Death of the Black-Haired Girl

38

JO HAD LEFT HER CAR a block and a half down the street from the counseling office. Parking regulations for the upcoming weekend required her to move it to her designated college space. Crossing one intersection, she had a view of the central campus and Cortland Hall. All but one of the windows were dark and she wondered if the lighted one was Steve Brookman’s. A minute later she saw Edward Stack heading her way on the far side of the street, advancing with the constricted gait of creeping suffocation. He guided and supported the weight of each right-footed step with the stick in his hand. Jo crossed the street to meet him.

“Hey,” she said. “You stayed awhile.”

“I stayed awhile,” Stack said. “That’s right.”

His voice had the same sly diffidence she had heard in it hours before, a certain caginess with a touch of menace. But now he was breathing with difficulty, seizing breaths between words. His jaw was trembling too. As he leaned on the cane facing her, his whole body seemed touched by tremors and she could not tell whether they reflected physical exhaustion or some emotional state. If Stack had walked all the way to Brookman’s house or to his office, he had covered a lot of ground for a man in his condition. Had there been a confrontation? Had something passed between them? The first necessity, she thought, was to get the old man off his feet.

“Bound for the station?” She looked at her watch. “You missed the peak trains.”

“Is that bad?”

“Well, you have a longer wait. Hey,” she said, “let me give you a ride.”

“I was going to the taxi line.”

“I’ll tell you what. You can wait in my office, then I’ll run you over there and you won’t have to sit around and catch pneumonia in that place.”

She saw that he was not in the mood to argue about a spot of rest. She led him back to her office, turned on the lights and showed him to the chair he had occupied earlier.

“So,” Jo asked, “did you find the scene of the accident?”

He only nodded. Jo had no idea what to say or ask next. At a loss, she thought, for follow-up questions like: How did you like it? Would you consider endowing a memorial crosswalk? Or for encouraging commentary like: We find people take comfort seeing the actual pavement. Isn’t it a great campus? And the building a block from where the car hit her was designed by Stanford White. She nodded back. She was not so tough anymore, she thought. It was a close-run thing whether she would break down and cry in front of him. He was going to die in grief, of grief. Was it too much to ask that he might have died rejoicing in his lovely daughter’s prospective bright future? Proud of her youthful achievement? Apparently.

“Your COPD,” she asked him. “Did you maybe respond on 9/11?”

She was trying to give him something to feel proud of but he looked at her more stricken than before.

“I saw Brookman,” he said after a minute. “You must of called Lou Salmone.”

It made her feel like a snitch. She had to remind herself not to be ashamed.

“Of course I did. I was afraid of the worst.”

“I guess you did what you had to do. You were right to be afraid.”

“I didn’t know you saw him.”

“Yeah. We talked.”

“So what was that like?”

He shrugged her question off.

“I saw his wife and the young kid. I saw them go in the house.”

“Nice people, Ed.”

“I’m sure,” he said.

“Listen,” Jo told him. “Lots of people around here are smart, you can figure. Some people are invaluable to the world for how they use their intelligence. I know Ellie Brookman a little. Not everybody is like her. She’s tops, Ed. All the way. She couldn’t get hurt more than she has been. Nor have her child hurt. Be hurt through the child.”

“He shouldn’t pull the shit he does. With other women. With other people’s kids.”

“Of course he shouldn’t. I think we have to suppose, perhaps, he fell in love. He never did anything to hurt her. Never meant to. He’s childish, I guess.”

“I’ve seen a lot of people go down being childish. And they went down in very bad ways over dumb shit. Being childish. Childish is no alibi with me.”

“He’s a risk taker,” Jo said. “He doesn’t mean harm. He had a pretty tough early life. He was an orphan. A guy can’t get enough mama love. I don’t know if you know what I mean.”

“There’s a lot of them like that.”

“Ed,” Jo said, “you got a right to do what you want, I guess. I mean, I don’t really believe that, but where I come from and the places I been, I kind of believe that.”

“Good,” Stack said. “I’m glad somebody does. Good.”

“But I have my hopes, you see. I have my hopes for pain — for pain cycles to stop somewhere. I’ve seen so much of it. A lot of people have seen a whole lot more but I feel like I’ve seen so much. I want to see this one stop somewhere.”

“I wish I could promise you, but I can’t. I can’t promise you and I won’t.”

“I don’t expect… I don’t know about promises. I have my hopes. My hope is that you can take care of this for me.”

He gave her no answer.

“OK,” she said. “It’s time for the train. Sit tight, I’ll get the car.”

Behind the wheel of her Taurus, she had the collapse. She could not make herself stop sobbing. Even screaming the convulsions down failed to stifle them.

“Shit, he’s gonna miss his train,” she finally told herself aloud.

She picked him up and they drove in silence to the station. It was quite a grand station. It might even, Jo thought, have been by Stanford White. Or Richardson, or McKim, one of those guys, if one of them had done railroad stations. Only this town, with its superbo college in it, would have a station like the Baths of Caracalla or the Baths of Nero or some such baths. She pulled up in front of the huge doors that were modeled on something in somebody’s baths too. The latest wonder was that the place, after moldering for decades under industrial-strength filth, rust and pigeon shit, was actually clean.

Stack struggled out with his cane.

“I’ll get out,” she said. She turned off the ignition, though the cop in front of the station had spotted her illegal park and was on his way toward her.

“Don’t,” Stack said. He leaned down to face her at the open passenger-side door.

“I told your friend Brookman I was gonna get him whacked. I let him know — bad ways. He was gonna die.”

Jo stared through the windshield, not seeing the outraged cop who was remonstrating with them, brandishing a ticket pad.

“You can tell him it won’t happen. Just… it won’t happen.”

“Because you’re changing your mind?”

“Yeah. I’m changing my mind.”

He started for the station doors, favoring the drugstore stick. The cop had stopped shouting at Jo. She seemed dreadfully upset, and he was afraid he had gone too far. Stack paused on his way into the station.

“It’s all right,” he told the officer. “It was life and death.”