What Is Not on the List

Baptist Alley ran between two walls and was eighty paces long.

You went in from F Street, you came out onto the same F Street, and between the two there were a dozen low houses, a stable, a trough, a workbench under a tarpaulin, and the back of the theater.

The back of the theater made up one whole side. It was a bare brick wall, very high, pierced at the bottom by a wide double door through which the scenery was brought in, and at the top by windows that were never opened and behind which, sometimes, somebody went past with a lamp. The door gave straight onto the alley. When it opened, out came light, dust, a smell of hot glue and paint, and the sound of an orchestra playing fifteen paces off that you could not see.

Harriet Vesey lived in the fourth house from F Street. Her door faced the theater's wide door. She had one room below, one above, a stove, a table, two chairs, a bed, and a window through which she saw the brick wall.

Mrs. Turner lived two doors along. Mrs. Anderson, next to her, shared the same party wall, and you could hear in one house what was said in the other, so that people had long since got into the habit of not saying certain things in the downstairs room.

That Friday, Harriet was coming back from Tenth Street with work delivered and money in her pocket.

She took in sewing for four houses: two on Tenth, one on F, one on Ninth. She darned, she turned collars, she remade hems, she ironed on the days she was asked. She delivered on Mondays and Fridays. The houses paid by the piece, and they paid well or badly according to the house. The one on Tenth paid well and made you wait in the hall. The one on F paid badly and offered tea. Harriet had never been able to decide which she preferred.

She bought the paper at the corner.

She bought it twice a week, no more, because three cents twice a week was already an expense, and because there was only one reason to buy it.

She went up the alley, pushed open her door, lit the lamp, sat down at the table, and unfolded the four pages.

The lists were on the third page, below the quartermaster's notices and above the auction sales. They had no heading, or rather the heading changed each time — Prisoners Exchanged, Arrived at Annapolis, Received at the Parole Camp — and they were printed in small type in three columns, by regiment, without rank, without age, without anything.

Harriet read well. It was a thing she was not proud of and that came in useful every day. Her mother had learned to read from a minister's wife and had taught her, and her brother had refused to learn until he was sixteen, and had ended up learning too, very badly, in one season, when he understood that you cannot be a driver without reading an address.

She began with the bottom of the third column, as she always did, because she had noticed that the names at the end were the ones she read most carefully and she wanted to give them the better part of her patience.

She worked upward.

The paper was poor and the ink spread. Twice she thought she saw something and brought the lamp closer. Twice it was not.

She read the three columns again. Then she read them once more the other way, because you do not read the same way from the bottom up as from the top down and you sometimes see the second time what you skipped the first.

The name was not there.

She folded the paper, set it at the end of the table, and sat still.

Outside, the theater's wide door opened; there was the sound of a plank being dragged, a man's voice shouting something to somebody, and the door closed again. The wall went back to being a wall.

Harriet got up, went to the cupboard, and took down the tin.

It was a biscuit tin that now held three things: a baptismal certificate, four dollars in small notes, and a photograph.

The photograph had been taken in June of sixty-three, in a shop on Pennsylvania Avenue where there was an armchair, a plaster column and a painted backdrop. Three of them had gone in — she, he, and one of his comrades who wanted his own as well — and they had waited an hour and a half because the line ran out onto the sidewalk. Every man in uniform in Washington wanted his portrait that summer. The man in the shop was German, he spoke little, he had set Solomon against the column, lifted his chin with two fingers, said don't move, and stood so long motionless behind the apparatus that she had thought he had fallen asleep.

In the picture Solomon was looking at the lens. He had broad shoulders, a thick neck, his hands laid on his thighs. He was not smiling, because you did not smile in those pictures, but there was something at the corner of his mouth that showed he was going to smile the moment it was over.

Harriet looked at the photograph a long time.

Then she tried to remember his voice, and she could not.

She remembered that he spoke slowly. She remembered that he said mm before answering, always, even when he knew the answer. She remembered that he sang off key and loudly. But the sound itself, the grain of it, the thing you recognize in the dark before the words — that was gone, and she had not noticed the day it went, and she did not know when it had happened.

There was a knock.

She put the photograph back in the tin, the tin back in the cupboard, and went to open the door.

Isaiah was on the step with a basket.

"It's late," she said.

"It's eight o'clock."

"That's what I said."

He came in, set the basket on the table, and took off his hat, which he did at her house and nowhere else. In the basket there was bacon, a loaf, a pound of coffee and two onions.

Harriet looked at the basket.

"You've had a good week."

"I've had a week."

"That isn't a week. That's a week and a half."

"I had a generous fare."

She raised her eyes. Isaiah had already turned to the stove and was stirring the embers with the poker, which did not need doing.

She knew that voice. It was the voice he had used at eleven, coming home with plums when there was no plum tree in the street.

"A generous fare," she repeated.

"A gentleman from the Treasury. He kept me waiting three hours outside a door and he paid for the waiting."

"Nobody pays for waiting."

"He does."

He put down the poker. He did not turn around.

Harriet could have pressed him. She was four years older than he was and she had raised him for half of their childhood, and there was a tone she could take against which he had never been able to do anything.

She looked at the bacon, the loaf, the coffee.

She thought of the rent, and of the coal they would need for January, and of what a pound of coffee was worth that winter.

"Sit down," she said. "I'll heat something."

Isaiah sat.

She turned her back to set the pan on, and in the black of the window in front of her she saw her brother's reflection watching her, and she saw that he knew she knew, and that he was grateful to her for not asking.

It hurt her in a way she had not expected.

"He wasn't there," she said after a while.

"On the list?"

"On the list."

Isaiah did not say that doesn't mean anything. He did not say the lists are badly made. He said nothing at all for long enough that she heard the water begin to sing.

"There'll be other lists," he said at last.

"Yes."

"You'll read them."

"Yes."

She set out two plates.