McCabe did not like to fish. In Bangor, this was the only leisure activity available to her other than church. So she worked, from the age of eight, to make money and kill time. She liked to have her own money. Her aunt was neither rich, nor poor, nor too stingy or young. She had died in a retirement home a few years earlier. McCabe was her only survivor (from which I inferred no parents, siblings, etc.). Fibulous Bebe had told me that McCabe did not remember her parents and (maybe—at the time I hated McCabe’s guts so much that her life story made me want to puke) that her mother may have been unmarried, or that her father had walked out on her and the baby. I now wished I had paid more attention to Bebe’s gushing reports. On the other hand, she may have been feeding me misinformation just for the hell of it. Bebe could have had a career as a double or triple agent.
It is also possible that McCabe had deceived her. After all, what did anyone know about McCabe before she took SoHo by storm in the winter of 2002? What did anyone know about anyone in New York, the Mecca of self-reinvention, the born-again capital of the universe? Haven’t you noticed, dear listener, how the eyes of New Yorkers glaze over when one of them imprudently mentions their original place of birth? How the room tone acquires a frigid buzz if the remembrances go beyond the geographical fact? How, if they persist, standers-by will drift away, afraid that they, too, may have to expose their loathed original selves?
As the second night without McCabe fell, I reviewed those facts, one by one. They ranged from her childhood diseases (whooping cough) and pets (a frog, a snail) to why she became an art merchant (“Just looking to scrub my money,” then finding out that “I dug selling trash”). I had memorized them. I counted them now (arithmetic had not deserted me). There were 676. In her voice, each of them had seemed uniquely hers, filled with meaning and possibilities. Now they were brittle shards of generic trivia that could be used to assemble anyone’s portrait. Her voice is what I missed most on that second night. A voice so ordinary that I can describe it only as what it was not: not loud, raspy, shrill, breathy, nasal, guttural, sweet, booming, soft, deep-throated, or high-pitched. Nothing special distinguished it. That is what was moving and, in retrospect, magnificent about her voice: it was an apotheosis of the generic. The transubstantiation of everything and everybody. The Holy Wafer of Sound. I craved a fix. A craving so brutal that my stomach cramped, my skin crawled and itched the more frantically I scratched, leaving bloody ruts. When my chest began to hurt, I settled for some aural methadone. I managed to crawl out of bed, gasping, and turn on the music player. I sobbed, dry-eyed, while the Antiochian soprano sang Reynaldo Hahn’s remorseful “Dis! qu’as tu fait, toi que voilà, de ta jeunesse.” Openly, shamelessly sobbed. Softly, though, so I could listen to her. It was not McCabe’s voice, but a palliative. My chest was about to explode when she began to sing. Before she finished, I was asleep on the rug in a pool of tears.
22
Searching
Petrona returned the next day. She left the lunch basket by my door and then began to vacuum. Chicken bones flew out of my hands as I quickly devoured the food. They landed where my tears had pooled on the rug the night before, grease dissolving in salty residue. I am a careful, civilized eater. Near starvation could explain my lapse that day. More ominously, it may have been the beginning of the degenerative slide that propelled me under this bed, encased in a crumbling, inhuman shell.
After brushing my teeth, I wheeled myself out to the landing and called Petrona. She came trailing the vacuum cleaner. I asked her to turn it off. She did so in slow motion, a one-second delay for every century of Aztec enslavement. Things were back to normal. For an instant, I imagined McCabe strolling in the garden.
Petrona did not know anything, or claimed not to. Miss Maké had not mentioned any trip. Petrona had no idea where the food they cooked with the church señora had gone. It was still in the kitchen when Petrona had left that evening. She had not come to work because of the flood. Even getting here today had taken her twice as long because the Elmira bridge was still closed, and she had to cross using the only bridge that was still open, in a neighboring county about twenty miles to the East. As I suspected, the food the three of them had cooked together on the eve of Thanksgiving was not the quail banquet McCabe and I had eaten during our last dinner together, of which Petrona was the sole, proud creator. I praised her inspired cooking, item by item, the way a restaurant reviewer would, observing the ingenuity of the sauces in one sentence, the perfect braising of the meat in another, and the presentation in yet another. There is nothing I liked more than praising a subordinate like Petrona for an exceptionally well-executed job, the accomplishment of the quail banquet redoubled by the pleasure of congratulating myself on my shrewd judgment in hiring her.
The mysterious Thanksgiving Eve meal, the one that had disappeared from the house without a trace, had been cooked under Miss Maké’s direction, with Petrona as executioner, and Mrs. Crandall as witness. This, according to Petrona. Mrs. Crandall just sat on a stool by the refrigerator and chatted with Miss Maké. About what, Petrona could not tell, given her limited English. They laughed a lot (I knew that: I could hear them from my room). Petrona did not know the names of the food she had helped prepare: one was some sort of vegetable stew, another a rice dish, a third some sort of dumplings. The dessert had been some kind of tiny balls covered with confectionery sugar. As to what Mrs. Crandall had brought wrapped in a blanket, Petrona was on firmer ground. That was the main dish, which took all day to cook, and turned out fine even if it was not prepared the way Petrona would have done it, with bitter oranges and cumin, garlic and oregano: “It was a suckling pig,” Petrona said.
In every nineteenth-century novel there comes a moment when the main character is left speechless. This was mine. Did I notice a malicious glint in Petrona’s eyes after she dropped the depth charge, or was it a glimmer of pity, or a reflection of the sun streaming in through my bedroom window? She stood frozen, holding the gray vacuum coil, a Mumbai python charmer about to feed a mouse to her star performer. I don’t know how long we were in this face-to-face frieze, me in the wheelchair of defeat, placed in a slightly elevated position to signal my rank, she displaying to me the snakelike machine. I may have lost consciousness for a while, because the next thing I remember is dialing McCabe’s gallery on the Judge’s black Bakelite phone. A voice assured clients in several languages that their calls would be quickly answered. I hung up without a word. The voice was not McCabe’s, as it had always been—a personal touch for the immensely rich—but that of a male computer surrogate. Was that a good or a bad sign? I couldn’t tell. Had it been her voice, I would have left a message for her, which she may or may not have answered. Either way, it would have advanced my investigation. On the other hand, I might have gotten hooked on her voice, and spent the rest of my days calling back at briefer and briefer intervals just to hear her for thirty seconds. Craving not just her voice, but increasingly her flesh.
Mrs. Crandall had slapped me in the face. She had stolen a four-legged creature that belonged to me, to people like me, not to her, never to her kind, never. She had brought Shangri-La to Round Hill, bypassing me, the gatekeeper. From a place she knew nothing about and had never set foot in, to a place she knew nothing about but in which she resided, thanks to her native husband. She had had the chutzpah to give the emblematic creature—my creature—to McCabe; it was a gift that should have come from me. She had done all of this under my nose. Brazenly. Don’t tell me she would not have done any of this if she had known where I was from! You know perfectly well she would have. The only difference is that she would have tried to curry my approval, to show off how down she was on all things spic. Mrs. Crandall had challenged me with the suckling pig. To what end? She was also telling me something about McCabe and something about herself—perhaps something about them both, together. I didn’t know what. Her message was opaque. I would have to extract it directly from her.