Saint Mazie: A Novel (23 page)

I mean, yes, obviously, I wanted to impress you. I wanted you to see something more than just this guy who works with his hands all day. I’m an actual community college dropout, have you ever met one of me before? I’m like a total joke in the intellectual department. And you’re smart. And fancy. You look fancy. You feel fancy. You smell fancy. I thought maybe showing you this would make you feel the way about me that I felt about you. It was like an offering. It was one of the most precious things I owned, as much as anyone can own something like this. And I didn’t realize how precious it was to me until I handed it to you and never saw it again. I thought, well I’ll give it to her, and maybe I’ll have a shot. I’ll give it to her and maybe she’ll love me for it.

I walked down through Wall Street before I went to visit Tee. Today, I had to see today on the streets, the day Wall Street fell. People were weeping on the corners. Why is this city so beautiful when it mourns? I pretended it was all for Tee.

I said: Tee, don’t leave me.

She said: What if you don’t think about it as me leaving you? And just that I’m going to him instead?

That’s of comfort only to her.

I wrapped my arms around her. I asked her for the hundredth time if she wanted to go to the hospital and she said no, that she would die there, in her own bed.

I said: We could get you a better blanket at least. You deserve a thick blanket.

She said: I’m not better or worse than anyone else. We’re all the same.

I said: We could get you silk sheets. You should be covered in silk. You should be swimming in it.

She said: It’s all the same. It feels the same if you let it. Don’t you see that yet? It’s all the same.

I got under the blanket with her.

I said: Silk sheets, fit for a princess.

I stayed the night there. I held her and she moaned sometimes with pain and I tried not to cry. When I walked back through Wall Street this morning, the sidewalks were littered with garbage, and men in fine suits were passed out on the street, and I thought something felt different in the city, but maybe it was just me that was different, having slept on silk for the first time in my life.

My great-grandfather ran the movie theater nearly single-handedly for a good six months while Mazie tended to a sick friend. This was noted as part of our family history because it was during this time the first of my great-uncles got sick and passed away. This would have been my great-uncle Gilbert. My great-grandfather was away from home, working at the theater, so sadly he wasn’t there when his son passed away. It happened very quickly, he got sick and died within a week. No one was to blame. But it was devastating for everyone, Rudy in particular because he felt so helpless, so absent, although I suppose no one can judge who mourns the most. But it hit him hard, harder than one of his heart attacks. My mother told me that her father told her that he was the one to run all the way to the theater to tell Rudy about it, and when he told him he watched the color drain from his face. It went from peach to yellow to white. It was the opposite of blushing, is what he told her. And he never got it back; the color never came back to his cheeks. He became a pale man, and he stayed that way for the rest of his life.

Without Sister Tee’s last name it’s impossible to find out any information, and even with it I kind of suspect it would be tricky because the place where she worked closed in 1960. I found out a few things about this place, the Mercy House. It was a settlement house on Cherry Street, not far from Knickerbocker Village, and it was founded in the late 1800s to help immigrants. Basically they fed and clothed poor families, housed the homeless, took care of sick people in their homes. The usual good works. I wish I could have found a record of her. Sometimes I guess we just forget people. Even if their work isn’t forgotten or at least
felt
in some way.

The Captain came back.

I thought I didn’t want to see him anymore. I’d written him out of the story of my life. He’s gone, he had a baby. He’s not coming to New York City ever again, or if he is it’s with his new family. Good-bye, good riddance, good night. That was how I wanted the story to end. But I can’t lie to myself, at least not here. I was glad to see him in that line. I’ve known him for so many years. We’ve lain in each other’s arms, we’ve shared our flesh with each other. He knew me when I was but a girl, and I knew him when he was the handsomest man in the world.

He’s not a Captain anymore, not sailing the seas anyway. Now he’s a businessman, working for his wife’s father. No uniform. Just a regular Joe, even if he’s a rich one.

I said: How’s business?

He said: We’ll survive this mess. People need cars.

I said: Can’t we just walk instead?

