But before we reached the door to the gas chamber, my mother pulled her coat away from me and threw me into the arms of a soldier. She screamed that I must try to live. I fought the soldier and tried to get back to my mother; but she was gone by then, and the door had closed. I couldn’t see her. They shoved me into the other line, and I tried for the next years to do what my mother had asked me to do, to try to live.”
But that grotesquely unfair and demoralizing struggle had been an empty victory; Ilana was dead within ten months of her release from the camp, her lungs betraying her unquenchable spirit.
This was the dreadful fear that had been burned into Rudi Zahn’s consciousness, and this was what Crescent Holloway could never understand; she had never in her life been vulnerable and helpless, and she couldn’t conceive how that experience could cripple a person’s character and confidence.
Money, with its consequent privilege and power, was the only specific against such terrors. .
In the lobby of Kate Boyd’s building the elevator doors opened and Mrs. Root Cadwalader stepped from the car with a bulky piece of luggage. She put the bag down and waved to Mr. Brennan, who was standing under the canopy in front of the building.
Mr. Brennan glanced through the revolving doors and saw Mrs. Cadwalader beckoning to him at the same instant that Kate noted what had caught Harry Lauder’s attention on the opposite side of Fifth Avenue.
It was a kitten, crawling uncertainly along the sidewalk, a white fur star gleaming on its black forehead.
Mr. Brennan hurried into the lobby and picked up Mrs. Root Cadwalader’s suitcase. “You’ll be needing a cab, Mrs. Cadwalader?”
“Yes, please, John. I have a seven thirty flight to Chicago.”
“Visiting your grandson then? How old is he now?”
“Sixteen, John.”
“Good heavens, where does time go? I remember him roller skating on the sidewalk here, just a lad.”
“Well, he’s sixteen, and he’s got a driver’s license to prove it. He’s meeting me at O’Hare in Chicago.”
During these exchanges between John Brennan and Mrs. Cadwalader, Kate had stopped to stare with longing eyes across the avenue at the little kitten, which she felt certain must be lonely, hungry, frightened by the sounds of horns and traffic.
She had been forbidden by her father to cross Fifth Avenue, but she was rationalizing that injunction now, telling herself that he couldn’t blame her for going to the rescue of a helpless little animal. Kate had been trained by her father to take care of dogs and horses, to make sure that they were fed and dry and warm, that their stalls or runs were clean, before going inside for her own bath and dinner. These were not chores you depended on grooms to perform, because a horse or dog trusted and obeyed the person who took care of it. That was not a responsibility to delegate to anyone else, her father had always insisted. Get in the habit of doing those chores yourself. And with these thoughts came another, prompted by a verse they were reading at Miss Prewitt’s: “Down to Gehenna and up to the throne, he travels the fastest who travels alone.”
The words thrilled her and made her feel strong and invulnerable.
Tightening her grip on Harry Lauder’s leash, she waited for a break in the traffic and then ran across Fifth Avenue to the sidewalk that flanked Central Park.
Harry Lauder barked so noisily at the crying kitten that Kate bent and gave him a sharp tap on his muzzle. But then the Scottie began to bark at something or someone in the thick shrubbery behind the four-foot black stone wall bordering this stretch of the park. And when Kate reached down to pick up the kitten, her dog leaped away from her and his leash slipped through her gloved hand. In an instant he was gone, scrambling first onto a park bench and then to the top of the wall, where he jumped from sight into thick tangles of spicebush and shining sumac.
Kate called for him to come back, her voice high and urgent, but the sound of his thrashing progress through the grove of underbrush warned her that he was already deeper into the park.
What a
She knew there was an entrance into the park just to her north. Kate hesitated only an instant, and then she put the kitten on the park bench and ran as fast as she could toward the next intersection.
Calling her dog’s name in a high, anxious voice, Kate ran along a cobbled pathway through the park and when she turned and ran back toward the area where he had got away from her, she was under huge English oaks whose shadows fell about her like great dark wings.
She stopped at approximately the place where Harry Lauder had scrambled into the park and stood listening for sounds of him above the noise of traffic on Fifth Avenue.
Then, while she stared about helplessly, she heard the Scottie barking, but he was a long way off, it seemed, his yelping coming faintly from a dark stand of trees near the East Drive.
Calling his name again, she ran toward the sound of his barking, her slim body blending and finally merging with the shadows until only her fair, streaming hair could be seen reflecting the last of the day’s sunlight.
And watching the plume of blond hair and waiting for Kate among that thicket of trees stood Gus Soltik, the barking little dog helpless in his huge hands.
But an additional element had threaded itself into his emotional complex of lusts and compulsions and angers. And that was fear. In his dim mind, he knew someone had told on him. . Men who would hurt him had chased him and shouted at him, with guns. . He had run away from them in an alley. But they were looking for him. Who had told them?. .
But it was all right now. “Greenropes” would follow the sounds of the dog, and he would draw her deeper and deeper into the park to a place he knew that was dark and silent, where no one would ever hear her.
Chapter 12
Central Park is potentially one of the more glorious and gratifying natural ornaments in the city of New York.
A long green rectangle consisting of eight hundred and forty-odd acres, it is enclosed on three sides by what may be the most prestigious and expensive real estate in the world. One might argue that the Rue Faubourg St.- Honore in Paris is more elegant and graceful or that the immense sweep of the Nash and Royal crescents in Bath, England, is more architecturally impressive and more spiritually satisfying, but the streets and avenues that embrace three sides of Central Park are clearly without peer in the world of commercial fashion and commercial art, in the fields of law and medical research, of finance and entertainment and publishing. In addition to its vast mass of mighty high rises, its shops and restaurants have long been legendary magnets to elite foreigners and Americans with the money to pay for their products.
The northern end of Central Park at 110th Street runs on a broad half-mile front into the area of Manhattan known as Harlem, an immense ghetto housing the city’s more than million-odd blacks.
Central Park provides a home and a handsome background for honeysuckle and American elms, ginkgo trees and Atlas Mountain cedars, Osage orange and massive green ash, black locusts, and fragrant tulip trees.
In most seasons the park is a haven for robins and redwing blackbirds, pied-billed grebes, green herons, spotted sandpipers, yellow and parula warblers, red shouldered and broad-winged hawks, emerald-winged teals, and the normal proliferation of permanent residents, starlings, cardinals, mallards and, of course, the city’s sparrows, owls, and pigeons.
Originally, the land given to the designers of Central Park in the middle of the nineteenth century was a discouraging expanse of urban litter, studded with squatters’ shacks, hog farms, and bone-boiling works. Also among these malodorous swamplands were sewers and cesspools covered with bramble nearly as impenetrable as huge clusters of rusted iron.
The granitic bones of the city itself thrust upward through this morass in formations of grotesquely beautiful black rock. These natural constructions create grottoes and escarpments, valleys and gullies choked with vegetation, and caves and ravines so convoluted and labyrinthine in their patterns that guided tours were essential before several decades of order had been imposed upon this rugged, inhospitable landscape.
The Ramble, a forty-acre area between Seventy-fifth and Seventy-seventh streets, directly north of the lake and boathouse, is a sanctuary for birds and animals, a wild and shadowed expanse of trees, juttings of steep black rock, and terraced serpentine walks which create a mazelike effect but which eventually lead pedestrians to bridges
