RICHARD - KRAUSE - URBAN TALES

Richard Krause’s collection of fiction, Studies in Insignificance, was published by Livingston Press, and his epigram collection, Optical Biases, was published by EyeCorner Press in Denmark. His second collection of epigrams, Eye Exams, is scheduled for publication by Propertius Press later this year.  A collection of his fiction called The Horror of the Ordinary has been accepted by Unsolicited Press for publication next March.
It includes "Out of State Plates, or Decapitation 101" that first appeared in Scarlet Leaf Review.  Since 2017 his fiction has appeared in Hackwriters Magazine, ink&coda,Cold Creek Review, Subtle Fiction, and EXPOUND, a Nigerian magazine. He has also had three prose poems accepted by The Courtship of Winds.  He teaches at Somerset Community College in Kentucky.

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Urban Tales
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​When it happened she went downtown to the funeral, for the child she never had.  Well, she did, but farmed him out before he was one, then finally when he was ten placed him in an orphanage.  She used to recount how her own mother of six children, who died when she was thirty-seven of tuberculosis, sympathized with the poor Japanese when the Russians took Sakhalin Island, the mighty Russian bear swallowing up the territory of that small country.
Mary spoke with her friend, also named Mary, about placing the boy in a school in Pennsylvania.  It was the practical thing to do, her friend told her.  Everything is paid for and “he’ll be out of your hair.”  Though the boy never really lived with his mother.  He remembered being left in Port Authority bus station for hours on end waiting for her to return, imagining the boy was safe in full view of so many strangers.  She took him to visit her one room apartment at the top of the building in Washington Heights.  He remembered her pinching him to get him to do something.  She wasn’t necessarily good with kids, but visibly attracted to them on the street, in the subway, or in stores, noticing their beauty, smiling and making faces at them all the time.
She finally did place the boy in the orphanage, five hours drive from New York City.  On her first visit she took him to department stores in nearby Harrisburg to buy him a red turtleneck sweater and a black leather jacket, saying to the houseparent when she took him out that he wasn’t dressed warm enough.  Actually at the homes he had stayed at before, his caretakers always worried about the boy not getting enough to eat, for Mary ate irregularly, didn’t think three meals a day was necessary, and growing up in the Depression always stinted with money.
            “Mary” she insisted was the name of the mother of God and should be treated with respect and reverence.  Of course when the boy returned to the group home that first time, all the clothes were confiscated since he could not be dressed differently than the other boys.
            The ride to the orphanage the boy would never forget, or the jungle film he watched that afternoon hoping it would never end and she’d never turn up, but she did, and in the long silence of the long Greyhound bus ride to Pennsylvania he uttered not a word.  He had a tiny, clear plastic gun with small candy colored balls that gave him a sense of confidence just in case he needed them, not as live ammunition of course, but something his appetite could fall back on if all else failed.  The mother hardly visited the boy after that, intent on living her own life, taking art classes, getting her degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology, doing Bible studies, dance classes, jazz and ballet, and acting classes at Actors Studio, but her career in fashion went nowhere and so her nursing continued.  She worked in pediatrics and spent her nights sketching young babies in their cribs.
            In her two-room apartment on Audubon Avenue where she moved, the clutter
was staggering.  She had dozens of dolls of every color and nationality.  She had always told her son that she wanted a daughter.  She wanted to write and illustrate children’s books, and so there were boxes upon boxes of clippings from magazines and newspapers of children and the scenes she wanted to draw, also boxes of her poetry.  It was a cornucopia of ideas and dreams and interests stacked to the ceiling that were never quite realized outside the thousands of drawings she made, lamenting always that she didn’t have enough space, and how she couldn’t break into the art or publishing world since they wanted young people.
            Mary never really found another man, a “Sugar Daddy” she called him, after the boy’s father died.  There was Giuseppe, the doorman, who called himself Steve, whom she privately referred to as Bozo whom she used as her tool.  Other than that, and despite all her forays downtown to Christian Science lectures, especially Raymond Barker, and finally to Ron Hubbard, the scientologist, and out to her brother’s and sister’s houses on Long Island during the holidays, she lived an extraordinarily lonely life.
