Part Two 1 страница

 

 

 

Six days later, I stopped all my careful planning and boarded a 10 a.m. American Airlines flight to New York City. I hadn’t informed my parents, my employer, my school, my doctor, or my parole officer, and now that I was acting in the true bent spirit of utter incaution—admitting, I suppose, that nothing could camouflage the obsessive nature of my trip—I strolled through the great awesome airport, buying magazines, treating myself to a shoe shine, and never venturing a frantic glance over my shoulder. I was the first one on the plane and I took my seat as near to the front of the jet as I could get without sneaking into first class. I’d read somewhere that the nearer to the cockpit you traveled the better your chance of surviving a crash and, though I’d given up the dread of being apprehended in Chicago, my impending reunion with Ann was still so strange and terrifying that I wondered if fate might intervene after all and pluck the long silver plane from the sky and dash it onto some flat unpopulated stretch of Ohio.

Soon enough, the plane filled with passengers to New York. I was sufficiently drunk on the music of my own mission to believe I wasn’t the only passenger off to run one of the heart’s unreasonable errands. A woman in her middle age wearing opaque green sunglasses and asking for a cocktail before takeoff, a soldier holding an innocent bouquet of daisies, an un- shaved man in his thirties carrying a shopping bag filled with clothes—who could say what crucial connections depended on this flight? It was only vanity and discouragement that sometimes made me feel alone with my endless love, but now that I was taking one of the risks my heart had urged upon me I could also feel I was not alone. If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life. After all, the intimations of endless love were the same now as they were thousands of years before, while normal life had changed a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Which, then, was more real? In love, and willing to sacrifice anything for it, I felt myself connected to all of human time, to slaves weeping on the auction block, to musicians strumming beneath moon-bright balconies, and, whether she wanted me or not, to Jade. But if I were to turn away from love, if I were to put it at arm’s length and do what was expected of me, who would be my companions then? Newscasters, Rose, and the chief of police.

I watched the ground crew checking beneath the wing. They peered at something for a few moments, nodded to each other, and walked away. One of the men gave the wing a little pat, as if it were his big silver pet. The gesture struck me as being so unconsciously tender, it made me want to know him. I turned away from the window. I’d sensed someone had sat next to me, and when I nodded hello I noticed that it was a fellow my own age and he was grinning broadly right in my face.

“I thought it was you,” he said. “David Axelrod, right?”

I had what I like to think is a normal impulse to deny my identity but force of habit had me nodding.

“You don’t recognize me?” he said, touching his dark mustache as if to remove it. “Hyde Park High. I’m Stu.” He was, of course. He was Stu Neihardt. His forehead was high and as uncreased as the inside of his arm. His hair was dark brown and curly and his eyes swam cheerfully behind his thick glasses. He was, to me, one of those people you know in school but never think of. He’d had, until now, no reality outside of the classes we’d endured together: sitting at the edge of a chlorine-bright swimming pool, diagramming a sentence on the blackboard, banging a tray against a lunchroom table on the day of the schoolwide protest against civil defense drills.

“I can’t believe this!” Stu said, taking my elbow and shaking it a few times.

“Small world, small plane,” I said.

“Going to New York?”

“New York?” I said. “I’m supposed to be going to Denver!” I made a move as if to get up.

Stu smiled openly, with his quickness of feeling and his complete willingness to be amused. “You haven’t changed, Axelrod.” Even when people mean to be pleasant when they say that, the phrase can’t escape its censorious overtones. But far more than the implication that I somehow hadn’t managed to mature enough, I wondered if his remark carried the knowledge of what I’d done and where I’d been since the last time we’d seen each other. Our graduation class had been enormous and divided into at least two dozen cliques. I didn’t remember who Stu’s crowd was and the few people who considered me a friend didn’t know Stu. If I was lucky, the last thing he had heard about my life was that I was planning to go to the University of California—I didn’t recall what school Stu had chosen; the name Bates College came to mind for some reason.

“So,” said Stu, fastening his seat belt and squashing out his cigarette, “what have you been doing?”

“I’m working for a union. I do historical research for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.”

Stu nodded. “Same old Axelrod,” he said, with apparent (if not enthusiastic) approval. He placed a new cigarette between his large, dry lips, noticed the No Smoking sign was lit on the panel above our seats, took it out of his mouth and placed it carefully back in the pack.

