CHAPTER XIII: The Cloisters
The Cloisters is an old, Catholic monastery sitting at the highest point of Washington Heights, a neighborhood in northern Manhattan famous for its hilltop brownstones and eclectic mix of elderly Jews, Columbia University med students, and vibrant, tough Latino immigrants, most from the Dominican Republic. It is an odd place for a monastery, and within its walls, removed from the gridlocked streets and swarming sidewalks, one feels something of what the monks of the 18th and 19th centuries must have felt. Of course, The Cloisters is no longer a monastery but a museum. Various works by religious and irreligious artists alike hang on the walls amid a tepid quiet the curators have parlayed into a churchly calm.
It was early winter when they visited. Mitkin had suggested the date a week before, and for the entire week fought a sinking feeling, one that had him saying all the wrong things and doing all the wrong things, and generally ruining everything that he imagined he and Raphaella had.
“You never would have joined me here two years ago,” Raphaella said as they ascended a steep path winding through a rocky outcropping in the incongruous Manhattan woodland. Looking up, they could see an old bell tower affixed against the crisp, pewter-blue winter sky. A jet rumbled above on its way out of the city while the afternoon sun jabbed slightly through the scanty canopy, throwing little diamonds of white light on the ground. “Of course, two years ago I never would have come here. I’m happy we’re here.”
They reached the monastery and went in. There were not many people inside. The few that were, coupled up. One pair held hands as they perused the finely carved votives and exquisite tracery cut into the stone cornices. Another couple walked arm in arm, each enveloping the other as if trying to stay warm. Raphaella and Mitkin walked apart. When Raphaella stopped, Mitkin would stop. Where she saw something interesting, so did he. She spied a cross.
“That is Byzantine.”
“I like it,” he said, and they continued. A hardy breeze with an icy sting slapped their faces as they turned to head outside where a garden filled with graves awaited. It was part of the museum. Various friends of the monastery had been buried there, buried in simple, well-kept plots all surrounded by a retaining wall of knee-high planters. Only one of the planters contained anything living; an early morning glory sprouted against the cold odds of winter.
“Do you remember when I told you I loved you?” asked Mitkin. She nodded. “Did you know what I meant?”
“I think so,” she responded as they weaved through the grave markers in silence, Mitkin’s palms moistening, his heart growing wild. At the back of the little ossuary, they found the same path that had brought them up the hill to the monastery. Mitkin watched as Raphaella entered it for the descent. He stirred in agitation. The bell tower now stood tall beside them, but soon, if they continued down, it would sink into the hillside, out of sight. Raphaella smelled something burning and slowed. “Can you smell that?”
He nodded but did not respond. “What did I mean?” he intoned, sternly.
“About love? You meant you love me. We understand one another. You’re searching, like me.”
“That is not what I meant.” He stopped and waited for her to do the same. “Raphaella, I didn’t mean that when I used the word love.”
She stopped. “What did you mean?”
“I meant love, sensual love. I meant the most basic desire known, the one I’ve denied for so long.” He took a step but then stopped again, turning to her quickly. “If you give a man long enough, he will believe in anything. I believed my own thing for a long time, but I was wrong about that. My father was wrong, too. I’ve rethought everything now. I’ve rethought absolutely everything. Do you remember when I first met you, how I measured your fetus, your baby, with my hand? Do you remember my hand on your belly, on your skin? I think I said that he would be big-boned and early. Well, that was a joke. The whole encounter was not what I made it seem. I was acting like that because I had been trained to take all of my insides, my deep passions, and turn them into cold calculations. I was like a pervert, because I wanted to touch you differently and wouldn’t admit it. I was a pervert, see, I buried what I wanted in a sick way. I always wanted you Raphaella, even when you were pregnant. Does that bother you?” He took a step closer. “David thought I was courting you when I put my ear to your belly, and he was right. I was courting you, I was falling in love with you, I was wanting you, and so what? I fell in love with you in my own way, it was scientific and stupid, but now it’s different, now I’ve gotten rid of all that baggage and found a new way. I love you, Raphaella.”
They were on a steep set of stairs that traversed the craggy hills on top of which sat the monastery itself. They were standing together about halfway down. She stood one step above him and looked down on him, he looking up, close enough to touch. When a cold breeze blew a thick bushel of hair into Raphaella’s face, he took her hand and held it forcefully. With his other hand he combed her hair back slowly. “I will never stop loving you, Raphaella.”
“You can’t love me, Mitchell.”
