After Dark

1977

BY THE EVENING of Wednesday, July 13, the atmosphere, which had been hot and humid all day, was getting oppressively close. It felt as if a thunderstorm could break. Apart from this circumstance, Gorham had no other expectations for the evening ahead—except the pleasure of seeing his good friend Juan, of course.

Gorham had armed himself with a large umbrella as he walked swiftly northward from his apartment on Park. He only saw Juan every six months or so, but it was always an interesting occasion. Opposites in every way, they’d been friends since they were at Columbia together. And although Gorham took pride in the fact that he had a large network of friends from every walk of life, he’d always felt that Juan was special. “I’m sorry that my father isn’t here,” he’d told Juan once. “He would have liked you.” This, from Gorham, was high praise.

By the year 1977, Gorham Master could reasonably claim that, so far at least, his life had gone according to plan. After his father’s death, he’d let the Park Avenue apartment during the rest of his time at Harvard, staying at his mother’s Staten Island house when he visited the city. He’d been fortunate to get a low number in the lottery and avoided the draft. Then he’d managed to impress Columbia Business School so much that they took him into the MBA program without previous work experience. Gorham didn’t want to hang around; he wanted to get started. Columbia had been a wonderful experience, all the same. The business school had provided him with a sound intellectual framework for organizing the rest of his life, and a number of interesting friends as well, including Juan Campos. Emerging with his MBA, he’d found himself, still in his early twenties, in the enviable position of being the owner of a six-room apartment on Park Avenue, without a mortgage, and with enough cash to pay the maintenance for years to come—all this before he started his first job.

This might not be riches by the standards of his class, but if he had been a different character, the possession of so much money at the start of his life might have destroyed Gorham, by taking away his incentive to work. Luckily for him, however, he had such a strong ambition to restore his family to its former status in the city that, in his mind, it represented only the accomplishment of the first step—namely, that the present representative of the family should be seen to start his career from a position of privilege. The next step was to get a job in a major bank. After that, he intended to do whatever it took to get to the top. His father might not have been a conventional success, but Gorham was going to be. That was his mission.

But he missed Charlie, even more than he’d thought he would.

Charlie had died too soon; the very year of his death seemed to proclaim the fact. With all its tragedy, 1968 had been an extraordinary year. There had been the failure of the Tet Offensive, and the huge demonstrations in New York against the Vietnam War. April had seen the terrible assassination of Martin Luther King, and June of Robert Kennedy. There had been the memorable candidacies of Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace for the presidency. In Europe, the student revolution in Paris, and the Russian crushing of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia had changed the history of the Western world. Andy Warhol had been shot and wounded, Jackie Kennedy had married Aristotle Onassis. So many iconic events in modern history had taken place that year, and Charlie Master had not been there to witness and comment upon them. It seemed so unnatural, so wrong.

Yet in some ways, Gorham was almost glad that his father had not lived to see the last few years. For that depressing garbage strike at the start of ’68 had not been the culmination, but only the beginning of New York’s troubles. Year after year the great city his father loved had deteriorated. Huge efforts had been made to market New York to the world as an exciting place. Taking a little-known slang term for a large city that dated back to the twenties, the marketing men called it the Big Apple, and invented a logo to go with the name. Central Park was filled with concerts, plays, every kind of activity. But behind all the razzmatazz, the city was falling apart. The park was turning into a dust bowl, where it was unsafe to walk after dark. Street crime continued to rise. As for the poor neighborhoods like Harlem and the South Bronx, they seemed to be falling into terminal neglect.

Finally, in 1975, the Big Apple confessed it was bankrupt. For years, it seemed, the accounts had been falsified. The city had borrowed money against revenues it did not have. Nobody wanted to buy New York debt, and President Ford refused to bail the city out unless it reformed itself. “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” the Daily News headline had memorably put it. Emergency help from union funds had saved actual collapse, but the Big Apple was still in a state of ongoing crisis.

Charlie would have hated New York’s humiliation. But Gorham still wished that he had his father to talk to. They might disagree, but Charlie was never passive, always informed, and usually had an opinion. Since his passing, Gorham was left to make sense of the world by himself, and when he was alone in the apartment sometimes, he would feel quite sad.

He had performed all his obligations toward his father, of course. He had delivered the little presents to his father’s friends, and heard their words of love and praise for Charlie. That had been a pleasant mission. All, that is, except one. Sarah Adler had been out of town at the time, on a trip to Europe. The present to her had been a drawing, carefully wrapped, so Gorham did not know what it was. He’d meant to deliver it several times, but somehow he’d always had something else to do, and after a year had passed, he had felt rather embarrassed to have waited so long. The gift was still sitting, fully wrapped, in a closet in the apartment. One day, he promised himself, he’d get round to dealing with it. God knows, he meant to.

His banking career had started well. The first choice had been what kind of bank he wanted to go into. Gorham knew that ever since the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 had regulated the banking industry after the great crash, one had to choose between two kinds of banking career: the commercial, high street banks that took ordinary people’s deposits, and the investment banks—the merchants banks, as they were called in London—where the financiers made their deals.

In a commercial bank, people told him, there was less risk, less frenetic hours, and probably a job for life; in an investment bank there were more risks, though maybe higher rewards. On the whole, he felt more attracted to the massive corporate respectability and power of the great commercial banks; he liked the solidity they represented. He’d been offered a position with a major bank, and he’d been very happy.

