The Throat (21 page)

If I had anything to say to these graves, or they to me, now was the
time to say it. I waited, standing in the sun, holding my hands before
me. A few bright moments came forward from a swirling darkness: sitting
safe and warm on the davenport with my mother, watching drivers wading
through waist-high snow after abandoning their cars; April skipping
rope on the sidewalk; lying in bed with a fever on St. Patrick's Day
while my mother cleaned the house, singing along with the Irish songs
on the radio. Even these were tinged with regret, pain, sorrow.

It was as if some terrible secret lay buried beneath the headstones,
in the way a more vibrant, more real Millhaven burned and glowed
beneath the surface of everything I saw.

Twenty minutes later, I turned south off the expressway at Goethals
Street and continued south in the shadows of the cloverleaf overpasses.
The seedy photography studios and failing dress shops gave way to the
high blank walls of the tanneries and breweries. I caught the odor of
hops and the other, darker odor that came from whatever the tanners did
in the tanneries. Dented, hard-worked vans lined the street, and men on
their breaks leaned against the dingy walls, smoking. In the partial
light, their faces were the color of metal shavings.

Goethals Street reverted to the jarring old cobblestones, and I
turned right at a corner where a topless bar was selling shots of
brandy and beer chasers to a boisterous night-shift crowd. A block
south I turned onto Livermore Avenue. The great concrete shadow of the
viaduct floated away overhead, and the big corporate prisons vanished
behind me. I was back in Pigtown.

The places where the big interlocking elms once stood had been
filled with cement slabs. The sun fell flat and hard on the few people,
most of them in their sixties and seventies, who toiled past the empty
barber shops and barred liquor stores. My breath caught in my throat,
and I slowed down to twenty-five, the speed limit. The avenue was
almost as empty as the sidewalks, and so few cars had parked at the
curb that the meter stands cast straight parallel shadows.

Everything seemed familiar and unfamiliar at once, as if I had often
dreamed of but never seen this section of Livermore Avenue. Little
frame houses like those on the side streets stood alongside tarpaper
taverns and gas stations and diners. Once every couple of blocks, a big
new grocery store or a bank with a drive-through window had replaced
the old structures, but most of the buildings I had seen as a child
wandering far from home still stood. For a moment, I felt like that
child again, and each half-remembered building that I passed shone out
at me. These buildings seemed uncomplicatedly beautiful, with their
chipped paint and dirty brick, the unlighted neon signs in their
streaky windows. I felt stripped of layers of skin. My hands began to
tremble. I pulled over to the empty curb and waited for it to pass.

The sight of my family's graves had cracked my shell. The world
trembled around me, about to blaze. The archaic story preserved in
fragments about Orpheus and Lot's wife says—look back, lose everything.

The yellow crime scene ribbons closing off the end of the brick
passage behind the St. Alwyn drooped as though melted by the sun. I
leaned as far inside the little tunnel as I could without touching the
tape. The place where my sister had been murdered was larger than I
remembered it, about ten feet long and nine feet high at the top of the
rounded arch. Wind, humidity, or the feet of policemen had gradually
erased the chalked outline from the gritty concrete floor of the
passage.

Then I looked up and saw the words. I stopped breathing. They had
been printed across a row of bricks five feet above the ground in
letters about a foot high. The words slanted slightly upward, as if the
man writing them had been tilting to one side. The letters were black
and thin, inky, and imperfections in the bricks made them look chewed,
blue rose, another time capsule.

I backed away from the crime scene tape and turned around to face
Livermore Avenue. Imaginary pain began to sing in my right leg. Fire
traveled lightly through my bones, concentrating on all the little
cracks and welds.

Then the child I had been, who lived within me and saw through my
eyes, spoke the truth with wordless eloquence, as he always does.

