They were of a kind not safely to be described in an account claiming to be unimaginative and trustworthy, for they had too much and too outlandish beauty not to be legendary. Since, however, they existed quite irrelevant to myth, it will be necessary to tell a little of them.

Sharecropper’s Bed, 1936 —Walker Evans

ON THE PORCH

Uneasy with the chipped rim, I set a glass of water on my bedside table for thirst in the night. I turned off the lamp. Sleep came quickly—cross out, that day over. The lamp is pink china. I have seen it perhaps a thousand and one nights and not seen it at all, the swell of its body capped with a tilting silk shade, a matron of cartoons gone by, the genteel world my mother aspired to, the pink lamp being hers, one of the many cherished possessions which furnished her life now mixed in with the discards of my tenants. To deal with the present untangled from the past, what an accomplishment. What a wonder it would be to see the houses on Cotrell Street undiscovered, emerging in soft morning light.

One thing about the lens: the view is always of the moment, never looks back, not even if you set up your subjects in artificial light with the apparatus of old studio photographs. The palm, the parlor table draped in a shawl, prop of a family Bible, etched glass of an oil lamp. Or set yourself up picturesquely as Juliet on her bier, or costume yourself in the clichéd role—housewife at the sink, bland office girl. The time lapse of self-portraiture is a trick of the present. I come back to this house on a street with the retired, the unemployed and workers of this town, come back weekends and Summers, as to a house in the country or on the shore. We are on a bay. Landlocked on the asphalt plains of urban life, you’d never know it. My neighbors no longer find me curious. I’ve abandoned the odd clothes which set me apart, though as I sit with the Wakowskis, August end of day, I’m burdened with the photographer’s curse, gaining their confidence as I once faked interest in the festive Saints’ Days of Argentina or the sumptuous fabric of a Park Avenue chair, or coaxed dew drops on the ripples and craters of a cabbage to please the jaded lens. Decades of such seduction, intrusion on faces, bodies, the body politic. Nature embalmed in my chemical bath. When not pursuing the down-home life on Cotrell, I return to New York, resume my professional life.

I will tell you of three families. Words as a medium are fairly new to me, but attempt to tell like James Agee (you do not have to know who that handsome drunk was, a man intoxicated with words that challenged his partner’s photos). I step in the print of those who have gone before. Monkey see. Monkey do. I will tell you of the Wakowskis, Sue and Henry, and of the poet who lives alone, and of the Murphys, who lived on the right side of town, and as I tell, you may see me hiding behind the camera, Riccardi never in the picture. What a dodge. The photographer is always there—a father beheading his child in the playpen, the tourist shrinking Buckingham Palace, the pornographer selecting the erect member, the aureole of nipple from swell of breast.

I am on the Wakowskis’ porch with Sue and Sandy—part Lab, part neighborhood mutt. In good weather Sue sits out, any season, takes in life on the street. There are sixteen houses, eight facing eight across the paved road and crumbling sidewalks, all alike when they were built by a local developer in the Twenties, built as affordable rents for workers in the mills and factory. Each clapboard house has two doors, two rents, upstairs and down. Each house has a narrow front porch and square plot of front yard, all the same though now different, amended over the years. Only the first and last houses on the block have a driveway. Autos were not envisioned for the workers. Healthy walk to work, that’s how Sue tells it. She’s fed up with Henry searching out a parking place when he comes home from the Bonanza Bus Station, where he’s lucky to sell tickets to Providence, Boston, Hartford and small stops in between, happy to have the job. In the mill, Henry was union. Didn’t work out, is how his wife tells it, though when pressed Sue can relate the whole story of the decline, the factories moving south for cheap labor, or show you the label, Made in Taiwan, on her cardigan, worn these evenings as the Summer cools down. Sandy rolling over for the belly rub, hard times not dwelled on as she documents her works and days, the good years when the children were small and she sewed for women on the other side of town in need of an adjustment of waistline or hem. Now you throw last year’s outfit away, said with a tart smile, her bright streak of lipstick drawn on, everything shipshape, faint odor of lavender soap, crease in the pressed jeans, whitest of tennis shoes, permed white hair, polished pink nails.

My hair has grown out of its crayon black. I tell myself we look much alike, Sue and I, women of Cotrell. She is younger by ten years, has always been here and asks don’t I remember her as a child, when she lived in number 12 with the front yard chained in? To be honest, I should say I had no use for this place. One season when first professional, I photographed the Riccardi house unpeopled. Working with my first Hasselblad while my mother and Phil Dunphy were keeping the books at the mill, I made haunting desolation of the empty rooms with lifeless chairs, rumpled beds, the silenced radio, broken tiles of bathroom mishaps, the melancholy diversion of the kitchen clock, a black cat with hours on its white belly, tail wagging the minutes. I made a statement, not to mention a success of the pathos: Factory Town Dwelling.

Above all else: in God’s name don’t think of it as Art.

—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

I will only take snapshots of Sue and Henry holding hands like high school sweethearts. No need to ask them questions. They are primed for the interview, as we all are, wired for the mike, the TV van, more than willing to say they own this house, bought in the good times. Their children have gone off to Boston and New York, except for the one they call Bing.

Runs La La Latte. Raking it in, goes to show, he was the slow one.

With the pride of a city slicker, I bring the Wakowskis tomatoes and fierce little peppers.

There was a time, don’t you recall, when the Italians had gardens took up the whole backyard you couldn’t play in.

Frank Riccardi never had a garden in the house he mysteriously owned. He left us with crabgrass and gravel. My effort, that’s what I recall, lugging in topsoil and manure after Bel Murphy died. The effort to stay in one place for a season. Here’s a heritage tomato and the jalapeños.

Sue holds a small red pepper at arm’s length. Bing will like that one. The slow son who still lives at home, the boy they are proud of, big as a linebacker but soft, his happy-face sweet and puffy as the muffins he home-bakes on the premises of La La Latte.

