The Rags of Time (7 page)

You hurried ahead, past dog walkers, babies in slings, past the elderly taking the air, skateboarders—illegal on the walkway. The pretzel salesman had resumed his Summer post. A fat boy in a red shako, much gold braid on his breast and belly, began a melancholy taps on his bugle—
Day is done, gone the sun
—broke to drain spittle from his mouthpiece.

You were not amused by this touch of Fellini. Checking your watch:
Four-fifteen.

Columbus Day,
I said.
Parade long over.

The holiday stuck on to the weekend. Cyril had wanted to go to school that morning, always wants to go to school, where he outwits his class-mates less endowed. His cleverness is a cross he will have to bear. Only now that I recall Bert Boyce and Artie Freeman breaking through the Fifth Avenue crowd when Columbus Day was kept in its place, the disruptive twelfth. Snotty nerds lusting for the drum majorettes and their flock of twirlers from the outer boroughs, those high-stepping girls far beyond our reach.

In the Pinetum we did a swift look-see searching for the red crest of the kinglet. There was only the resident clown in a battered derby prompting his flea-bitten parrot—
H’lo there! ’Lo there!
Impatient, you took the Reservoir Track the long way round. Not a merganser in sight as we headed to the crosstown bus to get home to the children. Our pretense of pleasure seemed a failed duty until you caught the noiseless swivel of an owl’s head, flick of tufted ears.

The long-eared, napping till end of day, did not deign to acknowledge our ogle eyes trained on him. Drowsy creature, yet I believe he heard every step of our approach, listened to each shallow breath of our silence, a comfort compared to the panting of joggers. We had discovered him fully disclosed on his perch. If he’d been in a story, he’d be wiser or at least crafty, the role he’s often assigned. You wrote in this very notebook, the turn of the page noiseless. Flipping back, I see with what care you drew the eye stripe cutting a perfect V to the owl’s beak. In any case, I had my prize for the day in your extended moment of delight, which swept aside Maisy’s catarrh, the terrifying pops of an old combustion engine, and the anxiety, never mentioned, that my work was not going well. I might not find my way through the knots of higher mathematics to the solution of one small problem. In clear sight of the owl, the troubling world dropped away. Louise, confess your thing about owls, starting with barn owls on the farm in Wisconsin. The first prize you ever won, sketch of an owl perched on a downspout, every night watching that bird from your bedroom window until the dive for its prey, the death shriek of its victim.

Our binoculars captured the Halloween mask of the owl’s flat face. I must not deprive the bird of his owlness, see him pompous and befuddled, like Owl in the book our son loves. An uncertain shuffle brought the prolonged silence to a halt. Do you remember the old woman huffing and puffing her way round the track? You signaled her to stop? With a flip of your hand ordered:
Look, look up.
A party of three sharing the vigil. In a contest of wills, this urban owl might outlast us. Finally, the shabby old girl broke the spell, shuffled toward the tennis courts, her breathing audible—uneven. The sky had darkened, leaves rustled underfoot. The long-eared was surely gloating as we headed toward Fifth Avenue, his unblinking eyes on us. I preened at coaxing a laugh at Turtle Pond, and for some time, long minutes of owl time, you’d been lost to the world.

 

 

 

This is Bud’s story, Bertie’s. I was the only kid allowed to call him Bertie and will use that boyhood moniker when I speak of our friendship, rekindled that very day, the day of our birding. My “guard” in the waiting room is a court attendant, Tim McBride, gabby Irish, “been in the job since.” What follows is the real dope on Jimmy Hoffa disappearing into a cement grave, not the void, same year as bilingual signs here in the courthouse rest rooms. “My case” will most likely not be called today. The parties still in judge’s chambers. McBride releases me till after lunch.
My case,
an odd way to refer to the troubles of Bertram Boyce, far from mine. His are unfortunately dated. Bert took liberties with time. My problem was clocked—will the scholar-in-training triumph over the odds or fail to make the grade in given time? That question troubles you, Lou, though the solution is solely mine.

