by Ruby Spinell
While he replaced the shovel, the door to his landlady’s apartment opened. Her sight might be failing, but there was nothing wrong with her hearing. “I know I wouldn’t be able to get you to sit down for this.” She held a tiny mug on a flowered saucer out to him, steam rising through a froth of cream on the surface of the liquid. He stomped his feet free of snow, removed his gloves, smiling at her and took the delicate china in hand.
“Glad we got it done tonight,” he gestured back over his shoulder, “it would have been very heavy in the morning! I’ll check before going to work, take care of whatever accumulation we get during the night. That will give you tomorrow to find out what happened to Andy.”
“Thank you!” She seemed very frail standing beside her high, dark door in the light falling on the landing. When he drained the tiny mug, she gave a sigh of contentment.
Back in his own apartment, while waiting for the kettle to boil for coffee—he couldn’t remember when he last drank cocoa—he called information for Mir’s number. There was no listing.
“No,” the operator said somewhat crossly, “it is not unlisted, it isn’t a number, period!”
How like her he thought, she still hasn’t gotten around to having her phone connected. He was restless. He thought of calling Marion and hesitated; he had deliberately not thought of the time they spent together the other day. Something he hadn’t known about himself had surfaced, a matter that made him more restless … he needed time.
Flicking the kettle off again, he opened the door into the coolness of the practice room and turned on the light. Stripping off his shirts and jeans, he pulled on a pair of black sweat pants that had been hanging behind the door. Naked torso, bare feet, he stood with the South behind him facing the North star.
Think of water, he commanded, gazing on the smooth vanished wood ten feet away. Instead of water, angry red buttocks and the flush and excitement of humiliation came to him.
He concentrated on allowing the chi to drop below his navel to the place of roil and turbulence. He instructed his shoulders to relax, his arms to be loose.
With concentration there is stillness. There was no stillness. None of the five essential qualities were present tonight. He did the only other thing he could, he began Tai Chi Chuan as a whirling dervish.
He focused on being true to the movements, without clarity, balance, lightness, or slowness and minus all calm. Rapidly, he moved from ‘grasp the bird’s tail’ to ‘ward off left.’ Immediately he was ‘warding off right,’ ‘rolling back.’
‘Single whip’ set off sparks within his lumbar region. ‘Shoulder strike’ … ‘stork spreads wings’ … he concentrated on fidelity and speed. Keeping the movements from slowing, he synchronized tempo to chaos.
Physical certainty filled him at the first ‘apparent closure.’ ‘Carrying tiger to mountain’ … mind obliterated emotion … mind protecting body from destroying itself. In the partnership of body and mind, he’d always know the heart of matter was mind.
Tai Chi was first and foremost a mind exercise. By the time he reached ‘snake creeps down,’ he had to force himself to keep up the fast tempo. Every cell of his body was crying for slowness and calmness. He ignored them.
At ‘fair lady works shuttles,’ the energy sank low. The gold snake stretching, uncoiling, began to wake.
A brilliance of physical certainty ‘kicked horizontal’ ‘bent bow and shot the tiger.’ Body at play, mind at east. The pivot of Tao, ego and non-ego no longer exposed.
Sinking into ‘apparent closure,’ a word came to him. Hsin, the Chinese word for heart and mind … which cannot be separated. Calm mind directing, method refines. Subtle, profound, practical mind directs body with increasing perfection. And the very certainty rebounds to increasing mental ease and equilibrium.
Taking a deep breath, he dropped into beginning stance again. This time the way it should be …
Later, sitting with coffee and a shot of cognac, reading the Times article by Benedict Nightingale on the Irish actor Ray McAnally, he was caught up by the rightness of the actor’s words. “The body is limited, but the mind is infinite.” Just as McAnally knew he could play any part in the world mentally, Eli knew it was possible for mind to direct body through all one hundred and twenty eight movements of Tai Chi … even though the body were paralyzed, insensate, confined to a wheelchair.
