In New Jersey, his relatives invited some other Ukrainian families to meet the new immigrants. One of the guests was a professor who taught at Murray State University in Kentucky. The professor was impressed by the earnest young man, who introduced himself as “Please to call me Jerry” and who, through an interpreter, told a reporter just two weeks after his boat landed: “Now—as for the girls, I am very sorry I can’t talk much with them, but you don’t have to speak English to dance with them. Man, do I like to dance with them!”
The professor invited the teenager to come back to Kentucky with him. He could learn English there and then go to college. The professor said he would begin teaching Jerry himself, immediately.
The professor’s name was Roman Prydatkevytch. He was, as it happened, an instructor in the music department.
Professor Prydatkevytch taught the violin.
Jarema performs with the student orchestra at Murray State in Kentucky shortly after arriving in the United States.
17
The Gift
MELANIE
Back in New Jersey, my father preserves Steph’s lilac-colored bedroom exactly as she left it, in anticipation of her return. Late at night, when the anxiety becomes too much to bear—Where is she now? Is someone holding her hostage in some dank cellar? Is she calling out for him?—he pads down the hall and turns on her light.
He lives alone in the faded red house now. My mother, in the hospital, is too weak to travel. As the weeks stretch into months, my dad, who seemed so numb when Steph first went missing, is succumbing to a grief he couldn’t begin to fathom. He is very private and very controlled. He rarely talks about his despair even with me. But he confides to me that in the middle of the night, long after he’s sent his last student home, he will restlessly wander the house, up and down the hall and through the empty rooms, until inevitably he is drawn to the room where he used to read Stephanie bedtime stories and tuck her in, safe and warm, with a good-night kiss. He hasn’t touched a thing in her cluttered bedroom. It is a shrine, like the wedding banquet in Great Expectations, all laid out and waiting for her, gathering dust.
Kneeling by her bed, my father closes his eyes, folds his hands, and prays. Out loud. The words escape his lips in English, in Ukrainian, in a mix of both.
“I tried so hard all her life to protect her, but I failed,” he sobs. “I couldn’t keep her safe.”
In her hospital room, my mother has now decided that Steph ran off to clear her head. Of course she’ll be back. With utter, uncompromising certainty, my mother is sure that no harm has come to my sister. As summer turns to fall, she funnels her worries into practical matters, like the snow and rain.
“The weather is getting colder,” she tells me on the phone a few months after Steph’s disappearance. “I hope she has enough warm clothes.”
Ed and I have to return to Chicago eventually. We’ve spent almost a month sleeping in Stephanie’s bed and eating off her plates, leaving all other responsibilities behind. The atmosphere in Rochester is bleak. We’ve run out of ideas, the trail is growing cold, and the odds of finding her are shrinking. As time wears on, and we realize that we’ve run out of steps to take, we have to make the difficult decision to pack up her belongings and leave her apartment.
I can’t bear the feeling that I’m giving up on my sister, that I’m letting her down. Surely she must be counting on me to figure out what happened, to stay nearby, searching until I find her, to think of her and pray for her and hold her close in my heart so she doesn’t have to suffer alone. Even if the worst has happened, how could I abandon her body to be torn apart by wild animals or rot in a Dumpster? She needs me to find her and bring her home to safety, to the place where she is loved. Late at night, the thought that she may be alive somewhere, held against her will, perhaps tortured in unspeakable ways, drives me to the brink of insanity. I have always been there for her. How can I be failing her now, when she needs me the most?
There is so much raw pain, so much guilt, such a terrible sense of loss. The grief strikes your whole body—a throbbing pain that burrows deeper and deeper, in layers. There is the utter sense of powerlessness and frustration, the terror of not knowing—and even worse, the dread of finding out. There is the pain of seeing my parents’ sadness, after they have already suffered so much more than their share. There is the sudden void left by my best friend, my partner, my soul mate, our whole shared past and our dreams for the future together. There is the grief and rage associated with a life interrupted; the music she owns but hasn’t yet played, the books unread, the knitting projects half done, the little string players still works in progress, the children of her own she hopes for someday. I have no way to cope with the magnitude of the shock and suddenness of events. There can be no peace, no closure. There is no way to say good-bye—no way to know if we should say good-bye—and so no way to heal.
