Read Online The City When It Rains by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online

you’d take me to a play.”
    â€œWhen did I promise that?”
    â€œAbout a year ago,” Lucy told him. “You said you’d take me to the one about the fairy tales.”
    Corman thought about the money, the promise, the collision course between the two. “Okay,” he said finally.
    Lucy’s face brightened. “Really?”
    Corman pulled himself to his feet. “A promise is a promise.”
    The theater was on Broadway, and as Corman stood in line to buy the tickets, he stared at its wildly teeming lights. Despite the gaudiness, it struck him as beautiful. He admired the energy that swept out from it, the self-assertion, the refusal to lie down and take it. It had always been like that, first as an Indian warpath, then as a street of burning effigies, secret conclaves, plots, riots, scandals. As part of his scheme to bilk the city, Aaron Burr had sunk his only water-well alongside it. Not a drop of water had ever come from the well, itself, but later someone had used it to hide the body of a murdered girl.
    Lucy knew nothing of all this, and as the line inched toward the ticket booth, Corman wondered if there were any real way to teach it to her. He could take her on a tour, of course, point out this and that, but he wasn’t sure that anything could find its way into a mind that wasn’t ready for it. That was the reason he’d finally given up teaching, because he could teach only skills, nothing beyond them; how to read and write, but not how to feel about what was written in a way that was immediate and searing, the way he’d dreamed a photograph might teach.
    â€œThis is supposed to be good,” Lucy said enthusiastically as her eyes swept over the billboard at the front of the theater.
    Corman nodded. “You’re staying with your mother next Saturday night,” he told her.
    â€œI know.”
    â€œAnd all day Sunday.”
    She looked at him. “I always stay all day Sunday.” Her eyes remained on him. “She’s taking me to a play Sunday afternoon. Jeffrey’s coming with us.”
    â€œHe’s a nice man,” Corman said, forcing himself.
    He bought the tickets a few minutes later, then escorted Lucy to their seats.
    The lights dimmed slowly. The play began, an amalgam of fairy tales which started with the happy endings then went on to what happened after that, untimely deaths and unfaithful princes. Corman thought it interesting, but glum. After a time he found himself drifting back to Julian’s suggestion, money, finally the stacks of photographs he’d gathered in boxes, stuffed in drawers, every picture he’d taken since the first time he’d gone out with Lazar.
    That had been over five years before, but he could remember it very clearly. A woman had called a local precinct, claimed that she’d swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, that she was dying, that they had to hurry, hurry, before it was too late. Even so, Corman and the old man had made it to the hotel before the police, then followed them as they kicked down the door to the woman’s room and plunged inside.
    Corman could still recall the precise details of what he’d seen that first time. The woman was stretched out facedown across the plain wooden floor. The phone was still in her hand, but her fingers had released it, so that it simply lay in the palm of her open fist like a dead bird. A few feet away, a two-year-old boy jumped up and down in a rickety playpen, gurgling happily while the cops stripped his mother to the waist and began pumping her back to life.
    She’d finally come to, dazed, but still able to walk shakily to the ambulance downstairs. A big cop had taken the child, cradling it gently in his arms, as if posing for a publicity photograph for the police department. “This is what it’s all about,” the cop had said to Lazar on the way out, and Corman remembered thinking that for one of the few times in his