The Girl in the Face of the Clock (3 page)

“Yes, the mind is a mysterious organ, mysterious indeed,” said Contino, grabbing a straight-backed chair from the bedside of a tiny old lady, who may or may not have been breathing, and placing it next to Aaron Sailor. “I'm sure you and your dad will want some time alone.”

“No, that's not …” said Jane weakly.

“Yes, of course,” said Contino, hustling toward the door. “You take as long as you like. I understand completely.”

In an instant he was gone.

Jane wanted with all her heart to run after him, to escape from this warehouse of the living dead. It would look uncaring, she knew, but so what? She wasn't a bad person, she told herself. It wasn't that she didn't want to see her father. Her father just wasn't here.

“No, Perry. Perry, no. No, don't do it.”

Jane stood by the bed for a moment, then sat on the chair that Dr. Contino had brought over.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said unconvincingly.

“No, Perry, don't do it. No, Perry, no.”

“Who's Perry?”

“Don't do it, Perry,” said the body that had been Aaron Sailor's, this time a little louder. “Please don't. No, Perry, no.”

Jane looked around the ward, half expecting someone's ancient
bubbe
to shout, “Pipe down over there, some of us are trying to catch some z's.” The other residents of the ward were silent, however.

“So how do you like the accommodations?” she asked. There was no answer from the still figure on the bed.

Jane reached over and took his limp hand. She began drawing tiny circles, trying to focus on his smooth cool skin and calm her thoughts.

What did Allah have in mind when He came up with places like this? she wondered unhappily. Wasn't life puzzling enough on its own, without dark rooms full of unconscious men and women in disposable nightgowns? The coed sleeping arrangements struck her as dreadfully improper, too, though none of the patients seemed to mind.

“Jane, Jane, Jane.”

Jane looked up in amazement. For an instant, she was a little girl again and her father was calling her. Had Aaron Sailor returned? Was he waking up? She waited a moment, afraid to breathe, feeling gooseflesh raising on her arms and legs.

But there was no further sound. There was no movement. The gaunt figure on the bed was no more sentient than it had been a minute before. Jane let out a deep sigh. Her father had simply repeated a word he once knew, not really called her name. Now he returned to a more familiar refrain.

“No, Perry. Don't do it. No, Perry, no.”

Jane returned to her chair and sat for another few minutes, until she couldn't stand it any more. She had stayed only for the sake of appearances, and she had stayed long enough. She no longer felt ready to run off screaming into the bushes, but her appetite, which had disappeared the moment she had entered the nursing home, had now returned with a vengeance. Was there a pizza place near the Great Neck station, maybe? Could she hold out until she was safely back in Manhattan? Was it horrible of her to think about her stomach at a time like this?

“Jane, Jane,” murmured her father again, as if he knew she was going to leave.

Jane reached into her purse for a felt-tip pen and carefully drew a little heart on the cast that covered his arm. Inside the heart she wrote “Love Janie” in the tiniest of letters.

“No, Perry, no,” he said in response, oblivious. “You're a liar, Perry. I know the truth.”

“The truth about what?” Jane asked.

“No, Perry. Please don't do it. Please.”

Jane left the room dry-eyed, but with a lump in her throat. Benton Contino was waiting for her in the hall. He wouldn't let her escape into the light of day until she had assured him that she didn't intend to sue.

An hour and a half later, hands deep in her pockets, stupid hat squished on her head, Jane climbed the front stairs of her brownstone on West Ninetieth Street.

Automatically she checked the mailbox, but of course there was nothing in it. The forwarding order she'd filled out at the Post Office before leaving town last month would be in effect until tomorrow. Nothing of any interest had reached her in Cincinnati anyway. Who but catalogue companies would care that she was now back in New York?

Jane stared up the long staircase that stood between her and her apartment on the fifth floor. She hadn't been gone long enough this time to sublet, and it was amazing how much dust a New York apartment could accumulate in a month just sitting empty.

The prospect of a lonely unpacking session followed by an hour of dusting wasn't much motivation to climb four flights of stairs. On the way home, she had stopped for some gyoza and a California roll at one of the zillion Japanese places on Broadway, then grazed for half an hour at the huge Barnes & Noble at Eighty-third Street. What else could she do to postpone the inevitable?

Jane's keys were still in her hand from opening the mailbox. A small steel one at the end of the ring caught her eye. It was the key to her storage space in the basement. Was there an address book somewhere in the boxes of Dad's personal things that she had stored down there? Could it tell her who this Perry was that Aaron Sailor was suddenly mumbling about? “No, Perry, no.” Jane had tried to push her father's words out of her mind, but they kept coming back. “No, Perry. Please don't do it.” Who was this guy?

Not needing further encouragement, Jane unlocked the basement, which took the same key as the front door, turned on the switch that lit a dangling naked bulb, and descended the stairs.

The basement of the brownstone consisted of a narrow central passage, off which six storage spaces had been created out of metal link fencing. Jane's cubicle at the back was triple the size of the others (and as expensive as an apartment in many cities), its cement floor covered with plastic milk crates that she had appropriated from outside a Gristede's supermarket when she had moved in.

