URGENT YOU TELEPHONE THE ADIRONDACKS.
DRUSILLA
I went out to the nearest local Bowery bar, where no one was usually wasting nickels on phone calls when it could buy beer instead. And stared at the bleakness of the telegram again. All except for a cheerful label attached, exhorting use of telegrams for distinctive socially correct modern correspondence. I dialed the operator to get long distance who tried as the minutes passed to obtain the number, and the number engaged. And as the call was attempted again and again, new nightmares taking wing. Something somehow more than dreadful had happened. When at last I got through, person-to-person, Dru was unavailable. And Parker, the butler, was on the phone who seemed to be crying but agreed to speak as the operator waited for me to plunge in quarter after quarter, clanking and chiming. To then hear his sobbing voice.
“They both got burned up in the fire, sir.”
“Who.”
“Our Sylvia and Mr. Triumphington. They’re gone. I can’t say any more, sir. I can’t. Good-bye.”
I telephoned Sutton Place. No one answering at that socially acceptable telephone exchange, Butterfield 8, I walked away across this socially unacceptable barroom floor where the toes of my shoes were disturbing the sawdust. Dark figures hunched on their stools, coughing in the stink of smoke and sound of spit landing in a spittoon. And the bird that seems in every bar dipping its beak amid the bottles. Two habitués drunkenly declaring their lifelong friendship with each other. “You take care of me, buddy, and I’ll take care of you.” And neither by the look of them, could take care of anybody. And do I now wait to go back to the phone and try again. Order a beer. Stand at the bar. Watch once more the little bird dipping its beak. Up and down. Like the words I hear over and over. They both went up in fire. Means flames. Immolation, as women do in India. They’re gone. Means both are dead. Only Dru left to speak to. And until I do, there is now no way of knowing if maybe wrong information is being given out in the Adirondacks.
I bought a pizza to bring back to eat in the apartment in Pell Street. Gave one of my quarters for the phone to a vagrant who stepped up from the gutter and silently held out his hand. His tired worn face like the paintings Catholics have on their walls of Jesus Christ. My good mother always said to her children, “Always wait on bad news and hear it in the morning when, if it’s bad, it will always be better to cope with after a good night’s sleep.” But my restless slumber was riddled by a nightmare of rattlesnakes coming from under the seats of the Bentley, beady eyes and forked tongues and rattles rattling, coiled to strike. And Max with his shotgun suddenly appearing out of a coffin alongside the Bentley, shooting their heads off one by one. I then suddenly found myself sitting up in the broken bed, sweat pouring from every pore, listening to the strange silence of Oriental nighttime out on the street and that refrain with a drumbeat marching through my brain, “The eyes of Texas are upon you.”
The rest of the night I sat frozen awake, wrapped in a blanket till dawn. Knowing that the bleak light of the sun would first cast upon the tip-top towers of the tallest buildings as they became gleaming spires in the sky. And I would have to further wait until the sun came lower down, glinting on the millions of windows and to finally light up this edge of Chinatown and the world here of our little lives cheek by jowl. The tenant upstairs who burned incense and occasionally played what sounded like an Indian tom-tom, which rhythm I adapted for a passage in my minuet. And the guy who lived beneath who you never saw but who never complained about the piano sounds and drove a taxi by night and studied acting by day. Rip back the covers. Get out of bed. Fight. Fight the world. Fight death. Sit to the piano. Imagine as I always do an audience chattering. Its perfume. The glittering diamonds agleam on women’s wrists, necks and ears. And then the conductor steps up on his podium. Bows to applause. Turns to his orchestra. Nods to the performer. His baton raised and brought down. As I play my minuet that took weeks to score for orchestra. In the hope that someday it would be heard. And is here now before me renamed.
Adagio for Sylvia.
Slow the movement. My fingers possessed by sorrow pass over the keys. Each note so touched to softly sound this threnody. Asking her forgiveness. For whatever trespass upon her I might have done. And who was never as cold and hard as could be her adoptive mother. But Sylvia did not as I can remember, ever cook one single meal. Or put her hand to my brow and say, You poor boy, do you suffer. Yet ask her. Still stay with me. Even in death. That our bones can one day lie melded together in the same grave. So that she would not be nor ever be unwanted. For I could remember another story she once told me of when she was a little girl all dressed up for her seventh birthday party. She’d gone to a new school and had brand-new playmates. Dru and her adoptive father away at polo matches in England, her English governess had organized the little “get-together,” as she called it, by sending engraved invitations whose printed bumps she said Sylvia could run her thumbnail over and always know when she herself got one that the invitation was top-drawer from top-drawer people. The dining room table festive, set for thirty. Surprise presents for each welcome little guest. A conjurer, circus clown and quartet of musicians. Fire-eaters and a man nine foot high on stilts. And when a handful fewer came than were invited, two little girls who did come said the others stayed away because Sylvia had no real mother or father.
Stephen O’Kelly’O in tattered crimson dressing gown. Of which Sylvia always said, “Why don’t you throw that rag away.” Horns blowing down in the streets. Day’s first traffic jam. Wait till it’s over. And it is. Dress and go out. Get something like a bun and a roll for breakfast and buy the paper. Look now out the window and up and down the street to make sure the coast is clear. Chill-enough day for a sweater. Get my mind to remember to buy a can of tomatoes and pound of onions and be able when I need to, to cook up a spaghetti meal.
Stephen O’Kelly’O in the candy store. Reminders of youth. Of jelly beans, fudge and bubble gum. Reach down to take up a newspaper. An argument in progress as two customers say they were there first to be served. And now I am served. I hand over a coin for a paper. Move outside slowly back into the street. And stare down. And there it is. The bottom of the front page of the newspaper. Under a photograph of the charred remains of Sylvia’s doll’s house in the woods. Special to the Herald Tribune and all the news that they think is fit to print in such a conspicuous headline.
PROMINENT SOCIETY FIGURE
IN DOLL’S HOUSE FIRE