7
Leonard’s hospital room was always cold, as all hospitals room are cold, in order to keep infections at bay. Germs love warmth, where they can zip into weak host after weak host, only the doctors and nurses with immune systems strong enough to battle them back into the dusty corners. Alice sat in the pleather visitor’s chair—easy to clean, with a squishy seat for long hours in one place—and pulled her hands inside her sweater’s sleeves. Lately she’d been trying to remember conversations she’d had with her father. One of her friends, a woman whose mother had died a few years earlier, had told her to record her conversations with her father, that she’d want them later, no matter what the conversations were about. Alice had felt embarrassed to ask, but she had recorded one conversation in the hospital the previous month, her phone facedown on the small table between her chair and his bed.
Leonard: . . . and here comes our lady, here’s the queen of the whole place.
（Nurse, unintelligible）
Leonard: Denise. Denise.
Denise: Leonard, I’ve got two pills, these are your afternoon pills. It’s a present for you.
（Shaking sound）
Alice: Thank you, Denise.
Denise: He’s my favorite; don’t tell the other patients. Your dad, he’s the best one.
Leonard: I love Denise.
Alice: Denise loves you.
Leonard: We were talking about the Philippines. About Imelda Marcos. So many nurses come from the Philippines.
Alice: Is that racist?
Leonard: You think everything is racist. There are a lot of nurses from the Philippines, that’s all.
（A machine beeps）
Alice: You working on anything?
Leonard: Come on.
Why did she ask? Who knew how many conversations she had left with her father, and that’s what she wanted to know, the same thing that any hack journalist would have asked him at any point in the last twenty years? It was easier than asking him something personal or telling him something about herself, and also, she wanted to know.
* * *
? ? ?
When Alice closed her eyes and pictured her father, her father as he would live in perpetuity in her mind, it was an image of Leonard sitting at their round kitchen table on Pomander Walk. There were a few streets like it in the city: Patchin Place and Milligan Place in the West Village, and a few in Brooklyn, near where Alice lived, but Pomander Walk was different. Most mews streets were carriage houses, or had been built as housing for some grand building being constructed nearby, and were now expensive but still dollhouse-sized, for the rich people who wanted exclusivity and quaintness more than they wanted storage space. Pomander was a dash straight through the middle of the block, cutting from 94th to 95th Street in between Broadway and West End. It had been built by a hotel developer in 1921, and what Leonard had always loved about it was this: it was a real street inspired by a novel-turned-play about a small town in England. It was a facsimile of a facsimile, a real version of a fictional place, with two rows of tiny houses that looked straight out of “Hansel and Gretel,” locked behind a gate.
The houses were small, two stories high each, and most were split into two floor-through apartments. Tiny, well-tended garden patches sat in front of each door, and at the 95th Street end, a guardhouse no bigger than a phone booth held shared equipment—snow shovels and cobwebs and the occasional cockroach doing the backstroke. When Alice was a child, Reggie, the superintendent, had told her that Humphrey Bogart had once lived on Pomander, and his private security guard had used the guardhouse as his post, but she didn’t know if it was true. What Alice did know was that Pomander Walk was a special place, and that even though the front windows were only about ten feet from their across-the-walk neighbors and their back windows faced their neighbors in the huge apartment buildings next door, it felt like their own private universe.
The scene was always exactly the same: Leonard at the kitchen table; the floor lamp on behind him; a book or three on the table in front of him; a glass of water, and then a glass of something else, sweating from the ice inside; a legal pad; a pen. During the day, Leonard watched soap operas, he walked in Central Park, he walked in Riverside Park, he took trips to the post office and to Fairway, he went to City Diner on Broadway and 90th Street, he talked to friends on the telephone. At night, though, Leonard sat at the kitchen table and worked. Alice tried to put herself inside the frame, to watch herself walk through the door, drop her bag on the floor, and settle into the chair opposite her father. What had she said to him after school? Had they talked about homework? Had they talked about movies, about television programs? About answers they knew on Jeopardy!? Alice knew they had, but her memories were all pictures without sound.