There was no way of hiding the collapse of our relationship from Harvey. Hanna, always on the lookout, relayed the information. When I confirmed it and told him that Beth Anderson had turned down his rental proposition in the bargain, he took it very badly. I wasn’t living up to the contract. I wasn’t helping him down in the cellar. My memories of Rachel were useless as eventual navigational assistance. Now I couldn’t even get into the Anderson house anymore. How could I do this to him?
On February 14, Saint Valentine’s Day as it happened, the sickness came back again. It had never been so bad. Maybe it had nothing at all to do with the end of the visits to Beth Anderson’s place. By now I understood that the sickness (I called it time-travail) manifested itself cyclically. There may have been an unrelated coincidence between the swing round to the active phase of the cycle and deprivation of the banal one-dimensional living room and the woman in it.
Whatever, the co-dwellers came back again, on the very border of materialization I sometimes thought: younger Harveys, his mother in various stages of progress to nothing, friends, the cat slinking past my legs many times, relatives, the reform rabbi, but not my mother. My mother wasn’t in that virtual throng.
I tried to picture her there, very hard, but what came up, as conventional memory, was my mother embracing Rachel again, this time with annihilating compassion (it was after the news from the liberated shambles of Europe, so in the summer of 1945) but when I tried to materialize her (my mother), transplant her to the dirt and disorder of the dead room, nothing came.
I forced myself to jog. The first time I’d done no more than five blocks when I started gasping for breath. There was a diffused pain in my chest. I remembered in alarm my juvenile heart-murmur. I had to go back to the co-dwellers.
I tried it again the next day. I jogged on and on, taking unknown streets. When my chest was stabbed with pain I don’t know how many hours later, I collapsed on a bench. I gasped down air like a beached fish. A nice middle-aged woman asked me if I was sick. When I found out where I was I realized I’d been heading toward the seaside. That close it was all built up. I took a bus back.
After that I didn’t even try to leave the house. Things got worse there. What finally rescued me was the contractual obligation to go to New York and do research for Harvey.
Suddenly he’d stopped harassing me about the house next door. He was on to something new. On the surface it was new. He was going to resurrect a strategic part of old Forest Hill, he said. What he wanted me to do was to recall the exact sites of the old shops. In particular, the A&P, the beauty parlor, the hardware store, Schultz’s butcher-shop, and the movie-house.
Of course I couldn’t do it, not after so many years. The new shopping center had been erected on the bulldozed old order. The Chase National, radically renovated, was still standing as a landmark but it didn’t help. When I said that I had memory problems myself and couldn’t do the job unaided he told me to go to the 42nd St Library and try to dig up old photos of Forest Hill. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the place to look but didn’t say so. I was glad to be forced out of the house. On my own I’d never have managed it.
Just before I left he said: “Also I want you to do other research. On tits. Maybe there are things about them. You don’t already know.” He explained what he meant.
Just climbing past the stone lions with my black briefcase in view of research (even on the futile things he’d commissioned) made me feel much better. In the studious hush I felt meaningful for the first time since retirement as I positioned my index cards and pens on the desk.
I started in on the tits, titmice, chickadees, genus Paries, family Paridae, order Passeriformes. I didn’t know what he was looking for. It turned out that the tit was the best-studied bird in the world. It had an agitated sex-life. There was plenty on them in the library, lots of photos.
I handed him my notes on the bird and said that I hadn’t found any photos of old Forest Hill. He wasn’t happy about that and also said I hadn’t given him anything on Rachel for a week now. I said I’d take care of that. As for the photos I’d try the local newspaper and City Hall.