Harper glanced at the clock on the table near the window. Ten after seven. Before the point of decision arrived the phone rang, right there on the nightstand beside the bed.
Harper frowned; picked it up. ‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hi.’ A woman’s voice.
A moment as Harper put a name to it. ‘Miss Hollander.’
She laughed. ‘Jesus, no-one calls me Miss Hollander except the police and the IRS.’
Harper smiled. Sharp sense of humor.
‘You’re up,’ Cathy Hollander stated matter-of-factly.
‘I am,’ Harper replied. Remembered the way she looked, the way he’d felt the entire time he’d been with her. Strong feeling, like a dull ache after a hard smack.
‘I checked with room service that you’d called for breakfast . . . they told me you had so I figured you were up and about. How’re you feeling?’
Harper didn’t say anything for a moment, then, ‘Tired maybe . . . a little confused. This has been some twenty-four hours.’
‘I can imagine,’ Cathy replied, but Harper – knowing nothing about her – figured that she couldn’t have known a great deal about how he felt. She was being polite: uttering such words of empathy was basic human nature.
‘The room—’ Harper started.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she interjected. ‘Walt is taking care of everything.’
‘It’s in your name.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Cathy said. ‘Walt isn’t one to go writing his name down and signing things, you know what I mean?’
‘Sure I do,’ Harper said, and wondered if he actually had any real idea what she meant.
‘So what do you want to do now?’ she asked.
‘Was thinking to go to my aunt’s and get my bag, and then maybe go back to the hospital. After that . . . after that I figured I’d go home.’
‘I can come pick you up and drive you,’ she said, and there was something in her tone that told him she was ignoring his last statement.
Harper smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s okay Miss . . . it’s okay Cathy, I can handle it.’
Cathy laughed. ‘Walt says I’m to take care of you. I’ll come get you in half an hour. I’ll take you over to your aunt’s and then I’ll drop you at St Vincent’s, okay?’
Harper shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘As long as it’s no hassle for you.’
‘No hassle,’ she said. ‘See you in a half hour or so.’
She hung up before Harper had a chance to respond. He stood there with the receiver in his hand, and then he set it in its cradle and sat on the edge of the bed. He wondered what the deal was between the Hollander woman and Uncle Walt, perhaps more relevantly the deal between her and his own father.
His own father.
Harper closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths. He couldn’t stretch his mind enough to make this thing fit inside. After a short while he stopped trying. He’d learned from times past that to push at such a thing only served to slide everything else out of whack.
Cathy Hollander arrived before Harper had had a chance to collect himself together. When she knocked on the door it was a minute or so before he got to opening it.
‘You alright?’ was the first thing she asked.
‘Compared to what?’ he asked back, which perhaps wasn’t such a polite thing to say to a visitor.
Cathy nodded her head like she understood something about what he was feeling, and for the first time – there in daylight – Harper noticed that she looked rough around the edges, like she herself had endured her own hardships. Nevertheless there was something. The same something as the night before. Perhaps nothing more than his own emptiness, the absence of any anchors, but she was beautiful. There was no denying that simple, honest fact.
‘Sit down,’ he told her. ‘I have to get some shoes on.’
She took a chair, lit a cigarette, looked around for an ashtray.
Harper wanted to ask her not to smoke, but he didn’t. She looked like she needed it as much as he did. He found it difficult not to stare at her, difficult not to think of how she might look beside him – in the street, at a restaurant table, close up against him.
‘So, what are you going to do?’
Harper sat in the chair near the window. He worked his right foot into his shoe without untying the laces. ‘Do?’ he asked. ‘What d’you mean?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what I mean . . . this is awkward.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, and then she turned towards the window. ‘It’s very strange—’
‘What is?’ Harper reached for the left shoe.
‘You.’
He frowned. ‘Me?’
‘You look too much like him . . . I mean, of course he’s older, a lot older than you, but I can imagine that he looked exactly the same as you when he was your age.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Harper said. His right foot found its home inside the shoe and he looked at her.
Cathy Hollander had ground the cigarette into the ashtray. She had a Kleenex in her hand; she was holding it against her face. The movement in her chest and shoulders told Harper she was stifling tears.
He thought of the Mary McGregor easing away from the jetty and making its graceful way towards Blackwater Sound. He knew if he concentrated for a second he would recall the smell of saltwater, the earthy swell of mangrove beneath it. He wished he was there, wished he was anywhere but here. His second thought about leaving New York.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and balled the Kleenex in her fist, her knuckles whitening. The mascara around her eyes had smeared. She looked like someone had kicked her six ways to Sunday and then some.
