Chapter 14

 

                Downtown Paterson by 1800 emanated out from the bridge crossing, a series of stores that served farmers on either side of the river as well as the fledgling industries begun at the urging of Alexander Hamilton.

                Conran Van Winkle's store occupied the curve at what was later called Water Street, just as a point where traffic descended from the bridge on the southern or what was then the Essex side. The weathered structure already out of date by a few decades, would later subdivide with a man named Chauncey Andrews taking over the General Store and George Broomhead opening a small wire works company in another part.

                Van Winkle sold pork, molasses, tallow candles, snuff, tobacco, whisky and other luxuries. Men from the various settlements gathered in his store to talk about the current political feud between those supporting Hamilton's Federalism and Jefferson's Democracy. These men also gathered to drink applejack.

                Up West Street at the Junction of Main Street (then called Park) Simeon Van Winkle, and later his son, Jacob, ran a store call "The branch." Another more famous store was run by John Bensen and his uncle, David; both uncle and nephew lived in a Water Street mansion between the two bridge on the northside of the river. Their store sat on the corner of Water and Northwest Street, near the site of Judge Sanfor's House (almost a century later). This store lasted well into the 1880s, although it had been built in the early 1790s. The business itself was moved to the rear of the mansion as it bowed to competition, an  slowly declined -- to finally close its door altogether on Aug. 11, 1811. Records of its prices, however, still remain, and one sampling of the average costs of various items has been recovered from old documents.

                                Pork, a shilling a pound

                                Rye flour, 35 shillings a hundred pounds

                                Sugar, a shilling a pound,

                                Calico, 15 pence per yard,

                                Soap, one shilling, four pence,

                                Coffee, three shillings a pound,

                                Candles, one shilling, then pence per pound,

                                Molasses, five shillings per gallon,

                                Salt, four pence per quart,

                                Tea, seven to nine shillings,

                                Butter, one shilling, six pense

                                Lamb, four shillings per quarter,

                                Rice, one shilling, six pence for seven pounds,

                                Wheat flour, three shillings for seven pounds.

                This last, wheat flour, was a luxury then, and used only on extra-ordinary occasions. Rye flower was in much more common use, since farmers grew it locally during that period when they rarely grew wheat.

                                A load of wood, five schillings

                                Cheese, a shilling per pound,

                                A broom, one shilling, nine pence,

                                Tobacco, six pence a paper,

                                Muslin, four schillings a yard,

                                Brandy, one shilling, six pence a pint,

                                Spirits, five shillings a quart,

                                Gin, three shillings a quart,

                                Rum, one shilling a pint.

                Almost every customer purchased alcohol, and among other offerings were basic small necessities such as fish hooks, needles, nails, corn, glassware, rope, axes, hander kerchiefs, gloves, indigo, knitting needles, lozenges, hook and eyes, etc.

                ***********

                Although no original buildings remained there, Lower Main Street sagged under the weight of the years, an aged face set deep with lines, the traditional roadway engraved into the landscape to and from the location of the original bridge, following the trail that the Lenape Indians took to the waterside to fish, wash or launch their canoes. It was this same place at the end of Lower Main Street to which the white men first appeared centuries later in their shallow boats, seeking a path around the impenetrable heights of the falls, over the years, camping here as a matter of habit, building a shelter here to comfort them in their temporary wait before their climb up along the banks with their boats, later building a bridge here to enhance their steady advance west and northward, the Dutch fading into English, and English into Irish, then Jews, Italians, Blacks and Latinos, all part of the steady march of feet invading this place, covering it first with buildings, then with asphalt, erasing all signs of the native feet who first walked here.

                Maxwell continually felt excluded here each time he wandered down into this section of streets, confused as to what county he had stepped, the narrowness and the lack of English-speaking making him think he had stepped somehow, not through time, but through distance, one minute standing on a street corner in New Jersey's third largest city, the next minute, caught in the close throng of a street in the poor section of some city like Rio or San Salvador, the chatter of the natives making him feel like an immigrant instead of them.

                While the mom and pop stores here followed the same pattern as stores in other parts of Paterson, emerging out of the air to thrive for a while then die, these wore their own unique faces, Sale signs written in Spanish, pasted over older, more yellowed sale signs in countless layers that only an archeologist could unravel -- all signs of the former colonization utterly eradicated whereas in other neighborhoods the Irish bars and German Deli's and Italian bakeries still clung on with their own aging constituency. Here, even the old looked and sounded Latino, and any memory of another culture could be found only in the history books.

