The Other Side of the World (30 page)

What also came to mind when I read
Triangle
, and again when I'd finished reading
Plain Jane
, were words a friend (Mrs. Cadwalader Jones) wrote in a letter to a friend of hers after she'd come upon some early stories by Henry James. The stories were pleasing, and well enough made, she wrote. What had impressed, though, was some other quality—what Seana has, and what you have, son. What had impressed was that the stories were informed, despite their undistinguished quality
as stories
, by a remarkable and remarkably unexpected singularity of mind—a quality of mind so rare it had, taking her by surprise, moved her utterly. It is so difficult, she wrote (in a sentence with which I've always hoped—no: intended!—to end this letter)—it is so difficult to do anything well in this mysterious world.

 

When I finished reading my father's story, I put it back in the envelope, then gazed out the window past Seana, who was fast asleep, and watched my reflection flicker on and off among passing trees, houses, and cars while imagining that I was falling, again and again, and that Max was catching me again and again, and I wondered: had it really happened? Had he really dropped me once upon a time, and had he really thought of killing the two of us, and had a look I gave him really served to stop
his
fall? I could recall the look on his face when he had me on the changing table—or I thought I could—and when I saw him bending over and wiggling his nose against mine to make me laugh, I
pictured Trish lifting Anna into her high-chair, and I wondered too: had we really inhaled Nick's ashes? And then, looking at Seana, whose mouth was open in a nearly perfect oval, but with no sound coming from it, I wondered if it were really true that she and I were together, and that we cared for each other in a way that—if I weren't afraid it would make her take flight—I would have told her could, in my opinion, be called love?

I thought, too, of how, when we made love, she would hold to me almost desperately, her nails digging into my shoulders and back, and how afterwards, without apology, her face against my chest, she would weep softly.

 

Seana didn't wake until the conductor announced that we were approaching the 125
^th
Street station stop, Harlem, in New York City.

She tapped on the envelope. “So what do you think?” she asked.

“I miss him,” I said.

“Meaning that for you this year of mourning will be a
missing
year?”

“If you say so.”

“He was my dear friend and mentor, yes, but he was
your
father,” she said.

“That's true.”

“Though he surprised us by dying too soon, didn't he?”

“He surprised himself more,” I said. “If, that is—and I guess I'm thinking the way he does in the letter—in his story—if, that is, he could know somehow—could
have
known—that he'd be gone sooner than he thought he'd be. He was looking forward to a longer life.”

“Sixteen years of it.”

“When you were going through his stuff,” I asked, “did you find any pictures of him with my mother?”

“A few. I put them aside, in case you asked.”

“I've seen lots of pictures of
her
,” I said. “He'd show them to me when I was a kid and asked about her, but I never saw any pictures of them together. She
was
very beautiful, though not the way you are.”

“How am I beautiful, Charlie?”

I shrugged. “I never think of you as pretty,” I said.

“Neither do I. So…?”

“So my mother was pretty the way lots of movie stars can be pretty,” I said. “You're beautiful.”

“The difference?”

“I think I would have grown tired of looking at my mother after a while, but I know I'll never get tired of looking at you. The more I look at you the more mysterious you become.”

“I'll take that.”

“It was the same when I first met you, though I certainly couldn't have put my feelings into words back then.”

The conductor announced that we were being held in the 125
^th
Street station momentarily, but would be moving shortly. Seana took
A Missing Year
from me, put it into her overnight bag, set a different envelope on my lap.

“Another gift from your father,” she said. “I'm not certain he intended you to see this, but when he presented me with his stuff—his archive, we'll call it—he said nothing about any restrictions.”

In Brooklyn, when we came up from the subway and stood at the corner of Church and Nostrand Avenues, Seana said she was pleased—and relieved—to find that the Lincoln Savings Bank, where she'd had a savings account when she was a schoolgirl, was still there, across the street. As miserable as our childhoods might be, yet the objects
of
our childhood remained precious to us, didn't they? she said. And the loss of these objects, she added a moment later—places, things—people too, sometimes—no matter the years gone by, could still wound us.

An A&P and an Ebinger's Bakery were long gone, she said—they'd been there, on the other side of Nostrand Avenue, all through her childhood—and so was a corner cigar store, and a poolroom that had occupied a floor above the cigar store, where the tough guys in the neighborhood—Italians for the most part—had hung out, and where she'd sometimes hung out with them.

We walked along Church Avenue, where stores, their brightly lettered marquees advertising goods and services, were all West Indian except for a new Starbucks coffee shop, and a Rite-Aid drugstore where a theater—the Granada—had been. At Rogers Avenue, I pointed to part of an old trolley track, like a silver rib, showing through the street's pot-holed surface a few feet from the curb. My father had set most of
Prizefighter
in this part of Brooklyn, and in the book the hero had hitched rides on the backs of trolley cars, had loved to watch sparks fly from the overhead electrical wires that supplied juice to the trolleys, and to watch the motormen, at this corner, switch trolley routes by
using long poles—like the kind pole-vaulters used, he'd written—to move cables from one overhead line to another.

