New Haven Noir

The Secret Societies by Roxana Robinson

Beinecke Library

The phone rang. It was Jake.

“It’s Jake,” he said, though I knew that. “Alison Ricks is dead.”

Jake is my editor. And Alison Ricks was very old. Had been.

“She’s dead?” I said. “When?”

“Yesterday,” he said. “Heart failure. At home.”

“How old was she?” I asked.

“Ninety-three,” he said.

“A great writer,” I said. I waited for him to tell me why he’d called.

“I thought you’d want to know,” he said.

“I did,” I said. “Thank you.”

“She was a great writer,” he said in a serious, slightly hectoring way, as though he wanted to bully me into agreeing, and as though I hadn’t just said the same thing.

“She was a great writer,” I said.

“You know, there’s no biography of her.” His tone had changed to airy, as though this was a curious fact he’d just learned.

I said nothing.

“So, what would you think about writing it?”

“Me?” I asked. “I’m not a biographer.”

“Still,” he said.

I’m mainly a travel writer. A hack, actually. I write pretty much anything for money, though when I get around to it I’m going to write a novel. Twenty years ago I published a memoir about growing up in Maine, which got some nice reviews but didn’t get me the Pulitzer. Then I published a collection of travel essays which ditto. I still have the novel in mind, but in the meantime I write to pay the rent and Jake makes suggestions. Why don’t you do a cookbook? Why not write a book about your dog? What about a garden book? Why don’t you write a book about Joan of Arc?

Jake’s full of suggestions, all of them terrible. I’d shoot myself before I’d write a book about food, I know nothing about Joan of Arc, and there are already too many tearjerkers about dogs. I write for a travel magazine funded by a big company, and they send me all over the world and pay me a lot. And I write book reviews and author interviews, and I do the odd ghostwriting or technical gig for a fat check, all while I’m waiting for the big time to come along and clap me on the shoulder and say, Sarah Tennant, this is your moment.

“I’ve never written anything like that,” I told Jake.

“Sarah Tennant,” Jake said, “this is your moment. You’d be great. You love her work. You’d have a lot to say about it.”

I do love her work.

Ricks became famous in the sixties, when she first started publishing in the New Yorker, and for the next twenty years she stayed famous, and then she disappeared. Her stories were witty and elegant, written in shimmering gold. The early ones were set in Italy, and were a sublime entanglement of art and history and beauty and sex. They were all beautiful, and some were funny, some devastating. The one about the mother and child standing on the cliff, in the evening — you could never forget it.

Alison Ricks fans were now legion, though for years she’d published nothing. I knew as much as anyone about her, though there was a lot no one knew. There was no biography because she’d never agreed to one. For the last thirty years she’d refused to give interviews. Now the books were being reissued and taught in college. And she had won some big awards, just for being brilliant. Lifetime achievement, that kind of thing.

I own all her books. Distant Plain, The Winter Beast, Come toward Sunrise, Raking the Field, The Stone Caveat. Some were set in London, some in Italy, and some in New York. She’d grown up in Connecticut and a few were set there.

I tried to visit her once in London. I’d gone to her house on a whim, knowing I’d be able to sell the interview if I could get it. She lived in a tall house on a dark street in Islington. I went there one afternoon with a note saying I’d come by the next day if it were possible that Miss Ricks was available for a few minutes of conversation. And how much I loved the work.

I rang the bell and waited. For a long time nothing happened. I rang again, and this time the door opened, just a narrow sliver. The housekeeper stood inside, peering out. She was small and old, very erect, with white hair pulled back in a bun. She had strange dark eyes, nearly black, that seemed to have no pupils.

“Hello,” I said, “my name is Sarah Tennant. I have a note for Miss Ricks. Would you be kind enough to give it to her?”

The woman nodded, looking at me with those black eyes. She took the note and shut the door.

When I came back the next day she opened the door again, but only the same sliver. As soon as she saw me she shook her head.

I smiled hopefully. “I came yesterday,” I said, but she was already closing the door.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s not possible.” She had leaned in toward the door to shut it, so her head was very close to me. I could see her thin silvery hair, held close to her head with a fine hairnet, and an odd nick in her earlobe. As she shut the door she lowered her gaze, refusing mine.

I stood on the step for a moment. I had the feeling that she was peering at me through the peephole, to make sure I walked away.

That had been — eight years ago? Twelve?

She was now even more famous, because last year a new book of hers had been published. It made a sensation because of all the rumors. Her old editor had died, and the new one swore that this manuscript had been discovered in a closet, but the rumors were that it was really just the original draft of her first novel, Distant Plain. The rumors were that Ricks had had a stroke, and didn’t know what was going on. But the editor claimed that the book was new, that Ricks was fine and everything was good. I hadn’t read the book. I hadn’t wanted to — the reviews had been bad, and it felt disloyal.

“Jake,” I said, “I’m not a biographer.”

“You write about writers,” he said. “You write reviews of their books. You write interviews with them. You love her work.”

All this was true.

“I’ve never done a biography,” I said, but I said it in a different tone of voice.

“Come in and let’s talk it over,” he said.

Jake used to be head of the trade division, but his publishing house had been taken over by an international conglomerate that was — big news — more interested in profit margins than literary merit. Jake no longer had the corner office, but a small one in the middle of a corridor. One wall was full of books, and I always checked to see that mine were there, tucked in modestly on the third shelf down, reassuring me that I existed.

I sat down across from him. Jake was tall and gangly, as though his arms and legs had outgrown him. He had a long head and sleepy eyes and a big grin.

“I think you’re the right person for this,” he said, “because you love her work.”

“And?” I said. Lots of people loved her work.

“Because you write fast,” Jake said.

“She’s been around for nearly a century,” I said. “Why does this have to get written fast?”

“Because there are three other people writing biographies of her,” he said.

“Who?”

“A woman called Jeanetta Wareham, for Jeeves and Wooster, someone called Lafferty, for Saki and Saki — she’s just a novelist, she won’t do much — and I can’t remember the name of the third. She’s an academic, working with a university press. Wareham’s the problem.”

“Who is she?” I asked.

“A features writer from LA. She writes celebrity profiles. And she’s having an affair with her editor, who’s the head of the trade division. So her book will get a lot of support, and she’ll write it fast. And it will be full of scandal.”

“A celebrity journalist?” I drew my head back in distaste. “My book would be better.”

“Your book will have to come out first or it won’t be reviewed,” he said. “That will mean that hers will stand as the biography.”

I was holding my cup of coffee in both hands, as though it was hot, but it was cold. I looked out the window: a tall building, full of windows, reflected this one. I didn’t want someone to write a scandalous biography of Ricks.

“Mine will come out first,” I said.

Jake cocked his hand like a gun, his index finger pointed up into the air like the starter at a racetrack. “Go,” he said.

The Alison Ricks archive is at Yale, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It’s a couple of hours from New York, and on the way up the Merritt Parkway I went over what I knew.

Alison Ricks had been born in 1924, in Cornwall, Connecticut. She’d gone to college but hadn’t finished. She went to Italy after the war, worked in Naples for NATO, and began writing fiction. She moved back to New York, worked for another government organization, and kept on writing fiction. At some point she left New York for London, where she’d spent the last forty years of her life. What had she done? She’d stopped writing for the New Yorker around 1980. What had happened after that?

I figured this would take two years to write. My agent and Jake had worked out a pretty good contract, with an advance that would be big enough to live on if I didn’t eat. The commute to New Haven wasn’t bad, and I figured I could get my magazine to send me on a story to London, where I could do some more research. Jake had heard that Jeanetta had gotten a huge advance, but I put that out of my head. Mine would be first and best.

I got off the highway in New Haven, and almost at once I was in quiet, tree-lined academe. The buildings were neo-Gothic, made of gray stone with small mullioned windows, as though we were suddenly in fifteenth-century England. I found the Beinecke, then began looking for a parking lot. I drove around through the maddeningly one-way streets, farther and farther from the library, until I found a small private lot on Trumbull Street.

Walking back, I passed a one-story brownstone building, massive and closed, built like a tomb. It had a flat facade with three blank arches, a Latin motto inscribed over them. There were no windows, and the door was sealed shut. I thought it was one of the student secret societies; it felt like a reminder of all the things I didn’t know.

The Beinecke is a pale stone tower set back from the street by an open courtyard, and as I walked across the flagstones I could hear my footsteps echo. I wondered what secrets I would find. I wondered if Jeanetta Wareham was already there.

Inside the building, it was like a church. The walls were made of translucent alabaster, and the light glowed through them, cool and elegant. People spoke in hushed tones and moved slowly.

I went down to register as a researcher. I’d done part of this online. The young woman at the desk was Asian, with black hair in a bowl cut. I gave her my name, and when I told her who I was working on, she glanced up at me.

“Alison Ricks?”

“That’s right,” I said.

She said nothing more, and I wondered if she had just checked in Jeanetta Wareham. I knew what Wareham looked like; I’d found a picture online. Short black hair and big teeth — too big — and small, close-set eyes, like a wolverine’s. Now I glanced around for her, but the only other person I saw was a young man walking toward the staff office. The hall was silent.

They checked my ID and took my photograph and explained how it worked, and what the rules were. Where the material is brought to you, how long you can use it, what the restrictions are. You can’t bring pens or markers into the reading room, or, really, anything at all but your laptop. There are lockers, where you leave everything but your computer. These libraries don’t take chances: someone must once have slipped some priceless letters into a briefcase, because now everyone is monitored and there are security guards at the doors.

I put in my requests and went in to wait in the reading room. It was a beautiful space, just below ground level, with a long wall of plate glass that looks into a sunken stone courtyard, empty and serene. In the room were eight long wooden tables. No one else was there, but on one table, on the far side of the room, was an open laptop with papers beside it.

When my material arrived, I opened the heavy cardboard box and took out the first folder. I was entering into Alison Ricks’s life.

The first folder held letters between her and a friend, Colewood Atchison, who was living in New York while Alison was in Naples. Inside was a sheaf of frail papers, inscribed in faded ink. The first was dated September 8, 1947. Dear Colewood, it began, How lovely to hear from you. Colewood was working for an arts magazine, and Alison wrote him about everything — her landlady, her boss, her struggles with Italian. He wrote about his job, the art scene, how high his rent was. I sank into their world: there’s little as satisfying as reading other people’s mail. When I finally looked up it was nearly one o’clock, and I was hungry.

The table on the other side of the room was empty.

As the days passed, other scholars appeared, each one bent over a folder. The light came in from the empty stone-flagged courtyard, and the only sound was the quiet clacking of our keyboards. Sometimes our eyes met as we raised our heads to ponder, or when someone stood and gathered his or her papers to leave. Our eyes met, but we did not speak.

On the fourth day Wareham was at her table when I arrived. She raised her head and we looked at each other. It was her, all right: small, with no neck and a big head and short black hair. Those close-set eyes like a wolverine. She stared at me hard. I stared back at her for a moment, then turned away. I didn’t want her to know I knew who she was. I didn’t want her to think we were in a competition.

I wondered what she was finding out about Alison Ricks. Every time I asked for a file I wondered if I’d be told it was unavailable — if she’d have it already, spread out on the far table, revealing its secrets.

That afternoon, when I turned my files back in to the desk, I asked, “Are there any other people here doing work on Alison Ricks?”

The woman nodded. She wore a tiny gold chain around her neck, and round gold-rimmed glasses. I waited, but she said nothing more.

“Really!” I said cheerfully. “Who else?”

She shook her head. “We’re not supposed to talk about the researchers.”

“Oh,” I said, “of course.”

Someone was crossing the hall and I looked up. It was the young man I’d seen before, walking toward the door marked Staff. With him was Jeanetta Wareham. He held the door for her and they went inside.

I wanted to know what was in that room, and why Wolverine got to go inside it.

An hour later I asked for some more recent files. If that was where the scandal was, I wanted to know about it. Though I didn’t know what it might be. I asked for the correspondence between Alison and her editor. The Asian woman shook her head. By now I knew her name: Chelsea.

“I’m sorry, but that file is unavailable,” she said.

I felt a little frisson at the word, as though I’d touched an electric wire. “Unavailable?” I said. “Because it’s restricted, or because someone else is using it?”

“Someone else is using it,” she said.

I nodded and asked for another file.

Later that afternoon I was in the ladies’ room, inside a stall, when I heard the big outer door swish open. Someone came inside and began using a cell phone.

“It’s me,” she said, her voice casual and intimate. “Just checking in.” I’d never heard her voice but I recognized it at once.

There was a pause.

“No, I’m here,” said the Wolverine. “I’ve just found some amazing stuff.” She said amazing as if it were edible.

Another pause.

“I know you do,” she said. “But it’s not like that. It’s just amazing.” Then her voice turned guarded: “I can’t talk here. I’ll tell you tonight.”

The days were getting shorter, and it was dark now when I walked back through the streets to the car. I used different lots, but wherever I parked it seemed that I had to pass one of those forbidding secret societies with their closed, enigmatic facades. On High Street I saw what looked like a rose-brown stone tomb, two small but massive buildings linked by a tall doorway. There was no sign there, and no street number, no information, no words. It was utterly closed to the world. Every time I passed by, it reminded me that there were secrets I couldn’t learn.

What were those secrets? What had the Wolverine found out?

I drove up to the town of Cornwall, which is a tiny, sleepy village up in the northwestern hills. Its claim to fame is a wooden bridge, which doesn’t really make it famous. I went to the town hall, the historical society, the library, and the only restaurant in town, The Wandering Moose. The Moose knew nothing about her, and the historical society was closed, but at the town hall I learned that the Ricks family had bought their house in the twenties, around the time Alison was born. At the library a gray-haired woman wearing blue-rimmed glasses told me where to find the place.

“No one’s left in that family,” she said. “She was an only child. Her parents died years ago. They were summer people, not locals. The house is closed up now. I don’t know who owns it. She came back for a while in the summers, during the sixties and seventies, but when she moved to London she stopped.”

“And was she popular here?” I asked. “Did people like her? Did you know her?”

The woman looked at me. “People liked her,” she said, shutting her mouth like a purse with a snap. She’d been friendly before, but now something had changed.

