The Rags of Time (3 page)

A mere walker in down-at-heel tennis shoes, I thought how neat to be of that company, to know I might scramble up to the Reservoir, pay homage to the old runner, listen to his words of wisdom or enjoy the gossip of the day to set me free of the reading chair which this day brought me back to the place of origin, my voyeuristic tale with its many variations—how on an Autumn night when the barberry hedge was not yet planted in the patch of front yard to absorb the noise of traffic, with the green linen shade drawn against the streetlight, my parents felt their way to each other in the dark. Felt their way with what purpose? I heard the footfall behind me, the huffing breath of the next trotter. All passed me by. As though I was stuck on a treadmill, the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park with its swirl of Guggenheim Museum seemed no closer. Soldiering on in my invalid pace, this day’s outing was a strategic maneuver against the assault of memory.

This stretch of track is more carefully tended, though the ornamental cherry trees have dropped their end of season pips and, sloping down to the police barracks, ferns flopped, yellow and limp. Tourists had found their way into the Park with museum shopping bags and guidebooks in hand—Germans with camera gear; Japanese lovers delicately holding hands; a party of Brits, the Union Jack on their sweatshirts. Clouds swept in, a sudden surface rippling, and a mallard, floating free of the rushes, ruffling her wings, was joined by a male with brighter plumage by far.

Name of the laike?
Sharp Cockney diphthong.

Walking on I called out:
Reservoir.

Can’t they see it’s man-made? The wonky circumference distorted by a hydraulic bulge on the south side. The slight undulations of this carefully plotted shoreline bear no resemblance to nature’s random design. Turning, not to be rude to visitors, I called out again,
Reservoir.
The Japanese man put an arm round his girl as though to protect her from my shrill cry. The Germans had set up a tripod for a picture of our Fall blazing an Oktoberfest across the shimmering expanse of water. That shot can be bought from a vendor outside the Guggenheim, but it would be their own view, recall a hike in New York. Yes, they carried burled walking sticks as though to conquer an alpine height, but our Track is level, the water piped in, no racing streams, no cascade. My breath came short, unsteady as I turned round again to call out another correction.

Reservoir,
I meant to repeat, but the Brits had gone their way. She would have recalled the old Croton Reservoir piping water down to the city after the raging fires that consumed Lower Broadway long before the Civil War. Keen on preservation, she might have winced then, aware of history’s erasures, accepted the memorial renaming with grace. On a slick little map, I’d seen the blot of blue water
Lake Jackie,
too familiar by far, yet she’d know her name would
convey
to the Germans, the Brits, even to the private school kids who replaced my Japanese lovers, kids awkwardly entwined on a bench, a lacrosse stick balanced between them.

Drawing back from the heavy breath of his ardor, the girl shrugged him off. I was their embarrassment, old lady in tennis shoes, buttons dangling.

Old party pretending to look away, not to admire the girl’s mane of long honey hair, the neat muscular knots in her legs. She’s baiting this guy. The awkward gesture of his hand hovering in limbo above her bare knee; his face, broad and earnest, Slavic perhaps. The affront of his rejection sends me back to the creak of the wicker chair in my parents’ bedroom as I settled each Summer day into the romance. How inevitable of Natasha, that enchanting child, to love the careless Prince, not the worthy suitor, Pierre. But worse, morally worse in my view: when Tolstoy finally marries her to the good man, she plays their last scenes as a frump, a plump housewife and mother.

Yes; they fed horse flesh to the Turks, did you know?
Proclaimed at the dinner table to alarm.
They,
the French or the Russians? I was uncertain, but the shocking tidbit was mine.
Which we may be eating now.

Rumor that Kunkel, the butcher on Capital Avenue, minced horsemeat in with the beef. Now that recall does stop me; the supper table lesson on the bloody retreat of Napoleon’s Grand Army. The lacrosse player, lolling on the bench not two feet from the Track, was the girl. The bright blue jacket of her team thrown open, breasts on display. Let me make that clear: nipples, erect in chill Autumn air, poked a T-shirt which read, EVERYONE LOVES A CATHOLIC GIRL.

