by Betsy Carter
8.
The sound of rat claws tapping across the stone floor in the subbasement of Bellevue Hospital was misleadingly friendly. The scratchy noises they made could have been marionettes clacking across a stage rather than rodents capable of chewing through cement and carrying typhus. When the rain came, the rats took to higher ground as water trickled in. Then the only noise would be human feet sloshing around in cold water. That the light was so dim in “the dungeon” was a blessing, Rose said, because you couldn’t see what else was in that water.
By January of 1918, the United States had been at war for less than a year. The Navy kept close watch over the East and Hudson Rivers, as they provided perfect cover for the Germans to snake through with submarines and torpedoes. Bellevue was on the East River, and Rose said all those patrolling naval ships made her feel safe.
Inside the subbasement, it was a different story. The walls were stone and mud, the floors granite. The space was only big enough to hold four giant washtubs and the two shifts of eight women who spent days and nights kneeling over them, scrubbing sheets, towels, and the doctors’ uniforms. Lye was harsh on the hands. Sometimes the blood from Rose’s hands mixed with the blood from the linens and clothes. Though they never met any patients, no one was more intimate with their suffering than these sixteen women. They saw the gangrene, smelled the vomit, and felt what death had left behind. Most of the women in the dungeon lasted a month, two at the most. They’d rather starve in the streets, they said, than live with that stench and cold. But Rose stuck it out. It was her way of proving herself a good Catholic and as brave an American as the boys fighting in Vichy and Verdun. She hoped she was a lesson to her children about endurance. And some part of her also hoped it was penance for Ryan’s sins.
Catrina had to acknowledge that Kiefer had won the bet about their father. She took on cooking, mopping the floors, patching up ripped pants and worn blankets, and, of course, the laundry. Her brother earned extra money by selling newspapers before school. He was clever, like his father, and listened well, but unlike his father, Kiefer fought back with wits rather than fists. One morning, a gang of boys confronted him and his friends as they hawked their newspapers. The leader, a squat freckled boy, stood a foot away from Kiefer and shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!”
Kiefer stepped forward and said in a stage whisper, “If I got the fuck out of here, you’d be gone, wouldn’t you?” The kid stood silent as his friends laughed.
Physically, he and Catrina were opposites: Kiefer was short and thin with dark skin and straight black hair; she was tall and big-boned, like her mother, with the same raging red hair and islands of freckles. Handsome Kiefer was sought out by the girls and respected by the boys, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t pull his younger sister out of her own little world into the aura of popularity he enjoyed at school.
Catrina was the largest girl in her class. As there were two Catrinas in her grade, she was known as Big Catrina. Until her father left, the name had never bothered her. Catrina Ballerina, she imagined, was beautiful at any size. But in the logic of an eight-year-old, her father’s leaving had everything to do with her. She wasn’t pretty or clever enough to keep him home.
Rose insisted that Catrina and Kiefer come to the Church of the Guardian Angel with her every Sunday, and every Sunday, Catrina wore her one “church dress,” a hand-me-down pink frock with puffed sleeves and a high round neck. They’d sit in the same pew in the same dark church that never had enough heat and say the same prayers: “Sacred heart of Jesus and Mary, protect us…” Jesus and Mary had always felt like kin to Catrina: Jesus with his big blue eyes and forbearing smile; and serene Mary, shy and loving with perfect skin. It had never occurred to her that they wouldn’t protect her. But when her father disappeared, so did her trust in Jesus and Mary. Despite her prayers and devotion, they’d let him vanish, and eventually she took off the cross she’d always worn around her neck and hid it away.
Catrina had seen her mother’s hands and understood how lye could eat away at anything it touched. On one of her laundry days, she crumpled up the pink dress, stuck it in a basin, and covered it with lye. When she took it out, it was full of holes. An accident, she told her mother. Besides, it didn’t matter; she wasn’t going to church anymore. Rose wouldn’t hear of it. For months afterward, she dragged Catrina off every Sunday morning wearing an old skirt and blouse. Catrina would focus on anything but the paintings of Jesus and Mary. She swore she’d never look at them again, nor would she ever say their names out loud. Rose understood that though she could make an eight-year-old go to church, she could not force prayer or comfort into a heart that had closed. But she never gave up trying.
