The Rags of Time (31 page)

All Gaul is divided into three parts! The Gauls didn’t succumb to ruination by way of Rome, the decadent culture. We must take note.
Her schoolroom remark hovered in the air, then:
And take care with our children
:
They’re all we’ve got. We’re finished.
That erasure of the Murrays’ ongoing lives, Joe’s pacemaker, Sue’s hip replacement, called for a change of subject.

He said:
The boy who painted our fence in the country sent us an e-mail. He’s in Afghanistan now crawling the mountains, not the Berkshire hills. I miss his simple messages ordering brushes and tarps.

One night at the Kleins’, she dozed off while Naomi enacted scenes of a Broadway musical she suffered when her sister came up from Florida.

She woke in alarm to dead silence, a hush of pity.

In the cab going home:
It can’t have been more than a moment.

It was nothing,
he said.
Naomi trashing the teen musical was tedious for us all.

He began, a stealth move, entering the back room where she worked. The lockup, as she called it, was off limits. Still, he made bold to shove books stacked on the floor to the side so she’d not trip. Colette, Marguerite Duras.

Scrap them,
she said:
I’ll never read those French women again. Licking their wounds.

All of Gertrude Stein?
Once adored.

Poor Gertie. The roundabout of her stories is too grand altogether.
Her Irish put-down pasted on Stein discards. A surfeit of biographies to go, four of Lincoln, three of President Wilson. Benjamin Franklin and V. Woolf saved; all murder mysteries of the genteel British variety out, every professorial turn and turn again that smacked of a time when she was into cultural geography, simulacra.
All that old stuff, untranscendable horizons.

Head bent to the side, he read off the titles of a potpourri concocted for a seminar. Her final time out, she’d faced off with homegrown reality—
Parents and Children, Sentimental to Scathing—
the daily bread of family life had been her concern: Dickens, Kafka, Welty, Flannery O’Connor. She had called the course an indulgence, published an offbeat piece on Rudy, the dead child of Molly and Leopold Bloom, “The Phantom of the Liffey.” Her close reading imagined the boy as a shade, most probably a suicide. Joyce wrote him into the dumb show of memory. And what did the scholars say? Go back to your tales, don’t tread on our dreams. He puts the “Phantom” offprints aside, but not on his life would he touch his wife’s clippings or postcards; or her old toys, still treasured. She had dusted them off for Christmas—a celluloid Santa, tin clown on a tightrope, windup Loop the Loop plane, a mini semaphore that properly belonged with the old train set, her brother’s. The little kids would find them under the tree, where they’d have a brief moment of attention before LEGO City was torn from its wrapping. Just that once, he made brave to tidy the discards and duplicates, then retreated to the evening news when she called him
invasive.
All in good humor of course, of course.

 

 

 

The dark red cardigan zipped right up to the neck. She should call, have it sent, shop online, but the trip to Macy’s was planned as an adventure. She plotted the day. Avoid the subway as promised. On the corner, catch the bus. Her view had been so limited to Park and apartment, to doctors’ offices, the favorite restaurant with friends. The journey midtown might now seem unknown to her, unreliable as the city dealt out to tourists on a double-decker, a bus that stopped across from the refurbished El Dorado to tell tales out of school—who’s prime time in the towers, which actor has reconciled with his wife. Old news: Faye Dunaway, the writer of a
Superman
script, Groucho Marx had all lived there, a child actor quite forgotten. Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe, golly! And Patricia McBride, the prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet, not in the guide’s spiel, the vision of her remarkable body, once upon a time, in the C/D elevator. And would they care about the woman journalist, seldom in residence, risking her life in Pakistan? Unreliable news: a member of the City Council, under investigation for misappropriation of funds, grows heritage tomatoes on his terrace. There would be such tattle, tourists in pursuit of their holiday, post-Towers New York. When she settled herself on the M10, it would pass the Park all the way to 68th, turn toward Lincoln Center, then down to Columbus in his Circle, past the daylights of Broadway to Macy’s at 34th. A harmless excursion proving she took pleasure in the city, in public transportation, not a back-number housebound. No taxi, thanks a lot.

 

 

 

Shopping days flipping by, when she finally geared up, went down to the lobby, a grand specimen of blue spruce was jammed against the high ceiling. Professionals were trimming the tree with large silver balls—glass bells, silent and chill, dangling between them. From the bottom branches, icicles skimmed the surface of empty boxes officially wrapped, blue satin ribbons on silver.

So Bloomingdale’s,
she said to Pedro. Pedro had been with the building since he was a boy. Well, a young man just out of high school. Peter, he had been called then. At times she reverted to the old name, as she did now.
Peter, remember the origami?

Beautiful,
he said.
Sure, I remember.

They watched an agile young man in a Santa hat climb a metal ladder. He clipped the top of the tree. Still the star did not fit. He clipped again and there it was, the Star of the East, shimmering plastic. On the front desk, four bulbs were lit in a tasteful menorah.

 

 

 

Pedro remembered that people had come from all round to see the origami tree. The folds of paper in many colors were magic.
It was done by an artist
, he said,
Japanese
.

She had thought the origami was the work of a single mom who lived with her pierced daughter, north side of the building. But no, their only role was to place the creatures great and small on the branches.
It was an artist,
Pedro said.