            She always claimed that she was mistreated by her father who because of her red hair called her “Cockroach,” and made fun of her freckles.  He kept her and her sister Sarah up in the attic away from the other siblings, and rationed out the food kept in a locked trunk under the bed.  That is why her apartment was ringed with cans of food on the floor, and stacks of jars that sealed all manner of comestibles to insure she would never go hungry again.  Often she had no school lunch, and wore cardboard in her shoes to cover the holes. 
            So when it happened she was ripe for the visit.  The time had come to mourn, and she never considered how it pointed right back to her.  In fact the whole city seemed to collectively grieve, and with Mary it wasn’t knee jerk, but her whole life had been building up to it.  In a sense you could say it was almost planned from the sympathies of her mother for the tiny country of Japan.  Just such a horror brought everything into focus in her own life, spotlighted her father who kept her and Sarah in the attic away from the rest of the children. What happened to that little girl she never had was mobilized around Lisa.  She could dispense with the disappointment of having a son by rerouting it to the unspeakable horror that now occurred.
            Sadomasochism must come from the anger of our stupendous solitude, to erase the barriers to our painful differences from each other, to bridge that gigantic gap.  It is nothing more than an overexpression of love that somehow is not enough until the other person finally stops breathing.  Those with inadequate love will go downtown to at least pay their respects, as if to celebrate the horror as an excuse for their own grief. Traveling underground, Mary could draw out her thoughts in poetry and sketch exactly how she saw the world to the clatter of the train tracks when her ideas would come so freely.
            She could already see Lisa playing with such pleasure, skipping through the city streets, over puddles after a rainfall, sailing boats in Central Park, what Mary never had in her own life, that the past and her strength of personality had kept away, her Catholic upbringing, the Irish privation, her father, the sudden death of her husband, all that would produce the little ninos in the Spanish she studied, words too she tried to get her little boy to repeat after her on the subway.
            What would she find with Lisa but her own lost opportunities, the absence of the little girl she never had, feelings that poured out of her for those shunted into art, feelings engaged in constant study that her son never received, living with others early on, living her own life in the city, bettering herself with everything but to give him her time, languishing finally in an orphanage in Pennsylvania, virtually unvisited, but he didn’t want to see her anyway.  For she was so unpredictable, making comments about strangers within earshot. 
“You don’t want to be like that guy,” she said once when they were walking in Parkchester, and the man turned around and said, “What’s the matter with you, lady?”
The tension wherever she was was almost palpable, in restaurants where the bread was always stale, the meat uncooked, her drink unrefreshed, or on busses or in theaters where she was never comfortable, or never had enough room.
            She was now traveling downtown to Lisa’s address, for the past now that age had caught up with her, realizing her blue eyes and red hair could no longer grab the attention like when she was younger.
            Her talent too she realized required youth, and in truth she never learned to speak to men, the easy banter, the flirtatious give and take, but instead thrust herself into someone’s lost opportunity.  All her feelings extended to the little girl for whom she dressed herself up as if she were a family intimate, for everyone was family to Lisa, the whole city fascinated by the treatment of that little girl, as if people took it personally; this most powerful revulsion in the world, harming a defenseless six-year-old, such innocence, fascinates us, for our own throttled assault somewhere in the darkest recesses of our mind, what we’d never dream of, but still is there under the crust of each of us, inevitably in the midst of our outrage towards someone else; we are unable to help ourselves, or call out for help, because we are sure no one would be listening, and our own past is deaf, carrying all the violence inside, the desire to strike out past the solid impediment of each other; the hand, arm, and shoulder are reflexive to overcome the sheer stupefying loneliness of whom we are, making our bodies almost always doubly, trebly ours, all that governs more than most of us, that is, the universal contagion of the self.  We are all catching from each other, even though wisely we try to keep our impulses to ourselves, mollify them by rushing downtown.  And that is just how we deal with them, by going on the attack, making pilgrimages, addressing the horror of what happened.  At the altar we are standing before we know it, and the train is rattling to get us there.
How it starts we don’t even realize. First by admiration, the worship that lowers the defenses, then circles in the dark while the smiles are up front, at a cocktail party or seasonal gathering of coworkers, or maybe it is just in a park on a sunny afternoon in spring, the seduction of a polite word, or his sense of humor.  You go home alone changed, or with each other, go through the dance of courtship, employ courtesy at first, knowing sometimes how to talk to the woman, be gentle, cadge to get what you want, but it is somehow you find in time never enough, neither of you can get close enough. Your bodies are wonderfully there, but then they are the obstacle; you can break down the resolve, erase the boundaries, the sky’s the limit, but the breast that is so attractive is one day openly bruised, the black and blue turns yellow; the head snaps back at first, and you don’t know what just happened. It is not you, but it is.  Or your teeth one night get out of hand, the biting that first time leaves you confused, but goes right to your partner. 
