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for the first time by the awfulness of what she was witnessing, she was released from the immobility
that had held her like a coelacanth in shale, she was filled with the blood thunder pounding against
the membranes of her mind: she had stood there! She had done nothing, nothing! A woman had
been butchered and she had said nothing, done nothing. Tears had been useless, tremblings had been
pointless, she had done nothing!
Then she heard hysterical sounds midway between laughter and giggling, and as she stared
up into that great face rising in the fog and chimneysmoke of the night, she heard herself making
those deranged gibbon noises and from the man below a pathetic, trapped sound, like the whimper
of whipped dogs.
She was staring up into that face again. She hadn’t wanted to see it again--ever. But she was
locked with those smoldering eyes, overcome with the feeling that they were childlike, though she
knew they were incalculably ancient.
Then the butcher below did an unspeakable thing and Beth reeled with dizziness and caught
the edge of the window before she could tumble out onto the balcony; she steadied herself and
fought for breath.
She felt herself being looked at, and for a long moment of frozen terror she feared she might
have caught the attention of that face up there in the fog. She clung to the window, feeling
everything growing faraway and dim, and stared straight across the court. She was being watched.
Intently. By the young man in the seventh-floor window across from her own apartment. Steadily,
he was looking at her. Through the strange fog with its burning eyes feasting on the sight below, he
was staring at her.
As she felt herself blacking out, in the moment before unconsciousness, the thought flickered
and fled that there was something terribly familiar about his face.
It rained the next day. East 52nd Street was slick and shining with the oil rainbows. The rain
washed the dog turds into the gutters and nudged them down and down to the catch-basin openings.
People bent against the slanting rain, hidden beneath umbrellas, looking like enormous, scurrying
black mushrooms. Beth went out to get the newspapers after the police had come and gone.
The news reports dwelled with loving emphasis on the twenty-six tenants of the building
who had watched in cold interest as Leona Ciarelli, 37, of 455 Fort Washington Avenue, Manhattan,
had been systematically stabbed to death by Burton H. Wells, 41, an unemployed electrician, who
had been subsequently shot to death by two off-duty police officers when he burst into Michael’s
Pub on 55th Street, covered with blood and brandishing a knife that authorities later identified as the
murder weapon.
She had thrown up twice that day. Her stomach seemed incapable of retaining anything
solid, and the taste of bile lay along the back of her tongue. She could not blot the scenes of the
night before from her mind; she re-ran them again and again, every movement of that reaper arm
playing over and over as though on a short loop of memory. The woman’s head thrown back for
silent screams. The blood. Those eyes in the fog.
She was drawn again and again to the window, to stare down into the courtyard and the
street. She tried to superimpose over the bleak Manhattan concrete the view from her window in
Swann House at Bennington: the little yard and another white, frame dormitory; the fantastic apple
trees; and from the other window the rolling hills and gorgeous Vermont countryside; her memory
skittered through the change of seasons. But there was always concrete and the rain-slick streets; the
rain on the pavement was black and shiny as blood.
She tried to work, rolling up the tambour closure of the old rolltop desk she had bought on
Lexington Avenue and hunching over the graph sheets of choreographer’s charts. But Labanotation
was merely a Jackson Pollock jumble of arcane hieroglyphics to her today, instead of the careful
representation of eurhythmics she had studied four years to perfect. And before that, Farmington.
