‘Hallelujah, get me out of here,’ he said. ‘What’s for dinner?’
She laughed. ‘We have to wait to see the doctor yet. For dinner, my veal bake. Ethan and Laini are coming. Finnegan has made you chocolate brownies.’
‘And dumplings with the veal?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Dumplings.’ They were his favourite.
She checked the bathroom to make sure that nothing had been forgotten. There in the bin on the floor was the newspaper story about Martin and his stroke, the boy and his dog. Apart from that, nothing had been left behind.
So this was what was next.
Hospital. Home. Dumplings.
Chapter 9
Next they are walking out onto the street, the sun overhead.
The loft was sepia, but there is nothing muted once they step outside. The colour is a wave of scarves, sky, spray-paint. The fire escapes crawl with life—people pegging clothes or bodies flopped on mattresses left out overnight. To look up at them Maggie holds her hat with one hand, and can’t go more than a block before she has to stop again and poke her head down basement steps or read some writing on the wall. Her hat is blue canvas, wide-rimmed.
No one is in a hurry. It is Saturday in downtown Manhattan, the end of summer.
‘I wish I’d come down here earlier,’ Maggie says. She has spent six days uptown burning the last of her money, getting lost in the park, bumping into people on the sidewalk and ticking off a long list of museums. ‘It’s not that I haven’t loved it; I just always feel like I want to get up onto the rooftops.’ She leans back into a lamppost, haloed by the bishop’s crook, Maggie in her big hat and little skirt staring up at the sky and telling him where she wants to be.
‘We’ll go to the garden and meet Dave,’ he says. ‘I’ll show you something better than the rooftops.’
Sometimes it hovered there, at the image of Maggie and the lamppost, behind them the streets of SoHo. There is the feeling that he had something to give her, this girl he had known for just a couple of hours, and with that, an unburdening of a loneliness he didn’t even know he’d been carrying . . . The man on the street in a striped shirt staring at the girl leaning against the lamppost, ahead of them the whole day, and in that day, the seed that will later form the basis of his better decisions.
In the background there is noise—a curtain drawn, the sound of steps in another time and place but close by, in the next room, or the same room. It stirs him into limbo, a foot in past and present, but the effort is to remain where he is, on the street at the lamppost . . . then and not now. The smell is sweat and garbage—that is what keeps it: steam rising from the baking tar.
So they head to the garden. And first—on the way—there is Mrs Bess; first there is the pigeon lady.
They walk. He lets her stop, just tells her which turns to take. At the corner of Broome and Thompson she starts scribbling in her little notebook then puts the book away to follow men in boxer shorts and bowler hats carrying a coffin down Spring. That takes them to a pop-up market, the street closed to cars, streamers hanging from fire escapes and sidewalks buried in art and books. Garbage sweats in black plastic bags and squatters on stoops ignore the smell.
When Maggie twists her hair and ties it up into a knot, he watches like it is a magic act, and he watches her wipe away the bubbles of sweat above her lip and laugh when the guy on West Broadway wrenches the cap off the hydrant. A kid sits on top and dangles his legs to block the full force. Even on the other side of the street it sprays their feet. She looks down. The tiny hairs on her neck, he can see them in the sun.
Near the corner of Mercer and Houston she has stopped at a storefront window. Pinned to the glass in rows are paintings on pages of newspaper: bamboo and cherry blossom trees in black ink.
‘What is this place?’ she asks.
‘It’s the pigeon lady’s studio. Check it out, to your left.’
She steps past the window into the entrance, peers inside and yanks her head back. ‘Oh, Christ!’ Perched on stools against the side wall on any given day are half a dozen pigeons.
‘Rats of the sky,’ he says.
‘What are all the pictures?’
‘She teaches people.’
It is then that a small voice sounds from inside. ‘Please,’ it says. ‘Come in.’
Maggie looks at Martin. ‘Come on . . .’
He shakes his head. ‘Let’s not.’ He has walked past the place with the pigeons a hundred times.
‘You’re just scared of the birds.’
She smiles, he follows. It can’t hurt to take a look.