The life suited him. He did well in the bank’s training program, and he was assigned to the automotive group. He spent long hours preparing the numbers for credit documents, but he worked fast, had an eye for detail, and when he got the chance to study the loan documents, he discovered that he had a natural understanding of contracts and their implications. And unlike some blue bloods, he didn’t only do the work, but he asked for more.

“I see you’re not afraid of hard work,” his boss remarked to him after a long session.

“It’s the way to go up the learning curve,” Gorham replied cheerfully.

And when his boss took him to meet clients, they liked him. Client meetings in the automotive industry were a leisurely business, conducted on the golf course. Charlie had never had a country club, but Gorham had learned to play golf at Groton, and he’d kept up his game ever since. On these occasions, he did well, and his boss took notice. Client relationships were important in banking.

Two years ago, Gorham had made assistant vice president. He was on his way. All he needed now to complete the picture was the perfect corporate wife. He’d had several girlfriends, but none that seemed quite right to be Mrs. Gorham Master. He wasn’t worried about that, however. There was plenty of time.

At seven thirty, Maggie O’Donnell walked out of the Croydon rental building on Eighty-sixth Street, turned up Madison, walked a few blocks, past the Jackson Hole where she got her burgers, up to the tiny, enterprising restaurant where they served a very reasonable prix fixe menu with minimal choice, which changed every night. The Carnegie Hill area, lying as it did at the very top of the Upper East Side, contained a lot of young professionals who were glad of a chance to get an inexpensive meal in amusing surroundings, and the little restaurant’s half-dozen tables were seldom empty.

She was going to meet her brother Martin. If he turned up.

To be fair to Martin, he had been quite specific. The bookstore where he worked had an author reading that evening. If he was needed, he’d have to take a rain check. If not, he’d see her at the restaurant.

Maggie had organized her time efficiently. She’d scheduled her doctor’s appointment, for a check-up, at five thirty. That was on Park in the Eighties. It gave her time to return home afterward, do the laundry she hadn’t been able to do the previous weekend, then go out to the restaurant. After she’d eaten, she’d take a taxi back to her Midtown office, and work until maybe midnight or one o’clock on a contract she was preparing. Maggie was a lawyer. She worked for Branch & Cabell. And like all the young associates at the big Manhattan law firms, she worked very hard. The lawyers at Branch & Cabell were almost immortals. They did not need to pause for rest or sleep. They worked in their wood-paneled skyscraper, advising the powerful, and sent out their mighty bills for the midnight hours.

Maggie was happy with her life. She’d been born in the city, but when she was eight years old, her parents had moved out. Her father Patrick, whom she sometimes suspected was more interested in baseball than he was in being an insurance broker, always liked to say that after the Giants had departed the city for San Francisco, and the Dodgers for Los Angeles, he couldn’t think of a damn reason to stay there. But the truth was that her parents had been just one of hundreds of thousands of white, middle-class families who, in the fifties and sixties, had deserted the increasingly troubled streets of Manhattan for the peaceful suburbs.

It had worried her parents that her brother had gone to live in the city back in 1969. When she had started working for Branch & Cabell they had been even more concerned. They’d insisted on seeing her apartment before she rented it, and when she told them that she intended to jog around the reservoir in Central Park, which was only minutes from her door, they had made her promise never to do so alone or after dark.

“I’ll only jog when everyone else does,” she told them. And indeed, in the summer months when she went out at seven in the morning, there were dozens of people doing the same thing. “Jackie Onassis jogs round the reservoir, too,” she told her mother. Not that she’d ever seen Jackie Onassis, but she’d heard it was true, and she hoped it would help to reassure her.

This summer, there was another threat to worry them.

“I just wish the police would catch this terrible man,” her mother would say, whenever she telephoned. Maggie couldn’t blame her. The Son of Sam, as he called himself, had scared a lot of people in recent months, shooting young women, and sending strange letters to the police and a journalist, stating that he would strike again. His attacks had been in Queens and the Bronx so far, but reminding her mother of this fact had done no good. “How do you know he won’t strike in Manhattan next?” she had said, and of course Maggie hadn’t got an answer.

It had been stiflingly hot and close all day. It felt like the start of a serious heatwave. She had changed into a light cotton skirt and blouse, and she was looking forward to a long, cold drink.

Juan Campos stood on the sidewalk and stared across the great divide. He too had noticed the hot and muggy weather, and right now, he sensed a heavy, electric feel in the air. He expected the rumble of thunder at any time.

He looked toward Central Park. His girlfriend Janet lived on the West Side, on Eighty-sixth near Amsterdam. She was walking across the park to meet him.

An ambulance, siren moaning and horn blaring, came round the corner from Third Avenue and raced along the north side of the street toward Madison. This was nothing out of the ordinary. There were always ambulances making a noise on East Ninety-sixth Street, because the hospital was so nearby.

Juan was standing at the intersection of Ninety-sixth and Park. The apartment he’d recently moved into was the other side of Lexington Avenue, on the north side. He had a sublet for a year, and he had no idea whether he’d be there for longer. Nothing in his life so far had ever been certain, so he didn’t suppose it would be now. But at least one thing was consistent: he was still living on the north side of the great divide.

