“Mrs. Richards?” He stood in the doorway while she circuited the room, hands still cupped. “Ma’am? What are you looking for?”
“Someplace to throw—” she stopped—“this. But you took everything upstairs already.”
“You know you could just drop it on the floor.” He was impatient and his impatience embarrassed him. “I mean you don’t live here anymore.”
After the silence in which her expression became curious, she said, “You don’t understand the way we live at all. But then, you probably think you understand all too well. I’m going to take this out to the incinerator.”
He ducked back as she strode through.
“I don’t like to go out in the hall. I don’t feel safe—”
“I’ll take it out for you,” he called after her.
“That’s all right.” Hands still together, she twisted the knob.
When the door banged behind her, he sucked his teeth, then went and got his notebook from the window. The blue-rimmed stationery slid half out. He opened the cover and looked at her even letters. With his front teeth set, he took his pen and drew in the comma. Her ink was India black; his, dark blue.
Going back to the living room, he stabbed at his pocket several times. Mrs. Richards came in with a look of accomplishment. His pen caught. “Mrs. Richards, do you know, that letter’s still down in your mailbox?”
“What letter?”
“You’ve got an airmail letter in your mailbox. I saw it again this morning.”
“All the mailboxes are broken.”
“Yours isn’t. And there’s a letter inside it. I told you about it the first day I came here. Then I told Mr. Richards a day later. Don’t you have a mailbox key?”
“Yes, of course. One of us will go down and pick it up this afternoon.”
“Mrs. Richards?” Something vented still left something to come.
“Yes, Kidd?”
His teeth were still set. He sucked air and they opened. “You’re a very nice woman. You’ve really tried to be nice to me. And I think it’s a shame you have to be so scared all the time. There’s nothing I can do about it, but I wish there was.”
She frowned; the frown passed. “I don’t suppose you’d believe just how much you have done.”
“By being around?”
“Yes. And also by being, well…”
He could not interpret her shrug: “Mrs. Richards, I’ve been scared a whole lot of my life too. Of a lot of things that I didn’t know what they were. But you can’t just let them walk all over you—take over. You have to—”
“I am moving!” Her head bobbed in emphasis. “We are moving from 17-E to 19-A.”
“—do something inside yourself.”
She shook her head sharply, not looking. “And you are very presumptuous if you think you are telling me something I don’t know.” Now she looked up. “Or your telling me makes it any easier.”
Frustration drove the apology. “I’m sorry.” He heard his own reticence modify it to something else.
Mrs. Richards blinked. “Oh, I know you’re just trying to…I am sorry. But do you know how terrible it is to live inside here—” she gestured at the green walls—“with everything slipping away? And you can hear everything that goes on in the other rooms, in the other apartments? I wake up at night, and walk by the window, and I can see lights sometimes, moving in the smoke. And when the smoke isn’t so heavy, it’s even worse, because then the lights look like horrible things, crawling around…This has got to stop, you know! Management must be having all sorts of difficulty while we’re going through this crisis. I understand that. I make allowances. But it’s not as though a bomb had fallen, or anything. If a bomb had fallen, we’d be dead. This is something perfectly natural. And we have to make do, don’t we, until the situation is rectified?” She leaned forward: “You don’t think it is a bomb?”
“It isn’t a bomb. I was in Ensenada, in Mexico, just a week or so ago. There was nothing about a bomb in the papers; somebody gave me a lift who had an L. A. paper in his car. Everything’s fine there. And in Philadelphia—”
“Then you see. We just have to wait. The guards will be back. They will get rid of all these terrible people who run around vandalizing in the halls. We have to be patient, and be strong. Of course I’m afraid. I’m afraid if I sit still more than five minutes I’ll start to scream. But you can’t give in to it, anymore than you can give in to them. Do you think we should take kitchen knives and broken flower pots and run down there and try to scrape them out?”
“No, of course not—”
“I’m not that sort of person. I don’t intend to become that sort. You say I have to do something? Well, I have moved my family. Don’t you think that takes a great deal of…inner strength? I mean in this situation? I can’t even let myself assess how dangerous the whole thing really is. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to move at all.”
“Of course it’s dangerous. But I go out. I live outside in it; I walk around in it. Nothing happens to me.”
“Oh, Edna told me how you got that scab on your face. Besides, you are a man. You are a young man. I am a middle-aged woman.”
“But that’s all there is now, Mrs. Richards. You’ve got to walk around in it because there isn’t anything else.”
“It will be different if I wait. I know that because I am middle-aged. You don’t because you’re still very young.”
“Your friend Mrs. Brown—”
“Mrs. Brown is not me. I am not Mrs. Brown. Oh, are you just trying not to understand?”
He gathered breath for protest but failed articulation.
“I have a family. It’s very important to me. Mrs. Brown is all alone, now. She doesn’t have the same sort of responsibilities. But you don’t understand about that; perhaps in your head, you do. But not inside, not really.”
“Then why don’t you and Mr. Richards take your family out of all this mess?”
Her hands, moving slowly down her dress, turned up once, then fell. “One can retreat, yes. I suppose that’s what I’m doing by moving. But you can’t just give up entirely, run away, surrender. I like the Labry Apartments.” Her hands pulled together to crush the lap of her dress. “I like it here. We’ve lived here since I was pregnant with Bobby. We had to wait almost a year to get in. Before that, we had a tiny house out in Helmsford; but it wasn’t as nice as this, believe me. They don’t let just anyone in here. With Arthur’s position, it’s much better for him. I’ve entertained many of his business associates here. I especially liked some of the younger, brighter men. And their wives. They were very pleasant. Do you know how hard it is to make a home?”
His bare heel had begun to sting, just from the weight of standing. He rocked a little.
“That’s something that a woman does from inside herself. You do it in the face of all sorts of opposition. Husbands are very appreciative when it works out well. But they’re not that anxious to help. It’s understandable. They don’t know how. The children never appreciate it. But it’s terribly necessary. You must make it your own world. And everyone must be able to feel it. I want a home, here, that looks like my home, feels like my home, is a place where my family can be safe, where my friends—psychologists, engineers, ordinary people…poets—can feel comfortable. Do you see?”
He nodded.
He rocked.
“That man Calkins, the one who runs the Times, do you think he has a home? They’re always writing articles about the people who’re staying with him, visiting with him, those people he’s decided are important. Do you think I’d want a place like that? Oh, no. This is a real home, a place where real things happen, to real people. You feel that way, I know you do. You’ve become practically part of the family. You are sensitive, a poet; you understand that to tear it all apart, and set it up again, even on the nineteenth floor: that’s taking a desperate chance, you see? But I’m doing it. To you, moving like this is just a gesture. But you don’t understand how important a gesture can be. I cannot have a home where I hear the neighbors shrieking. I cannot. Because when the neighbors are shrieking, I cannot maintain the peace of mind necessary for me to make a home. Not when that is going on. Why do you think we moved into the Labry? Do you know how I thought of this moving? As a space, a gap, a crack in which some terrible thing might get in and destroy it, us, my home. You have to take it apart, then put it back together. I really felt as though some dirt, or filth, or horrible rot might get in while it was being reassembled and start a terrible decay. But here—” once more she waved her hand— “I couldn’t live here anymore.”