The Street Sweeper (72 page)

‘You didn’t tell them either?’

‘Looking back with the benefit of more than fifty years, I think I bought into it too, this question of honour. I had thought so much of him. In a way I had so much invested in him, in the idea of him, that I … I couldn’t do it. I was always hoping that he would come ‘round.’

‘And tell her himself?’

‘Yeah. How naïve was I?’

The two of them stood up. Wayne Rosenthal put on his scarf and his coat. They shook hands and Adam thanked him. The older man began walking towards the door of the hotel when Adam called out to him.

‘Do you want to use my phone?’ The old man turned around.

‘What for?’ Wayne Rosenthal asked.

‘To call your granddaughter … get her to come and pick you up.’ Adam saw the psychologist’s eyes were moist.

‘No, I have a phone. I think I’ll walk for a bit.’

*

There was a man who had a job dispatching crosstown buses in the New York borough of Manhattan for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the MTA. He’d worked for the MTA for around forty years and for over twenty of them this man had, in all seasons, exuded warmth and good humour on and around the corner of 67th Street and York Avenue. He gave directions, advice and friendly greetings, not merely to MTA employees and their passengers, but to people he recognised from the area and also to passing strangers, visitors who had come to this
Manhattan neighbourhood in varying states of anxiety, sometimes in grief, sometimes even in despair. This prematurely wizened man, a rough diamond of sorts, who could be relied upon to be there day after day, to greet you irrespective of the weather, a man whose family had generations earlier made its way to New York from southern Italy, this man had a capacity for lifting the spirits of an occasional passer-by as well as of the regulars who had grown to know him and gain confidence from the very reliability of his anodyne presence. Indeed, so well known was he, and so well liked by everyone who had ever had anything to do with him, that he came to be known as the unofficial ‘Mayor’ of East 67th and York.

This was not just any street corner. This corner was within a few blocks of the Helmsley Medical Tower, New York-Presbyterian Hospital and the Weill-Cornell Medical Center, and it included part of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. It was there, in what some people called ‘hospital mile’, that the ‘Mayor’ of East 67th and York would daily find himself in the position of dispensing advice and comfort to people who had appeared out of nowhere suddenly needing, suddenly looking for something much more than just advice with respect to the crosstown traffic and modes of transportation.

In addition to a gift for raising people’s spirits with merely a smile from his eyes or a warm ‘Hey, how
you
doin’?’ the Mayor had the ability to detect even the smallest shift in someone’s circumstances. There might be many regulars and even irregular visitors in his constituency, most of whose names he didn’t know and would never know, but that didn’t stop the Mayor from noticing, as if by instinct, when a change had come about in the circumstances of one of his constituents. From his unprotected roost on East 67th and York the Mayor noticed something out of context one winter’s afternoon.

A grown man, still a couple of years shy of forty, Lamont Williams had never seen his father. He had only the vaguest memory of his mother; he wasn’t even sure it really was her that he was remembering. An ankle in a sandal, and a perfumed scent, he’d smelled it once in a store. He’d returned to the store some time later but the scent had gone. The memory was almost entirely sensory. He was raised by his grandmother in an apartment cluttered by magazines and TV guides
and random things earned with coupons cut out of the magazines and with photographs of people long disappeared whom you weren’t really supposed to talk about. Briefly encouraged at school just long enough for a moment of attention to waft onto him like a breath of air in a stuffy room, he had otherwise been ignored by teachers and people in authority until the day his offer of a ride to a friend and the friend’s new friend got him sentenced to six years in prison for a spur of the moment decision the other two had made after leaving his van. Kept going in prison and during his six-month probationary job as a janitor in a cancer hospital by the desire to find his young daughter, he’d helped an old man who alone had befriended him there and gifted him a
menorah
before he died, which was only just before his grandmother had gone to sleep and never woken up, leaving him barely able to speak out of grief and uncertain of where he was going to live.

