Kathleen Alcott: Infinite Home

Claudia, behind Paulie, made faces at Edward and Thomas, raked her teeth over her lips. The men looked at each other, mouthing words: Well? What now? The night had become, after the swiftness of the lights and sirens and the unremitting whip of the heat, very long.

After a minute Edith moved, her shoulder blades working, her feet flexing tentatively against cushioned sandals. “Oh, forgive me,” she said, picking up some unknown conversation where it had left off. “It’s gotten late.” As she climbed up the stairs, both hands on the left railing, her torso contorting to meet its line, she murmured, “Good night, good night,” and the sound of it paralyzed them, her inflection like that of a young woman turning in after a long, amorous outing in a car.

DECADES OF NEGLECT had left the property an elaborate obstacle course, and navigating it depended on delicacy and memory. Of the sixteen interior steps from top to bottom, two were unwise to use and rotted quietly. The tenants left these stairs to the wear inflicted by former occupants, as they did much of the leaning banister, which from any given angle revealed at least four layers of dark red paint. The wallpaper that ran along the stairs had not seen a change since the late sixties, when Edith had requested Declan install a pattern she’d fallen in love with: gold leaf details of trees, the background beige but made rich by the gaudy foliage, all of it smeared with a sluggish gleam. It hadn’t detached or discolored except at the base, where the sun reached it, and served as one last tribute to Declan’s craftsmanship, the forest he had pasted there to stand forever. The peeling door of each apartment was a different color, some by most definitions ugly and others slightly more palatable. Declan had insisted on this from the beginning, thought it a unique touch that spoke to his role as an eccentric. Edith’s was a deep royal blue the color of the Atlantic at a certain time of summer, Paulie’s a pastel pink nearing heartburn antidote that he called “The Terrific Tongue,” Edward’s a lavish purple he forever hated and for whose retirement he campaigned, Thomas’s a kitsch butter yellow he secretly found quite pleasant, and Adeleine’s a bath-tile green that suited her no matter what because after all it was a door she could close.

—

HAD SHE NOT BEGUN mentally confusing the words for appliances with those for breakfast items, had she continued as the attentive and reliable and well-liked landlord she once had been, Edith would have noticed. The turnover in the building had always been high; she had always kept around the ad she placed when an apartment opened, pulled it from the same bulging, marbled green file that held decades of obsolete lease agreements. She had liked this coming and going, especially the moment when she opened the door into the newly empty space, walked around it remembering her own first tour of the building. Had she not begun discovering her purse lodged in the freezer, her keys hidden in the forest of her potted plants, she would have understood that her current tenants were terribly intent on staying, that each of them had seemed to grow roots in an urban area known for a perennial turnover of wealth and identity, for changing impossibly around any fixed point. She might have observed that Edward retained a garish and incongruous set of silk curtains for most of a decade, and surmised he was waiting for the redheaded woman who’d lived with him to come back and take them down. Certainly, she would have recognized that Paulie’s sister, Claudia, had barely looked around the place before she signed the lease, most likely because there was no one else in the city who would rent to a strangely loquacious man of six-two with an eight-year-old’s disposition. She knew Thomas better than the rest of them, and she would have continued to visit him, seen the frames and canvases bulging from closets and cabinets, from under his couch and bed, and sensed the irrational belief he lived daily: that he had to stay in the place where the stroke had found him, where his gift had left him, in case it returned. She would have knocked on Adeleine’s door for never seeing her and concluded that the stockpiled cans of nonperishables, the desperate collection of coin banks and postcards, indicated a woman who kept her entire world close at hand.

But Edith didn’t and couldn’t — her incapacities growing each year — and still the tenants avoided the fourth and ninth steps, knew intimately the three important milestones in unlocking the front door, forgave the brokenness of their pre-war windows, placed pots under leaks and called the sounds of the water coming in familiar.

SINCE THE DAYS when Myrtle Avenue around the corner was nicknamed Murder for cautionary reasons, the days before crews from the city came to dismantle the yellow cane seats and leather hand straps of the elevated train, the days when men who built ships at the Navy Yard used to travel in packs with their cigarettes rolled up in their sleeves and curtsy at women and hoot, the days when several generations of family overflowed onto their stoops in the summer: sixty-six years she had spent at the same window. Of course there was much that remained: the magisterial art students from the nearby institute, their fashions shifting but their insolence and unwieldy bags of supplies the same; the steady pour, between six and seven o’clock, of those with jobs in Manhattan, the grunting up their stairs nearly collective.

At her core, Edith believed herself to be the same person she’d been at five, twelve, twenty-three, and so aging was mostly a point of interest, almost an entertainment were it not for its increasingly tangible interceptions in her daily life. Were these really her veins, a purple so bright as to seem inorganic? Her hair, thin and staticky, so reluctant to cooperate? She forgot sometimes: that these were hers, and more recently other things, gaps she found amusing or depressing, depending. Using a can opener became a deliberate, thought-through act; while reading, she had to concentrate, or else she was likely to follow some memory around a low-lit corner. Her daughter Jenny’s first birthday, the living room vibrant then and filled to the ceiling with balloons the baby didn’t know whether to carouse with or to fear. She and Declan, just married and new owners of the building, naked and sweating out August in one of the apartments yet to be rented, her linen dress balled under her head as a buffer between her tawny waves and the hardwood floor, his expression so different than when he’d courted her with flowers and offered handkerchiefs. How feverish her sister June’s eyes had gotten when she’d visited Brooklyn and then the city, how she’d marveled at Edith for going without hose and hailing black taxis. Owen, born second, surrounded by primary-colored blocks, content to play alone. The taxi he insisted on taking to college with money he’d saved.

Declan, an Irish drinker with a nervous heart besides, buried twelve years now, and Jenny gone or dead more years than Edith had actually known and held her. The same building, their apartment unchanged, though the spring before Declan died he’d had the whole thing repainted the color of milky coffee, had enjoyed sitting on the scaffolds with the men, yelling things down to her and passing emptied glasses of lemonade back through the windows. Theirs had been a protected love, this fact reliable to her since the Navy Yard produced vessels as tall as seventy men, and even after he collapsed, finally, while applying lather to his face with the wide-bristled brush. It was another object she kept in a box full of things that told her the story of her life, and she fingered it some afternoons and felt wildly envious or obsessively tender, it being the last item that had touched the perfect line of his jaw.