Henry’s arrivals and departures are timed by the bus schedules, the Providence Express, the Boston Local. His stories of rude and pleasant travelers, the encounters of his day more alive than my many excursions. Henry’s news is of weary commuters, the folkies still searching for Joplin at the Jazz Festival, the tourists to our exhausted town now converted to quaint. We sit of an evening and watch the street, the wobbly progress of a child just out of training wheels, the neighborhood dogs lifting the last leg of the day, teenagers with smokes playing at being somewhere else, the blue lights of television screens. We hear the distant voices and muted laughter that calls Sue and Henry in to their programs.

Night-night, Gemma.

I go along home, happy to have been awarded my given name. What is it I ask of the Wakowskis?

I have no contract to memorialize them. I have not been sent here like Agee and the photographer Walker Evans, to bring home the goods on tenant families in words and pictures. They traveled to Alabama during the Great Depression to tell the world of poverty as lived by the poor. I am on my own, can’t pretend to Agee’s passion, to Evans’ perfection of cool. Riccardi no longer works on assignment. If I please, I can take pictures of Sandy, beloved creature’s head in Sue’s lap, little girls pressing their luck in sexy dress-up, cops in a squad car cooping, wasting the taxpayers’ money. Snapshots of life on Cotrell are self-addressed, but I will tell you of the poet who lives at the end of the street with a driveway to park his car, a wreck of a Seventies Camaro. He is a youthful man, perhaps fifty, with a braid down his back of sandy hair, silver earrings, beads and Native American vests that mark him as once a free spirit. He lives alone. His children visit, two sullen girls pressing toward teendom. This Summer they wear strappy tops sold at our new mall on the highway, display their childish thighs, mosquito-bite breasts. Their father lives in the rent upstairs, but the girls choose to sit on the porch in Summer, ears plugged with their music, waiting out the hours until the poet drives them home to their mother.

He has given me a chapbook, a pretty thing of few pages with his poems. It was an awkward moment between us when he handed me his work with a smile I will call complicit, signaling that we are different. I said I would be pleased to read his poems, wanted to say I long not to be different on Cotrell. The poet is handsome as maybe an aging actor in Westerns, the good guy with a checkered past. He is narrow-hipped, in my mind, his thighs sinewy, chest smooth, hair feathering a narrow trail down to the neat package of dick and balls. I have never seen him with a woman. My candid camera did not capture the deep lines etched in his long cheeks or the small creases sprouting round his eyes. His gray beard faded. Teeth need attention.

Most young writers and artists roll around in description like honeymooners on a bed.

—Agee

I am not young and no writer to speak of. My poet is still strong, but that’s another story. When he gave me his book, I went home and read it at once. I wish his words were about wildflowers invading our patches of lawn, or the constant thrum of the highway that runs past the dead end of Cotrell, or the wetlands seeping in from the bay. They are about the mother of those daughters, small bleeps of disappointment. She counted my pennies like love in a jar. They are about what he wanted and did not get. Wine and song in the fast lane pass me entire, knapsack and all. So that I am embarrassed by his confessional verse when I see him get into the Camaro with, in fact, the knapsack to drive off to school where he teaches Language Arts, how to write the simple sentence; Communications, how to sell yourself to the prospective boss.

Why flinch when the poet insists we are different?

The poet is strong: that’s the other story. He’s built a ramp so the vet who lives downstairs can zoom out into the street, reckless in his wheelchair. What’s he got to lose? A bad habit or two. When he has indulged, the sturdy poet grounds him, a parental arrangement. I admire the vet’s tattoos and am tempted, but will not take a close-up of the Fu Manchu dragon rising in full splash from the high sea of a bicep, not exploit his grizzly male, useless male body. When our vet skids off the ramp of a Saturday night, the peacenik upstairs, shithead, pansy, heaves him out of the wheelchair, puts him to bed. Our vet nursing the bitter triumph of having been to his war.

If I were going to use these lives of yours as “Art,” if I were going to dab at them here, cut them short here, make some trifling improvement over here, in order to make you worthy. . . .

—Agee

I will simply tell you about the Murphys who lived on the other side of town. The enchantment of their little house and Bel’s garden. One day long ago, the way it is long ago in Victorian photographs set up in staged scenes, as the curtain went up in Brandle’s Pharmacy, I twirled on my stool at the soda fountain and entered the Murphys’ magic circle. There was the mother in a snappy straw hat, Isabel Maher, who had been in the silent movies. Gemma, she said, you’re in Joe’s class! There was Mr. Murphy, wounded in the Great War, petrified hand in his pocket, Tim Murphy decent and friendly to all, even to those on Cotrell Street who could not afford his insurance. There was the boy, above all others, who passed for a prince in this town. The girl, round and rather silly, miscast in the family story I wanted to be my own. It was the mother, Bel, who told me to leave town. Now, why did she do that, when she went out there, out there, turned around and came home?

Perspective, the easy answer. Back away from the scene.

Back away. There will be digressions. When Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published, 1941, no one much cared. There was a war on. Agee had taken too much time with his words. There was further delay with the pictures. Walker Evans saw his photos, about to be published. They had been cleaned up: Sharecropper’s Bed, 1936, no tear in the sharecropper’s pillow, no wrinkles, no fleas on the sheets. He had taken care to capture the family’s dignity as well as their poverty. Evans’ photographs display emotional accuracy, a grand accomplishment for a city boy, a Northerner, something of a swell. Spare the expense, restore each wrinkle, the tear in the pillow. The fleas were etched in.