His street. Ninety-sixth Street. It was a cross street of course, like Eighty-sixth, and Seventy-second, Fifty-seventh, Forty-second, Thirty-fourth and Twenty-third. The traffic moved both ways. If each of these great streets had their particular characters, Ninety-sixth Street, in the year 1977, was something entirely different. It was the border between two worlds. Below Ninety-sixth Street lay the Upper East and Upper West sides. Above it was Harlem, where people like his friend Gorham Master didn’t go. But if most people from outside the city assumed that Harlem was nowadays all black, they would have been quite wrong. There were numerous other communities in Harlem, but the largest of these, by far, lay in the southern portion, above Ninety-sixth and east of Fifth.

El Barrio, Spanish Harlem. The home of the Puerto Ricans.

Juan Campos was Puerto Rican, and he’d lived in El Barrio all his life. When he was seven his father had died and his mother Maria had struggled hard, taking cleaning jobs mostly, to support her only child.

Life in El Barrio was tough, but the spirit of Maria Campos was strong. She was proud of her heritage. She loved to cook the rich, spicy mixture of Spanish, Taino and African dishes that was the Puerto Rican cuisine. Black bean soup, pollo con arroz, stews, mofongo and deep fries, coconut and plantain, okra and passion fruit—these were the staples of Juan’s diet. Sometimes Maria would go out, and dance to the beating drums of the bomba, or the lively guaracha. These were the few times that Juan ever saw his mother truly happy.

Above all, however, Maria Campos was possessed of a burning ambition. She knew that her own life was unlikely to change, but she could dream for her son, and her dreams were grand.

“Remember the great José Celso Barbosa,” she would tell him. Barbosa had been a poor Puerto Rican, with imperfect sight, who’d worked his way out of poverty, become the first Puerto Rican to gain an American medical degree, and ended his life as a hero and benefactor of his fellow countrymen. “You could be like him, Juan,” she’d told the little boy. Barbosa had been dead a long time, and Juan would have been the living hero, like Roberto Clemente the baseball star. But since he was small and short-sighted, Juan knew he couldn’t hope for that destiny. All the same, he did his best to follow his mother’s precepts—except in one respect.

“Stay away from your cousin Carlos,” she always told him. But Juan had soon figured out that if he wanted to survive on the mean streets of El Barrio, then the person he needed more than anyone else was his tall and handsome cousin Carlos.

Every street has its gang, and every gang its leader. Among the kids where Juan lived, Carlos’s word was law. If a boy wanted to rob a store, or sell drugs, or anything else, then he’d be a fool to try it without Juan’s permission. If anyone laid a finger on a kid under Carlos’s protection, they could expect a beating they’d never forget.

If Juan was small and didn’t see too well, God had given him talents to make up for these disadvantages. He was lively, he was naturally kind, and he was funny. It wasn’t long before Carlos had decided that his little cousin belonged under his wing. The gang adopted him as a kind of mascot. If Juan’s mother wanted him to study at school, that was okay. What else could a kid like that do? For the rest of his childhood, no one gave Juan any trouble.

And Maria did want Juan to study at school. She was passionate about it. “You want a better life, you get an education,” she told him, time and again. And maybe if Juan had been big and strong he wouldn’t have listened to her so much, but a little voice inside him seemed to tell him she was right. So though he played with the other kids in the street, he’d often pretend to be more tired than he was and go back indoors to study.

Juan and his mother lived in two dingy rooms on Lexington Avenue, near 116th street. Though there were Catholic schools, Juan, like most Puerto Ricans, went to the public school. There were several kinds of kid at his school, and depending who they were, one could usually predict where they lived. The black kids lived west of Park, the Puerto Ricans from Park to Pleasant, and the Italians, whose families had usually been in Harlem longest, from east of Pleasant. There were Jewish kids in that school too, and several of the teachers were Jewish.

Juan was very fortunate in his school, because if one chose to take advantage of it, the teaching there was good, and Juan was happy enough. He found that most of the work came to him easily, especially mathematics, for which he seemed to have a natural talent.

It didn’t take him long to make friends, and one of the kids he spent time with was a Jewish boy named Michael. And it was Michael who said to him one day, “When I get out of here, my parents hope I can get to Stuyvesant.” Juan didn’t know what Stuyvesant was, so Michael explained to him that the three best high schools in the city for the public-school kids were Hunter, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant down in the Financial District. The schools were free, Michael said, but the exams for entry were tough, and competition was high.

When Juan told his mother about Michael’s plans for high school, he didn’t think such information applied to him. So he was astonished, and rather embarrassed when, the very next day, Maria called at the school and asked one of the Jewish teachers how her son could get to such a place too.

The teacher had looked rather surprised, but a week later, he had taken Juan to one side and asked him a lot of questions about how he liked it at school, what subjects he enjoyed most, and what he hoped for in his future life. And since Juan wanted to please his mother, who worked so hard for him, he said that he really wanted to go to Stuyvesant.

The teacher had looked rather doubtful. At the time Juan had supposed that this was because his grades weren’t high enough, but later he realized that the teacher had been worried because Stuyvesant wasn’t known for taking black Puerto Ricans. “To have any hope,” the teacher told him, “you’ll have to get grades at least as good as your friend Michael.”

After that, Juan worked as hard as he could, and his grades were as good as Michael’s. He sensed also that some of the teachers were paying him a little extra attention, and sometimes they would be tough on him, or give him more work to do, but he figured they were trying to help him, so he didn’t complain. And in due course, when they took the exam, both he and Michael were accepted into Stuyvesant. He was excited, naturally, but when his mother got the news, she broke down and wept.

