WHAT AM I GOING to do with you?” Lilly said aloud. “And what am I going to do with me?”
Her guest did not answer either question. He sat on the edge of the bed with that distant look in his eye. Lilly had washed his shirt in the large sink and hung it overnight by the windows. As dusty sunlight filled the studio, Lilly watched her neighbors dragging their mattresses off the fire escapes and back into their cramped, overheated apartments. The shirt, which his fit of tears had left a mess, was wrinkled but clean. Perhaps she could buy him a new suit as a going-away present—something nice, so he wouldn’t be mistaken for a vagrant.
She had stayed up late into the night, labeling and packing. Beneath the bed she had found the city guidebook given to her by the Foundation when she’d first arrived in New York. The book was thicker than a cigar box, too big to carry anywhere, and even in the studio she had only glanced at it. Josef had been right about her: without the New York List, she would have spent three months wandering the city, taking pictures, never knowing where she was and overlooking the red-letter sights pictured on the postcards. But now she thumbed through the index until she found Hospitals. There was a Hospital for the Insane on one of the city’s smaller islands, but the book said it was being “slowly evacuated.” Farther uptown was the Neurological Institute, but the brief write-up described experiments conducted on children—“scientific twins” whose development was tracked by doctors—and Lilly wanted no part of that. There was a Babies’ Hospital, a Doctors’ Hospital, a French Hospital, and a Jewish Memorial. Finally, in the four pages devoted to Bellevue Hospital, Lilly began to believe she might have found a new caretaker for her guest. The guidebook mentioned “pleasant murals,” “clean red brick,” and “a program of modernization.” It was almost enough to obscure the references to overcrowding, a sense of confinement, and patients drawn from the city’s “alcoholics, the sexually unbalanced, and the hysterical.” Her guest was none of these, but neither was he her pet, her plaything, her child, or her lover. He had to go somewhere—just as she did—but it wouldn’t be today. Today would be their last together, and they would spend it as two New Yorkers with busy New York lives.
Back in April, which now seemed eons ago, Mr. Musgrove had put Lilly in touch with curators from the Museum of Modern Art. She had met with them twice, and there had been talk at the last meeting of including her work in some future exhibition, perhaps even buying some of her street photography for the permanent collection. Despite the great heavy blind that she had tried to draw over any thoughts of life beyond tomorrow, she knew she needed to think about the future. If not for herself, then for her work. A last visit to the museum would get her away from the studio and perhaps allow her to stumble into another item on the New York List. She laid the list flat on the table, its folded lines so frayed that the paper threatened to separate. Next to the list she laid the note from the séance: George, Francis, London, the tower, Michael, no, no, nein. Wouldn’t this be a story for Josef? But she would get to tell him only if she ignored his letter and thrust aside the mystic visions of the medium.
FROM THE INSTANT Michael opened his eyes that morning he was smothered by the knowledge of his father’s death. There was no moment of half-sleepy forgetting, no zone of questioning whether he’d been dreaming. He came into the day and there it was, just where he’d left it the night before. He lay on his side probing the wound, feeling the ache of loss and knowing that the sharp pain of missing his father would get worse before it ever began to fade. He was still in shock, he knew that. The real pain was yet to come.
He had abandoned his father, left him isolated and alone. Betrayed him, even. It didn’t matter that his brothers had also left, and neither of them under pleasant circumstances either. Michael was the closest to his father and understood him better than his brothers did, and he knew that his own departure was the biggest shock of the three. Even as a boy, he knew Martin was in a fevered rush to get free of Ballyrath, and Francis had always been restless, too. Michael, by contrast, had seemed content until the blowup about Eileen. Then, at the first sign that his father had failed him, he ranted and ran off. If he was being honest with himself, he would admit that he chose the priesthood in part because he knew the anguish it would bring his father—a man who was barely Catholic. Michael sometimes wondered if his father believed in any god who hadn’t played a role in the Trojan War. To lose a son to the gold-plated promises of America or the cheap come-ons of Dublin was bad enough. But to see Michael cheerfully enlist in the ghastly corps of missionary priests was surely more than a man like Francis Dempsey Sr. could bear. But why had his father been calling out to him from the beyond? Was it to castigate him? To pull him out of the oblivion that followed Whatever Happened? To grab one last chance to say good-bye? He had wrestled with the questions all morning, but he had no answers.
At no point in his deliberations did it occur to Michael that his departure from Ballyrath was only the latest in a lifetime of abandonments, losses, and disappointments suffered by his father—not to mention the weight of the losses and hurt he had inflicted on others—and that every heart has more than its share of reasons to stop beating.