Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
THE BOOK OF DAYS
BOOKS BY MAUREEN HOWARD
NOVELS
Not a Word About Nightingales
Bridgeport Bus
Before My Time
Grace Abounding
Expensive Habits
Natural History
NOVELS OF THE FOUR SEASONS
A Lover’s Almanac
Big as Life
The Silver Screen
MEMOIR
Facts of Life
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Maureen Howard, 2009
All rights reserved
Portions of this book first appeared in different form in Conjunctions.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS: Page 1: © Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Pages 87 and 185: Drawings by Todd Mauritz. Page 142: Photograph by Andre Emmerich. By permission of Susanne Emmerich. Pages 112, 140-1, 145, 160, 163 (top), and 221: Photographs by Ali Elai Page 152: National Portrait Gallery, London Page 163 (bottom): Photograph by Ken Fang. Pages 177 and 184: Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historical Site Page 191: Sara Cedar Miller, Central Park Conservancy Page 236: Paul Strand: Bombed Church, Moselle, France, 1950. © Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive. PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Howard, Maureen, date.
The rags of time : a novel / Maureen Howard.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-14884-6
1. Fiction—Authorship—Fiction. 2. Central Park (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.O8823R34 2009
813’.54—dc22 2009015167
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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To Mark, and to Nicholas Howard Fudge—time bends
Acknowledgments
My family—husband, Mark Probst; brother, George Kearns; daughter, Loretta Howard, incalculable thanks for their support and correction. Richard Powers for his generous editorial reading; James Longenbach and Joanna Scott for their care and honesty with a work in long progress, this last of my Seasons. Binnie Kirschenbaum for her spirited commentary. My agent and friend, Gloria Loomis, patient with me over the years; and Paul Slovak, my gifted editor, at once exacting and imaginative. I am indebted to Jeri Laber, Patrick Keefe, Mohammet Yildiz, Harish Bhat, George and Sonya Tcherny, Cleo Kearns, Brenda Maddox, Ann Weiss mann, Ed Park, Paul La Farge, Bradford Morrow, and to Drs. Iris Sherman and Mary Anne McLaughlin for their consultation; to the Mercy Learning Center for letting me camp on their porch, and the Bogliasco Foundation for a residency at the Villa dei Pini.
Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.
—John Donne, “The Sunne Rising”
Central Park
THE BOOK OF DAYS
In soul-baring confessional writings (maximum honesty with regard to oneself), the third-person form is better.
—Max Frisch, Sketchbook (1970)
In God We Trust. She notes these words inscribed on a five dollar bill she sticks in her pocket, heads for the park. Odd, how she no longer sees the motto on twenties and tens, on every coin in her purse. Did she ever believe in that trust? When the patrician voice of the president declared a date that will live in infamy; when her brother was drafted during the conflict in Korea; perhaps held that tarnished belief when she marched with thousands against the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. Even then believed, though her trust was in the marching, not God on a dull penny, in the slogans and songs, trusting something worthy would come of her effort, more than camaraderie or the glow of self-satisfaction. Her picture had been snapped with the hippie academics. She’s in the tie-dye T pushing through the police barrier, storming onto campus when Governor Reagan punished children who stepped out of line, said oh no you don’t teach your dispiriting lessons against the war, not on my watch. These days she would not be sure of her footing if herded into the courthouse in Santa Barbara to be charged with unlawful assembly.
The Sixties were so performative! This contribution from her daughter who lives nearby.
What does that mean?
Well, she can no longer march. In Central Park she walks the short distance set by her failing heart, delights in a warm day, an amber wash of Indian Summer.
She would like to know who proposed the motto In God We Trust, and when unseasonable days were first called Indian Summer, as though knowing might steady her flip-flop pulse. These are almanac questions with almanac answers available on an Internet service. Suppose, just suppose, this time round the easy answers will not heal by way of distraction. I am outraged. She repeats this phrase in the lilting, stage center voice that entertained students in the classroom and readings of her work in years past. I am outraged. What crimes are they committing at their Black Sites? Delivered to her husband, her brother, to Cleo and Glo—whoever will listen, and they are outraged, too, repeating the day’s dreadful news. We have not been given the full count of the injured. She is caught up in gestures of dollars and cents where In God We Trust came into her story—on green-backs, coinage in the pocket of her old black coat, though it’s her credit card that registers the small donations of her protest. So it goes.
