4.
“HOME,” MADDIE READ aloud in Hannah’s dictionary. Hannah’d taught Maddie that when a word interested her she ought to look it up in the dictionary. They had such different levels of value, Hannah told her. If one got into your head it was good to look it up. This was the best way to find a passage for it back out again, and into the world. She seldom did, but this word in Maddie’s head wouldn’t leave her alone. On the train she thought the word, over and over, home home home home home, thought how she had but didn’t have a home, Henry had but didn’t really have a home, and Hannah who was both mother and father to the ranch that served as home to each of them, Hannah least of all had a home. That monstrosity up the river was no home now, and never had been. What was it? She had no idea. (And when Maddie had got back to New York and returned to the ranch she was so tired she could hardly focus. Henry kissed her. Hannah asked her how it went. Henry went down to work, down to feed the cattle. Hannah listened to what had happened, how Krieger had made his unexpected appearance, and then she left to walk and think. Krieger was here, nearby. Hannah knew that this wasn’t over. She had to leave the loft, get out in the streets and think.) Couldn’t you home in on something, too? yes, of course. This was wonderful.
Home (hm), n. and the words under the sharp light of the lamp Maddie saw in succession, then guessed aloud at how they might have been pronounced in Norse or Lithuanian or Greek or whatever … ham and heem and heimr and keimas and keitai … abode and the world and a village and he lies down. Strange. All these coming up through people’s mouths out of the single idea of home. It seemed impossible the richness of the word! It made her feel warm. Contented for the first time in days, the first time since Lupi arrived in the darkness of early Friday morning. She found a pencil and underlined the cross reference—See Cemetery—at the end of the etymology, flipped quickly back through the pages until she came to the word. She read through the entry; finger followed the small type across the page. What she found was that Cemetery referred her not only back to Home but also on to both City and to a word which she didn’t understand, Incunabula.
“Incunabula,” she said aloud.
She looked up Incunabula and there it was; it meant a cradle, a birthplace, an origin.
Strange, she thought, it was a full circle.
On the Norge the teapot whistled emphatically. Maddie turned off the gas. After pouring hot water through the strainer into a cup she put her overcoat on. She checked its pockets for loose bills, discovered a dollar crumpled into a limp ball. Leaving the door ajar she skipped down the flights of stairs and out to the doughnut shop past the corner. At the bakery the girl saw her come in and knew that she would want two glazed doughnuts and a plain cake. Sunday conversation centered on the weather. On the way back to the loft Maddie conceded to herself that this was something that stood, too, for home: all the tacit understandings between people. But routine wasn’t enough, was it? She was back upstairs before the tea had finished steeping, and the routine itself began to conjure its own calm, just as she had hoped it would, the routine of the tea, its bouquet, the Norge, its solid circle of flame, the kettle, its intractable clownish whistle. She put the two glazed on a dish for Henry, arranged them just so, and everything was beyond human fouling; that recess from her paradise—hers, Hannah’s, Henry’s—during the night journey all but canceled now in the soft morning which omitted the vision of Berkeley house buried like a spider’s nest under the low-clattering rails of the riverside train.
One’s own dwelling place (she read), the house in which one lives, one’s abode after death (she had never heard it used that way), abiding place of the affections, habitat, a place of refuge and rest, hence an asylum. She pulled the bulky dictionary up against her and hugged it.
The photograph on the front page of yesterday’s paper, which she was about to slide into the bottom of the cat’s litterbox, as the telephone rang, caught her attention for a moment as she crossed to answer. Several dozen Salvation Army Santa Clauses, their fake beards held in place on boozy, crooked faces by elastic bands, all waving mittens in the inky image, one (she noted) as fraudulent as the next, and surrounded by “At Relief Camp in Ethiopia Scenes of Horror … Three Koreans Killed as Soldiers Exchange Shots in DMZ.”
“Hello?” (how could children be expected to believe the nice old myths?).
“Hannah?”
“No, who is this.”
