Senida pointed to the basement door. “A . . . what do you call it . . . pull-out? Down there.”
Ellen’s gaze wandered to the mullioned window over the sink for a moment, and then, before Senida could stop her, she was on her way down the stairs. “No need for you to give up your bed,” she shouted up from below. “This will be fine for me, if you’ve got some clean sheets.”
While Senida unfolded and made up the sofa bed, Ellen tried everything she could think of to get that old piano, apparently a fond memory from her childhood, going again. But then, as if she’d suddenly recalled her sister’s sharp reprimand, she headed upstairs and settled herself at the desk in the living room, where the chits she needed to check Antonelli’s accounting were kept.
Ellen’s gushing enthusiasm was all gone, Senida saw, when she peeked into the living room a few minutes later. And her intentness had raised an alarm in Maddie. Senida could see wounded pride in the old woman’s eyes.
Finally, Maddie’s words came, hard fought, the muscles in her face almost too weak to form them.
“I shhhould be doing that.”
She made an ineffective attempt to point at Ellen, her arm bobbing like a compass needle.
Senida could feel Maddie’s hurt radiating across the room. Unable to bear it, she came in and hugged Maddie, and suggested, in her jolliest voice, that they listen to show tunes on the cabinet stereo.
She longed to point out that Ellen could have waited until Maddie went to bed, and to let her know, too, that she was working unpaid overtime. It was Sunday, when Antonelli normally sent a volunteer over from the church so that she could relax and telephone her mother back home.
Once Maddie was absorbed in the music, Senida did slip back to her room to make her call. But when she heard the stack of records finish and Ellen’s voice, full of instructiveness, replace the music, she quickly told her mother she’d call her back.
From the entrance to the living room, Senida observed Maddie’s fingers tapping on the arms of her chair. Ellen eyed the tapping fingers, as if she thought her great-aunt might be hearing phantom music. The rasp of exasperation entered her voice as she said: “I think there will be enough money for you and Senida to stay on here if we can refinance the house, Aunt Maddie.”
“I dh-hon’t want to sssell . . . .”
“This is so you can keep the house!”
Maddie shrugged, then nodded at Ellen and looked up at Senida. “Ssooo beautiful,” she said.
Ellen scowled as she turned toward Senida. “I don’t know what she finds so beautiful. Her eyes must be going, if it’s me. My sister’s the beautiful one. Aunt Maddie always said so.”
Senida’s cheeks went hot for Maddie. But this was an interesting piece of information: a grudge as ancient as Cain’s. A resentment of that sister, Jean, that had never been overcome, and that could perhaps work to Senida’s advantage.
As Ellen stood up and closed the desk’s writing flap, a photograph slipped through the space where the desk hinged, and floated to the floor.
There was Maddie in a cloche hat, like a movie star from the twenties. “That’s me,” she said, putting her hand out for the photo. “I dhon’t know whh-when . . .”
Brightening, Ellen reached into her handbag and fished for something. Her hand reappeared with a disposable camera, still in its cardboard, probably bought at the airport.
“Time for a new picture,” she said.
Senida hurried to escape, but her foot caught on Maddie’s box of pictures, which she’d carelessly left on the floor. Suddenly, she knew how to lead Ellen back down— what was the expression?— the lane of memories. She picked up the box, and when Ellen had finished taking Maddie’s picture, she handed it to her.
Ellen was reluctant at first. She drew a footstool up beside Maddie’s chair and began to flip distractedly through the top dozen photos, failing to identify a single face. Senida felt her lips tip into the ghost of a superior smile as she stepped forward to help.
“How do you know all these names?” Ellen said.
“Maddie tells me.” She placed a hand gently on one of the knobby shoulders. Maddie still had her lucid times, even if clouds were beginning to pass across the bright spaces.
“And you memorized them? Like baseball cards!” Ellen laughed.
