Louisa always knows how the story is going to end. And yet she makes the mistake of listening for too long rather frequently. Lost in the narrative, she'll quite suddenly, foolishly find herself paralyzed by fear. She won't dare get up from the couch to shut the radio off, as that would expose her back to the spider boy who wants to weave her into his web or the visitors who have arrived here aboard a spaceship in order to kidnap fertile young women to reproduce their horrid species or the mad butcher whose business is failing and so he is hiding behind the door with a cleaver, anxious to turn Louisa into ribs, a roast, and a London broil. Curled up on the couch, she'll pull a pillow over her head and sing a breathy version of Roll out the barrel, we'll have a barrel of fun in order to muffle all the shrieks, sudden organ pipes, and creaking doors coming magically, terrifically, and terrifyingly from inside the small speaker box of her radio. She waits, frozen, until the Magna Motors Music Hour starts up, until she hears the first happy strains of Al Washburn's "Egyptian Ella" before standing again to make sure that the living room is clear of all villains.
It is absurd, and Louisa is smart enough to know that. At twenty-four she considers herself quite sophisticated in all other matters. A sharp city girl, frank, skeptical, and wise, with a desperate weakness for corny radio tales. Creaking doors, she knows, are not creaking doors but rather some sound man doing his best with a cotton clothesline wrapped tightly around a rosined dowel. And yet, each night, she's frightened just the same. There are the goose pimples. There are the shivers. And there goes Louisa's good sense, out the window and down the street, lost somewhere in the traffic and lights of New York City.
This fear is an unfortunate side effect of Louisa's love for the radio. It started out simply. As a young girl she had asked her father, Walter, how so many people, so many voices, could fit inside such a small box.
"I think we need to talk," he'd said and led her into the kitchen, the room for the most serious family business. There at the table he explained and Louisa listened, her mouth agape because Walter's explanation, rather than dispel any mystery, created an even larger one. Miniature actors squeezed inside each radio was silly, yes, but understandable. Magical waves of hidden sound, secret messages traveling around the globe just waiting to be decoded in Louisa's living room? That was a true mystery.
And so Louisa spent hours of her childhood tuning the dial, studying the air around her, trying to catch a glimpse of these sneaky waves. She never saw anything, though her hours of listening did blossom into something: an addiction to radio dramas. Horror, romance, adventure serials, it didn't matter. Louisa loved them all.
Walter used to tease her. "My daughter of dreck," he'd say, not because he didn't love a good story—he did. He just preferred to get his stories from books or from his own memory. That is, until October 30, 1938, the night when Walter himself fell under the sway of the radio.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.
Walter put his book down. The Martians, it seemed, were heading for New York.
"We could probably make it to the train station," Louisa said. "And from there we could escape to the north."
Walter turned to size his daughter up. "Escape?"
"Yes?" she asked as a question. It seemed he had other plans.
"And miss out on seeing perhaps the most wondrous thing that will ever happen in our lifetime? Lou, it's visitors from outer space."
"But" she continued, "it says that they are throwing flames at innocent bystanders, Dad."
"Honey," he said, his voice disappointed, "maybe throwing flames is just their way of saying hello. I'm surprised by you." He raised one brow before laying out his plan. "Grab your warmest coat. We're sleeping on the roof tonight" Walter had a terrific talent in convincing people, particularly his daughter, using just his eyes. They sparkled damply when he was excited, the way a child's might or certain sentimental portraits of Jesus.
So up they went.
Louisa and Walter made themselves a nest of blankets and coats to lie in. Walter sat staring up at the sky while Louisa found a comfortable spot for her head in his lap. Above them their birds, their beautiful pigeons—Walter kept a coop on the roof—circled and danced in flight.
And then not much happened. To Louisa's surprise the following morning, Walter was not disappointed after learning that the invasion was a fiction. It had been an adventure. It didn't matter to Walter if it wasn't true right then, because someday, he told Louisa, it would be true, maybe even someday very soon.
