by S. J. Rozan
“Can I help you? You lost or something?”
“Mr. Harding?”
“Yeah. Who’s asking?”
“I went to school with Jenna. Maybe you remember me?”
He silently regarded me, so still and so coldly that I expected him to yell, Get the hell out of here!
“Sure. I remember you now. How’ve you been? Jenna hasn’t mentioned you in years. Well, come on in.”
I walked through the open gate and up to the steps.
“I know you weren’t expecting me. I’m meeting some friends for lunch in a while,” I improvised smoothly. “I thought that since I was here…”
“You want to know how Jenna’s doing?”
“How are you and Mrs. Harding?” I stalled, minding my manners.
“Fine, fine. Grandparents now, thanks to my son living in San Diego. Wife’s out at that street fair. Come on up and have a seat.”
“Thanks, but I can’t stay long,” I said. “I did want to ask about Jenna. How’s she doing, and everything. I lost touch with her a few years ago.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute. I wondered if he was putting together Jenna leaving City Island to go to high school and meeting me. And Brody.
“Well…you know Jenna. She became Miss Independent after she finished high school. Moved into the city, got a job…”
“Did she ever get married?”
“Two years ago. A young guy she grew up with from around here. He’s a cop in the city. Ran into Jenna when he gave her a speeding ticket, and boom. Before you could say City Island they’re planning a wedding.” He cackled gleefully at his own joke. “Sorry you weren’t invited.”
He wasn’t sorry at all, and neither was I. Things change. “I hope she’s happy.”
“She sure did make a beautiful bride. Come inside. I have an album with all the pictures.”
He got up and headed into the house. I hadn’t expected Tommy Harding to make it so easy for me. The inside of the house had not changed either. The first thing I still saw was that Home Sweet Home sign on the wall. It suddenly bothered me a lot to see it. While he was trying to find the right album, I walked toward the window that faced out on the backyard.
“Here it is. Let me turn on the light. See, wasn’t she something? Her husband is a great guy. Known him all his life. They live on the other side of the avenue.”
“So, it’s true. She moved back to City Island?”
His smile was knowing and amused. “She never really left. City Island is a great place to raise a family. The fruit don’t fall all that far from the tree, you know.”
I knew. But I’d hoped that the story would have turned out differently. I bent over the album opened to Jenna’s wedding ceremony. She made a stunning bride, the smiling man standing just behind her a handsome groom. I stared at the images wondering if there’d ever been a chance that Jenna’s future husband might have been Brody? I leafed through the pages but quickly lost interest.
“Why don’t you stop over and say hello? I’m sure Jenna would like that.”
I wonder.
The phone rang and Tommy Harding excused himself to take the call.
That was the moment I needed. I hurried to the window, my heart racing, knowing that this was the moment of truth. Out the window the yard had changed, but not in the way I expected. A small deck had been built, squeezed into one corner. But I also saw that the tree stump was still there. It had not been dug up to provide a convenient hole. The only thing likely to be found beneath it were very dead roots.
“How do you like the deck?”
I grabbed at the opening. “The last time I was here was for Jenna’s birthday our senior year. It ended in a fight with one of our friends, Brody. I don’t know what happened to him after that night. Do you?”
“Well, I sure don’t. Don’t remember the guy very well. Lot of drinkin’ went on that night. Wife told me the next day I made a fool of myself, embarrassed Jen. Too much beer,” he chuckled, unrepentant.
He walked back to the door. I knew that was my invitation to leave. He’d been gracious and let me in. But I wasn’t going away till I got what I wanted. Information. The truth. The whereabouts of Brody.
Halfway across the small living room I happened to spot a bottle of Johnny Walker Red on a bookcase. It was still sealed. It could have been a different bottle than the one given to Jenna’s father that night. It could have been the same. It was something else I’d never know for sure.
I said goodbye to Mr. Harding and walked off his property. Behind me I heard him whistling, comfortable and safe in his kingdom on the bay. He’d given me Jenna’s address, but in that moment I don’t know how much I really wanted to see her again. Too much distance had formed between us, and I was really pissed off with her. She got to come home again, get married to someone else, and settle down like Brody never existed. How could she forget what they’d been like together?
