Half the Kingdom (2 page)

“Not me,” said Bethy.

“I will!” said Al.

Benedict asked, “When is she supposed to start?”

“Today,” said Joe.

Lucy

That Lucy Friedgold had kept the paper with the address in her hand wasn’t—not in Lucy’s case—evidence of memory loss. She remembered herself back in her student days and she’d never been able to retain the number in the phone book long enough to dial it.

This was one of her bad-left-leg days, and her cough was troublesome, but Lucy liked 57th Street, full of folk walking west with her, or walking toward her, their eyes inward, talking into their phones.

Lucy liked the funny foyer. It had never been done over. The hazed and spotted mirrors were gold-framed in mail-order rococo. Joe had said to take the back elevator, no longer used for freight, to the eleventh floor.

Behind the door with the emblem of a wide-open eye, they stopped talking to listen to the clank and rasp of the elevator—Joe called it Marlow. Whoever got off was stopping to have a terrible coughing fit.

Joe welcomed his old friend with a hug. “How funny,” she said, “To step out of Fifty-seventh Street into Dickens’s London.”

“This used to be a dressmakers’ salon,” Joe said. “I picked up the lease from the two old sisters who’d been here for decades. We’re going to do it over, smarten up, get ourselves ready to be blown to kingdom come.”

“Oh, leave it alone. It’s dear. Have you been up to the office of Maurie’s
Magazine
? The couch smells of mold. When Maurie put in the new computers he didn’t remove the old wiring. It sticks out of a hole in the floor like a family of headless snakes.”

“How
is
old Maurie?”

“I sent old Maurie a story called ‘Rumpelstiltskin in Emergency,’ which is and isn’t about Bertie’s last ambulance ride to the ER. I sent it to him in October! This is July.” Like the Dorothy Parker heroine who spends her days and nights not calling the lover who does not call her, Lucy was
not
calling Maurie at
The Magazine. Why do I have this image of my little story posting outward into the ever-expanding universe?
is what she would have written if she had been going to write him.
How long can it take you to read a short-short all of three pages!

Joe said, “I’ve put you in the big room with the kids. Benedict will show you around.”

My poor Benedict, thought Lucy. Bethy’s glare, she knew, signified hello, and she responded pleasantly. The two young
men were sweet. Al Lesser spent the morning setting up Lucy’s PC while Benedict showed his mother around the office. Lucy kept her eye averted from the half-eaten apple trapped among the wires that snaked out the back of Benedict’s computer, and refrained from shutting the files he always left half open, until she thought he wasn’t looking.

Benedict refrained from telling his mother to stop coughing.

They all took Lucy to the luncheonette downstairs. Back in the office, Joe put a batch of books on the sewing machine and said, “You might start with these.”

“Will do,” said Lucy, but first she checked her home answering machine. There was nothing from
The Magazine
, and Lucy took pen and paper and wrote,

Dear Maurie, When you and I were starting out in the Fifties, a story had a value if only in hours of typing or dollars paid the typist, and if you were not going to publish, you put the manuscript into the self-addressed and stamped envelope with a rejection slip—the time and ingenuity we wasted decoding it for degrees of encouragement! Today you’re not going to return pages that printed themselves out while their author was in the kitchen making herself a sandwich, but how does that relieve you from responding with a “yes,” or a “no,” or the acknowledgment, merely, of receipt? How are you? How is Ulla? How old is …

“Benedict, did Shari have a little boy or girl?”

“Search me.”

 … Shari’s little one? Can you imagine Benedict and me working as colleagues in the same office! Did you know that Joe Bernstine has opened an office on 57th Street working on
The Compendium of End-of-World Theories,
where you can reach me during the day?

Lucy added the office address and phone number but did not send the letter. Lucy found her glasses, picked up
Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization
, by Frederic J. Baumgartner, and started reading.

When she got home that night, there was nothing from Maurie in the mail, nothing on her answering machine. There was nothing all that week, nor the next.

On the sewing machine there were always more books. Lucy proposed to stay in after Joe left for lunch and Bethy announced that she had shopping she wanted to do. Lucy observed her observing Benedict and Al refraining from exchanging looks of relief. They could go have lunch by themselves.

