I was relieved to know that I had touched her enough to produce those tears. It meant that there was something solid between us, a connection that wasn’t going to be broken any time soon. But I also have to admit that I felt relieved that Joyce had turned me down. I had made my big gesture, but in all honesty I had been of two minds about it, and she knew me well enough to understand that yes, I would have made a terrible husband, and neither one of us had any business getting married. And so, to paraphrase the words of the immortal Dr. Pangloss, everything turned out for the best – and for the first time in my life, I got to have my cake and eat it too.
Joyce dried her tears, and two weeks later Aurora and Lucy were living in her house. It was a sensible arrangement for all concerned, but even if logic demanded that mother and daughter should be reunited, one mustn’t forget how difficult it was for Tom and Honey to let go of their young charge. They had been taking care of Lucy for months by then, and over the course of time the threesome had solidified into a close little family. I had felt a similar pang when I relinquished her to them back in the summer, and she had lived with me for only a few weeks. When I thought of the five and a half months they had spent with her, I couldn’t help sympathizing with them – no matter how happy we all were that Aurora had landed safely in Brooklyn. “She has to live with her mother,” I said to Tom, trying to be philosophical about it. “But a part of Lucy still belongs to us, to each one of us. She’s our girl, too, and nothing will ever change that.”
Hard as it was for them to lose her, their brief foray into parenthood had convinced Tom and Honey that they wanted children of their own. For the moment, they were preoccupied by a multitude of practical concerns – negotiating the sale of Harry’s building, looking for a new apartment, applying for teaching jobs around the city – but once those chores were dispensed with, Honey threw away her diaphragm, and the two of them got down to the nightly business of attempting to start a family. In March of 2001, they moved into a co-op on Third Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues: an airy, light-filled place on the fourth floor with a sizable living room in front, a modest kitchen and dining room in the center, and a narrow hallway that led to three small bedrooms in the back (one of which Tom converted into a study). By the time they set up house in that apartment, Brightman’s Attic was no more. As one of the conditions for completing the sale of the building, the buyer had insisted that the books be removed from the premises, which had compelled Tom to spend a frantic period at the start of the year liquidating the entire stock of Harry’s old business. Paperbacks were sold for five and ten cents, hardcovers were listed at three for a dollar, and the volumes that didn’t sell by February first were shipped off to hospitals, charity organizations, and merchant seamen libraries. I helped out with these lugubrious tasks, and while the rare books and first editions on the second floor brought in a considerable amount of money (even at the rock-bottom prices Tom was willing to accept in order to transfer the whole collection to a single dealer in Great Barrington, Massachusetts), it was no fun taking part in the demolition of Harry’s empire – especially when I learned what the new owner was planning to do with the space after it was empty. Books were giving way to women’s shoes and handbags, and the top three floors were being converted into expensive co-op apartments. Real estate is the official religion of New York, and its god wears a gray pin-striped suit and goes by the name of Cash, Mr. More-and-More Cash. If there was any consolation for me in this grim turn of events, it was the knowledge that Tom and Rufus would never be hard up again. For the two hundredth time since his death, my thoughts turned to Harry – and his vast swan dive into eternal greatness.
On a Thursday evening in early June, Honey announced that she was pregnant. Tom put his arm around her, then leaned across the dinner table and asked me if I would be the godfather. “You’re our only choice,” he said. “For services rendered, Nathan, above and beyond the call of duty. For outstanding courage in the heat of battle. For risking life and limb to rescue your wounded comrade under intense fire. For prodding that same comrade to stand on his feet again and enter into this conjugal union. In recognition of these heroic acts, and for the benefit of our future offspring, you deserve to wear a title more fitting to your role than that of great-uncle. Therefore, I dub thee godfather – if thou wilt accept our humble supplication to assume the mantle of that burden. What shall it be, good sir? We await thine answer with pounding hearts.” The answer was yes. A yes followed by a long string of mumbled words, none of which I can remember now. Then I raised my glass to them, and unaccountably my eyes filled with tears.
