Map-Reading

They were to meet at the Empire Hotel lounge on West 63rd Street and Broadway, across from Lincoln Center. She told Benton she would be wearing a blue woolen hat shaped like a ball and a lighter blue top coat. “They have a great wine list,” she said. Then, through a small nervous laugh: “I’ll be early, and get us a table away from the piano.” A pause, and then the laugh again. “Believe me, it’s good to be away from the piano.” She sounded good over the telephone. A soft rich alto voice, full grown. She was now twenty-two. Benton was fifty-one. A half-sister he had never had a conversation with in his life. Kate. Katie.

Stephanie Shieldhouse

Her letter, last month, said that she was living in New York now, and had made the adult decision to get in touch with him. She had included an address and phone number. He sent her a postcard: Welcome to the big city. I don’t get into town much, but we should get together. He hoped she would leave it at that. But she had called him. Their sister, Alice, had given her the number. “I was kind of worried that you wouldn’t pick up.”

“Don’t be silly,” he told her. He knew Alice would’ve given the number with the air of someone expecting nothing less from him.

That was Alice.

He took the train into the city and spent the night and most of the day in the apartment of a friend on East 86th Street. The friend had left for work early in the morning. Benton, a high-school teacher, occupied himself with grading papers and reading The Great Gatsby, yet again, to teach. At four o’clock he went out into the rainy street to look for a cab. The rain was cold. There was surprisingly little traffic. He began to walk, hurrying toward Park Avenue. An easterly wind started up. His umbrella shielded only his head, and by the time a cab stopped for him, his front was soaked.

“West Sixty-Third,” he said, shivering. “And Broadway.” The thought occurred to him that this was life in the world: getting yourself drenched even with an umbrella. He had always been inclined to gloomy reflections. Friends remarked on it. With several of them he had formed a casual club that never met, called The Doom Brothers Club.

He sat in the cab and tried to shake the icy rainwater from his coat. The cab was not moving. Horns blew. The rain rushed from the ragged sky, and the windshield wipers made a nerve-racking screech every time they swept across.

He used the newspaper he’d been carrying to absorb some of the water. He was shivering. The cabbie, without being asked, turned the heat up. Benton looked at the back of his head. Dark hair, dark, deeply lined neck. A beetle-browed round little man of fifty or sixty. “I’m soaked.”

The cabbie was silent, shoulders hunched at the wheel. You could hear a Middle Eastern voice singing on the radio, though it was turned so low you wouldn’t be able to distinguish words even if you knew the language. He looked out at the people hurrying along in the windswept rainy street, and murmured the name, “Katie.” She had called herself Katie. “Hi, this is Katie,” she’d said over the telephone. “Thank you for answering.”

He had seen her only once, when she was three years old, in Memphis. He had traveled there alone expressly to meet his father’s new wife and child. His father got a room for him at the Peabody Hotel and they met down in the big lobby that afternoon, shortly after Benton arrived from the airport.

“How’s your sister and brother-in-law, there,

Tommy,” the old man said.

“Oh, they seem fine.”

“Haven’t heard a thing from her yet, you know.”

The divorce was done, and though their mother had met someone else—a real-estate man named Eddie...