There was a light rain going on, and I felt like getting down on my knees and saying Thank You to the sky. Not that the rain put out this particular fire, but, you know, without the occasional drizzles we had all that day keeping the city damp, there wouldn’t have been much of New York left.
Right then, I had no idea that what was going on was limited to New York City. I remember wondering, as I took shelter in a hallway across the street, if all this was some kind of sneak enemy attack. And I wasn’t the only one thinking that, as I found out later. I mean the nation-wide alert, and the hot line, and Moscow frantically trying to get in touch with its delegate at the U.N. I just read about the treaty the Russian delegate signed that day with the delegates from Paraguay and Upper Volta. No wonder the Security Council had to declare everything that happened at the U.N. in those twenty-four hours null and void!
When the rain stopped, I began to work my way north again. There was another crowd in front of a big Macy’s window on 34th Street near Sixth Avenue. A half-dressed guy and a naked girl were on a couch—the window display was advertising furniture that week—and they were making it.
I stood in the middle of all those trance-like stares and I just couldn’t pull myself away. A man next to me with a good leather briefcase kept murmuring, “Beautiful, beautiful. A pair of lemon-green snowflakes.” Then the Herald Square clock, the one where those two statues with hammers bang away at a great big bell, that clock began to sound off the strokes of twelve noon. I shook myself and pushed out of the crowd. The guy and the girl were still making it.
A woman on the edge of the crowd, a very pleasant, gray-haired women in a black dress, was going from person to person and taking their money away. She’d take wallets away from the men and little money purses out of the women’s pocketbooks, and she’d drop them in a large paper shopping bag. If anyone made the least sign of annoyance while she robbed him, she’d leave him alone and go on to the next one. The shopping bag was hanging kind of heavy.