The Sunken Cathedral (20 page)

“Anyway, the City is no longer the City,” he says, looking elsewhere.

XXXVI

I
t is as if she, too, is trapped by ice, Elizabeth says. A wall of ice, she says. And where is Pete? Slotnik says. Ben? She has been seeing Slotnik for a very long time. Once even, Slotnik came to dinner. It was entirely against protocol but there she was at the front door. Screw protocol, she had said. She ate roast chicken and admired the wood floors, the ones that dated back to Lincoln’s presidency.

I’m holding his hand, Elizabeth says. In this one we’re all holding hands.

XXXVII

I
t did look a little like love, Sid Morris told Gretchen. It looked a lot like love, he said. She wanted it so: love. She had come all this way. She had made her way here for love, she said, stoned.

She was always stoned.

Sid Morris pressed the bumpy raised scar, purple, with his calloused thumb.

A lot like love, Sid Morris repeated to his beautiful Gretchen. She had once been so beautiful. So fucking beautiful, Sid Morris would say, and he did, to anyone who would still listen.

But the fever got worse, ate her body like a cheese. She shivered so she could not stop and the doctor, the young resident, had already disappeared to treat the drunk with the gash on his temple, a comatose teenager.

Gretchen died that night. The next morning Sid Morris stood on his mother’s doorstep with an infant Veritas in his arms and asked forgiveness and she gave it, taking the baby in for a night, for a week, for years.
^I

He buried Gretchen in Queens, in the cemetery everyone passes on their way out of town, the rows and rows and rows and rows. It had been his idea to bring Marie to meet her. I want you to meet her, he had said. They rode out in a taxi, Sid Morris pulling crumpled dollar bills, spilling some, from his jacket pockets, the fare steep.

The last time it was five dollars, he told the driver with a wink.

They walked through the cemetery to Gretchen’s grave. It took some time to find it, everything so green. Alive. The birds were singing high in the trees, calling out to one another, mates and chums looking for company. A beautiful day. You couldn’t deny, Sid Morris said, helping Marie along—her hobbling like an old woman, she said—you couldn’t deny it a beautiful day.

“Beautiful,” she said, smiling. She felt as if she hadn’t seen the sun in years.

Earlier he had confessed the truth: they had closed him down without warning—violations, penalties, the outrage! The rent tripled overnight or maybe the entire place for condos, more of those glass towers. Have you see them? Needles! No wonder it’s raining! The hubris! Jesus! God help us! Who lives in glass houses?

Stone throwers? Marie said.

What? Sid said.

People who will live in glass houses, she said.

He looked at her.

That’s it? he said. That’s all you’ve got?

And for this, for all she cannot explain, she takes his hand; they sit on the broken-down divan, the heat kicking on though it’s already warm, the low hum of the collective Om downstairs rising, buoying their old spirits as well, perhaps. Sid Morris her friend, Marie thinks, her last friend.

She has wanted to touch him since before she can remember and now she does. He pulls her close and she can see the dark eyes and loose skin and the places where he hasn’t shaved and his eyebrows and all of him arranged like a kit of parts, his breath rank with tobacco smoke. And it surprises her and does not surprise her that he kisses her then, again and again, and what she feels from the softness of his lips and the strength in his arms, holding her, is the answer to Simone’s question that we are never, truly, old, in our hearts, old.
^II

I
. Goddess of Truth, she would say to the question, the first one always asked from the other women pushing carriages on the boardwalk. Daughter of Saturn, Mother of Virtue—Veritas, a goddess so shy she would not allow herself to be seen. She hid in water, at the bottom of a well, on the ocean floor. At this the other women would look down and admire again the baby with the odd name from the mother dead from drugs, the baby who stared back at them, unblinking: Goddess of Truth, Daughter of Saturn, Mother of Virtue.

