Bleeding Hearts(138)

Traci looked sympathetic. “Nobody lives in New Haven anymore, do they? Unless they go to Yale. It’s terrible what’s happened to this city.”

It probably was terrible what had happened to this city, Dessa thought a few minutes later, sitting out in her car again, but she hadn’t really noticed it. She had had too many other things going on in her life. And since her mother had died, she’d had her father.

Dessa got her car back onto Prospect Street and then down the hill. She made the twists and turns automatically, knowing exactly where she was going in spite of the fact that she didn’t know the names of any of the streets she was traveling on. She went past the Yale Bowl and saw that it was not lit up. She went through the intersection that would get her to Orange if she turned left and onto the Derby Road. If she remembered correctly, there used to be an International House of Pancakes near this intersection when she was still in high school. She and her two best friends used to spend half of every Friday night in it, eating waffles with hot fudge sundaes and talking about which of the girls who wouldn’t talk to them was sleeping with which of the boys who called them names.

The Derby Road was dark and punctuated by cross-streets and filling stations. When Dessa got to Derby itself, she had to pass that big brick complex—parish church, parish school, convent—that sat on the hill right next to her turn. When she was growing up, that group of buildings had always made her think that Catholics were better than other people, since they were able to build big buildings like that and put them high up where everyone else was forced to see them. Once she made the turn and went over the bridge into Derby proper, the night seemed to get darker and the weather seemed to get worse.

The house where Dessa lived with her father was a triple-decker one, just like the triple deckers that filled up so much of New Haven, but smaller. It sat on a bad twist in a narrow street near the center of town, surrounded by houses just like it that had started to come apart. Dessa’s house had started to come apart, too. The paint was peeling. The porch sagged. Dessa eased her car up the narrow driveway and cut her lights. This house belonged to her father. It had been paid for, free and clear, when Dessa was fourteen years old. Now the neighborhood had disintegrated and Dessa’s father had disintegrated along with it. Mrs. O’Reilly had the apartment on the second floor, but nobody had the apartment on the third. Dessa had tried to rent the apartment once or twice, but she had been afraid of the people who showed up asking to look at it.

The ground floor back door opened, and Mrs. O’Reilly came out. She turned on the back porch light and stood in the open doorway, her arms folded across her chest. Dessa bit her lip.

“Mrs. O’Reilly?” she asked, getting out of the car.

Mrs. O’Reilly swayed from leg to leg. “You’re back later than you ought to be,” she said. “You told me you were getting off work at eight.”

Dessa thought of the Fountain of Youth folder in her cloth bag, the fifty dollars in tens laid down on Traci Cardinale’s desk. “I ran into a little traffic,” she said. “I’m sorry to inconvenience you, Mrs. O’Reilly, but I need the overtime.”

“You ought to be glad to have a job at all, from what I hear,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “All this unemployment. There was nothing else on the news tonight. Pratt and Whitney laying off. Electric Boat laying off. I thought we were going to be finished with all that as soon as we got rid of the Republicans.”

“Yes,” Dessa said. “Well.”

“I think it’s Governor Weicker’s fault myself,” Mrs. O’Reilly said. “I never did like that man. Bringing in an income tax. He’s from rich people down in Greenwich, you know.”

“I know.”

“I never did like Greenwich,” Mrs. O’Reilly continued. “They’re a lot of snobs down there, if you ask me. They think they’re better than the rest of us.”

Dessa pushed Mrs. O’Reilly gently out of the way and went through the pantry into the kitchen. The kitchen was empty and she went through that into the living room. The living room was dark, but she could hear her father snoring. She went over to the chair he always sat in and touched his arm.

“Daddy?” she asked him.

No answer. No answer, no answer, no answer. He was wearing one of the flannel shirts she bought him at Sears. It was an old one that had been washed many times and felt soft and smooth against the palm of her hand. Dessa patted the old man on the shoulder and walked away from him.

“Torpedoes,” he said in his sleep. “Torpedoes first.”