The City When It Rains

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

THE BLOOD BANK operated out of a cramped storefront off the Bowery on East 3rd Street. Several men were scattered among the short, jagged rows of metal chairs that crisscrossed the front of the building. Some of them munched the plain sugar cookies distributed after the blood had been taken. Others were still waiting, their fingers holding idly to small cards with hand-lettered red numbers.

“Thirty-seven,” someone called from the back of the room.

Corman turned toward the voice and saw a tall man in a slightly soiled lab coat. He wore large, black-rimmed plastic glasses and cradled a clipboard in the crook of his left elbow.

“Thirty-seven,” he repeated. His eyes darted left and right, surveying the crowd. “Thirty-seven.”

A very thin old man eased himself to his feet, then walked shakily past Corman, nudging him slightly with his shoulder as he made his way down the aisle toward the tall beige curtain that divided the room. He had an oddly crumpled look, as if his body had been snatched up, crushed in a large hand then tossed back to earth.

“Your name Sanderson?” the man in the lab coat asked him.

The old man grunted, shifted on his feet, then reached listlessly for the clipboard.

The man in the lab coat drew it away from him. “Just a second, please,” he said sharply, then adjusted his glasses. “Have you been hospitalized recently, Mr. Sanderson?”

“No.”

“How old are you?”

Sanderson shrugged. “Somewhere ’round sixty, I guess.”

The man in the lab coat looked doubtful, but wrote it down on the form anyway. “Are you on any form of medication?”

Sanderson grinned. “Just my old standby,” he said.

The other man scribbled something on the form.

Sanderson waved his hand impatiently. “And it’s ‘no’ to all the rest of them questions.”

The man in the coat nodded, made a few checks on the paper, then escorted Sanderson behind the curtain.

Corman walked to the front row, shoved his camera bag beneath one of the chairs and sat down. For a moment, he stared about, trying to get a fix on the room by concentrating on the details: a Coca-Cola wall calendar, its pages a month behind, the soda machine next to it, a small table filled with uneven stacks of medical pamphlets, the poster of an earnest physician urging regular checkups on the listless men who muttered obliviously a few feet away. One by one, Corman envisioned the individual frames, trying to find a way to get beyond the obvious social ironies and clichés.

“Excuse me.”

Corman glanced around and faced the man in the lab coat.

“May I help you?” the man asked.

Corman reached into his pocket, brought out the small yellow receipt and handed it to him.

The man glanced at it peremptorily and gave it back. “What about it?”

Corman pocketed the receipt. “Do you recognize the name?”

“Yes.”

“She died last week,” Corman said.

“Was she a relative of yours?” the man asked.

“No,” Corman said. “I’m a photographer. I’m working on a story about her.”

The man thought for a moment, his eyes squeezing together slightly. “I do remember her,” he said finally. “Probably because she was white, a woman. We don’t get that down here.”

“Did you ever talk to her?”

The man nodded. “We try to be cordial to people,” he said. “We usually talk to them a little during the procedure. Like a hairdresser would, at about that level. We don’t give counseling or anything like that. That’s not our function.”

Corman took out his notebook. “Do you remember anything she said?”

The man shrugged. “Not really.”

“Do you remember when you saw her the last time?”

“Whenever that receipt was dated,” the man said. “Not since then.”

“How often did you see her?”

“No more than once a month,” the man said firmly. “We can’t accept blood more often than that. It’s against the law.”

Corman remembered the outstretched arm. “She had a lot of needle marks.”

“Maybe she was a junkie.”

Corman shook his head.

The man didn’t argue the point. “She could have been selling blood all over the place. We’re not the only one, and some of them don’t keep very good track of who’s been in and out.”

“Do you remember anything in particular about her?”

“She had a doll with her,” the man told him, as if suddenly recalling her with more detail. “She treated it like a real baby.”

“Was she alone?”

“Yes, always,” the man said.

“Did you notice if she talked to any of the other people?”

“As far as I can remember, she always sat alone.” He nodded toward the left corner of the room. “Over there, in that chair by the window. That’s where she sat until we called her number.”

Corman glanced at the chair. It was made of gray metal and one of the hinged supports was bent, throwing it off balance. “And you never saw her with anybody?”

