Act of God (6 page)

Here were the facts in the case she was building against Vida: Vida had been notified seven days previously about a foul odor and potential mold problem in the basement. Edith had left five additional voicemails in as many days notifying Vida about the dangerous infestation. She had also slipped a written complaint under Vida’s door, and mailed a certified copy of that letter, though she had no idea where it would be delivered now that the building had been condemned.

She was anxious about the archive. Each of the hundred-thousand-plus letters would need to be individually tested for spores, fumigated, and then retested. She could hardly ship them to the Smithsonian otherwise, risk infecting the National Archives. And could the oldest, most friable letters withstand whatever chemical bath they would be subjected to? How much would that cost?

She finally reached Vida the next morning. Vida must have been caught off guard, because Edith’s call didn’t transfer to voicemail like it had the previous ten times. Edith noted the hour: eleven sharp. She was keeping a log of her calls. She’d just gotten off the phone after seeking counsel from Stanley Flom, senior partner at Price, Bloodworth, the husband of Alice, Edith’s secret lover for twenty-two years.

“How dare you ignore my calls!” Edith’s voice detonated in pent-up rage when Vida answered. “My mother’s archives are being infested every minute you delay!”

“I know, I know. Can we talk a little later?” Vida said. “It’s pouring out and I didn’t bring an umbrella.”

Edith glanced out the hotel window for the first time that morning. The sky was swollen and violet, the expressway ablaze with headlights, but the streets looked dry.

“It’s not raining here. Don’t you dare hang up on me, Vida. I need to know what’s going on and when we can
safely go back. My mother’s archive is due at the Smithsonian by the end of next month. We’ll need to hire an archival conservator to work with the fumigators. What is your insurance policy going to cover?”

“The only thing I know for certain,” Vida shouted over the rumble of thunder, “is that my insurance company is trying to claim it’s an act of God and is threatening not to cover anything.”

The line went dead.

Edith didn’t believe for a second that a crack of lightning had interrupted the signal. Why would Vida employ that arcane term?
Act of God.
It was rarely used nowadays. It confused jurors, who might be awestruck by the concept of divine manifestation. “Act of Nature” was the popular term, though “act of God” remained the legal one. Vida must have already spoken to a real estate attorney, one with a savvy librarian, otherwise how would she have known that only an act of God could void their mother’s rent-controlled lease? Vida clearly intended to turn this temporary eviction into a permanent one.

After the disturbing call, Edith went to the window. Fistfuls of rain were now being thrown against the glass. She could no longer see the expressway, only red taillights, bleeding pinpricks in the downpour. Kat was out there somewhere. She’d slipped out while Edith was on the phone with Stanley. She’d taken the manuscript with her, the only letters Edith could be certain were safe, and now it was pouring out. She’d probably forgotten to take an umbrella.

Edith had nursed their mother during her protracted, pitiless illness with little assistance from Kat, except for the occasional, erratic visit from the West Coast, the airfare always paid for by Edith. She had tried to convince their mother to put Kat’s share of the inheritance, modest after
the medical bills, into a trust that wouldn’t begin until Kat turned sixty-five, but their mother fell into a coma and then she died, and Kat had gone through her share in less than two years, saving nothing for old age.

Fatigue settled over Edith like a mist, yet her pulse thumped wildly as if she’d just had a fright. Along the periphery of her vision, she noticed the familiar scintillation that invariably heralded a migraine. She’d forgotten to pack her headache pills, too. Where was Kat when she needed her? She had no choice but to lie down, though the Housing Department still needed to be called to get a copy of their mother’s lease now that the original had been eaten. When the first volley of pain struck just behind her right temple, she tried to shield her eyes from the blinding explosion, but her left arm was missing. Had it been blown off in the blast? She saw it on the bed beside her. She tried to lift it. It might as well have been an I-beam. The next piercing barrage left her skull ringing. When she came to, she was safely back in Price, Bloodworth’s silent library. She should look up “act of God.” She rolled the stepladder over to the wall bricked with New York tort law volumes, and pulled down the relevant tome. She sat at her desk and opened it, but to her surprise and escalating fear, all six hundred and seven pages were blank. On the far side of the library, Kat burst noisily through the mahogany doors, and once again, Edith felt that amalgamation of dread and monolithic love that she always experienced whenever she saw Kat.

