THE CITY WAS DYING, you could see it from the air. Those rows of up-thrust gray rectangles: what were they but the markers of an overcrowded cemetery? And the bright lights streaming from within. What could they be but souls, bent on escape? Soul after soul, gravestone after gravestone, so many souls they spilled out of their gravestones and so many gravestones they crowded out the graves, tall ones, taller ones, the tallest ones of all, as if death were some kind of competition: I’m more dead than you are, you son of a bitch.
And my plane shot up the center of this. Straight up Fifth Avenue it seemed, flying against traffic and against gravity, flying so low that the antenna-tipped tops of those tens of thousands of lighted gravestones grazed its bloated belly. The air was rent with crystal spikes and steely spires, their swords sliced right through the substantive world as if it and not death were the dream. They slashed the sky and smashed against each other, and their crashing made a kind of din, the cacophony of souls caroming off each other, so many souls colliding against so many other souls that my plane was rocked by the turbulence of their search for even one person, one dreamer, to give them form, a story, to give them life. They grabbed my plane and shook it so hard that luggage bins snapped open and carry-ons and wrinkled jackets and loose sheets of paper flew about the cabin. Listen to me, they seemed to say, like a parent trying to knuckle some sense into an errant child. Listen to me!
And I did listen. Maybe I only listened because there was nothing and no one else for me to listen to, but through the plane’s rattle and the babies crying and the parents screaming Dear God! I thought I heard a softer noise, a beautiful sound, a song of some kind. The song of the dying city. The city was dying but my mother was dead. Maybe six months dead, maybe nine, maybe eleven. Maybe my mother had been dead for more than a year. None of the functionaries who’d managed to track me down through nine cities in eight states knew for sure, but they were sure she was dead. They couldn’t tell me how she’d died and they couldn’t produce a corpse for me to view, couldn’t even point me to a gravestone with the consoling finality of birth and death dates, but they were sure, they were absolutely certain she was dead, just as the city she’d left me was dead. Was dying at any rate, and struggling mightily in its death throes. The dying city unraveled beneath me with the collapsing symmetry of an infantry under siege. I felt it tickle the bottoms of my feet, I choked on the smog of gridlocked souls. I pressed my face to the window and peered down in search of something, some spark, of meaning or at least of sense, to help me understand the manqué my mother had left me in lieu of herself, but all I saw were the innumerable lights fleeing into the night sky. Welcome home, the lights winked at me. Now say goodbye.
FROM CLOUDS TO CAVES. Mausolea above, catacombs below. You fly to the dying city with the birds only to tunnel in the last few feet with the worms. With relentless urbanity they deny the nature of the beast. They call it the train, they call it the subway. But in the beginning at least my eyes were open, and I knew I sailed the underground river on Charon’s barge, and the echoed groaning I heard was Cerberus barking in the distance. This was my first New York lesson: everybody takes the A train, but the lucky stick to Manhattan’s skinny length, avoiding the endless accumulation of streets and souls that is the outer boroughs.
The ride from the airport took two full hours—two hours during which entire families seemed to get on and off the train, black, Hispanic, Asian, sometimes white, but then almost always speaking some glottal Eastern European tongue. What I mean is, the other passengers all seemed foreign to me, alien, whether by dint of skin color or language or custom, yet of the thousands of people who passed before my eyes none was stranger than the pale, skinny, shaggy-haired boy whose hollow reflection stared back at me from the window opposite my seat, and I did my best to avoid his frightened, fascinated face, focused instead on the parade of flesh marching past. According to the watch Trucker had given me it was well after midnight, but nobody seemed to give a damn about the hour, the heat, the entrances and exits. Makeup was put on and shirts were taken off, hands were slipped inside waistbands (sometimes their own, sometimes not), kisses exchanged or stolen or pushed on pouting girlfriends just learning to exploit the power of crossed arms and sealed thighs, toenails pared with stubby knives, babies changed, breast-fed, burped, scolded; and I watched all this with one suitcase flat beneath my feet and another, upright, clamped between my legs, and I was glad the second was there because it hid my dick, which seemed to rise and fall with the opening and closing of the doors. It wasn’t the doors that made it rise and fall. It was just the feeling in the air, the heat, the energy, the over-the-fucking-topness of it all. Whatever it was, it was no more sexual than a morning erection—and it was like morning, for me, being on that subway, going into Manhattan, coming from John Fitzgerald Kennedy International Airport, coming down from the sky, coming from Kansas if you want to get right down to it. I was coming in off the farm, I was on my way to the big city to claim an inheritance from a mother who’d been taken from me before I’d ever known her, and even though it was the middle of the night it was like morning to me, it was like a new day dawning. It was like my mother’s death had allowed my life, at last, to start, and the place where it was going to begin was called Dutch Street.
