Princess of Passyunk

by Bohnhoff, Maya Kaathryn

  There was much swearing in Polish, the weight lifted, and he found himself peering up into the moonlit face of Boris Bzikov.

  Boris spluttered some more, then said, “Kim pan jest? Who are you?”

  “I’m...I’m Ganady. Ganady Puzdrovsky. I came to see Mr. Joe.”

  Boris leaned over and looked at him squint-eyed. “You! You’re that boy! The one who the window broke! The one who—who!” He choked and stepped back, shaking his finger in Ganady’s face. “You, you are the one responsible! You stole from me my Svetlana! You!” And he spun on his heel and disappeared down the alley toward Thirteenth Street.

  Ganady levered himself up onto his elbows and stared after the other young man. Then he picked himself up and dusted himself off and looked back up at the window. The light had gone out.

  Dismayed, Ganny trotted up the steps and tried the back door, but it was locked. He glanced over at the kitchen window, feeling an immediate stab of guilt. Mr. Joe had forgiven him for breaking into his shop once (twice if you counted the front window); he doubted he would forgive him yet again. He rattled the back door, then pounded on it, praying Mr. Joe was still inside and would hear him.

  He had spent several minutes at this, losing hope and wondering if he should go around to the front of the building, when he heard Boris’s voice again.

  “There! There he is! He tries to break in!”

  Ganady turned and saw below him in the alley a triumphant Boris standing side by side with a policeman, who looked not at all happy to be dragged into a malodorous alley in the middle of the night. The Bagel Prince was pointing at him with one beefy digit, his face so red it almost seemed to glow in the light of the moon.

  “I was just knocking,” Ganny said. “Mr. Joe was upstairs a moment ago...”

  The policeman sighed and beckoned Ganny to come down into the alley. What could he do but obey?

  “You know Mr. Gusalev?” the officer asked.

  “Sure. I know Mr. Joe. I...” Riding a roller coaster of sudden perversity, Ganny looked right at Boris and said, “I’m engaged to his daughter.”

  In answer, Boris Bzikov roared and launched himself at his rival, toppling him from the steps for the second time that night.

  When the shouting and pummeling was over, brought to a swift end by the policeman and a timely associate, Ganady found himself back in jail, in the very same cell he had inhabited not two weeks past. This time there were neither mice nor cockroaches but only Boris, who glared at him balefully from the cell next door.

  This time Ganady had asked the police not to call his family, but the sergeant had recognized him the moment he set foot in the precinct house and well remembered the circumstances of his previous arrest. Ganady sat upon his narrow cot in hopeless misery, anticipating that when next his cell opened, white-coated orderlies from Saint Mary’s would be there to take him away.

  Knowing of no other meaningful expedient, Ganady began to pray. He started with Hail Marys, then moved to the Lord’s Prayer, and then recited the Twenty-third Psalm. He was surprised to find he recalled some of the prayers he had heard in shul and mumbled those too—in less-than-perfect Hebrew. And when he had done that, he sang Sheyn vi di Levune.

  He thought of Armin the Opshprekher and wondered what the old kabbalist would make of these desperate incantations. Feeling most profoundly the emptiness of his pocket, he sang Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

  He was on the second chorus and Boris was beginning to growl at him when the door of his cell rattled. He glanced up, expecting the orderlies or at the very least, his Da. But it was Joseph Gusalev who stood there, looking as sad and rumpled as Ganny was certain he did himself.

  Boris leapt up from his cot. “Papa Gusalev!” he called out. “Will you take me out of here?”

  Mr. Joe glared at him. “Let your own Papa get you out, you no-goodnik. I’m here for Ganady.”

  Ganady could hardly believe his ears. He rose slowly to his feet and shuffled toward the cell door as the long-suffering police sergeant swung it open.

  “Ganady,” said Mr. Joe, “you gotta find her. You gotta find my Lana before she does something mule-headed.”

  “Me? But...”

  “It’s the cu—” He broke off and glanced sideways at the sergeant. “It’s like this, Ganny. Lana...Lana’s herself again.”

  “What?” said Ganady and the sergeant and Boris in perfect three-part harmony.

