When he came aboveground, he saw that the heavy clouds had made the street darker than it should be this early. He tightened his hold on his earnings. He carried the money in a worn knapsack someone had thrown away in a trash can at the 42nd Street Port Authority station, and now he tucked the knapsack under his coat. Folks knew him around his sister’s place; they might guess he was coming with some coins at the end of a day, and he didn’t want some junkie to jump him. The cops seemed to all be underground today, keeping warm, worrying about something that would probably never come to pass, leaving devils to harass folks up above.
His cheeks stung from the cold and then went numb as the wind screamed shrilly on its way down the tunnel of the street that emptied into the Hudson. The gale was at his back, at least, so it pushed him quickly toward Ruby’s. Between the station and Ruby’s, he saw only three men outside, warming their hands over a fire burning in an oil drum in front of Henry’s Restaurant Equipment and Supply Corp. A second later, he was at his destination. He pressed the bell, and Ruby’s voice came fast, as if she’d been waiting. “Who’s there?”
“Sonny.” He yelled to be heard above the wind. The door buzzed to signal that she’d unlocked it. He shoved it open and headed up the three flights and there she stood, waiting at the entrance to the apartment. “Get in here,” she said, wrapping him in a quick embrace and stepping back to pull him inside.
She held on to him for a long minute and then released him and stroked his cheek. He immediately felt the comfort of the indoor air. She held his cold hands between hers and rubbed them. “Sonny,” she said, “I knew it. I knew you’d come today.”
Sonny wasn’t sure what that meant, but he just grinned. “Well, here I be,” he said.
He saw Leo then, standing stiffly at the door to the kitchen. Leo was staring at Sonny’s shoes, though Sonny couldn’t guess why because they weren’t too bad—dirty, of course, but shoes were allowed to be. A little torn on the right insole, but otherwise just like new-from-the-store to Sonny’s eyes. A junkie had sold them to him for two dollars a week ago, though Sonny wouldn’t be telling Leo that. Ruby glanced back at Leo, and under her gaze, he attempted to smile at Sonny, but it more closely resembled a grimace.
“How’s business, Leo?” Sonny asked.
“Business is good, Sonny. Seems everybody’s in the mood to buy homes this month.”
Sonny nodded. He wanted to dislike Leo, but under the circumstances, he couldn’t. “You sure taking good care of my sister, Leo,” he said.
Ruby pulled Sonny’s arm. “You’re just in time for some dinner.”
Sonny followed Ruby into the kitchen. The dishwasher was open and partly full, the table mostly cleared. “Looks like you already ate here, Ruby,” Sonny said.
She reached to a shelf above her head to get a bowl. “Plenty waiting for you. I made Sunday beef stew, just like Momma used to make.”
“Hmm.” He nodded appreciatively. He shrugged out of his coat and set it on the chair next to him. Ruby was not the cook their momma had been. Still, it smelled good, and this was a pretty fancy meal for Ruby. Must have taken her some time.
She put a bowl before him. “Eat,” she said. She brought him two pieces of bread and grated some fresh ginger into a pot and added water and set it to boil. She didn’t talk much, but every now and then, she came over to squeeze his arm. She went to the cupboard and pulled out three candles and lit them, placing them carefully in the middle of the kitchen table. Then she sat down beside him. “So you remembered today,” she said.
“Today,” he said speculatively, noncommittally, staring deep into the stew in the bowl.
“It’s the anniversary.” Her voice was soft and expectant.
“Well, ain’t that right,” he said, her words jarring his memory. “Ain’t that right.” So that was why the candles and the stew. He reached out and patted her hand.
She rose abruptly. “I was looking through the old album,” she said. She disappeared for a moment and returned with a large, worn, dark-brown picture album. She opened it on the table in front of them. “Look. The three of us.”