                Here, winter, summer, spring or fall, racks of clothing cluttered the sidewalks along the curb, further narrowing the street already narrowed by the press of the three storied buildings on either side. Walking from Broadway, Maxwell turned as often sideways as he did forward to avoid head-on collisions with people coming the other way, his face as often pressed into clothing or doorways from which the smell of Spanish perfume or spices emerged. Each store -- fitted with a three or four inch tinny speaker above its ragged canvas awning -- broadcast variations on Latino music, from the blaring trumpet intensive songs natural to Puerto Rico to the more subtle classically influenced guitar stains more native to places like El Salvador or Nicaragua. These sounds, like the smells, mingled and twisted into an odd, complex cacophony, not unpleasant, just all encompassing, and as he passed from the influence of one store into the influence of another, he felt as if he was traveling, not feet, blocks or even miles, but again through time and cultures in a long, head-long rush, unable to break free of the web of influences, like a fly struggling from one strand of a spider's web to another, in a slow inevitable journey to the web's center.

                Maxwell had come here from time to time since he was a child, first with his mother on long tedious adventures to buy clothing, then later, after mother had been locked away, after the house had become an unbearable dungeon, to escape. In a strange way, even now, he was escaping as he pushed his way through the jungle of hangers and coats, dresses, shirts, pants and knickers. Weekday mornings were usually calm here until the first of the buses began to deposit shoppers along Market Street and Broadway as well as the ten black stretch of upper Main Street. Then, store by store, sale by sale, people began the arduous journey down here -- the remaining white patrons filtered out at Broadway where they either turned aside or back, or bolted for the buses home at the terminal at Broadway and Spruce.

                Maxwell's mother had always been an exception to that rule, the one lone pale face floating among the Latinos like a cork in a stream of brown water, drawing odd stares from the store keepers on both side of the dividing line. Store keepers north of it warned her of the dangers of the lower city. Latino store keepers south of that line demanded to know what she wanted there when she had all those "white" shops from which to choose from. She ignored them all with her stout-hearted and practical approach to reality. She knew prices were cheaper on lower Main Street and the quality of the goods better. Few of the Latinos were willing to rip off their brothers and sisters with shoddy merchandise as willingly as their white counterparts above Broadway. So this is where Maxwell's mother came, and this is where she stayed.

                Maxwell weaved around people and racks, as if through a maze, passed the thick-lipped overly painted ladies with pink lipstick, passed the hairy-chested broad-shouldered men thick with layers of gold necklaces, men with greasy hair and heavy cologne, men with 1920s era pinstriped suits. Everywhere the smell of jalapeno and burned beans wafted down from the open windows of the apartments above the stores. Winter or summer those windows remained open, curtains flowing out like oddly patterned flags, the smell of the food mingling with the smell of the incenses and perfume, for a sensual assault that Maxwell had come to love.

                But even this could not erase the smell of Suzanne on him, a scent that had imbedded itself into his jogging suit in his effort to clean her, part of her street life rubbing off on him as he scrubbed her. He ached for a shower and a fresh set of clothing, and thought to shop for himself, too, while here, just to be rid of the stench, but railed against the idea of spending more money than he needed, on things he would have no use for later when he had all the clothing he needed at home. He would wait until he got there, then shed himself of the smell.

                Yet walking here stirred up other older and more terrible embers than Suzanne's plight. Maxwell had felt these stirring his first time here, a sense of wonder that struck him even as he clung to his mother's hand. Perhaps this was the bones of ancient Paterson poking through this thick new flesh of a Spanish-speaking city. Perhaps it was as Creeley said, the magic that seeped out of the cracked pavement from years of Lenape Indian rituals, a magic that had drawn the white man here rather than merely an attraction to the falls.

                Maxwell and Creeley had routinely argued over this point, Maxwell always taking the practical side, always pointing to the falls as an obvious source of power.

                "I agree," Creeley said, raising a forefinger the way a college professor might in making a point. "But the waters here are source to greater powers than you have in mind."

                "Even if that is true, and you could find magic here," Maxwell said, refusing to get swallowed up in the Creeley's little magic traps again, "that would be Indian Magic. But what the white man wanted here was fast moving water to run his mills."

