The Curiosity (22 page)

CHAPTER 22

The Bandit

(Kate Philo)

Y
ears ago, when my father died, instead of flying back to Ohio, I decided to drive. My mother passed away when I was twelve, so there was no need to rush to give or receive comfort. Chloe was on the scene anyway, competent as a robot. Instead of jetting disconnectedly overhead, I wanted to feel the distance. It gave me time to remember, time to cry. He'd been declining for almost two years, my beloved, round daddy, but that did not mean I was prepared for the fact of it, the finality when his death arrived.

I drove north from New Haven, across central New York, into Pennsylvania, then down toward home. I kept the cell phone off, only checking for messages when I stopped for gas or a snack. Each time, Chloe's updates showed that she had things in better order: the casket selected, funeral songs chosen, relatives notified. She was an insurance litigator, skilled in detail, handling these tasks with her accustomed efficiency.

When I arrived, it was to discover efficiency times ten. I climbed out of the car before an open garage door. Inside lay boxes, chairs, kitchen gadgets, paintings, a disassembled bed.
What the hell?
I entered the kitchen. A stranger was packing up the everyday silverware. He glanced up, said hi, returned to his work.

I found Chloe upstairs in our bedroom, our childhood bedroom, separating books into two big boxes. I stood in the doorway, stupefied. “Hello?”

“Hi, Katie-bug,” she said, giving me a hug so quick and weightless you would have thought she was part hummingbird. Chloe had a look on her face, though, almost as if she'd been caught at something. It struck me, that expression, much as she tried to conceal it. Then she returned to her task, hunched like a vulture. “I hope you don't mind the disruption, but since we're both in town, I figured we'd get a head start on all this nasty dividing stuff.”

“Really? If you think so.”

I had no interest in participating. The one thing I wanted was a cable-knit cardigan my father had bought long ago on a trip to Ireland. He'd worn it constantly the winter I was seventeen. I found it in his closet, thin at the elbows, missing buttons, but it smelled like him. Except for the funeral, I wore it the whole time I was home: drinking wine with a high school chum on the rusty backyard swing set, standing in the kitchen in the morning waiting for water to boil, on quiet walks through my childhood neighborhood, the houses looking smaller but the trees become giants. Meanwhile my sister slaved away upstairs or in the basement, reenacting her half of the ancient roles of predator and prey.

After the blur of the funeral, the two of us riding home in a limousine I thought was unneeded but Chloe insisted showed proper decorum, she coughed, removed her masking sunglasses, seized my elbow. “I can't be silent one more second, Katie-bug. I have to say right now that I am worried about you. Extremely worried about your future.”

“Don't be,” I said. “I have my dissertation defense in three weeks, a great postdoc job lined up at Hopkins starting in July. I'm on my way, Chloe.”

She shook her head. “You don't have him to puff you up anymore. It's reality time.”

“Puff me up? What are you talking about?”

“We both know what I mean. Just try, Katie-bug, please. From now on? Try your best not to be insignificant.”

While I gulped in disbelief, my sister put her shades back on, her job done.

I should have been furious, I suppose. Instead I felt sorry for her. So I did not correct her. I did not explain that my father was not puffing, but loving. I did not pierce Chloe's view of herself as the responsible executor of his estate, when her behavior was more like that of a thief.

Is that the younger child's job? To bite her tongue out of pity?
Possibly. Meanwhile I was the one acting like a criminal, sneaking that sweater out to my car the night before driving back to Connecticut only when I knew Chloe was asleep.

I defended my dissertation, landed the next job, then the next, then the Lazarus Project. Each advancement served in my mind as a rebuke to my sister's putdown disguised as concern. In my nerdy world, not for one second have I been insignificant.

Enough years pass, I forget these things. Chloe has her husband, her two girls. But she is all the family I have left. That reality apparently enables me to excuse scorn, insults, even her decision not to divide my father's estate evenly. “I knew you needed the money more,” she announced, when I found out five years after the fact.

True. Still I fumed, I stomped, then I let it go. Yet it did not quite let me go.

