“And finally…” Herb delivered an emotional paean to the First Amendment, reciting it as though it were the “Song of Songs,” and bringing tears to Amalie’s eyes. When he finally stepped down from the stand, she stood up, wanting to go to him. But her legs wobbled and the back of the bench in front of her seemed too near her face. She motioned to the nearest guard. “I think I’m going to faint,” she whispered.
#
Amalie was lying on a bench outside the courtroom. Alex Dobrin was holding her hand, looking pretty pale himself. Several guards were looking down at her. Someone was fanning her. Alex said, “Your dad had to go. He had an appointment. A date,” he added, making a face. “He’ll call later.”
Still woozy she sat up. “The hearing. Where’s Charlie?”
“Here I am.” Charlie knelt on the ground beside the bench. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay. We got dismissed with a warning and a five-hundred-dollar fine. Your dad paid it. Why didn’t you ever tell me about him? He’s such a cool guy.”
She put her head between her knees. Bless Mr. Fowler the lawyer. Bless the Movement for hiring him. Bless the system when it works. She would write a note of thanks to Mr. Fowler as soon as she got home. And she had to talk to her father.
“Ma, this is Endive.” Charlie motioned to the longhaired girl dressed as though she was about to parachute out of a small plane.
“So you’re—Charlie’s friend.” She just couldn’t say that vegetable name. “What’s your real name?”
“Ellen Fielding? Charlie said you work in the same place as my dad? Ed Fielding?”
“I think,” Amalie said, “I’d like to be left alone. Please everyone go away.” She began to cry with relief. Her son was safe, for now.
“Come, child.” Alex helped her up. “I’ll take you home.”
Stewart, Stewart, why did you have to go and leave me?
Chapter 15
Alex tipped his hat to the wrecking machine parked in the lot next to his apartment building. Its head was raised like an giant insect’s, waiting to pounce. In the moonlight it glinted seductively. He could imagine its great teeth chattering ecstatically like castanets on a giant calliope. But the sound that accompanied him through the streets tonight was a muffled beating of bongo drums. There was trash under the benches on the Broadway mall, the surest sign of spring. The tents were gone from the grassy sections, the saffron-robed hare krishnas had decamped to 34th Street to bang their bongs in front of Pennsylvania Station.
Alex wandered over to Columbus Avenue, cutting through the low-income project, shabby even in blueprint, past the decrepit public school which Charlie Price had attended before the tortuous rezoning that redirected the kids in Alex’s building to the newer whiter school on West End Avenue. Columbus had undergone renewal of earthquake proportions. Although there were still pockets of bodegas and three-storied corniced brownstones inhabited by the last stickball players, huge supermarkets and boutiques were opening every day. The shadow of an unfinished thirty-story condominium lay over a parking lot that used to be a community garden. Prognathous balconies overhung the rubble-filled street.
Alex’s son was pressing him about Fernmeadow Estates. The destruction of his apartment building seemed imminent. Many of the people had relocated, including Amalie Price. All the rallies and petitions had come to naught. Now Ms. Price was working in the very office that controlled these decisions, the Mayor’s Task Force on Housing. Oh she was a hard one, all right. Gave up the fight as soon as she got the job half a year ago. The corruption of power. Her housing worries were over. As soon as she got that new job she was offered one of the apartments the city had set aside for select employees.
Alex could give in to his son, move to the retirement home, embrace canasta, bingo, and those harbingers of pestilence, the social workers. Or maybe move into one of the new efficiency apartments for the elderly the city was building so fast they forgot to put in closets. All the numbers and letters would be giant-sized like in a cartoon and there would be guardrails on every wall, in case he wanted to practice ballet—“No, Pop, they’re for holding on to.” They’d make him share his living quarters with some old geezer who would fill the refrigerator with prune juice and leave his dentures in a glass in the middle of the kitchen table. Herb Marcus had been the ideal bunkmate. He didn’t snore and they played chess every night. But that was over forty years ago.