I developed the Murphys into a myth that couldn’t hold water, the briny water of our bay stinging the cuts of my childhood. I’m attempting to clean up my act on Cotrell Street, ink each black speck on the white coverlet of memory. That’s the best I can come up with in words without pictures. Enlarged: the Murphys of Land’s End, who were not perfect in every way. Soft focus: Bel, the restless excursions; her beauty could not find its place in a shingle house or on the silent screen. Deleted: Dad of All Dads, the shadowy figure of the father, pleasant and dull, with the award of his wound in a war. Cropped: Joe, headshot of an old priest, his body among the missing. Posed: Rita, off center, startled, the red spot of my flash fixed in her eyes. I have a lot to answer for, taking my snaps of Sue and Henry, false testimony to the ease of our evenings on the porch.

I will tell of two places, long avoided. Cowardly, I thought to take the poet to Land’s End.

Yeah, big shots over there.The tower, I’ve seen it.

So I went alone, as always, parked blind side of the privet. The lane has been paved. Rampant local color, loosestrife and golden-rod. I took up my post at the break in the hedge, where I hid as a girl watching the life of their house, the coming and going. Mr. Murphy with a worn briefcase, Bel clutching groceries to her heart like she’d won a pot of gold, Joe swinging a bat or book bag. Gemma Riccardi out of the picture. Where’s Rita, skinning her knee, falling off her bike? This day that I speak of, this late Summer day on Land’s End, I spied once again. A house rose above me, a silo, reference to New England farm that never was, not here, where fishermen built their cottages low against the gale. Or a lighthouse, could that be the feeble notion of one Damien Forché? The photographer I’ve never met, but swear I know him. He’s of a type, his beacon lighting my way to disposable fashion, its shadow not reaching to the nude body of a girl grilling in the sun. He flips her, Forché dressed only in a planter’s straw hat, shameless. Oh, the girl is that starved-down model Pet, alias Elizabeth Strumm. They lie on striped canvas lounges, so Fifties, so today. There is no garden, only stone, gray stone, as though the topsoil of Bel’s half-acre has been washed away by a great wave and left only bedrock, un-fertile. A boy, dime-a-dozen Adonis, rises from the slash of pool set in the stone. Forché calls out, Carlos, saluting the boy’s tremendos co-jones . Laughing, all three laughing. I wanted to see Pet and her pals as less than human, register scorn, but there was nothing I cared to portray. Damien’s shingled post-modern dildo not worth a snapshot. If I back the car up, swing round—cross out, this day over. It’s a bitch of a turn in the narrow lane. How merciless we were, taunting Bel, sure she’d drive off the cliff. With her kids and Gemma in the Buick.

That night on the Wakowskis’ porch we speak of the doll woman who has disappeared from Cotrell Street. Some authority has claimed her, a daughter or son.

She was Bev Heany, married a Molloy.The doll in the window began, you know, when the kids moved away.

Sue no longer presses me as a witness, though I did see the big doll’s clothes were changed each day, overalls, party dress, plaid skirt and warm sweater for school. Now—a week, ten days—she’s in the same yellow sunsuit, sand bucket in hand. I’ll miss her when I pack up to go away. Miss sharing the virtual child, miss Sue and Henry. Miss Bing lumbering up on the porch with day-old goodies courtesy of La La Latte, the rattle of the busted muffler on the poet’s car and those awful girls cowering on the porch when they see our vet, as though that ruined body could harm them. Our talk turns to Land’s End.

You finally seen it? Henry leans forward in his creaking wicker chair, whispers. Tim Murphy must be laughing in his grave.

Mr. Murphy insured the Plymouth. That would be ’68, the Wakowskis’ first car.

Over the years, fire and theft, homeowner’s policy.

After his death they stayed on with Prudential.

First hurricane, that house’ll go down like a bowling pin.

That erection on Land’s End a curiosity. On a family drive you wonder at the establishments where the notables reside for their pleasure—TV anchor, shoe designer, fashion photographer—much as we wondered at the Vanderbilt and Astor cottages in Newport on a crazy excursion. Bel in her tour guide mode exhibiting The Breakers, the moral thrust of her lecture—All that money made them happy, you suppose? So beside the point of Good Humors and the elation of testing our toes in the icy Spring waves.

Sue seemed to know this was to be my last night on the porch. Labor Day looms with the final influx of tourists. The shops and cafés on Main Street will coast till the next Summer season; La La Latte serve only the professional class from Providence making suburbia of our town, now a small city. Up, out of my rocker, time to go. Last lick of Sandy’s rough tongue.

Wait, Gemma! There was a cake of Sue’s making and tea. Crumb cake. I thought of Bel, who attempted to bake and sew with the best of them but never made it past her domestic failures, or past the books she devoured, to really care. I felt honored being served on the fine china, sipping from a glass that might have been my mother’s, no danger in the smooth crystal rim. Doubly honored when I heard the racket of their Wheel of Fortune whirling while the Wakowskis sat on patiently with their company, Gemma Riccardi, not one of them.

As I walked back to my house, my home, the vet careened down the middle of the street, headed to a dreary pub, his nightly destination. His accident was as a biker, not in his war. We nod, nod, smile, the acknowledged pretense of friendship between us. When it is finally dark, I go out my back door to look at the Summer sky’s last shower of stars. It’s all endings now. By moonlight, last plucking of peppers and tomatoes, snipping of basil and thyme. In the darkroom I develop my snapshots of dogs, bikes, cars of Cotrell Street, front yards with their quest for variation, Vet, Poet, sulky girls, all three Wakowskis and the doll abandoned in Bev Heany’s window. Black and white film, true to myself in that way.