Dutch Street. That’s a real place. You can look it up on a map, I mean, and it’ll be right there, a tiny capillary connecting the eastern ends of John and Fulton. During my first year in New York, when towers collapsed and regimes changed and the City Council passed a ban on smoking in all public buildings, it was the one thing that remained fixed even as everything else disappeared into the haze that choked the city’s air.
Dutch Street, Dutch treat: Dutch is a diminutive adjective in English, diminutive and usually pejorative. Dutch treat (paying your own share), Dutch oven (an itty bitty oven), Dutch metal (a zinc alloy masquerading as gold leaf), Dutch cap (not the kind women wore on their heads in ye olde Newe Amsterdamme), Dutch Street: a dozen feet wide, a hundred yards long, just four buildings on the east side and four more on the west, and one of those western four was now mine. The plates of brownstone that made up its facing were mine, and the four mullioned windows set into the plates were mine too, and through the ornately curved wrought-iron bars that protected my ground floor from burglars I could make out a cavern of a room that also, somehow, mysteriously, belonged to me.
The room was both dark and suffused by light, a deep ochre fog that seemed to emanate from the floor itself, making it impossible to tell where solidity ended and shadow began, and through this weave of solidity and shadow and darkness and light I could make out more windows at the opposite end of the room, and through those windows I saw…something. Jets of spotlit water, or the whirl of a thousand fireflies? Tree trunks, or the legs of elephants? Tangled vines, or a deluge of serpents? What I saw was a garden, enormous, overgrown, but it was impossible to put a name to anything at that time of night, at that distance, through two sets of warped windowpanes and the swirling atmosphere that filled the space between them like some crazed Dutch interior (a painting by or in the style of Pieter de Hooch, who favored rooms that afforded glimpses into other rooms, or the outdoors). You could say I was guilty of Dutch reckoning, that is, faulty reckoning, or you could say I was dreaming a Dutch pink—which is really a yellow—dream, and that when I awoke I found myself on Dutch Street. But when I woke I found, also, that my dream had followed me into the light.
Or into the dark I should say, because it was nearly two in the morning when I shuffled up to my front door, listing slightly to the right because of my unevenly weighted suitcases—one half-filled with clothes, the other overburdened with books—and even as my eyes lost themselves in the murky expanse of the first floor I realized I’d neglected to procure a key to my new home, which is why I spent my first night in New York under the open sky, my suitcases (books on bottom, clothes on top) cushioning my bony ass, my head resting against pitted brownstone a few feet beneath a brass plaque that bore an address, No. 1, and a legend, The Lost Garden, and I don’t know, maybe I was tired, or maybe it was the spell of the heat. It had been a long day, after all: a six-hour bus ride from Selden to the airport in Denver, four more hours in the air and the two-hour subway ride, plus three or four hours frittered away waiting for one or another modern conveyance. Or maybe I’d already begun to surrender to the city’s vision of itself. But even as I fished a rubberband out of my pocket and pulled my damp curls into a little pigtail to get them off my neck I felt a prickly energy moving through my limbs, a tickle really, trickling through my veins and vibrating the length of my bones. My eyes closed, my head lolled forward. Dimly it occurred to me that sleeping on a New York City street with all my worldly possessions wasn’t the smartest idea I’d ever come up with and maybe I should try to find something, an internet café, a hotel room, a hotel lobby even, but before I could complete that thought I was asleep. The last thing I remember is a keening noise in the distance. I don’t know why I didn’t recognize it as a car alarm. Certainly they had car alarms in Kansas, and in Arizona for that matter, and North Dakota and Oregon and Florida and every other state I’d lived in; maybe I was just too tired; maybe I was already asleep. Whatever the reason, I could only imagine the sound was a siren of some kind. A Siren I told myself, less warning than enticement to dash myself against the rocks. But exhaustion had lashed my body to my new home and I was able to listen safely to her song—another verse, I told myself, in the song of the dying city—and I let its lullaby croon me to sleep.