Alex waved a salutation to the moon. In my veins, he thought, the moon organisms. Free, I hope from the litter we have strewn about the Sea of Tranquility. The cars faced him as though he were the speaker at an emergency meeting, side mirrors gleaming like the corner of an eye, catching flashes from other eyes around them. He wouldn’t know Ralph’s car if he saw it. One car in particular caught his attention, pearl grey with whitewall tires, like a distinguished gentleman in spats, which Alex had worn only once to a dance contest. Something scurried past his feet and he shut his eyes. Well, you have wildlife in the country too.
“Sssst!” It was a little kid, about ten, crouching near the fender of a Buick in the lot.
“What are you doing,” Alex called.
The kid straightened up. “I didn’t do nothing.”
“You better go on home. It’s very late.”
“I can go where I want.” A clanking noise made Alex look around.
“Shit,” he heard a voice say. Two other kids bobbed up over the hood of a Mercedes. They were bigger. One of them was holding what had been a car’s antenna.
“You got any money,” the first kid asked him.
Alex began to perspire. “I don’t have any money but I have music in my heart.”
If he got out of this he would make an important life decision.
#
A blond Hermes from Federal Express delivered a videotape to Amalie’s office just as she was about to step into a staff meeting. Her father’s name was on the envelope, which had a Vermont return address. She’d look at it afterwards.
It was getting on to five o’clock and one major issue still hadn’t been resolved at the meeting. Stewart used to complain about bureaucracy at departmental meetings at Columbia but those were just a pale simulacrum of what went on at city government agencies, as Amalie had found out. She had doggedly continued to pursue the case against her former landlord, tracking it through labyrinthine offices, putting what amounted to a “tail” on it in the person of the housing official who had been so helpful to her originally.
“I’m going to get you,” she often muttered to herself and sometimes people looked at her strangely. The case was interfering with her sleep and with her sex life. Talk about being distracted. Whoever she was with—Skip Fowler, Charlie’s former lawyer, or the charming philanthropist who was interested in preservation—would be startled to see her sit bolt upright in bed, fists clenched and cursing the real estate industry.
Even though Amalie no longer lived there, her old building deserved to be saved. Alex was still there though he seemed to be harboring a grudge against her, as though she had deserted her neighbors. There was no point in telling him that she was still fighting to save the house.
The pesky item on the agenda for the staff meeting concerned a mouse that had been spotted under a locked file drawer in Amalie’s boss’s office, the drawer that probably contained all his inept attempts to write coherent reports.
Presiding over the meeting while puffing on a pipe, her boss said, “I suggest forming a small committee to study this—pest problem.” The office manager, a desiccated male who had memorized every New York City statute on the books objected. According to some obscure bylaw, other divisions on the floor had to be consulted first.
Amalie shuddered. By the time the group came up with a recommendation, there would be whole colonies of mice in every office. “What about poison,” she said.
Several people looked at her with horror. There were some animal rights fanatics among them.
Her boss cleared his throat. Amalie knew it was to his advantage
not to antagonize her. The man had been a communications major which meant that he’d watched every sitcom since the l970s in a luxurious amphitheatre on the campus of Boca College, but still hadn’t learned to spell. He knew that someone would always clean up his work, which Amalie did, thereby fulfilling her father’s hope that she become the assistant to a male executive who in this case was the son-in-law of a City Council member. In exchange he left her alone most of the time. But it galled her that he took credit for reports she wrote.
Now he said, “I resonate with both approaches, but there is the push-pull factor.”
What in God’s name was the idiot talking about, Amalie wondered and looked at her watch. People were being thrown out of their homes every hour, inspectors were being bribed, fires were breaking out because of faulty wiring, and these people were dithering about a rodent.
“Folks,” Amalie said when there was a pause, “let me tell you how my father dealt with the problem.” Funny that she should remember for the first time something that happened when she was a child.