“Don’t say that, Raphaella. You’re strong, you’re silent and thoughtful and you have what you need in this life.”
“Doubt is what I have,” she said beneath her breath.
“How odd,” he said, then louder, and aggressively. “How odd it is you say that, because I was about to say how confident you are.” He paused, “I was going to say how much your confidence attracts me. It’s the thing that I need now, the thing I need the most.” His hands moved slightly to take her but she stopped him.
“See, we are no good, Mitchell. I am not what I seem. Please Mitchell, don’t talk about love anymore. Please. There is nothing between us.” He stared coldly at her. “Nothing, Mitchell. Do you hear me? Nothing.”
Mitchell Mitkin stopped staring at her, took a slight step back, and looked up through the tall trees. The sun found his eyes and he squinted. A ridge built of piled rock stood crooked at the bottom of the hill, the only sign of the city below. He buttoned the top of his jacket and tugged on his knit hat, pulling it nearly over his eyes. Then, heaving, he took a step up and took Raphaella by the shoulders with force, and as he did his hands slid up slowly until they were snug around her throat.
“You must love me, Raphie. I need you, you’re not like the others down there.” He held her too tightly for a moment and she recoiled, throwing herself to the ground, afraid. His chest grew tight and he pitied himself. There in the little wood under the monastery he swore his life meant nothing. Every attempt to make sense of it ended the same. She had betrayed him and his pride would not have it.
“Get up,” he cried as she crab-crawled away from him, her back ramming the step behind her. “Get up!”
“Please, Mitchell, what is it?”
He tried to grab her, but she refused, her face filled with fear. He raised his hand to strike her, but stopped. “Fine, whatever then, I’ll leave,” he said, pointing down the path. “I’m finished with all of this. You’re right. You don’t know what love is. Not you, not anybody. You are just like the rest.” He dismissed her with a wave and curled his lip. “Love is shit.” Still sitting on the ground, Raphaella watched him descend the steps, down and out of view he went, his image growing darker and darker in the shadows, until finally it disappeared into the street below.
CHAPTER XIV: The Monk Seraphim
Meanwhile, as Christmas drew near, I grew closer to my daughter. I had great plans for this Christmas, our first real Christmas together. It was a weekend I believe, and I was sharing lunch with Dana. We picked up a bucket of chicken and were enjoying a little picnic on an exceptionally warm winter day. We were in Central Park near Walden’s Pond. Crisp, cool air freshened our faces while above, the towering, gilded cornices of Central Park South soared. It was a place I loved to go.
“Daddy, can I have your potatoes?” asked Dana.
“Sure honey, but first eat your chicken.”
She picked up a leg and then quickly put it back down. “Oops, I can’t eat that, Daddy.”
I admonished her, “Sure you can, aren’t you hungry?”
“Mommy says that if I remember, and if I want to, I should not eat meat right now, not until Christmas.”
Dana’s face was wrought with angst. Her brow was stiff as she dug through the bag for a spoon. The chicken lay untouched on her paper plate.
“Go ahead, Dana,” I pointed. “Eat the chicken. I’ll tell Mommy it’s okay.”
“I don’t think so, Daddy. I’m more hungry for potatoes.” She scooped a pale white glob into her mouth. I looked at her chicken and then at our daughter and thought, this is weird. Denial at age four?
“Eat the chicken, Dana,” I said.
“But—”
“I said eat the chicken.” Startled, she quickly picked up her plate, rolling her chicken leg like a log from one side to the other. She squealed as the leg rolled again, back and forth across her plate until it crashed onto the sandiest patch of Manhattan real estate known to man.
“Oops,” she moaned.
I fumed and said, “Pick it up.” She did. I snatched it out of her hands and tried to brush off the sandy skin before handing it back. She gave me a furtive glance and clenched her teeth. “Dana,” I said loudly. She stared at me and then, obediently, began to bite in. I snatched the chicken away before she got to it.
“I’m sorry, Dana, it’s just that you should be eating Kentucky Fried Chicken like everybody else. Here, eat this one, it’s not so sandy.” She took it and we sat quietly, chewing. Finally, it was time to go home.
“Ready?” I said.
She nodded. I drove home, hurriedly.
“It’s called fasting,” said Raphaella, pointing Dana to her room while at the same time dealing with me. “It’s no big deal, people all around the world do it. Relax.”
“Why relax? Flogging at four? Don’t you think that’s a little much, a little ridiculous?” I was more irritated than I’d hoped to be.
