by Triss Stein
“Do you?”
He shook his head. “My father is gone. Nothing brings him back. Police will figure it out, I think, and then I will care. For now, my worry is my mother. I am not little school boy, you know? Now I am man of the house, but I don’t know how to help her. She only wants answers.”
I had a sharp flashback, across all those years, to the time when I believed that knowing exactly what had happened to my husband would somehow make me feel better. When I wanted to see the man at the wheel of the car, and shake him and scream at him. I was sure it would make me feel better. Then I did see him, and he went to jail, and it didn’t change a thing. Of course I was looking for a reason, a way to make sense out of something that made no sense.
But Dima had been shot. It was different. Someone was responsible, not just fate or chance or the wrong lineup of the stars. There was a reason and it could be found. Or should be.
“You talk to me whenever you need to. Any time. You got that?”
He nodded, grinned just a little.
“And you tell me if you see a way for me to help, okay?”
Nodded again.
“Now I’ll go say good-bye to your mother.”
He turned back to the stairs, and I found Natalya in the kitchen staring at a plate of pastries. She gestured at the platter. “People brought them to me. You eat, my dear. I am…” She made a face.
“Thank you. I will. But are you eating at all? You must.”
“I know, I know. Everyone says, but I could not care less about food. I need…I need…I don’t know what. Not food.”
I nodded, chose the largest pastry, cut it in half, and put one half on her plate.
“What do I do now?” Her eyes filled with tears. “He was a lovely man, my Dima. Now I have nothing. Tell me please. Tell me how you go on.” She stopped suddenly. “I am so sorry! I know, I always knew you lost your husband. I heard, but you never said, in all these years of friendship, and I did not want to intrude. I am so sorry.”
“It’s all right. I never talked about it before, because, because…it was back then, in my old life. And I met you in my new life. How do you say ‘Oh, by the way, new friend, my husband died at twenty-six.’ It was easier to just be a single mom, and no one dared ask about the story.”
I took a deep breath. “I have to answer your question with another question.” She smiled faintly. “Did I have a choice? I had Chris. And you have Alex.”
“Yes, yes, I have my Alex. If not for him, I would be walking right into that ocean over there with heavy stones in my pockets.” She paused. “After, that is, I see the right person gets what is coming to him.” She sighed, a long shaky breath. “But then, after that, I will have to live for Alex. He is Dima all over, a good man.”
“Would it be a comfort to talk to me about Dima? He was so good to Chris and me. Or is it better not talk about him at all?”
She shook her head. “Not talk about him. Not now. Not yet. I will need to cry if I do and I have no tears left. You talk. Tell me about your husband. If you would. If you don’t mind.”
I didn’t mind so much. Now. There was a time I could not talk about him at all.
“He was my high school sweetheart, a neighborhood kid just like me. We got married when he graduated from the fire department academy and I had two years of Brooklyn College. Chris was a honeymoon baby. I was twenty.”
“You said that one time. You were so much younger than most of us mothers in their class. We wondered.”
I added quickly, “We were thrilled. Too young and dumb to know any better, I guess. Our mothers babysat so I could finish college and start teaching. We planned that we would have more babies while we were still young enough to enjoy them and he would be promoted and I’d be a full-time mom. I never—well—I never thought past that. Never, in those days. We were happy.…” My voice faltered. “We were happy. Then…”
“What happened? Was he…was it from a fire?”
“Nope. He was off that day, and got hit by a drunk driver. It was as stupid as that. He was riding his bike in Prospect Park on a beautiful summer day. Just like that, it ended, my life as I knew it.”
“Oh, my dear.”
“Yeah. Chris was three. After a while, reality kicked in. I would have to support us, so I went back to school. And now here I am, and a long way from the old neighborhood and Chris almost grown.”
I looked at her and added gently, “So you see, life has to go on. Not right away, and not the same, and not easily, but I can promise that you won’t be right here where you are now forever. I swear.”
