The Girl in Times Square (40 page)

Lily went to Brooklyn to see her grandmother, as promised, to bring her some macadamia nuts, some Kona coffee beans, and some pictures of Allison without a foot.

“Lil, how could you have gone to Maui only to come back so pale?” was the first thing her grandmother said to her.

“I’m not pale, Grandma, I’m tanned.”

“You’re pale. But also you’re smiling. Oh, no. You’re not back with that man again, are you?”

“I am, Grandma.” She was smiling.

Her grandmother snorted. “I don’t know why you’re not looking better then. Are you feeling well?”

“I feel all right,” Lily said. But that was a lie. She did not feel all right.

“Sit.”

They sat on the Mylar couch with their cups of tea. They talked about Maui, about Andrew, about Grandma, and about Allison. There was one thing Lily wanted to ask her grandmother: to tell her about her mother’s crying room. Lily explained about the crying room and saw her grandmother’s cup tremble slightly, and Lily’s cup, at seeing that, trembled, too.

Lily pressed and pressed. Oh, Claudia said, don’t you have to be somewhere?

“Why are your hands shaking?”

“Lily, what are you worrying your head for about these silly things? Don’t you have enough on your plate?”

“Yes. No. I want to know. Tell me. Tell me about my mother.”

Claudia was silent.

“Grandma, please!”

“Don’t yell at me, I’m your grandmother.” She sighed deeply. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Frankly, with the kinds of things I’ve heard in the last seven days, I can’t imagine how much worse it can get. Let’s have it.”

Claudia finally spoke after a pause of several protracted minutes. “Well, you know Tomas and I got married in June 1939, and I became pregnant right away. My baby was due in March, exactly nine months and a day after our wedding. But then the war began in September, and Tomas and his three brothers went to the front. His mother and father were left behind, waiting for news of their sons. And I was next door with my family, waiting for news of Tomas. I was young, still working around the house, carrying heavy things, taking care of the goats, the cows, the chickens. I had a lot of anxiety about him. There were no letters from him, you see. I lost the baby that October, after there had been no news of him for five weeks.”

“You lost what baby that October?” Lily said dumbly.

“Lily. Listen. Do you want me to tell you or not?”

“I’m suddenly thinking of reconsidering, Grandma.”

Claudia continued. “The baby I lost that fall was Tomas’s baby, darling. Your mother wasn’t even born yet.”

“Grandma…” whispered Lily. “You’re confusing me.”

“Tomas’s mother was an exquisitely beautiful woman, in her early forties, but unbelievably as I watched her at the gate while we were both waiting for the postman, for our news, I saw that though she was painfully thin, she did have a belly on her. Tomas and his brothers were 18, 19, 20, 22, and suddenly their mother was pregnant again! Oh, what a scandal. No woman in her
thirties
got pregnant, much less in her forties.

“The Germans came to Skalka in December 1939. Our soldiers fought bravely, but we had horses and the Germans had tanks. Imagine the stupidity of standing in front of a tank on a horse. We fought, we weren’t going to go down without a fight, but after three days, Danzig fell and our village of Skalka with it. The Germans came into the huts, took our china, our dishes, then demanded food from us. They kicked several families out of their homes and quartered there. Not ours. Because we weren’t Jewish. But they did kick out Tomas’s mother and father, because they were.” Claudia sighed heavily.

“Your Tomas was Jewish?”

“He was. And the Jews all went to fight for Poland. Tomas’s father said he wasn’t leaving his home. The Germans beat him to death in it.”

“Oh God.” Lily never heard this part of Grandma’s story before.

“Tomas’s pregnant mother, because she had nowhere else to go, came to live with us. The Germans made her wear a yellow armband to distinguish her from the non-Jews.” Claudia coughed. “Because she was a Jew she never got any food, even though she was pregnant. We shared our food with her.”

“Grandma, how come you never told me any of this? I’m twenty-five years old!”

“You’re a young twenty-five.”

“Do my sisters know this, my brother?”

“They know.”

Lily couldn’t believe it.

“What can I tell you, Liliput. Sometimes people close to you, even people who love you, keep secrets.”

“No kidding.”

“Some things are too painful to tell.”

“Are you going to tell me the rest of it? Because I have to go to the hospital soon.”

“So why don’t you go?”

“No, no. Go ahead. Continue. So Tomas’s mother lived with you through the whole war?”

“She stayed with us as long as she could. She was a very sick woman, alone, depressed, and a desperate, irredeemable drinker to boot.”

Lily groaned. Her head was in her hands.

