Time's a Thief

by B. G. Firmani

  She was nothing like Kendra.

  “Look, I’ll do the dishes,” she said, by way of apology.

  I stared at her.

  “With what?” I said.

  Cornelia shrugged. Well, she was used to her mother. Perhaps she had different expectations. Or perhaps she had none at all? She went over and fished the Joy out of the garbage, and I pushed out through the back door to the garden, just to be out of that house for one blessed second before the evening work shift began. As the door closed behind me I heard Cornelia begin singing in her loud, space-alien voice:

  Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium…

  *

  Jovanna, who had worked for the Löwensteins for three years, was fired the next day.

  Help was cheap, right? Interchangeable.

  The summer was waning. I developed some kind of terrible ache in my heart, almost physically pinpointable, something to do with unsure contingencies and the feeling of time passing. When September came, it seemed strange not to be going back to school. It was like I was waiting for someone to call and find me: Where are you? they would ask. We were looking for you.

  I still kept Kendra’s room exactly as I’d found it, my own things only lightly overlaying hers, my presence there temporary, provisional. Sometimes I’d pick up a book of hers and read around in it at random (the Bhagavad Gita, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other, an Everyman history of France that was stamped on its first page CLIFFORD ODETS NEW YORK CITY). Sometimes I’d take an old dress of Kendra’s out of her closet and try it on, swooshing the skirt from side to side as I looked at myself in the mirror. And sometimes I wondered if I should just leave.

  I remember I went to the San Gennaro Festival by myself, one long melancholy weeknight when everyone else had other things to do. I got a sausage-and-peppers sandwich, one with a hot link from Faicco’s, and I stood on the wall and watched all the Gs pass by. At some point I realized that someone had set up camp next to me. I turned my head to see a neighborhood G, not exactly old but nothing like young, who had brought out one of those walking sticks with a padded circle on it that you could fold out into a little stool.

  He was sitting there with his porkpie hat, his stogie, his immaculately kept rayon shirt with some kind of bowling embroidery on it, watching the parade of humanity along with me. He could have been my Uncle Pasquale, who was in the faucet supply business.

  “Nice,” he said to me, meaning the night, meaning the people, meaning most of all me, somehow I knew, arched over my sandwich, with its slick neon oil running down my fingers.

  “Nice, yeah,” I agreed.

  We chatted comfortably about the weather and the liquefaction of the blood. He had multiple scientific explanations for it but said that he understood how it was important for a person to believe in miracles if you needed miracles to believe in. He wanted to know if I was Napoletan’ and I told him no and what I was, Abruzzes’ and Marchegiana. I always liked to say it. And the fondest window opened up. We stared across to pictures of the land, remembered nostalgia, keening grandmothers and dead grandfathers, their eyes to the sea…

  When I had finished eating and was cleaning up, he said to me, “You want your palm read?”

  “You read palms?” I said.

  “Sure I do,” he said.

  “It’s a little messy.”

  He gave the shrug, boh, I don’t know, only if you want to, and I wiped down my hands with a bunch of little two-fold napkins and gave him my left hand, palm up.

  He took it in his own hands, which were huge and pillowy Charlie Brown mitts, and stared at it for some time.

  “You an actress?” he asked.

  “Oh! No,” I said, somehow flattered.

  “You’re something creative,” he said.

  “In theory.”

  “It’s clear you are.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “Though right now I just—”

  He gave a start and pulled my hand away from his face, holding it out in front of him.

  “What?” I said.

  He didn’t say anything, just sat there studying my hand.

  In a moment he curled my fingers together, patted them gently, and gave me back my hand.

  “You’ll be fine, piccola,” he said to me. “You’ll be just fine.”

  And then he stood, folded up his seat, and disappeared down Mulberry Street.

  12

  One morning that October I sat in Clarice’s study with my book, waiting for her to come down.

