Today the elder GraBois was sitting in the courtroom, as at all such appearances, for moral support. Up on the witness stand, Stan felt especially thankful for his friend’s presence. As usual, Julie had left for school long before Stan was even awake that morning. Had she been there, she might not have been talking to him anyway. They rarely fought, but there were those long periods of silence, and he knew how she felt about what he was doing today, just as she in turn felt his disapproval for shunning the lawsuit.
“Mr. Patz, could you describe Etan prior to his disappearance?”
The question seemed to hang in the air, as Stan’s breath had hung in the chill fall morning when he’d walked over to the courthouse earlier and had struggled with what he would say on the stand. He knew he should deliver pathos, an image of Etan powerful enough to fly like an arrow to pierce the judge’s heart. Stan wanted to make the strongest case possible.
“I thought Etan was a wonderful child,” Stan answered. “He was as nice a little boy as there ever could be.” Afterwards, he couldn’t remember what else he said; just one more sentence, short, and filled with positive adjectives—happy, outgoing, beautiful. There should be more, Stan worried, but that was it. He had safely navigated the emotional precipice; no repeat of his outburst in the DA’s Office, and the moment had passed.
In the end, though, it really didn’t matter. His lawyer had already introduced into evidence a series of photos Stan had taken: his son’s birth announcement, with Etan lying in Julie’s arms, her eyes closed. His birthday party—the six-year-old smiling widely, hugging his mother tight. The last photo Stan had taken of Etan, looking serious and thoughtful. These were some of the same masterful photos handed out back in 1979, the ones that had made everyone care. They said more about Etan and what his family had lost than words ever could.
Afterwards, Stan and his attorneys walked out of the majestic New York Supreme Court building through the central front door, passing between the Roman columns and under George Washington’s words engraved into the granite façade: “The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government.”
The three men started down the expanse of the hundred-foot-wide steps, en route back to Brian O’Dwyer’s office. But Sheryl Crow was in court that day as well, testifying against an alleged stalker, and photographers were out in full force. When they saw Stan, they peeled off from their rock star stakeout to join the reporters already covering the inquest. It wasn’t a full-on press swarm, more an organic gathering, as one after the other reporters and photographers joined the migration, sprinting up the steps to meet Stan and his legal team halfway.
“This represents to the family very incomplete justice,” Brian O’Dwyer told reporters, as Stan stood quietly next to him.
It was something, Stan reminded himself. Something was more than the nothing of the last twenty-five years. It would sustain him until the next little something. And as he took questions, Stan felt resignation, but not despair.
Hands stretched out, extending tape recorders, pens jotted his words into spiral reporters’ notebooks. Stan, out of empathy for the line of photographers, varied the angle of his face, as once again he chose his words carefully. Even though he was no longer making his case in court, he knew that at this stage the court of public opinion weighed more heavily than any other. He told reporters he was grateful that Ramos would never be able to profit from Etan’s death, and called on the District Attorney’s Office to mount a criminal prosecution. This wasn’t about closure, he said. That would never happen, and he didn’t harbor such false hopes.
“But now I know what this man did,” he told a reporter, “and he should not be allowed to get away with it.”
When Stuart GraBois dropped Stan off at the loft later, Julie was already home, and he was happy to see that she was talking to him, with no sign of rancor over the day’s events. She was too excited about another news item that day. An article in the New York Daily News, “From Under the Bridge to On Top of the World,” was about two brand-new Rhodes Scholars, New Yorkers who had overcome all odds as Russian immigrants. One boy had for a time even been homeless. But there were “guardian angels” over the years, Lev Sviridov told the reporter, people without whom he would surely not have made his way off the streets. He cited one, the woman who ran his middle school office.
Lev and his mother, Alexandra Sviridova, a prominent investigative journalist, had arrived in New York from Moscow in April 1993 on a visitor’s visa. Lev’s mother spoke at universities in both the United States and Canada, and planned to return to Russia in the fall. But Boris Yeltsin made that impossible when in October, on the very day the Sviridovs were booked to fly home, the Russian president sent tanks into the Moscow streets to fire on the parliament building and beat back public protests. In the weeks of ensuing chaos, Lev and his mother were stranded, their visas expired, their passports useless. They were suddenly illegal immigrants, staying with friends and on some nights homeless. For the rest of the year, Lev watched other children go to school, while he and his mother walked the streets, desperately trying to sort out their identity crisis. Alexandra Sviridova appealed to office after office where bureaucrats shuffled their now invalid papers around. At one point, an official shook his head at Lev.
“In America, kids his age have to be in school. You can’t keep him with you all day,” he told Sviridova. She was in a panic. What if on top of losing her home, her livelihood, and her identity, she lost her son too? She couldn’t bear the thought. She heard about a middle school that might take Lev even though he’d already missed half the year and struggled to speak English. Armed only with a testimonial letter from an NYU contact, the first day after the Christmas break the two went to meet with the school’s principal. Both Lev and his mother felt terrified and out of their element, when a small woman with a warm smile came toward them to say hello.
