The postcards made me even more admiring of Lucy, if that was possible. There she was, middle-aged spinster, making her way around the globe like someone half her age. There were no references to Harriet. No comments about her former life in New York. No political observations. Just pleasant travelogue chitchat, the kind any aunt might write to any adolescent niece.
Even though the postcards weren’t sad, what was written between the lines was. I found myself, by the time I got to the final one from Vienna just before the war, crying my eyes out. Was she very lonely? Did she ever have another love? What happened to her?
I went into the bathroom to splash water on my face before Catherine got home. In fact, she was late. I left a note for her in the living room and went up to the third floor, empty except for some stored cartons and the box full of Lucy’s things. I sat down and started rooting through it again, looking for clues. But there were none. I’d been through the journals several times, but they were written in 1930, as an exercise in healing. Why did what came after not matter as much, even though she was probably witness to major upheavals in Europe and Asia?
“Lucy,” I said aloud, “I can’t believe you didn’t write about your later life. I can’t believe you had nothing to say about Hitler or Mussolini. I can’t believe you let yourself die with Harriet.”
“Oh,” someone said, “no, you’re right, of course.” The Lucy who stood in the shadows was one I hardly recognized. She was older than the woman who haunted me before, with more grey in her hair, more stoop to her shoulders. “I always intended to publish what I wrote on my travels, I just never got around to it. Then I had to leave Europe quickly, when the war started, and a lot of it was abandoned anyway. But my relationship with Harriet—well, I took great care to preserve what I wrote about it. I left most of it at my sister’s house, in case anything happened to me. Then . . .”
Did she really say these things? She’d never spoken so much to me before. Her presence was so slight, so faded, I could hardly see her mouth move.
“Then what? What happened to you?” I asked her, knowing full well she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. Ghosts, I’d learned, don’t give much away.
“Does it matter?” she asked, and I turned when I heard a door slam downstairs. Catherine, I thought. When I turned back, Lucy—quiet, thoughtful, middle-aged Lucy—had faded into the woodwork.
Catherine found me on the floor like that, staring off into the corner of the room. She must have thought I was working hard, because she never mentioned the incident at school. I told her I had decided to make an office for myself up here, instead of downstairs; and that, over the next few days, is precisely what I did.
• • •
We turned the spare room downstairs into a makeshift guestroom and invited Tuttie over for Chinese takeout and a round with the Ouija board. I hadn’t seen her in a week, and already she looked different to me. She had a new outfit on, a pants suit in a brilliant shade of green.
“Bought it with my raise, honeybunch,” she said when I complimented her. “New shoes, too,” and she stuck out one stylish black pump for me to admire. “Honey, I love my new job, but it just isn’t the same without you.”
“I know, it’s better,” I teased, and she smiled and poked me in the arm.
“What a kidder,” she said. “So Catherine, how do you put up with such a kidder?”
We had all of Tuttie’s favorites—Ta-chien chicken, prawns with black bean sauce, spring rolls, scallion pancakes. She talked nonstop about the store, which seemed like a different world to me now, even after so short a time. What would Margielove think of the way I had handled things? Would I ever really go back? My whole future, when I tried to think about it, seemed to be up for grabs, as clouded in mystery as Lucy’s last decade.
“ . . . so I told him no deal,” Tuttie was finishing as we cracked open our fortune cookies. “Keep talking, success is near,” she read from her slip of paper, laughing and crunching a piece of cookie.
“Social and recreational activities should improve,” Catherine read next. “I sure hope so. I could use some fun. I’ve done nothing but work for the longest time.”
They waited for me. I can’t explain it, but I had a sudden sense of foreboding when I broke that cookie, like it was going to say, “Life will end tomorrow.” I cracked it clean in half, then straightened out the fortune.
I swear that what I saw there was “Ask the Ouija board,” but when I couldn’t speak, Tuttie pulled it out of my hands and read it aloud for me.
