The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place (8 page)

“Mother, listen to me, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I think you'd be wise to drop your passive-aggressive analysis.”

“Even if you don't agree with me, the camp nurse does.”

“Oh, Mother!” he exclaimed. “Are you talking about Louise Starr?”

“I most certainly am.”

“What does that great authority on child behavior conclude about our Bartleby?” Even though he wanted to keep his voice level, he could hear for himself that it had an edge.

“She reported that the child is simply uncooperative.
Simply uncooperative
is just an old-fashioned way of saying
passive-aggressive.”
Jake shook his head. “It seems to me, Jake, that like that Bartleby lawyer, you
are a little sympathetic to this camper, this Margaret Kane.”

“No, Mother,” Jake replied, “I would say that I am a lot sympathetic to her.” His mother picked up her shawl, wrapped it around herself, and left the cabin without saying another word.

There! He had done it. Despite wanting to be sympathetic, despite not wanting to fan the flame of her anger, he had done it. But he was angry, too. Alums: six; outsiders: two. Greed should stop where good judgment begins.

On the day that Uncle Alex negotiated a ride back to Epiphany, Mrs. Kaplan had assigned one of the kitchen staff to do the driving. But Jake, who had been doing cleanup around the office cabin and had overheard the greater part of his mother's conversation with Uncle Alex, had insisted that it be he.

J
ake and I sat together on the back steps. We looked, just looked, for a long time. Then I said, “This is where I wanted to stay while my parents are in Peru.”

Jake replied, “I can understand that. I would want to stay here too.”

It was the time of year when the big-bellied, lanternshaped peppers hung heavily on their stems and bent them low. “Uncle Morris grows the peppers,” I said, “and Uncle Alex grows the roses.”

“And the towers? Who did the towers?”

“Both of them. They've been building them for forty-five years. They are older than my mother.” I pointed to the space that zagged between the third tower and the fence and said, “There's room for a fourth.” Jake squinted and shielded his eyes to look in the direction I pointed. “It will be tall and slender so that it will fit in the space.” He studied the spot as if to visualize another tower. “Many of the pieces are ready. They're in their basement workroom.”

Jake's focus shifted up and down and slowly around, but he didn't take his eyes off the towers. Not even once. He rested his elbows on his thighs and folded his hands in front of him as if in prayer. He concentrated on the tower closest to the back porch steps. “What about the pendants?”

“Uncle Alex does those. He uses a grindstone to shape the pieces and a little drill to make the holes for the copper wire to fasten them. Uncle Morris drills the holes through the pipes where they're to be hung. They never discuss what they are going to do. They just argue over it. Every single piece. Uncle Morris asks, ‘You want it here?' And he'll point. Uncle Alex will step back and look squinty-eyed at what Uncle Morris is pointing to, and he'll say, ‘No, here,' and he'll point to a spot that is an eighth of an inch away. ‘You want it here?' Uncle Morris will say. ‘Isn't that what I said?' Uncle Alex will answer. ‘Are you sure? Because once I drill this hole, I can't
un
drill it.' Then Uncle Alex will step back again and say, ‘If you're going to be so unsure, let me think about it.' ‘I'm not unsure,
you're
the one who's unsure.' Uncle Morris will throw up his hands and say,
‘Jaj, Istenem!'
which means
Oh, my God,
which he says a lot. They're always fighting. The Uncles have been living together for as long as I've known them, which is all my life, and they've been arguing ever since. My
mother says it's worth the price of an opera ticket to watch them on pendant-hanging day. She loves the towers. So do I.”

“Only a dead soul wouldn't,” he said.

“Then that would be my father,” I said.

Jake was embarrassed. “I didn't mean . . .”

“That's all right,” I said. “My father and the Uncles have issues.”

My father thought that building the towers with clock faces that didn't tell time was a waste of it. He was as relieved as I was hurt that my uncles did not put up an argument for my staying with them. He worried that if I lived with them for four weeks, I would never again remember to turn off the lights when I left a room and would never again be on time. He complained that they couldn't keep track of keys, bills, appointments, or time. Especially time. Being on time was a religion to Father.

My father spoke of time as a conception, and the only definition of
conception
I knew meant that time was something he had fathered. He was my father, and he was also Father Time. He worried about wasting time and running out of time. Mostly, he worried about losing time. When I was little, I used to think that someday I would find a picture of his lost child Time on a milk carton. To Father, time was meant to be saved. He saved
time all the time. He never said what he did with all the time he saved, but no one ever asked because people always admire people who save time.

To the Uncles, time was meant to be spent.

When people asked my father—and I hated when they did—what he thought of the towers, he would say that they were not only “useless, superfluous, a supreme waste of time,” but also “an extravagant waste of money.”

My mother's attitude was: “Extravagant? Yes, the towers are extravagant, but that hardly makes them a waste of money. Every now and then, a person must do something simply because he wants to, because it seems to him worth doing. And that does not make it worthless or a waste of time. It's true, the towers have no function. They do not give shelter. Neither does the statue of David. They don't hold up telephone wires. Neither does the Eiffel Tower. And the rose windows of Notre Dame don't let in enough light to read fine print. But by my definition, that doesn't make them useless or superfluous either. The towers are there simply because they are worth doing. Without them, my world would be less beautiful and a lot less fun.”

A lingering sense of loyalty to my father kept me from telling Jake all of that. Instead, I asked, “Jake, have you ever seen the rose windows of Notre Dame?”

