The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place (13 page)

I waited in her cubicle. On her desk was a picture of my mother, Peter, and Loretta Bevilaqua standing in front of Tower Two. My mother and Loretta looked to be about my age; they had no breasts. They were mugging for the camera. Peter was sitting on top of the tower, which was not much taller than either of the girls, and he had a hand on the top of each of their heads.

Mrs. Vanderwaal returned, and before she could say
dialysis
one more time, I asked about Peter.

“Peter actually got into his line of work because of those towers.”

“What work is that, Mrs. Vanderwaal?”

“Museum work. He went to Brown University. That's the Ivy League, you know.”

I didn't know, but I nodded. “Where is he now?”

“He lives in Wisconsin. Town by the name of Sheboygan. He's director of an art center there.”

“I would like to call him.”

“Yes, you should. I'll give you his number,” she said. “Such a shame about the towers. I should have called him about them long before this.” She wrote a number down on a Post-it and handed it to me. “These Post-its are wonderful. I think they were invented in Wisconsin. No, maybe it was Michigan. I know it was somewhere out there in the Midwest, so even if it was Michigan, it would be close to Peter in Wisconsin.”

I asked about Loretta Bevilaqua.

“I don't know too much about her since she's grown. I know she got married”—here Mrs. Vanderwaal leaned in close to me and whispered—“and divorced. I think she has some kind of big job in New York City. A real career woman. Right in Manhattan. I heard that in one month she pays so much rent that it would go for a whole year's taxes if she lived in
Epiphany. Her mother is still living here. Not in the old neighborhood, of course, but she's still local. Assisted living, you know. You can call her. She'll tell you how to get in touch.”

A skinny young man with a health-food-style, vegetarian-skimpy beard approached holding a few long sheets of paper with ratchet marks on both long sides. He handed them to Mrs. Vanderwaal and then disappeared without uttering a word. “This is for you, dear,” she said, separating the pages and tapping their sides until all the edges were even. “Your uncle was eloquent,” she said as she handed them to me. “Absolutely eloquent. But, of course, it did no good. No good at all.”

I put the Post-it on the top page of the transcript and got up to go. Mrs. Vanderwaal leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “In this town, my dear, the lawyers
always
win.”

“But there's
always
a first time, Mrs. Vanderwaal.”

“Right you are, my dear. I'm proud of you for trying. Don't forget to turn in your badge on your way out.”

—
the best monument

I
found the same bench in Town Square. I sat down and read Uncle Alex's statement to the city council:

The city says that we built three tall structures without a permit. The city refers to them as
structures.
If you'll permit me, like everyone else, I'll call them
towers.

The city says that without a building permit, the towers are illegal. And the city also says that we couldn't have gotten a permit unless we had a plan. The city says, “No plan, no permit.”

Does it surprise you that every house in what you are calling Old Town was built without a permit? Look it up. You'll see. The Tappan Glass Works owned the land where they built our house and every house on Schuyler Place, and all the other houses in the neighborhood were built without permits. The glass factory built them for their workers, and they built them without permits because they owned the land, and they were the boss, and nobody was going to tell the boss what it could do and not do on its own land.

Now the city council has declared that the Glass houses are a zone. And the zone has a
code. When we started the towers, my brother and I, we had no zoning code—or zip code or area code, either, for that matter. We had an address: 19 Schuyler Place. And we had a neighborhood. We loved our neighborhood and everything in it—our houses and our streets paved with bricks in the herringbone pattern. We loved the chestnut trees that lined both sides of the street. The branches of the trees make a canopy from the odd-numbered side to the even. And we loved our backyards, too. Some of the backyards had vegetable gardens of cabbages and tomatoes. Some had gardens of hollyhocks and irises, and in one of those backyards there was a garden of towers. The neighbors shared the cabbages and holly-hocks and Mrs. Bevilaqua's tomatoes. Mrs. Bevilaqua's tomatoes were so special, we called them by the name
pomo d'oro,
“golden apples.” The neighbors loved those tomatoes. The neighbors loved the towers too. You see, when we were a neighborhood, there was not a zoning code, there was an unwritten code. That unwritten code was: Love thy neighbor. But when we became a zone, we got a zoning code, which is written into law. And the city
council says that the towers don't belong inside the zone because they don't fit the code.

Since we are now a zone and not a neighbor-hood, we also don't have neighbors. We have
home owners.
And just as the zone wrote a code, the home owners formed an
association.
The Home Owners Association. Very official. It has bylaws. The Home Owners Association says that the towers lower property values for the professionals who have bought these old houses as an investment. When the Glass Works put the houses up for sale, people like my brother and me, we bought these Glass houses to live in, not to invest in.

But now the Redevelopment Authority is saying something worse. The Redevelopment Authority is saying that the towers don't fit the history of Old Town. My brother and I wonder, How can anyone—any
authority
—have the authority to say that the towers are not part of history? How can anyone say that something that happened, didn't happen? My brother and I ask, Where
does this history begin? The Redevelopment Authority answers that history begins with the first house in the Old Town
zone.
So then my brother and I ask, Where does history end? The Redevelopment Authority answers that history ends when the first permit begins. In other words, the history of Old Town begins when the Glass Works built the houses and ends when the towers begin.

How can you say that? History has no end. As soon as I say this word
history,
it is part of history.

No one should be allowed to take away someone's history.
No one.

My brother and I ask you to do one thing: Don't take away the history of the towers. Instead, take a good look at it. And if you look, really look, you will see that the towers fit the times and the zone and that the history of the towers is part of the new Old Town.

I put the pages down and stared at the courthouse.
When you get older,
édes
Margitkám, you'll realize that all
you have is time. You have time and your side of history. And that's all you have.
One by one, events of recent history fell into place.

