The Day the Bozarts Died Read online

  “You look tired, Stanley. Not working too hard, I hope?”

  “Nothing a round of golf wouldn’t cure.”

  “You remembered. Good for you. But you haven’t visited. Celia was down for a weekend last year.”

  “Was she?” It struck me that I could have visited, that I did have a sunny destination that winter we got snowed in. How had I forgotten the Queen B’s? But I sort of had.

  “Did you get our cards?”

  “Thanks, Beryl, I did.”

  “You didn’t answer. Bea thinks you’re still angry at us for leaving.”

  “No. I miss you.”

  “It looks as though you might be missing just about everyone. What the heck is going on around here?”

  “Do you know?”

  “Well I know there’s no one here. Do I know why? Hell, no.”

  I had also forgotten Beryl’s patrician “Hell, no” and it was good hearing it again. She was in the area to see her grandchildren (“They mostly come south, but you know, once or twice a year isn’t nearly enough”) and the foliage. I was glad she chose to see me too and we visited for an hour. She signed off on the gerania, then I walked her back to Weeks Square and put her on a train.

  Beryl was 80, and she had walked six miles in the same damn weather that had kept me cooped up so long. Which was distressing, without question—just not distressing enough to roust me out. I went right back to waiting for the phone to ring. When finally it did ring, “sometime soon” turned out to have meant 23 days.

  Lucy was ready to set up her fact-checking session and I just said “Great, let’s check ’em.” I said not a word about narcolepsy, paralysis, or fog, burying that whole pathetic backstory in gusts of cheer and charm as we hammered out an arrangement. Nor was my self-presentation fraudulent: I did feel cheered the instant I heard her voice and all the more so when her proposal turned out to be appealingly informal. She wanted to meet on “neutral ground” this time, in the evening, and the venue she proposed was The Brinded Cow, her “favorite Irish pub this side of Dingle.” Dingle Dangle, fine by me.

  We drew another Dickensian night, chill fog flooding the streets like a cold smoky soup. You would not go rushing out to enjoy such a night, though it was tailor made for a comfortable pub, with that lantern-in-a-storm quality. And as the Irish say, the drear conditions were good on Lucy. The rule held: each time I saw her she looked incrementally better. 15% better, give or take, which can start to add up.

  This time, her thick brown hair curled up over the margins of a blue wool watch-cap. Leather boots and a trench-coat served to slim and lengthen her legs. High coloring in her cheeks—from the raw wind, I suppose—set off the pool-blue eyes.

  Lucy’s look was preppie, I guess, or maybe what Nina used to call “catalogue chic.” Nothing like our waitress (whose speech was mildly impaired by the generous bits of metal lodged in her lips and tongue) or the other young ladies in the room. No such adornments for her (“Loveliness needs not the foreign aid of ornament”) though she did assert her 20-something props by ordering a drink I’d never heard of, with about five fruits and six liqueurs in it.

  “Are you ready to play a little trivial pursuit?” she said, and that’s what it was. When did so-and-so arrive, what did he do, when did he leave, and why. How many dogs were present the night of the ’88 blizzard and why were there never any cats at #4? It felt as though she was administering a lie detector test, and that abruptly, “casually,” she would toss in the real question. The tripper-upper.

  “No tape recorder this time?” I said, as the raw data began to accumulate.

  Here Lucy lifted her sweater to reveal and tap a shirt pocket, where apparently the tiny tape recorder was tucked away. “Full disclosure,” she said.

  “Not quite full.”

  “Transparency, then.”

  “Not that either.”

  “What I mean, if you can stop with the lame sophomoric humor” (and she my junior by decades!) “is that I’m not hiding it. I would put it on the table, except I did that once and the waiter took it away. It was in a barrel of swill before I realized it was gone. Which was an informing trauma.”

  “Who was on the tape?’

  “You mean did I lose an exclusive with Deep Throat?”

  “I’m impressed—you remember Watergate. You must have been in knickers.”

  “Try diapers. I saw the movie. Not the porno, the one with Dustin Hoffman.”

  “God, how I miss Watergate. Truly, it was our only big political scandal that had a happy ending.”

