East Into Upper East (22 page)

As usual, Ma was not in the least put out by his lack of response—she carried right on talking and asking her perennial personal questions. Only today he countered with, “But aren't you supposed to be a wise woman who knows everything about everybody?”

That made her laugh: “I know everything about
you
,” she said, and suddenly she seized his hand. As before, a shudder ran through him at her touch, and especially when she began to slither her forefinger along his palm to read the lines written there. He snatched his hand away and wiped it on a paper napkin. Just then Stella arrived with his meal, and she asked eagerly: “Do you tell fortunes?”

“Yes, my child,” said Ma. “Was there something you wanted to know?”

Fearfully, Stella put her hand before her mouth and nodded. Ma moved over on her rexined bench, inviting Stella to sit next to her; and after a swift look around—but there was no boss, the coffee-shop was part of a chain and a supervisor only came around twice a week—she slid onto the seat and, opening up her hand, she whispered: “Should I have the operation on my kidneys? My daughter says I should but what if afterward I can't serve the tables, what'll happen then?”

“Wait wait wait,” soothed Ma, studying the palm stretched out like an offering to her wisdom. And she did look worthy of the awe and trust with which Stella regarded her—not an ordinary fortune teller, not a gypsy, though there was something of both in her bright apparel (today she was in deep plum-purple) and her frizzy hair dyed black as ink: but truly a being from some other, probably superior place, where superior knowledge was available.

Ma's study was prolonged, and some customers were already impatiently banging their flatware on the glass-topped tables for service. But at last Ma looked up—with satisfaction, for she had good news to give: Stella's operation would not only be successful with regard to her kidneys but would also regenerate her whole system, so that she would be fulfilling her function here more splendidly than ever and for many years to come.

“You have a nerve,” said Ross, when Stella, already rejuvenated by these tidings, had returned to her duties.

“What's wrong? I've given her hope and optimism, which everyone needs, including you.”

“Kindly leave me out of your hocus-pocus. And now she'll go in for a dangerous operation on the strength of your lies.”

“You don't know that I don't know,” said Ma, and she looked at him mischievously, roguishly, while licking off her creamy mustache—a disappointment to him, for he had enjoyed not telling her that it was there.

It seemed to Ross that Ma was everywhere—in the apartment too, which was big enough for her to keep out of his sight instead of constantly appearing in it. Whereas for her outings she still dressed up gorgeously, at home she was now usually in dishabille, in some old Indian cotton housecoat torn under the armpits, or in the short blouse and waist petticoat she wore under her sari. Although the gloom of the apartment blurred details—often, when he had encountered Grace in the passage, she had been like a young woman walking toward him—Ma never appeared as anything but old and fat. Yet, unlike Grace who had thrown her shoe at a mirror because of what it showed her, Ma could be seen admiring her reflection—posing with one hand on her hip—in that same mirror that still hung over the mantel with a crack right across it.

To hide from her, he began to creep around stealthily, but as she too moved around silently—she never wore shoes in the house—she was always surprising him: catching him was how he thought of it. If she failed to trap him in the passage or one of the other rooms, she did not hesitate to track him down to his bedroom. This was a triangular corner room at the rear end of the apartment, allotted to him by Grace to be as far away as possible from her own bedroom. Ma never came in on him by surprise—she announced herself by calling out to him from her room at the other end, and then she padded down the corridor, calling all the way (“Ross! O Ross!”), so that by the time she reached his room, there was no need for her to knock but only to open the door and say, “There you are.”

What did she want of him? The only person with whom he could share that question was Tammy, but Tammy was at this time greatly preoccupied. Minnie had returned from Copenhagen, bringing the Doktor, who was just too marvelous to leave behind. They all became very excited about him: he had evolved a completely new set of techniques which, for the first time in the history of mankind, harnessed scientific method to the cause of spiritual attainment. This called for arduous training and was altogether a far cry from Ma's homely little get-togethers in her house in New Delhi, where she had talked a bit, sung a bit, burned incense, and performed some harmless miracles. Minnie laughed at herself now for ever having been taken in by Ma; but she explained to Tammy that it was because they all had such personal difficulties—were such lost souls—that they had grasped at the easy security offered to them by this matriarchal figure.

Tammy was as enthusiastic about the new teacher as Minnie and the other friends, and she spent long hours with him in the place that had been taken for him in a monolithic ultra-modern new apartment tower. She came in later than ever at night, but Ross was always awake and waiting for her to come in to talk to him. Ross loved seeing her the way she was at that midnight hour—alternately very serious or laughing at herself for not being able to express what she felt in anywhere near adequate words. Well, he loved seeing her anyway, always had done. It seemed to him that she hadn't changed much over the years: although now in her twenties, she was still the same budding young girl, impossibly light, swaying with every breeze of emotion rippling through her, her head rearing heavenward from the stem of her neck like a flower thirsting for rain or dew. Year after year he had expected her to fall in love—any day now, he thought, that would be the subject of her breathless confession: but though the emotion was ineffably there, it never was for a person but always for an idea, for a promise of something beyond what one human being could receive from another. He was disappointed but realized that he would have been more so if she had rested, or arrested, her yearning in some ordinary young man.

