Page 3 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“Hector!” Iris hisses, low enough that Nathaniel probably can’t hear. “He looks like he has the supply chain figured out.”
Patrick winces. When he was fifteen, he was a lot of things, but a reliable judge of what drugs a person might be on was not one of them. The spectacle of people enjoying varying degrees of success with an assortment of substances is hardly rare in the city these days. Iris and Hector know what to think when they see a pale, underfed man in secondhand clothes.
But Patrick thinks the twins misunderstood Nathaniel’s question. He goes over to the subway map and points to a space between the Christoper Street and West Fourth Street stations. “We’re right here.”
Nathaniel smooths both palms over the paper. He leans in close, squinting at the words, and Patrick tries to decide whether they need to take a trip to the eye doctor and pay for it out of petty cash. When five minutes pass and Nathaniel still hasn’t moved, Patrick figures bad eyes might not be the problem here. Iris and Hector exchange a knowing look.
When Nathaniel turns around, he peers at the twins’ homework. “What did those poor numbers ever do to you?” he asks. “Or, rather, what are you trying to make them do now?”
“We’re simplifying equations,” Iris says.
“Hardly. Who told you to do it that way?”
“The teacher?”
Nathaniel takes Hector’s notebook and scowls at it. “Your teacher needs to be brought before a tribunal.”
Patrick snorts and Hector laughs outright, but Iris folds her arms over her chest. “It’s how he taught us.”
“If you enjoy doing things the slow and silly way, I won’t stop you,” he says, then pulls up a chair and proceeds to erase half of Hector’s homework. Iris looks outraged, but Hector just looks glad someone else is doing his math for him. After a moment, Iris leans in and starts asking questions.
“Oh, Mr. Fitzgerald,” Hector says, ignoring his sister and Nathaniel. He leans out of his chair and pulls something from between two books about bird identification. “Did you lose this?”
“Can we stop with the ‘mister’?”
“No, sorry. I’m more afraid of my mother than I am of you.”
“Fair.” Patrick sighs and takes the envelope that Hector’s holding out. It’s the electric bill. He’s been looking for it for days. “Thanks,” he says. “I was going to have to call Con Ed to get a new one.
“How do you lose the electric bill?” Hector asks. “You always have a stack of bills on your desk. How did that one escape?”
For Patrick to know the answer to that question, he’d need an entirely different personality. He takes care of the bill and when he returns to the back of the store, the twins have moved on to biology homework.
“You mind if I read that?” Patrick gestures at the copy of theTimessticking out of Iris’s satchel. He hadn’t bothered going to the newsstand that morning. Iris is the kind of person you can count on to carry around reading material, a snack, and first aid supplies. She hands it to him without comment.
He unfolds it like he’s braced for a punch, or maybe like he’s driving past a graveyard. Above the fold is a picture of children in Saigon amid the rubble of their smoldering home, using buckets to put out the fire. He skims the articles about the sanitation workers’ strike and makes himself read every word about Vietnam.
He doesn’t feel guilty about not being there, not exactly. For one, America doesn’t have any business in this war, andsecondly, the army doesn’t want queers, and so they can’t have him. The bartender at a place on West Street got out of the draft with a letter from a psychiatrist and an affidavit written by the Mattachine Society. Patrick could have tried something like that, if he’d been called up. Or maybe he’d have burned his draft card like the kids in Washington Square Park. But he never did get called up, and now he’s twenty-seven, so he’s home free. Dumb luck.
“Good news,” Iris says, tapping the bottom corner of the front page. The state legislature is about to vote on expanding abortion rights.
“Good news,” Patrick agrees.
Iris takes the paper from his hand, flips a few pages, and folds it back to reveal a full page ad against the war. “More good news,” she says.
It’s an ad against the war, but mostly for Eugene McCarthy, who’s challenging President Johnson for the Democratic nomination in this fall’s election. The ad reminds him, very unnecessarily, that sixteen thousand Americans have died in Vietnam. Another hundred thousand are wounded. No mention of how many Vietnamese civilians are dead or wounded, but Patrick supposes that isn’t the kind of data that wins hearts and minds.
“Subways are filthy and the stations are foul,” the ad reads. “Our cities are dying of neglect.” It sets Patrick on edge, because yes, the subways are filthy and yes, the city never has enough money, but that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with asking American kids to commit war crimes a few thousand miles from home. This ishishorrible city, graffiti and rats and all.
It’s sweet that Iris can see this ad and think it’s good news. Patrick was an optimist, too, when he was fifteen.
Nathaniel’s watching them. Patrick passes him the paper, then watches out of the corner of his eye as Nathaniel reads thefront page, his lips pressed together, then flips to the second page. Patrick can’t tell if he disapproves of the news, or of Patrick and Iris, or if that’s just what his face looks like when he’s reading. He hasn’t said much, but there’s something in his voice that makes Patrick think about golf and the stock market. Nathaniel doesn’t sound like someone Patrick would expect to be on his and Iris’s side—and the fact that there are sides is increasingly obvious. Still, Patrick has yet to meet a conservative with hair as shaggy as Nathaniel’s. But who knows, maybe Nathaniel missed a few haircuts while he was busy going off the deep end, or doing whatever it was that landed him at Mrs. Kaplan’s house.
As the afternoon slides into evening, Patrick watches Nathaniel closely, mostly to make sure he isn’t slipping off to get high, but also to figure out what kind of sad story he is. There are only so many ways a person can hit rock bottom, and Nathaniel—distinctly twitchy, wearing clothes that don’t belong to him, living on a stranger’s charity, using a fake last name—has all the signs of someone who just scraped himself off the cellar floor. Usually it’s drugs, booze, jail time, or mental trouble. But there have been a couple women who left bad situations. At least once a year there’s a kid who’s run away or gotten kicked out, and Patrick spends the next month grimly furious.
Hector and Iris go home, Patrick closes the shop, and he and Nathaniel head up to the third floor with a broom that Nathaniel managed to turn up and a set of sheets Mrs. Kaplan brought, correctly guessing that Patrick’s own spare linens are wadded up in the bottom of his closet, waiting for a trip to the laundromat.
The apartment is furnished, for a given value of furnished: a couch, a bed, a table and chairs. There are two bedrooms, even if the second one is tiny, empty, and only has the sort of half window that looks out onto a ventilation shaft.
