Or shift to the daylight realm and take Rhonda Boule a little before the war. I was twenty-five, she, a tender twenty-one or two. She was one of those marvelously adaptive young women one encountered before the war who does not get much press.
She emigrated from some grid-plan capital city of some spacious Midwestern state, settling down in New York for vague aesthetic and professional motivations. She lived alone, on her own income, frugally but with a certain flashy style.
She decorated her single room Murray Hill apartment with baubles won for her from brawny, brainless beaus on hot summer’s evenings at Coney Island amusement concessions. Stiff maroon animals stuffed with unpliable saw dust sat impassively on a small shelf; a marksmanship trophy stuffed with wax apples rested on the lip of the window sill; a diorama of a bowling alley, decorated with colorfully painted, minature bowlers, the paint, distractingly enough, unevenly applied and skewed during mass production: the bowler’s facial features dripping on a collar, or a flesh colored paint snaking up a sleeve.
Rhonda herself held her firm sturdy, corn fed body upright from mere youthfulness alone. Everything that would eventually sag from weight and persistent gravity was tight and round with a certain solid, symmetrical configuration. She had auburn hair with jet black roots, a shinning button nose that she constantly dulled with granulated white talcum powder. She rouged her half apple cheeks and applied bright primary colored lipstick to her broad honey sweet lips as if it was erotic war paint or she was eros’ medicine man.
Taking a mid-town subway on a summer night (for it was a summer romance, and so all the more heartbreaking in its pathos: it is speckled in my memory with late day hazy humid sunshine beneath the dusty Norway maples of Murry Hill. It is sound tracked by the sudden after work cessation of traffic of bustling mid-town; it is scented by the ozone humid detumesence that follows a brief summer shower.)
Take a look at strapping me in my white summer suit, some kind of profusion of posies in my mitts, striding up the subway steps two at a time, bright floral tie flapping out of my seersucker, light straw hat perched high on my oblong Vandemark pate, joyful because I’m at a fork and I haven’t chosen a path yet, gleeful because I can see my life cleaving in two, forming parallel paths after they separate from a single stubborn point… and I’m dawdling; I am savoring the sensation of my own lassitude.
If life wants to force me to show my hand (and it has that power, it reserves that right, of course), then I can be petulantly playful as I lower my cards. I can savor the dread as fate awaits even the slightest twitch of my globular hands.
She is unstrapping her garter belt and removing her stockings. She is folding her girdle neatly over a wooden chair. Her deflated dress dangles from a wire hanger just over her vanity mirror. She sits perched on her wicker stool, rounded buttocks spilling over the leather confines, forming pleasant roundlets, and brushing her hair repeatedly, fifty strokes for each side of her evenly parted straight hair.
Soon that hair will spread out in wild sprays on the pillow when we make love. I stand behind her running my hands over her pale shoulders, occasionally cupping her prodigious breasts. She squirms, letting out peels of girlish laughter. Her reflective, imitation, immature little girl blue green eyes sparkle at me from the mirror, approving and disapproving in gorgeous simultaneity all of my naughty forays.
I will marry this plump little girl. Her firm baby fat body will incubate as many robust Vandemark’s as eggs she posess and sperm I can implant. And I will don a suit, and ride the subway downtown. And in the gray-green twilight I descend in the elevator and ride the careening subway uptown. And mundanely, she will be there, baby-fat more mature, less firm, surrounded by a brood of children. I will eat and drink, urinate and defecate, age and work, reproduce myself and die.
I let my hand drop from Rhonda’s broad shoulder. It is late at night. I look out the window and see the line of cars stopped at a red light on Madison Avenue. The light turns and the cars surge ahead to the next set of lights that turn red almost immediately.
I finished. I lay on the bed exhausted. Rhonda snuggles up and kisses my lips. Her heavy breasts pressing against my forearm. I can feel dead-weight on my brain for the first time in my twenty-five years. I realized, as those soft hands gropped about my body, that possible worlds were a cruel lie and impossible duty for a man whose vision was not just a keen twenty-twenty, but supernaturally acute --- from that point on I would use all my weight to halt forward progress.
As I rode Rhonda’s elevator down and pushed the sliding door, its rotating plates of glass glittering in the morning sun and stepped heavy footed and certain unto the terra firma of Madison Avenue, I knew that I would never marry that plump, solid, loving, perfectly acceptable girl.
I would never look back (and I did not, until now). The garters would hang limply on the chair, the bra would be slung over the vanity mirror, but some other man would leave a depression in the bed next to Rhonda after he rose to go to work. Some other man would stand stiffly down the aisle as a veiled Rhonda, donned in virginal white, took the somber teary stroll on her father’s arm. She would lock in her future with a certitude I could never dream of; she would never balk at the crossroad when it came. She would make the ontologically sound choice. She was not, after all, a Vandemark.
… When I came back from the war I felt a tumbling sensation. I would often check the ground beneath my feet to make sure that the soil of Harlem was still the stable platform it had been in 1942.
I began to realize that the finely wrapped layers of my psyche were being stripped away, torn asunder and trampled upon. When I came home from the war things and symbols could no longer be so easily teased apart. I could no longer choose, with the certainty that I always possessed, between two mutually exclusive and polar opposites.
When I came home from the war I NEVER wanted to let my guard down. I peered from around the corner and looked at the little hollow spaces I had fashioned for myself and was amazed at the incongruity between the created and the natural, the soul and the body, my bulk versus Homer’s wisp. …
Potentiality: my mother, a petite woman much younger than Father, always smelled vaguely of peppermint soap on her thin wrists. She would take Homer and I by the hand and go with Father to Grand Central Station to see him off to various medical conferences, (whose attendance, it seems, was mandatory), in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, even St. Louis. Of course I realized later that he never left New York.
