Dr. Rosen drew in a deep breath and began to speak very rapidly, as if trying to get it all out before drawing in another one. “I brought the diploma, something to show her, something to remind her of her life. But when I saw her again, in that place, the way her hair was so wet with the rain, I couldn’t imagine that it was Sarah at all. She was a ghost, a spirit waiting to die. She hardly spoke while I was there. She just looked at me while I tried to get her to come with me. I handed her the diploma, but she tossed it away. She kept holding to that doll instead. She even tried to feed it. That’s when I grabbed it from her. She got it back and ran upstairs. I went up after her.” He stopped for a moment, lowering his voice when he began again. “She kept clutching to that doll while I kept trying to get her to hear me. Finally I pulled it away from her. She tried to get it back. That’s when I threw it out the window.” His eyes opened wide as he stared piercingly into Corman’s face. “She looked at me at that moment in a way no one ever had. Then she turned toward the window. I grabbed at her dress, but she pulled away. And then she was gone.” He bent over slightly as if a hand had pressed his head forward, readying it for the axe. “I knew she was dead,” he added quickly, his eyes focusing intently on Corman. “Are you a father?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know what I mean,” Dr. Rosen said. “That I didn’t have to look, that no one had to tell me. I absolutely knew what had happened to my daughter.”
At that instant, Corman realized that there would be no book on Sarah Rosen, no exposure on film or otherwise. At the same moment, he saw Lucy in Sarah’s place, standing at the window, staring down as Sarah had, as all daughters did, poised on the excruciating ledge while their fathers watched them helplessly, watched as they retreated further and further from their care until finally they could grasp no more of them than the small white button of a dress.
Corman walked home to his apartment very slowly, often stopping to peer into a shop window or, more often, into the yellowish interior of a bar. The old city was no more. Like all things held too dear, it had become a phantom. Now there was only Lucy. He felt her like a wreath of smoke around his head, dense, powerful, and yet beyond his grasp, a presence he could neither hold on to nor bat away, and as he continued toward home, he wondered if he would always have to live with her in this new way, love her at a distance, visit only on recommended days.
She was standing at the window when he came in and turned toward him slowly, her face very solemn. He felt himself quake and shiver, swallowed hard, and gained control.
“You got a call, Papa,” she said.
Corman pulled the camera bag from his shoulder and let it fall into the chair beside the door. “Who from?” he asked in a whisper.
“That home where Mr. Lazar is.”
Corman looked at her and waited.
Lucy hesitated a moment, then spoke. “He died, Papa,” she said tenderly. “They want to know what to do with him.”
Corman’s thought came immediately. “Do with him?” he asked himself silently. “What could anyone ever do with such a man?”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
THEY NEEDED a suit to bury him in, as Corman found out early the next morning. As he dressed himself he tried to decide what would look best on Lazar. It was the kind of highly limited detail his mind could concentrate on, and he felt grateful for the way it kept everything else at bay.
“I guess there’ll be a funeral,” Lucy said quietly as she strolled into the living room.
“Yes,” Corman said, “but not today. You can just hang around here. I have to get some things before they bury him.”
She rubbed her eyes wearily. “He was a nice man.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Remember when he gave me that toy typewriter?”
Corman nodded, pulled on his jacket and headed for the door.
“I still have it,” Lucy said as she followed behind him. “I don’t play with it anymore.” She considered it for a moment. “But maybe I’ll keep it anyway,” she said at last. “Because he was a nice man.”
Corman bent forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead, carefully resisting his need to pull her fiercely into his arms and rush away with her, as animals sometimes did when their young were at risk, holding them like tender morsels within their open mouths.
“See you this afternoon,” Lucy said as she opened the door for him.
He nodded crisply, then stepped into the hallway.
She drew him down to her again and kissed him very softly on his cheek. “ ’Bye,” she said as she slowly began to close the door.
He watched her disappear behind it as he usually did, but differently too, in the way he thought must inevitably accompany the dwindling of life, when everything counts more in number than degree, and each sensation asks how many times are left to see, hear, feel or taste it.
It was only a short walk from the Broadway to Lazar’s apartment on West 44th Street. It was in a rundown five-story building where some of the older tenants, unable to live on Social Security, rented out their rooms for thirty minutes at a time to the small army of Eighth Avenue prostitutes who swarmed over the neighborhood. They were mostly old Broadway types, bit players in the long spectacle, who chatted casually on the stoop while their rooms were being used upstairs.
Corman rang Chico’s buzzer and waited the few seconds it took for him to come up from his own basement apartment.
“I need to get into Mr. Lazar’s apartment,” Corman told him.
“Sure, no problem,” Chico said. “How’s he doing? He doing okay, or what?”
“He died.”
Chico’s face remained oddly cheerful, despite the news. “My mother, the same. Sometimes, you know, it’s the best thing.” He smiled quietly. “You his son, right?”
“Just a friend.”
“You the only one I ever see him with,” Chico said. “So I figure you was his son.”
“No. We worked together.”
Chico nodded quickly. “So, what you want? The key?”
“I need to get a suit to bury him in,” Corman explained.
“Yeah, sure, no problem,” Chico said hastily. He pulled a huge ring of keys from his pocket, pulled one off and handed it to Corman. “What’s going to be with the apartment? You going to clean it out, or what?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s decontrolled now, you know,” Chico said. “So, the land-lord, he’s going to want to take it back, okay? I mean, right away.”
“He can have it tomorrow,” Corman said.
Chico looked unsure. “You sure that’s okay? The old man, he didn’t have nobody?”
“Nobody.”
“So, okay if we clean it out?” Chico asked. “You give me the okay to do it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good, then,” Chico said happily. He slapped Corman gently on the shoulder. “You take whatever you want. The rest, we’ll dump it.”
Corman nodded quickly and made his way upstairs, then into the apartment.
It was a one-room apartment which overlooked the street. Long, dark blue curtains hung over a tangle of battered Venetian blinds. The sink was stained and rusty, the toilet ran incessantly, filling the air with a soft gurgling rattle. The bed sat in one corner, its covers rumpled, the torn sheets piled up along the floor beside it like a drift of faintly yellow snow. In a photograph, Corman realized as he walked to the window and raised the blinds, it would look like a stage designer’s idea of a loser’s apartment, a dusty little room in a pathetic has-been of a building full of people who had nothing left to turn a trick with but their beds.