Page 71 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“I never thought it was Smith.”
Of course he hadn’t. Of course Patrick took for granted that the man he was feeding and housing and taking care of was using an alias for perfectly good reasons. He remembers that man downtown, how Patrick hadn’t cared in the least that he’d had a knife.
“I thought I was lying low when I came here.”
“Is Nathaniel your real first name?” Patrick asks, instead of asking who Nathaniel thought he was hiding from.
“Yes.”
“You did a shitty job of lying low,” Patrick says.
They manage to get lost on the way back to the subway station. “We should have brought the map,” Nathaniel says.
“We should have brought the map,” Patrick agrees.
They pass an old stone church they definitely didn’t see on the way to the cemetery. Churches are scattered all over the city, most of them wedged unceremoniously between other buildings, across the street from dry cleaners and barber shops, or attached to the side of a school. This one’s all by itself, severe and monumental, two stories high with a white bell tower that doubles its height. In the back there’s a cemetery with sunken, crooked gravestones.
Nathaniel isn’t sure which one of them slowed down first, but now they’re standing still on the cracked sidewalk, the church looming over them.
“Never really went in for that,” Patrick says easily, like he’s talking about California wine or bowling leagues, something morally neutral, something optional.
Nathaniel did go in for it, or at least he tried—or at least he knew he was supposed to. He can’t untangle those threads anymore, can’t pull free the thread of truth from the entire skein of pretense, denial, and wishful thinking. But when he looks at the church, it feels like it’s looking back in disapproval, whichhas to mean some part of him thinks it’s real. Or maybe that’s just more mental shrapnel.
They finally find the subway station, but it isn’t rush hour, and this is a local stop, so they have to wait a while for a train. They sit on an uncomfortable wooden bench, no closer than two men ordinarily would. The station is hot and muggy, the only breeze coming from the occasional express train barreling through the station.
“You said you got divorced in 1962,” Patrick says, evidently having noticed the date on the gravestone.
“We split up in ‘61,” Nathaniel says. “A few days after the funeral, there was an emergency at work and I didn’t come home for a while.” It had been the lead-up to the Bay of Pigs. “Helen was justifiably unimpressed. The widower next door was very comforting and the rest is history. They’re married now, with two children.” This fact always makes him feel marginally less guilty about having married her in the first place. When she announced she was leaving him for another man, he’d been relieved. Marriage transformed Helen from a friend into a round-the-clock audience for his deception. He’d been suffocated. She’d been miserable.
“It was wrong of me to marry her.” Nathaniel stares straight ahead across the tracks at the ads on the far wall. “I knew—I should have known—” He nearly laughs, because how many of his sins can be covered byI should have known? “I almost took this away from her.” He gestures between himself and Patrick, but they’re close enough that his hand lands on Patrick’s arm. He doesn’t even know exactly whatthismeans. Wanting someone and being wanted back? Falling in love? “I was thirty. People were going to start to wonder.” Laying his reasoning out like that makes it sound exactly as bad as it should.
“That happens to a lot of us.”
“It didn’thappento me at all. It was a choice.”
“Still.”
What might be worse than Patrick learning about Nathaniel’s career and kicking him out might be Patrick learning about Nathaniel’s career and making excuses for him. Nathaniel didn’t know any better, Nathaniel was doing the best he could, Nathaniel couldn’t possibly have known what he was aiding and abetting due to an excess of patriotism and the fact that his father never loved him.
Nathaniel doesn’t think he could stand to hear it.
The truth is, he’d do the exact same thing for Patrick, if Patrick had any skeletons in his closet, and he doesn’t know if that’s yet another character flaw or something even more dangerous.
22
“I always forget how quickly the town empties out in August,” Patrick says when a sunny Friday comes and goes with only a handful of customers.
Nathaniel could tell him that something similar happens in every city, with people decamping for long weekends at their second homes or those of their richer friends. But New York in August is uniquely revolting. When the city permanently smells like garbage and the sidewalks never cool down, when the subways are unbearable and the lights flicker from too many air conditioners running at once, anyone who can find an excuse to get out of this city grabs it and flees.
The number of customers dwindles to a trickle. The Valdezes are in Puerto Rico, so the building is quiet, and will only get quieter when Susan takes Eleanor to visit her parents on Long Island.
Nathaniel goes upstairs to help Susan pack. She’s staring with grim determination at a suitcase that’s open on her bed. It’s the same one she arrived with in February, a tan leather Samsonite thoroughly defaced with travel stickers.
“You don’t have to go,” Nathaniel says, folding one of Eleanor’s little dresses and laying it in the suitcase.
“She’s their grandchild.”
“You still don’t have to.” Nathaniel doesn’t add that he doesn’t want them to go, because that’s selfish and also embarrassing, even though he’s sure Patrick feels the same way.
