“I’m not going to sue you,” I say. “And I’ll show up for the opening, if you still want me. Sober too.”
“Uh, sure. Yes, I’d like that. What’s come over you?”
“I’ve been ill. I’m doing better now.”
“That’s good to hear. Now tell me why you ignored all my calls and the media requests.”
“I was totally out of contact. Just got home, and I’m trying to plow through the backlog.”
“Sounds like you had a good vacation.”
“Yes,” I say sincerely, nodding. “It was very good.”
“Any new paintings?”
“A few unfinished. I’ll try to have them completed by the opening. They’ll probably be somewhat different from what I’ve done before.”
He looks suddenly worried. I’m his moneymaker, his cash cow.
“Okay. Bring them in and we can have a look.”
There are phone calls to return, a few dozen urgents out of the hundreds of loud superficials. Not a word from France. A flood of messages from Maryland. I call my grandparents and arrange to visit them soon—a long visit. There are also bills to pay, and banking to do, the landlord to placate, the very last empty bottles to be taken down to the bins at the curb. There are plenty of things in the apartment I want to sell—the expensive ornaments and jewelry and clothing with which I used to console myself. A week or two passes and they are all gone. I donate the proceeds to the churches where Billy tends his breadlines and soup kitchens. I feel poorer and more buoyant, and in the process have learned that deprivation can be good for the soul—the nouveau-riche boy returning to his essential form. With some reluctance, though with a feeling of the rightness of the move, I consign the broken photograph of Françoise and me to a burial at sea—via the Liberty Park ferry. Images of other people are sacred, in a sense, but if we cling to them like talismans we run the risk of obsession with unreality.
I go down to the site of the catastrophe one more time, alone. There I weep openly, sobbing loudly and grieving completely at last. I walk all the way home to the East Village suspended in a feeling of peace.
Returning from Maryland, I take up painting again. The flow of creative intuition is more difficult, perhaps from lack of use, but more likely because the themes of my 9/11 paintings have altered in meaning. On one level they are the same. On another, I see them with new eyes—see my own experience with greater understanding. A trauma can keep you stalled at the age it happened to you. You can bury the memory and think it’s dealt with, done and gone. It is never gone, but it must be transformed into something that gives us life. To overcome death, you must create life. But we have to choose to undertake this hard labor, if we would grow older and wiser, and—as Billy said, as Granddad Robbie said—become who we are. Part of me, until now, has remained eleven years old. Now I can begin the long process of growing up.
Billy arrives at my apartment late one afternoon. I had left a note at his place, inviting him for supper. After some bone-rattling back thumps, we eat the meal he has brought in shopping bags—Chinese, of course. There’s also a gift of three dozen eggs, small and large. We don’t say much. It’s just good to be together again.
“Billy,” I venture as we sip our tea (his in a soup bowl, mine in a mug), “Billy, this is a pretty big place I live in. I’ve been wondering if you’d consider a change of scene. I’d be honored if you’d come live with me here.”
He screws up his face in indecision, smiles, laughs. “The ceilings are right,” he says.
“Yeah, and we could try to find an extra-long Lincoln bed for you, or maybe build one ourselves.”
“Ah, Max, you know I prefer the floor. It’s better for my back.”
“And if you’re worrying about where to put all the memories from your hidden room of the mind, there’s a loft for rent just down the corridor. I’d be happy to cover the cost.”
“Mmm, Max, that’s very generous, but you have your future ahead of you.”
“Well, think about it, would you?”
“I will.”
Two days later I am hard at work painting in my studio. It’s something new, a kind of landscape with symbolic implications, not quite coalesced into specific form. It’s full of lavish color. I’m not entirely sure what it’s going to be, what my heart is saying through it, but I can already tell it will be beautiful.
There comes a moment when my concentration is broken by a sense that there is someone else in the room. Startled, I look around to see Billy standing in the doorway, smiling paternally over me.
“How long have you been there?” I ask with a laugh.
“A while,” he says.
“I’m getting a little obsessed with this,” I tell him, turning back to the painting, and laying on a brush stroke.
“It’s very fine, Max,” he says. “It’s a new kind of work, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh,” I say with a nod, and continue painting, loath to lose the inspiration of the moment. “Gimme a second, Billy, and I’ll be right with you.”
“I love you, buddy,” I hear him say. “Keeping fighting now. Keep fighting.”
“Love you too, buddy,” I murmur distractedly.
Minutes later, when I turn around to ask him to put a kettle on the stove, he is no longer there. I search through the apartment, but he is gone.
11
Light fantastic
It is a measure of how absorbed I was in my art that a week passed before I ventured over to the west side to see my friend. I was perplexed when I found the front entrance of our old building boarded and padlocked.
I returned to my apartment, thinking that Billy would soon show up with an explanation. Another week passed, and still he did not appear. By then, my autumn show was looming, and I was busy with the gallery people choosing frames and deliberating over my new work. Of course, they had an assured winner in the older pieces dealing with death and destruction, and thus they looked dubiously upon my neosymbolist landscapes, with their not-quite-visible influence of the happier kind of Chagall and the relatively unmelancholic end of the Goya spectrum. A few of these paintings were added to the show, to test the waters.