“Ouch!” she says. 
She gets angry, may even hit you.  You like that too, are surprised at how much, and so there is almost a mutual escalation.  You can’t withhold yourselves, but all your past pushes you, urges you forward. There is something you need to resolve, the love that
never occurred, to erase the past cruelty, the favoritism, all the attention your sisters and brother got.
            Then one day you see the evidence of someone who did push past.  She’s lying before you. You know beauty is the most unfair element in the universe, the diamond beside the coal fields, the gemstone in ordinary rock, the transparency that one day is scratched, devalued, you can hardly imagine how it happened initially.  A diamond, a diamond, what did I do, left the bruise, a mark, the scratch on her!
            Hedda before and after.  Who can look at her?  It throws you for a loop, dizzy you look at what happened to the face. The transformation each time escapes your notice.  You are not reeling like the first few times when you were even sick yourself in the morning looking at her.  But the face infinitely fascinates you, the alteration, your handiwork, the absolute horror of what has happened, beaten to a pulp that you deny it is just the opposite of the Creator.  She brought it on herself.  She was your partner, participant, playmate. You can’t take it, beauty destroyed.  She revolts you, totally apart from anything you have done.  You only cooperated.  
The rectangular glasses, the cold unfathomable look of Joel, the alternate scenario of even Lisa’s death shrouded in lies, but the look of Hedda is too true to comprehend.  Joel is in absolute denial. Where did such a monster come from?  Hedda could have done it when Lisa was caught rooting round the medicine cabinet, overturning bottles that smashed on the tile floor.  Hedda did it, except for the punching bag she had become.
            The black eyes, the split lip, the absent bridge of her nose, that’s what gets you about the photograph.  A collapsed bridge?  Just where is that going to take you?  Where do such beatings lead?  To throwing yourself off the railing beforehand to stop your own breathing?  The cartilage it is reported even protruded, the frizzled hair she stopped combing, the beauty transformed, a forty-year-old looking like she was sixty.  The life extinguished from her eyes, more a hunted rat, a hunk of battered meat constantly tenderized by Joel, eventually defaced.  How could it happen?  How can we be so lonely, so alone, so angry, reach such cruel disregard? 
If you know about escalation we build ourselves up to it, slowly draw what’s inside further along, after one bruise, a too strong hold, then the next, and the next, until there is a discoloration, then a mess of them that doesn’t look like an arm, but a withered appendage, an excuse for an arm, finally a dead tree limb. Maybe the first time I am sure it startles us, but that is only the beginning you got to admit, we are all well-intentioned, but we get away from ourselves. We do.
            “Oh, I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean it, Hedda.  What came over me?  It won’t happen again.”
            But each time it does, more and more frequent, and so do the apologies that after first being elaborate empty themselves of meaning, as the lines between the couple blur. They become one flesh. Though he manages to keep his shape, in fact his lines are sharper, cleaner by the day due to the intent of being himself, being clarified in his body as her lines disappear, the bridge is flattened, eyes blacken and smear, sinking in their orbit, the lips split, the face is a mass of pulp, Joel’s blender.  Joel, the brilliant lawyer still has his place in the world.  He goes to work every day.  Hedda gradually withdraws further and further from the children’s books she wrote and enters the horror of her own fairy tale in the dim light of their apartment.  Something Grimm, that started out with such hope, does not shy away from the worst in us.  Innocence can bring that out, as can beauty, and then not knowing how to deal with it vis a vis our feelings, those creepy crawling things that multiply dizzyingly until swat, what we think swats them only multiplies. The goodness cannot last.
Brains confer advantages, can erase the boundaries with the right argument, split hairs so combs don’t pass through them anymore.  They became like Shredded Wheat, Hedda’s hair.  Look, she was in the apartment for ten hours with Lisa before she called the police.
