The Rags of Time (21 page)

Why, against my pleading
—a sharp edge to Claude’s words—
for God’s sake, as though a dose of economics, a shipment of rice . . .
She stopped mid-sentence not to offend staff from his office. They were family arriving without invitation. Not to say your big checkbook will never end a long history of revenge, she recalled his care for child soldiers, those killer kids his concern well before Rwanda. Visiting the camps, Hans could spot the one child in a gang perhaps redeemable. She brought to mind the apocryphal story of an appealing boy.
Handed over his machete.

Kalashnikov,
Ned’s correction.

In any case his weapon, to the American about to take notes on his education in violence. That boy, safe as sheet-metal houses, last heard of teaching school in Swaziland. If there was another rescue this last time out, Hans did not live to document the appeal of a child now truly lost. Delivering this impromptu eulogy, Claude ushered the mourners toward the front hall. They lingered. It seemed she would never reclaim a moment alone with her sorrow. The Park had provided confrontation, not comfort. She understood why they’d come. Her husband knew each caseworker, each volunteer by name, meted out generous praise for their efforts, his care for their lengthy reports on the useless distribution of beans without access to clean water; this renewed anger at the diminishing promise of Oil for Food, UN millions ripped off. He dropped his professorial cool raging at the low estimate—twenty thousand children kidnapped—Liberia and Sudan.

She said:
Armed boys malnourished, living in camps.
Then fell silent. The wisp of a servant:
Lo siento mucho, lo siento,
poured more tea in Claude’s mug than a body could bear.

What’s he say?
Amanda, patting the bump of her belly, suggested the Xanax:
Which you know I can’t take.
The girl, at long last, expecting a child.
My bubble dress at the cleaners, perfect for the reception.

Reception
?

Charles took control, brought Claude back to the bedroom where his father had lain in state through the long night. Gruen’s bathrobe lay at the ready on his reading chair as though he might rise to scan a report, search out the briefcase that traveled with him the long flight from Khar toum to Paris to home.

Always, the tidying
. She picked up his slippers, worn at heel.
You might want . . . ?
She was ripping the sheets off the bed, Lili’s job surely, and couldn’t help but think that in records of the colonial past she once scoured, the American past in the diaries of women, accounts of washing and dressing the bodies of their husbands, often with the help of neighbors.

She said:
The best shirt would be laundered, hands folded over the chest for the viewing. The boots polished, passed along to a son. Though, of course, it was more often the wife or mother who died.
It was a relief to talk in this school-mistress way, a clip of history taking up the sudden slack of emotion. All true, she told Charles, the christening gown was not buried with the dead child, saved in a chest for the next one sure to come along. She told Hans’ middle-aged boy, beefy and broad, once an athlete with the trophies to prove it, that she had, after all, met his father at a seminar table.

Charles brushed a twig out of her hair: He said:
I’ll stay with you tonight.
His wife would drive the children in from Greenwich in the morning.

Now Amanda stood in the doorway, eyes fixed on the tear in Claude’s slacks.
You going off like that so upset me.
She offered the Xanax in its plastic bubble.

Claude said:
Why should I want to dull my loss?
Yet, she must say something about her absence and with that purpose went to the dining room, where the last of the visitors had reassembled, the boy techie from Hans’ office among them. Dr. Gruen had valued his instruction. Tea party sandwiches were cleared from the table.

Charles took the calls. A congressman, then a photographer his father had an affair with long before Claude came on the scene. The black dress at Madame Celeste could be picked up in this emergency. Then
Newsweek
presuming there might be more to the story.

More than my father’s death?
He drew back, dealt politely with the journalist pushing inquiries with the body still warm. PetroChina drilling beyond AU allotment? Gruen toured illegal mines in the Congo?
Not this trip
. Charles pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen, with one hand manipulated the wallet from his back pocket, overpaid the little guy.
Lo siento, siento,
storing away the sandwiches. No story beyond Gruen
’
s long career monitoring what, in Africa, he might call the growth industry of human suffering. He had stolen that phrase from his father, hoped the journalist would not use it.
Nineteen thirty-two. My father would have been seventy-five this month, still saving the world
.

