by Linda Stasi
“What the hell is wrong with you, Larry? It’s not 1950. People don’t talk like that anymore. Fairy, my ass. He could take you out with one punch.”
“Eh, I’m only kidding. So he’s really rich now?”
“Not yet, he’s not.”
“What’s this about a cursed stone tablet?” Donald asked.
“It’s not a stone tablet. I never wrote that. Hello? It’s some ancient papers in a sealed brass tube.” I reached into my bag to show him.
Then I stopped, thinking, Maybe Roy is paranoid about someone messing around in his dad’s house, but then again, as they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean somebody’s not after you. Don’t play free and loose with something someone has entrusted to you.
I quickly shoved the tube back into my purse before they got their grubby mitts on it. But Larry had seen it. “Geez, it’s only us. It’s a brass vase?”
“No.” I left it at that, and gave Donald the look that meant, “Not in front of dopey Larry.” He nodded slightly so Larry didn’t see.
Donald put on his coat to leave. Larry, of course, didn’t follow suit. “Well, thanks for stopping by, Larry,” I said, hoping he’d get the hint and vamoose. He didn’t, so Donald grabbed him and shoved him out.
“You wanna hit Clippers?” I heard Larry ask him as I was closing the door. When I heard the elevator ding and voices in the hall, I peeked through the security peephole and saw that Mr. Buttinsky had corralled Donald and Larry. He’d gone to the compactor room to throw out some garbage just as Larry and Donald were about to get in the elevator.
Jesus, what a bunch. Who’s worse, the Buttinskys, or Larry and Donald, the gossips? I wondered and double-locked the door. I walked back to Terry’s room to check on him. He was sleeping with his little butt up in the air, happy as a clam.
I pulled down the Costco-sized box of diapers from the top shelf in his room, figuring I’d hide the tube in that giant box. But when I reached for the tube, I got a shock from touching the metal.
I picked it back up, holding it by a paper napkin, figuring it was the same as when you get a shock from touching a metal object indoors when it’s too dry and hot, and stuck it inside the diaper box, knowing that nobody goes into a diaper box unless absolutely necessary. The earring went into my locked jewelry box. Oh, the key. Right. I wrapped it in a sock and put it in my top dresser drawer.
That night I fell into a restless sleep, waking up over and over with my heart pounding, then falling back to sleep only to wake again in a panic. Bad sangria dreams.
I woke for the final time at six fifteen—not because I had to get Terry and myself ready to drive out to Queens, but because it was now freezing in the apartment. I jumped out of bed, threw on a robe and fuzzy slippers, and checked the windows in my room, the living room, and the kitchen. All locked. I walked into Terry’s room.
It was really freezing in there—what the hell? But stranger still? The baby was sitting up in his crib babbling and giggling to himself. He’d never sat up by himself before!
“Oh my little star!” I gasped. “Sitting up!” It was odd since he normally woke up crying to be picked up, fed, and changed immediately—but then I realized why it was so cold. The window in his room was open and a fierce breeze was blowing right on him.
But the window simply couldn’t be open, I knew. I had these steering wheel club-looking locks on every window in the apartment. But it was open. Not much. Maybe half an inch, but still. I made a note to call the super as soon as we got back from the funeral. Did that idiot Larry break the lock? Moron!
When I checked, I could see it hadn’t been broken at all. I relocked the window and reached for Terry, but he wasn’t even interested in being picked up. Instead he was babbling away to himself in baby talk in the freezing cold room. I picked him up and put a blanket around him.
Rubbing him up and down, I cooed, “That’s Mama’s good boy. Ooo, so cold. Mommy is a bad girl. I didn’t know your window was open!” But I knew it hadn’t been open when I had checked on him the night before. I knew it wasn’t.
I looked at the clock: 6:25. Instead of being overjoyed that finally Terry had slept through the night, I was a little weirded out. Even if he slept through the night, why hadn’t he cried to be picked up when he did wake up?
