Yeah, I know. He knows who pays for that service and that Marie Claude has looked into the price of an elevator. Glad he’s made the trip up here. It had always seemed improbable, a house by this name. Sorry his wife did not come.
Hey, she was invited. Six months down the road, going to have a baby, so.
So? Felice Martinez comes down from Lanesborough in her dinged Toyota with twins in her belly, every day writes down new English words, but why would Sissy, an angel, want to say that? She hands over Pat Laughlin’s best towels and lavender soap, how after the long drive he might want to wash up.
He catches her going down from the tower. Their hands touch on the newel post, withdraw in a swift avoidance of flirtation. Lunch is followed by Pat in her best classroom manner leading preschoolers through deer, a female deer, much rehearsed. Their high voices fill the front hall with a desperate cheer, a faltering then recovery of doe, a deer, the audience joining in. Cupcakes are passed round by two elderly volunteers helping out before heading for points West or South to avoid Winter.
I am a teacher, Miss M begins, makes that point each time she comes, that she instructs her mixed bag of students at a school much like the schools the successful graduates of Mercy, and so forth. It is not quite true, but they love her for speaking of their progress, urging them to take their place in the community, take pride in their economic self-sufficiency and so forth. The late Dr. Gruen’s death is finally mentioned, just a note of thank-you by his widow for their condolences. Though the duties of his professional life prevented him from witnessing the students’ achievements, his heart was always, and so forth, until a catch in Miss Montour’s voice cuts short her usual pep rally for the learning season to come.
Ned, I’m Ned, takes over. Prime-time slick and easy in his role of we’re in this together, how he’d never been much for the books as a kid but now values. . . . Sissy thinks what a crock: now he values, and clueless besides, as if these women were ever given a choice to value more than a few pesos in their pockets, and goes on to his remarkable father’s reach to the ailing world, and of family too good to be true, then falters. He is one of three men in the gracious entry hall of Mercy: Ned, Father Rooney who’s nodded off in a high-back chair of time past, and a handyman, plumber’s wrench at the ready. I’m Ned shuffles up a few stairs, and of course he’s a charmer, his sappy embrace of Pat Laughlin, then scooping the kid in a wheelchair into his arms. Guapo, guapo. More than Sissy can take, and she pokes the good Father, hustles him fast out the door. No formal farewell was planned. What is it she wants? Not to let Father mess up his final blessing. These people come up from the city don’t know him as the parish priest who never outgrew his belief or life stage of plain kindness.
As she settles him into the car with his driver, Doe, he asks. Doe?
A female deer. She sings on as she buckles him in, Father Jack Rooney.
He looks her straight in the eye. Margaret Phelan?
That’s me. I’m Sissy.
Marie Claude has two views from the tower of the old house, now so nicely updated to be of use, not the relic of her heart-tug family story. There is nothing left of the pond or trail through the woods. How did she tell it? One way to her husband, with the terrifying details—branches slapping at her face, the roots of ancient trees tripping her up, mud sucking at her shoes. Or was it bare feet? Their shrill spinster voices calling—Marie Claude! Marie Claude! Most certainly a black night, starless, but then the flickering light from the gardener’s cottage, the gardener of legend who once cared for the grounds of an old man’s estate. And in the cottage, this family of squatters who took her in; at least the mother did, one of those hollow-chested women who might once have been sweet, her face drawn tight. A man and a boy cut of the same threadbare cloth, gray—that’s how she sees the family—and the baby with bright hair, somewhat off balance toddling toward their visitor, Marie Claude. The child’s name, don’t you know, Sissy.
A story told to Hans Gruen, her husband, who then spoke to her of the Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm and Jakob, how they had gathered tales mostly from one woman of Kassel with an amazing memory. That was before the philologists got hold of folklore, he said, cutting off the brutal end of his wife’s tale. The police had found her sleeping that night in the cottage and taken her back to the maiden aunts. Sissy and family then evicted, but not before candles caught the curtains, the father stinking of drink and kerosene, sirens in the night. Mrs. Gruen, née Montour, had not said in her remarks today that her prince did come, just once to the tower. That’s a motif, for heaven sake; she might put it that way to her class or to Sissy, now in college. Hans drove up the Taconic, found his way to the old house she inherited just as she was about, about to kiss the young lawyer handling the estate which is now Mercy. Not today or any day ever did she tell that part of the story, though when rescued, she married Hans and they were contented and happy, of course. Though her husband, ever the economist, said Grimm’s Fairy Tales was first published during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, when fantasy didn’t sell, that footnote of history, as so often, diminishing the personal story.
