Don't Say a Word

Conrad looked at the clock again: 9:34. Mrs. Fefferman would be getting restless. He ran his hand up into his hair. “What, uh … what was she arrested for?”

  Sachs let out a loud laugh—half triumph, half relief. “Boy, you really don’t read the papers, do you? The Burrows case. Elizabeth Burrows? She killed a man, Nathan. She cut his throat. Christ Almighty, she cut the poor bastard to pieces.”

  Agatha

  Conrad was a small man, short and thin with sloping shoulders. He had a round, melancholy face: deep, soft brown eyes and thick lips that turned down, making him look thoughtful and grave. A few strands of sandy hair still lay limply across the top of his head, but most of it was gone. He was forty years old.

  He felt those years, all of them. Except for his hour-long walk to work in the morning, he never exercised. He often felt tired; creaky in the joints. After a lifetime of eating without gaining weight, he was now developing a paunch around the middle. And sometimes—well, a lot of times—well, just about every day—he found himself dozing in his recliner after eating the yogurt and nuts his wife packed him for lunch.

  On a day like this, it could be especially tough. Starting with Timothy, he had been in his recliner almost steadily from eight that morning until seven-thirty that night. He had listened to patients all day long with few breaks in between. It had taken its toll.

  He’d downed a couple of aspirin after lunch. That had stopped the flashing in his eye, cleared up his headache. But his right leg: it had really begun to ache on him. He was limping as he left his building for the night.

  He moved to the edge of the sidewalk and stood waiting for a cab. The traffic breezed swiftly down Central Park West. In the brisk October night, the green lights gleamed brightly all the way up the broad avenue. Across the way, in the park, the branches of the sycamores rattled their dying leaves against the sky. Some leaves fell onto the far sidewalk or tumbled and danced in the air above the park wall. Conrad paused and watched them.

  The leg really did hurt, he thought. The knee throbbed. He had to remember to stand up more during the day, walk around, stretch it out.

  It was Agatha’s fault, he thought, that knee. She was the one who had crippled him like this.

  But the thought made him smile as he watched the leaves falling.

  He had met Agatha when he was seventeen. That was the first time they had taken his mother away. Mom had been coming out of the Grand Union with a bag full of groceries. She had tripped on something—or maybe just collapsed. In either case, she had fallen to the sidewalk just beyond the parking lot. She had dropped the grocery bag. Red tomatoes, yellow lemons, and silver tuna-fish cans had all gone rolling this way and that, flashing in the sun. Another housewife and the cashier from the hardware store next door had run over to help. But Mom just lay there, just lay there trembling. Her mouth open, drool dribbling out the side of it, she stared into the brown paper sack on the sidewalk before her. She stared at the carton of eggs in there. She watched the broken shells dangling out the top. She saw the yolk spreading on the brown paper beneath them. And she began to scream.

  The housewife tried to calm her. The cashier tried to hold her steady. But Mom thrashed and screamed and moaned fiercely. When she looked into that bag, she had seen a carton full of eyeballs. She had seen those eyeballs split open right in front of her. Blood had poured out of them—viscous, scarlet—followed by black spiders clambering up out of the shattered pupils. Mom screamed and screamed. She wasn’t used to seeing that kind of thing. As hard as she’d been drinking for the last twelve years, this was the first time she’d ever had the d.t.’s.

  Seventeen-year-old Nathan was the one who got to the hospital first. He had just come back from school when he got the call, hadn’t even had time to take off his coat. He hopped back into the ancient Chevy he’d worked all summer for and sped off to the hospital. It was he who sat by his mother’s bed and listened to her sob in terror and humiliation. He sat and stroked the hair back from her gray face—that thin, once stately face with its thin, patrician nose. She was so proud of her nose. It was not a Jewish nose. “My father never let us live among Jews,” she used to say grandly. And she’d lift her chin in the air, showing off her swan’s neck, her slim figure.

  Nathan held her hand. Her skin was so pale that he could see the dark needle of the IV inside her vein. She cried and cried as Nathan sat there.

