Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  He said as calmly as he could, ‘I don’t see why you won’t think about coming over there. You’re not like Donny. He acts sometimes like going to Grand Rapids is as big a deal as flying to Paris. For Christ’s sake, you’ve travelled.’

  She was shaking her head before he had even finished speaking. ‘You know, you never see things from other people’s point of view. You haven’t changed at all in that respect. Say I did come with you – to where, by the way? From the sound of it you don’t even know where your next job will be. A London suburb where I don’t know a soul? Or a site in Germany? Or, where did you say? Dubai? I’m not xenophobic, you know, but visiting a place is a lot different from living in it. But say I did come. What if it doesn’t work? Maybe the kids turn out to be miserable. They’re not exactly fluent in Arabic, you know. Or you discover I’m a lot different from what you thought. Or I find out you’re not the man I used to know. What then? Where would I be then, Michael? No job, no husband, no home. You’d be fine – you’d just move on to the next job, and probably the next woman. But I’d have nothing. And if I stay here, even if I don’t have you, at least I’ve got something. At least I have this place.’

  Michael put a hand up to his face and sighed. ‘God, I hate Stillriver sometimes. I could cope with Ronald getting in the way; I’ve had years of practice with that one. But not this town.’

  ‘Bullshit. Now let’s go,’ she said, ‘I need to get the kids.’

  They drove back to town in silence, and when he turned the last corner for home he saw Maguire’s car further down Luke Street, moving in the opposite direction. ‘What is he doing in town?’ he asked. ‘I thought he was going straight out to Raleigh Somerset’s.’

  It was Gary who held the answer. ‘We’ve had a visitor,’ he said, coming out onto the porch to greet them.

  ‘Yeah, I saw his car going down the street as I came in.’

  ‘Oh, him,’ said Gary, flushing slightly. ‘He came by to tell me what Ethel had said. I guess I don’t have to worry any more about that bat.’

  ‘So you know about Raleigh?’

  ‘Maguire told me. I just hope they have enough to take him to trial.’

  His brother seemed strangely unexcited by the news – probably, Michael decided, because he’d already been thinking Raleigh had done it.

  ‘And guess who came by?’ Gary didn’t wait to let Michael speculate. ‘Mrs Minsky.’

  ‘What? Patsy?’

  ‘Across the street,’ said Gary, and as he pointed Michael turned and saw one of the new, foreshortened Cadillacs, a gleaming gold model, parked in front of Benny Wagner’s.

  ‘She’s staying there?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘Sh-sh-sh. She might hear you.’

  Cassie whispered, ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘An old Jewish lady. Nice though.’

  I like the ‘though’, thought Michael.

  ‘And you know what? Pop lent her some money years ago and it’s come good.’

  ‘How’s that?’ asked Michael suspiciously, since for all he knew, Mrs Minsky was running an elaborate scam, duping the unwitting heirs of a name plucked at random from the obituaries column of the Atlantic County Herald.

  ‘She gave him a small percentage in her company in return for the loan – this was way back mind you, before he even came up here. She sold the company to a competitor and the competitor’s about to go public.’

  ‘How much?’ asked Michael, uninterested in the history of the transactions.

  ‘A fortune!’ Gary seemed unable to contain himself. ‘My shares are going to be worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’

  Not a fortune, thought Michael, especially in the spendthrift hands of his younger brother, but nothing to be sneezed at either, especially by an older brother with far less money to his name than Gary seemed ever to realize. ‘What have you got to do?’ he asked, still playing older brother.

  Gary looked surprised. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I own the shares – well, I will as soon as Pop’s estate gets through probate. And you hold some shares, too. You’ve got money coming as well.’

  ‘But why weren’t there any certificates left behind by Pop?’

  Gary shook his head in amazement. ‘That’s just it – he never had them. She held them for him. He told her to look us up if something happened to him. And she has.’

  Cassie spoke up for the first time, looking reprovingly at Michael. ‘You never can trust anyone, can you? She just sounds an honest woman.’