Turning to her sugar maple, the crown of its branches, though leafless, perfection enough, the pot of yellow chrysanthemums, a nice touch though barely visible from above. They sit in the canvas chairs, her stepson and Sissy. Ned is the younger son, the boy running on charm and good looks, often in need of a handout. He may be telling her that he now works for his older brother, had better keep at it, the grunt work of a paralegal. Married late after fooling around, his wife now expecting a child. She is, to be kind, like a child herself. His father called her the girl. Sissy tells him his stage is midlife crisis a little early. Turn the page.
Ned and Sissy are drinking the bottle of wine meant to go with supper. Pat Laughlin, exhausted by the day’s festivities, had ordered in roast chicken. She is preparing, overpreparing, for a meeting of the board: a local builder, librarian, school principal. Hans called them doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. So Ned is pouring the cheap Chardonnay in the dusk of a chill evening. He pulls off Sissy’s red cap, roughs up her hair. Marie Claude looks away to a scattering of early stars, attempts to spot Venus. The show below her window is more compelling. They are laughing, their movements caught in the network of bare limbs. Lights turned on, both driveway and front porch on a timer. Day and night the old house is connected to the fire station, the precinct. It’s safe at the house of learning. Now they get up and come forward, as if onstage, her stepson and the young woman, Sissy. Their kiss is prolonged. She caresses his beard, then gives in to the scrape of it. Marie, call me Marie, remembers their need. Believes nothing will come of it. They drive off in the SUV borrowed for this trip from his brother, Hans Gruen’s reliable son. In the backseat a soccer ball, skateboard, a book she meant to read tonight, Billy Budd, attempting to lay that war story on her class in Jersey City. She fears that the students will favor Claggart, the mean master-at-arms, not Billy, the Handsome Sailor, too good to be true. Favor is not the right word, not a possible response to a complex moral story, not even to a fireside tale of the scholarly Brothers Grimm.
She has looked on their need, watched the instant lovers drive off. Now it is full night. The security lights of the old house do not banish the stars.
The next week and the next, Sissy Phelan waits for a call, an e-mail, a postcard would do, then one day she gets up before her mother wakes. She scrubs Clairol, dark burgundy blush, into her hair. It sticks like clotted blood in the sink, the answer to what’s needed. She heads to her job at Mercy. Pat Laughlin, wouldn’t you know, cries when she sees her. That night Sissy registers for the Spring semester: Western Civilization I, Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages, 3 credits. Turn the page.
ABOVE 96TH STREET
Her glasses lay on the mouse pad—for reading, not for the screen. In her CP files, he discovers the last document. At the head of the page: Longitude 74, Latitude 40, temperature approx: 34° in Central Park, wind east from the Hudson. Now locating herself
as she had when she first fashioned her almanac, stories within stories with threads of useful and amusing information. Tracking the plot of days, the seasons—nature’s way of insisting on change. Same old death and survival, late bloom against the odds, the bud nipped by the frost, puffs of hydrangeas bobbing, leaves ravaged by hail. More recently she set herself in time with the Daybook. Since the heart failed her—
He recalled the questions she’d posted early in the Fall—Where were you when?—and discovered she had started that parlor game again.
Daybook, December 20, 2007
When the Russians sent monkeys into space? My students recalled the sudden attention to math and science, the Sputnik makeup exam. When Maria Estrada, the Cuban girl, brought a tape to class. Where were you when Springsteen was just this kid from New Jersey? When Dolly was cloned?
He read on in the posthumous file, calling it that only to himself. She was no longer here to correct him, to say she was wired as she wrote her last days, fully alive as she spritzed the terrarium, the little kids caught up in the season, writing to Santa. Kate, in newly acquired script, had her doubts about Prancer and Vixen stomping the roof on 90th Street. A whiff of Pascal’s Wager here—believe it, girl, you’ve nothing to lose: Please drop by with my first cell phone ever. Finding her way into last thoughts, perhaps believing they were passing thoughts, she directed a note his way: Nick likes hermit crabs, the pet store on Broadway. A turtle less boring. Check the house in the Berks for mice. Exterminator in Pittsfield—New Age kills with kindness.
