2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas (10 page)

He blinks, clearing whatever spell has him. He releases her and sits on the chair, in shock. He begins to cry. Madeleine darts to the kitchen and slaps off the burner underneath the teapot, which pitches and empties its water onto the stove. It takes her years to wrench the front door open. Her father’s bellowing gains velocity and chases her down the hallway. She runs behind the building, but the dog is gone.

Back in the apartment, the sound has ceased. Her father has retreated into his bedroom and locked the door. Madeleine pours a cup of tea and calls Mrs. Santiago, who immediately becomes overwrought and hangs up. Two roaches charge down the kitchen wall in a race they abandon halfway through. They idle.

Madeleine stares through the window into the courtyard. On most days she feels something staring back: a God or a mother-shaped benevolent force. Today, nothing reciprocates. The streamers on the chained bicycles lift in the indifferent breeze. She is alone in old stockings she’s repaired twice but still run. Life will be nothing but errands and gray nights.

Madeleine cries. Cries more when she asks herself what
she could be doing while the tea is brewing, more when she fastens the clothespin onto her nose, more when she remembers the word
ungrateful
, more when she thinks of the caramel apples. She longs to hear her mother’s voice: a round, dulcet sound, ridged with spice. Madeleine pities her classmates, whose mothers’ voices are wry or weak, eliciting no allegiance from family members or vendors no matter how loud they yell. Madeleine’s mother was, at her quietest, her most powerful. Her voice could reverse the terms of every unfair transaction.

She thumbs through her mother’s recipe box for anything that will help:
HOW TO SEW A BUTTON, HOW TO MAKE WRAPPING RIBBON INTO CURLICUES, HOW TO CHECK CAR OIL, HOW TO TALK ABOUT A BOOK YOU HAVEN
’
T READ
.

Finally, she finds:

Madeleine brings her tea to the mirror where a girl with a freshly bowled haircut stares back. All she sees is nose. She
adjusts the clothespin. She selects a record and waits for the song to begin.

It is impossible to be sad when she is singing, even if the song she’s singing is sad. She marks “You with the Stars in Your Eyes” down in her notes. C minus.

She wants to keep practicing, but she is tired. Pedro is loose in the city. Her father is fastened to his room, with his records and his drugs and his quiet. She crawls under her covers. It is her fault for triggering one of his spells. At least it had been brief. She knows most girls do not have to deal with a father like hers. Most girls would be scared of his fits, and the way she lives, lawless in a roachy apartment. Madeleine would be scared too, she thinks, falling asleep. If she had only experienced finished basements and dads who acted like dads. But Madeleine loves her father, and how can you be scared of someone you love?

S
arina chooses a bottle of wine for the party at the corner store. Tinsel glints on the door and windows. The tree in the produce aisle revolves on its pedestal, reflecting red and silver light onto whoever buys grapes. “Surfer Girl” plays on the overhead speakers and everyone Sarina passes in the aisles is singing.

Good-bye, children, good-bye. Tucked into your buses, secured into the hands of your parents or guardians on the approved list of who can pick you up
. Principal Randles walks the halls of Saint Anthony, tapping off lights and shutting doors. Except for the art projects that flutter in her wake, nothing moves. The chalk dust has settled.

In her office, Principal Randles pours a glass of single malt. At home, a sink full of dishes and a poster of Paris at night. On Christmas she will volunteer at the convent, collecting the old nuns’ drool with cheap napkins.

What had the Altimari girl said?
Santa doesn’t exist
, with the same flip tone her mother, Corrine, had. Like her mother, this girl has no appreciation for a principal’s job. Someone has to enforce lines and ring bells and guide and discipline. The way that woman walked, like she was paying the sidewalk a favor. She hadn’t believed Corrine would actually die. But what had the girl called her? A bitch rag?

Principal Randles is going on a date tonight with a tax attorney who described himself on his profile as a culinary enthusiast.
Ha-ha
, she says to the empty office. Bitch rag, indeed. She wears a new dress the color of cornflowers and they are going to a restaurant whose patrons eat in plastic, glowing pods. She wants to show off the legs she maintains with Olympian discipline.

Principal Randles stands in the doorway to the main
office, mood buoying. She watches her secretary, Regina, count pretzel money, all the hemming and hawing parts of her; the unexplained bag of yarn, the Christmas gifts heaped upon her in card, ceramic, and doodad form, the battery-powered vest that exclaims:
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
Then goes quiet.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
Then goes quiet. Regina is in teaching for the outfits. By her elbow a pile of erasers waits to be clapped.

