The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place Read online

  There! He had done it. Despite wanting to be sympathetic, despite not wanting to fan the flame of her anger, he had done it. But he was angry, too. Alums: six; outsiders: two. Greed should stop where good judgment begins.

  On the day that Uncle Alex negotiated a ride back to Epiphany, Mrs. Kaplan had assigned one of the kitchen staff to do the driving. But Jake, who had been doing cleanup around the office cabin and had overheard the greater part of his mother’s conversation with Uncle Alex, had insisted that it be he.

  The Towers and the Town

  nine

  Jake and I sat together on the back steps. We looked, just looked, for a long time. Then I said, “This is where I wanted to stay while my parents are in Peru.”

  Jake replied, “I can understand that. I would want to stay here too.”

  It was the time of year when the big-bellied, lanternshaped peppers hung heavily on their stems and bent them low. “Uncle Morris grows the peppers,” I said, “and Uncle Alex grows the roses.”

  “And the towers? Who did the towers?”

  “Both of them. They’ve been building them for forty-five years. They are older than my mother.” I pointed to the space that zagged between the third tower and the fence and said, “There’s room for a fourth.” Jake squinted and shielded his eyes to look in the direction I pointed. “It will be tall and slender so that it will fit in the space.” He studied the spot as if to visualize another tower. “Many of the pieces are ready. They’re in their basement workroom.”

  Jake’s focus shifted up and down and slowly around, but he didn’t take his eyes off the towers. Not even once. He rested his elbows on his thighs and folded his hands in front of him as if in prayer. He concentrated on the tower closest to the back porch steps. “What about the pendants?”

  “Uncle Alex does those. He uses a grindstone to shape the pieces and a little drill to make the holes for the copper wire to fasten them. Uncle Morris drills the holes through the pipes where they’re to be hung. They never discuss what they are going to do. They just argue over it. Every single piece. Uncle Morris asks, ‘You want it here?’ And he’ll point. Uncle Alex will step back and look squinty-eyed at what Uncle Morris is pointing to, and he’ll say, ‘No, here,’ and he’ll point to a spot that is an eighth of an inch away. ‘You want it here?’ Uncle Morris will say. ‘Isn’t that what I said?’ Uncle Alex will answer. ‘Are you sure? Because once I drill this hole, I can’t undrill it.’ Then Uncle Alex will step back again and say, ‘If you’re going to be so unsure, let me think about it.’ ‘I’m not unsure, you’re the one who’s unsure.’ Uncle Morris will throw up his hands and say, ‘Jaj, Istenem!’ which means Oh, my God, which he says a lot. They’re always fighting. The Uncles have been living together for as long as I’ve known them, which is all my life, and they’ve been arguing ever since. My mother says it’s worth the price of an opera ticket to watch them on pendant-hanging day. She loves the towers. So do I.”

  “Only a dead soul wouldn’t,” he said.

  “Then that would be my father,” I said.

  Jake was embarrassed. “I didn’t mean . . .”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “My father and the Uncles have issues.”

  My father thought that building the towers with clock faces that didn’t tell time was a waste of it. He was as relieved as I was hurt that my uncles did not put up an argument for my staying with them. He worried that if I lived with them for four weeks, I would never again remember to turn off the lights when I left a room and would never again be on time. He complained that they couldn’t keep track of keys, bills, appointments, or time. Especially time. Being on time was a religion to Father.

  My father spoke of time as a conception, and the only definition of conception I knew meant that time was something he had fathered. He was my father, and he was also Father Time. He worried about wasting time and running out of time. Mostly, he worried about losing time. When I was little, I used to think that someday I would find a picture of his lost child Time on a milk carton. To Father, time was meant to be saved. He saved time all the time. He never said what he did with all the time he saved, but no one ever asked because people always admire people who save time.

  To the Uncles, time was meant to be spent.

  When people asked my father—and I hated when they did—what he thought of the towers, he would say that they were not only “useless, superfluous, a supreme waste of time,” but also “an extravagant waste of money.”

