“Who is that now?” asked the engineer, cupping a hand to his good ear and straining every nerve.
“Sally, Myra’s oldest.”
“Myra?”
“My stepdaughter.”
She was much as he remembered other ladies at home, companionable and funny, except when she got off on her pet subject, fluoridation or rather the evils of it, which had come in her mind to be connected with patriotic sentiments. Then her voice become sonorous and bell-like. She grew shorter than ever, drew into herself like a fort, and fired in all directions. She also spoke often of the “Bavarian Illuminate,” a group who, in her view, were responsible for the troubles of the South. They represented European and Jewish finance and had sold out the Confederacy.
“You know the real story of Judah P. Benjamin and John Slidell, don’t you?” she asked him, smiling.
“No ma’am,” he said, looking at her closely to see if she was serious. She was. In her smiling eyes he caught sight of fiery depths.
Rita, however, paid no attention tohim. She looked through him.
Kitty? Twice she was in Jamie’s room when he came up, but she seemed abstracted and indifferent. When he asked her if she wanted a Coke (as if they were back in high school in Atlanta), she put her head down and ducked away from him. He couldn’t understand it. Had he dreamed that he had eavesdropped?
On his fourth visit to Jamie he had a small amnesic fit, the first in eighteen months.
As he climbed into the thin watery sunlight of Washington Heights, the look and smell of the place threw him off and he slipped a cog. He couldn’t remember why he came. Yonder was a little flatiron of concrete planted with maybe linden trees like a park in Prague. Sad-looking Jewish men walked around with their hands in their pockets and hair growing down their necks. It was as far away as Lapland. A sign read: Washington Heights Bar and Grill. Could George Washington have set foot here? Which way is Virginia?
He sat down under a billboard of Johnnie Walker whose legs were driven by a motor. He puts his hands on his knees and was careful not to turn his head. It would happen, he knew, that if he kept still for a while he could get his bearings like a man lost in the woods. There was no danger yet of slipping: jumping the tracks altogether and spending the next three months in Richmond.
It was then that he caught sight of Kitty coming from the hospital, head down, bucking the eternal gale of the side streets. He knew only that he knew her. There were meltings of recognition about his flank and loin. He wished now that he had looked in his wallet, to make sure of his own name and maybe find hers.
“Wait,” he caught her four steps down the IRT.
“What? Oh.” She smiled quickly and started down again.
“Wait a minute.”
“I’ve got to go,” she said, making a grimace by way of a joke.
“Please come over here for a moment. I have something to tell you.” He knew that he could speak to her if he did not think about it too much.
She shrugged and let him guide her to the bench.
“What?”
“I, ah, thought you might do me a favor.” He looked at her hard, groping for himself in her eyes. If he could not help her, hide her in Central Park, then she could help him.
“Sure, what?”
“You’re going in the subway?”
“Yes.”
“I just came out. To see, ah—” He knew he would know it as soon as she thought it. She thought it. “—Jamie.”
“Good. He’ll be glad to see you.” She eyed him, smiling, not quite onto whatever roundabout joke he was playing and not liking it much.
“I changed my mind and decided to go back downtown.”
“All right.” But it was not all right. She thought he was up to some boy-girl business. “What’s the favor?”
“That I ride with you and that you give me a punch if I miss my station.”
“What?”
“Do you know where I live?”
“Yes. At—”
He touched her arm. “Don’t tell me. I want to see if I know when I get there.”
“What’s the matter — oh”—all joking aside now, eyes black as shoe buttons. She saw he was sweating.
Oddest of alclass="underline" strange as he felt, having slipped six cogs, the engineer knew nevertheless that it was a negotiable strangeness. He could spend some on her. “Nothing much. Will you do as I say?”
“Yes.”
Above them, Johnnie Walker’s legs creaked like ship’s rigging.
“Let’s go.” He started straight out, not waiting on her.
“That’s the wrong subway,” she said, catching up with him. “I’m taking the IRT.”
“Right.” It was like a déjà vu: he knew what she was going to say as soon as she said it.
They rode in silence. When the train came to the first lights of the Columbus Circle platform, he rose. “This is it,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, watching him sloe-eyed.
“Thank you,” he said, taking her hand like a man’s, and left quickly.
He stopped at a gum-machine mirror to see how he looked. There was nothing much wrong. His face was pale but intact. But when he straightened, his knee gave way and he stumbled to the edge of the platform. The particles began to sing.
A hand took his. “This way,” said Kitty. Her hand was warm and grubby from riding subways.
She led him to a bench on an arc of the Circle. It is strange, he thought, musing, but love is backwards too. In order to love, one has not to love. Look at her. Her hand was on his thigh, rough as a nurse. She made herself free of him, peering so close he could smell her breath. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“You’re pale. Your hand is so cold.” She made a slight movement and checked it. He knew she had meant to warm his hand in her lap.
“As long as you are here, will you go over there and buy me a glass of orange juice?”
She watched him drink the juice. “Have you eaten anything today?”
“No.”
“Did you have supper last night?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember to eat?”
“I eat when I get hungry. I don’t remember that I have eaten.”
“Are you hungry now?”
“Yes.”
They walked to the automat on Fifty-seventh Street. While she drank coffee, he ate four dollars’ worth of roast beef and felt much better. I’m in love, he thought as he drank his third glass of milk.
“I don’t think there is anything wrong with you,” she said when he finished.
“That’s right.”
“What will you do now?”
“Go home and go to bed.”
“You work at night?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
“There’s one more thing—” he said.
“What?”
“Write your name and telephone number on this.”
She smiled and did so but when she looked up and saw him she grew serious. “Oh.”
“Yes, I need somebody to call. Is that all right with you?”
“Yes.”
The sicker I am, the more I know, he thought. And the more she loves me. “Suppose I need to call you at three o’clock in the morning and say come to Weehawken.”
“Call me.” Her face clouded. “What about next month?”
“What about it?”
“I’ll be in Spain. In Torremolinos.”
“Write it down.” After she wrote it, he asked her. “Now what if I call you over there?”
She looked at him, taking a tuck of lip between her teeth. “Do you mean it?”
“I mean it. You’re the one I’m going to call.”
“Why me?”
He drew his chair closer to the corner of the table and put his hand in her lap. “I’m in love.”