  “Happy for whom?” she said, merrily. Maybe this was just another gambit (softening up the subject with laughs and booze) but Lucy did seem less the young reporter tonight than the young woman.

  “For this great nation of ours, as they say. Hey, for once the bad guys went down. A few of them even did a little time. Versus say Iran-Contra, where they came away with book deals and talk shows? Versus WMD in Iraq, which no one even noticed was a scandal?”

  Full disclosure? This girl was growing on me. And why not, when she was approximately 45% more appealing than when first appraised. But even without being officially attracted to her, I could enjoy being with her. We were having a blast.

  Gradually, though, as we went about the work of backfilling holes in her research, it became clear she had interviewed others in pursuit of the Bozarts story. I knew this the same way cops do, when they hold back pertinent details only the killer could possess. Clapper’s fingerprints were all over the place. Bea and Beryl had squealed. And clearly Celia was behind the coy inquiry “And what’s this thing about Wade Boggs?”

  There were others. The list of people she had not interviewed might well be the shorter list. Lucy had been a busy girl. But I was cool with it all. We survived Boggs easily (Lucy grasped what they had not, what even Boggs himself had not, that it was all a joke, a nothingburger) and we survived the other little hints and betrayals that filtered back from her extracurricular inquiries.

  In fact, a pint farther on, I had made genuine peace with those inquiries. Such research made perfect sense, such professionalism was vital to the integrity of The Baskin Reader. I trusted Lucy with our story, and I call it that because by now we were almost partners, we were shaping this piece together. So when she revealed her proposed title for the article, I not only approved, I co-opted it on the spot, concocting the notion that by the most amazing coincidence, my new play bore the exact same title!

  “Are you serious? The Day The Bozarts Died?”

  I don’t know about serious, but yeah, sure. It was a bit grim for my taste, yet undeniably suggestive of much that was real to me. “Absolutely. Great minds think alike.”

  “You send me yours when it’s done and I’ll send you mine,” she laughed, later on, as our evening was concluding. “But don’t be alarmed if I call once more before I turn the piece in. I tend to be grotesquely thorough, and I always panic about some damn thing before we go to press.”

  “Hey, you know my number,” I said, because one must speak a goodbye line when exiting the stage. Releasing her into the mist, I felt almost jolly—soused, I suppose—until we had traveled into the enveloping darkness of our opposite directions and I heard belatedly in her syntax the possibility we might never meet again. Never? Yet even the upside had been “once more.”

  I was the one who panicked. Something powerful, electrical, jolted me and I took off after her, sprinting fifty yards before I caught hold of myself. I retained just enough stage sense to know that catching up could only result in an impossibly foolish moment, a weak and hollow scene. I forced myself to let the curtain stand, allowing the distance between us to widen while the unforeseen, inexplicable panic continued to rise in my soul.

  I didn’t dare go home to the Bozarts. Instead, my frayed nerves like tiny wildfires, I tried to walk it off. I tramped the shrouded streets for I know not how long—hours I am sure—aimlessly tracing the city grid. The high windows of the hospital framed a warm, inviting li
ght; the barred windows of the police station showed cold and fluorescent. I kept score: Dunkin Donuts led Starbucks, 8-7.

  I went as far as Euclid Street, and opened the gate, came up the path to the vestibule, thinking about Nina’s kids asleep inside. According to a curlicue wrought-iron sign, someone named Wagner lived there now. Nina and Phil had moved on.

  I had not dressed for this long midnight, and the wind kept slicing away at me. Passing back through Sycamore Square, I decided to make a pit stop at The Brinded Cow—get warm and get collected, maybe drink an Irish coffee. It was late, though; too late: they had locked the door. Through the latticed window I saw them putting chairs on tables, drinking the leftover wine as they finished up. Our waitress was smoking a cigarette directly beneath the no smoking sign.

  Too late everywhere. All the bars were shuttered, people were disappearing down into the subway head, and by now I was shivering so badly I ran back to the Bozarts. I didn’t even turn on the lights, just crawled under the quilt fully dressed, jacket and all, and waited for my bones to thaw. Then I waited for sleep, which did not come or even approach as my mind kept racing and grinding. My sleep number could have been six or six million for all the help it brought.

