The Ballad of West Tenth Street Read online

  He looked around the table, his sad, gummy eyes taking in everything. Deen, it was true, was not such a little girl anymore; he’d better stop thinking he could maul her about. And young Hames was frighteningly like his father must’ve been at that age, a skinny, pale lad, all hair and the will for passion. It broke his heart to look at Hames. Sadie, well, there was someone who never changed in his eyes. She’d been a wisp of a thing with tangled hair all over her eyes when he’d met her, her fine wrist with a chunky man’s watch on it shooting out of a sleeve, a mad princess from a far-off land.

  Sadie had eaten a few bites but had gone back to her vodka seconds later, sitting quietly, listening to the children chatter with Brian. She looked fondly at her children, at their bright hair and eager faces. So like Ree’s it made her heart ache. They didn’t like her giving them what they called “moony” looks, so she could only indulge in them when they weren’t aware, but my, how she loved them.

  She poured more vodka into her glass, now well into her seventh drink of the day. Then she put the glass down with a thud. She’d tried to set it down carefully but had misjudged the distance.

  She’d always done it like that, Brian thought, seemed relatively sober until bang, she slipped over the edge.

  She stood, putting a hand out to the fridge to balance herself. “Think I’ll go to bed now,” she said.

  Brian got up and put an arm around her. “I’ll walk you up, love. Can’t have you breaking your neck just yet. Come on girl, up we go.”

  He came back down a few minutes later. The children were eating ice cream from pint cartons.

  “She’s been talking to a mouse that lives under the dishwasher,” Deen told him.

  “She’s got a mouse for a friend?” Brian said. He poured himself some more red wine and lit a cigarette. Brian was a dedicated chain-smoker, so he was always about the business of smoking—of lighting one, cupping his hands, flapping out a match, tapping a pack against the back of his hand, taking a drag, squinting, flicking an ash, stamping out a butt, sending one sailing into the gutter, rummaging in his pockets, taking that first puff, his eyes dreamy, throwing his head back to exhale a jet of smoke, crumpling a finished packet into a ball.

  “Well, I dunno if it’s a friend, but she talks to it a lot.”

  “And she cooked a tennis shoe for dinner last night. With tomatoes and herbs. We had to put her to bed and get subs from Mr. Z’s. Again,” Hamish said.

  “Right. We’ll get all this straightened out. I’ll have a little chat with her about tennis shoes and mice. Fair enough? Though mind you, talking to mice seems fairly normal to me.”

  “She’s been drinking a shitload lately,” Hamish told him.

  “Munster’s been acting kind of odd, even for her,” Deen added. “We’re worried she might be losing it.”

  “Your mother? Our Saids? Never,” said Brian. “That woman doesn’t lose it, she goes full bore off a cliff, a flaming trail of broken hearts in her wake. No, she holds onto it fast and takes it all with her. Your mum’s saner than anyone I know. She’s just drinking a bit hard is all. Worried about Gretchen, no doubt. And probably a bit lonely having no one but you two louts about the place. I shouldn’t worry, she needs a bit of cheering up is all.”

  2

  Sadie, like many dedicated drinkers, woke early, with a raging thirst. Too hazy to get up to satisfy it, she lay in bed letting her consciousness rise to the surface. She had a vague feeling that Brian had put her to bed—why she couldn’t say. She flexed her toes and stretched her arms, chasing the image. She hoped he had, hoped that he was in the house. She felt sure she’d seen him last night, seen his thin, runnelly face at the dinner table. That’s right, he’d lit a cigarette and said last bloody place a man can smoke in this town.

  If he had put her to bed maybe he’d…yes he had, he’d left a bottle of apple juice on the floor within reach. Oh, kind genie. She drank a long swallow.

  She looked around her room with the drifting interest of the newly wakened, her eye falling on various objects among the jumble. A rosewood cello key, a book bound in yellow cloth, a pile of necklaces, a glass with a smear of some ancient liquid in it, must remember to take that downstairs. A montage of other mornings, other places and times came back to her, powder spilled on a red lacquered tray, burned joints in their roach clips, big flashy earrings, letters from home, leaves caught up as mementos, reel-to-reel tapes, empty bottles. A thousand still lifes in a thousand mirrors of the day.