Lucy liked having the office to herself, and after checking that there was nothing from Maurie on her home answering machine, she settled in with a sandwich and Elaine Pagels. Came the moment when she looked up from
Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation
to search out the moldering apple, on the decomposition of which Lucy had been keeping an interested eye. Now she rose, went and
dislodged the wrinkled, blackened thing from its wire nest, and threw it in the wastebasket. Energized by action, Lucy was approaching the window to remove the parade of 7UP empties from the sill, when the body fell past outside. Lucy thought, I could not have seen that body falling past the window because if I had, I would have to do something and I wouldn’t know what. Stepping to the window, Lucy looked down the eleven-story shaft into the narrow gray courtyard. She saw the row of cans, the stack of bumpy, jagged black plastic garbage bags, a pot with a dead ficus, and the body, on its side, the cheek resting on the arm as if in sleep except that the left leg was bent at an angle that legs don’t bend at. Now Lucy dialed 911 and reported the body of a woman, an old woman, it was a black woman, in the courtyard, and, when requested, gave her address, the number from which she was phoning, and her name.

Lucy stood at the window and watched nothing happen. In the office building across the courtyard—the building that must front 58th Street—someone sat at a computer. On the floor right above, a woman brought a plant to the window and watered it and did not know what lay in the courtyard twelve floors below, where a door had opened. A man in shirtsleeves stepped out and stood. A small wind tugged at the dead woman’s skirt that was hitched up her leg in a way, Lucy thought, she would not have wanted. Lucy identified tears that constricted her throat. The man, perhaps because, like Lucy, he couldn’t think of anything to do, stepped back inside and closed the door.

Al and Benedict got back from lunch and looked out the
window. Bethy and Joe returned and Joe called the building’s administration. The Wide-Open Eye people tried to go back to work.

When Lucy returned to the window, the courtyard was crowded. The shirtsleeved man was there, and the police. People blocked the dead body from her view. In the building across the courtyard there were faces at the windows. The plant waterer had the view to herself, but in the window on her left, the people in the back row had to crane their necks to look over and between the heads of the people in the front.

“Interesting,” Lucy said to Bethy who stood beside her, “the long beat between something happening and the world taking any notice.”

“What do you mean, ‘beat’?” Bethy said.

Lucy, excited and upset, was glad when Joe invited her to come home with him. At dinner Joe and Lucy told Jenny about the suicide. The beat that Lucy had noted between event and reaction interested nobody beside herself, and when she reported her own initial denial of what she had seen because she couldn’t think what to do, Joe said, “All you had to do was call 911.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Lucy. “I did that. I just thought it was an interesting reaction, I mean, if one were writing a story. In what order would the protagonist take in what she is seeing? Is it “an old woman, unusually small, and black,” or “small, black, and old,” or “black, and old, and unusually small?” While she was talking Lucy observed Jenny listening with all her heart.
Her
tears were not stuck in her throat but flowed out of her eyes.
She
was not developing the dead
old black woman into a story. Lucy loved her friend Jenny. Lucy said:

“I once wrote a suicide story: A woman watches a truck bearing down toward the place on the sidewalk where she stands waiting to cross. She thinks, ‘If that truck were to run me over I wouldn’t have to think what to get for supper.’ The truck passes. The woman crosses to the supermarket and takes out her shopping list. It was called ‘Truck.’ Maurie published it in
The Magazine
. In the days when Maurie answered my letters.”

Jenny

Breakfast was the stage on which Bethy Bernstine vented her dissatisfactions. Bethy was dissatisfied with her father, with his Wide-Open Eye, with the country, the world. “Do we ask ourselves what we have done to that African American woman to make her jump out of her own skin?”

“Yes,” said her father. “We ask ourselves.”

“And what do we tell ourselves?”

“I’ve been thinking …” Jenny hesitated. Was this a good or was it the worst moment to say, “There are also things we do that are nice …”

“You mean like making unnecessary wars?” suggested Bethy.

