Prev Next

I take a turn round my room, tripping over the rag rug, shuffling in my slippers through printouts and postcards, return to my desk, to the pad stolen from my husband, work on to the end

—as the soprano, the wanton in darkness, having wrapped her strong thighs around the body of Varner, ach Varner, meine liebe. Turn the page: that bitch now reaches to the black telephone, whispers to her lover, the loyal party member who had worked on the German rockets built by concentration camp slaves. And with misinformation on the bomb never made, he attempts to discredit the testimony of the American Captain in the name of their Führer . . .

But now the storyteller, given to happy endings, throws off the shawl, flips to a fresh page.

In the cellar of a grand suburban house, an old gentleman—much honored, the life of the lab with his discoveries behind him—sits so straight in his chair with the sharp pain of a ruptured disk, he might be a man of military bearing. He has taken off his flannel bathrobe, folded it neatly in his lap as though he is at a performance. For the purpose of this story, he is in the second tier of the opera house designed by Richard Wagner to suit the grandeur of his work. The record that Doc listens to is as perfect as the day he bought it at Sam Goody’s on Sixth Avenue, one of his many trips to the city for Bell Labs that combined business with pleasure. He remembers his delight in discovering it, the Deutsche Philharmoniker rerecord ing of Das Rheingold, of course. His interest is in the opening scenes in which his Freia abandons herself to laughter—hei-a ja he . . . hei-a ja. He believes he can distinguish her sweeping high notes from those of the maidens, believes that she was in her prime, though the original recording was cut at the end of her career. She is young to him always. Die Minne macht ihn verrückt . . . ha! The cruel pain of her laughter, yet he would give his heart for the gold. He grasps the stiff arms of the chair. Tonight, the slow retrieval, the smudged vision of his wife, bundled in her bathrobe when she found him sitting Indian style on the floor of the playroom, head bowed to the magnifi cent rise of the maidens’ mockery, his eyes tearing up.

“It is that sort of music,” he said.

Next day she placed this stiff iron chair close to the speaker, breaking up the set perfect for lunch on the patio. When matters cultural were on the table, as though they both must shoulder the blame, she confessed her addiction to museums, reported with an indulgent smile, “My husband is devoted to Wagner, from his student days, you know.” Apparently she found his emotion reasonable, never questioned why only Das Rheingold in the game room—hei-a . . . hei-a—for love had lost him his wits!

I throw the yellow pad aside. My scrawl unreadable as a secret code of childhood. Drawing the shawl close, Old Mother Hubbard, Gam mer Gurton makes her way back to bed, heart thumping. I have breathed upon the old catastrophes, the mutilations and disfigurements of my story, perhaps not in vain. Now, now the old inner tube will give out, as good a time as any for that drama. My husband turns toward me in his sleep, mumbling, arms held forth as though begging an embrace. I tap him lightly. He flips back to his dream. A streetlight stripes the ceiling through venetian blinds. How efficient the linen shades in my parents’ bedroom closing out the sun the whole Summer long. Natasha at last came to love Pierre. My heart returns to a neat pit-a-pat, its constant revision. See again, Captain Varner at attention, the record spinning. Or see the son come down to save the old scientist who taught him to respect predigital, the value of 78s. All that old stuff. Grandma moving in. I understand how I came to be in the creaking wicker chair with the delicate scent of my mother’s eau de cologne defeated by the ash of Lucky Strikes, Bill’s butts in the souvenir ashtray, ’39, the World’s Fair.

Daybook, October 31, 2007

Intermittent drizzle, seasonal chill. Today, a mild bout of the blues. My brother mangles a song: Tomorrow, tomorrow . . . a persistent strand of gray, the offending book not quite forgotten. If gloom settles in, I’ll attempt to climb to Belvedere Castle at the topmost pinnacle of the Park. Scanning the panoramic view—Ramble, Shakespeare’s Garden, Sheep Meadow, Zoo—I’ll sight the arrogant towers of El Dorado and the looming skyscrapers of midtown, which could not be imagined, not by Olmsted or Vaux in their precisely drawn perspective, nor by the German laborers blasting the natural rock ledge to perfect a greensward in the uptown wilds of the city, nor by the Irish squatters who, with their rutting pigs, were displaced from the swamps, nor by the black folk of Seneca Village—all sent packing—many who owned their parcels of land, treasured their houses, stores, churches, and Colored School No. 3, all removed for the people’s Park. No chance against the might of Eminent Domain. So, the Park and its urban surround. Perhaps the mythic dimension of our city of the future would not come to mind until the Great Depression when Willy Pogany dipped his brush into a pot of tarnished gold to illuminate the mural in our lobby.

I’m walking over the bones of the villagers; their lost Seneca dutifully posted, its legend on a placard of Central Park green, determined to record the shapeless present with its small discoveries in this my book of last days. Let history with its monumental events tell its own story. No soul-searching in the merely personal. In my pocket an old postcard, a tinted photo of Bethesda Terrace sent to my mother by some chap, not my father. 1912, Dearest Loretta, Class for me? Well I guess. Matt Leary. The trees bleed green into the washed-out sky. Paint-box blue, the healing waters of the fountain. She would have been only sixteen. I head south with my map of byways and overpasses. Raincoat, binoculars—fitted out for this day’s discovery I follow the Bridle Path to Strawberry Fields where the lone word says it all: IMAGINE. The worshippers are out early, enchanted by this spectacular memorial of their past where the truest stories live on.

Where were you when the madman killed Lennon?

Teaching Moby-Dick to freshmen who gave me grief. I believe we had come to Sunset, XXXVII, or choose to believe it now, Ahab’s all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy.

When a man first walked on the moon?

Santa Barbara ’69. The baby-sitter pulled granny glasses down on her nose. My father’s got moon dust. I never believed a sample of the precious grit was dealt to an untenured astronomer, a dented Ford Escort dead on its rims in his driveway.

Your witness to history is wisdom of hindsight.

Score one for my brother.

We have closed the house, the Levittown ranch in the Berkshires, pre-Sheetrock. The garden nearing its end. A daylily protected by the fence held its final bloom tight. Lady’s mantle gone soggy. The first time we’ve done this, drained the pipes, cleared the fridge of cheese ends, onions, celery best not to mention. Bitter marmalade, ketchup transport to the city. Crackers in a tin, denied to the mice, though in the Spring we’ll find stuffing pulled out of the sofa, books chewed at the spine, candles gnawed to the wick. The few will lie dead in their tracks. The little house sits across from the town cemetery. You went for a last walk through the gravestones to the top of the hill. It’s not much of a climb.

You said: Best not chance it.

Not even for the view stretching to yonder? Last time I was allowed to garden, digging in the new laurel, a funeral procession drove up to the height where the old families of the town are laid to rest. The bagpipes sounded cheery, then wheezed to a dirge.

Well beyond the middle of the journey of my life, I’ll not come to a dark wood, just the loop in a clearing of memory. Back-braiding to the college girl who tossed Greek tragedies away and took Dante as her poet. I find her wonder and despair at the discovery of greed, usury, fraud unconvincing. She misplaced her faith, that’s all. Hell passed in a term, became plain-spoken outrage at corruption whatever the current scene. Soon she will find some relief in preparations for the terrarium, for the grandchildren, of course; here and now will see again the stars. Pebbles sprinkled with charcoal from the iron stove in the country, soil tamped with sphagnum moss. They will choose stones and sticks to create their landscape, form hills and ravines. Wood ferns and lichen brought down from the garden; from the florist, a bromeliad and the bird’s nest fern that delighted Columbus, all to be arranged in the giant brandy snifter, well misted with tap water. A rain forest sporting botanicals, the exotic blooms that heaven allows. The Park across the street not yet in Fall glory.

