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“Oh, go on,” she said. “I’m enjoying it.”

“So am I, Mrs. Hanson, but it’s four o’clock.”

She felt obliged to say something intelligent before he went off, but at the same time she didn’t want to show that she’d guessed the purpose of the experiment. “It’s a very unusual plot.”

Len bared small, stained teeth in a smile of agreement.

“I always say there’s nothing that can beat a good love story.”

And before she could add her little joke (“Except perhaps a bit of smut”), Len had chimed in with: “I’ll agree with that, Mrs. Hanson. Friday, then, at two o’clock?” In any case it was Shrimp’s joke.

Mrs. Hanson felt she hadn’t shown herself at all to advantage, but it was too late. Len was gathering himself together, his umbrella, his black book, talking steadily all the while. He even remembered the wet plaid cap she’d hung up on the hook to dry. Then he was gone.

Her heart swelled up inside her chest, hammering as though it had slipped gears, ker-whop! ker-wham! She went back to the sofa. The cushions at the end where Len had sat were still pressed down. Suddenly she could see the room as he must have seen it: linoleum so filthy you couldn’t see the patterns, windows caked, blinds broken, heaps of toys and piles of clothing and tangles of both everywhere. Then, as if to complete the devastation, Lottie came staggering out of her bedroom wrapped in a dirty sheet and reeking.

“Is there any milk?”

“Is there any milk!”

“Oh Mom. What’s wrong now?”

“Do you have to ask? Look at this place. It looks as if a bomb hit it.”

Lottie smiled a faint, mussed smile. “I was asleep. Did a bomb hit it?”

Poor silly Lotto, who could ever stay angry with her? Mrs. Hanson laughed indulgently, then started to explain about Len and the experiment, but Lottie was off in her own little world again. What a life, Mrs. Hanson thought, and she went out to the kitchen to mix up a glass of milk.

Lottie could hear things. If she were sitting near the closet that used to be the foyer she could understand whole conversations taking place out in the corridor. In her own bedroom anything else happening in the apartment was audible to her—the turbulence of voices on the teevee, or Mickey lecturing his doll in what he imagined was Spanish, or her mother’s putterings and sputterings. Such noises had the advantage of being on a human scale. It was the noises that lay behind these that she dreaded, and they were always there, waiting for those first masking sounds to drop, ready for her.

One night in her fifth month with Amparo she’d gone out walking very late, through Washington Square and past the palisades of N.Y.U. and the junior deluxe co-ops on West Broadway. She stopped beside the window of her favorite shop where the crystals of a darkened chandelier caught glints from the headlights of passing cars. It was four-thirty, the stillest hour of the morning. A diesel roared past and turned west on Prince. A dead silence followed in its wake. It was then she heard that other sound, a sourceless far-off rumble, like the first faint premonition, as one glides down a quiet stream, of the cataract ahead. Since then the sound of those falls had always been with her, sometimes distinctly, sometimes only, like stars behind smog, as a dim presence, an article of faith.

Resistance of a kind was possible. The teevee was a good barrier, when she could concentrate and when the programs weren’t themselves upsetting. Or talk, if she could think of something to say and find someone to listen to her. But she’d been submerged by too many of her mother’s monologues not to be sensitive to signals of boredom, and Lottie could not, like her mother, keep going regardless. Books demanded too much and were no help. Once she’d enjoyed the stories, simple as tic-tac-toe, in the romance comics that Amparo brought home, but now Amparo had outgrown comic books and Lottie was embarrassed to be buying them for herself. In any case they cost too much for her to get addicted.

Mostly she had to get by with pills and mostly she could.

Then, in the August of the year Amparo was to start at the Lowen School, Mrs. Hanson traded off the second teevee, which hadn’t worked for years, for a King Kool air conditioner of Ab Holt’s that also hadn’t worked for years except as a fan. Lottie had always complained about how stuffy her bedroom was.

Sandwiched between the kitchen and the main bedroom, its only means of ventilation was an ineffective transom over the door to the living room.

