A few nights after my interview with Hemingway, Harry came over to pick up the draft of my article. Thank goodness, he, Joe, and I had decided in advance that he’d take the lead in editing my Hemingway piece. I’d been avoiding Joe since I’d seen him outside my apartment. I’d confirmed it with my physician: I was expecting a baby. The news had totally rattled my cage. My face in the mirror looked wan and worried, and I felt sure Joe would guess what was up the minute he saw me.
And I wasn’t sure yet just what I planned to tell him. We’d skirted the topic of marriage but never children. I wasn’t sure how he felt about them. Plus, telling him we were having a baby was tantamount to begging the man to marry me. Where was the romance, or the spontaneity, in that? I hated to think that he’d see me as a burden, that he’d propose out of duty and nothing else.
All that aside—was I ready for a baby? Could I write with one underfoot, or would I wind up a full-time housekeeper?
It all made me want to weep.
Lucky for me, Harry didn’t seem to notice anything was amiss. I opened the door to find his rangy figure splayed from edge to edge of the threshold, dangling what looked like a bottle of Scotch between two fingers of his left hand. He cocked one eyebrow. “Evening, Louise. Mind if I come in for a nightcap?”
I tried not to groan. I had the typed pages ready to hand over, hoping I’d be able to get rid of him quickly. “Actually, I have quite a headache. I’m not in the mood to drink.”
His thick blond eyebrows leapt in mock offense. “Come on, Louise, we have to celebrate your first interview for Downtown! Your big break! I thought some thanks were in order.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, like a bellhop expecting a tip. He meant that I should be thanking him.
I attempted a weary smile. “Of course. Please do come in.”
He plunged past me, into my apartment. I had my radio on, tuned to a news broadcast about the crisis in Iran. The voice was droning about throngs of loyalists to the exiled Shah taking to the streets. “The mob has ousted the embattled premier, Mohammad Mossadegh, and now are demanding the Shah’s return…”
Harry went to the set and switched it off. “The people will have their way,” he said cheerily.
“Hmm. I would’ve thought the people preferred having Iranian oil in Iranian hands.”
“Oh, Louise,” he replied with an arch smile.
I cleared some laundry from the edge of my fading floral sofa, and we sat side by side in front of the fireplace that didn’t work. All of the windows were open, letting in hot exhaust and traffic sounds. Harry let his gaze travel over my tiny quarters: living room barely bigger than the couch, shoes kicked under the coffee table, piles of magazines and books stacked willy-nilly. He smirked at me in my blue summer-weight Lanz nightgown, probably thinking his maid had a better apartment. Clutching my robe around my chest, I reached for something atop the mantel.
“Looky here,” I said to Harry, holding out a plain woolen scally cap.
He looked reluctant to touch it. “What’s that?”
“It’s Hemingway’s.” The morning after our interview, I’d woken up feeling as if all of it had been a dream. I’d stumbled out of my bedroom, hair a mess and mouth tasting sour, half hoping I’d imagined everything—the boxing match, the cup of tea, the pregnancy. Then I’d seen Papa’s hat dangling from the knob of my radiator, like Cinderella’s shoe, from the night before.
Harry’s mouth fell open. “You have Hemingway’s hat?” He took it from me gingerly, then, laughing, lifted it to his nose and smelled it. “Brylcreem,” he said, and I nodded.
“I’ll admit I gave it a whiff, too. I don’t know why.”
“I don’t know why I did it, either,” Harry said as he handed it back to me. “Maybe I hoped I’d inhale a bit of greatness.”
We laughed. It felt as if we’d shared something funny and strange, both of us sniffing Ernest Hemingway’s hat, and I remembered then how much I sometimes liked Harry. “You know,” he told me, “you should hold on to this. You could use it to get an audience with him again.”
I shrugged. I’d thought of that, though I doubted a man like Hemingway cared about some old hat. “He probably has hundreds.”
