The Rest of Us

by Jessica Lott

  I said, “You’ve started looking for your family? Do you think the woman you got in touch with is your cousin?”

  “I think she may be. She said she had letters from my mother to hers. I would give anything to see them! I don’t have anything written from my mother. I think she was embarrassed of her English spelling.”

  I asked him to tell me about his mother again and then leaned my head back against the seat, as if settling in. He looked over at me and smiled. “You’ve always been an encouraging listener.”

  “She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

  “Very pretty. Dark hair, a slight figure. Very affectionate. At times she could be abrupt with people, but with me she wasn’t like that. She babied me, called me her ‘little prince’—Rudolf isn’t a Ukranian name, you know. She’d heard it somewhere and liked it, thought it sounded foreign and regal. I played the part when we were out, holding her arm and opening the door and negotiating everything with the store clerks. The neighbors used to compliment her on my politeness and maturity. It pleased her.”

  “Did she like books, too? Did she read to you?”

  “Not so much. But she told stories, usually set in Ukraine. I think she may have been inventing as she went along, she paused a lot. I wish she had written them down. It would be nice to have something in her own hand.”

  I knew what he meant. I had saved all the letters and cards my father had written me, even those from elementary school, notes jotted down on a napkin wishing me luck on a test or to remind me of something to ask the teacher. It was the most exhilarating thing about school lunch period, which seemed a confusing block of unstructured time at a long table with the smell of food garbage and the complexity of playground dynamics. To open up the lunchbox and see the napkin signed off “Dad”—it was like he had appeared next to me.

  “Your mother died of lung cancer, didn’t she?” I asked.

  “That’s where they think it started. She’d had breathing problems before. She covered them up with whistling. It took me years before I figured that out. I used to sing along with her, not knowing anything was wrong. Chechna’s right, I was a soft-headed boy.” He sighed. “My mother didn’t get a doctor until she was in a tremendous amount of pain. By then it had spread everywhere.”

  We were pulling into Woodside station, the sky an uncommitted color edged by streetlights. I remembered Rhinehart telling me about his mother’s death. The day she became too sick to stand and lay in the bed, raving and running a high fever. How he stood nearby, pale and nervous, covering her with blankets, which she kept ripping off. There were neighbors there, drinking coffee in the kitchen, and he was worried they would come in and see her trying to pull off her nightgown.

  I was holding his hand. The feel of it, the wide, warm fingers, was familiar. Almost instinctively, absentmindedly, he began circling the joint of my thumb.

  “It was a hard adjustment living with Chechna. She wasn’t accustomed to children and thought I should be more independent than I was. She worked long hours, and I was alone a lot. I got myself ready for school. I was always afraid of oversleeping. On the day I had my trumpet recital, I was so excited I slept in my suit, on top of my sheets, like a vampire. So I wouldn’t have to waste any time getting ready in the morning, in case I was late.

  “On Sundays, though, we’d take the bus together out to that crowded cemetery visible from the Queens-Midtown Expressway. It’s where my mother’s buried. We’d spend the day out there, bring a picnic lunch and a blanket.” I felt him beginning to pull away from the story, describing Russian Easter, when the priest went around blessing the graves, and how he’d try and leave a piece of candy for his mother. He laughed, but it sounded hollow. “I was so sad during that time. It’s hard to believe you can be that sad and still get through it.” He squeezed my hand and then released it. “I’m sorry, Tatie. Too much past. It’s seeing Chechna again that’s brought it up. You’d think after a number of years you’d forget these things. Maybe it’s just the nature of pain to stay put, lodged somewhere deep inside.”

  I repressed the desire to put my arms around him, imagining the great, confused outpouring it would turn into, tender, consoling, inappropriate. I wanted to comfort him, to climb on top of him.

  “Let’s talk about you,” he said. “What have you been doing these past months?”

  I told him about my move to Brooklyn. The new series I was working on of people in their environments, which, after the visit to Chechna’s, felt like it was taking shape. “Of course, it’s mostly just an idea at this point. I’ll need to see if I can bring it all together.” For some reason, as comfortable as I’d felt, I hadn’t talked much about myself.

