The Rags of Time

by Maureen Howard

  The boy said: They better have. We’re in an estuary here.

  He would be in high school now, that eager kid who knew why we built a Reservoir on this island, in this Park, why our water, then as now, must be piped down from upstate. We’re afloat in seawater here, so . . . So, the coopers, the rain barrels, the cartmen of Seneca Village hauling water into the churches and school, servicing the vegetable patches and those who might afford a bath.

  Did I say the boy was with his mother, who preened? And a little brother groaning with boredom, M&M’s supplied to shut him up, a roly-poly lagging behind as we climbed to the next site, Vista Rock. His game—tripping the bright boy who will be an annoyance all his life.

  I trust that notebook has filled up with answers that do not wash away.

  El Dorado

  Daybook, November 11, 2007

  LITERARY WALK

  Unfinished business, the popular poet, Fitz-Greene Halleck:Green be the turf above thee,

  Friend of my better days!

  None knew thee but to love thee,

  Nor named thee but to praise.

  Tears fell, when thou wert dying,

  From eyes unused to weep,

  And long where thou art lying,

  Will tears the cold turf steep.

  And so forth, elegy for his friend and collaborator, John Rodman Drake. Halleck—journalist, humorist, poet, banker and in that role confidential agent to John Jacob Astor. He moved in with the lonely millionaire, regretted the loss of his muse:The power that bore my spirit up

  Above this bank-note world—is gone.

  But retired to Guilford on Long Island Sound, wrote Connecticut, a long, now and then amusing poem that reflects nothing of the industrial state where I was born, where the manufacture of guns and invention of the cotton gin were to play significant roles in the Civil War. Nevertheless, ten years after his death (the designated passage of time to confirm posterity by Order of the Park Commission), Halleck was installed on Literary Walk. One of our forgettable presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Frederick Law Olmsted in attendance.

  On the other hand, Shakespeare, encircled in late blooming mums, is smaller in scale than Halleck, Robert Burns, and Walter Scott, though he’s afforded a more decorative plinth to set him above us. The inline skating proficienados on their way to the plaza fronting the bandstand to compete in splits, flips, airborne waltzes know the Bard and a fragment of verse, if only lines from a movie. Maria! Say it soft and it’s almost like praying. . . .

  Oh, leave them alone; don’t heckle, lick your old chops at their presumed ignorance while your fingers, a touch arthritic, fumble at the cell phone, which begs for your password. The call home aborted. In the Park, all I meant to say. Obsessed with the Greensward, I plump myself down in its stories, the neat rectangle of its map morphing into the uncertain turns and loops of the natural world, slopes and summits plotted.

  As I descend to the Terrace, the Lake appears two dimensional against a painted backdrop of an enchanted forest as in Midsummer Night’s Dream, but we are well into November. Movietime, Mickey Rooney played Puck, but who was Titania, Queen of the Fairies?

  Come, sit thee down upon this flow’ry bed,

  While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,

  And stick musk-roses in thy slick smooth head,

  And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.

  Many trivia questions remain unanswered. You remind me our little life’s not a game show. No buzzer of defeat. No cash prizes. My adventures in the Park across the way from our apartment seem all too solitary, enacted in the geography of my imagination. Virginia Woolf gave up on a friend who was addicted to Solitaire, laying out the cards in a dreary game the Brits call Patience. Well, I have no patience with life dealt out in med milligrams, scaled down to my daily walk: to the yield of small encounters, a scrapbook of facts and fables, though I have included you along the way, begged your advice, as in: What am I to do with terra incognita above 96th Street?

  You said: Anita Louise played Titania. Ashamed you knew that, then: There’s something odd going on with you. Some evasion.

  Dusting me off, you switch to an old story, this day’s further deflation of the dollar against the euro, then recall how we lived it up, traveled on two cents plain when we were kids. Our mighty dollars cashed in on the black market.

  Expensive gelato in the Piazza Barberini.

  Raspberry tart, rue Monsieur-le-Prince.

  A hundred bucks sent from home . . . I bought pantomime figures in the dusty bookshop on my way to the British Museum.

  Switching channels, you assume the editorial voice: Gold will top $800 an ounce. The banks have gone begging.

