Styx & Stone (7 page)

In comparison, my mother’s death was an anticlimax, slow and expected. I felt relief when her misery ended. But the sting was not as acute; Elijah had blunted the pain. Her death followed too closely for me to have recovered. Hers was easier for me. I was cold; the cruel surprise of Elijah’s death diminished Mom’s, and only with the passing of time did I realize how much worse that was. It still haunts me how cavalier I was about her passing. My father surely took note and was sickened by me. It’s funny that, while I’ve since come to grips with Elijah’s passing, I have not yet put Mom’s behind me.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 26, 1960

“Ellie, my dear, how are you?” The tall rail of a man in the doorway stretched a smile across his cheeks. Did he really believe people bought his practiced sincerity? Victor Chalmers, chairman of the Italian Department, was in his early fifties. A middling scholar—something like Snuffy Stirnweiss—Chalmers was better suited to administrative task-mastering than academic glory. In my limited dealings with him in the past, mostly at social functions, I had found him pedantic and hopelessly unaware of the scorn he inspired in others. At the graduation party my parents had arranged for Elijah, Victor Chalmers invited my brother to benefit from his insights into human nature. His advice, as insipid as it was condescending, was for him to respect his elders and mind their wisdom, for they knew better. I was standing nearby and overheard Elijah say that my father, who certainly qualified as a wise elder, had always told him to ignore fatuous counsel from blowhards. Yes, my brother was a wise guy, but, God, I admired him so. Chalmers blanched. His icy-blue eyes narrowed, and his jaw muscles flexed.

“You’ll never be anything but a loser,” he whispered so no one else would hear. Then he assumed his counterfeit smile, the same one he was brandishing now, and disappeared into the crowd of guests.

“I’m fine, Dr. Chalmers,” I said, standing aside. “Won’t you come in?”

“I can’t stay long,” he said, looking around the place from the foyer as he removed his hat and overcoat. “I just wanted to know if there was anything I could do for you or Abe.”

“He’s in good hands. As for me, nothing.” I stared at him.

“Well,” he said, folding his coat over the bench near the door, “I smell coffee. Would it be too great an imposition?”

“Not at all,” I said, thinking what a great imposition it was.

“That’s a good girl,” he said.

I showed him to the parlor. He wanted something. When I returned from the kitchen with his coffee, Chalmers was nowhere in sight. I found him in my father’s study, standing over the desk, contemplating the mess with a shaking head.

“A tragedy,” he said, as I set the coffee on the low table before him. “New York is going to hell in a handbasket these days. My wife, Helen, was mugged just a month ago. New York used to be a civilized place.”

I said nothing. Complaints of New York’s decline probably began the day after Peter Minuet rooked the Indians out of their home.

“Hoodlums,” said Chalmers, taking the cup of coffee I’d poured for him. “First your brother’s grave, then this.”

“Bad week for the department,” I said, sitting across from him, pulling my skirt to cover my knees.

Chalmers rubbed his eyes. “Horrible. I spent yesterday making funeral arrangements for Ruggero, wiring his family in Italy. It’s all too tragic. But what about you? You’ve got quite a mess to deal with, too.”

“I haven’t let the maid clean it up yet,” I said. “I wanted to poke around before she moved anything.”

“These records,” he said, indicating the shattered disks on the floor. “Such a beautiful collection.”

I looked down on the black shards, reading some of the titles from my sitting position: Mendelssohn’s
Lieder ohne Worte
, some Mahler symphonies, a rare recording of Chopin preludes performed and signed by Arthur Rubinstein, and fragments of many others too sad to count.

“I love those
Lieder
by Mendelssohn,” said Chalmers, looking with me. “A senseless waste.” Then nodding to the pile of loose pages on my father’s desk: “I see his manuscript was untouched.”

“Have you read it?”

“Not yet, but Abe has discussed it with me. I was looking forward to seeing the galleys; they were supposed to be ready in two months.”

“You’re talking about
Daughters of Eve
?” I asked.

Chalmers nodded. “Was he working on another?”

“No,” I said, snatching a handful of pages off the top of the pile. “But I’m having a hard time locating the manuscript.”

“That’s not it?”

I shook my head. “See for yourself,” and handed it to him.

He turned past the front matter, then read a few lines of the text proper. “But this is his last book,” he said, shuffling through the remaining pages to confirm his impression. “This was published six years ago. Where’s
Daughters of Eve
?”

I shrugged. “I was hoping to find out today. Maybe Bernard Sanger has an idea.”

Chalmers seemed troubled, more than I would have expected. He shook his head.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” he said, drawing on his cup of coffee and whistling it through his teeth, like an ass, as if aerating wine. “If it’s been destroyed, the loss to scholarship will be tremendous.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot about
Daughters of Eve
,” I said. “Trying to figure out how it could have disappeared. These pages were scattered when I found them, but the pattern is unmistakable.”

“What do you mean?”

“The title page, dedication, and acknowledgments are there, but the body of the text is gone.”

“Yes,” said the professor, following my lesson.

“At the same time, the title page is missing from the text I did find.”

“Deduction?”

“Someone took
Daughters of Eve
and hoped to have this other manuscript pass for it. After all, the police would never imagine any difference.”

“Why would a burglar steal a stack of manuscript pages? They have no intrinsic value, only scholarly.”

The door buzzer sounded, and we both left the study to investigate. There was a clicking at the front door: a key turning the lock. Chalmers grabbed an iron poker from the fireplace and shoved me behind him.

