A Woman with a Past
The better I knew Laura, the more I puzzled at her pure-heartedness. Life had wounded yet somehow not embittered her. She believed in love, and her capacity for loving was like a boxer’s heavy bag, sturdy and inured to blows. You could confide your chagrins to her knowing she wouldn’t try to assuage them with pat reassurances. I did my best to reciprocate, and if she read my work she might have recognized herself as a recurrent figure in it: a woman warring with the myths about femininity that sabotage us. Laura once hoped to write her own story, with my help. But when she died suddenly, on a winter morning in 2003, she left me to tell it—a task I’ve evaded for too long.
Danny and Laura were still relative strangers to me when I invited them to dinner with an old friend, an intellectual of courtly manners and wry despair at human ignominy. His dandyism is a reproach to modernity, like Laura’s penchant for playing the coquette, and they appealed to each other. She listened raptly, or pretended to, as he lauded obscure diarists of the eighteenth century.
After dessert, I did my party trick: reading palms. I had learned the basics in my youth from the girlfriend of my drug dealer, Nikos, a former theatre director who liked to quote Sophocles. She received callers propped in bed, looking like Jane Seymour as the Bond girl Solitaire, languidly casting her tarot cards. “It’s always better to be cryptic,” she told me. “People take dark truths to heart.”
That evening, though, I didn’t censor myself. I told my fastidious friend that he had a murderer’s thumb and a bent for violent revolution. This seemed to please him. After some teasing, he admitted that he owned a gun safe, and that his only fond memories of his remote, mandarin father were from their hunting trips together. My friend was later almost killed reporting from a war zone.
Chiromancy is an ancient practice, long discredited, and just a game to me. Yet the way that a subject tenders her hand suggests a secret about her character; that “tell” is what you read. Laura hesitated, protesting that her nails weren’t manicured. When she finally relented, she cupped her palms like a begging bowl. The right one had a prominently crisscrossed Mount of Venus, but its most distinctive feature was the merging of the head and heart lines—a rarity I’d seen only in illustrations. Old palmists took it to predict madness or depravity, but, as I told Laura, it could also be the sign of a great soul wrestling with its demons for the world’s benefit. “Aha!” she said gaily. “Then there’s hope for the world.”
The next morning, Laura called to joke about her “demons”—the two toy poodles she doted on. She and Danny wanted to return my hospitality, so, a week later, I scaled the five flights to their new apartment, in a former tenement a block from the pushcart stable. “Come meet my girls,” she said, as she opened the door. Her girls, I saw to my surprise, were the trophies in a private doll museum.
The walls of the apartment were lined with display cases that Laura had built herself and filled with rotating exhibits, drawn from a vast collection in storage. There were poignant sackcloth dolls from the antebellum South, made for enslaved children; antique baby dolls with painted Meissen heads; Madame Alexanders like the ones I had played with in Queens; original Barbies. Many were rare; Laura was a discerning curator. She restored dolls for other collectors, and, with the benefit of sewing lessons from my aunt Arkie, she dressed her girls in New Look ensembles that might have been modelled by Suzy Parker.
