The Rags of Time (2 page)

For years the woman who lives across from the Park recalled the shame of her relief when the foreign student left her college room, shame at her inability to feel nothing more than embarrassment, to wonder at—the harsh soap of suet and lye embedded under the princely ring as though the honored guest in the magenta beanie joined in a humble washday task. Had the woman found other children in the dead of night to listen to the calm recitation of her story? Today the warm dormitory room appears again with the two friends who went their separate ways by the end of that year, the poster on the wall—
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
—Sargent’s little girls in white summer dresses, their Japanese lanterns illuminating a garden beyond lovely. And there on the floor, the discarded textbook in which the Greek chorus mourned what had come to pass as in the chant—
We are outraged
—or warns what will come to pass, but tragedy had gone out of business. Her own initials were incised on her tea mug, MK—a gift from her father—a gruff, sentimental man, who never wanted her to grow up, leave home with new clothes—a lumpy rag rug, gauzy curtains fluttering near the hot coil of the burner.

 

 

Not much for mirrors, and not happy with my attempt at third person. In my book, confession begs for absolution, but my sins are not wiped away like sweat when you’ve run too fast or too far; and now I can’t run at all. Today I am outraged by the use of camouflage in the desert. Disguises nothing, you’ve noticed? With sophisticated surveillance devices, there’s no need for blotches simulating mud and sand. Camouflage of a sort is worn by the Cheerleader, his business suit, navy or gray. You’ve seen him bounce down the steps of Air Force One, sprightly, airy. Crossing the tarmac, he waves us off, the palm of his hand denying access as we watch the evening news. Thumbs-up, he gives us the finger; his tight-lipped smile, mum’s the word. The boy who painted our fence has gone to his war—a kid who worked in a toy store at the mall, had no future in that line and asked what I worked at since I am seldom at the little house in the country. I showed him a book. He took it in his hands. Bewildered, he laughed as though at a useless brick, slick and lighter than the ones that edge the front path but do not keep weeds out of the garden. It’s a book with false moves written at the turn of this century, not this sketchbook, album, field notes of the past and passing days.

I’m comfortable with first person, don’t mind drawing back the velvet curtain, coming onstage. I was born in the city of P. T. Barnum, the impresario who never feared facing his audience even when the music was too highbrow or the freak show failed to amaze. On
Good Morning America,
a marine amputee is learning to walk on metal stilts to carry on in our three-ring circus.

I have my troupe, my regulars, bring them center stage as they are needed, one by two by three, duets and line dancing, solo turns throughout the seasons, not lives of the saints, yet not lives of the sinners. The improbable mathematician, his lapsed artist wife, the foreign student with the heavy rope of hair who appeared one night vowing never to return to Innsbruck where she grew up in extraordinary comfort. Call them my cast: in shameless imitation of Papa Haydn and Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons,
I give you Sissy, a waif with golden hair and a bad habit; the Jesuit cousin—godless man of god; Audubon, who killed, stuffed and gave life through his art to our American birds; my parents in their molto adagio, who have long been defenseless. And you, brilliant in your supporting role, flipping the calendar back to take as good as you get, as though we are still in our prime. I look forward to your corrections, to my reply as I turn to the next blank page.

You advise me against bringing the Cheerleader into play, writing of here and now, allowing editorials to seep into my stories, spoiled fish wrapped in yesterday’s
Times.

You say:
Outrage is a bumper sticker, one of many sentiments parked side-by-side in Kmart Plaza. Proud parent of an honor student at Monument Valley High. Honk if you love Borges.

 

 

 

There’s a picture of Charles Dickens sitting at his desk. He’s not writing, not addressing his next cause—illiteracy, pollution, tax laws, copyright, child labor: the list is long. His biographer tells us he’s imagining. Time out to conjure a story. His characters paper the walls, enacting their memorable scenes. A miniature girl sits on his knee; asking what next, she looks to her maker. Will she marry after many trials, or be awarded the famous deathbed scene? This picture of Dickens is on a card which reads ALL GOOD WISHES OF THE SEASON, a bland greeting he’d never put his name to, yet I have recently posted it above my desk to remind me how inadequate my dreams. Boz, partner me in a pantomime. Hold me aloft in a cold season. You’d be outraged at our accidental killing of Arab girls in a cement block school. Dip into the ink pot, Lover, imagine more than my bitter words. Write a gay or plaintive story about your desk to be auctioned this year, proceeds for the children’s hospital in Great Ormond Street to which you contributed ten pounds, a theatrical skit, and your precious time.

