AFTER TAKING THE picture, she ducked into an Automat—not her sort of place, but the broad front window gave her a view of the street that made her feel like she was inside a giant glass camera. Two tables to her left, a woman huffed at a cup of coffee. Lilly’s cup from the same urn had come to her watery and lukewarm, but this woman blew on hers like she’d been served directly from a steam pipe. She was small, narrow-shouldered and flat-chested—petite, if you were being polite; mousy, if you were not. She wore a pale blue blouse and her soft, dented cloche was a type that had not been stylish for half a dozen years. The woman’s eyes were fixed on a book open flat on the table. It was clothbound, something from the public library, or perhaps one of her own, its dust jacket stored reverently at home where the jostling indignities of the daily BMT commute couldn’t fray its crisp edges. She saw no rings on the fingers that encircled the cup. There were no bags from Macy’s or Gimbel’s, no sacks from the pushcarts, in the empty seat next to her. Had she taken a break from work? Was she stealing a few free moments outside some office, away from the other girls, away from the tyranny of the telephone and the pile of typing and filing mounted on one corner of her desk? And that book: Was it a romance full of white-throated maidens, torn bodices, and roguish highwaymen, all offering an escape from a world of apartments, elevators, bus rides, and outer boroughs? Or could it be a Bible? Was Lilly witnessing devotion amid the grab and gabble of the city? The woman’s posture seemed somehow to fold in on itself, as if her shoulders could bend so far forward they would almost touch, like the covers of the book in front of her. All through this examination and dissection, the woman seemed not to feel the hot greedy glare of Lilly’s eyes.
Lilly was studying the way shadows pooled in the hollows beneath her eyes when she saw a glint, a sudden flaring of light in all that shadow, that told her the woman was crying—or was about to. It had taken patience and the sustained effort of staring to realize that she had been looking at a woman who did not want to cry in a diner and who blew on her wan coffee not to cool it but in an attempt to stanch the tears that were boiling behind her eyes. Something in that moment of recognition plucked the silver filament that joined Lilly to the woman, and without warning, she raised her head from her book, her face naked and unguarded. The woman appeared startled, embarrassed, and then—what? Angry, wounded, violated? Before Lilly thought to express some kind of fellow-feeling or apology, her hand twitched and the Rolleiflex went click.
Lilly turned away, staring now only at the window. The blood thrummed in her veins, but it was not from being caught in the act of intruding on another’s privacy. It was because she knew that the shot was a good one, and she was eager to see it emerge in the darkroom. Outside was a tumult of taxicabs and pushcarts and men and women waiting for the crosstown bus, but the window also threw back her own portrait. What would someone see in her? she wondered. What would a casual observer, or a dedicated starer, glean from the exterior she offered the world?
When she turned away from the window, the woman was gone and a young man had taken her place at the table. He was slight, though perhaps it was more charitable to call him trim, or compact, and his table was empty: no cup, no food, no book, nothing. He looked as if he had fallen into some trouble. His shirt was a deep ocean blue but the tails were hanging half out, and the collar was torn like a broken wing. His necktie, a pennant of red silk shot through with bolts of silver lightning, hung askew. But what caught her attention wasn’t the quality of his clothes or the state of their disarray. It was the way he stared—yes, a fellow starer—at the chair that sat across from him. There was something tragic about him, alone and disheveled among the shiny chrome surfaces of the Automat but determined to interrogate the furniture. She aimed the Rolleiflex, clicked the shutter, but she was not done with him. Those eyes and the sense he gave of a man who had fallen, or was in the act of falling, made her think of her studio, and her portraits, and how this could give her the one good reason she needed to delay packing for a few hours more.
“IT SEEMS THERE is someone here for you.” Yeats pointed a finger and when Michael turned to look, a woman put a hand on his shoulder as if she knew him, and her lips formed some useless words.
She was older than Michael but not old. Her crimped black hair was pulled away from her face. Her eyes were huge and as dark and inky as her hair. She spoke again. She had a full mouth, high cheekbones, and a nose that she must have hated when she was a girl. Michael thought of a shark’s fin, the prow of a ship. If he were to share these thoughts with Francis—if he could ever share such thoughts again—his brother would screw up his face and say she sounded dreadful, but she wasn’t. She looked regal, possessed of a swift beauty.
Michael managed a smile and the woman sat in the chair next to his. She had given up talking and had taken to staring hard at him. He feared she might think he was a nutter—he said as much to Yeats—and he pointed to his ears and then with both hands chopped the air in front of him: broken, empty, all gone. Then he touched his mouth and made the same sweep-it-all-away gesture. She squinched her eyes (I understand, I’m sorry) and he shrugged (What can you do?). She smiled herself and then Michael did the same. Natural and spontaneous this time. The woman had a boxy camera slung around her neck and after some fussing in her handbag she came out with a fountain pen and a feathery blue airmail envelope, both of which she offered to Michael. He shook his head and rubbed both hands over his temples, and she nodded to show that she understood.
She stood and Michael felt a surge of panic. She couldn’t leave, not when they were getting on so well. But she held out a hand and it was a hand that said not Good-bye but Come with me and that’s what Michael did. He looked to Yeats’s side of the table for some guidance but the old man had disappeared. The thought suddenly struck him that she might be as ghostly as Yeats, which was why she’d been able to grasp his meanings so quickly, based only on a few choppy gestures. But her hand felt solid enough. Her fingers were long and delicate, though the nails were blunt. As short as his own, in fact. He held her hand as he rose from the table and when he was on his feet she took his arm and guided him out of the diner. It wasn’t chivalrous, but he let her push open the door, as a test. He hadn’t noticed Yeats opening doors or moving furniture, and now that he thought about it, weren’t ghosts always moving things about? The seminarians all believed that St. Columbanus was haunted by a wax-faced monsignor who had expired over a secret stash of French smut and by the spirits of novices done in by some fatal combination of sodomy, spoiled meat, and self-flagellation. Weren’t they rumored to spill books from the library shelves? Hadn’t he, late at night, heard a stifled moan drifting from the lavatory, or the stairwell, or the empty room at the end of the corridor?
SHE WAS BEING pushy, she knew that. Why, she was practically abducting this boy from the café—an illiterate deaf-mute, of all things! When she’d first seen the way he stared at that chair, so intently, she’d wondered if he wasn’t somehow addled. But his eyes had a quickness to them, and who was she to pass judgments about staring? That alone should have told her that the two would hit it off—if that’s what you could call leaving with a man, a boy, really, with whom she had never shared a word.