Houseguests are a pestilence. They eat your food. They disrupt your routine. They rob you of the feeling of solitude that is, I have always felt, a home’s sole purpose. Worst of all, they make it nearly impossible to brood.
I was sitting by the parlor window, watching the sky turn black, rereading the baseball news from June 16, 1915—the Giants won and Brooklyn lost, a happy day—when Cherub entered, cradling a teacup between his hands. His face was scrubbed and shaved. His rags were gone, replaced with an ancient suit of my father’s that could have swallowed him. He looked ridiculous and wonderful.
“Have you tasted this?” he said. “It’s called grog or glok or something. It’s got me warm right down to my toenails.”
“A specialty of the house.”
He snatched the newspaper so roughly that an entire column of racing news crumbled.
“They do make new newspapers,” he said. “Every day, in fact. No need to keep them around.”
I took back the paper, handling the newsprint as gently as it deserved. “These are my archives.”
“It makes your house smell like food caught between an old man’s molars.”
“You know, you’re staying here for free. Which means you’re free to go.”
“Have I complained? The bed is soft, the food bountiful. This is a palace, and you live like you’re in a hovel. Why?”
There was no easy answer, so I said nothing. I shifted the papers and he sat down. Outside the light was nearly gone. Washington Square was gray, washed out, its branches bare, its overgrown paths drowning in snow. Past the mothball stench of Virgil’s suit, Cherub smelled cleaner than he ever had.
“What are you waiting for?” he said.
“Dark.”
He took my hand. It was strange to feel his calloused fingers so soft, to see his nails so tidy. I didn’t mind it.
“We’ve known each other,” he said. “We’ve seen impossible things. We’ve lost friends. You’ve been honest before. Don’t stop now.”
It would have been easy to deflect him with a joke or a kiss. It would have been safer. But he was right—there were few in the city whom I knew so well, and none I had loved the same way.
Cherub Stevens was the indulgence of a young woman who was trying to learn how to misbehave. The spring after the fence went up, I was a twenty-two-year-old with no interest in university or work, whose city was fractured, whose mother was dead, whose father was sinking into the case that would kill him after it drove him mad. I was not expecting to fall in love.
One day, the One-Eyes were making a vain attempt to hack a new path into the jungle of Washington Square. They were shirtless, sweaty, rippling, and obscene—a parade of vigorous flesh that even Walt Whitman might find excessive—all save the squat, bearded boy who slouched in a stolen wing-back chair on the sidewalk, sipping a pitcher of cognac and offering occasional words of encouragement. He had a cavalry saber across his legs and, beneath the patchy fur on his face, a smile he seemed unwilling to control.
I went up to him. “Are you the man in charge?” I said.
“What gave you that idea?”
“You’re not working.”
“That just shows I’m clever. The man in charge is Gilly, the redheaded girl swinging that ax like the tree did her harm. She leads by example, which is terribly inspiring if you’ve the intellect and initiative of a garden snail. Rather than exhaust myself trimming greenery that will regrow in the night, I’ve chosen to occupy myself in—oh heavens, I didn’t offer you a drink.”
He stood and bowed and compelled me to sit in his mildewy chair. He lowered himself to a knee and presented his tub of liquor like a knight offering the Holy Grail. In a neighborhood overrun with boys pretending to be brutes, here was a thug who styled himself a gentleman. It was absurd.
I was charmed.
That spring was the first dawn of a new sun. Having finally succeeded in evicting humanity, the Westside took its true form. Trees tripled in size. Vines erupted from brownstone. Earth buckled and split, swallowing some buildings and upending others, and in a matter of weeks, the map was redrawn. Each morning, I found Cherub on my stoop, and we explored our changing Westside arm in arm.
He was not the kind of boy I imagined myself being courted by, but then, I’d never really imagined being courted by any boys at all. I had no intention of treating him as anything other than a diversion, an amusing way to pass the weeks before it grew too hot to go outside, but in those years death was at our elbows, and that made it impossible to throw away something good.