Nevertheless…I crossed City Island Avenue to the quiet streets on the other side, looking for her address. When I found it and saw the life she was living I knew for sure the past was over. Dead and buried.
I was startled when a door slammed on the side of the house and a tall man walked around the car parked in the narrow driveway and prepared to get into the driver’s seat. He stood poised with one foot on the doorframe.
“Come on, Jen. Move it. We’re late.”
A second later the door opened again and the former Jenna Harding rushed out. She hadn’t changed either.
Her flaming hair was still the same length and style as in high school, as in her wedding photos. And she was still answering the call of men like her father who had never ventured very far from this place. Brody might have made a difference. But I forget. He wanted to live here too.
I was going to leave without making my presence known, but Jenna saw me and stopped dead in her tracks. Over the top of her white picket fence, and about seven years, we stared at each other. In her eyes, for a split second, I saw someone I used to know.
“Hey,” she smiled brightly. “What are you doing here?”
Over the fence we air-kissed. The man in the car gently tapped the horn.
“Wait a minute!” she yelled, irritated, turning once more to me. The smile reappeared. “Wow. It’s been so many years.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“So you heard I got married,” she shrugged.
Just then something sharp and bright sparkled at her throat. It was the pendant that Brody had given her on her birthday years before. I couldn’t believe it.
“Let me introduce you to…”
“You’re in a hurry. I just saw your father. I…stopped by to say hello.”
“You did?”
“Well, I actually came for the street fair,” I fabricated again. “He told me you live here.”
“You should have let me know you were coming. I would have invited you to visit, but we’re heading out to his folks for dinner.”
“Go ahead. I won’t hold you up,” I said, stepping back.
She suddenly reached out to me. “Wait. Did you ever hear from Brody?”
Her question was so unexpected that I looked at her hopefully. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
She silently shook her head. “I don’t know anything. Daddy kept telling me everything was going to be all right.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jen, come on, already!”
“Stop yelling. I’m coming,” she pouted.
We stared once more at each other.
“I never saw him again after that night,” she said.
“Maybe he never left the island, Jenna.”
“He did talk about signing up for military duty, and then coming back here.”
She didn’t get it.
The car sounded again.
“I really gotta go. Call me sometime, okay? We’ll get together.” She hurried to the car and got in.
> I knew I never would. I stood and watched as the car backed out of the driveway and the former Jenna Harding proceeded with her life as a newly minted matron of City Island, having given up all opportunities to become someone else.
I was overwhelmed with disappointment. I’d held out hope of solving the mystery, positive that something terrible had been done to Brody after the party and he’d never left the island. The body buried in the backyard turned out not to be true. Worse, Jenna appeared as much in the dark as I was.
So, what had happened to Brody Miller?
Had he crept away alone to lick his wounds? Been threatened to stay away from Jenna and City Island? Had he given up on his dream and moved somewhere to create a new one? Was he hiding in the military, always looking for a few good men, and the only place that would give him a home, no questions asked?
The fair was still in high gear, the beautiful weather bringing out more people than the sidewalk space could actually support. Many had given up and drifted into nearby cafés and restaurants to get out of the heat. I stopped in my tracks and was grabbed by another thought.
What if, as I’d believed for so long, Brody was still here. Just not here.
I turned around and began walking again. This time I was looking for a sign that would point the way to one of the other small islands just off the north shore of City Island.
It was called Hart Island. Well-known, but not often discussed. There was a ferry that went over, but no one ever went there just to visit.
I found Fordham Street, which cut through the middle of City Island at its widest point and extended to the ferry stand. I walked there and then stood on the dock staring out at Hart Island. I really don’t understand why I continued to believe, deep in my soul, that Brody’s final resting place was over there. In any case, this is where it ends.
With no family or real address, with only a name known in a very small circle, it would be so easy for him to disappear. With no record of his existence, there would certainly be none of his passing. Like so many others who never fit in anywhere, a final home may have been made for someone once known as Brody Miller in Potter’s Field.
