3Souls: Chapters XXV, XXVI, XXVII
Seever's Cool Digs, Summertime Rebels, To the Rooftop
CHAPTER XXV: Seever’s Cool Digs
Mitkin’s little political rally had left me cheerless and but for a pounding headache, alone. I went uptown to see Raphaella but found no one home. A bit edgy, I waited. It was Seever, the lumbering Wisconsinite from the first floor, who found me there on the stoop, on a Friday night, alone, exasperated.
“You look like you could use a big couch and a remote,” he said.
“And a beer.”
“I got those. Have you ever had a bratwurst?”
We went inside and lounged all night. His television was wide and tall and sat on a finely carved stand almost in the center of the room. The stand swiveled and Seever showed me to what end.
“I can make it turn without touching it,” he said. He held out his big blonde forearm and pressed a raised yellow button on the stout remote. The word interstellar came to mind. A humming sound escorted the TV as it pirouetted. “In case the sun is bad or you want to rearrange the room quickly, like for company. Pretty neat, heh?”
I fiddled with the yellow button and watched the television pivot. I stared glassy-eyed, not sure how to respond to such a mighty display of Japanese excellence. “Got ‘em all right here,” he said plopping down a cooler filled with beer and ice. “No need to make a kitchen run and miss the fight.” We both popped open a can. I slid deep into the spongy couch.
He then wheeled out some snacks. They were neatly arranged in matching bowls and included chips with dip and pretzels. There was a bowl of popcorn too. We ate and drank and watched as the pre-fight ceremonies dragged on. Seever kept his hand on the remote and turned the channel with great regularity. We rode from station to station, image to image, and all of it while enjoying his super-furnished apartment and his super-cold cold beers.
I was as comfortable as contrivance can make a man, but above me, in my head, other images clicked on and off. Mitkin’s students were there, gathered around a candle in Mitkin’s apartment, discussing their day’s work. I could not shake the wraith of the little preacher boy, Richie Rovers. His bony face and his silver tongue hovered there too, just beyond the pulp of my mind. And Raphaella. She was up there too, gliding back and forth, reminding me of my past and my inability to resurrect a relationship. I could see all of her idiosyncrasies, her stubborn faith and her genial dedication to the less fortunate, to bums. Our daughter, too, I saw her above me with her head on her mother’s shoulder, reading a book and in love. And the priest. All of them crowded into my mind and nearly ruined my Friday night Wisconsin party. I concentrated on the TV.
It birthed ideas at an incredible rate. They were sensual ideas mostly, creative, enticing ideas that let me get away from the Mitkins and Seraphims of the world. I got lost in them, and who wouldn’t? I was in Haiti one minute, working with UNICEF and feeding big-bellied babies and then, suddenly I was back at the fight, jumping gingerly up and down, my muscles bulging under dark skin, my mind prepared to bloody someone. Next, I was bombarded by a middle-aged fight commentator. So many words, words and more words, all of them tumbling out of his mouth: jabs, straight lefts, right hooks and cutting off the ring and use your strengths, and on and on. Then Seever was there with the bratwurst. These were obese hot dogs with acne, essentially, their tips charbroiled and crispy. He poured mustard all over them and I watched as he demonstrated what occurs when you bite in. They spray. I felt the hot, stinging tick of brat-grease on my cheek and then hurried to gobble down my own, forgetting about those chimerical things. It was good, and I smiled as Seever switched channels and we watched a team of college cheerleaders fling each other around a matted stage. They chucked and yelled at the same time, something about wildcats. Next I watched gritty black and white film of a great president delivering a speech, but that image lasted only a second—Seever nuked him in favor of a man with a tall white hat, puffy on top, who chopped away at some exotic vegetables. Again came the strong boxers and I popped another beer.
The front door to the building rattled and I ran to the front window to see. Whoever it was had already slipped inside so I ran quickly to the peephole of Seever’s front door hoping to catch a glimpse. Through the peephole, I saw Mitchell Mitkin struggling with something heavy. I watched without breathing.
