The governour and some companie with him went up by Charles River above Watertown and named the first brooke on the north side of the river, being a fair streame and coming from a pond a mile from the river, Beaver Brook because the beavers had shorn down divers dams across the brook. Thence they went to a great rock upon which stood a high stone cleft in sunder that men might go through which they called Adams Chair.

Governour Winthrop 1631

Priscilla, cycling to work in milky dawn: Saint Mary’s rich red brick, hummocky lawn already green from late March snow. They’re razing a fire-gutted house on Water Street. She wonders what they’ll put up in its place and if they’ll do it before summer.

She stops to buy a western egg at Alexander’s Waltham House of Pizza, eats it standing by her bike, and watching welfare mothers climb the stairs to number twenty-two, get at their social workers early. Tampon lying in the gutter. Unlovely artifacts of our age, she thinks.

The Charles River, below the Old Waltham Cotton and Wool Works. It’s elder housing now, and artists’ studios. Enoch Rowan, her great uncle, sold the property to Francis Cabot Lowell, another distant relative, who introduced the power loom and built the great mill on Elm Street.

The Rowans moved to Watertown, did well in snuff and mattress ticking, built the large house on Mount Auburn Street. She remembers Christmas dinner long ago, dressed up in velveteen.

A little late, still she makes the little detour at the Mill to cross at the footbridge at the river.

But it’s not your river, Frostie remonstrates. You always say everything is yours.

It is, she insists. I claim it. No one else does.

Well, if it were mine, I’d keep it cleaner, he says.

Working on it, she. I have a lot of people working on it…Her committee, dragging rusty supermarket carts and other unmentionable objects out of it. But she was first, the first to claim it.

Frostie is relentless, his mother’s son. He brings up Mount Feake Cemetery where they picnicked, ducks at Roberts, The Red Line and the Blue: You always talk as if you owned them.

Well I do! She carries the joke to ever grander heights of hyperbole. Back in those heady years she asked for the divorce—and freed the three of them from the eight room house, two Volvos,lawn, two dogs--they owned the Red Line. And the Blue line: futuristic bullet streaking through its tiled corridor to

WONDERLAND

They never took it there, but to Aquarium, and up the creaky escalator to the Bay State Liners: Edward Rowe Snow, gently rocking, waiting, hers. She claimed it too, the harbor and one island, hers.

You ought to keep it cleaner, Frostie says. Well, she’s been working on it, such responsibility. It was necessary to divest some pieces of it here and there: the Red Line, all the islands but for Peddocks—you could camp there free, and it had a ghost town, nature walks at ten and one, all free. And, coming back from Peddocks all filthy, they would make for her restroom at the Marriott, wash up in splendor. She kept the washroom. But she couldn’t be bothered keeping all of it, she told Frostie.

Her empire.

Frostie understood, for all the joking. Solie didn’t. She thought Priscilla’s empire wasn’t worth the losses.

But these other people, Ma, that use our island and our washroom. Do you give permission? Sure, I tell them, go ahead, it’s free. You have to be, too, free, she tells him. Free to see it’s yours, she lectures, but he squirms. He likes her flights.

But how, Ma? Do you give them tickets?

No, of course not. I have administrators, like the MDC.

And that’s yours too?

Of course.


The river rushes under her, reduced and concentrated, below the dam. It makes her lightheaded. She leaves the leafy bower and crosses the parking lot to Moody. The water over the dam is loud in the early morning calm. A nephew of Elihu Rowan, son of Enoch, Seth, incurred a gentlemanly debt at Harvard College, and sold the head of the water on the Charles to the Lowells for the equivalent of a mess of lentils. He sold the power source! Oh, her family ran to idiots and scoundrels!

Passing Grover Cronin’s, Crescent Street, The Irish Travel Bureau.

The great house on Mount Auburn Street was let in rooms in l900, to girls that worked in the Mill. It houses, now, retarded citizens. Let it go. Priscilla wouldn’t want a son of hers inheriting the fruit of other’s labor, incurring gentlemanly debts at Harvard College.

It’s seven-forty-six. Thirteenth of April, l981. Columbia is in its second day aloft. The morning stars are Mercury and Saturn. Evening, Mars and Jupiter.

She recrosses the river. Gold Star Mothers’ Bridge. Mist rising makes a romance of the old watch factory. Waltham Watches. Now Precision Engineering. Mount Feake Cemetery, Highland Street to hospital. She has to give a pint of blood before work, for Terry in the office who suffers with familial polycystic disease, and had a hemorrhage on Friday.

A hundred and seventy miles above the Earth, Columbia passes over gypsum sands, the Tularosa Basin. Young and Crippen sleep. Some of the almost forty thousand tiles on the spaceship are missing, but it shouldn’t present a problem say the experts.

