Page 14

Day and night the rancid smells of cooking and garbage were trapped in the stale air. Some of the residents on the higher floors could not face the long journey up and down the stairs and dropped their refuse bags from their windows like bombs that often burst open on the cobbled ground by the trash cans in the lane. There, a group of terrifying wildcats permanently lurked, fighting over the garbage. They seemed to Theo to be of a different species to the domestic cat, huge and hideous with scars and open wounds and bristly torn fur smeared with filth. They were rumored to use the fire escapes to steal babies from their cribs at night, and their caterwauling in the small hours was enough to freeze the blood.

Inside, Theo and Elena’s apartment consisted of four small rooms—a cramped bedroom for each of them, a tiny kitchen with a gas stove, and a living room with a fireplace that didn’t draw properly, so that the price of a little warmth was being enveloped in a thick black smoke that made them practically invisible to each other as they coughed and gasped for air.

They shared the toilet with the other three apartments on their floor. It was cramped and windowless and there was no electric light, so visits required crossing the hall with a candle. Horrors awaited if it went out, as enormous cockroaches and worse lived in there, waiting to latch on to defenseless victims as they crouched.

They were prisoners, Theo thought, captive like the pigeons that the caretaker kept in coops up on the roof. Sometimes he followed the old man up there and watched from behind a smoking chimney stack as he let them out to fly and then stood on a cornice, sinister against the skyline, and waved his black pole like a necromancer to call them back.

But to Theo’s surprise, his previously fastidious mother refused to be discouraged. She laughed at the smoke and the cockroaches and at the mice that ran in and out of holes in the wainscot, skillfully evading the traps she set for them each morning, and with Theo’s help, she bargained for vegetables and penny pinches of rice and butter with the peddlers and shopkeepers on Orchard Street, and concocted meals that were the highlight of their weary days.

The best dishes she reserved for when Frank came to dinner once a week. She rightly regarded him as their savior and constantly expressed her gratitude to him, which made him blush beet red and squirm with embarrassment as he stammered that he wished he could do more, but that he also had responsibilities to his old mother, with whom he lived in a small apartment over on Hester Street.

“You have opened my eyes, Frank,” Elena told him. “I had thought ill of the Jews before because my husband’s parents refused to accept me. In fact, they pretended he was dead after he married me.” Elena shuddered, and there were tears in her eyes as she recalled the memory.

“I know,” said Frank sympathetically. “Michael told me.”

“I hated them,” she said, warming to her theme. “But they weren’t done. When Theo was eleven, Michael’s father took him. It was the worst day of my life. I cried, I tore my hair, I was in despair until San Antonio answered my prayers and restored my son to me. And now that we have moved to this neighborhood, I worry that the old man is here still and will try again. I lie awake at night, thinking about it.”

“I think it’s all right,” said Frank soothingly. “I’ve asked around and I’ve found no trace of him. There are so many of us here. People come and go all the time and leave nothing behind.”

“But I don’t understand. Why would you be looking for him?” Elena asked, staring at Frank with sudden suspicion.

“Theo asked me to. After Michael died.”

“Is this true?” asked Elena, turning to her son, her eyes wide with alarm.

“Yes,” said Theo. “They’re my grandparents. I thought they might help.”

“They wouldn’t. Don’t you know that? They would take you away from me and make you live with them,” said Elena, almost hysterical now. “Promise me that you won’t go looking for them again. Swear it.”

Theo nodded reluctantly. The move to the Lower East Side had had the same effect on him as his mother, making his father’s family seem within reach, but unlike her, he wanted desperately to find them. He still remembered the authority in his grandfather’s voice—that sense the old man had conveyed that he could explain the world if he was just given enough time—and the feel of his grandmother’s hands as they slid down over his head, as if she was memorizing him. He longed to see them again and to be told that he was a part of their family.

He was like the survivor of a shipwreck, scanning the horizon for land. Released by his father’s death from his promise to forget, he had already gone looking for his grandparents several times since the move, trying to recognize the streets the old man had taken him through on that long-gone summer afternoon, but all the tenement buildings looked the same. Once, he’d been convinced that he’d caught sight of Rachel, the hunchbacked peddler whom they had encountered outside his grandfather’s building, but when he ran across the street, dodging the traffic, and went up close, he found the woman looked nothing like her and that there was a real child, not beans, inside her baby carriage.

The disappointment had hurt like a body blow, and he felt the same now, hearing that Frank had found no trace of his grandparents. The promise to stop looking for them extracted by his mother felt like another door closing, shutting out the light.