Daybook, All Saints’, November 1, 2007

Your wax teeth, my fright wig, cheap goods meant to fool no one. Amusing the children who came to our door last night, that’s all we were up to. You had no patience with teenagers who grabbed the Mars Bars and Snickers, leaving the stale corn candy for little kids. Two polite girls—twelve, thirteen?—done up in tawdry silk rags, rattled their UNICEF canisters. You stuffed dollar bills through the slot of goodwill.

Gypsies?

Summer of Love. We don’t do Gypsies.

In the lobby I’ve seen these girls exchange conspiratorial glances, sniggering at El Dorado inmates. An unearned innocence in their crisp school uniforms, Academy of the Sacred Heart. Still, they alone collected for the world’s hungry children. You were left with a wad of singles.

We feared superheroes, believed in their transformation. So truly other, unlike the actor who paced in front of our building this afternoon as I was about to take off for the Park. Cell phone at ear, shouting—Pay to play, pay to play?—impatient with the doorman who could not conjure a taxi out of chill air. Saint or sinner, he plays himself always. To be kind, which I’m not these days, I see him as an accomplished Everyman, his face a rubbery mask, different yet always the same. An honorable tradition: Cary Grant, John Wayne. I’m disclosing our addiction to old movies. Chaplin then, his performance trumping the limits of time, conjuring laughter from pratfalls, his sly smirk of victory. Same old, same old, yet a tear trickles down my cheek when the little fellow in the bowler hat struts down the road to his next adventure. Twirling his cane, undefeated, he is incredibly brave. I’m hopeful for him always as the screen reads THE END.

When you left for the office with those singles stuffed in your wallet, I squirreled away our feeble disguises, the presumption they will come into play next year—your nerdy wax teeth with exaggerated overbite, my Raggedy Ann wig of orange wool, forgetting I still wore the retro note, my mother’s graduated pearls. Our jack-o’-lantern deliquesces on the front hall table. Old fools, not ready to cut out the fun, nor wise enough to distinguish holiday from holy day.

The first of November was once holy to me. It’s my backdrop, you know, a worn tapestry hung in a ruined castle of faith meant to keep out the cold, or simply to display the daily rituals of the church. Now faded and frayed, yet the RC calendar with its surfeit of stories can still be read. All Saints, honoring the list of miracle workers, virgin martyrs, self-flagellates, popes not on the A list, Jesuits converting the indigenous to the blessings of their Lord. All of them winners, all saints, thus the crowd scene: (Apocalypse 7:2-12) the tribes, each with their twelve thousand believers in white robes, their foreheads marked with the indelible tattoo of Salvation. A spectacle best seen in high definition, but in the days of my belief we had only the grainy black-and-white TV. Often a ghostly gray shadow drifted across the screen, a twelve-incher set in the sun parlor, that chill appendage to our little house with uncomfortable cane chairs and struggling plants. Let me put it this way, I will attempt, in defiance of the doctors’ orders, to honor the day by walking the full distance to view secular saints of my trade, the choice few in the Park who stand watch over the language they honored.

LITERARY WALK

I set off on my way to Shakespeare, leader of the pack. He stands alone in his circle at Poets’ Corner, go figure. I can’t honestly say I was breathless in anticipation, just tentative as usual these days. I had lingered in my back room, writing notes toward the possible end of my days, or end of my Park project, turning through old photos of the Mall freshly planted with scrawny elms, of Ladies strolling the broad Promenade in fine shawls, girly girls chasing hoops, gents in fine equipage. I leafed through plans of The Greensward as submitted to the Park Commission by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, 1859, but found little satisfaction in my CP collection—the sepia photo of a single boat upon the Lake, an overexposed shot of Mall in Its Prime, or that tinted postcard of Bethesda Terrace sent to my mother (1910). The print on our bedroom wall—Skaters in the Park, Winslow Homer, Harper’s Weekly Magazine—no longer enchanted. I wanted to sit on a newly refurbished bench under the mighty elms that lead to the poets, not saints but they would have to do. Or simply to prove that I might, like the little tramp, go on to the next adventure.

Well aware of the paternal note in your voice. Take a cab.

Or the bus to 59th, then walk across? That would be cheating in the game of can-do.

I stalled in my back room, looking for a note on Fitz-Greene Halleck, one of the poets portrayed beyond life size, the only one you might not know. Then again, your head is full of curiosities—orts, bits, Scrabble words, the full complement of jurists on the Warren Court, lyrics of “Red River Valley.”

Halleck, the popular poet?

Absolutely. But the only poet with the indignity of a small sign of identification stuck in the ground. We have forgotten his newspaper versification, devalued his celebrity. The stiff cloak thrown over his chair might be that of a Roman Senator abandoned in a schoolroom play. His ink has solidified, pen hangs in midair.

Where’s Whitman?

Good question.

Where’s Emily?

Smoothing the folds of her lawn dress as she climbs the stairs to her virginal bedroom in Amherst. She’ll look down from the narrow window above her desk, a moody saint on a bright cloud of words.

So, a luminous Fall day, sun riding high when at last I walked directly across the street from our sandstone twin towers. I checked out the fading leaves of my favorite viburnum in the world, turned right on the Bridle Path, cut down to the grassy knoll, once Seneca Village. A woman sat on the cold ground, book clutched to her breast. Sobs choked in her throat, then spilled forth. The low pitch of her wailing.

Dismissing my inquiry and all I had to offer, crumbled Kleenex. No, no thanks. A tidy woman, even in her distress she smoothed a strand of pale hair off her forehead, brushed at the knees of her gray flannel slacks. Her smile apologetic, as though to admit how shameful, crying in public. She tapped the book, the cause or answer to a sad story?

Marie Claude, Marie Claude! She called as though scolding a child. Whatever tragedy started the waterworks in the Park, she turned from me in her sorrow, then caught at my sleeve, a deliberate gesture, as though to say, Take note: I’m in control now. Giving me the once-over. I wore the old black coat, splattered jeans. She allowed me to help her up, her mist-gray sweater the softest cashmere. I don’t often traffic with strangers in the Park, nod at a permissible distance, offer faint smiles to children. But we were not strangers. We were known to each other by caste. There, I’ve said it. We shared the downward glance of well-brought-up girls, feelings guarded, protective demeanor.

Raw red eyes. Twirling her rings: My husband died last night. Then: Four o’clock, this morning. Steady, cultured voice delivering these few words with a hesitant smile. Was she crippled by gentility, unhinged by grief? Plain crazy? Uncle Tom’s Cabin slipped to the ground. Well, that’s a weeper.

Anything I can do, spilled from my mouth. Tears stung my eyes for no possible reason. We could not move beyond this moment of mutual pity, a recognition scene, daughter and mother long lost. Anything, arms open in an idle gesture. When the frame flicked forward, we were nothing to each other.

Her false smile, It’s done, managed. Choking sobs came upon her again.

She left at once, with a determined efficiency ran toward a massive outcropping of stone, an adornment hauled into view by Olmsted’s design, never a natural feature of Seneca Village. The flat land the settlers built on is a footnote in the elaborate history of the Park. I watched her lean on the mighty stone, arms outstretched as though embracing a tomb, then stomp the ground, a display of anger before she briskly headed toward the Ramble, where a weeping widow might easily lose herself in the plotted wilderness. She had left Uncle Tom behind. I’d come to the Park for an encounter with the poets, a look-see at Robby Burns, Walter Scott, Longfellow—recalling inappropriate lines of Evangeline memorized in high school.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks . . .

