“But, see, I’ve tried to be the man of the house, and that means not bothering her about stuff I should be able to handle myself. So I didn’t bother her about this thing and then that thing and this other thing, until now it’s a giant mess, and she’s going to be mad at me for hiding things, which she has a right to be.”
Mr. Yoshioka stopped cranking the drill, looked at me, and said, “Now, there is a problem big enough to worry about.”
32
The funny thing was, nothing that happened next proved to be anything that I worried would happen.
Every night, my mother locked the apartment door, sometimes early in the evening and sometimes well after the witching hour on a singing night, after she first fetched me from Mrs. Lorenzo’s. She routinely engaged both deadbolts and the security chain without saying a word about the new addition. The fifth or sixth night following Mr. Yoshioka’s installation of the chain, at half past one in the morning, she seemed to realize for the first time that it hadn’t always been there.
“When did this happen?” she asked, holding the chain and slide bolt in one hand, jingling it slightly.
Half asleep, I might have inadvertently made a revelation that would have untangled the entire ball of deception. To my discredit, however, even semiconscious, I was guileful enough to mumble, “Don’t know. It’s been there a while.”
She frowned at it, shook her head, and said, “I just realized I’ve been using it for … days, I guess. Huh. Didn’t think the landlord would spend a buck to improve anything in this place.” Then she slid the bolt into the doorplate and walked me back to my room to tuck me into bed.
Never again did she mention the security chain.
I already thought Mr. Yoshioka was a cool guy in his own sort of buttoned-up way. Now I decided he was a genius, too.
Mother never asked Mr. Smaller about the chain. Later I realized that she pretty much always steered clear of him, most likely because when Tilton lived with us, he sometimes took a six-pack of beer to the superintendent and hung out with him. My father liked to hear Mr. Smaller’s wild conspiracy theories, which later he would repeat to my mother and me, making them sound even crazier, mocking Mr. Smaller. Often Tilton’s accounts of those theories were funny, but he was so mean in the way he portrayed the superintendent that I couldn’t bring myself to laugh. I figured Mom didn’t ask Mr. Smaller about the chain because she didn’t want him to ask her how Tilton was faring these days; Sylvia Kirk, soon to be Bledsoe again, didn’t believe in saying bad things about anyone, but she didn’t have a good word for the man who kept abandoning her.
One day in early October, about a week before the legal papers were to be signed to dissolve the marriage, my mother went to the restaurant where Tilton was working for a modest salary plus five percent per year of the business, which eventually he would own. She had no phone number for him, communicated only through his attorney, who was handling the divorce, and wanted to talk face-to-face one more time about the wisdom of what they were doing.
She discovered that he had been fired from that job seven months earlier, long before he had walked out on us. He had never been more than a salaried employee. Worse, his salary had been substantially higher than what he pretended when he lived with us and relied on my mother to pay the rent.
The weak spot she had for him in her heart finally healed that day, much to my relief.
As for Eve Adams, aka Fiona Cassidy, she never bothered either me or Mr. Yoshioka again that summer and early autumn. Periodically, disturbing chemical smells came from 6-C, though never for more than an hour at a time, and my friend the tailor repor
ted them to no one but me. Not long after my mother discovered the truth about Tilton, Eve Adams moved out of 6-C.
We only learned she had gone when, a week later, a crew of workmen set about stripping off the wallpaper, taking up the rotten linoleum, and painting that apartment. In the months she had lived there, she had addressed none of the tasks that she supposedly had been brought in to complete.
When I discovered this, I tracked down Mr. Smaller, who was working again in the spider-infested basement, and I asked about the pretty lady with the purple-blue eyes. I played the crush-stricken boy, bereft that he might never again see that goddess.
Mr. Smaller wasn’t dealing with boiler sludge this time. He was filling a glass jug with some kind of smelly lubricant that poured from a tap in one of the unlabeled barrels.
He sported the usual elastic-waist khakis with racehorse-tack suspenders, but not the tank-top undershirt that completed his summer uniform. Instead, in recognition of the cooler weather, he wore a gray sweatshirt with black letters, GET OFF MY CLOUD, which had been the title of a number-one hit by the Rolling Stones almost a year earlier. The faces of the Stones were arrayed across the sweatshirt. This seemed a most unlikely garment for Mr. Smaller. He must have been fifty, not of the demographic that wore garb purchased at rock concerts. Because he never seemed to be concerned whatsoever about his appearance, I supposed that he wore whatever second-hand clothes he found at thrift shops. That GET OFF MY CLOUD sweatshirt had perhaps been thrown out by someone who no longer got a thrill from being a fan of Mick Jagger and the boys, and Mr. Smaller had bought it most likely not because he was an admirer of the Stones, but because the size and the price were right.
