The Memory of Running

by Ron McLarty

  “That’s because you’re a dog, too,” Bethany said seriously. “You’re a runner, too, Hook. Don’t stop, okay? Don’t stop or you’ll be a fat-ass.”

  I ignored her. “I like it when Malzone runs.”

  “I love it when you run!” Norma screamed, trying to grab me. I kept pushing her hands away.

  “The animal doctor said that for a while Malzone will think something about it. He’ll have a memory of running or something, and after a while he’ll forget about the girl dogs and be fat and happy.”

  “He say ‘happy’?”

  “Wanna play with puppets, Smithy?” Norma screamed.

  I got up and started to walk out of the room. “Get away, Norma, little jerk.”

  We all picked up Malzone the next day. Mom boiled some chicken legs with rice, which was his absolute favorite food. We had some codfish. We were all together—even Norma screamed over for dessert—and before I had to go to bed, Bethany sang her choir solo from the Seven Last Words. It was purely wonderful, and she rubbed Malzone’s belly as she sang.

  19

  Route 1 merges over a bridge just outside New Haven, then heads off on its own again. The walk space is not exactly a sidewalk on this 195 overpass, so I couldn’t drive it with the cars shooting by. I walked, pushing my Raleigh next to me. It was late afternoon, and I was pretty tired. See, I made one of those traveling miscalculations that people make when they lose a certain sense of time. I should have stopped earlier, at one of the shore exits, where I might have been able to have a swim and a good sleep, but now I’d have to wait until I got outside the city of New Haven, and I was getting tired.

  After I had crossed the New Haven Harbor, I lifted my bike off the main road, onto a grassy slope, and walked it down to the service road. About a hundred yards ahead of me was the New Haven train station. I pushed through the high, ornate doors and walked in. Train stations are amazing. Uncle Count is a train-station buff. Not a train buff, but a station man. It’s his theory that when the big stations were built in Boston, Providence, and New York, people must have thought trains would always be the end-all and be-all of travel. Now they seem like museums with newspaper stands, but they are still amazing, with paintings on the ceilings and statues cut into the high walls.

  I sat on a long wooden bench that looked exactly like the pews in our church and ate the last of Father Benny’s fruit. Then I bought a tuna sandwich at the snack counter and ate that, too. It was 5:40. I didn’t think it was anywhere near 5:00. On the opposite wall, the huge information board flipped with each arrival and departure. The next train to New York was at 8:20, and when I bought my ticket, I was instantly sorry I hadn’t asked Norma to send some money. The ticket was pretty expensive, and it left me with seventy cents. But my stomach was full of fruit and tuna, and that wasn’t too bad a way to wait for my train.

  We came into the big Penn Station at 11:00 on the nose. It would have been earlier, but there was some track work going on around Stamford.

  I sat on another long, pewlike bench in the New York station and slept until a policeman slammed his nightstick next to me.

  I awoke with a start, and my fat heart raced a minute. I watched the young officer walk away, every now and then slapping his nightstick onto the oak benches. The enormous waiting area was filled with exhausted men and women in different stages of sleep. The ones that obviously could get the best rest were the people who’d figured out how to sleep sitting, with their eyes open. I have tried this, but it’s a skill I don’t have and can’t seem to learn. I smelled old pee and sweat. In that big room was sorrow, too. An old woman, who might not have been old at all, talked constantly to something that wasn’t there. I have heard that talk. I used to ask my pop if Bethany saw it clear, whatever it was. By then my pop couldn’t talk about the voice and didn’t. I watched the woman closely, and she turned her head and caught me looking. She didn’t stop talking, but she gave me the finger. I smiled like a stupe. Why do I do that?

  I sat until the sun came up. Then I got an apple juice out of a machine, went to the dirty toilet, and walked my Raleigh up to Seventh Avenue. It was five-fifteen in the morning, and I had ten cents in my pocket.

  “Ten cents,” I said out loud, under the Madison Square Garden sign.

  “What?”

  I turned around.

  “You say something?” a young black coffee vendor asked.

  “No. I mean, I just said ten cents.”

  “What ten cents?”

  I laughed. “That’s all I got.”

