Eagle Eye (13 page)

“I see,” he said.

He saw Maeve was going to leave them again. In a minute she’ll rise like a sleepwalker, pay them all her absent smile, and ease out that door, a plain refectory one, but thick as money could make ’em, when the year nineteen-hundred-and-twenty was bringing over monasteries from Spain.

J. P. Morgan and Hearst brought them, and the good Jewish bankers, working in their own way for Christ. Then the gangsters got them, and the theatre people. And now us. Underneath, are the monks and angels walking in the wood all the same, choralling from that tapestry up there, on whoever’s wall? And those mini-animals that grin and glee down at the bottoms of Italian painting before perspective, heavy-headed little ghouls on pin-legs? Does Buddy know how much Europe has taught me? I can’t see him as a monk, but I can in a Dutch burgher’s hat, wide with finance. And in a ruff, the family one, stiff with grandfather-starch and lacy hints from the family women. Holding him up. He’s staring out of the picture with the same pink abstraction about the eyes that Rembrandt saw clouding the eyes of one of the councilmen he painted; maybe they both had difficult wives at home. Since 1575, Dr. Jannie, that has been a worry. I can see why Buddy talks to you—even if neither of you knows.

When my father goes heavy and quiet like that, reddening like a solemn baby holding its breath against the bitter world, he never does anything physical. He’s not even touching Maeve’s hand. There was never anything to be scared of.

She’s going to get up. Nevertheless.

I never saw my father before. Those lines of force.

Only—the door got there first. Opening with a rumble from the wheelchair behind. By now, every door in the house would have my grandmother’s gouge in it. And every person she met. Maybe she had humor once; certainly there was sharpness; it’s all gone to ill-will. Of the kind people our age simply don’t have.

I don’t mean to exalt us. It’s only that in our own minds, we’re still saving people, not discarding them. No matter what we
do,
we still have general connections, not specific ones. Not narrowed down. That’s the barrier even between us and the next ones on—I’ve felt it already. I don’t mind it being called innocence. I wish it could be kept. Sometimes, I almost think it can be. If I could teach memory not to chafe in one rut for so long that it finally has to justify that rut. I can try.

“Why, the woman’s got an old AWVS uniform on.” The lady on my right—Mrs. Camel. Mrs. Drexel Jackson, as she’d informed me. Now that I myself had joined the animals, I no longer saw her the other way.

“Mrs. Reeves, you mean? What uniform?”

“American Women’s Voluntary Services, World War Two. That marvelous old blue.”

Poor Reeves, hoping that when friends meet her along the Avenue, they’ll think she’s some kind of volunteer. But she needn’t have; by now she’s got that limp look of people whose story you pass by, you haven’t got time for. I can tell she knows that’s what her story is. At school, much as I hated to pass by people like that, I did. It’s catching, otherwise.

Reeves brought the chair to a smart stop, waving her other hand meanwhile. She had our notice. Mother MacNeil helps her out there.

“Up on the balcony! Mother talked!”

My grandmother hadn’t budged from what she was when I first saw her. Every morning, in Amenia, she combed her hair at the kitchen mirror with a liquid that kept it dark, yet scorned to do it secretly. Her hands hadn’t spread with work, but gone pinched. In Leinster once, where her quarter of us had come from, on the border between Englishtown and Irishtown I met a postmistress reminded me of her. Wouldn’t deign to read your mail, but begrudged you it. A Kilkenny cat. Jonathan Swift went to school there. And learned something.

None of us three family was eager to inquire what she’d said, up there on the balcony. Any miracle would be so strictly her own.

But Dr. Jannie leaned forward eagerly. “What did she say?”

“It was when Bunty answered his father’s toast.” Reeves flushed, for the Yiddish maybe. If it was.

It was part of the gibberish the party-boy says at one point to his father; I couldn’t repeat it if I tried. I had faked it. It was from where he seems to be saying “A son. A son. A son is given.” Or a man.

… ‘A son is given’ is from the Messiah, I know that. We sang it in the glee club at the academy. And ‘My son, my son’—that’s David to Absalom. When he finds him hanging …

But that’s what I thought I said.