Shrimp, who was back home again, got her photographer friend from downstairs to take out the transom and install the air conditioner.

The fan made a gentle purring sound all through the night with every so often a tiny hiccoughing counterbeat, like an amplified heart murmur. Lottie could lie in bed for hours, long after the children were asleep in the bunks, just listening to the lovely syncopated hum. It was as calming as the sound of waves, and like the sound of waves it sometimes seemed to be murmuring words, or fragments of words, but however closely she strained to hear exactly what those words were, nothing ever clearly emerged. “Eleven, eleven, eleven,” it would whisper to her, “thirty-six, three, eleven.”

She assumed it was Amparo who was messing about in her makeup, had even gone so far as to mention the matter once at dinner, just her usual word to the wise. Amparo had sworn she hadn’t so much as opened a drawer, but thereafter there were no more lipstick smudges on the mirror, no spilled powder, no problem. Then one Thursday coming back wasted and worn out from one of Brother Cary’s periodic nonappearances, she found Mickey sitting at the dresser carefully laying on a foundation. His giggly dismay at her return was so ludicrous in the present blanked-out condition of his face that she simply burst out laughing. Mickey, without ever losing his look of comic horror, began laughing too.

“So—it was you all along, was it?”

He nodded and reached for the cold cream, but Lottie, misinterpreting, caught hold of his hand and gave it a squeeze. She tried to remember when she’d first noticed things out of place, but it was one of those trivial details, like when a particular song was popular, that wasn’t arranged chronologically in her memory. Mickey was ten, almost eleven. He must have been doing this for months without her being aware.

“You said,” in a self-justifying whine, “that you used to do the same thing with Uncle Boz. You’d dress up in each other’s clothes and pretend. You said.”

“When did I say that?”

“Not to me. You said it to him and I heard you.”

She tried to think of the right thing to do.

“I’ve seen men wear makeup. Lots of times.”

“Mickey, have I said anything against it?”

“No, but— ”

“Sit down.” She was brisk and businesslike, though looking at his face in the mirror she felt close to breaking up all over again. No doubt the people who worked in beauty shops had that problem all the time. She turned him round, with his back to the mirror, and wiped at his cheeks with a hankie.

“Now to start with, a person with your fair skin doesn’t need a foundation at all, or next to none. It isn’t the same, you know, as frosting a cake.”

She continued a stream of knowledgeable patter as she made him up: how to shape the lips so there always seems to be a little smile lurking in the corners, how to blend in the shadows, the necessity, when drawing on the brows, of studying their effect in profile and three-quarter views. All the while, in contradiction to her own sensible advice, she was creating a doll mask of the broadest exaggerations. When she put on the last brush stroke she framed the result with pendant earrings and a stretch wig. The result was uncanny. Mickey demanded to be allowed to look in the mirror. How could she say no?

In the mirror her face above his and his face below hers melted together and became one face. It was not simply that she had drawn her own features on his blank slate, or that one was a parody of the other. There was a worse truth—that this was the whole portion Mickey stood to inherit, nothing but these marks of pain and terror and certain defeat. It she’d written the words on his forehead with the eyebrow pencil it couldn’t have been any clearer. And on hers, and on hers. She lay down on the bed and let slow, depthless tears rise and fall. For a while Mickey stared at her, and then he went outside, down to the street.

The whole family was there for the program—Shrimp and Lottie on the sofa with Mickey between them, Mrs. Hanson in the rocker, Milly, with little Peanut in her lap, in the flowered armchair, and Boz beside them being a nuisance on one of the chairs from the kitchen. Amparo, whose triumph this was to be, was everywhere at once, fretting and frothing.

The sponsors were Pfizer and the Conservation Corporation. Since neither had anything to sell what everybody wasn’t buying already, the ads were slow and heavy, but no slower and heavier, as it turned out, than
Leaves of Grass.

Shrimp tried gamely for the first half hour to find aspects to admire—the costumes were ultra-authentic, the brass band went
oomp-pa-pa
very well, and there was a pretty sequence of some brawny blacks hammering a wooden house together. But then Don Hershey would reappear as Whitman, bellowing his dreadful poems, and she would just shrivel up.

