‘Not again. Still. They’re her best friends. I hope you took some breakfast,’ she said to Alison.
‘Now, Allie, honey, don’t you think it might be better if you—’
‘Oh please don’t start with a sermon, Josh. I can’t bear it so early in the day. If they want to take her, what’s the harm? I spoke to the woman about it on the phone last week. Mrs Blumenthal, I think. She sounded all right.’
Alison fumbled with her belt. How ironic that on her last morning, Wanda should be sticking up for her. She watched the belly heave under the white blouse as Wanda sighed and turned her smooth face up to the sun. There was still time to change her mind.
‘Well, stay close to them down there, anyway. It’s a huge place—easy to get lost.’ Josh reached up and patted the knapsack on her back. ‘What’ve you got in there, bricks?’
‘Just some books. I’m dropping them off at the library on the way.’
‘But the library’s closed on Sundays.’
‘They have a return box out front.’
‘Books, books.’ Josh shook his head, with the broad, silly grin. ‘Maybe you should slow down. At this rate there’ll be nothing left for you to read pretty soon. Why don’t you call from the station when you get in, and I’ll pick you up.’
‘Okay.’
‘Have a good time,’ Wanda said lazily. She yawned and stretched. Suddenly Alison wanted to put her arms around Wanda and kiss her good-bye. But it would arouse suspicion. There was a time, ages ago, when she used to kiss Wanda every morning before she left for school. She couldn’t remember when or how she had stopped. A person ought to be able to kiss her own mother without arousing suspicion.
‘Here’s two dollars extra,’ said Josh. ‘You might want to buy a hot dog or something.’
‘Thanks.’
When she was halfway down the front path he called, ‘Sure you don’t need a lift?’
‘It’s only a fifteen-minute walk.’
She waved once. As soon as she rounded the corner she began to run. They wouldn’t miss her for hours. Only around five or six o’clock would they begin to think...The air was sweet with honeysuckle and roses. She ran faster, as if she were being chased. As if she were chasing herself, and might catch up and drag herself back. A block before the station she stopped.
The trains ran every half hour. There was still plenty of time, enough to try once more. If he would change his mind and come, then she would return with him and Lettie and run away some other day. It was all up to him. If he wouldn’t, well, whatever happened would be his fault.
He looked as if he had just gotten out of bed. One cheek kept the pattern of the pillow’s creases, and his eyes were watery and vague. A wrinkled white pajama collar stuck out unevenly from the faded blue bathrobe. ‘Didn’t Lettie explain to you on the phone?’ Even his voice sounded older. Gravelly and hushed.
‘Yes. I just came for a minute. Can I come in?’
He stepped aside with an old man’s shuffle, old man’s maroon slippers on his feet. ‘It’s a bit of a mess.’
She had never seen him this way, his hair all matted, his face gray and drawn. This was how he looked in private. It was how he must have looked to Josh that night, when she had been too miserable to notice. No wonder Josh was so...
As she passed the kitchen she saw dirty dishes stacked in the sink and coffee grounds scattered on the counter. The curtains in the living room were still closed. Newspapers, empty glasses, and ashtrays with cigar butts rested on every surface. His shoes were on the floor near the couch, pointing outward, laces hanging limply over the sides. Through the open door to his bedroom she glimpsed the unmade bed, blankets and sheets all jumbled. There was a stale smell in the air.
‘Very homey, Max.’
‘I hate disorder. But...There’s my coffee perking. Do you want some? Oh, no, you wouldn’t be drinking coffee yet, would you?’
‘No, thanks. How’s your friend?’
‘Which friend?’
‘The one who got sick and was taken away in the ambulance.’
‘George. Hanging on. It got to his face this time, though. He’ll probably have trouble talking. They can’t tell yet how much of his brain was affected.’
‘That’s too bad. Is he a very old man?’
‘He’s certainly not a very young man if he’s here, is he? He would have been better off dead, if you ask me, but these days they keep people alive no matter what. It’s the accepted wisdom.’ He went into the kitchen.
