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THE CITY in autumn seemed, like the children themselves in the unaccustomed bulk of last year's woolen clothes, only changed by the new season, not renewed or refreshed. The odors were still the same when they emerged from the subway on the first school holidays and the voices of the men and women in the street seemed no less strident and incomprehensible for their cardigans and dry brows. The cool air carried less decay, perhaps, and the smell of incinerator fires had become more marked, there was a breeze in the air whose source might not have been underground, but still it was the same place in every detail, and after the suburban conflagration of autumn trees, the amended routine of school that had for now made summer seem as irrational a dream as July had once made of October, this sameness struck them as oddly dismaying; timelessness offering no appeal to the children, since everything they wanted was in the future.
Aunt Agnes had placed a sheaf of corn on the door that May opened with her usual feigned surprise at seeing them there. May had pinned a paper ghost to the mirror above the sealed fireplace. Over cocktails Veronica said, her hand in the youngest girl's hair, “The same thing again and again and
again,” or Aunt Agnes told them that she, for one, could not warm her heart with the attentions of a mailman.
At dinner the sisters plied them with roast beef and boiled potatoes and the dark descended long before there was a hope that their father might knock at the door.
From her chair Momma said, “Your father,” and the four sisters, the children too, held their breath. It was autumn then, too, she said, and it had not yet grown dark when she got home, which was why she'd been surprised when the door below her rattled and, looking over the railing, she saw their father enter the vestibule. She was on the third floor, talking with a neighbor in the hallway. She asked, “Are you all right?” and he climbed the two flights before he answered. His face was deathly white. “This head of mine again,” he said and the woman beside her murmured, “Poor man.”
“Go up, then,” she told him. “I'll be right along.” And not a minute later a cry of sorrow like she'd never heard, and by the time they reached him he was gone.
In fall the windows behind her darkened and filled with squares of yellow light before the plates were cleared, and strangers at their own dinners could be seen moving briefly through these squares. In the living room, on the coffee table before the sealed fireplace, were a dozen red rosesâblack red roses with thick leaves and brown thorns that thinned at their sharp points to the dull white color of fingernails. Entering the apartment this morning, their mother had had a brief, silly notion that they'd come for her, and along with the blinding pleasure the thought had given her there came, too, a sure resolve to change her life: for surely if he'd sent a dozen roses to her here he was not the man she'd married.
“From Fred,” Aunt May had whispered. “He bought them for me.”
Out on the street with her, with orange marshmallow
pumpkins half-eaten in their hands, the children studied him more carefully when he paused to lift his blue/gray cap and to admire once again her two nieces and her nephew. He said, “Saturday evening, then?” when they parted, and in the cool sunlight on the opposite side of the street Aunt May lifted both girls' free hands and rubbed them pinky to thumb against each other and then for a moment tucked their outspread arms beneath her own.
“Isn't your brother a handsome boy?” she said suddenly and the boy lowered his closely cropped head, only the history of his affection keeping him from despising her at that moment. “You are your mother's treasures,” she said. “You three.” But then she let up on that (one of the best things about her, the boy thought, was that she knew when and how to let up on such things) and she allowed the girls to take back their hands and their arms and to continue walking as they had been before the mailman had appeared on the opposite corner and, leaving his cart with its brown leather satchel filled with magazines and letters behind him, quickened his pace to meet them.
They were walking to the river. There had been much debate before they left regarding whether the younger girl was up to so much walking and for a moment there loomed the terrible possibility that they would go without her. But then May promised that if she got too tired they'd come back by bus, or even a cab, and she offered the child's good shoes and the cool sunny day as a kind of collateral.
At the candy store she said, when their three pairs eyes fell instantly on the orange sugar-coated marshmallows wrapped in cellophane, “Well, the sugar will give you energy.”
And orange mouths and fingers that stuck together like webs. At the park along the river she gathered them around the first drinking fountain they came upon and made them
wash their hands and rub their wet fingers across their lips. From her pocketbook she produced a man's handkerchief for drying. “This belonged to my father,” she said. It was dull white and thin as paper.
While she sat on a bench and wondered if
she
was still up to so much walking, the three children made a stiff-legged, sidestepping procession along the black bars of the fence that divided them from the water below, grabbing each rung and moving their feet step by step into the shoe-sized width between them. She watched carefully. The bars, buried in a raised foot of concrete, were, of course, secure, and far too narrow for anything more than an arm to fit through. There were only a few passersbyânone looked worth worrying aboutâand she told herself that if the three children did not start moving back toward her when they reached the lamppost she would softly call to them.
She had a memory (for certainly she, too, had walked like this as a child, walked along a fence in just this way) of encountering the thick black base of a lamppost, and because her leg could not reach around it or her fingers find anything to take hold of, she had started back againâalthough toward whom she could not say. Her father perhaps, if the memory was old enough.
The two girls wore the glen-plaid kilts she herself had bought for them and she smiled watching the way the skirts swung back and forth in perfect synchronization as they moved. The boy wore brown pants and a beige Eisenhower jacket that so set off his dark hair. Of the three, he was perhaps the best-looking, the one with the finest features, although the older girl still had a good chance at beauty. The youngest resembled her, and while she was sorry for that, she'd always felt a kind of pride, too, and so had despaired when Lucy said this morning that the child could not walk as far as the river.