Now I will tell you of the cemetery, once exposed to the highway. This past year it has been hidden behind a mall so we can look upon the offerings of familiar chain stores, our comfort goods within reach. The motif of Pilgrims’ Plaza is nautical, seaside New England. A Pawtucket in profile shakes Roger Williams’ hand. Sailors’ knots twine with lobsters in a frieze, so we no longer have to think about the grim repository of the dead as we drive to Providence or connect with I-95, but of the peace and prosperity that defies unemployment and the cost of our continuous wars. A new road cuts round the rear end of Pathmark to enter the Catholic cemetery by a wrought iron gate sporting a freshly gilded cross. The flatland is shrouded in spooky silver-gray haze. My mother and Phil Dunphy are buried here. I attended both funerals, perhaps to ward off guilt—for that thought forgive me—and made out a check for the monument, insisting their names be chiseled together in granite, reparation long overdue. There they rest, the grass nicely trimmed by perpetual care. The Dunphys, not who I came for, cruel, not as cruel as my years of avoidance. The plot, which Phil purchased, is defined with metal markers, and I see he’s left ample room for me. There was no attendant, no map, just row upon row of gravestones, straightforward, not a maze. The Italians keep to themselves. I never thought to look for him here, my father with the phantom beard, the subject of my romantic stories. A Teresa Riccardi died young, died the year I was born. She would have been my mother’s age. Once this would have thrilled me or set me in a rage. Now I leave such discoveries undeveloped. What would it prove, show or tell me that I had not guessed or imagined?

Oh, we have grown old; it has been a long, long climb. I’ve come to this cemetery on business. The morning mist has lifted, no ghosts, a clear view of angels, crosses, lilies, stone upon stone. Portuguese lie toward the marsh reaching to the sea. There will be digressions: a miniature stone temple with a low wonderland door, the resting place of Mary O’Brien Cotrell (d. 1873), buried in Catholic ground. Could she have been a housemaid or mill girl, an oiler of the multicolor press that printed our Saturday Evening Post? Never enough stories. Mary from the wrong side of town? Murphy will be nearby, center front with the Irish. Separate headstones of Timothy and Isabel, their dates scanning the last century. The end of Summer, Bel, not the Day of the Dead, no confusion with Halloween tricks, demons in Kmart masks. Just this day, an ordinary Thursday, no souls rising from their graves in the apocalyptic crowd scene we’ve been sold. I suspected you were mortal, that’s the skeleton in the closet, though I shouted above the din, the bombs bursting in air, playing my shadow puppet stories against the blank white wall, which is only my fancy way of saying I did not want you to be over, like silent movies or the Keith Circuit, like beauty, like instruction, like belief that if I brought you crumb cake or my harvest of basil, excellent for pesto, stayed in one place for a season, you would call out to me, Gemma, where are we going?

Cotrell, naming my street, which did not prove to be the right destination. The course of nature was too slow for Riccardi. I didn’t know how to manage with sun, shade or rain, couldn’t alter the process with cow shit or chemicals, lime to sweeten the soil. I hung in for two Summers with a small crop, unnatural to me.

Nevertheless: Oh, nevertheless. I have been asked to take on an assignment, to deal with the present. An editor has asked me to take pictures like Bourke-White’s (you do not have to know who she was, the woman who took the first cover—1936—for Life magazine, handsome, her picture in a high-altitude flying suit, a popular pin-up), but he knew, the young man schooled in photography’s past, knew Bourke-White’s Night Bombardments (1943), placing me back in the days of photojournalism, so pure, so Forties, though I would have been only thirteen. I dare not say the flat desert lit for an instant with Scuds and the flash of car bombs will not register like the gorgeous fireworks of the Italian Campaign. A job is a job, always was till the girl from Cotrell Street got into art. I’ll use a Rollei and a peanut flash of yore, not tell the young editor—

The beauty of the past belongs to the past. It cannot be imitated today and live.

—Margaret Bourke-White, Diaries

I’ve brought you a photo, Bel, a graveyard thing they do in Latin countries honoring the Day of the Dead. Your picture will last for a while. Taken from a negative so old I thought it might not survive its glossy lamination. It was snapped with my Brownie. You shifted your hand slightly during the exposure, so it looks like you’re waving hello, hello there, to me and your children out of the frame. A bright Spring day. You are propped against the Buick in a green cap and raincoat. The slice of white building behind is the Seamen’s Bethel, New Bedford, in need of a paint job. It was the day you read to us from Moby-Dick. Later I laughed with Joe at your take on The Whale, the way kids laugh out of ignorance. I understood nothing of your performance, just heard your voice which could tell me any old story and I’d believe it, the whole Hollywood script.

I’m costumed for the porch, Bel, slacks and a matronly cardigan for the cool start of the day. For the porch of my neighbor Sue Wakowski, not the back porch where I plagued you with questions, where I reappeared as Riccardi exhibiting her wares. I went back to Melville, his big bible of a book, where I knew I’d find the words to say: how is it that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss?

Gemma, where are we going?

Off on my own, this time for good. Enough of one place for one season. Riccardi—Little Miss Echo, quotidian quoter:

How were we caught?

What, what is it has happened? What is it that has been happening that we are living the way we are?

The children are no longer the way it seemed they might be.

SEED UPON STONE

Preacher speaks directly to Mimi Salgado who is mindful of the privilege. Let us take Matthew: Do not fear those who kill the body but can not kill the soul . . . Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?

She has been admitted to his study, a place of infinite calm, so many books behind glass, a grand desk with photos of the wife and children, blessed with his presence every day. Pooch good as good can be, snuggles against the wild beat of her heart.

You are of more value than many sparrows.

Which makes Mimi weep, then unburden herself to Preacher, tell all, all about her father, the informer, her sainted mother, Carlotta, and Rita, the woman who killed a dog. How long must she take their sins upon her as though her very self was apprehended, disgraced on TV?

It is within our belief system to carry the weak. Charity is given to those who enter His Kingdom, praise the Lord.

Mimi responds, Praise the Lord, as she does in meeting. In the hush of his study her voice sounds weak and forlorn. How long must she carry the weight of their sins upon her? Pooch shudders with fear for her Mamma, not the everyday tremors of a Yorkie. She tells about the men who waited for her father, how she knew their evil as a little girl. Spilling the goddamn beans like my father. How dare she take the Lord’s name in vain?

