Teresita had never met a Puerto Rican. She was fascinated by the young priest. The way he said words seemed precious to her, how instead of saying carne, “meat,” he said what sounded like calne. The gathered jewels and fine linens and hat pins and earrings and tall hats and cravats did not much catch her eye. She had seen all that before, all that future rot and dust, all that vanity. One woman had a great pin in the shape of a spider, and its parts were made of gold and gems. Teresita liked that and she wondered if the woman was a curandera.
The fine people were all pleasant, but she barely heard their talk. She watched the mouth of the priest, watched him form what to her sounded like phantom sounds. In New York, she was noting, Spanish was a foreign language as well.
Cornish game hens dressed in buttery brown coats of dough arrived, the birds lovingly placed drolly in rice and steamed carrots, as if abed.
“Tiny turkeys!” she exulted, and when the priest translated her words, the gathered minions laughed, not altogether kindly. Their eyes caught a certain sparkle when she revealed herself as a naïf.
To her right sat a lovely sixteen-year-old dewdrop of a girl with honey-colored hair and green eyes. She could have been whipped up of meringue. Teresita could have scooped out a taste of her with a spoon. The girl was a Hungarian princess, a Deszilly, though this meant nothing to Teresita. She wanted to say, Oh? Your Highness. And I am a saint. But she reminded herself that she was not a saint, at least not to the Catholic church. She smiled. The priest smiled back. At a table removed from the main party sat Dr. Weisburd and his small family. His longhaired wife and their daughter, a poet. He watched Teresa with his dark eyes, at once sad and amused. One of the bankers, well in his cups—rum toddies all around to cut the chill!—noted Teresita watching the Weisburds. “He’s a Yiddisher,” the fat man confided.
Teresita turned to the priest.
“He is not welcome at this table?” she asked.
“There is a certain social structure,” the priest noted. “Constraints.”
“What of you and me?” she asked.
He smiled. He sipped his white wine. He lightly touched his clerical collar.
“We are the entertainment,” he said.
Teresita laughed. They clinked glasses in a private toast. The gathered great ones felt a surge of dread. What if the exotics were mocking them in their obscure languages? But Teresita dazzled them with her saintliest smile, and they calmed down.
She turned in her seat and raised her glass to the doctor and his family as well, toasting them from a distance.
Chocolate truffle cake with looping battlements of frosting looked like small cathedrals stolen by giants.
The coffee came in dollhouse cups you could use for thimbles.
It was all so exquisite.
The aristocrats burst out of the restaurant and formed great steam-blowing cadres around her. They had brought in the finest taxi—a rumbling little Cadillac. They helped her in and stood waving her off with shouts and huzzahs. It chugged into the weather making ahoogah klaxon cries.
Dr. Weisburd was the one who saw John shivering in misery against the wall.
“If we hurry,” he said, “we can catch her. Come on, Tex.”
He waved toward his own carriage. Doc was old-fashioned. He had a horse pulling the rig, and a bundled driver looking like some mythological hulk in skins.
“Hey, King David,” John said. “Don’t call me Tex.”
It was slow going. The sleet was really pounding down now, sliding out of the sky at a sharp angle. John peered out, trying to see her through it. He didn’t say another word. The doctor’s family traded many looks and the poet daughter laughed but her father kicked her foot and shook his head. She managed to choke back her amusement.
John jumped out before they reached East Twenty-Eighth and said, “Thanks, Doc. I’ll pay you back someday.”
“Think nothing of it, T… John.”
John looked into the storm, ice already covering his eyebrows and whiskers.
“I must have rocks in my head,” he said and vanished into the heaving gray air.
She was standing in the vestibule looking at the names on the three mailboxes. John had forgotten to put his name up. She had a small bag and a larger valise. Most of her things had burned, but he wouldn’t know that. He burst in the door in a swirl of cold wind. She turned and stared at him. They didn’t move for a moment. And then she was in his arms.
“Where were you?” she cried.
