This Old Man (8 page)

There was something about that elevator that killed friendly conversation. We were silent going down, too, except for Mr. Saxe's toying with the lock on his pitiful briefcase. Out on the street he looked harried. He avoided my eyes. “Well, that was even more successful than I thought it would be. I've got to dash. My five-thirty's waiting for me at the office. You know how to get home, don't you?” he asked vaguely. What if I had said no?

“Sure I do, I'm streetwise, remember?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You know what, Mr. Saxe?”

“What's that?” he asked, shoving his sleeve over his watch. I didn't know why he bothered, because the clock tower was striking the half hour. I guess he was trying to tell me to make it snappy.

“I say this with all due respect, Mr. Saxe. You're an S.O.B.”

He seemed startled for a second, as if he had been accused unjustly, but he'd been trained not to respond to personal insult from clients, so he just turned around and said, “I'm not sure I know where you're coming from just now, but we'll discuss your feelings in my office on Tuesday. Put them on hold, okay?” And he was gone.

Talk about feeling deflated. I walked in slow motion to the newsstand on the corner. The headlines were screaming things like
MASSACRE IN LEBANON
and 9.8%
UNEMPLOYMENT
and
FIRST AMERICAN WOMAN IN SPACE
. I looked over the magazines—the women's magazines, the diet magazines, the mechanics magazines, the science fiction magazines, the girlie magazines, the puzzle magazines, the decorating magazines, the
Pyychology Todays
and
Today's Healths
—and I picked out one called
Major League Baseball
. I decided I'd give myself two weeks to become the world's expert on the San Francisco Giants.

There we were on Tuesday in the same office, with the same moon-sized clock that clicked each time it advanced a minute. Mr. Saxe wasn't about to bring up the Incident on Sutter Street. He was waiting for me to do it.

“I was mad,” I blurted out.

“Would you like to expand on that?”

“Oh, I don't know, I guess I was just fed up with your patience and your monotone. Don't
you
ever get mad?”

“I try not to get mad here.”

“What self-control.”

“There was more to it than that, wasn't there? After all, you called me a particularly hard name.”

“Okay, you want to know?” Why not? He had promised he wouldn't get mad. “You made me sick groveling in front of that pig Quinn. What could he do to you, that you have to get down on your knees?”

“It's not what he could do to me, it's what he can do for you. For so many of my kids. He represents several corporations that are willing to hire, well, let us say, high-risk individuals. I need him.”

I wasn't satisfied. I was going for blood. “I think I'll drop by my mother's place tomorrow.”

“What?”

“You heard.”

He regained his composure fast. “You realize what the risk is in doing that, don't you?”

“Oh, yeah, sure.”

“I will not be responsible for what happens, if you disregard my advice.”

“Naw, I'm not going to hold you responsible.”

“Greta, I submit that you're just angry at Mr. Quinn, at me, I'm not sure at what all. But please, my dear, don't do anything foolish. Don't invite trouble.” The hand clicked toward the end of our hour.

“Our time has expired,” I said, imitating his tone exactly, down to his thick
s
's. Let
him
feel like a parking meter, for a change.

He gave me a heavy sigh. “Nothing is resolved; we've only opened wounds.” I almost felt sorry for him. He was so used to tying things into neat forty-five-minute packages, and this one was popping out all over.

“Listen, we'll work on it next time,” I assured him flippantly. I hoped I had succeeded in spoiling not only my session, but the next kid's, too. Maybe even his whole evening. All that was left was for Quinn to fall into a kettle of tar at the bottom of a manhole, and my day would be complete.

8

Darlene her family to go home to on weekends. I had this idea to go someplace to celebrate Darlene's homecoming.

Elizabeth nodded, dubiously. “I just don't know, girls.”

“Oh, come on, Elizabeth,” Jo pleaded. “You can trust us. And it's broad daylight, what could happen to us?” We all pleaded and begged and watched Elizabeth's face change as she nodded yes. I thought maybe she let us go so she and her boyfriend, Jeremy, could have a couple of hours alone together in the house.