She follows the yellow dots on the ground floor of the Nichol’s wing, misses turn and has to ask…It’s three doors back and down the ramp. She stretches on black vinyl, closes her eyes and thinks of Terry…Ever had malaria? she’s asked. Not she knows of…Terry’s kidneys forming cysts that burst and bleed. He has a brother suffers from the same, and also a small son. She feels the tourniquet, the pinch, and overpowering tiredness even though the day’s only beginning. You want some coffee? No, she has to go Besides Columbia, 1,156 other crafts of one description or another are in orbit, as are 3,419 pieces of debris: spent rocket bodies, nuts and bolts…

She coasts on Frostie’s Nishiki the final half a mile to her first patient. The east windows of the hospital are glinting in pale sunlight now. Highland Street to Prospect, Vincent’s Florists are setting out narcissus bulbs. Van Houten is a rather run down street, but someone’s painting a cottage pink, with gray trim. A duplex is being sheathed in yellow vinyl—all of Waltham being sheathed, it seems, by M. Girardeau and Son. She thinks she couldn’t live in vinyl, under vinyl. No, she prefers the solidity of yellow brick. All the projects are yellow brick. They will make good ruins. She couldn’t live in a building that won’t molder well.

A house is almost immortal when you compare it to a body, Rika, her mother, says. Years now, she’s been constructing the house in Ipswich as a new enclosure for her soul, and all the time not letting Harry touch her body. Harry pays for most of it: the bath done over in a celery shade of tile, the cherry cabinets, and now the solarium… Not for her. It costs too much.

Not she doesn’t see the fires that burn within the project, leave their scorch around the windows and doors. A solid ruin, but she’d have been more generous had she built it--dream builder that she was, like Rika. Still, she’s lucky to have her unit in the elder’s section. She likes to live above their wheelchairs and benches where they sun themselves like turtles. Four flights up and insulated from the teeming families of Buildings A and B.

She locks her bike to a swingless swing set outside 440. The sisters’ house, inherited from their builder father. Also yellow brick, but older, and redolent of Catholic rectories, especially in this hallway with its umbrella stand and cloudy mirrors. Enedina, the night girl gives report: Adie and Winnie, as usual, slept through the night. Megan, as usual, didn’t. Had to pee on hour mostly, read her magazines, and bent Rosa’s ear with information on astronomy, history, politics. Enedina doesn’t mind this—unlike some others, treats her nicely, and the other two lovingly, like her babies, changing their diapers gently. Enedina comes from Guatemala. You write and I’ll get them up, Priscilla tells her. No, I write all wrong. Just copy mine from yesterday. It’s all the same. You need to learn, she tells her, so Enedina writes and she goes up. Winnie Blakey wakes, says, Innerspring.

Admiral Farragut, she says after a pause. Her sister Megan’s radio, set to WCRB, comes on in the middle of a Scarlatti sonata, whirling, climbing… Mandible, says Winnie. Megan wakes, sits halfway up, and picks up a copy of Opera News from the file at the foot of her bed. Am I alive? asks Adie, the other sister. Priscilla gravely takes her pulse. Yes, seems you are, Priscilla says, aware that moment of her own aliveness, lightened by her recrossings of the river, by bloodletting, and Scarlatti on Megan’s clock radio, something pulling down, however…Solie. Was it a hickey that she noted on Solie’s neck last night? There’s been a Puerto Rican boy hanging about. Male child turned to menace. You take us to live among Puerto Ricans, see what you get, say Solie’s eyes. Their new life, to Soli, wasn’t worth the losses. Well it’s done and can’t be un… She goes to Megan. Cesare Siepi of Milan played Figaro in l948, she reads out of her magazine. Whirling, climbing… Hello, my dear. I’ll have the bedpan and lie up a little while. She brings it, and goes back to lay out the sisters’ housedresses, then hot water for Winnie’s oatmeal. Checks back on Megan. It’s still coming, Megan says. It stops and starts. I can’t sleep peacefully a couple hours even. It’s the diuretic. Why don’t you go ahead and wet the bed like Adie. I can change it… Priscilla says, and in an instant she could bite her tongue out of her head. I ’d as soon bother you for the pan, says Megan. I’m not like them, I will remind you. Oh, god, of course I know it. Look I have tears coming in my eyes! How could I say it? I was thinking something about my daughter… I know you have worries. I think I’m finished. Did you know I heard ducks last night, flying back… The sight that Megan was losing went straight to her ears. Just let me look and see how much it is, says Megan, and Priscilla holds the pan for her to look at the bottom of the pan just covered with cloudy pee. Yes, a good amount, so maybe I can doze awhile and you can get on with them. It’s a grudge I have against the Universe that it’s so poorly arranged that this old body can’t get to the toilet so you must spend your day bringing bedpans and can’t be with your children… They don’t need me. They’re in school I ’d chloroform all three of us if I could get out of bed. Oh, stop it! If you had any sense you’d help me. Help you what? You know very well. You have control of all our pills. Those little blue ones would do it. They count you know. When the nurse comes, she counts. Well, I’m thinking people do miscount. Things fall on floors, roll under registers… I simply don’t fancy dying they way we all know I will. How’s that? Well drowning, in my fluids. I’ve heard that drowning’s not so bad. Peaceful rather. Who said that? Oh, something I heard, or read… You should be more accurate. You have no scientific curiosity. When the Bookmobile comes I’ll request a proper book. A good idea. She’s having night thoughts, Priscilla thinks. The daytime Megan thinks exclusively of murdering her sisters, not herself.