WHEN I OPENED MY EYES the Siren’s song had spiraled away, but the heat seemed if anything to have intensified. I was lost when I first woke up, and I found myself by lifting my wrist and staring at Trucker’s watch until my eyes focused and I saw it was nearly four. The only light was the refracted brilliance of the city itself, a phosphorescent glow the same color as the greenish-white dots marking the hours on the watch Trucker had given me six weeks before. He’d given me the watch, and the clothes I was wearing, and most of the clothes in the suitcase under my ass. Trucker had, after two years of frugality, lavished me with gifts, but none of these things, not even, finally, the computer—or the receipt for it, since he’d arranged to have the machine shipped here—could distract me from what his baggy suit and expensive cologne tried to hide. Images from our last day together whizzed through my mind like bats at nightfall: the shine of sweat atop his head, his limpid smile, the fecal stink emanating from his body, and in the end I had to physically walk away from his specter.
I gathered up my suitcases and, setting out from No. 1 Dutch Street, walked a few steps south to John, where I turned right and began heading west. The balmy streets were deserted except for a bony-hipped bag lady making her way toward me, her body wrapped in a filthy white dress, her head covered by a thick silver turban, and it was only when I saw the baby carriage into which she leaned her insubstantial frame that I realized its squeaking wheels were what had awakened me. The carriage’s paper-capped cargo spilled out of the bassinet like a scoop of vanilla ice cream from a cup, and as we neared each other I could hear her muttering curses under her breath, and I crossed the street to avoid her. In the distance the two towers of the World Trade Center marked the north and south poles of the urban defile, and then my eye was caught by a newspaper crowning a trash can on the corner of John and Broadway. My first New York headline screamed at me from atop its pile of refuse: CARNAGE ON THE GWB!
The GWB turned out to be the George Washington Bridge, the carnage was of animal rather than human flesh. Somehow in the pre-dawn hours of the previous morning nine deer had wandered onto the middle of the lower level of the bridge, where they ran into a wave of early commuter traffic coming from New Jersey. According to all reports the deer had stood there as deer do when confronted by headlights, and the drivers, more afraid of the cars behind than the hapless creatures before them, had had no choice but to mow the animals down. The effects were devastating. In some cases the deer had literally burst into pieces. Decapitated heads smashed through windshields, severed limbs sawed the air like batons, great swaths of blood painted a gooey calligraphy across the asphalt. Four deer were killed outright, two more were so badly injured they had to be destroyed on the scene, and the remaining three were rushed to an animal hospital. But according to the veterinarians the real threat to the deer’s survival wasn’t their injuries but malnutrition. The three survivors were bloated, mangy, pocked with sores and loose-toothed with something that would be called scurvy in human beings, and these details, combined with the fact that all of the commuters insisted the deer had been walking toward them, suggested the animals were leaving Manhattan’s concrete forest in search of greener fields. One of the people quoted in the article insisted he’d seen hoofprints in Fort Tryon Park all his life, and—
And then, with a roar and squeal of brakes, a garbage truck appeared. I’d set my suitcases down, taken the paper out of the trash to read it, but the truth is I didn’t want to hear about diseased or dying deer or anything else fleeing the city on the day of my arrival, and I tossed the story back into the can and watched as the trash collectors dumped it into the gullet of their wheeled leviathan. I considered throwing my suitcases after the paper and starting my new life with a completely blank slate, free of stolen possessions and unwanted gifts, but even as I considered that option my knees locked and my fingers tightened their grip on the