“That was good,” she says. “That was real good.”
“I know,” answers Larry. “That’s why I earn the big money.”
He pats Big Louise on the shoulder and leads his ignorant burghers off the coach.
They scale the steps of the world’s eleventh largest church, necks craned to admire the ornate spires and French-Gothic pinnacles, then pass through a narrow antechamber into the tranquility of the past. The handcrafted rose windows and marble memorials of Saint Patrick’s undo all of Larry’s reconstructive efforts, razing skyscrapers, depopulating shantytowns, thrusting his tourists into an age before travel and leisure. This is the sacrosanct witchcraft of the Catholic tradition, its ability to elevate one to the heights of the High Middle Ages. There is no longer any need for history or anecdote. The lambent flicker of ten thousand candles speaks for itself. The cathedral is the ideal place to conclude a day of sightseeing, a sanctuary where a person can momentarily escape from the rough-and-tumble of the city and retreat into one’s own thoughts. This is the universal allure of cathedrals everywhere, Larry thinks. They are all the same. Like cab rides. Like funerals. And maybe this consistency should be comforting. But the cathedral is a double-edged sword for the beset and the tormented. The vaulted alcoves and solitary chambers force a person to reflect. They demand self-examination. To Larry, who has little faith in a Supreme Being and less in himself, these weekly visits are a form of medieval torture. He prefers to stand on the steps and sneak a cigarette while his charges explore on their own.
Willem Van Huizen has other plans for Larry’s visit. Having lost his friend the deaf cleric to the mystique of the altar, the Dutchman reverts to his earlier target. He positions himself between Larry and the entrance, inching him backward toward the candle-lined tables so there is no escape.
“Meneer Blowm,” he says. “I want to congratulate you on a simply stupendous tour. As we say in the Netherlands, heel leuk. Extremely excellent. Your style reminded me of Pastor Bloem’s sermons. Are you certain that you are not related?”
“Anything is possible.”
“I am in complete agreement. Anything is possible, Meneer Blowm. Take a look as this contraption, for example. This is truly a wonder of science.”
Van Huizen extracts a small silver vessel from his tote bag; it resembles a flat-topped teapot.
“Isn’t it remarkable, Meneer Blowm?”
“Unquestionably,” answers Larry.
“It’s an oil lamp, Meneer Blowm. Much like those used in biblical times. Only this particular lamp is specially designed for air travel. It can carry a flame across the oceans. Now isn’t that something?”
“It is something,” says Larry. “Now if you’ll kindly—”
“My dear friend, Father O’Shea, entrusted me with this marvel. He’s a divine man, our Father O’Shea. Pastor Bloem was telling me as much only last week. Even though Father O’Shea is a Catholic, Paster Bloem holds him in the highest regard.”
“And why not?”
“My thoughts exactly. No reason to stickle over the finer points. But as I was saying, Father O’Shea procured this little contraption so I could transport a flame from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral back to his parish in Utrecht. He’s an American by birth, O’Shea is. An expatriate of the most desirable sort. He feared this might be an inconvenience to Klara and me, but I told him I’d be honored. Isn’t that right, Klara?”
“It is such an honor for my husband,” echoes Klara. “For both of us.”
“Now if I could just figure out where I pour the oil,” mutters Van Huizen, “I’d be all set. I’m not one for modern conveniences. Do you think you could lend me your expertise, Meneer Blowm?”
A tap on the shoulder extricates Larry from this entreaty. He turns to face a full-figured matron on the far side of sixty boasting a scallop-shell necklace and synthetic henna hair. She offers him the sweetest of smiles. He smiles back politely. For some inexplicable reason, although the two women share no physical resemblance, this strangers reminds Larry of his mother.
“I’m hoping you can help me, young man,” she says. “I’m looking for some sort of central office. The guard out front said I should ask inside. “
The woman has mistaken Larry for an employee of the church. This has happened several times before. For some reason, either his guide’s name tag or his clipboard or possibly some sixth sense regarding his long-term celibacy, middle-aged women regularly take him for a minor clerical dignitary. Experience has immunized him to this insult. He makes no effort to clarify his identity, but offers the woman detailed directions to the administrative wing of the archdiocese. She thanks him profusely and steps out of Larry’s line of vision. He recoils with a start. Is it mirage or cataclysm? Unquestionably cataclysm. While Larry was assisting the aging matriarch, Willem Van Huizen has ignited.