Released into the city at high noon, I could head up, or downtown. History lies in both directions. Downtown is Wall Street, where my grandfather went to the office every working day. He invested, bought and sold, made money. We are living off him now, Louise, though he’s gone these six years if I reckon correctly, which I should be able to do, since he has willed me the luxury of going back to school to pick up my love affair with mathematics. So I had the choice of walking down the blocks to look at the Stock Exchange that rang the market to my grandfather’s attention each day, though not going as far as the Trade Center wound or taking the route up to SoHo, where we lived our first years together in your loft, the materials of your trade all around us—paints, charcoal smudges in progress, canvases stacked against the wall. I was in that empty waiting room at my request, the privilege granted by the machinations of Bertie’s lawyer, who believed I must fiddle on with statistics and correlations for my class in applied mathematics. Furthermore, I did not want to spend time under the surveillance of Attorney Sylvan, famous for finding loopholes in the law. I had been coached by him, his every slick word put in my mouth, thinking when the time comes I’ll say what I have to say truly—my schoolboy adventures with Bertie, my larky jobs at Skylark, more play than employment.

My choice was not to travel downtown for recess, Lou, not to recall the dutiful life of Cyril O’Connor, not indulge in Lower Broadway, where we were so gone on each other our nights of love consumed us. I’ve loosened up, though
consumed
is too heady a word, or too visceral. My tongue freed by a hot dog with the works as I perused the discount junk on Canal Street, odd lots of T-shirts with Goth symbols of the Reich, dog beds, doll heads, faucets, copper wire, cruets labeled Oil and Vinygar, framed posters of Che and the Eiffel Tower. Products in their mass graves guarded by their keepers, who seemed to be doing swift business of sorts, perhaps as subject to investigation as Bertram Boyce’s deals at Skylark. Troubling.

You were well acquainted with troubles that day in the park, your fears crossing the line from daily concern to manic organic. Alar in the apple juice, bacteria flourishing in plastic bottles,
E. coli,
tuna with its dose of mercury—all loomed large as the national debt. A whiff of the super’s stogie in the hallway, Asian flu, Teflon and faulty seat belts—right up there with toxic waste.
Nothing to fear but fear itself,
attempting the noble line, I fail to amuse. Along with your catalog of horrors, there is Maisy’s persistent congestion, and the uncertain course of my career. Love, in one of its many distortions, allows you never to speak of my possible failure, though I work hard, harder than I ever have in my life. Lou, there is the one unspeakable word—
talent
, if in fact the gift of numbers was ever mine to squander. No longer nimble, one step behind the beat? Better to record the owl’s composure on a warm October day.

That night when Cyril and Maisy were safely stashed in their bunk bed, I discovered you were keeping an account of the current war’s fatalities, though only
our boys
were admitted to your file. You had copied each soldier’s name, age, rank and hometown into a baby book, a present from your mother intended for Maisy’s vital statistics—first tooth, first fever, first word. On the cover a stork carts a swaddled newborn in its beak. I suggested the death toll of Operation Iraqi Freedom is online,
www.Iraqbodycount.org
.
Oh, that’s only information,
you said, transferring Private First Class, 20,
Linden, NJ,
and Staff Sergeant, 34,
Shreveport, LA,
from the
Times
to your register, inscribing each name, your pen dipped in India ink. Kind of crazy, the record made personal, and then Louise Moffett, once an artist on the cutting edge, now invested in the role you embrace as housewife and mother, costumed in apron and sensible shoes, closes the baby book, takes up a mystery, British.
Potboilers,
you call these murders set in the manse or vicarage. The gardener did it or the village doctor you thought so kind. The night of our birding, you challenged the sly smile of my bewilderment.

You know the satisfaction, Artie. Puzzles, solutions
.

Our pleasant ongoing argument in which I point out that a problem chalked on the blackboard is without motive—no adultery, sibling rivalry, not even greed to provoke a crime.