He always insisted that we go home immediately on hugging him beneath that vast roof, the smoky light filtering through the upper windows of that beautiful nexus of embarkation and departure that says, in so many profound and significant ways, that there is no such thing as humanity, but humanity in process and in transformation. Once Mother, Homer and I boarded a subway uptown he would bid a hasty retreat downtown, to the other woman.
Father had an unchallenging medical practice mid-town. He had time to spare, and that combined fatally with the fact that he was the type of man who forty years ago women found irresistibly attractive: he was older than his appearance, even in photographs in his early twenties during his residency. His temples were already spotted with gray hair; the lines on his face had deepened appreciatively: grooves beneath his mournful, pale blue eyes, scorings on his broad forehead, and light crows feet in the transverse angles of his eyes.
He was unusually tall, even taller than me, an odd enough occurrence for Americans who tend to sprout an inch or two taller than their progenitors. He had long, lanky limbs, narrow, slender shoulders and remained wiry and robust all his days. And the last I saw of him, he was standing, framed as it were, in the doorway of his and Mother’s bedroom.
I was perched on the staircase, my body just below his line of sight, only the top most portion of my head and my beedy eyes jutting above the lavender runner on the flat step of the last stair of the marble stairway. He was distinguished looking, attired in some sort of dark evening suit.
Mother was just out of view in the interior of the bedroom. I could picture her with minute detail in my mind: she is in bed, white night cap perched low over her fragile brow, wisps of blond hair spilling out of the cap, a wrap around night gown closed tightly over her slim shoulders, pale, tired, perhaps one of her reoccurring migraines beginning an introductory salvo of stabbing, throbbing pain in her right temple.
“But Edgar do you really need to go out and take a house call this late at night?”
“Yes, dear, I told you this particular patient is extremely ill.”
“But can’t one of your associates make the call? One of the younger doctors?”
“No darling, I’m afraid its out of the question. This case is particularly difficult and I need to go. I have to give this woman my individual attention.”
There was silence.
“Darling, I can’t predict when or with what frequency my patients will become ill.” More silence. Father was looking in Mother’s general direction, and I imagine she was turning over in the canopied bed, lifting the quilt and tapering the edges around her slim neck. Father rapidly turned toward the stairway. I hid behind a hamper left by our careless maid on the landing.
Slipping out the door I turned to the left and spied Father’s retreating figure walking at a brisk pace toward midtown. He was not taking a cab. He was not riding the subway. I followed him at a safe distance, pacing myself, placing visual obstacles between us.
The Boar’s Loins was crowded with post-blitz crowd. Customarily after a raid the pubs filled to capacity. I pushed a hole through the throng and found a small table at the back.
I returned with the ales and sat down next to Clare. She had removed her coat and the small vest she wore over her blouse, which was white with little ruffles around the wrists and neck. The press of the people forced me to lean into her. She smelled vaguely of soap, not a perfumed variety, but of peppermint cleanser. I thought I felt her lean toward me. I could feel the protrusion of her lean ribs against my flanks. Lesley was saying something to her. She had to repeat it over the din.
“You must come up to Crotchford Downs. We can’t stay for the whole holiday, of course, Gavin must be back in London on Tuesday, but we could have a pleasant three or four days. All the flowers are just coming in, and it would be nice to get away from London.”
Clare nodded her head. The foamy ale made a moustache above her lip. I handed her a napkin and pointed to my upper lip as if I were a sympathetic mirror.
The Boar’s Loins was decorated with a profusion of American flags and red, white and blue bunting. They hung in clusters around the molding, were draped over the doors, rained down heavily from railings and abutments. There were too many, for on my innumerable trips for additional pints I kept getting snagged in them. Hands would slap me on the back, congratulating me on my American-ness, spilling dribbles and dollops of beer on the floor, the patrons, the seats, the flags…
Clare was getting drunk. She was slurring her words and leaning toward me, resting her hand on my leg, and allowing her body to lean lazily against mine.
“Tell me more about Crotchford Downs,” I asked.
“Oh, you’ll jolly well like it,” Gavin replied, blowing smoke out of his nose, “a positively English country experience for you Langley, you shan’t be disappointed, even in wartime. Acres and acres of bland, indistinguishable moorlands… country cottages occupied by stooped rustics that speak an archaic argot even I can’t fully decipher… hounds, horses, foxes, heraldry, suits of armor, castles in ruin, bogs, clay pits, inexplicable cold drafts, mysterious overcooked meats… I can assure you, old boy, your expectations shan’t be dashed.
Gavin paused, drank some ale, and continued, “Why, our dear Clare here in not unfamiliar with Crotchford Downs. Her father and mine roomed together at Merton, you know, read Greek or Latin or Hebrew… which was it?” he didn’t wait to hear the answer. “She used to come up on holiday every now and again when I was growing up.”
“Yes, its true” Clare slurred drunkenly, “And its just as d-dreadful as Gavin proclaims… it like a bloody outdoor cave… the sun never shines… there a per-perpetual mist… and those damned wild hounds…
“Wild hounds?” I asked.
“Yes, try as we may we can never fully eradicate the beasts, I’m afraid.” Gavin explained. “They’re something of a local oddity. Perfectly harmless I’m assured. Think of them as just a bit of local color. Some sort of medieval holdover”
Lesley, who had drunk too much for her light frame, was sliding against Gavin and falling down below the level of the table in a drunken snooze.
“Well, time to take my little cherub home. Upsy girl.” Gavin hoisted her to her feet. I helped him twirl her around and point her toward the door.
“You’ll see Clare home safely, won’t you old boy?”
“Of course”
“Splendid. See you both in the morning.”
Clare walked beside me on the deserted street. Her flat was far from the pub. We headed from Charing Cross to Leicester Square, up toward Covent Garden, and finally, Chancery Lane. She silently entwined her arm in mine. Somewhere to the south a single spot light scanned the low cloud cover. A few balloons shaped like aircraft hung low and gray over the horizon. In the blackout conditions London was dark with a lunar stillness.