“I was right there.”
“No, you weren’t!” she said.
“I was. I was.” He patted her back. “I couldn’t get to you. I watched you, though.”
He squeezed her. Mr. Somers opened his door and looked out at them. He was the painter. His room was crowded with easels, and the happy smells of linseed oil and paint came out around him.
“Bill,” said John, “meet my wife.”
Bill shook her hand and insisted on carrying the heavy bag up for them.
“Bill gives me books to read,” John said.
“Dios te bendiga,” said Teresita, putting her hand on the painter, who ducked his head and smiled and combed his beard with his fingers and headed downstairs again with a wave.
She didn’t even look at the rooms. She stared at John.
“I watched you eat,” he said. “I was outside the whole time.”
He felt small, forgotten. Overwhelming sorrow hit him. This wasn’t the way he’d imagined it. His eyes brimmed. What the hell. How embarrassing.
She dragged his shaggy head down to her chest and rocked him, standing there as the storm threw itself at their windows.
Days and days.
New York City leapt at each dawn with grandeur, maniacal energy that overcame the visitors and crushed them before noon. The sky shrieked, the land hammered around them. But warmth briefly returned, and they prowled. They crept the tumbledown blocks at the mouth of the three Brooklyn bridges. She was mad for the great bridge itself, and she made John walk across it often, stopping to admire its cables above and the dark water below, antic with tugs and ferries. They stood in the tenement shadows all up and down the East Side, they ran from rain squalls and cutpockets in the tumult of Broadway, they discovered the new pizza pies in a narrow brick-walled oven of a building, and they inevitably wandered the Chinese streets, where Teresita touched the hands of her beloved old Chinese monks and grandmothers. John took her to see the Flatiron Building—called the Fuller—as it was growing out of spindly bars of metal, already looking like the most beautiful building she would ever see. A brisk walk down Lexington and a turn on Twenty-Third to the corner of Fifth Avenue. That slender mystery triangle cutting through the city like a magical little ship.
Days and days.
On their first bright morning of falling snow, she stood at the window, puzzled. “John,” she said. “Someone on the roof has cut open his pillow and is shaking out the feathers!”
But warmth returned quickly and melted the down.
As they strolled in the great park watching prams full of babies rattle down the shaded paths, John, with a flourish, presented Teresita with a small yellow package.
“Juicy Fruit!” he said.
She took a stick of chicle from the pack and quite enjoyed it.
From boats that circled the fat south point of the island, they beheld the clamor, the mass, the heavy splendor of the great machine—its million scurrying ant-people coughing and shuffling along its many paths like the ghosts of the Indians long dead and buried under cement and brick. The far mouth of the Hudson revealed itself from the deck of the boat like the bright golden gate to some better world, a western vista of hope and light beyond the immense tumult. John meant to ride up that river to see what was there. Someday.
Teresita was used to being pummeled by bodies now—San Francisco, St. Louis, Los Angeles—it seemed that everywhere, everywhere, men built hives like wasps and swarmed there. It seemed so distant to her that she had once wandered a
bandoned deserts gathering plants. Were there plants in New York? She had to look twice.
“Immigrants everywhere,” John said. “Italians come on German ships. It’s crazy here. Greenwich Village is all tenements.”
“Oh?” she said, not knowing what such a village could be but eager to get to the villagers and start to heal them.
“There are tunnels,” John said. “They are building a subway.”
“Subway?”
“Trains that go underground!” he cried out like a little boy.
Teresita suddenly recalled the days when her father had argued over the scientific marvels in Jules Verne novels with Lauro Aguirre before they had ever ridden trains.
The shores of the island were not high, not noble, but low, crowded, bristling with dead docks and collapsing warehouses, rogue trees bursting magically from the cracked creosoted wood of the quays. Water all around. Massive forces of water: water underground, water before and behind, water simmering under streets in mummified sarcophagi of buried creeks and streams. Teresita felt the surge and throb under her feet. And the islands—islands all low and dark with clotted trees and heavy with ghosts.