“No.”

Corman felt the little notebook go slack in his hand, like a small bird that had just died. “Do you know anything at all about her?”

“Only what she wrote on the form.”

The bird’s eyes fluttered. “What form?”

“The one they have to fill out.”

“Do you still have it? Would you mind showing it to me?”

“No,” the man said. “Wait here.” He turned and disappeared behind the curtain.

Corman waited, his hand pumping rhythmically at the notebook as his eyes circled the room once again, looking for shots, noting a few more details, an old shoe lodged between two chairs, a plastic spoon on the windowsill, the fact that someone had started to paint the radiator blue, then abandoned the project halfway through. More cliché images. As pictures, they would fit perfectly in a light blue, tear-shaped frame. The chair the woman had always sat in would do the same. He took a few pictures of it anyway, hoping that after he’d developed them, Julian would not be able to see their grim melodrama.

“Here it is,” the man said as he came out from behind the curtain a few minutes later. “It’s just a simple form, not much on it.”

Corman took the paper from the man’s hand and stared at it intently. The woman had answered its few questions in a tiny, cramped handwriting that used up only a small amount of the space provided. The longer words were broken up into their syllables as Corman remembered being taught to do in elementary school. The spelling was crudely phonetic.

“Strange, I know,” the man said, “but she still fit the test for informed consent.”

Corman looked at him. “Which is?”

“That she was correctly oriented as to space and time.” The man answered matter-of-factly, as if he were reading it from a script.

“And that’s all she needed to know?” Corman asked.

“It was all we needed to know about her. All the law requires.”

Corman glanced back down at the form. She’d signed her own name and listed the name and address of someone to contact in the event of an emergency: “Burneece Taylur Ate Nyn Grow-ve” He studied the writing for a moment, then glanced back up at the man. “Bernice Taylor? Eighty-nine Grove Street?”

The man gave a quick look at the form. “Probably,” he said.

Corman copied the name and address down in his notebook, then scanned the form a final time, his mind concentrating on the oddly shattered words, the spelling of sounds. He remembered something one of his professors had once told him, that writing was the voice of the absent person. If that were true, then this was as close as he had gotten to Sarah Rosen’s voice. In a picture, her handwriting on this single form would have to represent its final days, cracked, disjointed, primitive, as if she had been striving for something beyond the words themselves, the meaning in pure sound.

Corman glanced at his notebook, checked the address, then walked into the building’s cramped vestibule. A line of small black buttons crawled down the wall to the left of the door, each just ahead of a name and apartment number. There was a B. Taylor listed beside the buzzer marked 3–B. Corman pushed the button, waited, then pushed again. There was no response, so he walked across the street, took out his camera and snapped a few pictures of the building.

It was a rundown brownstone, one of the few left in the West Village, but still elaborated with those soft touches the builders of the old city had insisted upon, a bit of carved stone here and there, flower boxes at each window. Corman concentrated on the large windows on the third floor and wondered if Sarah Rosen had ever sat behind them, or whether she’d simply scribbled Bernice Taylor’s name and address from a phonebook according to her own mad scheme.

He took a few additional pictures, focusing on the street, the glistening wet pavement and bare dripping trees. The rain would drench the photographs nicely, give them a mournful, watery fatalism, hinting symbolically at some kind of death by drowning or burial at sea. If the light was just right, they might even go a step further, suggest oceanic tragedies, tearful destinies, a picture worth a thousand banal words.

He took a final shot, this time of the line of shutters on the fifth floor. Then he returned the camera to the bag, tugged his hat down further over his face to protect it from the rain and headed toward the train.

At the end of the block, he noticed a small delicatessen, felt his late-morning hunger and decided to go in.

An old man rested on a metal stool behind the counter. He watched Corman listlessly and smiled only after he bought a muffin. “Nothing but rain,” he groaned.

Corman glanced out the window while he waited for his change.

Across the street, an old woman emerged from her building, tugging a small brown dog behind her. As she stepped out onto the sidewalk, the dog flinched violently, drew back and flinched again, snapping its head back and to the side.