“Edie, oh, Edie!” Kat shouted hoarsely, then froze. “Are you dead?”

“Quiet! You’re in a library.”

Shielding the manuscript from the sudden downpour, Kat bolted across Fifth Avenue. She didn’t have an actual appointment with the editor from Sutton House, though when they had spoken on the phone two months earlier, he had told her that his mother had been a huge fan of Dr. Mimi’s column; he could still remember her reading the choicest letters aloud to his father at breakfast. He promised to look at the collection as soon as Kat culled the archive down to the hundred best, impossible a task as that might be.

She had only planned to drop off the letters with his secretary this morning, and was surprised and grateful when the editor himself came out of his office to greet her, an unexpectedly thin man twig-necked like a heron.

“You look just like the newspaper picture of Dr. Mimi that I remember,” he told Kat.

He seemed so friendly and affable, Kat wondered if they wouldn’t sign the contract today. She wanted badly to bring Edith some good news. She had no idea what Sutton House would pay, but whatever it was, she’d finally be contributing. Even before the evacuation, Edith had worried about money. Kat couldn’t begin to guess what a librarian might have been able to save for old age, but it couldn’t be much, despite Edith’s lifetime of frugality. Even as a little
girl, she’d squirreled away her weekly candy allotment while Kat gobbled up hers, and then, when Kat ached for sugar, Edith would sell her M&M’s at a nickel apiece. As far as Kat knew, besides the four years at Skidmore, her sister had never left home. The summer they turned twenty-one, Kat begged Edith to join her at Woodstock, take acid, and dance naked under the stars. Kat honestly believed that if Edith had just one out-of-body experience, she’d at least have a choice whether to abide by the laws of this unjust world or chase after ethereal gusts of grandeur, as Kat planned to do. Instead, Edith had taken a summer internship in Price, Bloodworth’s library and fixed her fate. By thirty, she was stout and middle-aged. Why would she scrimp and deny herself during youth, with all its electric pleasures and titillating temptations, so she could eat well in old age? What? Salisbury steak? The astringent life Edith subjected herself to pained Kat.

Sitting across from the editor in his cramped, messy office, Kat watched his agreeable face frown as she handed him the manuscript. She had kept all the contenders in a three-ring binder, each letter sheathed in its own plastic sleeve. Some of the letters were more than fifty years old. The paper ranged from the back of a Chock full o’ Nuts place mat to a wedding napkin. More than one had been penned on toilet paper. Kat believed that the handwriting said as much as the words. The grieving wrote so lightly, it almost looked as if they wished to disappear too. The infatuated scribbled away in loopy exuberance. She was still hoping to persuade the editor to reproduce the original letters as photographs, not just plain text.

He weighed the manuscript in his hands as if it were a brick of pig iron. “You do realize we publish novelty books, not encyclopedias.”

Opening the binder, he flipped through the three-hundred-plus pages. Kat noted a look of discomfort sweep across his affable expression. “I’m sure each one of these letters deserves to be included, but we agreed to keep the number under a hundred. And this one is in pencil. I can barely read it. Where’s the typescript with your mother’s replies?”

Kat had invested so much in this book that the heroic effort it took to maintain her composure faltered. She could no longer blink back the tears.

The editor found her some tissues. He kept a stash handy in his top drawer. Kat couldn’t help but wonder how many of his writers he made cry.

“I don’t usually behave like this, but you can’t imagine what the last two days have been like,” Kat said, taking a Kleenex and blotting her eyes. When she lowered the tissue, she could see him staring at the slightly ajar door like a castaway fixes on the horizon in hope of a rescue ship. She took charge of herself. It was her moment to chase after a gust of grandeur. She reached across his desk and opened the binder to the penciled letter he’d dismissed. “It’s
supposed
to be difficult to read, that’s the point. Look at the signature: ‘Bereft in Plattsburg.’ It’s the mark of grief.”

But he didn’t look down at bereavement’s fingerprint. He remained focused on the exit.

