The boxes obstruct the passage through the house, Larry and Jules arguing it best to put Great-Aunt Eleanor’s valuables into immediate storage until they can get the right appraiser, someone they have used in the past in Los Angeles, to determine the value of the whole.
“There’s shitloads to do,” Marie’s heard Larry say on the telephone. “A mountain of crap.”
She’s given them the front room, her room—the comfortable queen, Very Grand attending—and moved into the sitting room with the daybed Abe dragged home from the street, the streets full of bounty then, all the SROs converted at a clip so that entire wardrobes might be found on Twenty-Second, Twenty-Fourth, Nineteenth, armoires reeking of cat pee, their faux oak doors peeled or peeling, papered with stickers from various campaigns. Once a gramophone; once a set of rusting golf clubs though neither of them played; once a banker’s box filled with postcards, letters, tax returns. Abe had said he couldn’t stand to see it all there for anyone to read. He planned to use the shredder and do the job properly.
In the last three weeks Jules has hired his appraiser. He has hired a real estate agent. He has hired the painters. He has hired the roofers. He has hired a maid. He has hired the liquor store to deliver straight to the front door exactly what he wants since Jules has become something of a wine connoisseur and Larry, apparently, always was.I
Marie wanders among the boxes, making do with a cane, the cast dirty, the symbols Sid Morris said meant something, painted with his shaky hand in the colors best for healing, grungy with wear, the heel filthy. Next week the doctor will slice it off, Larry said. The cast! Larry said. Not the foot! He had seen her expression. Things have suddenly become confusing; it is difficult to negotiate the hallway with these boxes. She loses track. The best thing, for the time being, sleep, Jules said. They will do all that needs to be done, he said. They have flown home and flown back in a little over a day. They have crisscrossed the entire country and arrived again at her doorstep.
“You’re here,” she said, opening the door to them. Had they been to the grocery? To the theater? A museum?
“We’ve been to California, Ma,” Jules said, taking her hands. His eyes are Abe’s eyes; he is already older, tall and thin.
But she can no longer sleep, she could tell him. She no longer sleeps.
She stands in the kitchen at the back window, watching Roscoe balance on the high fence between the two backyards, his tail quivering. It is early morning, earlier than that, and there are crickets already, the weather spiked. In virtually one day: spring. Perhaps tomorrow the cherry will bloom, perhaps the day after, Monday, or Tuesday. You can never tell: its blossoms a dull pink, slightly folded at the center, reluctant. The tree, grown tall as the brownstone, spreads out over the back garden, umbrellas it in spindly limbs and others broken at the joints—the weather. It is an ornamental species, complicated, fussy: its narrow trunk and branches, filly gray and slender, are similar to a fruit tree, an apricot, prone to blight and apple rust. But here again its leaves curl inward, a fist refusing to give up its treasure.
* * *
A soft knock.
“Elizabeth?” the voice familiar in her sleep, slightly accented.
Elizabeth’s out of bed quickly, her jeans on the chair. “Coming,” she calls. “I’ll be right there,” she says, and she is, the apartment tiny after all, just one narrow floor, a hallway with two small bedrooms and a bath between the street-facing living room and the garden-facing kitchen, the kitchen table centered on the back windows so she can sit here and see the view—the movie star’s birch, the other neighbors’ mulberry where once, last spring, she watched a hawk with a rat in its talons. Mrs. Frank has owned the brownstone for more than fifty years and raised her own boy here, she told her when they’d met that first day. A coincidence.
Destiny, Elizabeth had said.
Mrs. Frank had smiled, offering quiche and a glass of wine, her kitchen a beautiful yellow, her bedroom regal, a portrait—a distant relative, she’d said—above the carved mantel. The smell of that apartment, she later told Pete, as if all of the things crowded there gave off a certain odor of, what? History? Life? The china and the gold, the tiny photographs framed in silver, the letter openers, the crystal, the wallpaper, the faux gas sconces, the copper pans in the kitchen, the stewpots. Her husband had been a pack rat, Mrs. Frank said.
Wonderful, Elizabeth said, idiotic, but she had milk brain and besides, she did find it wonderful. Anyway, she said. We’ll be quiet as mice.
I don’t want mice, Mrs. Frank said. I want nice, she said. She has the most amazing blue eyes, Elizabeth told Pete.
We’re nice mice, Elizabeth said. She was delirious from lack of sleep; her breasts ached and leaked. They needed another room: a room for the baby, a room she might share with him, a desk and a crib. And at first, she tried: she waked early mornings and wrote: “The Story of Molly,” she called it. It began like this: There once was a little girl named Molly. But then she listened to her baby breathe. She liked to listen to her baby breathe. Is that weird? she asked Pete. I could listen to Ben breathe all day long. Sometimes I just sit there and watch him breathe and then I get all wiggy and think, If I walk out of this room, he will stop breathing.