She is still in her bathrobe at noon, her flighty gray hair unwashed, strange crust on her cheek, a new hillock of puffed flesh on the wrinkled map of age. She turns from the mirror. Not much for mirrors anymore. Let the body play out the days with a handful of pills adjusting the heartbeat, thinning the blood. Till well after noo
n she stays in her back room writing the last of her seasons, Fall with its showy splendor. She predicts year’s end may be her end, but that’s one of her stories. Her body will float on a bier of books and first drafts down the Lethe, or bob in Olmsted’s Lake, which appears at a distance, an elegiac vision she may have to revise, a cold wind ruffling the glass surface. Seldom given to self-pity. Consolation is across the street in Central Park with its Bridle Path, Pinetum, Reservoir Track, all that prospect of a healthy, if halting, afternoon walk, thus the five dollar bill in her pocket for the needy or a threatening encounter. She loses her glasses, forgets her cell phone and what’s for dinner, repeats her riff on outrage, remembers in some detail disturbing events of the past filed away under Wars I have known, one scene oddly persistent in recent days.
As a freshman in college, she stayed up late with her new friends. It must have been the first weeks of October. Three little girls at school with no bedtime, few rules. What stories did they have to swap? Empty vessels. She is harsh as she thinks of them in their flannel nightgowns, their French grammars and Lattimore’s monumental Greek Tragedies thrown aside for idle chatter. The woman came to their door, which stood open a crack. Looming, mysterious, she waited in the dim night light of the hall for a long moment, then invited herself in. The girls made tea on an electric hot plate, the red coil dangerously close to a curtain her mother had sewn to make life homey away from home. She figures how old their guest was, a graduate student from Austria studying Government, as they called Political Science then. Perhaps in her mid-twenties—big breasts, heavy thighs, the pulsing of her neck as she told her story. The plait of honey hair she drew round the fullness of that neck was a noose snapped free to reveal a silver cross. The three girls were children who listened obediently to the woman’s steady guttural voice with now and again a German word translated for them to English. The salty odor of sweat from the Austrian woman’s ragged ski sweater. They were all sitting on the floor of this room in a dormitory for mostly privileged young women. The rug was lumpy, braided of rags by the mother of the old woman who was then a girl listening to a story she could not comprehend, how their visitor’s father was taken away, the brother, too. Tap, tapping her cross, the woman said the Cardinal came to lunch. Her father had thought His Eminence’s visit a good sign. She knelt to kiss the Cardinal’s ring which smelled of laundry soap. They might find that the strangest part of her story. Come the next year, a knock on the door in Innsbruck and they were gone, the father, the brother taken by brutal men these girls had seen in newsreels and movies. More tea, and though they had not asked, the Austrian student with a woman’s body said as the war was coming to its end a soldier spoiled her. Schande. Never saw him, her face covered with a pillow. Soon after, the Russians came.
For years the woman who lives across from the Park recalled the shame of her relief when the foreign student left her college room, shame at her inability to feel nothing more than embarrassment, to wonder at—the harsh soap of suet and lye embedded under the princely ring as though the honored guest in the magenta beanie joined in a humble washday task. Had the woman found other children in the dead of night to listen to the calm recitation of her story? Today the warm dormitory room appears again with the two friends who went their separate ways by the end of that year, the poster on the wall—Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose—Sargent’s little girls in white summer dresses, their Japanese lanterns illuminating a garden beyond lovely. And there on the floor, the discarded textbook in which the Greek chorus mourned what had come to pass as in the chant—We are outraged—or warns what will come to pass, but tragedy had gone out of business. Her own initials were incised on her tea mug, MK—a gift from her father—a gruff, sentimental man, who never wanted her to grow up, leave home with new clothes—a lumpy rag rug, gauzy curtains fluttering near the hot coil of the burner.
Not much for mirrors, and not happy with my attempt at third person. In my book, confession begs for absolution, but my sins are not wiped away like sweat when you’ve run too fast or too far; and now I can’t run at all. Today I am outraged by the use of camouflage in the desert. Disguises nothing, you’ve noticed? With sophisticated surveillance devices, there’s no need for blotches simulating mud and sand. Camouflage of a sort is worn by the Cheerleader, his business suit, navy or gray. You’ve seen him bounce down the steps of Air Force One, sprightly, airy. Crossing the tarmac, he waves us off, the palm of his hand denying access as we watch the evening news. Thumbs-up, he gives us the finger; his tight-lipped smile, mum’s the word. The boy who painted our fence has gone to his war—a kid who worked in a toy store at the mall, had no future in that line and asked what I worked at since I am seldom at the little house in the country. I showed him a book. He took it in his hands. Bewildered, he laughed as though at a useless brick, slick and lighter than the ones that edge the front path but do not keep weeds out of the garden. It’s a book with false moves written at the turn of this century, not this sketchbook, album, field notes of the past and passing days.