                "Later on that's what he wanted," Creeley said. "But when the trappers first came it was the wonder of the place that brought them, that magic crooking its little finger and drawing them close."

                "What for? What would white men want with Indian magic?"

                "Magic doesn't stop at color," Creeley said, "or race, or nationality. It is a human thing, a sense that touches all people a like."

                "If so, then the white man did his best to ignore it once he got here."

                "All too sadly true," Creeley said with a heavy sigh. "As the white man has done for so many other important things on this side of the Atlantic, and on the other side, too, for that matter. They came, not knowing why, not recognizing what drew them, and when they got here, they fell the trees, built their houses and then searched out the reason for their being here. In the end, they saw the water, attached their wheels to it, and then with their mills spewing out consumer goods and pollution, they pronounced manufacturing as the reason for their coming. All the while, they ignored the real reason, and killed off those poor Indians who could have told them the truth."

                Creeley, during his long tenure here, had walked these streets in a daily search for that truth, like an archeologist digging through the ruins of a former culture to find the roots. He talked with old timers, white, black, Latino, Dutch, Jewish, Irish, Italian, El Savatorian, Cuban, consulting the soothsayers and healers of each culture for clues that would lead him deeper into the earth. Old women wearing scarfs on their heads and gold earrings in their ears, greeted him on the street or called after him as he wandered past their candle lit windows.

                "Powell! Powell!" they called, and he waved, a man growing grey in his search, the light in his eyes growing dimmer and dimmer as the years went on his search grew fruitless, and his changes of finding the one true channel to the great mystery here became more and more remote.

                But from the time Maxwell first met Creeley, those walk here had already taken on he aspect of legend, police and politicians, storekeepers and street sweepers, office clerks and prostitutes all knowing who he was, if not exactly what he searched for.

                Creeley's trips came mostly in the evening, after the rush hour traffic ceased and the shoppers had faded with the last buses back to the fringes of papers, when the old women with scarves and gold teeth lighted their candles in their windows to draw the spirits in, glass enclosed candles upon whose outer surface flickered the faces of saints each winking in the flicker of flame. From this place, Creeley transported images back to the loft, where he converted sketches to canvas or to manuscript, documenting each and every change he encountered, the master plan of which he had long ago set down in the more permanent canvas of his mind.

                Day by day, he examined his visual and handwritten notes, and grew more grey over them, taking to talking to himself, muttering his disappointments. Day by day, the images of Lower Main Street grew more and more twisted, changing from the nearly photographic realistic of his early works to impressionist, pointillistic visions, then finally to globs and blots of color, some floating amoeba-like in images a micro-biologist might find when staring into a microscope, more often, these became blocks of reds or greens, or blues, shaded at the edges, yet so geometrical they had ceased to resemble humans at all.

                These last had startled Maxwell the most, for they reminded him of a repeated dream he had suffered with as a child, where the people in his life turned into geometric shapes, uncles into triangles, aunts into squares, all looming over him, their gigantic shadows threatening to crush him with their overwhelming weight. The only salvation he had in this dream was the small, round gumball dispenser. He would put a penny in it and out rolled balls of gum, red and green and blue and white, bouncing over the pale and foreign landscape like escaping prisoners.

                Creeley's paintings and the dream they recalled haunted Maxwell as he walked among the buildings and people, as if both dream and painting had managed to suddenly become real, both capturing an important aspect of this place that mere mortal eyesight could not see, the paintings stripping away the garnishes of clothing and sale signs to the root of the place, finding not the magic for which Creeley so desperately search, but geometric and meaningless shapes, and Maxwell, after having the pattern pointed out to him by those paintings, unable to see them as anything else.

                Perhaps it was something as simple as the narrow streets and the way the upper stories of the buildings seemed to hang out over the street, helping to blot out sunlight, leaving the place in a haze of car fumes and cooking smoke, and perfume -- the lack of sky keeping the air trapped here, multiplying the scent of the people and the spices, especially on overly warm days, stewing it into a stronger even more volatile broth which drenched its people, and those like Maxwell or Creeley who came here often.