“We didn’t think she’d make it to the birth of the baby. She used to disappear for days even when pregnant, to go to Danzig. To beg for vodka on the streets. To offer herself on the streets for some vodka. But, somehow, in January 1940 she had the baby. And Lily—that baby is your mother.”

Lily dropped her cup of tea. She didn’t even bend down to clean it up. “What did you say?” she whispered. She couldn’t have been sunk farther down into the back of that couch, slunk down, stooped, lowered, debased. “My mother is your husband’s youngest sister?”

“That’s right.”

“Grandma…” Lily couldn’t take the hands away from her mouth. Her grandmother, who raised her, who adored her, who took care of her, who was the family’s only matriarch, was not her mother’s mother!

After five minutes of a trance-like silence, her grandmother continued in a lowered voice. “I wish I could tell you that Tomas’s father was your mother’s father, but I’m afraid no one thought so, not even the father himself. Hence all those nasty rumors about his wife. Everybody suspected she became pregnant on one of her excursions to Danzig while begging for the drink.

“The baby was born in the dead of winter, in Danzig, during one of her trips. When my father and mother found them, both were nearly frozen, the naked baby wrapped in her coat and skirts.

“Believe it or not, as if by a miracle, after the baby was born, she sobered up. All the cows were long eaten, all the goats were eaten, there was no milk, and no one else was having babies. There were no wet nurses. Someone had to feed the infant or she would die.”

Numbly, dumbly, mutely, Lily stared at her grandmother. “Grandma…her mother’s name…was Anya, or something like that? Anna? Anika?…Anne?”

“That’s right,” Grandma said, frowning. “How do you know?”

“I don’t know,” Lily said inaudibly. That remarkable Spencer. Saw even then, at the very beginning, something, everything. Saw without knowing, simply saw a shape of Anne with his own damaged heart.

“Your mother must have acquired a taste for that vodka in the womb and later while being nursed,” said Claudia. “You think I don’t know, but I know everything, Lily. The way your mother is and has been—I don’t think it was milk pouring from Anya’s teat into her baby’s mouth.”

“Grandma, please…”

“The sobriety lasted exactly until the weaning. Then Anya would take Olenka and disappear to Danzig, using the baby to beg for vodka. Interestingly she had enough sense to not get drunk in the city, like before. She would come back to Skalka, leave Olenka with me and go off into the woods with her bottle, like a bear.” Grandma collected her thoughts. Lily was coiled up on the couch. “Once or twice my own mother and I had to go to Danzig to bring them back. We’d find Anya cold on the ground, in an alley and Olenka would be sitting by her, not moving, every once in a while saying
Mama, Mama.
”

“Grandma, I can’t. I just can’t.” Lily put her hands over her ears. Grandma was right. At twenty-five, she was just a child who could not bear this.

“I’m sorry. That’s why we didn’t tell you for so long.”

“I would have happily lived out what’s left of my life without ever knowing,” breathed out Lily. “Had I known, I never would have asked, never. So is my mother Jewish? Am I Jewish?”

“Well, no.”

“No?”

“You know you are christened Catholic. And we christened your mother. We
had
to christen her.”

“Why had to?”

“Because at the end of 1942 all the Jews in the village were moved to the Warsaw Ghetto.”

“So my mother and her mother were taken to the ghetto?”

“Oh, Lily.”

“Don’t ‘Oh Lily’ me now, Grandma. You’re so far down into the precipice, there’s no way back.”

“In December 1942 the Germans came to our house, and said all Jews had to leave immediately for the train to Warsaw. The woman with the yellow band and her child had to go. At that moment Anya laughed very loud, shoved Olenka away from herself, and said, ‘
My
child? She’s not my child. I wouldn’t have a child, I have four grown sons, I’m forty-five years old, do I look to you like I’m capable of having a child?’ She grabbed the girl and thrust her in my arms, and said, ‘I can’t take care of it for you anymore, Klavdia, do you hear? No more!’ She turned to the Germans and said, ‘It’s
her
child, look! It looks exactly like her. I’ve been helping her a little bit because she is so young and doesn’t know anything about children, and I’ve been using the girl to help me get the vodka I need. I’m a drunk, you see. I’ve been stealing her from them to beg for vodka. Isn’t that true? Tell them, Klavdia.’ I didn’t know what to say. I said, ‘That’s right.’ The Germans looked at me and said, ‘This is your baby?’