suitcase handles, my entire body went rigid with the refusal to reject what had been given to me, and I retraced my steps to my most recent acquisition, my most miraculous and troubling gift: Dutch Street. My reflection in the window was just one of a thousand shapes in that yawning space until I remembered: these shapes had belonged to my mother. They had been placed by her hand, the shadows they cast were in effect her shadow, and I stared at them as if I might spy her crouched behind something, ready to jump up and laugh off her death and twenty-year absence as a practical joke I’d finally seen through. The feeling was so strong that I found myself wondering if I was still sleeping—I hoped I was, because on some level I knew that a dream was as close as I'd ever again come to my mother, and it had been years since I'd even thought of her, let alone dreamt of her. What I wanted more than anything else was for her to appear and tell me everything was going to be all right. That even though she was gone, even though I was only making her up in my sleep, the strange, wondrous inheritance she'd bestowed on me would make up for everything that had gone wrong up to that point.
But she didn’t materialize and I didn't wake up and, smiling sheepishly, I sat down again, leaned against the stone, closed my eyes. The next thing I knew I was being jabbed in the ribs. In the last fleeting moments of sleep I dreamed that what poked me was a deer’s antler—a particularly fantastic dream, given that it was June. Then I blinked my eyes and saw that I was being prodded by the blunt end of a scythe. It took a couple more blinks before I was able to see that the scythe was in fact an upside-down push broom wielded by a rail-thin woman cloaked in a long white shift, her dark narrow face draped by silver hair as stiff as cardboard curtains. Maybe it was the confluence of black skin and white clothes and light hair—maybe it was just the fact that I was still half-asleep—but for a moment I mistook her for the boy who’d wandered out of the blackened fields into Selden a little less than a year before, and I breathed deeply, sniffing for smoke. I even thought I smelled it, but then I realized it was probably just those shoes. The faint aroma was overwhelmed by the scent of my own stale body, and then the woman’s features congealed into her true shape. She was as old as Divine had been young, as visibly strong as he’d been weak. Even the deep lines in her face gave off the air of scrimshaw etched into tobacco-stained ivory, and it was only when I caught a glimpse of blue sky beyond her head that I realized it was morning.
You gonna have to move on now, I heard as I rubbed my eyes and attempted to make sense of this new vision. Perspective was skewed: the woman’s head stretched all the way to the top of the building behind her, the bristles of her inverted broom seemed to have brushed the sky clear of clouds. My clothes were wet, my mouth parched, I ached in so many places I couldn’t pinpoint a single pain save the most recent—the spot where she’d poked me—and even as I put a finger there I tried to blink her shade away. But she refused to disappear.
“I said,” she said, “you gonna have to move on.”
This time there was no mistaking the reality of her words. The woman still seemed familiar though, and what I said to her was, “Do I know you?”
“Don’t you be starting in with no questions. It’s morning now, you got yourself a good night’s sleep, now go on and find some other stoop to haunt.”
Her tone was so authoritative I found myself standing up, fully ready to move along, when the gleam of the brass plaque caught my eye. No. 1. The Lost Garden.
“This is Dutch Street?”
“This is Dutch Street. What it ain’t is Easy Street, and it ain’t Sleep-on-somebody-else’s-front-steps Street, so why don’t you—”
“No. 1 Dutch Street?”
Her expression changed then. Impatience was replaced by true hostility, and she hefted her broom as if to smite me.
“You’re not James Ramsay?”
For the first time since I’d deplaned last night the facts of my life laid themselves out straight: I was James Ramsay, abandoned and now orphaned son of Virginia, and this was No. 1 Dutch Street, which my dead mother had left me in her will. I lived here now.