  I’d gone through all the Mary McCarthy I could find by then, and I was trying to read her last novel, Cannibals and Missionaries. I had a smelly copy from the dollar cart outside the Strand, but that wasn’t the problem. It was that the prose felt so arched-eyebrow and yet so creaky and straining, as if trying to simulate the dash of the young Mary. Later I’d come to see how completely one could age out of being the Clever Girl.

  Outside it was raining hard, one of those thunderstorms that makes morning feel like night, and I realized I was really just watching the clock. Clarice was never this late. Should I go check on her? In the summer Cornelia would’ve been the one to do this, but she’d been sent off to a fancy school in Vermont where she was learning how to churn butter, speak Chinese, and play the doumbek. What gave me pause was that the night before I’d heard what sounded like an argument between Clarice and Sidney echo up from the living room as I lay in Kendra’s bed. That had been followed by a door slam, rendered with the sharp fidelity of a Foley artist, and then silence.

  Just before noon I knocked on her bedroom door.

  “Oh, come in, Francesca,” I heard her weary voice say.

  I went inside. She was in her bed, her festooned throne, propped up in a ruffled and beribboned bed jacket against a thousand pillows. She had a glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a crystal ashtray on her belly. All around her was a flotsam of papers and books, packets of cigarettes, tissues, a jar of face cream, a ripped-open gold-foil package of sugar wafers, and a bottle of Laphroaig. The silver loving cup from the mantel, empty of its dried hydrangeas, lay beside her.

  She hadn’t put on her eyebrows or her lipstick, and her big face, set off by a scarf in Schiaparelli pink, looked to me like something uncooked.

  “Come over here,” she said. “Don’t be so shocked and Catholic.”

  I dragged the tufted vanity seat over to her bed, cutting a groove in the rug, and sat by her.

  “Are you sick?” I asked her.

  “Am I sick?” she said.

  “I mean, are you unwell?” I said.

  “You kids are so boring with your sensitivity,” she said.

  She was…drunk!

  “You’re not yourself,” I said helpfully.

  “Gimme that,” she said, flicking her finger at the bottle of Laphroaig.

  “You sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” she said, “and give it to me.”

  Well.

  Years later I would wonder what course my relationship with Clarice would have taken had I grabbed that bottle, poured it down the sink, and told her to get her fucking head together. Sometimes I wonder it still. But I was someone with no experience of alcoholic parents or abrasive mothers. The same three bottles of anisette, Centerbe, and Galliano sat in the family liquor cabinet from about 1962 well through the 1980s, and my own mother was like a soft little lamb.

  So what I did for Clarice was to shut up and give her the bottle.

  “Oh, you know I don’t mean a thing by it,” she said, pouring herself a fresh glass.

  I sat on the stupid tufted vanity stool determined never to say another word to her again.

  “You kids—you’re all so susceptible,” she said.

  All? I wondered.

  She took a belt of whisky. She’d slipped down enough in her frilly bed that the angle of the glass was wrong, and I watched as little rivulets trickled down her frown grooves to come together at the high ruffle of her bed jack
et. Who owns a bed jacket anyway?

  “Take this,” she said, thrusting her glass at me.

  I took the glass without touching her hand.

  “I have four terrible children,” she said.

  I said nothing.

  “I have four terrible, terrible children,” she said.

  I looked down at my hands.

  “Actually,” she said, “I have two terrible children and two wonderful children. It’s true. My Bertrand, oh, always a wonderful boy. Such a, such a good boy. Such a fastidious little boy, never liked his food to touch. Loved his flowers. One day I found him doing sit-ups in the bathtub. Such a perfect little faggot! And oh, our Cornelia, little Sister Parish with her tea cart! Cornelia with her fat little waddle and her fat little do-gooder ass! Gimme that back.”

  I picked up her glass and held it out to her.

