I nodded. “I understand.”
“No, you don’t,” he said, sitting up somewhat straighter in the bed. “You assume I mean guilt, don’t you? Well that’s not it, not at all. Oh, hell, it was wrong of me, wrong to charge so high when times were so tough back in my clinic days. I was wrong. I was wrong, I’m first to admit it. Can you deny that? Hmmm?”
“I guess not.”
“You know, I wasn’t the black villain you’d think I was, if you heard those politicians tell it. The way they talked, bringing Richard down with all of it, and distorting it besides… hell. I gave them a lot of comfort, do you know that? Many people had hope, thanks to me. In their final days, even their final hours, they had hope because of me. False hope, you might argue, but it was hope, whatever kind, and real enough to them.” He coughed. “You… you just try to put a price tag on that, try to say you can charge too much.” He coughed some more.
I grabbed a stack of tissues off the cluttered nightstand and handed it to him. He coughed into one, crumpled it and tossed it on the stand.
He said, “People thanked me, you know.”
I nodded.
“You don’t know, you weren’t born. Listen here, you see that desk back there? Back by the windows.”
I nodded.
“Go over there and look at the top of it. Go ahead!”
I got up and walked across the room and stepped up on the platform by the window and looked down at the desktop. Under glass were photographs, aging, of varieties of people in snapshot poses, all of them with personal notes written on them thanking Simon Norman. In the middle was a signed photo of Herbert Hoover: “Best wishes, Doc Sy!” All of the inscriptions but Hoover’s were in the same hand.
I walked back and sat down.
“What do you think of that?” he said.
“Impressive.”
“Are you surprised?”
“Yes, I am. You seem in better spirits now.”
He smiled and reached out and patted my shoulder. “I like having someone your age to talk to. You know, when you spend a holiday evening alone like this, it makes you reflective, makes you think on things-and people-that you’ve lost. My son, I lost my son, you know, did you know that? He might’ve been president one day. Before that May Belle, and now…”
“Now?”
“Say, did you look at the picture on the mantel?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Go on over and look at it.”
I got up again and went to the fireplace and lifted off the silver-framed photo. The portrait in purple smiled down at me as I looked at the photo, a studio shot of a pretty young woman, in the thirties manner: plump face, wide bright eyes, rosebud mouth, dark tight curls.
“Your wife, Mr. Norman?”
“She was a dancer,” he said. His voice was soft now, as if in another room. “You never saw her feet touch the floor, that’s how she danced. I took some patients down to Miami that winter and she was dancing in a club. Not just the chorus line, mind you, she was featured. Everyone loved her, but it was me she came back with and married. Ah, you should have seen this place then. White fluffy carpet, all the latest furniture, mirrors everywhere. She liked mirrors. Over there was where the baby grand was, a white baby grand; I hired a fella to come in and play on it now and then so she could dance. Over against the wall there was the bar, and oh, it was stocked with everything, you wouldn’t believe… the funny thing is, she died of cancer, did you know that? Do you have any idea what it’s like to help others and not be able to help somebody you love?”
“Mr. Norman.”
“Yes, uh… Mallory, is it?”
“That’s right. Mr. Norman, a young woman named Janet Taber died the other day. Did you know that?”
His eyes became cloudy again, then immediately hardened. “Yes,” he said, “yes, of course, I mentioned that, didn’t I?”
“No, you didn’t… I…”
“Mallory. Mallory. You’re the one Stefan called about. He said I shouldn’t…” And he leaned over to the nightstand and pressed a white button.
I didn’t bother moving. Five seconds later the door opened behind me and I didn’t have to turn around to know there was a big black man back there waiting for me.
NINETEEN
Harold Washington said, “I’ll make you a proposition.”
I was sitting on a couch next to Rita in her brother’s one-room living quarters on the lower floor of the Norman house. Rita didn’t seem angry with me, though she wasn’t pleased, either; apparently she felt my little whitey lie classified me more like kid-in-the-cookie-jar than Judas. I’d expected my confrontation with brother Harold to be rather on the short side; he’d show up and it would all be over but the shouting. Well, it wasn’t over and there wasn’t any shouting. He had quietly escorted me out of Simon Norman’s presence, down the stairs and into his room, where Rita was waiting. And now Harold Washington was politely asking me if he could make a proposition.
I shrugged. “Propose away.”
He said, “I have to go back up and give Mr. Norman his medication. If you’ll wait here while I do that, I’ll come back and answer some questions. Providing, of course, that you’re first willing to answer a few of mine.”
I managed to nod. Where was the cyclops-like, bus station brute of Tuesday past? Punjab, is that you, Punjab?
“Would you like me to bring you a cup of coffee when I return?”
I managed a second nod. What’d I do, knock human kindness into his head with that Pepsi bottle the other day?
“How do you like it?”
“Uh, black.”
“Rita?” he asked.
“Nothing, thanks,” she said. She seemed embarrassed, as if her brother’s kindness and instant unspoken forgiveness was far worse than a scolding.
“Okay,” he said, and he ambled out like a big tame bear.
I looked around the room, which was the reverse of the rest of the all-but-unfurnished house. The floor was carpeted in rich, wall-to-wall brown, and there was a large deep gold reclining chair next to the couch Rita and I were sitting on, with a coffee table between. From where I sat, the door was on my left and the wall surrounding it was the only one with its cream color nakedly showing. The wall behind me was paneled, and the wall across from me was a network of wooden shelves that housed not only a considerable library, but a component stereo, its various speakers, photographs of Rita and (I assumed) other Washington family members, a small but well-shaped ebony statue of a jungle cat and a hunk of driftwood; two-thirds down the wall the shelves gave way to closed cabinets, with a space in the center making room for a big color television. A single bed ran along the brown-draped back wall, next to an arched doorless closet in the corner.
“Your brother keeps a neat house,” I said.
“Are you trying to make up?” Rita asked.
“No.”
A few moments of silence limped by.
She said, “Why aren’t you?”
“Why aren’t I what? Trying to make up? Because you aren’t mad at me.”
“I’m not?”
“Hell, no. You know it wouldn’t do any good.”
“That I’ll admit.”
“And you know my motives are altruistic.”
“You never stop bullshitting, do you?”
“I never noticed I was.”
“You’re right.”
“I’m right about what?”
“My brother does keep a neat house.”
“He sure does.”
Washington came in, shutting the door with his foot as he balanced two cups of coffee in his hands. He came over to me and handed me a cup, set the other down on the table by the couch, then went over and pulled a chair off the wall and dragged it over by me and sat down. He was still wearing the houndstooth suit, and not even the absence of a tie made him seem any less formal. His bald head and lack of eyebrows seemed somehow less frightening than they had two days ago, and made him seem almost peaceful, monklike. The only tangible difference in his appearance from the other time we’d met was the eyepatch, which was large enough to hide the lengthy scar as well as the empty socket. But this difference was a major one: the raving madman seemed now a quiet and sane gentleman. Yes, gentle, damn it, which was, after all, what everybody’d been telling me about him.