Read Online The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman - Free Book Online Page A

son of Jake with a Britishoid accent, Adam, for a time at least, was plucked up by the media as ‘the son’ and, consequently, the book had sold better than anyone, including Adam, had expected. He wrote a few non-scholarly articles in newspapers and magazines and was even asked to be a ‘talking head’ in a television documentary for public television.
    But even as this was happening, he wondered whether other people were wondering whether his public persona was going to his head. It wasn’t. His anxiety over what his colleagues might be wondering would not permit this. It crowded out most other things. Whether they were wondering this or not, colleagues did start to ask, ‘So what’s your next project about?’ More importantly, he started to ask himself the same thing. When he didn’t have an answer for himself it amplified a deeper question he had long fought to silence. Was he an intellectual lightweight? Perhaps he was only ever going to have one idea. He wondered if he was capable of writing another book that would contribute to scholarly debate in any meaningful way.
    But worrying if he would
ever
have another sufficiently good idea was now a luxury he could no longer afford because it wasn’t enough to have a good idea one day. It probably wasn’t enough to have one even now. He really needed to have had one before now because, having spent five years at Columbia with only one book to show for it, an untenured academic seeking tenure was in very big trouble. It would take an internal departmental committee to decide to put him up for tenure. That was standard practice. If this happened, the matter would then go before a university-wide committee, the ‘ad hoc’ committee, which consisted of academics from all over the university. But the real cut-off point was his own department, now headed by his friend Charles McCray, and Charles had more than an inkling that Adam had nothing about to come out. Adam would have discussed it with Charles if he had. What Charles didn’t know was that it wasn’t a matter of simply buying time, even werethat a simple matter. Adam had hit a brick wall. He didn’t have even the seed of something interesting. He felt he was finished and he didn’t want to put Charles through the unpleasant task of having to confirm that he was indeed finished. Charles had been leaving messages gently suggesting that they needed to talk. Their friendship and history would allow only gentleness. But for how long? The days in which it was legitimate not to have yet responded to any of Charles’ messages had evaporated till there were, so to speak, only hours left. Soon Adam’s failure to respond would itself become the first topic of their next conversation. Perhaps, after all, that’s what Adam wanted.
    Adam was going to have to talk to him sooner or later about Diana, who lay beside him every night. He had almost struck her in his near convulsion shortly before 4.30 am that Monday morning, she lying asleep beside him, and he, in a time unrelated to real time, an eight-year-old boy craning his neck on the corner of 43rd Street and 5th Avenue. He had never discovered the little girl’s name, the name of the orphan in the city of orphans, and even then, just before 4.30 am that Monday morning, only hours away from teaching, from assaulting a class with his particular version of ‘What is History?’, he was still, all those years later, replacing the missing picture in his mind of the little girl victim of 1863 from the Colored Orphan Asylum with the image of Denise McNair, who had been killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, for the same reason by the same people a hundred years later.
    Adam saw little eleven-year-old, feisty yet caring Denise McNair. He could have fixed on any of the other child victims. It was her eyes. More than anything else, it was her eyes. Not merely beautiful, they were expressive. They held more than a child’s eyes should hold;