, if he couldn’t, he didn’t know where he was going to live.
Sonia McCray watched her mother propping up the man who didn’t wear a suit to his grandmother’s funeral.
‘Your grandma prob’ly outlive you, Lamont,’ a man called Numbers had once said to him back in Mid-Orange Correctional Facility. ‘Highly good chance, highly good! Nothin’ as against you, just statistics, understand? No offence meant, I’m talkin’ ‘bout the science of statistics as it pertains to an African American man of your raw data and general … geneology.’
‘Wouldn’t bother me if she did,’ Lamont had answered. Sonia watched this adult man trying to pull himself together as her grandfather, William McCray, stood tall and quietly thanked the minister. She was determined to spend more time with her grandfather but now she listened to her cousin Lamont clear his throat and try to speak.
‘Mrs Martinez, thank you for coming. Really appreciate it. She was very fond of you. Always said what a good neighbour you were. Always there for us. You remember my cousin, Michelle … from the old days?’ Sonia heard the man say. Lamont Williams was desperate for people to remember other people. If they didn’t, what did anything mean, what had anything been for?
The fourteen-year-old girl stood with her gloved hands in her pockets and looked around the cemetery, so many tall Christs in the north Bronx, all of them under-dressed for early winter. You could see them from the overpass. Car horns let off steam in the distance. How few people had come.
*
Lamont Williams was sitting on a long bench in a corridor on the ground floor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He’d been asked to wait for a moment before his scheduled appointment. A message had been passed on to him from his supervisor that the Deputy Head of Human Resources wished to see him. In just under two weeks his six-month probation period was due to expire. His grandmother had been buried only days earlier. He’d told his supervisor and D’Sean, a colleague. Was that what this was about? No, probably not. It probably had something to do with the necessary paperwork that had to be completed when he transferred from probationary employee to the category of permanent employee.
People in suits walked past Lamont. Who were they – doctors, nurses, physicians’ assistants? No, they couldn’t be. These people looked more like business types, fundraisers and administrators. Lamont considered how much non-medical effort went into running a hospital like this. He read the titles on people’s doors as well as on the strategically placed brochures. There were people who worked only in research, all different kinds of research. There were people who worked only in education; continuing medical education, continuing nursing education. There was someone in charge of PhD graduate education, someone in charge of post-doctoral training and even someone in charge of a high school outreach program. There was a library and there were administrators who had his name on file somewhere, probably on a computer somewhere; Lamont Williams, Building Services, on probation as part of a pilot program for ex-convicts. If the right people had known about his grandmother they might even have someone offer him grief counselling. That’s what his cousin Michelle had said.
Michelle was a social worker, a senior one, and she knew about that sort of thing. What did it mean, ‘grief counselling’? Do you tell a therapist what it’s like to lose someone you love? Lamont wondered. Do you lie on a couch? Does the hospital pay the therapist money to hear about the grief of a man from Building Services who had lost his grandmother? She was like a mother to him, always had been, the only ‘mother’ he’d ever really known. He hadn’t been able to sleep since finding her, not for more than a couple of hours at a time.
‘Do you have any other family?’
‘I have a daughter. She’s eight. I’m going to find her.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘I have a cousin. We were close as kids … drifted for a while but now … We’re in touch now … since my grandmother’s passing. We were real close as kids and it’s kind of funny that it’s taken the passing of my grandma … I don’t mean funny that way but –’
Lamont was woken from his daydream by an administrative assistant, a young woman who worked for the Deputy Head of Human Resources, Mr Juan Laviera.
‘Mr Laviera will see you now,’ she said without affect.
Mr Laviera had an office with a desk, a big chair for himself and two smaller chairs on the other side of the desk, one of which Lamont was invited to sit in. Lamont sneaked peeks at the photos of Mr Laviera and people in his life that had been placed around the office. From the other side of a door that seemed to lead to an adjoining office Lamont could hear the muffled sounds of a radio.
‘Mr Williams,’ said the Deputy Head of Human Resources, ‘you might have some idea why you’ve been asked to come here today. One of our patients died recently, Mr …’ Juan Laviera clicked the mouse on his desk and squinted at his computer terminal, ‘Mr Henryk Mandelbrot. Did you know Mr Mandelbrot before he came to us?’
‘Before he came to the hospital?’
‘Yes.’
‘No,’ Lamont answered.
‘It seems that after his passing his family members came to collect his possessions and they allege that something was missing. Do you know anything about that?’
All at once Lamont Williams understood why he had been asked to come down to see the Deputy Head of Human Resources. It had nothing to do with the preparation of the paperwork necessary upon his completion of his six months as a probationary employee and nothing to do with grief counselling.
‘I think I know where you goin’ with this,’ Lamont said quietly.
‘Where am I going with this?’
