“Someone happy about herself,” said a big black lady in a striped yellow coat large enough to button around an ambulance. She was dragging a shopping bag bristling with about a dozen frothy heads of celery.
“Sorry,” said Laura. She was in the way and inched over.
“Celery soup for lunch at the Rescue Mission, and I’m late. My bus don’t show. Take some celery and lighten my load, or get out of my way, I got a stove to park myself in front of.”
Laura ducked back and Celery Lady trudged on. The celery was getting frozen, but maybe soup didn’t care about that.
Crossing Fifth Avenue, Laura headed back uptown so the wind would be at her back. Then she walked around Rockefeller Center. On Sixth Avenue near Radio City Music Hall she visited her favorite decorations, bas-reliefs carved in sand-toned stone above the doors at street level. A naked woman on the back of a swan. A Pegasus. A one-armed man hoisted aloft by an eagle. Well, he had a second arm but it was mostly hidden behind the outstretched wing. The ornamentations of the heavy limestone buildings were all about flying. She ignored the great ridiculous Christmas tree, too large to love, really sort of monstrous. She preferred the loose-limbed, gold-plated young god below it, nearly naked even in this weather, sprawled upon his ring of golden orbit.
The ice-skating rink opened up beneath him. Laura sidled along the railing, gliding on her elbows. From above, she watched couples and singles on the ice. Beside her, a man in a stiff black hat with a feather in it was complaining about the waltzy music to a younger woman who might have been his daughter or his secretary or maybe a baby sister.
“Shut up and let me listen to the music,” replied his companion. “It’s pretty. It’s all fairy-tale and princesses.”
“You’re the princess, you know that? But you should get yourself some better taste in tunes. This stuff gives me a pain in my wiener schnitzel. Gimme a bit of Dean Martin and a Scotch on the rocks any day. ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ why doncha.”
“At this hour? Herbie, you’re the rat’s ass, hands off me, we’re supposed to be at church, I told my ma. Someone could see us.”
Laura made sure her eyes were facing away but she kept listening. The music surged in tempered waves. “Herbie, get your hand outa my pocket, I might have an open mousetrap in there.”
Probably not father and daughter, Laura thought, but then, how would she know?
She was reluctant to leave the music but the self-approval of people braving the winds before Christmas was getting on her nerves. She scurried uptown, crossing just at 58th to glance in the windows of F. A. O. Schwarz. Stuffed animals drowning in tinsel. Then she veered back across Fifth Avenue and into Central Park, with its glistening, wet-sugar paths and its happy goofy dogs and their hungover owners. The outcroppings of schist—thank you Mrs. Mulvaney in fourth grade, for schist, and gneiss, and limestone—were sprayed with diamond gleam. Two young men walked by holding hands until they saw Laura looking. Don’t mind me, what’s wrong with brotherly affection, she thought. But she wouldn’t really know about that either.
This was the great mystery of the city in which she lived. It was so filled with variety that she had always trusted, somehow, that she would find her own available place in it. A perch, like that of any bird. A hidey-hole like the one that little white owl had found. There was enough otherliness here to have room for Laura. Surely?
But being moved to the care of nuns in Montreal—that couldn’t be good. That didn’t sound like roosting, but like migration. Or banishment. Or jail.
She passed pigeons scavenging for grain spilled from the feed buckets of the carriage horses. Crossed some widths where the wind growled with turbid force. Paced the stately alley of leafless elms, ended up at the snowy steps descending to the drained water basin of Bethesda Fountain. She approached the angel statue with its flared wings and its loving but blank expression. She tried to find the exact place to stand in which she could meet the angel’s eyes and be recognized. But either the angel was blind, like justice, or Laura was just not worth noticing. Into the corridors of wind and time the angel looked, seeing what Laura could not see, seeing anything and maybe everything but Laura herself. Seeing the blank space that made up Laura.
Someone was urging his kids to climb over the basin’s stone edge and stand and face his big box camera. “The Cohn family,” said the dad. “Three Cohns in the fountain! Smile, kids.” The kids, dad-rich, smiled at him.
6
Waiting at the light at 63rd and Madison, Laura turned her head to keep from being splashed by a taxi grinding to a halt. Grey water dashed upon her coat. Looking up at the sound of someone snickering, she saw Donna Flotarde a few steps away. Donna’s parents were behind her a step or two, arm in arm like real people, smiling. Donna was hissing, “She’s the one—Ciardi’s Fine Foods, remember I told you?” When Donna realized she’d been overheard, she winced out a fake smile. “Oh, hi, Laura,” said Donna Flotarde. Laura had no words with which to reply, but Mr. and Mrs. Flotarde said, “Merry Christmas, honey,” as if they were all cousins or something, and the Flotardes picked their way past in single file.
Two storefronts on this side of Madison were packed from doorway to curb with Christmas trees for sale, leaving only a narrow path through the green woods. The Flotardes disappeared in the temporary forest.
“Hi, Donna,” said Laura finally, after they were too distant to hear her. Laura wondered how far along the next block they would get before Donna Flotarde would fill her parents in on the story of why Laura had been expelled from Driscoll. It was so stupid, still; Laura could hardly bear to think about it. Instead, she looked at the taxi, which had dumped onto the pavement four irate ladies in Sunday church clothes.
“We going to heaven, but not in your taxi, you want to kill us all before we get to Salvation Chapel? No, I don’t think so, Mister Manny.” The chief church lady threw a few bills in the taxi window. “More than one cab working this avenue, and anyways we can walk and hallelujah at the same time if we got to.” The women stepped out into Madison with four gloved hands lifted in formation, alerting the next taxi driver to their immediate need.
Back to the dead-end lane of Van Pruyn Place at last. Nonno and Nonna weren’t home from church yet. In the warm light of the kitchen with its contact paper wallpaper and the lampshade featuring a parade of jolly fat cooks, Laura was, if not happy, at least alone and safe. Mary Bernice was a mere ghost of Jean Naté in the pantry, a trace of personality among the Christmas cloves and cinnamon. The cook had probably taken some gingerbread to give to her husband, Ted, who worked Sunday mornings in a Thruway tollbooth too far away, Nyack or somewhere.
Laura filled the kettle and pulled some loose mint tea from the canister and milk from the Frigidaire. After checking to make sure there were no peeping Toms in the back alley, she rolled off her tights and hung them over the radiator, which was hissing in a jazzy way. Garibaldi sidled over to sniff the fabric and to claw at it, but Laura made the pssst sound, and the cat ran off.
She turned on the radio, a red plastic dome-top device seething with emphysema. She’d get in trouble if she fiddled with the dial, so she tolerated what came on. The program was running seasonal. A dulcet voice introduced a carol Laura remembered having sung in the school Christmas pageant a few years ago.