“Hannah, I’m tired, it’s late, it’s early.”
“Who is this?”
It was Krieger. “So you must be Madeleine Berkeley, just the person I wanted to talk to.”
“Hannah’s not here and I don’t have anything to say to you.”
She stared at the Santa Clauses. There was an unsteady whisper over the line, and an echo, as if he were calling from far away. In his voice there was feverishness, a kind of rattle. He had said her name once more, firmly. “Madeleine, I’m furious with you.”
“What?” she said, absently reading now the article about how the elections in Honduras might have to be suspended next year so that the president could continue making great strides toward a real democracy—but, of course, she was only trying to block Krieger out. His voice grew sharper.
“You know it takes a hell of a lot to get me mad, what is this bullshit chicanery I mean you can appreciate with all the endless assholes to mix a metaphor all the endless assholes over the years I’ve dealt with whose brains you could measure out with cokespoons, but you my dear are a troublemaker of the first order and I don’t like outsiders meddling with my business and it just may be all my goddamn good breeding but I always settle scores.”
“Mr. Krieger, what are you talking about?” She pictured the face of the man who had stayed in the loft with them all those years ago, Hannah’s lover—the same face she’d seen hours before in her father’s house.
“All this does is make me a little angrier, Madeleine, so I advise you to cut the born-yesterday routine. I’ve been working on this for months, trying to bring a little happiness into the world, turn a couple dollars, etcetera etcetera, and you have to go a-cantering on your little do-gooder hobbyhorse blow the whole kit and caboodle sky-high, I mean where do you get off lady?”
“What’ve you got Hannah involved with? why can’t you leave all of us alone?”
Madeleine’s pitch, almost a scream, revolted Krieger.
“Involved with? nothing very worse than the clandestine and unsanitary menagerie she’s got going down there in Chelsea, as you well know, I mean of all people you, I mean I know more about you than you think—”
“So what is that supposed to mean?”
“Mean? means nothing except of course—”
“None of this is your business, I’ve got to go now, I’m sorry you’re angry with me but in fact I have no idea what you’re talking about, I’ve got to go.”
“Except, well, naturally you recognize your Hannah there is breaking more Board of Health codes than there are hairs on a calf’s ass, and all I have to do first thing tomorrow morning is give them a little jingle her whole fantasy world her little Oz-within-an-Oz comes crashing down around her ears, board the place up escort our friend to Bellevue where she’ll be safe from society society’ll be safe from her.”
Madeleine waited.
“What I want to know is what you think you’ve accomplished here besides squander a lot of important people’s time and energies with your goddamn meddling.”
“What?”
“Right. What. What. Good word, what. Like what the fuck do you know about Central American politics or eugenics or business or guerrilla war or emigration laws or longevity? You’re just another spoiled rich girl on a Hindoo holiday.” Krieger was breathing hard, struggling to maintain the authority of his impetus. It was clear Madeleine didn’t understand what he was talking about. Turning his face to the black and gold towers of the American Radiator Building, thus giving the two pedestrian policemen just then crossing Sixth Avenue a view of the back of his
head (for, how far had things gone? how quickly would a bulletin dispatched out of the Hudson valley travel downstream ultimately to reach regular gumshoes like these?), he tried to figure out who’d duped him and what response to take, besides the obvious—to flee New York and environs as soon as possible. But it nagged him, so fresh the outrage of presenting his product, so close to having had payment in hand (the police passed behind, and his head accordingly revolved to face south toward the financial district), then—all hell. Not quite a quarter million dollars of pure heroin in Olid’s vegetable-dyed mochila, planted there before they had caught the bus to Tegucigalpa, Krieger’s own side venture to smuggle material into the country secreted on the person of a man who himself was secreted and entirely separate: this would, when discovered, no doubt make news. And Lupi, having bolted out of the house like a crazed jackal, stealing that car before they showed up, running off with the single piece of evidence that would hang him, thought Krieger now at the phone booth. By now he’s probably treading water in the sewage waves out beyond Staten Island.
