Shadow Baby (14 page)

“The guilt,” I said. “He couldn’t take the guilt.”

The old man nodded.

“He had to live with the guilt,” I said. “Day in and day out, there it was. Wake up in the morning, there it was staring him in the face again.”

“And what was it that was staring him in the face?”

“Guilt, because he killed his grandchild.”

“I thought it was winter that killed his grandchild.”

“Winter played a role,” I said. “I do not deny that winter played a role. But who do you think was behind the wheel of that truck? Who do you think was driving when it slid into the ditch? Who was it who decided to go Glass Factory Road instead of Route 12?”

The old man stirred his water with his straw. All the straws at Crystal’s Diner are red. Red is Johnny Zielinski’s favorite color.

“Everyone knows what Glass Factory Road is like in the middle of a snowstorm,” I said. “You don’t go Glass Factory. You take Route 12. Route 12 stands at least a chance of being plowed. Route 12 is the only logical route if you’re trying to get to a hospital in a snowstorm. If you take Glass Factory you’re doomed.”

“And so he became a hermit.”

“And so he became a hermit,” I said. “Can we go find him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

There was a mean sound in my voice. I could hear it. The words kept going around in my head:
why not, why not, why not
. Stop, I thought. I said my question again. I took the meanness out of my voice.

“Because you don’t know where he is,” the old man said.

“He’s a hermit near the Vermont border!”

The old man said nothing. I listened to my voice again, going on in my head.
He’s a hermit near the Vermont border
. But that was only a story.

Again I had made up a story.

My grandfather was a hermit who lived in a patch of primeval forest near the Vermont border. In the summer he gathered berries and dried them in the sun. He traded pelts for the bare essentials. He wore deerskin clothes that he tanned himself. Over the long winter nights, sitting beside the small fire in his tipi, he chewed the deerskin to make it soft and supple. He cut it with his sharp knife and stitched his clothes together with rawhide threaded through a needle made of bone. His moccasins were reinforced with double rows of stitches.

My grandfather was alive up there. He was living that life right now. I could feel the life he was living. I could feel the silence of his life in the tipi, how he wanted his granddaughter, his only surviving grandchild, to come and show him how to make useful and beautiful metal objects. My hermit grandfather was longing for me. I looked at the old man.

“He’s up there,” I said. “He’s in his tipi.”

The old man nodded.

“He could very well be waiting for me,” I said. “Tamar isn’t always right. No one in the world can be completely accurate one hundred percent of the time. It’s a law of nature.”

He kept nodding.

“Do you know your grandfather’s name?”

“Of course I do.”

Knowing names is a point of pride with me. I know not only the first names of people, but I know their last names and any middle names they might have. I know all the names of every kid at Sterns Middle School. It’s not hard to learn their
middle names. You need only look at the teacher’s list. One look is all I need. Once there, never gone. That’s reading for you.

“Clifford Winter,” I said. “That’s his name.”

I
t took many a year for me to glean that from Tamar. It took me years of sneaking in a question here and a question there, years of plotting to ask questions when Tamar would least expect it, such as:

“Ma, what was Grampa’s name?”

That stopped her. Tamar didn’t even hear the question, she was so stunned by me saying the word
Grampa
. I saw that I had made a mistake. There was a look on her face.

“Grampa
? Did I just hear you say
Grampa?”

“Yes. What was his name?”

She was still stuck on the word
Grampa
. She started shaking her head and muttering. I had my notebook ready, but I saw that it was a useless proposition. When Tamar starts to mutter, there’s no hope.

“Grampa?”

Is it really that strange? When I was born in that truck in the ditch in the middle of the blizzard, wasn’t I his grandchild? But Tamar was muttering and shaking her head and I closed my notebook and left the kitchen. When I came back an hour later she was forking bread and butter pickles out of the jar and eating them, one slice at a time.

Many moons later I tried again.

“Ma, what’s your father’s name?”

“Clifford.”