With the radio shut off, Delphine's screams silenced, Louisa takes a moment to look around the living room, securing the perimeter. Neither she nor Walter has much talent in the domestic arts. There is a disaster in the living room. In one corner, bored a few months ago, Louisa started to build a house of cards that rose so high she is now scared to even get near it for fear it will topple. So it sits there, a mess of unused and rejected cards pooling on the floor around it. At the foot of the sofa there is an unruly stack of her father's Sunday papers dating back to 1940. USS GREER STRUCK BY GERMAN SUBMARINE, one says, filing itself away with the long list of war casualties that pile up in the papers daily. The aging newspapers shift gradually from tan to ivory depending on their age. Lining the walls of the living room there's a slapdash assortment of bookshelves filled to bursting. Walter grew up in a house where the only book was a secret manual for married couples, The Rhythm Method, so now he is a book fiend, collecting everything from biographies to French novels, Russian dictionaries to Pennsylvania Dutch cookbooks. The books spill out into piles on the floor, raising the banks of a moat about the room. The furniture stands like mini-citadels in the sea of books and bric-a-brac. On top of the piano there is a graveyard of once-used teacups and saucers whose in-sides are a developing experiment—some teas form a mold across the surface of the unfinished liquid while some others have simply dried into brown cracked deserts, miniature Saharas where Louisa imagines a miniature Sheik of Araby moving at night from harem tent to harem tent, teacup to teacup. There are two caramel-colored couches stuffed with horsehair that smell vaguely farmy when it rains. They face one another before a bay window that looks down onto Fifty-third Street. A number of pairs of disembodied shoes defend the sofas, sentries left standing where Louisa and her father removed them after work and have left them ever since. The radio, with its golden glowing eye, watches over the mess from its place on top of a secretary that once belonged to Melvil Dewey himself, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, or so claimed the man they got it from, a war buddy of Walter's, who used the desk as payment to squirrel out of a loan Walter had given him.
Almost nothing has changed inside the house in Louisa's lifetime because Walter can't bring himself to throw away anything that Louisa's mother, Freddie, might have come in contact with: coffee cups that have lost their handles, frayed sheets with holes large enough to catch and tangle a sleeping foot in, all of Freddie's clothes, all of her shoes, and every handkerchief she might have once blown her nose into. The house sometimes groans under the weight of it all, and Louisa is unsure what to make of these remnants. She'll finger a shawl that once belonged to Freddie. "Mom?" she'll wonder, uncertain what the word even means. Some longing, some fear, and a strong sense that it would be better for Louisa not to ask such questions.
In her own room there is a bed, a framed print of tulip pickers working a field in Holland, a writing desk, and one hard-backed chair. It is the only room in the house where order has taken any root. And while she usually loves pawing through the junk of the house, finding treasures and oddities, she has drawn a line at the border to her bedroom. "Stay back" she says, fighting off the chaos of clutter.
Walter coughs.
"Are you awake?" she calls upstairs, taking two step
s at a time. His bedroom is in the back of the house while hers is in the front. That way they both have windows, a luxury that the two small, dark, and quiet chambers separating their rooms don't share.
He swings his feet out of bed but remains seated on the edge in his boxer shorts and undershirt. "I'm awake," he says and squints his eyes up at her. His wild hair makes him look like a mad scientist. He hasn't been to the barber in months, so his loose gray curls cup the back of his head. His skin is deeply pocked into a surface that reminds Louisa of a church's mosaic floor tiles pieced together to make a picture of her father's face. Walter, in terms of looks, is the exact opposite of Louisa. Where he is ruddy, with blue eyes, freckles, and curly hair, Louisa's hair is a long, black, generally tangled mess. Her eyes are very dark, and her skin is so pale that strangers often stop to ask her if she is feeling faint.
"Hello, dear," he says and smiles. He looks small and delicate in his underwear, like a baby bird straining its neck for food. "Happy New Year."
