Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [20]
And here is the doorway of the building where we lived: 115 Beacon Street. It looks—well, untouched, except perhaps the double doors’ black paint peels a bit more, the windows of the bay fronting the sidewalk (once they were my windows!) grimy and unrevealing, sealed as they are with heavy venetian blinds.
I’ve brought along a camera. I’m standing at the foot of the steps, trying to get the entryway framed just right in the lens, when a dark shape enters the frame—the back of a man in a black coat forging brusquely into my view. He doesn’t look back as he says, “Don’t photograph me going in here.”
I tell him I won’t. “I used to live here,” I explain, “years ago.”
He hesitates a moment, deciding whether or not to talk to me, and then turns, halfway up the steps, so I can look up into his face. “You know,” he says, “the old girl’s in a nursing home now. She’s a hundred and two.”
The “old girl” is Miss K., the landlady, already ancient and close to senile when we’d known her a dozen years before. Her father bought a string of Beacon Street brownstones in the Depression, elegant bow-fronted rowhouses, which had fallen, over fifty years, into various states of disrepair, as their condominiumed neighbors were polished till they shone. She lived in the front room of one of the apartment houses, a bay-windowed parlor stuffed with her father’s immense Renaissancerevival furniture, a virtual warehouse of Chinese porcelain: blue and white ginger jars, umbrella stands, big tureens and platters swimming with carp and chrysanthemums and clouds. She slept on a grayed cot in the corner, and sat at a little worktable in her housecoat receiving rents and writing receipts. The huge mahogany armoires and china cabinets—with their carved profiles of Dante and Beatrice, their claws and beaks and garlands of fruit—blocked the windows, absorbing the light, so she’d sit beside a scholarly little lamp which illuminated nothing much besides her account books. She was quarrelsome, suspicious, and easily confused. She ran her houses like the rooming houses of another era, collecting rents by the week, but by those days she had a hard time knowing who was who and who lived where. Her tenants—whose boyfriends came and went, who shifted between apartments in new configurations of friendship and romance—didn’t help matters much. And because she was losing both her sharpness and her eyesight, people began to cheat her, bringing back the same rent receipt again and again with the dates changed to show her they’d already paid. And carrying and selling off the heavy Victorian stuff that furnished the apartments, replacing it with things found on the street. Wally said that Miss K. still had an attic, in the brownstone of which she herself was dowager empress, stuffed with princely beds and sideboards, unwieldy configurations of walnut and marble, sphinx-headed and brass-footed extravagances—useless now, in days of diminishing rooms, when what used to be a dining room or a second-floor parlor was someone’s whole apartment.
The man I’m talking to is in his sixties somewhere, I guess, with a slightly furtive quality that begins to relax as we talk. I explain that I lived on the first floor, alone, and then on the third-floor front