“Well, keep it as a souvenir,” said Harry. His eyes took on a bit of a glaze, the pupils dilated. His hips shifted over so that he sat very close to me, the knee of his wispy linen trouser touching my leg. With that move, he ruptured the happy balloon of camaraderie that had been floating between us, and I sat back on the cushions. He moved even closer. “Were you getting ready for bed?” he asked breathily.
“As a matter of fact, I was,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “What’s the matter, Beverly’s got you in the doghouse?”
He shrugged, gave me a devilish grin. “Beverly’s working tonight.”
The nerve of this guy. I should have clocked him with the baseball bat I kept under my bed for burglars. Or shut him up with the news that I was carrying a little baby inside me, one who belonged to his partner. But then Joe would know. “And I’d like to go there alone, thank you very much.”
The tip of one of his fingers went to my knee. “Are you sure you owe it to Joe?”
I sighed. He did this sometimes, implied that Joe hadn’t been faithful to me (and he’d tried to convince me many times Glenys had stepped out on him, which I didn’t buy for a second). But now that Joe and I had had our little heart-to-heart on that street corner in the Village, I knew in my bones that he wasn’t fooling around with other girls. Still, I wondered if he had other secrets.
I crossed my arms. “Do I not owe it to Joe?”
Harry must have seen something shift in my face, some signal that I was done playing. “Oh, don’t get like that. Sure, you do, Joe’s a good fella. You know I’m only kidding with you.” He put his feet on the floor and shifted forward, preparing to go, and as he got up he stumbled a little, bumping the coffee table.
“Watch yourself,” he said, blushing, rubbing his shin. “That table is dangerous.”
Something alighted in my mind just then, a memory: Harry stumbling in his spare bedroom, Joe grasping his lapels. There was a question I’d been longing to ask ever since that party in July. I decided to go for it.
“What did Joe mean by ‘You’ll get us killed’?”
Harry’s knees seemed to buckle. Quickly, he sat back down on the sofa. I thought I saw a twitch appear at his temple. “I haven’t a clue what you mean,” he said. His aristocratic New England accent became stronger, almost British, when he was nervous.
“At the party. I was watching, you know, when the two of you were alone in your guest bedroom. He said something to imply you were in danger, and you told him he was being dramatic.”
Little beads of perspiration clung to Harry’s hairline, like a tiara. I had the sense it had nothing to do with the heat. “I just remembered,” he said suddenly, brightening up. “Joe said you landed quite a scoop on Hemingway. He’s got a new novel in the pipeline, eh?”
“Yes.” I took the bait and let him change the subject, at least for now. Despite myself, I enjoyed being the one in the know, the source of some information Joe and Harry weren’t privy to. “It’s about Cuba, and I daresay he seems a little more sympathetic to what went on at Moncada than I think a lot of Americans would be comfortable with.” I handed him the draft of my article, typed and bound with a shiny paper clip.
Harry’s buggy eyes blinked a few times, at me and then down at the article. “Well. I’ll have a lot to work with, then.”
I felt nervous prickles under my arms at the thought of him tampering with my painstakingly crafted work. “Don’t cut it down for Hemingway’s sake. Frankly, he seemed proud to tell us about it.”
Harry had been perusing my first page; now his face shot up. A few fine wrinkles appeared on his forehead. “ ‘Us’? Who’s us? He told someone else about this new book?”
“Oh…” My cheeks went warm. It hadn’t occurred to me that the boys might not want anyone else listening in on my interview. “We went to see a fight, and there was a guy hanging around. Moe something. Just one of the owners of the Garden, in Queens.”
“Louise.” Harry waggled his finger in front of my face. “If you want to work for us again, you can’t be sloppy. Don’t risk having someone else scoop you.”
“The guy runs a boxing arena. I hardly think he’s going to write this up in the Times.”
“You’d better hope.” Harry patted his breast pocket. “We should celebrate in any case. I’ve got a joint if you think that would…loosen you up. Ease your headache.”
