Everywhere, every day, I see signs of hope, and of distress and defeat. A new restaurant opens on Harrison to rave reviews, Windows on the World is gone forever. A bustling crowd at a five-and-dime on Chambers, a shuttered storefront on Reade. A red carnation in a flower bed high on a ledge on Warren, and sidewalks still covered in a gray sheet of ash. American flags that have fallen from cars are now soiled rags in black water pooled in the gutter. (“Bella, I’m not sure you’re supposed to put a flag in the washing machine.”) On Duane, a Champagne party celebrating the anniversary of a shop that sells tchotchkes from England. On Duane, a man sitting on the steel steps of an old egg depot, his head buried in his hands as he sobs uncontrollably.
I believe we will be all right. We are resilient. We are strong.
We will never be the same. Something in us has been altered forever.
I’ve heard both sentiments expressed by the same people, unaware they had said the opposite moments earlier.
What can I say? I know what it’s like to be caught between echoes of death and the possibility of recovery.
It takes a boundless courage to hope.
I mean, why should we bother?
Because we are inexorably driven toward life, even in the darkest hours. We must accept this. Failing to do so, we are fighting our best angels. We are defeating ourselves.
And when we smile, we are asking the dead to forgive us. When we laugh, we know they have.
That’s what I say. Now, regarding what I believe …
I stood up. Under white streams of light, thin branches of trees on Harrison had spawned delicate yellow-green leaves. Someone—not me; Bella?—had sprinkled potting soil in the small squares of earth amidst the concrete and slate, as if store-bought nutrients would ward off ash, asbestos and fiberglass particles to help these slender trees grow strong. Nice gesture, I thought; futile? Who knows? Things continue to grow here and no one can explain it.
I went inside, dropped the lunch sack on the kitchen table and bent down to pick up the mail that had scattered after a short fall through the slot. The copy of a music magazine from the UK, a Janus statement and three junk fliers went on the table near Bella’s neatly stacked manuscript.
As I slid out of my jacket, I noticed a note on the refrigerator, pinned under a rubber magnet from Sam Flax. M. Orr, I speak to Dorotea. Grazie tante. Natalia Maoli.
On the stove, my reward: two jumbo artichokes, spiked with garlic cloves, expertly trimmed, were in the steamer. I’d bet rolled thin slices of veal were in Tupperware in the refrigerator to complete the meal.
Neither Bella nor I could convince our housekeeper that artichokes and messicani di vitello constituted not one but two meals for us.
I hung my coat on the back of the laundry-room door and went to the phone. Since Mrs. Maoli wouldn’t make a call without permission—a formality she insisted upon despite her years of service and Bella’s unconditional, if occasionally bemused, love—I knew Dorotea Salgado had contacted her. I tapped *69 and was given a 10-digit number; since all of Bella’s friends were in school, I figured the number belonged to Mrs. Maoli’s Cuban friend.
Outside, it was mild enough to eat in the backyard, to linger over the Times book review, to listen to Sheila Yannick, who lived behind us, run endless scales on her Amati cello. But I wanted to wrap up the favor to Mrs. Maoli, so I washed my hands in the kitchen sink, picked up the sack and took it and a small bottle of Badoit to the back of the house.
Mrs. Maoli had expressed her gratitude by feather-dusting Marina’s scene of Lake Occhito. I stopped, tapped the frame and centered it on the brick wall.
As I sat behind my desk, I tore open the lunch sack and inadvertently toggled the mouse. With a shudder, the screen saver, a quote from Poe, kicked in: “All that we see is but a dream within a dream.” I watched it scroll by as I dialed Julie Giada’s number and used a paper napkin to wipe off a plastic fork.
On the third ring, I got voice mail again.
“Julie. Terry. Thanks for the address,” I said, talking to the tape. “I’m thinking maybe you’d better give Salgado’s parole officer a heads-up, just in case. She ought to know someone’s looking for her, even if it’s just her mother.”
I thanked her again and cut the line. I logged on as I picked a plump caper from the salad.
“It’s up to you,” Bella said coyly as she dipped an artichoke leaf into the garlic butter I’d prepared.
