“You were looking for Frank again.”
I was determined to write when I came here today, I was, but then I found myself scouring old newspapers like a junkie looking for a quick hit and found two undiscovered articles on the campaign my mother claimed they volunteered for. And yet, further corroboration of her story—a photograph of my mother with a strange man, perhaps standing behind the candidate at a rally—still eludes me. “I didn’t lie. The two things are intertwined.”
He looks dejected. “We had plans.”
“Is it over?”
“You missed the whole thing.”
I rub my hands together in an attempt to warm them. I may have to start bringing gloves; cold air travels in here like whispers. “Is there any leftover?”
“Leftover what?”
“Popcorn.”
He takes a few steps away from me before abruptly turning and coming back. “Yeah. It won’t be as good though.” He shakes his head; I’m a lost cause, it seems. “I popped it on the motherfucking stove.” A smile creeps across his face. Daniel’s been downright chipper since he received the news a week ago that he was hired to direct a production of Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy at a small theater in the West Village. Rehearsals don’t start for a few months, but it’s changed his whole outlook on the year, and for our relationship it couldn’t be better timed; his good mood balances my dark one.
“How was it?”
“The popcorn? I just told you.”
“The inauguration.” At noon, Bill Clinton was sworn in as the forty-second president of the United States. I promised we would watch the inaugural address on TV together, which felt like a low-key second chance at New Year’s, when I fell asleep well before the ball dropped.
“It was good. There was a poem.”
An older gentleman approaches, holding a notecard, and I freeze as if Daniel and I are doing something covert. He consults his card and realizes he’s in the wrong spot and moves on. “A poem?”
“Yeah, apparently Kennedy had one.” He kicks me playfully.
I run my finger across a collection of atlases and decide I’ve had enough of the library for one day. It may be the dark corners or the sun setting in the early afternoon or the subject of my research, but I feel depleted. “Walk me home?”
“Sure thing,” he says, whispering at last.
Daniel spills more about the inauguration as we step out into the cold, down the steps, and past the stone lions that guard the library. Something about the speech or something about a parade—I’m only half listening as it occurs to me yearbooks might be another place to look for Frank. As we approach Bryant Park I hear Daniel say, “Saudade is how my grandmother would describe it.” His word catches me by surprise.
“Who?” At first I think he’s trying to say Sade, the singer of smooth R&B hits.
“Saudade. It’s a word my grandmother used to say when she was missing home.” Daniel’s grandmother was born in Brazil, and so every now and again some Portuguese pops up in conversation.
“What does it mean?”
“Oh. It doesn’t have an English translation.”
I give Daniel a little shove and he skids on a small patch of ice; I catch him just before he falls. “Easy, fella.” I have his arms behind his back like he’s under arrest and hold on until I’m sure he has his balance.
“Not a direct translation, anyhow.” He turns his head and makes a kissing sound.
“Why don’t you just give me the indirect one.”
“It’s like a nostalgia or melancholy, but more than that. With a recognition that the something we’re longing for hasn’t happened, or isn’t returning. Or maybe never was.”
“Why do you say that now?”
“About today? I don’t know. All those people in the inauguration crowd. They looked young. They looked hungry.”
“They were probably cold.” I exhale and my breath forms a tiny cloud before floating away. Daniel casts a sideways glance; this bitchiness is what he’s had to put up with of late.
“They want their Camelot. But it’s not coming back. It can’t come back. The world has moved on in complicated ways. Saudade.”
I study Daniel’s face. The cold lessens his skin’s elasticity, leaving an echo of his solemn look. “Or maybe it never was? Is that the idea?”
“Maybe.”
He points to the walk sign across Sixth Avenue and we enter the crosswalk facing west.
“Where are we going?”
“I thought we’d stop for soup at that place.”
I don’t really want soup, but I keep quiet. The truth of the matter is, it’s all too much. Clinton, Kennedy, nostalgia, melancholy. Things that are not coming back. Things that perhaps never were. I feel a deep need to believe there was another time, before, when everything seemed right. Unlike now, when everything feels wrong.
“Tell me something else.” I pull Daniel’s string to keep him talking so that I don’t have to.
“About the inauguration? Clinton was just wearing his suit jacket. No overcoat.”
“Idiot. What about Hillary. Hat? No hat.”
“Big hat.”
I think of Jackie on the same dais, how overwhelming it must have felt in person once upon a time. What the view must have been like looking across the National Mall and how small one must feel in the face of such incredible responsibility. Was she watching earlier today, or has she entirely moved on?
The cold whips down Sixth Avenue, but it’s invigorating to be outdoors. There are days when I barely get out of my bathrobe, when I manage only a winter coat over pajamas to run to the grocery on a ridiculous errand, to buy pears, for instance, before I remember that pears are out of season.
“What was the poem?”
