“I apologize,” said the old man. “I forgot how he is, about the boy.”
“Oh—if someone’s going to be ruined, it had better be me,” said my mother. “I’m glad you think I’m bad enough.”
“I forgot,” he said. “But I’ll give you a bit of truth to put between your teeth if you want it. Mirriam…is it out you want? Or in.”
I could tell how it would be when she was shivering. She must have put out her hand. “Well, thank you, Chauncey. For your instruction.”
He must have taken it. “Mirriam…you will take care?”
“You’re on his side, aren’t you. That’s why you let me come here.”
“A man would be,” he said. “I thought you knew.”
Her voice was farther away when it came next; was she going to leave without me? I couldn’t wake.
“She did ruin you, didn’t she,” she said.
She was hysteric of course, from seeing the truth, unable to act on it. That’s what the truth is. If you want to know, Austin, how I know—she told me so herself. How else would I remember all this, if she hadn’t said it in one way or the other over and over all our lives, to Simon-Si, to me then, in bits and pieces to everyone. Later, what Chauncey said was the only part I had trouble with. Finally, that too came back—like those cued parts they give actors, I had only to remember her.
But now as he came toward me in my chair, I kept myself in dreams of sleep. Century. I was a child in another century, any that would be secretly gardened, tunneled with love—any cave out of time. I meant to be happy—or for a moment, floated free.
I felt him lean over me, slip the stylus from my hand, and look down on me. “On what argent fields…” I heard him murmur it. I let him pat my shoulder. “All right, posterity,” he said. “You can come out now.”
I opened my eyes, letting him see they were clear and bright.
“What lovely designs you made,” he said courteously.
I nodded. “I mean her to be happy,” I said.
But outside, where she hailed a cab with a boy’s whistle—two fingers hooked between the teeth, right there on Fifth Avenue, and a girl’s tremulous smile down at me afterward, from under her matron’s hat with its Diana-wing of blue—I wasn’t sure whether it was her I meant to be happy, or me. Nothing was separate.
“What did you whisper to Chauncey?” she said. “At the door?” She leaned over me. The cape she wore, lined with monkey fur, dated from her wedding trip and had charmed her by coming in again; I hated its dead-black gypsy forelocks—for suiting her too well. But she’d made it smell of my favorite scent on her dressing-table, Guerlain’s Vol de Nuit, whose label she’d once translated for me with a smile—adding with a scratch of her nail on the zebra-striped box: “A lady’s bestiary. A lady’s night out.”
The cab hadn’t started yet. They always waited for her. I whispered it to her. “I said to him…that maybe I could come back.”
“You heard,” she said low. “Everything.”
“I was dreaming,” I said. “P-part of the time.”
She raised a brow.
“And—I won’t understand the parts that are bad for me.” It was what I had said to him, when he caught me with his edition of the Decameron. Maybe she knew… “Won’t?” she said absently, glanced at her watch, drew a bill from her bag, slid open the glass panel between us and the cabby, said, “Drive round the park; I’ll tell you where later”—they would do that then—and had us off, settled and yet afloat. She was always so quick at that. She left the panel open. “I’ll feed you your instructions as we go, driver.” She nestled back with me. “That’s what a mother’s for.” She nestled down. “Oh, I can see how late it is by your face, you truant. Let Anna wait, for once.”
“She doesn’t know I’m with you,” I said doubtfully.
“Doesn’t she though,” my mother said. “And your father’s not coming home. He has some dinner on. Every night this week. Tonight’s the one for him.”
“You could go.” I knew just which one of her dresses I would wear.
“You can go with him,” she said. “When you’re old enough.” I saw her eyes elongate. “I’ll save the bronze dress for you.” The scent of her was strong. It wasn’t her only one, but the one I knew. “Wouldn’t you rather have me here though?” She cradled me. “Who do I love?” she said low. Meaning me.
Everyone? Too many? Not enough. Or how was it too much?…How could I answer her, even now?…I did my best. “Even that doctor?” I said.