Senida struggled to bite back a sharp retort. She was a poet, and someday, maybe the whole world would know it. In the evenings, when Maddie nodded off to sleep, she sometimes wrote poems about these men and women in the yellowing pictures. She’d composed all sorts of poetry since childhood, keeping her Krajina epics— the last one a story of the war— in notebooks that had probably been destroyed by her family after she left for America. She’d sung them to groups of students back in that time before her life changed. But to Ellen, she was nothing more than the woman who helped her aunt to the toilet, washed her soiled clothes, and made sure she ate the little bits of food her stomach would tolerate.
A picture that Ellen recognized finally came to the top of the stack, and she beat both Senida and Maddie to it, snapping out the name.
“I had ssseven brothers and sssisters,” Senida heard Maddie say, once she had backed away.
“I know that, Aunt Maddie. My grandmother was one of your sisters. Look, here’s Mark’s son.” She shuffled through the pictures with purpose now, so absorbed, after a while, that she didn’t notice Senida studying her from the doorway.
“I went to sleep last night smelling lily of the valley on the sheets,” Ellen said next morning, as she stretched her back and lit the stove for coffee. “That brought me back. I’d forgotten how Aunt Maddie always used to smell of it.”
She looked younger and more at ease in the jeans and T-shirt she’d put on today, Senida thought. Forty-something. Just about her own age. The ring finger bare. Just like her own.
Senida knew all about the kind of memory a long-forgotten smell can trigger. Who would know that better than she, who had left so much behind in a country torn by war? Her memories now were like the fading scent that clings to a completely empty bottle of perfume.
After breakfast, there was another phone call, and she heard Ellen say: “Oh, Jean, I should have come sooner. One of us should have. Do you remember those presents Maddie used to bring us, all wrapped up with beautiful bows? It’s like we owe her, and now she floats in and out, I can’t be sure we’re communicating.”
She had no opportunity to indulge her regrets, however. For at that moment, Antonelli appeared at the door. Antonelli was wearing a blue T-shirt over his soft paunch this morning. Gone was the pinstripe, in which he’d greeted their guest then quickly excused himself, the day before.
While Maddie sat in front of a morning show, and Antonelli and Maddie’s niece settled down to their business, Senida put on the wide-brimmed sun hat she wore to work in the garden, and positioned herself just beneath the open window where they sat.
As always, when she worked outside, greetings were directed her way, partly because she herself was liked, partly because Maddie, at the age of a hundred and one, was of interest to everyone.
When Maddie was a girl, there were still a lot of Irish families in the area near Astoria Park. But most of them were at least two generations gone now, to suburbs on Long Island or elsewhere. Senida knew this from Antonelli, who’d lived here since childhood himself, his grandparents part of a wave of Italian immigrants who came in the twenties, a tidal wave of Greeks close behind.
Maddie occupied the bottom-most layer of the rock here, as Senida saw it— each group laying down its own distinct sediment, living side by side with, but never really blending into, the rest. She, on the other hand, was at the very top, where the dust of a foreign culture had yet to be pressed into those hyphenated-Americans she read about. If it weren’t for the war, no one in this place would even have heard of places like Bosnia. But here she was, along with so many others. Victims. Escapees.
She bent over for a moment and breathed deeply. She wouldn’t let hersel
f go to that dark place, not this morning. She needed to hear what Ellen and Antonelli were saying.
She missed Ellen’s question, when a delivery truck rumbled by, but she heard Antonelli answer, “Yes, she knows a lot of the neighbors. She helps them can tomatoes, make wine. She’s made herself liked.”
“I’m sure she’s very nice,” Ellen said. “I mean, she seems nice. But there’s something . . . how much do you know about her?” Senida could imagine Antonelli’s wispy brows rising beneath hair gone to gray. “I get the feeling that she’s, well, trying too hard. What about her references? I assume she had some.”
Antonelli sighed as if he had known this moment would come. “No references. One of our parishioners met her at a hostel. You have to understand. Your aunt’s money isn’t going to last long . . .” His voice went too low to hear, then rose again. “I had to make a decision and I thought we should try to conserve her money, hire someone who wouldn’t expect much . . .”