Lost in thought, he put the Arts and Leisure section down. Ray McAnally’s words were the realest thing he’d heard that day: “The body is altered, physically and chemically altered by the mind.”
One wakes eventually, but deep snow deactivates one’s usual leverage. It is hard then for the mind to take up the play of the game. Very slowly, Mir turned in the bed to gauge the light. Against the wall of the building opposite, an oblique triangular patch of it, told her it was almost seven a.m. It did not matter that she had never stayed in this particular room before. The snow had stopped. The light from the East was low.
Coffee! It would be an hour before the cafeteria downstairs opened. She thought of the patisserie on the way to the office … fresh croissants … large mugs …
As she lathered under the shower spray, presenting her foamy torso to the pelting warmth, she thought of Arthur Danley. He had a great zest for life; she’d had a thoroughly good time last night.
Curious though. She was sure he had known what her intended next article was before she broached the subject. But he didn’t give her an answer. He looked at her as if he were assessing a trotter at Yonkers. When he finally spoke, he referred to the fact that she was staying in town because of the weather and would she have dinner with him again tomorrow.
That is, today. He was picking her up at ten to six. Dinner at Porto Bello, a little cucina Italiana, he said. He had a great appetite for Italian. She sucked her belly in and patted its slight oval. She was going to gain weight knowing this man.
Did she enjoy Les Paul? Yes, then it was settled; they would burn off the calories walking to Fat Tuesdays on Third and Seventeenth to hear him. A man who could not give her a simple yes or no was surely being quite purposeful in other matters.
He had been quite purposeful when he said No! to CBGB’s. Looking somewhat startled, he asked her what on earth she wanted to go to a place ‘like that’ for? Bowery and Bleecker was definitely off limits. She wondered why; he certainly could handle himself.
Somewhat annoyed at this paternalistic attitude, she had opened her mouth. Maybe a little hardcore in spots, but not exactly in line with the male dancers with their boxer shorts down around their ankles in the burlesque theaters on Times Square. It had been a long time since her father told her what he thought was appropriate work for women. But time had not dissipated the hot angry sting.
She thrust that at Danley and was rewarded by a flush that started in his lower neck and rose to his ears. His response to the all-male revues differed from the former. One was merely scuzzy and uncomfortably off-limits. One was unmentionable. She smiled to herself remembering the cigar smoking maleness of him … the ease with which he lifted her over the snow banks … the evident pleasure he took in holding her far longer than he needed to.
At ten to nine she pushed open the office door. “Mrs. Janah! Oh, Mrs. Janah!” Cornelius Weber, one of her bosses, was wringing his hands just inside the opening. She had the feeling he had been pacing back and forth between the water cooler, the clock, and the door. “Mrs. Janah, such terrible weather!” She nodded, waiting, he had not called her Mrs. Janah passionately three times because of the weather. “So unfortunate. Traffic so devastatingly snarled. Oh, I do believe these things are arranged to test me. Why must it happen today?”
Flushed and exhilarated from her walk, she tried to look concerned for this most friable of the partners who to her mind, was always being tested. “Lawrence is ill. He was supposed to meet her,” a small sob escaped his throat, his hand did a so-so wobble in mid air as if his partner in a glider was encountering air currents.
Barbara Latouch
e, author of Bedevil Alphonse was arriving at Port Authority at ten that morning. The poor woman simply detested trains. She would not fly; flying was abhorrent to her. And most importantly, she had been assured that someone would meet her bus, and she was terrified of large cities. Mir, listening to this spiel, wondered what the creature was made of.
She had given a sympathetic grunt which he in his anxiety had taken for some kind of marvelous windfall. “You agree? Oh! I am so relieved. Someone must be there to meet her,” pump … pump … “thank you!” His slender fingers grasping the end of her mitten, nearly shook it off.
The elevator operator taking her off in the opposite direction from the flow of traffic, glanced her way, “Short day huh?” On the street, she struck off again, this time Northwest. Two young women were helping each other from a taxi whose rear wheels were stuck in a snow bank. The smell of rubber burns came to her along with the shrill cry of the wheels.
