The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter

by Kia Corthron

  Lincoln Center.

  Lincoln Center? Wait. We passed Columbus Circle.

  I thought I would walk you up to 94th. You can use your thirty cents to get home after your party.

  She stares at me, and I know I have made a terrible, presumptuous mistake. Some strange man offering to walk her all that way, and up Broadway through notorious Needle Park in the 70s no less! What am I thinking?

  Or I can just give you the other thirty cents if you want to get on the subway now. I keep my eyes low, fixed on her hands. I say, You’ll need the other thirty to get home later.

  I was going to borrow it from somebody at the party.

  I nod.

  You got out of the train at 50th. You don’t mind walking so far out of your way?

  And now I glance up and see she’s smiling. I tell her, I like to walk.

  She takes her little notepad out and scribbles something, tears off the sheet.

  My address. You can write to me sometime. Now she turns to Lincoln Center, across from where we are standing.

  I swore I would never come here. They removed San Juan Hill to make way for this. It sounds Puerto Rican but it was black, a poor black neighborhood decimated. Did you know?

  I shake my head.

  Come on.

  I follow her, and after navigating the heavily trafficked crisscrossing of Broadway and Columbus, we arrive at Revson Fountain, the centerpiece of Lincoln Center which currently houses the symphony, opera, and a theater, and has future plans for the ballet. Her hands are motionless now as we gaze at the gurgling flow. She smiles, the lights of the cascade dancing in her eyes. Finally she looks up at me, studies my face a moment before her hands gently speak. My sign name. And with a flourish she gives me her flowing, fused A M J.

  The water suddenly shoots high into the air. April May June and I laugh, surprised, standing next to each other, mesmerized and washed by the crystal spray bedewing the crisp, clear night.

  3

  My last day of classes before Christmas break I receive a message from Joy. I wonder if students realize that teachers also live in mortal fear of being called to the principal’s office. I have all my basic needs met from my superintendent career so losing the school position would not mean financial ruin. But I enjoy teaching.

  When I walk in, she smiles and hands me a note.

  I read the note carefully, then scribble my reply. I imagine Joy is stealing glances at her watch so as I write I don’t look up, as it would only embarrass both of us.

  As Joy reads the note, I see her laugh out loud. Then she turns the paper over.

  Two nights later, after a dinner of canned pea soup and saltines, I take my customary annual Christmas Eve stroll sixty blocks uptown and stand in front of St. John the Divine. I sip my deli hot chocolate and join a couple dozen other night wanderers waiting in anticipation on the steps of the Episcopalian Gothic Revival cathedral. The midnight bells. I know when they begin by the smiles on the faces of the others, the Merry Christmas embraces. I keep to the side, smiling myself, observing. When the doors open, I move quickly before the midnight service crowd comes pouring out.

  Trekking home I pass a lit window at 92nd and Amsterdam. Apparently the tradition of this Hispanic family is to open gifts just after midnight. The children are in heaven, wildly tearing off the wrappings. The mother seems just as enchanted, the father sitting in his chair smoking, trying to smile but looking exhausted. I watch them for a quarter-hour before the chill forces me back on my way. The next evening I embark on my other holiday ritual, Christmas dinner at my favorite Japanese restaurant, but for some reason this year the establishment is packed, a line out the door. I sigh and pick up egg rolls at the corner takeout to eat at home alone.

  As Hell’s Kitchen is adjacent to Times Square, every New Year’s Eve I plan on getting all that needs done early so I needn’t leave my apartment past three. Darkness falls and I stare out my window, wondering if April May June might be among the swarms.

  I never wrote her. When I came home that night, I taped her address to the free dog-photo calendar from my bank. I told myself I would dispose of the timetable on the day of its expiration, January 1, 1971, thus setting myself a fast-approaching deadline. But I nervously put things off and now, nearly a month since the evening I walked through Columbus Circle with a companion whose hands spoke to me with such vibrancy, I feel I’ve missed my chance.

