Brooklyn Graves

by Triss Stein

  This is artsy private school. The headmaster is called by his first name and so are the teachers. It took me a long time to get used to that.

  “And?”

  “Oh, he said they don’t know anything about what happened, but that other people will cover for Natalya this week in the office. And Alex is still out too.’ And we all send our best wishes to both of them. We will come together as a community to honor a man so beloved,’ blah, blah—you know how he talks. Not that it isn’t true, though. So now there is a committee to figure out what we should do. And then everyone who wanted to was allowed to say something. Sharing! So people who don’t even know Alex and were never nice to Dima, even, just had to get up there and talk. Sickening. I hate drama llamas! And then they said counselors will add sessions in case anyone is feeling frightened. Or whatever.

  “Well, so, we want to go see Alex tonight, just for a little while.”

  “Oh, Chris, I don’t know about that. It is so soon, they are still in shock. Are you sure it’s okay, having visitors tonight? Maybe they want to be alone.”

  “Mom, Alex asked us to. We all got texted. He needs his friends, like you said last night. So could you drive me and Mel and maybe Roger and Sean?”

  “Okay, if he asked you to come. If you don’t mind crowding. If it’s still raining, I’ll even pick them up.”

  I threw together a meal, and Chris connected with her friends and declared herself ready to roll. I wasn’t sure her sloppy school clothes were quite right for a condolence call but decided it wasn’t worth a fight; this evening would be hard enough for a teenager without that. First rule of parenting a teen: Pick your battles. Sometimes I even managed to remember that. Not always.

  Soon there were there three equally sloppy but wide-eyed, sober youngsters in my car, and we were winding our way through the evening traffic on Ocean Parkway headed to the other side of Brooklyn, right out to one of urban Brooklyn’s very own beaches. The car was filled with the sugar and oil smell of fresh doughnuts, Alex’s favorite food.

  Chapter Three

  I knew how to get there—just drive to the end of Ocean Parkway and stop at the ocean—and then turn onto a side street crowded with modest homes and worn brick apartment buildings. Their home was a modest stucco two-family house, one up and one down, standing in a row with others exactly like it separated by narrow driveways. It was an old house, a little tired-looking, but clean and cared for. I remembered Dima painting the woodwork and planting rosebushes in the tiny front garden. There was no crime scene tape now, but I saw some ripped pieces of it caught in the shrubbery.

  “You can go ahead. Alex might have wanted you, but I am afraid I’d be intruding.”

  “Mom?”

  “It’s not the moment for Natalya to be entertaining guests. I’ll park when I can, go have a cup of coffee, and meet you in front in an hour, okay? That’s long enough for this type of visit, and it’s a school night, too.”

  They tumbled out, unusually silent. I added, “Chris, you can call if you want to leave sooner.” I watched as they went up the walk, girls holding hands and the boys squaring their shoulders before they rang the bell, trying so hard to be grown up.

  I sat in the car, music on, thinking about the very different last time I had driven Chris out here, for another classmate’s gigantic sixteenth birthday party at a gaudy Russian restaurant. I tried to occupy my mind with watching for a parking space and wondering if I would have time for a short walk on the boardwalk along the beach. Sea air and the soothing sound of the waves suddenly seemed very appealing.

  I jumped when Chris knocked on the car window and motioned me to roll it down.

  “It’s awful. The house is full of people speaking Russian and crying, but we are hanging out in Alex’s room. Natalya isn’t crying, but she looks awful and she says come right up, don’t sit in the car.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not dressed for it and I’m empty-handed. People bring food…” The excuses tumbled out.

  “Mom, she really meant it. And quick! There’s a spot opening up.”

  She pointed down the block and I sped away to grab it the second it was vacated. Chris had gone back inside, and as I approached the front door Natalya stepped out. She stood under the light over the front door, and I could see her shiver in the chilly night air, hug herself, take out a cigarette. She came down the walk to meet me and took both my hands in her own cold ones.