“Did you know her?” I repeated.

The woman nodded frugally.

“After she left?”

The woman said, “I went to see her in London once.”

But that’s all she would say. She shook her head at all my other questions.

“Closing time,” she told me finally.

I drove out to see the house, up a long open hill with hayfields on either side. It was a white farmhouse, set on the edge of a stone retaining wall. I got out and walked around, but it was closed and locked. The shutters were crooked, and the lawn was tall grass. I looked out over the view that Alison Ricks had grown up with and wondered why she hadn’t come back. What had happened in London?

I was working my way through the letters. I’d finished with Naples, and moved to New York. The letters between her and Coleman had stopped because they were then living in the same city. She wrote to another friend from college, though, and there were some letters to her editor. They were fun to read. Ricks was smart and engaging. She seemed to be part of a big group of friends that did everything together. She talked about what she did and who she saw, but she said nothing about her love life, which was a little odd for a lively woman in her twenties. I wondered if she were gay, and concealing it.

I’d already begun writing the book at night, and by Christmas I’d done the first few chapters. They weren’t genius — they certainly weren’t Alison Ricks — but they weren’t bad. I sent them to Jake and he called.

“They’re good,” he said, “I like them.” I had the feeling he hadn’t actually read them.

“What do you hear about Wareham?” I asked.

“Nothing yet,” he said, which reminded me that at any moment he might find that her book was about to come out. “Have you made any discoveries? Any secrets?”

“There’s some great correspondence,” I said. “She writes a great letter.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “That’ll win you the Pulitzer.”

“I think she might have been gay,” I said.

Jake sighed. “Not a shocker. Would have been a shocker in the sixties, but not now.”

“I know. But there’s something going on.” I told him about Wareham walking into the staff room. And searching through the files online I’d found there was some material that was restricted, not to be seen until twenty-five years after her death. It was only referred to by file numbers: Alison Ricks, Files X–XIV were not available.

“I don’t know how she gets into that room,” I said. “They don’t give me any hint of it.”

“Maybe she got special access through her editor,” Jake said. “Didn’t he go to Yale?” He thinks everything is determined by where you went to college. He’s sort of right, but not the way he thinks.

“That wouldn’t do it,” I said. “It would be some other way. I think she’s been buttering someone up, but who? Some big donor, maybe.”

“Ask the staff,” Jake said. “Butter them up.” Then he changed the subject: “I did hear something about London.”

“What?”

“Some rumor about the woman she lived with.”

“What woman?”

“That’s all I know,” he said. I could hear him shrug.

The next day the Wolverine was at her desk again. She sat hunched down over her laptop as if she were about to pick it apart and eat it. She was wearing her rodent expression, squinting at the letters, ticking at her computer. Which ones was she looking at? And what had she been doing with that young man heading for the staff room?

I was buddies by now with Chelsea, and one day I asked her about the forbidden files.

She nodded pleasantly. “That’s right. Not available.”

“Is there any chance of just seeing them?” I asked. “Not taking notes, just reading them?”

Chelsea shook her head. “Absolutely not. They aren’t even kept with the other files, so they can never be taken out by accident.”

I raised my eyebrows. “By accident! Does that ever happen?”

“It has,” she said, frowning. “It won’t with these. They’re kept in the staff office.”

I nodded.

“But I’ve seen other researchers go into that room,” I said.

“Not to look at the files,” Chelsea told me. “It would be for some administrative thing. Like checking the chronology of the listings.”

“Could I do that?” I asked. “Check the chronology?” I had no idea what that meant, which was so obvious that Chelsea didn’t answer, only frowned and shook her head.

What was in the sealed files? I tried to deduce the content from their place among the rest, but there didn’t seem to be a chronological gap.

At lunchtime each day the Wolverine would fold up her laptop and speed off, as though she were meeting someone. Of course we didn’t speak to each other in the research room, where the only sound was the quiet clack of keyboards, and we also didn’t speak to each other anywhere else. When we met in the hall we nodded as we passed.

One day she was there with another woman. This one was also short, but blond, with that slick streaked-hair-gold-earrings-fuck-you look, like she’s too good to bother letting you cross her retina. The two of them sat side by side at the table. The Wolverine was showing her things, and talking quietly. The next day the new woman appeared alone. I saw her at lunchtime, walking up and down outside, talking on her cell phone, and I realized, with a horrid thrill, that she was a hired assistant. I wondered again how much the Wolverine had gotten for an advance.

The letters to Ricks’s editor, William Jens, in the beginning of the seventies, were entertaining. Ricks hadn’t been part of the hippie crowd, but she’d been amused by it. She wrote to Jens about whatever she was working on, and talked generally about the literary world. It suddenly dawned on me that Coleman was a woman, not a man; it seemed more and more likely that Ricks had been gay. Toward the end of the decade I noticed that she began to seem uncomfortable talking about her work. When Jens asked her how things were going, instead of answering she’d deflect the question. At first she was breezy: I wish I knew! but then as time went on she sounded more serious: I don’t know. I don’t know when the next will appear.

The Wolverine and I continued to nod casually to each other in the halls. One day, in the ladies’ room, I came out of the stall to see her standing with her back to me at the sink. She was examining her chin in the mirror. I looked directly at her, but she didn’t meet my eyes, and I had the feeling she was deliberately ignoring me, she was consciously denying my existence in the world, as though I was invisible. I felt affronted, in a way that had nothing to do with our competition, and I think that in that moment, when she picked sordidly at her chin, her eyes nearly crossed in her effort to focus, our relationship turned.

That night I called Jake.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Well,” I said. “I think I have a lead.” This was not strictly true, but now I was surer about Ricks being gay.

“You find out about London?” he asked, which was the question I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t want to leave the Beinecke, with its echoing stone courtyard and the secret societies standing guard around it. I didn’t want to leave the Wolverine panting over her laptop and slipping illicitly into the staff room. I didn’t want to leave her weaselly assistant. I had the feeling that if I left, something would go wrong.

“Not yet,” I said.

“When?” Jake asked.

“I’ll book a flight,” I said.

Two weeks later I was on the plane.

During the flight I finally read Ricks’s last book. I hadn’t wanted to read it before, but now I had to. I read it high over the Atlantic, turning the pages faster and faster out of distaste: it was awful. The story was about a young woman in an abusive relationship, but the insights were puerile and simplistic, and the writing was utterly clumsy and dead. The next day she woke up and sighed. It was time for some hard thinking... Billy gave her a heavy look, like a bulldozer. It was painful to see the name Alison Ricks on the cover. Where were those golden sentences, where was that shimmering light-filled prose? I wondered if this had been her first attempt at a novel, or something written at the end, when her mind was wandering. I put it away with distaste, and also with sorrow.

I’d gotten in touch with her estate, and they’d given me permission to come to the house. There was a housekeeper in residence, and I wondered if it was the same one I’d seen twelve years earlier. Twelve or eight?

At that same tall house in Islington I knocked on the door and stood waiting on the sidewalk. For a long time I heard nothing. The street was oddly empty, and lined with high dark trees. Finally I knocked again.

The door opened suddenly. An elderly woman stood inside. I’d never seen her before. She was my height, with wide shoulders and a big bosom. Her frizzy gray hair was cut short.

“Hello. Are you the writer?” She had a loud, wheezy voice, and a slightly cockney twang.

I said yes, and she smiled and stepped back.

“Welcome!” she said theatrically.

She took me back to the kitchen, where we sat at a small wooden table. She made us tea and I asked her about Alison Ricks. I started with the basics: her name, and how long she’d worked there. I like to ask simple, factual questions first. People are sure of the answers, which gives them confidence, and then, with any luck, they open up.

“My name is Eleanor Harkwood,” she said, “and I worked for Miss Ricks for thirty years. No, I lie, it’s a bit longer, really, as I worked part-time here before I worked full-time.”

I asked lots of questions: when had Miss Ricks moved here (1980, just before her time), how did she spend her days (working at her desk, reading, working in the garden), who were her friends?

“She had many friends,” said Miss Harkwood. “Many, many friends. All writer types, I think. Very intelligent people, they were.”

“And did she go out often? Or entertain?”

“She went out often, she loved it. She liked entertaining, they both did, but it was Miss Ricks who organized it. Miss Mays liked parties, but she didn’t do the organizing.”

“Miss Mays?” I said, my head down over my pad.

“Miss Pauline Mays,” replied Miss Harkwood. “Her friend.” The word “friend” seemed to be in quotes, and I looked up. She was gazing at me intently, as though hoping I was receiving some sort of signal.

“Oh, Miss Mays,” I said, as though I knew who she was. “And did she live here too?”

“Oh, yes,” Miss Harkwood said, nodding. “It was her house.”

The estate had told me it was Ricks’s house. “And is Miss Mays still living here?” I asked.

“She died ten years ago. No, I lie, it was twelve.”

I tried to date my last visit to the house. Was it eight years ago? Ten? Twelve? And who had opened the door? I remembered the dark, pupilless eyes. What story had I been writing? Why was I there?

“Could you tell me a bit about Miss Mays?” I asked. “Where did she come from?”

Miss Mays came from a very grand family in Ireland, Miss Harkwood said proudly, and grew up in a very grand house. She had no family now, her parents had died when she was a child.

I asked if there any photographs of her, and Miss Harkwood got up and led me into the library.

It was a high-ceilinged room, with tall bookcases and bottle-green curtains at the windows. Against the wall stood a mahogany partner’s desk, and along the back of it were framed photographs. Miss Harkwood stood beside me while I picked these up. Here was Alison as a toddler, smiling sunnily, standing by a little lake somewhere in Cornwall. Here was Alison sitting on a huge-wheeled bicycle, wearing a hat that tied under her chin.

“Miss Ricks was ever so much fun,” said Miss Harkwood with satisfaction. She was a heavy woman, and she stood with her feet spread apart, supporting her weight.

I was surprised to hear that Ricks had been the party organizer, the one who was so much fun. Miss Harkwood talked more and more about them, how they all laughed. How they hated dogs and loved cats. How they had gone to Spain for Christmas every year, it was very odd, but it was what they did, said Miss Harkwood, reminiscing happily.

“And then what happened as they got old?” I asked. “Did Miss Mays die here? Was she ill?”

“Oh, Miss Mays faded away, really.” Miss Harkwood’s eyes took on a sentimental look. “She got a bit furry in the head. You know,” she said, and I nodded. “Finally she didn’t know where she was, poor thing, and she just sat in a chair all day. After that she lay in bed, and then she died.”

“Poor Miss Mays,” I said facilely, writing it all down. Actually, it sounded like a pretty easy way to go. “And Miss Ricks? What happened to her?”

Miss Harkwood folded her arms over her big bosoms as though she’d been waiting for this. “Pneumonia. My fahver called it the old people’s friend, and so it proved to her. She was ninety-three, did you know that?” She nodded her head. “She slipped away too.”

I wanted to know if the two had shared a bedroom, but it was a nosy question and I didn’t want to scare her off. “Could you show me the upstairs?” I asked. “I’d love to see the rest of the house.”

By now Harkwood was full of pride and information, and she hadn’t had anyone to talk to for days. She took me all over the house: every bedroom (they each had their own, each with a big double bed, which didn’t tell me much), and the spare rooms, and the sewing room, and even the linen closet, which Harkwood informed me was very large for a London house. I took notes on everything. We ended up in the kitchen again, and I was beginning to hear the stories for the second time.

“Could I look again at the photographs?” I asked. “I’d like to take pictures of them with my camera.”

We went back in and this time I picked up each one and asked about it. One showed a pretty, laughing woman with dark eyes, wearing a full-skirted dress, with a hat and gloves.

“Is that Miss Mays?” I asked.

“Miss Ricks,” said Miss Harkwood.

“I thought she had blue eyes.” Surely the jacket photographs showed her with blue eyes?

Miss Harkwood shook her head. “Miss Ricks had very dark eyes, nearly black,” she said. “They were strange, they looked as though they were solid black. No student.”

“Pupil,” I said, trying to process this. Suddenly I remembered the story I’d been writing when I’d come to the house: it was on the Chelsea Flower Show, and that was 2008. Mays had died by then, so the woman who had answered the door must had been Alison Ricks herself. But I’d have recognized her, even thirty years older than the photographs I’d seen. I’d memorized her features, I knew them from poring over those books.

“Are Miss Ricks’s books here?” I asked, glancing around the room.

Miss Harkwood shook her head virtuously. “Miss Mays said it was poor form to keep your own books on the shelf. She wouldn’t have a single one on the premises.”

I turned back to the table again, thinking of the woman who had opened the door to me. Those black eyes, the thin white hair. The nick from the earlobe. I picked up another photograph, this one a close-up from the sixties. The same smiling, black-eyed woman, with a flirty smile. This was a three-quarters view, and it showed her right ear. There was no nick in it. Surely this was the same woman: maybe she’d gotten the nick later on?

“This is Miss Mays,” I said, to see if she’d agree.

Miss Harkwood shook her head again, smiling. “No, Miss Ricks. Here’s Miss Mays.”

She held up another picture from the sixties, a woman with her hand over her forehead against the sun, smiling into it, at the camera. It was the picture I knew from the dust jacket of Stone Caveat, and I felt that electric jolt.

“I see,” I said. “Is there another close-up of Miss Ricks?”

Miss Harkwood picked up another. This was taken from the other side, and the nick in the lobe was visible: I’d seen her in real life, but the camera had reversed the image. The nick was on her left ear.

“Thank you,” I said, closing up my notebook. “You have been very kind.”

Back in New York, jetlagged and exhausted, I called Jake. “I got it,” I said. “You won’t believe what happened. I’ll come in and tell you.”

We sat on either side of his desk and I held the cup of cold coffee again as I explained what had happened.

“I’m pretty certain she was gay,” I began. “Which is why people were so closemouthed about her, and why those files were sealed.”

He waved his hand.

“Wait,” I said. “That’s just the beginning. She moved to London so she could live with her girlfriend. But once she was there they switched identities. She stopped publishing, and she never gave interviews or allowed photographs, even when she won prizes. She had no copies of her books in her house, and over the years the new identity became real.”

