The Altar Girl: A Prequel

by Orest Stelmach

  The poster reminded me of the ordeal my godfather had doubtlessly suffered to escape the Nazis and the Soviets and start a new life in America. I didn’t know the details, but I was sure his early life had been harrowing, and now it appeared his end had been the same. He deserved better.

  Roxy’s voice carried from the kitchen. “You find anything in there?”

  “No,” I said, and began opening the drawers to his desk.

  “I told you there was nothing there. You almost done? I’m going to call home and tell my kids I’m on the way.”

  “Yup.”

  The drawers contained the usual office supplies, a slide rule and a calculator, a flashlight and three vintage copies of Playboy that appeared to have been perused three or four million times each. My godfather didn’t have a computer, which didn’t surprise me. My mother didn’t have one either, and many of the older generation wanted no part of the latest technology. What did surprise me was the complete absence of business records of any kind. I was about to ask Roxy if she knew who kept his books when I noticed a small pad of paper was elevated an inch off the desk.

  I lifted the pad and found a small notebook bound with burgundy leather. The first few pages contained phone numbers. I scanned the names. They featured the requisite servicers any homeowner would need, such as plumber, electrician, and duct cleaner. Duct cleaner? The others were either friends or business associates, I guessed. Some of the names were in English, but most were in Ukrainian. I recognized some of the latter.

  I heard the toilet flush so I stood up to leave. The rest of the notebook turned out to be a calendar. Various appointments appeared on the pages, most of them self-explanatory. Out of sheer logic, I turned to the date he’d died. While all the other entries in the calendar had been written in a normal font size, this one had been scrawled in blue ink with enormous letters that took up the entire page.

  The entry consisted of two letters: “DP.” The “P” had a little curl at the top. It was impossible to tell which language my godfather had been using because the letters were written in cursive. In printed form, the English letter “D” corresponds to the Ukrainian “Д.” But in cursive form, the “D” looked the same in both languages. The letter “P” was the Ukrainian version of an “R.” Hence, if the note was in English, it was DP. If it was written in Ukrainian, it was DR.

  People maintained calendars to keep track of meetings, which consisted of people and places. Hence, DP was most likely a person or a place. I skimmed through the calendar. Appointments pertaining to the Ukrainian community were noted in Ukrainian, details pertaining to those outside the community were written in English. They appeared evenly split with an average of one or two per week. Each entry contained a person’s name, and some contained a reference to a place, as well.

  An eye doctor’s appointment was noted in English with the address and phone number beside it. As with other appointments in English, the doctor’s name and location were spelled out in English. In cases where the entry had been written in Ukrainian, he wrote the destinations out in longhand—“National Home, Credit Union, Church Hall”—but abbreviated the names of the people with their initials. There were sufficient Ukrainian entries containing Cyrillic letters for me to deduce that he used initials when he had appointments with Ukrainains: “lunch with БШ,” “bingo with ЮТ,” “fix gutter for ЄЖ.” That meant the letters DP were probably someone’s Ukrainian initials, which corresponded to DR in English.

  The rest of the notebook provided no insight into his business. In fact, the calendar appeared to consist of his personal appointments, as though he kept his professional ones somewhere else, if not entirely in his mind.

  I heard Roxy’s footsteps and slipped the notebook into my bag. I’m not one hundred percent sure why I didn’t want to share my discovery with her. Perhaps I wanted to trust her, but couldn’t afford to put my faith in anyone for the time being.

  “You find anything?” she said.

  “Nope,” I said, brushing aside my pangs of guilt. “Do you know who did your uncle’s books?”

  “Some Uke accountant. I’ll get you the name.”

  We walked outside. I shined the light and Roxy closed the door. As I drove away, I noticed that one of the Hondas was still there but the other one was gone. The ignition wasn’t on, however, and there didn’t appear to be anyone inside.

  Roxy tried to talk me into staying the night with her but I refused. I told her I was going straight to a motel but it was a lie. I knew only one man in the Ukrainian community with the Ukrainian initials DP. His name was Danilo Rus and I’d been in his home before.

  He was my former father-in-law.

  He was Roxy’s father.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE HOUSE SMELLED of mothballs and echoed with the sound of a tragic Ukrainian ballad, a powerful soprano wailing with unrelenting misery about her son’s death in an ancient war with the Tatars. Darwin’s law had prevailed after centuries of battles for the breadbasket of Europe: no one could cry like a Uke. We were the world heavyweight champions of mourning.

  When I knocked, my former father-in-law opened the door and stood there mute, glaring at me, cane in hand. I refused to go away, so he moved aside to let me in. He stayed mum and kept his eyes on me as I passed him.

  A solitary Tiffany desk lamp with an amber stained glass shade provided barely enough light in the living room to conduct a séance. A portrait of a baby-faced JFK hung on the center of the main wall, draped in black velvet. A framed picture of a battle-worn JFK rested on a dusty old piano, with the proclamation of a day of mourning from the Connecticut Legislature framed beside it. Both pictures looked as though they hadn’t been touched for fifty years. The piano contained a collection of family photos. Conspicuous in its absence was any sign of me in any of the pictures. Also conspicuous was the second swath of black velvet resting atop a picture of Rus’s son—my former husband. The photo showed him at his most professorial and dapper, speaking from a lectern with passion etched in his face. It had been taken the day he’d died fifteen months ago.

