A Patchwork Planet

3

SHE WAS WEARING the feather coat again, and boots this time instead of last week’s pumps. (Overnight a light snow had fallen — that considerate kind of snow that sticks to lawns but melts on streets and sidewalks.) Would an angel wear quilted black nylon boots with white fluff around the tops? Well, sure; no reason she couldn’t. And she could sit on a bench in Penn Station reading a Baltimore Sun too, while she was at it.

I drifted closer, pretending I wanted to look through the window behind her. The 10:10 was on time for once, according to the notice board. All I could see was a segment of bare track, but I rested one knee on the bench and set my forehead to the glass and peered down. I think she felt crowded. She gathered herself together somehow; hid behind her paper. I backed off and turned away to show I posed no threat.

Of course, if she really was my angel, she would know that on her own.

Check out what I was wearing: a white oxford shirt and brown corduroys. No tie (there were limits, after all), but I had exchanged my leather jacket for my one tweed sports coat and trimmed my own hair as best I could and shaved that very morning. I was so clean-shaven, my face seemed to belong to someone else. Kind of plastic-feeling. A whole new surface to it. My skin felt stretched across my bones.

When the loudspeaker called out my train, I started down to the platform ahead of all the others so she wouldn’t think I was following her. And I kept my back to the stairs after I arrived. I could feel her approaching, though, like a current of air, a change of temperature in a room. Her presence, descending the steps. I fixed my eyes on a point far up the tracks.

Two young women stood nearby. Sisters, from the look of them, both dark and pretty and dressed in layers of black. The taller one was trying to convince the little one to come all the way to New York with her. The little one insisted she was getting off in Philly. I tallied up the other passengers: twenty or so, at the most. With luck, it wouldn’t be hard for Sophia to find a seat all her own. Then I would come along, nonchalant, couldn’t care less. “Is this seat taken?” Or maybe not ask. Just sit, kerplunk, looking elsewhere, before she could claim she was saving a place for a friend.

Not that she would tell an actual lie, you wouldn’t think.

But just to be on the safe side.

At the end of the track our train appeared, only a dot yet but growing. I stepped closer to the edge of the platform. The man next to me wore earphones looped beneath his jaw instead of over his head, which made him look like the bearded version of Abraham Lincoln. Just past him, Sophia rummaged through her bag for her ticket. Never mind that it was nowhere near time to have it ready.

The train drew up beside us, ding-dinging. Abe Lincoln and the two sisters entered through the door nearest me, but I walked over to where Sophia stood. Several people got off, and then a woman with a baby got on. Sophia followed her. I came next. I was too close behind and hung back, biding my time.

It was unfortunate that the car was almost empty. This way, she would wonder why I didn’t sit by myself. Well, too bad. She chose a seat at her right and for one awful moment seemed about to stay on the aisle but then, with a kind of flounce, she moved over. A good thing, too, because I was holding up a whole line of people behind me. Quick as a wink, I settled beside her. She kept her face turned toward the window. Her newspaper was nowhere in sight. She must have stowed it in her bag.

Passengers came shuffling down the aisle, and I watched the backs of their heads once they’d passed. A kid with a Mohawk, all prickly white scalp and pierced ears. Two nuns in short navy headdresses and square coats and thick-soled shoes. An old, bent man, creeping. I was trying so hard to sit still, to keep my elbow from touching Sophia’s, that I was almost rigid. (As a rule, I twitched and jittered, jiggled a foot, drummed my fingers.) Face it: I felt kind of shy. Kind of unconfident.

Scared to death, to be honest.

The train lurched and started moving. Sophia delved into the bag at her feet and came up with a section of newspaper. It was folded open to the business page. Business! Lord above. I wondered why I was kidding myself. Did I just not have enough to occupy my mind? Or what?

We were passing people’s wintry backyards, filled with scrap lumber and rusty shovels and plastic wading pools propped on their sides, everything skimmed with snow. The conductor came through saying, “Tickets, please.” When Sophia handed him hers, I saw that she wore a Timex watch with a wide black leather wristband.

