They went back to monkeying and peering. Oreo wondered where the puppy was. Surely Dominic could not have mistaken a Dalmatian for a bulldog? She did not wonder long. A woman she assumed to be Mrs. Minotti came through the swing door nuzzling and cooing at a sturdy bulldog pup.
“Stop spoiling the dog,” Minotti said. “You act foolish sometimes, Bovina.”
The woman shrugged to Oreo and put the dog on the floor. He frolicked around her a few times, playfully minatory, then jumped against her leg to show he wanted to be picked up again. Bulldogs had always reminded Oreo of grumpy cowboys because of their horseshoe jaws and bowlegs. This one was more like an awkward child, anxious to please. He was the first knock-kneed, smiling bulldog she had ever seen. His coat showed signs of inordinate fondling — it looked as if it came from a thrift shop. “What’s his name?” she asked.
“Toro — what else?” Mrs. Minotti said proudly. She picked the dog up again. “He’s my precious bambino, eh?” The dog shoved his muzzle against her ear.
Minotti made a derisive comment about his wife and the dog with an expressive twist of the wrist.
“La gelosia,” said Mrs. Minotti.
Minotti shook his head in exasperation. “Go see if Adriana is ready.”
“I’m ready.”
The voice was that of a young woman a few years older than Oreo. She had a black shawl of hair and wore a faded blue shirt and jeans. A guitar was slung over one shoulder, and in her right hand she was holding a dog collar studded with rhinestones. She took the dog from Mrs. Minotti and put the collar around his neck.
“Il mio bambino, il mio bambino,” murmured Mrs. Minotti.
“Oh, Mother, for God’s sake, Toro will be back as soon as this is delivered.”
Her mother and father both gasped and put their fingers to their lips as if to seal hers.
The young woman laughed. “Yeah, I know. It’s supposed to be a deep, dark secret,” she teased. “How silly.” She turned to Oreo. “I’m Adriana, by the way.”
“Christine,” said Oreo.
“How are you going back?”
“Subway. I got a little turned around coming down here. Lost my maps. I’m new in town,” Oreo explained.
“I’m going that way — to the corner, anyway. I’ll show you how to get where you’re going.”
“Thanks,” said Oreo.
“You’ll need a carrier. This is an active little bugger.”
“Adriana,” her father protested, with a pleading look.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “I’ll watch my language. Be right back.” She left and came back in a few minutes with a black carrying case for the dog.
Mrs. Minotti gave Toro one more kiss and put him into the case. He whined for a few moments, then was quiet.
“Can you manage this and your cane too?” Adriana asked Oreo.
“I think so.” Oreo picked up the case. “It’s not heavy.”
“Okay, we’re off.” Adriana kissed her mother and father. “See you in a few hours — right after the concert.”
“‘Concert,’ she calls it,” Minotti said.
“Don’t knock it, babbo. It pays the rent.”
Oreo and Adriana on a traffic island
The light seemed to be in the running for longest in the embarrassed history of red. Oreo saw an opening between a beetling Volkswagen and a bounding Jaguar. She timed her move and darted to the other side of the street.
Adriana was stranded on the island. She waved to Oreo.
“Change at Forty-second Street!” she shouted. “Follow the arrows for the IRT!”
“Forty-second Street. Arrows,” Oreo said, nodding her head. She waved her walking stick to Adriana. The last glimpse Oreo had of her was when a woman who looked like a Minerva flew onto the island, a racking Pinto narrowly missing her heels. The woman turned the smooth button eyes of an owl now toward Adriana, now away, her small hooked nose beaking this way and that as she gazed, unblinking, at the traffic.
Oreo underground at Forty-second Street
A horizontal rectangle with black letters told her:
PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL
←8TH AVE SUBWAY←
A red sign said:
TRACK 3
SHUTTLE TO GRAND CENTRAL
↑BMT LINES STRAIGHT AHEAD
said another red sign. A fairer sign gave one line each to complementary green and red:
GREEN ← FOR BWAY 7TH AVE LINE
& MEZZANINE FOR BMT
UPTOWN & DOWNTOWN BMT & IRT →
offered another. Under this, a graffito made a cross-cultural admission:
OH, BOY, AM I FARBLONDJET! — DAEDALUS
Oreo finally found the right train. She sat down and wiggled her perfect toes in anticipation of the about-to-be-revealed secret of her birth. As she moved Toro’s carrying case a little to one side, she noticed the socks of the man opposite her. She started looking at sock patterns. Was there a pattern to the patterns on this car? Lisle of Manhattan offers so many diversions, she thought as she knitted her brow.
Oreo on her father’s street again
She switched the carrier from her left to her right hand and her walking stick from her right to her left. As she looked down the street, she saw two things: a black girl in a white dress carrying what looked like a large lunchbox. Her father was waving at the girl. He turned his head and saw Oreo. He started to wave again and stopped in mid-wave. Oreo flashed on what was about to happen. She started to run. The other girl started to run. Their two black headbands sailed on oceans of air as they rushed toward each other. Samuel’s double takes took up less and less lateral space as they got faster and faster. Oreo stopped short under his window, fearing that she would collide with the onrushing girl — who also stopped short. Oreo looked up in time to see Samuel falling toward her. His body brushed her right hand as he smashed onto the carrier, driving it to the ground. Oreo ran over to her father. She looked up open-mouthed at an openmouthed girl who looked just like her.
And then the mirror moved.
15 Pandion
Oreo’s reaction to her father’s death
She was more distressed over accident than essence — the flukiness, not the fact of Samuel’s death. The jive mirror of the new people moving into his building, his landing on the carrying case. The fall alone, from the second floor, would not have killed him. No bones had been broken, but his plummet had split the carrier and squashed poor Toro, whose rhinestone collar had left an intaglio coronet on Samuel’s brow. Unmarked except for his baron’s band, he was dead nevertheless and (dear, fatherless Jimmie C.) winnie-the-pooh. Oreo was sad but not too. She felt about as she would if someone told her that Walter Cronkite had said his last “Febewary” or that a fine old character actor she had thought for years was dead was dead.
When it happened, Oreo knew she had two unpleasant things to do: break the news (banner head) to Mildred Schwartz and, worse, break the news (sidebar) to Bovina Minotti. She left worse for last. After the ambulance took Samuel away and the ASPCA claimed what was left of Toro, Oreo waited for Mrs. Schwartz outside her apartment until she and the boys came back from their track meet in the park. Mrs. Schwartz said nothing when she heard the news. Slowly, as if in benediction, her torch arm declined until it was level with her shoulder. One of the fingers that had encircled the invisible torch peeled off from her thumb and pointed to the telephone, to which she went directly and began dialing Samuel’s mishpocheh. Marvin and Edgar cowered in a corner with their suitcases.