Free The Sunken Cathedral by Kate Walbert Page A

them months ago, and at least one lifetime.
    It is Sid Morris who peers through one of the wavy glass panels beside the old oak front door, its brass knocker decidedly beside the point, his eyes adjusting to the dark foyer, the furnishings. He heard the news and has come around, assuming a service of some sort or another, a way to pay his respects to Simone. It is the least he can do, given their dinner out, that time in Madison Square Park, and so on, and so it is Sid Morris who eventually makes out the form of Marie on the floor, the toppled stepladder beside her. It doesn’t take much to put two and two together. Jesus Christ, his first thought, believing Marie dead and this an unfortunate and perhaps too complicating association, though his conscience, sharpened by age and his lousy performance with Veritas, leads him to the hardware store on Tenth, the locksmith, the police, the rescue, Marie not dead at all, perfectly healthy, she insists, just resting or perhaps she even dozed off. She refuses the ambulance and asks only for the support of the handsome policeman.
    “You looked dead,” Sid Morris says.
    “I couldn’t get up,” Marie says.
    “It’s an orthopedic issue,” the policeman says. “There’s a clinic on Seventh in the Twenties, can you get there?”
    “I’ll get her there,” Sid Morris says.
    “Are you her husband?” the policeman says.
    Marie, propped now on the Queen Anne chair upholstered in maroon velvet, her foot raised, her ankle packed in ice from the Korean deli (she never remembers to fill her trays), is too surprised by Sid Morris’s yes to say no.
    “Good then,” the policeman says. He tears off a form he drops in the cloisonné bowl and it is only then, watching the handsome policeman let himself out, that Marie notices the shards of teapot on the foyer floor, the dragon head miraculously intact, severed as if by guillotine from its magic spout.
----
    I . Letters and diaries were to be had for a song, the whole place in turmoil—Communists, Trotskyites, Nazis: a lost Chekhov, the notebooks of Gogol or, maybe, Pushkin. Great-Aunt Eleanor couldn’t wait: she had developed a love of ephemera in old age, of saving that which could not be counted on lasting forever. She pawed through attics, wooden chests, string-wrapped bundles stashed beneath loose floorboards. Wasn’t everything worth something? Every sentence? Every sound? She unfolds another square of brittle, inked paper. A confetti of words rains down.

XIII
    I t is quite late when Elizabeth finds her way into Progressive K–8, the hallway lights out, the classroom lights out, the only glow a watery blue fluorescence from the science room aquarium. She talked the keys out of Bernice Stilton, school secretary, on a separate pretext—Ben’s history textbook left beneath his desk and, given his struggles with hypergrandia and so on. I
    She promises to return the keys quick as a flash.
    Bernice Stilton has understood as she will always understand, the keys clammy with understanding as she passes them over to Elizabeth. “Safe travels,” she says; it is cold and her breath comes out in clouds. She stands at the front door to the Penn South building, where she has lived since coming to the City. Rudy Stilton, she would say, by way of explanation. Then, the rest of life: petitioning for Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, his handsome brother, his poor son. Once, years ago, she stood on the roof of Rockefeller Center dropping dandelions on the passersby. Once she rolled in sweats in a chain of women through Sheep Meadow, Central Park, stopping the bulldozers who were there to bulldoze something she can’t now remember what.
    She pulls her robe across her thin chest: Bernice very thin, and myopic: she squints. She has worked at Progressive for nearly forty years and almost half as many administrations, the first the actual grandson of William Winifred Scott, its philosopher founder. II
    On her relationship with Dr. Constantine