She remembered the many cranes mixed in with tigers, birds, unicorns. She sat on the bench meant for visitors or for residents of the building expecting children home from school, or waiting comfortably inside while Mike hailed a cab. Well, she was just getting her breath before the journey. Tonight she would remind her husband of their origami encounter, not of the cold-comfort tree in the lobby. They had gone one evening to the Ducal Palace in Genoa. A tribute to a local painter, the mayor was to speak. They arrived early with a group from the Villa dei Pini, a haven for visiting writers and artists, and for the historian combing through the Ligurian resistance (1943-44) to the British bombardment of Genoa’s port. He had found an old fisherman with war stories more compelling than the dry record in
i documenti diplomatica.
Properly invited in both English and Italian, the group from the villa wandered through the local master’s retrospective—vintage oils of the old city, what was left of it, genre views of the Mediterranean surround. The artists from New York had been restrained in their judgment.

 

 

 

That evening her husband had worn a tie and blazer. For the first time, she put on the black dress bought in Rome. They were chauffeured down the twists and turns from Bogliasco into the city. Now they idled in the grand piazza, waiting for the
omaggio
to begin. Someone said:
There’s time to see the photos.

Of Hiroshima
.

A different exhibit altogether. Dazed by scene upon scene of destruction, they shuffled slowly by the dead—dead in the rubble, dead on the road, the scorched eyes of a mother standing above the body of her child, a pack of felled dogs and the hollowed-out wall of what may have been a temple. No building, house or field spared. They had seen such pictures soon after that war, though not so well framed. Hung row upon row on partitions cleverly forming a gallery within the restored walls of the Palace, they were—stunning. The photographer, Magnum she supposed, though no name, no titles, no commentary given. Not needed. When they emerged in silence to the bright courtyard of the Palace, they came upon origami papers being set out on a table. A student, appropriately solemn, handed them notice of
One Thousand Cranes
. Years ago she read the story to her daughter—not read to the grandchildren, not yet, perhaps never—about a girl with leukemia, one of many in the aftermath of that infamous day. Sadako had folded a thousand cranes in hope against hope of good fortune, folding until she died. Her story became a book, a documentary, a Peace Project, and here they were,
i stranieri
in their finery attempting to add to the millions upon millions of cranes. The artists from the villa folded swiftly, flapped the paper wings as though their birds might fly. Her husband had attempted folding flap over flap, then stuffed lire in a lacquered box for the cause.

 

 

 

Mike was in his doorman’s uniform, vaguely military—brass buttons, gold braid on the cuffs and lapels.
You OK?

She was just fine. A small audience of residents and staff going about their day had now assembled, waiting for the tree to be lit.
Tutti Genoa
had waited in the piazza outside the Ducal Palace. Waiting was part of the show, a time to be seen, to see those invited. Then the black cars arrived with many officials. She caught at words in the mayor’s praise—
molta brava, sempre con cuore
. Receiving the honors of the city as his due, the artist had a touch of old-time Bohemia about him—trim white beard, silk ascot, above-the-fray importance. He set a floppy straw hat aside, the familiar headgear of Matisse, who painted just across the border in France, which brought to her mind the exuberance of the master’s bright rooms with harem women, bold patterns of rugs and shawls, windows open to sunlit views. That night after dinner, they had left her fellow artists and scholars, walked under the tall pines. The garden sloping down to the sea was the pride of the villa, though seldom used. Planted years ago—no one quite remembered when—its famed succulents were now monstrous, swollen.

Unearthly,
he called them.

They sat in a grotto. Broken pillars and shattered urns mimicked a ruin, once a romantic setting of decay, now merely spooky. A heavy breeze swept up from the shore. He took off his blazer, placed it over her shoulders. Tomorrow he would fly back to New York, back to business.

She said:
I’ll be fine. Get you out of my way.
She was writing, attempting to write about a local boy, Columbus. Though how was she fine when touring in recent days she could not climb the streets of Genoa with ease? Here in the garden, her breath gave out on the trail leading up from the shore, so they sat in the damp of the grotto.

He asked:
What did the mayor say?

Extravagant things. The artist captured the soul of the city,
l’anima della città.
I doubt the painter knew he shared the palace with a thousand cranes.

From their perch in the grotto, they could see the last ferry of the day coming into the Stazione Marittima. They had wanted to cross to Tunisia while he was with her at the villa, but there was more to the hillside towns along the coast than they had imagined, more Roman ruins, more breathtaking views. And she was here to work, after all. The lights in the
sala da pranzo
had gone off in the villa. The fellows had finished their coffee and little glasses of Amaretto. The garden, abandoned to moonlight filtering through the old pines, was illuminated once again by light from the library above. Now the historian would be telling the novelist and her partner, newly arrived from Glasgow, the old fisherman’s story, how he’d row out with his father as if for the catch, how they had signaled to the gunners on shore.

Can you figure,
she asked her husband,
which side the fisherman was on?

As they made their way up to the villa, she put on his blazer. In the pockets she found the crumbled origami, his failed crane.

 

 

 

Snow was predicted. The last possible day for the venture to Macy’s was bleak, though you’d never have known it when the Christmas tree was turned on in the lobby.
Ah
s of wonder. The natural beauty of the spruce outplayed the glitz. Now she would go to the bus stop wearing her green puffy, feathers escaping at the seams. Not a coat to wear out to dinner, or to the theater in their regime of ordinary pursuits. They had tickets to late Beethoven tomorrow—or next week?—their old custom, a Christmas concert. The quarters in her purse were heavy, sixteen in all to get to 34th Street and back with the dark red sweater. In the confusion of her back room, she had not found her senior bus pass. Or the taxi gang had taken it away, looking out for her welfare. Slush in the gutter was frozen. She took care not to fall. If she had remembered her cell phone, she might stomp her feet, call her daughter at work in the gallery, sputter with laughter at her adventure. Waiting seemed forever. Finally an M10 approached.

Going the wrong way, uptown. She ran across the street against the light, a cab swerving to get out of her way.

He whispered, not expecting an answer.
What in God’s name were you up to
?