            He became a lawyer again, with legal arguments eclipsing human nature, the stupefying, bottomless cruelty with rational arguments, discovery, contrary evidence reestablishing what happened, all the twists and turns we have at our command that don’t need to dig, or expose all those corpses in the backyards of our family tree that sometimes come to us in our dreams, why the night is so difficult to get through; we don’t want to fall into what we really are, fearing sleep will bring it out.
            And what strikes you are the intentions.  Yes, we all have the best intentions in the world for motherhood, for childhood.  That’s how we are made.  Or is it?  Are there contrary principles at work?
Hedda wrote children’s books, and Mary did too, at least she gathered all those clippings, examples for her own art, watercolors of dolls and stuffed animals and little girls.  What remarkable intentions to end like this.  You can easily imagine all the anxiety Hedda had waiting for her children’s books to appear.  How could things go so awry?  That is what Mary was going down to see, past dumping her own child in an orphanage, past the fact that he was just a boy, and not the girl she wanted; she was coming to pay her respects to her own vision of motherhood.  How they can unite, the good intention of mothers the world over, band together, what a force to be reckoned with!
            Mary could openly criticize the George Washington toll bridge operator who did note the bruises on Lisa, fault her for not reporting it immediately, or did she?  Perhaps Mary was coming to rectify that, even if it was too late, or at least pay her respects now to the dead six-year-old who only wanted to go out to eat with her Daddy, and was whipped for it.  Let me say, Joel took on Lisa to find her a home for five hundred bucks, but decided to keep her himself.  No, he wasn’t her real father.
            Men, Mary would say, faulting them, overlooking pinching her own son that he later dubbed the pinches her caresses focused.  Do we all have the capacity to focus so that we strike out at what we can’t control, what doesn’t love us enough, or feelings we ourselves can’t show.  Are there no lines, only nets we are all susceptible to being caught in?  Are we the loose fish of each other?  Is that what Mary was traveling downtown to authenticate.
            Hedda tried to get out of the relationship, missed work, though she was seen often enough that her facial changes were too gradual and noticed piecemeal so the overall effect hit no one until they saw her face in the newspapers, or on television.  At first the sexuality depressed everything in secrecy, the newly opened vistas of pain and the portals of pleasure.  Through it all Hedda left six times, but ultimately identified with Joel and came back, her life outside the beatings curiously incomplete.  She became part of him, that one flesh often talked about in marriages, her beauty totally absorbed into his power finally disappearing because of it. And she grew malnourished, buried the pain of the broken bones, the collapsed bridge of her nose, the lost weight.  She stopped going out.  Joel did everything. Lisa was her only solace, her saving grace.  Her book Plants Do Amazing Things no one saw as a reference to her life with Joel, or Animals Build Amazing Homes, how it now applied.  What an unspeakable gulf between the actuality and the warm comfort of cuddling rabbits or anything in its den against the dangers outside.  Outside!  The dangers within are the unspeakable ones, the muteness, the apartmental silence in the end where only the walls could talk about the heads that smashed against them, the unchallenged cruelty where everyone is afraid to speak, or look the wrong way, fend off the charge of cross-eyedness, for fear of the fist, of being throw against wall, or commanded to drop down on all fours to crawl and eat off the floor.   Joel didn’t even want to be pleased by her any longer.  He was long past that now.  She repulsed him, he told her.
            Maybe we shouldn’t live together.  Isn’t it cleaner to attack, gut, skin the other member of the species, like a trapped animal, rather than this slow erosion of ourselves living with each other, sharing our intelligence, dreams, talents, and then the absolute horror of when they are all drained away, and we are left alone.  Beforehand he was so nice. What happened to that woman, to her beauty, where did it go?  It makes us angry. Beauty some of us would die for?
