The Altar Girl (8 page)

CHAPTER 13

T
HE HOUSE SMELLED
of mothballs and echoed with the sound of a tragic Ukrainian ballad, a powerful soprano wailing with unrelenting misery about her son’s death in an ancient war with the Tatars. Darwin’s law had prevailed after centuries of battles for the breadbasket of Europe: no one could cry like a Uke. We were the world heavyweight champions of mourning.

When I knocked, my former father-in-law opened the door and stood there mute, glaring at me, cane in hand. I refused to go away, so he moved aside to let me in. He stayed mum and kept his eyes on me as I passed him.

A solitary Tiffany desk lamp with an amber stained glass shade provided barely enough light in the living room to conduct a séance. A portrait of a baby-faced JFK hung on the center of the main wall, draped in black velvet. A framed picture of a battle-worn JFK rested on a dusty old piano, with the proclamation of a day of mourning from the Connecticut Legislature framed beside it. Both pictures looked as though they hadn’t been touched for fifty years. The piano contained a collection of family photos. Conspicuous in its absence was any sign of me in any of the pictures. Also conspicuous was the second swath of black velvet resting atop a picture of Rus’s son—my former husband. The photo showed him at his most professorial and dapper, speaking from a lectern with passion etched in his face. It had been taken the day he’d died fifteen months ago.

Parkinson’s had gripped Rus since I’d last seen him. His tottering and twitching would have elicited nothing but empathy had he been someone else. But he wasn’t someone else. He was the father-in-law who’d advised his son not to marry an unremarkable-
looking girl who wasn’t interested in homemaking. That only idiots and men who’d impregnated their girlfriends compromised at the altar.

We spoke Ukrainian. First-generation kids with any sliver of language skills spoke Ukrainian with their elders. It was better to mix in an English word when one’s vocabulary fell short than to avoid Ukrainian altogether. The latter was an exercise in humiliation and embarrassment, and an admission that one had drifted so far from home that she couldn’t remember the language of her youth.

“I thought we’d had our final words at his funeral,” he said, after turning down the stereo. “When I told you I never wanted to see you again for the rest of my life. Why are you here? Why are you tempting me?”

I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant when he said I was tempting him, but I knew he blamed me for his son’s death. After all, my former husband had crashed his car while doing a special favor for me. Rus had blamed me for every moment of unhappiness in his son’s life. There was no reason for his death to have been any different. We’d never talked about it, primarily because we’d never had a private conversation about anything.

“This will be quick,” I said. “Trust me. I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here. But I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Questions?” He tried to laugh as though it were an absurd proposition but burst into a fit of coughing instead.

I waited for him to regain his breath.

“Questions about my godfather,” I said. “About your brother.”

“I just buried him. And now you’re coming around asking questions? Who are you to ask any questions about him? Do you hear what I’m asking you? Who are
you
?”

“Did you have an appointment to meet with him on the day he died?”

Rus didn’t answer. Instead, he locked eyes with me and ground his lips in a circle as though he was cranking up his hatred for me to a higher level.

“My son was a good boy,” he said.

Normally I would have let the remark slide, waited a moment, and repeated my question. After all, my one and only goal was to get the answers I needed and leave.
Wasn’t it?

“No, he was not a good boy. Your son was a brilliant man. A brilliant professor of religion at Yale University. But everything had to be his way, and when that became impossible, he became impossible. No. He most definitely was not a good boy.”

Rus’s right palm crushed my cheek.

I could have stopped him. I could have blocked it with my arm. But I didn’t. There’s an unwritten rule in Ukrainian society that you never, ever, under any circumstances raise your hand to an elder. Even if you want to shake hands with someone to say hello, you wait for the older person to extend his hand first.

Had I reverted to the instincts my parents had honed, or did I actually want to get hit? Had I wanted to become a victim so I could prove to myself that I was a better person than my father-in-law? Whatever my reason for standing there and taking his blow, I couldn’t have hated myself any more at that moment. I could feel myself shaking, my thoughts running away from me, as happened in those rare instances when I lost control.

My eyes watered and my nose stung. An acrid taste of blood and onions filled my mouth.

I inhaled my tears. “Like son, like father,” I said.

