The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place Read online

  I said that I had a home number, but when Loretta’s business hours were over and the administray assist was off duty, my uncles were home, and I didn’t want to make or receive calls then. And that’s when Peter Vanderwaal volunteered to be my go-between. “Give me that number, and I’ll be your administrative assistant, darling, and you can just go about your business of stopping the demolition.” I thanked him, and he said, “Nothing to it. I’m coming home this weekend to light a fire under a few art professors at Clarion State University. They should be mounting the barricades instead of sitting on their writing hands. I hope to shame them into becoming active.”

  “Will I see you?” I asked.

  “You tell me when to come, and we’ll have a secret visit in the Tower Garden. You’ll recognize me even though I don’t look at all like that picture in my mother’s office. I probably don’t look like anyone you’ve ever seen. I have a diamond stud in my left ear; I always wear a bow tie; and I shave my head. But, trust me, you’ll find me adorable.”

  I could hardly wait.

  He was pinker and rounder than I had pictured him in my mind, but he was everything else I had hoped he would be. When he said we—as in “We ought to go to Summit Street and get a latte’—that we meant him, Peter, and me, Margaret, and the latte meant a cup of coffee with a lot of steamy milk in it served in a special glass with a metal holder.

  As we sat at the small round table that was outside the restaurant, I put my elbows on the table, leaned forward, and stared deeply into Peter’s eyes. He was so fascinating. “How is your father’s dialysis?” I asked.

  “Oh, he’s all right. It sure keeps Mother busy, and that’s good.”

  “Why is that good?”

  “What with all the care she has to give Dad, I don’t think she wants grandchildren at the moment, so she doesn’t keep asking me when I’m going to get married. Mothers are so needy.”

  I let my wrist go limp as I dangled my latte spoon in my right hand. “You don’t care for children?”

  “I can stand a few of them as individuals, but, God forgive me, not in groups.”

  I stirred my drink and took a sip and, in my best movie-star manner, looked at Peter over the rim of my glass before putting it down. “That’s fascinating. I thought the very same thing after my experience with Talequa.”

  “Talequa? What’s a Talequa?”

  “It’s a summer camp where I was being warehoused.” “Well,” Peter said, “I had a summer camp experience once. Day camp. Two weeks. It was not pleasant, but then, neither was I.”

  “Oh!” I said, marveling at how much we had in common. “I was called incorrigible.”

  “How did you escape?”

  “Uncle Alex rescued me.”

  “Well, Margaret Rose, you must regard all of life’s experiences as corners in the maze of life. Round the corner or bump into it. It’s all part of getting there.”

  “Getting where?”

  “To being grown up.”

  “Is being grown up worth it?”

  “You betcha.”

  “Why?”

  “Because grown-ups get to make all the movies, get to lead all the orchestras, and get to get their ears pierced without asking permission.”

  We laughed, and I decided that we were the two most sophisticated people drinking lattes at a little round table on the pedestrian mall in all of Epiphany and possibly France. “Has Loretta told you what she has planned to do to save the towers?”

  “No. She’s a lawyer, you know. You can’t wedge a toothpick between her lips if her lips are sealed. She just keeps telling me that I am Phase Two. As if repetition is the mother of intervention.”

  “She keeps telling me that I am Phase One.”

  “And she is Phase Three. And the only hint she will give me is that her famous Phase Three has something to do with Infinitel, and that she has to make a presentation to the board of directors. Poor thing. I, too, have a board of directors. The funny thing is that they love me so much they expect me to tell them what I want, and then they expect me to ask their permission to do it. Have you ever had to deal with a board?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “the board of education. And from what I read in the papers, they can’t agree on anything except how many days we are to spend in school.” What I was saying was not exactly true because at that point in my life, I never read the paper. (If I had, I would have had at least a hint that the towers were coming down.)

