The Rags of Time (25 page)

He was now twelve years in the Tower. Antony would not die of love. Rome would not fall. There would be no room at the inn of some little Christmas Carol town until Sir Walter thought to spring himself with a sequel, a second search for El Dorado. Raleigh’s proposal: once more for the gold! James I bought it. Sir Walter, now old and ailing, was up for the fund-raising, not for the voyage. I believe the writer of
The Discoverie
was taken in by his own story spun of dross. He could turn its pages,
Imprinted at London by Robert Robinson, 1596,
to find, in the sparkle of his own words, marcasite turned to gold. How pleasurable to open a book of our own making. Or how shameful, until he thought to spring himself with a sequel. That war, this war depleting the treasury, as with Columbus’ repeated search for El Dorado.

Never should have begged and borrowed so liberally from his wife’s fortune, to commission the ships. Still, he was sprung from the Tower. He took the Product with him, his son Wat still yearning to be a soldier in the grand manner of his father, his once upon a time hero who now sent him off with the faithful Lawrence Keymis, an Oxford professor who gave up a scholar’s life for belief in gold, who had sailed with Walter first time to Guiana. Never should have Swisser Swatter, Swisser Swatter sent your boy up the tricky Orinoco. Sweet Sir Walter had mapped his bailout from the Tower by pure conjecture, the historian rewriting his past. Old soldier with a hacking cough, cruising the waters off Trinidad, old gardener searching out botanicals for his elixirs, idling while Keymis and his son were long gone on their adventure, days slipping by on their quest.

Time is displayed in a half dozen places in our bourgeois mother lode here at the El Dorado—on the bedside table, pantry wall, computer screen. In the corner cabinet, each hour my father’s self-winding pocketwatch guards my mother’s handiwork—her clay figures of Joseph, Mary, Babe in a cradle—time on my computer and on my wrist the sleek, numberless museum watch you gave me years ago. It’s half past whatever as the morning hours of my incarceration slowly tick by; no wonder that in Trinidad, waiting for word of good fortune, time stretched long and lonely for Raleigh.
Will that kid ever come home? S
urely you remember me sleepless, waiting for our girl’s key in the door. Well, time had stopped for Wat, an ordinary mortal, ordered to stay clear of the Spaniards his father taught a harsh lesson at Cádiz, the enemy who, after the century of bloody battles, were now to be pals. King James desired more than diplomatic relations with the handsome Spanish Ambassador, more than close friendship. But Wat, up for a fight, provoked the Spaniards, was ambushed, the bare truth of it according to Keymis, who killed himself having failed as the boy’s protector, his suicide a great sin against God according to Walter, who cruelly condemned him, which supports Sister Philomena’s claim, fantastic and girlish, that the Courtier was Catholic. She turns from me, flips her veil so as not to soil it with chalk dust as she approaches the blackboard, or not to hear me complain:
How was he a Catholic, Sweet Sister, when often charged as an atheist for liberal views?

When Sweet Sir Walter wrote to Keymis, the moment of forgiveness had passed; and in a letter to Lady Raleigh:
I was loth to write, because I knew not how to comfort you, and God knows, I never knew what sorrow meant till now.
This was the true end of his spirit. We may find it painful, his story carrying on and on. Home again, home again, nothing to show but debts and pre-Columbian trinkets plundered from the Spanish, you know. I’d rather not tell the story of his feigned sickness, or his botched attempt to escape across the Channel to France with that pair of fancy stays, just give in to gossip. The King, a fop troubled by his loss of the Spanish Ambassador, as well as his unpopular rule, moved in on Walter’s case, tried him for trumped-up crimes, old and new. Back to the Bloody Tower, a short stay.

Never loved by the Irish, those with recall of his ruthless injustice when, still the Queen’s favorite, Raleigh ruled over them. Sister Philomena might find cool comfort in more than the legend of his cloak thrown on a puddle, if she ever thumbed through an early chapter of his
Historie
to discover
That man is (as it were) a little world: a digression touching on our mortality.
Though he is loved for the soft spoken reserve of his last days, and for revising an early love poem to his wife, writing it out in his Bible. In my confinement, I search for your Viking Portable Elizabethan Poetry with a broken spine.

