She had by this time quite recovered from her earlier irritation. She belonged here, in the old heart of the City; roots were worth a good deal of schlepping.
Marlene now entered an area that constituted one of the many open-air after-care clinics provided by the City for its mentally distressed. Sprawlers, sleepers, fighters, talkers to spirits, hearers of voices, disported themselves as if in a day room at one of the bad old upstate loony bins, although here they had the benefit of exposure to the healthful elements and were responsible for obtaining their own medication. Marlene could not help but observe this being provided by thoughtful citizens at many points along the street.
Crossing Chrystie Street, she entered Sara Roosevelt Park. There are still parks in the City where, on such a pleasant Saturday in spring, the quality disport themselves, and have elegant picnics, and tourists ride in overpriced carriages, and nurses wheel expensive perambulators, but Sara Roosevelt Park is not one of them. It is a narrow strip of asphalt decorated with tired lawns and dispirited trees, populated heavily not only by the distressed but by gangs from Alphabet City, which begins a few streets to the north.
On the other hand, even so pitiful a green space was rare enough in that part of the City to promote some accommodation. There was at least one section of the park, a lawn around a small playground and basketball court, where respectable people-mainly Puerto Rican families from the Lower East Side-could congregate and watch their children play.
The baby was asleep. Marlene sank gratefully onto a bench, lit a cigarette, and watched the action. Platoons of kids were shrieking in the playground, largely unsupervised, and on a patch of scabrous grass a Latina matron was setting out the ingredients for a picnic, while her husband lay on his back and drank a beer. Another Latino family group was starting a portable grill, laughing as the flames from their lighter fluid shot with a whoosh and a fragrant stink up into the sky.
A small Puerto Rican girl, perhaps seven, skinny and dirty, was weaving through the crowd, wrapped in some internal fantasy. She was dressed in a grubby pink satin dress several sizes too small for her, to which she had affixed a red crinoline which hung limply to her ankles. On her head she had placed a tiara made of crumpled tinfoil, and she had pinned chiffon scarves to her shoulders so that as she leaped and whirled, they fluttered behind her like wings.
Marlene’s attention was distracted by angry shouts and the sound of breaking glass. She looked down the row of benches. Perhaps some drunks were fighting, but she couldn’t see. The baby, awakened by the racket, began to fret, and Marlene reached into her bag for a bottle. When she looked up again, the little girl was standing in front of her.
“Are you a pirate?” she said without preamble. Marlene was wearing her black eye patch, covering the space where her eye had been blown out by a letter bomb some years back.
“Yes,” said Marlene. “You’re a fairy princess, right?” The child nodded. She was holding a long dowel that must have once been a balloon stick, the end of which was covered with a ball of the gold foil used by one of the fast-food chains to wrap sandwiches. She wore cracked patent leather Mary Janes and grungy white socks. Her knees were scabbed. A pinched little thing but pretty, despite the visible neglect.
“Is that your baby?”
“Yes.”
“Can I play with him?”
“Her. No, she’s too little to play.”
The child smirked and whipped her wand back and forth. “I could, I could turn her into a frog,” she said confidently.
“Yes, but please don’t. I have zillions of frogs, but only one baby.”
The girl pirouetted on a toe, to make her scarves flutter. She was holding her body very stiff in an effort to maintain the appropriate hauteur, and looking down her nose at Marlene in a way that would have been funny were it not so serious. Marlene said, “What’s your name?”
“Princess, no, Special Fairy Princess Latameeshiana. The first. What’s yours?”
Marlene introduced herself and the baby and then asked, “You live around here?”
“I live on the moon,” said the girl, staring at an ordinary-looking man in a dark coat walking down the path. As he passed, the girl leaned close to Marlene and said in a stage whisper, “You see that man? He’s a werewolf.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t believe in werewolves?”
“Not that much.”
“How about … witches? Do you believe in witches?”
Marlene thought seriously about it. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
The child laughed out loud. “Ha-hah! There’s no such thing as witches.”
“No? Then what do you believe in?”
The girl intoned her credo portentously, ticking it off on her fingers. “I believe in werewolves, monsters … God, dinosaurs, vampires, fairies, and … angels. You can see angels. It’s true.”
Marlene let her face show an interest that was less than half patronizing. The sun was warm, the baby was sucking happily at her bottle, and Marlene was content to learn all about the characteristics of angels from an urchin. It was more interesting than condo-buying details, and more pleasant than listening to women talk about being raped.
More glass broke, the sound coming from around the bend in the path. The force of the argument rose a degree. The little girl stopped talking, and Marlene realized that she had asked a question.
The girl asked it again, “Did you ever see one?”
“An angel? No, I don’t think so. Did you?”
“All the time. Do you know what happens if an angel is bad? God takes off their wings, and they fall down and smoosh. They have real blood and goosh in them. Really! Or they could become vampires. It depends.”
“It’s an interesting theory,” Marlene agreed.
The child pirouetted again, admiring her wings.
“Fairies have special wings, so they could never get smooshed. I can really fly.”
Marlene smiled uncertainly and gave the child a close look. Imagination was all very well, but the Princess, who, by the ragged look of her was not one of reality’s darlings, might be taking it too far. Oddly, Marlene thought of the Jane Doe on the slab at the morgue. Maybe she had thought she could fly too.
“You know, Princess,” Marlene began, “pretend wings are very pretty, but they’re different from real wings, aren’t they? I mean, birds have real wings and they can really fly-”
Marlene’s introduction to ontology was interrupted, as such discussions so often are in the City, by a major felony. There was a hoarse scream, and a ragged man came racing down the asphalt path, staggering, his face a perfect mask of blood. Before Marlene knew it, she was on her feet, positioned between the gory apparition and little Lucy. The wounded man did not, however, spare them a look, but crashed through a low bush and across the picnic field, to a chorus of curses and more screams. His pursuers, two tattered louts, one with a knife in hand and the other clutching a broken wine bottle, came racing after. By that time Marlene was wheeling her stroller rapidly in the opposite direction. After thirty yards or so, she thought to look for her recent companion, but the little girl had entirely vanished. In this respect, at least, a fairy indeed.
7
Have a good time?” asked Karp when Marlene arrived, breathless, at the loft. She put on a smile and declined to tell her husband that she had been chased from the park by armed thugs bent on murder. Instead she conveyed delight in the recreational opportunities of the neighborhood and then asked, “How did your thing with Roland go? Did he attack you with his triceps?”
Karp also put on a smile and declined to tell Marlene about Roland offering him a piece of ass. He did mention the idea of a bet on the Tomasian thing.