Not going to school today, says Adie, under the covers. Oh, yes you are. Priscilla fishes in the drawer for underwear. There’re fifteen single stockings in there, not one pair. The half have seams. She wonders do they sell them that way still, or has Adie kept them since the forties?

Jaysus, Mother Mary! Adie cries. Why don’t I die?

And Enidina, just then leaving, says, Hush you. What would God think? He can hear you.

Megan, listening, appalled, the ignorance. She disbelieves in god herself, but thinks that he’d approve of Adie’s sentiment in case he did exist. She’d chloroform them both, of course, if she could get away with it. She studies a photo in Opera News of Mildred Meller of Cleveland, Ohio playing Cherubino. A nice role. Another of Alicia della Casa, of Burgdorf Switzerland in the same part. She had a smaller success. The Swiss are a phlegmatic race. Don’t often produce an artist of first rank. She dozes a minute, wakes to find Priscilla there.

Do you know, Priscilla asks, if they still make stockings that have seams?

Oh, dear me, yes. Megan sits up and eases into her yellow housecoat. I’ll get up, she says. And laboriously getting down from the high bed which had been her parents’ she handholds her way from one piece of furniture to another, into the little bathroom and makes a cup of tea with hot water from the tap. The tremors are not too bad this morning, and she manages to get the yellow pill that Priscilla places in her hand down her long and sensitive throat.

You’ll get The Globe so I can start the crossword.

Soon’s I have a minute, Priscilla says, making up the bed.

Nine-thirty, and Columbia is over western Australia, belly up so the cargo bay when opened is not exposed to sunlight…

Oh Jaysus, Mother Mary, take me! Adie crows, and Winnie wakes then to contemplate a cyclist on her ceiling. He has a number seventy-seven on his chest she puzzles over. The sheet under Adie that was warm and moist has grown cold.

A kind of hybrid, this Columbia. Climbed to orbit as a rocket, it cruises now like a spaceship, and tomorrow it will glide to landing like a powerless aircraft.

Once she gets the pill down, Megan feels a little better. Yes, she tells Priscilla, there was a comic on the radio who used to say she was so poor she couldn’t afford stockings, so she painted a black line up the back of each leg. She stops in her return from bathroom to take the cover off Billy’s cage and whistles to him Cleopatra’s aria from act two of Handel’s Julius Caesar. Billy fluffs his feathers, tries a note. She makes her way back to the bed and sits on it, gets her panties on, but cannot manage bra. Rosa comes in with her coat on and The Globe. Lovey Mother, calls Adie. Adie raised five kids alone, and now her energy, trapped in a geriatric chair, has gone to nattering. If she could die…her daughters think, and call God’s wisdom into question for the first time in their lives. Pleasantly confused, is Dr. Tanzer’s diagnosis. Megan doesn’t see what’s pleasant. Wearing everybody’s nerves, her own included, and doesn’t even know us!

Mandible, says Winnie. A cascade of complex trills from Billy.

Winnie, up in her chair now too, notes the old woman with the hat on across the street, the one that sells the waffles and the hot cakes, she tells Priscilla.

What?

The woman sells the hotcakes, wears a pillbox hat. We sisters used to wear them the year we started bringing fellows home to meet our Pa.

They had cerebral accidents, all three sisters, only Megan kept her wits. Fight, she used to tell them. Fight like I do, but they wouldn’t, allowed themselves to slip into their present selves. An article on the front page of The Boston Globe calls the shuttle flight a shot in the arm for the nation’s spirit…following an time of sapping of the public confidence.

“But now, Columbia restores us to a sense we’re not the paralyzed giant of our darkest self image.”

Priscilla hurries back to Megan’s room.

Harry Truman could quote lines from “Locksley Hall”. That’s Tennyson if you’ll remember, says Megan. Priscilla can’t get too taken up with this. She’s got Adie on the commode and Clifford across the street.

“S” in Harry S, know what it stands for? Nothing. In Ulysses S. it’s Simpson… Clifford’s bath, then Wolfie, and a quick stop at Jesús Roldáan, and Alcide Arsenault… Eulalie’s… “ To err is Truman,” people used to say. Still there was music in him, Harry. Grant, they used to say--Ulysses S—he couldn’t even whistle Yankee Doodle. There was music in him Harry, yes…

“The man that hath not music in himself, nor is not moved by concord of sweet sound…is fit for treason, strategems and spoils; his soul is dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted…” Shakespeare, case you didn’t…Yes, this present inhabitant of the White House, one suspects he has no music in him, though he has a son must dance…

I told them fight, says Megan. They wouldn’t. Now listen to them. We’ll stick around, we used to tell each other, see how things turn out…like if they prove or disprove the Big Bang, you know, theory.

