“The fruit plucked from the branch,” Yeats said. “The Edenic overtones. I thought you would appreciate the reference.”
“Even if you’re right about this,” Michael said, “you can’t stay. That is out of—”
“I’ll excuse myself, though I don’t imagine it will be a lengthy absence.”
Lilly had been sorting through a cabinet where she stored plates of film and the flashbulbs for the mirrored eye that perched above the camera. Now she was at Michael’s side. She led him by the arm across the room, away from the door. “If you wouldn’t mind,” she said. “Could you come over here?”
Michael craned his head back toward Yeats. “What is she saying?”
“Words of love.” Yeats took another bite from the apple.
Michael looked from Yeats to the woman’s face. In the time they had spent together, he had believed there was some connection between them. He was able to seize on her meaning, and it seemed that she could read him, could know him, without need for words. Now he wondered if all of this had been a deception, merely the tools of her trade. Not that he didn’t want to—to—know her. He had wanted this moment—well, perhaps not this exact moment, but the shedding of his virginity, the touch of a woman. It had boiled in his blood for years. He had imagined—he had hoped, dreamed, prayed even—that it would be Eileen. When he thought of her now, her image came in flashes. Her face flushed from running, the wind-flattened grass all around her. Eileen kneeling at the rail to receive Communion, her eyes shut and her tongue out, while he, the altar boy, held the brass patent beneath her chin. Eileen, dressed all in black, her face black-veiled. But when had that happened? He knew the other moments and what surrounded them, but Eileen all in black? Again he wondered if this was a memory or a premonition. Or was it a dreamy reminder that things between them were over, were dead, could never be?
And if all of that was over and done, then why not this? Why not with this woman? Must he be a monk to punish himself? Hadn’t he already tried that?
The bed against the far wall was small but neatly made. Michael took a deep breath, let out a long sigh.
He was an odd boy, that was for certain. One minute he was animated and elastic, all smiles and raised eyebrows taking the place of words. She would even have called him quick-witted. He seemed to notice things that others ignored or looked straight through. Hadn’t he been delighted, even consumed, by those boys and their game? His eyes had tracked that white ball up into the air, and his face—his mouth an O in wonder—had almost broken her heart. But when they entered the studio he became grave and distracted. His mind seemed to be fixed on a spot on the wall, or one of the columns, or her bed. She steered him to the space where the camera, a large box on a tripod, faced a single chair. With a hand on his shoulder she asked him to sit and it was as if she had snapped him out of a sound sleep. He looked at her and then the chair and then the camera and some knowledge of the situation registered and he bobbed his head: Yes, yes, yes, of course. He blushed, and she saw Josef in his features. Dark hair, dark eyes, the angled cheekbones, the high forehead. She brushed a hand over his temples, smoothed his hair. She posed his shoulders, squaring him to the lens, and retreated a few steps to consider the light, his posture, the way to approach this shoot with a subject who wouldn’t be able to hear the direction she had given to the others who sat in this spot: I want you to think of a question you have always wanted answered. For a moment, his eyes roamed over her face, her body, before becoming fixed again.
“You were wrong, Mr. Yeats.”
Yeats stood beside the camera. There was no trace of the apple. “It was a fair guess, given the facts at hand.”
“Did you really think she was a harlot?”
“I did,” Yeats said. “But I’ve been wrong about women in the past.”
She looked at Michael through the viewer, checked his position in the frame. Her subjects often had dreamy looks on their faces as they pondered the question, wondering either what they would ask or what their answer would be. She wanted to catch him in one of those moments when his eyes danced, absorbing the world around him, but this stare seemed as much a part of who he was as that other side. And she knew she couldn’t force it. She never told her subjects to smile, or not to smile, or to do anything but think about the question. It was a way of distracting them from the business of having their picture taken. But this boy was already distracted. She activated the shutter, cued the flash.
Light erupted where Yeats’s head had been only a moment before. Michael felt himself swallowed by it. His arms and legs, then his body and his head, all fell away from him. For a moment everything went white, and then all was blackness.
HELL’S KITCHEN
I’M GOING TO STRETCH my legs. That’s what Cronin had told the string bean with the ginger hair, the one who’d been so careless with his name that first night in the city.
“And what am I supposed to tell Mr. Gavigan when he gets here?”
“You tell him I’m stretching my legs,” Cronin said.
It was a sign that Gavigan had slipped in the past few years: the quality of the men he kept around him. When Cronin had first fallen into his orbit, Gavigan controlled a thriving bootleg-liquor business on the city’s west side. He had men on the docks, he worked in cars, had a piece of construction, too. Wherever the money was. He wasn’t a kingpin on the order of the bigger Italian outfits, but he had his own domain and he kept a close eye on its comings and goings. Even in the days before Cronin stepped off the train on the way to Albany, though, Gavigan’s sphere was shrinking. Repeal had been a blow, sure, and Gavigan had been too old, too slow, too old-fashioned, to make a move into prostitution, narcotics, hijacking. Cronin watched one man after another defect. Indignities were visited upon Gavigan that a year or two earlier would have been Cronin’s to punish. Each loss of the empire only made the old man more desperate to keep what remained. Not one to ease himself into the grave, he was sure to go out cursing and thrashing.
In the old days, the kid at the garage would have learned to shut his trap or someone would have dumped him into the river. Where’s Red, one of the fellas would ask. Oh, he’s walking to New Jersey. The others on the Gavigan payroll would have had a good laugh at that one.