She fell back in the seat, away from me. Smiled then, half shamed, as boys in a street fight do, when struck the first blow—when they already know the secret of what they will do. “Ruth.” She said it as if she’d never heard it before. The lights of the avenue were sliding across her face. The driver was taking us to the park’s northernmost border. “Ruth. You know what that doctor said to me? That we get to the unborn before they’re born. That then they just have to live us out.” She sat up straight, the fur edging her like extra shadow. “‘Ha-ha,’ I said to him. ‘What a dull man you are. I wouldn’t tell my children that if it was the last thing I did.’…‘What would you tell them?’ he asked me. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what it is yet, you see. But I’d show them.’” She leaned forward. “Ruth. I guess I’m telling you—everything I don’t know. I have to, you see. Your father knows so much.”
The lights were sliding across my face too—they made a screen. “Do you tell David?”
She took a long time to answer. “No. He’s just like him. He’s your father’s son. Remember that. Always remember that. He’s your father’s son.” She bent her head after this gravity; I heard her breathing, then her lighter tone, almost gay: “And your father’s not like us—he can’t face the world as we do. It’s not allowed him. He has to dream. He’s a man.”
She sat silent after that. We’d begun to move southward through the park at a stately pace; we might almost have been proceeding by horse. My parents both had a special way of talking in moving vehicles, and a special, important face for it—like land people on ship board, not used to the third presence of the sea. Or as if things not ordinarily said could come out now. Some of us are still like that—when airborne. My mother, though silent, kept the face and the posture, a royalty, reviewing the army, of her life.
…You and I don’t see the park as our parents did, Austin. Or the city. It comes to me that you may scarcely see it at all—or not like me. Are we really as they say, children of the city, as you people aren’t? I never remember the park as green. For me it’s all rough, porous slabs of city memory, those sweating arcades with the yellow smell where the words are; it’s a city vegetation of people, magenta-voiced plantings from Puerto Rico, the platinum voices of the tall shines moving cheekily bamboo along the paths. A rising peonage I half-wished I was at school with—steaming through bushes public as a urinary, fresh as the new bread they never ate, old as any grass. My parents saw the park as they thought their ancestors had—a Winterhalter drawing without the woman in it and so nothing until supplied one, perhaps from a stock of her own satin ball nights, seen through a bead curtain of snow. Or sometimes as he did, through parades rewound like toys whenever the bunting was brought out again—the little botanies of war. Come spring, they saw it in a stage set of perfectly matched lights marching upward—like the notes of the same Maggie Teyte Plaisir d’Amour they all remembered—toward the giant cubist glories of a skyline they’d begun to confuse with themselves. Summers—when the park defecated like a child—they never entered it. Though our house stayed open, my parents when there seemed to breathe, incognito, from a snobbery that wasn’t social, only habitual—to the gills of the kind of fish we were. Meanwhile, we younger ones used everything—but never thought of the city as being ourselves.
But that night, as the wheels galloped like horses, and my mother passed bill after bill to the driver, destination after destination, she was more modern than any of us; she used everything. And I
began to see her winter Barbizons. When the cab left the park’s borders, she squeezed me under her long, sheltering arm. “Little mother,” she said.
We’d come out at the park’s south end. My mother leaned to look at the meter—a lot of love and silence, six dollars’ worth. “Out of the park now,” she said. “We can’t be protected forever.” She pointed to a tall building on the opposite corner. “Driver—in front of there.” He U-turned, and eased us to the curb. A doorman put his hand on the knob, hesitating when he saw us two, and said, “The New York Athletic Club, miss?” She slipped him a tip. “I—we only want to look.” But the explanation she gave the driver was for me, for my possible embarrassment. Even she didn’t know all of me. I never thought she was strange—not for herself. When awkward or ugly people happen to carry the strangeness of the world about with them, one can clearer see that they themselves aren’t strange. Lucky or not, she was beautiful. “My daughter’s new to the town—to these parts of it.”
The driver spoke, not turning. “Men. It’s a place fuh men.” He sniggered for some reason. “Fuh dere healt’.”
