The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel

by Dorothy Uhnak

Patsy’s face froze, she jutted it a few inches from Megan. “Look in the mirror, clown, so do you.”

  They raced along the Concourse, scooped up snow from the fenders of cars, scrubbed at their faces, then attacked each other. They reached the triangle of benches wedged into a sliver of the Grand Concourse, directly across the street from Patsy’s apartment building. They walked on the seats of the benches, empty of the old women and the young mothers with little kids and the goody-goody girls who sat quietly on summer days, reading or playing jacks in the warm weather.

  Finally, perched on the back rest, feet on the seat slats, their day was winding down.

  “Got your tree up?” Megan asked.

  “It took exactly ten minutes,” Patsy said. “It’s about two feet high and Carl wouldn’t even help put the stand on it. He said it was a waste of time, since we weren’t going to be here for Christmas. He said that at the Big House, the tree is twelve feet tall and most of the ornaments are antiques. Your tree up?”

  Megan shrugged. “You know my father. Christmas Eve before we go to midnight mass. He’s been getting the lights all worked out and he’s got all the ornaments set out. So when will you be back?”

  “I dunno. There’s a lot of things to do out there. There’s a skating rink, and boy, I hope it snows hard. There’s great hills. And they have parties and stuff.”

  Patsy began to talk with animation, as though this were really what she wanted to do: go out to the big mansion on Long Island and spend the holidays with the Steiglers, who corrected her table manners and grammar, who told her running in the house was not the proper thing, who checked her hands and face as though she was three years old. But not to worry. They’d work on her.

  “They give you good presents?”

  “Yeah. Probably a new bike this year. Hey, if they do, you can have my old bike. It’s only three years old. If you want it.”

  “Okay. So they gonna send their Cadillac and their chauffeur?”

  “Just like in the movies.” Patsy laughed. “You should see my mother and father. They die every single minute from the time we get into the big black car until they take us back here. They hardly say a damn thing the whole time, they’re scared shitless.”

  “So why do they go?”

  Patsy frowned. “Damned if I know. I guess because they grew up together. They were kids together.”

  Megan leaped up, landed with her face turned to catch the heavy snow that was coating them like frosting.

  “Well, Patsy, when I’m rich and famous, I’ll send my car to pick you up so you can come to my mansion and celebrate the holidays.”

  They began jabbing, poking, hopping, roughhousing. “Yeah, you do that, only I won’t die waiting for you to become rich and famous. I’ll marry some old fart and help him die and leave me millions and then I’ll invite you and your poor husband and poor kids to come and see how the other half live.”

  There was a loud, shrill, jagged whistling noise. Patsy looked up and saw her brother Carl leaning out the open window of her apartment.

  “Hey, get your ass up here, dummy. We’re gonna leave in a few minutes. Move it.”

  Patsy waited until the window slammed closed, then softly she said, “Why don’t you just die, shitface.”

  They walked together to the entrance of the apartment building.

  “Well, have a good time with the rich people. Make sure you use the right forks and spoons. Don’t drop anything in your lap. Don’t put your elbows on the table, and don’t spit in your soup.”

  “At least I won’t have to wash the dishes.”

  “Hey, I got little cousins to do that.”

  “Well, I got servants to do that.” They played a quick game of touch-tag, gotcha-gotcha back, until Carl’s shrill whistle blasted down at them again.

  “Have a good Christmas.”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MIRI O’BRIEN WAS THIRTY-FIVE AND PREGNANT with her fifth child when she learned that her father had died. Her sister Rhea, a year older than she, her one remaining contact with her family, came one night to tell her. He had been an old man, a great-grandfather who had buried four of his own children literally—and his daughter Miriam figuratively—as well as two of his three wives, and many other relatives.