And fell asleep with the murder unsolved. I scanned my preparation for class—harmless proofs completed, then lay your book aside, turning down the page not to lose the place in that story. Even in sleep you looked troubled, gone from me, but earlier that day I had you back. As we headed along the sidewalk to 86th Street, I was hopeful till worry surfaced in tightness around your mouth, an audible sigh as you looked across Fifth Avenue at the apartment house where I lived with my grandparents when I was a boy, an orphan. You won’t
go there,
a slippery expression, though you take care to avoid the wounds of my childhood, which I believe long healed. I have hoped that Bertie, with his troubles, all too real, might release you from conjuring the demons of my past, and from free-floating angst that pursues you. OK pursues us all, but we get Cheerios in the bowl before reading the morning paper.

I imagine how gently your might cut me off. Backdating to that day of owl and egret, your ponytail slapping air, for no reason at all, gave me hope. That night, the night of our birding in the Park, while you slept I turned on the tube, muted it to indulge in our nightcap addiction to the comic turns on the dysfunctional state of our nation. The pantomime without clever words and background laughter seemed as inadequate, to wing a metaphor, as a Band-Aid on a suppurating sore. Or merely electronic—a fleeting message held in our hand:
pick up juice, organic snacks at the market.
We’d lost track of the sand castle blown away in Desert Storm. So it’s ever been while Rome burned, though have you noticed there’s no tune for this war?
Where have all the flowers gone?
My mother strumming,
Long time passing. Long time ago.

I am writing in a new notebook with unlined pages, bought at Pearl Paint, where you ordered supplies when you were still invested in your art. Your little green notebook is, after all, for the birds. When I returned to the courthouse, Tim McBride presented me with a sealed envelope. Lawyer for the defense—that is, Thad Sylvan—asked me to consider in my testimony the charities of Bertram Boyce Jr. and the corporate goodwill of Skylark. And what did I recall of the Boyce family holidays, and the religion of their choice? I remember that the mother (divorced) went to Aspen for Christmas, Bermuda at Easter. She took Bert along until he was old enough to be abandoned to the Park Avenue apartment or sent to visit his father, a mysterious tinkerer in Bethesda, Maryland, who held patents on medical apparatus that paid the bills, saved lives. I did not share these memories. Sylvan should do his homework. Why not ask poor Heather Boyce who, in
Newsweek,
walked up the courthouse steps arm in arm with Bertie, a couple properly suited for good works. Their names are printed in programs of the symphony, the opera—Bertram and Heather Boyce, right up there with the heavy donors. Black tie at the Modern and the Met, drives you crazy, Lou, their attention to couture. And Project Hope, the llamas with big, soulful eyes, Heather supplying indigenous folk with herds of the beasts for costly sweaters. Shearing, carding, spinning for a week’s handout of rice and beans.

There’s this. I had a few beers during recess. Observe, dearly beloved, that I was ever so slightly greased. Up for the self-portrait, not the idealized Artie Freeman you once sketched, boyish with a thatch of hair gone early gray. You demoted my smile to an air of bemusement. Forever looking on, not part of the show, the squint of my eyes at every sleight of hand, moral or monetary. Jimmy Stewart, you suggested, one of those innocent heartthrobs.

Back to Bertie, back to business. I have written more of me and more of you than the subject of my deposition.
Testimony:
corrected by Tim McBride when I attempt the legal lingo. I put the two of us on the stand while the accused awaited his day in court. Birding in the Park, the day we met Bertie, I now understand as a confession. The only one I ever knew who confessed was my grandmother, Mae O’Connor, the least sinful of women. She was shriven, strange word, at Ignatius Loyola a few blocks from the apartment. I waited on the church steps facing Park Avenue expecting a hum of holy about her when she emerged from the blessed darkness, but it was only Mae fumbling in her purse for the list of groceries we must pick up at Gristede’s. A shame you never knew her. I see this memory business, this getting it down, might be a simple image that I use for my class. You can’t, Louise, fill up a circle with circles that do not overlap, but if you allow the overlap, then there can be many if not infinite circles which will allow Mae O’Connor to take her place in my story.