The Brooklyn Follies

by Paul Auster

  “This is the holy bone, the reverend said, holding the erection in his hand and wagging it in my face. God gave me this glorious gift, and the jism that spurts from it can engender the lives of angels. Take it in your hand, Sister Aurora, and feel the fire coursing through its veins. Put it in your mouth and taste the flesh our good Lord saw fit to endow me with …

  “I did what he wanted, Uncle Nat. I closed my eyes and shoved that big veiny corncob into my mouth, and little by little I sucked him off. It was nasty. My poor nose rubbing up against his smelly crotch, my poor stomach churning around inside me, but I knew what I was doing, and I was glad. Just as he was about to come, I took him out of my mouth and finished the job with my hand, making sure his precious jism squirted all over my blouse. That was my evidence, the one thing I needed to bring the son-of-a-bitch down. Remember Monica and Bill? Remember the dress? Well, now I had my blouse, and it was as good as a weapon, as good as a loaded gun …

  “When I got into the car, I was crying. I don’t know if they were real tears or fake tears, but I was crying. I told David to start up the engine and head for home. He looked upset, but since he wasn’t allowed to talk until the next morning, he couldn’t ask me any questions. That was when I realized the thing could go in either one of two ways. I was about to tell him that the Reverend Bob had raped me. If David talked then, it would mean that he cared more about me than the goddamn Temple of the Holy Word. We could hand the blouse over to the cops, have it tested for DNA, and the reverend would be cooked in a vat of burning oil. But what if David didn’t talk? It would mean that I was nothing to him, that he was sticking with old Bob the Father to the bitter end. There wasn’t going to be much time to act. If David let me down, I would have to stop thinking about myself. Lucy was the one who had to be saved, and the only way to do that was to get her out of North Carolina. Not tomorrow or next week, but now, this minute, on the first bus leaving for New York …

  “After we had gone about a hundred yards, I told him. The bastard raped me, I said. Look at my blouse, David. That’s the Reverend Bob’s semen. He pinned me down and wouldn’t let go. He forced himself on me, and I wasn’t strong enough to push him off. David pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped. For a little while, I thought he was with me, and I felt bad that I’d doubted him, ashamed that I hadn’t been willing to trust him. He reached out his hand and touched my face, and he had that sweet, soulful look in his eyes, the same beautiful, tender look that made me fall for him back in California. This is the man I married, I said to myself, and he still loves me. But I was wrong. He might have felt sorry for me, but he wasn’t about to interrupt his silence and disobey the Reverend Bob’s holy command. Talk to me, I said. Please, David, open your mouth and talk to me. He shook his head. He shook his head, and I started to cry again, and this time it was for real …

  “We got back on the road, and after a minute or two I managed to pull myself together enough to tell him that we were sending Lucy up north to my brother Tom in Brooklyn. If he didn’t do exactly what I told him to do, I would take the blouse to the police, press charges against the Reverend Bob, and our marriage would be over. You still want to be married to me, don’t you? I asked. David nodded. All right, I said, then this is the deal. First, we pick up Lucy at the house. Then we drive to the A.T.M. at City Federal and withdraw two hundred dollars in cash. Then we go to the bus depot and you buy her a one-way ticket to New York with your MasterCard. Then we give her the money, put her on the bus, and kiss her good-bye. That’s what you’re going to do for me. What I’m going to do for you is this: the moment the bus leaves the terminal, I’ll give you the blouse with your hero’s cum stains on it, and you can destroy the evidence to save his ass. I’ll also promise to stay with you, but only on one condition: that I never have to go near that church again. If you try to drag me back there, I’m gone from your life, gone from your life forever …

