A long and opaque-windowed gleaming black chauffeured limousine pulling up to the curb. A black-uniformed, peak-capped chauffeur getting out. Crossing the pavement and tapping Stephen O’Kelly’O on the shoulder. Who swings around, making the chauffeur jump back in shock.
“Excuse me sir, but Mrs. Wilmington is waiting for you in the car.”
Stephen O’Kelly’O crossing the pavement. Bumping into a pedestrian. “Excuse me. I am most heartily sorry.” But she has come. Under an assumed name. Climb in. The soft-upholstered, glass-enclosed interior. The dim light. The city shut out. A chinchilla rug across her knees. God she can be stunning and even more beautiful than ever. Her hair swept back tight on her head as it was in my dream. A smile on her face. The very tiny division between her front teeth. Patting the seat beside her with a wink of her eye. A big glass arises to cut us off from the chauffeur. Her welcoming affection so eases the pain that I come to her with. And one hears “The Great Gate of Kiev” in Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
“Hi ya, Stephen kiddo. Glad to have you aboard. If that’s what they say in the navy.”
“Gee, how you doing Dru.”
“I’m doing much better, thank you, upon seeing you. This is the fifth time we’ve driven around the block and through the park and nearly ending up in Harlem. But heavens, you do look pale as a ghost.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ll forgive that ‘ma’am’ just this hundredth time more. What’s wrong.”
“Well, I’m a little better for seeing you, Mrs. Wilmington.”
“Well, I’ll take you at your pleasant word. And do forgive my little precautionary disguise. I’m afraid necessary. Which is, as you may have noticed, the vehicle we ride in. If I do not have a particular person always scrutinizing my movements, then I have those whom I don’t know about. At least when the former is around, which happily he isn’t at the moment, I can ignore those snoopers I don’t know about. And I’ve had the very wildest idea. Remember when you played Rachmaninoff. Well I thought that we could make a pilgrimage to Valhalla and visit his grave. Then perhaps later we could have dinner. Is that all right.”
“Gee ma’am. I mean Dru. That would be nice.”
“I can see we’re going to have to be tolerant. Perhaps very tolerant. I think, in fact, I might quite like it if you do call me ma’am. But I would prefer if it didn’t make me feel a little staid and stuffy and perhaps just even a little bit illicit, considering our relative positions.”
Dru speaking into a small microphone. Chauffeur nodding his head as we travel west on Central Park South. Slow down. Stop for a red light at Columbus Circle. Spacious enough for this open-air forum dotted with a few speakers attended with even fewer listeners. One on a soapbox wielding his fist to an empty street. Another patrolling with a sandwich board.
DOWN WITH
WRONGDOING
UP WITH RIGHTEOUSNESS
SAYS THE TRUE
AND ONLY ZORRO
Nearby, a shoving and pushing fight in progress. An old lady beating the protagonists with her umbrella. Nobody looking like they are going to change the world in this little oasis of discontentment. The gray stone ancient hotel there. And a warehouse. And we speed through the traffic to the elevated highway along this great noble river of the Hudson. Dru smiling, pointing through the thick glass of the windows.
“Up there atop that building, a newspaper magnet lived. Had an apartment with a swimming pool in it. He built himself a palace in California with a much bigger pool.”
Under the soaring silver sweep of the George Washington Bridge, the highway weaving its route along the shore of this solemnly deep river. Staring out the window and holding this hand giving a reassuring squeeze that I was told growing up, transmitted a message of true love to come. Listening to this voice as it tells me more. That beyond all this solid rock is Fort Tryon Park. The Cloisters. Lawns, terraces, and where they have the most secret of wonderful rock gardens. The remains of a Romanesque twelfth-century church. And dissolved over this voice telling me of these rocky cliff sides, the prostrate girl, her leather coat spread each side of her like the broken wings of a bird. Her face turned aside, twisted upon her neck. A hole blown through her skull. The blood on her hair. White specks of her brain. As if now strewn dotted across the beautiful passing wooded green contours of countryside.
“Stephen, you’re awfully silent. I won’t of course pry, but you must tell me if something is wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong, ma’am, and you sure do know New York.”
“Well of course one shouldn’t speak of it as being anything important but one’s family have over the years done various things in various parts of the city which I suppose, out of curiosity, one would sometimes investigate, making it familiar.”
Farther north, the highway curving past the hillsides with their strange distant amalgam of buildings, each isolated like the beginnings of abandoned empires. Then just as Dru knows what she does about the island of Manhattan, all growing familiar as places where I walked and knew were passing by. Where my best friend had a trapping line in the swamp in the valley of the Saw Mill River. Catching muskrats to sell to the Hudson Bay Company. And right in this, the area of a borough insisting to be known euphemistically as Riverdale but in reality the Bronx. That word, just like Brooklyn, conjuring up boorish accents and behavior. That makes one in unambiguous affirmation want to brag about where one comes from. As we pass another hillside. Over which the ghosts of childhood hover. Race through my memories. Of what happened beyond in those suburban streets. The artfully chastising, if not horrendous things we did to the neighbors. Especially at night, and most of whom were highly deserving real grumpy bastards with similar wives. Point now upward and toward houses in the trees.
“Dru, that’s where I grew up.”
“And someday it will be immortalized.”
Words such as Dru’s were glowingly pleasant to hear. Even as untrue and impossible as my humility made me feel them to be. But at least such sentiments could get you through another couple of hours of life believing there was reason to live. And not die brain destructed, facedown in a bus station. As go by now the little conurbations from Heather Dell to Hartsdale. My soul quieted a little from the turmoil of the spirit and my accumulated restless nights, I nodded off to sleep. Dreaming I was a salesman in a jewelery store and just having failed to make a sale, I woke. My head resting on Dru’s shoulder, her fur rug up over my knees and the limousine parked on a cemetery road. A chill in the air as I got out to follow Dru in her flat walking shoes. And just like the dead girl’s, her wonderful legs. Her calf muscles flexing in front of me to where we stood in front of the Russian cross on Sergey Rachmaninoff’s grave. Standing there in silent reverence on the grass, paying our respects. And I could hear the fervent poetic eloquence and intensity and the melodious sweeps of the strings in his Symphony No. 2 in E Minor. Then walking and wandering not that far away, there was the final resting place of a baseball player. The same one Max said he emulated.
“Stephen, didn’t that baseball player hit a lot of home runs.”
“Yes he certainly did, ma’am.”
“I suppose more people know who he is than know of Rachmaninoff.”
“Yes ma’am. But he hit forty-nine home runs in a single season. And had a batting average of three seventy-nine over his best ten years. And he lived in my neighborhood, Riverdale. I guess you might say he was a hero, knocking balls instead of musical notes, out into the ether. Folks called him Lou.”
“Ah, at last you’re talking a little. Stephen, you don’t mind if I comment that you’ve been so quiet, as I know you usually are, but then even quieter than that.”