“Or she might have charmed a workman into cooperating with her conspiracy.”
“It could very well be. She was quite a whimsical gal, or dreamy perhaps. And she thought about us, far off in the future. Every year I have a birthday party for Elizabeth, just her and me.”
“Did you ever find her?”
“I found a record in the city archives. A Walcott family lived at this address until 1907. It took me a long time to find the rest of the trail. There was a professor Peter Walcott who in 1907 began teaching at a small college in New Jersey. I finally found Elizabeth’s grave in a cemetery near Princeton. She died in a nursing home in 1972, age eighty-six. She was a philosophy professor for most of her life.”
“I wonder what she was like. She sounds very nice.”
“I think she was. I would have married her in an instant, if we had lived in the same era.” He pauses. “Have you had enough? Have I bored you?”
“I’m not bored, Billy. But I am very tired, and we both need to sleep. Can we come here again tomorrow?”
“Of course we can. So you don’t think I’m unbalanced?”
I shake my head.
“It is rather eccentric,” he adds uncertainly.
“I do not know what is unbalanced and eccentric, Billy. How can such things be measured?”
“Usually by how odd one’s behavior is compared with the majority of people.”
“Does this worry you?”
He thinks about it. Then he laughs. “No.”
We step out into the apartment, which now seems barren. Billy closes the door and pins it tight. He turns out the light, and we go back to bed.
The next day he leaves before I wake up. I find a scrawled note on the kitchen table:
Good morning, Francisco.
I’ll see you at suppertime.
Billy.
Beneath it is another note:
Dear F,
You seem to be getting better and better. If you feel you want to go out by yourself, please keep this card with you at all times, in case you forget where we live.
Take care,
B.
Under this is a pocket-size piece of cardboard, on which is printed:
MY NAME IS FRANCISCO DE GOYAI AM EXPERIENCING HEALTH PROBLEMS.
WOULD YOU KINDLY BRING ME BACK TO MY HOME AT:
This is followed by a street number on West Forty-Fifth Street.
I have no intention of leaving the building on my own. Though it is painful to admit, I know I am totally dependent on Billy’s generous hospitality, his guidance, and his patience with me. I wish it were otherwise, but I don’t know how to change myself.
During his absence I open the door to the hidden room of his mind by pulling out the lock pin. When I enter the room, I find it is no longer dark inside. Light filters through three windows on the left-hand wall. The glass is opaqued with amber-hued paint. I lift a window sash and poke my head outside. The view is a red brick wall of the neighboring apartment building. I close the window and turn on the ship’s lantern and the strings of Christmas lights. The stars have lost their brilliance in daylight, but they diffuse their colors warmly. After the starkness of the apartment, this room exudes a consoling sense of home—a familiarity, a recognition, though I have never lived in it. Perhaps the embedded radiance of its dormant histories is welcoming me.
I sit down on the sofa, feeling reservation about intruding on Billy’s privacy. These antiques and mementos are the relics of other people’s lives, but, still, he has rescued them and cared for them, and in some cases, such as the musical cosmic clock, he has re-created them as new phenomena. They contain stories and messages that he has deciphered. Cryptic though they may be to me, I respect them as objects he has lovingly interpreted or reshaped with his mind and his hands, without thought of profit or public attention.
After all these years, I am the first to see what he has created, and thus it is clear that these things have been, until now, his private meditation—indeed, his private language. Yet he told me last night that I can return to see more. Did he mean that I may enter this sanctum unaccompanied? Or did he imply that I must be guided through it by Virgil?
“Who is Virgil?” I ask with a skip of a heartbeat. A leaf rising from the sodden darkness at the bottom of the pond.
I have not yet looked at the paintings and photographs. I get up and wander around.
A large moody landscape in a gilded frame hangs beside a primitive painting of a horse. The horse is sorrel brown and approximately equestrian, its body split horizontally by the warped panels of wood on which it was painted. The varnish has been crackled by age, possibly by weather. Written in flowing script at the base of the image:
Benny’s Vermont Dark Ale.
I move on.
Next is a painting of men rowing a racing scull on a placid river bordered by autumnal trees. This too is crackled, with some damaged spots repainted amateurishly. I frown my disapproval. I hope the repairs were not done by Billy, whom I have come to admire greatly. I want no pall of criticism to fall upon our relationship. I begin to wonder why I care so much about art.
After that comes a section of wall filled with black-and-white photographs in narrow black frames. One of them stands out dramatically. It is two feet wide and eight inches high: an ocean liner on the high seas, white foam at its bow, smoke from its stacks streaming behind. It is heading west at top speed. A printed caption: R.M.S. Titanic.
In another, a well-muscled teenage boy in a sports uniform bends over a basketball in midbounce. He is looking up at the camera with an expression both determined and gleeful, expecting the very best from life.