  Parkinson’s had gripped Rus since I’d last seen him. His tottering and twitching would have elicited nothing but empathy had he been someone else. But he wasn’t someone else. He was the father-in-law who’d advised his son not to marry an unremarkable-looking girl who wasn’t interested in homemaking. That only idiots and men who’d impregnated their girlfriends compromised at the altar.

  We spoke Ukrainian. First-generation kids with any sliver of language skills spoke Ukrainian with their elders. It was better to mix in an English word when one’s vocabulary fell short than to avoid Ukrainian altogether. The latter was an exercise in humiliation and embarrassment, and an admission that one had drifted so far from home that she couldn’t remember the language of her youth.

  “I thought we’d had our final words at his funeral,” he said, after turning down the stereo. “When I told you I never wanted to see you again for the rest of my life. Why are you here? Why are you tempting me?”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant when he said I was tempting him, but I knew he blamed me for his son’s death. After all, my former husband had crashed his car while doing a special favor for me. Rus had blamed me for every moment of unhappiness in his son’s life. There was no reason for his death to have been any different. We’d never talked about it, primarily because we’d never had a private conversation about anything.

  “This will be quick,” I said. “Trust me. I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here. But I need to ask you a few questions.”

  “Questions?” He tried to laugh as though it were an absurd proposition but burst into a fit of coughing instead.

  I waited for him to regain his breath.

  “Questions about my godfather,” I said. “About your brother.”

  “I just buried him. And now you’re coming around asking questions? W
ho are you to ask any questions about him? Do you hear what I’m asking you? Who are you?”

  “Did you have an appointment to meet with him on the day he died?”

  Rus didn’t answer. Instead, he locked eyes with me and ground his lips in a circle as though he was cranking up his hatred for me to a higher level.

  “My son was a good boy,” he said.

  Normally I would have let the remark slide, waited a moment, and repeated my question. After all, my one and only goal was to get the answers I needed and leave. Wasn’t it?

  “No, he was not a good boy. Your son was a brilliant man. A brilliant professor of religion at Yale University. But everything had to be his way, and when that became impossible, he became impossible. No. He most definitely was not a good boy.”

  Rus’s right palm crushed my cheek.

  I could have stopped him. I could have blocked it with my arm. But I didn’t. There’s an unwritten rule in Ukrainian society that you never, ever, under any circumstances raise your hand to an elder. Even if you want to shake hands with someone to say hello, you wait for the older person to extend his hand first.

  Had I reverted to the instincts my parents had honed, or did I actually want to get hit? Had I wanted to become a victim so I could prove to myself that I was a better person than my father-in-law? Whatever my reason for standing there and taking his blow, I couldn’t have hated myself any more at that moment. I could feel myself shaking, my thoughts running away from me, as happened in those rare instances when I lost control.

  My eyes watered and my nose stung. An acrid taste of blood and onions filled my mouth.

  I inhaled my tears. “Like son, like father,” I said.

  I curled my hands into fists. No, I wasn’t a cop, a former soldier, or a trained fighter, but I didn’t care. Nor did it matter to me that he was an ailing old man, my elder, and my former father-in-law. If he raised his hand to me again I was going to hit him. The only question was whether I would have enough self-control to stop pummeling him once I started. I honestly wasn’t sure.

  Disdain shone in his face. His hand shook. He started to raise it again.

  “Good,” I said, barely recognizing my voice, which made me sound like someone who needed an exorcism. “Do it.”

  I must have looked the part, too, because he hesitated. His eyes fell to my fists. After a few more seconds of teeth grinding, he returned his hands to his side.

  “He was a terrible husband but I stayed with him. I never threatened to leave. I never uttered the word ‘divorce.’ And I was prepared to stay with him the rest of my life no matter what it cost me. Because I’m Ukrainian Catholic. Because that’s what I said I’d do when we took our vows.”

  “He’d be alive if he hadn’t married you.”

  “Don’t be so sure. Another woman in my shoes . . . Like one of those graduate students he slept with. I don’t know what one of them would have done. He’s gone and I’m sorry. I cried at his funeral. But it’s not my fault. You want to think otherwise? That’s your business. But don’t put your own guilt on me. I’m not interested.”

  My former father-in-law had dropped his cane before hitting me. I picked it up and gave it back to him. He shuffled toward his recliner and sat down. Reached over and drained the rest of the amber liquid in his tumbler.

  “Maybe if you’d stood up to him like that, things would have been better,” he said, staring into space.

  That was a new one. Now I could add timidity to my list of spousal flaws. It was the perfect counterpart to one of my other deficiencies, namely my stubborn insistence on having a career. They pretty much covered the gamut of personalities. On the surface, this latest remark left no doubt that I was and always would be a loser in his eyes. And yet, there was something forgiving in his tone. At a minimum, he was implying his son had issues. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have suggested his wife should have stood up to him.

