Blood Shot (4 page)

He sprang up from the table, knocking over his beer stein, and hit me in the mouth. “Get out of my house, you mongrel bitch! Don’t ever come back with your filthy mind, your vile tongue!”

I got up slowly and went over to stand in front of him, my face close enough to smell the beer on his breath. “You may not insult my mother, Djiak. Any other garbage from the cesspool you call a mind I’ll tolerate. But you ever insult my mother again in my hearing I will break your neck.”

I stared at him fiercely until he turned his head uneasily away.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Djiak. Thanks for the coffee.”

She was on her knees mopping the floor by the time I got to the kitchen door. The beer had soaked through my socks. In the entry way I paused to take them off, slipping my bare feet into my running shoes. Mrs. Djiak came up behind me, cleaning my beery footprints.

“I begged you not to talk to him about it, Victoria.”

“Mrs. Djiak, all I want is Caroline’s father’s name. Tell me and I won’t bother you anymore.”

“You mustn’t come back. He will call the police. Or perhaps even shoot you himself.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll bring my gun the next time I come.” I fished a card from my handbag. “Call me if you change your mind.”

She didn’t say anything, but she took the card and tucked it into her apron pocket. I pulled the gleaming door open and left her frowning in the entryway.

5

The Simple Joys of Childhood

I sat in the car for a long time before my anger cooled and my breathing returned to normal. “How she made us suffer!” I mimicked savagely. Poor scared, spunky teenager. What courage it must have taken even to tell the Djiaks she was pregnant, let alone not to go to the home for unwed mothers they’d picked out for her. Girls in my high school class who hadn’t been as resilient returned with horrifying tales of backbreaking work, spartan rooms, poor nourishment as a nine-month punishment meted out by the nuns.

I felt fiercely proud of my mother for standing up to her righteous neighbors. I remembered the night they marched in front of Louisa’s house, throwing eggs and yelling insults. Gabriella came out on the front stoop and stared them down. “Yes, you are Christians, aren’t you?” she told them in her heavily accented English. “Your Christ will be very proud of you tonight.”

My bare feet were beginning to freeze inside my shoes. The cold slowly brought me back to myself. I started the car and turned on the heater. When my toes were warm again I drove down to 112th Street and turned west to Avenue L. Louisa’s sister Connie lived there with her husband, Mike, and their five children. While I was churning up the South Side I might as well include her.

Connie was five years older than Louisa, but she’d still been living at home when her sister got pregnant. On the South Side you lived with your parents until you got married yourself. In Connie’s case, she lived with her parents even after she married while she and her husband saved money for a house of their own. When they finally bought their three-bedroom place she quit her job to become a mother—another South Side tradition.

Compared to her mother, Connie was quite a slattern. A basketball lay on the tiny front lawn, and even my untutored eye could tell that no one had washed the front stoop in recent memory. The glass in the storm door and front windows gleamed without a streak, however, and no fingerprints marred the wood on the frame.

Connie came to the door when I rang the bell. She smiled when she saw me, but nervously, as if her parents had called to warn her I would be stopping by.

“Oh. Oh, it’s you, Vic. I—I was just going to the store, actually.”

Her long, bony face wasn’t suited to lying. The skin, pink and freckled like her niece’s, turned crimson as she spoke.

“What a pity,” I said dryly. “It’s been over ten years since we last saw each other. I was hoping to catch up on the kids and Mike and so on.”

She stood with the door open. “Oh. You’ve been to see Louisa, haven’t you? Ma—Ma told me. She’s not very well.”

“Louisa’s in terrible shape. I gather from Caroline there’s nothing they can do for her except try to keep her comfortable. I wish someone had told me sooner—I’d have been down months ago.”

“I’m sorry—we didn’t think—Louisa didn’t want to bother you, and Ma didn’t want—didn’t think—” She broke off, blushing more furiously than ever.

“Your mother didn’t want me coming down here and stirring the pot. I understand. But here I am, and I’m doing it anyway, so why don’t you put off your trip to the store for five minutes and talk to me.”

I pulled the storm door toward me as I spoke and moved closer to her in what I hoped was a nonthreatening, persuasive manner. She backed away uncertainly. I followed her into the house.

“I—uh, would you like a cup of coffee?” She stood twisting her hands like a schoolgirl in front of a hostile teacher, not a woman pushing fifty with a life of her own.

“Coffee would be great,” I said bravely, hoping my kidneys could handle another cup.