April l3, l981, Columbia’s in its second day. A couple cancellations makes its launch date same as Yuri Gargarin’s historic flight in Vostok.

Step, step, slowly, Clifford comes along the hall, his clean clothes clutched in a little pile. Step, step, stopping by the kitchen clock. It’s half past nine, and Priscilla’s running late. Oh, Jaysus, Mother Mary, help me! Adie, left on the commode with Posey belt. Her sister Megan has turned to the crossword puzzle in The Globe. A harpsicord from the Hubbard Works is eased into a city van for transportation to the Public Library. Mr. Franklin Honey, Sexton of the Congregational Church affixes the sermon topic to the notice board…

THE BROTHER OF THE…

Step, step, Clifford stops at the hallway mirror, sticks out his tongue and studies it, while Priscilla sits on the radiator, resting her feet. I had a good B.M., he tells her, in case you want to note it down…

THE BROTHER OF THE PRODIGAL

A native of Gdansk, five letters. COLD, cries Adie. This day in l955, the Salk vaccine announced to public. A complex low is covering the Northeast. High pressure is building in the Midwest, will reach New England late tomorrow. Gird for war. Six down. Clifford arrives at bathroom, sits, takes off a shoe, a sock. He slowly places sock in shoe, in spite it’s going in the wash. Another shoe, a sock. She hopes Adie will be O.K. She runs the water. Now the shirt. She helps him with the buttons. Turns off the water. Three buttons, four. It’s off, and he insists on folding it. He was an engineer. Worked on the Hoover Dam. Now trousers. The water’s getting cold. Now underpants. He has to go, picks up his pale old shrivelled member, pees a feeble stream, shakes off a drop, another. There. Four hundred people trying to reach news of the astronauts forget to put 500 before the official number, get, instead, a Claremont, California housewife.

Spilled his seed, sixteen across. That’s Onan, in that Dirty Book. Dolomite. An Alp, that is, thinks Megan.

It’s ten-fifteen, and Clifford’s bath proceeds at stately pace.

Step, step, slowly, reaching for the handhold over the soapdish. Priscilla helps. He’s in. The water’s tepid. He takes the soap and traces circles on his chest, his belly. She pours shampoo and washes his pink old spotty head and rinses.

I wasn’t finished, he says. It can’t be helped. The water’s cold, not good for you. She towels him, leaves him dressing, seated in the bath chair, rushes back to Adie. Cold! says Adie. Leave me to my death with drafts around my hips! Priscilla walks her—listing like some old car that’s had its chassis knocked askew—back to the geriatric chair and wheels her out to waiting van that takes her to the Sunshine Club.

Scholar President, reads Megan. Jefferson. He fancied Homer. Must be Jefferson, but doesn’t fit with L from seven down, unless…Ah, yes, it’s peccary a kind of pig…. You’re back, my dear, I’m reading here they vote today, this issue of school prayer …

At the Sunshine Club, Rebecca, the director, passes jelly donuts. Adie asks her, Are you my mother, Lovey?

No, I’m not your mother, Adie. I’m Rebecca, and I’m thirty-three years old, and you’re a hundred, she instructs. Her birthday today, Adie. They’ve planned a celebration. I am? cries Adie. Gracious! Mayor Clark’s invited, and the News Tribune. So, I couldn’t be your mother, could I? says Rebecca. Reality Orientation is the term.

Rebecca sometimes thinks she doesn’t blame them caring for it not a jot—reality. Yes, you’re a mother, Adie. You’ve a daughter and three sons that live in Somerville, another daughter somewhere and seventeen grandchildren.

Do I? I never heard of any such a thing.

At 508, next door to Antonia, Alcide Arsenault escapes his wife, and with his walk-aid makes his way downtown by way of Crescent Street, past the Irish Travel Bureau, seeing ghosts: the old Hall’s Corner Smoke Shop, Lovings Furnishings for Men, Ike Allen’s Corinthian Alleys in the basement under the Waldorf Lunch on Gordon Street, and the old Embassy—a walkway now. It had a ceiling that gave an illusion of a starry night… Meanwhile Eulalia opens the front door to Priscilla. Needs his stick adjusted again, she tells her. I can’t do it with my hands… He’s gone, Priscilla quickly ascertains. No, not again, the second time this week. She mounts her bike and heads down Main Street

A starry sky, Alcide recalls, with floating clouds. A rather taking thing. J. Lesley Cahill played the organ.

