The Bride of Catastrophe (19 page)

“And one hundred dollar, month,” he said with satisfaction. An amount that would have changed his life, if only he'd had it when he was trying to get out of Poland. And which, as it matched exactly my father's suggestion, gave me a sense of holy rightness that I would, if I'd noticed it, have rejected as superstition.

But there's not time in a life to notice so much. As soon as Frank and Henny went away down the stairs, I twirled in the center of the kitchen, arms open and head back, just like a figure skater. Mine,
mine
, and the floors would always be swept, I'd get a geranium for the window, and behind the bathroom door, there was an ironing board. It was perfect here, perfect, like the places I'd seen out of train windows—modest and striving, with old women gossiping in bursts of evil laughter over the hedges and children on plastic tricycles barreling down the sidewalks—not unlike the neighborhood on Staten Island from which my mother had been delivered, to which she longed to return.

“Oh, I can't wait for you to see it!” I told her as soon as I got my phone. “There are all these little
pasticceria
s and delis, and everyone has a vegetable garden in the yard … it's just, so …
real
, do you know what I mean?”

“No,” Ma said, with irritation, reminding me how rude I was to go on like this, with her so lost and sad.

“So, how are things there?” I asked, nursily solicitous.

“Fine, Beatrice,” she said caustically. “Never better. I suppose you heard about the accident?”

“No.”

“Well, your father ran over a horse.”

“What?”

“He
ran over a horse
.” (So she'd been right, the rabbit was just the beginning, and now he went rampaging through state after state, murdering innocent creatures at will.) “In the middle of the night. Outside Terre Haute, it belonged to some poor child there.”

“Is he okay?” I asked.

“He's
dead
.”

“No, is Pop okay?”

“Apparently.”

“And Dolly?”

There was a long pause so I could ask myself if it was really necessary to torment her by bringing up Dolly, but she decided to be magnanimous.

“The truck is a total loss,” she said. “But I gather
your sister
is fine.”

“Your father”
meant “this Nazi I've had to prostitute myself with for your sake.”
“Your sister”
—not good. Pop would have made a very poor Nazi; he couldn't even bear to hear a mousetrap spring. Instead he'd put a lump of cheese in a milkbottle, propped at an angle. Once the mice were in, they couldn't skitter out. Then he'd turn them out into the field, and race them back to the house. I looked down at the envelope with his calculations and saw it was stamped
FINAL NOTICE
. Lucky he had Dolly beside him, I thought.

*   *   *

“
BEACHY?
”

The next call was from Dolly's careful voice, caught between truculence and apology. She'd promised to keep Pop awake by talking, but she'd closed her eyes for a minute and now—oh,
if only
—of course he'd been exhausted, who wouldn't be? They'd slept in the barn the night before, they'd been driving eighteen hours, and suddenly …

“Oh, Beachy, its head came right through the windshield,” she said. “Everything was soaked in blood. I had to throw Raggedy Ann away. I mean, she's just a doll, I know that, but…” She trailed off, mastered herself, went on. “But the thing is, the insurance expired. I mean, they didn't give Pop any warning, he just missed one payment, it's
not fair
, but they say they won't pay. We stayed overnight here, we're going to rent a new truck in the morning—thank God I have my college money.”

If only they'd hit a deer! A deer would have been okay, but a horse? That's what happens when things get past control. Bad luck, bad timing, bad judgment, they circle around and around, wrong leading to more wrong until … what? I didn't want to know.

And I didn't have to, I was on my own. That first weekend, I carried home a pizza and a quart of beer and ate on the little, tilting back porch in a heat so harsh and dry, it seemed like a physical force that held even the traffic on Wethersfield Avenue still. At first the only sound was the squeaking of a pulley as the woman across the way took in her laundry—the enormous panties and tiny dresses, the undershirts and pink uniforms and, finally, two sets of canvas overalls. Then the game, Red Sox vs. whoever, came on, and from every house I heard the organ huffing, the laconic announcer ticking off the plays as evening fell. Lucky, so lucky to look over this yard where so many lives feathered into each other, to feel the breeze come up with the darkness, see the backyard vegetable gardens below fade to shapes, beans laced over a teepee of poles, cornstalks in their ranks, tomatoes heavy on their vines. A cat leapt out of a copse of oregano to clap a grasshopper in its paws.

