Finally, he realized, it was his own moment and could not be shared any more than it could be, in just the same way, repeated.
It never was repeated, that moment, even approximately. Eventually he was able to forget what it had been like and only remembered the remembering of it.
Some years later Boz and Milly were sitting out on their balcony at sunset. Neither had changed radically since Peanut’s birth. Boz was perhaps a bit heavier than Milly but it would have been hard to say whether this was from his having gained or Milly having lost. Milly was a supervisor now, and had a seat, besides, on three different committees.
Boz said, “Do you remember our special building?”
“What building is that?”
“The one over there. With the three windows.” Boz pointed to the right where gigantic twin apartments framed a vista westward of rooftops, cornices, and watertanks. Some of the buildings probably dated back to the New York of Boss Tweed; none were new.
Milly shook her head. “There are lots of buildings.”
“The one just in back of the right-hand corner of that big yellow-brick thing with the funny temple hiding its watertank. See it?”
“Mm. There?”
“Yes. You don’t remember it?”
“Vaguely. No.”
“We’d just moved in here and we couldn’t really afford the place, so for the first year it was practically bare. I kept after you about our buying a houseplant, and you said we’d have to wait. Does it start to come back?”
“Mistily.”
“Well, the two of us would come out here regularly and look out at the different buildings and try and figure out exactly which street each of them would be on and whether we knew any of them from sidewalk level.”
“I remember now! That’s the one that the windows were always closed. But that’s all I remember about it.”
“Well, we made up a story about it. We said that after maybe five years one of the windows would be opened just enough so we’d be able to see it from here, an inch or two. Then the next day it would be closed again.”
“And then?” She was by now genuinely and pleasantly puzzled.
“And then, according to our story, we’d watch it very carefully every day to see if that window was ever opened again. That’s how it became our houseplant. It was something we looked after the same way.”
“Did you keep watching it, in fact?”
“Sort of. Not every day. Every now and then.”
“Was that the whole story?”
“No. The end of the story was that one day, maybe another five years later, we’d be walking along an unfamiliar street and we’d recognize the building and go up and ring the bell and the super would answer it and we’d ask him why, five years before, that window had been open.”
“And what would he say?” From her smile it was clear that she remembered, but she asked out of respect for the wholeness of the tale.
“That he hadn’t thought anyone had ever noticed. And break into tears. of gratitude.”
“It’s a pretty story. I should feel guilty for having forgotten it. Whatever made you think of it today?”
“That’s the real end of the story. The window was open. The middle window.”
“Really? It’s closed now.”
“But it was open this morning. Ask Peanut. I pointed it out to her so I’d have a witness.”
“It’s a happy ending, certainly.” She touched the back of her hand to his cheek where he was experimenting with sideburns.
“I wonder why it was open, though. After all this time.”
“Well, in five years we can go and ask.”
He turned, smiling, to face her, and with the same gesture, touched her cheek, gently, and just for now they were happy. They were together again, on the balcony, on a summer evening, and they were happy.
Boz and Milly. Milly and Boz.
Angouleme
There were seven Alexandrians involved in the Battery plot—Jack, who was the youngest and from the Bronx, Celeste DiCecca, Sniffles and Mary Jane, Tancred Miller. Amparo (of course), and of course, the leader and mastermind. Bill Harper, better known as Little Mister Kissy Lips. Who was passionately, hopelessly in love with Amparo. Who was nearly thirteen (she would be, fully, by September this year), and breasts just beginning. Very very beautiful skin, like lucite. Amparo Martinez.
Their first, nothing operation was in the East 60’s, a broker or something like that. All they netted was cufflinks, a watch, a leather satchel that wasn’t leather after all, some buttons, and the usual lot of useless credit cards. He stayed calm though the whole thing, even with Sniffles slicing off buttons, and soothing. None of them had the nerve to ask. though they all wondered, how often he’d been through this scene before. What they were about wasn’t an innovation. It was partly that, the need to innovate, that led them to think up the plot. The only really memorable part of the holdup was the name laminated on the cards, which was, weirdly enough, Lowen, Richard W. An omen (the connection being that they were all at the Alexander Lowen School), but of what?
Little Mister Kissy Lips kept the cufflinks for himself, gave the buttons to Amparo (who gave them to her uncle), and donated the rest (the watch was a piece of crap) to the Conservation booth outside the Plaza right where he lived.
His father was a teevee executive. In, as he would quip, both senses. They had got married young, his mama and papa, and divorced soon after but not before he’d come to fill out their quota. Papa, the executive, remarried, a man this time and somewhat more happily. Anyhow it lasted long enough that the offspring, the leader and mastermind, had to learn to adjust to the situation, it being permanent. Mama simply went down to the Everglades and disappeared, sploosh.
In short, he was well to do. Which is how, more than by overwhelming talent, he got into the Lowen School in the first place. He had the right kind of body though, so with half a desire there was no reason in the city of New York he couldn’t grow up to be a professional dancer, even a choreographer. He’d have the connections for it, as Papa was fond of pointing out.
For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America.
The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years.
Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised.