by Dale Peck
“You probably wanna see your momma’s things.”
But it was only the old woman. I turned and saw her for the second time. Every aspect of her being was still. She seemed somehow not to have moved, as if the world had rolled beneath her dress like a treadmill and brought me to her. Only her face had changed. She regarded me with an expression that had gone from impatience to hostility to false hospitality to, now, something like pity, and, poised between the lurid atmosphere beyond the glass and the parched air within, that was what I seized on. The woman’s expression reminded me that she worked here—that she had worked with my mother—and I strained to keep my voice steady.
“Did you know her well?”
“Practically my whole life,” the woman said, something very like love tingeing her voice, and she nodded at the statue in the fountain.
“I meant my mother.”
The woman seemed much less interested in this proposition. “Nobody knew your momma. Didn’t really want nobody to know her. What there is to know is upstairs, in her office. I’ll take you there.”
She spoke as if she were about to send me on a journey, which, I suppose, she was, but I sensed an undercurrent to her words, not simply a desire to get rid of me but a desire to get me started on something, some quest or labor. But before I let her lead me away I waved my hand, indicating both the tumultuous garden and the crush of junk I’d just stumbled through.
“Is this…yours?”
The woman opened her mouth then closed it, sucked in air rather than spoke. She shook her head, but not, it seemed, at me.
“It’s all yours. Everything you see belongs to you, for as long as you want to keep it.”
“Even you?”
I don’t know where the words came from nor why I let them out, but before I could retract them the old woman sprang forward and pressed the round knob of the broom’s handle into the hollow between my jawbone and Adam’s apple. Again the impression of irresistible stillness: she’d been standing, slightly stooped, her meager weight supported by the broom’s handle, and now she stood erect, the broom’s handle seemingly supporting me. One push and she could pop my head from its stalk like a child thumbing a daisy off its stem.
“Your name may be on the paper but you mark my words. The Garden’s mine and always will be, and if you want your time here to be a pleasant one you won’t never disrespect me again. You understand that, boy? You understand me?”
I nodded stiffly, trying not to choke. The old woman whirled away from me, without another word led me to a staircase and up to the narrow mezzanine. Stacked crates and boxes curved away from the masonry wall, leaning precariously toward the hand-worn wood of the balustrade and the shop floor twelve feet below. The woman held on to her broom—held it upside down, broomside up, and the blunt tip of the handle clunked against the floor like Ahab’s pegged leg. From the back she looked even more familiar, and I suddenly realized she resembled the bag lady I’d seen last night: both were skeletons draped in white. I remembered the headline then, CARNAGE ON THE GWB, remembered tick-riddled deer being torn apart by a juggernaut of automobiles, and it took a shiver to rattle the image from my head.
At the garden end of the mezzanine a closed door waited, and the woman reached her hand into a fold of her robe and withdrew a rusted skeleton key. It rattled into place, turned under duress, and when the door opened I was temporarily blinded by bright light streaming in through the huge windows on the far side of the room. I thought the sun had risen dramatically but it was just the amplified reflection of the morning’s light off iridescent skyscrapers. The air in the room was dry as a pharaoh’s tomb, the light beating down on a marble-topped desk the size of a sarcophagus. The woman pulled the key from the lock and handed it to me.
“I’ll leave you alone,” she said, her eyes burning with a desire somewhere between curiosity and contempt. “My name is Nellydean,” she added, then clunked her way down the mezzanine with her inverted broom.
Nellydean. She offered the word as if it were a truce between us, and if it wasn’t for the pain in my throat and the tender spot on my ribs I could’ve believed I’d dreamed her up. But if I knew one thing it was that the people in dreams don’t tell you their names.
I closed the door. I locked it. I turned to the desk and without thinking began to circle it, whirled around as a moon is whirled around its planet. Unlike the shop downstairs, the office was stiflingly hot and close, and I became aware of my sweat-soaked clothes once again. The garish outfit Trucker had given me covered my skin like some kind of minstrel rind. It constricted my muscles, made it hard to swim—to move I mean, or breathe, and as I circled the giant desk I peeled the rank garments off my body, and it was only when I was naked and my orbit had taken me to the leather chair pushed against the far side that I flailed at it, grabbed it, pulled myself onto the island of its seat. The leather sighed welcomingly. Its plump tufted coolness cradled me in its lap. My mother’s lap, my mother’s chair: with a single exception it was the first time in twenty years I’d touched something she had also touched, and, thinking that, I placed my hands on the stone surface of the desk in front of me. When I removed them I saw two palmprints impressed in the film of dust there, and it was the sight of those tangible outlines that convinced me I was really there, and I grabbed the center drawer of the desk, and pulled.
It was locked.
Of course it was locked: there was the keyhole, mocking me with its open silent mouth. The only key Nellydean had given me was the one that had opened the door, but lacking anything else I decided to give it a try. It slid into place, clicked into position, turned smoothly, and a pop! vibrated the entire desk as some internal mechanism sprung the locks on all the drawers like a starter’s pistol opening the wickets at a horse race.
