Redemption (2 page)

“You know it's illegal to park on the bridge, Professor.”

“I realize that. I thought at this hour of the morning—”

“The trucks ride this lane, morning and night. I'll let you go with a warning. Now, please move your car.”

I opened the passenger door of my car, wondering what the woman would do and trying to recall whether attempted suicide was a crime in New York State. She hesitated, then slowly climbed over the divider, walked to the car, and got in. I entered the other side and started the motor, and still she said nothing.

“What's your name?” I asked her as we drove across the bridge.

“Hopper.” Hardly more than a whisper, which set me to thinking of how much difference there is between death and life, in the mind. She had looked over the railing and felt the icy wind on her face as she plunged toward the water, and she was filled with the terrible passage between life and whatever lies beyond. I wondered what had been inside of her before she accepted death.

“I mean your first name,” I said.

“Elizabeth. My name is Elizabeth Hopper.”

“My name is Isaac Goldman,” I told her. “Where do you live? Where should I take you?” The moment I asked the question, I regretted it. I felt it was irresponsible, that she should not be left alone as long as she was in the grip of a suicidal condition. The obvious answer was to take her to a hospital, but I didn't know her and didn't want to deliver the explanation a hospital would ask for—I knew nothing about her. I am not a physician; I am a professor of contract law. I had glanced at her enough by now to see her face. No one just plucked from a journey to death looks beautiful, but she had good features—a warm, full mouth, some lines and wrinkles—probably in her forties.

She answered the question by saying nothing, and I made the best decision I could under the circumstances. “Elizabeth, I'm going to take you home with me. I live on Riverside Drive between 115th Street and 116th Street. I've lived there for forty years. I'm an old widower. I have an extra bedroom. I feel that you need to be with someone. If you feel uneasy about my offer, I can take you wherever you wish, but I assure you that you will be safe with me.”

“It doesn't matter,” she said bleakly.

I drove home then, and Gregory, the night man, put my car away. He said nothing about the woman who was with me; lonely years had stamped me with respectability beyond comment. It was still dark, and the empty streets had that forlorn, abandoned look that New York takes on in the few hours before dawn when the night is over and the next day has not yet begun. Like most of the buildings on the Drive, ours had converted to self-service elevators. I lived on the seventh floor.

Still, Elizabeth Hopper had said not a word. But at my door she paused and for the first time really looked at me, a long, tired look. “Perhaps I ought to go home—”

“If you wish.” I nodded. “I can call you a cab. But if you're as tired as I am, you'll be more comfortable in the guest room. It used to be my son's room, before he went to college. He's married now. I have three grandchildren—” I wasn't just chattering. I know something about depression, and I had already decided that before I let her go off, I'd call 911, not a taxi. In a manner of speaking, a person in deep depression has already begun the separation from life. The will to live sinks, and at its lowest level, there is no door open but suicide.

“Come inside,” I said, unlocking the door. I switched on the lights, and she followed me through the foyer into the living room. She looked around and murmured, “It's very nice.”

“Will you stay?”

“You don't know anything about me.”

“I know that you're very tired and you need sleep. Come with me,” I said gently. She followed me into the guest room. “It has its own bathroom,” I explained, opening that door. “The bed is made up.”

She nodded.

“There's a robe behind the bathroom door.”

“Thank you, Professor. I'll leave in the morning.”

“If you wish, of course. Perhaps you'd like a glass of warm milk? It would help you sleep.”

She shook her head. “I don't know who you are or why you are being good to me,” she said softly, “but I'm so tired I could sleep in the gutter. Thank you, Professor.”

She closed the door behind her. I had done what I could do, short of calling the police. Going into the living room, I dropped into an easy chair, realizing that I had taken her to my place so that she might not escape—but why not let her escape? The answer was simple: I couldn't allow her to leave her death on my hands. I heard her toilet flush, and I heard the creak of the bed as she fell into it. Then I washed my face and hands, found a glass of cold milk in the fridge, and drank it down. Back in the living room, I fell into the easy chair once again. Stuffing my pipe but not lighting it, I remembered that when my wife was alive, I smoked only in my own office. Still, I didn't light the pipe but simply sat and looked at it, reflecting on this sad little drama that I had stepped into.

I fell asleep in the chair, and the next thing I knew, a voice was asking, “Professor?”

Elizabeth stood in front of me, dressed and with her coat on. The sun was pouring through the windows behind me.

“I couldn't leave without saying thank you again.”

Stiff and cramped, I got myself out of the chair. “Good heavens, what time is it?”

“Ten o'clock,” she responded.

“How do you feel?” I asked her.

“All right. Better than last night. I'll go home now. I'll be all right.”

“No.” I rubbed my eyes. “Forgive me, I don't often fall asleep like that. A bit stiff. But I think we should talk.”

She shook her head. “There's nothing to talk about. I'm over it.”

“Yes, I'm sure,” I said, thinking that she was by no means over it. My impression of her the night—or the morning—before, was of a woman wrapped in distress and agony. She looked different now. I could see the white in her hair; her gray eyes were alert, and the translucent skin that people of her coloring have now looked less ghostly. About five feet six inches in height, she was not beautiful as we think of beauty. But she had strong, even features. She might have come into my life late the night before and now just walk out of it, through the apartment door. Then I might never have seen her again, except to read in the morning paper that her body had been found. I am not a religious man, but I recall that it is said somewhere—in the Talmud, I believe—that he who saves a life saves the whole world. I think it is also said that when a life is saved, the obligation is put not upon the one who is saved but upon the one who acts to save.

I didn't ask her to stay. She was all negative at this point. I simply said, “You are free to leave, of course, but I want you to have some coffee first, and some breakfast. That is a small favor that I can claim for having saved your life.”