‘I don’t have anything to tell you,’ Harper said, trying to dispel the thought of how she would feel up close against him. His voice was edged with irritation. ‘I’m thirty-six years old. My father, a man I knew nothing about, left when I was two years old. My mother died when I was seven. My aunt and uncle raised me. My uncle shot himself in the head when I was twelve. That’s my life story. I left New York when I was nineteen, and aside from one or two visits I have stayed away. Last time I lived here Ed Koch was mayor. You guys have had seven years of Giuliani and a couple of Bloomberg since. My aunt called me and told me to come back, and here I am. After thirty-four years I find out I have a father, a father I thought was dead, and I get to see him in a hospital bed because someone figured he deserved to get shot. With people like me you get what you see. It isn’t complicated, and I’m not trying to make it so. I don’t know anything about you, and I know just as little about Walt Freiberg. How you figure in this is your business and I’m not asking—’
‘Don’t you want to know?’ she asked. She sounded surprised, like Harper’s reaction was exactly the opposite of what she’d expected.
‘Know what?’ he asked. He leaned back in the chair. The window was behind him. To Cathy Hollander he was nothing more than a silhouette.
‘About your father? About how I know him? About Walt?’
Harper shook his head. ‘I figure I’ll get to know as much as I need to if I stay here—’
‘If you stay here?’
Harper leaned forward. ‘What do you want from me?’
Cathy frowned. ‘I didn’t mean to come here and upset you John—’
Harper opened his mouth to speak.
‘I can leave if you like. I can go back and tell Walt that you don’t want to be here and that you’re going to go home.’
‘You’re putting words in my mouth, Miss Hollander—’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Why the hell not? It’s your name, isn’t it?’
‘Jesus Christ! I’m sorry, I really am very fucking sorry for intruding in your life.’ She gathered her purse, her cigarettes. She stood up, straightened her skirt. ‘I’ll go,’ she said coldly. ‘I’ll go see Walt now. I’ll tell him that you’re going back to Miami—’
‘Who said I was going back to Miami?’
Cathy Hollan
der stood there for a moment. She looked like she would break down right where she was.
Harper figured he’d shaken her up enough. He felt sorry for her. Why, he couldn’t have said, but there was something about her – despite the apparently tough exterior – that aroused not only desire but sympathy. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but he knew it didn’t come out sincere. He tried again, once more with feeling. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘Sit down. Sit down for a minute. I’ve got a lot of shit going round in my head and you’re trying to fly right through it. Give me a minute or two, okay? Just gimme a minute or two to get myself together and then we’ll go get my stuff from Evelyn’s.’
Cathy sat down. She set her purse on the bed. She retrieved her cigarettes and lit another one.
‘You a religious man?’ she asked after a while. Her voice was softer, like she’d settled something within herself and it was showing on the outside.
‘You what?’
‘Religious . . . you know, like do you believe in God?’
Harper shook his head and smiled. ‘What was that Pacino movie . . . the one where he was the Devil?’
‘Devil’s Advocate?’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘What did he say about God? An absentee landlord? Something like that. No, I can’t say that I am a religious man, Miss Hollander.’
‘Do you have to call me that?’
‘Just for a while,’ Harper replied, believing that maintaining some semblance of distance would serve to quieten the sense of attraction he felt towards her. ‘Until I know how you figure in my father’s life, and how you connect to Walt Freiberg, and whether or not you and I are going to be anything close to friends, I’m going to call you, Miss Hollander. Until you’re something more than an acquaintance.’
‘Whatever you say, Mr Harper.’
‘So why the religious question?’
She shook her head. ‘I pray sometimes,’ she said quietly.
‘You what?’
‘I pray sometimes.’
‘What the fuck for?’ Harper looked around the room for his jacket.
‘Whatever I feel I would like to have happen, you know?’
‘Why don’t you just go get it instead of praying for it?’
‘Because sometimes you want things that aren’t so easy to just go get.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as your father getting better, something like that.’
‘Well, that’s understandable, Miss Hollander.’
‘Why do you say that?’
Harper shrugged. He located his jacket on the chair behind the door. ‘Because you’re his friend I s’pose, and when your friends get shot it seems common sense that you’d want them to get better, right?’
‘I don’t want him to get better just because of me,’ she said.
Harper looked across at her. There was that expression again, the one that begged sympathy.
‘I want him to get better so you can find out what kind of a man your father is.’
Harper sat staring at her for more than a minute. She didn’t look away. Neither did he. It was then that he wondered if he should stay.
They shared no more than a dozen words on the way to Evelyn’s. She’d come in the car that Walt had driven the night before. She knew her way around New York, knew the back streets that took them from Hudson and West Broadway to Carmine.
When they pulled over in front of the walk-up she turned and asked him a question. Right out of left field it came, like a curve ball from a greased glove.
‘You wrote a book, right?’ she asked, and the tone in her voice made it feel like an accusation.
Harper didn’t reply.
‘Something about fingerprints.’
‘I did.’
‘Takes some kind of person to put that many words together and have them make sense.’
He laughed suddenly, abruptly. Why it was so funny he didn’t know, but it was.
‘What’s funny?’
He shook his head. ‘Hell of a way to describe a book.’
‘Was it really about fingerprints?’
He smiled. ‘The title was an analogy.’
‘You can still buy it?’