  My mother’s attitude was: “Extravagant? Yes, the towers are extravagant, but that hardly makes them a waste of money. Every now and then, a person must do something simply because he wants to, because it seems to him worth doing. And that does not make it worthless or a waste of time. It’s true, the towers have no function. They do not give shelter. Neither does the statue of David. They don’t hold up telephone wires. Neither does the Eiffel Tower. And the rose windows of Notre Dame don’t let in enough light to read fine print. But by my definition, that doesn’t make them useless or superfluous either. The towers are there simply because they are worth doing. Without them, my world would be less beautiful and a lot less fun.”

  A lingering sense of loyalty to my father kept me from telling Jake all of that. Instead, I asked, “Jake, have you ever seen the rose windows of Notre Dame?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “They’re glass, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. Windows usually are.”

  Windows usually are. Of course windows are glass. Embarrassed beyond words, I studied Jacob Kaplan because now that I was sure that he had neither Asperger’s nor fragile X, I wondered if he had a problem with sarcasm. Chronic sarcasm could be the symptom of a syndrome—even though I didn’t know the name for that syndrome—if there was a name, if there was a syndrome.

  The next thing Jake said was, “I’ve seen pictures of the rose windows of Notre Dame in my art history courses.”

  He wasn’t being sarcastic. Not at all! “I’ve always dreamed of having a window of a rose,” I confessed.

  “It’s not a window of a rose,” he explained. “The traceries, the ornamental stonework that holds the colored glass in place, radiate out from a center circle like the petals of an open rose. That’s why they’re called rose windows.”

  “If the colored glass isn’t a rose, what is it?”

  “At Notre Dame, one of the big rose windows has a picture of the Virgin in the center. Notre Dame means Our Lady. As I understand it, she is encircled by figures from the Old Testament.”

  I thought about that. I said, “The figures from the Old Testament would be all right, but Our Lady wouldn’t be. My uncles are Jewish.”

  “So is my father,” Jake said.

  “Oh, really?” I said. “I’m just the opposite. I have a Jewish mother and a Presbyterian father.”

  “Well,” Jake replied, “I wouldn’t say we’re opposite. We’re both half-and-half. I’d say that we are mirror images.”

  That remark made me very happy, and I didn’t want to add anything to it, so I didn’t. Instead, I told him, “I thought that the rose windows were windows of a rose. That’s what I’ve always wanted: a window of a rose. Rose is my middle name.”

  “I know.”

  “It is also my uncles’ last name.”

  “I know.”

  “My uncles never had children, and they don’t want Rose to die.”

  “Neither do I,” he said. He said nothing more for a minute. He studied the towers, and then he turned to me and said, “You could have a rose ceiling, Margaret.”

  I had heard about glass ceilings. They were what women in the workplace had to break through. “You don’t mean glass, do you?”

  “Not glass, Margaret. Paint. I could paint a rose on your ceiling. One giant rose to cover your whole ceiling. The way I used to paint billboards.”

  I sighed deeply and said, “A rose rose ceiling is exactly what I’ve always wished for.”

  “Then you will have it,�
� he said emphatically. “Rose rose it will be. It will be painted in multiple shades of passionate rose.”

  Multiple shades of passionate rose. That was even more than I had hoped for.

  “But I will need a scaffold.”

  I said, “My uncles will make you one. They have enough pipe in the basement to make any kind you want.” I knew without asking that if I asked my uncles to make a scaffold so that I could hang the moon, their only reservation would be that they believed that I had hung it already.

  “I’ll start on it this week. Wednesday is my day off. I’ll come every Wednesday until it’s done.”

  I said, “I’d hate for you to give up your day off for this.” I, of course, did not at all hate the idea of his giving up his day off to come to Schuyler Place to paint my ceiling. I loved it.

  Jake replied, “I won’t be giving it up, I’ll be filling it up.”