  My tightrope walker, jugglers, clowns have never faded all these years. I love those theatrical folks trained to amaze, take chances.

  We talk a Mad Hatter’s babble avoiding what we intend. If we didn’t speak at cross purposes, I’d admit that I’m silenced by candidates now up and running, not one of them reflecting my angst as night by nightly news broadcasts our failure. My mistrusts of Sunday morning pundits. Last week, fellow with the plastic hair had the buzz: The war’s not front page. His easy skip to inflation. At my wrath, you pleasantly turned to the commodities market. Copper, corn, oil $$$ a barrel, the Chinese paying top price for iron. Tiffany & Co. interest in gold digging, though seven hundred thousand pounds of waste a day gives the corporation pause. Gold has nothing to do with my explorations in the Park written on devalued paper. No mention of uranium, or my angry outburst last month against the war, carrying on like a braless girl lost in Woodstockian fields of love is the answer. Your voice dipped to a whisper, a calming suggestion—El Dorado.

  Seems a year since my brother calmed me down. A little warm milk before bedtime, Mimi. Do Columbus.

  And now you accused me of evasion, ask, How was your day? Drama queen no more, I report that I gave full attention to my computer, then took the grandchildren to the playground that lies in the earthworks across the street. Longitude and latitude same as always on CPW, though you still refer to the 8th Avenue Subway. You grew up in this city. I did not. You climbed the Park’s massive rock formations with the janitor’s boy before he was thrown out of PS 6, years before Bimbo, your nefarious playmate, had a record, before they sent you to the private school with proper teams, playing fields. No more make believe in the Park above 96th—bang, bang you’re dead—no private adventures.

  Yes, I spent my fish-and-chips pence on comic cutouts of Columbine and Pierrot, those quarrelsome lovers, and prints of my tightrope walkers who never worked with a net. I’m a girl from the circus town of Bridgeport, where my grandfather, getting on with his life, carted water and hay—seventeen dollars for the season—to elephants shivering in Barnum’s winter quarters, longing for dust baths and a wallow in warm African rivers.

  See here, on the bill of sale: ALL GOODS SOLD AT PURCHASERS RISK. Now, wasn’t that smart of Grandpa?

  He left out the apostrophe.

  He never made it to eighth grade. You know there’s a statue of the Hatter in the Park. He smirks while Alice presides for a sane moment.

  The kids?

  Yes, after school with the children. We’re lucky to have them nearby. Just suppose we were in some sunny place with elder persons? Golf cart gliding us about the links, Happy Hour for Seniors, the lively arguments of a book club . . .

  Come off it. The playground in your Park?

  Yes, the one with decks, child-safe. Nicholas dangling from a rope swing—no hands! So, a full report: The playground was desolate, the bench I sat on littered with leaves that should have fallen weeks ago. The lone baby tender on the phone neglecting her charge, a bandy-legged toddler eating cookies coated in sand. Kate, beyond playground, stood aloft on the deck, my binoculars aimed at our building, the windows catching the brass light of sundown. Hoping to see their terrarium.

  She can’t see round corners.

  That’s worth a fleeting smile. Our argument is winding down. True,
we live in the rear of our building. With an angling of the head pressed to the window, I am afforded a partial view of the asphalt entrance to the Park, where you fear I’ve invested unwisely in a bear market of legends, unreal estate of my last place on earth. As for Kate, she wanted to spritz their terrarium, the brandy snifter in which they have created an alternate world—tropical, lush as the virgin forests of Guiana, which reminded Columbus of Valencia. You know perfectly well that it sits on our windowsill sweating the seasons.

  That was my day. Now will you answer my question? What’s above 96th?

  You’re back to the weak dollar, to gold mined mostly for jewelry. Whole hillsides destroyed, wetlands reduced to ash for rings on our fingers, bells on our toes. Not mine, no way José in Peru with lungs collapsing from tons of toxic waste. I am sanctimonious, but my outrage at those who think it’s OK to slam a prisoner’s head into water, bobbing for rotten apples, folks, doesn’t have the old huff and puff. I’m reduced to a litany of complaints. You have not separated paper from plastic while I have taken bottles to the bottle people who live on the returns of our trash. And have you noted that the smirk of Cheney’s smile has dipped to new lows? Never called Veep. That would lend him a pinprick of cozy: and the detained may never come to trial. The deflation of their captors is the best we can—I can—hope for, the stale breath of their dark secrets, slow wheeze of their hot-air balloon, the sorry spectacle of its bladder on the green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees . . .

