Rush

The rush came at a quarter past seven, the way it always came, all at once, as if somebody had opened a sluice.

The trains from up the river came in one behind another on the upper level, the seven-oh-five and the seven-twelve and the seven-twenty, from the towns along the Hudson and the towns along the Harlem and the towns out on the Sound, and the people came up off them and up the ramps and out through the gates onto the floor in a body, two or three hundred at a time, and crossed it. That was the rush. It lasted an hour and a half and in that hour and a half something like forty thousand people came up out of the ground under the green ceiling and went across the floor and out through the doors into the city, and they did it in silence, mostly, with coffee, and without touching.

He stood with his back to the booth and watched it.

It was the best hour of the day to watch. He would not have said so. In the rush the floor was not a floor any more but a river, a tide, a thing with currents in it that you could see if you stood still long enough: the main current from the upper-level gates across to the Lexington passage and the Forty-Second Street doors, and a second current from the lower-level ramps across to the Vanderbilt stairs, and the two of them crossing in the middle of the floor at the booth, where he stood, in an X, without a single person in either of them breaking step, and around the edges the eddies, the slow ones, the people who had missed something or were waiting for somebody or had stopped to look up.

The small grey woman with the tartan trolley came through at seven, before the rush, the way she did every Monday and Thursday, and crossed to the Lexington passage and went down it, towards the subway, with the trolley’s wheels squeaking.

He had never once seen her come back. Two years. He had sometimes wondered where she went, and what she did, and where she came back through, if she came back, at what time and by what door, and he had once nearly asked Teresa whether she had ever seen her come back, and had not, because it was not a question he could explain.

He watched her go down the passage. The wheels squeaked. Mr Pettiford said something to her as she went past, and she said something back, and was gone.

---

At ten to eight he went over to the newsstand for his paper.

Mrs Abelson was busy. She was always busy in the rush, at the counter on her high stool with the cardigan round her shoulders, giving change and papers and chewing gum to a line of people who did not want to wait and did not have to, because she was faster than any machine in the building and had been for fifty-six years. She saw him and did not stop. She reached under the counter without looking and brought out his paper, folded, and held it out over the head of a man buying cigarettes, and Tom took it and put the pound on the counter, and she swept it into the drawer and gave him his change with the same hand, and gave the man his cigarettes with the other, and said to Tom, without looking at him:

“The march is on the front.”

It was. He unfolded it at the booth. There was a big photograph across the top of the front page, from last year, of the Brooklyn column coming off the bridge with the towers behind it and the banners up, a whole street of them, with the sun on them, and the headline was the one they ran every year, THEY MARCH AGAIN, in capitals, and under it, smaller, the route and the times and the names of the speakers at the Battery and something about the transport unions and a pay offer.

He looked at the photograph for a long time. He could not see anybody in it he knew. It was last year. He had not been there last year either.

On the little television in the corner of the newsstand, with the sound down, there was a picture of a door.

It was a big plain door in a brick wall, double, propped open, with a sign over it he could not read at that distance, and men coming out of it in work jackets, a lot of them, into a street in the early sun, with rolled-up things on their shoulders and poles, and there were people on the pavement opposite watching them come out, and a man at the front of them with a megaphone. At the bottom of the screen, in white letters, BROOKLYN: BUILDING TRADES FORM UP ON ATLANTIC AVENUE.

He went closer. He stood at the corner of the newsstand and looked at it over the racks of magazines.

The men were unrolling things on the pavement. A banner came up, green and gold, the carpenters, on two poles, and the wind took it and four men held it. Another came up, blue, with a picture of a trowel on it. Then the camera moved, and there was a band, men with drums and trumpets standing in a group in the street in white shirts with their instruments, and then the camera moved again, and in the door of the hall, coming out of it backwards, slowly, with great care, two men were bringing out a pole each, and between the poles, coming out of the door after them in folds, dark red, with a gold fringe, an old banner.

It came out into the sun. The two men walked apart with the poles and it opened between them, and there was the faded painted man on his beam against the sky with his rivet gun, and the city under him, and the Latin. The camera held on it for a second. It was a good picture; it was the oldest banner in the street and the camera knew it. Then somebody at the edge of the picture, a young man in a work jacket with an armband on his sleeve, walked across in front of the banner with his hand up, saying something to the men on the poles, and the camera moved off him to the band.

“That’s your brother,” said Mrs Abelson.

He turned round. She was looking at the television, between customers, over her glasses on their chain.

“How do you know my brother?”

“I don’t,” said Mrs Abelson. “That’s how you’re looking at the television.” She gave a woman her change. “Is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Tom. “It might have been.”

“Then it was,” said Mrs Abelson, and turned back to the counter, and to the next person in the line, and said have a nice day.

---

At half past nine Walter came up from the lower level with his trolley and stopped at the booth.

“Ice,” said Walter.

“You did it.”

“I did it. Twenty minutes, twice a day, with a towel, like she said. Since Wednesday.” Walter leaned on the trolley and looked at his knee with deep suspicion, as though it might be listening. “My wife says what’s this, you never do what I tell you. I says, the Lieutenant-Governor told me. She says, oh, the Lieutenant-Governor, is it.” He shook his head. “My wife’s from Barbados. She has opinions about the Crown.”

“Does it work?”

“It works,” said Walter, unwillingly. “It’s better. It’s not right, but it’s better.” He straightened up off the trolley, and this time he did not make a face. “She’s on the ten forty-two.”

