The Metropolitans

by Carol Goodman

  Stay Out from Underfoot meant sleeping on the pull-down Murphy bed and keeping her clothes stored in the kitchen pantry and her boots in the stove (Aunt Jean meant it about no cooking) and clearing out on Sundays when Aunt Jean had her boyfriend, Tony, over. Tony worked the morning shift at his family’s bakery on Carmine Street, so the only time he and Aunt Jean could find together was on Sunday. Madge understood, didn’t she? Madge didn’t exactly, but it seemed little enough to do for Aunt Jean, who had taken her in and kept her off the streets and out of someplace like St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, where Frankie and the twins had gone when their father had Gone to Pieces.

  When she woke up on this Sunday and saw that a wedge of sunlight had reached the radiator, Madge knew she’d better get up before Tony arrived, but she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to get back to the dream she’d been having. In her dream, her mother had been leaning over the fire escape calling her home for dinner. The delicious smell of her mother’s Irish stew had been wafting out of the tenement window, and Madge, in the middle of a game of ring-a-levio, had stopped the game by calling Olly olly oxen free!, releasing all her teammates from “jail” (Mrs. Murphy’s front stoop). As she’d turned to run for home, a plume of steam had come up out of the sewer grate and blocked her way. Somehow she had known with the certainty of dream knowledge that she mustn’t step into that pillar of steam. That it was as “off block” as the boundaries of ring-a-levio. That it was as bad as stepping on a crack and breaking your mother’s back. And sure enough, a man had stepped out of it—

  Madge opened her eyes to the hiss of steam coming from the radiator. It was usually a comforting noise, but now it reminded her of the man emerging from the steam on the street, and she didn’t want to remember him. She got up and made her bed (although why it mattered when it was going to be folded up against the wall, Madge couldn’t have told you, only that her mother had always told her to make her bed every morning and so she did) and folded it back into its cupboard and latched it shut, reflecting as she did that if she could have folded herself back into the Murphy bed, she would have been well and truly out from underfoot.

  Instead she made a plan for the day. She didn’t have her brothers to organize, but she could still take control of her own time. Morning in the library, lunch in the park, afternoon—well, she’d think of something. After all, she was in Manhattan. Back when she lived in Brooklyn, she and Frankie used to stand on the roof of their building and pretend the skyline of Manhattan was a magical kingdom. “We’ll go live there someday,” Madge had promised Frankie.

  She opened the icebox and took out a paper sack of the uneaten sandwich halves Aunt Jean always brought back from the diner. It made Madge feel a little funny, eating the leftovers of strangers. Why horseradish on pastrami? she would wonder. Who orders corned beef without mustard? Why would anyone ever eat liverwurst? But if she didn’t have to buy her own lunch, she might be able to afford a movie. Suspicion was playing at Radio City Music Hall. She’d seen it, but Joan Fontaine was her favorite actress, so she wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

  She checked before leaving the apartment that it was all tidy. Bed up, pajamas folded in the pantry, cereal crumbs swept away. Everything in its place. Except her. She really didn’t know where she belonged anymore.

  After the library, she walked to Central Park and sat on her favorite bench on Bethesda Terrace near the angel fountain. It was her favorite place to sit because it reminded her of her mother. She had once taken Madge and her brothers on a picnic here, and while the boys were running around playing knights and dragons, she had told Madge the story of the angel. “When she touches the water, she blesses it, and the next person who steps into the pool is healed of any sickness or infirmity. Don’t you think that would be a wonderful gift to have—to heal the sick?”

  Madge had thought at the time that she might choose being able to run faster than a speeding bullet like Superman or being able to turn into a grown-up by shouting SHAZAM! like Captain Marvel, but when her mother had fallen in the kitchen a year later and she couldn’t do anything to help her, all Madge had wanted was the power to make her get up again.