  “I don’t want to talk about saying good-bye to Lucy. It hurts too much to think about it. I said good-bye to her when I went into rehab, but this was different. This felt like the end of the world, and all I could do was hug her, and try not to crack up, and remind her to tell everyone that I was doing okay. I’m sorry she lost the letter I wrote Tom. I explained a lot in that letter, and it must have seemed awfully peculiar when she showed up empty-handed like that. I also tried to call Tom from the terminal, but everything was so rushed, and since I didn’t have enough coins on me, I had to call collect. He wasn’t home, but at least I knew he was still at his old address. I might have been acting crazy that day, but not crazy enough to send Lucy to New York without knowing exactly where Tom lived …

  “I don’t understand this Carolina Carolina business. I never told her not to say where I was. Why would I do that? I was sending her to Tom – and it never occurred to me that she wouldn’t tell him about Winston-Salem. The poor kid. What I said to her was: Just let him know that I’m okay, that I’m doing fine. I should have known better. Lucy takes things so literally, she probably thought that when I used the word just, I meant that was the only thing I wanted her to say. She’s always been like that. When she was three, I sent her to day care for a couple of hours every morning. After a few weeks, the teacher called me and said that she was worried about Lucy. When it was time for the children to have their milk, Lucy would always hang back until all the other kids had taken a carton before she’d take one for herself. The teacher didn’t understand. Go get your milk, she’d say to Lucy, but Lucy would always wait around until there was just one carton left. It took a while for me to figure it out. Lucy didn’t know which carton was supposed to be her milk. She thought all the other kids knew which ones were theirs, and if she waited until there was only one carton in the box, that one had to be hers. Do you see what I’m talking about, Uncle Nat? She’s a little weird – but intelligent weird, if you know what I mean. Not like anyone else. If I hadn’t used the word just, you would have known where I was all along …

  “Why didn’t I call again? Because I couldn’t. No, not because we didn’t have a phone in the house – because I was trapped. I’d promised David that I wouldn’t leave him, but he didn’t trust me anymore. The minute we got home from the bus terminal, he took me upstairs to Lucy’s room and locked me in. Yes, Uncle Nat, he locked me in and kept me there for the rest of the day and all that night. When he started talking again the next morning, he told me that I had to be punished for lying about the Reverend Bob. Lying? I said. What the hell did that mean? There hadn’t been any rape, he said. The only reason I’d insisted on going into the house alone was because I’d been planning to seduce him – and the poor man hadn’t been able to resist my charms. Thank you, David, I said. Thank you for believing in me and understanding what a good wife I’ve been to you …

  “Later that day, he boarded up the windows in the room. I mean, what’s the use of a jail if the prisoner can crawl out the window, right? Then, very kindly, my dear husband carried up all the things we had put downstairs in the cellar after the Reverend Bob’s Sunday Edicts. The television set, the radio, the CD player, the books. Isn’t that against the rules? I asked. Yes, David said, but I talked to the reverend after services this morning, and he’s given me a special dispensation. I want to make things as comfortable as possible for you, Aurora. Gee, I said, why are you so nice to me? Because I love you, David said. You did a wicked thing yesterday, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you. To show the purity of that love, he came back a minute later with a big stew pot so I wouldn’t have to piss and shit on the floor. By the way, he said, you’ll be happy to learn that you’ve been excommunicated from the Temple. You’re out, but I’m still in. I’m crushed, I said. I think this is the saddest day of my life …

  “I don’t know what was wrong with me, but the whole thing felt like a joke, and I couldn’t take it seriously. I figured it would go on for just a few days, and then I’d split. Promise or no promise, I wasn’t going to hang around there a minute longer than I h
ad to …

  “But the days became weeks, and then the weeks became months. David understood what I was thinking, and he wasn’t about to let me go. He’d let me out of the room when he came home from work, but what chance did I have to get away? He was always watching me. If I tried to run for the door, how far could I have gone? About two steps, maybe. He’s bigger and stronger than I am, and all he had to do was run after me and drag me back. The keys to the car were in his pocket, his money was in his pocket, and the only money I had was a bunch of change I’d found in one of Lucy’s bureau drawers. I kept waiting and hoping, but I only managed to slip out of the house once. That was when I tried to call Tom. You remember that, don’t you? By some miracle, David dozed off in the living room after dinner. There’s a pay phone about a mile and a half down the road, and I ran down that road as fast as I could. If only I’d had the balls to put my hand in David’s pocket and steal the car key. But I couldn’t risk waking him up, so I went down that road on foot. David must have opened his eyes about ten minutes after I left, and needless to say, he went down that road in the car. What a fiasco. I didn’t even have time to finish the damn message …

