Connie Webber was crazy about the pigeons in the square. It was a joke that never grew stale at Mazzoli’s Restaurant—the joke about Connie and the pigeons. Rosa and Shirley, the two other waitresses, who were much younger and who, in a less easygoing establishment, would have treated her with more respect, were kidding her all day long.
“Say, Rosa, think we could sell a piece to Ripley about Connie and her feathered friends? A hundred birds and a girl.”
“Hey, Connie, why don’t you buy a coupla ostrich fans and give us a dove act?”
Their young friendly laughter would ring about the crowded little Greenwich Village restaurant, and the regular customers, who were in on the joke, would grin at Connie or pat her broad hip as she passed with a tray piled high with empty spaghetti dishes.
Sometimes even Mr. Mazzoli himself would emerge from his kitchen, his olive, sweat-shiny face impish under the cocked chef’s cap.
“Connie mia, you catcha me a coupla dem birds and I make-a the fine piccione alla cacciatore?”
That was always good for a gale of laughter.
But Connie didn’t mind being kidded. She was a big blonde with a big smile and a big heart who liked nothing better than a good laugh. She knew they were all fond of her, especially Mr. Mazzoli, who was always threatening to marry her once the restaurant was established and he could find enough time to get out of his kitchen and take her to City Hall. She wasn’t even surprised that they thought her comical. It was kind of crazy—a grown woman of forty-one feeling the way she felt about a bunch of birds. But there it was.
Whenever she got a chance—in the afternoons, for example, when the lunches were over and before the early dinners started to trickle in—she would slip out to the little shabby square and sit on a bench, watching the pigeons swirl and gleam across the bright sky. Instantly, she would be up with them, flashing, tumbling dizzily in the air. Then one of them would spot her and they would all plunge down for the scraps she always brought from the restaurant—plunge with a clatter of wings, an eager craning of iridescent necks and a regular symphony of coos.
They made Connie laugh with pleasure.
Everyone who frequented the square knew Connie. Even the precinct cops—Fred Kitner, Frank O’Mulligan, Sergeant Connors—all of them paused to chat with her when they passed her feeding the pigeons. She was just naturally friendly, and her friendliness was wide enough to embrace not only the pigeons but the whole of Manhattan Island.
It was through the pigeons that Connie first met Yo Yonson. Yo Yonson wasn’t really his name. Later she learned it was Erling Something-or-other, and he was a Norwegian sailor off a ship. But the moment she saw him one spring afternoon shambling through the square like a great blond bear, she said to herself: Look at that big Swede. She remembered the old vaudeville number, My name is Yo Yonson, I come from Wisconsin. And the name stuck in her mind.
She would, of course, have noticed Yo Yonson even if it hadn’t been for the pigeons. He was so big, for one thing. And so shabby. His pants had been patched at least a dozen times with neat, sailor-like stitches, and his jacket looked almost as if it had once been a tuxedo jacket. There was a hole under one elbow. He was unshaven, too, and there was so much unshaven cheek that it would have seemed like a great forest to a fly.
But all those things were just facts that Connie would have noticed about anyone. What really won her was his smile. It wasn’t a very clever smile, maybe, but, as he paused to look down at the pigeons clucking and pecking at the scraps around her, it came—sudden, white, infinitely tender.
He stopped right in front of her, watching the pigeons as if they were diamonds or maybe little children. One of his great hands went out towards them and then dropped.
“Here.” She smiled impulsively. “Like to try?”
She fumbled in her brown paper bag and held out to him a crust of black Italian bread. He took it like a kid receiving a present. He stooped down and held the crust out cautiously towards the pigeons. One of them cocked its head, made a swift peck, and grabbed the bread away. Yo Yonson pulled his hand back with startled swiftness.
Then he caught Connie’s eye and they both broke into delighted laughter.
