by Marge Piercy
Sandra María stood at her elbow, by the chair she had captured. “Daria, I think you’ve got the hang of it. I’m off to Northeastern for my class. Will you be all right?”
Daria glanced at her watch. She was astonished to discover it was twelve-thirty. Now she would be late for her appointment with the people at Channel 7, unless she had luck with her taxi and traffic.
Her lawyer Dorothy encouraged the search. “Find out whatever you can. We need a list of all properties acquired in the course of the marriage. This isn’t a community property state, but it recognizes your interest.”
“It takes me half a day just to follow one set of transactions.”
“That’s part of the idea—to discourage you.” Dorothy smiled stiffly. “There’s something as your lawyer I ought to know. Did Tom send you to me as a friend? Or are you one of his ladies?”
“His ladies? Me?”
“He walked the straight and narrow with Andrea, but I knew him before they got together. As your lawyer I should know if you have any involvements your husband may use against you.”
“Absolutely not,” Daria said as for some reason the image of her wriggling cat came into her mind. “Tom? We’re barely civil.”
“With him, you never know.” Dorothy gave a slight sigh and Daria realized with a pang of mild dismay that Dorothy had once been involved with Tom, perhaps more involved with him than he had been with her, to judge from the difference in the tone of their remarks about each other.
“Dorothy, I’m older than he is. Besides, if I had ten boyfriends, Ross left me for another woman. What difference would it make now?”
“Haven’t you heard of the double standard? It’s alive and kicking in divorce court. It doesn’t matter if he was keeping a mistress for twenty years, if you’re a bad girl the judge will punish you. Judges live in a world of judges, Daria, and they do their best to ignore what life is really like for most people.”
“I’m clean. My life is dull and lonely. Down to the Registry of Deeds and back. They think I’m a professional title searcher.”
“Incidentally.” Dorothy looked at her over the top of her glasses. “We have to keep in mind those buildings you wouldn’t sign over to Ross. How are you going to pay off those mortgages?”
“Oh!” Daria felt a start of pure fear. “I never thought of that!”
“If you don’t meet the payments, they foreclose.… I’m hopeful we can work things out with Ross long, long before that stage. Besides, there’s all that money somewhere. He lists those as liabilities but he acquired a lot of cash and it’s tucked away someplace. Listen, Daria, he’s hot to trot, his lawyer is huffing and puffing in my ear every day. Just get me the facts.”
“So that was Ross’s first fire.” Tom’s eyes glowed with excitement as he took more Hunan beef from the dish nearest him.
“Watch the peppers,” Fay cautioned. They were all eating take-out in her kitchen, Fay, Daria, Tom, and Fay’s two sons. Tom had insisted this was the best Chinese take-out around, and indeed it was pretty good.
“I like things hot.” Tom picked another pepper out with his chopsticks. “I just can’t help it, I’m hot-blooded.”
“It isn’t really hot,” Daria demurred, taking one too. She wasn’t going to let him get away with acting macho about a few peppers. “I see no reason to assume it was intentional, just because Gussie believes that. A house had to be worth a lot more than a parking lot.”
“Not in terms of cash coming in. You say it’s a busy lot.” He was sweating a little from the spices. He unbuttoned his shirt halfway and rolled up his sleeves, his forearms massive and muscled as a boxer’s propped on the table beside her. She felt a little crowded although she wasn’t.
“I don’t say that,” Daria said sulkily. “Gussie says that. Central Square lacks parking. People park all over the damned place.”
“And a great way to launder money, being a cash business.” Idly Tom’s enormous hand was exploring a wooden bowl filled with fruit, as if on an errand of its own. Fay had told her he had made the bowl as a present. His fingers sought and chased its grain. “He collected the insurance, which I bet was more than the building was worth, and now he has a tidy cash business.”
“You’re making up stories,” Daria said. “That trust is Cesaro, Tony and Ross together. The rents were chicken scratch and the neighborhood was red-lined so we couldn’t get any money to rehab it.”
