The Street Sweeper (12 page)

So for three years in Mid-Orange, after three years in Woodbourne, Lamont Williams swept up the cigarette butts and mess left by the prisoners and imagined a day when his daughter would look at him the way Darrell’s daughter had looked at Darrell. But whereas Darrell’s daughter knew what her father looked like, Lamont’s daughter hadn’t seen her father since she was two and a half. Unless she had seen photos of him, it was very unlikely that she would recognise him. And under the circumstances it wasn’t likely Chantal had shown her any of the few photos of him she’d once had. Nor was there anyone else to show her a photo of him. Chantal had had no contact with Lamont’s grandmother. The child was eight years old. She wouldn’t know what he looked like and he wouldn’t know what she looked like. But he could try to imagine.

In prison whenever he saw a reflection of his face – even in a puddle on the ground – he would try to fuse it and the image he carried in his mind of Chantal’s face into a photofit of the face of a little girl. But for
how long can you look for your daughter in your own reflection in a puddle on the ground of a prison yard before somebody steps in it? As long as you can. He was right to think he wouldn’t have got the chance to explain it to another prisoner but wrong to think no other prisoner would have understood.

Now he was out. He had a job. He had survived his fourth day as a probationary employee in Building Services at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The trick is not to hate yourself for what you’ve done or what was done to you. He was going to find his daughter. Where would he start? He could start by visiting Chantal’s mother. He could go tonight. Surely she would know where Chantal was? Don’t go tonight, his grandmother told him every night. Get yourself settled first. Start by surviving the six-month probationary period of the job.

Or he could visit Michael’s mother. He could go there to enquire after Michael. Then when Michael’s mother was assured he wasn’t harbouring hostility to Michael, he could casually enquire after Michael’s brother, who might or might not be with Chantal. Even if Michael’s mother wanted to lie about this, Lamont thought he’d be able to tell. He’d learn something from the visit. He would find Chantal. Just don’t go tonight. He would find his daughter sooner or later. And one day she would have that look on her face when she saw him coming, that look Darrell’s daughter had when through the window of the school bus she saw Darrell sitting on the stoop of her aunt’s house. He would take her to see her older cousin, Sonia, and to Sonia’s parents, Michelle and Michelle’s husband, the professor. Just don’t go tonight. He would read her stories. He would tell her stories. Make them up. Just a matter of time. Get settled first. Wait just a little longer so you can start looking from a position of strength.

When he got to his grandmother’s apartment he saw she had the Rice-a-Roni she used to make for him when he was still at school ready to heat up. She asked about his day. It was fine, he told her. Before going in to take a shower he took a photograph of his daughter from the time she was two that he’d had with him in prison and placed it carefully on the mantle so that it formed part of the shrine of photographs of family members his grandmother had created years ago. There was a photo of
him still at school, a photo of his late grandfather, several of Michelle including one as a child with Lamont and one from her college graduation ceremony. There was a wedding photograph of Michelle and the professor. There were two photos of Lamont’s mother. Leaning against one of these was now another member of the family, Lamont’s and Chantal’s daughter. He would find her. Don’t go tonight.

Over dinner he told his grandmother that he thought he might go to see Chantal’s mother after dinner. As usual, she didn’t want him to go. Not that night. He didn’t ask her why. He didn’t want to make her say that as long as he didn’t go he could always live in the hope that Chantal’s mother might lead him to his daughter. Once he had seen Chantal’s mother that hope was likely to vanish and his grandmother wanted him to have hope. He didn’t want to make his grandmother say all that. He wanted to spare her telling him she thought it was futile to look for his daughter. So he asked her about her day and answered her questions about his. He told her about the strange old white man he had talked to, a patient. He told her how they would be increasing his responsibility over time, giving him more tasks and more demanding ones. He volunteered to clear the table and do the dishes. His grandmother accepted his offer and went to her room to watch television. She listened out and observed that he didn’t go to Chantal’s mother’s place that night. She was relieved.