He produced a box, a weak-bottomed box which was about to give out. He pushed the door open with his buttocks and then dragged the box with his arms and took a break. I saw him wipe his brow. It was a long, deliberate wipe, and through the concave peephole it took on mammoth proportions. He disappeared suddenly, and then instantly was back in view, staring directly at me through the peephole, his nose sticking out elfishly. He turned and balanced the big box with his thighs, slowly ascending the stairs, step by step, breath by breath. Out of view, I heard his door open and then slam shut.
“Is it Mitkin?” asked Seever now standing behind me.
“Mmmhuh. He’s carrying a big heavy box.”
“I don’t like that guy,” said Seever. “He’s crazy, heh?”
“Yeah.” I wanted more channels and more beer.
“Have you noticed he stopped talking to everyone lately, even Raphaella? He’s got some kind of crazy chip on his shoulder, I think he’s got some kind of complex.” He walked with me back to the sitting area with its soft couches and inviting rugs. I slumped again, but he was not finished. “Did you ever find out what his deal was with Raphaella?”
I reached for the bowl of chips.
“Because I mean when I first moved in here, remember, like, what, two years ago? They were real tight. Or at least it seemed that way. I’m not saying they were doing it or anything, it’s just that he had this thing for her. You could tell.” He chugged on his beer while awaiting my response, and as he did I saw his bicep flex snug against his T-shirt’s rolled up sleeve.
I did not want this tired old conversation. I wanted what he had offered earlier, a respite.
“By the way, whatever happened with Allie?” he asked. I thought how he’s gotta be drunk to keep at it like this. How could he miss the hints I dropped all around him; the languid droop of my eyelids and insouciant fold of my legs, how I rolled my eyes and sucked up a vexed breath. I looked at him and, finally giving in, answered.
“We got together.”
“You nailed her, heh?”
“Yeah, sure, I nailed her.”
“Excellent dude. She had a nice body, right?”
“Yeah, nice.” What about the fight, I thought. I wanted him to shut up. “I think this is Holyfield’s fight. He’s too strong,” I said.
Seever fumbled with his thoughts and turned toward the TV. “Yeah, he’s real strong.”
We watched silently. The fight plodded on. The room began to shrink under the weight of an awkward silence until finally Seever spoke.
“I made bonus this week. I’ve got an extra five grand coming around Christmas time.” A grin spread wide under his Nordic cheeks. “New York is a great place.”
I humored him and we spoke at length about his job and his choice to move here. He told me about his family and brothers, all of whom were successful in their fields. One was a lawyer, the other a doctor. He had been competing with them for years and now was finally able to say he’d made it too.
“I’m thinking about trading in my Camaro, I want something a little more classy.”
I nodded and he continued, he said he was after a BMW or a Mercedes and he thought he’d like to drive back home for Christmas, pull into the driveway and honk the custom horn of his sinewy new success symbol. I went along. “That’s a good plan, man,” I said, remembering that Raphaella and I used to have similar plans and how, before her crazy conversion we could have been content with a BMW too. But that was before.
“My brother just bought his cruiser,” he said. “It’s a boss boat, rigged with a sweet Bose Cruiser Deluxe, I mean that music just cranks. His wife made him get lots of insurance on it but he says he’s wasting his money. ‘It’s a waste,’ he says, ‘thing’s unsinkable.’”
I imagined his brother as a big man, a square-jawed, square-bodied man with tight jeans. I imagined them all, in fact, around a robust Christmas tree, Seever describing New York for his family, using phrases like mean streets and don’t go uptown and bridge and tunnel crowd. They would envy him, I thought.
“Do your brothers have plans to visit you in New York?”
“Oh heck, yeah. They think New York would be a great place to visit, just not great to live in. You ever heard somebody say that?” I nodded. “But my father, well, he just thinks I’m crazy all around. He’s not mean about it or anything, he’s just, well, he’s proud to be from Wisconsin. He kids me now. Says I’m a big city kid that forgot about the little people. But he’s not so little, you know. He’s a judge, and he’s tall too.”
