The Rags of Time (33 page)

At last a car turns in to the circular driveway, a silver SUV. Miss M calls out to Pat and to the women who have come onto the porch waiting with Sissy for their patron’s arrival, the staff eager to thank her, the students to show off their children, their skills. The man with her is reality handsome with a shadow beard like he’s on vacation, jeans poured tight on slim thighs. Laughing as he comes round to hand Miss Montour down from his car. So what’s funny? The flock of women with an old priest propped on his cane? Someone back at the rectory has got Father in full clerical dress-up. Miss Montour, call me Marie, goes first to Pat Laughlin with the peck on the cheek, then to Sissy, kissing, ruffling her bright hair. Miss M’s different from before, gray at the roots, her face stiff, unsmiling. The death of her husband chills the Autumn air. To the north, clouds threaten Mount Grey-lock. The widow turns to the leafless tree, her maple you would think here from the beginning, at least from when her family built the house. Not so; at great expense she had it planted full grown when she restored what was left of the grounds, turned the house into Mercy. Father Rooney has lost track of his mission. Just as well, the dear departed who married Marie Claude Montour worshipped at the altar of World Food and clean water, had no use for his prayer. Without Father’s blessing, the tour begins of the nursery, study rooms. Lights in the computer lab blink for attention.

 

 

You’re Sissy
, Ned Gruen says.

So they say,
her flip answer a conscious decision. Initial care to be taken: the dynamics of attraction must not be put into play. They have made it up three flights to the tower with overnight bags, just Sissy and the man who’s not Miss M’s son.

Heard about you,
he says, expecting an answer.

With a slow burn of a smile, he takes in every inch of the girl, tousled bright hair to new sneakers scuffing nervously at the carpet. Longing to go back to her duties, to the safety of the lunchroom with the special treat of pizza or mac and cheese, both if you feel the need. And why would he care for Pat Laughlin’s report—four Colombian women have passed high-school equivalency, or flu shots once again free. The silent auction beyond expectation. There would be talk of an elevator to the tower. Sissy would like to be there, do her take on Pat puffing upstairs.

The house set on fire,
he asks,
where was it?
He stands at the curved window of the tower looking down on the old public school with boarded windows.

Other way.
So now they are facing the strip mall, only the bakery and thrift shop still open, nail salon come and gone. The house set on fire, will she ever hear the end of that story? It is now Miss M’s to tell and tell again, how, as an angry girl, she ran through the woods and there was this little child in a cottage with golden hair. Now this guy knows it, so thinks he knows Sissy, the angel baby of that tale. Well, the middle is left out, no-show father, dead flesh of the burn on her shoulder, making out with her body in New York, the loco parentis who fostered her. What she remembers of two years in Springfield, cleaning their loveless house, swiping their moldy tub with Clorox, closing her door against the clattering
Wheel of Fortune
, the siren screech of
ER
, then being ordered to close her book, turn off her light, so costly. Approaching eighteen, she was allowed to come home, home to her mother who could not look her straight in the eye.

She thinks to say the little house where she lived with her family, the house that went up in flames, is now the ramp where a cop car cruises to the bypass, bypass to highway. She says,
It’s safe here for the women and the kids. Some come on buses.

Yeah, I know.
He knows who pays for that service and that Marie Claude has looked into the price of an elevator. Glad he’s made the trip up here. It had always seemed improbable, a house by this name. Sorry his wife did not come.

Hey, she was invited. Six months down the road, going to have a baby, so
.

So? Felice Martinez comes down from Lanesborough in her dinged Toyota with twins in her belly, every day writes down new English words, but why would Sissy, an angel, want to say that? She hands over Pat Laughlin’s best towels and lavender soap, how after the long drive he might want to wash up.

He catches her going down from the tower. Their hands touch on the newel post, withdraw in a swift avoidance of flirtation. Lunch is followed by Pat in her best classroom manner leading preschoolers through
deer, a female deer,
much rehearsed. Their high voices fill the front hall with a desperate cheer, a faltering then recovery of
doe, a deer,
the audience joining in. Cupcakes are passed round by two elderly volunteers helping out before heading for points West or South to avoid Winter.

I am a teacher,
Miss M begins, makes that point each time she comes, that she instructs her mixed bag of students at a school much like the schools the successful graduates of Mercy, and so forth. It is not quite true, but they love her for speaking of their progress, urging them to take their place in the community, take pride in their economic self-sufficiency and so forth. The late Dr. Gruen’s death is finally mentioned, just a note of thank-you by his widow for their condolences. Though the duties of his professional life prevented him from witnessing the students’ achievements, his heart was always, and so forth, until a catch in Miss Montour’s voice cuts short her usual pep rally for the learning season to come.

Ned, I’m Ned,
takes over. Prime-time slick and easy in his role of
we’re in this together,
how he’d never been much for the books as a kid but now values. . . . Sissy thinks what a crock: now he
values,
and clueless besides, as if these women were ever given a choice to value more than a few pesos in their pockets, and goes on to his remarkable father’s reach to the ailing world, and of family too good to be true, then falters. He is one of three men in the gracious entry hall of Mercy: Ned, Father Rooney who’s nodded off in a high-back chair of time past, and a handyman, plumber’s wrench at the ready.
I’m Ned
shuffles up a few stairs, and of course he’s a charmer, his sappy embrace of Pat Laughlin, then scooping the kid in a wheelchair into his arms.
Guapo, guapo.
More than Sissy can take, and she pokes the good Father, hustles him fast out the door. No formal farewell was planned. What is it she wants? Not to let Father mess up his final blessing. These people come up from the city don’t know him as the parish priest who never outgrew his belief or life stage of plain kindness.

