Four Hundred and Thirteen

Gladys Trent took the bus out to Pell Avenue on a Sunday afternoon six weeks after the arrest, with the green notebook wrapped in a dish towel at the bottom of her shopping bag, and she did not once, in forty minutes, take her hand off the bag.

It was a gray day, with a low hard sky the color of a pot lid, and the seats were nearly empty. She sat by the window with her coat buttoned to the neck. She was sixty-one now; she had had a birthday a few weeks before, which she had spent behind the counter, and a cake that the cook had made, and a card signed by half the customers, and she had looked at the card for a long time and thought, he would have signed it. The bus rattled across the river, over the footbridge she could see from the window, and she did not look at that either. She had a method for the weeks since the television. She did not look at the places that she could not help.

She had meant to do it earlier.

That was the truth, and she had said it to herself on every one of those mornings, in the cold, unlit kitchen of her flat, with the kettle ticking. She had said, Sunday. I'll go Sunday. And then it had been the next Sunday. The police had come for the book in the second week, a young woman with a notebook of her own, who had been courteous and tired and taken photographs of every page and given her a receipt. The book had come back to her in a plastic sleeve with a number on it, a week after that. And she had put it in the drawer by the register, under the order pad, and gone about her work, and looked at the drawer at three in the afternoon and at eleven at night.

It was not hers. She knew that. She had known it on the night she took it. She had told herself, at the time, that she was keeping it safe, and she had been lying, and she had known that too. She had wanted it because she had nothing else of him. A boy had come into her diner for nine years and sat on the third stool and eaten a grilled cheese and a rye with mustard, and he had left, one night, and not come back, and she had a coffee can with the tips in it that she had never touched, and a book.

She got off at the stop by the hardware store, and stood on the pavement with the bag in both hands, and looked down the street.

…

It was a small house of yellow brick, with a porch and a plastic Santa still on the lawn, tilted, as if it had been blown by a long wind, and a wreath on the door gone brown at the edges. There was a light in the kitchen. Gladys went up the three steps and rang, and heard a chair scrape inside, and the chain being slid across, and the door opened about a hand's width on a small gray woman with glasses on a chain.

"Mrs. Kessler?"

"Yes?"

"I'm Gladys Trent. From the diner." She had not rehearsed it. She had told herself on the bus that she would know what to say when she saw the face, and she saw the face, and it was Daniel's: the long jaw, the heavy-lidded eyes, the sad sweet mouth that turned down a little at the corners, and she had a brief wild impulse to turn and run down the steps. "I'm the one who telephoned. That week. I'm the one you said he does this."

The woman looked at her for a moment without moving.

"Oh," she said. "Oh. You're the lady with the sandwich." She took off the chain. "Come in. Come in out of the cold. I've been meaning to write to you for weeks. I never found the words."

…

The kitchen was warm and cramped and smelled of onions. A radio was playing very low on the sill, an old station that did not announce itself, and a calico cat lay on the radiator with her chin on her paws and watched Gladys take a seat. Mrs. Kessler had put the kettle on. She moved about the narrow room with a worn quick shuffle, taking down cups, wiping her hands on her apron, and Gladys saw that her hands shook, and that she had not noticed.

"Ellen," she said, over her shoulder. "Please. It's Ellen."

"Gladys."

"I know." She put the cup down. "He used to say it. Gladys says. Gladys told me. On the phone, once a month, when I could catch him. I thought you were an old friend he was ashamed of. I had a picture of you. You had red hair."

"I did, once."

"I was very jealous," said Ellen Kessler, and smiled, and then her face broke, quite suddenly, in the middle of the smile, like a plate, and she turned and put both hands on the counter and stood there with her back to the room.

Gladys got up. She crossed the linoleum, and she put her arm around the narrow shoulders, and the other woman turned in against her without a word and wept, in the soundless dry painful way of a person who has done it alone for a long time. The cat on the radiator opened one eye. The radio played a waltz. Gladys stood in the warm kitchen with her chin on the gray head, holding the small shaking body, and thought: this is what I came for. She had not known it until now.