The door rattled again.
“Hey,” said Seever, “that’s got to be Raphaella.” We both hopped up. I felt the beers rush to my head and the floor swirl beneath my feet. Still, I got to the peephole first.
I saw a deformed, exaggerated image of Raphaella dragging a sleeping Dana with one hand while fumbling through the door with the other. She was serious and strong and determined, her jaw was set and her beautiful green eyes. She wasted no motion, no time. Hypnotized by drink and hemmed in by a torpid soul, I could not move. She struggled with our child, step by step, upward.
“Is it her?” whispered Seever.
I stammered a silent, “No.”
“Who is it?”
“Somebody for Mitkin I think.”
“Really. That’s a change,” said Seever, scratching his head.
“Yeah.”
I watched her go. Out of view, I could only hear her stomp, and then, soon enough, high overhead, I could only imagine her, living life up there, an angel of sorts, caring for our daughter and struggling.
“Are there anymore beers?” I asked.
Hopping up and with a smile Seever replied, “You bet there are, heh.”
We drank them all. The last thing I remember is the image of two women in floral patterns holding court over two shiny earrings and quoting prices. They went on and on about how great it was to have such an opportunity as this. I think I was on the floor when I fell asleep, at least that’s where I was in the morning. Seever was on the couch above me, and I pictured his big, cock-jawed face looking down on me as my eyelids closed and I passed out. That memory and the musty smell of my underarms put me in a bad mood as I emerged from the building and into the sunlight of the next day.
***
Mitkin looks exhausted. I have been telling him about Seever and he watches me closely, saying little. He has assumed a new posture, one hand holding his chin, elbow on the table, the other stuck beneath his bottom. He waits for me to finish.
“You were comfortable there?”
“Yes, very.”
“And drunk.”
“Yes.”
“Did you wonder what I had in the box?”
I think back. At the time I chalked it up to eccentricity, but now I am curious.
“I had our first shipment,” he says without prompting, “though I wasn’t supposed to.”
“Shipment of what?”
“Guns.”
“You had guns in that box?”
I am amazed. Mitkin was in deep and I had no idea.
CHAPTER XXVI: Summertime Rebels
Mitkin took a job teaching summer school. He taught at a place called Clinton in the Mosholu Parkway neighborhood of the Bronx. Taughtauer hoped to consolidate support in the Bronx by recruiting the toughest summer school cases, the hard-core of the high schools. He had done this every summer for four years and it had worked. Three of the martyrs had come by way of Taughtauer’s summer school classes and now, taking the summer off to plan the actual takeover, Taughtauer entrusted Mitkin with summer school recruitment. And it wasn’t just in the Bronx. Mitkin was asked to throw a wide net over the entire summer school system, a large system filled with apathetic, indolent kids, kids who Taughtauer loved to “save.”
Mitkin, as he had done since joining, worked hard for Taughtauer. He continued to produce his pamphlets, serializing them and keeping a story line running throughout each. He printed them on the Lower East Side, working closely with a cabal of underground anarchists who were well-versed in subversive publications. None of his tracts were ever accredited and none of them ever advocated outright violence, but each tract was very clever. They satirized public officials, including the Chancellor and they did it all in a student vernacular, each edition laden with glossy photos and busy covers and words like whack and da bomb and fly. The tracts became popular among the summer school students, and as his fame grew, Mitkin became an icon. He had learned how to teach, too. His lessons brimmed with confidence and swagger, and he deftly intertwined school curriculum and the philosophy of revolution. His classes were laced with controversy and youthful energy, and his reputation as a great teacher grew daily during that last summer. This was exactly how he knew it would be one day.
