The Rags of Time (34 page)

 

 

 

Fragment: This is not a story.

If I’d taken a cab, it would not have been to Macy’s. I’d have left the Christmas tree gala in the lobby, given my destination as Fifth and 72nd, overtipped my Muslim driver, ’tis the season, then found my way past the empty arc of band shell, a few chairs loitering long after a show; walked the length of the Mall past poets great and small, the arching beauty of the leafless elms etching the leaden sky. After the dog walker with assorted breeds, after the lovers—brave couple on this single-digit day, their down jackets in a slithery embrace, I would come at last to the bridge overlooking the Terrace where one baby stroller bounced up the broad steps, the mother’s
up-we-go, up-we-go
ditty vaporizing in cold air while down I’d go, faltering yes, down past Jacob Mould’s birds carved in a marble nest, his fruits of Fall, each season noted by our maiden lady poetess, Marianne Moore,
“Autumn a leaf rustles. We talk of peace. This is it. One notices that the angel hovering over the pool is really hovering, not touching the water.”
Why is Miss Moore not here? Memorialized in her tricorn and cape.

The
Angel of the Waters
is well draped and girded. Perhaps when not healing the lame, halt, or head cold, a troubling thought may occur. Unlike Magdalene and Cassandra—her myth may have outlived its time. Energetic flow of bronze gown, an athletic girl, sturdy bare calf thrust forward, a goalie protecting us all. I’d have the Angel to myself in the abandoned living room of the Terrace. There is no one about, no gentle young man just arrived in this place called Bethesda—recognizable fellow with a clipped beard, eyes burning bright, who asks:
Do you want to be cured?

I’ve come to the healing waters without my cup.

 

 

 

Olmsted, my Fred, had the sculptress, Miss Stebbins of a very good family, in to dine with her friend, Charlotte Cushman, the greatest actress of the day. He was propped on his cane, stumbling from that accident, trying out a new horse and gig. Two months back his newborn son had died. Forgive Mary for going off to visit her family, not facing the monumental gravestones across the way, natural to her husband’s Park. Emma Stebbins has been awarded the privilege of creating a statue for the Greensward. Her brother is the Commissioner of the Park, don’t you know?

The actress and the landscape-architect-come-lately perform for each other. Little Miss Stebbins is flustered by the might of these two. She’s in a romantic friendship with Cushman, turbulent waters. They live an arty life in Rome with women free of American decorum. They have come back to New York for this grand
balabusta
with the mug of a pit bull to enchant Broadway. The actress “plays the breeches” as Romeo, as Hamlet, though keeps her nightdress on to rage as the bloodiest of all Lady Macbeths. Whether I can bear to imagine Cushman’s elocution ary delivery of great tragedy is beside the point of her stunning career. Her breast cancer harbored both pain and the lovely angel for our Park. Emma nursed her lover through slow agony, following Miss Cushman from engagement to engagement, all triumphal, not attending to her own considerable talent. The maquette of an angel stowed away in her heart, the tribute she would create for Charlotte.

If I’d taken a cab, I’d have found my way to
The Angel of the Waters,
not working that day, idly dripping icicles from her wings. Baby, Baby—pity the naked cherubs in her pool.

I’d snap off a sharp dagger of ice.
Verily, verily, the waters melt in my mouth.

The fragment seemed to him story enough. She had gone back to her Park puzzle, not to forget Emma. Hard to decode his wife’s handwriting, ink on yellow pad as if tracking back—before the old Remington, upgrade to Olivetti, before her anxious love affair with Windows. Where are you now?

 

 

The children, the grown ones, all three said they would help him clear up her back room, keep what might be of value—
the personal stuff
.

When he bought the cell phone, he said,
Black will do
to the clerk promoting pink. Those first days, he heard his wife having the last word, the last laugh. Then the silence of his sorrow was heavy as stone, as the dark outcropping she had scaled that day in the Park to feel the height and weight of the place unknown, a semblance of wilderness plotted by Olmsted and Vaux. She should not have awarded herself the pleasure of that final misadventure. In the North Woods, there was a sign posted on the lone circle of lawn: PASSIVE ACTIVITIES ENCOURAGED.

She had been fine till the end of her adventure, until the slippery steps led down to Duke Ellington Boulevard.

He had not remembered. The entrance to the Park above 96th Street is called
Stranger’s Gate.

She had fallen, been vetted by the doctor, no hemorrhage; an appointment set up for a look-see at a troublesome artery. He’d brought her home from the cardiac center in a cab, of course, tucked an afghan around her as she lay on the couch. She threw it off to go down the hall, back to her workroom.

 

 

 

The children, little and grown, were bickering in the living room—should, should not, have a tree.
She would have wanted
seemed to be winning over gloom of the empty corner where they put up their tree from time immemorial, at least since they called this place home.

Of course
she
had remembered when the Loop the Loop plane did its trick before the key was lost; when the corn-husk doll wore a Mammy turban; when Pinhead, Beano and Buster (the dog) stood their ground as the red rubber ball came their way in a bowling game pre-Disney. Always such elation in her display of the tin trolley, the inevitable story: how her grandfather, aloft in his Locomobile, directed his workmen ripping out the trolley tracks on Main Street, making way for the future.