Port Authority, amazingly vacant, looked as if half the arriving buses hadn’t made it. She was twenty minutes early, so veered to the ladies’ room on the central plaza. A breathing spell … the kind of time she utilized for all sorts of things. She pulled a squat, plastic bottle of Listerine from her pocketbook and took a large mouthful.
Sitting in the cubicle, she sloshed the liquid back and forth therapeutically against her ageing gums. Paltry little proofreading this morning, my dear. There were some shuffling footsteps on the other side of the stall. She listened, but heard no voices.
Flushing, she gathered herself together, and stepped out into a ring of silent girls. “Madam will need towels, show her the cleanest sink, Viv. And soap! Of course, Tina, Madam will need soap. Soap is expensive these days, isn’t it girls?” There was a murmur of assent.
She stood silently, as one after another of the six haphazard citizens touched her arm. The circle drew together. But this was all too silly, she thought. None of them was over sixteen. Straggly hair, oversized army jackets, pinched faces … without looking any one in the face, she felt the undercurrent energy.
“Now watch the puddle, Madam,” the leader had taken her arm and was trying to steer her around the overflow from a nearby cubicle. “We aim to please, don’t we, girls?”
Listerine suds started trickling down her throat. With her free hand she pointed toward her puffy cheeks, coughed, squashed an urge to vomit, and lunged; the circle opened, six pair of irregularly clad feet backed away as she broke for the sink. She ran the water; when she looked up from rinsing her mouth, she was alone.
She looked around the derelict squalor of the restroom, why did they run? It could be a dream. The blocked plumbing. The wet floor. The dirt. The lack of towels. Six street girls playing at BIG bad energy.
“I struck out twice. The first woman I approached, looked at me as if I were crazed, changed her suitcase rapidly to her outer hand and hurried away. When the second woman laughed in my face, I decided to hang back, process of elimination, you know.”
Mir laughed long and soft, remembering. “Finally, there was no one left but this wispy, little grey-haired lady, clutching her bag with both hands, darting furtive glances left and right. I swear I couldn’t say it. I could not go up and ask her if she was Roxanne LaTouche.”
“What happened?” Arthur Danley’s eyes were full of humor.
“She came to me, one half-step at a time. She edged forward, clutching the bag like a shield.” Mir pitched her voice high, “’My dear, you wouldn’t happen to know a Mr. Weber at Linten’s Publishing Company?’ ‘Roxanne’ I asked. Couldn’t get out the second half. Her friends came up with the nom de plume. No one would suspect her of writing those steamy novels.”
“Someday I must show you the catacombs under old St. Pat’s. You enjoy oddities. There was a time the Church was into temporal power.”
“When has it not?”
He grimaced, pursing his full lips. “They stopped hiding their wealth in subterranean caverns in 1913 …”
“What about the art treasures moldering away under Rome?”
“Ornery tonight, aren’t we?” But he conceded with a nod of bushy, grey hair. She suddenly had a picture of him bending his mitered head to strike the blow that confirmed you a soldier of Christ. A soldier’s soldier.
“I’ve read that some felt His Holiness wanted to reside in the United States back when the original St. Patrick’s was built.”
“Some very angry people fought what they did not know. Those catacombs came in handy more than once.”
“I would like to see them. What’s under new St. Pat’s?” He hunched his shoulders, looked at his wine. Mir knew he would not answer. She felt incorrigible. “They knock them off? The builders? Bury them in the tower supports so they wouldn’t talk? Not a good idea to let too many know what’s under the ground … when you hope to wield power …”
He was shaking his head back and forth as if arguing with himself. There was a smile playing around the corner of his generous mouth. She decided to chance it.
“Am I doing the article on the Monastery of the Annunciation?”
“No one can stop you.”
“Do I have your support?” She waited.
“Yes.” Clipped, it dropped like a pebble in a goldfish bowl. A tiny spume of dust rose from the bottom.
“You don’t like the idea.”