“You were always into causes,” Stu said. “Back then.”

“Back then? What are you, Stu? Sixty years old.” I made a kind of laugh. “Anyhow, unions isn’t a cause.” I turned away and looked out the window. We were beginning to roll toward the runway. Is this really happening? I asked myself.

The stewardesses were in the aisles demonstrating how to use the supplementary oxygen, pointing out the emergency exits, and generally preparing us for a tranquil journey. The jet picked up speed, little muted bells rang, and one stewardess raced up the aisle making certain everyone’s seat was in the upright position.

“She’s not wearing a girdle,” Stu told me through the side of his mouth when the stewardess passed. “And the little bitch up there with the oxygen mask isn’t wearing a bra. I’ve been on fifty planes this year and this is the first I’ve seen of this—no bras, no girdles. They must be fucking the pilots up in the cockpit and didn’t have time to get dressed.”

“Women don’t wear bras and girdles anymore,” I said.

“Look. Here comes the midget again. Look at that ass go. That’s my favorite.”

We were airborne. The jets roared, the windows shook in their moldings, and the altitude turned the world below into a joke.

“So,” said Stu, after the take-off, “why you going to New York?”

“Visiting.”

“Isn’t that where you go to school? You got into Columbia, right?”

“No. Berkeley.” I glanced at him. Was he really in the dark or was he merely inviting me to confess? “But I didn’t go.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. How about you? You go to Bates College or what?”

“Where’s that?” Stu asked.

“Oh, I thought that’s where you got in.”

“No. I’m at Downstate.”

This was how Chicagoans referred to the University of Illinois in Urbana. Urbana was only a half hour’s drive from my alma mater in Wyon—in fact, some of the Rockville staff took courses at the University. Once, on one of our outings, my parents took me to Urbana to hear Oscar Peterson play in an auditorium that looked like a cross between a gymnasium and a space station. We were of course surrounded by students my own age. They were a serene lot, for the times—Urbana had more fuzzy sweaters and plaid pants than most college towns in the late sixties. I did my best to enjoy the music but my sense of isolation finally degenerated into feelings of true hatred. Rose frowned at me and shook her head and I realized I was scowling so outrageously my face hurt. We left during the intermission, stalking up the inclined aisle like a defeated minority caucus leaving a convention. The trip back to Rockville was a screamer, with me making my parents feel guilty for submitting me to the humiliation of viewing two thousand unencumbered college students, Arthur shouting his apology that was mixed with the implication that he’d known all along it was a bad idea, and Rose exploding into a fury of human pain—accusing me of making the day more difficult than it needed to be, accusing Arthur of hypocritically avoiding responsibility, and accusing the both of us of using any opportunity to conspire against her. “I’m always on the outside. You two want me to feel like a piece of dirt.” Sitting next to Stu, with the nose of the jet still pointed up, I heard Rose’s voice so clearly it made me shudder. It was summer and her school was closed. I knew she was feeling monstrously alone.

“How come you fly around so much?” I asked. I threw the conversation back to Stu, like a medicine ball.

“Summer job. I work for this guy named Dr. Schaeffer. Ever hear of him? He’s the best dentist in Chicago.”

“No.”

“I mean he’s famous. He’s been on Kup’s show, there’s been stuff about him in the papers. He’s fantastic.” Stu pulled a large attaché case from beneath his seat. “He has his crowns and inlays made by this terrific place in New York. It’s right above an art gallery and they’re the best in the world.” Stu snapped open the case and revealed a dozen or so plaster molds of Dr. Schaef- fer’s patients’ mouths. “I drop these off and they do the rest. While I’m there they give me the crowns they made the week before. Each one comes in a little box, lined with purple felt, like you’d buy a diamond.”

I tried to think of something to say and we drifted into silence. Clouds and vapor rushed by the windows as if we were flying through fire. Stu tapped my knee and cocked his head toward the front of the plane. A stewardess wheeled a cart filled with plastic cups, ice, soft drinks, and miniature liquor bottles.

“You like?” he asked with a friendly smile. I wished I knew him better so I could tell him to shut up. I shrugged, creating the impression, I suppose, that I didn’t know what to make of the stewardess.

“Say,” Stu said, “what ever happened to that chick you were going with? She was the best-looking flat-chested girl I ever saw.”