  Now she liked sitting beneath the fountain, looking up at the angel’s face, because she could hear her mother’s voice and that made her feel safe. Some parts of the park were dangerous. They’d cleared the Hooverville up in the reservoir a while ago, but there were still tramps living in the Ramble, the wooded patch between the Terrace and the Great Lawn. Madge had seen them—hard men she didn’t like to look at because she was half afraid she would see her father peering out of those bleary eyes one day.

  She had taken two books out of the library, but instead she read the one her mother had given to Frankie for Christmas last year: The Boy’s King Arthur. Because it embarrassed her to read a children’s book that said it was for boys, she’d taken the dust jacket off and made a new one of brown butcher’s paper. When she read the story of how the sorcerer Merlin hid the baby Arthur and how Arthur proved himself the rightful king by pulling a sword from a stone, she imagined she was reading aloud to Frankie. See, she would tell him, Arthur had to stay with Sir Ector until it was safe for him to reveal his identity, just like you and the twins have to stay at St. Vincent’s for now and I have to stay at Aunt Jean’s. But someday we’ll all be together again, as soon as I’m old enough to get a job and make a home of our own.

  Since Madge was only thirteen, that would be a few years, but when she read about King Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot and all the difficult quests the knights had to perform, she believed it would someday be possible.

  When her stomach began to rumble, she put down her book and took out her sandwiches. There was a half cheese with pickle on a roll and a half roast beef with lettuce on rye. As she looked up from the sandwich sack, she noticed that there was a boy hiding behind the bench across from her. He had dark hair, and eyes the color of burnished copper. His skin was a lighter copper except where it was smudged with dirt on his sharp cheekbones. He was so still, Madge might have mistaken him for one of the park’s statues, but then he blinked, and Madge knew he must be one of the tramps who lived in the park. Only he didn’t look much older than her, and he didn’t look hard like the other tramps. He looked . . . hungry.

  Madge chewed her cheese and pickle half sandwich and pretended she didn’t see the boy. She wasn’t sure why. The old Madge would’ve yelled, “Whatcha staring at, Mister?” But she wasn’t that Madge anymore. Every day she lived at her aunt Jean’s, fitting herself into the narrow space allotted her, she felt as if a little bit of that old Madge was vanishing. The boy clearly didn’t want to be seen, and Madge understood that. When she had finished the half sandwich, she crumpled the waxed paper into a ball and got up, leaving the half roast beef sandwich on the bench. It occurred to her that this was the second time this half sandwich had been left behind, which somehow made her feel sad. She walked slowly past the boy, studiously pretending not to see him, tossed the ball of waxed paper over her shoulder into a garbage can, and continued past the boathouse and the Ramble. That was where the boy with copper eyes probably lived.

  Madge shivered and walked faster toward the Seventy-Ninth Street exit. The day had grown cold, and it was only a quarter past one, which meant she had four more hours to kill before she could go back to Aunt Jean’s. She thought about the boy and wondered if he was cold. He’d had on only a thin denim jacket over his clothes. Where did he sleep at night? And what did he eat when no one left him half sandwiches? Then she thought about how if Aunt Jean hadn’t taken her in, she might be sleeping in the park and eating twice-cast-off sandwiches. And if St. Vincent’s hadn’t taken in Frankie and the twins, they might have that same starved look as the boy.

  It was one thing to read about knights questing through dark forests, and quite another to think of sleeping in the woods of Central Park at night.

  She needed to get out of the cold. She had enough money to see
Suspicion, but suddenly it seemed like a better idea to save her money just in case Aunt Jean ever got tired of her being underfoot. Ahead of her rose the white granite mass of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It looked like the white castle of Camelot on the cover of The Boy’s King Arthur. One of her teachers had told her that the museum was free. She’d spend the rest of her afternoon there.

  As she crossed Eightieth Street, a plume of steam rose from a manhole and wafted in front of her. Like any New Yorker, Madge knew there were pipes running below the city streets channeling steam to heat the buildings in winter, cool them in summer, and supply power to the city’s tall skyscrapers. But because of her dream last night, she suddenly felt afraid. She dodged around the steam—and ran into a man in a beige trench coat with a gray fedora pulled down low over his eyes. Madge couldn’t see his eyes, but she felt them, and they made her feel like she had just plunged into the frigid East River.