“It’s not flogging, David. And no, fasting is not ridiculous.”
“I think it is. Whose idea is this anyway?”
“It’s my idea.”
“I don’t believe you. I think it’s the priest’s idea. How often do you go to that church now? Huh?”
“As often as we can, so what?”
“Well, I think he’s got you brainwashed. That’s what I think.”
“Well I am sorry you think so little of me, but I’m not brainwashed. I made a conscious decision to fast. I explained my decision to my daughter and she has decided to fast with me. Big deal.”
“It is a big deal. Now I’m dating someone who starves herself, some guru of the gods, while my baby daughter learns the great lessons of self-deprivation. What’s next, the frickin’ iron maiden?”
“First of all, you’re not dating anybody. Secondly, it’s easy to say what you’re saying David. Try to look a little deeper.”
“Oh, I have Raphaella. I spent three years in California looking deeper.” She rolled her eyes. “Okay, I couldn’t love you correctly, I hated that. I came back in to do the right thing. I’ve done everything you’ve asked of me since returning. I haven’t pushed you into anything sexual, into dating, into being a couple. I’m just trying to do what’s right.” And now, I guess I blew a gasket. “I mean Dana’s my daughter too, right?”
“Not the point,” she said.
“So how about a little consultation before turning her into Mother Teresa?”
“And that would be so bad?”
“You know what I mean.”
“You know what? I don’t. I really, really don’t, David.”
“I mean stop subjecting her to somebody else’s ideas of what is right. Do what your heart tells you, everything you need to know is in your heart, just follow it, gosh.” I was running out of words and I kept wanting to say, “You know what I mean.” More than anything though, I wanted to start this whole conversation over. We had been doing so well together.
“That’s why I fast, David, to get to my heart, to uncover it and know it.” She had been nearly yelling, and suddenly she lowered her voice, looking for Dana. Near to a whisper she said, “David, don’t think it’s all just black and white for me. I’m struggling to understand all of it, too. I’m searching, so what?”
“Whatever,” I said. “I just want to know one thing. Will we ever be together? Am I just fooling myself? Am I an idiot?” But of course, I was an idiot. All of the peace treaties and good-boy credits had just gone out of the window because I just had to drop the big one. The together question.
“I don’t know if we’ll be together,” she said. “I really don’t know.”
There was no way to stay in that room now. How badly I wanted to take my daughter and leave, to get out of the wooliness of it all, to move into the outside where buildings were buildings and streets were streets and right was right and wrong was wrong. It was so uncomfortable inside. Just say goddamned yes, I wanted to blurt out. Just say, hell yes, I will be with you starting now, this moment, now and forever, quickly say yes, yes, yes, yes… yes! Instead, a mercurial mood overcame me, and I blurted out.
“I want to meet the priest. Tomorrow.”
She looked at me.
“I said I want to meet this guy. I’m free at five, I’ll meet you here at six.”
“If that’s what you want. But that’s not really it, is it?” she said.
“Yeah, that’s really it. Yeah.”
I left. I don’t remember anything about the day after that. I was consumed with her and her priest and her new creepy life. The next day, at 5:59 p.m. I knocked on her door. We walked in the first snow of the winter season. Large feathery flakes swept back and forth before us, dancing on the icy winds of late December. It had been coming down for more than an hour and was beginning to stick. Buses and cars, black on the bottom from oily precipitation, chewed their way up and down 5th Avenue. We crossed over to Madison Avenue where few cars and fewer people made the city disappear behind abandoned buildings and sparse gravel lots. I covered my head with the hood of my jacket, covering also the color of my skin. Walking with Raphaella this far uptown, this deep into Harlem, with the snow and the desolation of abandonment all around, I was moved to hide who I was. We did not hold hands, though at this point in our relationship that was rare regardless of where we walked. A pinch of sulfur hung in the air, a product of salt trucks dumping their wares up and down the main avenues. We passed a hospital. Its windows gleamed with warmth, and I thought of white-hot stars blazing through the thick haze of a snowy cosmos. At 124th Street, we again saw signs of life. Little hooded men on each corner, their hands in their pockets, swayed slightly to sounds of rhythmic rap. One raggedy bodega challenged the rap with merengue beats. Two men moved their hips slightly, dancing with invisible partners, swigging on large bottles of bagged beer.
