The Rags of Time (15 page)

Late-night comic spinning off script, or a karaoke assault on the captive audience, he bops on to the abuse of constitutional powers, Bible study in the White House, or just another peace rally, war protest, one of how many? Their teacher ranting, bringing it down, the uncomfortable day-to-day problems they must either solve or leave unanswered in all their details. Artie, in self-destruct, is running late. They look at the time on their cells. What’s the next assignment? Patient, amused at his apology, which they accept as no apology at all. Class dismissed.

In the cavernous hall below, Artie is faced with Gottschalk having a good laugh, a hearty rumble off the old tile walls. He’d thought our leader never laughed, just meted out sourballs to children with the indulgent smile. Gott, waylaying him at the door of his office,
I see that you were amusing in class today.

Artie reckons the half minute it takes to run down the spiral staircase.
Telepathy
?

Texting. It did give me a laugh, a student sending your tangent. You’ve been critical—
pause for mock harrumph—
of my insistence upon pencil and paper. It’s too easy to take answers off the screen, post them, send them about, as a miscreant just now broadcast your performance. We had to figure, in my day. In my day, the answer was inked on the palm of the culprit’s hand. In any case, an enjoyable excursion. Time, you old gypsy—

Artie dare not look at his watch. The hands of the old clock affixed to the wall are stopped in Western Union Time, five-fifteen of a day or night long gone.

In my day
goes on with good humor; then Ernst Gottschalk strikes a serious note. In that moment Arthur Freeman understands that his leader, grudging as ever with his slant smile, will deal him another chance to pick himself up, brush himself off as in his grandmother’s hope invested in God and Fred Astaire. Gott—it’s only a spec—has a job up his sleeve. Artie must remember to tell Lou that this kindest of men was wearing a mixed message, bush jacket and cargo pants, perhaps working his sartorial way toward Halloween.

He’s late to pick up Cyril, the last child in the bright kindergarten room. The harvest is in place, cornstalks and pumpkins, humongous gourds. Cyril is counting, slow and steady, to a thousand.

Mrs. Goldberg tells Mr. Freeman once again,
He does this to see how far he gets until you arrive
. She does not say,
Late as you often are
.

Artie damns his performance, time lost in Mathematics Hall.

Seven hundred twenty-five, seven hundred twenty-six, twenty-seven
. . .

No need to be sorry. Not closing the shop
.

Course not. She tidies up after the children the many days he’s been late, never as late as seven hundred and twenty-eight. She gathers the scraps of construction paper, collects the blunt scissors, clamps the paste pot left open. She’s a pro—brisk, not motherly, a comfort to the children in her care. In the world of her room, each child’s name is spelled out in capital letters, numbers envisioned as red apples and golden pears. Amusements blend into Mrs. G’s lessons as she tracks the daily progress of every child, so particular in its triumphs and failures.

Spoken clearly, it comes as a shock to him. Not really. They have nearly settled on a house in Connecticut not far from where he lived as a small boy before his mother drowned in that boating accident, before he preserved her in legend, her mahogany hair without a streak of silver, her voice uncertain in song, folksy strumming.

Mrs. G going on about Cyril, her brightest student in years, how the Freemans must be careful with their gifted boy.

Pacing himself now—
seven hundred and thirty-five.

Oh, come off it,
his father says.

On the way home, it’s not OK. His father doesn’t reach for his hand at the crossing. Cyril digs in his backpack for the bug box.
How much bigger does the magnifier make my beetle?

His father is somewhere else.
Hard to tell.

Late to pick him up at school not surprising, but the brush-off Cyril will remember, the chill of his father’s silence as they headed round the corner to Riverside Drive. His fear that he must not say it:
Seven hundred and thirty-six.