“I was light-haired then, and so was your mother, she was light blonde, while Anya was dark-haired and dark-eyed. The hair saved Olenka because aside from the blonde-dark contrast, she was really a carbon copy of her mother. They had the same face, the same features. But the Germans believed Anya and took her with them, and left Olenka with me.” Grandma began to cry. Lily had never seen her grandmother cry; it frightened her. “When they took her mother, the child in my arms ripped herself free, and shouted, ‘
Mama
!’

“The Nazis turned around, and I grabbed her and held her to me very tight, smothering her, covering her face, and said, ‘Shh, shh, it’ll be all right. Mama is here, right here, baby.’ You know,
I don’t think they believed me, I remember the way they were looking at me, at the baby. But they left the girl with me. And for the next three days Olenka sat by our frosted-over window waiting for her mother to come back.”

The two women sat side by side on the couch, not speaking, not touching. The house was quiet except for Lily’s anguished crying.

“Did we ever find out what happened to Anya?” she asked.

“No. I suspect it was what happened to all the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.”

It was a long time before Lily could speak again. Finally, she got up, said she had to be going. Thanked her grandmother for a cup for tea, for an enjoyable afternoon. She said she was going to call her tomorrow, tell her how her blood work turned out. And before she left, at the open door, with her voice breaking, Lily said, “Grandma, I think my mother is still sitting in that crying room, by that window.”

Lily walked not to the F train, but in the other direction to the New York Harbor, and sat on the bench for a long time on the Promenade on the East River overlooking the mouth of the Hudson and all of Manhattan Island. It must be getting so late. Is DiAngelo even there this late? It’s four o’clock. I might as well go home. Wait till Spencer hears. I can’t even remember what I’m supposed to do anymore. My poor mother.

That night, Lily did something she could not remember doing since she didn’t know when. She called her mother in Maui.

Her father answered. Her mother was back home, but she was not feeling well at the moment, she was sleeping; no, no, everything was fine, she really was just sleeping, nothing more. It’s been very good. She’s been going seven times a week to AA meetings. They had the meetings on the green lawns in front of the blue ocean for an hour a day. “Your mother is doing great. Shelly is so proud of her.”

That Shelly was nothing but a troublemaker. “Well, tell her I called, won’t you?”

“I will. She’ll be happy to hear you called, Liliput.”

When she hung up the phone, Spencer was looking at her. “She’s still going every day,” Lily said to him. “So there.”

He said nothing, just opened his arms to her.

Lily tried painting the frosted window in Skalka, Poland, but ended up sobbing onto the canvas on the floor, and all the blue frost became gray blobs and dried with a briny texture like the dried-out sea.

In the comfort of her bed, Spencer heard about Olenka Pevny, and Lily heard about John Doe.

Then they slept, woke up in the middle of the night, tried to deal with things.

“Spencer, so is this person definitely Milo?”

“He is. I spoke to Clive, showed him the drawing you did. He recognized the eyes. You can’t hide your crystal meth eyes. I showed it to Paul as well, but he didn’t know him.”

“Well, how are we going to find him?”

“
We
? You are going to do nothing except go see DiAngelo in the morning. I am going to go see Jan McFadden tomorrow but alone—without Gabe, so as not to scare her. Maybe she can identify the mystery man from Amy’s past—though I have my doubts. I’ve already talked to her until I’m blue in the face. She has no idea what her daughter had got up to.”

“Talk to her again, Spence. Use your finely tuned interrogation skills.”

“I’ll show you finely tuned.” Spencer kissed her prominent clavicle bones, all across.

Struggling to stick to the subject, Lily said, “I’m convinced this Milo is the reason that Amy is missing.” She closed her eyes and moaned lightly under his mouth.

Still in her robe, unshowered, unhappy even to talk, Jan said to Spencer, “Why do you keep coming back here if you don’t have any information about my daughter?”

“Jan, I have a drawing here of a homeless man that Amy used to be friendly with. Do you recognize this man? I hoped you might know his name.”

Jan glanced at the sketch of Milo Spencer was showing her. “Well, I certainly don’t know his name. I don’t recognize him. Do you have him in custody?”

“No. We’ve got an APB out for him. He’s known as Milo. If we find him, I think we might find out where Amy is.”

“Well, I don’t know any homeless men! I can’t believe Amy would either; not my Amy.”

“Her friend Paul said Amy was friendly with a lot of off-the-track
people he didn’t know.” Spencer put the sketch away.

“You asked me this already! I didn’t know them either!”

“Right. But perhaps—you knew somebody?”

“No matter how many times you ask me, I still won’t know.”