After that, Connie saw Yo Yonson every day in the square. He would come at exactly four o’clock and now he had a brown paper bag of his own. He was invariably dressed in the same rags, but they were always clean and always neat, except for the hole under the right elbow of his jacket. The ritual was always the same, too. He would pause at the bench next to hers and give her his shy, tentative smile, as if the pigeons were her possessions and he was asking her permission to visit with them. She would smile back. He would sit down then, rip open his bag of scraps, and leave it spread across his great knees like a tray. When the pigeons alighted around him, with a dry rustle of feathers, he would sit still as a statue so as not to frighten them. Soon they would be all over him, pecking in his lap, perching on his huge shoulders. Sometimes one of them would even rest a moment, wabbling slightly, on the top of his blond head.
His innocent delight in the birds enchanted Connie. Why, he loves them even more than I do, she thought. Sometimes she would try to speak to him, just to be sociable, but he didn’t say much and what he did say was hard to understand, though always polite.
It didn’t take the Mazzoli Restaurant long to find out about Yo Yonson. On the second day, Shirley saw him sitting on the bench next to Connie and that evening the restaurant was loud with a brand-new series of pigeon jokes.
“The pigeon-woman’s found a pigeon-man.”
“Say, Connie, why don’t you ditch Mr. Mazzoli, marry your pigeon-man, and set up in a menagerie?”
Even Sergeant Connors and Fred Kitner, in for a plate of spaghetti before going on duty, joined in the gag.
Connie just laughed and kidded back with them. But she was glad about Yo Yonson. Not because he was a man—nothing like that. Connie liked her men dark and quick and cheerful—like Mr. Mazzoli. But it made her glow to think of all that affection Yo Yonson felt for the birds. Maybe he was simple—not so bright in the head. But the world needed kindness. There couldn’t be too much kindness, Connie thought, not ever in a million years. There could never be enough.
She wondered where Yo Yonson lived. She hoped there was someone who was kind to him and saw that he got enough to eat.
Connie had every second Saturday evening off. One Saturday, about a month after she had met Yo Yonson, she left the restaurant just before five. She figured maybe she would go uptown and take in a show. As she strolled through the square, the afternoon sunlight, slanting down across the benches and the seedy city trees, made it all as pretty as a picture. Yo Yonson was there. He had just finished feeding the pigeons which were up again, darting and spinning in the sky. When he saw her, he rose, hurriedly brushing crumbs from his pants. The smile came as usual, but it seemed shyer, more excited, and his huge head was bobbing to and fro as if he was making an effort to think out the right words to say something.
Connie paused and smiled back at him encouragingly.
At last he managed, in his deep, guttural voice: “Pliz? My house. You come? Pliz?”
He turned and pointed across the square towards one of the shabby apartment brownstones.
“My house? A little time—pliz?”
His eagerness was as touching as his first cautious holding out of the crust to the pigeons. The smile had gone, giving way to an agonized fear that she might not understand. No one, not even a little child, could be afraid of him—for all of his bulk.
“Why, of course I’ll come.” Connie almost added Yo Yonson, and felt a tickle of amusement in her throat at her own foolishness.
The house where Yo Yonson lived was the most squalid in the block. The paint was peeling off the window frames. A slatternly woman was sitting on the dirty steps, and above, at one of the upper windows, another woman with bright auburn hair was gazing at the street, stolidly chewing gum. When she saw Yo Yonson and Connie, she grinned and yelled down at Yo Yonson: “Hey, moron, gonna give her some of that junk you tried to give me?” She laughed a loud, brassy laugh. The sour woman on the steps peered at them in prickly silence.
Connie was smarting with indignation against the slut of a woman at the window. But Yo Yonson did not seem to have heard, or at least didn’t seem to have understood. Wreathed in smiles, he stood at the head of a steep iron ladder which led down into an areaway. He gave a little bow indicating that she should precede him.
Where he lived was a cellar—an honest-to-goodness cellar. The only light seeped in from a small window just about at street level. It was damp, too. But he had it clean and shipshape as a boat deck. There wasn’t any real furniture. Wooden orange crates had been put out for chairs, and an old mattress on the floor was the bed. Stacked precisely against the walls were cartons and cartons of junk. Some of the boxes had chipped cups and plates in them; some had pieces of iron; others were full of old nails, all nearly hammered straight again. There were piles of wood and rags and old newspapers.