Marie Claude has two views from the tower of the old house, now so nicely updated to be of use, not the relic of her heart-tug family story. There is nothing left of the pond or trail through the woods. How did she tell it? One way to her husband, with the terrifying details—branches slapping at her face, the roots of ancient trees tripping her up, mud sucking at her shoes. Or was it bare feet? Their shrill spinster voices calling—
Marie Claude! Marie Claude!
Most certainly a black night, starless, but then the flickering light from the gardener’s cottage, the gardener of legend who once cared for the grounds of an old man’s estate. And in the cottage, this family of squatters who took her in; at least the mother did, one of those hollow-chested women who might once have been sweet, her face drawn tight. A man and a boy cut of the same threadbare cloth, gray—that’s how she sees the family—and the baby with bright hair, somewhat off balance toddling toward their visitor, Marie Claude. The child’s name, don’t you know, Sissy.

A story told to Hans Gruen, her husband, who then spoke to her of the Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm and Jakob, how they had gathered tales mostly from one woman of Kassel with an amazing memory. That was before the philologists got hold of folklore, he said, cutting off the brutal end of his wife’s tale. The police had found her sleeping that night in the cottage and taken her back to the maiden aunts. Sissy and family then evicted, but not before candles caught the curtains, the father stinking of drink and kerosene, sirens in the night. Mrs. Gruen, née Montour, had not said in her remarks today that her prince did come, just once to the tower. That’s a motif, for heaven sake; she might put it that way to her class or to Sissy, now in college. Hans drove up the Taconic, found his way to the old house she inherited just as she was about, about to kiss the young lawyer handling the estate which is now Mercy. Not today or any day ever did she tell that part of the story, though when rescued, she married Hans and they were contented and happy, of course. Though her husband, ever the economist, said
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
was first published during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, when fantasy didn’t sell, that footnote of history, as so often, diminishing the personal story.

 

 

 

Turning to her sugar maple, the crown of its branches, though leafless, perfection enough, the pot of yellow chrysanthemums, a nice touch though barely visible from above. They sit in the canvas chairs, her stepson and Sissy. Ned is the younger son, the boy running on charm and good looks, often in need of a handout. He may be telling her that he now works for his older brother, had better keep at it, the grunt work of a paralegal. Married late after fooling around, his wife now expecting a child. She is, to be kind, like a child herself. His father called her the girl. Sissy tells him his stage is midlife crisis a little early.
Turn the page
.

Ned and Sissy are drinking the bottle of wine meant to go with supper. Pat Laughlin, exhausted by the day’s festivities, had ordered in roast chicken. She is preparing, overpreparing, for a meeting of the board: a local builder, librarian, school principal. Hans called them doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. So Ned is pouring the cheap Chardonnay in the dusk of a chill evening. He pulls off Sissy’s red cap, roughs up her hair. Marie Claude looks away to a scattering of early stars, attempts to spot Venus. The show below her window is more compelling. They are laughing, their movements caught in the network of bare limbs. Lights turned on, both driveway and front porch on a timer. Day and night the old house is connected to the fire station, the precinct. It’s safe at the house of learning. Now they get up and come forward, as if onstage, her stepson and the young woman, Sissy. Their kiss is prolonged. She caresses his beard, then gives in to the scrape of it. Marie,
call me Marie,
remembers their need. Believes nothing will come of it. They drive off in the SUV borrowed for this trip from his brother, Hans Gruen’s reliable son. In the backseat a soccer ball, skateboard, a book she meant to read tonight,
Billy Budd,
attempting to lay that war story on her class in Jersey City. She fears that the students will favor Claggart, the mean master-at-arms, not Billy, the Handsome Sailor, too good to be true.
Favor
is not the right word, not a possible response to a complex moral story, not even to a fireside tale of the scholarly Brothers Grimm.

She has looked on their need, watched the instant lovers drive off. Now it is full night. The security lights of the old house do not banish the stars.

 

 

 

The next week and the next, Sissy Phelan waits for a call, an e-mail, a postcard would do, then one day she gets up before her mother wakes. She scrubs Clairol, dark burgundy blush, into her hair. It sticks like clotted blood in the sink, the answer to what’s needed. She heads to her job at Mercy. Pat Laughlin, wouldn’t you know, cries when she sees her. That night Sissy registers for the Spring semester: Western Civilization I, Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages, 3 credits. Turn the page.

Her glasses lay on the mouse pad—for reading, not for the screen. In her CP files, he discovers the last document. At the head of the page: Longitude 74, Latitude 40, temperature approx: 34° in Central Park, wind east from the Hudson. Now locating herself as she had when she first fashioned her almanac, stories within stories with threads of useful and amusing information. Tracking the plot of days, the seasons—nature’s way of insisting on change. Same old death and survival, late bloom against the odds, the bud nipped by the frost, puffs of hydrangeas bobbing, leaves ravaged by hail. More recently she set herself in time with the Daybook. Since the heart failed her—

He recalled the questions she’d posted early in the Fall—
Where were you when?
—and discovered she had started that parlor game again.

He read on in the posthumous file, calling it that only to himself. She was no longer here to correct him, to say she was wired as she wrote her last days, fully alive as she spritzed the terrarium, the little kids caught up in the season, writing to Santa. Kate, in newly acquired script, had her doubts about Prancer and Vixen stomping the roof on 90th Street. A whiff of Pascal’s Wager here—believe it, girl, you’ve nothing to lose:
Please drop by with my first cell phone ever.
Finding her way into last thoughts, perhaps believing they were passing thoughts, she directed a note his way:
Nick likes hermit crabs, the pet store on Broadway. A turtle less boring.
C
heck the house in the Berks for mice. Exterminator in Pittsfield—
New Age
kills with kindness.