Shrimp had grown up idolizing Don Hershey, and to see him reduced to this! A dirty old man slobbering after teenagers. It wasn’t fair.

“It makes a fella kinda glad he’s a Democrat,” Boz drawled, when the ads came on again, but Shrimp gave him a dirty look: no matter how dreadful it was they were obliged, for Amparo’s sake, to praise it.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Shrimp said. “I think it’s very artistic. the colors!” It was the utmost she could manage.

Milly, with what seemed honest curiosity, filled up the rest of station identification with classroom-type questions about Whitman, but Amparo brushed them aside. She no longer kept up a pretense that the show was about anyone but herself.

“I think I’m in the next part. Yes, I’m sure they said part two.”

But the second half hour concerned the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination:

O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night!—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!

For half an hour.

“You don’t suppose they’ve cut out your scene, do you, Amparo?” Boz teased. They all came down on him together. Clearly it was what they’d all thought to themselves.

“It’s possible,” Amparo said dourly.

“Let’s wait and see,” Shrimp advised, as though they might have done anything else.

The Pfizer logo faded away, and there was Don Hershey again in his Santa Claus beard roaring off into a vast, new poem:

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,
The simple, compact, well-joined scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,
The similitudes of the past and those of the future,
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk on the street and the passage over the river….

And so on, endlessly, while the camera roved about the streets and over the water and looked at shoes—floods of shoes, centuries of shoes. Then, abrupt as flipping to another channel, it was 2026, and an ordinary crowd of people mulled about in the South Ferry waiting room.

Amparo rolled herself into a tight ball of attention. “This is it, coming up now.”

Don Hershey rolled on, voice-over:

It avails not time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river….

The camera panned past conglomerations of smiling, gesturing, chattering people, filing into the boat, pausing now and then to pick out details—a hand picking nervously at a cuff, a yellow scarf lifting in a breeze and falling, a particular face.

Amparo’s.

“There I am! There!” Amparo screamed.

The camera lingered. She stood at the railing, smiling a dreamy smile that none of them watching could recognize. As Don Hershey lowered his volume and asked:

What is then between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Amparo regarded, and the camera regarded, the moving surface of the water.

Shrimp’s heart splattered like a bag of garbage dropped to the street from a high rooftop. Envy spilled out through her every vein. Amparo was so beautiful, so young and so damnably beautiful, she wanted to die.

In cross section the building was a swastika with the arms revolving counterclockwise, the Aztec direction. 1812, the Hansons’ apartment, was located halfway along the inner forearm of the swastika’s northwest limb, so that its windows commanded an uninterrupted view of several degrees southwestwards across the roofs of the lower buildings as far as the windowless, megalithic masses of the Cooper Union complex. Above: blue sky and roving clouds, jet trails and smoke wreathing up from the chimneys of 320 and 328. However one had to be right at the window to enjoy this vista. From the bed Shrimp could see only a uniformity of yellow brick and windows variegated with different kinds of curtains, shades, and blinds. May—and from two until almost six, when she needed it most, there was direct, yellow sunlight. It was the only advantage of living so near the top. On warm days the window would be opened a crack and a breeze would enter to ruffle the curtains. Lifting and falling, like the shallow erratic breathing of an asthmatic, billowing, collapsing, the curtains became, as anything watched intently enough will, the story of her life. Did any of those other curtains, shades, or blinds conceal a sadder story? Ah, she doubted it.

But sad as it was, life was also irrepressibly comic, and the curtains caught that too. They were a mild, elaborate joke between Mrs. Hanson and her daughter. The material was a sheer spun chintz in sappy ice cream colors patterned with sprigs and garlands of genitalia, his and hers, raspberry, lemon, and peach. A present from January, some ages ago. Loyally Shrimp had brought it home for her mother to make her a pajama suit from, but Mrs. Hanson, without overtly disapproving, had never got round to the job.