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My God, I thought, what if he heard and came over to visit?
Idiot, I thought.
And the phone rang for a last time.
I had to answer, maybe to apologize to that breathing far away and tell it to ignore my insolence.
I lifted the receiver.
And heard a sad lady five miles off somewhere in Los Angeles.
Fannie.
And she was crying.
“Fannie, my God, is that you?”
“Yes, oh, yes, Lord God in heaven,” she wheezed, she gasped, she floundered. “Coming upstairs almost killed me. Haven’t climbed stairs since 1935. Where have you been? The roof’s caved in. Life’s over. Everybody’s dead. Why didn’t you tell me? Oh, God, God, this is terrible. Can you come over? Jimmy. Sam. Pietro.” She did the litany and the pressure of my guilt crushed me against the side of the phone booth. “Pietro, Jimmy, Sam. Why did you lie?”
“I didn’t lie, I just shut up!” I said.
“And now Henry!” she cried.
“Henry! My God. He isn’t—”
“Fell downstairs.”
“Alive? Alive?” I yelled.
“In his room, yes, thank God. Wouldn’t go to the hospital. I heard him fall, ran out. That’s when I found out what you didn’t say. Henry lying there, swearing, naming names. Jimmy. Sam. Pietro. Oh, why did you bring death here?”
“I didn’t, Fannie.”
“Come prove it. I’ve got three mayonnaise jars full of quarters. Take a cab, send the driver up, I’ll pay him out of the jars! And when you get here, how will I know when you knock at the door it’ll be you?”
“How do you know it’s me, even now, Fannie, on the phone?”
“I don’t know,” she wailed. “Isn’t that awful? I don’t know.”
“Los Angeles,” I said to the taxi driver, ten minutes later. “Three mayonnaise jars’ worth.”
“Hello, Constance? I’m in a phone booth across from Fannie’s. We’ve got to get her out of here. Can you come? She’s really scared now.”
“For good reasons?”
I stared across at the tenement and judged how many thousand shadows were crammed in it, top to bottom.
“This time for sure.”
“Get over there. Stand guard. I’ll be there in half an hour. I won’t come up. You argue her down, damn it, and we’ll get her away. Jump.”
The way Constance slammed down the phone shot me out of the booth and almost got me run down by a car racing across the street.
The way I knocked on her door, she believed it was me. She threw the door wide and I saw what was almost a crazed elephant, eyes wild, hair in disarray, acting as if a rifle had just shot her through her head.
I launched her back into her chair and threw the icebox wide, trying to decide whether mayonnaise or wine would help. Wine.
“Get that in you,” I commanded, and suddenly realized my cab driver was in the door behind me, having followed me upstairs, thinking I was a deadbeat and trying to escape.
