He hunted among the rows of bells, found his brother”s, rang, and climbed up. The door of the flat was open a few inches. He pushed it and was startled to feel a resisting weight on the inside. Letting the knob go, he retreated a step. It ran swiftly through his mind that it was not a child behind that door, not Philip. And why should Max try to keep him out? Could it be Elena? A hot wave of fright passed over him at the thought that the energy of madness had held back his push. “Who’s there?” he said hoarsely. “Who is it?” He went up to the door again. This time, merely at his touch, the door swung open. Elena’s mother was in the hallway. He understood at once what had happened. Standing at the hinge to see who was coming she had been caught against the wall in the narrow vestibule.
“What are you doing?” His tone was harsh.
She was silent, and he was baffled by her look; behind its vindictiveness there was something crazily resembling amusement.
“Where is everybody?”
“Go out. I alone,” she said in her rough voice. He had never before heard her speak English. It surprised him. As for the amusement, he must have been mistaken about that. It was the concentration of her look that had suggested it. The boy was, after all, her grandson.
“Where did they go?”
Either she did not know or was unable to explain. She uttered a few sounds. Steam was coming from the kitchen; he saw it behind her. Was she cooking dinner?
“Where are they, at the chapel? Is the funeral today?”
She merely shrugged; she refused to answer, and she gave him another of those frightful glances of spite and exultation, as though he were the devil.
“They’re going to come home to eat, aren’t they—mangare? When?”
It was a waste of time. She only wanted to get rid of him. He turned from her and went downstairs.
No one responded to his knock at Villani’s. His headache was becoming severer. He frowned and hit at the door despairingly. Then it occurred to him to try the superintendent. He found him in the court, reading the paper in the shade of the furnace room stairs.
“Do you know where I can find my people?” he said. “I’m Max Leventhal’s brother.”
The superintendent got up. Old and slow, he rested his weight on bent, swollen knuckles.
“Why, the boy’s being buried out of Boldi’s parlors.”
“The old mother-in-law is upstairs, but she wouldn’t tell me. Where is this Boldi place?”
“Two blocks down. Turn left when you leave the building. Same side as this. There’s a church on the corner.” He bent to gather up the paper which had unfolded over his brown felt slippers.
The sun had come round to a clearer portion of the sky and its glare was overpowering. Leventhal took off his jacket. The heat of the pavement penetrated his soles and he felt it in the very bones of his feet. In a long, black peninsular yard a row of scratchy bushes grew, dead green. The walls were flaming coarsely, and each thing — the moping bushes, the face of a woman appearing at a screen, a heap of melons before a grocery — came to him as though raised to a new power and given another quality by the air; and the colors, granular and bloody, black, green, blue, quivered like gases over the steady baselines of shadow. The open door of the grocery was like the entrance to a cave or mine; the cans shone like embedded rocks. He had a momentary impression of being in a foreign city when he saw the church the superintendent had mentioned — the ponderousness, the gorgeous-ness, the decay of it, the fenced parish house, the garden, and the small fountain thick with white lead and flimsily curtained with water.
He passed through Boldi’s office and entered the lounge. There he saw Philip sitting in a wicker chair. His legs were crossed on a footstool and his head rested on his raised shoulder.
“How are you, boy?” Leventhal said quietly.
“Hello, uncle,” said Philip. He looked listless.
“I hear your father’s back.”
“Yes, he came in.”
Leventhal caught the flush of candles through the oval windows of the studded leather door. He went into the chapel. It was cool. A master fan murmured somewhere in the building. Beyond the heaped-up, fiery glasses of the altar hung a Christ of human size. Taking off his hat, Leventhal walked up to the coffin. He was struck by the softness of the boy’s face, the absence of signs of recoil or fright. He noted the curve of his nose, the texture of his brushed-up hair, the ends of which touched the folds of the satin, the poise of his small chin over his breast and decided, “He was going to turn out like Max and me. A Leventhal.” Reflectively he fingered the smooth copper rail with its knot of dark plush and glanced upward. The chapel displeased him. Elena had undoubtedly insisted on a Catholic funeral. That was her right. But from the Leventhals’ side, and the boy was one of them, too, it was peculiar, after so many generations, to have this. Prompted by an indistinct feeling, he thought to himself, “Never mind, thanks, we’ll manage by ourselves…”
He turned from the rail and encountered his brother.
The sight of him hit Leventhal with a terrible force. He had been prepared to meet him in anger; his very first word was to have been a rebuke. But now, instead of speaking, he took in his brother’s appearance, the darkness and soreness of his swollen face, the scar at the corner of his mouth from a cut received in a street fight years ago in Hartford. Outdoor work had weathered him; the loss of several teeth made his jaw longer. His suit — it was a suit such as laborers used to buy in his father’s store. His new black shoes were dusty.
“I didn’t make it in time,” he said.
“I heard, Max.”
“I left as soon as the telegram came. I got in about ten minutes late.”
“When’s the funeral?”
“Four o’clock.” Max motioned him to come aside. In the aisle near the wall, clasping Leventhal’s hand and stooping over it, he burst into tears. He whispered, but occasionally one of his sobs or half-articulated words broke out of key and reverberated through the place. Leventhal stiffened his arm and supported him. He heard him say, “He was covered up,” and bit by bit, through many repetitions, he learned that Max had come into the room unaware that Mickey was dead and found the sheet drawn over his head.
“Awful,” he said. “Awful.”
He gazed at Max’s burly back and his sunburnt neck, and, as his glance moved across the polished rows of benches, he saw Elena sitting between Villani and a priest. The look she gave him was one of bitter anger. Though the light was poor, there was no mistaking it. Her face was white and straining. “What have I done?” he thought; his panic was as great as if he had never foreseen this. He was afraid to let her catch his eye and did not return her look. Helping Max up the aisle, he sat down beside him, still holding his arm. What would he do if then and there — imagining the worst — she began to scream at him, accusing him? Once more she turned her face to him over her shoulder; it seemed to be blazing in its whiteness. She must be mad.