  “I thank you for coming, Erica! I had to get away for a moment.” She shivered again. “My house is full of crazy people. All the drama. Turns all your insides into opera. You know?” She put her arm around my shoulders and said, “Come. We talk ourselves, here, on the steps.”

  Her face was a decade older, a fierce mask. “No mistake. My heart is broken and I know it will not mend, not in my whole life. You know too, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. It will be better someday, I promise, but I won’t lie to you. It won’t be right away.”

  She said with chilly calm, “I have no need for it to be better. As long as it hurts, my Dima will be alive in my heart. But I do not need to make a spectacle of my feelings for a houseful of his relatives. They are my feelings, mine alone, and Alex’s.” She went silent. “They think I am cold, but they know nothing. If I could, I would crawl into a bottle of vodka and never come out.”

  I’d never seen Natalya take a drink and she was generally critical of anyone who liked it too much.

  “For now, I am angry and that keeps me standing. Standing up? Will keep me going. Later, later, I can go to pieces.”

  I hugged her. What else could I do?

  She shivered. “He has a second job, Dima. Had. Had a second job. Did you know? And sometimes he went straight from his night job to breakfast out and to his day job at school. So I did not think anything, when he was not at home this morning. Then. I stepped out to see how the weather looked. He was there.” She pointed. “Right there. Lying there, all crumpled up, my Dima. I found him. I screamed. I ran to him.” She shuddered. “I knew when I touched him. People came, called EMS, but I knew.” A long shuddering breath. “I am like an ice statue now, frozen at that moment. You know? Except I still see…”

  She lifted her head from my shoulder at last, and looked at me with a fierce expression. “The police came, they talk, they say no chance it was an accident. As if I did not know that. Someone put a bullet in his head and left him here, at home, so we could find him. They ask, those cops, did he have enemies? Only one. I told them to start with his no-good brother.”

  She gestured at the house. “They don’t know I said it. Oh, they would be angry. The good name of the family. Mama’s darling baby boy. Dima worked himself to death for all of them and they care more about baby brother. That…that…” She ended with a string of Russian words. I didn’t need a translator to know they were curses. “I have no one here now, no one, only my Alex.”

  She pointed to the driveway which was dominated by a black Mercedes SUV that made the house look even older and smaller, and made my own car look like a tin can.

  “My brother-in-law, the big shot with the big shot car and no job. We have our guesses about where that came from, but no proof. Dima tried, he tried so hard, he did everything…brought him here, tried to get him to go to school.”

  “That was Dima, wasn’t it? He took care of everyone. He had a big heart.”

  “Mine is not so big, but I learned from him. But with this one, his own brother, nothing, nothing worked.”

  A young man wearing a slick black leather jacket walked from the house, keys in hand.

  Natalya jumped up, walked right up to him and shoved him in the shoulder.

  “You have some nerve, coming here!”

  “What?” he said, holding her arms to prevent another shove. “What? My beloved older brother is dead and I should not come to comfort my mother?”

  “Don’t put o
n your act with me, you lying sneak. She’s fooled, but I am not.” She struggled out of his grip.

  “Natasha, Natasha,” he said softly. “Dima is gone. Is it not time to let go of the past?”

  “Do not call me by a pet name. You have not the right. Get off my property now!”

  He chucked her under the chin, and said softly, “You cannot keep me from my mother.” He stepped back and added, “You know I will be back.”

  “You can take your mother to move in with you—oh, you wouldn’t like that so much, would you?—but I can and will keep you out of my house.” She said it in a soft voice that was so furious it could have been shouting. I could hardly believe this was happening in her driveway, in front of me and any neighbor who happened to be on the street.

  He just got into his car and backed out so quickly his tires squealed. She went from red and furious to white and collapsing, sitting on her porch steps, head on her knees. I sat down beside her, my hand on her arm.

  “Natalya, what is it? How can I help?”

