The Book of Getting Even
Chapter One, pages 29—31

That year, in New York City, schizophrenia had stepped out of the shadows and into the limelight. Gabriel saw a florid woman pacing around in front of the Long Island Railroad ticket windows. Her mouth opened and closed in a tardive motion. She wore on her head a medley of things — a birdcage, a stuffed monkey with a blood-red mouth, some drapes, a plaster bust of JFK, a hot-pink bolster, a toy ironing board, a snowfall in a glass dome, a fitted sheet, a model B-52 — held in place with a bedspread and fastened under her chin with a clasp. This headdress was half again as tall as she was, and she wore a feed-bag dress and, over it, a hand-painted sandwich board that said on either side,

                    PLEASE EXCUSE
                   MY APPEARANCE.
                     I AM FORCED
                        TO CARRY
                         HITLER'S
                  DIRTY LAUNDRY.

"What are we supposed to make of that?" Danny said.

"Poor thing," Marghie said.

Gabriel said nothing, because the sight filled him with horror and made his stomach hurt. You didn't see the likes of her in New Orleans, not even in the depraved reaches of the Quarter above Dauphine Street. They walked all the way from Penn Station to the Gotham. Professor and Mrs. Hundert, who'd already retired and would rise early, had left a note at the front desk: "You young people enjoy yourselves, and we will see you tomorrow." This in Mrs. Hundert's hand. She gave an address where they would meet at noon for lunch, a club to which the professor belonged. To this sepulchral place Marghie and Danny had been brought over the years whenever the family visited from Chicago. "Please remember to dress properly," she'd added in a postscript.

Marghie exhaled with drama and handed the letter to Danny. "Tuckered out," she said, and went to her room. Danny and Gabriel decided on a walk, a timid one up Fifth and west along Central Park South. They stopped at Prexy's for a late snack, hamburgers with the special Prexy sauce. They looked in at Rumpelmeyer's, a kind of ladies' tea room decorated with stuffed animals. They got as far as Columbus Circle, then retraced their steps. The New York Athletic Club, the Essex House, the Hampshire House, the St. Moritz, the Navarro, the Barbizon Plaza, Prexy's, the Plaza. And opposite lay the great park of parks, pathways dimly lit to reveal — this amazed the Chicagoan and the New Orleanean alike — people strolling around without a care for their lives. Could it be, Gabriel and Danny wondered, that locals had simply not heard about the oblivion awaiting them in there?

They had a look in the F.A.O. Schwarz windows. "I had one of those," Danny said, pointing to the electric train circulating in the store. "Smaller than that, without the bridges and tunnels."

"Marghie didn't have one?"

"Still doesn't." Howls. Howls in the night.