Alfred shrugged. “The doctor keeps giving me the prescription.” He put the vial back in the drawer and closed it. “Sometimes it’s hard to sleep, so it’s for that, too. It’s been hard to sleep since getting back to New York.” Mary knelt down beside him and took a closer look. It was like a tree trunk, thick with bark and impenetrable. Next to it, the pale white of his good arm looked vulnerable, like it would be easily broken, quick to burn.
“Is it just your arm?” she asked, and quietly, his movements sure, he opened his shirt, pulled open the right side where the fire had taken a swipe at his chest, from his collarbone to the bottom of his rib cage. It wasn’t quite as bad as his arm, but it was there. She put her palm to it and felt his heart beating underneath.
“I started letters to you but I didn’t know what to say. I was trying to think of the perfect thing so that you’d agree to see me again. And then you showed up. You just showed up.”
Before he kissed her, he gripped her at the upper arms and put his forehead to hers. She closed her eyes, and the rough stubble of his chin and cheeks brushed up against the smooth skin of her neck as he breathed there for a moment, rested his head on her shoulder. She was tired, all of a sudden, and looking back over the twenty-six years since they met it seemed as if they never stopped, only worked and fought and went up and down stairs and opened and closed windows and counted their money at the table and fought again, and went out again, and once in a while they looked at each other, and talked, and laughed, and made love without rushing up to get somewhere after. Outside, a child shrieked, a woman shouted at him to hush. Alfred’s room had grown dark, and what had seemed stark and bare to her before now seemed merely simple, spare. Notes of Alfred played around the room, his razor on the edge of the sink, his boots topsy-turvy by the door.
“I’m sorry, Mary,” he said after a while.
“I’m sorry, too.”
TWENTY-FOUR
They spent the rest of the spring catching up. Alfred was driving for the Teamsters and had been selected for training on a motor truck. When he went to work he packed his medicine with the careful attention of a doctor administering to distant patients, fearful of leaving something important behind. Gone was the man who used to send chairs flying back when he stood. When he came home from his shift he rarely went out again after, unless Mary coaxed him to the market or out for a walk. She wrote to Mila to tell her she was safe and that she was sorry if Soper had harassed her after Mary left. She wanted to know if Soper had come for her, if he’d brought police or not, but she didn’t want to send Mila her new address, just in case Soper was monitoring the mail. “Is he allowed to do that?” Alfred asked, when Mary shared her worries.
“I don’t know if he’s allowed. But I know he would if he could.”
She considered going to the Department of Health to explain what had happened, but she knew that no one at the DOH would buy her argument that cooking and baking were different, and now, looking back, Mary admitted she didn’t buy it, either. But no one had gotten sick! Surely, they would have heard rumors at the bakery if Typhoid had broken out among their customers. But Soper would have warned every person at the DOH, and no one there would take her side. The testing would resume. She’d be taken back to North Brother. No, it was not worth the risk.
Their rooms were cheaper than the ones they’d shared on Thirty-Third Street, and Alfred’s wages covered the rent, but Mary wanted to work. She didn’t have the nerve to look into restaurants or bakeries in case Soper was looking for her everywhere, so she began taking in laundry. Their building was meant for single occupants only, and once in a while when she passed a group of neighbors at the mailboxes downstairs she heard them whisper about the couple that was flagrantly flouting the rules everyone else followed. He’d been injured, people heard. Had spent a year in the hospital. Where had she been, all that time? A man’s loneliness is a thing all women understand. An injured man. A working man. What time did he have for himself? Poor thing. But her—where had she come from? What was she after? He was liked, Alfred Briehof. He kept to himself, went about his business. Her? She was standoffish, and she had ideas about herself. Now she was going around mentioning to people that she took in laundry even though she knew full well that there were two other women on the block who also took in laundry. She was never grateful, people decided. Never. A woman could bring her family’s things to any one of the washwomen on the street, and so when she made a selection it was to be expected that the washwoman chosen might offer a cup of tea. A slice of cake. She might knock fifty cents off now and again. Not Mary. She never seemed to care, and if you implied that a shirt collar had not been scrubbed as clean as one would expect, considering the price charged, she struck a wide-legged stance and her face became terrifying.