…

"I told you he does this," said Ellen.

They were sitting at the table. The tea had gone cold between them, and she was holding a crumpled tissue in her fist, and her eyes were red, and she spoke in a flat steady voice, looking at the oilcloth.

"I've thought about it every day. I said, he'll call when he's ready. I said, he's very private. I said it to a woman who was frightened for him. It was true. He did go quiet. He did it from when he was fourteen. I'd ask, Daniel, honey, what's wrong? and he'd say, nothing, Ma, and shut the door, and I told myself it was the age. And then it was the next age. And then it was the next." She smoothed the tissue on the cloth. "He was thirty-six. I thought, if I pushed, he'd go. I thought, if I asked him the wrong thing, he'd stop calling. So I asked him whether he had eaten."

Gladys said nothing.

"It was all I knew how to ask. It was the one thing that couldn't be wrong." She laughed, a sound like a cough. "Thirty-six years. Did you eat. Are you warm. Did you sleep. And all the time there was something he couldn't tell me and I knew what it was. I've known since he was sixteen. I found a magazine."

"Ellen—"

"I wasn't angry. I want you to know that. I was never angry. I wasn't even surprised. I only thought: he'll tell me when he's ready." She raised her eyes. They were enormous behind the glasses, brown and wet, her son's eyes. "And I waited. I waited twenty years. Do you see? I was so careful to wait for him to say it, that I never told him he didn't have to."

"He knew you loved him."

"He knew I worried. It isn't the same." She wiped her nose. "He called me that Thursday. The last one. Did they tell you? He rang me from somewhere, it was dark, I could hear the traffic. I said, did you eat? and he said he'd had a sandwich. And then he told me the sweater was nice." She stopped. "A sweater. I'd given it to him at Christmas, and he'd never said a word, and I thought he hated it. And he called to say it was the right color. And he said he loved me. He said I love you too, Ma. He'd never said it. And I went and made a cup of tea and sat at this table for an hour, so happy. Do you know what I thought? I thought, he's turned a corner."

She put down the tissue.

"It was a good-bye," she said. "Wasn't it. He was saying good-bye. And I was making tea."

…

Gladys reached into her shopping bag.

She had not intended to do it so soon. She had meant to say a long, careful, prepared speech about the weeks, and the police, and the plastic sleeve, and how she had taken it from the table because there was no one else. She drew out the dish towel. She laid it on the oilcloth between the two cold cups, and unfolded it, slowly, the corners one by one, and there lay the little green book with its worn cover and its rubber band.

"This was his," she said. "It was on his desk. I took it the night I called you. I shouldn't have. The police have photographed it, and they gave it back, and I think it ought to be yours."

Ellen Kessler did not move.

"It's the fourth," said Gladys. "There were three before. He kept them on the shelf in his room. They're with the police still, I think, with the discs. This is the one he was writing in."

"What is it?"

"Films."

"Films?"

"He wrote down every film he ever watched. The date, and the title, and what he thought, in one line, and then a grade. Four hundred and twelve of them." Gladys heard her voice go thin. "He showed it to me, once, at the counter. He was very shy about it. He said, Gladys, it's the only thing I'm good at. I said, what, watching? and he said, remembering."

Ellen put out a finger. She touched the cover, lightly, where it was rubbed pale at the corner by a thumb, the thumb of a man who held it every night. She slid the rubber band off. The book fell open, as books do, at the place where it had been last read.

Gladys had not looked again. She knew what was there. She had seen it on the table, in the cold, that night, and she had seen it in the police photograph, and she did not need to see it now. She watched the other woman's face as the eyes went down the page. Slowly. Down. 412. Night Chapel. Third viewing. Still the best opening in the genre. Grade: A−. And then the empty line. And then, below it, in the same small upright careful hand, the thing.