One snowy afternoon, Catrina headed down to the river. It was cloudy, and there was a yellow cast to the sky, making it not quite day or night. Her daydreams sank into that peculiar nether light, and she must have dream-walked ten blocks before a noise jarred her back into reality. Howls they were, as unworldly as the awful sounds her mother had made after her father left. That’s when she noticed a man lying on his stomach leaning over the river. He was holding on to a rope attached to a small crate with bars that made it look like a prison. Inside the crate were dogs, eight or ten of them, packed so tightly that it was impossible to make out their forms, just their muscular necks craning and the horrible sounds of their cries as the man lowered the crate into the water. Catrina caught the bulging eyes of one of the dogs before he went down. She had to do something, she thought, but she couldn’t figure out what. The dog sank out of view, and the barking stopped. Only a few bubbles floated to the surface. The man held on to the rope and turned his head when he noticed Catrina. “Rabies,” he said, as if that explained everything. Catrina shook her head. She didn’t believe him. “A menace to the city,” he added.
So that’s what they do with the dogs no one wants, she thought. It was harder to get rid of unwanted people. Catrina never forgot those eyes and the realization that dogs could cry without tears. After that, she did what she could to take care of the strays. The cat was her first. She found him on the side of the street. At first she thought he was a dead pigeon. He was dirty and so scrawny that his vertebrae felt like the teeth of a comb. She carried him home and put out a bowl of milk. He lapped it up and then hid under the bed. Over time, she nursed him back to health until his coat was so white and shiny that she named him Spooky.
After Spooky came another cat, and a turtle she rescued from the park. Catrina trusted animals, and they her. She could look in their eyes and know if they were sick or had been mistreated. Even the irascible ones who initially growled or hissed could feel the kindness in her touch. The stiffness would go out of their backs and they’d allow her to handle them.
With her father gone, Catrina retreated into her own world, which her schoolmates misread as snobbish and odd. They ridiculed Big Catrina, the fatherless girl who always had the faint odor of animal piss about her. “It takes a stray to know one,” they teased. Catrina turned away from their taunts, and after a while they ignored her. The animals were kinder. They were hers alone: them and the memories of her father. The latter she parceled out in meager bits, only occasionally allowing herself a thought about those visits uptown to Central Park or reciting the rhymes he’d made up. Swallowing rocks: that’s what loneliness felt like to Catrina. It constricted her throat and weighed down her arms and legs.
On a cloudless afternoon in July, not long after her tenth birthday, she felt those rocks bulging out of her. Taking the trolley up to Central Park suddenly seemed the only thing that might contain them. She walked through the shrubs and white ash trees that muted the traffic sounds on Fifty-Ninth Street, then up to the duck pond. Folding her long skirt over her legs, she sat on the bluff overlooking the water. The swan boats sputtered around the rim of the pond and Catrina let her thoughts float behind them.
Her father. He’d been around her age when he’d come to this country. She could picture him: pale, skinny, licorice-b
lack hair. Scared? Shy? No, he wouldn’t have been either. She remembered his walk, how he led with his chest, fists clenched, sleeves rolled up above his elbows, as if something was about to happen. His calloused hands with ridges of scars, so big for his size. Her hand in his. A duckling under its mother’s wing couldn’t have felt safer. His voice. How he stretched his syllables so can’t became cahn’t and church, chaaarch. She knew that he’d stuttered as a child. The stutter had mostly vanished by the time he came to America, but he was always frightened that it would slip out of him like a faart. That’s why he talked in short blasts of words. Maybe that’s why he talked in rhyme. To make the sentences go faster. So fast that sometimes he’d gulp in the middle of words, his voice surprisingly soft for a man of his ferocity. She could almost hear it. Catrina closed her eyes. Concentrate, she told herself. Listen.