• • •
Autumn arrived, and a cool mist settled over the city. Hanging over the side of Mary’s basket as she moved through the market were the moppy green heads of carrots, bunched and dirty. She selected potatoes—one for herself, one for Alfred—brushed dirt off their skins, guessed at the depth of the eyes and the black spots she’d carve out with the tip of her knife. Alfred was following her, looking blankly at the stalls, waiting for her to make selections. She cooked supper for herself and Alfred every night, and tried to make those meals as interesting as they could afford. When the Teamsters went on strike, Mary advertised her laundry services more widely, more urgently, and people responded. Her reputation grew. Women showed up with armloads of their husbands’ shirts and Mary stopped bothering to put away the ironing board at night. Alfred was tired now, always tired. He slept in the mornings. He slept in the afternoons. He took his medicine when he woke, and at lunch, and before dinner, and when it was time for bed. The strike ended, and the Teamsters won lunchtime wages. They won Christmas Day. Alfred went back to work.
It was a different kind of life than any they’d had before. There were days when Alfred didn’t feel well enough to drive, and had to take an extra dose of medicine, and they were together more than they were apart. Where before the small space inside their rooms might have pressed in on them, might have made them both as crazy as rabid dogs, now it calmed them. They each had their domains. Alfred stayed mostly in the bedroom, either sitting at the desk or lying on the bed, and Mary stayed mostly in the kitchen. When he came home from work he always went straight to the bedroom to rub his arm and chest with oil, administer the medicine that could be taken only by needle and syringe. When Mary looked in on him to tell him supper was ready, she usually found him curled on the bed, one hand balled under his chin, the other open, palm up, surrendered.
Sometimes he closed his eyes even while he was awake. The light bothered him, he said. Since the fire he had headaches. He had pain in his bowels. He had trouble staying warm. He felt dizzy. The medicine helped all that, but only temporarily.
One day in October 1912, he was driving a truck up to Riverdale when he fell asleep at the wheel and the truck went off the road. He was hauling brick for a stonemason, and though none of the brick was lost, and no one was injured, the company wanted to fire him. The Teamsters got him another job. It happened again—this time he was driving four thousand day-old chicks from Nyack, New York, to the Bronx—and they moved him again. Next time, they warned, he’d be getting a dispatch job. There was only so much they could do. He told them he was sure it would happen again, so they might as well find him the dispatch job, and after that, Mary noticed, he was even more distant, as if he’d lifted a hood over his head and stepped into a shadow.
• • •
On Christmas, they shared a roasted breast of goose and Mary read aloud from the newspaper. At the end of February 1913, Mary bought him a handsome gray wool overcoat to replace the ugly coat he’d bought for himself when he was in Minnesota. He wore the new one for the month and then she packed it away in mothballs for the following year. Spring came, and children appeared on the sidewalk like bulbs that ha
d been planted in the fall and burst through the earth overnight. They shouted and shrieked and threw their balls in the street and dodged traffic and spooked horses while Alfred stood by the window and listened.
Summer came, and on a Sunday in late July Mary convinced him to go with her to the pink granite halls of Pennsylvania Station, where they purchased two tickets to Long Island and spent the day at the beach. She packed a clean sheet for sitting on the sand, a picnic lunch. They walked along the rocks, carrying their shoes, until Alfred got tired. They napped on the sheet before heading back to Manhattan. On the way back to the city, they said how amazing it was that they’d never done that before, that they would certainly do it again before the summer was over. But then the summer became rainy, and when the sun came out again Mary pointed out that train tickets were dear, and then Alfred wasn’t feeling up to it, and next thing they knew it was autumn.