“For what it's worth, Professor.”

“And, for heaven's sake, don't call me ‘Professor.' Call me Ike.”

For the first time since I met her, she smiled. Her face changed; for a moment it glowed and then the glow was gone and she was looking at me searchingly.

“All right,” she said. “I'm not being very pleasant. You're absolutely right. You saved my life. I would have done it, but I won't do it again. Do you live here alone—in this big place?”

“All alone. We bought the apartment some forty years ago, when I got my first teaching job at Columbia. It was very inexpensive then. Well, what wasn't? When my wife died three years ago, I simply went on living here. My memories are here. At my age, you don't have much more than that—looking backward.”

She was staring out of the living-room windows, where the view opened onto the Hudson River. One of the old Dayline ships was chugging by, and closer to the Jersey shore, a tanker, high in the water, was putting out toward the harbor and the sea. The wind made the river choppy, and each small wave was topped with a golden glint of sunlight.

“It's so beautiful,” she said.

“Yes—it is. The first time I considered doing what you were thinking of last night, I looked out of those windows, as I had a thousand times before.”

She nodded.

“Breakfast, Elizabeth. Not philosophy. We don't know each other well enough for that. I make coffee, and I have milk and dry cereal, four different kinds. The coffee's instant and I cheat by making it in the microwave.”

She had two cups of coffee and two bowls of cornflakes and sliced banana. One of the nicer things about my age is that women trust you; they figure that the libido has shrunk to a point beyond threat. She asked what I had taught, and I explained that I was a lawyer who avoided both clients and courtrooms by teaching contract law in a university law school. She was well educated, college and then a master's in American art. She wanted to talk. That didn't surprise me. People talk to me easily. She talked to me about the day that led up to the bridge. She talked about her failed marriage, but the last straw was quite literally a matter of Lalique goblets. Life is filled with non sequiturs.

Her ex-husband, a broker on Wall Street, had come to her apartment unannounced the day before. It began with a gold bracelet. Her mother, who had died six years ago, had left her some money—almost all of it gone by now. Elizabeth had married the son of wealthy parents; and the heavy bracelet, which had cost her three thousand dollars, was a gift to him on the first anniversary of their wedding. Three thousand dollars for a bracelet was outside my scale of values and probably outside of hers, as well; but in her husband's world the scale was different, and I didn't interrupt. Her husband had a fancy for gold jewelry, but he never wore the bracelet she had given him. She took to wearing it herself. Now he remembered it, and he came for it.

“It was the last indignity,” she said. “No, the goblets were the last—but you don't want to listen to this.”

“I do.”

“I'm keeping you from your work. I'm a stranger to you. I don't know why I'm here talking about these things.” She rose to look around for her coat.

“I have no work,” I said gently. “Please don't go—not yet—please. I have an obligation to you.”

“What obligation? You kept me from a stupid suicide. I have an obligation to you; you have no obligation to me.”

“Have you been able to talk to anyone else about this?”

“No.”

“It's very important that you talk—important to you and to me, as well.”

“Ike,” she said, but she was having difficulty with the name. “You do want me to call you Ike?”

“Yes.”

“Why don't you let me go?”

“Good heavens, I'm not keeping you here. Put it to my curiosity about goblets.”

Her question answered itself; she didn't want to go. The world was full of waifs who were no responsibility of mine, and she was a waif—no question about that—beaten and broken, unable to walk away from the only man who had shown a touch of kindness and interest. Did I want to keep her here with me? That's a question I have asked myself a thousand times. I was lonely—but that had been the sum and whole of every day of my life since my wife had died. Some trick of fate or fortune had brought us together; and for very different reasons—or perhaps for the same reason—neither of us was willing to break the fragile link between us.

“Sit down and tell me about the goblets,” I said to her, pouring another cup of coffee.

She sat down at the table again, and I think we both knew at that moment that we were trapped. Perhaps that's the wrong word. I have to say that my heart went out to her. I said to myself, Ike, this is a sick woman, a battered woman, and if you don't stop this right now, your life is going to become very complicated.

“Did you give him the bracelet? And by the way, what's his name?”

“Sedge. William Sedgwick Hopper. No!” The last word came out explosively. “No, I did not.” Then she appeared to be ashamed of the small outburst. “It wasn't that. He said he'd get it sooner or later. I don't care about the damn bracelet.”

“You're not wearing it,” I noted.

“No. It's crazy—I didn't want to destroy it. I left the bracelet at home.”

“It's not so crazy.”

“But I wanted to destroy myself.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. I don't know you well enough to know what you wanted. Tell me about the goblets.”

“Goblets?”

“You said that was the last straw.”

She managed to smile. When she smiled, her whole face lit up and she was quite lovely. “You really want to hear about it? It makes me out to be a fool. I broke down when he told me he was going to leave me and marry Grace. She was my friend, and they had been sleeping together for months. I knew and I didn't want to know. I felt so cheap and dirty, like one of those incredible people on the afternoon talk shows.” She began to cry at that point. I let her cry, only pushing a box of tissue toward her.

It was well past noon now, and the telephone rang, a colleague of mine at the university. I picked up the phone in the living room, and Elizabeth went into the bedroom where she had slept. As I put down the telephone, she came out of the bedroom with her coat on and her bag in her hand.

“Thank you for everything,” she said.

“I would like to see you again, at least to hear about the wine goblets,” I said.

“Yes, that would be nice.”

“What will you do now?”

“Just go home. I work a swing shift.… Sometimes it's in the afternoon, sometimes in the evening when the store's open late, and sometimes it's in the early morning. It just depends. Today it's the afternoon shift, so I'll just have time to shower and change my clothes. I'll be all right.”

“I thought we might have lunch together,” I said lamely.