The Rags of Time

by Maureen Howard

  —St. Augustine, Confessions, X, 12

  We had been best of friends, boyhood friends. A possible way to begin? My profession, such as it is, does not lend itself easily to words. Numbers are my game. At times I must explain as I chalk the blackboard. Given x + y and xy find x and y, simple stuff, but this is a confounding story. Bertie, Chairman and CEO of Skylark, a telecommunications empire—so his enterprise is called in the business section of the Times—Bertie is charged with conspiracy to commit fraud. I am waiting to take the stand as a character witness, have been waiting for two days, as you well know, since I deliver Cyril to school while you stay home with Maisy, our congested girl once again prisoner of the nebulizer. But this is not a family story. Cyril delivered, I head down to the Federal Courthouse we’ve often seen on cop shows. The echoing hallways are unfamiliar off screen, dismal. I have been called to testify that Bertie is an upright player in the financial games of this republic, in sum, a good old boy, has been since I first knew him, eighth grade. He is charged with backdating his options, tinkering with the books of his corporation so that gain became loss, or vice versa, good tricks that would please my students, many of them preparing for their future in the business world.

  I am writing in the small green notebook in which you record our sightings of northeastern birds. It has been years since I scribbled more than a quick note with pen on paper. Attorney Thaddeus Sylvan informed me that Security might not look kindly on my laptop, though my life and times are easily accessed, from the incompleteness of my Yale degree to my credit rating to the theorem I am attempting to work to its probable conclusion. Your notebook slipped easily into the pocket of a gray flannel suit worn to Wall Street by my grandfather. I rescued it along with his pocketwatch, so that I might wear it when called to testify on behalf of Bertram Boyce, who’s between a rock and a hard place. Silenced, I resort to the shorthand of clichés; sequestered in a small room with unforgiving metal chairs and a behemoth of a scarred wood table. It seems, as I look over the page, that I write in a retro voice much like my grandfather’s. Cyril O’Connor was a gent who was formal at breakfast, who muted his affection at bedtime and contained his exuberance when our Yankees won the game. A shame you never knew him.

  Bear with me, Lou. I will ease up. I’m attempting to describe the occasion when I reattached to Bertie, who I must claim as my good friend. You were along for the ride. It is best to turn back to that day on which Bert and Artie found each other again, embraced in a Judas moment, though who betrays, who saves the day is yet to be determined. Should anyone audit this memory bank or question its inventions, they must know you cannot testify against me, insofar as you are my loving wife.

  Field Notes: October 12, 2007, 3:30 P.M. U.S. Weather Station, Central Park, 65°-70° (trusting to memory, therefore guessing), possible afternoon shower.

  A volley of shots in the distance. A thrasher fluttered into the bulrushes. I faked a pistol with my hand. Backfire.

  A great egret flew to the island in Turtle Pond. Displaying his annoyance, he chose not to perform his strut. In something of a huff, you lowered your binoculars. We’d come for songbirds stopping off on their migration to pleasant winter climes. The day was unseasonably warm, as though the years flipped fast forward and phoebes had long abandoned the sheltering grasses round the pond.

  Lou, there was nothing to fear on a Monday afternoon in Central Park. Above—swift sailing puff clouds; below—still water glazed in sunlight.

  A second volley.

  I know it’s backfire, you said, convincing yourself no sharpshooter crawled the swampy undergrowth. Took me a week to get you to come birding, never my great thrill, yours. I wanted to see your pleasure at the green gold of the warblers, observe your full attention sketching their pinstripe tails. I wanted you to breathe easy, Lou, for a few hours of the day. Our Sylvie, more than friend, who often looks after the children, had gone off, a visit to her stepdaughter in sunny CA. You checked your watch, opened this small spiral notebook to record our sighting of the egret and the single thrasher in the reeds repeating his mockingbird cry. This outing was going as well as could be expected, given we had abandoned our children to a student of mine with no experience in kid care other than a brood of brothers back home.

