The Rags of Time

by Maureen Howard

  I throw down the book I was reading, nothing to do with an October night in Bridgeport at the start of the Great Depression. The false memory of my begetting was a digression, an off-bounds stop on the way to a disturbing story. This very day I had searched the pages of a novel I’d written as though checking an old bankbook to reckon where I spent foolishly, what interest accrued that I might go on with and ended up broke, wishing dramatically to have never been born. I was attempting to make some connection, this daybook with my rants against the war to the book thrown aside. To my discredit, that love story was of the Second World War, yet all I called up, attempting to balance the account, was to switch the scene to my parents’ bedroom, muslin curtains flapping in a welcome breeze while I read War and Peace in a creaking wicker chair. Why was I allowed to invade their space through the long Summer days while I read Tolstoy’s great work? I was fourteen years old.

  Today I can no longer look at my war story, the novel with the gold medallion on the cover declaring my prize. I put on an old black coat with the buttons dangling, as though covering tattered jeans might conceal the shame of conjuring my parents’ embrace on the four-poster. Is the coat needed on this warm day?

  Your topcoat, Mimi. Better safe than sorry.

  I put words in my mother’s mouth while Bill strikes a match, cups his hand around yet another Lucky. In this way we keep track of each other, though they’re long gone.

  If egg whites are stiffly beaten, the meringue never falls.

  Just brought the fellow across the state line into the jurisdiction, don’t get a hold on your lefty complaint. This rendition? I set myself up for their corrections, begging their care, their tolerance, my indulgence of the past, I suppose. The picture of him in the Bridgeport Post, Bill, plump, choirboy handsome, the jaunty brim of his felt hat casting a shadow on his smile. Handcuffed to a mobster of note: Simple police work, extradition.

  May Day 1978

  I write to you on his birthday, the wrong day for my father to be born. He voted Conservative down the line. You pulled the Socialist lever long after McLevy was thrown out of the Party. The one blip in your near perfect pairing? There’s no evidence to the contrary. In any case, thank you for having me.

  —A note never sent to my mother,

  her mind fleeting, soon gone

  So in the old black coat I headed to the Park across from our apartment house designed in ’29, a year of public and personal disaster. I aimed to cancel my debit column with fresh air, bracing city views. Just a walk, yet, waiting for the light to change on Central Park West, I felt I was off on a redemptive journey. Turning to see our apartment house as though for the last time, I noted the familiar storybook façade—the lofty terraces, crenellated towers, fake balconies and dungeon gridwork of each window. Do you recall the grande dame at a meeting in the lobby after we’d all bought our co-op shares and could now think of the golden concrete bulk with silvery doors as our property? In a voice steady with the assurance of old money, she brandished her cane, protesting any alteration to the building that would not be a landmark till 1985. Most particularly she defended the casement windows that screeched open on their hinges quite easily enough for men who’d lost everything in the market to jump to their deaths on Black Tuesday. Not accurate, for it would have been, at the earliest, the winter of ’31 when the first tenants moved in, but she was grand with a blue rinse permanent wave and bright lipstick of a past era. And who knows if it was only a story made up in defense of our iron windows, which, though not sturdy, are handsome to this day?

  You said: There’s no one among us to challenge her. The small triumph of the survivor.

  I walked into the Park slowly, as advised, and headed straight for the slope running up to the Reservoir newly enclosed with a black iron fence, replica of the Calvert Vaux original. There was not a ripple on the water. The ever present gulls squatting on the pipe that spans the Reservoir appeared two dimensional, so many ducks in a shooting gallery. For a long moment no one in sight, all the better to cherish my melancholy brought on by eavesdropping on my parents’ bedroom with its crisp dresser scarf and the wicker chair in which I spent most of a summer reading War and Peace for the love story, skimming the pages of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, understanding less of that carnage than I did of the Bridgeport Post mapping the D-Day Invasion, or the White Russian Division advancing on the Germans. That war progressed on the nightly news my father listened to, head tilted toward the speaker of our bulbous mahogany console, while I set the table in the kitchen. When I finished my chore, I’d come into the living room to hear the roundup; then my father took his place at the head of the table and softened the bloody events of this day for my mother, who absorbed the news in silence, then took off her apron to serve our supper. One night, with adolescent bravado, I declared that the defeat of the Soviets at Minsk was much like the fall of Napoleon’s Grand Army in the very same city, history repeating itself as our table talk mixed tidbits of neighborhood gossip, my brother’s mastery of Latin declensions and my father’s unpatriotic grumble at his paltry serving of meat.