“These letters are an oral history, a public diary. And they’re not just words, they’re artifacts,” Kat said, keeping her tone impassioned but subdued to hide her tears. “Seeing how a hand carves out meaning with a pencil point lets us remember that the human touch is essential.” She closed the binder and placed her hand on it, as if she were about to swear on something sacred. “Please, all I ask is that you read these letters with an open mind.”

He did not say no.

When Kat got outside, the storm was raging. She dreaded facing Edith without the salve of good news. She darted into the first refuge she found, an old-fashioned Midtown bar—garnet-red stools, a sticky counter, and an ancient bartender whose wooden face told nothing. She shook her head, like a dog does, to fling off the water. The only other patron, a slight middle-aged man with hairy wrists, was dry. He must have already started drinking well before the storm. Why not be friendly and sit beside him?

“I usually don’t have a cocktail before noon, but I’ve come from my publisher and I could do with a drink. Stoli,” she called to the bartender, wondering how she would pay for both it and Edith’s prescription, which she intended to pick up before returning to the hotel. She had less than twenty dollars in her purse. She might as well go for broke. “Make that a double, please.”

An electric storm the likes of which Ashley had never seen before drenched her within seconds, but she couldn’t walk any faster hauling her heavy red suitcase stuffed to bursting with Vida’s finery. By the time she reached the glass tower on the river, her suitcase’s seams had come unglued and the red color, which she had painted over the ugly gray cardboard with exhilarating anticipation of her upcoming adventure in America, now dripped what looked like a trail of blood. The doorman from yesterday ran outside with an umbrella and offered to carry the bleeding suitcase, but she shook her head. It was all she owned. In the lobby, it nearly fell apart in her hands. She opened the latches. Just as she feared, everything was wet and ruined. A sorrow she suspected had little to do with the stained plunder surprised her, and a hiccupping sob escaped before the tears came.

“Hey, hey, don’t cry,” said the doorman. “We’ll put everything in Mr. Sam’s washing machine.”

“I lock myself out.”

He kindly offered to use his master key, and then carried her bloated bag for her, holding it together as best he could. In the elevator, he snuck a glance at her breasts when he thought she wasn’t looking. Her sopping wet T-shirt was nearly transparent. The ZIBERAX lettered across her chest looked as if it had been tattooed on her naked breasts.

“You’ll need to press the button,” he said after the doors closed and they didn’t ascend. His hands were occupied trying to keep her suitcase from bleeding on his shoes.

But Ashley didn’t know which floor the actor lived on. She pressed all thirty buttons.

“In Russia, you press all or you go nowhere.”

Outside the actor’s apartment on the second floor, the doorman set down her now shapeless suitcase on the welcome mat, which quickly turned red, before opening the door with his master key.

“Thank you, you very kind to poor Russia girl locked out in storm,” Ashley said.

“You an actress too?” he asked, after he set her worldly possessions on the actor’s wooden floor. A red lake instantly formed.

“I new Ziberax girl. Big secret. Don’t tell.”

Alone in the apartment, she filled the tub with hot water and laundry soap she found under the sink. She didn’t know how to use the washing machine. She couldn’t save the whites—they were now pink, like bubble gum—but she was able to rescue a black silk dress and designer jeans, any fabric or color where a tint of red wouldn’t be noticed. She hung them over the tub to dry, and then washed what was left of her worldly things—her hairbrush was now saturated in red, like a paintbrush, and her emery board looked like a bloody dagger. Around the suitcase, the red lake was rising. She considered the mess and shrugged in humble resignation, just as her mother had shrugged whenever she had looked at the mess of her daughter Anushka. She walked over to the big window facing the skyline. Lightning appeared to spark from turret to spike. Wet, windy slaps buffeted the glass. The normally sluggish black river had whitecaps. She’d never before seen weather as drama. In Omsk, the weather
snuck up on you like an invisible gas: one instant you could breathe, the next frigid air scalded your lungs; one second you could see across the street, the next you were blinded by snow.

She heard knocking at the door and peeked through the eyehole’s wide-angle lens. The doorman’s ears appeared even bigger than usual.

“I brought you a clean doormat from the penthouse,” he said, rolling up the stained one and then rolling out the new one.