  Peter looked at his watch, a huge thing as big as a sundial with enough bells and whistles to run a railroad. “I have an appointment with two professors from the Art Department and two from the History Department. I hope to get their signatures on the CPC petition today so that I can get it into my mother’s hands. She’s promised to sneak it on to the city council agenda when they meet next time. What time did you say your uncles get home?”

  “On Saturdays, they both stay until closing. They won’t be getting home until about ten.”

  “Good,” Peter said. “I’ll be bringing by four professors—two from art and two from history—later this afternoon. I want to show them what a treasure we have here in Old Town.”

  “That will be fine,” I said. “You have my permission.”

  Peter, who had just raised his arm toward the waitress to signal for the check, let his hand go limp. “Permission?” he asked.

  “Yes. If I didn’t give my permission, they would be trespassing. I own the towers now. I bought them this past week. I have the bill of sale in my underwear drawer. It’s notarized.”

  “You own the towers?”

  “Yes. Loretta insisted that I buy them.”

  “She did, did she? I wish she had asked me to buy them.”

  “Why?”

  “I would have loved to own them. I would be their proud possessor—even if only for a little while. Do you think that’s just too, too romantic?”

  I replied, “‘’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’”

  “Ah, yes! Tennyson,” he said. He got a faraway look in his eyes, and then he snapped back to attention. “In the meantime, you have Phase One to carry out: Stop them. And I have Phase Two: Stall them. Stop and Stall. Has a good ring to it.” The waitress came and gave Peter the check. He paid with cash, piling the bills on top of the tab. “Margaret Rose, my dear, when I was growing up on Schuyler Place, I never once thought that there would come a day when I would spend three dollars for a cup of coffee—and enjoy it! But then, I never knew that the daughter of my chum Naomi Landau would provide me with such charming company. Now I’m off to meet the supremes of academe.”

  “Are they rainmakers?”

  “They think they are, but frankly, my dear, all four of them together couldn’t fill a latte cup with piss.”

  twenty-one

  On the Tuesday evening before Jake’s next visit, the Uncles walked around their garden. Tartufo ran figure eights around the base of Towers One and Two. Uncle Alex held his hands behind his back and scanned the towers top to bottom. “On Thursday,” he said, “the workmen will come to wrap the towers in netting to keep loosened pieces from falling on someone. This old Tower Garden will become a hard-hat area.”

  Uncle Morris examined his pepper plants. “Some of these will rot,” he said. “Let them.” Then he had a second thought. “Tell Jake to help himself to whatever he wants. He can take some back to Talequa.”

  “You can tell him yourself, Uncle. He’ll be here early in the morning.”

  “No, I’ll be at the mall. The Mall Association decided to have a Bastille Day Blowout. Uncle Alex and I will both work both shifts. We’ll be gone all day Wednesday to prepare and all day Thursday, hopefully to sell.”

  Uncle Alex told me that he was counting on me to take care of Tartufo both days.

  That meant that Jake and I would have all day to carry out our plans instead of having to crowd the work into the hours between the time Uncle Alex left and Uncle Morris came home.

 
; “Jaj, Istenem!” Uncle Morris said. “Twelve hours of being cooped up in the Time Zone with my brother makes me wish I was an only child. By the second day, I fear that I may arrange it.”

  When Jake arrived, we wasted no time in putting our plan into action.

  We had chosen Tower Two, and we had chosen a height that was above the rooftops but where the tower was still wide enough for a platform that would allow enough space to store all of my supplies and still give me room to sit or lie down.

  Jake climbed up first and measured the span between the uprights. Then together we went to the basement to choose boards that were long enough to rest easily on the rungs. There were not enough of them, so we hurried to the lumber store and had planks cut to the correct lengths.

  When we returned with the lumber, Tartufo would not let me out of his sight. He circled my legs, as twitchy as an ADD, an Attention Deficit Dog.

  After assembling all the boards, we constructed a platform by lifting planks from my bedroom window to the rungs of Tower Two that were just above the height of the window. From inside the room, I pushed them through the open window at an angle that allowed Jake to reach down, grab them, and lift them into place. After two were down, he lashed them to each other and to the horizontal rungs. The knots—hitch knots—tightened when pulled.