“I didn’t think you liked me,” I said softly, looking down on her shawled head.
“I don’t think I do, really.”
“Well perhaps I should go to my flat then,” I said tensely.
“No,” she said, “you can come up to my flat.”
“Why don’t you like me, if I may ask?”
“Its nothing personal, really, I’m just not sure if I fancy any men.”
“Men that you meet? Or men in general?”
“Oh,” she said, getting more sober by the minute, “in general I should say. I fancy they have their uses, but in general they’re pests. They always stay around too long. They always talk too much. Or, frustratingly enough --- too little. And then there is their physical needs. Dear God, they’re just too sharp, too pointed to have any real substance behind them. Its just a flash of powder in the pan. No… I find most of the men I meet fall well below the mark.”
“The mark of what?” I asked.
“Oh, my expectations, I suppose. Its just so tawdry and quick.”
“You’re very young, Miss Mumpy, to have such acute observations about the opposite sex.”
Her flint eyes gazed up at me with a comic twinkle.
“I’ve had many lovers Langley, even though I’m only twenty.”
I could feel heat collecting around my collar. Sweat was dripping from my hairline to my brow.
We walked along sometime in silence until we reached her door.
“Don’t get me wrong Langley,” she said, looking at me full in the face, “I do fancy you very much. But it will never run deeper than that.”
The blackout shade was drawn tight but I could tell it was morning from the street noise. Clare lay atop me, curled up on my chest, one slim leg resting on my muscular right thigh, the other curled under my left calf. Her tussled brown hair was spread over my chest. I could feel the slight stirring movement of her breathing and the angular pinch of her jutting ribs in my side. I gently rolled her off of me.
If you took her singularly, part for part, she looked unattractive, even sickly. The pointed ear tips, the gray dull eyes, the green tinted skin, the teeth a polished pointed yellow, the sallow, thin, girlish frame. But that very composition, arranged as it was, appealed and roused me. That seed within me was seeking out some riper, more fertile confine than my hulking frame to prosper. I could smell the odors of the night, the sweat, the musty breath, and I climbed on top of her, wrapping my arms around her fragile frame, feeling her move, accept me, and stir to meet my motions…
I also realized that a certain strength came from the bottom; for to be on top is a mixed and partial blessing. As a white man nothing stands between you and success in the world but your own naked ambition. All that prevents your entry into material Valhalla is your ability to manipulate a system designed for your success and inculcated with your values.
If you are white and push a broom in Pierpont Morgan’s Library, and the Morgan himself ponderously strides past your small pile of gathering dust --- the only thing that separates him from you is the chasm of your own ineptitude. For Sex and Class can be concealed beneath the gentle facade of manners and subtle courtesies, but race stares you unforgivingly in the face. You can hide your mulatto children on tobacco road, but you can never pretend that you ushered them into the world with the same boons you bestowed onto your plantation wife’s offspring.
I often wonder what would have happened to me if our family had remained Negroes? Would two glaring eyes be peering out of a dark maze? Would limbs continue to grow unchecked?
A particular: this is all correct, in a certain sense. But I could never escape the spatial urge when crafting my creations, the apt metaphor of building a house. I can never resist the impulse to build those areas most heavily trafficked with the most elegant of structures and furnishings, even if, from the restricted realm of truth, they are not the most important. The load-bearing zone may reside in some unused attic or some musty basement. I could easily usher you past my formal sitting room and show you the misshapen gnome that I hide away in the garret room above the stairs, but wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the Empire chair I’ve fashioned for you near the roaring hearth? We can ignore the traffic on Fifth Avenue, bleating outside our window and concentrate on what really matters, what is fundamentally important? For there is a great deal that needs to be ignored. A selective and editing eye will be our fussy host. For natural selection works not only in nature but in memory. For just as the white moth that recently lived in a forest of pale birches, whose trees suddenly and unfortunately are transformed to black from some natural catastrophe, so it is with human memory: what survives survives because of its usefulness: (and narrative is memory’s triage!)
The grand scope, the overarching vision, has no place in a family reunion. In families things must, narrow and close-cropped. Not every stone should be overturned. All that is necessary is focus and blur… focus and then blur…
Focus in: my family, take them for all in all, had their racial smudge, this genetic stammer. Personally, I always thought we could have considered it a feather in our cap, but no one in the family shared my views about our African ancestry, or at least never verbalized it to me. Instead, they sat serenely in stuffy parlors making fancy embroidery, or trotted over to Columbia or went up to Harvard to study law or medicine, and somehow forgot how dangerous it is to try and stand firmly on an uneven foundation. For nothing aggravates a case of historical vertigo quite so much as inadequate amnesia, or the erroneous notion that one’s head is as sound as a bell when you can see the crack, when you can hear the faulty resonance in cast bronze
And then there were all those portraits of father’s family that seemingly illustrated that we were white, that we were an old Dutch family from the Hudson River valley (Were we? Were we!?). But one need only do what I did when I came of age and my faculties became sufficiently acute: sidle up to them and think white and they are white; then, after a period of latency, sidle up again and think black and they become black. I realized, many years before I read Twain’s Puddin’Head Wilson that race is a Rorschach test. That at the margins and creeping toward the center it is as malleable as silly-puddy.
Blurring out, panning beyond, grasping at a universal, what could I do, having this questionable ancestral load to carry, but move on and pretend that none of it ever happened? That was the Vandemark philosophy. We had distilled this liquid until it was a fine jelly eager for consumption. We sported a stiff upper lip stoicism that was pure hollow poise. It was perfect rot. For behind the facade was a Poe like decay, a disillusionment that precipitated a slide to nothingness.