We decided to go to Fisherman's Wharf and then possibly take the ferry out to Alcatraz. We rode the cable car past Chinatown. I hoped for the most unbelievable of coincidences—that Wing would get on and go with us to the Wharf. Of course, with thousands of people in Chinatown, and hundreds of Saturday tourists, I knew I wouldn't see Wing. He would have been embarrassed to come with us anyway, and if he had, I would have been constantly checking to see how he liked things. As Chinatown dropped behind us in our climb up Powell Street, I remembered that Wing often spent Saturday afternoons with Old Man. I pictured him in the musty hospital room, hearing poems, and I wondered if he ever had any fun.

The Wharf was packed with people. Some had obviously come to San Francisco believing it would be as sunny and warm as the southern California beaches, and now they huddled and shivered together in spring clothes.

Elizabeth had given us each two dollars from the house entertainment fund, plus we had a little pocket money. Mine I spent on a shrimp cocktail “to go.” I made the six or eight little shrimps in the delicious spicy tomato sauce last for half an hour, and then I sucked the life out of the plastic spoon.

Then we had a big decision to make. Should we go tour the battleship
Balclutha
, which was in dry dock, and see where all the horny sailors used to sleep? Or should we take the ferry out to Alcatraz Island and see where all the horny prisoners used to sleep?

“Those poor monks,” Jo cried. “And to think, they were only out there for murder and rape and aggravated assault.” We opted for murder and assault rather than the chaste high seas, so we bought our tickets for the ferry.

Alcatraz Island is twelve acres of solid rock a mile and a quarter out in the middle of San Francisco Bay. It used to be a federal prison site, and I'd grown up hearing Hackey's stories about daring escapes through the icy waters. He even knew someone who had made it, or at least told me he did. The prison was closed by the government when it got to be too expensive to run. After all, everything had to be brought in by boat, even the prisoners. Then some militant American Indians occupied it for a couple of years, until California got it back and made it a national monument. The ferry guide had a few other things to say about Alcatraz, but I didn't pay that much attention. The view around the boat captivated me. How awful it must have been for the prisoners to be on that bleak rock with the spectacular view of San Francisco, so close, but just out of reach. Maybe they'd rather have had no view at all than to be tantalized that way.

The bay was calm, gently rocking the ferry boat. Darlene seemed very uneasy and finally admitted she was “sort of scared of water.” We made a circle around her. Jo tucked Darlene's arm under her own. The wind off the bay blew carelessly, and our hair lashed our faces. Jo just stood up and defied the wind, which carried her cheap perfume away with it.

As we neared Alcatraz, I imagined how it must have been to be banished to that island and to have the unrelieved wind turning your skin to leather through the years. The rock was so forbidding and cold. I pulled my coat tighter and no longer wanted to see the murderers' cells.

“What?” Jo yelled into the wind. “Don't you want to see the toilets they shouted through to the cellblock downstairs?”

“No,” Sylvia said.

“I don't understand you,” Jo cried. “Aren't you interested in seeing the Hole? That's the solitary confinement cells. No light, no sound, no TV. Bread and water, that's it.”

“Who wants to see
that
?” Darlene said.

“I hear there's a display of all the homemade weapons the guards captured. Did you ever hear of a pig sticker?”

“What's a pig sticker?” Pammy asked.

Jo gave us a patronizing look. “That's prison slang for knife. I thought you guys would at least know that much.”

“How come you know so much about prisons?” I asked her.

Jo shrugged. “I read a lot. Like, I read about this guy who sliced through the bars of his cell with dental floss.”

“Dental floss? Sure!” said Sylvia. “How?”

“This guy, he dips the dental floss in cleanser, like Ajax, you know? And he wets it, and saws through the bars. I guess it took a long time.”

“I can't believe that,” Sylvia said.

“It's like your dentist says, floss every day.”

“Shut up, Jo,” Darlene said, not unkindly.

“You guys don't have any adventure in you. Don't you want to see where the Birdman of Alcatraz used to hang out?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Al Capone. How about Al Capone's cell?”