I’m comfortable with first person, don’t mind drawing back the velvet curtain, coming onstage. I was born in the city of P. T. Barnum, the impresario who never feared facing his audience even when the music was too highbrow or the freak show failed to amaze. On Good Morning America, a marine amputee is learning to walk on metal stilts to carry on in our three-ring circus.
I have my troupe, my regulars, bring them center stage as they are needed, one by two by three, duets and line dancing, solo turns throughout the seasons, not lives of the saints, yet not lives of the sinners. The improbable mathematician, his lapsed artist wife, the foreign student with the heavy rope of hair who appeared one night vowing never to return to Innsbruck where she grew up in extraordinary comfort. Call them my cast: in shameless imitation of Papa Haydn and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, I give you Sissy, a waif with golden hair and a bad habit; the Jesuit cousin—godless man of god; Audubon, who killed, stuffed and gave life through his art to our American birds; my parents in their molto adagio, who have long been defenseless. And you, brilliant in your supporting role, flipping the calendar back to take as good as you get, as though we are still in our prime. I look forward to your corrections, to my reply as I turn to the next blank page.
You advise me against bringing the Cheerleader into play, writing of here and now, allowing editorials to seep into my stories, spoiled fish wrapped in yesterday’s Times.
Let’s not get into shelf life.
You say: Outrage is a bumper sticker, one of many sentiments parked side-by-side in Kmart Plaza. Proud parent of an honor student at Monument Valley High. Honk if you love Borges.
There’s a picture of Charles Dickens sitting at his desk. He’s not writing, not addressing his next cause—illiteracy, pollution, tax laws, copyright, child labor: the list is long. His biographer tells us he’s imagining. Time out to conjure a story. His characters paper the walls, enacting their memorable scenes. A miniature girl sits on his knee; asking what next, she looks to her maker. Will she marry after many trials, or be awarded the famous deathbed scene? This picture of Dickens is on a card which reads ALL GOOD WISHES OF THE SEASON, a bland greeting he’d never put his name to, yet I have recently posted it above my desk to remind me how inadequate my dreams. Boz, partner me in a pantomime. Hold me aloft in a cold season. You’d be outraged at our accidental killing of Arab girls in a cement block school. Dip into the ink pot, Lover, imagine more than my bitter words. Write a gay or plaintive story about your desk to be auctioned this year, proceeds for the children’s hospital in Great Ormond Street to which you contributed ten pounds, a theatrical skit, and your precious time.
Today I forgot the name Panofsky but remembered a review I wrote a long time ago in which I took issue with Slaughterhouse-Five, a war novel that became famous, much praised. Vonnegut was imprisoned in Dresden during the firebombing, carnage unfathomable, just months before the Allies won that war. I could not begin to understand how the writer worked his story in a somewhat co
mic vein. Wall of flame, overkill, body count, his banal refrain—So it goes. In honesty, I was still something of that girl, flannel nightgown buttoned to the neck, listening one night to the seductive report of a survivor, to a foreign student who could not guess my . . . emotional incapacity.
In God We Trust: the national motto was first used during the Civil War, when religious sentiment was running high. The Secretary of the Treasury responded to pleas of the devout that it be printed on our currency.
Indian Summer: a few days of blessed warmth after the cold weather has set in; or the time when the Indians harvested their crops; or a time before frost when they attacked European settlements storing their food for winter. The settlers retaliated with cumbersome muskets. So it goes.
I live in the city. I share the garden across the street. If you would like to know with maximum honesty about my loves or further shame, my faltering heart, it’s none of your business. My brother is switching channels, expecting the bombed mosque in Mosul will be shown in more detail. Was it them? Or us? No matter, he is outraged. We all are. My husband, who works with numbers—market up, market down—figures to the nth dollar the military contracts dealt out to the Cheerleader’s friends doctoring the books, the outrageous rip-offs. There will be a candlelight vigil. We will stand with our homemade placards: WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER. Song, piety, mulled cider in the Park. It will only be effective if we wait till the sun has set, well after dark.
Daybook, October 8, 2007
1929, the year of my conception. What were they thinking of, bringing another hungry mouth into the world? Perhaps not thinking—her red hair aflame on the pillow? I must not make a drama of that cool October night, perhaps Columbus Day, in the little house with its peaked gin gerbread roof and curlicue hasps on the door. The cottage had just been built for our middle class comfort, for a night of their fumbling and fondling under the blanket in the front bedroom that faced North Avenue. In the throes of discovery they were blessedly not thinking. Who am I to say fumbling at this very late date, casting my mother in the role of shy schoolteacher rescued from spinsterhood by the brash boy detective? I have portrayed them too often, Loretta and Bill, made them my subjects.
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