“She’d just been praying, as usual. She’s saying the Hail Mary, I think, if you listen close; I’m not too familiar with it. Anyway, she says it eight times a day. Hail Mary full of Grace. Either that, or else my name.” Reeves gave an odd smile. “Sometimes I think she confuses the two of us. Anyway, she slammed the door of her prayer-thing shut—she’s got a lot of strength—and said right out, “Hear that? They’ve got him. Get me downstairs.” Straight out. I had to bring her the back way—where the ramp is. But now she’s clammed up again.”

“What
is
your name?”

Reeves eyes got bluer. Not only the uniform. Contact is hard to resist, even if manners tell you to. “Mary Grace.”

Mother MacNeil was struggling jealously. Her mouth ran about like a mouse she couldn’t catch.

Jannie gave her his full attention at once. “Yes yes, yes yes
yes.
” His hand smoothed hers, buttering it with a new, light voice that came oddly out of his bear bulk. Yes, a dancing bear that somebody had long ago ringed. Neither an ugly cripple nor a handsome robot, yet his flat face, deep-slit eyes, and that long, plumb line from nose to upper lip, did make me think of toy-types like the Tin Woodsman or Pinocchio, some creature that had been created from behind, more plainly so than the rest of us. Not a ghoul, Jasmin had said, explaining why she had gone back to him—and why she left again. Only the ghoul’s son. “With a mother like his, whom could one go to—to be a child?” She hadn’t wanted to tell me his story. “It puts him in your power, Bunt, anybody who hears.” But I must have had her in my power without knowing it. After she told me, she lay very still. Since we spent most of our time together in bed, I have few memories of her any other way. He has all those.

“Yes, yes—try.” He held my grandmother offside like a vet holding a hurt animal. “Isn’t it marvelous, there’s nothing like it in the world.” He breathed deep. “She is hunting necessity.” He bent his head to hers.

“Go on, go,” he said. He was weeping joy, or sweating bright balm. It’s
his
necessity, flashed over me. He wants her to do it for him. To show him the lengths to which people can go.

Nobody in the room could crack the text she’d quoted, though the donkey far down the table quoted a few wavering lines of what he said was the Twenty-fourth Psalm.

“Get a Bible.” Leskel glanced at his watch.

All down the room, the guests murmured like people leaving a theatre. They were leaving us with our troubles. It was only polite.

I
UNDERSTAND BUDDY DID
go for a Bible … You can’t do that, Batface, great as you are. Unless somebody in the office has already fed you all of it—which I doubt. Hear then, Corinthians, chapter ten, verse twenty-one: “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils; you cannot partake of the Lord’s table and the table of devils.”

Meant for us human binaries, Batface. Not for you, who can partake of anything.

I hadn’t stayed to hear. I had come to my senses at last and run after Maeve. Why wasn’t she keeping us on anymore? Buddy? Me? The answer came to me in great spills of magnetic tape spiraling up through the house as I ran between its curling fountains, sidling at me anaconda from every corner. The machine of the past had vomited it.

I found her where I knew I would—at the terrarium door. She was standing with her back to me, pressed forward, her spread arms cradling the curved wall on either side, like a tiny Atlas holding the bubble of the world. Or an experimenter, about to step into space holding onto a glass-and-wrought-iron balloon.

The sneakers I’d changed to made their sneaker sound. A tremor in her shoulders told me she heard it. But in whatever yoga-plan she was breathing by, I had no place. I must have lost my place there long ago. For months on end, I had forgotten her myself. To me this was natural. Was it to her?

As I came nearer, she let go of the globe and wheeled to face me, arms at her side. Just before I got to her, moving slower because I was scared—she had her feet on solid floor, but I felt her teetering, as if she were going to jump somewhere—she reached behind her, slid open the terrarium door to an arc just wide enough to backstep into it, still facing me. Smiling humbly, deferent, she barred my way.

I let out my breath. In relief. I think the flesh of apartment dwellers never really forgets at what height it lives. Or not the child who is bred to it, warned when near windows, or grabbed away from them before language, his sight grilled with curlicued iron, or soft stone balustrade or glass, or nothing but nothing—between him and the people moving urgently down below. Down there is the empire. The eye is always making the magic, forbidden leap. In old dreams, I floated down plumb, my descent safe in the marble column of itself, to a slow melody. Heard at windowsills, when leaning awake. A tension, like silent decibels. One grew accustomed to it. A slight fear of heights. Like a slight fear of death.

