The Rags of Time (27 page)

A woman, elaborately draped, anxiously offers a sacred object, a casque that may contain some treasure of this fruitful place. The supporting cast may be headed for a flimsy arc that descends to—nowhere, really. Or, in Pogany’s play with perspective, they’re tripping to a point of darkness (8th Ave. subway?) while far above, a golden city gleams. We see the back side of the few who’ve made it out. Faceless figures, increasingly diminished, they appear to be everyday sorts, perhaps early residents of an apartment house, Upper West Side of Manhattan. Let’s say it’s Spring of ’30 by the time Pogany set up his scaffold before the blank wall. He’d painted, etched, engraved beyond his wildest dreams when an art student in Budapest and Paris, illustrated a full shelf of fairy tales in London, designed Broadway sets, worked (uncredited) on Chaplin’s
Modern Times
—Charlie mechanized in assembly-line frenzy. And then the murals,
Lovers of Spain,
for the Royale Theater;
Titan City
(1925)—the New York skyline from Dutch Village to cityscape of the future for Wan amaker’s department store, yet another for Hearst’s San Simeon, unfortunately not called into play for
Citizen Kane.

Is it properly named
El Dorado,
the mural in our lobby? That woman to the left in the richly patterned shawl offers the sacred (?) casque, urging those pressing to exit the scene, take it along, an ornamental reliquary that might—just guessing—harbor a golden chalice, the Grail. He was a smart young man, Pogany, when he illustrated
Parsifal,
the gem of his Wagnerian cycle. He must have read each and every story to envision heroes and villains, make them particular to legends that came his way: Hungarian and Irish,
The Arabian Nights, Tanglewood Tales, Mother Goose.
I presume he did his homework in preparation for
El Dorado,
read of the crystal mountain of Manoa, painted it as a gilded glob, then lightly sketched skyscrapers on its glossy surface—faint towers, spires, maybe Emery Roth’s apartment houses, so of the moment, flourishing despite bad times. Willy had just painted a mural for the grand dining room of Roth’s Ritz-Carlton (1929). From that panorama of a French garden in all its rigid glamour, he next turned to the vision of our paradise lost, a futuristic ghost town looming (the building in default, rescued in a real estate deal). Why do the climbers on Pogany’s frail arc want to leave their climate of plenty? Bottom of the canvas, there’s plump fruit in a basket. Why sell out for the gold? Better take pleasure in theatrical allegory than lightly sketch yourself into shellacked gold. In 1931, Willy headed for Hollywood, the paint not dry on
El Dorado
. He set the pedestal twirling in
Dames,
a Busby Berkeley extravaganza of showgirls showing leg, girls as pure design in a rousing loss of identity. Synchronicity the message.

Stroll to the side doors. You discover the companion pieces. 90th Street: pattern of feathers and robes overwhelm the scene of lust or perhaps just yearning. There’s that casque, and you’ll find it again on 91st Street. It was just such a box, carved or bejeweled, held the Holy Grail, so we’ve been told. I know that legend, not from the pop novel with profane misinformation, not sexed for the screen, not even from Wagner’s very long opera I once saw on a Good Friday, the tolling chorus of all those Germanic knights weighing me down with their sorrow. I knew the jeweled box that concealed the sacred chalice as I read
Percival
and
Parsifal
in college, each notable version. In my quest for more than a legend, I read into the night. My faith in the goblet with blood of the crucifixion, or a sword that bled crimson drops slow as a saline drip. I toyed with Pascal’s wager—put your money on God just in case. But insurance was for houses, the aged, not for a girl eager to chance it, flip the coin in her favor. I’d been given a single room—scholar, don’t you know—squirreling away clues to support my disbelief in a postcard of da Vinci’s
Last Supper
in which there’s no chalice, no cup at all. Like my father mounting evidence, determined to win the case, state versus local swindler or punk. All I was up to, you see, was swapping one legend for another. Storybook for belief. Pogany’s illustrations of
Parsifal
(1913) are grand, heroic yet light of hand—gossamer strokes of the boy knight’s long quest, swift movement of an angel’s wing.

 

 

The daughter who instructs me on matters pictorial, on what seems to float as art, balks at my scolding our muralist—
no style of his own.

I said his
Parsifal
was lovely.

I suppose he did sign on for too many projects. In
Hollywood on Parade,
he appeared as himself, that was just after
The Mummy,
before his carnival set of hell for
Dante’s Inferno.
And besides he was happy.

That may be a problem.