“It’s just the cleaning lady,” I said.

“How can you be sure? It could be a burglar.”

“It’s not a burglar; she rang the bell,” I said, pushing past him.

The door swung open and Nelda appeared, her purse dangling from her right forearm as she struggled to control two large, brown grocery bags.

“Well, Miss Eleonora?” she called. “Ain’t you going to help me?”

“You can put down the poker,” I told Chalmers, who weighed it briefly in his hand, then leaned it up against the fireplace. I strode to the foyer and reached for one of the bags. As I did, the door to 1504 popped open.

“May I help you?”

A woman in her midforties stood before me and Nelda in a red silk peignoir. Chalmers joined us in the doorway and looked the lady up and down. I apologized for the disturbance, explaining I was her neighbor’s daughter. She broke into a smile, then a laugh.

“Eleonora? Is that you, Ellie Jelly?”

I blushed. “Mrs. Farber, how are you?”

Angela Farber: the intriguing-woman-next-door of my youth. Elijah had had a major crush on her. I had forgotten about her and the endless rivers of
études, scherzi,
and preludes that flowed faintly from her piano through the thick walls that separated her flat from ours. She and her husband, Garth Farber, a bohemian painter of moderate success, had split when I was about twelve, and she had moved away, or run off. For some reason, she was back.

“Why, Ellie Jelly, you’re as cute as ever,” she cooed. “And here I am in my robe in front of strangers. I don’t want to corrupt anyone,” she said, eyeing Professor Chalmers, as she put the door between her racing silks and him.

Was she prematurely senile, drunk early, or flirting full-time?

“You poor dear,” she said, turning her attention back to me. “How’s your father?”

I gave her the same iffy prognosis I’d been repeating to all. “I’m going to the hospital for an update in a few minutes.”

“It’s just not safe these days,” she said. “We pay all this rent, and still the riffraff gets in.”

“Did you hear anything that night?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I remember him coming home around ten or so. I distinctly remember my lights dimming a little past ten, and that always happens when your father turns on all those little lights.”

Mrs. Farber was referring to the picture lamps Mom had installed over the paintings in our house. The fixtures were imported from Germany and, for some reason, had always caused minor surges in the electricity whenever they were switched on.

“Then you didn’t hear him come in,” I asked as clarification. “You noticed the lights dim?”

“That’s right,” she said, blushing crimson. “I was expecting a gentleman friend, you see, and I was in a bubble bath. Sometimes I can hear his keys as he lets himself in, but not when I’m in the bath. That night the lights blinked when he turned his on, and they blinked brighter when he switched them off a while later. That was about ten fifteen.”

I thanked her for her help and asked her to let me know if she remembered anything else.

“I sure will, Ellie,” she said. “It’s just terrible. He’s such a nice man. I took care of his plants, you know, when he went away last August. It’s just awful.”

I nodded thanks.

“Come by sometime for a drink, Ellie Jelly. You are old enough to drink now, aren’t you? We’ll talk some more.” She shut the door, and I became aware of Nelda and Victor Chalmers, who were watching over my shoulder.

“Well, Ellie Jelly,” said Nelda with a smile, “you want to come have your oatmeal and milk?”

Attempting to curb my embarrassment, I ignored her and asked her to clean the apartment, with the exception of the study. I had changed my mind again; something about the mess bothered me.

“I’ll go clean, Ellie Jelly,” she mocked. “But stay away from that woman. She’s got the devil in her head.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Where you think she went all those years she was gone? Your daddy told me she was in the crazy house. When the police sent her man away, he took her senses with him.”

“Her husband went to jail? What for?”

Nelda shrugged. “Drugs, wasn’t it? Ganja or dope. He was selling the stuff. They took him away from her, and she went mad.”

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“Now you do,” said Nelda. “While your daddy’s sick I’ll take care of you, Miss Ellie Jelly. And I begin with a warning: stay away from that crazy woman.”

“I’ll be going now,” said Chalmers. “Another difficult day ahead: we’ve planned a memorial service for Ruggero at Saint Paul’s Chapel this afternoon.”

“What time?” I asked. “I’d like to come.”

Chalmers seemed puzzled. “At four. But you never even met the man.”

Janey Silverman was my best friend growing up. We had met at a scrap-metal drive in Washington Square during the war. I was six or seven. My mother and brother had hauled a set of pots and pans to the park in my old pram. Then she donated the pram, too, as it had a metal frame. Janey’s mother had dragged her along to assist in the patriotic duty, and we played together in the old gazebo and chased each other around the fountain. Her mother yelled at her to be mindful of the buses rumbling under the arch, belching their fumes as they passed. Today, with motorized traffic prohibited, the park is safer for children shrieking with joy as they career off the landmarks like so many pinballs pinging off flippers and bumpers. Kids never seem to focus more than two feet in front of their noses, and will collide with anyone or anything not paying attention.

Janey and I became fast friends that summer, as armies clashed the world over. For the most part, we remained unaware of the war’s progress, except when my father cheered a victory or bemoaned a defeat from his chair near the radio. The two of us followed the serials together, listened to the
Green Hornet
with my brother Elijah,
Amos ’n’ Andy
, and
Fibber McGee
. In 1943, Janey joined the Brownies, and I ran home to beg my parents to sign me up. My father crushed that dream, insisting that no child of his would ever belong to a paramilitary organization.