8
The grantor was someone named Randall Freezy and he had been in title for over fifty years. I read through the description and looked at the attached survey which included two parcels, the house and the building with its lot that ran down to the river and back to the railway right of way, which was marked ‘abandoned’. The signature was notarized and stamped and the deed had a raised seal stamp on it initialed by some unknown civil service worker. There was a liber and page number on the upper right-hand corner and it all looked official to me, though I hadn’t seen a deed in several years.
The sun was almost hot and I sat absorbed in the moment, the stone step solid under me and the big house looming behind me. I turned and looked up at it, three stories high in the front though I knew it tapered back to two in the rear, the roof unseen behind a stone arched cornice with a medallion of some kind at its peak. The fairy tale quality of the morning abruptly vanished as I contemplated the place and the thatch of papers in my hand. I got up and went to the door’s window and cupping my eyes, tried to peer in, but there was a curtain.
There was a deadbolt lock with a big round brass escutcheon with the name Stockton Lock engraved into it. I took the key out from under my shirt and stuck it into the lock. It slid in and turned with some effort and I heard the bolt sit back in its place as I turned the knob and pushed the door open, breathing in a lungful of musty air.
The door opened to stair hall to the left, tiled in black and white, with a pair of pocket doors to the right, open to a living room, dimly lit. I left the door ajar and went into the room. It had very high ceilings. I pulled the heavy old curtains on the windows aside and light washed the room revealing an old elegant house, mostly empty of furniture. A marble mantle on the right wall and some wall sconces and a round glass dome fixture on the ceiling. I looked into the sconces and they were wired with modern fixtures and bulbs. A panel of switches by the door, also modern (I had expected pushbuttons) turned the lights on. There was power.
I stood and looked around, not feeling right about roaming around this place in spite of having a deed and a key in hand. There was no way this was mine, nor did owning it appeal at the moment. I noticed a bowl on the mantle, picked it up. It was heavy and made of hammered copper with a lid. I almost dropped it in surprise because I had held this thing before, many times. My father had made it when I was just a small child. It was one of the things I had searched for in my mother’s house when he died a few years ago, wanting something from his hand.
You wonder, when faced with overwhelming and unplanned-for events, how much more can keep coming and how you can possibly take it in. It almost always turns out that a lot more than you think can happen, and that you can survive it over time. Certain friends’ horrendous divorces come to mind– and illnesses. And it’s not just negative events. I’ve always had a fascination with lottery winners who have gone on to destroy their lives with their unexpected largesse, blowing it so quickly you wonder if they just wanted to get rid of it. It occurred to me that I could walk out, lock the door and go home and forget about the whole thing. But there was no way.
I took the lid off the bowl. It fit snugly. I remembered the ringing click it made when you snapped it open and shut, a sound I had not heard for 30 years. And the hand of it, all memories, as new as the last time I felt them. There was a roll of paper inside, bills apparently, quite a few. I took it out. Hundreds, bundled with a rubber band that disintegrated when I stretched it to pull it off. Nothing else inside, no convenient message.
I counted the money. $3800 in old bills with none of the technological tricks woven in that made the newer ones oddly phony looking. Another windfall. I looked around for a spot to stash them and pushed them above the shade of one of the wall sconces. The bowl I kept, knowing my claim was entirely legitimate, at least to this one thing. And I might have fought you for it, so powerfully did it embody my father, always making things, always reading things, always poking around in odd places. He’d had a deadly boring job all his life but raised us well and when he saw the chance to retire early he left without a glance back and got another 25 years of life without that office.
A dining room with a big old table covered in sheets. Chairs lined up against a wall. A butler’s pantry with a lavatory off to the side. Walk through into a kitchen, last remodeled perhaps in the sixties, with incongruous burnt orange counters and an electric range. Very dusty but not dirty, any of it.
There was a round table with two old chairs in the kitchen. I sat at it and looked out the window into the back. This house was a mirror of Maria’s and I might have been sitting at her table peering at a blank book.