That is why Hedda Nussbaum is so fascinating, because she shows us the potential of what any of us could become.  And the breathtaking study of beauty disappearing overnight.  Oh, at the start never, who’d think of that, but the tiny escalations, the baby steps before the long march, before the trampling goes unnoticed.  Who knew we are all toddlers taking our first step with each other, or who admits the appearance of the boot and the sheer number of kicks we can endure, or that the soft resistance of the human body is absolutely amazing.  Only public outrage can force the boot back into hiding.  How two of us tolerate each other together without jealousy, without appropriating all the other has, their talents, their laughter, their pleasure until in the daily erosion of the personality, the one absorbs the other and how she or he disappears from the other’s regard is a mystery. Until one is finally null and void and the other flourishes.  They are ours, the scoldings, the scratches at first, later the punches, the battering, until even the face that we admired is no more and we privately, unknown even to ourselves, revel in our own strength, or the truth slips out and we call ourselves “a piece of shit like me,” as Joel said, surprised at a guy one day who said that he was glad to meet him.  Better be on the veldt or in a savannah where we can attack an entirely different species, in the jungle or a forest, than worst of all in the same urban household.  The grip we imagine outside is really inside, our already knotted intestines over bruising her arm the first time, then regularly leaving black and blue marks all over that she covers with scarfs and long sleeves.  We get the dents in the wall repaired, the broken glass is swept up, Mama’s cherished vase or a favorite figurine that shatters where you forced her to walk barefoot.  Better a wild animal be brought down, the jaws clearly on the neck, the power displayed all in one leap, the decisive spring of the haunches, or squeeze of a trigger, one clean shot right through the heart felling the beast than this weakening of the heart muscle gradually, than the violence inherent first in the language of just wanting to live together.  Who knows in the beginning that they want to remove the body, the obstacle to loving ourselves standing in front of us.  Melt it right there, even if it means bruises, black eyes, and a caved in nose, superficial signs of not gutting her outright. It disappeared in Hedda so that her wheezing went with her gravelly voice and poor Joel couldn’t on some nights get any sleep himself.  Her books too were totally absorbed by him, reduced to nothing by a thousand silverfish.  Hedda was underwater, no longer worrying about simple breathing through her collapsed bridge.
            And the monster that Joel was pictured as, placed in protective custody so he would not be attacked, only embolden him.  He claimed it was consensual, that Hedda was his partner and enjoyed “the roughhousing,” the broken bones, the total domination where sex became blows to every inch of her body.  Remorse was alien to him, for he remained the lawyer saying his own defense lawyer Ira London had “his head up his ass”!  Freebasing cocaine could be blamed, but wasn’t it more than that?
Joel had absorbed Hedda, his striking out became routine, the tick tock of his own heart muscle.  He beat her like clockwork.  It was his morning workout and his midnight sleeping pill.  She was his heartbeat.  That’s it.  They were finally one flesh. That’s us, simple breathing, in and out.  The whole species rolled into one ball, the gender resolution. One person, one pulse, our differences extinct all at once.  And the staggering blow he gave to Lisa that made her brain swell sealed the deal; it was only the result, the old-fashioned Joel’s way of rewinding.
            Hedda’s limp, too, Joel began to imitate. Some thought he had actually injured himself.  Poor Joel, didn’t know sometimes if he was coming or going, mimicking, mocking, or mauling Hedda. The ice baths that he forced Hedda to take at first to reduce the swelling finally came to naught, and must have added to his own numbing. The rituals we can only imagine, forcing Hedda on all fours to crawl and eat scraps he threw down for her.
            Lisa too picked up the bruises. At St. Vincent’s Hospital they noticed marks all over her body, as if Hedda’s flesh was extended to the adopted girl at Joel’s feet. Joel was indeed a piece of work.  His military duty he felt the press overlooked, his connections to the Phoenix program where over forty thousand Vietnamese were killed, brutalized before Hedda, for democracy, for self-rule of the people.  Maybe Joel thought like in Vietnam it was all for the collective good, the single-headed monster marriage could be.  That each would benefit in the end, that there was no limit to pleasure or pain and the light was at the end of the tunnel.  One body, one head had to deface the rest, Hedda’s included.  How is love to survive except by this triumph, total possession of the other, so thoroughly until the beloved is no more; that is true love, no different than the narcotizing effect of living uneventfully forever together.  This oneness requires the disappearance of the other.  We are left absorbing memories of those forty thousand eliminated for love of country, of the facial disappearance of a beauty that drove us out of our mind in a love that finally had to erase itself the way love always does eventually, only not as in this case so dramatically. That is not love, you say.  Then what is it but such erasures?  Time does its own devouring of beauty.  Joel was only accelerating time, spearing the beautiful speckled trout, accelerating the shocking difference the years make by trumping time in a matter of short years, creating the appearance of an old woman almost overnight, showing the children’s books are a charade of the monsters everyone grows up into.  Yes, the wild things are here and now.  Maurice Sendak was right.  It is no joke what we should be afraid of.
