by Betsy Carter
“Where do you go when you don’t come home?” she asked after another absence.
“Here, there, anywhere,” he said.
“And what about home? To your wife?”
“My wife?” His voice became hoarse with anger. “My wife promised me babies, that was our deal. My wife got the big house, the fancy clothes, the jewelry, and what did I get? Where are those beautiful babies we were going to make? All I’ve got here is a house full of animals. My wife should stick with the dogs, because she’s not suited to be any man’s wife.”
Then one night, he did not come home at all, nor did he show up at the restaurant the next day or at home the following night. Catrina told the folks at the Blue Moon that Walter was sick. She tried convincing herself that he was probably out with a business associate and couldn’t get home. People don’t disappear into thin air, she told herself. But she knew better. That’s exactly what they did. They died. They moved to Chicago. Who cared where they went, they were gone. She wanted to leave Kiefer out of this and called the local police station instead. The cop who came took out a pad and asked her a series of questions: “Does he often stay out late at night?” “Does he like to drink?” “Can you give me a list of all of his friends and their phone numbers?”
She laughed at that one. “You don’t have enough room in your notebook for all of them,” she said.
When he snapped his pad shut, he gave Catrina a wary smile. “I wouldn’t concern myself too much with it, ma’am; he’s probably sleeping it off somewhere.”
But after a few more days, when Walter still didn’t show up, Catrina called Kiefer. “Okay, Mr. Detective, I’m sure it’s nothing, but…” She tried to sound jaunty.
“Sure thing, I’ll look into it,” he promised.
Her heart stopped when she heard the worry in his voice.
At the Blue Moon, people acted as if Walter had never existed. When Kiefer asked Tony the bartender what Walter did in his off hours, Tony put down the drink he was preparing and leaned across the bar. “Are you a cop or something?”
“I am,” said Kiefer. “But I’m also Catrina’s brother. So this is personal.”
Tony’s face softened. “I’m sorry. Catrina’s a fine lady. Anything I can do to help?”
“Yeah, tell me anything you see or hear that sounds out of the ordinary or pertains to Walter, even if it seems beside the point.”
A few nights later, Kiefer came back to the bar around midnight. “Got anything for me?” he asked Tony.
Tony looked around before answering. “Let’s just say I don’t think Walter’s friends are too happy with him right now. Please, give my best to the missus.”
For the next week, Kiefer checked the missing persons reports and found no hint of Walter. Catrina’s calls to him became more frequent. “I’m working all ends,” he reassured her. “I’m sure he’ll show up soon enough.”
Another week went by before a call came into a precinct in the Bronx from a chimney sweep who’d gone to clean the flue at a large apartment building and found a corpse in the chimney; the rope was still around the torso. When Kiefer got word of the unidentified body, he went up to the Bronx morgue to examine it. It had a head of thick, shiny black hair and was wearing a jacket with a Cuban cigar in the inside pocket.
Kiefer called Catrina. “I think we found him,” he said in a professionally calm voice. “I’m afraid the news is not good.”
Catrina fell into the nearest chair and covered her mouth so as not to scream. Kiefer kept talking, and though she heard his words, none of them made sense. “It looks like a murder. We can’t be sure until we do some tests. Unfortunately, we can’t do any tests until you identify the body. I’ll send a car for you. We’re at the chief medical examiner’s office on Worth Street. I’m sorry, Catrina. I know this is hard. Whatever you need, I’m here.”
She remembered the strange noises her mother would make when she’d sit alone in the kitchen after her father left. The sounds that came from her sounded like those. Although Walter had been cruel to her lately, there had been happy times and promises of more to come. He was her life and security and now he was gone. She wept for the losses—for her father, for James. But mostly she wept for who she’d become: a childless, used-up woman who, like her mother, would pay the price for her bad choices.
