The Rags of Time (19 page)

A huddled figure in a puffy vest, shawl thrown over his head, woke to the cold light of day, foraged through his shopping cart until he came up with a respectable hat, a black Willie Nelson prop, hitched the strap under his chin. In the daily drama of the Park, he was not an unusual figure. When the ground I sat on was the Village, a drifter might have been taken in by the black citizens with boardinghouses and a public school in the basement of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, that mouthful of redemption. But such thoughts only come now after the road not taken to Literary Walk, its proper name. Shameful, calling upon the cover of history to excuse my not seeing the young man with grizzled dreadlocks, assigning him a role—homeless, indigent. In the desolate tract that lay above the Village, he might have boiled bones, eaten slops with mostly Irish squatters, many parishioners of St. Lawrence O’Toole—an exiled Archbishop of Dublin, appropriate to my contemplation of martyrs on this first day of November; or he might have camped in the northern swamps that Olmsted drained for the painterly effect of his greensward, then flooded by design for his lakes. I cast my eyes down, not to witness the vagrant getting his act together, presuming he’d soon wheel his cart through Mariner’s Gate to be in the company of the homeless who stake out nightly ports of safety on the benches along Central Park West. Till the cops move them on. The widow’s tears, my idle offer of consolation, the forgotten line from
Midsummer Night’s Dream
:

The turf I sat on was newly seeded. I had not noticed the tender lawn that might or might not get through the hard season ahead. Still, I sat firm, flipping through the abandoned novel. Early passages were marked in the margin with a thin pencil line. The weeping woman had written single words of notation in a minuscule hand:
accurate, clever.
I made out
stunning
set on the page where Eliza, the beautiful quadroon, leaps across on the ice floe to freedom, child in her arms. Soon after its publication,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly
had more copies in print than the Holy Bible. That I did know, but who reads it now? Assigns it? Purveyors of catch-up culture demoting or promoting the antebellum best seller? A curiosity, a send-up like Barnum’s display of freaks and moral dramas?

And why would a woman, claiming to be widowed this very day, choose to sit with
Uncle Tom
in the Park? Straining to make out her cramped hand, I began to read where she marked a page with a shocking pink Post-it:
Tsk, tsk, Mrs. Stowe!

Tom’s awe when first looking upon the bewitching blond child, Little Eva, who
looked down upon him—
and don’t you know he can read his Bible, though a note informs the student of the prohibition in the South against teaching coloreds to read, thus promoting: Classroom Discussion. Looking up from the instructive page, I witnessed the close of this working day, men and women in business suits and sneakers, students heading home with mighty backpacks. I joined them on the roadway to the clearing where Bridle Path splits from Reservoir Track. There, on the curve of benches that face the public water fountain, my vagrant was conducting a class, strumming his guitar in the twilight, cowboy hat tipped back as he sang. He was quite at home instructing an intense young man who had laid aside his IBM notebook and a mother with twins sleeping side by side in their stroller. They strummed, oh they strummed together, the students straining to see the score between them in the dying light of day. The wind rustling the reeds on the bank of the Reservoir accompanied them in a dreamy autumnal rendition of “Honeysuckle Rose.” A small audience assembled. One sing-along girl fished in her purse for a dollar, but this was not a charity affair. The class became a session when the Park lights went on. One by one we drifted off, leaving their music to fade in the brisk evening air, and I heard the opening phrase of “When the Saints . . .” Or only imagined it, as I tend to in retouching the picture, for I wanted to be in that number, to set one last stroke to the story of this day when the saints come marching in.

 

 

Got caught up in Seneca, you know.
Well, of course you know.

I repeat my stories. The raw deal when the Village was taken from the rightful owners lot by lot, the goodwill of the proposal for a People’s Park reduced to city politics, real estate deals. Many gentlemen of the Union League Club, strict abolitionists, figured that displacing the black settlers might work to their advantage. We’d not be here in the third wave of uptown development were it not for the eviction of the citizens of Seneca Village. You knew I’d never made it, the distance to the Mall. It was an evening like so many, clips of the war, your incessant switching channels, just like my brother, as though the dumb machine might yield more than the nightly serving of media porridge. But dinner, in fact, was quite nice—lamb chops and mashers; so was your day in the office—profitable.

In the morning I discovered the inconsolable
Marie Claude, Marie Claude!
to be the second wife of Hans Gruen, sometime scholar at the Kennedy School, who had served as an Undersecretary of the Treasury in the Carter administration. The obituary tracked his career from Harvard to London School of Economics, professor of political economy to a post at the World Bank. A long list of his accomplishments. As in a perfectly cast world, firm jaw, full head of silver hair, yet with a touch of a schoolboy grin for all his harrowing travels to those in need of his attention. For many years Gruen, Senior Fellow, had dispensed the liberal care of his foundation. The notice was fresh, not dated. He had recently returned from the Sudan, assessing the lockstep of oil revenues with human-rights abuses. Gruen had been criticized for favoring divestment market merchandising, a term you will explain. His longtime concern: child soldiers, boys for hire, that note tacked on along with his near Pulitzer, a debunking of Reaganomics. So, the weeping woman had scolded herself, running from her husband’s death. Marie Claude Montour, associate professor of American history at a college in Jersey City. Odd, very odd, yet there was my answer to the puzzle of
Uncle Tom,
her questions written in a neat hand—
Read chapters assigned as serial novel. Romantic racism?
The cool classroom inquiry did not meld with the fresh sorrow of yesterday. I thought to return the book with her scant teaching notes, mail it to the foundation. Marie Claude, that sandy flop of yellow hair, younger than her husband, it figured. I clipped the
Times
obit, filed it away with my collection of Park notations, though my chance meeting with the second wife of Hans Gruen was merely personal, nothing to do with my attempt to document the landscaped garden of my earthbound Metropolis, my final, if limited, view.

