“I’ll get some candles.”
“What floor is your office on?”
“The thirty-second.”
“You’re going to walk up thirty-two floors?” Gorham asked. Maggie seemed to hesitate. “I guess this is how firms like Branch & Cabell test the commitment of their associates.”
“Very funny,” she said drily.
They drank their coffee. People passing in the street told them that every light in the city was out. Fifteen minutes went by and then Juan and Janet said they thought they’d be getting back. After Gorham and Juan had insisted they split the check between them, and Maggie had thanked Gorham, they all came out onto the sidewalk, and Juan and Janet turned northward.
“So,” Gorham said, “are you really going to your office?”
Maggie stared south at the total blackness of Midtown. “I need to. But I guess not.”
“Suggestion. We walk down Park toward my apartment, which is in the Seventies. If the lights come on, you can proceed. If not, I will give you a drink and then walk you safely home. Is that a good deal?”
“You are suggesting I enter a darkened building with a man I hardly know?”
“A Park Avenue co-op. One of the best.”
“When has that ever protected a lady?”
“Never, as far as I know.”
“Just a drink. You have candles? I’m not sitting in the dark.”
“You have my word.”
“What floor? The elevator won’t be working.”
“Third.”
Twenty minutes later, she started laughing. “You said you were on the third floor.”
“No I didn’t, I said fifth. We’re almost there. Look.” He pointed the flashlight the doorman had given him. “Just ahead.”
When they got into the apartment, he put her in the living room and returned a few moments later with a pair of handsome silver candlesticks. Placing these on a table and lighting them, he then went to the closet near the dining room and pulled out every one of the large number of silver candlesticks that Charlie had inherited from his mother. Soon the hall, kitchen, living room and dining room were filled with bright candlelight. Maggie sat on the sofa watching him.
“Nice apartment.”
“Thank you. I inherited it. What would you like to drink?”
“Red wine.” In the candlelight, Maggie’s red hair took on a magical glow. Her face looked softer. Her manner seemed to relax a little, too. “Maybe you could whip up a little soufflé.”
“I’m a terrible cook.”
She got up and had a look around while he got the wine. Then she sat down, cradling the wine glass thoughtfully.
“So,” she said with a smile, “this is your technique, is it? You invite the girl round for a drink, so she can see the beautiful apartment. Then you take her out for dinner telling her that you’re too helpless to cook. By this time, she has decided that you and your apartment need her tender loving care.”
“Absolutely inaccurate. If true, I’d be married by now.”
“Poor defense.”
They talked very easily. He told her how he’d always planned to live in the city since he was a little boy, and asked her why she had come there.
“Actually, it was my brother. He lives down in the Village, and one Sunday he took me out, and we walked into Soho. This was early in ’73, when the World Trade Center towers had recently been completed. It was an overcast morning, but the sun was trying to break through the clouds. And there was this great, gray tower in the sky below Soho, kind of grainy, and as the sunlight caught it, the tower seemed to change its texture. It was one of the most magical moments in my life. That’s when I decided I had to come to New York.”
“I thought you didn’t like that kind of architecture. The international style.”
“I usually don’t. But the towers are different somehow. It’s the surface I guess, the play of the light.”
“Is your brother married?”
“No. Actually, he’s gay.” She paused. “My parents don’t know.”
“That must be difficult. When did you find out?”
“Eight years ago. Martin and I are very close, and he told me. That was 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots after the police raided that gay bar in the Village. I was still at school.”
“Isn’t it time he told your parents?”
“Yes, but it won’t be easy. It’s going to be a big shock to Dad, because Martin’s the only son, and Dad’s relying on him to carry on the family name. Martin has to tell them sooner or later, but I’d better be around when he does. Everybody’s going to need me. Especially Martin.” She smiled. “I’m always there for my brother.”
Gorham nodded. There was more to this attractive lawyer than he’d guessed.
“The family’s a powerful thing. I feel this huge responsibility to restore my family to what it used to be, but I have to admit that I chose it. My father never did. Do you have anything like that?”
“I don’t feel a duty to the past, but I do feel a duty toward myself. My mother was always very strong about that. She was forever telling me I could be anything I want, and that I should have a career. Get married, she said, but never be dependent on a husband. She’s a schoolteacher.”
“Has there been friction between her and your father?”
“No, they’re devoted to each other. It’s just what she believes in.”
“I know quite a few women lawyers who did really well, but then stopped working when they had children.”
“Not this girl.”
“You think you can have it all?”
“Do it all, have it all. Sure. It’s an article of faith.”
“It may not be easy.”
“Good organization will be critical—I’m a great organizer. But I’m afraid I’d be a terrible corporate wife.”
“You’d better marry a lawyer, then. Someone who understands what you have to do.”
She shook her head. “No way.”
“Why?”
“Competition. There’s always going to be competition in any profession. Somebody’s going to win and somebody’s going to lose. Put that in a marriage and I think it would be too difficult.”
“You don’t intend to lose?”
“Do you?”
“I guess not,” said Gorham. “So what’s your plan?”
“No plan. Just hope I meet Mr. Right. Someone who thinks life’s an adventure. Someone who wants to keep on growing—professionally and personally.”
