Saint Mazie: A Novel (20 page)

Postcard from the Captain. Niagara Falls. A place not so far away from New York City. A day trip, a train ride away. I can see it on a map in my head.

I read the back of it once and that was enough. But I liked the picture, so I put it up on my wall. I can hear the crash of the waves when I look at it. I can feel the spit from the falls on my face. I bet it’s cold up there near the water. I bet the air stings your skin red. Like a man slapped you hard and meant to leave a mark.

We’ll move again, is what I decided. Back to the city, where I can keep a better eye on her between work and home.

She said: But I can’t go through his things.

I said: We’ll leave them then. We don’t need any of it.

She said: This house is a mess.

I said: Leave it. Let the next person worry about it.

She said: Where will we live?

I said: Anywhere we want.

Finally I convinced her to agree to the move. Agree to living, that’s the most I’m asking from her right now.

I think of all the misfortunes I’ve had through the years, but none of them landed me on the street—not unless I chose to walk it myself.

Do I have to? [Groans.] I have to. All right.

How did I find the diary? Well, I keep my head down a lot; I’m always looking at the ground, because I find things. Sometimes I find stuff I can sell, or I can use in the shop. For a long time the best thing I ever found was thirty-two Polaroids of this middle-aged Chinese lady stripping. They looked like they were taken in the eighties. They were all washed out, and there was something about her skirt that looked kind of eighties, maybe my mom had one like it? God, I don’t want to think about my mom stripping. [Laughs uncomfortably.]

Anyway, there was an order to the photos, like shirt on, shirt off, bra off, skirt off. There was definitely a little act to it, although I don’t know how sexy it was. I kept the pictures for a while. I couldn’t stop thinking about who she was undressing for. Whoever was taking the pictures, or if there was someone else in the room, too. For a year or so, I guess, she was on my mind. But then I stopped thinking about her. I just gave up trying to figure it out. I was never going to know, and then I stopped caring. I didn’t need to know how the story ended. It was sort of enough that I had seen the pictures in the first place, you know?

Now, the diary was a whole different game. I found it two years ago, give or take. It was in the fall. I was over near the Navy Yard walking to work. This was just a few months before I opened the shop, and I was still working at a studio there. I saw a big box over by where they used to have the used car auction. Most of the stuff in the box, I couldn’t use it or sell it. It was like, old lightbulbs and a roll of movie tickets and a flask. I opened the flask and it still smelled like booze. I mean old booze, but still.

But also in there was the diary with the postcards. Everything was pretty ratty. The diary was leather-bound once, but most of the cover was coming off in strips. The pages were loose—I had to be careful or they would slip out and blow away. All the paper was yellow, everything was crumbling in my hands. But all of it was like, chattering at me, asking to be read. I know that sounds kind of nuts. It looked like junk, but it was actually the exact opposite of that. So I stashed it all in my backpack and took it to work.

During my lunch break I started reading everything and then I was late getting back to work, and then after work I went to a bar and sat there and read them all the way through. Her handwriting wasn’t the greatest, you know that, but I made it through. I didn’t know anything about her, except that she sounded like a saint, the closest thing I’ve ever heard of anyway. I went to Catholic school, I studied them, but I never believed any of them were real people. She was definitely real. Because I saw the words in front of my own eyes.

There were parts of it that felt pretty personal to me. This person who felt like she had been bad but didn’t want to give in to it entirely. She thought maybe she had a shot at being a better person but she couldn’t shake who she had been. We all live with our pasts. I live with mine. You live with yours. I don’t even think she did anything wrong. She had just lived a big life, even though it was mostly in this confined space. And when you live big you fall big.

Near the end I started reading really slowly because I didn’t want it to be over, I just wanted it to go on and on. I wanted her to live forever. At the very end I cried. Then I put the flask in my pocket, close to my heart, which is where I still keep it. I fell in love with her a little bit, and I wanted a piece of her right next to me.

We’re back on Grand Street, six doors down from where we once lived, the home where I was raised. Now we’re in a two-bedroom flat, one room for Rosie, one for me. We’ve given up on Jeanie coming home. The only thing that feels familiar anymore is our table and our couch. Those things we brought with us. A table to eat on and a couch to faint on.

I’ve been walking to work again, through the throngs of the Lower East Side, the Jews, the Russians, the Italians, the Germans, the Chinese, the Gypsies, the cops, the children, the lads, the broads. The swirl of people, it’s heaven.

I miss taking the train sometimes, though, and the time I had to gather my thoughts before the day began. I always had a seat. I could watch the people get on and collect themselves. A tidy and a tug. I’ll miss seeing the people from across Brooklyn heading to work. I’ll try to remember what they looked like. I won’t have cause to return to Brooklyn again anytime soon. Once you cross the river you stay there.

But it’ll be nice to stay here, I think. I’m still trying to understand what here means. All our things are still in boxes. Rosie’s promised to unpack but it’s been weeks and she still hasn’t touched a thing but what she needed for the kitchen, a few dresses, some pairs of shoes. I kept you for myself, though. A book of secrets. Mine, and Jeanie’s.

Rosie hates the kitchen now, says there’s mold, can’t get rid of it, no matter how much she scrubs. I can’t see it, but she swears it’s there.

She says: There! There!

I say: Where?

She says: There.

I’m twenty-seven years old today. Rosie served me ice cream with raspberries and chocolate sauce when I came home, and there was a chocolate bar on my bed, as well. Sweets for the sweet. A quiet birthday, I didn’t mind it. She was calm for a moment. Not a word about the kitchen.

A postcard from Jeanie, birthday greetings, two weeks late.

