334 (27 page)

“Lord, whatever got me started on that track? Oh, the cathedral. When you were reading that part of the story I could imagine it so well. Where it said how the stone columns were like tree trunks, I remember thinking the same thing myself when I was in St. Patrick’s.

“You know, I try and communicate these things to my daughters, but they’re not interested. The past doesn’t mean anything to them, you wouldn’t catch one of them wanting to read a book like this. And my grandchildren are too young to talk with. My son, he’d listen, but he’s never here now.

“When you’re brought up in an orphanage—but do they call it an orphanage, if your parents are still alive?—do they bother with religion and all of that? Not the government, I suppose.

“I think everyone needs some kind of faith, whether they call it religion or spiritual light or what-have-you. But my Boz says it takes more strength to believe in nothing at all. That’s more a man’s idea. You’d like Boz. You’re exactly the same age and you have the same interests and—

“I’ll tell you what, Lenny, why don’t you spend tonight here? You don’t have any classes tomorrow, do you? And why go out in this terrible weather? Shrimp will be gone, she always is, though that’s just between you and me. I’ll put clean sheets on her bed and you can have the bedroom all to yourself. Or if not tonight, some other time. It’s a standing invitation. You’ll like it, having some privacy for a change, and it’s a wonderful chance for me, having someone I can talk to.”

“Is this me? It is. I don’t believe it. And who is that with me? It isn’t you, is it? Did you have a moustache then? Where are we that it’s so green? It can’t be Elizabeth. Is it the park? It says ‘July the Fourth’ on the back, but it doesn’t say where.

“Are you comfortable now? Would you like to sit up more? I know how to. Like this. There, isn’t that better?

“And look—this is that same picnic and there’s your father! What a comical face. The colors are so funny on all of these.

“And Bobby here. Oh dear.

“Mother.

“And who is this? It says, ‘I’ve got more where that came from!’ but there’s no name. Is it one of the Schearls? Or somebody that you worked with?

“Here he is again. I don’t think I ever—

“Oh, that’s the car we drove to Lake Hopatcong in, and George Washington was sick all over the back seat. Do you remember that? You were so angry.

“Here’s the twins.

“The twins again.

“Here’s Gary. No, it’s Boz! Oh, no, yes, it’s Gary. It doesn’t look like Boz at all really, but Boz had a little plastic bucket just like that, with a red stripe.

“Mother. Isn’t she pretty in this?

“And here you are together, look. You’re both laughing. I wonder what about. Hm? That’s a lovely picture. Isn’t it? I’ll tell you what, I’ll leave it in here, on top of this letter from …? Tony? Is it from Tony? Well, that’s thoughtful. Oh, Lottie told me to be sure to remember to give you a kiss for her.

“I guess it’s that time. Is it?

“It isn’t three o’clock. I thought it was three o’clock. But it isn’t. Would you like to look at some more of them? Or are you bored? I wouldn’t blame you, having to sit there like that, unable to move a muscle, and listening to me go on. I can rattle. I certainly wouldn’t blame you if you were bored.”

Years before 334, when they’d been living in a single dismal basement room on Mott Street, a salesman had come round selling the New American Catholic Bible, and not just the Bible but a whole course of instructions that would bring her up to date on her own religion. By the time he’d come back to repossess she’d filled in the front pages with all the important dates of the family’s history:

The salesman let her keep the Bible in exchange for the original deposit and an additional five dollars but took back the study plans and the looseleaf binder.

That was 1999. Whenever in later years the family enlarged or contracted she would enroll the fact faithfully in The New American Catholic Bible the very day it happened.

On June 30, 2001, Jimmy Tom was clubbed by the police during a riot protesting the ten o’clock curfew that the President had imposed during the Farm Crisis. He died the same night.

On April 11, 2003, six years after his father’s death. Boz was born in Bellevue Hospital. Dwight had been a member of the Teamsters, the first union to get sperm preservation benefits as a standard feature of its group life policy.