“Let’s see what’s made her speechless,” she said. “Make good use of time.”
“How appropriate!” Catherine squealed. “I’m going to frame that for you. We’ll hang it in your office!”
I took the paper from Tuttie and read it myself, “Make good use of time.” Then I cleared away dinner without a word and set the Ouija board in the middle of the table.
• • •
We still had the black candles from the last time we had indulged in this game. Black candles are really just like any other candles except for the way they make you feel—like you’re indulging in something forbidden. In fact, one of the candles was worn down to a nub from the time a few weeks before when Catherine and I had sex in our newly assembled bed in our brand new apartment.
“Huh,” Tuttie said, lighting both of them. “How’d this one get so small?”
Catherine looked at me lasciviously through the flames and winked. “Power failure,” she said. “Remember the big rainstorm last week?”
Tuttie accepted that and settled herself with her fingertips grazing the top of the pointer. I was half thinking about the black candle, half pondering the fortune cookie incident.
“Come on,” Tuttie said, sternly. “You have to concentrate. I can tell you’re not concentrating.”
She closed her eyes and started asking questions. We repeated the answers for her as the pointer skidded across the board. Clearly, she had come prepared with her own agenda for the Ouija board. Catherine and I were just her assistants, her eyes, for a full fifteen minutes, as Tuttie asked and got the answers to her queries about the store and its future, whether or not her building would go co-op, the fates of friends and relatives she hadn’t seen in years. When she finally opened her eyes, they were clear and bright.
“Wow,” she said, “that’s really the way to do it. I felt like I was off somewhere, in a trance or something. Now you try.”
We exchanged seats, but my aura was definitely not as strong as Tuttie’s. I closed my eyes, I waited for the pointer to slip under my fingers, but nothing happened.
“Dumpling,” Tuttie said, taking my chin firmly in her hand and turning my face. I opened my eyes and found I was staring directly into hers, which were two bright glints in the candlelight. “You’re not concentrating. See how easy it was for me? You’re not asking it what you really want to know. You’re putting around. There’s something on your mind.”
I’d never heard Tuttie so forceful. I glanced over at Catherine who was sitting stiffly in her chair, her long hands flatly on the table, like she had a feeling something was happening and she was afraid to know what. Slowly, I closed my eyes and called to the blackness behind my lids a shaky picture of Lucy, the one of her in the thirties, wearing the marcasite pin. I pressed my lids down tighter and tighter, forcing my face into a mass of creases and puckers. I concentrated as I have never concentrated on anything in my life.
“Lucy,” I said, firmly, “are you there?”
The pointer pulsed under my fingertips and began its long slide across the board.
“Yes,” Catherine read out in a small voice.
In my mind, Lucy’s lips moved slowly in the photograph and formed the word “Yes.” I had the urge to open my eyes and turn the whole table over. But I could feel the hushed, hollow breathing in the room—my own? Catherine’s? Tuttie’s? Lucy’s?—and courageously, I went on.
I asked her questions about her travels, and she gave simple, one-
word answers that often didn’t make sense. When I asked, for example, why she didn’t return, she said “Never,” and if she ever had another lover, she replied simply, “Out.”
“Ask her easier things,” Catherine coaxed. “Maybe these are too difficult or require longer answers than she can handle.”
“Lucy,” I said, my hands feeling suddenly very tired, like someone had placed a weight on them, “did you die in 1940?”
The answer came quickly, “No.”
I raced through the decades, trying to pin her down. At each one, the pointer would slide back then skid straight to “No.” Cautiously, almost holding my breath, my fingers aching, I pressed on. “Did you die in the 1980s?”
There was a moment’s hesitation, then the pointer took off for the opposite end of the board.
“Yes!” Catherine gasped, and Tuttie started breathing more heavily.
“What day?” I questioned, almost in a whisper.
