City on Fire (108 page)

At 6:30, the aftercare kids get brought out into the blast furnace of rush hour to wait for pickup on the school’s front steps, so that the janitors can start cleaning inside. The sky, as usual, is perfervid. Away and to the north, smog climbs the air. And still no Dad. Will can already see where this is headed: phone calls, embarrassment, the screwing-up of Mom’s plans. (Maybe this is what Dad wants.) But can’t they just leave on their own recognizance? He’s almost thirteen, for God’s sake. When the A.H.C. goes to use the john, Will approaches a Shaggy-haired Counselor-in-Training and points to a figure down at the end of the block. “I think I see him. That’s our dad.” And when Cate opens her mouth to contradict him, he pinches her, hard. Her shout seems to distract the C.I.T. enough that he doesn’t look too long at the gentleman in question. Good thing, too, as Will can now make out a prayer shawl and yarmulke. He hustles his arm-rubbing sister down the steps.

It’s only a fifteen-minute walk down to the old apartment, though the way Cate complains about her feet you’d think it was fifteen thousand. He’s a bit nervous about going over like this unannounced, but you can tell even from the street that no one’s home. The lights stay off, despite the fact that it’s getting dark. Probably Dad’s forgotten all about them and gone to the ballgame himself. And Will has left his extra keys at Mom’s. He could always ask the super to let him in, but that would mean letting Dad off the hook, when the hook is what he deserves. He decides instead they’ll walk back to Brooklyn. If they average a block a minute, they can be to the foot of the Bridge by eight. Or okay, maybe half past. How hard can it be?

What he’s failed to account for here is Cate having to stop every five blocks to use the can, or drink from a fountain, or be bought a bagel with Will’s last quarter. At Forty-Second Street, she makes them cut over to the library so she can sit out front for twenty minutes rubbing her sore feet. She’s always loved knowing their grandpa’s name is etched into a third-floor wall inside, like initials sewn into underwear. It occurs to him to turn the walk into a game for her, mapping out all the personal landmarks they’ll pass. But as it gets darker out, he’s getting worried he’s made the wrong decision. He’s never been on some of these streets before; people are watching from doorways, with what intentions he can’t tell. He and Cate have come too far to turn back, but don’t seem remotely close to Brooklyn, and he has no money left for even a phone call. It’s only the thought of Dad pacing frantically outside the day camp’s locked doors that keeps him going—of justice finally being done.

See, Will suspected what was going on even before he found out for certain. He wonders now if that was what had brought him back to the apartment that day he’d played hooky from school last fall, before the separation. He’d climbed into bed to read and had fallen asleep there. He woke to sounds coming from the living room as if someone were being hurt. But even kids know the difference between pleasure and pain; if it was the latter, why was Will getting hard? He’d padded to the door, hating himself for wanting to hear more, but maybe that was Mom out there with Dad, and everything was okay, if also gross. A floorboard creaked, though, and he froze. What came next was his father’s voice. He sounded pissed at whoever the woman was. And what might he do if he caught his son spying on them? Will retreated to his closet and climbed into the laundry basket and pulled a pile of old sheets on top of him. He waited there, nearly suffocating, until he heard them leave. Then he waited another ten minutes, to make sure they weren’t coming back.

Now buildings are coming on above them like bejeweled drunk ladies at parties. He leads Cate by the hand past lit-up nail salons and dry cleaners and Jewish bakeries, telling her every few blocks it’s just another few blocks now. She’s got to pee again, she says. And she’s tired. He slings her overstuffed backpack over his own shoulder, where it bumps against his duffel. The street signs dwindle toward single digits, and it starts to seem they might make it to the Bridge. But somewhere below Fourteenth Street, there’s a kind of whooshing feeling, and everything around them save the traffic falls dark.

It takes him a full minute, pinned to the middle of a downtown sidewalk, to figure out what’s happened. To judge by the sudden quiet, cars stopped dead in the streets, Will isn’t the only one afraid. He can feel people moving around and behind him, each of whom now registers as a potential threat. Sirens, undulant, paint distant sectors blue. “It’s okay,” he tells Cate shakily. “Just a blown fuse somewhere.”

“I want to go back to the library.”

“That was an hour and a half ago, Cate.”