The woman continued to fix me with her eyes and, as I had tried to do with her, her blink willed me gone. But I remained as she remained, we were both still there, and with visible reluctance she set the broom down.
“I guess I should-a seen the resemblance. You skinnier than your momma, but the features is the same.” She laughed, but I could see she was faking it. “My goodness, child, where’d you get that costume?”
I looked down at myself. My cabana shirt was canary yellow, and it was open too, revealing an acid-washed chartreuse tanktop; my pants were cerulean blue, and in the substantial gap between cuffs and those shoes—Trucker was so used to me squatting over him he had no idea how tall I was—a pair of red socks was visible. It seemed less a clown’s costume than a crazy man’s get-up, something, say, Cousin Benny might have worn, and I marveled that the two short decades of my life contained such a long history: Trucker, Cousin Benny, Divine, all those aunts and uncles and several-times-removed cousins forming a broken chain that somehow stretched from my mother to this woman before me. But Dutch Street didn’t seem big enough to hold so many people, at least not yet, and all I said was, “From a traveling salesman.”
Something seized me then. Not the anticipation with which I’d fallen asleep, but instead a sense of outrage at what my mother had done twenty years earlier. Now that I was finally faced with an opportunity to discover what had been so much more compelling than her son I found myself consumed by an anger I thought I’d left behind four or five houses earlier, and I grabbed my suitcases and stepped across the threshold of No. 1 Dutch Street like a latter-day Columbus. A new world awaited me, and I was eager to claim the treasures it contained.
Now.
The Lost Garden.
Walk with me, if you will, into the shop. Experience it for the first time with me. See it (just shapes and shadows at first, nothing specific), feel it (it was cool in there, much cooler than it was outside, but dusty, and dry), smell it (the tingle of dust and the tang of dryrot, an atmosphere so desiccated it practically cried out for just one match), take it all in. It was like a storied version of your parents’ attic, your grandparents’ barn, it was like a miser’s horde or a pirate’s cave or a dragon’s lair deep within the heart of the mountain. It was all of those things, and less, and more, but whatever else it was, infant dream of pregnant possibility or something repressed and untouchable, it was, like the city of which it was a fragment, too big for me to understand at once, and instead I felt it. Felt it in the same empty place where I also felt the burning need for food: I hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday’s airplane meal, and I was starving.
Through the more mundane miracle of architectural specifications I was already aware that the ground floor of the building I’d inherited contained slightly more than forty-four hundred square feet of floor space. But that figure meant nothing to me until I stepped into that vast cavern—fifty feet of Dutch Street frontage reaching back ninety feet to the garden and two stories and nearly twenty-five feet more up to the pressed-tin ceiling—and saw that virtually every cubic inch of that enormous room was filled with junk. Filled is inadequate. Crammed comes closer: the stuff that was in that room was crammed, rammed, shoved and stuffed into place, stacked on shelves or packed in boxes or simply piled one thing on top of another in meandering mini-mountain ranges of memorabilia. It filled the room in an incomprehensible arrangement of massive pieces of furniture and tiny pieces of bric-a-brac, of art and architecture and archeological artifacts, cardboard boxes and packing crates and cloth-draped mounds that could’ve covered anything from sleeping elephants to piles of gold coins. What I mean is, there didn’t seem any room left over in that vast overcrowded space for me, let alone for my mother.
I stood transfixed, not so much taking it in as simply stunned, until, slowly at first, then faster and faster, I began to push my way through the room in my brightly colored clothes, bouncing from one brown hillock to the next like a beach ball in the dunes until finally I found myself in front of a pair of French doors that offered a view of the garden I’d glimpsed last night, its green-on-green depths receding into the shadows cast by the tall steel walls of the bland modern skyscrapers that hemmed it in on three sides. Closer in was a patio made of small gray blocks, and in the middle of the patio stood a pool filled with bluish water. A copper angel, so green it was almost black, floated atop the pool, and in its hands it held an enormous pitcher turned as if to pour forth ambrosia, though nothing emerged from the pitcher’s tongue, which was as long and fluted as a cow’s. The wings of the angel were fully unfurled and tendrils of hair curled around its breasts and neck, their jagged ends framing a face that had been wrenched away, leaving a gaping, almost plaintive hole between its bare shoulders. Even though it was headless, the statue had a compellingly lifelike air, and when it addressed me I wasn’t really surprised, despite its lack of a mouth from which to speak.
