He told himself that the countess might only be testing him, creating through this surprise a way to see whether Cormac was indeed free of jealousy. If so, she was playing a silly and dangerous game. Too French by far. He told himself he was not jealous but angry over a breach of manners. And then realized that he was indeed suffering from a slippery attack of jealousy. To his own complete surprise.
His ruminations were interrupted by a knock on the door. He got up quickly and cracked it open.
Fiammetta was there, in a sheer nightgown, holding a candle.
“Madame says you need me,” the girl said.
“Thank you, Fiammetta,” he said. “But I don’t.”
Her face was trembling.
“I can help you sleep,” she said.
“I’ll be all right.”
“Okay, Mister O’Connor. Sleep tight.”
“I’ll try.”
He did not sleep well that night or the next night or the night after that. He plunged into reporting, moving from hearings into the Croton water project to the murder of an apprentice boy on Baxter Street to the burning of a ship at the dock on Coenties Slip. He was cut off from the piano in the closed suite of the Countess de Chardon and put his energies into painting. He did not see M. Breton. He saw the countess on the fourth day after her husband’s arrival in their lives.
“I can explain,” she said. “But not now.”
Jennings was in the doorway of the house on Hudson Street when Cormac arrived. His face looked pale and wasted, his eyes rheumy with horror. He was smoking a thin rum-soaked cigarillo.
“Even you don’t want to see this one, Cormac,” he said, a tremble in his voice. His eyes wandered to the small crowd on the sidewalk, and the horse-drawn carts beyond, and the old black men huddled in the doorways. Jennings clearly wanted to see something banal and comforting and familiar on this morning gray with the threat of rain.
“How bad is it?” Cormac asked.
“Two babies, their brains beaten out of their skulls. A woman shot three times in the face. A man with a bullet in his brow. They think he’s the woman’s son, and the babies belong to him.”
“Oh, God…”
“The babies…” Jennings had lost all his mannerisms. His mouth trembled. “Oh, Jesus, Cormac…”
He seemed about to cry, then clamped the cigarillo in his teeth and slipped a whiskey flask from his jacket pocket.
“Who’s on it?” Cormac said.
“Ford. Who else?”
“I don’t envy his dreams.”
Jennings took a swig from the flask, offered it to Cormac, who declined.
“How do you handle your dreams—without drink?” Jennings said.
“I don’t.”
Cormac patted Jennings on the back and entered the house of the newly dead. A young doctor pushed past him, climbing the stairs to the third floor. Children and adults peered from the partly opened doors, white faces and black. The odors of soup and shit and sewage filled the air. On the second landing a thin mustached cop blocked his way.
“Who are you?” the policeman said.
Cormac showed a press identity card. The cop squinted at it and handed it back.
“It’s pretty bad up there,” he said.
“So I’ve heard.”
“All niggers,” the cop said. “And a lot of opium too.” Cormac moved past him up the stairs. The egglike odor of soft coal now mixed with the stench of shit and blood. Another policeman blocked his way.
“Not now,” he said. “They’re still working.”
“Ask the inspector if he can give his friend Cormac some names.”
They were not friends, but he wanted the names.
“Ask him yourself,” the cop said.
Cormac leaned past him, glimpsing blood on polished plank floors. “Inspector Ford, it’s Cormac O’Connor…. I need some names.”
Ford emerged from another room. His face was pale too, as if the crime were draining blood from the living.
“Come in, Cormac,” he said softly. “I think you know this woman.”
That night, his story written coldly and set in type, his stomach empty to fight off the nausea, he made drawings of Beatriz Machado. He drew her as she was in life. He drew her as a young woman in the bookstore in Lispenard Street. He drew her as she was at Quaco’s funeral, an American in the presence of the oldest Africans. He drew her rich with fat, as she sold corn and oysters and opium from her stall on Broadway. He drew her with charcoal and sepia chalk, pulling her into life from memory, from the river of time. He hummed music as he used line and shadow and volume to make her as she was in life. He hummed the melodies that came from the hands of the countess. He hummed music that had never been written on paper, music that came from gourds and fiddles in a lost year in a vanished century. He worked in a kind of anguished frenzy, sweat pouring from his body.
Then, his hands black with chalk, he fell on the narrow bed, pulled a pillow over his face, and wept. He was sick of the things human beings did to one another. He was angry too. Too many people were chopped out of the world before you had a chance to say good-bye.
He did not hear the door open. But he felt the bed sag as she sat on its edge, felt her hands in his hair.
“Poor Cormac,” the countess said.
He looked at her, expecting some gloss of irony. All he saw was care.
“You’re hurting,” she said.
“I am.”
“And I’m one of the reasons you’re hurting.”
He sighed in a reluctant way.
“Yes,” he said.
“But she—the woman in these drawings—she’s a reason too.”
“She is,” he said. He sat up now on the edge of the bed and stared at his blackened hands.
“Tell me the story.”
He stood up and went to the sink and began washing his hands.
“I knew her for many years,” he said. “She sold oysters and other things from a stall on Broadway. She was warm and human and funny. At some point last night, she was murdered.”
“My God.”
The black would not come off his fingers. He pulled at it with a towel.
“Her own son killed her, along with two of his own children, and then shot himself in the brow.” He heard his voice as if the voice alone were the cold teller of a tale. “He beat out the brains of the children. He shot off his mother’s face.” Then he took a deep breath, not looking at the countess for the effect of his words. “He told a woman on the first floor that he hated his mother because she laughed at him. That was probably true. She laughed at everyone and everything. She laughed at me, as well she should. She laughed at life.” He paused, turned to look at the countess, whose face was lost in imagining.“The same woman on the first floor saw the son yesterday, in the morning. He told her he had been out of work for eleven months. He was tired of depending on his mother. He was tired of being black.”
He glanced at the black lines dug into his fingertips, and the sanguine chalk red as blood. The countess looked up at him.