“Your own sister thinks they burned it,” Fay put in.
“Gussie has a grudge against the boys. She feels they could help her more than they do. She’s just repeating gossip.”
Fay rapped her fingers on Daria’s outstretched hand of protest: “It upset you enough. You believed it.”
“I did not! I was just upset that Gussie believed it. And my own neighbor when I was growing up, Patsy. She used to take care of me.”
Johnny yelled, “That last egg roll is mine, you pig!”
“Fire isn’t real to you,” Fay said. “Shut up, Johnny, and give Mikey the last egg roll. You know he doesn’t eat shrimp. It’s real to me, I’ll tell you. I come awake at three A.M. with my heart thumping from nightmares the house is going up. We’ve had too many fires around here lately.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Daria said. “You walk around East Boston and you see burned buildings everyplace, vacant lots where houses used to be. But here, I’ve seen only two, three burned out buildings in the whole neighborhood.”
“Most fires aren’t so big the whole building goes,” Tom said, putting down the bowl he had made. “Just enough to get a tenant out. Or move them all out. They don’t destroy the brick structure.”
“You talk as if anybody could decide what kind of fire is going to happen,” Daria said scornfully. “This is a city that’s always had fires—miles of frame dwellings, aging, not up to code.” She was learning rapidly about codes.
“I agree with Daria,” Fay said. “If the buildings were up to code, we wouldn’t have those fires. All the claptrap wiring from the Year Zero. They said those last two fires were electrical. It scares me.”
Mikey began imitating a fire engine siren. Johnny said, “Ma, you never get enough egg rolls. Never! If you’d send me, I’d come back with the right amount, but you never do!”
“You’d come back with the whole restaurant. You’re going to be the size of Tom, you know that? Lift refrigerators in one hand. Jack up a car with your fingers. Eat your mother out of house and home.”
A little shyly, Johnny asked Tom, “Did you work out when you were my age? Some of the guys, they use weights.”
“Just what they made us do for football,” Tom said. “In spring, are we going to have a softball team this year?”
“Are we?” Johnny’s voice rose, breaking. “Are you going to coach us?”
“Coach you hell, I’m going to play,” Tom said. “SON can lick anybody this year.”
“Except the landlords,” Fay said. “We ain’t doing so good fighting them.”
Faintly, faintly she was beginning to trace Ross’s activities. Tony, Cesaro and Ross owned the parking lot together through a trust whose last activities centered on a building farther out along Commonwealth near the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, which they had turned into condominiums. It was in the last three years that Ross had begun buying heavily into the SON neighborhood. Cesaro had apparently refused to follow Tony and Ross into that venture, because his name was on none of those buildings or the trusts under which they were held. Roger Kingsley or his wife Barbara appeared frequently. Carl Johansen, Ross’s other law partner, turned up only once. Most of their mortgages were with the Allston Savings and Loan. She began to understand that mortgages were means of generating the money to buy other buildings and that was how Ross had expanded so far so fast. But the mortgages, although they were set up to require the heaviest payments late in the life of the loan, still had to be paid off, as Dorothy had warned her. Was that why Ross wanted to turn their Lexington home into cash? She was still f
ormulating more questions than answers.
“What are you dragging your heels about? Your lawyer isn’t returning my lawyer’s calls,” Ross said on his end of the phone.
“We only began this painful process the day after Christmas—”
“We began this painful process twenty-two years ago.”
“If you were so miserable, why did it take you twenty-two years to clear out?”
“Obligation. Guilt. Commitment,” he said sonorously. “I’m cursed with a sense of responsibility. You’ve often pointed that out.”
“How about comfort. Affection. The knowledge you had a pretty good deal. Lots of love and good food and good company and a lovely home and good sex and friends always welcome.”
“I want matters cleaned up, Daria. I want the situation straightened out fast.”
“But aren’t you happy living in your condo? I thought you wanted to live on the harbor?”
“It’s a tiny hole and the other people in the building are driving me crazy. I need to be settled.”
