The City When It Rains

by Thomas H. Cook

  “I didn’t know you were from South Dakota.”

  “I’m not,” Groton said. “But my brother is. At least, that’s where he lives now.” He shrugged. “We never were that close. But here. Well. There’s just … the way you feel … like nothing stuck. Through the whole thing, nothing.”

  Corman nodded.

  Groton stepped over to the bed and began tightening the last strap on the suitcase. “Anyway, that’s what I decided. I called Pike. I guess he couldn’t get in touch with you.”

  “I guess not.”

  “The shoot’s at Tavern on the Green,” Groton said matter-of-factly. “Be there by six. You’ll like it. They got all those little lights wrapped around the trees, little ones.” He drew the strap up very tightly, pulled the suitcase from the bed, and lowered it onto the floor. “That’s all I’m taking. The rest can go get fucked.”

  Corman’s eyes swept the room, taking in all Groton had decided to leave behind: the bed, a rickety chair or two, a gray metal desk, a calendar from a Brooklyn bank. The walls which surrounded them were dirty, but completely unadorned, as if in all the years he’d lived in the room, Groton had never bothered to lighten the atmosphere with even so much as a single dime store painting of a fuzzy kitten in balled-up blue twine.

  Groton smiled. “You need any of this stuff? You see something, take it. The landlord’ll just toss it.”

  Corman shook his head. “My place is already a little cluttered,” he said.

  Groton nodded quickly, walked to the front door, drew his raincoat from a small brass peg and pulled it on. “Well, good luck, Corman,” he said as he thrust out his hand.

  Corman didn’t take it. “I’ll go down with you.”

  They rode silently down the elevator and walked out onto the bustling sidewalk. For a moment, Groton stood very still, his hunched frame poised like a rumpled statue. “It’s not easy, leaving,” he said finally.

  “You’ll miss the city,” Corman said absently, without conviction.

  Groton looked at him irritably. “That’s not what I meant,” he snapped, then whirled around quickly, hailed a cab and disappeared into it as fully as if it were a faded yellow cloud.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE LITTLE WHITE LIGHTS were twinkling brightly at Tavern on the Green by the time Corman arrived. Clayton was already staring about anxiously, waiting for him.

  “Groton out again?” he asked as Corman came up to him.

  “He’s gone to South Dakota,” Corman told him. “Pike knows.”

  “And you’re the official replacement?” Clayton asked.

  Corman nodded.

  “So you took the job?”

  Corman shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “But I’m here for the night.”

  Clayton smiled pleasantly. “Good,” he said. “Then let’s get to work.”

  Corman started immediately, moving through the crowd as invisibly as he could. He shot little knots of tuxedos and evening dresses, tables of densely packed hors d’oeuvres, flower arrangements, the slightly overweight members of the classical quintet that played in a distant corner.

  As the minutes passed, the room grew increasingly more crowded until, toward eight, it was entirely filled. Corman had taken five rolls of film by then, and he was busily putting a sixth into his camera when he glanced up and saw Lexie standing only a few yards from him, her face smiling quietly through a clutter of shoulders, champagne glasses and gliding silver trays. He felt his legs go rubbery beneath him, his stomach empty, and began to shrink away, just as she glimpsed him suddenly, excused herself and made her way toward him through the crowd.

  “David,” she said quietly when she reached him. “To say the least, I didn’t expect …”

  “No, of course not,” Corman said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Corman lifted his camera and smiled lamely. “Filling in,” he said. “For the regular guy.”

  Lexie looked at him doubtfully. “I see.”

  Corman shrugged. “Just for the night.”

  She was dressed in a shimmering green dress, cut low, so that the rounded tops of her breasts shone toward him whitely, like two muted lights. She was incontestably beautiful, but there were distractions now—a diamond choker, a gold pendant—things so radiant she seemed lost within their glare.

  “You look very nice,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Lexie replied. “You look …”

  “The same,” Corman said quickly, helping her out.

  “Yes.”

  For a moment, Lexie’s eyes studied him with that quietly burning stare that peeled back his soul the way heat peeled back curls of liquefying paint.

  “As a matter of fact, I was just about to leave,” he told her. He smiled again, tried to look at ease, and shifted the subject away from himself. “Is Jeffrey here?”

  Lexie glanced about idly. “Somewhere in the room.”

  “I guess you know these people.”

  “People?”

  “Whoever this party’s for.”

  Lexie smiled indulgently. “It’s for the seals.”

  “Oh … the Seals. They live around here?”

  Lexie laughed. “Christ, Corman.”

  “What?”

  “In the ocean,” Lexie explained. “Those seals.”

  A quick frantic little burst of embarrassed laughter broke from him. “Oh, those seals.” He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  Her face softened. “Are you all right, David?”

  His face stiffened. “I’m fine.”

  The look came back. He could feel the heat from it sinking into his bones.

  “We have to talk, you know,” she said.

  Corman nodded.

  “Edgar said that he’d spoken to you,” Lexie added significantly.

  “Yes, he has,” Corman told her. “And you and I are supposed to talk tomorrow night, right?”

  “That’s right,” Lexie said. She smiled sweetly. “I’ll meet you at your apartment, if that’s all right.”

  Corman didn’t want her to see the apartment any more than Edgar had, but didn’t know how to prevent it without looking like a felon hiding evidence of his crime. “Okay,” he said.

  “Eight o’clock, I believe.”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  For a moment she watched him silently, her eyes turning oddly inward, as if they were watching something other than him, a movie playing in her mind.

  “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow night,” she said finally. A tiny smile fluttered onto her lips, clung there like a little girl holding to a liferope, then fell away. “Good night, then, David,” she said, turned and made her way back through the jungle of silk and satin until she seemed far, far away from him, beyond the rolling surf of even the most distant sea.