So Juan Campos had gone to Stuyvesant. Luckily his cousin Carlos decided to treat this strange circumstance as a kind of victory for the gang. Their mascot was going to get an education and maybe become a lawyer, or something like that, and learn how to beat the white people at their own dirty game. During their years at Stuyvesant, he and Michael would take the subway together every morning and evening. During the vacations, he worked at any job he could find, delivering food for pizza parlors or restaurants mostly, down in Carnegie Hill, where the tips were good, to help pay for his keep at home.

But in his last year at school, Juan’s life had changed.

“I suppose,” he told Gorham years later, “I was really a child until then.”

He’d come home one evening to find that his mother had had a fall and hurt her leg. The next day she hadn’t been able to go to work. For several days she’d been laid up, and Juan had looked after her each evening when he’d got back from school. She didn’t want to see a doctor, but finally the pain and swelling in her ankle got so bad that she agreed. And then the truth had come out.

“I think she had a good idea she was sick all along and she didn’t want to know about it.” When the doctor told Juan that his mother’s ankle would be okay in a month, but that she had a bad heart, Juan’s path had been clear.

There were scholarships available for Stuyvesant pupils to go to the Ivy League schools, but it was obvious that wouldn’t work. The City College up at West 137th Street, however, was free and the education was good. He could attend it from home, and look after his mother as well. For the next years, he’d studied at City College by day and worked nights and vacations to help support her. When Maria hadn’t even been able to do the few light jobs she’d still retained, he’d taken time off from college so that he could work non-stop and put some extra savings by. It had been tough, but they’d managed.

Then, in his final year at City College, she had died. He knew very well that she’d wanted to go; she was in pain and had little energy—but she also wanted him to be free.

Until his mother’s sickness, Juan had never paid much attention to his surroundings. He knew the rooms they lived in needed painting, and that the light in the hallway didn’t work, and that the landlord said he’d fix things and never did. But his mother had always insisted that the household was her affair, and he should concentrate on his studies. Sometimes he’d dreamed of having a fine house one day—he didn’t know where—and of marrying and having a big family, and looking after his mother. This was a dream that his hard work at school might one day realize. The present, in his mind, was only a temporary state.

But as Maria grew weaker, and he had to take charge, the harsh realities of the present had become very real indeed. There was the rent to be paid, and food to be bought. Some weeks, there wasn’t enough money, and on more than one occasion, Juan had to ask the owner of the nearby corner store to let him have food on credit. The man was friendly with Maria, and he was kind. When Juan came in one afternoon with a few dollars he owed him, the man just said, “That’s okay, kid. Pay me back when you get rich.”

More difficult were his dealings with the landlord. Mr. Bonati was a small, bald, middle-aged man who’d owned the building for a long time, and who collected the rents himself. When Juan had to pay him late, he was understanding. “I know your mother a long time, now,” he said. “She gives me no trouble.” But when Juan tackled him about the dangerous broken stair, or the blocked drain, or any of the other things that made daily life a trial, Bonati always gave him some excuse, and did nothing. Finally, seeing the young man’s exasperation, Bonati had taken Juan by the arm.

“Listen, I can see you’re a smart kid. You’re polite, you’re going to college. Think about it—do you know any other kids on this block going to college? Most of them never finished high school. So listen to what I’m telling you. Your mother pays me a low rent. You know why? Because this building is rent-controlled. That’s why I can’t make any money out of it either. It’s why I can’t afford to do many repairs. But this is a good building, by comparison. Some of the buildings around here are falling apart. You know that.” Mr. Bonati waved his hand toward the north-west. “Do you remember that building a few blocks away which burned down eighteen months ago?” That had been a huge fire, and Juan remembered it well. “The owner of that place couldn’t make a thing out of it. So he stripped out most of the wiring and after the building burned down, he collected the insurance. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“You mean he burned it down?” Juan had heard a rumor.

“I didn’t say that. Okay?” Bonati gave him a quick, hard look. “It’s like that all over El Barrio, all over Harlem. There used to be decent neighborhoods up here. Germans, Italians, Irish. But now it’s all changed. The place is falling apart, and nobody cares. The kids up here live in terrible housing, they don’t have jobs or education. They haven’t a hope, and they know it. It’s the same in Chicago and other big cities. I’m telling you, the whole of Harlem is a ticking time bomb.”

A few days later, some men came to fix the drain. But Bonati never did anything else. So Juan made inquiries about getting his mother a better place to live in one of the housing projects, but got nowhere.

“Don’t you know, kid?” the man at the corner store said. “The housing projects favor whites and blacks, but Puerto Ricans, they don’t want to know about. In some areas, they just want to push the Puerto Ricans out.”

He went to some of the white welfare organizations, and found the people there treated him with ill-concealed contempt. He wasn’t surprised, but he nonetheless felt rage, not just for himself and his mother, but that Puerto Ricans in general should be treated like this. And now he began to understand that his mother’s vision was not only that he, her son, should escape from poverty and make a good life for himself in the world, but that he should accomplish something larger than that. When she spoke of Baroso, she didn’t just mean a man of respect, but one who had done something big and important to help his people. And he loved her for this greater, nobler ambition all the more.

