In the Night Café Read Free Page B

what came to mind—it was cold and hurt your throat but you liked it so much you ate it all up and your mother said “All gone,” in a loud, approving voice as if it were all right that everything ultimately disappeared.
    Caroline had flown up to New York with Tom’s two kids just for the weekend. “On impulse,” she said when she called me, as if she were a person accustomed to taking impulsive flights. An old flame had resurfaced, she said, and was taking her to dinner and she wanted to meet me while she was in town. Or look me over. After all, wasn’t I that girl her husband had gone and married? I’m not sure to this day, though, what she wanted.
    â€œMy little nieces have a gorgeous apartment where we’re staying and they seem to believe we’ll all survive the visit. You could see the children if you came by.”
    I said, Yes, I’d like to do that, and wrote down the address. It was the first time we’d ever spoken. She could have been talking to anyone, any friend of a friend in a strange city.
    By then I knew any unlikely thing was possible, anything formerly unthinkable. That was the principle upon which the universe apparently operated. You could wait on a street corner, for example, for a man who’d died two hours ago; you could walk into your house and find your life swept away. Caroline had never come with the children while Tom was alive. It made sense she would do it now, when it was too late.
    â€œThis is Joanna,” she told them. “Joanna was married to Daddy.”
    It couldn’t have meant anything to the little girl Celia, who was only three. She sat on her mother’s lap eating animal crackers with great deliberation, taking them out of the box one by one. But the boy stared. His blue eyes fixed on me with a million questions.
    â€œWell, say hello or something,” Caroline said sharply.
    He looked down at the toes of his sneakers. “Hello.”
    â€œThat one’s Tommy,” his mother said, pointing him out offhandedly as if I wouldn’t have known his name.
    The nieces’ apartment was all the way east in the twenties. It was on a high floor and had a living room that seemed to hang out in space over the river. The river was a hard gray like the air, the color of January. Tugboats kept passing, as they had the day I’d gone to Bellevue and sat in a room that also looked out on the river, waiting for my name to be called. It had all been done in Swedish modern and potted palms for the benefit of the living who were there to make the final identifications. But when they’d ask the next of kin to come outside, the body would be rolled into a kind of hallway, as if it had no real place. Is this Thomas Murphy? they asked and I said Yes it was him and they said That will be all, thank you very much. And that was all there was to death in the dream I couldn’t wake up from, that kept unreeling behind my eyes. In this dream Tom had died, though I knew he’d only disappeared as he’d threatened to do in the dark times. For weeks I’d been seeing resurrections—brown-haired men in bright blue nylon jackets always walking too fast for me to catch up with them, vanishing around corners before I saw their faces. Sometimes a motorcyclist would streak past me into the distant, shifting traffic, bent over the handlebars in a certain familiar way, reckless and unhelmeted. It was only in the dream that there’d been an accident, that I’d seen the body of the rider, stretched out on a steel table, that I’d touched the thick brown hair for the last time.
    Tom’s son had hair of a different color, so light it could have been made of cellophane; even his eyelashes were paler than his face. Until I saw him I’d never understood Tom’s childhood nickname Whitey. Finally, now, I could see little Whitey, exiled among the ashcans, the cement courtyards of the Bronx. Little Whitey had a