Her father would set a trap before going to bed, she began. In the morning he would approach it “obliquely, you might say, just close enough to see that the mouse had been caught. You see, he first put on a pair of dark glasses.” Then he would take one of her mother’s hand-embroidered handkerchiefs and drop it over the trap. (Amalie could see that her colleagues were fascinated.) Next, he shoveled up the trap, which was covered by the handkerchief, into a paper bag and threw it out the window which faced the alley. Her office mates looked scandalized. This was one of the very problems they had to deal with in the slums. She lives in a slum, Amalie could imagine them thinking, but so what. “Oh yes, then he’d announce that there had been a death in the family. Are we finished?”
“Maybe,” said the timid receptionist, “I could bring in a have-a-heart trap. It wouldn’t hurt the little fellow and then we could release it somewhere.”
“First of all, which budget would it come out of?” demanded the office manager. “And second, where would the mouse be released?”
“How about the mayor’s office?” Amalie said and scraped back her chair. “I think we’ve got our methodology squared away now.” There must be a special bureaucratic gene, she thought, remembering the old tenant meetings and people like Ms. Fanchelle and her panic about touching the mail.
In her office, she slipped the video into the machine.
Against a musical background of country fiddling the video opens with a shot of a good-looking young man atop a tractor, waving and churning up the ground. Charlie, during his last visit to his grandfather in Vermont. A year and a half after relocating to Vermont Berger MicroPubs has expanded into audiotapes, videos, slides and software, and Herbert Marcus, the eminent sociologist, has become their audio-visual consultant. He’s also doing a little market research on the side, specifically on company towns like Hershey, Pennsylvania, though Bristow is a long way from changing its name to Berger.
On the video, shots of a town road, trucks passing. It looks like the same footage as in the Mrs. Ojibway movie. Herb Marcus’ voice-over explicating that what we are about to see reveals parallels with a society in Madagascar. Cut to a diner, interviews with a waitress, Amalie’s father somewhat flirtatious. He’s made a hit with the locals.
Amalie still couldn’t forgive her father for keeping his early life a secret from her. She remembered how he never answered her questions, always held back, made fun of her for being a nosy body. It was his own fault that she never showed him much affection. Too bad if he held it against her. There was a time when she just couldn’t measure up to people’s ideals. Amalie knew that. Stewart even accused her once of being indifferent to social suffering, but then he apologized, admitting he’d been wrong. And Charlie used to reproach her for being uninvolved. One doesn’t have to man the barricades to be involved, she thought, switching off the video. With the exception of an incompetent boss, her job with the Task Force was just right for her.
Amalie remembered her conversation with Marshall when she told him her decision about relocating with the company.
“I know, I know,” he said, raising his hands when she came in. “It’s bad news. You’re not coming with me—with us. You found another job.”
“Not yet,” Amalie said. “But I’m hopeful. And I’m sorry.”
“Tell me where to send a recommendation and I’ll do it,” he said.
The man really was a softie, Amalie decided.
Since there would be a skeleton staff in New York, at least for a few months, Marshall invited Amalie to stay on—in a reduced capacity of course—until she found something else.
That suited her fine. It would leave her time to go job hunting. She suspected that there really wouldn’t be any work for her to do at the New York office and that Marshall would have a hard time convincing Hannelore to let her stay on. But she wasn’t going to worry about that.
“I’ll be shuttling back and forth,” Marshall said, “so we’ll see each other, won’t we?” He seemed so forlorn.
“You’re doing a great thing, starting over up there,” Amalie said encouragingly. “It’s really—visionary.”
“So good to hear that from you,” he said, his voice breaking a little. “I have hopes, great hopes. I know Hannelore will miss you.”
She smiled. “And I’ll miss her of course.”