Wall Street, that old avenue of the ruined city wall. Back when the city was a fort. Ruins of a lost culture—how fast cultures moved! How recently did the canoes of the native hunters circle the island! How recently the meadows hereabouts had small lakes and populations of deer and bears, where now buildings and theaters stood. Where once wooden farmhouses faced deep woods, then brick and wooden flats and wooden hospitals crowded those former cow paths and hunting lanes and the farmhouses already forgotten as the flats tumbled to the brownstones and the Chicago-style tallness reaching for the sky that had never changed, a sky that could have been seen by the most ancient resident’s eyes as familiar… when the smoke and glare abated after midnight. What kind of a place was this where the sky remained steady and the land changed like storm clouds? She could feel the layers of sound and voice in every neighborhood, Five Points so dense in its buried music she could almost not breathe there.
But the power, the power of it. The island and its outliers were like an armada. Manhattan itself an engine, infernal in its pulse. It pulled the earth toward sunrise out of sheer exuberance. Just stepping out their little door exhausted her.
Days and days.
When they returned from venturing down to the block between Thirty-Fourth and Thirty-Fifth Streets to visit the new Macy’s department store, she was so exhausted that she went to bed without supper. The aristocrats apparently kept different hours than the working classes, for they sent cabs for her at night to deal with gout and carbuncles, sore backs and mysterious female agonies. John was left at home.
Mornings could be slow, as he slept off his comfort from the night before.
Out their back window, she saw foxes. She saw deer. She saw shadows that paced north, then south. East, then west toward her. Then away again. Sad shadows, hungry and confused, shadows that could not find the water, shadows that could not find the old walking paths that had been torn out of the living soil and replaced with stone.
They ran downstairs when it was hot inside their rooms—Bill Somers liked his heat on high—and purchased tall glasses of the new syrup tonic Pepsi-Cola. The bubbles made her sneeze. John tried to hide the long string of small belches the tonic inspired.
She opened the curtains only to greet New York’s daily magnificent sunrise, exploding out of the sky as if God Himself had chosen this city for His blessings. Later in the day, when the shadows appeared, she shut the curtains. On most days, she was out the door, on her way to an appointment, joining all the million other workers deaf to the sounds of the ghost island. And John, with his headache, carried her coat for her.
“What did you do in Los Angeles?” he asked one night.
They lay in their narrow bed, smelling the opera singer’s garlic wafting down from above. Pigeons shuffled and cooed on their small window ledge. John hated them, but Teresita fed them crumbs. He wished he had his pistola.
“Nothing, really,” she said into his ribs. “Court.”
“I can’t believe I haven’t asked you yet.”
“We are so busy.”
“Is it busy like this in Los Angeles?”
“It is busy, yes, in a lazy way. Don Lauro kept me away from too much craziness.”
“Don who?”
“Don Lauro! You know Don Lauro.”
“Nope. I don’t know no Don Lauro.”
“Lauro Aguirre,” she said.
“I never met no Lauro Aguirre,” he insisted. “He was in Los Angeles?”
“I stayed with him,” she said.
“What do you mean, you stayed with him?”
He was growing stiffer beside her.
She patted his chest.
“Now, now,” she said.
“Don’t ‘now, now’ me,” he said sharply. “What do you mean you stayed with him?”
“John! Don Lauro is like an uncle to me! He is my father’s best friend in the world! I have known him since I was a girl!” He said nothing. “I stayed with him. Yes! We had a house.”
“Jesus,” he said. “You had a house?” He laughed bitterly. “Ain’t that rich. Poor Johnny out here missing his woman and she’s in a house with some old goat having a high old time.”
“John!”
He rose. He paced. He stared at her. He shook his head.
“John?” she said.
“I cannot believe you,” he announced.
He grabbed his coat and hat.
“I don’t understand!” she cried.
“You should have told me,” he said.
