A Private Sorcery (27 page)

She hears the catch in her voice, and then Leonard clearing his throat. “My sentiments exactly.”

They hang up and she heads downstairs to get milk, flowers, the newspaper. The lobby is empty except for Pedro, who stands in his
gold-trimmed overcoat in the front vestibule.

“Happy new year, Pedro.”

Pedro takes off his cap and holds it over his heart. “Not a good day.” His eyes fill with tears.

Rena leads Pedro to the marble bench by the door. Seated, Pedro bows his head and dabs at his face with a pressed white handkerchief.

Five minutes, maybe more, go by before Pedro speaks. “Mr. Domengo. He passed last night.”

T
HE PRISON WARDEN
allows Saul to come to the phone.

“Is it my father?”

“Santiago.”

Saul exhales loudly.

“He was still in the hospital. A woman here in the building who was close with him said he went in his sleep.”

She can hear Saul crying.

“I'm sorry, honey.” The honey surprises her.

“I kept thinking that at some point I'd write him, give you a letter to read him. It's just that everything I have to say seems hackneyed. I couldn't bear to be hackneyed with him.”

“I think he understood.”

“I never thought he'd die while I was here.”

P
EDRO TELLS HER
that Santiago's daughter, Flora, has arrived and has said nothing to him other than to ask for the key. Coming in from work, Rena slips a condolence card under Santiago's door. All morning she sleeps deeply, no dreams, only snatches of images, like scenery whizzing past on a highway, so that when she wakes to a ringing, it takes her a moment to discern that the sensation is coming from outside this inner montage—coming from her own front door.

She puts on her robe. Heading to the door, she imagines the giraffe, labeled and tagged on a precinct desk, feels the same beating rush of nearly a year ago, certain they've come now for her.

Lifting the peephole cover, she peers at a female face. She cracks the
door, leaving the chain in place. A woman with black hair and skin so devoid of color it looks ghostly holds out a typewriter case.

“The doorman thought maybe you'd want this.”

Rena undoes the chain and opens the door. The woman puts the case down at Rena's feet. Despite her ghoulish surface, there's a girlishness about her, a breathiness in her voice or perhaps it's the state of her spine—straight and limber—such that Rena imagines her sitting on the floor to tie the canvas shoes she wears under her loose black pants. She turns to leave.

“Excuse me,” Rena says. “Who are you?”

“Flora Fahrsi.” She points next door.

“I'm sorry, I didn't put it together. I'm sorry about your father.” “Why? He was an old man.” Flora Fahrsi pushes her hair out of her eyes. “There's more stuff inside. I've been telling people to take whatever they want.”

Rena takes her keys. Barefoot, still in her robe, she follows Flora next door. It's been over a month since she's been in Santiago's apartment, and the first thing that strikes her is the new smell: something strong and caustic, one of those green cleaning agents in a large plastic bottle. A suitcase sits in the middle of the living room floor.

Flora waves a hand toward the kitchen. “Maybe there's something you can use. There are some lamps in the bedroom.”

She's never before been in Santiago's bedroom. The lamps have brown watermarks on the shades and chips on the ceramic bases. Over the dresser is a framed watercolor, poorly matted: three amoeboid shapes in primary colors. It reminds her of early Calders, of a discussion she'd once had about them with Rebecca. What had Rebecca called them? Clever naïfs.

She takes the picture off the wall and carries it into the living room, where Flora is kneeling on the floor folding things into the suitcase.

“If no one wants this, I'll take it.”

Flora doesn't look up. “Whatever.”

“Do you know who did it?”

Flora glances over. “That's just a kid's painting. Their son did it when
he was in kindergarten or something.”

She stares at Flora's back. Flora had called Bernardo their son, not her brother or even, as in fact he more precisely would be, her half brother. “Are you certain you don't want it?” she asks softly.

“You've never flown on a Saudi airline. They're Nazis about the weight limits. My husband says they tamper with the scales so that even if you're under the limit, you still come out over. One ounce extra and they make you start throwing things out. Of course, they just keep whatever you have to leave. There …”

Flora pushes on the top of the suitcase with one hand while she struggles with the other to close the clasps. Propping the picture against a chair, Rena presses down on the hard suitcase top.

