The Girl in Times Square

by Paullina Simons

  “Not yet, Lily…”

  “My brother? My sisters?”

  “They’re still looking…”

  Lily fell back to sleep without asking Spencer: with all the things they now knew and thought they were so smart about, one disheartening, gaping hole remained:

  If Milo didn’t know, then where was Amy?

  Marcie, still smelling of Milky Ways (though not nicotine: she must have quit smoking) would open the windows in her room and Lily would smell the arid midsummer air.

  Joy would sit by her and knit. Joy was knitting? “Joy, are you knitting?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Who are you? Madame Defarge? What are you knitting?”

  “It’s going to get cold soon. I’m practicing on you. You need a sweater.”

  One morning Joy ushered in a man. She said Lily knew him, but Lily didn’t know him. Who was he? He was an older gentleman in a very smart suit. He told her he was the one who had bought the Whisky in the Hands paintings. “Oh,” said Lily. “What happened? Did the colors run?”

  The man introduced himself as David Lake of Lake Gallery in Soho. “I’ve been coming to 8th Street for three Saturdays in a row. Someone who knew you in the deli told me about you, told me you were sick. I took a chance you’d be in Mount Sinai. I did try Sloan-Kettering first.” He told her that her seven small paintings sold for $78,000 in his gallery last Monday.

  If she knew how to whistle, she would have.

  “And you know what? It was my eighteenth offer for the lot. I finally had to accept. You must have touched a nerve with those displaced hands around a drink. So intensely personal.”

  She said nothing, acutely remembering one girl and one man to whom she was nothing but a speck of insignificant, intensely impersonal pollen in the faraway air. Means to an end to Amy—whom Lily had loved so much.

  David Lake had a proposition for Lily—if she offered him thirty or so pieces of her work, oil on canvas only, he would have a show of her art in his gallery, and they would split the profits fifty-fifty.

  In the background Joy was vigorously nodding.

  Lily, up against the pillows, didn’t know what to say. She said, “I’ve put my paintbrushes away, Mr. Lake.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t need them anymore.”

  75

  The Postman

  Lily hears Grandma come and sit by her side.

  Lily’s mouth isn’t moving, and she suspects her eyes are closed. She can feel her grandmother near, and the mind’s eye is supplying the other details, the gray hair, the elastic comfortable pants, the clean tennis shoes that have not been out of the Brooklyn brownstone, the small gold cross around the neck. Tell me something funny, Grandma, she thinks. And Grandma, as if hearing, says, “Lily, a woman was on a Qantas flight from Wellington, New Zealand to Melbourne, Australia, and do you know what she found perched on a green cucumber in her salad?”

  I don’t know, what?

  “A live frog. An airborne amphibian. Qantas is very unhappy with the lettuce supplier. They feel the quality control is not what it should be.”

  If Lily could laugh, she would. Was this in coach or first class, she wants to know.

  Her grandmother presses her lips to Lily’s head. “You hang on, baby, DiAngelo is working on you. He’ll fix you all up, you’ll see. He’s full of pride, that man, he doesn’t trade in failure.”

  Lily hears quite well.

  “Lily,” says Grandma, “remember I told you about your mother under the boards in Ravensbruck?”

  I remember, Grandma. Ravensbruck—sixty miles north of Berlin. You hid my mother in your skirts to shield her from the German guards. You gave her all your rations. You hid her in the floor of the barracks while you went out to work with the other women. Ravensbruck, the first and only all-women’s prison in the Nazi camp system, but you were in Germany, you were hoping for salvation. The Americans were rumored to be coming. The Soviets, too. You wanted to hang on just long enough. So you hid my mother in the planks in the floor with another small girl. One evening when you came back to the barracks and lifted the planks you saw the girl lying there immobile and you started to scream, but it wasn’t Olenka, it was the four-year-old girl Olenka was hiding with, lying there dead. And when you realized my mother was still alive under the floorboards, you were so relieved.

  “Lily, that’s your doctor, that’s what he’s doing, hiding you under the wooden planks.”