So that’s how he earns his living, she thought. Going around collecting junk from ash cans at night and then selling it to the dealers. It’s a shame, she thought, and this is the United States where everyone’s supposed to have rights and earn enough for a decent meal.
Yo Yonson was still smiling happily. He gestured to one of the crates and she sat down. Then he went way back into the darkest part of the room and seemed to be searching through the cartons. Soon she heard him give a little grunt of satisfaction. He came back to her. His big arms were stretched out in front of him and, delicately draped over them, was a long black dress with black artificial lace around the collar and cuffs.
He held it out to her. His smile was unsure again. When she did not take it, he gripped it around the neck part and held it out to her, pointing at the label inside. In the dim light, Connie could just make out the name of a department store.
“Good!” he said. “From big, big store. In the junk can.” He nodded vigorously, pushing the dress at her, almost smothering her with it. “Good. From big store. For you.”
Connie took it, and, rising, held it up in front of her. It was much too small for her; there was a rusty brown stain on one of the sleeves which showed why it had been thrown out; and personally she preferred a more colorful dress. But she knew he was paying her back for the pigeons, and suddenly she wanted to cry. She smiled up at him brilliantly, patting the material, making little exclamations. “Why, it’s lovely! It’s beautiful! You shouldn’t … Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.”
His answering smile spread right across his face. “You like?”
Then he looked embarrassed, and the blood flooded into his unshaven cheeks. Stiffly, almost with the grandeur of a duke, he bowed towards the door. He was telling her that she didn’t have to stay any longer just to be polite or to show she was grateful.
Clutching the dress, Connie hurried out and climbed the area steps. The slut was still at the upper window. Connie jerked her thumb contemptuously at her.
But she didn’t really feel angry, not even against that cruel, stupid woman. She felt the way she felt when the pigeons were soaring and swooping against the blue spring sky. She didn’t go to the show. She took the dress home and tried it on. It was much too small for her large, solid body, but that didn’t make any difference. All evening it warmed her little furnished room, as if it were an expensive electric heater.
Because the whole episode had seemed so beautiful to her, she told them all about it at the restaurant the next day. It never occurred to her to keep it to herself. Nor did it occur to her that the reactions of her friends would be so violent.
Rosa said: “You went there—right there in his place? Connie, how could you? Gives me the creeps just to think of it!”
Shirley said: “He could have murdered you right there and then. That’s what he could have done!”
But Mr. Mazzoli was the most concerned of all. He harangued her ferociously in the hot, richly smelling kitchen, all the time stirring a Parmesan sauce.
“Connie, you crazy? That’s a crazy man. That’s a loco. Guy like that ain’t got no brains—is like-a the animals in the zoo. He grab you. One big fist—he grab you. Connie, you crazy! Better I take-a you quick to City Hall and stoppa all this foolishness.”
He tried to make Connie promise she would have nothing to do with Yo Yonson ever again. But she wasn’t married to Mr. Mazzoli yet and she wouldn’t listen. Not that she was mad with him or with the girls. She knew they weren’t being unkind to Yo Yonson. They were just saying what they thought was right for her. They didn’t know the Big Swede. They hadn’t seen his sweet, clumsy smile when he held the crust out to the pigeons.
It was two days later when it happened.
Around eleven o’clock, the last diners had gone and all the tables had been cleared off. Connie said good night to Mr. Mazzoli, who still had hours of work ahead of him in his kitchen, and left Rosa and Shirley at the door because they always went off in the other direction to get a downtown bus. From the very first moment that she stepped out into the dimly lit square, she could tell something was wrong. It was kind of in the air. Then she heard the murmuring voices and made out the small crowd which was gathered around a house on the north side of the square. She hurried towards the disturbance and, as she did so, she realized that the center of the chattering, excited throng was the house where Yo Yonson lived.
“Murder!”
She heard the word instantly, passed from one shadowy face to another. A woman standing next to her turned to her eagerly.
“You heard? A woman’s been murdered. Second floor front. Not better than she ought, they say. Strangled, she was. Strangled with her neck snapped clean in two. And you know something? Her hair was pulled out. Great chunks of it—pulled out, lying there on the floor.”
