by Neal Pollack
"No, I'm not. My parents would send me to a convent if they heard I was meeting with a mystic or a seer or whatever it is he calls himself."
Mary looked on with great interest at the cards that Billik was flipping around carelessly, and she eagerly held out her hand, which Billik pretended to study with poorly concealed boredom. He accepted the nickel she offered him like it was soiled linen.
I received some good news a few weeks later. My family was able to put some money together and I was going to go up to Milwaukee to attend Alverno, a women's college. Fall of '06, I packed my things, said goodbye to my family, and took the train to Wisconsin to begin classes. I wrote home frequently, and tried Mary several times, telling her about school and my classmates and the city, in hopes of getting her to speak with me again, but she gave me no answer.
I came home for Christmas, excited to see my family.All the aunts and uncles and cousins met at our house, and Ginny and I took a walk around the neighborhood to see if anyone else was out celebrating. All the houses looked lit up and warm, but as we came to the Vzral house, it was dark, with a wretched little black wreath on the door.
"What happened?" I asked.
"That poor family," whispered Ginny, who was becoming like her mother, more pious and maternal, as she grew older. "Tillie died the day before you came home," she said, referring to one of the younger sisters.
"Oh! That's so sad. First their father, then Tillie …"
"Actually," said Ginny, "Susie passed away right after you left for Milwaukee. They've lost two sisters."
"Why didn't you tell me?" I said.
"I didn't find out about it until much later," she said. "You know that family better than I do. I forgot, I suppose."
"What happened?"
"They say stomach trouble. For all of them. I hope it's not contagious."
We came home just as Mary had stopped by to say hello to my parents. She looked gaunt, much older than when I had last seen her. She seemed happy, though, and was cordial to me.
"How is your father, Mary?"
"Oh, he's fine, on death's door as he always is. But I've been working, and it's good to get out of the house."
"That's good news," I said. "Where are you working?"
"Some housekeeping here and there," she said lightly, trailing off. "Some bookkeeping too."
"Where?"
"Neighbors," she said, and abruptly changed the subject.
I hadn't seen Edward, my neighborhood boy, for a while and it was good to spend time with him again, away from my family and my classmates. I enjoyed school but being around so many other girls was tiring. The night before I left to go back, he asked if I would marry him. I said I'd think about it but of course I knew that I would.
Back in Milwaukee, Mary deigned to write to me again. I found out that she was working for Billik. She really, truly seemed happy, though, and told me stories of their fine house, his dusty cases of fortune-telling equipment that she wasn't allowed to touch, and the large sums of money that she kept track of, but knew nothing about.
"Is he paying you well, at least?" I wrote back.
"My payment comes in watching him work," she wrote me. "And his knowledge. He says that he's starting to see some good luck for me in the future. And love! I hope it's true."
"What's his wife like?" I responded, and she ignored this question in her next letter. She did congratulate me when I told her I was going to marry Edward.
I came back to Chicago for good that summer in 1907. We were hoping to marry in the winter, so we went to the parish to discuss the date with the Father and were surprised to see a coffin inside.
"Rose Vzral," he said, sighing and looking sad. "Only fourteen years old. If I believed in such things, I would think that family had a curse on it." I wanted to ask him if he believed in curses later when Rose's sister Ella died that fall. Stomach problems as well.
A month before the wedding, I had lunch with Ginny and Mary. A few years previous I would have expected Mary to be drawn and bitter at any wedding news, spinster-to-be that she was, but she actually seemed haughty, although perhaps she kept tossing her head to show off the new earrings she was wearing.
"Those are beautiful, Mary," Ginny obliged.
"Aren't they?" she breathed. "They were a gift from my employer."
"Billik?" I said. "He makes that much money off fortune-telling?"
"The man has a gift," she said. "He helps people, and they reward him in return."
"Really? How so?"
"You remember how Martin Vzral was going to suffer from a competitor …"
"Yes, but he's dead now."
"That's beside the point. That family has made its own problems. The mother is a fool. She's holding onto that house of theirs. She would be better off to sell it to Herman. She can't rattle around in there like the crazy old bat she is. It's too bad, what happened to her family, but for goodness' sake."
"You're trying to drive the Vzrals out of their home?" said Ginny. "What does Billik have to do with it?"
"I just keep records of finances," Mary said. "The Vzrals owe everything they have to Herman. If it wasn't for him, they'd all be dead, or worse."
"Or worse, such as what?"
Mary just raised her eyebrows mysteriously and said she had to go. "I'm keeping house for him while he travels."
Although it rarely starts snowing in earnest until January or February here, God granted us a beautiful coating of snow for the wedding. The ceremony was lovely and we were giddy with the prospect of the future. Before we returned to my house for dinner and gifts and music, we had to pay Father Vincent his honorarium. As we were meeting with him and about to invite him over to the house, one of the Sisters rushed in and whispered in his ear. He frowned.
"What is it, Father?" asked Edward.
He crossed himself. "Poor Mrs. Vzral," he said.
Though I said a small prayer for her and the family, I soon forgot about it, until Mary, who seemed rather stoic throughout the wedding and the party, excused herself early, saying that she had to meet with her employer, who had come back to town.
