by Tracy Wolff
She had deliberately saved the storage shed for the last day of their trip, because it held what was left of the heart and soul of Harry Sagalowsky. After yesterday’s game, they’d visited the shelter and hospital where Harry had volunteered, and where many of the people remembered both him and Gracie. Then she and Harrison had had dinner at her and Harry’s favorite hole-in-the-wall barbecue joint, where the owner-chef had come out to regale Harrison with stories about how he and Harry had always argued good-naturedly over whose sauce was best. The chef had finally admitted—but only to the two of them—that there was something about Harry’s chili he had never been able to duplicate and he was pretty sure it had something to do with the cumin.
Gracie and Harrison had ended the day by retiring to his hotel room with a rented DVD of The African Queen, Harry’s favorite movie, something that also surprised Harrison because, even though it was kind of a war movie, it had a romance in it, too, and his father had thought the idea of romance was foolish.
Gracie wondered if Harrison thought that, too. For the most part, he didn’t seem any more of a romantic than he claimed his father had been, but there had been times over the last couple of days—and times when they’d been in New York, too—when she’d caught him looking at her in a way that was... Or else he’d said something in a way that was... Or the air around the two of them had just seemed kind of... Well. Gracie wasn’t sure if the right word for those occasions was romantic. Then again, she wasn’t sure it was the wrong word, either. Because something about those occasions, especially over the last couple of days, sure had felt kind of...romantic.
That wasn’t likely to change tonight, since the last leg of their tour would be at the Moondrop Ballroom, the epitome of old Hollywood romance, where Gracie would try to teach Harrison to dance the way Harry had once taught her.
If, after all that, Harrison still saw his father as a coldhearted, cold-blooded cold fish who hadn’t cared about anything but money, then he was a lost cause, and Gracie didn’t know what to do. Of course, she still hadn’t accepted the coldhearted, cold-blooded cold fish who’d only cared about money that Harrison kept insisting Harry was, so maybe she was a lost cause, too. At least they could be lost causes together.
She had to wrestle with the storage-unit padlock for a few seconds until it finally gave. Then it took both Harrison and her to haul up the big, garage-type metal door. It groaned like a dying mammoth when they did, and the storage unit belched an odor that was a mix of old books, old socks and old man. Gracie gazed into the belly of the beast, a cinderblock room about twenty feet wide by twenty feet deep, wondering where to begin.
“I probably should have tried to find Harry’s family as soon as he passed away,” she said when she realized how musty, dusty and rusty everything was. “But I truly didn’t think he had anyone.”
“Was no one at his funeral?” Harrison asked, the question touched with something almost melancholy.
Maybe there was part of him that still had the capacity to forgive, and even love, his father—or, at least, think fondly of him from time to time. Although he might never fully grieve the loss of a man he hadn’t seen in half a lifetime, and hadn’t really ever known, maybe he was beginning to entertain the possibility that his father wasn’t the villain he’d thought him to be.
In spite of his somber tone, Gracie couldn’t help but smile at the question. “There were lots of people. His visitation was three days long so that everyone could have a chance to pay their respects. Even after that, there were still hundreds of people who attended the funeral.”
“But no one from his family,” Harrison said, still sounding pensive. “Not from any of his families.”
“In a way, he had family here,” Gracie said, hoping Harrison wouldn’t take it the wrong way. She didn’t want to diminish his and Vivian’s ties to Harry. She just wanted to comfort him, and make him realize his father hadn’t been without loved ones when he died.
But Harrison didn’t seem to take offense. “That’s not the same,” he said. “Someone from his real family should have been here.”
Gracie extended a hand to touch him, waffled for a moment and then placed her palm gently against his shoulder. Harrison looked over at the contact, his gaze falling first on her hand, then on her face, but he didn’t move away.
“Your father touched a lot of lives, Harrison,” she said softly. “He made a difference for a lot of people when he lived here. And he’ll make a difference for a lot more when his fortune is given away.”
Harrison inhaled a breath and released it. Then, not even seeming to realize he was doing it, he covered her hand with his. “I just don’t understand why he felt like he could only do that for strangers.”
Gracie didn’t understand that, either. There had to be a reason. But they might never know what it was. She looked into the storage unit again. Maybe they could start looking for an explanation here.
She had taken care to organize Harry’s things when she stowed them. Furniture on the left, boxes on the right, clothes and miscellaneous in the middle, with two narrow aisles separating everything to enable access. Nearly half the boxes held books and his record collection, mostly jazz and big band. Many of the rest held his accumulation of Cincinnati Reds memorabilia. It was the boxes in front, though, that Gracie wanted to open first. They were the ones that contained Harry’s personal items, including the photographs Harrison needed to see.
She strode to the one closest to the front, pressed her blade to the packing tape seam and slid it along the length of the box with a quick z-z-zip. Harrison took a few steps into the unit as Gracie finished opening the box and removed a couple of layers of cedar-scented tissue paper. The first thing she encountered underneath was a beer stein from the last Oktoberfest she and Harry attended. She smiled as she lifted it up for Harrison to see.