Jake stared at me, leaning back in his chair, his long arms sticking out at angles. “Switched? But what about Mays? She was English. People would have known her. How could she change her identity?”

“I found out more about her. She wasn’t English but Irish. She must have arrived in London with Ricks and the two of them did it together.”

“But why?”

“Ricks did it because she had dried up as a writer. You can see it in the letters to her editor at the end of the decade. She couldn’t write, and it was painful to be asked about her work, and what she was doing, when she knew she couldn’t do it anymore. Remember poor Hemingway, trying to walk into the airplane propeller because he couldn’t write? I think she wanted to put that part of her life behind her, not be that person anymore.”

Jake nodded slowly. “I like it,” he said. “And then what about the new book?”

“Mays wrote it. I don’t know when. It’s probably in those secret X-files in the staff room. Then after Ricks died she got up her nerve and published it.”

Jake whistled. “Zowie. And then of course she kept the house that had been Ricks’s.”

“It had gone on for thirty years,” I said. “Kind of genius. All their London friends knew them as each other.”

Jake nodded. “I like it,” he said again. “But how fast can you get it down? Because I have some news for you.” I waited. “It’s not good. Wareham’s book is on her publisher’s spring list. Next year.”

“What?” How could she be done? I’d been writing as I was researching, but I was only halfway through. How could she be finished? Well, I knew how. She’d been writing all day while the Weasel was reading the letters, then calling her to tell her what she’d found. It would be trash, pure trash, and full of clichés. And also, what was the secret she had mentioned on the phone? Was there something else I didn’t know about? What had she discovered that was so amazing?

“It’s going to be the lead nonfiction book,” Jake said.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” Jake said. “Yours has to come out in the next six months or we’re lost.”

The next day I was back at the Beinecke. The Wolverine wasn’t there, but the Weasel was, wearing a cream silk blouse and a gold bracelet, sitting at their table. In the middle of the afternoon the Wolverine appeared. She very ostentatiously did not see me, and she walked over to the Weasel and whispered something. The Weasel stood and the two of them started for the door.

I spent the afternoon going over the latest files I could get, letters from the seventies. I saw plenty of evidence of what I was looking for. When Jens asked about her next book, or even her next story, she resisted more and more. Don’t ask, she said finally.

It killed me that I didn’t have another six months to work all this together properly.

When I got up for a break, out in the hall I saw the Wolverine again. She was headed toward the staff room, though this time alone. In her clothes and style she tried to imitate the Weasel, but because she was squat and dark she couldn’t. She was one of those women who throws a big scarf around her neck to appear rakish, but since she has no neck she looks as though she’s drowning in textile. Today she was wearing one of those scarves, and it came up to her ears and nearly down to her waist.

She was walking away from me, down the hall, and on an impulse I followed her. I moved silently, keeping my heels from hitting the floor. I wanted to see what was behind that door. She pulled it open fast and slipped inside, but I could see through a narrow slit: several long tables, chairs standing messily about. High metal shelves against the wall held a hodgepodge of file boxes. Then the door shut and I was left out in the hall, standing on my tiptoes, wondering what she was looking at.

I had the feeling that those X-files held the fact that she was gay — which would have been a big deal decades ago, when she gave her papers to Yale, but a small deal now. So what had the Wolverine learned that was so amazing? Was it Ricks’s confession, during the eighties, that she couldn’t write anymore? Was it the secret of the switched identities? Or was it the secret that Pauline Mays had written the idiotic book which had been on the best-seller list for forty-eight weeks now, and which might — who knew? — mean a claim of fraud, if the publisher had presented the work of a clumsy amateur under the golden name of Alison Ricks?

The thought of Wolverine learning this made me angry. And worse, it seemed unfair that she had chewed in her horrible rodent-like way through the barrier Ricks had chosen to erect. She’d done it just by buttering up some rich donor, whereas I had done real research and found it out on my own.

There was no way I could finish my book in time to compete with the Wolverine. She had finished it in a year and a half, so it would be a quickie, superficial and trashy. Even worse, she was a terrible writer.

I’d looked up some of her stuff. I could imagine the sentences: Alison (she’d call her Alison, as though they were friends) and her lesbian girlfriend, the elegant socialite Pauline May, led a scandalous life of partying and debaucheries.

Did she even know what debaucheries meant? It made me angry just thinking of her using it.

Their big London town house was a party pad, full of wild times and bohemian revels. Drugs, sex, and liquor were rife.

Did she even know what rife meant? Could she write a single sentence without a cliché? She would write, She must have thought... a sentence that should never appear in a biography. She would call Ricks an acclaimed author and her work luminous and provocative and compelling, and say that her writing was haunting and her style was deft.

I doubted that she had even read Ricks’s work, or had any idea why it was great. Whereas I had not only read every book, I also owned them all, and I had bought them years ago, as they came out.

The more I thought about the Wolverine’s terrible writing the angrier I became, standing in the hall as I thought about her cliché-ridden style, and her big fucking advance, and her trashy, splashy, successful book that was going to be the lead nonfiction book on the spring list. Across from me Chelsea was standing at her desk. She looked up, her eyebrows raised interrogatively. I was motionless, doing nothing.

“Do you need something?” Chelsea called over. “Or are you just thinking?”

“Thinking,” I said. “Trying to decide what angle to follow next.”

Just then the door to the staff room opened and the Wolverine came out. She peered up and down the hall, then walked quickly toward us. She didn’t look at either Chelsea or me, but stared straight toward the exit. She was wearing thick stacked heels and a skirt, with one of her big drowning shawls over her neck and shoulders. There was something odd about her posture: her shoulders were even more hunched than usual. They were drawn up high under her shawl, making her even more neckless.

As she walked past me, steaming along on her short thick legs, her rodent-like profile jutting out ahead of her, I thought again of her terrible writing and something came into my mind, out of nowhere. I stepped forward and stuck out my foot.

The Wolverine tripped, staggered, lurched, and fell headlong. She landed on her knees, putting her left hand out to break her fall. With her right hand she was clutching at her chest. Out from beneath the shawl fell a file folder. When it hit the stone floor it spilled its contents: a sheaf of handwritten letters.

There was a silence. No one moved.

Chelsea said, “Miss Wareham.”

Then we heard the sound of the alarm, loud and metallic against the alabaster walls.

It was the first time I’d heard a loud noise in the library, and the first time I’d seen speed and confusion there, people running, hard shoes on stone floors, raised voices, the static of walkie-talkies, the complicated metallic synchrony of doors locking.

I liked the library when it was silent and light-filled, suffused with that alabaster glow. I liked it when it was like a church, where people moved slowly and reverentially, and spoke in hushed, respectful voices. I liked the library when it echoed the secrecy of the closed, forbidding buildings studding the narrow streets, with their sealed windows and locked doors. I liked the idea of closed archives, inaccessible information, facts that were not available to the public. I liked mysteries that were only to be shared with those dedicated initiates who had earned the right to be inducted into the world of secret knowledge. I liked the Beinecke when it held those secrets within its silent realm.

But I liked it like this even more.

The Boy by Karen E. Olson

Fair Haven

While they wait, she gives the boy a glass of milk.His hand shakes, almost spilling it, and she indicates he should sit. So he does. His eyes flitter around the room, and she positions herself between him and the back door. She knows what he’s considering, and she’ll have none of it. He drinks the milk in three gulps without breathing in between, and she marvels at that. It’s as though his thirst is unquenchable. She wonders when he last had milk. His lanky build is almost anorexic, but it could just be that he is at that age where he is growing into himself. She remembers that, how awkward and uncomfortable it is as your body molds and stretches into what it will eventually become. He is a good-looking boy, maybe twelve, thirteen. His face is long, his cheekbones high, his nose wide, his skin swarthy. His ears stick out a little from beneath the close-cropped hair. His eyes are full of fear.

She puts a cannoli from Rocco’s on a plate and shoves it across the table. He gives her a wary look before scooping it up and putting half of it in his mouth at once, seemingly swallowing it whole. She hands him another glass of milk.

Taking a cannoli herself, she nibbles it slowly. Her tea went cold awhile ago, but she drinks it anyway. This was her after-dinner treat, the one that reminds her of her mother and how they’d pick out their Sunday pastries together, her mother wistfully reminding her that they would never be as good as the ones back home in Italy.

He drums his fingers nervously on the top of his leg, almost as though he is playing it like a piano. She glances toward the living room, where the baby grand sits. No one has played it in years, not since Frank died. Christmases were full of soft candlelight and the scent of pine needles and music. She wants to ask the boy if he can play, but it might embarrass him if he doesn’t.

She is pretty sure it was him she saw last week downtown with a group of boys on bicycles that were from another decade, small with long seats and high handlebars. Her son used to call it a banana bike, because of the seat, and he pinned playing cards to the spokes of the back wheel and it made a flip-flip-flip sound as he pedaled. Those boys downtown, though, didn’t want to make any noise. They pedaled past a woman with a large handbag slung over her shoulder; she was talking animatedly into her cell phone, not paying attention. It was easy for one of the boys — was it this one? — to pull the bag off the woman’s shoulder as he rode past. She marveled at his swift, smooth movement, not even hesitating. It was almost as if she were watching a dance, like that show on TV with the celebrities and the judges, what was the name of it? She can’t remember things anymore, not like she used to. She used to dance herself, gliding along the floor in Frank’s arms, her skirt fluttering around her calves, her thin heels barely making a sound against the wood, the music swirling around them. It used to be like magic.

The boy shifts a little, his eyes taking in the kitchen. For a moment, she sees what he sees: dark wooden cabinets full of nicks, worn laminate countertops, a bright red cookie jar shaped like an apple with a broken green stem, delicate china teacups on the shelf over the table, the cross over the small calendar where she writes all her appointments. It’s probably better than what he’s used to.

She doesn’t know what she’s going to do with him until they come. She’s already fed and watered him; he hasn’t spoken, just stares at her with those large dark eyes. He hasn’t tried to leave; it’s almost as though he’s relieved that it ended this way. Maybe she reminds him of his own grandmother. Maybe he was brought up right and just got in with the wrong crowd. She knows what can happen with that. She’s known her share of boys who went bad.

Those boys from her past grew up over near James, off Grand. When they started their families, they moved to the other side of Blatchley near Ferry, a better area, even though they weren’t but a few blocks from where they started. Grand Avenue was their Main Street; they were separate from the rest of the city on their patch of land: a peninsula surrounded by the East and Quinnipiac rivers and a swamp on the other side.

She doesn’t like what Grand has become, all those shops and restaurants with Spanish signs owned by the Mexicans. Or are they Ecuadoreans? It doesn’t really matter, because they don’t speak English and she’s willing to bet that most of them are illegal anyway. When her people came, when Frank’s came, they were all legal. They were proud to become Americans and live in tidy houses and take advantage of the opportunities. Now she passes the old wooden houses in decline, three or four families living inside, maybe more, piles of junk in the backyards: rusted cars and bikes, dirty plastic toys, stained mattresses, old furniture. Does this boy live like that? Is that how he grew up?

The boy is fidgety. She doesn’t have any more cannoli, and he’s finished up the last of the milk. She’s only got a little half-and-half left, and she wants that for her morning coffee. She’s got to keep something for herself. There might be a little bread in the box, it’s from Apicella’s, which is still on Grand after all these years. When she’s out doing her shopping, she always stops in for a loaf of bread, the scent bringing her back to her childhood. She walks all the way to Ferraro’s for everything else; she won’t set foot into that C-Town ever since that one time when she saw those kids with the knife. It’s cheap, though, and sometimes she’s tempted because she always likes a bargain.

It’s not as though she doesn’t have money. She’s got enough to live on, what with the Social Security and Frank’s insurance. She doesn’t need much. The house was paid off a long time ago. Her son wants her to move to East Haven, near him. She and Frank decided to stay here in Fair Haven back when everyone else was going to East Haven or the East Shore, and she thinks if she moves now it would be a betrayal of Frank. Her son doesn’t understand, tells her how unsafe the neighborhood is now, it’s not like in the old days when everyone had protection. He wants to take care of her. She told him maybe she’d consider one of those new condos along the river, but it was really only to keep him quiet. If she lived there, she wouldn’t be able to have her vegetable garden anymore. It’s not what it used to be, only a few tomatoes, some green beans, zucchini, garlic, and onions, but she likes to work the small plot, get her hands dirty. What would she do without it? She doesn’t want to plant in the community garden, that sad little patch of land that’s overgrown, showing how no one really cares.

She worries, however, that her son will put her in the Mary Wade Home over on Clinton at some point if her memory keeps failing. Agnes and Emelia ended up there, forced to leave their homes by their children, and they didn’t last long. Once you go to a place like that, it’s over pretty quick because you know it’s the last stop and who wants to keep living with the smell of urine and disinfectant in the air all the time?

The boy shifts in his seat, and she holds up her hand. He catches his breath, stops moving, obedient. She wants to ask him about himself, where does he live, how did he end up here like that, but she isn’t sure she should invest that much in him. One of the things about getting older is that you suddenly stop caring what people think or what other people’s lives might be like. She lives with her memories, wraps them around her while she sips her sherry, watching the world go by from her front window.

There’s the young woman who jogs in the early evenings with those wires in her ears and the young families who walk on weekends with their strollers and designer coffees as though the neighborhood is gentrifying rather than deteriorating. It’s just less expensive than anywhere else, which is how they can afford to live here, making it easier to pretend that it will turn around. They close their eyes to the little ones, their eyes wide, their bellies growling with hunger, only half dressed even in the winter, leaning against the rickety railings on the decrepit front porches.

She wonders if this boy was one of those little ones, then admonishes herself. Of course he was. He wouldn’t be here right now if he wasn’t. He looks familiar. He looks a little like those boys she grew up with. No, that’s not it. She is certain she has seen him, but she can’t remember where.

She doesn’t understand why he’s still here. Oh, that’s right. She reaches for the phone, then remembers that she’s already called, that they are waiting. She opens the Frigidaire and looks for milk, but the carton isn’t there. Where did it go? she wonders, then spots the empty glass next to the boy on the table. He drank all of it, didn’t he?

