"Were the pipes broken?" he asks.
"I don't know."
"Did they have tools?"
"I don't know."
"How many of them were there?"
She turns her head toward the kitchen, toward the front door, toward the short hallway to the bedroom, as though sending her memory to rewalk the route. "I don't know."
"Two? Three?"
In the darkness she wrings her hands.
A leak of indignation has sprung in him, but he doesn't know where from, or in what receptacle to catch it. The thieves could well have been his clients. He has fought for and won acquittal for men who have done far worse.
"They take all of Joe's things?"
She says nothing.
"When?" he asks.
She turns her head.
"Two days? Three?"
She nods, little bobbles of her chin.
"You've been sitting here for three days? Why didn't you call Milton?
She shrugs.
"You sure you're all right?" No reply. "How much did they get
Nothing still.
"What was in the purse, Rose?"
She holds out her hand. Her lip is quivering now. Her voice like the cry of a cat. "Maybe five dollars."
He walks back toward the bedroom. His name is called behind him. "Are you hungry?"-an old routine: she hasn't cooked in years.
"I already ate."
"I can heat up some eggs."
He stops along a wall and is confronted with his genealogy, everything aslant, a gallery of faces glowing darkly out from behind picture glass dulled with grease. Everyone dead or ceased breathing in that form. Their various guises: ballplayer, graduate, attorney. Milton in his first days as a T-man, turned to display the contents of his shoulder holster. The child he sees beside him, in the Silver Shadow, heading to school, watches the man's massive shoulders and arms jerkily spinning the wheel. Up the boy goes to his knees and, kneeling high, takes measurements with his hand between the man's head and his own, shifting as necessary and craning his neck if need be to make their heights exactly, precisely the same. It is all the boy can be sure of passing off: from the back and at a distance two heads in silhouette are two heads in silhouette, anything the boy desires, a pair of friends, a couple of cops, two grown men and not the father and his little boy that they are. And this man, this boy's mate, pays no attention to the pesky hand hovering around his head.
She clears her throat in the room behind him. "Which one are you looking at?"
"What do you mean?"
"You're looking at the pictures."
"No.”
"I can hear you."
A baby in his mother's arms. "Third from the right."
"That's you."
"That's not me."
"Yes that is. That's you."
Watery eyes stare out at him. At seven years old a wisp of golden hair. He'd forgotten he started out blond. All night he has tried to raise that child's face in his mind, but all he can remember is an old summer in which the huge hand clamps to his as he is led to the Coney Island carnival and the passing image of his own eyes open to the Wonderwheel toppling, its passengers spinning in place. The tattooed girls writhing. Invisible rockets shooting aloft and scattering in colored spiders and dripping, like the caps of gargantuan fools, into the countless eyes, the faceless sea of upturned heads, heads like his. Upturned to his grandfather, Milton's father, Joe, sweet man.
One night early that winter at seven, during the first impressive snow of a winter of impressive snows, Joe and Rose came to stay the night and were given the master bedroom. This was in Queens, before Milton's big cases, before Central Park West. Their modest row-house on a street of row-houses. Nathan's mother moved to Nathan's room and Milton and Nathan moved downstairs to the convertible couch. The actual incidents of the visit are gone from his memory, but Nathan assumes them, as one can: the moments spent passing a fragile coexistence, a faint hostility; ice clinking in glasses, a shiny and crowded dinner, a fire.
Then a blundered moment. A little after midnight, Nathan woke beside his father on the pullout couch and opened his eyes to a succession of threatening sounds. He checked his body with the body at his side, unconsciously mimicked it, calculating the required adjustments. But Milton was sitting bolt upright, yards, hundreds of feet, above him, as still and as silent as though this was the position in which he'd fallen asleep.
The boy, Nathan, reached up. Hands clenched in rage, Milton warded off the touch. There was something deeply wrong. The room gyrated with snow shadows, rained with the blue streetlight. Tree branches and ice chips slid in sinister silence along the walls. Table and chairs turned and danced and all the storm was silent, as though mimed, its fierce howls chained somewhere safely outside. Camouflaged, wrapped by the arms of light, Nathan could not escape if he tried. So he turned, as Milton had turned, toward french doors where beyond there was groaning, whistlng, snorting, and a soliloquy in a strange language. Through the spinning trees and snow in the next room moved the faint image of Joe with an overcoat wrapped perilously around his shoulders. His head bowed, he stuttered, stopped, gestured wildly, then stumbled forward, dragging his feet across the living room floor, and again stopped in a deliberate sort of hesitancy. Milton, no longer immense but merely unwieldy, clumsy, did not scoop and cradle the boy in safety. He did not save him. Instead, the boy watched his father's watching and his grandfather's confused slog into the interpretation of old dreams. In a month the old man was dead.
In the bedroom doorway Nathan finds himself shoulder to a column of pencil markings in the wood, random dates beside each in his grandfather's scrawl, the last just below shoulder leveclass="underline" Mr. Nathan, nine-years-old.
His grandmother's bed is made but the cover is askew, the pillows fluffed and misaligned. The bureau drawers lie overturned on the floor, underwire brassieres and stockings and pennies crushed beneath them. A coffee tin, her secret stash for phantom grandchildren and rainy days, lies empty on its side, its top flung away. Nathan stands looking at it.
"Good thing they didn't get to the coffee can," he calls down the hall.
"They'll never find that."
He squats over it. "How much do you have in here?"
"I'll never tell."
Nathan straightens his leg to get at his billfold and what change he has. He peels off a few bills and restuffs the can.
He returns to the living room and when he grabs her her shoulder seems to come apart in his hands. "You mind if I put on a light?" He tries one lamp then the other. He bends to peer under the lampshades. There are no bulbs.
"When was the last time you had bulbs in these lamps?"
"When was the last time you were here?"
Nathan can't remember. "Hasn't Milton been to visit?"
She says nothing.
"He says he comes every few days to see you." Nathan waits but still no response. Then he didn't tell you about the new case.”
"New case?
"He's a bastard," Nathan says.
"He's my son."
“He's my father."
“You don't talk that way about a father."
"Well."
Nathan sits across from her and stretches his feet before him. He reaches for the back of his head and holds it steady and yawns.
His grandmother cocks her ear toward the hissing drone in the radio.
“You like that," he says.
"Stories for old women. Can't I get you something to eat?"
"I'm all right."
"Here, let me."
“I will. I'll do it. You sit."
In the kitchen he stands before the refrigerator he has known all his days. It once bloomed with life, leaves and fruits and wrapped y meats and eggs with candies and bottles of sugary drinks. Blood sacs of golden yolk. Tonight, a brown banana sits on a wire shelf, kinked and shriveled like a link of old sausage. Nathan rattles around, makes noises.
"Thank you," he says.
"Good?"
"You sure I can't get you something?"
He eyes the phone, considers the call, the money.