My family would sometimes whisper its secrets, but so much was contradictory and mutually exclusive. No one told anyone anything except in groups of two --- a wise policy, since it prevents factions, always a danger in a family with dark skeletons in their closets. For me it added impetus to enterprise when investigating for some sort of cohesion, some way to pick up the pieces and find the Ariadne thread out of the maze. My family never had the firm grounding that I wanted it to possess. I wanted it to cough up its secrets while I held its neck at the choke point.
…I thought, one fateful late November day that I had the clue, that I had found the secret ember that could, in a sense, light the fuse and explode the safe door, and reveal, to my eager eyes moist with tears of frustration, its hidden content….
But the War stopped my investigations.
One may as well begin here:
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor I leaped from the porch of our Harlem brownstone and sprinted to the recruiting station. I was too old to enlist in the regular Army, so I left in frustration. But a day later I used certain family connections to pull strings and get on the fast track to a commission. Some chits were called in, some promises were made on late night telephones to smoky offices, chewing the fat and calling in old debts to corpulent family friends. In a week I was down in cradle Dixie for my inadequate training.
By early the next year I was on a ship creeping snailwise across the North Atlantic for England. We were taking a northerly route not to save time, but because of the ice floes (unusually strong that year) and the constant threat of U Boats (who were getting their cross hairs trained for the anticipated west-east transfer of Warehouse America to Airstrip England) we were at sea for weeks. The boat rolled and pitched on black, unforgiving waves, and I sat, nestled in my cabin berth, piling up crates of rations against the row of unusually wide port holes, for they gave me a continual view of the broken black landscape of pitching waves, and caused, for the first time in my relatively serene and optimistic life, to doubt that Order existed in the Cosmos, and to entertain that perhaps Disorder ruled the weary day.
And I got, on that crossing, an oddly prescient view of what would happen after the war, of what would occur when America would no longer be a Crusading Nation. It would be forced to turn back into herself and realize, quite to her dismay, that her house was not in order. For what was worse than a nation that had to turn back greedily into herself: no more Indians to defeat, frontiers to conquer, Dixie to reconstruct, Japs to subdue. What would we do with a nation that was complete?
It is easy to be derailed on this front: the pain of being complete is a far worse a penalty than the curse of incompleteness. Promise is better than fulfillment and the race more exciting than the trophy loving cup. With nothing to do, where would we put our hands as we stand around the water cooler?
I worried for myself as well. A certain self-serving element existed in my nail biting woes. My ‘taint’ could easily be discovered by some Puddin’head Wilsonian character and then where would I be in the New World Order? I knew, or at least I surmised, that strict taxonomy would be demanded, a new purity, a new drive toward distinction, would mark that bright future day.
By the time our gray little ship came in sight of England, the storm serge had lost its height. The sea was a placid steel gray, so I slunk out onto the deck.
Britannica hung low over the horizon: a series of blue black hills with a ring of dingy mist hovering overhead. I gripped the cold rusted steel of the railing and looked down at the sparkling reflections of my golden-cuff links. Then, as my eyes moved into hyper focus, I imagined myself inhabiting a small, self-contained world within those cuffs --- complete, crystalline in its brightness, glimmering in purity --- and I wondered, as those blue gray hills began to show more details (a candy cane red and white colored light house on a black rock, a clutter of square shaped houses lining the harbor, laid out like haphazardly arranged packing crates) why open spaces gave me the atavistic urge to burrow into the earth. Not from anything so banal as agoraphobia (for despite local Harlem lore, I am not eccentric or insane, but a man who has laid each cognitive brick that composes the structure of his life with great care --- with careful self-consciousness) but from a simple metaphysical stance: unity is a better, more solid state than disunity; singularity a more primal, more fixed point of reference than multiplicity.
And the world produces multiplicity from its multifarious parts with the singular insistence of a flower spewing millions of uncountable grains of pollen in the spring tide air. Simply put, proliferation is king in our world! Spawning and living, dying and decaying, and time, that ceaseless metronome, making us keep pace, and all the loss… the loss…
We disembarked at the English port of Swansea. In 1942 Channel ports were still too dangerous for weakly armored ships like ours, so I had to endure a grueling twelve hour train ride from Swansea to Cardiff, and then a ferry to Bristol, a transfer to a cattle car at Reading, and finally, a slow conveyance to London.
England was a bewildering tangle; the civilian and the military were separated by the thinnest of lines, so trains, cars, boats, planes were constantly appropriated at the last minute. Often a gaggle of gray, listless people were left stranded on a rural station platform in the rain. A peace-time four hour ride was stretched like taffy by the Gods of War into a twelve hour daymare of transfers both missed and abandoned, accidents, unforeseen and in retrospect avoidable.
Servi stood out on the street looking around. There was an overflowing trash can on the corner, so he laid the daisies on its summit. When he rounded the corner, he noticed a little boy about Paulo’s age drawing pictures on the sidewalk with a piece of oversized chalk. Without a word, Servi handed the boy the fire truck and walked on. Servi shivered, as if he had just immersed his torso in ice water. But the sirocco was staring to blow and he could almost smell the sands of the Sahara in the rising tide of scalding air, so Servi knew that the shiver was buried inside him.
The next evening Servi climbed the long flight of steps to Claudia’s flat. He had bought a fire engine for Paulo and a bouquet of daisies for Claudia. He imagined, with a little felicitous care, with the kind application of love, taken in common sense doses, as men and women and their children had done for centuries, he could fix the life of Claudia and Paulo.
Wasn’t it all a simple exercise in the basics of human nature? The love of a mother for a son. This was as powerful a terrestrial force as gravity. It was what attracted him to Claudia, the firm manner in her bearing, her posture, the way she washed and dried a dish with absolute maternal authority. This was the type of love that must be pulled out along from its roots and removed from the detritus of less noble emotions.
