Styx & Stone

by James W. Ziskin

  Now it was Bernie’s turn to rouse me from my dream. I blushed crimson, unsure how long I’d been staring at the young man.

  “Ellie Stone, this is Luigi Lucchesi,” said Bernie, embarrassed for me if his obvious discomfort meant what I thought it did.

  “How do you do,” I said, holding out a hand. Luigi took it and pressed just enough to unsettle me further. Even his grip was beautiful.

  “Please call me Gigi,” he said. “Everyone does.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Gigi? Like Leslie Caron?”

  Bernie chuckled. “Not exactly. It’s just short for Luigi. Still, rather a silly name for a grown man.”

  Gigi smiled at the affront, seemingly taking no offense at all. Then he asked if I was Professor Stone’s daughter.

  “Yes. Are you a student of his?”

  “Oh, no. I’m a visiting lecturer.”

  He looked awfully young to be a lecturer, but Bernie would have surely contradicted him if he hadn’t been who he said he was.

  “What’s your field of study?”

  “I specialize in history of science and art. This semester I’m teaching a course on Galileo’s poetry.”

  “Galileo wrote poetry?” I asked. Again I had mortified Bernie. But Gigi didn’t seem to mind.

  “Some,” he said. “But he’s better known for other things.”

  As he spoke, I noticed his Italian accent was a dignified collection of precise vowels and guttural—not rolling—Rs, what the Italians call erre moscia, or soft R. My father had described the phenomenon like this: “If you come from a wealthy family, it’s a sign of class or affectation, depending on your political persuasion. If you come from a poor family, it’s a speech defect, like a lisp.” This was the first time I’d actually heard it. I was bowled over.

  Gigi took his leave, his smiling eyes lingering on mine as he turned slowly toward the exit. Then he disappeared into the corridor, and I exhaled for the first time since I’d laid eyes on him.

  “I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that Hildy Jaspers plays in his sandbox,” said Bernie. “Not Professor Bruchner’s.”

  My heart took a tumble.

  “They seem very cozy with each other, but they try to keep everything on the QT.”

  I returned to Saint Vincent’s at seven o’clock for visiting hours. My father’s condition hadn’t changed, and there was nothing for me to do but sit by the bed and watch the rise and fall of the respirator’s bellows. The steady pumping of the apparatus was not new to me. I had seen it once before, at the Westchester hospital where my brother Elijah’s body lay awaiting transportation to the funeral home after the accident. An old woman was tethered to the machine, which inflated her weak lungs with oxygen and sucked the CO2 back out. The vision remains eerily clear in my mind, and I associate it with Elijah’s corpse. At times his face blurs into hers: gaunt eyes and loose, colorless skin; a trickle of saliva escaping from the corner of her mouth; and thin gray hair, too weak to stick together, falling like dried grass on the foam pillow of a hospital gurney.

  My mind drifted inexorably to thoughts of my older brother, his offbeat sense of humor, uncommon intelligence, and charm. A gangly kid, Elijah grew into a restless adolescent, rebellious in the often-strange world of Greenwich Village. There was the flirtation with a smoky crowd of beatniks on Bleecker Street and the time he ran off with a group of out-of-town toughs on motorcycles. He lived his adolescence as if it had been a challenge to my father’s authority and cultural legacy.

  In the meantime, Dad and I were enjoying a special affinity, as special as it ever got between us, grounded in the iconography of American childhood: sports. I loved the Yankees and the football Giants, perhaps to win his approval or just to be close to him by sharing his zeal. My father didn’t seem to mind that I was a girl in love with boys’ games; he just liked having an enthusiastic protégée.

  My idols were called DiMaggio, Berra, Vic Raschi, Hank Bauer. For a time in the late forties, my favorite Yankee was Snuffy Stirnweiss. I liked the name. My father indulged me for a while, but when Snuffy was traded to the Browns and later to the Indians, he disparaged him as a middling player, whose only good years had come during the war when the best players were overseas. By the time Mickey Mantle came to epitomize Yankee pride and glory, I was too old and rational. Baseball is a childhood obsession; adolescence brings other fixations, and the spell of the game dissipates.