Three days later, Rachel and Terrence drove in from New Jersey for Sunday brunch at my apartment. Joyce helped me prepare the spread, and as the four of us sat in the back garden eating our bagels and lox, I noticed that my daughter looked lovelier and happier than at any time in recent months. Her miscarriage in the fall had been a brutal disappointment, and she had been on shaky ground ever since – covering up her sadness by working too hard at her job, cooking elaborate gourmet meals for Terrence to prove that she was a worthy spouse in spite of her failure to bear a child, exhausting herself at every turn. But that day in the garden, the old luster was shining in her eyes again, and though she was normally reserved in company, she more than held her own in the four-way conversation, talking as much and as often as the rest of us. At one point, Terrence excused himself to go to the bathroom inside, and a moment later Joyce dashed off to the kitchen to fetch a new pot of coffee. Rachel and I were alone. I kissed her on the cheek and told her how beautiful she looked, and she responded to the compliment by returning the kiss and then leaning her head against my shoulder. “I’m pregnant again,” she said. “I took the test this morning, and the results were positive. There’s a baby growing inside me, Dad, and this time it’s going to live. I promise. I’m going to make you a grandfather, even if I have to stay in bed for the next seven months.”
For the second time in less than seventy-two hours, my eyes unexpectedly filled with tears.
* * * * *
Pregnant women were sprouting up all around me, and I was turning into something of a woman myself: a person who wept at the mere mention of babies, a lachrymose saphead who needed to walk around with a box of emergency tissues so as not to embarrass myself in public. Perhaps the house on Carroll Street was partly to blame for these lapses of manly decorum. I spent a good deal of time there, and now that Nancy’s husband had been replaced by Aurora and Lucy, the household had become an entirely feminine universe. Its only male member was Sam, Nancy’s three-year-old son, but as he could barely talk, his influence over its operations was severely limited. Otherwise, it was all girls, three generations of girls, with Joyce at the top, Nancy and Aurora in the middle, and the ten-year-old Lucy and the five-year-old Devon at the bottom. The interior of the brownstone was a living museum of female artifacts, with galleries devoted to the display of bras and panties, blow-dryers and tampons, makeup jars and lipstick tubes, dolls and jump ropes, nighties and bobby pins, curling irons and facial creams and endless, endless pairs of shoes. To go there was like visiting a foreign country, but since I adored every person who lived in that house, it was the single place on earth I preferred above all others.
In the months that followed Aurora’s escape from North Carolina, a number of curious things happened chez Joyce. Because the door was always open to me, I was in a position to observe these dramas at close hand, and I watched in a state of perpetual wonder and surprise. With Lucy, for example, all bets were suddenly off. During her time with Tom and Honey, I had been apprehensive, expecting trouble to break out at any minute. Not only had she threatened to become “the baddest, meanest, cussingest little girl in the whole of God’s creation,” but it seemed inevitable to me that her mother’s continued absence would eventually wear her down, turning her into a mopish, angry, disgruntled kid. But no. She had thrived in that apartment above Harry’s old store, and her adjustment to her new surroundings had con
tinued at a remarkable pace. By the time I brought Rory back to Brooklyn with me, Lucy’s southern accent was gone, she had shot up at least four or five inches, and she was one of the best students in her class. Yes, she had often cried for her mother at night, but now that her mother had returned, one would assume our girl would have felt her prayers had been answered. No again. There was an early rush of happiness immediately following the reunion, but after a while resentments and hostilities began to surface, and by the end of their first month together, our smart, energetic, wise-cracking child had turned herself into a royal pain in the ass. Doors slammed; polite requests were greeted with sour derision; belligerent shouts resounded from the third floor; grumps devolved into sulks, sulks devolved into storms, storms devolved into tears; the words no, stupid, shut up, and mind your own business became an integral part of the daily discourse. With everyone else, Lucy’s conduct was unchanged. Only her mother was subjected to these assaults, and as time went on, they became more and more relentless.
