The Street Sweeper (70 page)

‘The old man gave it to him … a
menorah?’

‘That’s what he said.’

Lamont Williams sat out in the corridor. ‘The trick is not to hate yourself.’ That’s what he’d been told inside. ‘If you can manage not to hate yourself, then it won’t hurt to remember almost anything: your childhood, your parents, what you’ve done or what’s been done to you,’ he was told. He thought of this as he heard the radio playing softly from inside the office of the Head of Human Resources, a Mr Danny Ehrlich.

Lamont was looking at his hands, the hands that once took a prized toy, a birthday present from an uncle to a new friend’s home to show him the gift, hands that, when asked by an old friend, drove a van to a liquor store and waited outside while two other men spontaneously formed illegal intentions, hands that tried their hand at woodwork in Woodbourne Correctional Facility, hands that accepted a gift in the form of a silver candelabrum from an old white European man, hands that touched the cold forehead of his recently discovered dead grandmother, two hands fairly coordinated, appropriate in size for a man of his height and weight, hands unremarkable but for one characteristic never yet remarked upon – their innocence.

*

In the last gasps of the second half of the 1940s two men lay sleeping in different parts of a house on Sheridan Road, in Uptown Chicago. One of them, a father, was old enough to have been a grandfather; the other, a son, was still young enough to pass for a boy. There were areas of the country in which, no matter how old the young man got, he would only ever be seen as a boy. He had been to some of those places and he took what he’d seen into bed with him every night when he slept. It was unlikely that these two men, Henry Border and young Russell Ford,
should be sleeping in the same house in mid-century Chicago but they were, and it was through their different connections to Russell’s mother, Callie Pearson, that this came about.

Henry Border tended to retire for the evening long after everyone else. He would sit alone in his study reading and making notes or listening to foreigners talking about terrible events on strands of wire. The study door would be closed and he would rub his eyes, he would close his eyes and sometimes he would dab at his eyes with a handkerchief that Russell’s mother, Callie, had laundered.

Then, quietly as he could, he would wash up in the bathroom and go to bed wearing only a nightshirt and a weight of lead on his chest that never shifted, even when he turned over. It had been this way since he’d visited the DP camps. The grandfather clock ticks downstairs. He takes off his watch and puts it on the dresser, turns out the bedside light and the familiar whispered question comes no sooner than his eyelids have closed. ‘What kind of a man abandons his wife to be tortured and murdered?’

Henry Border had a professional interest in ‘people in distress’. His ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’ hypothesis asserted that people in ‘distress’ will use adjectives and verbs in a different ratio to each other than will people who are not in ‘distress’. He had gone to Europe in search of distressed people to study. There were too many rooms in the house he shared for a time with his daughter, Russell Ford, Callie Pearson and her husband James Pearson, so the hallway was by necessity also too long. But it didn’t stretch to Europe.

Close to Russell’s bed in his room along the hall, so close that his hand could reach out from under the covers and touch it, was a worn leather satchel that had belonged to his father. Asleep in his bed Russell would suddenly grow cold from a sweat that announced the return of that hot Detroit Monday morning towards the end of the school year and he would see it all over again: his father being torn from the street car by strangers and being punched and hit and kicked and stomped on until he was bleeding, then unconscious, then dead, then no longer a dead man, no longer a deceased human but some wet and torn corpse lying on the roadside beside a leather satchel. And the scene visited him once
a night several nights a week and sometimes, often, it could be heard from the other side of the door. But Henry Border, the psychologist with the special interest in distressed people, never once went to the young boy to find out what was wrong, let alone to offer him any comfort. His own nightmares deafened him to the moans from the nightmares in the other room.

From the bedroom along the hall that she shared with her husband, Callie Pearson however would hear her son’s distress. Her husband James Pearson, hearing it too, would put on a bathrobe and walk down the hall in the dark to his stepson’s room often only to notice someone else already at the door.

‘I got it, Mr Pearson,’ Elly Border would whisper, a glass of water in one hand. She’d learned what it was that Russell had witnessed in Detroit and now, like his mother and his stepfather, she too heard him every time.