  Good Ol’ Reliable Nathan. That’s what his dad liked to call him. His dad—who didn’t show up for another hour. Nathan suspected Dad was purposely taking his time leaving his office. He was a busy man, a dentist, but still … Dad liked for Nathan to clean things up a bit before he himself arrived on the scene. Then, when Dad got there, he could chuckle weakly and slap Nathan’s shoulder. “See there, it’s not so bad,” he would say. His pale, round face would open on a grin, his small eyes would blink behind his big glasses. “No big deal, right?”

  And Nathan would swallow hard and say, “Right, Dad.” And Dad would chuckle some more and then turn away miserably.

  After an hour, Dad finally did get there. Nathan left him at Mom’s bedside and went to the hospital cafeteria for a cup of coffee. He sat at a corner table, brooding over the stained-brown cup from the vending machine. After about ten minutes, he lifted his head. There was Agatha.

  She was a candy striper, a hospital volunteer. And as if her pink-and-white-striped outfit were not bad enough, she also had one of the most cheerful faces Nathan had ever seen. Round cheeks that reddened as she smiled, and bright blue eyes that grew brighter. Her auburn hair was tied up under her pink-and-white cap, but Nathan could see how thick it was. He could imagine it spilling down around her face, offset by her complexion, which was as pink and white as her outfit.

  Nathan was a shy kid, some might even have said sullen. He had only one friend—Kit, his faithful companion since elementary school. He’d never had a girlfriend at all. He’d had a few dates in a row with Helen Stern, but she’d broken it off with him when he’d gotten “too serious.” In general, he considered the opposite sex rather foolish, and more than a little untrustworthy.

  He’d never seen Agatha before, and he didn’t know what she was staring at. He was made uncomfortable by that steady smile, the bright gaze of those eyes. He almost glanced over his shoulder to make sure she wasn’t looking at someone else.

  But Agatha—that was the name on the black nameplate above her chest, the one he could barely peek at for fear his eyes would become glued to the full swell of her pink-and-white blouse—Agatha spoke to him directly.

  “You know, you can’t save her,” she said. “No one expects you to be able to save her.”

  The words struck so close to home he felt compelled to deny them. He stared down at his coffee cup and muttered glumly, “I’m not trying to save anyone.”

  To his surprise, she reached out and touched his wrist. Her fingers were cool and soft. “You’re trying to save everyone,” she said gently. “I’ve seen you. I go to North too. I’m in eleventh. I heard you arguing with Mr. Gillian about the kid with the hall pass last semester.”

  “Ah, Gillian’s a jerk,” Nathan muttered. “He practically made that kid cry.”

  “You could’ve been suspended for what you called him. And I saw you out in the yard—just before spring break—I saw you stand between Hank Piasceki and that little guy. Hank Piasceki is twice your size. And he can box too.”

  Nathan couldn’t help it—he smiled. That actually had been kind of brave of him. But he tried to wave it off. “I wasn’t gonna fight him. Piasceki likes me. I helped him pass Bio last year.”

  Agatha smiled at him, the light in her blue eyes dancing. “See what I mean?” she said.

  Nathan looked up at her. She laughed. He laughed too.

  Conrad grew up in Great Neck out on Long Island, about fifteen miles from Manhattan. It was a fresh and pretty suburb of wide green lawns and large white houses. Most of the people who lived there were well-to-do and Jewish, as he was. They were moderate
ly liberal in their politics and largely conservative in their behavior. As for free love, drugs, antiwar protests—though it was the heart of the sixties, these were only beginning to leak through the first cracks in the community. They attracted a few rebels, problem kids, outcasts, that was all.

  They did not attract Nathan. He was having none of it. He was going to be a doctor—a surgeon. He had no time for fads and nonsense like that. The first time he saw a senior wearing bell-bottom jeans, he sneered and snorted and raised his eyes to heaven—and then hurried home to crack open those books. Most of his classmates felt pretty much the same way—for the time being at least.

  But Agatha was different. She wasn’t Jewish, for one thing. And she wasn’t all that well-to-do for another. Her father worked for the town highway department and her family lived on Steamboat Road. Steamboat was a long, curving stretch of run-down clapboards, small groceries, auto parts stores, bars, and the like. The town’s maids lived here, many of them, and its service station workers, its gardeners: its blacks. And at the far end, near Kings Point Park, there was a small collection of Polish and Irish families. That’s where Aggie’s green, two-story clapboard stood.

