The Rags of Time

by Maureen Howard

  —“The Present Look of Our Great Central Park,”

  July 9, 1856, the New York Daily Times

  The truth, if told at all, must need be dreadful.

  —Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

  Hans Gruen died at 4:13 in the morning. Precise about arrivals and departures, he was often at the mercy of meetings running late, airport delays. He liked a drink with his wife at six-thirty. They were not together for dinner often enough. His children knew that their Sunday call must come just after nine o’clock his time, whether he was in Brussels or in Cambridge or New York with the wicked stepmother. Charles, always the gentleman, set up his kid brother for the first call. This practice went back to their college days, when he gave his father a weekly account of his accomplishments. Ned charmed for the money. Weeks might go by when Gruen was inaccessible, or his schedule rearranged by the breaking news. He would have been amused, not annoyed, by the inconvenient hour of his death, too late for the Times obituary that day.

  His wife stood at the foot of their bed, let the boys close in on his last indulgent smile, his final breath soft as a sigh. They wanted more of their father, always. When they were growing up, he had been absent so often, tracking economic disaster in general, in particular the fate of children hungry and abused. It was Charles, the sturdier son, who broke down when he closed his father’s eyes, then threw himself on the bed in a primitive keening, a supplicant, though now he would never get the attention, never be praised for the soccer trophy, the magna cum laude, the tree house he built on his own. With an unnatural strength, his stepmother pried him away, led him to the window to look down upon blank silence offered by the city in the middle of the night, unsure that view was a comfort.

  Amanda, the younger son’s wife, had been in these last few days, show ily incompatible with grief, leafing through Vogue until she knew the gaudy allure of each handbag by heart, ducking out of the vigil to meet friends for lunch. Claude—that was Gruen’s wife—now directed Ned and the girl—Hans persisted in calling Amanda the girl—to touch the cool flesh of her husband’s hand. Marie Claude had been christened MC, Mistress of Ceremonies, when she first took charge of events beyond Thanksgiving and Christmas—taxes, car insurance, yes, really, the rental of their cottage on Nantucket, all home economics to the man who, just back from the Sudan, would support targeted divestments in the petroleum sector, but did not live to elaborate on that moral scheme. The wicked stepmother: his joke when he brought his sons to meet Claude, a lifetime ago. The younger son now held her in his arms, Ned, the simpler boy who sought a replacement mother from the day he was born.

  She called Gruen’s office, could not bring herself to leave on tape the message they were expecting. The doctor said he would come at once to the apartment, death not officially closing the case. Claude proposed that in the morning Charles’ wife send the children to school. There was no need at this point to shepherd them in from Connecticut. The hospice nurse gathered the last vials of medication. She asked if Mrs. Gruen would like tea. Lili had been on night duty with Gruen in New York Hospital and here at home. A tidy body from the Philippines with a lilting accent, she spoke to her patient in a whisper each night of the crisis, bathed his dry lips with a sponge, begged a smile when she placed his finger on the silver cross on her neck, never guessing that Mr. Gruen had no use for her Christ on the cross, only the good works of human effort.

  Her role was not finished. Recording final dosage: the last rite of her service. The teapot was warm, as though Lili had known the hour of his death was upon her patient and his family. Skilled in consolation, she doled out the half spoon of sugar for Claude, who wanted the nurse and these grown boys to leave her alone with her husband but could not bring herself to say it.

  Amanda fussed about a particular black dress she had sent to the cleaners, and wondered if a coat might be needed.

  Her husband spoke softly not to offend. Why needed? No funeral. Ned had known for some years he’d married a brittle porcelain doll, self-absorbed like his mother, a guilt-free queen of décor and the bountiful gifts of the mall. He is the handsome son, slight and reedy, disfigured with a scrag gly beard. The adventure capitalist, his father called him, bailing him out time and again. There would be no again.

  There would be no funeral in accordance with Gruen’s wishes.

  When Claude was finally alone with her husband’s body, she knelt by the bed, their bed where he lay, the journey for best boy in the class over, resting in peace from the final trip he should never have taken. His weak lungs—he recently suffered a brief bout of pneumonia. Claude begged him to pass the job to an eager young woman, the one who spoke Arabic.

