Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(3)

“Thanks anyway, Ma,” he says. “How are you doing?”

“You just saw me. Healthy and hardworking as a Central Park carriage horse.”

“Is that lady who comes to check on you still checking through the holidays?”

“Vera moved to Texas with her husband when he got that oil-field job six months ago,” I say. “I’ve told you three times.”

“Who’s taking care of you now?”

“Vera is my friend, not my caretaker. Rest assured that if I should drop dead I won’t be reeking in the apartment for weeks, with the cat gnawing my carcass. There are a few people who would miss me. Not many.”

“I wish you’d just come up to Brunswick for good, Ma. We’ve got the room. Murray Hill’s not what it used to be. The city’s not what it used to be. You’re not safe.”

I had hoped that the impending death of the false mother, of Julia, would have spared me another round of his entreaties to migrate permanently to Maine, if only because these efforts would be unseemly, would cast him in a bad light: my Gian, the Bluebeard of mothers. Once Julia’s been in the ground for a few weeks, I’d reckoned, his Vacationland campaign would resume in earnest.

But no such luck. “I’m not leaving, Gian,” I tell him. “The city has been unsafe for twenty years, and I’ve survived.”

“Well, you’re twenty years older now,” he says. “And the city’s getting worse. It’s never been such a cesspool. The crime and disorder. The murders. The Subway Vigilante, Ma! It’s out of control. What if you’d been on that train? What if you’d been on it with the kids?”

This, more and more, is Gian’s attitude when I speak with him: a skittishness about the city’s numberless perils. It strikes me as odd: He was never a nervous child. But as his own kids have grown older and more independent, his inventory of potential threats has steadily expanded—as, apparently, has his authority to give advice on such matters. Like many parents in middle age, he’s quick to spot changes in the world, slow to note shifts in his own perspective.

That said, he is not incorrect. The city I inhabit now is not the city that I moved to in 1926; it has become a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot twists and preposterous dialogue.

Last week a man—neatly dressed, wearing wire-rimmed glasses—snapped on a downtown 2 express. Midafternoon, on a train full of people. Four teenagers surrounded him, asking for five dollars; people have been killed for refusing less. The paper says he says they threatened him with sharpened screwdrivers. The man pulled a gun from his waistband. I have five dollars for each of you, he is said to have said—as if he had practiced—before shooting them all. Two women collapsed at the end of the car in fright, and like a gallant gentleman, he helped them up before fleeing into the darkness of the tunnel at Chambers Street. Mayor Koch has said vigilantism won’t be tolerated, and it seems he is right: Callers have been flooding the tips hotline the police set up, but their calls congratulate the shooter, thank him, offer to pay his bail if he turns himself in. The Subway Vigilante is not being tolerated; he is being idolized.

Gian just about about-faced the family back to Maine when it happened, even though we’d been uptown at the Museum of Natural History at the time, safe beneath the blue whale hanging by its dorsal fin, unarmed and pacific, silent as ever, a sentinel in the lurid tabloid nightmare this city’s been dreaming.

“I walk everywhere, dearest,” I say. And it’s true: I like the exercise, and the subway cars are graffitied with so much text it’s like being screamed at, like the voices inside my head and everyone else’s have manifested their yelling outside, ill-spelled with spray paint. “And we weren’t on that train. And he isn’t shooting elderly ladies and adorable tots.”

“But guys like the guys he shot are everywhere. Hoods. Gangs. Toughs. Whatever you want to call them.”

“I would not resist if young thugs approached me for money,” I say. “I would acquiesce. I agree with Governor Cuomo that a vigilante spirit is dangerous. Rude, too.”

“Rude?” he says.

“Yes, Gian. Incivility is not incivility’s antidote. I don’t know whether I believe that vigilante really had reason to think those young men were going to harm him. It sounds to me like he planned to shoot someone regardless—like he’d seen those I Want Death movies one too many times.”

“Death Wish?” says Gian.

“One of those young men is paralyzed. Eighteen years old. Never going to walk again.”

“Maybe they deserved it, Ma. The city’s a sick place. People are sick.”

“This city may be a rotten egg,” I say, “but I’ll still be the last one out. What have I got to lose?”

“Ma, you sound depressed again.”

“Of course I do. This time of year is depressing. New Year’s Eve is a bigger thug than any mugger, the way it makes people feel. Being old is depressing. The Subway Vigilante is depressing. But I love it here, this big rotten apple. I’m near my old haunts, my sycamore trees, my trusty R.H. Macy’s.”

“I will never understand,” Gian says, “why living near Macy’s is more important than living near your grandkids. You haven’t written an ad for them in twenty-five years.”