She wouldn’t have any message for me. She was merely annoyed that I’d sat down beside her; and here I was, like a fool, waiting for her to inform me how to begin my life.

Wouldn’t she laugh at me if she knew!

When Great-Granddad saw his angel, she lit the air of the woodenworks. A golden dust, she dispersed, floating in the gloom, he reported. Lingering for an hour, at least, after she left the room. The rhyme was intentional. He wrote up his encounter in the form of an epic poem whose scheme was A, A, A … till he ran out of words to rhyme with A, evidently, and then B, B, B …, and so forth. Not what you would call a literary masterpiece. Even so, my family treasured it. They kept it in a glass-doored bookcase in my father’s study. A gray cloth ledger with maroon leather corners, containing three pages of penciled business accounts followed by seventeen pages of “A Providential Visitation, April 1898.” Since then, the tradition was for all the Gaitlins to file reports on their angels — though Great-Granddad’s was the only poem. Myself, I planned to stick to prose, when the time came. And right from paragraph one, I would stress my reliability, my solid and trustworthy nature. It’s a mistake to go all misty and poetic when you’re trying to convince your readers you’ve seen an angel.

Sophia said, “Excuse me, please.”

She had her bag in both hands now, and she was perched on the edge of her seat, knees angled toward me, getting ready to rise. I said, “Oh!” and stood up and stepped into the aisle. She sidled out, bulky and wide-hipped, and started toward the front of the car. Was she leaving me? What was she doing? I sat back down and watched her bypass first one empty seat and then another; so I was partly reassured. She didn’t stop at the rest room, either, but vanished through the end door. Maybe she was buying a snack. And her ticket stub was still in its overhead slot, her newspaper still in her seat. I was pretty sure she’d be returning.

I checked to see what news items she’d been reading. Plans for a merger between two banks. A growing concern over Maryland’s bond rating.

She was probably some kind of financial wheeler-dealer. And I was out of my mind; and this train trip had cost me a whole lot of money for nothing, not to mention the goodwill of my best-paying customer. Mrs. Morey had wanted me to take down all her curtains for laundering today. I’d told her at the very last minute that I would be out of town. “Out of town!” she said. “You can’t be out of town! This isn’t a Philadelphia week; it’s the first Saturday of the month!”

Oh, my life was a wide-open book to half the old ladies in Baltimore.

There was a sudden rise in the noise level, and I looked toward the front of the car and saw Sophia stepping through the door, gliding back in my direction at a stately, level pace. She hadn’t left me, after all. I felt so grateful that when I noticed something in her hands, I thought for a second she was bringing me a gift. But it was only a Styrofoam cup of coffee. She paused next to me, and I jumped up, and — oh, God.

Jostled against her coffee. Spilled it all down her front.

“Geez!” I said. “I’m so — geez! I’m such an oaf!”

“That’s all right,” she murmured, but in a faint and reluctant tone that made it clear it was not all right. And who could blame her? Dark splotches stained the feather coat. Even her hands were wet. She shook one hand in the air, meanwhile hanging on to the cup with the other. “Allow me,” I said, and I took the cup away from her — both of us still standing, braced against the swaying of the train — so that she could get a tissue out of her bag. She wiped her hands and then ducked into her seat and started dabbing at the splotches on her coat. I slid in after her. “I could kick myself,” I said. Even through the Styrofoam I could tell that the coffee was hot, which made things all the worse. “I hope you didn’t get burned,” I told her.

She said, “No …,” and stopped scrubbing her coat and looked over at me. In a friendlier tone, she said, “Really. I’m fine. I should have let the counterman put a lid on, the way he wanted.”

“Well, how could you have foreseen you’d be sitting next to a klutz?” I said. I passed her the cup. Then I removed the screw of soaked tissue from her hand and stuffed it into my seat pocket. “It was nerves, I guess,” I told her. “I think I’m a little nervous.”

“Nervous! About a train trip?”