He said: You’ve lived in Manhattan your whole life. You don’t know what the rest of the country is like. Even if they don’t need cars, people want cars.

He asked me to dinner, and I said yes. We ate steak. He insisted upon it. He told me I needed the vitamins.

He said: You look pale and thin.

I said: I’ve been in mourning.

He said: For whom?

I said: For everyone.

He said: I’m sorry.

I couldn’t eat any more after that.

He said: Come back with me to my hotel. I’m worried about you. Let me comfort you.

I said: You’re a father now.

He said: So?

I said: I don’t know why that makes a difference to me, but it does.

He said: We don’t have to do anything. We could just hold each other.

I laughed so hard at that the entire restaurant turned and looked at me, and then I waved at the lot of them.

He said: All right, all right. You don’t need to cause a scene.

I said: I’ll come back with you.

He said: Are you sure?

Once I told him I was mourning, I knew I couldn’t go home, not right away. I’ve been sad for so long there. All of my sadness is wrapped up in that bed, that kitchen, that woman in the other bedroom. This diary.

And worse comes to worst, I’d have a roll in the hay with a handsome man.

So I went with him to his hotel, a nicer one than usual, nicer than when he was just a seaman. Uptown, a bellman with shiny buttons and downcast eyes. Deferring to the rich man.

There was whiskey on the table, and the room smelled of fruit. We sat next to each other, and he kissed me on my cheek and neck. I didn’t mean to, but I tittered anyway.

He said: You’re still a beauty.

I sighed, and then I held his hands for a moment.

I said: Could we do what you said? Would you just hold me?

He said: Mazie, what’s wrong? What happened to my good-time girl?

I said: I’m sad.

I started to cry and he told me not to and he kissed me again and I said there was no way to stop, that I must cry, I must.

He said: Then if you must, I am going to have to insist you tell me everything. You can’t go halfway. Let’s just finish this. Tell me now or forever hold your peace. Just get rid of it, and then we’ll be done.

So I told him about Louis dying, and how he had been a criminal, and how he had made me a criminal too, in one way or another, but that I had not fought too hard against it. And it started to feel good, to say these things, even as sad and awful as they were. I told him that my sister had gone mad years ago and I tried to help her as much as I could, but also that I hated her, too, I hated her for making me suffer as much as she did. I told him that Tee had died, and that I had loved her, and now that love was gone, and that I had tried so hard to be the person she wanted me to be and it hadn’t mattered in the end, she died anyway, and what was the point in being your very best if all love dies?

He said: Not all love dies. Here I am with you now. Here we are together, Mazie.

It didn’t feel real to me when he said that. He was listening but he wasn’t hearing me, or he was saying the thing he thought I wanted to hear, but that wasn’t it at all. It was not the right thing. And so I told him finally about the baby I had lost, nearly eight years ago, the baby that had been his. I told him how I had kept the baby a secret except from my family, and that I would have given it to Rosie and Louis to keep as their own, and he started to say something but then he stopped himself because I saw him working it out in his head, that there was a baby, and then there wasn’t, and I told him that the baby had died, died inside of me while I slept, and I told him about the mattress, how it was suddenly soaked with blood, how it turned red, I woke up, and it was red and sticky and I was wet with my blood, the insides of me turned out, and I had bled so much I nearly died, but also it wasn’t just losing all the blood that was killing me, it was the sadness, and the guilt, and the broken heart.

This was when he started to cry. He asked if it had been a boy or a girl and I told him a boy. He told me that he was sorry I had gone through that and if he had known I was with child he would have done the right thing by me and I told him that we had only met once, there was no right thing or wrong thing, and it was a good thing he hadn’t because he’d probably be sitting in a hotel room with a different woman now, being the kind of man he was. That stung him, and I didn’t mean to sting him, only I suppose I did. He told me there was no need for that, and I apologized.

He said: It was my child too.

I said: It’s nobody’s baby anymore.