Steinberg even wanted his lawyer, Ira London, to be “more aggressive with Hedda.”  In fact Lisa was not hit for wanting to go to dinner with Joel, but Hedda herself could have done it, he maintained, over her cosmetics on the bathroom shelf out of Lisa’s reach. 
“She wanted to go with her Daddy,” Darnay Hoffman, Joel’s attorney speculates; “she wanted to ‘make herself up’ to accompany her Daddy to dinner.  She knocks over the tray and Hedda, already jealous of the six-year-old, goes into a rage and smacks her against the wall and there you have the fatal injury when her head hits the tile.  Hedda is paralyzed by the blood and there you have it,” Hoffman speculates. 
Anything can be speculative.  We don’t know where to stop, we can like Swift says of lawyers make black white and white black.  She is passing on what Joel did to her, “violence she shared in their sexual life, that she too enjoyed, folks, but now she takes it out on Lisa and Joel is only the fall guy.” 
“Poor Joel, getting a bad rap,” Hoffman concludes and adds, “Joel is your grandmother.  If you let him be demonized and receive an unfair trial and distorted coverage, as happened, your relatives are next!”
            “I rest my case.” 
Who has a rebuttal for that outside a burned down courthouse.  No wonder the stretch limo was sent to prison upon Joel’s release, the Lincoln town car, the height of emancipation, “Darnay’s prom ride.”  Joel was only a kid, really.  Where’s his boutonniere, and Hedda, well, she’s no longer his date.  Look at what she had done to herself?  It’s her handiwork, too.
            Her looks, “They were nothing but ‘title fights’ folks.  She enjoyed being hit, some do,” Hoffman said. 
“A man can be factually guilty, but legally innocent.  Then who is ultimately guilty?”  Just those in harm’s way, for being there, sitting in the park, or in a café, or on the subway when they are first noticed?  Isn’t this what they deserve?  That’s love, folks.  We may not want to face up to it, but there it is!
 
*
           
Taking the A train was a descent into herself. Her talent, her latent abilities, her sympathies flourished underground. The sturdy steel structure gave her support, absorbed sound in a way that even when the oncoming and passing trains were deafening, it left her with a peace of mind she could never find in her cluttered apartment filled with countless dolls and knickknacks, paintings and boxes of news clippings, art from magazines, not to mention all her sketches. All were a charade of the life she found down in the subway that calmed her. Every race made its appearance; it was a United Nations ensemble that one person had gathered in the small, sad apartment where she lived alone except for her son’s occasional visits.
It was down there that something else overcame her. One could see the trans-formation as she entered the yellow light of the subway system and descended
the steps of her psyche that led not only to herself, but to that communion among all
people that above ground and finally in the solitude of her own apartment she never had. 
“I can't work here,” she said, “it's too cluttered. I need a separate room for my artwork.”
In fact as she paid the fare and went through the turnstile, she descended a second set of steps into the most unexpected studio that in a few moments would come well-lit and on wheels. She sat down and waited, and always had a book. The loneliest of lives reads the most books, knows how to people their solitude, though her relationship with people was never ordinary. She never mastered those social graces attached to the uninspired, everyday contact between people. No, she always kept that edge where the caustic remark, the curt brusque reply, would sit precariously on her tongue.
As the train came the doors opened and she stepped into the lighted car and took out her sketch pad, pencil, eraser, and gray shading stick. She looked into the distance and picked some figure, often a black person for the train passed through Harlem. She delighted in the richness of their features. The generous spread of their noses, the large wings, the expansive nares, the broadlined flatness so easy to draw, she'd say. And the lips, so richly sculpted and with thick, beautiful curves, on each person as distinctive as their fingerprint. And the largest eyes, dark and reflective in the yellow light of the train. The warm yellows that seemed to go with the skin entered the discolored whites of their eyes, and that was one of the reasons that she favored them above all other races. For she loved color and its powerful effect on the emotions.
            Coming from northern European ancestors and not having the same access to her feelings, she could appreciate the warmth in others where she found it so visibly and did her best to transfer it to paper. Sometimes, too, she'd go home and add watercolor. And the hairstyles as they became more distinctive intrigued her. The woolly black and brown hair, bushy and in corn rows, and the powerful athletic figures, or the steatopygous hips on the women. Or those tall svelte figures to offset the motherly and expansive. But most of all it was the old men. Those with dignity and snappy dress, with two-tone white and gray or beige shoes and straw hats, and the poor, the broken old men whose bloodshot eyes mapped a life of hardship. How the athlete's frame would turn into these unrecognizable figures as frail as hangers upon which the clothes were hung was a mystery she tried to capture with her pencil. How the body grew resigned, how work or the lack of it had sapped the vital energies.  But how the women kept coming, rich and fertile, the very picture of fecundity, how they welded the family together, sometimes it seemed just by their own body mass.        