My mom the pediatrician would have told me that Terry had hit a milestone and that was a good thing. I knew that she would have been right and I was probably just having new mom anxieties—it wasn’t easy raising a baby alone since my bleeding-heart parents had gone to Africa to help other women with their babies. So why, then, was I feeling anything but good about this new milestone in baby Terry’s progress?
Then, as I was putting Terry onto the changing table, he spoke. “Mama!” I stood there immobilized for a second. Terry had also just said his first word! Make that two giant milestones in one day, or three, counting the fact that I was about to take him to a funeral of a Jewish man in a Catholic cemetery.
I felt momentarily excited and bereft at the same time because no one was there to share the moment with me. More to the point: his father wasn’t there to share the moment with me.
Then Terry put his hands up, and I heard what I knew I couldn’t have heard. “Mama! Up!” What? I nearly dropped my baby off his changing table.
6
It was too much to take in—alone—so instead I managed to chalk the weird incidents of the morning up to, well, weird incidences. And that was my second mistake. My first was taking the tube into my home.
I fed Terry, dressed us both for the funeral, went down to my building’s garage, took the car seat out of my own car and put it into Morris’s Buick, and strapped Terry into it in the backseat. It was a tough go. Buicks from 1987 were not designed for modern-day car seats, which require the skill of the Top Gear guys to attach even to a modern car, let alone an old clunker. I finally figured it out and stuck a Binky in Terry’s mouth—knowing he’d drop it in five seconds, at which point, he’d immediately scream for it again.
Instead, Terry fell asleep before we even got into the Midtown Tunnel. He was still fast asleep when I pulled up to Roy’s apartment building in Astoria. I waited and waited. No Roy. I called his cell. He picked up after three rings.
“Where are you? I’m waiting outside. Funeral? Hello?”
“Oh shit. I overslept—what time is it?”
I waited another ten minutes and my cell rang this time: Roy. “I’m outside. I don’t see you.”
“In front of your building, and I’m double-parked!”
“My apartment building? I went back to the old man’s house. I slept in Hicksville. And I slept like the dead.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake! What now?”
“I’ll call a cab and meet you at the cemetery. You head over. I’m really sorry, Ali, but I thought you knew I was staying here. If somebody had messed around here, I didn’t want to leave it unguarded.”
“You could have told me last night.”
“I was drunk. Your fault.”
“My fault. I accept full responsibility. Now please get to Saint John’s. I don’t want to bury your father alone while carrying my baby!”
I turned the car around and headed for the cemetery.
I got there just before nine, asked directions to the gravesite from the guard who gave me a map, and drove around the vastness of the grounds.
It had started to rain again—it was one of those nasty, cold mornings. Perfect day to bury a nasty, cold man. Finding the site was easier said than done. It’s not like I could type it into the GPS or anything.
Even on a gorgeous day the St. John Cemetery is creepy as hell with giant mausoleums and horrible gravesite statues of giant, scary, looming angels; weeping angels; Jesuses who are posed like Rodin’s The Thinker; and God knows what else, no pun intended. “Catholics sure know how to do up the afterlife,” I mumbled aloud. Coming from a long line of agnostics, I never understood how I ended up with as many priests as friends as I have. M
aybe because we all liked arguing about God. Yes, I’ve got some set.
Speaking of priests, when I finally found gravesite # 42.7121-73.8662, a lone priest was standing next to a giant hole that had been covered with a grave blanket, the casket resting on a bier.
Since Terry was sleeping and I was able to drive right up, I left him in the car with the window cracked open a tad, and began to make my way, under my umbrella, attempting to keep my heels from sinking into the wet grass as I trudged the thirty feet or so.
“Good morning, Father,” I said. “Is this the funeral site for Mr. Morris Golden?” I asked, feeling rather foolish asking a Catholic priest if he was there to bury this Jewish man.
The priest, a sallow-faced man in his fifties, with a clear plastic raincoat over his priest blacks and collar, was holding an umbrella and looking upset. He grabbed my free hand and said, “Are you one of Mr. Golden’s, ah, er, friends?”
“In a manner of speaking…” I said, not sure where this was going.