A door in the stair hall opened into a passage that took me into the warehouse. There was a small office walled off in the far corner, otherwise it was open space punctuated by large wooden columns that held up great wooden beams perhaps 14 or 15 feet above the concrete floor. The construction told me it was turn of the century or older. The room was entirely empty as I walked across to the office. It had a dutch door and a window looking out into the warehouse space. The door was unlocked and I went in. If it weren’t for the dust and the overgrown windows that might once have looked out on the river, I’d have thought the occupant had just walked out for lunch. If this was the case it was a long lunch. A desk was strewn with yellowed papers and an old typewriter stood on a table of its own in the corner. Two large file cabinets and a sink and toilet in an alcove. I tried the water but nothing came out.
Curious, I sat on the old oak office chair and surveyed the desk. The first drawer I opened contained an old pack of cigarettes, Luckies, one of those ashtrays set in a beanbag and a bottle of bourbon, half empty. The papers were bills of lading, invoices and other business documents with the RF Freezy Co. label on them. Nothing much to look at but they might reveal what business the Freezy Co. conducted. But I had no interest in getting into that right now. I felt a sudden urge to get back to the house and back to my world. It was getting hotter and I felt drowsy and in need of some fresh air. I had a sudden irrational thought that I should not drowse off in here, that I might awake in another time and light a cigarette as I woke up, though I have never smoked. I got up and left the office and walked quickly back to the house. The door in the hallway locked from the inside and I made sure it was secure. Carrying my bowl and the abstract, I locked the house and walked up the hill, leaving an extremely odd morning behind me.
“Are you the one that bought the Freezy place?”
The voice, hacksaw raw and cigarette tinged, came from the porch of the third house up the hill, one that had escaped being boarded up. I looked over to see an ancient black woman in an old lawn chair with a thin cigar in her mouth. During our conversation the cigar never left her mouth. It was fascinating to see how she spoke without losing it.
“Not exactly.”, I answered, conscious of the sheaf of papers in one hand and the copper bowl in the other. “More like the person who apparently owns the place. I didn’t buy it.”
“Did Randall give it to you? That old bird...”
She seemed to contemplate this for a minute.
“You’re a mover, aren’t you.” She looked hard at me and exhaled an enormous amount of smoke. For a moment it hovered around her head and then disappeared with a puff of air.
Before I could answer she said, “Of course you are. That’s why he did it. Baited the trap with the only thing he had left I guess.”
“I found the deed and title in the mailslot with my name on it. And someone sent me a key in the mail with no explanation. And then I was given an address...” She interrupted me.
“Given by whom. Who gave you the address?”
“Miriam at the coffee shop up the street.”
She contemplated this.
“Interesting.”
She proceeded to think out loud.
“Randall gives him the house and building. The girl gives him the address. A key shows up in the mail. How does the mail get over there? There’s a question.”
She looks at me again.
“How many times have you been here?”
I think for a minute.
“Three that I know of but Maria said she knew me..”
“Maria? Redhead Maria? She’s Randall’s niece. She lives around the corner in his other property. After he left 67 he moved into her basement, at least it’s hers now, and then he disappeared. Seven, eight years ago. Probably dead now.”
She said this very matter of factly. I looked at her.
“He was an old man and he went back and forth too much. Trying to find people, as usual.”
She said this as though it explained everything and got up after crushing her cigar into the wooden porch railing.
“Wait,” I said, “I have some questions.”
She looked at me.
“No time now, my show is on. Welcome to the neighborhood. Call me Elissa. See you.”
She went in and shut the door affirmatively. I stood out in the street in the sun, suddenly aware that it was still morning, and that these events had taken little more than an hour. I continued up the street, stuffing the title into my back pocket and cradling the bowl in my hand. It occurred to me that I could simply leave, go home, place it on my mantle and forget the whole thing. At least that seemed a tempting option though I could not see how I could erase this stuff from my head, not with my father’s handiwork staring me in the face after being gone for 40 years or more. And I couldn’t ask him or my mom, both gone now. I felt suddenly very lonely and began to walk faster towards the street above, mentally shaking off a kind of sloth that had descended on me as I entered Astarte Way. I felt a strong need to see some hustle and bustle, to drink another coffee, eat a danish and get a clear explanation of what the hell was going on.