I noticed a slight tension in the muscles around his scrupulously shaved jaw and it struck me with great, sickening force that Stu knew full well where I’d been the past years, knew all about the fire and the trial, and was for some reason teasing me with it. Maybe he was too shy, or too embarrassed for me and the wreck I’d made of my life, to simply admit his knowledge. Or perhaps some old adolescent score was being settled, some slight I’d forgotten. He’d never been treated as if he were terribly interesting or important and I was now conceivably ensnared in his dreary revenge.

“I don’t know where she is these days,” I said.

“Jade,” Neihardt said.

“What about her?”

“That was her name, right? Jade Butterfield. She had that whole weird family. Her father was some kind of faith healer or something.”

“No. He was a doctor. He had an MD. He just was into a different kind of medicine.”

Stu shrugged, as if I were splitting hairs. “I knew her brother Keith. He was a brainy one. What’s he doing now?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was weird, too. He never wanted to be friends with anyone but then he’d come up to you and say, ‘I’ve been thinking about you. Can we talk after school?’ He actually pulled that on me, if you can believe it. And I was stupid enough to go along with it.” Stu smiled and shook his head.

“What did he say?” I asked. I felt caught in the logic and momentum of our conversation: it was like being accosted by one of the black kids after school and being taunted and misunderstood into insulting him, at which point you’d have to fight.

“Oh, I don’t know. Psychological bullshit. You knew him better than I did. But the weird thing was it made me think he’d been studying up on me behind my back and all I knew about him was he never raised his hand in class but every time he got called on he knew the answer. Where’d you say he was now?”

“I said I didn’t know.”

“That’s how it goes,” Stu said, with satisfaction. He looked at me and raised his large eyebrows, inviting me to ask him to share his wisdom.

“That’s how what goes?”

“All the great high-school romances. I always thought I was missing out on the best but you see I wasn’t missing a thing. You and Jade were such a big deal, right? And now—poof—you don’t even know where she lives. Am I right?”

“That I don’t know where she lives?”

“No, David. The whole thing. Did you know Kenny Fox?”

“Slightly.”

“Well, I see him around. Remember him and Arlene Kirsch? They went steady for two years, she had an abortion because of him, the whole bit. So what does Kenny do when I mention Arlene? He smiles. He can hardly even remember her. She goes to college in Florida and they don’t even write each other.”

“You sound pleased.”

“No, it’s just interesting. Here’s me feeling like Mr. Asshole all through high school because I’m not part of some big romance. Never knowing what I’ll be doing on New Year’s Eve. Everyone and his brother losing their cherry and me going steady with Mrs. Thumb and her four skinny daughters.”

“Sounds pretty normal to me,” I said.

“Hey,” said Neihardt, his voice sharpening. His aggressions were beginning to show more clearly; it was like ice melting off a pond, exposing the dark, brackish water beneath. ’ I know it was normal. I don’t need you to tell me what’s normal, for Christ’s sake. I’m just telling you what it feels like for someone like me. Who felt so out of it. And who now sees all that shit he felt left out of didn’t mean so much after all. I can’t believe you’re not getting what I’m saying because I’m really being honest with you.”

The stewardess was next to us now, asking what we’d like to drink. I asked for an orange juice and Stu said, “Make that two, honey.” As she poured our juices, Stu said, “What else you have today, huh?” The stewardess, who was at least five years older than us, began to rattle off the various fruit juices and soft drinks available, but Stu broke in, saying, “No, I was just kidding.”

Stu finished his juice in one swallow and pushed back in his seat as far as it would recline. “I remember you two walking around the halls of old Hyde Park High,” he said. “Couple of first-class hand-holders. Jesus Christ, you hand-holders used to drive me nuts. I mean, what was it? A school or a fucking lover’s lane? You know what I mean? Kenny and Arlene were the same way—worse! One day I’m walking out of trig and goddamned Kenny whips his finger under my nose and says, ‘Breathe deep, old pal. I just finger-fucked Arlene.’” Stu made one of those old-fashioned rueful laughs. “High school. Four years of torture. You know the only girl’s tits I ever saw for that whole time were Jade’s? And that was an accident. It was at the science fair. We were both looking at Marsha Bercovitch’s water-pressure project and Jade—I didn’t even know her, except she was your chick—leans over to get a closer look and I see her blouse hanging away from her body. So I say to myself, ‘Peek in, Stuie, and maybe you’ll get lucky.’ So I take a quick look and there they are, what there was of them. Like two fried eggs shaking on a plate. And you know the pink part, you know whatever you fucking call that part that goes around the nipple—it was no bigger than a dime and it was wrinkled and tight. Christ. That’s the famous Stu Neihardt sex life in four years of high school. You know if—”

