The Auerbach Will Read Online Free PDF Page B

from their storage places, and the men from Woodruff & Jones will come, and the freight elevators will fill with new trees and shrubs and flowering plants and ivies. The December night is clear and cold, and Essie has thrown a cashmere shawl over her shoulders, but the fresh air is tonic and the view from the twenty-ninth floor at the corner of Seventieth Street and Park Avenue where Essie lives has a certain splendor. Below her, the lights from the cars along the avenue crawl silently by, then stop while the light turns red, then crawl on again. Though there are no sounds from the streets, the air is filled with the city’s persistent hum which never goes away. Was it always like this? she asks herself. Was it always so awful, so much unkindness? Perhaps, if Jake were still alive, it could have been different, but only perhaps. If, by some magic, she could command him back, but no, the trouble is—the shameful, awful, secret thing is—that she doesn’t want Jake back. And of course much of what Joan said is true. Though she shouldn’t have said that about Josh not being a real member of the family, even though Josh has always been different, special.
    There would be stars on a night like this, if the lights of the city didn’t always manage to outdazzle them. Essie has often noticed how the lights from her terrace with its two views, the south and the west, are different, depending on which way one faces. The two views are like two parts of a symphony. To the south, downtown—the New York Central Building, the Empire State Building, the Pan Am Building and, at the farthest reach, the twin towers of the World Trade Center, none of which were there when she was a girl—the lights strike an aggressive, almost warlike chord: intense, full of furious enterprise, crackling with the fiery notes of money. To the west, across Central Park, through the bare branches of the trees, the residential lights of the West Side are softer, pinker, quieter. These strike more lyrical and modulated chords of domesticity and care and love. Oh, my city! Essie thinks, gripping at the half-wall of her terrace and looking at the contrasting rhythms of the lights.
    It was not so long ago—surely not nighty-nine years ago—and not that far away, where it all began. How many miles is it from here to Norfolk Street, to a place that now lies buried somewhere deep behind that strident Midtown skyline? Essie used to know how many city blocks there were to a mile, but it is not that many blocks, and even fewer miles. It is not so far, or so long ago, to where she came from. And now they are all waiting for her to go away.
    Norfolk Street—is that what a life comes round to at the end? A small circle, with the journey finished almost within sight of where it started? Essie wonders suddenly whether the ghosts of her mother and her father still linger somewhere in the walls and stairwells of the old building, the way the scent of a man’s or woman’s presence will hang in the air long after he or she has left the room. All at once she can smell the smell of cabbage cooking, and the chocolatey smell of her mother’s fingers, and hear the sound of her father’s voice:
    â€œ Outlaw. Pariah. When you defy your parents, you defy the ground under your feet, the sky over your head. He who separates himself from his people buries himself in death. This is written in the Torah. ”
    â€œBut I was young, Papa, and I loved him, and I wanted to marry him!”
    Suddenly Essie realizes that she is not alone on the terrace.
    â€œMary! I thought you’d gone home hours ago.”
    â€œI had a feeling in my bones, Mrs. A, that things wouldn’t go so well tonight. I’m sorry.”
    â€œDid Karen leave?”
    â€œMr. Carter took her home.”
    â€œHe’s much too young for her. That’s the trouble.”
    Mary touches Essie’s hand, very lightly, where it rests on the half-wall.