The Sunken Cathedral (21 page)

“What about the TV?” Larry says. He has bitten his fingernails to the quick and now works his cuticles.

“A joke,” Jules says.

“It works,” Larry says.

Mayors sit around a wooden table, arguing.

“It’s a rerun,” Jules says. “That’s Koch. Koch is dead. This is something else entirely, a different emergency.”

“I wish I could understand what they’re saying,” Larry says.

“It’s a rerun!” Jules says.

“It’s soothing,” Larry says. He sits very still, watching the old mayors who admit they cannot predict what’s coming next discuss what’s coming next.

I
. Yet never in her lifetime would she forgive herself for what she believed was the responsibility she bore for the sudden departure of Margaret Constantine, PhD, for New Zealand, a woman she considered a friend at an age when friendships seemed almost too much to bear, given the accumulations and disappointments in a life, given what would eventually be lost. Many nights she returned to the drinks the two had shared at that sticky bar. How she had told Dr. Constantine about her oldest boy, Lenin, and dancing with Frank Sinatra, and how the next morning, or maybe the one after that, she had shown Margaret Constantine the way to Google Earth: Go on, she’d urged. Give it a try.

She had stood behind Constantine and watched as she typed in Ariel’s address, watched as the camera pivoted on the satellite in the very dark of space, above the atmosphere, even, though she couldn’t be sure of that, but somewhere far, far away, as high as the stars in their distant, fiery places, though what we see of any of it is already in the past. She and Margaret Constantine had watched as the camera zoomed in on what looked like brown swatches of nothing and then rows and rows of houses and then what looked like water and forests and then, finally, a bungalow of sorts, something built from wood and painted white, the banana fronds and ferns that shaded its front walk grown to almost the size of the house itself. The screen door looked propped open by a brick, or a rock; within the house barely perceptible movement and shifting shadows. Perhaps the play of all that vegetation or perhaps a person—her daughter?—sitting at a table, in a chair.

“Should I go?” Margaret Constantine had asked. And to this Bernice had said, “You must go.”

II
. The years pass quickly, decades, even, accumulations of conversations and interruptions and good dinners and drinks, moves to houses first empty then filled to bursting—Marie’s brownstone to a brick colonial in Rye, higher ground, where the family suffers the rest of Ben’s teenage years.

He smashes the car against the flagpole and walks away with just a scrape: a miracle or someone watching over him. His first date a girl from a faraway Asian country he will grow to love and marry the day after graduation.

Elizabeth and Pete follow their son and his new wife to Canada given the forecasts, offering to babysit the grandchildren, three, every chance they get, Pete especially adept at getting the grandchildren to sleep, Elizabeth listening to the stories he spins out of thin air, leaning against the doorway, watching him, surprised each time a little by her love for this man—for their fiftieth anniversary she gives him a novel,
The Possessed.
The youngest grandson is Elizabeth’s particular favorite, a boy who will not look her in the eye or speak but who, every once in a while, claps and squeals at the top of his lungs. He is a handsome boy who grows to be the spitting image of his grandfather.

Outside the drought turns the green hills and the green valleys to mud and then dust, crumbling the earth to so many sand cakes. You used to call them sand cakes, remember? Elizabeth says. The old sandbox Mrs. Frank let you use in the backyard in Chelsea? She takes a walk along the cliff with Ben. She leans on his arm as he steadies her. Your father would have liked the view, she tells him, and her son says, He would have very much. The view is the Pacific Ocean, as constant as the North Star or the Insomniac on the ninth floor. Do you remember the Insomniac on the ninth floor? Elizabeth asks. When we lived in Chelsea? That building in back—the ugly one: he never turned his light off. Not once. Any time of night you’d look out and see the ninth-floor light. Mrs. Frank, do you remember her? Marie? Lovely woman. She called him the Insomniac of the ninth floor. She let you use the sandbox.

I remember her, Ben says, steadying Elizabeth over a particularly deep fissure. There are signs everywhere: AT YOUR OWN RISK. FALLING BANK.

Falling bank? Ben had said earlier. It should say, Failing bank.

Failing bank, Elizabeth said. That’s funny, she said. Now she grips Ben’s arm to get over the particularly deep fissure. Everything is at their own risk; there are no longer any protections in the field, landscapes awash with disclaimers. The National Park Service condo project, even, she has read, requires a certificate of noninsurance before money can change hands: fire, flood, tornado, earthquake. The Pacific Ocean roils and froths below, breaking over the rocky outcrops and small islands just beyond, the remnants of Highway 1 that appear only at low tide.

“Maybe there were just too many ghosts,” she says. “Maybe he just needed to keep the lights on.”

“Who?” Ben says.

“The Insomniac of the ninth floor,” she says.

“Maybe,” Ben says, his hand on her bony elbow, negotiating. “Maybe.”

