“You’ll be back at work soon?” Tom asked.
She glanced at Hattie. “Oh, I reckon Boney’ll get word to me in a couple of days. Damn him anyhow.”
“You got that right,” Hattie said.
They began to move toward the door. Nancy suddenly hugged Tom again, so hard that he couldn’t breathe. “I hope—oh, I don’t know what I hope. But be careful, Tom.”
They were out on the ramshackle wooden walkway in the dismal air before he was entirely aware of having let go of her. Bill straightened up from the railing and drew on his pipe.
“She look okay to you, Hat?” he said in a low growl that cut through the hum of noise from all about them.
“That girl’s
“Always was,” Bill said. “Folks.”
Tom put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the first note he found. In the gloom, it took a moment to see that it was a ten dollar bill. He put it in Bill’s hand and whispered, “For whatever she needs.”
The bill disappeared into the shabby clothes. Nancy’s brother winked at Tom, and began to make his way toward the door at the end of the walkway. “Oh,” he said, and turned around. The three of them stopped at the top of the stairs. “You got by.” He must have seen that Tom did not understand. “Didn’t spot you.”
Sarah clamped herself on Tom’s arm, and together they followed Hattie beneath the overhanging passages, through the narrow streets with mocking names, along the tilting walls. The air stank of sewage. Children jeered at them, and hard-faced men moved toward Sarah until they noticed Hattie, and then backed away. Finally they hurried across the crazed concrete of the First Court, through the darkness of the arch, and back out into the shadowy street, which seemed impossibly sweet and bright.
Even Percy’s dusty emporium, with its dim parlors and endless stairs, seemed sweet and light after Maxwell’s Heaven. Down in the small cobbled court, Percy and Bingo sat companionably on a bus seat from which horsehair foamed through slashes and split seams. Bingo’s nose was deep in the folds of Percy’s leather apron, and his tail moved frantically from side to side. “The girl okay?” Percy asked.
“Nothin’ can get that girl down,” Hattie said.
“That’s what I said.” Percy handed the whining, wriggling Bingo back over to Sarah, and Bingo continued to give longing, ardent glances to the leather apron until they had turned into the narrow uphill drive, and even then whined and looked back at it. “Fickle animal,” Sarah said, sounding genuinely grumpy.
When they came to the top of the drive and out on the street, a police car sped past them and squealed around the corner down the south end of Elysian Courts, its siren screaming. Another screaming police car followed it.
Sarah drove, more slowly than before, downhill toward the sea, the dump, and the old slave quarter.
“I have a high opinion of you, young lady,” Hattie said from her perch on Tom’s lap. “And so did Nancy Vetiver.”
“You do?” Sarah seemed startled. “She did?”
“Otherwise, why did she say so much? Ask yourself that. Nancy Vetiver’s not a loquacious fool, you know.”
“Not any kind of fool,” Sarah said.
At her shack, Hattie took the cape and kissed them both before saying good-bye.
Sarah leaned over and rested her head on the steering wheel. After a moment, she sighed and started the car.
“I’m sorry,” Tom said.
She gave him a smoky look. “Are you? For what?”
“For dragging you into that place. For mixing you up in everything.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s what you’re sorry about.” She rocketed away from the curb, and Bingo flattened out in his well behind the seats.
She did not speak until they were past Goethe Park and maneuvering through the eastbound traffic on Calle Burleigh. Finally she asked him what time it was.
“Ten past six.”
“Is that all? I thought it was a lot later.” Another lengthy silence. Then: “I guess because it seemed like night inside there.”
“If I’d known how bad it was going to be, I would have gone alone.”
“I’m not sorry I went there, Tom. I’m happy I saw the inside of that place. I’m happy I met Hattie. I’m happy about everything.”
“Okay,” he said. She passed three cars in a row, causing temporary pandemonium in the westbound lanes.
“I meant everything I said to you today,” she said. “I’m not Moonie Firestone or Posy Tuttle. My idea of paradise isn’t a rich husband and a lodge at Eagle Lake and a trip to Europe every other year. We really did see the Tuaregs and the lascars, and I saw places I’d never seen before in my life, and I really
She cut in front of the carriage, and its driver shouted a string of four-letter words. Sarah flipped her hand up in a mocking wave and tore off through the traffic again.
“Oh, well,” she said when they skirted Weasel Hollow, and when they passed the St. Alwyn Hotel on Calle Drosselmayer, “She
“Every now and then I thought she looked sort of like her stuffed hawk,” Tom said.
“Her stuffed hawk?” Sarah turned to him with her mouth open and an expression in her eyes that convicted him of a profoundly irritating idiocy.
“Inside that big cage.”
She snapped her head forward. “I don’t mean Hattie. I mean that Nancy Vetiver is really beautiful. She is, isn’t she?”
“Well, maybe. I was sort of surprised by her. She turned out to be another kind of person than I thought she was. My mother used to say she was hard, and she certainly isn’t, but I can see what she meant. Nancy’s tough.”
“And she’s beautiful besides.”
“I think you’re beautiful,” Tom said. “You should have seen yourself in that cape.”
“I’m pretty,” Sarah said. “I own a mirror, I know that much. People have been telling me I was pretty all my life. I was just lucky enough to be born with good hair and good teeth and visible cheekbones. If you want to know the truth, my mouth is too big and my eyes are too far apart. I look at my face and I see my baby pictures. I see a perfect Brooks-Lowood girl. I hate prettiness. It means you’re supposed to spend half your time thinking about how you look, and most other people think you’re a sort of toy who will do whatever they want. I bet Nancy Vetiver hardly ever looks in the mirror, I bet she cut her hair short because she could wash it in the shower and dry it with a towel, I bet it’s a big deal for her to buy a new lipstick—and she’s beautiful. Every good thing in her, every feeling she ever had, is in her face. When I was in that little room, I even envied her those little lines on her face—you can tell she doesn’t let other people make her do things. In fact the whole idea of being like me would strike her as ridiculous!”
“I think you ought to marry her,” Tom said. “We could all live together in Maxwell’s Heaven, Nancy and you and me. And Bill.”
She punched him in the shoulder, hard. “You forgot Bingo.”
“Actually, Bingo and Percy seemed made for each other.”
She smiled at last.
“What’s all that stuff about being a toy, and doing what other people want?”
“Oh, never mind,” she said. “I got carried away.”
“I don’t think your eyes are too far apart. Posy Tuttle’s eyes are actually on opposite sides of her head, and she sees different things out of each of them, like a lizard.”
Sarah had turned from Calle Berlinstrasse into Edgewater Trail, and coming toward them from the opposite direction, smiling and raising his homburg from the seat of his trap, was Dr. Bonaventure Milton. “Sarah! Tom!” he