Senida let the words float through her, as if she were nothing but air. Of course she wouldn’t expect much. She wasn’t able to expect much after what had happened. Her own brother was unwilling to put a roof over her head afterwards, saying she was nothing but an enemy soldier’s leavings.
“I know,” Antonelli continued. “We should have checked her out. We should be making Social Security payments. But these women at the hostel are mostly running from abuse. References, work records, those things create a risk for them of being found. But of course, this is your decision now.”
There was silence for a beat. Then, just at the wrong moment, a woman who was walking her dog shouted out a hearty hello. By the time she was gone, Senida had missed whatever Ellen said upon discovering that Senida was working off the books.
Senida slipped back inside, but stayed out of their way while the subject was business. Finally, the conversation segued into observations on Astoria and how it had changed, the perfect chance to inject some casual questions. But before she could decide whether to throw her line in, Antonelli fished with a question of his own. “You must have a lot waiting for you back in Dallas,” he said. “I was dazzled by all the letters that come after your name.”
“It’s always busy, that’s for sure,” Ellen said. But instead of taking the bait, she sent a question Senida’s direction.
“You have family here?” she asked.
“No, I came by myself. From Liskovac. A very insignificant place. You would not know it.” She was trying to think of how to evade the inevitable question of why she’d come— and how— when a sound from Maddie saved her. Senida’d given her a yardstick with which to poke the ancient television on and off, and now she tapped it against the leg of the nearby end table. She’d become bored with television and wanted to get up.
Antonelli took it as his signal to leave.
Senida stepped out to the curb with him to seek some reassurance. But there was nothing reassuring in what she saw when she glanced back through the screen door. Their visitor was using her absence to dart across the hall to her aunt’s bedroom. She tried to hurry Antonelli away, but he was suddenly garrulous— his words tumbling forth, Senida thought, out of sheer relief at being finished dealing with Ellen.
When she finally made it back inside, Maddie’s niece was in the dining room, the silver drawer open. She tried to cover her intentions by leaning against the drawer and gathering her papers from the table, but Senida was no fool. That visit to the bedroom had probably been to check Maddie’s jewelry boxes.
In her race to inventory the house, Ellen had left Maddie dangerously alone, pushing weakly up from her chair. Half-standing, she had managed to pick up her yardstick, and was waving it at Ellen.
As soon as Senida saw it all, she flew to Maddie’s side. Lips pressed into a hard line, she eased the old woman back into her chair and cajoled her until she agreed to remain seated.
No words were needed. With Ellen’s lapse, Senida had gained the upper hand. She might be only the hired help, but she would not have left Maddie at risk of falling and breaking a limb.
Ellen blushed and retreated to the basement to retrieve her things.
Senida was adjusting an enormous sun hat with its corsage of silk flowers on Maddie’s head, when Ellen came back into the room.
The look on her face said she regretted suspecting Senida of stealing from her aunt, especially when Maddie began to giggle like a girl playing dress-up. But Ellen would need to convince that sister of hers. Maybe that was why she did it, Senida thought. Senida didn’t see it coming, because she had moved to crouch behind Maddie.
Suddenly Ellen’s throwaway camera clicked and flashed, and their guest said, “Oh, that will make a beautiful shot.”
Senida’s hand went to her mouth.
“What is it?” Ellen said. But then she must have remembered what Antonelli had told her about hostel women being on the run.
Senida didn’t have a man after her— unless you could count a man’s ghost— but she had good reasons for not wanting Ellen to have that picture.
Maddie beamed at them both.
Ellen didn’t move, except to let her eyes scan the room. On the wall behind Maddie was a framed letter, written to Maddie’s grandfather in America during the potato famine in Ireland. To Maddie, Senida knew, it represented what family was all about: recognizing one’s own; knowing the difference between one’s own and others.
But it wouldn’t end well for Maddie, if left to the care of her own family.