XL

V
ery Grand is not amused. Who knows when the water will reach her slippered feet? Already her toes are moist and cracked and now the water rises from the basement, entirely flooded so that the hot-water heater swirls with the washer and the dryer and the mud that once, remarkably, they packed with horsehair and straw and molded into bricks. The mud bricks are layers of sludge, actually, studded with two-bit-piece coins and arrowheads.

Imagine it! Abe had said. These foundations laid as the Civil War raged!

XLI

A
be wore his blanket like a wrap, his bones honeycombed, always cold. The doctor said the pain was such he felt his bones broken, every one, this the reason then for the amounts of morphine, increasing, to take him away from the pain of broken bones. He slept and slept and in the few times he waked she groomed him, brushing his sparse hair with the silver brush with the mother-of-pearl handle, a baby brush, his intricate, carved initials. She polished the brush and laid it next to the silver comb on the silver tray, all of one set, all of one piece, next to their bed. His hair white, thin; the blanket white, thin, loosely knitted by Jules, practicing. She read him the books they had loved as he slept. She watched him sleep: his hollowed-out eyes, his skeletal teeth. Very Grand looked on. She wished it over and then she wished it never over. She wished his heart would stop. She wished her heart would stop. She rubbed lotion on his old feet, the toenails cracked, greenish. When he smiled, he would always smile, she traced his beautiful smile lines with the tip of her finger and thought how long it had been since she looked so closely at her husband, a happy man. Marry a happy man, her mother had said. This she did remember.

His body turned to something else entirely, a gnome, a hobbit from the garden, an illustration, something Great-Aunt Eleanor might have collected, fissures in his skin already cracked and cracking, and when he died she did not want to sit with it, his body. She wanted it gone. He was no longer there: he had disappeared. Where? she asked the undertaker. They had come with her phone call, the ones on Thompson Street that had been there forever. Mr. Winowsky, he introduced himself. The owner. This a family business.

He introduced himself at the front door, his two sons, big lugs, hovered behind in Yankees hats.

She showed them the room and then she stepped aside as they lifted the body no longer Abe onto a stretcher and covered him. In books, in films she had seen, the widow sits beside the bed holding the hand of the dead spouse, talking to the dead spouse, refusing the last good-bye with the corpse. She could understand none of it. Abe has disappeared, she told Mr. Winowsky. I have no idea where he’s gone.

Do you have family? Mr. Winowsky wanted to know; his face gleamed with sweat though his sons were doing the labor.

A son. He’s on his way. I called you first.

Mr. Winowsky looked puzzled at this, as if she had upset the natural order of grief.

Far?

Columbia, she said. University.

Oh, Mr. Winowsky said. He appeared to take inventory of the foyer, the grandfather clock and its hands, stuck, the bowl on the walnut sideboard; the small alabaster lamp. If the lights were completely out, she could tell him, the alabaster lamp would glow a beautiful yellow, a light made from stone.

The boys negotiated the hallway with Abe’s body, covered in a sheet. Abe on his way out the door of their grand adventure. Good-bye, Abe, she thinks but does not say.

XLII

T
ime will pass as time will pass. The City still stands. One year becomes five, then ten. Children grow like weeds as do the sycamores shedding their rough bark with the warmer weather, dirty trees, the residents say, sweeping up after them. The residents have lived here forever or they have just moved in. The residents are thinking of leaving, or they have just arrived.

On the High Line the high school kids practice their samba; there is no more room in the cafeterias for dance and besides, tests are being taken, scores tallied—the fate of the untutored millions. In front of the dancers, on the billboard, the underwear model looms over a skeleton in lace, his erection obvious. And what of the machinations of his mind? thinks one of the dancers, a boy who has recently learned the word
machination
and is eager to use it until, called to pay attention, he loses the word entirely, dance not his forte and his concentration gone weak, he tells the instructor, a woman who rallied the principal to sign the forms to allow the teenagers to pass out the doors of the school, doors guarded now by dropouts hired by a security firm for less than minimum wage, registered guns clipped to their belts. Not your forte, tough shit, the woman who rallied the principal told the boy. You’re going to dance as if it’s the last thing, she said. And so he does, and so they all do; they dance as if it’s the last thing, high above the crowds of Chelsea, the throngs beneath the High Line and west, in the rebuilt parks along the newly shored landfill and west, on the concrete, fireproofed pier where once the banana boats docked and now the next batch of toddlers ride the new donkey carousel, screaming at the tops of their tiny lungs.

But this is in five years, maybe ten. Now, here, the seminary bells toll, marking the beginning of one hour or, possibly, the end of another.

© DEBORAH DONENFELD

Kate Walbert
is the author of the novels
A Short History of Women
, named one of the ten best books of 2009 by
The New York Times Book Review; Our Kind
, nominated for the National Book Award; and
The Gardens of Kyoto
; as well as the story collection
Where She Went
. Her fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories,
and
The Best American Short Stories
. She lives in New York.

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ALSO BY KATE WALBERT

Where She Went

The Gardens of Kyoto

Our Kind

A Short History of Women

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.