The opening went very well, with more than half the work sold that night, the disasters going first, the new work following close behind. Reviews were mixed.
By then it was a month since I had last seen Billy. Now I made a concerted effort to find him. Our Chinese friends had not seen him since our last meal there. Our favorite waitress at Dina’s reported the same. The people at the soup kitchens and breadlines where he had regularly volunteered were as concerned as I was. No one had seen him. I dropped into Giacomo Loncari’s apartment building on Lexington, only to learn that the man was recently deceased. Neither the doorman nor the manager had seen Billy since the funeral, though they knew him well. I wondered if he was ill, perhaps a patient in one of the city’s many hospitals. I telephoned every one, as well as the psychiatric institute where he had lived for some months around the time of September 11. He had not been admitted to any of them.
By now I was feeling a little hurt, and more than a little worried. Remembering that he jogged daily in Central Park, I sat for three days on a bench among pigeons and falling leaves, reading books and waiting for the vibrations in the earth that presaged the sound of pounding feet. He did not come. The local police precinct informed me that not a single body of a giant had turned up in the city morgues. I left a note inserted into the door crack of our old apartment building on West Forty-Fifth. Returning a few days later, I found that it hadn’t been touched. Again and again I returned, sometimes at night, hoping to see a light in an upper floor window. Nothing.
In the end I decided I had to get on with my life. It was what Billy would have wanted me to do. Keep fighting now, he had said the last time we saw each other. Keep fighting. They were the last words he had spoken to me.
In early March I returned to the building for a final visit. A crew of workmen were carrying lumber and sheets of d
rywall up the front steps. The sound of circular saws and hammering came from within. The foreman told me that the building had been sold and that the new owner was turning it into luxury apartments. I explained that I had lived here until only recently and would be grateful for a last look around. He gave me ten minutes. The fourth floor was a maze of open wall studs. An electrician high on a ladder was removing old wiring from the ceiling. Two broken chandeliers had been heaped in refuse bins by the staircase. The room of Billy’s hidden memories was still exactly where it had been, though it was now empty of all furnishings. Only the paler squares and rectangles on the walls testified to paintings and photos that had once hung there. My own room of hidden memories was likewise bare.
In April 2014, I purchased a used minivan. It was an ugly, rusty old thing, but it had a motor and transmission built to last forever, and the gas mileage was moderately good. Though I had plenty of money, there was no guarantee that it would last as long as the vehicle. Besides, I had resolved to live more simply. Along these lines, I had also decided that I would soon try to find a cheaper apartment, maybe something farther out toward the edges of the galaxy—that is, a suburb of New York.
A year had passed since the return of my memory. Recalling the day Billy and I had driven north to Vermont in search of clues, I thought I might make the same journey, a kind of final step of closure.
The morning was sunny, the hills washed with mint-green new leaf and the occasional bursts of white and pink apple and cherry trees enduring in the midst of old farms encroached upon by young woods. I stopped at every place we had stopped, trying to regain a sense of what I had felt that day, how limited my consciousness had been, how damaged my emotions. By the Connecticut River and later a branch of the White, I paused and stepped out of the vehicle to breathe the clean air and listen to the soft flow of the waters. I drank coffee from my thermos and ate my chopped-egg sandwiches in the village that had a bronze memorial to the fallen Civil War soldiers of the region. I read the names of young men not much different from me, more than sixty of them, the loved and bereaved of another century, boys who had turned the fields with plow and oxen, and hunted the forests in search of game, dreaming of love and fruitfulness and plenty, not knowing they would be felled in their prime.
As I took the road that went over the mountains and down into the valley of Tadd’s Ford, I felt a vague apprehension. There was no fear in it, however, and along with the most recent, most unhappy memory of the old homestead, there were numerous beautiful memories that rose to greet me: me and Puck and our mischievous adventures, the thrilling dangers of the reservoir and waterwheel, the molting rocking horse, the endless affection of our grandmother Dorothy, and even the less frequent kindness of Ben. I was not entirely sure if I was ready to have a look at the dark cabin, or at the pond, which for me was a well at the world’s end, containing, I knew, both evil memories and the mementos of permanent loss.
Entering the village, I coasted slowly between its few buildings and rolled to a stop in front of Myrt’s Cafe. The memory of the tang of lemon pie leaped to my tongue, and my fate was sealed.
The doorbells jingled as I went inside, but Myrtle was nowhere in sight. The place was deserted, save for the old man who had been sitting at the same table a year ago, and perhaps had never vacated it. He looked up from his newspaper, took a sip from his coffee cup, and went back to reading. Looking around, I saw that nothing had changed. The glass dome covering the pie racks was still there, along with the crossed snowshoes and the bobcat pelt. A few colorful quilts hung from the rafters, with price tags pinned to their borders.
I sat down at a table by the front window and waited. Presently a young woman came out through the kitchen doors, wiping her hands on an overly large apron. She swung around the end of the counter and approached me with a somewhat amazed, pleased look, as if the arrival of a new customer did not happen very often.
“Hi,” she said in a cheery voice. “I’m afraid the lunchtime menu is closed for the day, but I can offer you coffee and pie, if you’d like to try a slice.”