  “Impressed?” he asked.

  “Very.”

  “I was a Boy Scout. Surprised?”

  “Very.”

  When the last of the boards was in place and tied down, Jake bounced up and down a few times and declared, “Sturdy enough for one twelve-year-old and her supplies.” My living space would be a square platform, four feet on a side.

  Finally, we laid a wide board to reach from the platform to the open bedroom window to use as a gangplank. It rested at a steep angle, which made navigating dangerous, but by being cautious and by not hurrying, we managed to transfer all my accumulated supplies without a single slip.

  We worked from a list I had prepared: a poncho for rain; an umbrella for sun; water (lots of water); crackers, beef jerky, and trail mix; a Walkman; three books from my summer reading list; my documents of ownership in a gallon-size Ziploc plastic bag; a flashlight; and a stack of cottage cheese containers with lids.

  Without a word, Jake picked up the stack of cottage cheese containers and carried it down the plank, across the bedroom, down the stairs, and into the kitchen, where he deposited it in the trash on his way to his truck, which was parked in the alley. I waited on the platform, wondering.

  Jake returned with two things: a chemical toilet and a tarpaulin that he used to cover furniture and floors when he was painting. “I’ll drape this over three sides of the platform. I’ll leave the side next to the house open. That should give you enough privacy for when you use this,” he said, pointing to the chemical toilet. “Tillie has an inventory of these things for camping trips at Talequa. I borrowed one.”

  I was too embarrassed to say something and too grateful not to. I said, “Köszönöm,” a simple “thank you” in Hungarian, and he understood.

  “I told you I was once a Boy Scout. We were trained to help ladies in distress.”

  It was late afternoon when we finished. Jake did some work on his drawing of the rose as I warmed up leftovers for our supper. We had little to say to each other as we ate, but Tartufo made up for our quiet. He whimpered. He pranced around my legs, his nails clattering on the kitchen linoleum like hail hitting a tin roof. He was demanding more attention than I had time or patience for. I knew I had to give him a good long walk. I invited Jake to come along. “Sure,” he said, lighting a cigar on his way out. He took the leash from me as soon as we were out the door.

  “Let me,” I said. “It will be our last walk for a while.” Jake turned the leash back over to me. I was relieved to have something to do that kept me from linking arms with him.

  We walked down one side of Schuyler Place, and as we passed number 17, I told him about my failure as a starter baby-sitter. We walked back on the other side of the street. Jake stopped at the same spot as I had the week before. He gazed over the rooftops at Tower Two. Some of the glass pendants caught tiny pinpoints of light from the streetlamp, and the slight breeze set some of them to trembling like wind chimes. Jake shook his head. “How could anyone—anyone—believe that taking those towers down would improve the neighborhood?”

  “Some of us don’t.”

  “And at the moment, Margaret Rose Kane, we are the sum of the some.” And with that, he swept me up into his arms and carried me across the street. It would have been as romantic as a groom carrying a bride across a threshold if Tartufo had not gone wild and nipped at Jake’s heels all the way.

  When we returned to the platform, we again checked the supplies against my list. Tartufo wailed so long and loud that Jake slammed the bedroom window down onto the plank that was resting on the sill. He succeeded in muffling the sound slightly. At last he asked, “Are you ready?” My throat was too dry to answer, so I nodded yes. I put the heavy athletic sock from my uncles’ box on my right foot, and folded down the cuff once and then again. Jake looked at me for a final okay before locking one hoop of the cuffs to my ankle and the other to the vertical post of Tower Two.

  He pocketed the key and climbed back down the plank and through the bedroom window. Before he could pull the plank back through, Tartufo jumped, and in one giant leap he landed on the plank on three of his four feet. He did not take his eyes off me as he scratched and scrambled and reassembled his hindquarters. All of my outer self was frozen with fear, but my stomach roiled like a tsunami and my heart pounded like surf erupting on shore. At last Tartufo managed to get all four paws on the plank and made his way grandly—head held high—onto the platform by my side.