 

 

 

Beetle was the best, better than the fright wig of mad scientist last year. A pizza pan painted by his mother became his rusty black shell, jaws and legs black, belly of bubble wrap, Ping-Pong balls bulged with the many facets of insect eyes. The Beetle won “Most Original.” He carried a trick-or-treat hive, brown paper totally incorrect. Spider-Man, “Most Popular,” was everywhere in school, on Broadway, on the block, nothing like a spider, just a costume merchants sold in the shops. His mother soothing:
Comics trump
Insects for Girls and Boys. Cyril had better get used to that. He tore the antenna from his head. Late enough now to be dark. He dodged between taxis honking, braking with a screech. In Riverside Park, he burrowed down between rocks, sucked three Milky Ways before his father found him, a dung beetle weeping chocolate from his sticky mouth.

Louise makes ginger tea, splits a bagel with Sylvie. Mother and daughter scene, but they are nothing to each other. Their odd circumstantial connection prompts Louise Moffett to draw a tree as she listens once again to Sylvie’s adventures in California, great tacos in Santa Barbara, Bonfilio stomping his solo on the steps of the Institute, Martha’s softness this year, never too late for the girlish gleam in her eye, heavy equipment fellow on the plane. Drawing: Louise is drawing on the newsprint pad that belongs to her boy, says his name in bold caps. She has flipped past Cyril’s airplanes, rockets, a spaceship to Mars, finds a blank page. Maisy sleeps on the couch. Sylvie, head bobbing, trails off in midsen tence. She was saying about a cave under the sea, how like a story she read to the children, Waite’s children. She never suspected that the caves in the story might be real. Now Martha may go down many leagues to measure a dark pit with her mentor. Sylvie repeats her stories. Her sentences lose words, but today Martha’s sea adventure comes with a fable for children.

The charcoal pencil feels strange in Lou’s hand, but the tricks of dimension and line—the smudge and shading reliable. The sketch comes along. It’s a tree. Not a tree she might bring into focus when sighting a bird. Those trees she observes in detail, each node, crook of a limb to harbor a nest, bark broken where woodpeckers dig for their grub. This tree is puffy and perfectly round, a simplified picture-book tree. She believes she is drawing it for Sylvie, who must insist once again that Martha and Gerald are not her children. Louise has seen their photos displayed on a sideboard, sturdy girl in cap and gown, conventionally handsome boy, blazer and school tie. She writes
Family Tree
on top of the page, big page so a kid can draw freely. When the tree is finished, she inscribes a bold line under it, writes the names of Ulrich von Neisswonger and his wife, Inga, from which dangle Sylvia and Otto. Then Sylvie affixed to Bob Waite (deceased), from which, on a slant, Martha and Gerald, from Gerald a wife and two children unnamed, a second offshoot from Sylvia to Cyril O’Connor (deceased), from which Fiona with mate unknown, the begetter of Arthur Freeman, impossible to place as a piece of white cloud in a jigsaw puzzle, from which sprouts their boy connecting to Louise Moffett, from which Cyril and Maisy with side line to Pop Moffett and Shirley out there in Wisconsin, to her brothers so often deleted and a firm sidebar to Pop’s sister, Aunt Bea. Now the tree which spreads above must have leaves, and caught in the crotch of the branches, a corporate jet, powerful as Bob Waite might will it, then Fiona’s pleasure boat, the death vehicle, upended in turbulent waves. $$$ fluttering for both Gerald and Inga, and why not the stockbroker, Cyril? A moo cow for her father and an equation—here the artist is out on a limb—a problem, might have been solved by the von or by Artie, two guys who share the math gene. The cheap newsprint does not take to fine lines, but she must have the speckled ruff of a wise owl, as though she could go back to her bird, the one she drew as a girl, the owl that won her first prize. She has left out, quite by accident, Artie’s sainted grandmother, Mae.

Lou turns the page. With a stroke she gets Maisy wheezing in perfect peace, lips slightly parted, the gentle curve of her cheek, the scramble of pale curls. Gets the humpback of the old couch, the stick figure of Sylvie in her proper gray suit, mouth slack as in death, as though words might not come again. Lou, alone with these sleepers, feels she’s never been so alive, not even on the bus she flagged down to leave the farm, not even in her first studio apartment in this city. Back then she was fearless, her intentional distortions sharper than binocular blowups, than the camera’s eye. Alone with pencil on paper, she sweeps a line cross page, pure pleasure. She’s forgotten her work’s satisfactions. Call it art, the intentional smudge, lump of clay, streak of acrylic. Making something out of nothing.