We continued uptown and reached 125th, the epicenter of Harlem. Yellow light from skinny streetlamps illuminated a lively world. Heavy pedestrian traffic and big black gypsy cabs cock sparred for space in the crowded crosswalks. They crept along on either side of the street, honking occasionally, trawling for cold and tired mothers on their way home from a full day’s work. Sidewalk vendors hawked jackets and caps. A young man displayed a card table full of cassettes, a failing boom box blared Bob Marley. African merchants displayed leather belts and wood carvings. Sweet incense hung in the frosty air, and no one seemed to notice the snow. We headed east again, down 127th Street and the world left us. With each passing block, a hint of darkness returned. Streetlamps failed again. One blinked on and off, its broken rays splintering in every direction. An abandoned building with gaping, paneless windows stood frail before us. Like lightning, the streetlamp broke above and I imagined the face of a child peeking out at us. I saw a mother too, and together they held tight to each other, shivering in their decrepit home and searching the night for rest from the cold. Another burst of light and they were gone.
We crossed the street and arrived at the foot of a tall stoop. Raphaella pointed up at a thick black door with a gilded cross looming above. Next to the door was mounted a box of some kind. It held in its open face an oil lamp and a picture. A mother and a child kissed gently, he looking up and she, tenderly down. Raphaella began up the stoop, and for a moment I changed my mind. I wanted to leave and forget all of it—the fasting, the praying, the all-controlling change of direction. I wanted to let her go. I waffled and watched as she climbed, steadfast. Up she went, gingerly getting a foothold on the damp, snow-covered steps. She stopped at the top of the stoop and looked down to see if I was coming. Her bright eyes shone through the melee of winter, inviting me up. I cowered imperceptibly beneath the weight of my petulance, while all the while she kept her stare. Finally, I followed.
“Does he live alone here, Raphie?”
“Oh no, there are three other monks here with him.”
We heard footsteps inside and I again felt the pang of regret trickle through me, pricking hard in my stomach and reminding me that this was all very, very odd, and too foreign. The door opened. A tall man, dressed entirely in black and wearing a long, thin beard greeted us.
“Is Father here?” asked Raphaella.
The man nodded and motioned us inside. Raphaella went first. Inside, we immediately mounted more steps and on the second floor we turned again to climb yet another flight. We trudged upward. I kept looking for other monks and nooks and crannies where I’d find little robed men bent over and bobbing up and down to some icy chant. We passed a candlelit room with many more of the paintings I had seen mounted outside. After another flight of stairs we reached a landing that opened into a big room filled with couches and chairs. I looked behind me for the man who let us in, but he was gone. We stood in the fourth floor foyer alone, waiting for something. Raphaella rang a little bell that hung over the door. Another man in black robes appeared. He too had a long beard and like the other, greeted us with a nod.
“Good evening, Raphaella. Father will be right out.”
We sat down. The monk took our jackets and dissolved into a back room.
“What’s next?” I asked.
“Father Seraphim,” replied Raphaella.
I sat stiff, trying to remember why I had come. It was not easy as my mind kept focusing on little things, a tiny painting of a skinny man holding his own decapitated head, another of a malnourished woman and her companions, a skull and a lion. A skull and a lion, I thought. The Wizard of Oz? There was a dog’s head carved into the back of a rugged dining chair, a pair of large black slippers, an 18th century candle lamp, complete with a large reflecting mirror for reading, and there was a black cane. I turned slowly, half-expecting to spy an iron maiden. On the other side of the room there was a television. Okay, good, I thought. Raphaella seemed more at ease than I was. She sat humbly, reverently even. She looked at me and made a face somewhere between a smile and a sneer.
It was the paintings that stuck with me. There were many of them. All were done without a three-dimensional perspective, and all of them seemed so simple. The bodies of the saints seemed misshapen; a head too big for a body here, hands too small to hold a cross there, or children painted as adults. An oil lamp dangled in front of many of them. If I had come here under different circumstances, alone or on a field trip for school, let’s say, I would not have had such disquiet. It was Raphaella that unnerved me, really. She wasn’t watching all of this as I was; she was beginning to belong to it. For this reason, all of it, the ancient paintings, the oil lamps, the big tattered books, the black robes and thick beards, the dim candlelight, the chant I did not hear, all of it became animated and filled with life, alive and working to capture her, the woman who was part of me, the woman whose flesh I’d had and in whose womb I had placed a life. She was slipping away, and I was, too. I needed a handle, something to hold. I tried to return to more tangible concepts, the ones that brought me here, the thought of her and me splitting apart, the thought of me hoping and trying, and of her drifting, and in which direction, and to whom? To him, of course, the priest, to this place and these ideas, all of this was stealing my woman from me and I would not let it happen. This thought, this new direction, was simple and in thinking it, I became calm. I had purpose.
