This Magnificent Desolation (18 page)

You're as black as me down here, brother.

Oh for Christsake, will someone shut him up.

August 1982

Holding hands, Maggie and Duncan walk the rooms of the Museum of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of San Francisco, their footfalls reverberating on the stone tiles. For a while it has been one of her favorite places to visit; she'll be waiting for him after school, standing on the corner of the street, squinting into the sun, looking slightly lost, and when Duncan emerges from between the double doors with the throng of squirming, hollering children, she will seem both surprised and strangely elated, as if she's convinced herself that she's only imagined him into existence, as if with the sight of him she is always waking from a dream. They'll jump a trolley with the tourists and head downtown, perhaps get dim sum in Chinatown or fish chowder in the Mission, catch the second matinee at the Viceroy and then stroll over to Humboldt Street.

Today they enter the high-ceilinged gallery that houses the collection, two floors of stately dark-wood-trimmed display cases backlit by
soft warm light, their footfalls sounding upon the tiled floors. Hanging from the wall on wires are two eviscerated children and an adult. Their chest and bellies have been cut open and the skin pinned back to reveal the internal organs. There is the skeleton of a man whose muscle turned to bone and who died in the pain of rigor. The limbs are so horribly and fantastically contorted that for a moment Duncan can't believe that he could ever have been a real man.

Young doctors, aspiring surgeons, move about the room smiling. Two men laugh and their laughter follows them down the wide stairwell. Shivering Duncan stares at the brains of murderers and epileptics as if he can understand them, as if they share something in common, a hereditary closeness perhaps, like brothers.

And then in the last room there is the sad body of the nameless Soap Woman, who died of yellow fever sometime in the nineteenth century. Buried deep in warm, damp ground her corpse turned to soapy adipocere. An accompanying display shows an X-ray cross-section and tells her brief story. All that's left of her is bone, a little bit of hair, and the soaplike substance, which preserves her.

Mother is at his side. She stares down at the Soap Woman and her face visibly softens—there is a release of tension and of pain perhaps but in this there is also incredible sadness. I used to bring you here, when you were little, she says, as if she is speaking from a dream. This is what she always says to him when she picks him up at school and on the trolley ride here. Her eyes open and close slowly. She stares at the Soap Woman's face and says to her, It's not right that you don't have a name. It's not right that they took it away from you. She whispers reverently, evoking a past only she can see, her fingers lightly, frenetically touching the mahogany cabinet, like spiders scuttling across wood, as if she is unable to help herself from touching it. Duncan looks at the contorted face beneath the glass and tries to feel something, tries to remember the past she speaks of.

Have you seen enough? she asks, and Duncan nods and touches the glass and although he hasn't spoken, mother seems to understand
this and rests her hand over his, and they stay that way together for a long time until a security guard comes over and tells them to take their hands off the exhibit.

Later at home, after they've stopped off at the Windsor Tap, where Mother bought him a burger and fries and herself a highball, she leads him to her bedroom, telling him she has something she wants to show him. There is a look of gleeful anticipation upon her face; her eyes shine blearily.

Look, she says and sweeps her arm back like a magician to reveal the photographs—hundreds upon hundreds of them—she has spread upon her bed.

What are they?

Pictures of us, of you, Duncan—before the Home. I've gone through all my old boxes to find them for you.

Duncan stares at the photographs, feels his mother watching him. Most of the pictures have been taken with an old camera and are blurred and indistinct, but clearly, there is a young boy holding his mother's hand and another where the mother is pushing the boy upon a swing in a park, and another of them hugging each other outside the doors of a church that mother tells him is on Divisadero. And here's one of you on your birthday, Mother says and points to a photograph of a young boy bent over a birthday cake, caught in the moment before he attempts to blow out its candles, his face aglow in their shimmering light. Duncan turns the photograph over and sees the Fotomat date stamped, SEPTEMBER, 1974.

They're really us?

Mother nods and smiles. What's wrong, Duncan?