All Souls’ Day troubled me beyond the passing of an admirable man whose life never touched mine. On this day, turning back to the front page where the gotcha game of uranium spinners was playing itself out, I feared the Last Judgment; shouldn’t we all? At The End will we skip through the killing fields, player piano sending us off? It was then I recalled a way down, down the rabbit hole, gray hair escaping my Alice band. I went to the shelf where I stack Marina Warner’s exploration:
From the Beast to the Blonde, On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
with Ovid, Yeats’ Irish Tales, the Brothers Grimm, and
My Sunday Missal,
a little black book, the worse for wear by a pious girl, with the stories that once fed her unblinking faith day by day and turned to—

Debts still owed? I was told to believe it as a child. Not by my mother or father: they were surprisingly free of such blessed instruction. I asked my brother why I bought into the accounting system of salvation then, at an early age, began posting credit in my favor, assigning myself the star role in the family story; and now believe I must pay off my debts in this exhausted confessional form.

Debased, not exhausted. Lighten up, Mimi. Get Out of Jail Free.
And then he consoled me:
That book, your D-Day extravaganza, overreaching it’s true, but reading
War and Peace
as a kid, you were trifling with subjects eternal. You had—
his whisper recharged with a cough—
even had a go at Apocalypse.
I imagine a gnomish smile as he toddled across the room with his pronged cane, faced the shelf with every word I’ve committed. A touch of purgatory waiting through his slow progress as he came back to the phone, then began to read the embarrassment—how Bible-deprived I was in my youth, confined to the upbeat story of redemption, chapter and verse of the terrifying Old Testament withheld in my little black book that tracked the liturgical calendar, an anthology adjusted to each passing day, an almanac of sorts. He had ferreted out my attempt at a personal take on the Bible, my reading of scarifying last things in Revelation no less.

Jubilant, my brother settles to his task:
Listen to this!

Then, in a lilting voice mocking mine, he reads the damning performance:
I worry myself to death writing against the doctrine of continuous narrative. I’m all for multiple stories, splicing it together in biblical fashion.
Silence. I imagine that in this pause he turns to discover the date, ’88, then proceeds to give me grief about highfalutin blather written to please a dreary conference on intertextuality, fashionable that year.
Poor old Bible,
he says, and picks up with my—
Is it a presumption, or a transgression, to read the Good Book as cobbled together stories, one episode playing off another?

A transgression! Plain old sinful, telling in your own words, Mims,
his laughter choking, out of control.
Forget the forbidden King James Version: same story in our homespun translations. You told in your own simple words the fantastic tale of Daniel in the Lion’s Den, his buddies thrown in the fiery furnace. And how did you get into Apocalypse then? Apocalypse now. If you want to worry yourself to death read the morning paper. Where’s the festering outrage?

He suggests the Crucifixion. It’s like arm wrestling on the kitchen table, though neither one of us has the strength to pin the other. I hear him speak to his arthritic chocolate Lab in their consoling private language, then clearly to me:
All Souls
’
was a day off from school. End of the Halloween candy. We’re all grown up now, aren’t we?

Sent back to my room to lighten up or to memorize the multiplication tables, a task I could handle. I should never have put my ignorance on display, not at that conference, which I believe embraced hypertext, welcomed the search-and-employ manipulations of early Internet exploration. I put the little black Mass book back on the shelf, not sure whether to blame its coercive calendar or praise it as enduring folklore. Washed in the blood of the lamb, am I let off the hook by the ingenious idea of Purgatory? Like Green Stamps, if they’re still around, calculating points for the promised day when I can cash in my prayers and good deeds for the microwave, airline mileage, season’s pass through the Pearly Gates. Or just take my place in the bleachers on this day, All Souls’.

You draw a blank, the old mystified look; actually blinking your eyes. What in the world, not in the world, am I talking about? Purgatory! Your smile is indulgent, a pat on the head for an investment you can only consider as cultural baggage. Risk management.

 

 

Chastened, I turn to the daily encounters in Central Park. I swear to owe nothing to the mother lode of memories, a photo recently found of our parents walking hand in hand down Fifth Avenue. Delighted to be released from Bridgeport, just for the day. Who snapped them? All that old stuff. I am under self-imposed orders: pay attention to here and now, to the deal they are pulling off in the oval office, placing the money on black, spinning the wheel of misfortune. It is not a game of skill, don’t we know! We’ve seen the footage with coded signals, the pitcher idling, twice touching the tip of his cap, the catcher bouncing his butt. Low ball. Shouting through the megaphone a cheerless message, he has wandered in from another game without the call of safe home, the sweeping gesture of forgiveness. Lately he has called out for
nuance,
for
closure
. If he uses these words three times in a sentence, he will own them.

But I’m advised not to carry on about the present, not to speak of all that old stuff. Time out of mind, that OK?

 

 

 

In any case
, my brother said, reading my mind always,
if your angst is about our parents, they lie side by side in St. Michael’s Cemetery. All is forgiven.
I heard the dog collapse at his feet, the snort of its pain. His master’s grunt as he reaches down to soothe the gray muzzle.
Day of the Dead has come and gone. They do it up in style down Mexico way. Food for the departed and music, call them back for the party. Weren’t you writing the view from your window? Daily walk in the Park, that sort of thing?