After dinner, when the dishes were done, we played 500 rummy at the kitchen table. Mrs. Lorenzo wanted to turn on the radio and find some good music, but I pretended that, being an obsessive musician, I couldn’t concentrate on cards with music playing. What actually concerned me was that music might mask the sound of Eve Adams coming back with bad intentions.
I went to bed at 9:30, like I was supposed to, though I couldn’t sleep. Mrs. Lorenzo was watching TV in the living room, but the sound was low. It wasn’t the TV that kept me awake; it was the witch from 6-C, if she was a witch. I got to thinking that maybe I should hope she was just a witch; there were worse things, after all.
At 10:20, I got out of bed and went into the living room to see if Mrs. Lorenzo was all right. During less than an hour of insomnia, I’d thought of several ways Eve Adams might have killed her suddenly, quietly, with that switchblade. I found Mrs. Lorenzo lying on the sofa. She wasn’t watching TV, but she wasn’t dead, either. Sound asleep, she snored softly.
I went back to bed and assured myself that I was a big baby. Whoever the mystery woman might be, she wasn’t a witch any more than she was a vampire or a space alien hatched out of a giant seed pod. She was up to no good in 6-C, and she didn’t want any interference. A nine-year-old kid was easy to intimidate. A shy tailor living in the shadow of some tragedy or other was easy to intimidate. All that she wanted was for us to fear her and stay away from her, and in a couple of months she would be gone.
Nevertheless, at 11:00, I crept along the hallway to the living room again, to see if Mrs. Lorenzo was still sleeping or maybe, this time, slashed and dead. She was neither. Sitting on the sofa, bent forward with her face in her hands, ghostlike in the pale flickery light of the TV, she wept quietly but with such grief that her body shook. Nothing on television had made her cry. She didn’t need a sad movie or the horror of the news to bring her to tears.
No matter how crazy the occupant of 6-C might prove to be, I was embarrassed to have all but forgotten how recently Donata Lorenzo’s world had turned upside down. Although the dream of Fiona Cassidy strangled with a necktie had disconcerted me when later I saw her alive on the stairs, I was nonetheless responsible for whatever woe I brought down on myself; I was reckless when I followed her and inexcusably bold when I entered her apartment and prowled its rooms uninvited. Mrs. Lorenzo, on the other hand, had done nothing to deserve her widowhood; she’d been an innocent whom Fate had struck with great cruelty.
Before she might look up and discover me watching her from the threshold of the hallway, I returned quietly to my room. My shame dampened my fear, and though I doubted that I would sleep that night, I slept.
28
The next morning, because it was Grandma Anita’s birthday, she and Grandpa Teddy picked up Mom and me in their Cadillac Club Coupe, and we went to 10:00 Mass, and after that we stopped for brunch in a big hotel where I went around and around through the revolving doors three times and would have completed a fourth revolution if Mom hadn’t given me the Look, which always brought me immediately to my senses.
I had never been to a brunch before, and this was an all-you-can-eat buffet, which amazed me. I was also astonished by the fresh flowers on every table and the ice sculpture of a swan and the white uniforms and tall white chef’s hats worn by the men who carved the roast beef and the turkey.
The posh surroundings and the spectacle seemed to sharpen my appetite. After finishing my first plate, when I wanted to go back for a second, Mom warned me to take only what I was certain I could finish. “All you can eat doesn’t mean waste as much as you want.”
When I came back with a full plate, they looked dubious. But I finished every bit of it.
Grandpa Teddy said, “Anita, I suspect this grandson of ours is from another planet. He’s really as big as a horse with a crocodile’s mouth, but he’s able to hypnotize us into seeing him as a young boy who might be blown away in a strong wind.”
Later we went to a movie starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. It was pretty funny, though not as funny as the cartoon we saw first.