She takes the bottle of sherry out of the cupboard and pours herself a small glass. The boy’s eyebrows rise, and she makes a face at him. It’s like with her son, always nagging her about things. Doesn’t he know she can take care of herself? She’s been here a long time. She’s survived it all. Survived all of them. No one is left. They’re not even in prison anymore. They’re dead. Midge disappeared to who knows where back in the seventies. They say he’s at the bottom of Bridgeport Harbor. She’s always thought he might be in someone’s backyard, here in town, right under their noses. Serves him right. He should have known better from the get-go. He was no stranger to the life. Holding up that card game was a mistake. It was the first time they sent him away. He might not have been a dashing fellow, that Midge, but he was always charming.

Billy was a different story. He scared her. Scared her father and Frank too. Scared everyone. Like Whitey. The two of them were the same. Cold-blooded. It was no surprise they ended up the way they did. They deserved it.

She wonders about the boy: does he deserve it?

He’s looking at the door again. She reaches over and puts her hand on his forearm. He stiffens; she can feel the tension. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen now. He’s not as tough as he thinks he is; he’s not like Midge or Billy. She can see the softness in his eyes, behind the fear. Maybe this is his first time. Maybe it’s like the bomb. The one that killed that child.

She pulls her hand away and sits back farther in her chair, farther away from him. She doesn’t see him anymore as she pictures the shattered windows, the blood splatter on the sidewalk. Why is it that she has such trouble remembering what she needs at the grocery store, but the bus stop is as if it happened only moments ago? Every detail is etched in her memory and won’t let go: Frank in the basement, heading out through the cellar door; two hours later, they were having dinner and the sound of the blast echoed through the house, making it shake like an earthquake. She rushed down the few blocks, along with everyone else, to see the charred remains of the car, the mother kneeling on the pavement next to the child with a piece of the car’s fender sticking out of his chest, her screams almost inhuman, Frank whispering over and over to himself that it wasn’t supposed to happen that way.

She touches the short gray curls near her ears, patting them down, pretending that she doesn’t hear the low roar. She knows it’s not real, that it’s all in her head, but she can’t make it go away, no matter what she does. Her son keeps taking her to the doctor to adjust her hearing aids, but she can’t tell him that’s not the problem. She can’t tell him about that day. About what his father did for a living because he was a part of something that always ended in a violent death.

The equipment and tools are still in the basement. They’re in a locked trunk. Her son asks what’s in it, and she tells him she doesn’t know, that the key is long gone. He has not pushed it, but she’s often wondered if he really does know what his father used to do down there. If that’s not the real reason why he wants her out of here, so he can get rid of the evidence. As long as she’s living here, she won’t let him get rid of anything.

What’s not locked is the cabinet in the den. She reaches into her apron pocket and fingers the iron key. The boy sees her movement and flinches. She frowns at him. Doesn’t he know that he’s safe now? That the danger is gone? She opens her mouth to say so, but the words don’t come. The ringing in her ears is worse; she wouldn’t be able to hear herself anyway. So she merely shakes her head, as befits the situation.

He doesn’t belong here, but he is here. How did he get here anyway? She hates it that her memory does this. Moments are lost, some forever, some come back. She has no control over which. And then as quickly as she forgets, she remembers. She was watching the news, like she does every night after supper, when the doorbell rang. Her plate with the chicken bone and potato skin is still on the counter. She usually washes up after the news.

She wasn’t going to open the door tonight. She never opened the door after dinner or when it got dark — she knew better than that — but the banging started and wouldn’t stop. Rage filled her — how could they interrupt her evening like this? — and she turned the knob and yanked it open, ready to give them a piece of her mind.

The boys charged into the house, shouting about something.

All she could see was the gun.

The one with the gun raised his hand, and she felt the blow against the side of her head. She spun around and watched her hearing aid skitter across the floor. She was so busy focusing on it that she didn’t see him come at her from the other side. He grabbed her arm, pulling her off balance, and she stumbled, her ankle bending unnaturally. She had the crazy thought that she couldn’t fall on her hip, that would be the death of her, and then the hand tightened around her wrist and yanked it. She did fall, but on her knees, which had been filled with pain for years and now it was excruciating. He dragged her across the floor and into the den. Her glasses were half off her face; everything was blurry and her ears weren’t working right, sounds were muffled.

Where was the other one? She frowned. He was saying something; his lips were moving, but she couldn’t make it out. He was shouting now, looking up toward the stairs, shouting more, finally dropping her arm, and she pulled it underneath her like a bird with a broken wing. The wood floor was cool against her cheek.

For a moment, he peered down at her, his lips opening, baring his teeth, and she was reminded of a pit bull she’d encountered a few months ago, but it was on the other side of a fence and this boy was leaning closer and closer until—

He was gone.

She lay on the floor, feeling the vibrations. He was heading upstairs. That’s where the other one had gone. What would they find there? Her jewelry, her mother’s pearls, her father’s watch, Frank’s cuff links. None of it is worth a thing; she’d sold the good stuff years ago to pay for Frank’s care. She doesn’t have any money up there; it’s in the freezer, in the coffee can, an old trick that these kids probably wouldn’t think of. There are some drugs, her aspirin, her blood pressure medication, the Valium — but that’s so old it probably wouldn’t work anymore.

It was only a matter of time before they found out she had nothing worth taking.

Frank was in her head then, telling her to get up. She couldn’t die like this; she’d rather go to the Mary Wade Home and continue to lose her mind. It wasn’t gone yet, though, and she knew what she had to do.

She ignored the pain in her knees and crawled across the floor. The cabinet loomed overhead, and she pulled herself up by grabbing onto the arm of the chair next to the desk. She glanced back for a second, saw nothing, fished the key out of the desk drawer, and unlocked the cabinet.

When they came back downstairs and burst into the room, she fired.

The first one fell, a blossom of red spreading across his chest.

The other one let out a shriek. He was just a boy. Her hand, no, her entire arm, was shaking, but his eyes were focused on the gun.

She waved it in front of him, stepping over the boy on the floor, ignoring the blood. It would come back, like the blood on that sidewalk so many years ago, but for the first time in a long while, her head was clear and the ringing in her ears was gone. She could even hear the siren in the distance.

Her hand steadied, and a sense of calm spread through her.

She pointed the gun at him like Frank taught her.

“Do you want something to drink?” she asked.

Evening Prayer by Stephen L. Carter

Dixwell Avenue

The boy hated Mondays most. He used to hate Sundays most, but that was before Yale happened to his father.

The reason the boy hated Sundays was that church took half the morning and he had trouble keeping still that long. His mother was in the choir and his father in his black suit sat up front with the deacons, so the boy was stuck in a pew with Mrs. Percy and her girls. Mrs. Percy was very strict. Her girls could sit for three hours and never move once. The boy knew he was wicked because he couldn’t sit still like they did, and Mrs. Percy was always shaking him by the arm and hissing at him to stop fidgeting. The boy understood. He had realized years ago that he was going to hell. Every week Pastor Harrigan talked about the flames that awaited the unrepentant sinners and, from the looks Mrs. Percy and the other church ladies gave him when he squirmed or dropped the hymnal or yawned, the boy knew he was one of them.

Mrs. Percy was a big, dark, round lady who wore a white hat and a veil to church. She and her son Christopher ran the candy store. Mr. Percy was dead. Christopher only had one leg. He was crippled from the war. Christopher was even meaner than his mother. If you spent too much time looking at the comic books in their spinning rack, he would yell at you to get out and then roll up a newspaper and swat you unless you were quick. But in church he liked to get up and tell the congregation about everything the Lord had done for him. Sometimes he would tell the story of how he got his leg blown off in the war by a mine and should have bled to death but Jesus saved him. The boy thought a mine was a cave where you dug for gold and he couldn’t figure out how a cave could explode. One day after church, Christopher and another man got in a fight about who would be better for the Negroes, Truman or Dewey. The boy’s father had to break them up. Truman was the president. The boy was not sure who Dewey was. For a while the boy was not even sure exactly what a Negro was.

Then he found out, and that was when he started hating Mondays.

After church was Sunday dinner. The boy’s mother would make sausage and eggs and ham and greens and grits and sweet rolls. The family would sit at the dining room table with its pressed white cloth, the boy and his mother and his father and Nana, who was his father’s mother and had the room next to the boy’s. Sometimes they would have guests from the church or out of town. Before dinner his father would say a long prayer. After dinner he would say another long prayer. He was always correcting the boy’s table manners. He liked to say that your manners were your passport to the world. He worked at one of the big hotels down by Yale. All around the neighborhood, people nodded when the boy’s father passed by. Everyone said good morning. No one ever called him by his Christian name. Everyone called him Deacon or Mister. When he took the boy to the soda fountain the man would say, No charge, Deacon. Even Christopher, Mrs. Percy’s mean son, would come out from behind the counter and shake his father’s hand. People were always coming to the house with problems, and the boy’s father would listen and nod and listen and nod until he had the whole story. He would give them advice, and they would say thank you. Days later, on the street, they would come up to him and say it again, Thank you, Deacon. If the boy’s father was on his way home and saw kids acting up, he would tell them to stop and they would do what he said. The boy was secretly proud that his father was so important, and this secret pride was another reason he was sure he was going to hell.

The church was a small brick building on Dixwell Avenue just up from Munson Street. That was how he always heard people describing things, just up from. Their house was just up from the church. The doctor was just up from their house. The school was just up from the doctor. But the stores where his mother liked to shop were down, not up. They were down by Yale. The boy liked to go with her. He would watch her try on dresses and she would smile at him over her shoulder. Sometimes she would stand on the sidewalk and look in the window and say, I sure would love to try that dress, but then she would not go in the store. The boy would ask why and his mother would say, Hush, sweetie pie, don’t worry about it. But the white women would walk right past her and go into the store and come out with big boxes and bags. He asked an older kid at church who told him that some of the stores down by Yale did not serve Negroes.

One afternoon his mother took him downtown to Malley’s to buy shoes. There were lots of department stores on Chapel Street but Malley’s, with its colorful awnings and big picture windows, was his favorite. Today the windows featured a display about the store’s history. The boy looked at the mannequins in their costumes from the olden days. Each diorama moved forward a few years. The styles kept changing. One window said, Bride of Today and Her Attendants. The bride and her attendants were all white. The last window showed the bride and groom boarding a shiny new train on the New Haven line. The groom was white too. The boy stared. His mother told him to stop gawking and hurry up. She thought he was looking at the train.

Children’s shoes were on the second floor, and that was where the birdcage was too. The boy loved the cage. He ran over. The cage was taller than his father. There were parakeets chirping and singing. They jumped and fluttered from branch to branch. A blue one flapped broad-feathered wings and looked at him. The boy looked back. A sign said not to feed the birds. The boy stood there with his nose against the wire, waiting for the parakeets to start talking, but they never did.

The boy wanted red shoes but the man said red was for girls. The man said he should try blue. The boy said no. His mother said his dress shoes were always blue. She said, You love blue. The boy said, I don’t love blue. I hate it. His mother said, God doesn’t want us to hate. You shouldn’t say things like that. So the boy said he was sorry. He tried on the blue and said he liked them. This was a lie but it wouldn’t make any difference because he was going to hell anyway. When they got in line to pay for the shoes, two of the big kids who went to Yale were standing behind them. The big kids who went to Yale all seemed to wear blue scarves or white sweaters with big blue Ys on them. One of the big kids who went to Yale asked the other why the line was taking so long, and the other big kid made a joke about Darktown ladies. At least the boy thought it must be a joke because the first one laughed. But his mother blushed and grabbed the boy’s hand and hurried him out of the store, and that was the day the boy decided that Yale had happened to his mother.

The boy thought his mother was very pretty. She had big brown eyes and smooth brown skin. She loved to play the piano. She loved to dress up. People called her elegant. The boy was not sure what elegant meant but he liked hearing people call his mother that. When his parents went out on Saturday night his father would always wait downstairs in the foyer in a gray suit, and when his mother came down in one of her fancy outfits he would say things like, The most beautiful woman in the world has arrived! or, Look, it’s the Queen of Sheba! Then he would hold out his hand and she would take his arm and they would walk out the door.

The rest of the week his mother did not put on a fancy outfit. She worked at Yale. She wore a gray uniform with a white ruffled collar. She left for work very early, before the boy was awake. She had to take care of the offices before the professors got there. That was what she called it, taking care of the offices. She was not supposed to bother the professors, not ever. The boy did not know what a professor was, but in his mind he saw a big scaly blue monster, because of those blue scarves the big kids who went to Yale liked to wear.

The boy liked when his parents went out. Nana would take care of him. Her hair was thin and gray. She wore very thick glasses. She loved to sit in the kitchen eating snickerdoodles and reading her magazines. The magazines had funny names. The League for the Freedom of Darker Peoples and All Oppressed or The Ethiopian World Federation. When his parents went out, Nana would feed him his supper and make sure he said his prayers. The boy knew the words to “Now I Lay Me down to Sleep” and one or two others, but his father told him it was better to come up with his own bedtime prayer, a different one every night. The boy found this hard, which was another reason that he was sure he was going to hell.

Nana didn’t seem to care which prayers the boy said. If he wanted to say “Now I Lay Me down to Sleep,” that was fine with her. Then she would tuck him in and sit on his bed and tell him stories about how her own father had escaped from Virginia and how they sent a man to make him go back and her father had shot and killed him. Or about how when her brother went to France in what she called the First War, he was treated better there than back home. Or about how the Negroes of New Haven tried to build a college of their own a hundred years ago but the white folks wouldn’t let them. Or about how Marcus Garvey would have saved the whole darker nation except that the white folks wouldn’t let him. One night he asked her if the man her father had shot went to heaven. She laughed and said, He was a wicked man, but th’ Lord’s mercy don’t know no bounds. After the day his mother bought him the blue shoes at Malley’s, the boy asked Nana if maybe he could go to Europe one day. Nana laughed and said he could do pretty much anything he wanted.

The boy decided that Yale had never happened to his Nana.

