He frowned at the flickering lights of the console. Was it possible, he wondered, that — that “It” had already happened, the terrible event that everyone dreaded. He smiled and socked his head: he was not yet so bad off as to believe that he was being affected by an invisible gas.
Then, after looking at the map another ten minutes, he saw it at last, and his heart gave a big bump in his neck. Like a funnel, the circles carried his eye plunging down into the heart of Manhattan Island to — there, just inside the southeast corner of Central Park; there the point of the compass had been stuck while the pen swiveled, there just north of the little amoeba of the Pond.
The bench, where the Handsome Woman had sat, was exactly at ground zero.
He smiled again. It was a sign. He knew he would see the two women again.
He resolved to resume his vigil.
He needn’t have bothered. The very next morning, an unmemorable day neither cloudy nor clear, hot or cold, the engineer, who had emerged from Macy’s only to plunge immediately underground again, caught sight of the Handsome Woman on the subway level of Pennsylvania Station. It was not even necessary to follow her. She took his train. When she did not get up at Columbus Circle, he stayed on too.
The train burrowed deep into the spine of the island and began a long climb up into Washington Heights, where they emerged, she taking an elevator and he a flight of steps (but why? she didn’t know him from Adam), into a gray warren of a place which descended in broken terraces to the Hudson River. From the moraine of blackened gravel which covered the rooftops below, there sprouted a crooked forest of antennae and branching vent pipes. A perpetual wind pushed up the side streets from the river, scouring the gutters and forcing the denizens around into the sunny lee of Broadway with its sheltered bars and grills and kosher groceries and Spanish hairdressers.
He followed the Handsome Woman into a great mauve pile of buildings. Inside he took a sniff: hospital.
This time, when he saw her bound for an elevator, he entered beside her and swung around behind her as she turned. Now, eight inches in front of him, she suddenly looked frail, like a dancer who leaves the stage and puts on a kimono. There arose to his nostrils the heavy electric smell of unperfumed hair.
She got off at the tenth floor, so up he went to the eleventh and back down the steps in time to catch a glimpse of her foot and leg disappearing through a doorway. He kept on his way, past the closed door and other doors, past a large opening into a ward, and to the end of the corridor, where he cocked a foot on a radiator, propped his mouth on a knuckle, and looked out a sooty window. As usual, he had forgotten to put on his jacket when he left Macy’s, and his tan engineer’s smock gave him the look, if not of a doctor, at least of a technician of sorts.
Directly a man came out of the room into which the Handsome Woman had disappeared, and, to the engineer’s astonishment, made straight for him.
At first he was certain he had been found out and someone had been sent to deal with him. His imagination formed the picture of a precinct station where he was charged with a misdemeanor of a vaguely sexual nature, following a woman on a subway. His eyes rolled up into his eyebrows.
But the stranger, an old man, only nodded affably. Lining up beside him, he rubbed himself against the vanes of the radiator and began to smoke a cigar with great enjoyment. He cradled one elbow in the crook of the other arm and rocked to and fro in his narrow yellow shoes.
“It looks like Dr. Calamera is running late.” The stranger screwed up an eye and spoke directly into the smoke. He was a puckish-looking old fellow who, the engineer soon discovered, had the habit of shooting his arm out of his cuff and patting his gray hair.
“Who?” murmured the engineer, also speaking straight ahead since he was not yet certain he was being addressed.
“Aren’t you assisting him in the puncture?”
“Sir?”
“You’re not the hematologist?”
“No sir.”
“They suspect a defect in the manufacture of the little blood cells in the marrow bones, like a lost step,” said the stranger cheerfully, rocking to and fro. “It don’t amount to much.”
Two things were instantly apparent to the sentient engineer, whose sole gift, after all, was the knack of divining persons and situations. One was that he had been mistaken for a member of the staff. The other was that the stranger was concerned about a patient and that he, the stranger, had spent a great deal of time in the hospital. He had the air of one long used to the corridor, and he had developed a transient, fabulous, and inexpert knowledge of one disease. It was plain too that he imputed to the hospital staff a benevolent and omniscient concern for the one patient. It amounted to a kind of happiness, as if the misfortune beyond the door must be balanced by affectionate treatment here in the corridor. In hospitals we expect strangers to love us.
An intern passed, giving them a wide berth as he turned into the ward, holding out his hand to fend them off good-naturedly.
“Do you know him?” asked the old man.
“No sir.”
“That’s Dr. Moon Mullins. He’s a fine little fellow.”
The illness must be serious, thought the engineer. He is too fond of everyone.
The stranger was so wrapped up in cigar smoke and the loving kindness of the hospital that it was possible to look at him. He was old and fit. Ruddy sectors of forehead extended high into iron-colored hair. Though he was neatly dressed, he needed a shave. The stubble which covered his cheeks had been sprinkled with talcum powder and was white as frost. His suit, an old-fashioned seersucker with a broad stripe, gave off a fresh cotton-and-ironing-board smell that pierced the engineer’s memory. It reminded him of something but he could not think what.
The engineer cleared his throat.
“Excuse me, sir, but are you from Alabama?” He had caught a lilt in the old man’s speech, a caroling in the vowels which was almost Irish. And the smell. The iron-washpot smell. No machine in the world had ever put it there and nobody either but a colored washwoman working in her own back yard and sprinkling starch with a pine switch.
“I was.” The old man took a wadded handkerchief from his pocket and knocked it against his nose.
“From north Alabama?”
“I was.” His yellow eye gleamed through the smoke. He fell instantly into the attitude of one who is prepared to be amazed. There was no doubt in his mind that the younger man was going to amaze him.
“Birmingham? Gadsden?”
“Halfway between,” cried the old man, his eye glittering like an eagle’s. “Wait a minute,” said he, looking at the engineer with his festive and slightly ironic astonishment. “Don’t I know you? Aren’t you—” snapping his fingers.
“Will Barrett. Williston Bibb Barrett.”
“Over in—” He shook his hand toward the southwest
“Ithaca. In the Mississippi Delta.”
“You’re Ed Barrett’s boy.”
“Yes sir.”
“Lawyer Barrett. Went to Congress from Mississippi in nineteen and forty.” Now it was his turn to do the amazing. “Trained pointers, won at Grand Junction in—”
“That was my uncle, Fannin Barrett,” murmured the engineer.
“Fannin Barrett,” cried the other, confirming it. “I lived in Vicksburg in nineteen and forty-six and hunted with him over in Louisiana.”
“Yes sir.”
“Chandler Vaught,” said the old man, swinging around at him. The hand he gave the engineer was surprisingly small and dry. “I knew I’d seen you before. Weren’t you one of those fellows that ate over at Mrs. Hall’s in Hattiesburg?”