  He was listening intently. “Why don’t you come upstate with me on Tuesday? If you can get the morning off. I’m going to see a genealogist—he works out of his home. It should be a fascinating environment to photograph. I’ll ask him, but I’m sure it would be fine.”

  • • •

  At Penn Station, Rhinehart insisted on helping me carry my things onto the subway platform, since I had turned down the offer of a cab. I felt the pressing need to sum up the afternoon, everything that I’d felt pass between us, and it came out in a stuttered rush. He nodded, as if he understood. But even after I stopped talking, he was looking at me, expectantly, as if there were more that was supposed to happen. “I’ll see you on Tuesday then,” he said for the second time. The train arrived with its blast of warm air and squealing, and I hugged him spontaneously. He embraced me and held on, as if like me, he had been wanting to do that all day.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Before picking me up in Brooklyn, a significant detour, Rhinehart had stopped to get sandwiches from one deli and knishes from another—he must have left his house at 6 a.m. to make that happen. I loaded three camera bags into the car, which impressed him. I’d gone to Adorama the day before to rent two different lenses that I wanted to try out—a high-end portrait and a 45mm wide-angle. Riding up the tiny elevator with four guys, weary photo assistants returning the gear from a commercial shoot, I remembered my days assisting, before I started working for Marty, and realized that I had actually made progress in all the years I’d been living in the city.

  I was wearing a light floral skirt and tights, a little cool for the weather, but I was enjoying the sight of my knees, exposed after a dry and difficult winter. Rhinehart looked at them, too, and then pretended to be concerned with a rattling noise coming from the passenger door, making me smile into the window. It felt as if he and I weren’t merely headed out of town, but to a country I’d never been. I often got this feeling around him, an ebullient bubble in my chest that made me want to laugh or run around.

  He clicked on the radio, and we listened to faint jazz as we nosed our way out of the Bronx. His phone was ringing, and he excused himself as he answered it. I listened while pretending not to. It started with an article he was doing and turned into a discussion about a prize jury he was on. The schedule of meetings. I used to follow all these details. Although I wouldn’t have admitted it back then, his connections had probably contributed to the intensity of my desire for him, and also, in my lesser moments, made me feel twice as insecure. He was asking who else was on the panel. I recognized the name of a famous film director. I hadn’t realized Rhinehart was still leading a life with these sorts of high-profile obligations. When we were at Chechna’s, he’d seemed to have nothing but time.

  The phone rang again, and he shut it off. I smiled at him but his eyes were back on the road, all business. He was explaining that the genealogist he’d chosen had come recommended by his friend, a Boston neurologist who’d found Vichy survivor relatives in France and even a tenuous link to the Louis XVI throne.

  We were passing the heavy brown co-ops that reminded me of 1970s TV shows like Welcome Back, Kotter, when I confessed that I found genealogy boring.

  “Boring!” Rhinehart said, as if I’d proclaimed I didn’t like music.

  I flipped through the boo
k he’d brought along, as he reached over and tapped the pages, explaining the different mapping systems, and why he favored the drop-line pedigree chart, which was neatly labeled with shorthand annotations: GC for grandchild, CA for common ancestor, reminding me of the chess moves printed in the newspaper and how they seemed to suck all the life out of the game so that I no longer wanted to play. In one diagram, a stick figure labeled “Me” was at the bottom, the massive triangular weight of his entire family history sprung from the top of his head, which, I explained to Rhinehart, seemed to accurately illustrate the egotism I had always associated with this undertaking.

  “Are you doing this to find out whether this woman Lyuba really is your cousin? The one who says she has your mother’s letters?”

  “Exactly. As well as to learn more about my roots. A good genealogist can work wonders. A poet friend of mine claimed to have traced her family line back to the Jamestown settlement with a link to Thomas Jefferson. He was a libidinous man, but still.”