He has seen the birds, but he has never seen the lady herself. From the back corner of the cluttered room, she emerges, a tiny woman in a jade kimono, glittering in the dim light as she shuffles towards them across the stone floor. Her neck remains perfectly still, like she’s balancing the bun of black hair on top of her head. Close up he can see the hair is streaked with silver, but there isn’t a line on her face.
‘What can I do for you?’ she asks, still holding Maggie’s hand. ‘Are you here for lessons?’
‘Oh no,’ Maggie says. ‘I’m going home tomorrow . . . We were just looking at the paintings. The ink is beautiful.’
The pigeon lady nods. ‘And where is home?’
‘Australia.’
She is staring now, screwing up her eyes. ‘But your parents?’
‘They’re from Hungary.’
Her eyes light up. ‘That is why the perfect forehead . . .’
Maggie cocks her head, listening to the music playing. ‘That’s strange . . . This music, it’s my mother’s favourite.’
‘Not strange,’ the woman says. ‘I like your mother.’ She closes her eyes. ‘When we do birds or branches it is good for the students . . . the violin flutters and flaps as the lark ascends, you hear that now?’ Her hand rises in the air and comes down before she opens her eyes again. ‘Sit down, please. Call me Mrs Bess. And I will get you tea.’
She doesn’t wait for them to accept the offer, and is back in a minute with two little bowls. Marty knows pieces of the pigeon lady’s story. She has been in SoHo for a couple of years, and already has a pile of students coming to her to learn the art of brush painting. Linda has a friend who went, said she made him draw bamboo for a year until he graduated to blossoms. Within minutes Maggie has extracted the rest of the story; it is the same as back in the loft—her eyes stay fixed and she listens like she’s making a recording in her mind. It opens you up, he thinks, makes you feel like you are being discovered—like you are gold.
Mrs Bess migrated from Japan when she was a child and grew up in Arizona. She learnt the art from a master when she was interned in a camp in the Utah desert during the war.
‘I thought everything was taken. But I was wrong. That is what he taught me. I had lost nothing that mattered.’ She studies Maggie’s face. ‘You know what I am saying.’ It is not a question. ‘You were born in Australia?’
‘No, my parents migrated after the war, when I was five.’
She nods. ‘You are an exile. Did they put you in a camp?’
‘Yes, a migrant camp—for the first year or so.’
‘And did your parents ever go back home?’
‘No. My father died when I was twelve. My mother’s still in Sydney.’
‘So you will go back to her.’
‘Tomorrow. I leave tomorrow.’
Mrs Bess nods with resignation. ‘I never went back to Phoenix. Over the years I made my way here. And here I will stay, in my shop, feeding my pigeons and watching Americans pass by.’ She looks at Martin. ‘I know what you are thinking. And the answer is no, they have never shat in my shop.’ A qualification comes with an impish smile: ‘Not the pigeons.’
Maggie asks about the paintings pinned up around them. Mrs Bess tells her it is the beginners’ work. They start on newspaper. ‘Not worth wasting paper yet.’
Maggie smiles. ‘I used to draw on newspaper when I was a little girl. T
hat’s why I stopped here, when I saw the drawings in the window. Please, can I see something you have done?’
Mrs Bess lets her eyes settle on Maggie’s face again as though she is measuring it. ‘Why not?’ She shuffles into a back room no bigger than a closet. A door opens into a third room, on the floor of which is a mattress. Mrs Bess points to one of a number of brush paintings pinned to a board on the wall. The image is of rocks at the foot of an escarpment. ‘I call it The Lost Cat,’ she says. ‘Find it.’
Maggie studies the picture, steps up to the wall and traces her finger around an outcrop of rocks that look to Martin like nothing more than that. Mrs Bess takes her arm. ‘You have the eye,’ she says. ‘That is the first step.’ She takes the painting down from the wall and signs the bottom of the page. For Maggie. And she rolls it up and ties it with a piece of string. ‘Will you send me something? Something you draw for me in Australia?’ she asks.
Maggie promises she will.
‘Worry about the soul,’ Mrs Bess says. ‘None of the rest.’ And to Martin: ‘Even fear can be a gift. You just have to know how to unwrap it.’ She claps her hands as though to release herself from the thought.
