The school year Mrs. Werner was den mother she had
a nightclub act at a midtown hotel with a horseshoe bar
She practiced with her partner in the living room during
cub scout meetings while we cut and pasted construction paper
teepees for wildlife badges and filled in outdoor worksheets
Her partner, Juliette, played the piano and Mrs. Werner sang
40’s and 50’s standards like “Blue Moon,” and “Besame Mucho”
Her son, Bobbie, explained that Mr. Werner traveled on airplanes
and was looking for a house in Pittsburgh
Bobbie was the only cub scout who actually lived in an apartment
and owned a pair of binoculars and a championship yoyo
An architect’s rendering that hung in the entrance of each building
showed the apartments in neat rows with steep roofs, red bricks,
cement stoops, a front window in each unit, nine panes in each window,
each with white paper shades pulled down, faux white shutters,
oak trees, green grass along the walk and flower beds never planted,
which will explain an older man’s memory and a boy’s reality,
given that the following October the acorns dropped early
and Bobbie Werner didn’t come back to school:
The reality, hidden from passers-by many years later, of children,
as people in cars one might have seen them then, their hands,
faces, noses and foreheads pressed hard against window panes,
looking out into the gray, waiting for Bobby Werner’s mother
to return and finally award them their insignias, their Wolf badges,
the promises made to them as children by grownups like Mrs. Werner
who secretly leave town and trash piled in the hall