There Was an Old Woman

by Hallie Ephron

  The doors opened on the second floor, where the main exhibit hall was located. A minute later there was a chime. A text message. Evie fished out the phone.

  The message was short and sweet. It was not from Seth; it was from her sister, Ginger, and it was so not what she wanted to see.

  Chapter Three

  It’s mom. Call me. xx Ginger

  Why now? Not again. Evie knew she should return the call right away, and as she and Nick entered the Great Hall of Five-Boroughs Historical Society, pushing ahead of them a platform truck with the B-25 Wright Whirlwind engine wrapped up on it like a gigantic pastrami sandwich, that’s what she was intending to do. But her boss’s reaction to their arrival sidetracked her.

  “Wow. Is that what I think it is?” Connor Kennedy’s familiar voice boomed behind her. A moment later, he was in her space and she could smell his cologne and cigarette breath. He stood absolutely still and silent, staring at the engine. Moving the thing had eaten up a good chunk of Evie’s budget, but judging from Connor’s reaction, it had been worth it.

  “So this is going to be sensational,” he said, doing a 360 and surveying the disarray in the exhibit hall with apprehension. “We are going to make it, aren’t we?”

  “Of course we’ll make it. We always do,” Evie said, sounding more confident than she felt.

  The parquet floor of the Great Hall was awash in packing crates. The other two members of Evie’s small staff were assembling bases and plexi mounts for the installation. The museum’s resident electrician was drilling into the wall and wiring one of six massive flat-screen monitors. One of the janitors was sweeping up wood and plaster dust with a wide push broom.

  Outside, beyond a row of narrow two-story arched windows, bright yellow banners for the upcoming exhibit snapped in the breeze. Dramatic red-orange letters on them read: SEARED IN MEMORY. Below that and smaller: June 10–November 17. Just three weeks until it opened.

  Evie could envision the room, silent and cleared of debris. Each of four historic fires would have its own timeline and photographs, audio and video. Artifacts she’d culled from their own collection and borrowed from others would be mounted, lit, and documented. Together, each grouping would tell its own story.

  She walked Connor through the half-finished installations. Greeting visitors and already in place was a magnificent red-and-black steam-powered pumper like the one used to fight the Great Fire of 1776 that destroyed the Stock Exchange and much of lower Manhattan. The next section, commemorating the fire during the ugly 1853 Civil War Draft Riots, would feature blowups of inflammatory broadsides (“We are sold for $300 whilst they pay $1000 for negroes”) that stoked passions so much that anyone with dark skin risked being chased through the streets, beaten, and even killed. One of her favorite pieces in that section was a long speaking trumpet, the kind that would have been used to shout orders to firefighters over those five hellish summer days when the city burned.

  Another section remembered the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, arguably the saddest of all time. In the center was a raised platform where they’d set a battered fireman’s net that couldn’t save the young, mostly immigrant women who’d thrown themselves from the windows of the upper floors of the Asch Building. Foam-core mounted photographs, showing views of the devastated factory interior filled with charred sewing machines and coffins lined up tidily on the floor like fallen soldiers, were already on the wall. Something about the photographs from that one always did her in, filling her head with the gut-wrenching smell of smoke, a smell seared in her own memory.

  The list of the 146 who died in that fire was particularly heartbreaking. Mary Goldstein had been only eleven; Kate Leone, fourteen; most of the rest were in their teens and early twenties. A few of the bodies remained unidentified a hundred years later.

  Journalists back in those days were allowed, encouraged even, to write unabashedly emotional prose, and Evie had selected a quote from a reporter’s viscerally melodramatic eyewitness account:

  I learned a new sound—a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk. . . . Thud-dead, thud-dead—together they went into eternity.

  Thud-dead, thud-dead, together they went into eternity. The elegiac passage, more poetry than prose, moved Evie profoundly. She couldn’t imagine today’s Daily News or New York Times printing anything like that.