But Alexandra Sviridova didn’t notice the smile on Julie Patz’s lips as much as the expression in her eyes. She’d seen such eyes in Russia all the time, but never in the United States. In Russia, she would tell Lev, the people have no life but they have a history. Here they have lives, but no history. Americans were happier, maybe, but their eyes were blank.
Not this woman, she thought. Her eyes had layers, thick and deep, as if they had been painted by Sviridova’s favorite artist, Titian, with fine, almost transparent brushstrokes, one on top of the other. She didn’t know who this woman was, or her history, but she knew there was one. Sviridova was overwhelmed by her frustration and fear, and she could barely speak. In Russian, she directed Lev to ask for help with the letter that she now held out for Julie.
“Can your mother speak any English?” Julie asked Lev, then turned to Sviridova. “What’s your name?”
Alexandra fumbled for words, wishing her English wasn’t so limited.
“Please,” she begged. “I am nobody. I have no name, no profession, nothing. I am just mama now. I am garbage from street. But I want my son to go to school. Can you help us?”
Tears welled in Julie’s eyes, as she went to the earnest-looking eleven-year-old and hugged him. She continued speaking to him but looked back at Alexandra. “Tell your mother that she’s not a nobody. She’s an immigrant in a country filled with immigrants who came here with nothing, just like her. She’ll be somebody very soon, and even now she’s not a nobody. She’s a mother.”
Now Alexandra Sviridova was weeping openly. The two women stood with the boy between them. He could understand that something important was happening, even if he didn’t know quite what.
Julie took the piece of paper from Sviridova’s hand and examined it.
“This isn’t going to help you,” she said authoritatively. “You’ll need to get approval from the Board of Ed.” Lev translated as Julie started to explain what to do. They followed her instructions and went immediately to an office some blocks away, where a stern-looking functionary finally signed the necessary paperwork that would require the school
to accept Lev. Then the two hurried back, where Julie looked through everything and pronounced them successful, hugging Lev again.
Until then, Sviridova had despaired for Lev’s safety in this city, in a whole new reality where they suddenly had so little and were constantly forced to depend on near strangers. But looking at Julie, with her arms wrapped protectively around Lev, Sviridova thought: He is safe with her. She is the first person in this country to whom I can give my baby.
When Julie learned how little they had at home, she convinced Sviridova to let Lev stay at school long after hours, eating an extra meal there, doing his homework, meeting new friends at afterschool activities, until his mother could come collect him. When Julie cobbled together her improvised library, Lev was her first librarian, a proud member of the “library squad” who posed with her in the yearbook picture. She was the same height as everyone else in the photo.
Many years later, after Lev won a Rhodes Scholarship, Alexandra Sviridova listened in when the reporter called to interview him. She was outraged to hear her son completely skip over his early immigrant days. He’d been the proud son of a distinguished journalist back in Russia, and he was embarrassed by the rough times that had followed. She broke into the conversation, yelling at him in shrill Russian.
“Liova, you have to talk about the worst days,” she scolded him, as he held the receiver close to his chest to mute her words. “If you don’t, no one will know about all the people who helped you out of such troubles. That’s important. And say their names.” She wagged her finger. “You have to make it about real people.” So Lev sheepishly did as his mother told him and talked about washing up some mornings in the bus station bathroom under the George Washington Bridge. And he gave the reporter Julie Patz’s name. When Sviridova saw Lev’s story in the same paper that carried news of Stan Patz’s day in court she was stunned. She wasn’t particularly religious, but she saw it as a sign that God was watching over them all. For their part, the Patzes savored the family name in print for once in a story about triumph, not tragedy. But Julie was baffled.
“Guardian angel?” She turned to Stan as they scanned the article again. “I just don’t get it—all I did was my job. Her English wasn’t great, and so I spent a lot of time with them; calmed them down. And treated them the way I was raised to treat people. It was no big deal.”
And even though Stan knew what a big deal it really was, he also knew that Julie was telling her true story. Yes, it was also the truth that in one tragic day a pall of grief had descended over both of them, a cloud that could never fully dissipate. Such an event sends some people into a cold, bitter place forever, and there had certainly been frigid days for both Stan and Julie. But Stan always liked to say that in the end, he hadn’t changed much from the person he was before Etan’s disappearance, that he and Julie were still who they’d been raised to be.
In the years after Etan was lost to them, Stan had witnessed so much proof of the good in man. The accumulation of all those smaller acts of kindness over time had muted Stan and Julie’s enormous sense of loss, like the sweet strains of Mozart and J. S. Bach that obscured the ringing in Stan’s ears as he worked. He took his small comfort from finally knowing the fate of the child lost to them, always the cruelest part of this long story. But he took much greater comfort in what he had held on to. He thought of Lev Sviridov heading off to Oxford, and the labor-of-love library that had opened so many little minds, and the stories Julie would regale him with of “her kids.” Jose Ramos may have tested Stan’s faith in humanity, but he hadn’t destroyed it. The best and most obvious example was the woman sitting next to him.
