The Rags of Time (37 page)

He opens the book. His mother’s swirling cursive, the way she writes notes to Maisy’s teacher, even the list of stuff she needs at the store. He reads, but only pieces that go with the pictures he likes.

Cyril flips pages but stops where his mother draws a little nest of numbers. He’s good at math, even at this early age can deal with negative numbers. His mother has written:
Artie likes teaching his students to see the beauty of shapes and numbers. At night he is often content with his mathematical journals, or so I believe. Must believe he has survived his youthful promise. I do know I will never balance this book of my magpie collecting and spending. No final answer.

Well, that’s his mother, loopy. He closes the ledger, suddenly shy as any child should be, embarrassed by the note about his father. He shuffles the stack of postcards, comes up with a smiling lady. Her plump body takes up most of the foreground. It’s hard to see the sheep, cows, and men working.
Mrs. Heelis on Her Farm
(Beatrix Potter, watercolor, D. Banner). It’s sunny, so why the shawl and umbrella? She holds a quill pen in her hand. Cyril remembers when he was little, liking her stories. He takes a thumbtack, pins Mrs. Heelis right up there on the canvas, between paradise and earthly destruction.

She had made out a check to Daily Bread, a worthy fund, this year recalling day-old Wonder Bread doled out to the poor, a small story recalled for Kate, who is studying the Great Depression in fourth grade. As though the yeasty smell of a neighborhood memory might take its place with
Les Misérables
or the starving children in Darfur. How Mrs. Howe stole down the street for the handout before dawn not to advertise her need; how Jack Cleary sold aprons door-to-door. His wife ran them up on the Singer—
that’s a sewing machine. We had lots of aprons. It’s better to read about those times than to live them.
Should he tell the kids that their grandmother was, as a girl, safely installed in the little house, not the big house next door with the sub-Tiffany window and the bronze statue of a woman praying—The Angelus now holding a sprig of gilded holly? He thinks not. That was her story.

He would keep the terrarium sweating for its unnatural life. Someday in the future, he might show them a book with Magic Marker slashing down the pages; and the printout of her revision. They must know she never got the love story right, said perhaps it was not meant to be a love story at all.

He would walk with them to the Park, to the empty slope that was Seneca Village, or, in a pleasant season view the Pool and wilderness where she climbed slippery rocks though did not fall to her death. Her end was delayed mysteriously, a stunt of the body. Question is, why did she scale the heights? To see beyond her limited view of the Park and the brazen towers of El Dorado. He might say,
Come along, let’s look at the mural in the lobby where golden skyscrapers are sketched in, phantoms set beyond the horizon line, the dim arena of the future raised above the fantasy life below. Do you think she preferred to stay in the foreground? Costumed, up for the performance?

They might ask,
What’s that box?

Why must she know—high-tide, crescent moon? Where are we now? That’s not an easy question. But he had been married so long to the detective’s daughter, he scouts the date. In the spineless black Mass book, propped up in plain view, she had placed faded red and green ribbons to mark both the Day of the Holy Innocents and the Feast of the Epiphany. Which day did she intend in reckoning time? He thought Holy Innocents, given her complaints against the war, though it might be Epiphany, the consolation of gifts brought to a stable in Bethlehem that took the prize—gold, incense. What exactly is myrrh?

 

 

If it can be imagined, RC. She was so far beyond me, that Austrian student stroking the cross buried in the throbbing pit of her neck.
Schande,
the shame was all mine.

Then
RC
on an illustration scanned from Willy Pogany’s
Parsifal,
the young knight having discovered the Grail. Finding the initials again and again, he believes she was back to figuring herself at the starting line in a parochial school with a crucifix over the blackboard, which had always made him uncomfortable. A secular Jew, her wager with the gods was improbable to him. Then
RC
on a turned-down page in the biography of Oppenheimer who—he is pleased to discover—studied the rock formation in Central Park when he was twelve. The mystery cleared up with the disappointing annual report of The El Dorado Gold Corporation:
Reality Check says it’s old news
. That was her pet name for him when they were first together. He did not mind it,
Reality Check
—not then, not now—but minded that he had failed, for a moment, to understand she was only attempting to square the circle, to give heaven its due.