The Rags of Time (32 page)

 

 

 

A man walking his corgi had found her at 106th Street, halfway down the steep steps glazed in ice, quarters scattered. She thanked him in what he recalled as
a lively fashion
, took her home in a cab, the playful corgi nipping at her boots. He would not take the cab fare offered by Pedro or Mike. Rummaging through her purse, she found a dog-eared notebook, took his name—a Mr. Kunkel.

The kindness of strangers,
she said. Kunkel was the butcher in Bridgeport who was, of course, plump, while this Mr. Kunkel was lean.

She would never forget waiting with her mother while German sausage poured from the grinder.
It glistened, all that fat
.
Such innocent times. I was handed over by Mr. Kunkel, escorted upstairs by Eduardo.

He begged her to cut the false brightness.
It doesn’t cover your crime.

 

 

On the following day I was lonely. Not like Olmsted yearning for the comfort of family. They’d all come to see the ruins: an aged wife and mother who breaks the rules, hadn’t she always? The little kids brought the chocolate treats they like best. When the pleasant surveillance was over—then I was lonely.

Daybook
I wrote on the yellow pad but did not record the month, the year. I was missing my people, not family. You will think I’m heartless, or just headed in the wrong direction again; unbalanced as in a pratfall down icy stairs. I could not return to a spill of words that charted the passing of this year. I looked to the usual suspects posted on the wall of my workroom to find Borges—the blind poet; V. Woolf, eyes avoiding the camera, gone mad in time of war; Raleigh in fancy dress—always. Only Dickens held me to account. On the old Christmas card, he’s without desk, pen or paper; slumped in a chair, eyes closed though not dreaming. Figures, alive in his stories, are sketched all about him. What was next for the rumpled old man in house slippers? I lay aside my legal pad. Found a story I started years ago, ballad of a lonesome girl never finished. There was a scene in the Park, snow and a soldier, a love story perhaps, one I might honestly tell.

I’d lost my Park City of Bridgeport, was scaled back to Central Park, the limited view. I once had the whole spread, quo, quo, quoting myself—with revisions:

But we cannot turn back to those innocent days.

Sissy believes she remembers the black smudge on her brother’s face and the smell of scorched wool. Her mother said the scar on her arm would go away. It’s nothing dreadful; a patch of thick skin on her right shoulder. Her mother had plucked her out of bed, wrapped her in a blanket, the fire traveling fast, eating up air. Perhaps she remembers her brother playing with matches or an old picnic table with candle stubs stuck in oily tuna cans. No electricity, they were that poor. The cottage was not theirs. They were squatters. She spoke of the fire as an accident, not a crime. It wasn’t memory, just what her mother wanted her to say about the family coming to an end, how they had set themselves up in this abandoned place, hiding out till they were evicted, how her father had been arraigned for arson. Rich people had no use for that cottage. Now no one would ever live there again.

Her mother had an eye that strayed. Sissy could never tell when she was looking at her or at some place far away. Well, the fire was the end of Lyman; that was the father’s old Yankee name. They never found him those years ago, just that he ran off; that was the story. The fire was written up in the
Eagle
with the little one treated at the hospital for second-degree burns, but that item—so sad—got her mother work in the paper mill. They waited for Lyman to return. In time Rachelle, that was her mother’s name, settled in with a man who trucked in pulp to the mill. Then it seemed Sissy and her brother became left baggage. Did she remember that her mother was pretty, despite the wandering eye? Father Rooney said it was a gift from God, the eye finding its own way. Rachelle had been raised strict, a Catholic Canuck. The priest was especially nice to Sissy, though her mother wasn’t married and had a baby by Matt Baegler. That was the trucker’s name.