We gazed in unable to see much but a decent marble gleam; the men sauntered out when in couples, strode purposefully down the steps when alone. If she tensed at each arrival, I only recalled it later when there was time enough, or never time enough. Bear with me, Austin, and with her—she won’t be with us long.
When she told the driver to move on, “Anywhere, tell you in a minute,” the doorman was still watching us. As we left the Athletic Club, I looked back at him. He had that seedy-soft look a man gets from carrying around prejudices that don’t belong to him, when, six feet or not, the flesh isn’t up to it. Maybe she’d given him the quarter for that. “He doesn’t look too healthy,” I said.
She didn’t answer until we were well away. “‘You’re a hysteric,’ the doctor said to me. ‘If you can’t stop.’ There’s only one answer to that. ‘And the ones who have stopped, Doctor,’ I said, ‘what are they?’”
I used to remember what she said by the destinations. Over the years they’ve blurred—was it the settlement house came next? Or that Hotel Seville we only slowed past, en route by accident, or that corner hotel on the west riverfront, with the workmen’s clothing store stuck in its side, where we’d certainly never been before, but sat outside of, for five minutes by her watch. The driver said nothing more, though she’d left the panel open. Maybe she wanted him to hear. Or to have an audience larger than one.
Some of the places I already knew. At the settlement house, way over east, she leaned out the window into the fruit-smells; I thought she was looking back at that part of her dancing girlhood. But when she spoke, she said, “Life is movement. Tell me how to stop.” I thought she was asking me. Until she leaned back in, and said, “I asked him that.”
We went back uptown after that, by slow stations, and more bills. At the little hardware store in those El blocks not far from us, she leaned forward again. We’d often passed it on foot, Posliuty’s Hardware, glanced in it, but never gone in. The same old woman sat there, huge flab breasts resting on her navel, the kind of fat that, until I knew more of diet and brassieres, I thought exclusive to the poor. Tonight, no one else was in the store; sometimes we’d glimpsed a man. “Yorkville has everything,” said my mother in a dry voice. “Just like any neighborhood.” Nobody was needing hardware tonight. I sat thinking, at her side. What do we ever know of what a parent or anyone means by “everything”? But another idea was growing in me. While I squirmed with it, peering out, her voice continued its musing. “We’re miles away from our money. Many times as I’ve heard your father tell that tale, you’ll never hear him say that. None of us, our kind, ever sees the real city. I only meant to try. That’s all I ever meant to do.” Then she looked up from her watch, and saw me, my face. “Hungry?”
I wasn’t. But I nudged her, at the driver. “Maybe him.”
“He’ll tell us.” Then she squinted at me. “Have to go?” she said, and before I could answer—“Or—?”
I could never be sure of that these days without looking, but I shook my head. And finally I blurted out what was preying on me, which until this ride all our walks hadn’t made me realize. “Are we being followed?”
…It’s possible isn’t it, Austin, that I’d got it right. And have it wrong now. For when someone follows an idea that way, or a person—in a haunting of places that person isn’t, might have been ten minutes ago, or will be an hour later, but at the precise moment never is—all of which is meanwhile known to the pursuer, who maybe wishes the timetable to go wrong, to catch her, the seeker, unaware—isn’t that being followed, in a way?…I followed Edwin that way for a while, for what he was and what it meant to me, not for himself. I hope it’s not the way I’m following you…
My mother said nothing at first. She passed a slow finger over my mouth, as if in marvel at the words that could come from it. “Like a cliff-hanger movie?” she said then. At my nod, she nodded, faster and faster, suddenly tapped at the pane, gave an address unfamiliar to me, and said, “Driver, all speed!” just like in the movie installments. We sat tense, clasping each other, fists against fists. I had a feeling this address would be the last. There was an ozone of action in the cab now, like the smell of a metal thought to have none, or like the air that comes through a real window opened high above in a theatre—when the people in the loges stir against its current on their necks and bury themselves in the play. When we stopped in front of a café, one I’d never seen, even the driver knew that this time we were going to get out.