She dragged the leaf against her bottom front teeth. One of what she calls her “trance mixes” played from the laptop at the other end of the table; something rehashed from the ’70s, I think. With little regard for copyright law, my daughter pillaged MP3 files from the Web for our nightly entertainment. She’s burned me a few CDs that aren’t half bad.
“If you didn’t want me to look at it, you wouldn’t have left it there for me to ask you if I could. That’s obvious.” I pointed with my fork. “It’s been there since Friday.”
“Thursday.” Then she muttered, “Obvious.”
She was right. It was on the table the night before we went uptown to see Elizabeth Harteveld, Bella’s twice-a-month shrink. The two of them probably agreed it was time for me to read it, that I was finally ready to give it its due.
Two years ago, I learned from Harteveld that Bella was putting together a chronology for, and biography of, a fictional detective named Mordecai Foxx, who was supposed to have worked here in the 1870s. Her idea: She’d turn it over to me and I’d write a novel, as if a man who’d written nonfiction about Tammany could snap his fingers and become a novelist. When she was 12, what Bella wanted most, I thought, was a return to the life she’d known, which included me at the library or the computer keyboard 10-12 hours a day. I thought she was embarrassed that I’d put all that away to become a P.I. A lot of listening to her and Harteveld convinced me that what she wanted was for me to stay alive, for me to, as she once put it, “stand where a Dad is supposed to stand. Which is not digging through the trash for used condoms.” She wanted me to hold her when she puts on her brave face: Her lips flatten, then quiver as her eyes brim with tears and her cheeks go to red. Bella’s brave face: It tears me open. It reminds me that my heart is not the cold stone I’d convinced myself it had become.
I told her I wasn’t going to write again—and as far as I’ve come, I can still say that unequivocally—and I challenged her to write the novel herself.
“Mr. Orr,” said Mary Gottschalk, the librarian at Bella’s Montessori school, “I’m not supposed to tell you anything about what Gabriella is up to. She made us all promise.” The cranelike, silver-haired librarian looked left and right and then leaned over books stacked hastily on the long check-out desk to whisper to me. I bent down as she said, “It is the single most amazing thing I’ve seen in my seventeen years here. She’s written an entire book.”
“Yes, I—”
“No, you don’t understand,” Mrs. Gottschalk insisted. “It’s really a book.”
Now I took a sip of the red, a ’97 Il Sodaccio that Leo had scored for me. “So … ?”
“So it’s there,” Bella said, without looking at me. “There it is.”
She had butter on her dimpled chin. A girl who was obsessively neat in many ways—House Beautiful could do a piece on her closets—had abysmal table manners: She now had a bare foot on the chair and her knee up by her ear. A ridiculously large hoop earring lay flat on one of the patches on her jeans.
“You want me to read it or what?” I asked. “Just say so.” I looked at the title page. Nursery of Crime was what she called it.
“Oh, I don’t know …”
“Bella …”
She suddenly asked, “When did McSorley’s open?”
“In 1855. Why?”
“Fifty-four.”
“Fifty—” I stopped; I felt myself frown. “Are you sure?”
Her earring rattled as she gestured toward her manuscript. “The man who wrote Slippery Dick doesn’t know when McSorley’s opened. He-he.�
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I wiped my slippery fingers on a paper napkin. “What is your—”
“Fraunces Tavern?” she challenged.
I cut into a piece of juicy tomato. “It opened in 1719. Samuel Fraunces bought it in 1762. Does Mordecai Foxx have some sort of drinking problem?”
“No, not at all,” she said aggressively as she defended her creation.
“So your point is …”
“My point is that I don’t need a fact-checker. Or a proofreader. To read is to read only. For pleasure.”
I looked at her as she toyed with a ring of purple onion. I couldn’t tell if my daughter was outgrowing her looks or growing into them: She walks into my study and I see what will soon pass for a young woman. She walks into my study and I see a little girl. Tonight, she’s a precocious 14-year-old. No: Tonight, with her long brown hair bunched on top of her head with a big pink clip, she looks like a Dr. Seuss character with a couple of freckles sprinkled about her nose. A nose which didn’t resemble her mother’s. Nor did it resemble mine. Since I’d had mine broken four times, I was glad of that.
