Infinite Home

A
LSO
BY
K
ATHLEEN
A
LCOTT

The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2015 by Kathleen Alcott

Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint lyrics from “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” Music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Mack Gordon. Copyright © 1941 (renewed) Twentieth Century Music Corporation. All rights controlled by EMI Feist Catalog Inc. (publishing) and Alfred Music (print). All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alcott, Kathleen.

Infinite home / Kathleen Alcott.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-698-18419-0

I. Title.

PS3601.L344154 2015 2015013742

813'.6—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For the writers who brought me here:

David Alcott, 1941–2004

Carolyn Power Alcott, 1953–2013

No man has ever died beside a sleeping dog.

—J
OY
W
ILLIAMS

T
HE NEIGHBORS HADN
’
T
NOTICED
the building’s slow emptying, didn’t register the change until autumn’s lavish colors arrived and leaves sailed through the windows the man hadn’t bothered to shut. The wind captured various vestiges—a sun-bleached postcard covered in outmoded cursive and a chipped plastic refrigerator magnet shaped like a P and a curling photo of a red-haired woman asleep on a couch—and flew the tenants’ things before relinquishing them to the sidewalk.

He was often visible in the evenings, backlit by a feeble table lamp, immobile in a plastic school chair placed against a top-floor sill, and he seemed untouched by any changes in sound or light or weather, an ambulance’s amplifying moan or the snap of a storm on parked cars or the inked saturation of the sky at dusk. Some nights his seat remained empty, and yellows and whites and golds briefly filled each room before darkening and appearing in the next, the lights traveling from the first floor to the third, and the movement of electricity was a quiet spectacle, like the reappearance of hunger after a long illness.

When the cold knock of air came and New York turned white, he closed the windows.

O
NE
Y
EAR
E
ARLIER

A
SIDE FR
OM THE GIRL
on the top floor, they all came out to watch the fire, and most saw the woman walk into it: Thomas still wearing his disability like a new shirt, unsure of how it fit his body; Edward in the baseball cap pulled low that had been his uniform all summer; Claudia and Paulie, she begging that he not ask the firefighters any questions about their outfits; Edith repeating the name of the neighbor trapped inside, a woman she’d known for forty years. Three stories above them, Adeleine came and went, a face in a window, her hands often tugging at the curtains.

“It must have been candles,” Edith said from the lowest stair of the stoop, as if naming the ingredient at fault in a lackluster meal. “She does love those, the tall kind with the saints.” She was the only one who did not appear panicked, who did not worry that tragedy might prove contagious. Sitting beside her, Thomas held the wilted side of his torso with his right arm and stared at the idling ambulance, trying to divest himself of personal associations with it. He didn’t ask Edith where she was going as she rose, slowly as a diminished balloon, didn’t watch as she moved towards the throbbing orange light.

Paulie, as excited as he’d been to comment on the show of red hats moving through the dark, had soon settled all his six feet and two inches onto his sister’s frame, his chin sharp in her collarbone, and closed his eyes. Just beyond them, taut hoses crossed from their hydrants to firemen who stood with their feet planted on concrete, who gripped ladders that emerged from the trucks at a lean.

It moved from the first story to the third in a matter of minutes.

Standing with a hand still on their gate, Edward looked down the slight slant of the street. All the buildings had emptied of people, some already dressed in pajamas and nightshirts, and they moved together in the dynamic flicker, passing sweating bottles of water, readjusting the children on their hips. The low thrum of air conditioners and the silver-blue glow of devices in the apartments they’d come from were briefly forgotten as they speculated on the fates of their neighbors, four of whom had already departed in speeding, flashing fanfare.

“Nothing brings a community together like a good old fire,” Edward said. “
‘
And how’d you meet your wife?’
‘Fire!’
‘Where’d you get this wings recipe?’
‘Great guy I met at a fire!’”
Claudia permitted herself a restrained snort against the tightness of Paulie’s body, which pressed against her like a vigorous current. Through the curls of her brother’s hair, she saw Edith’s slight shape moving and raised her hand to point.

“Hey,” she said, trying to reach Edward through his cynical haze. “Hey, that’s your
landlord
.” His face slackened from its smug expression and assumed a limp astonishment as he watched Edith step beneath the angle of a ladder, her wizened body newly divided into frames by the steel rungs. He gestured to Thomas, a low, brief fold of the hand, as if indicating the fleeting presence of a grazing deer or a rare bird. In one square, they saw the veins of her upper legs, the cotton of her shorts tucked higher by sweat on the left side; in the next, her torso, the arms reaching away.

Edward and Thomas abandoned their disbelief almost immediately, and soon they were crossing through, placing their hands on anonymous shoulders, kicking their knees up to step over rubble, holding their shirts over their mouths, working towards the glow.

A fireman had reached her before they could, had shoved her from risk, and as they approached, he looked down at Edith as though she were a total impossibility. She opened and closed her mouth but it was apparent, without being able to hear over the roar, that it produced no words, did nothing, a door blown unlocked by bad weather. When they got to her, when they each took a flaccid elbow, he had brought a small black box to his mouth and was speaking into it. “Yeah, I need an escort for a possibly disoriented older woman. That’s correct. She almost walked right into a fire here.”

“There’s no need for that,” Thomas said in the brawny man’s general direction, determining his confidence in the statement as he went. “We’re her neighbors. We can take her home.”

