wife is African-American, from Chicago, so his daughter is kinda like your color—and my middle son’s girlfriend is Korean! Now, the youngest is not seeing anybody at the moment, but I’m thinking, what’s next? Chinese? Right? Or maybe the next’ll be an Ind—Native American. Maybe the next’ll be Native American! Point is: we’re all God’s children. Me and my wife—we’re separating—but we’re thrilled. When I first saw my little brown granddaughter”—his eyes teared up as he took a hand off the wheel and placed it on his breastbone— “it was like my heart got larger and there was a new room in it. A new chamber.”
To this, his beautiful passenger said nothing at all; only bit her blood-red lip and looked out the window. He could not know that her mind had drifted strangely: to her imagined stepdaughters, whom she placed now in rooms of her own design—twin eyries either side of a chimney breast—in a shingled house that sat on a bluff, over a wild beach of dunes and sea grass, in America or in Africa—in some dream combination of the two. Mike, believing he had caused offense, stood the silence for as long as he could. He turned on the radio. Put the wipers on. Spied a meth-faced girl leaving a pharmacy with something stuffed down the back of her pants. The shadow life. He saw it everywhere—it was a kind of second sight—but what use was it? He took a left toward campus. He looked back at his passenger, her face anxious, turned away. Her window misted, a single cloud. What could she possibly see?
3
It had cost six million dollars and was described as a “re-imagining,” but to Mike it looked like someone had taken a large box of concrete and glass, put wheels under it and driven it into the side of the old library. On the other hand, it seemed busier than he remembered it, with somebody at every one of the new terminals, and many more waiting to use them. A lot of homeless folks, easily spotted by their shoes: elaborate self-creations, or else combinations of several pairs, wound together with duct tape. A uniform had once allowed him to speak to such people; now he stood, undifferentiated and unnoticed among them, waiting in the “atrium” for a Miss Wendy English, the senior administrator. There were so many possible entrances and exits to the new space he didn’t know from which to expect her, and in the end it was an ambush: the feel of a little finger poking him in the back.
“Miss Wendy. Now look at you. Wowee. Did you get younger?”
“I had my seventy-fifth birthday last week and I’ve decided to stop right there. It’s good to see you, Michael.”
They clasped hands, which required, from McRae, a certain delicacy. She was five foot one, weighed only about eighty pounds in her skirt-suit, and he could feel each vein and bone.
“Long time,” she said. They stepped back and admired each other. Six months. Evidently she had stopped dyeing her hair, the small, stately afro white as lambswool.
“Really appreciative of you seeing me today,” he said, and for a ridiculous moment feared he was about to weep. “Means a lot.”
“Means nothing at all,” she said, gesturing at the high, light space. “As you can see, we’re open to everybody. And I meant what I said: it’s good to see you. Let’s go to my office.”
But she walked quickly, always slightly ahead, and of the many people who stopped to salute Miss Wendy or ask her some practical question—in the atrium, through the corridors—not one of them did she introduce to Mike McRae. By the time they reached her corner office, back in the old red-brick building, he felt like a pale shadow, chasing this little dark woman through the world.
“Now, what can I do for you, Michael?”
She sat behind her gigantic walnut desk, bird-arms folded on the green baize, and McRae thought of Alice McRae—mother of six, admirer of Louise Day Hicks—for whom this image of her son, cap in hand before a tiny old black lady, would have been incomprehensible.
“Michael—you okay?”
“Oh, I’m great.” He put his fingers to both eyes as a deterrent. “You know, when the whole community comes around you like people have, well, that just feels great. And after all the stuff in the papers there was a lot of support—a lot of love.”
“You are a part of this community,” she said, looking directly into his eyes, as few people