Caroline hovered anxiously around the locker-room door, worried I would leave without her. She was so tense I began to feel uneasy about what I was going to find at her house. She’d acted just this way when she’d dragged me home from college one weekend, ostensibly because Louisa had hurt her back and needed help replacing a broken window. After I got there I found she expected me to explain why she’d given Louisa’s little pearl ring to the St. Wenceslaus Lenten fund drive.
“Is Louisa really sick?” I demanded as we finally left the locker room.
She looked at me soberly. “Very sick, Vic. You’re not going to like seeing her.”
“What’s the rest of your agenda, then?”
The ready color flooded her cheeks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She flounced out the school door. I followed slowly, in time to see her get into a battered car parked with its nose well into the street. She rolled down the window as I walked by to yell that she’d see me at the house and took off in a squeal of rubber. My shoulders were sagging a little as I unlocked the Chevy door and slid in.
My gloom increased when I made the turn onto Houston Street. I’d last been on the block in 1976 when my father died and I came back down to sell the house. I’d seen Louisa then, and Caroline, who was fourteen and following determinedly in my steps-she even tried playing basketball, but at five feet even her tireless energy couldn’t get her onto the first squad.
That was the last time I had talked to any of the other neighbors who had known my parents. There was genuine grief for my gentle, good-humored father. Grudging respect for Gabriella, dead ten years at the time. After all, the other women on the block had shared her scraping, saving, cutting each penny five ways to feed and shelter their families.
Now she was dead, they glossed over the eccentricities that used to make them shake their heads-taking the girl to the opera with an extra ten dollars instead of buying her a new winter coat. Not baptizing her or giving her to the sisters at St. Wenceslaus for schooling. That disturbed them enough that they sent the principal, Mother Joseph Something, around one day for a memorable confrontation.
Maybe the biggest folly of all to them was her insisting on college for me, and demanding that it be the University of Chicago. Only the best did for Gabriella, and she’d decided that was Chicago’s best when I was two. Not, perhaps, comparing in her mind with the University of Pisa. Just as the shoes she bought herself at Callabrano’s on Morgan Street didn’t compare to Milan. But one did what one could. So two years after my mother’s death I’d left on a scholarship for what my neighbors called Red University, half scared, half excited to meet the demons up there. And after that, I’d never really gone home again.
Louisa Djiak was the one woman on the block who always stood up for Gabriella, dead or alive. But then, she owed Gabriella. And me, too, I thought with a flash of bitterness that startled me. I realized I was still pissed at spending all those glorious summer days baby-sitting, at doing my homework with Louisa’s baby howling in the background.
Well, the baby was grown up now, but she was still howling exigently in my ear. I pulled up behind her Capri and turned off the engine.
The house was smaller than I remembered, and dingier. Louisa wasn’t well enough to wash and starch the curtains every six months and Caroline belonged to a generation that emphatically avoided such tasks. I should know-I was part of it myself.
Caroline was waiting in the doorway for me, still edgy. She gave a brief, tense smile. “Ma’s really excited you’re here, Vic. She’s waited all day to have her coffee so she could drink it with you.”
She took me through the small, cluttered dining room to the kitchen, saying over her shoulder, “She’s not supposed to drink coffee anymore. But it was too hard for her to give it up-along with everything else that’s changed for her. So we compromise on one cup a day.”
She busied herself at the stove, tackling the coffee with energetic inefficiency. Despite a trail of spilled water and coffee grounds on the stove, she carefully arranged a TV tray with china, cloth napkins, and a geranium cut from a coffee can in the window. Finally she set out a little dish of ice cream with a geranium leaf in it. When she picked up the tray I stood up from my perch on the kitchen stool to follow her.
Louisa’s bedroom lay to the right of the dining room. As soon as Caroline opened the door the smell of sickness hit me like a physical force, bringing back the odor of medicine and decaying flesh that had hung around Gabriella the last year of her life. I dug the nails into the palm of my right hand and willed myself into the room.
My first reaction was shock, even though I thought I’d prepared myself Louisa sat propped in bed, her face gaunt and tinged a queer greenish gray under her wispy hair. Her twisted hands emerged from the loose sleeves of a worn pink cardigan. When she held them out to me with a smile, though, I caught a glimpse of the beautiful young woman who’d rented the house next to ours when she was pregnant with Caroline.
“Good to see you, Victoria. Knew you’d come by. You’re like your ma that way. Look like her, too, even though you have your daddy’s gray eyes.”
I knelt by the bed and hugged her. Underneath the cardigan her bones felt tiny and brittle.
She gave a racking cough that shook her frame. “Excuse me. Too many damned cigarettes for too many years. Little missy here hides ’em from me-as if they could hurt me any worse now.”
Caroline bit her lips and moved over next to the bed. “I brought you your coffee, Ma. Maybe it’ll take your mind off your cigs.”
“Yeah, my one cup. Damned doctors. First they pump you so full of shit you don’t know whether you’re coming or going. Then when they got you tied by the hind legs they take away anything that’d make the time pass easier. I’m telling you, girl, don’t ever get yourself in this spot.”
I took the thick china mug from Caroline and handed it to Louisa. Her hands shook slightly and she pressed the mug against her breast to steady it. I slid off my heels into a straight-backed chair near the bed.
“You want to spend some time alone with Vic, Ma?” Caroline asked.
“Yeah, sure. You go on, girl. I know you got work to do.”
When the door shut behind Caroline I said, “I’m really sorry to see you like this.”
She made a throwaway gesture. “Ah-what the hell. I’m sick of thinking about it, and I talk about it to the damned docs often enough. I want to hear about you. I follow all your cases when they make it to the papers. Your ma’d be real proud of you.”
I laughed. “I’m not so sure. She hoped I’d be a concert singer. Or maybe a high-priced lawyer. I can just imagine her if she saw the way I live.”
Louisa laid a bony hand on my arm. “Don’t you think so, Victoria. Don’t you think so for one minute. You know Gabriella-she’d of gave her last shirt to a beggar. Look how she stood up for me when people came by and threw eggs and shit at my windows. No. Maybe she’d of liked to see you living better than you do. Heck-feel that way about Caroline. Her brains, her education and all, she could do better than hanging around this dump. But I’m real proud of her. She’s honest and hardworking and she sticks up for what she believes in. And you’re just the same. No, sir. Gabriella could see you now she’d be as proud as can be.”
“Well, we couldn’t have managed without your help when she was so sick,” I muttered, uncomfortable.
“Oh, shit, girl. My one chance to pay her back for everything she did? I can still see her when the righteous ladies from St. Wenceslaus were out parading around my front door. Gabriella come out with a head of steam that damn near drove ’em into the Calumet.”