  Ours was not a religious family, so Yankee Stadium was my temple. I preferred the upper deck in the infield while my father, more reflective and attuned to the history of the House That Ruth Built, liked the bleachers in dead center, where he could contemplate the monuments at any time. So while I enjoyed rare moments in my father’s company, Elijah had always remained his favorite, and that despite his lack of direction and my father’s constant disappointment. Whether it was my sex or my sins that he couldn’t accept, I can’t say. There was nothing I could do to warm his frozen affection for any length of time.

  A nurse nudged my shoulder, rousing me from my thoughts, and told me it was time to go. Before leaving, I looked again at the harness of tubing affixed to his face, and I realized he hadn’t moved since I’d arrived.

  I stopped for a drink at a tavern across from McSorley’s on East Seventh Street. As a woman, I wasn’t allowed inside that establishment, but Jock Brady’s welcomed me warmly. Two drunken gents at the bar stared at me for ten minutes before annexing the empty seats in the booth where I was sipping my Scotch. Good, sturdy proletarians, about forty, they probably worked for the city hauling trash or digging up streets. Their hands looked knobby and strong, with a little too much grime under their fingernails for my taste. They smiled gray, toothy grins at me. The one opposite me did all the talking.

  “What’s a pretty little thing like you doing here all by yourself?”

  “I’m not so pretty,” I said. Probably came across as flirting, which it wasn’t, but I can’t always control my sassy disposition.

  The man introduced himself as Pat Duggan and his silent friend as Dennis. I inched toward the wall of the booth, but Dennis closed the gap I’d tried to create.

  “A whiskey drinker, are you?” said Pat. “Dennis has a bottle of rye in his room.”

  “Leave her alone, boys,” called the burly barkeep.

  “We didn’t mean no harm, Jock,” said Pat. “Just trying to make her feel welcome.”

  “Get out of the booth,” said the barkeep, my hero. “Don’t go chasing my customers away, or I’ll toss you out of here.”

  The two men reluctantly slid out of the booth, but continued to watch me with the singular focus of a border collie on a straying sheep. I downed my drink, intending to get out of that dingy place posthaste. But then the barkeep appeared above me and offered an apology.

  “They don’t mean no harm, miss,” he said, wiping his hands on his apron. He was a big man of about fifty, tall, with a mammoth belly testing the resilience of the stitching in the seams of his white shirt. “We don’t get many young ladies in here. At least not proper ones like you. Hope they didn’t give you a fright.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Brady,” I insisted.

  Then, to prove a point to the bartender—or perhaps myself—I ordered another drink and moved to a stool at the bar, a few feet from the two leering Lotharios. They looked me over for the next few minutes until they grew tired of the exercise and turned their attention to the numbers they intended to play the next day. When I left an hour and two whiskies later, I felt I’d won the battle. Still, I had wasted my time and money on swill in a dank hole, with all apologies to the kind proprietor, Jock Brady. I thought of Gigi Lucchesi. I wouldn’t find his type in such a place. I wondered where I might find him.

  Out on the street, I walked briskly toward Cooper Union. Seventh Street was dodgy; the wet pavement steamed from a vented manhole, rubbish waited for the street cleaner, and a couple of men watched me from their roosts in doorways. I hailed a passing cab and went home to 26 Fifth Avenue.


  The debris from the burglary still littered the floor of my father’s study. Scotch in hand, I kicked off my heels and dropped into the leather chair behind his desk and surveyed the disorder. It was time to let Nelda clean it up.

  I like to read. Books, magazines, newspapers, even crossword puzzles; the written word has always been my entertainment of choice. So, by second nature, I looked for something to skim while I relaxed in the low light with my drink. A loose manuscript page—154—was the only printed material on the desk besides the big book: the Comedy. The unfamiliar subject matter—something about Helen of Troy in the Inferno—separated from its sister pages lost my interest almost immediately. Nevertheless, I thought I should reunite the scattered leaves of my father’s opus before Nelda threw them away.