“You probably wanna see your momma’s things.”
But it was only the old woman. I turned and saw her for the second time. Every aspect of her being was still. She seemed somehow not to have moved, as if the world had rolled beneath her dress like a treadmill and brought me to her. Only her face had changed. She regarded me with an expression that had gone from impatience to hostility to false hospitality to, now, something like pity, and, poised between the lurid atmosphere beyond the glass and the parched air within, that was what I seized on. The woman’s expression reminded me that she worked here—that she had worked with my mother—and I strained to keep my voice steady.
“Did you know her well?”
“Practically my whole life,” the woman said, something very like love tingeing her voice, and she nodded at the statue in the fountain.
“I meant my mother.”
The woman seemed much less interested in this proposition. “Nobody knew your momma. Didn’t really want nobody to know her. What there is to know is upstairs, in her office. I’ll take you there.”
She spoke as if she were about to send me on a journey, which, I suppose, she was, but I sensed an undercurrent to her words, not simply a desire to get rid of me but a desire to get me started on something, some quest or labor. But before I let her lead me away I waved my hand, indicating both the tumultuous garden and the crush of junk I’d just stumbled through.
“Is this…yours?”
The woman opened her mouth then closed it, sucked in air rather than spoke. She shook her head, but not, it seemed, at me.
“It’s all yours. Everything you see belongs to you, for as long as you want to keep it.”
“Even you?”
I don’t know where the words came from nor why I let them out, but before I could retract them the old woman sprang forward and pressed the round knob of the broom’s handle into the hollow between my jawbone and Adam’s apple. Again the impression of irresistible stillness: she’d been standing, slightly stooped, her meager weight supported by the broom’s handle, and now she stood erect, the broom’s handle seemingly supporting me. One push and she could pop my head from its stalk like a child thumbing a daisy off its stem.
“Your name may be on the paper but you mark my words. The Garden’s mine and always will be, and if you want your time here to be a pleasant one you won’t never disrespect me again. You understand that, boy? You understand me?”
I nodded stiffly, trying not to choke. The old woman whirled away from me, without another word led me to a staircase and up to the narrow mezzanine. Stacked crates and boxes curved away from the masonry wall, leaning precariously toward the hand-worn wood of the balustrade and the shop floor twelve feet below. The woman held on to her broom—held it upside down, broomside up, and the blunt tip of the handle clunked against the floor like Ahab’s pegged leg. From the back she looked even more familiar, and I suddenly realized she resembled the bag lady I’d seen last night: both were skeletons draped in white. I remembered the headline then, CARNAGE ON THE GWB, remembered tick-riddled deer being torn apart by a juggernaut of automobiles, and it took a shiver to rattle the image from my head.
At the garden end of the mezzanine a closed door waited, and the woman reached her hand into a fold of her robe and withdrew a rusted skeleton key. It rattled into place, turned under duress, and when the door opened I was temporarily blinded by bright light streaming in through the huge windows on the far side of the room. I thought the sun had risen dramatically but it was just the amplified reflection of the morning’s light off iridescent skyscrapers. The air in the room was dry as a pharaoh’s tomb, the light beating down on a marble-topped desk the size of a sarcophagus. The woman pulled the key from the lock and handed it to me.
“I’ll leave you alone,” she said, her eyes burning with a desire somewhere between curiosity and contempt. “My name is Nellydean,” she added, then clunked her way down the mezzanine with her inverted broom.
Nellydean. She offered the word as if it were a truce between us, and if it wasn’t for the pain in my throat and the tender spot on my ribs I could’ve believed I’d dreamed her up. But if I knew one thing it was that the people in dreams don’t tell you their names.