At the center of the pile there is a black-and-white picture of a young boy, and Duncan reaches for it and holds it to his face. The boy is walking away but looking back over his right shoulder and staring into the camera, as if someone had called his name.
What is
your name?
Duncan asks of the picture.
What is your name
? The boy's right hand is clutched by a man's hand, whose arm, angled upward to the shoulder, is cut by the borders of the photograph, and bodiless. Duncan can tell it is a man's hand by its size, the thick-boned wrist, the heavily veined backhand, the large wristwatch. He can even make out the time by the sharp-looking black hour and minute hands upon the dial face: It's three A.M. The boy's gaze is oddly vacant, and his mouth is parted slightly, as if he is calling to the photographer, asking perhaps why the photographer is not going with them. It is a strange, questioning expression, but the eyes are merely white pinpricks of the camera's flashbulb. And if this eyeless boy is him, then it must be his mother who is holding the camera and watching him leave with this strange man—could this be the priest Mother entrusted him to when he was six? He can make out the texture of the man's dark jacket sleeve—heavy-looking, like the wool jacket a priest wears over his clerical shirt, of the type Father Toibin wore in the cooler months. Or could this be his father?

Duncan?

I don't know. Duncan shrugs.

You don't know what?

It's like looking at ghosts.

That's only because you don't remember, sweetie, but you will, you will.

October 1982

Duncan often imagines that he sees Billy and Julie standing on various street corners, watching him from a distance. When he turns, he sees them briefly, an accusatory flickering of light at the corner of his eyes: Julie's black brilliantine wig from the Home's production of
Whose Baby Are You Now?
and her pouting mouth; Billy's large, blue eyes burning fiercely in their ever-prominent sockets, the fragile, pale dome of his oversize skull—and then they are gone. At other times Duncan has the sense that they are following him, but if they are, they never make a sound, never call out his name. He doesn't mention their presence to mother—they seem to move too quickly for others to see—and after a time he thinks they might merely be ghosts, materialized into being by the power of his longing. And though they never show themselves fully, he remains convinced that they are there.

It's a Friday evening that has turned chill. Leaves rustle and scrape
along the street and Duncan lies on the couch watching
Creature Double Featur
e on the television, glad for the heat thumping from the radiator. Outside it's already dark and his mother has closed the outer storm windows against the cold. The narrow windows continue to rattle in their wide frames; the wind bangs and bows the glass. Every now and then a car makes its way slowly up or down the hill, and its lights sweep briefly across the porch and up the far wall, and for a moment it is as if the images upon the television had come writhing alive and his breath momentarily stills. The door buzzer sounds, startling him, for he's heard no footsteps on the porch, and he rolls off the couch and crawls slowly to the door in the way that he imagines a deformed half-man, half-mutant fly might.

He opens the door and Julie is standing there, pale-faced and grim. Finally, after all this time, one of them has shown themselves! She's tracked him down, and at any moment, Billy will appear. Duncan's mouth has already shaped Julie's name, but then he closes his mouth. This girl's hair is glistening and long and pulled back tightly from her scalp so that he can see the roots and her eyebrows are much fuller and dark, arched as if in constant thoughtfulness over large, puzzled eyes. And then he realizes that her mouth is fuller also and there is a fine wisp of hair above her lip and at each side of her long neck. He stares at her long forehead, pale and unblemished, so like Julie's, and back to her eyes, and her mouth, to the lips that are chapped and cracked from biting. There is an odd smell off her, a pungency like old cheese or damp clothes molding in a pile before a laundry basket.

Duncan! Mother says sharply. Stop staring at the poor girl. Mother steps around him and, apologetically, waves the girl forward.

Come in, Magdalene. Don't let his bad manners stop you. You know, I really do try my best.

The girl steps into the hallway, adjusting a heavy satchel on her shoulder. From its depths she pulls a plastic soup bowl, fogged by heat, and hands it to Mother. That's okay, Mrs. Bright.

She glances at Duncan, frowning. I go to school with you, she says. I'm in your class.

Duncan nods. I know. I know who you are. I'm sorry. It was dark. I thought you were someone else.

