Some years later, long since having come to the conclusion that I was wrong about that, I was living in a different Philadelphia neighborhood, in a three-room “railroad” apartment—so called because it’s laid out in a line, like a string of railroad cars—on Quince Street with my wife and young son, and, eventually, almost a dozen cats. I’d almost died, and been hospitalized for a stretch (so much for immortality)—but ironically, after I was released from the hospital, I was filled with a surge of new energy, and in that crowded Quince Street apartment, I wrote “The Peacemaker” and “Morning Child,” and a dozen other stories, both solo and in collaboration with Jack Dann, Michael Swanwick, my wife Susan Casper, and others. When it got too hot inside the apartment to work, which was most of the time except for deep winter (we had one window-mounted air-conditioner, in the bedroom, but you had to lie directly under it, keeping as still as possible, for it to do you any good), I would go outside and drift around the neighborhood, sitting on benches or on the white marble steps of old brownstones to write a few pages in longhand in my three-ring notebook, before moving on to sit somewhere else. Sometimes people would come to the door and yell at me to get off their steps, thinking, with excellent justification, that I was a vagrant—as, in a way, I suppose I was. In Spring, the cherry trees that lined Quince Street (no one ever commented on the incongruity of this) would bloom, covering the sidewalk with a deep drift of petals, like pink snow in May. In winter, whenever there was a real snowstorm, the narrow streets, almost too small to get a car down without scraping the Trinity houses on either side, would prove to be too narrow to plow as well; sometimes the snow-drifts would sit there for months, until they finally melted away to patches of dirty black-and-gray city snow as the season turned. In summer, our cat Spooky, who had assumed the role of Ruler of the Neighborhood after our tomcat died, would sit out in the fenced-in square of concrete we called our “backyard,” lounging around idly with all her cat buddies, seven or eight of them, male and female, from blocks around, just sprawling there in whatever shade they could find, looking like they would call for mint juleps or iced tea—or a plate of iced mice?—if they could figure out a way to get the humans to understand them. Occasionally, if she had kittens then, Spooky would go up to passing strangers on the sidewalk and yap at them until they agreed to go into the apartment and admire her babies.
A few years after that, we’d moved eight or nine blocks away, to a small but more expensive and classier-looking apartment on Spruce Street, a few streets below Independence Hall, on the cheap edge of Society Hill, just before the area where the really rich people lived. We were down to two cats by then (we gained one more later, but managed to hold the line at three), our son had just moved away to go to college in New York, freeing up a room to use as an actual office, I was working as the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and I even had a home computer, although I’d still hang on to using a typewriter (now an electric typewriter, at least) for a number of years to come. More importantly, we had central air conditioning now, which meant that I didn’t have to lose three or four months of work every summer when it became too hot inside to do anything other than crouch stunned under the window unit. Perhaps this is why, in spite my hugely increased workload as Asimov’s editor, I still managed to write a fair number of stories (for me), in our Spruce Street place, including “Ancestral Voices,” written with Michael Swanwick, and a number of other stories not included in this collection.
For the last couple of years, we’ve been living in a small house (the first one I’ve ever owned, and probably the last) in the Fairmount district, which is tucked away at the top of a low hill just behind the Art Museum. It used to be a hardcore Blue Collar working-class neighborhood called Brewerytown, mostly composed of Ukrainians (there’s still a big Ukrainian cultural center here, as well as a VA lodge) and Irishmen and a sprinkling of Polish people and other nationalities, but now the breweries are all closed and turned into townhouses and condos, and a tide of young professionals, rent-refugees from the very area of Center City where we used to live, and where property values have been skyrocketing, is washing in, taking over houses one by one as the old folks die and their kids decide they’d rather stay out in the suburbs than return to their childhood homes. So it’s a neighborhood in transition. The curb is crowded with SUVs, but you can still hear church bells ringing and carillons chiming every morning from the half-dozen churches within as many blocks, and wizened old clerks in tiny hole-in-the-wall grocery stores where the shelves are lined with cans of beef stew and peas and other basic stuff stare in bewilderment at yuppies asking for bottled water and brie. Here I wrote “,” and, most recently, “Fairy Tale,” sometimes upstairs in the office at the very keyboard I’m sitting at now, sometimes sitting on an old office chair in the basement and writing in longhand while one of the cats (we were down to one, but just got two more) peers at me puzzledly from the stairs and meows, as if to say, “What the hell are you doing down here? Why aren’t you upstairs watching TV? Or, to do something useful, giving me something to eat?”
So, perhaps it’s an odd way to review your career, by the places where you’ve lived. Probably not very satisfactory to the critics. The most disgruntled among them will just have to get that time-machine and go back and ask that bright-eyed young twenty-year-old kid about his work. Doubtless he will be able to answer questions about it much more satisfactorily than I can.
If you see him, say hi for me.
MORNING CHILD
The old house had been hit by something sometime during the war and mashed nearly flat. The front was caved in as though crushed by a giant fist: wood pulped and splintered, beams protruding at odd angles like broken fingers, the second floor collapsed onto the remnants of the first. The rubble of a chimney covered everything with a red mortar blanket. On the right, a gaping hole cross-sectioned the ruins, laying bare all the strata of fused stone and plaster and charred wood—everything curling back on itself like the lips of a gangrenous wound. Weeds had swarmed up the low hillside from the road and swept over the house, wrapping the ruins in wildflowers and grapevines, softening the edges of destruction with green.