The Rags of Time Read Online Free PDF

laughter—hoo-hoo-hooting, having deprived us the thrill of the kill.
    Clouds moved in with surprising swiftness, dusk turning twilight. I approached the dreary granite of the North Gate House, or houses—two on the Reservoir shore—straight and tall like giant rooks abandoned in a game of chess. Their black iron doors bolted, double padlocked. I take the notice personally: KEEP OUT. As though I would trash, pollute the works, while in the backwater sloshing between the towers my fellow citizens have deposited plastic bottles, deflated soccer balls, dead sneakers. Skeletal ribs of an umbrella float in thick green scum. This debris seemed placed here to call the city to mind—its waste, fumes, and general congestion of the grid in which Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux staged their pastoral drama, drew up plans for a park with hills and vales, rusticated nooks, and the folly of a castle to be viewed from the grandeur of Bethesda Terrace. The people of New York, high and low, would take pleasure in this otherworld that would never admit crumbled cigarette packs, milky condoms, a dismembered iPod jauntily floating in a tangle of weeds. Just beyond this detritus, the water was clear across to the South Pumping Station. The gulls, drained of color in the approaching night, held their post all along the pipe that dissects the Reservoir. I’d always thought a pipe’s a pipe. Not at all, when the water’s low you see their perch to be handsomely paved with stone. Above, the moon was translucent, a nibbled host in a starless sky. The programmed lights shone brightly on the tennis courts for players who would not give up on the day.
    Home before dark, Mimi.
    Take care.
    Repossessed by their warning, I found myself, dark end of day, round the block on French Street—its empty lot with shanties, idle men out of work. Our mother never called them tramps.
    Watch out for the Gypsies your father runs out of town, rabble that follow the circus. Duck the Commies at Workmen’s Circle. Steer clear of Benny the Drooler.
    I can take care of myself.
    As I crossed the Bridle Path, the last child in the playground struggled against his mother’s embrace. The fiberglass hippos and jungle gym clung to their stations while the kid was dragged off protesting. He did not want to go home, nor did I. How I hate that antique locution—prissy, at arm’s length from my fear the escape route ended where I began, the backward glance at my storybook with its claims to a sorrow never felt for the reality of a war and its aftermath I did not—may never—fully understand. With the doctor’s warning and the day’s meds, I had accomplished the loop, 1.58 miles, still subject to parental correction. Why the twinge of disgrace, sharp as a stitch in my side? Why my childish name? What’s more, they were right, I do not know how to take care of myself, simply enjoy the day’s adventure, cut free of the past. I’d been seduced by the contrived beauty and small adventures of Central Park, hoodwinked by an owl, affronted by black iron doors. My playground was closed for the night. I was home, Chez El Dorado, elevator at the ready.
    You were there, waiting. I passed you by in the hall—rudely, I guess—ran to my workroom, made a note— Everyone loves— lest I forget the self-serving legend of the Catholic Girl, forgetting I’d had a Bic and small pad in the pocket of the old black coat, two of its three buttons now missing.
    I called to you, Put on the pasta pot.
    By my reading chair, the book I threw aside. On a knockout cover, a single Rhinemaiden swims for the gold. By the sparkling stream, the author’s name is printed in Third Reich Gothic. I had aimed at important: that took the prize. Liebestraum , now reissued with a student guide, should have a query on the writer’s plagiarized emotions: Does the note of doomed love underwrite the inexhaustible horror of that war? My journey down the well-trodden path into the dark woods of National