With fifteen minutes still to go a puddle of silence formed between them. She searched through the week’s memories for an anecdote to float across it. The letter she’d written last night to Merriam? No, Bernie would accuse her of literature.
The puddle spread.
“Monday night,” she said. “On Monday night I dreamed a dream.”
“Oh?”
“I think it was a dream. Maybe I tinkered with it a little before I was completely asleep.”
“Ah.”
“I was dancing out in the street with a lot of other women. In fact I was sort of leading them. Down Broadway, but I wore a palla.”
“That’s a dichronatism.” Bernie’s tone was severe.
“Yes, but as I say, I was dreaming. Then I was in the Metropolitan Museum. For a sacrifice.”
“Animal? Human?”
“One or the other. I don’t remember.”
“Blood sacrifices were prohibited in 341.”
“Yes, but in a crisis the authorities would look the other way. During the siege of Florence in 405, which was years after the destruction of the temples—”
“Oh very well.” Bernie closed his eyes, conceding the point. “So, once again the barbarians are storming the gates.” The barbarians were always storming Alexa’s gates. Bernie’s theory was that it was because her husband was fractionally a Negro. “Then what happened?”
“That’s all I remember. Except one detail earlier in the dream. There were heaps of dead babies in the cess trenches in the middle of Broadway.”
“Infanticide was a capital offense from the beginning of the third century,” Bernie pointed out.
“Probably because it was becoming too common.”
Bernie closed his eyes. Then, opening them: “Have you ever had an abortion?”
“Once, ages ago, in high school. I didn’t feel much guilt though.”
“What did you feel about the children in your dreams?”
“Anger, at the untidiness. Otherwise they were just a fact.” She looked at her hands, which seemed too large, the knuckles especially. “Like a face in a news magazine.” She looked at Bernie’s hands folded on the desk. Another silence began to form, but gracefully, without embarrassment. She remembered the moment she’d found herself alone on the street; the sunlight, her pleasure. It seemed quite reasonable that people should expose their children to die. There was what Loretta had said yesterday—“I’ve stopped trying”—but it went beyond that. As though everyone had come to see that Rome, civilization, the whole burning issue wasn’t worth the effort any longer, theirs or anyone’s. Every infanticide was the kindness of a philosopher.
“Pish,” Bernie said, when she’d said this four or five different ways. “No one sees his own culture declining till around the age of forty, and then everyone does.”
“But things had been going downhill for two hundred years.”
“Or three, or four.”
“Farmlands had become deserts. It was visible. Look at the sculpture, the architecture.”
“It’s visible with hindsight. But they could be as blind as their comfort required. Trivial poetasters like Ausonius were declared the equals of Virgil, of Homer even, and the Christians, now that they were official, were positively giddy with optimism. They expected to see the city of God shootup like an urbal renewal project.”
“Then explain those dead children.”
“Explain the living ones. Which reminds me. Last week you still hadn’t madeup your mind about Tancred.”
“I sent off the letter this morning, with a check.”
“To?”
“Stuyvesant.”
The rock on the desk split open and became two hands. “Well— there you have it.”
“What?”
“An interpretation for your dream. The blood sacrifice you were ready to make to save the city, the children on the scrapheap—your son.”
She denied it.
By three that afternoon the tops of buildings were invisible at street level.
She had walked crosstown from the office in a lukewarm drizzle, then taken the subway down to East 14th. All the way, the argument with Bernie had continued inside her, like some battery-powered toy, a novelty doll with a loop of tape that croaks after each smack of the old smacker. “Oh, don’t do that again! Oh, please don’t, I can’t stand it!” Before she’d come out through the turnstile she could smell the grease from Big San Juan’s, a dark ground of onion polk a dotted with plantain. By the time she was up on the street, her mouth was watering. She would have bought a quarter bag but customers had gathered three deep around the counters (baseball season—already?) and she saw Lottie Hanson in the crowd in front of the screen. The plantains weren’t worth the risk of a conversation. Lottie’s blowzy sexiness always affected Alexa elegiacally, like a roomful of cut flowers.
Crossing Third Avenue between 11th and 12th, a sound dopplered at her, swelling in an instant from a hum to a roar. She whirled about, scanning the fog for whatever lunatic truck or …
The sound as suddenly diminished. The street was empty. A block to the north the lights winked green. She got to the curb before the traffic—a bus and two shrill Yamahas—reached the second stripe of the ped crossing. Then, several beats after she’d figured it out, her idiot heart caught up with her panic.
A helicopter certainly, but flying lower than any she’d ever known.
Her knees took so to trembling that she had to lean against a hydrant. Long after the distant whirr had diffused into the general midday din the machineries of her glands kept her in a flutter.
Marylou Levin had taken her mother’s place at the corner with the broom and the can. A homely, slow, earnest girl who’d grow up to be a day-care worker, unless, which would probably be more profitable both for Marylou and for society, she took over her mother’s license as a sweep.
Alexa dropped a penny in the can. The girl looked up from her comic book and said thank you.
“I hoped I’d find your mother here, Marylou.”
“She’s home.”
“I’ve got a declaration she had to fill out. I didn’t get it to her last time and now the office is starting to make a fuss.”
“Well, she’s sleeping.” Marylou turned back to the comic book, a sad story about horses in a Dallas circus, then thought to add: “She relieves me at four.”
It meant either waiting or walking up to the seventeenth floor. If the M-28 wasn’t cleared through Blake’s section by tomorrow Mrs. Levin might lose her apartment (Blake had been known to do worse) and it would be Alexa’s fault.
Usually, except for the stink, she didn’t mind the stairs, but all the walking today had taken it out of her. A weariness as of heavy shopping bags focused in the small of her back. On the ninth floor she stopped in at Mr. Anderson’s to hear the poor tedious old man complain about the various ingratitudes of his adopted daughter. (Though “boarder” described that relationship more accurately.) Cats and kittens climbed over Alexa, rubbed against her, inveigled her.
On eleven her legs gave out again. She sat on the top step and listened to the commingled urgencies of a newscast one flight up and a song one flight down. Her ears filtered Latin words from the Spanish phrases.
Imagine, she thought, actually living here. Would one grow numb eventually? One would have to.
Lottie Hanson hove into sight at the landing below, clutching the rail and panting. Recognizing Alexa and conscious of having to look nice for her, she patted her damp, drizzly wig and smiled.
“Glory, isn’t it”—she caught her breath, waved her hand in front of her face, decoratively—“exciting!”