Servi stopped short: Claudia’s door was open, but she was not making love to her husband, nor was Paulo on the floor, cutting out collages from a magazine on the living room floor. The flat was empty all but for some stray items: a pile of newspapers, a box of old clothes, two or three broken toys scattered in a corner. Servi rushed down to the concierge.
“Excuse me,” Servi asked the old woman in the lobby office with a mesh cage. “Has Claudia Sacerdotti moved? The woman in 13F?
“Moved?” the woman spat. “More like fled. She just packed up and ran in the middle of the night like she was wanted by the police. And she stiffed me for three months rent!”
“You don’t know where she went?”
“No,” the woman shot Servi an icy glare. “If I did, I’d make the bitch pay the back rent, wouldn’t I? And if it wasn’t for that rent, good riddance. Too many men coming and going. Two much screaming at that little boy. We don’t need that trash around here.”
Servi allowed Claudia to take command on the couch that evening. She was rough, pinching and grinding and taking him at odd angles, grasping and releasing him in a firm and unshakable embrace. She bit his shoulder and Servi thought she had broken the skin. He placed his finger on the dent, but the liquid was only a pool of her warm and sticky saliva, enlivened with some invigorating substance which felt to Servi’s fingers like blood.
Servi awoke wrapped in a haze. His head felt as if it was slit open. He was alone on the couch, surrounded by empty bottles of cheap red wine. Before his eyes were fully opened, he realized that someone was waving a piece of paper in front of his nose.
“Did he write this to you?” Claudia said in Italian, holding Paulo’s note in a quaking hand. In the tussle of last night’s stern lust, it had fallen from Servi’s pants to the floor.
“Yes,” Servi answered, sitting up with great difficulty.
“The little bastard,” she hissed. “I grind my ass to a nub to feed and cloth that little prick, and he tries to disown me to strangers…”
“He’s already at day school,” she screamed, pounding her foot against the floor. “I came back here to ask you about this note without him here. He wrote this!”
“I already told you he did.”
“Son of a bitch,” Claudia turned and stormed out the door.
“Ah, here is my novice,” Father Roberto purred, as Servi carried the boy into the rectory. The old priest had the milk and cookies out. Servi gently placed the sleeping boy on a bench.
“An American?” the priest asked, and Servi introduced himself. “Your name is an old Jewish-Italian name, I’m sure you are aware. It’s been found on inscriptions on the via Antica Appia. So odd that you are a friend of Senora Sacredotte. There is another Italian-Jewish name… a translation of priest, kohen, in Hebrew. Our little Paulo’s ancestors administered to God in the Temple in Jerusalem,” the Father pointed to the sleeping boy. His finger trembled.
Servi began to tell the priest little Paulo’s story of Cosmo Ricchetti. The priest listened in grave silence.
“The boy has never told me such a thing,” he said when Servi was finished. “And he is too young to go to confession. He must be telling fibs to impress you.” Then the priest removed his glasses. All around his eyes were webs of wrinkles. “Of course, Claudia has told me about her life. I don’t doubt it’s taken its toll on the little fellow. Perhaps it’s what the psychologists call wish-fulfillment. He’d rather be Cosmo Ricchetti than Paulo Sacredotti. It is probably his way of coping…”
“No one copes…” a woman’s voice interrupted them. It was Claudia Sacerdotte, standing behind with her arms akimbo. “We all move from crisis to crisis and no one copes with it and God doesn’t give a damn.”
“It is you who doesn’t give a damn, Claudia,” Father Roberto answered softly. “If you don’t care about how you live, then how can God help you? If you don’t do the things that you can do to fix your life, how can you expect God to do the work for you? How can God fix what is in His control if you don’t fix what is in your own?”
“I hear you two boys played the truants today,” Claudia said, addressing Servi, ignoring Father Roberto. “Where did you go, on some adolescent rite of passage? To a dirty movie? Or did you go to one of those filthy whores on the via Salaria to lose your virginity?”
“No,” Servi answered. “I took him to the Sistine Chapel.”
“Well,” Claudia grimaced, “that is nearly the same. All those nude mannerist bodies writhing around in either ecstasy or torture, who can tell the difference. Certainly not me… Paulo,” she said in a raised voice. “Get up… we’re going home.”
Servi bought the boy a slice of pizza and then they waked toward the Vatican. Servi kept looking about nervously for Claudia’s bus, and was surprised by the boy’s fundamental lack of knowledge of his native city. He didn’t even know what the Vatican was; Servi bought them two tickets to the Vatican Museums and after standing on a lengthy line in the scalding sun they entered and Servi led the boy immediately to the Sistine Chapel.
In broad strokes, Servi explained who Michelangelo was and how he had painted the ceiling and how long it took. The boy looked up at the ceiling, but neither spoke nor registered any discernible emotion. Servi explained that one of the most famous and reproduced parts of the wall was God’s finger just leaving Adam’s, having rendered dead clay into living flesh. Again and again the boy could not find it, even when Servi knelt down and pointed a plumb line from Paulo’s eyes to the scene of contact between God and Man.
The day was getting late, and the boy was tired. Although he was heavy, Servi carried him, and he fell asleep on his shoulder.
“Are you sure? They won’t care?” Servi asked Paulo again, holding his hand and moving quickly away from the day school.
“Yes,” Paulo answered, looking straight ahead. “They won’t care at all. They don’t know who is there and who isn’t.” Then the boy was quiet, and Servi imagined he was thinking long and hard about his predicament.
“Just get me to Father Roberto when Mama is supposed to come,” he said nearly inaudibly. “She’ll expect to find me there.”
Servi took the boy to a playground. He pushed him on a swing until the boy said he wanted to stop, and then Servi sat on a bench while he nimbly climbed the monkey bars. Paulo was scrawny, yet he clambered with considerable dexterity. But the day was scorching, and after sweating a while on the asphalt playground, Servi suggested they get a drink. The boy nodded, neither relieved nor appreciative as Servi ordered him a cherry flavored soda from a push cart.
