“When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.”
- Pearl S. Buck
Her name was Evelyn Bates and in the late 1980s she lived and reigned over a subsidized, independent-living old folk’s apartment building in Albany, New York. Evelyn was a chain smoker with missing teeth and a raspy smoker’s voice. In her younger years she had worked as a kind of live-in supervisor under the aegis of some sort of housing authority. Her last days were in the west side of town, walking a beat in a stucco and concrete high-rise which offered views of the setting sun in earshot of Angelus bells, in the gentleness of dusk.
All snapped up in floral housecoats, Evelyn had a mouth full of opinions to help maintain order in a population often edging toward dementia and grown old in vice and pettiness. The Bingo table could get heated, as could customary laundry times disrespected. It was, however, her habit to laugh and so she attracted trust. Evelyn had grit and volume, with a well-placed curse at the ready if need arose.
The fourteen floors of the high-rise were circular halls encircling double elevator shafts. Beginning from the top floor I would count out, between floors, the number of newspapers due at the foot of subscribers’ doors. In my prime, at thirteen years old, I was fast enough to drop all the papers correctly on a given floor and get back in the elevator before the door closed once. But on some days I took the hall at an easy saunter, careless of where the elevator may have been summoned.
It was on a sauntering morning that a newly subscribed septuagenarian on one of the halls painted green opened his door with nada on. Naked he stood as I dropped the paper at his feet. I thought it must be Alzheimer’s, or perhaps an emperor’s tailor had sold him a bill of goods. I had known the trajectory of failed memory since my grandmother lived in a nursing home and was aware of a plug-puller being restrained in that same home. Anyway, at that moment it didn’t seem as unruly as the shirtless man of another floor who would appear without his colostomy bag and whose apartment reeked even through the closed metal door. My diagnosis of the morning nude changed when days later the nude in the door frame appeared again, but smiling. A smile like I had never seen, an uneasy and unseemly invitation to evil.
Whatever inner faculty or guardian angel dear was engaged at that moment, it said only one thing: “Tell Evelyn!” In no time I finished the floor, broke my sequence of descent, and headed for Evelyn in 4B.
These thirty years on, I wonder how often poor Evelyn’s door was pounded on daily for one kind of help or another. On her wall was a crucifix — did she ever connect the pounding of His affixing nails to the banging at her own door? That morning she answered her door impatiently, her white and tobacco-yellowed hair teased high. “What’s goin’ on?” she asked, chewing toast. Her coffee stained napkin was knocked like whack-a-mole into her housecoat’s utility pocket.
“Mrs. Bates, Mr. T— in apt 11F has answered the door twice this week with no clothes on.”
Evelyn stepped toward me, seeming to look to stand on my toes as I backed against the hall wall, her throat appearing as the outline of Charlie Brown screaming: “He did what!” Spittle percolated and flew — I caught the smell of aged tonsil and coffee.
“You come with me!” She grabbed my wrist and seemed to fly to the elevator, looking grim, like a harpy on a mission. Arriving at the pervert’s floor Evelyn said, “Wait here — he’s not to see you!”
The sound of her arthritic bony mallet of a hand pounding on his metal door was more than a heavy fist for the hard of hearing. The noise indicated a kind of pent up anger over so many interruptions — their neediness eventuating now in this kind of a thing. . . I heard the machinery of the doorknob and then a wink toward calm civility in her voice: “I heard you have been opening the door with no clothes on when the paperboy is by in the morning. . .” That was the brief fuse fizzling on the powder keg. Then, “You son-of-a bitch you! I know what you are! If I hear you so much as show your face in this hallway when the boy is in the building, I will cut your fucking cock off and you’ll never live in public housing, you’ll die under a fucking bridge.”
The door closed. She came back to me. “Honey, he won’t bother you again. I’m not having that shit in here. I’m here if you need me.”
The next day the pervert cancelled his subscription and I never saw him again.
Evelyn, I saw always. I loved her. She had done a holy and righteous thing, for my soul and his. She taught me vigilance.
On Saturday afternoons my mother watched an afternoon of old westerns on television, just before I headed out to collect for the newspaper. At some hour handsome Hugh O’Brian appeared in rerun with a theme song, the only memorable part of the show:
I'll tell you a story, a real true-life story,
a tale of the Western frontier.
The West, it was lawless,
but one man was flawless
and his is the story you'll hear.
Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp,
brave, courageous and bold.
Long live his fame and long live his glory
and long may his story be told.
Gerald Coleman writes from Maryland.
They just showed The Searchers, in full 70mm glory, at the Paramount here in Austin this past summer.