After she died, Juan, who had grown into a slim and decidedly good-looking young man, returned to college. He graduated with honors, and wished that his mother could have been there to see it. And from that day, he had set out on the long and arduous path that destiny, it seemed, had chosen for him.

Gorham Master found the tiny restaurant Juan had chosen without difficulty. He arrived there first, and sat down at a little table for four, taking a seat with his back to the wall. A good-looking redhead arrived just moments after him, and was put at the next table. She also sat against the wall, as she waited for her date.

Apart from the fact that Gorham always enjoyed seeing Juan, he was curious to see the new girlfriend his friend was bringing. Five minutes later, they arrived.

Juan was looking well. He’d grown a pencil-thin mustache since they’d last met. It gave his clever, handsome face a somewhat military look. He greeted Gorham with a big grin, and introduced his girlfriend.

Janet Lorayn, Gorham noted with admiration, was drop-dead gorgeous. She looked, and moved, like a younger version of Tina Turner. Giving Gorham a warm smile, she sat down opposite him, with Juan on her left. The tables were so small and close together that Juan was almost looking into the face of the redhead at the next table.

They exchanged a few words of greeting. Gorham complimented Juan on his mustache, and Juan said that Janet thought it made him look like a pirate. “She says she likes pirates,” he added.

The waitress came and they ordered a bottle of white wine. Gorham glanced outside; the sky was darkening as it began to fill with clouds. After they had poured their wine and the waitress had told them the two choices, Janet turned her attention on Gorham.

“So you’re a banker?” she said.

“That’s right. And you?”

“I work in a literary agency at the moment. It’s interesting.”

“She just sold the serial rights of a new novel today,” Juan informed him proudly.

“Congratulations—we’ll drink to that. My father wrote a novel once.”

“I heard,” said Janet. “Verrazano Narrows. That was a big deal.”

Juan had observed the redhead at the next table. She couldn’t fail to hear their conversation, but was politely ignoring them, and glancing toward the door from time to time. At the mention of the famous book, however, she did steal a quick glance toward Gorham, out of curiosity.

“Janet’s wondering whether to try to get into the television business, however,” said Juan. “She has a friend who works in production in NBC.”

It was one of the things Gorham loved about the city that, just as in his father’s young days when the great men of letters sat at the Algonquin Round Table, the big publishing houses were still here, and the mighty New York Times, and leading magazines, from Time to the New Yorker. The great television networks had joined them too—all gathered within walking distance of each other in Manhattan’s Midtown. But it seemed Janet didn’t want to talk about her future in television just now.

“What I want to know,” she said, “is how you two met.”

“At Columbia Business School,” Gorham told her. “That was the great thing about the MBA course. You had all kinds of people, from conventional banking types like me to really unusual guys like Juan. Plenty of the people I knew in the MBA program went into not-for-profit organizations, careers in charity, hospital administration, you name it.”

Gorham had been very impressed with Juan and so had the admissions office at Columbia. By that time, Juan had already worked for Father Gigante, the priest and community leader who was helping the poor up in the South Bronx, and he’d spent another year in the South Bronx with the Multi-Service Center in Hunts Point. Before trying to use his experience in El Barrio, he’d been told he ought to try for an MBA program, to which he’d not only been accepted, but got grants to pay for everything.

“I’m sure Columbia reckoned that, with his background, Juan could become a leader in New York,” Gorham said. Then he grinned. “Of course, I have even higher ambitions for him.”

“Tell me,” said Janet.

“First he’ll revitalize El Barrio, and he’ll have to get into politics to do that. Then he’ll become mayor of New York—another La Guardia. Then he’ll run for president. By that time I’ll be a big-time banker and I’ll raise funds for him, and then when he’s president, Juan will reward me by sending me somewhere really nice as an ambassador.”

“Sounds great,” said Janet, with a laugh. “Where do you plan to go?”

“Maybe London, or Paris. I will accept either.”

“London,” said Juan firmly. He turned to Janet. “His French is terrible.”

“I’m impressed, Gorham,” said Janet. “You have your whole life worked out.”

“It all depends on Juan, though.”

“Did Juan ever take you round Harlem?”

“I took him round El Barrio several times,” Juan said. “He asked me to. And it’s not all bad in El Barrio—he got to like our music, and our food, didn’t you, Gorham?”

“I did.”

“Of course,” Juan continued, with a twinkle in his eye, “if you want to see something really impressive, you have to see Gorham’s apartment. He owns this big place, you know, on Park Avenue.”

But though he said this to Janet, it was the redhead at the next table that he was watching out of the corner of his eye. And sure enough, as he had planned, she turned to look at Gorham again.

Outside, there was a rumble of thunder. Rain started to fall. Juan glanced at the door. There was a young couple there, hoping to get in, but all the tables were now occupied. He saw his chance, and leaned across to the redhead.

“Excuse me, but are you waiting for someone?”

“Yes,” said the redhead tersely. And then, so as not to seem rude, she added: “My brother.”

“Do you think he’ll show up?”

Juan had such a charming way of being intrusive, that people usually forgave him.

“Maybe.” She glanced at her watch. “Maybe not.”

“I was just thinking,” said Juan politely, “that if you came to our table, those poor people at the door could get in out of the rain.”

The redhead stared at him coldly for a moment, glanced at the couple at the door, and then relented.