Second floor front. That would be the one with the dyed auburn hair. The dyed hair! Connie felt a twinge of horror and sympathy. Murdered! The poor soul! People were running up and down the steps into the house. Conspicuous among them was the sour-looking woman who had been sitting there the day Yo Yonson had given her the dress. Soon Sergeant Connors and Fred Kitner arrived. All the people on the steps crushed around them, but they pushed their way inside. A little later, more important policemen and detectives swung up in a car. They went inside too.
Gossip was tossed from person to person in the constantly increasing crowd. Just as Connie was turning to leave, the woman next to her grabbed her arm.
“Hear that? There’s an idiot that lives here. Some kind of a big Swede. She was always kidding him, they say. And that’s the way they go—they have spells on them when they kill. It’s the Big Swede that did it, the moron …”
Connie felt her heart turn over. All around her now she could hear voices whispering: the moron… the Big Swede …
The avidity, the cruelty in the atmosphere was choking her. They couldn’t say that! Not about Yo Yonson—Yo Yonson who loved the pigeons, who couldn’t hurt a fly.
Sergeant Connors was coming out of the house. The sour woman jumped at him crying: “The moron! It’s the moron! The Big Swede. Get the moron!”
Sergeant Connors, his normally cheerful red face heavy and flustered, managed to break through to the street. But the onlookers had taken up the refrain.
“The Big Swede … The moron …”
Then to the left of the crowd there was a murmuring. It came closer, growing in strength, until it was a gasp of excitement. Everyone lurched to the left. As Connie was jostled along with the others, she felt sick and frightened, but mostly she felt furiously angry. How could people be like this? How could they judge and condemn before they were sure, absolutely sure?
An eccentric current in the throng shoved her to the front. She saw then what it was that had caused the commotion.
Yo Yonson had come around the corner into the square. He was pushing a little cart made out of a big crate on old bicycle wheels. The crate was filled with junk and he was standing behind it, huge, shabby, gazing back bewildered at the hostile group in front of him.
Connie wanted to run to him, to protect him. But something about him checked not only her but the rest of the crowd. It was a kind of dignity in the way he held his unshaven head, the way his great fingers curved firmly around the handles of his cart.
The crowd stood still. Yo Yonson stood still. There was a complete silence, but it lasted only a second. Then someone yelled: “Get the moron!”
A rock was thrown. It landed with a clatter in Yo Yonson’s cart.
It was then that Sergeant Connors and Fred Kitner broke through. Before a riot could start, they had whisked Yo Yonson away in a police car.
Connie did not have to stop and think what to do. It was as clear to her as an order from a customer in the restaurant. Those wicked people! They would hound Yo Yonson into the electric chair. Just because he was different—that was all they needed. They’d never bothered to get to know him, to find out how kind he was, how innocent, how much he wanted to be friendly. Oh, no, he was different—so, hound him, destroy him.
They would lie, too. Connie knew that. The stringy woman with her face shining in excitement, for example—she would lie, and not even know she was doing it. She’d say anything, say she saw Yo Yonson actually coming out of the room. They’d all say anything, because by now they believed it, or thought they believed it. They’d kidded themselves because that was the way they wanted it to have happened.
And poor Yo Yonson with his slow wits, his few stumbling words, could never stand up against them.
She would have to stop them. She would have to go to the police station. If she talked to Sergeant Connors and the other precinct boys, maybe they’d understand, because they liked her and trusted her judgment.
Maybe …
Connie Webber sat stubbornly for over an hour in the drab receiving room of the precinct house. There was a man she didn’t know—must be a new cop—at the night desk and she wasn’t going to risk talking with him. She was waiting to see Sergeant Connors, she said, and she just sat there.
All sorts of things were going on. Every few minutes some detective or other would come in or go out. It was all about the murder. Once a little man with a moustache and a black bag hurried in—the medical examiner. He stopped at the desk.