Preacher reaches across the big desk—Surrender—takes Mimi’s hand. Surrender.There is no torment He can’t lift from your soul. Let us pray.

Then silence all about, their heads bowed for the grace of the moment. Mimi looking down at Preacher’s wedding ring, at the perfection of his long fingers and the soft sandy hair on the back of his hand, at a small crescent scar pale as the moon in ascendance. She is mindful of the healing half-hour of his gift, yet he has not answered. How long?

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

But that is a phrase of her mother’s, an answer that was never any answer at all, Carlotta never saying, I am sick unto death of his kickbacks and bribes, of the little gun not a toy in his pocket, the black car at the curb. For the first time Mimi does not trust Preacher or does not trust herself, longing to turn back to a day when she was proud of Manny Salgado, who had drivers and buddies, her daddy in tailor-made suits, polished wingtips and always the silk handkerchief tucked in his pocket, who dealt out crisp bills to his son and daughter. Make the good grades. Buy out the store. It was Tony brought home all the A’s, all the trophies. Manny reciting a poem he learned in school before shapeups on the docks. You betta ya life, Mia Carlotta, I gotta. Wanting to say he was a champ, welterweight, did you know it? Good grades, trophies, the poem finito and now her time with this Preacher is over. Those who kill the body? She doesn’t get it about the sparrows, or the text for future study, mustard seed sown on a stone. All she has asked, how long must she endure the shame of their evil? Preacher has not answered, now begging for her pledge—not calling it cash—to carry forth his crusade.

When Mimi returns to Bon Soir, the gravel voice of her father begs her to call. Delete. Delete that message. Twice she’s changed her number. Twice her brother has betrayed her. Why does her father sound pitiful? Sweetheart, all is forgiven, silly words used on her mother when he came home tanked, big business with the boss, the scum he handed over to the feds. Grasso, doing twenty to life. A nasty cough cut off her father’s plea for mercy. Mimi, give us a call. Us. That would mean butterball Rita, who pounded a dying woman, overwatered the rex begonia, killed it with kindness before her mother’s eyes. The boutique that evening is lively, Mimi’s ad bringing them in for a sale, mark down the caftans, half-price the thongs, even in Boca Summer ends, time for the twin set, the shawl. Pooch in a sling chair, they love her, little head wagging, chewing her Petpourri ball. Mimi, thank you, makes her own money, no need for Daddy’s allowance. When she unloads the last of the Betty Boop T’s, flop of a novelty item, she packs up Pooch, drives home to their condo, orders in Thai—how her girl loves it, the milky sweet with touch of piquant.

You little monkey. Tonight Mimi knows she talks to a dog. Sometimes it all falls away. What to believe? Alone in this world. Parables she can’t understand.

She must take stock: precisely what Mimi does next day, puts up a notice on the door of Bon Soir, Closed for Inventory. Those who kill the body may not kill the soul. She’s on a plane to L.A. Pooch her co-pilot in the pretty net basket, good as can be. A girl. She’s a girl, Mimi tells her seatmate plugging numbers into a laptop, though the man never asked. Well, it’s no novelty, Mimi having no one to talk to. When did her angry words, mouthing off, turn to something like silence? When her son threw in with her husband and Manny. When Rita worked over her mother’s body each day. When her brother went off to Boston College, all A’s, so where did that get him? Threw in with Grasso and Manny. Tony with a new name, leopard changing his spots. No one to talk to way back, back before the marriage, in the marriage, in the Tudor on the street with doctors, lawyers and the phony businessman, her father. When did Mimi Salgado drop her married name? When discover silence and shame? Back, way back, a day when she went to Providence with Daddy in the back seat of the big car, a Caddy, not quite a limo, with walkie-talkie, jump seat and bar.

Special, her birthday, going to see a show. Her mother ailing as always. No parties with the neighborhood kids. She had on the pink A-line, that she remembers, the grown-up style of that dress and white tights. They were driven to a restaurant, dark wood, heavy curtains, real dim though it was noon. No customers this time of day. She sat in a booth waiting for her father to talk upstairs with Mr. Grasso. In her purse she had lipstick, not allowed by her mother. The first greasy feel of that redness streaked on her mouth. When they came down, her father and the boss, they were laughing at her. Wipe it off, Manny looking at his little girl, handing her a napkin, the bright smudge on the white cloth. They ate big steaks, talked business. Side orders of creamed spinach and home-fries. No cake, no candles, Boston cream pie.

A little something for the birthday girl. Grasso took a Kennedy half-dollar from his pocket. There’s more where that came from.

The men talked for a long time, ordered more wine. She kept thinking, How great to be out of school on my birthday. The other kids were at math, after recess Dina and Val changing into gym suits. No school, but Mimi was not dumb. Grasso was talking about our friend, about someone can’t play ball, a man who needs hurting, talking that way as if she could not figure hurting meant harm. Old enough to know they did not want her to understand. Their waiter came over with a message, the only waiter in the empty, dark place, lots of brass, big mirrors. The green glass lamps hanging from the ceiling were not lit, just a small shaded light at the booth like the one her mother turned on to play the piano. Grasso’s driver came in with a message.

Her father said, Sweetheart, see you back at the ranch. Nervous, rapping his fingers on the table, wiping his face with the silk handkerchief she’d never seen him use. He was halfway out the door. She remembered the bright shaft of sunlight and how he turned, came back to the booth to kiss her, a big smooch, not like him at all. Turn back to that day when she smelled the wine on his breath, felt the tremble of his hand. Sorry to miss the show, darlin’.

She never knew what movie was playing at the Strand. Thanks, but she’d just as soon not see it with one of her father’s buddies.

