Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

A Private State: Stories (11 page)

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Elizabeth wanted to know what happened here before her family arrived. She learned the Mercers had divorced after twenty-five years then the Cohens had another baby. A split followed by an increase; one offset the other, she supposed. Elizabeth picked up a shred of paper: blue men sat inside pagodas, fingers tangled in their beards.

"You could have used hot water and vinegar to get the paper off." An old man stood in the doorway. He was small and carried his coat in a dark oblong over his arm. His pants had perfect hems.

"Who are you?" Elizabeth said, too surprised to move. How had he gotten in? Where else had he been? She imagined the drawers of her bureau wrenched wide. But he didn't look sturdy enough to wrench drawers. She stood up. With relief, she saw she was taller.

"I'm Joseph Krystowicki. Vera's cousin. I should be on that family tree you're working on downstairs." He sketched the air, mimicking the strokes Elizabeth used to draw her genealogical charts. "Vera told me to say hello. You left the kitchen door open." He shifted his coat to the other arm.

"A cousin of Vera's? Is she all right?" Elizabeth asked. Why hadn't he called out? Or phoned?

"She's fine, she's gone to Miami." He waved his free hand in the air. Elizabeth remembered that Vera had mentioned she was thinking of spending a week in Florida; but Elizabeth knew she hadn't said anything about a cousin. "I'm looking after the house. And she told me to help you with your chart," the man said patiently, as if that were enough to explain. "Let's go downstairs." What was strange to Elizabeth was that it seemed like the only proper thing to do.

The man led Elizabeth to the drafting table in the study where a rectangle of archival paper was thumbtacked smooth. It was a tree

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she was tracing for Vera Kosovsky, her neighbor and a survivor of a labor camp in Poland. Her tree was difficult, the way they often were for Jewish clients, with no way to avoid the many branches pinched short by the war. Families that should have run to the bottom of the page, run right off it, stopped in the middle, hanging there like black and broken chandeliers. Elizabeth imagined Vera looking at all the gaps and saying, in her decisive way, "Well, we can't change what happened. There is no way around the facts."

The man pointed. "There. That's where I should be: Joseph Krystowicki, Lodz, 1925. Son of Avram and Magda." Elizabeth traced the line from Vera: he was her second cousin, born in the same town. Why had she never talked about him?

Elizabeth looked at her feet. It was hard to assert yourself when you weren't wearing shoes. She said, "Mr. Krystowicki, I don't mean to be rude, but Vera hasn't ever mentioned you." He was a formal man. Despite his intrusion, she would never have called him Joseph. He looked as if he were in slight and constant pain. His knuckles were flat and huge as if they had once been smashed.

"We don't spend a lot of time together. But I wanted a change of scene and she wanted someone in the house while she was gone." He looked at her, calm, measuring. "Vera said you were doing this project for her. She said I should help you. My memory is better than hers, for certain things."

Elizabeth felt slightly dizzy. "Would you like some coffee?" she said.

"Please. With sugar." Joseph dipped his head, looked courtly.

When she returned with steaming cups, Joseph was sitting in a chair at the sunny end of the room. Despite his age, his unclear status as visitor or intruder, he made her feel like a hostess still mastering the etiquette of entertaining. Sugar tongs? Why hadn't she thought to arrange a plate of cookies? At least she'd found her sneakers. Standing there with her tray, she realized she often felt

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callow around those who had lived through the war. They had stood things she could hardly fathom. He was older than Vera, but had her same dry vigor.

Joseph sniffed his coffee. "This makes me think of Rome, those pigeons and statues." He put his nose to the brim and sniffed again. "I am sorry I surprised you."

"That's all right," Elizabeth said slowly, "I was taken aback. I don't usually leave doors open. I'm careful about it, in fact."

"Quite right," he said. "Vera told me about your Kate." He sipped his coffee and closed his eyes for a moment. His accent was strong, Eastern European.

"When was the last time you saw Vera?" Elizabeth asked.

He opened his eyes. "Two years ago. We bumped into each other in Miami. Before that, not since before the war. Imagine that," he said and closed his eyes again.

Elizabeth wondered if he was asleep. Then she asked, "Mr. Krystowicki, why didn't you knock harder? I would have come downstairs."

His eyes snapped opened. "Because you would never have let me in," he said. "You don't like strangers."

It was true. Friendly once she knew who it was, she let her sympathies grow slowly. She often woke in the middle of the night convinced someone was trying to jimmy a window. An historian, she'd tried to train herself to assess sources just as critically, a skill that kept her attuned to personal detail. She taught two classes at the local college: one on U.S. presidents and the other called "Pursuit of Happiness: The Character of Thomas Jefferson."

Elizabeth's students earned their diplomas in fragments, at night, which made her tolerant when they couldn't turn papers in on time. She understood working in pieces from her experience with genealogy, with its hunt for links and separations, its attempts at the neat articulation of relations, so tactile but evasive.

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It always amazed her how branches of information just disappeared. All this was why she asked her visitor, "Mr. Krystowicki, why don't I have your information on the chart?"

It was an early summer morning when he had heard the gunfire, the whine of rusted gates, the echoes of boots on concrete. The ones who were left had known someone would be coming soon, Americans or Russians. But it was bad to hear the sounds of an army again, even a liberating one. He had hoped for Americans; they were supposed to have food. The Nazis and their Poles had poisoned the well and burned the warehouse before retreating, although someone had found a bottle of wine in the officers' mess.

Then the Americans appeared, looking like tall, fat babies, with their long legs, their round cheeks. The first thing that had struck him at the evacuation camp was the smell of trees. All of them had been cut down at the lager. But everything was sharp and strange: the stiff arms of the new shirt, the hiss of jazz from a radio. He was beyond hungry, though all he could manage was a little rice. The tea was hot and bitter.