I was on my way to those gentle rhymers set in perpetuity on their plinths, All Saints, more or less. Did I remember each and every poet settled to his work in mighty bronze chairs, pens poised above unflappable pages? Was Longfellow among them? And why should I want to check it out now, lost clue to my scribbler’s life launched more than a half century ago with an outpouring of abysmal undergraduate poetry? To my credit, I abandoned Calliope, that carnival imp of a muse, for plain prose, which I believed to be more honest than hip-hop iambs never torn from my soul. I knew for certain that the Bard stands on his own in the Olmsted Circle, playbook in hand, contemplating his next scene:

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing

The following line lost in the dust mouse of memory along with CP marginalia, the year of our No Nukes march to the Sheep Meadow—’82 or ’83?; though I am clear on the Preppy Murder, Gay Pride, and the Polish Pope blessing an overflow of the faithful on the Great Lawn, urging them to multiply. I started again for the Mall when, suddenly overcome with the flip-flop thump of my heart, I turned back, took the distraught woman’s place on the cold ground. A tandem on the roadway swiveled out of control, the bikers righting themselves, not taking the spill. Mother and daughter live in our elevator bank. They pedal together in perfect trust. Always helmeted, safe home from their risky business. I have seldom seen them apart. Suddenly a moody sky. Caretakers gathering their charges. I began to leaf through Mrs. Stowe’s popular novel, could not recall when I first read it. Why would the newly minted widow bring Uncle Tom as a comfort to the sloping fields once Seneca Village? The blacks at this location having been turned out of their homes for the construction of the Park. As though on cue, or just coincidentally, I noticed a human bundle on a bench, awarded it my fleeting attention.

A huddled figure in a puffy vest, shawl thrown over his head, woke to the cold light of day, foraged through his shopping cart until he came up with a respectable hat, a black Willie Nelson prop, hitched the strap under his chin. In the daily drama of the Park, he was not an unusual figure. When the ground I sat on was the Village, a drifter might have been taken in by the black citizens with boardinghouses and a public school in the basement of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, that mouthful of redemption. But such thoughts only come now after the road not taken to Literary Walk, its proper name. Shameful, calling upon the cover of history to excuse my not seeing the young man with grizzled dreadlocks, assigning him a role—homeless, indigent. In the desolate tract that lay above the Village, he might have boiled bones, eaten slops with mostly Irish squatters, many parishioners of St. Lawrence O’Toole—an exiled Archbishop of Dublin, appropriate to my contemplation of martyrs on this first day of November; or he might have camped in the northern swamps that Olmsted drained for the painterly effect of his greensward, then flooded by design for his lakes. I cast my eyes down, not to witness the vagrant getting his act together, presuming he’d soon wheel his cart through Mariner’s Gate to be in the company of the homeless who stake out nightly ports of safety on the benches along Central Park West. Till the cops move them on. The widow’s tears, my idle offer of consolation, the forgotten line from Midsummer Night’s Dream:

And gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

The turf I sat on was newly seeded. I had not noticed the tender lawn that might or might not get through the hard season ahead. Still, I sat firm, flipping through the abandoned novel. Early passages were marked in the margin with a thin pencil line. The weeping woman had written single words of notation in a minuscule hand: accurate, clever. I made out stunning set on the page where Eliza, the beautiful quadroon, leaps across on the ice floe to freedom, child in her arms. Soon after its publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly had more copies in print than the Holy Bible. That I did know, but who reads it now? Assigns it? Purveyors of catch-up culture demoting or promoting the antebellum best seller? A curiosity, a send-up like Barnum’s display of freaks and moral dramas?

And why would a woman, claiming to be widowed this very day, choose to sit with Uncle Tom in the Park? Straining to make out her cramped hand, I began to read where she marked a page with a shocking pink Post-it: Tsk, tsk, Mrs. Stowe!

Tom, who had the soft, impressionable nature of his kindly race, ever yearning towards the simple and childlike, watched the little creature with daily increasing interest. To him she seemed something almost divine; and whenever her golden head and deep blue eyes peered out upon him from behind some dusky cotton-bale, or looked down upon him over some ridge of packages, he half believed that he saw one of the angels stepped out of his New Testament.

Tom’s awe when first looking upon the bewitching blond child, Little Eva, who looked down upon him—and don’t you know he can read his Bible, though a note informs the student of the prohibition in the South against teaching coloreds to read, thus promoting: Classroom Discussion. Looking up from the instructive page, I witnessed the close of this working day, men and women in business suits and sneakers, students heading home with mighty backpacks. I joined them on the roadway to the clearing where Bridle Path splits from Reservoir Track. There, on the curve of benches that face the public water fountain, my vagrant was conducting a class, strumming his guitar in the twilight, cowboy hat tipped back as he sang. He was quite at home instructing an intense young man who had laid aside his IBM notebook and a mother with twins sleeping side by side in their stroller. They strummed, oh they strummed together, the students straining to see the score between them in the dying light of day. The wind rustling the reeds on the bank of the Reservoir accompanied them in a dreamy autumnal rendition of “Honeysuckle Rose.” A small audience assembled. One sing-along girl fished in her purse for a dollar, but this was not a charity affair. The class became a session when the Park lights went on. One by one we drifted off, leaving their music to fade in the brisk evening air, and I heard the opening phrase of “When the Saints . . .” Or only imagined it, as I tend to in retouching the picture, for I wanted to be in that number, to set one last stroke to the story of this day when the saints come marching in.

So tell me, your poets?

Got caught up in Seneca, you know. Well, of course you know.

I repeat my stories. The raw deal when the Village was taken from the rightful owners lot by lot, the goodwill of the proposal for a People’s Park reduced to city politics, real estate deals. Many gentlemen of the Union League Club, strict abolitionists, figured that displacing the black settlers might work to their advantage. We’d not be here in the third wave of uptown development were it not for the eviction of the citizens of Seneca Village. You knew I’d never made it, the distance to the Mall. It was an evening like so many, clips of the war, your incessant switching channels, just like my brother, as though the dumb machine might yield more than the nightly serving of media porridge. But dinner, in fact, was quite nice—lamb chops and mashers; so was your day in the office—profitable.

All Souls’ Day, November 2, 2007

In the morning I discovered the inconsolable Marie Claude, Marie Claude! to be the second wife of Hans Gruen, sometime scholar at the Kennedy School, who had served as an Undersecretary of the Treasury in the Carter administration. The obituary tracked his career from Harvard to London School of Economics, professor of political economy to a post at the World Bank. A long list of his accomplishments. As in a perfectly cast world, firm jaw, full head of silver hair, yet with a touch of a schoolboy grin for all his harrowing travels to those in need of his attention. For many years Gruen, Senior Fellow, had dispensed the liberal care of his foundation. The notice was fresh, not dated. He had recently returned from the Sudan, assessing the lockstep of oil revenues with human-rights abuses. Gruen had been criticized for favoring divestment market merchandising, a term you will explain. His longtime concern: child soldiers, boys for hire, that note tacked on along with his near Pulitzer, a debunking of Reaganomics. So, the weeping woman had scolded herself, running from her husband’s death. Marie Claude Montour, associate professor of American history at a college in Jersey City. Odd, very odd, yet there was my answer to the puzzle of Uncle Tom, her questions written in a neat hand—Read chapters assigned as serial novel. Romantic racism? The cool classroom inquiry did not meld with the fresh sorrow of yesterday. I thought to return the book with her scant teaching notes, mail it to the foundation. Marie Claude, that sandy flop of yellow hair, younger than her husband, it figured. I clipped the Times obit, filed it away with my collection of Park notations, though my chance meeting with the second wife of Hans Gruen was merely personal, nothing to do with my attempt to document the landscaped garden of my earthbound Metropolis, my final, if limited, view.