I was strolling Cambridge with Judge Rice. June, a windless evening, streetlights dappled through the trees. By that point we walked arm in arm, whenever we had privacy. I delighted in being his teacher. He was amazed by everything: this traffic light was brilliant, that parking meter a revelation. I prompted him to tell me about days in his court. Judge Rice's memory was spotty in that area, but on rare occasions a case would come back to him in detail. His favorites were the ones in which both sides were partly in the right. He called it “competing legitimate interests.”

There was a banging from a stand of trash bins a few feet away, a metal top clanged to the sidewalk. It scared me; I hooted, jumped aside. The barrel tipped over, more noise, garbage spilling into the alley.

Who should poke his head up from the cans then but a fat old raccoon, his face masked like a bandit. He made no effort to run or hide, but rather growled at us.

Judge Rice laughed. “Bold creature, isn't he?”

“He startled me, though.”

The raccoon returned his attention to the empty soup can between his little black paws, glancing up at us while he licked his snout.

Judge Rice offered me his arm again. “Seems this fellow knows what he wants.”

“He sure does,” I said. “Good thing for him that I already ate.”

We moved away slowly, calm regained. But two things stayed in my mind. The first—say what you will about human traits in animals—was that the raccoon's face echoed Chloe's expression when I caught her dividing the books. I recognized it. The spoils.

The second thing was that in the moment I leaped back in alarm, Judge Rice had jumped forward to protect me.

CHAPTER 23

“For My Next Trick”

M
y name is Jeremiah Rice, and I begin to receive a welcoming.

Each day Dr. Philo promenaded me from place to place in Boston, one corner of the city to its opposite. Newspaper interviews, business meetings, long marches down one street after another. Everywhere people greeted me, shook my hand, and provided me with whatever merchandise my heart desired or they felt to be beneficial to my needs. At no place would anyone accept payment.

Restaurateurs held their doors open to us, and when we demurred because of Dr. Borden's diet for me, they extracted promises that we would return. I met teachers, lawyers, clergymen, clergy
women,
by glory, plus women lawyers, doctors, and more. The city's people came from all nations and races, Japanese and Russian and Brazilian and African American, and all manner of mixtures thereof.

Everyone knew my name. They hailed me on the avenue, called from passing cars, saluted on passing transit vehicles. As I walked a side street, an upper window opened and an enormous woman stuck out her head and waved a meaty arm.

“Hey theah, Jerrr-oo-mmiieee-uhh.”

“Hello and good morning,” I called in reply.

She laughed. “Good mawning ta you, too, ya crazy fuckah.”

“Hm,” I said, recoiling.

“Actually”—Kate leaned near—“it's kind of a compliment.”

“Thank you.” I waved the woman good-bye, then muttered to my companion, “Your world is mad.”

But oh, the voices, to hear so many voices once again. In my time I had disapproved of the long-voweled accent of Boston, which I equated with brawling, ignorance, and drink. In the here and now that same drawl sounded melodic, expressive, sincere in the best and earthiest way. Ha. It was akin to entering a house and smelling a favorite food cooking on the stove.

And the crowds, the throngs outsized even those from the weeks before our expedition set sail. I met police officers who stood straight and puffed their chests. I held babies, thrilling to their animal aliveness even as my heart clenched with the memory of little Agnes. I played checkers in a park with old men who defeated me without mercy, for which I thanked them.

The city opened its arms to me. I saw a film, so bright, frenzied, and loud it caused me to perspire. I visited the control tower of Logan International Airport, giant aircraft going and coming in a pandemonium as frightening as it was sublime. I visited the Old North Church, symbol in the story of early American freedom. I rode on a bus that became a boat that became a bus again as we toured the harbor and Commons. I strolled the lawns of Harvard University, I stood to applause in the Statehouse chamber, I rode an elevator to the Skywalk of the Prudential Center, the city at my feet, and off to one side the infinite Atlantic.

I must say a word about touch. In my time, reserve was lauded. Men shook hands only, women touched arms only, couples of any standing made contact in public only with their eyes. Here and now seemed the opposite, with displays of intimacy in every direction. Couples swooned in each other's arms in broad daylight. Men hugged; I saw it repeatedly. Women strolled arm in arm. Travelers crowded onto trolleys and trains, like so many sheep in a fold.