‘I s’pose so,’ Harper replied. He didn’t know. For months after its publication he’d searched through the book lists, even gone to libraries to see whether people were checking it out. After a while it hadn’t seemed so important anymore, so he’d stopped. When the royalty checks dried up to nothing he’d pretended to himself it didn’t matter. Nothing, in all honesty, could have been further from the truth. His predominant thought, right there a couple of inches back of his forehead, had been the wish to feel that rush again, the sense of personal achievement that came with seeing his own name on a book cover right there in Walden’s or some such store.
‘I’m going to get one,’ Cathy Hollander said. ‘I’m going to read it and tell you what I think, okay?’
‘Sure,’ Harper replied, and felt a sense of interest he hadn’t experienced for as long as he could recall.
‘You go in and get your bag,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait here.’
‘I might be a little while.’
‘I’m not doing anything else.’
Harper climbed out of the car. He hesitated on the sidewalk for a moment and looked back at her. The fact she’d chosen to wait for him gave him a distinct sense of reassurance.
‘Not a good idea,’ Evelyn said.
‘Like not telling me my father was alive for the past God knows how many years?’ he retorted. ‘Like that was a good idea.’
‘Had my reasons, John Harper.’
He stood there staring at her, stood there in the kitchen doorway with his bag in his hand. He felt like cussing, shouting at her, but he gritted his teeth and kept his tongue in his head.
‘I had my reasons and, right or wrong, they were reasons,’ she went on. ‘I never did anything in my life that didn’t have some kind of reason behind it, and even now, even with this thing happening, I’ve not changed my mind.’
‘I’m not arguing with you, Ev,’ he said. He tried to make his voice gentle.
‘Who’s arguing,’ she came back. ‘You want an argument I’ll give you a run for your money.’
‘Jesus, Ev, this is crazy talk. What the hell has happened to you?’
She frowned, looked askance at him. She raised one eyebrow and peered at him with eyes like small river-washed stones. ‘Happened to me? Happened to me? You want to know what happened to me? I’ll tell you what happened to me, John Harper. I lost my sister, your mother, and out of the goodness of my heart I took you in despite what my own husband wanted, and then he died and I kept right on going even though I knew you didn’t possess a respectful or grateful bone in your body, and then as soon as you got it in your mind that there was something better out there for you . . . well, as soon as you figured you were old enough, you took off out of here. How long ago was that? Sixteen, seventeen years ago, and in all those years I saw you what, three or four times? You called maybe twice?’
‘A little more than twice—’
She raised her hand defensively. ‘I don’t want to hear explanations. Don’t want to hear anything, John Harper. You’re a grown man now, and I have to take some degree of responsibility for the way you turned out. The fact that you’re an ungrateful, self-centered—’ Evelyn took a step forward and sat down awkwardly at the kitchen table. ‘You’re here. You’re here now, and that’s all that matters. Your father got himself shot because he’s a fool more than likely, and I can’t say that I feel a great deal of sympathy for what’s happened. Goes around comes around, you know?’
Harper shook his head. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘He treated your mother like she didn’t matter, John. He got her pregnant, and then as soon as you were born he disappeared.’ She laughed, a bitter and caustic sound. ‘Like father like son, right? He took off the moment there was anything even remotely resembling responsibility showing its face. He ran away just like
you did, and left everyone behind holding the baby.’
‘I didn’t leave any baby behind, Ev—’
‘It’s an expression!’ she snapped. ‘You should know that, what with your writing books and being all self-important and having no goddamned time for the people who raised you. I did everything I could for you, and then you left me here on my own and never had the decency to even mail me a copy of your stupid goddamned book. For Christ’s sake I had to go into town and buy one for myself. A boy I raised as my own son and he never even sent me a copy of the book he wrote.’
She looked up at him. There was a threat of tears in her eyes. ‘I read your book, John. I read your book and I recognized things that were said in this house, things I said to you, things you said back. I was in there, right? I saw myself in there and you made me out to be some wicked stepmother . . . a hard and bitter person who never had a good word for anyone.’
Harper felt his blood rushing, his pulse quickening. ‘You read whatever you wanted to read, Evelyn, plain and simple. You want to talk about not having a good word for anyone then I suggest you take a good, hard look at yourself. You called me back here. I came. Seems to me that there’s one helluva lot of questions that have not been answered, and I figure you owe me some answers—’
She shook her head. She had a way of doing it that made it clear nothing was going to get through. ‘Questions? Answers? The past is the past. Let it go, John. What you did and didn’t mean is all water under the bridge now. I read the book, and I have to tell you it made me mad. But that was a long time ago, and time has a way of drawing everything up inside itself and making you feel it wasn’t so bad. I figured I deserved at least one good word, you know? Just one good word amongst all the blackness you painted around me. I’m not a crazy person, whatever you might think.’
‘I don’t think you’re crazy, Ev,’ Harper started. He felt like someone had taken his mind and heart and smashed them together. Somewhere inside the wreckage he was peering out and trying to remember where he was and what his life meant. There were no clues. It was all too much, too much by far.