The Rags of Time (22 page)

I know.
With wounded children in Darfur.
Oh, I know.

 

 

 

In the Park she had run to the very spot, the banished Seneca Village, where her subject, Bill Dove, was hidden from the authorities who might ship him back to Massa, shackled not beaten. Frederick Law Olmsted had written about the Slave States when cotton was king. Mrs. Stowe praised him as a fellow abolitionist. Hans would understand that she must sort it out, whether to cite Olmsted as a good guy carefully recording testimony of a Virginian he’d known at Yale who fed him a conciliatory line: free men were better workers. You could get an Irishman for $120 a year, cheaper than a slave’s board and keep. Olmsted laid it all out, the Southerner hedging his moral bets—you really wanted nothing to do with a slaver, a man who traded in flesh.

As though not a club to belong to,
Hans said.

That was it, and why was she impatient with Olmsted’s paternalis tic chatter allowing that, if free, the Negro should be reprogrammed—morally brought up to snuff, but not granted the vote? She put the landscaper’s early career down to lively reportage. Claude knew what her husband might say of cotton economics, that Irishmen were cheaper in the long run, a proposition that allowed the Virginia gentleman to barter back his soul. Something like that, so she’d think about Billy Dove, perhaps shackled if captured, sent back to serve in the opulent accommodations of Tara, not beaten. Though why would you want him when an Irish house girl came for $6 a month? The Virginian had thought the figure of Uncle Tom false, sentimental. That was in his favor. He would never be charmed by her story of Billy. Coming to Seneca was the near est thing to having Hans with her; show-and-tell time as on an evening when they sat with their drinks before supper, her notes scattered on the couch. The old economist would know to cite Olmsted as a good guy.

How long did she sit where Alonzo See’s house, so thoroughly gone, cast its faint shadow, the new sweater not warm enough over the soiled shirt she had worn for days? Not long. Then that old lady came upon her, poked into her sorrow.

She throws the quilt Charles has folded at the bottom of the bed over her shoulders, not to sleep, not to let it end, this livelong day. The quilt is a ragged thing. Little diamonds forming a star shed their batting, the work of one of the aunts who cared for her those years ago when she was abandoned. The one who sewed, not the one who played the piano. Today’s lesson, Miss Montour: memory trumps invention. Plopped down on the cold ground in Central Park, her grief was about the old hurt, not the imagined history of Dove brushing silk top hats of the corrupt gentlemen visiting the Boss of Tammany Hall, nor the lashes delivered in
Uncle Tom,
nor the architects of the Greensward, nor the honored gentleman who had been her husband. The Park blurred as the woman came toward her. That wondering, clueless gaze, as though with simple inquiry she might help.

 

 

So, Marie Claude ran away as a child. She had been left by her mother with two maiden aunts, dumped in an old house with mildew rampant, creaking floorboards. Abandoned, the child felt worthless as the yellowed lace petticoats and corsets, the wills, marriage certificates, letters with family history thrown in trunks that once traveled the world. She ran through the woods, storybook girl tripping over limbs of fallen trees, hair tangled in vines that devoured her grandfather’s garden. She could hear the old ladies, their fluty voices calling,
Marie Claude, Marie Claude,
then only the swamp suck of limp ferns, the croak of night creatures. Tripped up, she fell just as she did today, scraped her knee running from the spook house. Light at the end of the trail, the oily yellow of a kerosene lamp in a shanty with a family of squatters. She was no one to these people, a girl from the house through the woods, a big old house in advanced disrepair. The mother took her in, fed her, washed the wound, put her to bed with her little girl, Sissy. In the Park on this day of her bereavement, Claude recalled that worn woman, the baby blessed with golden curls, Sissy, dirt poor but with family. The father drank from a pint bottle, wiping the spill of whiskey off his lips. She had no one in the world—not true, but true to Marie Claude. Her father a minor diplomat off to a new posting; her mother pursuing which love affair? But on the day of her husband’s death, Claude does not question her recall of that abandoned girl, though no shack is left standing, only the memory of a coached bedtime prayer. Squatting on the ground once Seneca, the subject of her inquiry, she cried softly as the woman approached offering help, looking like she needed help herself, her black coat worn but good in its day. Claude’s mother had trained her in matters of quality, the informed judgment of fine shoes and good haircuts, even a lack of pretension reflecting a woman’s comfortable place in the world. A legacy she hated, but there it was in a teary eye blink, the assessment of this woman, the
lady pearls
of refinement around her dry neck, the boast of old jeans, her soft hand with the slim wedding band comforting her. Claude ran from the kindness, embraced a hill of stone, shamed that she guessed more of this woman’s history than she ever would construct of Bill Dove’s, the story of his free life and honored place in the household of Boss Tweed. She believes she has found his later life in an advertisement for Barnum’s American Museum—
Negro Song and Dance Straight from the Plantation!
—The BLACK DOVE strutting down the broadside from EDUCATED WHITE RATS and THE RENOWNED HAPPY FAMILY. That would be correct: the war well over, six hundred thousand dead, Emancipation finally signed and sealed, Boss Tweed coming into full power. Why, in this time of mourning, had she recalled the song-and-dance man, Dove’s place in our culture of entertainment, one of her appropriated lives?

Because, Hans said of this work in progress, her paper with its plotting:
You might call it “American Pastimes
.
”
Now she takes his words to heart, her fiddling with time past was what he meant. Kindly, of course. And then there was Sissy, the angel child now well grown, working for her at Mercy House. He so loved the story of that girl.
The Golden Legend
, he called it. Not unlike her missionary work.

