“What?”
“I never actually declined the acceptance. All of my friends encouraged me to go, Razi especially. I couldn’t make up my mind. And then, just when I thought I’d worked up the nerve to tell my parents I was going, Razi died. Going to New York alone was one thing. Going to New York alone without knowing she was a phone call or telegram away, I couldn’t.”
“She was your good luck charm.”
“No, she was my talisman.”
Amy’s silence mirrored my own.
“A shame, when you think about it. Neither of us got what we really wanted.” Twolly seemed to detach from her thoughts, but the mist in the room suggested otherwise. She was thinking of Andrew and didn’t want to. His essence was strangely distilled, but powerful.
“It’s so sad what happened to her,” Amy said.
“The Lord shouldn’t take people so young.” Twolly stood up and glanced at the bins on the floor. “I’m going to the potty. Listen that I don’t fall in.”
Loretta entered the room with a spoon coated in thick orange batter. “I thought you might like the scrapings. You okay, honey? Your eyes are all watery.”
“Allergies. Too much old dust.” Amy left the room to blow her nose.
Loretta didn’t notice the breeze that stirred the bin of postcards.
October 18, 1969
Twolly—
Warren kept the silver necklace you made for Anna years ago and gave it to his granddaughter. It was Anna’s favorite. He wanted you to know.
APO
July 9, 1955
Twolly—
Conference is a petty bore. However, the weather is perpetually sunny and pleasant, unlike what we’re used to. The Golden Gate Bridge is magnificent (see back).
APO
I DOUBLE-BOUNCE the diving board and splash into the pool. After I surface, I drop my face in the water, fill my cheeks with a mouthful, and float aimlessly for a few moments. Two glasses shatter on the concrete nearby. Waves rush against my slack body. My head pulls above water as his arm crosses my chest and his hand grabs the pit of my arm.
Andrew lifts me over his shoulder and shakes. “Don’t you die. Don’t you die, Razi. I swear to God, don’t you dare die on me.”
I spout the water down his back. “My hero.” He lets me down.
“What is wrong with you?” His face is red, and there are two clear puddles lining his bottom eyelids. He breathes as if he’s been swimming sprints.
“I was only kidding.” I touch his chest firmly. I sense the currents rushing below his skin and bones.
He pulls away. “You scared me half to death. That wasn’t funny.”
“It will be later. Rather convincing, don’t you think?”
“Too convincing.” He frowns. His whole body trembles.
I expect him to crack a smile, but he doesn’t. “I’m sorry. It was a joke.”
Andrew looks me straight in the eye, defies me to glance away. “Don’t ever do that to me again. I swear my heart stopped.”
“Andrew, please. Melodrama doesn’t suit you.”
He walks toward the garden chair where he placed his towel. “I’m serious, Raziela.” He rubs his head and face, pulls the towel around his neck. “What if you’d slipped off the board and really hurt yourself? Be careful.”
“Don’t worry.”
“I worry about you all the time.” He stares at me until I stare back.
“I know, and you shouldn’t. I’m careful as I can be. So is Gertrude.”
“Your luck will run out at some point.”
“I will not stop the Boyless Parties, and I won’t stop leaving the pamphlets.”
“Would you if I insisted?”
“What do you think?” I glare at him, unsure whether he’s joking.
“I’m waiting for a late-night telephone call from your mother telling me that you’re in custody. There’s a sock full of bond money in my dresser drawer.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet.” I smile, relieved. “You shouldn’t worry, really.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t, but I do.” He runs his fingers through his damp hair until it’s sleek as a black seal. “What would I do without you? You’re my match.”
“You sound like Grams.”
“Your grandmother isn’t as crazy as you think.”
“I love you, Andrew. Isn’t that enough?”
“For now, perhaps. But I’m your match, like it or not.”
“I’d say it’s a matter of timing, if finding a true love happens at all.”
“What a generous statement from one so pragmatic. Your grandmother would disagree that it’s timing at all. It’s part of a plan. Every soul ever made has a perfect partner, she believes.”
“She also believes in ghosts, darling.”
He rushes the distance between us to catch me in his arms. “Bella Rah-zee-aye-lah, how you maykah me crazy.” He kisses me on both cheeks. “You are such an irresistible troublemaker.”
ANDREW HOLDS the door open for me to pass, and I link into the angle of his arm when he catches up with me. He carries a box from his favorite haberdashery under his left arm, a new dove gray shirt and violet tie with narrow magenta stripes. This is not the first time we have picked up a purchase downtown, or lunched at D. H. Holmes, or stood waiting while the other has admired a watch or a hat. This cold November Saturday afternoon on Canal Street, through the bustle and hum, I feel as if our steps answer each other’s in a way they haven’t before. I am simultaneously bewildered by and drawn to the sensation.
“I’d like a chocolate egg cream,” Andrew says. “What sounds good to you?”
“Two straws.”
He clinches his bicep, which pulls me into him a little tighter. “Which fountain?”
“What block are we on?”
Before he can answer, Gertrude suddenly strides into our path from a niche outside a shoe store, pulling the lapels of her winter coat around her shoulders.
