The Sunken Cathedral (17 page)

“Teach me,” Poppy says, Poppy a quick learner,
Hop on Pop
his favorite—Pete waiting for his steady finger to move to the next word, trying not to say it aloud, his whole self crazy with wanting Poppy to say it aloud—he never wanted anything more than for Poppy to read this word and then the next, the whole sentence, to get on with it. And he did, Pete tells Elizabeth. He does, he says to Elizabeth. Lizzie in high school but since college Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, he said, as if it were a name difficult to pronounce.

Like wildfire, Pete says. The guy’s obsessed.

They lie on the narrow single in Elizabeth’s dorm room, a thin sheet over them, wet in certain places, the top sheet from the twin set with the scalloped yellow edge her mother insisted she bring with her to school, to remind her of home, her mother had said, in case you feel lonely.

The twin sheet went with the cartoon comforter, Tweety Bird and Sylvester. She pulled the comforter up to her chin now, wanting to be covered ankle to neck; they had classes but decided to stay in bed all day. Later they would get Chinese and beer and ride to the rocks where he’d stashed his sleeping bag before meeting Poppy. But before any of this, before meeting him, Pete was a boy who rode his pink girlie bicycle around campus. She would see him sometimes and then she would not, until one day she saw him everywhere. “Are you following me?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“I thought so,” she said.

“Aren’t you in Nietzsche?” he said.

“Dostoyevsky.
The Possessed.
”

“Close.”

“Not really,” she said. He wore a button-down plaid shirt with a frayed collar; she had on a fringed jacket, feathers dangling from her ears. He smelled of tobacco and needed a shave. Just that morning, Poppy had told him he looked like a bum.

He walked his ratty pink bicycle beside her and told her he had grown up outside Seattle, like nobody else there in the Midwest, and that he found the cold really cold and the wind almost unbearable and the whole windchill thing impossible to understand and she said, “We’re talking about the weather?” and he said, “No, we’re going to the Paramour.” But it wasn’t yet three and besides, she had things to do: she worked as a hostess at the Keg and she needed the cash and extra tips because she had blown a lot recently, literally, she said, but he didn’t get it, and later, when he did, he convinced her not to bother, sex better without coke, like the old days, he told her. “Real old-time fucking,” he said. “Like in the movies.”

But before he said any of it, she said, “Carry me,” and he did, Pete in front pedaling, riding the two of them double on his rickety bike, bought at a garage sale from a family in Winnetka, four children all grown and flown the coop, the father said, watching Pete pick through the bikes and the bins of his sons’ and daughter’s clothing, dressed for his later doubles game in white.

Youngest left just last week, he said. This is something we’ve promised ourselves.

Necessary, Pete said to the man, the father of four all already grown.

The man looked like a doubles player; he looked like a cheat. A lawyer downtown, he told Pete. You?

Philosophy, Pete said. I don’t know. Haven’t decided. Maybe philosophy.

Big decision, the man said.

I suppose, Pete said, then, choosing the pink, he said, This one.

Caroline’s? the man said. Really?

Sure, Pete said, pulling bills from his pocket.

He had wanted to rock the man’s world, Pete yelled, to shake up the doubles game, he yelled, and how is she doing back there? he yelled. She has heard some of what he said but not all; he has given her most of the seat and she holds tight to his waist, eyes closed, her head pressed against the warmth of his sweater, feeling the softness there, this the kind of sweater you might find at the bottom of a drawer or the back of a closet and wonder how long it had been lost to you, how you could possibly have survived without it; this the kind of boy you could love.

XXVII

O
n the steps of Progressive K–8, the seventh grade ethics class gathers for Survival, Ms. Kim clapping her hands and saying today is the day they’ve been waiting for, the day to practice Screams. A handful of faculty corral them into smaller groups, offering them advice—don’t knock anyone down, don’t run into the street, keep your wits about you, keep your pants on. The students head out, each to a different avenue, a different block, on their own, their shadow teacher shadowing them, waiting for the right moment.