 

 

Today I forgot the name Panofsky but remembered a review I wrote a long time ago in which I took issue with
Slaughterhouse-Five,
a war novel that became famous, much praised. Vonnegut was imprisoned in Dresden during the firebombing,
carnage unfathomable,
just months before the Allies won that war. I could not begin to understand how the writer worked his story in a somewhat comic vein. Wall of flame, overkill, body count, his banal refrain—
So it goes.
In honesty, I was still something of that girl, flannel nightgown buttoned to the neck, listening one night to the seductive report of a survivor, to a foreign student who could not guess my . . . emotional incapacity.

 

 

In God We Trust:
the national motto was first used during the Civil War, when religious sentiment was running high. The Secretary of the Treasury responded to pleas of the devout that it be printed on our currency.

Indian Summer: a few days of blessed warmth after the cold weather has set in; or the time when the Indians harvested their crops; or a time before frost when they attacked European settlements storing their food for winter. The settlers retaliated with cumbersome muskets. So it goes.

I live in the city. I share the garden across the street. If you would like to know with maximum honesty about my loves or further shame, my faltering heart, it’s none of your business. My brother is switching channels, expecting the bombed mosque in Mosul will be shown in more detail. Was it them? Or us? No matter, he is outraged. We all are. My husband, who works with numbers—market up, market down—figures to the nth dollar the military contracts dealt out to the Cheerleader’s friends doctoring the books, the outrageous rip-offs. There will be a candlelight vigil. We will stand with our homemade placards: WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER. Song, piety, mulled cider in the Park. It will only be effective if we wait till the sun has set, well after dark.

1929, the year of my conception. What were they thinking of, bringing another hungry mouth into the world? Perhaps not thinking—her red hair aflame on the pillow? I must not make a drama of that cool October night, perhaps Columbus Day, in the little house with its peaked gin gerbread roof and curlicue hasps on the door. The cottage had just been built for our middle class comfort, for a night of their fumbling and fondling under the blanket in the front bedroom that faced North Avenue. In the throes of discovery they were blessedly not thinking. Who am I to say fumbling at this very late date, casting my mother in the role of shy schoolteacher rescued from spinsterhood by the brash boy detective? I have portrayed them too often, Loretta and Bill, made them my subjects.

I throw down the book I was reading, nothing to do with an October night in Bridgeport at the start of the Great Depression. The false memory of my begetting was a digression, an off-bounds stop on the way to a disturbing story. This very day I had searched the pages of a novel I’d written as though checking an old bankbook to reckon where I spent foolishly, what interest accrued that I might go on with and ended up broke, wishing dramatically to have never been born. I was attempting to make some connection, this daybook with my rants against the war to the book thrown aside. To my discredit, that love story was of the Second World War, yet all I called up, attempting to balance the account, was to switch the scene to my parents’ bedroom, muslin curtains flapping in a welcome breeze while I read
War and Peace
in a creaking wicker chair. Why was I allowed to invade their space through the long Summer days while I read Tolstoy’s great work? I was fourteen years old.

Today I can no longer look at my war story, the novel with the gold medallion on the cover declaring my prize. I put on an old black coat with the buttons dangling, as though covering tattered jeans might conceal the shame of conjuring my parents’ embrace on the four-poster. Is the coat needed on this warm day?

Your topcoat, Mimi. Better safe than sorry
.

I put words in my mother’s mouth while Bill strikes a match, cups his hand around yet another Lucky. In this way we keep track of each other, though they’re long gone.

Just brought the fellow across the state line into the jurisdiction, don’t get a hold on your lefty complaint. This rendition?
I set myself up for their corrections, begging their care, their tolerance, my indulgence of the past, I suppose. The picture of him in the
Bridgeport Post,
Bill, plump, choirboy handsome, the jaunty brim of his felt hat casting a shadow on his smile. Handcuffed to a mobster of note:
Simple police work, extradition.

