Halsey Street Read online

  Penelope picked up the sculptor’s plaid shirt from the floor, turned it over in her hands. She fingered the little white button still pinned to the pocket. She took off the button and slipped it inside her portfolio, along with her drawings. Penelope finished the two jam jars of gin and choked down a few aspirin from the nightstand to offset a hangover. She lay down with the blue-ink-and-white drawing of her father’s store still in her head. Before she drifted off, she saw the crack in the pavement deepening, wide enough for a man to fall in.

  The alarm went off too soon, and Penelope slapped the top of the clock. It didn’t quiet, and the boy beside her moaned. She heard him rustle, turn onto his side. She thought, He’s going to vomit all over my black beautiful floors, but she couldn’t move to bring him a bucket. Her ears and eyes were stuffed full of steel wool, her mouth too dry to speak. She slapped and slapped the alarm clock, until she realized it was her phone ringing. She forced her eyes open and saw the phone lit up on the nightstand. It was a call from a 718 number she didn’t recognize.

  Pop.

  Penelope sprang upright in bed, still woozy, but her thoughts suddenly, dreadfully clear. My father is dead, she thought. He has fallen down the stairs in that house again, and this time he’s dead.

  “Hello?” Penelope shouted into the phone. The green-eyed boy groaned, and Penelope swatted at him violently. She repeated into the phone, “Hello, hello?”

  A man on the other end asked for Penelope Grand, and when Penelope answered that she was Penelope Grand, the terrible anthem started beating in her head again—He’s dead, he’s dead, my father’s dead. It’s his birthday, and now he’s dead.

  “Are you the daughter of a man named Ralph?”

  The man’s voice was even and low, as if he had called to inquire about an overdue library book and not to announce an emergency.

  “Jesus Christ, what’s happened? Put my father on the phone.”

  “He’s pretty out of it right now. I have him here, on the corner of Franklin Avenue. He’s refusing to go to the hospital.”

  Penelope had not forgotten how it felt to receive a call like this, although it had been over a year since the last. That first phone call came rushing back to her, as if no time had passed at all. Ralph’s accident had happened yesterday, this morning, a few hours ago. He had never been safe. She had always been waiting for this second call. When she asked what was wrong, the man said Ralph had too much to drink and then took a fall. He was bleeding from the head.

  “Why are you calling me? He needs an ambulance.”

  “We found your number in his wallet.”

  Penelope began to curse.

  “Honestly, it doesn’t look like more than a scrape. He probably just needs to go home and sleep it off. Put some ice on that eye.”

  “But he’s bleeding.”

  “I only called because I noticed he can’t really walk. I’m the manager at the bar up the block—”

  “Sheckley’s?”

  “So you know where we are. I’ll stay with him until you get here.”

  Penelope told the manager she couldn’t pick Ralph up, and when he asked her why, the shame nearly swallowed her voice.

  “I’m far away,” she said.

  The manager started going on about how he couldn’t wait outside with Ralph all night. He had a business to run, had to get back to the bar, and the only reason he was being nice was because her father was so old and couldn’t walk right. Penelope pinched her thigh to keep herself from cursing at him. “I know someone who can help,” she said. “Stay where you are.”

  Penelope hung up and called Miss Beckett. She told her Ralph was bleeding outside Sheckley’s, and she had to go to him as fast as she could. She asked the old woman to call as soon as Ralph was back at home. Miss Beckett agreed and hung up in a panic. Penelope was left with nothing to do but wait.

  She thought briefly of crying, but told herself there wasn’t any need to—Ralph was fine. A head scrape, a hangover, a little blood. Nothing else.

  The green-eyed sculptor was sitting up in bed now, rubbing her back. He squinted at her in the dark, his short hair sticking straight up. He asked her if everything was all right, and he opened his arms for her. She rested against his lanky body, and he brushed his lips across her forehead, her shoulders. He made all the motions of a longtime lover, and it was nice to feel that he knew her, that they were steeling themselves for bad news they would bear together. It was beautiful, the vise of his arms, his measured breath, and she made a great effort to shut her eyes against the picture, forming and re-forming in her head, of her father, his face slashed open. The phone call had come and gone, and, still, he was alive. He was newly sixty-three.