The leaves fell off the trees, and then came another winter, another new year. And then, in late February 1914, Alfred came back from Dr. Tropp’s office looking ashen. He went straight to the bedroom and shut the door.
“What happened?” Mary knocked. He ignored her. When she turned the knob he was standing at the window, hands on his hips.
“Nothing,” he said. “I can’t get prescriptions from him anymore. A new law.”
Mary frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Me, neither. He just said there’s a new law, and he can’t write maintenance prescriptions anymore. He said the government is going to check every one he writes now, and if they don’t like what they see they’ll take his license. He said from now on I’m to go downtown to a maintenance clinic on Eighth Street.”
“Well, that’s not so bad.”
“It’s a reduction clinic.”
“What does that mean? Will they give you something or won’t they?”
“They will . . .” Alfred trailed off. He put his finger to the glass of the window and drew a circle. Next to it he drew a square. “It’s for tapering off. For getting off the medicine entirely.”
“But does it hurt, Alfred? When the medicine wears off?”
He rubbed his arm. “I’m not sure.”
• • •
Toward the end of her life, when Mary had nothing to do except think about the things she’d done when she was still young, especially those months, when she was approaching the end of being young and beginning, finally, to be old, she wondered why she spent so much precious time trying to change things: trying to change herself and Alfred and the way they lived and what they thought and the things they had and the way they spoke to each other and the way they loved each other. Everything. Looking at the back of Alfred’s neck, she wanted him to shake off this news, assure her it would all be fine. She wanted him to forget about his medicine, shave himself, go to work, earn his paycheck, come with her to the market, talk with her. And maybe, it came to her years later, all he’d wanted from her was for her to put her hands on his shoulders, kiss him on the neck, tell him that no matter what, it would all work out in the end.
The clinic had cut him down on his very first visit and wanted him weaned entirely in a matter of six weeks. Mary went with him. It had been nearly two years since Soper had discovered her at the bakery, since she’d fled from the back door. She thought of him less and less as time wore on, and looking back at those years of dreading her check-ins, straining into a pot while a fresh-faced nurse made conversation, she wondered if she’d been insane to comply with all of it. She’d been tired, confused, scared, angry. At the clinic, the young physician ignored Alfred when he told him that it was impossible, that he couldn’t work without his medicine. The physician said that it wasn’t medicine anymore, not since his wounds had healed, that what he was now was a drug addict, not a patient. Alfred’s neck became mottled and angry, he balled his fists, but he didn’t say a word. No, he hadn’t been a patient in years. It wasn’t his fault, the physician admitted, but now that they knew more about all those drugs it was up to Alfred to get himself free of this noose that had been cast around his neck. Mary expected him to argue, to explain that his wounds still hurt at night, that he was in a different category altogether, but Alfred just set his jaw and walked out. When Mary got to the sidewalk, he was gone.
Here is where you should have done better, the distant Mary thought as she looked back on the Mary of this moment. Here is where you should have helped him more, used all that strength inside you to shield him from whatever it was he feared. The price of the drugs had increased with the new law, and later, when Alfred told her that he wouldn’t do it, he just couldn’t do it, it was selfishness that kept her silent. She liked this Alfred. They hadn’t fought in nearly two years. They sat at the table together for three meals a day and if he nodded off, occasionally, while she was talking to him, if he spent mornings staring out the window at the empty sidewalk across the street, it seemed a small price to pay for peace.
He told her that there were other places to buy the drugs. It would cost more, especially now, but it was the way things had to be. No way, Mary should have said. And to make her point, like she would have in the old days, she should have thrown what was left of his drugs in the fire and walked out. Instead she only nodded. “Where?”
The following morning, when he woke up before she did and pulled on a clean undershirt, she didn’t ask where he was going, or what time he’d be home.