The Uncles would not be building the fourth tower because it really would be a waste of time, and there never would be lemon and lime sherbet to go with the orange because all maintenance on the towers would be a waste of time too.

The Uncles had not wanted me to stay with them because they didn't want me to witness the destruction of the towers that I loved so much. And they couldn't bring themselves to tell me because they loved me too much.

And now Tartufo too made sense.

Uncle Alex didn't really care if Tartufo found a truffle. He had gone to Italy and bought Tartufo when all this legal wrangling started. He wanted someplace to go, something to do in the evenings when he would have been working on the towers. He didn't want Uncle Morris to approve of Tartufo or his truffle hunting. Like the path between their roses and peppers, the Uncles needed this difference to unite them.

And now the trip to Texas made sense too. They had gone there not because Uncle Alex wanted to prove that Tartufo could find a truffle or because Uncle Morris cared about the eight hundred dollars a pound that
truffles might bring, but because they wanted to get out of town. They wanted to get away from the community that had cast them out. They did not prefer the
warm companionship
of the Home Owners Association and the
friendly guidance
of the city council.

I
stood on the even-numbered side of Schuyler Place and studied number 19. There was a slight breeze—too high and too slight to feel—but enough to make the pendants on the towers dance. Their sound floated above my head. Why didn't their music work for everyone?

I looked over at number 21, at the tasteful wooden sign that said

HAPGOOD, HAPGOOD & MARTIN
ATTORNEYS AT LAW

Hapgood had said that the towers were a blight on Old Town. He didn't like the towers because they lowered his property value. The story at number 17 was different. Gwendolyn and Geoffrey Klinger lived there, and they hated the towers because of me. It was my fault. Totally.

—
The story at number 17

On the first day of spring vacation last year, I arrived at Schuyler Place and found Uncle Alex out in the yard
pruning his roses. He called it editing. He always waited for the forsythia to bloom before he edited. He always said, “What you take away is as important as what you leave, Margitkám,” and then he would add, “and what you take away makes what you leave more important.”

Epiphany was far enough north that sometimes the forsythia came into bloom on dim, gray days when the skies and the temperature—everything except the calendar and the forsythia—said,
winter.
But on this, my first day of spring vacation, the air was so clear and the sky so bright that the forsythia seemed to cast a yellow halo in the air above it. I shaded my eyes with my hand as I watched Uncle edit his roses with pruning shears and a small saw.

Gwendolyn Klinger called to me over the fence and asked if she could talk to me about something. She always spoke just above a whisper, and she always made me feel as if I caused global warming by speaking too loud. So in her presence, as often as I could, I nodded.

“Can we go inside?” she whispered.

I nodded yes.

She sat down on the sofa in the Uncles' living room. Gwendolyn Klinger always wore sincere natural fibers and no makeup. I sat on a chair on the opposite side of the room and concentrated. She patted the sofa cushion
next to her and said, “Come here, Margaret. I need to read your body language.”

I did as requested. I sat so close to her that I saw the irises of her eyes whittle to pinpoints. I whispered, “What is it?”

“Margaret Rose,” she said in her natural voice, which was not much louder than a whisper but was as moist as a French movie star's, “I know you are starting your spring vacation. I also know that you like to spend time with your uncles when you are out of school.” I nodded, wondering where all this was leading. “Will you do me a favor?” Before I could answer, Gwendolyn reached out and took my hands and folded them into hers—like a hand sandwich. “For Geoffrey and me? This means as much to him as it does to me.”

“What is it?” I asked, hushed, worried.

Unlike my uncles, who were in business together but separately and who ran the household together but separately, Gwendolyn and Geoffrey Klinger were as together as the biblical Ruth and Naomi, except they were of opposite gender. They were together in all endeavors. The law, remodeling their house, decorating their offices, cooking, baking. Everything. Gwendolyn said, “Geoffrey and I are going away for a week. There's a conference on torts in Tucson. . . .“

“There's a whole conference on tortes?” I asked,
allowing my voice to rise. I knew they liked to cook and bake, but I couldn't imagine two lawyers going all the way to Arizona to attend a conference on tortes. “Uncle Alex can probably teach you everything you need to know about tortes, Mrs. Klinger. He bakes a Dobos torte and a Sacher torte that could take a prize and—”

Gwendolyn Klinger smiled benevolently. “No, Margaret dear, these torts are
T-O-R-T-S.
They are legal cases, like when one person sues another for wrongful acts willfully done.”

“I thought you meant the kind of cakes that are called tortes.”

“I know you did, dear, but that has an
e
on the end.
T-O-R-T-E
,” she said, at last unwrapping the hand sandwich so that she could pat my hand. I pulled both my hands away—slowly, so as to not cause any offense—and moved to the far end of the sofa. “Geoffrey and I thought we'd like to stay in Arizona a few extra days as a little vacation, but we need someone to take care of a little something for us. Will you?”

I wondered why a grown woman would say
little
so much, but I nodded yes.

Gwendolyn lowered her head and stretched her neck to read my body language. “Sure?” she asked.

Not at all sure I meant it, I said, “Sure.”

She reached for my hand again, but I decided to twist my earring. (Getting my ears pierced had been my birthday present for turning ten.) I waited.

Gwendolyn said, “We need you to feed our starter. It's not like it will die if you don't, but it is very important to Geoffrey and me that you feed it. It's so new, so very new; it needs a little extra care.”

“I think you ought to tell me what it is I'll be feeding.” Gwendolyn looked down at her lap and said, “It's our starter.”

Well, I thought, if I heard right, she's talking about
starts,
not
stoats,
so it's probably not a ferret. I certainly hoped it wasn't a ferret. I had heard that some people were getting ferrets. I didn't want to feed a ferret. I also didn't want to feed a hamster or a gerbil or any variety of mouse. I didn't even like Mickey.