“Zee?” she said, affecting her best German accent—which, okay, wasn’t all that good. “Your papa luffed hiss Schwarzbier und leberwurst. He vas a real Feinschmecker.”
Harrison chuckled at that. He even took a few more steps toward her. But all he said was, “Um, Feinschmecker?”
“Ja,” Gracie replied. Then, returning to her normal voice, she said, “I wanted to slap him the first time he called me that. German isn’t the easiest language to figure out.”
“So what’s a Feinschmecker?”
“A connoisseur of fine foods. Okay, maybe beer and liverwurst don’t qualify as such. Suffice to say he enjoyed good Hausmannskost.”
Harrison nodded. And came a few steps closer. “I never knew my father spoke German.”
“Very well, in fact,” she said. “He grew up in one of the German neighborhoods here.”
Gracie held out the beer stein for Harrison to take. It was stoneware and decorated with a dachshund wearing lederhosen and playing an accordion. Gingerly, he closed the last few feet between them and took it from her.
“Harry was good at the chicken dance, too,” she said as she released it.
“No,” Harrison said adamantly, finally meeting her gaze. He set the beer stein on top of another still-closed box. “You will never convince me my father did the chicken dance.”
Gracie picked through some of the other items in the box. “If you’re ever in Seattle, look me up. I have photographic evidence. Oh, look!” she cried as she picked up something else, cutting Harrison off from commenting on the “if you’re ever in Seattle” thing. What was she thinking to say something like that? “I gave Harry this for Christmas!”
She withdrew a plastic electronic device the size of a toothbrush that, when its buttons were pushed, lit up, made funny noises and was generally annoying. She handed it to Harrison.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A sonic screwdriver like the one Doctor Who uses.”
“But Doctor Who is science fiction. My father hated science fic
tion.”
“Your father loved science fiction.” She gestured toward the boxes in back. “There’s a ton of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison books in those. You’ll see.”
Harrison began pushing the buttons on the sonic screwdriver one by one, the same way Harry had on Christmas morning after unwrapping it. Then he grinned. In exactly the same way his father had.
“Okay, here’s what I’ve been looking for,” she said when she uncovered the shoebox with Harry’s photographs. She began sorting through them, and then was surprised when Harrison reached in, too, and pulled out a handful to look through himself.
“Here,” she said, pausing on one. “This is what I wanted to show you. It’s your dad and his brother, Benjy, when they were kids.”
She handed the black-and-white photo to Harrison. The edges were frayed, the corners bent, and it was creased down the middle, creating a fine white line between the two boys. They were on the front stoop of the brownstone where the family had rented an apartment. Benjy was sitting on a square box nearly as big as he was. Harry had his arm around his brother, and both were grinning mischievously.
“Your dad is on the left,” Gracie said. “He was six in the photo. Benjy was three. The box Benjy’s sitting on is where the milkman left the weekly milk deliveries. Harry said the reason they’re smiling like that is because they just put the neighbor’s cat in the box without telling anyone, and with Benjy sitting on it, the poor thing couldn’t get out.”
Harrison nodded. “Now that sounds more like my father.”
“He assured me they let it go right after their neighbor snapped the photo, and he promised it wasn’t hurt.”
She watched as Harrison studied the photo, but his expression revealed nothing of what he might be thinking or feeling. Finally, he said, “That’s my dad, all right.” After a moment, he added, “And I guess that’s my uncle. Or would have been, had he lived.”
Gracie sifted through the photos until she found another one. “And here are your grandparents.”
Harrison took it from her, studying it with the same scrutiny he’d given the first photo.
“You look just like your grandfather,” she said. “He couldn’t have been much older in that picture than you are now.”
He considered the photo for another moment. “I can’t believe my father never told me about any of this. About where he came from, or his little brother, or what his parents were like.” Now he looked at Gracie. “But then, I never asked him about any of it when I had the chance, did I? I never took an interest in where he came from when I was a kid. It never occurred to me that his history was mine, too. I know everything about my mother’s family. But they’re Park Avenue fixtures. They’ve been rich since New York was New Amsterdam. My father marrying her was the biggest social coup of his life.”
“Maybe that was why he never talked about his past,” Gracie said. “Maybe he didn’t think it could stand up to Vivian’s. Maybe he thought you would be ashamed of an alcoholic grandfather and a grandmother who abandoned her only surviving child.”
“The same way he abandoned his family,” Harrison said softly.
Gracie sighed. “Yeah. I guess so.”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have been ashamed of any of that. I would have felt bad for him. If I’d known how much he lost when he was a kid... How hard he worked to try to keep his family together... How poor they were all along...”
“What?” she asked when he didn’t finish.
“I don’t know. Maybe it just would have helped me understand him better or something.”
