'Since you ask, yes. Jeffrey and I had a little misunderstanding.'
Alden laughed and said, 'If Jeffrey ever hit you in the head, you'd be in the hospital for a week.'
At twelve-thirty the next day, Davey brought down to the dining room the rescued copies of his mother's two novels and placed them under his chair. His father raised an eyebrow, but Daisy seemed not to notice. Unasked, Maria brought Bloody Marys to all three of them.
After the Bloody Marys came a bottle of Barolo and a soup in which streamers of egg, flecks of parsley, pesto sauce, and pasta circulated through a chicken broth. Davey took half a glass of the wine and nervously devoured the soup. A homemade mushroom and Gorgonzola ravioli followed the soup, and tender little fillets of beef and potato croquettes followed the ravioli. Maria announced that in honor of Mr Davey she had made a zabaglione, which would be served in a few minutes. Did they have these stupendous meals every weekend, did they eat this way every night? It was no wonder that Daisy was looking puffier than ever, although Alden seemed utterly unchanged. Davey said that he didn't remember the Italian girl's being such a great cook and Alden said, '
The brief silence that followed his father's remark seemed the perfect time to produce his gift.
'Mom, I've got something for you.'
'Goody, goody.'
Unwilling to tell Alden that he had been prospecting in the Chancel House basement, Davey said that he had found two books in the Strand one day last week, and he hoped she would be pleased to see them again. He rose from his chair to bring the humble package down the table.
Daisy grasped the bag, tore out the books, smiled at their jackets, and opened them. Her eyes retreated into a band of red that appeared over her face like a mask. She set the books on the edge of the table and turned her face away. Still thinking that she was pleased by his gift, Davey said, 'They're in such good shape.' Daisy drew in a breath and let out a frightening sound that soon resolved into a wail. She shoved back her chair and ran from the room as the Italian girl entered with cups of zabaglione on a silver tray. Baffled, Davey looked inside the first of the two books and saw written in a hand more confident and decisive than his mother's,
At eight o'clock on the previous Thursday night, a flat package clamped under his left arm, Davey had stood uncertainly in front of a restaurant called Dragon Seed on Elizabeth Street, looking back and forth from the restaurant's front door to a slip of paper in his hand. A row of leathery ducks the color of molasses hung across the restaurant window. The black numerals beside the menu taped to the door matched the number, 67, Paddi had written on the piece of paper.
A delicious odor of roast duck and frying noodles met him when he opened the door. Davey stepped inside, stood at the end of the counter for a moment to look over the room, then went to the only empty table and sat down.
All the men in the: room ignored him. Davey looked around for the door that would lead to a staircase and saw two set into opposite ends of the rear wall, one of them marked RESTROOMS, the other PRIVATE. Then he was on his feet.
Two waiters in black- vests and white shirts watched him from across the room, and a third set a platter of noodles before four stolid men in suits and began cutting toward him through the tables.
Davey tried to wave him off, and said, 'I know it says Private, but it's all right.'
'Not all right.'
Davey put his hand on the knob, and the waiter's hand came down on his before he could open the door. 'You sit.'
The waiter pulled him away to his table and pushed him down. Davey placed his package on his lap and considered making a break for the door. He looked around and found that everybody in the restaurant was eying him.
The waiter came back through the tables carrying a tray with a teapot and a cup the size of a thimble. He set these before Davey and spun away, revealing a small man in a zippered jacket behind him who rotated a chair and straddled it, and gave Davey a horrible smile. 'You funny,' the man said.
'I was invited.' Davey withdrew from his pocket the paper on which Paddi had written her address and showed it to the man.
The man squinted at the paper. He looked straight into Davey's eyes, then back at the paper. Without any transition, he started laughing. 'Come,' the man said, and get on his feet. He led Davey to the front door, stepped outside, and motioned Davey to follow him, Davey came out. The man moved one step to his left and pointed at Dragon Seed's door. He pointed again, and this time Davey saw it.
Set back into the building between the entrance to Dragon Seed and a shop filled with souvenirs of Chinatown, at an angle that concealed it if you did not know it was there was a plywood door with the number 67 spray-painted on it in black.
Grinning, the man prodded Davey's chest with his forefinger. 'Dey go in, but dey don't come out.' Davey settled the package under his elbow and knocked on the spray-painted door, and a faint voice told him to come in.
He found himself at the foot of a tenement staircase. 'Lock the door behind you,' the voice called down.
He came upstairs and passed through another door into a vast, darkened loft created by the removal of most of the tenement's walls. A few dim lights illuminated crude murals it took him a moment to see were illustrations of passages in
'What is this place?'
'Where I live,' Paddi said, not naked after all, but wearing a flesh-colored leotard. She gave him a smile and moved toward the sofa, swept up from a cushion a man's wing-collar formal shirt, slipped it on, and buttoned the last few buttons so that it covered her like a short white frock.
'What's that under your arm?'
'I had some trouble finding you.' Davey's legs finally unlocked and permitted him to move toward her through the darkness.
'Looks like you had trouble finding the manuscript, too. Unless
'No.'
Paddi shifted her position, drawing her legs up beside her and tucking them in. She gave three smart pats to the seat of the sofa.
He found that he was standing directly in front of her and sat down as ordered. Her feet insinuated themselves against his thigh as if for warmth. 'Here,' she said, and turned sideways to take from a tray and press into his hand a glass filled with ice cubes and a cloudy red liquid.
He drank, then jerked back his head at the pungent, unpleasantly sweet shock of the taste. 'What's this?'
'A Top-and-Bottom. Good for you.'
Davey let his eyes wander around the dark, jumbled spaces of Paddi's loft. Arches and openings led into invisible chambers from which came inaudible voices. 'Are you going to show me what's in that package?'
Davey said, 'Oh,' because he had forgotten the package, and handed it to her. In seconds her fingers had undone the knots. In another second the wrapping lay in her lap like a frame around the frame and Paddi was gazing down at the long photograph with her mouth softly opened.
'Shorelands, July 1938.'
'And here is your grandfather.'
Warts and carbuncles jutting from nose and cheek, jowls bulging over his collar, eyebrows nearly meeting in a ferocious scowl above blazing eyes, hands locked on the arms of his chair, rage straining at the buttons, seams, and eyelet; of his handmade suit, Lincoln Chancel appeared to have breakfasted on railroads and coal mines.
Davey regarded the phenomenon with the mixture of wonder, respect, and terror his grandsire invariably aroused in him. For the fifty years of his adult life, he had bullied his way south from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to New York and Washington, D.C., north to Boston and Providence swallowing human lives. Before a massive stroke