Every time Bella leaves the house with her basketball tucked under her arm, I can see Marina shaking her head in disapproval, looking at my nose, and the scars and knots on my knees and elbows, before looking at Bella’s sweet perfection. “Is this what you want for your daughter?” she’d ask, her Italian accent a bit thicker than when she was less nettled.
“What?” Bella asked. She caught me staring.
I changed the subject. “Is Glo-Bug’s mom still helping you find a dress?”
“Sure.” She put down her fork. “Everyone knows it’s a big thing.”
“Everybody,” I repeated.
“Everybody wants to go to the Rock Critics’ dinner.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Not silence—electronic beeping and bleating and Bella whisper-singing absently into her cup of cranberry juice: “And for a minute there, I lost myself. I lost myself.”
She looked at me. “Remember, Dad, it’s ‘rock ’n’ roll black tie.’”
“Got it.” Maybe she’d explain later.
“He’s going to win.”
“If Diddio wins, I will be very happy.” I stood and grabbed my plate. “What about Mordecai Foxx?”
“What about him?” She dipped another leaf into the garlic butter.
“Bella …”
She made a sound that seemed like a snort.
I scraped scraps into the garbage pail and put the plate in the sink. “I’ll be fair.”
She took a deep breath. “Go ahead.”
TWO
I felt the warmth of the early-morning sun, despite the chill off the river, and I paused for a moment on cobblestone, went back to my front steps to stretch again, then headed off to West Street, away from grinding bulldozers, groaning cranes and the caravan of dump trucks and containers on flatbeds at Ground Zero. I crossed the highway and ran south, then passed Point Thank You at Christopher, where handmade posters, bouquets and men and women with grateful hearts and generous smiles paid tribute to weary workers as they passed in Humvees, city-owned buses and blue Chevy Suburbans wearing NYPD shields.
I got in a quick three miles and was back on Greenwich by 8:15. After a stop at the refrigerator for bottled water, I went to the cabinet, remembered I was out of vitamins and took one of Bella’s Flintstones chewables. Seconds later, I washed Dino out of my back teeth with l’eau minérale naturelle gazeuse.
Upstairs, I sat on the edge of my unmade bed for a moment to cool down, flipping on the radio on my nightstand for company. Unlacing my running shoes, I half-listened to a report on the corn grown near a nuclear plant in central France.
By the time I got out of the shower, NPR had moved on from mutant corn to something that involved Aldous Huxley. I missed most of what a giddy Brit commentator had to say as I towel-dried my hair. I tossed the towel in the general direction of the steamed bathroom and called Julie Giada.
“Well, this is a coincidence,” she said, her voice clear and characteristically bright.
“You had your finger on the nine?”
“Not quite.”
I went toward my chest of drawers and cradled the phone between my ear and shoulder as I started to dress.
“This Sonia is not for you, Terry. Terry?”
“I’m here.”
“She robbed and killed a sixty-seven-year-old man. Asher Glatzer. At the station at Chrystie and Grand.”
I knew that station. It was a block from the Bowery, near the downtown diamond district.
“Vicious, Terry. Cut his chest, chin, throat. Arms, hands.” She made a guttural sound. “Not pretty.”
“You call her P. O.?” I asked.
“Left messages. He was out by the time I got back last night and he’s not in yet.”
“Damn.”
“Why? Something wrong?”
“Well, something’s not quite right,” I said. “Mom stays away at least five years, then suddenly wants to visit.” I got my black loafers from the other side of the bed. “I mean, the kid’s sick, but—”
“Kid? What kid?”
“Sonia’s grandson, Enrique.”
I could hear her ruffle pages. “Sonia Salgado doesn’t have a child. She never gave birth.”
“Are you sure?”
“They can tell these things, Terry,” she replied. “And she was too young to adopt before she went inside.” She paused as she shuffled through the file. “No, there’s nothing in here. No child.”
“No child, no grandchild.”
She said, “The mother’s story—”
“—is bullshit.”
“I was going to say questionable,” she laughed. “Did you give her the address?”
“Not yet.”
“Well?”
I tucked my blue Oxford shirt into my jeans. “Can you keep trying her parole officer?”
“Of course.”
I grabbed my money clip from the top of my chest of drawers. Sixteen dollars.
“I’ll go see Sonia,” I said.
“Terry, remember: She’s not for you.”