Take the girl home, Mr. Grasso said. So—wasn’t it nice to have lunch with your father?

Almost the same words her mother used when she found Mimi hurting, poking right through her white tights, splotching her leg with lipstick in oily red wounds.

Wasn’t it nice? Only her mother’s voice was more like a cry than a question. Carlotta, I gotta, in a worn chenille robe, fingering the rosary beads in her pocket.

Torment remains. She will lift it from her soul.

Mimi has planned. Reserved their room in an airport hotel, researched the kitchen shop on Google. Room service with Pooch. It’s ten o’clock back in Boca. Early to bed, the California sun still shining. In the morning a cab. Fearing a dumb driver, she’s not had time to map her route with red marker to Tarzana, to White Oaks Boulevard where the greyhound’s body was crushed by a car, to the starred destination, La Cumbra Terrace. Pooch not abandoned to a soulless hotel. That was the hardest to figure. They are in this together, Pooch secure in the net basket. No gate, no guard, Mimi in the maze following numbers down pathways with bright flowers so much the same, same as Boca. The chlorine smell of the empty pool smarts her eyes as she descends step by step to a giant hibiscus. The C line, 54, 55. There is no one about, then a baby’s cry, cartoon babble, the hack of a morning cough; 60, 61 C inscribed on a Home Sweet Home placard. She will carry the sins of the weak no longer. The worth is herself, not a sparrow. At 63, a patio like all the others.

They see her through the glass door, her father and that Rita, their shock and confusion, then their disbelieving smiles. Their welcoming arms. And she is in this sunny room imagined as a cell, a dark place of hiding. She is pulling hard to unsheathe the kitchen-shop weapon, to hurt or be hurt forever. The knife tangles in the netting of the dog’s basket. A wild yapping. What was Mimi thinking, not to leave her girl out of this? The knife cuts a tuft of pale hair from the Yorkie topknot, poor little girl. A puddle on the carpet. Pooch scampering under the couch in shame.

Rita mops up: That’s the dearest little dog.

Manny taking the knife from his daughter’s hand: She’s cute as a button.

Yes, a little girl! He did not even have to ask. Her father looks old, so old in his tattered pajamas, his hands, mapped with blue veins, in a constant tremor. His body, always so tense, has gone slack. He pulls her to him in a timid embrace, but his kiss on her moist cheek is firm, what she’s been waiting for how many years, a smooch and the open door with a flash of sunlight. Rita scrambling under the couch is a sketch, that’s the kind way to see her, slimmed down to a 14 Regular, the henna hair not too bad. Then Mimi is drinking coffee with her father, catching up on golf and the sales figures at Bon Soir while Rita fashions a little nest of pillows and towels. Pooch settles in with a Bow Wow Biscuit. So does Mimi settle, surrender to this weepy ending, its laughter and release—immoral, entertaining—like how many movies seen or only imagined in which killers and lovers are granted their reprieve.

“Chris?” Her father asks, “How’s the boy?”

Chris, Christopher—the name of her son finally surfaces. Then the floodgates truly open.

“Oh, a boning knife! So useful.” Rita, comforting Pooch, still wonders at the nature of their visitor’s intention. “Useful, but you know it’s bad luck to give knives as a present.”

The Salgados did not know.

“It’s thought the blade cuts love, but if you give the giver a pin or halfpenny . . .” Rita tells the undoing of that spell imported from Ireland by way of Ansonia, Connecticut, to a shingle house on a bay in Rhode Island. In her purse she finds a bright penny, places it in Mimi’s hand. She withdraws from this happy reunion to the kitchen, puts the boning knife in the drawer next to the poultry shears, ruined when she hacked open the greyhound’s cage. She routs about on the shelves for flour, baking powder to make muffins. It’s been a while since Rita’s thought of comfort food. Hard to say whether it’s the father or daughter no longer among the missing. Tonight she will call Paul Flynn, tell him of this extraordinary occasion, hoping for news of her brother. Surely one miracle may beget another. Isn’t that how it goes—loaves and fishes, raising the dead, walking on water? Never enough stories.

THE LITTLE MERMAID

She’s been missing, long gone. Imagine her dead. Give it a try. Sample her, bitter and sweet, Fiona O’Connor. In his version, that’s the priest’s, her hair is burnished copper as it was when he knew her—loved her, we want him to say. One thing is certain: her story can’t be simply another account of adolescent rebellion. Else why did she cut out her tongue?

Begin on upper Fifth Avenue, a good address. Her parents were happy to have her, the child of their polite disaffection. Cyril O’Connor adored his girl as only a father can. Banking on her promise, he never looked back to the happenstance of personal history that brought him to invest himself in Wall Street. He sure enough loved his irreverent child, made light of her every spill on the carpet, stain on the furniture of his wife’s proper life. Mae was the mother.

They were kind, good people.

Mae pulled the girl’s unruly hair into tight braids, dressed her in plaid skirts and navy blue sweaters. Sent to school in this disguise, she was always discovered. A note sent home. Fiona has laughed, hummed, will not follow the lesson. The girl’s rosebud mouth spewed forth inappropriate language. She was expelled from one school, then another. Daddy’s reprimands sounded like praise. The child’s moxie was what he’d lost, moxie his word lost in time. A bleat in her mother’s voice called her to account for homework not done, teachers sassed, unsavory companions.

Mae’s scolding was hesitant, shy. I will pray for you, Fiona.

Imagine the girl’s fury at all those saints and angels tracking her wicked ways.

Fiona ranted against her mother’s choice of evening entertainment.

Simmer down, Mae said.

Cool it? A retort to please her father.

They were patient people.