  He left Tavern on the Green an hour later, and by that time, he’d run into Jeffrey, too, exchanged empty pleasantries, and slunk away. It was a relief when Clayton had finally come by and dismissed him with a quick nod.

  The lights were still twinkling behind him as he headed downtown along Central Park West. For a moment he stood silently under the sheltering trees, stared back at them, then turned south again, making his way slowly down the cobblestone walkway that bordered the park. The rain had stopped, but large, isolated droplets still fell from the overhanging branches, splashing against his jacket or streaking past his face as he moved slowly under them. The traffic was very heavy, but there were only a few people along the edges of the park. Across the avenue, a tall slender man hurriedly walked an even more emaciated Airedale. A few yards away, a doorman slumped listlessly in a lighted vestibule, then pulled himself quickly to attention as an elevator door opened in the lobby behind him.

  At 65th Street, Corman crossed the avenue, then continued south. He walked on a few blocks, glanced back toward the park, then slowed immediately, finally coming to a full stop. He could see an old man sitting silently on one of the wet wooden benches. The white beard glimme
red slightly in the street light, and as Corman inched closer to the curb, he saw the face emerge slowly from the darkness, assuming the features he thought he recognized from his encounter in the chapel. There were the same bushy eyebrows and carefully manicured silver beard, the same dark, deep-set eyes with their long black lashes, but it was not Dr. Rosen, only some other lone figure, hunched in the rain. The resemblance held him nonetheless, and for a long time, Corman stood a few yards away, his eyes focused on the old man while he let the impulse build slowly, steadily, until he had no choice but to follow it.

  For an instant he couldn’t move but simply stood in the door, facing him. Then he drew in a deep breath, like a swimmer before a long dive, and plunged forward. “I was at Sarah’s … the photographer.”

  Dr. Rosen stood rigidly at his door, staring at him expressionlessly. The pen in his hand twitched gently, but everything else remained utterly still. The earlier rage was entirely gone, replaced by a strange resignation, the eyes settled, firm and untrembling. It was as if the explosion in the chapel had sounded the final note of his resistance. “You came earlier,” he said finally.

  “Yes.”

  “Posing as a graduate student.”

  Corman nodded.

  “Did you use your real name?” Dr. Rosen asked. “Corman, isn’t it?”

  “My real name, yes,” Corman said.

  Dr. Rosen’s face grew stoney, as if his body had suddenly turned into a slab of granite, solid, immobile, unimaginably old. “What do you want, Mr. Corman?” he asked.

  Corman realized that he had no precise answer to that question. For a moment he felt stymied. “The diploma,” he said finally, nodding toward the office. “The one they found with Sarah’s things. It came from your office.”

  Dr. Rosen’s gray face studied him with a concentration Corman remembered only in pictures of doomed romantic poets, driven, tormented, people caught within the throes of tragic fermentations.

  “What do you want?” Dr. Rosen asked again.

  “To talk about her.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to understand what happened.”

  Rosen shook his head. “You will never know what happened to Sarah.” He began to close the door slowly, with a strange courtliness, as if he were doing it with regret.

  Corman raised his hand to stop it. “The diploma,” he repeated. “It came from here.”

  Rosen eased the door forward again. “Yes, it did,” he whispered, lowering his head somewhat, his voice growing less robust and taking on the muffled quality of a whisper.

  “It still smelled of lemon oil,” Corman added. “So you must have brought it down with you that night.”

  Rosen looked at him plaintively, and with an expression of such overwhelming grief that Corman realized immediately that all his darkest ruminations about Rosen were entirely wrong. “To save her,” he said.

  The door stopped its forward progress as Dr. Rosen stepped back slightly, watching Corman intently, but with eyes that seemed battered into softness. “To save her,” he said quietly. “But she’s dead now, and nothing can be done about it.”

  The last words came in a gentle coda, and instantly Corman understood how much the sounds of things mattered to Dr. Rosen, how much he shaped each word with the intonations of his voice, giving each one the music called for by its meaning in the context of the sentence, pure as his daughter’s indecipherable imitations, her titanic striving to be like him.

  “She’s gone,” Dr. Rosen said. “Gone. So what’s the use of going into Sarah’s death?”

  “I want to know what happened,” Corman said. “Over the last week or so, I feel that I’ve sort of …”

  “Come to know her?” Rosen asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “What then?”

  “Come to know you,” Corman blurted before he could stop himself.

  Rosen looked at him, amazed. “Me?”

  “As a father,” Corman added. “How you tried to save her.”

  Dr. Rosen’s eyes studied him thoughtfully for a few seconds before he spoke again. “After the accident, the way her mother died …” He shook his head. “It’s how arbitrary things are. Random. You have to work within that frame, don’t you?”

  Corman said nothing.

  “That there is absolutely no pattern to anything,” Rosen said. “None at all.”

  Corman watched silently as Dr. Rosen drew in a long slow breath, then continued.

  “And so, you try to intervene,” Rosen said. “Rewrite the world, you might say. You have a daughter, and you try to save her. You try to teach her everything she needs to know. You try to control her experience. That’s all I ever wanted to do for Sarah.”

  She rose in Corman’s mind as he listened, the air surrounding her dense and lightless, the rain falling in long gray sheets as she stood at the window, the doll clutched to her breast.

  “She lived on my terms,” Dr. Rosen went on. His eyes took on a fierce wonderment. “She was a perfect daughter.” The wonderment deepened into amazement, intense, magical, a prophet in the midst of his promised transformation. “She heard every word I said, did everything I asked.”

  “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 ther
e 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?”