Because although she had proposed the trip for the children's sake she had also seen immediately how the long walk would increase the chance that he would run into them while making his rounds; that he would notice again as he had noticed once before the resemblance between her and the child and so have some sense of what she had been like when she was young. And perhaps find something charming in the thought, all children being beautiful and that childish beauty the only kind she herself had ever known.
And now there was a new thought: perhaps for the girl to resemble her was not so bad after all. A new thought that had at its origin a dozen red roses in a cream-colored vase.
The three children stopped at the lamppost, each of them still splayed against the black fence. A brief bit of conversation seemed to pass through their shoulders where they touched and then they began to make their way back again, the youngest now in the lead. They were coming toward her.
Beyond them in the October sun there was the familiar backdrop of the city and then the gray moving waters of the river, a barge on it now that the children stopped to watch.
She had said, Your mother's treasures, and the recollection of her own childhood might have made her wonder whose treasure she had been (surely she could not really recall walking to the river with her father), but today her thoughts preferred to linger on the lucky way the morning had run, the way Lucy's hesitation about the walk had delayed them long enough and the orange pumpkins on the counter in the candy store had made their time there short enough, so that they were on the right street when he turned the corner. It might not have seemed as wonderful to a woman who had lived through it before: this sudden transformation of coincidence and happenstance into the signs and symbols that made a fate of new love or even gentle attraction, but she was living
it for the first time and she found herself going over and over again each turn the morning had taken; she found herself saying a short, silly prayer of thanks and then wondering if in order to bestow such a blessingâthis blessing of romance, middle-aged romance at thatâGod was not sometimes as foolish, as childish, in his love for us as we are when we first discover our love for one another.
The children returned, falling noisily into her lap with a new request, for peanuts from the man selling them from a cart behind her, and although their forwardness made her inclined to say no (It's better, she did say, to wait to be asked if you'd like some), she followed them to the man and bought them each a warm bag in gratitude for the part they had played in this perfect morning; in some expectation, too, that the time they spent shelling the peanuts and tossing most of them to the flock of pigeons that suddenly descended would somehow lead to yet another chance meeting with her mailman.
It didn't happen, although she silently promised them, on their slower and more subdued walk back when they refused each of her offers to hail a cab or to wait for a bus, a place forever in the home she might make, might yet make, for herself.
She said, walking with them, “My parents, your grandparents, were married in the fall. It would have been, let's see, 1913, '14? They'd met on the boat, both of them coming over from different parts of Ireland. A shipboard romance.” She would have liked to linger on the topic but the children had politely slowed their pace to listen to her and she wanted to get them home, in case they were getting tired, in case he had paused somewhere in the neighborhood. There was little else she could tell them anyway, except, perhaps, that the chance, mid-ocean meeting that had brought her and her sisters to life suddenly struck her as astonishing.
In the vestibule of their building she found her smallest key and opened the mailbox: the glad proof that he had been there but a sorrow, too, to think that he would not be back for the rest of the day. And how long it was until Saturday.
The youngest one took her hand as they climbed the stairs, the other two, growing quickly, going up before them. On the floor of the landing there was a lozenge of sun on the worn runner and the blue sky was a dulled jewel through the dirty skylight. Veronica let them in and then the three children threw themselves one after the other on the wide green couch. Their mother felt their foreheads. The smell of the roses had taken over the place.
“We had fun,” the children said, turning away. Aunt May said she could not remember such a spectacular day and saw later that evening, after the cocktails and in the midst of the dinner she could barely swallow because of certain things that had been said, that happiness put some people at risk: today, for the first time she could remember, she had climbed the final flight of stairs and crossed the worn carpet of the landing and not thought for a moment of how on a fall afternoon over forty years ago her father had died here.
“I often wonder,” Momma said from her chair, “if he heard me. âAll's forgiven, Jack,' I said. But there's no telling if he heard me.”
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In autumn, the cool air carried a taste of steel, as if it collected scent from the subway grates and the schoolyard fence and the black ribbons of wrought iron that guarded the lower halves of the two broad windows in Momma's bedroom. Without turning on a light, the children watched from their window seats, and as Aunt Veronica passed by, the sound of the ice in her tumbler seemed to them to be a musical accompaniment to her journey through the growing darkness: a few
faint, high notes that on a stage might indicate magic, a sprinkling of fairy dust.
“Hello, children,” she whispered and then surprised them by not continuing past them as usual and into her room but instead placing herself carefully (the ice cubes tinkling) on the edge of Momma's bed. She sipped from her glass and because she seemed to stare out past them the children turned back to watching the street as well. The sidewalk at this hour was silver blue and the growing darkness seemed to have repaved the road: they could make out, but only barely now, the worn patches here and there where the cobblestones showed through. Once, their mother often told them, toeing just such a worn spot in the asphalt, all the streets were like this. They heard Aunt Veronica raise her drink again and saw the circle of yellow light against the schoolyard pavement grow gradually brighter and more distinct. Cars passed by slowly and their father's, they imagined, would somehow distinguish itself from the other humped and brittle roofs shining back the light by being faster, more luminous, more welcomed. They heard the kettle whistle in the kitchen, the clink of saucer against cup.
This room, Aunt Veronica told them, had once been part of the living room, with only a curtain where the door and wall were now. They glanced at her over their shoulders; it was all a part of the things they had heard before. When Momma came her first request was that a proper wall be built, and their father himself had done it, hammering and plastering and bringing all the neighbors up to mark his progress, much to the humiliation of his new bride.