  At the end of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s walking tour of the east coast of England, having embraced the near and far reaches of history, personal and public, he returns to home and garden, recalls the elms devastated by the Dutch elm disease:One of the most perfect trees I have ever seen was an almost two hundred-year-old elm that stood on its own in a field not far from our house. About one hundred feet tall, it filled an immense space. I recall that, after most of the elms in the area had succumbed, its countless, somewhat asymmetrical, finely serrated leaves would sway in the breeze as if the scourge which had obliterated its entire kind would pass it by without a trace; and I also recall that a bare fortnight later all these apparently invincible leaves were brown and curled up, and dust before the autumn came.

  This year, next year . . . will mark the hundred years since the elms were planted to arch over the Mall. With great care and expense, many are still standing, some replaced, each tree endowed, money down against disease. Olmsted understood the American elms’ formality, the grandeur of their welcoming arch to the people of the city, high and low. Saplings demand patience.

  In the morning you leave a report on the front hall table. It is a research update on the Eldorado Gold Corporation. So we spar, paper-doll lovers, kiss and make up. Product development toward year end. No new ounces added to the reserve. Read as a message, I understand you would like me to nest on the sill, flourish under glass like the ferns in the children’s terrarium, and entertain no dangerous exploits above 96th Street. Stay put, here in the El Dorado. Next you may advise meditation—ooom, ooom—and renew the prescription: no exercise beyond the short walk in which I turn and see them looming, the safe towers of home. But today I’ll push on in the Park to 72nd across from the Dakota, determined to investigate the report that IMAGINE is sinking, the tiles at the edge of the magic circle sucked into sandy soil. By the time I reach Lennon’s memorial, I’m bummed out, the heavy heartbeat throbbing as I join a busload of tourists, baby boomers honoring their bonged past. And the crazies always, humming as they lay tulips round about in a mysterious pattern. I’m foolishly encouraged. IMAGINE has been shored up, as certain in this uncertain world as Radio City, Ellis Island, St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  Imagine there’s no Heaven

  It’s easy if you try . . .

  Down the slope to Strawberry Fields, NYPD reads the Post.

  It’s Armistice Day. No mixed emotions. My father wore the poppy in his buttonhole but would not march. Something about the pomp after the circumstances he’d seen in France; and you’ve never told me why you trusted the sodden parachute that sucked you down. There were alligators and the scum of algae in Florida’s warm waters, never told your air force career as a terrifying story. Last year a vet home from Iraq stood by the memorial in the corner park just down from our little house in the country. Veterans Day, we now call it. He spoke of his friends, those left behind, shuffling through his words, not attempting eloquence, while old vets in their overseas caps and scraps of uniform buttoned over the bulge stood at attention. Then Taps, truly moving, followed by the ear-shattering salute that made the babies cry.

  Daybook, Thursday, November 18

  There will be a water shutdown from 10AM until 4PM in the CD line. Please make sure all taps are closed. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

  Old pipes give out now and then, don’t I know. I draw water in the pasta pot and big salad bowl, laundry day in the village. Almost immediately I’m thirsty. I drink from the brass dipper that hangs on the kitchen wall, a decorative item. Thirst quenched, our lives are too easy, don’t we know. Meditation and water are wedded forever. Ishmael, about to go on his journey in Melville’s big book that would succeed, though not in his time. I haven’t the heart, literally, or mind for meditation. In this arid world, the waves lapping against the shore of the Reservoir may be too gentle, the still mirror of the Lake cold, unreflecting. The November of my soul.

  So, in the parched season at the El Dorado, I’ll stay home as you once again advised. Oh, the familiar warning was in your voice as you put on your wool cap.

  Don’t venture. That’s how you put it, no need to say more.