  But what if I’m the other girl? thinks Lily. Someone was hiding her, too.

  The rumors got louder that the Soviets were coming, the Americans were coming. The louder the rumors got the more frequent the executions got. It was blind luck that you and Mama managed to live, though Mama caught scarlet fever and nearly died. You gave yourself to a German guard in return for some chicken stock for my mother. In March 1945, the Soviets must have gotten very close, because the whole camp was evacuated and all the women sent on a trek south deep into Germany, sent without shoes, without food, without warm clothes. It rained the whole month. The Germans stood by the side of the road and threw rocks at you, “they who were without sin,” you always add ironically after you tell me this; they threw stones at you, hoping you would fall.

  “I turned my body to shield her,” said Grandma, “I carried her because I loved her because she was my own, and I love you because you are my own…Liliput, I have no other.”

  I hear you, Grandma.

  Small tears trickle out, and her grandmother leans over her and kisses her eyes, whispering, “Ah, my angel, my child, so you can hear me. DiAngelo said to me that unconsciousness doesn’t mean you can’t hear, and he was right. I’m growing a newfound respect for him.”

  Grandma is crying as she is telling Lily another story. And this one Lily has never heard. Grandma is telling her about Tomas. Lily thinks it’s about Tomas, though she can’t be sure because it begins on Montague Street in Brooklyn, in 1992. Why do so many things begin in 1992? Why wasn’t that year on her lottery?

  Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights, 1992. Claudia runs into her postman—the one who used to bring her no letters from the front, the one she used to wait for every day by the fence, along with a pregnant Anya.

  Claudia had been out on Saturday morning doing a bit of fruit shopping, when she heard a voice from behind her. “Klavdia?” No one has called her Klavdia since Skalka.

  The postman. They stopped on the street and chatted. Claudia remembered the day well because it was an Indian summer October morning and it was warm, and they were standing near a church while the leaves were changing. The air smelled bittersweet, like sad nostalgia, and he said to her, I’m going to tell you something, Klavdia.

  And Claudia didn’t want to hear it.

  I know how you feel, Grandma. There are so many things I would have liked to never hear. These are so many things 1 would have liked to never be true.

  The postman told her that Tomas took him aside before he went off to the front and asked that if a death telegram was ever sent to the house, not to deliver it. “He made me promise.” Tomas told him that neither his young wife nor his ailing mother would survive that news. “If there was ever a telegram either about Tomas or his three brothers, I was supposed to just walk by your house, and if you were out in the front yard by the fence waiting, I had to put on my happiest face, and smile. I promised I would do it.” The postman looked at the church, and said, “And that’s what I did, Klavdia. I threw four telegrams away, one for each of the Pevny brothers, and as I walked by your gates, I waved to you and smiled.”

  Claudia paled then, and the air stopped smelling ripe or fresh.

  “Don’t be upset,” he said. “It’s been forty-three years. I did it because your Tomas asked me to. He said it was kinder.”

  Claudia asked if the postman had read the telegrams.

  “Yes. They all said, died of his wounds in battle.”

  That’s why Claudia stopped going out. Who knows who else she might run into, who els
e with tattoos on their arms might tell her tales of horror about telegrams of death. She is too old for such surprises, she can barely lift her load as it is.

  Claudia emits an awful sound, and Lily opens her eyes. She is on a respirator. She can’t speak. Only her eyes move, looking at her grandmother’s face for a sign, for a gesture, for something, her eyes pleading, asking, hoping.

  Claudia swallows down, lifts her hand, waves to Lily, and smiles.

  76

  The Only One

  DiAngelo debated with himself, trying to get up his courage, waiting for a miracle from the marrow registry, but finally he went into his small office on the hospital records floor and dialed Lily’s mother’s number. Spencer reluctantly gave it to him, saying he didn’t think calling was a good idea. But Lily was getting to a point where a successful platelet transfusion was no longer an option. Her organs were becoming clogged with detritus. Dialysis wasn’t helping, her salt levels were abnormally high, making her swell, and her blood wasn’t circulating. Lily was slipping in and out of consciousness, spending more and more days in a deep sleep, in a stupor from which she could not awaken. For four weeks the International Marrow Donor Registry had been unable to find a marrow match closer than four out of six enzyme markers. DiAngelo needed at least five.