  Turtle Pond lies directly below Belvedere Castle, once a stone shell, a hollow stage set built to enchant the eye. All such notes, Lou, come by way of my grandfather, a would be historian if life had not ordained his career on Wall Street, allowing only an occasional Sunday walk in the Park to instruct a boy. So, if I include the Delacorte Theater with its seats facing an empty pit, we might have been a couple of lost ground lings from a pageant of heroic legends. Tourists and a busload of schoolchildren were on the viewing terrace above, looking down from the battlements on the little body of water and the island both, as their guide blasted through a megaphone, ENTIRELY MAN MADE. A disappointment to his audience surely, but there we were by way of entertainment, Louise Moffett and Arthur Freeman, playing our observation of the birds for all to see. With the next volley of earsplitting pops, you mimed fright. If these outlanders had simply turned from us, looked down other side of the Castle, they might have seen men in their Conservatory jackets attempting to deal with a disabled tractor backfiring at the utility shed. I enclosed you in the rough body hold of a protective embrace. How long had such childish fun been in short supply? Shrugging free of me, your cap tumbled down the embankment. Artie to the rescue. In a princely gesture, I set it atilt on your head. Worry lines not permanently etched in your brow were hidden in the shadow of the bill, but your cheeks were ghostly pale in the bright light of day. You tucked in the ponytail. That day plays a PowerPoint show in my head: Here’s the moody egret, here a lone phoebe seeking shelter in the reeds from the guide blasting Vista Rock with misinformation, here’s my wife, gorgeous and plain. Mind if I put that down? You insist you are a throwback to Household Mom in black-and-white reruns. I might say a fading American rose. I still call you Miss Wisconsin. Cheese, say cheese.

  Pen poised above this very notebook, the stern set of your mouth would not give way to a smile as you estimated the great egret’s height. I brushed the wet grit of the embankment off my khakis. Then, as though to amuse in a game of I Spy, I trained my binoculars on the foot soldiers above. The schoolchildren, you may recall, waved little flags—red, white and green—but the tourists seemed puzzled or plain embarrassed by their bird’s-eye view of us horsing around. What had they seen? A private moment, always lovers in the Park, though not often caught in an act of observation. Adjusting my lens, I dictated notes to you on the enemy’s shaggy plumage, their slack mandibles and splintered beaks.

  They could not hear me describe them as goosey gander, common tern, but no doubt heard you cry, “Oh, Artie.” The high chirp of your laughter reached up to include them as they watched our tussle, your love punch to my ribs and my gentlemanly gesture, taking your arm as we climbed toward the Great Lawn, where soccer practice was in progress, boys in the blue jerseys of Trinity School. Next the Pinetum, where you hoped for a red crested kinglet, then the Reservoir, expecting the arrival of grebes basking in the sun. Again you checked the time. Our Maisy had the first cold of that peculiar season, which did not deliver crisp Fall days. I’m uncertain how much to recall of our encounter with Bertram Boyce, not yet charged with backdating options of Skylark shares, but I am certain I lured you away from the apartment with Maisy’s congestion, with Cyril’s trembling tower of Lincoln Logs. I offered you the consuming delight of birds in their citified migration.

  You hurried ahead, past dog walkers, babies in slings, past the elderly taking the air, skateboarders—illegal on the walkway. The pretzel salesman had resumed his Summer post. A fat boy in a red shako, much gold braid on his breast and belly, began a melancholy taps on his bugle—Day is done, gone the sun—broke to drain spittle from his mouthpiece.

  You were not amused by this touch of Fellini. Checking your watch: Four-fifteen.

  Columbus
Day, I said. Parade long over.

  I wish they’d stop fooling with the calendar.

  The holiday stuck on to the weekend. Cyril had wanted to go to school that morning, always wants to go to school, where he outwits his class-mates less endowed. His cleverness is a cross he will have to bear. Only now that I recall Bert Boyce and Artie Freeman breaking through the Fifth Avenue crowd when Columbus Day was kept in its place, the disruptive twelfth. Snotty nerds lusting for the drum majorettes and their flock of twirlers from the outer boroughs, those high-stepping girls far beyond our reach.

  In the Pinetum we did a swift look-see searching for the red crest of the kinglet. There was only the resident clown in a battered derby prompting his flea-bitten parrot—H’lo there! ’Lo there! Impatient, you took the Reservoir Track the long way round. Not a merganser in sight as we headed to the crosstown bus to get home to the children. Our pretense of pleasure seemed a failed duty until you caught the noiseless swivel of an owl’s head, flick of tufted ears.

