Ashes of Fiery Weather (16 page)

Delia paused. If she'd brought something, she would put it in the revolving cabinet—the turn—and a nun would spin it from her side and retrieve the offering. But she was empty-handed, because she hadn't admitted to herself that she was coming here.

Indeed, she was just about to leave when she heard a scraping sound, and she turned toward a heavy mesh screen in the wall, the size of a window. Behind the screen, a panel opened.

“Good afternoon.”

The voice was young. Delia couldn't speak through her disappointment, and her anger at herself for being disappointed.

She finally said, “I didn't bring an offering.”

“It's not required.” The nun sounded like she might be smiling.

“What's your name?” Delia squinted, but she could see only a shadow behind the screen.

“Sister John,” the nun said after a slight hesitation.

Delia wanted the name her parents gave her, but she let it go. “I'm looking for my mother. She might be here.”

“There have been a few people here today. I can't say if your mother—”

“Not on my side. On yours.”

After a startled silence, Sister John said, “Ah, Miss, I don't think—”

“She entered the convent this summer. She's a widow.”

“Oh. Oh, yes.”

“You know her?”

“I know
of
her.” She stopped. “You can leave a letter. Mother will see that she gets it.”

“I need to tell her that the Japanese attacked a place called Pearl Harbor. It's a military base in Hawaii.”

“We know. We're praying for the country and the men who were killed.”

“How did you find out? Do you have a radio?” Delia pictured the nun looking over her shoulder.

“Father Halloran came by yesterday afternoon to tell us and to ask for our prayers. Monsignor came to say Mass at dawn today, but neither of them have been by since.”

Delia understood that they wouldn't, or couldn't, ask the monsignor for an update.

“The president declared war on Japan at twelve-thirty,” Delia said. “They think they might hit California next, or even New York.”

“We're at war?” Sister John said.

The gentility fell from her consonants. She was from New York.

“Yeah,” Delia said, allowing herself the lapse as well. She listened to the nun's quickened breathing.

“You see the pictures on the wall?” Sister John asked. “We're supposed to leave everything in the world behind when we enter, but we're allowed to bring one photograph. Mother doesn't approve, but it's the tradition. We're not allowed to keep them with us, so we hang them out there.”

“Do you get to see them when you go out to the garden?”

Again Delia had the sense that the nun was checking that she would not be overheard.

“Out there, where you are, is a public area. We don't go out that way. There's another door, through the kitchen.”

“When do you get to see them then?”

“After Mass on the Feast of the Epiphany,” Sister John said.

Delia thought of the picture of her brothers. She'd imagined it confiscated, like bootleg liquor, but the mother superior must have told Annie-Rose that she could bring it. One picture.

“Can you—starting from the left, go down five? He's standing by a Ford.”

Delia found it easily. The man's face was narrow and, though he was young, he had a receding hairline. Still, there was a certain confidence in the way he leaned against the car door, smiling as if he'd been told he was handsome, and so believed it to be true.

She did not see her brothers. Her mother must have kept it, against the rules.

When Sister John asked Delia if she might, please, put the picture in the turn, Delia had already plucked it from the wall. She placed it on the shelf, its edges curling as though trying to hide itself, and the nun whisked the cabinet around.

“He's my brother,” Sister John said. “I'll give it up. I'll confess, but for now . . .”

“Of course,” Delia said. January 6 was a month away. Sister John could slip the photo back in place before then.

“God be with you. I'll keep you in my prayers.” Sister John closed the screen.

Delia pictured her rushing through halls, climbing stairs, her robe swishing frantically. If the nun had stayed another minute, Delia might have asked her, “Did he leave you? Did it kill you when he did?”

Delia headed home by way of Cross Hill Avenue. She was about to pass the Irishman's monument with barely a glance, as she usually did, but then she stopped. Except for the time her father told her the story behind it when she was a kid, she hardly ever noticed the Celtic cross. Once there had been a garden, but now only some roses grew and a few other flowers left over from the days when it was tended. In December, of course, there was nothing but dead grass. It seemed fitting that the worst day in the history of their country should have come in the winter. It also seemed appropriate that Delia should pay her respects to a dead soldier on this day. The gate was ajar and she went in, wishing she'd brought a wreath.

She traced the intricate Celtic knotwork with her cold hand before sitting on the stone bench nearby. If she'd chosen nursing instead of teaching, she could work in an army hospital. She'd be able to do something to help. As it was, she was useless.

