Monkey Island Read online

  “Doesn’t she remind you of Miss Moffa?” Earl asked. “Especially when it’s teacher vampire hour at three P.M.?”

  “She’s prettier,” Clay said. Earl laughed.

  Monkey Island, Clay was hearing, where the monkeys live. In his mind’s eye, he could see those bawling faces, those bodies hauling themselves along, coming toward the park, set on damage and hurting, worse than any shoe polish vampire or irritable teacher.

  Earl was paying the clerk for the comic book. He made a little money on weekends putting fliers in mailboxes for a Chinese take-out restaurant. Edwina often asked Clay if he needed a dollar or two. But he didn’t care much for comic books, and he couldn’t think of what else he wanted. He did like the newspaper Henry brought home every evening. He read it all through, sometimes even the apartment ads.

  “You want to do something?” Earl asked when they were out on the sidewalk. “Like go down to the river and those old warehouses? Or we could go to where they’re putting up that new office building and look through the holes in the fence.”

  “It’s too cold for the river,” Clay said.

  “Well—what do you want to do?” Earl asked a little crankily. “You’re all wrapped up like a package today.”

  “There’s a place near here … if you want to come with me,” Clay said, not sure he really wanted Earl along.

  Earl shrugged and thrust the comic book into a pocket. “Let’s go,” he said.

  There were a number of streets to choose from. Clay made several false starts until suddenly his memory shaped itself into an arrow. He headed down a broad avenue.

  “Bird-dogging,” remarked Earl. “What’s the mystery?”

  Clay was unable to speak. Not much more than fifteen minutes from the comic-book store, the avenue split in two to fork around the triangular park.

  For a second, Clay felt so dizzy he thought he would pitch forward to the street. He grabbed Earl’s arm. There were no newspapers along the paths, no black plastic sacks. The cement drinking fountain had been removed. One bench, most of its slats broken, stood on its three remaining legs under a tree.

  The park was only a pause in the streets, a small place surrounded by rusty iron rails where trees had trouble staying alive.

  “What are we looking at?” asked Earl.

  “I lived there for five weeks,” Clay said, letting go of Earl’s arm. “In that park, over in that far corner, in a kind of crate house.”

  He stared at the corner, seeing himself in the big sweater Buddy had found for him, sitting at the entrance to the crate, looking up to see what Buddy was going to take out of a pocket or a paper bag for them to eat.

  “You were on the street,” Earl stated.

  “Yes.”

  Earl blew on his fingers, looking over them at Clay.

  “My cousin, Lawrence, is on the street,” he said. “He sleeps over to the Port Authority except when the cops chase him away. We haven’t got room for him. My mother takes him food when she can.”

  Earl went far out of his way to walk Clay almost to the Biddle apartment. It was still hard for Clay to think of it as home, but on this dark, cold afternoon, after seeing the park, it wasn’t possible at all.

  He was silent at supper that night. He knew he was making the Biddles uncomfortable. Henry told jokes. Edwina piled food on his plate. He couldn’t do what they wanted, laugh at Henry’s stories or tell them about school, or about what Earl and he had done that day. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt their disappointment.

  He did the chores he was asked to do, made his bed, dried dishes, helped to clean the apartment on Saturday mornings, put his soiled clothes in the hamper for Edwina to take to the Laundromat down the block. But they wanted more from him, even though Edwina told him he was the easiest boy she had ever taken care of. As she spoke, there was a questioning note in her voice as if she hoped he would contradict her.

  It flashed into his mind that she might be relieved if he acted up a little, balked at a chore for once, sulked and slammed shut his bedroom door.

  This sense, this knowledge, of what grown-ups were feeling was new in Clay. He thought it had come to him because he had lived like a grown-up himself all those weeks.

  It wasn’t that Buddy and Calvin hadn’t known he was a child. But in some deep way, he’d been on his own. He’d been one of them.

  It filled him with a somewhat spooky hilarity to realize that he had real thoughts of his own. From the time you learned to talk, he thought, people were always saying, Think about what you’re doing! Don’t be thoughtless!

