by Monica Wood
“I knew a man who juggled mice,” she told him.
His eyes popped open, so she hauled out her midway story.
“You ran away?” the boy said. She could feel herself being deliciously reassessed. “You left your mother?”
“Times were funny, war in the air. I hemmed every skirt I owned that year, all the girls in Kimball suddenly flashing their calves.” Felled by the child’s listening gray eyes, she went on: “Mr. Holmes was the show’s owner, a huckster if ever I knew one. His show wasn’t very good, as midway shows went, more like a carnival you might see now at a shopping mall.”
“Oh,” the boy said. “I went to one.”
“How was it?”
“The rides were very fast.”
“Well, we had an old carousel Mr. Holmes won in a poker game—a bona fide Armitage Herschell two-row portable—put-upable and take-downable. Ever seen one?”
“No,” the boy said, goggle-eyed. “I want to.”
Ona had her cards out now and began shuffling. “We did the best we could with the carousel, some third-rate midway games, and a parrot who sang the Sophie Tucker version of ‘Some of These Days.’ Ever heard it?”
“Can I?”
“My Victrola’s long gone,” she said. “I went to the midway every night for seven nights running. And on the seventh night, I fell in love right there in front of the carousel.”
How could it have been otherwise? The sultry evening, the smell of peanuts and drying mud, the steam carousel with painted horses posed for all eternity in an attitude of escape. “I can still see the wild white eyes on those horses,” she told the boy. “You can’t imagine the colors, nothing like the dullards you see nowadays. Pick a card.”
The boy looked startled. “Now?”
“Whenever you’re ready. In the meantime, I shall regale you.” She had learned the word regale from Maud-Lucy Stokes, her childhood tutor, who had employed a flawless grammar that inspired little Ona’s initial, inaccurate, and ultimately disappointing impression of America as a land of precision. Ona loved English from the get-go and paid strict attention, noting the cause-effect of language: her parents’ syntactical shipwrecks, the tin peddler’s casual profanity, Maud-Lucy’s pristine enunciations. Style could move listeners to pity, to reverence, to the purchase of a stewpot they didn’t need. Maud-Lucy taught Ona to compose a sentence with intention, and eventually she chose for herself a high-low hybrid that matched her ambivalence toward humankind.
“There I was,” she told the boy, “standing in a huddle with some girls from my neighborhood, watching the handsome horses go round and round, when Viktor, the tattoo man’s apprentice, sauntered over as if we’d already met in a dream. Beautiful, blond, Russian Viktor.” He stole first her heart, then her virtue, and finally her money. “I’d never even held a boy’s hand. I wasn’t that type of girl.”
“What type of girl were you?”
“Oh,” she said. “Well. Innocent. Like you. Now, why on earth would I tell you all that?”
“I don’t know.” The boy’s gaze fell on her like a strong slat of sunlight. She felt, briefly, unclothed. It was the mention of Viktor that put her in this state. Viktor, who would be one hundred nine. Dead and buried and flirting with her from the grave.
At last, the boy picked a card. He studied it for a full thirty seconds, then gave it back. She pretended to shuffle it into the deck. “Presto,” she said, then flipped his card right side up onto the table.
The boy’s mouth dropped open.
“For crumbsake, haven’t you ever seen a card trick?”
“Not a good one. There’s a kid in my class who does bad ones.” He frowned. “Everybody thinks Troy Packard is so great.”
A bully, Ona surmised. “Well, then,” she said, spreading out the cards. “Look here.”
She laid out the cards for a simple Bottoms Up, as she had for a generation of jittery schoolboys at Lester Academy in her capacity as the headmaster’s secretary. To the youngest ones, the smallest and most scared, she taught the very trick she was teaching now to the boy.
He had remarkable fingers, was willing and avid, but possessed no knack whatsoever for misdirection. “You have zero wiles,” she said. “Don’t try this at school.”
“The world record for a house of cards is one hundred thirty-one stories.”