  Arabic not needed this time out. Just dollars and common sense.

  Dr. Do-Good.

  I will be—said as a complaint—escorted wherever I go. See only what they want the old man to see. Led about like a rock star or visiting congressman.

  Then why go?

  He held out his cell phone displaying his doctors’ numbers—office, home, weekends.

  Not about to believe that excellent medical advice would be carried out in a refugee camp, sub-Saharan, she scolded, In case of an emergency take two aspirin, drink plenty of clean water.

  Don’t be foolish, my dear.

  Had he said my dear? Hans playing Daddy Warbucks over the years to her Annie. She gave up, gave in to his determination.

  Smoothing the dent in his ring finger, she cried at her loss. In the hospital Lili had removed his wedding band, for safety. Time warped; the sun did finally rise, yet there would be the long day to get through. First, the doctor with kind words signing the official death certificate, dealing out Xanax to alleviate bereavement, dismissing Lili as she served more tea. Then on to phone calls, mumbled condolences, to arrangements that the Mistress of Ceremonies was, at this moment, not famously good at. She recalled the elaborate business of death, had buried, as they say, her mother and father. This past week she canceled her classes, no trip on Jersey Transit to the gritty school where improbably they first met, Hans Gruen and Claude Montour. His sons spoke with due solemnity of a memorial service, disposal of ashes. Charles reviewed the prepared obit for the Times. It was known that Gruen had entered the hospital, cause of death an aneurysm. Claude diagnosed it as exhaustion, years hooking up life support to the incurable world. Hans admitted to abandoning his routine on a long flight—skipping the Sudafed, not walking the aisles, perhaps knew he was dying. In his rush to get home unescorted, he crashed into economy class on the final link from Paris. A clot formed in his lungs, traveled to his brain, that generous brain. The doctors double-talked his inoperable chances. Hans demanded living, living so far as he was able, his last days at home.

  To Claude it seemed not their home, neighbors hovering, brandy and soda before breakfast. A wisp of a young man in a waiter’s jacket followed her back to the bedroom, a servant Mrs. Gruen had not called into play. Looking upon the dead, he blessed himself. It came back to Marie Claude from childhood. She performed the swift crisscross gesture she’d been taught by her aunts. Then the discovery came upon her—abandoned. And when abandoned as a child, she had refused the comfort offered, ran away from a home not hers, a spook house where she was billeted while her mother pursued an episode of true romance. The slight man in the white jacket mumbled in Spanish, a fragment of prayer. He cast his eyes down, asked at what time lunch should be served.

  Kneeling by the bier that was their bed, she heard the girl, Amanda. She must not be left alone. Then Marie Claude shut the door, said good-bye to her husband, clear and plain, not a whisper or a quick buss on the slack cheek, fleeting like the kisses bestowed when he hailed a taxi for Penn Station, packed her off to her classes in New Jersey. In recent months she looked back to see if he was steady as he walked along with the computer slung on a strap over his shoulder, balancing the old briefcase in hand. Saw his little two-step of recovered balance as the driver helped him into the car that would take him to the f
oundation where he had served his time. At the end of this year, he would graduate from Senior Fellow to Emeritus. Alive, alive-O, that became their sing-along at the breakfast table as she doled out his meds for the day: cockles and mussels, alive, alive-O . . . Sweet Molly Malone, Molly, the name of the mother who abandoned her to territory unknown in the Berkshires; idling with great-aunts, not a great passage in a girl’s shattered life. Raised on extravagant love and neglect, she was left-baggage in a ruined house. When she inherited its sagging ceilings, loping stairs and leaning tower, Hans had said raze it. Sell the ground it stands on as commercial property. She couldn’t find it in her heart—remembers speaking the wistful phrase—find it in her heart to demolish the old wreck, named it Mercy House as in—have mercy. For years it has been Mercy Learning Center for Women. As though she could roll back the emotional insolvency of her family, make amends, share with illiterate women what little she earned as a teacher. The house was in restoration when she married Hans. He called it a folly, her blue-chip folly.