Gorham considered a while. This lawyer was quite a challenge.
“What did you think of my friend Juan? You seemed to be noncommittal after he gave the big speech about the Young Lords and the Panthers.”
“No, I was just thinking about what he said. I thought he was quite admirable actually.”
Gorham nodded. He’d met plenty of women in New York who wanted successful careers. But in Maggie he sensed not only intelligence and determination, but a warmth that he found attractive. Behind her lawyer’s caution, he realized, there was also a free spirit.
They were just sitting quietly when the telephone rang.
“Hi, Gorham.” It was Juan. “Have you seen what’s going on?”
“How do you mean?”
“I guess it’s quiet down there on Park.”
“Pretty much.”
“Well, stay indoors, buddy. I discovered what happened, by the way. Lightning strikes destroyed some of the power grid—they have lights in New Jersey, but almost the entire five boroughs are down. Things are heating up in El Barrio, and if the lights don’t come on soon, there’s going to be a lot of action in Harlem tonight. I already saw one store broken into just up the street.”
“You mean there’s looting?”
“Of course there’s looting. The stores are full of things people want, and nobody can see what’s going on.” His voice sounded almost cheerful about it. “Gorham, if you had a bunch of kids and no money, you’d be looting too. Anyway, I just wan
ted to tell you to stay indoors. This could spread downtown as well, the way things are looking.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Well, I may go out and take a look. But this is home territory for me, if you know what I mean.”
“Stay out of harm’s way, Juan.”
“Don’t worry, Gorham, I will.”
Gorham hung up, and told Maggie what Juan had said.
“Maybe you’d better stay here,” he said. “There’s a spare bedroom.”
She gave him a cynical look. “Nice try.”
In normal circumstances, he supposed he might have made some careful moves to see which way the evening would go. He was starting to get really interested in Maggie, but now wasn’t the time.
“No,” he said quietly, “much as I like your company, Maggie, I wasn’t trying to make a move. What I am going to do, though, is take you safely to your door in a little while. If Juan thinks it could get rough out there, I’m not taking any chances.”
“Okay. That’s nice of you.”
They talked for a short while after that. He asked if he could give her a call, and she said yes, and gave him her number. Then he said he’d take her home. Before doing so he gave Juan a call to find out the latest, but there was no reply.
There weren’t any taxis on Park, so they started to walk up to Eighty-sixth. Everything was dark, and quiet, but staring up the wide avenue, they could see faint glows that suggested fires. They walked together without speaking, but when they got to Eighty-fourth, Maggie broke the silence.
“Something on your mind?”
“It’s nothing. Kind of stupid.”
“Let me guess. You were worried when Juan didn’t pick up.”
He turned to her in the darkness. He couldn’t really see her face.
“Actually, I was. Which is absurd. He knows El Barrio like the back of his hand.”
“Where does he live?”
“Right on Ninety-sixth and Lexington. It’s actually a doorman building.”
“After you leave me safe at Eighty-sixth, you’re going to go up to his place, aren’t you?”
“I was thinking of it, actually.”
“So.” She linked her arm in his. “Let’s go up there together.”
“You can’t come.”
“You can’t stop me.”
He looked at her in astonishment. “You are a strange woman, Miss O’Donnell.”
“You better believe it.”
When they got to the Ninety-sixth Street crossing, they had a view over a whole section of Spanish Harlem. The streets were quiet for the moment, but they could see several fires. They walked swiftly along to Juan’s building. The doorman had shut the door, but after shining a flashlight to inspect them, he opened it, and Gorham explained his mission.
“Mr. Campos didn’t go out again, sir, I can tell you that.” Gorham expressed relief. “Did you come here to visit him once before?” the doorman asked. Gorham replied that he had. “Well”—the doorman evidently decided that Gorham and Maggie looked respectable—“some of the tenants went up on the roof. He may be up there. The intercom isn’t working, but I can telephone his number if you have it, just in case he came back down.”
This time Juan picked up. He was amazed to find that Gorham was at his building.
“I thought you might be hanging out with the pretty redhead.”
“She’s with me.”
“You want to come up on the roof? There’s a bunch of us up there, and we have beer. You’ll have to walk up a dozen floors.”
Gorham relayed the invitation to Maggie.
“We accept,” she said.
There were quite a few people up on the roof. There was a good view over sections of Harlem; part of the skyline of Brooklyn, to the east, was also visible; and all over the area, fires had broken out.
The sound of fire engine sirens echoed across the night. After a while, from a few blocks up Lexington, there was a screech of tires followed by a resounding crash of glass, as if someone had driven a van through the windows of a store.
“That’ll be the supermarket,” said Juan calmly. Then, turning to Maggie, he added: “El Barrio. My people.”
They sipped from cans of beer, and watched the fires spreading in the hot and humid night. After a time, over in Brooklyn, a huge fire started to develop. Half an hour passed, but it just kept spreading.
“It must stretch for twenty blocks,” Gorham said.
“More, I think,” said Juan.
And so, well into the early hours of the morning, they stayed on the roof, watching the great, divided city of New York express its tensions, its rage and its misery, by fire, and looting, and more fire.