“Oh, dear. I thought you wanted a bachelor life. Desertion takes a couple of years, you know.” She lay on her bed surrounded by real estate notes and black cats.
“I’m prepared to fly down to the Dominican Republic. We can get a divorce overnight and be free of this nightmare.”
“How self-sacrificing of you, Ross.”
“I told you, I’m willing to do it. To spare us both the degradation of a nasty day in court.”
“But I, as yet, am not,” she said sweetly. “It’s all moving so fast, Ross. It’s going to take me a while to recover from my shock.” She had no intention of letting him know about the research. “It’s just too painful for me to deal with yet. I’m still getting used to it.”
Ross did not speak for perhaps two minutes, while she remained silent, waiting him out. She was finding in herself various useful although disagreeable entities, alternate personalities. Sometimes when she was handling Ross in one of these bitchy chats, she felt as if she had taken on Gretta’s persona, tall, lean and silvery. She was being forced to change into someone she liked less, in order to survive, someone who cared less, someone less accessible, less warm. She was not being allowed to remain the woman she had been.
“But, Daria, it’ll be less painful to get it over with. Reach an agreement and get the situation cleaned up.”
Like an oil spill. Now she became tremulous and fluttery. Ruffles and chiffon scarves formed around her. “Ross, we were married for twenty-two years! Can’t we go on being married a little longer, even on paper, just till I’m used to the situation? Until I have time to recover, a small bit, from the traumatic shock of your departure? It’s hard to do without you, however you may feel.”
“Daria … Daria!” His voice thickened. Probably he too was acting in a little movie of sensibility. “Of course I understand. I miss you too, of course, but—”
“Thank you, Ross, thank you for understanding. Now I must say good night. I can’t endure speaking to you any longer just now.” Her voice sounded thick with tears. She hung up and giggled. What charades. It was disgusting. She could scarcely believe she could play these games with him, yet somehow they helped. She needed time to do her research, and the roleplaying put emotional distance between them.
Sandra María’s building, a small apartment house in a row of similar brick apartment buildings, had belonged to Ross at one time, but he had sold it the year before in a transaction in which it appeared a fair amount of real money had been paid to him and in which the purchaser was Revco Realty, the Petrises. The Petrises were larger developers than Ross. They owned heavily in North Cambridge, where the Red Line was extending, had a piece of a plaza along Alewife Brook Parkway, had been active in condo conversion in Brookline across the near border. Ross or Roger Kingsley frequently turned up as their attorney on deeds and in court proceedings.
What Daria learned was that Revco had sold Ross a building at the same time. It had been almost a trade-off, although Ross appeared to have cleared perhaps ten thousand in cash. That was how and when Ross had acquired Fay’s building. Dorothy was not quite sure that Ross had not been doing a little divorce planning, letting the Petrises take over a much better building for the time being with perhaps an arrangement to buy it back after the divorce. Sandra María was dubious because Revco owned the building next to hers and the one beyond that. They were putting together a parcel, as she put it, for some kind of development. Sandra María’s row of old brick apartment houses backed onto large buildings on Commonwealth that had already been remodelled and sold as condominiums.
Daria’s days were divided between work on her cookbook and research downtown. After every research session she reported to Sandra María, explaining what she had found out and what still stumped her, odds and ends they were sometimes able to resolve together. Sandra María was the friendliest of the SON members, perhaps because they had not met until after Ross had left and Daria decided to work with them, on however limited a basis. Perhaps they had good rapport because Sandra María also came from a large family she remained close to, although her brains and upward mobility had led her into a life quite distinct from theirs. They understood each other more easily than she could reach Fay, who was born working class too, but remained there. Perhaps Sandra María’s having a daughter, Mariela, helped. Sandra María’s boyfriend Ángel, a photographer, was not Mariela’s father. About that man Sandra María never said a word. She said she had been seeing Ángel for two years, that he wanted her to move in with him, but that she didn’t want to. She didn’t think she could handle living with him and going to graduate school at the same time. She and Sandra María had struck a personal note early and easily. As mothers of daughters, they shared their experiences.
