CHAZ REETZ-LAIOLO
Lady at Fordham RD
Cornell stayed alone in the house. People dropped by; a visit to Utopia Parkway became an art-world trophy trip . . . His involvement in Christian Science intensified; his attention to housekeeping declined . . . sometimes he just opened his kitchen window, scattered seeds on the table and let sparrows fly in.
—Holland Cotter, on American artist Joseph Cornell
It’s as though we’re in the underbelly of an old whaler. Cramped and unsteady, a coffin of air and the light from the oily windows comes through unevenly as if through brown water. I actually cover my mouth with my hand.
How long’s he been dead? I ask.
Couple days, Anna says. Well, they found him a couple . . .
I follow her without touching anything. I duck down on the threshold, under the rancid smell and dingy claustrophobic light.
He was a recluse, she says.
Her in-laws lived next door to the man, Charles Graf, for years, watching when, on odd occasions, he would emerge from his house, dragging a trash can to the curb. They were so fascinated that when he died, they purchased the house at auction. This is the story I get.
Nobody’s been in here for forty years, she says. Not since his mother died.
Through an arched doorway the kitchen ferments in the spillover from the stove top; rust stains below the prehistoric faucet; a plate of food rotted into the floor; then, oddly, in the living room a La-Z-Boy facing an armoire, which stands askew in the middle of the room as if lumbering its way out. Nothing else. No sofa. No television. The floorboards run the length of the room.
I wouldn’t even look around down here, she says.
You’re just dragging everything out? I muffle.
She stops with her hand up on the door jamb (she’s touching this mess, I think) and waits for me to repeat myself.
You’re just dragging everything out?
We haven’t touched anything, she says. That’s how it was.
I can’t stop sneezing, so I go out and pull my shirt up to get at my clean undershirt, then stretch that up to wipe my nose and mouth. I gather the dust from my lips, spit out dry white spit. Spit out air, filth.
92 Wilson Street.
From the outside it’s a simple three bedroom. The lawn is weedy, but the entire add-on East Rockaway neighborhood is low and dull and wintered in. A pizza delivery kid stands at a door while his car huffs exhaust in the street between salt-stained minivans. One place with a fence down the block. Kids bundled up, walking the sidewalk with their schoolbags.
Anna says they were Irish, the Grafs. That the mother and father arrived separately in the long tattered lines through Ellis Island, pushing their only possessions along the floor with their feet. Victoria Isador McKinley. Then an unknown young man with the surname Graf. Little about them is known, save the skeletal history of the house: built in 1910, the Grafs are the only family to have occupied it. The furniture is the same that surrounded the boy, Charles, from birth until now in death. But of his boyhood there remains little evidence. No report cards. No team photographs, award ribbons. Only three portraits: fat as any toddler, his cheeks chromo-colored in the fashion of the time; eager in grade school; then as a teen, his face elongated, narrow eyes set over a nose that looks like a knee. He seems to be waiting to say the right thing. But there is no proof of there ever having been a recipient for this right thing. Even in a letter to his mother and father, dated Oct. 1, 1945 from the SS Shannon, he mentions no mates, no friends, no girl back home. Instead he writes of the Asiatic continent, of this being his first time on land since June.
Very, very alone, Graf’s neighbor and Anna’s mother-in-law, Varvara Lefkaditas, says.
I always bring him food, when I cook the Greek food. When I really cook, not sandwiches. I didn’t like sandwiches because he always ate sandwiches. So every time I cook something good, I always take it to him.
And I say, Mr. Charlie, I’m bring you something, open the door.
So he says, no, no, no! Leave it at the door, that’s okay, I’m gonna take it.
I say, no, I’m gonna wait for you so I can bring it inside.
So I went to the door. I wait. He was not walking, you know, straight, and he was old. I don’t know if he needs time to come down to the stairs. And I wait for him and when he opens the door, I try and go inside so I can put the food on the table or someplace.
But he didn’t let me come in. Never. He never let me come in. He opened the door maybe a few inches. That’s enough, he says. I’m gonna take it.
I say, no, no, no, your hand is full with a cane, so I have to—
No, that’s okay, he says. I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it. And he took the food, closed the door, that’s it. He never let me go in. Except once.
I only went in one time when he called me. He said that he’d missed a grocery. He says, I missed a bag and I can’t pick it up. I can’t bend. Can you please bring it and leave it at the door? Always the same—the door.
I said, OK.
I went from the back—that’s what he told me to do—but it was a little open. It was a little open, so I say, Mr. Charlie! Mr. Charlie! I have your groceries!
Leave them, he says. I’m gonna take them, that’s okay.
Yeah, but the door is open, Mr. Charlie. I’m gonna bring them in. You don’t have to come. But he starts screaming. Put it down. Thank you, put it down. Get out!
Maybe he didn’t want to see me to look at the kitchen like that.
And then I closed the door and then I left.
The attic window clatters open now and Mrs. Lefkaditas thrusts her chubby arms out into the cold air and snaps the dust from a nightgown. Lace trim, a flag of white like a herring erupting from the window, and the building is transported as if to spring forty years ago when the deceased’s own mother had busied herself about the house where she was living with her adult son.
