On Green Dolphin Street (13 page)

It was not guilt that troubled Frank. The person responsible for taking those six lives was not himself but a numbered infantryman whose actions had won the gratitude of the society to which he returned. He himself was exonerated; he was not much given to introspection and hardly at all to guilt, but it surprised him, when he saw this city at a fine moment in its history, to think how many vice presidents, short-order cooks, lawyers or construction workers, how perhaps even some of the jazzmen in Birdland or the Half Note, doped on heroin, giddy with improvised elations, had, like him, performed the drab act. What did women think? Did they mind? Was it merely an idea of “good taste” that had ruled the subject unmentionable?

Roxanne, his ex-wife, had known. She had asked him once what it had been like. He thought for a long time before telling her, “It felt like everything that happens to you. It felt like nothing at all.”

This was true; at least, it expressed the part of the truth that interested him: how something could be separated and shut off; how rapid was the mind’s ability to digest and dismiss because its appetite for calm and gladness was overpowering.

The greater the distance of time from the killings, however, the more Frank thought about them. He did not scratch himself with the memory;
he refused to admit any tremor of remorse; but he found them there, bulking solid and unchanged: they were something that would not move over and with which he had to share his life.

In a way that he could not understand, the memory was connected to something he felt about women. Occasionally he thought it was nothing more than the fact that women had not killed, and he valued them for that separate innocence, as though they were the guardians of the past or the intact connection to the previous and better world. But there was an element of female ignorance and complicity that was also, in a perverse way, exciting, because if women could be accomplices in this great deception they must be adept at other moments of disingenuousness and ignored shame.

Frank lay on the bed, thinking of Lester Young. A delicate man, exhausted by disappointment, he had taken a room in a hotel on 52nd Street and Broadway; looking down from his balcony onto Birdland, his own talent no longer in demand, he had steadily drunk himself to death on glasses of gin and sherry. When the news of Young’s death came into the office, Frank volunteered to go and speak to the jazzmen who had been his friends; by the time he tracked down Charles Mingus, sitting among a group of red-eyed men in a small bar, Mingus had already composed his elegy, a tune he later called “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”

Lester Young had had an exquisite talent, Frank thought; Charlie van der Linden, on the other hand, had none. All Charlie’s education came to nothing in the end because he could find no expression for the rage inside him. In that way, it seemed to Frank, these two most disparate men were similar, and he felt certain that Charlie would rush toward death in the same way. It was not enough to die, there had to be self-destruction; the debonair indifference to extinction, the flirting with and courting of it, was supposed to be a criticism of the inadequacy of the existence that preceded it. Of course, it was also a sign of unrequited love, since only those who had adored the possibilities of living could be so recklessly critical.

Frank lit another cigarette and watched the smoke rise. Then, involuntarily, he began to think about Mary, and once more, as he had done so
often since the day of the van der Lindens’ party in Washington, he tried to understand the feelings she had fired in him.

He closed his eyes and lay back with his head on the pillow. There was something in the pallor of her skin that was like an essence of femininity. It incensed him because it would not let him rest: he had to understand her, to experience exactly what she was; and although this undertaking had a sweetness in its urgency, it also seemed to him oddly perilous, as though if he failed he might tumble into some void that lay beyond her.

For the space of two or three days, the period coinciding with Charlie’s absence from New York, Mary had had the curious yet exhilarating sense that time was distorted: it was both running headlong and, simultaneously, suspended. Charlie’s return, now settled for Friday at midday, had seemed laughably remote, more like a hypothesis than a scheduled moment.

On Thursday morning she agreed to meet Frank for the concluding part of the tour; he arrived at the hotel at twenty past eight, but she was ready to go. He looked preoccupied but well dressed, in a flannel suit she had not seen before and a knitted silk tie. She noticed his hands, the broad span with long, unexpectedly delicate fingers, clutching a roll of morning newspapers, already well worn. Mary felt strangely reassured, as though something worrying had been set right by his arrival; she felt galvanized by the possibilities of the day.

