“I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I said. “Please, Susan. Trust me. It’ll keep overnight.”
She looked into my eyes and either saw something there or didn’t. Anyway, she gave in. I wasn’t giving her much choice.
At her building, she slammed the door shut and then leaned on the half-open window. “You’re not going to do anything foolish, are you, John? You’re going back to the park and you’ll wait for me, right?”
“That’s right,” I said.
She seemed reluctant to go. But the meter was ticking and the driver honked. She stepped back.
I pressed my hand to the glass, and she waved back. I smiled. How had Harper put it? It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
“So now we’re going up to the park?” the driver said as we pulled away.
“No,” I said. “Now we’re going down to the Bowery.”
Chapter 29
We turned in on Fifth Avenue at 61st Street. Three blocks later, we passed FAO Schwarz, closed for the night but all lit up by the ten thousand tiny lights that dot the ceiling there. The thing can be programmed to show constellations like the night sky, or an undulating rainbow, or a flood of blue and white like a crashing surf; but tonight it was frozen on a single color, ten thousand dots of red blazing silently in the night like pinpricks or jewels or tears.
I thought of Dorrie standing beneath that jeweled sky with her satin shoes on and her tiara and her wand, dispensing fairy dust to girls too young to die shivering and sweating in a hospital bed the way Catherine Burke had.
I was a fairy princess once, she’d said, and I’d asked her, Why’d you stop? And she’d told me, she’d told me.
The driver didn’t speak to me on the way downtown and didn’t play the radio, didn’t honk his horn. We met no traffic on the way, just coasted silently beneath the ranks of glowing traffic lights and past a thousand shuttered storefronts. If the ancient Greeks had lived today, I imagined this would have been their Charon, a silent taxi driver ferrying souls along a concrete Styx.
I found myself wishing it could continue, that I could keep riding this taxi to the edge of the river and beyond, could coast endlessly through the night. But at Eighth Street we turned east, and then there wasn’t much ride left at all.
I gave the driver Susan’s twenty, didn’t ask for any change in return. He pulled away from the curb and left me in darkness.
The building was five stories tall. A craggy relic from perhaps 1870, maybe earlier, its windows decorated with the fancy stonework that even tenements boasted back then. The fire escape bolted across its face was a later addition, a sop to building codes and regulations effected after good Father Demo took his stand.
I had to hunt halfway down the block before finding a trash can I could upend and climb on to reach the lowest rung, and when I pulled myself up I could feel the edges of the cut in my back pull apart beneath the sodden bandage. It hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes, but I kept climbing.
At the second floor, I knelt by the windows and looked in. One opened on a narrow kitchen, the other on a parlor. There were no lights on, but at the far end of the parlor I could make out a closed bedroom door.
The parlor window was locked, but the kitchen window wasn’t, and with some effort I was able to lift it. I climbed inside and pulled it shut behind me.
There were dishes stacked neatly in the sink and on the drainboard, and beside the garbage can a row of empty bottles stood sentry—Skyy, Beefeater, Kahlua, Glenmorrangie, Baccardi, Baileys. The refuse of an equal-opportunity drunk.
I pulled open a drawer by the kitchen door and sorted through a tray of cutlery until I found a heavy wood-handled steak knife. Nothing like the camp knife Kurland had wielded, but weapon enough.
I crossed the tiny passage that connected the kitchen to the parlor, then stopped by the bedroom door. I couldn’t hear any sounds from the other side, and realized there was some chance he wasn’t home—he could, for instance, be drying out again in the hands of Cornerstone or one of the city’s other rehab clinics. But, no: the dishes in the sink had still been wet. He ought to be inside.
I turned the knob and swung the door open.
He was sitting in an armchair with a glass in his hands and he raised it to me as I entered. He was wearing the same shirt and pants he’d been in before, at the cemetery. I saw the tweed cap lying on a writing table off to one side.
“Robert,” he said.
“Doug.”
“Should I call you that, or do you prefer John?”
“Either way,” I said.
“I thought you might come,” he said. His voice was thick. “That woman today, the one who wrote to me, then never showed up—she was one of yours, I assume? That’s how you found me?”
“I found you months ago, Doug. I did it for Dorrie, so she could send you her letter. The one you refused.”
He nodded slowly. “Then that woman today—ah, never mind. It doesn’t matter. Would you like a drink?”
“No,” I said.
“Have a seat?”
I shook my head.
“Why are you here?”
“I want to hear the truth,” I said.
“And then...?”
“That depends on what you tell me,” I said.
“I see. And what exactly do you want to know?”
“Was a handjob from your younger daughter enough, or did you make her fuck you like her sister?”
He winced. Took a sip from his glass. “Don’t be crude, Robert.”
“Answer the question,” I said.
“I suppose you’ve been talking to my ex-wife,” he said.
I stepped closer, raised the knife. He didn’t react, just looked from me to it and back again. “You’re not going to use that,” he said. “You told me yourself. You’re no killer.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“I understand,” he said. “You’re angry at me, you want to hurt me. But you’re not going to do it. Because you’ve got one thing I’ve never had.”
“What’s that?”
“Self-restraint,” he said. “Most people have it. You’re lucky if you do. In rehab you meet all the people who don’t, and not a one of them’s happy.”
He was slurring his words slightly. I wondered how many of the bottles on the kitchen floor he’d emptied since returning from Philadelphia.
“I can’t want something and not have it, Robert. It’s just how I’m made. When I’m hungry I eat.” He held up the glass. “When I need a drink, I drink. I try not to, but the craving builds and builds and eventually... You never met my older daughter, Catherine. You’d have only been nine or ten, I guess, when she died. But if you had met her—my god, you’d have felt, well...I’m guessing the way you felt about Dorrie. You’d have fallen in love. Now imagine having that under your roof every night, the adorable little girl becoming an entirely different species, a grown woman, and not just any grown woman, but the most beautiful you’ve ever seen. You catch a glimpse of her in the bath or playing in the front yard in her swimsuit and you say to yourself, my god, where did that come from?
“But Robert, if you’d been her father, that’s where it would have stopped. You’d have admired her, loved her, maybe imagined the man that would one day win her heart—maybe even, in the dead of night, admitted to yourself how that glimpse of her had made your heart race—but you would never have done more than that.”
“No,” I said.
“ ‘No.’ You say it so easily. It was not so easy. I couldn’t do it.”
“Was it your child she aborted?” I asked. “In the clinic you took her to?”
“Probably. No way to be sure, is there? But I don’t think she was sexually active. Outside the home, I mean.”