Falling in with the stream of subdued, almost indifferent men and women in light coats and suits pouring toward Travelers’ huge red umbrella logo, I went north along Greenwich until I saw a cab roll to a stop on Hubert. After waiting for the passenger to adjust bills in her crowded wallet, I avoided the pale silt where the cobblestone met the curb and jumped in. Too much sweet perfume and a high-pitched interpretation of a song from India greeted me.
“Saint Mark’s Place,” I said.
The Sikh driver wore a beige turban and had a thick, perfectly groomed beard. He waggled over to Broadway and, as if to remind me why I was in the cab, headed east on Canal to the Bowery: Less than a half mile over my left shoulder was the subway station where 67-year-old Asher Glatzer was killed, the knife tearing his throat as he struggled in vain to protect himself.
People die in subway stations here, I thought, as we caught a red on Houston. They enter, perhaps warily; but they have a destination in mind. They’re thinking not of the journey, but where they will be, and they expect to be delivered. …
A Madman, orange hair done up Rasta-style, ragged rips in his soiled pants, dirt crusted around his ankles. He approaches a beautiful woman and her baby boy who, in his stroller and his blue jumper with its rubber soles, pedals his tiny legs, who flexes his tiny fists—
“Radio OK for you?”
“I’m sor— Excuse me?”
“Radio,” the driver repeated, his voice a terse bark.
“Radio, sure. It’s your cab.”
I remember everything: I had a habit, which I started in college, of keeping a journal. To exercise my ability to observe, to refine my craft (such as it was), to remember everything.
I destroyed all my journals. But I can’t purge my mind. It’s all there for easy referral. And it’s easily triggered: passing a subway station, for example, on a sunny morning.
&
nbsp; I use the good now to block out the bad. I’d spent a good portion of the past four years trying to use the bad to push away the good, only allowing in the light when I wrote love letters sent toward the heavens, where Marina resides, Davy sitting in her lap. Obsession? Can anyone know? When I wasn’t among burning suns in distant galaxies, I was in the squalor here, wallowing in self-pity, in self-loathing, rummaging through my ragged mind for what was wrong, beginning with bad, racing toward worse.
Of course, even I could recognize the futility of my obsession, the absurdity of my self-absorption, when two 110-story towers collapsed and some 3,000 of us were killed and countless families shattered by another type of madman, by many madmen.
Forty-six kids at Walt Whitman High School lost parents in the World Trade Center attacks. Even though we could not return to our home for nearly a month, Bella and I went to funerals, memorial services, in TriBeCa, the West Village, Chelsea, for 13 consecutive days. Sometimes we went to two in the same morning.
Bella’s brave face. Bella holding my hand.
A happy thought, please. A good thought.
That summer Marina and I visited the Tremiti Islands, the Lesina and Varano lakes, the Castel del Monte built by Frederick II, the amphitheater in Lecce. We rested under the late-afternoon sky in her sister Rafaela’s fragrant garden behind the small stone house. We shared a hearty Squinzano, olive-stuffed bread and chestnuts her father had roasted.
“Terry, you like?” Benedicto asked. The old man eased himself onto the bench on the other side of the weather-worn table.
Smiling, Marina said something in Italian to her father. I understood only “Papà” and “New York.”
Benedicto repeated, “Terry, you like?”
“Si,” I replied. “Mi piace.”
Rafaela shrugged, unimpressed. “It’s a beginning.”
The cabbie entered the East Village at Third and went to St. Mark’s Place, where I hopped out, tossing him a five.
I went east along the wide, lumpy thoroughfare that’s part bazaar, part hackneyed backlot. Here reside the last vestiges of hippiedom and free-flowing sexual ambiguity, the Village longing for the days when Lindsay let his hair go over his ears and wore double-breasted jackets with wide lapels and shirts with fat pinstripes. Squint (to blur the Internet ads stapled to telephone poles) and you see what you saw then: scrawny men with scraggly beards and bleary eyes, squat women with cropped hair, heavy boots and thick chains looping from front pocket of their stiff Levis to rear, and odd specialty shops that cannot survive and yet there they are, all in a mismatched row. I looked at the boutique on my left; Religious Sex was its name. Maybe they called it Purple Peace or Leary’s Lair 35 years ago.
A Well-Known Secret Page 2