They sat on a bench under a linden tree surrounded by retired pensioners playing chess. Servi watched as the boy slurped his soda and the warm breeze, the first stirrings of the sirocco, tossed about his wispy black hair. Servi examined him for strain, but the boy bore his suffering with stoicism. He seemed neither happy nor sad that Servi had taken him out of his dreaded daily routine, and as the boy was not inclined to loquaciousness, Servi allowed him to sit in dignified silence.
When the boy was finished with the soda Servi asked if he wanted a gelato. The boy nodded and Servi walked to a vendor and as the boy did not specify a flavor, chose lemon. He handed Paulo the little paper cup. When the boy was half way through, he finally looked up at Servi; his brown eyes bore a hint of expectancy in their glint, as if Servi, and not he, was about to reveal a satisfying secret.
“Did you leave that note in my pant’s pocket, Paulo?” Servi asked, producing the letter. The lad looked at it for a moment, not so much because he did not recognize it, but rather to give himself time to get the facts straight without initial missteps.
“Yes,” the boy finally answered between casual slurps of his gelato. A flock of pigeons landed near their feet. An old man had opened a bag of stale bread and was casting it among the dappled blanket of birds. A scooter squealed by, it exhaust hung in the air. “I’m not really Paulo Sacerdotti and that woman is not my real mother.”
“But how do you know this for sure,” Servi asked. “That boy, Cosmo Ricchetti, was only two when he disappeared. How old are you, seven? You can remember your other family?”
“Of course,” the boy said evenly. “I had a Papa who went to work in the morning, but always came home at night. He wore dark suits and was handsome. And Mama stayed home with me all day, and cooked anything I wanted.”
“Does anyone else know who you really are?”
“Yes,” the boy answered. “Father Roberto. But he can’t tell a living soul. I told him in confession.”
“If you are really Cosmo Ricchetti,” Servi explained patiently, trying to build up his case gradually, sentence by sentence, word by word. “Why don’t you go to the police?”
“I can’t,” the boy explained, getting near the end of his gelato. “Claudia would find out.”
“Claudia?” Servi asked. “Your mother?”
“She’s not my mother,” the boy answered resolutely. “She is the woman who took me from my real mother.”
“What does Father Roberto tell you, when you tell him you aren’t Paulo Sarcedotti?”
“He doesn’t say a thing,” the boy answered. “It isn’t a sin not to be the person people say you are, so what can he do? But he has to keep the secret, because I told him in confession.”
“Why did you give me the note?”
“I don’t know,” the boy said, looking off into the distance. “I guess so you can bring me back to my real Mama and Papa.”
When Servi arrived at Claudia Sacerdotti’s apartment he was nearly a half hour early. He was surprised that her door was unlocked and ajar. Quietly, he peered in to see if he could find Paulo and speak to him before he saw Claudia. But the little apartment was empty and quiet. Then Servi took a step into the vestibule. What he heard sounded like a groaning of rusty springs. In between, in the space between its rhythms, was a hissing sound like the workings of a faulty piston. Then a rapid exhalation, deep and guttural, like the call of some tribal serenade.
Servi walked to the bedroom door and saw a naked man moving on top of Claudia. The man was fast and efficient. Claudia dug the balls of her feet into his sagging flanks. “Tell me…” the man said between clenched teeth. “Tell me…” and Claudia lifted her head and whispered something in his ear. This made the man’s movements wild, and just before Servi turned around to leave, he caught Claudia’s eye.
Servi returned two hours later. The door was now closed, so Servi knocked. Claudia opened the door immediately. She was wearing a light cotton dress with a plunging neckline and a gold cross dangled between her breasts.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” she said to Servi, annoyed, but with a light of mischief in her eyes.
“I was by early, but it looks like you had your hands, or something, full,” Servi walked by her while Claudia laughed. Servi frowned.
“Don’t be such a prude,” she answered, patting Servi on the cheek as if he was a boy. “That was a little gift for Rosario, my ex-husband. You should have stayed to the end of the show. Rosario is a maestro.”
“And where was Paulo during this piece of theater?”
“What the hell is wrong with you, Servi?” Claudia moved past him and into the kitchen. “You have no moral high ground here. As far as I can tell you wander around Rome and stalk women. You got lucky with me – I didn’t call the police but brought you to bed. So don’t get uppity about the terms.” They stood and faced each other in silence. Then Claudia’s face softened.
“To answer your question,” she said quietly. “Paulo is at a friend’s house until 10PM. I thought it would give us a nice romantic night alone,” and she moved toward Servi and kissed him.
The librarian led Servi to the stacks of Rome’s most illustrious daily newspaper.Left to himself, he rifled through the loose chronology of papers, until he found the date when the boy disappeared.
Servi read in the dim light that Cosmo Ricchetti had disappeared from his flat on August 3rd, 1987, sometime between .He was napping in his room, and when his mother came to retrieve him, the boy was simply gone. A rear door to the flat was open, but there was no sign of a forced entry.Then the search began.Servi followed the stories in the papers through the days and weeks which followed.Suspects in little Cosmo’s disappearance were rounded up and then released.There were sightings of him all over Rome, Florence, Milan, Palermo, London and Paris.
There were rumors he had been sold as a sex slave in Tunisia by a cartel of pedophiles.But nothing came of all this speculation and rumor.After two months, there were few stories.After six, Servi could not find a single mention of the little boy.Then he found in the Sunday magazine section of the paper a story, five years following Cosmo Ricchetti’s vanishing act, entitled What Happened to Cosmo Ricchetti?It was a summing up of the case.There were full color pictures of the Richetti’s plush apartment.Sylvia Richetti explained that she continued to keep Cosmo’s room as it was the day he disappeared, in the hope that one day he would return. The mother and father remained in their old apartment, despite the pain of remembrances, because little Cosmo knew his address and phone number.