A madman from my own childhood, a creature of darkness I had once
glimpsed in the narrow alley at my back, had returned to take more
lives. The man with the ponytail might have assaulted April Ransom and
imitated his method, but the real Blue Rose was walking through the
streets of Millhaven like a man inhabited by an awakened demon. John
Ransom was right. The man who called himself Blue Rose was sitting over
a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee in his kitchen, he was switching
on his television to see if we were in for cooler weather, he was
closing his front door to take a stroll through the sunlight.

Tom Pasmore had said something about place being the factor that
linked the victims. Like his mentor, Tom Pasmore never told you
everything he knew; he waited for you to catch up. I went up to the
corner and crossed when the light changed, thinking about the places
where Blue Rose had killed people forty years ago.

One outside the St. Alwyn, one inside. One across the street,
outside the Idle Hour, the small white frame building directly in front
of me. One, the butcher, two blocks away outside his shop. These four
were the genuine Blue Rose murders. Standing at the side of the Idle
Hour, I turned around to look across the street.

Three of the four original murders had happened on the doorstep of
the St. Alwyn Hotel, if not inside.

I looked across the street at the old hotel, trying to put myself in
the past. The St. Alwyn had been built at the beginning of the century,
when the south side had thrived, and it still had traces of its
original elegance. At the entrance on Widow Street, around the corner,
broad marble steps led up to a huge dark wooden door with brass
fittings. The name of the hotel was carved into a stone arch over the
front door. From where I stood, I could see only the side of the hotel.
Over the years it had darkened to a dirty gray. Nine rows of windows,
most of them covered on the inside by brown shades, punctuated the
stone. The St. Alwyn looked defeated, worn out by time. It had not
looked very different forty years ago.

Our old house stood four doors up the block, a foursquare
rectangular wooden building with two concrete steps up to the front
door, windows on both sides of the door, two windows in line with these
on the second floor, and a small patchy front lawn. It looked like a
child's drawing. During my childhood, the top floor had been painted
brown and the bottom one yellow. Later, my father had painted the
entire house a sad, terrible shade of green, but the new owners had
restored it to the original colors.

The old house hardly affected me. It was like a shell I had grown
out of and left behind. I'd been more moved at Pine Knoll Cemetery—just
driving into Pigtown on Livermore Avenue had affected me more deeply. I
tried to let the deep currents, the currents that connect you to the
rest of life, run through me, but I felt like a stone. What I
remembered about the old house had to do with an old Underwood upright
on a pine desk in a bedroom where blue roses climbed up the wallpaper,
with onionskin paper and typewriter ribbons, and with telling stories
to charm the darkness: a memory of frustration and concentration, and
of time disappearing into a bright elastic eternity.

Then there was one more place I had to see, and I walked back down
South Sixth, crossed Livermore, and turned south.

From two blocks away I saw the marquee sagging toward the sidewalk,
and my heart moved in my chest. The Beldame Oriental had not survived
the last three decades as well as the Royal. Sliding glass panels
crusty with stains had once protected the letters that spelled out the
titles of the films. Nothing remained of the ornate detail I thought I
remembered.

Two narrow glass doors opened off the sidewalk. Behind them, before
a set of black lacquered doors, the glass cubicle of the ticket booth
was only dimly visible through the smudgy glass. Jagged pieces of
cement and smoke-colored grit littered the black-and-white tile floor
between the two sets of doors. The paltriness, the meanness of this
distance—the stingy littleness of the entire theater—gave me a shock so
deep that at the moment I was scarcely aware of it.

I stepped back and looked down the street for the real Beldame
Oriental. Then I went up to the two narrow glass doors and tried either
to push myself inside the old theater or simply to see better—I didn't
know which. My reflection moved forward to meet me, and we touched.

An enormous block of feeling loosed itself from its secret moorings
and moved up into my chest. My throat tightened and my breathing
stopped. My eyes sparkled. I drew in a ragged breath, for a moment
uncertain if I were going to stay on my feet. I could not even tell if
it were joy or anguish. It was just naked feeling, straight from the
heart of my childhood. It even tasted like childhood. I pushed myself
away from the old theater and wobbled over the sidewalk to lean on a
parking meter.

