The Empire of the Dead (15 page)

It was a relief to ascend to the thin crust of legal amenities after witnessing the world's
actual
business, the scrabbling, seething back-dealing underneath the streets.

He passed an old water fountain, long out of service, in a locked-up city park. No more dipping into the public well, because no more public wells.

A couple of subway trips and he found himself in Chelsea again: a gallery district. He remembered his promise to Mrs. Mehl. In a swift stroke, the thought of her made him lonely, a thudding sensation like losing his breath.

The first two docents he spoke to had never heard of her nephew. The third place he entered, the Pavel Zoubok Gallery, displayed four or five Joseph Cornell boxes. An apple-cheeked girl with short black hair was quoting prices to two apparently serious buyers. Waiting, Bern observed the boxes:
Celestial Navigation
, a star map, sand, delicate clear drinking glasses filled with marbles, stamps, and driftwood.
The Storm That Never Came
, paper cutout sparrows nestled among grasses beneath a map of the constellation Scorpio and a textbook scrap demonstrating wind patterns. Bern wanted to crawl inside a box and cozy up to the universe. He overheard one of the buyers call the docent Nora. When they left, he asked Nora if the owner was around. He was not but she knew about Bob Mehl. “Oh yeah, his stuff was legendary,” she said. “Me and my friends at NYU used to hear about him. He didn't have a studio of his own. He'd hang out in his friends' lofts in SoHo, paint like a madman, two or
three a day sometimes, and they were brilliant, just brilliant, and he'd leave them with people or give them away.”

“Have you seen his work?” Bern asked.

“Not personally, but everyone says they're knockouts.”

“Where might I find his paintings?”

“Oh my.” She scratched her head. “I wouldn't know where to start. A lot of his friends—that '70s–'80s art crowd, you know—they're gone now. AIDs. High rents.”

'70s–'80s! Bern had assumed '50s–'60s—Mrs. Mehl had mentioned Jackson Pollock—but of course, now that he thought about it, it didn't make sense that her nephew would be that old.

“Okay, thanks,” he said. As he turned for the door, he was dazzled by the wings of an angel, sitting in one of the boxes along with a thimble, a gold coin, and a clear glass cube.

That night, Mrs. Mehl confirmed that her nephew was younger than Bern imagined. She looked better late in the day than she did in the mornings before she'd had her breakfast and a session at the makeup mirror. Still, she complained. “Osteo
and
arthritis,” she said, rubbing her calves. The kitten lay on a cushion and lifted its head reluctantly when Bern approached.

“Would you like me to make an appointment for you with the doctor?” he asked.

“No no, all that fuss and nonsense.”

Bern considered her sagging skin and the backs of his own rough hands. Maybe she was stronger than he thought. Stronger than
he
was. Possibly, kvetching kept her alive.

Who could
he
complain to? Maybe he should get a cat.

He realized that taking care of Mrs. Mehl these days was his best and most lasting achievement—certainly more substantial than anything he conceived at work. Well. Good enough, he reasoned.

“Pleasant evening, Mrs. Mehl.”

“You too, Mr. Bern.”

* * *

In the next few days—
solitude isn't so bad, really it's not!
—he tried a couple of other galleries with no success. One night, walking home, he passed an IRS office, stacks of 1040 forms in its window. That time of year again: reach for the coffee spoons, measure out your life.

No dependents.

Nothing to depend on.

Really, it's not so bad.

Turning a corner, he glimpsed a newsstand headline: rockin' sockin' Earl Palmer had died. “Tutti Frutti,” “You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling,” “I Hear You Knocking.” Bern couldn't count the tunes whose spines Palmer stiffened with his backbeat. It was years ago, during the Torah studies with the rabbi in Houston, that Bern had learned of the drummer. Each week, once the lessons were over, he walked home with other teens discussing their favorite songs. King David's sexcapades aroused the boys, but not like rock ‘n' roll.