I had never had it for her or Buddy, of course. They had had it for me. Now the balance had changed. But she was in the safest place here. Heavy glass, aluminum banded at good close intervals. No access to the parapets—the only outside room that hadn’t it. A small core of safety. Aluminum is such a joyously weightless metal, a cheap sunbeam in rain. I fell in love with modernity all over again, just looking at it.

“What a great idea, Maeve.” And she is safe. No way to go except back to me where I am, feet planted on the same parquet pattern that has followed us through all the apartment houses.

She’s standing just back of the glass wall that curves toward her from either side. The floor inside there must be some three inches higher, bringing her that much nearer my eye-level; when I first passed her height, years ago, I used to waggle a forefinger at her, senior to child.

Above her head, a dark fester of vines and leaf-faces pressed toward me through the glass.

“Even the door’s curved, isn’t it? That Claes is clever. Boy, what it must have cost.” Brushing against her wrist as I put my palm against the doorframe, I find her arm rigid. She really means to keep me out. Of her lair? I can understand that.

“Oh, it cost.”

No grin. In department-store days, there would have been.

“Maeve. What’s between you and Buddy? … That I don’t know, I mean.”

“Nothing new.”

“Something I should have known? And don’t?” I try to grin at her. “Or shouldn’t have. The bathroom wall. Remember?”

She does look up, then. “Remember? The end of an era.”

“The day I—” What had I done, really.

“You scared us. Me.”

“How?”

“After that, I really did things Buddy’s way. Before that, it was sometimes for myself.”

“Your parties, you mean. Changing apartments. Your not going downtown.”

“That the way you saw us? Only those three things?”

I shook my head like a swimmer. Second string. “Maybe it was me. The way I saw me. Between the two of you.”

She shrugged. “People act on one another. A family. One day or another doesn’t make the difference. Don’t you mind.”

“What am I minding? … You haven’t yet said.”

When she doesn’t answer, I say “Maeve. Let me in, huh.” I try to laugh it off. “Let me see your lair.”

She looks up quick. Says nothing.

“After all, I am going to be an architect.”

She put a palm up to my cheek. “Build well … No, stay where you are. I’ll talk.”

“Aw, come on.” I become her child again. “We could sit on that bench in there.”

On the far side of the terrarium, one of those iron cemetery benches had been poised, near what must be the new plants. Thin airy ones, spreading their lace; they couldn’t weigh that much. At each point in the wall where there was a metal stave, Claes had bracketed it with a speared oval teardrop frame in filigree, in the center of each of which there was a piece of milky glass—amber or lavender or green, and in one or two, an old streaked mirror; he had copied what the eighteenth century called a repose. It did make me feel a child again. In front of a secret garden. Out of those fairybooks I’d hated, but wanted to believe in.

“No. No.”

She’s not lucid here. At this point, it stops. Here at this door. And here is where I’m no longer a child.

“Okay. Give.”

“You make me feel so good. So normal. Just to hear your slang.”

“A convenience. That’s what I am. You’re brownnosing me.” But I couldn’t make her smile. I touched her hair. “Since when Kwan Yin.”

“Since.”

Depression became her; she looked younger for it. But it sat on her cheeks like rouge on a corpse’s. On the one corpse I’d seen.

“You look like him. Like Granpa MacNeil. I never saw it before.”

“You only saw him dead.” She reached up to touch the spot between my eyebrows, where the Hindus put a red dot. Or the ash goes, on Ash Wednesday.

“I used to be afraid your chin would turn out like hers. Like a cat’s.”

“Maybe it will yet. My mother’ll never make a Park Avenue wheelchair lady, though, no matter what Buddy does. People should lead their lives to their natural outcome. She’s doing it. I don’t mind her anymore. Not like Buddy hoped.”

“But you left, just now, when she—”

“No, I did it for myself. I’m doing that now. Learning it.”

“For yourself, Maeve?”

“I can only do it here.”

The globe was like a rival. Into which she would recede.

“You’re a quick learner.”

Joke. But she shrank. I don’t have to imitate Buddy. I already sound like him. She made a movement. I saw she wanted in. I needed to delay her. That’s all the vibes said.

“How’d you come to build this thing?”

“I came here for the city, you know. When I was young.”