I opt for the tree,
he said to the children.
Bring on the clowns, her tightrope walker, the dancing bear.
One cymbal missing. He left them to their grief, having discovered soon—too soon—that sorrow came over him solo, could only partially be shared. He stood at the door of her back room, Stranger’s Gate indeed. Only days ago he had pushed the towers of discarded books out of her way. She had fallen on her way home from the Park, above 96th Street, forbidden ground. He opened a manila folder on her desk. She would have noted his hands trembling as he adjusted his glasses to read an article from
Science Times
. It seems the universe is expanding. He could not follow why dark matter doomed the theory of everything. Why we need new laws of nature. If you can’t do the numbers, must we take it on faith? What use would she make of this prediction, which was surely beyond her? Science for the general reader, nothing to do with the Park. He thumbed through what had seemed an unmanageable mess of clippings, photos, postcards, her scrawl in notebooks half empty, half full. She had called this room her estate of confusion. In days to come, he would figure that the accumulation seemed to have a method, even a message, if he could decode it. But now Christmas was immediate, inevitable. When he flipped through her calendar, each day of the countdown was leavened with predictable pleasures—the kids’ pageant (
apron for Mrs. Cratchit
)
,
her baking duties: Glo’s biscotti, bread pudding laden with rum.
Family Not Invited
to his office party, the firm cutting costs. Lightly penciled in, the midnight Mass at St. Greg’s. Every year she hedged her bets. Should she sign on as a Christmas-carol believer?

Not this year, though she had posted an e-mail from Cleo, her brother’s scholarly wife. St. Anselm’s Argument, right over her desk with the gallery of ghosts she believes in.

1. God is, by definition, a being greater than anything that can be imagined.

2. Existence both in reality and in imagination is greater than existence solely in one’s imagination.

3. Therefore, God must exist in reality: if God did not, God would not be a being greater than anything that can be imagined.

S
he insisted on singing
O holy night . . .

He places Mary and the Babe into position on the front hall table. The familiar story comes to mind, how her mother modeled these clay figures attended by chubby angels with broken wings, glazed them, fired them in a mail-order kiln installed in the cellar.
Yet another attempt at art.
Well art they are, for over the years he’s noted the mystery of the crackled patina, the expression of wonder on the Madonna’s face, the concealing folds of her veil. A lone shepherd held a staff in his hand, but no Wise Men, no Joseph. The crèche was incomplete, or her mother’s belief in the project waned. The stable insufficiently rustic, at which point the artist’s daughter might hold out her glass for a refill, her Christmas Eve pleasure in the neighborhood choir at St. Gregory’s forgotten or forgone. Faith put on hold by the very woman who wrote ahead in her Daybook an almanac posting:
Winter Solstice, December 22, 2007, 1:08 AM
,
True. Sagittarians prefer the journey to the arrival
.
Unreliable.

To write ahead, what could that mean? Then a query, a one-liner on the lined page:
Where were you on the Eighth Day?

Maps: of three pretty ships halfway to America; of Cyril O’Connor’s Wall Street and environs long before it suffered its scar; of the rectangular Park across the street—limited, vast; and of the watershed under the Appalachians from whence our city water, Jackie’s Reservoir now for the birds; of the Fall migration, its dramatic urban stop-off in the Greensward. Sifting with care, he came upon shards—a glamour shot of their building, that studio portrait of her grandfather in full prosperity, a Chinaman with a queue porting baskets to a family, the grand vista of Yosemite behind him.
The Angel of the Waters,
triumphant above the splash. A note to no one in particular!
The last cantos of Dante’s
Paradiso
were discovered after his death when he had presumably arrived at that destination.
And a poem she read to him one evening not long ago. In response to discouraging news of the market he brought home at the end of each day, every day. Was she unsteady pulling Whitman down from a forbidden high shelf?
Drum-Taps
lay, open to the page, the passage faintly marked for his reading:

He discovered that these lines had been read out to her brother when our President, playing do-si-do with Russia, proposed once again our antinuke missiles—useless, obsolete—be stuck in Czech soil. Had he not noted, back on the day the Supreme Court said OK to listening in, scanning our e-mails, that her rage petered out? No place to go with a thin bleat of complaint. Let a borrowed poem say it. Let the Park flourish day by passing day—with never enough stories. She had scratched fury, turned to old recipes for comforts of the season, linzer torte and strudel. Turned back in time to when they were first together, proving herself in the kitchen, having proved themselves in bed. And here was the famous shot of Olmsted, the only man he was ever jealous of, rather a stern young fellow in a seaman’s cap, primed to create a world. Well, the photo was famous to her family along with the old prints—Pierrot and Columbine, pantomime lovers in their kiss and make up routine—with her circus folk in the dining room performing their breathtaking feats, showing off for the devout maiden of
The Angelus.

 

 

 

She had read to page 733 in
War and Peace,
marking the confrontation between Napoleon and the Russian emissary as they moved ahead to their bloody war.
Girlish !!!
in the margin next to the description of the Emperor . . .
a white waistcoat so long that it covered his round stomach, white doeskin breeches fitting tightly over the fat thighs of his stumpy legs, and Hessian boots.
Her notes—
his snuff box, his cologne!
trailing down the side of the page, remarked upon the brilliant maneuvers of the scene, the slippery give-take of diplomacy, the rough talk of plain take. He presumed she’d read the love story so far, though this time round, her second chance, notes in the margin revealed how closely she observed the lush setting of the Tsar’s palace, the slippery make-nice that preceded war. Revise, reread, work ahead right up to the end. He must tell her brother, who maintained when she took up her post with the fat library book each long Summer day, then slept on a cot in his room—that she snored.