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“No.”
“Staten Island Ferry?”
He makes a buzzer sound.
“I give up, Jerome.”
“Central Park! It’s beautiful! I could walk for miles in this place and see something new everywhere. It’s even got an overgrown part like the Thickets in Deerfield Park, only it’s called the Ramble!”
“Well, don’t get mugged.”
“No, I can always do that when I come home.” He laughs.
“You sound happy.”
“I am. It’s been an authentically good day. I’m happy for me, I’m happy for Barbara, and Mom and Dad are happy for both of us.”
“Of course they are,” Holly says. She isn’t going to tell him that Barbara’s friend and mentor died; that’s not her news to pass on, and why bring him down? “I’m also happy for you, Jerome. Just don’t spoil it by calling me Hollyberry.”
“Wouldn’t think of it. What’s going on in the case?”
A thought blips across her mind: This is my chance to get in the running car instead of hiding behind the chainsaws. But the part of her mind that insists on checking the stove burners, the part that can never forget she left A Day No Pigs Would Die on the bus, whispers not now, not yet.
“Well,” she says, “Barbara may have run across another one.”
She tells him about Jorge Castro. After that the conversation turns to his book and his hopes for it. They talk awhile longer, then Holly lets Jerome go to continue his magical mystery tour of Central Park. She realizes she hasn’t told him about the sudden upgrade in her personal worth, either. Not him or anyone else. In a way, it’s like not talking about the possibility of the van. In both cases there’s a little too much baggage to unpack, at least now.
14
Barbara and Marie brought author copies of Olivia’s twelve books, including a few of the hefty Collected Poems, but it turns out to be unnecessary. Most of the people gathering on the quad in the shade of the iconic bell tower bring their own. Many are dog-eared and battered. One is held together by rubber bands. Some are also carrying pictures of Olivia at various stages of her life (the most common is the one of her and Humphrey Bogart standing in front of the Trevi Fountain). Some bring flowers. One is wearing a tee-shirt, surely specially made for the occasion, reading simply OK LIVES.
Frankie’s Dog Wagon shows up and does a brisk business in soft drinks and foot-longs. Barbara doesn’t know if that was Rosalyn’s idea or if Frankie showed up on his own. For all Barbara knows, Frankie is a fan of Olivia’s work. That wouldn’t surprise her. This evening nothing would surprise her. She has never felt so simultaneously sad, happy, and proud.
By six-thirty there have to be over a hundred people on the quad, and more are coming. No one is waiting for the candles to be lit at dusk; a young man with a Mohawk mounts a stepstool and begins reading “The Foal in the Wilderness” through a bullhorn. People gather around to listen, munching dogs, drinking sodas, munching fries and onion rings, drinking beer and wine.
Marie loops an arm around Barbara’s shoulders. “Isn’t this wonderful? Wouldn’t she have loved it?”
Barbara thinks back to her first meeting with the old poet, Olivia patting her enormous fur coat and saying Fo, fo, faux fur. She starts crying and hugs Marie. “She would have loved it so much.”
Mohawk Boy gives way to a girl with a snake tattooed around one upper arm. The girl raises the bullhorn and begins reading “I Was Taller When Young.”
Barbara listens. She’s had a little wine, but her head has never felt clearer. No more to drink, she thinks. You have to remember this. You have to remember it all your life. As Tattoo Girl gives way to a skinny bespectacled guy who looks like a grad student, she remembers that she’s left her cell phone at Olivia’s house. Ordinarily she goes nowhere without it, but tonight she doesn’t want it. What she wants is a hotdog with lots of mustard. And poetry. She wants to fill herself up with it.
15
While Barbara and Marie are handing out copies of Olivia’s books to the few who don’t have them, Roddy Harris is walking in Deerfield Park, as he often does in the late afternoon or early evening. It limbers up his sore hips—they’re sorer than they should be after weeks of partaking with fresh comestibles courtesy of the Christmas elf—but there’s another reason, as well. He doesn’t like to admit it, but it’s becoming harder and harder to hold onto things. To not lose the plot, as the saying is. Walking helps. It aerates the brain.
In the last weeks Roddy has eaten half a dozen dessert parfaits containing a mixture of ice cream, blueberries, and elf brains, but it’s still harder and harder to stay mentally sharp. This is both bewildering and infuriating. All his research insists that consuming a diet rich in human brain tissue has positive and immediate benefits for the consumer. When male chimpanzees steal and kill the offspring of mothers unwise enough to leave their babies unguarded, they always eat the brains first. The reason might not be clear to them, but it is to researchers; the brains of primates contain fatty acids that are crucial for neurological development and neurological health. Fatty acids (and the human brain is sixty per cent fat) aren’t manufactured by the body, so if they are being lost—as his are—they must be replaced. It’s quite simple, and for the last nine years it’s worked. Stated in simple terms that he would never dare put in a monograph or articulate in a lecture, eating healthy human brain tissue, especially the brain of a young person, cures Alzheimer’s.
Or so he’s believed… but what if he’s wrong?
No, no, no!
He refuses to believe his years of research are in any way incorrect, but what if he is excreting neurological fats faster than he can take them in? What if he is quite literally pissing his brains out? The idea is ludicrous, of course, and yet he can no longer remember his zip code. He thinks he takes a size nine shoe, but can’t be positive; maybe it’s an eight. He would have to check the insole to be sure. The other day he had to struggle to remember his own middle name!
Mostly, he’s been able to hide this erosion. Emily sees it, of course, but not even Emily has realized the extent of it. Thank God he’s not teaching anymore, and thank God he’s got Emily to edit and proofread his letters to the various academic journals he subscribes to.
A great deal of the time he’s as sharp and on-point as ever. Sometimes he thinks of himself as a passenger in a plane flying over a clear landscape at low altitude. Then the plane goes into a cloud, and everything is gray. You hold onto your armrests and wait out the bumps. When questions are asked, you smile and look wise instead of answering. Then the plane flies out of the cloud, the landscape is clear again, and all the facts are at your fingertips!