  ‘I guess so,’ said Michael, trying to take this all in. ‘She sure must have some story to tell.’

  2

  AND IT WAS a very pretty story. She told it very well, consuming two glasses of iced tea during her recital, which took place the following afternoon, only half an hour after Jimmy Olds had phoned to say, dutifully rather than enthusiastically, that Raleigh Somerset had been taken in for an identity parade.

  Patsy had first known Henry because Henry’s mother had been her own mother’s best friend. ‘Close,’ she said, and rubbed her index finger against the side of her thumb. ‘Close as this.’

  She sat at the kitchen table, wearing a raincoat of orange cotton, belted loosely at the waist, declining Michael’s offer to hang it up. For an old woman she was tall, though it was hard to pin down just how old she was – Michael thought she could be sixty-five or eighty-five. She had a pleasant, pixie-like face with no cheekbones and light green eyes, and she was heavily made up in an old lady’s powdery way. As she spoke she seemed slowly to relax, putting her arms on the table. But she kept her coat on.

  Henry Wolf had been an only child, and had grown up alone with his mother. His father had ‘gone away’ before the Second World War. To help his mother, Henry had left school early to go to work, then enlisted in the army in his early twenties and served in Korea. Once out of the army, he had finished high school while working a night shift on an assembly line, then gone to college, courtesy of the GI Bill. His mother’s death virtually coincided with his BA, and it was then that Henry had moved to Stillriver and begun to teach school in 1957. He’d had no family left at all, and few if any close friends. ‘He was always a bit of a loner,’ declared Patsy, fingering her wedding ring as if it were an aide-memoire.

  ‘Did you ever meet my mother?’

  Patsy looked at him and smiled like an indulgent grandmother. ‘No, and what a shame. She must have been a lovely person.’

  ‘You didn’t go to their wedding?’

  She took a sip of iced tea with great care, as if it might burn her mouth, then twiddled her ring again. ‘Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend. There was an illness in my family.’

  It would have been an interesting encounter, he thought – the gentle lady of his memory, and this urban yenta, whom he found himself starting to like. ‘My brother Gary told me you said there are some shares my father held in a company of yours.’

  ‘Of course,’ Patsy said, with a smile that showed she was expecting this. ‘It’s quite simple, really. And presumably pleasing to you.’ Presumably was pronounced elaborately, almost ironically.

  It seemed Patsy’s family had begun a wartime business manufacturing small steel components for armaments. After VJ Day, they’d switched to supplying parts to automobile manufacturers. In the following years, the car business boomed, but the family business didn’t. By the time Henry Wolf left Detroit for Stillriver, the business was in decline; by the time he had married Michael’s mother, things were even worse, and Henry had made an emergency loan of five thousand dollars – out of general kindness, perhaps, or the specific recognition of how close his mother had been to Patsy’s.

  She didn’t know how Henry had come into this kind of money, Patsy quickly added, pre-empting any questions from Michael. My mother? he wondered, as Patsy moved on. In 1967 the business had changed tack again, and began producing less heavy-duty auxiliaries – they made ashtrays for cars, for example, and a better kind of rear-view mirror. A major contract with Ford Motors m
eant they were soon in a position to laugh about their former hard times (when five grand made a life or death difference) and in the following decades they had expanded, diversified, prospered, and, inevitably, been bought by another, much larger privately owned firm.

  ‘Why didn’t you just repay the loan then?’ asked Michael, sounding a little ungracious even to himself. He managed a small smile.

  ‘Well, it was business,’ said Patsy, expansively gesturing with an open hand, ‘and not business. Like I told the detective.’

  ‘What detective?’

  ‘The young fellow in charge of your father’s case. You know, Mick something. An Irish name.’

  ‘Maguire?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘That’s him. Nice young man.’

  ‘When did he come and see you?’

  She shrugged. ‘Ages ago. It must have been in July.’