  I wanted to throw my arms around him and kiss him, and I would have if I had not wanted to so badly.

  ten

  We ate in the kitchen. For as long as I could remember, the Uncles had never dined in their dining room, so the four of us crowded around an old enamel-top table. We sat on wooden folding chairs that had not been manufactured since the invention of plastic. The slats were scratched, and their color had mellowed beyond yellow to mustard. But there was a linen cloth on the table. The napkins were linen too. The dishes were china; the glasses, crystal; and the silverware was sterling. The food was served family-style from antique tureens and platters and presented with a panache that would have been the pride of any four-star restaurant in Epiphany—if Epiphany had had a four-star restaurant.

  Jake could hardly wait to find out more about the towers. He started by asking when they got started.

  Morris was pleased that he had asked when and not why. There was no why. “It was a long time ago,” he said. “I started shortly after we bought the house.”

  “It was a Glass house,” Uncle Alex added.

  “A glass house made of wood?” Jake asked.

  “A Glass house because it was built by the Tappan Glass Works.”

  Uncle Morris said, “I didn’t hear this man ask you who built the house. I thought I heard him ask when did we start the towers.”

  Looking sheepish, Uncle Alex answered, “He did. He asked when.”

  “Can I continue?”

  “You can, and you may.”

  “So, if I may,” Uncle Morris said, casting fish-eyes at his brother. “I started shortly after we moved into the house. Wilma, my wife, had died. I wanted to do something. I didn’t even know what. I just knew it was not going to be small like a watch or exact like a clock. So one day I started. What I was building, I wasn’t sure. An idea I had, but not a plan; so even before I decided what it was I was doing, I found out. I was building towers. They became as they grew.”

  —the Glass house

  Like every other house in the neighborhood, the house at 19 Schuyler Place had been built and owned by the Tappan Glass Works. The company rented them to its workers until the factory was moved to the other side of the lake. Then the houses were sold. Like the Uncles, most of the people who bought them were immigrants to whom owning a home meant owning a piece of America.

  Every house was tall and narrow and faced the street straight on. Every house had a front porch with four steps leading up to it, a mailbox nailed to the wall by the front door, and a metal box that sat on the floor of the porch near the steps. Milkmen delivered milk in glass bottles into the metal boxes, and mailmen carried heavy leather pouches that they lightened, one letter at a time, as they walked up and then down each flight of front porch steps.

  The neighbors helped each other out in the small ways that neighbors can and the ways that friendly ones do. They held keys to each others’ houses, and borrowed cups of sugar and shared cookies, casseroles, and the produce from their gardens.

  They called each other “Mr.” and “Mrs.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Bevilaqua lived at 17 Schuyler Place, and Mr. and Mrs. Vanderwaal lived at number 21.

  Alex said, “We had once a jewelry store downtown, only one block away from Town Square. We called our store Jewels Bi-Rose. We loved the name. Bi was a play on English words. B-I means two and is also a homonym for buy, B-U-Y, and for B-Y”

  Morris pointed his chin in his brother’s direction. “That one took care of the crystal and china. We had a bridal registry. I took care of the fine jewelry and watches.”

  Alex added, “Business at Jewels Bi-Rose was very personal. Half the diamond engagement rings and place settings of china sold in Epiphany came from Jewels Bi-Rose. That’s the way it was before the days of discount stores and universal credit cards. Things were personal. If a customer wasn’t satisfied with something, he complained to us, not to his lawyer. People who were our friends and neighbors were also our customers. Back then, when we had our store, one person could be all three—a friend, a neighbor, and a customer.”

  “Downtown was booming,” Uncle Morris said.

  “Business at Jewels Bi-Rose was good. Very good. Morris kept a watch repair shop in the back of Jewels Bi-Rose. People from all over Clarion County came to him to get their watches repaired. And then there were the clocks.”

  “I repaired the big clocks,” Morris explained. “The ones that were on the sides of buildings or in steeples or on top of columns at street corners. I’ve been to towns in Maine and Tennessee, and once I went to Des Moines, Iowa, to fix a clock in a bank tower. Nowadays banks aren’t built to look like banks. They are built to look like bungalows with drive-through carports. Nobody puts a clock on a bungalow.”