My spine tensed. He really had come over for his reward in return for giving me this opportunity, an opportunity he was now implying I might have blown. I’d have to get him on the defensive again, scare him out of here. I remembered his rant the evening of the launch party, about the place being bugged. “You sure we won’t get in trouble?” I teased.
He laughed. “What do you mean?”
“What if my place is bugged? What if there’s someone watching us?”
His face fell apart, reassembled itself into a mask of panic.
And then the alarm went off.
I had no idea what it was at first; I assumed a fire truck or ambulance, but the sound started at level ten and did not die down the way a speeding vehicle would. We were both covering our ears, shouting God knows what at each other; then Harry finally mouthed Nuclear siren with animal terror in his eyes, and my nerves went haywire.
Both Harry and I jumped up as if we were being jolted with electricity. Siren blaring, we ran around the room, screaming, me looking for my shoes, Harry panicking, hands over his ears, his body rocking forward and back, forward and back. Reading his lips, I saw the words Korea, Iran, bomb.
What do I do, what do I do? my mind asked over and over as I fumbled with my bedroom slippers, all other shoes seemingly vanished. The nuclear siren had gotten into my skin, in my bones, and what did bedroom slippers matter, who cared if they got dirty on the bottoms, they would be dust in a matter of minutes. If we weren’t crushed by the building, we’d inhale the poisonous cloud, we’d be singed, screaming, burned, the planes were on their way….
Breathing hard, I tried to pull myself together. Harry was kneeling on the floor, his crouched body rocking against my legs. But I was back in tenth grade, and my teacher, kind, calm Mrs. Holton, was directing us under our desks for an air-raid drill. “If there isn’t time, duck and cover. If there is time, you go to a bomb shelter.”
Opening my eyes, I grasped Harry under the armpits. “Come on!” I tried to tug at his great solid weight. “Come on, you bastard, there’s a shelter in the basement next door.”
We stayed in the nuclear shelter for thirty-five agonizing minutes, crouched and shaking and sweaty. Harry, who’d turned into a sniveling mess, turned out to have claustrophobia among many other varied and surprising phobias, and he counted out the minutes on his wristwatch for the rest of us until the firemen arrived and led us, sheepishly, out into the night.
“Us” were only me, Harry, my loony upstairs neighbor, Lena, with two of her dogs, and one of the cooks from the Italian restaurant downstairs. The rest of his co-workers had assumed, rightfully, that this was a false alarm. They’d noticed that only the one siren on our street had gone off. The cook returned to the restaurant to a cacophony of cheers and jeers from the kitchen staff.
“But it was so loud,” shouted Lena, who was hard of hearing (a good quality in a neighbor). She was seventy-two and operated an illegal kennel in her apartment; she now wore the shortest bathrobe I had ever seen and held a blind cairn terrier in her arms. “Shouldn’t we get some compensation from the city?”
“Quite right, we should.” Somehow Harry had recovered after we emerged back into civilization, and had adopted all his previous airs and then some. He cracked his neck, readjusted the cuffs of his shirtsleeves. “This is no way to treat citizens.”
The fireman looked bored. “Don’t look like nobody got hurt here.”
Harry sniffed, his face reddened by the flashing lights of the fire truck. “I disagree with you there, sir. I shall take it up with the mayor personally.”
Lena batted her eyes at him. “You know the mayor?”
“Why, yes, ma’am,” he replied, voice once again oozing charm. “I’ve interviewed him myself.”
My ears were still ringing. Without saying goodbye, I made my way back to the glass entryway of my tenement building. Harry caught up to me. “Ah—say, Louise. This is quite the story we’ve gotten ourselves wrapped up in.” Nervously, he shuffled the pages of my article against his chest.
“Quite the story? It’s New York, Harry. It won’t even make the evening news.”
“I mean, I’d rather you not mention it to anyone, not even Joe. If you don’t mind, that is.”
I tapped my nose. “You were never here.”
His blue eyes crinkled in relief. “I was never here.”
“Like a spy,” I said, and watched him flinch.
I went inside and climbed the flight of stairs to my apartment. Then I chained, locked, and bolted my door.