“Nana, are you OK? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I smiled as I reached out and patted her hand.
“Yes, baby, I’m fine. Just memories from a long time ago.”
“Who is he? What happened to him?”
What happened to him? The real question was whether or not I was willing to take the story to my grave. And I was sure her parents weren’t ready to have her hear the story of the family murder. I hadn’t told them everything. But maybe it was time someone besides me knew the truth, and I could certainly tell her the beginning.
WHEN you made the turn off Broadway, 211th Street was in the heart of Inwood, on the narrow, northern-most tip of Manhattan. The small street was only one block long— the subway station, a few blocks away, an easy walk. There was no grass anywhere, only gray cement and building doors right at the sidewalk; 514 was across from the schoolyard, but in the summer, it was empty and quiet. In the summer of forty-four, the whole block and the schoolyard— in fact all of upper Manhattan and the Bronx— was my country idyll.
My father, who had enlisted in the navy in the fall of forty-three, was stationed somewhere in England. I lived with my mother in Elmhurst, Queens, and in early forty-four, my mother got a job doing war work in Manhattan. Most children who had no one to care for them were sent away to summer camp, or at least to family and friends in the country. I got 211th Street and Aunt Tess and Uncle George. But mostly, I got Uncle George. My aunt worked in an office, and my uncle didn’t work at all. He had a bad heart, but had declared himself ready and able to take care of a nine-year old for the summer. For as long as I could remember, my aunt always seemed angry, so I wasn’t sure how it would work. But it turned out I only saw her in the evenings, because I went home on the weekends. The rest of the time I spent with Uncle George.
“Here,” I said, handing Grace some more pictures, “look at these.” Uncle had found other girls my age in the neighborhood to be my summer friends. He was an amateur photographer and had taken pictures of us wherever we went. Barbara, Judy, and Agnes came with us on day trips to Van Cortland Park and for swimming in Croton Park and Orchard Beach. There were pictures from Dyckman House, and the Santa Scala, and eeling in the Hudson River.
Looking through the pictures, I realized there weren’t any of Mrs. Gormley. Rita Gormley lived in the same apartment building as my aunt and uncle, but on the second floor. One time, when the elevator stopped to let someone off, I saw a little flag with a blue star on it hanging from her apartment door. We had one at my house, too, for my father. When I asked about it, Uncle knocked on her door so I could meet her.
She could only have been in her early twenties, and, with her red hair and porcelain skin, she reminded me of my Irish aunts. Holding my hand, she drew me into her living room, eager to hear about my adventures. I fell in love with her on the spot. She explained that the blue star was for her husband, who was in the army, fighting in Europe. After that she would sometimes go with us on our explorations. I was sure she was there when Uncle took some of his pictures.
Nobody told me, not when Mrs. Gormley’s husband was killed in France. She simply stopped going places with us, and one day, I noticed that the flag with the little blue star had been replaced with one that had a gold star. When I asked why, Uncle finally told me. She only went out with us one time after that, when we went to the Edgar Allan Poe cottage in the Bronx. Poe had been widowed, and Mrs. Gormley talked about being widowed and how sad she felt. That’s why it really stuck in my memory. She now seemed such a sad and unhappy creature, and Uncle worked hard at trying to get her to smile. I didn’t tell Grace about Mrs. Gormley, but I knew.
“HERE,” Aunt Tess said one afternoon, tossing the envelope on the table, “I picked up the pictures you had developed at the drugstore.”
“Oh, let me see, let me see!” I grabbed for the thick package that would tell the story of our latest travels. My uncle beat me to it.
“Me first, kiddo,” he said. “Me first. How did you get them?” he asked. “I still have the ticket.”
“Oh, they know me,” she said. “I stopped in to get some things, and Mr. Rozzano asked if I wanted to take them. There are a lot, and they were pretty expensive.” She seemed put out.