Elena breathed deeply, trying to regain control of her emotions. “I’m sorry, Frank,” she said, reaching out and taking hold of his hand. “Michael’s death has unnerved me. Nothing feels safe anymore. But it’s better when I don’t think of him. Much better. With your help, Theo and I are trying to start anew.”

“It’s not better for me.”

“What?” Elena looked up from her sewing, not understanding.

Theo had been replaying the dinner conversation in his mind ever since Frank left, and now his long-suppressed anger toward his mother burst out from him like a flood tide breaking the walls of a crumbling dam: “It’s not better not thinking of my father. It’s worse. It’s like you’re killing him a second time, pretending he didn’t exist. Frank’s too polite to say so, but he feels the same. I know he does. He loved Dad, just like I did. Like I do!” Theo added, raising his voice.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Elena, flustered.

“Yes, you do,” said Theo harshly. “How do you think I’ve felt listening to you talking about him burning in hell this last month? And then leaving me to go to the funeral alone? Do you know how old I am?”

“Fourteen.”

“Exactly. And you think that’s right? You think that’s how a mother should treat her son?”

“He did this to us. He disgraced us, left us with nothing. He put us here. Have you forgotten that?” said Elena, fighting back now that she had recovered from the initial shock of Theo’s attack.

“He didn’t want to. He worked like he did to succeed, to make us rich and give you the best that money can buy. But he was defeated by the Depression, by Alvah ... God, you don’t even know who that is, do you?” said Theo incredulously, seeing the uncomprehending look on his mother’s face.

“No, I don’t. Who is it?”

“A snake who organized the workers against him. One of your Communists.” Theo laughed humorlessly. “It doesn’t matter. The point is that you had no idea what Dad was having to deal with at the factory.”

“He didn’t tell me, and nor did you, for that matter.”

“You could’ve asked. You saw the stress he was suffering from.”

“Stop! Please stop!” Elena pleaded, putting her hands up to her temples.

“All you care about is yourself!” he shouted. “I don’t exist, just like Dad didn’t.”

“What are you talking about? I love you. You’re my son.”

“I’m talking about my school. I was happy there, and you took it away from me. Destroyed my hopes.”

“Your father did that.”

“He couldn’t have without you. That’s why he went through that charade with my coach. To get you on his side. And God did he succeed!”

“Your coach was a Communist. He was training you up to be a Red.”

“Rubbish. He cared about me, wanted me to make something of myself. Not like the two of you.”

“The Communists killed my parents. Your grandparents. Have you forgotten that? They took away everything from me. My home, my country ...”

Elena had started to cry, but Theo steeled himself to go on. He had to. He felt his life depended on it.

“Coach Eames wasn’t like that and you know it,” he told his mother. “Don’t you dare tell me he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing like you did before.”

Elena was silent. She looked crestfallen, and Theo wondered in a corner of his brain if she might be going to apologize, but he’d gone too far to stop now and escalated his attack further, going to the forbidden place that he had tried without success to obliterate from his mind. It was as if he had been headed there from the beginning and only realized it now when it was too late to turn back.

“You were thinking about yourself, just like you always do,” he said slowly, deliberately. “About what happened to you. About your church and your parents, about Don Andrés ...”

“What are you talking about?” Elena looked genuinely incredulous at the sudden turn in the conversation, but that didn’t deter Theo.

“You encouraged him.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Everyone could see it. Why do you think he kept on coming back?”

“Because he likes the church. He didn’t know about it before. But that stopped because of you. I hope you’re pleased with yourself.”

“You bet I am. I should have told my father about that stupid book he gave me. He was using me to get at you, and I let him. It makes me ashamed.”

“He was not. He was being kind, even though you didn’t deserve it with the way you treated him. You were rude and ungrateful. You made me ashamed.”

“You’re blind,” said Theo, shaking his head. “He’s been after you since that first day he came to the church. When I went back to the presbytery, I heard him talking with Father Juan. He said you were like a painting. A Madonna. He said you were beautiful and that you had faith like that priest that got shot. The one you knew.”

Theo’s voice slowed as he said the words that he had kept bottled up in his head for so long. Aloud, they didn’t sound so ugly or dangerous. Maybe because they were true.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Elena asked.

“I don’t know,” said Theo softly. His anger had evaporated, replaced now by a cold emptiness and a pricking behind the eyes.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” said Elena. “I swear it on all that is holy. Not for one moment did I think of Don Andrés in an impure way, and it pains me that you could believe such a thing.” It hurt Theo to see that she had her hand on her heart.

“Maybe you didn’t know what you were feeling.”

