Mildred Pierced by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online

an apartment on the eighth floor.
    At sixty-five, Jeremy was a mountain, a solid bald mountain with a calm but battle-bruised face.
    “How you doing, Jeremy?” I asked, moving behind my desk.
    “Well,” he said. “You’ve seen Sheldon?”
    “I’ve seen him.” I settled into my chair, dropping the pamphlet Timerjack had given me on the desk and facing him. “He says he didn’t kill her. I believe him. He doesn’t lie well.”
    “Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked.
    “Not right now unless you know something about these people.” I held up the pamphlet.
    Jeremy reached into his pocket and came out with his glasses. When they were settled on his nose, he reached for the pamphlet and I handed it to him.
    “I’ve heard of them,” he said.
    “From Shelly?”
    “And Professor Geiger. I think it was Professor Geiger who told Sheldon about Survivors for the Future.”
    Professor Alan Geiger had an office two doors down from ours. He sold and gave lessons on the Aeolian trafingle. From time to time when I was on the hall landing outside the office I could hear the weird sounds of the machine. The Aeolian trafingle was played not by blowing into it, banging on it, or passing one’s hands over it like a theremin. The trafingle produced music when a hand gently brushed one of a dozen bright aluminum rods sticking up from a square metal box. I had never yet recognized any melody that issued from Geiger’s office.
    “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “Is he in?”
    “Yes,” said Jeremy, returning the pamphlet. He also handed me a sheet of paper, neatly typed.
    “It may have something to do with Dr. Minck,” he said. “I dreamt last night this building crumbled and fell and that somehow the fault was mine.”
    He got up and added, “Anything I can do, remember?”
    “I’ll remember, Jeremy,” I said.
    When he closed the door, I looked down at the poem he had handed me. It was titled “Disappearing Houses.”
    In English cities and small towns, weather,
    factories and the tread of man have worked
    To wear away the homes of peasants and kings.
    Yet there and where unbombed in Europe
    Are still homes of high and low, lived in,
    their wood worn, stones smoothed
    by four or five hundred years of man and God.
    Brick, wood, stones, some rescued from Roman ruins
    with telephones and radios and temporary furniture
    leaving the essence of what once still stood.
    Why so different here where a century of standing
    is deemed a miracle and little plaques are placed
    on solid California homes whose sole distinction
    is that they have survived for a single century?
    And we are loath to have our personal history
    Endure for more than three generations?
    We live where nothing’s meant to survive,
    Not our homes, cars, the tools with which we work,
    Friendships, loyalties, dedication, principles.
    Today’s history is tomorrow’s nostalgia.
    Today’s friend is a remnant of only yesterday.
    And so I attend to friends, homes and work places
    keeping them alive as tribute to what can
    endure rather than that we will not have stand.
    The next time I saw Jeremy I’d tell him I found the poem moving and deep. Actually, I liked the ones that rhymed better.
    I got up, turned off the light, went out the door, through Shelly’s office and into the reception room. Violet was on the telephone saying, “Dr. Minck had an emergency.… No, he’s not out of town, but it might keep him locked in for a while. I can pencil you in for an appointment in a few weeks and let you know if he’s back.”
    While she talked, I took a pencil from her desk and wrote on the back of an envelope that I was going down the hall to see Professor Geiger. Violet turned the envelope around, read my message, and nodded, saying to the person on the other end of the line, “Yes, if you really can’t wait, I can recommend my dentist.… No, Dr. Minck is not my dentist.”
    I left the office and closed the door. Two doors down was the office of Alan