On Tuesdays through Saturdays the boy went to Vacation Bible School in the basement of the church. The boy liked Vacation Bible School. It was summer and the days were very hot. There were ten big signs around the walls, one for each of the Commandments. The kids would sit there in the basement sweating in the heat and Miss Deveaux would lead them in prayer. Miss Deveaux never sweated. She was very strict, but the boy liked her. She also had the best job in the whole wide world. She worked for the A.C. Glibert Company, painting the American Flyer trains. She was surrounded all day long by black engines and green Pullman cars and red cabooses. The boy wished he had her job. So he was going to hell for envy too.

After prayers the class would sing a hymn and then one of the kids would read a psalm and then Miss Deveaux would read them a story from a thick brown book. One morning the story was about a boy named Dick who was trying to win the prize for never missing a day of third grade. Dick was so proud of never missing. Then one day he saw an old man who needed help with his apple cart. Dick helped the man and missed a day of school. The moral of the story was that helping the old man was better than winning the prize. The boy didn’t know if that was right. What if Dick really needed that prize? What if Dick was a Negro and the prize was a trip to France? What if the prize was an American Flyer train set? But the boy never asked questions like that. Just thinking those questions was probably enough to send him to hell.

After story time, the class would sing another hymn and then Miss Deveaux would read them another story, like about why Jesus came and how he died for them, or about how Hannah wanted a baby and prayed until God gave her one. Then they would stand up and make a circle and join hands and sing some more, and then it was time for lunch and school would be over for the day. Usually the boy had to stay late, because his mother could not pick him up until three o’clock. Miss Deveaux or Mrs. Percy would look after him and a few of the others whose mothers had to work. Mrs. Percy would shake her head and say how terrible it was that a woman should have to work. Supporting the family was the husband’s job, she would say. The boy wondered whether that meant it was sinful for Mrs. Percy to run the candy store.

On Saturday mornings the boy’s father would come to Vacation Bible School. He wore the same black suit he wore for Sunday services. Miss Deveaux would warn the kids to be on their best behavior while the senior deacon was talking. Then she would fold her hands and sit quietly, just like the kids. The boy’s father would stand in the front of the room. He would talk about why it was important to listen to their elders and do what they were told. He would tell them how God had put them on this earth not to do what they wanted but to do what was right. He would tell them how the only way to know what was right was to listen to their parents and their teachers and go to church and also read the Bible with their families. Sometimes he would go around the room and ask each of the kids their favorite Bible verse. Some of the kids would say things like John 14:6 or Matthew 8:27, and some would say things like the story about the loaves and the fishes. His father would nod and go on to the next kid. But if one of them didn’t have an answer, his father would write a note to the parents, and the kid would have to bring it back the next day signed. And the kids who didn’t know any Bible verses were always so embarrassed that they knew five by the next time the boy’s father came. The fact that the kids were all scared of his father was another reason the boy was so proud of him, even if he was scared of him too.

After Vacation Bible School on Saturdays, the family would climb into the big black Buick and go motoring. That was what the boy’s father called it, motoring. Nana usually stayed home. Sometimes they motored to the beach. Sometimes they motored to a state park. But what the boy loved best was when they would motor up to West Rock and park by the fence and get out of the car and watch the men blasting a tunnel through the mountain. The men wore helmets with lights on them. They would go into the tunnel pushing a cart on a track and a little while later there would be a big explosion. The fence would shake. The boy would think about Christopher getting his leg blown off by a mine. But it looked like a very exciting job. All of the men digging the tunnel were white. The boy watched closely for any injuries. It’s dangerous work, his father would say as they motored back home in the shiny black Buick. Let’s remember to pray for them tonight. His father had been in the war too but he still had both of his legs. The boy wondered if the men digging the tunnel prayed for the Negroes.

Vacation Bible School had Mondays off, and so the boy would stay home all day with Nana. After he did his chores she would let him read comic books and sometimes even listen to the radio. When his parents were home, they usually listened to music or shows with important-sounding names like America’s Town Meeting of the Air. But Nana liked to sit in her room with her eyes closed and her feet up and listen to the radio preachers. Or she might tune in Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories and listen to the recipes and say things like, No, no, Jenny, that’s wrong, you don’t use paprika. Nana was always complaining about the heat, so the boy would go down to the kitchen and pour her some lemonade even though his mother did not really allow it upstairs. He would sit with Nana and rub her feet. When it was the boy’s turn to pick a radio show, he chose The Answer Man and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! And if he did a few extra chores, Nana might let him listen to The All-Star Western Theatre or The Lone Ranger, even though she knew his father disapproved. But there she would draw the line. The other kids were always talking about Amos ’n’ Andy and Baby Snooks, but Nana would say, No, boy, you know what your father says, they are forbidden in his house. Then she would close her eyes again. Nana’s feet were big and wrinkled and knobby. Sometimes while the boy rubbed her feet she would call him by his father’s name.

Then one Friday Nana could not get out of bed. The boy’s mother took her to Grace — New Haven Hospital and came home that night and told the boy’s father that they were keeping her in the ward while they did some tests. His father nodded his stern head and went out on the porch. The boy asked what was wrong and his mother said to leave his father alone just now. They stood by the parlor window and looked out at the dark street. After a while the boy asked his mother if having tests meant that Nana was going to die. His mother’s eyes got teary and she gave him a hug and kissed him and took him upstairs to wash and say his prayers and get tucked in.

On Sunday the pastor asked everybody to pray for Nana. He called her Our Sister. After church his parents took him to the hospital. It was a big brick building with dark hallways. It smelled. There was a new wing that was brighter but Nana was in the old part. There were twelve beds in her ward and there was a woman in every one of them. A lot of them had bandages, and a lot of the bandages were dirty. There wasn’t much light because the windows were mostly blocked by the building next door. There were liquids spilled on the floor. There seemed to be only one nurse. Nana was in the last bed, down by the wall. Screens were set up between the beds. Each bed had a wooden chair, so his mother sat next to Nana and held her hand, and his father stood on the other side and held her other hand. The boy wanted to rub Nana’s feet but they were covered with a sheet. His mother and father did not pay attention to him, so he decided to go look at the other women. No one seemed to mind as he wandered along the row of beds, peering past the screens, trying not to step in any of the spills. He noticed that all of the women in the ward were Negroes. Maybe white people never got sick.

That night the family ate cold fried chicken from the Frigidaire. His mother did not believe in leftovers on Sunday but she served them anyway. She seemed sad. His father looked just as stern as he did every other day. He scolded the boy for getting crumbs on the cloth. He scolded the boy for being too slow clearing the table. After prayers, he told the boy that because Nana was in the hospital, she would not be able to take care of him tomorrow. The boy wondered if that meant he would be able to listen to Baby Snooks. But his father was still talking. Neither I nor your mother can take a day off just now, he said, so you will have to go with me to work tomorrow.

The boy was surprised. To the hotel? he asked.

That’s where I work, his father said. Pray for Nana tonight, he said, and his voice sounded funny.

In bed that night the boy could hardly sleep. The hotel! He had never seen his father at work at the hotel. His father never talked about what he did there. But the boy was proud that his father worked at the hotel. It was taller than the church spires on the Green. It was taller than almost all of Yale. It was built out of red bricks, except the top stories, which were covered in white stone. People were always talking about the time Babe Ruth had stayed there. And Albert Einstein, although the boy only knew he was famous; he did not know exactly who he was. The president of the United States had stayed there too, although the boy had no idea which president. The other kids said the hotel had even been in a Hollywood movie, but the boy wasn’t sure whether to believe them.

On Monday morning the boy’s father put on a dark suit and a white shirt and a dark tie. He carefully combed his hair. He told the boy to put on nice clothes and his new blue shoes. They boarded the trolley even though the hotel was not that far away. His father said, We can’t afford to be sweaty. The boy liked the streetcar, the way it clacked along the tracks ignoring the other traffic. The engineer would blow his horn and the cars would get out of the way. Some of the drivers honked back. The boy listened to the crackle of the pantograph. He said it would be fun to drive a trolley when he grew up. His father said, I expect more than that of you. Besides, he continued, the city will be getting rid of the streetcars soon and there will only be the buses left. The boy asked why.

Money, his father said, with that stern disapproving look.

The boy gazed out the window as they passed Yale. He was watching for blue professor monsters. But he only saw the big kids who went there. All of them were white. Nana had told him that when his father was young he used to shine shoes for the Yale kids. He was not allowed to go into the buildings where the boys lived, she said, so he would stand under the window and the Yale kids would throw their shoes outside. He would take them home and shine them up and bring them back the next day. He would knock and one of the Yale kids would open the door. He would take the shoes and say, Wait here. Then he would close the door. The boy’s father would wait. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Sometimes half an hour. Then the same Yale kid would open the door again. He would pay the boy’s father for the shoes he shined, fifteen cents a pair. That was a lot of money in those days, Nana would say. A lot of money.

The boy and his father got off the trolley at the corner of Chapel and College. The boy took his father’s hand. He stared up at the hotel. He was very excited. They walked right past the big glass doors. His father did not even turn to look. The boy was surprised. Aren’t we going in? he asked. His father told him to shush. They walked around the side all the way to the back where there was a wooden door that said Staff. Inside was a hallway. It was very crowded. People were walking this way and that. Most of them wore brown uniforms. The men had brown hats with shiny black bills. The women had little brown caps. The boy was proud of his father again because he was wearing a suit. There were a lot of doors in the hallway. One of them said Staff Men Dressing. His father told him to wait here. He went in. The boy waited. There was nowhere to sit so he stood up. There were notices on the wall about all the things the staff was not allowed to do while on duty. The door opened and a tall man came out. He was wearing the brown uniform and the brown hat with the shiny black bill. He walked straight toward the boy and held out his hand and at first the boy was scared until he saw that the man was his father. His father took his hand and led him to another room. The sign said Men Staff Lounge. The letters were faded. Inside were some old tables and chairs. A couple of men were sitting by the window with their uniform blouses open. They were smoking cigarettes. The boy’s father drew him into a corner and pointed to a bench and said he had to stay here and be quiet all day. The boy could not stop staring at this stranger in his brown uniform. His father said he would have a break in three hours and he would come and take him to the bathroom. He said there was a drinking fountain in the hall. His father was starting to say more when a man walked into the room and went straight up to him like people always did on the street. The boy wondered if he needed advice. But the man did not ask the boy’s father for advice or shake his hand. The man was fat and white and bald. He called the boy’s father by his Christian name and told him he was late and he’d better get about it if he expected to keep this job. Then he looked down.

Oh, he said. Who’s this?

He’s my son, sir, said the boy’s father. With his grandmother in the hospital, I’m afraid—

The fat white man interrupted him. He spoke to the boy directly. You just keep out of the way, boy, he said. We can’t be having you causing any trouble now, can we?

The boy said, No sir.

The fat white man smiled and ruffled the boy’s hair. Then he walked away. The boy’s father had a funny look on his face, a look the boy had never seen before. He took his son’s hand and sat him on the bench.

Stay right here until I get back, he said. Do you understand?

Yes sir, the boy said.

His father left.

For a while the boy sat there. He was embarrassed. He had never seen anybody talk to his father like that. He wondered who the fat man was. Other men kept walking in and out in their uniforms. One or two of them glanced his way but mostly they did not pay him any attention at all. The boy sat on the bench. He glanced down at his shiny blue shoes. He was still upset about the way the fat white man had talked to his father. The boy kept expecting his father to come back, but when he looked at the big clock only half an hour had gone by. Finally he could not stand to wait any longer. It was wrong to talk to his father that way. He would have to find somebody to tell. He slipped off the bench and walked down the hall the way his father had gone. Nobody stopped him. He opened the door. He was in a big kitchen. He smelled fried food. He smelled spices. There was a lot of yelling back and forth. He saw the people in uniform going out a little passage off to the side, so he went that way too. He wound up in some kind of room with shelves and suitcases. He went out another door. He was in the lobby. The lobby was very bright and cheerful. The floor was tiled. The ceiling was two stories high. There were chandeliers. There was music. White people in fancy clothes were coming in through the front doors. Luggage stood on shining gold carts. Black men in uniforms pushed the carts. One of the men was his father. He was walking with a young white couple, a man and a woman, pushing their luggage on a golden cart. He walked with the couple to the front desk. The man was wearing one of those Yale scarves. He turned to the boy’s father and said, Thanks, boy, and gave him some money. His father said, Thank you, sir, that’s very generous, and if there’s anything else I can do for you, just call down and ask for me. He gave them his Christian name. The white couple was talking to the clerk behind the desk. The boy’s father just stood there waiting with the cart. Then the clerk handed over the key and the boy’s father and the white couple went off toward the elevator. The boy followed them. His father said, I’ll meet you upstairs with the bags, sir. The white man turned around. He said, Can you shine my shoes for me and have them back in an hour? His father said, Of course I can, sir. It would be my pleasure. Shall I pick them up when we’re upstairs? The white man said, Well, I can’t very well give them to you now, can I? Not when they’re still on my feet. His father nodded his head and smiled and said, No sir, I expect you’re right. Here’s the elevator now, sir. Another Negro in a uniform stood inside. His father said, Take these nice young folks to the eleventh floor. He said to the white man, I’ll see you upstairs, sir.

The elevator doors closed. His father rolled the cart down another hallway. The boy stood there staring. He had never seen his father smile before. Not like that.

When his father was gone, the boy went back into the room with the suitcases and back into the little passage and back into the kitchen and back into the hallway and back into Men Staff Lounge. He sat on the bench again. He sat there for two more hours. His father came in, stern and unsmiling. He took the boy to the bathroom. He gave the boy an apple and a peanut butter sandwich to eat. He said, You’ll only have to sit here a few more hours, son. I’m leaving early today.

The boy sat on the bench for three more hours. Then his father came back. He asked if the boy had to go to the bathroom. The boy said no. They went out into the hall. His father went into Staff Men Dressing. He was out fifteen minutes later, back in his suit and crisp white shirt. He took the boy’s hand and they left the hotel. Across the street was an ice cream shop. He bought the boy a cone and they walked to the trolley stop. His father hardly said a word on the ride home. They passed Yale again. The boy looked out at the stone towers with their long windows and wondered how it would feel to be one of the kids inside throwing his shoes out.