Sonny leaned forward and peered. A posed black-and-white snapshot: Sonny and Ruby in front, their mother behind. Momma wore a dark, smooth-fitting dress and that silver cross of hers around her neck, while Ruby, still slightly taller than Sonny in those days, wore a short-sleeved dress that sprang out from her waist. Sonny had on a miniature suit. He would never have recognized himself. Ruby’s shy grin was pretty much the same, but otherwise she, too, was completely changed. Momma, though, looked just like Sonny always remembered her: lined forehead, smiling mouth, shoulders back. She always told Ruby and Sonny to carry themselves straight because once they started to bend over with their troubles, that was good as giving up; that meant the troubles were halfway to winning.
“This,” Sonny said, “is how we can know there’s an afterlife, just like Momma always said.”
Ruby tipped her head. “How do you mean?”
“Well, that little boy.” Sonny tapped his right pointer-finger on the tiny image of himself. “He dead. He don’t exist anymore. But me, I’m still here. Touch me. Go on.” Ruby laughed a little and squeezed Sonny’s arm. “So that’s what it’s like when we be dying, Ruby. Momma still exists, just she somewhere else right now.”
Ruby shook her head, a sad smile tugging at her lips. “Don’t know what I’d do without you, Sonny. You always do make me feel better.”
“She probably in the expanse of Heaven right now, kicking up her feet dancing,” Sonny said, warming to his subject. “Or belting some rambunctious boy.”
“Oh, Sonny.” Ruby poked his arm. “She never belted you.”
“The hell she didn’t.”
“If she did, you deserved it. You were wild in those days.” Ruby flipped a couple of pages and pointed to another picture of Sonny, about fifteen, clowning for the camera with a stern, forbidding expression. “Can’t you just see the mischief in that face?”
“Mischief” was a nice word for it. Both of them knew, after all, that crack had played a part in Sonny’s life turning out like it had, and crack surely qualified as more than mischief, though he’d never become a full-out addict and finally lost interest; turned out lucky that way.
This picture Sonny only glanced at, not really interested in a long look. He took another spoonful of the stew. What he remembered from those teenaged years was how narrow the world seemed, how limited to whatever block he and Ruby and Momma were living on, to the hard, thick walls of the neighborhood school, and to the friends who lived nearby and were as dissatisfied as he. There were three who didn’t make it, and another four or five who ended up in jail, but the rest were probably still trapped on those blocks, still fighting a dissatisfaction they were trying to ignore. Some of the old apartment buildings were close enough that he could walk there if he had to. But to his way of thinking, he’d ridden that subway right out of his hometown—even if it was just to another part of New York—and made good. Or good enough.
“You hold on to these memories, Ruby,” he said, “ ’cause you do it for all of us.”
He took one more sip of stew, wiped his mouth with the napkin Ruby had set before him, and reached into his coat to pull out the bag holding his day’s earnings. He dumped it on the kitchen table, and Ruby pushed aside the photo album and began helping him separate the coins from the bills, and then the quarters from the dimes, and so on. Leo came to stand at the door of the kitchen, watching as though he expected them to do a magic trick.
“Two hundred sixty-four dollars and thirty cents,” Ruby said when they finished. “Lordy, Sonny. That’s a good day’s work.”
Leo snorted, but they both ignored him.
“Put it with the rest, now,” Sonny said.
Ruby tilted her head and looked at him, silent for a moment. Then she stood up and poured him a cup of the ginger tea that she always insisted he drink. She thought it protected him from infection. And truth was, despite the
subway drafts and the viruses carried by commuters and other subway dwellers, he couldn’t remember last time he’d gotten sick. Ruby placed the tea before him, sat and leaned over the table. “Sonny,” she said, “you got quite a pile now. When are you going to use it to come in off the street?”
“Now, there’s the question,” said Leo, who hadn’t moved from the kitchen door.
Ruby ignored her husband. “Momma would like it to see you somewhere regular for the nights, somewhere warm-like,” she said.
“The irony never ceases to amaze me: I sell houses, and you’re homeless,” Leo said.
Ruby shot him a look over her shoulder but remained concentrated on Sonny, waiting for him to speak.
Sonny took a sip of the spicy tea before answering. Ruby made it strong, and it lit up his throat on the way down. “We already been down this crooked road, Ruby,” he said.