Ben’s crush, Esme Perkins, lingers outside the falafel place on Bedford when she feels the slithery hands reach around from behind, pulling her in, tightening their grip, the breath warm or even hot in her ear saying nothing. She panics, remembering absolutely nothing except the sound of her heart, doubled, and believing that these hands, this breath, are not the hands and breath of Ms. Collins, assigned as her shadow she happened to know—they had all seen the sheet—but rather the hands and breath of a criminal, a terrorist who will slip the noose around her neck and drag her away to be killed. Then she hears Ms. Collins’s nice voice in her ear: “You’re supposed to scream, Esme. You’re supposed to run for your life.”

And so she does. She screams. Esme Perkins, twelve years old and only recently in proud possession of breast buds, her underpants etched with the days of the week and still insistent on matching Sunday for Sunday, screams. She screams and screams, twisting free from Ms. Collins’s grip, not insubstantial given Ms. Collins’s, soon to be Mrs. Prandori’s belief in the plank, which she holds every morning for seven minutes and counting, aiming to work up to ten before her June wedding to Reynolds Prandori, a man she met in graduate school who still believes her decision to teach science to seventh graders beneath Ms. Collins’s dignity. But how can she ever show him what? Even here, watching Esme Perkins scream and flail as she runs down Bedford toward the steps of Progressive K–8, Ms. Collins’s heart breaks a little, like a thin-shelled egg tapped with a knife. What next for these children? What possibly next?

XXVIII

T
he boxes obstruct the passage through the house, Larry and Jules arguing it best to put Great-Aunt Eleanor’s valuables into immediate storage until they can get the right appraiser, someone they have used in the past in Los Angeles, to determine the value of the whole.

“There’s shitloads to do,” Marie’s heard Larry say on the telephone. “A mountain of crap.”

She’s given them the front room, her room—the comfortable queen, Very Grand attending—and moved into the sitting room with the daybed Abe dragged home from the street, the streets full of bounty then, all the SROs converted at a clip so that entire wardrobes might be found on Twenty-Second, Twenty-Fourth, Nineteenth, armoires reeking of cat pee, their faux oak doors peeled or peeling, papered with stickers from various campaigns. Once a gramophone; once a set of rusting golf clubs though neither of them played; once a banker’s box filled with postcards, letters, tax returns. Abe had said he couldn’t stand to see it all there for anyone to read. He planned to use the shredder and do the job properly.

In the last three weeks Jules has hired his appraiser. He has hired a real estate agent. He has hired the painters. He has hired the roofers. He has hired a maid. He has hired the liquor store to deliver straight to the front door exactly what he wants since Jules has become something of a wine connoisseur and Larry, apparently, always was.
^I

Marie wanders among the boxes, making do with a cane, the cast dirty, the symbols Sid Morris said meant something, painted with his shaky hand in the colors best for healing, grungy with wear, the heel filthy. Next week the doctor will slice it off, Larry said. The cast! Larry said. Not the foot! He had seen her expression. Things have suddenly become confusing; it is difficult to negotiate the hallway with these boxes. She loses track. The best thing, for the time being, sleep, Jules said. They will do all that needs to be done, he said. They have flown home and flown back in a little over a day. They have crisscrossed the entire country and arrived again at her doorstep.

“You’re here,” she said, opening the door to them. Had they been to the grocery? To the theater? A museum?

“We’ve been to California, Ma,” Jules said, taking her hands. His eyes are Abe’s eyes; he is already older, tall and thin.

But she can no longer sleep, she could tell him. She no longer sleeps.

She stands in the kitchen at the back window, watching Roscoe balance on the high fence between the two backyards, his tail quivering. It is early morning, earlier than that, and there are crickets already, the weather spiked. In virtually one day: spring. Perhaps tomorrow the cherry will bloom, perhaps the day after, Monday, or Tuesday. You can never tell: its blossoms a dull pink, slightly folded at the center, reluctant. The tree, grown tall as the brownstone, spreads out over the back garden, umbrellas it in spindly limbs and others broken at the joints—the weather. It is an ornamental species, complicated, fussy: its narrow trunk and branches, filly gray and slender, are similar to a fruit tree, an apricot, prone to blight and apple rust. But here again its leaves curl inward, a fist refusing to give up its treasure.

*  *  *

A soft knock.

“Elizabeth?” the voice familiar in her sleep, slightly accented.

