Tours of the Black Clock

66

WINTER COMES LIKE GRAMERCY Park, irrational and overnight. I strain to remember the winter of Gramercy Park, three or four winters ago I keep thinking, until I remember it was only last year. Megan and I marry nearly as suddenly. There’s a last moment flurry of activity by the shipbuilder and Megan’s mother to thwart things; the mother hurries to Vienna to approve. She’s aghast at the sight of me. I think all the more highly of her for it. “Oh Mama, go bloody home then,” Megan tells her. When they threaten to cut off her money she only says, “You ought to have done it years ago.” The wedding takes place on a Saturday morning before a vaguely denominational minister who’s nearly as little as Megan; I’m Gulliver in matrimony, yet barely large enough for the occasion. Megan wears a peach dress with a small veil. She’s sweet and the awe she shows in her eyes is humbling. When we leave the wind rips the veil from her head and hurries it over the rooftops where it passes out of sight beyond a post office spire. We take a new flat upstairs from where she’s been living, somewhat smaller actually except that it has an extra room. A stairway leads from right outside our door up to the top of the building where another door’s unlocked by the same key that unlocks ours. At night we fall asleep to the roar of rallies in the hills. People talk of nothing but Germany, and by the end of winter the government calls an election in which Austrians will decide whether to be Austrians. Only Austrians would need an election to know such a thing. Only Germans would be enraged by the temerity of it, or would call it temerity. I pull Megan’s voluptuous little body close to my head and place my ear to the core of her, where I hear redemption growing inside her. When her water breaks in seven months I’ll let it splash on my head as baptism. We both know it’s a girl and have named her Courtney. “Oh big boy,” Megan whispers in my hair, “love me just a little.” I hold her hard. I’ve kept the place on Dog Storm Street, I go there each twilight. To work, I tell her. Discreetly, fearfully, she doesn’t ask where or what. My part of the bargain is that when she opens her eyes in the morning, she’ll find me next to her.