I looked into her eyes. Don’t you know? was the thought I sent her, but she gazed pleasantly, blankly back at me. Her eyes were blue. Her mouth was large and well shaped, lipsticked in too bright a shade of red, and the light from the window behind her gilded the powdery down along her jawline.

I said, “I’m, ah, heading up to Philly to see my little girl on not my normal visitation day.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’m sure it will all work out.”

Was this an official prophecy? No, of course not. Get a grip, Gaitlin. She took a sip of her coffee and shifted in her seat so she could pull her newspaper from beneath her. I said, “And besides!” (I was desperate. I didn’t want to let the conversation die.) “Not only is it not my normal day; I’m not supposed to see her any day, ever again.”

Her eyes came back to me. “Why is that?” she asked, finally.

“Last time I had car trouble, and I got there late, and her mother claimed it broke her heart,” I said.

Then I said, “My little girl’s heart, I mean. Not her mother’s. Lord knows, not her mother’s.”

Sophia laughed. I caught the faint scent of flowers mingled with the coffee, as if she’d been chewing roses.

“So today I’m going up blind,” I said. “I don’t even know if Opal’s going to be there.”

Which was true enough, certainly. I hadn’t given Opal a thought. I’d assumed that once I reached Philadelphia, I would turn around and catch the next train home. But I said, “Kids need their fathers. You can’t just break off ties like that.”

“You can’t, indeed,” she told me. “How old is she?”

“She’s — um — nine? Yes, nine.”

“Oh, at nine they definitely need their fathers.”

“The trouble is,” I said (for lack of any other subject), “I doubt my visits are anything she looks forward to. I’ve been seeing her once a month, is all. Last Saturday of every month. When they’re that young, they can change completely in a month! Not to mention she’s a girl. What do I know about girls? Do you have any daughters yourself?”

“Oh, no,” Sophia said. She hesitated. Then she said, “I’m not married, actually.”

I’d have been flabbergasted to hear she was, but I just said, “At least you’ve been a little girl.” (Though in fact I wasn’t so sure.) “You remember how it feels.”

“Well, but I suspect I wasn’t typical,” she told me. “I was an only child. I think that tends to keep children childlike longer, don’t you?”

“Opal’s an only child too,” I said. “Oh — sorry. My name’s Barnaby Gaitlin.”

“Sophia Maynard,” she told me.

“Sophia, if you had your say,” I said, “what would you advise a guy in my general position to do about his life?”

“I’d advise you to persevere, of course,” she said.

“Persevere?”

“Why, certainly! I can guarantee that no matter what, Opal wants to keep seeing her daddy.”

“Oh. Opal,” I said.

Actually, Opal had never called me “daddy.” “Daddy” sounded like someone else — someone who’d treat her to Shirley Temples in stodgy, flocked-wallpaper restaurants. I was starting to feel like some kind of impostor.

“But I don’t have to tell you that,” Sophia was saying, “because look at you!”

“Pardon?”

“You’re already on your way to visit her!”

“Ah. Except that, well, this visit was really just a … random activity, so to speak.”

“I know just what you mean,” Sophia said.

“You do?”

“Sometimes intuition is our truest guiding force, don’t you agree?”

“Intuition? Hmm,” I said, paying close attention now.

“You can be led to get on a train, not even knowing why,” she said.

“Is that a fact.”

“And once you arrive at your ex-wife’s, you’re going to be led to say exactly the words that will change her mind.”

“But see,” I said, “I’m not sure that … at this point, I don’t believe my family situation is the central issue anymore.”

“I’m going to tell you a story,” Sophia said.

I grew very still. I said, “Okay.”

