“Victor asked for you especially,” he had said.
I had known Dev would never forgive me if I killed again. But I had pretended that he might, and I left.
2
After two more cigarettes and some burnt coffee from the percolator that an old lover had left behind and I always meant to replace, I called Gloria.
“I thought I could take Sonny and Ida to the park for a few hours. Give you a break. Is Tom around?” Tom didn’t like me, though he tolerated me for Gloria’s sake.
“There’s a new ship down at the yards so I’ve hardly seen him for the last week. You all right, honey?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Cut. I just haven’t seen my favorite niece and nephew in ages.”
“And your favorite sister?”
I smiled and unspooled the phone cord from my fingers. “You betcha.”
“Well, if you got nothing better to do, you know those kids would love to see you.”
So I put on my yellow day-dress, the one that looked all right but wouldn’t give my old neighbors cause to think I’d got uppity from my years downtown, and headed out.
Outside, I checked for Red Man, but I didn’t see him. My apartment building was in the middle of East 63rd Street—not an office block—and this late in the morning I could see everyone on the sidewalk and the street easy and clear. Not yet, I thought, relieved, and headed to Lexington. I sat down at the counter of my local milk bar to eat four thick slices of challah still warm from the ovens in back, soft with butter. Late nights, they kept the borscht on the stove and I liked to eat it, thick and beet-red, with a heel of stale challah in those still hours before sunrise, when my hands smelled like French-milled soap and hard water; like lavender and someone else’s blood.
There were a few soldier boys on the A train, already in uniform, duffels on the seats and bodies in energetic motion, pacing the car and swinging from straps when the wheels struck up sparks against blind curves. They were black, young and handsome. Called up, I guessed, in Roosevelt’s peacetime draft, though they didn’t seem unhappy about the prospect of killing themselves on the other side of the world. One of them smiled shyly at me just before the City College station and asked if I’d like to get a drink with him and his friends before they got their deployment orders.
“We’re only here for a week, ma’am,” he said. “My friends and I are up for a swell time.”
He had fine, even teeth with a little gap between the front two that reminded me of my brother Roger, dead almost fifteen years. I wondered how I looked to him, reading alone on that car, that he would invite me to share one of his last nights before heading to war.
“Where you gonna go?” I asked, wishing for a useless moment that I were young enough to have a good time with them, because then I’d be young enough to have never met Victor.
“Minton’s,” he said, quick. “And there’s this place my buddy Jerry knows, some mobbed-up joint, with a bird name, down in the Village … Jerry, what’s that club called, the one with the snake dance?”
“Pelican,” his buddy said, swinging over to me on the straps, all ease and good looks and unconsidered strength. “Ain’t segregated, and they got the best bebop in the city after Minton’s according to my uncle Joe, who plays tenor sax at the Savoy, so he oughta know. But this here cat, you know, he hears ‘snake dance,’ and all he can see is titties—uh, sorry.”
“Jesus, Jerry,” my admirer muttered, and elbowed his friend hard in the ribs.
The third recruit poked his head between the two of them and smiled. “Hello, miss,” he said. “What these two fools trying to say is, we’d be real happy to see you at the Pelican if you’d like to find us there.”
“What’d you sweet boys want with an old lady like me?” I said.
“Old lady!” Jerry crowed, and the peacemaker kissed my hand while my first admirer just shook his head and said, “I wouldn’t mind you for my old lady.” It was silly, and I was a fool to get my head turned by half of what they said, but I wasn’t on this train with a knife in my bag because I was wise, or good, or did what was best for me. So I told those fellas I might just see them at the Pelican that night and waved goodbye when they got off.
I was still smiling when I got to Gloria’s, and she froze with her hand on the knob. The fissures radiating from her downturned mouth traced a map that I remembered from our mother’s face, and probably for the same reasons. Gloria, the golden eldest, had never given our mother the grief that poor Roger and I had. I wondered if Gloria even recognized the ghost that stared back from her mirror, late nights.
“Phyllis,” she said, with heavy meaning.
“I can’t be happy?”
She rubbed her neck. “Depends on what you’re happy about.”
“Nothing bad, Glory. For heaven’s sake. You gonna let me in or should I go back home?”
To Gloria—and Dev—my seven months would be a drop of virtue in an ocean of sin, but I’d already started to feel the quiver of something different, something old but newly growing. I felt it in my hands when I held my knives, those old hurting things, which gave one kind of power and stole another away. I waited for the day the two of them would see the change in me too, but in their eyes I was still the same old girl, Victor’s aging knife.
“Come in, baby,” Gloria said, and embraced me. We couldn’t save Roger, but Gloria had saved me a dozen times over. Not enough for her peace of mind, I knew that, but enough for me to