Elizabeth’s out of bed quickly, her jeans on the chair. “Coming,” she calls. “I’ll be right there,” she says, and she is, the apartment tiny after all, just one narrow floor, a hallway with two small bedrooms and a bath between the street-facing living room and the garden-facing kitchen, the kitchen table centered on the back windows so she can sit here and see the view—the movie star’s birch, the other neighbors’ mulberry where once, last spring, she watched a hawk with a rat in its talons. Mrs. Frank has owned the brownstone for more than fifty years and raised her own boy here, she told her when they’d met that first day. A coincidence.

Destiny, Elizabeth had said.

Mrs. Frank had smiled, offering quiche and a glass of wine, her kitchen a beautiful yellow, her bedroom regal, a portrait—a distant relative, she’d said—above the carved mantel. The smell of that apartment, she later told Pete, as if all of the things crowded there gave off a certain odor of, what? History? Life? The china and the gold, the tiny photographs framed in silver, the letter openers, the crystal, the wallpaper, the faux gas sconces, the copper pans in the kitchen, the stewpots. Her husband had been a pack rat, Mrs. Frank said.

Wonderful, Elizabeth said, idiotic, but she had milk brain and besides, she did find it wonderful. Anyway, she said. We’ll be quiet as mice.

I don’t want mice, Mrs. Frank said. I want nice, she said. She has the most amazing blue eyes, Elizabeth told Pete.

We’re nice mice, Elizabeth said. She was delirious from lack of sleep; her breasts ached and leaked. They needed another room: a room for the baby, a room she might share with him, a desk and a crib. And at first, she tried: she waked early mornings and wrote: “The Story of Molly,” she called it. It began like this: There once was a little girl named Molly. But then she listened to her baby breathe. She liked to listen to her baby breathe. Is that weird? she asked Pete. I could listen to Ben breathe all day long. Sometimes I just sit there and watch him breathe and then I get all wiggy and think, If I walk out of this room, he will stop breathing.

Morbid, Pete said.

Exactly, Elizabeth said, but it was true.

Then Elizabeth tried to write “The Story of Molly” in the afternoons, between feedings, but there were no between feedings; the day the meal, the meal the day: Ben ravenous.

You’re a writer? Mrs. Frank had asked.

Yes, Elizabeth had said, the quiche delicious. Well, I write poetry. I mean, I wrote poetry. I can’t really call myself a poet. I haven’t been published or anything.

You’re a poet, Mrs. Frank had said.
^II

*  *  *

Elizabeth opens the door to Marie in housecoat and slippers, suddenly old. Perhaps she has come to apologize for that bit of business in the rain—they haven’t seen each other since—or with the news Elizabeth has already heard from Jules, and before that from the boyfriend, Larry. It’s only a matter of time, he had said. They had crossed paths on Eighth. We’re on a reconnaissance mission: project Chelsea. Jules hates to do it but given everything, what else can be done?

I see, Elizabeth said.

The neighborhood is through the roof. You know, the High Line. Jules thinks we should strike while the iron is hot. Jesus, I’m cliché man.

Larry laughs, squinting at Elizabeth as if she is lit from behind. He clearly likes and does not like to be the deliverer of this news, although he seems a decent enough fellow, Elizabeth later tells Pete. He has the look of a Broadway dancer; she could picture him running up a lamppost singing something from
Oklahoma!
or
South Pacific
. He is handsome that way—the smoothest baby skin, a nice smell. Anyway, he says. It’s all the same to me. I need to get back to California.

He worked for Legal Aid: total insanity, a billion cases on the docket. They want me to be a judge, eventually, so they’re watching, you know, like everything I do. Usually you’re on your own ticket. Deadlines.

Larry’s eyes wander to a couple passing with a small dog on a leash. The couple waits as the dog hunches its hindquarters, shivering, shitting on the sidewalk.

Jesus, I still can’t get used to that, Larry says, though they both watch as one of the men bends over to scoop up the dog mess with his bagged hand. Near him, on the railing intended to protect the tree trunk, a handmade sign asks all dog owners to curb their dogs.
PLEASE LET ME GROW IN PEACE
, it reads.
NAMASTE
.