Too soon, we were in front of my father’s office. It was on Wabash underneath the elevated tracks. I looked out of the cab’s rear window at the deserted street. The streetlights shined down on emptiness. The stores had steel gates over the windows.
“Four-fifty,” said the driver, not turning around.
“All I’ve got is a twenty,” I said, digging it out of my pants.
The driver muttered something and opened a cigar box next to his portable radio and thumbed through a stack of bills. Next to the cigar box was a billy club with nails driven halfway in. He began counting out my change.
“Say, I wonder if you could wait,” I said. “I won’t be very long.”
“The meter’s off,” he said.
I stopped to consider what this meant; it made no sense to me.
“I’ll be about ten minutes. Then I’m going right back to Hyde Park. It’ll be hard for me to get a cab. Could you please wait? Here. Take the twenty, OK? That way you’ll know I’m coming back.” I handed him the twenty and put my hand on the back door handle but didn’t open it. I wanted him to reassure me that he would wait. “OK?” I said.
He put the twenty on the dashboard and turned off his motor, the lights.
I’d been to my father’s building dozens of times. As a young boy I’d pretended to be his partner, lunging for the phone whenever it rang, stuffing my shirt pockets with his pens, riding on the sliding library ladder. It was a small, whitish building, filled with the offices of marginal enterprises: importers of knickknacks, jewelry repair, the editorial offices of a Serbo- Croatian newspaper, a chiropractor, a Hong Kong tailor. I tried the street door on the off-chance it was unlocked, but it wasn’t. There were seven keys on my father’s ring and the first one I tried unlocked the door. (A measure of my state of mind was the intense, practically religious exultation I felt at this.) Inside, I found myself beneath a flickering fluorescent light. I listened for footsteps—perhaps they kept a maintenance man on twenty- four-hour duty. I stood there, transfixed, much longer than necessary. Something in me wanted to stay right there, to not walk up the one flight of stairs to my father’s office. It was the first time in three years that someone in control didn’t know exactly where I was; now, at last, my aloneness was complete and it terrified me. The only cord connecting me to the known world was that cab outside—or had it already left? I didn’t dare look and finally the thought of the driver making off with my money and abandoning me was more palpably frightening than anything else and I ran to the steep, dingy stairway and raced up it three steps at a time.
It was dark on the second floor, a solid, unvarying darkness. I staggered forward and kicked a wash bucket that had been left in the corridor. It went crashing down the hall and I covered my ears and said, “Shhh.” I waited for the darkness to recede. I stared ahead, blinking slowly, trying to tame the blackness with the intensity of my need to see. Slowly, I began to make out shapes. I could see the glass on the doors along the wall. My father’s office was the third one down and I made my way toward it. This time, though, I wasn’t so lucky with the choice of keys. I went through the seven keys three times around before I got the door to open.
I turned on the overhead light and regarded my father’s small office, I knew that I must move quickly, but that was all I knew. I didn’t know which way to turn. I closed the door behind me. I went to his desk and forced myself to sit in his swivel chair: my body was so stiff with fright that it was hard to seat it. Then I went through his desk drawers. I rifled through reams of blank paper, stacks of yellow legal pads, blank contracts, forms, packets, pads, boxes of pencils, balls of twine, envelopes, folders. Somewhere in the middle of going through his desk I took the phone off the hook—I’d imagined it ringing and what that would do to me. I didn’t look very carefully. I was too scared to search well, but I satisfied myself that the letters weren’t in Arthur’s desk. I went across his small office to the file cabinets. They were locked but the key, a small slender one, was on the ring. The files were packed. I looked under Axelrod, under Butterfield, under David, and under Jade. Finding nothing, I even looked under Letters. Everything seemed innocent and impersonal and suddenly I was filled with a boiling sadness for my father and his files, for the work he had done, for the tender, perishable details of his life.
His file cabinet was three gray metal drawers and two of them were sufficient for the alphabet. I opened the third. There were old staplers, phone books, a flashlight, a scarf…But in the back of it was a locked metal box, the size of a bread loaf. I picked it up and I knew that if my letters existed, they were in that box. The keyhole told me that it took a key the size of the one that had opened the file cabinets, but there was only one key like that on the ring. I tried it but it didn’t fit. I don’t really remember what I did next. I was no longer able to move in any deliberate way. I went to the bookcase and randomly removed some volumes, thinking the key might be hidden behind one of them. I picked up ashtrays, fell to my knees and peered beneath the office’s two green chairs. I paced wildly around and around, slapping crazily at my thighs and talking to myself, like a prisoner in the violent ward. Somewhere along the way I must have organized my senses enough to sit at his desk again and go through the drawers because soon I was inspecting the top middle drawer where, on a little interior shelf, which it shared with two sharpened pencils and a roll of mints, I found the key. I closed my fist around it, closed the drawer, and then collapsed onto the desk and burst into tears.
But there was no time for that. Still weeping, I made my way across the room again and, no longer with any energy left to hope, I opened the box.
Jade, our letters were there, all of them, folded and packed into a long brown envelope. Your handwriting was next to mine and I held them both and the words that we wrote.
When I finally left the office and went down to the street, the taxi was still waiting. The driver sat sleeping at the wheel, his chin touching his chest. I watched him for a moment and imagined he dreamed of someone he loved. The night had turned cool and the wind touched me as if for the first time. The sky was slatey, with a few bluish stars poking out of it. The moon, practically full, hovered on top of a nearby office building, like a bright cold dome. I looked at that moon as I had so many nights before, for prisoners love the moon, but now I was not looking at it as a prisoner, and not just as a dreamer, but as a free man, a pilgrim, a navigator charting his course.
5
Left to my own devices, I don’t know what I would have done with my life. But so much was required of me: I had to enroll in school, I had to see a psychiatrist twice a week, I had to stay in contact with my parole officer, and I needed a part-time job. Everything was too mandatory, pressing, and I resented it with a deep, helpless passion.
With the help of my mother’s friend Millicent Bell, I got into Roosevelt University and was even allowed to apply some of my work at Rockville toward college credits. Roosevelt is a big downtown college, with a student body made up of part-time workers, married people, and a lot of people over forty. There was no campus and because there was no obvious place to meet and talk, it was difficult to make friends with the people you shared classes with—or, in my case, easy not to. I studied astronomy, though Roosevelt was not much of a school for that. I took math, physics, and I did well in my courses, but none of my instructors seemed to recognize me from one class to the next. Even the guards at the planetarium where I showed up two or three times a week to stare at the dome full of lucious points of fire and light never remembered me, never returned my nods.