“Why, Andrew, how nice to see you.” She does not look at me, not directly. Then in a whisper, “Razi, dear.”
“Mrs. Delacourt, good afternoon. And how are you?” he says warmly.
“Fine, fine. Oh, do you have a moment? I want your opinion about something my husband has his eye on.” Her look tells us to follow. She walks ahead as if we’re strangers.
“Gertrude, were you lying in wait?” I ask with as much humor as I can muster. I have not seen her in a couple of weeks. The next Boyless Party isn’t for another month. Something is wrong.
She doesn’t turn to face me. “I saw you two walking this way. A lucky chance. I need to speak with you.”
We follow her into a department store and into an inconspicuous corner. She actually crouches next to a support column. Andrew releases my arm, and I sense the heat of his hand near mine.
“Should I come back in a moment?” Andrew asks.
“Can he be trusted?” Gertrude asks.
I glance at them both. “Yes.”
“Face each other. Don’t look at me. Listen. Snitchy has been raided. That isn’t the problem, entirely. He’s been able to keep it out of the papers by giving away what came in. But the shipment had the usual items, his wholesale purchases, you understand, and what he allows in as well.”
“They checked the fruit crates.”
“He usually has his different goods shipped separately, or mixed, but this time they came all at once. A larger shipment than usual, and for some reason, that tipped off someone at the port. Someone who turned out to be more appalled about finding certain paraphernalia than bottles.”
“What’s happened?” My body is a furnace. I want to take off my coat.
“Nothing yet. He’s claiming there was a mistake with the shipment. That some of it didn’t belong to him. That may not take him far. His wife does have a reputation.” She smiles briefly. “He has a couple of favors to call in. He’s not happy to use them in this way, I tell you.” Gertrude meets my eyes. Her almond shapes narrow to slivers. “We can
’t be seen together, dear. The next party has to be canceled. It’s temporary. I need to find out how much word has spread.”
“What can I do?” I ask.
“The impossible. Keep quiet. Don’t implicate yourself. You have too much to lose.” She looks at Andrew, then at me again. “I promise, this is temporary. When it’s safe to begin again, we can if you wish. We’ll have to take a different tack. If desperate women come to you, you’re absolutely safe still. You don’t know what I know to help them. As for the rest—”
“This can be maneuvered,” I say. “There are other ways.”
Gertrude smoothes the front of her coat. “You’re too brave for your own good. Be careful, dear. You will do so much more from a physician’s office than a prison cell.” She grins with mischief, finally. She’s worried about me, about us, but Gertrude is a woman of adventure. We understand each other.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“Andrew,” Gertrude says, “Razi tells me that you’re a young man of rare character. Prove her right.”
She peers around the column, then strides out of the store with her shoulders wide, pushing the air out of the way.
I need a still moment to decide what I will do now. I think of the grateful women who have left Gertrude’s house with a sense of control that had been denied them before. That freeing force is not so easily stalled. In an instant, I think of what my mother said when she learned women had won the vote: Our daughters have a say from now on. Oh, the fear of what you’ll tell them. Her laugh was merry, proud—and conspiratorial. She hugged me close for a long time.
Andrew remains quiet. He watches me. His expression reveals conflict.
“What I’ve been doing is my purpose. It’s something I hold true. I’m not afraid.”
“I know you’re not,” Andrew says. “Fear would at least dissuade you.”
“You’re angry.”
“Yes, but I’m not sure why. Come on. Let’s have that egg cream. I’m suddenly ravenous.”
He allows me to pass first. I take his hand. He returns the pressure. When we step into the street, he releases my palm and offers an arm to keep me close.
ONE WEEK before our senior year first-term exams, January 1929, Andrew and I study in the library. Without glancing up from his book, he asks, “When will you hear from Northwestern?”
“Early spring I think. What about Yale?”
“Same time, I’d expect. Do they have a nursing school, too?”
“Probably. I don’t know. Why?” I stare at him until he looks up.
“Have you ever thought of that instead?”
“Instead of becoming a doctor? Never.”
“It’s still medicine.”
“What’s your point?”
“Women doctors aren’t particularly well received.”
“That’s hardly a reason to become a nurse. As if that notion would even discourage me. I’m perfectly capable of doing what it takes to be a physician.”
“Without a doubt.”
“Ever since I was little, that’s what I wanted to do. All during high school and now, well, I could have taken domestic science courses, but that’s hardly science. It’s a consolation prize for all those girls who want something more but someone tells them they can’t have it. No matter what job a woman gets these days, there’s always someone who says she shouldn’t have it anyway.”
“Some situations can be worse than others.”
“If you haven’t noticed, men don’t intimidate me. I can handle myself.”
“There are different kinds of men. You’re being idealistic.”
My chest becomes a vacuum. He means naive. “I know I’m going to have to be twice as smart to get half as far. I don’t care.”
“Don’t get angry.”
“Too late. Why did you even broach the issue?”
“I was merely curious.” Then he fidgets. A roll through his shoulders, not so subtle that I can’t read it.
“Tell me.”
Andrew eases himself into his chair and tries to look as comfortable as possible. “What if we married?”
“What?”
“Hasn’t it crossed your mind?”
