“Now, hold on, man,” Charlie Chan said. “You know what you’re saying? You know what it
The next day, while he was working at the grocery store, Dwight Roberts heard the sound of the fire engines. They were screaming up Gates Avenue. Dwight went out to look, and saw in the distance that smoke was pouring from his own house. He ran all the way. The street was a wilderness of hoses, engines, a pumper, three police cars. Kids were clambering on the apparatus or watching from across the street. Then he saw his mother against the fence, shaking and sobbing. The horn man was beside her, his arm on her shoulder.
“You be quiet now,” he was saying to her in a crooning, singsong voice. “You jus’ be calm, you jus’ be quiet.…”
And Dwight ran over and heard the story, about the fire in the kitchen, and his sisters screaming, and the wall of flame, and how the horn man was suddenly coming through the rooms, a blanket over him, grabbing kids, shoving his mother into the hall, the great large man knocking over furniture, shouting for them to get low, and then banging on all the doors on the way to the street. The apartment was ruined. But they were alive. And now the horn man was asking about the subway, his clothes gone, his horn in the rubble. He kissed Dwight’s mother, hugged Dwight, and started walking. Dwight shouted after him: “Where you goin’, Charlie Chan?”
“I’ll be around,” the horn man said, and walked out of the neighborhood, and out of Dwight’s life. Dwight turned to his mother, who was sobbing and praying, waiting for a chance to inspect the ruins. She glanced at the corner where Charlie Chan had disappeared.
“He was just like a bird,” she said. “Come here in the spring, and then flown away. Just like a bird.”
MISS FLANAGAN WAS FORTY-ONE when Mr. Macias came knocking at her door. He had a newspaper under his arm and a tentative look in his eyes. Did she have a room to rent? The words stumbled, then broke; his English was not good. But she understood. Yes, she had a room to rent.
“Well,” he said. “I can see it, please?”
She looked down at him; he was a small man with a neat mustache, a cheap brown suit wrinkling at elbow and knee, black-and-white shoes. On the stoop beside him there was a battered suitcase. His eyes convinced her to let him into the hall; they were filled with rejection, and on that subject Miss Flanagan was an expert.
“Yes, of course.”
The room was at the back of the parlor floor, directly off the stoop. When her parents were alive, they’d used it for a bedroom; her mother liked the view of the garden, the fireplace in winter, the parquet floors, the elegant molding that was popular when the old craftsmen built the brownstones in this part of Brooklyn. But Miss Flanagan could never sleep there; she felt as if she were usurping part of her own past. It was all right for strangers; it simply wasn’t for her. When she opened the oak door, with its solid-brass fittings, and showed the room to Mr. Macias, he issued an involuntary little breath of surprise.
“Oh,” he said. “Is so beautiful.”
“Yes,” Miss Flanagan said. “It is beautiful.”
He ran a hand over the polished wood mantelpiece. He gazed through the windows at the garden, white with winter, the tree as precise as calligraphy. He turned to her, and his mouth trembled, and rejection washed through his eyes.
“How much it is?” he said.
She thought: a Hispanic man, the neighbors will be alarmed, I don’t know him, I don’t know where he came from, I don’t know what he might have done in his past. And then: to hell with it. He has sad eyes.
“Thirty dollars a week,” she said.
The sum must have been enormous to him. He inhaled, placed a hand in his pocket, took out some bills, and handed three tens to Miss Flanagan. He gazed again around the large, bright room and said: “I can move in now?”
And so it began. Every morning at nine, Mr. Macias left for work; every evening he arrived back at precisely seven; every Friday morning, the envelope with thirty dollars in cash was in her mailbox. Gradually, he bought himself new shoes, another suit, and a guitar. And the guitar changed everything. Miss Flanagan would lie alone at night in her bed on the third floor, trying to read or watch television, tired from the day’s work at the hospital, and she would hear Mr. Macias playing softly and singing in his own language.
