neighborhood, too, slouching loiterers with slidy eyes on every street corner; maybe it had been them scrabbling against the door after dark, when the project was locked. Most of the marks were just strikes lashed in the paint.
Michael pushed against the door, then rattled it, and finally had to shoulder the thing to get it squealing open. How, he wondered, did the old folks who lived here ever get the door open?
Inside he was confronted with a long bank of battered mailboxes. The Cathedral Project, a yellow-brick monolith between Harrison Avenue and Washington Street near Franklin Square, housed some two thousand low- income tenants. Michael scanned the mailboxes looking for the name and apartment number. Outside, trains clattered by on the elevated line, which straddled Washington Street on paired legs like an enormous centipede, and the mailboxes shivered. He found one with a handwritten card taped to it with foreign-looking numbers. Presumably this was how Europeans wrote their numerals, with a horizontal strike across the middle of the 7 and fishhook tail on the 9. He wandered into the wrong wing of the project looking for number seventy-nine. It took him ten minutes to find the right apartment.
A woman answered through the closed apartment door, “Who is it?”
“Mrs. Cavalcante, it’s Michael Daley. I don’t know if you remember me.”
“You from the Renewal?”
“No. I was the lawyer in your trial, when they took your apartment in the West End. I’m a lawyer. You remember?”
“From the Renewal?”
“No, Mrs. Cavalcante. I’m with the Attorney General’s office. I just have a few questions. It’s not-you’re not in any trouble. Just questions.”
Michael could barely remember the old woman. She and her husband were both short and slight, he recalled, and during the brief hearing they had spoken mainly to each other.
“I don’t want no questions.”
“It’s about what you said that day, Mrs. Cavalcante. In court. What you said. You said something about gangsters had come to your apartment. Dinquenti, cinquenti, something. I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italian-I don’t remember the word.”
A chain rattled, then two locks, and the door opened a crack. An eye peered out, with a dull yellow sclera but alert, flicking up and down, nervous. “Delinquenti.”
“ Delinquenti, yes. Si. ”
“I remember you.” She opened the door now and glared. “I remember you.” Propping herself with a cane, she gimped back into the apartment on one dead leg, which she urged forward with a roll of her right hip. “I remember you.”
“Did you hurt your leg, Mrs. Cavalcante?”
“My hip. I broke my hip.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Pssh, she said.
“Should you be walking on it?”
“What else should I do?”
“Rest.”
“I already rest. Three weeks I’m in the hospital with all old, sick…”
“I’m sorry,” Michael said again.
Pssh, she said again.
“Is your husband home?”
“No. He’ll be back. What do you want from us now?”
Michael closed the door behind him. “Look, I know how you must feel, Mrs. Cavalcante. I know how it must have looked to you. But there was another side. I had a job to do.”
“What do you want from us?”
“Mrs. Cavalcante…”
She stared. The old couple had both been small but, Michael recalled, there had been an erect, peasant sturdiness about them. Two tough little brown nuts from some Umbrian hillside. No longer. Whether it was the injury to her hip or the effort of moving, only a few months later Mrs. Cavalcante looked withered, humpbacked.
“I wanted to ask you-I got to thinking about what you said that day, about men coming to your apartment?”
“Do you know what they did, the Renewal? When I was in the hospital with this hip, and the doctors were telling me I would never walk again, I should just stay in bed, do you know what they did? They sent in the movers and they took away my things. Pictures my dead son, dead from twenty years, they take away and they throw them in the trash like nothing. They wait until my husband comes to visit me in the hospital and they do this, they sneak. This is the kind of people. All my dishes, my blankets, my clothes, everything gone. Just like that they come, they take it all. I come home and my apartment is empty. My home twenty years.” She stood waiting for an answer from Michael, a confession of remorse. She had checkmated him and an apology was her due.
Michael regarded her-she looked like a comma, standing there with her hump, a curlicue of hard gristle left over from what must once have been a fuller, softer woman-and he knew he could not say what both of them surely realized: that it did not matter, nobody cared. The Cavalcantes had been in the way, and so they had been swept aside and it was done now. There was no point in analyzing the right and wrong of it. Right and wrong had nothing to do with it. It was quaint even to think in terms of the old virtues. You would think she would have learned by now.
“So then I come home,” the woman continued, reciting a familiar litany, “and one day while we’re asleep they boarded up the building! With us inside! We had to shout out the window till somebody heard and the cops come get us out. We could’ve been killed in there, they could have knocked down the whole thing and buried us.
“Then they send us up to Lenox Street, this tiny little apartment where you can’t even turn around. And you can’t go out at night. It’s all colored, drinkin’ and hollerin’ all night and day. Knives-they’d soon as slit your throat. We didn’t even open the door. They had guys there would knock on your door and push their way right in if you opened it. We didn’t like to get killed, so we just sat inside like two crazy people not answering the bell. The social worker had to put her card under the door before we’d even open it. Finally we made a stink about my hip and I can’t walk up the stairs, till finally they give us this place. Only forty-seven bucks a month, and that’s with the light and gas included.”
“It’s very nice.”
“Not like what we had, though.”
“No. I suppose not.”
“We’re all alone here. Never see the old crowd anymore. They’re all out in Medford, South Boston, different projects all over. Most of them went to Medford.” She pronounced it MED-fid. “Unless they had family somewheres would take them in, they all went to Medford, flew away like birds.” She waved her hand. “What am I gonna go to Medford?”
“Mrs. Cavalcante, about that day in court. What did you mean when you said the delinquenti had been bothering you back in the West End?”
“Eh, these guys, they come around and say, ‘You have to go, everybody has to move out. If you don’t move, we’ll throw you out.’”
“Who were they?”
“Big guys.”
“Did you know any of them?”
“No. I seen ’em around, some of ’em, but I didn’t know them.”
“You saw them around in the West End?”
“Some, I said. Most we didn’t know.” She moved to a chair with that oscillating step-lurch and sat down slowly. Michael made tentative gestures to indicate a willingness to help, but she ignored him. She said, “They come at night, they bang on the door, say they got a message for us: ‘What do you think you’re doing? How come you don’t move out like the rest?’ They think we’re gonna get scared and just go. Where were we gonna go? Huh? Sometimes there’d even be cops come around, knock-knock-knock, ‘Hey, Mrs. C, hey, you should move out someplace else.
