“It was on the Brooklyn side?”
“It was closer to the Brooklyn side than ours.”
“Then why didn’t you try to get some help over there?” The officer dropped his hand to put a fist on his bullet-belt.
“I didn’t see anybody over there. And I was coming back this way, anyway — I mean, I don’t think there’s anything anybody could have done. Not now. Even then. But I still thought I ought to tell somebody. An officer. That it happened — that it probably happened… I mean.”
“Oh,” the policeman said a third time. “I see.”
Sam looked around, looked at the policeman, who seemed to be waiting for him to leave, and finally said a hurried, “I just wanted to tell you — Thank you, sir,” and ducked around him, embarrassment reddening his cheeks, rouging his neck.
At the corner, Sam glanced back, hoping the officer would be marking it down on his pad — at least the time or the place or something — in case, later, it came up. (Above, incomplete construction marked the day with girders and derrick, flown against the clouds in sight of the sound; for a moment Sam recalled the white workers who, with saw and torch, would hang there, humming, through the week.) Would that white man remember? But the officer was walking on, crossing silver tracks in a fan of sunlight, one untroubled hand flipping his billyclub down, around, and up — now one way, now the other.
Starting purposefully uptown, Sam mulled, block after block, toward the twilight city, now on the disappearance of the fisherman, now on the ravings of the stranger on the bridge, now on the three girls coming down the steps when he’d arrived at the underpass, whose delicate descent had innocently initiated it all, now on the policeman who’d brought the afternoon to its inconclusive close. A knot had tied low in his throat — an anxious thing that wouldn’t be swallowed, that kept him walking, kept him thinking, kept him rehearsing and revising bits of the day in their dialogue — till, stalking some greater understanding still eluding him, he got as far as Fifty-second Street.
Nestled in the grip of gilded tritons and swept round by cast nereids’ metal drapes, up on the pediment of a bank, with its brazen disk, from arrow-tipped hands, down-cast, short one right and long one left (a wonderful water clock, he thought suddenly and absurdly, in which the water had all run out), Sam realized it was just after… twenty-five-to-five!
Along all four legs of the intersection, he looked with electric attention for a subway stop’s green globes. He’d been due at Elsie and Corey’s almost forty minutes ago!
e
Sam got to Elsie and Corey’s after five.
Elsie’s school books — she was studying for her Master’s in Education — had been moved to the windowsill. The table had been carried from the kitchen into the living room and the wings attached. The peach colored cloth was already spread. Knives, forks, spoons, and linen napkins were laid — and in front of Lucius, in New York for the week, a bread-and-butter plate was crummy with half a dinner biscuit, butter knife propped on the rim. Lucius was saying: “Well, I certainly wasn’t going to wait for him. Where you been, boy? We’ve all been sittin’ around here hungry!”
Originally Lucius’s apartment, eventually (Sam knew) it had housed all his older brothers and sisters — getting in each other’s way, helping each other out, arguing with one another, going out for the evening so this one might study or that one entertain, scuffling to get together the forty-five dollars a month rent, generating a thousand stories to tell on holiday trips back to Raleigh. Even Jules, during her year in the city, had lived here. (They’d all moved now, except Corey and Elsie.) Even Hubert.
“Well, he’s here now,” Corey said. “That’s what’s important. There’s no harm done.” (All had lived here — except Sam.) “Go wash your hands, Sam — then bring in those soup plates for Elsie.”
In the hallway while Sam was heading for the bathroom, Hubert overtook him. At the mirror, a loop of palm still stuck in back from Easter, one gas lamp chuckled faintly against the wall; and Hubert, hurrying up to lean a hand on Sam’s shoulder, said quietly, quickly: “Look, now — Corey had an emergency extraction this morning, and had to go into the office. So they didn’t get a chance to do anything special for your birthday. They feel right bad about it, too. But I just didn’t want you to be expecting anything — or say anything to make them feel worse than they do,” while his mirror image leaned away.
“Oh,” Sam said, from the chasm of his own forgetfulness. “Sure. That’s all right.”
In the bathroom, he turned the enamelled handle at the sink. From verdigrised brass the raddled stream chilled his knuckles, ran over the backs of his hands, dripped between his outsized fingers. While it warmed, he washed with the fresh bar of Jules’ soap sitting in the clamshell soap dish: knifed, unblunted edges meant Elsie must have unwrapped and set it out that afternoon.
The bathroom window held a granulated pane. Though it splayed the tile across from it with early evening sun, it let through not a shadow of the city. At its leaded edges, in blobby tesselations, however, rectangles of red, green, yellow, and blue showed — if you got down to the border panes and looked — colored fragments of the fire escapes and trees and clotheslines in the lot outside. If you didn’t, but only stepped in and out, say, it reminded Sam of the stained glass in the school chapel down at the college. (Sitting on the commode’s wooden ring, or standing, listening to his water fall while gazing at the overhead flush box, he wondered sometimes if it were right for a bathroom to look like a church.) Diagonally on the sill sat a box of kitchen matches — for the gas lamps in the hall. Lucifer. Years ago Corey had explained to him that Phosphorus was Greek and Lucifer was Latin for the same thing. Christos Pheros. Phos Pheros. John, carrier of Christ. Venus, carrier of light. Hesperus. Were John and Lewy sitting down to their Saturday dinners? Outside in the back the Negro fellow was hollering, as if his voice were the city’s plaint itself: “Hang-a-line…? Hang-a-line…?”—as he made his way through Harlem’s alleys, to put up new clotheslines or clothesline pulleys for a dime, in time for Monday’s washing. Somewhere in the past months Sam had learned to decipher the shrill exhortation. At some moment he’d seen the man with a coil of rope on his shoulder, a ladder under his arm, swinging his pail of metal spikes and wooden spools… Outside the glass, the line-man wandered away, litany fading, barely heard, “Hang-a…?”
Sam dried his hands on one of Elsie’s white hand-towels, on which she’d appliquéd a spray of red and purple flowers among long leaves, that creased and uncreased about his fingers.