It said:

You’ll always be older than me & wiser too. I hear you in my head when I least expect it.

Like she’d listen to a thing I have to say.

Oh yeah, all the postcards are pretty special. All the places she saw but never went to. Oh California! [Clutches heart.] You and I disagreed about that Niagara Falls postcard, and what it meant exactly. “It could have been you.” You think it’s romantic but I think it’s ice cold. The Captain was spitting in her face. Why would you tell someone something like that? That you’ve married someone else but you had your shot. I’d rather not know. I think it’s disrespectful.

We’re moving again and there’s nothing to be done about it. I can’t argue with her any longer. I can’t listen to her yelling. I can’t bear the neighbors knocking on the wall. I can’t bear the tears. The pointing at the floors, the ceiling, the corners, the crevices, the mold, the germs that don’t exist. I don’t see a damn thing and she sees everything. I have dreams about her pointing at things.

234 Elizabeth Street, second floor, new kitchen. Scrubbed clean. Sparkles. Sunlight through the window, hands in front of our squinting eyes.

I said: Can you argue with this?

Rosie said: I cannot.

Rosie hates all our neighbors. Let’s see, what’s her list of complaints. Hershel downstairs reeks of fish, she hates passing him in the hallway, especially when it’s hot, and lately it’s hot. Menachem on the third floor is too religious and she swears he’s judging her for not going to services every Friday night. But that Russian seamstress next door with the newborn, it’s her she hates the most. Says the baby’s too loud, and that I don’t even know the half of it because I’m gone all day.

I said: Then take a walk.

She said: All day? I can’t walk all day.

I’d kill to take a walk all day but that’s not what she wants to hear.

I said: It’s a baby. How can you hate a baby?

She said: Well it’s no blood of mine.

I said: It’s a helpless human being.

She said: It’s rattling me.

Rattle’s a word I don’t like her using. When she gets shook there’s no unshaking her.

Mack Walters passed. His heart gave. Tee and I went to his funeral in Queens this morning. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, a year, maybe more. We’d stopped talking, stopped flirting, and then he transferred uptown. After that it was like we hadn’t even known each other in the first place. Still I remembered that day we all ran downtown when the bomb went off. Tee did, too. A day when you witness something terrible together, you don’t forget a day like that. You can’t unsee what you saw. So I’d give him tribute.

Mack was Catholic, and Tee knew every single prayer before the priest said it out loud. I liked the church, the cool wooden pews, the stained-glass windows dividing the sun, the statues of Jesus and Mary all around us. A mother and her son. It meant nothing to me, none of it, but it meant everything to Tee.

There was no family at his funeral, just other police officers. He was an orphan from a young age, is what I learned. These officers were the only family he had, and I noticed a few of them pawing away their tears. I was an orphan in a way but I’ve always had Rosie steady in my life, even if she’s unsteady herself. Poor Mack didn’t even have a lunatic sister to call his own.

Afterward someone asked me if I was Mazie and I told him I was and then a few other officers came to greet me and suddenly a whole crowd of them was around me. The famous Mazie, is what they were saying. You’re the one. They told me Mack talked about me all the time, that I was a heartbreaker. I forgot I could do that, break a heart.

Tee and I held hands the whole time. She told me later she could tell I was nervous. My whole life I handled attention from strangers just fine. It’s just lately I’m used to the bronze bars of a cage between us. When the rush stopped I remembered that some of these men could have been the ones beating up on Al Flicker. I wished that I could humble them instead of being so humbled myself. But I was there to pay respects, and that’s what I did.

A postcard from the Captain. Washington, DC.

He wanted me to know he’s back east now.

The picture on the front is of the Washington Monument. A giant prick.

I’ll be honest, I like a girl with a little seasoning, a little special sauce. I’m not interested in the helpless young virgin type, I guess partially because I’m not so innocent myself. And women that have had some experiences in their lives, there’s some kind of wisdom that comes with that. Also they’re less likely to make certain kinds of demands, particularly of, say, a permanent nature. I just never wanted to settle down or anything like that. Opening my shop was about as settled as I was going to get. But I swear to god, reading this diary made me want to settle down. I actually found myself wanting to marry her! I know it’s nuts. I just heard her in my head so clearly and thought I
know
her. I mean I didn’t know every little thing about her. But I knew that she liked to walk the streets of New York, and that I love more than anything. And I knew the quality of her character, which made me think I could spend the rest of my life with her.

112 Delancey Street. Only elderly women reside in this building, polite old Catholic ladies. Tee told us there was a room for rent—she’d heard it through the grapevine. They’re all her favorite tithers. Quiet mice with hair like snow. They’ve even got a knitting circle every evening at sunset. Dolores with the bad knee one floor down has already offered to make us a quilt. We’re on the fourth floor in three rooms. There’s no street noise. Kitchen’s clean, I made Rosie run her finger on the counter and show it to me. Here we sit, here we stay.

So that was a thing that was very strange for a long time with these two ladies. They could not stop moving. Six months max, that’s how long they lasted in each apartment, and it went on for years, this moving-around business. This was when I was just starting to investigate a career in real estate. It seemed like the only economy that never changed in New York. People always needed a place to live, and you didn’t have to have much of an education to get started in it. So I started circling everyone. I got to know a lot of the building owners on the Lower East Side. A few of them, I had grown up with their families, or I’d seen them around. So I was just schmoozing with them. The good ones and the bad ones, both. I wanted to know what they knew. And one of the things I kept hearing about, just as part of everyday gossip, was that the Gordon girls were on the move. Who knows why, but they had turned themselves into gypsies.