“But I’ve really got to go.” He recalls having seen a parking lot up ahead and tells her she’s going to have to pee between some cars. He stands guard and, when she’s done, tells her she’s a mensch and squeezes her hand and explains what it means. They start walking again. They must be heading south, because there are little lights flashing atop the Trade Center ahead. The farther they go, though, the higher the intervening buildings loom, until he can no longer see those flashes. They are east, too far east, in the Village. Down here, headlights prowl sharklike through unsignaled intersections, light up freakish swaths of streetscape: ashcans, knees, hydrants gushing senselessly. On one block, a man strides out of the dark with a TV on his shoulder. On another, music blasts. Behind a wrought-iron park fence black guys with sweaty chests writhe around to disco music. He makes Cate look away, but can’t help staring back at the gate. When he does, a man wearing only a cowboy hat and a jockstrap is standing there, watching them closely.

Will is spooked. He takes a sharp right at the end of the fence, then another. He’s navigating by feel, trying to veer neither into the mounting disorder nor into sockets of light where they’ll look like gazelles dissevered from the herd. Fifteen minutes later, though, when he tries to straighten out their route with two additional lefts, the grid has broken down. He’s starting to feel like one of his avatars in Eldritch Realms, the Gray Wizard, doomed to wander alone in the underlit maze of a once-great civilization. Or not even alone, actually. For when he looks back again, there is the man in the jock and the black hat, less than a block behind.

ANOTHER MOTHER

OUT ON LONG ISLAND, Ramona Weisbarger cranes toward her television set, where every few minutes the stalwart newsroom gives way to images from around the City. Battered storefronts, burnt-out cars, gangs of menacing ethnics perched on stoops in the dark. All the boroughs gone black, the anchorman repeats when he returns. So how are your cameras still running? Ramona wants to know, but Morris Gold has already decided there must be generators. Then he’s gone a little huffily back into the kitchen to mix up another packet of iced tea, “for in case the ballgame ever comes back on.” She’s been doing her best, for an hour and a half now, not to compromise the illusion that she gives a damn about the Yankees. But she refuses to get up and help him, because here it comes again, the City flickering across the screen, and she knows, with maternal ESP, that her Charlie is out there in it.

Morris has lectured her on this, too, these last few months—how it’s not her fault, how the boy has to learn his lesson. Though “lecture” probably isn’t fair, his method is more what-do-you-call … the one where you ask the questions. Wasn’t it true that … Didn’t she think … Usually, she responds like a sensible woman, rather than the guilt-ridden creature she’s become. And part of her knows he’s right. Charlie’s practically an adult, and it really is his fault for running away. To cover up the grief she therefore shouldn’t feel, she’s tried to adjust. Has, after those first few stunned and inconsolable weeks, spent many more trying to get used to the new order of things. Or just trying to distract herself (she sees now) from the absence at the heart of it. She has shown houses, gone twice as often for hair appointments, sat with a stiff smile through birthday parties the twins got invited to, renewed the Valium prescription her doctor first wrote back at the start of David’s heart trouble. She has even begun, without either of them formally acknowledging it, letting Morris Gold stay over on certain nights when he comes to dinner. A family of squirrels died in his air-conditioning ducts over the long Fourth of July weekend, and with the humidity high every day since, there’s apparently a waiting list for repairmen. The two of them sit on the davenport by the window unit and watch the late games beamed from other time zones, though she hardly knows an RBI from an APR.

This is not like that.

Morris comes back in, carrying a glass whose perspiration runs in clear tracks when he taps a spoon against it. He doesn’t know how much sugar to put in, can never quite hit the saturation point, but she takes the tea and lets him gather her feet into his lap. The Channel 5 Newsplatoon is reporting that looting has spread to Brownsville, Harlem, Washington Heights, and the Lower East Side. Officials are cracking down, says the reporter on the ground, and hope to have the power on by morning. He is standing in an incongruous zone of bright white outside Con Ed headquarters, a nice-looking black man in a tie and windbreaker. Behind him, what look like protesters duck into waiting police cars. Careful of their heads! she thinks. Though who’s to say that the reporter isn’t standing on a soundstage somewhere, and that the rail-thin kids being paraded in handcuffs before the spotlight aren’t just special effects?

“Where is Brownsville again, exactly?”

