Dissident Gardens (9 page)

This was how deeply Rose had gotten into Cicero: Within the imposed and immutable corridors of his mind lay an oasis, a micro-cosmic realm where his present self could converse with her, make fresh access to the single most penetrating intelligence he’d ever known—not that he could persuade her to lay aside the warpages and loathings decorating that intelligence like thorns. These—warpages and loathings—were how he knew it was her. Cicero had no interest in hoodoo. Yet he could reanimate the dead, or one of them, anyhow. It tended to happen at the soda fountain, while seated on twin stools, with malteds before them.

Cicero glanced at the comic books on the counter, one already soaked at one corner where it had rested in a pool of melted ice cream dripping from his straw.
Detective Comics. Tales to Astonish
. He’d lost interest in such things a year or two later and couldn’t reconstruct his affection for the garish things now, those amateurish prototypes for the monolithically hellish culture of the new century.

“Rose.”

She raised an eyebrow at his tone.

“It’s not the child speaking to you now, but the man.”

“Some man.”

“Every form of human life on the earth, Rose. Those are your words. The feeble and the fags.”

“For this I fought.”

“That’s right. For this you fought.”

“Why must I live so long as to regret things I shouldn’t even be forced to contemplate coming into being?”

Cicero ignored Rose’s lament, too typical to mean other than that he should get to his point. “Your grandson has appeared, darling. Sergius Gogan.”

“Surely a homosexual too by this time. He showed every indication.”

“Apparently not. Or if so, not apparently so. He’s come to ask me to tell him what I know about
you
.”

If she’d arched an eyebrow before, now Rose’s entirety cocked in scorn, from the upsweep of her short hair, never dyed, still black but for the white at her temples and a streak from her forehead’s center, and the sardonic, one-sided smile revealing front teeth’s gap, to the attitude of her hand braced on the pantsuit of the one leg that reached to the floor, in her stance of only perching, not sitting, on the soda-shop stool. Rose might avow Marx or Lincoln, but the way her body occupied space was one thousand percent Fiorello La Guardia, sole mayor ever to meet her approval, pure pugilistic screw-you Noo Yawk.

“I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“I never suggested you did,” said Cicero. “But it’s not incumbent on me to have my brain picked by the ass-end leavings of your posterity.”

You could tell she relished at least this part of what her protégé had become.

“You’re a teacher, reputedly. So teach him.”

“You playing Jiminy Fucking Cricket with me now?”

Rose ignored him. “Here’s what I suggest. You say what you know and I don’t.”

“Meaning what?”

She shrugged. What this signified, beyond Cicero letting his brain be picked, she wouldn’t elaborate. If he didn’t know, she’d wash her hands of the matter.

“Now finish your malted, I need a smoke.”

Rose’s words flung him back into his body in the sea.

Well. He’d finished talking. Somewhere during his time-travel reverie, Cicero had ended the nostril-sputtering saltwater monologue. Let Sergius negotiate it. That she whom he professed to despise was his goddamn involuntary spirit animal Cicero wouldn’t let on.

“That’s the kind of stuff I’m looking for,” Sergius said. “The Communist stuff especially, Rose’s life in the party. I think it would be terrific, actually, to write some songs about that.”

“Oh, songs were written on the subject, Sergius. Your father wrote a few.” Cicero began some backstrokes again, his horny feet pointed to the shore. Could he lure Sergius farther out, to where they’d lose sight of land? Could he perhaps abandon the fool there? Cicero beat with fat choppy strokes another distance toward the barrier islands. His house and the others of the cove, their porticoes and sliding glass doors, their decks bearing gas-cartridge grills and thousand-dollar telescopes, were barely visible now. But Sergius, the poor sonovabitch whom Cicero now recalled had been named for Norman Mailer’s character from “The Time of Her Time”—did Sergius even know this self-trivia?—Sergius, despite his concave chest and scrawny arms, his scrawny ass, kept pace. His beseeching made him a swimmer Cicero couldn’t lose. Sergius had that much of Rose’s tenacity in him, perhaps, despite his Irish coloration and Quaker politesse. And so Rose was out here with the two of them. She’d gotten into Cicero’s medicine, like a moth, musty creature of the night, plopping into a glass of good water in broad daylight.