  Miri knew that in her father’s eyes her life had been one continuous journey toward early death. As a sixth child, the fourth girl in a family that finally numbered eight girls and eight boys, Miriam fitted into the center of her family’s life. Her chores were simple things, picking up clothes, dusting and tidying, helping prepare food. No one realized, or cared, that she was an excellent student, from the first day at kindergarten all through the eighth grade. She kept her abilities hidden. She knew that in her family, as in the families of all her relatives and neighbors in the crowded, noisy, busy Lower East Side, what a girl did in school counted for nothing. What was important was that she could sew carefully and quickly enough to get a job, and contribute her bit to the family’s jar of money.

  Because Rhea did the hard thing first, went to high school for two years, where she learned to type and take shorthand and bookkeeping, it was easier for Miriam to follow. But she wanted something different. She planned and calculated and waited and yes, prayed to the Almighty, He who was so powerful and terrible He could not be named, to give her the courage and the wisdom needed to tell her mother, who would then have to tell her father, that she wanted to be a nurse.

  Miriam had all the information she needed, all the applications, the forms for teachers to fill out, the papers that would admit her. She had the qualifications, the dedication. All she needed was permission. And money for tuition. She had it all worked out. She would continue her baby-sitting jobs, her part-time evening job at Moise’s market. She could get work at the hospital. They had plans for scholarships.

  Her mother, always pregnant, her face a small worried oval, her hands forever busy with something, cooking or cleaning, polishing or sewing, washing, ironing, fussing, pulling a comb through thick hair, braiding, tying, dressing a child, smoothing, never just reaching out to pat, to touch, but always with a very specific adjustment, never any affection involved; her mother was one to be helped, not burdened. How could Miriam ask this thing? Her mother’s face was always sorrowful, always ready to dissolve at some new disaster; she had lost two babies to pneumonia, she knew what tragedies could happen. Why must Miriam ask this thing, this special treatment? She was just a girl. Did Miriam think this was fair?

  Miriam was her parents’ first child born in the United States. She was an American.

  It was not easy, but Miriam Greifinger finally attended and graduated from the Bellevue School of Nursing.

  Tom and Miri met in the emergency room at Fordham Hospital one cold winter night. He had accompanied a jumper who seemed to have some life still in him.

  Young Patrolman Tom O’Brien found it hard to look at the kid. What in God’s name could he have been thinking, jumping from the roof of the six-story building where he lived with his family. He had ended up impaled on the iron gate that closed off the inner courtyard, and it had taken the rescue squad men nearly an hour to saw him free. They carried him to the ambulance with a spike protruding through his stomach. All during that time the kid was conscious, his family standing around saying a rosary, his mother deadly calm while his father became hysterical and passed out. This young nurse was the first to see him under a good light. She moved quickly, efficiently, her face showing nothing of alarm or horror. She glanced up at Tom, caught something in his face, and gestured him away.

  “I have to stay with him,” he said. He held up his notebook as though that explained his presence.

  “You’ll have time to get all that later,” she told him firmly.

  She moved aside as the team of doctors approached, and then stepped back as the parish priest arrived and gave the dying boy the last rites. She watched Tom O’Brien as he watched the boy die, and then he watched her.
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br />   He noticed that when the priest finished, everyone around the boy mouthed a prayer and crossed himself, except the nurse. She just bit her lip—her only show of emotion, although when she looked up finally, directly into Tom’s eyes, he caught the caring.

  There was something so clean and fine and strong about this young woman, a toughness and a womanliness that went beyond her age. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two.

  She finished her share of the chores, then went to the staff room for a cup of coffee. Tom O’Brien, his heavy uniform coat thrown over a chair, his plaid flannel shirt sticky around his neck, stood up and nodded at her.

  “Tough way to go,” he said, indicating his notebook, which told the bare facts of a young man’s death.

  “Hard on his family. He’s out of it. They’ve got to live with it.”

  She sounded angry, but he had a feeling she used anger as a shield. He had done that himself, many times, in many terrible situations.

  They sat quietly, not saying much, comfortable in each other’s company.

