him now, they say, taking him for an autopsy, I don’t know where. He was only thirty-six, so they have to … they have to … they have to cut him open and find was it a heart attack or what. There’s nowhere I can go, he was all I had, and I don’t know where to go.”
Maybe she hadn’t cried until then, maybe the shock and terror had numbed her, but now the tears came in great wrenching sobs, pent up but released in a flood. She was racked by the kind of grief that is part horror, when the mourner suddenly knows death to be not just a profound loss but also an abomination, and the wretched sounds that came from her made me tremble and raised in me a feeling of absolute helplessness and uselessness unlike anything I’d felt before.
As usual, my mother coped. She brought Mrs. Lorenzo into our kitchen and settled her in a chair at the table and pushed aside the checkerboard. She insisted that Mrs. Lorenzo had to drink something warm, and she set about making tea, all the while commiserating not in a phony way but with the right words that I could never have found and with tears of her own.
Mrs. Lorenzo was gentle and kind, and I couldn’t stand watching her coming apart like that or the thought of her widowed so young. I went to a living-room window and looked out and saw the ambulance still at the curb in the crimson twilight.
I had to get out of the apartment. I don’t entirely know why, but I felt that, were I to stay there, I’d start crying, too, and not just for Mrs. Lorenzo or Mr. Lorenzo, but for my father, of all people, because he had that awful emptiness inside himself, and for myself, too, because my father couldn’t ever be a father. Grandma Anita was still alive, and I’d never known anyone who died. Mr. Lorenzo had been a waiter; he often got home late, and he sometimes carried me up to our apartment when I was asleep and my mom returned from work at the club, and now he was dead. I was glad my father moved out, but this was like two deaths close to each other, one the death of a neighbor, the other the death of my father-son dream, which I would have denied having, if you’d asked me, but to which just then I realized I’d still been clinging. I ran out of the apartment and down six flights of stairs to the foyer and outside to the stoop and down more stairs to the sidewalk.
The paramedics were loading the body into the back of the van ambulance. A sheet covered Mr. Lorenzo or maybe he was in a body bag, but I couldn’t see him, only the shape of him. Across the street, a crowd of twenty or thirty had gathered, probably people who lived in the apartment houses over there, and they were watching Mr. Lorenzo being taken away. Some kids were over there, too, my age and younger. They chased around and danced and acted silly, as if the flashing beacons of the ambulance were holiday fireworks. Maybe if the death had occurred on the other side of the street, I’d be watching from here with different kids, acting as foolish. Maybe the difference between horror and holiday was just the width of an ordinary street.
At nine I knew about death, of course, but not as an intimate truth, rather as something that happened out there in the world, in other families, nothing for me to worry about for a long time yet. But now people I knew were going away forever. If two could go in just two weeks, three others could go in just three more—Grandpa, Grandma, and my mother—and I would be like Mrs. Lorenzo, alone and with nowhere that I belonged anymore. It was crazy, a little-kid panic, but it grew out of the undeniable realization that we’re all so fragile.
I thought that I should do something for Mr. Lorenzo, that if I did something for him, God would see and approve and not take anyone from me until I was much older. I guess if I hadn’t been so crazy afraid, I might have gone to church and lit a candle for him and said a few prayers. Instead I thought that I should play the piano for him, one of his favorite songs that he listened to on his stereo.
The community center stayed open until 10:30 on Monday because it was bingo night. As one paramedic closed the rear doors of the ambulance and the other started the engine, I turned away and headed toward the Abigail Louise Thomas Room.
Perhaps in my peripheral vision, I saw him moving, paralleling me. But as long as I live, I will credit luck and the feather pendant in my pocket, because I was in a distraught emotional state that made it unlikely that I would have picked up on clues glimpsed from the corner of my eye. My father must have been among the crowd across the street, because now he paced me. When he realized that I had seen him, he didn’t call out to me or wave, which would have been much less creepy. He only walked faster when I did and broke into a run when I ran.
If I made it to the community center, he might come in after me. No one there knew that my mother had thrown him out or that divorce was imminent. Sylvia didn’t wash her dirty laundry in public. They knew me at the center, and they didn’t know him, and if I caused enough of an uproar, they would surely call my mom.
But then I saw that he was glancing both ways along the street as he ran, checking on the traffic, looking for an opening, ready to dash across all three lanes at the first opportunity. The center was still more than a block away. His legs were longer than mine. I’d never make it there before he caught me. He wouldn’t hurt me. I was his son. Grandpa Teddy said Tilton wouldn’t harm me. Might snatch me and take me away. But wouldn’t harm me. To snatch me, he needed a car, surely a car. You didn’t absolutely need a car in the city; and Tilton hadn’t owned one. Maybe he owned one now, but he would have to drag me to it, and I’d fight all the way, and he wouldn’t want that. So maybe he meant to hurt me, after all.
At the corner, one-third of the way to the community center, I turned left, heading for the alleyway behind our building. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Tilton crossing the street, dodging cars as the drivers pounded their horns and brakes squealed. He looked wild. I wouldn’t make it into the back street and half a block to the rear entrance of our building before he overtook me.
Twilight slanted through the streets, fiery in the windows and painting emberglow across tenement walls, purple shadows swelling, but night already claimed the narrow alley. Not all the buildings had back entrances; some had switchback fire escapes, and where there was rear access, the security lamps above the doors were often broken. On both sides, Dumpsters rose, hulking shapes in the gloom, some lids up, some down, some stuck halfway. I climbed the side of a Dumpster where the lids were open and dropped inside, landing on slippery piles of plastic garbage bags, in a stink of rotting vegetables and God knew what else.
I knelt with my back pressed to the metal wall, trying to be still, cupping both hands over my nose and mouth, not because of the stench but to soften the sound of my breathing. His shoes slapped loud on the blacktop and on the bricks where the blacktop had worn off, and as he passed me, he was panting louder than I was. He came to a halt about where I figured the back door to our building must have been, and I listened to him muttering in frustration and making small noises for which I couldn’t account.
I began to wonder if I had done the right thing by fleeing from him. He was my father, after all, not a good one but my father nonetheless. Maybe I’d misjudged his mood and was mistaken about his intentions.
When he began to curse and when my name proved to be part of it, I stopped worrying that I’d been unfair. He rattled the knob and kicked the door hard. I didn’t understand what had foiled him. The superintendent had cut new keys to our apartment; but Tilton still possessed the other key, the one to the back stairs, which unlike the front entrance was kept locked. He became increasingly agitated, cursing explosively, and when he repeatedly kicked a Dumpster—not mine but one nearby—I figured he’d been drinking. The big trash bin gave off hollow drumlike beats that echoed along the alleyway—boom, boom, boom. A man shouted from a high window, “Knock it off!” Tilton shouted back at him, cursed him out, and the man said as if he meant it, “I’m comin’ down there, you bastard.” My father hurried away then, but no one came down to look for him. Comparative quiet settled over the alleyway, disturbed only by the muffled sounds of traffic out on the main street and by music and voices from a TV channeled through an open window overhead.
Suspicious,