But Madeleine. Surely she hadn’t hung up, because she was afraid—yet this meant nothing, her first few words assured him of that, which left only Hannah.
He caught his breath, “Maddie?”
Madeleine continued to say, “Why don’t you go away just leave us alone you just go away …”
“Maddie stop it, listen, never mind, I believe you.”
“Believe what? just go away, I wouldn’t ever say anything, we wouldn’t we just want to be left alone.”
“Right, right. You know what? You’re right. I hear you. I believe you. You may be right. I think you didn’t have anything to do with this. But, look, it’s kind of a mess, Madeleine, and I need to see Hannah.”
“She’s not here I said.”
“I know, but I need, what I need is for you to let me in there at the ranch and I’ll just wait around until she comes back, I won’t get in anybody’s way I’ll have my chat with Hannah and then I’m gone, poof, but first I have to talk with her.”
“I can’t help you.”
“Maddie?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Let me just come down for a minute I’m right here not that many blocks away, where is this, I’m in Bryant Park, I’ll come straight down there in a couple of minutes.”
“Go away.” But all she heard was a siren in the telephone. Krieger had dropped the receiver (thinking to himself, Just like Washington Square, Bryant Park, another goddamn potter’s field—) and it swung by its aluminum-coiled cord in the dank, raw day. Maddie pictured the bluejays out in the trees crying jaaeh, then queedle queedle, slurring harsh first, flashing belligerent blue over the gray and crashing delicately about the branches, charlatanic and idiot, and when the siren finally passed away into all the other sounds carried over the phone she hung up and dialed Berkeley house with a memory that went back to her childhood and no real idea what Jonathan could do to help.
Her father answered and when she asked for Jonathan he mistook her for her sister.
“Alma, I’m so glad you called you know how they said they were going to come here and saw down my dead dogwood? Well, they showed up with their chainsaws and I walk up to the offices for half a minute come back and what do you think they’d gone and done but take down that big mulberry we put in there all those years back.”
“Pa?”
“You got to stand me witness, Alma, and I know they’ll listen to you. I’m going to sue.”
“Pa?”
“People just ruin everything, don’t they?”
Madeleine replaced the handset, slowly, deliberately, fingers quivering at her lips. She would go tell Henry she was taking a walk to find Hannah. She would take the service elevator in the back to avoid Krieger.
5.
WHY WASHINGTON SQUARE struck these resonances in her and not Central Park or any other park on the island, Hannah didn’t know. Full half the park was capped in unevocative pavement, the fountain rarely filled with water or its jets turned on to shoot spray above the circle, the grass was straw-yellow under the leafless trees, a pigeon on the pocked statuary head of Alexander Lyman Holley, his face in an alert stare under the deposit of a vermicular dash of green-yolked guano. It seemed anything but romantic, this place, the dingy scaling plane trees, the red brick toilets, the playground a halfway house for nocturnal derelicts. Unlike Central Park, so carefully laid out, here there were no fanciful outcroppings of granite, schist pushed to the surface; no bridle paths, evergreens, hills, hollows, gracious duckweed- and lilypad-blanketed pond, no shepherd’s meadow. Nevertheless Hannah sat on a bench breathing deeply as if the air could come in and wash her blood of rum, here in steelman Honey’s view in the late morning unusually abandoned except for those two of indeterminate gender and race at the chess table over in the southwest corner, gloved hands dropping the lever on the timeclock, and felt the mystery of the earth rise up from its caverns far, far down under the city’s weight.
She was still mildly tipsy. Maybe it was the dead buried in their paupers’ graves here, or the canals’ underground susurration, the palavering trickle of ancient mineral-heavy water two, three, four hundred feet below her still ticktocking the same paleontologic language it echoed before the earliest Indian trail was cut or first divining rod was carried, witch-hazel fork jumping like a quick hare. There was a tiny quadrant nearby, fenced off and allowed to grow wild; a sign indicated the tract represented precolonial Manhattan, with sassafras, shrub evergreens, oak, maple, and thriving at their trunks a litter of bottles, plastic, paper, a dead, disintegrating pigeon: time capsule run amok.
