The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [32]
By this point, however—after they had toured the Tudor dormitories on the boys’ campus, complete with verdigris roofs and slender iron-casement windows, and an art museum that would have been at home on Albert Speer’s Unter den Linden—Jane’s reservations about hockey were beside the point. Aesthetically, everything—even the sleek, neoclassical fountains where water nymphs reposed and dripped small icicles from their languid mouths and fingertips—“worked” here, and Martin knew that to be confronted with such a magical combination of extremes meant that his mother had lost the battle on her terms. The school was exactly what she would have wanted for herself and, as a result, she had no choice but to join her husband in offering it to him.
BACK IN NEW York City, Martin’s car thudded to a stop at the corner of Fifty-second Street and Seventh Avenue. He signed for the fare and stood on the sidewalk for a few seconds to cool off in the dry September air. The car pulled away, and he was distracted by an eight-story video screen across the street, where flocks of dotcom-branded seagulls careened in circles above a white beach before evaporating over the thousands of midtown commuters. As he walked toward his building, his thoughts returned to his parents, and he noted that in his memories they were very close to the age he was now, which made him smile wistfully as he imagined them—Hank and Jane Vallence of Cedar Village, and the suburban sheen of perfection that implied—plagued by the same doubts and longings he associated with his own life (Exhibit A: the malaise with which he had been afflicted after waking up just a few hours earlier). He had long considered his parents so different from himself, if not exactly dissimilar in certain limited ways, but now—as he placed his hand on the cool metal handle of the revolving glass door—it seemed that to be a decidedly nonheterosexual (and single) attorney in Manhattan did not create such a wide gulf after all.
11
Meine Musikdramatische Idee
PITTSBURGH, 1972. Maria transferred to Honus Wagner Junior High—the public school in Castle Shannon—where some former classmates who had already made the move promptly rechristened her Morticia, a name that seemed even more appropriate in light of rumors about her having slit a nun’s throat at St. Anne’s. She remained as ostracized as ever; even her teachers were reluctant to engage her—and vice versa—for while she never made trouble and received passing—if unremarkable—grades, they were busy with more vocal students or intimidated by the way she towered over them. At home, she closed down her musical productions with Gina and Bea and spent time in her room, where she stared at the ceiling or mutilated her old prayer books, crossing out the contents line by line until the books were filled with brittle pages of lead.
Unnerved by her daughter’s bleak intensity, the way she could look right through her and make her feel like she didn’t exist, Gina tried to lull the old Maria out of this new one; she cooked her favorite lasagna, played her favorite records, and with Bérénice even pulled out some of their old costumes—made of plastic bags and thousands of paper streamers—and tried to reprise some of the former hits in the backyard. To Maria, these numbers appeared juvenile and wooden, and it