Daria found it strange to turn from the Registry of Deeds, where a building was a listing with various notations about its status, to the neighborhood, where the documents became real homes scarred with time, inhabited by women and men and cats and dogs and children and goldfish, mice, cockroaches and rats. In that window geraniums bloomed; there, a woman in a sari hung out clothes on her porch.
As she walked through the straight and winding streets, the short hills of the Allston neighborhood, she was learning to see the neighborhood many ways simultaneously. Sociologically it was mixed. The large condominiums along Commonwealth were inhabited by professional and business people, affluent, almost all white. The streets behind were more polyglot and particolored. Some houses had been bought and individually improved like Tom’s, like the two-family houses Chinese moving out of Chinatown had bought. Some apartment houses catered to Third World people, some Black, some Asian, some Hispanic, a few Indians. The neighborhood was home for poor and middle-class whites, lots of singles, gay men, elderly people, mothers alone with children. Up on the hill were a smattering of refurbished houses, islands of the affluent. Actually this was a pleasant and viable neighborhood. It had crime problems, insufficient parking and too much traffic. It also had a pleasant local park, good shopping, a healthy variety of neighbors to befriend or ignore.
She could also see the buildings as investments, an area developers planned to change. She could see tax shelters, in which income earned elsewhere was written off, depreciated, protected. She could see the buildings as bank enterprises, paper written on many of them far beyond the property’s worth as the banks too decided how and whether the neighborhood would change. It was political turf, tenants and property owners fighting an unequal battle. How would those puffed-up mortgages be paid for? That introduced a hidden factor of volatility under the busy but tranquil enough streets.
Ross had been renovating one of the buildings still in her name, the one where Bobbie Rosario had died, but the work appeared to have halted. Another listed under Red Robin had been emptied, gutted, rebuilt and was now on the market, with a model condominium available for viewing. He had done no violence to the lines and style of the old building, Moorish in inspiration. A tasteful rehab.
In a way, she thought, hastening toward her car parked in front of Sandra María’s building, she could now say that she was taking that interest in Ross’s work he had complained she lacked. In educating herself to fight him, she was also educating herself to understand him. He might not be one of the worst landlords, she thought, admiring his completed building. Perhaps he was doing the right thing ultimately, in spite of the SON people.
17
It took Daria a moment to realize her room was dark, she had been soundly asleep and the phone was ringing. As she snapped on the bedside lamp, she saw it was two thirty-five. She hesitated, her hand over the phone. Something had happened to Tracy? To Pops? “Hello? Who is this?”
“Sandra María’s building is burning,” Tom burst out. “Come over.”
“Sandra María? Is she all right? What about Mariela?”
“They’re safe, but badly shaken. Come over now, Daria. Come and help,” he barked and hung up.
What could she possibly do to help? She ought to go anyhow. Presumably they had been awakened as suddenly as she had, but not by the phone. Hastily she dressed and rushed out. The night was bitter cold with a harsh wind blowing from the northwest across a clear icy black sky pricked with tiny sharp-edged stars. Driving fast, she got to the neighborhood in twenty minutes. A fire truck and a hook and ladder blocked Sandra María’s street, so she parked way up the hill in Tom’s driveway and trotted down the icy curve. She was suddenly aware of herself, a woman alone in the middle of the night on a city street, and looked around warily. Above the engines, could the people on the next block hear her if she screamed?
She hastened as much as she dared, sliding on the ice, around to the row of brick apartments. Enormous black hoses ran into the front door, and the firemen were trying to haul another up the steps. Other firemen were on the roof, chipping away with their axes. Occasionally a hunk of burning roofing fell over the side into the street. The radios spat words and static; the engines and the pumps made the sidewalk thrum under her feet. In spite of the hour and the intense cold, a crowd stood in clumps on the other side of the street watching the firemen. Many nearby apartments had lights turned on. At the windows worried faces showed, peering out.