That whole day was perfect; and it is the nature of the nine-year-old mind to believe that each extreme experience signifies a lasting change in the quality of life henceforth. A bad day raises the expectation of a long chain of grim days through dismal decades, and a day of joy inspires an almost giddy certainty that the years thereafter will be marked by endless blessings. In fact, time teaches us that the musical score of life oscillates between that of Psycho and that of The Sound of Music, with by far the greatest number of our days lived to the strains of an innocuous and modestly budgeted picture, sometimes a romance, sometimes a light comedy, sometimes a little art film of puzzling purpose and elusive meaning. Yet I’ve known adults who live forever in that odd conviction of nine-year-olds. Because I am an optimist and always have been, the expectation of continued joy comes more easily to me than pessimism, which was especially true during that period of my childhood.
When we came home on the evening of Grandma Anita’s birthday celebration, I gave little or no thought to the woman in Apartment 6-C. Such a day of unalloyed delight must mean that my world had begun to rotate around a warmer sun than before, that the mystery woman and the evil she represented were surely now on a different world from mine, in some far arm of the galaxy, and our orbits would never again intersect. I slept deeply and without dreaming.
On Monday morning, Labor Day, I woke and yawned and stretched and sat up in bed—and saw a Polaroid photo propped against the lamp on my nightstand. It was a picture of me sleeping.
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Sitting there in bed, this is how I interpreted the meaning of the Polaroid: I can get at you anytime I want, snoop. I can put a shiv through your heart while you’re sleeping, boy, and you’ll be dead before you can wake up and see me.
That wasn’t the worst that she promised. As the glossy photo rattled softly in my trembling hand, I remembered what she had said when she paid a visit to me in this very room, shortly after I had toured 6-C.
You don’t want to be talking about me to anyone, not to anyone. You never saw me. We didn’t have this little chat. You get my point, snoop? She had threatened to use the knife on my mother. If you love your mama, then you think about what I said.
Instead of running to my mother and spilling the whole story, I sat on the edge of my bed and took the La Florentine candy tin from my nightstand. I opened the lid and found the fabric eye staring up at me.
When you keep a secret from those closest to you, even with the best of motives, there is a danger that you will create a smaller life within your main life. The first secret will spin off other secrets that also must be kept, complicated webs of evasion that grow into elaborate architectures of repressed truths and subterfuge, until you discover that you must live two narratives at once. Because deception requires both bold lies and lies of omission, it stains the soul, muddies the conscience, blurs the vision, and puts you at risk of headlong descent into greater darkness.
As a boy, I could not have put any of that into words, but I sensed it all and, even if I sensed it vaguely, was distressed by every step I took further into secrecy. If I showed the Polaroid to my mother, I would have to tell her about the woman in 6-C. Mom would want to know why I’d been so bold and rude as to venture uninvited into the apartment of a stranger. I doubted that I could convince her—or anyone—that previously I had seen the mystery woman in a dream, strangled and dead; therefore, I would be suspected of compounding my error with an outrageous lie. I would raise in her mind the prospect that I might be more like my father than she could bear.
And so I put the Polaroid snapshot in the candy tin with the fabric eye and other items, and I told myself that if I stayed well away from the sixth floor and from its temporary tenant, there would be no more threats. First, however, I turned the hateful eye upside down, so that it was looking at the bottom of the tin instead of at me.
Mom had been up long before me. She’d showered, dressed, and set the dinette table. No sooner had I put away the tin box of treasures—and curses—than she rapped on my door. “Rise and shine. Breakfast in five, sleepyhead.”
“Okay. I’m awake. Be right there.”
In a solemn mood, not the usual chatterbox, I went to the table in pajamas and slippers. I got through breakfast without arousing her suspicion, largely by pretending to be only half awake, still worn around the edges from all the activity of Grandma Anita’s birthday.
I was lucky. Because Sunday had been so busy, my mother hadn’t read that newspaper, which must have weighed four pounds. She gave her attention to it as she ate eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes. I borrowed the funnies, which gave me an excuse to keep my head down.
Slinky’s didn’t feature live music on Mondays, except on certain holidays that ensured a good crowd. Like Labor Day. My mother and Virgil Tibbins, the club’s other contracted singer, were to perform that evening. She was the star of the early show, six o’clock until nine, and there was a rehearsal, which meant she would be leaving the apartment by three o’clock.
After I showered and dressed, I hugged Mom and said, “Knock ’em dead tonight.”
“I’ll be happy just to knock ’em speechless, so there won’t be any heckling.”
Shocked, I said, “Do they heckle you at Slinky’s?”
“Wherever there’s enough liquor for enough time, everyone gets heckled, sweetie. But whatever there is tonight, it’ll be saved for poor Virgil, since he’s the second show.”
I reminded her that although the community center was sponsoring a couple of holiday events, the Abigail Louise Thomas Room remained open for me to practice the piano.