“Maybe you can go for that. Set a new one.”
“I tried to set a new one.”
“How many did you get?”
“I got eleven.”
“That’s one story per year.”
He looked pleased and said, “Miss Vitkus, you have very beautiful hands.”
On the third Saturday, in return for her first compliment in decades, Ona unveiled her entire arsenal of card tricks—the whole shebang, for free. But the boy proved too gullible to appreciate the difference between the obvious step-by-step of a We Three Kings and the multilayered staginess of a Morning Mail. Though the diversionary tactic of telling stories during each slip and shift proved entirely pointless, she answered his questions anyway. It had been a long time, if ever, since another human being betrayed so intense an interest in the ordinary facts of her life.
The boy listened in a fashion she had not heretofore encountered: nothing moved. Not his eyes, not his shoulders, not his legs or feet. Just his fingers—a restrained but detectable ritual that looked like counting. From his lightly closed fist, one finger flicked open, then a second, a third, a fourth, and a thumb; then the other hand: one, two, three, four, thumb. Then the fists closed again, and the fingers jutted again, predictable, systematic. He appeared to be slicing her stories into items on a list, a form of prestidigitation that turned commonplace information into incantation.
Miss Vitkus came to America as a four-year-old child.
With her parents, Jurgis and Aldona.
From the country of Lithuania.
Which was run by the Russians.
Who tried to take all the Lithuanian men and put them in the army.
So Jurgis and Aldona moved to Kimball, Maine, where there were seven mills.
Jurgis got a job as an acid cooker and Aldona got a job as a rag sorter.
And they decided to make their little girl an American.
So they didn’t talk to her in Lithuanian.
And they couldn’t talk to her in English.
“Did you get lonely?” the boy asked. “If my mom didn’t talk to me, who else would talk to me?” He curled his fingers and waited for another one-to-ten. She felt compelled to oblige.
“My parents did talk to me,” she said.
One.
“It’s just that their vocabulary was limited.”
Two.
From the veiled years came the sound of her name: Ona, what you got, Ona? Ona, smile nice, Ona. Ona, pretty dress, Ona. Ona: their sole allowable native word, a meek comfort, a bubble of remembrance. An early memory floated in, Ona pressed against the door of her parents’ bedroom, listening in panic and longing as they whispered in their mother tongue: pushka-pushka-pushka, mysterious susurrations that sounded like quavering trees.
Outside that room it was English, English, English. Aldona worked all day at the bag mill, Jurgis all night at the pulp mill, ferrying fresh words and phrases across the footbridge at shift change. When Ona was six they built their own apartment building, a wooden triple-decker with open porches. On an eighth-acre at the corner of Wald and Chandler, the Vitkus block rose up board by board, a testimony to foresight and grit. In the tiny backyard they revived a swatch of their beloved Lietuva in a garden so shrewdly planned that vegetables flourished through three seasons.
“What kind of vegetables?” the boy asked.
“I remember a lot of cabbage.”
“Cabbage!” the boy said. Apparently it took nothing to astonish him.
Jurgis and Aldona saved up money to build a house in Kimball.
Which had three floors.
And was called a block.
Cabbages g
rew in the backyard of the Vitkus block.
Also parsnips.
Little Ona Vitkus and her parents lived on the first floor.
Some other people lived on the second floor.
And on the third floor lived a young lady from Granyard, Vermont.
Her name was Maud-Lucy Stokes.
She taught piano and tutored immigrant children in English.
Good talking, Jurgis said, bringing his little daughter to the third floor, to Maud-Lucy. Brilliant, sophisticated Maud-Lucy Stokes. Jurgis meant to say, Teach her something! Our tongues are tied.
“My own English was atrocious,” she told the boy.
“Your grammar is excellent,” he said.
“Not back then. My English was a chewed-up mouthful of American slang, salted with Italian and Franco specks I picked up from the street. My parents knew I’d get nowhere talking like a melting pot.”
“But your parents didn’t speak English. How did they know yours was bad?”