Morbid, Pete said.
Exactly, Elizabeth said, but it was true.
Then Elizabeth tried to write “The Story of Molly” in the afternoons, between feedings, but there were no between feedings; the day the meal, the meal the day: Ben ravenous.
You’re a writer? Mrs. Frank had asked.
Yes, Elizabeth had said, the quiche delicious. Well, I write poetry. I mean, I wrote poetry. I can’t really call myself a poet. I haven’t been published or anything.
You’re a poet, Mrs. Frank had said.II
* * *
Elizabeth opens the door to Marie in housecoat and slippers, suddenly old. Perhaps she has come to apologize for that bit of business in the rain—they haven’t seen each other since—or with the news Elizabeth has already heard from Jules, and before that from the boyfriend, Larry. It’s only a matter of time, he had said. They had crossed paths on Eighth. We’re on a reconnaissance mission: project Chelsea. Jules hates to do it but given everything, what else can be done?
I see, Elizabeth said.
The neighborhood is through the roof. You know, the High Line. Jules thinks we should strike while the iron is hot. Jesus, I’m cliché man.
Larry laughs, squinting at Elizabeth as if she is lit from behind. He clearly likes and does not like to be the deliverer of this news, although he seems a decent enough fellow, Elizabeth later tells Pete. He has the look of a Broadway dancer; she could picture him running up a lamppost singing something from Oklahoma! or South Pacific. He is handsome that way—the smoothest baby skin, a nice smell. Anyway, he says. It’s all the same to me. I need to get back to California.
He worked for Legal Aid: total insanity, a billion cases on the docket. They want me to be a judge, eventually, so they’re watching, you know, like everything I do. Usually you’re on your own ticket. Deadlines.
Larry’s eyes wander to a couple passing with a small dog on a leash. The couple waits as the dog hunches its hindquarters, shivering, shitting on the sidewalk.
Jesus, I still can’t get used to that, Larry says, though they both watch as one of the men bends over to scoop up the dog mess with his bagged hand. Near him, on the railing intended to protect the tree trunk, a handmade sign asks all dog owners to curb their dogs. PLEASE LET ME GROW IN PEACE, it reads. NAMASTE.
“I want you to look at something,” Marie is saying. “I need you to look at something.” She limps by Elizabeth to the kitchen window facing the back, above the square of garden Marie still maintains—Elizabeth at odd times watching her as Marie putters about or sits in one of the rusting wrought-iron chairs.III
“Do you see?” Marie is saying. “Look!” And Elizabeth does; she looks to where Marie points: the cherry tree suddenly and remarkably in full bloom.
I. Marie heard something on the front stoop and stepped out. This is all she says she can remember: robe, slippers, a cast, and crutches in the rain. It was the middle of the night. Stroke of luck that crossing Ninth—toward the seminary?—she met the tenant, Elizabeth, bicycling home. Elizabeth herself quite undone, Jules said: maybe the weather or, God knows, that teenager. We should all live on the West Coast, he said. Anyway, Elizabeth returned his mother long after midnight. We’re talking about a woman who would never go anywhere without her face on, Jules said.
And only then had Marie agreed to sell.
II. Tiny! she had told Pete, like a French Audrey Hepburn but tinier than that and the most incredible blue eyes.
Wasn’t she French? Pete said.
Who?
Audrey Hepburn, Pete said.
Dutch, I think. A war refugee. Malnourished. That’s why she was always so thin.
But why speak of Audrey? she wanted to say to Pete. The point was Mrs. Frank: the look of the beautiful black-and-white photograph of the dead husband, Abraham Lincoln Frank, and the little boy Jules, Elizabeth had admired and all the other things on the ornate walnut sideboard, pennies in a bowl, etched glass, quills, and sundials. They’d had an espresso after their wine. They’d nibbled sugar cookies. It had all been something, she would say: miniature and beautiful and perfect. Like a lost fairy world.
III. A few months back Pete had said he was sure there was a man there, too. He said he heard a man’s voice. “It’s the movie star,” she said. “He’s always on his roof acting.” But Pete said, no, a different man’s voice, and look, he said. “Someone’s down there.”
“Do you think he’s her suitor?” Pete whispered, and something about the way he whispered or maybe even said suitor, suitor a word like blank or giggle, made Elizabeth laugh and remember how much she loved him. She laughed and then she said, “God, I hope so,” and pulled Pete down to crouch at the back window, where they could listen and spy and maybe it was Pete’s idea or maybe it was hers but eventually Pete slid off her jeans on the kitchen floor in the way of years before so that she could not think of anything but Mexico and the convent and the little bird that hopped off its perch to read her fortune. What had been her fortune? This? Here? But no, it had been something else entirely, hadn’t it? She had no idea, she thought, losing whatever else she thought to nothing but the feel of him in her, with her.