“I know, and I sat quiet on the question for a long time, but tonight, I gotta ask again, Sonny.”
Sonny thought back, must have been eight or ten years ago, when Ruby had insisted he see a head doctor, set up an appointment, and walked him to the office. She thought then that with a little mental health counseling, Sonny would choose to change his profession and lifestyle. He felt uncomfortable as soon as he stepped into that starchy office, but he walked up to the receptionist and announced, “I be doing this for Ruby.”
“Name, please,” the receptionist said.
“Sonny Hirt.” The receptionist, with a mole on right cheek and fingernails painted with a checked design, looked familiar. “I may know you,” he said. “You ever seen me on the subway?”
She glanced at him coolly. “Take a seat, Mr. Hirt. It’ll be a few minutes.”
He did sit then. He sat for about ten minutes, until that doctor’s waiting room began to feel like the principal’s office and he couldn’t stay anymore. Then he just walked out. He waited six months to go see Ruby again, to press home his point that she had to take him as he was.
“I got myself a home, Ruby,” Sonny said now. “Biggest home imaginable. Stretching through all five boroughs. I got places to sit and a bed comfortable enough, and . . . and I entertain a lot. . . .” He guffawed.
“If you got yourself a home, then why do you come here to shower?” Leo asked.
Ruby straightened up and turned fully toward her husband. “Leo,” she said, and there was a stripe of iron in her voice, “this is the anniversary of my momma’s death. Sonny and I are going to spend some time talking now. You’re welcome to sit with us, but you might be more comfortable seeing what’s on TV, the way you usually do.”
Leo shifted his weight without answering at first. “Guess you’re right,” he finally said.
She watched him leave and then turned back to Sonny. He saw more of Momma in her worn expression than he ever had before. “You know, I was sitting here looking at these pictures, all the way from when we were babies, Sonny, and seeing all the love in Momma’s face. You can see how proud she is. And then I wonder, what went wrong? What went wrong, Sonny?”
Sonny looked directly at her eyes, which were starting to fill, and he had to stop that or Leo might run in here and accuse Sonny of making his wife cry. It had happened like that before.
“Nothin’ wrong,” he said, though he knew that wasn’t enough to put an end to it.
“Oh, Sonny.” Ruby stroked the top of the kitchen table with her palm. “No matter how I’ve tried to change it, you’re living on the streets, and you know that would upset Momma. And me, I got a home and I got Leo, but . . . but it wasn’t what I was expecting.”
Sonny ran his finger around the rim of his cup. “I know you be holding these questions tight in your head—they’re good questions, Ruby, about the course of life and all,” he said. “But you got to remember. You got an everyday man. That’s something Momma didn’t have. And you got yourself what else we never did, when we were little. These walls around you that you can count on. That ain’t nothing, so with all your worrying, don’t forget that. Remember all those times we had to be moving, a block over or to the end of the street, trying to make it in places that each one be feeling smaller and dirtier than the one before? Momma was always struggling. She’d be pleased and proud to see you not struggling, Ruby.”
“Not that way, at least,” she said.
“Not that way,” he agreed. He took another sip of her tea and then went on, “And about me, well, I’m the happiest guy in the world.”
She laughed. “In the world, is it?”
“I got somethin’ to judge that by, too, Ruby, ’cause every day I see hundreds of people. You know how it is with me: I can walk into a place and feel a body. I walk in here and feel you wanting for more with Leo, for instance. With them folks brushing by me, or reaching to put a coin in my hand, I’m feeling some of the same. They all be longing for something. A steady diet of longing, Ruby, well, that drives a person to the needle or the gun. Me, looks like from the outside I got less, but I’m not longing for more, and there’s a freedom in that. I don’t know why, and I’m not trying to brag on it. But I’m free in a way Momma never was, and I think she’d be full glad for it. For me, it’s still a plenty good life.”
“Listen to you,” Ruby said, and her face was a bit lighter now, as if her cheekbones had risen half an inch and the skin beneath them had magically tightened. “Talking the way you do, like a subway philosopher.” She reached out to tug playfully on his right ear. “You know, you could have gotten married, quite a few times.”