He read Lev’s section of the article one more time, and the pleasure Julie took from it he felt too, as his own. That was the way of it. Their next anniversary would mark forty years together, and they were still and always partners, who’d looked out for each other in the worst of times and cheered each other on in better. Not that they didn’t disagree. Today’s court appearance proved that. But the trick, those four decades and the tough moments had taught them, was tolerating each other’s differences. It had worked up until now, which was good, because Stan wasn’t done.
Stu GraBois had already talked to him about a new path to try. A year from now, New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau would sit for reelection, and for the first time in his three-decade reign, he faced a real challenger—a former assistant DA from his own office, who was also a former judge and now partner in a powerful Manhattan law practice. GraBois had known Leslie Crocker Snyder for many years, and at Stan’s request he’d arranged for the two of them to meet with her a few weeks from now. If she was willing to study the case and agreed it was worth pursuing, then Stan was willing to study her candidacy and might support her publicly. And if she didn’t, well, they’d try something else. The FBI had also told GraBois that they planned to take a fresh look at the case, and Stan knew he’d help in any way he could.
Both men agreed—they had no choice. There was just no way they could stand by as the years passed, until September 2014. When Jose Ramos was released from prison, unless there was a way to stop him, he would slip away as he had done so many times, losing himself among the unguarded, to return to his old ways. Ramos would be seventy-one years old by then, but he had always preyed on the small and weak, who would be defenseless against anyone, no matter their age. It would be nice to think that the passage of time had healed his wounds as well, but in all the years Ramos had been in prison, he’d never completed the treatment that, above all, required he admit to and show remorse for his crimes.
Whatever the two men could do, they had to do it. It was the way they had both been raised.
Coda
Julie Patz gets up at her normal hour, sometime after 4:00 a.m. It is two hours before sunrise, but over the years she’s gotten into the habit of savoring this early time to herself. She will trade it off at the other end of the day, sometimes asleep by seven, before the late spring sun has even set. Today, she pulls a short, lightweight shift over her still lithe form, in preparation for the sweltering heat of an un-air-conditioned public school, but adds a sweater in deference to the cool, drizzly night skies outside her window now. Then she ties her straight brown hair—liberally streaked with gray—into her usual tidy ponytail, leaves her husband sleeping, and heads into the kitchen to look over his lunch choices for the day.
Once every few weeks, Julie cooks up a big pot of beef stew, or a casserole of bacon-laced meatballs, or her specialty, adapted from an old recipe of Stan’s mother’s—steak in wine sauce. She herself eats at her desk most days, take-out from the local deli or fast-food Chinese. But it’s a point of pride to Julie that Stan eats her home cooking. She freezes her dishes in separate single portions, then he picks one out every morning to defrost. Around four o’clock he will heat it up for the late afternoon lunch that has remained his custom. Often he waits for Julie to get home, and she serves it to him on the black matte stoneware that complements the larger white plate she might place underneath. Left alone, he’ll just eat from the container, but Julie’s careful presentation always adds to the dish and the accoutrements she brings with it—a side tray of olives swimming in their own oil, a row of small bowls filled with different-flavored coarsely ground salts. Sometimes she sits with Stan as he eats and shares her day.
This morning she gets to her desk near the principal’s office at around six and settles in to another quiet hour or two of steady work, preparing for her day without distractions. No gum-popping thirteen-year-olds clamoring for late passes. No recalcitrant class-cutters serving penance on the chairs beside her.
When May 25 hits on a weekend, she and Stan usually spend it in solitude at a rustic church camp a few hours outside the city. This year it falls on a Wednesday, right in the middle of the school week. This year, the judge in the civil suit has ruled on the damages, awarding two million nonexistent dollars to Etan’s parents. All that means to Julie is more headlines, more gawking. This morning s
he braces herself for the inevitable—that some youngster will have spread the word about the anniversary, conjuring up the stares she’ll have to ignore, or the tearful child she’ll have to assuage. But otherwise she’ll proceed like it’s an average school day. Just like every year.
Stan hears her slide back the heavy track-mounted front door to the loft that afternoon, just as he’s breaking out the food she’s left him for lunch. She’s carrying a rolled up tubelike sheaf of art posters, and she is beaming. She unrolls the heavy papers and spreads them on the worn maple planks of Stan’s studio space. “Look what my kids did!” she tells him. She is practically breathless with glee. She recounts to Stan how two twelve-year-old girls had read about Etan online, then Googled the details. One student told a few of her friends. But instead of the sorrowfully averted gazes that always made Julie feel so uncomfortable, the girls wheedled time from their teachers, and everyone in school spent a class constructing two-foot greeting cards.
And that’s how 250 or so inner-city kids have made Julie a new kind of poster, filling all the white space with their love for her.
Stan Patz struggles to make out the slanted, adolescent handwriting:
After Etan Page 46