“It’s blind,” the old man said, his eyes watching the dog. He shook his head. “It can’t see the rain, so it don’t know what’s hitting it. I told her to put it to sleep.” His lips curled down disapprovingly. “‘For Christ’s sake,’ I told her, ‘you can’t have much of a life if you don’t know what’s hitting you.’”

Corman picked up his change and walked outside. The rain was beating down heavily, tapping loudly against the store’s striped metal awning. He took out the muffin and ate it slowly, his eyes drifting back toward the brownstone. The window boxes on the third floor hung heavily in the gray air, and for an instant, Corman thought he saw something move just behind the shutters, and reached for his camera, then realized it was only the finger of a limb as it raked its bony tip across the closed white slats.

It was almost an hour before he saw someone go up the stairs of 89 Grove Street. She was a tall, slender woman with close-cropped blond hair, and she moved very quickly through the rain.

Corman headed toward her quickly, making it to the bottom of the landing just as the woman got to the top.

“Excuse me,” he said, then offered a quick, uneasy smile the woman did not return. “I was wondering if you were Bernice Taylor, by any chance.”

The woman eyed him silently, with a certain icy wariness, as if already calculating her moves if he should suddenly lunge toward her. “I’m Bernice Taylor,” she said in a voice that sounded as if it had slid off the blade of a knife.

“My name’s David Corman. I’ve been looking into someone’s life, and your name’s come up.”

She seemed to guess his business. “Candy’s not here,” she said. “She moved out a month ago.”

“I’m not looking for Candy,” Corman said. “Somebody else. Maybe you’ve heard of her. Sarah Rosen.”

Her small eyes squeezed together. “Sarah Rosen? You mean Dr. Rosen’s little girl?”

“Her father’s a doctor? Do you know his full name?”

Bernice shrugged. “I always just called him Dr. Rosen. Maybe I knew his name one time, but I can’t recall it now.” She waved her hand. “Anyway, he wasn’t a real doctor,” she added. “Just one of those teacher-type doctors.”

“A professor?”

“Yeah. College professor. Columbia,” Bernice said. “Why are you asking about Sarah?”

Corman saw no reason to blur the issue. “She’s dead,” he told her. “I was hoping I could talk to you about her.”

“When’d she die?” the woman asked.

“Last Thursday.”

Bernice’s face remained passive. “You a friend of hers?”

“I never knew her,” Corman said. “But I’m trying to find out what she was like.” He anticipated her next question. “She was selling blood at this place on the Bowery. She listed you as her next of kin.”

The woman’s eyes widened. “Me? Next of kin?” She shook her head. “I haven’t even seen Sarah since she was five years old.”

“Would you mind talking to me, Mrs. Taylor, or is it Miss or …”

“Just Bernice,” she answered dryly. “Yeah, okay. I’ll tell you what I know.” She turned, opened the door and headed up the stairs. Corman followed behind her until they reached the third-floor landing.

“I was living in this same place back then,” she said as she fumbled for her keys. “I guess that’s how Sarah had the address.” She swung the door open and walked inside.

It was a tiny studio, but everything had been arranged in a neat, orderly fashion that made it look larger than it was. Two orange overstuffed chairs rested by the front window, ashtrays balanced on the right arms. A large hoop rug stretched between them, sending out swirls of steadily lightening yellows from its dark brown center, so that from where Corman stood it looked like a huge yellow eye, its dark pupil staring sightlessly toward the faded ceiling.

She moved directly to one of the orange chairs and motioned for Corman to take the other.

“So, you knew Sarah when she was a child,” Corman began, as he leaned back into it.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“When her mother got killed, her father needed somebody,” Bernice said. “That’s when I come by.”

“Her mother was killed?”

“That’s what Dr. Rosen said. Hit by a car. Right on the street.” She reached under her chair, drew out a pack of cigarettes, and lit one.

“What year was that?” Corman asked.

“That must have been in 1973, something like that.”

“And you worked for Dr. Rosen after that?”

“That’s right.”

“For how long?”

“Couple of months,” Bernice said. “Up until November.” She inhaled deeply, then let it out in a quick angry burst. “Then he let me go.”

Corman looked up from his notebook. “Why?”

Bernice smiled bitterly. “Guess I wasn’t good enough to watch over his precious little daughter.”