  He didn’t want to call Allison Quinn but he had no choice. It was blast crisis time.

  After a few rings Allison picked up. DiAngelo introduced himself, explained who he was and how long he had been treating Lily. He told her how sick Lily was, how they had tried every combination of drugs to kill the cancer cells and could not. How they had tried experimental treatments, and Vitamin A therapy, and Alkeran, and even arsenic, and how now the only option left was a bone-marrow transplant, which involved replacing Lily’s diseased marrow with a healthy marrow from a suitable donor. Allison listened carefully to it all.

  DiAngelo said, “Mrs. Quinn, here is my problem. Marrow donors are not like blood donors. We cannot get matching marrow from just anyone. There is an international registry that lists all possible donors but at the moment no suitable match can be found for Lily…”

  “You know, I don’t understand all this medical stuff very well. I had a perforated stomach operation and a gall bladder removed, and I’ve had sponges left in me by careless nurses, and I don’t know if you know this, but I had an infection in my foot that was so terrible, I had to have the foot removed—amputated, doctor! but I don’t know anything about this cancer stuff, this bone marrow. Frankly, I’ve never heard of it. I think it would be better if you spoke to my husband. He understands these things much better, he used to be a journalist. I’m just going to go and get him—”

  “No! Mrs. Quinn, I don’t want you to get your husband, what I have to say, I have to finish saying to you. I don’t want you to get your husband. Please let me finish.”

  “All right,” Allison drew out. “But I really don’t understand…”

  “What I’m trying to tell you is that we have tested all her siblings, who are usually our best bet. But we cannot find a match among them for Lily.”

  Allison was mute on the other line. DiAngelo suspected that though she didn’t know anything about the “cancer stuff,” she perhaps knew more than she wanted to admit at the moment about why Lily’s brother and sisters were such bad marrow matches for Lily.

  “I don’t understand why you’re calling me here,” Allison said through her teeth into the phone. “Who are you? I didn’t know she was still so sick, I thought she was better. I just saw her, she came to visit me, and she was all better. What kind of trouble are you trying to cause here?”

  “She is not all better. Have you not spoken to your…your—mother, to your other children? She is much, much worse. And what I’m trying to do here is save your daughter’s life. Her siblings’ marrows don’t match.” DiAngelo paused, swallowed and just came out and said it. “Without even testing him, I will have to assume that your husband’s won’t match either.”

  Allison did not speak.

  “The only one who may be a possible match is you, Mrs. Quinn. I’m calling to ask you to come to New York and let us take a sample from you, and if you match even five of the six necessary markers, to let us harvest your marrow and give it to Lily.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Allison hissed into the phone.

  “I’m begging you. I’m pleading with you. You are the only one who can help. You are her only hope. Please. Please come and help her.”

  “My blood might not match either,” Allison whispered. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “Was she adopted?”

  “God, no! She is my child.”

  “Then come. It will match better than anything else we have. Get on the next plane and come to New York.”

  “Do you understand what you’re asking me? I can’t. I lost a foot. I had gangrene and lost a foot, had my foot amputated. I’m an invalid now. Didn’t you hear me? I can barely walk through my own house.”

  “Have your husband help you. They have wheelchairs at the airport, and Lily will pay for everything.”

  “I thought she was unconscious in ICU, how is she even going to know?”

  DiAngelo was fitfully rubbing his forehead. “I thought you didn’t know how your daughter was doing, Mrs. Quinn? Never mind that. Trust me, I will work everything out. You will fly first class, you will stay at a first-class hotel, everything you need will be taken care of.”

  “I can’t just come. I can’t. I have to think about it.”