  As she finished showing Connor around, taking notes on his suggestions for ways to tweak the displays and adding to her to-do list, she was reminded what being senior curator meant. Much as she might delegate, she was the one responsible for seeing that every little detail, down to the spelling on the signage and the training of security guards, was done properly and completed in time for the opening gala.

  When Connor stopped to chat with Nick, who was carefully cutting away the protective covering they’d built around the airplane engine, her phone chimed again. Evie reached into her pocket and turned it off.

  Evie meant to call Ginger back. Really, she did. But she got pulled into one meeting and then another. Two hours later, eating a midafternoon granola bar instead of lunch, she was back in her office, the door closed, trying to finish editing transcripts of eyewitness accounts of the fires before the voice-over actors arrived to record them. When her cell phone rang, she recognized the number with its Connecticut area code and for only an instant considered not answering it.

  “Didn’t you get my message?” Ginger started right in.

  “I’m sorry. I was tied up. I was going to call back but . . .” Evie bit her lip and took a breath. She didn’t want to make it sound as if her time was more important than Ginger’s. “Listen, I am sorry. I should have called you right back. How’s Ben? The kids?”

  “You know that’s not what I called about. It’s Mom.”

  “Again,” Evie said, at the same time as Ginger.

  Even though there was nothing even remotely funny about that, and even though she knew that laughing was wildly inappropriate, Evie couldn’t stop herself. A moment later, Ginger was laughing, too, and that made Evie laugh even harder until she nearly dropped the phone and had to sit down to keep from peeing in her pants.

  At last, laughed out and gasping for breath, she wiped tears from her eyes. “So how bad is it?”

  “She fell and dislocated her shoulder this time. And I guess it was a while before she managed to call for help. Mrs. Yetner left me a message. She’s at Bronx Metropolitan. The shoulder’s not all that serious. It’s everything else that’s the problem.”

  Evie thought she had a pretty good idea what that meant. “You saw her?”

  “Just for a few minutes. She was barely conscious. Stabilized is what the doctor called it.”

  “Stabilized,” Evie said. Did that mean she was going to get better? Or was she going to stay as sick as she was?

  “On top of everything else, the EMTs who pulled her out alerted the health department. They sent an investigator over to the house. They say the place is a health risk. If it gets condemned—”

  “Condemned? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I guess it’s gotten that bad. If Mom can’t go back, she won’t have anywhere to go and, well . . .”

  Evie finished the thought: then she’ll have to move in with one of us. Ginger couldn’t be thinking that Mom could move into Evie’s one-bedroom apartment. Ginger was the one with a house. A guest room.

  “Evie, I can’t always be the one,” Ginger said.

  “Why does it have to be either of us? She’s a grown-up.”

  “She’s never been a grown-up, and you know it. And now she’s in the hospital. All alone.”

  Right. Alone because one after the other she’d pissed off the friends she and their father had once had. Alone because she hadn’t been able to hold a job for years. Thinking about her mother made Evie furious and unbearably sad at the same time. Talking to her was even worse. And seeing her?

  “No way.” Evie looked down
at the pile of audio scripts, sitting on her desk, deadline looming. At her to-do list that only seemed to grow longer, no matter how much got checked off. “Come on, Ginger, I can’t take time off right now. This exhibit is my first. It has to be great. It’s opening in three weeks, and there is still so much to do. I promise as soon as I’m done, the very minute it opens, I will pitch in.”

  “Pitch in?” There was a long silence. Then Ginger sniffed, and Evie realized she was crying.

  “Ginger?”

  “I don’t want you to pitch in,” Ginger said, her voice a harsh rasp. “I want you to take charge.”

  “I will. I will.”

  “And not in three weeks. Now.”

  “But—”

  “Surely you’re not the only person who works over there. No one is irreplaceable.”