She walked through the living room, brushing chairs and tables with her fingertips. When he returned with his coffee she cleared her throat and looked away. ‘I thought maybe you might change your mind about going today. As long as he’s not...dead or anything. You’d still have time to get dressed.’
‘Why don’t you take two friends instead, Alison? People your own age. You’ll find the place all right.’
‘I wanted to take you.’
He drank his coffee as if he hadn’t heard. So close that she could reach out and touch him, yet he was unreachable. Like hide and seek, and he had crept into a deep, secret place this time; she would never find him. She wanted to grab the cup out of his hands and throw it at him.
‘I think it’s mean of you not to come. You know I had it planned for weeks.’
‘I’m sorry. It can’t be helped.’
‘You’re not sorry,’ she burst out. ‘You don’t care at all! You don’t care anything about me.’ She waited, but nothing came. ‘What are you thinking, anyway? Why don’t you say something to me?’
He set down the cup. His hands were trembling. ‘I am thinking about trying to keep my temper so I don’t have another heart attack. That is all.’
‘Oh.’ She blushed with shame and fright. ‘I guess I always say the wrong thing.’
‘Not always.’
‘I’ll go.’
He was up immediately and had the door open for her.
‘Maybe I will take a friend. I have lots of friends, actually; I just never happened to tell you about them. Or maybe my father will come. My mother might even come too, if we drove and she didn’t have to go on the train.’
‘Fine. And if for some reason you can’t get rid of the tickets, let me know. I’ll pay you back for them.’
‘I wouldn’t do that. Good-bye, Max.’ She had to get out—her voice was shaking. ‘Say good-bye to Lettie for me.’
He smiled faintly. ‘Surely this isn’t adieu? I trust you’ll be seeing her pretty soon? At the movies, or whatever?’
She started down the hall and didn’t reply.
She bought a one-way ticket to New York City; finding a window seat, she placed her ticket in the slot in front, like everyone else. As they picked up speed she watched the river wind by way below, dotted with white sailboats so small and distant that they looked stationary: a photograph. It was hard to believe there were real people on them, maybe laughing and talking, out for the afternoon, or for the weekend, or forever. Some people lived on boats, Josh once told her, and stopped off at harbors for food and water. In thirty-five minutes she would be in the city, on her way to Madison Square Garden. She remembered it dimly from a circus of years ago, an odd-looking low white building with a broad border of concrete. And inside would be the real thing, not some dingy little mud show—scrawny animals in rusty cages, and shoddy equipment. Dilapidated trucks sloshing through the mud; a bunch of freaks and amateurs playing to pathetic dusty towns that didn’t know any better.
If you stared very hard at the sailboats on the river you could see them moving. Those people were unattached and free to go anywhere they pleased. They could be seen by strangers at a great distance, but they could not be reached. Like her. No one in the world knew exactly where she was at this moment.
CHAPTER 12
SUNDAY EVENING LETTIE WAS trying to persuade him to go downstairs for once and eat in the communal dining room. Talk to some new people, she urged; be distracted. No, he said. He didn’t care to look at dying
faces.
‘You should have gone with Alison if you like young faces.’ If it was men he wanted, fine, she persisted. There were several others besides George whom he would enjoy talking to. She even described a few of them in detail.
‘How come you know all these men so well?’
‘Because I’m interested. A person doesn’t have to act dead before they’re really dead.’
‘When I first met you you weren’t so full of wisdom. Now you’re coining proverbs right and left.’
‘I won’t say another word.’ She stalked off to his kitchen, where she began rummaging through the refrigerator and cabinets.
He followed her. ‘I don’t like people dying on me, that’s all.’
‘He’s not dead yet. How would you like a tuna salad? Or maybe we should order a pizza. There’s not much here.’
‘Tuna is okay with me. Oh, there it goes again.’ He left her to answer the phone. It was Alison’s father, courteous this time. He hoped Mr Fried remembered him? Ah, but exceedingly well. And might Alison be visiting him again, by any chance? With a diffident, embarrassed laugh. Certainly not. Once more, Max explained.