So untrue. I could tell her stories along that line. We were not embarrassed by each other.

Me—reading her chest.

She—slouching in a phony embrace, humiliating that boy. Then, ditching the flirtation, she ran off, lacrosse stick cradling air, boy trailing after. Dismissed from their after school tryst, I felt a sharp pang of shame, the lot of a voyeur. Had I invented my parents’ embrace in the four-poster, then hovered over these hapless kids to dismiss my guilt? I had manipulated history to write a love story. Printed and praised, there could be no erasure. Playing a shell game—that war, this war, did I hope for a reprieve with the feeble cry of my outrage at the Cheerleader, at the coaches directing his boyish strut as he comes to the podium on the White House lawn? We are audience to his grotesque performance at halftime, his bounce, joy in atrocities. Whatever happened to Civil Disobedience? The essay not assigned in college. Fellow grew beans, lived by a pond, nothing as fine as Central Park, what we’ve got here.

When I turned back to see the distance I’d come, the Germans were still in the photography business. Finding the pin oaks dull at end of day, they’d set up a white screen to reflect what was left of sunlight on tarnished bronze leaves.
Give it a week. Our grand finale will knock your Birkenstocks off.
My heart beat a fierce catch-up thump. I was breathless as I came to the open view at last, the point of full exposure. Clear across the Reservoir loomed the house I fled a half hour ago. From this vantage point, the trees, still leafed out, erased all other buildings on Central Park West. Our turrets caught the last glitter of this day in false gold.

Yes, the El Dorado. The presumptuous name of the house where we live with ancient plumbing and electric circuits updated with vigilance, with those casement windows sanded and painted against rust and the mural in the lobby of a phantasmagoric pilgrimage to a futuristic city of heavily varnished gold. And in a back room where the sun never shines, my failed book thrown aside.

My secondhand Raleigh, tires gone flat while I turned the pages of Tolstoy’s very long story renewed and renewed. I feel the hard surface of its indestructible library cover (dark green), title stamped in the spine. And see, as of this day, the slick dust jacket of the war story that garnered my prize.

—Henry James,
The Art of the Novel

 

On the flap of the book which bears a gilt medallion on its cover,
The Normandy invasion of the Second World War is rendered in cinematic detail.
Flap copy performs its duty.
With detailed care the writer illuminates
(!) the baby face of a soldier who figures in the opening pages as disfigured beyond recognition. The dog tag hanging round the kid’s neck with a Star of David recalls his bar mitzvah, Torah in hand, that side story set in a clap-board temple on an unlikely back street in the Berkshires, but then it’s all unlikely—the body count of those left behind on the sands of Normandy fails to elevate a misbegotten romance. The boy soldier—he’s well out of it, out of the plot. His commanding officer had studied physics with Heisenberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute whereby hangs an operatic tale.
Liebestraum,
my story of an American Captain’s puppy love for a soprano he occasionally slept with in Bayreuth, the Führer’s favorite Art Site, is
searchingly honest.
Blurb on, elicit kudos from readers before they turn the first page. Too late to be sorry. Terrible thing to do, conjure that kid out of a squat brick high school, flagpole at the ready in a dusty playground. Note of pathos, fakes his age to fight the Nazis. Stunning body count of the D-Day landing, the Captain’s doomed foreign affair, his postwar prize of suburban survival. Was that last bittersweet chapter all I learned from Tolstoy’s true and dark story? That war, this war. I think now of the boy who painted our fence in Monterey, Mass. He waited some months till he was the age to enlist, but writerly ambition stirred my plot line years before he quit the toy store, that job with no future. He is now serving his third deployment in Iraq.

Today, reading in my airless back room, the landing gear grunting onto the shore of Omaha Beach, my soldier boy—jaw shattered, chill waves pulling him under—ticked off the memory of my father turning up the volume of the Philco on the evening when all America, so the story goes, listened to Roosevelt call a benediction upon our troops,
the pride of our nation.
My mother coming from the kitchen to hear
we shall return again and again,
while I stood by the console. The clatter of knives and forks when I dropped them during the President’s prayer.