A door opened, Raphaella stood up, and then so did I. A big man with a cane approached.
“Hello, Raphaella.” He nodded and then looked at me, square. “And you’re David, right?” He gestured with an open hand. “Sit down, please. Would you like something to drink? A cookie?”
I didn’t think about the cookie while nodding. I was thinking about this guy’s get-up. He was wearing a long black robe cinched at the waist by a thick black leather belt. The robe didn’t have a hood like I’d seen other monks wear, but it was full-length and old-fashioned. He wore big black boots as if he were about to go out into the snow, and he wore a round black hat pulled down quite low on his head, almost covering his eyebrows. His hands were very large, I thought, and they were very strong and thick, while his eyes were kind and soft. And blue, bright blue, so blue. He didn’t seem to be Slavic or Greek or smarmy in that Old World way, mostly because his eyes were like the sky. I wondered about this for a moment, but more than anything, sitting there, I thought about how long this guy’s beard was, and how gray. Let’s just say his beard could easily have gotten stuck in his thick black belt, maybe as he got dressed in the morning, bent over and cinched up. I’m sure he could have made a real mess of his morning, yanking on his beard, pulling his head and face almost off. That’s what I thought of, I couldn’t help it. What a beard!
The same monk who had earlier disappeared, now reappeared, this time with Oreo cookies. “Fasting food,” the priest said, nodding to the cookies. We ate the cookies in silence.
“Oh, forgive me, David,” said Raphaella. “This is Father Seraphim, the priest I told you about.”
I nodded, and so did the priest.
“What a night last night,” he said. “Two men from El Salvador just showed up at about two in the morning, dirty and tired. I still don’t know how they found us. Father Silhouan thinks old Albert down the block told them we had a Spanish-speaking monk here, and that they thought we were Roman Catholics. Wait until they wake up and find out we’re not Catholics, ha!” He said Catholics like cat-liks, laughing. And then within just a few seconds, he composed himself and spoke to me in a deep, clear, clipped baritone voice. “So why are you here, David?”
“Well,” I said, “I wanted to know about fasting and why my little girl has to fast?”
“Dana?” he said.
“Yes, my daughter. Why does she have to skip meat, when she is growing?”
“Well, she doesn’t. Nobody does.” I shot a look at Raphaella. “Nobody has to fast, David. Nobody has to do anything, unless they want to. I mean, you didn’t have to come here, but here you are.”
“Sure, but she isn’t eating meat because she thinks eating meat is bad. Her mother here thinks so too. I mean come on, how bad can it be?”
Father Seraphim had been sitting like my mother sits when she drinks coffee, legs crossed and to the side, back resting against the armrest of her big, comfortable favorite chair. Now he unfolded himself and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, boots squared up in front of me. He was suddenly very masculine. I shot another look at Raphaella.
“It can be very bad, David. Sin is very bad, missing the mark is very bad because when we miss the mark we distance ourselves from God, and God is love, and so, we distance ourselves from love. From the thing that makes us like God.”
Wow, I thought, and then I blurted out, “Come on, eating meat does that?”
There was a pause, and then he pointed at me. “Let’s say that you played basketball for a living. You know, you were good at it. Let’s say you had the season coming up and you needed to get ready for the year by getting in shape, and so you started your workout regime and cut back on certain foods and hit the weights. Then one day a buddy tells you about this great party with beer and girls and cake and pork rinds and I don’t know, you imagine.” He gesticulated with his big hands. “First of all, would you go to that party? Maybe. If you went would you hang around the pork rind table, the chocolate float table? Maybe, you might even eat at those tables, and it might taste really good, and you might be happy. But you wouldn’t be a world-class basketball player, would you? You would be something else, especially if you didn’t understand why you weren’t supposed to eat from those tables. Some tables are just off limits. And so what? Everyone would understand because they’d know you are trying to be the best you can. Good, they’d say. They might even help you by giving you some other food, tasty food, but the kind that makes training easier for you, not harder. They might even help you.”
The priest pointed at David again. “They might even help you to make the mark, to reach your goal, to be a star ball player. They might even do that, if they believed you had it in you.”
He leaned back and crossed his legs. I just tried to process the whole thing, tried to relate it to my daughter. I mean, sure, the basic concept was clear, but why my daughter? She just wants to go to school, just wants to play with dolls already. Like a hawk, he watched me think.