413. THIS ONE I WILL WATCH IN PERSON.

Ellen read it. She read it again.

"What does it mean?" she said in a very small voice.

"I think," said Gladys, "that he went to see a thing he'd only ever watched."

She had been rehearsing that sentence for weeks. It had been much better in her head. Now it lay on the table between them, bare and terrible, and she saw the other woman take it in, a word at a time, with her mouth slightly open, and with no sound at all.

…

It was dark by five.

Ellen had turned on the lamp over the stove, and put a pot of something on, and they sat on either side of the table with the book between them and the cat in Gladys's lap, where it had climbed uninvited. They had been reading. The two of them, in turns, aloud, from the front, the way you read a will. It was a quiet, strange, dreadful, funny hour. No. 7. Halloween. Age 8. Watched through the crack of the door while Ma was at work. Scary. Grade: B. No. 41. The Hollow. Better than the book. Ma took the popcorn away because it was past ten. Grade: A. No. 109. Skull Lake. Gladys says I should stop watching these. I said, I'm not afraid of them. She said, I know, honey. That's what worries me. Grade: C+, for the ending.

"He wrote about me," said Gladys.

"He wrote about both of us." Ellen wiped her eyes. "Look. Here. No. 190. Cry of the Hollow. Ma came to the apartment with a casserole and sat on the couch the whole time and never asked who the other pair of shoes belonged to. I didn't tell her. I think she knows. I think she's afraid that if she says it, it will become true. Grade: B." She put down the book. "There was nobody. The other shoes. I never saw them. I think he made them up, so that I would have something to not ask about."

"Maybe he wanted you to ask."

"Maybe he did."

They sat for a time without speaking. The soup began to hiss, and Ellen rose and went to the stove, and stood with her back to the room stirring it with a wooden spoon, once, twice, three times, slowly, and Gladys watched her and thought of the quiet cook in the other kitchen, and the seven turns, and wondered at the way in which it was always, in the end, soup.

"Gladys."

"Yes."

"I want to ask you one thing." The spoon had stopped. "And I want you to answer me honestly, the way you'd answer him. That Thursday. At the counter. You saw him last. Did he—" She turned. Her face in the lamplight was pinched and white and perfectly steady. "Did he eat?"

Gladys looked at her.

She saw the diner. She saw the gaunt pale boy on the third stool in the yellow light, in the white shirt that he had ironed himself and the gray sweater a little too big across the shoulders, chewing slowly, carefully, as one tastes a thing for the last time. She saw the plate. The rye, the mustard, the pickle on the side.

"Rye and mustard," she said. "A pickle. Coffee, black. Every bite, Ellen. He cleaned the plate. He ate it slowly, like it was a holiday. And when he'd finished he wiped his mouth and put a twenty on the counter and I wouldn't take it, and he said, Gladys, call it a tip, and I said, call your mother." She stopped. Her throat had closed. "And he did. He did that. He went out and called you."

Ellen Kessler stood quite still by the stove, with the spoon in her hand and the steam rising round her face.

"Then he ate," she said.

"He ate."

"Then that's something." She nodded, once, twice, and then more slowly, and set the spoon on the rest, and came back to the table, and sat down beside the other woman, so that their shoulders touched. She took the green book in both hands. She turned to the first page, the very first, where a child of nine had written in pencil, in letters that wandered uphill, a heading that had been underlined three times, and she put her thumb on it.

MY FILMS.

"I'd like you to stay for supper," said Ellen.

"I'd like that."

"There's plenty." She did not take her eyes off the page. "We can read the rest after. We've got four hundred and twelve to get through. I'd like to hear what he said about every one."

The cat purred. The radio played. And in the small bright kitchen on Pell Avenue the two women sat shoulder to shoulder over the green book, turning the pages, one after another, aloud, with the soup going on the stove, and the dark coming down outside, as if there were all the time in the world…