…READING FROM EURIPIDES THE LECTURE ROOM AT

SPINGOLD…runs round the electric sign on the Waltham Savings The wonders of the modern world, thinks Alcide. But give him any day the starry sky at the old Embassy, billiards at Ike Allen’s,trolley trips to Norumbega, French-American Athletic and Literary Association, met on the second floor of the Odd Fellows. Alcide is watching the river scum wash up in little inlet under the Gold Star Mother’s Bridge when Priscilla spots him from a rise two blocks away. There used to be A dance hall on those pilings, he’s thinking. Nuttings. The Black Velvet Irish Band, Prince Edward Isle Quadrille. He suddenly decides to have a beer in O’Reilly’s Daughter, hails a passing cab.

A toasted dungbeetle, reads Megan, has a crisp exterior and, inside, a texture like souffle (the answer to last week’s acrostic)

At the Sunshine Club little Jerome Aucoin, who’s come by with his mother to visit Great Aunt Adie on her birthday, wears a polo shirt from Disney World. He’s three years old; holds up three fingers when he’s asked. Adults get quite excited when he does this. But he’s run away because they want to know the name he’s chosen for his baby sister when she comes out of his mother’s tummy. Now he hides behind a table, spilling tiny pieces of a puzzle. Auntie, in a funny chair says Lovey Mother. And he sees—her knees are spread—she wears a diaper like his own, and that she’s wet it.

The usual? Melissa asks, and pushes a Michelob in front of Alcide. Fresh still, he notes. She’s only forty-seven, she’s told him. Has she got her teeth still, he wonders? A little overweight, of course, but he prefers that in a woman. He likes to see it high on hips the way Melissa….Saucy. He would bet she’s got her teeth…maybe ask her later.

That’s a lovely picture, Bobby, says Rebecca to Bobby Rosier who is simple. And you colored in the lines.

It’s going to be snow flowers tomorrow, Berta Bechtel says. I heard it on the weather.

I’m just wondering, Alcide dares, you got your own…?

My what?

Teeth. Your own teeth. Alcide grins and shows his full upper and lower.

Well, six of them. Four up, two down, Melissa grins back. Just thought you’d check me out, eh, Alcide?

Rosa, from the agency, waits for the Auburndale bus at the corner of Flint and Adams. She had to leave Laureano up on the ladder inspecting the chimney flashing. Now she’ll have to worry about him the whole day. Seventy-five years old and walking around on roofs. Always, it is something. Yesterday it was the officer coming about the cocks in the yard. “You have to catch them and put them in a cage today,” she told him at breakfast. He thinks he can carry on however he wants, being Puerto Rican and legal. He forgets her own vulnerability to cops snooping around. And all the Guatemalans in the rented basement. They attract attention too. Does he ever think of that?

At least she goes in comfort on a bus. She used to have to walk to her jobs when they lived out in the suburbs in the other house that he had built with his own hands. Oh, he was strong then. Only trouble was he built it without getting any permits, so, even after they wasted large sums on lawyers, the town tore it all down. Just let things be quiet for a while, she tells the Virgin. Let me go to my work in peace.

Out the window she sees the couple in jogging shorts who walk along Mount Feake Avenue. He’s always in front and stands waiting for her at corners with a stopwatch in his hand. She’s a little woman with sturdy legs, and walking behind her taller husband reminds Rosa of her own people scouring the sierra for firewood, the woman always behind with a pile of sticks on her head. The man stalking ahead. They have their pride, men. Ask them to come down off a ladder so you can go to work in peace and they have to say no.

She gets off at Fletcher. Sees Priscilla from the agency on her bicycle. Alcide has run away from Eulalie again.

“I thought she hide his walker.” “He found it. You look on Crescent Street. I’ll ride up Moody.”

She shouldn’t hide his walker. He has his pride like all of them. She looks into the Irish Travel Bureau. Sometimes he goes in there. Most likely he’s at the used car lot. They keep offering him a job there, and he doesn’t know it’s a joke. Well, let Priscilla look there. She has the bicycle. Other days, he sits in the little park where he told her the Embassy Theater used to be. It had a sky full of stars painted on the ceiling, he told her. And an organ. There was never anything like it. He’s not in the park either. She can see around the corner of the bank that it’s empty.

She abandons this--can’t waste anymore time, with Wolfie waiting--crosses Moody again and takes the little path beside the sluice gates to The Mill and up the elevator to Wolfie, waiting in his motorized wheelchair for his bath. “Come me!” he says, his words little explosions that you stand around waiting for, wanting to help him, but how? She stands over him and he puts his arms around her hips and buries his head in her belly. “Soft, soft,” he murmurs, the words coming easier. She lets him, just because the words come easier. Her belly cramps up. She got her monthly in the night, three weeks late, heavy with clots. “Bath,” she says, “bath, it’s late,” her words coming easy also, because she talks to him like a baby, not needing to put together the unfamiliar sentences she learned in night school.