Kiefer and Rose tried to be comforting and swallowed their I told you so’s, but their suspicions about Walter were confirmed when it turned out that the brownstone in Washington Heights was all he’d had in his own name.
Several weeks after he died, Catrina went back to the Blue Moon. She walked in tentatively, wearing a long skirt with a brocade cape, not one of the revealing dresses she usually wore there. She waved at Tony the bartender, who floated his dishrag in the air and said, “So nice to see you, Mrs. B.” But when it became clear that he wasn’t going to invite her to have a drink, and no one was going to ask her to sit at their table, she decided to go home. About a month later, a new owner took over the restaurant, a former banker from Westchester. He did away with the dancing girls, the opulent menu, and the ornate banquettes and changed the name of the place to Child’s.
At home, Catrina removed all traces of Walter. She sold most of his possessions, though not the grand piano. She packed up the cocktail dresses and evening gowns she couldn’t imagine she’d ever wear again and donated them to the Red Cross. She kept the silver fox, not because she had use for it but as proof to herself that she’d once been a girl with a reason to wear a silver fox. She figured that her time with men was finished. Between James and Walter they’d used up her sex and her body and exhausted her spirit. She felt older than her twenty-four years. The parts of her where a baby might have nested felt hard and cold. She’d never questioned whether or not she’d have a child; it was a matter of when. She’d hoped it would be with James, though had there been one with Walter, maybe the marriage would not have faltered. Although she’d long ago given up her belief in the church and its retributions, she couldn’t help feeling that being barren was her punishment for the life she’d led.
With Catrina on her own, Rose came around more often, though never without offering a reminder of how right she’d been about Walter. “He thought by dressing you in fancy clothes he would make you into someone more appropriate for who he was. But all the fur coats in China couldn’t erase the fact that you are the daughter of Rose and Ryan Walsh from County Mayo.”
Catrina let her mother think what she wanted about Walter. She never admitted to her inability to have children, figuring it was too cruel a thing to tell someone who had lost two of her own. “One thing has changed,” said Catrina the third time Rose brought it up. “I have this big house now. You don’t have to live in that tiny apartment anymore. You could come live with me. You’d have the whole second floor to yourself. I know you’ll say no, but think about it before you do.”
Rose bristled. “I don’t belong up here. I’ve lived so long in that tiny apartment. You can’t uproot an old tree just like that.”
“Even if I rent out the other floors, this place is too big for me. Besides, for better or worse, you and I know how to live together. And this time we wouldn’t be living on top of each other. I’d like it if you came to live here.”
Rose looked away from her daughter, embarrassed by how moved she was by Catrina’s words. “I’m not promising I’ll stay, but I suppose we could try it for a while.”
“It’s you and me again,” said Catrina. “Thank God.”
Rose laughed. “You may thank God, but frankly, I’m going to ask him to help us.”
Catrina changed her name back to Catrina Harty and returned to her old job at the ASPCA, where the strays bounded to her, and Iris and Susanna embraced her as if she’d never left. Even the familiar smell of shit felt like a homecoming. At night, she slept with Sasha curled in the crook of her arm, Spooky on the other side of her, and the beagle and terrier by her feet. One evening, as she and the girls were cleaning up to go home, she
overheard Iris singing “But Not for Me.” Her voice was girlish and not the least bit mournful as she sang about the memory of his kiss and clouds of gray. Catrina knew Iris was a spinster in her late thirties and had had one serious romance. “Do you ever miss the company of men?” she asked.
Iris ran her hand through her hair, and Catrina could see the beginnings of gray at her roots. “I used to think it was sad, being one of those women who thought of animals as their children,” she said. “But now I come home late at night. I make myself a cheese sandwich. I sit on the couch and read a magazine with a dog’s head in my lap. No one asks anything of me. It’s quiet. It’s not a bad life, really it isn’t.”
So that’s how it would be, Catrina thought. She wondered what her father would have to say about his Catrina Ballerina: an old maid covered in dog hair.