Dragging himself back to work and finding himself falsely accused of the theft of the
menorah
, too many thoughts crowded out the space that might have been taken by the words he could have used to pursue his defence as he sat in the office of a man who’d thought him dishonest and a thief even when he was a child.

Standing alone in the bowels of the cancer hospital’s administration wing, at this precise moment in his life it was all that this particular man could do to breathe and walk more or less upright without succumbing to the ever increasing build-up of defeat that had lived deep in his chest for longer than he could remember. It hadn’t taken any time at all to clean out his tiny locker and he was already walking out of the building when he heard behind him the voice of D’Sean, another man from Building Services, speaking to a colleague. ‘Yeah, dead meat ‘cause of them candles, silver candles or some shit. Eight candles, stole ’em off of an old man, patient, died. Then the Jews got his ass fired.’

He stepped out onto the street feeling utterly alone. But he was not entirely alone. The death of his grandmother had led to the rekindling of his relationship with his cousin Michelle, a rekindling that his grandmother had always hoped for. In an effort to comfort him, the very fact of this was something Michelle was keen to point out when she visited him not long after his last day in Building Services.

When she walked into her grandmother’s apartment that night the place was quiet but for the sounds of distant televisions and remote conversations coming in from nearby apartments. ‘Zoloft is not for everyone. Talk to your doctor about Zoloft. Because no one should have to feel this way.’ Lamont sat numb on the couch in the living room inside the Co-op City apartment surrounded by their grandmother’s things left scattered or else in the piles in which their grandmother had left them; a magazine, a hair brush, a CVS catalogue and, in the kitchen, a can of Seneca frozen apple juice that she’d forgotten to put away, things left untouched as though she would be back any minute.

Alone in the kitchen Michelle opened the freezer and saw her grandmother’s cooking frozen in Tupperware and labelled and though Michelle had promised herself she’d be strong for Lamont, she found herself crying silently but unambiguously and quite soon without restraint. If this was how
she
felt, with a career, a husband and a daughter, she wondered to herself, how must Lamont be feeling? She stayed alone in the kitchen she had visited as a child, where she had had so many meals with her grandmother and with Lamont. She missed this woman. She regretted not spending more time with her. Had she told her how brave she thought she was? Her grandmother would not have understood what she would have meant by that, at least she would have claimed not to have understood. Had she told her how much she loved her? Had she thanked her enough? Had she loved her enough?

Michelle wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and attempted to compose herself before joining her silent cousin back in the living room. They were going to have to talk about their grandmother’s possessions. It felt wrong to throw them out, wrong even to sell them for what little they would fetch. But Lamont would no doubt need any money they could get and, anyway, what would she or Lamont want with any of the time-worn things their grandmother had saved? What would anybody want with them, Michelle wondered, walking back into the living room? When she stood in front of Lamont he told her, quietly, ‘’Chelle, I lost my job.’

‘At the hospital?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘How, what happened?’ she asked and so Lamont explained the story behind Mr Mandelbrot’s
menorah
. It was there on the mantel. With memories of her grandmother churning with guilt and concern for her cousin, it was only now that she noticed it for the first time.

‘But if you just gave it back –’

‘It was a gift,’ he said quietly.

‘
I
know you didn’t take it but if it gets you your job back –’

‘It wouldn’t. It would confirm for them what they already think … that I stole it.’

‘But that … that doesn’t make any sense. You’d only still have it if the old man
had
given it to you, not if you’d stolen –’

‘’Chelle, you of all people … I mean, given what you do … for work, for a living …’

‘What?’

‘You ought to know by now. It doesn’t have to make sense.’ Neither of them spoke for a few minutes as she sat down beside him on the couch and rubbed his back with the flat of her hand.

‘’Chelle, where am I going to live?’

Michelle suddenly realised that she had no idea what kind of proprietary interest, if any, their grandmother had had in the apartment she’d lived in all Michelle’s life. It was called Co-op City but what kind of Co-op was it? Neither she nor Lamont knew.