Then, thunder, and looking west I saw a cloud light up fitfully, as if it had a loose bulb inside. I packed up and went in to unplug things when I realized I could still hear the Red Sox game; the man across the way was not going to let the storm drive him in. He was still sitting beside his radio under the eaves as the first drops began to fall. I hit the screen door open with the flat of my hand and went back onto the porch, smelling the dust as the first drops wet the ground, and also the scent of oregano: the cat must have torn the leaves.

Suddenly there was an earsplitting thunderclap and the scene was lit so starkly that a brilliant, ashen afterimage burned in my eyes. I'd never seen the way things looked when they were lit up by lightning.

*   *   *

I'D TOLD
Frank I had a job, and I meant to get one right away, but I hadn't counted on Henny and her world of foreboding. She lurked in her kitchen, boiling pierogies, watching the street from behind the curtain as if she expected to see tanks rolling in from the west. As I locked my apartment door, I'd hear her move toward hers, to listen as I passed on the stairs, then she'd go back to the window. And as she didn't let Frank smoke in the house, he was always on the stoop with his cigarette, waiting for something to happen, someone to walk by.

So I went off every morning dressed as if I were on my way to work, and didn't return until five. I'd take the bus up Franklin, and settle into a booth at Louie's, across the street from City Hall. Even the smells there—black coffee and eggs on a grill—were reassuring. The double doors to the kitchen bubbed open and shut as waiters pushed through with trays held high, to be set clattering on the other side. Glass domes sheltered piles of muffins and crullers for the businessmen in line at the counter. I stood, blessed, among the men in their dark suits with their decisive movements and great energy. Men going to work, going to make a difference in the world.

Soon, I'd be one of them. I'd bought a red pen to mark the ads I might respond to, and I had twenty résumés on vellum in a special folder. From the wooden phone booth at the back of the room I could dial prospective employers, and in the pink formica ladies' room I fixed myself in the mirror with the expression my mother used to meet the world—perfect moxie, a challenge: “Strike one spark here and what a blaze you'll see.” I was looking for work in the same superheated way I'd looked for love; I expected to stumble through some job opening into another life. If I didn't harness my genetic predisposition to hysteria and put it to some professional use, I was afraid I'd find myself playing “The March of the Toreadors” the way Ma played “Lara's Theme.” I had to escape myself, to join the rest of the world.

The man at the next table was drinking black coffee, which proved that strong and able people did not need cream, and I would reveal my foolish weakness by asking for it. I drank. How bitter it was, but it was what real people liked.

Now the man folded his newspaper in quarters; again, I followed suit, going through job titles—financial assistant, payroll analyst, operations associate, systems coordinator, provider specialist—perhaps more black coffee would clear my head, because I felt like I was reading another language.

If I'd turned from the classified section to the front page, I might have noticed that unemployment was at a record high. If my father had known the things he'd pretended to, he might have mentioned that I'd have a hard time finding work, with few qualifications and no experience. If I'd had any experience, I might have realized the city of Hartford was dying. I had only ignorance to shield me, but thank heaven it was a very thick and impenetrable ignorance.

It was eight o'clock—time to cross the street and make my first application. I trembled, fishing out my quarters at the cash register. I was taking too long at it; real people had their change ready or threw a few dollars on the counter and went their way. There were two men behind me, with jobs to get to. The cashier counted the coins I'd dumped into his hand and returned two nickels, squinting at me with irritation. He knew I was an impostor.

The City Hall personnel office had me fill out a form and take a standardized test: my two best skills. There were sharpened pencils, little round circles to be carefully blackened in, a monitor who tap-tapped purposefully around the room, and who explained, once we'd finished, that the tests would be scored the very minute they lifted the hiring freeze.