We came to a narrow side street that ran next to the Holy Cross church—Veronica Place—and Seana told me the house in which she'd grown up and where her mother still lived, was down this street, four houses in, which was something I already knew (Max had pointed it out on one of our visits), but I didn't say so. She asked if we could walk a while longer, said she was more nervous—anxious—than she expected to be. Then she started talking, her words coming fast, about
Julius Caesar
, and how Max, who'd taught a Shakespeare seminar she'd taken, had pointed out that the main character in the play named for him dies halfway through, and that one way of understanding the play was to consider how and why, though never physically present in the play's second half, Caesar remains the play's major character, its controlling presence.

“Like my father dying halfway through
my
life?” I said. “Is that what you're trying to say?”

“It crossed my mind,” Seana said.

“I'm exactly half his age—half the age he was when he died,” I said. “Thirty-six to his seventy-two. Did you realize that?”

“No.”

“Neither did I. Not until now.”

We passed the Holy Cross schoolyard, where some black guys were playing basketball, and I remembered my father telling me about older guys he'd played with here when he was a boy, some of whom had been caught in the point-fixing scandals of the early fifties. One of them had made a cameo appearance in
Prizefighter
—a black guy kicked out of college and banned for life from professional basketball—and whenever someone asked why he wasn't playing in the big time, he'd answer: “Because I work in the Minit-Wash now, washing down cars, you know? That's how come I got such clean hands. Yeah, me, I got the cleanest hands of any fixer around.…”

When we got to Bedford Avenue and stood in front of Erasmus Hall High School, where Max had gone, Seana talked again about hanging out with Italian guys when she was growing up, and told me they'd been her first lovers.

“They were football, baseball, and soccer players, most of them,” she said, “and they lifted weights, and they were in great shape, and they were always in a rush. Sometimes we'd do it in the schoolyard when it was dark, me bent over and bracing myself against the wall—usually the wall where they'd chalked in the strike zone for stickball—them coming into me from behind. They took turns some nights. I was very
American
in this, Charlie—in wanting to be
well-liked
—and afterwards they'd ask if I wanted one of them to walk me home, to be with me in case any niggers—
their
word—tried to molest me, which seemed to them the very worst thing that could happen to a girl, even an Irish girl they'd just screwed.”

Like the church, Erasmus appeared to have been well maintained. Built in the style of British universities, with four buildings, turrets at the corners, forming a rectangle that enclosed an inner courtyard, it looked like a medieval castle. I told her that the first time I'd come here Max had remarked on how incredible it was to find a replica of Oxford University smack in the middle of a lower middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. He'd talked about how much he owed to his education at Erasmus: to being taught by men who, more than a handful with doctorates, had become high school teachers during the depression in order to support their families.

We headed back toward the Holy Cross church, and when I said that I knew she hadn't been back here for a while, but didn't she once own an apartment in Brooklyn, she let go of my arm.

“Yes, I own an apartment in Brooklyn,” she said. “In Carroll Gardens. I also own a condo in Boston, a home in Taos, New Mexico, and a tastefully furnished flat in Paris.”

“
Really?
”

“Thanks to my two books, and shrewd investments, I
am
a fairly wealthy woman,” she said. “Isn't that why, even though I'm almost old enough to be your mother, you've been hot for my crotch?”

“Oh come on,” I said. “I know this—going home—is hard for you, but…”

“And I don't need your two-bit sympathy or condescension,” she snapped. “How the hell would
you
know what is or isn't hard for me?”

“Stop it,” I said. “Just stop it, okay, or…”

“Or what? You'll throw me off a balcony?”

“If I can find one around here,” I said. “Sure. Though a fire escape might do.”

“Thank you, Charlie,” she said. “Thanks for pushing back. Despite your story—you and Nick and whatever did or didn't happen at the party—I wasn't sure you had it in you.”

“But you
are
nuts,” I said. “Mean too.”

“I can be,” she said. “You've got that right.”

“Mean to yourself first of all,” I said.

“
Above
all,” she said.

“Do you really have an apartment in Brooklyn?”

“I told you I did.”

“And three others?”

“That's right.”

“But
why
?” I asked. “Why so many different places?”

“Guess.”

“So nobody can find you?”

“Maybe.”

“But
I
found you.” I pulled her close, and spoke the words that came to me next: “Finders keepers…?”

We were passing the Holy Cross schoolyard again, and she set her overnight bag down, then pushed me, step by step, until my back was up against the chain-link fence.