Now Madame Schumacher—“Can’t I be Erika?” she’d requested — poured generous tots of sherry. “You’re living on the West Side?” she asked.
In their new building the elevator always clanged. They had no second bedroom. On Roland’s bad nights he sat up reading and Sonya slept on the living room couch. There she dreamed of London and the bombs. But the place caught afternoon sun. They had purchased cotton rugs and secondhand furniture. Then they had splurged on a Finnish chest painted with stylized flowers. They used it as a coffee table.
“The West Side, yes,” Sonya said.
“An easy bus ride to Carnegie Hall,” Roland said. They talked of music, and of the mayor, and of films.
“Were you in Hollywood?” Sonya asked. Direct questions were not her habit; but she was a quarter century older than this beautiful woman, and her navy shirtwaist gave her the modest authority of a nanny. She had abandoned the Mary Martin hairstyle. Her straight white hair just grazed the shirtwaist’s collar.
“The whole family is in the movie business, none of us in front of the camera. I did some translations, this and that … I was divorcing when I left New York and I am thoroughly divorced now.” She gave a graceful shudder. Her accent was light, not at all guttural, just a sometime transposition of Ws and Vs, as in “diworced.” The sisters had all learned English from their tutor, she said; and she, Erika, had worked on French during a summer spent with an aunt, such a beautiful apartment, you could see the Seine. Sonya thought of ailing Paris, the oily river, the bridge.
More conversation, then silence. They would not see each other again: the woman of the world, the pair of pensioners. When Sonya and Roland got up to say good-bye, Erika stood also and left the room and came back with the tuxedo over her arm. “I didn’t notice it when I first came home. It was hiding behind Franz’s old coat.”
“Oh Yes The Coat,” Sonya said.
“My ex-husband’s. I kept it out of malice, he loved it so. I think I’ll give it to the Writers and Artists Thrift Shop.”
“Our organization distributes clothing to the needy.”
“I’ll remember that,” Erika said. She’d forget it before the elevator reached the lobby.
On the sidewalk, Roland pointed to the tuxedo, which Sonya carried over her arm. “I’ll never wear that thing again.”
“Who knows? ‘With proper care you can live another twenty years,’ ” she said, quoting his doctor.
“Proper care does not include after-dinner speeches in a monkey suit.”
“Yes, well.” And the coat, the coat …
“The tuxedo … will do for a shroud.”
… the coat: she would haunt the Writers and Artists Thrift Shop until the thing appeared. She’d buy it and stash it in the Finnish chest; maybe in that relic the Old World would find repose. And if not, let it writhe. Love, love … “A shroud? Up yours,” snorted Sonya, startling him, making him smile. “I intend to keep you around. Darling, let’s have dinner out.”
She took his arm and led him to a new Italian place on East Twelfth, one which the courtly old gentleman in the fur-collared coat had never had a chance to patronize.
MATES
KEITH AND MITSUKO MAGUIRE drifted into town like hoboes, though the rails they rode were only the trolley tracks from Boston, and they paid their fares like everyone else. But they seemed as easy as vagabonds, without even a suitcase between them, and only one hat, a canvas cap. They took turns putting it on. Each wore a hiker’s back frame fitted with a sleeping bag and a knapsack. Two lime green sneakers hung from Mitsuko’s pack.
That afternoon they were seen sharing a loaf and a couple of beers on a bench in Logowitz Park. Afterward they relaxed under a beech tree with their paperbacks. They looked as if they meant to camp there. But sleeping outside was as illegal twenty-five years ago as it is today; and these newcomers, it turned out, honored the law. In fact they spent their first night in the Godolphin Inn, like ordinary travelers. They spent their second night in the apartment they had just rented at the top of a three-decker on Lewis Street, around the corner from the house I have lived in since I was a girl.
And there they stayed for a quarter of a century, maintaining cordial relations with the downstairs landlord and with the succession of families who occupied the middle flat.
Every fall they planted tulips in front. In the spring, Keith mowed the side lawn. Summers they raised vegetables in the back; all three apartments shared the bounty.
Anyone else in their position would have bought a single-family house or a condo, maybe after the first child, certainly after the second. Keith, a welder, made good money; and Mitsuko, working part-time as a computer programmer, supplemented their income. But the Maguires kept on paying rent as if there were no such thing as equity. They owned no television, and their blender had only three speeds. But although the net curtains at their windows seemed a thing of the moment, like a bridal veil, their plain oak furniture had a responsible thickness. On hooks in the back hall hung the kids’ rain gear and Keith’s hard hat and Mitsuko’s sneakers. The sneakers’ green color darkened with wear; eventually she bought a pair of pink ones.
I taught all three of the boys. By the time the oldest entered sixth grade he was a passionate soccer player. The second, the bookish one, wore glasses. The third, a cutup, was undersized. In each son the mother’s Eastern eyes looked out of the father’s Celtic face; a simple, comely, repeated visage; a glyph meaning “child.”
Mitsuko herself was not much bigger than a child. By the time the youngest began high school even he had outstripped his mother. Her little face contained a soft beige mouth, a nose of no consequence, and those mild eyes. Her short hair was clipped every month by Keith. (In return Mitsuko trimmed Keith’s receding curls and rusty beard.) She wore T-shirts and jeans and sneakers except for public occasions; then she wore a plum-colored skirt and a white silk blouse. I think it was always the same skirt and blouse. The school doctor once referred to her as generic, but when I asked him to identify the genus he sighed his fat sigh. “Female parent? All I mean is that she’s stripped down.” I agreed. It was as if nature had given her only the essentials: flat little ears; binocular vision; teeth strong enough for buffalo steak, though they were required to deal with nothing more fibrous than apples and raw celery (Mitsuko’s cuisine was vegetarian). Her breasts swelled to the size of teacups when she was nursing, then receded. The school doctor’s breasts, sometimes visible under his summer shirt, were slightly bigger than Mitsuko’s.
The Maguires attended no church. They registered Independent. They belonged to no club. But every year they helped organize the spring block party and the fall park cleanup. Mitsuko made filligreed cookies for school bake sales and Keith served on the search committee when the principal retired. When their eldest was in my class, each gave a What I Do talk to the sixth grade. At my request they repeated it annually. Wearing a belt stuffed with tools, his mask in his hands, Keith spoke of welding’s origins in the forge. He mentioned weapons, tools, automobiles. He told us of the smartness of the wind, the sway of the scaffolding, the friendly heft of the torch. “An arc flames and then burns blue,” he said. “Steel bar fuses to steel bar.” Mitsuko in her appearances before the class also began with history. She described Babbage’s first calculating machine, whose innards nervously clacked. She recapitulated the invention of the Hollerith code (the punched card she showed the kids seemed as venerable as papyrus), the cathode tube, the microchip. Then she, too, turned personal. “My task is to achieve intimacy with the computer,” she said. “To follow the twists of its thought, to help it become all it can.” When leaving, she turned at the doorway and gave us the hint of a bow.