That night after dinner the boy got down on his knees to say his prayers. His mother sat on the bed. She reminded him to pray first for others. So he asked God to make Nana better. Then his mother said he should give thanks. So he said, God, thank you that Monday is over and tomorrow is Tuesday and I can go back to Vacation Bible School. Then he said, I hate Mondays, God. I really hate them. His mother was upset. Don’t say things like that, she said. I told you, God doesn’t want us to hate. The boy said he was sorry. But he already knew he was going to hell. Then his mother said he should say a prayer for himself. He shut his eyes tightly.

Dear God, he said, when I grow up, please, God, I will do anything you want. I will be anything you want. But please, God, please, don’t let me grow up to be a Negro. Amen.

Author’s Note: For more on the origin of this story, see Chapter 1 of my novel Palace Council as well as the author’s note at the end of the book. The Edward Malley store on Chapel Street did indeed have the window display the boy describes in 1948. In the fall of that year, New Haven did indeed retire the streetcars. The Vacation Bible School lessons are drawn from Florence M. Waterman, Standard Vacation Bible School Courses: Primary — First Year, published in 1922.

Second Act by Jessica Speart

Food Terminal Plaza

It was the way her hand hovered around the deli case that first caught his eye. It fluttered back and forth like a butterfly caught in a moment of indecision. Her palm finally came to rest between the salami and the tuna salad and her fingers lightly tap-tap-tapped on the glass window case.

“Come on, already. Pick something, will ya? I wanna order a sandwich and get back on the road,” groused the trucker behind her.

Jimmy saw the heat rise in her cheeks and planted his meaty fists on the countertop. “Leave the lady alone. I’m sure McDonald’s can wait a couple of extra minutes for your delivery. Take your time, miss. Don’t let this bum rush you.”

The trucker angrily tugged on his blue Ferelli Sausage cap. “Screw you, Jimmy. The taco trucks have better food than this place does, anyway.”

“Sure, if you like chowing down on crappy corn cakes filled with mystery meat. Try not to choke on the truck fumes coming from I-95 while you stand there eating your lunch.”

Annabelle’s eyes lowered as she drifted off into thought. She didn’t say a word although she knew the food trucks they were talking about. Parked on a thin strip of asphalt along the waterfront, they resembled a flock of exotic birds with their colorful array of plume-like flags and flashy yellow, green, and red exteriors. The pulsating sounds of salsa and mariachi music blared from their speakers most of the day and into the night. She’d been drawn to them one evening after rehearsal. Their siren song had lured her past Ikea, under the highway overpass, and on to Long Wharf Drive where the sun was beginning to set. It hung in a fiery ball above a group of white petroleum storage tanks, round as moon pies, that lay across the Sound.

She had walked past the semitrailers and parked cars to where a crowd had gathered. Truckers and New Haven college students stood in separate groups laughing and talking as they ate quesadillas and burritos topped with bright green salsa. One college boy had looked at her askance as she’d joined the end of a line.

“I’ll take two tacos, please,” Annabelle said upon reaching the front of the food truck.

“What kind do you want?” asked the young girl leaning out its side window.

“Oh, dear. I don’t know. I don’t eat Mexican food all that much.” Her mind drew a blank as she studied the menu board. What she wanted to do was turn and run.

“Try the pork loin. They’re nice and juicy tonight,” whispered a voice in her ear.

Spinning around, she saw a trucker standing behind her, his T-shirt stretched tight across his chest and his nipples erect from the wind whipping across the Sound. His gold tooth caught the last rays of light, gleaming bright as hidden treasure.

“Trust me. They’re so moist you’re going to be begging for more. It’s a good night to try things you’ve never had before.” He leered at her and she did as he said. “Give her a beer too,” he added.

That was the first of many drinks Annabelle had that evening.

“My name is Tommy Corona. You know, Corona. Just like the beer.”

It was the last thing she remembered him saying. The next morning, she woke up in a strange bed.

“The chicken salad is nice and fresh today, miss. Why don’t I make a sandwich of it for you?”

The words plucked her from her thoughts and she looked up to where Jimmy stood smiling at her across the deli counter.

“Thank you. That would be nice. I’m sorry that I made you lose a customer.”

“Who? That mook? Oh, hell. Don’t worry about him, pardon my French.”

Annabelle watched as he spread the chicken salad neatly between two slices of bread. He was portly with a sparse head of hair that was carefully combed across his scalp. The tip of his tongue, pink as a wound, grazed his upper lip as he deftly sliced the sandwich in two. This was a man who clearly enjoyed his food.

“There. I think you’ll need a bag of chips to go along with that.”

Annabelle quickly calculated the total in her head. “Please don’t bother. Just the sandwich will be fine.”

“Here, take it,” he said, waving her ten-dollar bill away like a pesky fly. “Lunch is on the house today for having to deal with that jerk. I’d hate to think you wouldn’t come back again.”

“Of course I will. I’m rehearsing a play at Long Wharf Theater next door. So I’ll be working here for a while.”

He brightened and Annabelle thought he wasn’t such a bad-looking man after all. He’d be quite handsome if he were only thirty pounds lighter.

“I thought you looked like a movie star! What’s your name? Have I seen you in anything?”

Annabelle cringed inside, although her smile remained in place. She always sensed the disappointment that usually followed her answer. “Probably not. Most of my work is on the stage. I’m Annabelle Rogers. I’m sure you’ve never heard of me before.”

“Annabelle Rogers,” he repeated. The name tingled on his lips like a fine sparkling wine. “Well, if you’re not a movie star yet, you should be. You’re as pretty as one and you’ve got a good name. Pleased to meet you, Annabelle Rogers. I’m Jimmy Carbonara. You know, Carbonara. Like the spaghetti sauce.”

Annabelle shivered at the memory of Tommy Corona.

“You’re cold! Here, take a cup of coffee with you. Let me know if you like the sandwich and I’ll make something special for you next time.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off her as she smiled. Annabelle Rogers was no twenty-year-old, but still totally doable. Tall and slim, she was stacked in all the right places. She was an absolute babe and completely out of his league. He’d never thought about going to the theater before. Maybe it was time he got some culture. He was already dreaming what to make her for lunch tomorrow as she waved goodbye and walked out the door.

Refrigerated trailers hummed where they sat in their bays and hand trucks groaned under the weight of crates loaded with sausages and boned chickens. Annabelle hurried past the meatpacking plants and walked through a parking lot the length of three football fields. Close to the docks, the theater was located in the heart of New Haven’s food terminal.

She hadn’t performed at Long Wharf Theater before and was grateful for the job. People always assumed an actor’s life was filled with glamour and glitz, but the profession wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. At least it hadn’t been for her, so far.

It had been nearly a year since her last acting gig, and the ones she tended to land paid very little. Some of them paid nothing at all. Unemployment checks gradually kicked in, but they eventually ran out and then she was left to scramble. Annabelle usually managed to find work waiting tables, temping as a phone-sex operator or a lowly telemarketer dialing for dollars. There were days when she felt as if her life had become nothing more than a walking cliché.

People always said that talent and hard work would eventually pay off. Annabelle had believed that to be true when she’d left Kansas and moved to New York City. She’d relentlessly studied her craft and gone on endless auditions and cattle calls. But years later she remained just another pretty face, one in a long line of hopefuls who were still pounding the pavement. Only now, at forty-six years old, she was no longer so young and her beauty was on the wane. It wasn’t the same for men. Show business could be cruel that way. George Clooney was box-office gold at fifty-four while Anne Hathaway felt washed up at thirty-two. A woman of Annabelle’s age was considered ancient.

She had vowed to give up acting any number of times but couldn’t get off the merry-go-round. A small role always seemed to come along that was just enough to keep her going. She found herself trapped in a perpetual game of trying to grab hold of the brass ring. What Annabelle needed was a decent break but she’d begun to think it would never come. Not until a few weeks ago.

Thank God for the casting director who’d seen her perform in some half-assed play at a run-down warehouse in Brooklyn. Her prayers were answered when he’d called and offered her the lead in a new production at Long Wharf Theater the very next day.

All those years of heartache and scrimping to get by might finally be over. A plum role and good reviews would help to launch her career. With any luck, the play would move to Broadway and movie roles would begin to roll in. Maybe she’d no longer be plagued by nightmares of being a bag lady. Instead, Ryan Seacrest would ask to interview her as she walked down the red carpet of her dreams.

She had worked hard for this and paid her dues. Success was now within her reach. Annabelle Rogers was bound and determined not to let anything stop her.

Jimmy Carbonara’s heart skipped a beat as she entered his store the next afternoon.

“So you must have liked the sandwich, huh?”

Annabelle smiled and he had to remind himself to breathe as the rest of the customers melted into the background.

“It was delicious, Jimmy. The best I’ve ever had.”

Just the way she said his name made his testosterone level soar. “That’s ’cause I put a little extra love into it. What can I get you today?”

“Surprise me, Jimmy. Make me something special.”

Annabelle couldn’t have been feeling better. She was beginning to remember her lines and the director seemed to be happy, even if rehearsals were still a bit bumpy. Then there was Jimmy. A man hadn’t looked at her this way in years.

He thrust a round to-go tin into her hands. “Here, I made it for you this morning in case you showed up. How about I take you out to dinner tonight? Nothing fancy, just some good food. We can go to the Italian place next door.”

She hesitated. “Thank you, Jimmy. That’s very nice, but—”

“Aw, come on. Give a guy a break. This way I can say I once went out with a famous actress.”

She took a peek inside the tin. A mound of egg salad had been molded in the shape of a heart.

“Hey, I know I’m not Sylvester Stallone, but I’m no Pee-wee Herman either.”

Annabelle was surprised to hear herself laugh. “No, you’re not. You’re my charming gentleman caller.”

“Oh yeah? Who’s that?”

“He’s a wonderful character from The Glass Menagerie. It’s a play by Tennessee Williams that I was once in.”

“So, what do you say? Can I take you to dinner tonight or what?”

Annabelle considered the invitation. What harm could it do? She’d been working hard and was tired of living on canned tuna and pizza. Besides, an evening out might help her relax.

“All right,” she agreed. “I’ll meet you here at seven o’clock.”

Jimmy gave her a wink. “I’ll be waiting with bells and whistles on.”

He kept an eye on the time for the rest of the day. At six forty-five, he opened a bottle of wine, poured two glasses, and slipped some mood music into the boom box. When she hadn’t arrived by seven fifteen, his stomach started to churn. He began to anxiously pace the floor when the clock hit seven thirty.

What in the hell’s going on? Is this bitch standing me up?

He was cursing every woman he’d ever known by seven forty-five when she finally opened the door. He’d never seen such a vision before. Annabelle Rogers was decked out in a gauzy formfitting red dress. B.B. King wailed the blues as she walked into his store. Now this had been something worth waiting for.

Her body tingled as she saw him checking her up and down. “Is one of those glasses of wine for me or do you plan on drinking them both yourself?”

His pulse throbbed as he handed one to her. There was something different about her tonight. Annabelle’s hips swayed to the music as she took a deep sip. His hormones morphed into fireworks while he stood and watched, mesmerized. Jimmy wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off her if they stayed here any longer.

“What say we finish our drink and split this joint? I reserved us a table next door and we’re already late.”

Annabelle thrust out her lips in a playful pout. “It’s such a beautiful evening, I’d much rather be outside. Why don’t we go and eat at the food trucks? I can hear music playing there and we’ll be able to dance.”

Her hips swiveled as B.B. King crooned “I Put a Spell on You.” She twirled and wine from her glass spilled onto the floor like tiny drops of blood. How could he deny her anything?

“It’s a pretty rough place for a lady. Especially with the way you’re dressed tonight. Have you ever been over there?”

No,” she lied. “But I feel perfectly safe with you.”

His eyes remained glued to her hips. “Okay. If that’s what you really want to do.”

“It is, Jimmy. It’s what I want more than anything,” she whispered in his ear, setting his body aflame.

She needed to drown herself in music after what had happened that day. Rehearsal had started off all right but had gone quickly downhill from there. She’d kept forgetting her lines and been told that the director was looking for a replacement.

Jimmy put an arm around her waist and guided her across the street, past the highway, over to the food trucks. He placed his jacket over her shoulders to shield her from the wind.

“Buy me a beer, Jimmy. I’d like a Corona,” she said, and immediately started to dance.

He considered himself a lucky man as every eye in the truck lot turned toward her. By his fourth beer, Jimmy had to admit that the food trucks weren’t half bad. Even better, Annabelle pressed herself tightly against him. The air crackled with sexual tension as they danced, her body moving sinuously with his. It seemed to mold itself to the part of him that was growing. Jimmy was fantasizing how the night might end when a trucker came up and stood closely behind her.

“Hey, mama, remember me? I’m your big daddy from the other night.”

Annabelle turned her head and her heart leaped into her throat. It was Tommy Corona, the trucker she’d gone home with. “I’m sorry, but you must have me confused with someone else.”

“No way, mama. I’d know those hips of yours anywhere. I’ve been thinking about you and was wondering when you would come back again.”

Jimmy’s temper flared when the man brazenly placed both of his hands on Annabelle’s hips. “The lady said she doesn’t know you, buddy. Comprende? So do yourself a favor and back off.”

The trucker’s gold tooth shone bright as a star in the dark. “She knows me all right. She enjoyed nine inches of me the other night. Didn’t you, sweetheart?”

“That’s enough, you goddamn son of a bitch.” Pushing Annabelle aside, Jimmy began to beat the man. He didn’t stop until the trucker looked like a piece of raw veal.

“Come on, Jimmy. Let’s go before the police get here,” Annabelle urged. She began to reach for his hands before realizing they were covered with blood. “Oh, dear. Are your hands all right? Are they hurt?”

He quickly pulled them away. “Don’t worry. I’m fine. I’ve dealt with tougher guys before. Your friend got the worst of it. I think he’s going to be needing another gold tooth.”

