He pushed through a squeaky front door into a vestibule still fragrant with Friday’s fish. Everything about the place was familiar; above all, the echoey clatter of his footsteps in the stairwell. Christ, how many floors were there? Barbaric to have a cripple living all the way up.
The apartment was small, crowded, close. Femininity breathed from every surface down to the cheap wainscoting. Perfume, women’s hair, fingernails, their monthly time—all of it enclosed him in a gamy, intimate cloud that made his head swim. It was almost a surprise to find Miss Feeney, with her arched eyebrows and man’s handshake, standing in this female miasma. She seemed to have nothing to do with it.
She led him past the gloomy kitchen to the front room, where every pretty thing her family had managed to hold on to through the Depression was on display. There wasn’t much. A stained glass aureole of Saint Patrick banishing snakes, a feathered fan pinned to the wall beside a calendar of the Dionne quintuplets. Several empty rectangles where pictures had been removed from hooks. He nearly asked why, but the answer arrived in that feminine cloud: there was no man here. Dead or gone away. Likely the latter, judging by those empty patches on the walls. Everyone liked to remember the dead.
Shouts of children from the street mingled with the ticking of an old clock, gold angels at its base, the time off by twenty minutes. The treasure of the house: the thing that everyone would lunge for in a fire. Like his mother’s bell. “Check for me my bell,” she would say, and Dexter would run to fetch it, holding the clapper. She’d brought it with her from Poland, and its silver stream of sound evoked her descriptions of girlhood: churches, snowdrifts, skating on ice-covered ponds in the dark. Warm bread pulled from howling red ovens. He was not accustomed to thinking of his mother. The familiar apartment, the sound of his footsteps in the stairwell, had done it. Or perhaps the presence of an invalid.
“Where is your sister?” he asked.
She led him into a room barely large enough to hold two narrow beds. The shade was drawn on the single window. A beautiful girl lay splayed on one of the beds in what appeared to be an erotic faint, pale curls scattered in the half-light like spilled coins. The vision disconcerted Dexter. He moved closer, blinking to dispel it, and saw that her face was like that of someone very frightened or in a death throe. Her limbs jerked as he watched: a lack of control that was permanent. She wore a blue velvet dress and wool stockings and appeared to be asleep. Dexter imagined the effort that must have gone into dressing her and was relieved he’d fulfilled his promise to show.
“She looks . . . well,” he said, feeling that some remark was expected.
“Doesn’t she?” The sister gazed with such love and pride at the malformed creature before them that Dexter doubted himself for blundering into this family’s pain. But then it hadn’t been his choice. She had engineered it.
“So. What next?” he asked, eager to be moving again.
“I’ll get our coats.”
He nearly followed her from the room, so reluctant was he to be left alone with the cripple. He went to the window and lifted the shade to check on the Cadillac. Then he glanced at the bed, reassured to find the prone girl’s eyes still shut. He thought of the father, Feeney, having to look upon this daughter day after day. The agony of it. A whisper of what might have been in that beautiful hair. Was that why he’d gone—if he’d gone? Dexter liked the Irish, was drawn to them, although time and again they had proved untrustworthy. It wasn’t duplicity so much as a constitutional weakness that might have been the booze or might have been what drove them to it. You wanted a mick to help you dream up schemes, but in the end you needed a wop or a Jew or a Polack to bring them off.
Miss Feeney returned, leaned over the bed, and shimmied her sister’s crimped limbs into a smartly trimmed navy blue wool coat. Her expertise left no doubt as to how much time she’d spent caring for her. All her life, Dexter guessed.
He scooped the cripple from the bed and hefted her into his arms. Only when her smell reached him did he realize he’d been dreading it, expecting that rank odor of bodies in rooms without much air. But she smelled fresh, wonderful, even, that version of flowers that inheres in feminine creams and shampoos. She smelled like a girl who had bathed that very morning, pointing toes from the suds to shave her legs smooth. He shielded her head from the doorframe and angled her into the front room, her golden hair dousing his sleeves.
“What is her name?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, it’s Lydia. Lydia, this is Mr. Styles. He’s kindly offered to take us to the beach.”
Not exactly, Dexter thought, permitting himself a wry smile as he followed her to the front door, carrying her sister. When he looked back down at Lydia, her eyes had opened and were fixed upon his face. The engagement startled him physically, as if a pair of hands had seized him. Her eyes were luminous blue, unblinking, like the eyes of the dolls Tabby used to play with.
Descending, he watched the soiled walls, feeling with his feet for turns in the stairs. It was awkward work. “She’s so calm,” marveled the healthy sister from behind. She was carrying a folded wheelchair that looked heavier than Lydia. “She whimpers and cries when Silvio carries her.”
“I’m flattered.”
Outside, she greeted one or two children by name. He shifted the cripple in his arms and began opening the door to the backseat, but the sister said in a rush, “We’d like to ride in front, if that’s all right.”
“You’ll have more room in back.”
“I want her to see.”
“Suit yourself.” Her hurry had infected him, and he came around quickly to open the passenger door. She slipped in, and Dexter carefully placed the cripple in her arms. It was a tight fit, even in the Series 62. Only as he closed them inside did he realize how much he’d counted on retreating into the role of chauffeur rather than companion to these girls.
A good deed needs no excuse. So his pop used to reassure Dexter when he would resist, embarrassed, carrying a covered dish of leftover meatballs to the bums and hoboes who haunted the carny houses near his restaurant. Dexter muttered the phrase to himself as he lifted the heavy folded chair into his trunk. A good deed needs no excuse.
He drove away from the children and headed back toward Flatbush, enlivened by the thought that at this rate, he’d have no trouble reaching the Knickerbocker by lunchtime. He heard whispering across the seat. “Can she talk?” he asked.
“She used to. Not talk, but repeat things.”
“That’s talking, isn’t it? How much can she understand?”
“We don’t really know.”