“The general term?” Dr. Rosen asked. “Schizophrenia.” He smiled mockingly. “It’s just a word for something no one understands. It means ‘broken soul.’”
Corman recalled her short paper, knew now that her scattered sentences had been an effort to draw her soul back together through a rope of words.
Rosen looked at Corman as if he were explaining himself to a tribunal of ancient gods. “And so, given all of this, I felt that I had to control her environment as much as possible.” He took a pair of glasses from his pocket and wearily drew them on. “I thought about some kind of institution for her,” he said. “Especially after the baby.” His face took on a terrible conviction. “We have to have what our souls require, don’t we?” he asked passionately. “No matter how strange it may seem to some other person, we have to have it.”
Corman looked at him evenly. “What did your soul require?’ he asked.
“That she be safe,” Dr. Rosen said desperately. “Isn’t that what we all want for our children, just to keep them safe?”
Corman studied Dr. Rosen’s face and understood the terror that drove him. In him, the passion of fatherhood had taken on a mystery beyond what could ever be described to someone else. It had become heroic in its refusal to accept what all fathers had heretofore accepted, that they could not rid the world of its dark snares, nor provide safe passage through them for their children. It was an effort that had lasted all the years of Sarah’s childhood and adolesence, and which she had resisted only once, perhaps in dreams during one long night, her small white teeth tearing fiercely at her bottom lip.
“You were there the night she died,” Corman said matter-of-factly, with no sense of accusation.
“Yes, of course,” Dr. Rosen answered without hesitation.
“How did you find her?”
Rosen’s eyes fell toward his hands. “By chance. I was down at the library annex, the one on Forty-third Street. I’d been working there all day. It was late in the afternoon. I started home, and there she was. Across the street.”
“You followed her?”
Rosen nodded slowly. “To that … place … that …”
“Did you talk to her?”
Rosen shook his head. “No. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know where to begin. I just went home.” His eyes darkened. “After the baby, I realized what I’d done, so, when she disappeared, I didn’t try to find her. I had learned by then that she had to get away from me, make a life of her own, regain, if she could, the sanity she’d lost. But when I saw her that day, the way she was, I knew I had to intervene, so I went back that same night.” He seemed to tremble at the thought of it. “The rain was terrible,” he said. “There was no one on the streets.”
Corman nodded. He didn’t have to imagine the rain, the streets, only Dr. Rosen moving through them, glancing fearfully at the wet, unpeopled stoops, then up toward the dripping metal fire escapes, down again to where the gutterwash swirled toward the steadily clogging drains.
“It seemed unreal,” Rosen said. “That she was in a place like that.”
Corman’s mind moved through it again, saw the littered alleyway, the naked ceilings, the empty cans of Similac, the pictures he’d taken as she lay on the street, her arm reaching desperately for the doll. “What happened the night she died?” he asked.
Dr. Rosen drew in a deep breath and began to speak very rapidly, as if trying to get it all out before drawing in another one. “I brought the diploma, something to show her, something to remind her of her life. But when I saw her again, in that place, the way her hair was so wet with the rain, I couldn’t imagine that it was Sarah at all. She was a ghost, a spirit waiting to die. She hardly spoke while I was there. She just looked at me while I tried to get her to come with me. I handed her the diploma, but she tossed it away. She kept holding to that doll instead. She even tried to feed it. That’s when I grabbed it from her. She got it back and ran upstairs. I went up after her.” He stopped for a moment, lowering his voice when he began again. “She kept clutching to that doll while I kept trying to get her to hear me. Finally I pulled it away from her. She tried to get it back. That’s when I threw it out the window.” His eyes opened wide as he stared piercingly into Corman’s face. “She looked at me at that moment in a way no one ever had. Then she turned toward the window. I grabbed at her dress, but she pulled away. And then she was gone.” He bent over slightly as if a hand had pressed his head forward, readying it for the axe. “I knew she was dead,” he added quickly, his eyes focusing intently on Corman. “Are you a father?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know what I mean,” Dr. Rosen said. “That I didn’t have to look, that no one had to tell me. I absolutely knew what had happened to my daughter.”
At that instant, Corman realized that there would be no book on Sarah Rosen, no exposure on film or otherwise. At the same moment, he saw Lucy in Sarah’s place, standing at the window, staring down as Sarah had, as all daughters did, poised on the excruciating ledge while their fathers watched them helplessly, watched as they retreated further and further from their care until finally they could grasp no more of them than the small white button of a dress.
Corman walked home to his apartment very slowly, often stopping to peer into a shop window or, more often, into the yellowish interior of a bar. The old city was no more. Like all things held too dear, it had become a phantom. Now there was only Lucy. He felt her like a wreath of smoke around his head, dense, powerful, and yet beyond his grasp, a presence he could neither hold on to nor bat away, and as he continued toward home, he wondered if he would always have to live with her in this new way, love her at a distance, visit only on recommended days.
She was standing at the window when he came in and turned toward him slowly, her face very solemn. He felt himself quake and shiver, swallowed hard, and gained control.
“You got a call, Papa,” she said.
Corman pulled the camera bag from his shoulder and let it fall into the chair beside the door. “Who from?” he asked in a whisper.
“That home where Mr. Lazar is.”
Corman looked at her and waited.
Lucy hesitated a moment, then spoke. “He died, Papa,” she said tenderly. “They want to know what to do with him.”
Corman’s thought came immediately. “Do with him?” he asked himself silently. “What could anyone ever do with such a man?”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
THEY NEEDED a suit to bury him in, as Corman found out early the next morning. As he dressed himself he tried to decide what would look best on Lazar. It was the kind of highly limited detail his mind could concentrate on, and he felt grateful for the way it kept everything else at bay.
“I guess there’ll be a funeral,” Lucy said quietly as she strolled into the living room.
“Yes,” Corman said, “but not today. You can just hang around here. I have to get some things before they bury him.”
She rubbed her eyes wearily. “He was a nice man.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Remember when he gave me that toy typewriter?”
Corman nodded, pulled on his jacket and headed for the door.
“I still have it,” Lucy said as she followed behind him. “I don’t play with it anymore.” She considered it for a moment. “But maybe I’ll keep it anyway,” she said at last. “Because he was a nice man.”
Corman bent forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead, carefully resisting his need to pull her fiercely into his arms and rush away with her, as animals sometimes did when their young were at risk, holding them like tender morsels within their open mouths.
“See you this afternoon,” Lucy said as she opened the door for him.
He nodded crisply, then stepped into the hallway.
She drew him down to her again and kissed him very softly on his cheek. “ ’Bye,” she said as she slowly
