“How old were you?”
“Seven.”
“Why did she kill your rabbits?”
“We were poor. Had no food. We couldn’t really afford to feed them. My mother was a psychopath. I am prone to horrific luck. All of those things.”
“Father McNamee didn’t know that—”
“How could he?”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Elizabeth said.
I felt as though I had failed horribly in the romance department, as all we had managed to talk about were Elizabeth’s childhood traumas and her adolescent thoughts of matricide.
Hardly romantic banter.
“Tell me something nice,” she said. Elizabeth stopped walking, faced me, and looked up into my eyes with frightening desperation. “Please! Anything. Tell me one nice thing. Something that makes me feel as though the world is not a terrible place. I’m at the end, Bartholomew. I don’t care anymore. Tell me something that will make me care. Come on. Just tell me something good. One good and true thing. If you can do that, then maybe, just maybe . . .”
She didn’t finish her sentence, but sighed, and I wondered what she was going to say.
Elizabeth kept searching my eyes, but I didn’t have a clue as to what I was supposed to say here in response, and I hoped that you, Richard Gere, would show up to help me, because you always know what to say to women in these situations, in all of your movies, but you didn’t materialize.
“Like what?” I said, stalling for time.
“Something nice about your mother maybe.” She was choking up here, her eyes brimming with tears. “Something that will make me forget I just ate rabbit—that I have no place to live. That my life has been a cruel, sadistic joke—that everything is going to end shortly.”
“End?” I said.
I hated to see her so sad, but wasn’t sure what to do.
“Tell me something about your mother. Something nice,” Elizabeth said, ignoring my question. “Really sweet. You seem like a sweet sort of man, Bartholomew. So please, please, please. Something sweet.”
I thought about it—there were a million nice things to choose from when it came to memories of Mom.
“The first sweet thing that pops up in your head,” she said. “Don’t think about it. Just talk. Please. You must have nice memories of your mother if you love her so much. It should be easy for you! I need to hear something sweet—something sentimental even.”
Suddenly I was talking without thinking—the words were flowing out of me like air—and I was utterly surprised to be saying so much. It was like she had found my hot and cold knobs and now words were suddenly gushing out of my spigot.
“When I was a little boy, my mother told me that if I wrote a letter to the mayor of Philadelphia—Mayor Frank Rizzo at first, and then it was Mayor William Green—asking for special permission to go to the top of City Hall, he might let me look out over Philadelphia from under the high dome atop of which William Penn stands. So I’d write a letter, and I’d take days to think up a persuasive argument justifying why I should be admitted. I’d write about how hard I was trying in school, what a good son I was, always completing all of my chores on time, doing what Mom told me to do, how I promised to vote in all of the elections when I was old enough—a promise I have religiously kept, as Mom taught me it was my patriotic duty as an American—and how I went to Mass every week and tried to be a good Catholic.
“Then I would write out the letter over and over until my penmanship was good enough to be read by a real officially elected mayor. Mom would read it, and as we dropped the letter into the neighborhood mailbox, we’d both cross our fingers and hope the mayor was moved enough to let us visit City Hall—that I had been a good enough boy.
“I’d always receive a personalized handwritten response a week or so later, saying I was a good boy and was allowed to visit City Hall. Mom and I would walk down Broad Street hand in hand, watching City Hall grow up from the street taller and taller, and we’d take the elevator up to the top of City Hall—which, incidentally, once was one of the tallest buildings in the world and was the tallest in Philadelphia until 1987—and we’d look out over the City of Brotherly Love, seeing how Philadelphia is mapped out in right angles, like a big grid constructed by the most anal of city planners determined to make sure no one would ever get lost, and I’d be so proud to be high in the sky looking down, knowing I’d earned it by being an exemplary boy.”
I could see excitement in Elizabeth’s eyes, and I hoped I was doing well here, because my heart was pounding and my gloves were soaked through with sweat.
“It wasn’t until I was an adult that I figured out anyone and everyone is allowed to go to the top—regardless of whether they have been good or not—and that Mom had written the letters from the mayor, pretending.
“And so I visited the top of City Hall again as a man, took the same tour, but of course it wasn’t as special anymore, because anyone could do it—I hadn’t earned it. The building didn’t rise as majestically from the asphalt when I walked down Broad Street, the elevator ride up didn’t make my heart pound, the view wasn’t as spectacular, the right angles of the city blocks didn’t look as crisp, and I didn’t even want to stay up there for very long, not without Mom.”
“She sounds wonderful,” Elizabeth said, and smiled.
“She was.”
“You miss her.”