Mimi!
My father scolding.

History demoted to domestic anecdote, the uncontrollable urge to bear witness, write myself into the scene.

Where was I when the first mushroom cloud rose in its ghostly threat on the black-and-white screen?

When Kennedy slumped into his wife’s lap?

Bobby bloodied on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel?

Let me unscramble time. In the personal almanac: my solemn attention to the landing of Allied Forces in Normandy, June 6, 1944, was broken by the kettle shrieking on the stove. I let go forks, knives and dessert spoons to savor rice pudding still warm from the oven. The following week, the school year ended, I turned to the opening pages of
War and Peace.
Mastering the difficult Russian names, I pursued the romance, admiring the wealthy landowners, suspecting the impoverished royals might be up to no good. In my parents’ bedroom I settled into the creaking wicker chair by a side window. On the few dark days, I read under the soft light of a silk-shaded lamp. Scraps of my mother’s old skirts and my father’s worn trousers had been braided into a lumpy rug at the Women’s Art League, wool gathering history. On their Victorian dresser, her soft chamois nail buffer in its ivory case lay beside the empty leather holster for the County Detective’s gun. I am no longer sure why I plotted, or why they tolerated, this incursion into their room.

The next year, watching the first A-bomb do its unspeakable thing, I was reading nothing at all. That summer was one long orgy of desire at Fairfield Beach. I blistered my fair skin parading in front of a wheezing asthmatic boy mustered out of the army. He never took notice of me—
Everyone loves a Catholic girl—
his name irretrievable, while I bear the near-invisible scars where the basal cells were removed from my chin. Looking across the Reservoir to the El Dorado, I stopped on the track remembering the good doctor who zapped the offending growths with such skill, Bernie Simon, who lived in the north tower of our building. He had worked with the team of plastic surgeons when the Hiroshima Maidens were brought back to New York, twenty-five Keloid Girls mostly kept out of sight by their families. Nine years after the bomb, they arrived at La Guardia, June 1955. Their disfigured faces and limbs were to be reconstructed. Many of the maidens were billeted with Quakers, peace-loving people. By October some had discarded kimonos. Others posed for the camera in saddle oxfords, twinsets, cultured pearls, the costume of American college girls; others wore prim secretarial suits cut close to the body. In the photographs, taken at a distance, you can’t really see the thick, dead flesh on their hands and faces.

Today, the mighty block of Mount Sinai hovers over the eastern skyline of the Park, but it was in the old hospital at 100th Street and Fifth Avenue where the A-girls were slowly, painfully transformed into something like normal—that can’t be the word—poster girls for an act of reparation, cruel footnote to history. Dr. Simon lost a spirited maiden on the operating table, though he massaged her bare heart with his hands. Tomoka had wanted to wear summer blouses with short sleeves, not much to ask. The year before his death, Bernie worked out in a loping run, an easy stretch on the Bridle Path, the flesh of his legs and arms burnished with a healthy tan. As though to figure in my story by a masterful computation or throw of the dice, an honored mathematician, Peter Lax, lives other side of our building. When called to Los Alamos, the Project he worked on seemed to the young lieutenant “like science fiction. There were all these legends everywhere.”

Here’s a true story you might recall if you’re getting on in years:
This Is Your Life,
a popular show, bottom of the TV barrel, in which the unsuspecting party is brought onstage and confronted with someone long lost who “made all the difference.” A programmed occasion for faked embarrassment, tears of joy, shrieks of disbelief:
Oh, my God!
Which is exactly what the pilot and bombardier of
Enola Gay,
the plane of infamy that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, cried out,
Oh, my God!
upon viewing the shadowy forms of two Keloid Girls hidden behind translucent screens, lest the audience of 40 million be disturbed by their Bar numesque disfigurement. The pilot died this past year, ever sure of his mission. Well, that’s the story folks, entertainment trumping science fiction.