Sandor, normally a retiring, thoughtful fellow himself, might have been driven to violence had he known that while he was aggravating his angina and adding to his collection of slipped disks, my father was watching him as if he were a zoo animal. Already he was going to rain hellfire down on the rest of the night crew for this. They all lived in the Bronx and had fled for home when the mayor’s office announced that nonessential government services were closing down. All except Sandor. Double overtime wasn’t going to buy him a new spine.
Sandor turned the corner onto 78th, and though my father had intended to pitch the bag of burned fish onto the four-foot wedge of ice and snow at the curb and hightail it back inside, it was hard not to notice that the street had become an alien thing, and he wondered at the silence, as out of place as a panther in this Upper West Side neighborhood. Before him the air was a curtain of undulating white and within the folds he saw a dark movement—another person. The figure was about three blocks away, advancing slowly, steadily forging north.
The figure passed into an orange cone of light, out of it, into another one, as if fixed on a strip of celluloid advancing a single frame at a time.
Heavy wet flakes clung to my father’s face and eyelashes, and he pawed at them with his free hand, but there was no way to see clearly. The wind had parted his hair in a neat line down the back of his head, snow packing into the seam like caulk. He squinted. He curled the fingers of his hand into a tube and brought it to his eye. He still couldn’t see.
No music, no delivery truck loading decks slamming against the concrete. No buses heaving into gear. Wind. Rattling street signs. Somewhere to the east, a snowplow clattering over the pavement. God, was it quiet. When was it, my father wondered, that we became frightened of silence? When he was a boy, his father had come home after work and had sat in a rocking chair by the window, pondering, sometimes smoking, the chair creaking back and forth while his children fanned out across the room to read. No one spoke. No one turned on the radio. It was quiet enough to hear the contraction of the timbers releasing the day’s heat into the cool dusk. Quiet enough to hear the tobacco crackle in his father’s pipe. When he was a child, the ability to hold his tongue, not to blurt out the answer, to keep thoughts to himself—these were pact and signal of adulthood, of a thoughtful nature, ideals to which he aspired and from which he sometimes wondered if he’d ever escaped.
There was the stillness that would fall across the crowd at a Yankees game, a fog, a lull born not from anticipation for the next pitch, but of shared contentment, it seemed, a silence that had once been as natural as a cloud drifting in front of the sun but that was now obviously a source of anxiety for management, who viewed the absence of overt displays of happiness a sign that at any moment the crowd might descend into a state of mass reflection from which they would never recover. Steinbrenner had marshaled his troops to attack silence with the dipsy plonking of “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” on the electric organ, or canned chants over the PA, as though quiet were a pernicious creature who’d wandered onto the field and had to be exterminated with great prejudice.
Oh hell. What bullshit. Baseball, last stop on the double-decker tour of great American propagandas, right after Life magazine and gap-toothed soda jerks and Bobby Kennedy’s jaw. He wasn’t in that line of work anymore. Great American somethings were behind him. Of course, there was no greater American something than always-charming, ruby-lipped, plump-assed mass appeal, whose wretched acquaintance he’d made all too well with Slingshot. Nope, nope, hold the watery beer and false hope, thanks anyway. Interiority? Self-examination? Even that had become a noise-making enterprise, primal screamers yelling into their own vertiginous hollows. Theater, all of it. You want to be left alone? It’s a downright guarantee if you slip back down the mineshaft of your own navel again, Salty.
Over his own brain’s dissonance, my father heard an engine revving, rising, too, over the wind and the distant sound of the plow, and he turned in time to see a Checker cab drifting around the corner of 79th, tires ripping up the graupel. The driver had the nose pointed more or less in the right direction, that is, south, but the cab was sliding intently eastward across the width of West End, toward the shoulder-high snowbank behind which my