I curled my hands into fists. No, I wasn’t a cop, a former soldier, or a trained fighter, but I didn’t care. Nor did it matter to me that he was an ailing old man, my elder, and my former father-in-law. If he raised his hand to me again I was going to hit him. The only question was whether I would have enough self-control to stop pummeling him once I started. I honestly wasn’t sure.

Disdain shone in his face. His hand shook. He started to raise it again.

“Good,” I said, barely recognizing my voice, which made me sound like someone who needed an exorcism. “Do it.”

I must have looked the part, too, because he hesitated. His eyes fell to my fists. After a few more seconds of teeth grinding, he returned his hands to his side.

“He was a terrible husband but I stayed with him. I never threatened to leave. I never uttered the word ‘divorce.’ And I was prepared to stay with him the rest of my life no matter what it cost me.
Because I’m Ukrainian Catholic
. Because that’s what I said I’d do when we took our vows.”

“He’d be alive if he hadn’t married you.”

“Don’t be so sure. Another woman in my shoes . . . Like one of those graduate students he slept with. I don’t know what one of them would have done. He’s gone and I’m sorry. I cried at his funeral. But it’s not my fault. You want to think otherwise? That’s your business. But don’t put your own guilt on me. I’m not interested.”

My former father-in-law had dropped his cane before hitting me. I picked it up and gave it back to him. He shuffled toward his recliner and sat down. Reached over and drained the rest of the amber liquid in his tumbler.

“Maybe if you’d stood up to him like that, things would have been better,” he said, staring into space.

That was a new one. Now I could add timidity to my list of spousal flaws. It was the perfect counterpart to one of my other deficiencies, namely my stubborn insistence on having a career. They pretty much covered the gamut of personalities. On the surface, this latest remark left no doubt that I was and always would be a loser in his eyes. And yet, there was something forgiving in his tone. At a minimum, he was implying his son had issues. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have suggested his wife should have stood up to him.

I decided to seize the moment and return to my original agenda. I sat down on the couch across from him. When interviewing company executives, it’s sometimes useful to test their mettle with a shocking question, rather than slowly leading into it. The current conditions were ripe for such a strategy.

“Do you think your brother’s death was an accident?”

Rus’s head snapped upward. His eyes stretched wide momentarily before he could control his expression. “The police said it was an accident. Did they say they were wrong?”

“He was afraid of stairs. He never went down to the basement at night, did he?”

“Do you know something I don’t?”

“If it was raining, and he knew the basement floor and the last couple of stairs would be wet, why would he have gone down there?”

Rus slammed his fist on his armrest. “Have the police told you something? Why would they tell you and not me?”

“You’re acting as though you wouldn’t be surprised if they had told me they’d made a mistake.”

“Did they? Did they admit they were wrong? Do they know who killed him?”

“Then you admit you think it wasn’t an accident, and that he was murdered.”

“Of course he was murdered! He never went down the stairs at night. Never!”

“Hallelujah. We agree on something.”

“How do you know this? Did the police—”

I stood up. “No. I haven’t talked to the police. It’s just my theory, and I’m pleased you agree. No one knew him better than you. And in answer to your next question, I have my own reasons for caring, not the least of which is that I loved my godfather, and I’m angry someone took him away before I could tell him that. Now, my last question is my first question, and it’s very important. Did you have an appointment to see him on the day he died?”

He threw his hands up in the air. “Appointment? What appointment? He was my brother. We didn’t make appointments. If I needed to see him, I picked up the phone and called. If he needed to see me, he showed up at my doorstep. He didn’t need to call ahead, like some other people would, if they had manners.”

“How can you possibly expect me to have manners when I’m such a hideous person to start with? So you didn’t have an appointment.”

He answered me with such venom I was afraid he might try to bury his cane in my eye. “No. I had no appointment.”

“That’s strange because I found the initials DP in his calendar for that day. In big letters. I don’t know of any other Ukrainians in the community with those initials, do you?”

He sneered as he sat thinking about it. He confirmed my suspicions by saying nothing. Then his eyes brightened as though something had occurred to him. “How do you know it wasn’t written in English? How do you know the appointment wasn’t with an American?”

“I don’t know. There was no one with the initials DP in his address book—”

“For that matter,” Rus said, “how do you know it was a person at all?”

“Are you saying it’s something else?”

Rus seemed to enjoy my uncertainty. He elevated his chin and chuckled. Curled his lips into a quizzical expression and shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it was a pet. A dog. Or maybe a cat. Or maybe it was a ghost. A ghost from the past.”