We stuffed the end of her poncho into her mouth and got back onto the ferry for the return trip. A few hearty tourists, probably people from Minnesota or Alaska, got off to tour the prison and wait for the next ferry, but not us.

The mile back to shore seemed longer and rockier, and Pammy was quite green. “If I have my baby at sea, what country is it a citizen of?”

We all laughed and then realized Pammy was absolutely serious.

“It's going to be a U.S. citizen,” Sylvia said, “no matter what.”

“Then it can get welfare?” This seemed to relieve Pammy's nausea.

“And you know what? It's going to be a beautiful kid,” I assured her. I felt a little like the proud father myself.

“Not only beautiful,” Pammy said quietly, “but it will be a boy.”

Ten Thousand Pieces of Gold, I thought.

“And he will look just like his father,” Pammy mused.

“My God, then pray, sisters,” Jo said, waving her arms like a tent preacher. “Pray that it gets some brains, if nothing else.”

When we got home Elizabeth was in a housecoat and was just finishing up her paper on British social agencies. Jeremy was nowhere in sight. Elizabeth said, “By the way, Greta, Mr. Saxe called.”

On Saturday? He never worked on Saturdays, and even on weekdays he never called me at home.

“Your mother's fine, if that's what you're worrying about,” Elizabeth assured me.

“Then why would he call on the weekend?”

“He didn't exactly call. I called him. I'll tell you what, we'll go upstairs, and you can call him back from my phone.” She whispered something to the other girls and led me up to her room. Things were tossed helter-skelter, but the phone was in the very center of her bed. I realized she'd planned all along to have me use her phone. She even dialed for me, then pretended to be busy cleaning out her desk drawer.

I did not expect a child to answer the phone; I didn't think Mr. Saxe was a father. So I almost hung up when the sweet voice asked, “Whossis?” Mr. Saxe was on in an instant.

“Greta, how are you, dear?” I heard the other extension in his house click. I imagined that the child had gone back to
The Muppet Show
. “Greta, I've had a call.”

I didn't have to ask who it was from. I already felt as cold as Alcatraz.

“Not directly from Hackey, but about him. There's nothing to worry about, but I just wanted you to know what's happening.”

“What's happening?” I asked, sounding like a computer.

“He saw you at the Chinese Hospital and asked a nurse about you. She didn't know you, but she gave him Wing's name. Next thing you know, he called Wing's father, who doesn't speak much English, I gather, so Wing got on. Hackey asked a lot of questions about where you were living and where you go to school.”

My jaw felt locked with cold: I could barely get out the words. “What did Wing tell him?”

“Nothing, nothing. The boy is smart. He got suspicious of this man calling out of the blue and asking a lot of personal questions. He told Hackey he hardly knew you. Right away Wing called Anza House to find out what was going on. You were out.”

“We went to Alcatraz.”

“Um-hmm. So he talked to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth called me, and now the story's gone full circle. Now don't worry.”

“No, I won't worry.” Worry? He could follow me home any time, and then what?

“The message is pretty clear—stay away from Chinese Hospital.”

I nodded, stupidly, as though Mr. Saxe could see me over the phone.

“Did you have a good time at the Wharf?”

I nodded again, squeezing the plastic coin purse in the pocket of my coat. “I bought a shrimp cocktail.”

“That's great, great!” he said, as though I'd just told him I'd won the national spelling bee. “Hang in there, Greta.”

I hung up.

“I can't go with you to the hospital anymore,” I told Wing.

He nodded. He accepted things too easily. “It's got something to do with that man who called me?”

I was afraid he'd ask questions I couldn't answer. We walked along Stockton Street, the dinner basket swinging between us. We passed the Chinese Elementary School, with its uninviting door open. Wing took me up the front steps to get a closer look at the gold dragons painted on the columns out front.

“See? The dragons are chasing their own tails,” Wing explained. Did he mean me? I counted three flights of stairs straight up inside the building before the first floor began. Children in a room somewhere upstairs were reciting nonsense sounds together in a sleepy rhythm, peppered from time to time by the teacher's high, straining voice.