Jan stubbed out her cigarette. “Are they even looking in Central Park anymore?” she said emptily.

Spencer didn’t reply. They weren’t. The police had searched for a year, combing 843 acres of wooded terrain and, having found nothing suspicious, finally stopped last month.

Jan asked if he wanted a drink.

“Coffee.”

“Coffee if you want. I meant—”

“No, thank you.”

“Just so I don’t drink alone.”

“No.”

If only anyone but the demons knew with what effort Spencer’s lips formed the words no. They didn’t even form them. He managed to shake his head while his lips went dry.

He waited, thinking of something else to ask, while she stared grimly into her glass of Chivas, while he stared grimly into her glass of Chivas.

He asked if Amy belonged to any clubs. Sports? Art? Choir?

Jan said choir.

“Any political clubs? Did she run for student council? The treasurer? The president? Was she in young conservatives of America club?”

“Choir, I told you. Nothing political.”

“Did she vote?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know, darling,” said Jim. He had walked into the kitchen earlier, still sweaty from running, and was fixing himself a drink of ice water as he listened. “She voted in the ‘92 election when she was a senior in high school.”

Jan McFadden looked stupefied. “Did she? I know nothing about that. She was in choir. She sang. She was creative, artistic.
She may have voted, but politics didn’t interest her.”

Well, they must have interested her a little bit, if she came in to see Andrew Quinn, thought Spencer. He wanted to say that to Jan, but didn’t see the point, she seemed pretty high-strung as it was.

Jim said, “Maybe if you stop with the Chivas in the morning, you’d be able to recall a few more things that would help this man find your daughter.”

“Oh, stop it! You don’t think if I could help him, I would? If I knew anything!”

Spencer stepped into the breach.

“Did Amy know…Congressman Quinn…back then?” asked Spencer carefully.

“Of course not! God, what are you getting at? I don’t even think she voted for him. She was so uninvolved. What are you getting at?”

“What I need from you is a single name: one of the people she traveled with, hung with, went out with? A name of a boyfriend, anything.” God!

“I told you a thousand times, I don’t know! I forgot, or I never knew. Amy’s senior year, I had two small babies in the house to take care of. And she was eighteen! I mean, honestly.” Jan sat, nearly crying. “I don’t remember. It was seven years ago. With everything that’s happened, I’m surprised I can remember my own name.”

“A single name. A first name of anyone you let your oldest child, your daughter, go traveling across America in a van with.”

“Let her, who let her? I didn’t let her! She just went.
I
wanted her to go to college.”

“One name.”

“Truth is,” said Jim suddenly, “you didn’t want to know. Tell the detective. Amy was wild, she constantly disobeyed, screamed back at you. You washed your hands of her. You had the twins, you didn’t want to be thinking about Amy. When
she said she was going traveling across the U.S., you told her never to come back, as if you were glad to be rid of her. You as much as kicked her out when you heard she wasn’t going to college.”

“I didn’t kick her out!” Jan shouted.

“That’s why you don’t know. You didn’t
want
to know. You didn’t care!”

“Lindsey!” Jan cried.

Spencer stepped back against the counter. LINDSEY!

Panting and lowering her voice, Jan said, “Lindsey was one of the girls she used to hang out with.”

Well, well. “Lindsey what?”

“You wanted a first name, I gave you a first name. Lindsey.”

“This Lindsey lived…?”

“Down the road somewhere, here in Port Jeff Village.” In a quieter voice still, and after a significant pause, Jan said, “Detective, if there’s nothing else, do you mind…I’m very tired. I need to lie down.”

Jim followed Spencer out to the car. “I’m sorry about her.”

“Don’t worry.”

“She can’t see straight.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this, man. I’m at the end of my rope.”

“You should do this for a little longer,” Spencer said. “She needs you.”

In New York City on 22nd Street at the hair salon, Paul said Lindsey? Lindsey who? Not Lindsey Kiplinger? I didn’t think Amy was friendly with her, she was a year above her in school, and besides, I only know of her because she’s dead, died a few years back in a car wreck or something, somewhere out west. New Mexico? Utah?

Spencer called the Kiplingers in Port Jeff. Their message machine said they were away on vacation.

Back at the station there was a message from DiAngelo.

“Are you busy?” DiAngelo said, when Spencer called back. “I know it’s the middle of the day. But Lily needs someone with her, and I’ve got to get her transferred to Sloan Kettering.”

“I’ll come. Sloane Kettering? What’s wrong?”

“She’s very sick, Detective O’Malley.”

“Well, I know, but…”

“She’s dying.”