  The long-eared, napping till end of day, did not deign to acknowledge our ogle eyes trained on him. Drowsy creature, yet I believe he heard every step of our approach, listened to each shallow breath of our silence, a comfort compared to the panting of joggers. We had discovered him fully disclosed on his perch. If he’d been in a story, he’d be wiser or at least crafty, the role he’s often assigned. You wrote in this very notebook, the turn of the page noiseless. Flipping back, I see with what care you drew the eye stripe cutting a perfect V to the owl’s beak. In any case, I had my prize for the day in your extended moment of delight, which swept aside Maisy’s catarrh, the terrifying pops of an old combustion engine, and the anxiety, never mentioned, that my work was not going well. I might not find my way through the knots of higher mathematics to the solution of one small problem. In clear sight of the owl, the troubling world dropped away. Louise, confess your thing about owls, starting with barn owls on the farm in Wisconsin. The first prize you ever won, sketch of an owl perched on a downspout, every night watching that bird from your bedroom window until the dive for its prey, the death shriek of its victim.

  Our binoculars captured the Halloween mask of the owl’s flat face. I must not deprive the bird of his owlness, see him pompous and befuddled, like Owl in the book our son loves. An uncertain shuffle brought the prolonged silence to a halt. Do you remember the old woman huffing and puffing her way round the track? You signaled her to stop? With a flip of your hand ordered: Look, look up. A party of three sharing the vigil. In a contest of wills, this urban owl might outlast us. Finally, the shabby old girl broke the spell, shuffled toward the tennis courts, her breathing audible—uneven. The sky had darkened, leaves rustled underfoot. The long-eared was surely gloating as we headed toward Fifth Avenue, his unblinking eyes on us. I preened at coaxing a laugh at Turtle Pond, and for some time, long minutes of owl time, you’d been lost to the world.

  This is Bud’s story, Bertie’s. I was the only kid allowed to call him Bertie and will use that boyhood moniker when I speak of our friendship, rekindled that very day, the day of our birding. My “guard” in the waiting room is a court attendant, Tim McBride, gabby Irish, “been in the job since.” What follows is the real dope on Jimmy Hoffa disappearing into a cement grave, not the void, same year as bilingual signs here in the courthouse rest rooms. “My case” will most likely not be called today. The parties still in judge’s chambers. McBride releases me till after lunch. My case, an odd way to refer to the troubles of Bertram Boyce, far from mine. His are unfortunately dated. Bert took liberties with time. My problem was clocked—will the scholar-in-training triumph over the odds or fail to make the grade in given time? That question troubles you, Lou, though the solution is solely mine.

  Released into the city at high noon, I could head up, or downtown. History lies in both directions. Downtown is Wall Street, where my grandfather went to the office every working day. He invested, bought and sold, made money. We are living off him now, Louise, though he’s gone these six years if I reckon correctly, which I should be able to do, since he has willed me the luxury of going back to school to pick up my love affair with mathematics. So I had the choice of walking down the blocks to look at the Stock Exchange that rang the market to my grandfather’s attention each day, though not going as far as the Trade Center wound or taking the route up to SoHo, where we lived our first years together in your loft, the materials of your trade all around us—paints, charcoal smudges in progress, canvases stacked against the wall. I was in that empty waiting room at my request, the privilege granted by the machinations of Bertie’s lawyer, who believed I must fiddle on with statistics and correlations for my class in applied mathematics. Furthermore, I did not want to spend time under the surveillance of Attorney Sylvan, famous for finding loopholes in the law. I had been coached by him, his every slick word put in my mouth, thinking when the time comes I’ll say what I have to say truly—my schoolboy adventures with Bertie, my larky jobs at Skylark, more play than employment.

  My choice was not to travel downtown for recess, Lou, not to recall the dutiful life of Cyril O’Connor, not indulge in Lower Broadway, where we were so gone on each other our nights of love consumed us. I’ve loosened up, though consumed is too heady a word, or too visceral. My tongue freed by a hot dog with the works as I perused the discount junk on Canal Street, odd lots of T-shirts with Goth symbols of the Reich, dog beds, doll heads, faucets, copper wire, cruets labeled Oil and Vinygar, framed posters of Che and the Eiffel Tower. Products in their mass graves guarded by their keepers, who seemed to be doing swift business of sorts, perhaps as subject to investigation as Bertram Boyce’s deals at Skylark. Troubling.

  You were well acquainted with troubles that day in the park, your fears crossing the line from daily concern to manic organic. Alar in the apple juice, bacteria flourishing in plastic bottles, E. coli, tuna with its dose of mercury—all loomed large as the national debt. A whiff of the super’s stogie in the hallway, Asian flu, Teflon and faulty seat belts—right up there with toxic waste. Nothing to fear but fear itself, attempting the noble line, I fail to amuse. Along with your catalog of horrors, there is Maisy’s persistent congestion, and the uncertain course of my career. Love, in one of its many distortions, allows you never to speak of my possible failure, though I work hard, harder than I ever have in my life. Lou, there is the one unspeakable word—talent, if in fact the gift of numbers was ever mine to squander. No longer nimble, one step behind the beat? Better to record the owl’s composure on a warm October day.