All Souls’ Day troubled me beyond the passing of an admirable man whose life never touched mine. On this day, turning back to the front page where the gotcha game of uranium spinners was playing itself out, I feared the Last Judgment; shouldn’t we all? At The End will we skip through the killing fields, player piano sending us off? It was then I recalled a way down, down the rabbit hole, gray hair escaping my Alice band. I went to the shelf where I stack Marina Warner’s exploration: From the Beast to the Blonde, On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers with Ovid, Yeats’ Irish Tales, the Brothers Grimm, and My Sunday Missal, a little black book, the worse for wear by a pious girl, with the stories that once fed her unblinking faith day by day and turned to—

The Souls of those who departed this life in the grace of God, but with debts still owed to His Justice, are purified of stain in Purgatory.

Debts still owed? I was told to believe it as a child. Not by my mother or father: they were surprisingly free of such blessed instruction. I asked my brother why I bought into the accounting system of salvation then, at an early age, began posting credit in my favor, assigning myself the star role in the family story; and now believe I must pay off my debts in this exhausted confessional form.

Debased, not exhausted. Lighten up, Mimi. Get Out of Jail Free. And then he consoled me: That book, your D-Day extravaganza, overreaching it’s true, but reading War and Peace as a kid, you were trifling with subjects eternal. You had—his whisper recharged with a cough—even had a go at Apocalypse. I imagine a gnomish smile as he toddled across the room with his pronged cane, faced the shelf with every word I’ve committed. A touch of purgatory waiting through his slow progress as he came back to the phone, then began to read the embarrassment—how Bible-deprived I was in my youth, confined to the upbeat story of redemption, chapter and verse of the terrifying Old Testament withheld in my little black book that tracked the liturgical calendar, an anthology adjusted to each passing day, an almanac of sorts. He had ferreted out my attempt at a personal take on the Bible, my reading of scarifying last things in Revelation no less.

Jubilant, my brother settles to his task: Listen to this!

Then, in a lilting voice mocking mine, he reads the damning performance: I worry myself to death writing against the doctrine of continuous narrative. I’m all for multiple stories, splicing it together in biblical fashion. Silence. I imagine that in this pause he turns to discover the date, ’88, then proceeds to give me grief about highfalutin blather written to please a dreary conference on intertextuality, fashionable that year. Poor old Bible, he says, and picks up with my—Is it a presumption, or a transgression, to read the Good Book as cobbled together stories, one episode playing off another?

A transgression! Plain old sinful, telling in your own words, Mims, his laughter choking, out of control. Forget the forbidden King James Version: same story in our homespun translations. You told in your own simple words the fantastic tale of Daniel in the Lion’s Den, his buddies thrown in the fiery furnace. And how did you get into Apocalypse then? Apocalypse now. If you want to worry yourself to death read the morning paper. Where’s the festering outrage?

I was simply . . .

Not simple enough. Just say it. We were Catholics.

We never read the hard lessons. All stories skipped along to the Resurrection.

He suggests the Crucifixion. It’s like arm wrestling on the kitchen table, though neither one of us has the strength to pin the other. I hear him speak to his arthritic chocolate Lab in their consoling private language, then clearly to me: All Souls’ was a day off from school. End of the Halloween candy. We’re all grown up now, aren’t we?

Sent back to my room to lighten up or to memorize the multiplication tables, a task I could handle. I should never have put my ignorance on display, not at that conference, which I believe embraced hypertext, welcomed the search-and-employ manipulations of early Internet exploration. I put the little black Mass book back on the shelf, not sure whether to blame its coercive calendar or praise it as enduring folklore. Washed in the blood of the lamb, am I let off the hook by the ingenious idea of Purgatory? Like Green Stamps, if they’re still around, calculating points for the promised day when I can cash in my prayers and good deeds for the microwave, airline mileage, season’s pass through the Pearly Gates. Or just take my place in the bleachers on this day, All Souls’.

You draw a blank, the old mystified look; actually blinking your eyes. What in the world, not in the world, am I talking about? Purgatory! Your smile is indulgent, a pat on the head for an investment you can only consider as cultural baggage. Risk management.

Chastened, I turn to the daily encounters in Central Park. I swear to owe nothing to the mother lode of memories, a photo recently found of our parents walking hand in hand down Fifth Avenue. Delighted to be released from Bridgeport, just for the day. Who snapped them? All that old stuff. I am under self-imposed orders: pay attention to here and now, to the deal they are pulling off in the oval office, placing the money on black, spinning the wheel of misfortune. It is not a game of skill, don’t we know! We’ve seen the footage with coded signals, the pitcher idling, twice touching the tip of his cap, the catcher bouncing his butt. Low ball. Shouting through the megaphone a cheerless message, he has wandered in from another game without the call of safe home, the sweeping gesture of forgiveness. Lately he has called out for nuance, for closure. If he uses these words three times in a sentence, he will own them.

But I’m advised not to carry on about the present, not to speak of all that old stuff. Time out of mind, that OK?

In any case, my brother said, reading my mind always, if your angst is about our parents, they lie side by side in St. Michael’s Cemetery. All is forgiven. I heard the dog collapse at his feet, the snort of its pain. His master’s grunt as he reaches down to soothe the gray muzzle. Day of the Dead has come and gone. They do it up in style down Mexico way. Food for the departed and music, call them back for the party. Weren’t you writing the view from your window? Daily walk in the Park, that sort of thing?

I thought to e-mail a tart response, a recently updated accounting of our dead in the Battle of the Argonne, our father’s war, thought better of it, found a CP postcard, the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, big storybook balanced on his knee. In the flowering plaza, the ugly duckling is the only one listening to his magic tale.

I wrote: The present is prelude to the past. Thought better of that, saved the stamp.

But it will never end between the two of us, till the end. His e-mail posted in the morning: Hope, ye unhappy ones: ye happy ones, fear.—The Anatomy of Melancholy

No answer to that. I head to my dig, Seneca Village. “Melancholy Baby” signals my husband’s call.

Hi! I can’t call up my sins of omissions.

Say again?

Am I allowed to rage against the mercenaries waging our wars?

You feed me new material. Oil’s up and gold. Then: Taking care?

Seneca

West of the reservoir, within the limits of The Central Park lies a neat little settlement known as “Nigger Village.” . . . It is to be hoped that their removal will be effected with as much gentleness as possible.

—“The Present Look of Our Great Central Park,”
July 9, 1856, the New York Daily Times

The truth, if told at all, must need be dreadful.

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Hans Gruen died at 4:13 in the morning. Precise about arrivals and departures, he was often at the mercy of meetings running late, airport delays. He liked a drink with his wife at six-thirty. They were not together for dinner often enough. His children knew that their Sunday call must come just after nine o’clock his time, whether he was in Brussels or in Cambridge or New York with the wicked stepmother. Charles, always the gentleman, set up his kid brother for the first call. This practice went back to their college days, when he gave his father a weekly account of his accomplishments. Ned charmed for the money. Weeks might go by when Gruen was inaccessible, or his schedule rearranged by the breaking news. He would have been amused, not annoyed, by the inconvenient hour of his death, too late for the Times obituary that day.

His wife stood at the foot of their bed, let the boys close in on his last indulgent smile, his final breath soft as a sigh. They wanted more of their father, always. When they were growing up, he had been absent so often, tracking economic disaster in general, in particular the fate of children hungry and abused. It was Charles, the sturdier son, who broke down when he closed his father’s eyes, then threw himself on the bed in a primitive keening, a supplicant, though now he would never get the attention, never be praised for the soccer trophy, the magna cum laude, the tree house he built on his own. With an unnatural strength, his stepmother pried him away, led him to the window to look down upon blank silence offered by the city in the middle of the night, unsure that view was a comfort.