  How long did she kneel by their bed? How fiercely insist she must watch as Gruen’s body was efficiently placed on a gurney, wheeled down the back hall, out the kitchen door to the service elevator? So that’s how it’s done—by two young attendants trained in the comfort of their neutrality. Left alone, she went at once to her Victorian dresser, its stained marble top facing off with Hans’ sleek Scandinavian wardrobe. Complementary, he said of their possessions, books in particular. His first editions of Ricardo, Das Kapital, all of Keynes and Galbraith; her worn copies of Mrs. Dalloway, Walden, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Day by day, his facts, her fancy. She grabbed a gray sweater, the one he brought from London midsummer, presented to her triumphantly: Costly, now the dollar is down. As long predicted. A gift he could easily afford. There was always some prize in his briefcase, a cowrie-shell necklace, a vial of precious saffron, a glass paperweight with a cricket trapped inside.

  Today was Friday, almost midday. For days she hadn’t done a lick of work. How did that come to mind? Her work was why Hans first loved her, so she supposed, when she was still starry-eyed with trust in the historical record, wondering if she could truly care for this man who asked with an arch smile, The truth will set us free?

  Now that he was gone, her every move seemed planned—slipping the book from the bag with student papers, following the route of her husband’s body. Stealing—back hall to kitchen door where she let herself out, rang for the service elevator, thanked the bewildered operator for his kind words. The half block to Fifth Avenue, then on to the Park, finding her way across the drive to Seneca Village, where she would read dry-eyed her preparation for class. Marie Claude (her childhood name) was good at hard lessons.

  Amanda said, We were about to call the police.

  Appropriately, Claude cried. She had been gone for an hour—longer. Her husband would have clocked it exactly. My loss, now isn’t that foolish? His leaving me. Gruen left so often for extravagant good works, this last time for the oil proposal and to observe thousands behind the chain-link fence of no-man’s land. He would write a report not limited to financial aid, give in to the old passion before he was elevated to Emeritus.

  Why, against my pleading—a sharp edge to Claude’s words—for God’s sake, as though a dose of economics, a shipment of rice . . . She stopped mid-sentence not to offend staff from his office. They were family arriving without invitation. Not to say your big checkbook will never end a long history of revenge, she recalled his care for child soldiers, those killer kids his concern well before Rwanda. Visiting the camps, Hans could spot the one child in a gang perhaps redeemable. She brought to mind the apocryphal story of an appealing boy. Handed over his machete.

  Kalashnikov, Ned’s correction.

  In any case his weapon, to the American about to take notes on his education in violence. That boy, safe as sheet-metal houses, last heard of teaching school in Swaziland. If there was another rescue this last time out, Hans did not live to document the appeal of a child now truly lost. Delivering this impromptu eulogy, Claude ushered the mourners toward the front hall. They lingered. It seemed she would never reclaim a moment alone with her sorrow. The Park had provided confrontation, not comfort. She understood why they’d come. Her husband knew each caseworker, each volunteer by name, meted out generous praise for their efforts, his care for their lengthy reports on the useless distribution of beans without access to clean water; this renewed anger at the diminishing promise of Oil for Food, UN millions ripped off. He dropped his professorial cool raging at the low estimate—twenty thousand children kidnapped—Liberia and Sudan.

  She said: Armed boys malnourished, living in camps. Then fell silent. The wisp of a servant: Lo siento mucho, lo siento, poured more tea in Claude’s mug than a body could bear.

  What’s he say? Amanda, patting the bump of her belly, suggested the Xanax: Which you know I can’t take. The girl, at long last, expecting a child. My bubble dress at the cleaners, perfect for the reception.

  Reception?

  Charles took control, brought Claude back to the bedroom where his father had lain in state through the long night. Gruen’s bathrobe lay at the ready on his reading chair as though he might rise to scan a report, search out the briefcase that traveled with him the long flight from Khar toum to Paris to home.

  Always, the tidying. She picked up his slippers, worn at heel. You might want . . . ? She was ripping the sheets off the bed, Lili’s job surely, and couldn’t help but think that in records of the colonial past she once scoured, the American past in the diaries of women, accounts of washing and dressing the bodies of their husbands, often with the help of neighbors.