  At 11:30, I am inexplicably inspired to rush down into the multitudes. There was some attempt by the police to have barricaded out all latecomers, but this plan seems to have been overruled and I am shoved into the mob. People drunk and happy. I see screaming and broad laughter, I see horns blowing, it seems noisiness is an important part of the celebration. And then their lips: Ten. Nine. Eight. No one in my vicinity can see the lowering ball and still people are jubilant and in one moment they all cheer and embrace, and someone embraces me, and someone kisses me, and someone pours me a plastic glass of champagne which gets knocked out of my hand in the big crush but it’s alright, I have not been embraced nor kissed nor touched other than anonymous accidental brushes on the sidewalk in over ten years, I am trembling and relieved they are all too inebriated to be aware of my tears.

  It takes me half an hour for the five-minute stroll home. I walk into my apartment and pull out pen and paper.

  I couldn’t have tasted more than a few drops of the spilled champagne and yet I feel drunk and merry, dreaming she will write back, that we will begin to correspond regularly, and I will invite her to visit me in New York, I’ll pay her way and take her to the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, to the theater (I live in the Broadway district and have never seen a show!), to Macy’s and Gimbels and when she comes again in the spring we’ll have a picnic in Central Park.

  This optimism directly contradicts my apprehensions in recent years that my mother may have passed on. She would be sixty-nine now, a senior citizen, but then many people live to that age and beyond, and she had been a healthy fifty-nine when I saw her last. Had she wanted to contact me she couldn’t since she had no idea where to reach me.

  The second letter is suddenly easy after bolstering myself for the first.

  It’s going on two, and I walk to the mailbox now because by postponing it until tomorrow I’d undoubtedly change my mind.

  A cold January of periodic snow and sleet passes slowly. On the 27th, my Met tour group informs me they’re interested strictly in nineteenth-century Impressionism. I smile as always and internally sigh: the request is a common one, and I am notably less taken with that particular movement coupled with that particular time period, so I cheat in a few van Goghs and Matisses, which garner no complaints since they are famous names.

  On an early February Thursday I plod through slush, my feet soaked by the time I get to school. More than half my students are home with the flu, and the ones in attendance are irritable, embittered by the endless winter. I’m hardly in top form myself, my regular insomnia rearing its head with a vengeance the last week. By the time I leave for the day I have a pounding headache.

  On the subway home I notice a card next to me. On one side are sketches depicting the manual alphabet, on the other side an appeal. I look up to see the deaf beggar laying cards next to the other passengers of the sparsely filled car. Many working deaf consider ABC peddlers a disgrace and would have given him hard looks and no money. He goes back to collect the cards, leaving them as a gift for those who offer him coins. I give him back his card along with a dollar. He signs Thank you and when I return You’re welcome, he grins.

  My migraine is worse on Friday despite the heaps of aspirin I’ve swallowed. In the afternoon I sit in the library reading The Wretched of the Earth. At 4:15 I leave, as my superintendent shift will start at five. While checking out the book, I realize I left my coat around my chair on the second floor. I go back up to retrieve it but it’s gone. I ha
d absently worn only a cotton shirt, no sweater, and now walk the twenty blocks home, the icy air penetrating my bones.

  I stop by the drugstore to purchase a sleeping aid. I look over the various brands and decide to buy three large bottles, mixing and matching. The cashier eyes me suspiciously, and I present a warm smile to assure her how happy I am.