  Thanks detective, thought Michael angrily, remembering Maguire’s cross words over the phone when Michael was still in Scotland: ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Patsy?’ Whatever Maguire’s agenda was, it didn’t seem to involve helping anyone else. Atkinson and I have been looking for this woman since May and Maguire didn’t even mention that he found her two months ago.

  Patsy was saying, ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t much help – I think he must have decided whoever hurt Henry had nothing to do with Detroit. Anyway, we wanted to thank your father and so we converted his loan into a small position in the business. To be frank, very small, but one that grew in time. Believe me, we asked him repeatedly if he wanted to cash in, but he always said no.’

  ‘Why?’

  She looked surprised by this. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’ As if to say, He was your father. Which of course had always been the problem.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Patsy, and she went on to explain that after the imminent flotation – which was already underwritten – the shares would be worth at least the amount quoted so ecstatically the previous afternoon by Gary. And with that Patsy clasped her hands together, lifted her head and beamed. End of story.

  Michael sat in silence, thinking hard, until he realized Patsy was about to get up and leave. He didn’t want her to go; there seemed so much unsaid still, so many questions he wanted to ask. ‘Let me take you for a drive around town,’ he said. She looked about to shake her head, so he added quickly, ‘You can’t come all this way without at least seeing the place where my father lived.’Again she hesitated. ‘Please.’

  Outside she handed him her keys. ‘Let’s go in my car.’ So he drove the Cadillac quite slowly, going down Calvin Street under the canopy of the maple-lined avenue. At the Dairy Queen corner he turned onto Main Street, and cruised like a teenager showing off his father’s car. Where two months earlier high sunlight had flooded the street like the flesh of a white peach, now the lengthened shadows of early September cast dark squares and oblongs. At the marina he circled around, then retraced their tracks through town. He pointed out the former drugstore.

  ‘I used to work there,’ he said, and when she looked curious, explained, ‘when I was a kid.’

  Back at the Dairy Queen, he turned down Beach Road and drove past the summer cottages that lined the street until he turned at the entrance to the State Park. He paid four dollars for a day pass, resisting Patsy’s offer to pay, and parked in the vast asphalt lot on the edge of the beach, which was almost full. Before he turned the engine off, he pressed a button and lowered the windows all the way down.

  ‘That’s town,’ he said lightly.

  ‘Very nice,’ she said politely, as if finishing a sandwich he had made.

  ‘What you expected?’

  She seemed determined not to look at him. After a moment she said quietly, ‘Frankly, it’s not at all what I thought it would be.’

  He felt a twinge of irritation. What did this woman want – Grosse Point transplanted to Atlantic County?

  She cleared phlegm from her throat, and said, ‘It’s much nicer than I thought it would be.’ She turned her head towards the dunes on North Beach, and to his surprise he saw there was a tear on her cheek.

  He waited, and in time she turned her head back. ‘You have no idea how many times I visualized all this. How many times I had a picture in my mind of where Henry lived. Your father. But I had it all wrong.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because it’s pretty here. It’s lovely. In my head, I thought it would be small and dry and horrible.’ She laughed wryly.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why didn’t you ever come up here? It’s not that far from Detroit.’ She seemed uncomfortable with the question, and as he looked searchingly at her he thought he saw the answer. ‘Or was it that my father didn’t want you to?’ When Patsy’s expression seemed to confirm this, he asked, ‘Why was that? What was he hiding from?’

  Patsy shrugged and wiped the tear from her cheek. Michael sighed. ‘Mrs Minsky, I am not trying to upset you. I am just trying to get to grips with my father a little better than I ever did when he was alive. They think they’ve got the guy who killed him now, and I realize nothing you and I talk about holds a candle to that, now does it? But I would like to know about my father’s past.’

  ‘It was so long ago,’ she said in a whisper.

  ‘Can’t you tell me the truth?’

  ‘I haven’t lied to you,’ she snapped.