*

When Danny Ehrlich was a boy his laid-back and slightly indulgent parents, both teachers, encouraged discussion of social and political issues at the dinner table not just with each other but also with their children. Danny’s relationship with them was close enough for him to want to inform them of anything of significance that happened to him as soon as he could. This was how it came about that when a new school friend visiting his place for the first time brought him what Danny thought was a gift, a quite outstanding gift, a Shogun Warrior action figure, he raced down the hallway of his family’s apartment to his mother in the kitchen to show her what his new friend had given him. But after the new friend had left to go home the Shogun Warrior action figure was never to be seen again in that apartment. Everyone in the Ehrlich home just assumed that the visiting friend had grown overly fond of his own gift and had stolen it back.

It was only close friends, family and his wife who called Danny Ehrlich ‘Danny’ now that he was a grown man. Professionally he was known as Dan Ehrlich, Head of Human Resources at Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center, and he had been hoping to avoid this now unavoidable meeting with the adult version of the little boy who had visited his apartment that day, the little boy who had given him and then taken back the Shogun Warrior action figure. On the door side of the desk sat Lamont Williams, an ex-convict who had been given a chance to start his life afresh with a six-month probationary stint in Building Services as a janitor. The decision to begin an outreach program for appropriate newly released ex-convicts had been made by a subcommittee chosen by the hospital’s Board of Directors. Both Dan Ehrlich and Juan Laviera, the Deputy Head of Human Resources, had been on the subcommittee. Although the two men shared an easy working relationship that bordered on friendship, they had respectfully taken opposing sides on the question of whether the hospital should take on former convicts as probationary employees. Juan Laviera had been opposed to it. He had taken the view that the rehabilitation of former prisoners was not part of the hospital’s core mission and that it would only lead to problems they didn’t need.

‘Dan, believe me, a lot of guys I grew up with went that way and … well, you knew even back then that they were headed for trouble. We might’ve been kids but people … they don’t really change.’

Dan Ehrlich had taken the opposite view. He felt that people,
some
people at least, were capable of change and that they needed to be given a chance. And when they did change, it could be truly inspiring. It might be good for the morale of both the hospital staff and even some of the patients for the ex-cons working their six-month probations to feel part of a team effort, a community of carers of varying backgrounds all united in their attempts to help people with cancer. It would send out the right signals to the community about the hospital and, if they started off slowly, choosing one or two ex-prisoners at a time and very carefully, what was the worst that could happen? This was the worst that could happen.

Juan Laviera genuinely did not want to take an ‘I-told-you-so’ attitude but perhaps this theft of a dying man’s
menorah
could put an end to the experiment. He liked working with Dan Ehrlich, he liked his easy-going manner, and was worried that the apparent failure of the program would redound to Dan’s discredit. Surely now Dan should, and could without
guilt, recommend that this, what he, Juan Laviera, had always regarded as a fraught program, be ended.

Opposite Lamont Williams, on the window side of the door with a desk that held photographs of his wife and twin daughters between them, sat Dan Ehrlich. This was the meeting his wife knew he had been dreading for days ever since the recently deceased patient’s family had complained that one of their loved one’s personal items, a silver
menorah
, had gone missing. The two men looked at each other and though both of them were equally close to certain that the man opposite him was the adult incarnation of a briefly adopted school friend, neither of them let on that they had a fair idea of the identity of the other. Instead they each waited for the other to bring it up and they each, for different reasons, wondered what good it would do them to bring it up now. After all, their association had ended as uncomfortably as their friendship had been brief.

Lamont’s thoughts took him back for a moment to Danny Ehrlich’s kitchen and Mrs Ehrlich’s admiration of the toy before he shook himself and was suddenly re-deposited back in Dan Ehrlich’s office, the office of the Head of Human Resources, some thirty years later. Under the terms of the pilot program for ex-prisoners the hospital was entitled to terminate its employment of and association with any given ex-prisoner without warning, written or otherwise, without explanation, indeed without just cause, up until the expiration of the six-month probation period. At the expiration of six months, the ex-prisoner was to be subject to the same rights and entitlements as any other employee of the hospital. Henryk Mandelbrot had died some two weeks shy of the expiration of six months from the day Lamont Williams had begun work in Building Services.