When he returned to the mourners, Claude had taken up her place again at the head of the table, telling Ned, Amanda, the neighbors they had always meant to visit and the fresh delegation of volunteers from Gruen’s office that in her grief she ran off to the Park, where they often walked on a Sunday to admire the Conservatory Garden. She thanked Hans’s assistant for the stiff arrangement of flowers, so unlike the casual bouquets she ordered to greet the golden donors and powerful guests for dinner.

I’ll be fine now. We’ll come together tomorrow.
She had no idea what that meant,
come together, fine
. Then, to call a stop to sighs and anecdotal remembrance, thought she must say something about Hans for these good people and the sake of his children.
A loving husband and father,
chill, fit for a headstone. She said,
We shared him, we all did.

 

 

 

End of the interminable day, Charles brought her to the spare room where she had been sleeping since her husband was transported home from the hospital. Fussing over towels and soap, he set Claude up as a guest. The night light cast him as a looming shadow of the father who eluded him all his life. The reliable son, clocking in more pro bono than his law firm allowed: for his sake she hated her lie about the Conservatory Garden. He must know from the rip in her pants, the disorder of her hair, she had not walked up Fifth Avenue to look at flower beds perfectly groomed. She now saw herself in the mirror, a smudge of dirt on her temple. On the Sunday before his final African trip she tore Hans from his work to come with her to the Park. Her loving, though often distracted, husband agreed to a cab up Madison. They walked the short block to the Vanderbilt Gate. In the garden, lilies were making their last gaudy show. They watched a hummingbird levitate over a red flower.
What flower is that?
City people wondering at the bird’s small iridescent body, its helicopter wings. The overbred blooms of hydrangeas nodded in the breeze, a thousand clowns. Hans had tired. Silenced in their disagreement of what might come to pass on his last African adventure, they settled on a bench, soaking in the heat of Autumn. They spoke, predictably, of global warming. Why hadn’t she told Charles the simple truth? That she was foolishly clear in her purpose as she ran the short distance to Seneca Village. Indeed crazed, plopping down on the grass, reading through tears, knowing that
Uncle Tom
trimmed to bare bones would not make the medicine go down for her class in Jersey City.

Yo, Mama Teresa, improvin’ my black ass?
Always one hoodie with the nerve to mock the gangstaspeak he aimed to leave behind. The girls were so pleased at Miss Montour’s cool. They could not guess her husband’s patronage, honoring her for teaching inner-city kids. Some would make the grade. One girl had actually read Mrs. Stowe’s novel, all 450 pages: Felice, a Haitian far ahead of the pack. Proficient in Toussaint’s Rebellion, searching for news of our Civil War, she asked who might be labeled
Uncle Tom
. She’d heard that expression.

A Supreme Court judge
,
a Pullman porter. His trade went out with the last guilty laugh at Stepin Fetchit.
But then Miss Montour had to gloss Pullman, provide footnotes for pandering and the stupefying vaudeville performance.

 

 

 

Gruen honored her equally for the grit of her teaching and for playing the gracious lady with foundation folk. It simplified matters for them to believe they were in the same game: for Hans to come home and mix drinks at the set hour, for Claude to report, as on the day before his departure, which kid sassed her. For her husband to confess there’s almost no one to salvage in a parched village in Chad.
Dignity
: as far back as Mozambique, he found the word useless in speaking of rehabilitation of the millions behind the barbed-wire enclosure of their history. Often he looked with pride at his wife’s notes scattered on the couch. Never class notes. This past year she was attempting to write a paper tracking the fate of a runaway slave hidden here in the city.

