“In the winter all those green leaves will be gone,” Leland said.
“Yes,” Carney said. “That’s what happens with trees.” He made a quick prayer for Elizabeth’s return from the kitchen with the cookies. He asked his in-laws how they were enjoying Park West Village, the complex off Columbus that they’d moved into.
“We love it,” Alma said. “There’s a Gristedes opening up.”
It was their third apartment since they’d sold the Strivers’ Row house. They left the first because the block transformed into a drug bazaar once the weather changed. They’d toured it on a snowy afternoon and it had seemed sleepy enough.
The second apartment was in a nice clean building on Amsterdam. Next door to a judge and down the hall from a pastor. Six months into the lease, the Joneses were alarmed by an odd smell. They assumed a mouse had expired in the walls. A reddish-brown liquid dripped from the ceiling and sent them running to the super, who after a quick investigation identified the substance as the upstairs neighbor’s putrefying remains. Such unchecked seepage through the substandard flooring pointed to larger structural issues in the building, on that point everyone agreed. The Joneses stayed at the Hotel Theresa until they landed at Park West Village. As for the upstairs neighbor, he had chased away his friends and family over the decades and the city buried him on Hart Island one unexceptional Sunday afternoon.
There had been plenty of relocations and pullings-up of stakes recently. Leland moved his firm from Broadway and 114th to a more affordable space on 125th. Carney and Elizabeth finally made proper use of the apartment fund and split for the river and the boulevard of Carney’s aspirational dreams. The building was integrated, with a lot of black families with children moving in. Elizabeth had made two friends already. Historically, turnover had been low, with little wear and tear to speak of in the individual units. The common areas were well-lit and well-maintained. There was a laundry room in the basement with a bank of brand-new Westinghouse machines, an active tenants’ group, and of course the park was right there.
The furniture store remained where it was, an anchor on 125th and Morningside, and continued to flourish in areas aboveboard, and below.
The new living room had plenty of space for the kids to sprawl. On the thick Moroccan Luxury rug, May flipped through her Richie Rich comics and disjointedly hummed Motown tunes while John harassed a Matchbox fleet with the toy brontosaurus. This year Carney went Argent with regard to his home furniture, opting for the three-piece sectional with the kiln-dried hardwood frame and Herculean blue-and-green upholstery. As he sat on the couch with his legs extended and his ankles crossed, taking in the room and the greenery outside, Carney grudgingly allowed himself a contented moment. He rubbed his fingertips across the tweed cushions to calm himself as his in-laws prattled.
At last Elizabeth arrived with the cookies. The kitchen in the new place was more hospitable than the last one, granting a survey of an uptown battalion of rooftops as opposed to the dead-end air shaft. Marie had been sharing recipes, and this had to be one of hers, so thoroughly did the aroma bend them to its will. Elizabeth gave Carney a smile to reward his forbearance.
The children jumped up for dibs on the best cookies.
“He get that at the World’s Fair?” Leland asked. The little dinosaur.
Carney said yes. They’d taken the subway to Flushing to check out the exhibition last May. “This is what they call ‘Queens,’ guys.” The publicity machine had plugged it so much that it was bound to disappoint, and the editorial pages had wrung their hands over how the city’d pay for it, but the whole production was top-notch. Years from now May and John would look back on it and understand they’d been a part of something special. Sinclair Oil had handed out plastic versions of their brontosaurus mascot at the Dinoland pavilion. John slept with it under his pillow.
“We’d still like to take them,” Leland said. “Max and Judy said that Futurama was something else.” May and John squealed. The fairground was too vast, too stuffed to take in on one visit. The grandchildren provided an alibi for Alma and Leland to mix with the commoners.
“That’s fine,” Carney said.
“If they haven’t looted the place,” Alma said.
“I don’t think burning down the World’s Fair was high on their list, Mommy,” Elizabeth said.
John said, “They burned down the World’s Fair? Why?”
“Who knows what they’re liable to do, those student activists,” Alma said.