The Rags of Time (35 page)

He opened the FedEx from Macy’s. On her last day, she had found time for his gift, a sweater more plum than red. It zips with ease, though his hand quivers each time he puts it on. Soon that will pass. He will simply enjoy its cashmere embrace as he looks down this day at
Short Readings for Dr. Shah
—Cather’s
The Old Beauty,
Beckett’s
Company,
Twain’s
Mysterious Stranger.
That’s the list she boldly crossed out. Perhaps not missing the point, though he had lived with her a lifetime,
perhaps
was not the right word. The point being each one of the readings was about death, immobility, angry old age, not stories for the charming young doctor who had little time to read in emergency, attending to probable death every day. The list was appropriate to herself, to finding her way out of this room with a voice not yet silenced.

December, 1937. At the Rialto,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. My favorite, Grumpy.

Contrary,
my father called me, wishing I’d fall for Happy or Doc, not the Prince that’s for sure. Perhaps Disney. He admired conservative gents who made money within the limits of the law.

Our Scene neither animation nor tragedy:

A Printout:
Walden,
Is It You?

The drama of the day was not my taking the bus in the right direction to confront at last what I’d seen in many photos of the Park, and read of in Olmsted’s papers. My venture was personal. What lies above 96th Street? The question you never would answer.

A wilderness for dangerous games. Well, for city boys pretending to danger, or simply for the thrill of knowing you should not be far from your East Side home scaling these rocks with the janitor’s boy who’d steal a kid’s lunch box, threatened frail old women till they dealt out a dollar. Did you look on from a moral height? We all have need of a Bimbo to take the rap as we watch from a safe distance.

I was no sooner out of the bus, halfway up the steep steps, so many, when I understood I’d come not to discover the dangers of your boyhood revelations so edited they might have been printed in
Boys’ Life,
which my brother subscribed to, stories of good-family kids escorted from the crime scene having learned their lesson.

Halfway up the steps, bare branches glistened with ice-palace glamour. Three-thirty. I had studied the map, knew my way to the circle of lawn frosted over. Worth the climb to see in the distance the Harlem Meer, saved that for another day. I turned at once to the trail leading down to the Pool. Thought I knew the route from maps and picture books, and the stone outcropping from our scrambles up Monument Mountain. The path was lonely as promised, until the open view of the wildflower meadow mowed low for the season; and there was Vaux’s charming rustic bridge over the silent stream, the dark rocks in the distance walling me from the city. I might have been where the architects wanted to place me in their pictorial semblance of wilderness—the Adirondacks, or the heights overlooking the Hudson. I stumbled—a tree root but did not fall. You see, you must see, this was not an escapist journey. It led me far beyond a disclosure of the guarded stories of your nefarious past. What struck me when I found a place to rest, was the reality of the landscap ers’ contrivance, not the contrivance of reality. It seemed a challenge to nature or God, whichever way you’ll have it. The sun made a mirror of the water. I went close to see the clouds float by at my feet but did not see myself, nor did I want to. Nor, nor—quaint diction. There could be no charm in seeing myself. Reflection being in the mind, it came easy, remembering my way back to when I first read
Walden.

 

 

 

She had been, the professor at my girl college, an officer in the Wacs, a commanding presence in the classroom. We were given our orders as to readings in American Lit. She found the writer of
Walden
feeble, a dropout spinning his lofty thoughts, “flatulent on his beans.” She expected our laughter, and let us know Henry David was well fed by his relatives who left him meals he need not pay for. Thoreau was a freeloader, his economics a fraud. Was she envious of his talented instruction? I have forgotten her name but remember her brown oxfords double-knotted and the military cut of her tweeds. Seeing at long last above 96th Street the construction of pastoral beauty, I was furious all over again at the chill bluster of that woman troubling me in the wintertime of my life. Did the spoiler dislike the writer because he spoke out against the war with Mexico when she had served in the War to End All Wars? His essay, “Civil Disobedience,” was never assigned in her class. I would read it in my furious ’60s, should reread it now, stand opposed to our broken social contract, beg to be put in prison if only for one night. But it would seem just another stunt, which is exactly what she called the writer’s protest as she marched us back and forth across the flat parade ground of her hup-two-threeput-downof
Walden.
Oh, she would never know his house, garden, pond are Paradise enough, a place real and imagined, beyond dollars and dimension.

 

 

 

Postcard: Wish you were here, though this pilgrimage was mine. As I made my way round the shore of the pool, the wind cut through my puffy. The heart thumped its irregular beat as it does when recorded in the doctor’s office. The familiar flutter, no longer disturbing, seemed a warm throb of love. I take it back, did wish you were with me. I headed up the Great Hill. It’s one hell of a climb. There was no one in this sanctuary of a vast public space and no added attractions—statues, Bridle Path, fountains or playing field, no candles to light for peace or the dead—to justify this earthly creation.

Here the mortal architects outwitted nature with nature itself. I was fiercely happy. It could be, don’t you see, imagined. That is allowed in this forgotten corner of the Park, but not in the country beyond that encourages passive activity only; that lets Dumbos like Bimbo serve time and Big Time Offenders go free? Why had I allowed myself to flip to the concealing comforts of Literary Walk and Pinetum, to the charms of a phony castle and guarded revelations of first person?

She had lost herself in the Park. It was
The History of the World
all over again, arranging events as she wanted them to be.

