The Rags of Time (4 page)

I managed to make my way huffing, puffing to midpoint in the eastern stretch of the Track. Windows high above Fifth Avenue flashed the bronze setting of the sun. I will never understand how that brilliant display, mostly blocked by the apartment houses on Central Park West, leaps the Reservoir’s expanse. And do not care to understand, demanding magic from this forbidden journey, though the simple refraction of light at end of day may be grammar-school science. Breath coming short, halfway home, no use turning back. Feeling my considerable age, I settled into a simple touch of the blues. Not a jogger in sight, as though an official blew the whistle—ending play. Loping on, heart racing ahead, I was alone on the loop that leads to the North Gate House, thinking the tennis courts would soon come into view, might still be open at dusk with the
plunk-plunk
of balls and the mercy of a public drinking fountain. But there, under the flickering cover of trees, were two figures, still as statues until they heard the slow shuffle of my feet, then the woman put out her hand. With a swift gesture demanded I stop.

Perched above—an owl. In the lens of his unblinking golden eyes, the bird possessed us.

The quiet, spooky at first, was then pleasantly prolonged, the owl joining our conspiracy of silence. The woman’s attention consumed her. The man lowered his binoculars to feast on his wife’s pure pleasure as she wrote in a little book. I presume wife. Now I place gold rings on the birdwatchers’ fingers. Matched beyond their Nike jackets and billed caps, they became one in their attention to the bird. It’s only now I frame them as young lovers in a chill season, intent on their pursuit of nature; not shepherd and milkmaid tumbling in the hay, stockings in telltale disarray. I presume they are blessed with each other beyond this bucolic scene. Or not blessed, for he withdrew a few steps, looked somewhat paternal, admiring the quick strokes of her drawing, the ardor of her attention. For a moment he took me in—disheveled old lady with no claim to bird lore—then flashed me a smile as if to say,
We’re not among the converted
.

His wife would know, without benefit of my Audubon Guide, the long-eared owl to be ubiquitous in the Northeast. She drew us to our observation again. A sudden movement in the undergrowth broke the spell. We waited, we three, for something tremendous, the owl’s dive for its victim, a chipmunk or Reservoir rat. The bird would not perform. Then, in that still, suspended time, thump-de-thump declared itself, the heavy off beat of my heart. Random, the turbulence does not follow fast moves or exertion, drops in like a petulant neighbor with its complaint. I waited for the fibrillation to tap its way back to something like normal. When I skipped off from our hushed encounter as best I could, then turned back, the birdwatchers had also left the scene. The flat Track seemed uphill all the way, the North Gate House much farther than recalled. As it finally came into view, I heard a creature’s high screech of death, and the owl’s cruel laughter—hoo-hoo-hooting, having deprived us the thrill of the kill.

Clouds moved in with surprising swiftness, dusk turning twilight. I approached the dreary granite of the North Gate House, or houses—two on the Reservoir shore—straight and tall like giant rooks abandoned in a game of chess. Their black iron doors bolted, double padlocked. I take the notice personally: KEEP OUT. As though I would trash, pollute the works, while in the backwater sloshing between the towers my fellow citizens have deposited plastic bottles, deflated soccer balls, dead sneakers. Skeletal ribs of an umbrella float in thick green scum. This debris seemed placed here to call the city to mind—its waste, fumes, and general congestion of the grid in which Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux staged their pastoral drama, drew up plans for a park with hills and vales, rusticated nooks, and the folly of a castle to be viewed from the grandeur of Bethesda Terrace. The people of New York, high and low, would take pleasure in this otherworld that would never admit crumbled cigarette packs, milky condoms, a dismembered iPod jauntily floating in a tangle of weeds. Just beyond this detritus, the water was clear across to the South Pumping Station. The gulls, drained of color in the approaching night, held their post all along the pipe that dissects the Reservoir. I’d always thought a pipe’s a pipe. Not at all, when the water’s low you see their perch to be handsomely paved with stone. Above, the moon was translucent, a nibbled host in a starless sky. The programmed lights shone brightly on the tennis courts for players who would not give up on the day.

