New York Echoes (24 page)

“That's why I'm here, Mr. Waldman.”

He nodded, drained his Bloody Mary. He
knew he was about to play a duet with his mind. His words would not match his
thoughts. In his thoughts, he was enraged by Milton's cowardice, his retreat,
his surrender. He was a fucking coward. A real writer goes on the attack, never
retreats, wages war to be heard, to be read, to be discovered. His voice must
be heard. There is no other choice for a real writer. Why didn't this stupid
son-of-a-bitch know that? Was he so inundated with praise and the surety of
success that he could not arm himself against the motley crowd of pigmies who
would bar his way? Damned, fucking cowardly fool.

This was your life,
you stupid schmuck. Nothing had to stand in your way, certainly not the stupid
bleats of the untalented, the unannointed, the pretenders, the fools that
barred the door. If you can't find one door open, find another, then another,
then kicking down the next fucking door you come to, you goddamned idiot. Life
is war. Your talent is your armor. Let the arrows come. They will not dent your
armor. He felt the blood rise in his head. He was conscious of her watching
him, perhaps wondering why it was taking him so long to respond. Had his lips
or his eyes mimed this diatribe of rebuke?

“If you have half the talent of your
grandfather for writing works of the imagination, you will win the game
handily. There was no one I knew that was a better writer than your
grandfather, including yours truly. Without his being there, just being there
at a certain time of my life, I might never have realized even my far more
modest potential. We were part of his hand-picked group of real writers, the
true committed, who met every week and read our material to each other. It was,
believe it not, the truly greatest, most defining moment of my life. You know
what I think?”

He felt a sob coming from deep inside
him and knew that tears were starting. He reached from a napkin and blew his
nose, then coughed away the sob.

“Damned pepper,” he said.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I think . . .” He paused. “I think
that, by some miracle, your grandfather's spirit has reached out to you and
handed you a relay stick.”

Really, he thought. Where did that come
from? He sounded like some preacher in the Southern sticks. Nor had he ever
believed in such things.

“But you've never read any of my work,”
she said.

Nor will I ever, he told himself, hoping
she would not ask.

“Let's say I am psychic about the power
of DNA,” he said, rebuking himself for what was little more than clumsy,
cheerleading stupidity.

She laughed, perhaps seeing a joke in
it. He hoped so. The irony of it was that he believed implicitly in his
judgment despite the silliness of the sound of it coming from his mouth.

“I am so happy to hear that,” she said.
“It makes it all worthwhile.”

He searched her expression to see if it
reflected either ridicule or sarcasm.

“This was important for me, Mr. Waldman.
Really. I couldn't find anyone else who knew him at that time. You are
apparently the only seed that grew.”

“Really?” he said, feeling the sob begin
again. This time he let a few tears drop before he wiped them away with his
napkin. “I'm sorry to hear that.”

They sat for a while longer and he told
her other stories about her grandfather's generosity and kindness, his
mentoring and his fondness for other writers. Real writers, but he did not
allude to that. If she were a real writer she would know.

When she left, he watched her pass out of
his life.

Later he discovered that he was no
longer angry.

“Cynthia Barish?” the voice said,
cracked, clipped, harsh.

Normally cautious and skeptical,
unafraid to show her irritation with unsolicited calls, she answered “yes.”
Then it was too late.

“Your father's dead,” the voice said.

“So?”

She hadn't seen or heard from him in
twenty-five years, not since she was five. Her meager memory of his presence,
occasionally reinforced by her mother's remarks, had become less sporadic as
time passed. 

“Who is this?”

“Feschetti, Mario. Actually I was his
landlord. I wouldn't say he was my friend, but I kind of traded out on some of
the rent. He did odd jobs. You know, took out the garbage, cleaned the halls,
washed the front.”

“Where did you get my name? I haven't
seen him in twenty-five years. Am I supposed to cry?”

He ignored her question.

“He had this heart attack. Died a few
days later in Bellevue. His wallet gave you as next of kin.”

“You're kidding,” she said, expelling
air through her teeth.

“The thing is he left instructions to be
cremated, which he was. What I got here is this, his ashes, and a basement full
of paintings, which has to be removed. I mean, I don't really have a choice in
this. I don't know, maybe hundreds of paintings, stashed away. What am I
supposed to do?”

“I haven't got a clue.”

“I suppose I could dump them somewhere,
burn them. I don't know. So I called. He had you as next of kin with an address
in Scarsdale. So I took a chance.”

She was baffled by the explanation.
Contrary to some practices, she hadn't used her maiden name since her marriage
to Todd. How could he possibly know she lived in Scarsdale?

“And what am I supposed to do, Mister .
. . . What was the name?”

“Feschetti.”

“I guess all this stuff is yours. It's
why I called. Somebody has got to move it out. And I got the ashes.”

“What the hell am I going to do with the
stuff? As for the ashes, I just don't know.”

