When she got off at 117th Street, the subway's morning ammonia smell was beginning to accumulate more legitimate odors of authentic urine as she passed by a man pissing on the wall. It had become such a common sight, she had long ago forgotten it was a crime to use the city's walls for a toilet. She climbed up the stairs into the light of morning, cool air and a whiff of hot pretzels and coffee from a nearby sidewalk stand.
Limping towards her down the sloping sidewalk was a graduate of the New York School of Begging. He carried the requisite paper cup, and his foot was turned out in a convincing twisted handicap. As he approached Mallory, something in her eyes deterred him, and he veered off sharply on two good feet.
She passed through the familiar gates of the university campus and crossed the plaza to the cover of a doorway where she could watch the street. The cab dropped Gaynor at the same place each morning and never before nine. By Markowitz's watch, it was ten before the hour. The watch had never run when the old man carried it. Repairing the watch had been the topic of a decade-long conversation between the Markowitzs, a few words dropped by habit in the pie-and-coffee hour after dinner. She'd taken care of that old unfinished business for them and had the watch repaired the day it had been returned to her along with the other personal effects. When it came back from the jeweler it had been altered in another respect. Inside the gold cover and beneath the names of Markowitz's grandfather, his father and his own name, it said Mallory.
Her gaze wandered across the plaza to the canteen's wall of glass. Sleepy students were slogging back coffee. Other students carrying trays were lining up to pay the cashier. Over the next ten minutes, she watched a few of them leave without paying. The canteen was staffed with student workers who hated their jobs and could not care less if the other students walked off with the tables and chairs. It was easy theft, and not worthy of her respect.
She checked the pocket watch again. Gaynor was late this morning. She pulled her notebook out of her jacket pocket, and scratched a memo. Any break in a routine was noted.
But he was not late. He was early.
She watched him stroll out of the front door of the canteen and cross the plaza. He carried a covered paper cup and the brown paper bag which, according to her notes, usually contained one chocolate donut, one napkin and three sugar packets for his coffee which was on the light side.
She followed him to his office and leaned against a wall down the hall from his door, pretending interest in a bulletin board and waiting out his twenty-minute breakfast ritual. Exactly twenty minutes later, he emerged and locked the door behind him, slinging a book bag over one shoulder. She followed at a discreet distance as he walked to his first class.
His legs showed a decided preference for two different directions, and his elbows pointed east and west. Clearly, his four limbs were only going along with his torso under duress. It was predictable that he would trip on one paving stone and stumble on one marble step before arriving at the auditorium.
His first class was gathering as he arrived. Students straggled in by ones and twos. Gaynor arranged his notes on the podium to the sounds of young bodies hitting the seats, rustling paper, books slapping to laps, yawns and coughs, settling finally to absolute quiet as Gaynor smiled and wished them good-morning.
Mallory took her regular seat at the back of the lecture hall where she was lost in a sea of a hundred young faces. Notebook and pen in hand, she played the familiar role which had ceased to be pure role-playing from the first class she had attended. He was good. No one nodded off during his lectures.
When he dropped his chalk for the third time, Mallory noticed the student in the next seat was drawing a short line alongside two other lines at the top of a page. This boy would round the scorekeeping off at five before the class ended.
Gaynor was predictable in many ways, but never boring, and she was as attentive as the rest, listening to him, trying not to smile at his wry humor, trying very hard not to like him.
After a second class, they were walking back to his office again, Gaynor and his sun-gold shadow, without more serious mishap than his dropping a book and managing to trip over it.
She sat on a bench in the hall during the hours of student appointments. One after another, the students filed in and out. For the next two hours, he was never alone.
She made quick notes on the time his last student arrived, and then pulled her mail out of the canvas book bag. She looked at the letter she should have opened yesterday, weighing it in one hand. She knew, without opening the envelope, it was another request from Robin Duffy, lawyer and longtime friend of the small family that wasn't one anymore. She would have to do something about the house in Brooklyn, Duffy would say for the third time. She jammed the unopened letter into her pocket.
Not yet.
She wasn't ready to walk through the front door of the old house and sit down with the hard fact that there was no one home and never would there be.
In some dimension, Markowitz was continuing on, but not in any afterlife. Heaven would not do; it was beyond belief. She could believe in old radio heroes for an hour or more, but there were limits. Yet Markowitz had to be somewhere.
She had never returned to the small cafe down the street from the station house. She avoided walking on that block in the morning hours, when he might be eating breakfast there… continuing on. How could she go back to the old house in Brooklyn and not see him there, if Markowitz was to continue on outside the dark hole in the cemetery lawn.
She also continued on in her own usual way, wondering what she could do to bug his eyes out and give him a new story for the Thursday-night poker game which would always begin: "Let me tell you what my kid did this time."
Samantha Siddon nodded her white head at the doorman and walked slowly up the street to the next block, brandishing a silver-handled cane. She hurried along the sidewalk with a trace of a limp and the fearful memory of a bad fall which had broken one hip. The bone had taken forever to mend, and the onset of arthritis had increased her agony. She would rather be quartered by four swift horses than suffer a second fall. She never went anywhere without the cane which bore a lion's face and lent her a little courage.
She was soon well out of the calm of Gramercy Park and into the surrounding alien atmosphere of Manhattan, taking shallow breaths, mistrusting this air. She hailed a cab, and gave the driver a Midtown address. Samantha was pleased and stunned to have a traditional New York cabby, a native son with a Brooklyn dialect who took risks on every block, defying death to swerve through lane changes and beat each yellow traffic light. When she stepped out of the cab on Madison Avenue, it was well ahead of the appointed hour because she had anticipated a driver who translated addresses to the wrong side of town.
With fifteen minutes to spare, she stood on a busy street corner near a public telephone, and watched the parade of surefooted children of commerce marching on the avenue with the hard slaps and clicks of flat-soled shoes and high heels, eyes fixed with terrible purpose, prepared to trample old women, toddlers, anyone who impeded them on their lunch hour. Though she knew she could buy and sell any one of them with a day's interest on her capital, they terrified her. One careless shove and she might spend the rest of her days in traction or a wheelchair. The days of the walking cane were numbered as it was.
As the minutes passed by, these ideas fell away from her. When the public telephone did ring, she was ready, more than ready.
She whispered into the receiver, though the pedestrian army of that avenue was hurrying by at a heart-attack clip not conducive to eavesdropping. Her words were lost in the noise of a passing bus followed by a police car, its siren opening with a panicky scream and then switching into the nagging mode of "Hey, get out of my way, come on, come on, move it, move it". And at last, she was screaming to be heard above the hustle of the throng which looked through her and moved around her, and never noticed if she had two heads or one.