Repossessed by their warning, I found myself, dark end of day, round the block on French Street—its empty lot with shanties, idle men out of work. Our mother never called them tramps.

As I crossed the Bridle Path, the last child in the playground struggled against his mother’s embrace. The fiberglass hippos and jungle gym clung to their stations while the kid was dragged off protesting. He did not want to go home, nor did I. How I hate that antique locution—prissy, at arm’s length from my fear the escape route ended where I began, the backward glance at my storybook with its claims to a sorrow never felt for the reality of a war and its aftermath I did not—may never—fully understand. With the doctor’s warning and the day’s meds, I had accomplished the loop, 1.58 miles, still subject to parental correction. Why the twinge of disgrace, sharp as a stitch in my side? Why my childish name? What’s more, they were right, I do not know how to take care of myself, simply enjoy the day’s adventure, cut free of the past. I’d been seduced by the contrived beauty and small adventures of Central Park, hoodwinked by an owl, affronted by black iron doors. My playground was closed for the night. I was home, Chez El Dorado, elevator at the ready.

You were there, waiting. I passed you by in the hall—rudely, I guess—ran to my workroom, made a note—
Everyone loves—
lest I forget the self-serving legend of the
Catholic Girl,
forgetting I’d had a Bic and small pad in the pocket of the old black coat, two of its three buttons now missing.

I called to you,
Put on the pasta pot.

By my reading chair, the book I threw aside. On a knockout cover, a single Rhinemaiden swims for the gold. By the sparkling stream, the author’s name is printed in Third Reich Gothic. I had aimed at important: that took the prize.
Liebestraum
, now reissued with a student guide, should have a query on the writer’s plagiarized emotions: Does the note of doomed love underwrite the inexhaustible horror of
that
war? My journey down the well-trodden path into the dark woods of National Socialism was pure Grimm. I cast myself as the clever troll to lead the way.

But if,
you suggested in a reality check way back when, when I was in the heady spin of my misdirection,
if, before the war, that lieutenant you’re writing about studied physics with Heisenberg, he should have been stirring the hot pot at Alamogordo with our neighbor Peter Lax, not slogging through enemy fire on D-Day.

Captain.
I promoted him toward the end of the war. Yes
,
or he might have been translating at Nuremberg and not so easily betrayed by a Rhinemaiden bitch; but D-Day it was for the sake of my PLOT, the
nefarious name, in any flash upon the fancy,
so advises Henry James. As though calling upon the Master would make amends for my
patter of quick steps,
the forward march of my story. Did I then presume the glib balance of an aphorism, sum up the argument:
Memory prods History. History corrects Memory. As in—

Where were we when Al Gore won the election?

In Seville, the Grand Hotel. We went to bed happy.

 

 

This evening you appeared at the door of my workroom, no longer costumed for the office. For the first time this year, you wore your old wool vest, offered me a glass of wine. You had news of the children and the world, urged me to take off my coat.

The children, you told me, by which we mean grandchildren, have moved on to pumpkins and plastic masks of action figures unfamiliar to oldies, but the options are still open about what they will actually
be
for Halloween. Transformed, as we were, to tramps or ghosts in homemade costumes?

I noticed the scar on your nose which I lose track of over the years, a perfectly round patch of slick keloid, large as a dime. One day you had a chat with Bernie Simon in the lobby.
I’ll take care of that,
he said, saving your life. In those days we were cavalier about the ravages of time. Heart-burn, toothache, a touch of vertigo—our vision of the future blurred by cheap drugstore glasses.

As though just another jaunt, breath of fresh air, not a reprieve from the heavy sentence of the book I’d thrown aside. What might I have said that was truthful? That I too often looked back, not to presume upon the day’s blessing, isn’t that how my mother might put it? Channeling that cultured voice—
Best get on with your business, Mimi. Remember Lot’s wife.