By the middle of July, he had found two new martyrs for the movement. They were baptized and Taughtauer was impressed. He asked Mitkin to find more and they were found, like clockwork, one by one. The movement was truly growing. Not only did the elite ranks grow, but the outer ranks too, with kids who were deemed trustworthy enough for basic initiation, “The Oath” as Taughtauer called it. It was in this vortex of activity that Taughtauer called a Sunday evening meeting of the martyrs. It was time for the assault on Livingston Street—the beginning of the end of the NYC Board of Education.
Standing in front of his televisions, the sounds of news muted but the images of death and destruction in full flower, Taughtauer began. “We need to act soon. September 6 is our target date, can we make it official?” One by one he questioned the martyrs, and each reported on the status of preparations. James Hunt reported that he now had a surplus of firearms and that the 6th was possible. His report was given in quiet tones and with a profound sense of humility. Hunt offered, “I can show you what we have tonight, if you’d like?”
Taughtauer nodded and then turned to Mitkin. “The lists? How are the numbers?”
“Higher than they’ve ever been, Ed.”
Taughtauer stood up and turned to his compatriots. “This is the flag that I intend to fly in front of each coalition school once we’ve taken Livingston.”
He held up the flag. It was half red and half white with a black line down the middle. The word FREEDOM was emblazoned in stern black letters across both halves.
“Our girl Alysha designed it. I like it.”
“No flowers? asked Richie Rovers. “That girl loves drawin’ her some flowers.”
“Once this flag goes up,” Taughtauer continued, “my kids will know what to do.”
“And what’s that?” asked Judy Strand.
“Go to the principal’s office with our demands. At that point, the priests and deacons will be authorized to use force, and hopefully the laity will all follow their lead.”
“I’ve got every name of every student at all levels, Ed,” said Mitkin. “From laity all the way up to us, the martyrs. I’ll sit with you after the meeting and show you where our strengths lie. But you already know that it’s not Manhattan. Brooklyn and up here, that’s where we are strongest.”
Taughtauer nodded and then became very grave. He seemed to get emotional, rubbing his hands together as if to hold back a cry. He asked Judy Strand, Roger Nin and an old former principal with whom he’d been close for more than twenty years, Elvira Ramirez, to each stand up. With all four of the older martyrs with him in the front now, he turned to his cadre of students, about thirteen in all, and addressed them.
“And now I want to do something that I’ve waited fifteen years to do. Many times, yep, I never thought this day would come, but it’s here, and well,” he wiped a tear, “today we must assemble the Livingston team. I need six of you.”
Immediately Richie Rovers stood up. “I’m one.” Ricky Cuevas motioned Richie to sit down, but he wouldn’t. “Naw, Rick, I ain’t sittin’ down on this one. I’m going into that bitch and I’m lighting that fire. I’m going.”
“In time, bro. Right, Ed?” said Ricky.
“I want you to decide for yourselves who goes, all of you together, the only way I’ve ever imagined it. So now. Decide.”
Taughtauer called the teachers out of the room and onto the back porch. “This is the meeting I’ve been waiting for, for fifteen years, this is it!” He looked wild-eyed at Mitkin and then, one by one, at the others. Finally he settled on his old friend Elvira. “We’ve done it. They will choose.”
Judy Strand looked anxious. “I don’t want Ricky to go, Ed. He’s my baby. He’s been telling me since the first day that he has to go, that he can’t sell out, but I’m afraid—”
“If they want him, then he’ll go,” said Taughtauer. “It’s not our decision.”
“Then I’ll go too,” she said.
“None of you will go to Livingston. Only students, they are the ones, they are the masterminds, the victims. Each of you will stay in your schools and prepare to fight there. This is very important. We will take and hold the building for the night, and then, the next day, at the schools, you will organize your kids.”
“You’re going?” said Mitkin, sharply.
“I’m going,” he said.
“But—”
“I’m going, period, the end. Now...”
As Taughtauer went on, Mitkin heard the voice of loneliness well up in him and he did not want to stay in his school during the assault. He wanted to join the kids and he wanted to be with Taughtauer. He felt compelled by a sudden unknown fear.