Finally we pack all her things. We return her borrowed furniture and donate her TV set to the Ukrainian club she had joined. Most everything else we box up and move in a U-Haul to our house in Chicago. Ed and I keep Steph’s two parakeets and give her cockatiel, Choobie, to Ken. I force myself not to give up hope that she will come back to us. When she does, she’ll want her books and papers and music and violin. I will keep them all safe for her.
Ed and I go back to Chicago, back to our new little house that has not yet become our home. We store all of Steph’s boxes unopened in our garage and basement, and try to figure out how life for us can go on.
It turns out that we have some time on our hands: just after we get back, the Chicago Symphony goes on strike. Despite our new status as homeowners, with looming mortgage payments and depleted savings, I don’t care. Money has never been that important to me, and never less so than now. I withdraw into a private world, with Ed as my only human contact for weeks. I speak on the phone to each of my parents almost every day, searching fruitlessly for something encouraging to say. Our grief is like a wall around each of us, a form of solitary confinement.
When I’m awake, I alternate between crying and praying. I cry thousands of tears, mostly alone. I pray aloud or in my head constantly. I scrub and clean obsessively in rhythm to long-forgotten hymns and prayers. I splurge on hundreds of bulbs for the garden and sob as I dig my sadness into the ground. I pray formal prayers and made-up prayers and chanting prayers like “please God please God please God” over and over again.
Nights are unbearable. The horror of the unknown is a black hole that sucks me toward it, its gravitational pull overpowering. I literally cannot close my eyes. Hideous scenarios play in my mind, and nightmares torment my sleep. The ache never leaves, not even when I drift off toward dawn. The grief is like a sound track to a movie, rising and falling in volume but always there. Often I sing aloud just to drive away the thoughts of what may have happened to Stephanie. I get up in the middle of the night and come downstairs and mop the already clean kitchen floor, singing the Lord’s Prayer at full volume. Ed comes stumbling from our room into the light looking for me, worried and sleepless himself. Our house is immaculate, and we are both exhausted.
Ed and I don’t consider ourselves especially religious, and we seldom go to church. But we become convinced that if Stephanie’s soul is out floating around somewhere, we want to grab it before it’s too late. When our baby is born the following June, my sister has been missing for almost a year. We name him Nicholas Stephen, after Stephanie, of course. We make Steph his godmother.
Not long afterward, my dad comes to visit. I hurry out the front door to greet him, carrying Nicky sleeping soundly in a basket. Daddy looks years older and frail. He’s lost weight. The bobbling of his chin is more pronounced now, and I notice his hands are shaking, too.
My father’s former students rallied when Steph went missing, and that has helped get him this far. Joanne has connected him with newspaper reporters and TV shows, bringing more publicity for Steph’s case. He draws strength from the letters of support that have come in since. Miriam
, now a music teacher herself, treats him as part of her own family in New Jersey. When Nick is born, she comes to Chicago, stepping into the void that otherwise would have been filled by my mother or my little sister. She cooks, cleans, rocks, sings lullabies, and holds the flashlight as I change diapers during yet another days-long power outage.
But the strain is weighing on my father. His health is suffering.
He peers into the basket in my arms. “Oh my God,” he gasps, and it sounds like a prayer. The sadness and loss drain out of his face for a moment as he gazes at his sleeping grandson. “Oh my God,” he says again, and it is a prayer—of thanks for the renewal of life and for the sight of the family red hair and chubby little cheeks handed down to another generation.