‘The family of the deceased patient –’

‘Mr Mandelbrot.’

‘Ah … yeah, the Mandelbrots were particularly upset about the missing –’

‘Mr Ehrlich, he gave it to me.’

‘I told them that was your position but they –’

‘Mr Ehrlich, it’s not my position. It’s my candleholder. He gave it to me as a gift. We were friends. I used to go there after my shift. I –’

‘Mr Williams, they wanted to press charges.’

‘What!’

‘They wanted you charged.’

‘With what?’

‘I don’t know. Theft, I suppose.’

‘I can’t be charged with –’

‘Mr Williams, I didn’t let on that you were ever in prison. I didn’t even give them your name. They wanted the item back and I told them we didn’t have it.’

‘Where’d you say it was?’

‘I told them the truth – that I didn’t know where it was. They said that they’d seen a janitor hanging around the patient’s room and –’

‘They said I stole it?’

‘They can’t identify you but the hospital is liable for –’

‘I have it.’

‘Mr Williams, to avoid further unpleasantness and any possible negative press the hospital is going to reimburse the family for an agreed value of the item but –’

‘I still have it.’

‘It’s too late to do –’

‘He gave it to me and I still have it.’

‘Mr Williams, the hospital has kept your identity from the Mandelbrot family and that wasn’t easy but we’re going to have to let you go. We won’t be reporting the allegation of theft to the Department of Correctional Services. We’ll just say that things didn’t quite work out but there’s no way we can continue to employ you. I’m sorry but it’s just too –’

‘This is bullshit, man!’

‘Lamont, what the fuck do you want? It was the best I could do.’

The two men looked at each other with an intensity they’d not been able to muster since before the incident with the Shogun Warrior action figure some thirty years earlier.

‘Lamont, I’m trying to help you make the best of a bad –’

‘It’s a
menorah.’

‘What?’

‘The item … it’s called a
menorah
, Danny. He told me ‘bout it. Got to do with the Maccabees.’

*

Adam Zignelik wondered if it was his imagination or was he now regularly recognised by the bar staff at the Chi bar in the Chicago Sheraton? He had arrived in Chicago the previous day and had spent all of the day making copies of as many of Border’s papers as time permitted to take back with him to New York. Certainly by then the staff of the Galvin Library at IIT knew well who he was. Today he was to be meeting Wayne Rosenthal, Henry Border’s former student who had for so long refused to meet him. One day, Adam promised himself, he would visit Chicago and actually stay at the Sheraton where they were meeting but today was not that day and he took a cab there from the place he usually stayed and had nicknamed for himself ‘the truck stop’.

‘I hope you don’t mind, Dr Zignelik, but I would prefer it if I wasn’t recorded. I’m happy for you to take notes but –’

‘No, that’s fine. Absolutely. And it’s Adam by the way.’

‘Thank you … Adam. Well, feel free to call me Wayne.’

Dressed conservatively in a jacket and tie and carrying a leather satchel, Wayne Rosenthal was an intelligent-looking man of about eighty with perfectly trimmed silver hair. He immediately picked which of the people sitting on their own in the bar was Adam Zignelik, and they shook hands. The retired psychologist draped his overcoat over his chair, sat down at a table and volunteered that he was to call his granddaughter – it was she who had brought him there – when he wished to be picked up. Adam discerned that the man before him, Dr Wayne Rosenthal, possessed all his mental faculties but he suspected that the reference to being picked up at the end of their time together was more to calm himself than to answer a question Adam hadn’t asked and whose answer he didn’t really need to know. In order to relax him Adam, playing amateur psychologist, thought to begin by outlining what he already knew about Border’s work and about his life and who he had already interviewed.

‘Yes, well, Arch and the others – was it Amy you spoke to? She’s a lovely person – they didn’t quite have the kind of relationship with Dr Border that I had.’ He paused to take a sip of tonic water.