“I mean the small, funny things. I walked past the building site on the next block, and they’re making square holes
in the wooden fence so people passing on the sidewalk can watch the work in progress.”

Bethy had perfected the stare of exaggerated disbelief: “ ‘Happy Days’ in the sandbox, Winnie.”

“And the doggie bag,” persisted Jenny. “That’s friendly, sensible, and I think it’s an entirely American invention.”

“Mom, Jesus! We’re the state terrorists in the people-killing business.”

“We are that too!” agreed her mother eagerly.

“How,” Jenny asked Joe, after Bethy banged out of the room, “is she making out in the office?”

“She’s not ‘making out’ with Benedict or Al, if that’s what you’re waiting for. That’s not going to happen.”

“What do you mean? I’m not waiting for anything. Don’t be silly,” said Jenny. “Benedict lives with that nice Viennese girl. Al Lesser is too young for her.”

Jenny came to the door to see her husband and daughter off. “I’ve got an appointment with Dr. Switt this morning. He’s two blocks from your office. Why don’t I take the two of you out to lunch?”

“Sounds good,” said Joe.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” said Bethy.

Jenny went down the elevator with Mrs. Pontefiore. The weather lasted them the eight floors to the lobby, but conversation all the way to the corner was going to be a chore. At the front door Jenny Bernstine and Mrs. Pontefiore parted with a mutual fiction of going in opposite directions. However,
Jenny accelerated her step so as to fall in with a newer neighbor. She didn’t know the name of the young woman whose short black hair bobbed along beside her. They had got the weather out of the way by agreeing they loved the midsummer city, when Jenny’s companion let out a laugh.

“What?”

The young neighbor laughed again but shook her head. Jenny wouldn’t let it pass.

“Nothing. That baby in the stroller smiling at its mother and the mother smiling. I mean, nothing.”

Jenny said, “Yesterday, I was annoyed with my cabbie for not getting a move on.
He
was smiling at the cab that was stopped in front of us with its door open. My cabbie said, ‘The kid’s left his bear on the back seat.’ I tell my daughter—New York is a turn-on!”

“Oh, oh, it is!” the young neighbor agreed.

“My husband believes the terrorists are going to blow us up.”

“Probably are,” said the young neighbor and, opening her handbag, found a quarter which she dropped without breaking stride into the parking meter so that the meter maid aborted the ticket she had begun to write. And Jenny Bernstine had her subject for conversation: “You don’t find it tiresome to own a car in Manhattan?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Whose car did you just save from getting a ticket?”

“Oh …” The young woman turned to look briefly in both directions, said, “I don’t really know,” and raising her hand in a good-bye, started down the subway steps.

Jenny had come to confess to Dr. Switt: She was not taking her anti-depression pills. “It’s that I don’t
feel
depressed.” Jenny told the doctor about the baby and the mother smiling at each other; about the cabbie and the teddy bear, and about the neighbor who saved a fellow citizen she didn’t know from being ticketed.

The doctor on the other side of the desk had the awkward air of a man not getting a joke. He said, “It takes time to combine the right medications in the right dosage.”

Joe was not going out. Jenny’s arrival coincided with a delivery of books and Joe thought he would stay in and get sorted.

“Bethy and I will have lunch. What’s a good place around here?”

Bethy said, “Mom. I told you this morning, No! N. O.”

Lucy said, “
I’m
taking Jenny to lunch in my new favorite restaurant—just two blocks.”

Lucy and Jenny

The two friends passed an interesting older couple seated by the window. “They got my table!” Lucy complained to the unsmiling proprietress of the Café Provence. “But here will be fine if you bring us some of your good bread.”

Lucy and Jenny sat and ate the good bread. Lucy kept looking with a widow’s eye at the man and woman at the
window table. “They look as if they’re in the habit of conversation,” she said.

“So are you and I,” Jenny said. “My neighbor and I ride down the elevator that
feels
like such a neat little cabinet made for intimacy, but Mrs. Pontefiore and I talk about the weather. Mrs. Pontefiore and I don’t know, and don’t care to know, anything about each other’s lives. Why don’t we? You and I have been talking for more than half a century and we’re still talking.”