by Alice Nelson
Marina bent down and picked up the little boy, kissing his hot cheek as he pressed his face into her shoulder. Constance slowly approached them. There was never any greeting from her except a shy ducking of her head that Marina had come to realise was the girl’s way of saying hello. How precarious this all was, Marina thought as she shifted Gabriel in her arms. For the past few weeks Constance had brought her letters and notices, and she had accompanied her to appointments and clinic visits, tried to decipher things for her. Today was a visit to the doctor. Constance needed her help, and yet every hour she spent with the girl felt to Marina as though it might be the last one. She might tie her child to her back and glide out of Marina’s life as abruptly as she had stepped into it.
They walked together towards the subway, Gabriel still in Marina’s arms. She bent down to put him on his feet but he fought her, kicking his legs and crying out frantically, so she gave in and carried him on her hip. Constance ignored them, trailing a few steps behind. Jacob thought that all of this, her entanglement with the girl and the child, was ill-advised. It was a dangerously encumbering role that she was playing, he had told her. With Constance, but especially with the little boy.
Gabriel twisted his legs tightly around her waist as they walked. How swiftly the smell of him had become familiar to her; his clean, soapy warmth. She knew that Jacob was right to be concerned. The risk of harm. She should not let the child become attached to her. He was not hers. But every time she saw him her caution vanished. Gabriel would only feel it as a cruelty if she were to try now to put distance between them, she reasoned. Another baffling rejection. Better that he knew the feeling of love, even if it turned out only to be fleeting.
In the waiting room at the hospital a nurse gave Gabriel a picture book. He held it tentatively in his hands. It struck Marina that the child might never have seen a book. Constance would not read to him. Gabriel slipped down from his chair and came to stand by Marina, leaning against her legs and resting his arm on her thigh. She opened the book and started to read the story, pointing to the words as she spoke them. Gabriel stared up at her, open-mouthed. So much about the world seemed to bemuse him.
The only child Marina had ever read to was Ben. Always with him there had been the sense that he was somewhere ahead of her. That he understood more of the story than she did. Not necessarily the words, but something at its core. She and Ben still shared books, passing novels between them. It was another sign of hope, Marina felt, that he had never abandoned his love of reading.
The doctor called them in at last. He was a mild Indian man, a lilt to his voice. He came from Madurai in the south, he had told Marina at their last visit. A town of temples. ‘We have too many gods and too many people in India,’ he said to her. He had a gentle way with Gabriel; there was never anything brusque or businesslike about him. ‘Hello again, little man,’ he said, extending his hand formally to the boy, who looked at him in surprise. The doctor did not wear a wedding ring and Marina wondered fleetingly if she could find a way to introduce him to Leah. She laughed about it with Rose, this incessant matchmaking of theirs. ‘When did I turn into a bossy Jewish matchmaker?’ she had asked Rose as they washed the dishes together the week before.
‘When you have found love, you want everyone else to have it, too,’ Rose said. ‘Happiness makes us generous. When I first met Max I was unbearable. I just about drove my brothers mad with my romantic conniving. They refused to go out in public with me in case I tried to set them up with some unsuspecting girl.’
‘I actually thought for a moment about propositioning that doctor for Leah,’ Marina said. ‘He would have thought I was crazy.’
‘Who knows? He might have said yes. He’s probably lonely.’
‘Well, why don’t you come along to the next appointment and we’ll do a joint pitch. We can take him a photo.’
‘Sssh. She’ll kill us,’ Rose laughed.
She and Rose had both turned to watch Leah, bent over the Scrabble board in the dining room with Jacob and Ben. Jacob played with maddening slowness, agonising over his letters, and the other two were huddled in conversation. Marina wondered if Ben was telling Leah about Alma. Perhaps he was asking her advice about the girl’s immigration status. Leah had her arm draped lightly over Ben’s shoulders, her head close to his.
‘The thing about having children,’ Rose said, ‘is that you learn it is possible to feel someone else’s pain more deeply than your own. It’s the cliché of motherhood, I know. But it’s true.’
Constance sat silently while the Indian doctor listened to her chest. She and Gabriel both had tuberculosis. The doctor had smiled at Marina’s horrified face when she had learned this on their first visit. It was much commoner than you would think, he had told her. Even here in New York. Not just a nineteenth-century disease, after all. Many of those who came from refugee camps had it, especially the children. There were very good new drugs now. It was not something to kill you anymore. And not easily contagious; it was not a risk for her.
Constance and Gabriel were nearly at the end of their long course of medication. ‘Just a few more weeks,’ the doctor said to Constance, ‘and you’ll be good as new.’
They walked home along the edge of the park, Gabriel holding Marina’s hand, singing as he walked. When she had first heard him singing, she thought it must be a Rwandan song; that it had come to him from Constance, or from a time before their life in New York. But the words were made up, Constance told her when she asked about the song. They were not words at all. It was no song she knew.