“She never done nothin’ in Six-C, and I never checked on her to see was she doin’ what she was gettin’ free rent for. Them pennypinchin’ suits downtown send some hippie skank up here so she’ll do a cheap job and make their sacred bottom line look good, then they got no right expectin’ me to supervise her on top of all my other damn work. I’m happy she stiffed ’em, they ain’t deserved nothin’ better, but I’m even more happy she’s outta here. She’s a weirdo, got a screw loose. We’ll see that freak on the news one day, and it ain’t gonna be ’cause she won herself some Nobel Prize. Son, I done warned you not to go moonin’ around her. You’re lucky she ain’t cut out your heart, dried it, and smoked it to get high.”
This was a Friday, after school, when ordinarily I would be in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, being encouraged by Mrs. Mary O’Toole to move from American standards and current pop to classical music, not as an ultimate destination, just to see if Mozart stirred me as much as did Duke Ellington and Claude Thornhill and Fats Domino. Before I got home from Saint Scholastica’s, Mom had left for a meeting with a talent manager, after which she would catch a cab to Slinky’s. I had come home to freshen up before going to the community center, but when I’d found the work crew from 6-C taking a cigarette break on the front stoop, my plans had changed.
After racing up to the sixth floor to verify that Eve Adams was gone, and after plunging down to the basement to see Mr. Smaller and confirm that the woman was never coming back, I went next to our apartment. Inside, I engaged both deadbolts behind me but neglected to fix the security chain to the doorplate.
Excited, almost giddy with relief, I went directly to my bedroom and opened the nightstand drawer and took out the La Florentine candy tin. I intended to take scissors to the Polaroid of me sleeping and throw the pieces in the Dumpster in the alleyway.
Thus far I had kept the photograph because it seemed to be proof that Eve Adams had threatened me. I couldn’t have taken a snapshot of myself in sleep, especially considering that we didn’t own a Polaroid camera. If someday events unfolded in such a way that Mother learned part of what I had been withholding from her and I was required to explain myself, or if Eve Adams, under one name or another, became aggressive toward me again and I needed at last to ask for help, my Polaroid and the one of Mr. Yoshioka’s tiger screen—and to a lesser extent the photo of Manzanar torn from a book—would serve as proof, if thin, that she had threatened us.
Now that she had left our building, where obviously she would never again be welcome, the photo would not be needed as proof of anything. But it could serve as evidence, evidence that I had kept secret from my mother events of considerable significance. Although she would never invade my privacy, if by some chance she saw the Polaroid, she would wonder who had taken it, why, and when. I could imagine no satisfactory explanation—except the truth. Whatever she might decide was proper punishment for deception, nothing could be worse than her disappointment in me and the sorrow in her eyes. But with Eve Adams gone, I had no need of proof against her and no desire to keep evidence that would convict me of being less of a good son than I wished to be.
In retrospect, as a man of fifty-seven, it’s difficult to reconstruct the reasoning of my nine-year-old self, because at that age the brain is literally still forming; the power of reason is not as strong as the power of fantasy. Yet if I remember correctly, when I took the lid off the La Florentine box, my mood was akin to that of a prisoner freed, for the architecture of deceptions and evasions I’d built seemed to be dissolving like a structure in a dream, freeing me from the prospect of one day being shamed before my mother.
Of the familiar items in my eccentric collection—two were missing. The photograph of me sleeping. The fabric eye. I had not looked in the box for more than a week. I knew instantly that Eve Adams had been in the apartment during the day, one day or another, when the security chain was not engaged, that she—no one else—had taken the items. I couldn’t imagine why she wanted the fabric eye.
One thing had been added to the collection: a strip of glossy paper clipped from a magazine, two inches by six or seven inches, cut from what must have been a full-page photo of a woman’s face, perhaps a glamour shot: the eyes and eyebrows and the bridge of her nose. The subject of the photo must have had blue eyes, but with a purple art pencil, they had been colored to approximately match the shade of Eve Adams’s eyes.
I rubbed one of those eyes, and some of the soft purple color came off on my finger.