What a contrast! The barrenness of Rebekah followed by wet dreams of Dizzy Miss Lizzie. Bern believed the 45s he bought helped him find depths in the Five Books of Moses he wouldn't have noticed otherwise: Hagar, Sarah's abused servant, decked out like Lady Day. Strange Fruit in the Garden. Goin' to Kansas City, surely the Promised Land. Sarah scoffed when the Lord told her she would bear a son: “Am I, a withered old woman, to experience pleasure again with my dried-up old husband?” And God's flirtatious reply: “Do you think anything is beyond
me
—your Lord? On your knees, woman! Get ready!” Oh yeah! You give me fever!

These days, you couldn't buy a 45 single to save your life.

Whenever Bern got home after meeting the rabbi, his grandfather, who had insisted on the lessons, saw the happy flush in Bern's cheeks and knew something was wrong. The lessons must not be taking. If they were, they wouldn't be so exhilarating.

Frequently, after dinner, he waved a photograph in Bern's face—a sepia portrait of Bern's great-great-grandfather, Jacob, taken in Budapest. No one knew when. A wheatlike, long white beard, a
slender Ashkenazi nose, a round black hat. “His namesake wrestled an angel!” Bern's grandfather admonished him. “
He
wrestled fascists in Europe! And you? You lie in bed at night, with that jungle noise grinding on the radio, and tug on your little
petseleh
! Aren't you ashamed?”

The picture of Jacob was one of his grandfather's few possessions at the end. Bern recalled seeing it in the rest home just before his grandfather died, his last raspy gasps buzzing like a Passover plague.

The old man had once traveled to Budapest and found the graveyard where family lore said Jacob had been laid. The headstones were inscribed in Hebrew; Bern's grandfather, who did not read the language, had failed to foresee this eventuality. He couldn't identify Jacob's resting spot or even prove he was there. Ever since, he'd said, he felt more rootless than ever.

Tell me about it, Bern thought. Earl Palmer dead. Jesus.

At Fifth and Fifty-third now, he faced St. Thomas Church and recalled his first defiant moment as a Jew. It coincided with a feeling that he would live forever and always be loved. After Torah study one night, Bern and his friends were walking home down an oak-lined avenue. They passed a bland building shadowed by a spire topped with an iron cross. Bern stared at the place. It confused him, architecturally. Apparently a Christian church. He had never really noticed Christian churches, but he thought they all had, as a matter of course, stained glass windows. The windows here were smudged and plain. While he stood, a nun appeared on the doorstep, the wings of her habit flapping like a gull's. She looked like Natalie Wood. Her beauty stunned him. “Wouldn't you like to join us for mass?” she said. With the force of a tsunami welling up from Eastern Europe, Bern blurted, “Shalom!” Laughing, his friends ran down the street. The young nun smiled at him. “Shalom,” she said. “May the Virgin be with you.” That night he dreamed of an Ashkenazi Miss Lizzie with Natalie Wood's big eyes.

* * *

Mrs. Mehl saw him in the lobby late that Saturday evening and told him a joke. “What do you call a pile of cats?”

“I don't know,” Bern said.

“A meow-tain.” She laughed and laughed, spry old thing. Jacob seemed to be doing her good.

Bern wished her
shuvua tov
.

The following Monday at lunch he checked another gallery on her behalf. Or his—after all, the quest for her nephew gave him something to do. In the guest book by the entrance, visitors wrote to the featured artist, “Always a pleasure!” “Such joy, reacquainting myself with your exquisite compositions!” The work was a series of black and white photographs of an S and M parlor, men and women binding and hitting one another.

Murphy, one of the firm's new hires, caught Bern when he returned to the office. “Hey,” he said. Bern's supervisor had asked him to collaborate with Murphy on a low-income housing project over in Little Italy. “I like your latest sketches,” Murphy said. His hair touched the tops of his ears—shaggier than Bern had seen it. He was working hard, keeping long hours. He won't rest until he's nailed
my
job as well as his own, Bern thought.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I admire your patience, Wally. Really. Your attention to detail. I'm too restless for my own damn good. More of an ideas guy.”

“We all have our strengths,” Bern said.

“Maybe by the time I've been here as long as you have, gotten married and settled down … are you married, Wally?”

“No.”

“Isn't it funny I didn't know that?” He fiddled with his hair. “You work with someone for months, maybe even years, and know so little about them.”

“Yes.”

Murphy looked at his shoes. “So. I guess it's been hard on you. I can't imagine.”