Then he said, “If you believe that we are spirit first and flesh second, then the goals of the spirit must come first. Love, joy, sacrifice, but mostly love for God and others, these are the things of the spirit. But the flesh, well, you know your body. You know how it works. We like stuff, we like warm baths and ice cream every day, and sex. But these things must happen in conjunction with, no,” he shook his head slightly, “in concert with, the spirit. If not, well, it’s just all so frustrating and short-lived. You know?”
Yeah, I thought, I guess so. But I wasn’t sure enough to nod my head or even acknowledge his words. Instead, I just sat there, inexplicably waiting for more.
“Dana doesn’t have to fast. Eating meat is not a sin. Ever. But if you desire that she find truth and love, it may be that foregoing meat is a means to a very beautiful end. But she is not Orthodox, and she is not seven. At seven, the Church instructs its children to fast so that they may begin to train their body to obey their soul. Of course, if you don’t sin, you don’t have to fast. So don’t sin, and there you go.”
“But I don’t even believe there is such a thing as sin,” I said.
“Yeah, I figured that.”
“You figured that?”
“Sure, it was the look on your face. You have a real dilemma on your hands, don’t you? Here is this woman, this crazy woman that believes in sin and is also the mother of your child, and there you are, a father and a guy who doesn’t believe in sin, and between the two of you nothing is working. Not even close.”
I thought to myself that this guy was mean. He thinks he knows a lot about me, about us. I mean here he is just laying his opinions on me like he is right, and that is that. I looked around and all the old paintings, as quaint as they were only moments ago, became irritations and reminders of the irrational, the pre-enlightenment mumbo-jumbo about souls and spirits and voodoo and witches and iron maidens. There just had to be an iron maiden in this joint somewhere. I looked at the old priest and decided to dive in.
“But, this is just some belief that you have about spirits and souls. It’s just a hope, isn’t it?”
“No. It is the truth.”
“But only as you know it.”
“Well, how else would the truth be known?”
“Well, like scientifically. Provable.” I looked at Raphaella and sensed that she was uneasy with the turn in the conversation.
“David. Why? Why did you come here?”
“I told you,” I said.
“Fasting?”
“Yeah, and Dana and just the whole thing. I want to know what the heck happened to Raphaella.”
The priest sat with his legs crossed and a big hand stroking his long beard. “Do you have a minute?” he asked.
Almost against my will I said, “Well, I have to go...” And then I stopped and sort of got stuck on what I wanted to say, and where I had to go. He just kept stroking his beard. “I have to go in a little while.”
“So do I,” he responded, leaning over and sipping his coffee. Swallowing, he started with, “How old are you?” I told him I was twenty-six. He nodded. “Were you in New York three years ago?”
“I, well, I was in California.”
“Do you remember the story of the little boy from the Bronx? Ty Ty they called him.” I shook my head and he looked at Raphaella. “What is with this Ty Ty by the way? Was it for Tyrone or something?”
“I think so,” she said.
“Whatever it was, his name was Ty Ty, and Ty Ty was a crack baby, and his mother ran a crack house. Actually his mother ran a whole drug dealing operation, pretty much as big as it gets for a while there. She was good at what she did, but she had been a user during her pregnancy with the boy. So he had all kinds of neurological complications and all kinds of kidney issues. You could say he was sick, but some might say he was kind of crazy, a little bit wacko. He would wander all the time, and talk to himself, and bob, you know, like an autistic boy. But he was like a dove, too. Just as gentle as can be. I met him many times, used to see him when I’d walk up to visit an old Catholic friend of mine who ran a soup kitchen at St. Ann’s. I’d see the boy walking and bobbing and holding a pack of baseball cards, always with his cards, flipping through them at top speed, saying each player’s name as he went. He had a little clumpy Afro, matted half the time and he had this stare, this real simple, innocent stare that just went out of his little beaten body, and you weren’t sure if he was looking at you or at something behind you or at something entirely not of this world. He’d take the same exact route each time he’d go wandering. Looking at people and buildings, birds, trash, just always staring and walking.” The priest sipped his coffee.