In my dormitory room, my choice single, looking down on the quad, I could see the watchman on his rounds. No Sea Monsters or Red Knights to trouble a girl, no Peeping Tom come over from Amherst College seven miles away. My grandfather, as a young workman, had laid the stone walks at Amherst when Olmsted’s landscaping firm refurbished the campus. That’s how he heard there was this place of learning, Smith College for girls. That’s why my mother was sent here to study mathematics and German, which may be why I dutifully turned from the window to devote myself to the next adventure of Percival, the boy with a bleeding lance sent in pursuit of grail, bowl, vessel or casque. The rag rug on my floor was braided by an educated woman filling her days with craft. She had chosen these scraps from the worn clothes of her husband, her children, fragments with the sniff of our bodies upon them. Her thin lavender coat, the best she could afford, was looped round the red vest Bill wore at Christmas before his waist gave way to belly. It may have been that night when I turned from the lamplit quad, gloomy but safe, that I first understood my mother’s rug braided with memory was lumpy, not beautiful, that it was never meant to be useful. No more than a story.

Waiting to hear from my brother, long as we’re still standing. Sent him the short tour, Andromeda, et al.

I had not told you the full story when we ran through the nightly news of the kids large and small. You’d bought tickets to
Macbeth.
That would be later in the season. We spoke of missing the little house in the Berkshires, but wasn’t it best, what with the price of heating oil? I could no longer manage the garden, put it to sleep for the season. We tracked the many presidentials, a fresh form of entertainment; were enchanted with one or another member of the press—last week how lame her questions, this week how sharp his reply. The message has long been the medium, an observation with no bite. Outrage was out of fashion: its gasping rhetoric of little hope. And wasn’t I really, in my notes on the Cheerleader with playground permission to torture, writing an in-house memo?

In house. I had not held to my promise. My confinement in the tower these days had an alternate ending. I turned from the bleak horizon that cuts across Pogany’s mural separating his road-show Eden from the chill city of tomorrow, walked back past Perseus transforming himself—killer to lover—and marched out the front door. Did it snow midtown? Had you stuffed the wool cap in your pocket? In my mini-climate it was snowing, the blustering rain swept away. Snow fell gently, translucent on the pavement. I felt a cheat not telling you,
confessing.
OK, I walked out the double doors—no coat, hat, scarf—to the doorman’s wonder, crossed to the Park. As yet, the snow did not conceal the Bridle Path, or decorate dead heads of viburnum, the black limbs of cherry trees. Whiteness was a scrim, false hope the show might soon begin: prelude of lute song, paisley shawl from a trunk in the attic. Dr. Shah, free of emergency, reads a slim novella, my mother cuts a navy blue strand of my brother’s confirmation suit. The set is splendid with the tropical fern of the kids’ terrarium. An El Dorado kind of place with you as lenient judge of my folly. And I, an ancient Columbine, go it alone, leave this good scene, climb the slippery slope to the Reservoir Track, flirting with disaster. All I want: my footprint in the first snow of the season, faint proof that I still venture.

We have gone back to our custom of nightly news. Watching the world go by with a glass of wine, witnessing the heft of one more sandbag to the levee. Market up. Market down. Online, I sign up for the war to end, the one in Iraq; and—
late, late again for that very important date
—order Advent cards for the little kids, Hanukkah gelt for you, my love, your only religious observance an indulgence in chocolate coins.

Last of your
Seasons.

I stand corrected. You want me to turn from gloom—a heartbeat away—to the comforts of my back room. Well, it’s no spa—hot tub, herbal massage. I’m still mad as Quixote, the spindly knight. Lost in the tragedy of my bookishness, I share with the Don the illusion that tales are the true documentation of life. Wouldn’t he be surprised to find that his flapping windmills are transformed into powerful creatures these days. Let me take Primo Levi’s
The Periodic Table
off the shelf
,
find my place at “Uranium” in which the heavy metal of destruction appears in a story. A hoax has been perpetrated upon the writer. Cadmium, that’s all the scary substance is when tested. Levi envies the liar his
boundless freedom of invention . . . now free to build for himself the past that suits him best, to stitch around him the garments of a hero.
Sounds familiar, and furthermore—the story brings to mind Hans Blix, the gallant diplomat who poked around for heavy metal in Iraq to come up empty. Best not go there, yesterday’s news. Cindy Sheehan? Lost her son in the war, walked cross the country to let us know.

Furthermore, we head into the joyous season. You recall a family occasion, taking the bus up Amsterdam Avenue to St. John the Divine. Swaying to music of the spheres, we celebrated the Winter Solstice. That expedition brought on by the progressive school my daughter attended, the one that had her reading beyond grade level, that taught history—Contemporary to the Present. Contemporary was the Age of Aquarius. The headmaster kept the legends of his youth on life support for his beautiful people—his students who went on to tougher courses in life. I approach the longest night without a cyberfriend; with you in rational disbelief, with that daughter’s cultural reach suggesting Christ share Christmas with the cultural devine; with my brother’s wife correcting proofs of her study:
The Virgin Mary, Monotheism and Sacrifice,
Cambridge University Press.

You said:
We had a grand time at the spiritual hootenanny
. I suspect you came up with this memory of the Solstice as a distraction. You’re clever in your attempt to amuse while keeping me under house arrest. For all the world, you now sound like my brother:
I thought you were attending to the Park across the street
.
Time running out.
Do Olmsted,
Mims.
Go for the gold
.