Her lips moved. She might have been talking to herself.
“Dr. Hendricks has to be there. He gave me his card only a few days ago. He’s expecting me, I think.”
“Ma’am, you want I should wait for you? Case you comin‘ right back down?”
The uniformed man loomed over her. She had to wonder if he was teasing her, that she might become shaken, tearful; and he might comfort her. Yet he appeared to be sincere. He was wearing white gloves to operate the elevator. She smelled his hair pomade. She had never been in such proximity to a Negro man before, and she had never been in a position of needing help from a Negro man before. At the General Washington Hotel the “Negro help” had mostly kept to themselves.
“No. That isn’t necessary. Thank you.”
The uniformed man stopped the elevator at the fourth floor and opened the door with a flourish. Quickly Rebecca stepped out into the corridor, pulling the child with her.
He is thinking I want Dr. Hendricks to examine my son. That’s what he is thinking.
“He down there, that dir’ection. You want for me to wait, ma’am?”
“No! I told you.”
Annoyed, Rebecca walked away without glancing back. The elevator doors clattered shut behind her.
Zack was fretting he didn’t want any old doctor, he did not.
Suite 414 was at the farther end of the medicinal-smelling corridor. On a door whose upper half was set with a sheet of frosted glass had been hand-lettered BYRON K. HENDRICKS, M.D. PLEASE ENTER. But the interior appeared to be darkened, the door was locked. There was a begrimed and derelict air to this end of the corridor.
Desperate, Rebecca knocked on the frosted glass.
She could not think what to do. In her fevered but vague fantasies of seeking out Byron Hendricks, anticipating that moment when the man’s eyes perceived her, when he smiled in delight in recognition of Hazel Jones, she had not anticipated him not being where he had promised he would be.
Zack was fretting he didn’t like the smell in this place, he did not.
Well, Rebecca had money. She had several hundred dollars in bills of varying denominations. She would not have to find work for a while, if she was careful with the money. She would find an inexpensive hotel in Port Oriskany, she and Zack would stay the night. They were badly in need of rest. They would bathe, they would sleep in a bed with clean, crisp sheets. They would lock themselves in a room in a hotel populated by strangers, they would be utterly safe. For three nights in succession they had slept in the Pontiac, parked beside a country road, shivering with cold. The bus trip from Rome had been five long hours.
“In the morning. I can telephone him. Make an appointment.”
Zack saw his mother was becoming anxious. Coming to nudge himself against her thighs murmuring Mom-my? in his plaintive child’s voice.
She was thinking it had been unwise to come directly to Dr. Hendricks’s office from the bus station. She should have telephoned to see if the doctor was in. She could look up his telephone number in a directory. It was what people did, normal people. She must learn from normal people.
Another time, Rebecca turned the knob of the locked door. Why wasn’t Hendricks here!
When he saw her, he would know her. She believed this. Whatever would happen next would happen without her volition. He had summoned her to him, he’d begged her. No one had ever begged her in such a way. No one had ever looked into her heart in such a way.
The man in the panama hat. He’d followed her from town, he had known her. He had altered the course of her life. She’d been a deluded young woman living with a man not her husband. A violent man, a criminal. She would not have had the courage to leave this man if she had not met Hendricks on the canal towpath.
Very possibly, she would not have aroused the jealousy of the man who’d masqueraded as her husband, if Hendricks had not approached her on the canal towpath.
“You see, you have changed my life! Now I’m here in Port Oriskany, and this is my son Zacharias…”
She would not lie to him. She would not claim to be Hazel Jones.
Though she could not absolutely deny it, either. For there was the possibility that she’d been adopted. Hadn’t Herschel suggested this, they’d found her, an infant, newly born on a ship in New York Harbor…“My parents are gone, Dr. Hendricks. I will never be able to ask them. But I never felt that I was theirs.” In her exhausted and deranged state this seemed to her more than theoretically possible.
The child frowned up at her. Why was Mommy talking to herself? And smiling, biting at her scabby lip.
“Mommy? C’n we go now? It smells bad here.”
She turned, numbly. She groped for the child’s hand. She was thinking hard and yet no thoughts came to her. In the wan reflective surfaces of frosted-glass doors they were passing her face was obscured and only her thick straggling hair was sharply defined. She looked like a drowned person.
One of the frosted-glass doors opened. The sickly medicinal smell was intensified. An individual was leaving suite 420, occupied by Hiram Tanner, D.D.S. On an impulse Rebecca entered the waiting room. Did D.D.S. mean dentist? A woman receptionist frowned at her from behind a desk. “Yes? Can I help you, miss?”
“I’m looking for Dr. Hendricks in suite four-fourteen. But the office seems to be closed.”
The receptionist’s crayon-eyebrows lifted in exaggerated surprise.
“Why, haven’t you heard? Dr. Hendricks died last summer.”
“Died! But…”
“All his patients were notified, I thought. Were you one of his patients?”
“No. I mean…yes, I was.”
“His office hasn’t been vacated yet, there’s some problem. It was left in pretty bad shape and has to be cleaned.”
The receptionist, middle-aged, tidily dressed, was looking from Rebecca to the child nudging against her thigh. She was staring at their battered faces.
“There’s other doctors you could see in the building. Down on floor two there’s-”
“No! I need to see Dr. Hendricks. It’s the son I mean, not the father.”
The receptionist said, “There hasn’t been anybody around that office since last summer, that I’ve seen. People say somebody comes in after hours. There’s things get moved around, there’s debris in boxes for the janitor to take away. I used to see the son, but not recently. It was a stroke that killed Dr. Hendricks, they said. He had a lot of patients but they were getting old, too. I never heard the son was a doctor.”
Rebecca protested, “But he is! ”Byron Hendricks, M.D.“ I’ve seen his card. I was supposed to make an appointment…”
“A man about forty, is he? Nervous, like? With a kind of strange way about him, and eyes? Always dressed kind of different, wearing a hat? In cold weather it was a fedora, other times it was a straw hat. He wa’n‘t never any M.D. that I ever heard of but I could be wrong. He might’ve gone to medical school but wasn’t practicing, there’s some like that.”
Rebecca stared at the woman, as Zack nudged and twisted impatiently against her legs. Seeing Rebecca’s shock, the woman laid her hand on her bosom: “See, miss, I don’t feel comfortable passing on rumors. Dr. Tanner was one to say hello to the old man, and they’d chat for a few minutes, but Dr. Tanner didn’t know them, either of them, real well.”
Rebecca said, confused, “Can you be a doctor and not ”practice‘? But…“ Seeing in the woman’s eyes a measure of pity, yet of satisfaction. She thought she had better get accustomed to it.
She thanked the receptionist, pulled Zack with her out of the office and shut the door behind her.
Out in the corridor Zack wrenched out of her grasp and ran limping ahead of her, flailing his arms foolishly and making a whistling-gagging noise as if he couldn’t breathe the stale air. He was becoming unruly, obstinate. He had never behaved this way in any public place in the past.