She did not know where they went. She talked without stopping, it seemed to her, though the object of her talk was to make him speak, to hear his voice. At some stage they visited his office, where Frank introduced her to the receptionists, then left her in the lobby area, watching the tape spool out the Dow Jones prices from a glass-covered machine, like manic shoots beneath a bell jar. She moved from foot to foot, a little embarrassed under the scrutiny of the two women and the young man behind the high-topped desk, hopefully eyeing the frosted glass doors through which Frank had disappeared. She felt as though she were living someone else’s life. She felt very young.

They walked in Central Park, then sat on a bench where fierce spring shoots had broken through the city crust. Frank talked about his life as a child in Chicago, how his father had lived in a wooden rowhouse in the Back of the Yards, fighting for work in a market swamped with cheap labor as thousands of families moved up from the southern states, turning the South Side suddenly into a black neighborhood. He spoke affectionately, with the indulgent humor of one who knew he need never return.

They roared downtown on the subway from Columbus Circle. Yet when they climbed the steps from the underworld, the people were still pressing through the grid, past the florists, the delis, the awnings, the hydrants; Mary wondered if someone called ahead to these robotic actors to tell them she was arriving, so they must put out their cigarettes, drink up their coffee fast and resume their heads-down bustle through the rectilinear set.

Then, at the bottom of Seventh Avenue South, near Carmine Street, it all broke up; the place became industrial, though on the sides of buildings the names of merchants and importers were vanishing, sinking into the cement, their endeavor not yet forgotten, the surnames with their European roots still legibly uptorn. They went to a bar, a small brick frontage in a row of warehouses overlooking the Hudson that Frank liked because it had a telephone booth in the middle of the room, from which he once more called the office.

It was a narrow, dingy saloon with a dark dining room at the back; above the rows of bottles were earthenware jars holding bunches of dried twigs. Mary sat at the bar, as instructed, and sipped a martini that made her eyes water. Time was running faster than at any moment she had known; yet all her previous life was trapped and distilled into the instant. The small girl in blue taffeta opening the door to her party guests, the young woman in WAAF serge uniform, the mother returning home in triumph with her firstborn were reconciled and alive in her.

“They call this place the Ear,” said Frank, taking a stool beside her. “The neon sign outside used to say ‘Bar,’ but the curved parts of the ‘B’ broke off.”

She did not know if he was serious. It was not somewhere she would have dared to come alone, but with Frank she felt at home there; the crumbling warehouses seemed vital beneath his gaze; even a gloomy bar seemed radiant. Things fell into place for him: when he stepped into a void, a foothold invariably materialized.

She told him so, and he laughed, not unkindly. “People don’t normally speak that way at the Ear Inn.”

“It was a florid way of putting it.”

She looked down at the wood grain of the mahogany bar and at the small paper mat that was growing damp beneath her chilled glass.

In the afternoon they sat at a cement table in Washington Square Park, next to two Italians playing chess on the inset board.

“You haven’t called the office for at least ten minutes,” said Mary.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Thing is, I’m told Cordell’s about to blow out. I’m getting this from Bob Levine, who’s my buddy there. But it’s not official.”

“Who’s Cordell?”

“Webster Cordell’s the Washington correspondent. He’s been with the Kennedy campaign. The problem is that he seems to have fallen in love with the candidate. It’s happened to a few of them. He’s incapable of being critical. In fact I think he’s playing politics rather than reporting it. The trouble is, he’s a senior guy, he’s senior to most of the editors. There’s only the managing editor, Bill Stevens, who can take him off the story.”

“And if he got taken off?”

“I’d be the next in line. But I’ve been there before. It depends if the proprietor thinks I’ve done my time.”

“And have you?”

He shrugged. “Levine says they were asking if I was in town.”

Mary felt unaccountably perturbed by this information. She ran her finger over a rough indentation in the tabletop.

“Do you mind if I ask you something?”

“Go right ahead.”

“Why aren’t you married? I mean you’re not …” She waved a hand inexpressively.

