and the world was before me. She found us a bench in the sun, asked me my name and told me hers. I thought she must be remarkably self-assured to take charge of a blind man and then, having done the good deed, to sit down to talk with him. People who help you usually make a quick exit.
This is so perfect, she said.
A match was struck. I smelled the acrid smoke of one of her European cigarettes. I heard her inhale to get the smoke as far into herself as she could.
Because you are just the man I was coming to see, she said.
Me? You know who I am?
Oh yes, Homer Collyer, you and your brother are famous now in France.
Good God. Don’t tell me you’re a reporter.
Well, it’s true, I write sometime for the papers.
Look, I know you’ve just saved my life—
Oh, poof—
—and I should really be more gracious, but the fact is my brother and I don’t talk to reporters.
She didn’t seem to hear me. You have a good face, she said, good features, and your eyes, even so, are rather attractive. But too thin, you are too thin, and a barber would be advisable.
She inhaled, she exhaled: I am not here to interview you. I am to write about your country. I have been everywhere because I don’t know what I am looking for.
She had been to California and the Northwest, she had been to the Mojave Desert and to Chicago and Detroit, and to Appalachia, and now here she was with me on a park bench.
If I am a reporter, she said, it is to report on my own self, my own feelings for what I discover. I am trying to get this country—is that how you say it, to get something is to understand it? I have leave for a very impressionist Jacqueline Roux commentary for Le Monde—yes a newspaper, but my commentary is not to be where I’ve been or who I’ve talked to, but what I have learned of your secrets.
What secrets?
I am to write about what cannot be seen. It is difficult.
To take our measure.
All right, yes, that. When I found your address I looked at your house with its black shutters. In Europe we have shutters for the windows, not here so much I should have thought. In France, in Italy, in Germany, the shutters are because of our history. History makes it advisable to have heavy shutters on the windows, and to close them at night. In this country the homes are not hidden behind walls, within courtyards. You have not enough history for that. Your homes confront the street unafraid, for everyone to see. So why do you have black shutters on your windows, Homer Collyer? What does it mean for the Collyer family to have the shutters closed on a warm spring day?
I don’t know. Maybe there is enough history to go around.
With your views of the park, she said. Not to look out? Why?
I come out to the park. As now. Must I defend myself? We’ve lived here all our lives, my brother and I. We do not neglect the park.
Good. In fact your Central Park is what drew me to New York, you know.
Oh, I said, I thought it was me.
Yes, that is what I am doing here besides meeting with strange men. She laughed. Walking in Central Park.
At that moment I wanted to touch her face. Her voice was in the alto register—a smoker’s voice. When she had taken my arm, from the feel of her sleeve on my wrist—the material might have been corduroy—I had the impression of a woman in her late thirties, early forties. As we had walked across Fifth Avenue I thought her shoes might be what were called sensible, just from the sound of the heels hitting the ground, though I was no longer as confident of my deductions as I had once been.
I asked her what she hoped to find in the park. Parks are dull places, I said. Of course you can get murdered here at night, I said, but other than that it is very dull. Just the usual joggers, lovers, and nannies with baby carriages. In the winter everyone ice skates.
The nannies as well?
They are the best skaters.
So we had a rhythm going, making the kind of conversation that brings out one’s competitive intelligence—at least it did mine. Or was it simply flirtation? How refreshing this was. I had a certain class. As if I