“Well, she was strangled between four and five this afternoon. No doubt about that. They didn’t need me. A couple of them heard a scream around quarter of five. Didn’t do anything, of course. In that sort of house, no one bats an eye at a scream.” He grinned waggishly at the cop Connie didn’t know. “If you were one of her boy friends, Joe, I hope you have an alibi.”
One of her boy friends! That meant that what the woman in the crowd had said was right. The dead woman had been no better than she—a real slut. If she’d been that sort of woman, with the crazy twisted kinds that always hang around a person like that, anything might have happened to her any time. Surely, they would see that Yo Yonson wouldn’t be …
It was then that the thought came to Connie, and the moment it came she knew she would go through with it. The scream had been heard around quarter of five. That was the time Yo Yonson had been sitting with the pigeons right next to her in the square. Of course, as it happened, that afternoon she had remembered a nylon slip she’d forgotten to wash out, and just about four-thirty she had left the pigeons and run home to do it before the dinners began.
But she’d been there with Yo Yonson until almost a quarter to five! No one need know about that little extra time.
Now that she was less angry, she could see more clearly. Sergeant Connors was kind—but would he and the other big, important cops really believe her when she tried to explain about Yo Yonson? Hadn’t Mr. Mazzoli and the girls failed to understand? Hadn’t Mr. Mazzoli called Yo Yonson a loco, no better than the animals in the zoo? Why wouldn’t Sergeant Connors and the rest of them react the same way? Wouldn’t it be better if she said she’d been there with Yo Yonson in the square all the time until five, and not to mention the nylon slip? It was a kind of lie, of course, but that way none of them, not fifty of them with cruel tongues, would be able to hurt Yo Yonson.
Sergeant Connors came in with some big-shot detective. He grinned wearily at Connie.
“Hi, Connie, what you doing here?”
All the talk and everything lasted about three hours, but she won. Over and over again, to all ranks of policemen, she repeated her tale that Yo Yonson had been with her in the square. Over and over again too, she tried to explain to them how kind he was, how harmless, how helpless for all his strength, and how the people in the house, because they were stupid, so set in their ways, would surely make up things against him. At first, some of the important detectives were not going to take her seriously, but Sergeant Connors insisted that she was a reliable witness. And it came out that there was nothing to pin on Yo Yonson—no fingerprints, no one whose word could be relied on had seen him around at the time. He had only been taken into custody to protect him from the angry crowd. What with the woman being the type she had been, and with all kinds of crackpots hanging around, it was finally all right. The Inspector explained that, since Yo Yonson had an alibi, they couldn’t hold him—there was a law about that.
At four-thirty in the morning Yo Yonson was released. That was when Connie found out that his name was Erling Some-thing-or-other, and that he was a Norwegian sailor off a ship. It was written in the night book.
Yo Yonson didn’t seem changed. At least, Connie couldn’t see any difference. He came out of the precinct house quietly, stooping a little the way he always did, as if he was humble about being so tall. When he saw her, he gave his same quick, shy smile of pleasure. But he didn’t seem to realize that he’d been locked up as a murder suspect, or that it was she who had obtained his release.
She thought: What’s to be done with him? He can’t go back to that horrible house. Heaven knows what they would do to him. But when she asked him, real slow and clear, where he was going, he only said: “Home.”
There was a sort of stubbornness about him that she recognized and accepted. Maybe he knew more than she thought; maybe it was a matter of pride with him to show them all that he wasn’t afraid.
She walked with him through the lonely night streets back to the square. The moment they reached it, she saw what had happened. There were no people around. It was too late for that. But, strewn over the sidewalk in chaos were all Yo Yonson’s pathetic belongings from the cellar. She could see them all. The orange-crate chairs had been ripped to pieces; the mattress had all its stuffing torn out; the cartons were crushed; the plates and cups broken into bits; and the old scraps of metal flung all over the sidewalk.
The bicycle-wheel cart was there too, but both its wheels had been hammered crooked.
Exhausted as she was, Connie felt anger flare up in her again. She would have liked to rush into the house and beat all those people with her bare fists. But Yo Yonson didn’t seem to feel that way. He just stood looking at the wreckage—looking silently, resignedly. For the first time, Connie dimly grasped a fact about the world that she had never guessed before. Maybe the Yo Yonsons were so used to unkindness and unhappiness that they accepted it the way others accept the wind or the rain.
