"All warm now?"
"Pretty much," she said. "Can I sit here until my mommy comes back?"
"Where is your mother?" Leon asked as he lifted the child to sit there next to him.
"She"s up over there talking to Bill," the girl said, pointing down a path that turned away and disappeared into the trees.
"What are they talking about?"
"How come you looked scared when you saw me?" the girl asked.
"Did I?"
"It"s not polite to answer with a question," the girl said primly, gesturing her hands like a traffic cop or maybe a music conductor.
"I asked the first question," Leon said, also gesturing. "And then you asked about why was I scared."
"But I wasn"t answering your question," the girl giggled. "I was changing the subject."
"Oh you were, were you?" Leon had the urge to reach out and tickle the child, but he didn"t. He didn"t know her. He could go to jail for twenty years for child molesting. But she was so darling, like Fera had been. She didn"t look anything like Fera, but she had the same silly s.p.u.n.k.
"I was surprised," he said, "because when I was a boy and lived here there were no little white girls in Harlem."
"Am I a white girl?"
The question stunned Leon. He didn"t know what to answer.
"Your hair is almost white," he said lamely.
"But you didn"t mean my hair, huh?" the girl said. "You meant my skin."
"Yeah. I guess so."
"And if I"m white then what are you?"
"Black," Leon said instantly.
"But your skin is just brown," the girl said. "And my skin has some brown and some pink and some yellow, too." She rubbed her arm and peered at the skin as she did so.
"I think we"re all the same color, just more of some colors and not so many of others." She held out her arm and looked at Leon as if to get his opinion on her theory.
Leon suppressed the urge to hug the child. He clasped his hands and pressed them against his lips.
There came a gurgling cry. Leon jerked his head around to look up the path where the child"s mother was talking to someone named Bill.
"Coming, Mom!" the child yelled. She was running up the path, toward the cry.
Leon was exhausted by the long walk from his apartment to the park. He struggled to his feet and went up the pathway, but the girl had already disappeared.
When he got to the playground on the other side of the park the girl was gone. Children capered while their mothers or nannies watched, but there was no one who looked like the child"s mother talking to anyone who looked like a Bill.
No one seemed worried about a gurgling cry.
"I met this little girl in the park today, Fifi," Leon was saying to his daughter on the vid that evening. She was at her office, poring over a blue and red pie chart on a wall-mounted computer screen.
"A child?" she asked, turning momentarily from the graph.
"Just a little girl. Her mother left her alone and she wasn"t dressed warmly enough. I let her have that scarf you gave me last Easter."
"You gave a strange child in the park your scarf?" Fera gave the vid screen her full attention now.
Cosmetic surgery had completely fixed her broken nose and the permanent swell that had developed over her right eye. Her golden skin nearly shone in the fluorescent lighting. At twenty-five she was ravishing if a bit imposing at six-nine and two hundred plus pounds.
"She was cold," Leon said in a glad tone. "Smart little kid, too. Reminded me of you."
"What"s the child"s name, Daddy?"
He could hear the concern in her voice.
"I didn"t get it. Her mother called and she ran away. I went after to make sure she was all right, but you know I"m so tired after the operations."
"Why did you need to see if she was all right?" Fera asked.
"Oh, it was nothing. Just the tone in her mother"s voice."
"What tone?"
"It sounded more like she was screaming than calling, that"s what I thought, but when I got to the playground they were gone." When Leon Jones grinned and nodded his head, he realized, for the first time, that he"d become an old man.
"Daddy. Daddy, are you listening to me?"
"Sure I am, Fifi."
"You drifted off there a minute."
"I did?" the professor said. "Oh."
"Daddy, I don"t want you going up to that park anymore."
"I must have been thinking about Maitland," Leon mused.
"Who"s Maitland, Daddy?"
"Frederic William Maitland. He wrote a history, the history of English law. Ideas can have a history, you see. People are too complex, their motivations too capricious to be doc.u.mented accurately." It was a fragment of a lecture he"d given thirty years earlier, but he experienced it as a new idea.
"So, Daddy, you"ll stay away from the park?"
"Whatever you say, honey." Leon was reconsidering the notion of ideas having history separate from the people who had those ideas. Language can have a doc.u.mentable history where the orator may not, he was thinking as he broke off the vid connection to Congresswoman Jones.
"Hi, mister," the little girl said in the park three days later.
