C4 antho - Chamber Four

Peacocks ~93~
of what, growing up, we had reverentially called “The City,”
we recognized one another as landsmen, all of us darkhaired
women who carried the inflections of our parents’
Yiddish in our speech. Our cramped apartments were fine
with us; we would never in a million years live in some bourgeois
outpost in Long Island, and the only way we’d return to
Brooklyn was in a coffin. We called ourselves The Quorum.
We called ourselves the Collective Unconscious of the Upper
West Side.
Our children played in a bleak little playground near the
Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. We invaded the place
with our sand toys and tricycles, the bags we packed with apples
and breadsticks. While we pushed our children on the
swings, we talked about Carl Jung, whom we understood in a
handful of telegraphed phrases, and Ingmar Bergman, whose
films played downtown and which we desperately wanted to
see. On the grounds of the Cathedral, several peacocks wandered
freely. Sometimes, we took our children over to see
them, although the great birds frightened us with their manic
darting, their unholy screaming and reputation for viciousness.
The hens were a dull gray, nothing much to look at, but
the males were magnificent. I think we wished to see ourselves
in them: rare and graced, transcendent in their
vaguely shabby setting.
* * * *
It was during this time of strollers and failed cassoulets
that Rebecca Redl moved into the building where I lived with
my husband and our two boys. I first saw her sitting on the
stairs, reading a book. Instinctively, she shifted her body
while men in brown uniforms lifted chairs and bookcases up
and over her head. At first glimpse, I took her for a girl of