The Sunken Cathedral (14 page)

I
. Bernice Stilton had called Dr. Constantine on the unlisted number Constantine keeps with the hope of hearing from Ariel, time zones and whatnot, New Zealand impossible; the number only to be used in emergencies. Constantine answered—she had been sleeping over Vicram’s XXI, the chapter on the musings of his first wife, a woman who had agreed to free love, veganism, and meditation, and lived duly with it all until her untimely death from TB. “Hullo?” she said.

“Bernice,” Bernice said.

“Bernice?” Dr. Constantine said.

“Listen,” Bernice said. “I’ve made a mistake. I gave the keys to Elizabeth Fanning, Ben Hewitt’s mom. She convinced me she needed something but I’ve got a funny feeling.”

“Where is she?”

“At school, I presume,” Bernice said.

“I’m on my way—”

“Be careful,” Bernice says.

“Is she armed?” Dr. Constantine said, a joke.

“Not sure,” Bernice said, humorless. “I’ll meet you there.”

Not for nothing does Bernice Stilton live in Penn South with the other ladies from the Garment Union days; not for nothing did she meet Rudy Stilton on a picket line, did they name their first son Lenin, did she carry the card from the Communist Party. Not for nothing does she sometimes wake to hear the thwack thwack thwack of the helicopters that dangle over Chelsea at odd hours, helicopters pursuing something—terrorists?—through the dark. She happens to know they’ve housed Homeland Security not too far west from here, in the old thread factory on Eleventh, the one where they broke all the windows during Stonewall and looted in the Blackout of ’77 and now, revamped, its skin a photovoltaic green, the Feds have taken over three whole floors, just above Fox News and under Scorsese.

II
. Was this it, then? Her sense of slowly disappearing? Like in that cartoon she watched as a little girl where the character dissolved not all at once but as if someone were taking an eraser, wiping her away? Could she start again? Could she forget what she had done? Could she ever, even here, be forgiven who she was?

III
. Rebecca Hollingsworth had brought the eggs from the country last week, believing the project might boost her daughter Claudia’s standing among the clique of girls who, in no small measure, have spent the past months excluding Claudia Hollingsworth from every game they invent in the playground—Mommies and Babies, Cops and Robbers, Blondes and Brunettes. Claudia doesn’t appear to mind though Rebecca knows better. Or, rather, Rebecca minds. She has made up excuses to be there, to watch; Claudia sitting alone on the top of the monkey bars, talking to no one or to one of her imaginary friends. These times Claudia knows full well that her mother watches and so sprouts a pair of wings and lifts off from the monkey bars high over the City to observe the complexities of the traffic and the fascinating construction projects: the trucks, the jackhammers, the yellow and orange cones. Her imaginary friends suggest farther places, maybe returning to her country house to snuggle at the end of her bed, where it is always warm, and quiet, or possibly her grandmother’s farm in Canada, but Claudia says no, she needs to be back for Snack.

Last week Rebecca had appeared at the door to K203, Ms. Greene’s kindergarten class, citing the absence of nature from children’s experiences in the City, recent public scandals and school shootings elsewhere, the culture in general and commercialization in particular, carting the incubator, and the eggs the students might hatch as an experiment in
kinder
living,
kinder
a word, she would tell Ms. Greene and anyone else in the administration cornered to hear, that should be invoked more often, especially here, at Progressive K–8, a school on the forefront. And for that morning Rebecca had watched as her plan worked perfectly, as the other little girls—so kind!—gathered around her Claudia, touching her, hugging her, jumping up and down, laughing as Claudia beamed out from within them, from her place, suddenly, at the center of this world.

IV
. A hundred years ago, sawdust and blood, the threat of something, but now just the smell of grease, the bang and clash of dishes washed too quickly by men paid too little. In her day, a June one in 1954, Bernice would have gone in back to ask them what, exactly, they earned. She would have wanted to practice her Spanish. But she’s grown tired of Labor, she’s grown tired of all that.

