Liberty Falling

by Nevada Barr

  Suffering the teenage angst that only menopause can cure, she was afraid to go back to the hospital lest she run into Dr. Madison. She called Molly’s room from a pay phone in the back of a bar two streets from the hospital.

  With the annoying need of all lovers to have others catch their dread disease, Molly and Frederick fell in enthusiastically with her plan. By four-thirty, Anna and Frederick were on the Upper West Side. He sat on the sofa and sipped Scotch. Anna and Rani repaired to Molly’s bedroom to effect the magical makeover so beloved in romances: rags to riches, pauper to princess, ranger to femme fatale.

  Once the process was under way, Anna found herself having terrifically good fun. For the fashion-deprived, Molly’s closet was the mother lode. And accessible to the style-handicapped. Clothing was arranged by type—evening, work, casual—and then by color. Tidy racks held shoes of every shade and heel height. Plastic hanging bags, cut into tiny windows, showed off the hosiery and scarves to accessorize each variation on the ensemble theme. Cosmetics, jewelry, bath luxuries all received the same anal-retentive devotion.

  For nearly an hour she played dress-up. As a psychiatrist, Molly wasn’t a great proponent of inner-child reparenting. Anna made a mental note to give her this anecdotal evidence next time they talked. When she was a little girl she’d loved playing in Molly’s things. They were deliciously grown-up. Sitting in her sister’s expensive satin slip on a padded bench before a mirrored vanity of inlaid wood from the height of the Art Deco craze, Anna felt the same tingling sense of forbidden fruit and endless possibilities.

  When she emerged in a dusty-rose sleeveless summer dress, low at the neck and flaring over the hips, her labors were rewarded by a brotherly wolf whistle. Because the dress was Molly’s, it was made not of rayon but of silk. Sweat would probably discolor the armpits before Anna got anywhere near Rockefeller Center, but she was in a mood to live on the edge.

  “The good doctor hasn’t got a chance,” Frederick said.

  “You don’t have to make sure I get a new puppy,” Anna grumbled. “I told you I’m okay with you and Molly.” She hadn’t meant it unkindly—at least she didn’t think she had. God and Molly only knew what her subconscious was up to at any given moment. Still Frederick looked hurt.

  Unable to think of words that would undo any damage, she said, “Wish me luck,” and left.

  Her date was neither a smashing success nor a crashing bore. Food was good, talk was easy, compliments satisfying, but by the end of dinner she found herself envying Molly and Frederick’s love-at-first-sight scenario, and wondering if she still had the capacity to be swept off her feet. If she did, would the experience exhilarate or terrify?

  By nine-thirty she was glad to have the Liberty Islander’s Cinderella excuse. One didn’t turn into a pumpkin at ten o’clock, but that’s when the last boat left MIO. Stragglers were marooned on Manhattan for the night.

  Her clothes were at her sister’s, but she’d not left herself time to change and so rode the subway in Molly’s silk dress and Louis Vuitton shoes. Theoretically she should have felt like a target: a lone woman in the subway at night wearing what probably amounted to a month’s wages for half the city’s denizens. She didn’t. Other travelers looked at her not with envy or malice but with the polite disregard one bestows on those who arrive at wienie roasts in Chanel suits.

  Because she was cutting it close, trains came with aggravating infrequency. After twenty minutes, she lucked into an express. She would have to switch to a local for South Ferry farther downtown. As the train shrieked through the next station, Anna saw Mandy, Patsy’s roommate, waiting for the local. It was comforting to know somebody was cutting it even closer than she. By South Ferry, Anna had made her way from car to car and stood in front of the doors nearest the conductor, the portion of the train closest to the stairs to the street. When the doors opened, she broke through. Molly’s evening clutch tucked under her arm like a football, she took the stairs two at a time, then ran across the street to the chain-link fence and guardhouse that protected the dock.

  The guard was a man Anna had met twice before, a genial fellow in his early thirties with velvety brown skin and wide-set eyes under sparse black brows. Revealing a mouth full of braces, he smiled as she skidded to a stop before his booth. “Your ship done sailed,” he said. “Time and Dwight wait for no man. Speaking of which, you comb your hair and mop the sweat off your face and you’d be purely worth waiting for. How come I never seen you in a dress before?”