  “My Dima is gone, and this—this—is what I have left of him, this rotten brother.” She wiped tears off her face with a furious movement of both hands.

  She stood up and stumbled her way back to the front door, moving blindly, groping for the doorknob.

  I thought I had better go with her, but she stopped herself at the door, wiped the tears from her face, and tidied her hair.

  “Thank you for sitting with me, Erica. I am in control of myself now. I send everyone home and Alex and I must have some sleep. My cousin the doctor left us some pills for sleeping without nightmares.”

  “Natalya, I am so, so sorry. Can I do anything else for you?” It was dawning on me that though she was surrounded by family, she seemed to be lonely.

  “You know. You know! You understand. If I could just talk from my heart…”

  “Any time.”

  She nodded, wearily, looking as if she had already taken a pill.

  “I will call you soon, when I am thinking a little clearly. More clearly.”

  She closed her eyes and then snapped them open again. “I will send your kids out now, and everyone else too. We have had enough, Alex and me.”

  She turned back to the house, straightening her back and curling her hands into little fists.

  Just a minute later my passengers came out and got in the car without a word. They looked stunned. This was the only silent ride I’d ever taken with Chris and her talkative friends. Usually they sound like little birds, chattering away.

  The silence was fine with me. My thoughts kept chasing each other around, past and present colliding over good men dead too soon. I thought of the Natalya I had seen tonight when shock and grief had ripped the doors open on the side of her she kept tightly shut. I knew a woman who was witty and adventurous and playful, in love with New York, in love with fashion, passionate about her husband and her child. She kept the doors tightly closed on the dark days in her life.

  When we were back in our own house, Chris hugged me hard, turned and came back for another hug before she went to her room without a word. In the morning she flew out the door, late as usual, and I settled in to work at home. I would call Natalya later, I thought, but now she would be sleeping. I hoped she would be sleeping, blessedly oblivious for many hours. Thank goodness for sleep meds.

  My plan was to do my own work, chain myself to the computer, and make some real progress. Not think about Chris or Dima or Tiffany for a few hours.

  The only flaw was that Tiffany was thinking about me. Not really Tiffany of course, but his fans. My work e-mail had a badly typed, all caps message from Dr. Flint, insisting I return to Green-Wood to collect the information he still needed. He wrote: “IF SIND TODAY, CAN STILL UES. FAX TO HOTL? ASAP” Evidently he did not realize I could send it all digitally. I also noticed there was no “please” anywhere in there.

  Young Ryan was also very definitely thinking about Tiffany. And me. He was contacting me every five minutes with questions that ranged from panic about Flint to background about Tiffany. Maybe it only felt like every five minutes, but it was enough to blow my concentration into confetti. By midday, I gave up. I was going to make myself unavailable.

  I would go back to Green-Wood but I could keep my phone off. With any luck, I told myself, I could calm both Ryan and Flint, the power behind the curtain, by going to see the window we had missed the other day.

  I was glad to have a little time to myself. Today my own memories of my husband came flooding in. It took me by surprise, after all this time, but I knew it was set off by Dima’s death. After a while, I stopped seeing the stones and the mausoleums and only thought about my Jeff dying in a park kind of like this, under the trees.

  I’d met him at my best friend’s Sweet Sixteen barbecue. To this day, he comes back to me with warm summer nights, the radio playing “Heaven is a Place on Earth,” and the smell of grilling hot dogs. We were deaf to all concerns from my Jewish parents and his Italian ones. We knew we belonged together.

  Brooklyn girls are nothing if not tough.

  After the accident, I remade my life and in the process I accidentally became a scholar. When I went back to school to become a high school teacher because I thought it offered a better future for us, my professors encouraged me, and I got some fellowships, and then I started a PhD program at City College. Now I go to museums and antique shows—for fun! And I read scholarly journals and even understand them. I have fallen into a life that my Jeff didn’t even know existed, a bigger life in some ways, and I am fine with it.

