Even now that I was back—thirty years older, wiser, richer (in strings to pull and big words to use, if not cash)—white Elmirans, rich or poor, still scared me. I couldn’t get into their skins, guts, or brains. Uncomfortably, like someone trying on a coat that’s too small or too big in an overheated store, I nevertheless managed to penetrate most of Spicdom, and on certain, narrow wavelengths, even most of your blacks and Orientals. Around white Elmirans I felt gaseous while they seemed solid and tri-dimensional, or vice-versa. Physically different, as in Law of Physics, not flesh.
Against my will, then, I was often forced to be near to Mrs. Crandall’s disturbing buttocks. It would have been out of character for Señora Mirtila to want to read Turgenev’s complete works in English, as I did. So I cleverly pulled out the yellowing library index cards for all of Turgenev’s novels, shuffled them by order of desire from top to bottom, and took the deck to a horrified, but bravely collected Mrs. Crandall. Señorita Maké wants me to bring her two of these each time, I said in laborious Mirtila English. Mrs. Crandall tried not to stare at the flowery peasant scarf on my head, but its visual pull was irresistible. She stood up, shaking her head to regain control, then took me to the library’s humid cellar where all the old books no one read anymore had been relocated after a flood. Only the new ones everyone craved (the Harlotquins, the astrology and demonology self-help manuals, and the Nostradamuses) were displayed on the safer main floor. Below, we stood silently before the hand-carved oak shelves holding exquisite nineteenth-century editions of the canon of our dying civilization: The Alexiade and Tirant lo Blanc and the complete Hawthorne, Justinian, Dostoyevsky, Saint Theresa, Melville, Prodromos, Balzac, Cervantes, Akindynos, and so on, awaiting the next flood to destroy them. “Here,” Mrs. Crandall said in a soothing, nightingale voice, pointing at the Turgenevs. “We will come here every time to find the books Miss McCabe wants,” she added, enunciating each word carefully. She then smiled the pained smile with which white Elmirans, who are very good-hearted, show compassion for the less fortunate.
6
Scratching
A scratching noise woke me up in the middle of the night on our third week in Elmira. I jumped out of bed, drenched in sweat, imagining it was Glorita’s front door. It took me a few seconds with my eyes open in the vibrating darkness to realize that it was now thirty years later and Glorita no longer existed. Someone by that name might live somewhere, perhaps even on the other side of town, in the muddy lowlands across from the river where the spics had moved, but my Glorita was no more. Glorita, who, I could now see, announced Bebe. Even if Bebe had never reminded me of Glorita. Why could I now glide in the dark from Glorita to Bebe, cause and effect, but still not backward? This was not normal. I listened to my ears in case there was a tiny palpitation, a sure sign, I had recently read, of an aneurysm. A lesion to the left or right lobe of my brain might explain why I could go forward, but not backward in this memory, and a lesion to the hippocampus or the middle temporal lobe why I had never thought about Bebe and Glorita in the same breath, as obvious as it now seemed. I was blinded by appearances. Bebe’s milk-white, peachy-creamy boobies (her words) and Glorita’s tanned, assertive earlobes with the old-fashioned half-moon golden earrings decorated with peacocks. So contrary in substance and flesh, yet so close to each other in my heart of hearts. I sat on the bed in the dark, in a Buddha pose, holding in my mind Glorita’s right earlobe and Bebe’s left nipple. Floating over the bed in ecstasy and revelation: elle est plongée dans un oubli étrange.
A grating sound brought me back to earth. I got up and looked out the window. McCabe was walking on the gravel path toward the front gate. A dark blue sedan pulled over silently. She slid inside. The car took off as noiselessly as it had arrived. Where was she going on a Tuesday at three in the morning, in a town that shut down the moment the sun set behind Round Hill? When I woke up the next morning, I thought I had dreamt it all. Until I got outside the gate and noticed the fresh tire marks.
At dinner, McCabe was uncharacteristically dry. Her soliloquy lasted no more than two minutes and covered only one subject: the severe cognitive disorder which had suddenly struck first-generation “new humans” on the eve of their fifth birthday; pending tests, they’d been isolated from their one- to four-year-old cohorts in the secret facility outside America where they were being raised. That was all. I pricked up my ears. She had not quoted her sources, as was her custom. “Where did you get all that?” I asked. “Everybody knows it,” she growled, baring her teeth. I knew she was lying. There was no word of this in the Times or the Journal. Was it fantasy, gossip, perhaps truth? But where did it come from? I had persuaded McCabe not to bring a cell phone or a tablet. After all, this was to be a period of healing. And Elmira was blessedly disconnected. McCabe didn’t receive any mail. Anything requiring her signature was FedExed to her overnight by her assistant, along with the daily Times and Journal, and returned by her immediately. There was no TV set in the house (the Judge hated them). Other than the two papers, the kitchen radio, locked on the Elmira station, was our only source of information. There was a phone in the kitchen and another one in the Judge’s study, but none in her upstairs room. Besides, the story that McCabe had just regurgitated sounded like a written report, not phone gossip. Could she have gotten it from the blue sedan driver, or from someone they had met? After that day, I began to listen carefully to McCabe’s dinnertime monologues. She was up to something and, stupid as it might be, I should know about it. Crime and punishment is a fragile mechanism that can be upset by even a microscopically unaligned event. Like Monsieur de la Trouille’s famous automaton, the one that was supposed to release a miniature guillotine over the neck of an equally tiny curé figure but, due to a .000001-mm misalignment on the guillotine’s dented wheel, instead sliced off the tip of Monsieur de la Trouille’s index finger, eventually provoking his death of septicemia at the Hôtel-Dieu. I read this in an antique clock magazine that my mother fished out of Judge Wilkerson’s garbage one rainy afternoon and put in my hands with the warning, “Don’t let the Judge see you reading this.” I must have been six or seven. “Why?” I asked. “I don’t want him to know I’m taking his magazines home,” she said, polishing the Judge’s desk with the kind of cheap wax that always has a slightly rancid smell, even when new. “But he threw them in the garbage,” I said. “Precisely,” my mother said, turning her back to me to signal that the matter was forever closed.