‘This is about the candleholder, the Jewish candleholder.’
‘Yes, the candelabrum. Do you know anything about this?’
‘They call it a menorah. That’s what he told me. Yeah, I know about it.’
‘Did you … I’m sorry, I have to ask you this, Mr Williams. Did … You don’t deny – ?’
‘I have it but I didn’t steal it.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying he gave it to me.’
‘The patient?’
‘Right. Mr Mandelbrot gave me it.’
‘He gave you it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘As … like a gift?’
‘Right.’
‘Would you excuse me a minute, Mr Williams?’
‘Sure.’
‘No, I mean, would you mind waiting outside for a moment?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
It was early afternoon and, unusually for him at that time, Adam Zignelik was not teaching or in his office or anywhere else on campus but some two and a half miles uptown in his Morningside Heights apartment waiting for a van to come and deliver the contents of boxes he had packed. The boxes contained his career to date. He had emptied out his office of all but a few items. There was room on the bookshelves for much of its contents now that Diana wasn’t there. Where the
hell was the van driver?
On the ground floor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Lamont Williams got up from Juan Laviera’s office as requested and walked outside to where he had waited before. He had closed the door to Mr Laviera’s office but it had not shut tight. From the hallway Lamont heard Mr Laviera knock on and then open the door to the adjacent office. From the tone of his interaction with its occupant, theirs was an easy relationship.
‘Sorry to bother you, Dan.’
‘No, what’s up?’
‘I got him waiting outside.’
Lamont could hear the radio playing louder now that the two doors were slightly ajar.
‘He says he didn’t do it, didn’t steal it. Says the old man gave it to him.’
Lamont looked at the name on the outside door of the office next door to the Deputy Head of Human Resources. It belonged to the Head of Human Resources, the man Mr Laviera was now talking to. It read, ‘Daniel Ehrlich, Head of Human Resources’. Where did Lamont know that name from? He used to go to school with a kid called Danny Ehrlich. It couldn’t be the same one.
‘The old man gave it to him … a menorah?’
‘That’s what he said.’
Lamont Williams sat out in the corridor. ‘The trick is not to hate yourself.’ That’s what he’d been told inside. ‘If you can manage not to hate yourself, then it won’t hurt to remember almost anything: your childhood, your parents, what you’ve done or what’s been done to you,’ he was told. He thought of this as he heard the radio playing softly from inside the office of the Head of Human Resources, a Mr Danny Ehrlich.
Lamont was looking at his hands, the hands that once took a prized toy, a birthday present from an uncle to a new friend’s home to show him the gift, hands that, when asked by an old friend, drove a van to a liquor store and waited outside while two other men spontaneously formed illegal intentions, hands that tried their hand at woodwork in Woodbourne Correctional Facility, hands that accepted a gift in the form of a silver candelabrum from an old white European man, hands that touched the cold forehead of his recently discovered dead grandmother, two hands fairly coordinated, appropriate in size for a man of his height and weight, hands unremarkable but for one characteristic never yet remarked upon – their innocence.
*
In the last gasps of the second half of the 1940s two men lay sleeping in different parts of a house on Sheridan Road, in Uptown Chicago. One of them, a father, was old enough to have been a grandfather; the other, a son, was still young enough to pass for a boy. There were areas of the country in which, no matter how old the young man got, he would only ever be seen as a boy. He had been to some of those places and he took what he’d seen into bed with him every night when he slept. It was unlikely that these two men, Henry Border and young Russell Ford, should be sleeping in the same house in mid-century Chicago but they were, and it was through their different connections to Russell’s mother, Callie Pearson, that this came about.
Henry Border tended to retire for the evening long after everyone else. He would sit alone in his study reading and making notes or listening to foreigners talking about terrible events on strands of wire. The study door would be closed and he would rub his eyes, he would close his eyes and sometimes he would dab at his eyes with a handkerchief that Russell’s mother, Callie, had laundered.
Then, quietly as he could, he would wash up in the bathroom and go to bed wearing only a nightshirt and a weight of lead on his chest that never shifted, even when he turned over. It had been this way since he’d visited the DP camps. The grandfather clock ticks downstairs. He takes off his watch and puts it on the dresser, turns out the bedside light and the familiar whispered question comes no sooner than his eyelids have closed. ‘What kind of a man abandons his wife to be tortured and murdered?’
Henry Border had a professional interest in ‘people in distress’. His ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’ hypothesis asserted that people in ‘distress’ will use adjectives and verbs in a different ratio to each other than will people who are not in ‘distress’. He had gone to Europe in search of distressed people to study. There were too many rooms in the house he shared for a time with his daughter, Russell Ford, Callie Pearson and her husband James Pearson, so the hallway was by necessity also too long. But it didn’t stretch to Europe.