When Minnie had first brought Ma to be their guide, Tammy had spoken of her in the same terms that she now spoke of the Doktor: but by this time they found it incredible that they had once believed
in that fat old gypsy woman smelling out the apartment with her hair-oil and fried messes. Now when Ross asked, “How long is she staying?”—and he asked several times more—Tammy said, “Oh, the poor old thing, where would she go?” But the last time he asked—for Ma was really getting on his nerves—Tammy said, “Well, if you want, we can tell her to go,” quite carelessly, and then she continued at once talking to him about the Doktor.

After a while, Ross interrupted: “Should we tell her?”

Tammy said, “I said if you want. It's up to you . . . You see, Ross, his method is to reach that point in us where we merge with the universal—”

“Do you want me to tell her?”

“Yes, but do it in a nice way, please, Ross.”

Although the idea of Ma being endowed with special powers had always struck him as ludicrous, he had been ready to grant her some form of heightened feminine intuition. But now it seemed to him that she was exceptionally obtuse. He only had to think back on his own years of living on sufferance in other people's houses to remember how acute and immediate had been his perception of the moment when he was no longer wanted. But Ma didn't notice a thing: every day she settled in a bit more happily—she gave herself oil baths, she walked around in her slatternly housecoat, she hardly ever bothered to wear her teeth, and she sang her hymns of praise now not only in the morning but all day long.

And she seemed to be following him everywhere; even when he stood in line for the cinema, she was suddenly there. He often went to see films with subtitles, which he didn't need to read—he spoke many European languages—and she couldn't read fast enough, so that she nudged him to explain till he got up in disgust and left halfway. She followed him willingly, for she found these sort of films very dull; whereas she hugely enjoyed the other kind that played in the big picture palaces where popcorn was to be had. Here she only nudged him to help himself out of the giant tub she had bought, and if she liked what she saw on the screen, she cheered and clapped, or she cried out warnings to the hero to guard against the menace behind him. All the time, while she was engrossed in innocent amusement, he thought of how to tell her to leave; once or twice he began to approach the subject but in ways too devious to succeed. Then he would continue plotting—he knew of so many openings,
of excuses he had often heard himself, of how other guests were expected. And in rehearsing these openings, he found his thoughts constantly occupied with her; and suddenly she would appear beside him, a scented, solid, brilliant embodiment of these thoughts.

“Have you told her yet?” Tammy would ask. And one day Tammy said, “You'll
have
to tell her.” She made it sound so urgent that he began to protest the difficulty of turning someone out of doors.

“But you said you couldn't stand her another minute.”

“Maybe I could.”

“Poor old Ma,” Tammy said. “We should never have brought her.”

“Yes, but now that she's here—”

He and Tammy looked at each other: they both felt bad about the situation. Yet he saw something else in Tammy's face besides guilt. Her eyes danced, the corners of her mouth twitched—he felt that she wanted him to know something and was deliberately suppressing it, like a beautiful secret she was keeping not from but for him.

Meanwhile, he and Ma spent more and more time together. He ceased to avoid her and even began to seek her out, to find opportunities to broach the subject of her departure. She had so much to say that it was difficult for him to say anything at all. Occasionally he got as far as opening his mouth to speak, but never much further. He was by no means the only person she addressed. Often, in the park, she called out to strangers, though they might be too sunk in drink or misery to hear her. In the coffee-house she spoke to everyone within earshot; but here she was listened to eagerly, for she had built up a little reputation. Stella had undergone her operation and was on her feet again, which was ascribed to Ma's good offices, so that now others also sought her advice. She was very ready to give it, whether it was to the cook—a young man suffering from boils who was breaking up with his live-in friend—or salesgirls from the neighboring discount store who came hurrying between customers with their urgent problems. Ma dealt with everyone in the manner of one used to hearing strange and even terrible things without letting herself be overwhelmed by them. This attitude had a soothing
effect; and so did her words of reassurance, even though they had no basis in fact, or any bearing on the situations to which she applied them. She was also ready to give more advanced treatment, consisting of whispered spells or little talismans secretly passed under the café table; for the most drastic cases she performed some circling motions with her arms and then cracked the knuckles of both hands against her temples.

Patients began to arrive at Tammy's apartment. Ma seemed to take this for granted—she was used to people in need seeking her out—and she had given orders to the doormen (they too sometimes consulted her) to let everyone in who asked for her. Her visitors sat rather shyly in the darkened drawing room; it was a grander place than they were used to, though dusty and derelict. The brocade upholstery, already frayed and worn, now began to split open with people sitting on it, and a couple of antique chairs collapsed from the same cause. Ma clicked her tongue at the damage done to Tammy's property, and once Ross found her up on a ladder repairing a curtain that had been torn from its rings (long ago, when he had chased Grace around the room to get some pills away from her).