Slipping Into Darkness by Peter Blauner Page A

How can that be?”
     
“All that heavy lifting.” He flexed his arms self-consciously. “Keeps the blood pumping.”
     
She’d always been a little loose at the hinges anyway. His father said she was some distant relative of the famous industrialist Andrew Carnegie. She’d lived here since about 1923, a shy wallflower with knobby knees and horsey gums. Legend was, her parents had thrown an extravagant Sweet Sixteen party for her back in the day, hoping to bring her out of her shell: a band in the living room, a top-of-the-line caterer in the kitchen, and engraved invitations going out to all her classmates from Spence and the boys across town at Collegiate. When eight o’clock came and went, though, nobody showed. There was just a pink party dress with no one to admire it, platters of expensive food going to waste, and musicians in rented tuxes looking at their watches.
     
And ever since, according to Papi, Miss Powell had hardly left that apartment except to sit outside on the hydrant for an hour or so every afternoon. Though once, when he was eight, Hoolian had glimpsed her on a swing at the Mariners’ Playground in Central Park, looking up dreamily at the sky, as if she were waiting for someone to come along and push her.
     
“How’s your son?” she asked.
     
“My son?”
     
It took him a beat to realize that his father had been close to this age the last time she saw him. Up to now, he’d only vaguely acknowledged the growing resemblance in his cell’s shaving mirror, still half expecting to see his seventeen-year-old self staring back.
     
“He’s doing the best he can,” he said, playing along since setting her straight at this point would only scare her. “Trying to be strong.”
     
“He was such a good boy.” She nodded at the swish and sigh of passing traffic. “Julian. Such a pretty name for a boy.”
     
“Got his butt kicked for having it in public school,” he muttered ruefully.
     
“He used to come up and keep me company.”
     
“Yes, he did.”
     
He nodded, the doorman keeping a wary eye on him from under the shadow of the canopy, as if somebody were actually angling for his sorry-ass job.
     
“I used to use any excuse to get him to stop by,” she said, slipping deeper into reverie. “I’d pour coffee grounds down the sink and put too much paper in the toilet, just so he’d have to come up with the snake and the plunger.”
     
“Is that what you did?”
     
He shook his head. The super’s son. Always eager to come up with his tool kit when Papi was too busy. Was she another one who’d taken advantage of him? He worked it around in his mind, trying to convince himself that’s how it had been, so he could justify getting upstairs and exacting reparations for all the time he’d spent there without being paid.
     
But then he remembered how she’d let him sit at her big oak dining-room table sometimes with his calculus book, catching up on homework, avoiding the grim little motherless apartment downstairs, rush-hour light slanting through the old drapes and finding prisms in the chandelier glass, making a small rainbow on the wood while she bustled around the big hollow kitchen, keeping the servants’ door open to look in on him now and then. It’d been years since he’d allowed himself to think of those long quiet afternoons, the two of them staving off loneliness until six o’clock, when he had to go start dinner for Papi.
     
“I never believed . . .” She caught herself on the verge of an uncomfortable utterance. “Well . . . I just thought it was a shame what happened. I knew the young lady as well. I’d said hello to her on the elevator. She was subletting, but she was lovely.”
     
“People still talk about her?”
     
She looked up at him, the mist burning away a little. “Not too often anymore. It was so upsetting.”
     
“Yeah. End of my life too.” He saw her pink-rimmed eyes open wider. “Because of what happened to my son,” he amended.
     
“Of course.”
     
The doorman had disappeared into the