Uncle walked to the other room with the pictures, and I quickly followed— but not before I noticed the steady glare with which my aunt watched him. Despite my jumping up and down and my uncle’s lapse into Italian— “Aspetta, aspetta!,” I had to suffer while the contents were removed one by one. He first looked through the whole group, without showing them to me, and seemed relieved. As he handed each photo to me, I ran back to my aunt in the kitchen to show her. At last, we had seen them all. Maybe not all— there were no pictures of Mrs. Gormley at the Poe cottage for me to share with my aunt.
Uncle’s heart was so bad that he had to sleep sitting up in a chair or on the couch in the living room. I slept with my aunt in the big bed in the bedroom. Sometime during that night, I became aware of their voices. They weren’t exactly loud, but my aunt sounded really angry, my uncle placating. I remember hearing her say “Rita Gormley,” and, “you promised.” Not really awake when she came to bed, I could still sense her stiffness and her anger as she lay next to me.
The summer continued as it had begun for my uncle and me. We still had our excursions, usually with my friends, but not with Mrs. Gormley. He was a great cook, and we sometimes spent our day making ravioli, which was set out to dry on clean sheets throughout the apartment, or a red sauce with clams, or maybe a caponata. Uncle would often leave the apartment to take his handiwork to “a neighbor.” I didn’t need to ask who the neighbor was and I didn’t need to be told that I shouldn’t say anything about it.
Their apartment was on the fifth floor, and the day the elevator broke, Uncle George only made it up the steps to the landing between the second and third floor. His breathing was so bad he was prepared to sit there until the elevator was fixed. I rang the super’s bell to tell him what had happened, and then sat with Uncle to keep him company. We were together when we heard a door bang and then footsteps hurrying down the flight behind us.
“Go, look downstairs and see if you can see anything. Maybe someone fell or is in trouble.” My uncle, always so concerned about others, now depended on me for legs. I slowly walked the hall on the second floor and came back to the stairs to call up to him.
“Mrs. Gormley’s door isn’t closed.”
“Ring the bell, see if she’s there.”
I rang the bell and waited. No answer.
“Mrs. Gormley? Mrs. Gormley?” Slowly, I pushed the door open. Prepared to run, I tiptoed to the back of the apartment. I could see only some clothes thrown on the bedroom floor, and there was a funny smell. I returned to my uncle to report.
He looked at me for what seemed like forever and slowly pulled himself up. Shuffling down the stairs to the second floor, he walked into Mrs. Gormley’s apartment and to the bedroom, with me close behind. He sniffed and looked closely at the pile of clothes. Suddenly he pushed me toward the door. “Get the super!” he whispered. “Tell him to call the police.”
“What is it?” I asked. Suddenly scared, I began to back up to the door, and then, without waiting for an answer, turned and fled back to the super’s apartment again.
This time, the super was cranky. “What?” he snapped.
“Please, oh, please, come, and my uncle said to call the police!” I was nearly shouting.
“What?” he said again. “Come where? Why the police?”
Shaking, I grabbed his hand and dragged him up the stairs. I waited just inside the door of the apartment as he joined Uncle in the bedroom. Still unsure of what was wrong, but certain that it was something awful, my eyes focused on the floor.
“Holy mother of god!” exclaimed the super as he ran past me.
Shortly after, I understood what people mean when they say that ‘all hell broke loose.’ Mrs. Gormley was dead; she’d been stabbed with her bi
g kitchen knife. And the elevator, under police pressure, had miraculously been fixed. Uncle and I had been sent back to our apartment, with a police officer in charge. Uncle was in the living room and I in the kitchen, and we each had to tell what we knew, what we’d heard, what we’d seen.
All the time, I kept thinking: Who would want to kill Mrs. Gormley? Uncle seemed devastated. Wiping tears from his eyes, he kept saying “So sad, so sad. So unnecessary.” He was holding rosary beads in his hand, and at some point, it dawned on me that they weren’t his, but my aunt’s. They were made of rolled rose petals; I had bought them for her at the Santa Scala shrine, that summer. She always carried them with her. I wondered where he had gotten them, but that wasn’t the question I asked.
“Uncle, what is it?”
“Ah, carina, I think your mama has to take you home now.”
“Why, what did I do?”