“Maya Angelou. She has very. Crisp. Diction. It had the word mastodon.”
I feel my face contort. “In what context?”
“Who knows. I just remember the word.”
The street stretches like taffy; it actually feels like it gets longer, as if we’re in some carnival funhouse. When we finally make it to the soup place I stomp my feet to regain sensation in my toes. We read the menu board together before I settle on Thai carrot ginger because they make it with coconut milk and there’s something about that that feels lush and warm.
“Eat it here? Or get it to go.”
I look around the restaurant and there are plenty of seats. “To go,” I say, after some consideration. If we go home we’ll turn on the TV to keep us company while we eat. If we stay here, Daniel will drone on about the inauguration, and an inauguration is a beginning—one whose end is unwritten. I need to focus my brain on endings.
As Daniel pays for the soup I turn to the TV mounted in the corner of the restaurant. It plays clips from Washington—the events of the day inescapable. I watch Bill and Hillary wave to the crowds as they walk from the Capitol to the White House, so full of promise and hope. An administration is judged by whether or not it fulfills the promise of its start. A book should be judged in a similar way, I think to myself.
I watch as the soup guy tapes lids to our containers, places them in a paper bag, and calls out, “To go!” As Daniel collects our order and I grab two plastic spoons from the counter, inspiration hits: The answers I need are not here, not in the library, not in the city.
I need to take my quest to go.
◆ TWENTY-FIVE ◆
I’ve spent three nights in as many Super 8 motels, although I hardly notice—they’re all the same. The rooms, the sounds (always next to a major road with rumbling trucks at almost evenly timed intervals), the musty smell, the beds, the pillows, the lightbulbs, a maddening hum whose source can never be traced. Even the wall art, which is at least slightly different in each port and designed to make the whole experience more palatable, fails spectacularly in exactly the same way.
Before I even left the school I had already forgotten her name.
I wandered around the town, bundled against the cold and the frigid winds that came whipping down the water. The lakefront had a number of private docks, and I walked out to the end of one and sat to watch the sunset. I could feel the cold boards of the dock through my pants; I should have packed long underwear. I have no ability to change a flat tire, but I do always carry pens. If the goal was to feel a connection with Frank, Hammondsport was kind of a wash. I stayed until my fingers and toes felt like the slushy bits of lake water that lapped at the shore, and the lake reflected the raging fire of a bright orange sky.
Next stop: Oneonta. It’s a SUNY town, and that alone made it sparkle with more possibility. I nervously walked the high school hallways looking for the office, peering through the narrow window in each classroom door. There’s a sameness to all these mid-century schools. The floors, the lockers, the drab paint colors—the scent alone is instantly transporting. In my high school, I walked the hallways trying my damndest to hide my true identity, head down, hiding behind books; now I wander these halls in search of it, head up, with no props to hide behind. But awkward still. Give me a college campus and I will feel at home. High schools contain haunting memories that jangle my very nerves.
The vice principal in Oneonta, a Mrs. Casky, is less friendly than was the secretary in Hammondsport, but ultimately more helpful. She knew Frank, but she’s not sure why I want to. I told her I was a writer from The New Yorker (I’m surprised how easy lies come of late—it’s as if my mother has opened a floodgate) doing a story on high school English teachers who had writerly ambitions of their own; I was given his name as a lead. It’s ridiculous to think this idea would fly at The New Yorker, but it seemed to pass muster in Oneonta.
“He was always working on something in the teacher’s lounge, that’s for certain. Sometimes he was late for class,” she said.
“Do you know what it was?” I imagine some brilliant work the world may never know.
“It wasn’t a grade book. He was terrible about turning in grades.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “I can procrastinate too.”
She tilted her head and pursed her lips, as if annoyed by my trying to draw a connection. I asked if there was an old yearbook I could see, to make sure it was the same Frank Latimer whose name I’d been given; she walked over to a closet in the back. A minute later she returned with three yearbooks and plunked them down on the counter. “He was definitely here at least one of these years. Faculty’s near the back.”
I bought myself a moment by studying the book’s cover. The school mascot—a not unfriendly-looking yellow jacket—looked straight back at me, as if it were about to buzz my face. Sting, quickly and with purpose. I immediately flipped toward the back, but the faculty names jumped from Lancaster to Lester. In the second book I found him on the first page I opened to. It wasn’t like looking in a mirror, but I recognized him nonetheless. It was his nose, I think, and something about the eyes. A discomfort of being photographed we shared, as if posing were taking us both away from something more important. I traced his features with my index finger like a blind person feeling a stranger’s face, suddenly able to see.
“That him?” Mrs. Casky asked.
“That’s him,” I said, my voice cracking between the two words.
