The Invention of Everything Else (4 page)

Almost nothing has changed inside the house in Louisa's lifetime because Walter can't bring himself to throw away anything that Louisa's mother, Freddie, might have come in contact with: coffee cups that have lost their handles, frayed sheets with holes large enough to catch and tangle a sleeping foot in, all of Freddie's clothes, all of her shoes, and every handkerchief she might have once blown her nose into. The house sometimes groans under the weight of it all, and Louisa is unsure what to make of these remnants. She'll finger a shawl that once belonged to Freddie. "Mom?" she'll wonder, uncertain what the word even means. Some longing, some fear, and a strong sense that it would be better for Louisa not to ask such questions.

In her own room there is a bed, a framed print of tulip pickers working a field in Holland, a writing desk, and one hard-backed chair. It is the only room in the house where order has taken any root. And while she usually loves pawing through the junk of the house, finding treasures and oddities, she has drawn a line at the border to her bedroom. "Stay back" she says, fighting off the chaos of clutter.

Walter coughs.

"Are you awake?" she calls upstairs, taking two steps at a time. His bedroom is in the back of the house while hers is in the front. That way they both have windows, a luxury that the two small, dark, and quiet chambers separating their rooms don't share.

He swings his feet out of bed but remains seated on the edge in his boxer shorts and undershirt. "I'm awake," he says and squints his eyes up at her. His wild hair makes him look like a mad scientist. He hasn't been to the barber in months, so his loose gray curls cup the back of his head. His skin is deeply pocked into a surface that reminds Louisa of a church's mosaic floor tiles pieced together to make a picture of her father's face. Walter, in terms of looks, is the exact opposite of Louisa. Where he is ruddy, with blue eyes, freckles, and curly hair, Louisa's hair is a long, black, generally tangled mess. Her eyes are very dark, and her skin is so pale that strangers often stop to ask her if she is feeling faint.

"Hello, dear," he says and smiles. He looks small and delicate in his underwear, like a baby bird straining its neck for food. "Happy New Year."

"Happy New Year to you." Louisa kisses him on the cheek. Both Walter and Louisa had to work through the holidays. He is a night watchman at the public library on Forty-second Street; Louisa chambermaids for the Hotel New Yorker. She sleeps at night and he during the day. They see each other most often during the odd twilight hours. Sometimes they have a small meal together before saying goodbye, living as they do at opposite ends of the sunlight. Other times they won't see each other for days, so when they do, it is a happy surprise. "Oh! You live here too. How wonderful! Let's go to the kitchen and have ourselves a glass of sherry."

Aside from the slightly more lavish party thrown at the hotel on New Year's Eve, as opposed to the parties thrown there nearly every night, Louisa barely noticed that 1943 had just arrived.

She sits down beside Walter on the bed, takes his hand in hers, and rests her head on his shoulder. "Hello, stranger." It has been a day or two since they last saw each other. She looks down at his feet. They are horrible troll paws with long nails and flaking skin—the feet of a watchman who spends his shifts on patrol. "Your feet look like oatmeal," she tells him.

"I know. I was thinking I would eat them for breakfast," he says and begins to draw one of the nasty appendages up to his lips. Louisa drops his hand and runs over to the window to escape.

"You're disgusting and you're going to be late if you don't get going," she says from her safe distance, away from the wretched feet.

He stands and scratches his hair with both hands before placing his watchman's cap on his head. He walks to the back window to join her, looking outside up the fire escape to the coop on the roof and then across the laundry lines to a row of houses on the next block.

"Get dressed," Louisa says.

Walter yanks on his pants, tucks in his shirt, and shrugs his small frame into a very tight-fitting woolen winter coat, courtesy of the Hotel New Yorker's unclaimed lost and found. Louisa stands leaning against the wall.

"You look like your mother standing there," he says.

He always has to ruin it, Louisa thinks, a perfectly pleasant evening. Walter's fidelity to someone who's not even here makes Louisa claustrophobic. She says nothing but studies the very tips of her hair, peeling her split ends into separate strands. She is tired of looking like her mother.

"OK, OK. Bye, Lou" he finally says. "See you in the morning."

She waits in his room until she hears the front door close behind him. And then the house falls quiet. Sometimes the silence drives her crazy, scratching all day and night like a branch against the outside brick. But other times it seems like the greatest gift New York can give a person. Quiet. Wrapping herself in Walter's blanket, Louisa steps out the back window onto the fire escape before climbing up to the roof.