  One of his thoughts was that people only saw you when you were standing in front of them. By now, the nurse, Alicia, would have had many more patients. Mrs. Greg would have seen and tried to help many more children in trouble. And if he suddenly disappeared, the Biddles would take in a new boy or girl. Henry would make jokes to get them to smile. Edwina, in her kindly way, would see that their socks were clean and that they had warm sweaters. But Clay did make an effort now and then to talk to them more than he felt like talking.

  He felt his mind had become a clean, bare room with a hard, clear light shining in the center of it.

  He did pretty well in school. He kept away from the really rough kids. There was nothing he wanted from them. He knew most of the places where drugs were dealt and used, and he avoided them. He and Earl learned a large part of the city like a lesson in a book.

  The truth was simple. He was alone. His father had left. His mother had left. In time, he’d grow up and find a job and have a small apartment of his own and take care of himself. Nothing lasted forever.

  But there was one shadowed corner in the bare, clean room of his mind. In that shadow, he glimpsed Buddy standing motionless, looking at him gravely, and he felt an enormous longing to see him, and an uncertainty about all these new thoughts that had come to him with his trouble.

  In early March, there was a blizzard, and school shut down for two days. The whole city seemed to have shut down. There was hardly any traffic. Only a few people moved about the streets, thickly muffled in clothing, their heads down.

  Clay kept to his new routine. In the afternoon, he went to the park. It took him just under forty-five minutes to reach it. When he got there, he walked all around the railing before going up the path to the corner. He’d been doing this on the afternoons he didn’t spend with Earl, even on weekends when he’d finished whatever he had to do at the Biddles’.

  Nearly two feet of snow had fallen. The traffic light clicked, but no cars passed. His were the only tracks in the drifts that had piled up along the paths. On the sidewalk, in front of the big building on the far side, a man with a long scarf wrapped around his head and face trudged through the snow as lights went on above him in several windows. It was so silent, as silent as it might have been in a forest of great trees.

  What had happened to Mrs. Crary? To Dimp Laughlin and his dog? To the boy with the earrings? Calvin was probably dead. But Buddy couldn’t be dead.

  What am I doing here? Clay asked himself, and answered, I’m looking for Buddy.

  He let himself into the apartment with his key. He heard voices from the living room, Edwina’s and someone else’s that was vaguely familiar. After he’d hung up his jacket, he looked into the room and saw Mrs. Greg sitting in an armchair, taking a sip from a cup of tea. She smiled at Clay.

  “Here he is!” she cried.

  Edwina said, “Oh, Clay! I was getting worried. Did you and Earl go off somewhere? It’s already dark.”

  “I walked in the snow,” Clay replied, staring at Mrs. Greg.

  “Mrs. Greg has something grand to tell you,” Edwina said, and her voice trembled very faintly.

  “Clay,” Mrs. Greg began. He held his breath. “We’ve found your mother and your tiny new sister.”

  “Lucy?” he said so quickly he didn’t think either of them heard him gasp.

  “Her name is Sophie, actually,” said Mrs. Greg. “She looks quite a bit like you, Clay. Yo
ur mother is living in a shelter with other women and their children. She’ll be moving into a place of her own very shortly. And then you’ll be with her. She was so happy to know you were safe and being taken care of. Yes. We made the connection—it’s truly wonderful how it all came out—just patient work,” and at this point, Mrs. Greg appeared to ponder on how wonderful it all was.

  Wonderful didn’t fit Clay’s feeling at that moment, unless it could mean dazed, unless it meant the faint hollowness he had often felt when he woke up bundled in rags and canvas, hearing old Calvin snoring a foot away, or else Buddy breathing lightly as though he were never fully asleep.

  He felt a strange embarrassment too, as though he was waiting for a huge sensation of surprise that was somehow passing him by.

  Then he thought—I have a sister, Sophie, and he was able to smile at Mrs. Greg.