This contact, I hasten to add, extended to me. I was hugged, touched, patted, squeezed like some fruit perpetually being gauged for ripeness. Hm. At first it demanded accommodation on my part, a resistance to the impulse of withdrawing, but by degrees I came to like it. It seemed almost a way of treating bodies as friends. It felt warmer.

One day Dr. Philo broke a shoe on the sidewalk, and we stopped at a shop to have it repaired. The woman at the counter was wizened, with three hairs bristling from her chin. Her husband labored in back. She brought the shoe to him, then returned to the counter. Lacking other customers for the moment, she eyed me, and I wondered if perhaps she recognized me. After the cobbler returned from behind his curtain, she rang up the cost and made change for Dr. Philo. As we made for the door the woman rushed around the counter and pulled me down into an embrace so fierce it surprised me. What's more, she planted a buss on my neck and thanked me for showing the world that Boston is a smart city.
Smaaht
was how she said it.

Out on the sidewalk again, Dr. Philo elbowed me. “All the women fall for Judge Rice,” she teased.

“I will never wash my neck again,” I replied.

Not everyone delighted in my presence. Dr. Philo took me to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, which I had visited long ago on the day between my father's death and his funeral. I had sat there all the silent afternoon. The loss of my last parent was a finality without mercy. Moreover, a barrier no longer stood between me and mortality. My generation would be next. Thus in the here and now, when I stepped beside Dr. Philo to open the heavy doors, their weight was burdened by personal history. Whilst we stood in the foyer, an old woman crept toward me with her rosary raised.

“Get thee behind me, Satan,” she hissed.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust you shall return.”

“Why are you accosting me?”

“We are given only one life on this earth,” she said. Her manner of speaking bared yellow teeth. “Then there is life everlasting.” She crooked a bony finger at me. “You are a walking blasphemy. Your existence is a sin.”

“While you,” Dr. Philo called over her shoulder, drawing me away, “are a nasty old crone.”

“Get thee behind me,” the woman said, louder.

Dr. Philo led me into the central nave, where the echoing stones compelled us to silence. At once I had fresh eyes for beauty. The stained-glass windows shed multicolored light on the pews. The aspiring arches drew our eyes toward God.

The woman's anger remained in my mind, naturally, but not topmost. There was too much competition. I was a student of the present and every day brought a deluge of novelty: a web of colored lines on a map corresponded to routes in the city's transportation system; streetlights shone when the sun went down, with no one needed to spark them; signs beside the roads directed a ceaseless stream of vehicles like so many bees in a hive; refrigeration; lawn-mowing machines; timepieces worn on the wrist.

Often I reminded myself that our species had not become smarter over the years, nor any more moral than is its nature, and what I witnessed merely represented the culmination of a century's exertions.

Possibly the rate of change and discovery had been greater when I was a youth, and the combination of steam power and coal had multiplied a thousandfold the force a man could exert with a lift of his hand—provided that hand was guiding a mechanical lever. Possibly neither of these eras came near in courage and adventure to the decades in which people cast monarchy from their backs and shouldered the burdens of democracy. Perhaps those times shrank beside the days when men sailed toward the edge of the globe, and discovered a new world. And those days possibly were eclipsed by the dawn of the scientific method. Which in turn must bow to the invention of the plow. And so on backward to the commencement of human time.

Yet then I would encounter another tool or toy of the present, and surrender my judicial prudence all over again. For example there was the device through which images from one time and place are sent to another, countless options, a torrent of information, a lifetime's worth of narratives happening at once—the television. At first I was amazed. Soon I found it predictable, however, and dulling to the senses. There were only two subjects, death and money, both taken to violent excess. The one exception was my old amusement, baseball. The game was unpredictable, at least, with moments of alertness and speed. Dr. Gerber's computer held more appeal, until I inadvertently spied that journalist Dixon savoring a screen filled with pendulous breasts.

He hardly held supremacy for lewdness, however; I heard obscenities everywhere, as though the world were populated entirely by longshoremen. Drivers, pedestrians, shopkeepers, professionals, all exercised the lower end of their vocabulary without reserve or apology. Had no one told them that coarseness lacks dignity?