"Happy New Year to you." Louisa kisses him on the cheek. Both Walter and Louisa had to work through the holidays. He is a night watchman at the public library on Forty-second Street; Louisa chambermaids for the Hotel New Yorker. She sleeps at night and he during the day. They see each other most often during the odd twilight hours. Sometimes they have a small meal together before saying goodbye, living as they do at opposite ends of the sunlight. Other times they won't see each other for days, so when they do, it is a happy surprise. "Oh! You live here too. How wonderful! Let's go to the kitchen and have ourselves a glass of sherry."
Aside from the slightly more lavish party thrown at the hotel on New Year's Eve, as opposed to the parties thrown there nearly every night, Louisa barely noticed that 1943 had just arrived.
She sits down beside Walter on the bed, takes his hand in hers, and rests her head on his shoulder. "Hello, stranger." It has been a day or two since they last saw each other. She looks down at his feet. They are horrible troll paws with long nails and flaking skin—the feet of a watchman who spends his shifts on patrol. "Your feet look like oatmeal," she tells him.
"I know. I was thinking I would eat them for breakfast," he says and begins to draw one of the nasty appendages up to his lips. Louisa drops his hand and runs over to the window to escape.
"You're disgusting and you're going to be late if you don't get going," she says from her safe distance, away from the wretched feet.
He stands and scratches his hair with both hands before placing his watchman's cap on his head. He walks to the back window to join her, looking outside up the fire escape to the coop on the roof and then across the laundry lines to a row of houses on the next block.
"Get dressed," Louisa says.
Walter yanks on his pants, tucks in his shirt, and shrugs his small frame into a very tight-fitting woolen winter coat, courtesy of the Hotel New Yorker's unclaimed lost and found. Louisa stands leaning against the wall.
"You look like your mother standing there," he says.
He always has to ruin it, Louisa thinks, a perfectly pleasant evening. Walter's fidelity to someone who's not even here makes Louisa claustrophobic. She says nothing but studies the very tips of her hair, peeling her split ends into separate strands. She is tired of looking like her mother.
"OK, OK. Bye, Lou" he finally says. "See you in the morning."
She waits in his room until she hears the front door close behind him. And then the house falls quiet. Sometimes the silence drives her crazy, scratching all day and night like a branch against the outside brick. But other times it seems like the greatest gift New York can give a person. Quiet. Wrapping herself in Walter's blanket, Louisa steps out the back window onto the fire escape before climbing up to the roof.
The coop Walter constructed is a small shed, only some of the walls are screened and the screens can be opened up. There is both an indoors and an outdoors to the coop. As far as coops go, Walter and Louisa's is quite nice.
Louisa clicks her tongue to let the birds know she is there. "Hello. Hello. Hello." A few birds pop their heads out the small windows, into the screened area. She opens the door to the coop and, ducking, steps inside. "Are you hungry?" she asks. The birds are cooing. "Yes, yes. You are. OK. All right."
At this hour, in this lighting, any gray, red, or green on the birds 24 fades to a rich, wonderful blue. Louisa is surrounded by it. It matches the coldness in the air. She shakes a bag of seed into a small trough, cleans and refills the water dispensers, and then steps outside, leaving the doors wide open behind her. She has a seat and can feel a bit of warmth from the roof. She wraps Walter's blanket even tighter around her before lying back to watch a formation of about twenty pigeons begin a slow spiral, working their way up higher and higher. A dark motion against the blue sky. The birds turn together, listening to some ancient pattern, a whispered command that Louisa can't quite hear.
Later, she has a small dinner of mushy canned peas with salt. It is one of her favorite meals, and she eats it in front of the radio. Eventually she falls asleep there, pulling a blanket of the back of the couch to cover herself. She stays downstairs because the streetlight shines in the window of the living room and Louisa feels comforted by the shadows of New York City and all of her father's stuff.
In the morning her mouth is dry and gummy from the peas. The house is still quiet. Lou rests her arm across the top of the icebox, staring in. No eggs, no bacon—not with the food rationing—and so Louisa chews through half a piece of toast she's smeared with white margarine. No butter. Louisa gives up on breakfast and instead gets dressed for work.