While he puts a hand under her blouse and fondles her left breast, she takes off his pajama top and unties and slips down the bottoms. His sex is purple and hard. It has no failures like his legs or his speech. She pushes him into the bathroom. “Lock door,” he says, and she does this carefully as usual. He’s able to swing himself into the bath chair, while she slips the bottoms down and off, and starts the water until it’s the right warmth, then throws the lever to start the shower.

He was a lawyer, Wolfie. A good lawyer. Helped people like herself get legal: Inez Flores, and Mercedes Lopez, legal for twenty years. She herself, came along after his stroke, but she knows he’d help her if he could. If Laureano would marry her, she’d be legal too, but no use thinking about that. She sits on the tub edge to soap him, her hair filling with droplets of spray. His hand goes up her skirt and finds the pad. Alcide always asks women if they still bleed. If they still bleed and have their teeth. He’s crazy to know and asks before he even knows your name. She’s over fifty, and only has about half her teeth, but she still bleeds enough for two women, she thinks as she feels a rush of warm blood. He has his finger now, right up inside her, and another on her nipple. She is going to come, she thinks. It’s disgraceful he can do this to her, when all of Laureano’s pumping above her merely makes her tired. “Touch, touch!” Wolfie cries, and she cradles his penis as she comes, comes comes...oh, oh, oh, her womb is leaping inside her.

Then she’s ashamed. How can she not be ashamed? But it gives him such pleasure. And her too, she admits. On his face is a look, as if it was him who just came. How can it make him so happy when he can’t come in her properly. When Enedina Lopez got legal, she told Rosa, Wolfie was as happy as she was. “Dear man,” she says, and puts her lips to his.

Then she’s all business. It’s ten-thirty. Wolfie needs to go down to the Sunshine Club for juice and cookies and the Reality Orientation where they tell him what day it is, and when the next holiday is coming. He knows this perfectly well, but most of the others are just as happy knowing or not knowing about such things. What is so important about reality when you’re fastened in a geriatric chair, Rosa wonders?

As usual, he wants his shirt and tie, as if he’s going to business, poor man. He looks happy this morning, as if he’s brought off the most wonderful thing in making her come on the ledge of the bathtub at ten in the morning. She wants to kiss him again, but abstains. Suppose she knew him when he was all himself? She wonders about this sometimes. Of course, she knows he had a wife then and a big practice. Kids, who live in California now. But still she likes to think of him caring for her then, a woman on the side, of course, not his wife. She would have been younger, maybe she would have given him a baby, instead of Laureano. It would have been a smart kid, and studious and careful, unlike Mondo, who is presently in jail so she doesn’t have to worry about him for a while. And white. Wolfie is very white. Almost blue in his whiteness. And black, black, hair. Both of our hairs are straight and black. But Wolfie is a Jew, and Jews have their ways, maybe different from most men. She never knew anything about Jews. Were they Turkos like the Syrians in the dry goods stores at home? She thinks they are probably different, though they look similar.

Priscilla gives up Alcide, returns to Megan. Tycho, saw a supernova as a boy. Eleven down, says Megan. That’s Brahe. He was a great astronomer. He had his nose cut off in a duel and ore a false one made of silver, or gold, I can’t remember…Priscilla’s supposed to get her and Winnie to the birthday party in the van at one o’clock. Won’t be easy. She’s prepared to fail.

The Mayor. What do I want to see the Mayor for? I know all about him. He has fourteen children and brags about it. I didn’t vote for him. I never vote for Catholic or Irish. How do you know which are, which aren’t? Priscilla asks.

I read the literature they send you, every word. Those that aren’t don’t go bragging about ten children and graduate from B.C. and Holy Cross where they learn football and some Latin. Fourteen children. You’d think that some of them never heard of such a thing as interruptus—coitus interruptus… in spite of its being latin, it’s not a thing they’ll teach you at B.C. One, I had. A single brat. You ask me how? Coitus Interruptus, that’s how. Priest ridden race. I saved myself. It wasn’t easy. Get you when you’re weak and helpless.

The boys from the Press Box are lounging in the settling body of an old Pontiac in the lot of Masserelli Motors. Batty Allard, Berto Ginastero, Cristos Demos, Jacko Winegar:

Hey, Alcide, lookin’ for a job again?

Don’t Jacko. Don’t you see that he believes you?

Naa, he don’t. Nice job out front, with coat and tie; you meet the public…

Listen Frenchy, it’s just a joke, says Cristos.

A joke?

Yes, he’s just kidding you.

A coat, he said, a tie. I’d meet the public.

A joke. He’s only joking, Alcide baby. We ain’t got no public here. You tell me, you see any public? Cristos waves his arms around the muddy lot. And what you want to work for, anyhow? You got yourself nice pension from Canadian…

U.S. Army. Alcide straightens up his shoulders. U.S. Army.