                Then, Maxwell reached the river, a section of the river that twisted away from the foot of the falls through the channels where many of the mills rested on its shore (now brick ruins in which the junkies slept and fires started). The riverbed widened here, and the water slowed, and the banks lowered to a more reasonable height, banks upon which houses had been build, backs up to the edge with overhanging wooden porches as rickety and unusable as if they were pieces of the original old Passaic Hotel, crumbling over time. Laundry hung from the rails. Old men stood staring out over the water, sucking on cigarettes, smoke mingling with their steaming breath to leave small clouds around their faces.

                Here, on this side, stood Rosey's Bar and Grill, as tattered and crumbling a building as in any part of this town, its red sided box faded and cracked, its signs pealing and its steps broken. At one time, the small dock -- now only posts at its rear -- served as a recreation center for couples seeking to ride out onto the water, or fishermen intent on an all day excursion down to the Garfield shallows. Maxwell could remember the last of these boats from when he was a kid, rotting, disused at the pier with a few die-hard fishermen clinging to the warped grey board of the pier in an effort to draw anything more than old boots from the polluted water. But now, twenty odd years later, even the fishermen had surrendered, and the bar which had once served them as center for their tale-telling and a place to get a warm meal, became like the pier, a lone holdout for the dying white man's hobby here in the heart of Paterson, old white men, who remembered better days, cling into the its bar stools and lingered over warming bottles of beer. Now, the only tales told here had been repeated so often and for so long, they had taken on more the aspect of myth than memory, with names like Sam Patch, James Ryan, Archie McKee, George Dobbs, Harvie Leslie and others bandied about, with only the old men knowing exactly who they were and what they did and when they had been last seen in these parts.

                Ruined and abandoned store fronts separated the tavern from the rest of the street, as did a cobblestone road with the big red Rosie's as a barrier to traffic plunging down Lower Main Street towards the River. Many of the cowboy drunks from Wayne found themselves lost and confused when they rushed down here on weekends-- finding Rosey's building rather than the bridge across -- already peeved about the fact that the go-go girls in other bars had not taken up their offer for a blow job or a visit upstairs to bed. The side of Rosey's had been struck numerous times over the years. Creeley spoke of a time when one pickup truck crashed right through the wall, emerging through the huge mirror that had once filled the wall behind the bar.

                "Many a man got cured of alcohol that night," Creeley recalled with a deep laugh, a laugh he usually reserved from some ironic discovery he made during his search for the mystical past.

                After numerous assaults, the bar owner -- Rosey -- installed a guard rail along the crumbling sidewalk, and even this later bore the brunt of the impacts until the city finally closed off most of Lower Main Street to traffic, in the late 1970s.

                This was not a move made to save Rosey's but part of an effort to compete with the increasing influence of Willowbrook and Wayne Hills malls, which was slowly stealing business away from the traditional hub of business downtown. The city fathers mistakenly believed they could keep people doing business here if they created a mall-like atmosphere, the city fathers hoping Sterns would stay and Macy's would come. In breathless anticipation, they even held an official ground breaking, and waited for the rich house wives from Wayne to replace their whoring cowboy husbands in the rush down the hill, only to be disappointed when it was the cowboys seeking love-making that continued instead.

                Maxwell had only been inside Rosey's once, and then in search of Creeley when Maxwell had lost his keys to the loft and needed the old man to let him back in. Creeley had visited the place as part of his daily tour, listening to the old men tell their tales. Creeley hoped to catch some clues in the endless variety of names, places and details.

                "How can you stand it?" Maxwell asked Creeley once. "They repeat the same stories over and over."

                "Very true," Creeley said with a gleam in his eyes. "But never twice the same way."

                The door to the building protruded from the east side, a small vestibule with a peaked roof looking much like an early 19th century outhouse. Men stomped the mud and snow off their boots here, then pushed through another door into the bar itself. Along the left, north wall men lined the stools to the bar, backs bent, heads down, only the most curious and still sober glancing up to see who had just come in. A dilapidated pool table stood at the far or west end, in a kind of alcove suggested that the building had originally been a barn and that side the main doorway. A few square tables made of splintering wood filled in the empty space between the bar and the south wall. There might have been room for a dance floor if the tables had been set aside. Yet one walk across the bare wooden planks explained why no one bothered. On a busy Friday or Saturday night, the floor seemed to bend down, creaking and groaning like a masted ship in a gale -- each step threatening to be the one to send the floor and building into ruin.