Amanda, the younger son’s wife, had been in these last few days, show ily incompatible with grief, leafing through Vogue until she knew the gaudy allure of each handbag by heart, ducking out of the vigil to meet friends for lunch. Claude—that was Gruen’s wife—now directed Ned and the girl—Hans persisted in calling Amanda the girl—to touch the cool flesh of her husband’s hand. Marie Claude had been christened MC, Mistress of Ceremonies, when she first took charge of events beyond Thanksgiving and Christmas—taxes, car insurance, yes, really, the rental of their cottage on Nantucket, all home economics to the man who, just back from the Sudan, would support targeted divestments in the petroleum sector, but did not live to elaborate on that moral scheme. The wicked stepmother: his joke when he brought his sons to meet Claude, a lifetime ago. The younger son now held her in his arms, Ned, the simpler boy who sought a replacement mother from the day he was born.

She called Gruen’s office, could not bring herself to leave on tape the message they were expecting. The doctor said he would come at once to the apartment, death not officially closing the case. Claude proposed that in the morning Charles’ wife send the children to school. There was no need at this point to shepherd them in from Connecticut. The hospice nurse gathered the last vials of medication. She asked if Mrs. Gruen would like tea. Lili had been on night duty with Gruen in New York Hospital and here at home. A tidy body from the Philippines with a lilting accent, she spoke to her patient in a whisper each night of the crisis, bathed his dry lips with a sponge, begged a smile when she placed his finger on the silver cross on her neck, never guessing that Mr. Gruen had no use for her Christ on the cross, only the good works of human effort.

Her role was not finished. Recording final dosage: the last rite of her service. The teapot was warm, as though Lili had known the hour of his death was upon her patient and his family. Skilled in consolation, she doled out the half spoon of sugar for Claude, who wanted the nurse and these grown boys to leave her alone with her husband but could not bring herself to say it.

Amanda fussed about a particular black dress she had sent to the cleaners, and wondered if a coat might be needed.

Her husband spoke softly not to offend. Why needed? No funeral. Ned had known for some years he’d married a brittle porcelain doll, self-absorbed like his mother, a guilt-free queen of décor and the bountiful gifts of the mall. He is the handsome son, slight and reedy, disfigured with a scrag gly beard. The adventure capitalist, his father called him, bailing him out time and again. There would be no again.

There would be no funeral in accordance with Gruen’s wishes.

When Claude was finally alone with her husband’s body, she knelt by the bed, their bed where he lay, the journey for best boy in the class over, resting in peace from the final trip he should never have taken. His weak lungs—he recently suffered a brief bout of pneumonia. Claude begged him to pass the job to an eager young woman, the one who spoke Arabic.

Arabic not needed this time out. Just dollars and common sense.

Dr. Do-Good.

I will be—said as a complaint—escorted wherever I go. See only what they want the old man to see. Led about like a rock star or visiting congressman.

Then why go?

He held out his cell phone displaying his doctors’ numbers—office, home, weekends.

Not about to believe that excellent medical advice would be carried out in a refugee camp, sub-Saharan, she scolded, In case of an emergency take two aspirin, drink plenty of clean water.

Don’t be foolish, my dear.

Had he said my dear? Hans playing Daddy Warbucks over the years to her Annie. She gave up, gave in to his determination.

Smoothing the dent in his ring finger, she cried at her loss. In the hospital Lili had removed his wedding band, for safety. Time warped; the sun did finally rise, yet there would be the long day to get through. First, the doctor with kind words signing the official death certificate, dealing out Xanax to alleviate bereavement, dismissing Lili as she served more tea. Then on to phone calls, mumbled condolences, to arrangements that the Mistress of Ceremonies was, at this moment, not famously good at. She recalled the elaborate business of death, had buried, as they say, her mother and father. This past week she canceled her classes, no trip on Jersey Transit to the gritty school where improbably they first met, Hans Gruen and Claude Montour. His sons spoke with due solemnity of a memorial service, disposal of ashes. Charles reviewed the prepared obit for the Times. It was known that Gruen had entered the hospital, cause of death an aneurysm. Claude diagnosed it as exhaustion, years hooking up life support to the incurable world. Hans admitted to abandoning his routine on a long flight—skipping the Sudafed, not walking the aisles, perhaps knew he was dying. In his rush to get home unescorted, he crashed into economy class on the final link from Paris. A clot formed in his lungs, traveled to his brain, that generous brain. The doctors double-talked his inoperable chances. Hans demanded living, living so far as he was able, his last days at home.

To Claude it seemed not their home, neighbors hovering, brandy and soda before breakfast. A wisp of a young man in a waiter’s jacket followed her back to the bedroom, a servant Mrs. Gruen had not called into play. Looking upon the dead, he blessed himself. It came back to Marie Claude from childhood. She performed the swift crisscross gesture she’d been taught by her aunts. Then the discovery came upon her—abandoned. And when abandoned as a child, she had refused the comfort offered, ran away from a home not hers, a spook house where she was billeted while her mother pursued an episode of true romance. The slight man in the white jacket mumbled in Spanish, a fragment of prayer. He cast his eyes down, asked at what time lunch should be served.

Kneeling by the bier that was their bed, she heard the girl, Amanda. She must not be left alone. Then Marie Claude shut the door, said good-bye to her husband, clear and plain, not a whisper or a quick buss on the slack cheek, fleeting like the kisses bestowed when he hailed a taxi for Penn Station, packed her off to her classes in New Jersey. In recent months she looked back to see if he was steady as he walked along with the computer slung on a strap over his shoulder, balancing the old briefcase in hand. Saw his little two-step of recovered balance as the driver helped him into the car that would take him to the foundation where he had served his time. At the end of this year, he would graduate from Senior Fellow to Emeritus. Alive, alive-O, that became their sing-along at the breakfast table as she doled out his meds for the day: cockles and mussels, alive, alive-O . . . Sweet Molly Malone, Molly, the name of the mother who abandoned her to territory unknown in the Berkshires; idling with great-aunts, not a great passage in a girl’s shattered life. Raised on extravagant love and neglect, she was left-baggage in a ruined house. When she inherited its sagging ceilings, loping stairs and leaning tower, Hans had said raze it. Sell the ground it stands on as commercial property. She couldn’t find it in her heart—remembers speaking the wistful phrase—find it in her heart to demolish the old wreck, named it Mercy House as in—have mercy. For years it has been Mercy Learning Center for Women. As though she could roll back the emotional insolvency of her family, make amends, share with illiterate women what little she earned as a teacher. The house was in restoration when she married Hans. He called it a folly, her blue-chip folly.

How long did she kneel by their bed? How fiercely insist she must watch as Gruen’s body was efficiently placed on a gurney, wheeled down the back hall, out the kitchen door to the service elevator? So that’s how it’s done—by two young attendants trained in the comfort of their neutrality. Left alone, she went at once to her Victorian dresser, its stained marble top facing off with Hans’ sleek Scandinavian wardrobe. Complementary, he said of their possessions, books in particular. His first editions of Ricardo, Das Kapital, all of Keynes and Galbraith; her worn copies of Mrs. Dalloway, Walden, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Day by day, his facts, her fancy. She grabbed a gray sweater, the one he brought from London midsummer, presented to her triumphantly: Costly, now the dollar is down. As long predicted. A gift he could easily afford. There was always some prize in his briefcase, a cowrie-shell necklace, a vial of precious saffron, a glass paperweight with a cricket trapped inside.

Today was Friday, almost midday. For days she hadn’t done a lick of work. How did that come to mind? Her work was why Hans first loved her, so she supposed, when she was still starry-eyed with trust in the historical record, wondering if she could truly care for this man who asked with an arch smile, The truth will set us free?

Now that he was gone, her every move seemed planned—slipping the book from the bag with student papers, following the route of her husband’s body. Stealing—back hall to kitchen door where she let herself out, rang for the service elevator, thanked the bewildered operator for his kind words. The half block to Fifth Avenue, then on to the Park, finding her way across the drive to Seneca Village, where she would read dry-eyed her preparation for class. Marie Claude (her childhood name) was good at hard lessons.