The coop Walter constructed is a small shed, only some of the walls are screened and the screens can be opened up. There is both an indoors and an outdoors to the coop. As far as coops go, Walter and Louisa's is quite nice.

Louisa clicks her tongue to let the birds know she is there. "Hello. Hello. Hello." A few birds pop their heads out the small windows, into the screened area. She opens the door to the coop and, ducking, steps inside. "Are you hungry?" she asks. The birds are cooing. "Yes, yes. You are. OK. All right."

At this hour, in this lighting, any gray, red, or green on the birds 24
fades to a rich, wonderful blue. Louisa is surrounded by it. It matches the coldness in the air. She shakes a bag of seed into a small trough, cleans and refills the water dispensers, and then steps outside, leaving the doors wide open behind her. She has a seat and can feel a bit of warmth from the roof. She wraps Walter's blanket even tighter around her before lying back to watch a formation of about twenty pigeons begin a slow spiral, working their way up higher and higher. A dark motion against the blue sky. The birds turn together, listening to some ancient pattern, a whispered command that Louisa can't quite hear.

Later, she has a small dinner of mushy canned peas with salt. It is one of her favorite meals, and she eats it in front of the radio. Eventually she falls asleep there, pulling a blanket of the back of the couch to cover herself. She stays downstairs because the streetlight shines in the window of the living room and Louisa feels comforted by the shadows of New York City and all of her father's stuff.

In the morning her mouth is dry and gummy from the peas. The house is still quiet. Lou rests her arm across the top of the icebox, staring in. No eggs, no bacon—not with the food rationing—and so Louisa chews through half a piece of toast she's smeared with white margarine. No butter. Louisa gives up on breakfast and instead gets dressed for work.

They were lucky. Walter and Louisa did not live in one of the tenements but rather in a small home that had been left to Freddie by her father, a merchant who'd made his money from the piers along the Hudson River a few blocks away. He had purchased the house in 1898 and then disappeared one night, the victim of a rival merchant whose toughs, or so the story went, had chopped Louisa's grandfather into tiny bits, stuffed him into the drawers of an old bureau, and heaved the oak chest into the river, never to be seen again. Still Louisa sometimes imagines him, in his bureau, in pieces, under the water counting his money.

She does not remember the bad old days of her neighborhood, though Walter likes to tell stories of Death Avenue, the slaughterhouses, frequent arsons committed out of boredom, the Prohibition war between Dutch Schultz and Mad Dog Coll. Louisa wonders how much to believe. Walter can go on and on about the Gophers, a brutal gang who terrorized the neighborhood when he and Freddie and their friend Azor were young. There was a man named Murphy who used a mallet on his victims, and Battle Annie Walsh, a prodigious brick thrower.

"Bricks?" Louisa would ask Walter, finding nothing too fearful in bricks.

And he'd answer, nearly foaming at the mouth, still able to capture his childhood terrors, "Yes! Bricks! Tossed sometimes from the tops of the tenements down onto unsuspecting heads. Have you ever seen what that looks like?" Of course Louisa would have to shake her head no.

But they had removed the railroad tracks that once ran along Death Avenue, and now it's just called Eleventh Avenue. The slaughterhouses were mostly gone, taking their stench of blood with them. The worst of the tenement buildings were razed, dispersing some of the primarily Irish and German residents to other neighborhoods. After they tore down the elevated trains and let the sunlight in, Hell's Kitchen became, to Louisa's mind, an excellent place to grow up in comparison with the Hell's Kitchen Walter still lives in, one populated with the ghosts of thugs and filth and Freddie.

On her way to work Louisa heads over to Fiftieth Street where she can catch the Eighth Avenue IND. Most days she walks to work. It is not too far away, twenty-odd blocks. But the wonder of the subway lines still thrills Louisa, so on cold or nasty days like this one she allows herself the small luxury of paying one nickel to ride the train down to the hotel. As she approaches the station she can smell the subway from above ground. It smells like rocks and dirt. She walks faster, hearing a train arrive. It forces warm air up the stairwell out onto the cold sidewalk like a tongue. As she pays her fare, the train pulls out of the station. Louisa hears another rider, one who missed this car by a far narrower margin than she, moan long and low, whimpering as though he were a movie-house vampire exposed to the first piercing rays of sunlight. When Louisa arrives on the platform this man is mumbling, repeating the word
damntrain, damntrain,
under his breath.