The little boy’s world was so small. For so long it had contained only Constance. No one sang to him or read to him. He had never been to a library, a swimming pool, a zoo. The week before, they had stopped at a small playground and he had hung back in alarm, watching the other children clambering up the play fort and down the slide. He did not know what to do, Marina had realised. She lifted him up and hauled him to the top of the slide. A look of amazement had come over him as he slid down, clutching her hand tightly all the way. It was the closest thing she had seen to pleasure on his face.
When they reached the Museum of Natural History, Marina stopped and turned to Constance. ‘Would you like to go in? It’s a museum.’
The girl stared at her uncomprehendingly, her lips slightly open. With hardly any shared language between them, how would Constance know what a museum was? In a way her world was just as limited as her child’s.
‘There are elephants,’ Marina said. ‘And lions. Lots of animals from Africa.’ All these relics of another world, possibly the one Constance had lost. Were there elephants and lions in Rwanda? How little she really knew about Constance’s country. On all the maps it was so tiny that its printed name barely fitted inside the sliver of colour.
The three of them walked up the stairs and into the cavernous entrance hall. Gabriel stared in bewildered wonder at the enormous dinosaurs looming above them, their tapering spines arcing elegantly towards the ceiling of the atrium. In the intricate traceries of their skeletons the spirit of the creatures could somehow be felt. They were beautiful and terrifying at the same time. How Ben had loved these dinosaurs. He once climbed beneath one, lying on his back and staring up, transfixed, at the solid casing of its ribs. A little boy encased in a great ship of bones. He loved most of all knowing that his father had come to see them as a boy – this seemed to him more miraculous than the dinosaurs themselves. On one outing to the museum Ben had stood solemnly before each display and asked the same question: ‘Did my father see this giraffe? Were these elephants here when my father was little?’ She could see in him the fascinated awareness of lives that existed before he did, his delight in the symmetries between his father’s childhood and his own. Sometimes he still stopped by the museum, he had told her not so long ago, just to look at the dinosaurs. She wondered if he would ever bring Alma here, if he would offer up his childhood to her like some secret, tender gift. She hoped so.
Constance followed them as they
walked through the museum. The girl always acquiesced to Marina’s suggested itineraries when they were out on an errand together. A café, a shop, a visit to the playground, she never refused anything. Marina would like to have seen this as an agreement of trust between them, but Jacob had pointed out to her that Constance might not feel she was able to say no. By casting herself as the girl’s benefactor, had Marina removed any agency Constance might have had? What if she detested the hot chocolates in crowded cafés, the shopping trips to buy sensible shoes, the visits to parks? How could she ever express this?
There was something unnerving about the painstakingly constructed dioramas in the hall of African animals. Behind each glass window was an entire world, the animals carefully arranged to look as if they were in the wild. A pride of lions grouped around a waterhole, a baby zebra nestling against its mother’s side, an ostrich raising its wings. All of this against elaborately painted backdrops. The hall was dim and hushed, each tableau lit up with its own simulated sunlight. It was as if the ghosts of the animals were watching them.
If there was any flicker of recognition in Constance, she revealed nothing. Standing before the animals in their counterfeit wildernesses, her face remained impassive, as though nothing she saw had any power to make an impression on her. Perhaps another kind of woman could have befriended Constance more adeptly than Marina had, coaxed her under an assured wing. Someone stronger or jollier might have drawn her out in a different way. It was impossible to describe the precise nature of their relationship, if indeed it was any sort of relationship. My friend, she called Constance to doctors and officials and shop assistants, but in truth it was not a friendship. Just an existence in the same space of waiting and uneasiness, the contours of their own folded lives unknown to each other. Then there was their shared currency. Gabriel.
The little boy stood solemnly before one of the more elaborate dioramas, his face very close to the glass. Marina crouched down behind him and pointed to the animals, telling him their names. He leaned back, making a place for himself against her. He did not speak, but his lips moved as if he were testing out the shapes of words. Looking up, Marina saw that Constance was watching them. The girl’s arms were clasped behind her back, a pensive air about her.
On the second floor, Marina led Constance and Gabriel into the Hall of New York City Birds. She wanted to show them creatures that they might see here in the city, birds she could point out to them in Central Park. It seemed important that they learned the names of things, a form of knowledge that could locate them. An antidote to everything that had been lost. She had been rereading A Passage to India and she thought suddenly of the scene where Ronny and Adela try and fail to identify a strange green bird they see in a tree. To know the bird’s name would somehow have solaced their hearts, Forster had written. A lion or an elephant might seem too large and abstract a notion for Gabriel, but she could find him a wren or a sparrow here in the city. She wanted him to come to know New York as his own place. His home.
The room was dim and hushed. There were no elaborate dioramas, no attempts to create the illusion of life. The birds were arrayed in rows in long glass cabinets, small cardboard tags tied to their feet. Study skins, Marina remembered they were called. Preserved for scientists, not to entertain museum-goers. The birds seemed unbearably melancholy, pinned neatly to cardboard. They were so inert, so irretrievably dead. She had not been here for a long time and she had forgotten how macabre the display was, how gruesome the birds looked. It was not a place to bring a child.