  “Thank you, dear. And then we have of course our Kendrick. Kendrick the fuckup! What was so bad? I always wanted to know. What was so bad? She was a perfect little girl. You must have seen her. She was an angel. Best in her class at the School of American Ballet. Doubrovska loved her. She loved my girl. My girl could have been Wendy Whelan. And what does she do? What does she do? She eats her way into the history books and scotches that plan pretty neatly. A heroic eater, this girl of mine, as if she could win a medal in a contest. And when she’s sick of that and she’s ruined her chances, she goes and starts snorting things up her fucking nose. Thirteen years old, she’s running around with a bunch of perverts. Oh poor baby, she thinks no one loves her! And then she has to run away and live with those animals in Alphabet City, those lunatics who have things written on their faces…but then she has her brother Gerhardt to thank for that—

  “My Jerry,” she said, “my, my, my, my Jerry.”

  Suddenly she seized my hand and squeezed it tightly. Her own hand was like a nutcracker, and it was all I could do not to cry out. And then it was as if I felt something snap inside her. Her head dropped forward and it had a terrible reach, as if it were barely attached, as if she were folding up like some wretched construction, a collection of ruffles and rancor and sad old bones.

  And I realized that this woman before me was just some grieving old lady, alone in her castle.

  “Here,” she said, raising her head. She swam her hand through the papers on her bed until she found what she was looking for and handed it to me. I roved all over it with my eyes. What was it? It was a handbill, advertising a concert of early music, Taverner, Byrd, someone called John Browne. It looked like it had been crushed into a ball and smoothed out again several times over.

  And then I saw his name: Gerhardt Marr-Löwenstein, Tenor.

  “And here my boy hasn’t been home to see his mother in almost two years,” she said.

  The concert was on the Lower East Side, and it was that evening.

  “Are you going to go see him?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said, her voice at the very end of its weariness. “You are.”

  She rolled onto her side, away from me.

  “Pick these things up,” she said over her shoulder. “Get this shitty loving cup off my bed. Ha! Sidney’s anniversary gift. He’ll be in Denmark forever now. Oh, forget it, just get out of here.”

  And she flicked me out of her room.

  *

  Despite everything, I confess that the strongest emotion I felt for Clarice at that moment was an enormous rush of gratitude.

  She wanted me to meet Jerry!

  I must be in fact a special person to her, I realized.

  The rest of that afternoon I made myself useful, running errands, typing up anything I could find, dusting every inch of Clarice’s study. All the time I expected her to show herself, but as I went about my labors, running up and down the stairs, she never appeared.

  Toward evening I was as beset by thrilling expectation as any young debutante. What would I wear? I tried on and threw off everything I owned until I’d heaped a mountain on the bed. I finally found the perfect thing, a tea gown from the ’40s with rhinestone buttons and a thin velvet belt—very Gene Tierney. I stuffed some old nylons into a pair of Kendra’s heels and stepped into them.

  When I finally came down, I found Clarice sitting at the dining room table.

  The only light came from the next room, but she sat excruciatingly erect, herself once again. Her hands with their polished thick nails were folded on the table in front of her, and one of those padded kinds of envelopes, stuffed full of something, sat beside them. She was very pointedly waiting for me. All trace of that morning’s sloppiness—and softness—had vanished.

  “Why so fancy?” she asked me.

  I deflated instantly.

  “Well, I’m going to the concert,” I said.

  “I did ask you to do that, after all?” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I didn’t understand.

  “Did I say anything strange?” she asked me.

  “What do you mean, strange?”

  “What did I say to you, Francesca?”

  “You told me Gerhardt would be singing at the concert and that I should go. That you wanted me to meet him.”

  “I said that?”

  “In so many words.”

  “Did I say anything else?”

  I looked at her, aware that I should not move my eyes up or down. Or blink, or swallow.

  “Not really.”

  She searched my face.

  She had no memory of that morning at all. Nothing.

  “Well,” she said, “here’s what I want you to messenger to him.”

  And she shoved the package across the glossy table at me. Then she got up and left the room.

