Specimen Days

"I suspect. He had his accident because he was unhappy. He may have been so distracted by the thought of our wedding that he allowed it to happen. Think of it. He'd been in the works for years. He knew better than to let his sleeve get caught."

Lucas said, "Simon loved you." "Did he tell you that?"

"Yes," Lucas said, though Simon had never said the words. How could he help loving her? Not everything needed to be said in words.

Catherine said, "I'm a whore, Lucas. I tried to force myself on your brother."

"Simon loved you," he said again. He couldn't think of anything else.

Catherine said, "I'm going to have the baby. It's what I can do for poor Simon."

Lucas could not think of an answer. How could she do anything but have the baby?

She said at length, "I told him he'd taken advantage, I told him he must make it right. I told him he'd come to love me, in time. So there you are. I'm a whore and a liar and I'm going to give birth to your brother's bastard. You mustn't come to see me anymore. You mustn't buy me things with the money you need for food."

Her face took on a new form. It grew older; its flesh sagged. She became a statue of herself, an effigy. She was not who she'd been. She was going somewhere.

Lucas said, "I can help you."

She stood with grave finality. She was formal now.

"No one can help me," she said.

She walked resolutely eastward, toward home. Lucas went alongside her.

"You are in danger," he said.

"I'm in the same danger as every woman who draggles her shawl, neither more nor less."

"Don't go to work anymore. Please."

"Soon enough I won't be going to work anymore. That will happen regardless."

"No. Tomorrow. Don't go tomorrow, you're in danger."

"I'll need every penny I can get, won't I?"

"The dead search for us through machinery. When we stand at a machine, we make ourselves known to the dead."

"Your precious book." "It isn't the book. It's true."

He confused himself. The book was true. What he was trying to tell her was differently true.

She walked on. Her new face, reddened and ravaged, cut through the air. She might have been the carved woman at the prow of a ship.

She said, "I can't worry about you anymore. I'm sorry, but I can't. I have too much else to think about."

"You don't need to worry about me. Let me worry about you. Let me help you. Let me care for you."

She laughed bitterly. "What a good idea," she said. "I'll come live with you and your parents. We'll live, all four of us, on what you make at the works. No, there will be five. That shouldn't be a problem, should it?"

For a moment, Lucas could see her as she'd said she was: a whore and a liar, a woman of the street, hard and calculating, naming her price.

He said, "I'll find a way."

She stopped, so abruptly that Lucas went on several paces ahead. Foolish, he was a foolish thing.

She said, "Forget me. I'm lost."

He said, "Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded."

She emitted a small, muffled cry and continued walking. He stood watching the back of her blue dress, the pile of her copper-colored hair, as she passed out of the square.

Always, then, it everything made a more complete and sickening sense. Simon would want her and the child as well. He sought to marry her in the realm of the dead, to live there with her and his child.

She must be prevented from going to work tomorrow.

Lucas couldn't think what to do, yet he must do so much. He must keep her from her machinery. He must find money for her.

He remembered the money she'd thrown at his feet. He hadn't picked it up. He ran back to Eighth Street for it, but of course it was gone.

He walked east on Eighth Street. He thought perhaps he could find the money again, if not the coins Catherine had tossed at his feet then some other money, some equivalent sum that might be out there, sent by a heavenly agency that forgave and abetted foolish hearts. He thought that if he scoured the city, if he went high and low in it, he might happen onto some money that was not being watched, that belonged to someone but was unattended, dropped on the pavement or otherwise misplaced, as his own coins had been. He didn't propose to steal, any more than whoever had found his money had stolen it from him. He hoped rather to take his place on a chain of losses and gains, an ongoing mystery of payments made and payments received, money given from hand to hand, to satisfy an ancient debt that had always existed and might be finally repaid in some unforeseeable future. He hoped the city might produce help through incomprehensible means, just as his stamping of iron plates produced housings.

He would search for whatever might be there.

He went along Eighth Street to Broadway. If there was money overlooked, if there were coins carelessly dropped, it was likeliest to happen there.