Instead, the three of us are looting his home. Prying open the cracked leather steamer trunks, waving the dust back, digging through the contents, holding up some treasure to the light.
I take two jackets, a suitcase, hand tools, ledgers, a leg from a figurine broken at the knee, three portraits, and, from his desk drawer, a stack of 123 folded graph pages on which Charles Graf cataloged the daily high and low temperature from March 1969 to January 1990—from the month his mother died to god knows why he quit.
Twenty-one years—7,665 days. I imagine him, each evening of those years, watching the nightly news, the local meteorologist taking on weight, trying a mustache, bell-bottoms, bundled up in winter, doing the broadcast from the steps of the courthouse with an enthusiasm that went completely unnoticed by Charles Graf, sitting there, waiting to pencil in the high and low. Getting up to shut off the television as the meteorologist talked on toward Tomorrow folks, make sure you’ve got your snow shov—Click.
Forty-three degrees at 1:30 in the afternoon.
Twenty at 5 a.m.
Of course, in scouring the graphs for information on Charles Graf’s life, I’ll learn that this scenario is impossible. He was a radio man.
The graphs sit in my living room for weeks after their discovery. They lap in the breeze from the open window, a bulk of them still stacked (there are so many), I can smell the instant I pulled them from his desk drawer. They smell like humidity and paper and un-daylight.
The first sheet was folded and put away thirty-eight years ago. Then three months later, another sheet was added. Then another. And so on for twenty-one years. A project so patient that its conclusion stands only five inches tall. Paradoxically, as the papers grew, Charles Graf, who stood for the majority of his life a hulking six feet five inches, bent, eroding humanly, until his last ten years were spent hunched over as if searching the floor for something he’d lost.
For twenty-nine months nothing appears on the graphs save the daily high and low temperatures. Otherwise the page is blank (coffee stains will appear later, but these early sheets seem fussed over, guarded). Then, in August 1971, a line slants suddenly from one end of the page to the other. It would seem a daily average, but is too high above the days’ temps. I lay the next two years of pages in a length down my apartment hall and see that the line continues in perfect repetition from one year to another. From what source he derived this median—the Farmer’s Almanac, the East Rockaway archives—I have no idea, but it remains a constant undulating horizon through the next nineteen years of jagged daily spikes.
April 20, 1973—four years in—Charles Graf finally inserts himself into the catalog. His bus schedule:
Sou Fy
242
GTY SQ
GD FDY
St. JOHN
242
To PENN
Six months later he remarks on the fare: 30 cents, Vet. Day.
The next year, July 1974, he names the natural world, which, to this point, has existed only as an abstraction: Cloudy Rain, Cold.
He has lived alone for five years now. Each day, running pay envelopes. In one set of doors, up the elevator, delivery, and then quiet again, standing tall over the elevator man as they descend in silence, and out into the climate. Every day the climate. Hurrying along the front of a building as rain falls from an awning; turning up his collar against a wind; coming out into the blare of soul music from a window and shirtless kids hopscotching in the hissing water of an open fire hydrant. None of these possibilities is ever mentioned. But finally, after having penciled in the brittle lows of 1970 and 1971, where on January 13 it reached thirty-six degrees below zero, here, on July 24, 1974, the mild temperature of sixty degrees is cause for rupture. Cloudy Rain, Cold. And suddenly, by name, Charles Graf’s world: buses splash along the puddled July street and Charles Graf, shaking his umbrella, takes his first steps up through the door, ascending and ducking at the same time, hunched. But he hasn’t invented the driver yet, nor his fellow passengers. That will take another six months, until having walked 18 MIN to the HRLY bus at Mt. VERN he sees the Lady at Fordham RD.
From here there remain sixteen years of graphs. And though his handwriting will litter them more and more often, they remain at a glance largely what they are: the cryptic abstracted witnessing of a world not quite lived in. Always a payroll runner, delivering money in the form of checks for labor he’d not witnessed, toiled over by people he would never know.
Of the three annual outings that dot the graphs—in early April, mid-July, and the second week of October—the bus schedules are copied as if from a city roster. The same route and hours year in, year out. To the bus driver he would have never become a regular, but to Prescott Field, where each October he visited for between one hour and one hour and thirty-seven minutes, he must have seemed like a staple, as reliable as the temperature change. What the field meant to him appears only in the briefest glimpses: Men Marking Football Lines, 1977; Lite Pole Down, 1980; Mound Dirt on Field, 1982; Field Empty exc 1 Old Man Pulling Flowers—End of Summer, 1983. Then the repetition of the name Harder, whom Mrs. Lefkaditas recalls as his only friend, one who would pull up to the curb, honk, and sit waiting for Charles Graf to appear from the house where the bushes had overgrown the windows. Even Harder was never let inside.
At some point along the graphs Margaret has died. Bishop Charles W. McLean. Walter Nieman, Matt Thomas, and Geoffrey Parsons, all broadcast men from WQXR Classical.