“Now I know Romero, he’ll want his system to work,” Taughtauer said. “He will tell the mayor to keep the schools open, and he’ll be too proud to call school off that first day. I know it. He’ll play right into our hands. That’s why you must be at your schools, and the others too, the ones you’ve been organizing, Mitch. They must be there and you must make them aware of what’s coming.” He waved his index finger. “But never talk of violence, never, not until the exact moment… and then, pow.”
Taughtauer put his hand on Mitkin’s shoulder. “I need you, Mitch. I need you. You are magnificent, all of you.” Mitkin’s eyes were fixed. “And Roger, listen, your school is the jewel of this operation. If we can get King, well…” He smiled and went silent, thinking of just how perfect all of this could be. King High School was important not only because it was home to two thousand city students, but also because it housed all the offices for the Manhattan public schools.
“Which of them is going with you, Ed?” asked Judy Strand, her flaxen hair pale like the troubled countenance of her wrinkled face.
“I don’t know, I told you, they will decide.”
“Yes, excellent,” peeped Roger, the sycophant from Manhattan.
Ricky Cuevas approached with paper in hand. “It’s done.”
Taughtauer took the paper and gave it to Mitkin, and they all returned to the room. They were greeted with a mix of hope and fear, but more palpable still was the glow of reverence visible on the face of each child in that room. Mitkin, filled with pride, looked out over the little gathering and read. “Richie Rovers. James Hunt. Nicole Harrison. Alysha Trotter. Jason Olivo. Ricky Cuevas. You all agree to go?” They nodded.
Taughtauer chimed in, “And that’s the list, the end? Everyone in this room agrees that these six will go, according to their own free will?”
“The end,” said the thin, dark-eyed Cuevas. “It’s what we want.”
“Good. Next up, you’ll write a plan for the rest of you. Think hard. Maximize your presence in the city. We are not just taking a building here, we are overthrowing a regime.”
CHAPTER XXVII: To the Rooftop
It was about this time that Raphaella received news that she had to vacate the premises. September 30 was the exact date. I remember her then, in that hot summer, scurrying all about town, looking for homes and good shelters for her women. She called old friends who, to the last, denied her, calling her kind but crazy. She spent every dollar she had on security deposits for the girls. She did manage to get Kitty and Diamond Lee into a small one-bedroom in West Harlem. “Better than the old Greystoke Motel, I guess,” said Diamond Lee. “Roaches is better than rats.”
Slowly Raphaella cleaned out her apartment and returned it to its previous elegance, a sparse simplicity being the appeal. She was so at peace now. Her decision to forego the shelter job and abide by the admonitions of her priest had settled softly in her soul. I asked her from time to time how he was and it was always the same, “Good, thank God.”
Dana, too, seemed serene and happy. She had finished school without entering special education classes, and as for the demons, she had not backed down. If asked, she always asserted that they were there, right there with them in the classroom, watching and waiting for weak souls to invite them in. She simply learned to deal with the belittlement and ostracism, and her teachers learned to write her off as the odd one. They’d talk about her in the halls as “the one who’d one day turn out okay if only she’d be allowed to.”
Life now was uncomplicated, at least as far as I could tell. During the day, Raphaella worked hard for Doctor Ferrare, and at night she and Dana would attend 6 p.m. Vespers. Afterwards, Raphaella would serve a small meal in the monastery while Dana played with a tough little girl named Anya. Anya was an orphan who had been adopted and brought back from Russia, a quick-witted, golden-haired girl who liked to spread food on things like jeans and the floor.
After Vespers, Raphaella and Dana would return home, bathe, then fix some tea and eat shortbread cookies. She’d read her daughter to sleep and then pray her nighttime prayers, unfailingly. She never asked me for money, never spoke anxiously of the future, never criticized me and always volunteered to help in any way she could.
