Constance Read Free Page A

she’d gone into the bedroom and Harriet was gasping as though she couldn’t get enough air in her lungs. Iris thought she should go get Daddy but Harriet wanted her to stay with her. So Iris got in bed with her and held her hand. Then she died.
    —How did you know?
    —Her fingers went limp and it got real quiet.
    —What did you do?
    —After a bit I went away.
    —Why didn’t you tell anyone?
    —I thought I’d get in trouble.
    We stared at each other for a second. Then we burst out laughing. How we howled, oh, gales of mirth. We couldn’t help it. Iris had never told anybody until she told me, that’s how close we were. But at the same time I felt resentful. It was I who should have been with her at the end.
    So after Iris had her great success at the dinner Sidney gave in her honor I asked her please to show me the hotel where she worked. I was trying to look out for her. This was what Harriet had wanted me to do, for all I knew it was a mother’s dying wish. It was dusk and we were standing on the sidewalk in front of a brownstone on the corner of West Thirty-third not far from Penn Station. In the sky over Jersey I glimpsed a few smears of rusty sunset. There were black clouds overhead. I felt uneasy. The last of the light burnished the windows of the tenements opposite and made the fire escapes gleam. There was an empty lot just down the block with a chain-link fence around it. Some young men stood around, aimless and smoking. They kept looking at us. I didn’t like it. Iris told me it wasn’t so bad inside.
    —You don’t say.
    Wide stone steps with brass handrails ascended to a door overhung by a canopy embossed with the hotel’s crest. Pigeons roosted on the ledge above. As we mounted the steps they fluttered off into the gloom. We were greeted by a black man in a frayed gray uniform with scarlet piping. He welcomed us to the Dunmore Hotel. He greeted Iris by name.
    —Hi, Simon, she said, this is my big sis.
    She then took from her purse a pair of spectacles with heavy black frames and put them on. They transformed her completely. She looked like an intellectual!
    —Don’t look at me like that, she said, I need them.
    We entered a lobby with a tiled floor and pots of dusty ferns. Old leather armchairs and couches were grouped around low tables. The place was shabby, but a vestige of gentility still clung to it, and I imagined lonely salesmen checking in with their suitcases full of samples, then slipping out to buy a mickey of rye or whatever. By the reception desk a broad carpeted staircase ascended to the floors above. I discovered then, for I heard him, that the Dunmore boasted a pianist. Apparently he performed nightly in the cocktail lounge. His name was Eddie Castrol and Iris was eager that I meet him. I wanted to know why.
    —Are you going to get mad at me?
    —It depends what you’re going to say.
    Already my heart was sinking. Then she was telling me that she’d gotten involved with this man. That was why she wanted me to meet him. I told her I was going straight home unless she told me who he was. I was very firm about it. So we sat in the lobby for half an hour and she told me that this time it was the real thing.
    —Oh, is it? I said.
    She led me through to the lounge. It was a large gloomy room with scattered tables, a small dance floor, and a bar. The few customers sat alone or in huddled whispering couples. Lamps in scalloped shades gave out a muted yellowy glow. The atmosphere was strange and sad and vaguely dreamlike, and made more so by the presence of a man in a shabby tuxedo sitting ata concert grand on the far side of the room. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He was playing something I couldn’t identify. It was oddly disconnected, spiky somehow.
Syncopated.
I am acutely sensitive to music. I am acutely sensitive to all sound.
    —Doesn’t he remind you of Daddy? whispered Iris.
    He did not! It was alarming that Iris should think he did. She showed me to a