Free The Rags of Time by Maureen Howard Page B

know we broadcast our progress with a sense of camaraderie, as though still low on the ladder, we might settle into a Viennese café, spell our answers out on paper tablecloths, though the acrobatic dream of my climbing a rung up while scribbling through cigarette haze may not work out, not at all. You see how precarious it was, yet how available my various routes to solvation.
    Perhaps that Gina was even aware that Ernst Gottschalk, our leader in the quaint Hall of Mathematics, is the man I dodge even when he’s gone a-conferencing, not settled in his endowed Chair, elegantly tailored beyond the three dimensions of the world we inhabit in out-at-elbow Gap, worn student jeans. The door to his office flung open, no appointment needed, as though we play in time gone by—kindly teacher welcoming a confab with befuddled adjunct in need, though mostly unavailable as he publishes the next and the next paper, the only one that counted back in ’78, the dark age of a quantum past. Gott, who still holds with No. 2 pencils, red erasers, an ancient’s belief in the contemplated mark on the page, the rubber crumbs of correction. I slouch by his door each day. Idle fear, Louise, as though he might catch me out in a miscalculation. Tut-tut shake of the ponderous head with its unruly ruff of white hair. For now I will call it a touch of paranoia connecting that Gina, Bert’s Munster mom, to Gott, a legendary figure of fun and fear you have never, may never, meet. Our leader does not frolic at math parties, partake of our pizza sweating in the cardboard delivery box, sip our tepid beer.
    Gina, this is the professor. Her bangled arm raised in greeting. Gina multitasks, nanos, surveillance.
    In the past, Bert claimed the title Entrepreneur—telecommunications in Africa, oil in Belarus, gold in Peru—seemed multi enough. At his emporium a job arranged for Artie when in need, so I’d run the books on the screen, always this side of the law, or play pixart, imaging whatever the boss imagined in his climb to the heights. I trust you recall Skylark’s shot at a weather channel, Bertram Boyce controlling the elements. Make it rain, Freeman. Give us a blustery day. More often than not, reality echoed my cloud cover or the mist of a Spring morning. Snow fell softly on the tristate area, credit of Arthur Freeman. We marketed the sun, the rain. The atmosphere in the limo that day was heavy with a climate of restraint, a forecast of possible grief.
    The 86th Street transverse allotted little time for my sorry tale. I was not and, as you feared, may never gain the dimension of professor. The Park glowered above its stone walls, trees and sky dimmed, blur of a dirty white cloud. Bert scrolled a window down to admit a wave of fossil fumes, then, skeletal hand on your thigh, made his move, the old one-on-one maneuver.
    How’s the art business?
    You sweetened your answer with a smile. I’m not in business. Let it play out, the uncomfortable silence enclosing us at the stoplight.
    Then Gina on the wireless canceling out the old friends of Bud Boyce. I’m on the board, to whom it may concern, so I’ll go in that direction.
    Feathering her nest?
     
     
    Fast forward: Bertie is ushered up the courthouse steps, spiffy with a silk handkerchief in his blazer pocket, Heather tottering behind on perilous heels. Cameras that day. I was ordered to keep my distance by the defense, T. Sylvan, Esquire, who does not deserve his arboreal name. I am well aware of the unkind view I’d taken as the case presented itself at the distance of judge’s chambers. My day in court, I’d have said nice things, believe me. Bert, devoted father and husband, simply lost his way in the prevalent culture of greed. Why not skim off the cream? My grandmother, Mae O’Connor, taught me about top o’ the milk when milk came in a bottle, when children were instructed not to skim or backdate, though everyone’s doing it. Mea culpa, another of her lessons, came to mind as I opened