  Inane as the question was, it brought Anna up short. Somehow it seemed important that she recall how long it had been since she’d worn a dress. The answer eluded her. Children born the last night she’d disguised herself as a girl were riding tricycles by now.

  “You got a place you can stay?” the guard asked kindly.

  There was always Molly’s apartment, but the train ride back to the Upper West Side and facing Frederick in his new avuncular persona were too vile to contemplate.

  She must have looked as forlorn as she felt. “Tell you what,” the guard said. “Sometimes we let castaways bunk in the Coast Guard’s conference room. It’s not swank but it beats sitting on the pier all night.”

  Gratefully, Anna followed him through the door of the building opposite the security kiosk and up a narrow flight of stairs. He flipped on the overhead lights in a room housing a sizable wooden table surrounded by chairs. “I never tried it myself, but I hear you can make yourself a pretty decent bed if you stack up a bunch of seat cushions. I’m on all night. Holler if you need anything.”

  With those comforting words, he left her alone.

  Having located a phone, she punched in Patsy’s home number. A peal of laughter met the story of her predicament. “I’ve spent a few nights on that conference table,” Patsy assured her. “Slept like a baby. Just be sure you put all the cushions back. I don’t know if the Coast Guard brass know they’re running a flophouse for homeless park rangers.”

  Anna promised she would bring to bear her considerable experience with minimum-impact camping.

  “Be sure you catch the early boat,” Patsy told her. “I’ve got a treat for you, but you’ve got to get here early. Remember Charlie?”

  Anna cast about in a mind overloaded with new people and unexpected situations. “The Keeper of the Flame?” she asked when she’d made a match.

  “That’s him. I’ve got an in with Charlie. He’s promised to take you up into the torch if you get with him first thing. Be properly appreciative. Charlie doesn’t just let anybody go up there.”

  Tired as she was, Anna made the effort to sound as pleased as she felt. Going into the torch: the sort of perk that rangers sometimes got.

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” Patsy finished, and Anna hung up the phone. The disgruntled rumble of a gasoline combustion engine took her to the window of the Marine Inspection Office. At the end of the dock a figure in dark sweats, the hood up though the night was mild, threw off the moorings from a boat so low in the water Anna could see nothing of it. “Hey!” she yelled, and pounded the flat of her hand on the glass. The sound must have carried. The dark hood turned toward the high window. With no light to catch the face, it looked like the costume customarily given to Death. For a long moment the dark oval stared at Anna with unseen eyes. Then turned away. In seconds the boat was motoring away, its wake a silver-blue V. On the stern was painted Puddle Jumper II.

  Nobody but NPS and Coast Guard used the MIO dock. That boat was Liberty-bound.

  Having no idea what the phone number of the guard shack was, Anna padded down the steps in Molly’s soon-to-be-ruined panty hose. The guard met her near the door. By the way he was fiddling with his belt, she guessed he was just back from the john.

  “Who owns a boat called Puddle Jumper Two?” she asked.

  “Guy named Claypool, the Assistant Superintendent. You want to catch a ride home?”

  “Too late. He’s gone.” Anna sounded accusing.

  “Hey, I had to take a leak,
” he defended himself.

  “Not your fault,” she said. Her apology was curt and not accepted. The guard didn’t say anything but she knew goodwill was lost, at least for the moment. He went back to his post. She retraced her steps to the conference room.

  Since arriving in New York she’d had the disconcerting sensation of being on the fringes of life, a spirit wandering unseen, unheard and unnecessary in the world of the living. Molly and Frederick, Hatch and his dead visitor, bare footprints where none should be, aborted falls from subway platforms, collapsed stairs, grouchy actors and Park Policemen who saw ghosts, now Claypool leaving her in the lurch—all seemed to be happening in a realm she was not a part of and yet was not free to leave. Perhaps, like an unsettled wraith, she had to find answers before she would be set free.

  Exhausted by the need to interact with members of her own species, Anna found the lonely expanse of the conference table inviting. On a nest of cushions, clad in designer silk and covered by an army blanket smelling faintly of mildew, she slept.