She blinked hard, held my hand so tightly I thought it would break, then whispered. “I understand with my mind. But, you know, I don’t believe it at all, in my heart.”
“You don’t have to believe it for now. For now you just need to get through each day. No, no, I mean, each minute, just putting one foot in front of the other.”
Her fingers released mine and she picked up the pastry I had cut.
“Dima did not like the drama scenes. He would be telling me to get a grip.” There was the ghost of a smile. “He loved the American expressions Alex taught us. ‘Get a grip’ and ‘too much information’ and ‘chill.’ And ‘dude.’ He loved to say that. He was trying to get his English better, so he could pass his licensing exams. He was an engineer, you know. He could do anything technical here but his reading English was not so good.”
“Where did you meet him?” She seemed to want to talk about him after all. “Here? Or there?”
“University. In Leningrad. Just kids, like you.” She smiled faintly, again. “We had good jobs there but Russia is hard now—different from hard under communism but still hard. A mess. And always no good if you are a Jew, whoever is in charge. I had no family, and his was moving here, bit by bit, and we wanted better chances for Alex. So we came.”
Her eyes filled with tears again. “Now I have no one here for me. His mother. His sisters. And his no good brother. That gonif. You know that word? You know Yiddish?”
“A few useful words. Donato was my husband’s name. My people were Jews from Poland and Romania. It means thief.”
She nodded. “I could say even worse, in Russian, and in Yiddish too. But that will do.” She reached for another pastry and ate it, and I thought, I have accomplished one thing here, at least.
***
Late that night I found Chris on the living room floor, surrounded by photos, boxes of old photos next to her, crammed with the pictures I had never had time to sort or put in albums.
“Honey? I thought you were doing homework.”
She just gave me that irritating blank stare.
“Seriously?”
“They asked us to bring in pictures of Dima. So it’s still schoolwork.” She looked up at me. “It’s harder than I thought.”
“I’ll help.”
“I didn’t mean finding them. I meant, it’s so sad.”
“I know. I’ll still help.”
So we sat together and trolled for photos of us with the Ostrovs, at birthday parties and picnics and outings, a couple, two cute kids, and a single mom, forming a friendship based on our children. I helped Chris figure out where and when the unlabeled photos were taken, mostly by the size of the children. They were taller when they rode camels at the Bronx Zoo than they were at the Halloween Walk in Prospect Park.
And after, when Chris returned to her homework, I took the boxes, and while my hands automatically sorted the jumbled photos into neat stacks by subject, my mind flew backward, remembering. It was too painful to think of Dima now, but I thought of Natalya. Natalya, then, and Natalya now, as I had last seen her, because I knew her Before. She would never be that person again.
Here was Natalya, pants rolled up, wading into the waves at the beach, holding hands with both children and laughing. Here she was at the children�
�s zoo, pointing to the penguins and clowning, pretending to shiver. The children were the ones laughing in that one. Natalya standing on her head and demonstrating cartwheels at the park, the day we went to a small circus. Chris remembers that day and Natalya teaching her to do a cartwheel too.
Here was the day the children looked around the zoo on their own, always in our sight, while we sat and talked. And Chris and Alex came running up saying, “We saw a skunk! Ew, ew, ew.” And then immediately said to each other, with bravado, “Let’s go back!”
I think one of the children snapped that wobbly looking photo of us.
That was the day she told me a little about their move from Russia, how she and Dima had not even had long discussions. How it was in the air, and on the very same day, they just looked at each other and said, “No more. No more. Now is the time.” That’s all she ever told me about it. But that day I saw a toughness come over her face. I knew that was the side of Natalya that brought them here, but she only pointed to Alex, and smiled. “For him.” Her smile grew. “For him, it was all worth it.” She used to smile a lot.