Then one day, a year later, we were walking the banks of Morton Creek, which had recently overtaken a few sleepy blocks of the far Village. He asked me to marry him and I laughed in his face.
I still saw him after that—he was, after all, lord of my block—but only from afar. As the Westside settled into its own awful pattern, Cherub found his place. The older One-Eyes died or grew up, and the recruits got younger and younger, until Cherub was a man in his mid-twenties babysitting a gang of child soldiers. He discarded his beard, along with whatever savagery had lurked beneath his cheerful front, and settled into life as an old softie who liked to lie about how tough he’d once been.
Not long after my father disappeared, Cherub washed up on my stoop once more. He never said he’d come to help me forget, but that’s what it had to be. To distract me, he gave me a case—a silly thing, a trifle—and I remembered how fine a friend he had been. But then his boys were killed at the Battle of Eighth Avenue, and I feared the light went out inside Cherub Stevens for good.
So now, in my parlor, as Washington Square faded away, I told him everything: the dreams of Mary, the missing finger, the prophet who had come back from the dead. I must have told it well, because when Bully exploded out of the fire, Cherub cackled and smacked his knee.
“Amazing! Beautiful!” he said.
“But it’s a lie. Whatever magic there is on the Westside is indifferent, like those impossible trees outside, or relentlessly cruel. There are no miracles here.”
“Why not? It’s not hurting anybody. Why not let this be simple? Why not assume it’s real?”
Through my grimy window, I saw the shadows were impenetrable. The time for nuance had passed. I felt right at home.
“Because I’m a pain in the ass,” I said, slapping my gloves on his leg as I stood to leave.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way. Where to?”
“The Electric Church.”
“Breaking and entering! What fun!”
“You’re not invited. I asked you into my house, not my case.”
He stood. His eyes were wet. His cheeks were flushed. It was infuriating how handsome he got when he chose to be sincere.
“It’s been four months since I had anything to think about but the faces of those boys I led to their death,” he said.
“I know.”
“So give me something to do. I won’t cause trouble. I won’t complain.”
“Those are both lies.”
“Maybe.” His forefinger stroked the back of my wrist. “But it’s dangerous out there, even for you, and if you don’t take me along I’ll tell Hellida and she’ll insist on coming, too.”
“Fine. But if there’s a fight . . .”
“Don’t worry. I can still run away, fast as ever.”
He smiled, and curse that beautiful idiot, I smiled, too.
On a summer day, it was five minutes to the banquet hall. On the ice, in the dark, it took longer. There was enough moon that we didn’t need the lantern, but the mediocre path Van Alen’s guardsmen had cut along Sixth Avenue was too slick for us to move fast.
Cherub kept me entertained. There wasn’t a brick in the neighborhood that didn’t remind him of some story—gory, bawdy, or simply profane—from his days with the One-Eyed Cats, and I was happy to hear them all for the fifth or sixth time. I laughed at the right moments, gasped at others, and in between let my mind drift across the main hall of the Electric Church, wondering if there was anything I could find to prove whether or not Bully Byrd had really come back to life.
“I’d bring back Roach,” said Cherub as we approached Carmine Street.
“Pardon?”
“If the miracle is true. If the doors to death are opened, if we all get to call a few people home—I guess the responsible choice would be someone really marvelous, Frederick Douglass or someone, but what would he and I even have to talk about? Roach always made me laugh, and the way he died was . . . I’d want him back.”
I had never told Cherub that I had seen Roach after Eighth Avenue, trapped in a half death from which no miracle could save him. There were some truths it was braver to keep to yourself.
“What about you?” he said. “What lost soul would Gilda Carr call back from the grave?”
“Frederick Douglass seems a noble enough choice,” I said, and pushed ahead before he could ask me again.
The windows of the Electric Church were dark. Despite Enoch’s promises of openness, the door was locked. Less than a minute with my burglar’s tools corrected that. How nice it felt to be doing something wrong.