The priest started to cry. Cry! “I am Father Elias,” he said, unclasping my hand to take out a handkerchief to wipe his eyes. “Morris—Mr. Golden—he converted just last year, you know, after years of devotion to Jesus.”
I pretended that I did and nodded my head. “Yes. Devout. Tragic that he came to it so late in life. Catholicism, I mean,” I lied.
“He came to me for conversion. The man was a saint!”
A saint with a strap for his son, and a stolen artifact, I thought but didn’t say.
“I can’t believe there is no one else here,” Father Elias moaned, looking for any approaching cars. “A life like his and nary a mourner, except for you, Miss, Miss…”
“Russo, Alessandra Russo.”
A look of recognition crossed his face. “Ah. The reporter. You wrote about the missing holy pages that his son now possesses?”
“Well, yes…” How did he know they were pages? I decided to play it cool.
“And where is this son, may I ask? Is he not coming to say a final farewell to his beloved father?”
“He’s on his way. We had a mix-up.”
“I see,” he said, not seeing at all, obviously, by the look of disdain on his face.
Then, “Have you seen it? The relic, I mean?”
As inappropriate as it clearly was for him to bring this up, what with dead Morris in the casket right next to us and all, I still managed to bite my tongue. But seriously, what had been appropriate about any of this from the first call I had received yesterday anyway?
I simply said, “No, no, I haven’t.”
“Well, has the son found it yet—the papyrus?”
He knows it’s papyrus? I thought.
“Roy, his name is Roy Golden. But no, he hasn’t located it. No, not that I know of. Why, may I ask, do you think it’s papyrus that Mr. Golden left?”
“Well, Morris told me! It’s what brought him to the conversion in the first place—these pages are simply among the most important Christian relics of all time. The world needs them. Mr. Golden promised to will them to me”—he made a quick course correction—“I mean to our church, not to me personally.”
“I see. And which church are you affiliated with, Father?”
He slightly pulled on his collar, as though it was too starched, and answered, “Why, Our Lady of Vilnius. Mr. Golden told me about the pages in confession one day.”
“Confession?” What priest tells what he learned in confession?
He got out of it by quickly saying, “I can only tell you that because we had many, many conversations about it after that.”
Right.
So Morris had told him what he had! I’m not going to get into it with a weeping priest while standing in the rain at a cemetery, over the body of a Jew who left a ten-million-dollar Christian relic.
But I did. “That’s what he told you?”
“Of course. I was his father confessor.”
“So you mentioned. Do you know then how the relic came into his possession, Father?”
“Again, yes. He was given the pages by the owner.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “But did you know, unfortunately for St. Vilnius parish,” I began as tactfully as I could, until I was stopped.
“Our Lady of Vilnius.” Elias sniffed.
“Sorry. Our Lady of Vilnius. You see, Mr. Golden’s will says something different,” I said, watching the priest’s eyes narrow. I continued, not knowing what the hell Morris’s will said one way or the other, “He left everything to Roy.” I wasn’t about to let this unknown priest or his church steal Roy’s inherited relic any more than I was about to let another reporter steal my story. Wasn’t happening.
Just then I saw a cab pulling up with said-heir Roy in the backseat. Oy, I thought. How do you answer something like that?
“Speaking of which…” I said, waving to Roy. I tried to signal to him not to slam the door, but he did, which woke Terry.
I slogged back in the soggy ground to unhook Terry’s car seat and kiss Roy at the same time. Terry woke screaming his head off, so I picked him up and pulled a bottle out of the diaper bag and began trying to feed him as we walked. He was having none of it, kicking and wailing. He screamed even louder when he saw Roy.
“I have a way with kids,” Roy joked as we walked back to the gravesite and the morose Father Elias.
Mourners at the next funeral over shot us nasty looks. “Who takes an infant to a funeral?” I knew they were saying.
This graveyard was like the Leonard’s of Great Neck of cemeteries. “Golden funeral! Party of three.”
Terry continued carrying on like he was possessed—until we got right to the grave, that is. Father Elias made the sign of the cross on my baby’s forehead, and he immediately calmed down, looked up at Father Elias, and smiled.