“The real reason, though, is that they let the royalty carry as much as they want. The super rich ones, of course, have their own planes, but the princesses, there must be a thousand of them, the distant cousins of the king, sometimes three of them will book the whole first class. Coming over, I counted. One had twenty-eight suitcases. That's before her shopping trip. It's a miracle we don't all end up in the Mediterranean.”

“I think you have to take some things out.”

Flora mumbles under her breath. “This always happens.” She pulls out two men's sweaters from inside the suitcase. “Here, you want these? I thought my husband might use them if we ever get out of Riyadh.”

Rena places the sweaters next to her. One of them is a cardigan with some buttons missing. The other has a hole in the sleeve. “He's Saudi, your husband?”

“Lebanese. He and his brothers run the concession stands outside the embassies. He's the eldest, so he took the best spot, the American embassy.”

Rena pushes down again on the suitcase top, and this time Flora succeeds in closing it.

“My husband was a student of your father's. Your father's teaching had a big influence on him.”

Flora sits back on her haunches. “Well, I hope all that crap helped him more than it did me.”

A
T WORK, SHE DRAGS
. She'd forgotten to ask Flora about the funeral. When she gets back, Pedro is slumped on the marble bench. If I get right into bed, she thinks, I'll be able to sleep.
Do it
, she orders herself.
Walk by
.

She sits down next to Pedro.

“I feel sick to my heart. Such a cold woman, Mr. Domengo's daughter. Every day, since his wife died, I visited him before I started work. I brought him groceries from my own refrigerator. Sweaters knitted by my own sister. When I told her I wanted to go to the funeral, do you know what she said? No funeral, he's too old.” He rubs his chest. “Mrs. Lehrman, she told me the daughter gave his body to medical science. That this is what Mr. Domengo wanted. Still, they should have had a funeral. A great man like that.”

Rena watches the entranceway, worried someone will come through and be angry that Pedro is not holding the door.

“A very important person. He went before the Congress when they had those hearings.”

“You mean the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

Pedro takes out his handkerchief. Ceremoniously, he blows his nose. “And she didn't even say good-bye to me. I didn't know she left until Mrs. Lehrman told me this morning.” He points to a pile of mail on the table near the mailroom. “She didn't leave no forwarding address. All this mail and no address to send it.”

“I'm sure someone must have Flora's address. I'll ask around.”

She stands. When Pedro follows her, she assumes it's to press the elevator button. Instead, he takes the pile of Santiago's mail from the table and thrusts it into her arms with a vehemence that makes it clear that the mere presence of the letters is salt in a wound.

V
ISITING
S
AUL, SHE TELLS
him that she has inherited Santiago's mail—that Pedro now puts it in her box. “What set Pedro over the top was Flora not having a funeral. He just kept shaking his head and saying, ‘a great man like that.'”

“You see it all the time. Old people who sign their bodies over to
medical schools because they're afraid no one will bury them.”

“I'm going to have to dust off my Nancy Drew and try to find Flora's address.”

“Santiago's neighbor, the one who set him up with the Guild for the Blind, you should ask her.”

It's the first time in a long while that she's heard Saul's doctorly problem-solving voice. She studies his filled-out face. He appears oddly more prosperous than he did before going to prison.

“Jail suits you.”

He looks at her in a way that makes her think he is going to make some sort of sexual innuendo. Please don't, she silently intones. Instead, he pulls out a photograph from his shirt pocket: a plump woman with small eyes and a flattened nose.

“Who's this?”

“Peg. A woman I've been corresponding with.”

On second examination, the woman seems older. Something flutters inside her. It's not jealousy but the need to readjust the space between them.

“I met her through a prison correspondence club. Pen pals for convicts. She's one of those women who has the hots for men behind bars.”

She's never heard Saul talk like this—with this touch of vulgarity. With her, he'd always been so delicate, talking about sex only in its spiritual and clinical aspects.