He went out and slammed the door and galloped downstairs.
“I’m going for a drink!” he called.
Days and days and days.
Fifty-Five
THE WALDORF-ASTORIA HOTEL lobby was a cavern overcrowded with pianos and settees. They entered and were swept up by handsome swells and powdered ladies in sashed dresses that trailed the floor and revealed huge bustles in back that made them seem to be oceangoing schooners with sails made of eggshell-colored silk. Their hair was lifted in gleaming buns and pierced by chopsticks. Some carried fans and all worked sly little shawls off their shoulders. They tittered and whispered and swept Teresita away like a squadron of angels swooping down upon a sinless girl on Judgment Day. Wrists jingling with silver baubles hanging off charm bracelets—small Eiffel Towers and steamships, palm trees and cable cars, camels, pyramids. John was left behind in the company of a crazy granny from Long Island named Effie Woodward who had appeared in Indian garb complete with headband and eagle feather. She was trailed by her sultry and exquisitely bored daughter Louise in a vast hat with small straw flowers arrayed on its great wings. Effie took his arm and followed the flood of ladies into the deeper recesses of the labyrinth where humid scents of food permeated the excellent great rooms, and warbly sentimental music played incessantly—immigrants in tuxedos and profoundly greased skullcaps of dark hair sawed away at fiddles and breathed through clarinets; one drub-drubbed on a stand-up bass and another brushed a small metallic snare drum while melancholy saxophones and a single muted trombone gave background voice to a melody sung archly into a megaphone by the skinny gigolo in white who occasionally turned and conducted the entire maudlin combo.
Teresita sat at the head table and apparently didn’t need any damned translator at all, as John could plainly see. So what else had she kept from him?
He smiled at Effie, who occasionally shook her eagle feather at Teresita and droned on about hidden Lemurian masters, the secrets of Atlantis hidden beneath the sphinx in Cairo, and the powers of the great line of mystic Indian chiefs of which Teresita was a descendant. Here he was, stranded with Pocahontas. Already, he noted, Teresita was throwing her hands up when she laughed, lifting her palms in what looked like surrender. The powdered faces around her didn’t open their mouths to laugh—they pulled the points of their upper lips down to their low
er lips and worked their shoulders up and down as they surrendered with their hands.
“Aho!” Effie said, extending her rather tattered feather toward Teresita.
“Aho!” John concurred. “Damned right, Effie! A-holy-o!”
Effie rattled her feather again.
“Yippee-ti-yay,” he muttered into his glass of white wine. Pink salmon lay on his plate, surrounded by some sort of purple vegetable. John munched a bread stick. He was thinking about some good bloody beef. He signaled a waiter.
“Got beer?” he asked.
“Sir,” the boy said and walked away.
Sir? What kind of answer was that? Was that yes or no?
“In your previous lives,” Effie asked, “who were you?”
“Goddamn, madam—one life is more than enough for me!”
Louise snickered.
Effie produced a small leather pouch and spilled colorful stones and a bone on the table and stared at him meaningfully.
“Do you see what I’ve been saying?” she said.
“Of course,” he lied.
To his great shock, Teresita was ushered upstairs to a guest suite after supper. She looked back at him and mouthed Sorry.
“Fame, dearie!” chirped Effie. She had pulled an aromatic bundle of sage from her bag. “Shall I smudge you?”
“Maybe next time,” John said.
“You could use a good job,” Effie announced. “How about you come to my antiquities store in Washington Square and learn to deal treasures?”
“Job?”
“You can’t just sniff around after the Saint!” Effie cackled.
His beer never came.
“Excuse me,” he replied, heading after Teresita, but the suited gents intercepted him and hustled him to the door. They had waved down a car to take John back to the ol’ homestead. “Sure you won’t mind, old boy!” They guffawed and blustered. One of them thrust a white package at him and said, “Here—take some food!” He tossed the sack aside as he was hustled out but managed to grab a bottle of port.
Queen of America Page 38