Stephanie is still missing two years later, when our twins, Gregory and Laura, are born. It has been three years, almost to the day. The private detective my dad hired to keep on the case has run out of leads. We never talk aloud about giving up hope; hope just slips away on its own.
My dad visits us in Chicago that December. He doesn’t leave the house much these days, other than to see his grandchildren.
“When I come home, I half expect to find Steph waiting on the doorstep,” he confesses, in a rare moment when his iron grip on his emotions falters. “I’m afraid to stay out too late, een case she might be there, locked out and cold.”
I worry about my dad. It seems as if, with each day that passes with her still missing, a little piece of him is lost, too. His eyes have begun to lose their focus, his head bobs and weaves, his hand shakes when he holds a fork. I try to ask him about it, but he waves me off, making it clear that questions aren’t welcome. But during my next visit to him in New Jersey, I find a bottle of prescription pills in his medicine cabinet. It’s a medication used to treat Parkinson’s disease.
We still have no news of Steph. The police have settled on a “person of interest”: a maintenance man who worked at Steph’s apartment complex. He was arrested and jailed after Steph’s disappearance, after being caught trying to abduct a teenage girl. It turns out, astonishingly, that he had a long history of felonies, including rape.
But the police have no evidence. My dad and I have no emotional reserves to press them. We need every ounce of energy we have to try to heal our family. We don’t want to divert a drop of it into rage or hatred or revenge. We take what little comfort we can in knowing the man is now in prison, unable to harm anyone else.
My dad is in Chicago not just to see us but also to accept a lifetime achievement award from the National School Orchestra Association. I watch proudly as he receives an ovation from the crowd of educators in attendance. Afterward, one of them takes me aside and hands me a tape from her video camera.
“I taped your father’s acceptance speech, but I want you to decide if you think he ought to see it,” she says softly.
I raise an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid it will upset him. When he sees himself. You know, the swaying and shaking…”
While he’s still in Chicago, my dad announces his retirement after thirty-seven years of teaching in East Brunswick. “That’s great, Daddy!” I say. “You can spend more time with us, tour with me, teach violin to your grandchildren. I think you’re doing the right thing.”
“I guess so,” he says. But he doesn’t look happy, just wistful.
The retirement party that spring is held in East Brunswick. It’s just one day after I get back from a Chicago Symphony tour to Japan, and I am discombobulated and jet-lagged. Our little family’s first airplane trip with all three children, including the infant twins, has been an epic disaster, culminating in an airline worker being dispatched to unbolt and replace the seat that Nicky has ruined with his projectile vomiting.
My mother arrives by ambulance to attend the dinner. My ninety-one-year-old grandmother Baba is there, too, in a big shapeless dress, to all appearances heartier and healthier than either one of my parents. Enough former students and colleagues have shown up with their instruments that we’re able to form a small string orchestra.
After the speeches, during which my father speaks tenderly about the “babies born under my supervision,” we give an impromptu performance, my dad conducting. It is the last time he will take the podium in front of a group of East Brunswick musicians. He is funny, and as tough as always on the group of middle-aged performers he’s known since they were kids.
“Watch intonation! A leetle beet off. Don’t be stubborn!” he disciplines the orchestra as we do a bit of rehearsing before the opening number.
Turning to the audience, my father announces the first piece: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart. He raises his arms dramatically, and the orchestra leaps to attention, just like the well-trained beginners we once were under his baton. Then my father brings down his arms to signal the first note, and the orchestra launches into the piece. But it isn’t Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. As my dad looks on, at first perplexed, then smiling, then laughing along with the audience, the orchestra pours itself wholeheartedly into his beginner orchestra classic: “Reuben and Rachel.”
The other pieces are sentimental favorites of my dad’s. Katahdin Sunrise had been written for him by composer Philip Gordon years ago, a nod to the mountain that he loved to climb in Maine, whose peak is said to be the first place the morning sun reaches in the United States. “We deedn’t have a chance to rehearse thees piece,” he explains to the audience before we start, in a tone that signals he is about to issue an order, not an apology: “So eef we fall apart: don’t mind.”