Some time later the desk’s dusty surface was dotted with objects. Clerical supplies mostly, although they seemed to come from the early part of the century rather than just a few years ago. An ancient metal stapler heavy as an ingot, a massive pair of scissors whose chromed blades were flecked and peeling, a fan of stationary, cream-colored, though whether with age or printer’s dye I couldn’t tell. Pencils, unsharpened, and a pencil sharpener hidden inside the open mouth of a metal mouse whose coat had turned brown with rust; I also discovered chewed paper deeper in the desk, suggesting real rodents had rifled these drawers before me. When was the last time my mother had been here? I could have asked Nellydean, but my throat tightened at the thought of another confrontation with her, and instead of questions I gave myself more answers. A single fountain pen, dry. The ink in the crystal well had congealed into a black fingertip I popped out with the point of a letter opener. The letter opener was brass and fashioned into the shape of a peacock whose furled droopy tail served as the blade. A ledger smelled of its leather and paper and even of the money it represented, although I couldn’t make heads or tails of the accounts; a compass nestled under the hinged shells of a scarab beetle told me the North Pole was somewhere above my left elbow; a chrome-framed mirror stood up on its accordioned stand like a trained seal, and its small circular face barked at me that yes, I was still here, yes, I sat in my mother’s chair, and yes, behind me were the palmlike branches of trees in a garden whose fecundity hadn’t penetrated this abandoned room in a long, long time. The last item I found, before I found the letter, was a brass key dangling from a long thin silver chain. There was so much more in the desk, rows of hanging files to be gone through, drawers I hadn’t opened yet, secret compartments waiting to be discovered—and of course the promise of that key, as shinily modern as the door key was rusty and old—but when I found the letter I stopped, because the envelope was addressed to me. “Master James Ramsay,” she’d written, as adults wrote to children thirty or forty or fifty years ago (which is to say, before I was born, and she was born as well). Her handwriting was childlike, each block-printed letter neatly, discretely distinct from its neighbor, as though she were terrified that someone might not be able to read what sh
e’d written.
In twenty-one years my mother had written me only one other time, on my first birthday, but my grandmother died less than a year after my mother left, and my great uncle, who took me in, refused to read it to me, and so I didn’t find out what my mother had written until seven years after she’d composed it. By that time my great uncle had moved into a retirement villa in Rhode Island and shipped me off to his youngest son and daughter-in-law in Florida. They’d put the letter in a small box they hid in their attic, which, as it happened, was the only place I felt safe when they launched into one of their frequent and violent arguments. The box, I remember, was mislabeled “John’s Things,” but somehow I knew it was mine, and so, when I was eight years old, to the tune of breaking glass and bouncing cutlery, I finally read the words “I left you because it would have been worse if I stayed.” There was more than that, of course, but not much more, and in the end it all came back to that one line. To the second clause really: it would have been worse if I stayed. At eight what bothered me most was that up until then I hadn’t realized things were bad, let alone that they could have been worse.
Her second letter was no less infuriating, but this time I was better able to understand my anger. “I met your father in the dunes behind Jones Beach,” it began. “He was one of three black-haired boys. One boy’s hair was black and thick and straight,” the letter went on to say (the letter that actually began “Dear Jamie”) “and one boy’s hair was black and thick and wavy” (well, it actually began with a date, “July 31, 1991”—my twelfth birthday—and a location, “Outside Istanbul,” but whatever) “and one boy’s hair was black and thick and crinkly, kinky I want to say”—my mother wanted to say. My mother wanted to say that the third boy’s hair was like still-new, still-soft steel wool but she didn’t: she just said that she wanted to say it was kinky, and that she thought the boy was Jewish. She said it—wrote it, I mean, nearly thirteen years after the events to which it alluded. “The second one was Black Irish or maybe Italian, and the first one could have been anything, Latin, Mediterranean, Asian maybe, or maybe it was just some Anglo with straight black hair,” and that was all my mother had to say about my father’s hair—my fathers’ hair, I suppose I should put it—or about my fathers, or about herself. The letter, written in Istanbul but mailed from Ithaca, New York on August 18, was addressed to my grandmother’s house on Long Island, but the address to which it had been returned after being stamped “UNDELIVERABLE” was Dutch Street, and as soon as I finished reading I looked up and caught another glimpse of myself in my mother’s small mirror.
Among the other documents that had been in my great uncle’s son’s attic was a photocopy of my birth certificate, from which I gleaned the first hint of the story I was now getting in full. In the line marked by the circled “boy” had been typed “James Ramsay” and in the line marked “mother’s name” had been typed “Virginia Ramsay” but in the line marked “father’s name” there had just been a magic marker stripe whose thick smear dominated the page like an asphalt runway in the middle of a snow-covered field. For thirteen years I’d thought a name had been crossed out by that line, but now I realized no name had in fact ever existed, and as I studied myself in the clouded glass (did my mother, I wondered, like to look at herself as she worked at this desk, or did she keep the mirror here so she could, without turning, watch the leaves flickering in the garden behind her?) my eyes finally lit on my own hair, which was not black but brown, not thick but thin, with a lazy curl to it that almost disappeared when it grew out. I pulled it from its rubber band, attempted to fluff it up with my fingers, but it hung in limp wispy brown strands because it is in fact limp and wispy and brown—just as, by all accounts, my mother’s had been—and when I finished her letter (“I always loved your black hair Jamie, it was so thick, it reminded me of your fathers”) I picked up the scissors that had waited along with mirror and letter for an entire decade, and I cut it all off.