I reached the main street, turned right and found myself outside of Maria’s house. I peered down the stairs going under the stoop but they were blocked with an array of clay flower pots filled with dirt and the remains of last year’s annuals. It was obvious that no one had been down there in quite some time.
“Admiring my garden?”
The voice came up the sidewalk. It was Maria. Or Maris. Whatever.
“Just looking for answers.”
I took on a firm attitude that I did not feel. In the morning light she was strikingly beautiful. She handed me a cup of coffee, one of two she carried.
“Miriam told me you were around so I grabbed a coffee in case I found you. Let’s sit on the stoop. It’s too nice to go in.”
I took it and gratefully took a long drink.
“I’ve been trying to reach you.”, I said, “I came here with Maris but you weren’t around.”
She spoke slowly. “You came here with Maris? And I wasn’t around? What did she want? And how do you know Maris?”
Before I could answer she quickly added “I know you’ve found out about the mover thing. Maris must have figured it out.”
I sat silent for a moment thinking this through. I felt a strong feeling that I was in dangerous waters here, waters I had never navigated before. For some reason I felt that I should be as mysterious, or cautious- call it what you will- as everyone else seemed to be. There was something being held back, something possibly momentous. Perhaps they thought (and catching myself lumping them together as ‘they’ instantly struck me as being melodramatic) that they would scare me away. It didn’t sound like there were a lot of movers around or rememberers for that matter, whatever they are. Shifting gears, I answered her questions with a question.
“What is a rememberer? Do they remember things?”
She didn’t look at me but gazed out at the street scene bathed in morning sun.
“They can’t forget, that’s their curse but that’s not why they are different. They help us remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Who and where we are. So many cannot remember and are lost. Look around you- see any people?”
The street was silent.
“There was a bus and a girl on a bike when I got to the cafe this morning.”
“Who were you with, Miriam?”
She let this sink in. I thought for a minute, once again feeling that sense of being on the cusp of something, some knowledge just out of reach.
“I met a woman earlier. Elissa. On Astarte Way. I was alone.”
“In one of your houses I assume?”
“Houses? I don’t have houses. I have a pile of papers and found something that belongs to me. That doesn’t make them my houses. Who is Elissa?”
“How old did you think she was?”
“60? 70? Older in any case...what difference does it make? She was there and Miriam was nowhere near. She was real.”
She turned quickly.
“We’re all real.” she said a bit sharply. “As real as you are. How real do you feel these days?”
It felt like the light changed, like a fast moving cloud passed over, sweeping a shadow down the street, first bright, then dark, then bright again. And a breeze with a chill in it, then the warm sun. I sipped my coffee. That spice hint again.
I turned and looked at Maria. She looked back, sharp-eyed, expectant, holding my gaze and silent. I felt she was waiting for me to figure something out. For a moment I saw her still and ancient, like those two dimensional medieval paintings without perspective, but beautiful and almost impossibly still.
“How old are you Maria?” The question came without thinking. “How old is Maris? How old is Miriam? Why am I here in this place? What the fuck is going on?”
She still sat looking, still, then turned a bit and drank from her coffee.
“Maris has forgotten how old she is. Or perhaps more accurately, she has chosen not to remember. This has been going on for a long time, so long she thinks she is a new person, not an old person. A new person with a newly minted life in a newly minted world.
Miriam is something else. She is frozen in her knowledge and time. She needs the messy power of the world.”
I thought of that passionate, attacking sex. Messy power was a good description.
“I am the timid one. You didn’t walk away. I did.”
She looked anything but timid, flame haired, green eyed, slender and still. Abruptly she got up.
“I’m sorry about not contacting you. My means are limited. I won’t go over there, even for you. Someone has to remember this place. Miriam can tell you more but she needs to be careful about doing too many passages. It’s not good for us.”
I stood and looked at her. I wanted to hold her again but so many things clouded that option.
“Elissa? Randall? The Title?”
I held it in my hand.
“My father?”
I lifted the copper bowl.
“Elissa is a caretaker. Randall is dead or irreversibly gone. The houses are yours. I know nothing about your father or that thing. I have to go. Find me again.”
She jogged up the stairs and slipped into the red door, still ajar. It closed with a click.