“Your mother’s friend Stella Kim once told me you had no memories of Tommy and Miriam,” Cicero said to him.

“I know, it seems impossible. I was eight when they died. But they’d been away.”

“And you can’t remember Lenny Angrush.”

“No. Just stories.”

“Well, your uncle Lenny was the species of motherfucker who’d gratuitously snuff out the chess career of a thirteen-year-old black kid, a kid with very little else in his life to cling to at the time.” Cicero was aware he’d concocted this grievance. A reverse sour-grapes maneuver: to inflate the value of that which had been taken from you, merely because it had been taken.

Sergius blinked. “I—I heard he was killed by the mob.”

“Sure. Only this wasn’t the Martin Scorsese mob you’re thinking of. Lenny wasn’t involved with the French Connection. He had to find a mob on his own level to get killed by—boneheads from Queens. Stella mentioned this?”

“No.”

“You don’t know jack about any of the Angrushes.”

“You can tell me.”

“If I felt like it.”

Sergius opened his mouth but said nothing.

“Be free of them,” Cicero commanded him. He was out of breath now. But Sergius only stared, helpless to accept this command, his shadow-body wavering beneath his strawberry-hued, bewildered head: a forked radish in aspic, a jellyfish. Maybe Cicero should have attacked Sergius, wrestled his shorts off, attempted to molest the forty-something child who’d entrusted himself to him. The Angrushes had once made a black boy their pet—Rose, and Miriam too. So, for revenge, make Sergius his pet now. Thinking it, Cicero understood that by drawing Sergius out here he’d evaded nothing at all. They were not disembodied heads, no, not free to drift away. Rather, they were heads anchored in a medium. Two American heads barely surfaced from a memory sea, seeking not to be drowned in it, limbs crawling, clawing for life. The sun above for a hammer, beating at fleshed skulls as they stared and blinked in the salt glare. No escape.

When he was thirteen years old Cicero Lookins was told, for the first and only time, that Rose Zimmer had once shoved her daughter’s head into an oven. Miriam Gogan told him one cool November afternoon, a day unforgettable in any number of arresting specifics.

It began with chess. Cicero had lately been savaging all comers at I.S. 125’s chess club, so Miriam, on Rose’s counsel, had proposed to bring him to call on Cousin Lenny at the chess store on MacDougal, there to play and have measured whether he might be a prodigy, a wunderkind. Afterward, Miriam promised, she’d shepherd Cicero to a loft on Grand Street, to have his astrological chart professionally drawn for him. So this would be a day of futures foretold.

Though thanks to Rose and Cicero’s father’s improbably durable affair she might be considered Cicero’s de facto older sister, Miriam had artfully ignored Cicero until sweeping him up this day. She’d come and seized him from Rose’s apartment, from Rose’s grip, and with very little ceremony in the exchange. As though it were graduation day. Miriam in her flyaway hair and long houndstooth coat, hypnotic pattern of the black-and-white squares like some devilishly blurred chessboard, but one you couldn’t play on, couldn’t see in its entirety at once, because it wrapped around her—Cicero should have known at that moment that Miriam was here to foster revolutions in
him, to demonstrate that the chessboard, like the world, wasn’t flat but round.

Cicero had been to that point
Rose’s Negro boy
. So, Cicero supposed, Miriam planned now to put some check on that dynamic, to insert in Cicero’s mind a little healthy skepticism as to Rose’s high ideals. Cicero’s obedient silences would have suggested the need for such intervention. Outwardly, he was obedient, in the extreme. He’d have appeared to Miriam to be conforming absolutely to Rose’s Abraham Lincoln fantasies of the good and proper result of her patient patronage, to her obsession with book-learning the Negro policeman’s child by feeding him the novels of Howard Fast, the poetry of Carl Sandburg, and by making him sit, as Miriam herself had had to sit, through repeated listenings to Beethoven’s
Eroica
, overlaid with Rose’s paeans to its greatness in alternation with her teeth-clenched weeping.