“Not especially.”
“It hasn’t?”
“Not in a way that made me consider giving this up.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to do that.”
“Aren’t you now? Become a nurse. How could you? Would I question why you don’t choose to be a court reporter instead? Never. No one will ever interrogate you about your aspiration to become a lawyer. You get to pick what you want to be, and people think it’s grand. Don’t you think I notice that dismissive look in people’s eyes when they find out I’m truly working to get a degree, not a husband?”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Then ask your mother what she really thinks of me.”
“Honestly.”
“Would it shame you if a wife of yours worked?”
“Why should it?”
“The truth.”
“It doesn’t matter what other people think.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“No.”
I collect my books into a pyramid and draw them against my chest. “I don’t know whether you’re lying to me or yourself.”
“Neither. Razi, you have my full faith. I would be proud of you, regardless of what you chose to do.”
“Until someone asks you who wears the skirt.”
Without a good-bye, I walk briskly from the library. I am too furious to cry. A sharpness streaks through the core of my body. What do I feel, what is this edge? Is this the edge of his love for me, where it ends, beyond reconciliation? Sooner or later, it was going to happen, wasn’t it? Andrew was bound to buckle under the strain of a practical world and consider what part he was expected to play to strap us in our proper places. I’m angry at myself. I should have anticipated this, prepared for its implications. I am many things, but I am not naive.
I FOLLOWED the rule for the most part. I didn’t interfere with the lives of my family. Rarely, I did cheat, and then only on their birthdays, only on my best behavior. Mother, Grams, and Daddy didn’t acknowledge that they sensed me—no wistful glances around the room, no sniffs, no tears. The physical changes in them were abrupt, without seamless days and nights gently letting me know they aged.
When they died, I was not there. I would have been a distraction. I might have caused them afterthoughts in the awareness of their deaths. Had any of them stayed, I would have gladly taught them what they needed to know. If there was something beyond, I hoped there was explanation for them about what happened to me. If not, it was just as well they didn’t know about the alternative.
After they were all gone, now and then, I went to the graves and polished the stones. The Burrat tomb was almost full—great-grandparents, infant great-uncle, Grandfather, Grams, some symbolic part of Uncle Roger—a beatific, feather-winged angel keeping watch on them, over my Grams, who hated such fairy-tale simplifications of the unknown. How Grams gained entrance into that Catholic cemetery, I have no clue. Her baptismal and confirmation certificates aside, she hadn’t attended mass in decades. I wondered if she had chosen to return to my grandfather, a devoted wife in death as well. In another part of the city, in a small Episcopalian cemetery, the Nolan tomb held my bones, then Daddy’s, then Mother’s, the order in which we left each other.
The bones, where cold and intuition eat at the marrow.
How simple, how obvious, the reason we were not to visit our own graves. Being so close to my remains, what was left of my body, reminded me of its absence. My flesh was dust, but even that could be sifted, felt, an outline sketched into a rotted silk lining. I wanted the pallid, calciferous scaffolding back, the anchor for muscles, the core of every movement. I wanted pain and pleasure in its physical form again.
I was not alone.
Once, Noble appeared as I was burning away weeds from the edge of the Burrat tomb. He wa
tched the plants wither, disintegrate, and join the earth again. “I never thought to do such a thing,” he said. “I take them out at the roots and blow them away.”
“Why are you here?” I asked. “Changed your route?”
“I come here rather often.” He almost touched the scapular around his neck. He began to drift away, toward the old tombs.
“Noble—”
“Good day, Razi.”
I trailed behind him, curious. His wife and children were buried in a mass grave somewhere in the city. Not in this place. He stopped in front of a dilapidated tomb that was clean and well tended. The weather had worn the inscriptions, but they were still legible.
“Leave me alone.” He blew dust away from his name. Noble began to mutter the Act of Contrition.
I had seen him in such moods before, the memories as sharp as the events. His emotion had been stirred by an anniversary or a birthday, perhaps the midsummer hum of mosquitoes, the descendants of ones whose poisoned saliva made his family bleed to death under their skin. This time, he hovered at the foot of his grave, in prayer, apologizing for his mortal sins.
Noble turned to spot me hidden among the stones. He knew I was still there. I moved toward him.
“You will not understand,” he said. “Such pain, worse because it is not of the flesh. The body is simple, no matter your science. Agony reaches far deeper. All those days and nights I burned the candles I made with my own hands. Filling our rooms with His light, our prayers. People at my storefront shouting, ‘Open the door and sell us your candles,’ while my wife and children vomited blood in my hands.”
“Noble, there was nothing you could do then. No one knew that mosquitoes carried the yellow fever virus, much less how to stop the spread.”
“I was bitten as well. My arms and neck were covered in bumps.”
“No one understood why one person got sick and another didn’t.”
“But why was I spared to watch them suffer? Such devotion I had shown to Him and the Virgin Mother. Such faith. And I was not the only one. My children, my wife, they prayed. They had trust in the Lord.” Noble glanced at me. “I lost them all, one each night, my wife, my four babies. As if God had chosen to prolong my agony as He ended theirs.”
The Mercy of Thin Air Page 21