A VISIT TO ST. NICK’S
BY ROBERT J. HUGHES
Fordham Road
I could have found it in my sleep, I could have made my way by touch, or even sense, through the turnstiles, to the trains, to the seat, my seat, the one at the middle, the one that let me out closest to the Fordham Road exit, the one I’d considered my stop, my station, my neighborhood, for too long. But I kept my eyes open. I wanted to see how it had changed, I guess, I wanted to see how it had not, and how twenty years had wasted away—twenty years of my life, my half-life.
It was all so new to me. Again. This life, this freedom, this air. Even the fetid smell of the sweating subway station, even the feral rats that nibbled on the black and glistening garbage bags, even the putrefying corpse of a drunk wheezing on the end of the oily platform, they all meant freedom to me. In the car, they all meant the world had gone on. The big-busted Latinas in their halters with their hoop earrings and stilettos, perched on the benches giggling, half women, all girl. The attitudinous black boys, boastful and wary, manful and scared, sitting with hooded eyes in the corners. The plaid school kids in clutches, the Laotians, the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, whose features I couldn’t figure, whose Asian geographies had populated the place when some more of the Irish had seeped out in the recent past. But not all of them had gone. Not my mom. Not my sister. Me, yes. My brother, of course, gone. This had been mine once, this neighborhood where all I saw was squalor, all I savored was stench, and all I felt was opportunity slipping away. This was now mine again, at least in time, for an hour, for two, for today. For more, though. For more. Always, for more.
My neighborhood. My home, once. My home never again. My home was far away, had been, for too long, for too needlessly long. And all because I’d been afflicted with stupidity, and never thought about repercussions. I’d never figured that a victimless crime would eventually have one. We are all victims, somehow, sometime, somewhere. No matter. But though I would never live here again, I had to come back just for now.
The train pulled out into the air and became an el, and the light made me feel, as always, as if I had just discovered grace. The sun blossomed over the rooftops. A few people on the car took out cell phones, and began to shout over the din, din themselves. At Fordham Road, I stepped down again onto the street. I cupped my hand over my brow and got my bearings. Not that I needed to. But I wanted to survey the shifting landscape. The stores were different, but the sidewalk held the same hubbub, now less Irish, now more other, less pink, more beige. The views I had thought vivid faded as my memories met new banks, aging bodegas. There was that White Castle, still going, still open twenty-four hours. Mike’s Papaya, too, dusty and yellow. There the 99-cent store. And there the Mega 99. There the pawnbroker, now with debt solutions in seven languages. And new nail and hair palaces. China Nail. Beauty J. Fordham Nails Ltd., tatty and limited indeed. And the restaurants: Centenario V, Comidas Latinas y Mariscos, Excellents II. English must have been new for them once, but twice? I’d taught ESL upstate, part of my good works there, my rehabilitation. If good had meant anything. It got me here, then, partly, it helped my release. But here, I still didn’t know. I gazed again. There, on the corner, the little bakery, and across from Devoe Park a white van, El Rancho, selling frituras and chimichurri. There, tucked away just off Father Zeiser Place, Patsy’s Bar, the old reliable, and, oh, up ahead, my undoing.
Across University Avenue at the Fordham Road intersection stood those stately gray twin bell towers. Positioned between them above a stained-glass window, a cross, small and unnecessary, punctuated the hot blue sky, as if anyone needed reminding that this was a church. St. Nicholas of Tolentine. Unwelcoming below were the same wooden doors still blistering paint a shade of iron-rich dried blood. My church. My parish. My grammar school. My baptism, my communion, my confirmation. My bête noir. My childhood in a granite sanctuary. Here was my soul anointed in the baptismal, my brow moistened by the holy-water font, my fingers sulfured by matches snuffed at the foot of the saint, my conscience soothed by muttered pleadings at the altar rail, cosseted by lies in the confessional. Shadowed by scuffling in the sanctuary. Haunted by the shouting. Sickened by the blood. Hounded in the darkness. I shouldn’t be here.