Inside, we were greeted by stale, silent air perfumed by the memory of char. Cherub lit the lantern and swept the light across the room.
“Is this a quiet thing, or a talking thing?” he said.
“Perhaps a whisper.”
“What, precisely, are we searching for?”
“Proof, one way or the other.”
“I bet we find nothing at all.”
The brazier had been dragged off to the side. Faint heat hissed from the smoldering wood. The stage was bare. A blue imitation velvet curtain hung behind it, hiding a brick wall. In the corner of the room was the chipped door to Helen’s office. It was padlocked. It could wait.
I dragged a pair of folding chairs across the room and set one next to the brazier. I stood on it and prodded the ash with the other, kicking sparks into the air.
“Careful,” said Cherub.
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Just seemed the thing to say.”
I began to regret allowing him to come.
I dug and dug, not certain what I was looking for, until the chair swept across something other than ash. I tried to drag it out but couldn’t snag it.
“Hold a minute,” said Cherub. “I saw just the thing.”
He loped across the room and returned with a long iron candle snuffer.
“Step aside,” he said. “This is no job for such stubby arms.”
“You’re just as stubby as I am.”
“Probably, but I’m the man with the whatsit.”
I could have kept arguing with him, but at a certain point it is easier to let a man feel useful than remind him he is anything but. I hopped down and let myself enjoy the unique spectacle of Cherub Stevens, warlord of the Lower West, stabbing the snuffer into a potful of ash like he was spearfishing for his dinner. I’d nearly stopped laughing when he let out a Neanderthal roar, jerked the snuffer out of the brazier, and hurled his catch to the ground.
It was a shapeless bag—large, gray, empty—made of weighty canvas. It looked like the discarded skin of a mammoth snake. Cherub kicked it, scattering sparks across the floor, and I knelt to give it a feel.
“Asbestos bag,” I said.
“So?”
“It’s fireproof. Bully—or the man they’re calling Bully—was in the brazier before they lit the fire. He was waiting in this bag. The ceremony was a fake.”
Cherub chucked me on the shoulder in an altogether too brotherly manner.
“Don’t look so gloomy, old girl,” he said. “We’re hard-bitten, cynical Westsiders. We didn’t believe for an instant.”
“Of course not,” I said, unable to add any more to his lie.
“I only wish I’d been here to see those rubes fall for it. Must have been a sight. Only question is—”
Before he could ask it, the church was split by a scream. It was high and strangled, like a cat being sawed in half. It came from the back room.
Cherub, true to his promise, broke for the exit. I ran toward the sound. I yanked on the padlock, but it held firm. I kicked at the old, warped wood. The door buckled but did not break.
The scream grew worse.
“Help me, you idiot,” I called to Cherub, who had frozen in the doorway, waiting for me to see sense. Remembering I never would, he hurtled toward me and threw every ounce of his slight frame into a flying kick. It was enough. The wood splintered. The screaming stopped. Cherub fell to the ground, dazed, and I shoved the door open.
Inside, I saw no one. I heard nothing. I swept the lantern across the room. A pair of swayback couches stared at each other across a lopsided coffee table. A desk held a mess of papers and candle stubs. Then, in the corner of the room, beneath a threadbare blanket, I saw the shape of the man who had stepped out of the fire. It was hard to believe that noise had come from him, but there was nobody else here.
I lowered the lantern and eased my way across the floor. I had to get quite close before I was sure he still drew breath. There was a bottle in his hand and a red stain around his mouth.
“That’s our man?” hissed Cherub from the doorway. I nodded. “Alive?” I nodded again, and he stole into the room to pick over the desk while I inspected the would-be prophet.
His skin was puffy; his teeth atrocious. Up close, the clumsy stitching on his white suit shone plainly. I brushed my hand across his hair, knocking loose the powder that had made it look burned. I dragged my thumbnail over his cheek, scraping up some of the greasepaint that had passed for soot.