Well, I do, I remember that wife is given no name, no space in the story, and no say. She disobeys, turns to look at the sinful city in sulfurous flames. Swift chapters in the good book don’t miss a beat turning her into a pillar of salt. Whatever the indulgences of body and soul in Sodom, she was leaving home with nothing like the comfort of Central Park to run to.

You took
Liebestraum,
the offending book, from my hand.
Leave it.

You knew perfectly well what I’d been up to, picking at the gold medallion on its cover like a kid with a scab on my knee.

I said,
Let’s give some thought to supper.

The new flat-screen TV in the kitchen brought cut-rate news. Corporate Greed, Celebrity Breakup, DNA Frees Convicted Rapist, Dollar Drops Against Euro. As president flops off mountain bike, I shed onion tears. High school bands march down Fifth Avenue: NYPD, Mayor Bloomberg, Senators, Sons of Italy, Knights of Columbus. Car Bomb in Haifa, Helicopter Malfunction in Mosul. Five marines, their deaths verified. Sipping my wine—tears, the real thing.

Their photos: two in camouflage, three in dress uniform. Tonight the oldest is twenty-three. I could see you didn’t buy my tears for the cruel fate of those boys shipped home, RIP. Onion knife in hand, I left you to go back down the hall to my workroom. Behind the confusion of old postcards and printouts, there’s the photo of my grandfather sitting on the steps of the Knights of Columbus, an ample brick-and-shingle house spiffed up to rival the Masonic Lodge. Bridgeport, 1918. He is broad-shouldered; craggy forehead shelters his eyes from the sun, mouth rather too generous with a twist of a smile. George Burns is remarkably handsome, big hands clasped on his knees to ground him while this picture is taken with the fraternal brothers, important men who run Main Street, the harbor, City Hall. He is the only Knight in a soft shirt and tweed cap that a worker might wear on a Sunday. The rest of the Templars sport confident fedoras, stiff collars, four-in-hand ties. All of them Irish, and it’s a wonder to me still how these Paddys-come-lately tied up with Columbus when they had little to do with Italians other than renting them tinderboxes in the Hollow or granting the occasional loan. Burns built houses for the men who worked on his crew, all Italians, paving roads in the city outgrowing its limits. At sixteen, when the landscape firm that bore Olmsted’s name extended the breakwater in Seaside Park, he’d carted stones, scythed the bulrushes of Long Island Sound and lost half a finger.

Back in the kitchen, I hand over the photo dulled to amber photogravure. You’ve seen it often, yet I launch the whole roundabout story while the water in the pasta pot boils away, tell how I circumnavigated the Reservoir, hooting at tourists when I came to that bend in the road, and end with the devalued holiday, the grandfather I hardly knew, an old man bankrupt, shrunken, silenced by age, dealing his grandchildren pennies from a jam jar.

I’m small, with few words. He reaches out, strokes my cheek with the stump, the slick flesh of that terrible finger. I’m ashamed of my tears. Pennies clink as my mother drops them one by one back into the jar.

 

 

Last night I told you of my slow progress round the track, the reflection of clouds skimming the water, Fall not yet in its glory as balm to my passing fit of despair, the fabled Reservoir drained to the events of my day. Outwitted by an owl. I did not mention shortness of breath, my heart’s marathon beat pumping for the booby prize. It took the evening news in the kitchen to connect me to Columbus Day, the great Christoforo aiding and abetting my notion that history prods memory, serving up fragments of postcolonial lore.

We’ve lived too long together. I feed you your lines.

Yes, plotted,
and on I went turning back to serving my life sentence for the story I committed, that Nazi soprano who betrays a smitten officer, his love doomed from the first page, American innocence exposed as plain foolish but
always forgivable
.
Liebestraum
(
Love Story
in plain English); a touch of irony to leaven my story.