Bereavements (30 page)

She’d been tempted to ask “what
kind
of love” (crane drivers made) but caught herself in time, thinking, how silly, how cruel to make him shape it into words. How many kinds of love can there be between a boy and a man? His father, whatever his relations with women, was also a pederast; this sometimes happening to drivers of cranes and Alexanders the Great.

“Pass” had done nicely, and would continue to do. The important thing was that he’d
told
her. That much—so very much—had been gained.

But why was the boy still so tense, with little visible sign of relief. Unburdened, confessed, his fearsome secret known at last, she expected to see tight muscles relax, the body loosen, the mist of sweat on his forehead dry.

Then she realized that the greatest, darkest secret of all hadn’t been exposed. The most important question, the only important question hadn’t been asked—no less answered—that question being: What about Joey? Does
he
love the kind of love his father loves . . . ?

She couldn’t ask. No one could. Not even Joey of himself. Even if Joey knew, Angel surely didn’t.

On the evening of the 23rd, just as Mrs. Evans and Martin emerged from Sardi’s after a small supper that followed the theater—a fine production of
The Chairs
—a light snow began to fall.

By the time they reached Washington Square, the flakes were large, the fall windless and heavy, and the temperature sufficiently below 32 degrees not to have it all melt on the pavements.

In their twenty-odd minute ride from mid-town, the city had turned a glorious blue-shadowed white.

Mrs. Evans stopped Dori before the arch of the Square beginning at Fifth Avenue, telling him to take the car home, she and Martin would walk the rest of the way.

“Didn’t you love it?” Martin asked, about the play. “Wasn’t it marvelous? They were simply great, both of them, and that make-up! Didn’t you believe she was ninety years old—a girl barely twenty? Wasn’t it funny—and terrifying? Such an incredible play! How I would love to do it one day! That old, old man . . . tottering about with his cane . . .”

But Mrs. Evans scarcely heard a word; she was too taken by the snow, breathing its clean wet fragrance, turning up a smiling face to let the icy crystals kiss her cheeks and mouth and forehead. They clung, unmelting for a moment, so thickly to her eyelashes, she laughed and had to blink them away, else not see at all.

To Martin’s dismay, she began to whirl and dance her way into the small park. He caught her in time, pulling her back.

“Don’t go in there,” he warned; “do you want us both murdered? Good Lord! you’ve lived long enough in the Village to know!”

Half in his arms, she continued to dance.

“No one is murdered on such a beautiful night.”

“Everyone is,” he returned. “Precisely because nobody thinks so.”

Mrs. Evans looked at him with an expression that was suspiciously euphoric, and he wondered if, when at Sardi’s he’d gone into the men’s room just before they left, she might have taken a pill—or several. But it was always difficult to tell: her moods were so varied and many. It may have been, simply, of all things, the snow!

It was. The fall of it immense.

She removed her cloche hat, silk scarf, opened her coat, letting the flakes feather her hair, drift coldly against her throat.

“How
wealthy
God is!” she said.

The snow, reflecting the street lights, made everything quite bright, so it was easy to see the bag of garbage or bundle of laundry—whatever it was—that someone had left next to the stairs that led to the Evans home.

Mrs. Evans was annoyed. People were so disgusting, discarding their refuse wherever they pleased.

“Oh do get rid of it, Martin,” she said; “put it on the curb.” But when he touched it, it moved!—shaking itself of snow, and stupor or sleep.

When it stood up, Martin was dumbstruck. “It’s a child!. . . why it’s a little . . .” Then he saw exactly what it was and murmured, “Good Lord!”

Mrs. Evans moved closer, equally astonished.

“Why it’s Bruno!” And all three stood in a momentary tableau, until her unsteady, dazed Little Crocodile took a glassy-eyed, bewildered step from the half-shadows into the light and she saw the tiny icicles that had formed around the brim of his hat.

“The poor boy is frozen! Good heavens! Bruno! Whatever are you doing here, crouched in the snow? We thought—”

“You know him!” Martin asked, illuminated, his scalp beginning to crawl. “He’s one of your—
boys
?”

What kind of question was that at this time? “What?” she asked.

“Your boys!” he snapped. “
He
answered your ad? You’ve been seeing him?”

Why was he so angry, his face so pale?

“Well . . .” What could she say? “Yes.”

“This . . .
creature!
”

How shocking, how unkind! How could he use such a word. And worse.

“God knows,” he continued, “I knew you enjoyed talking down to people, but really, Carma—” with a gesture toward Bruno “—that’s pretty low. Maybe you have a stepladder handy when he visits. No? A pair of stilts? Or does he just manage to fly—with that broken wing on his back?!”

She was incapable of reply, her mouth working to find words, her body moving between the two of them so Martin would stop feasting his eyes.

Finally she managed: “Will you stop it! Martin, stop! Can’t you see he’s ill, and all but frozen? Help me get him into the house.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Martin replied with a strangled half-laugh. “What am I? Part of the menagerie, the freak show you’ve got going? Carma—” (barking it out, bubbles of foam at the corners of his mouth) “you’ve got a decision to make, and make it fast! Either you tell this—little. . . monster to fuck off, get lost quick—or it’s the last you’ll see of me.” Whereupon, the outrageous inhuman man took the $500 Brooks Brothers Gift Certificate she had that very evening given him as a Christmas present, tore it in half, and threw it in her face.

So it was he, not she, who had already made the decision.

“Goodbye, Mr. Dzierlatka!”—the words edged out between closed bared teeth. She watched him turn instantly and walk away. But, as very serious moments in life sometimes provide, his raging departure was punctuated with a touch of comedy. One foot slipped on the snowy curb, make him dance like a wounded bear and go down—so ungracefully!—on one knee before he picked himself up and, behind the heavy fall of snow—a curtain on a stage—disappear.

So she was left with her Little Crocodile, whose eyes were as glazed as the small icicles that hung from his hat. He was muttering something she couldn’t make out, and, as little as she cared to see him now, she couldn’t let him go like this, and pushed him before her, steering his staggering little body into the house.

Since everything was dark except for the hall and the window on the left, which was Dori’s, she used her key to let herself in.

Once inside, she turned to look clearly at Bruno—un-shaven for days, eyes pink with blood, sunken in blue shadows—with both surprise and the first touch of fear. The left side of his face seemed to hang, as if he’d been stricken with Bell’s Palsy, the mouth turned-down, shiny with a dribble of spit.

He hadn’t the sense to take off his hat, so she did it for him, and looked at hair that was dirty, matted, sticking wetly to his head, and a forehead, despite the outside cold, dripping with sweat.

Had he a fever, a raging fever? She put out a hand to see, then drew it back sharply, untouching, her fear mounting.

“Bruno—Bruno—” like a frightened mother to a child sleeping too long, refusing to wake.

And then it started, perfectly memorized, precise: the priest’s love-mad speech from
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
the voice sonorous, rolling out the words like muted thunder:

“Take pity on me! Thou deemest thyself miserable. Alas! Thou knowest not what misery is!”—dropping to his little knees, one of them creaking. “It is to love a woman—to love with all the energies of your soul—to feel that you would give for the least of her smiles your blood, your life, your character”—following on his knees as she, her hands crossed below her throat, backed slowly away, down the hall toward Dori’s room, under whose door was a crack of light”—your salvation, immortality and eternity, this world and the next—to regret that you are not a king, an emperor, an archangel, that you might throw a greater slave at her feet . . .”