He's seen this girl on the streets, at the bus stop and on the opposite side of the street as he walks home from school. Sometimes she will be just ahead of him, walking slowly, following the cracks of the sidewalk, and he'll match his pace to hers so that he can continue watching at a distance. At other times he catches her behind him, seemingly unaware of his presence, her eyes never straying from the broken and fractured concrete.

Every autumn, to make extra money, Magdalene Kopak goes from door to door asking if anyone wants to buy her elderly aunt's homemade Polish soup and chili for $2.50 a bowl. Magdalene's parents died in a car wreck on Big Sur Coast Highway when she was eight, and so most seem to buy her soups more out of pity and a sense of obligation than anything else. When the neighbors are finished, they're expected to leave the plastic Tupperware containers outside their doors so that Magdalene can retrieve them—in much the same way that his mother leaves her empty bottles of Old Mainline 454 on the front porch so that the homeless man can collect them and cash them in for the deposit down at Bradford Avenue Liquors.

I thought you were someone else, Duncan says again, as Magdalene clasps her satchel shut and steps out onto the porch. She's pretty, he stammers, like you. Magdalene pauses and stares back unsmiling, dark eyes reflecting twilight like nail heads. Lying is a sin, she says, and thumps gracelessly down the porch stairs, her frowzy overcoat billowing about her.

On rainy days that mist the glass and turn everything gray beyond the window and the bay is covered in fog, Maggie and Duncan sit in the living room before the big bay window and listen to the horns moaning beyond the wharves. There are no men in Maggie's life but Duncan and Joshua now and she knows Duncan is grateful for this as she spends more time with him reading and talking, and she begins to feel like the girl, the young woman she was—had once been: inquisitive, daring, adventurous, humorous, easy to laugh and smile, and impassioned and pleased by the simple things around her.

She plays music on the old Victor phonograph: arias, operas, madrigals, and in the evenings before night comes down these become spirituals, then Paul Robeson. She'll imitate his full baritone singing “Old Man River” or “Roddy McCorley,” and she and Duncan will laugh together as she shapes her face to reach the notes deep down in her belly, then Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and, often at the end of the night, before Duncan sleeps, Elvis.

Her voice fills up all the spaces of their house, the narrow corridors she swept, the cold kitchen she mopped, the mildewed bathroom she scrubbed, and Duncan no longer notices the peeling paint, the dripping faucets, the cracked plaster and tile, the dark-water-stained ceilings, the pictures and markings and odors left by other people in the place that they call home but that can never rightly be theirs. It is only later that Duncan realizes how hard his mother has worked at making it a home, or at least, keeping him believing that it is, and how hard she has worked at maintaining the safety this allowed him.

Gray mist comes in off the bay and climbs the narrow side streets. Duncan is in the front room doing his homework on the shag carpet, which, although Maggie has cleaned it countless times, still smells of dog piss, especially on the damp rainy days. Maggie is in her bedroom upstairs and her door is open so that as she sings he feels she is somewhere close by and this makes him feel safe. He sits upon the reading chair by the bay window and looks out over the cloud-shrouded city. Birds wheel carelessly in the street, their wings as sharp and white as bone. Masses of gulls coming in from the bay, huge thrashing clouds of them trailing the fishing boats into port as dusk falls before the window. The image of the birds holds him in silence, and, Duncan feels, that moments upon moments like this must be what make up a life.

Maggie moves back and forth in her room, the floorboards creaking slightly beneath her feet. She is singing the Magnificat, the Virgin Mary's joyous prayer in response to her cousin, Elizabeth, who recognizes that Mary will become the mother of the Son of God. She sings in Latin plainchant, and then sings it high and sweet in English. Later he knows that she will play Bach's rendition of the Magnificat on the old Victor, perhaps as she prepares dinner. But he finds nothing in that joyous, resplendently overwrought version that compares to her spoken word-song.

The first time he tells her how lovely it is and asks her what it is, she looks at him in amazement. You never heard the Magnificat in the Home?