  I got up and hit the lights. Tried reading, tried writing (or at least pondering the bogus play I had described to Lucy, a play that made excellent sense, why not write such a play?) and I would have tried arithmetic. It was half past three, and Fitzgerald’s line kept repeating itself the way a bad hit song will when it catches on a rough edge of your brain: “In the dark night of the soul it is always three in the morning.… In the dark night of the soul it is always.…”

  I was geared way down, thoroughly accustomed to solitude (inured to it I had thought, it was what was) yet the paradox was unblinkable: Lucy’s companionship had rendered me more lonely, not less. I never felt so lonely as I felt that night. Lonely clean through to the marrow.

  By four I had drafted a desperate but casual sounding note to my sister proposing I visit for a week at Thanksgiving. I had no idea where else to go, what else to do. Then, because she would never let me stay a whole week, I revised it down to “a few days.” No sense scaring them off.

  Wrapped in a blanket, I began ranging through the deserted building, opening doors, trying to reconstruct all that had gone on behind them. I made it a game of sorts, reconfiguring the layouts of all those easels and kilns and platforms, light-tables and chemical baths, even (lately) computers. How the hell do you paint on a computer, I asked Ed one day, and he showed me. Took a painting of a New England village inn, scanned it onto the screen, and “tweaked” it so many ways so quickly that in less than a minute he had pretty much ruined it.

  “See how you can enhance it?” he said, shrinking a majestic beech tree down to the size of bonsai. “And you save all your sketches, in case you want to go back.”

  Yes Eddie, I want to go back. Back to 1979, or 1984, even back to 1999. Get me out of this new millenium!

  I pulled the folding ladder down and climbed through the hatch onto the flat roof and stood in the freezing sheets of wind, remembering how Missy McKay used to lie up here by the chimney sunbathing in the nude.

  Missy for Sheldon Gross? Easily the best trade in local history until the Sox got Pedro Martinez from Montreal. Boring old Sheldon would lumber up the stairs every day at noon (he and his wife cleaned houses all morning) and barricade himself in his studio for eight hours, churning out moonscapes by the dozen while the sunlight came streaming in through his windows. Sheldon saw night; he saw moon. Albert Pinkham Ryder had nothing on him.

  Whereas Missy saw sun. She would head for the roof, unbutton her dress (nothing under it, ever) and grab a few rays. Bare-assed on a faded blue air mattress, she looked her best and she knew it, so she didn’t mind company. She liked showing off, and she liked getting a hand with the suntan oil as she turned and basted herself.

  I remembered how good she was with buttons, how she could do up her dress with one hand while spooning her yogurt with the other. It was stunning to think Missy had left the Bozarts 14 years ago. How could 14 years go by so quickly, when a single night could loom eternal?

  The sky was clearer (stars appearing here and there through the shredding fog) but it was still night when I climbed down through the trap door and went back into their old studio. Could Missy still look sleek as an otter after 14 more years of ultraviolet life? She must be close to 50 now. And what about Sheldon? Was he on his one millionth moonscape, or had another subject finally caught his eye?

  Each year at Christmas, as I mentioned, the friendly folks at Hargrove & Drew send an unglimpsed functionary over to deposit, in each studio, a shiny holiday package filled with inedible viands: chocolate-covered pretzels, cheese crackers, garlicky crisps, unnaturally colored hard candies. The functionary comes and goes like the tooth fairy, so you are always “surprised” to discover the gift on your table. Such a lovely gesture, Beryl would coo, while Clapper and I could only shake our heads in wonder.

  Now, nearly hallucinatory with fatigue, I flashed on the shadowy figure, carting in those fancy baskets, carefully placing one gift pack in each uninhabited studio. It would be sort of a Rod Serling ending to the long Hargrove joke on us all. Or maybe the functionary would come earlier than usual, next week, and leave a plump Thanksgiving turkey in each room, a 20-pounder with all the fixins, stuffing and turnip and cranberry sauce, maybe a bottle of Chardonnay.

  It must have been the first flush of dawn by then (unless I dreamt the thin rim of brightness edging the eastern skyline) and I must have crashed right in the middle of the Thanksgiving riff (and right in the middle of Missy’s cold long-abandoned linoleum) and I must have slept 12 hours too, because when I woke a thin rim of brightness was edging the western sky—damned close to night again.