“Just across the street,” Edward said, motioning with a quick shrug, as though denying his involvement in a crime. The man raised his hat a little to look at them, the odd slump of the taller one’s body, the established sweat and food stains on the shorter one’s shirt, and pressed a button on the device, preparing to issue some further instruction.

A sound filled the next moment, something like the forcing of an object into a space much too small for it, and the man in the heavy black cloth was gone. The two neighbors, briefly meeting eyes over the meager fluff of their landlord’s hair, began to advance, their fingers still fixed to the crooks of her arms. Thomas took naturally to small reassurances, the restrained lilt of them, and with each step he offered another. “We’re just going to head home. We’re just going to get you out of this heat. It’s only a little farther now.” Twice Edith looked up at them, examining their faces, giving off benign blinks. The crowd parted like water around a rock, and they watched her shuffling in the same way they’d watched the windows of the ignited building buckle.

Outside their home Thomas and Edward waited, their backs turned to the heat, for her to speak. When she couldn’t, they began the work of filling the air. “Here we are,” Thomas said. “There’s your kitchen window, Edith, with the spider plant and the rosemary soap you like and the tall blue kettle.” Rattled by the pressure to comfort her, Edward spoke too loudly. “And there’s the front door, and just inside the brass mailboxes and that ridiculous sign that says No Flyers What-So-Never.” As Paulie untucked himself from his sister, he seemed to spring into his full height, the jungly curls of his hair moving half a second behind the momentum of his body. Confused by the nature of the game, he mentioned objects as though they were questions. “A bucket full of umbrellas no one uses? All the doors painted differently?” Edith’s stare remained fixed on something they couldn’t see, and her mottled arms hung limp as dishrags.

Claudia, behind Paulie, made faces at Edward and Thomas, raked her teeth over her lips. The men looked at each other, mouthing words:
Well? What now?
The night had become, after the swiftness of the lights and sirens and the unremitting whip of the heat, very long.

After a minute Edith moved, her shoulder blades working, her feet flexing tentatively against cushioned sandals. “Oh, forgive me,” she said, picking up some unknown conversation where it had left off. “It’s gotten late.” As she climbed up the stairs, both hands on the left railing, her torso contorting to meet its line, she murmured, “Good night, good night,” and the sound of it paralyzed them, her inflection like that of a young woman turning in after a long, amorous outing in a car.

D
ECADES OF NEGLECT
had left the property an elaborate obstacle course, and navigating it depended on delicacy and memory. Of the sixteen interior steps from top to bottom, two were unwise to use and rotted quietly. The tenants left these stairs to the wear inflicted by former occupants, as they did much of the leaning banister, which from any given angle revealed at least four layers of dark red paint. The wallpaper that ran along the stairs had not seen a change since the late sixties, when Edith had requested Declan install a pattern she’d fallen in love with: gold leaf details of trees, the background beige but made rich by the gaudy foliage, all of it smeared with a sluggish gleam. It hadn’t detached or discolored except at the base, where the sun reached it, and served as one last tribute to Declan’s craftsmanship, the forest he had pasted there to stand forever. The peeling door of each apartment was a different color, some by most definitions ugly and others slightly more palatable. Declan had insisted on this from the beginning, thought it a unique touch that spoke to his role as an eccentric. Edith’s was a deep royal blue the color of the Atlantic at a certain time of summer, Paulie’s a pastel pink nearing heartburn antidote that he called “The Terrific Tongue,” Edward’s a lavish purple he forever hated and for whose retirement he campaigned, Thomas’s a kitsch butter yellow he secretly found quite pleasant, and Adeleine’s a bath-tile green that suited her no matter what because after all it was a door she could close.

—

H
AD SHE NOT BE
GUN
mentally confusing the words for appliances with those for breakfast items, had she continued as the attentive and reliable and well-liked landlord she once had been, Edith would have noticed. The turnover in the building had always been high; she had always kept around the ad she placed when an apartment opened, pulled it from the same bulging, marbled green file that held decades of obsolete lease agreements. She had liked this coming and going, especially the moment when she opened the door into the newly empty space, walked around it remembering her own first tour of the building. Had she not begun discovering her purse lodged in the freezer, her keys hidden in the forest of her potted plants, she would have understood that her current tenants were terribly intent on staying, that each of them had seemed to grow roots in an urban area known for a perennial turnover of wealth and identity, for changing impossibly around any fixed point. She might have observed that Edward retained a garish and incongruous set of silk curtains for most of a decade, and surmised he was waiting for the redheaded woman who’d lived with him to come back and take them down. Certainly, she would have recognized that Paulie’s sister, Claudia, had barely looked around the place before she signed the lease, most likely because there was no one else in the city who would rent to a strangely loquacious man of six-two with an eight-year-old’s disposition. She knew Thomas better than the rest of them, and she would have continued to visit him, seen the frames and canvases bulging from closets and cabinets, from under his couch and bed, and sensed the irrational belief he lived daily: that he had to stay in the place where the stroke had found him, where his gift had left him, in case it returned. She would have knocked on Adeleine’s door for never seeing her and concluded that the stockpiled cans of nonperishables, the desperate collection of coin banks and postcards, indicated a woman who kept her entire world close at hand.

But Edith didn’t and couldn’t—her incapacities growing each year—and still the tenants avoided the fourth and ninth steps, knew intimately the three important milestones in unlocking the front door, forgave the brokenness of their pre-war windows, placed pots under leaks and called the sounds of the water coming in familiar.