Maddie’s niece came out of her reverie— resolved, apparently, to interfere no further. She leaned over and kissed Maddie goodbye. As she did so, a tear slid down her cheek.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “This picture isn’t going anywhere but into an old box of snapshots just like Maddie’s. Someday, when I’m old like Maddie, maybe I’ll bring it out and look at it. But otherwise, no one will see it.”
Ellen came over and put an arm around Senida’s resisting shoulder, and then she was gone.
ONLY the other sister, Jean, came at the end.
Ellen must have been too busy with her own affairs to attend the funeral. Or, perhaps it was simply that Jean wanted to marshal the sorting out of Maddie’s belongings alone. She made piles to be shipped to herself back home, others for Goodwill.
After she’d packed her own meager possessions, Senida attempted to help Jean, rescuing Maddie’s dirty, but cherished, ormolu vase from the pile for Goodwill and putting it with the things Jean should keep.
“Put it back,” Jean directed her husband. Adding, when she thought Senida was out of earshot, “It’s not her place to tell us what to do with Maddie’s things!”
The words stung.
When Senida reached Maddie’s door, prepared to pass through it for the last time, her hand went to the hook that held her giant sun hat. There the diamonds were, in the center of the hat’s corsage. But you had to look to see them, unless the light caught them just so. It was Maddie herself who’d suggested pinning them to the hat, when they were looking for ways to attach the silk flowers to it in decoration.
“This time, take a little something for yourself at the end,” the other women at the hostel had urged Senida.
Senida had huffed her rejection of any such suggestion. Who did they think she was?
It wasn’t until Maddie insisted that her most valuable jewels be pinned to the hat, that Senida started to imagine she would one day walk out with them— for it seemed to her, then, that Maddie meant them as a sort of legacy for her. After all, she was the one truly bereaved by Maddie’s death.
But Ellen and her camera had spoiled that fantasy. The camera’s flash might have sparked the diamonds to life, lit them up in the photo, so that Ellen might one day notice.
She was about to unpin the brooch from the hat and hand it to Jean, when inspiration struck.
She raised her voice. “This old hat?” she said, catching the eyes of Jean and her husband. “Maddie was very fond of it. I’m sure she would like you to ke
ep it.”
Then, Senida stepped out into the bright October day, leaving the hat on its hook by the door.
She had given Jean a chance. If Jean tossed the jewels out, unaware they were there, Senida would at least have— how did you say it, a poet’s justice?
Just like in Liskovac, when she’d left it to that soldier’s vanity whether to believe the girl he’d taken by force had really crawled back to ask for more. Undressed, his nakedness like a boast, he’d been as easy to slay as a newborn lamb.
THAT SUMMER
Joan Tuohy
“NANA, what’s this box?”
“I don’t know, honey. What’ve you got?” Grace Ann, my nine-year old granddaughter, was helping me sort through a box of papers and photographs among my mother’s things. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, a position I could no longer manage, and separating papers from photographs. “Is it heavy?”
Listing a little, Gracie managed to move the unwieldy box to the coffee table and lifted off the cover.
“Oh, look,” she giggled. “Who’s this old-fashioned looking man?”
We were sitting in the living room of my ninth-floor apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It was an older building, with windows wide open to the afternoon breeze. By great good fortune, nothing had yet been built between those windows and Manhattan, so, in addition to the warm spring air, there was also a splendid view of the New York skyline and the George Washington Bridge.
It was the right setting for this chore. My mother had been living in Manhattan when she died, and I imagined she was hovering out there somewhere, while her great-granddaughter and I tackled this box.
The picture in my hand was of my uncle, George Prestato, my Aunt Tess’s husband, who, at the time of the photograph, was about forty years old. He was tall and thin and very elegant. I had only the one picture of him. He was wearing a bowler hat and a topcoat. His face was straight toward the camera, and he was smiling, just as I remembered him. The picture looked as if it had once been torn in half, but had been repaired. I wondered why.
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