“Regina.” The principal wags her scotch. “Go home.”

“But the erasers.”

“Forget them.”

The secretary has too many bags, so the principal follows her through the schoolyard to her sagging Nissan. She watches Regina drive out of the parking lot, the reflection of her vest insisting
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
against the windshield.

A figure crouches near the trees that border the yard.

“Who is that?” she calls.

It is a boy she doesn’t recognize. He considers her, then scurries away. She walks to where he had been kneeling. A line of trees dusted with dead leaves. A piece of chalk, a drained soda can, and a phrase written on the asphalt.

BITCH

Mindless graffiti, she assures herself, backhanding a stray tear from her cheek.

L
orca sits at his desk, stabbing Mrs. Santiago’s sausage out of its container with a plastic fork. Mongoose will come in later to buy the Snakehead. The club will be saved, Sonny will roil, spring will come, and maybe by then Lorca will shake the feeling of sliding down a hill of ice that gets steeper as he falls, reaching out for anything substantial but finding ice, and ice, and ice.

Mongoose, the traitor. The desk phone rings. It is Gray Gus, five years earlier, calling to tell Lorca about a girl he’s just met.

He, Mongoose, and Sonny had chased a promoter’s late-night oath to Chicago. Charlie Roads went with them, a childhood friend of Gus’s who was a bookie and a drug dealer.

The promoter sets the boys up with a gig playing The C Note three times a week. Gus meets a girl from the South Side named Alessandra. She writes her name and number on a piece of paper and it takes up the whole page in A’s and S’s. Everything is that name Alessandra. He rides the El. Alessandra. He buys the paper to check the box scores. Alessandra. The street kids slap playing cards into the spokes of their bike wheels. Al-es-san-dra. He carries her number around for a week before he calls her.

Alessandra has ten brothers and sisters. She is a neighborhood girl, a gem. Gus decides she can follow him out of those slums like a star. He calls Lorca late at night from pay phones
all around Chicago to say words like
alabaster
and
resplendent
, the relief of her perfect face.

“Are you having a stroke?” Lorca says.

Charlie convinces Gus to take bets on horses. Charlie has a wife and little boy, so Gus gives him the lion’s share when they win. Gus doesn’t care about money, as long as he has enough for his fix and a pack of cigars to smoke during his gigs at The C Note. But instead of taking care of his family, Charlie places bigger bets with more seasoned dealers. “Reinvesting,” he calls it. He loses, and begins to dodge a bookie named Leland.

Gus was born with a Hollywood chin, a butter touch, and an ear that can hear rhythms tapped out from Neptune. In another life he would have been drumming in Johnny Carson’s band, drinking water out of a mug. But in this one he has a disease and he can’t say no to shysters like Charlie, who uses his wife and kid to cheat on Gus’s lousy, glowing heart.

Lorca warns him over the phone, “They’re going to break your hands, Gus, and you’ll never play again.”

In love, Gus is a mess. “They can take my hands,” he snorts. “I don’t need them.”

Alessandra sews a warm lining into his old coat, salves his arms with cotton balls soaked in crèmes from her sister’s salon. She cooks big meals. Gus sends Lorca a picture: him grinning loonily at one end of a table, and her at the other, holding a noodle salad. Between them in dozens of chairs are her brothers and sisters, variations on Alessandra. After dinner, he ties up and they sit on her roof. They put the best views of a city in its worst neighborhoods. She holds him while he pukes.

He says she sings like Patsy Cline. She calls him
lupo grigio
, Gray Wolf.

“When you’re not around,” she says, “my days are gray.”

Leland and his buddies find Gus at The C Note, looking for Charlie. It is late, and Gus isn’t feeling any pain. He won’t tell them where Charlie is, so they beat him up and take his coat.

They find Mongoose in a corner store. He doesn’t run, or take it for his friend. The next morning, a janitor stumbles over Charlie on a train platform, so brained in Gus has to identify him by his sleeve of tattoos at the morgue. Then he goes on a bender, a weeklong disaster. Charlie’s debt falls to him, so one night he lets himself into Alessandra’s house and creeps into one of the empty upstairs bedrooms. One of the sisters catches him going through her purse and calls for Alessandra. Alessandra isn’t mad. She gives him what she has. There’s no fight to be had, but Gus fights, anyway. He tells her she is only good for one thing. They scream at each other on the front staircase: Alessandra in tears and Gus so high he won’t remember the names he keeps spitting at her until they drag him away.

