Joseph Caldwell: Lazarus Rising

The elevator, with a thump, arrived. Dempsey gave the upper half of the door a quick hoist, sending the lower half down into the floor. After she’d stepped inside and the door began to close, she saw that the man had lowered his head again onto his arms.

From the large pot that brewed endless amounts of coffee that she’d drink while spending long hours at her easel, Dempsey brought them down cups of it, not on a tray but on a piece of Plexiglas stained with paint, some of it in gobs, some in streaks that had washed into the other colors. It was, Dempsey explained, a palette. She was a painter. An artist. Their lack of interest in so fascinating a revelation might have annoyed her, but there was nothing much she was willing to do about it. A lecture on the importance of the artist in our society did not seem relevant under the circumstances.

Two of the cups were bone china, the other two, thick white mugs she’d swiped from a diner. The two men slumped against the wall chose the bone china; the men near the railing got the mugs. The man who’d done all the talking let himself be last. As he dug the spoon into the sugar bowl, Dempsey had to create an opposing upward pressure so the palette wouldn’t be shoved all the way down to the floor. The man mumbled some thanks—at least she heard it as thanks—then took a strong gulp.

Dempsey waited for approval or complaint. The man was looking at her over the rim of his cup. He tilted the cup upward but could still see her around the sides of the mug. When she started to move away, he put a hand on her arm to keep her there. He lowered his mug and, still saying nothing, added another spoonful of sugar.

Dempsey set the palette onto the floor and poured more coffee into the smaller cups. She tried to bend mostly from the shoulders rather than the waist so she wouldn’t be sticking out her behind. The presumed leader was now holding his mug up against his face, warming his cheek. He was still looking at her, and she became aware that his eyes were a deep and penetrating blue. She was more amused than flattered that she had become their favored object.

He lowered the mug and moved his gloved hand in a circular motion, swirling the coffee inside. Even though he seemed huge, garbed as he was in the enormous rubber coat, shod with the high and bulky boots and gloved with the gauntlets of a falconer, it seemed to Dempsey that she was looking at a sixteen-year-old who’d slipped down inside a fireman costume. Even the soot on the man’s face failed to give him the toughness and texture the uniform seemed to demand. But the nose, smudged, smeared by an attempt that had been made to wipe away the mucous, could only be characterized as perfect. It was far from delicate, even somewhat obtrusive and yet perfect.

Dempsey purposely looked at the other men, eager to pour more coffee if necessary—or offer more sugar if it was wanted. As she watched them gulping and heard their frequent sighs, she felt an odd sense of satisfaction. For her, for these brief moments, they had become her charges, a brood given to her care. She almost felt uneasy when she realized they had warmed her heart. They were the ones who gave. And she, somewhat to her amazement, was the grateful recipient. To distract her from the uneasiness she felt, she asked the man, “More sugar?”

Now looking directly at her, he said, “Thanks, but I’m fine.”

The next meeting between Dempsey and Johnny was far less eventful. Johnny had stolen the sugar spoon. He’d slipped it inside his glove when Dempsey turned to give more coffee to the bone-china men. Two days after the fire he rang one of the bells outside the door to her building and was told by a man calling down from the third- floor window that the woman he was looking for—the artist lady with the honey-colored hair—was Dempsey Coates and her loft was on the sixth, the top, floor.

Johnny returned the spoon. First he said he had pocketed it by mistake; then he admitted it had been deliberate. He had wanted to see her again.

“A thief and a liar,” Dempsey said. “And devious besides. What more could a woman want?”

This time the blue eyes neither flattered nor amused.

And so they were brought together, the fireman and the painter, Dempsey Coates, the artist from Manhattan, and Johnny Donegan, the youth from Staten Island. Added to the obvious excitement available to two young people was the exoticism they provided to each other. Dempsey felt, through Johnny, she was being brought into a world of valor and sacrifice. He was ordinary, but extraordinary; he was brave and he was good. He was like no one Dempsey had ever known or expected to know. And he was from Staten Island, a country she had visited but would never have claimed as her own. But now all this could be hers.

That Johnny would have for his lover the most desirable woman in the world and an artist besides, one who lived in a loft in Tribeca, was a possibility not even introduced to his most fantastic imaginings. And now, through her, he came into possession of a world more distant than Cathay, than Mozambique, than Manhattan itself. This world was never meant to be his. But now it was—for the taking.

Given the circumstances and the two people involved, none of this could possibly last. And it didn’t. Within a few months, before summer had come and gone, the affair was at an end. At the beginning, Dempsey felt, Johnny had revealed himself to be a god. And she, in turn, became his idolater. She worshiped Johnny, and he, in amazement, accepted this elevation to divine status. Eagerly he received her offerings; lavishly he bestowed his gifts, never doubting that Dempsey had seen him for who and what he truly was. But Dempsey, like any mystic given to worship, to say nothing of abject adoration, could not sustain the intensity of her ecstatic state. She eventually decided that Johnny Donegan, despite his many splendors, was one man among many, not the singular idol she had worshipped, fireman or no fireman, Staten Island or no Staten Island. And besides, she was not yet ready to remove herself from a life of other possibilities. Her adoration ended, and she was quite simply no longer in love—hardly an unusual phenomenon—and there was nothing she could do about it. Nor did she feel required to even try. It was hardly Johnny’s fault that he was no longer possessed of the mystery that once had so entranced her.

And so he withdrew with what grace this devastation would allow and did what he could not to cry out and gnash his teeth, to go mad and fall in a tangled heap.

In the years between Dempsey’s first experience of Johnny and her second, he was mostly forgotten. She had her painting, her other men, then later, her drugs, and even later, her illness.

The money for the drugs came from her mother by way of a limousine service. The limousine had made a right turn off Third Avenue onto Twenty-Seventh Street. Her mother had been crossing Twenty-Seventh. The light was in her favor. The limousine hit her and killed her. To protect the names of the occupants, the limousine company’s lawyer offered Dempsey six hundred thousand dollars, an out-of-court settlement. From the lawyer, she learned that at the time of the accident, an autopsy had shown that her mother was drunk. Dempsey’s mother never drank. Her only delight was the horses. Alcohol, sex, drugs never had a chance.

Dempsey had considered finding her own lawyer, but when she discovered that he (or she) would claim from forty to fifty percent of her mother’s hard-earned cash, Dempsey decided she’d try her own negotiating skills—emanating from an implacable streak of inborn stubbornness. She would take her chances. Her mother, she didn’t doubt, would have approved.

The limousine lawyer showed her the obviously falsified autopsy report to make her aware of the power he had at his command, a power that reached even into the city morgue. The lawyer’s offices were paneled with walnut that didn’t look like veneer. The desk was teak and as smooth as a piece of driftwood that had crossed all seven seas and finally washed up on Madison Avenue; the spacious view from his office reached all the way to LaGuardia Airport. The man himself was slovenly, as if he’d cast himself in the part of a small-town lawyer, complete with rumpled suit, wrinkled collar, and too wide and garish a tie. He slouched in his chair, he peered at her over bifocals. Apparently it was all meant to reassure the clients or litigants that he was a wise, well-intentioned practitioner, eager to achieve simple justice with the least possible fuss. And she had to admit he was masterfully persuasive. With the simple gesture, the pudgy-fingered hand offering her the autopsy report, he had let her know that her mother’s death had an importance to people who would prefer not to be made important themselves. Perjury and falsification that could reach into any level of litigation were common tools of his trade, tools that he could wield with big-hearted alacrity and deadly determination.