Annabelle grew quiet but she’d never been so turned on in her life. Jimmy Carbonara was a lethal weapon and he was all hers.

“Is what that guy said about you back there true? Did you sleep with him?” he angrily demanded as they headed for his store.

Annabelle’s eyes welled up with tears. “No, of course not. How can you even ask that? I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

Jimmy felt like dirt for having questioned her.

“You’re my hero, Jimmy,” she said while straddling him in bed later that night. “You’re my big, strong protector.”

He cupped her buttocks in his hands and gazed at the swell of her breasts in the moonlight. Jimmy wished she hadn’t made him turn off the lamps. She was probably self-conscious but she’d have to get over that. Annabelle had a terrific body from what he could tell, and he wanted to see every inch of it. So what if she was no spring chicken? Neither was he. How had he gotten so lucky? “I’d do anything for you, Annabelle. You know that.”

“Would you? Would you really? I’ve been hurt so many times, Jimmy. Promise you’ll always protect me and won’t let anyone hurt me anymore.” Leaning over, she kissed him lightly on the lips.

“I swear it,” he said, and meant it.

Annabelle didn’t show up at his store the next day or the day after that and Jimmy started to worry. What had happened? Had he done something wrong? He stopped by the theater and was shown to her dressing room, where a woman could be heard crying inside.

“Annabelle, is that you? Is everything all right?”

Her eyes were red and swollen when she opened the door.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. Stepping inside, he closed the door behind him.

Annabelle’s bottom lip quivered and her breath caught sharp. “Oh, Jimmy. It’s the director. He’s firing me.”

“What do you mean he’s firing you? What’s he doing that for?”

She placed her head on his chest and he thought for sure that his heart would break.

“Another actress wants the role. She’s a friend of his so he’s letting me go and giving the part to her.”

Lisa Larson was to be her replacement. The woman was the bane of her existence. She’d been making Annabelle’s life a living hell for years. Every role that Annabelle lost seemed to go to her.

“Can he really do that to you?”

Annabelle nodded. “The director can do whatever he wants. This role was supposed to be my big break. What’s going to happen to me now?”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of you, but it still doesn’t seem right. How about I speak to him for you?” The guy needed to be taught a lesson. Jimmy’s sore knuckles throbbed at the thought. “Maybe I can talk some sense into him. You know, make him see things my way.”

Annabelle’s head lolled on her neck, seeming as weak as a baby bird’s. “No, that wouldn’t end well for either of us. It might even get me blackballed. Besides, Lisa Larson is the real problem. If only there was some way to get rid of her. She’s coming by the theater later tonight. She wants to talk to me about the role.” Annabelle dropped her head in her hands and began to sob harder.

Jimmy couldn’t bear to see her cry. Something had to be done. Hadn’t he taken a solemn vow not to let anyone hurt her? “How about if I put a little scare into her? I bet then she wouldn’t want to stay and you’d get to keep your job.”

Annabelle raised her head and smiled wanly. “Would you really do that for me?”

He gently wiped away her tears. “You’re my girl, aren’t you?”

She pressed herself against him until he could feel every muscle inside her move. “You know that I am, Jimmy.”

“Then stop your crying. I’ll take care of this for you.”

Annabelle plucked a tissue from its box and blew her nose. “How? What are you going to do?”

“You leave that part to me. Just make sure you bring her out the back door of the theater tonight. Say you want to take her for a drink or something. It’ll be dark. I’ll wear a mask and rough her up a little bit. Just enough to put the fear of death in her.”

“And what about me? What do I do?”

“You don’t do anything except maybe pretend to be afraid and run away. Just don’t attract attention or scream.”

Annabelle spent the rest of the day preparing for her role that night. She wanted to be ready when her rival arrived and the proverbial curtain went up. She was seething by the time the actress swept into the dressing room.

Lisa Larson’s toned body and tight skin were part and parcel of her successful career and only helped fuel Annabelle’s rage. The woman could afford to hire a personal trainer and plastic surgeon with all the money she made. Even so, the wrinkles around her neck were like the rings on a tree. They gave away her age. The bitch had to be at least fifty years old.

“Oh, poor Annabelle. I feel so bad for you. But you know how Billy can be when it comes to this sort of thing. He prefers to work with actors who he already knows.”

Annabelle wasn’t fooled by Lisa Larson’s sad face. She saw the scorn flickering beneath her mask of concern and, for once, she remembered her lines perfectly.

“Don’t worry, Lisa. There are no hard feelings. I know it isn’t your fault. That’s why I came here tonight. Can we go discuss it over drinks?”

Lisa Larson breathed an audible sigh of relief. “That’s a wonderful idea. Maybe I can get them to hire you as my understudy. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

She cast a questioning glance as Annabelle slipped on a man’s jacket and a pair of large gloves. A rubber band around each wrist held them in place. “I’m not used to this weather and my fingers get cold,” she explained.

She had rehearsed the next step at least a dozen times in her mind. Everything would be fine as long as Jimmy was on time and didn’t miss his cue. Annabelle made sure no one was around as she led Lisa Larson through the bowels of the theater and out the rear door.

“Why don’t we go back inside and use the front entrance?” Lisa said nervously when a man in a ski mask appeared.

Annabelle didn’t respond but pulled a blackjack from her pocket and mustered all her strength. The club slammed into Lisa Larson’s skull with a resounding thud. Had it been a baseball, she would have hit a home run. Lisa Larson’s legs folded beneath her and she fell to the ground like an unstrung marionette.

Jimmy stared in disbelief as the woman’s head bounced twice on the pavement. “What in the hell did you do that for?” A puddle of fluid formed at his feet.

“I was afraid she was going to scream.”

Jimmy kneeled beside the body and felt for a pulse. “Jesus Christ! You bashed in her skull. She’s dead!”

“I was only thinking of you, Jimmy. I didn’t want you to get caught.”

She dropped the weapon into a plastic bag as Jimmy headed over to his car to collect an old tarp. Carefully wrapping Lisa Larson in it, he placed her body inside the trunk.

“What do we do now?” Annabelle asked. She peeled off the gloves and slipped them in with the weapon and shoved the bag in her pocket.

“Quit talking so much and let me think,” he snapped.

Annabelle was shocked at his response. Jimmy was clearly panicked. If he was going to treat her this way, he could fend for himself. She was beginning to think maybe he couldn’t be trusted.

“There’s a processing plant at the end of terminal. The security guard there owes me a favor. Stay here until I get back.”

She watched silently as he drove over to a cyclone fence, opened the gate, and went through.

Jimmy’s nerves were shot to hell. What in God’s name had just happened? Things weren’t supposed to go down this way. He’d talked about scaring the woman, not committing murder. The bitter taste of acid filled his mouth and his stomach was starting to burn. Damn it! He’d kill for a swig of Mylanta right about now.

He parked near the back of the plant and killed the headlights.

“Hey, pops,” he said, poking the security guard who sat fast asleep on the job.

The old man woke with a start and began pecking at the night like a hungry chicken. “Who is it? I don’t have any money. What do you want?”

Jimmy glanced around cautiously. “You know that favor you owe me? Well, it’s time. I’m calling it in. How about you take a cigarette break and I’ll keep watch for a while.”

“Sure thing, Jimmy. Whatever you say.” The old man’s bones creaked as he stood up, stretched, and hobbled off in the dark.

Jimmy took a deep breath and opened the trunk of his car. The remaining heat fled Lisa Larson’s body as he pulled out the tarp and dragged her down the steps of the processing plant.

Jimmy had worked as a butcher before. He’d carved plenty of animals and knew what had to be done. After cutting her up, he threw the body parts into the chopper where a lethal line of sharp blades went to work. From there, the flesh was blended in a large vat and fed through a funnel and came out the other end looking like a meat smoothie.

He swore he’d never eat another hot dog again. But there had been no choice. It had to be done to protect Annabelle. His loins tingled at the thought of how she would repay him later tonight. Annabelle owed him big time. She’d be at his beck and call. Yet when he drove back behind the theater, she wasn’t there. He scoured the area, but she was nowhere in sight.

There had been no time to think about things before. Now that he did, the images that came at him were fast and furious. Annabelle had been wearing the jacket he’d loaned her the other night. His gloves had been shoved in the pockets. As for the blackjack, she must have found it hidden in his desk drawer. Jesus Christ. Had she been setting him up all along?

Jimmy rushed back to his store. Annabelle wasn’t there either. But a note had been slipped under the door. He unfolded the scrap of paper with trembling fingers.

Sorry, Jimmy. It was fun while it lasted. But all good things must come to an end. Think of me whenever you go to the food trucks. It’s time that I begin my second act.

The Gauntlet by Jonathan Stone

Edgewood Avenue

In my junior year of college, I lived off campus with several roommates — Larry from Rye, New York, Roger from Brentwood, California, Bruce from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and Lionel from Lincoln, Nebraska. We rented the basement apartment and the open-plan, skylighted second floor of a blue clapboard house whose first-floor apartment was occupied by Keneisha — a sometime prostitute and drug dealer — and her six-year-old son Marcus. (We bought dime bags from her — probably the only genuine convenience of off-campus living, as it turned out.) Keneisha wore a gold necklace with a gold phallus pendant, which nestled in permanent thrall deep in her cleavage. I got the sense that Keneisha at some point had put out the word to leave the Yale boys alone, but her word apparently went only so far. Because while we were never burglarized or attacked inside the house, on the walk from the house to campus we were, it seemed, fair game. Hell, we were more than fair game. We were sport.

This was Edgewood Avenue. Edgewood — accent on the second syllable for the proper local pronunciation. We’d say it like that in jest to each other — out of the locals’ earshot, of course. My Smith girlfriend was in France for the semester. So this was my semester abroad. My own cross-cultural experience.

Edgewood. Six blocks of anarchy in the shadow of Yale. At that time, New Haven, 1976, a lot of the blocks around Yale were seas of, and lessons in, anarchy. Say “New Haven, 1976” to Old Blues of a certain vintage and we shake our heads in mournful recognition. Just the name of the city coupled to the year calls up tensions, hostility, urban America at its worst.

Our Edgewood education started even before the semester officially began. The windshield of my Volvo was smashed on our first night in the house, when I left the car out after moving my stuff in.

Oh, you have to garage it.

Our shiny bikes — stolen from right off the front porch.

Oh, you have to bring them inside with you.

Our dreams of a little freedom from the constraints of Yale. A little liberation for five boys who had followed all the rules all their lives to get here. Looking for a little independence, a little adventure, a modest little divergence from the constrictions of academia and convention and expectation.

Oh, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

As fate would have it, for the galloping hormones of a nineteen-year-old Yalie, my basement bedroom was contiguous to where Keneisha “partied” with her gentleman callers, and the thumping of music — KC and the Sunshine Band, “That’s the Way (I Like It)”; Ohio Players, “Love Rollercoaster”; Vicki Sue Robinson, “Turn the Beat Around”; Donna Summer, “Love to Love You Baby” — drowned out whatever other audible accompaniment there might be, though the music did not purge it from my imagination.

My bedroom had a sliding door onto a small junk-cluttered backyard. Metal bars held the slider closed, but I would hear the door jiggle occasionally while I was working at my desk. That’s when I would grab the five iron I slept with under my bed.

A five iron. The comfort of its familiar shaft in my hand. That should tell you a lot about Yalies on Edgewood: a five iron for protection.

I did not stroll down Edgewood with a five iron, though. I walked only in daylight. One walk to campus in the morning, one walk back before dark. There was no consistent theme or look to those six blocks — a tiny Ukrainian bakery, a locksmith, a few empty storefronts, some residential “projects” whose crazy pink, purple, and tangerine pastel doors were comically bright spots — some developer’s idea for a little accent of cheerfulness — that only highlighted the slapdash, thoughtless, halfhearted attempt to dress up the drab brown brick around them. And even those doors were quickly faded and besieged by graffiti.

In New Haven in 1976, it was essentially running a gauntlet, walking those six blocks. Day was risky. Night was lawless.

I walked focused, intent, staying alert, watching around me every step, probably not a good target. If I was going to a party on campus, I’d stay in a friend’s room. I lived my life around timing the Edgewood walk right.

Lionel Patton did not. Lionel ambled, strolled, looked around casually, curiously, taking it all in.

Lionel, from Lincoln, Nebraska. Big-boned, loose-limbed, ambling down the sidewalk oblivious — a creamy-skinned, bright-eyed, howdy-there-how-ya-doin’ friendly Midwesterner. Black-framed glasses on an open face. Big, outgoing, cheerful. Carrying his French horn everywhere. It was practically attached to him, and he was here because of it. Recruited by all the Ivies for his French horn prowess.

The world had always been his oyster, you could tell. His family were rich corn and soybean farmers. Farmers with thousands of acres. The kind of farmers who took frequent trips to Europe and the Far East. Life an ongoing project in growth and learning.

He was the kind of Yalie who comes east to school and maybe finds a pretty wife (prime breeding stock), and after graduation heads to Europe for more cultural education, maybe finds a European wife instead, returns to the Midwest eventually to take over the family holdings and tend them for the next generation. Lionel let drop once that his family had loaned some money to a bright young fellow, name of Warren Buffett, and had gotten some stock shares in return. In short, the kind of Yalie you can’t make up. And I’m sure that when he told his folks, I’m going to live off campus, Ma and Pa, they had a certain bon-vivant vision of it that did not match the reality of New Haven, 1976.

Lionel was, in short, a target.

Might as well have painted a bull’s-eye on his French horn case.

Although they never took the French horn. They didn’t want a French horn. They didn’t even know what a French horn was. They wanted his wallet. They wanted his new sneakers. They wanted his suede jacket.

It was a certain group of kids. I’d seen them, and managed to avoid them. They swarmed out of nowhere on their bikes, in their hooded sweatshirts, yelling and laughing and posturing for each other, intimidating girls and the elderly, and then disappearing into the housing projects or alleys just as quickly. Street guerrillas. A gang in its formative stage. A project for some enterprising Yale anthropology major with a suicide wish.

Lionel, unlike the rest of us, insisted on reporting it every time. That was the proper thing to do. So the weary cops would come out, hold their pads in front of them, and dutifully take down the information, looking at Lionel like he was from another planet, which he clearly was.