Then the pointer ambled slowly from number to number, giving the month, day, and year, all in numbers. My thoughts made a sudden leap, as I realized that Lucy had lived to be almost a hundred.
“Sophia Cervenak, who was she?”
The pointer spelled out “nurse” slowly and steadily, but I already knew that. “Your nurse?” The answer came back “Yes.”
“Where can I find her?” received the simple and unsatisfying reply “There.”
And then when I added, ambitiously, “Lucy, how did you die?” the pointer slid right off the board into my lap. I opened my eyes and stared at it.
Tuttie had started to cry, and Catherine looked as if she were about to. I had a terrible headache from scrunching up all the muscles in my face for what seemed like hours but was really only about ten minutes. Catherine went for the lights, and then stood behind me, massaging my neck and shoulders.
“I owe you an apology,” she whispered.
“Why?” I asked, feeling the tightness give way under her hands.
“For not really believing you,” she said. “It’s been hard for me to accept that you see ghosts.”
Tuttie was putting the game and the candles away, muttering to herself something in Yiddish I couldn’t understand. She seemed to be more shaken than I.
“That date,” Catherine said, her hands now caressing my shoulders, in a way that made me think we would probably have sex later. “Does that mean anything to you?”
I repeated the numbers several times. They had a familiar ring, but I couldn’t place them. The most amazing thing was that it was only a year ago.
“Maybe that’s when you took over the store,” Tuttie suggested. “Wouldn’t that be creepy?” But I knew when Margielove had died, and it was less than a year before.
It hit me later that night, when Tuttie was tucked away in the guestroom. Catherine and I were in bed, engaging in a little foreplay, like I knew we would. I don’t know why it occurred to me then, when I was running my hands over her thighs, what the date might correspond to. Anyway, I stopped suddenly, turned on the light, and stared determinedly into Catherine’s surprised face.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, but I was already up and hunting through a box of my financial records in the closet. I must have looked possessed, because Catherine sounded worried.
“Honey, what is it?”
And there it was, the checkbook register from a year ago. I rifled quickly through the pages like a madwoman, till I got to April, where I had crossed out a check for thirty-five dollars and marked in “never cashed.” And, as I had known somehow deep in myself and forgotten, it bore the same date that the Ouija board had just supplied.
34
It had been almost a year since I’d stood at the entrance of the building on Eighty-fifth Street, trying to find out about vacant apartments. At the time, nothing had connected. But maybe you’re smarter than I am. Maybe the minute I told you the super of Lucy’s building said a woman had died, you knew it was Lucy. But how could it have been? She would have been close to a hundred. And why did her family think she was dead? Was it like Lucy to live as a recluse for almost fifty years?
I pushed the buzzer for 5A. The names “S. Cervenak” and “A. Godinez” were stripped in next to it. It took a few minutes, but a woman’s voice finally answered. “Yes!” it crackled.
“Ms. Cervenak? My name is Susan Van Dine, and you don’t know me but I’ve been doing research on Lucy Weir, and I’d just like to ask you a few questions.”
There was silence, then more static. “Go away, before I call the police.”
I swallowed hard and pushed again.
“I said go away,” she yelled through the speaker.
“Please,” I said, “I’m alone, I’m unarmed, I really am just a curious researcher. Please—just one minute of your time?”
“I’m calling the police now,” came the crackling voice.
But she didn’t. I knew she wouldn’t. I couldn’t possibly have sounded threatening. I waited there for a few moments, until a tall, striking woman in an oversized sweater and jeans came down to the lobby. She was not my image of a nurse or caretaker, though she certainly had the physical strength required. She looked at me curiously through the inner locked door and finally held it open for me.
“What did you say your name is?” she asked in a throaty voice.
“Susan Van Dine,” I said, holding out my hand. She hesitated, then held out her own strong one to me. The nails were perfectly rounded, making my own bitten ones look pathetic. Her deep eyes held me as firmly as her hand.