Warmth on my head and shoulders brought me a little way back to
myself, and I blew my nose into my handkerchief and straightened up. I
stuffed the handkerchief back into my pocket. I moved away from the
parking meter and pressed my hands over my eyes.

Across the street, a little old man in a baggy double-breasted suit
and a white T-shirt was staring at me. He turned to look at some
friends inside a diner and made a circular motion at his temple with
his forefinger.

I uttered some noise halfway between a sigh and a groan. It was no
wonder that I had been afraid to come back to Millhaven, if things like
this were going to happen to me. All that saved me from another spell
was the sudden memory of what I'd read in the gnostic gospel while I
waited for John to come back from the hospital:
If you bring forth what
is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring
forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

I was trying to bring it forth—had been trying to bring it forth
since I stood in front of the graves in Pine Knoll cemetery —but what
in the world was it?

I nearly went straight back to the Pontiac and returned to John
Ransom's house. At the back of my mind was the idea of booking a seat
back to New York on the evening flight. I was no longer so sure I cared
about what had happened more than forty years ago in, near, or because
of the St. Alwyn Hotel. I had already written that book.

Either in spite of or because of the experience I'd just had, I
suddenly felt hungry. Whatever I was going to do would have to wait
until I ate some sort of breakfast. The neon scimitar in the restaurant
window had not been turned on yet, but an open sign hung from the
inside doorknob. I went into the hotel for a morning paper at the desk.

What I saw when I came into the lobby must have been almost exactly
what Glenroy Breakstone and his piano player, the murdered James
Treadwell, had known forty years ago; and what my father had seen,
walking across the lobby to his elevator. Worn leather furniture and
squat brass spittoons stood on an enormous, threadbare oriental rug.
One low-wattage bulb burned behind a green glass shade next to a couch.

A small stack of the morning's
Ledger
lay on the desk. I picked one
up and slid thirty-five cents toward the clerk. He was sitting down
behind the desk with his chin in his hand, concentrating on the
newspaper folded over his knees. He heard the sound of the coins and
looked up at me. The whites of his eyes flared. "Oh! Sorry!" He glanced
at the three copies that remained on the desk. "Got to get up early to
get a paper today," he said, and reached for the coins. I looked at my
watch. It was nine-thirty: the St. Alwyn got up late.

I carried the paper into Sinbad's Cavern. A few silent men ate their
breakfasts at the bar, and two couples had taken the tables at the
front of the room. A waitress in a dark blue dress that looked too
sophisticated for early morning was standing at the end of the bar,
talking with the young woman in a white shirt and black bow tie working
behind it. The place was quiet as a library. I sat down in an empty
booth and waved at the waitress until she grabbed a menu off the bar
and hurried over. She was wearing high heels, and she looked a little
flushed, but it might have been her makeup.

She put the menu before me. "I'm sorry, but it's so hard to
concentrate
today. I'll get
you some coffee and be right back."

I opened the menu. The waitress went to a serving stand on the near
side of the bar and came back with a glass pot of coffee. She filled my
cup. "Nobody around here can believe it," she said. "Nobody."

"I'll believe anything today," I said.

She stared at me. She was about twenty-two, and all the makeup made
her look like a startled clown. Then her face hardened, and she took
her pad from a side pocket of the sleek blue suit. "Are you ready to
order, sir?"

"One poached egg and whole wheat toast, please." She wrote it down
wordlessly and walked back through the empty tables and brushed through
the aluminum door to the kitchen.

I looked at the blond girl in the bow tie at the end of the bar and
at the couples seated at the far tables. All of them had sections of
the morning newspaper opened before them. Even the men eating on stools
at the bar were reading the
Ledger
.
The waitress emerged from the
kitchen, stabbed me with a glance, and whispered something to the girl
behind the bar.