“Roll!” Larry shouts. “Get down and roll!”
But the Dutchman does not roll. He stands relatively motionless, his arms elevated and forked at the elbows like a scarecrow, seemingly examining his own predicament. As though self-immolation were an intellectual exercise. The flames have burned up the back of his tweed jacket and engulfed his shoulders.
“Goddamnit!” Larry shouts again. “Get down and roll!”
The crowd draws back to admire the spectacle from a safe distance. A bespectacled priest dashes down the central aisle securing his skullcap with his hand; he stops short at the second to last pew and expresses his shock in expletives. Klara Van Huizen attempts to rescue her husband, but retreats when confronted with a wall of heat. The Dutchman makes no effort to put out the flames. Instead, he staggers forward like a zombie, his face devoid of expression, then rotates in a semicircle and accidentally kicks the oil lamp against the poor box. The clatter of metal striking wood reverberates through the chamber. And it is this sound, surprisingly like the clangor of bedsprings, that spurs Larry into action.
He charges across the gallery and mounts the Dutchman from the front, sending them both tumbling into a stand of alabaster icons. Then they are rolling across the marble tile, amidst the shattered limbs of Saint Peter and Saint Francis, scattering onlookers with their horizontal tarantella. The shock of the fall jolts Van Huizen to his senses and he digs his nails into Larry’s throat. Larry must fight both the Dutchman and the flames simultaneously. The heat is scorching his hands. Van Huizen is cutting off his air supply. He attempts to flip the Dutchman onto his back and fails. All seems lost. And then, Larry’s reserve energy entirely depleted, Van Huizen takes over. Now it is the Dutchman who rolls them down the central aisle, dislodging statues and lecterns, trying to punish his assailant and extinguishing the flames in the process. Hate triumphs over love and the fire is dead in an instant. Both wrestlers are still alive. Larry pries Van Huizen’s hands from his throat and pushes the Dutchman, maybe too forcefully, into a table of prayer books. He examines his arms for burns. His shirt is charred at the elbows and across the waist, but its contents are unharmed. Then he instinctively checks on the welfare of his magic letter. Although singed across the top of the envelope and somewhat the worse for wear, it too has survived the trial by fire. Another ordeal has come to a tolerable conclusion.
Larry is lying sprawled against the back of a pew, panting, when the paramedics join his tour for their second visit of the day. Only this time they want him, need him, make every effort to deluge him with the clinical attention and pseudo-personal concern they so unjustly denied him on the parapet of Castle Clinton. A muscular black man bombards him with questions. Can he speak? Is he in pain? Does he remember what happened? As though the sacred atmosphere of the cathedral has unleashed the medic’s ambition to play Grand Inquisitor. But Larry will have none of the man’s belated regard. If these fools in uniform had any understanding of the particulars of the situation, they would understand that he rescued an imbecile. And a dangerous imbecile to boot! That makes Larry an aggravated nuisance, not a hero. He should be cuffed rather than coddled.
Larry s
tands up and double checks that his magic letter is safely stowed in his breast pocket. Then he brusquely steps past the befuddled paramedics and out onto the steps of the cathedral. A team of aggressive professionals is loading Van Huizen onto an ambulance. The patient is fully conscious and beaming; he is thriving on the attention. His somber wife has her hands on the charred patches of his coat, as though assessing the cost of repairs, impeding the efforts of the EMS team. Fools! Larry curses. Goddamn fools, all of them. But the truth of the matter is that Larry isn’t angry with the Van Huizens or even with the medical team, but with himself. Why did he risk his own life and his literary career and his future with Starshine for a presumptuous stranger? Why couldn’t he put himself on the line like that for the teenage girl at the waterfront? What sort of man can’t manage to rescue a beautiful young girl but somehow saves a blustering dolt? Larry thinks of all the single women he knows in their fifties and sixties, the divorcees, the widows, the spinsters, all desperate for a decent, hardworking man to marry. They will be his someday, he fears, when it no longer matters. That is the bitter ironic connection between his heroics and his romantic prospects. It is all a matter of too little, too late.