Beyond the insult of being intimidated by skinny, arrogant, undernourished fifteen-year-olds, privileged Yalies could of course absorb the forfeiture of a few material goods. Part of me thinks those little Edgewood hoodlums knew that, and it peeved them to see Lionel with new sneakers and a nice new jacket a few days later, and that’s why they upped their game.

And in a way, this is where this story really begins:

With Lionel coming in our front door one evening, left ear and head bleeding profusely, shirt collar and right sleeve ripped, scratches on his face and hands.

As soon as he was safely inside, he slid down the wall in the front hall in relief, and we gathered around him as soon as we saw what had happened.

“Jesus, Lionel, what the hell!”

“Whoa.”

“Oh man.”

Roger hustled to the kitchen and brought back a couple of wet towels to start cleaning up the wounds, to get the blood off and see what we were dealing with.

Lionel said nothing in response. Smiled up at us dumbly, vacantly, probably a little in shock. Then shook his head in annoyance, embarrassed in that Midwestern way to be drawing so much attention.

The cops got there pretty quickly.

Lionel did his best to describe the kids. “Three of them, officer. About fifteen years old.” He described their sweatshirts. Gray. Baggy jeans. He didn’t remember much more. “A lot was happening, officer.”

I noticed that Lionel didn’t mention their race. But for cops in that neighborhood at that time, you didn’t have to. In that Edgewood section of New Haven, 1976, you’d only mention if they weren’t black.

“How’d you get the head wound?”

“The one karate-kicked me.”

Wow.

“Kung fu kind of thing. I was not expecting it,” said Lionel, formally.

Jesus. Trying it out on you. Like kicking an inflatable clown.

The problem was, we learned, the cops couldn’t do much. “Look, if you’re right and they’re fifteen, then it’s juvenile. They’re not yet sixteen. Thing is, they didn’t pull any weapons, they know what they’re doin’, these kids, they’ve already learned what they can and can’t get away with as far as the law. That’s why he karate-kicked you. That’s why they punched you. ’Cause that’s not gonna land ’em in anything too serious.”

Officer Perez, I remember. Stocky, bushy mustache, alert black eyes. A messenger, a repository of street knowledge. Translating it all for us.

“See, their parents don’t trust us, think we’re the enemy, so they instruct the kids to lie to us, and they defend the kids, accuse us of exaggerating the events and even fabricating the charges, and as juveniles they and their parents retain a lot of rights, so a lot of times we can’t even get to square one with kids like this. We’ll go look for them, Mr. Patton, and we might even find them, and might even get them into the juvie system, with your testimony and if you’re willing to skip a lot of class time, but I do want to point out to you that when they learn it was you who brought charges, and they go back home as they eventually will, they’re only gonna have it in for you more.”

I find this line of logic infuriating, of course, but Lionel has a completely different reaction, which trumps my fury.

Lionel adjusts his glasses. “Well, look, they’re not bad kids, really.”

What?! Kids who just karate-kicked you in the head? Punched you in the face?

Perez stops writing for a moment. Clearly distracted by what he’s just heard.

“I mean, look what they’re faced with. The deck is stacked against them,” says Lionel, who looks at the cops, at us, and then reveals the rest: “I asked them why they were doing this.”

The second cop — Landry, tall, freckled — is genuinely confused. He blinks twice, trying to understand. “Wait. You asked them... why?”

“Yes. Why are you doing this, fellas? I wanted them to explain themselves.”

Fellas. I could hear him saying it. Good God.

“I mean, you know, beyond the sneakers and the jacket,” says Lionel. “In a larger sense. Why?”

Wanting three fifteen-year-old thugs, apparently, to stop and examine their own motives. To look into their own souls.

Perez taps his pencil against his chin a couple of times. “During the attack, you asked them why?”

I see the cops exchange glances with one another, and then Perez glances at me.

“My questions only seemed to make them angrier,” Lionel acknowledges.

Making philosophical inquiries of fifteen-year thugs on Edgewood Avenue.

“Why did they do this, officer? Why do they behave this way?”

Now turning the philosophical inquiry to the New Haven Police Department.

Perez looks at me. Asks wordlessly: What planet is your roommate from?

Nebraska, officer. The planet of Nebraska.

“I’d like to help those kids somehow, officer.” Blood still running down the side of his head. It hasn’t fully coagulated yet. “I’d like to change things for them somehow. Clearly they need help.”

Perez has had as much as he can handle. He takes a breath. “I think the most helpful thing you can do, Lionel, is stay out of their way. Be alert. Avoid them. I think that might be the most helpful behavior right now.”

When I close the door behind the cops as they leave, Perez turns back toward me and says, somewhere between annoyance and alarm, “Tell your pal to cut out the humanitarian relief effort.” He peers at me warningly. “Gonna get his ass killed.”

Lionel Patton. With black-framed glasses off, pretty good looking. Naturally modest in a way that hard-nosed Eastern Yale women liked. Khakis, white shirt. High school class president and valedictorian and captain of his high school tennis team. (I kid you not.) Skating lessons. Flying lessons. Chess lessons. Golf lessons. Lessons in everything. The well-bred, high-achieving Midwesterner — very much a Yale tradition. (A tradition that helps keeps Yale’s coffers full and flowing, generation after generation.)

Here at Yale, a music major. (Because he could. Because he was going back to inherit and oversee four thousand highly profitable acres of soybeans and corn, so he could major in any damn thing he wanted.)

And by the peculiar chain of circumstance that produced Lionel Patton, by the coincidences and alignments of his particular existence, he had never known anything but brightness, cheerfulness, good fortune. Not a moment of doubt or deprivation. By the concatenations of luck and privilege and advantage and happenstance, he had never confronted the forces of darkness. He went whistling down Edgewood Avenue. Literally. (I knew it because I had heard him — whistling the same French horn part in Mahler or Mozart that I heard him practicing at the house.) And when the forces of darkness swarmed around him, it was unexpected, inexplicable, and he was ill-prepared. It was an ambush, in a way, that went beyond the literal. Beyond Edgewood.

Once the cops were gone and Lionel was cleaned up, and he sat down with us (the bong on the wooden shipping-crate-cum-coffee-table between us — Lionel did not typically partake, though the rest of us felt that his encounter certainly merited a fresh bowlful), I felt the occasion called for a little bit of philosophical discussion from safely within our walls.

“Lionel, you can’t discuss motives and ethics and right and wrong with fifteen-year-old black kids on Edgewood Avenue.”

“I just want to understand why they would do this...”

“Why? ’Cause they wanted your sneakers,” said Roger.

“Why? ’Cause this is what they know. ’Cause this is what they see. ’Cause this is their world,” Larry said.

“Then we have to try to change it. We have to try to make things better for them.” He looked at us with bright resolution. “I’m gonna reach out to them.”

Oh Jesus.

“No you’re not.”

“Listen,” I said. “Marcus, Keneisha’s little boy? Six years old. He tried to hold me up with a sharpened pencil.”

“Serious?”

“That’s the world he knows. That’s what he aspires to. And you and I are not changing that in a semester.”

“But what if they see that I care about them? I’ll bring them a dozen donuts. We’ll get started on better footing, they’ll see I’m a nice guy.”

Donuts!

“Lionel, they know you’re a nice guy. That’s why they’re doing this to you.”

You have success, happiness, joy, privilege written so loudly on you, Lionel, they can’t take it. They can’t take you ambling up Edgewood, whistling. Whistling classical music at that.

The quest for understanding. The clearly marked trail of knowledge. It had been a way of life for Lionel, a unifying theme. But here, there was no understanding. That was darkness’s creed, the wild steed it rode, its trusty companion, part and parcel of its power. No understanding. Blunt irrationality. Comprehensive incomprehension.

Officer Perez was right about everything, I was sure. But he turned out to be wrong about the use of weapons.

The next time it happened to Lionel, there was a knife.

The knife changed everything.

But not in the way you think.

Not in the way any of us thought.

Same three kids. And feeling thrilled, victorious, adrenalized, invincible from the success of their previous encounter, no surprise, they were not done with Lionel.

Same cops — Landry and Perez. I’m glad they happened to be on duty that day, to come around to our Edgewood house again, to be there to experience the same disbelief that we all did. The same intersection of Yale and Edgewood. The same sobering result. The same rethinking of all our assumptions.

Because with the unfolding of that knife, the flash of its blade, something else unfolded and flashed in Lionel Patton. Some new edge was suddenly exposed.

The appearance of that knife, gleaming there in the afternoon sunlight — an expression of Edgewood itself?... of accelerating events?... bringing them literally and figuratively to a point? — the appearance of the knife changed the calculus. As it always does.

Held there, inches from his chest, arrogantly — creating pure power, pure powerlessness. Generating in Lionel a sudden complex math of threat, insult, terror, instinct, rage, memory, confusion, the formula’s coefficients arranging and rearranging themselves in milliseconds.

If you’ve ever had a knife held at you (and at that moment in time, New Haven, 1976, many of us had), then you know how it alters the moment.

And oh, it altered the moment for Lionel.

His French horn — his trusty French horn — unexpectedly, from stage right — swung into action. Twenty mighty, unexpected, highly effective pounds of defense — and offense, as it turned out.

He knew his weapon intimately, after all. He’d swung it onto buses, under desks, into car backseats, balanced it on bicycles, lugged it since the age of seven. He had total control of it. He could wield it. Hefting twenty pounds for over twelve years, your carrying arm and hand get strong. Unexpectedly, acutely strong. Uncannily precise. He was at one with it.

He punched the French horn case at the knife and knocked it out of the first kid’s fist with such force, and to such stunned surprise, that the knife tumbled to the sidewalk.

Clearly, three armed teenage thugs on Edgewood Avenue were not expecting the attack of a French horn.

And when the kid bent down to retrieve it, the instrument swung with equal force and violence at his head. He was literally dumbstruck.

And when the other two kids came at Lionel in blind, unthinking retaliation, he karate-kicked the first one — perfectly, effectively, in the gut — then swung the horn at the second, its twenty pounds catching him solidly in the lower back, sending him to the sidewalk doubled up in pain.

Like I said: French horn, All-Ivy.

Amid all the music and golf and chess and skating lessons back in Lincoln, Nebraska, Lionel had years of martial arts lessons as well, and had been sternly and repeatedly instructed never to deploy what he had learned; it was an art and a discipline, and such stern instruction it must have been, because his teachers could not imagine a circumstance in which Lionel Patton, bright-eyed, cheerful, upbeat, friendly Nebraska farmer’s son, would ever have to actually use it. But fortunately, into that meticulously developed cerebral cortex of his at that moment came a neural signal that perhaps this was the appropriate deployment of those long-honed martial skills. And maybe in the end that was fortuitous. Because it added the element of surprise — for Lionel himself, and therefore for his adversaries.

Like I said: lessons in everything.

A symphony of violence, with a French horn solo. You can hear the solo, can’t you? Heraldic sounding — but only in our imaginations. In reality, a solo of thumps and thuds.

And then, a final flourish, and a predictable one, as it turned out.

As the kids backed away, stunned — holding their heads, doubled up in pain, unsure what to do next — Lionel grabbed the knife off the sidewalk.

Did he hold it to their chests? To their throats? Turn the tables on them? Show them how it feels to have a knife held inches from you?

No, Lionel reverted suddenly to Lionel.

“I told them they should not be carrying something like this around and threatening people. I told them it’s wrong. And I confiscated it.”

Confiscated it. Good Christ.

And knife in one hand and French horn in the other, Lionel continued up Edgewood Avenue.

Those are the details of that afternoon, related first to us, and shortly thereafter to the astonished cops. With one notable difference.

“So what happened to the knife?” Perez asked him.

“I don’t know,” said Lionel.

That straightforward, honest Midwestern face. That do-gooder Boy Scout demeanor. “Things were happening so fast, I didn’t notice.”

“Too bad. It would make prosecuting this a slam dunk.”

“My testimony’s not enough?”

Perez looked at that big, honest face. A Midwestern French horn — playing Yalie. Assaulted by three black kids. And there were no actual stab wounds, anyway, thank God, so the knife was not crucial evidence anyway.

“Yeah, your testimony is probably enough.”

And it was.

Two of the three kids went straight into juvie. Their first port of call, their entry at last, into the criminal justice system. Where they no doubt turned from rambunctious, chaotic, delinquent fifteen-year-olds to angry, hate-filled, avenging adults. Where, as the overwhelming odds and statistics predict, they learned more violence. Committed more crimes. Graduated from menace to full-fledged criminals. Edgewood started them on their path. But Lionel Patton hurried them along it. Pushed them into the system, started their formal criminal educations.

The French horn case was permanently dented. The horn inside survived unscathed. I went to see Lionel performing Mahler’s Fifth.

It’s got a French horn solo.

The solo he’d been practicing incessantly. The solo he’d been whistling.

Lionel performed it with passion. With beauty.

He had walked to the performance. Walked Edgewood.

So I knew he had the knife onstage with him in magnificent Woolsey Hall.

A few weeks later, in the process of buying another dime bag, Roger and I were surprised to be invited into Keneisha’s apartment.

It was quiet, warm, a refuge from Edgewood Avenue, and a heartbreaking display of middle-class aspiration. Comfy couch. Big TV. Big stereo speakers. A song of consumerism. Not knowing anything else. Not aspiring to anything else. A living room filled with objects. Filled with want.

And amid our straightforward transaction, out of nowhere, with no preamble, but clearly because she wanted us to know, she confirmed my original deduction: “I tol’ them to leave you alls alone, you know. And they did too, mostly. But they couldn’t leave that one boy, they said. They tol’ me they just couldn’t leave that one boy. And I can’t control them.” She shrugged. “Ain’t nobody can.”

There is no understanding.

Knife in one hand. French horn in the other.

That is how he continued to walk Edgewood for the rest of the semester.

Not quite the same happy, cheerful Midwesterner. Never again.

Now taking that knife, a little bit of the streets of Edgewood, with him everywhere he walked. Just like his French horn.

Don’t mess with Lionel.