“Hmm,” said Cherub. I turned to see what he had found. A hand grabbed my ankle. The man on the floor howled as loud as a person can. His eyes were open, but he did not see. I sucked in a breath and held back a scream, trying to pull away. He held on with a dead man’s grip. I could not get free.
Cherub bounded toward me. I believe he had a notion of staging some kind of rescue. I held up a hand for him to be still. I shut my eyes, tasting ash in my mouth, trying to pretend I was somewhere far away. It was not easy standing still.
The man screamed for a minute or more before his eyes shut, his shoulders sagged, and his fingers released my ankle. I stepped out of his grip, walking backward, waiting for the monster to come alive. No matter how I willed them, my eyes could not break from his slack, sleeping face and my feet would not move faster than a crawl. Only when I passed the threshold of that filthy little room did I allow myself to run.
We got all the way to Sixth Avenue before I risked a look back and saw that we had not been pursued. Still, I didn’t stop moving until we were across the avenue, when I threw myself onto a snowbank. My neck was so hot, I’m certain I heard it hissing.
“What the hell just happened?” said Cherub, a question that, this time, I could answer.
“He wasn’t dead, just dead drunk and screaming in his sleep. A common affliction around these parts. Probably he’s onstage and can’t recall his lines. Or maybe he’s just being roasted alive.”
“Since when can you peer inside the minds of drunks?”
“He’s an actor. What else would they dream about?”
“How can you tell?”
“The makeup looked professional. The asbestos bag is a stage trick. I don’t think any of the Byrds have a theatrical background, so the man they hired must have provided it himself.”
“You’re sure he’s playing a part?”
“If that was really their dear, departed father, would he be drinking himself to sleep, locked in a frozen room, or would he be at home, in bed, surrounded by the family that’s waited so long for his return?”
Cherub hauled me out of the snow. We walked. He pulled his borrowed scarf tighter around his neck. In the moonlight his eyes shone yellow. His lips were chapped nearly to bleeding.
“What was it you found,” I said, “before he started screaming?”
“The reason for the hoax.”
He handed me a thin slip of paper, a spotlessly printed handbill advertising “A Grand Ceremony of Electric Resurrection” two nights hence on the Flat. It promised sermons from Ruth Byrd and her lately revived father, plus fifty sinners brought back from the dead. Two dollars bought admission, a view of the miracle, and a ticket to enter the drawing for the lucky fifty whose loved ones would be returned to life.
“Fake one resurrection,” he said, “and sell tickets for fifty more. Hell of a racket.”
I tore the handbill into careful shreds and dropped it where, if it weren’t for the snow, the gutter would be. I had spent so long trying to understand how I felt. The answer was familiar.
Rage.
“They cannot do this,” I said, surprised I could speak. “They cannot dress themselves up as saints, inflame the passions of the hopeless, and bilk them out of what little they have in exchange for a lie.”
“They’re going to make a fortune.”
“No. I’m going to stop them if I have to tear their church apart, board by board.”
I walked east. He followed, stumbling a bit as he tried to keep up.
“Are you really that embarrassed?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You saw that fire and you saw that smoke, and when Bully stepped out of it, you thought for just one second, if they can get their daddy back maybe you can have yours, too.”
“I’ve met my father. I had a chance to have him back, and I said no. Death is final. Grief is permanent. Those rules aren’t meant to be broken.”
“You can lie to yourself, Gilda, but I hate when you lie to me.”
I didn’t answer. What was the point in telling a man the truth when he’d already read it on your face?
We reached Washington Square, where I’d paid a gang of Barbarossa’s old men, unemployed and desperate, to cut a path along the sidewalk from the street to my front door. We stepped gratefully onto the pavement, our calves burning from the effort of keeping steady on the ice.
“My feelings don’t matter,” I said. “That ceremony has to be stopped.”
“How?”