“Anyway, he grew up in his mother’s crack den basically, but he hated that place. His mother would beat him when he came back from his day trips, but that didn’t stop him. He started wandering at night, too. He wasn’t in school, and nobody paid any attention to what school he should attend. The closest thing he had to a parent was his grandmother on his mother’s side. She would walk with him some days, give him new clothes when she could borrow a few dollars, and even read to him. She wasn’t always around but she was very kind and tried to do what she could. She loved him. One day, I guess this would have been about two summers ago, maybe three, she took him to see the Yankees. Ty Ty bobbed all the way to the park and sat there bobbing in his seat and his Grandma didn’t think he was understanding much of what was going on, but she didn’t leave. She stayed to the end and he bobbed away, talking to himself with his baseball cards flying through his hands, and well, the Yankees won. Do you remember Don Mattingly?” he looked at me.
“First baseman?” I said.
“He hit the game winning home run that day. Apparently the Yankees weren’t very good and that was a rare win for them. Is that right?” I nodded. “Well, Ty Ty came back after that game and kept up his wandering and everything seemed just the same as before, except that from time to time the little boy didn’t come home at all, for the whole night, and even his mother began to worry. This continued for a while. Entire nights and days would pass and that little boy would not come home. I guess he was about seven now. When he’d get a beating, he would just cry silently, mend his wounds and continue with his wandering. Apparently his mother continued selling her drugs, though it appears she wasn’t doing them so much now. She was getting rich, actually.”
I nodded, but the story was long. “Then, in the fall, and I remember this as clear as day, I saw little Ty doing his thing on the sidewalk, and I stopped him and put my hand on his head and said ‘Hello, son,’ like I had done many times before. He looked at me, well around me, in his way, so sad and deep, and then he slipped out from under my hand and onto the stoop of an abandoned building. He scooted inside and I thought, this little crazy kid is living in this building! I followed him inside and what’ya know, I found an immaculate room, swept neat as new. It was a huge, empty room. On the floor was this perfect, I mean perfect, re-creation of Yankee stadium. It covered the floor. It was the room. An infield had been taped to the tiles, hundreds of long strips of masking tape lined up over and over again, in the shape of an infield. There was a pitcher’s mound too, a home plate and a backstop, all just like Yankee Stadium. There was the light blue outfield wall made out of cereal boxes and constructed to the exact proportions of the real field. There were thousands of tiny little seats, thousands of them, placed in tiers just like the stadium, all of them fashioned individually out of thousands of gum wrappers, each glued down. There was the little museum out in left field, everything immaculately drawn or painted to scale. Even the scoreboard looked exactly as it is, or at least as I’ve seen it on television. I’ve never been, have you?” he asked, looking at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “The wall is blue.”
“Well, yes it is. I was just dumbfounded. There was all of this and then thousands of baseball cards, organized nicely in shoeboxes, team by team. He must have had all the players from all the teams. It’s up there with the most manic things I’ve ever seen. And I’ve known some real manic people, trust me. I stood there astounded.”
Raphaella, who I had nearly forgotten about, wondered aloud, “What did the boy do when he saw you there?”
“He just started playing.”
“Playing what?” I asked.
“The game. Flick ‘em. He started playing Flick ‘em. That’s what all the neighborhood boys called it.”
“Flick ‘em?”
“Yes, of course. He motioned me to my knees, him on one side of the field, the first base side, and me on the other.” The priest got out of his chair and pulling up his cassock, got down on all fours. “Like this,” he said, “he handed me a card, a pitcher I guess, and showed me how to flick this little tin ball that he had. You flicked it with the card of your player, and in my case I was supposed to flick the ball at his card, the batter, standing at home plate. So I did and guess what, he cracked that little ball, and it flew out and over his perfect model of Yankee Stadium.” Still on his knees he pointed out across the room, like Babe Ruth before his famous home run call. “That little tin ball flew over the wall and landed in the seats of center field. It was brilliant. He was a genius. And best of all, after some more of this, I noticed that he was keeping score, or something like that, in a book. I paged through his book and he had hundreds of scorecards, like old men keep when they watch or listen to the games on the radio. Hundreds!”
The priest got off of his knees and hardily made his way back into his seat. “He was the commissioner basically, I mean he had a league of Flick ‘em, and he played with all of the neighborhood kids, every one of them knew about this spot. It was Ty Ty’s spot. He had been coming here for so long, creating this game, this world. And his favorite card was Don Mattingly. He kept it in his pocket at all times. He was a crazy kid, but not so crazy really. Not so crazy at all. I left him when some other boys came over and wondered why a man in a black gown was hanging around ruining their Flick ‘em games.”
“How did you know it was called Flick ‘em?” I said.