  ‘I didn’t mean you had. But please understand, I don’t know anything about my father’s life before he came here. I don’t even have a photograph of him from then.’

  She played again with her wedding ring. It circled once, then twice around her finger as she seemed to consider what to say.

  Michael said, ‘Did you know my grandfather? He couldn’t have just disappeared.’

  Patsy spoke without hesitation. ‘Oh no, you’re mistaken. That’s exactly what happened to him. He went back to Poland before the War for a visit, wrote your grandmother that he was going to stay there for a while, then war broke out, and that’s the last she ever heard from him.’

  ‘Did my grandmother take it pretty hard?’

  ‘Not emotionally, if that’s what you mean. My mother told me it wasn’t a happy marriage. But financially – I mean, think about it, your grandmother had a little boy and she spoke bad English and it was still the Depression. I don’t know how she got by.’

  ‘Your mother must have helped,’ Michael suggested.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding, ‘I think she did. Your grandmother took in laundry for people. I know that. Henry once told me he’d rather sleep rough than ever iron another sheet. He was helping your grandmother by the time he was four years old.’

  ‘So my grandfather never came back. Did he die in the War?’

  ‘I assume so. It would have been a miracle if he’d survived.’

  Michael looked at her for a moment, trying to understand. Then he felt as if a light bulb had gone on in his head. ‘Wait a minute, was my father’s father a Jew?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Patsy simply.

  He thought of the swastika on his father’s house and Jimmy Olds’s bizarrely prescient query: Was your father some kind of Jew? ‘My father never told me that.’

  ‘Why should he? I don’t think it mattered much to him.’ Patsy looked at him and added sharply, ‘What’s the problem? You look like you swallowed a goldfish.’

  ‘So my father was a Jew?’ he said. His father had run away from that? Michael felt a terrible sense of disappointment, both because the secret seemed so mundane, and because his father’s concealment seemed so fundamentally at odds with the essential honesty Michael had always perceived in the man.

  Patsy looked at him oddly. ‘Don’t tell me you’re an anti-Semite.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said hastily. ‘But why did my father run away from it?’

  ‘I don’t think he did. Anyway, most people wouldn’t say he was a Jew, because his mother wasn’t.’ Her voice suddenly rose. ‘Listen, I don’t care what your father was. As far as I’m concerned, your father w
as wonderful. When I was a girl he was my hero. And later on he gave me five thousand dollars that saved our business when nobody else gave a damn whether we sank or swam.’ Her lips were pinched tight and there was real anger in her voice now. Michael said nothing and she seemed to calm down. ‘Your father wanted to make a new life for himself.’

  ‘You mean a new self?’

  She shrugged. ‘I suppose you could call it that. That meant Detroit was out the window. In a funny way, it meant I was too, and my mother, and anyone who knew him before. But religion wasn’t the issue. That’s not what he was ashamed of.’

  ‘So what was he ashamed of?’ Michael looked at her so intently that Patsy started to blush. He was tired of pleading and let the question sit between them, waiting for an answer. Patsy squirmed slightly, then took her handbag, a small flat lozenge of shiny black leather with a gold clasp, and opened it. Peering down, she extracted a packet of Tic-Tacs and offered Michael one. When he shook his head she popped one in her mouth, and sat sucking for a moment.

  When she spoke it was in a low, almost offhand voice, as if otherwise her emotions would betray her. ‘There was an accident.’

  ‘What kind of accident?’

  ‘A car accident.’ She started twisting her ring again. ‘Your father was driving.’

  ‘Who did he hit?’

  She looked at him. ‘He didn’t hit anybody.’

  ‘Well, who else was involved?’

  ‘Your grandmother. His mother,’ she added redundantly, looking slightly stunned by her own recollection. ‘They’d been up along the Huron shore for the weekend and were driving back late at night. Your father was tired, and he must have nodded off. They went off the road and down an embankment; I think the car rolled over. Your father didn’t have a scratch on him, but your grandmother got thrown from the car.’