Amanda said, We were about to call the police.

Appropriately, Claude cried. She had been gone for an hour—longer. Her husband would have clocked it exactly. My loss, now isn’t that foolish? His leaving me. Gruen left so often for extravagant good works, this last time for the oil proposal and to observe thousands behind the chain-link fence of no-man’s land. He would write a report not limited to financial aid, give in to the old passion before he was elevated to Emeritus.

Why, against my pleading—a sharp edge to Claude’s words—for God’s sake, as though a dose of economics, a shipment of rice . . . She stopped mid-sentence not to offend staff from his office. They were family arriving without invitation. Not to say your big checkbook will never end a long history of revenge, she recalled his care for child soldiers, those killer kids his concern well before Rwanda. Visiting the camps, Hans could spot the one child in a gang perhaps redeemable. She brought to mind the apocryphal story of an appealing boy. Handed over his machete.

Kalashnikov, Ned’s correction.

In any case his weapon, to the American about to take notes on his education in violence. That boy, safe as sheet-metal houses, last heard of teaching school in Swaziland. If there was another rescue this last time out, Hans did not live to document the appeal of a child now truly lost. Delivering this impromptu eulogy, Claude ushered the mourners toward the front hall. They lingered. It seemed she would never reclaim a moment alone with her sorrow. The Park had provided confrontation, not comfort. She understood why they’d come. Her husband knew each caseworker, each volunteer by name, meted out generous praise for their efforts, his care for their lengthy reports on the useless distribution of beans without access to clean water; this renewed anger at the diminishing promise of Oil for Food, UN millions ripped off. He dropped his professorial cool raging at the low estimate—twenty thousand children kidnapped—Liberia and Sudan.

She said: Armed boys malnourished, living in camps. Then fell silent. The wisp of a servant: Lo siento mucho, lo siento, poured more tea in Claude’s mug than a body could bear.

What’s he say? Amanda, patting the bump of her belly, suggested the Xanax: Which you know I can’t take. The girl, at long last, expecting a child. My bubble dress at the cleaners, perfect for the reception.

Reception?

Charles took control, brought Claude back to the bedroom where his father had lain in state through the long night. Gruen’s bathrobe lay at the ready on his reading chair as though he might rise to scan a report, search out the briefcase that traveled with him the long flight from Khar toum to Paris to home.

Always, the tidying. She picked up his slippers, worn at heel. You might want . . . ? She was ripping the sheets off the bed, Lili’s job surely, and couldn’t help but think that in records of the colonial past she once scoured, the American past in the diaries of women, accounts of washing and dressing the bodies of their husbands, often with the help of neighbors.

She said: The best shirt would be laundered, hands folded over the chest for the viewing. The boots polished, passed along to a son. Though, of course, it was more often the wife or mother who died. It was a relief to talk in this school-mistress way, a clip of history taking up the sudden slack of emotion. All true, she told Charles, the christening gown was not buried with the dead child, saved in a chest for the next one sure to come along. She told Hans’ middle-aged boy, beefy and broad, once an athlete with the trophies to prove it, that she had, after all, met his father at a seminar table.

He lectured. Emerging markets, I remember. And I challenged him, what gall. It should never have happened, his coming to that limp branch of a city college.

Charles brushed a twig out of her hair: He said: I’ll stay with you tonight. His wife would drive the children in from Greenwich in the morning.

Now Amanda stood in the doorway, eyes fixed on the tear in Claude’s slacks. You going off like that so upset me. She offered the Xanax in its plastic bubble.

Claude said: Why should I want to dull my loss? Yet, she must say something about her absence and with that purpose went to the dining room, where the last of the visitors had reassembled, the boy techie from Hans’ office among them. Dr. Gruen had valued his instruction. Tea party sandwiches were cleared from the table.

Charles took the calls. A congressman, then a photographer his father had an affair with long before Claude came on the scene. The black dress at Madame Celeste could be picked up in this emergency. Then Newsweek presuming there might be more to the story.

More than my father’s death? He drew back, dealt politely with the journalist pushing inquiries with the body still warm. PetroChina drilling beyond AU allotment? Gruen toured illegal mines in the Congo? Not this trip. Charles pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen, with one hand manipulated the wallet from his back pocket, overpaid the little guy. Lo siento, siento, storing away the sandwiches. No story beyond Gruen ’s long career monitoring what, in Africa, he might call the growth industry of human suffering. He had stolen that phrase from his father, hoped the journalist would not use it. Nineteen thirty-two. My father would have been seventy-five this month, still saving the world.

When he returned to the mourners, Claude had taken up her place again at the head of the table, telling Ned, Amanda, the neighbors they had always meant to visit and the fresh delegation of volunteers from Gruen’s office that in her grief she ran off to the Park, where they often walked on a Sunday to admire the Conservatory Garden. She thanked Hans’s assistant for the stiff arrangement of flowers, so unlike the casual bouquets she ordered to greet the golden donors and powerful guests for dinner.

I’ll be fine now. We’ll come together tomorrow. She had no idea what that meant, come together, fine. Then, to call a stop to sighs and anecdotal remembrance, thought she must say something about Hans for these good people and the sake of his children. A loving husband and father, chill, fit for a headstone. She said, We shared him, we all did.

End of the interminable day, Charles brought her to the spare room where she had been sleeping since her husband was transported home from the hospital. Fussing over towels and soap, he set Claude up as a guest. The night light cast him as a looming shadow of the father who eluded him all his life. The reliable son, clocking in more pro bono than his law firm allowed: for his sake she hated her lie about the Conservatory Garden. He must know from the rip in her pants, the disorder of her hair, she had not walked up Fifth Avenue to look at flower beds perfectly groomed. She now saw herself in the mirror, a smudge of dirt on her temple. On the Sunday before his final African trip she tore Hans from his work to come with her to the Park. Her loving, though often distracted, husband agreed to a cab up Madison. They walked the short block to the Vanderbilt Gate. In the garden, lilies were making their last gaudy show. They watched a hummingbird levitate over a red flower. What flower is that? City people wondering at the bird’s small iridescent body, its helicopter wings. The overbred blooms of hydrangeas nodded in the breeze, a thousand clowns. Hans had tired. Silenced in their disagreement of what might come to pass on his last African adventure, they settled on a bench, soaking in the heat of Autumn. They spoke, predictably, of global warming. Why hadn’t she told Charles the simple truth? That she was foolishly clear in her purpose as she ran the short distance to Seneca Village. Indeed crazed, plopping down on the grass, reading through tears, knowing that Uncle Tom trimmed to bare bones would not make the medicine go down for her class in Jersey City.

Yo, Mama Teresa, improvin’ my black ass? Always one hoodie with the nerve to mock the gangstaspeak he aimed to leave behind. The girls were so pleased at Miss Montour’s cool. They could not guess her husband’s patronage, honoring her for teaching inner-city kids. Some would make the grade. One girl had actually read Mrs. Stowe’s novel, all 450 pages: Felice, a Haitian far ahead of the pack. Proficient in Toussaint’s Rebellion, searching for news of our Civil War, she asked who might be labeled Uncle Tom. She’d heard that expression.

A Supreme Court judge, a Pullman porter. His trade went out with the last guilty laugh at Stepin Fetchit. But then Miss Montour had to gloss Pullman, provide footnotes for pandering and the stupefying vaudeville performance.

Gruen honored her equally for the grit of her teaching and for playing the gracious lady with foundation folk. It simplified matters for them to believe they were in the same game: for Hans to come home and mix drinks at the set hour, for Claude to report, as on the day before his departure, which kid sassed her. For her husband to confess there’s almost no one to salvage in a parched village in Chad. Dignity: as far back as Mozambique, he found the word useless in speaking of rehabilitation of the millions behind the barbed-wire enclosure of their history. Often he looked with pride at his wife’s notes scattered on the couch. Never class notes. This past year she was attempting to write a paper tracking the fate of a runaway slave hidden here in the city.