He moved over to examine the ruined wheels of his cart. Then he found one of the cartons that wasn’t entirely crushed. He picked it up, and moving carefully through the litter, he selected several objects that seemed to mean most to him and put them in the carton. He turned back to Connie then and suddenly the hopeful smile came back to his face.
“You like? The dress from the big store? You like?”
“Oh, it’s lovely.” Connie rested her hand on his rocklike forearm. “It’s really beautiful. One day I’ll put it on for you.”
“Good.” Yo Yonson nodded his head, happy, reassured.
He turned from her then, with the carton under his arm.
It was after he had gone that Connie found it. She was passing a wire-mesh trashbasket under one of the street lights and she noticed something iridescent gleaming inside. She paused and looked down. Lying among the trash and the thrown-away newspapers, its legs tilted stiffly upwards, was one of the pigeons.
Its throat still flashed like a little rainbow, but she could tell from its lolling head that the bird had been strangled—its neck snapped clean in two.
For a moment there was nothing for Connie but normal horror and pity. One of her pigeons! The poor bird! Then she remembered what the woman in the crowd had said about the murdered slut. Strangled with her neck snapped clean in two.
Connie started to shiver. She looked down again at the pigeon, deposited there so neatly—almost as if it were packed away in a cardboard carton. She was still shivering hours later when she lay in bed at her home. The blankets were thick and the night was not cold, but she went on shivering just the same.
Next day at the restaurant she was welcomed like a heroine. Sergeant Connors had spread the news of what she’d done and everyone in the square, even some of the ones who had been in that terrible crowd the night before, seemed to be ashamed of what had happened and grateful to Connie for having put it right. Just because they were all fond of her and trusted her, it never occurred to any of them that she could have lied. She had said Yo Yonson had been with her, feeding the pigeons, at the time of the crime—so, of course, he had been there. He was innocent. And she, by coming forward, had saved an innocent man.
“Gee, Connie, you were wonderful!” Shirley’s young face was gleaming with admiration. “I would never have had the nerve, not to go down to the police station, with everyone against him and all.”
Rosa was just as enthusiastic and started saying she had, from the very beginning, always thought Yo Yonson kind of cute and sweet, like a stray puppy.
Only Mr. Mazzoli remained unaffected by this new trend. He puttered darkly about his kitchen.
“Connie, you a silly girl. How d’you know he didn’t-a do it? How d’you know he didn’t-a slip away just a moment before the five o’clock? With a loco man—what you know what he does when the craziness comes?”
No one else found the pigeon. No one saw Yo Yonson either. He had taken his carton of possessions and, like a stray puppy, wandered off to find a home somewhere else.
The days that came after the murder were terrible for Connie. No one seemed to notice the difference in her. She laughed and kidded with the customers just the way she’d always done. She seemed just as big and cheerful as ever. But inside she felt small, shrivelled, and scared. She couldn’t suspect Yo Yonson. To suspect him was to deny everything she had ever believed in about kindness. Kindness and cruelty—how could they both be in the same person, especially in a poor, simple creature like Yo Yonson who loved the pigeons? No, she couldn’t believe it. And yet …
Sometimes she’d wake up in the middle of the night and find herself shivering, just the way she had shivered on the night of the murder.
And there was one change in her which they certainly would have noticed if the murder hadn’t put everything else out of their minds. She didn’t go and look at the pigeons any more. Whenever she had to walk through the square and she knew they would be flashing up there and rolling through the sky, she couldn’t bring herself to look up and see them.
The pigeons had somehow become like a finger in the sky, accusing her …
It was three weeks later that she got the grippe. She’d been ailing for several days but she would go to work. Finally, Mr. Mazzoli put his foot down and insisted that she go right home, take a couple of aspirins and stay in bed until she was better.
“You wanta all the customers should sneeze and carrying on like-a you? Go on. Scram. Get outta here.”
