I followed Hamsun Avenue down to the Central Library. A beaux arts palace with high arched windows and two gilded owls whose
eyes had once glowed in the dark flanking its front staircase. The owls’ eyes had closed with the brass gates. It was now
a tense disputed zone. Our new mayor, Dwight “the Fist” Fuller, had coasted to landslide on a histrionic and brutal budget
reform plan. A decorated veteran and an ex–pro wrestler who had sparred with the likes of Jerome the Jackal and the Non-Amigo,
Fuller had turned his violent energies against the city’s bloated and antiquated infrastructure. His inaugural address began:
“Citizens of Trude, we have become a sickly, namby-pamby people. Too effete and decadent by far. Think about it—what are we
known for? Our mental asylum, our shopping mall, and
opera
.” In his first days of office, Fuller pummeled the Historic Preservation Board, the Forestry Department, the Complaint Desk.
The Beautification Bureau found itself exiled from its crumbling office suite. But he wasn’t done. He slashed public library
budgets so deeply that they were forced to sell off their rare books, their extensive holdings of city records, their bound
medical and legal periodicals (Boggs had bought a set of these), and, finally, large portions of the circulating collection.
Amid layoffs and emergency book sales, it became clear that Fuller intended not a bureaucratic overhaul, but a complete starvation
of the public library system. The neighborhood branches soon closed, followed by the larger regional branches. Outraged editorials
were printed and ignored. When Fuller announced a second round of closings, the remaining librarians organized and took refuge
at Central. Availing themselves of newly liberalized gun laws, they formed a small militia, which for a time kept the peace
while maintaining access to the stacks. Now, however, Fuller’s demolition team had moved in, buffeted by a handful of police.
The police, smarting from salary and pension cuts, and the loss of the annual Policemen’s Ball, were more ambivalent than
the mayor expected. They refused to raid the library. This civic crisis had reached a standstill by midsummer.
Roadblocks were up now, and the street was full of loitering men in orange flak jackets and library patrons irrationally waiting
for the building to reopen. Traffic cops strolled the scene, sipping coffee from white paper cups. A heavy wrecking ball dangled
from a crane and rocked slowly over the street. Police tape festooned the grounds, though it was unclear what the tape demarcated
exactly. Pigeons strutted the cobblestones, browsing for muffin and croissant crumbs. Librarians loomed in the high arched
windows. Their watchful lenses caught shards of sunlight. I felt for them, these formerly mild public servants, driven to
rage. Guardians of the sensible world, they had been assailed by a dark force, and who could blame them for taking up arms
against it? Two gray-haired women stood on either end of the palatial front staircase, flanked by the blind golden owls. Their
dignity was immense. They wore Hush Puppies. They held shotguns. If I hadn’t a son to go home to, a son who I thought then
needed a father
, I would have joined them, those sentries, those last defenders of reason, order, and beauty.
K
YLE’S SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY FELL IN MID-AUGUST, AND IN
the days leading up to it I shopped for gifts and confections. As if I could plaster over the rift that was already growing
between us with wrapping paper, ribbons, and frosting. I’d had plenty of chances to consider my shortcomings as a parent,
waking on the couch in my work clothes among the littered remnants of last night’s wine and cigarettes. I needed to call some
people. I excavated the numbers of neighbors and opera friends from Molly’s bulging address book. I even put in a call to
Boggs, who had four lovely daughters. All four of them picked up at once (they had a “party line”), but when I mentioned Kyle’s
name, they conjured maladies, summer school projects, a distant family reunion. As it turned out, there was a lot happening
on August 12. The pretexts piled up as my invitations were declined. Some pall of disaster had fallen over us. Frau Huber
alone was delighted to come and promised to bring a batch of her famous nut balls.
Over white takeout boxes from Li Po’s—a sizable colony of which had formed on the kitchen counter—I asked Kyle who
else he’d like to invite, and strongly implied that I would be willing to buy beer.