When I frowned, he laughed even harder. I stood there for a few seconds and waited for his laughter to subside. “Are you going to tell me what you mean by that?”

“I thought you were a mathematician. I thought you were ingenious. You can’t figure this out on your own?”

I pressed him to reveal what he thought he knew but he wouldn’t say anything more. I tried a soft tone, and then a harsher one. Nothing worked. I tried not to lead him with my suspicion about his deduction but when I failed with my general queries I gave it a try.

“You think DP is a place, not a person?” I said.

He smirked with the kind of intellectual arrogance befitting his deceased son. The way he arched his neck and wrinkled his nose left no doubt that he was certain he understood the meaning of DP.

“It’s a person and a place,” he said. “You can’t figure it out on your own, go ask your mother. Maybe she can help you.”

I marched toward the door and opened it to leave. Then I heard Rus’s voice behind me.

“When was the last time you went to see him? Have you even been there once during the last year?”

I didn’t answer. Instead I continued on my way out.

He hurled a few obscenities at my back. This was becoming a habit, I realized, people swearing at me as I left their homes.
On the surface, a potential cause for concern, but wasn’t therapy supposed to be this way? Didn’t pain precede healing?

I slammed the door shut behind me. More therapy. A wave of relief washed over me as soon as it clicked shut. I’d survived and hadn’t killed him, either. I wasn’t sure if I’d made any progress but the latter two achievements were minor causes for celebration.

I drove eight miles to the bedroom community of Rocky Hill and checked into a Super 8 motel. It was cheap, well-lit, close to the highway, and had a good rating online.

The next morning I ate a short stack of pancakes at the Town Line Diner for breakfast. Then I made a trip across the Connecticut River to the suburb of Hebron to visit my deceased husband’s grave. Rus was right. His son had been my husband. He may have been a terrible one but I’d promised before God to honor him for the rest of my life, and this former altar girl took her vows seriously. Afterward, I drove back to Rocky Hill to visit the person who’d killed him.

I drove to see my mother.

CHAPTER 14

I
DON
’
T HAVE
many vivid memories from childhood. At least not many pleasant ones. That’s not to say I was beaten constantly or struggled to survive. No. My parents made sure there was food on the table and clothes in our closet. My brother and I never suffered for anything other than calm. We were nervous all the time. In fact, our nerves remained on alert for the first eighteen years of our lives until each of us left for college. We simply never knew when our father would explode.

I do recall, however, one particular moment of joy. It was a moment of unconditional release and surrender. Fear and anxiety left me. Perhaps the constant trauma magnified its emotional resonance. Maybe that was a common experience for most kids. But to me it was anything but normal.

I was probably five or six years old and I hadn’t learned to swim yet. My father ordered me to take my inflated swimming ring and follow him into deep water, where he would take it away from me and force me to swim back alone. I was so afraid I would drown, I looked at my mother and begged her to let me stay ashore with her. She scolded my father and told him to leave me alone. Then she picked me up at the ocean’s edge and held me close to her breast. I could still feel her salty kiss on my forehead and the moisture of her bathing suit as she told me I didn’t have to go, that she would take care of me. And as the waves crashed ashore and spilled water onto my legs, I hung onto her and believed that at least one person on Earth loved me and would protect me until the day that I died.

Now I stood at the door to her corner condominium unit in Rocky Hill, pulse racing, wondering if she would even let me in her house. The thought of her slamming the door in my face made my stomach turn, even more so than the thought of having to talk to her at all. There are few things worse in life than holding hate in one’s heart for a parent, except the knowledge that the feeling is mutual.

The curtain in the front window moved. I couldn’t see anything through the tinted glass. Then I heard the sound of the chain sliding open and the door swung open.

She was a shockingly fit woman with striking gray hair, so streamlined from head to toe that she wouldn’t have needed the proverbial broom to take flight. The skin on her face glistened and belied her age. She didn’t say anything. She simply stared at me with her cold, disapproving eyes. Someone needed to say something. I decided I was the visitor, so the obligation fell to me.

I nodded at the beaten and worn hiking boots standing at attention beside the door.

“What’s with Marko’s shoes?”