  Now, Bill. How often she’d sneak her chop or chicken thigh onto his plate.

  Taking up my route round the Reservoir, I determined to leave behind these girlish memories of war, more honest than my invention of Nazi espionage in the novel I’d thrown aside. Looking to the first lap of my forbidden journey, I saw the runners coming upon me, a full cadre of men and women in red jerseys training for some competition. Their leader swiveled his gleaming shaved head to check on the pack falling farther and farther behind. It is only in recalling the moment of the runners straining to catch up with this lean man wound tight, clearing me out of his way, that I clung to the fence, saw in the tranquil Reservoir a mirror image of the bright sky that banished all thought of my troubling intrusion on the lives of Loretta and Bill, subject to my telling their tales. In a Chaplinesque strut, sure to leave my fraudulent war novel behind, a love affair trumped by betrayal, I began my route around the Reservoir Track. The body took hold with its thoughtless demands. The level course is rimmed with limp mullein in this season and untidy wild asters. I’m not part of the jogging scene. The heart that’s failed me improvises its bebop arrhythmia. I take caution as ordered, slow to a stroll, but never give in to a bench, not even as I approach the bridge joining track to parkland, where a gathering of athletes, maybe just neighborhood friends, pay court to the old runner, Alberto Arroyo. He’s at his post every fine day, some not so fine, the gold medal dangling from the patriotic ribbon round his neck. In running gear, silk shorts this crisp day. I catch sight of the swollen blue veins in his legs, fanning out on the weathered cheeks the handlebar mustache white as his gleaming halo of hair. His gestures exuberant as always, though by his side the steel cane, rubber grips on its claws. It’s said he ran the first New York Marathon, indeed was a founder. Who knows if that story is true or with time became legend? The time before the old legs gave out, before he sported the Mylar toga each cold day, conserving body heat at the end of no particular race, before he became a figure of reverence at the South Pumping Station, fashioning himself as local patron saint, grandee of the Running Track.

  A mere walker in down-at-heel tennis shoes, I thought how neat to be of that company, to know I might scramble up to the Reservoir, pay homage to the old runner, listen to his words of wisdom or enjoy the gossip of the day to set me free of the reading chair which this day brought me back to the place of origin, my voyeuristic tale with its many variations—how on an Autumn night when the barberry hedge was not yet planted in the patch of front yard to absorb the noise of traffic, with the green linen shade drawn against the streetlight, my parents felt their way to each other in the dark. Felt their way with what purpose? I heard the footfall behind me, the huffing breath of the next trotter. All passed me by. As though I was stuck on a treadmill, the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park with its swirl of Guggenheim Museum seemed no closer. Soldiering on in my invalid pace, this day’s out
ing was a strategic maneuver against the assault of memory.

  This stretch of track is more carefully tended, though the ornamental cherry trees have dropped their end of season pips and, sloping down to the police barracks, ferns flopped, yellow and limp. Tourists had found their way into the Park with museum shopping bags and guidebooks in hand—Germans with camera gear; Japanese lovers delicately holding hands; a party of Brits, the Union Jack on their sweatshirts. Clouds swept in, a sudden surface rippling, and a mallard, floating free of the rushes, ruffling her wings, was joined by a male with brighter plumage by far.

  Name of the laike? Sharp Cockney diphthong.

  Walking on I called out: Reservoir.

  Can’t they see it’s man-made? The wonky circumference distorted by a hydraulic bulge on the south side. The slight undulations of this carefully plotted shoreline bear no resemblance to nature’s random design. Turning, not to be rude to visitors, I called out again, Reservoir. The Japanese man put an arm round his girl as though to protect her from my shrill cry. The Germans had set up a tripod for a picture of our Fall blazing an Oktoberfest across the shimmering expanse of water. That shot can be bought from a vendor outside the Guggenheim, but it would be their own view, recall a hike in New York. Yes, they carried burled walking sticks as though to conquer an alpine height, but our Track is level, the water piped in, no racing streams, no cascade. My breath came short, unsteady as I turned round again to call out another correction.

