New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [426]
“I thought you might be hanging out with the pretty redhead.”
“She’s with me.”
“You want to come up on the roof? There’s a bunch of us up there, and we have beer. You’ll have to walk up a dozen floors.”
Gorham relayed the invitation to Maggie.
“We accept,” she said.
There were quite a few people up on the roof. There was a good view over sections of Harlem; part of the skyline of Brooklyn, to the east, was also visible; and all over the area, fires had broken out.
The sound of fire engine sirens echoed across the night. After a while, from a few blocks up Lexington, there was a screech of tires followed by a resounding crash of glass, as if someone had driven a van through the windows of a store.
“That’ll be the supermarket,” said Juan calmly. Then, turning to Maggie, he added: “El Barrio. My people.”
They sipped from cans of beer, and watched the fires spreading in the hot and humid night. After a time, over in Brooklyn, a huge fire started to develop. Half an hour passed, but it just kept spreading.
“It must stretch for twenty blocks,” Gorham said.
“More, I think,” said Juan.
And so, well into the early hours of the morning, they stayed on the roof, watching the great, divided city of New York express its tensions, its rage and its misery, by fire, and looting, and more fire.
Giving Birth
1987
GORHAM MASTER RACED around the apartment. He knew he shouldn’t panic like this. In the bedroom, Maggie’s bag was neatly packed, and had been for weeks. So why didn’t he just grab it and run? Maggie was already on her way to the hospital, racing in a taxi through the November streets. She’d need him to be there with the bag, when she arrived.
Their first child. They’d waited a long time, and they’d both agreed that they should. Maggie had wanted to get more established in her career, and he’d wanted that for her too. And now at last the great day had come, and he was filled with panic.
Was Maggie ready for this? Was she going to be all right?
He’d thought she should stop work last week. But she’d assured him it was okay.
“Quite honestly, sweetie,” she told him, “I’d rather have the work to distract me.” He saw her point, of course. But had she gone too far? Now that the great moment had arrived, he was seized with fear. Should he have begged her not to go into work today? If, God forbid, something went wrong now, it would all be his fault.
She’d left the apartment at eight this morning. At eleven, in the middle of a meeting in one of the big, wood-paneled conference rooms in the ten floors of Branch & Cabell’s Midtown offices, she had started to go into labor. She’d been very calm; he could just imagine it. She’d excused herself, called him to bring her bag, and gone down in the elevator to find a taxi to the hospital. It was uptown, but at this time of day, it shouldn’t take her long. He needed to hurry.
“Bella,” he called.
“Yes, Mr. Master.” Bella was standing behind him already. Thank God for Bella. She always knew where everything was.
“Did I forget anything?”
Bella was a treasure. She came from Guatemala, and like so many of the domestics in New York, she had begun her career as an illegal immigrant, but her previous employers had managed to get her a green card. He and Maggie had employed her three years ago—after all, with two people working full-time, it was a lot easier if one had a housekeeper. When they had first engaged her, Gorham had been a little uncertain about the forms of address to be used nowadays, but Bella had solved that for them. She’d been working in a big Fifth Avenue apartment before and she sensed, quite correctly, that the people in the Park Avenue building expected everything to be formal. “Mr. and Mrs. Master,” she called them, and they didn’t argue.
But there was another tactic involved in employing Bella. In a little while, they’d planned to have children. Maggie wanted someone whom she could really trust already in place, as part of the family, before that happened. The understanding was that when they had a baby, she’d be the nanny too. Recently, though, Bella had