“In what way not good enough?”

Bernice shifted slightly in her seat, threw one long bony leg over the other and rocked it edgily. “He had a check done on me. That’s when he found out I had a record. If he’d asked me, I’d of told him about it. I’m not ashamed of what I did. But Rosen had his own way of doing things.”

“What way was that?”

“On the sly, you might say,” Bernice said. “He never came clean on anything. You always felt like you were talking to somebody he’d sort of made up, not the man himself.” She shrugged. “Anyway, he had a check done, and I came up with a record, so that was the end of that.”

“And this was only about two months after he hired you?” Corman asked.

“Yeah, about that. Two months, I’d say. Not much longer. She was five years old, I think. Went to this private school over on the East Side. Every morning the car came for her. The car was always coming for her. Dr. Rosen wouldn’t let her out on the street. Not even for a little walk. Wherever she went, the car took her.”

“Did you talk with her very often?”

“I would have talked to her,” Bernice said. “I didn’t have nothing against her. But she never seemed that interested. One time—this was just before I was let go—Candy, that’s my little girl, she got sent home from school, so they called me to come get her, and I had to leave, so I took Sarah with me, because I knew Rosen wouldn’t want her left alone in the house. So, anyway, I took her home with me, and when I picked Candy up, we all went to the park near the school, and they played together for a while.” Her face grew more concentrated as the memory returned to her. “Sarah was real quiet. She sat real close to me. She wouldn’t do much. Candy was about her age, but tougher, the way she’s always been, and Sarah didn’t want to play with her. I guess she was afraid. Anyway, it took forever for Candy to get her in the swings. But after she got in it, she swung a little. Not too high, sort of dragging her foot.” She dropped the cigarette into the ashtray, lit another. “That’s about the only time we really had together. The very next day, that’s when Rosen found out about me, and that’s when he let me go.”

“What did he find out exactly?” Corman asked.

“What I did to Harold.”

“Harold?”

“Candy’s daddy,” Bernice said. “I shot him one night. Everything was setting him off, and I got tired of it, so when he started in on me, I shot him. The bullet went right through his arm. Didn’t even touch a bone.” She shrugged. “I just got three years, and even that was a suspended sentence, but that didn’t matter to Rosen. With him, a record was a record.”

“And that’s why he fired you?”

“That’s what he told me,” Bernice said. “He said he’d hired this guy. Told me his name. Walter Maddox. He said this Maddox guy had checked up on me, and it came out I had a record, and he didn’t want anybody like that around.” She shrugged. “He was nice about it, I guess, gave me a whole month’s pay.”

Corman nodded and wrote Maddox’s name in his notebook.

“So really, as far as Sarah was concerned, I didn’t know much about her,” Bernice added. “Didn’t have time to learn much.”

“Did you get some sense of her?”

Bernice thought a moment. “Well, there was this one thing she did that made me wonder.”

“What?”

“She bit through her lip one night,” Bernice said. “Almost all the way through it. Her bottom lip.”

“Why?”

Bernice shook her head. “She did it in her bed. Maybe while she was sleeping, I don’t know. There was blood all over the pillow, I remember that. Dr. Rosen said it had to be thrown away. He didn’t want it washed.”

“Did Sarah ever talk about it, mention a bad dream, anything?”

Again, Bernice shook her head. “She was very quiet, but very jumpy, too. The slightest little movement and she’d flinch.”

“Flinch?”

“Yeah,” Bernice said firmly. “Like everything was about to jump her somehow, fly out at her, something like that.”

“But you never knew why?”

“I always wondered, but I wasn’t there long enough to find out,” Bernice said, then shrugged. “That’s about all I know.” She glanced at her watch. “Got to change into my uniform,” she said. “I’m waitressing now.”

Corman fixed his eyes on Bernice Taylor. Backlit by the window, her face gave off an eerie sheen that reminded him vaguely of Sarah Rosen’s skin. He reached for his camera again. “Would you mind if I took a picture?” he asked.

Bernice grinned coyly. “Nobody’s asked for my picture in a long time,” she said, then stood up and posed grandly by the shutters, the cigarette still dangling from her hand.