“Two weeks ago, I went to visit my mother. Well, I do that every week; she’s elderly and she lives alone. But this time she was in such a fretful mood; so fractious. I made her some tea, and she said, ‘This tea tastes moldy’ ‘Moldy?’ I said. ‘It’s a new box! How could it taste moldy?’ She said, ‘I don’t know, but it does.’ I said, ‘Very well, Mother.’ This was not fifteen minutes after I had got there, mind. I was still exhausted from my trip. But I said, ‘Very well, Mother,’ and I picked up my purse and went out to buy more tea bags. I was walking toward this little store nearby, but once I reached it, do you know what I did? I walked right past. I kept walking till I came to Thirtieth Street Station, and I hopped on a train and rode home. And all the way, I was thinking, Heavens, what have I done? Then something told me, This is what you were led to do; so it must be right. Well, my point is, that evening Mother telephoned, which she almost never does — she has that old-time attitude toward long distance — and she said, ‘Sophia, I apologize. I don’t know what got into me. All day I’ve been regretting my behavior, and I promise that when you come next week I will watch my p’s and q’s.’ And true to her word, when I went back up last Saturday she was an entirely different person.”

I couldn’t figure out how this related to me. I said, “Well. That’s very interesting.”

She must have sensed my disappointment, because she said, “You think I acted terrible, don’t you?”

“No, no. Not at all.”

“You’re shocked I would walk out on her like that.”

“I’m not a bit shocked,” I told her. “I know all about these aged parents. The kind that want everything done for them, and the kind you can’t do a thing for, and the humble, self-denying kind, and the cranky, picky, dissatisfied kind … I must have seen every existing model. They’re who my company deals with, mostly.”

“What company is that?” Sophia asked.

“Rent-a-Back, it’s called. We go around to people’s houses, perform whatever chores they aren’t quite up to.”

“Oh! What a valuable service!”

“Well, we try,” I said. (I wanted to look as good as possible.) “How about you?”

“I work in a bank. Equity loan department,” she said. And while I was adjusting to this, she gave a little laugh and said, “Nothing like as helpful as what your company does!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “A loan can be extremely helpful.”

She made a face, turning her mouth down. (She had no idea.) “And can people just telephone and you send somebody over?” she asked. “Or do they have to be on a schedule of some kind?”

“Either way. We offer both arrangements,” I told her.

“Would a client be able to get her groceries carried in? Her garbage taken out to the alley? Little humdrum things like that?”

“Oh, the humdrum is our specialty,” I told her. Then it dawned on me that she might have her mother in mind; so I added, “We operate just in Baltimore, though.”

“I was thinking about my Aunt Grace. She’s in Baltimore; and independent? You wouldn’t believe how independent. But she’s getting hard of hearing, and she’s frail as a stick, besides; has trouble with her bones. She can break a bone in midair, if she’s not careful.”

“Osteoporosis,” I said knowledgeably.

“ ‘Aunt Grace,’ I tell her, ‘you need a companion! Someone live-in, to fetch and haul!’ But oh, no, no. Not Aunt Grace. ‘I prefer to have my house to myself,’ she says, and of course you can’t really blame her.”

“Yes, we see that every day,” I said. Then, trying to get back to the subject, I said, “But anyhow. You believe in intuition.”

“I most assuredly do.” She nodded several times, cradling her coffee cup in both hands.

“You believe a person will just be led to the proper action.”

“Absolutely,” she told me.

I made myself keep quiet a moment. I allowed her a block of silence to fill; I put on an expression that I hoped would seem receptive. She didn’t seize her chance, though. She just took a sip of her coffee. Beyond her head, bare trees skimmed past.

“So,” she said, finally.

I sat up so straight, you’d think I’d been electrocuted.

But all she said was, “Tell me more about your company.”

“My company,” I repeated.

“How many workers does it employ? Would you call it a success?”

“Oh, yes, it’s done very well,” I said.

And then I gave up and just went with the flow — told her about our two newspaper write-ups and our letters from grateful clients and their relatives, their sons and daughters living elsewhere who could finally sleep at night, they said, now that we had taken over their parents’ heavy lifting. Sophia kept her eyes on my face, tilting her head to one side. I could see how she would make an excellent loan officer. She had this way of appearing willing to listen all day.