V
. The kids sat in their kid chairs at their kid tables watching as Chita Goldman Google Earthed her apartment building in the Bronx, as she zoomed in—thirty-six years!—to show them a bird’s-eye view of its brick façade, nothing special, and the seventh-floor window that would lead to her living room and the faded rose pattern of Chita Goldman’s couch—it belonged to Nanna! If they could have gone in, and Chita Goldman explained that very soon they would be able to go in, given the advances of technology, drones the size of bees, pretty soon, Chita Goldman said, they would be able to go all the way into her apartment, to see the way she had left her dirty breakfast dishes on the red-checked tablecloth in the kitchen, to see her powder room with its windmill wallpaper, and the flowers in the vase in her bedroom, the kids now dead quiet as Chita Goldman went on, as she talked them through her entire apartment.

VI
. Carlos rides away in the rain, shamed for all he did not say about the ugly bulldog, Otis. He could have told those women much more: How Otis would ride shotgun, his paws on the dashboard looking out, and how Otis’s eyes were black, and how Otis smelled of his wife’s powders tucked as Otis often was within the covers of their bed. How Otis was the first to rise and how Otis sometimes slept on his back, legs in the air like an overturned bug, his wife would say, pointing and laughing, never failing to be amused. How holding Otis he had watched the vet prepare whatever it was and prime the syringe and how he wished his wife were with him but she was not, this happening much too suddenly, this failure of something vital, Otis unable to stand, unable to eat, Otis’s black eyes wrong, as if trapped behind scratched glass.

He’d cradled Otis in his winter coat to where the vet lived, the vet unable to make it to the vet hospital but he would meet him in the vestibule and let him up to his apartment. Carlos remembers all this in the reflective light of the post-rain City, riding a bit distractedly up the bike path along the West Side Highway toward the stables, the joggers and pedestrians and bicyclists mostly inside due to weather except a few, a certain few, and so Carlos might be forgiven for not calling backup for the furious bicyclist, the bicyclist’s bicycle of the thousands of dollars variety now dented and thrown to the cement bike path, the bicyclist so furious he cannot speak. He shoves the person who has slowed him down, a young boy crossing the path to the river in search of something he cannot find elsewhere, something more than this, the bicyclist shoving the young boy against the cement barricades intended for suicide bombers, the young boy defending himself against the bicyclist and the policeman suddenly in the picture, a rookie who charges in alone, jumping off his horse to break it up. The switchblade intended for the bicyclist’s neck lodged in the policeman’s neck instead.

His blood was wet as the rain, the young boy would remember, will remember; the policeman’s blood staining the cement barricade red so that many years later, many years passed, the young boy, now an ex–con artist, will spill the red paint on the cement gallery floor, bleached for this occasion—the occasion of the artist—prepared and prepped, the announcements mailed, the party planned, the ex–con artist at work on the installation, etching the flowers in the red paint with his fingers, the petals, the details he’s known for—he’s done this before—as he remembers the dead policeman, as he never forgets the dead policeman, the rookie, or the look of his dumb horse still waiting in the rain.

XXI

D
ebussy’s enchantment with the story of the sunken cathedral may have come from his summers in Brittany, near the Bay of Douarnenez, Helen’s father said. A lovely place known for the sea and for the legend of the lost City of Ys (and here Helen, still a child, wonders if there are other magical cities named after letters of the alphabet: the City of Bs, the City of Xs), a city built out of the sea and circled by a high dike to protect it from tempests—rough storms, her father said. They say its only entry was an elaborate brass door on which artisans who had sailed down from the north had carved mermaids and mermen, the creatures’ webbed hands and scaled tails worn from the many kisses of the king’s admirers. The king, Gradlon, was a good king and had many admirers. Only he was good enough to hold the key to the famous brass door.

King Gradlon had one daughter, Dahut. The queen, his wife and the girl’s poor mother, had died (and here Helen frowned; she did not understand why all the mothers in these stories had to die when her own mother was in the kitchen frying meatballs in the electric skillet and perfectly alive).

The daughter, Dahut, was not quite as wonderful as her father. In fact, she was terribly evil. She invited strangers into the city, men whom she promised she would marry at dawn but whom she killed instead at midnight. (And here Helen pictured her mother, Louise, promising to marry her father, the moon high over them, her mother, Louise, in one of her beautiful dresses, and then . . . But she could not picture it. She could not picture her mother as the evil Dahut, and anyway, her mother was calling them. Dinner, she called.)