I closed the door. I locked it. I turned to the desk and without thinking began to circle it, whirled around as a moon is whirled around its planet. Unlike the shop downstairs, the office was stiflingly hot and close, and I became aware of my sweat-soaked clothes once again. The garish outfit Trucker had given me covered my skin like some kind of minstrel rind. It constricted my muscles, made it hard to swim—to move I mean, or breathe, and as I circled the giant desk I peeled the rank garments off my body, and it was only when I was naked and my orbit had taken me to the leather chair pushed against the far side that I flailed at it, grabbed it, pulled myself onto the island of its seat. The leather sighed welcomingly. Its plump tufted coolness cradled me in its lap. My mother’s lap, my mother’s chair: with a single exception it was the first time in twenty years I’d touched something she had also touched, and, thinking that, I placed my hands on the stone surface of the desk in front of me. When I removed them I saw two palmprints impressed in the film of dust there, and it was the sight of those tangible outlines that convinced me I was really there, and I grabbed the center drawer of the desk, and pulled.
It was locked.
Of course it was locked: there was the keyhole, mocking me with its open silent mouth. The only key Nellydean had given me was the one that had opened the door, but lacking anything else I decided to give it a try. It slid into place, clicked into position, turned smoothly, and a pop! vibrated the entire desk as some internal mechanism sprung the locks on all the drawers like a starter’s pistol opening the wickets at a horse race.
Some time later the desk’s dusty surface was dotted with objects. Clerical supplies mostly, although they seemed to come from the early part of the century rather than just a few years ago. An ancient metal stapler heavy as an ingot, a massive pair of scissors whose chromed blades were flecked and peeling, a fan of stationary, cream-colored, though whether with age or printer’s dye I couldn’t tell. Pencils, unsharpened, and a pencil sharpener hidden inside the open mouth of a metal mouse whose coat had turned brown with rust; I also discovered chewed paper deeper in the desk, suggesting real rodents had rifled these drawers before me. When was the last time my mother had been here? I could have asked Nellydean, but my throat tightened at the thought of another confrontation with her, and instead of questions I gave myself more answers. A single fountain pen, dry. The ink in the crystal well had congealed into a black fingertip I popped out with the point of a letter opener. The letter opener was brass and fashioned into the shape of a peacock whose furled droopy tail served as the blade. A ledger smelled of its leather and paper and even of the money it represented, although I couldn’t make heads or tails of the accounts; a compass nestled under the hinged shells of a scarab beetle told me the North Pole was somewhere above my left elbow; a chrome-framed mirror stood up on its accordioned stand like a trained seal, and its small circular face barked at me that yes, I was still here, yes, I sat in my mother’s chair, and yes, behind me were the palmlike branches of trees in a garden whose fecundity hadn’t penetrated this abandoned room in a long, long time. The last item I found, before I found the letter, was a brass key dangling from a long thin silver chain. There was so much more in the desk, rows of hanging files to be gone through, drawers I hadn’t opened yet, secret compartments waiting to be discovered—and of course the promise of that key, as shinily modern as the door key was rusty and old—but when I found the letter I stopped, because the envelope was addressed to me. “Master James Ramsay,” she’d written, as adults wrote to children thirty or forty or fifty years ago (which is to say, before I was born, and she was born as well). Her handwriting was childlike, each block-printed letter neatly, discretely distinct from its neighbor, as though she were terrified that someone might not be able to read what she’d written.
In twenty-one years my mother had written me only one other time, on my first birthday, but my grandmother died less than a year after my mother left, and my great uncle, who took me in, refused to read it to me, and so I didn’t find out what my mother had written until seven years after she’d composed it. By that time my great uncle had moved into a retirement villa in Rhode Island and shipped me off to his youngest son and daughter-in-law in Florida. They’d put the letter in a small box they hid in their attic, which, as it happened, was the only place I felt safe when they launched into one of their frequent and violent arguments. The box, I remember, was mislabeled “John’s Things,” but somehow I knew it was mine, and so, when I was eight years old, to the tune of breaking glass and bouncing cutlery, I finally read the words “I left you because it would have been worse if I stayed.” There was more than that, of course, but not much more, and in the end it all came back to that one line. To the second clause really: it would have been worse if I stayed. At eight what bothered me most was that up until then I hadn’t realized things were bad, let alone that they could have been worse.