I described my favorite customers — the unstoppable little black grandma whose children phoned us on an emergency basis whenever she threatened to overdo (“Come quick! Mama swears she’s going to wash her upstairs windows today!”); and our “Tallulah” client, Maud May, who smoked cigarettes in a long ivory holder and drank martinis by the quart and called me “dahling.” Then the weird ones. Ditty Nolan, who was only thirty-four and able-bodied as I was but couldn’t face the outside world; so everything had to be brought to her. Or Mr. Shank, a lonesome and pathetic type, who took advantage of our no-task-too-small, no-hour-too-late policy to phone us in the middle of the night and ask for someone to come right away for some trifling, trumped-up job like securing a bedroom shutter that was flapping in the wind.

By the time we reached Wilmington, I’d progressed to Mrs. Gordoni, who couldn’t afford our fees but needed us so badly (rheumatoid arthritis) that we would doctor her time sheet — write down a mere half hour when we’d been at her house a whole morning. “For a while, none of us knew the others were doing it,” I said. “Then it all came out. Our two girl employees, Martine and Celeste: they weren’t filing any hours at all for her, which is a whole lot easier to catch than just underreporting.”

“Isn’t that nice,” Sophia said. “You don’t often see that kind of heart in the business world.”

“Well, I wasn’t trying to brag,” I said. “I mean, we generally do charge money for our labors.”

“Even so,” she said, and she gave me a long, serious stare and then nodded, as if we had shared a secret. But I didn’t know what secret. And before I could say any more, the conductor walked through, announcing Philadelphia.

Still, even then, I hadn’t quite lost hope for some kind of revelation. I went on weighing and considering her most casual remark, giving her every chance to redirect my course. As we stepped off the train, for instance, she said, “Notice how much faster people move, here,” and I blinked and looked around me. Faster? People? Move? What was the deeper significance of that? But all I saw was the usual crowd, churning toward the stairs in the usual hobbling manner. “It always takes me by surprise, what a different atmosphere Philadelphia has from Baltimore,” she said, and I said, “Atmosphere. Ah,” and stumbled as I started up the steps, I was so intent on analyzing the atmosphere.

In the terminal, I stopped and faced her, wondering if her goodbye, at least, might be instructive. “Well,” I said, “I enjoyed our conversation.”

“Yes! Me too!” she told me. But she continued walking, and so I was forced to follow. She said, “I thought that was so fascinating about your company. Where are you headed?”

“Where am I headed,” I repeated, sounding like a moron.

“Does your daughter live nearby?”

“Oh. Yes, she’s off Rittenhouse Square.”

“So’s my mother. Shall we share a cab?”

“Well …”

It hadn’t occurred to me that my actions would be observed at the other end of my trip. I said, “No, thanks; I—”

“Though it is a nice day to walk,” she said.

A nice day?

We followed a group of teenagers through the Twenty-ninth Street exit, but I was dragging my heels, pondering how to get out of this. Suppose, by some horrible coincidence, Sophia’s mother lived in Natalie’s building! What then?

The weather did seem to have improved, I found when we reached the sidewalk. The temperature had risen some, and the sun was trying to shine. I said, “It’s still kind of damp underfoot, though.” I was looking toward the line of taxicabs, hoping she would change her mind and take one. But she walked right past them, and it was true she had those boots on.

On Market Street, she asked, “Are you bringing your daughter a present?”

“No,” I said. I flipped my jacket collar up. (Tweed was not half as warm as leather.) “This was such a sudden decision,” I said. “She’s probably not even home! I should just cut my losses and grab the next train back.”

“Darn,” Sophia said, not appearing to hear me. “If I’d thought, we could have picked up something in the station. They have all those boutiques there.”

“Well, no great loss,” I told her. “I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea what to get her, anyhow.”

“You could have bought a stuffed animal. Something of that sort. All little girls like stuffed animals.”

We veered around a man pushing a grocery cart full of rags. Sophia’s pace had grown leisurely and wafting. I had a sense of being dragged backward. “When I was nine,” she said, “my favorite toy was a stuffed raccoon named Ariadne.”

“Ariadne!”