“The house is really a mess,” Connie said apologetically, picking up a pair of gym shoes that stood in the little entry-way.

I never say that to visitors—it’s obvious that I haven’t hung up my clothes or carried out the papers or vacuumed in two weeks. In Connie’s case, it was hard to see anything she might be talking about, other than the gym shoes. The floors were scoured, chairs stood at right angles to each other, and not a book or paper marred the shelves or tables as we went through the living room into the back of the house.

I sat at the green Formica table while she filled an electric coffee maker. This small deviation from her mother cheered me slightly: if she could make the switch from boiling water to percolator, who knows how far she might go.

“You and Louisa were never much alike, were you?” I asked abruptly.

She blushed again. “She was always the pretty one. People don’t expect so much of you if you’re pretty.”

The poignant gaucherie of her reply seemed almost unbearable. “What, didn’t your mother expect her to help out around the house?”

“Well, she was younger, you know—she didn’t have to do as much as I did. But you know Ma. Everything got cleaned every day whether you’d used it or not. When she got mad at us we had to scrub the underside of the sinks and the toilets. I swore my girls would never do any of that kind of thing.” Her mouth set in the hard line of remembered grievance.

“It sounds rough,” I said, appalled. “Do you feel Louisa left you holding the bag too often?”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t really her fault as much as the way they treated her. I can see that now. You know, Louisa could talk back and Pa’d think it was kind of cute. At least when she was little. He wouldn’t take it even from her when she got older.

“And Ma’s brother liked Louisa to sing and dance for him when he came over. She was so little and pretty, you know, it was like having a doll around. Then when she got older it was too late, of course. Too late to discipline her, I mean.”

“Seems like they did a pretty good job,” I commented. “Throwing her out of the house and all. That must have been scary for you too.”

“Oh, it was.” She was rubbing her hands over and over in the towel she’d taken out to wipe up a little spot of water left from filling the coffeepot. “They didn’t even tell me what was going on at first.”

“You mean you didn’t know she was pregnant?” I asked, incredulous.

She turned so red I thought blood might actually start oozing through her skin. “I know you won’t understand,” she said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “You led such a different life. You had boyfriends before you got married. I know. Ma—Ma kind of follows your life.

“But when Mike and I were married, I didn’t even know —I didn’t know—I—the nuns never talked about things like that at school. Ma, of course, she couldn’t—couldn’t begin to say anything. If Louisa was missing her—her period—she wouldn’t have said anything to me. She probably didn’t know what it meant, anyway.”

Tears spurted from her eyes against her will. Her shoulders shook as she tried controlling her sobbing. She wound the towel so tightly around her hands that the veins in her arms stood out. I got up from my chair to put a hand on one heaving shoulder. She didn’t move or say anything, but after a few minutes the spasms calmed down and her breathing grew more normal.

“So Louisa got pregnant because she didn’t know what she was doing, or that she might start a baby?”

She nodded mutely, her eyes on the floor.

“Do you know who the father might have been?” I asked gently, keeping my hand on her shoulder.

She shook her head. “Pa—Pa wouldn’t let us date. He said he hadn’t paid all that money to send us to Catholic school to see—see us chasing after boys. Of course lots of boys liked Louisa, but she—she wouldn’t have been going out with any of them.”

“Can you remember any of their names?”

She shook her head again. “Not after all this time. I know the boy at the grocery store used to buy her pop when she’d go in. I think his name was Ralph. Ralph Sow-something. Sower or Sowling or something.”

She turned to the coffeepot. “Vic, the terrible thing is—I was so jealous of her, at first I was glad to see her in trouble.”

“God, Connie, I hope so. If I had a sister who everyone said was prettier than me, and was petted and fussed over while they sent me off to Mass, I’d put an ax through her head instead of waiting for her to get pregnant and be kicked out of the house.”

She turned to look up at me, astonished. “But, Vic! You’re so—so cool. Nothing ever bothered you. Not even when you were fifteen years old. When your mother died Ma said God gave you a stone instead of a heart, you were so cool.” She put her hand over her mouth, mortified, and started to protest.

“Well, I was fucked if I was going to sob in public in front of all those women like your mother, who never had a good word to say about Gabriella,” I said, stung. “But you’d better believe I cried plenty in private. And anyway, Connie, that’s the whole point. My parents loved me. They thought I could succeed at anything I wanted to do. So even though I lose my temper a hundred times a week or so, it’s not like I had to spend my life listening to my folks tell me how my baby sister was wonderful and I was garbage. Loosen up, Connie. Give yourself a break.”

