I sat up on the bed, looking out of the window at the kids playing in the yard, bundled up in their little faded anoraks and gloves. Two boys swung strenuously back and forth on the swings while a toddler ran from one to the other waving a plastic shovel and whimpering for a turn. A small girl slid down the slide, then ran back to the steps to climb up and slide down again. She did this again and then again, with a grim intentness; running off from the bottom of the slide back to the steps without a smile or a moment’s pause to savor the pleasure of the descent. A woman in a suede coat stood watching her, puffing on a cigarette with the same intent, joyless hunger. The toddler, exasperated, hit one of the boys on the swings with his plastic shovel. The boy casually kicked him in the face, sending him sprawling in the mud, where he sat looking dazed.
I lay back down on the bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to the pipes clank in the wall until Josephine knocked on the door and led me down to dinner.
We ate at two large tables, mothers, children and singles all mixed together. The meal was simple and wholesome, and for several minutes the conversation consisted solely of appreciative remarks addressed to the two women who’d prepared it. When one of them began trying to avert the praise, saying her pasta dish had come out too dry, Sister Cathy, the shelter director, gently reproved her:
‘Chantal, do you think it really is too dry?’
The woman looked at her uncertainly a moment, then broke into a grin.
‘No – you right Sister Cathy. It’s perfect and I’m proud of it. So now would you all shut up and eat!’
Everyone laughed, and the room filled with the voices of women and small children. I sat quietly, smiling and nodding, eating my food with what I hoped was a plausibly feminine grace. My neighbors were friendly without being overbearing or inquisitive; the rule seemed to be that if you wanted to talk, you would volunteer something about yourself, but not ask questions or get into exchanges beyond the response of an affirming murmur or nod.
Sister Cathy sat at the head of my table, the other end from me. She was a broad-shouldered woman in her thirties, wearing a flowing crimson dress. Though not immediately or conventionally attractive, her appearance was of a kind that drew your gaze powerfully in her direction. Her eyes were blue and piercing. Her dark hair shone in thick burnished waves under the electric light. Her mouth was firm but not tight; full-lipped in a way that suggested a developed, disciplined sensuality. I was careful to stop myself glancing at her more often than would have seemed natural.
After dinner Josephine led the children upstairs while the rest of us went into the living room and sat on the sofas and chairs with mugs of herbal tea. Sister Cathy closed the shades and lit candles and incense sticks. I watched her circle the room, spreading the warm yellow light from candle to candle. There was more than a hint of fleshiness about her shoulders and waist, but she had a dignified, almost regal carriage, and gave the impression that it suited some queenly purpose of her own to carry a certain superfluous bulk through the world.
As she sat down, we all linked hands and sat in silence for a moment.
I was on a sofa next to a young woman in a seventies-style denim coat with wide, fleece lapels. She had a choker tattooed around her neck. She gave me an ingratiating smile and whispered that her name was Trixie. In the chair on the other side of me a large, weary-looking woman was nursing a somber little baby. Above the hand she extended to me was a splint running the length of her forearm. I squeezed the hand as gently as I could.
I remember the hyperalert state I found myself in when I realised the women were going to be telling stories about themselves: I felt suddenly that I was being offered an unexpected opportunity here, and that I needed to be especially attentive. I remember the magnetic, statuesque presence of Sister Cathy on her wooden chair, her dress hanging in crescents over her knees, her broad face golden-looking in the trembling candleflames. And I remember the women. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen of them, yet in recollection the incense-filled room seems to swell and overflow, as though it had been populated by the wounded souls of half of womankind. They spoke in turn; some tearfully, some in dry-eyed detachment, some offering up only brief moments of their lives, others giving detailed accounts of entire relationships. There were poems, stories, anecdotes, abstract musings. After each woman spoke, there was an interval for discussion, comment, or in many cases merely sympathetic hugs.
Difficult as it was not to become overwhelmed by the sheer pain circulating around the room, I tried to stay focused; to reserve my attention only for things that might constitute clues relating to my particular quarry.
I caught a scent of him with the very first speaker, a thin woman with a cane, who offered a wryly told story involving an ex-husband not paying child support, a Green Card marriage proposal from a would-be immigrant, a financial arrangement that had ‘blurred at the edges’, an attempt to ‘back away’, an eruption of insanely possessive jealousy, violent assaults, and a final dramatic escape through the window of a Brooklyn apartment when the man came crashing through the door. Trumilcik, I had thought, picturing the maniacal figure I had glimpsed in the basement theater, bursting through this woman’s apartment door. But a little later an equally plausible version of my antagonist, this time in his philanderer’s guise, seemed conjured before me by a woman who read a comic doggerel ballad about a ‘cheat ’n’ beat’ husband whose idea of marriage was to send his wife out to work cleaning houses, while he blew her wages picking up women in clubs and bars.
One time the crazy bitch complains
And gets her nose broke for her pains…
‘That’s a powerful way to take possession of our anger, isn’t it?’ Sister Cathy said, ‘turning it into laughter?’
But no sooner had I made up my mind to get into conversation with this woman after the meeting was over, than another resident, frail-looking, with wide, watery blue eyes, stood up and delivered an incantation entitled ‘Naming the Weapons’ where, in a tremulous monotone, she cataloged the occasions of her boyfriend’s outbursts of violence, and the weapon used in each attack. Morning, October, began one of the entries, after I telephone to my sister Jean in Poughkeepsie, the one he knows she wants me to leave him. Weapon of choice: metal bar. And immediately I seemed to glimpse my quarry again…
Too many clues… The last thing I had expected! It was more bewildering than having none at all. I began to feel as though the various aspects comprising my picture of Trumilcik had been distributed piecemeal about that room. A familiar redolence of dereliction wafted up from the fitfully coherent reminiscence of a scarlet-faced woman, formerly homeless, who had been stalked by a homeless man she’d met at a mixed shelter in Rockland County… Then an educated, timid-voiced Asian woman spoke of her misbegotten alliance with a man who had seemed the soul of gentleness and civility, a college professor no less, until he lost his job, started drinking, and took to kicking and punching her of an evening, until she was hospitalised with three broken ribs and a fractured pelvis, and once again I found myself thinking, Trumilcik…
‘What about you, Marlene?’ Sister Cathy asked me, as my own turn came around. ‘Is there something you’d like to share with us?’
I remembered my ‘plaindealing’ moment with Mr Kurwen, and for an instant I imagined how similarly large-spirited it would make me feel to stand up, reveal myself for the man I was, beg their pardons for intruding on them in this way, and ask outright if any of them knew a character by the name of Bogomil Trumilcik.