She sketched them all, the mothers with arms outstretched around their children. And the children's faces she adored. In fact when she worked in pediatrics on the night shift, more than once she was reprimanded for drawing the babies in their cribs, accenting the long eyelashes in their sleep that was so peaceful. Or the children on the subway, their eyes so alert and inquisitive. Even the sauciness, then the scoldings from the mother, the quick slaps, she caught the aftermath of all that on paper. The child's lowered eyes nursing the sting in front of everyone. And the young boys, she tried to capture their jauntiness, the pride in their developing bodies, their postures and carriage before it turned menacing.
Mary’s art career never took off in fashion, and so she had to continue nursing but still drew. Drew the faces, the mixtures of people that were now changing the complexion of the city, drew the features blended through intermarrying. She often raved over the beauty of the Spanish women. Caught the stiff dignity of some, the slouching lassitude of their boyfriends, or how they held their bodies. She caught them sleeping on each other's shoulders, the amorous scenes they now engaged in more openly, the petting and caresses, all that her pencil followed.
She tried to sit far enough away to capture them without their seeing. But sometimes people came up to see what she was doing and asked her if they could have the sketch and she always tore it out and gave it to them without hesitation. For there were so many trips on the subway and so many faces she had captured. She had finally taken to using scraps of paper to draw on, old envelopes, and the back of used stationery, for her drawings stored in boxes were getting to be a problem in her small apartment. She was happy to give them away, and glad for the pleasure on people’s faces.
This one day she took her seat as usual and started to sketch even as Lisa’s face kept popping into her mind, when she noticed a group of younger girls at the other end of the car talking animatedly. She had caught their attention and they glared back at her. From experience she paid them little mind and looked elsewhere to draw someone else. They grew louder and it seemed they were discussing the old lady.
"Who does she think she is?" was one comment.
"Damn white!" another said.                                                                                       Suddenly the subway car froze as an electric current went through everyone. There must have been four or five girls--the lines of hatred went out from them sharper than the point of the old lady's pencil that kept on mechanically drawing. The sound of the subway was deafening, and more easily allowed riders to look away. From the 1950s to the 70s, and now the 80s, it seemed to get louder, ever more strident.
Just before l25th Street the girls approached and stood by the old woman who was looking down at her pad moving her pencil, drawing now from memory. As the station came within sight, the one girl reached out and smacked the old lady across the face that her glasses flew off. The other girl grabbed her pad and threw it down. The old woman dropped her pencil and clutched for her handbag that had fallen out of her lap.
Another girl stepped on her hand, “Think you’re going to draw us?” she screeched--as she drove the fragile bones of the old woman underfoot.
The doors burst open and the girls jumped out and disappeared into the crowded platform.
The woman sat dazed as she reached for her things. Her one eye was swollen, already black and blue.
A large black woman came and stooped down to pick up her pad and gave it to her and said, "I'm sorry."
The old woman's nose was cut. Her nose, as sharp as the tools she used to pare her pencil points, looked flatter as the bridge seemed slightly pushed in, broadened by a discoloring bruise. Her lips that were as thin as the lines on her paper, where she always smeared large daubs of lipstick to thicken them, now were enlarged and swollen. Her disheveled hair was curling over her forehead. And the dark facial discolorations of her skin that had come with age, and a blotchiness of tan pigment also on the backs of her hands, were now duskier as the light of the subway flickered. People stood above her and stared down at the old woman who had tried to capture the richness of a race that no longer wanted to be enslaved by even the admiring pencil of a white woman. They wanted to be free of that too.
We can imagine how Mary continued on to the stoop at 14 West 10th Street cluttered with pictures of the little girl, candles, notes and flowers, but all is uncertain.  She claimed she attended Lisa’s funeral like many other New Yorkers who in their own way look out for each other, but in Mary’s case for the mother she never was to a little girl, we can still picture her standing there.