She didn’t happen to mention the other thing.
James had a sister who was blind. She lived there in Detroit. James wanted Leonora to meet her. James asked if Leonora might wish to go to his sister’s apartment and say hello.
“That would be nice. I mean, having someone I could talk to — someone who could give me a sense as to what to expect.”
“My newly registered car’s just down the street. I’ll drive us over.”
“You mean right now?”
“Why not?”
Leonora shrugged. A jolt of happiness shot through her. It mattered less now, her original mission. Just to know someone who could help her now that the lights were rapidly dimming — what an unexpected gift that would be!
*
James rang the bell. The sister was not home. “I have a key. We’ll go up and wait for her. She’s probably out shopping.”
Leonora grew suspicious.
“It’s all right. She won’t mind.”
It was Leonora who minded. It didn’t feel right. Although James had been funny and warm and kind, Leonora didn’t trust people easily. But this had to change. Because life is difficult for a blind person who is incapable of putting trust in those whom she meets — those who have the benefit of sight. The blind man who asks for help crossing the street, isn’t the request usually made of a total stranger? A balance must be struck. A balance between commonsensical caution and faith in the good intentions of the majority of human beings — even brash young men who don’t take “no” for an answer.
James took two bottles of Pepsi-Cola from his sister’s icebox and poured them into glasses of chipped ice. The two talked for a few minutes before James excused himself to use the bathroom, closing the door between the sitting room and the intervening bedroom behind him. He was gone for several minutes. Leonora felt awkward. Then Leonora felt a little afraid. She questioned why she was there, sitting with a stranger in a strange apartment. She wondered if she should leave. She even started up from the sofa, but then sat back down again.
And then the door opened and James appeared. He was naked. Completely naked. His body had been perfectly sculpted from years of manual labor. He was Michelangelo’s David, but with greater muscularity (and no Victorian-appended fig leaf). All the colors of James’s body sang out to Leonora: the Copenhagen Blue of his eyes, the Rustic Brown of his lips and Ebony Black of his wiry hair. The French Tan of his sun-kissed forearms, the more muted Cinnamon Heather and Velvet Brown of his upper arms, shoulders, chest, and legs. The Oyster White of his exposed buttocks and groin, the Autumn Brown of his scrotum and shaft, the Blush Pink of his peeking glans. It was all magnificent to Leonora. She didn’t turn away. She got up from the sofa and walked up to the naked man she hardly knew and touched him, ran her hands all over him, absorbing every inch of muscle and sinew and appendage. Memorizing his body with both her eyes and her hands.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Amanda’s a good friend of mine. She knows that I’m a nudist. I’m joining Mr. Barthel’s League for Physical Culture. He’s starting a group in the Hudson Highlands in New York.”
“Your body is beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful, too, Leonora.”
“Amanda told you to say that.”
“She did. I won’t deny it. So now I’ll say it again, because I want to say it. I find you very attractive. I want to get to know you better. How about I get dressed now and the two of us take a nice walk through Belle Isle Park?”
Leonora nodded. “Is there a sister and is she really blind?”
“Yes. We’ll meet her later. Oh, and I really did have to register my new car. Funny how things work out sometimes.”
Leonora watched as the proudly naked James Touliatos turned and went back into the bedroom. Regardless of what happened between James and her from that point forward, she was enormously grateful to her friend Amanda for having brought the two of them together. And she didn’t know how she could ever thank her.
But she tried nevertheless. That next week she bought Amanda’s lunch. You know where.
1930 WITHOUT APRON STRINGS IN DELAWARE
The woman lived in an old ramshackle boardinghouse two blocks from the boardwalk in Bethany Beach. Her eyesight was failing and she had to squint up at the balding middle-aged man standing before her. She was sitting with another woman on a bench in front of the weather-beaten clapboard building. At first she doubted what the man had said when he introduced himself, but then she saw something in his eyes that reminded her of a man she’d known when she was young.
Jerome.
She had always believed Jerome to be the father of her second child, whom she had given up as an infant. The stranger’s eyes now confirmed it. The eyes spoke. They asked things of the woman. Jerome had been persistent in his bedroom advances. It was easy to see how his son would be persistent in his search for his mother.
“Would the two of you like some privacy?” asked Mrs. Grosbard. “I can make a pot of tea and take it up to your room.”
“I think I’d like to stay out here, if the young man doesn’t mind.” Sadie Craddock turned to the man she now knew to be her son. “This is my favorite time of year. The breeze is so cool and the ocean so kind.”
Mrs. Grosbard smiled at the man and got up. She turned and climbed the stoop and disappeared inside, the click of the screen door’s latch punctuating her departure.
A seagull landed on a grassy patch of sand nearby. It looked about for some stray morsel to eat. Sadie Craddock patted the wooden bench where she wanted her son to sit.
It was an old bench and seemed out of place in front of the boardinghouse. Harold wondered if it had once sat bolted to the boardwalk and then been replaced by something newer and shinier. He wondered if it had been brought here to end its days in the company of creatures equally old and only slightly more ambulatory.
Harold sat down. The sun, which had been bold, now retreated behind a rack of clouds. Harold took off his hat and brushed his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. His forehead was dry, but it was force of habit. Harold worked out of doors as a railway traffic inspector.
“How did you track me down?” she asked after he had settled in next to her.
“Aunt Emily said she’d heard that you’d moved to the Delaware coast a couple of years ago. She thought you’d become a Disciple of Christ. Isn’t this where ocean-loving Disciples of Christ wind up?”
It was hard for Harold to look at Sadie while sitting so close to her, but he wanted very much to do so. He had wondered for years what she would look like if he ever found her. Instead he looked at the sliver of seascape tightly framed by the two buildings across the street. The boardinghouse was near enough to the ocean that Harold could hear the cadence of its surf — near enough to smell its salty, fishy scent.
“How is Emily? It’s been years since I’ve seen your aunt.”
“She’s well. She lives in Plainfield, New Jersey. So you aren’t denying that I’m your son?”
Sadie took up Harold’s left hand and sandwiched it between her own hands, each age-spotted and osseous. “You have your father’s hands. Strong hands. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Harold nodded. “When Aunt Emily told me who I was a few years ago, we talked a lot about you and about my dad — the way he’d come and go when I was young — checking in with me, I suppose, seeing what I was to become. And then he stopped coming. I was fifteen, sixteen by then. I knew what it meant. I knew that the drinking had finally done him in.”
“All the men I lay with drank. That’s one of the reasons I wouldn’t marry them.” Sadie released her son’s hand. He allowed it to lie limp and unattended upon the wooden slats of the weathered bench.