"Mary, it's my wedding day," I said.
"I don't want to upset him," she said unapologetically, and slid out.
A few weeks later, Edward and I moved to St. Louis so he could set up his law firm with his friends from school. I tried staying at home for some time but got bored quickly, so Edward let me come work for the firm as a typewriter.
I received some good news from Ginny. She'd been rescued from contemplation of the convent when her shy admirer George from down the block finally proposed to her.
"No more excitement for me," she joked in her letter. "Except right now. The whole neighborhood is buzzing. Everyone is suspicious of Mary's friend."
"I'm not surprised that everyone is suspicious of him," I wrote back. "He's a very strange person. What does everyone suspect him of?"
I received a telegram from Ginny before I even sent my letter.
"VZRAL'S MURDERED," was all it said.
She filled me in via letters. Based on some neighborhood suspicion, Mrs. Vzral had been dug up and poison was found in her stomach, and how we did not guess that to begin with, I'm ashamed to even speculate. Billik was picked up a few days later.
Ginny sent me clippings from the newspapers. The city seemed more enthralled than horrified. Reporters kept comparing Billik to a previous murderer, Holmes, who was executed while we were still children.
I felt relieved that the strange man was behind bars, but I felt sorry for my cousin, that this man who she so admired, who didn't even seem to reciprocate, was now so disgraced.
"It's not true," she wrote to me.
I stopped paying attention to neighborhood gossip for a while after that, until in June '08, when I received a telegram from my mother saying that my uncle, Mary's father, had finally passed away. It was difficult to feel sorrowful, as nobody had ever really known him other than as an invalid that Mary was forced to tend to her whole
life. I wondered if she felt relief or complete despondency.
I came home for the funeral. Ginny was starting to get big with her first baby and it was good to see her. Mary seemed rather unemotional at the funeral. Afterwards, I embraced her and said, "What are you going to do now?"
"I'm free," she whispered.
I smiled. "So what are you going to do with your newfound freedom? Go to school? Move? Get married?"
"I'm selling the house," she said, "But I'm moving to a smaller apartment in the city."
"I don't blame you," I said. "You've been in that house all your life. It's a shame that your father didn't leave you more to get a little house for yourself."
"No," she said. "I did get the money. Herman told me to do it. He told me that that house is cursed, and that I should move."
"Isn't he in jail?"
"We write letters," she said. "It's time, Helen. It's a terrible thing that he's in prison but now that my father's dead, he's told me that his spirit isn't in the way anymore. He can see my future!"
I couldn't do anything.
I went back to St. Louis and did not return to Chicago for almost a year, as Edward and I found out that I was expecting my first. I hadn't heard from Mary since I wrote to tell her. She wrote me, requesting a donation for a fund she was organizing to release Billik from prison. I wrote a rather forceful decline.
She did respond though when I sent her the announcement of our son early in 1909. She congratulated us, sent a rattle, and slipped it into her letter that Billik was granted life in prison, not the death penalty. I sent her a thank you note but didn't comment on the latter. I was sick of hearing about him. After that, our letters were terse, when they existed at all.
In June of the new decade, I got the bad news that my mother was quite ill, so we took the children (now two of them) and went back down to Chicago to see her one last time. I managed to speak with her right before she slipped away. We stayed for the funeral.
It was good to be with Ginny, and I saw Mary for the first time in a couple of years. She looked even older and her clothes seemed threadbare, which was surprising. I'd heard that the sum her father had left behind for her was unexpectedly generous, and she was never a spendthrift. We embraced but did not speak beyond the formalities. She excused herself after the services.
"You're not coming back to our house?" I asked.
"No," she said quietly, but with an excited look in her eyes. "Her— … Billik? You remember him? He's been released from prison."
"Good news," I said.
"I promised him I'd go meet him. I'm so sorry to leave," she said, not seeming sorry at all.
I spent the rest of the day in a fury. Getting back home to St. Louis, I wrote to Ginny, "I've had it with Mary. She couldn't even be there as family after Mother died." I spent the next several days going about my business, but I could not stop thinking about how angry I was with my cousin, how she'd grown too selfish and foolish for even her own family.
"I'm sure she's sorry," Ginny wrote back. "I'll tell her you say hello and maybe she'll say something nice in return. I'm off to go visit her now, actually. It'll be the first time I see this apartment of hers. She says that she's not feeling well."
I looked up from my letter and stared at the wall for a few moments and then picked up the pen. I changed my mind, put it down, and rushed to the telephone, although I had a feeling I knew what I'd hear when I reached Ginny.
"Her stomach's been bothering her," Ginny said. "Possibly a cold or something she ate."
MAXIMILLIAN
BY ALEXAI GALAVIZ-BUDZISZEWSKI
18th & Allport
I have three memories of my cousin Maximillian. Two of them involve his fists.
My cousin was a short man. But like everyone else on the Mexican side of my family, he was built like a brick two-flat, heavy and hard, a cannonball, the way my grandmother on my mother's side was a cannonball, the way my uncle Blas was a cannonball. They were all skull, impossible to hug, but warm blooded, steaming, like just standing next to them could get you through a winter's day. My mother was like this. I miss her terribly.