“It's your stuff, lady. Not mine. You're
the next of kin. You think he left a will?” He snickered. “Look. Here's my
number.” He gave her his number. “Think it over. Call me. I'll let you into the
place. You decide. I really don't know what to do with all the stuff. You tell
me. Call me later, OK?”

“I'll give it some thought,” she said,
finally reacting to the weirdness of it.

“By the way,” she asked before he could hang up.
“Where did he live?”

“The Village,” the man said. “Little Italy, actually.  It's no palace. Got eight apartments but I'm sort of holding it for, you
know. Developers buying it up now. ‘Gentrification,' they call it.”

“I don't believe this,” she said.

“Listen, the man is dead. You're the
next of kin. He was your father. Lou Harris, right? I have his ashes, for
Christ's sakes.”

“I don't mean that,” she said. “I
thought maybe he was far away. Gone, maybe the west coast. But Little Italy. We go there for Italian food.”

“The best in the city.” He gave her his
number again and the address of the apartment. “Call me when you decide. I mean
tomorrow at the latest. I got to clean out this stuff. Man painted day and
night. Paintings all over the place.”

“That's what my mother told me. Never
sold one when she knew him.”

“Looks like he never sold any since. Not
that I know about art. Not my cup of tea. Day and night he painted. That I
could tell you. As far as I know he never sold anything. I think he was on
welfare or something. He paid part of the rent and worked off the other part.”

“I'll call you, Mr. . . .”

“Feschetti. Mario Feschetti.”

It was mid-afternoon, April, a bit
overcast, but that was to be expected in April. The baby was sleeping and Todd
would be home in a couple of hours. Oddly, or coincidentally, she was a
commercial artist working at home, designing logos, book covers, advertising
layouts. Somewhere in back of her mind, she did acknowledge the genetic thing.
Her mother embellished the connection by recalling that all he wanted to do is
paint and never sold a damned thing. No tickee, no shirtie, she told him, in
ultimatum after ultimatum until one day he upped and disappeared.

She got a divorce on desertion grounds,
married Jack Nolan, had two other kids, and moved to Texas, where her
stepfather had a Toyota franchise. But the picture she painted, the image
another irony, was of a man consumed, obsessed with plying his art, unable to
make a buck, forcing her to be the breadwinner as a secretary where she had
three jobs to do, take care of baby Cynthia, do the housework, cook the meals,
the usual cliché.

OK, her mother admitted in those early
days. She loved him, in the beginning at least. But, she averred time and time
again, he was a wastrel, didn't lift a finger. Painted from morning until
night. No dealer bit. The paintings were probably shit. This was the story
Cynthia was weaned on, which got increasingly bitter as her mother struggled to
raise her only child who was five at the time.

Cynthia's memory was vague, although the
turpentine aura that hovered around him was something that stuck in her mind.
She supposed the memory of odor was quite powerful since she could barely
remember what he sounded like. Sometimes it took her a moment to remember his
name. Lou. Her mother destroyed all the old snaps, although, for some reason,
she retained the one showing the young couple at City Hall, where they were
married. The man, her father, had black hair, a long thin face, like her. He
was smiling and wore no tie. She had no idea what happened to that picture.

Her mother's attitude toward her missing
husband was contemptuous. Her anger about him accelerated as time passed, and
Cynthia's early life echoed with one long harangue about her missing father,
the ungrateful, unfeeling bastard, who left wife and daughter in the lurch. Not
that he was missed as a breadwinner. Finally it became good riddance to bad
rubbish and that tolled the end of any possible fond memories for his daughter.
The man had turned his back on her and not once, not a single time, in the
twenty-five years had he ever attempted to contact her. There were no letters, not
even a postcard, no phone calls, nothing. The man had faded into oblivion. Is this someone she should cry over? Is this
someone for whom she must disrupt her life? Was she supposed to care about his
ashes and his paintings? “He's your father,” the man Feschetti said. Really?

After a few years, especially when she
met Jack Nolan, her mother stopped talking about Cynthia's father and he became
a kind of legendary ne'er-do-well who disappeared, abandoning his wife and only
child, the son of a bitch. Cynthia supposed he had reasons, since her mother
was something of a shrew, but now that she had her own baby girl, she could not
imagine her being abandoned, certainly not by Todd, who was a most loving Dad,
who was steady and smart and climbing the ladder of financial success at Morgan
Stanley.

After she hung up from Mr. Feschetti,
she called her mother and told her the story.

“What can I say,” her mother said. “He
lived so close and didn't have the decency to visit his only daughter.”

“He wants to know what I should do with
his paintings. I guess I'm the heiress.”

“Burn the shit. He never could sell
them.”

“The man said he would do it, if I
didn't come up with some solution.”

“Your call, darling. To me, he doesn't
exist any more. As for his demise, I really don't give a tinker's damn. I spent
six years with the man in some ancient history time warp. He gave me nothing
but trouble and misery.”

“And me,” she said. She felt a sudden
sensation of loss, which disturbed her.