“They were foreign, not deaf,” Ona said. “Maud-Lucy tutored me for free, merely because she wanted to. She tutored me every day.”
“Plus school?” the boy asked, rearing back, horrified, the list forgotten.
“In place of school. School smelled like unwashed boys and wood smoke. The schoolmistress despised girls.” Instead, Ona had climbed the stairs to the third floor every day to Maud-Lucy. Self-possessed, heavy-bodied Maud-Lucy, who cut her hair insolently short, loathed the passive voice, and kept a piano and a cat and a library of books with dark and stalwart bindings. Maud-Lucy, whose rooms smelled of ink and lavender. Who claimed to have no use for a man. Who longed for children and took Ona as a surrogate. Who fed adjectives to Ona like drops of chocolate.
“My goodness,” Ona said, looking at her fingers. “Now you’ve got me doing it.”
The boy abruptly hid his hands. After a moment, he said, “Did you miss your mom and dad? When you ran away to the circus?”
“Not a circus,” she said. “Don’t get the idea I was prancing around on an elephant.”
“I won’t.”
“You’re picturing me prancing around on an elephant, aren’t you?”
He laughed then, a yip of pleasure. So far he’d exhibited little capacity for humor, only varying degrees of earnestness. “It was easier than you might think to leave them,” she said. “I felt like Maud-Lucy’s child by then. But she had to take care of her auntie that summer, back in Granyard, Vermont. At the time, I thought my parents were plotting a return to the motherland. So it wasn’t that hard to run. I was fourteen, old enough. Maud-Lucy’s the one I missed.”
The boy was quiet for a moment. “There’s someone who I think likes my mom. It’s a secret.” He looked away. “He might be my dad someday.”
“Oh. Well, this was different.”
“Sometimes I feel like this other person is really my dad. Same way you felt like Maud-Lucy was really your mom.”
“I see your point.”
“My real dad is excellent at music.” He pointed out the window. “What’s that one?”
“House finch,” she informed him. The boy rushed to his backpack, extracted a pristine notebook, and added “house finch” to his list. “That’s eight,” he said. “Twelve to go.” He peered out at Ona’s spirea bushes, which were greening already, spring finally on the way.
“I miss the morning chorus,” Ona told him. “The birds are all pitched too high.”
“I have to remember five songs.”
“Well, I can’t help you there.”
“If birds sang lower, you could hear them.”
“You’ll have to take that up with God.”
The boy thought this over. “Are your mom and dad still alive?”
“For crumbsake! Add it up.”
He paused a moment, calculating. “What happened to them?”
Few creatures on earth had ever asked her such a thing. “Their English improved,” she said. “They got out of the mills and opened a grocery store. They worked till they retired, lived a little longer, then died. Same thing that happens to everybody.”
“Not everybody,” he said. “Look at you.” His calculations took on a sudden, heated clarity that showed in his body. “Hey,” he said, standing up. “I just thought of something.” His eyelashes quivered. His narrow hands went to his head as if trying to keep it on his shoulders. “What if—Miss Vitkus, what if you’re—the oldest person in the world?”
Ona could think of two or three ways to take this news. “Goodness,” she said. “I hope not.”
He was hopping around her kitchen now, still holding his head, trying to contain his runaway glee. “Hey, Miss Vitkus, you could be a Guinness . . . world . . . record . . . holder!”
“Do I get a cash prize?”
“One, you get a certificate,” he said, his voice sailing. “Two, you get respect. Three, you get immortality!”
“Well,” she said, “I suppose you can’t put a price on that.”
Then that pestering scoutmaster appeared at the door, and it was time once again for the boy to go home.
Chapter 4
Jailbreak Brew Pub smelled beery and old, though its patrons blazed with vitality: a thirtyish crowd, women with streaked hair and skimpy blouses, guys with gym-muscled forearms and fake tans. They liked to dance, these guys, hands gripped on the swiveling hips of some girl they appeared to be driving. They liked old rock-and-roll, the music of their parents.