“No, I haven't.”

“They're glass, aren't they?”

“Yes. Windows usually are.”

Windows usually are.
Of course windows are glass. Embarrassed beyond words, I studied Jacob Kaplan because now that I was sure that he had neither Asperger's nor fragile X, I wondered if he had a problem with sarcasm. Chronic sarcasm could be the symptom of a syndrome—even though I didn't know the name for that syndrome—if there was a name, if there was a syndrome.

The next thing Jake said was, “I've seen pictures of the rose windows of Notre Dame in my art history courses.”

He wasn't being sarcastic. Not at all! “I've always dreamed of having a window of a rose,” I confessed.

“It's not a window of a rose,” he explained. “The traceries, the ornamental stonework that holds the colored glass in place, radiate out from a center circle like the petals of an open rose. That's why they're called rose windows.”

“If the colored glass isn't a rose, what is it?”

“At Notre Dame, one of the big rose windows has a picture of the Virgin in the center. Notre Dame means
Our Lady.
As I understand it, she is encircled by figures from the Old Testament.”

I thought about that. I said, “The figures from the Old Testament would be all right, but Our Lady wouldn't be. My uncles are Jewish.”

“So is my father,” Jake said.

“Oh, really?” I said. “I'm just the opposite. I have a Jewish mother and a Presbyterian father.”

“Well,” Jake replied, “I wouldn't say we're
opposite.
We're both half-and-half. I'd say that we are mirror images.”

That remark made me very happy, and I didn't want to add anything to it, so I didn't. Instead, I told him, “I thought that the rose windows were windows of a rose. That's what I've always wanted: a window of a rose. Rose is my middle name.”

“I know.”

“It is also my uncles' last name.”

“I know.”

“My uncles never had children, and they don't want Rose to die.”

“Neither do I,” he said. He said nothing more for a minute. He studied the towers, and then he turned to me and said, “You could have a rose ceiling, Margaret.”

I had heard about glass ceilings. They were what women in the workplace had to break through. “You don't mean glass, do you?”

“Not glass, Margaret. Paint. I could paint a rose on
your ceiling. One giant rose to cover your whole ceiling. The way I used to paint billboards.”

I sighed deeply and said, “A rose rose ceiling is exactly what I've always wished for.”

“Then you will have it,” he said emphatically. “Rose rose it will be. It will be painted in multiple shades of passionate rose.”

Multiple shades of passionate rose.
That was even more than I had hoped for.

“But I will need a scaffold.”

I said, “My uncles will make you one. They have enough pipe in the basement to make any kind you want.” I knew without asking that if I asked my uncles to make a scaffold so that I could hang the moon, their only reservation would be that they believed that I had hung it already.

“I'll start on it this week. Wednesday is my day off. I'll come every Wednesday until it's done.”

I said, “I'd hate for you to give up your day off for this.” I, of course, did not at all hate the idea of his giving up his day off to come to Schuyler Place to paint my ceiling. I loved it.

Jake replied, “I won't be giving it up, I'll be filling it up.”

I wanted to throw my arms around him and kiss him, and I would have if I had not wanted to so badly.

W
e ate in the kitchen. For as long as I could remember, the Uncles had never dined in their dining room, so the four of us crowded around an old enamel-top table. We sat on wooden folding chairs that had not been manufactured since the invention of plastic. The slats were scratched, and their color had mellowed beyond yellow to mustard. But there was a linen cloth on the table. The napkins were linen too. The dishes were china; the glasses, crystal; and the silverware was sterling. The food was served family-style from antique tureens and platters and presented with a panache that would have been the pride of any four-star restaurant in Epiphany—if Epiphany had had a four-star restaurant.

Jake could hardly wait to find out more about the towers. He started by asking when they got started.

Morris was pleased that he had asked
when
and not
why.
There was no
why.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. “I started shortly after we bought the house.”

“It was a Glass house,” Uncle Alex added.

“A glass house made of wood?” Jake asked.

“A Glass house because it was built by the Tappan Glass Works.”

Uncle Morris said, “I didn't hear this man ask you who built the house. I thought I heard him ask
when
did we start the towers.”

Looking sheepish, Uncle Alex answered, “He did. He asked
when.”

“Can I continue?”

“You can, and you may.”

“So, if I
may,”
Uncle Morris said, casting fish-eyes at his brother. “I started shortly after we moved into the house. Wilma, my wife, had died. I wanted to do something. I didn't even know what. I just knew it was not going to be small like a watch or exact like a clock. So one day I started. What I was building, I wasn't sure. An idea I had, but not a plan; so even before I decided what it was I was doing, I found out. I was building towers. They became as they grew.”

—
the Glass house

Like every other house in the neighborhood, the house at 19 Schuyler Place had been built and owned by the Tappan Glass Works. The company rented them to its workers until the factory was moved to the other side of the lake. Then the houses were sold. Like the Uncles, most of the people who bought
them were immigrants to whom owning a home meant owning a piece of America.

Every house was tall and narrow and faced the street straight on. Every house had a front porch with four steps leading up to it, a mailbox nailed to the wall by the front door, and a metal box that sat on the floor of the porch near the steps. Milkmen delivered milk in glass bottles into the metal boxes, and mailmen carried heavy leather pouches that they lightened, one letter at a time, as they walked up and then down each flight of front porch steps.