                Maxwell did not go in this time, through from the half dozen pickup trucks parked in the gravel lot along the east side, he knew nothing had changed inside, and he wondered if any of the aging drunks missed Creeley half as much as Maxwell did.

                A small seed store -- just up Water Street from the bar and slightly divorced from the Latino quarter of huddled buildings -- struck Maxwell with greater pangs of loneliness, since Creeley had always used this place the way other intellectuals used book stores or libraries, going in daily to speak with the owner about the latest issue of flower or vegetable seeds, pondering over seed catalogues with the diligence of researchers and the respect of priests for biblical texts. From this place, Creeley continually returned with unmarked packets out of which he removed a variety of samples at night.

                With a lone light hanging over his table, Creeley sat with a jeweler's eye glass and tweezers, separating the varieties, examining each with the utter satisfaction.

                Maxwell stopped before the door of what amounted to a shack. The shutters had been drawn across it glassless windows. While the place had always appeared in disrepair, the wood planks that served as walls had gaps through which he could insert his fingers, and splinters as larges as knives, the place now looked abandoned. The wood had grown greyer, lacking any paint or white wash. On rainy days, water seeped through these walls unimpeded, and down through the rusty seams of the tin-sheeted roof. Half the day on these occasions, the old man spent shifting sheets of plastic to protect his stock or moving to empty buckets that had brown too full.

                Now, a small cardboard sign hung from the door, yellowed slightly with rust marks flowing down from its staples, yet clearly put up since the last time Maxwell had wandered this way. Its message was almost a plea for help, printed in letters large enough that a three year old might have understood them: FOR SALE.

                This startled Maxwell. This had been an institution of a different sort here in Paterson, a holy place upon which Maxwell  had come to rely in Creeley's absence. Unlike Rosey's bar or the dead plants hanging beneath the skylight in the loft, this place had sparked more hopeful memories in Maxwell, and framed his final vision of Creeley, not as a bitter defeated man making a retreat from Paterson (AKA George Washington, 200 years earlier) but as a kind of Johnny Appleseed moving on after his work had finished, to retire to a lake side retreat where his plants could flourish in the ground rather than clay and plastic pots, where he could -- if he wished -- fill up his yard and house with overflowing green without fear of limited sunlight or an overabundance of pollution.

                Yet seeing this shop closed, further destroyed that vision, and left Creeley's retreat cluttered with ruin: plants and trees vanishing as thoroughly as the south had under General Sherman during the American Civil War. Perhaps Creeley had moved on to better pastures, but behind him, Maxwell stood alone in those ruins with all the remaining institutions of hope collapsing around him.

                The sign gave no reason for the closing. The old man, who ran the shop, could have died or gone broke. He might have come to miss Creeley as much as Maxwell did, or he might even have succumbed to the greedy slumlords who wanted to use this space to house the thousands of immigrants that came to Paterson each year or to the speculating developers who bought land wholesale here on the off chance Paterson might someday turn itself around and become a place worth building in. Some believed Paterson would change once the off ramp from Route 80 was complete and the Federal Building went up, causing a sweeping change to occur not only downtown, but here and elsewhere on the boundaries, transforming these ragged blocks into gold, with bulldozers to push buildings and people out of progress' way.

                More likely, Maxwell thought, the old man simply saw the direction Paterson was headed in, as Creeley had, and moved onto his own nirvana, leaving the city to its own fate.

                Then, Maxwell turned back, moving towards downtown again along the other side of Lower Main Street, the threads of the past evaporating as he came back to the present and his present needs. People appeared, shoulder to shoulder along the narrow street, stopping to gawk at the wares, fingering the fabrics, full daylight bringing them out the way darkness brought out the bums, their voices filling the space with yammering and laughter.

                Half way up the block, men and women crowed around a Spanish deli's door, jostling each other as they wanted for the slow Latino clerk to work through each order. Creeley used to buy his coffee here, a strong branch of Puerto Rican blend that stunk up the loft each morning and left a thick, oily taste after a single sip.

                Maxwell almost stopped to buy some, but resisted the urge. Buying coffee he didn't need would not bring back Creeley, or fill the hole left by the old man's leaving. Maxwell hurried on, aware that he had wasted a lot of time already, and imagined Jack squawking at Suzanne, or cursing him in a panic over the possible arrival of Mr. Harrison. Still, Maxwell could not for himself to move faster, as if caught in a sleepy spiel, one that cast him into a haze of memory each time he crossed over the boundary into this place.

