The Sunken Cathedral (13 page)

*  *  *

“Please let’s not get into this now,” Marie says.

“There are a million reasons but let me name three: Zone A, Zone A, Zone A. I couldn’t live with myself if you floated out to the Hudson.”

“There are worse ways to go,” Marie says. The boys—she can’t help but call them this—have had a nap, a shower. The sun is high, but weak. They sit in back somewhat revived, full of pep, Larry says, petting Roscoe, who has jumped down to their side.

“So, this is really his cat?” Larry says, changing the subject.

“One and the same,” Marie says. “You’ll see him around. He sometimes rehearses on his roof.”

“I fucking love New York,” Larry says. “Sorry,” he says.

“And what if you were injured in any way, or lost power for a week? They don’t know what will happen next. Get out. Dad would have said so.”

“It’s weather,” Marie says. “I survived the Blitz.”

“Mother was there, I told you,” Jules says to Larry. “Then she found her way here.”

“I thought you said Rochester,” Larry says, admiring Roscoe. In a different life, the cat might have been a raccoon—blacks and browns and white, his tail ringed.

“London then Rochester then Dad then New York,” Jules says.

“I got the sequence wrong,” Larry says, pulling Roscoe to his lap. “Sue me.”

“I wasn’t criticizing.”

“That’s a first.”

It had been Larry’s idea to take the red-eye, to reach Jules’s mother as soon as they could—she’s hobbling around Chelsea at eighty-seven, he had said.

Eighty-five, Jules had said.

Whatever. The point is she’s a target for a lunatic.

Lunatics can no longer afford Chelsea, Jules said.

“You’re wrong about your father,” Marie says.

“What? I thought you met him in Rochester?”

“About him wanting me to leave,” Marie says. “This was our home.”

Roscoe leaps from Larry’s lap to the still-hard ground, the crimped green bulb shoots like so many broken fingers, matted clumps still matted by the dead leaves of winter. This year she hasn’t yet raked, another reason Jules will say: the upkeep.
^II

I
. He had Abe’s curly hair, his broad shoulders. He loved men, not women. They knew before he told them; Abe wept, his shoulders shaking. He loved his Jules. He scooped him up in his strong arms and kissed Jules’s toes until Jules dissolved from it: Jules loved his father best.

II
. A thousand pigeons rise in Roscoe’s wake and above, in the windows of the Stalin-era leviathan, apartments 15A and B, the idiot sons of St. Claire, Dudam and Benoit, pull aside the draperies, their greasy bangs and noses to the window watching as the soldiers force the neighbors out. Distracted by their foggy breath, the boys draw angels on the rippled glass, their nails sharp as quills.

XX

“I
don’t know why,” Elizabeth tells the policeman, Carlos, who apprehends her as she climbs the stairs to the Progressive K–8 art room—her intent finding spray paint, or maybe only a brush and oils. “I guess I was going to write something.”

Stop, he had yelled, as if she were a criminal, and she had turned to see a policeman standing at the base of the stairs, his hand poised, or maybe just too close, to his gun.

Given the heightened alert of the City, the looming storms, the melting subterranean freeze, and the speed at which the oceans are rising, their currents no longer predictable, the police have come to suspect that anything can and most likely will happen. Every day they drill their What Ifs:

What If a Pandemic?

What If Manhattan were put under quarantine?

What If terrorists arrived by submarine?

What If the power grid goes?

What If a Biological Event were introduced?

The point is, someone has seen something and said something: something at Progressive K–8, a darting light in the shuttered windows. The police have been notified. Carlos eventually arriving on his horse, Otis, boots shit-caked—he’d been mucking the new stables near Thirty-Fourth. And soon after, Bernice Stilton, Dr. Constantine close behind: she couldn’t get a cab in the drizzle.
^I

“Bernice,” Elizabeth says. “Could you please tell him I’m a parent?”

“She’s a parent,” Bernice says. “What happened?”

“Nothing I can ascertain,” Carlos says. “I found her here with a flashlight. She was on the stairs. She was heading up the stairs with a flashlight.”

“I was on my way to the art room,” Elizabeth says.

“The art room’s on the third floor,” Bernice says, helpful. “That makes sense,” she says, as Constantine arrives.

“Who are you?” Carlos asks Constantine.

“I’m the head,” Constantine says.