  Penelope woke to the sun in her eyes. It was after six, and no one had called. Her alarm hadn’t gone off either. She rose from the bed, and the sculptor didn’t notice her slip away. She sat naked on the floor and dialed her father.

  “Good morning. Grand residence.”

  “Una, is that you? Where’s my father?”

  “Morning, Penelope. He’s fine. I gave him some tea and some bread last night, and the bleeding had nearly all stopped by the time I put him to bed. I don’t think he’ll be needing stitches. The worst part was getting him up those stairs. It wasn’t easy, I’ll tell you that.”

  “What happened?”

  The sky outside her windows was a cobalt blue and lightening. Penelope watched the exquisite change in colors while Miss Beckett told the whole story. It was a terrible film, unspooling in her head.

  “I came by before, like I said I would, to bring him dinner and make a pot of tea. He seemed a little sad, playing ‘Alabama’ and going on about how much he missed Lionel, how Lionel would never live to be sixty-three, how he wished he could go have a drink at Lionel’s bar. He talked about the times he used to go to Sheckley’s, with you and with your mother. How he used to have a family on days like this.

  “By the time I got to Sheckley’s, that manager was getting impatient. A mean-looking white boy, tattoos everywhere, on his neck and his hands. He said Ralph had been in there for hours, just drinking and not saying a word, until he got up and they could see the kind of trouble he has—that he was unsteady on his feet, and it wasn’t just the beers. So they went with him to make sure he got outside all right. Something about liability—they didn’t want him to fall inside the bar. And when they got to the curb, somehow they dropped him, and Ralph still had the bottle in his hand.”

  “You should have taken him to the hospital.”

  Miss Beckett snorted. “Force Ralph Grand to do something he doesn’t want to do? Impossible, and you know it.”

  “Put him on the phone. I’ll convince him.”

  “He’s fine now, Penny.”

  “You promised you’d call as soon as you got him home.”

  “Call you for what? Hmm? What were you going to do from all the way out there?”

  “He’s my father. You should have told me whether he was all right.”

  “I had my hands full with him! He might be all skinny now, but he’s still a grown man. I had to get him up the stairs and change his clothes and get him in the bed all by myself! I thought my strength was going to go out on me, that we were both going to fall down those stairs and die, and here you are, telling me I should have called—”

  “All right, all right. That’s enough,” Penelope said. The women sat in silence on the line. “Will he have a scar?”

  Ralph already had a crisscross of scars along his spine from the surgery after his first fall, but no one could see those. He wouldn’t be able to hide a scar on his face, not even from himself.

  Miss Beckett sighed. “I’ll take a look when he gets up.”

  Penelope tried to imagine the chronology of the night, what she had been doing while her father was gearing up for another fall. She sat down in the armchair at the Anchor; Ralph sipped the last of his tea with rum in the living room. The green-eyed boy squatted beside her; Ralph lifted the needle o
ff a record, squirmed into his coat. She and the green-eyed boy walked up the Slopes; Ralph tumbled into a car that would take him to Sheckley’s. She entered the loft; he entered the bar; she fucked the boy; he drained his beer; she drifted off to sleep; he smacked his head on the pavement; the bottle broke.

  Penelope thanked the old woman, and Miss Beckett huffed.

  “You know, this is the kind of thing that family usually does.”

  “I’m grateful, Una. Just let me know, will you, if he needs anything else?”

  “You know what he needs.”

  “I have my life here.”

  “Everybody’s got a life someplace else! You’ve got yours there, your mother has hers wherever she is. Everybody’s got a life, it seems, except your daddy!”

  Miss Beckett hung up, and Penelope sat motionless on the floor, her bare legs and bottom cold, her breath short. She was used to the old woman’s meddling but not her anger. But Ralph had never been injured and alone—the first time he fell, her mother, Mirella, had been there.