No questions, no looks, no muttering. That one just slipped right out of her.

“What do you want to know for?”

“School. Do they call him Cliff or Clifford? Or Ford, maybe. Would Ford be a possibility?”

“What do they want to know in school for?” she said.

“A genealogy project.”

She looked at me.

“Family tree. That kind of thing,” I said. “Charts. Diagrams. Ancestors.
Et al.”

Her eyes narrowed. I kept on talking.

“Cliff? Clifford? Ford?”

Suddenly she looked tired. She gave up. I could tell. I can always tell when she decides to stop pursuing something. A tired look comes over her all at once. It invades every cell of her being, and around her the air slumps, too.

“Cliff.”

“Thanks Ma. By the way, I also need the name of my father.”

I tried. You have to give me credit for trying. I know it’s in there somewhere. The name of my father is in Tamar’s brain and there is a way to get it out. I have not found it, but there must be a way. A way must exist.

“You don’t have a father.”

“Everyone has a father. It’s a law of nature,” I said for the hundredth time, and then we were back to square one. That was all she wrote.

T
he old man and I sat in our booth and watched Johnny Zielinski play with the star cookie cutter. He could play with something shiny for hours.

“So that’s my grandfather’s name,” I told the old man. “Clifford Winter.”

Crystal poured more coffee into the old man’s coffee cup.

“Cream?”

“Thank you,” he said. “Do you have a telephone book?”

She brought it over. The old man slid it across the table to me.

“What’s this for?”

“Look in it,” he said. “Look in it for Clifford Winter.”

I couldn’t breathe right. I kept trying to take a deep breath but the air wouldn’t go all the way in.

“He’s a hermit,” I said.

The old man said nothing. I opened up the phone book to Utica, to a page with Clifford Winter on it.

Winter, Clifford 1431 Genesee Street 732-7953
.

“You can call him,” the old man said.

I kept looking at his name in the phone book. Had it been there the whole time? My grandfather, who chewed deer hide to make it soft enough to slip his bone needle through, who traded pelts for salt and sugar and coffee, who collected only dead wood for his campfires, lived at 1431 Genesee Street and had a phone?

“It’s not the same person,” I said.

The old man carried our dishes to the counter and passed them to Crystal. When he came back, he had a tinfoil gum wrapper in his hand. He started to fold it into a tiny animal, for Johnny.

“My grandfather is a hermit,” I said. “It’s possible. My grandfather could just as easily be a hermit as you could be an immigrant who lives in a trailer in Sterns and doesn’t have any family.”

Words, words, terrible words. They kept tumbling out of my mouth. My chest hurt. There was a feeling of despair in
my rib cage. Nothing of the person I wanted to be was coming out in my words. The wrong words kept bubbling and churning inside me, that whole long day. My hermit grandfather started slipping away from me, fading north into the Vermont woods. In my mind I reached for him, but he shook his head.

Meanwhile the image of a man I didn’t know, sitting hunched at a table in the kitchen of a Utica apartment I’d never seen, started taking shape. Terrible words that hurt the old man kept spilling from my mouth, and Johnny Zielinski was laughing but it sounded like crying.

T
here is much I still wonder about the old man. Questions I have that I did not have the chance to ask. What did he eat on the ship to America, for example? Was there food on board or did they have to bring their own? Did they eat hardtack and drink water from big wooden barrels belowdecks? Did the ship have a rough crossing? Did it hit a small iceberg and almost plunge beneath the surface of the waves, like the
Titanic?
Where did the young Georg Kominsky go when they finally let him through at Ellis Island? Did he sleep on the street? Was there anyone in New York City who could speak his language? Was anyone nice to him?

They never found out. His parents must never have known what happened to their sons. There were no other children. I know because the old man told me when I was doing his oral history.

“My parents. Myself. My brother, Eli.”