He lowered his eyes. “You must think I have friends or something.”
“Sure you do,” I said. “Don’t you?” I added, realizing that I would be hard-pressed to name one. “Kids from school?”
“School’s out,” Kyle said.
“I am aware, but back when I was your age, we sometimes picked up the phone and—”
“Just forget it, okay?” He had mauled the chicken with his fork and was now raking white rice over the remains. “I don’t even
want to think about school until you make me go back. You should have heard the things they said about Mom.”
“Are you serious?”
“They said … that she was a slut and probably went to France, because that’s where they invented the threesome.”
“Idiots,” I said, lighting a mid-meal smoke.
“So if it’s all right with you, let’s just skip the party. I’m not in the party mood, to be perfectly honest, Dad.”
“It is
not
all right with me. But if you want, we can do something quiet. Mrs. Huber is coming, and I’m still waiting to hear from a
couple people.”
“Mrs. Huber, great,” Kyle said, planting his fork. He narrowed his eyes at me. “Mom would be pissed if she knew you were smoking
at the table.”
“Well,” I replied, “she’s not here, is she.”
F
RAU
H
UBER ARRIVED
an hour early, holding a cookie tin embossed with a blue windmill and an envelope inscribed to
Kyle in a shaky hand. She wore an ancient mauve party dress with a clump of cat hair dangling from the sleeve. For several
years I’d been urging Molly to break off the so-called lessons with Frau Huber. “I couldn’t do it,” Molly always said. “She
would have nothing.” The old lady was adrift in our living room and I guided her toward an armchair.
“We’re glad you’re here,” I said. Playing the gracious host, I put on water for tea. As the water boiled, I casually mentioned
my recent conversation with the Oracle at the tenth precinct station.
“Strange, isn’t it, that Molly never told me about that performance.”
“She was always so modest,” Huber replied elusively. “Yet it is strange. It was a major triumph for her—no more than a handful
of mezzos in the world could have handled that role. Just a little milk, please.” Huber seemed grateful for the distraction
of the spoon and sugar, avoiding my gaze. “Imagine that, the tenor and his understudy being ill on the same night!”
I nodded at Frau Huber without smiling. “I have to go out,” I said. It was true. Huber’s resemblance to an aged and frail
Molly was too unsettling to endure for long intervals. This wasn’t going to be much of a party, it was painfully clear. Would
it have been so much for Boggs to let me borrow a couple of his daughters for the afternoon? Couldn’t someone have skipped
a doubles match or a dress rehearsal?
I climbed into Molly’s car, feeling buzzed, untrustworthy, humming to myself. It was hard to wring much sense of occasion
from the ashen sky, my brain fuzzed by last night’s alcohol or today’s.
The bakery, when I reached it, was closing. Like many of
the neighborhood businesses this seemed to be its default position. The neighborhood historian, a reclusive chain smoker,
had told me the building was once a philosophical academy devoted to Hegelian and Marxist thought. It now offered a murky
dialectic of bakery and chop suey stand, and a superstructure of boarded windows.
“Hang on,” I called to the clerk, still rattling her keys in the bakery door.
She turned, and I had the odd sense of being truly noticed. Not just regarded or acknowledged, but seen. The girl had very
large eyes. She had a metal stud in her left nostril and a blue streak in her short brown hair.
“Oh,” she said. “I’d given up hope on you.”
I glanced at the spot on my wrist where a watch might have been. “I must have lost track of time.”
She was already reopening the door. “It’s just that we’ve been getting a lot of strange orders lately,” she said. “People
are paying for cakes in advance but not coming to pick them up. I don’t get it. The owner wants to rename the shop Cake for
Cake’s Sake.” She rolled her eyes. “And yes, before you ask, I do eat some of the unclaimed cakes. I guess that’s obvious.”
“Not to me.”
“That’s a nice thing to say to a fat girl.”
It was sitting there alone in the display case.