She usually slept well but that night she was awakened by a sound and after a few moments she got up to confirm that it was Lamont. It was around two-thirty in the morning. He was having a glass of apple juice in the kitchen. The fluorescent strip light hummed from the ceiling. He couldn’t sleep but he assured her he was fine.

‘Work okay? Really?’

‘Yeah. It’ll be fine. It
was
fine.’ He started going over the events of that day in his mind. There were six months less four days to get through the probation period. His grandmother poured herself a tea cup of apple juice. She said they should both try to get some sleep.

‘Grandma, what’s a death camp?’

‘A what?’

‘That old white guy, the patient, he said … he said there were six death camps.’

‘I guess that’s where they take the deaf kids. Like a summer camp or something for deaf kids.’

‘No, no, a
death
camp,’ he said as she was washing her cup.

‘I don’t know. Sounds crazy,’ his grandmother said and then she leaned in to him to kiss him on his forehead. ‘Get some sleep,’ she added, leaving the kitchen to go back to bed.

On her way back to the bedroom she noticed a photo of a tiny light-skinned black girl partially covering one of the photos of her daughter. It took her a few seconds to realise the identity of the child in the photo. This shamed her just for a moment.

Lamont had finished washing his cup and was placing it on the draining board when he heard his grandmother’s voice from the hallway near her bedroom.

‘He’s prob’ly …’ she said almost to herself.

‘You say something, Grandma?’ Lamont called to her.

‘Prob’ly … That old white man … the patient in the hospital … He’s a Jew.’

‘L
ISTEN CAREFULLY
. A young man – a very young man – lived in a house with his elderly father whom he loved very much. His father had grown unwell to the point of being bedridden. The young man shared the responsibility for taking care of the ailing father both with his mother and with a long-time and loyal servant of the family. His care extended to giving his father the medicine he had been prescribed, even compounding different drugs at home when the situation required. He sat with him, dressed his wound, massaged his legs and generally did everything within his power to comfort him. He took pleasure in this even though, being a serious student at that time, he might have been forgiven for begrudging time away from studying in furtherance of his own future. It was all the more remarkable given the added stresses on him as a newly married young man living upstairs in the family home with his even younger pregnant wife. The desire to be a dutiful son competed with the desire to be a dedicated student and a devoted husband to his very young wife. Still, the young man loved taking care of his father. Is any of this true?’ Adam Zignelik asked those of his students who attended his ‘What is History?’ course at Columbia University that day.

This particular lecture had been due some weeks earlier but when the students arrived on the originally scheduled day they had found a note attached to the lecture theatre door informing them that the class was cancelled because Professor Zignelik was unavailable for what the note
described as ‘personal reasons’. While it would have been harsh to have characterised his cancellation of that lecture back then as self-indulgent, harsh and unfair to Adam as only he was to himself, he now regretted not having given it because he was currently in a far worse state and he couldn’t cancel it twice. He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to make it through the lecture. Recently he’d been speculating that perhaps it was a bit late in their studies to be telling college history students what history was. But then the department liked the course being taught and it was popular with students, the latter possibly influencing the former. Anyway, if historians could argue over the definition of history, there was no shame in discussing it with students. Adam used to enjoy teaching it too, used to find it exciting.

But today the excitement would come only from seeing whether he could get through the lecture. Would he be able to make sense until the last student had left the room? There were always one or two who stayed back. Would he lose his temper and shout at the students if their ignorance mocked his choice of career, a career he had at times allowed himself to see as a vocation? Would he chastise them without humour or good grace because their silence in response to his questions, their failure to play their part in today’s employment of the Socratic method, a method Adam seldom resorted to, would definitively confirm to Adam, on the very day that he was most susceptible to counting any lack of response as confirmation, that he was wasting his life? Would he be able to keep standing the whole time? Would he make it through the lecture without crying? This could be an exciting lecture after all.