II
. These kisses she will remember at her own death, much sooner than expected although the one constant of death, the director of the retirement home is quick to point out to Jules, is that it comes calling at inopportune times. The director is as oily as the lines he speaks, and it is all Jules can do to get in and get out, Jules on this mission alone, Larry long ago returned to California, the two having terminated their relationship although Larry does, decently, send flowers as soon as he hears, flowers that arrive several days after the fact, given the inclement weather, and atmospheric disruptions in general: the no-fly zone temporarily in place over the Dakotas. Still. The flowers are revived to good health and last through the funeral, a private affair, since Marie would have never wanted a fuss, Jules knew. She wanted to be cremated, she wrote in a letter she had left behind in the cloisonné bowl and addressed to Jules, knowing he would find it as he cleared the rest of everything out. She left her worldly possessions to her adored son, Jules Lincoln Frank, named, she writes in a footnote to the single sheet of paper of her will, a footnote in the shaky, fading ink of her hand, for the two men who saved her life—the forgotten photographer Jules Gradeau, who forged her papers out, and her beloved husband, Abraham Lincoln Frank. It is only then, reading his mother’s addition, that Jules breaks down for all he has lost and all he will never know and for the beauty of who she was, his mother, Marie.

But first, Sid Morris’s kisses: Marie feels Sid Morris’s kisses in the dark, her eyes closed, dreaming. Is she dreaming, again? She liked his eyes, mostly: he reminded her of a boy she had known in London, one of the sweet soldiers she sometimes danced with, the boys who bought her gum, stockings if they could pinch them. The boys were on leave or about to go—this near the end of it, when the rubble you did not want to step through you stepped through in the morning on your way; the feral dog and occasionally or maybe only once the fingers of a hand in its jaw. You would walk anywhere just to get to blue, the blue sky—did she know blue? Sid Morris had asked, not the color of land but the color of the sea—walk anywhere to escape the war, the constant disaster, emergency. Once she found a cantaloupe in Russell Square. Another time the ruins of a bookstore, a single wall of books standing, untouched. She pulled Dickens from a shelf.

Maybe it’s a dream and maybe it’s not but Marie kisses Sid Morris back. She lets him hold her and she kisses him and then, opening her eyes, she sees that it has not been Sid Morris at all, but Abe. Abe is here. He’s come home and now here he is: standing right in front of her. He smiles in the way of Abe and she smiles back to see him. She was waiting, she does not say. She was beginning to feel all alone.

XXXVIII

F
lights have been canceled. They’ll be out tomorrow if they’re lucky, though there’s no accounting for this crazy weather. Yesterday hail. A few odds and ends at home and then back, again. So much to do but for now, a tornado somewhere: Midwest or lower—farther south. Near Texas but not on the border, north.

All right, Larry says.

An omen, Jules says.

Oh God, Larry says. Here goes, Larry says.

There’s a consensus but still people do not believe there’s a consensus. They think it’s an act of God.

God is dead, Elizabeth says. If nothing else, she remembers her Nietzsche.

Is that Shaw? Larry asks.

Nietzsche, Elizabeth says. They have invited her down so she will not be alone in this weather: the wind howling, the subways closed—the storm appearing out of nowhere. Everyone advised to stay precisely where they are: Pete at work in his shelter-in-place, Ben at Progressive K–8 in his shelter-in-place. It’s a Citywide lockdown: shut the windows, bolt the doors.

And tornadoes, Jules says.

Enough! Larry says.

I mean, yes, there have always been tornadoes, but did you see this one? Did you see the news? Whole parking lots, everything, crushed. We looked like ants swarming over it.

Aren’t you glad you’re here, Elizabeth?

Where else would I be? Elizabeth says. She’s trying not to get worked up. She’s trying to look on the bright side.

It will pass, Marie had said, opening the door wide for Elizabeth, who had said yes, she would feel a lot better in company.

I love you, Pete texted.

I love you, too, she texted back.

At the door Elizabeth held up the fishing tackle box Pete had put together, the one he labeled
CONTINGENCIES.
I’ve got contingencies, she yelled to the boys in the kitchen.

And we’ve got chips! Larry called back.

Now they sit around Marie’s old table drinking the rest of the sherry Jules found in the Antoinette cabinet—not just the bottle but the cut-crystal tumblers and the snifters and the sterling silver nut bowl Larry insisted on polishing with toothpaste before the almonds were procured. Circa 1973, these almonds, he said. Nuts don’t get old, Marie said, to which they all laughed.