He gently stroked my head. “You, my little one, did nothing. But another has done great evil. So unnecessary.”
My aunt and my mother arrived at the apartment almost simultaneously. As my aunt walked through the door, Uncle George held out his hand with the rosary beads.
“Where did you get those?” She patted the pocket of her dress, thinking that her own beads were there. They weren’t.
“You dropped them. In the apartment.” That was all he’d said, but Aunt Tess was suddenly very pale and she looked frightened.
MY mother and I did go back to Queens that day. She was able to take days off from work until school started, and we had adventures of our own. There were times when she seemed really sad, but she never said what it was about, and I never asked.
Uncle George died that September. His heart finally gave up, and Aunt Tess had him waked at the apartment. The casket was in the living room, where he’d slept for so many years. When I went with my mother to pay our respects, I was terrified. I had never seen a dead body, and I didn’t want to see Uncle George. In my nine-year-old eyes, Mrs. Gormley didn’t count. When I saw what I thought were clothes, I hadn’t known there was a body in them. As I knelt on the small prie dieu in front of the casket, my aunt slid down beside me, her voice a small murmur in my ear, asking if I would like to kiss Uncle. My mother’s No shot out of her mouth, faster than I could have imagined. Without another word, she grabbed my arm and led me, shaking, out of the apartment.
As we waited for the elevator, I became aware of a few men standing a little distance away. One of them smiled at me, and I realized that he had been the policeman that had questioned me the day Mrs. Gormley was killed. I had no clue why they were there, but before I could ask, I was whisked onto the elevator, and we were on our way down.
At the second floor, the doors opened, and I gaped in surprise. There stood my uncle, just as he looked in my picture. Mrs. Gormley was beside him, holding his arm. He smiled and tipped his bowler hat. I smiled and waved. My mother peered around the open door and looked at me in surprise.
“Who are you waving at?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. I just shrugged. By the time we got to the lobby, I had stopped trembling. In all the years that followed, I never talked about that summer again.
AT the bottom of the box Grace and I were so carefully emptying, I found two yellowed newspaper clippings. One told of the death by stabbing of the recently widowed Mrs. Rita Gormley of 514 West 211th Street in Manhattan, the other of the death of the recently-widowed Mrs. George Prestato of the same address. Mrs. Prestato’s death was believed to have occurred, at her own hand, by arsenic poisoning. I had never seen the papers before.
“Nana?” Grace Ann leaned into me as I carefully returned the papers and pictures in the box. “I think you should write your stories down so that we all know them.”
I took a deep breath and gave her a non-committal smile. I knew that some stories were better left unwritten.
DEATH WILL TANK YOUR FISH
Elizabeth Zelvin
“SURE, I’ll feed your fish,” I said. “No problem.”
“You gotta promise, Bruce,” Neil said. “Those little fellas mean a lot to me.”
The Monday night AA meeting, in the High Episcopal Church at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninetieth Street, had just ended. As we stood at the curb outside, the smoke and babble of recovering alcoholics bonding eddied around us.
“I know, man, I know.”
Neil was probably the only alcoholic in town whose story about hitting bottom involved stumbling home in a blackout and crash-landing in a tankful of guppies. Apart from that, we’d heard it all before in the church basements of New York: the shattered glass, the brokenhearted children bawling, and the soon-to-be ex-wife screeching as she kicked him out. How does an alcoholic make amends for a two-hundred guppy mistake? If you’ve flushed your dead, you can’t apologize or visit their grave. All Neil could do was replace the tank and take very, very good care of it.
“It would break the kids’ hearts if it happened again.” Neil lit another cigarette from the stub of the last and ground the old one into the pavement with his heel. “And Angie would kill me.”
Angie was his ex. We’d all played in the streets together, back when the yuppie Upper East Side was working-class Yorkville. Angie’s mom had been a woman who never forgave, or forgot, especially broken glass. I knew, from when I’d pitched a memorable curve ball right into her living room window. Angie had turned out just like her.
“So give me the key.”
