The Sunken Cathedral Read Online Free

Sid Morris would say: tenements and immigrants, the teaming masses yearning to be free, fighting like cats in a bag, sonsofbitches most though some good souls who moved among them, administering. No one now knows from poor, he said.
    They have learned the things Sid Morris says he cannot forget: that he did nothing when a boy in his gang tormented another into falling from a fourth-floor window, that he cheated on his wife and was a rotten father to his only child, foolishly named Veritas; that he killed not one Communist in the war but shot himself, instead; that he skipped his mother’s funeral for a party.
    But he is not alone; there are other old cowards still hanging on in the East Village, in Chelsea, on the Lower East Side, men who frolicked with the likes of Rauschenberg and Warhol, their aged companions—once ingenues—still painting spheres, squares, a circle in their rent-controlled studios, their arthritic hands claw-curled to the brush.
    Beauty! Sid Morris said, addressing the dirty windows that looked out to the alley where, on certain Thursdays, the smell up from the Chinese restaurant across the street reached a point you could almost taste. Beauty! he said.
    “He is talented,” Simone is saying. “I mean, not hugely so, but in the way one must be in order to teach.”
    “Yes,” Marie says.
    “He’s got an interesting way of speaking.”
    She hasn’t noticed. “I know,” she says.
    “I wonder if he stuttered as a child. I bet he stuttered. So many of them did.”
    Time was Marie might have asked Simone what she meant, exactly—so many children stuttered? Boys? Boys named Sidney?—but age has undermined the urgency of these questions, or made them less pressing, somehow; most things unexplainable anyway—words too quickly fall away, disappear; where, she isn’t sure, but they are suddenly gone; language jittery, unsustainable. Connections lost. This is what has plagued her most about Abe’s death—not so much the death of Abe, but the death of all Abe knew: his books, his lifetime of asking, his thoughts, his memories, all this and everything else, their yellow kitchen with each object in its place, carefully mannered, intricate, ornate though not rich, more historical or, rather, well loved—objects inherited from Abe’s relatives in Philadelphia, silver a museum or a library collection would want to catalog though the value never interested him: it was the archaeology of the things, he would say, the history—the watchmaker’s insignia, the fleur-de-lis crest. A fortune sat on these shelves. Even Very Grand on her wire in their bedroom, painted by some somebody known for portraiture, posed against her Victorian wallpaper, arms crossed, challenging, as if she’d rather be anywhere else, a wrap—was it then called a wrap?—around her pale, regal shoulders. I
    “Marie?” Simone says.
    “Yes?”
    “You’re daydreaming,” Simone says.
    “Hmm?”
    “I said, the stew was delicious; you used fennel.”
    “Cumin.”
    “It tastes better than ever.”
    “Thank you.”
    Marie stands so abruptly the wooden chair wobbles. She gathers the plates and carries them to the sink. Where am I? she thinks: then, the yellow kitchen: the view: the darkening back garden. Beyond young families sleep in the taller building—a dull, white-bricked modern, twenty-some floors of windows in a checkerboard square, their lights a tic-tac-toe or random puzzle although the insomniac on the ninth floor remains as constant as the North Star. In a matter of hours they had torn down Mrs. Stern’s brownstone and the others: the one with the window boxes, the one with the honeysuckle that grew over the roof, the wrecking ball the size of a boulder, and the sound so loud. Marie dries her hands slowly but Simone’s coat is already over her shoulders.
    “He asked me to coffee,” Simone says, absently, as if distracted by a small loop of thread at her wrist. No doubt she waits, listening for the sharp intake of