In the Glamore Salon she paged through Hair Styles until she found what she was looking for: Hazel Jones’s breezy short cut, with bangs scissor-cut just above the eyebrows.

There he sat in the automat, where she’d left him. Very still as if his thoughts had collapsed in upon themselves. His expression was intense, absorbed. He was gripping himself oddly, arms folded across his chest in a tight embrace. She thought He is playing piano, his fingers are making music for him.

He trusted her utterly. He had no doubt that she would return to him. Seeing her now he glanced upward, blinking.

“Mommy you’re pretty. Mommy you look nice.”

It was so. She was pretty, she looked nice. When her bruises and swellings faded, she would look more than nice.

The new feathery haircut drew eyes to her. Something in her walk, her manner. Purchasing two adult tickets at the Greyhound Bus counter, impulsively choosing a destination (“Jamestown” somewhere to the south of Port Oriskany) because the bus was leaving in twenty minutes and she was wary of lingering in this busy public place where she and the child might be observed. (Zack was wearing a cloth cap on his head. He was sitting where she’d positioned him, on the farther side of the crowded waiting room, his back to the room and to her. They would be seen together only outside at the curb as the bus loaded, and then briefly. And on the bus they would sit together as if by chance, at the very rear.) Rebecca was smiling at the ticket seller, rousing the man from his late-morning torpor. “A beautiful day, so sunny.” The ticket seller, male, youngish, rounded shoulders and morose eyes brightening in turn, seeing a pretty-breezy American girl with shiny dark bangs across her forehead, feathery strands of shiny dark hair lifting about her ears, smiled at her blinking and staring, “Yeah! Man it sure is.”

The remainder of her life. Maybe it would be easy.

The Greyhound to Jamestown was loading. She signaled the child to follow her. Made him a gift of two discarded comic books she’d found in the waiting room. Kissing and cuddling in their seat on the bus. “They didn’t find us, sweetie! We’re safe.” It was a game, only Mommy knew the rules and the logic behind the rules. By the time the bus was lumbering into the hilly countryside south of Port Oriskany the child had become absorbed in one of the comic books.

Cartoon animals! Walking upright, talking and even thinking (in balloons floating over their heads) in the way of human beings. They did not seem to the child any more bizarre or even illogical than the actions of those human beings he’d witnessed.

Waking later, alone in his seat. Mommy was in the back playing gin rummy with a couple sitting in the rear seat that ran the width of the bus.

The Fisks, they were. Ed and Bonnie. Ed was a flush-cheeked fattish bald man with sideburns and a genial laugh, Bonnie was big-busted, glamorously made up with flashing fingernails. Across Ed’s spread knees was a cardboard suitcase upon which Ed was dealing cards for himself and the women seated on either side of him.

It wasn’t like Mommy to behave like this. On the bus trip from Rome she’d kept to herself not meeting anyone’s eye.

“”Gypsy-gin-rummy.“ It’s a variation of the other but there are more options. With gypsy, you have ”wild cards’ and “free draw‘ if you earn it. I can show you, if you’re interested.”

The Fisks were interested. Bonnie said she’d heard of gypsy-gin-rummy but had never played.

Zack watched the game for a while. He liked it that his mother was smiling, laughing in the new way. He liked her pretty new haircut. From time to time she glanced up at him leaning over the back of his seat, and winked. He drifted off to sleep hearing the slap-slap-slap of cards, exclamations and laughter from the players. He took comfort from the immediate fact They didn’t find us, we’re safe. It was all he wished to know at this time.

Later, at another time, there would be other facts to know. He would wait.

Already Port Oriskany, that had been so exciting to arrive in, was receding into the past. The brownstone hotel with the creaky double bed. The automat! The surprise of Mommy returning to him, her hair so short and shiny, bangs across her forehead to hide the bruises and worry lines. The child was beginning to know the satisfaction of departure. You arrive in a city in order that you might leave that city at a later time. There is a thrill in arrival but there is a greater thrill in departure.

It was Mommy’s turn to deal. She laughed and joked with her new friends she would never see again after the bus deposited them at a farm just outside Jamestown. It was intoxicating to think that the world was crammed with individuals like the Fisks, good-natured, quick to laugh, ready for a good time. She said, “The world is a card game, see? You can lose but you can win, too.” She was Hazel Jones laughing in the new way, shuffling and dealing cards.

4

In Horseheads, New York, in late winter/early spring 1962 befriended Willie James Judd, state-licensed notary public and head clerk, Department of Records, Chemung County Courthouse. At that time waitressing at the Blue Moon Café on Depot Street, Horseheads. A young widow, just her and the little boy. A popular presence at the Blue Moon where most of the customers were men but the men quickly learned to respect the young widow. See, Hazel is like your own sister. You don’t come on to your own damn sister do you?

Willie James Judd was near to retirement from his longtime county employment. Ate most of his meals at the Blue Moon where he became acquainted with the new waitress Hazel Jones who was also known to him through his younger sister Ethel Sweet who’d married the owner of the ramshackle Horseheads Inn where the young widow and her child rented a room by the week. Ethel Sweet liked publicly to marvel how uncomplaining Hazel Jones was. Not like other boarders. Quiet, kept to herself. Never any visitors. Never wasted towels, linens, hot water, soap. Never went out without switching off all the lights in her room. Nor did she allow the child to run on the stairs, to play noisily even outdoors behind the Inn. Nor did she allow the child to sneak downstairs and watch TV in the parlor with other boarders.

Almost, Ethel said approvingly, you would not know a child was there.

And Hazel’s life had not been easy: gradually it was revealed to Ethel Sweet how the young widow had lost both her parents as a child, her father in a house fire when she was four years old, her mother to cancer-of-the-breast when she was nine. Taken in then by relatives up in Port Oriskany who were begrudging to her, never found room for her in their hearts made her quit school at age sixteen to work as a chambermaid till at last at age eighteen she ran away with a man twice her age, married him and realized her mistake afterward learning he’d been married twice before, had children he was not supporting, he was a heavy drinker, beat her and their child and threatened to kill them both so at last unable to bear it she’d run away one night taking the terrified child with her this had been three years now and she had not stopped running out of fear of the man finding her.

No they had not been divorced. He would never give her a divorce. He would wish to see her dead first. And their son, too.

Ethel Sweet reported how, telling this, Hazel began to tremble. It was so real to her!

But now, in Horseheads, she wished to remain. In Horseheads she’d made friends, she was happy. She was content. She wished to enroll Zacharias in the elementary school next fall. He would be almost six years old in September.

Saying to Ethel maybe she’d noticed, Zacharias is not like other boys? Doesn’t play with other children, he’s shy and fearful of being hurt, his father had beat him so often, only just needed to raise his fist and the child would become terrified so she had to shelter him from the roughness of men and boys, boys’ games and loud shouting, also Zacharias had a musical gift, he would be a concert pianist someday and so he must not injure his hands.