“And I’m the assistant head,” Bernice says. “The keys are mine. My responsibility. She said it was an emergency.”

“What emergency?” Carlos asks Elizabeth.

Elizabeth shrugs. “That’s the thing,” she says.

“She’s a mother,” Dr. Constantine says to Carlos, as if this explains everything. “I can vouch she’s a mother,” she says. She would rather just forget it, Elizabeth clearly out of sorts, maybe even a little unstable. Anyway, she does not want to see Progressive’s name sullied and things too easily fall apart: there was the time the four-year-old, Belle, pushed her way out the unmanned door—since alarmed—with her best friend, Lolly, the two—it was cute, actually—heading to Lolly’s apartment on West Tenth.

Carlos looks at the three women and then pulls the thick pad of paper from one of his many pockets.

Waste of time. False alarm, he does not write. He goes through the motions, signs his name, and notes the hour as Dr. Constantine and Bernice return to report nothing out of place but a miracle of the order they should all come see.

“Me, too?” Elizabeth says. She has been sitting in the dark window well, beneath the stitched-together quilt of the Class of ’79. They had almost forgotten her.
^II

“You, too,” Dr. Constantine says. And they follow her to the second floor, to K203, where the red glow of an incubator pulses in the corner, like an isolated heart, five newly hatched goslings asleep in a furry pile, their tiny beaks tucked under their tiny, tiny wings.
^III

“Beautiful,” Carlos says.

“Yes,” Dr. Constantine says.

His little girl had been in one of those incubators, Carlos says. Betsy. Born at twenty-six weeks with lungs too weak and small, the doctor said, he and his wife not even able to touch her, not even with the glove because she was hooked up to tubes. His wife was afraid she might jostle something and so she did not touch her and he did not and sometimes they wondered whether, you know, with the articles you see about bonding and so forth, they wondered whether they might have really screwed something up but their little girl fine now, a soccer player, a fourth grader but also so tough that they sometimes wondered. Margaret said she had a doctorate in education and please. She said, Please do me a favor and tell your wife not to worry. Please tell her not to worry.

They stand looking down at the goslings. Carlos asks permission and reaches into the incubator to lift the smallest one, the runt Claudia will be allowed to keep in the country, the runt she will name Pickles, its down still shell-stuck. Carlos holds it in his big hand, the runt settling down quickly, snuggling there tucked under the policeman’s thumb as if the policeman were its mother.

*  *  *

“A misunderstanding,” Margaret Constantine concludes.

“Don’t do it again,” Carlos says.

“I won’t,” Elizabeth says. “Temporary insanity,” she says. “Honestly, I promise. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

They push open the heavy doors and walk down the steps of Progressive K–8 to the street, where Otis waits. The rain has let up, the City’s lights softer somehow, exhausted as a child after a good cry.

Elizabeth pets the soft fur on Otis’s neck, remembering how, when she was a young girl, a horse seemed the closest thing to heaven.

“Why Otis?” she asks.

“A dog I had once. An ugly bulldog.”

“Oh,” Elizabeth says.

She realizes they are all waiting for her to move along, to do something, to be okay. She should go home. The thing is, she should go home. She had only wanted to read again the other stories, the stories of the women who have met the deadline early. Insane, they might say of their schedules. Busy, busy, they say. I don’t have a minute, they say. And still, It’s all good, they say. We’re fine.

“Best of luck to your son,” Carlos says. He mounts Otis, who shifts his weight and keeps chewing. Carlos’s raincoat, a duster, looks a cape in a different century.

“And to your little girl,” she says.

Carlos waves good-bye to Margaret and tips his policeman’s hat to Bernice. She blushes beneath the big frames of her plastic glasses and strokes the keys now safely tucked in her hand.

*  *  *

Elizabeth apologizes to Constantine and Bernice again—but they’ll talk about everything in the morning, Margaret says sternly.

She and Bernice wait, watching as Elizabeth rides her bike safely into the shiny, wet landscape, the random pulse of brake lights. Then the two, colleagues in a distant hierarchy, retire to one of the corner bars of the City often overlooked and for good reason. Screens hang like nattering stars in the dark and men slip from their barstools to form watery blurs that puddle and spread on the wooden floor.
^IV

“I don’t know what’s wrong with these women,” Margaret begins.