  Jacqueline Kennedy!

  Reservoir, I meant to repeat, but the Brits had gone their way. She would have recalled the old Croton Reservoir piping water down to the city after the raging fires that consumed Lower Broadway long before the Civil War. Keen on preservation, she might have winced then, aware of history’s erasures, accepted the memorial renaming with grace. On a slick little map, I’d seen the blot of blue water Lake Jackie, too familiar by far, yet she’d know her name would convey to the Germans, the Brits, even to the private school kids who replaced my Japanese lovers, kids awkwardly entwined on a bench, a lacrosse stick balanced between them.

  Drawing back from the heavy breath of his ardor, the girl shrugged him off. I was their embarrassment, old lady in tennis shoes, buttons dangling.

  Needle and thread, Mimi. Don’t let yourself go.

  Old party pretending to look away, not to admire the girl’s mane of long honey hair, the neat muscular knots in her legs. She’s baiting this guy. The awkward gesture of his hand hovering in limbo above her bare knee; his face, broad and earnest, Slavic perhaps. The affront of his rejection sends me back to the creak of the wicker chair in my parents’ bedroom as I settled each Summer day into the romance. How inevitable of Natasha, that enchanting child, to love the careless Prince, not the worthy suitor, Pierre. But worse, morally worse in my view: when Tolstoy finally marries her to the good man, she plays their last scenes as a frump, a plump housewife and mother.

  Still reading your book?

  Yes; they fed horse flesh to the Turks, did you know? Proclaimed at the dinner table to alarm. They, the French or the Russians? I was uncertain, but the shocking tidbit was mine. Which we may be eating now.

  Rumor that Kunkel, the butcher on Capital Avenue, minced horsemeat in with the beef. Now that recall does stop me; the supper table lesson on the bloody retreat of Napoleon’s Grand Army. The lacrosse player, lolling on the bench not two feet from the Track, was the girl. The bright blue jacket of her team thrown open, breasts on display. Let me make that clear: nipples, erect in chill Autumn air, poked a T-shirt which read, EVERYONE LOVES A CATHOLIC GIRL.

  So untrue. I could tell her stories along that line. We were not embarrassed by each other.

  Me—reading her chest.

  She—slouching in a phony embrace, humiliating that boy. Then, ditching the flirtation, she ran off, lacrosse stick cradling air, boy trailing after. Dismissed from their after school tryst, I felt a sharp pang of shame, the lot of a voyeur. Had I invented my parents’ embrace in the four-poster, then hovered over these hapless kids to dismiss my guilt? I had manipulated history to write a love story. Printed and praised, there could be no erasure. Playing a shell game—that war, this war, did I hope for a reprieve with the feeble cry of my outrage at the Cheerleader, at the coaches directing his boyish strut as he comes to the podium on the White House lawn? We are audience to his grotesque performance at halftime, his bounce, joy in atrocities. Whatever happened to Civil Disobedience? The essay not assigned in college. Fellow grew beans, lived by a pond, nothing as fine as Central Park, what we’ve got here.

  When I turned back to see the distance I’d come, the Germans were still in the photography business. Finding the pin oaks dull at end of day, they’d set up a white screen to reflect what was left of sunlight on tarnished bronze leaves. Give it a week. Our grand finale will knock your Birkenstocks off. My heart beat a fierce catch-up thump. I was breathless as I came to the open view at last, the point of full exposure. Clear across the Reservoir loomed the house I fled a half hour ago. From this vantage point, the trees, still leafed out, erased all other buildings on Central Park West. Our turrets caught the last glitter of this day in false gold.

  Yes, the El Dorado. The presumptuous name of the house where we live with ancient plumbing and electric circuits updated with vigilance, with those casement windows sanded and painted against rust and the mural in the lobby of a phantasmagoric pilgrimage to a futuristic city of heavily varnished gold. And in a back room where the sun never shines, my failed book thrown aside.