During that summer, I sensed that all of this was natural, not forced or dictated by an external voice. This was a change. I became enthralled with the paradox in her; she was both more austere and, somehow, more kind. She was filled with an unbounded sweetness and I found myself craving her more than I’d ever craved her before. But my appetite was less carnal now. My longing was for what I’ve come to know as sovereign beauty. I was uncovering the tip of the truest, purest iceberg man can know, and I was being transformed (though I don’t think I knew as much then—I simply called it settling down, or whatever other cliché came to mind in whatever other canned conversation I was having at the time).
I slept soundly every night, got up early in the morning and even started to exercise. I began to write, daily, persistently, and without too much pain. I wrote poems and simple short stories, not all of them filled with some deep-rooted message or dark, solitary mood ratcheted from the recesses of my mind. Sure, many of them were childish and light, puerile disclosures on life and the beauty of creation. But they were still mine, low art, but mine. I thanked Raphaella and she very predictably refused to take credit. She, in fact, apologized for the past and her brittleness, though she did not apologize for our broken relationship. No, that was still a proper thing, a deigned fact of fallen life, one that could not be transgressed until I had become what she was.
And what was she? Well, according to her she was a sinner. That was it. A sinner. She wanted me (though she never told me and never would) to see myself as a sinner too. Believing as much would be a type of first step toward truth. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” That’s what she said, all day, every day, and it was these archaic mantras that poured from her heart and shaped everything she did in life. It was what divided us still. Anthropology. I could not come to see myself as fallen, as a member in the body of created beings who once occupied a land called perfect, and now, due to the sins of our fathers, are stuck in this world as holy fish in a sea of sin, sipping it up and swimming in it so thoroughly that we cannot even recognize our inimitable perfection. We, her life testified, are divine creatures who don’t know it, deluded spirits who choose to desecrate their sanctified selves and place passion before perfection. I didn’t believe this, and because I did not, I would remain apart from Raphaella.
Still she loved me in her way, in that crucial, transcendent way. Practically, it meant being attentive to me and what I perceived as important. She always returned my calls and made sure to ask me about work, about writing. She would buy little gifts, thoughtful things like ink cartridges for the computer, or bulk boxes of my favorite cereal because she was at a discount warehouse and knew that I “love these sugary things.” This love made the simple life possible again. It was okay to enjoy a movie alone, to eat a hearty meal with good friends and never think once of her. It was possible to hug her and not wonder when I’d bed her. That summer, life was okay and getting better.
Still, I can’t say I ever really understood just how the gap was closing back then. I was oblivious and appropriately so. After all, this was her charge against me, and against herself, against us all. But now I see that I was trekking the divide, or rather that she was trekking it in me. It is so striking to realize now the catastrophic expanse of that divide. How far across to the other side we must go, and how tiring a walk we must all be ready to take.
These ideas come to me as images from the past. I see us in Central Park West strolling with Dana, under a darkening blue sky, the final rays of a humid sun crackling through the thick green trees above. I see us finally finding a restaurant we can afford (but just barely), wandering in wide-eyed and a little loud, happy to be out, thankful. We’d get our food and they would make the sign of the cross over it, unflinchingly, while I would steal little sideways glances at the booth next to us, the one with the twenty-somethings furtively glancing back.
I see me and how I would go at dusk to retrieve the girls from Vespers, sitting on the stoop and waiting until they tumbled out of the monastery, Dana loping down the steep steps and plunging into Daddy’s arms. Though I still did not go in, I went without angst and accepted, at least in part, the thing that I had once fought and railed against. The specter of the church had lost its sting. Even the fasting became benign that summer. I bonded with my two forsaken women, who in so many ways were little caricatures of a bygone time; two diminutive souls mocked by modernity and alone but for their love of obedience, hierarchy, simplicity, humility and meekness. They were like mascots of antiquity, but I loved them that summer.
I say this now, of course, but then it was not them and their love that brought placid joy to my soul. It was more my actions, my acceptance and insouciance that brought me joy. After all, I said to myself, I sacrificed the truth according to my ego so that they might be left to their delusion. I had it all figured out. We all got along. Finally, we could just all get along.