  I’m shivering everywhere by the time I get to my building at 4:45. The entrance door has been left slightly ajar, meaning the lock is frozen again. I walk in, and am immediately greeted by a thick curtain of water falling hard from the lobby ceiling. I run through the wet cold wall and up to 2F, banging on the locked door but getting no response. I sprint upstairs to my apartment for the passkey, dropping the over-the-counter barbiturates in my living room, then race back down to 2F. The tub is overflowing, the apartment a flooded mess. I turn off the spigot. I notice folded clean towels in a laundry basket and I instinctually grab them, trying to sop up the liquid from the carpet, obviously damaged beyond repair. Minutes later, a fist slams into my back, the force of the punch pushing me forward, and I swing around to see the tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Wolinski, screaming at me. They are in their coats and dressed nicely, apparently returning from some afternoon formal event. The wife snatches her towels from my hands, the husband keeps pointing at the carpet and the ceiling, and it dawns on me they have astonishingly deduced that the whole mess originated in the apartment above. After much effort I manage to bring the couple to their bathroom, the source of the disaster blatant now, yet they seem determined to place the blame elsewhere. Finally I leave, the heat of their incessant screeching rage against my back.

  I knock on Lloyd’s door, who will likely be in trouble with the management if they find out he left before five. I leave a note, then go to my apartment, flop down supine on my bed.

  Why would I think my mother would reply after all these years? Her last words to me, her last tearful screams enunciating every syllable to be sure I understood: You betrayed your brother! You betrayed your family! Six weeks today since I sent off those letters, a fool to open up all those old wounds again. And April May June. I remember she had planned to spend Christmas with her family but no job would tolerate holiday time-off to continue into February, she would have returned weeks ago and received my note. Well, the lack of response from her is less surprising. She may very well have a boyfriend, I don’t know anything about her. And given my tardiness in writing her, all she knows about me is that I apparently have some emotional complications, and who would want to start any kind of relationship knowing that?

  I take down my plastic green pitcher. Generally I have bad luck with sleeping aids, my insomnia so powerful as even to defy narcotics. Success may require a hundred pills so this is the plan. The plan is to pour the contents of all three bottles into the pitcher and to swill it, one gulp. To drink too slowly might mean I’d fall asleep before I have taken enough to not wake and the goal is to not wake. I stir, the water turning chalk white.

  I scratch a brief note, bequeathing my only treasure, my books, to the public library. Had I any other valuables there’d be no one to will them to anyway. A nagging sense of responsibility drives me to investigate the wreckage in the lobby, to make sure the ceiling isn’t about to all come bursting down. I walk down the stairs. It will withstand the night. I would go ahead and repair it now, leaving no unfinished business, but I can’t make an official decision on a public space without Lloyd’s say-so.

  I glance at the mailboxes. In all the excitement I had forgotten to check my mail, as if it would be anything other than an advertising circular.

  I stare, my heart thumping. A personal letter. I take it out.

  The exact same letter I’d sent to my mother six weeks ago, but now with a special stamp by the post office: DECEASED. RETURN TO SENDER.

  4

  I have no idea how long ago my mother died but for me it just happened and I weep, my body violently convulsing with the torrent but I’m silent: a deaf person learns early on the awkward and unfriendly looks his utterances can attract and thus perfects the art of soundless emotion.

  Would it have been so painful to have mailed an occasional postcard, just to have kept her apprised of my whereabouts? Even if she refused to respond immediately, she may have thought differently later. Why couldn’t I have been loving son enough? Man enough? If she never answered, at least I would have been at some peace knowing I’d tried. For all she knew I could have been dead. And might this stress have contributed to her own passing?

  At 1 a.m. I glimpse a note being slid under my door.

  I’m ordinarily off Saturdays, but this task is definitely classified under the emergency on-call feature that’s part of my job description. I don’t sleep and at 6:30 start to force myself calm, at seven leaving my apartment. Lloyd is not in the lobby so I knock on his door, and when there’s no reply I knock harder. He wakes, and by 7:15 we begin the formidable chore. An all-day job and, against union rules, I work through lunch as I fear a break could catapult me into another sobbing episode from which I may not easily recover.

  Seven in the evening, the work completed, I lie on my bed. I should write to Benja. I need to know the cemetery, where to send flowers. And when did she pass on. And was she at all happy those last years? And are you alright, sister? And your children? My Lord, the oldest must have graduated by now and suddenly it comes flooding back, the last time I’d seen her, barely healed from the pounding her husband had given her and when I’d seen him last I’d just removed the bullets from his pistol. What happened after he bought more and reloaded?