When she asked him to wait for us, he wouldn’t, even though she offered him a sandwich inside. Maybe that was why. She’d spoken to him half as to a man—for his hunger—and half as to a chauffeur—when he was only a cabbie. Women aren’t ever as libertarian as they think. My father, who never faltered over his position in life, would have managed it.
“Naw,” said the driver, getting out to look up at the café, then at the whitewalls of the two long cars he had drawn alongside of. He had his cap down. Neither of us ever really saw his face. In those days the city was still full of these faceless—friends. He kept it down when he refused the last bill she held out—one too much. We already had our backs to him when he spoke from the curb, from inside the cab, just before he drove off, and we didn’t turn in time to see him. “Now,” he said. “You two can get your ashes hauled inside.”
We hadn’t turned in time. I hadn’t got what the words meant but that was the feel of it. She held on to me as if we were hearing a tocsin between her two worlds. Or maybe because he had included me. I found that to my liking, even then. Clasped together, we stared at the café. From those narrow pavements we could have seen in if the windows hadn’t been blind, very decently painted in dark green, above it a frosted design. There was no name such as I’d seen in our recent travels—Blarney, or McDonagh, or the Ould Sod—but it had an Irish look to it, by the smell of it sold food, and had an air of being better than it should be for these streets. Two neighboring Tudor-roofed houses of the old New York sort also did. One, a lawyer-real-estate combination, was dark. The other had the floors above well lit, and a brass sign saying it was a club. The Conestoga? I’ve forgotten. Something Indian. She ignored it, her glance on the two cars, one a roadster, one a limousine with leather top, both black, and better than they should be, here. She stood there in that street, while an El train clangored above us, and checked her watch. What schedule did she have inside her? Mine was a raven’s. By the smell there would be those hot roast-beef sandwiches sopped in gravy brown as shellac on the dead-white bread, and more filling than good food. I couldn’t ask, though a small sign on the plate glass reassured me. I could feel how far away she was from me now. But we stood so long. “Are we going in?” I said softly at last, but she didn’t hear me. That often happened too, these days.
“Oh yes, we’re being followed,” she said suddenly, and the voice was the loud, strident one I feared, the smile too. “He’s
even followed us here!”
And precise to whatever her watch said, the gleaming, brassbound door opened—not a swinging half-door like the ones in my father’s plates of Old New York—and two men stepped outside, one large in the light behind him, the other small and rotund, made penguin-shaped by the same black and white in which my father went to dine. I saw the second one melt, into a car. He took the roadster. That left the limousine, my mother and me, and this man.
Austin…you remind me of him. That face hadn’t been made in ten minutes either. Older in lineage than ours even, maybe, not a Phoenician curve in it; But to us, and forever, the fair barbarian. Otherwise—he was himself, neck and shoulders looming with a crudeness from wherever he immediately came. His flesh had such direction in it. He hadn’t an extra word in him.
He motioned us in.
She circled me with an arm. How pitiful she was when she tried to lie—this tall, older girl. Only the truth came out, inverted. “Oh no!” she said. “I don’t walk her for that!”
When he did speak, clefts above and below his lips scarcely moved. “New-style customer on my beat, I hear from Posliuty’s. Never goes in.”
A dark blush bloomed upward from my ankles. For her.
He glanced at a striped cuff twice the circumference of most, under it a quiet watch that made a schoolboy’s of my father’s. “You know my beat. Sent him on to take care of it. For an hour or so.”
She drew back, head bent, but only to open her bag. For a bill? A letter?
A match. The spurt of blue was already there in front of her, in his hand. I smelled the phosphor. She faltered out a cigarette to meet it. The cuff fitted his wrist. “Drive you home, if you want.”
“He took the roadster.” She said it like conversation. I knew these exchanges; younger girls get these duennaships early. Or apprenticeships. And I knew what a beat was. Places—one walked.
His shoes were a no-color—not sharpy. A gentleman’s.
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