Looking into was the phrase Claude used, demoting her academic work to something like a hobby, her papers published with little notice. She was currently looking into Bill Dove, a smart house servant, young at the time he ran from a tobacco plantation in Virginia. She was looking into stations of the Underground Railroad in this city that sent the fugitives on to Quakers in New England. Dove’s name in faded ink on letters in the New-York Historical Society suggested he may have been hidden in the cellar of a house owned free and clear by Alonzo See, a cartman who lived with his sister in Seneca Village. William Dove we called Billy, in Betha See’s gliding hand, written from Riverside Heights after the Civil War, was a sweet man to behold at our table. Billy moved upcity with us for a season. Wind off the river blew away his fancy. He went from me on his onward journey. Claude figured Betha had fallen for the lively Dove, his charm, his antics, though back in the Village wooden board houses were propped on stone, so perhaps it was in Alonzo’s shed, not cellar, where she kept him like a prize pony, a handsome and entertaining boy who danced jigs, sang songs of the plantation. Not a scrap of evidence in Uncle Tom touched on the city life of a figure like Dove. Claude assigned the novel to herself as well as her class. Mrs. Stowe in her pulpit, self-ordained:

The negro, it must be remembered, is an exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world, and he has, deep in his heart, a passion for all that is splendid, rich and fanciful, a passion which rudely indulged by an untrained taste, draws the ridicule of the colder and more correct white race.

The passage often cited as clear evidence of the novelist’s condescension. Claude thought to play it again as she searched out the flamboyant figure of Bill Dove. How long had he lived with the Sees in the settlement on the Heights, a prisoner of Betha’s affection? This day I have sewn the last stitch on a Sunday shirt of fine cotton for our Billy. Then he’s gone missing, four years, five. Talk about stitching: the gaps in Dove’s history patched by guesswork—New York saddled with the Fugitive Slave Act, though unofficially not in compliance. Further supposing his wiles, she finds Dove hired by Boss Tweed, living once again as a domestic. In one of those rare moments, a historian’s dream, she discovers her Billy as porter for the Boss. Four “coloreds” worked in the household of this powerful man known for his Negrophobia. Thing is, Hans loved her discoveries, how she read history in the little guy’s unheralded work and days. Appropriating the past, he called it. Her essays, not all of them pleasantly anecdotal, might be read as small stories despite the apparatus of bibliography and endnotes. The indentured servant of the widow Eliza Tibbs, her education and subsequent freedom. The Parisian tailor of Benjamin Franklin. The midwife who wrote each day in her journal while plying her trade through blizzards and haying, paddling swollen rivers on her journeys to stillbirth or new life in New England cabins.

Now Claude thought she must never publish the charming story of a runaway who came up in the world to serve a corrupt politician in the Gilded Age, ushering Tweed’s guests into the drawing room on Lower Broadway. The night before he died, Hans rallied to speak of her project as though they might go on with the old routine, catch up on discoveries of her day. With great effort, he told of the millions Tweed’s ring ripped off the city. That would be—the effort of his breathing as he converted the Boss’s take to today’s currency—that would be eleven million, small change. Missionaries, he said falling into a sleep.

Though in fact, the 11 million was aid lost to warlords in the country he had just looked into, far less than Tweed’s 45 swiped from the coffers of the city. Missionaries, that’s all we are, her husband often said. Let it be known to celebrities discovering Africa—his good humor avoiding despair—missionaries, throwbacks to those innocents sent to convert the lost tribes. Your Jesuits, my minister in a pith helmet. His Lutheran grandfather had made Christians of the Chinese. They claimed the term lightly. Missionary work, he called the life she was currently looking into, her appropriation of this entertaining Bill Dove—Take care, no minstrel show. Claude would never enjoy her first reader again, bask in his admiration. Impossible to tell his boys, even Charles who might defend her from the charge of History Lite, that his father loved her persistence, hanging in with uncharted lives, small truths—well, at least stories that may not set us free. Her reading of Miss See’s diary placed Dove in family living quarters, not the pigsty or hen coop of speculation. She sat on the edge of the guest bed, not ready to give up this final day, heard a shrill whistle, a coach making a call on the television in Hans’ study. His big boy settling into a game; but Charles came to her door rumpled, beer in hand. His pleasure as he handed her the framed shot of his father with a crop of rusty hair going white at the edges. Gruen, chin up for the photo op with the smiling Nelson Mandela.

I know. With wounded children in Darfur. Oh, I know.

In the Park she had run to the very spot, the banished Seneca Village, where her subject, Bill Dove, was hidden from the authorities who might ship him back to Massa, shackled not beaten. Frederick Law Olmsted had written about the Slave States when cotton was king. Mrs. Stowe praised him as a fellow abolitionist. Hans would understand that she must sort it out, whether to cite Olmsted as a good guy carefully recording testimony of a Virginian he’d known at Yale who fed him a conciliatory line: free men were better workers. You could get an Irishman for $120 a year, cheaper than a slave’s board and keep. Olmsted laid it all out, the Southerner hedging his moral bets—you really wanted nothing to do with a slaver, a man who traded in flesh.

As though not a club to belong to, Hans said.

That was it, and why was she impatient with Olmsted’s paternalis tic chatter allowing that, if free, the Negro should be reprogrammed—morally brought up to snuff, but not granted the vote? She put the landscaper’s early career down to lively reportage. Claude knew what her husband might say of cotton economics, that Irishmen were cheaper in the long run, a proposition that allowed the Virginia gentleman to barter back his soul. Something like that, so she’d think about Billy Dove, perhaps shackled if captured, sent back to serve in the opulent accommodations of Tara, not beaten. Though why would you want him when an Irish house girl came for $6 a month? The Virginian had thought the figure of Uncle Tom false, sentimental. That was in his favor. He would never be charmed by her story of Billy. Coming to Seneca was the near est thing to having Hans with her; show-and-tell time as on an evening when they sat with their drinks before supper, her notes scattered on the couch. The old economist would know to cite Olmsted as a good guy.

How long did she sit where Alonzo See’s house, so thoroughly gone, cast its faint shadow, the new sweater not warm enough over the soiled shirt she had worn for days? Not long. Then that old lady came upon her, poked into her sorrow.

She throws the quilt Charles has folded at the bottom of the bed over her shoulders, not to sleep, not to let it end, this livelong day. The quilt is a ragged thing. Little diamonds forming a star shed their batting, the work of one of the aunts who cared for her those years ago when she was abandoned. The one who sewed, not the one who played the piano. Today’s lesson, Miss Montour: memory trumps invention. Plopped down on the cold ground in Central Park, her grief was about the old hurt, not the imagined history of Dove brushing silk top hats of the corrupt gentlemen visiting the Boss of Tammany Hall, nor the lashes delivered in Uncle Tom, nor the architects of the Greensward, nor the honored gentleman who had been her husband. The Park blurred as the woman came toward her. That wondering, clueless gaze, as though with simple inquiry she might help.