  “Watch where you’re going, Mister!” she cried, pulling the collar of her own thin wool coat up around her neck.

  The man in the trench coat didn’t apologize. Madge walked on as fast as she could, not looking back, a cold wind reaching down inside of her collar like icy fingers trying to yank her backward.

  2

  THE STONE GIANT

  JOE HADN’T MEANT to follow the girl with the fiery hair and sky-colored eyes into the great white building. He’d only wanted to give her back the book she’d left on the park bench. It seemed the least he could do after she left the sandwich for him. It was the first meal he’d had in days, and the first act of kindness he’d met since he’d come to the city.

  But she’d walked so fast, he hadn’t been able to catch up with her, and then she’d gone up the steps of the building as if she owned it. It must be wonderful to feel as if you belonged. Joe hadn’t felt like that . . . well, not since he’d left the Akwesasne reserve where his family lived, and that had been a long time ago.

  He stood on the white steps and looked up at the row of white columns in front of the doors. They reminded him of the Mush Hole, the school where he’d been taken when he was five, which made him want to turn around and run the other way. The girl probably didn’t care about the book she’d left behind any more than the sandwich, which she’d probably left for the pigeons, not him. He was about to turn away when he saw a policeman standing at the foot of the stairs, looking at him. Joe did what he always did. He ran.

  The first time he’d run away, it had taken three days before they found him. He’d almost frozen to death, but he’d done what his Tóta, his grandmother, had told him the bears did in the winter: he found a cave with warm dry leaves and burrowed into them. He’d chewed leaves and drunk melted snow. His plan had been to work his way back to Akwesasne, but when he ventured out to the road on the third day, the first car that passed him had belonged to the principal. He took Joe back and gave him thirty lashes with a hickory switch for running. When Joe told him he wanted to go home, they beat him for using Mohawk.

  Speak English, the teachers told him. But the words felt like lumps in his mouth, choking him. Like the mush they fed them morning, noon, and night. That was why they called the school the Mush Hole, but the name also described how the words felt in his mouth.

  Now he ran through the great bronze and glass doors and into a vast hall lined with columns on three sides. A woman with a pinched face, who reminded him of one of the teachers at the Mush Hole, stared at him with eyes magnified by thick, round glasses. He looked around and saw the girl disappearing between two white columns and took off after her.

  On the other side of the columns, Joe came to a room filled with hundreds of pictures painted on the walls. Some were of animals he recognized—snakes, owls, a sharp-nosed dog, a long-faced cat. Others he’d seen in books—great lions, fat hippos, an alligator. But in between were signs he didn’t know: something that looked like a twisted rope, an eye, a squiggle. The signs looked like what English letters had looked like to him when he’d first started learning the language.

  The second time he’d run away, he’d made it back to Akwesasne, but when he’d opened his mouth to tell his mother he was back, all that came out was a croak. As if he’d been turned into a crow. His mother had wept to see him, but his father looked away from him and told him that he had to go back. Billie had told him that he just had to tough it out until he was sixteen. Then he could come work on the steel towers in the great city at the mouth of the Hudson River. Skywalkers they called the men who built the towers that were taller than the oldest trees. Before he left, his Tóta had whispered his Mohawk name in his ear so that he would never forget who he was. But then the teachers’ straps had beaten the words out of him and Joe had forgotten everything, even his own name.

  There were paintings of men amongst the animals and signs here—lean, muscular men, naked but for loincloths, working in fields, hunting with bows and arrows, herding cows, carrying limp geese—all painted the color of red clay. Joe put his own hand up next to one of the paintings, but his skin was paler.

  The sound of angry voices nudged him forward into the next room, but the voices were coming from above his head. He looked up and saw that a balcony ran along the second story of the room. A man was pacing back and forth, shouting at a dark-haired girl who trailed behind him like a duckling swimming behind its mother. Joe couldn’t understand the words the man shouted, but he felt the anger behind them.