They were lucky. Walter and Louisa did not live in one of the tenements but rather in a small home that had been left to Freddie by her father, a merchant who'd made his money from the piers along the Hudson River a few blocks away. He had purchased the house in 1898 and then disappeared one night, the victim of a rival merchant whose toughs, or so the story went, had chopped Louisa's grandfather into tiny bits, stuffed him into the drawers of an old bureau, and heaved the oak chest into the river, never to be seen again. Still Louisa sometimes imagines him, in his bureau, in pieces, under the water counting his money.
She does not remember the bad old days of her neighborhood, though Walter likes to tell stories of Death Avenue, the slaughterhouses, frequent arsons committed out of boredom, the Prohibition war between Dutch Schultz and Mad Dog Coll. Louisa wonders how much to believe. Walter can go on and on about the Gophers, a brutal gang who terrorized the neighborhood when he and Freddie and their friend Azor were young. There was a man named Murphy who used a mallet on his victims, and Battle Annie Walsh, a prodigious brick thrower.
"Bricks?" Louisa would ask Walter, finding nothing too fearful in bricks.
And he'd answer, nearly foaming at the mouth, still able to capture his childhood terrors, "Yes! Bricks! Tossed sometimes from the tops of the tenements down onto unsuspecting heads. Have you ever seen what that looks like?" Of course Louisa would have to shake her head no.
But they had removed the railroad tracks that once ran along Death Avenue, and now it's just called Eleventh Avenue. The slaughterhouses were mostly gone, taking their stench of blood with them. The worst of the tenement buildings were razed, dispersing some of the primarily Irish and German residents to other neighborhoods. After they tore down the elevated trains and let the sunlight in, Hell's Kitchen became, to Louisa's mind, an excellent place to grow up in comparison with the Hell's Kitchen Walter still lives in, one populated with the ghosts of thugs and filth and Freddie.
On her way to work Louisa heads over to Fiftieth Street where she can catch the Eighth Avenue IND. Most days she walks to work. It is not too far away, twenty-odd blocks. But the wonder of the subway lines still thrills Louisa, so on cold or nasty days like this one she allows herself the small luxury of paying one nickel to ride the train down to the hotel. As she approaches the station she can smell the subway from above ground. It smells like rocks and dirt. She walks faster, hearing a train
arrive. It forces warm air up the stairwell out onto the cold sidewalk like a tongue. As she pays her fare, the train pulls out of the station. Louisa hears another rider, one who missed this car by a far narrower margin than she, moan long and low, whimpering as though he were a movie-house vampire exposed to the first piercing rays of sunlight. When Louisa arrives on the platform this man is mumbling, repeating the word damntrain, damntrain, under his breath.
The station has a vaulted ceiling walled with millions of ivory-colored tiles that give the acoustics a chilly tone as though Manhattan were a mountain and they were tucked down into its stony underbelly where the echoes of trains slithered through darkened, rocky tunnels.
"Damntrain, damntrain, damntrain." Not angry, almost like a prayer.
There is a continuous whoosh of far-off motion and air as it makes its way through the underground like a distant roaring. Louisa tries to ignore the stranger, wondering if he might not be a bit daft. She has a seat and, in order to avoid eye contact, she pulls a horrid book from her bag, On the Aft Deck by Wanda LaFontaine. It is a ladies' novel that was left behind at the hotel and stuffed into Louisa's purse before she realized just how silly a book it was. She feels the stranger's eyes on her. She starts to read slowly, whispering the pronunciation of each word, entirely unable to concentrate on the book but happy to be able to hide in its pages from the stranger's eyes. She reads the same sentence, Ahoy! said the captain's lusty wench, over and over and over again. The man beside her, the late rider, is staring directly at the side of her face. She can feel his stare on her left cheek and chin.
The Invention of Everything Else Page 3
