“Did you ever tell anyone about that mirror?”
“Oh! No, never.” He sat on the floor by my chair, his head on his knees. “You must have had better things to do than look for me.”
“No. I still have that mirror, Angelo.”
“Abraham. Abraham Brown, please.”
“All right, it’s a good name.”
“I had — reasons, for taking it in place of my own.”
“Well,” I mumbled, “what’s a self? I’ve lived a long time and don’t know…. Glad to see me?” A stumbling human question.
He looked up and tried to smile along with his muttered “Yes.” A smile of confusion.
“What do you want to do, Abraham? Music?”
“I don’t know.” He stood clumsily and walked to the painting, his back to me; lit another smoke as if cruelly hungry for it. “Bill got me a piano a year ago. I — oh, I work at it.”
“Mm. Billy Kell.”
He didn’t look around. “So you recognized him too.”
“Newspaper photograph. Looked him up on the chance he’d be in touch with you, I’m pretending to be interested in the Organic Unity Party.”
“Only pretending, huh? You never liked Bill, did you?”
“No…. Look at me, Abraham.”
He wouldn’t. “Bill Keller and his uncle have done everything for me. They saved my life, really. A chance to start over, when—”
He stopped.
“I met your fiancée last night, at Max’s.” He just grunted. “Keller and his crowd didn’t buy your brain, Abraham. You know that gang of power-hunters isn’t your dish. You can’t look at me and say it is.”
“Don’t!” He choked on it, but wouldn’t turn around, and somehow there was little force in his protest. “My brain! If you knew — if I had a good one, would I be—” Again he couldn’t go on.
“How long have you been Abraham Brown?”
“Ever since I was picked up in K. C. for breaking a window.”
“What did they do with you?”
“Home for the homeless. Reform school — we weren’t supposed to call it that. The court was my legal guardian. Unfortunately it was a jeweler’s window, though I hadn’t noticed it.”
“Kansas City — that was soon after you left Latimer?”
“Soon? I guess.” He spoke as though suddenly indifferent whether he relived this dream of the past or not. “Latimer — I simply walked away. Junk yard, patch of woods, think I slept there. Didn’t eat anything for two or three days. Later I happened on a rail siding, couple of hobos gave me a hand up. Kansas City. They wanted me to stick with them, but I didn’t belong — not with them or anywhere—”
“Wait a minute—”
“You wait a minute. I’ve never belonged anywhere. I wasn’t even a good hobo, so I walked out on ’em.” He faced me at last, quickly as if to catch me off guard. “I didn’t want anything. Can you understand that? Can you? Twelve years old, hungry, not a cent, but I did — not — want anything! Oh, Christ, there’s not a worse Goddamn thing in the world — well, all right, I saw that plate-glass window — late at night — nice half brick in the gutter, so I thought: ‘Here! Suppose I do that, maybe it’ll make me interested in something’ — like a nightmare — you try to wake yourself up by hurting yourself….”
“Was it interesting?”
“Made a hell of a fine smash…. I graduated six years later.”
“Never told about the real past?”
“I did not.” He grinned savagely. “History’s a process of selection, remember, Mr. Miles?”
“I met some of your mother’s relatives after her death. Nice people.”
“They were nice people,” said Abraham Brown. “At the school I told three or four different stories. Safer than faking amnesia. They followed up the first two or three, you see, and then decided I was a pathological liar. K. C.’s a long way from Massachusetts. Homeless kids a dime a dozen.”
“Are they, Abraham?”
“That was the impression I received for six years.”
“And it was important not to go back to Latimer?”
“Do you understand your mind?”
“No. But you’re still the boy who was interested in ethics—”
“Oh, Ben!”
“And you’re still blaming yourself for your mother’s death: I want you to stop that.”
He stared blindly, but not without understanding. “Who else—”
“Why blame anyone? Dunn maybe, for hauling you in there without warning and looking like the wrath of God, but he was merely doing his job as he saw it. Why blame anyone? Is blame so important?”
“Yes, if it reminds me that I’m capable of spoiling anything I touch — reminds me never to love anyone too much, or care too much—”
I scrambled up and caught hold of his wrists. “That’s one of the worst damn-fool monkey traps in the world. And there you are, with the biggest mind and heart I’ll ever know, running circles inside the trap with your tail in your teeth. You think nobody ever got hurt before? You’ve got life, and you’re saying: ‘Oh no, there’re flies on it, take it away!’”
“I’ll live,” he said, and tugged at his wrists a little. “Miriam, for instance, she’s just my size, a nice brassbound decorator’s job with her heart in the right place and I don’t mean her chest.” I guess he was trying to hurt me with words thrown back in my face. “Just bitchy enough so I don’t have to care whether I’m in love with her or not—”
“Nuts! She’s a harmless little woman who could be hurt like anybody else. I think you got engaged to her because Keller and Nicholas and maybe Max planned it that way.”
“What!”
“Yes…. What happened after you graduated?”
He stopped pulling at his frail wrists. “Oh, I — saw Bill on a telecast. Hitchhiked to New York. That’s all. What did you—”
“Three years ago?”
“Two.”
“After a year of what, Abraham?”
“What did you mean about — Keller and Nicholas—”
“Skip it — I could be wrong, if I am I’m sorry. Tell me about that year after you graduated, Abraham.”
“I — oh, I’d never make a good criminal, I’m simply one of the school’s failures. Matter of fact I was a good boy. Grease monkey in a filling station for a month, till they missed something out of the cash register. Hadn’t taken it, but there was the record. Couple of dishwashing jobs. Not good at that either. Often wondered if I’d make a good flagpole sitter—”
“Why not stop whipping yourself?”
“Ever sleep in a barrel, Mr. Meisel?”
The doorbell rang. “Abraham, you must promise me never to tell Keller or Nicholas or anyone about knowing me in Latimer.”
He looked up with his wounded, half-cruel smile. “I must promise?”
“If anything connected me with that ancient history, it could mean my life.” His anger vanished. “Like you, Abraham, I’m vulnerable.”
He asked softly with no wrath at alclass="underline" “Outside the law?”
The bell rang again, long, urgently. “Yes, in a way, and I can’t explain it. If you ever spoke of that it could be a death sentence.”
He said with immediate sincerity: “Then I won’t speak of it.” I let go his wrists. He limped into the foyer, where I heard him exclaim: “Hey, take it easy! Are you ill, Dr. Hodding?”
He looked ill, that old man, so ill and changed that without hearing his name I might have failed to recognize him from the evening before. He had been drunk then, fish-eyed drunk. Now there were fires in his cheeks; his necktie was under one ear, his silvery hair wild. He lurched past Abraham as if the boy were intrusive furniture. “Walker — let me see Walker—”