  *

  I walked to Eldridge Street choking on my bile.

  The sidewalks were still wet from the rain, and as I wobbled in my borrowed heels I seemed to step into every last city-scum puddle, all the while turning over in my mind the full measure of my stupidity, my vanity, my presumption. I was ridiculous, absurd. I was pathetic. Foolish. Naive.

  And then I was incensed, furious. I was furious. How dare that woman do this to me? How dare that phony wretch? I wanted to punch her in her fucking uncooked old-lady face.

  And then I was just sad.

  The streets were empty as I walked down the Bowery with the stupid package in my arms. I just wanted to get this over with.

  The concert was in a community center, in what turned out to be a huge turn-of-the-century building, maybe once a school. In the foyer, an old fellow wearing a beret and reading the Workers Vanguard waved me up the stairs. Inside, with its heavy wood wainscoting, high ceilings, and smell of strong, cheap disinfectant, the place felt like another era. There was the feeling of many years of a specific history—English lessons, striving, civic responsibility. Girls with huge floppy hair ribbons and homemade sailor dresses, immigrant newsboys with button shoes.

  Upstairs, I looked down a long, dark hallway. At the far end sat a severe-looking gal at a folding table, leaning over a metal box and counting money in the faint light. As I got closer I saw she had a punk-rock Bettie Page dyed-black-hair-with-bangs thing going on: serious eyeliner, red lips, vamp dress, lots of rack; a hard, manufactured style. She looked up at me and we instantly slit down our eyes at each other, doing that dog-sniffing-dog, are-you-cooler-than me? thing. From the door behind her, music leaked out.

  “You’re real late, so be quiet,” she said with a proprietary air as I handed over my money.

  *

  I stood inside the auditorium door, letting my eyes adjust to the light.

  I could just barely see the stage, but it appeared to be crowded with singers. None of them seemed a likely Jerry. I clutched the bulging package to slow my beating heart and tried to listen. As my ears began to prick up, I could tell the piece was in Latin, but I couldn’t make sense of it. I stood straining to take it in.

  The music began to be overlaid with multiplying amens and I realized it was slowly, so slowly, ending. When the cla
pping started, I slunk to the first empty seat and looked about me.

  Almost every seat was taken, mostly by older people with gray or white hair. These were the kind of New Yorkers you’d still see downtown in those days, wry and smart elderly folks with canes and library hardbacks and Bella Abzug hats, people who drank in culture but didn’t have a lot of cash. I stared at the program, and the lady sitting next to me leaned over and stabbed her finger at it, as if critiquing my lateness: John Browne’s Stabat Mater was about to begin. It was the last piece.

  I’d missed almost everything, lost in my daydreaming.

  The singers on the stage moved and regrouped, and when I lifted my eyes again, I saw him.

  And then the voices began.

  I am a musical ignoramus, I understand nothing of theory, and so I must step out of the way here. There are some things that can’t be learned. I am thinking of that Bible verse about faith: the evidence of things not seen. I closed my eyes and the voices that started so sparely began to double and echo, and then they swam up and soared. None of the words meant anything at all to me, nothing at all, but the sound was beautiful, the somber complexities weaving together, unweaving, massing. Stilling. And then I heard the voices come back to the incipit, Stabat Mater, and it was like a burst of color blossomed out into the air above me. And some hard-secreted thing in my heart sprang up with it, sprang up and came loose, and I felt a flush of insane grief as tears filled my eyes and then went burning down my face.

  I understand that thing now, now that I am older, when you have so much sadness inside you and you can’t find a way to let it out and then something, or someone, gives you a way to put your burden down.

  I had turned to the side, to the darkness, to calm my face. Now I looked back to the stage. This young man called Gerhardt was looking directly at me. We locked together and his gaze was shocking, almost shaming, in its frankness. We stared at each other as he sang, and it was as if together we kept hovering in the air between us this thing, this unnamable grief.