Styx & Stone (2 page)

When I landed in New Holland about six months after Mom had passed away, I welcomed the distraction it provided. I had tried to stick it out in New York, living at home with my grieving father after the terrible year of 1957, but it wasn’t the moment to repair our relationship. He was adrift, and the only thing he knew for sure was that I displeased him. Finally, a college professor of mine steered me toward her old friend Charlie Reese and a job at the
New Holland Republic
. What harm was there in chancing it, she asked. For my part, I was happy to have found a job that didn’t involve shorthand and fetching coffee. New Holland may not have been everything I had hoped for, but a girl can’t be picky when it comes to careers. I considered myself lucky, but my father was ashamed of my choice. Our family’s is a legacy of erudition and the arts, and I was not holding up my end. Although to his mind, my choice of career was the least of my offenses.

The chill in our relationship mellowed somewhat once I left home. Absence makes the heart grow fonder for some, but with us it was more out of sight, out of mind. Though our differences troubled me from time to time, the wound had calloused over and had become an ordinary bother, like arthritis or tennis elbow. Under the present circumstances, however, it merited my immediate attention; my father might expire at any moment, alone in a hospital bed two hundred miles away.

I called my editor, Charlie Reese, and told him my plans. He understood, said not to worry about work, and wished me well.

Before setting out for New York, I stopped at Fiorello’s, the soda shop opposite my apartment on Lincoln Avenue. Over a coffee, I discussed the situation with the proprietor, Ron Fiorello, known to the locals as Fadge. He was a big man—six foot two and over three hundred pounds—a few years older than I was (twenty-three), and the closest thing I had to a friend in New Holland. We spent long hours sitting at the counter in his shop, talking late into the night. I enjoyed his wit and salty humor. He liked having a girl around.

I remembered the first time I realized we would get on. Having recently moved to New Holland, I had been frequenting the shop for a few weeks, enjoying the occasional cup of coffee over a newspaper, which I liked to read in a booth near the back. On that day, I arrived just before lunch, and Fadge greeted me at the door, a magazine tucked under his arm.

“Hi,” he said. He looked distressed. “You’re Ellie, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Watch the store for a few minutes. I’ll be right back.”

He rushed to the back room and disappeared into the toilet, where he remained for nearly forty-five minutes. When he finally emerged, looking relieved and not the least bit embarrassed, he thanked me and asked me how I’d fared.

“Not a soul came in, so I read the dirty books,” I said, motioning to the magazine rack against the wall.

“Didn’t I see your picture in one of them?” he asked, so sweetly that I fell in love with him on the spot.

“That’s terrible news about your dad, Ellie,” he said, staring at me with his bulging brown eyes—he suffered from a thyroid condition. “Maybe it’ll turn out all right, but just in case, don’t let him leave you feeling guilty; that lasts forever.”

Normally, I take the train to New York. You have to be sure to reserve a seat on the right-hand side of the car, though, or you’ll have nothing to see but trees and embankments rushing by for four hours. That gives me motion sickness. On the right side of the car, you can stare lazily at the Hudson, broad and majestic, and admire the Catskills and Palisades, the flinty rocks and green hills, and wonder if you’ve just passed the tree where Rip Van Winkle slept for all those years. But there was no train to anywhere at this hour, so I got onto the Thruway at New Holland around ten o’clock, hoping my ’51 Plymouth Belvedere would get me to New York. Charlie Reese had pulled some strings to get me the company car in early December. I suspected it was a lemon—old-fashioned and round and, yes, a shade of yellow—they had no other use for, but I was grateful to have it anyway. It meant I could cover high school basketball games without having to take taxis or beg rides on the team bus. The teenage boys always stared slack-jawed at my legs.

Four hours later, I was bouncing down the Henry Hudson Parkway, under the George Washington Bridge and past the piers, arriving at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village around two thirty.

I had phoned the hospital before leaving New Holland to arrange a quick visit, since I would be arriving long after visiting hours had ended. They agreed to accommodate me. A short nurse with a pleasant smile identified herself as Mrs. Buehler. She showed me to my father’s bed in the Intensive Care Unit. I never would have found him otherwise; the long, snaking tubes of a breathing apparatus obscured his bandaged head. His skin, normally a robust tan, was a waxen gray. Liver spots I had never noticed before spread over his forehead, cheeks, and hands. He looked like a corpse. I stood over the bed for a few minutes, unsure of what to do. Then the nurse spoke.

“Why don’t you go home and get some sleep, Miss Stone?” she said. “He’s stable, and you can speak to the doctor in the morning.”

Feeling vaguely guilty for abandoning the vigil, I left the hospital and drove over to University Place and Tenth Street, where I parked my Plymouth. I grabbed my bag, walked across Tenth and down Fifth Avenue, and paused at the door of my father’s apartment building. The neighborhood hadn’t changed. I peered through the cold darkness at the most familiar landmark of my youth: Washington Arch. A grayish shadow in the night, it loomed an eerie portal. An icy breeze ruffled the collar of my coat, and I ducked inside 26 Fifth Avenue.

“Miss Eleonora?” called a voice from a chair across the lobby.

Rodney. He used to watch out for me like a mother hen, tie my shoes, and adjust my book strap when it was loose. And I used to tell him stories of my day as we rode the elevator to the fifteenth floor. He was a kind man who liked little children, perhaps because they treated him like a whole person, not a cripple with black skin. I crossed the polished marble floor, dropped my bag, and extended a gloved hand to the aging elevator operator. He pushed himself off the chair and stood lopsided but sturdy on his right leg, bent since birth. His tired face smiled sadly as he clasped my hand.