  Now Nathan, in those days, paid little attention to differences in culture. All kids went to school and were pretty much the same to him. It wasn’t as if he really liked any of them anyway. So it was actually several months before it occurred to him that, Agatha’s last name being O’Hara and all, she was probably of Irish ancestry. The thought flitted through his head and was forgotten.

  But what he did notice was that life at the O’Haras’ on Steamboat Road was not the same as life with the Conrads on Wooley’s Lane. Aggie’s older sister, Ellen, for instance, had actually dropped out of high school. Just dropped the hell out just like that and was living away from home and working as a beautician up on Middle Neck Road. And then Mr. O’Hara, a bulky, silver-haired rough guy, could sometimes be heard to remark after a beer or two that he thought Mr. President Lyndon Johnson was no better than a two-bit, son-of-a-bitch asshole—and that John F. Kennedy, rest his soul, hadn’t been very much better! Whereupon Mrs. O’Hara might shout—really shout from the kitchen—“Stop talking filth in front of the children.” And her husband might yell back, “Ah, who asked ya?” and storm out of the house, slamming the screen door behind him.

  Nathan’s head reeled. God knew his mother drank enough. But no one in his family ever yelled. Or dropped out. Or voted Republican. What kind of a place was this anyway?

  And then there was Agatha herself. When she wasn’t wearing her candy stripes, it turned out, she not only wore bell-bottoms, but tie-dyed T-shirts too. And suede vests that left her midriff bare. And sometimes no bra though her breasts were large and round and heavy and he could see her naked nipples, for Christ’s sweet sake, pressing through the fabric of her blouse.

  She smoked cigarettes—at sixteen, right in front of her parents. And alone with him in the tiny apartment she had above the family garage, she offered him his first taste of marijuana—which Nathan sternly declined.

  But he was not so prim when, the very first time he kissed her good-night, she guided his hand up inside her shirt. Or when, only two months after they’d started dating, she suggested they make love.

  They were both virgins. But Aggie had plenty of experience and an older sister to guide her. That first afternoon, up in the garage apartment, she was calm—serene—as she undressed in front of him. Nathan sat on the edge of an old armchair, his hands clasped between his legs. He shuddered as he watched her.

  Agatha was a short girl, shorter even than he was. But she was sturdy and round, with big hips and those breasts, those wonderful breasts, with salmon areolas the size of silver dollars. To this day, Conrad could remember the liquid softness of her flesh and the smell of Ammens baby powder and her small, welcoming kisses. He could remember that first afternoon in detail—and all the afternoons of their first spring together. The little room with the low ceiling. The old convertible sofa that opened into a bed. The cries she stifled with the back of her hand. The song of sparrows gathered on the rusting swingset in the little yard out back.

  Mostly, though, he remembered that convertible sofa. That goddamned convertible sofa.

  It was a Castro; older, it seemed, than time. The mattress was dirty. It was thin. It rippled and sagged. Nathan could feel the springs and metal support bars of the sofa’s mechanism right through it. He could especially feel the metal support bar that jutted up directly into the center of the thing. No matter where Agatha lay—no matter how he shifted her and which way he turned her—the minute he climbed on top of her, that bar was jutting up right into his knees.

  It seemed a small price to pay, though. For the texture of those lips, for the taste of those breasts. For the long shock of warmth inside the rippling cleft between her legs. Sometimes his knee was so sore, he could barely make it up the apartment’s short flight of stairs. But he’d make it, all right. And moments later, he would be on top of her, in her, thrusting as she cried, and oblivious to the fact that somehow, no matter how he’d arranged it, he had slipped back into the one position the old mattress seemed to allow, with his knee rubbing smack up against that goddamned bar.

  Twenty-three years later, when a taxi pulled up to the curb in front of him, Dr. Nathan Conrad had to lower himself to the seat backwards and pull his right leg in after him.