“And if my brother turns up?”

“I think,” Juan smiled, “we could fit him on the end of our table.”

The redhead shook her head with a wry amusement. “Okay,” she conceded, “I’m Maggie O’Donnell.” They introduced themselves. “I guess I already know what you all do, but I’m a lawyer.”

The meal passed very pleasantly. They learned that Maggie worked for Branch & Cabell, and Gorham said: “That means you’re going back to work after this, am I right?” And Maggie admitted that she was.

It wasn’t long before Gorham decided that this B & C lawyer was rather attractive, and he tried to find out more about her. He managed to discover that she’d been to a meeting of the Historical Landmarks Commission at lunchtime, and that she was passionate about protecting the city’s classic architecture, like Grand Central, from the relentless advance of the glass-box skyscrapers. His father would have approved of that—a point in her favor. But though Maggie was perfectly friendly, Gorham noticed that she had the lawyer’s trick of evading questions she didn’t want to answer.

Gorham wanted to know more about what Juan had been doing recently, so Juan told them how he’d been working with nearby Mount Sinai Hospital to provide health care in El Barrio, and how he was trying to improve the terrible housing there. He’d been working with some of the radical Puerto Rican activists in El Barrio as well, getting them to back these projects too.

Gorham was impressed. “That’s good work, Juan,” he said. “The link with Mount Sinai is brilliant.” Maggie also listened intently, but the young lawyer seemed puzzled.

“How do you work with the radicals?” she asked. “From what I hear, some of these people are pretty dangerous.”

Juan sighed. He knew what was troubling her. Back at the end of the sixties some of the younger Puerto Ricans had formed a group, called themselves the Young Lords, and demanded better conditions in El Barrio. For a while they’d made common cause with the Black Panthers of Chicago, for which they’d been reviled in the press. It was hardly surprising that a nice, white, middle-class lawyer like Maggie would find such people frightening.

“You have to understand, Maggie,” he said, “that I was lucky. I got an education, and I was out of the gangs. Otherwise I might easily have been in prison by now, like my cousin Juan. Illegal activities are natural in some communities.” Maggie frowned—the lawyer in her didn’t like that—but he pressed on. “Look, the problems of Harlem and the South Bronx are the same as those of other American cities. New York, Chicago, wherever: it’s the same thing. You have poor populations who’ve suffered years of massive neglect, who have few if any chances of getting out of the mean streets where they live, and who believe, often rightly, that no one cares about them. When Puerto Ricans in El Barrio called themselves the Young Lords and organized free breakfasts and health clinics, that wasn’t such a bad idea. They were demanding help for their people. So, in their way, were the Black Panthers in Chicago. When Puerto Ricans talked about self-determination, that wasn’t so unreasonable either. Nobody else seemed to care about them.

“Some of them, in their rage, advocated violent demonstrations. I’m against that. And it’s perfectly true there was an accompanying political philosophy. They claimed to be socialists or even communists—whatever that actually meant. Hoover and his FBI made a big deal of the communist thing. I’m certainly not a socialist, but I find their feelings understandable. When a society turns its back on one community, then people in that community may quite reasonably believe that life might be better under another system—it’s human nature. So I try to alleviate the causes of that mistaken belief. Some people have worked hard to discredit the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, and they have largely succeeded, but the underlying problems that caused these groups to protest remain unsolved. If Harlem is still seething, it’s for a reason, I promise you.”

Juan realized he’d become a little heated, but he couldn’t help it. He watched the redhead to see her reaction. He’d thought she might make a nice date for Gorham, but if she reacted badly to what he’d said, maybe he’d made the wrong choice.

“Interesting,” she said.

Gorham laughed. “Typical lawyer,” he said.

The conversation turned to people’s childhoods after that. Janet had been brought up in Queens. “Black Catholic. My mom was very strict.” Gorham described visits to his grandmother. Once or twice the conversation was interrupted by great crashes of thunder and lightning as the storm moved from south to north up Manhattan. Gorham learned that Maggie’s grandfather had been brought up in a big house on lower Fifth Avenue. “Old Sean O’Donnell had money. He made it in the last century.” She smiled. “We don’t have it now.”

“Lost in the crash and the Depression?” Gorham asked.

“Maybe some of it was. But I think we were just a big Irish family. Lots of children, for another three generations. It soon gets watered down. My father’s worked all his life, and he still has a mortgage. What can I say?”

Once or twice toward the end of the meal, Maggie had discreetly glanced at her watch, obviously thinking about getting back to work. But the rain was falling so heavily that the chances of finding a taxi didn’t look good. As they were having dessert, however, the storm withdrew to the north. The thunder could still be heard rolling up the Hudson, but the rain had slackened off. It was nearly nine thirty.

“Well,” said Maggie, “this has been really nice, but I’ll have to be getting back to work soon.” A huge flash of lightning in the distance seemed to confirm the urgency of her mission.

“Won’t you have coffee first?” said Gorham. “It’ll help you work.”

“Good idea,” said Maggie.

And then all the lights went out.

It wasn’t just in the little restaurant. The entire area abruptly went dark. There was a silence, followed by laughter. There were candles in little glass jars lighting the tables; after a few moments, the owner appeared from the kitchen and started lighting more. The coffee was already made, she told them, so they could have that, anyway.

“I expect it’ll be over in a little while,” said Gorham. “Con Ed has massive backup capacity.”