I don’t know what he was about to add to his little tale. I’d been wondering if I should punch him in the face, but I felt too vulnerable because of my broken parole. Still, if I let him go on, the whole purpose of my flight to New York would be weakened—the reunion with the best part of myself would be that much more unlikely. And so I leaned toward Stu and as quickly as you’d move your hand to catch a housefly I grabbed his lower lip between my thumb and forefinger. He tried to jerk his head back but I had him too tightly. “Why are you telling me this?” I whispered. I turned his lip like the key in the back of a mechanical toy—90 degrees, 120 degrees, a full 180.

He screamed and he grabbed my hand and pulled it loose, but it only hurt him more. He tried to rear back to hit at me but all motion increased the painfulness of my grip. My thumb was slipping a little on his saliva and his noises were attracting attention. I let him go, wondering what he would do to retaliate. But he merely sat back, rubbing his mouth and muttering. He had nothing at stake in fighting me or even knowing me and I’d frightened him.

“Are you crazy?” he asked.

“Could be,” I said. The only people who gave any indication of having noticed the flare-up were three nicely dressed old women sitting across the aisle from us. But when I glanced at them, they averted their eyes, moving in unison the way young best friends or sisters sometimes do. Repeatedly, a little obsessively, I wiped my fingers on my pants, trying to fix my attention on the Antarctica of clouds that streamed beneath the silver and orange wing of the jet. My pulse was racing; the violence of my impulses toward Neihardt was still within me, like the sharp end of a splinter improperly removed. I didn’t yet know if his remarks were merely gross or if they proved some cunning foreknowledge of my life’s condition. But what was worse was the sudden plummet into a fact of my life that I’d been able to absorb up until this point but that was now grown in its immensity: tearing at Stu’s lip had been yet another instance of my war with all the world since Hugh Butterfield told me in 1967 that I couldn’t see his daughter for thirty days.

And now here I was on yet another desperate mission and what possible reason did I have for not believing that it would lead to more disaster? I’d violated parole, deserted my parents, ditched out on my doctor, and was probably going to lose my job. Was it all for the delirium of love? Was the path I walked flanked by ruin on one side and emptiness on the other? Or was there no path at all and was ruination and emptiness where I was really heading all along? I’m sure it is only the very wicked who think of themselves as Good, but sitting in that seat two miles above somewhere or other, I doubted myself as never before—not my prospects, not my sanity, but the nature of my ineffable, essential self: I was beginning to feel that at my root I was not at all good. It wasn’t guilt and it wasn’t really shame. I felt trapped and repelled by the person I was.

We were late arriving in New York, though I don’t know why. Perhaps a headwind slowed us down. Stu was still next to me when we landed. Out of his incomprehension of my behavior, or perhaps out of simple boredom, he’d resumed speaking to me and I was grateful for this. Stu’s conversation increasingly revolved around his mildly pornographic fantasies—the numberless girls he slept with at the University of Illinois, the dental technician he brought to orgasm by blowing on her clitoris with that forced-air contraption dentists use to dry out your mouth, and all the bars and massage parlors where he persistently tried to heal the erotic wounds of adolescence. He sounded half like a liar and half like a middle-aged man gone mad from too many nights alone, but it was somehow agreed upon that I was obliged to listen to him

As we waited for our luggage, Stu was still with me. He was at the next stage of his approach, which was to invite me to come with him and sample the paid-for pleasures of a certain New York whorehouse. “I haven’t been there myself,” Stu said, “but a friend tells me it’s the best deal in New York. Thirty bucks for everything and no tipping. If you try to give the girls anything extra, they get pissed off at you. It’s really supposed to be nice.”

Our suitcases came out on the conveyor belt at the same time, his big blue American Tourister right next to my smaller wheat- colored case, an early inheritance from Arthur. My senses were at once blurred and jittery. Why of all the luggage in the belly of that plane did mine have to gravitate next to Stu’s? Our bags glided toward us. Stu grabbed his with a possessive snap and I picked up mine gingerly because the night before, when I was stuffing it with as much clothing as it would take, I’d somehow yanked the handle loose and now it was affixed to the case only by a few feet of kite string.