In point of fact, Cicero at thirteen was already a monster of skepticism.

Yet he believed in chess, a secret garden of rational absolutes. On the squares, things swooped or swerved according to their hard-and-fast scripts, bishops and rooks thus, pawns durably plodding, black and white unmistakable foes. Knights, like Cicero himself, had secrets. They played at brazen invisibility, at walking through walls. Apparently looking in one direction, knights killed you in a side glance from another. If you employed them just so, all other pieces seemed earth-mired, sluggish as pawns. To that day, Cicero had been tempted to believe that if you got good enough at a first thing you might never need a second.

Cicero believed in chess, and so though Miriam interested him as a fellow endurer of Rose, one with an advantage of years, when Miriam escorted Cicero into the tiny chess store he forgot about both women. The store, air mucked with pipe smoke, smeared glass cabinets exhibiting exotic sets, and, in the ice-cold mezzanine, the gray obsessive figures, barely human, their coats not even shed, hunched over gnarled endgames. The pale twitchy hands that darted forth from sleeves to clop the wooden pieces forcefully to new squares, and flicked out to punch the dull brass button on the time clocks, then to retract—those
hands might have had a life of their own, no relation to the rolling eyes and bunching brows and pursing lips above. You might have no idea, looking only at the faces, which of them was connected to the hands that had made the newest moves. This might be Cicero’s first glimpse, really, of an authentically
academic
setting, the destination toward which his life was pitched: a miniaturized world craven with self-regard, unimpressive except to those who read the palace codes, and sublimely oblivious to the outside. And Cicero was here not only to meet, at last, Cousin Lenny, who’d played Fischer once; he was here to play him.

Lenin Angrush bustled upstairs a moment after. “A glass of tea!” he said before greeting Miriam, slapping his palm in mock outrage on the small counter, where the proprietor only lifted his eyebrows slightly. Then the bearded fist of Cousin Lenny’s face unclenched, his smile revealing a trace relation to Rose in the gap of his teeth. Behind them, his molars were a disaster area of black and gold. “Bubbelah!” He clutched Miriam in her houndstooth coat, her purse trapped in his embrace, his limbs encasing her like sausage. Then released her to the vigilance of his gaze, which mingled scorn, worship, and guilt. The black hair everywhere on his head was clipped to a weirdly identical length, his Fuller Brushes of eyebrow, his lip-smothering beard, the hair on top the same as that shooting from around his ears, as though he’d been mowed. His spinal curvature tended toward the rabbinical, his eyes toward the heretic. That beneath his stinking black coat he wore some insignias of the hippie—a worn-thin Woodstock T-shirt, bird perched on guitar’s neck, a frayed woven sash of rainbow wool for a belt on his stained suit-bottom pants—did nothing to counter the impression of a figure heaved painfully and against steep odds into the present, out of the rank and degraded past.

Miriam’s own outfit, once her coat was at last loosened, struck Cicero as a kind of costume, rather than ingenuous clothing: a yellow silk-screened Groucho Marx T-shirt, worn braless beneath her white denim jacket, peace-sign earrings, and tiny, purple-tinted John Lennon shades. Cicero sometimes wondered: Were hippies
serious
?

Anyway, Cousin Lenny clocked her nipples like a hypnotist’s pocket watch, a distraction that ought to provide Cicero with an advantage in the coming chess match. Really, though, cousin? A horny, tragic
uncle, that’s what Cicero thought now, as he stood with his fists dug into the pockets of his Tom Seaver #41 Mets warm-up jacket, staring. Rose had implied Lenny was Miriam’s contemporary; he seemed twenty years older, at least. Lenny still hadn’t glanced at Cicero, so far as Cicero could tell. When he did, Cicero felt caught, lulled into making a full, slack-brained examination, as though Lenin Angrush was a movie projected on a screen, not a person who could look back.

“So why did nobody mention the black Fischer was a man-mountain?”

Cicero was at thirteen already accustomed to being presented, by Rose, to those who’d shamelessly exclaim over him. There were only so many things they could exclaim. Ready for
man-mountain
, for
black
, for
Fischer
, he picked out only what interested him. “You really had a match with Fischer?”