Looking into
was the phrase Claude used, demoting her academic work to something like a hobby, her papers published with little notice. She was currently looking into Bill Dove, a smart house servant, young at the time he ran from a tobacco plantation in Virginia. She was looking into stations of the Underground Railroad in this city that sent the fugitives on to Quakers in New England. Dove’s name in faded ink on letters in the New-York Historical Society suggested he may have been hidden in the cellar of a house owned free and clear by Alonzo See, a cartman who lived with his sister in Seneca Village.
William Dove we called Billy
, in Betha See’s gliding hand, written from Riverside Heights after the Civil War,
was a sweet man to behold at our table. Billy moved upcity with us for a season. Wind off the river blew away his fancy. He went from me on his onward journey.
Claude figured Betha had fallen for the lively Dove, his charm, his antics, though back in the Village wooden board houses were propped on stone, so perhaps it was in Alonzo’s shed, not cellar, where she kept him like a prize pony, a handsome and entertaining boy who danced jigs, sang songs of the plantation. Not a scrap of evidence in
Uncle Tom
touched on the city life of a figure like Dove. Claude assigned the novel to herself as well as her class. Mrs. Stowe in her pulpit, self-ordained:

The passage often cited as clear evidence of the novelist’s condescension. Claude thought to play it again as she searched out the flamboyant figure of Bill Dove. How long had he lived with the Sees in the settlement on the Heights, a prisoner of Betha’s affection?
This day I have sewn the last stitch on a Sunday shirt of fine cotton for our Billy.
Then he’s gone missing, four years, five. Talk about stitching: the gaps in Dove’s history patched by guesswork—New York saddled with the Fugitive Slave Act, though unofficially not in compliance. Further supposing his wiles, she finds Dove hired by Boss Tweed, living once again as a domestic. In one of those rare moments, a historian’s dream, she discovers her Billy as porter for the Boss. Four “coloreds” worked in the household of this powerful man known for his Negrophobia. Thing is, Hans loved her discoveries, how she read history in the little guy’s unheralded work and days. Appropriating the past, he called it. Her essays, not all of them pleasantly anecdotal, might be read as small stories despite the apparatus of bibliography and endnotes. The indentured servant of the widow Eliza Tibbs, her education and subsequent freedom. The Parisian tailor of Benjamin Franklin. The midwife who wrote each day in her journal while plying her trade through blizzards and haying, paddling swollen rivers on her journeys to stillbirth or new life in New England cabins.

Now Claude thought she must never publish the charming story of a runaway who came up in the world to serve a corrupt politician in the Gilded Age, ushering Tweed’s guests into the drawing room on Lower Broadway. The night before he died, Hans rallied to speak of her project as though they might go on with the old routine, catch up on discoveries of her day. With great effort, he told of the millions Tweed’s ring ripped off the city.
That would be—
the effort of his breathing as he converted the Boss’s take to today’s currency—
that would be eleven million, small change. Missionaries,
he said falling into a sleep.

Though in fact, the 11 million was aid lost to warlords in the country he had just looked into, far less than Tweed’s 45 swiped from the coffers of the city.
Missionaries, that’s all we are
, her husband often said.
Let it be known to celebrities discovering Africa—
his good humor avoiding despair—
missionaries, throwbacks to those innocents sent to convert the lost tribes
.
Your Jesuits, my minister in a pith helmet
. His Lutheran grandfather had made Christians of the Chinese. They claimed the term lightly.
Missionary work,
he called the life she was currently looking into, her appropriation of this entertaining Bill Dove—
Take care, no minstrel show.
Claude would never enjoy her first reader again, bask in his admiration. Impossible to tell his boys, even Charles who might defend her from the charge of History Lite, that his father loved her persistence, hanging in with uncharted lives, small truths—well, at least stories that may not set us free. Her reading of Miss See’s diary placed Dove in family living quarters, not the pigsty or hen coop of speculation. She sat on the edge of the guest bed, not ready to give up this final day, heard a shrill whistle, a coach making a call on the television in Hans’ study. His big boy settling into a game; but Charles came to her door rumpled, beer in hand. His pleasure as he handed her the framed shot of his father with a crop of rusty hair going white at the edges. Gruen, chin up for the photo op with the smiling Nelson Mandela.