Fragment: This is not a story.
If I’d taken a cab, it would not have been to Macy’s. I’d have left the Christmas tree gala in the lobby, given my destination as Fifth and 72nd, overtipped my Muslim driver, ’tis the season, then found my way past the empty arc of band shell, a few chairs loitering long after a show; walked the length of the Mall past poets great and small, the arching beauty of the leafless elms etching the leaden sky. After the dog walker with assorted breeds, after the lovers—brave couple on this single-digit day, their down jackets in a slithery embrace, I would come at last to the bridge overlooking the Terrace where one baby stroller bounced up the broad steps, the mother’s up-we-go, up-we-go ditty vaporizing in cold air while down I’d go, faltering yes, down past Jacob Mould’s birds carved in a marble nest, his fruits of Fall, each season noted by our maiden lady poetess, Marianne Moore, “Autumn a leaf rustles. We talk of peace. This is it. One notices that the angel hovering over the pool is really hovering, not touching the water.” Why is Miss Moore not here? Memorialized in her tricorn and cape.
The Angel of the Waters is well draped and girded. Perhaps when not healing the lame, halt, or head cold, a troubling thought may occur. Unlike Magdalene and Cassandra—her myth may have outlived its time. Energetic flow of bronze gown, an athletic girl, sturdy bare calf thrust forward, a goalie protecting us all. I’d have the Angel to myself in the abandoned living room of the Terrace. There is no one about, no gentle young man just arrived in this place called Bethesda—recognizable fellow with a clipped beard, eyes burning bright, who asks: Do you want to be cured?
I’ve come to the healing waters without my cup.
Olmsted, my Fred, had the sculptress, Miss Stebbins of a very good family, in to dine with her friend, Charlotte Cushman, the greatest actress of the day. He was propped on his cane, stumbling from that accident, trying out a new horse and gig. Two months back his newborn son had died. Forgive Mary for going off to visit her family, not facing the monumental gravestones across the way, natural to her husband’s Park. Emma Stebbins has been awarded the privilege of creating a statue for the Greensward. Her brother is the Commissioner of the Park, don’t you know?
The actress and the landscape-architect-come-lately perform for each other. Little Miss Stebbins is flustered by the might of these two. She’s in a romantic friendship with Cushman, turbulent waters. They live an arty life in Rome with women free of American decorum. They have come back to New York for this grand balabusta with the mug of a pit bull to enchant Broadway. The actress “plays the breeches” as Romeo, as Hamlet, though keeps her nightdress on to rage as the bloodiest of all Lady Macbeths. Whether I can bear to imagine Cushman’s elocution ary delivery of great tragedy is beside the point of her stunning career. Her breast cancer harbored both pain and the lovely angel for our Park. Emma nursed her lover through slow agony, following Miss Cushman from engagement to engagement, all triumphal, not attending to her own considerable talent. The maquette of an angel stowed away in her heart, the tribute she would create for Charlotte.
If I’d taken a cab, I’d have found my way to The Angel of the Waters, not working that day, idly dripping icicles from her wings. Baby, Baby—pity the naked cherubs in her pool.
Do you want to be healed?
I’d snap off a sharp dagger of ice. Verily, verily, the waters melt in my mouth.
Take up your pallet and walk.
The fragment seemed to him story enough. She had gone back to her Park puzzle, not to forget Emma. Hard to decode his wife’s handwriting, ink on yellow pad as if tracking back—before the old Remington, upgrade to Olivetti, before her anxious love affair with Windows. Where are you now?
The children, the grown ones, all three said they would help him clear up her back room, keep what might be of value—the personal stuff.
It’s all personal.
When he bought the cell phone, he said, Black will do to the clerk promoting pink. Those first days, he heard his wife having the last word, the last laugh. Then the silence of his sorrow was heavy as stone, as the dark outcropping she had scaled that day in the Park to feel the height and weight of the place unknown, a semblance of wilderness plotted by Olmsted and Vaux. She should not have awarded herself the pleasure of that final misadventure. In the North Woods, there was a sign posted on the lone circle of lawn: PASSIVE ACTIVITIES ENCOURAGED.