  Genealogical research was heavy on the procedurals. The first was to sketch a family tree of known relations. His notepad showed that he had stopped at his mother: Anna Golovnya, bn 1928, Lviv, Ukraine, one sister, Marta, with a question mark next to it, and one great-uncle.

  “You don’t know anyone else?”

  “There are those other sisters Chechna had heard of. The surname keeps changing, which makes them difficult to trace.” He took his eyes off the road to look at me. “You never had the desire to investigate your family history?”

  I thought of my father, sitting in a lawn chair at the end of the driveway, buckets of zinnias at his feet to sell to the tourists coming down Route 25. On Fridays, Hallie would help out with the weekend traffic, attempting to set up dates for us when my dad was out of earshot. I’d stand behind her, cutting bouquets in my mother’s old straw visor. “Lose the hat,” she’d whisper every time a car pulled up. At the end of the day, my dad would bring out sun tea and let Hallie count up the cash box, always giving us a bigger cut than we deserved. Even then he seemed old, sitting beneath his striped umbrella, his rough, knobby hands on his work pants. When I tried to give him back some of the money, he’d say, “No, no. With you two gals working so hard today, there’ll be no wives crying into their pillows tonight.” It was a marginally profitable business, but my father understood it as a public service.

  Entire summers stretched out this way. This seemed to be my history, just as removed from me as the dead relations Rhinehart was searching for. If I could, this would be what I’d revisit—the tough feel of the zinnia stems as I sawed through them, the dry fields behind me, the sound of the screen door slamming as my dad came out to join us.

  The genealogist worked out of a basement apartment in a middle-class development of ranch houses with scrubby lawns and yew bushes. A small, hand-lettered sign hanging off the mailbox signaled his office, and we made a sharp right onto the sloping drive.

  Rhinehart had dressed in a collared shirt, his papers in a manila folder, as if he were going to see his lawyer. He patted his breast pocket reassuringly.

  “What’s in your pocket?” I asked him as we went around to the back of the house. I had to watch my footing as the railroad ties that were supposed to pass for stairs were loose.

  He smiled. “You’ll see.”

  We opened the screen door and a little bell dinged. A cat shot past my legs into the yard.

  The “office” looked like a rec room where Starsky and Hutch would relax with women. There was a rust-colored carpet and pine-paneled walls that made it dark for midday. The starburst clock said half-past two. Books were stacked under chairs—research, I guessed, until I saw that many were crime fiction hardcovers. The genealogist, whose name was Gerald, sat at a large, messy desk. He had an outmoded computer with a boxy monitor as big as an old TV set.

  I had envisioned a thin man with a nervous tic and maybe a little pencil mustache, but Gerald was heavy-faced, with bulldoggish jowls and big plastic-frame eyeglasses, the lenses yellowed. He mistook me for Rhinehart’s wife, despite the age difference. I began setting up my tripod.

  They sat in a couple of cracked easy chairs while Rhinehart laid out the details of his search for his mother’s relatives and Gerald took notes on a legal pad. “And your father?”

  “His name was Yosyp, and his last name may have been either Romanchuk or Rudnitsky. Our last name was changed when my mother and I came over. He never emigrated with us. His mother was ill, and he stayed on with her in Ukraine. He died a couple of years after we arrived. My memory of his death is very faint, and I’m mostly dating it by a memory of my mother locking herself in the bathroom and wailing after she received the news. She couldn’t bear to talk about him after and so I never found out how he died—I assume sickness. There aren’t any letters between them, but I do have this—” He showed Gerald a photo, one I had seen before, of his father as a young man, not very tall, in uniform on a barren field, squinting into the sun. It had been on Rhinehart’s desk when I had known him.

  “Do you have any records for your father?” Gerald asked.

  “No, I know so little about him. We may have to work forward to the present on his side.”

  From behind the lens, I cut in, “How is it possible to work forward from hypothetical ancestors?”

  Rhinehart was making a motion to me to be quiet, but I ignored him. He was always overly deferential to people he hired, as if they were volunteering help.