Catrina and Rose fell back into their old routines. Catrina would stop by the A&P on Fort Washington Avenue on her way home from work. She’d pick up whatever meat was on sale that day and a can of peas or wax beans. On Friday nights, Kiefer would come for dinner often with a bottle of wine. They’d roast a chicken and some potatoes and talk about their lives as if Walter Bianco had never happened.
On a rainy Thursday afternoon in April 1939, Catrina realized there was no food for lunch. The A&P was four blocks away, so she decided to dash out to Art’s Grocery Store, which was slightly more expensive but only two blocks away.
“May I have a half pound of Swiss cheese and a quarter pound of ham, please?” she asked the man behind the counter.
“Perhaps you would like to try a slice of our American cheese,” said the man.
“I’m sorry? I asked for Swiss cheese.”
“I understand that, madam, but perhaps you would like to try a slice of our American cheese. Free, compliments of Art’s.”
“No thank you, I’ve come for Swiss cheese and I’ll pay for Swiss cheese.”
“Of course.”
The man hunched over the slicing machine as he prepared the Swiss. His hands were thin and knotty. He was attractive despite his messy apron and formal way of speaking.
When she came back to the store later that week, she bought a can of peas and a loaf of bread and watched him from afar. He was older, probably Walter’s age. He was polite to the customers yet seemed distant. If it was possible that blue eyes could fade, then his had.
She didn’t think about him for the next week, though every now and again the image of his black hair and light blue eyes would scrape her memory. It had been nearly five years since Walter, and she’d not given much thought to men. Older men in particular.
So when she returned a few days later, she told herself that she only needed a few things and Art’s was more convenient.
“Hello again,” said the man. “I would offer you some cheese, but I know you will refuse it.”
Catrina patted her hair and looked away from his eyes. “Sir, do I look to you like someone who needs a handout?”
“Not at all, madam, but it’s the policy of the store. And please, I am no sir.” He pointed to the name tag affixed to his apron. “My name is Egon Schneider.”
11.
Because the apron absorbed the mustard and bloodstains, Egon was able to wear the same shirt and pants several days in a row.
He worked behind the delicatessen counter in the back of Art’s Grocery Store on the corner of 187th Street and Overlook Terrace in Washington Heights. The store was long and narrow. There was sawdust on the wood-planked floors and about two feet between the gray cement wall and the refrigerated case filled with white and yellow cheeses and cold meats. Egon was one of four employees: a cashier, a stock boy, Art, and himself. The other three were Americans. Short and round and the color of liverwurst, Art Able, in his late forties, was the oldest by far. He told Egon that he’d hired him because he was a doctor. “We could use some brains around here,” he’d said when Egon told him his profession. “Also, it doesn’t hurt that you speak German, with all these refugees swooping in.”
Art had taught him the English words for ham, salami, bologna, turkey, roast beef, cream cheese, Swiss cheese, and American cheese, then handed him an apron that tied around his neck and waist. “This one’s for free. Keep it clean. Lose it or mess it up? There goes a buck fifty out of your paycheck.” He showed Egon how to use the slicing machine and the way to wrap meat or cheese in brown paper, folding it around the edges as if wrapping a gift. “You don’t need to say much; ‘Thank you’ and ‘How may I help you?’ will do. Oh, and the men like to be called ‘sir’ and the women ‘madam.’ It makes them feel important. Be friendly, but don’t talk too much, and don’t bring up any of that stuff that’s going on over there. You’re here to sell meat, not teach world politics.”
Egon considered the fact that he’d gotten this job six weeks after arriving in America to be a miracle.
It wasn’t the only one.
There was a fan in the back of the store that blew hot air on him, but at least it was air.
When Art wasn’t looking, he sliced pieces of bologna or cheese and shoved them into his mouth. Sometimes it was all he ate in a day.
The sawdust made standing for eleven hours easier on his back.
