A Private Sorcery (15 page)

“Perhaps I could come to read to you.”

“What a pleasure that would be.”

The doorman approaches. He waits for Santiago to finish speaking before touching his shoulder.

“I have just had the honor of making the acquaintance of Señora Dubinsky, the wife of my good young friend.”

Pedro smiles shyly at her. Santiago removes his beret and places it over his heart. He bows slightly. “Good day, señora.
Hasta martes
.” Until Tuesday.

S
HE'S NO MORE
than halfway up the block before she regrets the offer, misconstrued by Santiago since she'd meant on occasion, not every week and certainly not this Tuesday. Tomorrow she'll call, she'll clarify, tactfully extricate herself, but by the time she reaches Broadway, she can hear Saul's gentle chide:
And what else do you have to do that's so pressing? Polish your earrings again?

She stops to buy fruit and milk. Afterwards, crossing Broadway, it occurs to her that her one memory of her father—a blurred still, a father and child marooned on an island in the middle of a wide boulevard waiting for the light to change, the father's long arm reaching down, the child's short one stretching up—probably took place nearby. It has always disturbed her that her memories of the braggadocio Johnny Campanella, the man her mother ran away with, Rena, age two, in tow, are more vivid: leaning against the side of Johnny's red Ford while she
ate a strawberry ice-cream cone, the fat drips rolling down the brown wafer, the sudden idea to turn the cone over to let the drips fall onto the ground. When the pink ball fell, splat, she must have started to cry because the next thing she remembers is Johnny slapping her hand and her mother swooping her up, yelling, “Don't you ever touch her, she's not your child,” and then Johnny throwing something, maybe the map, against the side of the car and her mother carrying her to the rest room, where the two of them stayed locked inside until someone started banging on the door.

Johnny Campanella hadn't lasted long. A week after they reached San Francisco, he turned the Ford back around and headed for Brooklyn, leaving Eleanor and Rena in their North Beach hotel room. For a day, Eleanor was nervous: there was enough money for a couple of cartons of milk, some bread, a jar of peanut butter. By nightfall, though, she was smiling. “Just as well, big stupid creep. He got us here, didn't he, baby?” And by the next day she'd found the job at Nick's Ristorante, where the cook let Rena play in the corner of the kitchen while the waitresses fed her the tastiest morsels from the untouched food on the customers' plates.

I
NSTEAD OF CALLING SANTIAGO
, she calls Leonard to tell him that she's taken a job as a temp and is going to start looking for a smaller apartment. Plunging forward, she asks if she could store some of Saul's things in his attic.

“With a one-bedroom, I won't be able to fit all his books and records and files.”

Leonard pauses just long enough for Rena to notice the questions he doesn't ask. He offers to come with a U-Haul before she moves.

The new job suits Rena. She leaves the house at eight in the evening, just as the summer heat begins to lift, walking the three miles south and east to the law firm's office at Thirty-Ninth and Park. She stops at the Zaro's in Grand Central for a sandwich and water and then sits on the steps of the law firm's building, reading and nibbling. At quarter to ten, she feeds the crusts to the pigeons and heads inside, showing her identification
card to the security guard and then riding the elevator up to the twenty-sixth floor. Unlike Muskowitz & Kerrigan, where there would rarely be anyone in the office at this hour, here there are always a couple of the firstor second-year associates wandering around, the women with their shoes kicked off, the men with their ties askew, sometimes one of the regular secretaries coerced into staying late.

It takes Rena a few days to adjust to her new status as support staff, to give a little wave to the secretary and save the small nods of the head for the young associates. It surprises her how liberating it feels to no longer be one of the professionals mired with anxieties about what the senior partner thinks that lead them to leave their written work until the eleventh hour and then fuel themselves with candy bars and coffee in order to get it done. Each night, she heads to the cubicle set aside for the temp, reads over the list of projects the office manager, Sari, has left her, the diskettes clipped to the marked-up pages. The tasks are complicated enough not to be tedious but simple enough to do without strain. By one, she is usually alone and can turn on the radio she keeps in her drawer and listen to the chamber music the classical station plays at this hour. She works until six and then walks home in the cool morning air. At home, she bathes and puts in earplugs before climbing into bed.

There is something delicious about it all: the walks at dusk and daybreak, the long, quiet hours spent midtown, the deep sleep so much easier for her to come by in the light of day.