So in the old black coat I headed to the Park across from our apartment house designed in ’29, a year of public and personal disaster. I aimed to cancel my debit column with fresh air, bracing city views. Just a walk, yet, waiting for the light to change on Central Park West, I felt I was off on a redemptive journey. Turning to see our apartment house as though for the last time, I noted the familiar storybook façade—the lofty terraces, crenellated towers, fake balconies and dungeon gridwork of each window. Do you recall the grande dame at a meeting in the lobby after we’d all bought our co-op shares and could now think of the golden concrete bulk with silvery doors as our property? In a voice steady with the assurance of old money, she brandished her cane, protesting any alteration to the building that would not be a landmark till 1985. Most particularly she defended the casement windows that screeched open on their hinges quite easily enough for men who’d lost everything in the market to jump to their deaths on Black Tuesday. Not accurate, for it would have been, at the earliest, the winter of ’31 when the first tenants moved in, but she was grand with a blue rinse permanent wave and bright lipstick of a past era. And who knows if it was only a story made up in defense of our iron windows, which, though not sturdy, are handsome to this day?

You said
: There’s no one among us to challenge her. The small triumph of the survivor.

I walked into the Park slowly, as advised, and headed straight for the slope running up to the Reservoir newly enclosed with a black iron fence, replica of the Calvert Vaux original. There was not a ripple on the water. The ever present gulls squatting on the pipe that spans the Reservoir appeared two dimensional, so many ducks in a shooting gallery. For a long moment no one in sight, all the better to cherish my melancholy brought on by eavesdropping on my parents’ bedroom with its crisp dresser scarf and the wicker chair in which I spent most of a summer reading
War and Peace
for the love story, skimming the pages of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, understanding less of that carnage than I did of the
Bridgeport Post
mapping the D-Day Invasion, or the White Russian Division advancing on the Germans. That war progressed on the nightly news my father listened to, head tilted toward the speaker of our bulbous mahogany console, while I set the table in the kitchen. When I finished my chore, I’d come into the living room to hear the roundup; then my father took his place at the head of the table and softened the bloody events of this day for my mother, who absorbed the news in silence, then took off her apron to serve our supper. One night, with adolescent bravado, I declared that the defeat of the Soviets at Minsk was much like the fall of Napoleon’s Grand Army in the very same city, history repeating itself as our table talk mixed tidbits of neighborhood gossip, my brother’s mastery of Latin declensions and my father’s unpatriotic grumble at his paltry serving of meat.

Now, Bill.
How often she’d sneak her chop or chicken thigh onto his plate.

Taking up my route round the Reservoir, I determined to leave behind these girlish memories of war, more honest than my invention of Nazi espionage in the novel I’d thrown aside. Looking to the first lap of my forbidden journey, I saw the runners coming upon me, a full cadre of men and women in red jerseys training for some competition. Their leader swiveled his gleaming shaved head to check on the pack falling farther and farther behind. It is only in recalling the moment of the runners straining to catch up with this lean man wound tight, clearing me out of his way, that I clung to the fence, saw in the tranquil Reservoir a mirror image of the bright sky that banished all thought of my troubling intrusion on the lives of Loretta and Bill, subject to my telling their tales. In a Chaplinesque strut, sure to leave my fraudulent war novel behind, a love affair trumped by betrayal, I began my route around the Reservoir Track. The body took hold with its thoughtless demands. The level course is rimmed with limp mullein in this season and untidy wild asters. I’m not part of the jogging scene. The heart that’s failed me improvises its bebop arrhythmia. I take caution as ordered, slow to a stroll, but never give in to a bench, not even as I approach the bridge joining track to parkland, where a gathering of athletes, maybe just neighborhood friends, pay court to the old runner, Alberto Arroyo. He’s at his post every fine day, some not so fine, the gold medal dangling from the patriotic ribbon round his neck. In running gear, silk shorts this crisp day. I catch sight of the swollen blue veins in his legs, fanning out on the weathered cheeks the handlebar mustache white as his gleaming halo of hair. His gestures exuberant as always, though by his side the steel cane, rubber grips on its claws. It’s said he ran the first New York Marathon, indeed was a founder. Who knows if that story is true or with time became legend? The time before the old legs gave out, before he sported the Mylar toga each cold day, conserving body heat at the end of no particular race, before he became a figure of reverence at the South Pumping Station, fashioning himself as local patron saint, grandee of the Running Track.