Each line a penance. And Walter is loved for his dignity as he was led to his death. Dressed in black silk and velvet for heaven and history, he spoke to the crowd:
So I take my leave of you all, making my peace with God. I have a long journey to take and must bid the company farewell.
He felt the honed edge of the ax.
This is sharp medicine, but it is a sure cure for all diseases.

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it,
but those are Will Shakespeare’s words, the butcher’s son, as Aubrey noted, an actor of some merit who was writing of another soldier’s death.

The old pipes will not splash our way till four. Inconvenient for laundry, and for infants, a new crop wheeled through the lobby. We have multiplied. I nod until my white moon face comes into focus to fetch their smiles. Family, mostly a friendly sort here, though I am wary speaking of family: you, my love, the correction officer my brother, the dear departed, and grandchildren who live nearby are fair game. But I will not puff with pride or disapprove of our grown children, run to third-person honesty in tattle time. Two out of three are killing themselves with nicotine. The stepdaughter dresses as if she is sixteen, not fifty, knows the names of the supporting actors on cop shows. One fuses bok choy with tamarind while he performs the lost art of joinery; the third, my own, educates me with a subscription to
ARTFORUM
.

All three children run, lift weights, are given to excessive self-preservation. They are sure I court sedentary death in the clutter of my back room, that my addled head will slump onto the keyboard or I’ll fall to my death reaching to a top shelf for a book I didn’t really need, did I? Need that shard of information—
Mercury lent his winged shoes to Perseus. Bulfinch’s Mythology,
weighty, slipped out of my grasp. I tottered, scattering the El Dorado clippings,
New York Times,
May 23, 2005: more residents ante up for the Democratic Party than in any other apartment house in the city. Head shot of Natalie Wood cast as Marjorie Morningstar in film of that name taken from the novel: Puttin’ on the Ritz, the Morgensterns moved down from the Grand Concourse to the El Dorado. Gene Kelly, male lead . . . but really who cares if his theatrical snare captured the heart of an enchanted Jewish princess?

I’ve come down on this day for the tour. To give thanks for the etched-steel elevator doors, for the gilt and silver trim—sort of Egyptian or Aztec—on the lobby’s high ceiling, for the marble fireplaces of no place like home and the latest generation of deco furniture, and for the imperial desk from the set of
Duck Soup
(Groucho Marx, loony president of Freedonia). I head back through our Promenade, where the mural of El Dorado lures the eye to a slick mountain of gold. First stop: Perseus. You see, it was necessary to reach over Calvino and Cather, above Austen and Auster, where mythology lives with those fairy tales aforementioned. Turn round in the soft light of the lobby and you will find his statue in an alcove stippled in gold. There on a marble pedestal, Perseus holds Andromeda in a swoon. She’s had a wretched time, but is now free of her shackles. He sports those winged boots borrowed from Mercury, wings on his hat, too. He’s flown down from up, up and away, or so we suppose, to be cast in the heroic moment, has saved the beautiful maiden from the Sea Monster. Her chains dangle. His bloody sword is cast down on the rocky shore where an elegant little scallop shell rests in the pebbles. Sculptor unknown who captured the moment of the young god falling in love. Till her hair fluttered in the wind, Perseus thought she was turned to stone. Misplaced but homey, the statue in its gilt cubby has nothing to do with El Dorado myth or décor. A middle-classy bronze to claim the residents were once acquainted with the classics, not Seventh Avenue, not talking heads or rock stars, nor fans of
The Andromeda Strain
, New Age nuts fearing the galaxy just beyond ours. The Greek lovers in the lobby, fellow inmates can’t possibly know, are distant relations to
The Angelus,
the bronze girl praying as the bells ring midday devotion in our dining room, an item that once held its place of honor in Bridgeport. In that grandfather’s house with a broad staircase, she stood on a landing set before a stained-glass window, Tiffany of sorts. Grandpa had arrived at art. When the bells toll, the idealized peasant says her prayers.