  “I can take him?” the butcher asked the policeman, gesturing at Ganny.

  “Well...”

  “It was my alley you found him in. I tell you he wasn’t breaking in. I...I was expecting him.” Mr. Joe took a deep breath. “He is to be my son-in-law.”

  “Papa Gusalev!” wailed Boris, and Ganady’s heart soared like a long fly ball.

  The Sausage King fixed the Bagel Prince with his most thunderous scowl. “You, I was done with once tonight already, you pompous shmegegi.”

  “He was fighting with this other boy...” said the sergeant.

  “Fighting? Ganady Puzdrovsky?”

  “Well...not so much. Mostly he was trying to keep from getting hit.”

  Mr. Joe shrugged as if to say: Well, there you have it.

  Ganny was released and Mr. Joe hurried him from the precinct house out into the moonlit street.

  “What you said about Svetlana—” Ganady began, following him down the steps and into a puddle of lamplight.

  “Is so.” Mr. Joe began walking up the street, hands jammed into the pockets of his coat. “Beyle came to me just now, all baroygis—madder than a wet hen. ‘Lana is Lana again,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how the shlimazel did it, but he broke my curse.’ Then she says, ‘The good news is, your girl is just as mule-headed as ever. You’ll never guess what she’s gone and done.’“

  He took a measure of steps in silence and Ganady’s blood ran colder than the river that sliced Philly and Camden in two.

  “What, Mr. Joe? What’s Lana done?”

  “She’s gone to a—a convent.”

  Of all the things Joseph Gusalev could have said, that was the least to be expected.

  “But she’s not even Catholic.”

  “You’re telling me? I’m telling you, this is killing her mother. It’s bad enough she should marry a Catholic—no offense—but if Lana doesn’t marry somebody, we get no grandchildren. Lana is it, Ganady. Our only child. And right now, I’d rather have her marry you than the Church.” His brows gathered in a perplexed knot. “How can she marry a whole church? I don’t get that.”

  Ganny shrugged. He had always been weak on theology, and his understanding of such fine detail was especially sketchy.

  “A crazy, shiftless son-in-law is better than no son-in-law at all.”

  “I’m not shiftless. I have work. I’m a musician.”

  “What did I just say?” Mr. Joe stopped next to a gleaming sedan in two-tone cream and turquoise that was drawn up to the curb. “Well, at least there’ll be grandchildren.”

  “But you had her turned into a...you know...a cockroach. How were you going to have grandchildren from a cockroach?”

  Mr. Joe’s eyes misted over. “I only meant to put a scare into her. I didn’t mean for it to go this far. I asked Beyle to cancel the curse if Svetlana would only come around to talk to me. But she said she couldn’t. She said the curse was stronger than she thought. She said it had ‘legs.’ What the hell does that mean: ‘It has legs?’“

  Ganny opened his mouth to say he didn’t know, but Mr. Joe continued on, not even stopping for breath.

  “I was mad, I gotta tell you. ‘What have you done, you old makhesheyfe?’ I say. And she looks me in the eye and gives me this brazen, ‘So I made a mistake! So what?’ A mistake, she says! Revenge is more like. ‘Look here, you old witch,’ I say, ‘who’s going to inherit my shops if my only child is a Cockroach?’ And you know what she says? She says, ‘How about me?’ Like she’s gonna live that long.”

  He stopped and gave Ganny a sharp look. “You sur
e you want to marry into this family?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The butcher shook his head. “A glik ahf dir. You’ll need all the luck you can get.”

  “But, Mr. Joe, I don’t understand: if your sister-in-law can turn someone into a cockroach, couldn’t she charm Lana out of the convent?”

  “Hey, even Beyle’s got her limits. She don’t dabble in the affairs of the Church.”

  Ganady shook his head, wondering if he were in fact still lying on the cot in the jail cell, dreaming. He wished desperately that his Baba were here, or Mr. Ouspensky.

  “Which convent?”

  The butcher shrugged eloquently. “I should know from convents?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Of course not. That’s why I came to get you when the police called. You gotta find her, Ganady. Like you did the first time.”

