The First Casualty

2

Mary Jurgens was pretty sure the old man on the bed had passed.

She had no idea how old he was, but he had been living in the two-room suite long before she had come to work at the hotel just after she and Joshua, her husband, had left Alabama four years ago. Moses, Joshua’s brother, had made good on his promise of good, regular wages and union hours at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for Joshua. Better yet, the job was going to keep Joshua out of the draft.

But what was she going to do about the dead man on the bed?

Years in the South had taught her not to be in the neighborhood when something like this happened to a white man. The white folks claimed it was different in New York, but Mary had observed they liked to talk about equality but put it into practice rarely. In fact, she and Josh felt more isolated in their Harlem apartment than they ever had as sharecroppers in a shack at the edge of a cotton field. At least in Alabama, white or black, there was a commonality of cause: Get the crop in or everybody was looking at a pretty lean winter.

Still, she didn’t feel she could just slip out into the hall and leave the doctor there. He’d been as much a friend to her as any white person, asking in that funny accent of his how her family was doing, leaving her a crisp ten-dollar bill every Christmas and birthday.

An hour later, she wished she had left.

Four men in three-piece suits and hats had appeared within minutes of her reporting to the front desk what she had found. She was pretty sure they weren’t New York City policeman. One spoke with a southern accent. They had taken her into a vacant room and were asking her questions that made her uneasy, as if they thought she might have something to do with the doctor’s death.

How well did Mary know him?

Not any more than she had learned cleaning his suite daily and exchanging the occasional “good morning” when he was in it.

Who were his friends?

She had no idea. She had never seen anyone else in the suite nor had she seen evidence of visitors.

Had he ever been on the telephone when she was in the suite?

She couldn’t remember. But if she had, she certainly didn’t pay any mind to what was said.

Things like that.

To Mary, the questions implied these men thought she had been something other than a maid working for the Hotel New Yorker. Plus, it was starting to get dark outside. She couldn’t afford a watch, but she knew it was past six o’clock, when Joshua would expect supper to be on the table.

The thought of food made her wonder. Had the red stamps, the ones for January’s meat ration, come in yet? What about the ones for sugar and butter? She couldn’t remember. One thing was certain: Whether they had or not, it would never occur to Joshua to take them to the grocery store down the street and buy something he could prepare himself. She wished they had decided to spend the money on a telephone.

For one of the few times since leaving Alabama, she thought of it nostalgically. There wasn’t rationing when you raised your own chickens, maybe a hog or two. Butter was a luxury anyway, and lard did just as good most of the time. And nobody she knew had a telephone, so it wasn’t any use to even think about one there.

“Mrs. Jurgens, I asked you a question.”

One of the men in suits brought her back to the hotel room.

“Yes, sir?”

“I asked you if the deceased ever left papers out.”

“Papers?”

The man made no effort to hide the annoyance in his tone. “You know, papers.”

“He read lots of papers: The Times, Evening Sun, Herald Tribune…”

“No, no. I mean things he had written. Did he ever leave something like that lying around?”

“Not that I know of.”

“But, if he had, you would have seen them, right?”

“I suppose. I try and tidy up as well as clean. I know he asked me several times if I’d seen anyone in his rooms while he was gone, asked me to call the police if I did.”

For some reason, the man asking the question didn’t seem in the least surprised by the dead man’s fears his suite might be entered in his absence. “You’ll be here tomorrow?”

She bobbed her head, yes, sir. “Ever’ day ’cept Sunday. Used to get Monday off instead, but I been here long enough now I gets to choose my day off.”

She was thankful she was free to go until she thought maybe she wasn’t as free as she had thought. There was a white man in a three-piece suit on the Harlem Line, something she had never seen north of 120th Street.

Later that night, after she and Joshua had turned off the lights in their third-floor walk-up, something made her go to the window and peek between the blinds. There, just across 141st Street, a Ford was parked, a 1942 model, she guessed, made before the production of civilian automobiles had been halted for the duration. Inside, she could see the glow of a cigarette. Car like that, new as cars were going to get for sometime, people didn’t just park at the sidewalk. A fact she pondered as she went back to bed.