  The cab slipped out into the rapid flow of traffic. The driver, a grim-lipped, dark-skinned man named Farouk, glanced up at him in the rearview mirror.

  “Thirty-sixth Street,” Conrad said. “Between Park and Madison.”

  The cab eased up to speed. Conrad sat back wearily, gazed out the window. He watched the park wall speeding by, and the spidery branches of the trees above it. Absently, he rubbed at the throbbing knee with his hand. He tried to stretch it, moving his foot back and forth a little in what space there was. He really had to remember to walk around more. It only got bad like this when he was in the chair all day.

  He just hadn’t been able to stay away from Agatha, that was the thing. He hadn’t been able to change beds. Or find another room. Or do anything that took away from the time he spent making love to her.

  Finally, just before his eighteenth birthday, the knee had swollen up on him. By the time he overcame his embarrassment and went to the doctor, it was the size of a small pumpkin and still growing. Poor old Dr. Liebenthal. He’d been taking care of Nathan forever—gave him his first tine test, stitched up his forehead when he fell off the jungle gym, all of that. He’d looked at that knee and rubbed his chin and shook his head in deep puzzlement.

  “It looks like a whopping bad case of bursitis to me,” he had said. “It’s the kind of thing you usually see with older folks, though. People who work on their knees, like washerwomen or repairmen—you know? And you say you’ve got no idea what could’ve brought it on.”

  And Nathan had spread his hands and shook his head. “It’s a poser, Doc.”

  Later he and Aggie had sat on the floor and laughed until their bellies hurt. And then they’d climbed back onto the bed and gone at each other again.

  The taxi reached the end of the park. Conrad watched as the marble Columbia—a heroic woman standing in the prow of a boat—saluted his passage by the Maine Memorial. Then the cab was sliding down the dark entrance of Broadway, moving over that short shabby stretch before the burst of neon and Times Square.

  At Fifty-third Street, the cab stopped at a light. Conrad, his chin propped on his hand, found himself gazing absently out the window at a trio of streetwalkers. There was one black one, two whites. All were dressed in leather skirts that ended high on the thigh. All wore tight, glittery T-shirts, too light, it seemed to Conrad, for the cool fall weather.

  Farouk looked up into the mirror hopefully.

  “Hey, mister,” he said. “You wanna get laid?”

  Conrad kept gazing out at the hookers. He thought of Agatha. He smiled.

  “Yeah, I wo
uld,” he said quietly. “Take me home.”

  Jessie

  The cab dropped him off on East Thirty-sixth Street. An elegant block, between Park and Madison. The north side was taken up by the J. P. Morgan library. It was a low, graceful temple of a place, with a Palladian porch flanked by lionesses. Its floodlights, just on, brought its marble facade into relief against the dusk. Friezes and statuary gleamed through the spreading sycamores that lined the sidewalk.

  Conrad went into the building just across the way: a rippling prewar brick tower half a block long and fourteen stories high. The ancient doorman struggled off his bench as Conrad pushed through the glass doors.

  “Evening, Doc.”

  Conrad smiled and limped past. Across the lobby, he saw one of the elevator doors was open.

  “Going up,” he called out. And he hopped toward it, his briefcase rocking at his side.

  The doors began to slide shut but a hand reached out and stopped them. Conrad stepped through. The doors closed.

  He was standing in the elevator with a young man. Mid-twenties maybe. Tall, well-built, handsome. He had a smooth, angular face and a slick crest of black hair. A shy smile but quick, ferocious eyes; an expensive serge suit, navy with gray pinstripes: Conrad pegged him as a Wall Street turk.

  When Conrad pushed the button for the fifth floor, the young man turned to him. “Well, I guess we’re neighbors then,” he said. He had an even voice, self-assured. It had a faint Mid-western twang.

  Conrad smiled politely. The young man stuck out his hand. “Billy Price. I just moved in. Five-H at the far end of the hall.”

  Conrad shook hands with the kid. “Nathan Conrad,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah. The doctor, the headshrinker. I guess I better watch what I say around you, huh?”

  Conrad managed to laugh as if he’d never heard that one before. Then they reached five and the doors opened. They came out and went their separate ways, Price to the left, Nathan to the right.