  She said: The best shirt would be laundered, hands folded over the chest for the viewing. The boots polished, passed along to a son. Though, of course, it was more often the wife or mother who died. It was a relief to talk in this school-mistress way, a clip of history taking up the sudden slack of emotion. All true, she told Charles, the christening gown was not buried with the dead child, saved in a chest for the next one sure to come along. She told Hans’ middle-aged boy, beefy and broad, once an athlete with the trophies to prove it, that she had, after all, met his father at a seminar table.

  He lectured. Emerging markets, I remember. And I challenged him, what gall. It should never have happened, his coming to that limp branch of a city college.

  Charles brushed a twig out of her hair: He said: I’ll stay with you tonight. His wife would drive the children in from Greenwich in the morning.

  Now Amanda stood in the doorway, eyes fixed on the tear in Claude’s slacks. You going off like that so upset me. She offered the Xanax in its plastic bubble.

  Claude said: Why should I want to dull my loss? Yet, she must say something about her absence and with that purpose went to the dining room, where the last of the visitors had reassembled, the boy techie from Hans’ office among them. Dr. Gruen had valued his instruction. Tea party sandwiches were cleared from the table.

  Charles took the calls. A congressman, then a photographer his father had an affair with long before Claude came on the scene. The black dress at Madame Celeste could be picked up in this emergency. Then Newsweek presuming there might be more to the story.

  More than my father’s death? He drew back, dealt politely with the journalist pushing inquiries with the body still warm. PetroChina drilling beyond AU allotment? Gruen toured illegal mines in the Congo? Not this trip. Charles pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen, with one hand manipulated the wallet from his back pocket, overpaid the little guy. Lo siento, siento, storing away the sandwiches. No story beyond Gruen ’s long career monitoring what, in Africa, he might call the growth industry of human suffering. He had stolen that phrase from his father, hoped the journalist would not use it. Nineteen thirty-two. My father would have been seventy-five this month, still saving the world.

  When he returned to the mourners, Claude had taken up her place again at the head of the table, telling
Ned, Amanda, the neighbors they had always meant to visit and the fresh delegation of volunteers from Gruen’s office that in her grief she ran off to the Park, where they often walked on a Sunday to admire the Conservatory Garden. She thanked Hans’s assistant for the stiff arrangement of flowers, so unlike the casual bouquets she ordered to greet the golden donors and powerful guests for dinner.

  I’ll be fine now. We’ll come together tomorrow. She had no idea what that meant, come together, fine. Then, to call a stop to sighs and anecdotal remembrance, thought she must say something about Hans for these good people and the sake of his children. A loving husband and father, chill, fit for a headstone. She said, We shared him, we all did.

  End of the interminable day, Charles brought her to the spare room where she had been sleeping since her husband was transported home from the hospital. Fussing over towels and soap, he set Claude up as a guest. The night light cast him as a looming shadow of the father who eluded him all his life. The reliable son, clocking in more pro bono than his law firm allowed: for his sake she hated her lie about the Conservatory Garden. He must know from the rip in her pants, the disorder of her hair, she had not walked up Fifth Avenue to look at flower beds perfectly groomed. She now saw herself in the mirror, a smudge of dirt on her temple. On the Sunday before his final African trip she tore Hans from his work to come with her to the Park. Her loving, though often distracted, husband agreed to a cab up Madison. They walked the short block to the Vanderbilt Gate. In the garden, lilies were making their last gaudy show. They watched a hummingbird levitate over a red flower. What flower is that? City people wondering at the bird’s small iridescent body, its helicopter wings. The overbred blooms of hydrangeas nodded in the breeze, a thousand clowns. Hans had tired. Silenced in their disagreement of what might come to pass on his last African adventure, they settled on a bench, soaking in the heat of Autumn. They spoke, predictably, of global warming. Why hadn’t she told Charles the simple truth? That she was foolishly clear in her purpose as she ran the short distance to Seneca Village. Indeed crazed, plopping down on the grass, reading through tears, knowing that Uncle Tom trimmed to bare bones would not make the medicine go down for her class in Jersey City.