  Alex added, “My brother can repair chimes—a lost art.” He studied Jake for a minute. “It’s probably hard for a young man like yourself to believe that people once relied on the face of a public clock to tell them the time of day. And before clocks, there were mill whistles and church chimes. Time was measured in sections: mornings, afternoons, and nights. It wasn’t too many years ago that measuring time by the quarter hour was accurate enough for most things, and the minute hand was good for boiling eggs.”

  “The second hand was invented as a form of persecution,” Morris said.

  Jacob laughed. “What do you have to say about nanoseconds?”

  “Useless! You can’t even say nanosecond in a nanosecond. Can a horse win a race by a nose and a nanosecond?” Jake shook his head. “In a nanosecond, can I even tell our little Margaret Rose that we are glad she is back here with us?” He reached over and patted my hand.

  “How did you find the time to do the towers?” Jake asked.

  “By not being in a hurry,” Alex said. “That’s how you find the time.”

  Uncle Morris pushed his chair back from the table and got up. He went to the kitchen counter to start the coffee. He ground the beans and set them into a filter and poured boiling water over them. Like the ancient Japanese tea ceremony, no part of the ritual was to be rushed. As we waited, I got up from the table to clear the dinner dishes. Jake got up too. “My job,” I said. “You must sit still while they do coffee and dessert, or my uncles will think you’re in a hurry. My uncles do not believe in hurrying any part of dinner.”

  As he was setting out the cups and saucers, Uncle Morris said, “Alex, my brother, he never asked me what I was doing. Never a question. What he was doing, what I was doing, we never discussed.”

  “Even when we dug the foundation for the first tower,” Alex said, “even after we sank the first pilings, we never discussed it.”

  Morris said, “During World War II, we couldn’t build much because the country needed all the scrap metal for the war effort. Then one day Alex started making pendants. The first ones were from the broken china and crystal that we had in our store. As it was with the towers, so it was with the pendants, also. My brother pointed to a spot. I knew what to do. Without discussion, I knew what he wanted. I drilled a hole, and we hung a pendant.”

  Alex said, “No rehearsals.”
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  “After he used up the broken pieces we had from the shop, he started buying glass and bottles from flea markets.”

  “Noxzema used to come in a pretty blue-glass jar,” Alex said. “Also Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia. They use blue plastic now. But most of the cobalt blue glass you see there is from those old jars. I like to mix the colors and also to mix glass and porcelain and the metal parts from Morris’s old clocks.”

  “I saved all the old parts,” Morris said. “Worn-out gears, I saved, and balance wheels. Sometimes there were chimes.”

  “There is a part inside a clock that is called an escape wheel. It is round and has sawteeth. I loved when Morris had one of those. Those I made into a feature attraction.”

  “And you didn’t love when I brought home a balance spring?”

  “Of course I loved the balance springs.” He turned to Jake and pleaded, “Did you hear me say I didn’t love the balance springs?”

  Jake didn’t know if he was to answer or not. Instead, he said, “The mix is good. I like it a lot.”

  Morris grunted. “The balance wheels, he bound with wire, and these he hung on the towers like earrings.”

  Alex nodded. “Yes, like earrings.”

  “Did you hang them so that some of them would strike one another like wind chimes?”

  Alex got a faraway look in his eyes. “They sing, you know. When the wind blows, the towers sing. The wind decides the pitch. When it blows strong, the heavy ones sing bass and compete with the crystal, which is a soprano.” He smiled to himself.

  “Was that deliberate or a happy accident?” Jake asked. Alex shrugged his Old World shrug. “The answer is yes and no. It just happened; it was worked out; it was an accident; it was planned. Maybe an accident led to a plan. Maybe the accident was part of a greater plan. Who knows?”

  Uncle Morris said, “The Noxzema looks pretty, but it makes a clunky sound. To the Noxzema and the Milk of Magnesia, you shouldn’t listen.”