CHAPTER SIX

SHIFTING IN AND OUT OF CHARACTER

Unable to rid my mind of ceiling pie, the next morning I slipped two quarters into an automat’s glass window display and sat down to eat in the crowded dining area with other menfolk looking just like me—a vagrant.

Except now I didn’t feel as lost.

Westley Mueller was many people, moving in and out of characters either by will or because of the circumstances of the narrative forcing him there. And it dawned on me that the information I was piecing together wasn’t so much to inform me where he was but why we should meet. That why, I chanced, is that our lives were bound by an inextricable fate.

In effect, we had met on the bridge of acid-green lights in jelly jars.

My quest would succeed only if I was able to discern that the why of our impending meeting was for each of our sakes . . . and not mine alone.

I looked around, curious whether he’d caught my eye.

I’ll find you, brother, I mouthed. Watch me. I will find you.

And this time the meringue pie will be on me . . . and not the ceiling.

Exiting the automat, I eyed the tops of fabled buildings—the Chrysler and Empire State—and women, their nails polished cinnabar, passing sylph-like in spiked heels, a breath of an alien perfume in their path.

It was now our quest. As if I were the fabled brother, Jeremiah, about whom he had written so much and whom he’d slept alongside all those boyhood years. Except I knew I wasn’t.

Did it matter?

If he had been shadowing me back in the automat, he was now at its window, grinning wide.

Perhaps I overstate Westley’s conflicting identities. But to consider his principal characters as a means of finding him made more sense than, say, searching for him in Gotham.

What immediately came to mind was Papa’s brothers: the priest and the clown.

SHE’S A LITTLE STORE INSIDE (excerpt)

My father, Jacob Müller, had three siblings. Stephen, the monsignor; Felix, who doubled as a clown and lion trainer for the Mills Brothers Circus; and sister Eva, who sold her body until it shook too much.

When it came time in Jacob’s life to sum it all up, to prepare himself for what might or might not occur after death, he didn’t knock on the sacristy door. Instead he sought out Eva and Felix, who lived in rundown bungalows on the outskirts of our town.

As a boy I couldn’t understand why.

I loved frequenting Uncle Stephen’s cathedral with its flying buttresses, its west and east stone towers, one carrying the great bell, the other housing more than one thousand pipes for the electro-pneumatic organ in the baptistery. Monsignor ascended the grand circular staircase in his polychromatic chasuble at high mass while racks of ruby-red, ink-blue, and clear votive jars bearing flame and melted wax illuminated wooden saints, and morning sunlight filtered through stained glass clerestory windows. And there on the rood screen separating the choir from the nave, a crucifix larger than the statue of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on our village green—Christ’s gold-leafed body, mirroring the votive flames. Alive.

Parishioners rising and crossing themselves, kneeling, rising again . . . their solemn incantation echoing Uncle’s Latin liturgy.

And Christ on fire.

Why a whore and a clown? I wondered, when Monsignor Stephen owned a golden ring with a giant ruby that his congregants kissed.

“I’m off to the whiskey bar,” Father said. I clandestinely followed to see if the monsignor would embrace him in an alleyway minus his surplice and the two of them would stroll into the backdoor of the parish house.

Instead I watched Father walk wide of the large shadows that the basilica towers, Temperance and Perseverance, cast across Main Street like an ominous embrace.

Aunt Eva sat in the shadows of her porch on summer afternoons. A Kewpie doll with rouged cheeks, and henna-dyed hair that haloed a china face. Her dress dropped inches above her bony knees. She wore spiked heels painted with fuchsia nail polish and dreamily stared onto the dirt street, her slight body jerking as if a motor oscillated under its bottom. Waiting. Waiting for a blanket of darkness to eclipse the bungalow.

I asked Father what Aunt Eva was selling, since so many men stopped by after dusk.

“She’s a little store inside,” he said.

Once, as I was passing her house, she signaled me over.

“I’m your Aunt Eva,” she said. “You look exactly like Jacob.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

“Your father chooses to ignore I’m his sister.”

I nodded as if I understood.

“You must come by and visit me sometime. We’ll get to know each other better.” She grinned.

In time I learned what she’d been selling inside her bungalow. That she took off her gaudy doll clothes for strange men. Then I dreamed of paying her a call. I envisioned her standing disrobed in her bedroom, arms outstretched to the door jambs, one foot touching the other, and the henna triangle burning like the bush in the Bible. A smoke of yearning curling out of Uncle Stephen’s censer.

Her image provoking the ache I bore for the gold-leafed crucifix.

But as Aunt Eva’s tremors grew more conspicuous over time and the traffic upon her walkway diminished . . . so did my ardor and contrition.

Her house was no longer freshly painted a periwinkle blue. Its front steps fell into disrepair. Like a plaster-of-Paris palmist inside a cloudy glass arcade box, she sat staring out her window. You place a nickel into a slot, her wooden hand overturns a queen of spades, and a cardboard fortune drops out—somewhere, you imagine, below her skirts.

Except a house fly had died on her forehead. Flesh-tinted plaster exposed chalky stigmata. These women in arcade boxes are saints too, I thought. Lesser saints than those mutely lining St. Margaret’s side aisles. Or Christ pinioned against the rood screen—He was the master saint, the biggest and best of all the arcade ones, and of those who lived on dirt streets like Aunt Eva, waiting, waiting, for acolytes with jingle in their trousers.

Uncle Felix lived one street over from Eva’s place. He kept a palomino in a shed behind his modest one-story house. On Independence Day, he dressed like Tom Mix and headed a parade down Main Street with paper American flags attached to his steed’s halter. He’d painted stars on its hooves and braided its flaxen tail with red and blue ribbon. A large, barrel-chested man with chiseled features, Uncle Felix resembled an American Indian.

“He could whup lions!” a bystander exclaimed. “Make ’em lie down docile before him like house tabbies.”

Felix Müller swept his Stetson against the sweaty flanks of his golden horse.

“I seen him standin’ on the back of a galloping Arabian once,” said another, “a pair a six-shooters blasting crockery out of the sky that clowns spiraled aloft like barn swallows.”

“Was he a trapeze artist too?”

“If one of those spangled dames dangled by her gams—you bet! He didn’t join the circus to get away from ’em.”

As the parishioners glowed, watching Monsignor Stephen’s vestments sweep the basilica’s cobbled floor, the Eucharist chalice ascending to the giant rood, so, too, did the town’s women in Uncle Felix’s wake. Always he’d spot a comely bystander, dismount, and, like the gentleman I think he never was, boost her onto the horse’s backside. The pair would clop up the pavers past Hutton’s Hardware, the Episcopal church, and the post office, halting before the viewing stand, where Uncle Stephen officiated alongside the mayor and chief of police.

Felix’s woman gripping his midriff, the horse perspiring under her thighs.

The two brothers locked into each other’s gaze.

A splinter of wistfulness marred the cleric’s severe demeanor. The bouquet of incense is impotent to satisfy a man’s need to scent a woman, he sighed. Felix feels the drumming of her heart, her hot breath against his neck. And for a single blasphemous second, he envisioned her splayed against the basilica’s apse, a thousand votive candle flames rising up to illuminate her. Stephen blinked, removed his steel-rimmed frames, and rubbed his eyes, praying the image that returned would be the worthy one.

But she mouthed his name, beckoning for him to veil her nakedness with his peacock robes.

His malicious brother, Felix, taunting him about women when really all he ever yearned for was salvation.

Felix flashed a sardonic grin, gesturing to the weighty crucifix that hung about his brother’s neck.

“He suffered a big letdown, too, Steve.”