“Or maybe it’ll be like ’65 again,” said Juan. “A population explosion.” It was a statistical fact that, nine months after the last big blackout, back in 1965, there had been a short, sharp increase in the local birth rate. Gorham turned to Maggie.

“I’m afraid you may have difficulty getting to work now.”

“I’ll find a taxi. It’s not raining any more.”

“But there’s no light.”

“Maybe the office has a backup generator.”

“And if not?”

“I’ll get some candles.”

“What floor is your office on?”

“The thirty-second.”

“You’re going to walk up thirty-two floors?” Gorham asked. Maggie seemed to hesitate. “I guess this is how firms like Branch & Cabell test the commitment of their associates.”

“Very funny,” she said drily.

They drank their coffee. People passing in the street told them that every light in the city was out. Fifteen minutes went by and then Juan and Janet said they thought they’d be getting back. After Gorham and Juan had insisted they split the check between them, and Maggie had thanked Gorham, they all came out onto the sidewalk, and Juan and Janet turned northward.

“So,” Gorham said, “are you really going to your office?”

Maggie stared south at the total blackness of Midtown. “I need to. But I guess not.”

“Suggestion. We walk down Park toward my apartment, which is in the Seventies. If the lights come on, you can proceed. If not, I will give you a drink and then walk you safely home. Is that a good deal?”

“You are suggesting I enter a darkened building with a man I hardly know?”

“A Park Avenue co-op. One of the best.”

“When has that ever protected a lady?”

“Never, as far as I know.”

“Just a drink. You have candles? I’m not sitting in the dark.”

“You have my word.”

“What floor? The elevator won’t be working.”

“Third.”

Twenty minutes later, she started laughing. “You said you were on the third floor.”

“No I didn’t, I said fifth. We’re almost there. Look.” He pointed the flashlight the doorman had given him. “Just ahead.”

When they got into the apartment, he put her in the living room and returned a few moments later with a pair of handsome silver candlesticks. Placing these on a table and lighting them, he then went to the closet near the dining room and pulled out every one of the large number of silver candlesticks that Charlie had inherited from his mother. Soon the hall, kitchen, living room and dining room were filled with bright candlelight. Maggie sat on the sofa watching him.

“Nice apartment.”

“Thank you. I inherited it. What would you like to drink?”

“Red wine.” In the candlelight, Maggie’s red hair took on a magical glow. Her face looked softer. Her manner seemed to relax a little, too. “Maybe you could whip up a little soufflé.”

“I’m a terrible cook.”

She got up and had a look around while he got the wine. Then she sat down, cradling the wine glass thoughtfully.

“So,” she said with a smile, “this is your technique, is it? You invite the girl round for a drink, so she can see the beautiful apartment. Then you take her out for dinner telling her that you’re too helpless to cook. By this time, she has decided that you and your apartment need her tender loving care.”

“Absolutely inaccurate. If true, I’d be married by now.”

“Poor defense.”

They talked very easily. He told her how he’d always planned to live in the city since he was a little boy, and asked her why she had come there.

“Actually, it was my brother. He lives down in the Village, and one Sunday he took me out, and we walked into Soho. This was early in ’73, when the World Trade Center towers had recently been completed. It was an overcast morning, but the sun was trying to break through the clouds. And there was this great, gray tower in the sky below Soho, kind of grainy, and as the sunlight caught it, the tower seemed to change its texture. It was one of the most magical moments in my life. That’s when I decided I had to come to New York.”

“I thought you didn’t like that kind of architecture. The international style.”

“I usually don’t. But the towers are different somehow. It’s the surface I guess, the play of the light.”

“Is your brother married?”

“No. Actually, he’s gay.” She paused. “My parents don’t know.”

“That must be difficult. When did you find out?”

“Eight years ago. Martin and I are very close, and he told me. That was 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots after the police raided that gay bar in the Village. I was still at school.”

“Isn’t it time he told your parents?”

“Yes, but it won’t be easy. It’s going to be a big shock to Dad, because Martin’s the only son, and Dad’s relying on him to carry on the family name. Martin has to tell them sooner or later, but I’d better be around when he does. Everybody’s going to need me. Especially Martin.” She smiled. “I’m always there for my brother.”

Gorham nodded. There was more to this attractive lawyer than he’d guessed.

“The family’s a powerful thing. I feel this huge responsibility to restore my family to what it used to be, but I have to admit that I chose it. My father never did. Do you have anything like that?”

“I don’t feel a duty to the past, but I do feel a duty toward myself. My mother was always very strong about that. She was forever telling me I could be anything I want, and that I should have a career. Get married, she said, but never be dependent on a husband. She’s a schoolteacher.”

“Has there been friction between her and your father?”

“No, they’re devoted to each other. It’s just what she believes in.”

“I know quite a few women lawyers who did really well, but then stopped working when they had children.”

“Not this girl.”

“You think you can have it all?”

“Do it all, have it all. Sure. It’s an article of faith.”

“It may not be easy.”

“Good organization will be critical—I’m a great organizer. But I’m afraid I’d be a terrible corporate wife.”

“You’d better marry a lawyer, then. Someone who understands what you have to do.”

She shook her head. “No way.”

“Why?”

“Competition. There’s always going to be competition in any profession. Somebody’s going to win and somebody’s going to lose. Put that in a marriage and I think it would be too difficult.”