  “Good enough. Cream and sugar?” he said, businesslike.

  “Uh . . . yes . . . please.”

  I gave him my dime and drank the wonderful coffee. By the time I had finished, the street was alive. And the people gave off the same feelings I got when Mrs. Fox took our fourth-grade class to the Narragansett Electric Company. We were studying turbines that made the electricity. This is what I remember. A feeling of energy, of something unbelievably powerful and electric. This is the same feeling I got from the New Yorkers on the street on an early Monday morning. I got onto my bike and pedaled with the traffic.

  It was a nervous ride from Pennsylvania Station at Thirty-fourth Street. Everybody screamed at me or honked at me or gave me the finger. Pedestrians, too. I was so frazzled by the time I reached Fourteenth Street that I had forgotten being embarrassed about my fat ass and huge belly. When our family came to New York, we went to Radio City and Mom made us stroll Fifth Avenue. That was New York to me. It was cleaner then. Nobody gave us the finger.

  “Where’s Fifth Avenue?” I said to a group of kids. They pointed east.

  I followed the flow of Fifth Avenue a few blocks and came to a white arch with a crumbling sculpture of George Washington. Behind him was Washington Square Park. In Rhode Island, parks are used occasionally. That’s it. It would not be an overstatement to say our parks are not used that much. New York parks are used. They are crammed. They are the magnets, I guess, for interludes. Does that sound right? I sat on a bench facing an empty fountain. Now, this is not by any means a complete list, but in five minutes I saw roller skaters, baby carriages, bikes, skateboards, pogo sticks, stilt walkers, Indians from America in full headdress, Indians from India in full turbans, beautiful girls with large breasts, a group of Spanish kids kicking a soccer ball in a circle, men holding hands with other men, an old man with a ponytail in a black leather jacket that said SPEED on the back, a kid with blond hair who had to be seven feet tall, and, directly in front of me, on her hands and knees, a woman who looked like a hag in one of my nightmares.

  She was nearly bald, except for a few wisps of long white hair, and the top of her head was shiny with sweat. She was wearing a pair of baggy overalls, torn and covered with so much paint I couldn’t see the denim. She had drawn a circle of blue chalk on the pavement and on the inside had drawn a beautiful blue-and-gold bird. Light—or I guess it was supposed to be light—shot off the head of the bird in silver and orange and red. She worked fast, grunting and groaning, and when the light was wrong off the bird, she would erase the dusty chalk with her bare hands.

  “Bad, bad . . . good . . . good,” she said.

  I leaned forward on my bench. She was putting clouds under and around her shiny bird.

  “Art, fat boy. Art. Art. Art,” she grunted, not looking up at me. Her hands moved quickly over her sky and through her clouds.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, and I meant it.

  “Notes, that’s all. Want to remember it. Want to put it in my noggin. Watch this, fat boy.”

  She reached across the top of her circle and arced a purple piece of chalk just outside the blue arc.

  “That’s all, fat boy, that’s how you remember. Notes.”

  She struggled, grunting to her feet, and stood looking down at the bird and the sky.

  “I’m eighty-nine,” she said, still staring down, “and that bird is always here. There. Up there. That’s a bird, and now he’s down here, too.”

 
; “It’s very beautiful,” I said again, and, since the purple over the blue, I meant it even more.

  After a while she stooped down and dropped the bits of chalk into a canvas sack, then walked to my bench and sat. She was quiet and looked even older sitting next to me, but her eyes lived hard in her head and flew across the park.

  “Look,” she said, nudging me, “other side of the fountain. Venelli. Venelli the fraud. He sells for hundreds of thousands, and Venelli is a fraud. Maybe that’s not Venelli. Wait. No. No, that’s not Venelli, but explain this. Paintings of squirrels? Still life with the carcass of a poor squirrel, and Venelli sells it for hundreds of thousands? That is the university painter in a nutshell. I went to Art Students League. Pay what you can, they told me. They were happy to have me. But they taught the tension of preparation. The notes. There. I won’t forget my bird. He’s there. I won’t forget. O’Keeffe was there, too. Of course, that’s poster painting.”

  A bunch of kids with book bags walked by, looking at the picture as they went. They liked it, I could tell.