“Repulsive?”

“Not completely. You’re solvent. You’re not a drunk. Though, come to think of it, drunks …”

“I was married for a short time. A girl named Roxanne I met in college. You didn’t know I went to college, did you?”

“How could I know? You didn’t tell me.”

“I went on the GI Bill after the war. If you’d been in the armed services the federal government paid your fees. One day my first week there I saw this beautiful girl walking through the campus and I followed her and asked her for a date. She turned me down. She said she had a boyfriend.”

“But you got your date?”

“I guess I wore her down. We were married two years later.”

“What went wrong?”

“There was nothing wrong. It was a passion that ran its course.”

Mary felt his gaze on her, as though he expected her to counter with an equivalent confession of her own, or at least to comment on the idea that such feelings were finite. She saw no need to indulge him; she felt protective of her intimate life and of the welfare of the children, which depended on it.

“How long did it last?” she said.

“Five years. She didn’t want to come to New York. That was the breaking point for a lot of people. We were coming from the Midwest, that was the biggest wave of immigration to the city at that time, and for a lot of those people New York was like a foreign country. It was like going to Europe or Africa.”

“Were you sad?”

“I was sad because I had loved her.”

Mary looked down at the table and licked her lips. She swallowed.

“Couldn’t you have stayed?”

“In Michigan? No.”

In the early evening, they were walking on another street and Mary recognized the Circle in the Square Theatre.

She pointed in surprise. “I was here with Charlie the other night. We had dinner just down there.” It seemed a year or so ago.

“Oh yeah?” said Frank. “My apartment’s not far from here. A few blocks up the street.”

Mary laughed. “You weren’t going to mention it? We were just going to walk past the front door and you weren’t going to say a thing?”

“It’s not a site of historic interest.”

“My dear Frank, the bookshops on Fourth Avenue are not a national monument. Nor is the spaghetti utensil shop or the public housing project.”

“You didn’t like the tour?”

“I liked it a lot. Though I was never sure about its guiding principles.”

“Me neither. It’s almost eight. Do you want to get some dinner? I guess you won’t want to be too late.”

“No. No. Let’s go and have a drink somewhere first. There’s no hurry.”

While they drank cocktails, there was no sense in Mary’s mind that the evening would come to an end: there was still dinner, the hours afterward, maybe more drinks. Friday was a very long way ahead. They were in another restaurant and she could not stop talking, perhaps now inflamed by the wine she insisted he order, and the words were pouring out of her, about her mother, her children, her life, and she was watching his face, no longer unreadable, but a screen of animated reaction, engaged, disbelieving.

But the fish had been and gone, the dessert, the coffee, more wine, more coffee, innumerable cigarettes, and she did not dare to look down at her wristwatch but was aware of two waiters standing in friendly but impatient proximity and of Frank rising in slow motion from his chair, taking her arm through the empty restaurant and of his face registering intense relief when she suggested a further bar, a café, some quiet Village nightspot and of their walking together for the first time quickly, with an identity of purpose.

On Cornelia Street there was a bar with tables on the sidewalk, and the night was warm enough for them to sit outside and order cognac. Mary tried to make hers last, but eventually the moment came and the waitress leaned over the table with the check.

“Maybe …” Mary gestured interrogatively.

“You want another?”

“I shouldn’t, but if …”

“Sure. Two more, please.”

With the euphoria of reprieve, Mary began to talk again, then stopped. She froze where she sat and drew her breath in tightly. So utterly had she misled herself that she had no idea what words were about to come from her mouth.

“Frank, there’s something I want to tell you, something I want you to know. In the last few days I’ve formed a kind of … admiration for you. No, listen, please. I think …” She found both arms rising of their own accord from the table; she felt like a puppet, being animated by someone unrelated to herself: even the words were not hers. She was speaking to him as though delivering a eulogy. “I want you to know that I think you are the most remarkable man and that I’ve enjoyed your company more than I can say, more than … I don’t know.”