Chapter Six
Life has to go on. In my mind, I wanted to make fun of myself for thinking in clichés, but yes, really, it does. That is what I had been telling Natalya, and that is the truth. My mind might be fogged with sympathy, and further fogged with my own memories, brought to the surface by Natalya’s tragedy, but Chris still needed meals, my advisor still needed me to edit some pages, and my boss still needed me to be nice to Dr. Flint.
My boss had confirmed this was my job for a few weeks. Maude’s story was still calling me. Chris was yet another puzzle, as usual. And Flint had dashed off another incomprehensible e-mail.
The question wasn’t: Does life go on? The question was: Which puzzle do I work on first? Today it was Dr. Flint’s marching orders.
“At Gwood talk to dr. Reade, use my name. photos no good. MUST HAVE detils. TODAY. Us beter camra. Ryan help. RE ltrs. Getting all about Tf? most crutchel!”
Ryan confirmed this was not a feeble attempt at text speak. It was Dr. Flint’s inability to type.
I gave in to the highest power, looked up a phone number, and called Dr. Reade, noting her title was director of art and history. Not exactly the same as assistant to an assistant. I wasn’t intimidated, not really, but I did start right off with the biggest gun and explained we worked for Dr. Flint. The voice on the phone said, “Give me one moment,” and returned.
“Dr. Reade is extremely busy today, but will make an exception for Dr. Flint’s work. She can spare a few minutes for you after lunch. Say, one-thirty?” She explained how to find the office, I took notes, and then I went back to my work. Later, I glanced over at what Ryan was doing, and then looked again.
He was cataloguing and digitizing the fat file of working sketches. Maude had drawn the same object from different angles, and in different colors. Some were pencil; some were watercolors. Most were easily recognized Tiffany designs, the flowers and butterflies and peacocks that said Tiffany anywhere, but today the designs up on the screen were a little different. They seemed to be forest animals. A graceful deer, a wild turkey, something furry that might be an otter or a beaver. It looked as if she wasn’t sure and was trying out both. I thought they looked oddly familiar, even though they were not Tiffany’s signature designs.
“You wait right here. Leave them up.”
I scrambled through the stacks of books on my shared desk to find the one I had used at Green-Wood and borrowed from the museum library. There it was, the Hudson River scene from the Konick chapel. And under leaves on the shore, there was a family of turkeys and deer peeping out.
“Look at this! This is what I saw the other day. Look familiar?”
Ryan’s eyes opened up wide and we shared a real smile. I think it was the first smile I’d seen on his face.
“The boss is going to love this. That is freaking cool. You sure it’s the same?”
“Ah, no. Not sure. The angles are different, and then this is so small. Are there any dates on the sketch? I’d like to see if we can match it up with anything in the letters.”
“No, no dates. She numbered them when they were a series, but that’s it. “
“You know what we need to do?”
He nodded. “Field trip. Go see those windows for real, sketches in hand.”
“How convenient, we already have to be there later. Let’s go do this now. Pack up the sketches and for God’s sake, do it carefully.”
He gave me the same look Chris would have. The one that says, “Thanks for the advice, cause I’m an idiot who would have done it badly otherwise.” He didn’t say it though. I’m his boss, sort of, not his mom.
The subway to the cemetery is one of the slower locals. It is slow, but that gave us more time to discuss what we needed to do. Ryan was carefully clutching the envelope of sketches the whole way. Good. An ounce of paranoia prevents a ton of problems. That was an old saying I made up on the spot.
I remembered how to find the Konick chapel, but Ryan couldn’t resist a little sightseeing, and we had enough time to make our walk a leisurely one. And I couldn’t resist a little sharing.
When I pointed out the elaborate chapel, and told him it was available for weddings, he said, “A wedding at a cemetery? That is so awesome,” and he took off, camera phone ready.
Walking briskly I soon found myself walking up Battle Path, which is not a fanciful name. An early battle of the American Revolution had been fought and lost here, the one when Washington famously said, “What brave men I must lose today.” I knew some of them were buried right here where they fell, long before it was a cemetery.