  That night when Cyril and Maisy were safely stashed in their bunk bed, I discovered you were keeping an account of the current war’s fatalities, though only our boys were admitted to your file. You had copied each soldier’s name, age, rank and hometown into a baby book, a present from your mother intended for Maisy’s vital statistics—first tooth, first fever, first word. On the cover a stork carts a swaddled newborn in its beak. I suggested the death toll of Operation Iraqi Freedom is online, www.Iraqbodycount.org. Oh, that’s only information, you said, transferring Private First Class, 20, Linden, NJ, and Staff Sergeant, 34, Shreveport, LA, from the Times to your register, inscribing each name, your pen dipped in India ink. Kind of crazy, the record made personal, and then Louise Moffett, once an artist on the cutting edge, now invested in the role you embrace as housewife and mother, costumed in apron and sensible shoes, closes the baby book, takes up a mystery, British. Potboilers, you call these murders set in the manse or vicarage. The gardener did it or the village doctor you thought so kind. The night of our birding, you challenged the sly smile of my bewilderment.

  You know the satisfaction, Artie. Puzzles, solutions.

  Our pleasant ongoing argument in which I point out that a problem chalked on the blackboard is without motive—no adultery, sibling rivalry, not even greed to provoke a crime.

  Ambition?

  You win.

  And fell asleep with the murder unsolved. I scanned my preparation for class—harmless
proofs completed, then lay your book aside, turning down the page not to lose the place in that story. Even in sleep you looked troubled, gone from me, but earlier that day I had you back. As we headed along the sidewalk to 86th Street, I was hopeful till worry surfaced in tightness around your mouth, an audible sigh as you looked across Fifth Avenue at the apartment house where I lived with my grandparents when I was a boy, an orphan. You won’t go there, a slippery expression, though you take care to avoid the wounds of my childhood, which I believe long healed. I have hoped that Bertie, with his troubles, all too real, might release you from conjuring the demons of my past, and from free-floating angst that pursues you. OK pursues us all, but we get Cheerios in the bowl before reading the morning paper.

  Some of us. Some do not.

  I imagine how gently your might cut me off. Backdating to that day of owl and egret, your ponytail slapping air, for no reason at all, gave me hope. That night, the night of our birding in the Park, while you slept I turned on the tube, muted it to indulge in our nightcap addiction to the comic turns on the dysfunctional state of our nation. The pantomime without clever words and background laughter seemed as inadequate, to wing a metaphor, as a Band-Aid on a suppurating sore. Or merely electronic—a fleeting message held in our hand: pick up juice, organic snacks at the market. We’d lost track of the sand castle blown away in Desert Storm. So it’s ever been while Rome burned, though have you noticed there’s no tune for this war? Where have all the flowers gone? My mother strumming, Long time passing. Long time ago.

  I am writing in a new notebook with unlined pages, bought at Pearl Paint, where you ordered supplies when you were still invested in your art. Your little green notebook is, after all, for the birds. When I returned to the courthouse, Tim McBride presented me with a sealed envelope. Lawyer for the defense—that is, Thad Sylvan—asked me to consider in my testimony the charities of Bertram Boyce Jr. and the corporate goodwill of Skylark. And what did I recall of the Boyce family holidays, and the religion of their choice? I remember that the mother (divorced) went to Aspen for Christmas, Bermuda at Easter. She took Bert along until he was old enough to be abandoned to the Park Avenue apartment or sent to visit his father, a mysterious tinkerer in Bethesda, Maryland, who held patents on medical apparatus that paid the bills, saved lives. I did not share these memories. Sylvan should do his homework. Why not ask poor Heather Boyce who, in Newsweek, walked up the courthouse steps arm in arm with Bertie, a couple properly suited for good works. Their names are printed in programs of the symphony, the opera—Bertram and Heather Boyce, right up there with the heavy donors. Black tie at the Modern and the Met, drives you crazy, Lou, their attention to couture. And Project Hope, the llamas with big, soulful eyes, Heather supplying indigenous folk with herds of the beasts for costly sweaters. Shearing, carding, spinning for a week’s handout of rice and beans.