“Here we go!” Patrick had exclaimed to Gregory as, with the boy’s damp hand grasped in his fist, the two of them made their way awkwardly through one of the angling, cavernous passageways leading from the street to the elevated central lobby of the city’s restored art deco train terminal. Patrick was in the habit of carrying along, wherever he went, the current volume of “Pond, with Mud.” Here, with a view ahead toward the train station’s towering and heavily leaded windows, windows that allowed ray after ray of sunlight to spill into the station’s airy middle spaces, illuminating floating dust and giving the whole marble place the steamy, mystical aura of a site associated with feelings and moods that were, for want of a better word, spiritual (the spirit of progress? This, to Patrick, had the feel of a theme), even otherworldly — here in the train station, Patrick felt inspired to say to the boy, whose hand he now shook loose, “Hang on a minute, Bunny.”
He took his pen from the inside pocket of his coat. He unscrewed the brass-and-lacquer cap. What he loved most about untwisting the cap was the care required to keep the ink from running. Rituals were important. For instance, Patrick always carried the journal tucked at a certain angle beneath his left arm, pressed close to his heart, in the manner, he fantasized, of some boyish scholar traipsing with a rare edition of Donne through an English library hung with tapestries. Now he opened the volume and found a clean page. He gazed up at the tile mosaics of women’s faces adorning the lintels above the station windows. As he wrote, Patrick whispered to himself, in cadence with the travelers’ footsteps echoing along the entryway to the great hall, “Beasts or angels / arcing / entwined.”
“We! Go!” Gregory shouted, badly interrupting Patrick, who looked rapidly left to right, and up and down, saying, “What? What? Of course, Gregory. We’re going to the zoo to see the deformed animals.”
Patrick had one of his upsetting everyday thoughts: Christ, I’m not much of a poet, am I? He pushed this question out of his mind.
In a soft voice, and in tones meant to be conciliatory, he said to Gregory, “Hey, little man, you don’t have to scream.”
It was too late. The boy was crying. Patrick shut the book. He had forgotten to blow the ink dry, and the page would smudge. It would be a bad writing day.
“Shit,” he said to Caroline’s son, bawling in the middle of the crowded station concourse. Carefully Patrick capped and returned the pen to the interior pocket of his jacket. He produced a wad of the loose tissues he always carried in his coat pockets for these routine weeping sessions. He knelt and pushed the soft white paper toward the boy’s face. What had made him think that he could ever deal with a kid?
In fact, he was dealing with a kid, and not doing nearly as bad a job as he worried others might suppose, were any of those people rushing by — on their way to trains or jobs — to stop and watch as he wiped the tears and the snot from Gregory’s cheeks and the rashy area around his mouth.
“There, it’s all right. Come on. Don’t you want to see the goiters on the chimpanzees?”
“The! What?”
“Where in the world did you learn to talk, anyway?” Patrick asked. This question came out sweetly. He said, “We’re a pair, aren’t we?” and finished wiping the boy’s face. Gregory had such clear eyes. They were not at all bloodshot, even after sobbing.
Patrick put the wet tissues back in a coat pocket to dry for the next squall. From another pocket he fished a child-size bottle of juice and a miniature straw. He shook the bottle, opened it, planted the straw in the juice, and held bottle and straw for Gregory to drink. The bottle was quite small; Patrick’s hand closed around it. Were you to have seen the two of them, the man kneeling before the boy, the boy sucking on the almost invisible plastic straw, you might have imagined that the boy was drinking from the man’s hand.
“Ready?” Patrick asked.
“Juice!” Gregory exclaimed, and, just like that, he was done drinking, and everything returned to normal.
Patrick removed the wet straw from the juice. He capped the bottle and put it back in his pocket for later. No trash can was in sight, so he replaced the straw in the jacket pocket already stuffed with the bottle and the used tissues. Looking over the top of Gregory’s head, he saw, across the terminal crowded with people indistinctly coming and going, a young man and woman holding hands and running, though not in the manner of people hurrying to board a train. The girl seemed to be skipping, or dancing. Her skirt flew up around her legs. Was there music playing in her head? Was she maybe wearing headphones?
Patrick took Gregory’s hand in his. He said, with equal measures of sarcasm and earnestness, “Shall we dance?”
It was at this moment that a musician who had set up near the door to the street — the door through which Patrick and Gregory had entered the station — began playing a violin. The musician was situated directly behind Patrick, who, for one narcissistic moment, believed that the music in the tunnel was a reverberant production of his own imagination. Then, peering down at Gregory, he saw that Gregory was peeking around his, Patrick’s, legs. Gregory was seeing the man playing the violin. Patrick turned and saw that the violinist was Roger, Gregory’s father, the man Caroline had been married to when Patrick had come on the scene.
“Roger! Hey, Roger!” Patrick called down the corridor. It was an act of impulsiveness and guilt. Patrick heard his own voice echoing, decaying, and dying against the richer, seductive sounds of the music. The musician — yes, it was Caroline’s former husband — was wearing a green coat that looked frayed and unclean. God only knew what he might have been carrying in the pockets of that coat. It appeared that Roger had continued to be what he had been in the old days: a poor, alcoholic artist.
“Look, Bunny,” Patrick said to the top of Gregory’s head. “Do you know who that man is?”
“Daddy.”
“Right you are. Daddy. The pea-green boat with torn sails. Someone should haul her out to sea.”
What was he saying? What was he doing? Why had he called out? Had the violinist heard? Had Roger seen Gregory spying from behind Patrick’s legs? Patrick flipped open “Pond, with Mud,” got out his pen, went through the ritual of delicately removing the cap, and scribbled (after searching for an unsmudged page) a few lighthearted, comical-nautical associations. “Pea-green / boat / towed / in shreds / out.” This time he remembered to blow on the ink.
And it was still possible, he thought, that Roger had neither seen nor heard them, that he and the boy might slip away and take refuge on a train-platform bench, before setting out on their journey to the contaminated zoo. He had taken the afternoon off for this. They really ought to make it to the zoo.
He watched the violinist, who was swaying above the hips in that enchantedly theatrical fashion in which string players expectably do — as if blowing in the intermittent wind on which all music travels. And travelers, actual ones, entering and departing through the colossal wooden doors onto the street, altered their courses, automatically tacking around Roger and his empty music case left open on the ground for small bills and change. Patrick watched the bow rising and falling, pulled by the violinist’s hand across the instrument’s strings. He had the impression that the musician was rocking himself to sleep. The music rolled up the tunnel. Because the corridor walls and the ceiling were tiled, the notes came on amplified, and certain passages sounded both muddled and complexly dynamic, orchestral.