Well. When I found her first letter I’d reacted by tossing a lit match into the box, and the resulting fire had burned up the letter and my birth certificate and “John’s Things” and the roof of my great uncle’s son’s house, so it seemed to me I took her latest revelation rather well by comparison. Then again, I didn’t have matches handy, so maybe the scissors were just a way of making do. But something fell away with that hair. My past, I’d’ve said if you asked me in the moment, though now I realize it was something more subtle. Something like desire: the desire to know who the mother was that had haunted me my whole life, the desire to know why she’d left, and why it would have been worse if she’d stayed. You’d be surprised how easy it is to forget a woman you never knew, a woman for whom your birth and her death serve as the two major connections—I know I was, when, nearly a year later, I finally remembered her. But the letter in which my mother had decided to tell me I wasn’t just a bastard but actually fatherless contained the coda “Love Mom,” and I couldn’t follow that simple instruction. I would not, not now, not any more, not again, and instead I played Delilah to my own Samson, and I cut off all our hair.
two
NO ONE TELLS A STORY without intention. Um, duh. But I was so shocked by my mother’s letter that it was days before I began to question why she wrote it. What could she have hoped to gain by informing me of my uncertain paternity? Was she trying to justify her decision to leave, or confess a sin of omission? Certainly if any of my relatives knew the truth they never hinted at it. Then, too, what effect did she think her letter would have on me? That’s a question I’m not sure I could answer even now. Yes, I hacked off my hair. But I did that because I was mad at my mother—not only for abandoning me, but for girting the image of her son with the features of men she’d known for perhaps an hour or two, an evening. Did she think such a revelation, however honest, would somehow free me? And if so, from what?
The truth is, I’d never given much thought to my father. I’d always opted for one of those girl-in-trouble scenarios in which the boy is little more than a sperm donor. I imagined that boy to be blissfully ignorant of my existence, whereas my mother had stuck around for almost a year before she took off. It was her I wanted to know, not some guy who hadn’t given birth to me, suckled me and changed my diapers and seen me through a bout of pneumonia that nearly killed me when I was three months old. But after I read her letter the idea that I had a father became yet another unanswered, perhaps unanswerable mystery about my origins. Before, my father had been not anonymous exactly, but erased: I’d always assumed it was my mother who’d drawn the line through the space where his name would have gone on the birth certificate. Now she’d given him back to me, not as one man, one name, but as any man—or any man with dark hair in, what, his late thirties, early forties? The average child has his hands full with one mother and one father, but I had no mother and, now, hundreds of potential fathers, thousands. The streets around me were filled with plausible candidates: Asian, Hispanic, Jewish, Italian, “Black Irish.” Was there any black-haired man around forty whom my mother might not have fucked?
But such an idea was too vague for me to hold on to, and almost as soon as it came it dissipated, and my mother’s story became nothing more than an abstract version of the lockless key I’d found in the folder that contained her letter: it opened nothing. But at least the key was a solid thing, and I hung it around my neck off its silver chain as, clearly, I’d been intended to. Finding its lock in the overstuffed ruins of my new home seemed no less daunting a task than plucking a father from the streets of New York and, torn between two impossible tasks, I decided to tackle a more concrete problem: my head. What I mean is, I might have attempted to scissor my past away, but I’d done a pretty shitty job. The top of my head looked like a lawn attacked by an epileptic mower; what’s more, it crowned the scrawny body of a boy who began his first full day in New York dressed in tie-dyed MC Hammer pants held up by Mork from Ork rainbow-striped suspenders. The boat-necked (read: woman's, or at any rate womanly) T-shirt I put
on started out white until a sidewalk jostle emptied half the contents of a shark-suited yuppie’s cranberry juice all over my chest. The stain resembled South America cut loose from its oppressive northern neighbor (the yuppie, of course, resembled my father) and, what with my ragged haircut and those shoes, I must have looked like an escapee from Bellevue.
It took an hour of wandering before I finally found a barbershop. As I settled into the chair it sighed beneath me, and for some reason I froze, half in, half out of the seat. My eyes in the mirror were wide with a fear that registered plainly on the face of the boy in the glass but I myself didn’t feel. I took a good look at him: the crazy-man clothes, the stick-skinny limbs that barely held them up, let alone his ragged skull. There was a story there anyone could understand—anyone except me, who noted the details yet kept them separate from myself, as if the boy in the mirror were a person I wasn’t yet ready to recognize.
The old Russian barber laid a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, I make nice for you.”
A white sheet settled over my shoulders, the jagged outline of my head floated atop it like smoke from a snow-covered volcano. I took a last look in the mirror, then closed my eyes.