The Empire of Ice Cream Read online

  I sat back down at my desk, and instead of writing about the investigation, I wrote about Mr. Farley. After describing him getting into the pool and fake drowning on the water, I wrote about two other incidents I remembered about him. The first was about his older son, who had since moved away from home. When the boy was younger, Farley, an engineer who made tools for flights into outer space, tried to get his son interested in astronomy and science. Instead, the kid, Gregory, wanted to become an artist. Mr. Farley didn’t approve. Before the kid left home for good, he created a giant egg out of plaster of Paris and set it up in the middle of the garden in the backyard. It sat there through months of wind and rain and sun and eventually turned green. On the day after the astronauts walked on the moon, Mr. Farley sledgehammered the thing into oblivion.

  The second incident happened one day when I was raking leaves on the front lawn with my father. Suddenly the door over at the Farleys’ opened and there he stood, weaving slightly, highball in hand. My father and I both stopped raking. Mr. Farley started down the steps slowly, and with each step his knees buckled a little more until upon reaching the walkway, he stumbled forward, his knees landing on the grass of the lawn. He remained kneeling for an instant, and then tipped forward, falling face first onto the ground. Throughout all of this, and even when he lay flat, he held his drink up above his head like a man trying to keep a pistol dry while crossing a river. I noticed that not a drop was spilled, as did my father, who looked over at me and whispered, “Nice touch.”

  I put the pencil down and closed the notebook with a feeling that I had accomplished something. It was hard to believe how much I had enjoyed capturing Mr. Farley on paper. I thought to myself, Perhaps this writing is something that could be mine. Jim had Botch Town, Mary had her imaginary world, my mother had her wine, my father, his jobs, Nan, the cards, and Pop, his mandolin. Instead of writing about the footprint or Mrs. Kelty’s scream, I planned to fill the notebook with the lives of my neighbors, creating a Botch Town of my own between two covers.

  When I went down into the cellar to tell Jim about my decision, I found him holding the plastic soldier up to the light bulb. He showed me what he had done to the figure. Big white circles had been painted over his eyes, and his hands, which had once held the machine gun and grenade, had been chopped off and replaced with straight pins that jutted dangerously point out from the stubs of his arms.

  “Watch this, glow in the dark paint,” said Jim, standing the figure upright on the board between our house and the Keltys’. He then leaned way out over Botch Town and pulled the light bulb string. The cellar went dark.

  “The eyes,” he said, and I looked down to see the twin circles on the soldier’s face glowing in the night of the handmade town. The sight of him there, like a specter from a nightmare, gave me a chill.

  Jim stood quietly, admiring his creation, and I told him what I had decided to do with the notebook. I thought he would be mad at me for not following his orders.

  “Good work,” he said. “Everyone is a suspect.”

  Saturday afternoon, I sat with Mary back amidst the forsythias and read to her the descriptions of the people I had so far written about in my notebook. That morning I had gone out on my bike early, scouring the neighborhood for likely suspects to turn into words, and had caught sight of Mrs. Ryan, whom I named The Colossus for her mesmerizing girth, and Mitchell Potaney, a kid who shared my same birthday and who, for every school assembly and holiday party, played “Lady of Spain” on his accordion.

  I doled them out to Mary, starting with Mr. Farley, reading with the same rapid whisper and grave import as I used when relaying a chapter of a Perno Shell adventure. Mary was a good audience. She sat still, only nodding her head occasionally as she did when sitting with Pop while he figured the horses. Each nod told me that she had taken in and understood the information up to that point. She was not obviously saddened when Mrs. Ryan’s diminutive, potato-head husband died nor did she laugh at my description of Mitchell’s simpering smile when bowing to scanty applause. Her nod told me she was tabulating the results of my effort, though, and that was all I needed.

  When I was done and had closed the notebook, she sat for a moment in silence. Finally, she looked at me and said, “I’ll take Mrs. Ryan to place.”