She had been fine till the end of her adventure, until the slippery steps led down to Duke Ellington Boulevard.
Not called that when I was a boy chasing Bimbo.
Of course not. But the Gate, remember?
He had not remembered. The entrance to the Park above 96th Street is called Stranger’s Gate.
She had fallen, been vetted by the doctor, no hemorrhage; an appointment set up for a look-see at a troublesome artery. He’d brought her home from the cardiac center in a cab, of course, tucked an afghan around her as she lay on the couch. She threw it off to go down the hall, back to her workroom.
The children, little and grown, were bickering in the living room—should, should not, have a tree. She would have wanted seemed to be winning over gloom of the empty corner where they put up their tree from time immemorial, at least since they called this place home.
Not allowed to play with her antique toys. Remember?
Of course she had remembered when the Loop the Loop plane did its trick before the key was lost; when the corn-husk doll wore a Mammy turban; when Pinhead, Beano and Buster (the dog) stood their ground as the red rubber ball came their way in a bowling game pre-Disney. Always such elation in her display of the tin trolley, the inevitable story: how her grandfather, aloft in his Locomobile, directed his workmen ripping out the trolley tracks on Main Street, making way for the future.
I opt for the tree, he said to the children. Bring on the clowns, her tightrope walker, the dancing bear. One cymbal missing. He left them to their grief, having discovered soon—too soon—that sorrow came over him solo, could only partially be shared. He stood at the door of her back room, Stranger’s Gate indeed. Only days ago he had pushed the towers of discarded books out of her way. She had fallen on her way home from the Park, above 96th Street, forbidden ground. He opened a manila folder on her desk. She would have noted his hands trembling as he adjusted his glasses to read an article from Science Times. It seems the universe is expanding. He could not follow why dark matter doomed the theory of everything. Why we need new laws of nature. If you can’t do the number
s, must we take it on faith? What use would she make of this prediction, which was surely beyond her? Science for the general reader, nothing to do with the Park. He thumbed through what had seemed an unmanageable mess of clippings, photos, postcards, her scrawl in notebooks half empty, half full. She had called this room her estate of confusion. In days to come, he would figure that the accumulation seemed to have a method, even a message, if he could decode it. But now Christmas was immediate, inevitable. When he flipped through her calendar, each day of the countdown was leavened with predictable pleasures—the kids’ pageant (apron for Mrs. Cratchit), her baking duties: Glo’s biscotti, bread pudding laden with rum. Family Not Invited to his office party, the firm cutting costs. Lightly penciled in, the midnight Mass at St. Greg’s. Every year she hedged her bets. Should she sign on as a Christmas-carol believer?
Not this year, though she had posted an e-mail from Cleo, her brother’s scholarly wife. St. Anselm’s Argument, right over her desk with the gallery of ghosts she believes in.
1. God is, by definition, a being greater than anything that can be imagined.
2. Existence both in reality and in imagination is greater than existence solely in one’s imagination.
3. Therefore, God must exist in reality: if God did not, God would not be a being greater than anything that can be imagined.
She insisted on singing O holy night . . .
Mimi, you never could carry a tune.
He places Mary and the Babe into position on the front hall table. The familiar story comes to mind, how her mother modeled these clay figures attended by chubby angels with broken wings, glazed them, fired them in a mail-order kiln installed in the cellar. Yet another attempt at art. Well art they are, for over the years he’s noted the mystery of the crackled patina, the expression of wonder on the Madonna’s face, the concealing folds of her veil. A lone shepherd held a staff in his hand, but no Wise Men, no Joseph. The crèche was incomplete, or her mother’s belief in the project waned. The stable insufficiently rustic, at which point the artist’s daughter might hold out her glass for a refill, her Christmas Eve pleasure in the neighborhood choir at St. Gregory’s forgotten or forgone. Faith put on hold by the very woman who wrote ahead in her Daybook an almanac posting: Winter Solstice, December 22, 2007, 1:08 AM, True. Sagittarians prefer the journey to the arrival. Unreliable.
The Rags of Time Page 24