So, Marie Claude ran away as a child. She had been left by her mother with two maiden aunts, dumped in an old house with mildew rampant, creaking floorboards. Abandoned, the child felt worthless as the yellowed lace petticoats and corsets, the wills, marriage certificates, letters with family history thrown in trunks that once traveled the world. She ran through the woods, storybook girl tripping over limbs of fallen trees, hair tangled in vines that devoured her grandfather’s garden. She could hear the old ladies, their fluty voices calling, Marie Claude, Marie Claude, then only the swamp suck of limp ferns, the croak of night creatures. Tripped up, she fell just as she did today, scraped her knee running from the spook house. Light at the end of the trail, the oily yellow of a kerosene lamp in a shanty with a family of squatters. She was no one to these people, a girl from the house through the woods, a big old house in advanced disrepair. The mother took her in, fed her, washed the wound, put her to bed with her little girl, Sissy. In the Park on this day of her bereavement, Claude recalled that worn woman, the baby blessed with golden curls, Sissy, dirt poor but with family. The father drank from a pint bottle, wiping the spill of whiskey off his lips. She had no one in the world—not true, but true to Marie Claude. Her father a minor diplomat off to a new posting; her mother pursuing which love affair? But on the day of her husband’s death, Claude does not question her recall of that abandoned girl, though no shack is left standing, only the memory of a coached bedtime prayer. Squatting on the ground once Seneca, the subject of her inquiry, she cried softly as the woman approached offering help, looking like she needed help herself, her black coat worn but good in its day. Claude’s mother had trained her in matters of quality, the informed judgment of fine shoes and good haircuts, even a lack of pretension reflecting a woman’s comfortable place in the world. A legacy she hated, but there it was in a teary eye blink, the assessment of this woman, the lady pearls of refinement around her dry neck, the boast of old jeans, her soft hand with the slim wedding band comforting her. Claude ran from the kindness, embraced a hill of stone, shamed that she guessed more of this woman’s history than she ever would construct of Bill Dove’s, the story of his free life and honored place in the household of Boss Tweed. She believes she has found his later life in an advertisement for Barnum’s American Museum—Negro Song and Dance Straight from the Plantation!—The BLACK DOVE strutting down the broadside from EDUCATED WHITE RATS and THE RENOWNED HAPPY FAMILY. That would be correct: the war well over, six hundred thousand dead, Emancipation finally signed and sealed, Boss Tweed coming into full power. Why, in this time of mourning, had she recalled the song-and-dance man, Dove’s place in our culture of entertainment, one of her appropriated lives?

Because, Hans said of this work in progress, her paper with its plotting: You might call it “American Pastimes.” Now she takes his words to heart, her fiddling with time past was what he meant. Kindly, of course. And then there was Sissy, the angel child now well grown, working for her at Mercy House. He so loved the story of that girl. The Golden Legend, he called it. Not unlike her missionary work.

In the narrow bathroom meant for a maid, Claude strips for a shower. Under the three-corner tear in her slacks, her knee is swollen. The new sweater, Hans’ gift, has come through the painful incident just fine. What seemed to be a smudge of dirt on her temple now shows itself as a bruise. The water is scalding, then chill. As she towels off, it’s halftime. The blaring staccato trumpets of a high-school band: “What Now My Love?” Charles, gone shy, comes to tuck her in. Amanda has placed Xanax on the night table.

Isn’t she awful? he says.

Yes, the girl.

This day must end. Tomorrow Charles will cancel a fund-raiser, black tie. He is perfectly clear that the senior partners in his firm believe he overinvests, defending the barely defensible, scanting billable hours, but he is Gruen’s son, bad form to complain. Tomorrow he will get into his father’s computer. Tonight it will do to open the briefcase. He figures all urgent papers have been delivered to the foundation. There are published reports: environmental stress on nations surrounding Lake Chad; the inefficiency, or questionable loyalty, of hybrid peacekeepers; a note free of time and place—Long Term Development; a slim bracelet of woven straw wrapped in Arabic newsprint. There is the cell phone with Dr. Gruen’s core numbers—work, family, the doctor who allowed him to die at home, and a run of photos on the small screen of a boy with scant flesh on his bones, the black knobs of his knees and elbows painful to behold. The kid wears a camouflage T-shirt, floppy white sneakers. Here he bends over a bowl, hand scooping gruel into his mouth; here with a whip in hand; here brandishing a grenade, then a rifle, a machete in a PowerPoint display of the weapons he has used in his war. Gruen about to make his case for the boy before he became a cause? Or just a last encounter, one boy among many playing with guns. And here is this photo—bright sun against the frail reed fence—the boy with a man in a dated safari jacket. Gruen sickly, smiling. The thin smile his sons had been awarded, not often enough. In the morning Charles will scoop the Times up from the doorstep, see how it reads, his father’s life. Tomorrow his children will be brought into the city.

His daughter, sucking her braid, lets Claude kiss her. It’s Saturday. Missing his soccer game, Charles’ son tugs at his team jersey, doesn’t have to be coached: Sorry, really sorry he’s gone, that last, almost a question.

She had taken the long route home, daring the Ramble. In the confusion of paths, Claude came upon a flock of birdwatchers. Running, she ruined their silence. The leader threw a handful of seed. A greedy flutter of wings. She ran on in this picture-perfect wilderness, climbed the hill from which the wide screen of the city could be seen blurred by her tears. Below—the serenity of the Lake. The Angel of Bethesda Fountain, on duty blessing the waters, directed her to the straight path of the Mall, but Claude must find her way home through this tangle, past boathouse and playgrounds.

The man came round a curve from a path plotted to invite a stroll, in fact a ramble downhill. He was bent though not old, his shaved head glossy black with the sweat of his climb. He wore a running suit that had seen better days, carried a gnarled walking stick that he raised when he saw her. Hans Gruen had died. Now there was no one for his wife to tell how the stranger twirled his stick high, how she ran back down the embankment, stumbled through undergrowth, fell on sharp stone. Her head, thrust forward, came to rest on a pillow of twigs and dead leaves. He came toward her, laughing. His front teeth broken, she would remember; all but one, the one capped with gold. He rapped his stick on stone.

What you think I was goin’ to do, girl?
I don’t know. I don’t know.

Seneca: Lucius Seneca I or II, father and son, Latin poets. The father, a rhetoritician, looked back to a Golden Age in which private property, as in the Village bearing his name, did not exist at all, nor did slavery. He disapproved of his son (d. AD 65), a strict vegetarian who drank only water, tutor of Nero—morals, not the fiddle. Seneca II fell out of favor, committed suicide, a noble act, having been directed to do so rather than suffer political humiliation, thus the poison draft. He was spared the later commentary on his poetry, too lofty by far.

More likely, the village named after the Senecas, an Iroquois tribe that wisely prepared for war with the French, hiding their children and the elderly in the woods, burying crops of the last season, stripping their towns of everything of value. Or Seneca, a password of the Underground Railroad. Or Seneca Falls, where abolitionists flourished before and during the Civil War. I know this by way of a boy, twelve or thirteen, black kid in a poncho, scholarly glasses, notebook in hand. We were on a walk through Central Park, courtesy of the Conservancy, maybe a dozen history buffs, half that number by the time we reached Seneca Village that was. The guide leading our dwindling group was determined to complete her assignment on that cold, wet day. Her umbrella took off for the Diana Ross Playground, a black bat flapping against the chain-link fence. Undaunted, she called out what little information she had at her command.

Ink dribbled down the boy’s page. He carried on without notes, asked a question. Water?

Yes, they think there may have been a well.

The mysterious they of guesswork, of diggers for shards in Thebes, divers for pirate gold. They, a couple of groundsmen poking for moles or chipmunk trails, may have found a bubble of springwater that serviced the Village.

The boy said: They better have. We’re in an estuary here.

He would be in high school now, that eager kid who knew why we built a Reservoir on this island, in this Park, why our water, then as now, must be piped down from upstate. We’re afloat in seawater here, so . . . So, the coopers, the rain barrels, the cartmen of Seneca Village hauling water into the churches and school, servicing the vegetable patches and those who might afford a bath.

Did I say the boy was with his mother, who preened? And a little brother groaning with boredom, M&M’s supplied to shut him up, a roly-poly lagging behind as we climbed to the next site, Vista Rock. His game—tripping the bright boy who will be an annoyance all his life.

I trust that notebook has filled up with answers that do not wash away.