The plan had not been to work at her alma mater forever.
The plan had been to be a painter. Or an artist, of any kind, who got paid to make art. Or an art teacher who was beloved by her students, and had walls full of gorgeous things made by small children, and made her own art in her own time. The chances of her becoming a Famous and Successful Artist now were slim, but because she was still surrounded by people who had known her as an artsy teenager, they still looked at her that way, even though she hadn’t touched a canvas or a brush in over a year. The friends of hers from Belvedere who had actually become artists had all left New York, which was too expensive. They had left five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago. Alice had lost track. The ones she loved the most had even abandoned social media, except for some fuzzy landscapes or pictures of funny things in grocery stores once in a while. Alice missed them all.
“Earth to Alice,” Melinda said, not unkindly. They were sitting in a clumsy circle, their wheeled office chairs pointed inward.
“Sorry, I was just thinking about something. I’m here,” Alice said. Emily winked at her.
“I’d love for us to get through this batch in the next two weeks—if you can reach out to the families on your list and set up times, I believe Emily’s already made the sign-up spreadsheet. Great.” Melinda nodded at them.
The pile of folders was heavy—each one had a child’s photograph stapled to the outside and was filled with their application materials. Alice couldn’t imagine it had been like this when her parents had sent her—they never would have filled out more than a single piece of paper. Alice shuffled the deck of folders on her lap, looking for names she recognized. There were always a few. The classmates of hers who had stayed in New York had procreated at astonishing rates—some wereon their third babies, and the private school recycling mill was an effective one. Sometimes Alice thought it was strange, how many people stayed within the zip code where they’d grown up, but then she thought about how many people in small towns and cities across the country did it, too. It only seemed strange because this was New York, a place that regenerated every few years, populated by newcomers and transplants. It was usually nice to see the people she knew—mostly they were women who Alice hadn’t known very well, but who were all perfectly friendly and seemed on very solid ground. More solid ground than she was. Much more rarely, Alice would come across the name of someone she’d known better.
Like little Raphael Joffey. How many Joffeys could there be? The boy in the photograph had olive skin, dark brown hair, thick eyebrows, and one missing tooth. He looked so much like his father that Alice knew what she would find before she opened the folder. There it was, on the second line—Thomas Joffey. The address listed was on Central Park West—the San Remo, where Tommy had grown up. He was nearly two years older than she was, and a grade level ahead. Alice couldn’t remember the apartment number, which was comforting, but she could remember his landline number. If this information was true, he lived just a few blocks from school, and was still in the neighborhood where they’d both grown up. It was odd that Alice hadn’t seen Tommy on the street, not ever, but that was the way it worked sometimes. There were some people who were just on your circuit, people who lived around the corner or across the borough, but for whatever reason, you and they were on the same track and would bump into each other again and again. Then there were the people who lived next door and were on a different schedule, and you never saw them at all. Different paths, different subway lines, different timetables. Alice wondered what Tommy did for a living, if anyone in his life still called him Tommy. If he’d just moved back, or if he’d been right down the street the whole time. If he and his family livedin the apartment he’d grown up in, or on another floor, with little Raphael taking the elevator up or down to see his grandparents. She wondered what Tommy’s face looked like now, if his hair had started to gray, if his body was still as beautiful as it had once been, tall and willowy in his clothes, like there was always a breeze blowing against him. She hadn’t even heard his name since her twentieth high school reunion the spring before last, which he had not attended, but where Alice had overheard several people asking if he was coming. That was the real power move—to be missed.
Alice closed the folder and left it on top of the pile. Alice wondered what they called the boy—if they said his whole name, or if he was Rafe, or Raffy, or Raf. She would send his email first, addressed to both parents. Alice would say what she always said to alumni in her stacks:Hello! This is Alice Stern, class of ’98!At the end, after her copied-and-pasted message about setting up an interview and a tour, with a link to the sign-up page, Alice typed and then deleted a postscript.Hello, she wrote.Hi!No.Hi—looking forward to seeing you and meeting Raphael.It was always best to focus on the children. When she’d started in the admissions office, Melinda had explained that to her—sometimes the prospective parents were movie stars, or musicians who played at Madison Square Garden. It didn’t matter. They didn’t want you to fawn or to stutter. They wanted you to look their kids in the eye and be astonished, just like all parents did. They wanted you to recognize their special flower. The famous people didn’t flummox her, not more than they would if she saw them walking down the street, but there were people she had known as a teenager whose names still made her stomach tighten. Alice didn’t know what she’d say to Tommy if she saw him on the street, or in the back room of a dark, crowded bar—she might not say anything at all—but she knew what to say to him in her office. She would pull open the door and smile, nothing but sunlight and confidence. He would smile, too.