Was I saying about the cave
? Sylvie’s voice a soft whisper.
I am not sure what Martha . . .
now she speaks up . . .
what they are looking for, Martha and her mentor, but in the story, a man is kept in a cave under the sea.
Eine Fabel,
a spell, you see. This drunkard, not worthy of the King’s daughter.

Maisy smiles at some turn of events in a dream.

Seems right.
Lou closes the pad.
We do tend to make nice.
The family tree intended for Sylvie now seems sentimental. So she takes the hard path, says what she must finally say. On this day Louise announces they are leaving the city.
I wish it could be different.

Sylvie touches a trembling hand to the useful aids in her ears, first one, then the other.
I know about moving on.

Lou has never quite believed the legend of that woman’s beauty, sees only the silver delicacy of Sylvie’s old age.
We will have a house,
she says,
with a shed. Cyril claims it. Enter at your peril.

For your work, then? About time.
She has never let up urging Lou to go back to her art.
And the boy?
A slip of the tongue, but so Artie Freeman was tagged when his grandfather was alive.
He has finished his studies?

As though just another cup of tea, a repeat of Sylvie’s travels—the best tacos and the old Mission in Santa Barbara, another day in which deflating birthday balloons (Maisy’s) begin one by one by one to fall to the carpet; in which the hamster rests beneath the wheel in his cage; in which Louise Moffett Freeman, just another night, turns to the end of her mystery to find out who fired the antique rifle point-blank at the Colonel, thereby missing the pages that told her why. Why kill off the old gentleman, so decent to his servants in Singapore?

Arthur Freeman discovers the family tree in the trash. Though it is signed Moffett, dated this day in November, it seems a relic of what his wife used to do, make sense of their world in scrapbook art—here’s where we came from, some of us intact, some children of disconnect and misfortune. The paper tears as he hides it in the drawer of his grandfather’s desk. He will find it again when they are about to move out of the city, when the children have their valuables packed, Maisy’s doll of mixed race with its infant paraphernalia, Cyril’s bugs labeled, his butterflies pinioned under glass. For weeks the children have been ready to go, waiting for their parents to get it together. In the future they will have their own rooms, a backyard, a dog—think of that. The backyard is a ruin, not cared for in years, but the property goes back, back to a small barn, nothing like the Moffett spread in Wisconsin.

Looking over the property, Cyril spotted a horned caterpillar, a sphinx eating the first fresh leaves of a birch, and a turquoise beetle not documented in
Insects for Girls and Boys
. It is his last night in the bunk bed, staring at the ceiling. He will never again hear his sister’s soft mewing in a dream, her phlegmy cough that begins the fevers once again, though who knows what lies ahead in the white house with a wreck of a shed, KEEP OUT OR ELS painted on its side by a child who died in that house. He is not supposed to know that. He will take possession of that shed—chess table, specimen cabinet, pincers and slides. He can see himself peering through a lens, the slight flutter of wings as he measures the thorax of a queen bee. He imagines a cot set up under the window facing the quiet street where he will be allowed to ride his bike, but never gets to the sad story of carpenter ants. If he could read the Latin words in his book, he might know why they have eaten his shed at the foundation. When you touch the doorframe, there at the bottom, what looked like wood crumbles to dust. He hears his mother in the kitchen packing dishes with gold rims, never used.

Artie Freeman has left the desk for last. The usual records, household insurance, bank statements, marriage certificate, last will and testament of one Cyril O’Connor, photo of his grandmother, Mae, in a white linen dress now yellowed with age, the tree he’d forgotten. It’s flimsy, like the list of the war dead Lou discontinued in the kitchen. He folds the sketch of the family tree in with past taxes, not his wife’s best work, still, not worthy of the trash.