And so it was like this, wispy, wonderstruck and deeply delighted, that I went to see her one day in early August.
MEET ME UPSTAIRS, YOU’LL LOVE THE SKY!
That’s what the note on her door said.
When I reached the roof, I realized why she took the time to mention the sky; it was the richest, most extraordinary sapphire. She stood in the corner wearing a white sundress, and in the bright sun I could see the lines of her lithe body. Her hair was as long as I’d ever seen it, curly and thick as ever, black and brilliant. On her feet were simple two-dollar flip-flops. She stood over a hardy acacia bush with its crimson blossoms in full bloom. In her long brown hands she held a shallow watering can. She turned and noticed me, and I waved.
“Look at it.” She pointed with her chin and eyes, upward. “Isn’t it fantastic?”
“Most,” I said, stepping up to her and laying a gentle kiss on her cheek.
“Look at the garden, David, hasn’t it grown nicely? I thought it would all burn to death up here but nope. Look at this.” She bent over and conscientiously held the plump bud of a lilac. “He’s still waiting, just waiting and not dying.” She shook her head with a naive innocence. “And look here, this patch of marigolds are all going strong, just growing like weeds.” She smiled without looking up.
I couldn’t disagree. The entire garden, a mishmash of planters woven together on top of thin pea-green artificial turf, had taken life.
“I brought you these,” I said holding out a little bag of seeds.
She took them. “Morning Glories.”
“I don’t know much about them, just that they’re strong and can live a long time.”
“Thank you, David,” she said, her hand out, gently extended. I looked at it, upturned and supple, and realized it was meant for mine. I took it and she led me to the other side of the garden where she bent down in front of two empty planters, and I felt her mood change. She became very earnest as she ran her hand through the dry soil, motioning to me to bend down too. “I never planted here, David.” She looked at me. “Will you plant something here, you and Dana? Make it your spot?” She watched me, and in my gut I wondered if this was less a question and more a celestial attempt to reunite us all as we were meant to be.
“We could plant corn,” I said. Corn?
She reached out and touched my forearm. “Corn is good.” And then she got up from her crouch. I followed her to the building’s edge where she placed her hands on the retaining wall, a grimy thing covered with a thin film of soot. She wiped them, one against the other, and then put them behind her, clasping them. She waited like that, looking off, facing downtown, toward the city’s giant steel towers and their glistening windows. I walked over to her and stood close. The sapphire sky had begun to fill up with afternoon storm clouds, or perhaps they had been there all along. I took her hand, but our intertwined fingers hung limp between us and I frowned.
“David, we’re moving.”
I went dry inside.
“I’ve been invited to a monastery in Alaska. They want me to come and help them with a school and a day care they’ve started for the needy. We’re going to live in the monastery but separate from the nuns.”
I met the news with an inexplicable calm, as if I had known this already. “Forever?” I asked.
“No, the whole thing will be about a year.”
“Is that why you asked me to tend the garden? You want me to keep the place for you while you’re gone? A gardener?”
She looked at me worried. “That’s not why I asked you to tend the garden. I asked you because I want you near to us.” With trouble she said, “I’ve made many mistakes in my life. Please be my good friend, our daddy?”
From behind us, a steam valve lurched and I was filled with the emotions of someone who has utterly failed. “I just always wanted to be more than that, you know?” I looked down and said, “I’m sorry.” She shook her head.
“You are a good father, David, young, good. We love you, David.”
And there it was, the end. Because it came with the quiet and soft tones of sadness I thought how unexpected it was. I hadn’t imagined it this way, but this was it. It was over in my soul, in that very thing she had tried so hard to enliven—and that’s funny, that’s a funny and awful thing. I found my soul when she killed it. “When?” I asked.
“We’ll go at the end of September.”
“Gonna be cold.”
“Yes, real cold.”
“I hope you can find a way to stay warm, Kiwi. I’ll miss Dana. I love her.” She nodded. “I’ll miss you too, somehow. Somehow Raphie, I’ll miss you too, I know it.”