  Heart pumps a heavy beat. Ankles and wrists swollen, shipping water. My vials of medication, sleepless nights, heavy rain against the kitchen window advise against panning for choice nuggets in the Park today. So it’s follow the yellow brick path, stake my claim in El Dorado. For Columbus there was no gold, only the discovery of parrots, pumpkin seeds, cinnamon bark, the useless glisten of mica and the trade-off of measles for syphilis—until the third voyage. At last, a gritty find up the Orinoco. By then Christoforo was out of favor. He believed in El Dorado, the name of an island where a gilded man rose from the river once a year. As though to sustain his belief in Christ and the Madonna, he honored the story of a god never seen.

  This day, in a tower that’s lost the legend for which it was named, I am confined with my books to take up this endgame of discovering where I am in the world—not Kansas, not Bridgeport. An outlander, I arrived in this city in my college kilt and polo coat fifty-five years ago. You understand that the Park will always be new territory under my surveillance; not so for the kids in the playground, not for you, city boy. So my archives: tinted postcard of Bethesda Fountain, a clipping from the Times flaky at the edges—John Paul II blessing the adoring crowd through safety glass of the Popemobile, bird lore aplenty, a sepia photo of real sheep in the Sheep Meadow, shots of the young guys from your office playing softball, Nick’s birthday piñata spilling its treasures in the Pinetum, and The Gates of 2005, their citrus grandeur flying free of critical commentary, General Sherman gilded anew, and you, misty-eyed on the Great Lawn cheering Nessun dorma . . . O Principessa, holding my hand when Pavarotti hit high C. Who took the picture?

  You will know at once that all views and encounters are true as the arc of the Bow Bridge though carefully engineered as a cascade in the Ramble, inevitable as statues along the way. I will never, under oath, convert the Park to an attic or yard sale for the El Dorado, just file the cache of mementos as travel stories, tickets for safe passage to the end of my days. When I make the call, isn’t that how you do it? No investment too big or too small.

  THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD

  Like Sir Walter Raleigh, who packed a trunk of books when he went to sea, I depend on books in my back room—too often, you say. Land-locked, I could never invent Raleigh’s bogus search for El Dorado, or predict his downfall having betrayed the Virgin Queen by loving a maid
. His story often told between scholars’ covers and popular bios with portraits of the great courtier himself, pearls sewn into his weskit, gilt buttons, Orders of Merit. And here’s the heartbreaker in silk stockings, a Gentleman of the Crown with his son Wat, dwarfed by Dad’s glory. A girl would easily lose her heart to Sir Walter’s bright eye, the curl of his rusty beard, but the Queen’s Maids of Honor were never to marry. Too many books in my cell: I take down Aubrey’s Brief Lives (c. 1692) in which the gossipy biographer gives Shakespeare short notice, though he’s enchanted at some length by Raleigh’s amorous adventure.

  He loved a wench well; and one time getting up one of the Mayds of Honour against a tree in a Wood (’twas his first lady) who seemed at first to be somewhat fearful of her honour, and modest, she cryed, sweet Sir Walter, what doe you me ask? Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cryed in the extasey, Swisser Swatter Swisser Swatter. She proved with child, and I doubt not but this Hero took care of them both, as also that the Product was more than an ordinary mortal.

  About the Product, more later.

  In The Loss of El Dorado, Sir Vidia Naipaul sifts through Raleigh’s The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, With a relation of the great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spanyards call El Dorado) And of the Provinces of Emeria, Arromaia, Amapaia, and other Countries with their rivers, adjoining. Performed in the year 1595. by Sir W. Ralegh Knight, Captaine of her Majesties Guard, Warden of the Stanneries, and Her Highnesse Lieutenant Genrall of the Countie of Cornwell, to declare the book part of the world’s romance and its details fatally imprecise. Like Raleigh’s first readers, I’m charmed while I mistrust the writer of The Discoverie but will testify that he threw his cloak down on a puddle so the Queen might not muddy her royal shoes. How did this story of gallantry find its way to the lower grades of a working-class Catholic school in the last century? It was said by Sister Philomena that Raleigh may have been of the Catholic faith! A shy woman, fingers fumbling with her rosary when the Monsignor came to bless us once a year. Movies have made much of Sir Walter romancing the Queen (best Tudor pick, an unleashed Bette Davis in Elizabeth and Essex, ’39, in which Raleigh is demoted to an ex). Fool’s gold in the Hollywood Hills, or on the banks of the Liffey:Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugal love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures.