The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place (24 page)

People
magazine sent a photographer, who took pictures of the girls in the towers and told Mrs. Kaplan that the magazine would run the story the following week under the heading,
OUTWARD AND UPWARD BOUND FOR ART
. Mrs. Kaplan posed at the base of Tower Three, with two of the girls (Heather and Berkeley) visible. She smiled at the camera and for the cameraman. Jake's picture was not there at all. Neither was mine or the Uncles'.

CNBS, the national all-news cable channel, put Peter's interview on what they called a “loop,” so that at least once every two hours, he got prime-time coverage. Of course, he was convincing. And adorable. In
the week that followed, he got three marriage proposals and inquiries about job possibilities from fourteen recent art history graduates. He loved all the fame and fortune except for the marriage proposals. They depressed him.

Ever on the lookout for a way to outbroadcast the national broadcasters and to keep the story going, Holly Blackwell pursued City Hall for background on the story. Her many attempts to reach the mayor were unsuccessful. He was in South Carolina attending the National Mayoral Conference at the Hilton Head Golf and Country Club and was unavailable. His spokesperson said that the mayor would not have a statement until Monday, and, of course, there would be no demolition until he returned and had an opportunity to review both sides of the issue.

And that was time enough to stall.

And time enough for the Meadowlarks to get back to Talequa for visiting day.

And that was Phase Two.

W
ith Phases One and Two—
STOP
and
STALL
—completed, Loretta Bevilaqua saved the towers, just as she had promised she would.

Infinitel bought them.

—
Whenever them big shots at Infinitel hear
Bevilaqua,
they know it means something

Loretta Bevilaqua knew that the next big thing in the telephone communications business would be wireless—cellular—telephones. Cell phones are little radios that need towers to hold antennas to repeat signals from cell to cell, across a town or a state or from sea to shining sea.

Loretta Bevilaqua knew that giving the towers a useful purpose would not make them any more welcome in Old Town than they had been when they were useless. She also knew that for her purposes, the towers would function better if they were positioned at an elevation higher than downtown.

On Loretta Bevilaqua's recommendation, Infinitel
moved the towers to property that the company owned high on a hill above the university campus.

And them big shots knew that money could not buy the excellent free publicity Infinitel got from CNBS and
People
magazine.

U
ncle Morris drove me to the airport to meet my parents upon their return from Peru.

I had not seen them for a month, and I was excited. I had a lot to tell them.

That evening when I went downstairs to join them in the family room before dinner, I hoped to have them all to myself. But sitting on the sofa beside my father was a young woman who had been a graduate student of my mother's. I looked from my dad to that woman to my mother, and I knew that we would never again be the family we once had been.

I understood then why my parents had chosen to go to Peru without me. They needed time without me. Time to see if there was love enough between them—just them.

I
never saw Mrs. Kaplan again, and except for Berkeley Sims, I never saw any of the Meadowlarks again either. Berkeley registered at Clarion State University the same semester I did. We saw each other occasionally—even had lunch together a couple of times—but no friendship ever grew out of it. After one semester, she dropped out of school to become a massage therapist. About a year ago, she sent me a copy of
People
magazine that featured her as the masseuse preferred by all the major male Hollywood stars. She had attached a Post-it to the page and written,
My second fifteen minutes of fame!
I saved the magazine.

—
American woman in space

I
have saved one other issue of
People
magazine. It is dated the same year as the one Berkeley sent me. I was glancing through it as I waited in line at the supermarket checkout. I bought the magazine along with my grapefruit juice and Boursin cheese when I saw it contained an article about a certain Anastasia Mouganis, who, as a
member of a volunteer group of NASA employees, answers queries sent in to NASA's Web site. The caption under the picture reads:

Ms. Mouganis reports that the most frequently asked question is, “How do you go to the bathroom in space?” To this query, she replies with words and pictures using her vintage Cabbage Patch doll to demonstrate how astronauts must strap themselves into the WCS (waste collection system) to compensate for zero gravity.

And there was a picture of Anastasia—a.k.a. Stacey, a.k.a. Dolly—demonstrating that she had indeed learned left from right.

—
El Niño . . . off the coast of Peru . . . caused disasters on almost every continent . . . at El Niño's peak . . . the angle of Earth shifted

Conditions off the coast of Peru caused the earth to shift but could not change the relationship between my parents.

—
on the third Monday of January

My father moved out of our house. He married that young woman as soon as his divorce from my mother was final.

—Ma Bell broke up and gave birth to several independent low-cost long-distance communications companies

Infinitel set the towers in a parklike setting on top of the hill overlooking Clarion State University. They no longer zig and zag along the property line but are clustered together inside the iron pipe fence that was reshaped to encircle them.

—
The Federal Communications Commission authorized . . . cellular phone services

Within four years of moving the towers, there were over one million cell phones in the United States, and the demand was growing.

Developers quickly saw the towers as a focal point for a new neighborhood. The main road leading up to the top was named Tower Hill Road. On either side of the hill, home builders were granted permits to carve out streets in a typical suburban pattern of curves and culde-sacs. One of those streets is called Clocktower Drive, and Alexander Place, a short street—only one block long—spans the distance between Morris Avenue and Rose Way. It is a nice neighborhood. Definitely upscale.

Gwendolyn and Geoffrey Klinger continue to keep their law offices at number 17 Schuyler Place, but seven
years ago they started a family and moved. They bought a house on Alexander Place. Three of the young lawyers from Hapgood, Hapgood & Martin also moved to Tower Hill. So there they are, living in the neighborhood of the towers they had fought to destroy.

Like the Klingers, when my father and the woman he married started a family, they moved. They have a son named Connor, whom I happen to like a lot. They live at 184 Tower Hill Road in the very shadow of the towers that my father once called “useless” and “superfluous.”

Infinitel appointed Jake as official conservator for the towers. He says that the job combines his best talents—janitor and artist. Jake visits Tower Hill at least once each season to do maintenance on the paint and the pendants.

Jake and Loretta Bevilaqua got married the summer after we saved the towers. I figure that he wanted to put to good use his experience at dealing with older, bossy women who have no sense of humor. There is the temptation to think of them as Mr. and Mrs. Bevilaqua because “for business she stays a Bevilaqua.” Jake does his serious artwork at a studio in New York. I've never asked, but I'm sure Loretta pays the rent.

Last year there was a retrospective of the works of Jacob Kaplan at Peter Vanderwaal's museum in the Sheboygan Art Center. I flew to Wisconsin for the opening reception. Loretta took the time to attend. Even though I am as old now as Jake was then, the sutures holding the nip he took in my twelve-year-old heart loosened and wept when I saw him with her. I tried to like her. After all, she did save the towers; but she uses up all the air in the room, so I save my breath.

Peter has had his left ear pierced twice more, so with a three-hole punch, he has tripled his sparkle, and he is gaining weight, so with his added girth there is even more of him to be adorable.

The second summer after the towers were in place, the Uncles liquidated their inventory of “fun” watches and
occhiali antisole
and retired from the Time Zone. Uncle Alex continued to edit his roses, and Uncle Morris tended his peppers, but the two thirds of the backyard that had once been the Tower Garden was bare—planted with grass, nothing more. And where the iron pipe fence once stood there are hedgerows of privet to separate 19 Schuyler Place from its neighbors at 17 and 21.

My uncles lived long enough to see a new passion of rose roses climb and entwine itself along the fence. After
they closed the Time Zone, Uncle Alex would take Tartufo to the top of Tower Hill for his evening walk. In the summer when the days were long and there was some remaining light after they had finished dinner, Uncle Morris would go with him. Their eccentricities—the Borsalino, the truffle hunting, the perpetual hand-waving arguments—were famous by then, and at dinner parties, people who lived on Tower Hill would tell each other of Rose Brothers—sightings. It became something of a contest to see who had the best story to tell. One resident of Clocktower Drive insisted that he had seen one of the Uncles jogging, wearing a warmup suit. But everyone suspected that the teller of that tale was in need of a designated sighter.

When Tartufo died, by special permission of the city and of Infinitel, his ashes were scattered inside the fence at the base of the towers. He never found a truffle.

My uncles died within six weeks of each other. Alex, the younger, died first.

I inherited the house at 19 Schuyler Place. Like others who own these old houses, I converted the living room and dining room into offices and rewired the whole house for my computer consulting business. And like the Klingers, I remodeled the kitchen and added a room and a terrace in the back, but unlike them, I still live here.

I sleep in the small bedroom upstairs, the one with the “very distinguished, quite elegant,” bedroom suite in genuine French provincial style. Its white is now as yellow as its gold-tone accents. But it is the rose rose ceiling that keeps me here. In a section in the far corner near the window that once looked out on the Tower Garden, there is a patch of a forgotten grid that is sketched but not painted. Jake has often offered to finish painting it, but I never let him.

The year after my uncles died, the city council commissioned a marker to be placed on the verge of the state highway just before the turn to Tower Hill Road. The marker explains that the towers were built by Alexander and Morris Rose and that they had been moved from their original location in Old Town. Even though the paragraph on the bronze marker is long and the lettering small, most people can read it, not because they are farsighted or rapid readers, but because most cars slow down as soon as the towers come into view.

From a distance, they strike the skyline like steel lace. Not until you get closer do they take on color—many colors—from orange sherbet to lemon and lime. No longer can anyone—except telephone linemen—stand under them and look up and farther up and watch the light hit the sheared blue surface of a shard of
an old Noxzema jar or see a piece of amber Daum crystal dance in the light. The towers stand tall against the sky, silent symbols of a new neighborhood until a breeze comes from the direction of the old Glass houses, and then they sing a song of witness to the old.

So the history of the towers has not come to an end.

But the telling of it must.

Here.

Now.