  “But the first time I had The Baseball—the miracle Baseball. I don’t have it anymore.”

  “D’you know where it is?”

  “Well, yeah...”

  “Well, then.” Again the eloquent shrug. Mr. Joe opened the door of his car. “You want me to drop you someplace?”

  Ganady looked up the street toward his house. His home. A place he wasn’t even sure he would ever see the inside of again.

  “No. I need to do some thinking.”

  The butcher patted his arm. “I knew you would help. Dos hartz hot mir gezogt.” He slid behind the wheel, closed the door, and started the engine.

  Ganady stepped back from the curb and watched him drive away.

  Dos hartz hot mir gezogt.

  My heart told me.

  Svetlana had said that to him once. The night he’d admitted to her that he’d met her Da. He wondered if he should let the words give him hope.

  He turned and started up the street toward his house. There was nowhere else to go, for The Baseball was there and he needed The Baseball to find Lana again. He must get into his room somehow. Get to The Baseball somehow.

  Without being caught.

  Blocks later, as he stepped up onto the curbing at the intersection of Seventh and Dickenson, he saw two men approaching from up the street. They were walking quickly with their heads down, not speaking to each other, and as they passed beneath a street lamp, he recognized them.

  Da and Nikolai.

  Without thinking, he turned and trotted down a short flight of steps into a basement doorway and waited there until they had passed by.

  Quivering, he emerged again, glancing after them. They were across the intersection now and he doubted they would recognize his back. He turned back up the zibete, walking as fast as his legs would carry him. His heart felt lighter; perhaps with his Da and brother gone, he might be able get The Baseball without trouble. Surely neither Marija nor Baba Irina would rat him out, as they said in the gangster movies.

  With hope lifting him, Ganady continued up the street until he stood before his front door. The house was completely dark. No lights were on upstairs or down. As his bedroom was the only one that overlooked the street, there was no hope of rousing Baba or Marija from this side. He decided he must go around to the alley and get into their small back yard.

  He hastened back toward Dickenson Street; two houses down there was a tiny access that fed into the alley. It was this he made for, slipping into the dark slit and sidling as quickly as he could along it to the alley beyond.

  Moments later he stood outside his garden gate. It was latched. He didn’t let than deter him, but launched himself up and over the fence, which was only inches taller than his head. In a matter of seconds he was looking up at the rear of the house from the center of the little garden. The windows were dark here as well, from the kitchen to the bedrooms above. He tried the back door, but found it locked, which was peculiar. He hadn’t even known the kitchen door could lock.

  He looked about for pebbles to throw, but there were none in the neat garden. Finally, he stumbled into Mama’s potting table, where he found an empty flower pot. He broke it, smashing it into small fragments, which he stuffed into his pockets.

  Marija’s window was upstairs to the left of the kitchen door. His parents’ window was to the right, but as much as he craved seeing his Mama, he couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t call the hospital the moment she saw him. So, he tossed shards of the broken flower pot at his little sister’s bedroom window until he exhausted his supply.

  He was looking about for another pot to break, when he heard a soft skittering sound from the direction of Baba’s bench. He glanced down and saw, rolling toward him in the waning moonlight, a whitish, spherical blur. It bumped across the paving stones to his feet, coming to rest against the toe of his right sneaker.

  He reached down and picked it up.

  In complete darkness he would have known it—The Baseball. He squatted on the garden paving stones and marveled at it. How had it come to be here?

  He looked toward the bench again and saw the stones before it ripple strangely in the pale silver light. His first instinct was to run, but curiosity won out. He stood stock-still as the ripple resolved into about a dozen gleaming cockroaches of various sizes. As one, they rose up on their hindmost legs and waggled at him.

  “Thank you,” he whispered, then looked up toward the dark heavens and the shimmering moon and said “Thank you” to God as well.

  The words had no sooner left his lips when a light went on inside the house. He could see it as a faint golden glow through the kitchen windows and heard his Da’s voice shouting for Mama: “Ravke! Ravke! Wake up! Ganny...”