But here—here.
They swelled, swirling through wire and rock in an upward vortex, these impossible rhythms, shifting up and up until they reached the soles of Hannah’s feet and continued up through her body like a palpable fugue to make known to her that it was always the earth’s intention to wrest itself back to its elemental condition; that the predisposition of all organisms and all organic matter was to come again and again to composition.
“Yes,” she said.
Sunday, a good day she thought to listen to the earth as it communed with the bottoms of her feet. Then the water-voices broke their bonds and came over her with such a fury she jumped.
She stood on the green-slatted seat of the bench. Immediate silence followed. She shook her head, hands on her ears. On the back of the bench she sat, feet still safely propped on the seat. Her hands came together and thumbs twiddled quickly, and she found herself whistling, and the whistling reminded her of how, when she was a girl, back on the plains, she would whistle an aimless tune just like this when she didn’t know what to think or what to do next, when she most missed mama Opal.
A chessplayer coughed: respectful dignified sound muffled in the palm of a wool glove whose fingers had been cut off. Hannah looked over to see it meant the same as toppling a king; concession, and composition. And the clicking of pawns and knights and rooks established that a new game would begin. She stepped down and set out briskly in the opposite direction, back to the arch. Behind, a body swung, ghost shimmering like Hannah’s breath in the thick air, from the limb of a gallows-tree, hands tied behind, ankles bound, a strangulated grin made by the handkerchief gag tightly tied at the back of its neck.
Hannah left the park with her hands dug deep into her pockets. Looking up the avenue the whole gray heart of the city was like a photograph of ruins. A light wind stretched out from the north. The wind rushed at her face in vertiginous simplicity and clarity.
6.
THE TERMS OF their arrangement, such as they were, had never been enforced by Hannah since they had never been challenged by Hammond. Nothing was put on paper since it was an agreement between Westerners, as each understood it and to differing degrees (Hammond more involved with his image of urban cowboy), and pride held it together. The principal item in their understanding was that the ranch be kept secret. Each felt that survival of the place depended upon a cla
ndestine approach, Hannah less from a sense of its questionable legality than her own vision of how the city would reject them, as a body an artificial heart, were their presences at its center made known. There was something pure and fundamental about the ranch, and both Hammond and Hannah felt protective toward it, and even jealous of its anonymity.
Regarding each other, their feelings were mixed. Hannah, as they both saw it, had the alien strain of Easterner in her; both saw it and suspected it, even though it was Hannah who perpetrated this romantic subversion. And Hammond’s sexual innuendos about Maddie and occasionally even Hannah herself (which she shrugged off) were inoffensive insofar as they were flippant. He was cocky by nature, Hannah concluded, and mouthing off was allowable so long as it remained an attitude, and did not progress toward an idea.
Hammond kept his keys in his hip pocket on a chain that was secured at his beltloop. They crunched as he walked, in syncopation with the stab-thud, stab-thud of his boots.
Hannah entrusted him with a set of keys to the green-and-silver graffitied metal door on the street. She never asked Hammond where he went during his off-hours—long periods of time, six, eight, ten hours at a stretch, staggered nights and days—although sometimes she wondered. There was Hammond’s life at the ranch, circumscribed by the painted walls, the schedules for hosing down the floor, feeding the cattle, exercising them on the windmill walker, but out in the city what did he do to fill his time alone? The possibilities were myriad.
This morning Hammond’s head was full of drowsy sweetness; he had awakened in a room that smelled of—? baby lotion? and heard his stomach issue a gentle soughing that sounded like a baby crying. His hand went down to gather it in, the palm to heat it there, for it also was full of the pain of his gastritis, but his fingers jogged up against another hand and as they did his mouth slackened and cakey eyes blinked and thoughts went sour.
Come Sunday Page 45