Beside it is a photo of a middle-aged man and woman with broad open faces, looking proud, the same teenage boy standing between them. He is dressed in a suit and tie, with a suitcase at his feet. A shock of blond hair falls over his forehead. The parents are reaching up, their arms draping around the boy’s shoulders—he is more than a head taller than they are. In the background a two-s tory clapboard house rises from the crest of a hill. Beside its front veranda is a stone well with a hand pump. Scrawled across the bottom of the image are the words:
We’ll miss you, William. Love, Dad.
and
Have the best year of your life, son. Love, Mom.
Then a larger shot of William, an eight-by-ten glossy with wide creamy matting, nonglare glass, and a narrow box frame.
He is wearing denim farm overalls, two straps over his bare shoulders and chest. He is straining with an arched back and chin held high, lifting a calf that must weigh two hundred pounds or more. His eyes are squinting with the physical effort, and the delight of his accomplishment. His grin is as wide as a field. He is laughing, either silently or aloud.
The only other photograph is of a teenage girl about sixteen or seventeen years old. She is wearing a formal dress with a pinned corsage. Her hair is piled high and bound by a ribbon. Her face is long-shaped and plain, but there is plenty of character in it. Her expression is feminine, generous, loving. She is smiling into the camera, and presumably at Billy, who, though invisible to me, is absolutely present to her when the shutter opens and closes. It would seem that he is still so.
I move on, pondering.
On the opposite side of the room stands a bank of small wooden drawers, hundreds of them, each of their fronts about six inches square with a round ceramic knob. I pull out a drawer. Its interior is a foot long. Inside is a collection of mushroom-top metal buttons. Picking through them at random, I learn that they come from various nations and military services. Anchors and wings and crossed rifles.
I close the drawer and open another. This one contains handmade bone buttons.
In the next are coils of fine brass wire, neatly bound by their stems.
In drawer after drawer I find an incongruous array of items, thoughtfully sorted, either worthless or not very valuable, but intriguing nonetheless:
— A collection of small brass bells, including colored
Christmas bells that one might affix to a wreath.
— Canceled postage stamps of recent vintage.
— Lapel pins, some quite old, some newer, all of them emblematic of wildly disparate themes, political, commercial, tourist, academic, and religious.
— More cigar bands, which are miniature artworks, meticulously saved by someone over a long period of time.
— Five round, Chinese-red Tiger Balm containers, empty.
— Packages of incense cones, mainly purple.
— Spools of pink embroidery cotton.
— Four little balsa wood boxes that once contained cheese, their lids stamped with French and Italian logos and printed medallions for past awards. The boxes no longer smell of their former contents.
— Knitting needles.
— Crochet needles.
— Sewing needles, a spool of white thread, and a spool of black thread.
— Illustrations of World War II aircraft, cut from magazines.
— New York subway tokens.
— Straight pens with packages of nibs as sharp as razors.
— A sealed plastic bag containing a single light-green sock with a red stripe and a hole in the heel, powdered with copious dust or white ashes. It is a young child’s.
— A dried flower corsage.
— More black arrowheads.
— Broken pieces of fern fossil.
— A highway map of the central region of the United States, along with a water sample receipt, stamped by an Iowa state agency, certifying that the sample was completely free of biological or chemical contaminants.
— Marbles, solid colors.
— Marbles, glass with inner swirls.
— Marbles, giant size, glass without internal patterns.
— Miniature gears, mainly brass and thin steel, one copper.
—Pinecone-shaped weights for clock pendulums.
— Seven crystal doorknobs.
— Broadway theater tickets from the 1960s and ‘70s, more than two dozen famous and non-famous productions.
— Nozzles for pumping up leather sports balls.
— Glasses for watching three-dimensional films.
— Paper party hats, toy trumpets, and whistles.
— A false beard and mustache. (Has Billy worn this?)
— Electric panel fuses—20 amp, 15 amp, 10 amp, 5 amp.
— A toy fire truck.
— Golf balls stamped Eliot’s Driving Range.
— Several snail shells, small and large (one as big as a golf ball), various patterns.
— A library card, New York Public Library, expiration date, January 1952. A man’s name, Giacomo Loncari.
— Three plastic pharmacy containers, prescription sedatives, Wm. Revere typed on the labels. They now hold colored beads—red, white, and blue.
Surfeited, I close the drawer. There are many more I have not opened, but they can wait. I go back to the apartment, lock the door to the hidden room of the mind, lie down on my mattress, and fall asleep.
Billy returns to the apartment for supper, flushed from the cold wind of the still-unabated storm. He is looking impossibly cheery. He has found a stuffed water bird at a flea market. It is dusty and nearly colorless, a damaged white crest, a few wing feathers missing. Triumphant, he intends to clean it up and repair the feathers. He tells me it is a hooded merganser.
5
Voices in empty rooms
We work together on the merganser in the evenings. Most of the restoration tasks are too delicate for Billy’s fingers, which are twice as long and thick as mine. We take turns gently brushing off the dust, blowing against the grain of its feathers. But I am in charge of washing its crest, a near-circular fan. After several rinses, employing a warm damp cloth with surgical care, I bring the crest from dirty gray to white. This painstaking process is repeated again and again over the rest of the body until the original colors emerge. I am feeling more confident because now I can contribute something to Billy’s life. It is a terrible thing to be locked into the role of the constant taker.