  * * *

  From “The Day The Bozarts Died” by Lucy Young, reprinted from The Baskin Reader:

  .… The last wave was going out from The Blaisdell Street Artists Co-operative. Just as the first memoirs and biographies began appearing, the place itself was disappearing.

  Or its tenants were. Liz Clougherty and Ed Bellingham were the old pros, the stalwarts. Their art had always been firmly tied to the workaday world, through the bottom-line business of children’s books. And for 20 years at Blaisdell Street, they had been tied together. “The toughest consideration for me,” says Bellingham, “was Lizzie herself. We never worked jointly on projects, but there was a definite sense of partnership. A comfort level I would be going without.”

  Nonetheless, without it he went, to his wife’s hometown in the midwest. Out of decency, Bellingham offered to cover his half of the rent until Clougherty could find a suitable replacement. Instead of looking for one, she went looking for a new studio in Lewiston, Maine. They were scattering to the four winds.

  Arnie Cloud was next. Cloud purchased the former Ranford Tannery Building in Fallonville, where he would enjoy “ten times the space for about the same money. Not a terribly difficult decision.” When his niece relocated to the new facility with him (“Twice the space for half the money?” says Gately, blushing.) Cloud dubbed them the New Original Two. “Me, I just live from one quarter-century to the next,” he quips.

  All of which left Stanley Noseworthy alone at the top, so to speak. If you ventured to Blaisdell Street today, you would find (perched above the bustling Ravello Brothers operation) 11 glaringly vacant spaces—and Noseworthy. Even for those inclined to think in terms of philistine conspiracies, or strategies for profit, it is a mystifying outcome.

  “In this country, we want entertainment, not art,” Noseworthy declaims, perhaps answering an entirely different question. His is a familiar enough lament, and manages to disregard the sunny, voluntary nature of Cloud’s departure.

  Whatever question he is answering, Noseworthy does go on: “Serious art is discarded, or ridiculed, while stereotypical titillating garbage is embraced. And our leader, self-proclaimed leader of the free wor
ld—whatever that is—proudly declares he does not read, while the real question is whether he can read. So there you go. Welcome to the 21st Century.”

  And to every other century since the Renaissance, according to Bea Jasperson, though she concedes there is bound to be more of that “titillating garbage” in an age where there is so much more of everything imagistic. “It’s all pictures now, or pixels,” says Jasperson, “so you do see too much of young ladies in their underwear. But I’m surprised Stanley has a problem with that.”

  Arnie Cloud concedes the current administration in Washington may be more than usually hostile to diverse modes of thought and expression, but shares Jasperson’s philosophical overview. “It’s not like people stopped watching sitcoms and started loving chamber music when Clinton was in the White House. Philistines and politicians can be a plague, no question. Yet never, anywhere throughout history, have the arts been successfully stifled.”

  No one, he points out, kept him from casting his scathingly satirical “Wolfowitz At The Wailing Wall” and no one kept a collector in Bruges from paying “a small fortune for it, enough to buy a small crumbling castle,” solely on the basis of a flock of pixels on the Internet.

  “The arts are incredibly resilient,” insists Cloud. “Look at the symphonies composed at Buchenwald and Theresienstadt. Or the samizdat novels smuggled out of Czechoslavakia. Look at hiphop music for that matter. What could be more anti-Establishment than crowing about rape and murder? Stanley just doesn’t get it. He needs to believe we are on some cosmic shit list. I believe he’s depressed and paranoid.”

  “Absolutely,” says former Hargrove agent Kristen Dane, who offered to show Noseworthy spreadsheets, phone logs, and the newspaper ads she placed attempting to fill the vacant studios. “Paranoid is the word.”

  An affable, open woman of 40, Dane had in fact parted ways with Hargrove & Drew (“All right, they canned me”) by late 2002. For all she knows, Dane jokes, her own office in East Canterbury may still be vacant. But Dane’s severance was a piece of news Noseworthy refused to accept. “Stanley kept coming after me. He came after me the week my husband canned me too, when I swore my own damn house was only at 50% occupancy.”