W
HAT
S
ANTIAGO WANTS
her to read to him is John Rawls'
A Theory of Justice
.

“I taught this book the year I had Saul in class,” he says. “But I haven't read it since. Saul brought me his copy. We were going to read it after Mr. Melville.”

On the inside cover, Rena sees Saul's signature from a decade before they met. The same crooked scrawl, alternatingly too much and too little pressure applied to the pen. Letters formed by someone at risk of tripping over his own feet.

“If you would start, please, with Chapter Six. Duty and Obligation.” Santiago's voice is surprisingly strong today, the Rawls having revived his habitual teacherly projection.

She reads slowly and loudly. While she can imagine Saul being riveted by the words, she reads with little attention to what she's saying until the passage on mutual aid pulls her back into focus. “‘Consider, for example,'” she reads, “‘the duty of mutual aid. Kant suggests, and others have followed him here, that the ground for proposing this duty is that situations may arise in which we will need the help of others, and not to acknowledge this principle is to deprive ourselves of their assistance.'”

Santiago nods vigorously.

“‘But this is not the only argument for the duty of mutual aid,'” Rena continues, “‘or even the most important one. A sufficient ground for adopting this duty is its pervasive effect on the quality of everyday life. The public knowledge that we are living in a society in which we can depend upon others to come to our assistance in difficult circumstances is itself of great value.'”

“These are the most important sentences in the book,” Santiago says. “Here, in your country, self-sufficiency is idealized. Receiving help, people think it is demeaning. After Bernardo disappeared, people became embarrassed around us. They pitied us because we needed so much help to continue our search.”

“But what if a person refuses help?” She is thinking of Saul, how he'd never told her about the pills.

Santiago takes so long to respond, she wonders if he has not heard her. Or is he thinking that if Saul rejected her help, it was never truly offered?

He clears his throat, lifts his chin. “In a capitalist society, money becomes the metaphor for everything. People believe that help is a limited resource, that they've spent their ration. They don't understand that love is like air. We can take as much as we need.”

O
N HER THIRD VISIT
to Santiago, she tells him she's been
apartment hunting, looking, in fact, for something here on Riverside Drive.

“But my neighbors just told me they are moving! Of course, I have not seen the apartment in years, but it has the same view as mine. Before they moved in, my daughter and her husband were going to take it, but then they moved to Saudi Arabia.”

“I didn't know you had a daughter.”

“By my first marriage. Flora's mother died in the childbirth, so she was raised by her mother's mother, a good woman but very cold to me. She blamed me for her daughter's death. Then she blamed me when Flora eloped at fifteen with an older cousin.”

Behind Santiago, the river shimmies in the wind. “A disaster. He was a philanderer and a gambler. My daughter followed him to Caracas, where he lost both of their allowances. It took her grandmother three years to get the marriage annulled.”

“She's remarried now?”

“The year Bernardo disappeared.”

Santiago leans forward on his white-tipped cane. With the mention of his son, the room fills with silence. Rena places the Rawls on the coffee table. She forces herself to ask. “What happened—with your son?”

“If only I could answer that question. He'd gone with his tape recorder to visit a man who lived about three kilometers outside the town. He must have been kidnapped on the way. That's all we really know.”

Only Santiago's lips move—movements so small it seems no voice could emerge. “We took out ads in the newspapers saying we would pay fifty thousand dollars American to anyone who could return our son or lead us to him. I did not say this to my Helen, but I knew when we had no response, we would not find him.”

Santiago lowers his head. His shoulders heave and the cane wobbles. Rena raises herself from her chair, goes to sit at his side. She wonders if Santiago was like this with Saul: his grief infiltrating everything. She places a hand on his back, so thin she can feel his spine.

He takes a handkerchief from his shirt pocket. “No one would tell
me who killed my son. The army, someone paid by the local police …”

It is the first time he has used that word:
killed
.

“It used to matter to me who it was. Now—it doesn't seem to matter.”

“You're certain he was killed?”

“For many years, I thought there was a chance he was in prison. Sometimes, at night, I would imagine it was like one of those romance stories where the hero gets amnesia. That he'd been in an accident and lost his memory but was living in good health somewhere. Other times, I would imagine things much worse. The imagination is crueler than a torturer. Not seeing the body, I was left with no limit of possibilities. I am an atheist. But still, I have never been able to get over feeling that it is a break, a breach—is that the word, my English in these matters, it still fails me—not to bury your kin.”