He has “borrowed” feathers from the girls, and with careful experiments—trying them for size, snipping and remolding—facsimiles are created, indistinguishable from the bird’s true plumage. You would never know that the poor thing is the survivor of bird catastrophes.
We like to chat as we putter side by side. I am putting a dab of glue to the base of a rooster feather—a delicate job, I don’t dare blink. He is using large-handled scissors to snip pigeon feathers into shape.
“Billy,” I ask, “why was the hidden room of your mind sealed up?”
“Sealed up?” he murmurs, not really listening.
“When you first showed it to me, you had to take wood strips off the door before you unlocked it. It looked to me like you never go in there.”
“Mmm,” he replies, still concentrating on what he is doing.
He lays down the scissors, sits up straight, looks thoughtful.
“Before you came, Francisco, I opened it up maybe once or twice a year. I’d spend a day in there and then get back to my usual life.”
“But why don’t you keep it open all the time? You could have a much bigger apartment, full of wonderful things.”
He smiles. “They are wonderful, aren’t they.”
“But why?”
“I do better keeping my life simple. If you live with amazing things all the time, after a while you stop seeing them.”
“Stop seeing them?”
“You stop listening to them.”
“Listening to them?”
“They go silent and flat. They don’t change, of course. But your mind changes, gets dull, stops wondering. The room reminds me not to forget the past, but I know you can’t live in the past. I keep my eyes on the present and looking toward the future. That way you never say to yourself, ‘There, I’ve got all I need.’ Like a chipmunk who’s stuffed his nest full of acorns and baubles. He just goes to sleep for the winter.”
“But how can you understand the present—or the future, for that matter—without understanding your past?”
“I do try to understand the past. But the most important thing is to keep your eyes open for amazing new things in the present and future.”
“I don’t get it.”
Billy’s eyes sparkle with what appears to be a secret joke, or possibly a wealth of cryptic information.
“Francisco, I really love it when you argue with me.”
“I am not arguing!”
He laughs. We return to our feathers.
A week passes, and the merganser is fully restored. We are very proud of it. Its bearing is regal, its crest a crown. “The King of the Water Birds,” Billy calls it. It sits on the kitchen windowsill for days after that, and we cannot look at it without feeling a swell of pleasure.
One evening, after dishes and egg washing are done, Billy looks at me and says, “This is your bird, Francisco.”
“It’s ours, Billy,” I retort.
“You did most of the work, things I couldn’t have done,” he insists. “I want it to be entirely yours.”
“Thank you, but we can share it,” I reply. “Unless this is a good-bye gift. If you think it’s time for me to find another place to live, I’ll understand. Truly.”
“No, no, Francisco,” he says with a furrowing brow and emphatic thrusts of his hands. “You can stay as long as you need to, or want to. Whether it takes a year or ten years for you to find your memories is okay by me.”
I am unable to say anything. Why is he so good? Was I this good in my unknown life? I doubt it very much.
“I expressed that poorly, Francisco. What I meant to say is, I hope you find your memories as soon as possible, for your sake, not because I want to hurry you on your way—which I don’t—if you see what I mean.”
I nod uncertainly.
“There are plenty of signs that you’re recovering,” he says with a bright look. “You sleep about ten hours a night, and another six to eig
ht hours of naps during the day. Sleep’s a great healer.”
“I feel stronger,” I admit. “My mind seems clearer too, but there’s still not much in it.”
“I notice that whenever you aren’t thinking about your amnesia, it seems to take a backseat. When we talk about other things, you come up with words I don’t know, but I always find them when I check in the dictionary.”
“It helped me when you showed me your special room. There’s so much in it, so much to think about. And I love the stories you tell.”
“Hey, thanks. I love it that someone wants to hear them.”
“Billy, who is Giacomo Loncari?” Billy raises his eyebrows.
“Giacomo is my landlord. How did you hear about him?”
“I found his old library card. He must have lived here at one time.”
“He sure did. For about sixty years. He was still living on the ground floor when I first rented a room. He was quite old then, and he’s older now. He lives in an apartment on Lexington Avenue, with a twenty-four-hour nurse looking after him. I visit him sometimes. On nice summer days I take him out for a jog in the park. He has a motorized wheelchair, and he likes to race me with it. Of course, I let him win sometimes.”
“And who is the young woman in the photograph?”
Billy’s face grows still. He drops his eyes for a moment, then looks up with a noncommittal smile.
“She’s someone I cared about back home, before everything changed.”
“Changed because of your accident?”
“Actually before the accident.”
He is staring at the floor, at nothing much maybe, possibly a vague memory. The smile is gone. He is breathing through his mouth.
“It happened when I came home for summer vacation, after my first year at college,” he begins. His tone is neutral, as if he is removing an unneeded implement from a store of forgotten items with little value in themselves but too good to throw out.
“I asked her if we should become engaged. I told her we could wait a few years before the wedding, but as far as I was concerned, she was the only one for me. Forever. I was just eighteen at the time, but even then I knew my own heart. She told me she felt the same.”
The Fool of New York City Page 7