She had to help her cousin. A social worker with more than fifteen years’ experience, she should have immediately known what to do but, at least for a few days, her emotions clouded the intellect and experience she needed to deploy to devise a plan for him.

One thing she knew immediately was that despair couldn’t be allowed to colonise his mind beyond the period a functioning, active, socially integrated person would grieve for a lost mother-figure. She guaranteed him that she and her husband Charles would not let him go homeless. She would investigate the status of their grandmother’s apartment with the relevant people at Co-op City. In the meantime, she promised, she would secure him at least temporary employment, explaining that it was vitally important for his mental health and general wellbeing to be gainfully employed as soon as possible. To this end she put him in contact
with the John Doe Fund, a charitable organisation dedicated to assisting both the homeless and ex-prisoners.

No longer in the uniform of a Building Services employee of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Lamont Williams wore instead the bright blue uniform of members of the Ready, Willing and Able street cleaning crew of the John Doe Fund. Armed with a broom and a plastic garbage pail on wheels, there was a stretch of York Avenue that was all for him. He had chosen it from a few options and explained that, although it wasn’t so close to where he was currently located, he knew the area fairly well. He used to work around there. The stretch that most appealed to him and where he showed the greatest attention to detail, the blocks where he was most scrupulous in his sweeping, were those that included or were adjacent to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

It was the Mayor of East 67th and York who first noticed Lamont Williams in the area in the period after he’d been let go from Building Services two weeks shy of the six months he needed to get beyond his probation period. Although they had only ever exchanged nods and the briefest of pleasantries, the Mayor felt sufficiently emboldened to approach the street sweeper.

‘Hey, buddy, you doin’ a hell of a job. Am
I
crazy or did you used to work at Sloan-Kettering? ‘Cause I’m tellin’ you there’s a guy there who looks –’

‘No, you’re not crazy.’

Sensing that the explanation that would take this man from hospital employee to a Ready, Willing and Able street sweeper would involve a disclosure of information that even he wasn’t ready to seek, the Mayor removed himself from the situation with, ‘I tend to be over there, you know, if anyone needs me. You take care o’ y’self.’

It wasn’t very much but those few words gave Lamont Williams just enough sense of himself to take the chance that was presented less than an hour later when he saw Dr Washington, the woman who had been his friend’s oncologist before Mr Mandelbrot had died, and acting on a feeling he wasn’t sure he could generate again at will, he approached the oncologist.

‘Excuse me, ma’am. Ma’am? You remember me?’

‘No,’ she said, doing her best to ignore him.

‘Dr Washington, you’re Dr Washington, right?’

‘Well, that’s what it says,’ she said distractedly, briefly pointing at the name tag pinned to her coat.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

‘No, should I?’

‘I’m Lamont Williams. I used to –’

‘Have a good day, Mr Williams,’ she said, pulling her mobile phone out from her pocket.

‘No, wait a minute. See, I used to work here at Sloan-Kettering. I was in Building Services –’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘No, see, I was in Building Services and I used to visit one of your patients, Mr Mandelbrot. Henryk Mandelbrot? He only just died a little ways back. You remember him?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, I’m the one they fired and –’

‘Pardon me?’

‘I’m the guy from Building Services they fired.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The Mayor was watching on as the doctor and the street sweeper talked. Nobody else was taking it in.

‘See, I used to visit him … and I … like … we became kind of like … friends. And he would tell me his life story at the end of my shift when I used to visit him. And see, just before he died … I don’t mean his last day but … he gave me, told me he wanted me to have this candleholder. It’s a Jewish candleholder. They call it a
menorah
. It was his. His family brought in his
menorah
and he told me that he wanted me to have it. And when he died I took it home. Now his family sayin’ I stole it whereas it was a gift and now I’m out here ‘cause I got fired from the hospital and … and, you know, like I need this job … the Building Services job.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, I’m on the medical staff so I don’t –’

‘Yeah, I know, but Dr Washington, you was his oncologist and you seen me in his room or near his room talkin’ to Mr Mandelbrot a million times and you could tell them –’