  Our mother called us in then. My father had just gotten home from work (Saturdays he only went to the shop until 12:30), and it was time for us to visit our Aunt Laura at the T. B. hospital. We piled into the white Biscayne, Jim and me in the back with Mary between us. My father drove with the window open, his elbow leaning out in the sun, a cigarette going between his fingers. I hadn’t seen him all week until just then, and he looked tired. Adjusting the rearview mirror, he peered back at us and smiled. “All aboard,” he said.

  St. Anselm’s was somewhere on the north shore of Long Island, nearly an hour drive from our house. The ride was usually solemn, but my father sometimes played the radio for us, or if he was in a particularly good mood, he’d tell us a story about when he was a boy. Our favorites were about the ancient, swaybacked plough horse, Pegasus, dirty white and ploddingly dangerous, he and his brother kept as kids in Amityville. Those stories had wings and he managed to end them just as we pulled in through the tall iron gates of the place.

  This hospital was not a single modern building, painted white inside and smelling vaguely of Lysol and piss. St. Anselm’s was like a small town of stone castles set amidst the woods; a fairy tale place of giant granite steps, oaken doors, stained glass, dim, winding corridors that echoed in their emptiness. There was a spot set amidst a thicket of poplars where a curved concrete bench lay before a fountain whose statuary was a pelican piercing its own chest with its beak. Water geysered forth from the wound. And the oddest thing of all—everyone there, save for old, bent Doctor Hasbith of the bushy white sideburns, was a nun.

  I’d never seen so many nuns before, all of them dressed in their black flowing robes and tight headgear. When one of them came toward you from out of the cool shadows and your eyes weren’t yet adjusted to inside, it was like a disembodied face floating in midair. They moved about in utter silence and only rarely would one smile in passing. The place, haunted by God and his mysteries, was both a dream and a nightmare. I couldn’t help thinking that our aunt was being held prisoner there, enchanted like Sleeping Beauty, and that on some lucky Saturday we would rescue her.

  As was usual, we were not allowed to accompany our parents to the place where Aunt Laura was being kept. Jim was left in charge, and we were each given a quarter to buy a soda. We knew that if we went down a set of winding steps that led into what I thought of as a dungeon, we would find a small room with a soda machine and two tables and chairs. Our usual routine was to descend, have a drink, and then go and sit on the bench by the fountain to watch the pelican bleed water for two hours. But that day, after we’d finished our sodas, Jim pointed into the shadow off to the left side of the small canteen at a door I’d never noticed before.

  “What do you think is in there?” he asked.

  “Hell,” said Mary.

  Jim got up and went over to it. I watched as he turned the knob. He flung the door open and jumped back. Mary and I left our seats and stood behind him. From there, you could see a set of stone steps leading down, walls close on either side like a brick gullet. There was no light in the stairway itself, but a vague glow shone up from the bottom. Jim turned to look at us briefly. “I order you to follow me.”

  At the bottom of the long flight of steps, we found a room with a low ceiling, a concrete floor, and a row of pews that disappeared into darkness toward the back. Up front, near the entrance to the stairway, was a small altar and above it a huge painting in an ornate gilt frame. The dim light we had seen from above was a single bulb positioned to illuminate the picture, which showed a scene of Jesus and Mary sitting next to a pool in the middle of a forest. The aquamarine of Mary’s gown was resilient, and both her and Christ’s eyes literally shone. The figures were smiling, a
nd their hair along with the leaves in the background appeared to be moving in a light breeze.

  “Let’s go back,” I said.

  Mary inched away toward the stairs, and I started to follow her.

  “One second,” said Jim. “Look at this, the holy fishing trip.”

  We heard a rustle of material and something clunk against the heavy wood of one of the pews behind us. I jumped and even Jim spun around with a look of fright on his face.

  “It’s a lovely scene, isn’t it?” said a soft, female voice. Then from out of the dark came a nun, whose face, pushing through the black mantle of her vestments, was so young and beautiful, it confused me. She was smiling and her hands were pale and delicate. She lifted one as she passed by us and climbed onto the altar. “But you mustn’t miss the idea of the painting,” she said, pointing.

  “Do you see here?” she asked, and turned to look at us.

  We nodded and followed her direction to gaze into the woods behind where Mary and Jesus were sitting.

  “What do you see?”