  Tom O’Brien fell in love with Miriam Greifinger—who called herself Miri Grey—within two minutes of seeing her at the side of the dying jumper.

  It took Miri Grey a little longer, but it was a quick and passionate courtship.

  They faced the obvious problems of differing backgrounds without concern. Each was a strong individual. This was their own business and they would do what they could to minimize it. They lied to his family.

  There was no need to lie to her family. Her father declared her dead. Her family mourned her lost life, sat shiva for their deceased daughter-sister, buried her in their hearts. Her mother died a year later in a terrible, unsuccessful pregnancy. Her father remarried after a year and continued expanding his line of descendants. He named one of his new daughters Miriam, after his dead daughter.

  To the O’Briens, who either believed or did not believe, Miri Grey was presented as an orphan, totally without a family history. They had all been destroyed in a fire in upstate New York when Miri was an infant. She had no memory of them. She had been raised in a state orphanage without any particular religion, since her family records had been lost in the fire and no one knew much about them.

  They were married by Father Murphy in his study, and while Miri Grey O’Brien agreed to raise her children as Catholics, she did not herself convert. She was a silent bystander who attended church on special days, but did not partake.

  When she was pregnant with her first child, Miri asked Rhea to tell their father. This was to be, after all, his grandchild.

  Rhea loved her sister but saw that nothing but the truth would finally allow Miri to be free of her past and get on with her future. She reported to Miri what their father had said:

  “A dead woman can only give birth to an abomination.”

  All during her first pregnancy, Miri waited for something terrible to happen: a spontaneous abortion; a death in the womb; a breach, an abnormal child.

  All of her first four pregnancies were substantially the same. Nausea the first two months; radiant good health until the last month; heartburn, discomfort, too much retention of fluid in the ninth month. Good, strong labor—two healthy sons and two healthy daughters.

  Her fifth pregnancy, when she was thirty-five years old, was so easy she could hardly believe it. No morning sickness; no moods or craving or ankle swelling. Her labor was exactly on time. The contractions began strongly, went very quickly, and her fifth child, Eugene Sebastian O’Brien, was born without complications.

  The only discomfort she felt was when the doctor came to her bedside instead of a nurse to give her the baby.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The doctor shrugged. “With a war-horse like you, what could be wrong?”

  “Don’t patronize me,” she said in her best nurse-in-charge voice. “What’s the problem?”

  “Maybe no problem. We’re not sure.”

  He spoke quickly, quietly. The child seemed perfect. Seven pounds, three ounces, nineteen inches long, all toes and fingers in place, all the right equipment. Even a head of silvery blond hair some two inches long.

  But there might be a problem with his eyes. Of course, that would be hard to determine in a newborn, but he felt she should be informed.

  The abomination her father had predicted.

  She lay back on her pillow, breathing in long, hard gasps as it flooded through her. Did she think, really, truly, in the center of her being, did she believe He who was too terrible to name would let her off that easily? Her father, who had studied these things every day of his life, knew things she could never know. And now would find out.

  The infant in her arms was beautiful. His color was faintly pink, his features tiny and well defined, his eyes locked in sleep. She held him, studied him intently, and felt a chill run through her body, starting at the base of her neck, running down her spine, and turning into a sharp icicle in the pit of her stomach.

  The locked eyes snapped open and stared. They were almost totally colorless. Two circles defined by a pencil-thin line, pinpoint pupils. Eyes of ice. Eyes that could stare holes through walls.

  The child had been born with the eyes of her father.

  “His eyes are all right,” she told the doctor. “He isn’t blind.”

  The doctor nodded. There was no way at this point to be sure, but if it comforted the mother, let her be so certain.

  Of course, Miri was right.

  She knew what she could never tell another living soul. The child was possessed by a dybbuk. The father who had condemned her for all time, who had died just before this pregnancy, had entered her womb and existed in the small body of this beautiful, special child.

