The Last Gentleman

needn’t have bothered. The very next morning, an unmemorable day neither cloudy nor clear, hot or cold, the engineer, who had emerged from Macy’s only to plunge immediately underground again, caught sight of the Handsome Woman on the subway level of Pennsylvania Station. It was not even necessary to follow her. She took his train. When she did not get up at Columbus Circle, he stayed on too.
    The train burrowed deep into the spine of the island and began a long climb up into Washington Heights, where they emerged, she taking an elevator and he a flight of steps (but why? she didn’t know him from Adam), into a gray warren of a place which descended in broken terraces to the Hudson River. From the moraine of blackened gravel which covered the rooftops below, there sprouted a crooked forest of antennae and branching vent pipes. A perpetual wind pushed up the side streets from the river, scouring the gutters and forcing the denizens around into the sunny lee of Broadway with its sheltered bars and grills and kosher groceries and Spanish hairdressers.
    He followed the Handsome Woman into a great mauve pile of buildings. Inside he took a sniff: hospital.
    This time, when he saw her bound for an elevator, he entered beside her and swung around behind her as she turned. Now, eight inches in front of him, she suddenly looked frail, like a dancer who leaves the stage and puts on a kimono. There arose to his nostrils the heavy electric smell of unperfumed hair.
    She got off at the tenth floor, so up he went to the eleventh and back down the steps in time to catch a glimpse of her foot and leg disappearing through a doorway. He kept on his way, past the closed door and other doors, past a large opening into a ward, and to the end of the corridor, where he cocked a foot on a radiator, propped his mouth on a knuckle, and looked out a sooty window. As usual, he had forgotten to put on his jacket when he left Macy’s, and his tan engineer’s smock gave him the look, if not of a doctor, at least of a technician of sorts.
    Directly a man came out of the room into which the Handsome Woman had disappeared, and, to the engineer’s astonishment, made straight for him.
    At first he was certain he had been found out and someone had been sent to deal with him. His imagination formed the picture of a precinct station where he was charged with a misdemeanor of a vaguely sexual nature, following a woman on a subway. His eyes rolled up into his eyebrows.
    But the stranger, an old man, only nodded affably. Lining up beside him, he rubbed himself against the vanes of the radiator and began to smoke a cigar with great enjoyment. He cradled one elbow in the crook of the other arm and rocked to and fro in his narrow yellow shoes.
    â€œIt looks like Dr. Calamera is running late.” The stranger screwed up an eye and spoke directly into the smoke. He was a puckish-looking old fellow who, the engineer soon discovered, had the habit of shooting his arm out of his cuff and patting his gray hair.
    â€œWho?” murmured the engineer, also speaking straight ahead since he was not yet certain he was being addressed.
    â€œAren’t you assisting him in the puncture?”
    â€œSir?”
    â€œYou’re not the hematologist?”
    â€œNo sir.”
    â€œThey suspect a defect in the manufacture of the little blood cells in the marrow bones, like a lost step,” said the stranger cheerfully, rocking to and fro. “It don’t amount to much.”
    Two things were instantly apparent to the sentient engineer, whose sole gift, after all, was the knack of divining persons and situations. One was that he had been mistaken for a member of the staff. The other was that the stranger was concerned about a patient and that he, the stranger, had spent a great deal of time in the hospital. He had the air of one long used to the corridor, and he had developed a transient, fabulous, and inexpert knowledge of one disease. It was plain too that he imputed to the hospital staff a benevolent and omniscient concern for the one patient. It amounted to a kind of happiness, as if the misfortune beyond the door must be balanced by affectionate treatment here in the corridor. In hospitals we expect strangers to love us.
    An intern passed, giving them a wide berth as he turned into the ward, holding out his hand to fend them off good-naturedly.
    â€œDo you know him?” asked the old man.
    â€œNo