“Mama. Up,” Terry babbled to Elias, while trying to scramble out of my arms.
“Mama’s here, baby. Right here…” I baby-cooed to him.
Roy whispered, shocked, “The kid talks?”
“It just started. Clearly he’s a genius!”
Too bad the genius wouldn’t stop trying to squirm out of my arms. Finally Father Elias reached for him, took him from my arms gently, and Terry again immediately quieted down and smiled up at him. “Mama!”
What the…?
The last damned thing I wanted right then was my newly fluent infant to be held by a priest over a grave, so squirming or crying or not, I held out my arms and the priest gave him back after making the sign of the cross again on Terry’s forehead, this time with the holy water he was carrying to sprinkle on the casket. This seemed to quiet him down enough to at least be given back to me, his own mother. Roy and I shot each other looks.
“If no one else will be attending…” Father Elias sighed, disappointed, searching for any approaching mourners. He finally began. “Would you like to say anything?” he asked Roy, who shook his head, looking down at the grave.
That really seemed to offend Elias. “Well, if you don’t choose to—I’m sure you’re too upset to speak,” he snarked, “then I shall.” Roy nodded.
Father Elias described in detail Roy’s father’s conversion to Catholicism. “After Morris miraculously was given a relic of enormous importance to the Catholic Church,” Elias intoned.
“Given? After he stole this relic of enormous buckaroos, you mean,” Roy whispered to me as I was standing there trying to rock the fussing Terry into some kind of quiet.
Elias must have heard him because he repeated, annoyed, “Right after Morris miraculously came into possession of this relic, he found Jesus!” The rest was a bunch of purple prose about the sainted Morris Golden, who’d spent the last years of his life in total devotion to his personal savior, Jesus Christ. Finally, the funeral ended, and even though it wasn’t the Catholic way, we threw handfuls of dirt on the grave in the Jewish tradition. Terry started screaming again.
And so good-bye, Morris Golden, and hello to what we both thought would be
the beginning of a life without shame and shackles for my boy Roy. Who knew how wrong two people could be?
“What a pile of horse shit,” Roy said as we headed back to the car after thanking Father Elias for taking the time to come out to Queens all the way from—well, he never actually said from which borough or town, although we assumed it was Hicksville—and for throwing such a swell funeral.
Elias, however, followed us. He handed Roy his card with just a phone number and his name. “Please call me. I must discuss the find that your late father left.”
“Yeah, sure,” Roy said, as in, Screw off. It ain’t happening.
The priest kissed Terry on his forehead and he momentarily—again—stopped bawling. Roy shot me a look, which I pretended not to notice.
“Father, you have the magic touch,” I said, wanting to get back into the car and out of the rain.
Father Elias brought me up short, however. “I only possess that which comes from my Lord Jesus Christ. Not magic. Belief!”
Oy. How do you answer something like that?
Roy took Terry from my arms and tried to hook him back into the car seat, but he screamed loud enough to wake the dead, no pun intended. I nervous-giggled, hoping this guy would just leave us alone.
Father Elias grabbed my sleeve as I was turning to help Roy deal with Terry, and sneered at me. “This is no laughing matter. I know who you are. I know what you did last year with that terrorist. I know you helped him. Do not let yourself get caught up again with the Antichrist. The thirteenth daimon has you in his sights!”
“Who?”
“The Satan. ‘And I saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and on his horns ten crowns, and on his heads a blasphemous name.’”
What a freak! I thought, but in reality the freak was freaking us both out.
I jerked my arm free and snapped back as calmly as only a reporter can when faced with a nut job. “A news story is a news story, Father! And that so-called terrorist was an innocent…” Why in the hell are you getting into this? I thought to myself before Elias cut me off, now shaking his finger at me.
“Well, Ms. Russo, what is now in Roy Golden’s possession,” he said, looking at him but speaking as if he weren’t there, “is as dangerous now as your so-called innocent man was back then. The only place for the papyri is in my church where we can consecrate them in the name of our Lord.” He turned and walked away without another word.