“An antique,” said Stu.

“Not yet.” I was slipping into a kind of despair. I didn’t regret causing him the small pain an hour before but the immediacy of my impulse still frightened me. I hadn’t any real idea whether or not Stu knew all about my three years in Rockville—I hadn’t had enough control over the conversation or myself to find out. And if he was in the habit of talking about me—his loneliness and sense of revenge made him a likely type to gossip about anyone who’d passed through his life—then it remained to be seen whether my meeting him was another instance of my generally crummy luck. I didn’t think he was going to call the department of corrections to report seeing me, but his knowledge made my eventual apprehension just that much more likely. He was, at the least, an eyewitness.

We walked out of the baggage area, slowly, as if we were afraid to part. “Where you staying?” Stu asked.

My plan was no more developed than to go someplace central and find an affordable hotel. “With friends,” I said.

“Oh yeah? Who?”

“This guy I know.”

“Someone from Chicago?”

“No.”

“What’s his name?”

I stopped. We were in the lower level of La Guardia. The world beyond the glass doors looked to be the color blue of a gas flame. There was a line of cabs waiting and a few enormous buses.

“What’s with all the questions?” I asked.

“In case I want to call you,” Stu said with an uncle-ish shrug. “Look. I’m staying at the Taft Hotel. It’s near everything.”

I nodded. “The guy I’m staying with is named Ben Ecrest.”

“What’s the phone?”

“I don’t remember. He’s in the book, though. He lives in the Village.”

“The Village sucks,” said Stu. “Look. You want to share a cab? It’ll be about three bucks each. It’s worth it.”

“No thanks.” I waited for him to do something but he just stood there. “Ben’s coming to pick me up.”

“Oh yeah? OK. Would it be OK if he dropped me off in Manhattan? Then I could scoot up to my hotel on the subway. I could use the extra money to have fun with.”

“If you don’t mind waiting,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s going to be late. Maybe about two o’clock.”

“Well that fucks that. I’ve got a two o’clock appointment on Fifty-seventh Street. Why’s he coming so late?”

“He works.”

“Well, why don’t you give him a call and tell him you’ll come in yourself and save him the trip out here?”

My anxiety was giving way to a great weariness. It seemed that no matter what I said, Stu would have another maddening idea. I was growing comfortable with my lies and my made-up friend; I could have imagined standing there lying to Stu and dodging his questions for hours. “He works. I have no way of getting in touch with him.”

“He doesn’t have an office?”

“No.”

“What’s he do?”

“He’s a cop.”

“A cop? A New York City cop?”

“That’s right. Weird, isn’t it?”

“Weird? Are you nuts? That’s very weird. And he’s a friend of yours?”

“He’s a great guy. Not what you’d think. He smokes pot. He’s a socialist, too.”

“Leave it to Axelrod to know the one hippy cop.”

I was outfoxing myself, I realized. My phantom pal was sounding glamorous enough for Stu to forget about the plaster- of-Paris teeth waiting for him in their plush cases. I could see him considering waiting with me, pacing before the idea like a guilty man pacing in front of a porno theater, leaning toward the ticket window, pulling away. He looked out through the glass doors. The long line of people who’d been boarding the bus was almost gone now. The driver was boarding.

“I’m going to take that bus,” Stu blurted out. He grabbed my arm. “Remember. Taft Hotel. You remember my last name?”

“Neihardt.”

Stu looked pleased, even a little touched. “So call me,” he said, turning away. “Call me and we’ll do something.”

I waited a few minutes before leaving. I found a phonebook and looked up Ann’s number and address, though I knew them by heart and had also written them down on the back of my library card, which was in my pocket. But it made me feel better to see her name and I went out to hail a taxi with a portion of my confidence and determination beginning to return. I asked the driver to take me to Macy’s. I’d never been to New York and had no idea where to look for a hotel—the only hotels I knew were the fancy ones I’d read about and I knew just enough to realize they were way out of my price range. Macy’s, I thought, was central and I felt certain there’d be plenty of hotels around. The driver navigated his cab as if he were more accustomed to driving a motorcycle. We sped practically up to the bumpers of the cars in front of us, darted in and out of lanes, and managed to pass nearly everyone on the crowded Long Island Expressway. “You want the tunnel?” he called to me over his shoulder. I didn’t exactly know what he meant but I had a foolish horror of being taken for a total out-of-towner so I said yes. At one point, we were entangled in a knot of traffic that the driver could not pass through. To our right was one of those infinite graveyards that cause in us strangers something very close to disapproval—as if so many dead people reflected darkly on the city. And to our left was a big silver bus, its motors roaring, its sides splattered with mud.