The station has a vaulted ceiling walled with millions of ivory-colored tiles that give the acoustics a chilly tone as though Manhattan were a mountain and they were tucked down into its stony underbelly where the echoes of trains slithered through darkened, rocky tunnels.

"Damntrain, damntrain, damntrain." Not angry, almost like a prayer.

There is a continuous whoosh of far-off motion and air as it makes its way through the underground like a distant roaring. Louisa tries to ignore the stranger, wondering if he might not be a bit daft. She has a seat and, in order to avoid eye contact, she pulls a horrid book from her bag,
On the Aft Deck
by Wanda LaFontaine. It is a ladies' novel that was left behind at the hotel and stuffed into Louisa's purse before she realized just how silly a book it was. She feels the stranger's eyes on her. She starts to read slowly, whispering the pronunciation of each word, entirely unable to concentrate on the book but happy to be able to hide in its pages from the stranger's eyes. She reads the same sentence,
Ahoy! said the captain's lusty wench,
over and over and over again. The man beside her, the late rider, is staring directly at the side of her face. She can feel his stare on her left cheek and chin.

She stops trying to read and, annoyed, turns to look at him.

Oh, she thinks. Oh. Because while he might be crazy, he is also quite handsome.

The man is about Louisa's age. He wears his hair long, as if he were a British poet. His hands are large and rough. Each fingernail has been bitten back to a red nub and is lined with black grease. His shoulders are quite broad, and he wears the collar of his coat turned halfway up, halfway disheveled and down. He pushes a pair of wire spectacles back up the bridge of his nose.

"Louisa Dewell," he says. "Hello." He smiles. "How's Marlene?"

"What?" she asks. She's never seen this man before in her life.

"Marlene the pigeon. You don't remember me?"

"No. I'm sorry. I don't."

"I'm Arthur Vaughn. You and I were in primary school together. I guess that was a long time ago now."

Louisa remembers everyone from elementary school, but she does not remember this man. And she would remember him. "Are you sure?" she asks.

"You went to Elias Howe Elementary on Forty-fifth Street. Your homeroom teacher was named Miss Knott. Right?"

"Yes. That's right." For some reason what this man says makes Louisa blush. It burns. Louisa is not one accustomed to blushing. She's had a good deal of experience with the opposite sex, and while she couldn't say that she's ever been in love, it is only because she hasn't chosen to fall in love. Men do not intimidate her; instead she delights in intimidating them. She considers herself thoroughly modern. She once shocked a suitor by walking herself home, alone, at ten o'clock at night. She has little patience for prudes.

"And I won't ever forget. One day you brought a pigeon to school in a wicker cage. It was for show-and-tell," the stranger on the platform says.

"That's right." Louisa remembers how at a prearranged time Miss Knott nodded to Louisa, who fetched the covered cage from the back of the classroom and carried it up to Miss Knott's wooden desk. Louisa had been terrified. She scratched at her head, chewed on her lips. She was flustered to be standing before a perhaps inhospitable classroom full of fourth graders. She began to sweat and twitter.

"Go ahead" Miss Knott said, so finally, after one large swallow, Louisa pulled back a worn chamois cloth that had been covering the cage. The bird was lean, strong, and gorgeous. Its iridescent feathers looked like a jewel.

A few children snickered because pigeons were as common as dust in New York City. Louisa opened a small door on the wicker cage. The bird hopped over to her outstretched pointer finger. And Louisa removed the bird from its enclosure.

"Ladies and gentlemen," she said to the roomful of fourth graders, just as Walter had practiced it with her. "Study this bird well." Louisa paused with the pigeon perched on her finger. The bird was nearly purple everywhere except for her extraordinary neck and her feet, which were the healthiest shade of bright pink magenta. She had a small white ring around her orange eye, an eye that did not blink. The bird bobbed herself nervously about, ducking and stretching her neck as though she were a miniature Irish boxer in the thick of a rumble. "Ladies and gentlemen," Louisa repeated, though they were really just boys and girls. "Please remember what this bird looks like," she said and turned to the bank of windows at the head of the classroom. After pushing on one of the wooden slats that held the rippled panes in place, she drew the window up with one hand while extending her arm outside. The bird took flight simply, magnificently, as birds do, and Louisa turned to collect her cage. The class mustered a round of applause for Louisa, though her demonstration remained to them as mysterious as the bird's iridescent neck.