Until three months ago, the milk crates had kept eighteen Aaron Sailor paintings off the floor in case the basement flooded. Thankfully, it never had, but Jane wasn't going to take chances with her father's work, no matter how many people had told her it was worthless.

Ultimately, she had been proven right. The paintings had gone off in February to the Fyfe Museum in San Francisco as the centerpiece of their show on Contemporary Realism. After all these years, Aaron Sailor was finally gaining acceptance from the art establishment that had virtually slammed the door in his face a decade back. For all the good it did him.

Jane applied the key on her ring to the padlock and opened the wire door of the cubicle.

Without the paintings, the space looked smaller somehow. The lights, ornaments, and the base for the trees that Jane bought herself those few Christmases she was in town (and which took up virtually half her apartment) were stored on the far left side. At the far right were the big garment bags of winter clothing she brought down each April to exchange for her summer stuff—her apartment had less storage space than a Toyota.

Four large cardboard boxes of Aaron Sailor's personal effects sat on a brick ledge protruding from the basement wall. Jane had only vague recollections of what she had taken from the loft before leaving eight years ago. She had tried to push that whole year out of her mind.

Having this stuff upstairs would have been too painful, always reminding her of the man who had drunk invisible tea with her at childhood parties, the man who had taught her how to play poker, the man who had taken her to Bergdorf Goodman a month after Mom died and bought her the most beautiful dress she had ever seen. It was too much to bear that she would never see that man again.

Jane reached up and took down the first of the boxes, pushing the feelings back before they overwhelmed her. Years of dust had hardened on the top of the box into a gray patina. Inside was a neat stack of sketchbooks, more than a dozen in all. She sat down on a milk crate and leafed through them one by one, amazed after all these years at the subtlety with which her father had seen his world, and the delicacy with which he could render it.

One book was filled entirely with drawings of wrists and fingers. Another contained studies of stern-faced men and women from the days when Aaron Sailor had made his living as a portrait painter, before he started doing “real” art. A third had sketches of their old loft, a huge space on Greene Street that Jane still had dreams about, dreams in which she would discover whole new rooms that she had never seen before and find her mother practicing her cello. None of the pads, however, held a clue to the identity of Perry.

Jane returned the box to the ledge and took down the next, which contained financial and tax records. Nothing here about anyone named Perry either, just monetary details that had no relevance to Jane or her father or probably even the IRS any more. Each successive 1040 recounted the descent of her father's earnings after he had given up doing portraits.

How long did you have to keep stuff like this, Jane wondered, packing the tax forms back away. Seven years? She probably could throw most of it out now. One of these days she would.

The third box was the biggest and heaviest of the four. Jane had only to open the top flap to know what was inside. It was the ceramic monstrosity that Jane's Jewish grandmother, Sylvie, had for some incomprehensible reason brought out of Belgium with her when the Nazis invaded.

Even after all these years, Jane still remembered exactly what it looked like. It was truly hideous: a solid chunk of fired clay slightly larger than a cinder block. Trompe l'oeil clocks were depicted in colored glazes on front and back. The dial of one clock was marked with Roman numerals, the other with Arabic numbers. Neither had hands.

Handless clocks were strangely fitting somehow. Time had never really begun for Sylvie. Her father had been a well-to-do doctor, but he and the rest of the family had perished in the concentration camps. Only Sylvie had managed to escape. Somehow she made it to New York City, where she had met and married Jane's Catholic cabinetmaker grandfather, only to die a year later giving birth to Jane's father.

A feeling of being totally alone in the world suddenly swept over Jane. She wrestled the box with the garish ceramic back onto the shelf, fighting a cloud of dust and self-pity. She knew that looking through this stuff was going to upset her. She should have left it alone.

Jane sank down on one of the plastic crates and tried her best to cry. She managed a few sniffles, but no tears would come. Feeling a little better nevertheless, she took down the only box that remained on the ledge. In it was the hodgepodge of stuff that every man had in a drawer somewhere: cufflinks and collar stays; silver quarters and wheat-back pennies; old lighters, high school medals, old passports, fountain pens, and souvenirs.

Jane fingered the gold watch Aaron Sailor had been wearing the night he fell down the stairs, its crystal shattered. She sighed as she paged through an album of photographs and stared at the banded letters from her mother to her father. Jane had read them once and couldn't bear to again, so tender and loving they were. He must have been heartbroken when the cancer had taken her, Jane knew. As heartbroken as Jane had been.

In the back of the box was her mother's dragonfly cross. Jane hadn't seen the cross for years and didn't even remember that it was down here.

It hung on a simple black ribbon: a stylized insect consisting of two open-ended tubes—the short top one about the diameter of a drinking straw, the long tapering bottom piece narrowing to a bulb the size of a capital O. The tubes were joined together three-quarters up by a pierced pair of wings which served as the crosspiece. It had once been gilded but this had mostly worn off, revealing the dull yellow brass beneath.

Ellen Sailor wasn't a religious woman. She had worn the cross only to funerals and to the Episcopal Christmas and Easter services uptown at St. Thomas's to which she took Jane. Aaron Sailor had always refused to come.