Her mental map of the City has, like the City itself, crumbled in the years since she and David moved out here, looking for an actual yard for the baby to run around in; still she’s having trouble figuring out how something “spreads” from Hell’s Kitchen to Harlem while bypassing the Upper West Side. Morris kneads her foot and says he believes it’s in Brooklyn somewhere, and why? As if he doesn’t know why. There are books in the library about these kids who turn on and drop out. She’s learned how they collect in the poorest and most G-dforsaken stretches of the inner city; how they end up as addicts, or prostitutes, or both. It makes her think she’s been too hard on Charlie, though here Morris would shift back to the interrogative mood: Isn’t it possible this is just the ’70s talking? She’s never admitted to him that she voted for Jimmy Carter, whom he blames for abetting a culture of permissiveness, and now she wonders if he isn’t right, if this President isn’t too soft a touch. Still, Morris has no idea how to massage a foot, and sometimes she wishes he’d just rise to the bait and start yelling.

Update dissolves into anchor, and then quickly to commercial—even during a civic emergency, peanut butter must be sold—and when a leggy jar of Jif bumps and grinds onto the screen, she hears giggles from the foyer. She calls the twins’ names, and two sets of feet go galloping up the front stairs. They stop at the top. She calls them again. “Abe, Izz. What have I said about sneaking out of bed?”

The peanut-butter music takes over as they confer in that unsettlingly wordless language of theirs. Then: “We can’t sleep. Can Uncle Gold read us a story?”

No, Uncle Gold cannot, she’s started to say, but Morris already has his hands on his knees to push himself up. “Don’t worry. I’ll get the little pikers down.”

As he goes, she can feel the past going, too, when this would have been David, whom the boys merely pretend to remember now. Charlie was the only one of them who ever knew how to grieve. But what was she supposed to do: let him get drunk, wreck the wagon, come and go as he pleased? Just look at what happened to that girl in the newspaper! From right across the tracks. She still wants to believe that before Charlie gets into that kind of trouble, before he shoots himself up with drugs or sells the ungainly body she … she can’t complete the thought. And she knows all at once that she can’t be the only person holding her breath tonight for whoever it is she loves most. That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you’re most desperate to see. Sometimes in the morning when the paper hits the front steps (easier to keep renewing David’s subscription than to explain to Newsday’s phone reps why it is she wishes to discontinue) she rises from the heat of sleep convinced it will turn out to be him. She will come downstairs in her nightgown and unlock the door to find her son there on the flagstone porchlet, so tall even with his slouch, and he’ll be shaking as she takes him into her arms. Every lover is a mother. Every parent is a home. And she has tried to be this for him from the moment the woman at the orphanage first offered her the bean-shaped bundle of swaddling. His shrieky red face, the scalp so furrowed under the fine copper hair she worried it might get stuck that way. She’d worn a crucifix, over David’s objections, to convince the Mother Superior they were good Catholics. She’d started to wonder just what on earth she was doing when the woman let go. And now Ramona rises another level toward her daytime self, and the newspaper is only a memory of a newspaper. She won’t repeat again the emptiness she felt the one morning she went so far as to go down and open the door upon that dewy empire of lawn after lawn, birds kiting down to peck at seed, no other human being in sight. She’ll plant herself here on the davenport instead, she thinks, and keep watch, willing bad things not to happen to these dark young men raging in every motherless corner of the city. Or to her own son, her Charlie. Where is he?

UPPER EAST SIDE—11:11 P.M.

THE BLACKOUT MAY HAVE SOWN REBELLION EVERYWHERE ELSE, but as of a couple hours in, Lexington Avenue’s adjusting seamlessly. Some of the cafés have even dragged candlelit tables to the sidewalk, boxed seats from which to take in the night’s folly. When a Hispanic kid crashes his too-small bike into one of these tables, the couple there picks him up and brushes him off and sits him down for grappa. Keith stops to ask if any of them have seen a girl and a boy pass by; she’s six, the boy is twelve but looks more like ten. But Regan doesn’t wait for an answer, having already heard it a dozen different ways in as many blocks. (Nope, Sorry, Nada.) Far better to try to figure out where the next cop car’s going to appear. They’ve been sweeping past every so often, but always a hundred yards ahead, on one of the cross-streets. When the next siren takes up its war-cry, though, she’s miscalculated; the lights are passing east to west back behind her, on the other side of the brasserie. “Why didn’t you try to wave it down?” she pleads, reaching Keith again.