The next part came from a place of sadness and us both being animals like we are. We removed just enough clothing for us to put all our parts together. I wasn’t even wet enough for him to fit inside me easily but then very suddenly I was. I didn’t look at him and he didn’t look at me. I stared out over his shoulder, my legs wrapped around the small of his back. I couldn’t tell if it was making me feel better or worse. Better, worse, worse, better. It didn’t seem possible that I could feel either.

After, I couldn’t stay there with him. I didn’t want to wake up in his arms. I didn’t want to talk to him anymore about the things I had just told him. I told him I had to leave, and he didn’t argue, because he was thinking his own thoughts, about his lost son, probably, and the son he had now. I told him I’d see him around and he said the same and it was like a good-bye only more like a lie.

And then I walked home from his hotel, all the way downtown, and it was cold, and it tasted bitter, and I liked it. And then I saw it, truly, for the first time, the way this city has changed. It’s lost its pride. There’s bums everywhere, and there’s drunks everywhere, and it’s filthy, and people are hungry. It’s not just in the tenements, it’s everywhere. I ain’t never seen anything like it. I was lifting my skirt up over the men in the gutters, but there were children there too, and women, and they were spread out all over the island. Maybe I’ve been blind because I’ve been mourning, or maybe I’ve just been trapped in my little cage for too long, because it is only just now that I am seeing how much trouble this city of mine is in.

I thought of Tee walking next to me, and what she would have thought about it all. Her habit gathered up around her as she bent to help. We never would have made it home, she would have stopped and helped each person. She couldn’t turn down a soul.

I fished in my pocket, and I squatted down next to a man on the sidewalk. There was a cut on his cheek. Stubble, dirt, dried blood. Blood on his collar and coat. He was shivering. Everyone on the streets was shivering.

I handed him a quarter.

I said: This is for a bed to sleep in.

I handed him another quarter.

I said: This is for a meal.

I handed him a final quarter.

I said: And this is for a drink or two.

That last part Tee wouldn’t have approved of, but Tee never knew how to have a good time.

The younger ones still have a chance to change their lives, and I’ll lend them a hand if they like. But too many of the older men, they’ve been on the road so long they wouldn’t know what to do with a proper home if they had one. The concrete feels right under their bodies. Their discomfort has become their comfort.

Is it weird that I love teaching the Depression the most out of all the eras? I think part of it has to do with it being
the most
. Like it was the longest and the worst and it was global and terrible, and these kids only know how to pay attention to superlatives. Also the idea of businessmen jumping out of buildings freaks them out. Breadlines freak them out, too. A lot of these kids have had experience with food stamps, and then I get to tell them it was because of the Depression that food stamps were even created in the first place. This speaks to them. The image of New York City in trouble, with so many people down on their luck, that genuinely speaks to them also. They weren’t here for the seventies and eighties, which is when I was a kid, and when New York City was still, pardon my language, a shit show. But the idea that it exists, that so much of New York City was in trouble that there were breadlines everywhere, it freaks them out, it makes them pay attention, and more than anything I like it when I have a classroom of eyeballs facing forward. All those heads up, listening to what I have to say, I love it. I wish I could teach the Depression all year long.

Now I’m back regular at the theater, and Rudy and I met this morning about business. He said it’s no good. First, people were coming to the theater to forget their worries, but now the money’s run out. He thinks it’ll be bad for a while. Gloom and doom on that poor man’s face. Pale-faced Rudy, he is. The faintest sliver of a man.

I said to Rudy: We’ll run it at a loss for a while if we have to. We’re not closing this theater down. We won’t put the people who’ve worked here out on their behinds like everybody else.

I talked to Rosie about it all over dinner tonight.

I said: Who knows when it will pick up?

She said: We won’t close it.

I said: No, of course we won’t.

She said: I’ll sell all my jewelry, and whatever else I need to. Louis loved that theater.

I said: And those people are our family.

She said: I don’t even understand why we’re having this discussion.

I said: I only wanted to make sure. We choose this, there’s no unchoosing it.

She said: You and I disagree about a lot of things, Mazie, but I think we can both agree we will not send our people out on the streets until the last dime is gone.

Ah, I loved her then. I loved my Rosie.