She frowned as though I were an idiot for having to ask. “When you’re a woman living alone you can’t take any chances. If a burglar sees those shoes, he’ll assume there’s a man inside and he’ll go away. Unless the burglar knows my son and daughter. Then he’ll waltz right in, rob me, and kill me because he’ll know that neither of them stuck around to take care of me.”

She stepped aside to let me in. My spirits soared. If I was entering her house, there was a chance for reconciliation. This was familial hate as I knew it. Beneath it lay a desperate desire for healing and the inner peace that had evaded me my entire life, which made the heartbreak all the more excruciating.

I followed her through the house. As we passed the dining room, I glanced at the corner étagère that contained my mother’s prize possession, a jewelry box inlaid with rubies and emeralds. Her grandfather had been a craftsman commissioned by Czar Alexander III to produce such treasures. It was the only masterpiece that had stayed in the family and made it to America.

We entered the kitchen. The sweet smell of black cherries wafted into my nostrils. A rolling pin and cookie cutter rested on a cutting board covered with flour. Steam billowed from a huge silver pot on her stove. I knew by the smell and the utensils that my mother was making Ukrainian dumplings called
varenyky
. This particular batch would be stuffed with black cherries and served with melted cane sugar and sour cream. One of my childhood favorites. Mercy.

A mother never forgets her child’s weakness. I spied her checking out my figure.

“You hungry?” she said.

Another mother might have meant it in a caring way. But I knew that cajoling me into leaving a pound heavier would provide her with a sick form of satisfaction. Some mothers try to help their daughters become as beautiful as possible, while others reach a point where they prefer to compete with them.

Another daughter might have cared, but she would have never tried my mother’s black cherry
varenyky
. This is one of the benefits of aging. One can humble oneself when necessary to get the best out of life.

“Yes,” I said. “I’d love a couple. So thoughtful of you to make these for me.” Of course she hadn’t made them for me. Even if she’d known I was visiting, she wouldn’t have cooked for me.

My mother chuckled. “You’re so lucky I’m your mother. How many girls have such a good sense of humor? Obviously you got it from me. Your father’s idea of a joke was staring at the balance in his savings account. Sit down and let me fatten you up. You’re too thin.”

Her true motive, as suspected. What a surprise. “I did get my sense of humor from you, didn’t I?”

I sat down at the square kitchen table. My knees shook. So far so good but how would we get through the visit without one of us offending the other? She spooned four
varenyky
onto a plate and added sugar and sour cream. Poured two cups of tea and took the seat beside me.

“I left you a voice mail,” I said. “You didn’t return my phone call.”

“Why should I? You didn’t talk to me at your godfather’s funeral, or at the reception.”

“I walked up to you but you turned your back on me.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Oh, please, Mama.” I wasn’t making it up. She was always trying to pull my chain to make me feel miserable. In her world, guilt inspired remorse. Contrition was measured in dollars.

She stared ahead. “All those people watching and you didn’t even sit with your mother. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“We should all be ashamed of ourselves.”

“So what’s changed to make you call and show up at my house unannounced? Are you making so much money the bottom of your mattress is stuffed full? I have room under mine, you know.”

Love had been conditional in our house. Growing up it was based on scholastic achievement. Ever since I got a job, it was based on money.

“Really?” I said. “I would have guessed it would be stuffed by now with gifts from your many suitors.”

My mother was the black widow in the Uke community. Every widower and lifelong bachelor wanted to taste her cooking. I knew she’d made the
varenyky
for one of them. Easter Sunday was in two days. No self-respecting Ukrainian woman made
varenyky
during Lent, which meant the man in question had to be rich.

“There’s money and there’s New York money,” she said. “You’d think if my daughter had left me for a fancy job she would have bought me a Lexus by now. Especially given she’s driving a Porsche.”

It was a twelve-year-old car I’d bought six years ago with my first bonus. Other than my rapidly depleting savings and my paltry retirement account, it was the only hard asset I owned. A salary and bonus of a hundred thousand dollars doesn’t amount to much in New York City, where the marginal tax rate is north of fifty percent and rents are stratospheric. But there was no telling my mother any of that. The fact I’d given her the down payment on her condo didn’t matter, either. Her philosophy revolved around a single question: What have you done for me lately?

“As soon as I can afford to buy you a car, Mama, you’ll be the first to know.”

“I won’t hold my breath.”

