Doris Lane

“Don’t worry about a thing. We take care of everything here at Happy Valley,” Marguerite Simonson assured the client. “All you will have to do, Mrs. Adamson, is come for visits between 10 and 4.”

“And flowers?”

“Why send them? We will plant Alfred’s little park beautifully and you will have a fine bench to sit on when you come. Remember, Mrs. Adamson, this is all coming from you, including the flowers we will plant.”

“Yes, of course, I see. Well, poor old Alfred’s not gone yet. When the time comes?”

“Here is my card again, Mrs. Adamson. Just phone us and we will come for Alfred. We take care of all concerns. The graveside ceremony, everything.”

“May I see that photo again, please?”

It was an 8×10 in a wide shot from slightly above and showing the hills in the distance. Sandy tree-lined roads traversed the long valley. The lots were the size possibly of the footprint of a small one-car garage, each lot encircled by wrought iron fencing. The many roads crisscrossed the large area, passed the lots, and ended in parking fields for visitors’ cars. The parking lots were tidily laid out beyond an eight-foot ivy-covered wall that enclosed the pet cemetery, which the Simonsons called the “Rest Area.”
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A warm day in June, 1972, drinking mimosas and eating Eggs Florentine on Tar Beach, Anna said she wanted to go to Poland.

“Nah, Poland,” said Singe Le Fleur derisively, “I want to go to Bulgaria.”

“I want to go to Albania,” Alan growled. Alan always growled when he spoke.

Such a great name, Singe Le Fleur, thought Masie to the side, as she wondered where she wanted to go this summer. Singe was a brilliant and jolly person who critiqued science fiction books. She would die fairly young and very soon. Singe had a foreign accent that, despite her last name, never sounded French, but of some mysterious Eastern European hodgepodge language.

“I want to go to the South of France,” Masie said and saw she had let them down. Anna and all her friends were wild for Eastern Europe. Anna, although she was a successful painter, had gotten a PhD in political movements among the Serbo-Croatian peasantry. When Masie thought of Europe, she thought of sidewalk cafes, of bookstands along the Seine, of Zelda Fitzgerald and Sarah Murphy and Josephine Baker.

The soft, clean Sunday air was a rare treat over Jane Street, where Anna’s studio sat, a very small tarpaper shack, really, on a large expanse of Village rooftop. Anna had pots of flowers everywhere and climbing honeysuckle lost among very old vines of ivy. The building was only one story high and the adjacent buildings much taller. From three sides of Anna’s rooftop rose sheer old brick walls. None of the walls had windows, or if they had, the ivy had latched on and spread over them.

Across the street was a large 1920s apartment building with hundreds of windows overlooking Anna’s rooftop. But she had all chairs angled away from the front, so that it was like sitting in a green bower. The sun was overhead for only a brief period. The rest of the day, a watery green seemed to tint the air and reflect onto every surface.
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Whenever I think about it, I am brought straight back to the Easter of 1932. I grow numb all over, cold all over, thinking about the boys. It was hard on the girls, too, my two sisters, but they were saved. Those poor boys and the poor Lindbergh Baby and the 21,000 suicides and Annabel Lee, come all together as a memory piece in the dark of night.

A song accompanies the memory when it comes, a song my father used to sing when I was a girl. I’ve learned to accept the memory when it comes, to put my head back against the pillow and let it replay itself until it plays out, is finished, over with, until the next time.

I go back and they are calling this time the “Great Depression.” The bridge to Jersey is just finished building in 1932. Mama used to sit at the front window watching that bridge go up. She’d sigh and say, “I will never see that bridge finished.”

And she didn’t.

In her last year, there were only the huge concrete stanchions lined up all in a row, along our street, down the long hill to the Kill Van Kull, stopping at the edge of the water, and starting again in Bayonne, New Jersey. The stanchions with no bridge on top of them, just the empty space of sky, looked like a string of giant legs, she’d say. Having lost their bodies, they seemed to stride purposefully along their merry way. If I could have one wish, it would be that Mama lived to see the bridge finished building.
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It is hard to know what makes the night so black here. The night is black as pitch here. They all are here, every night, black as pitch. Look up and the clouds racing across the moon are black. The green grasses beneath your feet at night are black. The water is not blue, but brown, the river the color of weak coffee, from the cedar and the iron ore.

That river damn near never moves. It is the slowest flowing river, the Mullica. You could float on your back for five months and go nowhere a-tall. The water is very close to the ground here, 17 trillion gallons of it, sitting just underneath the million acres of Jersey Pine Barrens. There are places one wrong step could drown a man in an ocean of tea water.

The trees are low here, stunted and dwarfed, but not too short to hang a man. The lonely sand roads wind their way through the forest of pygmy pine. These roads are forlorn and carpeted thick with pine needles. You should not be able to hear footsteps out there in the night atop all those soft pine needles, but you do. The screams that tear your heart out through your mouth, you hear them, too.

We don’t go out at night here. A gun might help you with some sights you can see here, but not all of them. You might do better to stay inside. We who live here stopped going out at night a century or more now. It’s become the local custom, you might say, staying home at night.

