Corman copied the name and address down in his notebook, then scanned the form a final time, his mind concentrating on the oddly shattered words, the spelling of sounds. He remembered something one of his professors had once told him, that writing was the voice of the absent person. If that were true, then this was as close as he had gotten to Sarah Rosen’s voice. In a picture, her handwriting on this single form would have to represent its final days, cracked, disjointed, primitive, as if she had been striving for something beyond the words themselves, the meaning in pure sound.
Corman glanced at his notebook, checked the address, then walked into the building’s cramped vestibule. A line of small black buttons crawled down the wall to the left of the door, each just ahead of a name and apartment number. There was a B. Taylor listed beside the buzzer marked 3–B. Corman pushed the button, waited, then pushed again. There was no response, so he walked across the street, took out his camera and snapped a few pictures of the building.
It was a rundown brownstone, one of the few left in the West Village, but still elaborated with those soft touches the builders of the old city had insisted upon, a bit of carved stone here and there, flower boxes at each window. Corman concentrated on the large windows on the third floor and wondered if Sarah Rosen had ever sat behind them, or whether she’d simply scribbled Bernice Taylor’s name and address from a phonebook according to her own mad scheme.
He took a few additional pictures, focusing on the street, the glistening wet pavement and bare dripping trees. The rain would drench the photographs nicely, give them a mournful, watery fatalism, hinting symbolically at some kind of death by drowning or burial at sea. If the light was just right, they might even go a step further, suggest oceanic tragedies, tearful destinies, a picture worth a thousand banal words.
He took a final shot, this time of the line of shutters on the fifth floor. Then he returned the camera to the bag, tugged his hat down further over his face to protect it from the rain and headed toward the train.
At the end of the block, he noticed a small delicatessen, felt his late-morning hunger and decided to go in.
An old man rested on a metal stool behind the counter. He watched Corman listlessly and smiled only after he bought a muffin. “Nothing but rain,” he groaned.
Corman glanced out the window while he waited for his change.
Across the street, an old woman emerged from her building, tugging a small brown dog behind her. As she stepped out onto the sidewalk, the dog flinched violently, drew back and flinched again, snapping its head back and to the side.
“It’s blind,” the old man said, his eyes watching the dog. He shook his head. “It can’t see the rain, so it don’t know what’s hitting it. I told her to put it to sleep.” His lips curled down disapprovingly. “‘For Christ’s sake,’ I told her, ‘you can’t have much of a life if you don’t know what’s hitting you.’”
Corman picked up his change and walked outside. The rain was beating down heavily, tapping loudly against the store’s striped metal awning. He took out the muffin and ate it slowly, his eyes drifting back toward the brownstone. The window boxes on the third floor hung heavily in the gray air, and for an instant, Corman thought he saw something move just behind the shutters, and reached for his camera, then realized it was only the finger of a limb as it raked its bony tip across the closed white slats.
It was almost an hour before he saw someone go up the stairs of 89 Grove Street. She was a tall, slender woman with close-cropped blond hair, and she moved very quickly through the rain.
Corman headed toward her quickly, making it to the bottom of the landing just as the woman got to the top.
“Excuse me,” he said, then offered a quick, uneasy smile the woman did not return. “I was wondering if you were Bernice Taylor, by any chance.”
The woman eyed him silently, with a certain icy wariness, as if already calculating her moves if he should suddenly lunge toward her. “I’m Bernice Taylor,” she said in a voice that sounded as if it had slid off the blade of a knife.
“My name’s David Corman. I’ve been looking into someone’s life, and your name’s come up.”
She seemed to guess his business. “Candy’s not here,” she said. “She moved out a month ago.”
“I’m not looking for Candy,” Corman said. “Somebody else. Maybe you’ve heard of her. Sarah Rosen.”
Her small eyes squeezed together. “Sarah Rosen? You mean Dr. Rosen’s little girl?”
“Her father’s a doctor? Do you know his full name?”
Bernice shrugged. “I always just called him Dr. Rosen. Maybe I knew his name one time, but I can’t recall it now.” She waved her hand. “Anyway, he wasn’t a real doctor,” she added. “Just one of those teacher-type doctors.”
“A professor?”
“Yeah. College professor. Columbia,” Bernice said. “Why are you asking about Sarah?”
Corman saw no reason to blur the issue. “She’s dead,” he told her. “I was hoping I could talk to you about her.”
“When’d she die?” the woman asked.
“Last Thursday.”
Bernice’s face remained passive. “You a friend of hers?”
“I never knew her,” Corman said. “But I’m trying to find out what she was like.” He anticipated her next question. “She was selling blood at this place on the Bowery. She listed you as her next of kin.”
The woman’s eyes widened. “Me? Next of kin?” She shook her head. “I haven’t even seen Sarah since she was five years old.”
“Would you mind talking to me, Mrs. Taylor, or is it Miss or …”
“Just Bernice,” she answered dryly. “Yeah, okay. I’ll tell you what I know.” She turned, opened the door and headed up the stairs. Corman followed behind her until they reached the third-floor landing.
“I was living in this same place back then,” she said as she fumbled for her keys. “I guess that’s how Sarah had the address.” She swung the door open and walked inside.
It was a tiny studio, but everything had been arranged in a neat, orderly fashion that made it look larger than it was. Two orange overstuffed chairs rested by the front window, ashtrays balanced on the right arms. A large hoop rug stretched between them, sending out swirls of steadily lightening yellows from its dark brown center, so that from where Corman stood it looked like a huge yellow eye, its dark pupil staring sightlessly toward the faded ceiling.
She moved directly to one of the orange chairs and motioned for Corman to take the other.
“So, you knew Sarah when she was a child,” Corman began, as he leaned back into it.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“When her mother got killed, her father needed somebody,” Bernice said. “That’s when I come by.”
“Her mother was killed?”
“That’s what Dr. Rosen said. Hit by a car. Right on the street.” She reached under her chair, drew out a pack of cigarettes, and lit one.
“What year was that?” Corman asked.
“That must have been in 1973, something like that.”
“And you worked for Dr. Rosen after that?”
“That’s right.”
“For how long?”
“Couple of months,” Bernice said. “Up until November.” She inhaled deeply, then let it out in a quick angry burst. “Then he let me go.”
Corman looked up from his notebook. “Why?”
Bernice smiled bitterly. “Guess I wasn’t good enough to watch over his precious little daughter.”
“In what way not good enough?”
Bernice shifted slightly in her seat, threw one long bony leg over the other and rocked it edgily. “He had a check done on me. That’s when he found out I had a record. If he’d asked me, I’d of told him about it. I’m not ashamed of what I did. But Rosen had his own way of doing things.”
“What way was that?”
“On the sly, you might say,” Bernice said. “He never came clean on anything. You always felt like you were