“Peg's been married twice to men in prison.” “What happens when they get out?”

“They get divorced, of course.”

G
RITA
L
EHRMAN OPENS
the door dressed in house slippers and a cardigan sweater that falls off her shoulders as if still on the hanger. Her gray bun is askew in a way that leads Rena to suspect she's aroused Grita from an afternoon snooze.

“Yes, dear,” the
dear
and the little smile intended, Rena sees, to hide the forgetting of her name.

“Rena. Your neighbor downstairs.”

“Of course. Of course. Come in. I was just preparing my afternoon coffee.”

Rena follows Grita into the living room. The apartment is the same line as her own, four stories below. Where in Rena's apartment the light spills in, splashing the walls, here, in the curtained rooms, it is more blue than yellow—muted and somehow sad.

“I'll fetch the coffee. Make yourself at home.”

Rena sits on the couch, velvet with rolled arms and an embroidered shawl arranged over the top. The walls are covered with prints hung in stair-step clusters, each print suggesting a story: a painter friend who inhabits the Green Mountains, a watercolor Grita fell in love with at a little shop on Third Avenue bought by her husband as an unexpected gift. On the end tables are pieces of glass, ceramic bowls, a gourd, a sepia-tone family portrait that looks like it made an Atlantic crossing.

It's the kind of room Rena associates with Jewish people of Grita's age who consider themselves part of the broad band of the intelligentsia, who, no longer believing that religion brings meaning to life, have found in culture their organizing principle—the kind of room, Rena imagines, Leonard would have created had Klara not insisted on purchasing sets back in those early years before she'd abdicated as homemaker. Living room sets, a dining set, bedroom sets for themselves and the boys. An era when elegance was equated with achieving perfect matches: a matter of endurance and cunning to have found shoes the exact blue of the dress, wall-to-wall carpet the same pea soup green as the stripe in the sofa and chair. Only in Leonard's study, furnished with remnants from the furniture sets Klara had once replaced every few years, is there any hint of the aesthetics that would have enlivened him. An ashtray from Peru. A strand of Indonesian paper fish. A photograph of the Mena House Hotel at Giza with the Cheops and Chephren pyramids looming behind.

“Just another minute, dear,” Grita calls out.

Studying the Giza photograph on one of her rare visits to Leonard and Klara's house, Rena had remembered a time when she'd been fascinated by the pharaohs and the cities they'd erected for their dead.
Young enough to still hold her mother's hand, she and Eleanor had walked in silence through the Egyptology collection of the De Young Museum, as beautiful a building as she'd ever seen, reading how wives, cats, gold and dishes had been buried with the pharaohs for use in the world beyond. It had seemed terrible and wonderful all at once, this life so many millennia ago, these relics now inside locked cases in the windowless room, cool and dark as the insides of the pyramids themselves. Emerging from the museum into the sun of Golden Gate Park and Eleanor's gay
Let's go to the teahouse
, and then, as if vaulting across the Indian Ocean, sitting on cushions on the floor of a pagoda perched by a rippling brook, all polished teak and rice paper dividers, trying to find the least expensive thing to order without letting her mother see that she knew the pot of tea they shared would leave them with little more than the bus fare home. Everything as unreal and distant as the pharaohs themselves or as the day itself, a day without Nick and his belches as he passed on the stairs.

Grita returns with two china cups filled with coffee. She holds the saucer in one hand as she takes hot gulps, gets right to the point about Flora Fahrsi. “She was a pill. I'd lent Santiago my tape player. I told her to keep it while she was there. She never even bothered to return it. Just left it on the floor with the door to the apartment open.” She finishes her coffee in one long gulp. “Santiago loved both his wives in a way that would make anyone with an ounce of feeling weep. After the death of his first wife, Flora's mother, he wrote a eulogy for her that he published in an arts magazine in France about how she had danced with the Diaghilev Ballet when she was a girl and how she approached all of life with the same kind of grace. When I told Flora that her father had shown me the article, she shrugged her shoulders and said she'd never read it. The consciousness of a toad, that woman.”