  “I . . . I just can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? Sorry? Sorry doesn’t cut it. I have a life, too. In case you’ve forgotten”—Ginger’s voice spiraled up—“I’m taking classes. The paralegal certification exam is in four weeks. Ben is working two jobs. Lisa’s got dance classes and soccer practice. And . . . and . . .” Ginger blew her nose. “And why is it that every time, every fucking time she crashes, I’m the one who has to drop everything?”

  There was a knock at Evie’s door, and Nick stuck his head in. He pointed to his watch. The voice-over actors must have arrived, which meant the meter was ticking—they charged for their time whether the script was ready or not.

  Evie put up her hand, fingers splayed. Five minutes. Nick nodded and disappeared.

  Ginger was saying, “—can’t do it, Evie. Not this time. I’m tapped out. Completely tapped out. It’s your turn. I’m sorry, but this time you don’t have the luxury of cutting her off unless you’re planning to cut me off, too.”

  In the silence that followed, Evie could hear the massive schoolhouse clock behind her desk tick-tick-ticking. The last time she’d seen her mother, they’d arranged to meet for brunch at Sarabeth’s in Manhattan, halfway between Evie’s Brooklyn apartment and her mother’s house at the edge of the Bronx. They were supposed to meet at noon. When Mom hadn’t shown up, and hadn’t shown up, Evie had tried calling her. No answer at home. No answer on her mother’s cell.

  As minutes ticked by, Evie had gone from being furious with her mother, late as usual, to being hysterical and in tears, imagining the worst as she tried to flag a taxi to take her to Higgs Point. Good luck with that. Three cabs refused before she snagged one that would.

  When she got to the house, her mother was passed out in front of the TV. “I must have lost track of time,” she said when Evie finally managed to rouse her. Later, as Evie made an omelet, she caught her mother sneaking some vodka into her orange juice. She’d tried to talk to her mother about her drinking, but her mother flat-out denied it, like she always had. Evie was the delusional one, she’d insisted, then screamed at Evie for butting in and trying to run her life.

  On the bus and subway ride home, Evie had seethed with anger. That was it, she promised herself. Never again. If her mother couldn’t stop drinking long enough to get herself to Manhattan for a lunch date with her daughter, wouldn’t even admit that she drank, then to hell with her. Evie was finished. Finished taking care of her. Finished talking to her even.

  After that, Evie stopped returning her mother’s calls. Screened out her e-mails. Maybe if she cut her off completely, she told herself, her mother would get serious about drying out. But the truth was, it was a huge relief to sever the cord, to allow herself to give up responsibility for caring.

  That had been months ago. And now Ginger was finally fed up, too, but she couldn’t walk away. She wasn’t wired that way.

  “Okay, okay.” Evie couldn’t believe she heard herself saying it. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll go up to the house tomorrow and start getting things cleaned up. I’ll go over to the hospital in the afternoon. Stay—”

  “And stay? Oh, would you?”

  “Just for the weekend.”

  “But—”

  “Then we’ll see.” Evie swallowed. “And you’re right. It is my turn.”

  Chapter Four

  Before she left work, Evie told everyone that she might have to take some time off. Ginger was right, of course. The exhibit would launch just fine without her. Nick could manage the final details as well if not better than she. Besides, even though it looked like an unfinished mess, the exhibit installation was nearly complete.

  She left Seth a message, too. Told him she had a “family emergency.” Her mother. That she had to spend a few days sorting things out.

  Early the next morning, she took the subway and then the bus from her tiny apartment near Sunset Park deep in Brooklyn to Higgs Point at the southern tip of the Bronx. She tried not to think about what she’d find when she got there.

  She took her time walking to the house. The bright blue sky was streaked with mare’s-tail clouds. Leaves on the trees and bushes were still that electric green of early spring. Of course it would be the same in every neighborhood throughout the city, even Manhattan, but she rarely slowed down enough to notice.

  In return for Evie’s agreeing to deal with the house and watch over their mother in the hospital, Ginger said she’d sort out the health insurance. Fortunately their mother was still covered as a firefighter’s widow. Fortunately, too, their father had had the prescience—though it was no secret that firefighters died young—to purchase mortgage life insurance. When he died, their mother owned the house outright.