I dug into the
varenyky
and momentarily forgot my agenda. Black cherries spilled open in my mouth. The juice blended with sugar while the tender dough melted with sour cream. The flavors exploded on my to
ngue. A moan escaped my lips. I brought my hand up quickly to cover it, but I was too late. When I glanced at my mother, I noted a curl of satisfaction on her lips. Whether she was happy I was consuming calories or deriving a cook’s pleasure,
I wasn’t sure.

“Tell me why you’re here,” my mother said. “Something’s happened. You need something from me. I only hear from my children when something terrible has happened. What is it?”

I explained my suspicions about my godfather’s death and my visit to his house with Roxy. I had no choice. The minute I asked her for help with the initials, she would ask why. I decided I was better off being up-front and honest. I didn’t mention my incident with Donnie Angel at all. If I had, she would have spent the next ten minutes screaming at me for being a fool and blamed my kidnapping on my carelessness.

Her expression changed from one of surprise to disgust as I told her my story.

“Did you just make all this garbage up to irritate me,” she said, “or are you serious?”

I felt the heat rise to my face. “I’m serious. Of course I’m serious. When have you known me not to be serious?”

“Who do you think you are? Angie Dickinson?”

“Who?”

“Angie Dickinson. The actress. She was
Police Woman
. Did you go to police school or did you go to business school?”

“Neither, actually—”

“Don’t get wise with me, child. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. My daughter, a financial executive in New York City, wasting her vacation time solving a crime that doesn’t even exist.”

“You think he fell down the stairs?”

“You are doing this on your vacation, right?”

“Of course. Answer my question.”

“The police said he fell down the stairs. What could you possibly know that they don’t know?”

“The same thing you do. That my godfather had a fear of stairs and never, ever would have gone down to the basement on a rainy night.”

“Let me tell you something about men, child. You give a man enough wine and he’ll climb the roof of his house and dance naked under the antennas during a thunderstorm. Especially that homemade wine your godfather used to make. Why are you doing this? Do you still feel guilty about your husband’s death? Are you trying to punish yourself for some reason?”

In fact, she should have felt guilty about his death. She was the one who’d called me in Manhattan the day of his death sounding frantic. One of her suitors had gotten drunk and was about to rape her. Help me, she pleaded. Don’t call the police, I don’t want to be fodder for community gossip. And I don’t want to get this man in real trouble, she said. My former husband had just finished giving a lecture at Trinity College in Hartford. By then we were practically living separate lives, but he still had a sliver of decency about him so he took off to Rocky Hill right away at my request. He probably never saw the SUV that hit him head-on because its headlights weren’t working. Nor did he live long enough to find out my mother’s alleged assailant had left by then. The truth was that I was never convinced she was even in trouble that night. In my heart, I was certain she simply wanted to cause a commotion. As always, she just wanted attention.

“Why would I feel guilty about my husband’s death? I’m not the one who cried for help.”

My mother appeared incredulous. “I wouldn’t have had to call him if you were living near me, like a caring daughter should, would I? Obviously you must blame yourself. Obviously he’s dead today because of you.”

I wanted to strangle her. I wanted to go to her garage, get a shovel, come back in the house, and tell her I was ready to bury her if she would just please die. I couldn’t have imagined revealing the depth of my rage to anyone, and the mere thought of it inspired a new level of self-loathing. But that was the truth.

Instead of confronting her and pursuing what would undoubtedly turn out to be an illogical argument, however, I impressed myself. I stayed on point.

“Do you know anyone in the community with the initials DP?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

I explained the entry in my godfather’s calendar. At first her frown deepened with disapproval. I got the sense she thought there was something wrong with me if I was looking up entries in my deceased godfather’s address book. But she’d always liked crossword puzzles, and her expression gradually morphed into one of deep concentration.

Her eyes came alive. She looked at me and shrugged. “It’s obvious, but it’s not what you think.”

I moved forward in my seat. “It’s not?”

“No. It’s not the Ukrainian DP. It’s the English DP.”

“You know someone with those initials? Someone he was close to?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Dolly Parton.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Mama . . .”

“He was obsessed with her. And the bigger her boobs got, the more he obsessed over her. Men are babies. Give them a good meal and show them a big tit and they’ll do anything for you.” She arched her back and thrust her cleavage in my direction. “You show me a so-called leg man and I’ll show you a liar. You want seconds?”