As they go to leave, she presses Martin’s arm. ‘This one is special,’ she says.
Martin shrugs. ‘We just met.’
‘Still,’ she says. ‘You will follow her home.’
The words jar; he doesn’t respond and he doesn’t wait for more. Out on the street he breathes more easily again as he waits for Maggie. She has leant down and has her arms around Mrs Bess. A couple of pigeons come out first, fly straight out the door and up to a roof across the street. Then comes Maggie, all smiles.
‘What a great woman!’
‘Sure.’
‘What do you mean, “sure”?’
‘I mean, sure: great woman.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Okay, you tell me what I mean.’
‘You are cynical.’
‘Of what? The haiku bullshit? No, I love that stuff . . .’
‘Ah, so easy to judge, close yourself off . . . but you heard her.’ She is smiling, and with a skip in her step she stares him in the eye as Mrs Bess had done: ‘This fear of yours, it is a gift . . .’
‘Oh, get fucked!’
Now she’s in front and has turned around to face him. ‘You just have to unwrap it.’
So they are laughing and she is walking backwards past the kitchen sinks on Lafayette and he reaches out like he is going to strangle her, hoping she’ll trip so he can pick her up and smother her with his bare hands. They keep the pace across the Bowery, then she slows up, looks around her. More and more of the shops are vacant; a Chinese grocery store peeks out from beneath the layers of graffiti. An old black man on a beanbag asks a girl walking the street in her underwear if she can spare any change. When they turn the corner onto Elridge, smoke is spewing from the blackened window of a tenement. There is the sound of sirens.
‘Should we be here?’ she asks. He listens for it but there is no fear in her voice.
He stops. ‘This is it,’ he says. She looks around her—the sidewalk strewn with broken bricks, cigarette butts floating in stagnant puddles. At the end of the street there is a man sweeping. Ethan points to a plywood door in a crumbling wall. ‘Behind here.’
The door needs to be yanked up and shouldered in.
Stepping through it, he keeps a watch on her face, fresh eyes marvelling at what is inside, the garden in the rubble. They are standing on the outer ring of a series of garden beds, each planted with vines and flowers and fledgling trees. Amid the dots of colour there is a patchwork of green—mint and moss, grass and lime. The rubble that remains is at the back of the enormous block: timber and piping and sheets of metal. And towering over both rubble and garden are the grey, muddied walls of the neighbouring tenements, the windows that had been bricked up or cemented over now being cleared again to let the light in.
Halfway around the path there is a link to a circle inside it, and another, until they are in the centre, at a Chinese Empress tree. Around them the garden beds burst with asparagus plants and creeping cucumber vines and a ground cover of strawberries and parsley.
‘Whose place is this?’ she asks.
‘No one’s. A friend of Dave’s was living behind it when the tenements got pulled down. He’s a poet, an artist, pretty radical. The whole thing was a stack of rubble. He started clearing it then began planting and put the paths down. He designed it all first; Dave will tell you about it . . .’
She follows him back to the outer ring and down a central path to the back of the block, where it is still what it was before—chipped, broken, shattered. There are weeds sprouting through the concrete and dirt, and in the middle of it all an American flag has been pitched, as big as a sheet and waving in the breeze. A few kids, black and Latino, are jumping on a mattress, half the springs laid bare like a wire skeleton, and behind them a little boy climbs to the top of an abandoned scaffold. On the other side of the rubble, sitting on a burnt-out refrigerator in yellow gumboots and smoking a joint, is Dave.
When he sees them he gets to his feet, his pale legs poking out between the boots and the hem of his shorts, a torn singlet scooped below his left nipple, but his chest is cut with muscle and his grey eyes are almost black, so even with the boots the overall effect is more menacing than comical.
‘Greetings.’ He isn’t looking at Martin. ‘My name is Dave. You are . . . ?’
‘She’s from Australia.’
‘About fucking time. We’ve been waiting for his friends to come. You want some?’ He hands Maggie the joint. She takes a puff and hands it to Martin.
‘So you guys old friends?’
Martin hesitates. ‘This is Maggie.’