  Heigh-ho, up and to the bathroom, that palace of flowing water. Sp-lash around in the cold first, then look in the mirror. She drew her fingers on either side of her cheeks, pulling the skin up and back. The effect was slightly weird but definitely younger. Is that where they would lay the scalpel? No, they never would, she’d never let them cut her for that, for mere vanity. Allow madmen with scalpels to cut her face so that she could pretend, yes, pretend! she shouted at the mirror, to be younger? Younger? She’d been young once and that was enough, thank you very much.

  A drawing caught her eye, taped up next to the mirror. Of a crone leaning down to scream into a cauldron. Hamish’s latest effort, evidently. Oh, the crone was her. But why did he show her screaming into a white cauldron? Who’d ever heard of a white cauldron for Christ’s sake? Cauldrons were black, everyone knew that. Well, she’d ask him later.

  It is a known phenomenon among drunks, their minds and their systems hardened to their habits and therefore suffering in no way the depredations of a hangover that a novice drinker suffers, that if they wake early they still have a bit of the juice running through their veins, therefore the sometimes astonishing jauntiness of their behavior in the mornings. Sadie was among this hardy type, and she sang a song as she tied her peacock silk dressing gown around her. “Who knows what evil lurks in the shadow of a society woman’s bustle?” she sang. “Perhaps the imps of Satan.” Nevertheless, she held firmly to the banister as she went down the stairs.

  She read the Times and drank coffee, tucking one foot under her, enjoying knowing she would be alone for an hour or more. Hames woke first, clumping down the stairs, making a racket. He kicked the fridge and tangled with chair legs, getting himself breakfast, wanting to talk but knowing she wouldn’t, so he clamped his headphones over his ears and munched away, lost in a world of miraculous guitars. Deen came down later, to eat an apple and read a book. Then they grabbed their knapsacks and rushed off.

  Sadie looked around her and sighed. She loved this house but it really needed some work. Maybe if she could just get it to a certain point she could feel the courage to do some painting and spiffing up. But like her life, it was too unraveled.

  Many people—or perhaps one should say, many people like Sadie, aren’t much good at handling staff. A delicate balance exists between employer and employee in the household and a certain toughness and dispassion is needed on the part of the employer, which Sadie, child of the egalitarian sixties, was incapable of. As a result, after having lost a trusted and efficient cleaner who’d been with her for ten years, she’d tried repeatedly to find someone—let us be correct and not call it a woman, to clean her house once a week with any degree of skill, care, or honesty. Or anything like the spit and polish that in the recesses of her untidy soul she cried for, an ancient holdover from her New England childhood and its memories of salt-washed shingles.

  Corralled into hiring nearly any applicant by her willingness to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, she’d soon realize she’d made a mistake. She was adept at not seeming to fire them, simply wafting away. “Darling, I am so sorry,” she’d say. “But it turns out we all have to go back to London for I don’t know how long, ages perhaps. So it simply wouldn’t be fair not to let you be a free agent, look around for other work.”

  There would be a slightly mulish tone to her last sentence, so perhaps she wasn’t so bad at firing people after all. But she had to screw herself up for weeks to do it. Meanwhile, the house got rattier.

  Into every run of bad
luck and poor judgment there eventually comes a whiff of hope. Some weeks earlier Sadie had hired a new woman named Brenda MacFarland. Brenda MacFarland had a churchy, solid air and smelled of starch. Her skin was the color of polished chestnuts and she was very good-looking, but seemed to be trying to hide it. She’d told Sadie, as if getting it off her chest, that she’d come north from South Carolina with a husband thirteen years ago, and that he had left her with their boy to raise. Then she’d looked around disapprovingly and said, “This here’s going to take some real thumping and scrubbing to even make a start. Just so you know.”

  Sadie waved her hand around vaguely. “Yes, it does rather, doesn’t it? It’s gotten so none of us can find anything.”