For a singular son at seventeen
was written in blue frosting on the white cake, faintly colored by the light from a high stained glass window. Across the
counter, the girl was fishing for my invoice. She didn’t look fat to me, but I hadn’t been an especially harsh critic of appearances
lately. Boggs had called my own look “Dostoevskian” the other day.
“Did you do the frosting?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s me, I do all the inscriptions.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “I didn’t think people learned to write cursive that way anymore.” And I was thinking of letters
Molly had written me in college, while she was studying abroad. Her spidery, looping script had seemed like an extension of
her gentle, distant hand. The way the two
L
s had hooked into the
Y
like a line of thread that just happened to fall that way.
From the way the girl read the invoice, I could tell that she’d heard the news. My name had become a diagnosis. I thanked
her and carried the cake to the car.
Inside, I rested my head against the seat and lit a cigarette. When the smoke cleared she was standing at the bus stop, leaning
forward on her high-top sneakers and peering down the vast wrecked corridor of the boulevard. Then she slumped back on the
sagging bench, next to the eroded headshot of a real estate agent. When I saw a Trude bus it was usually steaming with its
hazards on. I didn’t want to leave her alone; there had been shootings in the area, though it was now eerily still.
I rolled down the window. “I could take you somewhere,” I called. “If you don’t mind stopping by my son’s birthday party first.”
For a moment she seemed to consider the street’s dangers and her misgivings about the guy behind the wheel. It was not an
easy choice she faced, far from it. I kept my eyes fixed on the street until I heard the door and felt the weight shift in
the car. Reaching down for the shift, my hand landed next to the red, swollen knob of her knee, which showed through her torn
tights.
“I tripped,” she said. “I haven’t figured out how to walk in these boots.”
Her name, she told me, was Plea. Her full name was Pleiades, after the constellation. Her parents weren’t around: they were
at a swingers’ convention in Omaha for the weekend, she said. As we drove, she freshened her lipstick in the passenger mirror,
and it felt good to see someone do that again.
B
Y THE TIME
we returned home, Kyle was in bed. A parallelogram of murky light from the tiny basement window landed on his midriff. He
looked like he was slowly becoming part of the foundation. A song crashed through the headphones inside his hood. To reach
up, to extract the headphones from the ears, to verify the cause of the disturbance—it was a major effort, and he looked at
me with deep fatigue. I guided the birthday boy upstairs, where Plea and Frau Huber were having an awkward tête-à-tête over
the untouched cookie tin. “Basically, I just sing in the shower,” Plea was saying. “Where the acoustics are good and no one
will hear me.”
Kyle emerged to ground level blinking at the two women. He looked affronted by all the food and wrapped gifts. Frau Huber
enveloped him in her menthol embrace. “Happy birthday, my son,” she said, weirdly. The hug extended way beyond its appropriate
length until I realized that Frau Huber was crying on Kyle’s sweatshirt sleeve. Arms clamped to his sides, he glared at me
over Huber’s shoulder. I still had not introduced him to the girl.
“Kyle, I want you to meet Plea,” I said, peeling off Frau Huber. “We met at the bakery and I thought you two might get along.
I think she actually goes to your school.” I took Frau Huber to the kitchen and poured her some wine. She apologized
all the way: there were certain things she couldn’t understand. She was so old-fashioned and a young man like that ought to
have his mother, she said. I told her that I agreed entirely. The wine was a nice Burgundy—I was making inroads into the more
expensive precincts of our cellar now—and it seemed to steady her somewhat. I wanted to tell her that her words were tearing
into my chest, but instead I reminded her that we were trying to have a good time and that no one wanted to talk about Molly.
“Of course, you are right,” she said. “I will behave better.”
Back in the family room, Plea was sitting next to Kyle on the couch and running the back of her hand along the side of his
cheek. Little flakes of his face landed on the black leather. It amazed me that he was letting her do it.
