To Paradise

“But they are welcome here,” countered a boy across from her.

“Yes, but only to pass through on their way to Canada or to the West—we do not wish them to stay, and when we say we open our borders to anyone from the Colonies, we do not mean them, and yet they are even more persecuted than the ones to whom we offer shelter! We think ourselves so much better than America and the Colonies, and yet we are not!”

“But Negroes are not people like us.”

“But they are! I have known—well, not I, but my uncle, when he was traveling through the Colonies—Negroes who are just like us!”

There was jeering from some of the group at this, and then one boy said, in a lazy, arrogant drawl, “Anna would have us believe that there were even redskins like us, and we ought never to have eradicated them but left them to their savagery.”

“There were Indians like us, Ethan! That has been documented!”

This was greeted with the entire table shouting their response, and between the ruckus they made, and the click-click of the abacus, now louder than before, and the heat of the fire on his back, David began to feel woozy. It must have shown on his face, for Edward leaned again across the table and asked him, in a near-shout, if he might want to go elsewhere, and David said he would.

Edward went to find the waitress to tell her they didn’t need the coffees, and the two of them shouldered past the table of students and the customers waiting for their bags of tea, and out into the street once more, which felt, for all its activity and life, a relief, spacious and quiet.

“It can get quite loud in there,” said Edward, “especially toward late afternoon—I should have remembered. But it’s nice, usually, really.”

“I’ve no doubt,” he murmured, politely. “Is there somewhere else we can go?” For, although he had been teaching at the school for six months, it was not a neighborhood in which he dallied—his visits there were short and purposeful, and he felt himself too elderly to frequent the pubs and inexpensive coffeehouses that made the area so attractive to students.

“Well,” said Edward after a moment’s silence, “we could go to my flat, if you could bear it—it’s very nearby.”

He was surprised by this offer, but also gratified—for was this not exactly the kind of behavior that drew him to Edward initially? A promise of free-spiritedness, a blithe disregard for conventions, a dispensing of old modes of behavior and formality? He was modern, and in his presence, David felt modern as well, so much so that he accepted straightaway, emboldened by his new friend’s irreverence, and Edward, nodding as if he’d expected this answer (even as David was momentarily stunned by his own boldness), led him first north and then west on Bethune Street. There were handsome houses on this street, newly built brownstones in whose windows tapers of candles flickered—it was only five in the afternoon, but already the night was drawing around them—but Edward strode past them all to a large, shabby, once-grand structure quite close to the river, a mansion of the kind David’s grandfather had been raised in, although in ill condition, with a swollen wooden door that Edward had to tug at repeatedly to open.

“Watch the second step; there’s a stone missing,” he warned, before turning to David. “It’s not Washington Square, I’ll grant you, but it’s home.” The words were an apology, but his smile—that beam!—made them into something else: not quite a boast, perhaps, but a statement of defiance.

“How did you know I live on Washington Square?” he asked.

“Everyone knows,” Edward replied, but in a way that made it sound as if living on Washington Square had been David’s own accomplishment, something worthy of congratulation.

Once inside (having taken care to avoid the troublesome second step), David could see that the mansion had been converted into a boardinghouse; to the left, where the parlor would be, was a breakfast room of sorts, with a half-dozen tables of different styles and a dozen chairs, also of different designs. He could tell, by just a glance, that the furniture was poorly made, but then he noticed, in a corner, a handsome, turn-of-the-century secretary of the kind his grandfather had in his own parlor, and moved to examine it. The wood had not been polished in apparently months, and its finish had been destroyed by some inferior oil; its surface, when he touched it, was sticky, and when he brought his hand away, his fingers were padded with dust. But it had once been a fine piece, and before he could ask, Edward, behind him, said, “The proprietress of this place was once wealthy, or so I’ve heard. Not Bingham wealthy, of course”—there it was again, a mention of his family and their fortune—“but moneyed.”

“And what happened?”

“A husband given to excess gambling, who then ran away with her sister. Or so I’ve been told. She lives on the top floor, and I rarely see her—she’s quite elderly—her distant cousin manages the place now.”

“What’s her name?” David asked—if the owner had truly once been rich, his grandfather would know of her.