Now, Amalie was helping people with their housing problems and navigating her way through the system. Not only was she paying a debt to society—they let her kid off, after all, and she was grateful—she loved the raw power of it, the ability to pull strings with a clean conscience, which was more than Evan Diaz could say, though she was indebted to him for recommending her. She was tempted to give in to his pleas to get together. It would be a novelty to go to bed with someone you know is a bastard. It could add some spice to her life. She knew that her friend Julie was dating Evan whom she’d run into at the Columbia gym. Julie had been trying to stop a defective treadmill and he caught her as she spun off it. Actually they had met years earlier, at a party Amalie and Stewart had given. “What could be more romantic,” Julie told her, “though it’s true that he’s a couple of years younger, but so what, look at Catherine Deneuve.”
The phone rang. Skip Fowler, the erstwhile barefoot lawyer with dog had taken a shine to her, after receiving her thank-you note for his brilliant work at the hearing for Charlie and his friends.
“The Vera Institute wants to hold an awards dinner for me next month. I won’t go unless you come with me. I hate these things. I would rather do takeout and make-out. How’s tonight?”
“I can’t miss my stretch class,” Amalie said. “I know you want my corpus delicti—remind me to tell you about the French porn I used to translate.…No, I’m not trying to turn you on.” She laughed. Just before she started her present job she was offered a position with a French ad agency with an office in New York. Their advertising copy read very much like the pornography she used to translate. “Tomorrow night?” she said. “I can’t. I have a ticket to the opera and I’ll be out of town through the weekend. Back on Monday evening.” She was driving to Bristow, Vermont to see her father for the first time since he moved there three months earlier. And maybe she’d see Marshall who had demonstrated admirable restraint in not pressuring her to go out with him. As for Ed Fielding, he had shown his true color: puce. If Ellen, a.k.a. Endive, weren’t working here as an intern, Amalie would never hear from him.
On Monday morning she was going to pick up Charlie in Bennington where he was staying with a friend who’d built himself a yurt. Then they were going to visit Bennington College where Charlie had an interview scheduled, after convincing the authorities to ignore the gym class he never made up and, more importantly, to give him credit for “life experiences.” The teenage hotline he’d started was running smoothly, supervised by a board of professionals in social work, education, and medicine. He was editing the newsletter which had articles on politics, th
e environment, and an events calendar. In an interview on public access television, Charlie credited both his parents for instilling in him a dedication to public service.
“I’m going.” Ellen Fielding looked in. “You want me for anything?” She gazed at Amalie adoringly. The girl had never been pregnant. It was a false alarm because of her gymnastics. “It messes up your period,” Charlie explained at the time, relieved. Amalie said she hoped he’d have the sense to take precautions next time. Sure, he said. He’d found an herbal contraceptive in Chinatown.
“My dad’s in town? He said hi.”
“Hi,” Amalie said without too much enthusiasm.
“My folks?” Ellen went on. “They’re splitting?” Tears began to roll down her cheeks. “My mother’s coming back to New York,” she explained. “She can’t stand it in the boondocks up there. They’re always fighting.”
Maybe, Amalie thought fleetingly, they’re fighting about me. Not that anything ever happened. There was more activity with the guy from the Library of Congress with the highly touted incunabula which turned out to be not so great. Ellen looked like her father. Maybe that’s why I hired her, Amalie thought. More likely it’s because I like having another dedicated kid around. Charlie seemed to have bowed out, temporarily. He was actually looking forward to going to school. Maybe she’d have some peace of mind for a change. Charlie’s last adventure was a bus trip to the Yucatan. He sent Amalie a postcard depicting a Mayan temple where human sacrifices were performed (him, a vegetarian). Two days later he was home, vanquished by turista.
#
Disguised as a faggot vendor, Romulo enters the inn. The sound of peasants making merry is heard in the background. The wedding takes place as the gypsies dance around the pole. Suddenly the lord of the manor appears with his entourage and urges them to continue. Monks take up a chant foretelling the doom of Carlo. “He is your brother,” the old gypsy cries even as she stabs herself.
Amalie in Orbit Page 17