After some tiresome, typical mishaps, I finally checked into the Hotel McAlpin. The lobby had quite a few people who looked even more awkward and on the loose than I felt—men in green pants and string ties, an Oriental woman with a hairdo that must have been two feet tall, a furtive pair of aging teens carrying filthy knapsacks, eating Snickers and trying not to be noticed—they looked more like siblings than lovers; they were probably part of the last wave of mass runaways and they paced the lobby not to get away from the elements (it was a balmy day) but to relieve the foreverness of being outside. In a huge conference room off the main lobby, the Scientologists were conducting a personality test for people they’d spirited off the streets. Shoppers, wanderers, and businessmen who didn’t care to return to their offices sat in folding chairs and answered questions pertaining to their emotional lives while a few grim-looking Scientology employees paced the room like proctors at a college board examination.

My room seemed like as good a place as any to commit suicide. I turned on the TV and unpacked. The phone rang and I lunged for it, my hopes wild and unformed. It was the front desk. A woman’s voice apologized: wrong number. I hung up, my desolation laced with little threads of paranoia. I took a shower and while I stood beneath the powerful hot spray, the thought that finally I was in the same city as Ann Butterfield took on a new vividness and my heart began to slam so fiercely that I pressed my hands against the wet tile wall to keep from falling. “What am I going to say to her?” I heard a voice say, and I was in a sufficient state of confusion to take a full moment before realizing the voice was my own.

It hadn’t been my plan to waste so many hours but I couldn’t control it. Sitting in my hotel room and staring at the telephone I was closer to Ann, and to Jade, than I had been in nearly four years and I was afraid that the wrong response from Ann would break the spell. Then I was seized by the idea that calling her would be totally wrong and what I should do was simply appear at her door. Her apartment was on 22nd Street.

I walked from the hotel on 34th, downtown on Avenue of the Americas. It was not the New York of movies or my imagination. Small stores, some of them permanently closed, others with plain old junk pressed against their sooty windows; Jewish cafeterias mixed in with hardware stores, old men’s saloons, and wholesale linen outlets; the streets filled with taxis and phenomenally noisy trucks; the sunlight white, blurry, and warm; the odors of cardboard and gasoline suddenly giving way to eucalyptus and carnation as I passed three solid blocks of flower shops.

I turned the wrong way on 22nd Street and walked west for a while, past handbag and ladies’ clothing factories and tiny restaurants with Spanish names lit up in green and red neon. I asked some truckers the way and they pointed me east. My shirt was wet with perspiration, but only partially from the heat. I crossed Fifth Avenue—not the Fifth Avenue of fashion models but the street of toy manufacturers—and continued down 22nd Street, past an occasional young tree and huge, stately buildings that were either empty or filled with small factories. There were no Chicago industries here, no sausages, no steel. Here they made corrugated boxes, flags and banners, and junior miss raincoats. Mixed in was an occasional townhouse with window boxes filled with geraniums and kingly grillwork on the slender windows to keep out the burglars. There was a grubby little sandwich shop and an Indian restaurant slightly below sidewalk level—it was empty except for the staff who sat reading newspapers and drinking tea at a front table. I was at Park Avenue now (and, for me, an utterly perplexing Park Avenue), standing next to a savings bank such as an early socialist balladeer might have sung about—bricks the size of mattresses, the tinkling glow of chandeliers in the high arched windows—and the addresses were climbing quickly and neatly toward Ann’s. Looking east, I saw a dark green canvas awning reaching across the sidewalk with her address printed in white. For the entire walk, I’d done my best to keep myself at bay, but now my pulse was racing and I felt a mixture of yearning and dread I hadn’t experienced since the day I stood in Judge Rogers’s chambers waiting to hear what he planned to do with me as punishment for starting the fire.