Connie had thought it would be worse lying in bed alone in her room all day. But she was wrong. Those days of illness did something for her. They brought her back together again with the pigeons. There were roof tops outside her window where quite a few pigeons lived. The first morning of her sickness, she woke up to find one of them standing on the window sill, cocking its bright eye at her lying in the bed. After that, she started putting scraps, from the meals Rosa, and Shirley brought over for her from the restaurant, out on the sill. Soon the pigeons came there just as tame as the ones in the square.
She was terribly weak from the grippe, but the pigeons took some of that bad feeling away. It was stupid, of course, but she felt kind of as if they’d forgiven her.
And, for long stretches at a time, she would forget about Yo Yonson …
It was on the third afternoon, at two o’clock, that the knock sounded at the door. She was still in bed and she was rather surprised, because Rosa and Shirley, her most faithful visitors, always dropped in mornings on their way to work and then again at four with the food from the restaurant. That day they’d already been there, bringing a cake Mr. Mazzoli had baked especially for her. Surely they wouldn’t be coming right in the middle of the lunch rush?
But the knock sounded again. She got out of bed, throwing her old pink wrap around her, and went to the door to open it.
Yo Yonson was standing there.
Even before she had time to think, she was afraid. She felt the fear in her knees, in her stomach. She didn’t remember to smile. And, maybe because she hadn’t, he didn’t either. He stood looking at her, then he shambled into the room and closed the door.
He was different. Even in her fear, she could tell that at once. His eyes were sort of fixed and … different. He wasn’t stooping as if he was humble. He stood straight up, so that his blond head almost reached the ceiling and the bulk of him seemed to swallow all the space in the room.
And then Connie seemed to hear the voice of the woman in the crowd: That’s the way they go—they have spells on them when they kill.
He was standing scarcely two feet away from her, looking at her as if he didn’t recognize her. But he must recognize her, of course. How else could he have come here? But he hadn’t known where she lived. He must have gone to the restaurant, and Shirley or Rosa, who were so crazy about him now she had saved him, had given him the address. Then, if he had come on purpose, surely it was because they were friends, because …
She pulled the wrap more closely around her, and moistened her lips.
“Hello,” she said, but her voice didn’t sound right. It was false and dry, giving her fear away.
It was then that she heard the cooing on the window sill. She glanced around. There were the pigeons, still pecking at the crumbs of Mr. Mazzoli’s cake that she had put out.
And, as she turned her head, Yo Yonson took his gaze from her and shifted it to the pigeons too. He swung around and stood looking at them. Slowly a smile came to his lips. But the smile was different from usual. It was sort of dazzled, as if he was looking at something too beautiful, something that didn’t fit into a life of drabness, damp cellars, and carts with crooked bicycle wheels.
He started towards the window—very gently. He could walk so softly. The pigeons went on feeding and clucking. Even when he was right up beside them, they didn’t stir. It was as if they knew him.
That was the moment when Connie could have run for the door and escaped—while he was looking at the pigeons. She realized it, but she couldn’t do it. If she ran, that would mean that she had lost her faith in everything that mattered. She saw that and suddenly she wasn’t afraid any more. She waited, watching Yo Yonson, not calling out, not doing anything.
His hand went cautiously towards one of the pigeons. The bird didn’t move. He picked it up, holding it out in front of him, gazing at the rainbow on its breast.
Then it was done. His fingers crept up to the pigeon’s neck and closed and squeezed until the head flopped over and the flat eye stared as the neck swung to and fro. After a while Yo Yonson opened his fist. He brought up his other hand and kept the pigeon in his huge cupped palms. But it was at his hands that he was looking, not at the pigeon. He was looking at them with a kind of pride, almost with love.
The terror came back to Connie with a rush. But it wasn’t just fear for herself. It was the terror of someone who half-understands a great truth. Yo Yonson hadn’t killed the bird because he was evil. He hadn’t even killed it, like a child, because it was beautiful and he wanted it for himself. He had killed it because it was something that didn’t need him.
His poor baffled mind saw beauty and kindness all around him, but he had never been a part of it. He was always alone, with his desire for love that was never granted, with his hatred of being the unwanted one, the one that was always mocked at. Most of the time he could endure it. But times when it got too bad, he thought of his strength. That was something he did have. And by using his strength to kill things, it helped his pride.