He stumbles to The C Note and passes out behind the bar. When he wakes up a penny postcard has arrived with news from Lorca.

Francis Lorca is dead. Jack Lorca has inherited The Cat’s Pajamas. He is calling everyone home. Bring your guitars, your Alessandras. Come home.

To Gus, clothes papery with dirt, Lorca is offering a place to get quiet. It is as if his future is revealed to him like the
archangel coming down to Mary, only this is a crappy postcard, a soft pretzel with arms and legs, dancing on a word spelled out in cartoon letters.

Gus and Sonny move back and join the Cubanistas. Sam Mongoose moves back too and opens his own club in Center City. Lorca ignores his phone calls until he stops calling. Gus goes clean and quiet, and never ties up again. The last time Gus sees Alessandra is through the elbows and arms of her brothers and sisters who force themselves in between them.

That’s a drummer’s love story. If you want a prettier one, you’ll be waiting forever. If you could separate your body into four distinct rhythms, you’d be cracked too.

I
t is dark, dark seven P.M. on Christmas Eve Eve.

The city gathers its black-skirted taxis around the ankles of Rittenhouse Square. A vendor rolls his cart into the park. Pinwheels hem and sigh in flowerpots stuffed with foam. Every audience in every theater on Broad Street leans forward into the hyphen of silence between the overture and Act One. A couple necks in the backseat of a Honda parked at Thirteenth and Spruce.

Ted Stempel leaves for his shift at the store. His battered pit bull puppy, Malcolm, gazes at him. “On second thought,” he says to his wife, “I’ll take him with me.”

Once in a while a gust of evergreen settles over the man selling Christmas trees on Walnut. It really is nice, he thinks, that smell. In Olde City a girl follows her breath down the street, drifting away from her friends. “Look.” She claps her mittened hands. “Look!”

Madeleine is sleeping.

On her building’s rooftop, Mrs. Santiago unclips a shirt and yanks the laundry line toward her, unclips a bra then yanks, and so forth, until the line has been yanked empty, its contents folded into a wicker basket. She watches the Market-Frankford El slice across the horizon. She’s never been on a plane. She wants to take a trip, but she has to fold the laundry. Find the dog. Freeze the gravy. Take care of the child who lately has seemed troubled and distracted.

Mrs. Santiago once cooked for three days in preparation for Christmas, then spent the entire meal running back to the kitchen for a cheese grater, a certain pepper, a record someone mentioned. Borne back ceaselessly into the kitchen.

A faraway ambulance screams through the city.

Mrs. Santiago prays:
Little Flower, show your power at this hour
.

In Georgina McGlynn’s kitchen, Sarina uses wooden tongs to refresh a salad. She was the first guest to arrive and now suffers through the aneurysm of the doorbell, heralding another guest, Bella and Claudia and Michael, so far. So far, things are not going well. Her presence has caused glances of confusion (Bella), raised eyebrows (Michael), and one pointed “Who are you, though?” (Claudia). This has made Sarina nervous, resulting in several earnest exclamations regarding the salad. Breathtaking, she called it. More confused glances caused her to call the baked potatoes badass.

The necking couple at Thirteenth and Spruce has fogged up most of the Honda’s windows. The man presses his lips against the woman’s neck, her earlobe. Her eyes are closed, but she leans forward as if straining to see something through the misted window, Ben Allen perhaps, who is several yards away coaxing the last drag from his cigarette. Ben had been about to leap the stairs to Georgie’s house when he caught sight of the pawing couple. He watches until nostalgia forms in his lower gut—he once made slow work of someone’s neck, but whose? Certainly not Annie’s—but not long enough to be a cad. He takes Georgie’s steps in two leaps, as usual the last to arrive. His sanctified role in this group is showing up unforgivably
late but armed with a story of what kept him that is so compelling he is at once forgiven. He shakes himself out of his coat in Georgie’s entryway. “You will not believe what is happening on your very street, Georgie.” He waits until she pauses in her work lighting candles and Bella and Claudia turn, to announce, “A couple is making out in a car.”