  “Get back here,” Jake yelled.

  “Must he?” I asked.

  “Of course he must. You can’t keep him up there.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, Tartufo can’t use a cottage cheese container or a chemical toilet.”

  “How are you going to get him back?”

  “I’ll climb back up there, get behind him, and shove.”

  “What if he slides off the plank and falls?”

  “What if I do?”

  “You won’t.”

  “Neither will he.”

  “Uncle Alex asked me to take care of him.”

  “He’s going to be no end of trouble.”

  “But he’ll also be good company.”

  Jake was tired. He had no energy left to convince me, so he shrugged and pulled the plank through the bedroom window. “That dog is going to be no end of trouble,” he repeated, half to himself, half to the almostrose ceiling. He slammed the window shut, locked it from the inside, and left.

  I stood upright, high up in the night sky, feeling as if the mild summer breeze could pass through my ribs as easily as it did the ribs of Tower Two. I reached over to Tartufo. “Well, we’ve done it,” I said. At that moment I could not have said whether done it meant that I was where I wanted to be or that I had alienated the last person in the world that I wanted to.

  Nine Points

  twenty-two

  It was a long night.

  How could I have known how much having a leg fastened to the tower would cramp my sleeping style? How could I have known that I had a sleeping style? Tartufo’s insistence on keeping close company didn’t help either. Around ten thirty, I heard my uncles’ muffled voices as they entered the darkened house. I’m sure they saw my closed bedroom door and decided not to disturb me. I heard Uncle Alex calling for Tartufo.

  In the dim light from the streetlamp, I saw Tartufo lift his head. His ears perked up. I held my breath. I did not want to be discovered until it was too late for them to do anything about it. “Shush,” I whispered. Then, as I had often heard Uncle Alex do, I spoke to him in his native language, using the only word I knew. “Capisci?” The calling stopped. Uncle Alex must have gone to bed thinking that Tartufo was with
me behind the closed door of my bedroom. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “It’s all right,” I repeated. Tartufo wagged his tail and laid his head in the narrow parting of his front paws.

  • • •

  Even though I was certain that I had not slept a wink all night, I later reasoned that I must have. Otherwise, why would I remember being awakened by the sound of men’s voices? The first thing I saw was Tartufo, up on all fours, standing at attention, waiting for instructions to bark or not to. I held my finger over my lips, and Tartufo sat down, his ears forward. What a good dog he was. How could Jake have said that he would be no end of trouble? He was a comfort and a companion.

  I lifted a corner of the tarp and saw three men standing outside the fence, resting their forearms on its top rail. They seemed to be studying the towers. The morning breeze had shifted, and their conversation came to me in puffs of sound.

  “. . . never seen nothing like this . . .”

  “Why . . . want to take them down?”

  “. . . not safe ...”

  “. . . neighborhood look bad . . .”

  “. . . look good to me . . .”

  The men took rolls of yellow tape out of the back of their truck, opened the back gate, and came inside the yard. They started stretching the tape from post to post along the fence. It looked like the CRIME-SCENE tape I had seen on the TV news. I was too far away to read what it said, but I believed that what these men were about to do was a crime, and any tape that said so was perfectly suitable. (I later learned that it said CAUTION.)

  Tartufo was quiet until the man who had been sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck came into the yard. And then he began to bark. Tarfufo knew a villain when he saw one. He got louder and louder and more and more insistent. The men holding the rolls of yellow plastic tape began to back away. In another minute, Uncle Alex, in bare feet and a short terry-cloth robe, came to the back door. Uncle Morris, similarly dressed, followed. Uncle Morris’s comb-over stood up like a cockscomb. The two of them shielded their eyes with their hands and focused on the source of Tartufo’s barking.