Dissident Gardens (42 page)

“You said I was an old man.”

“Also a child.”

“This is craziness. We just made love, Rose.”

“Get out of my room, get out of my house.”

“I’ve got enemies out there.”

“You never made one enemy worth making. Don’t after all this time try to hide in my skirts.”

She couldn’t help provoking and abusing him, any more than she could have kept from inspiring him, long ago and always. Rose was a statue to be studied or ignored, to endure weather and accumulate the shit of birds, but not to be negotiated with. That he was a man in a perilous circumstance wasn’t going to impress her.

Better, thought Lenny romantically, to be doomed outright than doomed to such irrelevance. But—not Miriam. Miriam, whether she knew it or not, was under both their protection. He’d come full circle again. Let this be his final priority. “Rose, is she seriously going to Nicaragua? I’m speaking seriously here for a minute, indulge me. After that, if you wish, I’ll go. Seriously, they’ll get themselves killed.”

“For the record, that’s my prediction as well, made this morning on the telephone. We don’t require a family go-between, Lenny. You’re an outlying cousin, which fact explains why your visit here is tolerated, but it shouldn’t happen again. Now go.”

“If you don’t believe in Halloween, how do you account for my arriving here dressed as I am?”

“Because you’re a lunatic.”

They picked him up again creeping out of the Gardens through the Skillman Avenue gate. He broke free, clutched his hat as he scrambled and, thank God now for the Adidas, made for the concrete courtyard of the Cambridge Apartments, where he should have gone to begin with, to vanish into verticality and anonymity, rattle on the door of some kid he’d gone to school with, now grown fat and with fat wife and fat kids, vanish into muddling Queens anonymity where he could park himself until the Krugerrand Caper cooled somewhat. He’d ring fifteen buzzers at once with the flat of his two hands and hope somebody expecting somebody buzzed him in. He only got as far as the dry concrete fountain, in which he sighted irrelevantly a child’s abandoned baseball, fluorescent orange, Charlie Finley–style, moldering in webs. Now, there was a man with the iconoclast’s outlook. If Lenny’d only been petitioning the office of a man like Finley, rather than Shea and Rickey. Water under the bridge, but maybe Jack Kerouac was right, possibilities for utopian reinvention lay on the West Coast. Maybe Lenny should cross the Hudson, after all this time, Go West, Old Fart, see what was out there. He thought of pausing to scoop the ball, to hurl at his pursuers. But he had a corroded shoulder, doubted he could throw, a cumulative thing he’d aggravated somewhere in the escapade, getting from Village bacchanal to Rose’s bed. Fucking was like gym class, like doing push-ups, and he was a long time out of gym. He ignored the ball, dodged for the entranceway instead. The first bullet went through the stovepipe’s brim.

The year Rose Angrush Zimmer fell in love with Archie Bunker was the same in which she began attending the funerals of strangers. This was also the time when Rose’s perambulations grew increasingly random, her old block-watcher’s orbit around Sunnyside becoming wobbly and strange, until it had unspooled completely.

What on earth was her intention, going to the funerals?

It began with Douglas Lookins. Without warning, he’d succumbed to an embolism, just months after Diane’s slow-motion passing from her prized array of ailments. In perfect imitation of a loving spouse, as if unable to imagine living on without her. One further brushstroke added to the masterpiece of indignity the affair had been for Rose, but she’d gone to usher him into the ground nonetheless. A policeman’s noble interring in New Calvary Cemetery in Maspeth, on a cloud-harassed hillock, there to vanish into the sea of headstones on view from the Long Island Expressway. Rose was the only white face apart from Douglas’s commander, a major Rose had come to know. They stood together; Rose might easily have been mistaken here for his wife. No matter. Cicero, now a man, looked something of a stiff himself, in the costume of a Princeton junior, and not glad in the least to be drawn by his father’s death back into this universe of hard-ass black cops and their suffering families. Rose offered him a rough embrace, free of tears on either side, and told him to call her, when he wanted, if
he wanted. Otherwise, she had spoken to barely anyone. An art she’d perfected on hundreds of former occasions, no effort whatsoever.

Next, the horror of the commune’s scattering of Miriam’s ashes, mixed with Tommy’s, in the so-called community garden on East Eighth Street, beyond Avenue C—a vacant lot.
A vacant lot!
Ground zero for a ghetto childhood, or worse—the pockmarked Lower East Side truly resembled newsreel footage of postwar Berlin. Well, Rose had thought bitterly, at least she made it to Manhattan! Six months later than it should have taken place, the boy absent, being shielded, Rose suspected, from her. There, Rose uttered not a word. The mourners sang and swayed, arms braided together, pot smoke wafting, rumors of the MacDougal Street scene’s demise apparently exaggerated. Rose left before the love-in concluded.

Lenny? Shipped in a box to Israel.

So Rose went looking for a proper funeral, which turned out, to her surprise, to mean a proper
Jewish
funeral.

Maybe she’d become meshugah ahf toit, loon-crazy with bereavement. One of those who, losing everyone in a cataclysm, begins seeking situations both anonymous and which exemplify grief. Possibly this wasn’t crazy at all, or crazy not like a loon but a fox. The trick might be to diffuse and depersonalize the act of mourning, and also to freeze it, to entrench it as a permanent occupation.
We Jews mourn, there’s nothing to it, and also nothing new to it
. Let me attend six million funerals, maybe then I’ll be done. By that time my personal dead will be as raindrops in the sea. I’ll forget their names.

