“I wouldn’t mind an angel,” said Laura, almost to herself.
“Everyone wants to get something, everyone has something to give,” replied Mary Bernice. “Even the rich want their Christmas presents, even the poor want to give their mite. Aren’t I just after saying to our cousin Sheila in the Bronx that I wanted to give a nice coat to the clothing drive for the poor. ‘Ooh,’ says our Sheila, ‘I’ll take that coat off your hands, I like it.’ I said, ‘It’s bloody Christmas, Sheila. I want to give this to the poor, not to the cheap and miserly. Buy your own damn coat.’”
In the most basic of terms, Laura knew that she herself was not actually poor. She had a coat from Macy’s in Herald Square, full price, not picked up at a sale. It was pearl blue edged with a rolled white cord that finished in braidwork around the buttonholes. She had seen in the pews three or four people who wore the plastic sleeves from dry cleaning around their shoulders to keep the snow off their threadbare jackets. Poor was poor and rich was something else. But she slept in a cold attic room and had no parents to speak of, and virtually no friends. Mary Bernice didn’t count. So while this wasn’t poverty, it was some cousin to poverty.
4
When she went upstairs, she saw the light was still on in the parlor and the door was open a crack. “Is that you, Laurita?” called her grandfather. “Come down and see us before you go to bed.” He used his sweet-touch voice. Somehow she resented him most when he was trying to be thoughtful.
“I have a headache, I’ll see you tomorrow.” She was up on her own floor now, and closed the bathroom door to avoid hearing any argument.
She was still thinking about ways of being rich and poor, and how she had eaten a bowl of pasta fazool for supper and had clean blankets and her own bathroom, even if the sink sported a big crack in it. On the windowsill she had two kinds of shampoo and a bottle of spray to hold her do in place. But here she was lying in the dark again. She whisked her forefingers along her closed eyelashes, removing damp. She heard the sound of footsteps in the hall below.
“Laura?” It was her grandmother, wheezing from the effort of stairs. “You can’t be asleep, I just heard the toilet flush. This last flight is too steep for me so come where I can see you. I want to talk to you.”
The struggle over being obedient or being willful. Laura got up and walked in her slip to the top of the stairs and stood there sullenly with her arms folded over her.
“I know you need some time to get used to everything new,” said Nonna. She had made it up the first two steps. A world record. “It’s normal. I want to talk to you some more about this tomorrow. We’re all going to ten o’clock Mass and I have Sodality afterward. Nonno has to count the collections as usual, so we’ll go over all this Montreal business at lunchtime when we get back. Capisci?”
“Mary Bernice thinks I caught a cold being out tonight. At church.”
Nonna grunted like a cavewoman. “Terrific. Well, get some rest and we’ll see how you feel in the morning.”
Laura coughed stagily and tried to change the subject. “I’m going to stay home tomorrow and have Mary Bernice teach me how to smoke a cigarette.”
But Nonna just laughed at that. “I think she’s leaving after she makes the morning coffee. But if she stays, have her give you a glass or two of beer while you’re at it. If you’re going to go to hell, take the express train. Now, seriously, if you’re sick, I’ll see you tomorrow at lunch. It’s the pot roast. Don’t forget to say your prayers.”
“I said them at church.”
“Say them again. Insurance.”
Laura’s silence was, in her opinion anyway, both belligerent and magnificent.
Nonna continued cagily. “You could always join us at church after Mass and do Sodality with me. If you feel better by then.”
Sodality of the Virgin Mary was extra-credit rosaries chanted by a phalanx of old women wearing black lace veils. “No thank you. Good night.”
“Yes,” said Nonna, turning around and fastening her hand upon the rail. She never said good night back; one remark seemed to serve for the whole household.
Nonna huffed away, landing both feet on each step for security before proceeding to the next. Her broad back made a perfect target. But all Laura could put her hands on quickly was a can of Elegance hairspray, and probably it would just bounce off Nonna without her noticing. It wasn’t worth it.
Laura returned to her room and lay down so she could be poor and cold on the Upper East Side. But then she got up. She was remembering something the priest had said about Veni, Veni, Emmanuel. O come, o come, Emmanuel. She went to her window. The cord in the sash was broken but there was a piece of wood on the sill that she used to prop the window up on hot summer nights. She used it now. Never mind the cold air.
The wrought iron railings that had kept small children safe, back when Laura’s room was a nursery for some long-gone New York family, were leaning up like iron fencing in the box room next door. John Greenglass and Sam-Whoever-He-Is had taken them down that morning so they could climb out to repair the stonework and fix the leak.
The sky was flat with snowlight. She could smell balsam, and a hint of the sea on the rising wind, and something like sauerkraut. She stayed there for quite a few minutes, her chin propped in her hands.
O come, o come, Emmanuel, sang the girl.
5
The next morning set in, bleak as a diagnosis. The snow had stopped falling but the wind kept it unsettled, rushing it against the windows as Laura rambled about the empty house. It was well past ten before she accepted that Sam and John weren’t going to show up today. Of course: Sunday. Without realizing it, she had hoped that she would be home with them, and nobody else fussing about. She couldn’t name for herself what she wanted, so she tried to tell it as if she were a character in some story of her own life.
The girl had wanted—well, company?
At last she put on her everyday coat and let herself out the utility entrance. She headed west, which was the only way to go unless you wanted to throw yourself in the East River. She crossed East End Avenue and continued on toward the park, but at Fifth Avenue she decided to head downtown to look at the decorated store windows. She walked to keep warm underneath the low clouds, now a gritty caramel color. Foot traffic was steady. Nothing stopped New Yorkers from getting their Sunday papers and coffees, and their bagels in white wax bags.
Once in a while she thought about Montreal, but there wasn’t much to think about it. It was up in the Arctic somewhere, up past Albany and Troy. She would be stationed there like a soldier at a hardship post. At least here she felt like a player with a walk-on part in her own life and times. In Montreal she would only be one of the stage mob saying “rhubarb rhubarb.”
The ordinary world asserted itself through a smorgasbord of aromas. Hot air from a dryer vent. A sizzle of onions. A reek of roasting chestnuts and nearly scorched salt pretzels from a pushcart tended by an old woman in a babushka.
Things got more evened out, even a little perfumed, on Fifth Avenue. She kept walking, lost in her thoughts or what passed for thoughts, until she caught sight of herself in the windows of Scribner’s. A cellophane cutout of a girl. Polar gusts flickered snow-dust around her. The wind tore her long, irresolutely colored hair out from her head scarf, an insult of apparel Laura was obliged to wear on Sundays whether in church or not. She tried to catch her eyes glancingly in the window to see if she looked as stupid as she felt. Coal-dark and judgmental, her eyes were forming some opinion about her that she couldn’t decipher.