“Hysteria,” Bernice says. She ordered bourbon on the rocks with a twist to Margaret’s martini, and it did not take them long to be on their second. “They’re all hysterics. Just like the old days.”

“I don’t think so,” Margaret says. “I was there in the old days.”

“Anxiety then,” Bernice says. “The curse of the twenty-first century.” She would like to bum a cigarette off someone but remembers no one is allowed to smoke. Maybe that’s the problem now: everyone needs a cigarette.

“Who knows,” Margaret says.

“Not me,” Bernice says. “But I’ve been at Progressive a long, long time and I’ve never seen anything like it. You would think they’re all lining up to win the Nobel Prize. You would think the sun rises and sets on New York City. What more can they do? And this is what they get: loony tunes. I say, relax. I say it’s all too much. I say, enough.” She doesn’t quite know what she says, actually, but it feels good to be gossiping with the boss, to be sitting directly across from the famous Margaret Constantine, PhD, heir to the throne, or at least for the time being, author of a number of papers concerning primary education and blah-da-de-blah. They run together now, all the Margarets and Steves and Carls and Veronicas—this a place where the heads don’t stay too long before they roll out the door. Like the French Revolution. She would like to see Margaret’s head roll out the door or she would not. Truly. Margaret a much nicer person than anyone would think. Here in the dark of the bar Margaret almost kind. Her boss had gone through the drill pretty quickly: the reasons Bernice should be fired, the reasons she would not fire her.

And then Margaret Constantine tells the bartender to put it on a tab.

And then she says to Bernice, Let’s have another.

And then she says to Bernice, So, I understand you are not just the brains, but also the balls behind this entire operation.

But before any of it, Constantine turns to Bernice, Elizabeth disappearing into the shiny, wet landscape, and says, “I need a drink.”

*  *  *

“We were in Scotland, a graduation trip. I must have said something terrible but for the life of me, I don’t remember what. It hasn’t been the same since.”

In the dark, her boss looks almost pretty. She is pretty, actually. Bernice never noticed.

“Anyway, that’s that. You? You’ve never said.”

“You should call her,” Bernice says.

“Who?”

“Ariel.”

“I never know what time it is in New Zealand. I try to figure it out sometimes, just to see if she’s brushing her teeth for bed or for morning. Just to picture where she might be standing.”

“You could Google Earth.”

“Maybe.”

“You could zoom in. It’s easy,” Bernice says. She tells Margaret about her recent visit to Chita Goldman’s first-grade class. Chita Goldman was showing the kids how to Google Earth on the Smart Board and used her own apartment—rent-controlled!—in the Bronx as an example of a location on Earth.
^V

“I suppose I could,” Dr. Constantine is saying.

“What?” Bernice says; she’s lost the thread.

“Google Earth,” Margaret says.

“Right,” Bernice says.

“And you?” Margaret says. “Children?”

“Two boys,” Bernice says. “Dylan lives in Palo Alto. My oldest, Lenin, passed in 2004.”

Iraq, she says, the irony. Lenin recruited from the hallways of PS 124, a crappy school then and more so now—this before she organized Progressive K–8’s employees to strike for a better family education policy. Every year they invite her back for Veterans Day, she says. The commemorative reading of the names the children painted on a mural outside the gymnasium, a mural of doves and daisies and blue skies that has seen better days and still, she goes. She returns to the crappy school to see her boy’s name among the other names and to greet the little girls and boys who walk the line of now only mothers, shaking hands and thanking them for their sacrifice.

There’s a game on—basketball, some kind of rivalry that has the mostly men at the bar suddenly cheering, a point won or lost, fairly or unfairly, the referee a total dick, somebody’s shouting, a total, fucking dick.

“My sacrifice?” Bernice Stilton says, then nothing.
^VI

Margaret Constantine gestures to the harried bartender for the check, understanding that in the morning, or later in the morning, she and Bernice will meet again in the hallway outside of the administrative offices of Progressive K–8, where she will review her day’s schedule, asking her if she might do a little rearranging given the late night. But now, it seems, they are friends, good friends, sailors on the same choppy sea; they push away from the bar and stand a bit unsteadily. From here they negotiate the dark to the door out, their beacon the red neon in the windows. From the west, Eleventh Avenue or maybe farther, a sudden eruption of sirens deafens everything, another emergency passing, almost gone; they stand on the sidewalk, waiting it out.