I went down to the solarium and was just sitting at the little table by the windows when my friend Elaine poked her head in. She looked tired, and, I thought, unwell. She’d combed her hair out but was still in her robe. We old sweeties don’t stand much on ceremony; for the most part, we can’t afford to.
“I won’t disturb you,” she said, “I see you’re getting set to write-”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ve got more time than Carter’s got liver pills. Come on in.”
She did, but stood by the door. “It’s just that I couldn’t sleep – again – and happened to be looking out my window a little earlier … and …”
“And you saw Mr. Dolan and me having our pleasant little chat,” I said. I hoped seeing was all she’d done; that her window had been closed and she hadn’t heard me whining to be let go.
“It didn’t look pleasant and it didn’t look friendly,” she said. “Paul, that Mr. Dolan’s been asking around about you. He asked me about you – last week, this was. I didn’t think much about it then, just that he’s got himself a nasty long nose for other people’s business, but now I wonder.”
“Asking about me?” I hoped I didn’t sound as uneasy as I felt. “Asking what?”
“Where you go walking, for one thing. And why you go walking.”
I tried to laugh. “There’s a man who doesn’t believe in exercise, that much is clear.”
“He thinks you’ve got a secret.” She paused. “So do I.”
I opened my mouth – to say what, I don’t know – but Elaine raised one of her gnarled but oddly beautiful hands before I could get a single word out. “If you do, I don’t want to know what it is, Paul. Your business is your business. I was raised to think that way, but not everyone was. Be careful. That’s all I want to tell you. And now I’ll let you alone to do your work.”
She turned to go, but before she could get out the door, I called her name. She turned back, eyes questioning.
“When I finish what I’m writing-” I began, then shook my head a little. That was wrong. “If I finish what I’m writing, would you read it?”
She seemed to consider, then gave me the sort of smile a man could easily fall in love with, even a man as old as me. “That would be my honor.”
“You’d better wait until you read it before you talk about honor,” I said, and it was Delacroix’s death I was thinking of.
“I’ll read it, though,” she said. “Every word. I promise. But you have to finish writing it, first.”
She left me to it, but it was a long time before I wrote anything. I sat staring out the windows for almost an hour, tapping my pen against the side of the table, watching the gray day brighten a little at a time, thinking about Brad Dolan, who calls me Paulie and never tires of jokes about chinks and slopes and spicks and micks, thinking about what Elaine Connelly had said. He thinks you’ve got a secret. So do I.
And maybe I do. Yes, maybe I do. And of course Brad Dolan wants it. Not because he thinks it’s important (and it’s not, I guess, except to me), but because he doesn’t think very old men like myself should have secrets. No taking the ponchos off the hook outside the kitchen; no secrets, either. No getting the idea that the likes of us are still human. And why shouldn’t we be allowed such an idea? He doesn’t know. And in that, too, he is like Percy.
So my thoughts, like a river that takes an oxbow turn, finally led back to where they had been when Brad Dolan reached out from beneath the kitchen eave and grabbed my wrist: to Percy, mean-spirited Percy Wetmore, and how he had taken his revenge on the man who had laughed at him. Delacroix had been throwing the colored spool he had – the one Mr. Jingles would fetch – and it bounced out of the cell and into the corridor. That was all it took; Percy saw his chance.