Cyril O’Connor made money, that’s what he did, but never brought the business home to Fifth Avenue. At night he read history against television white noise. His concentration was a presence, a giant thought balloon with old stories running. Lincoln’s letters and Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant in sober covers were stacked by his chair, his leather reading chair by the window. When Fiona was in high school, he told her, I should go back, start with the Founding Fathers. I’m stuck in the middle. His briefcase, Mark Cross, a gift from his wife, sat unopened each night in the front hall. Fiona was not above riffling through the Annual Reports of Hess Oil or Xerox, the wonder stock, to find evidence that he really went downtown each day, played with these numbers. A lovely name she discovered, the name of a Spanish knight. Who’s Cerro de Pasco?

A copper company that’s failing. Are you interested in the market, Fiona? He smiled at her poking round in his business, went back to his reading.

Cyril, Mae, and their girl carried on in that cavernous apartment on Fifth Avenue with the extra bedroom waiting for another child or the guests who never came, until Fiona discovered lust. Not lust like the doorman’s salivating pass at her ass, the elevator boy’s moist breath on her nape. Oh, you will think she was into BODY, exciting explorations of tit and clit, of boy smell and facial fuzz—incidental. She lusted after someplace far from the privileged view of Central Park, from the potted parties of private-school snots, quested not after the holy land of A-list colleges.

Fiona’s smart, Mae said to Cyril, smart, not bookish, a little dig as he looked up from, maybe, the Reconstruction, if he’d got that far.

Arrive at scenes with the priest, make quick work of family, Fifth Avenue. Yes, Fiona went downtown. She was studying at the New School, those walk-in courses, dabbling in art and music, strumming a guitar like how many kids. This guy in Pottery I invading her with talk of Redemption on the Bowery, the ultimate show, which sounded like Jesus Christ Superstar warmed over. Still, together they went down to Anima Mundi. That was the first night Fiona didn’t go home.

Well, it’s your HOLY Catholic Church.

Mae could not stop her wailing.

That’s where I’ve been, where they CARE about the poor, the homeless. Care and humility figured heavily in the lecture delivered to her parents, undigested material of a one-night stand. For a week she did not go back downtown, then that guy found her in the auditorium there on 12th Street, listening to the professor do the Alan Lomax folk, Bad Man Ballads so peaceful after “Light My Fire,” her favorite oldie. They held hands listening to the blues, this nice guy with long blond hair she’d talked to through the night, slept with incidental, then went down, made the scene at Mundi. Poverty, community, much to learn aiming toward the good life or good death. Children to feed, drunks and druggies to care for. Searchers checking out of a material world. Fiona felt loved. Loved, not by the nice guy throwing pots at the New School, growing the beard of an apostle, loved by this family who fed her the lines to say on Fifth Avenue, instructing her father about the sins of Dow Chemical, her mother about the massacre at My Lai, as though Mae couldn’t watch it on the evening news. When his daughter launched her attack on the covert operations that led to our invasion of Cambodia, Cyril attempted a course of instruction. He had been a captain in the undeclared conflict in Korea, led his soldiers to defeat in a brutal ambush. What disturbed him? Fiona’s high on this war, her embrace of the drama without the dull backdrop of history.

Fiona half listened, not wanting to know her father might have reason on his side, pressing her half-baked argument, loud and clear, “As a pacifist, I am called to LOVE my enemy.”

Mae, working a Celtic cross in needlepoint, pricked her finger. “Please!”

They were tolerant people.

Fiona’s apostle deflected, took off for chemical inspiration in Bombay, leaving his parents’ address for Fiona. He was Gerald Kalb of Shaker Heights, Ohio. In case, they said, all tolerance and understanding at Mundi, she might want to reach out to Shah, as we knew him. The girl thought for a moment about loss, about the transient lesson of that apostle, their trip on the Broadway Local downtown. Now she was sought after by all—the mothers, children and naturally the men of Mundi. Leave sex out of the picture. It’s not about the body, is it? Though to continue we must see her: abundant hair, terra cotta or color of a tarnished penny, the violet-blue eyes wide open, the serious upturn of nose dusted with innocent freckles, a brave beauty long out of date, Girl of the Golden West, not the early Seventies, upper Fifth Avenue. Fiona cleaning toilets, baking pies, mending shirts like Sister Suzy, barely knowing which end of the needle was up. A thick slab of wood lovingly polished was the Mundi altar from the Tree of Heaven. As though to counter her mother’s rote Aves, she lulled herself poor and needy with mantras. Cyril admired this wacky independence, more moxie, which pissed off Fiona. She moved out. First time Mae came downtown decked out in kid gloves and pearls to find her daughter, the girl spoke to her harshly.

No. No, that was not the anima. All were welcome in the old schoolhouse.

Mae put down her purse, began to ladle out soup. The children took to her, hungering for the very indulgence that once set her daughter to letting her hair go wild, hiking the plaid skirt to a mini, selling her school ring for the bong abandoned with psychedelic posters in a back closet. Mae was just as nice as could be to those kids, some with mothers at Mundi, some not. Mae had a life. Good works downtown, two days for the hospital shop, one as a docent at the Metropolitan Museum: Fiona sloughed off the caul of her embarrassing birthright, came to believe her mother passable, never laughed when she clipped notices out of the Mundi Newsletter, number of GIs dead and missing, Watergate tidbits, Nixon with Pinocchio nose.

Arrive at the priest. It was over that altar of precious wood she first saw him performing his duties. He came from uptown where he taught, wearing civvies not to offend, Mundi being free of clerical attire, though at Fiona’s urging he donned the Buddhist saffron of renunciation, still a good look. They sat cross-legged on the destroyed linoleum of a schoolroom. She recited from the Gita—I am the fire and the offering. She was eighteen, might have been one of his students. I am the goal, the upholder, the witness. . . . Enchanted with the freckled girl as his guru, with the intensity of her quest, not her lesson, a confusion of selflessness with self-proclamation, he whispered, Shantih. Shantih. Shantih. About love, he never doubted. The peace that passeth understanding was far from his mind, though hadn’t the poet monk, Thomas Merton, gone off in search of Hindi Masters, Nirvana, Zazen? At his university, the enrollment in Sanskrit was up. Up to five. A time of theological tourism, he thought to shatter Fiona’s mindless chant, tell her stories of Loyola’s fierce concentration or the mystical apparitions of St. John of the Cross. Pursuing the Void, Nirvana or Heavenly Rest, it would be unfair to say their mind game gave way to the body game. About love, he was certain. In years to come, the priest would never consider himself a fakir for his silence, for simply devouring the sight of her face turned up in meditation to the water stained ceilings of Anima Mundi.