Then Mrs. Tuer. P. Laugherty. R. Hall. Paul M. R. Fosters. VIG. Taft.
And the daily high, the daily low.
What are they? my three-year-old asks, when I hang a line of them across our apartment wall.
I don’t know.
She stares up at them where they are hung with his portrait, her open umbrella dragging behind her, though outside the sunny windows seagulls hover above the neighboring apartment. No rain. The graphs have been up three days and suddenly she notices them while I’m in the kitchen and she awaits her dinner. Three days of my squinting up at them, having to admit that I’m failing at translation. That when I come home and unshoulder my bags, even as I kick off my shoes, I watch the graphs. That I come out in the middle of the night and sit woodenly in front of them. Same watermarked graph paper. Same median line. Same habitual travel dates in April and October. Same wet smell, now in my house. One man’s cavernous habit, his routine, his mourning. Twenty years of temperature graphs that Mr. Charles Graf graphed. How many graphs could Mr. Graf graph if Mr. Graf could graph graphs? And now, as I take the boiling pot of corn over our heads for the sink, my daughter, for the first time that day, holds the umbrella overhead as if aware of the boiling danger.
Are they his? she says.
They were, I say. I take utensils out to our little table, returning through the doorway, where I have to squeeze past her upraised face as she takes them all in. They’re mountains, she says.
What if they are? Summits and valleys, terrain he had to traverse away from his mother, toward a life. As Michel de Certeau speculates in The Practice of Everyday Life, many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking) are tactical in character. There is no doubt these graphs fulfill this expectation. Graf didn’t allow for much chance early on. The cleanliness and deliberate order is forensic in nature. It’s as if he expected to find a pattern—maybe even predict the conclusion of living—by mapping out the weather of his days. But it continues to resist such predictability. Continues to rupture, to bewilder.
Death, weather, land. The immigrants’ expansion west was most embittered by distance, by weather, by mountains, which, once traversed, gave way to what awaited their labor. How different an embarkation is Charles Graf’s, his anchoring mother dead, he must set out on his own. But how? By trying to understand, meter, and then foresee in the weather what comes next. Why else do we look for patterns than to see into and control the future? But there is nothing to understand. He maps and maps, but no patterns appear, save for cooler temperatures in winter, hotter in summer. The median line doesn’t even seem to add up. He is failing.
I drag a chair over and begin wallpapering the entire room in the graphs and am reminded of something Mrs. Lefkaditas mentioned about perspective: My English is not so good, she said. I try to help you, but I don’t know if you—I don’t know how to say? If you really take it the way it really was. And I thought, what is there to take wrong? Charles Graf was mad, a shut-in, screaming in his old age for you to get out of his house. Maybe he didn’t want to see me to look at the kitchen like that. Look at the kitchen, not him. It is not his public self, but his private that he hopes to hide. He’d called her. He’d directed her to the back door. But to bring and to leave, not enter.
He just didn’t want her in the house, I say out loud.
You’re not supposed to stand on chairs, my daughter says.
I’m being safe, I say without looking at her.
I line them six across so each row represents a year. It takes two walls. And when I step back and look around—my daughter is of course now standing on her own chair with her corn on the cob—the second wall does not even resemble the first.
Is it a story? she says.
What? Sit down, I say.
I’m being safe. What’s it about?
And he does develop. The Lady at Fordham RD seems to be his first time on land since the death of his mother. From there he darkens the later pages with an accumulating narration of a lived life.
In 1975 Julie and Bridget appear at Greens. The following October, Florence. The Tropic Frost closes. Then is Levelled in 1980 while a Lady Hands Out Holtzerman Literature. He visits Terry’s House of Beauty. Has SANKA & EGGS. Sits Jury Duty. Then, immaculately, Charles Graf is engaged on a Walk Along Croton Aquaduct Path—Little Girl Asks Time. Throughout, Charles Graf’s handwriting loosens, begins to encroach upon the graphs, coloring almost. Doug’s Birthday. The Nimetz Anniversary. He and Harder visit the Albert’s Lane House in Sayville; an Italian Restaurant; they join Rita’s Sister and Sister-In-Law, Walk Through Vineyard to Snack Bar; they have Vietnamese food. One can almost see him fumble with the chopsticks, picking up his draped napkin over and over again, practicing. He and his friend laughing. Alive. And on his way to his final visit to Prescott Field he remarks uncharacteristically at having passed ST JOHN OCTOBERFEST. Then in forty minutes, less than half the time he usually spent at the field, he observes more than on any other occasion: Boy with a Baseball Bat & Ball. The sky is CL[ear] 59. Marigolds. An Old Man. Children In Play Area. And a note to self to purchase a CAMERA. Only forty minutes, as if the world comes to him whole now. He must carry the graph with him to note such precise times, and I see him hurrying, jotting in shorthand the movement before him, then folding it (there is even a misfold on this sheet) and stuffing it into his breast pocket, because he’s done with the field, the observations, and from here, instead of his usual route home, he returns to the boisterous booths of the open-air ST JOHN OCTOBERFEST, where he has COFFEE.