“You don’t intend to lose?”

“Do you?”

“I guess not,” said Gorham. “So what’s your plan?”

“No plan. Just hope I meet Mr. Right. Someone who thinks life’s an adventure. Someone who wants to keep on growing—professionally and personally.”

Gorham considered a while. This lawyer was quite a challenge.

“What did you think of my friend Juan? You seemed to be noncommittal after he gave the big speech about the Young Lords and the Panthers.”

“No, I was just thinking about what he said. I thought he was quite admirable actually.”

Gorham nodded. He’d met plenty of women in New York who wanted successful careers. But in Maggie he sensed not only intelligence and determination, but a warmth that he found attractive. Behind her lawyer’s caution, he realized, there was also a free spirit.

They were just sitting quietly when the telephone rang.

“Hi, Gorham.” It was Juan. “Have you seen what’s going on?”

“How do you mean?”

“I guess it’s quiet down there on Park.”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, stay indoors, buddy. I discovered what happened, by the way. Lightning strikes destroyed some of the power grid—they have lights in New Jersey, but almost the entire five boroughs are down. Things are heating up in El Barrio, and if the lights don’t come on soon, there’s going to be a lot of action in Harlem tonight. I already saw one store broken into just up the street.”

“You mean there’s looting?”

“Of course there’s looting. The stores are full of things people want, and nobody can see what’s going on.” His voice sounded almost cheerful about it. “Gorham, if you had a bunch of kids and no money, you’d be looting too. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you to stay indoors. This could spread downtown as well, the way things are looking.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, I may go out and take a look. But this is home territory for me, if you know what I mean.”

“Stay out of harm’s way, Juan.”

“Don’t worry, Gorham, I will.”

Gorham hung up, and told Maggie what Juan had said.

“Maybe you’d better stay here,” he said. “There’s a spare bedroom.”

She gave him a cynical look. “Nice try.”

In normal circumstances, he supposed he might have made some careful moves to see which way the evening would go. He was starting to get really interested in Maggie, but now wasn’t the time.

“No,” he said quietly, “much as I like your company, Maggie, I wasn’t trying to make a move. What I am going to do, though, is take you safely to your door in a little while. If Juan thinks it could get rough out there, I’m not taking any chances.”

“Okay. That’s nice of you.”

They talked for a short while after that. He asked if he could give her a call, and she said yes, and gave him her number. Then he said he’d take her home. Before doing so he gave Juan a call to find out the latest, but there was no reply.

There weren’t any taxis on Park, so they started to walk up to Eighty-sixth. Everything was dark, and quiet, but staring up the wide avenue, they could see faint glows that suggested fires. They walked together without speaking, but when they got to Eighty-fourth, Maggie broke the silence.

“Something on your mind?”

“It’s nothing. Kind of stupid.”

“Let me guess. You were worried when Juan didn’t pick up.”

He turned to her in the darkness. He couldn’t really see her face.

“Actually, I was. Which is absurd. He knows El Barrio like the back of his hand.”

“Where does he live?”

“Right on Ninety-sixth and Lexington. It’s actually a doorman building.”

“After you leave me safe at Eighty-sixth, you’re going to go up to his place, aren’t you?”

“I was thinking of it, actually.”

“So.” She linked her arm in his. “Let’s go up there together.”

“You can’t come.”

“You can’t stop me.”

He looked at her in astonishment. “You are a strange woman, Miss O’Donnell.”

“You better believe it.”

When they got to the Ninety-sixth Street crossing, they had a view over a whole section of Spanish Harlem. The streets were quiet for the moment, but they could see several fires. They walked swiftly along to Juan’s building. The doorman had shut the door, but after shining a flashlight to inspect them, he opened it, and Gorham explained his mission.

“Mr. Campos didn’t go out again, sir, I can tell you that.” Gorham expressed relief. “Did you come here to visit him once before?” the doorman asked. Gorham replied that he had. “Well”—the doorman evidently decided that Gorham and Maggie looked respectable—“some of the tenants went up on the roof. He may be up there. The intercom isn’t working, but I can telephone his number if you have it, just in case he came back down.”

This time Juan picked up. He was amazed to find that Gorham was at his building.

“I thought you might be hanging out with the pretty redhead.”

“She’s with me.”

“You want to come up on the roof? There’s a bunch of us up there, and we have beer. You’ll have to walk up a dozen floors.”

Gorham relayed the invitation to Maggie.

“We accept,” she said.

There were quite a few people up on the roof. There was a good view over sections of Harlem; part of the skyline of Brooklyn, to the east, was also visible; and all over the area, fires had broken out.

The sound of fire engine sirens echoed across the night. After a while, from a few blocks up Lexington, there was a screech of tires followed by a resounding crash of glass, as if someone had driven a van through the windows of a store.

“That’ll be the supermarket,” said Juan calmly. Then, turning to Maggie, he added: “El Barrio. My people.”

They sipped from cans of beer, and watched the fires spreading in the hot and humid night. After a time, over in Brooklyn, a huge fire started to develop. Half an hour passed, but it just kept spreading.

“It must stretch for twenty blocks,” Gorham said.

“More, I think,” said Juan.

And so, well into the early hours of the morning, they stayed on the roof, watching the great, divided city of New York express its tensions, its rage and its misery, by fire, and looting, and more fire.