The cross was three inches or so long—too big and heavy to be stylish, but it had a vaguely Art Nouveau/Art Deco look and wasn't unattractive. Jane didn't know when she would ever want to wear such a thing—she hadn't been to church or a funeral for years. Still, the cross was a connection to her mother, and the memory didn't hurt so much any more. As she put it in her pocket to bring upstairs, a black leather book no larger than a playing card caught her eye. She grabbed it greedily and riffled through it.

This was exactly what she had been looking for. The book was filled with names and phone numbers divided alphabetically. Jane recognized some of them. Imre Carpathian and a few other artist friends of her father. Elinore King, Dad's art dealer. Jane's own dorm address and phone number from Lewis College in New Hampshire eight years ago.

To her disappointment, there was no one named Perry, but there were plenty of women, some with brief descriptions beside their phone numbers: “Nice hips, heart belongs to her schnauzer”; “Smells like a salad, not many brains”; “Tall, blonde, cooperative.”

“Jesus,” muttered Jane. “Daddy had a sex life.”

She tossed the little black book back into the box. Today was not the day Jane wanted to hear about sex. She could take only so much irony in a twenty-four-hour period. She was ready to call it quits when a small, cream-colored card sticking out of a well-worn copy of Marcus Aurelius'
Meditations
caught her eye.

Jane pulled out the card and found herself looking at a drawing of a little man with a big white mustache, a top hat, and a cane. Underneath it bore the inscription: “Get Out of Jail Free.”

Smiling involuntarily at the image, familiar from myriad childhood games of Monopoly, Jane turned the card over. On the back, above a date just before her father's accident, was a signature scrawled in blue letters. It was not her father's handwriting.

“Peregrine Mannerback,” Jane read out loud.

It was a totally unfamiliar name, but then Jane didn't know many of her father's friends, having been farmed out to boarding school after her mother's death and then off at college in New Hampshire.

“Peregrine,” she repeated. “Perry. Is he the one you were raving about today at the nursing home?”

Jane studied the card and spoke again to the empty walls.

“So what didn't you want Perry to do, Daddy? Borrow a hundred dollars, maybe? Fix you up with a girl who smelled like a salad? Push you down the stairs?”

Jane's hand came involuntarily up to her mouth, but it was too late. The thought that Perry, whoever he was, might have pushed her father down the stairs had been just beneath the surface of Jane's mind ever since Benton Contino had delivered his theory this morning.

Was Aaron Sailor simply repeating mindlessly the last words he had spoken? Had he been arguing on the third-floor landing outside the door to their loft with a man named Perry who had pushed him? Was a final plea, “Don't do it, Perry,” blazoned into her father's brain as he plummeted down the stairs and crashed headfirst into the vestibule floor?

“No,” said Jane, shaking her head determinedly. “No way I'm going down that road.”

No one had ever suggested that Aaron Sailor's fall was anything other than an accident. Though the police had asked routine questions, the facts had spoken for themselves. Her father had had sixty dollars in his pocket and a gold watch on his wrist when he was found on the vestibule floor. That ruled out robbery.

Also, the stairs were treacherous. The loft was an industrial space, built long before the days of building codes. The treads were a good two inches higher than modern steps, making them dangerously steep. Everyone had worried about them. And Aaron Sailor had been drinking that night. His blood-alcohol level would have been high enough to get him arrested had he been driving. There had been no witnesses, and without a statement to the contrary, there was no reason to assume that he hadn't simply tripped and fallen down the stairs.

But now there was a statement from Aaron Sailor. “No, Perry, no. Don't do it, Perry.”

Unsettled, Jane put the “Get Out of Jail Free” card in her pocket with her mother's cross and placed the box with her father's things back up on the ledge. Then she locked the storage cubicle, walked up the basement stairs, and turned out the light.

By the time Jane had gotten up to her apartment on the fifth floor, the suspicions she had been trying to dismiss as absurd and unsupportable had jelled against her will into a full-blown scenario.

This Perry Mannerback could indeed have been with her father that night eight years ago. “You're a liar, Perry,” Dad could have said, angry, intoxicated, unpredictable. “I know the truth.” Perhaps Perry couldn't afford for anyone to know that truth, whatever it was.

Unlike modern buildings, where you couldn't fall further than the next landing, the staircase descended diagonally in a straight, unbroken path from the Sailor loft on the third floor at the very back of the building all the way down to the ground-floor doorway at the front. Pushing someone intentionally from the top of those stairs was the same as hurling him out of a window.

In a way, such a scenario was somehow less horrible than Aaron Sailor just getting drunk and falling. To lose her father in such a stupid accident had always been almost the worst thing about the whole tragedy. The shame of it, the pointlessness. But if he had been pushed …

“No, this is nuts,” muttered Jane, turning on the faucet in the kitchen sink to wash the basement grime off her hands. “Don't I have enough troubles? There's nothing to this. There can't be.”

Twenty minutes later, her socks and underwear out of suitcases and safely back in their drawers, her slacks and blouses hanging in the tiny closet, Jane put down the dustcloth and reached for the telephone book. Instead of disappearing as she had hoped, her questions about Perry Mannerback had only multiplied.