Mercy is sought for my solo flights in the workroom; and the
consequent break of unity in my design
—that’s Mrs. Woolf who confessed to a childlike trust in her husband, while we have been sparring. Mercy on me, RC.

 

 

On her desk, he finds the blowup of a photo, been there so long he’s ceased to see it. He’s in air force fatigues, not much flesh on young bones, full head of black hair. He had been trained to jump out of planes, pull the rip cord, view the world from above. Oh, just the Florida swamps. Practice only. The battalion sent ahead had been slaughtered when the Germans tried out their V-1 missiles. Then, that war was over before he got his chance.

 

Printout: November 2007 Names of the Dead

Correction: December 18, 2007

A listing of American military deaths on Nov. 8 misidentified the country in which Sgt. First Class Johnny C. Walls was killed. It was Afghanistan, not Iraq.

 

 

The last e-mail to her brother:
You have surely heard of my fall. I am tidying up my back room after the incident. Though what setting things in order has to do with a skinned knee is beyond me? I’m sorting books, papers, middle-of-the-night notes to myself, the web of possibilities. The plot of the Seasons is unavoidable. It was cold in the Park that day. I had climbed the Great Hill, then cut from the path, what was left of it. Underbrush, broken limbs, neglect not foreseen in a Greensward Proposal, was beautiful to me. I saw that nature might survive our meddling, our once upon a time stories, even the artwork of the Republic. The steps back down to the street glistened in the sun, invited danger. It was then that I fell, as warned, as expected. The greater danger lay behind me, the looming blackness of the humped rock formation like a beached whale. The novel Melville started in New York is not the one he wrote in the Berkshires.

I took your semaphore out to put under the tree with our old toys. Meddling, I dusted it, now the caution arm flops, won’t give its warning of the possible train wreck down the line. Bread pudding—3 eggs, 5 egg yolks, heavy cream—is lethal. I presume you still crave your holiday helping unless otherwise directed. In my recipe files I came across fragments written back when I was into the notion that time bends. My intention had nothing to do with fast trains and synchronized clocks. Three dimensions are all I can handle. Though a math teacher had a walk-on, all I intended was the leap forward, the years flipping by like calendar pages: not where were you when we sang
—We will all go together when we go?
Where are you now? The more difficult question. I must have set these butter-stained pages aside as I measured out sugar and cream, not knowing the answer. Our mother taught trigonometry, which you mastered, though it was art that she favored, and craft. I suppose I can figure why I’ve stayed up half the night to finish this story of an artist—stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive, God, I loved Travolta in that movie; and why I’m sending the story to you. Time having flipped ahead. I don’t intend a tearjerker. Dickens sure pulled out the stops with those
Christmas Books.

 

 

 

His reply:
Go ahead, Mims, make me cry. On the other hand, my train set circling the sun parlor floor, the schoolhouse with a little brass bell that never rang, the church’s torn cellophane windows, the fisherman on the bridge over the cracked-mirror stream, the brown cows and yellow sheep not to scale, and the policeman directing the Mitchell Dairy trucks at the crossing of North and Main means nothing to me at all, not even the uncertain headlights flickering on the engine, nothing to me at all. We’re grown up now. Aren’t we?

—Jacques Derrida,
Memoirs of the Blind

 

Everything arranged. She has placed the last postcard, posted it, you might say, with a Lucite thumbtack pinning it to the canvas. A murky photo of the Chicago Stock Yards, hand-colored before color was invented for film. The haunches of the cattle glisten, a patent-leather brown. They are being led to slaughter by a fellow with a prod in his hand, his face bright orange under a dun colored cap. The sky, washed-out blue. A dreary scene, but the postcard is one of many. The Poussin, for instance (
Earthly Paradise
), though reduced to an absurdity, is all dense Edenic growth with a sunlit distance, a small shimmering lake and a celestial figure (God, as we know him?) riding a cloud above, looking down on our first parents, naked as the day they came to the Almighty mind. Eve, center stage, points at the apple tree, urging the reluctant Adam on. You know the story; so did Louis XIV, to whom the painting belonged.

On an easel, Louise Moffett seems to have been copying the Poussin The apparatus of her craft—paint, turpentine, brushes—are displayed on a table nearby. They may be for real or props. Perhaps the copy will always remain half done, those two figures arguing, stuck in their best moment. Mealy or tart; what were apples like back then, or for that matter in 1662? Looking back to postcards posted on canvas,
The Ruins of San Francisco City Hall
(1906), the gilt dome intact as well as the classical columns at its base. Only the center did not hold. The stretched canvas that displays the postcards is painted black. A big bulletin board, that’s all it appears to be.

Louise wears a painter’s smock, a thrift-shop treasure. You recall the floppy garments worn so as not to soil the artists’ clothes in the atelier photos of Matisse, Mary Cassatt, et al. She places a wooden palette with dabs of color—some right from the tube, some mixed—on the table, runs her hand over soft sable brushes. The smell of oil paint, a thrill. Deep breathe it. She is a good looker heading toward middle years, her gray hair dusted with leftover gold. Winsome? That may be the word, as though something she once cared for has gone by and she wonders. . . . A sweet wince of a smile as she pins
St. Catherine of Siena Dictating Her Dialogues
(Giovanni di Paolo, 1460?) to the canvas. One more postcard may be the answer for this particular day.