Well, you shouldn’t go believing every little…

Meet the public…Alcide murmurs as he turns the corner at the French American Victory Society. He took Eulalie here to dances in his uniform, the Sixteenth Infantry. It was the year they opened up the second front. He can still see Tranquille Galant behind the drums in his Navy whites, and Claude, Eulalie’s brother, fiddling. He had one leg shorter than the other, so he didn’t go off to war with the rest of them.

Priscilla’s back from the Bookmobile. They have nothing on the Nile or the Tudor Queens. They specialize, it seems, in Romantic fiction and popular biography. She’s found a book on Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth the Which? asks Megan. The Second. Ach! The world’s most boring woman. Take it back. The world’s most boring woman! All she ever thinks about are dogs and horses.

A largish crested bird is strutting just ahead of Alcide on the sidewalk. He turns his pocket out and shakes the last crumbs out. The U. S. Army, he served in. The Navy was what he wanted, but they wouldn’t take him because of his missing finger, so it was the Army, late in the conflict. Embarrassing, it was to be around in civvies so long, going to the kitchen rackets in Irish Town every night. They used to call it The Bleachery. A crazy time. The French, Italians, Irish whirled together by the war. They married, many of them—French to Irish, Irish to Italian. Tranquille and Jean Pierre were bedded down with Irish girls before they’d finished training. And he was having his first woman. Irish Peg, they called her; used to charge a dollar, but she gave it free to uniforms. The Rat, they also called her, for her coarse brown hair and little pointy teeth that nibbled at him… U.S. Army. Zut! He scatters a crowd of grackles, sparrows; crosses the tracks below the car wash. Used to be a school here, the Misses Warrens: made Americans out of you, combated Bolshevism and lawlessness in the Foreign Born…He sees it now, his memory a lucid pool, the creamy walls, the projected stereoptican ghosts of Lewis and Clark on the shores of the Mississippi. The terrible Miss Varnum, who would make Eulalie leave the Monday wash to write her essay: Why I Want to be a Citizen… She took them berry picking, wouldn’t let the girls mix with the dirty boys. She thought she’d hold that tide back, till the War undid her. Yes, married, most of them, a half breed in the oven, but the Second Front. Jean Pierre, Tranquille, and he, soon after, to the prim Eulalie. She got word of Irish Peggy. He never had her after that. He sees her still sometimes. She turned to drink, got skinnier than ever. Never had enough to eat until that Jew that owned The Buckle kept her, fattened her up. He saw her last in a respectable gray suit that strained against her spreading bottom, going to those meetings they had now, in the basements of the churches. He stops to watch two boys who’ve caught a large fish—a bass—from off the bridge at Moody Street. It’s a huge fish, almost a foot and a half in length. They’ll never get it up, because they haven’t got a net with a handle long enough to reach it.

That tea, you know, that ended up in Boston Harbor, Megan tells Priscilla, was traded to the Indians for opium and sold to the British. The Indians from India, that is, not Redskins. The mayor’s phoned to say he’s running late, will be there in less than fifteen minues. Albert, getting bored with waiting, opens his pants and begins to slide them… Lookit! Alva Otting shrieks. Rebecca goes: You mustn’t, Albert. Cannot do that here. She pulls them up and fastens them. You want a cigarette? She walks him to a table. Dirty! Alva scolds.

The bass they’ve caught off Moody Street expires slowly at the end of the line. There’s nothing to be done, till finally a passerby with a penknife cuts it. The biggest fish that’s probably ever been seen in the Charles River, says the owner of the knife. Just too bad they didn't bring a net with a long handle. The coin collectors at the White Cloud Laundromat on Prospect Street are being forced with a pair of pliers. Two white kids, one black. They get away with twenty dollars and sixty cents. Alcide pushes the traffic button, brings the north and south-bound traffic on Prospect Street to a halt. A listener to WHYY calls to ask if Young and Crippen can make out the Great Wall of China. No, says a former astronaut who’s manning phones. It’s things like highways and ship’s wakes you can see. The Houston Astrodome, but not who’s winning. The factor’s contrast. You can see the Houston Astrodome, but not who’s winning.

A Belmont woman’s purse is being snatched at the Waltham Supermarket.

Young and Crippen wake and are instructed to look down on the Kennedy Space Center below. Man, that is so pretty, is Crippen’s comment. They check the cargo bay and open the clamshell doors to check for warps. The spaceship undergoes tremendous stresses, moving from night to day at intervals of ninety minutes. The kid they call The Maggot wakes on the landing of the second story of Building D—the wags have named it Maggot’s Landing—makes his way to the railroad trestle where The Professor waits with a bottle of Lambrusco and a discourse on the relation of the space-time continuum to Cream of Wheat.