  “That’s the real McCoy, children!” she yelled after them. “That’s Omega there. That’s God’s work.”

  She went quiet again, and we both looked at the bird. When I glanced over at her, she was staring at me.

  “Art, fat boy.”

  “Beautiful.”

  “People? I don’t use them in my notes or my canvas. And when I had just the cardboard, and when I had just the . . . what? Plywood, I don’t use them.”

  A man on those single-line roller skates rolled by. He was wearing a Roman soldier uniform. Sword, too. Nobody seemed to notice him.

  “My father would say, ‘Art and light, art and light, that’s all you ever talk about.’ But I knew a secret. People suck the light, they don’t give it off. I could get more glow from a tree. Big trees. Chestnuts? Oaks? Oh, yes, fat boy, big oaks, too. I come down from Pennsylvania. Nineteen twenty-seven. My father had hands like this. Big hands, and he would kiss the girls, my father, but even he sucked the light. All people, really. In 1927 I thought Peter Ogilvy might not suck it, but he did, later he did.”

  A breeze ruffled the leaves and it felt good and comfortable. Pigeons moved together from one end of the park to the other. I realized I wasn’t aching very much. I was relaxed and rested, but I still saw Bethany in her hard pose, under the arch. She wore blue like the chalk, and the breeze shimmied her loose dress. A brother sees a sister, then—without the lagers, the pilsner, the occasional pale ale.

  “Turned out he loved men and women, which is all right and modern, but, dear God, fat boy, I was twenty-two and in love and had defied my father. There was no going back on that. Running to the big city with the poet Peter Ogilvy. So lovely, lovely, lovely. We made love at night on the train. On the train.”

  She laughed and coughed and grunted. She slapped her hand against the bench.

  “Making love into New York City. I just climbed right over him. Then we were on Union Square, and it wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t artistic, and the damn windows were always dirty, and Peter’s father gave up on him and stopped the money, and he would cry like a girl. Peter Ogilvy would sob, would weep!

  “ ‘I can’t write,’ he’d cry. And I would cry, too, and I would say, ‘Light, I have to have light. The windows are dirty. I need light to paint.’ Then one day Peter Ogilvy comes home, and I think I had done a crow, a blue-black crow that had a face like tar, and I was so happy with it, and he has this young man with him. Did I know him? I’m not sure. ‘Here she is,’ he says to this other man. I stand covered with paint, gesso. ‘Here she is.’ I go to kiss him hello, but he turns away. ‘Here is this artist,’ he says. ‘Here she is. She can’t find light in people.’ They are both drunk, and I see it, and Peter tells me he is a bad poet. I remember him saying over and over, ‘I’m a bad poet. I’m a bad poet.’ Then he tells me I don’t need him and he is going to fuck this other man. I can’t believe what he said. So I asked him what he said. He said it again. Dear Peter Ogilvy. I can still hear them in that room while I grabbed all of my paints.”

  I listened, and I watched my sister float between the columns of the arch.

  “On the street. Rain. Cold. Was it April? Above me, my poet and another. I hold my brushes like this. In my fists. My sack of paints and thinners. On the street, in the rain, without love. That! That place, fat boy, is where you must go before you can think of the fact of Art. I’m eighty-nine, and a fuck is not as good as a bird on a branch or a wagon a child has pulled in the afternoon. Light. Light.”

  She nudged me.

  “Is that Foreman by the maple? Could it be that fraud? He sells and sells. They swoon at the galleries in the warehouses. It’s shit. Always children in some future pastel. Is that him? Fraud. I’m tired now.”

  The old woman nudged me again. “What’s this?”

  “My Raleigh.”

  She looked hard. My maroon bike. I looked back to the Washington Arch, and Bethany was not there.

