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10
HER mother's current apartment was in one of the newer high rises overlooking the Hudson River. Some women shift furniture; A
These frequent moves had been so much part of Sigrid's childhood that she no longer recalled that they had begun immediately after Leif's funeral. By now it was just another quirk of A
This year's building was all glass and steel, its ground floor as impersonal as a bank and quite bare except for the slight softening effect of low fern-filled planters along the front walls, a colorful mosaic floor and a few backless leather benches clumped together in the center of the lobby. At the rear were elevators and banked mailboxes. The whole place was as brightly lit as an all-night diner and even less inviting, but it was virtually mugger proof. To compensate for the lack of doorman, tenants could inspect everything behind those floor-to-ceiling glass walls before unlocking the street door and letting themselves in, and there were no shadowy culs-de-sac where a rapist could lurk undetected..
Closed-circuit televisions on the main door and in the elevator videotaped everyone coming or going, and it was useless to tell her mother that the tapes probably weren't checked unless a tenant actually got mugged. A
"They must get so bored just watching people galumph in and out as if they're going to their own funerals," she would say.
Whenever her mother was brightening up a hypothetical watchman's day, Sigrid would stand to the far side of the elevator and pretend not to know her.
It was raining briskly when Sigrid slipped inside the lobby and paused long enough to empty A
A
A
Things were normal that evening. Nothing dramatic like burst water pipes or signs of forced entry, although a stranger might have had difficulty distinguishing between a burglar's ransacking and A
"The plane leaves at noon?" she'd wail. "But it's eleven now! Who's got the car? Where's my coat? My camera bags?"
Some people found her disorganized, chaotic air appealing. Sigrid preferred order and calm; but because she'd lived apart from her mother since college, it was not a source of friction any longer. Now they could look at each other fondly-if somewhat quizzically-across the generation gap.
Like many untidy people, A
Under the S's was a file with Sigrid's name on it, begun in her fifth year because A
She located the old Life article on her first try, pulled it out and started to close the drawer when another folder nearer the front caught her eye.
It was labeled simply 'Leif', and it was not very thick. Inside were a couple of letters addressed to Miss A
Sigrid had seen most of the pictures before but not in several years. She had difficulty locating her father in a group-graduation pose, one skinhead rookie out of a whole class of uniformed look-alikes. There was a formal studio portrait-how very young he looked-and a close-up of herself at six months, sitting on his lap, wearing his patrol-man's hat and gnawing on the handle of his service pistol.
In the last picture he was as she could just barely remember him: laughing directly into the camera, his fair hair slicked back, tall and handsome and utterly self-assured. A man's hand rested on his shoulder, and a closer look revealed that someone had been cropped from the picture. Odd. Idly she wondered who it was, and why he'd been cut away. Along the right border was a date and in her mother's hasty script the words: 'First day in plain clothes."
Two months before he'd been gu
It was disorienting to look at the date and suddenly realize that she was now older than he had been. Somehow one never expects to grow older than one's parents. It upset life's natural order. Then she remembered the time when she was still in uniform and had been sent to tell an elderly mother that her son had been killed in a car wreck that evening.
The old woman had just stared at her numbly, shaking her head over and over in mute denial that finally came out in soft bewildered cries, "But he isn't old enough. He's not old enough to die."
Sigrid knew it must feel much more u