I think I was awake when she spoke those words, but I can’t swear to that. I might have been asleep through all of it, might have dreamed everything, including her entrance into my room, her weight on the edge of the bed, the mattress sagging, the springs creaking. In the darkness, I felt a hand on my brow, such a tender touch. She whispered, “Sleep, you lovely child,” and either I continued sleeping or fell asleep once more.
When I woke with dawn light at my window, I felt that the dream hadn’t been just a fantasy, that it had shown me true things, murders that already had been committed somewhere, at some point in the past. Lying there as the morning brightened, I wondered and doubted and then banished doubt only to embrace it again. But for all of my wondering, I couldn’t answer even one of the many questions with which the experience had left me.
At last, getting out of bed, for a moment I smelled a certain sweetness of roses, identical to Miss Pearl’s perfume, which she had been wearing when she sat beside me on the stoop. But after three breaths, that, too, faded beyond detection, as though I must have imagined it.
7
The next bit of my story is part hearsay, but I’m sure this is how it went down. My mother would fib to help a child hold on to his innocence, as you’ll see, but I never knew her to tell a serious lie.
I was just over a week away from my ninth birthday, and Grandma Anita had ten months to live. I’d begun piano lessons thanks to Miss Pearl, and my father had been back with us about six months when he messed up big-time. We were still in that fourth-floor walk-up, and he wasn’t bringing home much money because he was getting part of his salary in stock.
Mrs. Lorenzo lived on the second floor, but Mr. Lorenzo hadn’t yet died, and Mrs. Lorenzo was thin and “as pretty as Anna Maria Alberghetti.” Anna Maria was a greatly gifted singer and a misused actress in films and eventually a Broadway star, petite and very beautiful. She won a Tony for Carnival! and played Maria in West Side Story. Although Anna Maria wasn’t as well known as other performers of Italian descent, anytime my mother meant to convey how lovely some Italian woman was, she compared her to Anna Maria Alberghetti. If she thought a man with Italian looks was especially attractive, she always said he was as handsome as Marcello Mastroianni. Anna Maria, yes, but I never understood the Mastroianni business. Anyway, Mr. Lorenzo didn’t want his wife to work, wanted her to raise children, but it turned out he couldn’t father any. So Mrs. Lorenzo ran a sort of unlicensed day care out of their apartment, looking after three little kids at a time, and on occasion me, too, as I’ve said.
When it happened, noonish on the first Tuesday in June, I was at Saint Scholastica, on the last day of the school year, being educated by nuns but dreaming of becoming a piano man.
My mom had left for Woolworth’s lunch counter at 10:30. When she got there, she discovered there had been a small kitchen fire during the breakfast shift. They were shutting down for two days, until repairs could be completed. She came home four hours early.
Because my father worked late nights at the restaurant, he slept from 3:00 A.M. until 11:00. She expected to find him still asleep or at breakfast. But he had showered and gone. She made the bed, and as she was changing from her waitress uniform, she heard Miss Delvane rehearsing her rodeo act up in Apartment 5-B.
Miss Delvane—blond, attractive, a free spirit—had lived above us for three years. She earned a living as a freelance writer of magazine articles and was working on a novel. Sometimes, from her apartment would arise a rhythmic knocking, maybe a little bit like horses’ hooves, gradually escalating in a crescendo, as well as voices muffled and wordless but urgent. On previous occasions, when I wondered about it, my mom said Miss Delvane was practicing her rodeo act. According to my mother, Miss Delvane’s first novel was going to be set in the rodeo, and because she planned eventually to ride in the rodeo as research, she kept a mechanical horse in her apartment to practice. I was five years old when Miss Delvane moved in and only eight when my mom came home from Woolworth’s early, and although I had doubts that a rodeo act was the full explanation, I accepted the basic premise. When I asked about the low groans, my mom always said it was a recording of a bull, because you had to lasso bulls or even wrestle them if you were in a rodeo, and Miss Delvane played the record to put her in the mood when she rode her mechanical horse. I had more questions than a quiz show, but I never asked Miss Delvane one of them, because Mom said the poor woman was embarrassed about how long it was taking her to get her rodeo act together.