Anyway, the evil Dahut stole the key one evening for the devil, her father says. (The devil!) And the devil unlocked the brass door in the middle of a tempest and the waters rose and drowned the city and Gradlon tried to escape on his magic horse with Dahut behind him—

“Where?”

—on the horse but the Queen of the North—

“Who?”

I don’t remember who. Someone appeared and said that Gradlon must cast Dahut into the ocean.

“Her father?”

Yes. And so he did. And so she became a golden mermaid.

“On the brass door?”

In the ocean.

“Oh.”

But the story is not what was important to Debussy. It was what the story must have made him feel, her father says. There is a difference, he says. Debussy’s “The Sunken Cathedral” is the musical version of Impressionism.

Had she heard of Impressionism? he asked.

“Of course!” she said. “Impressionism is when you shake the hand of your teacher, or your friend’s parents, before you are even asked.”

You are a very smart girl, her father said.

You are the smartest girl in the room, her father said.

She does not move from her place on her father’s lap even though he says Mother will be furious if the dinner gets cold. They cannot let Mother be furious, he says. Tonight they cannot let the dinner go cold, he says.
^I

She sat on her father’s lap as her father told her the story of the music he played on the console, the brown furry thing in the corner Mother called his beast, his favorite animal. He explained how the story of the drowned City of Ys was a story that had been told over and over again by many different writers and artists and here a composer, so this was just one interpretation of a legend.

Do you know the word
interpretation
? he said, and she said, “Of course.”

Hold on, her father said.

He picked up the telephone from the small table next to his chair and her heart slipped believing he might change his mind and return to work after all, so late in the day, a spring day, the grass already green and birds singing in the trees and Mother in the kitchen in a pretty dress, believing maybe he will say into the big mouthpiece in the voice he used for work that he would head out after supper as he sometimes did, that he would be there soon. She watched her father listening as if the telephone had actually rung first. Did it ring first?

Then her father said, “Uh-huh.” Then her father said, “I certainly understand, Mr. President. I will pass that along.”

Her father set down the telephone and sighed.

“Well,” he said to her. “You won’t believe who that was: General Dwight D. Eisenhower. President of the United States of America.”

“I know,” Helen said.

“You do?” her father said. “And do you know why he was calling?” he said.

Helen shook her head quickly, a lie.

“Well,” her father said. “I’ll tell you why President General Dwight D. Eisenhower just rang me up,” he said, peering at his daughter’s eyes, huge behind the fringe of bangs his wife thought stylish, something to liven up a dull face, she said.

“He wanted to correct me,” her father whispered. “ ‘Not the smartest girl in the room,’ Ike Eisenhower, thirty-fourth President of the United States of America, just said to me from his desk in the Oval Office of the White House. ‘But the smartest girl on the entire planet!’ ” And here her father smiled his smile, his eyes bright behind his thick glasses, so much like her own in high school, where she sits in the darkened room looking at the slides of Matisse’s blue dancers, her breath stopped in her throat.

This is what she remembered of the story “The Sunken Cathedral,” Helen would say, if Sid Morris, or any of them, ever asked her inspiration.

I
. Her father wears a small gray hat he takes off in church and when he walks through the front door home from work in his suit and tie. Where he works she is not sure: in an office in town, in a building cut from stone with a clock tower that counts every hour. He loves music the most, the piano; he loves the sound of the clock tower. He loves Mother, who sometimes dresses up to meet him in town, at Whitfield’s on the corner, for lunch, and on those days she doesn’t smell like Mother but like perfume. Today Mother met Father at Whitfield’s and she watched as they walked up the walk to home, her mother pretty and her father handsome in his suit and hat. She dressed, too, in a starched dress that only yesterday hung on the line in the sunshine. She likes to picture her clothes there—on the line. Breathing the sunshine. She also likes to picture the fairies that live in the woods in the hollowed-out rotten tree trunk across Jackson’s Creek, and in the moss that grows on its bark. The fairies plant tiny gardens there in rows and if you are quick enough you might catch them picking flowers but she has straight bangs that fringe her eyelashes and tickle and it is difficult for her to catch anything or even to see clearly. Still, she might with looking hard; her father always tells her to look hard.