She asked, “What do you teach?”

Such a simple question. He thought to devote the rest of his life to an answer, but said, “This week Donne’s sonnets—

“When I died last and, Dear, I die

As often as from thee I go . . .”

She put a finger to his lips. “I’m not bookish.”

About love: He was, yes, good looking: the sculpted high forehead so promising, crisp hair going early gray, the stringy build of an ex-athlete and no, not fumbling with her body, just never been there. Tender, will that do? Those consecrated hands discovering her thighs, stroking her tangled hair, Suppose we were Fiona O’Con-nor and Joe Murphy, just a couple of ordinary micks? All first names at Mundi; O’Connor and Murphy edged toward personal, prehistory. As O’Connor and Murphy they broke the unstated rules. Ordinary, that’s a lot of supposing. One night when Joe did not go uptown to the clean cell where he lived, actually had his life with the Jesuiticals, a boy, maybe six or seven years old, came from round the corner, from First Street, called for a priest to come quick. Father Joe took the girl along. That was his mistake. Fiona’s mistake was listening to him coax the woman’s sins, his whispered absolution. The boy who had come for the priest knew they were too late. His mother was dead, couldn’t he see? Bruised, wasted, her face still glistening with overdose sweat. Father Murphy wore the saffron shirt, the purple stole of his calling round his neck, In the name of the Father and of the Son insisting on the sacramental moment, never doubting the woman’s soul had not yet departed. Fiona O’Connor saw the hovering Holy Ghost of his belief steady as the flame of the blessed candle she held at the bottom of that urine-soaked, bloodstained cot.

They’d never be just a couple of ordinary micks.

When she knew the child was coming, she more than supposed he would do the right thing. They would marry.

One Spring day Mae came downtown with a camera. To show Dad, she said, snapping the improvised kitchen, the slab of wood altar, assorted Mundi children in a tidy circle game. Then to snap Fiona with her friend—a young Jesuit, imagine! Mae ushered Fiona and Father Joe out into the sun. Then along came Russo, the ghetto priest from New Jersey who had discovered the cool world of Anima Mundi, who leaned on the darling redhead, everyone’s sweetheart. Smart Fiona made certain a couple of micks would not be documented as a couple. She grabbed Russo’s black leather jacket, the hip getup he wore into the big city, and they posed, all three, in front of a noplace brick wall. Mae clicked one exposure before Father Murphy called a halt.

A photo Fiona never saw, never wanted to see. Straining the waist of her bellbottom hipsters, costumed by the Sixties, hair blowin’ in the wind. Priests were coming out of orders. The Great Exodus. Well, didn’t they know that downtown embracing real poverty, not a vow. Suppose the right thing. Marry. The right thing was to go uptown with her mother, home to Fifth Avenue, no parting kisses. Where had she come from, the enchantress? Who would know on that first-name isle of downtown innocence? Was it ever entirely clear in that dreamy old schoolhouse that the priest had been sent by some higher authority to check out their belief in the system? If so, he was an undercover agent, or a lost soul not finding his way.

The right thing for Fiona O’Connor was never to see him again, having seen him blindly greasing the dead woman’s eyes with oil like the holy ghee in the Gita. The right thing was to forget the ambulance that took away the body, to forget the child in the back seat of the cop car and the cops who didn’t believe Murph in the Moonie outfit.

“Father!” Handing back the priest’s ID. “How about that!”

The right thing was never to have cared. And then to be silent.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, the Little Mermaid rescues her prince from drowning. Poor fish-tail girl yearns to be human. Here’s the hard bargain: if she’s to stand pat, maybe dance at her wedding, she must cut out her tongue. In her rewrite, Fiona went silent to abandon Murphy to his belief. If her disappearing act has a cruel end, it’s that she lived the bourgeois life she so mistrusted as a child.

“No more uptown, downtown,” she pleaded, turning from the window that looked out on the reservoir in Central Park, holding her infant son, blaming her unholy confusion on the city.

Cyril set his daughter up in Connecticut, North Stamford, that’s as far as she got from Fifth Avenue, a dream of a white house with shutters, stone chimney, shade trees, a garden with frogs in a swampy pool, all the comforts of home fit for married life. There she cared for her boy and fashioned pots, mugs, plates that hardly ever got sold. At times she drifted away, sang the old songs picked up on 12th Street—The times they are a-changin’. Strummed Love, oh love, oh careless love to the son she cared for, CARE the poison dart she’d flung at her parents. Biscuit bakin’ woman, don’t you lie to me.

Really cared for the boy, who was bookish, good at math. She sang to the men who came courting, men of no great interest to Fiona. And one day, never, never enough stories, one day when her very smart boy was eleven years old, she drove him into the city to stay with Cyril and Mae, good people, while she went off with, call him a lover, the man who took her to the Caribbean where one pleasure boat slammed into another, and down, she went down to her grave, red hair streaming in the luminous green sea.

Once upon a time there lived on upper Fifth Avenue a girl named Fiona. She was pretty, unruly, not pleased with her circumstances, which were not so bad as family stories go. She left home and was loved. As far as we know she was not deeply unhappy. That is most of the story. We might have ended it there, but the rest needed telling, because

I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost, Who died before the god of love was born.