East Into Upper East (23 page)

Tammy asked more often, “Have you told her yet?” and each time he had to admit he had not. Tammy bit her lip, as one who had something difficult to say and could not. She was distracted, her thoughts elsewhere—of course they usually were, Tammy characteristically had something rapt, distant, inattentive about her. So it was not surprising that she failed to notice signs of change in the apartment; sometimes people were still sitting in what had become a waiting room late at night when she came home. Ross, who now constantly looked and felt guilty, muttered in explanation that they were waiting to consult Ma. “Oh yes,” Tammy said, as though this were the most natural thing in the world, and then she said again, reverting to what was important, “Have you told her yet?”

But one day Minnie came and was appalled by what she saw: “Who
are
all these people?” she accused Tammy, for it was in the afternoon and the place was crowded.

“They're waiting for Ma,” Tammy said, with the same guilty air as Ross.

Minnie was speechless—but only for a moment, she was never speechless for long. Although Minnie and Tammy were such
close friends and shared the same interest—that is, spiritual improvement—they were opposite types. Minnie was far more forthright than Tammy—one would have said more worldly, if her business had not been so specifically in the cause of unworldliness. It turned out that it was for this cause that Ma, and now all her retinue, had to be cleared out of the apartment: “Next month,” said Minnie. “He'll need to move in next month.”

“Who'll need to move in?” Ross asked, looking at Tammy; and at the same time Minnie also looked at Tammy, who blushed like a rose between them.

“Don't say you haven't told him,” Minnie said.

“I will. I'll tell him today. Truly,” Tammy implored.

“Just see you do. Good God, there's so little time left and this place will need some straightening out, I tell you. Pooh,” said Minnie, wrinkling her nose against the smell she had so disliked in her own place—Ma's hair and cooking oils—now mixed with that of the visitors, who included a few homeless people.

Later that night Tammy spoke to Ross. She told him that the work they were doing with the Doktor was advancing by leaps and bounds; that so many people were coming to his lectures and workshops, and to live under his tutelage in the place taken for him in the apartment tower, that they were in urgent need of more accommodation. “Like Minnie says,” Tammy urged, “this place is perfect. I mean, it's just too big for only the two of us to rattle around in, and Ma wants to go back to India, she needs to.”

“She thinks she's needed here.”

Tammy made a gesture that was affectionately dismissive: “She doesn't understand that everyone has changed.”

“You've changed,” said Ross—but it wasn't true, Tammy was the same only more so: more yearning, more straining upward.

“Of course I've changed!” she cried, her voice too straining upward to a higher register. “That's what it's all about—his technique,” she explained. “It's incredibly hard work—he says it's like drilling through rock, the rock being the calcified self. He's really helping me, Ross.”

“Why should you need help?”

“Because I'm a terrible person,” said Tammy, a cloud of despair darkening the pure heaven of her face.

“Is that what he's told you?”

“It's what he's shown me. He makes you turn inward, and the horrors you see there! Not only what your own past has deposited but everyone else's too, all the generations before you—you have to break them down because you're responsible for them, for what they were and did. We'll have to get rid of all the furniture, Ross. Because it's charged with everyone's bad living; and dying.” She laid her own cool hand on his and whispered, “We'll both feel better when it's all gone. You'll see—it'll be like everything's been purged away, exorcised.”

“I don't know that I'd want to exorcise Grace out of her own apartment.”

“But it's so different already.” Tammy sniffed the air as Minnie had done. “It's even got in here—is it oil or incense? You'll really have to tell her, Ross. We have to clear the place out. His work is so fearfully hard inside that outside he absolutely needs a neutral space.”

However, as news of Ma spread in the neighborhood and beyond, the apartment became more and more crowded. It wasn't only through the people in the coffee-shop that Ma was getting to be known; those clients brought new clients and those in turn brought others; the doormen too had friends and relatives; and finally a new sort of clientele came from the other inhabitants of the building. This mighty pile, with its Gothic façade, its marble entrance halls, its Boston palms and areca ferns, was chock-full of troubled people. Some of these had inherited their apartments from their grandmothers, others had bought them from other people's grandmothers, or from heirs who had had to sell to pay the inheritance tax. Their furniture was of the same vintage as Grace's, their lives too not unlike hers, each with a quota of madness, suicide, even in one instance a hushed-up murder. The most recent owners were the wives of businessmen who had made a lot of money very quickly and were now in jail for financial fraud on so enormous a scale that their sentences ran into decades. At first all these neighbors had complained about the rag-tag jamming up the mahogany-paneled elevators on their way up to Ma; but one by one they became curious, and some of them, and then more, came to see what she would do for them.

All this could not be managed without some organization, and Ross found himself handling that end. He arranged Ma's timetable
and allotted the appointments for special sessions. It was years since he had had a job—he had usually been employed by more successful fellow refugees, whom he had helped over some delicate matter in their accounts; for, though not highly qualified, he was trustworthy. Now again he was in a position of trust as Ma's right-hand man; he was kept very busy, and of course so was Ma, and there was no time for any private exchange between them.

Tammy too was under pressure, for it was past the date when the Doktor was due to have moved in. Meanwhile the apartment had become transformed into what was almost a public meeting place; people felt free to walk in and out and to stay as long as they liked, and they liked to stay very long. When Tammy came home at night, she had to thread her way through the passage, saying “Excuse me,” very politely to the people blocking her way; she made straight for Ross's corner room. Instead of asking him, “Have you told her yet?”, she would ask, more of herself than of Ross, “What can I tell him?” for it seemed the Doktor was expecting to move in at any moment.