I held out my hand, and he forked it over, along with instructions— guppies, care and feeding of— and directions to his apartment that I didn’t need. I knew where he lived, in his parents’ old rent-controlled apartment, like me.
“I’ll only be gone a couple of days,” he said.
“I got it, dude,” I said. “Food’s on the foyer table. Sprinkle it across the top, check that the heater’s on, say the Serenity Prayer, and it’s a wrap.”
Neil growled low in his throat. His Higher Power had not yet lifted his temper.
“It’s not a joke, man! I don’t want those little guys to end up floating on the top of the tank.”
They didn’t. When I walked into Neil’s living room around noon on Tuesday, fish food in hand, I found him face down on the floor, with the back of his head crumpled and bloody. The tank was shattered, because he’d fallen on it. The dead guppies were scattered, not only around him, but on his shirt and jeans. There were even a few in his hair.
“He was supposed to be out of town,” I told the cops. “He gave me the key last night.”
“Any witnesses, Mr. Kohler?”
Yeah, about five dozen, smoke-filled sober drunks.
Should they remain anonymous? No. Neil was dead, and my best friend Jimmy wouldn’t want to see me in the slammer. He’d been drinking coffee and schmoozing a few feet away when Neil handed me the key. I’d shown it to him before we said goodbye. He knew Neil from the old neighborhood, as well as AA.
“And this morning, Mr. Kohler?”
All I’d done was get up, flush the system with coffee, and walk the few blocks to Neil’s.
“What kind of work do you do, Mr. Kohler?”
I was still temping, a recovery job that didn’t interfere with my real life in those church basements. I hadn’t called the temp agency this morning. Now, I was sorry I’d rolled over and gone back to sleep instead. No alibi. But they wouldn’t find my fingerprints on anything but the fish food.
“I didn’t do it,” I told my friends Jimmy and Barbara in Starbucks a few hours later. My encounter with the cops had left me in grave need of a triple-espresso latte.
“Do the cops know that?” Jimmy asked.
“Did they search you for guppies?” Barbara asked.
“If it had happened this morning,” I said, “his clothes would have been soaked. That tank held two hundred gallons. But his shirt was dry. Besides, if I’d killed him, I wouldn’t have called them.”
“So, who wanted Neil dead?” Barbara looked like a robin with a worm, b
right-eyed and perky. It would be deerstalker hats for three again, for sure.
“I’d put Angie at the top of the list,” I said.
“She never coshed anyone back in school,” Jimmy said.
“She was a thrower,” I said. A shoe, stiletto heel-first. An algebra textbook heavy enough to raise a classic goose egg. A live mouse.
“I could go talk to her.” Barbara’s eyes sparkled. She loves to hear about our dysfunctional childhoods, since she’s a nice Jewish girl from Queens with the kind of parents we only saw on TV.
Jimmy and I looked at each other.
“Naaah,” we said simultaneously.
“Why not?”
“She’s not, um, psychologically oriented,” Jimmy said.
“Probably paste you one in the mouth if you said, ‘And how do you feel about that?’” I translated.
“Not as a counselor,” Barbara said.
“Yeah, right,” I said, because Jimmy was too nice to say it. We both knew Barbara could seldom resist playing shrink when she got the chance.
“Woman to woman.”
“Forget it.”
“One of you, go see her.”
“It had better be Jimmy,” I said. “Angie and I have history.”
In tenth grade, Angie had flirted with me, trying to make Neil jealous. So, Jimmy promised to attend the wake and snoop around some.
“What about Neil’s AA sponsor?” Barbara said. “He’d know Neil’s secrets if anyone would.”
“Who was his sponsor?” I asked.
Jimmy knew, and Barbara persuaded him to tell. She said that death trumps anonymity.
I already knew Hank from the Program. I found him the next day, at a meeting in the gym of a church, off Central Park West in the Seventies. When it ended, I suggested we go out for coffee.
“How’s it going?” I asked, when we were settled in the nearest Starbucks.
“Not bad at all.” He took a sip of coffee. You could tell he was an old-timer, because he didn’t order a latte. “I just made my twenty-five years.”
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