Free The Rags of Time by Maureen Howard Page A

girl’s leg up to the black leather skirt that ended far above her knee.
    He said, Long time no see. Better part of a year?
    Christmas . Ah, the holiday visit. Bert’s family in suburban splendor. You will not forget the extravagant gifts. Bert, dispensing goodwill of the season, offered a priceless claret, Lafite-Rothschild: Some prefer ’85. He found ’86 more than OK. A fete out of the nostalgia manual—Dickensian goose, Bud with the girth of St. Nick. Better part of a year for that rotundity to scale down to skin and bones.
    You surely remember Heather Boyce flashing Santa’s watch ringed with diamonds. Boyce children, bored with our kids, dismissed to their Game Boys.
    Heather, So what can you do? The holidays. Something like that, putting words into her mouth as I’ve put them into yours. Isn’t that the idea of writing it down? Call back the day, things said in passing or by intent, translation from the foreign film of memory into the subtitles of here and now.
    Hear her? See her? Heather, who has never shed the yearbook smile of savvy innocence, the pleasant efficiency with which she packed away your offerings to Fern and Bertram III? Sketch pads, Chinese brushes, from ye olde curiosity shoppe with a bell over the door. The Christmas invite, an awkward duty for both parties.
     
     
     
    Court dismissed for the day. My keeper, McBride: See you tomorrow.
    Same time? Same cubby?
    Cubby brought a scolding. I did not value the privilege, Attorney Sylvan having procured this cell to prepare my schoolroom assignments. Had Thad slipped McBride a gratuity?
    Tim ran his hands over the digs and stains of the table. This room, interrogation room, used to be.
    Did money change hands so that I might sit among the ghosts of the guilty? Released for the day, I drew circles within a circle on the Broadway Line. Students will guess a scribbled infinity at one glance, though this simple visual has nothing to do with their progress in Math for Business Dummies, everything to do with my notebooks, with this spill of words written in ballpoint on paper, circles within circles. I could not run word count on the inked page, that’s only information, closed up shop on the Broadway Line listening to the muffled beat of my neighbor’s music, having written not one word in defense of my friend.
    I am reminded of Einstein’s letter to someone famous in which he confessed that images ran in his head long before the difficult search for language. The notebooks stored in my backpack with their weight of words seemed . . . well, wordplay skirting some image central to the story that is mine as much as Bertie’s, as though we are still competing as we did first day in the schoolyard. Let the image be the soccer ball with its patchwork of pentagons he shot my way, and my penalty kick these many years later, roughing him up in my version of our story. We were tough on each other, always outside the varsity game in progress.
     
     
    Gina! As though I could forget the fourth party in the limo. Her commanding presence, uncomfortable at best. She swept back the red hair. On second glance, not a girl.
    You’re Freeman, the boyhood chum.
    Backdating, Bert filled her in on the apartment where I lived with my grandparents. Where we picked them up, a block from the old homestead. Grandpa was Wall Street, last of the ticker-tape honchos.
    Gina stayed in the present. You’re the guy working on knots.
    Your Ghostly Honor, I may have actually joined the prosecution in my estimate of that leathery woman, she of the great legs who tossed off what might, or might not, be the subject of my dissertation when she apparently hadn’t a clue that we, the Freemans, had for some years moved uptown? Why get into it, Lou? She seemed well aware that I was a Boy Scout tangled in a stubborn knot of string theory. This Gina sneaking up on the site in which my theorem depended upon the work of others. She would know that the problem was not mine alone, and further