  “Well! I should say!” she exclaimed, smiling back at him. “Tomorrow I’ll come and get you after school, and I’ll take you to her. I know how eager you must be.…”

  He nodded energetically, hoping the two women would not notice his silence.

  Edwina said, “Clay, I’m so glad for you.”

  That night at supper, Henry didn’t make a joke. He said what a miracle it was that people could find each other even in this vast city, that things can turn out fine. Looking at Clay and touching his arm, he said, “We’re going to miss you when you move in with your mom. But you’ll come and visit us sometime? Many of the children do, for a while.”

  “Yes,” Clay croaked. It was hard to talk. Whenever he meant to agree with Henry, to say how glad he was his mother had been found, an opposite feeling would push up behind his words. But it wasn’t that he was not glad. It was rather that he couldn’t understand at all why the small explosions of joy that rose up in him became muted at once as if they couldn’t make their way through a dense cloud of bewilderment and discontent.

  The women’s shelter was an old brick house on the Upper West Side of the city. When Clay looked up at it and caught sight of a woman passing in front of a bay window, carrying a child, he pulled away from Mrs. Greg.

  “Clay, what is it?” she asked.

  He shut his mouth tightly so nothing could come out of it that would surprise them both. The big glass doors opened. He found himself in a large, disordered room full of worn furniture, toys, and children’s clothes folded and piled up on chairs as though just taken from a dryer. Unframed pictures of babies were taped to the walls. A young woman with long black hair was sitting on a couch, nursing an infant. Clay looked quickly away. Mrs. Greg was speaking with a thin, tall woman wearing steel-rimmed eyeglasses who glanced at Clay from time to time. She beckoned to him, and when he went to stand beside her, she looked at him gravely as she stroked his hair.

  “Your mother is in her room,” she said. “We’ll go up. She’s been expecting you all day.”

  “I was in school,” he said.

  “Oh, she knew that.”

  They walked up a broad, curving, uncarpeted staircase. The banister was shaky. He heard babies crying, a child shouting, “Waffles, Mama!” and the rise and fall, like wavelets, of women’s voices. The lady with the glasses pushed open a door that was already ajar.

  On a narrow bed sat Clay’s mother. Next to her on a white flannel cloth was a sleeping infant.

  She and Clay looked at each other. He glanced behind him. Mrs. Greg and the woman with the glasses had withdrawn into the hall and were speaking together softly.

  His mother held out her arms.

  He took two steps. Her hair was short, cropped like a little cap around her head. She was thin. When he had imagined her all these weeks, she had been heavy, carrying the baby that now lay outside of her on the bed.

  “Clay,” she whispered.

  He went up to her, felt her arms around his shoulders, and was startled when she let fall the whole weight of her head against his neck.

  He was speechless. She kissed his cheeks and his forehead. He looked at the baby. Her face was as quiet as a small pond. She frowned slightly; a faint tremulous smile twitched her lips. For an instant, her hands moved like birds fluttering.

  “Clay,” said his mother again, pushing the hair from his brow. “You’re parting your hair. You look so grown-up. You have grown. Oh, Clay. I’ve missed you so.”

  “You went away,” he managed to say. It was not what he’d meant to say, although what that was, he wasn’t sure.

  His mother bowed her head and stared at the baby. He could hear everyone breathing, his mother, the baby, himself. Then she looked directly at him and began to speak quickly as though she’d said the words she was now saying many times before to herself.

  “I think I was out of my mind,” she said. “I couldn’t go back to that place. I’d left the money for you under the doughnuts—did you find it?—so I must have known I wasn’t coming back. I wandered the streets. I was frightened of what I was doing—leaving you like that. But I couldn’t go back there. And I thought—God knows if I thought at all—that somehow you’d be taken better care of if I wasn’t there.”

  She paused. Her face was close to his and it was flushed all the way to her forehead. He saw she felt shame. Some of it poured out of her and touched him and so he felt it too, for both of them, for what had happened to them.