But Max, my cousin, Maximillian, was young, sixteen or so when my memories of him first begin. His sister Irene celebrated her cotillion in the basement of St. Procopius Church on 18th Street and Allport. I don't know much about the planning. I was eight years old. But I know my sister Juana stood up in it. She was a Dama, and my cousin on my father's side, Little David, was her Chambalan. They went off doing their own thing, dancing, waltzing, the way they'd been practicing for weeks, my sister constantly fitting and refitting her dress, me calling her Miss Piggy because she was chubby and more queda than the rest of us darkies.
That night I sat with my mother and ate cake and people watched. My father, done with his shift at the basement door, hunched at a side table sharing a bottle of Presidente with his friend Moe. My cousin Chefa danced with my uncle Bernardo and my aunt Lola danced with her only son, my cousin, Maximillian. It was all beautiful, all quite nice. Then Stoney showed up.
I'm not sure my uncle Blas would've allowed any boyfriend of Irene's to attend the cotillion, but Stoney didn't have a chance. He had issues, most noticeably the tattoo on his neck that said Almighty Ambrose.
No one had been at the door at that moment. So Stoney and his four partners simply burst into the basement. They were obviously high. My father and Moe walked up to them. There was wrestling, chair throwing, screaming, and two gunshots, pops that sang off the basement's polished cement floor, the massive concrete support columns. Then the police came and made arrests—three paddy wagons worth. But the moment I remember most, right before my mother pulled me under the table, was catching sight of my cousin Max, on his knees, his fist jackhammering straight down into Stoney's limp head over and over. I couldn't see Maximillian's face; his head was bowed. But I could see his thick shoulders, his biceps bulging within his dress shirt. Behind him my aunt Lola was pulling at my cousin Irene, my uncle Bernardo was reaching for Max, and my father had one of the gangbangers up by his collar. All of them were staring down at Max. All of them had looks of horror.
Maximillian ruptured something. His arm and fist were in a cast for months. I don't know what got worked out, but Irene kept seeing Stoney. Eventually they married.
Stoney never had a cross word for Max, not that I ever heard.
Memory number two happens a few years later, when I was eleven. By that time Maximillian had turned eighteen, graduated from Juarez High School, and joined the army. We threw a going-away party for him in the yard behind his father's house.
I'd lived in this house for nearly a whole year, holidays included, back when my parents were split up over my father's cheating. They gave me my own bed, the bunk over Maximillian's. Like other houses were haunted, my uncle Blas's house was marooned. The Kennedy Expressway rumbled within yards of the back door. Out the front door the South Branch of the Chicago River turned. There were neighbors to either side, but still my uncle's house was lost. Living there made life desperate.
The party happened a year or two after I had moved back in with my parents, and though I'd seen Maximillian nearly every weekend since I'd left his house, at the party he seemed aged. He'd grown a thin mustache. He had on shorts and a Diego T. His muscles looked thicker than usual. His skin was dark, worn even.
Maximillian was never a big talker. But as the afternoon progressed and he continued to draw from the keg, he spoke more freely, eventually calling out my name like I was a friend of his from the street. "Jes-se!" he would say. "I love you, bro." And then he'd start laughing.
Late into the party, the adults were drunk and I remember Maximillian putting his head under the tapper and chugging beer right from the keg. He smiled and laughed as he gulped. He came up choking, spitting suds, and stumbled around the gravel yard trying to catch his footing, like he was momentarily blind, lost in his spinning head. We were laughing. My mother had her arm around my shoulder. My father had his arm around my
uncle. When Maximillian fell on his ass we doubled over in laughter. We were roaring. And at that moment we seemed really together, my father, my mother, my aunt and uncle, my cousins, Irene and Chefa, Stoney, my sister, even my cousin's dog, Princess. For a moment we were a real family. Behind us traffic droned on the Kennedy Expressway.
Just out the front door, the South Branch flowed.
My last memory of Maximillian happens a couple of years later. I was thirteen. Maximillian was in his twenties. He'd come home on leave from Germany because his mother, my aunt Lola, had died.
As sick as my aunt Lola had been, her death was mostly unexpected. In just a few weeks her cancer had gone from manageable to terminal. The last time I saw her was two days before she died. She was back in St. Luke's Hospital and when I said hi to her she could not respond but to look in my eyes. Her look scared me. It was the kind of look that needed a voice to explain itself.
My aunt Lola was a kind woman. The months I lived with her she always had a steaming bowl of frijoles waiting for me when I came home from school, two or three thick tortillas waiting to be dipped and sucked like summertime paletas. My aunt's most remarkable feature was her bridge, which she'd pull from her mouth and set on the armrest of her La-Z-Boy as she sat and watched TV. When she dozed off I'd try to put the bridge in my own mouth. As my months of living there wore on I used to steal her bridge and move it to some other location, in her bedroom or on the kitchen table, then wait for her to wake and be forced to speak, her pink gums showing through her fingers as she asked if anyone knew where her bridge was.
