19 Purchase Street by Gerald A Browne Read Free Book Online

it and its seething wake looked as though it could boil anyone who fell in. But soon another ferry headed into the slip, a friendlier ferry, its bow smiling at the waterline. For only a nickel each it skimmed Norma and Gainer across New York harbor and deposited them on the toe of Manhattan.
    They had eleven dollars to go on. And hope in the address of a girl named Dolores Hart. She had been at Mount Loretto the year before, was now out on her own with a nice place of her own, Norma had been told.
    400 East Eightieth Street.
    It was a six storied building, fifty years older than those on either side of it, apparently depending on them for support. In its entranceway were twelve abused mail boxes, each with a mail slot and an intercom buzzer button. Only four of the boxes had printed names. The others had names scratched over names on the bare metal.
    There was no Hart, not even a Dolores.
    Norma checked several times. She couldn’t even tell which was apartment 6-R because the numbers on the buzzer buttons were so worn. Perhaps, Norma thought, the girl at Mount Loretto who had given her Dolores Hart had made a mistake on the address. Or maybe Dolores Hart was only a fancy, a haven invented out of the girl’s own wishful thoughts.
    Gainer was chewing on his thumbnail, a sign that he was hungry.
    Norma pressed all twelve buttons, causing voices so faint they seemed from distant, tiny people.
    â€œIt’s me,” Norma said in a register lower than normal.
    At once a raspy buzzer sounded, enabling the inner door to be opened.
    Norma and Gainer climbed. Steps covered and re-covered with linoleum. The metal edgings nailed on the front of some were loose enough to trip on. There was an inconsistent lean to every flight and landing, a slant one way and then an opposite list. The entire stairwell had long ago settled as much as it ever would and so was more reliable than it appeared.
    On the sixth floor the only apartment had a door painted baby pink. The high gloss paint, amateurishly sprayed on, had run in places. There was no name or number or doorbell.
    Norma knocked politely.
    She thought she heard movement inside but no one came to the door. She knocked again, several times and certainly loud enough, but still no one came.
    Gainer put his ear to the door. “Someone’s in there,” he said.
    Norma doubted it. She was full of misgivings. They should leave now, forget ever having heard of Dolores Hart. They should take the long ride back to Mount Loretto, back to sure beds and meals.
    â€œWait here,” she told him.
    She hurried down the six flights and in twenty minutes came back up bringing a pizza in a box and four cold Pepsis. They sat on the landing. The string on the box cut white into Gainer’s hands but he broke it, while Norma opened the drinks and put straws in them. She’d brought extra napkins but could have used more with the melt on their chins and fingers. When they’d had enough, two slices of the pizza were left. For those, possibly for later, Norma made a smaller box out of the larger, tied it neatly with the string.
    There they sat. With their backs against the wall. Norma put her arm around to have Gainer truly next to her. The bare bulb in the fixture above was only twenty-five watts but still it exposed where wet moppings of the linoleum had turned dust into dirty cake at every corner and angle. Norma pictured where they were in relation to the city, and expanding further, the city to her mental map of the coast and ocean. Her imagination returned so suddenly to being there on that tilted landing it seemed to her she was surely too small to be protection for him, smaller yet, whose boychest and heartbeat she felt on the flat of her hand.
    Scratching sounds. On the inside surface of the painted pink door. A cat, Norma thought, that must have been what she’d heard before. She doubted a Dolores Hart lived there.
    The hour that passed seemed like four.
    The pink door