“It’s really interesting,” she said. “The way it feels.”
“Well, are we ready for presents?” I asked.
Frau Huber’s gift, as I’d feared, was piano-related—the sheet music for Schumann’s Kinderszenen, a piece Molly had been urging
on Kyle, though it was far too difficult for him. She had always overestimated his musical abilities … Kyle took a cursory
look at the staffs, the key signature, the drizzle of notes, and grunted in the direction of Frau Huber. Perhaps she hadn’t
noticed the closed cover on the piano keyboard, the scrim of dust that had settled over it. Kyle was more receptive to the
contents of the envelope, his eyes lighting up when he saw the sum on the check.
“Wow, thanks,” he said.
Frau Huber nodded from Molly’s antique rocker, colorless as a figure in a charcoal sketch. I was not sure how this impoverished
voice coach could have the money to make large birthday donations, especially now that she’d lost her most accomplished student.
My own gifts for Kyle had been the product of long and tense deliberations. Never an efficient shopper, it was even harder
now that I was on my own and the stakes seemed higher. Wandering the famously disorienting corridors of Bernhard’s Ringstrasse
Mall, I’d stayed until closing several nights, haunting the shops until the clerks sighed audibly. There were a couple of
heavy metal CDs that I’d chosen because Martin Breeze, the music critic for the
Trumpet
, had singled them out in a column called Symptoms of Cultural Decline. A pair of sunglasses, which I hoped would remind Kyle
of the relatively good times we’d had together as I taught him to drive. A new stereo, a sketchbook, a handful of gift cards:
I knew that I had somehow fallen short. Molly had always been so good at finding joke gifts, those little grace notes: the
stress ball, the robotic dog.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get you anything,” Plea said.
“It’s okay.” Kyle balled up some wrapping paper in his hand. “I mean, I just met you an hour ago.”
I wouldn’t have minded a thanks. I took it out on Frau Huber, who had been nibbling her cake slice quietly in the corner.
She half-yawned, and I jumped at the opportunity to tell her how tired she must have been, how late it was. I shepherded her
to the door, returning her tin of untouched nut balls. She insisted that I keep them,
she had
made them especially for us
, she said with odd emphasis, adding that if there was anything at all she could do, anything in the house that needed a woman’s
touch, or if we wanted a home-cooked meal, we only had to ask. I thanked her, although I wouldn’t be calling any time soon
to request her heavy plates of sauerbraten and spaetzle.
“Of course, we will,” I said, nearly pushing her out the door. As I closed her out the old woman’s mouth opened, as if about
to
say something or sing a high note. After pausing a moment on the front step, she hobbled out to the bus stop. Though I felt
guilty for not offering her a ride, I watched her go with incredible relief.
“What?” I asked the teens, who stared me down critically. “I think I forgot something,” I said, climbing the stairs to collect
Kyle’s last present. I passed the painting of Molly singing in the coliseum. I passed the swarms of buzzing gray men, and
the dim man in the mirror. I wondered if she would have approved of how I was handling the situation. No, I thought, she certainly
wouldn’t have. I lingered in the bedroom to smoke a cigarette. Our mattress was rumpled on my side, flat on Molly’s—some superstition,
or perhaps simply habit, had prevented me from crossing the central boundary. I listened to the murmur of voices from the
room below. With the sigh of a swimmer prepared for a blast of cold water, I put out my cigarette and went to the closet.
I dove behind Molly’s dresses and, submerged in a wave of her scent, dug for the package. I carried it downstairs, making
my slow steps as creaky as I could.
Kyle stared from his mound of wrapping paper and ribbons: he knew what it was. Molly and I had argued over it many times,
she taking the hard-line position that it would erode his morals, attention span, and sense of reality; me making the laissez-faire
point that the culture would get him sooner or later. He unwrapped it slowly and warily, the psoriasis scars on his cheeks
like imprinted tears. The video game console was shiny and sleek. It gleamed in his hands.