“I knew. My conscience is God’s most precious gift. More valuable than life itself. Do you think I would sully it like that?”

Theo shook his head. Now the idea seemed crazy, when he had been certain it was true a minute before.

“You humiliated me that day, Theo. And yes, you’re right: it hurt even more because I loved that church. It was the last link I had to where I came from, to what I had lost. I tried to carry on going because of that, even though it wasn’t the same. People looked at me differently. They knew you weren’t with me and that Don Andrés had stopped coming. But I wouldn’t give in, until I had no choice, after what your father did. And I didn’t deserve it. None of it. Just like you didn’t deserve what happened to you, for which I’m sorry. More than I can say.”

Theo wanted to run away and he wanted to embrace his mother all at the same time. Instead, he sat rooted to his chair, weighed down by the silence between them. Words dried in his throat, where before they had come rushing out uncontrolled. He felt exhausted, more tired than he could ever remember.

Elena began to get up and he forced himself to speak. “I’m sorry too,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I know it seems like I do, but I don’t.”

She leaned down over him and stroked his hair, just as she used to do when he was a boy. “I’ve always found it so hard to get beyond what happened to me,” she said, and her voice was quiet, almost a whisper. “I wasn’t much older than you, and it’s stayed in my head. In my dreams. The shots, the screams, the fire. That they should have died like that.” She paused, breathing deeply, gathering herself before she went on: “Michael made it better. He made me feel safe, but then he took it away. And it was as if I’d lost everything all over again. But I hadn’t. I have you. My beloved son.”

Theo was crying. He reached up blindly and took his mother’s hand. Outside, it had begun to rain and the torrent of water running down the dark window glass felt like a stream washing away the barriers that had for so long kept them apart.

In the days that followed, Theo was buoyed by the improvement in the relationship with his mother that followed their conversation, but the new openness between them did nothing to help his ongoing struggle to make sense of his father’s death, which his mother understood even less than he did.

He searched constantly in his mind for his father, but Michael was as elusive in death as he had been in life. Theo’s memories fragmented if he looked at them too closely. He remembered words, but not how they had been spoken; times they had shared together, but not how those moments had felt. He had often been told that he looked like his father, and he took to gazing at his reflection in the mirror for minutes at a time, trying to find traces of the dead man, but he remained forever just out of sight.

One night Theo imagined that if he died, too, then he might find his father waiting on the other side, ready to explain everything, but the thought frightened him and he backed away, squeezing his temples with his fingers to expel the idea from his mind.

He was haunted by the image of the big imitation revolver hanging upside down outside the gun shop on Fourteenth Street. He knew why: the gunshot had been his father’s final message. Brutal and simple, it told them that he did not love his wife and son, because he had been prepared to abandon them to destitution, and that the world was a terrible place from which he had had to escape. But that message was the polar opposite of everything he’d always said about himself and about them. It contradicted his constantly repeated assertion that they had been chosen by destiny. Was life meaningless? Was that what he was telling them? Had he been lying all along?

Theo needed to find his father to ask him why he had blown his brains out. And to punish him and even perhaps to forgive him. But he could do none of these things. And every morning he rose exhausted from his broken dreams to face the life of grinding poverty to which his father had condemned them.

Soon it got worse. On a night in March a blizzard blew over the city. Snow swirled in the light of the arc lamps and settled on window ledges and fire escape treads. Down below, the garbage disappeared under a white cloak, and Theo’s face lit up as he looked out in the morning on this magical transformation of ugliness into beauty that had occurred while he was asleep.

But with the snow came a new kind of cold that spread through the tenements in the days that followed, grasping the inhabitants in a hypothermic vise. Theo and Elena could not afford the dollar sacks of coal that the street vendors sold, and so Theo had to join thousands of others who roamed the streets with their makeshift carts, foraging for wood.

Beneath the thin layer of snow was ice. A horse slipped in the road outside their tenement building and lay quivering in agony for hours until a policeman finally arrived to put it out of its misery. And people began dying, too, carried out of the tenements in cardboard coffins and stowed in the back of morgue vans whose gassy exhausts filled the frosty air with clouds of choking black-and-blue smoke as they drove away.

Elena began to cough. At first Theo thought it might be because of the damp steam from the wet laundry that they had had to hang inside, draped across the furniture because of the weather, but the cough persisted and got worse. It racked her thin body, and Theo became terrified that he would lose her.