Giving Birth
1987
GORHAM MASTER RACED around the apartment. He knew he shouldn’t panic like this. In the bedroom, Maggie’s bag was neatly packed, and had been for weeks. So why didn’t he just grab it and run? Maggie was already on her way to the hospital, racing in a taxi through the November streets. She’d need him to be there with the bag, when she arrived.
Their first child. They’d waited a long time, and they’d both agreed that they should. Maggie had wanted to get more established in her career, and he’d wanted that for her too. And now at last the great day had come, and he was filled with panic.
Was Maggie ready for this? Was she going to be all right?
He’d thought she should stop work last week. But she’d assured him it was okay.
“Quite honestly, sweetie,” she told him, “I’d rather have the work to distract me.” He saw her point, of course. But had she gone too far? Now that the great moment had arrived, he was seized with fear. Should he have begged her not to go into work today? If, God forbid, something went wrong now, it would all be his fault.
She’d left the apartment at eight this morning. At eleven, in the middle of a meeting in one of the big, wood-paneled conference rooms in the ten floors of Branch & Cabell’s Midtown offices, she had started to go into labor. She’d been very calm; he could just imagine it. She’d excused herself, called him to bring her bag, and gone down in the elevator to find a taxi to the hospital. It was uptown, but at this time of day, it shouldn’t take her long. He needed to hurry.
“Bella,” he called.
“Yes, Mr. Master.” Bella was standing behind him already. Thank God for Bella. She always knew where everything was.
“Did I forget anything?”
Bella was a treasure. She came from Guatemala, and like so many of the domestics in New York, she had begun her career as an illegal immigrant, but her previous employers had managed to get her a green card. He and Maggie had employed her three years ago—after all, with two people working full-time, it was a lot easier if one had a housekeeper. When they had first engaged her, Gorham had been a little uncertain about the forms of address to be used nowadays, but Bella had solved that for them. She’d been working in a big Fifth Avenue apartment before and she sensed, quite correctly, that the people in the Park Avenue building expected everything to be formal. “Mr. and Mrs. Master,” she called them, and they didn’t argue.
But there was another tactic involved in employing Bella. In a little while, they’d planned to have children. Maggie wanted someone whom she could really trust already in place, as part of the family, before that happened. The understanding was that when they had a baby, she’d be the nanny too. Recently, though, Bella had been dropping hints about how much she had to do, and he could see the writing on the wall. Within a year, he reckoned, Bella’s idea was that they’d be employing a nanny as well as a housekeeper. And this was not what they wanted to do. There might be a battle ahead there, he supposed.
“No, Mr. Master.” Was there a hint in her tone that he was always looking for things? Maybe not. Anyway, she smiled. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
He told himself not to be foolish. Bella was right, of course. Maggie was in good condition. They’d seen the sonograms. The baby was fine. And it was a b
oy. Gorham Vandyck Master, Jr. The names had been Maggie’s idea, not his, because she knew it would please him. She might not share his dynastic sense, but she was happy to go along with it. Well, it did please him. So if Maggie was okay with the idea, why fight it?
The baby was fine, and the doctor was fine as well. Caruso was a good doctor. Not everyone had the guts to go into obstetrics these days. If anything went wrong, everyone wanted to sue the obstetrician. The insurance premiums for obstetricians were so high that many medical students reckoned they just couldn’t afford to get into the field. Caruso was only a few years older than he was, but Maggie had researched him and been impressed.
Dr. Caruso had turned out to be a nice man, as well. Gorham had happened to meet him one evening about six months ago, when the doctor was walking home. His surgery was only a few blocks down from them on Park Avenue, so they’d walked along together and had quite a chat. “I live over on the West Side,” he’d told Gorham, “on West End Avenue. Unless the weather’s bad, I walk to work and back across the park every day.” He’d smiled. “Even doctors need to take exercise, you know.”
“Were you brought up on the West Side?”
“Brooklyn. My father had a house in Park Slope. But I went to school here in the city.” He named a private school that Gorham knew well.
“Great school. Did you enjoy it?”
“To tell you the truth, not really. The other boys mostly treated me like dirt.”
“For living in Brooklyn?” It was true that the splendid brownstones of Park Slope had become rundown in the fifties, and most of the respectable folk had moved out. But in the sixties, a renewal had been under way. All kinds of people had moved into the area, many of them people who wanted to restore the houses for their own sake. The private-school kids probably didn’t live there, but all the same … “I was brought up on Staten Island,” Gorham said.
“Nice place. Brooklyn wasn’t the problem, though.”
“You were on scholarship? They were mean to you because you weren’t rich? That’s despicable.”
“No—as a matter of fact, we weren’t short of money at all. My father began his life as a bricklayer, and my mother’s family ran a delicatessen. But then my father received a legacy from his uncle and became a developer. Small-time stuff—he bought up Brooklyn houses, restored them and sold them—but he did pretty well.” Dr. Caruso paused. “No, the problem was nothing subtle. It was because I was Italian. Simple as that. Italian name. Dirt.” He shrugged. “Now I’m their obstetrician.”
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