CHAPTER 10
BY LARRY BLOOM
The ferry deposits her at Saint George’s Station. From there, she must ride the light rail out to Old Town, then catch a bus down to South Beach. The trip takes nearly an hour, but Starshine does not mind the delay. A bout of sea air has done much to soothe her nerves and purge her anger. She relishes another brief recess during which to collect herself, to recover from the jolts of the afternoon, before her impending confrontation with her aunt. Experience has taught her that visits to Aunt Agatha these days are never soothing.
In the old days, it was different. Nobody knew how to repair a shattered heart or mend a shredded ego as proficiently as Agatha. Her home-brewed remedies and perennial altruism faced down a myriad of teenage crises. When Starshine’s mother died—shortly after the death of Agatha’s own husband—the dear woman moved to San Francisco to save her niece the added trauma of relocation. When no teenage lothario stepped forward to take the girl to the junior prom, the discerning widow scheduled a family vacation in Hawaii to conflict with the dance. She may have been the homely daughter of a Bavarian pipe-fitter with a third-grade education, a mediocrity in the sight of man and God, but to her surrogate daughter, she filled the roles of both heroine and confidante through an otherwise forlorn and turbulent adolescence. But that was before. Before the diabetic blindness and the throat cancer, before age asserted its claim upon her retinas and her larynx, before darkness and silence enveloped the last of her alacrity. All that remains is a withered husk of memories. Now that the old woman’s only purpose is to divulge her horde of buried secrets before they accompany her to the grave. Debunking past myth is her principal pleasure. Bosc pears and clandestine cigarettes sustain her on her mission.
Starshine settles into an aisle seat on the commuter train. She rests the fruit basket on her lap and observes the middle-aged nine-to-fivers scurrying through the last lap of their rat race. The men skim ragged newspapers and periodically run their fingers between limp collars and chafed necks; the women examine themselves in pocket mirrors. They take no interest in each other. They do not converse. The trek from ferry to rail to bus is a necessary inconvenience, an unfortunate drain on their pressing schedules. It is far from a pleasure outing. But to Starshine, sheltered from this domain of lackluster routine, these men and women are as exotic (and as menacing) as the big cats at the zoo. She admires their tenacity. She fears their indifference. She wonders what drives them out of bed each morning— onto the ferry, into their offices, through their empty and colorless workdays. She tells herself that this is their business, their choice. Not hers. And at the same time, she longs to warn them, to shake them, to let them know that they are only hours away from their massive coronaries, and that throat cancer and blindness wait right around the corner. Aging isn’t a gradual process. It’s sudden and relentless. One minute you’re visiting your niece in New York City, buying her costly perfumes at Christian Dior, treating her to four-star lunches at Aquavit and the 21 Club, grilling the floor manager at Le Bernardin on his suspicious dearth of female waitstaff, and then some microscopic internal stitch comes undone, or a few cells wake up in a disagreeable mood, and before you know what’s happened, you’re on your back in a nursing home, rubbing apricots with your earlobes. Or dead in a municipal parking lot. And unless you’re famous, unless you’re one of the anointed few who are born both photogenic and lucky, you’re quickly forgotten. This is Starshine’s worst fear. This is Agatha’s fate.
She transfers to the bus, rides past the medical center, and then walks the final eight blocks to the glue factory. That is Agatha’s pet name for Bayview Manor, something she picked up from a magazine article on horse breeding, although the facility actually offers state-of-the-art care in modestly comfortable surroundings. The home occupies a turn-of-the-twentieth-century mansion. The structure was once the centerpiece of a vast estate, the suburban hacienda of a prosperous bauxite importer, and it has experienced previous incarnations as a coast guard station and a home for incapacitated seamen. The formal English garden and the tennis lawn have long since been cleared for the construction of a cinderblock administrative annex, and the spacious drawing rooms and parlors have been viciously subdivided, but a handful of the ancient sailors remain on the property in accordance with the original deed of sale. The living quarters are copious and sanitary. The food is abundant, if not terribly eclectic. Staten Island Community Hospital is within shouting distance. What more can an old blind woman possibly need? If Bayview isn’t the Waldorf-Astoria, it certainly isn’t a glue factory.