On May 29, 2013, Amparo was born, at 334. Not until she’d mistakenly written down Amparo’s last name as Hanson did she realize that as yet the Bible possessed no record of Amparo’s father. By now, however, the official listing had acquired a kind of shadow of omitted relatives: her own stepmother Sue-Ellen, her endless in-laws, and Shrimp’s two federal contract babies who had been called Tiger (after the cat he’d replaced) and Thumper (after Thumper in
Bambi
). Juan’s case was more delicate than any of these, but finally she decided that even though Amparo’s name was Martinez, Lottie was still legally a Hanson, and so Juan was doomed to join the other borderline cases in the margin. The mistake was corrected.

On July 6, 2016, Mickey was born, also at 334.

Then, on March 6, 2011, the nursing home in Elizabeth phoned Williken, who brought the message upstairs that R.B. O’Meara was dead. He had died peacefully and voluntarily at the age of eighty-one. Her father—dead!

As she filled in this new information it occurred to Mrs. Hanson that she hadn’t looked at the religious part of the book since the company had stopped sending her lessons. She reached in at random and pulled out, from Proverbs: “Scorn for the scorners, yes; but for the wretched, grace.”

Later she mentioned this message to Shrimp, who was up to her eyebrows in mysticism, hoping that her daughter would be able to make it mean more than it meant to her.

Shrimp read it aloud, then read it aloud a second time. In her opinion it meant nothing deeper than it said: “Scorn for the scorners, yes; but for the wretched, grace.”

A promise that hadn’t been and obviously wouldn’t be kept. Mrs. Hanson felt betrayed and insulted.

Lottie had dropped out in tenth grade after her humanities teacher, old Mr. Sills, had made fun of her legs. Mrs. Hanson never lectured her about going back, certain that the combination of boredom and claustrophobia (these were the Mott Street days) would outweigh wounded pride by the next school-year, if not before. But when fall came Lottie was unrelenting and her mother agreed to sign the permission forms to keep her home. She only had two years of high school herself and could still remember how she’d hated it, sitting there and listening to the jabber or staring at books. Besides it was nice having Lottie about to do all the little nuisance chores—washing, mending, keeping the cats off—that Mrs. Hanson resisted. With Boz, Lottie was better than a pound of pills, playing with him and talking with him hour after hour, year after year.

Then, at eighteen, Lottie was issued her own MODICUM card and an ultimatum: if she didn’t have a full-time job by the end of six months, dependent benefits would stop and she’d have to move to one of the scrap heaps for hard-core unemployables like Roebling Plaza. Coincidentally the Hansons would lose their place on the waiting list for 334.

Lottie drifted into jobs and out of jobs with the same fierce indifference that had seen her through a lifetime at school relatively unscarred. She waited on counters. She sorted plastic beads for a manufacturer. She wrote down numbers that people phoned in from Chicago. She wrapped boxes. She washed and filled and capped gallon jugs in the basement of Bonwit’s. Generally she managed to quit or be fired by May or June, so that she could have a couple months of what life was all about before it was time to die again into the death of a job.

Then one lovely rooftop, just after the Hansons had got into 334, she had met Juan Martinez, and the summertime became official and continuous. She was a mother! A wife! A mother again! Juan worked in the Bellevue morgue with Ab Holt, who lived at the other end of the corridor, which was how they’d happened to coincide on that July roof. He had worked at the morgue for years and it seemed that he would go on working there for more years, and so Lottie could relax into her wife-mother identity and let life be a swimming pool with her season ticket paid in full. She was happy, for a long while.

Not forever. She was a Capricorn, Juan was Sagittarius. From the beginning she’d known it would end, and how. Juan’s pleasures became duties. His visits grew less frequent. The money, that had been so wonderfully steady for three years, for four, almost for five, came in spurts and then in trickles. the family had to make do with Mrs. Hanson’s monthly checks, the supplemental allowance stamps for Amparo and Mickey, and Shrimp’s various windfalls and makeshifts. It reached the point, just short of desperation, where the rent instead of being a nominal $37.50 became a crushing $37.50, and it was at that point that the possibility developed of Lottie getting an incredible job.