‘Is any of this true?’ Adam repeated as though his students’ silence might have been explained by the failure of each of them to hear the question the first time. Adam waited again but not for long. He had to make it through the silence. But even then it was possible that his mind could wander from the words he was giving voice to and leave it free to be colonised by those thoughts he most feared that day and would most fear for so many of the coming days in the silences between his words when his mind was completely unprotected. Breathe in but not too sharply, he told himself. The silences would get him. It might have
been a mistake to adopt the Socratic method that day. The plan had been to have the students’ contribution fill up the time so that even if he didn’t get through all the material meant for that day he would at least survive the lecture. Surely he could count on these students to try to impress each other, flirt with each other, joust with each other armed with statements dressed up as questions, jargon from one or other discipline dressed up as knowledge, and vague political attitudes dressed up as considered positions within established schools of thought?

‘I’m so pleased none of you tried to answer that question.’ The class laughed. Adam breathed again. ‘Your silence is almost the perfect answer. Really! Almost. How could you make it better? How could you make it an even better answer?’

There was more silence. Come on, kids, Adam pleaded with them to himself. Where are your libidos? Where are your egos? Help me. I made you laugh.

‘Okay, I asked you if any of this is true. How can you know? How can you
possibl
y know? I haven’t given you enough information even to ask better, more sensible, more meaningful questions. The better question is, “Having heard what I told you about the young man, is it
likely
to be true?” Let me suggest these categories: true, untrue, likely to be true, unlikely to be true, and, there isn’t enough known to answer likely or unlikely.’

*

Not far away, Diana, Adam’s girlfriend for the last eight years, had taken that day off and was at that time on her knees in their Morningside Heights apartment folding cardboard sides and sticking them together with duct tape to make the last of the boxes she would need to finish her packing. They had spent the weekend together assembling boxes and packing but you always need more. As the last minute approaches you always need more. On Saturday afternoon they had started making boxes listening to Jonathan Schwartz play songs from the
Great American Songbook
on WNYC. By the time he had closed the show with Nancy LaMott, the boxes had formed a wall.

Soon a man she had found on Craig’s List would come with a van and take Diana and all the boxes to an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. A friend of Diana, an actress whom she’d met in college, lived in the oldest of the new apartment buildings that some ten years earlier had started shooting up out of the concrete like a phalanx of fortified fungi spawned by market speculation and watered by the rain coming in off the ocean. They now stretched from the makeshift Falun Gong camp opposite the Chinese Consulate on the Hudson all the way along 42nd Street to Times Square. The actress friend had been cast in a play in London and after that was scheduled to appear in a movie to be shot in Eastern Europe and Diana had the use of her friend’s apartment for six months. Beyond that she couldn’t imagine her life. But she had never imagined that this day would come and now here it was. She couldn’t cry. She wanted to cry but there wasn’t time. She still had to assemble what she thought would be the last box. Soon the man would arrive with the van. Why was this happening? she asked herself. It made no sense. It was so unnecessary. As the last minute approaches you find you always need more boxes. You always need more time.

*

‘Okay then,’ Adam continued to his students, ‘let me tell you a little more about the young man with the ailing father and the very young pregnant wife. The young man’s father’s condition was getting progressively worse and he was spending more and more time asleep. One evening the young man was massaging his father when an uncle came to the house and offered to take over from him for a while. The young man was glad to be relieved for the rest of the evening and his mind went straight to his young pregnant wife and where his mind went his body followed and he was soon with her in their bedroom. She was asleep but he woke her and only minutes after leaving his father’s bedside he was intimately joined with her.

‘What did she think? I won’t pretend to know that, but within five or six minutes the loyal servant knocked at the young couple’s bedroom door. He explained to the young man that his father was very ill. Of
course, the young man realised from the fact that he was being interrupted at that time of night in the privacy of his bedroom by the servant only to be told that his father was “very ill”, that his father’s condition had become extremely grave. How did he know? Because everybody in the house had known for a very long time that his father was very ill. It wasn’t new information. It was a description chosen in the middle of the night in delicate circumstances by a loyal servant who was himself likely to have been affected emotionally by what was going on in the house, an expression chosen hastily with due deference and without any pretension to medical expertise, an expression chosen to impart an urgent request, “Get up. Your father’s illness has taken a turn for the worse”.