He sighed. “In some ways I think you’ll be more trouble than you’re worth.” That gave her cause to nod assent.
“You will help me though, keep my facts straight?”
He rubbed a finger pensively through a brow … pushing the brush up, letting it fall, pushing it up, letting it fall. “Keep tabs?”
“Something like that.”
“If you insist.” But he had already thought it out and decided there were advantages.
“I appreciate it.”
He frowned, shaking his head. “Don’t thank me yet.”
Chapter Ten
Mind is the knower; mind is the object known. There was the brightness of linen everywhere. Damian, dropping a fold softly so it would not crease, laid the tunic in the drawer atop the green brocade of the chasuble. Sacristy light drenched the mounded snow. Through the large window looking into the garden, the yew, unusually tall, gave a little lurch against the glass, settling new fur about its shoulders.
Always the loosed delight. Silence—the snow.
The bells in the tower muffled the call to Mass. She heard a step on the other side of the wall.
Sister sacristan was always released from silence to speak with the officiating priest, but Father Elias never spoke until after Mass. If he needed something, a note was passed through the drawer, a tap on wood advising of its arrival.
Placing the matching stole, she folded the white linen cloth for the handwashing, laying it on a diagonal just across the edge of the green outer garment. So much white tended to forsake boundaries. They were such silly inconspicuous little things, utterly unabsorbent, always getting lost.
He sounded in good spirits. Truly, the man had done an about face in the last few years. There had been talk of an imminent nervous breakdown when he first arrived. Those times he came with Monsignor Reilly you could feel the tension, gloom, and nervous energy. Reilly kept muttering, “give ’im time.”
Well, time it was then that healed all wounds—and prayer. They might mother the whole Asian peoples, but she would always direct the main thrust of her prayer toward the priests.
She waited while he removed the vestments in the order in which they were put on, first the tunic, then the stole and the chasuble. Waiting to see there was nothing else needed, she then let herself noiselessly out of the sacristy into the muted light of the enclosed wing of the church.
“How do you feel about grabbing some real breakfast … pancakes, sausage, bacon …?” Eli, still wearing the torn ski jacket and knit hat looked hopefully at Walt Bathesday and John Fay who had their coats on before he said ‘bacon.’ They stood grinning like two kids on reprieve from school.
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Fay jerked his chin. “You paying?”
“Yeah, let’s go. I need something to stick to my ribs this morning.” Eli led the way.
Bath plucked at the old ski jacket as he passed, “Bit casual this morning, aren’t we?”
Eli just shook his head in exasperation. “Damn plows. I think they deliberately shove their load in any poor fart’s opening.”
They wisely refrained from comment.
“By the way, bring what you’ve gathered so far.” Bath patted his overcoat pocket. Fay tapped his fist against the spines of the spiral notebook tucked in the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
Mom Molinari, in her beaming bulk, soon had them surrounded with steaming plates and fraternal smells. She was in her element; three hungry men! There was no talk for twenty minutes.
Then Eli gave a great sigh and leaned back, “God, I needed that, feel like I’ve been up for hours.”
Bath wiped his mouth. “Well, I haven’t been up all that long, but it sure was good.” Fay agreed, swiping his plate one last time with a hunk of sweet roll. “Why don’t I start?” Bath said. They watched as he dug deep into the overcoat he’d draped over the back of his chair.
“Father Arturo Polaski. Thirty-four years old. Diocesan priest. His folks still live in the Bay area where he grew up. Sheepshead Bay area. Honor student all the way. Secretary and all around gofer for his excellency Bishop Danley. Studious, sensitive, well-read. The man speaks five languages.” They could tell that Bath was impressed. “He speaks Chinese, a southern dialect spoken in the vicinity of the Sung-shan mountains in Honan province. That’s one of China’s sacred mountains, the central sacred one. There are sacred mountains in their North, South, East, and West.”
Eli, fascinated, was considering this new facet of Walt Bathesday. He grinned. “Do you have the mountains’ names too?”