She stretched out on the bluff and let the sun beat down on her. With her eyes closed, she saw the colors of fire. Warmth trickled through her, filling her with a kind of peace she had rarely known. The edges between her body and the ground blurred until she felt as if she had melted into the earth. She no longer summoned her thoughts; they flowed into her. Catrina Ballerina.
Catrina Ballerina. Have you seen her?
It was his voice.
Catrina Ballerina. Have you seen her? I’m her father.
Catrina Ballerina. Have you seen her? I’m her father, only farther.
Catrina Ballerina. Have you seen her? I’m her father, only farther, never further, always near her.
Had anyone looked down at the young girl lying on the bluff above, they would have seen her arms stretched out by her sides and her palms turned up to the sky as if she’d surrendered. And in a way she had. Her father was gone. She would never see him again.
The rocks had gone out of her, the loneliness filled up.
Rose tolerated the various strays that Catrina brought home. By 1922, five years after Ryan had left, Rose had enough money to afford a four-room tenement on Tenth Avenue and Thirty-Sixth Street. Kiefer, now fourteen, had his own room with a door, and Catrina slept on a couch in the living room. The rooms were small, but the kitchen was wide enough to fit a table for four. The living room window faced the street, and Kiefer’s window looked down onto a back alley. With his door open, there was a cross-breeze through the apartment.
Unfortunately, the breeze was not strong enough to unseat Sunny the rabbit’s stink. Catrina had nabbed her newest pet by the neck one afternoon in Central Park, stowed him in her book bag, and brought him home. A squirrel was really what she had been after. Lots of people kept squirrels as pets, but they darted so quickly through the underbrush that the closest she’d ever come to getting her hands on one was the swish of its tail through her fingers.
Sunny was Catrina’s first rabbit. Until Sunny, she hadn’t known that rabbits could burrow through couches and nest in their cushions, and nothing prepared her for his smell. The moment anyone opened the front door, their eyes would sting and they’d put their hands over their mouth. Rose finally put her foot down: “This place stinks. Get rid of the stench or the rabbit goes.”
Catrina promised she’d fix it. The next morning before school she shredded up the newspaper from the day before and put it in a corner of Sunny’s crate. When she came home that afternoon, the paper was soiled, but the house didn’t smell as bad. Kiefer supplied her with spare newspapers for the next several weeks, until his boss complained that he wasn’t returning enough papers for pulping. She decided to seek out one of the newsboys who hawked the New York Evening Journal and ask for his leftovers. It gave her an excuse to walk down to Madison Square Park on Twenty-Third Street and Broadway and look up at one of the tallest buildings in the world. The new Metropolitan Life Tower was fifty stories high and had a white marble tower with an ornate four-faced clock that told time in all directions. Accustomed to the weather-beaten shutters and drab red bricks on the walk-ups of her neighborhood, she thought this skyscraper was as modern as a rocket.
According to the clock, it was nearly five p.m. when she spotted the newsboy standing beneath a streetlamp next to the subway station. She asked if she could have some of his unsold papers; he told her to come back at six and he’d give her what he had.
The next time she came by for the papers, he asked, “What do you do, eat them for dinner?”
“No, they’re not for me.” She explained about the rabbit.
“I know a little about rabbits,” he said earnestly. “What are you feeding him?”
“Any scrap I can find, pieces of bread, cheese, like that.”
“Rabbits love to eat grass,” the boy said. “They also like lettuce. The vegetable stand on Thirty-Second and Eighth dumps their brown lettuce leaves in the street every night after nine. It’d be a feast for him.”
The boy, James Harty, was taller than Catrina and just as fair-skinned. He had cat-green eyes and wavy blond hair, and was fourteen, two years older than she. He promised her his leftover newspapers if she’d meet him under the clock each day at six. The third time she met him, it was raining. She hadn’t realized how eager she was to see him until she found herself running down Tenth Avenue without a hat or umbrella. By the time she reached Madison Square Park she was soaked and out of breath, and her red hair trailed down her neck. “I’m here,” she said, standing before him.