The Richettis held hope that one day the phone would ring and it would be Cosmo on the other end.Servi looked at a picture of the boy which the police had aged five years.There was a resemblance to Paulo Sacredotti, but in the dim light, Servi could not be sure.He was about to tear out the photo, when the librarian walked into the carrel and told him the library was closing for lunch
In the morning Servi was awoken by a dusty beam of sunlight tickling his face. There was a folded note placed firmly on his chest.
If you wish, the note said in Italian, come by for dinner at 8PM – Claudia.
Servi was alone in the apartment. As he put on his pants, he found a piece of thick, light blue construction paper in his pocket. There was writing on it in a child’s rough hand:
I am not Paulo Sarcedotti. I am Cosmo Ricchetti. Please help me.
“Yes, Senor Servi, something else?” the man asked, drooping forward with a napkin to snatch at some crumbs.
“Bobbo,” Servi asked, “who is Cosmo Ricchetti?” The waiter listened to the words and rolled on the balls of his feet, his head reclined backward, as if he was searching through a Rolodex in his mind. Then he smiled and snapped his fingers.
“Ah yes, that little boy,” he said, smiling broadly. “About five years ago, no, maybe more, this little boy, Cosmo Ricchetti, two years old vanished without a trace from his parent’s flat. It became a sensation. The police searched every apartment, rooftop, cellar and water conduit in Rome, and even opened the catacombs. His poster was on every wall and streetlamp. They searched and searched but never found him…”
“No clues?” Servi asked. “Just gone without a trace?”
“Yes,” the waiter answered sadly. “They never found a hair from his head.”
When Claudia returned she had changed into a robe. Servi was still at the kitchen table, drinking a coffee.
“Do you mind if we do it on the couch?” she asked, moving past Servi and into the tiny living room. “I share the bedroom with Paulo and he is a light sleeper.”
“Do what?” Servi asked.
“Sex,” the woman answered quizzically. “I have never been stalked before but I imagine you did not follow me around all day to just eat my pasta? From what you have said you have been in Rome sometime, doing nothing really, and must have seen all the sights, and you don’t speak French, German, or Hebrew, no? And besides, your eyes never left me…”
“I thought we could talk first,” Servi said, rising from the table and moving toward her. Claudia had removed her robe and reclined on the threadbare couch without a stitch of clothing. Servi loomed over her for a moment and she pulled him down to her. “No time for talk Americano,” she continued, grappling with his clothes. “I have my first tour at 7:30AM. It’s now or never.”
As it was apparently now, Servi helped her removed his clothes.
“You talk too much, Paulo,” his mother scolded him. “Eat. Don’t wear our guest out for me.”
But the boy continued, and Servi felt a bit like the older brother returned from the great overseas voyage. Feeling like Claudia’s son did not damped Servi’s attraction toward her, but the source of the sensation unsettled him, and he pushed it to a remote corner of his addled mind. All evening long he had watched her in a little sun dress, studded with daisies, moving about the kitchen like an Italian matron: padding back and forth on bare feet from the stove to the sink, the sink to the kitchen with pasta, bread, wine. Servi watched with devotional awe the surge of muscle beneath the sheer material of her skirt, and marveled at her slim arms and sharp elbows, as if the dichotomy of this woman made in flesh was also etched in the universal form of Female Herself.
When the meal was over and the boy was in his pajamas Claudia told him to kiss Servi. The boy did so dutifully on the cheek. It was 9PM in June, and streaks of ruddy light arched over the Roman sky, as if the sun had not really set, but was merely hiding beneath the horizon, awaiting for an unsuspecting and auspicious moment to reappear where it has just gone missing.
Claudia led Servi through a winding alley which ended in a high courtyard. A line of clothes hung above them; shirts and pants rustled stiffly in the warm breeze. Servi felt yet another shiver at the confluence of memory and experience: he had, as a boy, escaped from nearly every institution designed to provide him with care. Most of the time, he knew his way home, but once, during afternoon religious instruction at his local Roman Catholic Church, he was following his class down a hallway when he saw a door. Doors are for exiting, so Servi found himself on the street. He was not familiar with the neighborhood around Saint Jude’s Church, so after wandering around for a half hour, he began to cry. After another half hour, he was in front of the rectory. An old nun saw him and accompanied him back to his class.
Servi was suspended in some form of half-life, some purgatory designed not to expunge his soul of sin, but to keep him from choosing between either or or. He wanted to be home but despised it; he fled his mother only to return. He corroded the valves of his heart with emotions as conflicting as identical poles of two magnets, forced together again and again without natural compliance or complicity.
And now he was here, at twenty-three, being led by a mother to a son, an escapee who had so ritualized the routine that it had become as mundane as a neighborhood football game.
Claudia entered a rectory and on a broad, wide oak table sat her son in front of a plate of cookies and a glass of milk. An old priest with wide, round glasses like an owl’s eyes and a head shaved to a gray stubble, was quietly speaking with the boy in the soft accents of the Roman dialect which are employed domestically, over a supper table or in a bedroom.
“Ahh, Senora Sacredotte,” the priest rose up from his chair. “You are here for Paulo, no?”
Servi walked quickly alongside Claudia Sacerdotte. She asked him several pointed questions about his visit to Rome, and upon hearing his answers, clicked her tongue in evident disapproval.
“A young man should not waste his time like that,” she said, glancing at him as they walked. “How old are you, anyway?” Servi told her. She clicked her tongue again. “I have ten years on you, so I should know about lost time.”