  “I did a series of six sets of bicycles. Nineteen fifty-two. Flyers and Schwinns. Over there. Across by the college. There were bicycle racks. And no chains. There are chains now that cover the world, but without freedom is there a world to paint? Now? I did the bicycles with Joan Dupree. She worked faster than I did and without the color, but her quick look, that quick-look, I liked the immediacy of it. But . . . I could never love a woman. Sunfeld. That was a man. A lover. An artist who, dear God, made a handsome living. Sunfeld was immediate, contemporary. He knew what they wanted, and he gave them what they wanted. I was thirty and forty and ripe as a plum in the sun. And Sunfeld said that. He would hold these breasts, and he would kiss them, and then he would give them the pastels of children in the park, and he would paint their pets, and he simply sold his art until his art sold him. Killed himself, this happy lover, just here in the head. Bang. And there was the other woman of course, the wife, and there I was in the rain, the wet cement, my brushes all in my little fist. Again.”

  A small girl in a wheelchair passed us. She was alone, and she labored at the big wheels.

  “Norma,” I said out loud.

  “There was Douglas Owsley,” she said, “and there was Chris Lamb, and there was Robert Clavert, and there was that Argentinean who hit me. They were the real item. Not like, over there, by the men’s room. Is that Nigel Tranter? I thought he was dead. He would be at least a hundred twenty-five. But he was not the real item. He was a fraud. Once you do a circus elephant, you can put all the Latin names in your title, but it remains circus posters. You’re a fraud, Tranter.”

  I watched the little girl in the wheelchair. Then looked over at my old hag.

  “I ought to call my friend Norma.”

  “I ought to be back at my studio, fat boy. The men across the hall keep my windows clean. Birds and clouds. Look at my notes. It’s not a struggle now. It was a struggle before, and the struggle was subject. Now I know it’s the birds, because they’re the closest to light. It whams, it just whams off them. Once I painted a silver place setting by the window in the sun while Larry Monsanto kissed my naked bottom. Nineteen thirty or 1940. It was a different kind of light.”

  She grunted to her feet and pulled her sack of chalk over her shoulder. She walked around her bird, and off.

  “That’s the real McCoy, fat boy. That’s Omega there. That’s God’s work.”

  The Washington Square Park breeze is like a wheel. I mean, one tree will shake its leaves in the wind and stop, and another one will shake. One at a time. I called Norma from the edge of the park.

  “Yes?”

  “Norma?”

  “Smithy?”

  “I watched an old woman draw a circle on the pavement, a blue circle, and then draw this perfect bird with colors and light all shooting off it.” I felt silly saying that. Norma couldn’t see the bird, and I stopped before I explained about notes that wash away in the rain. But it felt good saying something that somehow seemed important to me. She waited until she was sure
I was finished with the bird.

  “Where are you, Smithy?”

  “I’m in New York City. I’m at the Washington Square Park.”

  “That’s where the hippies used to be.”

  “There’s still some, only they look older. I don’t have any money. I was wondering, what do you think is the best way for me to get some money?”

  “I can send it.”

  “But what’s the best way?”

  “Will you call me back in ten minutes? I can call my bank.”

  “I have money in my bank. I mean, I can pay you back.”

  “Oh, Smithy.” I could hear her again as if she had to cover the phone with her hand so I wouldn’t hear her cry. Me. All disgusting on the other end of the phone, calling collect. She came back on. “Ten minutes,” she said, hanging up.

  Ten minutes later I called her back.

  “Smithy? Okay. I called my banker. Find a Chemical Bank, tell them you’re having money wired from the Old Stone Bank in Providence.”

  “Chemical?”

  “Chemical.”

  She had energy and defiance, even in her voice. I could see her sitting tall. I could imagine all of her work spread out in front of her.

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “Oh, Smithy. Oh . . .” She sounded like she might cover the phone again, but she didn’t. “I’m looking at a picture. I’m holding Bethany’s hand, and I’m grabbing at your sleeve, and Pop is in his Socony baseball uniform. I remember Mom taking the picture. I just love . . . I just get happy seeing this picture.”

  “I . . . see Bethany sometimes, Norma. I see her really clearly and when I do, she’s dancing or she’s in a pose. Do you think it’s all right for me to see her?”

  I felt her in Rhode Island. I felt how fierce she could be when she wanted to.

  “I think it’s perfect,” she said.

  “Well . . .” I said after a bit.

  “I suppose . . .” she said, and her voice drifted off into the park.

  We held the phone, I guess, Norma and I. We held each other quietly to our ears.