  Gerald said, “Good question. Like all detective work, it takes a little fact, speculation, and inquiry. In theory, if you put together the genealogies of everyone in the world, they would fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Twenty-five years to a generation, roughly, and each of us had more than a million ancestors in the fifteenth century and more than a billion in the thirteenth. Although that number reflects a tremendous amount of overlapping, the same people popping up on the tree dozens of times.”

  “Just think, Tatie,” Rhinehart said. “We could even be related.”

  I frowned. Was he serious? He was giving me a polite but closed look that discouraged intimacy. I’d noticed it earlier in the car when he dove into genealogy, a one-way topic. It reminded me of how he used to withdraw, right in front of me, if I wasn’t giving him enough space. But he had invited me to come with him today. I hadn’t forced it.

  “It’s an exciting process,” Gerald continued. “I found out I was related to Don Rickles, the artist Jasper Johns, and Helen Sobel—one of the best bridge players in the world.”

  From behind the camera I spied on Rhinehart, staring at his hands, his lips. I was starting to wonder if all my desire—even the image of him sliding his hand up my thigh that I’d been half-willing to happen in the car—was the fantasy by-product of a hugely misinformed person. But I had felt the energy pass between us at Chechna’s. Or thought I had. He’d held my hand on the train.

  I was having trouble shooting here, despite the initial potential of the place. Everything I framed was too candid, as if I’d been brought in as Rhinehart’s documentarian. He was looking inquiringly at Gerald, a customer intent on a purchase. How foolish I’d been to think that I’d inspire him to start writing poetry again. He wasn’t lost. As usual, he already had a project.

  From his manila folder, Rhinehart had removed photocopies of his mother’s birth certificate, her passport and bank statements, a birthday card she had received from someone in the U.S., and a short letter that Lyuba had written and her son had translated. The originals were in a fireproof box. Rhinehart read us Lyuba’s letter out loud. She was recounting one of the times she’d seen Rhinehart, “a fat little boy with a big nose” and had taken him outside to play while the two mothers talked in the kitchen. Lyuba had been enthralled with the idea that this boy was going to America where there were trains, and car traffic, and big puffs of smoke, and tall buildings. Did he remember the chickens? the letter asked. That one had pecked him and he’d been scared? Rhinehart lifted his head to interj
ect here. He did have a dim memory of a chicken pecking him, and he’d always had a mild phobia of them. The story ended ominously. Lyuba’s mother had looked into her tea cup after the visit and started crying, saying that there was a lot of bad in the world.

  Despite myself, I was intrigued. “I don’t get the ending. What a strange thing to say about your sister leaving for a better life.”

  “She was looking into her cup, so maybe she was reading the tea leaves. That was common then—my mother did it occasionally in New York, for a neighbor or sometimes for me.” Rhinehart looked to Gerald, who nodded in confirmation. “If so, Marta may have seen my mother’s death after leaving for America. Lyuba also sent this.” He handed me a photo of a chubby little boy in short pants, standing in front of a wood-sided row house, holding a ball with both hands.

  “This is you! You’re so blond!” I’d never seen a childhood photo of him before. I had searched for one at Chechna’s but there had been none. “It looks like it was taken in Brooklyn. How did Lyuba have it?”

  “My mother must have sent it to her mother in Ukraine.”

  “I wish you had the other part of the correspondence—the letters Marta wrote to your mother. You’d know so much more.”

  “My mother wasn’t a sentimental person. She probably threw them away. I recently found this, though, between the leaves of an old book.” He carefully reached into his shirt pocket and removed a wax paper packet; inside were three round cutouts, black-and-white heads, which Gerald took over to the drafting table and looked at with an old-fashioned magnifying glass. Rhinehart said, “I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing these are likely my mother’s three sisters. She’d tell me about how they used to brush her hair and tell her stories. I believe two may have died while in their twenties, one when my mother was still a girl.” He pointed to the youngest-looking one with dark hair and a shy smile. “I think this must be Marta.”