Free The Sunken Cathedral by Kate Walbert Page B

she prefers not to comment, and it is for this reason that Elizabeth prefaced her phone call by admitting she knew this was against school policy, but given the fickle nature of the changing guard she hoped Bernice might make an exception. This was close to an emergency, she said. This once. Just tonight. She would return the keys first thing, she promised.
    “All right,” Bernice had said without a fight.
    “I’ll be quick,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll keep the lights out.”
    “All right,” Bernice had said.
    It is Bernice’s job each morning to raise the flags that hang on the flagpole—U.S. and UN—and to unlock Progressive K–8’s large glass doors and prop them open so the children don’t get swatted as the busy parents race in and out. It is also Bernice’s job to make the coffee in the principal’s office, to pull the blinds in the science lab, and to check to make sure the reptiles are still alive—no one eager to repeat the unfortunate Trisi Watkins incident. It is Bernice’s job to outfit the volunteer crossing guards and the volunteer morning greeters and to make sure that the cluster of mothers, the Early Birders, whose 7:00 A.M. Steps! class is now up to twenty-five rotations of the four flights leading to Progressive K–8’s playground roof, know to move it along for the hordes who will descend at 8:30. It is perhaps for this reason and despite Elizabeth’s claim that she’ll drop the keys back off by 6:30 that Bernice keeps watch as Elizabeth moves into the Ninth Avenue traffic, steering her bicycle down one of the new bicycle lanes, the light on her helmet flashing as if Elizabeth were her own ambulance on her way to her own emergency.
    But Bernice was once a mother, too, and always a working girl, a professional. She drank gin. On weekends she took a pottery course at the New School. In 1963, at a glamorous club somewhere midtown, Frank Sinatra had asked her to dance.
    Charmed, she had said.
    Why Bernice remembers Frank Sinatra while watching Elizabeth’s flashing bicycle light disappear into the stream of Ninth Avenue, taxis piling up here and there and delivery boys hell-bent for somewhere sideswiping one another, she could not say, but returning she feels already regretful, a bit undone by the look of it all, or more specific: Elizabeth Fanning lost in traffic. She wonders if she has done the right thing and knows she has not.
    Face the music! Rudy used to say. No one wants to face the music! She can see him now, Rudy. Like Fiorello La Guardia, a real firecracker, a spark plug, a pistol. He gave her a tough time sometimes—he couldn’t help it, his own father and so on. You have to consider the tree before you call me a rotten apple, he’d say.
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    I . The and so on is a long list, hypergrandia often one in a constellation of learning challenges formerly known as learning differences formerly known as learning disabilities that have dogged Ben for years, resulting in Elizabeth’s purchases of the vitamins B, G, Y, and R3, her consultation with a hypnotist and psychic, and her bedside table loaded with books on various theories and diagnoses. Although Progressive K–8’s submandate to Partner with the Parent and its attendant Circle Rap sessions have keyed her in to the epidemic nature of and so on, in her heart of hearts she believes most of it only fashion. Such as melancholia; or hysteria.
    II . Winifred after his mother, she the Winifred Scott of the Cooperstown Transcendentalists, a woman so legendary for her ability to detect portals to the spirit world she counted Mary Todd Lincoln among her high-paying clients, although Lincoln’s desperation to reach her son also led her to every quack operating along the north-south corridor and finally to a room at Bellevue Place sanitarium. But everyone agreed Winifred Scott was the real McCoy. She stood on the steps of the abandoned Home for Destitute Women her son had found in bankruptcy on Bleecker Street, his dream of an