  Jim stepped closer and a few seconds later said, “Eyes and a smile.”

  “Someone is there in the woods,” I said as the figure became evident to me.

  “A dark figure, spying from the woods,” said the nun. “Who is it?”

  “The Devil,” said Mary.

  “You’re a smart girl,” said the nun. “Satan. Do you see how much this looks like a scene from the Garden of Eden? Well, the painter is trying to show that just as Adam and Eve were subject to temptation, to Death, so were the Savior and his mother. So are we all.”

  “Why is he hiding?” asked Jim.

  “He’s waiting and watching for the right moment to strike. He’s clever.”

  “But the Devil isn’t real,” said Jim. “My father told me.”

  She smiled sweetly at us. “Oh, the Devil is real, child. I’ve seen him. If you don’t pay attention, he’ll take you.”

  “Goodbye now,” whispered Mary, who took my hand and pulled me toward the steps.

  “What does he look like?” asked Jim.

  I wanted to flee, but I couldn’t move. I thought the nun would get angry, but instead her smile intensified, and that same face went from pleasant to scary.

  Mary pulled my arm, and we took off up the stairs. Not bothering to stop in the canteen, we kept going up the next set of steps to the outside and only rested when we made it to the bench by the fountain. We waited there for some time, hypnotized by the cascading water, before Jim finally showed up.

  “You chickens should be hung for mutiny,” he said as he approached.

  “Mary was afraid,” I said. “I had to get her out of there.”

  “Check your own shorts,” he said. “Anyway, get this. That nun’s name was Sister Joseph.”

  “You mean she was a guy?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “But she told me a secret.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “How to spot the Devil when he walks the Earth. That’s what Sister Joe said, ‘When he walks the Earth,’” said Jim, and started laughing.

  “She was the Devil,” said Mary, staring into the water.

  That night, back at home, the wine flowed, and my parents danced in the living room to The Ink Spots on the Victrola. Something dire was up, I could tell, because they didn’t talk and there was a joyless gravity to their spins and dips.

  Before we turned in, Nan came from next door and told us that while we were out she had heard from Rose across the street that the prowler had struck again. When her husband, Dan, had gone out late on Friday night to throw away the trash, he heard something moving back in their grape arbor. He called out, “Who’s there?” Of course there was no answer, but he saw a shadow and a pair of eyes. Dan was an airline pilot who flew all over the world, and one of his hobbies was collecting old weapons. He ran inside and fetched a long knife from Turkey that had a wriggled blade like a flat, frozen snake. Rose had told Nan that he charged out the back door toward the arbor, but halfway there, tripped on a divot in the lawn, fell, and stabbed his own thigh. By the time he was able to hobble back beneath the hanging grapes, the prowler had vanished.

  While my mother sat in her rocker, eyes closed, rocking to the music, Jim and I arm-wrestled my father a few times and then Mary danced with him, her bare feet on his shoes. “Bed,” my mother finally said, her eyes still closed. At the top of the stairs before Jim and I went into our separate rooms, he said to me, “He walks the Earth.” I laughed but he didn’t. George followed me to bed and lay at the bottom, falling instantly asleep. He kicked his back leg three times and growled in his dreams. I stayed awake for a while, listening to my parents’ hushed conversation down in the living room, but I couldn’t make anything out.

  I wasn’t the least tired, so I got up and went over to my desk. Nan’s talking about Rose and Dan gave me the idea to capture them in my notebook before I forgot. What I found interesting was that Dan could only be defined by the things that he owned: the leopard skin rug, the shrunken head, the axes and knives and ancient pistols. Otherwise, he was a pretty blank person, save for his toupee, which sat on his head like a doily. Rose, on the other hand, had been born in Ireland, in the town of Cork, and had the most beautiful way of talking. She had grown up with the actor Richard Harris, who sang the song about the cake in the rain. I could not write about her without recounting some of the ghost stories she had told Jim and me.