Her second letter was no less infuriating, but this time I was better able to understand my anger. “I met your father in the dunes behind Jones Beach,” it began. “He was one of three black-haired boys. One boy’s hair was black and thick and straight,” the letter went on to say (the letter that actually began “Dear Jamie”) “and one boy’s hair was black and thick and wavy” (well, it actually began with a date, “July 31, 1991”—my twelfth birthday—and a location, “Outside Istanbul,” but whatever) “and one boy’s hair was black and thick and crinkly, kinky I want to say”—my mother wanted to say. My mother wanted to say that the third boy’s hair was like still-new, still-soft steel wool but she didn’t: she just said that she wanted to say it was kinky, and that she thought the boy was Jewish. She said it—wrote it, I mean, nearly thirteen years after the events to which it alluded. “The second one was Black Irish or maybe Italian, and the first one could have been anything, Latin, Mediterranean, Asian maybe, or maybe it was just some Anglo with straight black hair,” and that was all my mother had to say about my father’s hair—my fathers’ hair, I suppose I should put it—or about my fathers, or about herself. The letter, written in Istanbul but mailed from Ithaca, New York on August 18, was addressed to my grandmother’s house on Long Island, but the address to which it had been returned after being stamped “UNDELIVERABLE” was Dutch Street, and as soon as I finished reading I looked up and caught another glimpse of myself in my mother’s small mirror.
Among the other documents that had been in my great uncle’s son’s attic was a photocopy of my birth certificate, from which I gleaned the first hint of the story I was now getting in full. In the line marked by the circled “boy” had been typed “James Ramsay” and in the line marked “mother’s name” had been typed “Virginia Ramsay” but in the line marked “father’s name” there had just been a magic marker stripe whose thick smear dominated the page like an asphalt runway in the middle of a snow-covered field. For thirteen years I’d thought a name had been crossed out by that line, but now I realized no name had in fact ever existed, and as I studied myself in the clouded glass (did my mother, I wondered, like to look at herself as she worked at this desk, or did she keep the mirror here so she could, without turning, watch the leaves flickering in the garden behind her?) my eyes finally lit on my own hair, which was not black but brown, not thick but thin, with a lazy curl to it that almost disappeared when it grew out. I pulled it from its rubber band, attempted to fluff it up with my fingers, but it hung in limp wispy brown strands because it is in fact limp and wispy and brown—just as, by all accounts, my mother’s had been—and when I finished her letter (“I always loved your black hair Jamie, it was so thick, it reminded me of your fathers”) I picked up the scissors that had waited along with mirror and letter for an entire decade, and I cut it all off.
Well. When I found her first letter I’d reacted by tossing a lit match into the box, and the resulting fire had burned up the letter and my birth certificate and “John’s Things” and the roof of my great uncle’s son’s house, so it seemed to me I took her latest revelation rather well by comparison. Then again, I didn’t have matches handy, so maybe the scissors were just a way of making do. But something fell away with that hair. My past, I’d’ve said if you asked me in the moment, though now I realize it was something more subtle. Something like desire: the desire to know who the mother was that had haunted me my whole life, the desire to know why she’d left, and why it would have been worse if she’d stayed. You’d be surprised how easy it is to forget a woman you never knew, a woman for whom your birth and her death serve as the two major connections—I know I was, when, nearly a year later, I finally remembered her. But the letter in which my mother had decided to tell me I wasn’t just a bastard but actually fatherless contained the coda “Love Mom,” and I couldn’t follow that simple instruction. I would not, not now, not any more, not again, and instead I played Delilah to my own Samson, and I cut off all our hair.