Miss Pearl, who said she was the city, the soul of the city, gave me a piano when I desperately needed one, and she gave me warnings and advice that proved of great value. She gave me back my life, too, after Lucas Drackman took it, after he shot me that night and I fell into death. Otherwise, something would have gone much differently than it did, and Fiona would have been killed as well, perhaps by Drackman, and my body and hers would have been put in the trunk of her car, to be driven away in the rain and perhaps left in some parking lot to be found as the body of Dr. Mace-Maskil’s wife had been found. The dream I was given was not predictive; it was only the way things might have gone, a warning. That’s what I think, anyway. Miss Pearl said we have free will, that what happens next is up to all the people who live along her streets, that my part of it is up to me. The next to the last time I saw her, she said that she had already done more for me than she should, that I was on my own thereafter, and yet she caught me in that long dark fall and brought me back into the world, from death to life. As you might imagine, I have thought about that a lot over the years, and about her claim to be the city.
When I was twenty-one, I sought out Albert Solomon Gluck, the taxi driver who had given the Lucite heart to my mother when I was eight years old. He never became a famous comedian. He still drove a taxi when I found him, and shortly thereafter he moved into a house in our neighborhood and became my driver. Back in the day, he had assured us that a woman, a passenger, had given him the pendant six months earlier and had told him that she wanted him to pass it along to someone. When he asked who, she said he would know who when that person crossed his path. The second time that I saw Albert, thirteen years after our first encounter, he told me more about that woman. He remembered her vividly. She was tall and beautiful and moved with the grace of a dancer. The outfit she wore was not like anything Miss Pearl had worn, but it did include a feathered hat. She favored a light rose-scented perfume. She called him Ducks. But here’s the thing: Her skin was not mahogany, not any shade of black or brown. She was a Jewish lady, no one he knew and yet so reminiscent of some of the women in his family that he felt akin to her the moment she got into his cab.
If you recall, when I was in that dying fall and lifted by her, just before she breathed upon my face and brought me back to life, I met her eyes, felt a chill. The character of that chill was like unto what I felt in the Kalomirakis Pinakotheke, when I stood before the painting by Fabritius, The Goldfinch, and looked into the masterfully illumined right eye of the little bird and understood what the artist might have meant, understood that not only one cruelly treated bird watched me through that eye, but also all of nature watched, and not only all of nature. When I looked into Miss Pearl’s eyes just before I woke from death to life, I saw a rush of images, more than I could count, passing in mere seconds, a few of which were: my dear mother kissing my fingers, one at a time, as she had done that night soon after we moved in with Grandpa Teddy; Grandpa sitting bedside in the hospital, his fingers moving bead to bead as he kept watch over me; Grandma Anita giving me a silver dollar to spend only on the day that I was confirmed; the faces of Mr. Yoshioka’s mother and sister, not the internment-camp photos from the book, but those framed in silver, which he had kept always lighted, which he also had left to me, and which he had asked me to keep lighted as well; and the eternity of candles, the small flickering lights, that were part of what I’d seen in that big black purse.… And there as I rose with Miss Pearl out of death, just as I passed back to life, I knew that she was not the soul of the city made flesh, or at least that she was not only the city, that she was not just black, as she appeared to me, that she was of all races and continents and times, that she wore no rose perfume but was herself the embodiment of the rose, that she was the mother of the ancient story, that I had known her not just since I was eight, but always.