 

 

Absolutely.
An intentional turkey. How can a sixteen-pounder have slipped my mind? I rise to my duties, order the bird. It’s the once a year call to the kosher butcher, some belief left from your childhood, though belief, as such, is far from your mind. Custom, you call it, a custom that a rabbi’s surveillance improves the drumstick that you favor. The slaughter of the innocent fowl is clean according to a Son of Abraham, who kindly puts up with my lives of the saints, and at this time of the year with Advent Calendars I order for the little kids. Each day they will flip open another link of the story. Not
the
story, you say, giving advent your reality check. The dominant narrative is Pokémon cards, iPod shuffles—few candy canes in Santa’s pack. So much for Mary approached by the angel of the Lord:
Do not be afraid.

 

 

 

Ever cheery, the weatherman predicts sleet mixed with rain. You were right about the wind stealing through the old iron windows. Heat sucks the soul out of my struggling plants that will not be watered today while the children’s terrarium flourishes, sweating in tropical splendor. I do morning e-mail—Cleo, Ed, GK, Bin and Paul tracking me down. To all:
I’m on El Dorado duty. Park not allowed today. Item: Sinclair Lewis lived in a vast apartment in the south tower gussied up at great expense by his lady love, Marcella Powers, who lived in Little Towers, perhaps a cubby tucked in line B. He called our El Dorado Intolerable Towers, though he could see the East River and the Hudson, the whole island spread before him. It wasn’t Main Street, or Minnesota, Just “29 floors up in the air.” Lofty loneliness, don’t I know. Old friends still able to board his battered airship came round for cocktails. Americans had received his message. We are moral bumpkins, bewildered Babbitts, lynch men of hope. He’d made his move on Fascism in ’35; about time, said his wife of those days.
It Can’t Happen Here
was a comeback novel written five years after the Nobel, in which a Vermont journalist turns from passive belief in this country to active disillusionment, protests grandly, is sent to prison by Minute Men. You may see in Lewis’ description of his hero’s study, with few deletions and updating, a semblance of my own.

Get the picture, though my back room is electronically amended and old toys are displayed on dusty shelves. Brave fellow of
It Can’t Happen Here
is a journalist of the highbrow persuasion. With brash editorial rants, he named names—Father Coughlin, Huey Long, KKKs—connecting the homeland fascists of the day to brownshirts. Swastikas flutter in the wind. A triumph in the Depression when the Bund was still news, when the tin cup of the hungry came up empty. But in 1943, Lewis wrote a novel that irritated the critics. In
Gideon Planish
, he bashed America when we were at war. His son, Wells, died in that war on D-Day. The day Lewis got the news, he took a girl, too young for him—often the case—kid from the Midwest, took her to the musical
Oklahoma!,
kept his loss in silence. I imagine him coming out of the show to the blacked-out lights of Broadway. I must suppose the hearty lyrics pissed him off—
We know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is grand.
Well, it was grand to Lewis even in this forgotten novel where he had a fine time in thinly disguised portraits of Media Moguls—William Randolph Hearst, Colonel McCormick—the lethal power of their editorial clout. Planish comes on eloquent, citing greedy corporate committees, contracts signed in their interests—sound familiar?—alas made a hero, then a fool of himself. I can’t say if the novelist mourned when the matinee date was packed off, a ticket stub in his cluttered life. But here’s what I do know by way of Red Lewis: like Dickens, he had causes to pursue, the scold who lived upstairs for a few years; and that I’m not angry enough, just a girl of the old school who can’t throw a pass. I conjure up the Cheerleader bumbling through his pep rally, megaphone concealing the folksy grin; then I reach down the paperback with messages once timely.
It Can’t Happen Here?
Condi sets the mood with a Bach partita as we bid farewell to habeas corpus. Where’s the body to fit the crime?