A brief, thick silence. He could near Markman draw in breath. ‘She never told us you weren’t going! Jesus Christ! I don’t know where the hell she is, then. She should have been back over an hour ago.’ His voice rising in pitch was an eerily familiar ascent. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have let her. Every time you’re involved...’ The voice floundered and crackled.
Max broke out in a sweat. He took the phone over to the couch and sat holding his head. Lettie came in from the kitchen and stood watching. ‘For Chrissake,’ he told Markman, ‘stop yelling and do something. Call the train station, for a start.’
‘I’ve done that already. I’ll go down there myself and find her. Did she say anything to you? Did she have any...plans for after?’
Plans? Ah! Did she have plans! He had never taken her chatter very seriously—a big mistake. A failure of attention. No, of perception. As with Lettie, there was more to be known than he had exerted himself to know. ‘She didn’t mention anything. But...she used to talk a lot about joining a circus. It could be—’
‘Joining a circus! If I weren’t almost out of my head I’d laugh. So that’s the sort of nonsense you’ve been feeding her. Is there anything else? Is she in trouble? I know she tells you things she won’t tell us.’
‘Trouble? You mean drugs? Boys?’ He could have laughed too. ‘Oh, come on. With her it wouldn’t be anything so commonplace. Look, I’ll go down there with you.’
‘What for?’
‘If she’s there, I’ll know better where to look.’
‘Okay. I’ll be over in ten minutes.’ Markman clicked off.
He could feel the energy speeding through him as though they had shot it into a vein. He darted into the bedroom and Lettie followed. ‘Where are my shoes?’
‘Max, you’re not well enough for this.’
‘I know.’ His heart beat fast when he bent over to tie the laces. He brushed his hair in three strokes; a quick glance in the mirror, and he grabbed up his wallet and keys and stuffed them in his pockets. Like he used to.
‘I haven’t seen you so lively in a long time.’
‘Nothing like a trip to the circus to pep you up.’ He hurried into the bathroom.
She handed him his cane when he came out. ‘I’ll go too.’
He stopped dashing and very softly laid his fingers on her cheek. ‘Oh, you don’t have to. You’ve had a bad enough month as it is.’
‘I’ll just go back and get my purse.’
He waited outside her door, tapping with a foot. The cane was in his fist but he wouldn’t need it tonight. The sluggish machine inside was turned up to peak intensity, whirring like a propeller, parts lost in the spinning rush. He could run for miles. Even fly. It was like stepping into the circle of light, those many years; all excitement and fear and cool control, so meshed you couldn’t unravel them, so tangy you could almost taste. The premonition that something transcendent—a spasm like love—was about to take place.
Lettie opened her door. She had put on the clogs that were so comfortable you couldn’t feel the ground beneath your feet.
‘I’m ready.’ She took his arm.
Crazy kid. They must have laughed her out of the building. And then? On those seedy streets, skinny prey to anything? He didn’t want to think about it. Because in the core of the whirring machine, supplying its brute energy, was a suspicion. Face it: he was implicated all right. He didn’t know why it should be, for surely he hadn’t wanted it, but if you lived among people you were implicated; what you wanted was irrelevant. Bumper cars, they all were, veering crazily, diverting each other’s courses. And whether you crashed or got crashed, laughed or screamed, you couldn’t get out of the action till the power was turned off. With Lettie, too, he had diverted a course, but then, Lettie had chosen it (hadn’t she? What the hell was choice anyway?). And Lettie could take care of herself. Couldn’t she? He held the door open for her as Markman’s car pulled up.
In the front with him was a hugely pregnant blond woman whose pretty face was etched with anxiety. Calm, Max imagined, it might have a sort of petulant charm. She had Alison’s big green eyes. The introductions were cursory and the silence, while they raced through town, dense and irritating as smog in the throat.
‘I don’t know, Wanda,’ Markman said when they hit the parkway. ‘Maybe you should have stayed home in case she gets back. She might need someone...Who knows what may have happened?’
‘How could I sit home alone and wait? The things going through my mind, the things I read in the papers! My baby!’