  Evie shifted her backpack to her other shoulder. She’d brought a few changes of clothes and her toothbrush. The closer she got to her mother’s house, the slower she walked. It was its own world, this spit of land in a corner of the South Bronx with the East River on one side and the Long Island Sound on the other. Lanes that ran higgledy-piggledy were lined with long, narrow, shotgun houses built close together. Off any official planning grid, these lots for summer cottages had been divided early in the twentieth century, long before the Whitestone Bridge made it easy to get there. The most fortunate houses, like her mother’s, were lined up along Neck Road at the edge of one of the city’s only surviving marshes. Evie had no idea why Soundview Lagoons had been spared the indignity of landfill.

  She passed the house where her friend Alicia had lived. She’d smoked her first cigarette behind its garage and almost started a fire in the dry grass. Made out with Joey Mendez on the glider on the back porch. Now the house was badly in need of a coat of paint; instead of curtains in the window of what had been her friend’s slope-ceilinged bedroom, there were torn shades. The house next to Alicia’s looked oddly palomino, white paint peeling off to reveal great patches of dark brown.

  A little farther on, three blocks from her mother’s house, stood Sparkles Variety. Evie smiled to see it still there. The granite-block building was decades older than anything else nearby. Its sign had a few residual metallic spangles that caught the light. The store was open and apparently busy—half the angled parking spaces in front were filled. Around the side, where customers must have pulled up their cars to fill up even before Evie’s family had moved there, stood an old gas pump. Once painted bright red and yellow, it was now mostly rust. With its big round disk on top, it had always reminded Evie of an overgrown chess pawn, AWOL from its regiment.

  The grouch who pretty much lived behind the cash register at Sparkles used to scold Evie and Ginger if they so much as breathed on a piece of candy they weren’t prepared to buy. He kept Seventeen and YM magazines in plastic pouches so they couldn’t be browsed, and Penthouse behind the counter wrapped in brown paper with only the title showing. Inside the pay phone he’d posted a time limit, and a sign on the front door warned customers against bringing any food or beverage into the store. He wouldn’t have stood for anything taped to the front window, never mind the welter of flyers plastered across it now. Evie stopped to scan them, resting her backpack at her feet.

  Some of the notices were in Engl
ish, others in Spanish. Yard sales. English lessons. A used book sale at the library. A “Preserve the Marsh” meeting at a nearby community center. A potluck supper at St. Andrews.

  She peered into the store. She knew she was postponing the inevitable, but what the heck. Her mother’s house wasn’t going anywhere.

  A bell—the same one from her youth?—tinkled overhead when Evie pushed through the doorway. The interior smelled the same, too. Sawdust and dried sweat. And there was still an actual pay phone just inside the front door. She scooped her finger into the change return slot and came back with a dime.

  The enormous ice cream freezer where she and Ginger had discovered root-beer-flavored Popsicles was still there near the front. As Evie peered through the sliding glass top, she realized that she was starving. She’d left her apartment having had only coffee. Sitting right on top was a Ben & Jerry’s Peace Pop. Cherry Garcia. Her favorite. She carried the ice cream to the cash register. The rod over the counter was festooned with rolls of bright shiny lottery tickets. Her mother had long been a steady scratch ticket customer.

  The clerk, a tall young man with sharp eyes and a beaky nose, pressed some keys on the familiar-looking massive silver-painted cash register and the cash drawer flew open with a ka-ching that took her right back. On a shelf behind the counter was a display of flashlights and batteries. Every house out here had a good supply—all it used to take was a stiff breeze for the power to go out, and then hours for it to get fixed. She remembered her mother had a bowl full of spent batteries, back in the day when it was illegal to throw them in the trash.

  “You think rechargeable batteries save energy?” she asked the clerk.

  He blinked at her, as if seeing her for the first time. “Only if you remember to unplug the charger when they’re cooked.”