That was it, the four of them. Georg, seventeen, and Eli, eleven. They probably told the old man to take care of Eli on the journey. To watch over him. Keep him safe. If they were religious, they probably said prayers every night: God, keep
our children safe. But they never knew.
What happened
, they asked themselves. On their deathbeds they were probably still wondering.
What happened?

Georg’s family may have written to the authorities in America.

Dear America, We have not heard from our beloved sons Georg and Eli. Have you heard of them? Are they alive? Georg’s identifying characteristics are these: he is seventeen years old, he has a slight limp in his left leg from a fever he had at age nine, he works well with tin and other forms of sheet metal, especially making decorative lanterns, and he writes in the air with his nose. Eli is eleven. A child. Please help us. They are our children and we are missing them terribly
.

I asked the old man about it once.

“Did your parents write to you after you came to America?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not? Didn’t they miss their children?”

“No.”

“Then why not?”

“They were dead,” the old man said. “They died before I came to America.”

He got up and took one of his extralong fireplace matches out of its extralong box and went to the furnace and lit it. He blew the match out and looked at me.

“Don’t worry, Clara,” he said. “It’s all right. They died long ago.”

My dreams of the old man’s mother and father—the mother in her apron, the father bent at his forge—shimmered in front of me and faded away.

“It was T.B.,” the old man said. “Many people died of it then.”

I knew about T.B. Consumption. When you’re near the end, your eyes sparkle and shine and your cheeks burn red. To the unschooled, a person near death from consumption might look like the picture of health.

“It was soon before we left for America,” the old man said. “With both of them gone we decided to leave.”

The old man stacked the dishes in his sink and ran hot water over them. He squirted in a little dish soap. Miniature bubbles rose from the steam and then popped.

“My mother used to sit in the bedroom with Eli,” he said. “I remember her as a young woman, with Eli a baby. She sat in the dark, singing him to sleep. That’s how I like to remember my mother: the sound of her voice in a dark room, singing.”

T
he old man taught me to seek consistency. “Consistency is a part of the art of possibility,” he said. “Everything is related to everything else.” That’s what he was training me in. I wasn’t far along in my apprenticeship when suddenly he was no longer there. I was only a beginner. It takes years, many years, to become a master. That’s why I’m starting to think that the old man was a child prodigy. He may well have been a prodigy in his hometown. He may well have been the first child in the world to master the art of metalworking at such a tender age, the age of thirteen or fourteen.

It’s possible. Think of all the Dalai Lamas, discovered at the age of three or four or, at most, five. There are certain signs you look for. There are rituals and secrets that only this child, the future Dalai Lama, can divine. He can’t be taught how to be the Dalai Lama. He can only be born into it. It is his destiny.

I started looking for relationships that would explain my destiny, and the destiny of Baby Girl. That’s what the old man taught me:

“Everything is related to everything else. Consistency is a part of the art of possibility.”

There’s got to be an explanation somewhere. It’s hard to know what to look for, though. How do you figure out destiny?

Every week the old man and I baked a different kind of cookie. The rules were few but always consistent; our cookies were (a) rolled, (b) thin and crisp, (c) fully baked. Sugar cookies, gingersnaps, lemon cookies, and the like. We tried out all the cookie cutters. All worked perfectly. All were beautiful. All were constructed from cast-off materials. These were the consistencies among the cookie cutters, and their relationship one to another.

“I’m studying the art of possibility,” I said to the old man. “I’m looking for consistency.”

“Good,” he said.

“Consistencies among cookie cutters, snow, twins, and babies dying in winter.”

The old man looked at me.

“Are you sure you understand what consistency means?”

“Consistency,” I said. “The agreement of parts or features to one another or a whole.”

I do that sometimes. I look things up and get the exact definition. You’d be surprised how many definitions there are for a single word. Take an ordinary word. Snow, for example. Or winter. You would think there would be one, possibly two meanings at most for either of those words. You would be wrong.

“Actually there are several definitions for consistency,” I said. “But that’s the one I like the best.”

“Why?” the old man said.