Demoralizing as this behavior was on the fragile Aurora, I began to see it as a necessary purge, a sign that Lucy was actively fighting for her life. The question of love wasn’t at issue. Lucy loved her mother, but that same beloved mother had also thrown her onto a bus one hectic, crazy afternoon and shipped her off to New York, and for the next six months the girl had been abandoned. How can a little person absorb such a perplexing turn of events without feeling at least partially to blame? Why would the mother get rid of the child unless the child was bad, a creature unworthy of the mother’s love? Through no fault of her own, the mother had slashed a wound across her daughter’s soul, and how can the wound ever heal if the daughter doesn’t cry out at the top of her lungs and announce to the world: I’m in pain; I can’t stand it anymore; help me? The household would have been a more tranquil place if Lucy had kept quiet, but bottling up that scream would have caused her no end of trouble in the long run. She had to let it out. There was no other way to stop the bleeding.
I made an effort to see Aurora as often as I could, especially in those first difficult months when she was still struggling to find her bearings. The North Carolina horrors had marked her for life, and we both knew she would never fully recover from them, that no matter how well she managed to cope in the future, the past would always be with her. I offered to pay for regular sessions with a therapist if she thought they would help, but she said no, she’d rather just talk to me. Me. The bitter, solitary man who had crept home to Brooklyn less than a year earlier, the burnout who had convinced himself there was nothing left to live for – knuckle-headed me, Nathan the Unwise, who could think of nothing better to do than quietly wait to drop dead, now transformed into a confidant and counselor, a lover of randy widows, and a knight-errant who rescued damsels in distress. Aurora chose to talk to me because I was the one who had gone down to North Carolina and saved her, and even if we had been out of contact for many years prior to that afternoon, I was nevertheless her uncle, her mother’s only brother, and she knew that she could trust me. So we got together for lunch several times a week and talked, just the two of us, sitting at a back table in the New Purity Diner on Seventh Avenue, and little by little we became friends, in the same way her brother and I had become friends, and now that both of June’s children were back in my life, it was as if my baby sister had come alive in me again, and because she was the ghost who continued to haunt me, her children had now become my children.
The one thing Aurora had never shared with her mother, her brother, or anyone else in the family was the name of Lucy’s father. She had guarded that secret for so many years by then, it seemed futile to broach the question anymore, but at one of our lunches in early April, without any prompting from me, the answer accidentally slipped out.
It all began when I asked her if she still had her tattoo. Rory put down her fork, broke into a big smile, and said, “How do you know about that?”
“Tom told me. A big eagle on your shoulder, right? We wondered if you’d had it taken off, but Lucy wouldn’t tell us.”
“It’s still there. As big and pretty as ever.”
“And David was all right with that?”
“Not really. He saw it as a symbol of my fucked-up past and wanted me to get rid of it. I was willing to go along with him, but it turned out to be too expensive. When he realized we couldn’t afford it, David did a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree about-face. That gives you a good idea of how he thinks, of why I could never win an argument against him. Maybe it’s a good thing, he said. We’ll leave the tattoo where it is, and every time we look at it, we’ll remember how far you’ve come from the dark days of your youth. That’s typical David for you: the dark days of my youth. He said it would be an amulet that I wore on my own skin, and it would protect me from further harm and suffering. An amulet. I had no idea what that was, so I looked it up in the dictionary. A charm for warding off evil spirits. Okay, I can buy that. It didn’t do much for me when I was with David, but maybe it will help now.”
“I’m glad you still have it. I don’t know why I’m glad, but I am.”
“Me too. I’m kind of attached to that stupid thing. I had it done in the East Village eleven years ago. To celebrate getting pregnant with Lucy. The same morning the nurse at the clinic told me I’d tested positive, I rushed out and got my tattoo.”