Santiago wipes his dripping nose with the handkerchief and blows. “It is a basic law. We must consecrate our dead. It goes through all civilizations.”

His shoulders heave again. “That is the worst part for me. That I could not even bury my child.”

T
HE SUPER
shows her the apartment. A kitchen with the original paned cabinets and room for a table. A small living room with a long hallway leading back to a bedroom and an enormous bath, both facing west so that she can see over the treetops to the river. In the bath, a clawfoot tub and a huge window filled after dark with the sparkling of the lights from the Jersey shoreline. She imagines a pale yellow kitchen with geraniums in the window, a bedroom all in white. She hesitates, wary of living next door to Santiago, afraid not that Santiago will in any real way intrude on her but that she will be unable to maintain a wall between her wishes and his, his sadness and hers. In the end, though, the apartment is too wonderful to pass up.

Ruth and Maggie volunteer to help paint. At first, it is going to be just the three of them, but then Leonard calls to say he can come that
same morning to take Saul's things and insists on staying to give a hand.

“It will be like an old-fashioned barn raising,” Leonard says over the phone. There's an unfamiliar touch of joviality in his voice, as if painting her apartment will be the most congenial thing he's done in months. “Where is it?”

“Actually, it's in Santiago Domengo's building.” She doesn't say the apartment next door.

“I remember that building. There's a marble bench in the lobby. Saul took me there once. Years ago, before Santiago's wife died.”

After they hang up, she can't shake an uneasy feeling—a reluctance to let Leonard see her, her empty walls, up close. The first time she met Leonard, she'd felt this same uneasiness. Seated in a Chinese restaurant on Columbus Avenue, dawdling over the last few Hunan shrimp and the remaining broccoli with garlic, Saul and Leonard had discussed biography and the nature of memory while Klara made a show of some kind of advancing malaise, a transparent display of displeasure at the déclassé restaurant and the quiet new girlfriend, pretty enough but dressed in clothes that looked like they came from a catalog.

What had set it off—this uneasy feeling—was a single sentence of Leonard's.
Our personal history begins with the memories of our grandparents.
In her mind's eye, she'd seen the photographs Saul had shown her of his grandparents: his maternal grandfather elegantly arranged in his Johns Hopkins office (a man with memories stretching back to his own grandparents and the china they brought from Edinburgh to the United States the year Andrew Jackson became president); Leonard's mother, the perky little Rita who had left a village in the Ukraine in 1909, never again to see her babushka'd grandmother plucking chickens or her white-bearded grandfather bowed over a religious book.

Leonard, of course, had not known that Rena could remember only one of her grandparents, her mother's father, who by then had lost his own memories, unable to recognize even his daughter, and that for the other three, she could not even imagine their memories. As though with Eleanor's run to the west coast, a bag hastily packed for Rena and her,
not a photograph, not a dish, not even a toy taken along, history had been leveled, a city brought to rubble, and it would take generations—Rena's children's children—before there would be relics again.

7
Leonard

I've not held a paintbrush since before I met your mother, when I lived in a studio apartment in Hell's Kitchen and painted the walls sunflower yellow and cobalt blue thinking it would make me feel like I was in Provence rather than the basement of a cigar shop where you could hear the rats chasing each other between the walls. Not that I'd ever been in Provence, but I'd seen the paintings collected by the Cone sisters, Dr. Claribel and Etta, and had imagined myself belonging somewhere near the Mediterranean Sea: at one moment, an arid rust vista, at the next, ochre cliffs aglow with the pink of a setting sun. In Provence, I imagined Nature showing herself with full abandon, like a young girl with her lover—the peaches paler and softer, the olives almost navy in their delicious saltiness. Everywhere the hint of the sea: the anchovies in the bread, the white of fishbones. A more pleasing picture than the small dusty city in the Ukraine, the color of mud, where my mother, in fact, spent her first fourteen years—her first sight of the sea, the icy waves at Antwerp where she embarked for New York, everyone except herself (
a stomach of iron
, she proudly proclaimed) vomiting five, six times a day on the weeklong crossing.