It’s the night sights we’d rather not see out there in the black. The lady all dressed in white, the hanged man who goes looking for his gold to pay off the devil, but mostly we don’t want to see the devil itself, so we stay in at night here. Read the rest of this entry »

From someplace back there behind the eyes images project onto little skin screens. Lamplight filtering through blood makes for rosy skin screens. That is an illusion. They are black in an unlit room. Visual visitations come in clear bursts like fireworks in the night sky. A rainbow over a river, an onyx ocean hung in moonlight, a Rousseau zebra the instant its hoofs have left, but not yet returned to the ground; how exotic.

She listens now behind closed eyes. The blank skin screens are rosy with lamplight and blood. The images fly at sound; the opening door click, the crushing tissue paper rustle, the dry scrape of cardboard on cardboard, a whisper of silk. The brass bed had been a gift from him to one of her predecessors, abandoned. His Valentine is on the night table at his side of the bed. A manila folder cut in half, addressed to him in royal blue felt tip ink. When he opens it he will see scrawled across the left-hand side of the fold in royal blue on buff, To My Valentine, 1981, Regina.

On the right side is posted a black and white photograph. The dark afternoon interior of some working class tavern in one of the boroughs. A flat lustrous plane entirely dominates the foreground. The straight flat saw dusted light colored wood surface of the shuffleboard. It narrows quickly to the back of the long bar room.

There is a small table pushed up against the side of this World War II relic. Regina is sitting alone. Her clasped hands set in the center of the tabletop. Her shoulders strained forward. Her chin held high as ever. Her collarbone stands out sharply under her white skin. She looks like a chanteuse. Her smile is thin and hungry.
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“Look, Masie, this is what I do,” Rafe told her on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Christopher Street. “I kill bad guys. The law doesn’t do it; I do it.”

“Rafe, it’s wrong.”

“Masie, it’s right.”

She turned and hurried away through a mob of carefree-looking gay men that clogged the sidewalks. He stood watching her go until he could see no more of the back of her head. He couldn’t keep following her everywhere. He knew that wasn’t fair to her. He loved her, but he couldn’t hold her. He couldn’t make her understand. She’d have to come to it herself. Weary of the come-on looks he was getting, Rafe started up Sixth Avenue to where life was not quite so gay.

He turned into the Riviera on a whim and sat down at the bar before realizing the new bartender was Louise’s friend, Daniel. Perched on a stool near the front window, in all her glory, there in support of her friend’s new job, was Louise. Rafe almost turned and walked out, but he heard Daniel call, “Hey, Rafe!”
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“I’ll wait 20 minutes and that’s it,” Ruby said to herself, checking her watch.

“That’s it,” she said louder without realizing it.

“What?” the waitress asked a bit snappish.

“Coffee, please.”

Ruby watched the girl walk up the aisle between the long lunch counter and the booths lining the windowed wall. A real Jersey Girl, big hair and all, long fingernails painted blue, with little somethings in spots near the tips. Ruby had read about Jersey Girls and listened to Bruce Springsteen sing about them. Who knew? If her father had stayed with her mother, she might have been a Jersey Girl herself.

Ruby loved the father she did have, the man who married her mother after she was born; this had nothing to do with him. Her caring stepfather would always be part of who Ruby was; she wanted now to know the part she never knew. She needed to know it. The need had grown inside her until she was heavy with it.

So here she was at a truck stop on a highway in Neptune, New Jersey.

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“I no worry,” the shoeshine man muttered, leaving a small cloud of vapor on the glass of the lobby door. The library entry had a columned Tuscan portico. The shoeshine man was himself Tuscan. “I no worry,” he breathed on the glass door.

The little library built in 1905 was one of sixty-seven built for the City of New York with steel capital donated by Andrew Carnegie. The architects Carrere & Hastings also designed the main library on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, but there the similarity ended.

Two blocks from the waterfront and south of the railroad overpass, the one-story library was petite and brick-walled with white adobe arched over huge windows. The Port Richmond Library served the northwest corner of Staten Island, an area of salt marshes, shipyards, factories, and graceful nineteenth century homes.

The library overlooked the village park this gray October day in 1944 and every day.
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William Desmond Taylor had a rare free day from his work at the Famous Players-Lasky studios. It was February 1, 1922. He left his bungalow at the Alvarado Court Apartments and walked downtown. His chauffer, Howard Fellows, was busy bailing his valet, Henry Peavey, out of jail.

Henry had been arrested early that morning for indecent exposure in Westlake Park. Taylor didn’t know if Henry was guilty, but if he were, Taylor would have to fire him. Taylor was fond of the eccentric Peavey, who made a perfect rice pudding. Taylor couldn’t afford a scandal associated with yet another valet in his employ.

After stopping at his jeweler for a watch crystal, and also purchasing a silver pocket flask, Taylor went to Robinson’s. He wanted to replace a set of verse for Mabel Normand. Robinson’s didn’t have the set, but he bought a translation of a German criticism of Nietzsche and Ethel Dell’s Rosa Mundi.

At the Los Angeles Athletic Club, he went upstairs to Arthur Hoyt’s room. The actor still had some of the bonded whiskey Taylor had given him as a gift. Taylor’s private stock had been stolen from his house, and Taylor’s bootlegger had replaced it with bathtub hooch. Taylor was livid, demanded his money back, and threatened the gang with exposure. Taylor was already known to be cooperating with federal authorities on getting rid of dope dealers in Hollywood. Bootleggers could be next, he warned.

“Not smart, Bill,” Hoyt advised. “These mugs don’t play. And, remember, you’re breaking the law, too.”
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