Still with that half smile, he took both handles of the coal bin, heaved it up with a forward thrust of the hips, and made his way to the far door.
“I’ll see ya, Miss,” he said. Inside, with the doors closed tight, Mary listened to hard knots of anthracite slide along the metal throat of the chute, the crunch of his large tin scoop driven into the pile again and again.
• • •
Saturday morning was overcast, and the skies threatened to storm. When she woke and smelled rain in the air she told herself not to be disappointed if he didn’t come. The ferries wouldn’t run if the waters were too rough, and it wouldn’t be his fault. But when she went outside to see if she could spot the dock through the fog, everything seemed to be running as usual. John Cane stepped out of the mist and onto the path just before Mary, with a covered plate in his hand.
“Everything all right?” he inquired, peering at her unusual hairstyle.
“Fine.” She took the plate, peeked under the lid, and sighed. After two and a half years she was getting to the point where she would mug someone for a good plate of eggs and rashers. “Are the ferries operating on time?”
“They are,” John said, putting one foot. “Why? Expecting someone? That lawyer?”
“You are the nosiest person I ever knew in my life.”
“Your man?”
“I don’t put it that way, but yes.”
“What kind of name is Alfred anyway? What’s his surname?”
“Briehof. It’s German.”
“What part of Germany?”
“John, do you have any work to do today? Are you paid to work, or just to visit?”
“I just like to know things is all.”
“Doesn’t everyone? But not everyone thinks it’s right to ask.”
“Not everyone. That’s true. Take you for example. You’ve hardly asked me a single thing.”
“Okay, tell me something about yourself.”
But John just shrugged and walked back up to the hospital.
• • •
Mary saw him before the ferry docked. She saw his dark head swaying with the rhythm of the water. She watched him leap from the boat to the pier without the assistance of the handrail. She watched him say something to the ferry’s captain, and then both men wheeled around to face Mary’s bungalow. She lifted her arm and waved.
They walked toward each other. He leaned in to kiss her when they met on the path, but she told him to wait, not yet, she’d say when. He looked so good, and so young, and so healthy. His teeth were clean and white. His neck was shaved close without a single nick. He was tall. He moved with the ease of a man who was well fed, and well washed, and had full use of his lungs and got physical exercise every day. So this is how she appeared to the patients of the hospital. This was the light they were looking at when they sat, wrapped in blankets and propped up on hospital benches and stared at her, struggling to recall what being fully alive was like. Mary and Alfred, they weren’t as young as they once were, but they weren’t so bad, not so bad at all. She pointed out the hospital building, the chapel, the coal house, the male dormitory, the morgue, the nurses’ quarters, the physicians’ quarters, the lighthouse, the female dormitory, the stable, the sheds, and her own little shack, which she promised to show him later. She led him down the path that John Cane had cleared for her, down to the beach and her snowy egret. They found a damp log to sit on, and she pointed out the Bronx to their left, and to their right South Brother and Rikers. To their far right was Astoria, and behind them, of course, was Manhattan. She asked him if North Brother was as he had pictured it.
“No,” he said. “There’s more here than I thought. It’s like its own little village. And yet…”
“What?”
“It’s still empty. Where is everyone?”
“They’re patients. Most of them will die here. Or they work here, and they go home at night.”
Mary waited for him to kiss her again, but the moment seemed to have passed. He seemed darker now, caught up in thoughts of his own, and she worried that he regretted coming, that he’d come up with an excuse to leave.
“How are things at the ice company?”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “What’s to stop you from getting on the ferry one day and going over? Disappearing? Couldn’t you work under another name?”
“The guards, for a start. The ferry captain. It’s always the same man, and he knows me.”
“You could hide. You could wait for a moment when he’s not looking and then hide on the boat, under the bench, and then sneak off on the other end when he’s occupied with something.”
“You saw the size of the boat. And they run it only if there’s people to take it. Do you think it would work?”
Alfred was silent, brooding over something.
“Besides, I don’t want to work under another name. I haven’t done a thing wrong. I should be allowed to work under my own name. Mr. O’Neill says he’s making progress, and…”
“Mary—”
“… there are men who’ve done the same as I’m accused of and they’re walking free—”
“I have to tell you something.”
Alfred walked to the water’s edge, picked up a stone, and threw it.
So this was it, Mary thought, this, whatever this was, this was the thing that had driven him uptown and across Hell Gate to see her. He kept his back to her, and she remained silent. She would not make it easier by drawing it out of him.
“I wanted to tell you when you were kept at that hotel, but then they wouldn’t let me see you, and I didn’t want to tell you during the hearing because I was afraid you’d make a scene and hurt your case, so this is better, really, this way, alone here. I think it’s best anyway.”
“Why would I make a scene?” Whatever it was, she would not make a scene in this spot, the only peaceful place she’d discovered on the entire island.
“You’ve been gone for more than two years now…”
Mary put her hands to her head and her chin to her knees. She knew it. She damned well knew it. She knew it, and she didn’t know she knew it.
“… and most of the papers say they’re never letting you off this island.”
Mary stood up from the log, brushed off the back of her skirt, and headed up the path. He took a few quick steps after her and caught her arm.
“Like I told you, I couldn’t afford the Thirty-Third Street rooms, so I took a bed at the Meaneys’.”
“Oh, yes! The happy Meaneys and their son Samuel, for whom you like to set a good example.”
“For whom Mrs. Meaney forced me to set a good example. After a week there she said I could stay on only if I stopped drinking.”
“And yet you’re still there.”
“I did the Oppenheimer Treatment. I’m still doing it. Her husband did it and it worked for him and she thought it might work for me.”
“It’s bogus. Everyone knows it’s bogus. They take your money and you drink the quinine until you’re so sick you can’t take a sip of anything, and then the cure is telling you not to drink. Then the day you stop the quinine it doesn’t work anymore. The husband is still not drinking?”
“The husband is dead.”
Mary squatted on the path, touched her fingertips to the ground to steady herself. That was it. She almost smiled. She’d felt it between them when she saw him in New York, but she couldn’t put a name on it. Now she could. Alfred remained standing.
“How long dead?”
“About five years now.”