The day nurse greets Starshine at the registration desk. Miss Bohm is an elfin, puckered creature well past retirement age who could easily pass as an inmate rather than a warden. A jagged scar cuts across the left side of her face, from eye to lip; it brands her one of the last living survivors of the Hindenburg explosion. She is Starshine’s opposite—a beautiful young woman thrust into premature ugliness—and maybe for that reason they have struck up a close acquaintanceship.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” says Miss Bohm. “And she’s brought such a lovely basket. Agatha will be delighted.”
“It has been a while, hasn’t it?” says Starshine. “I’ve had a hell of a month.”
“A month isn’t so long. Your aunt will be overjoyed to see you. She is such a remarkable woman, that aunt of yours. And the stories she tells … a regular Gracie Allen. She has us in stitches nearly every morning. But she’s also very naughty, my dear. She hides cigarettes inside her wig and smokes them in the middle of the night. You really have to scold her for us. It’s bad for her, but it’s also dangerous. We can’t have our patients smoking in bed.”
“How is she?” asks Starshine.
She follows Miss Bohm along the passageway. A shriveled man in a wheelchair bobs his head at her as she passes and she quickly looks away. She can’t help viewing the elderly like expensive glassware: any admiration is tempered by a fear of breaking them.
“She’s as well as she can be,” says Miss Bohm, “Mood swings. Lots of pent up anger. She’ll be telling a delightful story and all of a sudden she’ll start cussing about being penned up in the glue factory. Her mind wanders. She’s like the girl in the nursery rhyme: when she’s good, she’s very, very good, but when she’s bad, she’s horrid. And I’m afraid today is one of her bad days. “
“Maybe the fruit will cheer her up. I bought the largest basket I could find.”
“That’s sweet, dear,” says Miss Bohm. “But there isn’t really any need. We always tell her that you’ve brought the largest basket. You are aware that she doesn’t eat any of it. Honestly, there’s no call for you to be feeding me and Nurse Tithers. But your aunt appreciates the thought.”
“I do hope the basket will cheer her up. Last time was just unbearable.”
>
Starshine’s previous visit coincided with the farthest advance of Agatha’s revisionist crusade. Having decided that her niece was unenlightened with regard to her own sister-in-law’s marriage, delinquently so, she bombarded Starshine with a salvo of the woman’s secrets and sufferings. Did Starshine know that her father frequented brothels along the San Francisco waterfront? That while her poor mother sewed her own dresses by hand, the bastard she had married lavished hookers with silks and satins? That she had even caught him with one of the whores in their own bedroom? The stories were whetted, painful, and often extremely inconsistent. Brazen streetwalkers instantly transmuted into high-class call girls; the back alleys of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast flowed into the boulevards of prewar Munich. Aunt Agatha further undermined her own credibility by periodically lapsing into anecdotes picked up at the family dinner table, the fragments of the history of genocide that were Uncle Luther’s final legacy, so one moment Starshine’s father would be carousing at a cathouse and the next he’d be liquidating kulaks. It is impossible to tell where truth lets off and fantasy takes over. But there are two convictions about which Starshine harbors absolutely no doubts. One certainty is that her father’s suicide had as much to do with women as with money. Throughout her childhood, he exuded the distinctive hunger of a man on the prowl; it is the only lasting impression he had left on his ten-year-old daughter. The other certainty is that his philandering doesn’t matter, that it cannot be undone, that there is no afterlife and no salvation and that the dead should be left to decay in peace. Yet Aunt Agatha values these stories immeasurably, conceives of them as some sort of perverse oral legacy, as her homage to history and justice, and as Aunt Agatha remains among the living, Starshine has no choice but to endure.
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