Staying silent didn’t do her any good anyway. The peace of that time was ruined despite her decision not to stand up to him. Destroyed. Heroin was cheaper than morphine now, not as closely regulated, and he’d heard about a doctor on East Ninetieth Street who was quick to prescribe heroin for serious respiratory ailments. “Do you suffer from any respiratory ailments, Mr. Briehof?” the doctor asked when Alfred went to meet with him, his thumb fluttering the pages of his prescription pad. Alfred paid the man, and from the first instant he inhaled it he could tell it wasn’t quite the same as what he’d gotten before. Morphine, too. Everything was being cut, mixed with milk sugar, baking soda. Even the laudanum was being diluted with alcohol, table syrup, juice. He measured his own dosages but it was no good. Sometimes he slept whole days away, but there was no peace in sleep anymore. He tossed and raked at his pillow, and when Mary went to him she often found he’d soaked their sheets even though she’d as likely find him shivering, clutching himself like a child. He shit himself and even when he was drinking he had the basic human sense to apologize for something so filthy. Now he shit himself and said nothing and just tried to move away from it. People who came with their arms full of laundry stopped at their threshold, drew in their breath, said they’d come back another time. The Teamsters wrote a letter to say that they could not reinstate his membership until he paid back dues.
Here is where she should have left. And here again. And if not there, then here. Here. He would have snapped out of it if she’d left, would have paid attention, but still, she stayed, and tried to make more money, and whatever she made she handed to him. The laws got stricter and the drugs got more expensive every month.
When a neighbor on the fourth floor came home from the hospital, Mary distracted herself by bringing up a quiche and a loaf of freshly baked raisin bread. When the woman was strong enough to make her way downstairs, she stopped at Mary’s door to thank her, ask if she could make another one of those quiches for a friend. “I’ll pay you, of course,” she said, and something switched on in Mary. “Sure,” she responded, and named her price, almost as much as half a day of taking in laundry. One quiche. And instead of balking, the woman seemed grateful, told Mary it was her quiche that had given her strength.
She no longer had any fear that Soper was hiding around every corner, spying on her through a crack in the door. She imagined baking out of their small oven, lining up what she made on the sill. She let it be known that she could cook and deliver dishes, and it went around that she had a talent for it. She st
opped taking in laundry, and once, when Alfred was feeling well enough to keep her company in the kitchen, and cheerful enough to talk, he came up behind her and whispered that nowhere in the world was cozier than their tiny rooms when she had butter melting in a pan, when she tossed in a handful of chopped onion, diced carrots.
One evening he came home with a black eye and a busted lip, then was bad for days after that, wretching into bowls and eventually knocking over the bowls when he thrashed. Mary put on her best dress and went to see Dr. Tropp, intent on making him write a prescription like he had so many times before, but when she got to the office his sign was gone, the door locked. She went to the druggist, and he said it was impossible. His license would be taken away. There was a register now, and men came around to check his orders. The only thing for it was to go to the maintenance clinic, and when Mary explained that he’d already been, the druggist shrugged.
“But there are places,” she said to the man cooly. “There are places. You can’t expect me to believe there aren’t.”
“There are places,” the man said. “But you have to have money. And you have to have the stomach.”
“I have the stomach.”
The doctor on East Ninetieth Street had disappeared as suddenly and completely as Dr. Tropp, but they got the name of another doctor down on Spring Street. Alfred wanted to know the extent of every penny Mary had. She could tell by the way he was standing that he expected her to go wild, tell him it was none of his business. Instead, she went to the closet and together they counted everything. The pain in his stomach was too strong for him to make it downtown himself, so she put a little powder on her face and went on her own. She expected dark alleyways, locked doors, but instead she was shown a pleasant waiting room decorated with hanging plants and an oriental carpet, and after a while she was brought into a second bright, clean room, where a bearded man asked what exactly she needed. She told him what Alfred had been taking, he told her the price, and she counted out the money and slid it across the desk.
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