he senses a deeper explanation, a desire to let the plosive force that gutted the first building express itself in its successor.
But there had been no bomb factory here on West Seventy-fourth Street, and so there is no reason for this fine house to have disappeared, merely because it has ceased to hold a place in his day-to-day consciousness. It still stands, and the same young woman still occupies it, all but the lowest floor, where the same old woman, older now, maintains the same undistinguished antique shop.
He thinks of another shop, of the letter opener he bought there. Of the woman who sold it to him, calling it a paper knife. The term itself, he thinks, could be ambiguous, meaning either a knife to cut paper or a knife made of paper. Or a knife in name only, like a paper tiger.
Gone now, whatever you called it. Oh, it still exists, even as the house still exists, but it’s no longer part of his life.
All the Flowers Are Dying
149
Is this house part of his life? Does it, like so much else here in this ex-traordinary city, come under the heading of Unfinished Business?
He’ll have to think about that.
On his way home he stands for a few moments directly across the street from another much larger building, this one on the southeast corner of Fifty-seventh and Ninth. There’s a doorman on duty twenty-four hours a day, and there are security cameras in the elevators and the lobby. Still, how difficult a hindrance are they likely to prove? Created and installed and maintained by men, surely they can be subverted by a man.
But it’s not yet time.
He walks home. He sometimes thinks of himself as a hermit crab, taking up homes and discarding them when he outgrows them. The shelter that suits him now, his home for the present, consists of three rooms on the top floor of a tenement on Fifty-third Street west of Tenth Avenue.
The building shows some of the effects of gentrification. Its brick facade has been repointed, its halls and stairways renovated, its vestibule entirely redone. Many of the apartments have been done over, too, as their occupants have moved or died off, replaced by new tenants paying full market value rents. Only a few of the old rent-controlled tenants are left, and one of them, Mrs. Laskowski, probably doesn’t have much time left. She’s fifty pounds overweight and diabetic, and suffers as well from something that makes her joints ache in bad weather. But she’s out there on the front stoop, smoking a malodorous little Italian cigar, when he mounts the steps.
“Well, hello,” she says. “How’s your uncle?”
“I was just visiting him.”
“I wish I could, I’ll tell you that. You see somebody for so many years, you miss seeing them. It’s a shame you couldn’t get them to take him at St.
Clare’s. My cousin Marie was at St. Clare’s, God rest her soul, and I was able to visit her every single day until she passed.” And what a rare treat that must have been.
“They’re taking good care of him at the VA,” he reminds her. “The best possible, and it’s all free of charge.”
150
Lawrence Block
“I never even knew he was in the service.”
“Oh, yes, and very proud to have served. But he didn’t like to talk about those days.”
“He never said a word on the subject. The Veterans, that’s up in the Bronx, isn’t it?”
“Kingsbridge Road.”
“I don’t even know where that is. I guess it’s a long ride on the subway.”
“You have to change trains,” he says, “and then it’s a long walk when you finally do get there.” He has no idea if this is true, he’s only been to the Bronx once, and that was years ago. “And visiting him can be difficult. Today he didn’t know me.”
“You went all that way and he didn’t know you.”
“Well, you have to take the bitter with the sweet, Mrs. L. And you know what my uncle always used to say. ‘You get what you get.’ ” He climbs the stairs, lets himself into the apartment, locks the door.
The apartment is run-down and shabby. He’d have cheerfully hired someone to clean it, but that could have caused talk, and so he’d done it himself as best he could, scrubbing the floors and walls, spraying air freshener. But one can only do so much, and the place still holds the stench of fifty years of Joe Bohan’s cigarettes, mingled with the persistent aroma of Joe Bohan himself, a man who lived alone and evidently never made too much of a thing of personal hygiene.
Still, in a city where even the shabbiest hotel room is ridiculously expensive, there’s much to be said for a free apartment, especially one so close to so much of his unfinished business.
In a delicatessen on Tenth Avenue, where he’d stopped for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, he’d heard two old men talking about poor Joe Bohan, who wasn’t getting out much anymore. Always kept to himself, one man said, but a nicer guy you wouldn’t want to meet.
He’d found a Joseph Bohan listed in the phone book. He called the number, and a man with a scratchy voice answered. No, the man said, there was no Mary Eileen Bohan at that address. He was an old man, he lived by himself. Close relatives? No, none at all. But there were lots of Bohans, although he didn’t remember hearing of a Mary Eileen.
He gave the old man a day or two to forget the phone call, then packed All the Flowers Are Dying
151
up and moved out of the room he’d been living in, an overpriced flophouse a few blocks from Penn Station. He mounted the stoop on West Fifty-third with a suitcase in each hand, rang the buzzer marked bohan, and climbed to the third floor, where an unshaven old wreck stood in the doorway, wearing a gray nightshirt and at least a