  The voice trailed off and Ganny thought Da must have gone upstairs. He pocketed The Baseball and turned to go. He’d barely uprooted his feet when his shadow sprang up before him, looming long across the suddenly bright pavers.

  The kitchen light! He spun back toward the house and saw that Nick had come into the kitchen. He was at the sink pouring himself a glass of water.

  Ganady was stuck in the beam of light like a fly in butter, unable to move even when Nick’s eyes met his through the glass. His brother’s mouth opened in a soundless O, and then he turned his head and shouted, “Da!”

  Ganny came unstuck and bolted for the back gate. He flipped up the latch and darted into the alley, where he ducked down below the level of the fence and ran as best he could back to the narrow walkway between the houses. Not trusting himself to the lamplit street, he dove across the zibete and into a matching slit of darkness on the other side. He flew through it to the alley beyond, pinballing off the rough, brick walls on either side.

  Praying no one had seen him, he slowed and began to walk north toward Wilder. When he reached the mouth of the alley, he felt in his pocket for The Baseball. Praying it still possessed magic or miracle, he tossed it out into the street and hurried after it.

  It drew him north. No matter how he threw it or where he threw it, it drew him north toward Fitzwater.

  He was standing in the middle of Jefferson Square when it came to him—the great, soul-filling sense that he no longer needed The Baseball to find Svetlana. He picked it up from the cold, wet grass, but did not throw it again. Instead, clutching it in his hand, he crossed the parkland toThird Street and headed north again, his heart pounding in rhythm with his feet.

  He ran until he was standing beneath the shimmering façade of Saint Stanislaus, staring up at the spires. He was shaking and breathless by the time he’d climbed the steps to the doors of the sanctuary. They were unlocked. They were always unlocked. Parishioners might need to pray or to confess at any time of day or night.

  He pushed the big doors open and stepped into the narthex, drinking in the soft, velvet warmth. He crossed the narthex and stepped out into the soaring vault of the nave, peering down the candlelit rows of pews toward the altar.

  A woman knelt there at the very bottom of the aisle in which he stood, her knees on the prie-dieu. She wore a simple black dress, her hair covered with the white coif of a novice nun.

  He wavered f
or a moment, wanting to shout, wanting to pray, wanting to sing, wanting to cry. Instead he set The Baseball down in the carpeted aisle and gave it a push. It rolled true and silent until it met the soles of the woman’s feet with a gentle bump.

  She kvitched, then reached a hand around to feel behind her.

  Ganny did not breathe as her fingers wrapped around the ball. He did not breathe as she picked it up, turning it as he always did, over and over in her hand. He did not breathe as she stood, pivoted and went into a wind up. She pitched it to him side-arm and he caught it, gasping for air as it stung his palm.

  When he looked back at her, Svetlana the Mule-headed was standing demurely before the altar, a woman of flesh and blood. A smile hovered on her lips.

  He didn’t know how he crossed the distance between them; he only knew that he did. He stood before her and poured out his heart, telling her all the things that had happened to him since he had seen her last—the Singer, the Crone, his break-in at Mr. Joe’s and his subsequent trip to jail, the rescued cockroaches, his “fight” with Boris, Mr. Joe’s intervention, his escape from his Da and Nikolai.

  Coming here to find her.

  Lastly, hands clutching The Baseball, he pleaded with her from the bottom of his heart and the depths of his soul, “Please, Lana. Please don’t marry the Church. Marry me, instead.”

  In answer, Lana threw back her head and laughed. Her laughter soared into the highest arches and shimmered off the stained glass windows and bounced among the pews.

  Ganady reveled in the sound, afraid it might be the last time he heard it.

  When she had done laughing (at him?), she wrapped her hands around his hands and asked, “And Da’s good with this?”

  “He gave his blessing. I promise he did. He said, ‘Find her, Ganny, and you can marry her.’ He sent Boris away.”

  “And how did Boris take that?”

  Ganny blushed, remembering the pummeling he took. “Not so good.”

  “And how did you find me? Following this?” She squeezed his fingers tighter around The Baseball.

  “I started to, but then...” He gazed into her twilight sea-colored eyes. “Dos hartz hot mir gezogt. My heart told me.”