She was about my age, pretty and eager, dressed in a blue denim skirt and white blouse, and lacking any hint of either the sultry or desultory. She wore no makeup, and wisps of dark-brown hair escaping from bobby pins fell over her clear brow. A local girl, I supposed, hanging on to the last scraps of wholesomeness in the midst of a jaded era.
“I would love a piece of your lemon pie,” I said. “It’s famous.”
“Famous within a five-mile radius,” she said with a smile, without a hint of sarcasm. The joke made her face shine, and I laughed without any effort at all.
She went off to cut me a piece, and returned shortly bearing a plate with an extra-large helping and a cup of coffee I hadn’t ordered. She placed it before me just as Myrtle had done a year ago.
“How do you know about our pie?” she asked, hovering.
“I stopped by last April,” I explained. “That’s why I’ve driven hundreds of miles for a second piece.”
“My goodness, that far! Hmm, your accent isn’t Boston, which stands out a mile. My guess is somewhere in southern New Hampshire.”
“I was born in Brooklyn and spent my childhood there. I live in New York City now.”
“But you don’t sound like New York at all.”
“I guess my accent has changed, kind of a mix of everything, Maryland mostly. Maybe even a drop or two of Vermont. My mother’s family used to live around here.”
“Really?” she said, looking closely at my face, and sitting down across from me. “What was their name?”
“Franklin,” I said with a note of apology, for I wasn’t sure of their reputation.
“Dorothy Franklin?” she asked.
“That was my grandmother.”
“Oh, I remember her so well. A very nice lady. She taught me to knit and weave when I was younger. She ran a craft club for girls around here. We used to have it in the village hall before the roof collapsed in the bad winter of—mmm, I forget what year. Not many of us, three or four girls, but that didn’t stop her. I still love weaving.”
“I’m Max Davies,” I said, offering her my hand. She shook it firmly, and then leaned forward, crossing her arms on the table, silently examining my face.
“You don’t look like a Franklin, not that I knew any other than her.”
“I resemble my father,” I said. “And your name, miss?”
Before she could answer, the old man at the other table piped up:
“I’ll have one of them lemon custards, Katie.”
“Coming right up, Cory.” She went back to the counter, unhurriedly going about her business, and when the old man was served she returned to my table and sat down again.
“Do you live here in Tadd’s Ford?” I asked.
“Just returned,” she said with a whimsical look. “I went off to see the world for a time. Got myself an arts degree and a graduate certificate in education, but decided enough is enough.”
“So you’re a teacher,” I said disingenuously.
“Nope. Pie maker. Too much ego and ambition in all that education racket, too much ‘quiet desperation’, as Thoreau called it. People forget what life is about.”
I indulged in a swift glance at her fingers. No rings.
“They never learn about the art of the pie,” I said between bites.
“That and weaving and splitting kindling. The smell of wood smoke on a winter’s eve. Stars you can see at night.” She smiled. “And the world’s chock-full of great books. By the way, Max, I hope I haven’t offended you. Are you educated?”
“Informally.”
“More pie?”
“I’d love a piece of Myrtle’s pumpkin. By the way, where is she today?”
Her face saddened. “Grandma had a stroke last fall. She’s in a nursing home in Montpelier. I make the pies now. I try to follow her recipe, but people tell me it’s not quite up to her standards.”
“It’s still good pie,” the old
man interjected. “Though you go too heavy on the nutmeg.”
“Thanks, Cory, I’ll do some experimenting. You can be my taste tester.”
“Glad to.”
Katie and I shared a conspiratorial look.
“So,” she said, turning back to me, “are you heading up to the old place?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “I spent most of my summers there when I was a boy.”
“It must have a lot of memories for you. It’s really a pity what happened to it after your grandparents died. First the neglect and then the vandals. A fire took the roof off the mill and the brewery a few years back, though no one was ever caught. Such a fine old place with plenty of history.”
“You’ve been there, then?”
“I used to pick berries on the property after it was abandoned—blackberries and raspberries running wild, and also the blueberries on the higher ground, among the junipers. There’s that sweet pond out in the back. Migrating ducks land on it in the fall.”
“Your grandmother told me that a bank took the property.”
“Uh-huh, I think so,” she said, with a sigh. “But no one has ever wanted to buy it. It’s not good-enough soil for farming, and the timber is poor. I expect the bank would let it go for a song.”
I glanced across the room in search of a clock, because I wanted to visit the homestead before the afternoon sun began sinking. I planned a short visit—my last, forever—and a return trip that would bring me back to the city by midnight. And then I spotted a framed painting of a horse hanging on the wall above the cash register. I stood up and crossed the room to look more closely. It was a painting very much like the one I had seen in the room of hidden memories.
Benny’s Vermont Dark Ale.
For a moment I wondered if it was merely a copy of the one Billy had owned. But the crack across its middle was the same.
“Where did you get this?” I exhaled in wonder.
“Grandma told me a man gave it to her.”
“A giant?”
“A giant, I don’t know. She said he was a ‘Paul Bunyan sort of gentleman’—her exact words.”
The Fool of New York City Page 21