“What do you mean?”

“This thing with Raymond.”

Bern shrugged. “His productivity had slipped. We all knew it.”

“Yeah, but …”

“What?”

“Well, the—”

“
What?
”

“Oh shit. Well … oh shit. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“Wally, they found Raymond—”

Bern groaned.

“Yeah. In a little B and B over by the Bowery. Two or three days ago. Apparently, it happened in his sleep. Heart attack or a stroke. Maybe the booze.”

“They? Who's they?”

“I don't know. The owners, I guess.”

“What was he doing there?”

“Beats me. He was always sort of a loner, huh?”

“I don't know,” Bern said. “Honestly. I didn't see him much outside of work.”

“He sure
talked
an edgy game.”

“He was never the same after his …” Bern touched his chest.

“Well, anyway. I'm sorry.” Murphy patted his arm. “The sketches look great. It's a neat little project. How does it feel?”

Bern glanced at the pencils in his pocket: the erasers he had chewed and chewed again. “Fine,” he said. “It feels fine.”

He didn't know Davis well enough to grieve. He didn't seem to know anyone anymore except Mrs. Mehl. How had he come to this? Had he stopped trying? On the subway he distracted himself eavesdropping on two men sitting nearby. They were discussing a boxer they used to watch on television. “I loved that guy,” one of the fellows said. “He was synonymous with taking it in the face.”

A Hispanic lady sat beside Bern, her patient expression reminding
him of the woman in the Municipal Archives (“
no tenemos
”) as well as of pictures he'd once seen of the sainted Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi. In Barcelona, years ago, in a perishingly hot museum, Bern had seen some of Gaudi's models. He had suspended strings, like webs, from the ceiling using weights, and then he'd studied the designs in a mirror he'd placed on the floor, to see how buildings constructed that way might look: as though the structure were suspended
from the ground up
.

Strings and mirrors, Bern thought. Simple huts, as spare as Mrs. Mehl's apartment. Surely there is still need in the world for humble objects, humble surroundings.

Thinking of Davis—would anyone say Kaddish for such a man?—he remembered the temple in Houston, a modest A-frame, as humble a structure as you could find, where he attended evening services with his grandfather during the Days of Awe. It overlooked a trickle of Buffalo Bayou; amid the singing and chanting, Bern heard water. His favorite part of the service was Ne'ilah, holding hands with others in golden candlelight, asking God's forgiveness. “The gates are closing,” the rabbi intoned. For Bern, even as a child, this was an architectural detail embodying many thoughts: the past shut away, chances lost, belonging (enclosed inside a sweet, holy space).

And the hut … each year, following Yom Kippur, his grandfather took him to a placid bend of the bayou. There, men constructed Sukkot—temporary shelters filled with bread and fruits in honor of the huts in which the Israelites had dwelt in the desert. Some of these huts were made of plywood, some of aluminum, as precise as a Joseph Cornell box; Bern saw tents made of sheets (to evoke the Cloud of Glory in which the Children of Israel were said to have been shielded by God). He prayed with his grandfather and watched men haul water from the stream in ritual echoes of ancient pleas for rain. They quoted Isaiah: “And you shall draw waters with joy from the wells of salvation.” Buffalo Bayou was hardly a Well of Salvation; it was clotted with mud and trash; the scum on its twiggy surface stank of organic decay.

“According to the Talmud, the minimum height of the Sechach—the covering of the Sukkot—is ten tefachim,” the rabbi told him once. “In terms
we
understand, that means the height of a man seated at table.”

From that moment, human scale had been, for Bern, a central design principle.

“The walls can be made of any material,” the rabbi said, “but they must be sufficiently strong to stand in an average wind.”
Average
? The bayou was an elm-lined Corridor of Storms. Nothing average about it. Already, as a boy, contemplating the beauty and necessity of shelter, Bern pondered escape hatches.

Buildings rise. Buildings fall.

Friends and colleagues come and go.

But in any arrangement, he thought, there were openings.

The gates are closing?

No. Solitude doesn't
have
to mean the end.

On tax day, Bern proved his existence by signing forms and slipping them into an official drop box on the corner of Twenty-third and Fifth. The box slammed shut with a
thwack
.