The woman who’d driven me home from kindergarten after my mother died, the pretty one in jeans with short red porcupine hair, the one Dad had told me was our next-door neighbor — it had been Hannah.
I cut out pieces of evidence from every other conversation I could remember, gluing them together, awed, but also sickened by the resulting graphic collage (see “Splayed Nude Patchwork XI,” The Unauthorized Biography of Indonesia Sotto, Greyden, 1989, p. 211). “She had a best friend growing up,” Hannah had said to me, cigarette smoke pirouetteing off her fingers, “a beautiful girl, fragile; they were like sisters. She could confide in her, tell her everything under the sun — for the life of me, I can’t remember her name.” “There are people. Fragile people, that you love and you hurt them, and I–I’m pathetic, aren’t I?” she’d said to me in the woods. “Something awful happened in her twenties, a man was involved,” Eva Brewster had said, “her friend — she didn’t go into details, but not a day went by when she didn’t feel guilt over what she’d done — whatever it was.”
Was Hannah the reason Servo and Dad (in spite of their dynamic working relationship) warred with each other — they’d loved (or perhaps it was never anything so grand, simply a case of poorly wired electricity) the same woman? Was Hannah why we moved to Stockton, remorse over her dead best friend who committed suicide from a broken heart, the reason she’d showered me with breathy compliments and squeezed me against her bony shoulder? How was it possible scientists were able to locate the edge of the observable universe, the Cosmic Light Horizon (“Our universe is 13.7 billion light years long,” wrote Harry Mills Cornblow, Ph.D., with astounding confidence in The ABCs of the Cosmos [2003]), and yet mere human beings stayed so fuzzy, beyond all calculation?
Yes, Not Sure, Probably, and Who the Hell Knew were my answers.
Fourteen days after Dad was gone (two days after I received the cordial greeting from Mr. William Baumgartner of the Bank of New York notifying me of my account numbers; in 1993, the year we left Mississippi, it seemed Dad had set up a trust fund in my name) I was downstairs in the storage room off of Dad’s former study, weeding through the shelves piled with damaged stuff, most of it belonging to the owner of 24 Armor Street, though some of it was junk Dad and I had accumulated over the years: matching lamps in mint green, a marble obelisk paperweight (a gift from one of Dad’s worshipful students), a few faded picture books of little consequence (A Travel Guide to South Africa [1968] by J. C. Bulrich). I happened to push aside a small flat cardboard box Dad had marked SILVERWARE and saw, next to it, wedged in the corner behind a crinkled, jaundiced newspaper (the grimly titled, Rwandan Standard-Times), Dad’s Brighella costume, the black cloak in a ball, the bronze mask with its peeling paint and fishhook nose sneering at the shelves.
Without thinking, I picked up the cloak, shook it loose and pressed my face into it, a sort of embarrassing, lost thing to do, and immediately, I noticed a distantly familiar smell, a smell of Howard and Wal-Mart, Hannah’s bedroom — that old Tahitian acidic sap, the kind of cologne that barged into a room and held it up for hours.
But then — it was a face in a crowd. You noticed a jaw, eyes or one of those fascinating chins that looked like a needle and knotted thread had been stuck and pulled tightly through the center and you wanted, sometimes were desperate, to glimpse it one last time, but you couldn’t, no matter how hard you fought through the elbows, the handbags, the high-heeled shoes. As soon as I recognized the cologne and the name panthered through my head, it slipped out of sight, drowned somewhere, was gone.
Metamorphoses
I knew something screwballed and romantic would happen on Graduation Day, because the morning sky wouldn’t stop blushing over the house and when I opened my bedroom window, the air felt faint. Even the girlish pines, crowded in their tight cliques around the yard, shivered in anticipation; and then I sat down at the kitchen table with Dad’s Wall Street Journal (it still turned up for him in the wee hours of the morning like a john returning to a street corner where his favorite hooker had once strutted her stuff), switched on WQOX News 13 at 6:30 A.M., The Good Morning Show with Cherry, and Cherry Jeffries was missing.
In her place sat Norvel Owen wearing a tight sports jacket the blue of Neptune. He wove his chubby fingers together, and with his face glowing, blinking as if someone were shining a flashlight in his eyes, he began to read the news without a single comment, plea, passing remark, or personal aside about the reason for Cherry Jeffries’ absence. He didn’t even throw out a bland and unconvincing “Wishing Cherry the best of luck,” or “Wishing Cherry a speedy recovery.” Even more astonishing was the show’s new title, which I noticed when the program cut to commerciaclass="underline" The Good Morning Show with Norvel. The Executive Producers at WQOX News 13 had erased the very being of Cherry with the same ease of deleting an eyewitness’ “uhs,” “ers,” and “see heres” out of a top news story in the Editing Room.
With his half-a-slice-of-pineapple grin, Norvel turned the floor over to Ashleigh Goldwell, who did Weather. She announced Stockton could expect “high humidity with an eighty percent chance of rain.”
Despite this dismal forecast, as soon as I arrived at St. Gallway (after running my last few errands, Sherwig Realty, the Salvation Army), Eva Brewster made the announcement over the intercom that proud parents would still be ushered to their designated metal folding chairs on the field in front of the Bartleby Sports Center precisely at the stroke of 11:00 A.M. (Five chairs maximum were allotted per student. Any relative spillover would be relegated to the bleachers.) The ceremony would still begin at 11:30. Contrary to the circulating rumors, all events and speakers would proceed as scheduled, including the post-ceremony Garden Hour of Hors d’oeuvres (music and entertainment provided by the Jelly Roll Jazz Band and those St. Gallway Fosse Dancers who were not graduating), where parents, faculty and students alike could circle like Pallid Monkey Moths among the whisperings of Who Got In Where and the sparkling cider and the calla lilies.
“I’ve telephoned a few radio stations and the rain isn’t forecast until later this afternoon,” Eva Brewster said. “As long as all seniors line up on time we should be fine. Good luck and congratulations.”
I was late leaving Ms. Simpson’s classroom in Hanover (Soggy Ms. Simpson: “Can I just say, your presence in this classroom has been an honor. When I find a student who demonstrates such a deep understanding of the material…”) and Mr. Moats also wished to detain me when I turned in my Final Drawing Portfolio. Even though I’d been meticulous in making sure I looked and behaved exactly as I had before my abrupt hiatus from school, a total of sixteen days — dressing the same, walking the same, having the same hair (these were the clues people bloodhounded when trying to chase down Domestic Apocalypse or a Deteriorating Psyche), it still seemed Dad’s desertion had altered me in some way. It had revised me, but only very slightly — a word here, a bit of clarification there. I also felt people’s eyes on me all the time, though not in the same envious way as in my Blueblood Heyday. No, it was the adults who noticed me now, always with a brief yet baffled stare, as if they now noticed something old within me, as if they recognized themselves.