Instead, he walked. He heard the click of his hips as he tracked circles around tents in the light of a half moon. It was better with the sun down. He picked up speed. The air tingled his stubble. He jumped at a sound in the nearby woods, then realized it was the rattle of wind in leaves, as sharp to him as coins rapping glass. Going back to his tent, he ran into two soldiers with dark faces and bright eyes. He was on his knees. They had hands with callused finger tips that lifted him to his feet. One soldier put his rifle down and said, "It's OK, mister, it's OK."

"So that was the first thing I really knew about America," Joseph said. "Those soldiers. It's not the same place now; the soldiers aren't the same. Even then, just because you'd won didn't mean you were a friend to Jews. But it was enough. It made me say, no more Europe."

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Joseph lifted his cup to make sure it hadn't left a ring of mist. "In my camp, there were over two hundred thousand of us, Jews from all over, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses. One hundred and seven were liberated." He made a fist that stayed planted on the arm of the chair.

Sun lit his face, his black eyes. He peered out the window, squinting. "It's three o'clock. What time do you have to pick up your daughter?"

Elizabeth jumped. Kate had been the last thing on her mind. Would he like to come to dinner? Was there anything she could do for him? There was still the chart to discuss.

He stood up and said, "No thank you. I will talk to you later about the chart." He complimented her coffee. She helped him with his coat and waited while he wound a muffler around his neck. They left through the kitchen door, which Elizabeth tried twice before she was satisfied that the lock had held.

Elizabeth nestled herself in a cluster of adults wearing sensible boots with crinkled soles. Au pairs, Tortolans and Finns, whispered to each other in the weak suburban light. The northern girls bore the cold with the stare of Samoyeds. The islanders blew clouds of breath on hands curled in ski gloves borrowed from busy mothers. Mothers who cleaned bathrooms, mothers who never had disturbing encounters with anyone, much less sharp, sad survivors of the Holocaust.

Elizabeth thought she would find comfort in the company of American grown-ups after her conversation with Mr. Krystowicki. Instead, she found herself wanting to tell the story to these young foreigners. They looked kind but tough. She wondered if this was why the children who ran to the au pairs seemed so relieved to see them. Did Kate want an au pair? Did she want someone more seasoned than her stay-at-home mother? Should she send Mr. Krystowicki next time? He even had Old World manners.

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Steam poured from Elizabeth's nose in plumes, like the smoke from the nostrils of dragons. It was almost time for Chinese New Year. What was itmonkeys, snakes, rats? Kate would know. Her school took almost every culture's history aggressively in stride.

The children burst from the school and the adults dispersed, each holding the hand of a child in a padded coat. Kate and Elizabeth walked in silence, as Kate did not like to be asked how school was. But today, Elizabeth wanted Kate to ramble, to beg her to race to the end of the block, even to insist on television. Instead, she eventually told Elizabeth about Martin Luther King. Their class was learning parts of his dream speech by heart; they were going to see a movie; but they had decided not to do a play about his life. No one felt that they could play Dr. King.

Elizabeth said she could understand: those were big shoes to fill.

"I think he's still here," Kate said.

"Who?"

"The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." Kate glared at her.

"It would be better if he were still here, but he was shot in 1968." What would have happened if King and Kennedy hadn't been shot? Elizabeth wondered how the list of presidents in her class would have changed. Among other things.

"That doesn't mean anything," said Kate. She tore down the street, knapsack bobbing. With Kate bounding into her own world, Elizabeth felt abandoned. She realized Mr. Krystowicki had said he would help with the chart and then had not. She remembered the afternoon she found out about Dr. King. She was slouched, twelve, ravenous. The refrigerator shelves were empty of almost everything except mustard and relish. No one had been to the store. That was when she heard the television and her mother crying.

The answering machine had taken a message from Andrew, who asked plaintively if she would mind making dinner tonight.

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Elizabeth's husband worked with an agency that built housing for the mentally ill. His battles for justice were beset, operatic. Sometimes, however, they ended in concrete results. Houses were put up. People got to live in freshly carpeted homes instead of hospitals. Andrew believed that new carpets were a kind of progress. Elizabeth admired his persistent belief in humans' ability to become better.

At dinner, Andrew was still fuming. A residence for schizophrenics was slated for a tony neighborhood of Brooklyn. Residents were getting edgy. Andrew attacked his spaghetti as if it were one of the nervous homeowners. "Will one of these people go after my children? Will it smell funny? One of them actually said that today."

"There's room in the attic," Kate said. She made herself a green mustache with two beans.

Elizabeth and Andrew looked at her. Andrew said, "Get those beans off your face, Kate. These people need more attention than we can give them. Medication, doctors. Elizabeth, what happened in the bathroom?"

Kate said, "Yeah, there was paper all over the place." She arranged beans on her plate in the shape of a trapezoid, the new shape in math this week.

Elizabeth realized she hadn't told them about Mr. Krystowicki. As she looked at them, Andrew's hand on his wine glass, Kate's fingers glossy with butter, she decided to keep the news to herself. A domestic secret. Like adding cumin to the potatoes although Andrew claimed he didn't like it when in fact he never noticed. "Sorry," Elizabeth said, "I got caught up in other things." It was even pleasant and a little shameful to lie like this and to wrap the day's oddness around herself.

Kate said, "Dr. Martin Luther King would have had sick people in his house." She pushed her chair back from the table.

"Katie, come on back," Andrew said. Kate had Elizabeth's eyes

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