  Penelope had received that first call at the bar, just over a year ago. Her boss said someone was on the line from New York. It was her father’s old friend, Freddie Elias. Dr. Elias told her about the fall and calmly recounted Ralph’s injuries—broken fingers, knuckles, an eye-socket fracture, a bruised hip, likely concussion, and a few slipped discs in his spine, but he was fine. Penelope made it to the break room before her feet went out from under her, and Una and Freddie had done their best to calm her down from where they were. Freddie had even suggested putting Mirella on the phone, although he knew they hadn’t spoken in years, not since Penelope left for Pittsburgh. Penelope had shouted that no, she didn’t want to speak to Mirella, especially not now, not ever again. She had hung up, resolved to call back when her father was awake.

  She had told herself that if her mother weren’t there, she would have flown to see Ralph, but then Mirella left for good, and still Penelope couldn’t bring herself to fly back. Instead she called every day and sent flowers and chocolates. When Ralph was out of his temporary wheelchair, she flew him out to Pittsburgh and saw with her own two eyes that he had survived one disaster and then another. The sight of him sealed up some of the guilt inside her. She kept flying him out, whenever she could afford a ticket, and Ralph looked a little feebler every time but never as awful as that first time, when his back was hunched and his fingers gnarled, and he was quieter, as if the fall had cleared away a part of his brain, too. He had recovered, and it was Miss Beckett who gave her reasons to worry—she called to say Ralph was moody, or Ralph was crying, or getting thinner, or Ralph was stuck inside because there was no one to shovel ice off the stoop. Her father never told her these things himself, but she had assumed he was safe, even if he had lost things. A person could live with misery.

  But now Penelope could see his blood; she could picture blood crusted onto Ralph’s forehead. An idea she had managed to submerge since that first accident began to rise up in her; it settled on the rim of her conscience: her father could die while she was away.

  Penelope stood, her head still clogged from the drinks, and she found her clothes. She dressed again in her fake leather skirt and brown boots, her T-shirt the faded color of wine. The sculptor was still asleep, and she couldn’t remember his name, so she called him, “Hey, hey.” She shook him awake. He smiled at her, as if she were rousing him for another round.

  She handed him his shirt and his underwear, said there had been a family emergency and she had to fly home.

  “I thought you were from here,” he said. “A steel girl through and through?”

  “I’m not,” Penelope said. “You need to leave.”

  He stood to dress, and Penelope started to strip the sheets off the bed. She would need to buy boxes. Her boss wouldn’t be awake for a few hours, but she would call him then and let him know she was quitting, but that she’d need at least two weeks of double shifts to make enough for the move. The grad-boy quietly lifted Penelope’s phone off the floor and tapped in his number.

  He interrupted her rolling things up and tossing them in piles to give her a hug. He kissed her on the cheek and breathed in her ear, but it didn’t charm her. They said good-bye and he lingered in the doorway, as if he were afraid to leave her. She ignored him and flashed around the apartment. She closed her easel, carried the empty jam jars to the sink, lifted out a mass of dried gym clothes from the machine. These were the many things that had kept her away from Ralph, these petty, little loads.

  The grad-boy asked her whether she really had to leave so soon, and Penelope laughed.

  “Why should I stay any longer?” she said. “To go another round with you?”

  He blinked hard, as if she had struck him, and Penelope saw then that his eyes weren’t green at all—they were brown, like hers, the color of rosewood. She turned away, back into the apartment. She didn’t owe him anything.

  “Where is home anyway?” he asked, as if the more kindly he spoke to her, the greater his chance at making her stay.

  Penelope didn’t look up when she answered. “Bed-Stuy.”