It had rained on Tuesday. Wednesday he started reading Marc Bloch"s book on feudal society. He had long admired the Frenchman"s patriotism but never read deeply of the man"s work. That afternoon he considered writing a history of his block of One twenty-fifth Street. He thought that maybe if he could keep it down to that, or maybe just a history of the businesses there . . . Maybe, he thought, the nature of the businesses would express the changing nature of the population, its makeup and income. Finally he fell asleep.
But on Thursday he made a pilgrimage to Morningside Park. He had forgotten the rain, his urban narrative, and any promises made to his daughter.
"What"s your name?" he asked the child.
"Tracie."
"Do you come to the park every day, Tracie?"
"Not every day."
"But many days?"
The child nodded vigorously and climbed up on the bench to sit next to her friend.
She told him all about a test she"d taken in which she misspelled the word merry-go-round.
"I thought it was marry go round," she said and giggled.
The love Leon felt for that child frightened him. He noticed that she had on the same cranberry-colored dress that she"d worn on Monday and supposed that it was either her favorite or that her parents were poor.
"Would you like some ice cream?" he asked Tracie.
"No thanks. But I would like to go swimming."
"You would?"
"Yes please," she said.
"But there"s no place to swim around here. And even if there was, it"s December."
"Uh-huh. Yes there is. There"s a big lake, and it"s warm there."
"You must mean the pond down in Central Park."
"Nuh-uh. It"s a pond right here. Come on, I"ll show you."
She pointed up the path where her mother had been talking to the man named Bill.
"You go on," he said, thinking that her mother would be angry at him for walking with her.
"But I can"t go swimming by myself. I"ll get in trouble."
"Isn"t your mother up there?"
A frown knitted itself in the young face. Tracie concentrated on the words Leon spoke. He imagined them running through her mind again and again: Isn"t your mother up there? Isn"t your mother up there? Isn"tyourmotherupthere. Isntyourmotherupthere, until it was just a fast jumble of meaningless sounds.
"Talking to Bill," Leon added.
"Yeah." Tracie grinned widely and jumped off the bench. "You wanna go swimmin", mister?"
"No," he said. "You go on."
The gurgling cry of her mother"s call came just after Tracie rounded the bend.
3.
Pell Lightner was waiting on the marble bench that sat out in front of the Schomburg Residence Hotel. Professor Jones felt as if he had been caught committing some crime. Indeed, he had been wondering on his walk home if Tracie"s mother would allow her to come visit, that if he screwed up the courage to go up that path he could introduce himself and maybe become a friend of the family. He loved the child.
"Good afternoon, Leon," the short chocolate brown young man said.
"Pell." Leon walked past the bench and up the granite stairway. Maybe he hoped that Pell was just stopping to rest, that he was up from D.C. on business and had stopped to sit after visiting some of his White Noise friends at the Common Ground below One thirty-fifth Street. But Pell jumped up and accompanied the professor as if he had been invited.
And how could Jones turn him away? He was Fera"s full-time live-in boyfriend, had been her boxing manager--after Leon had succ.u.mbed to the symptoms of Pulse use--and was now her valued congressional aide. Pell was a savvy kid born of Backgrounder parents. He had no education except what he had gleaned from public computer links and by overhearing others talk about the news. He couldn"t read, but the advancement in reading computers meant that he had heard many of the cla.s.sic novels, and he preferred listening to the East Coast Times to getting news from the vid. When Fera picked him up he latched onto her like a barnacle, Professor Jones said for the first few months. But the young man showed his worth when he steered Fera through the Konkon fight, a fight she would have surely lost if not for Pell"s psychological motivation.
"How have you been, Leon?" Pell asked in the small two-man elevator.
"Slow."
"Fera said that you"ve been taking long walks."
The elevator doors slid open on eight.
Mrs. McAndrews was sitting on her rocker in the hallway, munching her gums. The elderly Korean woman had married Sergeant Steven McAndrews in 1955 at the age of sixteen. Now, at one hundred nineteen, she"d been alone in Harlem since the nineteen eighties. Her husband and son both dead, her family back home forgotten, or forsaken--Leon was never sure which.
"Good afternoon, Mrs. McAndrews."
"Mr. Jones," she replied, surprisingly lucid considering her obsessive munching. "This your son?"
"No. My daughter"s boyfriend."
"You a boxer too, boy?" She spoke with a slight Korean accent.
"No, ma"am. I"m a congressional aide."
Inside the rooms Jones offered Pell tea or gin.