  12

  AT EIGHT THE next morning, when Kevin docked the Liberty IV, Anna was waiting. Staggering into morning in rumpled evening clothes, shoes in hand, she looked a classic wastrel. Perversely, she didn’t mind the knowing winks and sly comments. If one couldn’t actually have had a wild night on the town, it was pleasant to know others still believed one had the stamina for it.

  The water was smooth, the Liberty IV’s engines loud. She isolated herself in the worst of the noise at the stern under the flag and enjoyed the view of Manhattan on a golden June morning. Most of the ferry’s other passengers disembarked at Ellis. When they had pulled out again into the harbor, Anna made her way to the bridge to visit with Kevin for the short leg from Ellis to Liberty.

  Kevin, as ever, seemed delighted at the company. He politely refrained from noticing Anna’s state of dress, his very delicacy suggesting a racier time than she’d enjoyed in years. Hoisting herself up on the high shelf behind the wheel, she watched the water divide over the captain’s shoulder.

  “Anybody on Liberty commute in their own boats?” she asked, thinking of the defection the previous night.

  “Not as much as you’d think,” Kevin answered, a touch of the mariner’s disdain for landlubbers seeping through, “This isn’t a water park—you know, like Voyageurs or St. John or even Fire Island,” he said, referring to the National Park scattered in pieces along a sandbar-become-island off the coast of Long Island. “Though the monument is set on these two dots in the harbor, it doesn’t attract seafaring types. Law enforcement doesn’t mess with boat patrol. Nothing like that. On Liberty one house is a secretary’s. Then Pats and Mandy. They’re more your talk-and-push-paper kind of people. They’re happy to let someone else do the driving.”

  “Nobody keeps a boat?” Anna pressed.

  “Trey’s got one, I guess. I see it moored there at the dock, but he doesn’t use it much. He prefers to ride with me and Dwight. Truth is, I think he’s scared of the water. That boat used to belong to the old superintendent. He retired someplace in Arizona. Didn’t need a boat there and let it go for cheap. I think Trey picked it up not because he couldn’t resist boats but because he couldn’t resist a bargain. Me? I’d sure have a boat if I lived here.”

  Scared of the water but heading out alone at night on a busy commercial harbor. Claypool must have had compelling reasons to come and go at odd hours.

  Not my problem, Anna thought as she caught sight of Charlie on the dock. Charlie DeLeo wasn’t a national treasure—at least not officially—but he was in the hearts and minds of some. Unprepossessing in the green and gray of the NPS maintenance uniform, a cap looking as big and balloon-topped as a conductor’s on his head, he sat on a piling waiting for the boat to dock.

  He couldn’t have been much taller than Anna and she doubted he weighed as much. As Cal looped the Liberty IV’s line to the pier and Charlie stood, Anna could see his trousers bag straight from prominent pelvic bones. His shirt looked as if it were still on its wire hanger. She had no idea how old he was—around fifty at a guess—and over half his life had been dedicated to keeping Liberty’s flame burning bright and ministering to the health and dignity of the lady herself. Charlie was arguably the most celebrated maintenance person in the service. And NPS maintenance workers had countless jobs, from cleaning toilets to clipping the bushes from President Roosevelt’s nostrils at Mount Rushmore.

  Periodically the press rediscovered Charlie DeLeo and an article would be run on him. He’d designed and rigged climbing gear and routes. With a heavy vacuum on his back, he’d scaled each and every inch of the statue’s infrastructure, keeping clean the girders of her skirts, the crooks of her elbows, her rivets and folds. Outside, he’d climbed to the tip of the torch to make repairs. The flame, he’d said, was pock-marked from lightning strikes. As far as Anna knew, Lady Liberty was the only woman in his life.

  An ember of childlike excitement was fanned within her as Cal handed her ashore. Seeing the statue with Charlie DeLeo was akin to river-rafting with the Archdruid or bird-watching with James Audubon.

  Charlie smiled and shook hands formally. His hand looked too large for wrist and forearm, the knuckles swollen into knots by years of physical labor and, perhaps, the beginning twinges of arthritis. A tooth or two had gone missing over the years and never been tended to. Self evidently wasn’t as important to Mr. DeLeo as service.

  “You’re going to want to change your shoes,” he said matter-of-factly, and they walked together in companionable silence to Patsy’s house. In Liberty’s one alley, Patsy Silva passed them at a run, catching the boat to work.