Carola and Max had come to America four months earlier and gotten an apartment ten blocks up from Art’s. Egon spent his first months in New York sleeping on their pullout sofa. From their living room window, he looked out onto Our Lady Queen of Martyrs parochial school. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary in a niche above the entry. A shawl was draped over her head and body, and pigeons took refuge on her outspread arms. He stared at her finely honed face and downcast eyes, certain that, though he was not a Catholic, she would shelter him as she did the birds. When he couldn’t sleep, he’d whisper to the dark, “I am alive and in America.” These were the things Egon Schneider was grateful for in the summer of 1938. He recited this litany to himself. It became his prayer of hope, his lifeline from the outer edges of despair: the apron, the fan, the free cheese, the sawdust, the job, the statue of Mary. He was alive.
When a customer asked for turkey, he answered as slowly and clearly as possible, “How much of this would you like?”
“What?”
“How much of this would you like, sir?”
His h’s stuck to the back of his tongue and his th’s hissed. His w’s slipped out as v’s.
“Can’t you speak English?”
“I try, sir.”
He’d learned some English in school, but none of it came back to him at times like these.
He used hand motions.
Some made sour-milk faces, others cursed: “Go back to where you came from.”
At those times, he reminded himself of the apron, the fan…
In the mornings, before the customers came, he unpacked boxes, stocked the shelves, and stamped prices on the dry goods.
… the free cheese…
At night, when the store closed, he swept the floor and emptied the garbage. He rummaged through the rotten tomatoes and broken eggs until he found stale rolls and cracker remnants and collected them in a bag.
… the sawdust, the job, the statue of the Virgin Mary.
By the time he got home, Carola and Max were usually asleep, so he undressed in the hall, folded his clothes and left them at the foot of the pullout sofa, then got under the covers and lay in the dark waiting to fall into a bothered sleep. Always an early riser, he awoke at five thirty, before Carola and Max. He showered and brushed his teeth, made his bed, and boiled water for tea. He was conscious of not eating their food, knowing that they, like he, lived on a crimped budget, so he’d eat one of the rolls he’d bagged the night before, then head off to Fort Tryon Park, where he’d sit on a bench (none of them yellow) and scatter the crumbs from the previous night’s scavenging on the ground. He never figured out where the pigeons came from or how they knew, but within moments there would be a horde of them at his feet, waddling like old men, cocking their heads and bru-u-ooo-in
g as they gobbled up breakfast. Egon found them drab and inelegant, nothing like the sleek warblers and mottled woodcocks in the Stadtwald, but then again, perhaps buried inside them was the link to something grander.
Every Sunday afternoon at four, he would meet Meyer at Nash’s Bakery uptown on Dyckman Street. Sometimes Max and Carola joined them, but on this gusty fall afternoon it was the two of them. At Nash’s they ordered éclairs and Linzertorten. The small wicker chairs and round marble-topped tables reminded them of the kaffeehäuser back home, and, because most of the customers and all of the waiters were German Jews, they could speak German without feeling self-conscious.
Washington Heights was filled with German Jews, most of them from the smaller cities in Germany, particularly Frankfurt, because they’d heard that this fifty-block aerie at the tip of Manhattan had a new park with winding paths and, beneath it, a sweep of the Hudson River. It was as similar to the Stadtwald and Main River as they were likely to find in America. In truth, they found little of the gentility of home. The streets were lined with red and white brick apartment buildings, none of them higher than six stories. While many had fashionable art deco–style mirrors and tiled floors in their lobbies, most were walk-ups with small rooms and low ceilings. The three main shopping streets were wide but littered with newspapers and candy wrappers, and streams of people crowded the sidewalks. There were so many automobiles that Egon felt he was taking his life in his hands every time he stepped off the curb.
Meyer had been in New York for a year and was eager to try out his Americanisms on Egon. “So how’s the tricks?” he asked Egon as they sipped their coffee.