  “Well, I’ll have to chip and chip till I get there. Don’t go expecting any miracles right away.”

  Sadie felt a shiver of hope at Brenda’s obvious disgust with the state of the house. She thought it a happy omen the way she clenched her jaw as she gave it the gimlet eye.

  And things had indeed begun to improve. Each week, after finishing the general cleaning, Brenda attacked a particular part of the house, staring at it first and seeming to breathe smoke as she planned her campaign.

  Brenda appeared to prefer to be left alone while she worked, so Sadie kept out of the way. She also liked to give a full report when she’d finished, one that culminated in a triumphant description of her day’s special project. These pleasant sessions were conducted in the kitchen.

  “I got it into my mind to take the bull by the horns and do something about that front hall,” she told Sadie that afternoon. “My, there was a mountain of dust behind that table, and a few things some people have been looking for for some time, I don’t doubt. And that light above? Must’ve been a whole army of dead bugs in there. Been a while since you had anybody knows what they’re doing here, hasn’t it? Floor’s waxed too.”

  “How wonderful, Brenda. It’s getting so I look forward with real relish to hearing about your special projects. I think I’ll take my drink up there later to just sit and admire it.”

  “Miz, uh…” Brenda trailed off, uncomfortable at using Sadie’s first name, though she’d been asked to more than once. For years she’d worked during the week for an old dragon to whom the rigors of social hierarchy were law, and she was used to addressing her employer formally.

  She began again, dispensing with the tricky problem of names. “I was thinking, if all the copper pots and such down here got polished it’d sure be brighter. Now, it’d be years before I could get to that, so I was wondering, what if I bring my boy Liall along next Saturday? He’s twelve and can do as he’s told. Oh no, I didn’t mean for you to have to pay him,” she added, seeing the look on Sadie’s face. “But it’s like this—he’s a good boy but big for his age, and he’s starting to run after some older boys I don’t like the cut of, not one bit. If he were here I could keep an eye on him and sure worry less. I was minding about giving this kitchen here for instance a real going over, and I know I could do it a lot better if there were gladness in my heart and I wasn’t worried about my boy.”

  Sadie thought this as neat a piece of blackmail as she’d ever heard. It also made perfect sense, so she said, “Bring him along, by all means. Perhaps he’ll shame my two into stirring themselves to a bit of work. But I’m a little troubled by the idea of a young boy scouring pots down here all day, it seems a bit Dickensian.”

  “Oh no, I thought he could do some then go off to play in the park, or do some errands. I’ll make sure he’s no bother.”

  “Maybe he and Hamish might do some things together. They’re the same age. But children are funny about being put together….” Sadie trailed off. She hoped fervently that the two boys would like each other, but hopes like that were so often dashed.

  “Yes, that’s the truth,” Brenda said. For the first time a look of true warmth was exchanged between the two women.

  After Brenda had gone, Sadie sat at the kitchen table marking the calendar she made each week for the children’s schedules. Red for Hames and blue for Deen, it was taped to the fridge each Saturday.

  Sadie had thought long and hard about education in the city for her children. She’d decided that private schools were too insular, but then the public schools not challenging enough. Homeschooling was out, she was far too flighty and unlettered, besides it had always struck her as slightly creepy to be both mother and teacher. Surely homeschooled children grew up to be socially maladjusted. So she’d hit on a fourth option—she paid certain inhabitants of the Village to give them lessons. The Village was stuffed with intellectuals and artists with time on their hands and a liking for cash money. In fact, the children were getting excellent educations for far less than the cost of private school. The only drawback was that their schedules were complicated and often subject to change. Twice a year they took a test to prove that they’d passed the required state levels, tests they galloped through.

  Having taped up the schedule she then turned her mind to planning dinner. Once she’d done that she could have a fucking drink and relax. Brian had said he’d be back, so she’d better go to the market. A limo had called for him at noon to take him to the recording studio. Good old Brian, he still kept rocker’s hours, still rushed down at noon to drain two cups of coffee and smoke two fags, acting as if he’d been wrenched out of bed at dawn. He still wore leather and strutted around like a lad, got into brawls, and worked now with other, younger bands. He’d never married and to Sadie’s mind it had kept him from ever feeling either the dull weight of responsibility or alimony.