“Well, I was extremely fanciful. I liked the Greek myths and all that. It’s because I was an only child. I was quite the little reader, as you might imagine.”

She had the only child’s elderly way of speaking too, I noticed. But I didn’t point that out to her.

“My father kept forgetting Ariadne’s name,” she was saying. “Most often he called her Rodney. ‘Sophia! Come and get Rodney! She’s out here on the porch, and there’s supposed to be a storm!’”

She laughed.

I looked at her then and knew, for a fact, that she was not my angel. She was an ordinary, middle-class, middle-aged bank employee with no particular life of her own, and it showed what a sorry state my life had come to that I could have imagined otherwise even for an instant.

If I’d had the nerve, I would have turned around then and there. Already half my Saturday had gone to waste. But it would have seemed peculiar, just wheeling and racing off with no good reason. So I dug my hands in my pockets and kept going.

I really hated this city, come to think of it — these wide, pale, bleak sidewalks littered with blowing rubbish, and the bombed-out-looking buildings.

I said, “Where does your mother live, exactly?”

“On Walnut Street,” Sophia said. “How about your daughter?”

“Locust,” I said.

Thank goodness.

A truck roared past, and we walked awhile without speaking before Sophia asked, “Is your ex-wife a Philadelphian?”

“No,” I said, “but her husband is.”

“Oh, so she’s remarried.”

“Right.”

“That must be difficult for you.”

“Difficult? Why would you say that?” I asked.

“Seeing her with someone else, I mean. I suppose inevitably there’s a bit of—”

“I never give it a moment’s thought,” I said, and then I stopped short, at the corner of Twenty-second Street, and said, “Well, here’s where I’ll be—”

But Sophia turned down Twenty-second and kept walking. I had hoped she would continue east. “It must have been an amicable divorce, then,” she called over her shoulder.

I said, “Oh …,” and took a few extra steps to catch up. “It was sort of amicable,” I said. (No sense going into the gory details.)

“Were you very young when you married?”

“Lord, yes. I was way too young. And she was even younger. We got married on her twentieth birthday.”

Then I happened to glance down the street, and who was walking toward us? Natalie. She was wearing a red coat and holding Opal’s hand. It was unsettling, because I’d just had a flash of how she had looked on our wedding day: all dressed up for the registry office, so pale and prim and solemn in a red coat that was not this same one, I guess, but close enough; close enough.

She hadn’t seen me yet. She was speaking to Opal, turning to look down at her, and it was Opal (gazing straight ahead) who spotted me first. Opal wrenched her hand free and cried, “Barnaby!” and ran to meet me. There was enough of a breeze so she had lost that careful, prissy look. Her hair was tumbled, her cheeks were pink, and her jacket was flying behind her. She barreled into me and threw her arms around my waist, which she wouldn’t ordinarily have done. She wasn’t a very warm child, in my limited experience. But she said, “It’s not true you’re stopping your visits, is it?”

“Who, me?” I asked, and I looked past her to Natalie. She approached more slowly, with a hair-thin line of puzzlement running across her forehead as she noticed Sophia. (Maybe she imagined we were together.) I said, “Hey there, Nat.”

“Mom said you weren’t going to come anymore,” Opal told me. She grabbed hold of one of my thumbs and started tugging on it, bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet in an edgy, agitated manner I’d never noticed in her till now. “She said you’d talked it over and you’d be stopping your visits. But I knew you wouldn’t do that. Would you? You’d want to keep on seeing me! Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, sure I would,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that she would take this so personally. I felt kind of touched. In a funny way, I felt almost hurt. My throat got a hurtful, heavy feeling halfway down to my chest.

And Natalie must have felt the same, because she said, “Oh, honey. Of course he would! I didn’t realize you would mind so much.”

Then a hand arrived on my arm, so light it took a moment to register, and I turned and found Sophia smiling into my eyes. It was the most serene and radiant smile; the most seraphic smile. “Goodbye, Barnaby,” she said, and she dropped her hand and walked away.

I never did explain her presence to Natalie. I honestly don’t know what I would have said.