  “You will have to think about it on the plane. Your daughter has days to live. She needs you not five days from now, not a week from now, not tomorrow, but yesterday. Please come.” DiAngelo paused, steeling himself, drawing from within him everything he could think of to persuade her. “I know you’ve been sick. I know how hard life has been for you. You’ve been depressed, you’ve been unhappy. And you have difficulty traveling. But a mother is all the hope that Lily’s got left in this world. If I had a choice I wouldn’t’ve troubled you, I know you’ve got troubles plenty.”

  “What is that supposed to mean? I’m fine, just a foot problem…”

  “Of course. I apologize.”

  “Give me your number, I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”

  Allison called back in an hour. DiAngelo hadn’t moved from his desk. “I will come,” she said, “under one condition.”

  “Name it,” he said. He would have promised her all of Lily’s money if she had asked.

  “That you will not breathe a word of what you think you have found out about me. The woman who brought me here went through too much to have my one indiscretion tear apart my family.”

  “Not a word out of me.”

  “They simply didn’t match, that’s all, and I’ve come to help. Mine might not match either. It’s simple.”

  “It’s very simple.” He could barely hear her, she was so quiet.

  “Until an hour ago when you called, I didn’t know Lily wasn’t my husband’s. She could have been, couldn’t she? It was very possible that she was his.”

  “Yes. Absolutely. You have four wonderful children. You should be proud.”

  “They don’t love their mother, but I am proud of them. I love them.”

  “Time is running out, Mrs. Quinn. There will be a ticket waiting for you and your husband at the United Airlines counter for an eight p.m. flight tonight. I will also book you a room at the Pierre on 61st Street and Fifth. It’s an excellent hotel, and just a few blocks from the hospital. Ask for me when you get to reception, and don’t be afraid to request a wheelchair.”

  “A wheelchair? I’m footless, doctor, I’m not incapacitated.”

  DiAngelo squared everything away with Spencer, who used Lily’s American Express card to get the tickets and the hotel room. But Spencer was who he was, and nothing anyone said got by him. “I thought bone marrow matched best in siblings?”

  Taken aback for just a second, DiAngelo glanced away, but it was all
that Spencer needed. “Not this time.”

  Spencer sat down. “Oh, Mother of God.” His hands were in his lap. He got up after a minute. “Them hits, they just keep on coming.” He sighed. “Lily might be able to live through the stemcell transplant, but she won’t live through this.”

  “I don’t know about you, detective, but in my experience, human beings manage to live through quite a fucking lot.”

  Spencer didn’t disagree. “Doctor, assure me that not a word of this is going to leave this room.”

  “I assure you.”

  “Though you cracked like an egg on marble, didn’t you?” said Spencer. “I barely even opened my mouth to ask a question.”

  “Detective O’Malley, I’m hoping it’s the last time I’m going to be interrogated by a professional investigator.”

  “That was being interrogated?” Spencer smiled. “Not a word to anyone.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  They shook hands. “Though the mother knows, doesn’t she?” said Spencer.

  “You think we should knock her off after we harvest her marrow?”

  “Well, not you. But I haven’t taken the Hippocratic oath. Perhaps put something in her drink? Maybe arsenic?”

  And they laughed softly at that, at the irony of it.

  Lily could have painted this: The father by the side of his wife on the airport conveyance. Allison had refused a cart, and now stood holding on to the moving walkway rail, her prosthetic leg limply propping her up. And the father had his hand on his wife’s back as they were silently propelled forward. And at the other end of the walkway, past the stairs, past the luggage carousel, three of her children, two daughters and one son, stood together waiting for their mother, to take her to the hospital where their sister lay dying.

  77

  Wollman’s Rink

  Lily is trying to form a word on her lips. The doctor is adjusting her respirator mask. She is laboriously breathing. DiAngelo lets her breathe without the oxygen for a few minutes every hour, to see how she does. And this time before he reattaches it, she forms and forms the word she wants the doctor to hear. The only word she wants to see in front of her.