Dave ponders the name. The light goes on. ‘Maggie! Stalker girl!’ Martin tries to cut in, but to no avail. Dave has his hand on Maggie’s shoulder. ‘His words,’ he says. ‘I told him he was a rude prick for not tracking you down. Here you were in the big city, and now all the time we’ve wasted . . . Has he shown you around the garden?’
‘Sort of, just quickly,’ Maggie says. ‘It’s amazing, awesome—I mean, what you’ve done.’
‘Well, no, not me, I’m just a soldier, and this is just the start. Marty, take this.’ Dave hands him a shovel. ‘Follow me.’ He picks up the handles of a wheelbarrow filled with horse dung and pushes it up the path to the outer circle and weaves his way back to the centre. He drops the barrow, stands before them and draws with his hands: ‘You get how it works, see: the yin and yang . . . At the centre there is balance, and everything grows from there until the circles bump into buildings and the buildings come down. It’s gonna keep growing, the circle, waves of energy will seep through the city, through the whole fucking world.’ He pauses, hands mid-air, shakes his head in wonderment at the words leaving his mouth. ‘It is incredible if you think about it, if you follow it through. It is food. It is art. It is everything. You feel that?’
‘Sure,’ Maggie says. ‘Can anyone come in here?’
‘You bet. Kids still play in that shit.’ He points back to the rubble. ‘But then they come here. You want some gloves? You can give me a hand.’
Maggie and Martin hammer in bamboo stakes for the sweet pea to climb while Dave spreads the dung. Over his shoulder he throws the question: ‘You wanna weed this patch, Marty?’
Martin ignores it. There aren’t any weeds. Then comes the follow-up: ‘You staying with us tonight, Maggie?’
‘I’ve got my stuff over in the hostel.’
‘So we go get it.’ He stops shovelling, studies her face with a view to purchase.
‘Hands off, Dave. She knows my mum.’
‘Well, I don’t know your mom, Marty. I don’t give a fuck about your mom. Do you give a fuck about his mom, Maggie?’
She is blushing and squirming but smiling all at once, like this was part of the tourist experience and Dave here was the Empire State.
�
�I don’t think they’ll give my money back,’ Maggie says. ‘I paid already.’
Dave gives it up, or parks it for later. ‘And when do you go home?’
‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.’
Dave shakes his head at Marty, marvelling at the hit-and-run opportunity of a lifetime. ‘So what are the plans? You want to come to a party, Maggie?’
Behind them kids are on the ground in the dirt, scavenging the last of the black raspberries. One of them has got the flag and they are marching in time. Dave starts reeling off options, but all of a sudden it’s like a voice in a jar. Because now there is a louder one . . .
‘Dad? Hey, Dad? You awake?’
The face was like the fair-haired man on the street.
‘Sorry, I just wanted to make sure you were okay. You okay, Dad?’
He nodded his head. ‘Fine, thanks.’ He practised it now the way the speech therapist told him. A breath before the ‘th’ pushed the word out so it didn’t get stuck in his mouth.
‘Great. You look great.’ Ethan’s complexion was grey and the corners of his eyes were red because he rubbed them too much. He sat waiting, as though expecting direction. Martin obliged by reaching over and putting his hand on his son’s arm.
‘You look like shit. But nice suit.’
Now Ethan smiled, loosened his tie. Better.
‘How was your day?’ Martin asked. ‘Tell me something . . .’ It was harder when ‘th’ was in the middle of a word; his tongue flopped around it and turned the word to blubber.
Work was alright, Ethan told him, but the situation with the partners wasn’t getting any better. He got up and opened the curtains. From the bed Martin could see the ocean, grey and distant in the fading light. ‘I’m not good dealing with them . . . The politics of the place, it’s just bullshit.’ Sitting down again, he looked back at the door, a reluctant witness waiting to be excused. ‘Here, I bought you some of those mints you like.’ This time he rubbed his whole face up and down with his open hands.
It was like the face on the street in New York, but it was not that face. It was older—the eyes were worn—and it bore a load that the face on the street was yet to bear, one that Martin now recognised: it was the weight of guilt. Had he seen it there before? He couldn’t remember; he didn’t know.
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