  Get out in the sun, Mimi. Take your bike for a ride.

  My secondhand Raleigh, tires gone flat while I turned the pages of Tolstoy’s very long story renewed and renewed. I feel the hard surface of its indestructible library cover (dark green), title stamped in the spine. And see, as of this day, the slick dust jacket of the war story that garnered my prize.

  REVISION

  I could but dream the whole thing over as I went—as I read; and bathing it, so to speak, in that medium, hope that, some still newer and shrewder critic’s intelligence subtly operating, I should have breathed upon the old catastrophes and accidents, the old wounds and mutilations and disfigurements, wholly in vain.

  —Henry James, The Art of the Novel

  On the flap of the book which bears a gilt medallion on its cover, The Normandy invasion of the Second World War is rendered in cinematic detail. Flap copy performs its duty. With detailed care the writer illuminates (!) the baby face of a soldier who figures in the opening pages as disfigured beyond recognition. The dog tag hanging round the kid’s neck with a Star of David recalls his bar mitzvah, Torah in hand, that side story set in a clap-board temple on an unlikely back street in the Berkshires, but then it’s all unlikely—the body count of those left behind on the sands of Normandy fails to elevate a misbegotten romance. The boy soldier—he’s well out of it, out of the plot. His commanding officer had studied physics with Heisenberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute whereby hangs an operatic tale. Liebestraum, my story of an American Captain’s puppy love for a soprano he occasionally slept with in Bayreuth, the Führer’s favorite Art Site, is searchingly honest. Blurb on, elicit kudos from readers before they turn the first page. Too late to be sorry. Terrible thing to do, conjure that kid out of a squat brick high school, flagpole at the ready in a dusty playground. Note of pathos, fakes his age to fight the Nazis. Stunning body count of the D-Day landing, the Captain’s doomed foreign affair, his postwar prize of suburban survival. Was that last bittersweet chapter all I learned from Tolstoy’s true and dark story? That war, this war. I think now of the boy who painted our fence in Monterey, Mass. He waited some months till he was the age to enlist, but writerly ambition stirred my plot line years before he quit the toy store, that job with no future. He is now serving his third deployment in Iraq.

  Today, reading in my airless back room, the landing gear grunting onto the shore of Omaha Beach, my soldier boy—jaw shattered, chill waves pulling him under—ticked off the memory
of my father turning up the volume of the Philco on the evening when all America, so the story goes, listened to Roosevelt call a benediction upon our troops, the pride of our nation. My mother coming from the kitchen to hear we shall return again and again, while I stood by the console. The clatter of knives and forks when I dropped them during the President’s prayer.

  Mimi! My father scolding.

  History demoted to domestic anecdote, the uncontrollable urge to bear witness, write myself into the scene.

  Where was I when the first mushroom cloud rose in its ghostly threat on the black-and-white screen?

  The sun parlor, where my father had set up a twelve-inch set to watch the Yankees.

  When Kennedy slumped into his wife’s lap?

  London, a rented flat in Chelsea. The neighbors we’d never met came to the door with flowers.

  Bobby bloodied on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel?

  Walking my daughter to first grade, streets strangely empty. The assassination posted on the school door.

  Let me unscramble time. In the personal almanac: my solemn attention to the landing of Allied Forces in Normandy, June 6, 1944, was broken by the kettle shrieking on the stove. I let go forks, knives and dessert spoons to savor rice pudding still warm from the oven. The following week, the school year ended, I turned to the opening pages of War and Peace. Mastering the difficult Russian names, I pursued the romance, admiring the wealthy landowners, suspecting the impoverished royals might be up to no good. In my parents’ bedroom I settled into the creaking wicker chair by a side window. On the few dark days, I read under the soft light of a silk-shaded lamp. Scraps of my mother’s old skirts and my father’s worn trousers had been braided into a lumpy rug at the Women’s Art League, wool gathering history. On their Victorian dresser, her soft chamois nail buffer in its ivory case lay beside the empty leather holster for the County Detective’s gun. I am no longer sure why I plotted, or why they tolerated, this incursion into their room.