“I’ll leave that for morning. Right now, I’m tired and cold and—”
“Look at that,” he said. I turned my head and saw ice-packed trees glittering in the moonlight. When I turned back, he was two steps closer, leaning in for a kiss.
I’d loved him once for being an idiot, and it was nice to see he hadn’t changed. His lips were frozen, but so were mine. It was like finding an old pair of slippers buried in the back of a closet and being surprised they fit as easily as ever.
I pulled away and found my breath. On the Eastside, I’d have been obligated to smack his face and stamp my feet and scream to the world that my honor had been insulted. But there was no one watching, and so I kissed him again. When I finished with him, I took him by the hand, opened my gate, and started up the steps. He looked up at me like a sunflower admiring the sun.
“You should let the Byrds alone,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because what we’re doing here, it isn’t working for us anymore, is it? I haven’t slept right since Eighth Avenue. I wake up six or seven times a night, even when I’m drunk. I’m grinding my teeth—by morning my gums are bloody and my jaw feels like I’ve been chewing rocks. And my dreams . . . you saw everything I saw, and more. You did everything I did and more.”
Shot a man through the heart. Knocked a woman senseless and watched the river swallow her. It’s all right, though. I only see them dying whenever I shut my eyes.
“Honestly,” I said, “I’m doing fine. What’s your point?”
“That’s honesty?”
“The closest I can give.”
He sighed. “Fine. If you can’t talk straight, I will. Why not get out? You and me together, and Hellida to make those pancakes she does. To the Upper West or the Eastside or maybe even another city altogether, where things are passably normal?”
“And what would we do with normal?”
“Anything we want.”
“This is the only neighborhood in the country where your skin and my skin can touch without fear.”
“There are places we could go. It would be hard, but no less a hell than here. We’re too young to give up. I’m through being an overgrown boy. Whatever kind of man you want, that’s the kind I’ll be. It’s the same as I was saying earlier—why not take the thing that’s simple? Why not assume this is real?”
If it had been summer, I might have let him down easy. If it had been summer, I might have said yes. But the wind was sharp and my hands were numb, and I lacked the patience to explain my fear that if I unpacked the iron around my heart, I would find it had died in its cell.
“Maybe not. But I still can’t,” I said, and he nodded like he’d been expecting nothing else. “Come inside and I’ll find something to drink and we can talk about it, okay?”
But he was already opening the gate.
“It wasn’t easy to say a thing like that,” he said. “You’re a tough audience when it comes to speaking the truth. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to do any more tonight.”
“At least come in and sleep.”
“I’ve survived worse nights on the Westside, and colder, too,” he said, and he closed my gate and he was gone.
I covered my eyes and breathed as best I could. In a minute or so I was nearly fine. I turned my knob and found that while I was away, someone had locked the door.
“Damn it, Hellida,” I said. Deep in my bag I found my seldom-used keys. I stepped inside and closed the door, shutting out the wind and leaving me in silence so deep that I could hear nothing but my heartbeat and, worse, my own thoughts. Light was needed, and a few hours with the Giants’ box scores, and I would feel human again. I reached for a match. Something hard pressed against my back.
“Mr. Burglar,” said a woman’s voice. “If you keep moving, I shall be forced to fire this revolver. It will put a hole in your back the size of a Granny Smith apple. Be good, stand still, and live.”
“That’s not a gun,” I said.
“It most certainly is.”
“There are no guns in my district. No guns west of the stem. And every New Yorker knows it. So who in hell are you?”
I spun around. It wasn’t a gun, but it was still a weapon—something heavy enough that when she cracked me on the head with it, I fell down hard.
“I may be in hell,” she said, “but I don’t let anyone, even a demon, speak so disrespectfully.”
“Who are you?” I said.
She swiped at me with the weapon.
“What are you doing in my parlor?”
She swiped at me again. I scrambled backward and found the match.
I scraped it against my thumbnail. It flashed into light and I saw my mother’s face.