She lay in bed, holding Theo’s hand, and gazed at the shrine on the opposite wall. She had carefully packed up all its pictures and statues when they’d left the Fourteenth Street apartment and had set them up here in exactly the same arrangement, with the wooden cross up above. Only the porcelain Christ that Theo had broken was missing from the assembly. Amid all the troubles at the factory, he had never gotten around to replacing it as he had intended, and there was a space on the side of the shrine where it had once been.

Suddenly, Theo felt an overwhelming need to confess. He had to tell her. It was as if the untold sin undermined the power of the shrine like short-circuited electricity.

“I broke it,” he told her, the words spilling out of him in a rush before he knew he was going to speak. “Christ, I mean. Because I was angry at you, and because I wanted to know what would happen. I’m really sorry ...” He broke off because he was crying and couldn’t say any more.

“I know,” she said, looking up at him and taking hold of his hand. “I knew all the time, and it doesn’t matter. God forgives you if you are sorry. He always does.”

“Will he forgive Dad?”

“No, I don’t think he can,” she said sadly, looking up at the cross. “Your father’s not sorry.”

She closed her eyes and he said no more, not wanting to upset her. Soon she fell asleep and he stayed beside her all night long, anxiously watching her labored breathing until he, too, slept where he sat, as the gray light of the early dawn began peeping in between the thin cotton drapes.

In the morning Frank came and brought an old Jewish doctor with a long, doleful face that grew longer as he took Elena’s temperature, stared down her throat, and listened to her chest through his stethoscope. He moved the chest piece up and down her rib cage, while her wide-open garnet-brown eyes stared up into his.

When he had finished, he looked over at the shrine. “You’re a Christian,” he said. “A stranger in a strange land here!”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Innocents abroad.”

He smiled and his face lost its lugubriousness, almost as if it was a party trick. “The shrine’s beautiful,” he told her.

“Thank you.”

“Do you pray a great deal?”

“Yes. The saints are watching over us, me and my son.”

“Good,” he said. “Because you must pray to them now for life, you hear me? Not how you Christians say—‘thy will be done.’ Your son needs you.”

“I know,” she said and squeezed his hand as he got up to leave.

Theo and Frank followed him out of the room. “It’s touch and go,” the doctor told them, writing out a prescription on the table in the living room. “This medicine may help, but we need the weather to change. It’s too cold for the poor and the weak—Christians and Jews. And she needs to fight, which is hard because she’s delicate.”

Whether it was due to Elena’s prayers or just a favorable adjustment in the movement of the continental jet stream, the unseasonable weather did change on the day after the doctor’s visit, and the long-delayed New York spring suddenly arrived with a burst of sunshine breaking through the overhanging clouds. The high walls meant there was little change in the light at the back of the tenement, but the warmth in the air soon had a beneficial effect, and Elena began to rally.

On his next visit, the doctor recommended air and exercise, so every morning she and Theo walked in the neighborhood, going farther as Elena’s strength grew. One day they crossed the Bowery and found themselves in Little Italy. It was like entering a new country where the pushcart vendors sold eggplant and plum tomatoes and olives, instead of the Jewish food they had been used to. They called out their wares in Italian, and Elena half understood. It wasn’t her language, but the people were of her world and she felt the hair on her skin quivering as she stood stock-still on Mulberry Street and tried to take in everything around her—the signs on the shops and in the windows, the dress of the people, the infectious chorus of a Verdi opera being played through a loudspeaker outside the entrance of a phonograph shop, the smell of pizza and oil, and another Latin world stronger in her nostrils than anything she had experienced since she first came to America.

And then, around the corner, came the Virgin Mary. Borne by six handsome young men in open-necked shirts on a platform of shimmering silk and flowers—roses and lilies and marigolds—she floated at head height with a beatific, serene expression on her curiously fleshlike face. Elena was ecstatic. Gazing up, she saw not a statue but a vision of the Holy Mother herself, like the one the peasant Juan Diego saw in Guadalupe five hundred years before.

Without a word, she joined the procession and began to follow the float down the street in the wake of the golden-robed priest and his acolytes. Theo pushed his way through the crowd to keep up with her. All along the sidewalks, people were kneeling and smiling and crossing themselves and even breaking into song.

“Today is the Annunciation when the angel came to Our Lady,” Elena told Theo, shouting over the noise. “At home there was fiesta and nobody worked, not even my father. We danced instead!”

The procession wound its way up Mulberry Street, turned and turned again, and entered a small church filled with incense and saints in alcoves and awash with deep color from the sun’s illumination of the stained-glass windows.

Theo saw that his mother was crying. “What is it?” he asked fearfully. “Why are you upset?”

“I’m crying for joy,” she said, taking his hand. “God is here. We’re going to be all right, Theo. I know it.”