She looked at me doubtfully. “Do you really mean it? After what I said and everything?”

I took her shoulders between my hands and turned her to face me. “I really mean it, Connie. Now how about some coffee?”

After that we talked about Mike and his job at the waste-management plant, and young Mike and his football playing, and her three daughters, and her youngest, who was eight and so bright she really thought they’d have to try to get him to go to college, although Mike was nervous, he thought it gave people ideas that they were better than their parents or their neighborhood. The last comment made me grin to myself—I could hear Ed Djiak warning Connie: You don’t want the kid turning out like Victoria, do you?—but I listened patiently for forty-five minutes before moving my chair back and getting to my feet.

“It was really good to see you again, Vic. I—I’m glad you came by,” she said at the door.

“Thanks, Connie. Take it easy. And say hi to Mike for me.”

I walked slowly back to my car. The heel of my left shoe was rubbing on the back of my foot. I savored the pain the way you do when you’re feeling like crap. A little pain: the gods letting you expiate the damage you caused.

How had I learned the facts of life? A little in the locker room, a little from Gabriella, a little from our basketball coach, a relaxed, sensible woman except on the court. How could Connie have made it through junior high without one of her friends tipping her off? I pictured her at fourteen, tall, gawky, timid. Maybe she hadn’t had any friends.

It was only two o’clock. I felt as though I had spent a whole day loading bales on the levee instead of a few hours drinking coffee with the old folks at home. I felt as though I’d already earned a thousand dollars, and I didn’t even know where to start looking. I put the car into gear and headed back to the mainland.

My socks were still damp. They filled the car with the smell of beer and sweat, but when I opened a window the cold air was too much for my bare toes. My irritation rose with my discomfort: I wanted to stop at a service station and call Caroline at SCRAP to tell her the deal was off. Whatever her mother had done a quarter century ago should decently be left to rest there. Unfortunately, I found myself making the turn to Houston Street when I should have been heading north to Lake Shore Drive and freedom.

The block looked worse in daylight than it had at night. Cars were parked at all angles. One was abandoned in the street, black showing around the hood and windshield where a fire had burned the engine block. I left the Chevy in front of a hydrant. If the traffic patrols were as assiduous down here as the street cleaners, I could probably stay until Labor Day without getting a ticket.

I went around to the back, where Louisa always used to leave a spare key on the ledge above the little porch. It was still there. As I let myself in a curtain twitched in the house next door. Within minutes everyone on the block would know a strange woman was going into the Djiaks’.

I heard voices inside the house and called out to let people know I was there. When I got to Louisa’s bedroom I realized she had the television on at top volume—what I thought were visitors was only General Hospital. I knocked as hard as I could. The volume went down and her scratchy voice called out, “That you, Connie?”

I opened the door. “Me, Louisa. How’re you doing?”

Her thin face lighted in a smile. “Well, well, girl. Come right in. Make yourself at home. How’s it going?”

I pulled the straight-backed chair next to the bed. “I just went down to see Connie and your folks.”

“Did you now?” She looked at me warily. “Ma never was one of your biggest fans. What’re you up to, young Warshawski?”

“Spreading joy and truth. Why did your mother hate Gabriella so much, Louisa?”

She shrugged bony shoulders under her cardigan. “Gabriella never went in much for hypocrisy. She didn’t keep to herself how she felt about Ma and Pa kicking me out.”

“Why did they?” I asked. “Were they mad at you just for getting pregnant, or did they have something special against the boy—the father?”

She didn’t say anything for a few minutes, but lay with her eyes on the television. Finally she turned back to me.

“I could kick your ass right out the back door for poking around in this.” Her voice was calm. “But I know what happened. I know Caroline and how she always twisted you around her little finger. She called you down here, didn’t she —wants to know who her old man was. Spoiled stubborn little bitch. When I blew up at her she called you in. Isn’t that right?”

My face was hot with embarrassment, but I said gently, “Don’t you think she has a right to know?”

Her mouth set in a tight line. “Twenty-six years ago a goddamn bastard tried to ruin my life. I don’t want Caroline anywhere near him. And if you’re your ma’s daughter, Victoria, you’ll do your best to keep Caroline from prying into it instead of helping her out.”

Tears smarted in her eyes. “I love that girl. You’d think I was trying to beat her, or kick her out on the street instead of protecting her. I did my best to see she got a different shot at life than I did and I’m not watching that go down a sewer now.”