Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,144

stopped us and said: “Excuse me, ladies, but Mrs. Soderberg called down on the intercom and she’d like to see you again a moment.”

Marcia gave one of her long sighs, and Jacqueline said how maybe she was bringing us some leftover bagels, like it was the funniest thing in the world, and I felt the heat pulse up in my cheeks.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Ooh, somebody’s hot under the collar,” said Marcia. She had sidled up beside me and laid her hand on my forearm.

“I’ve got choir practice to go to.”

“Lordy,” she said, her eyes reduced to a slit.

I stared right back at her, then stepped out the door, up the avenue, the burn of their eyes on my back.

“Gloria,” they called. “Glor-ia.”

All around me, people were walking surefooted and shiny down the street. Businessmen and doctors and well-dressed ladies on the way to lunch. The taxis were driving by with their lights off all of a sudden for a colored woman, since they didn’t want to pick me up, even in my best dress, in the bright afternoon, in the summer heat. Maybe I’d take them the wrong way, out of the city, where the money and the paintings were, to the Bronx, where the money and the paintings weren’t. Everyone knows the taxi drivers hate a colored woman anyway—she won’t tip him, or at the very best she’ll nickel-and-dime him, that’s the thinking, and there’s no way to change it, no amount of freedom-riding is ever going to shift that. So I just kept placing one foot in front of the other. They were my best shoes, my going-to-opera leathers, and they were comfortable at first, they weren’t too bad, and I thought the walking would shuck the loneliness.

“Gloria,” I heard again, as if my own name were drifting away from me.

I didn’t look back. I was sure that Claire would run after me, and I kept wondering if I’d done the right thing, leaving her behind, with the radio parts spread around her son’s room, the books, the pencils, the baseball cards, the snow globes, the sharpeners, all neatly arranged on the shelves. Her face came back to me, the slide of sadness along her eyes.

Walk, don’t walk.

I flat-out wanted to go home and curl up, to be buried in my apartment, away from traffic signals. I didn’t want the shame, or anger, or jealousy, even—I just wanted to be home, the doors locked, the stereo on, some libretto sounding out around me, to sit on the broken-backed sofa, drowning everything else until it was all invisible.

Walk, don’t walk.

Then again, I was thinking that I shouldn’t be acting this way, maybe I was getting it all wrong, maybe the truth is that she was just a lonely white woman living up on Park Avenue, lost her boy the exact same way as I lost three of mine, treated me well, didn’t ask for nothing, brought me in her house, kissed me on the cheek, made sure my teacup was full, and she just flat-out made a mistake by running her mouth off, one silly little statement I was allowing to ruin everything. I had liked her when she was fussing all over us, and she didn’t mean harm, maybe she was just nervous. People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time—but even on the best day nobody’s perfect.

I could imagine her there, staring at the elevator, watching the numbers go down, chewing on her fingers, watching it all descend. Kicking herself for trying too hard. Running back to the intercom and begging us to stay just a minute more.

After almost ten blocks I got a little stab in my stomach, a stitch. I leaned up against the doorway of a doctor’s office on Eighty-fifth Street, under the awning, breathing heavily, and weighing it all up in my mind, but then I thought, No, I’m not going to turn back, not now, I’m going to keep right on going, that’s my duty and nobody’s going to stop me.

Sometimes you get a bug in your mind. I’m going to make it all the way home even if it takes me a week, I thought, I’m going to step every inch of the way, gospel, that’s what I had to do, no matter what, back to the Bronx.

Marcia, Janet, Jacqueline weren’t calling after me anymore. Part of me was relieved that they let me go, that I didn’t give in to