“Sophia Cervenak,” she said. She may have pulled me through the door, but I doubt it. It’s more likely I followed her willingly. “Now what is it you want from me? You’ve got one minute.”
She leaned against the wall in the lobby, her arms folded tightly across her chest, her eyes sizing me up. She had a good eight inches on me, and even if she hadn’t been so self-assured, her height alone would have intimidated me. That, and the feeling I had that she was a lesbian.
“Well, I’m not sure exactly,” I stammered. “It’s kind of a long story. You see, a few years ago, I found this photo album that belonged to Lucy Weir . . .”
It took considerably longer than a minute to unveil my side of the story for her, but she was patient, unquestionably interested. All I wanted, I said, was to see the apartment briefly and to ask her a few questions about Lucy’s old age. She never took her eyes off me. At the end, she simply asked, “You’re a lesbian, aren’t you?” and I nodded.
“Come on up,” she said, and we took a silent elevator ride to the fifth floor.
I didn’t recognize it immediately. I’d only really seen a few photographs. She led me down a long hall with three bedrooms leading off of it to the living room, which looked out onto Broadway through six magnificent windows. They were new windows, probably put in recently. The paint was fairly new, too, but the fixtures and molding had been maintained. The room was big enough to hold two sofas and a wild array of plants. There were various watercolor paintings on the walls, all in pastel hues. “My lover Ana’s work,” Sophia explained, when I admired them. “She’s an artist.”
It didn’t look exactly like the photographs I’d seen, but it had a certain feel to it. It felt like Lucy had been here. It felt like a place at peace with itself.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” I said reverently. “This is where they lived.”
She was still eyeing me curiously, wondering, I guess, what exactly I wanted and how much she should give. “You had some questions,” she stated.
We sat in the living room, and I tried to recover my thoughts. There was so much in my head and heart at that moment.
“How long did you take care of Lucy?” I asked.
“Just two years, till her heart gave out. She had another companion before me, Martha, but she was in her sixties and she died, too,” Sophia answered. She smiled, a bit roguishly. “They were lovers, we weren’t.”
I must have looked surprised. I’d never consid
ered that they might have been, since Sophia was no older than I.
“I was under the impression,” I continued, “that Lucy just disappeared in the forties. Her family had no contact with her after that time. Do you know anything about that? Why she lost touch with them?”
She seemed genuinely puzzled. “She never mentioned family.”
This didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Sophia hadn’t been with her long, probably couldn’t tell me anything worth knowing. I sighed, wondering what else to ask.
“But maybe there’s something in her papers,” she added, helpfully.
My ears pricked up, my heart beat a little faster. “Papers?” I whispered, my excitement practically taking my voice away.
Sophia stood up and escorted me down a shorter hall to the kitchen. Off the kitchen was a small room, which had once been a maid’s room, and was now a catchall full of boxes, painting supplies, a vacuum cleaner, a ladder and various tools. We wended our way to the back corner, where two medium-sized cardboard moving boxes, like the one I had with Lucy’s writings in it, sat taped shut. “Lucy Weir, Papers” was written in heavy black magic marker on the sides.
“I’ve been lazy about this. I keep meaning to pack them off to Barnard, but haven’t yet,” Sophia explained, untaping one of the boxes for me. “That’s where she talked about sending them at one time. It’s journals and things like that. I should go through them, but I never have the time.” She pulled a leather journal out and handed it to me. “I’ve gone back to school full time at City College. I never finished my B.A. Lucy left me a little money and got me on the lease here, so Ana and I can live pretty cheaply.”
“What a nice thing to do,” I murmured, remembering how Elinor had described Lucy as a caring person.
“Oh, she was special,” Sophia said, with real emotion.
She opened the other box for me and brought out the first thing her hand touched. It looked like a ream of paper wrapped in brown paper. On the front, in the handwriting I recognized so well, it read “Our Time, Our Place.” And beneath, “A Novel by Lucy Warner Weir.”
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