(17 of 26)
On Third Avenue, there are the lights of gas stations, garages and used-car lots: bulbs blaring in loops. The bars glow. No light whatever shows under the BQE, where the shush of cars grows louder with the rush hour, people passing over Sunset Park on their way home to other places. Tony and Ingrid live just east of Third, across from a car wash whose walls are covered with curlicues of graffiti. At this hour, Tony is on the job at the metal plant, and Ingrid has the two girls home from school.
^ Maria lives just west of Third, on a dead-end street where END has been crossed off the sign. The windows in her house are blue. She heads home after a tutoring session in chemistry. Mallory lives just off Sixth Avenue, near the Park Slope line. A streetlamp sheds a pale beam in a circle in front of his house.
Where the lights come into their own is on Fourth and Fifth avenues, not only the Christmas decorations but the shops shining from inside: Santiago Grocery, De An's House of Beauty. Billy, the drug addict with the gash on his cheek, skulks in and out of these lights like an actor on a stage. He pauses at various clusters of men his age, hangs out for a while, then moves along. Everywhere there are huddles of such men, standing together and apart at once, their bodies angled away from one another while they remain close. From a shop window piled high with big box radios, Carly Simon's voice sweeps into Fifth Avenue singing That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be. At the south end of the avenue, beyond Sunset Park, the Verrazano Bridge loops like a necklace in a black velvet case.
If one did not know differently, Sunset Park at this hour could be mistaken for a small New Hampshire town. The shorn trees in the park, the cemetery on the hill, the quiet churches, the low houses looking for their occupants' return at the day's end. At P.S. 314, Diana Hart-Johnson rehearses the Nutcracker presentation scheduled for Christmas week. Teenage boys, galoots, clomp on the stage and attempt to learn their dance as the Spirit of Winter Dreams. The smaller children make soldiers' hats. The windows of the school blaze out into the cold.
Things quicken and contract. At the Center for Family Life, Geraldine plays cards with Michael in her office, after Michael's group has dispersed. They talk in whispers. Upstairs in the convent, Mary Paul completes some paper work, prepares a dinner of cold salad and sits down to watch the news.
X ROSE
"When we moved here we counted 28 mice, and we didn't count twice. I got one cat. He died. So I was looking for a new cat now because I had mice. And I was very upset for the kids. I went all over looking. Somebody told me they were giving away cats over at the clinic at 59th Street. I went and I got this one here, which was named Mollie, and I changed it to Jangles. When I got back, there was my girlfriend's friend waiting for me with another cat, Patches, which I had no heart to throw out, so I took him in too. So now I have Patches and Jangles. Meanwhile, my darling son Benjamin here brings home this kitten, Lucky. Lucky because he has a home. And I told Benjamin, 'You're going to be unlucky because I'm going to kick youse out.' " She wipes her brow with a dishrag. "Your turn, Benjamin."