Max turned to Lettie. She wrinkled her brow in puzzlement; her lips curved in the subtlest of smiles. She put her hand over his, which was drumming on the seat between them.
‘Alison can take very good care of herself,’ Lettie said. ‘She seems very—uh—advanced for her age, in certain ways. An unusual child.’
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ her father replied. He was driving at least seventy miles an hour, zigzagging in and out of the left lane.
Her mother was crying. ‘Why does she always do these things to us? You never know what she’ll do next! Just when you think she’s settling down...’
Markman patted her knee. ‘Now don’t get hysterical, Wanda. She may be perfectly all right. There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation.’
‘Yes, maybe she stopped for something to eat,’ said Lettie. ‘Or to look around. She’s so curious about everything.’
Max said nothing. He pictured her crouched in a shadowy corner of a dressing room in her solar energy shirt and colored sneakers, her eyes softened to hazel and desperate, as he had seen them once.
‘And the way she is about you two,’ said Wanda, gulping down tears. ‘I mean, I’m sure you’re very fine people and have a lot to offer and all, but it doesn’t seem normal for a girl of thirteen.’ She swiveled awkwardly to face them. ‘I don’t mean anything personal. But it is a little funny, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a little funny,’ Max agreed.
‘I would like to know, Mr Fried, what is the special attraction? Besides the fact that you can juggle, okay, I understand that. I mean, why...What is it she can say to you that she can’t say to us?’
Here was his chance. He could do the righteous thing, return her back where she belonged, even give them a few tips. But he found himself clinging to those hours, almost too swiftly gone now, when she had appropriated his chair to interrogate him, for every story from his past offering a fantasy from her future—not a bad exchange, since the whole world dangled before her like a radiant bubble, though tantalizingly out of reach. Her voice on the phone in his dark hours had been so unripe with infinite longing. And the wispy look of her, half naked under his blankets. Buried treasure wrapped there, for all he knew. He had been unable to take off her shirt. He couldn’t betray her.
‘Nothing much, really. She eats
a lot, and chatters.’
‘I take her for ice cream sodas,’ Lettie volunteered.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ her father said.
‘Chatters,’ said Wanda. ‘She doesn’t chatter to me. I know she’s having a hard time adjusting to the idea of the baby, but still...’
‘That’s enough, Wanda,’ said Markman softly. ‘We don’t have to drag in everything.’
The quiet was worse. Markman turned on the news, and the very air around Max tensed for the horror story, the body, mangled...But there was only the price of gold, a terrorist on a plane to Cuba, the Vice-President back from a global tour. Weather, eternal. Warm, humid, hotter tomorrow. Degrees in Celsius—glad, at any rate, that he wouldn’t need to learn all those conversions.
As they swooped round the series of curves that brought them into the city, Lettie’s hand in his slid to and fro on the seat. The city air was heavy and damp, and it was twilight. Lights were going on. Lights from both sides of the river rippled on the water with a softness that made him forget, for a moment, their errand. The sun, a hot amber ball poised at the horizon above a dimming skyline of concrete cubes strangely mellowed in the hazy light, was about to sink behind the western shore. They sped past a park along the river, where picnicking families cooked over open grills. The smell of charcoaled chicken drifted into the car, and Max inhaled with a stir of hunger. Below, a rusty barge floated, leaving a slow wake, a ripple of shimmering lassitude. He pressed Lettie’s fingers, He looked at her bare arms, and want streamed through him. For her, in the flesh, and for so many things; a spring of wants, submerged, welled up. To have the kid back and lie on the grass in the cooling dusk like the picnickers and watch that amber sun slip down. All simple and all, perhaps, beyond him. But he let them stream unchecked, for the sole pleasure of such keen desire.
The car speeded up. The speed tugged against his growing lassitude, which echoed the foam behind the barge, uncurling now to blend into the river. Hurtling from lane to lane, they provoked a blare of horns. Max snapped alert, to feel the tension about him nearly palpable, drawn in taut lines like the electrical wires that laced the darkening sky. Lettie withdrew her hand and ran it over her face. The road narrowed.
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