At the hotel I open a bottle of drugstore cabernet and wallow in feeling lost. The room doesn’t have a corkscrew, so I mangle the stopper with a pen that’s laid out by the telephone until I can push the remnants into the wine; with each sip I spit out bits of cork. For some unknown reason, Deb from Martha’s Vineyard comes to mind. If you’re ever lost, take a right. I’m not sure this counts as a turn, but I pick up the phone and call my mother.
“I’m in Oneonta,” I say, another bid, but not really caring this time if I pique her curiosity. In the brochure left on the table it states Oneonta means place of open rocks in the Mohawk language, so I tell her that too.
“I found a letter,” my mother blurts out, after we talk about January’s snowfall. “It had a return address. In Syracuse.”
I drop the phone in annoyance and it lands on the bed with a thud. The Super 8 mattresses could be the open rocks the Mohawk were referring to. I take a big swig of cheap, syrupy wine and can feel the cork bits in my throat when I swallow; I make a sound like a cat trying to cough up hair. Eventually I pick up the receiver. “A letter from him.”
“Yes,” she says, but only after a great pause.
“Well. You’re just full of surprises.”
“Don’t be like that.”
“No. You don’t get to do this and also tell me how to be.” Neither of us says anything for a long time; the room’s natural hum mushrooms into a piercing ring. “What does it say?”
“The letter? I never opened it.”
“But you never threw it away.”
“I guess not.”
I rap the phone on my forehead three times before saying, “No time like the present.”
“Please don’t make me.”
I open my mouth, ready to bark at her to open it. But instead I say, “I have his nose.” I laugh because I picture myself actually having his severed nose and then I think of Isis collecting pieces of Osiris and I stop laughing and actually start to cry.
“Do you,” she says, but I don’t know if she’s questioning this information or if she can’t really remember enough about him to know if it’s true.
“I think so.”
I hang up after she gives me the return address on the envelope.
Outside I take several deep breaths in the cold as I watch the traffic go by; the air is sharp like razor blades. My sweatpants and T-shirt provide little warmth, but I lean on the railing until I spot a car with one headlight out and feel I’ve seen enough to go back inside. I pour the rest of the wine down the sink and take a hot shower. Afterward, I flop on the bed in only a towel and flip through the TV channels until I’ve watched every station at least three times. I turn the TV off and study Frank’s address. Milnor Avenue. Named, perhaps, after the people who make hats? The Latin speaker and the hatmaker. No, wait, that’s milliner.
In the morning I drive from Oneonta to Syracuse; it takes two hours and thirteen minutes. I stop at a AAA and ask for a map and even though I’m not a member they take pity on me. It doesn’t take long to find Frank’s house, although I pass it without meaning to and have to throw the car in reverse, parking across Milnor Avenue to get a good, hard look. The house is brick, small, with a red door. The driveway is plowed, and there are burlap bags over what I imagine are rosebushes under the front windows along the walk. Icicles hang over
the front door, which seems dangerous; I judge Frank for not taking better care. There’s a car in the driveway, some sort of hatchback—it’s hard to see exactly what make and model from where I sit. Someone is obviously home—Frank, or maybe a new wife.
I’m drenched in sweat, despite temperatures hovering around freezing. I focused so singularly on getting myself here that only now do I realize how nervous I am. When the windows completely fog, I remove my knit cap to blot the sweat from my forehead; it’s as if I’m a burglar afraid of being made. But am I stealing anything so much as reclaiming a part of myself? I wipe a small section of the window so I can continue to study the house. It’s as unremarkable as these events are unusual. If Frank is indeed inside, we’re only a few hundred feet apart. This is it. The last few steps. The closing of a thirty-year gap I only just discovered.
I don’t remember opening the door or getting out of the car, but I’m in the middle of the street anyhow, crossing toward Frank’s driveway. My feet move independently of my commanding them to. I’m a marionette; my legs are bowed where they are attached to strings and I do this weird pivot as each leg moves closer to the drive. I place one foot on Frank’s property and stop dead like there’s one of those electric dog fences keeping me from advancing any farther. It’s the mailbox. The source of this current. Across the top is a little sign that says THE DEMBROWSKIS.
Total panic. I pull my cap farther over my brow and look from the house to the mailbox to the car and back to the house again to make sure I have the right number. I even fetch the paper from my pocket with the address my mother gave me; I wrote it down three times, once for each time I made her repeat it. The curtain in the front window flutters, movement in the house. I whip around to cross the street and come this close to getting hit by a Toyota pickup. If my heart had stopped, that started it right up again. Slush from the melting snow is all over the front of my pants, all the way up to my knees.
It’s now or never. I turn back to the house, walk up the front steps, and knock on the door three times. I live a lifetime in the thirty seconds it takes for someone to answer—a man, shorter than I imagined Frank to be, and rounder. “Yes?” he says.
The Editor Page 20