  Upstairs, Deen let herself in the front door and headed straight for the piano. Elizabeth, her piano teacher, had begun her that afternoon on Beethoven’s Pathétique. She was itching to keep working on it. She pulled the music out of her case and set it on the stand, looking at the notes, absorbing their pattern. She took a breath, straightened her back, held her chin up and her arms out, relaxed, and began. The solemnity, sadness, and vigor of the piece thrilled her.

  She threw herself into playing, letting herself go now that she was alone with it, but knew she must slow down, do what Elizabeth had shown her. To breathe in the sense of the piece then exhale, to create the modality of the dying notes. Slow the chords, use the pauses, timing was everything, breathe with it. She came to the climax of pity in the piece, the fading gasps of some beautiful, broken creature. Two tears welled at the corners of her eyes. She nearly wanted to stop, to lean over and bawl her eyes out over the keys it spoke to her so strongly of the well of human loneliness, but her desire to play was greater.

  One level of her mind thought of the music, the other of Gretchen. All alone in that terrible place. Oh, so alone. Cut off from everyone, abandoned, and with all those terrible people wandering the hallways like ghouls.

  Did being crazy mean not actually knowing where you were, being all confused, not knowing why you were there? Why all of a sudden your own family sent you away, just that you’re lost and it hurts? Like an animal feels, lying in the road after being hit by a car, but not knowing what a car is? Torn asunder and bleeding—oh, stop thinking about that.

  Deen could see more clearly now what had happened to Gretchen than in the confused days six months ago. Well, it had started earlier than that, she could see that now, when Gretchen stopped playing the drums. It had seemed like an ordinary teenage whim at the time. But Gretchen loved her drums, spent hours tuning and adjusting them. Then she’d gradually stopped talking. Right up to the time she’d really stopped talking, it hadn’t seemed so odd, she’d hardly ever talked anyway.

  Now Deen saw how Sadie had tried to keep what was happening from her. The veiled conferences behind sealed doors, Sadie slamming the lid down on the washer before Deen saw what was in it. The people Munster had coming over to the house at all hours to sit with Gretchen, and Dr. Ed skidding in and out. The day it had all boiled over and Deen, thinking she’d heard her mother call out for her, went running into Gretchen’s room, though she’d been
told not to. She couldn’t figure it out; Gretchen was all cut up. All the parts of her that would normally be covered were all cut up. Munster was holding a bloody towel and she threw her head back like she was going to howl, then covered Gretchen with it. Made no sound, which was worse than if she’d screamed. Then Dr. Ed came and the three of them left in an ambulance.

  Deen played the final chords slowly, they made her ache with sadness. But Elizabeth had told her that in music mood had two levels, that tears and someone leaving had to have another sound hidden inside them, a faint but inevitable ringing that spoke of joy, return. She’d said that the dominant note could only truly effect pathos if the opposite notes hovered inside it. That there was no certain way of saying how to play this, except that you knew. But scales have it inside them too, Deen thought, obviously. Scales are logic and highly refined systems of numbers, and have two ends that must meet.

  And every time her mind, not that she allowed it to often, replayed that image of her sister on her bed, she felt sure that even though the whole world had troubled families and were crying and wailing on Oprah, that Gretchen had been waylaid and attacked by evil, jealous demons. That they had found a way into her room and out of their rage for her beauty and her pure, trusting ways, had attacked her viciously with knives.

  Gretchen at that moment was sitting in a wheelchair in the corner of a large room with a linoleum floor, sofas in a nasty shade of blue, and potted plants with broad, dark leaves. Night had fallen and the bank of windows along one wall no longer afforded their calming views of acres of mown grass and trees in islands of pachysandra. She was alone. This pleased her. They’d forgotten to collect her for dinner. She’d sat very still and tried to blend in with the potted plant next to her. Soon they’d figure it out and come looking for her, to put her to bed. She worked harder on her drawing to get it done before they did.