  “Now you know why I look so pale, so worn out. I was locked up in that room for six months, Uncle Nat. Locked up like an animal in my own house for half a year. I watched television, I read books, I listened to music, but mostly what I did was think about how to kill myself. If I didn’t go ahead with it, it’s because I promised Lucy that I was going to come back for her one day, that one day we would live together again. But Christ, it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t easy at all. If you hadn’t come for me this afternoon, I don’t know how much longer I could have taken it. I probably would have died in that house. It’s that simple, Uncle Nat. I would have died in that house, and then my husband and the good Reverend Bob would have carried me out in the middle of the night and dumped my body in an unmarked grave.”

  A NEW LIFE

  Because of my friendship with Joyce Mazzucchelli, who owned the house on Carroll Street that she shared with her B.P.M. daughter and two grandchildren, I was able to find new digs for Aurora and Lucy. There was an empty room on the third floor of the brownstone. In former times, it had served as a multipurpose workshop-studio for Jimmy Joyce, but now that Nancy’s Foley walker ex-husband was gone, why couldn’t they live there? I asked. Rory had no money and no job, but I would be willing to pay the rent until she got back on her feet, and now that Lucy was old enough to lend an occasional hand with Nancy’s kids, it might work out to everyone’s advantage.

  “Forget about the rent, Nathan,” Joyce said. “Nancy needs an assistant for her jewelry business, and if Aurora doesn’t mind helping out with the cleaning and cooking, she can have the room for free.”

  Good old Joyce. We had been monkeying around together for almost six months by then, and even though we lived in separate places, it was the rare week when we didn’t spend at least two or three nights in the same bed – hers or mine, depending on what the mood and circumstances dictated. She was a couple of years younger than I was, which made her something of an old broad, but at fifty-eight, fifty-nine, she still had enough moves to keep things interesting.

  Sex among aging people can have its embarrassments and comical longueurs, but there is also a tenderness to it that often eludes the young. Your breasts might sag, your cock might droop, but your skin is still your skin, and when someone you care about reaches out and touches you, or holds you in her arms, or kisses you on the mouth, you can still melt in the same way you did when you thought you would live forever. Joyce and I hadn’t reached the December of our lives, but there was no question that May was well behind us. What we were together was an afternoon in mid-to late October, one of those bright fall days with a vivid blue sky above, a gusty nip in the air, and a million leaves still clinging to the branches – most of them brown, but with enough golds and reds and yellows left to make you want to stay outdoors as long as you can.

  No, she wasn’t the beauty her daughter was, and based on the early photographs I’d seen of her, she never had been. Joyce attributed Nancy’s physical appearance to her late husband, Tony, a building contractor who had died of a heart attack in 1993. “He was the handsomest man I ever met,” she once told me. “The spitting image of Victor Mature.” With her strong Brooklyn accent, the actor’s name emerged from her mouth sounding something like Victa Machuah, as if the letter r had atrophied to such a degree that it had been expunged from the English alphabet. I loved that earthy, proletarian voice. It made me feel on safe ground with her, and as much as any of the other qualities she possessed, it told you that this was a woman without pretension, a woman who believed in who and what she was. She was the mother of the Beautiful Perfect Mother, after all, and how could she have raised a girl like Nancy if she hadn’t known what she was about?