Quinn was here for his weekly gig with his oldest friends, who composed a band called the Benders. In their heedless youth they’d penned a few middling tunes but over the years had morphed into a middle-aged cover band.
“Maybe you’re working too much,” Rennie said to him now. The Benders were on their second break of the night, Quinn at the bar sipping a heavily iced Sprite—his drink of choice since his cold-turkey promise to Belle eleven years back, on the night the boy was born.
“I’m not working too much, Ren.” He’d missed a cue and mangled an intro, which never happened. He wasn’t sleeping, that was all; but he kept this to himself.
The last thing he wanted was sympathy.
“When did you last have a night off?” Rennie persisted.
“I don’t need less work, Ren, I need more. I’ve got—a debt.”
“A debt? You own nothing.” He made this sound like a compliment.
“Things have changed.”
“I can get you a couple of shifts,” Rennie said. He owned a direct-mail business that had seen Quinn through more than one dry spell. The musician’s living was something he’d learned to manage over the years, imagining it as a streambed that flooded in one season, vanished in another. The trick was to keep standing in that fickle, vitalizing water as it rose and fell. He’d managed better than most. You’re not afraid of work, honey, his young mother had told him before she died. It’ll be the best thing about you.
“It’s not that kind of debt, Ren.” He could hear Gary and Alex chatting up a table of young teachers celebrating a birthday. His bandmates had grown up with him in a neighborhood of triple-deckers on Munjoy Hill. Now Rennie had his mailing empire, Alex his law firm, Gary his chiropractic office. Jailbreak was the highlight of their week. They were the fathers of bloomy and vibrant children, caretakers of lawns and tax returns and long-division homework, but in their hours of ordinary despair they believed they wanted the life Quinn had made for himself: a working musician.
“I’ll, okay, I’ll leave you alone,” Rennie said, and withdrew into the burbling room.
Quinn hadn’t craved a drink this badly since the night after the funeral, when he’d retreated deep into his Monday-night routine: tallying the week’s projected income and expenses. He’d stopped in mid-stroke, a revelation arriving like a telegram from hell: his biggest expense, a boy who needed health insurance and school supplies and lunch money and haircuts and shoes and a college fund, was now moot. He took a breath and calculated the balance of what he would have owed B
elle had the boy made it to age eighteen. The number was staggering, but he resolved to pay it, as soon as possible, like a penance. A tithe. He did not want his life to be easier now that the boy was gone.
That had been his last night off.
Now his phone vibrated in his back pocket. Quinn thought twice about answering—he’d been waiting for this—and his stomach pitched when he heard her. He took in her raging voice and pictured the phone connection as a purple thread, wet and umbilical, which bound them.
“I was going to put it back,” he said. “Yesterday, in fact. But you wouldn’t let me in his room.” He tried closing his eyes slowly, to be with her, even like this. But now she bleated the boy’s name, one time, two times, three. Quinn’s eyes snapped open with each pitiful bark, snap-snap-snap, as if she were shaking him out of a coma.
“Belle,” he said gently. “Calm down.”
“I will not calm down! I will not! Unless you’d like to give me lessons, Quinn? Would you like to give me a lesson, you’re such an expert on calming down? Can you do that, please? That would be a great boon to me in my hour of need, a lesson from a fucking robot, a lesson in calming down!”
“Belle. Jesus.” He eyed the bartender.
“You could have told me you took it. But you were afraid, you’ve always been afraid.” She was bawling now, sodden, phlegmy dollops of despair shuddering through the line.
“I’ll bring it back, Belle,” he said now. “Tonight, I’ll bring it back, I promise. I don’t know why I took it.” Which was true. But now that he had the boy’s diary, he wanted it to be his.
In his peripheral vision he caught Gary waving his sticks, calling Quinn back to the stage. Belle was crying at normal decibels now. “That was his private stuff,” she said huskily. “You had no business taking it. You never earned the right.”