“Do whatever you want, darling. As you
say, you're the heiress. From what you tell me he was nothing more than a
janitor. The man was off the wall. Do whatever you want. Oh yes, there're the
ashes. Might make good fertilizer.”

The idea was ghoulish and, while she had
never thought about her father affectionately, she was insulted by the remark.
No
matter what, he's still my father.
Todd was on that same page.

“He's your blood.”

“Fruit of his loins,” she said, being
sarcastic.

“There's something to say for the
genes,” Todd said. His father was a professor of mathematics at Columbia, and Todd was a whiz at math and working on derivatives for the company. He often
expressed the idea that such talents are handed down in the DNA.

“I think you should go down there and
see what it's all about,” Todd said. She knew he would give her that advice. He
was a family man to the teeth, a beloved son, grandson, brother, and husband.
Being taken in by Todd's family had been a blessing for Cynthia, who had felt
like a third wheel when her mother married Jack Nolan.

“You're such a family-values person.
Don't forget my father abandoned me when I was five years old. He was a real
shit, never getting in touch with me.”

“Apparently he had your name in his
wallet.”

“How the hell did he sniff that out?”
she exclaimed, intrigued now.

“Clinches it. It's a mystery. You've got
to go.”

“And what will I do with the damned
paintings. Apparently no one was ever interested in buying them. Feschetti said
there are hundreds of them.”

“We'll cross that bridge when we come to
it,” Todd said. He was logical, sensible, and practical. He always did know the
math. Got that from his dad, she thought, thinking of her own artistic bent.
One day, too, she secretly yearned to be a successful painter. But then, what
commercial artist didn't aspire to that.

Leaving the baby with a sitter, she
drove into the city and met Feschetti in front of the building on Mulberry Street. Feschetti was accurate. The building was a dump, a four-story walk-up with
eight apartments, waiting for gentrification. Feschetti was a heavyset bald
man, probably in his fifties, which was about the age of her father. She'd have
to check his exact age on her birth certificate. But then, why would even that
detail matter to her.

The apartment was a mess. It reeked with
paint and the stink of turpentine, which set off strange memories in her mind.
The man lived as if he was homeless, sleeping on a crippled cot, with a
paint-stained mattress. In fact everything about the place looked like a
Jackson Pollock painting.

“Okay,” Feschetti said. “He was a slob.
Wore paint-stained overalls. The place is like a cyclone went through it. But
you gotta understand, he cleaned the place halls real nice, kept the front
clean, took out the garbage.”

“How long did he live
here?”

“Jesus, twenty years at least, maybe
twenty-five. Who knew? My mother made this deal with him. And when she died and
I took over, I kept it going. Hell, it paid for itself. No mortgage.”

“What kind of a man was he?” Despite
herself, the crummy atmosphere in the apartment made her curious. What kind of
a man could live in this squalor?

“Actually, tell you
the truth, he wasn't a bad guy. He did a good job with the place and all he did
was paint as far as I knew.”

The paintings were piled in all the rooms,
and in the back where the furnace was there were more paintings. There was a
shack in the back that Feschetti said had even more paintings. They were piled
flat, floor to ceiling. She pulled one from the top of the pile. Not bad, she
thought. Apparently he was an experimenter. Impressionist pieces, many snow
scenes depicting New York sites, cityscapes in all seasons, Central Park scenes
with the trees in bloom and green grass, lots of images of what appeared to be
Little Italy, the bridges, river scenes, street scenes, also abstracts, even
drip paintings like Pollock. Portraits in different styles of people of all
ages.

“I guess he painted his life history.”

“Looks like it,” Feschetti said. “I got
six of his paintings around the neighborhood.”

“And he never sold any?” she asked,
baffled.

“Can't tell by me.” He looked around the
apartment. “This look like he made a buck?”

She moved through the apartment to a
back room filled floor-to-ceiling with paintings. There were additional
paintings placed upright against the wall near the furnace. Suddenly she
stiffened and she felt her stomach lurch.

It was her. Recent. She felt that she
might faint. Feschetti was behind her.

“That's you,” he said.

Her knees shook and she began to rifle
through the other paintings. There she was again and again, painted in all
ages.

“I don't believe this.” She could barely
get the words out. “How?”

Had he stalked her in some way?
Photographed her? She rushed through the apartment, opening closets. One was
filled with shoeboxes. Opening one, she found photographs of her from every age
but never front-faced.

Feeling faint again, she had to sit on
the broken cot, baffled and deeply disturbed.

“You OK?” Feschetti asked again. “You're
white as a sheet.”

She nodded but couldn't get the words
out. She opened her purse and reached for her cell, wanting to call Todd, but
her fingers shook too much and she put the phone back in her pocketbook.

“Why?” she mumbled, looking up at the
round face of Feschetti, who shrugged. She took a deep breath and stood up.

“He could have made himself known to me.
Why?”

“You're asking the wrong guy,” Freshetti
said. “I got kids.”