I noticed on the sign outside that mass was beginning in ten minutes. I looked over to my right at Devoe Park, where a listless player was shooting hoops, his ball hitting the court in lazy thuds. I ascended the seven heavy marble steps. A Latino man was more sure than I and, coming up behind me quickly, held open the creaking door. I nodded gracias and followed him in, staying a moment in the dank narthex. The stone fonts were empty. Had they been filled, would I have dipped my finger in and touched the water to my blasphemous temple? Attempted my own atavistic ritual of ungranted forgiveness? I would have. I would have relished the blessed water fizzling to steam on my iniquitous fingers as I dared dishonor God. But I was spared that visible damnation for now. I ignored the dusty fonts and went in, standing at the back under the choir loft, letting my eyes adjust.
It was sticky here in the muffled light. A fan at the back whirred, faint against the humid afternoon. Two stained-glass windows on the right side near the choir loft were cracked open at the bottom, under a scene of Jesus speaking to the elders. His early years. When he was filled with promise. Millennia until they’d discovered speed and crack and all of that delightful nastiness.
About twenty-five people were here in church, dropped like random seeds along the hard furrows of the pews. Most of them were at the front, sprouting near the apse. A few knelt to the right side, under the white figure of St. Nicholas floating on a high shelf by the transverse door, a rare papal touch of statue in a church austere enough to have been Episcopalian. But no, here was more sign of a particular denominational kitsch, a chapel at the left transverse, a shrine to the Virgin, Nuestra Señora
de Providencia, for the defiantly devout and luckless. I walked that way, barely genuflecting in front of the altar, just another worshiper. The church was empty on the far side but for one man wearing in this heat a camouflage jacket, perhaps from the Army-Navy store on Davis around the corner. Perhaps a veteran. Perhaps a murderer. Perhaps a brother in carnage. And still touched by his religion. Or his disgrace. Or his memories. He could have been Puerto Rican. He could have been Irish. His white hair glowed as if dappled by some interior star, and he held his head down, in sleepy prayer, a cane propped against the pew before him. I walked past him into that side chapel. The front of the church had begun to rustle with the movement of the priest; he checked the sound system, a few taps on a mike, followed by a rumple of fabric as his surplice sleeve scraped across it. Testing.
The chapel was dark too, with but a few candles glowing electric in their enclosed ruby glass biers. I put in a quarter, and another light sprang to feeble life. Before, in my distant youth, this place had been a vague chapel for the Virgin of the Whatever. She wasn’t particularly providential for me, whoever she’d been. I couldn’t recall her mission, or mine, for that matter—beyond offering her candles, real ones then with flickering flames unlike the repellant little flashlights now. The battered kneeler, imprinted with the depression of countless others, was still there, askew, pushed away from the array of fake votives; someone had risen awkwardly and shifted it. Perhaps the camouflaged veteran Garcia-Gerrigan out there finding way to his unsteady feet and lamentable cane. On the wall was a plaque in Spanish and several overemotional icons of the Virgin’s face. A painted statue of that fortunate Mary guarded one corner, and a small onyx one kept sentry at another. Here was a shrine of true belief, simpleminded, strong, primal.
I left and moved softly back to the rear, to another corner, where a statue of St. Nicholas, this one brown instead of white, more earthbound, rested at the wall. This was one I had hoped to find; I hadn’t seen it at first, its own beige camouflage hiding it from my greedy eyes. Its feet were polished from countless eager peasant fingers. I ran my hand along its pedestal myself, feeling as obvious as if I were a surplice brushing an open mike. I looked around me, a furtive supplicant. I felt around the back of St. Nicholas, searching for an indentation underneath. I stepped back, to bow in specious prayer, to scrape my mind for where it might have been placed. It had to be there. They never moved these plinths, they were bolted to the floor and their false idols to them, secured against the marauding horde, the petty us, the larcenous me. I felt again, pious and plaintive, my fingers touching the worn marble feet. There. Yes. A nib of something metal by the back right side, wedged tightly in. Just as Jimmy had said there’d be. I would return.