Priscilla asks if Megan wants a novel. .Novels? No, I haven’t any truck with novels! Megan says. I’m eighty-six years old; I haven’t time for fiction. Fact! Yes, fact is stranger than…Rasputin, take Rasputin. Strange. They couldn’t kill him, did you know…? They gave him poison, shot him six or seven times and still he’s on his legs. That Alexandra, she’s the one that caused the Russian revolution. She couldn’t keep her finger out. He was her pet, Rasputin

Coat and tie, thinks Alcide. And meet the public. He crosses at the corner of Hammond Street, and to calm himself he sits on a bench and feeds the pigeons pretzels from his pockets. Pigeons strut on their red legs. If there weren’t so many of them, Alcide thinks, you might say They were beautiful…Calm now, and, feeling both hunger and an urge, he thinks he’ll have the eggplant parmigiana, use the bathroom at Mama Josie”s.

A block away and suddenly the urge is…Merde! A woman with her little daughter by the hand is shrieking on the corner of Prospect and Newton.

Merde! Alcide fastens up his trousers. He’s done it neatly as any dog, there in the gutter, but now the woman’s screaming. Officer, this child has had to witness this filthy act! Her cry is taken up by the crowd that gathers, brings Lieutenants Langille and Mackle on their break in Dunkin Donuts. Yes, Ma’m, we’ll take him in. They pull him into the parking lot. We’ve told you, Mr. Arsenault. Here, get in the cruiser. This time we’ll have to take you in.

Merde, merde!

But instead they take him to Eulalie: Going to have to watch him, Missus.

Watch him! You try!

A woman’s little girl…

I turn my back a second!

Second time. A woman’s little girl…what can we do? We ought to take him to the station, book him on indecency… Officer Langille is blushing, softening, pushing him toward her. He’s a second cousin once removed.

At the Sunshine Club they’re making meatloaf, lemon jello. When I was in the hospital with my stroke, this little priest, his wafers in a leather case,surprises me, Megan tells Priscilla. Don’t you come in here, I told him. I’ve no dealings with your kind, not since I’m seventeen and on my own. An anticleric’s what my Louie used to call me. An honorable appellation, I would say. They’ve opened up old Galileo’s case again. Imagine it. We see it spinning out in space, this Earth, with our own eyes, and so they’ll reconsider whether possibly they made a little error back in l642.

Priscilla finds this very interesting but must get Winnie to the toilet. She tries to pull her panties down and sit her. Hah! cries Winnie, pulling them back up. I won’t have any funny business in me panties, thank you very much!

Of course they’d never even have the file on him, if Napoleon’s soldiers hadn’t sacked the Vatican, says Megan, to no one in particular.

A man in Indiana dials 7667—That’s Eulalie—wants to know her favorite color: Blue.

Her favorite dish?

That’s tuna melt. Why is he calling her, a perfect stranger…?

Research, Madame. It’s a research project. Station GVX in Terre Haute, to ascertain if people with the same digits in their phone numbers in different states have any other things in common. Has she children?

One.

Grandchildren? Wait a minute. Who is calling?

Research, Madame. Play a musical…?

She doesn’t. Number years completed school?

Eulalie hangs the phone up, mortified. She never reached the sixth.

Mir ist so wunderbar, Megan croons to Billy, hanging upside down. She wishes she could reproduce the dungeon whispers in Fidelio.

Rebecca takes a group from Sunshine Club to Mini Mart to get some napkins for the birthday party. Berta Bechtel skips and Bobby carries a flower that he’s picked. It must be nice in some ways, she thinks, to be retarded, get such a bang out of a little walk to the store. She takes Bobbie’s hand at the corner. It’s as soft and trusting as a baby’s.

Superstition. You find it everywhere, says Megan. And priests…

From the halls of Monte zu u ma…Berta Bechtel sings and skips

You take Montezuma, Megan says, You take the Aztecs. Montezuma just collapsed, turned over all he had to What’s-his-name…Cortez. Cortez invited him to wine and women, and he moaned, accepted. It was all ordained by stars, thought Montezuma… …to the shores of Tripoli… Berta Bechtel pushes the traffic button, brings the east and west-bound traffic to a halt on Main Street, once the Great Road..

Once the Great Road, a busy thoroughfare from earliest times, it was used by early settlers of Connecticut. It branched south in what is now Weston. Produce travelled it to Boston, and, in return, came sugar and molasses from the West Indies. A Bonaparte passed through Waltham on the Great Road in l804, and James Munroe, in l817

The little group from the Sunshine Club has crossed Nonantum Street, avoiding The Kisser, who is wearing his Red Sox uniform this morning, and has just purchased a packet of peanutbutter cups in the Myrtle Spa. He’s on his way to Mass at the French Church. There are some people that just laugh and allow him to buss them on the lips as he passes. Opinion about town is that he’s harmless, but Rebecca feels that mental health requires setting certain boundaries, and steers her charges well around him. He caught her once, as she was coming out of Grover Cronin’s. She looked up and there he…soft and gentle, not what she expected, not a dirty kiss. She takes Bobby’s hand to cross the river. Sun’s behind a cloud now. Going to be snow flowers, says Berta Bechtel, leaning over railing.

CONTINUED IN NEXT ISSUE

More Fiction