“I’m just sick about what happened to Professor Stone,” he said, shaking his head. “Can’t figure how someone got in here. I was on duty that night, and not a soul came through that door I didn’t know.”

“What time did my father come home that night?”

Rodney’s face twisted in thought. “I remember seeing him come in, and I wasn’t sleeping.” This last observation seemed to be germane in fixing the approximate time. “Let’s see, I came on at six, got off at two . . .”

“Never mind, Rodney,” I said. “I’ll talk to you again tomorrow. Try to remember when he came home.”

“I know who’ll remember,” he said. “That young man who works with Professor Stone.”

“Who’s that? Someone named Sanger, perhaps?”

“I don’t know his name, but he comes around here all the time. He’ll know; he was with him.”

“Could he be the one?” I asked, but Rodney shook his head.

“No, miss. They went upstairs together, then the young man buzzed the elevator about twenty minutes later. While I was bringing him down to the lobby, he said he forgot something upstairs. I called Professor Stone on the intercom right then and there from the elevator, and he answered. So, I handed the receiver to the young man, and they settled it between themselves.”

“Do you know what he forgot?” I asked.

“No, miss. He must have mentioned it, but I wasn’t really paying attention.”

“So you didn’t take him back upstairs to get it?”

Rodney shook his head again. “No, Professor Stone told him he’d give it to him on Monday.”

“Did you tell the police about that guy?” I asked.

“About thirty times before they was through with me.”

Rodney whisked me up to the fifteenth floor and left me alone in the long, still corridor. The walls hummed peacefully, almost inaudibly, as all these prewar New York residences do. Lugging my bag to the last apartment on the southeast corner, 1505, I fished two brass keys from my pocket and turned the lock, then the dead bolt. Inside, the apartment was dark. The smell of the house had changed; the last whiffs of my mother’s perfumes had faded, and more masculine scents had settled in. The place was spanking clean, but the odor of old books and oriental rugs defies feather dusters and pine wax.

I flicked on the light, dropped my case next to the bench in the foyer, and stepped through the archway into the parlor. Everything looked different; it had been two years since I’d left. Flowers spewed from pots in every corner, on every end table. I recognized them as my mother’s favorites, but couldn’t remember what they were called. She had tried to teach me about flowers, but I was more interested in the boys who played baseball. Not a tomboy, but a fan. I suppose I still am. The wallpaper had been changed, and some new pieces of furniture anchored the grand old Kashmiri rug that my mother adored. Silk on silk, nine hundred knots per square inch—woven by children with very small hands, no doubt. One of the old paintings was missing: a Wyeth watercolor of a hillside, framed by a barn window. My mother had received it as a gift from the artist in the late forties. In its place was a portrait of my late mother beside a vase of orange tulips, painted by someone named Romich—most probably an artist she represented. Not my taste. On the mantelpiece in the parlor sat a simple gray vase. My mother’s ashes were inside. I wondered how my father had managed the redecoration project, since the room didn’t strike me as consistent with his dark and austere style.

My father had been found unconscious in his study on Saturday morning, struck on the back of the head by a heavy object, unknown at present. The police had scoured the room that very afternoon, but had taken nothing away. The fingerprint experts had left a dusty trail over most of the study, since, judging by the scattered books and papers, the intruder had touched nearly everything in his search for valuables.

Despite the late hour, I wanted to have a look at what had happened. I circled around my father’s desk, swiveling his green leather chair with a distracted hand as I examined the room I had so rarely visited as a girl. The three windows behind the desk were dark, locked tight with the louvered shades drawn. The desk drawers had been pulled out, some dumped on the floor. I stepped over the mess and opened the shades to look outside. The airshaft: twenty feet of nothing, then a brick wall. No access and very little light. I had never understood how my father could work in that cave, but he liked the dark, insulated peace of the room.

I glanced at the ponderous book on his desk: a magnificent, 1861 Gustave Doré
Divine Comedy
. No surprise there; Dante was my father’s life’s work. He had more than fifty different versions in various languages. The papers strewn about on the floor had not been moved by the police. I knelt down and picked through a few of them. Students’ dissertations, notes for lectures, decades of professional correspondence . . . The contents of an academician’s desk. His personal documents were scattered on the floor between a filing cabinet and the wet bar. I cracked an ice cube, dropped it into a tumbler, and poured Scotch over it. As one of the boys, I had learned how to drink whiskey, and hold it well. I had to hold my drink or be ready to defend my virtue.

The hi-fi, hidden inside a cherry wood cabinet, was untouched. A record sat on the turntable: Gounod’s
Faust
. The encyclopedic collection of classical music records (78s and LPs) lining five long shelves of the chest above, had been ransacked. I say “classical” with a twinge of guilt, since my father insisted on pointing out the misnomer whenever he heard it. Classical, he declared, was a period of music dating roughly from the mid-1700s to about 1830. Mozart and Beethoven were classical composers, he maintained. Brahms and Tchaikovsky were Romantics.

One March evening fifteen years earlier, as we sped north up Sixth Avenue in a taxi, heading to the Ninety-Second Street Y to hear Lotte Lenya sing Weill, my brother Elijah referred to
The Three Penny Opera
as classical music.