  I decided to seize the moment and return to my original agenda. I sat down on the couch across from him. When interviewing company executives, it’s sometimes useful to test their mettle with a shocking question, rather than slowly leading into it. The current conditions were ripe for such a strategy.

  “Do you think your brother’s death was an accident?”

  Rus’s head snapped upward. His eyes stretched wide momentarily before he could control his expression. “The police said it was an accident. Did they say they were wrong?”

  “He was afraid of stairs. He never went down to the basement at night, did he?”

  “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “If it was raining, and he knew the basement floor and the last couple of stairs would be wet, why would he have gone down there?”

  Rus slammed his fist on his armrest. “Have the police told you something? Why would they tell you and not me?”

  “You’re acting as though you wouldn’t be surprised if they had told me they’d made a mistake.”

  “Did they? Did they admit they were wrong? Do they know who killed him?”

  “Then you admit you think it wasn’t an accident, and that he was murdered.”

  “Of course he was murdered! He never went down the stairs at night. Never!”

  “Hallelujah. We agree on something.”

  “How do you know this? Did the police—”

  I stood up. “No. I haven’t talked to the police. It’s just my theory, and I’m pleased you agree. No one knew him better than you. And in answer to your next question, I have my own reasons for caring, not the least of which is that I loved my godfather, and I’m angry someone took him away before I could tell him that. Now, my last question is my first question, and it’s very important. Did you have an appointment to see him on the day he died?”

  He threw his hands up in the air. “Appointment? What appointment? He was my brother. We didn’t make appointments. If I needed to see him, I picked up the phone and called. If he needed to see me, he showed up at my doorstep. He didn’t need to call ahead, like some other people would, if they had manners.”

  “How can you possibly expect me to have manners when I’m such a hideous person to start with? So you didn’t have an appointment.”

  He answered me with such venom I was afraid he might try to bury his cane in my eye. “No. I had no appointment.”

  “That’s strange because I found the initials DP in his calendar for that day. In big letters. I don’t know of any other Ukrainians in the community with those initials, do you?”

  He sneered as he sat thinking about it. He confirmed my suspicions by saying nothing. Then his eyes brightened as though something had occurred to him. “How do you know it wasn’t written in English? How do you know the appointment wasn’t with an American?”

  “I don’t know. There was no one with the initials DP in his address book—”

  “For that matter,” Rus said, “how do you know it was a person at all?”

  “Are you saying it’s something else?”

  Rus seemed to enjoy my uncertainty. He elevated his chin and chuckled. Curled his lips into a quizzical expression and shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it was a pet. A dog. Or maybe a cat. Or maybe it was a ghost. A ghost from the past.”

  When I frowned, he laughed even harder. I stood there for a few seconds and waited for his laughter to subside. “Are you going to tell me what you mean by that?”

  “I thought you were a mathematician. I thought you were ingenious. You can’t figure this out on your own?”

  I pressed him to reveal what he thought he knew but he wouldn’t say anything more. I tried a soft tone, and then a harsher one. Nothing worked. I tried not to lead him with my suspicion about his deduction but when I failed with my general queries I gave it a try.

  “You think DP is a place, not a person?” I said.

  He smirked with the kind of intellectual arrogance befitting his
deceased son. The way he arched his neck and wrinkled his nose left no doubt that he was certain he understood the meaning of DP.

  “It’s a person and a place,” he said. “You can’t figure it out on your own, go ask your mother. Maybe she can help you.”

  I marched toward the door and opened it to leave. Then I heard Rus’s voice behind me.

  “When was the last time you went to see him? Have you even been there once during the last year?”

  I didn’t answer. Instead I continued on my way out.

  He hurled a few obscenities at my back. This was becoming a habit, I realized, people swearing at me as I left their homes. On the surface, a potential cause for concern, but wasn’t therapy supposed to be this way? Didn’t pain precede healing?

  I slammed the door shut behind me. More therapy. A wave of relief washed over me as soon as it clicked shut. I’d survived and hadn’t killed him, either. I wasn’t sure if I’d made any progress but the latter two achievements were minor causes for celebration.

  I drove eight miles to the bedroom community of Rocky Hill and checked into a Super 8 motel. It was cheap, well-lit, close to the highway, and had a good rating online.

  The next morning I ate a short stack of pancakes at the Town Line Diner for breakfast. Then I made a trip across the Connecticut River to the suburb of Hebron to visit my deceased husband’s grave. Rus was right. His son had been my husband. He may have been a terrible one but I’d promised before God to honor him for the rest of my life, and this former altar girl took her vows seriously. Afterward, I drove back to Rocky Hill to visit the person who’d killed him.

  I drove to see my mother.

  CHAPTER 14

  I DON’T HAVE many vivid memories from childhood. At least not many pleasant ones. That’s not to say I was beaten constantly or struggled to survive. No. My parents made sure there was food on the table and clothes in our closet. My brother and I never suffered for anything other than calm. We were nervous all the time. In fact, our nerves remained on alert for the first eighteen years of our lives until each of us left for college. We simply never knew when our father would explode.