from the station beneath one umbrella, and by the time they reached the apartment house, an ugly brick rectangle with a keyhole of an air shaft excised from the middle of the yellow-brown façade, their skirts were wet almost to the waist. “Nasty day, ladies,” the man mopping the marble floors of the lobby had said pleasantly, eyeing their shiny, skinny legs.
Maggie had assumed that Debbie had asked her to come along because she had realized that Bridget Hearn was a jerk, and that Maggie was a much more suitable companion for such an important excursion. This was not true. Debbie had told Helen that she might come by, and Helen had said that if Debbie brought Bridget she would not let them into the apartment. “Maggie saves you from yourself,” she had said.
Debbie had been to visit Helen three times before, each time with Aggie, and she was affecting an air of great nonchalance, although she was terrified. Nearly every apartment in Helen’s building was occupied by the widow of a Columbia professor, and the ladies all bore a great resemblance to one another, all small, slightly humpbacked elderly women with round hats like toadstools and pronounced foreign accents. When they spoke to one another in the elevators, they talked mainly of the price of produce, which they purchased in small quantities each day as part of their daily routine. When they shared the elevator with Helen or her roommate, they usually kept silent, their mouths as tight as the snap closures on their handbags.
One of them, who had herself been an anthropologist in Germany before her marriage, had written several letters in her ornate, rather spindly handwriting to determine how the girls had come in possession of the apartment, and whether they were old enough to be legally permitted to live alone. She was the one who entered the elevator with Maggie and Debbie now, staring down at the puddle on the floor their skirts made. Maggie noticed that the woman was wearing the same sort of shoes and boots that the nuns at school wore, low-heeled, black lace-up shoes with perforated uppers and translucent plastic boots that fitted the contours of the shoes exactly. Maggie’s aunt Margaret had once told her that she had found those shoes the greatest impediment to remaining in the convent.
The elderly woman looked at Maggie. “Alone?” she suddenly spat out.
“Excuse me?” Maggie had said.
Debbie giggled.
“You are alone?”
“We’re going to visit my sister,” Debbie said. “Eight-B.”
The elevator door opened. “Ah,” the woman said, and stepped off.
“Oh God,” said Debbie, when the door had closed.
Helen’s apartment was silent. The peephole shone in the yellowish rainy-day glow from the airshaft window. Maggie stood on tiptoe to look inside, but she saw only her own distorted face, her nose as splayed as a bloodhound’s. “We came all this way for nothing,” Debbie said, pressing on the bell with her thumb. Maggie could hear it ringing faintly inside. Finally Debbie started back toward the elevator. “Come on,” she said irritably. “They probably went out to lunch.”
Maggie leaned on the bell again, staring back at herself through the peephole. As she walked away, the door opened. A girl with long brown hair and a flowered kimono that barely covered her behind stood there looking down at Maggie. She was holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
“Yes?” she said a little grandly, with a hint of an English accent. Then she saw Debbie skittering down the hall. “Oh, Christ,” she said. “Come on in. Helen, it’s your little sister.”
“Debbie,” said Debbie.
“Debbie,” the girl called to the back of the apartment.
Maggie walked in and sat down on the daybed, which was something like the sofa in her grandfather Mazzo’s house, brown and shiny, its shabbiness accented by an embroidered shawl arranged over the back. The fabric was worn away from both arms. There was no other furniture in the room except for a record player and a set of bookshelves made from bricks and planks. Atop the bookshelves was a plastic version of the Pietà, with a rosary hanging around the Blessed Mother’s neck. A Rolling Stones album cover was pinned to the wall.
Next to it was a professional black-and-white photograph of Helen. She was wearing a lot of obvious eyeliner and looked older and very beautiful. Her shoulders were bare. Maggie stood up to look at the picture closely as Helen’s roommate exhaled and said, “Her Theda Bara look. Wonderful, isn’t it?”