So, on to the Gold Building, fifty stories high, its windows mirrored in gold instead of the common silver so it could be touted by the Chamber of Commerce as “the centerpiece of the Hartford Renaissance.” The elevator went up along the front of the building so you could look out over the brave little city with its puffed-out chest and boarded-up storefronts, across the river which had none of the legendary might of rivers and just flowed humbly along as if it understood it wasn't needed anymore. On the thirty-seventh floor a pale man with small glasses and gray teeth shook his head in sympathy as he read my résumé over.

“Oscar Wilde and the Flowering of Decadence in the Fin-de-Siècle,” he read. “What an interesting subject.” I was afraid he was going to pat my hand, so sadly did he peer at me. “Not terribly helpful in the financial services industry, though. Do you follow the stock market?”

“No,” I said, feeling very small. No doubt I was supposed to thank him and go, but I couldn't quite get myself to move. I looked over at him with what must have been naked avarice, because he said suddenly “Here, have one of our pens.”

Having got me to stand up, he took pity.

“Have you thought of word processing? That would be the thing, I think, for someone of your background.” Now he was cheerful, buoyant, even, jumping up to shake my hand. “Word processing. It's a coming field, just the thing for you.”

To apply as a cocktail waitress, I wore the push-up bra Philippa had favored and the lowest-cut sweater I could find—in the mirror I saw the quintessential tough chick with a heart of gold. I'd move with quick grace between the tables, offering a smile to the regulars, who would love and confide in me, take comfort in the sight of me. When I tried this smile on the manager of The Inner Sanctum, a long, low place with flocked red velvet walls and an undulant bar, he looked into my eyes to see if my pupils were dilated. “I'll give you a call,” he said, looking over my shoulder out the door.

At
The Courant
, though, I could see I really had a chance. The arts editor was so tweedy, even his beard seemed to be flecked, and his office smelled like Sweetriver: his pipe and the old books piled on the radiator. I was wearing a very tight shirt (I'd noticed that people paid better attention to me when I wore tight shirts), and I sank into the chair across from him, feeling as if I'd finally come home.

“It's been so long since I had anyone to
talk
to!” I said, giddily confiding my take on Wilde and the fin de siècle, humbly acknowledging my want of luridness, explaining that I thought the English language in general did not allow for the same lushness of decadence as French. When he checked his watch I talked faster, trying to squeeze everything in, saying how even though I'd never studied Shakespeare, I'd nearly memorized
Lolita
and
Portnoy's Complaint
. How I missed Philippa, missed the person I was when I was with her. Bubbling on, I felt I'd almost regained myself, but just as I was quoting Saul Bellow on Sweetriver girls—“Cold sweets won't spread”—I felt myself being helped into my coat.

I was not, apparently, “seasoned as a reporter” yet.

It was fate, I told myself, that was all. Really, public relations was the field for me, and had I been hired at
The Courant
, I'd never have seen the ad for an administrative assistant at Wings to Fly promotions. About public relations I knew only one thing: that my mother, for whom private relations had been so troublesome, held this profession in her highest regard. She pronounced the words “public relations” with portentous reverence, as: “
He's
in
public relations
.” So I had come to associate this profession with men who swashbuckled across continents with great long strides—the kind of man I was trying to become.

Just by saying the words “public relations,” I seemed to become slightly more substantial, and as I walked down Belfry Street, the last cobbled street in the city, toward Wings to Fly, I knew I was going home. The brownstones with their carved lintels and leaded windowpanes, the gas street lamps fitted with electric bulbs—any minute I'd see Emma Bovary drawn by on her way to an assignation.

Yes, Wings to Fly was solid, it was real. I entered through the beveled glass door and smiled at the receptionist, who told me someone would be with me shortly. An hour or so later, a tall, slender man with a halo of silver curls came whizzing through the revolving door and fixed on me like a hawk on a vole.