After the piece is over, he rewards the players with his ultimate compliment. “Hey,” he says, sounding surprised. “Not bad.”
Then he turns again to the audience. “Thees concert would not be complete without some raw, Slavic sentimentality,” he announces, and we launch into “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago. I smile at the memory of our train trip in the Soviet Union before Steph went missing.
Finally, we play his own arrangement of Ukrainian folk dances. “I want to dedicate thees to my mother,” he announces, his voice catching with emotion. But Baba has left the room. In the middle of her son’s final concert, at the culmination of his four-decade-long career, she decides it’s a good time for a bathroom break.
He sighs, and you can see he is willing away a lifetime of disappointment. “Maybe we could play eet a second time for her, something like that.”
The Baba moment aside, I am moved to see my dad gathering strength from the crowd, looking more robust than he has in a long time. But another guest, my old violinist classmate Ted Kesler, has perhaps a more clear-eyed view. Ted hasn’t seen my dad since we graduated from high school. When he returns home that night, he describes my father this way in his journal:
I was stunned when I introduced myself to Jerry Kupchynsky. Is this what 17 years does to a person? He was gaunt, three inches shorter than me, his head bobbled uncontrollably, and his eyes were glazed over. It seemed that only his left eye worked. I thought maybe he had had a stroke. Later I found out that he has Parkinson’s Disease… His wife was contorted in a wheelchair at a table by the windows.
An alumni orchestra played… Jerry barked the same commands “Watch me!” “Watch your intonation!” “Stop at no. 4 or answer to me!” Arms flailing, body hunched and rocking: no subtlety whatsoever. Everyone smiling at his bullish charm, making [it] through the piece despite the conductor. It was a throwback to H.S., struggling with the music, following him, intimidated.
During our annual summer visit to New Jersey a few months later, one of the staff at my mom’s nursing home pulls Ed and me aside.
“Your mother isn’t doing well,” the nurse says in a hushed voice in the corridor. “We’re concerned that her health is failing.”
I turn that thought over and around in my mind. She has been ill and frail for so long that it almost seems as if she can carry on that way forever. Her illness itself is a constant that in a way has lulled us into complacency. Be
sides, she has so frequently declined, then rallied again over the years. It’s a permanent cycle, in its own way oddly static.
This time the nurses want us to be prepared: the next dip in my mother’s condition could put her past the point of no return.
In September, I make an impromptu visit back East, bringing two-year-old Laura with me for company. When we get to the nursing home, I am shocked by the changes since just a few weeks earlier. My mother’s body is so twisted and crooked in her wheelchair that it makes my neck ache just to look at her. She falls asleep more than once in mid-conversation.
As I watch her doze, it strikes me that my mother has always seemed invincible to me. She’s made the best of her situation, keeping up with her music as long as she could, writing for the hospital newsletter, and creating mosaic tables and trivets with the help of the occupational therapists. Her mind is still as active as ever. From eight hundred miles away she keeps track of everything that’s going on in our lives in Chicago.
“How did Ed’s performance of that weird modern piece go?” she’ll ask during our near-daily calls. “What did the doctor say, does Greg have an ear infection?”
Ever since Steph has gone missing, from her wheelchair, my mom is the one who lifts my spirits. She never stops hoping for a miracle, that Steph will come home. My dad and I have long ago given up trying to convince her otherwise. When we’re with her, we can almost believe it, too.
Now, my dad and I sit side by side in her room as she tries to rally enough energy for our visit. Though my parents’ marriage was frayed even before she became ill, they are approaching their fortieth wedding anniversary. I know he’s painfully lonely at home. He takes solace in his career, his students, and music. But he also visits faithfully with my mother, sharing news of their grandchildren and his trips to see us in Chicago.
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