“That is what the Daily News writer called it when he did a story on the little boy. They called him the Yankee Dandy and he became quite a little celebrity in this town. He met with Mayor Koch and got himself into a good school and he even had someone buy the rights to his Flick ‘em game. But then the darndest thing happened. Ty Ty got beat up one day real bad. Some thugs thought he had money after all the fuss in the papers. They beat him pretty bad with some rebar. He got tetanus from that rebar, but his mother didn’t know because she never managed to leave the crack den and he, well, he died. He died all alone. Sure the city came out for him, and he was back in the papers as a little hero and a sad case of how the system fails kids and all of that. His mother was demonized. She was run out of town and sent to prison, but what people didn’t know is that after his death and before her trial, she had already begun to change. Something took hold of her after this little boy’s death, something that made her want him back. Grief, sure. Guilt, sorrow. But I think she also saw something else. I think she saw the love that so many of these very normal neighbor boys had for her son. They loved him, went to his funeral, even cheered at his funeral when Don Mattingly showed up and gave a wonderful speech. These were little lives and they were touched by her son, and I think she saw in them the thing she had missed while her son was alive.” He sat forward on the edge of his big chair. “She wanted that. She wanted that thing that he had, that he had given.”
He got up and walked into the kitchen. I wondered where he had gone. From out of sight, he yelled, “Cookies?”
“No, thank you,” said Raphaella.
“I’m fine,” I said. He came back into the room with a tin of cookies.
“Russian,” he said. “Great cookies, but don’t eat too many, the Russians don’t know how to moderate their food, or their passions for that matter.” He popped one in his mouth. “So sweet.”
Was the story over? I thought. I watched as Raphaella gave in and plucked a cookie out of the tin. It looked good, light and crunchy, but I held back. “So, what about the story. Is that it?” I asked.
“Well, not really. She gave all of the money she had, and she had a bunch from his sale of the Flick ‘em game, to build baseball lots in the neighborhood where Ty Ty had become a fixture. And they were all mini Yankee Stadiums.”
“That’s what those are?” I said, knowingly.
“Yep. You’ve seen them then?”
“Yeah, when I go up to see Raphie. Sure. Those are because of this kid? They’re nice.”
“Yes, they are nice,” he said.
He got up and slipped on a black wool coat, long and simple, and heavy. “So, now I’ve got to go.” He buttoned his coat carefully and fetched one last cookie. As he prepared to leave, Raphaella got up and went to him with her hands together, palms up. Crouching ever so slightly, she extended her hands as if begging. The priest made a crossing motion and placed his hand in hers. She kissed it.
He turned and looked at me. “Nice meeting you, David. Please come back and see us again, maybe go out with the monks to feed the homeless, or come to a vespers if you’d like.” He looked down at me, and I realized I was still sitting. “You can stay if you’d like. No problem.”
I hopped up and retrieved my jacket, sort of shaking off the fog of his story, and his crossing, and her kissing. “No, that’s fine, thanks anyway,” I said. I looked at Raphaella and she smiled, sheepishly. He buttoned the top buttons of his coat as he descended the three flights of stairs. We stood above, in silence, half-listening to the tap-pop of his boots on the stairs below.
When all was quiet, I turned to Raphaella and said, “Flick ‘em?”
She nodded.
“But don’t you think he sort of, I don’t know, skipped a few things. Maybe sort of swerved a bit, off the track.” I straightened my arm and pointed with a flourish. “Like frickin’ Stanley and Livingstone off the track?”
She was staid. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”
On the way back, neither Raphie nor I spoke much. The only thing I could get myself to say was, “Nice place.” Whenever I went to question the whole story and its relevance I was met with resistance, a sort of gust of dread. Outside, the snow had stopped and the night had grown clear and cold. The moon was so bright, and Harlem gleamed beneath it. A man with a long, shabby beard sat all alone next to a heap of cans. His swollen hands gripped a cup of hot coffee and his eyes glared out at us. There was something fearful in his look. Raphaella nodded to him and we walked on until reaching the stoop of her apartment. I forlornly looked up at the door, doing what I’d done so many times since my return from California, begging inaudibly to come up, and in, for the night. But this time, in the midst of my performance, I stopped. I couldn’t keep my stare, I couldn’t keep the syrupy, shallow strokes of my lashes in tow. I turned my head.
“Good night, Raphaella. I’ll call you about Dana’s next visit. Tell her I love her.” She extended her hand. I shook it and left.
Thank you for sharing this. I am enjoying it immensely.