  That had been what he’d understood first at the school—the anger. The teachers were angry if he spoke his own language, if he cried to go home, if he took his shoes off, if he ate with his hands. For a while he thought English was a language only spoken in shouts and hisses. He preferred looking at the letters on the pages of the books the teachers gave them. They never shouted or hit.

  The angry man wasn’t speaking English. That had been a surprise about the city; the streets were full of strange languages. The woman at the boardinghouse where Joe had gone to find Billie had first spoken in a language that sounded like gargling, as if her words were stuck way back in her throat and she had to hawk them out before the English would come.

  “They cleared outta here a month ago,” she spit at Joe. “The whole tribe of them—left owing rent. Last time I let to dirty Indians.”

  It wasn’t like Billie not to honor a debt, but then Joe had done a lot of things since leaving the Mush Hole that he’d never thought he’d do. Like eating food out of a garbage can and stealing clothes from a clothesline. But he’d had to get rid of his uniform. The police were looking for an Indian boy running away from the Mush Hole. He couldn’t be that boy.

  The problem was, he wasn’t sure who he was anymore. How could he be the boy he was before the Mush Hole when he couldn’t even remember his own language? When he couldn’t even remember the name his Tóta had given him?

  “Otousan!”

  The word, sharp and mournful as a loon’s cry at dusk, pierced through Joe’s fog. He looked up and met the girl’s dark eyes. Was the man hurting her? But the man was striding away across the balcony. The girl followed him—and Joe kept pace with them on the lower floor, through a room with a statue of a cat-faced woman and one of a dog-faced man, and then into a room with a long coffin shaped like a man. Joe nearly skidded to a halt at this sight, but then the girl let out another wounded cry, and Joe followed below her, as if tracking a high-flying bird. He went through a wide doorway into a high-vaulted hall full of slanting light coming down from arched windows, flashing on silver-plated figures like lightning. Sky Girl was standing at the back of the hall, but she wasn’t alone. She was talking to a boy who had red hair too—her brother, maybe, or a friend from school. How could he give back the book with the other boy there? They would think he stole it. They would call the police and then they would find out what he had done.

  The third time he’d run away was after he struck the principal. Joe had been walking past his office when he heard the swis
h of the switch and heard a sharp cry he recognized as his sister Jeanette’s voice, and before he knew what he was doing, he’d wrenched open the door and snatched the switch out of the principal’s hand, and he was hitting him across the face with it, unable to stop, a roaring in his head like a train bearing down on them both. The principal stumbled under his blows and fell to the floor, where he hit his head against the iron railing in front of the fireplace. Only Jeanette’s voice had brought him to his senses. “Run!” she’d told him. And he had, even though it had meant leaving her behind. No matter how far he ran, he couldn’t get rid of the smell of blood.

  He smelled it now. The smell before a thunderstorm, a crackle in the air that made the hairs on the back of his neck lift. He turned away from Sky Girl and the boy, and saw a man walking through the room with the big coffin. He was wearing a tan coat, the collar turned up high, and a gray hat pulled down low so you couldn’t see his eyes. Joe froze. Last night he had dreamed of Stone Giants. His Tóta had told him about a race of fearsome monsters that hunted the people of the Six Nations to feast on their bones and flesh. No arrow could pierce their stone skin. No matter where the people hid, the Stone Giants’ eyes could see into the darkest places. That’s what it felt like when the Stone Giant in his dream had looked at him—like he saw into Joe’s darkest places and wouldn’t mind snacking on his bones—and the Stone Giant had worn the face of the man in the gray fedora.

  The sound of Sky Girl’s voice came from behind him, and the man lifted his head as if he were sniffing the air for prey. Joe wanted to run but he couldn’t go if this thing was looking for Sky Girl. That would be like leaving Jeanette all over again. So he did the thing he was second best at after running. He stepped into a shadowy side gallery and hid.