  On the surface, we had almost nothing in common. Our backgrounds were entirely different (city Catholic, suburban Jew), and our interests diverged on nearly every point. Joyce had no patience for books and was a strict nonreader, whereas I shunned all physical exertion, striving for immobility as the ne plus ultra of the good life. For Joyce, exercise was more than just a duty, it was a pleasure, and her preferred weekend activity was getting up at six o’clock on Sunday morning and riding her bike through Prospect Park. She still worked, and I was retired. She was an optimist, and I was a cynic. She had been happily married, and my marriage – but enough about that. She paid little or no attention to the news, and I read the paper carefully every day. Back when we were children, she had rooted for the Dodgers, and I had rooted for the Giants. She was a fish and pasta person, and I was a meat and potatoes man. And yet – and what can be more mysterious about human life than this yet? – we got along like gangbusters. I had felt an immediate attraction the morning we were introduced (out on Seventh Avenue with Nancy), but it wasn’t until we had our first long talk at Harry’s funeral that I understood there might be a spark between us. In a fit of shyness, I had put off calling her, but then one day the following week she invited me to the house for dinner, and so the flirtation began.

  Did I love her? Yes, I probably loved her. To the extent that I was capable of loving anyone, Joyce was the woman for me, the only candidate on my list. And even if it wasn’t the full-blown, one hundred percent passion that supposedly defines the word love, it was something that fell just short of it – but so close to the mark as to render the distinction meaningless. She made me laugh a lot, which medical experts claim is good for one’s mental and physical health. She tolerated my foibles and inconsistencies, endured my black funks, stayed calm during my blistering rants against the G.O.P., the C.I.A., and Rudolph Giuliani. She tickled me with her rabid devotion to the Mets. She astonished me with her encyclopedic knowledge of old Hollywood films and her talent for identifying every minor and forgotten actor who flitted across the screen. (Look, Nathan, there’s Franklin Pang-born … there’s Una Merkel … there’s C. Aubrey Smith.) I admired her for having the courage to let me read to her from The Book of Human Folly, and then, in her good-natured ignorance, how she treated my piddling stories as literature of the first rank. Yes, I loved her to the full extent allowed by law (the law of my nature), but was I prepared to settle down and spend the rest of my life with her? Did I want to see her every day of the week? Was I mad enough about her to pop the big question? I wasn’t sure. After the long disaster with Name Deleted, I was understandably hesitant to consider another stab at matrimony. But Joyce was a woman, and since the vast preponderance of women seem to prefer couplehood to singledom, I figured I owed it to her to prove that I meant business. In one of the darkest moments of that fall – two days after Rachel suffered a miscarriage, four days after Bush was illegally handed the election, and twelve days before Henry Peoples managed to zero in on the missing Aurora – I broke down and did it. To my immense surprise, the marriage proposal was greeted with hoots of raucous laughter. “Oh, Nathan,” Joyce said, “don’t be such a nitwit.
We’re doing just fine the way we are. Why rock the boat and start making trouble for ourselves? Marriage is for young people, for kids who want to have babies. We’ve already done that. We’re free. We can screw around like a pair of teenagers, and we’re never going to get pregnant. Just whistle, pal, and my big Italian ass is yours, okay? You get my ass, and I get your nice Yiddish you-know-what. You’re my first Jew, Nathan, and now that you’ve parked yourself on my doorstep, I’m not about to give you up. I’m yours, baby. But forget about this marriage stuff. I don’t want to be a wife anymore, and the fact is, my sweet, funny man, you’d make a terrible husband …”

  In spite of these tough words, she started crying a moment later – suddenly overwrought, losing control of her emotions for the first time since I’d known her. I assumed that she was thinking about her dead Tony, remembering the man she had said yes to when she was hardly older than a girl, the husband she had lost when he was only fifty-nine, the love of her life. That might have been the case, but what she said to me was something entirely different. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate it, Nathan. You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time, and now this, now you give me this. I’m never going to forget it, angel. An old bag like me getting proposed to. I don’t mean to blubber, but boy, boy oh boy, knowing you care that much hits me right where I live.”