A FOREVER SECRET

A FOREVER SECRET

Winter in New York City. 1949, and late day. It had been raining and would no doubt soon rain again.  A painter would have been making good use of his Payne’s Grey. He would be eyeing his verticals and dimensional planes. He would wish there weren’t so many cars, and he would paint the street that way—empty, shiny, with a drizzle on all the windows. He would be awaiting the streetlamps because every lamp would have its very paintable halo—but it was still too early for haloes.

Winter in New York can be bone-chillingly cold. For a girl of ten in a velvet-trimmed wool coat it can, especially if she hasn’t remembered to wear mittens or a hat. She would have to keep her hands in her pockets; her bare knees would turn risibly purple, and her face would sting from being slapped by her own hair in the wind. If she had waited for her mother more than an hour, her limbs would feel so shaky she would end up sitting— carefully—on the edge of the curb, her coat pulled well under her so her pants wouldn’t get wet. 

She would be busy looking down, at the interesting things in the gutter, things being carried along rapidlyly by rainwater to the grating, where they would disappear, never to be seen again. The disappearance of these innocent things, like Popsicle sticks and gum wrappers, would make her uneasy (a word she had just added to her vocabulary), would arouse pity and anxiety in her heart. Probably she would be so intent on this doomed flotsam that she wouldn’t notice the man who approached her. Not even his shadow, since there wasn’t enough light to make a shadow. She wouldn’t hear his shuffling footsteps, not over the honks and toots and clatter that never stopped in the city. She wouldn’t notice him until he spoke to her, “Hey, little girl.” 

Then she would look up. Hands still deep in her velvet-trimmed pockets, she would look up. Look up and see that the rims of the man’s eyes were red, and his face was so wet he looked like he was crying tears.

It would be bone chilling for the man, too, since he probably had no place to live and had likely slept that night on a bench in Washington Square, under a blanket of newspapers. And if he had managed to glean a little change from shamefaced passers-by, he might be thinking about going into a restaurant where he could warm up and drink a cup of coffee. It’s possible that when he saw the little girl, he felt a kinship, because they were both cold and abandoned; it’s even possible he would want to share his change with her and buy her a cup of coffee—no, not coffee, she was a little girl, so maybe hot cocoa.

But, the little girl had probably been told not to go off with strangers; growing up in New York City, there’s no way she would be so stupid as to get up and leave with this raggedy, sour-smelling bum, for a cup of cocoa she didn’t particularly want. She would explain to him that her mother would be showing up any minute and would be terribly upset not to find her child waiting where it was told to wait.

Perhaps, though, desperation of some kind would make the man eloquent. Or perhaps the little girl would have an overriding obligation to obey out of politeness, because the man was, before anything else, a grownup. In which case she might, yes, she might get up, albeit with reluctance, and even accept his hand, because he was holding it out in a way she couldn’t well refuse without being a rude little girl. She would, of course, feel a great deal of unease, because of that problem of her mother’s instructions.

The man might find the girl’s unease an annoyance. He might be reduced to telling her things he did not, himself, quite believe, such as, “We’ll sit right by the window, and when we see her walk by, we’ll run out and stop her.” Who knows, those words might even have worked for him successfully in the past. Besides, why imagine the worst? The man might be extremely lonely. Perhaps he had a little girl of his own, in some heated apartment to which he was no longer permitted access.

Too, it’s possible that the mother had a very good reason for not showing up. It wouldn’t be fair to assume that she’d been in the studio of the artist Korsokov, posing in a low-cut white peasant blouse and a crown of artificial flowers, and that the session, due to unforeseen or unknown causes, ran more than an hour late. Painting sessions do, in New York, on dark, rainy afternoons when it’s best to drink hot toddies—but that doesn’t mean this one did, or that hot toddies were consumed at it, or even that such a session took place this day as it had on several other occasions. 

It’s also purely in the realm of speculation to say those occasions had been growing more frequent of late, that this was not the first time the little girl had waited to be rescued from some situation that caused her unease, nor even that she used the word unease to herself because some sense of loyalty precluded her admitting to less acceptable emotions—resentment, say, or outrage—that might have dwelt half-submerged in the deeps of her heart beneath the double-breasted lapels. 

Might or might not; can we say for sure? After all, there are children, or so we’ve been given to understand, who have a limitless capacity for tolerance even toward the most errant of mothers. And children of this mild nature are probably much less likely to disobey—to take matters into their own reddened hands—to fling caution to the harsh, gritty wind that smarts the cheeks and blows cardboard boxes through the alleys to knock unwary children down.

But let’s say this particular child was somewhere between the two: loyal yet angry, obedient yet willful, cautious yet with a fatalism that comes from never having had a hand on the reins, the tiller, the wheel. 

Besides, what right-minded, shivering, teeth-chattering creature would refuse an offer of hot cocoa? Imagine how good it would feel to be sitting in a cozy leather booth, beside a steamed-up window, fingers wrapped around a warm cup. It may well be that she asked the man how far away this restaurant was, and it’s equally likely that the man told her it was very close, just across Hudson street. Or maybe down a block—or two blocks, but very close. So she might rise stiffly from the curb and allow herself to be led away.

If so, she would not have liked noticing—for she would have noticed—that two blocks became three. Her unease would have turned into unwillingness, and maybe unwillingness into resistance. Surely she would have tried to take back her hand, to twist it from him, to tug. If she was a smart girl, and we think she was, it must have occurred to her to say they had come far enough, that she would go no farther…except there was still that problem of hurting the man’s feelings, if he was actually trying to help her, because no doubt she could sense that he emanated sadness and disgrace from every pore of his body—as by this time would she herself.

And very likely the mother would appear any minute, or so the little girl would still believe as her eyes searched the sidewalk for a sign of the familiar felt hat, the freshly permanented chestnut hair, the golden aura of the most beautiful woman in New York City. She would hope for it—but wouldn’t she dread it as well? Because then she would have to see herself in this new light, as a disobedient girl who had done a really stupid thing. She would have to explain why she left her post, and with an unknown man, too, a man who clearly had one foot in some nether world where the rules of ordinary reality didn’t apply.

On the other hand, maybe the mother would never come at all, was lost. Or she had taken another street and by this happenstance missed seeing her daughter lagging back against the ever-hastening pace of this man who couldn’t seem to remember exactly where the hot cocoa restaurant was. Maybe the mother waited right now at the appointed place with escalating anxiety, asking hurried pedestrians if they had seen a brown-haired, brown-eyed girl of ten, with a velvet-trimmed coat but no hat or mittens. Maybe by this time the mother was crying, and the tears were ice on her cheeks. She would be praying—praying to turn back the hours; praying that tonight at dinner they would all have a laugh over this whole comic mix-up; praying that just once more the gods, yes even God himself, would forgive her sin, which she promised never, ever to repeat. 

Or maybe the prison door had already slammed shut, and the mother’s eyes, maternal after all, had become blind to anything except the grey walls of certainty.  

Maybe. There is so much we don’t know. Memory scrabbles like baby fingers at an unyielding walnut shell; no, there’s no nutcracker for this one. Wild guesses sound plausible for a few seconds, after which they are sucked through the grate like popsicle sticks and drop into an underground cistern full to the brim with wild guesses that have never been proven or disproven. Will never be. Because there is no one left to know, no one to ask, no one to answer.