He looked startled. The way he stared at her made Catrina worry he didn’t recognize her. “You’re pretty, and you’re shivering,” he said, pulling off his jacket and throwing it around her shoulders. “Let’s get you to a dry place.” With his hand on her back, he led her to a luncheonette on one of the side streets. She could barely feel his touch, but there was something about him—maybe his height or the way he’d looked at her—that made her want to nestle under his arm. At the luncheonette, he ordered an egg cream and told her she should get some hot barley soup. Though the soup was too salty, she liked the feeling of being taken care of and drank it down without a word of complaint.
Whenever she could, she’d meet James under the clock at six. In time, she told him about her other pets, and about her family. On weekends, they took walks around the city, and on the first warm day they strolled up to Central Park and lay in the grass by the duck pond. She recited some of her father’s limericks and a few of the stories he’d made up about people. “He’s gone and he’s never coming back,” she told James. “He lied to my mother. I should have known by how mean and quiet he got right before he left that he was never coming back. She cried for days and days. I don’t understand how you could do that to another person.”
James put his hand on her arm. “I’d never do anything like that.”
“I didn’t think he would either,” she said. “Tell me about your parents?”
“My father worked in construction. Two years ago, he fell off a ladder while he was putting up a window in some building on Broadway. He broke his leg in four places. It never healed right. We thought it would only be a matter of time before his leg got good again, but it stayed bent. Now he can only walk with a crutch. He can’t do much of anything with a crippled leg, so my mother has to work. She’s a teacher. She loves children. Well, she’d better love children, she has five of us. Anyways, I hear she’s really good at it. Sometimes my father gets so mad at her for no reason any of us can see. His face goes pale. He’ll curse and his voice gets different from his real voice, high in a scary way. Then me or one of my brothers has to grab him before he hurts her.” James turned to Catrina. “I can’t make up limericks, but I like to write stories and things.”
In the bubble of their world, Catrina was beautiful and smart, and James was a magician who made her feel safe and promised her a forever. He knew how to make shadow puppets with his hands. By holding his fingers a certain way, he could cast a swan or giraffe on a wall. Love in itself was dizzying. Adding shadow swans to the equation launched Catrina out of time and place. Her days at school were hours to be gotten through, the portal to afternoons with J
ames. She knew that girls whispered about the things boys wanted them to do with them, but she and James never spoke about those things. Kissing and touching came naturally to them. At first, he would fumble when he tried to undo her brassiere, but Catrina thought it was sweet. Together they learned what to do and where.
They married in 1926, when Catrina was sixteen, and James moved into her room at Rose’s house. By the time she was nineteen, James was dead. All she had to show from him was a stack of letters. He’d leave one under her pillow each morning: her name written one hundred times, a short poem, random thoughts—anything that reminded him of her, which was everything. The letters were hopeful and so filled with the promise of their forevers that even when his fever sweat soaked through the bedclothes and he stopped taking food and water it never occurred to her that he might die.
When he did die, he took whatever joy was left in her. She yearned for the darkness of night and hid herself from daylight and other people as best she could. She let her hair run wild and her face get puffy. Ringed with sadness, her eyes seemed to recede. She tried to make herself believe that James was watching over her, but mostly that fantasy unraveled before she opened her eyes in the morning. She took to talking to Spooky, her only surviving pet. She’d ask him whether she’d need an umbrella when she went out, and read to him from James’s letters. “He’s never coming back. They never come back,” she’d whisper. Spooky’s pink ear would twitch, and his soft breath on her neck was as reassuring as things got in those days.
Often Rose and Catrina, with matching untamable cinnamon hair, were mistaken for sisters. They were built the same—as Ryan used to say, “generously constructed”—both had milky complexions that blotched with the slightest emotion. But their hearts were made of different stuff. Rose was as set in her ways as she was in her opinions. Even after Kiefer moved out and James died, she wouldn’t be budged from the old apartment on Tenth Avenue and Thirty-Sixth Street.