Funerals in Corona, or in Woodside or Forest Hills or even Manhattan, served one more practical function: They got Rose free of the house, yet vaulted her beyond the immediate precincts of the Gardens, that labyrinth of grudges. For her stores of defiance were running short. The funerals made of Sunnyside a foyer, a lobby, to more important destinations. And she needed, from time to time, and apart from the tasks of shopping or schlepping her letters to the P.O., to get free of the house. Rose watched too much of her splendid new color television. There were days she thought she was falling through the screen, toward the Shea Stadium outfield, a green whose seductiveness mocked her long indifference to green. There were days she spent
just adjusting the color balance, trying to modulate the scarlet blare of the actors’ cheeks on
Ryan’s Hope
.

It was in this mood that Rose stumbled upon the comedy program, curious merely because someone had said it was set in Astoria. She’d thought herself done with love, until she saw him. The doughy bigot with pain all over his face. At first Rose barely listened to his words, heard only the painful music of Archie’s accent. He muttered and droned, a caricature of indigenous New York. Her reaction? She should have expected it, yet after a lifetime of such lightning bolts it never quit astonishing her, that her fascination with some human male, whether judge or policeman or mere loading-dock foreman, was wired to her sex. Astonishing that any of her brain’s wires still reached that forsaken region! She’d welcomed no man to touch her in a decade, unless you counted her cousin’s farcical spasm, the night he was killed. For Rose to respond in the first place, she seemed to require a man whose vanities struck her as secretly absurd—surely this was the only thing they’d all had in common. Perhaps she required that a man’s vanities rise high enough to blot her own, to make obdurate stances look reasonable.

So Archie squirreled into her heart and loin.

Edith she could live without—but they always had wives, didn’t they?

Other days Rose watched the Gardens as though
it
were the television. If she stared through her kitchen window with persistence enough, teacup turning cold in her grasp, the inhabitants blurred, even those who stood and waved at her, as though Rose took a longexposure photograph with her mind. She saw just the buildings and the fences and the growth and decay in the beds and along the pathways, saw just time itself. Each by each the new owners had balkanized the commons. A ration of the planet belonging at once to everyone became mere property, a scrap of fenced weeds large enough for a cast-iron barbecue grill or a plastic deck chair, craven assertion of a McCoy-versus-Hatfield view of human rights. Even the walking path had been claimed. You couldn’t pass through the Gardens from Skillman to Thirty-Ninth without conducting a square dance of diversions past the new fencework.

The difficulty with permitting the fire of your gaze to melt the humans down to ghosts was this: If Rose then glanced down at the hands gripping the tepid teacup, they’d gone invisible, too. Nobody left to properly mourn it all.

So make of every day an opportunity to read the death lists, put on some lipstick and a black pantsuit and let the body in the casket stand in for everything—body, mind, world, beliefs—going daily into the ground.

Then one day the name in the newspaper was that of Jerome Cunningham, formerly Jerome Kuhnheimer, and known to his family and friends as “Stretch,” and she readied herself for the funeral, out in Corona, and when she attended she found that her life inside and outside her apartment, even more specifically her life on the two sides of the television’s bowed glass, had gotten mixed up.

It occurred at a generic parlor chapel, one fitted with cursory Jewish disguise, a shawl here, a menorah there. Rose’s method was to ensure she’d be unlikely to exchange recognitions, by entering late and seating herself in the back row. There was an oddness to this funeral to begin with, the cohort from Pendergast Tool & Die, Stretch Cunningham’s place of occupation, where the poor bastard slaved his whole adult life on the loading dock, mixing uneasily with the Jewish family. The dead man had had either the guts or the stupidity to anglicize
Kuhnheimer
, WASPishly, to
Cunningham
—one single act of boldness in a lifetime otherwise distinguished, if you believed the eulogists standing above his casket, only by Stretch’s chimplike foolishness. A resolute unwillingness to be serious about anything: This endeared the man to everyone. A jokester, who’d dropped dead.

Despite Archie’s role as eulogist, he came in even later than Rose. He burst in, Edith pushing a yarmulke onto his skull and, with barely an introduction, was drawn up onto the chapel’s tiny altar. The portly man was toothpasted into a black suit, one likely in mothballs since some previous funeral, years and neck-sizes ago. Collar and tie looked cinched tight, to stanch rebellion from below; meanwhile, above, his white hair was capped by the ill-fitting yarmulke, containment
against the top end’s explosion. Between, Archie’s face formed a pasty meat-map of his soul. His features showed every type of involuntary pathos, auditioning bovine stupefaction, bearish wrath, and wily self-amusement, without ever disguising that flayed aspect at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

“I worked shoulder to shoulder with Stretch for eleven-twelve years and I, uh, I knew him good. Well, not as good as I thought …” Rose, though not understanding how Archie Bunker could intrude on her life in this way, got the gag immediately. Archie, anti-Semite, hadn’t known until he walked into the funeral that his beloved friend was Jewish. Archie went on: “Stretch was one of them up guys, one of the uppest guys you ever met, always laughing, tellin’ jokes himself, and many a
Jewish
joke he told …”

Rose loved Archie even better here, in person, humiliated in front of all these Jews. She felt defiance on his behalf, on behalf of the marvelous innocent resolve that kept the man bumbling forward. He missed his friend Stretch and death bewildered him and yet he found a way to stand there with his foot continuously in his mouth and not flee or begin weeping.