  In one, her father was coming home from a neighboring town one evening, and just before crossing the bridge into their hometown, he was confronted by a funeral procession. He thought it an odd time for a funeral and he asked each of the long train of mourners preceding the funeral carriage who had died. The strangers, dressed in stiff, black crepe and tall hats, none of whom he recognized, refused to acknowledge him. Only the carriage driver would answer, and he told Rose’s father that John Connely had passed away. Her father couldn’t believe it, because he had just seen John the night before and he had been drinking and laughing. The eerie procession passed by and he continued over the bridge. Upon arriving home, he saw John coming out of his own house to go to the pub. Rose’s father waved and wondered what sort of madness he had been subject to, but later that week, his poor neighbor, John, dropped over stone-cold dead from heart failure at dinner in the middle of a sentence.

  I wrote it up in detail and also added the one about the giant black dog that haunted the abandoned abbey. It didn’t surprise me that the visit from the prowler had frightened Rose. Nothing ever happened by chance for her. Banshees, little people, fetches, you name it and she’d seen it. She was devoted to the tea leaves, and because Nan could read the cards, Rose respected her more than anyone else on the block.

  By the time I was done, it had grown quiet downstairs, and I knew my parents had finally gone to bed. Still, I wasn’t tired, and on top of that I was a little spooked by remembering Rose’s stories. Any meditation on Death was capable of conjuring the angry spirit of Jimmy Bonnel. To dispel his gathering presence, I got out of bed and tiptoed quietly down the stairs. In the kitchen, I stole a cookie and that’s when I decided to descend and review Jim’s recent progress with Botch Town.

  Every old wooden step on the way to the cellar groaned miserably, but my father’s snoring, rolling out from the bedroom at the back of the house, covered my own prowling. Once below, I inched blindly forward and when my hip touched the edge of the plywood world, I leaned way out and grabbed the pull string. The sun came out in the middle of the night in Botch Town. I half-expected the figures to all be moving of their own volition, but no, they must have heard me coming and froze on cue. Jim was right, there was a sense of being God, hovering above the clouds and peering down on the minute lives. It also made me think for an instant about my own smallness.

  Scanning the board, I found the prowler, with his straight-pin hands, on the prowl, hiding in the toothpick grape arbor netted with vines of green thread behind the Curdmeyers’ house
across the street from ours, his clever, glowing eyes, like beacons, searching the dark for lost souls.

  School started on a day so hot it seemed stolen from the heart of summer. The tradition was that if you got new clothes for school, you wore them the first day. My mother made Mary a couple of dresses on the sewing machine. Because he had outgrown what he had, Jim got shirts and pants from Gertz department store. I got his hand-me-downs, but I did also get a new pair of dungarees. They were stiff as concrete and, after months of nothing but cutoffs, seemed to weigh fifty pounds. I sweated like the Easter pig, shuffling through school zombie style, to the library, the lunchroom, on the playground, and all day long that burlap scent of new denim smelled like the spirit of Work.

  Jim was starting junior high and, going to a different school, he had to take a bus to get there. Mary and I were still stuck at the Retard Factory around the corner. None of us were good students. I spent most of my time in the classroom either completely confused or daydreaming. Mary was in a special class, basically because they couldn’t figure out if she was really smart or really simple. The kids they couldn’t figure out, they put in room X. Although all of the other rooms had numbers, this one just had the letter that signaled something cut-rate, like on the TV commercials: Brand X. When I’d pass by that room, I’d look in and see these wacky kids hobbling around or mumbling or crying, and there would be Mary, sitting straight up, focused, nodding every once in a while. Her teacher, Mrs. Rockhill, whom we called Rockhead, was no Mrs. Harkmar and didn’t have the secret to draw the Mickey of all right answers out of her. I knew Mary was really smart, though, because Jim had told me she was a genius.

  As for Jim, no one knew what the hell he was up to. He had a history of putting obviously wrong answers down on his tests and homework assignments. “What’s 6 apples and 3 apples?” they’d asked him in third grade. Jim’s answer: “4 tin cans.” In an essay question dealing with the Navajo boy, Joe Mannygoats, we had to read about in fifth grade social studies, Jim ignored the question about Navajo family life, and created a scenario where Joe stole a gun and shot his goats. Then he cooked them and invited everyone to a barbecue. How Jim stayed out of room X was a room-X mystery no one could solve.