Arts & Entertainments: A Novel Read Free

eyes. Had his brain been capable of generating a response, he would still have been unable to break his tongue sufficiently free from its surroundings to articulate it. He offered instead an affirmative cough.
    “Was Blakeman there?”
    Eddie remembered with some regret offering Susan as an excuse for his disappearance from Blakeman’s life. In fact, Susan liked Blakeman, and she didn’t understand why they saw so little of him. Eddie couldn’t tell either of them that Blakeman belonged to his old life with Martha.
    “He invited me for dinner tonight,” Eddie managed after working his mouth into functioning order.
    “That sounds nice. It would be good for you to get out a bit more. Maybe I’ll see if Annie wants to do something.”
    Annie was Susan’s best friend from childhood. They’d moved together from Ohio to New York after college, and Annie had introduced Susan to Eddie, with whom she’d worked at St. Albert’s until leaving the year before, after the birth of her first child.
    “See you this afternoon?” Eddie asked before Susan left.
    Each year since their engagement she’d taken half a day off work to join him at graduation. She liked seeing the faces of the boys whose names she heard all year, chatting with the other teachers, feeling fully immersed in Eddie’s life.
    “I’ll be there,” she said.
    Eddie fell back to sleep after Susan left, and it was almost noon by the time he got across town to pack up his things at school for the summer. Rounding the corner, he saw Stephen McLaughlin sitting on a fire hydrant with his handmade sign propped up beside him. Eddie couldn’t read it from where he stood, but he knew exactly what it said. “Make St. Albert’s keep its word. Don’t evict a disabled man.”
    Since its founding, St. Albert’s had occupied a mansion on Eighty-ninth Street between Madison and Fifth, donated by one of the rich Catholics who’d started the place, mostly third-and fourth-generation Irish who’d finally arrived in the higher reaches of society and wanted their own version of the private schools where rich Protestants sent their sons. The school had eventually expanded into an adjacent building, converting all the apartments into classrooms except the penthouse, where the young headmaster lived with his family. He’d stayed in the job for almost five decades. Shortly after his death, St. Albert’s went about taking possession of the apartment and found itstill occupied by his fifty-year-old son. For three years now, Stephen and the school had been locked in litigation. For the last two, he’d camped outside the building every day, picketing while parents dropped off and picked up their sons. Despite the message on the sign, Stephen had no disability that Eddie could discern apart from a fairly encompassing pot habit. Since taking up his place outside the school, he’d grown out a thick red beard, as if to appear slightly menacing or to give off a hint of indigence—though he’d refused an offer of three-quarters of a million dollars to vacate the apartment.
    “Handsome Eddie,” he said. “It’s been a slow day.”
    Eddie’s mother had started working at St. Albert’s as Mr. McLaughlin’s secretary, and Stephen—then in his twenties and unemployed—often babysat the infant Eddie. Apart from Eddie’s parents, Stephen had known him longer than anyone alive.
    “School’s out,” Eddie told him. “Graduation starts at the church in a few hours. You ought to set up shop over there.”
    “Thanks, Handsome E.”
    Stephen rose from the hydrant and picked up his sign while Eddie let himself into the building. He had a key to the rickety elevator, but he still thought of it as vaguely off limits to him, as it was to students, and he rarely used it. He walked up the back stairs to the faculty lounge on the second floor, which was already stripped almost bare. Most of the other teachers had cleared their things out the day before, while Eddie had been at his