There was a feeling of warmth and unity in our kitchen that early morning, generated by the close friendship between Norman and Jason, the concern Norman showed for poor Mary. We sat drinking hot, steaming coffee, not at all frightened by what had happened to Mary, sweet Mary who looked like a high-school girl in her sweaters and skirts, but determined instead to find the intruder. We had no idea what we would do with him once we captured him, nor do I think any one of us was thinking in terms of punishment. The important thing was to catch him, and it became clear almost immediately that the chase, rather than the capture, would hold all the excitement.
There was no fire escape outside the window where the man’s face had appeared. The windows on the inland side were high up on the wall, like elongated slits in a turret. Mary was sure the face had been hanging at her window upside down, so it seemed likely that the man had simply crawled to the edge of the roof and then leaned far out and over to peer in at her. To confirm our suspicions, Norman went for a flashlight, and we climbed the six steps from the fourth floor to the roof. We found that the lock on the roof door had been broken open. In our pajamas we walked to the edge of the roof directly above Mary’s window. We found a discarded candy wrapper there, a sure sign to us that someone had recently been there.
Jason was bursting with plans. It never occurred to any of us to wonder how our Peeping Tom had known Mary would be nursing her baby at exactly four o’clock in the morning. We listened as Jason — who had been an ensign during the war — outlined a watch schedule for every man in Finley Hall on a rotating basis throughout the nights to follow. Norman loved the idea, and he devised an intricate alarm system, with each man in the building assigned a post to which he would hurry should our lookout sound the call.
We put the schedule into effect the following night.
There were twenty-two men living in Finley Hall at the time, five on each floor, and two on the ground-floor landing. We exempted from watch Peter, the dental student, because he was studying for exams — he was, it seemed to me, always studying for exams — and also a man named Mike on the second floor because he was holding a nighttime job as well as attending classes during the day. That left twenty men among whom to divide the ten P.M. to six A.M. watch schedule. We decided that a two-hour watch would be long enough for men who were expected to be bright and attentive the next morning. With twenty men available, this meant that each of us would stand watch once every five days. Actually I only got to stand two watches, one from midnight to two A.M., and the other from two A.M. to four A.M., before we called the whole thing off.
We never did catch our intruder; I’m not sure we were trying very hard. Besides, word of our vigilance spread all over the island, and our man would have been a fool to pay a return visit. But Jason’s idea was a rewarding one nonetheless. We had all been subjected either to watches or guard duty during our time in the service, but this was somehow different. It was October, and not too cold, and there was something almost pioneerlike about setting the alarm and waking in the middle of the night, touching Joan’s warm shoulder where she lay asleep in the sofa bed, and then going up to the roof where Norman was waiting to be relieved. Each night Mary provided a thermos of hot coffee for the men standing watch. Norman would hand over the flashlight, and I would pour myself a cup and then lean against the parapet wall, alone, looking up at the stars or out over the river. There was a lot of sky over North Brother Island. The stars were sharp and bright against it; the air was crisp. The factories on the mainland burned with activity all night, their long stacks sending up pillars of gray smoke tinted with the glow of neon. The prison on Riker’s Island was dark except for probing fingers of light that occasionally pierced the blackness. There was hardly any river traffic, no hooting of tugs, no pounding diesels. Out on the dark water you could hear only the solemn gonging of the buoy marking South Brother Island and beneath that, if you listened very carefully, the gentle hiss of waves slipping almost soundlessly against the walls of the island.
I thought a lot of things alone on the roof of Finley Hall. I wondered about the future and about what was in store for Joan and me and our newborn son. I thought ahead to graduation; I thought of our canceled Paris sojourn, perhaps lost to us forever. I thought a lot about marriage and about what my responsibilities were supposed to be. The night encouraged speculation. I was twenty-one years old, and the world lay ahead of me, and I searched the darkness for answers it could not and did not contain.
That was in October.
In December, Herbie and Shirley and their two children moved into the building. I must describe them now as they first seemed to me and not as I came to see them later, after New Year’s Eve. They were, to begin with, much older than most of the people on the island. Herbie was perhaps thirty-eight, and his wife was at least thirty-five. We were not still young enough to believe that anyone past thirty was middle-aged, but Herbie and Shirley were certainly beyond us in years, and this made them strangers to us. Then, too, they were from someplace in the Middle West; he had chosen to be discharged in New York City so that he could go to television school there before going back home with his family. So, in addition to their age, they spoke with an accent that was unfamiliar to most of us and grating on the ears. But, most important, Herbie and Shirley were not attractive people. He was short and stout and always seemed to have a beard stubble, even immediately after he had shaved. He was nearsighted and wore thick spectacles that magnified his eyes to almost Martian proportions. He was balding at the back of his head, unevenly, so that he always seemed in need of a haircut. He wore brown shoes with a blue suit, and he moved with a lumbering, ponderous gait that seemed designed to infuriate speedier people. His wife seemed to be a perfect soul mate. She called him “Herbert,” and she looked at him with adoring eyes that were a pale, washed-out blue in a shapeless plain face. She had borne two children and apparently never bothered with post-natal exercises; her figure, like her face, was shapeless, and she draped it with clothes in the poorest taste. She made only one concession to beauty, and that was in the form of a home bleach job on her hair, which left it looking like lifeless straw. Watching them walk to the ferry together was like watching a comic vaudeville routine. You always expected one or the other of them to take a pratfall, and when neither did, it only heightened their comic effect.
The walls on North Brother Island were hastily erected and paper-thin; Herbie and his wife lived in the apartment immediately next door to ours. It was impossible not to hear them in the middle of the night.
“Herbert,” she would say, “do you think I’m beautiful?”
“I think you’re very beautiful,” Herbie would answer in his thick Midwestern voice.
“Do you think I have a good figure?”
“I think you have a beautiful figure, Shirley.”
There would be a pause. Joan and I would lie motionless on our sofa bed. The night was still.
“Herbert, do you love me?”
“I love you, darling. I love you.”
Joan got out of bed one night and whispered, “I don’t want to listen. Please, do we have to listen?”
“Honey, what can we do?” I whispered back.
“I don’t know. I’m going into Timmy’s room. I don’t want to listen. I think...” She shook her head. “It makes me feel that maybe we sound that way, too.”