Many years later Sissy would ask her brother why, just like her father, she ran away. Was it taking care of that colicky baby while her mother and Matt tanked up at the tavern on Lake Pontoosuc? As though she could begin her story the day she got on the bus, not when her own father struck her or Matt felt up the bumps on her chest. She was visiting her brother before he went on trial for just a small stash and DD violation. He couldn’t say it was the continual screech of that kid or just she was flunking out of school. Stay out of trouble, he told her when he gave her money to get out of town. She had a plan, going to find her friend Debby who sent her a postcard from New York. Debby had a baby, one that slept, never cried, and why didn’t Sissy come on down? They could make it together. Now, she does remember that the fake ID said she was sixteen and her name was Margaret Phelan. She had been just the sister in her family. Sissy stuck. In the Port Authority, a woman at a newsstand asked, real sweet, like she was lonely and wanted to talk:
Why aren’t you in school?

Well, I am
, Sissy said.
I’m doing a project.
Should have said,
None of your business.
She picked up
Newsweek,
leafed through it to show she was smart. Asking her way, she had walked to the place Debby wrote out on the postcard. It was a store where the woman spoke Spanish. An old man slumped on a cot behind the counter. She showed the woman the postcard Debby sent up to Pittsfield.

Cariña,
the woman said when she looked at Debby’s postcard, a tabby cat kissing a mouse, but knew nothing of that baby and mother. The old man sat up straight to say,
Nevah, nevah,
in English. And Sissy understood that he must say it often to people who came to the shop—
Nevah, nod here
. There were saints and candles, a smell—the weed Matt Baegler smoked, only heavier, sweeter. The statues were of Mary and her Baby, of St. Christopher carting the Holy Child across a stream. Tin hearts pierced by arrows hung on the wall. New York had seemed like she expected, walking uptown from the bus terminal, too many people. Louder than the city on TV, but she had not figured the distance. What had she expected of Debby who wrote down the name and number of this street? She stood in the heavy perfumed air of the shop thinking no place to go, nevah back home. It was as though she’d always known how to palm a Milky Way and mints. Later she would find out why the candy was stale; that bodega on Amsterdam didn’t sell sweets. It was when they saw her spit out the mint, she met Little Man and Tony. They saw the tag tied onto her gear up in Massachusetts to get her on the bus safe to New York. She would tell Father Rooney they were not bad guys, Little Man and Tony, only street people like her for a while. Not the full story. It was cold toward the end of the year. She had packed up on Christmas. Her mother sat watching the snow with one eye, massaging the baby’s belly so it wouldn’t cry. But it did, it did cry. They had not named it yet. It was a girl. Sissy had been given a red wool cap, that’s all, and she put it on for the holiday visit with her brother, who asked, many years later, how she stole out of there, out of the company house near the mill with her big canvas zip bag. Their mother wasn’t looking.
You know how she was, off somewhere
.

When she came back, Father Rooney pulled off a deal. He dealt with the mother.
You get that baby baptized, I’ll take care of Sissy.
He arranged for foster care, wouldn’t be the first time, till she was eighteen. He said:
Till your ID isn’t fake anymore, Margaret Phelan.
The priest was the only chance she had in this life, a plump dude in black pants and a Patriots jersey makes him one of the guys, a smooth dough face too often smiling. But as he drove her to Springfield, to a childless couple who needed the money for her care, he’s wondering, keeping their last hours together light with “Stardust,” “One for My Baby,” Matt and Mama’s music she hated, he’s wondering what would become of the girl. The girl who was half dreaming of her time in the big city, of Tony picked up by the cops in the Park on New Year’s Eve, how she dodged the crime scene with Little Man, who wasn’t the meanest. How she had kissed a soldier, just this guy, kissed deep in his liquor mouth. It was no joke—Happy New Year. He held her, and they fell in the snow. He pushed off her hat, kissed her hair. Wore that cap soldiers wear, and he wasn’t a soldier. For some days, she stalked him, knew where he lived. It was like love, she supposed, wanting Soldier to see her, to see Sissy, the girl picked him out of a snowdrift, kissed him, tongued him. She had Soldier’s cap with silver bars.

Captain,
her brother said,
where’d you get that?
Has it still in her zip bag with clean jeans and sweaters for whatever, wherever Holy Rooney is taking her.

One more for the road,
Sissy said.

