A Patchwork Planet Read online

  On TV, they were asking pedestrians for their New Year’s resolutions. People said they had resolved to lose ten pounds, or stop smoking, or stop drinking. They’d resolved to join a gym or take up jogging. Seemed it was always something body-related. Except for this one guy—slouchy black guy in a hooded parka. He said, “Well, I just can’t decide. Could be I’ll start going to church again. Could be I’ll apply to truckdriving school. I just can’t make up my mind.”

  As if he were allowed no more than one resolution within a given year.

  I finished my beer and set the can on the floor beside the phone. My answering machine was blinking, but I didn’t expect any great messages at this hour. Unless some acquaintance was throwing a party and suddenly recollected my name. I leaned over and pressed the button.

  “Barnaby,” my mother said, “this is your mom and dad.”

  What a thrill.

  “We just wanted to say Happy New Year, sweetie. Hope it’s the start of good things for you—good news, good plans, a whole new beginning! Call us sometime, why don’t you? Bye.”

  Click.

  I flopped back on my bed and looked up at the ceiling. Hope it’s the end of all the trouble you’ve caused us, was what she was really saying. Hope at long, long last you’re planning to mend your ways; hope you’ll meet a decent girl this year and find a job we’re not embarrassed to tell the neighbors about. Hope you get your instructions from your angel, finally.

  Now, why did this next thought occur to me?

  I don’t know, but it did.

  Sophia Whatsit. Maynard. The woman on the train. Suppose Sophia Maynard was my angel.

  Silly, of course. I’d been snickering at that angel stuff since I was old enough to think straight. If that was not the Gaitlins in a nutshell, I always told them: imagining they had connections even in heaven!

  But still.

  I saw her gold hair, her feather coat, her bun that was not so unlike (it occurred to me now) a coiled braid.

  The trouble was, I seemed to be the first Gaitlin in history who didn’t have a clue what my angel had wanted to tell me.

  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-ti
me 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.”