And there was Ryan, waiting for me at the foot of the impressive bronze memorial to the fallen soldiers. I touched his arm and pointed. “Look out over there. This is a statue of Minerva and she’s saluting her sister, the Statue of Liberty, out in the harbor.”
“Minerva, huh? That seems right. It’s the Roman name for Athena, the goddess of war and civic life, both.”
I must have looked surprised because he flushed and said, “Mythology comes up a lot in the comic-book world.”
“Okay. Now move your mind from Mt. Olympus to a Brooklyn factory. This statue was the dream project of Charles Higgins, who made a fortune manufacturing India ink.”
“No way! I used that ink a million times. Funny, you never think about if there was a real Higgins. India ink built this goddess? That’s kind of…I don’t know…”
“Yeah. Incongruous? And how surprised do you think those colonial solders would be, if they could see this great big golden statue built in their memory? They were simple men, mostly—farmers and tradesmen.”
We looked around, finding it hard to move on. The view was seriously spectacular. We could see out over a mile or two of city streets, right across to the water and the great harbor. The endless space of the sky and the water brought with it a kind of peace. If there were ghosts—and I don’t for a minute believe in them—the colonial solders had quite a view of the city they helped create. They were indeed resting in peace, I hoped. Ryan sighed deeply.
One more bend in the path and a slight walk downhill brought us to the crumbling building I had visited the other day. We went up the front steps, stepped carefully over the broken marble, and looked at the massive closed bronze door. I pushed it, gently at first, and then harder, but it did not budge. When Ryan stepped in behind me, and leaned in, it still didn’t move. This time, it was locked up tight.
“I don’t get it. It was open the other day. We can’t do our job if we can’t get in. Damn. We’ll take it up with this Dr. Reade, that’s what we’ll do. Let’s see how far Dr. Flint’s name really takes us!”
I didn’t know if Ryan got the sarcasm but I thought I saw a tiny spark in his eyes.
“I’m exploring anyway, now that we’re here.” He went around to the other si
de, where we could see the massive main window, the small side window, and the boarded-up area. Meant to be seen with sunlight coming through, on the outside they were a blur of dull colors and grime.
“If I climbed up that fence, I’d be high enough to look in.”
“What? No, you can’t do that! The fence doesn’t look any too sturdy, you could get hurt or you could damage it. Either way, it would be…”
I should have saved my breath. He was already pulling up to the top of the wrought-iron fence.
“Ya, I can see in.”
“Is it useful?”
“Nope, windows are too dark and dirty. Complete waste.” He leaped off the fence, landing neatly on his feet with no obvious damage.
I repeated to myself that I was not his mother and there was nothing I should say.
We turned toward the admin building, discussing what we wanted to say to Nancy Reade. And how to say it appropriately. I explained carefully to Ryan that showing the exasperation we both felt would not get us results, no matter how satisfying it would be to express it. Good advice that I gave myself. I needed to be the one setting a good example. Even if I didn’t want to.
I led us toward the entrance. As we walked along I pointed out a gravestone to Ryan. “Did you grow up in New York? If you did, you should stop here and say thank you to this ghost.”
He looked at the name, and baffled, said out loud, “Frederick Augustus Schwartz?” and then, “Hey, I get it. It’s F. A. O. Schwartz?”
“The very one. He brought a lot of joy to a lot of generations of New York kids, including my own. There’s another ghost over there, though I guess he was responsible for equal amounts of joy and despair in Brooklyn.”
“Carl Ebbets. Ebbets Field? That Ebbets? The Dodgers?”
“Before my time, of course—it’s always been the Ebbets Field housing project to me—but my dad used to tell me about it.”
And how odd was I becoming anyway, to be sightseeing in a cemetery?
Yet I was not alone. Though I assumed this was an off-hour of an off-day, to my right were a few people laying flowers at a clean new stone, reminding me that this was still a working cemetery as well as a place of history, and to my left a group of young people walked, stopping to take notes, while an older man talked and gestured. A class, obviously.