One day Tammy said, “He'll say it's my fault. And he's right—I've let him down and let you down and let Ma down and everyone. It just shows I'm a failed human being—I am, Ross, unfortunately. I can't do anything right because I'm not right inside myself. I'm very poor material for him to work on.” She gave a wan smile. “I've been with him long enough to acquire some self-knowledge. Failing yourself is one thing—but failing him and Sally and the children—his family,” she explained to Ross's look of inquiry. “Well, of course he has a wife and children—he's a fully developed man, that's what makes him what he is. He's about fifty,” she answered Ross, “but you would never in a million years think it. Sally's his second wife—I mean, the second one he's had a ceremony with or whatever—but of course everyone who submits to his guidance is his wife. You know, like the soul and the spouse.” There was a silence. “Anyway,” she continued, “all that's just technical.”

Ross looked down at the floor, and there was another silence.

“It's not fair,” she accused him. “When Mother said that about your being her last lover, I never asked is it true or not, so why are you asking me?”

“I'm not asking anything. What am I asking?” He waved his arms around as he did on the rare occasions when he got excited.

“You
cared
for her like a lover, took care of her, that's what was important. Is important.”

“Is that what he does for you?”

“Of course he does,” said Tammy, wiping her eyes. “Guiding someone psychologically means taking care of them—caring for them—” In spite of her efforts to brush them away, tears flowed—so many that Ross had to help wipe them away. She leaned against him while she went on: “He has this wonderful gift of being with you even when he's not—like you think he's busy with someone else? Like he might be with Minnie or someone for hours and you think you've been completely forgotten and then next thing you realize he's never for a moment stopped thinking about you and knows exactly what's going on inside you. I can't stop crying, I feel stupid. I never used to cry, did I, Ross? Not at the worst times so why should I now when the best thing in the world is happening to me?”

Later that night—very late at night—Ross made his way to Ma's room. He had to step over several bodies asleep in the passage, for some visitors had developed the habit of staying overnight. They slept very peacefully, and the only sound to be heard was the snoring from Ma's room; and when he reached there and had slipped inside, the sound was so loud that it was like being in the engine room of an ocean liner with everything churning to keep the ship afloat. Ma was on the high mahogany bed between four bedposts; her window and curtains were wide open, spilling in a mixture of moonlight and streetlight, both white. She had fallen straight on the sheet without changing her clothes and lay spread-eagled on that snowy surface, forming a mound that, with each snore, appeared to heave higher to the ceiling. Ross called out, “Hey!” (he still refused to call her Ma, so had no name for her at all) and shook her shoulder till she started up.

He said, “We have to help Tammy.” He explained the situation, but—perhaps she had been too abruptly awakened out of her deep sleep—she only yawned and stretched, so that her sari slipped from her upper body and spilled in a pool of violent, violet silk around her. She seemed terribly to want to go back to sleep.

Ross became more explicit: “She wants you to leave.”

“And you?”

He grimaced: “There's always a corner for the poor old dog.”

That sounded like a good joke to her and she laughed at it. Her mouth was like an empty cavern but her teeth smiled all by themselves in a glass by her bedside. He began to be very irritated with her.

She said, “Well, I'll have to find somewhere else.”

“Where would you go? And with all these people?”

“If I go out of this door and into the park and sit on that broken bench you like so much or under a tree or anywhere I choose, they'll follow me. Don't ask me why. I don't know why.”

“Neither do I. You're setting up as this wise woman and you don't understand the most basic situation. You can't even help one single person.”

“You mean yourself?”

“No, not me,” he said, now more irritated at her obtuseness. “What help could you give me?”

“No, none,” she agreed. “But if Tammy wants me to go, then I'll have to.”

“I would have thought you'd have some better solution after all your promises. Yes,” he overrode her, “when Minnie sent you packing, that's what you promised: that you were here to help Tammy.”

“But now Tammy is sending me packing, so what can I do?” She laughed again and then she chucked him under the chin in the most familiar manner. Offended, he turned to leave, with her calling after him: “But why are
you
angry? It's I who should be angry that you've come into my bedroom in the middle of the night, making people think all sorts of things that should not be.”

But only a few nights later, it was she who came to his room. She entered silently on her bare feet, only her bangles jingling. She climbed nimbly on to the end of his bed, and tucking her feet under her, she said, “So what are you arranging for me? . . . What, nothing? First you tell me to go, then you have nowhere for me to go to—you're a fine first-class business manager.”

“Business manager,” he repeated: he had never had such a grand title and didn't think he could live up to it.

“Well, who else has been arranging my business here, and doing it quite well too? I think you have a future.”

“With you?”

“If you care to come with me, certainly.”

He took off his reading glasses; he said, “But where are you going?”

“I'm asking you! I thought you'd have arranged a place by now. That's why I've brought all this: look.” She lifted her sari; a cloth bundle was hidden there, tied to her petticoat string. She unfastened the bundle and shook it out on his blanket: hundreds and hundreds of bank notes of all denominations fluttered down, together with crumpled checks and money orders. “This is for a deposit: you get us a nice place and the rest of the money will come. That's easy.”

“So you've had a fund-raiser.”

“I only said, ‘Children, I need another home where you can all come visit me.' Everyone gave. Some stood opening doors at the supermarket collecting in a paper cup so as to have something to give. They needed to give—some more than others.” She smoothed out one of the crumpled checks, which was for an astonishing amount: “From the lady upstairs, the one who has all the lawsuits with her son. She needed to give very badly . . . And meanwhile you've done nothing.” She clicked her tongue at him but playfully, and playfully she shook his toes under the sheet. When he indignantly withdrew them—“How proud you are,” she pretended to pout. “Here I've come to you past all these people looking on and suspecting, now what are those two up to again? And you won't even let me touch your feet . . . I think you only think of her: Grace. You live with a ghost.”