                Creeley would have defined it as an aspect of this place's overall magic, a clue to those oriental Native American Indian spirits for which the old man had searched for so long.

                "You can feel it," Creeley told Maxwell after one walk or another. "It was very strong today."

                This feeling defined Creeley's day the way weather did for other people, and after any morning in which "the vibes were strong", Maxwell caught the sharp tangy scent of incense rising from Creeley's corner of the loft, and heard the old man's thick voice chanting out of some sacred text in hopes of drawing these spirits closer. Only God knew where Creeley had acquired the texts, probably from some dark shop with some gnarled dealer. Creeley dealt constantly with some creepy characters, some of whom even came to the downstairs door of the loft from time to time, strange men who rarely stepped out of the shadow of the furniture store when asking for the old man.

                In full daylight and among the yakking Latino women, these characters did not appear, and the haze that had overcome Maxwell down by the seed shop eventually evaporated as he plunged back into the world of clothing racks and bartering sales people, perfume, cologne, cigarette smoke and body odor. Latino men shouted over each other to barging down the prices of goods. Many of the products came here as factory seconds, though a good deal of the stuff was too ethnic in color and design for any local factory to lay claim to. Maxwell recognized none of the labels, but knew that at least some of these came from the sweat shops along the river, the grey-doors of unmarked buildings into which people mysterious went each morning and exited each night, out front of which old women sorted through piles of discarded, odd-angled fabric each Friday. Sometimes on sunny summer days when the heat forced managers to open the windows, Maxwell could look in or hear the rattle and clack of the looms as he jogged by,, with grim and determined black and Latino faces leaning over the machines, their frustration written out on their faces in wrinkles. Each time Maxwell saw or heard them, he realized how little Paterson had changed down deep from the past, trading the huge brick silk mills of open exploitation for small cottage-style factories hidden among the more legitimate business. And each time, he wondered, which aspect of the glorious past the city fathers had in mind when they sought to revive the city.

                Maxwell paused in front of one of the shops that seemed most likely to have what he wanted, a narrow store front wedged between fresh vegetables and housewares. Unlike many of the other stores up and down the street, the goods here seemed plainer and less gawdy, with a few dresses and skirts in its window that actually appealed to Maxwell's simple taste. Even then, the Latino extravagance showed in some of the smaller items, frilly under garments and low cut blouses. Many of the Latino women passed by without noticing the store and those who did go in, had the practical, even blunt expressions of factory women. A few young girls -- firmly in the grip of matron mothers glanced at Maxwell as they passed him.

                Maxwell lingered at the doorway among the racks of skirts, now reluctant to proceed with his plan, wondering if perhaps he should have brought Suzanne to measure the garments against. He didn't trust his memory, something that seemed to betray him as much as it reflected his history with her. He shifted to one side only to find a hand grabbing at his arm through the racks of clothing, a hand with pointed red nails and numerous gold and silver multi-stoned rings. It gripped him and held him as the arm appeared, then the slightly portly shape of a woman, more gypsy than Latino, though clearly as Spanish in origin as her customers.

                "You want something, mister?" she asked with a grin intended as seductive, a gold tooth glinting from a mouthful of otherwise unmarred teeth. She had popped up between the blouses and skirts the way one of Creeley's spirits might have, her thick black hair poking out from under a kerchief decorated with pink roses and lime green leaves. She smelled of incense and perfume, coffee and cigarette, which made Maxwell a little dizzy.

                "You speak good English?" Maxwell asked, reluctant to test his Spanish in the matter of buying clothing. He might spend much more time trying to translate than needed and come away with garments Suzanne could never wear.

                The woman, however, shook her head. "English, no good," she said.

                It made sense. Down here, few had opportunity to practice such a skill, where all but the cops and the social workers spoke some variety of Spanish.

                Maxwell sighed, and then dredged up recollections of college Spanish, the kind of classical stuff these people frowned over whenever he attempted it in the past, that Castilian dialect acceptable in Europe which colleges and high schools could teach with clear conscience, but did not reflect very much what went on in the Latino world.

                He tested a few phrases on the woman, but her face remained blank, the eyes squinting ever so slightly as if she saw something on his nose and struggled to determine what it was.