  2

  HOMECOMING

  Penelope arrived in Brooklyn on a Sunday morning. She went straight from the airport to the room she was renting on Greene Avenue, a few blocks from her father’s house. The mustard-yellow brownstone was in better repair than her father’s house had ever been. Vines fell delicately over the edges of the concrete window boxes; potted mums lined either side of the stoop. None of the original sandstone was visible through the brilliant yellow paint, unlike the other houses on the block, which stood in grim shades of brown.

  The landlady was waiting for her on the stoop like a picture out of a catalogue. She had pale blond hair, lifting in the morning breeze, and she wore a black-and-white polka-dot dress with a collar, a pair of little red sandals with a heel. She was round faced and pretty, a white woman who smelled of perfume and an air-conditioned summer.

  “I’m Samantha,” she said. “Welcome.”

  Penelope had guessed she would be much older, since she was already married, a lawyer, the owner of this house, but she didn’t seem very far from her in age. The women shook hands, and Samantha unlocked the door behind her, the knob and then the deadbolt. Penelope thought it unusual that she had turned all the locks since she had been standing right on the stoop.

  The layout of the first floor was exactly the same as her father’s house, but the interior of the house was immaculate. As Samantha led her up the stairs, she pointed out the original nineteenth-century medallions on the ceiling, the refinished, cream-colored moldings.

  “The houses where I grew up in California are hardly ever this beautiful. The designs are so garish and cold. But there’s so much history in these brownstones. It must have been a magical place to grow up.”

  Penelope nodded at her, certain there had been no magic in her growing up. She followed the landlady across the polished floors and empty landings. Every door was shut on every floor, until they reached the attic, which looked as if it were the point of a cathedral, expansive and light-filled for a single room, its walls forming a peak at the ceiling. Her boxes had arrived, and they were stacked neatly beneath the only window in the attic, a porthole, rimmed with white wood, large enough to offer a clear view of the street below. It was the picture of the window that had made her bookmark the ad, call, and say she wanted the place. It wasn’t as much light as her Pittsburgh studio, but it would do, and the price was decent, a bit less than the other rooms she had seen online. Penelope wondered now why they had been willing to rent the room for under market value. Maybe they had paid for the house in cash and didn’t need the money at all; maybe they wanted to imagine themselves magnanimous for renting to someone like Penelope; maybe they had plans to hike up the rent later. Penelope decided to ask why they had searched for a tenant.

  “It’s a little embarrassing,” the landlady said. “But our daughter’s convinced a ghost lives up here. We thought having a rea
l person in the attic would make her less afraid. And you sounded just perfect—you’re a schoolteacher, aren’t you?”

  Penelope mmhmmed. On the phone it had seemed a better idea to mention the substitute teaching than the bartending. She wasn’t sure yet what kind of white people Samantha and her husband would be. Penelope handed her a check for the first month’s rent, and the landlady gave her a ring of keys.

  “I forgot to mention that the pipes sometimes bang at night, but you must be used to that. These old houses.” Samantha smiled at her as if they were fast friends.

  The landlady said she was off to meet her husband and their daughter in the city. They were headed to a playground then brunch with another pair of parents they knew from law school. She wished Penelope a good day and left the attic, her heels hardly making a sound.

  Later, Penelope heard a car pull up to the front of the house. She looked out the window and saw Samantha climb into it, wearing sunglasses and carrying a red purse to match her shoes.

  Penelope set down her suitcase and pulled out her old radio, tuned it to the Motown station. She could have called her father, but she decided to unpack, to give herself time to work up the nerve to walk over to Halsey Street. She opened the window, lit a cigarette, and settled into the familiar late-August heat.

  She didn’t have much to arrange. She assembled a wooden breakfast table by the china sink, hung scarves from the wall to give the room some color: gold, sky blue, pine green. She plugged in a toaster and a hotpot for tea, lined her bottles of gin in a row underneath the table. The ad had explained she wouldn’t have access to the kitchen, which wasn’t a problem for Penelope since it had likely saved her money on rent. She could use the bathroom one flight below on the fourth floor, and she would have it all to herself. Surely, they had enough bathrooms for the three of them on all the other floors of the house.