“A strange way to celebrate, no?”
“I’m a strange girl, Uncle Nat. And that was probably the strangest time of my life. I was renting some rathole apartment off Avenue C with two guys, Billy and Greg. Billy played the guitar, Greg played the fiddle, and I sang. We weren’t too bad, really, considering how young we were. Most of the time, we’d perform out in Washington Square Park. Or else in the Times Square subway station. I loved the echoes in those underground halls, belting out my songs as people dropped their coins and dollars into Greg’s fiddle case. Sometimes I sang stoned, and Billy would call me his floozy, woozy, boozy girl. Sometimes I sang sober, and Greg would call me the Queen of Planet X. Jesus Christ. Those were good times, Uncle Nat. When we couldn’t earn enough playing our music, I’d go into stores and shoplift. They called me Fearless Fosdick. Rumbling down the aisles of a supermarket, stuffing steaks and chickens under my coat. Nothing was serious back then. One week I was in love with Greg. The next week I was in love with Billy. I slept with both of them, and then I wound up pregnant. I never knew which one was the father, and since neither one of them wanted to be the father, I kicked them both out.”
“So that’s why you never told June. You didn’t know.”
“Shit. I can’t believe how dumb I am. Shit, shit, shit. I swore to myself I’d never tell anyone, and now I’ve gone ahead and done it.”
“It doesn’t matter, Rory. Greg and Billy are just names to me. Don’t say another word if you don’t want to.”
“Greg died of an overdose about two years after Lucy was born. And Billy just kind of vanished. I don’t know what happened to him. Somebody once told me that he went back home, finished college, and teaches music in some high school out in the Midwest. But who knows if it’s the same Billy Finch? It could be someone else.”
Even after she arrived in Brooklyn, it was far from certain that Aurora had seen the last of David Minor. My name and address were in the telephone book, and it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to track her down through me. I cringed at the thought of another confrontation with that self-righteous turd, but I kept my fears to myself and said nothing to Rory. Minor was such a painful subject for her, she could barely bring herself to talk about him, and I didn’t want to stir up any new anxieties that would add to the problems she already had to contend with. As the months went by, I began to feel more hopeful, but it wasn’t until late June that I was finally able to stop worrying and put the matter to rest. A thick white envelope appeared in my mailbox one morning, and because I carelessly failed to notice that the letter had not been addressed to Nathan Glass but to Aurora Wood in care of Nathan Glass, I opened it befo
re I realized my mistake. The brief, handwritten cover note read as follows:
Dear One,
It’s better this way.
Good luck – and may God ever be merciful to you.
David
The note was attached to a seven-page document, which turned out to be a divorce decree from Saint Clair County in the State of Alabama, dissolving the marriage between David Wilcox Minor and Aurora Wood Minor on the grounds of desertion.
That day at lunch, I apologized to Rory for having opened her mail, and then I handed her the letter.
“What is it?” she asked.
“A note from your ex,” I said. “Along with a bunch of official papers.”
“My ex? What does that mean?”
“Open it up and find out.”
As I watched her read the note and scan the document, I was struck by how little her expression changed. I had thought she would smile, perhaps even let out a laugh or two, but her face registered almost nothing. A slight flicker of some buried, enigmatic feeling, but it was impossible to know what the feeling was.
“Well,” she said at last. “I guess that’s that.”
“You’re free, Rory. If you wanted to, you could marry someone else tomorrow.”
“I’m never going to let another man touch me for the rest of my life.”
“That’s what you say now. Eventually, someone new will come along, and you’ll start thinking about marriage again.”
“No, I mean it, Nathan. That part of my life is over and done with. When David locked me in that room, I said to myself: This is it, no more falling for men. Not a single good thing ever came of it. And nothing ever will.”
“You’re forgetting Lucy.”
“Okay, one thing. But I already have my kid, and I don’t need another.”