Father Jack wondering what will become of the girl.

 

 

 

Sissy waits for Miss Montour, coming with a companion. She comes alone every Fall, drives up when her tree turns, other times, too, but Sissy’s only seen her twice since she’s been working at Mercy. Each year they set out the green canvas chair by a little table for Miss M’s morning tea. This year she’s late. Her husband has died, and she stayed sorrowful in the city until the bright leaves of her sugar maple are mostly gone. There has been a discussion, almost a meeting: to rake or not rake. Some of the students say she might like the rustle of leaves. The rakers won with their argument for tidying up and put out a pot of sunny chrysanthemums. Two canvas chairs are set side by side on the grass gone brown for Winter. Sissy’s job will be to show their visitors the rooms ready for them up in the tower. Miss Montour will sleep in the administration office on the foldout couch, queen size. Her stepson is assigned to the little waiting room just beside. A cot has been donated by Rich’s on Main Street for the occasion. Smiling at Sissy, she will say,
Call me Marie,
as she did last year, but that’s hard, hard to imagine they are just pals talking over the season at Mercy, planning ahead for the cold season. Like, please can we turn up the heat at six-thirty? Mothers come early with their kids if they have jobs, even if they just work here at their lessons; their fingers go stiff at the keyboard waiting for hot coffee, muffins not out of the oven.

But, of course, use common sense,
Miss Montour laughing at Mrs. Laughlin, who runs Mercy, Pat who’s too shy to find anything funny, too sorrowful about the whole world. So, it’s warm in the playroom when mothers park their children on a cold day in Fall and cool in the Summer with central air-conditioning, an extravagance in the Berkshires. Miss Montour billed for whatever the cost. Sissy in Target jeans, turtleneck, new wind-breaker, looking smart with her hair clipped close, bright golden hair always her problem, something of a come-on she never intends, a local girl, no Madonna. Chill day, Mrs. Laughlin, Pat, wears the navy blue suit makes her look like a nun, which she was before she fell for Mr. Laughlin. Now he’s gone of pneumonia last year, and she’s moved into the back parlor of Mercy, her saints on the bookshelf, her small-screen TV, the closet stuffed with not one pretty outfit.

Sissy is waiting on the porch of the old house where she works teaching women to learn English, read, cook good food for their children, to take care of their bodies, temples of the Lord. That’s what Father Rooney calls them, not women with breasts or heavy butts. She’s not laughing, not really, when he turns away from a mother breast-feeding her child. Pat says he’s a throwback to holy innocence, not even a priest of this time. Sissy calls it arrested development. Not a term allowed in the classroom. She is taking Human Growth and Development at the Community College, the emphasis on normal growth in the human life span, three credits. Holy Rooney is very old but like a child needs structure, the matins, what’s that? Evensong no longer remembered. Has needed the Church, a system outside the family, though he’s been her father, all she ever had. His life stage is nearing death. It is stupid to think of people that way, like a chapter in a book. Turn the page. What’s her life stage, trapped twenties, living with her wall-eyed mother who flashes the credit card at Sears, with the crybaby and biker brother in trouble again, and caring for kids at Mercy parked in the playroom while their mothers punch the keyboard—
ay, linda,
they call her—switching off with a volunteer, guiding achievers through Microsoft Excel. This morning Sissy should be reading the dynamics of conformity, stupid stuff—how we follow the leader like mice in the Pied Piper story. But then she may not be going to class tonight to discuss how we all kiss ass to whatever’s going down. It’s a special day, very, with Miss Montour coming and Father Rooney’s last visit to Mercy. He will be somewhere nearby where old priests live together doing their thing, praying and watching the Red Sox win the pennant in a replay from heaven. He’s skinny now, like the air’s been let out of his body. For a while he has not been all here, forgetting her name, his car keys, and why he has come to the front hall of the house where photos of Spanish families and black women in graduation gear hang on the wall. He is now driven by a parishioner to visit Mercy, where he taps the heads of the children and slowly flips through the easy books the women are reading, like they were written in a language he never learned.