In the morning, back alone in the apartment, he is woken by his grandfather.
Walker has prepared a towel and shaving soap and a straight-blade razor on the bathroom counter. Laid them all out neatly in a row, even heated extra water on the stove. Walker’s gray beard has grown too long, he says; he hates the way he can grab the ends of his mustache between his teeth. He has begun to find pieces of food dried in there, and he dislikes catching a glance of himself in the mirror.
Clarence Nathan follows his grandfather. Early morning shadows lie on the floor. When the men push open the bathroom door — the lock is broken — Louisa is sitting on the toilet seat, bent over. At first all they notice is a hunched body, but then she raises her head slowly and they see that her skirt is lifted and she is ferreting around her thighs for a new place into which to shove a needle.
“Get out of here!” she shouts.
Walker bangs a half-open fist against the wall. “What the hell y’all think you’re doing, woman?”
She looks up and shoves the needle in quickly. Clarence Nathan shivers at the sight of his mother’s tired pubic hair peeping out from her white underpants.
“I swear it’s my last one, I swear it’s the last.”
She stands and pulls at the hem of her skirt, rubs a shirtsleeve over her eyes. She looks straight in the old man’s eyes as she passes him.
Walker sighs and bends over the handbasin and washes his hands even though they’re already clean. Sitting on a stool in front of the bathroom mirror, he says, over and over again in a mantra, “Lord.”
His grandson takes off most of the beard with the scissors first, fingers trembling. Walker can feel the heat of the morning lying down inside his saggy cheeks, then diving further inside him — even his lungs and heart feel as if they are sweating in the disappearing landscape of his body. At the edge of the horizon, he can see a catastrophic gale heading his way: dark winds and a contagion of rain. The forecast speaks to him in his knees and shoulders and elbows. The way of weather. He feels there is not long left. Surrendering will not be difficult. Let it rain, he thinks, as water and lather slip over his cheeks. Let it pour on down. In recent months Walker has given up the trips to the doctor. Pain is his companion. He would be surprised — even lonely — if it left him. It has gathered around him for so many years, donated a necessary order to the hours, to the routine, to the watching of the street. He thinks of Eleanor, the way she once lifted her nightdress by a different bathroom sink.
A small, rude smile appears at the edge of his lips as the beard falls away.
Tiny moments flit back into Walker’s mind. He lingers on the rim of these memories. He has begun to say prayers again, long convoluted rhythms, though he’s not quite sure if he’s talking to himself or not. He recalls the prayer he didn’t quite speak in the tunnel, in 1917, that moment of silence before the boys began to throw candles. He can reach out his tongue and almost taste it.
The razor is high around his gray sideburns.
“Say, son.”
“Yessir?”
“I heard some rumblings on the roof last night,” says Walker. “Sounded like someone jumping around.”
Clarence Nathan feels his cheeks flush, but his grandfather laughs long and hard.
“That’s a nice girl. Whatshername?”
“Dancesca.”
“Yeah, now, she’s a catch.”
Embarrassed, Clarence Nathan’s hands shake and he lets the razor slip and a tiny nick appears near his grandfather’s ear. He wipes the remaining soap off the old man’s face and dabs at the cut with the towel, watches the cotton soak up the blood.
“Hold on to her,” says Walker.
Clarence Nathan tears off a piece of newspaper, licks it, and puts it against the old man’s cut, where it dries and stays. The blood darkens the paper.
“Sorry I cut you.”
“Can’t feel a thing,” says Walker. Looking at his reflection in the window, he says, “Nathan Walker, you are still so goddamn handsome!”
Chuckling, he turns to Clarence Nathan.
“Let’s you and me go enjoy the day. Just a quick walk.”
“Yessir.”
“I’ve got something to tell ya.”
“Yessir.”
The streets seem split open with sunlight, widened by heat. Walker and his grandson cross the avenues westward and up the hill toward Riverside Drive. Walker feels the silver cross flip at his neck, and the cool side lies against his skin.
As he walks, he looks sideways at Clarence Nathan. The young man wears a dashiki. A red-green-yellow hat perched on his head. Flared green trousers. A harmonica — a present from Walker — dents one pants pocket. Clarence Nathan has gone over the lip into late adolescence: muscles rumbling under the shirt, his Adam’s apple big and prominent, a familiar swagger to the shoulders. The boy has been trying to cultivate an Afro, but mostly his hair falls quickly out of it, lying lank and black down to his collarbone.
They sit on a park bench at the rear of Grant’s Tomb and look down through the trees along the bluff to the river flowing below. The teenager perches on the high back of the bench. Walker lifts up the flap of his tobacco pouch, puts his nose down close to the bag, drags the scent down, raises his face to the air.
“Feels clean, don’t it?”
“Sir?”
“The day, it feels clean.”
“Yessir.”
“Whatshername again? That girl?”
“Dancesca.”
“Hang on to her. Did I tell ya that already?”
“Yessir, you did.”
After a long silence, Clarence Nathan says, “They let me go up yesterday to the forty-third floor. With the ironworkers. You can see the rivers for miles: the East, the Hudson. When it’s not hazy.”
“Y’all making money at this job?”
“Yessir. A little.”
“Saving it up?”
“Yeah, yeah, ’course.”
“What ya spending the rest on?”
“Bits ’n’ pieces.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk about.”
“What?”
“There’s two types of freedom, son. The freedom to do what ya want and the freedom to do what ya should.” And then Walker says, “Y’all’re buying your momma’s dope, right?”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t lie to me, son. Y’all’re buying her smack. I know. Ya know how I feel about lying.”
“I never bought any drugs, never.”
“Then y’all’re giving her money.”
Clarence Nathan says nothing.
“Don’t be giving her any more money.”
The teenager lowers his head. “Yessir.”
“I mean it. Promise me that.”
“Yessir,” he says.
“If ya don’t stop, there’ll be no telling what happens to her. It’s the right thing to do.”
“I know it is.”
“Ya know what she did? She took out all the keys from the piano. I lifted the lid the other day, and they were all gone.”
“Sir?”
“I guess she thought they were pure ivory. I guess she thought she could soak ’em. They got ivory tops, but the rest of them is wooden. They ain’t worth diddly squat.”
Clarence Nathan stares at his fingers.
“Listen up, son,” says Walker. He coughs and wipes a dribble of spittle from his chin. “Did I ever tell ya about the first sub-aqua pitch in the history of the world?”