  I fall into an anxious sleep, waking at 4:30. I throw on a couple sweaters and walk hours in the predawn darkness. I wind up at St. John the Divine as the doors are opening for the day, and I enter, sit in a pew, not knowing what to pray for but I missed my mother’s funeral so this is the place I believe I should be now. Twenty minutes later my solitude is broken by an influx of congregants, and I remember it’s Sunday and early morning services will start soon. In the neighborhood I discover a thrift shop and stop in to buy a used coat. Walking home the seventy blocks I begin to feel dizzy, and by the time I step into my building I have fever and chills. I go into the bathroom to splash my face and am taken aback to see Ma staring at me from the mirror, how much I have come to resemble her with age. I have occasionally pondered that I have not inherited even one of my poor father’s physical features. I shake my head. What’s the difference? He fed me and clothed me, and the rest was the business of him and my mother.

  I realize I haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday and check to see if there’s any canned soup in the kitchen, where I find the pitcher of dissolved pills right where I’d left it. I’d forgotten. And if I hadn’t, how selfish to have killed myself rather than to have given my mother her proper mourning. Only now does it occur to me: How would my young students have taken my self-inflicted demise? I’ll have to remember for the future that no matter how alone you are, you cannot escape affecting others. If I ever make this decision again, I’ll be considerate enough to plan it during a summer break. I pour the concoction down the sink.

  I turn in early, and when I wake in the morning I’m still a bit light-headed but strong enough to hold a pen.

  Tuesday morning I feel somewhat better, and I walk down to see how the lobby ceiling is holding up. It’s fine, but I’m reminded about the broken entrance door lock, something I’d mentioned to Lloyd Saturday and which he should have repaired yesterday. I walk up to his apartment. He shrugs and says he needs special parts and has sent away for them. I’m not sure he’s telling the truth. An hour later I commence the fifty-block walk to my classes and when they are through I walk the fifty blocks home, not certain why since the news of my mother’s passing I keep choosing my feet over the subway. I step through the unlocked outside door and open my mailbox, pulling out the drugstore circular. I’m surprised to see a personal letter behind it, no name, only the return address
. I recognize it instantly.

  Terrified of train delays, I am waiting for the IRT at seven and standing in front of April May June’s townhouse at 7:25. I was afraid to walk and build up a sweat even bigger than my nervousness already has. She may not be pleased to have me here this early, so I stroll around Greenwich Village checking my watch every two minutes.

  Her letter arrived on the 10th, giving me only three days’ preparation. Though the only reply it had called for was my showing up tonight or not, I was so worried she may get the wrong idea that I wrote back immediately.

  After mailing it, I fretted that its delivery may be somehow delayed. I considered sending a second note,

  but feared if she got both messages she may think I’m a lunatic.

  And while receiving her letter was the single happiest event of my New York life, I was racked with trepidation regarding this party. My only comparable experiences were childhood birthday celebrations with my family. I had requested tea, a one-on-one with her, not a roomful of people. But of course after my long silence she couldn’t be sure she could trust me. If she invites me to accompany her to a party and admonishes me to be punctual or she’ll leave, then if I don’t show she wouldn’t feel stood up, or not very stood up, having arranged that me or no me she has social plans for Saturday night.

  At 7:55 I stand outside April May June’s four-storey building and try not to panic as I wonder how I will summon her. It’s a quiet street, no one going into her building to whom I could pass a note to slip under her door. Not knowing what else to do, I push the buzzer. To my surprise, lights flash on the top floor. She comes to the window and waves, then signs something but it’s too dark to see. A few moments later she opens the outside door, smiling. She looks very pretty in her miniskirt, and seems to have spent time on her cosmetics. I wonder if I have dressed properly, the secondhand pinstripe suit I purchased for the occasion, not knowing who to consult on these matters. She takes the flowers I have brought, and invites me up.