Harrison continued sifting through the photos of his father’s family—of his family—lost in thoughts Gracie figured she would probably never be able to understand. Thoughts he would never share with her, anyway, she was sure. Funny, though, how there was a quickly growing part of her that really wished he would.
* * *
Sunlight was slanting into the storage unit in a long beam of late-afternoon gold when Harrison finally closed the lid on the box of things he wanted to take back to New York with him. The rest could wait for him to have it moved professionally. There was plenty of room in his mother’s attic to store everything. Not that he had any idea why he wanted to store it all. There was nothing of value among his father’s things. The furniture was old and scarred. The clothes were old and worn out. The knickknacks were old and kitschy. Even the books and records were run-of-the-mill titles that could be found in a million places. For some reason, though, Harrison didn’t want to let go of any of them.
So everything Gracie had said was true. Neither she nor his father had made up any of it. Harrison Sage, Jr. really had had a little brother. He’d really dropped out of school to go to work—one of the things they’d found was his first union card, issued when he would have been fifteen. And he really had lost his parents in terrible ways—they’d also found diaries written by his grandmother describing it all. Harrison had scanned a couple of them, but he wanted to read them all in depth when he got back to New York.
As he gazed upon the boxes and bags that held all his father’s worldly possessions—or, at least, all the worldly possessions he had wanted to surround himself with as his life drew to a close—Harrison tried to understand how and why his father had lived his life the way he had. How and why a man who’d had everything in New York had preferred to spend his last years in a place where he had had nothing.
Gracie’s words echoed through Harrison’s head. There were hundreds of people who attended the funeral. A lot of them were people Harrison had met yesterday. Kids who loved terrible jokes. A World War Two veteran whose only visitor most weeks had been Harry Sagalowsky, who brought him a magazine and a cup of coffee, then stayed to talk baseball. A homeless mother he’d helped get a job at a local factory, who was then able to move herself and her kids into their own place and start life anew.
Big damn deal.
There would have been thousands of people at his father’s funeral if he’d died in New York. And they would have really known him. They would have known how much he was worth and recognized his accomplishments in the business and financial worlds. They would have known what companies he’d acquired, which ones he had shed and which ones he had his eye on. They would have known which of his latest ventures had been most profitable. They would have known his favorite drink, his favorite restaurant, the name of his tailor. Hell, they would have known who his current mistresses were and where he was keeping them.
But here? What was the value in delivering a magazine or helping in a job hunt or making kids laugh? What difference did it make if Harry Sagalowsky had shared part of his day with others, supplying simple pleasures and favors to people who needed them? Who cared if one person took time to acknowledge another person’s existence in the world and share a little bit of himself in the process? What was so great about making a connection with other people to let them know they were important? Who needed to be remembered as a normal, everyday person who made other normal, everyday people happy when he could be remembered as a titan of commerce who’d made billions of dollars for himself instead?
Thankfully, Harrison’s spiel was in his head. Because if he’d said those things out loud, Gracie would have read him the riot act. And he probably wouldn’t have blamed her. Okay, maybe he was starting to see why his father had wanted to spend his final years here. Because here, with people who didn’t know him as Billionaire Harrison Sage, Jr., he could live a life free of that image and be...well, some guy named Harry who did nice things for other people. Things that maybe didn’t change the world, but things that made a difference on a smaller scale. Things that would maybe make up for some of the stuff Billionaire Harrison Sage, Jr. did during his lifetime, like putting money ahead of everything else.
Like turning his back on his family.
Not that Harrison thought what his f
ather had done here in Cincinnati would ever make up for that. But he could see where his father might think it would.
“Did you get everything you want?” Gracie asked.
Her question registered on some level, but Harrison didn’t know how to answer it. No, he didn’t get everything he wanted. There were still answers to some questions about his father. There was still his father’s estate. There was still fifteen years of his life that his father could have been a part of but wasn’t. And the other fifteen years when his father was around, but not really part of his life, either. And then there was still the most maddening thing of all that he wanted.
There was still Gracie Sumner.
The trip to Cincinnati had been as eye-opening for him where she was concerned as it had been where his father was concerned. A lot of the kids on the baseball team had responded to her with genuine affection, even begging her to do an impression of a rival coach they must have seen a dozen times before, but still left them rolling with laughter. She’d stopped for five dozen doughnuts before they’d hit the veterans’ hospital, and the staff had received them with thanks in a way that indicated it was something she’d done all the time when she lived here. At the homeless shelter, she’d shared fist bumps with a half-dozen men and asked them how things were going. More to the point, she’d listened to each of them when they replied.
And tonight, she wanted to take Harrison to a place called the Moondrop Ballroom. Somehow, he was certain she would know people there, too. And that they would love her the same way everyone else in this city seemed to.
All of these things made him wonder again about this Devon person whose name had come up more than once today—never in a good way. And every time, Gracie’s reply had been the same before she’d changed the subject: that’s all in the past. But how could it be in the past when everyone kept bringing it up?