  Once on my hands and knees, however, I discovered something strange: the pages on the floor appeared to be older than the one on the desk. After I’d put them all together, my puzzlement grew. There were two pages marked 154: the one I’d found on the desk, and one that had been among the papers on the floor. Furthermore, the two 154s were quite different, one from the other, both in apparent age and content. The slightly yellowed page I’d found on the floor matched the others I’d picked up, with the exception of the very first pages of the reconstituted manuscript. The type was a little worn and the corners somewhat dog-eared. The older page 154 dealt with an early work of Dante Alighieri’s, La Vita Nuova.

  I took the manuscript back to the desk, where I considered it over my Scotch and a cigarette. Curious how the most abstruse text grabs your interest when it’s in the wrong place.

  The title page, as white as a combed-cotton bedsheet, announced: Daughters of Eve: Women in the Works of Dante Alighieri, with my father’s name trailing below. The following page, equally as white, dedicated the work to my late mother. Next came the table of contents and other front matter, all as white as the title page. The text proper, however, began the long string of yellowed sheets, broken only by the extra page 154. I pored over the material surrounding pages 154, finding it obvious that the whiter one had nothing to do with the rest of the text. Neither, for that matter, had the title page or front matter.

  Figuring the pages had been scattered during the burglary, I set out to find another manuscript. There were no typewritten or manuscript pages among the contents of my father’s drawers, dumped on the floor during the burglary. Nothing in the bookcase or cherry wood shelving either. A row of filing cabinets next to the hi-fi produced other manuscripts: essays, book reviews, papers, and hardcover copies of two of my father’s books, Dante at the Edge of the City of Dis and Satan’s Jailers: The Monsters and Fiends of the Inferno, both published when I was a child. I remembered the sketches my father had made of the various beasts: Harpies; demons; Cerberus, three-headed sentry to hell . . . His talent for breathing life—or death—into the flat pages of a 650-year-old poem was never more impressive than in his drawings. Even today—especially today—magnified by twenty years, his demons try my faith with spindly fingers and horned crowns, dancing furiously in the shadows. Their memory still grabs my guts with an icy hand.

  I flipped through the book, looking for my father’s spooky drawings, but there were none. I wondered if he had saved them.

  Resuming my search of the study, I found nothing that resembled, even remotely, the papers I’d found on the desk and floor. Not even in the wastebasket, where the only paper was an empty envelope from Carnegie Hall.

  I poured myself another Scotch and sat down with the unmatched pages. It was understandable that two unbound manuscripts could be thrown together during a frenzied search. What I couldn’t figure was what had become of the newer manuscript, Daughters of Eve. Though its absence puzzled me, I probably could have explained it to my own satisfaction had it not been for the other, equally mysterious omission: Where was the title page of the older, yellowing manuscript? Bernie Sanger had seen Daughters of Eve on Friday night, or had he only spoken of it with my father? I scribbled a note in my pad to ask Sanger about both manuscripts.

  Since the bed was not made up in my room, I turned back the fresh sheets Nelda had stretched onto my father’s king-sized bed that morning. My parents had always slept in a huge bed—large enough to accommodate my father’s ego, I used to think. In their bed, my mind wandered in a semiconscious state of near sleep, dragging me back through the years to the time when I had actually lived in the Fifth Avenue apartment. The city’s late-night murmur—cars passing by fifteen floors below—lulled me to sleep; New York’s bustle has never disturbed my rest. But that night, noises inside my own head cranked me through the wringer. I had heartburn—too much whiskey—and the noises in my head were dreams of my late brother.

  I dreamt I could see him roaring down 9A, and suddenly I was with him on the back of the bike, wind rushing through our hair, Elijah urging the motorcycle on as we screamed with laughter. We leaned into each curve as one with the machine, side to side, our knees nearly scraping the wet pavement. The speed was raw, thrilling, and we owned the road, invulnerable and without a care.