  Charlie was walking stiffly, his back bent. “I’m stove up,” he said when Anna remarked on it. “Hurt my back pretty bad yesterday. One of the boys does the cleaning was trying to be funny. He threw one of those five-gallon detergent cans and yelled ‘Catch!’”

  Charlie was more generous than Anna. It didn’t sound like the idiot was trying to be funny, just plain mean.

  “You’ll be on your own a little. I won’t be climbing ladders or anything else for a few weeks.”

  He waited on the bench under the London plane tree while Anna changed back into her real self: Levi’s, moccasins and a black Jockey tank top. In her middling years, and with brassieres back in style, she’d considered abandoning thin clingy tops worn sans foundation garment but decided there were few enough perks for the small-breasted. Freedom was one. If somebody’s eye was offended, they could damn well pluck it out.

  The transformation from uptown to down-home took considerably less time than the reverse. In a matter of minutes she was back with Charlie DeLeo.

  “Needn’t have hurried,” he said, and she realized the patience a man might develop who spent a quarter of a century waiting on a woman who neither moved nor breathed but stirred souls by her mere existence.

  Burying her hands in her trouser pockets, Anna unintentionally aped him as they walked the wide plaza to Miss Liberty’s doors. Charlie talked and Anna listened. He spoke of God, His calling him to tend the statue. It was said with such simplicity and unassuming faith that it didn’t grate on her nerves. The torch, Charlie said, was like a chapel, so high, close to God, with a humbling view of His world. Anna murmured politely and made a mental note to mind her manners. Charlie talked of not being as young as he once was, of feeling his age in the aches in his joints. He’d trained a handful of others to wait on his lady, but they hadn’t the calling and had moved on to other parks. There was concern in his voice and Anna allowed herself the fancy that the statue would shed a tear the day Charlie DeLeo died.

  Could be a while, she thought, forced to abandon her maudlin romance as Charlie, accustomed to climbing the sixteen stories from the elevator’s last stop to the torch, moved right along. Without his back injury, Anna doubted she could have kept up.

  A ways below the crown he stopped and stepped through an opening in the waist-high iron wall hemming in the corkscrew stairs. A metal plat
form, just big enough for the two of them to stand, was closed off by a gate of heavy iron mesh. A chain lock secured it.

  “Nobody can go into the torch,” Charlie said. “Just me and God. Today you.”

  “I’m lucky,” Anna said.

  “Me too. This is some job for a poor kid from Brooklyn. I been admiring her all my life and here I am. You got to be grateful for that.” He unlocked the gate and Anna stepped back as he swung it open. “A guy got under here once.” Charlie pointed to the space between the bottom of the gate and the flooring. “Lay down and scooched under.”

  Before Anna had been forced into the world of caving by a call for help from a friend, she wouldn’t have believed it possible. Cavers—and so, maybe mere mortals—could squeeze through ridiculously tight places.

  “Did he just want to see the torch?” she asked as Charlie ushered her into a dark rounded chamber with a metal ladder affixed to the wall.

  “Nope. Wanted to bungee-jump. Bungee-jump!” Charlie repeated, still amazed at the irreverence of the would-be perpetrator.

  “I’ll wait here, if you don’t mind,” he said, and she knew his back was hurting. Forty-two feet up inside Lady Liberty’s right arm, Anna ascended in a circular twilight of copper, false stars created by pinprick holes in the lady’s skin. She imagined herself a bizarre corpuscle in the brachial artery of a giantess.

  Splendid reality banished feeble fantasy as she emerged onto the torch itself. Anna had been higher, had seen farther, yet she felt as if she’d come to the top of the world. The torch swayed slightly in a stiff breeze off the harbor. Behind and above, the gold flame burned in the clear light of morning. Below were the spikes of the crown, Liberty’s nose, the pages of the book she held. The harbor, Staten Island, Brooklyn, were spread out as if in tribute. Anna felt the hush of Charlie’s chapel and the nearness of Charlie’s God.

  When she left, she was touched by sadness, the intensity of which caught her off guard. In the normal scheme of things, she would never again visit the torch. She comforted herself with the thought that she’d never lived much in the normal scheme of things.