  Yet some days, I’d give it all up—everything I am now, everything I have—for just one summer night in the back seat of his battered Toyota, parked at Rockaway Beach with the sound of the surf rushing in and out.

  As I reached the hill I didn’t know if I was crying for myself or for what Natalya would have to live through. She would, though, just as I had. If Brooklyn girls are tough, Russian women have backbones of steel. Still, I would not tell her I still miss Jeff.

  One more bend in the path brought me to the crumbling building I could not get to see the other day. A tall metal fence, now rusty, and a small garden, now filled with overgrown evergreens and weeds surrounding it. The elaborately wrought gate was open, hanging on its hinges, and the caution signs were gone, so I went right up the front steps, walking carefully over the broken marble. I pushed on the massive bronze door, gently at first, and then harder, until it finally squealed and slowly opened just a crack. Just enough.

  I was assaulted by a damp, musty, moldy odor before my eyes had even adjusted enough to see anything. The light was dim, coming through a great rear window that had not been cleaned in, I guessed, decades. How strange to be in a chapel like this for the second time in a few days, when I had never even been near one before.

  There were two marble benches and a carved marble altar. Or was it, actually, the sarcophagus for the people who had built this memorial? There were some memorial tablets on the walls, but they were too dirty, and the light was too dim, for me to read them. Certainly they were in memory of the rich people who intended to establish their social position in death as well as in life.

  I turned to look at the great window. It was far too grimy to have the glorious effect it should have, but where the sun pierced through the dirt, brilliant rainbow fragments of color splashed across the dingy marble floor. I could see chips and scrapes around the frame, some ugly scratches in the dust on the glass, some bending of the leading.

  I looked up and up, as the window rose at least six feet above me. I could not make out what was depicted—I really would have to ask to see a reproduction—but it seemed complex and dramatic. Repeated patches in shades of blue suggested maybe a lake or river, or perhaps it was the sky.

  One side wall was plain white plaster now grimy and cracked. On the other, there were wooden boards covering an empty space. So t
hat was it, all the problem from the other day. A window was broken? Or removed because it was unsafe? Could the metal frame have become weakened, or rusted? I had no idea, but I knew someone who might. I would call him later. I was curious now. Ahhh, maybe someone was hurt when it fell out.

  It was fascinating but also a little creepy. It was not the presence of death, which after all is what a cemetery is all about. It was the sadness in this neglected building, once so elegant and now so deteriorated. Or perhaps I had brought the sadness with me. I pulled out the list of needed photos from Dr. Flint and completed the job as quickly as possible.

  I was happy to return to the brightness and warmth of the outside world. I shivered and sucked in a few deep breaths of fresh air before I struggled to pull the heavy door back in place. A brisk walk back to the cemetery entrance helped to clear my head. A helpful young staffer at the visitors center—I knew she wasn’t twelve but she looked it—did find a photo of the dimly seen window in an elegant and expensive book the museum would have to buy for me if they wanted me to have it.

  It was not the Biblical or mythological scene I was expecting but a spectacular river view, the Hudson with the cliffs of the Palisades on the western shore. I’d know it anywhere. A shimmering brilliant blue sky reflected in the blues of the water, there were multiple shades of green forest in the foreground and dark storm clouds off in the northern distance. It was a scene from a museum, from the great Hudson River paintings of Cole or Bierstadt, and just as breathtaking in glass, even in the small book illustration.

  There were no bridges or cities or even the small villages that hug the riverbanks. There were no Iroquois longhouses either. The sole sign of human life was a small three-masted ship under full sail and heading north, upstream. The tiny flags in the picture were too hard to see, but the text told me it was Henry Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, claiming this land and this river for the Netherlands. As a historian I had to be charmed, though it seemed pretty odd for a memorial chapel. It resembled the brilliant but somewhat cloying religious window of the other day in nothing but its art.