 

 

In the narrow bathroom meant for a maid, Claude strips for a shower. Under the three-corner tear in her slacks, her knee is swollen. The new sweater, Hans’ gift, has come through the painful incident just fine. What seemed to be a smudge of dirt on her temple now shows itself as a bruise. The water is scalding, then chill. As she towels off, it’s halftime. The blaring staccato trumpets of a high-school band: “What Now My Love?” Charles, gone shy, comes to tuck her in. Amanda has placed Xanax on the night table.

Isn’t she awful?
he says.

This day must end. Tomorrow Charles will cancel a fund-raiser, black tie. He is perfectly clear that the senior partners in his firm believe he overinvests, defending the barely defensible, scanting billable hours, but he is Gruen’s son, bad form to complain. Tomorrow he will get into his father’s computer. Tonight it will do to open the briefcase. He figures all urgent papers have been delivered to the foundation. There are published reports: environmental stress on nations surrounding Lake Chad; the inefficiency, or questionable loyalty, of hybrid peacekeepers; a note free of time and place—
Long Term Development;
a slim bracelet of woven straw wrapped in Arabic newsprint. There is the cell phone with Dr. Gruen’s core numbers—work, family, the doctor who allowed him to die at home, and a run of photos on the small screen of a boy with scant flesh on his bones, the black knobs of his knees and elbows painful to behold. The kid wears a camouflage T-shirt, floppy white sneakers. Here he bends over a bowl, hand scooping gruel into his mouth; here with a whip in hand; here brandishing a grenade, then a rifle, a machete in a PowerPoint display of the weapons he has used in his war. Gruen about to make his case for the boy before he became a cause? Or just a last encounter, one boy among many playing with guns. And here is this photo—bright sun against the frail reed fence—the boy with a man in a dated safari jacket. Gruen sickly, smiling. The thin smile his sons had been awarded, not often enough. In the morning Charles will scoop the
Times
up from the doorstep, see how it reads, his father’s life. Tomorrow his children will be brought into the city.

His daughter, sucking her braid, lets Claude kiss her. It’s Saturday. Missing his soccer game, Charles’ son tugs at his team jersey, doesn’t have to be coached: S
orry, really sorry he’s gone,
that last, almost a question.

 

 

 

She had taken the long route home, daring the Ramble. In the confusion of paths, Claude came upon a flock of birdwatchers. Running, she ruined their silence. The leader threw a handful of seed. A greedy flutter of wings. She ran on in this picture-perfect wilderness, climbed the hill from which the wide screen of the city could be seen blurred by her tears. Below—the serenity of the Lake. The Angel of Bethesda Fountain, on duty blessing the waters, directed her to the straight path of the Mall, but Claude must find her way home through this tangle, past boathouse and playgrounds.

The man came round a curve from a path plotted to invite a stroll, in fact a ramble downhill. He was bent though not old, his shaved head glossy black with the sweat of his climb. He wore a running suit that had seen better days, carried a gnarled walking stick that he raised when he saw her. Hans Gruen had died. Now there was no one for his wife to tell how the stranger twirled his stick high, how she ran back down the embankment, stumbled through undergrowth, fell on sharp stone. Her head, thrust forward, came to rest on a pillow of twigs and dead leaves. He came toward her, laughing. His front teeth broken, she would remember; all but one, the one capped with gold. He rapped his stick on stone.

Seneca: Lucius Seneca I or II, father and son, Latin poets. The father, a rhetoritician, looked back to a Golden Age in which private property, as in the Village bearing his name, did not exist at all, nor did slavery. He disapproved of his son (d. AD 65), a strict vegetarian who drank only water, tutor of Nero—morals, not the fiddle. Seneca II fell out of favor, committed suicide, a noble act, having been directed to do so rather than suffer political humiliation, thus the poison draft. He was spared the later commentary on his poetry,
too lofty by far.

More likely, the village named after the Senecas, an Iroquois tribe that wisely prepared for war with the French, hiding their children and the elderly in the woods, burying crops of the last season, stripping their towns of everything of value. Or
Seneca,
a password of the Underground Railroad. Or Seneca Falls, where abolitionists flourished before and during the Civil War. I know this by way of a boy, twelve or thirteen, black kid in a poncho, scholarly glasses, notebook in hand. We were on a walk through Central Park, courtesy of the Conservancy, maybe a dozen history buffs, half that number by the time we reached Seneca Village that was. The guide leading our dwindling group was determined to complete her assignment on that cold, wet day. Her umbrella took off for the Diana Ross Playground, a black bat flapping against the chain-link fence. Undaunted, she called out what little information she had at her command.

Ink dribbled down the boy’s page. He carried on without notes, asked a question.
Water?

The mysterious
they
of guesswork, of diggers for shards in Thebes, divers for pirate gold. They, a couple of groundsmen poking for moles or chipmunk trails, may have found a bubble of springwater that serviced the Village.

The boy said:
They better have. We’re in an estuary here.

He would be in high school now, that eager kid who knew why we built a Reservoir on this island, in this Park, why our water, then as now, must be piped down from upstate. We’re afloat in seawater here, so . . . So, the coopers, the rain barrels, the cartmen of Seneca Village hauling water into the churches and school, servicing the vegetable patches and those who might afford a bath.

Did I say the boy was with his mother, who preened? And a little brother groaning with boredom, M&M’s supplied to shut him up, a roly-poly lagging behind as we climbed to the next site, Vista Rock. His game—tripping the bright boy who will be an annoyance all his life.

I trust that notebook has filled up with answers that do not wash away.