7
Leonard’s hospital room was always cold, as all hospitals room are cold, in order to keep infections at bay. Germs love warmth, where they can zip into weak host after weak host, only the doctors and nurses with immune systems strong enough to battle them back into the dusty corners. Alice sat in the pleather visitor’s chair—easy to clean, with a squishy seat for long hours in one place—and pulled her hands inside her sweater’s sleeves. Lately she’d been trying to remember conversations she’d had with her father. One of her friends, a woman whose mother had died a few years earlier, had told her to record her conversations with her father, that she’d want them later, no matter what the conversations were about. Alice had felt embarrassed to ask, but she had recorded one conversation in the hospital the previous month, her phone facedown on the small table between her chair and his bed.
Leonard:... and here comes our lady, here’s the queen of the whole place.
(Nurse, unintelligible)
Leonard:Denise. Denise.
Denise:Leonard, I’ve got two pills, these are your afternoon pills. It’s a present for you.
(Shaking sound)
Alice:Thank you, Denise.
Denise:He’s my favorite; don’t tell the other patients. Your dad, he’s the best one.
Leonard:I love Denise.
Alice:Denise loves you.
Leonard:We were talking about the Philippines. About Imelda Marcos. So many nurses come from the Philippines.
Alice:Is that racist?
Leonard:You think everything is racist. There are a lot of nurses from the Philippines, that’s all.
(A machine beeps)
Alice:You working on anything?
Leonard:Come on.
Why did she ask? Who knew how many conversations she had left with her father, and that’s what she wanted to know, the same thing that any hack journalist would have asked him at any point in the last twenty years? It was easier than asking him something personal or telling him something about herself, and also, she wanted to know.
•••
When Alice closed her eyes and pictured her father, her father as he would live in perpetuity in her mind, it was an image of Leonardsitting at their round kitchen table on Pomander Walk. There were a few streets like it in the city: Patchin Place and Milligan Place in the West Village, and a few in Brooklyn, near where Alice lived, but Pomander Walk was different. Most mews streets were carriage houses, or had been built as housing for some grand building being constructed nearby, and were now expensive but still dollhouse-sized, for the rich people who wanted exclusivity and quaintness more than they wanted storage space. Pomander was a dash straight through the middle of the block, cutting from 94th to 95th Street in between Broadway and West End. It had been built by a hotel developer in 1921, and what Leonard had always loved about it was this: it was a real street inspired by a novel-turned-play about a small town in England. It was a facsimile of a facsimile, a real version of a fictional place, with two rows of tiny houses that looked straight out of “Hansel and Gretel,” locked behind a gate.
The houses were small, two stories high each, and most were split into two floor-through apartments. Tiny, well-tended garden patches sat in front of each door, and at the 95th Street end, a guardhouse no bigger than a phone booth held shared equipment—snow shovels and cobwebs and the occasional cockroach doing the backstroke. When Alice was a child, Reggie, the superintendent, had told her that Humphrey Bogart had once lived on Pomander, and his private security guard had used the guardhouse as his post, but she didn’t know if it was true. What Alice did know was that Pomander Walk was a special place, and that even though the front windows were only about ten feet from their across-the-walk neighbors and their back windows faced their neighbors in the huge apartment buildings next door, it felt like their own private universe.
The scene was always exactly the same: Leonard at the kitchen table; the floor lamp on behind him; a book or three on the table in front of him; a glass of water, and then a glass of something else,sweating from the ice inside; a legal pad; a pen. During the day, Leonard watched soap operas, he walked in Central Park, he walked in Riverside Park, he took trips to the post office and to Fairway, he went to City Diner on Broadway and 90th Street, he talked to friends on the telephone. At night, though, Leonard sat at the kitchen table and worked. Alice tried to put herself inside the frame, to watch herself walk through the door, drop her bag on the floor, and settle into the chair opposite her father. What had she said to him after school? Had they talked about homework? Had they talked about movies, about television programs? About answers they knew onJeopardy!? Alice knew they had, but her memories were all pictures without sound.