                "No comprende," she said when Maxwell finished, and he sagged a little, already too weary to engage in a long process by hand gestures and grunts.

                Yet what other options did he have? He could look over the street and find someone who spoke both English and Spanish well enough to act as a go-between, and yet come up with no one. After a moment, he sighed again, then motioned towards the skirts.

                "I need some women's clothing," he said, in the same slow English that tourists used when traveling to foreign countries, each believing that if spoken slowly enough and loudly enough the listener would understand, as if they believed themselves talking to children, not adults.

                The woman continued to frown, her dark gaze flickering from the garment to Maxwell's face and back again, seemingly unable to make a connection. Then, a growing horror came across her face and she shook her head sharply.

                "No good clothes for men," she said and jabbed her ring-encrusted finger in the direction of a smaller display where gaudy silk shirt and striped bell-bottom pants made up the men's section.

                "But I don't want those, I want these," Maxwell growled, too tired after his dealings with Suzanne for an extended argument. Only now did he realized his mistake by coming here, and what these people would think by having him -- a man -- buying such things. He would have been better shopping in the more traditional shopping district, where the store owners knew a bit more English and he could have explained better the reasons behind his purchase.

                This woman, however, ceased to direct him towards the men's wear, and her expression changed from helpful and annoyed to suspicious. Paterson had a fair-sized population of transvestites, who wandered lower Market Street at night like wraiths. The blacks endured them, the whites hurled beer bottles at them, but the Latinos -- who seemed to take their existence as a person affront -- often cornered the overdressed figures and beat them up. On most Friday nights, St. Joseph's Hospital pulled in women’s battered bodies only to discovered them to be men.

                "You go," the woman said, strong fingers pinching Maxwell's arm as she propelled him towards the door.

                "No, no, you don't understand," Maxwell protested. "The clothing isn't for me. It's for a friend, a female friend."

                Again, the woman stared, attempting a translation from his expression, shaking her head from side to side with the same slow sense of doubt. Maxwell dredged up a few more words from his college Spanish and pieced them together into a coherent, if not grammatically correct phrase. The woman continued to study him, seemingly unconvinced, though less insistent about his leaving. Maxwell fumbled the cash from his pocket, and this seemed to win the woman over.

                "You come," she said and led him on a tour of the store, through the crowded, shoulder to shoulder racks of female garments. Most of it proved far too flaunting, low shouldered, deep necked, things designed for Friday night out of the town. These were the kind of things Maxwell saw routinely on his walks through town, young women standing outside smokey bars, giggling and flirting with equally exaggeratedly dressed men, all with outrageous color combinations designed to draw attention. Maxwell wanted simple fair, plain cloths in which Suzanne would become invisible, just one more ordinary soul among the masses who happened to stop in on the Greasy Spoon for a meal.

                It took him time to get this message across to the woman, and strangely, when the woman finally got it, she looked relieved. Transvestites tended to prefer the gawdy wear, and after a short further search, the woman produced a plain white dress, something that might have served a nurse, though far less starched.

                Gesturing wit his hands, Maxwell managed to convey the size, which further settled the woman's agitation. The dress he indicated was clearly too small to fit Maxwell, though now, Maxwell's level of discomfort rose as he tried to describe the less obvious garments. While he could clearly remember the texture and firmness of Suzane's breasts, he could only vaguely translated this into a bra size, and gave up with a guess after he examined several, as he did for the rest of the under garments, selecting three of each along with three sets of socks, two skirts, two blouses, and two sets of tennis sneakers. He guessed large on these last, believing she could easily pad the extra space with extra socks, rather than guessing too small and trying to have her squeeze her feet into them.

                Then, with the shopping finished, Maxwell allowed the woman to pack it all up in two shopping bags, bags recycled from the now defunct Grants store that had once been a main stay of the downtown shopping district.

                The woman wrote the cost on a piece of register tape. The amount was surprisingly low and he grinned as he counted out the bills, putting each into the palm of her hand. Finally, he took up his purchases and plunged back out into the busy street, aware of the woman's stare at his back. But even that feeling faded, and he caught sight of the time from a clock in the window of a deli, the steamed glass bloating the numbers a little, and yet did not make him feel any less guilty about how much time he had wasted. But at least Suzzane would be dressed like a human being, something less Maxwell would have to think about tonight when he had to meet Patty at a club called "The Palace."

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