If Victor had had to take a cab uptown, he would never have gotten there. The cabdrivers were listening to the news, even if he wasn’t. Victor didn’t take a cab because he had learned from previous forays into Harlem that cabs didn’t like to go there. It was easier on the nerves to take his very own car and his very own driver, which is what he kept a car and driver for. Victor’s driver didn’t listen to the news any more than Victor did. He couldn’t. Victor’s driver was from an obscure little town in Brazil. He spoke ten words of English and a dialect of Portuguese so rarefied he shared it with no other person in the city of New York.
Victor’s driver took the car to the front door of the Sojourner Truth Health Center, around the corner from the emergency-room door and more or less out of the fray. It was only more or less because everything up here was in the fray now. The crisis had gotten so large, there was no real way to avoid it north of 140th Street. Even from inside the car, Victor could hear gunshots. He could have heard the sirens if he’d been dead in a coffin in the back of a hearse. He scooted over to the side of the car closest to the curb and looked out.
“What do you think is going on around here?” he asked.
He could have asked the air. The driver didn’t answer. Victor opened the door and got out. Most nights when he came up here—which was not often; he hated coming up here—there were bag ladies in little clusters around the front door and kids in torn jeans cluttering up the sidewalk, but tonight there was nobody. He climbed the steps and rang the bell and looked around again. If it wasn’t for the light spilling out from the front windows, he would have thought everybody had disappeared. Yes, disappeared. Just like in one of those old Twilight Zone episodes. Victor often felt as if he were in one of those old Twilight Zone episodes.
It took forever for someone to open up. The doors to the center were never left unlocked. The young woman who let him in seemed distracted and upset. Instead of asking her what was wrong, Victor asked her where his cousin Martha was. The young woman repeated “Martha” a couple of times, then went off shaking her head.
Victor was just about ready to decide that he was going to have to go wandering around looking for Martha himself, when Martha herself showed up in the dimly lit foyer, looking as frazzled as the young woman had. Victor did not put a great deal of stock in this. Martha always looked frazzled. Martha always looked undone. She was pudgy in that depressed-teenage-girl sort of way adolescents got around the time of their parents’ divorce, and her skin always seemed to be on the verge of sprouting out in pimples. Victor had never known her actually to have a pimple, but that was something else.
Martha was wearing a long black jersey jumper and a short-sleeved shirt. She looked like the least popular girl in camp.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” she said as soon as she saw him. “Don’t you realize what’s going on around here? We’re in the middle of some kind of war.”
“War?”
Martha looked impatient. “Never mind, Victor. Let’s just say that dinner is off, all right? Ida can’t make it. She’s all tied up in the emergency room.”
“Medical school.” Victor made a face. “Can you imagine medical school? Why would she do something like that when she doesn’t have to?”
“Maybe because she doesn’t want to be bored. I really think you ought to get out of here, Victor. Grandfather is up in Dr. Pride’s office and Rosalie is stalking through the building. I keep running into her in the oddest places. You don’t want them to catch you here.”
“Why are they here?”
“Grandfather comes up to check things out every once in a while. I suppose he’s here tonight because of all that publicity about Dr. Pride. You have seen something of the publicity about Dr. Pride?”
Victor had seen it. More to the point, he had heard a violent argument between the city editor and one of the Sentinel’s top reporters about the fact that the Sentinel was not reporting any of the news about Dr. Pride. This, he was caught up on.
“That explains why grandfather’s here,” he said, “but it doesn’t explain why Rosalie’s here. Is she going everywhere with him these days?”
“Something like that.”
“One of us should have gotten a degree in accounting. I should have. We’re going to have to meet on this sooner rather than later, Martha. We can’t wait on it forever. Eventually he’s going to stop talking about changing his will and actually go do it.”
“It’s not that I want any more money than I’ve already got,” Martha told him. “It’s just that I don’t want to see it all go to her. God, she’s a poisonous woman. She was a poisonous child.”