From the flow of the conversation, from the biting edge of her words and her teasing, tense and imaginative sense of the world, Servi thought they may sleep together. He imagined her as the tour guide of eros, giving him instructions in French, German, Hebrew, English, Italian, in technique, speed, etiquette; she would attach to sex the same commando style which she imposed on a group of aging Germans: firm, gentle, brisk, polite, but always with one eye on the clock, continually aware that days and nights and sex were cycles to be enacted, and that like a guided tour around the heart of the capital of Christendom, it must come to a conclusion, whether satisfying or not.
Servi watched Claudia speak with one of the day school attendants, who told her that her son Paulo was nowhere to be found.
“Oh Jesus,” the attended explained, looking about. “He’s escaped again.” On hearing this, Claudia did not register any visible distress. She just glanced at Servi knowingly.
“They can’t even keep track of one little boy,” she said to him loudly, so the other woman could hear. “I can lead forty French pensioners around by their noses but they can’t hold onto one boy.”
“We have a dozen little boys here, Senora Sarcedotte,” the woman answered primly.
“Your son is missing?” Servi asked Claudia, alarmed.
“Don’t worry,” Claudia pulled Servi away by his arm. “He is only ritually lost. He always goes to the same place.”
The day went on like this: three German groups, two French, a group of Scotswomen in English. The guide did not stop even for lunch. Servi did not get off the bus. The woman changed languages but not the intensity of her presentation and the veracity and firmness in which she projected it: the Vatican, the Pallazo Nova, the Pantheon, the Coliseum, the Circus Maximus, the Forum, a roll call of Roman antiquity in four languages and four gears, with marginalia presented by the bus driver, who grunted and groaned at the woman’s whispered commands. This was the same will which she had used to drop off her reluctant son at the day school. The impulse which Lot’s wife succumbed to, but not this woman.
Then it was all over. Servi was once again alone on the bus but no other group came on. The woman was in front of him, casting him a wan smile, an expression which all at once seemed to inform and confuse him about her motivations and drives. She threw a bag over her shoulder and placed both her hands firmly on her hips.
“Now you have to get off,” she said in English, only to finish in Italian. “The bus goes back to the garage and I must go fetch my son.”
“I can come?” Servi asked.
“To the garage?” the woman answered, raising her eyebrows.
“No, to get your son.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, turning away. So Servi followed her into the street.
Servi did not look out the window. He simply watched the woman speak Hebrew into the microphone. The hail of words were incomprehensible, but occasionally Servi could hear such terms at Vatican City, the Pope, Michelangelo, the Sistine Ceiling, and noticed without intersest that he was in front of such and such a monument to human artistic achievement.
They would get down on the street, and the woman would point and speak, and then they were on the bus again, moving rapidly down the Via Veneto. Scooters surrounded the bus, like sucker fish near a shark, moving ahead and behind, forward and back, of the larger beast. Servi saw this only through the corner of his eye, for he solely watched the woman.
Now, after nearly an hour of surveillance, he thought that perhaps she was not really like his mother at all. Her face was far more theatrically inclined; the lines beneath the eyes gave the woman a certain gravity to her expression which offset her quick step, her fast talking, and the glimmer of her white skin like light kissing the surface of polished marble.
And then it was over. Servi was all alone on the bus, and the woman was no longer at the microphone. All the elderly Israelis were gone, and Servi sat in the seat in front of some second class hotel he did not recognize on some side street he could not name.
The woman was talking to the bus driver in Italian. The man was grunting in response. Then she was in front of Servi. She did not even try to address him in Hebrew, but in English.
“You need to get off,” she said primly. “We have to clean the bus for the next group.”
“How did you know I speak English,” Servi answered in Italian. The woman just flicked her wrist.
“I do this for a living,” she answered in Italian. “I can tell from a glance who is who and where they are from… even someone like you, who tries to hide it with your big beard and shabby clothes. You can’t hide it from me,” she wagged her finger at him, as if he was a naughty child. “It’s in the face, the hands, the walk, America, America, America.” She seemed irritated, but she smiled at Servi. “You have to get off, another group is coming.”
“What language?”
“German,” she explained, placing a hand on her hip. She gazed inscrutably at Servi.
“I can’t understand German either,” Servi answered.
“Well,” the woman explained, dropping her hand from her hip, “then there is no harm in staying on, I suppose.” She smiled brightly at this idea, but then the smile fell from her face, as if the notion pleased and displeased her in such rapid succession, the sensation was irritating.
Then Servi was once again surrounded by elderly people, and the woman took up the microphone and addressed them in German.
Servi watched the woman as she approached a door surrounded by a phalanx of other women and children. The woman passed off the boy somewhere in the scrum, and walked briskly away, never looking back.
Servi followed her. She trotted down the street in medium sized heels. He watched the long arch of her legs, her sturdy calves as they tensed and flexed as she skipped down the sidewalk, the hint of strong thigh revealed through the tight outline of her skirt. Her upper body was skimpy compared to her lower, as if a creator had meant to fashion a woman out of hardy, peasant stock and ran out of material above the waist. She wore some sort of uniform on her tapered upper half, a vest emblazoned with words which Servi could not read.
Then it all became apparent: she bounded on a tour bus and quickly addressed the driver, who was waving a hand dismissively toward her. She picked up a microphone and was about to address the crowd behind her as Servi moved to take a seat near the front.
For a moment, she looked at the young man keenly, as if she may know him, but then blinked and the expression fell from her face, like a curtain falling from a window and revealing a rainy day. She licked her lips and began to speak. She spoke to two dozen elderly men and women quickly in a language Servi did not recognize. She spoke rapidly but efficiently in this strange tongue, harsh with gutturals and sudden with full stops and brimming with brisk, skipping vowels. Servi thought it was Arabic, but then saw an Israeli newspaper in an old man’s hand and realized it was Hebrew.
The woman began to gesture with her right hand out the window as the bus pulled away from the curb and into a harrowing wall of Roman morning traffic.