One afternoon Dr. Philo and I sat on a trolley about to depart, and two schoolgirls hurried on at the last moment: pigtails, plaid skirts, as fresh as apples. They flounced into their seats, met eyes, and simultaneously pronounced a single syllable of filth that no lady of my era would have uttered at any time.

I startled easily: when an engine backfired, a police car passed shrilly, or someone yelled. The violent images from television had made me suggestible. A door slammed and I wheeled, expecting to see a gun. A jet bellowed overhead and I resisted the urge to cower against the nearest building. A car honked and I jumped.

Another disconcerting observation: memory was worth less than a fig. You could have brought me before a black-robed justice, and with my hand upon the holy book I would have sworn before him, God, and all, that I knew every building on Newbury Street, the names of each crossing avenue, the nearest place horses could be watered. Yet when Dr. Philo and I strolled that boulevard one sunny afternoon, peering into shops and pausing to enjoy some flowering azaleas, I found the order of the cross streets had changed. In my memory they fell, from east to west, in reverse alphabetical order: Fairfield, Exeter, Dartmouth, Clarendon. That day, however, when we passed Dartmouth and Dr. Philo detoured into a shop to buy a coffee, I meandered ahead expecting to see Clarendon at the next corner. The sign read
EXETER
.

“One moment,” I said to her. “Hurry on with me, would you?”

She held the coffee at arm's length whilst keeping up, and I was certain the next block assuredly would be Clarendon. Yet the sign read
FAIRFIELD
. I stopped in complete perplexity.

“Something wrong?” Dr. Philo asked.

“I presume that no one in the past century changed the order of boulevards.”

“I imagine not.”

“Fascinating,” I said. The rather, though, it felt a bit frightening. In what other realms have I misinformed myself? I could be wrong about the street where I lived. I might be misremembering the law. My literary references seem right, but no one around me is well read enough to correct any errors. My grasp of the past feels thin.

Thank goodness one region remains sure, as certain in my person as my bones, and it contains a population of two: my Joan, firm in mind, quick in temper, generous in tenderness, and my Agnes, a barefoot, laughing gnome of joy. Much is disconcerting in this land of unknowns. So long as that one region is secure, none other matters. The heart knows truths that cannot be altered by the sequence of the streets.

Everywhere we went, there were cameras. Sometimes it was a newsperson. Sometimes it was Daniel Dixon, who on odd days would follow Dr. Philo and myself at a distance but whom I could not persuade to join us. Often the camera was borne simply by some person who recognized me, and had a telephone in his pocket or her purse. I posed with the checkers players. I posed with the babies. I smiled with a pilot. I stood beside a surgeon after watching with astonished eyes as he removed a diseased man's tumor, dropping it in a pan like so much rancid meat. I posed for a photo with my arm, as requested, around the shoulders of a lovely shopgirl, no more than sixteen, who had wires all through her mouth for a therapeutic purpose I was too intimidated by the sight of to ask about, and my discomfort in the moment was outdone by her delight in it.

One evening in Harvard Square we encountered jugglers of surpassing skill, including a fellow who tossed flaming batons to his partner whilst both of them rode unicycles up and down ramps. Meanwhile the city sped by uninterrupted all around.

“For my next trick,” said the cyclist in a top hat, “I need to borrow a twenty-dollar bill. Who has a twenty?”

A man raised his hand, the rider wheeled over, thanked the man for volunteering, snatched the money, and tucked it in his back pocket. “Presto, it disappeared.” Then he zoomed away while the crowd laughed.

Later he returned the cash, and at the end of the show he ambled through the crowd with the top hat outstretched. People put in dollar after dollar. I was astonished—and felt like I'd been to an impromptu circus.

One night Dr. Gerber took us, over Dr. Philo's objections and then begrudging agreement, to what he called a nightclub. I had no money, and thus felt somewhat like the second rider on a horse: no stirrups, no reins. At the entrance a muscular man dressed entirely in black scanned me with his eyes and sneered, then waved us in.

The music was deafening, the lights bright and spinning. The songs were less melodic than those in Dr. Gerber's headphones, with an emphasis, the rather, heavily upon the drums. Men and women mingled in close quarters. I witnessed a kind of public animalism, flirting gestures and suggestive clothing unimaginable in my former time.