  When his baby brother, Charley, was born just thirteen months later, the silvery blond Eugene was not only toilet-trained, but had been completely weaned from the bottle. Within a month of his birth, he rejected his mother’s breast, more content with a bottle, and within a few months he was happier with a cup. She noticed how he carefully pulled back from the admiring hands that reached out to stroke him, caress his shining head, play with the magical whitish hair. He avoided any unnecessary touch, and she felt his small, slender, yet strong body stiffen against anything more than necessary contact during his bath, at bedtime, anytime. Everyone commented on his maturity, his independence. He walked at nine months. He spoke hundreds of words and short sentences before his first birthday. He rarely cried. He was pleasant, easygoing. He seemed to accept the presence of a baby brother with relief; now he would not be the focus of attention.

  As Miri watched him, the child watched her. There was a secret between them that could never be revealed. But she knew that he knew.

  Though everyone, including her husband, Tom, was surprised that she became pregnant so soon after Eugene’s birth—their other children were spaced at two-and three-year intervals—for Miri it was a deliberate pregnancy. She had decided that the dybbuk would not rob her of one last loving and loved child.

  Eugene was five when he had his first epileptic attack. His mother was neither frightened nor surprised; after all, she had grown up watching her father suddenly waver, faint, his body arching in spasms, shaking, frothing, his eyes rolling upward until they disappeared. She calmly maintained the safety of the small, convulsing body. When those around her in the playground marveled at her calmness, she claimed it was her nursing background.

  At home she merely exchanged a deep, long stare with those white eyes. Yes. I know you. What I don’t know is what you want of me.

  The child regarded his mother without expression.

  Eugene was an excellent student. Teachers who remembered his older brothers and sisters were delighted by the boy. The less perceptive, less sophisticated teaching nuns were enchanted by his beauty and his manners. The wiser ones regarded him with something close to awe. It was as though a Presence were among the children at St. Simon Stock.

  The parish priest, Father Murphy, noticed noth
ing special about Eugene O’Brien. A very pretty lad, a good boy, who worked hard and didn’t cause the good sisters any problem.

  His assistant, Father Kelly, knew that this academically gifted child was special. He was also lithe and lean, athletic and a team player. He was slow to anger, but when faced with a great deal of provocation, the silvery boy responded with his fists.

  In Father Kelly’s opinion, it was in religion that Eugene excelled. The practice, participation, and extraordinary understanding that Eugene showed was significant. The only complaint any teacher ever had about Eugene was his questioning nature. Of course, the good Sisters of Mercy had no answers to give: Faith is based on faith. Period.

  By the time he was a sixth-grader, the boy had begun to receive special attention from Father Kelly. Not only was Gene the best altar boy any priest could pray for, but he was totally involved—his emotion, his understanding, and his soul—in the holy rituals.

  It was a foregone conclusion, at least to Father Kelly, that Eugene would enter a seminary.

  Miri was silent the night the boy told his parents of his vocation. She did not understand the word. Later, when they were alone, Tom tried to explain to her what a privilege it was for a child to become a priest. A nearly overwhelming gift from God.

  “Maybe because I’m not a Catholic, Tommy. I don’t know. I don’t understand much of it.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time you did,” her husband said.

  It was not enough that she had given all six of her children to his Church. They wanted her. Had always wanted her. The priest had come, through the years, to talk to her about her conversion. Told her what a wonderful gift it would be to her husband, to her children, to strengthen the family ties with the Church.

  The nuns came and told her that when her husband and children died, they would be able to die within God’s grace and would spend eternity in heaven. She could not enter heaven unless she converted.

  In dealing with the priests, she had been polite and noncommittal. In dealing with the nuns, she was brusque and tough. After all, these were the same women who warned her that she had no right to work part-time at her nursing profession while she still had school-age children. By and large, she considered them stupid, ignorant, undereducated women whose childlike devotion to the parish priest was pathetic.