He grinned at her. “You saying it’s too late now?”
Ruby laughed. “Lord, no. We clean you up a bit, maybe a blue silk tie, and you’re still a catch.” Then she gestured out the kitchen window. “Stay here tonight at least. It’s bitter cold out there.”
He glanced toward the kitchen door, which led to the living room and its sound of the television’s canned laughter. Ruby followed his gaze.
“Oh, him,” she said. “He don’t understand, Sonny. Don’t let him worry you.”
For a moment, Sonny considered spending the night on Ruby’s couch, resting his head on a real pillow. He’d taken her up on the offer a few times over the years. The night he got rolled in the Times Square station, for instance. They sliced his neck near the jawline, yanked back his arm, and bloodied his eye for the love of about twenty-two bucks. He made it to Ruby’s and spent close to a week on her couch. He was certainly thankful for Ruby. But tonight he felt loaded with optimism and ready to go.
“Leaving my earnings with you, Ruby, it’s saving me a pile of worry,” he said, “and I’m thinking I’ll likely be back with more tomorrow night, because tomorrow’s going to be another good day for Mr. Sonny. I feel it. But now I’m thinking, with your blessing, I’ll just be getting a shower and shoving on.”
Ruby looked down at her hands and straightened her fingers as if studying her nails. “Even though it’s Momma’s anniversary?” she asked.
“Even so.”
She shook her head, but when she met his gaze, she was smiling softly. “You’re a hardheaded man,” she said. “I’ll go get you a fresh towel.” At the kitchen door, she turned back to him. “Thank you, Sonny,” she said. “For coming tonight. Wouldn’t have been the same without you.”
“Ruby,” he said, full of tenderness. There weren’t many around to praise Sonny for meeting family obligations. He clenched his fist lightly, kissed the top of it, and blew it in the direction of his sister.
NEW YORK: 6:25 P.M.
MECCA: 2:25 A.M.
Jake had been consumed by trying to figure out exactly how to present the facts to Carol so she wouldn’t get too upset and they could logically discuss what to do next, and because of this he hadn’t given a thought to what it might feel like to be standing outside his old building until he was there. It was odd that in all this time, she’d never moved and even odder to think that he could have continued coming here every evening after work forever. In that case, this would just be an evening lik
e any other instead of an evening that marked the first time he’d been here in, what? Fifteen years? In this other, no-divorce reality, they might be upstairs watching the news together, having already talked through what to do about Jonas, or they might be bumping hips in the kitchen, making a cheese-and-mushroom omelet to share.
Probably romanticized visions, all, but how could he be anything but romantic standing in front of the building that had contained him during the most hopeful days of his life? The name over the buzzer still combined hers and his. Carol Meitzner. She’d never changed it back to her maiden name, and that moved him in a way that he suspected it probably should not. She would say even noticing was a sign of his self-involvement, but she was still the only woman he’d ever given his name to—or ever would, he suspected now—and he had to admit he felt pleased that she’d kept it. He thought about ringing the buzzer in their code pattern: three short and one long. That game had enabled them to skip the step of pressing the intercom button and calling, “Yes?” Before Jonas, it allowed one to greet the other naked, if they wanted, because the unspoken rule was that you used the code only if you were coming up alone.
But if he used the code, she might discover how tightly he still clung to old dreams, and consider him pathetic. Or he might discover she’d forgotten it, which would feel—just wrong.
Whatever. It was too cold to be out here musing, so he leaned on the buzzer, waited a second, and then gave it a last short tap for good measure.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” Jake said, and she buzzed him in.
It remained a nice building, well maintained, he noticed as he got into the elevator and pushed the button for the eleventh floor. The aroma of spaghetti sauce clung to the elevator just as it had when he’d lived here.
She was waiting for him in the hallway when the elevator door opened. Still slender, with hair that hung to her shoulders. He took in these details even though he knew what she looked like—Jonas showed him photographs every so often.
31 Hours Page 10