Close to Russell’s bed in his room along the hall, so close that his hand could reach out from under the covers and touch it, was a worn leather satchel that had belonged to his father. Asleep in his bed Russell would suddenly grow cold from a sweat that announced the return of that hot Detroit Monday morning towards the end of the school year and he would see it all over again: his father being torn from the street car by strangers and being punched and hit and kicked and stomped on until he was bleeding, then unconscious, then dead, then no longer a dead man, no longer a deceased human but some wet and torn corpse lying on the roadside beside a leather satchel. And the scene visited him once a night several nights a week and sometimes, often, it could be heard from the other side of the door. But Henry Border, the psychologist with the special interest in distressed people, never once went to the young boy to find out what was wrong, let alone to offer him any comfort. His own nightmares deafened him to the moans from the nightmares in the other room.
From the bedroom along the hall that she shared with her husband, Callie Pearson however would hear her son’s distress. Her husband James Pearson, hearing it too, would put on a bathrobe and walk down the hall in the dark to his stepson’s room often only to notice someone else already at the door.
‘I got it, Mr Pearson,’ Elly Border would whisper, a glass of water in one hand. She’d learned what it was that Russell had witnessed in Detroit and now, like his mother and his stepfather, she too heard him every time.
*
When Danny Ehrlich was a boy his laid-back and slightly indulgent parents, both teachers, encouraged discussion of social and political issues at the dinner table not just with each other but also with their children. Danny’s relationship with them was close enough for him to want to inform them of anything of significance that happened to him as soon as he could. This was how it came about that when a new school friend visiting his place for the first time brought him what Danny thought was a gift, a quite outstanding gift, a Shogun Warrior action figure, he raced down the hallway of his family’s apartment to his mother in the kitchen to show her what his new friend had given him. But after the new friend had left to go home the Shogun Warrior action figure was never to be seen again in that apartment. Everyone in the Ehrlich home just assumed that the visiting friend had grown overly fond of his own gift and had stolen it back.
It was only close friends, family and his wife who called Danny Ehrlich ‘Danny’ now that he was a grown man. Professionally he was known as Dan Ehrlich, Head of Human Resources at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and he had been hoping to avoid this now unavoidable meeting with the adult version of the little boy who had visited his apartment that day, the little boy who had given him and then taken back the Shogun Warrior action figure. On the door side of the desk sat Lamont Williams, an ex-convict who had been given a chance to start his life afresh with a six-month probationary stint in Building Services as a janitor. The decision to begin an outreach program for appropriate newly released ex-convicts had been made by a subcommittee chosen by the hospital’s Board of Directors. Both Dan Ehrlich and Juan Laviera, the Deputy Head of Human Resources, had been on the subcommittee. Although the two men shared an easy working relationship that bordered on friendship, they had respectfully taken opposing sides on the question of whether the hospital should take on former convicts as probationary employees. Juan Laviera had been opposed to it. He had taken the view that the rehabilitation of former prisoners was not part of the hospital’s core mission and that it would only lead to problems they didn’t need.
‘Dan, believe me, a lot of guys I grew up with went that way and … well, you knew even back then that they were heade
d for trouble. We might’ve been kids but people … they don’t really change.’
Dan Ehrlich had taken the opposite view. He felt that people, some people at least, were capable of change and that they needed to be given a chance. And when they did change, it could be truly inspiring. It might be good for the morale of both the hospital staff and even some of the patients for the ex-cons working their six-month probations to feel part of a team effort, a community of carers of varying backgrounds all united in their attempts to help people with cancer. It would send out the right signals to the community about the hospital and, if they started off slowly, choosing one or two ex-prisoners at a time and very carefully, what was the worst that could happen? This was the worst that could happen.
Juan Laviera genuinely did not want to take an ‘I-told-you-so’ attitude but perhaps this theft of a dying man’s menorah could put an end to the experiment. He liked working with Dan Ehrlich, he liked his easy-going manner, and was worried that the apparent failure of the program would redound to Dan’s discredit. Surely now Dan should, and could without guilt, recommend that this, what he, Juan Laviera, had always regarded as a fraught program, be ended.
Opposite Lamont Williams, on the window side of the door with a desk that held photographs of his wife and twin daughters between them, sat Dan Ehrlich. This was the meeting his wife knew he had been dreading for days ever since the recently deceased patient’s family had complained that one of their loved one’s personal items, a silver menorah, had gone missing. The two men looked at each other and though both of them were equally close to certain that the man opposite him was the adult incarnation of a briefly adopted school friend, neither of them let on that they had a fair idea of the identity of the other. Instead they each waited for the other to bring it up and they each, for different reasons, wondered what good it would do them to bring it up now. After all, their association had ended as uncomfortably as their friendship had been brief.
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