The woman with the dyed hair had mocked him. Maybe that was why he had killed her. But he would probably have killed her anyway when the feeling came, because, when it came, the beautiful, the ugly, the kind, the cruel—all the things in life that weren’t for him had to be killed—to make him feel all right again.
The woman with the dyed hair, the pigeons—now Connie …
Yo Yonson had dropped the bird. He was looking at her again—if just having his eyes fixed on her was looking. He came straight towards her, and, in the wonder and terror of her knowledge, she just stood.
He took her up in his arms as easily as if she were an empty cardboard carton. He sat down on the bed with her on his lap. One of his great hands came to her throat and rested there for a moment. Then it moved on up to her hair. She felt him stroking her hair gently, and, in spite of her strange exaltation, she was aware enough to know it was hopeless to cry out or to struggle. If she did, he would kill her. It would be over in a flash.
The hand was still stroking her hair. She felt a tug and a sharp pain. Then his hand was down in her lap. In it were a few strands of her blond hair. But he was not looking at them. He was gazing at his hands again, just as he had gazed at them when he held the pigeon.
Suddenly, the knowledge in her became strength, strength such as she had never felt before. It bubbled up in her almost like laughter. Yo Yonson didn’t have to feel alone. He didn’t have to be starved of kindness. Inside, he was like a mudhole in the desert, cracked, parched. It was kindness that mattered, and kindness could fall like rain.
“I know why you came.” Her voice was right now. It wasn’t an insincere voice that he could see through. “Of course, how silly of me! It’s the dress, isn’t it? I promised to show you how I look in the dress.”
She patted his great hand, which still held the strands of her own blond hair, and slipped out of his lap. He made no attempt to stop her. She ran to the closet, pulled out the black lace dress, and, quite without shame, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, threw off her wrap and started to struggle into the dress.
He got up from the bed, still holding the bright hair. He came right towards her. But she smiled at him, squeezing and wriggling to get into the tight dress.
He was so close that she could feel his breath fanning down on her. His hand went out towards her throat.
“There!” She gave a great gusty laugh and pirouetted in front of him. “Isn’t that something? See how pretty it is! Thank you. Thank you so much.”
As he looked at her, his eyes slowly changed. The deadness was fading and gradually the old pigeon look came back—the delight. With it, a smile.
“You like?” he said.
He dropped down on the floor at her feet then. He was still kneeling there humbly when Mr. Mazzoli, Sergeant Connors, and Frank O’Mulligan arrived.
In a moment Mr. Mazzoli’s arms were around her.
“That Rosa—that crazy Rosa. He come-a to the restaurant and Rosa, she give-a the address. Only later she tell-a me what she done. Quick I think: Dio, the loco—the crazy man go to kill-a my Connie. Quick I run out from the kitchen. Sergeant Connors and Frank, they sit there taking the spaghetti. Quick I grab them. We run … Oh, Connie, la mia ragazza, my little silly ragazza! Quick, we go to City Hall. We stop-a this foolishness—quick …”
But, although she luxuriated in the protective warmth of Mr. Mazzoli’s arms, Connie could still think only of Yo Yonson. He would have to be put away. She saw that now. Although he wasn’t really bad, it wasn’t right for him to be free around a lot of cruel people who didn’t understand him, who got him all mixed up, who turned him into a—a monster. Yes, he would have to be put away. And maybe it would be happier for him like that—better than the damp cellars.
Yo Yonson had got up and was standing quietly, between Sergeant Connors and Frank O’Mulligan.
“Well, Connie,” said the Sergeant. “I guess you got a little mixed up on the times in that alibi.”
She turned from the protection of Mr. Mazzoli’s circling arms.
“Don’t let them hurt him, Sergeant.” Part of her was thinking now, with a kind of awe, that this was the first time Mr. Mazzoli had ever come out of his kitchen in the afternoon. “Be kind to him. That’s all he needs. He’ll get along fine, honest he will—if you just make them be kind….”