Cece Benn, in 1438, was the sweep for 11th Street for the block between First and Second Avenues, a concession good for twenty to thirty dollars a week in tips and scroungings plus a shower of goodies at Christmas. But the real beauty of the job was that since your earnings didn’t have to be declared to the MODICUM office, you lost none of your regular benefits. Cece had swept 11th Street since before the turn of the century, but now she was edging up to retirement and had decided to opt for a home.

Lottie had often stopped at the corner in decent weather to chat with Cece, but she’d never supposed the old woman had regarded these attentions as a sign of real friendship. When Cece hinted to her that she was considering letting her inherit the license Lottie was flabbergasted with gratitude.

“If you want it, that is,” Cece had added with a shy, small smile.

“If I want it! If I want it! Oh, Mrs. Benn!”

She went on wanting it for months, since Cece wasn’t about to forfeit a consideration like Christmas. Lottie tried not to let her high hopes affect the way she acted toward Cece. but she found it impossible not to be more actively cordial, to the extent eventually of running errands for her up to 1438 and back down to the street. Seeing how Cece’s apartment was done up, imagining what it must have cost, made her want that license more than ever. By December she was groveling.

Over the holidavs, Lottie was down with flu and a cold. When she was better, there were new people in 1438, and Mrs. Levin, from 1726, was out on the corner with the broom and the cup. Lottie found out later from her mother, who had heard it from Leda Holt that Mrs. Levin had paid Cece six hundred dollars for her license.

She could never pass Mrs. Levin on the street without feeling half-sick with the sense of what she had lost. For thirty-three years she had kept herself above actually desiring a job. She had worked when she had had to work but she’d never let herself want to.

She had wanted Cece Benn’s job. She still did. She always would. She felt ruined.

After their beers under the airport, Juan took Lottie to Wollman Rink and they skated for an hour. Around and around, waltzes, tangos, perfect delight. You could scarcely hear the music over the roar of the skates. Lottie left the rink with a skinned knee and feeling ten years younger.

“Isn’t that better than a museum?”

“It was wonderful.” She pulled him close to her and kissed the brown mole on bis neck.

He said “Hey.”

And then: “I’ve got to go to the hospital now.”

“Already?”

“What do you mean already? It’s eleven o’clock. You want a ride downtown?”

Juan’s motive in going somewhere was so he could drive there and then drive back. He was devoted to his car and Lottie pretended she was too. Instead of telling the simple truth that she wanted to go back to the museum by herself, she said, “I’d love to go for a ride, but not if it’s only as far as the hospital. Then I’d have nowhere to go but home. No, I’ll just plop down on a bench.”

Juan went off, satisfied, and she deposited the butt of the souvenir carrot in a trash bin. Then through a side entrance behind the Egyptian temple (where she’d been led to worship the mummies and basalt gods in second, fourth, seventh, and ninth grades) into the museum.

A cast of thousands was enjoying the postcards, taking them out of the racks, looking at them, putting them back in the racks. Lottie joined. Faces, trees, people in costumes, the sea, Jesus and Mary, a glass bowl, a farm, stripes and dots, but nowhere a card showing the replica of the A & P. She had to ask, and a girl with braces on her teeth showed her where there were several hidden away. Lottie bought one that showed aisles disappearing at the horizon.

“Wait!” said the girl with braces, as she was walking away. She thought she’d had it then, but it had only been to give her the receipt for twenty-five cents.

Up in the park, in a baffle away from the field, she printed on the message side: “I Was here today + I Thout this woud bring back the Old Times for you.” Only then did she consider who she’d send it to. Her grandfather was dead, and no one else she could think of was old enough to remember anything so far back. Finally she addressed it to her mother, adding to the message: “I never pass throuh Elizebeth without Thinking of you.”