  Then the tire blew. In a split second, the front wheel jerked to the left, and Elijah yanked it back, struggling to regain control. He pulled too far too fast, and the wheel jack-knifed, sending us veering to the right. The handlebars twisted from his grip, and we skidded over the edge, tearing through a phalanx of brittle branches, cartwheeling down the embankment, and hurtling into the massive trunk of an oak before finally bouncing to rest on the wet forest ground. The front wheel, its punctured tire torn from the rim, continued to spin for nearly a minute, ticking gently as it slowed to a stop. I picked myself up, somehow unhurt in the twisted wreckage, and tried to rouse Elijah, who’d been tossed against a tree some twenty feet away. I shook his still body, and he looked up at me, his bloodied face tightening into a startled expression of disbelief as the realization dawned. He was about to die.

  “No, it can’t be,” he whispered. “Why wasn’t it you?”

  It was absurd and unfair that he should say such a thing in my dream. Elijah would have given his life for me, but that’s what guilt does, I suppose. And though I knew Elijah would never have asked that question, my grief and mourning were savaged by the awful suspicion that others might well have done.

  The smoke from my cigarette curled its way to the ceiling, and I watched it flat on my back in my father’s bed. Lying awake, I played tricks on myself to divert my thoughts from Elijah, but I failed except when I turned my attention to the burglary. In the dark, I wondered if the apartment was secure, if the service entrance in the kitchen was sealed as it had been when I was a child. Might someone else—besides Nelda and her snarling brother—have keys?

  I got up and checked the kitchen. The service door was locked tight, sealed with putty and paint, with a 400-pound refrigerator in front of it. A team of husky cat burglars might have been able to breach the door and move the refrigerator, but a lone intruder, no way. I tugged at a couple of windows, finding them all secure, then fastened the chain and turned the bolt on the front door. Sure that all entries to the house were locked, yet barely more confident of my safety, I returned to bed where I tried to clear my thoughts and sleep.

  I lay awake for hours more.

  People often say that we experience tragedy as if in a blur, but that wasn’t the case for me. I remember Elijah’s sudden death, funeral, and burial with raw clarity. The abrupt telephone call to my ill mother, her ashen face as she stammered into the receiver, the confusion in my head and the knot in my chest as she held me to explain through her sobbing that my brother was gone. She could scarcely console me in her weakened state. It was she who needed solace, and, to my discredit, I was unable to provide her any. I don’t know how my father reacted when he heard, but I only saw a silent block of marble for three days, and his hostility toward me only fossilized after the shock dissolved into acceptance and sorrow. His disappointment in me, heretofore buried deep beneath his denial, seeped to the surface, boiled over,
and manifested itself in a variety of ways. Sometimes, when we were at the dinner table or reading in the parlor, I would look up to find him glaring absently at me, as if he didn’t realize what he was doing. His darkened brow frowned, his lips curled in a half sneer, and his eyes, hollow and gray behind his glasses, looked to be shattered by a secret regret. Then, when he noticed me aware of his gaze, he said nothing and looked away. Other times, his rancor ran free, and he would rebuke me with a single word or a disapproving shake of his head. I was powerless to fight back, unable to right the wrongs he placed at my feet, so I waged my own subtle war of resistance.

  But the night Elijah died, I wept alone in my room, raging against such unreal and staggering news. He couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be gone. Not so suddenly, it wasn’t possible. We had sat together on the subway that very morning, me on my way to Yorkville for lunch with a friend, him to a parking lot on Thirty-Fourth Street to collect his motorcycle. He jumped from his seat as the train came to a stop at Thirty-Third and Park and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “See you tonight, El,” he said, and I waved good-bye without looking up from my crossword.

  The abrupt loss of his life ripped a gaping hole in my heart, and I couldn’t believe there was any way of going on if it were true. This was the first death I’d ever experienced, and the ache was too thick and too vicious to accept. I closed my eyes to the world that night, insisting it was wrong, that Elijah would walk through the door as he had promised that morning on the train. When he didn’t, when he was still lying cold in the mortuary the following morning, I gasped for breath in my bed, I shrieked in grief and horror, begging for it not to be so. And then the door burst open, and my father stood there, fulminating eyes burning mine.