Beside her Constance lurched away from the cabinets, her hand to her chest. The girl looked stricken, a deep and terrible surprise crossing her face. She gave a rending, guttural wail. Marina was stunned. She put her hand on Constance’s shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, it’s awful. We can leave.’
But Constance leaped away from her touch as if she had been scalded, and turned and ran out of the room. Marina watched her disappear down the empty corridor, her plastic sandals slapping against the floor. She picked up Gabriel and hurried down the stairs after her, but when they reached the ground floor there was no sign of Constance.
Surely the girl would come back. Marina sat for a long time in the entrance hall of the museum, waiting for Constance to return. Gabriel ran up and down the room, seemingly unconcerned by his mother’s absence. A panicked sense of shame engulfed her. How could she have taken Constance into that gallery? All those rows of tiny bodies. The unmistakable presence of senseless death. It had been artfully disguised with the animals downstairs, but the still, slick bodies of those birds seemed horrifying. Marina found it difficult to keep from crying, and her sorrow had a confused, amorphous nature. She was not sure whether it was the birds or Constance she wanted to weep for. Perhaps, she thought, it was herself.
A museum guide touched her on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ the woman said. ‘Your little boy has gone into the butterfly exhibit.’
Marina jumped to her feet. How could she have let him out of her sight for even an instant?
In the conservatory Gabriel was standing completely still in the middle of the walkway. Around him, like a strange halo, was a cloud of brightly coloured butterflies. Against the greenery, the yellow of their wings looked even more improbable. It was like an image from a dream, or from a fairy tale. After the grimness of the dead birds, the butterflies felt like a miracle of redemption. Such unforeseen abundance. Gabriel was staring up, transfixed, his hand outstretched. It was the first time, Marina realised, that she had seen him smile.
At home later that afternoon, Marina sat in the armchair by the windows with Gabriel asleep in her arms. He had cried and clung to her when she had tried to put him down on her bed. She could feel the rise and fall of his small chest and the quick, steady beating of his heart. She put her hand against his cheek. He seemed to her to possess the most singular beauty, a kind of hypnotic perfection. She could stare at him for hours. All mothers believe their children to be the most beautiful in the world, Rose had told her once. But Gabriel was not her child. No matter how swiftly she had fallen for him, he did not belong to her. She thought of the way he had sobbed when she had deposited him on the bed just now, the frantic scrabble as he had thrown himself against her. All of this was fraught with danger, but the greatest peril, she realised, was for this damaged child sleeping in her arms.
When Marina moved her legs Gabriel moaned quietly in his sleep and pressed himself closer to her. He tucked his head into her neck and she rested her cheek against his soft hair. The pale curtains moved slowly beside them in the faint afternoon breeze. She was making a promise to the little boy, Jacob had told her, that could not be kept.
Marina had waited a long time at the museum for Constance to return. Eventually she walked north through the park towards Harlem, Gabriel beside her, his hand in hers. When they reached the projects Marina climbed very slowly up the stairs. She was afraid, she realised, to face Constance. She kept thinking of the flinch that had moved through the girl’s whole body, her cry as she fled the room. Marina imagined a descent into a grief that she would not be able to rescue Constance from. Or, worse, that the girl would stand before her in some sort of angry accusation; that she would blame her for the birds and never want to see her again. So often with Constance, Marina felt that the girl had sized her up and found her wanting. Here was another example of her own ignorance, her failure to understand anything important. Perhaps this would be the end of whatever relationship they had forged these past weeks.
When Marina knocked on the door to the apartment there was no answer. She pressed her ear to the thin plywood, listening for movement inside. She knocked harder on the door and called Constance’s name. A large Puerto Rican woman emerged from the next apartment, a red scarf tied around her glossy wig. There were small droplets of sweat on her forehead. She stared suspiciously at Marina.
‘You from Children’s Services?’ she asked.
Marina wondered later why the woman had asked that.
If it was only because she was white, or if there was some other reason for her question. Had Children’s Services been involved with Constance and the child? They led such unnoticed lives she found it hard to believe that anyone would intervene in them. But she thought of the times she had seen Constance strike the child, or push him away roughly. Perhaps someone else had seen this.
‘No,’ she said to the woman. ‘I’m just looking for Constance. I’m her friend. Have you seen her?’
The woman gave her a hard stare but said nothing, stepping back into her apartment and closing the door with a bang.
By the time Jacob came home that afternoon, Gabriel had woken and was sitting at the kitchen table eating an apple she had cut into quarters for him. Jacob had never met the little boy before. He knew of him only from Marina’s descriptions. He frowned when she told him what had happened at the museum. He had read her a quote from Lionel Trilling the other day. Something about being aware of the dangers that lie in our most generous wishes, about kindness turning inadvertently into a form of coercion.
Jacob watched her pouring Gabriel a glass of milk. He was unusually quiet. It was Friday evening and soon they needed to set out for Rose’s house. Marina slipped her arms around Jacob and rested her face against his neck for a moment. ‘I thought we could bring him to your mother’s house with us and then take him back to Constance on the way home.’