In the Absence of Angels Read Online Free

straightened up. Robert, his face askew with the impossible question, was behind them.
    After this, there was the hubbub — the ambulance from St. Luke’s, the prowl car, the two detectives from the precinct station house, and finally the “super,” a vague man with the grub pallor and shamble of those who live in basements. He pawed over the keys on the thong around his wrist and, after several tries, opened the bedroom door. It was a quiet, unviolent room with a tossed bed and an open window, with a stagy significance acquired only momentarily in the minds of those who gathered in a group at its door.
    Much later, after midnight, Peter and Susan sat in the bald glare of an all-night restaurant. With hysterical eagerness, Robert had gone on to the station house with the two detectives to register the salient facts, to help ferret out the relatives in Ohio, to arrange, in fact, anything that might still be arrangeable about Vince. Almost without noticing, he had acquiesced in Peter’s proposal to look after Susan. Susan herself, after silently watching the gratuitous burbling of her father, as if it were a phenomenon she could neither believe nor leave, had followed Peter without comment. At his suggestion, they had stopped off at the restaurant on their way to her stepfather’s house, for which she had a key.
    “Thanks. I was starved.” She leaned back and pushed at the short bang of hair on her forehead.
    “Hadn’t you eaten at all?”
    “Just those pasty sandwiches they sell on the train. There wasn’t any diner.”
    “Smoke?”
    “I do, but I’m just too tired. I can get into a hotel all right, don’t you think? If I can’t get in at Arthur’s?”
    “I know the manager of a small one near us,” Peter said. “But if you don’t mind coming to my place, you can use my mother’s room for tonight. Or for as long as you need, probably.”
    “What about your mother?”
    “She’s away. She’ll be away for quite a while.”
    “Not in Reno, by any chance?” There was a roughness, almost a coarseness, in her tone, like that in the overdone camaraderie of the shy.
    “No. My father died when I was eight. Why?”
    “Oh, something in the way you spoke. And then you’re so competent. Does she work?”
    “No. My father left something. Does yours?”
    She stood up and picked up her bedraggled gloves. “No,” she said, and her voice was suddenly distant and delicate again. “She marries.” She turned and walked out ahead of him.
    He paid, rushed out of the restaurant, and caught up with her.
    “Thought maybe you’d run out on me,” he said.
    She got in the car without answering.
    They drove through the Park, toward the address in the East Seventies that she had given him. A weak smell of grass underlay the gas-blended air, but the Park seemed limp and worn, as if the strain of the day’s effluvia had been too much for it. At the Seventy-second Street stop signal, the blank light of a street lamp invaded the car.
    “Thought you might be feeling Mrs. Grundyish at my suggesting the apartment,” Peter said.
    “Mrs. Grundy wasn’t around much when I grew up.” The signal changed and they moved ahead.
    They stopped in a street which had almost no lights along its smartly converted house fronts. This was one of the streets, still sequestered by money, whose houses came alive only under the accelerated, febrile glitter of winter and would dream through the gross summer days, their interiors deadened with muslin or stirred faintly with the subterranean clinkings of caretakers. No. 4 was dark.
    “I would rather stay over at your place, if I have to,” the girl said. Her voice was offhand and prim. “I hate hotels. We always stopped at them in between.”
    “Let’s get out and see.”
    They stepped down into the areaway in front of the entrance, the car door banging hollowly behind them. She fumbled in her purse and took out a key, although it was already obvious that it would not be usable. In his