It takes a few minutes to get to South Street, but it isn’t nearly enough time to figure out how I am going to avoid running into someone who knows the baby and his dead mother and sister. Mrs. Arnold asks which of the four addresses on the list Mama was at when I found the baby, and I say it was the first one. She tells Ambrose to turn up the street past the barbershop and soon we are at the curb where I’d seen that cat.
“All right, then,” Mrs. Arnold says. “Which direction from here?”
Once you start getting the hang of not telling the truth, it not only gets easier, but you can think up lies quicker. I no sooner open my mouth to answer her than I realize all I have to say is that I walkedupthe street, not down it. Just up from that first building that Mama went into are more alleys, on both sides of the street.
“It was up that way,” I say, “but it’s hard to remember which alley it was.”
Mrs. Arnold pats my arm. “Take the first one to the right, Ambrose,” she says. He does and we stop at the first building on the corner. It might have been the one where I found the baby, except it isn’t.
“Perhaps this one?” she says.
And I say, “Maybe.”
“You said you heard the baby from the street, so it couldn’t have been farther up the alley than this, right?”
I can only nod.
A man comes out of the building then and Mrs. Arnold pokes her head out the car window. “You there! Sir! Might I have a word?”
The man just stands there, like he can’t quite believe she spoke to him. He has bushy eyebrows and a thick mustache. He holds a faded tweed cap in his hands, thready in places.
“Yes. Might I have a word? It will only take a moment.”
The man comes toward the car cautiously.
“Do you happen to know if there is a young mother in your building sick with the flu? A mother with a young baby? On the first floor?”
He just blinks and stares.
“Do you speak English?”
“Little.” It sounds likeleetle.
Mrs. Arnold repeats her questions slowly.
“Yes. Many sick inside,” the man answers.
“A young mother with a baby, though. We’re looking for a young mother with a baby. And the baby’s father.”
“I—not—marry,” the man says, like he just learned those three words that minute.
“No, I don’t mean you. I mean, is there a young mother on the first floor who has the flu?”
“Many sick for flu. Many. I have job. Good-bye.” The man turns and walks away, fitting the cap to his head.
Mrs. Arnold sighs loudly and looks at me. “Wait here.”
She gets out of the car, goes inside the building, and is gone for a few minutes. Then she comes back out. “I don’t think this is the building where you found him. There are two families on the first floor who have no idea what I’m talking about. What about that building across the street?”
I look at the shabby structure on the other side of the car. “Maybe.” I start to get out, but she tells me to stay put.
“The flu is worse here now than it was a few days ago. Let me go ask,” she says. “I don’t want you catching anything.”
I sit and wait, knowing she won’t meet with success. Four more little alleys and eight more hellish row houses, and Mrs. Arnold is weary of the search and clearly peeved at me. How can I not remember a place I had been to only hours before?
“It was just so terrible,” I say. After all the lies, it is nice to finally speak the truth. “His mother was all gray and bloody. Her eyes were stuck wide open.”
“All right, all right,” Mrs. Arnold says soothingly as she gets back into her car. “Take us back, Ambrose. We can try again tomorrow.”