“I know.”

“The Assembly. Today. In the old room, with the mace.” Walter looked at the board, where the ten forty-two to Albany was up already, at the bottom, with no track yet. “I’m going to be at that gate at twenty past. With the trolley. And when she comes across that floor with her sandwich bag I’m going to take my cap off and say Ma’am, the knee is better, you were right, and she’s going to laugh.” He nodded to himself. “She’s got a good laugh. A real laugh. Not a laugh for a camera.”

“You’ll tell me what she says.”

“I’ll tell you everything she says,” said Walter, “and you’ll be sick of it by Friday,” and went off across the floor with the trolley towards the Albany gates for the nine fifty, slowly, and his knee was better; Tom could see it was better. He was walking straighter.

---

At ten to ten a woman lost her glasses.

She was an old woman, in a black coat and a hat with a feather in it, from out of town, from somewhere up the river by the look of her, and she came up to Tom at the booth with her hands out in front of her and said she had had them a minute ago, a minute ago, on a chain, and she could not see the board without them, and her train was at ten past, and her daughter was meeting her at the other end, and she had had them a minute ago.

He found them. They were on her. They were on the chain round her neck, behind her, where the chain had swung round when she bent down for her bag, and they were hanging down her back between her shoulder blades under the feather, and he went round behind her and lifted them, gently, on their chain, and brought them round to the front, and put them in her hand.

She looked at them in her hand. Then she looked at him.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you’re very kind.”

“They were on you.”

“They’re always on me,” said the old woman. “That’s the trouble.” She put them on and looked at the board and found her train and looked back at him through them. “You’re very young,” she said, with surprise, as if she had not been able to see that either.

---

He took his telephone out at ten.

He did not know why. He had said lunch. He stood with his back to the wall by the mouth of the Lexington passage, where it came out onto the floor, and took it out of his jacket pocket and looked at it.

The photograph. The banner on the hall floor. The boots round the edge. The hand on the pole. And underneath it the words he had typed in the kitchen at twenty to six and not sent.

Mum’s stitches.

He looked at them. On the little television in the corner of the newsstand, across the floor, with the sound down, the Brooklyn column would be stepping off now, from Atlantic Avenue, at ten, behind the bricklayers who had drawn the front, with the carpenters and then the ironworkers and the band and the old banner, towards the bridge.

He put his thumb on the screen.

Then he took it off, and put the telephone back in his pocket. He had said lunch. He would think of something better than Mum’s stitches by lunch.

---

Nico came at five past ten.

He came up the Lexington passage with his fiddle case, past Mr Pettiford, who said Musician with a straight face, and stopped at the mouth of the passage where it came out onto the floor, a yard from Tom, and looked at Tom, and Tom looked at him.

“Constable Keane,” said Nico.

“Nico.”

“It’s the first of May.” Nico held the case in front of him with both hands, like a man holding a hat. “Everybody’s marching. The market office is shut. There’s nobody at the board by the Vanderbilt doors to read the rules to anybody.” He looked at the floor, at the floor going round. “I thought I’d ask.”

Tom looked at him.

He did not know why he said it. It was the first of May. The Inspector had said it would be a quiet day. Teresa was on the Vanderbilt side, with her back to them, a long way off across the floor, talking to a man with a map. There was a photograph in his pocket of a banner on a floor with a reply under it he had not sent. He had moved this boy on twice, and Teresa had moved him on twice, and every time the boy had put the fiddle in the case the way you put a child in a cot, without arguing, and said the third one’s the best.

“Go on,” said Tom.

Nico looked at him.

“All four,” said Tom. “And then you go.”

Nico’s face did something Tom had not seen it do before. It went very still, the way a face goes still when somebody has said a thing it did not expect and it is afraid that if it moves the thing will be taken back. Then he knelt down on the floor at the mouth of the passage and opened the case and took the fiddle out, very carefully, and stood up, and tuned it, two strings, four, with his head on one side, and put it under his chin.

He played the first one. The one that went up at the end like a question.

People slowed down.

He played the second one, which was faster, and went round and round on itself like a dance at a wedding, and a woman going past with a suitcase smiled without knowing she was smiling and walked on with the smile still on her.

Then he played the third one.

It was the best. It was the best by a long way. It was slow and low and went down instead of up, a long way down, into the bottom strings, where the fiddle sounded like a man’s voice, and then up again, very high, and stopped there, on one note, held, for a long time, so long that the people crossing the floor near the passage looked round to see what had stopped, and found that nothing had stopped, that it was only a boy with a fiddle by the passage holding one note, and they did not walk on. Six or seven of them stood there. A man in a suit with a briefcase. Two girls from an office. The man in the dark blue raincoat with his coffee. An old man with a stick. They stood there on the floor in the middle of the morning in the slant of gold light from the high windows and listened to a boy hold one note on a fiddle, and above them the stars went the wrong way round, and nobody spoke.

Mr Pettiford had come up the passage. He was standing behind Nico with his rag over his shoulder, listening, with his eyes shut.

The note stopped. Nico took the bow off the string.

“That’s the third one,” said Nico, to Tom, a little out of breath. “That’s the best one. My grandfather played it at weddings and funerals. The same one. He said it was the only tune he knew that was right for both.”

Across the floor, by the gates for the upper-level tracks, Walter Odom was standing beside his empty trolley with his red cap on straight, at the gate for the ten forty-two, twenty minutes early, waiting.

Nico lifted the fiddle again and began the fourth.