  “I don’t know how to explain it,” she went on. “All I could think about was getting away. It’s more than you should have to take in, but that’s the truth of it. I fell apart. The night I left, I slept in a doorway. I panicked in the morning, thinking about the baby, thinking I’d lose it, that I had to do something. I tried to talk to a woman on the street. I couldn’t speak. It was as if language had been taken from me. Then another woman at Pennsylvania Station took hold of me, actually grabbed my arms and led me to this place. I couldn’t speak, Clay. I couldn’t write down words on paper for people to read. I was locked in. Then the baby came just over three weeks ago. I heard her first crying. And I was able to talk then. Our social worker, the one who tries to help us here, took down everything about you and where we’d been, everything. And they found you. And that’s what happened.”

  The baby awoke. Her eyes were blue.

  “Their eyes are always blue in the beginning,” his mother said. “Sophie,” she murmured, and picked up the baby and cradled her in her arms.

  “I’m all right now, Clay. In a few weeks or a month, there’ll be an apartment ready for us, all of us,” she said.

  “Daddy?” he asked quickly.

  “No,” she answered somberly. “But I know he’s alive. If he wasn’t, I’d have heard. We can hope he’ll come back. I think now that maybe the same thing happened to him that happened to me. But we can manage. In a few months, I’ll put the baby in day-care. I’ll get a job, only this time it will be a day job.”

  He touched the baby’s cheek. She had fallen asleep again. He touched her ear.

  “Clay, I know you can’t forgive me. Did Mrs. Larkin help you? I thought she might. She knows her way around all these agencies.”

  “She gave me soup,” he said.

  His mother groaned. “It all happened,” she said as though she couldn’t believe it. She put Sophie back on the white flannel cloth and looked down at her. Clay hoped the baby would wake. He wanted to hear her voice.

  “You suffered,” his mother said in so low a voice, he had to lean forward to hear her. “I know you did. I thought about it all the time, and about Daddy going away. If saying sorry was enough, there’d be no hard feelings in the world. I am sorry, but what can you do with that? They told me how you lived—like a stray animal, and then sick and alone in the hospital. Sorry can’t erase all that. There must be a way for people to go on caring for each other that’s a long way beyond sorry.” She looked up at him and smiled hesitantly.

  He looked away from her smile. He had listened to what she’d said, but he couldn’t think about it yet. She hadn’t been there at all; now there was almost too much of her.


  “You don’t have to forgive me,” she said. “I can bear that. But you’ll have to get to a place beyond forgiveness.…”

  The baby woke then with a small but piercing cry.

  10 Searching, Finding

  On a Saturday morning at the beginning of April, Clay stood at the door of a small apartment in a building on a street two subway stops south of the Biddles’ apartment. Beside him was a shopping bag containing his clothes, the red double-decker bus, and the copy of Robinson Crusoe Buddy had given him. The canvas bag that held his schoolbooks hung from one shoulder.

  “Welcome home,” his mother said. She had been putting groceries away, and she was still holding a carton of milk. When she hugged him, he felt the coldness of the milk through his sleeve.

  Sophie was lying on her back on a small sofa. When his mother had released him, he went to look at her. She seemed interested in the ceiling.

  “She’ll recognize you soon,” his mother said, putting a can of tomato sauce on a shelf. The kitchen was so small, he could see most of it through the doorway. When he looked back down at Sophie, her eyes were closed.

  Edwina had planned to bring him to the new apartment. For the first time since he had gone to live with the Biddles, he had argued with her. He wanted to go to his mother by himself. He had grabbed Edwina’s hand and kept hold of it. She gave in to him at once, looking down at his hands clasping hers. He realized it was the first time he had really touched her.

  “But you must call me when you get there,” she had said.

  “I will,” he promised.

  “I’d like to see the baby,” she said.

  “Oh, you will,” he said. His foster parents and his mother would meet, he knew, but there was a part of him that wished he could leave the Biddles and not see them again. It was the same part of him that was reluctant to return to the triangular park; yet he continued to go there whenever he had the time.

  His mother had come to look at Sophie. “She’ll sleep for a while,” she said. She held out her hand to Clay. “I’ll show you everything.”