“In honor of Great-Aunt Eleanor. Elegance at all times,” Jules had said, pouring.

“Cheers!” Marie said.

“I feel like Marlene Dietrich,” Larry said, clinking his glass. “I need a turban.”

They’ve already had a lot; they’ve already had enough. In the ancient dust on the sherry bottle they scrawl their names, the date. Just in case no one finds them. Larry was here, Larry writes. From the sherry to the wine, bottles a thousand years old. There is not much else to do but wait it out and drink. Anyway, Marie says, in the place where she is going they will require a note of approval for alcohol with dinner. In the place where she’s going she will have to share a room, and she will have to share a living room, and she will have to share a dining room, and when she gets infirm, if she gets infirm, she will have to share an infirm dining room.

“At least there’s company,” Jules says, watching as the first gusts bend the cherry tree to the ground and fling it up again, its blossoms hurtled like so much window confetti. Make it rain, he would say to his father. Pink rain best, he would say.

“Look,” he says now.

And they do. They watch the miracle of it all: how the tree does not snap but bends this way and that, throwing off its glorious pink, a survivor.

“Onward,” Marie says, watching.

What If your life suddenly gives out on you?

What If your home sinks into the sea?

XXXIX

T
he e-mail went out at noon of the probability for Sudden Weather—this moniker a new subcategory of disaster coined in the Midwest from the microbursts and combustible clouds that magically appeared out of nothing, like Dorothy’s tornado, Sudden Weather now one of the many disasters listed on the New York preparedness website.

Shelter-in-Place activated, the e-mail subject line read. The text, as per the directive of Wayne Arden, the new interim, interim principal of Progressive K–8, a series of bullet points. Declarative sentences get to the heart of the matter, Wayne Arden had said at his Introductory Wine & Cheese, sparsely attended by the Applicant families and Vicky and Matty Tange. He stood in front of a PowerPoint and slowly read the declarative sentences, as if the gathered did not know how to read them themselves. He read the lines as if they were poetry. He had written them earlier with the help of Bernice Stilton, she the brains and balls of the operation, he understood from the start.
^I

Know that precautions have been taken.

Know that Progressive K–8’s Shelter-in-Place is in place.

Know that your children are safe with us.

Know that your children have been drilled.

Know that thousands of dollars have been spent.

Know that we are doing all this to keep your children alive.

This may actually be the big one, Jules says; he’s consulting his device although connections are fuzzy. The new mayor sounds nervous. He says it’s best to get out. If you choose to stay, he can no longer protect you. If you choose to stay, the mayor has said, good luck. Jules has heard all this on the radio; he passes along the news as Marie pours Elizabeth more wine and winks. Elizabeth smiles and closes her eyes, trying to calm her heart; in times like this she pictures the boat her father drove over the rough lake toward Grizzly Cove, the two of them inside it, the whitecaps swamping them in fishy lake water, drowning them, practically. “What are you made of?” her father had shouted into the wind. “Show me what you’re made of, Lizzie!” he had shouted.
^II

Shelter can be had for a song at PS 11, where the Gifted and Talented kindergartners—the ones who last week sold the trucked-in vegetables from the farm in Staten Island on the school steps, their handmade signs adorable, their enthusiasm contagious:
ZUCCHINI! LETTUCE! STRAWBERRIES!
—unpack the prepacked emergency kits: fresh towels and toiletries they will hand to their frantic neighbors when the rain begins. The rain is beginning and no one quite knows what will happen next. This may be a real emergency, someone says on the broken, staticky television Larry keeps on in Marie’s kitchen. He turned it on for company as he packed the last of Marie’s kitchen things. Might as well pack, he says. Keep busy, he says.

The sailboats in the Hudson tear against their moorings while above them helicopters drone, here and over the East River, the shoals of Staten Island and the New Jersey boardwalks, charred and still burning from last year’s fires.

“This is ridiculous,” Jules says, turning off his device. He can no longer get any bars, the system overloaded.