A man paused on the sidewalk, then entered in the same careful way she had herself, stepping past the gate without opening it further. He stood before the cross with his hands clasped behind his back. Delia noted the red yarmulke. She coughed a little, thinking he didn't realize she was there. When he began to speak, it was in a voice so low, she thought at first he was talking to himself.

“I was up the street working in my father's shop.”

Delia detected an accent. Russian? Polish?

“This woman brings her radio in all the time, says it's not working. But there's never a thing wrong with it. We can take her money and pretend to fix it, but my father is an honest man. Every time, he tries to show her that she's turned the volume down or she unplugged it by mistake. Maybe it's the cat playing tricks. Who knows? Today my father plugs it in and turns it on and that's how we heard.” The man turned around.

“I was with my friend at my house. She's been living with me.” Delia hesitated, but this man was obviously not part of the parish. Besides, what did one illegitimate child matter now?

“She and her son. He was outside playing. We were—we were talking. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I'm glad I didn't have to go to work today. I don't know how I would have stood it.”

“Did they give you the day off?”

Delia shook her head. “I teach at a Catholic school. Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. You're supposed to go to Mass.” She smiled wryly.  “I didn't.”

He smiled back. “I said to my father that I can't work today. I have to go for a walk is what I told him. He takes it as another sign of the weakness of young people. But me too, I can't sit still.”

Delia hugged her elbows. “The latest I heard was fifteen hundred dead. Civilians were killed too. Families lived there, on the base.”

“I heard that they think there are men alive, trapped inside the ships that were sunk.”

Delia shuddered. “And it was just a regular Sunday morning. That's what I keep thinking about.”

“A man who came into our shop this morning told us that Mayor La Guardia is moving an artillery gun into Prospect Park.”

“Oh my God,” Delia said. “Why would they drop a bomb on Prospect Park?”

He shook his head. “I guess it's to protect, you know, nearby. I don't think they'd drop a bomb on the park itself, no?”

“If there's an artillery gun in it they might.”

He laughed, and she did too. They sat in silence, their breath frosting the air. Delia glanced at him and then away.

“Will you enlist?” she asked.

“I'm going to try, but”—he tapped his chest—“I think probably they won't let me join up. My heart. There's something wrong with the way it beats, the doctor says. Not such a problem in everyday life, but the army, I don't know.”

“If I could go and fight, I think I would, I swear to God.”

“You know someone who will?” he asked.  “A husband, brothers?”

Delia hesitated. “I had two brothers who would be old enough,” she said, “but they died a long time ago.”

She imagined being able to say to people that she had two brothers off fighting, and she felt a surge of affection for them that she never had before. Certainly, they would have both joined the navy or the marines after high school and then gone on to the FDNY. If they were already firemen today, they'd be reenlisting, no matter what Mayor La Guardia got the government to agree to do. She felt their bravery as almost a palpable thing, as though it existed in place of their ghosts.

“It's the same with me and my brother. I think of him all the time, but it's worse today.”

“How did he die?” Delia asked.

He took a step toward her but then hesitated. She slid over to make room for him on the bench. He sat, folded his hands and fixed his eyes on the cross.

“My brother is the baby of the family and I am the oldest. There are three girls in between us. My mother said that of all her children, Mikolaj is the one who loves beauty. She says he liked to look at things, the world around him. The trees, the flowers, the stars. I don't know if he did. She was his mother.”

“The Nazis?” Delia didn't mean to interrupt, but she needed to get past the part of the story where the little boy was alive and stargazing and have him be bones in his grave.

The man shook his head. “I don't believe he's dead. I wish I could.”

In 1928, he himself was ten years old when the family decided to leave Poland and come to America. The day they were supposed to go, Miko was too sick to travel. Miko, who was five, was placed in the care of an aunt and uncle who were to follow with the boy when he was well. The two families had planned to leave together. But this way, only three fares had to be lost and repurchased, those of Aunt Ewa, Uncle Josef, and the boy, Mikolaj.

“Almost as soon as we got to America, my father wrote to his brother, ‘Tell me if my son is still alive. Tell me when you'll bring him . . .'”

There was one brief letter back. The child was still too weak. For months, letter after letter went to Poland, each one more frantic. After a year, his father wrote to the rabbi of their old synagogue, as his mother had been begging him to do. His father had not done so out of fear and maybe shame, since he was the one who had said they couldn't wait for Mikolaj to get well. By then he understood he was not going to hear that his son had died. Perhaps, in some way, he would have preferred it. And indeed the rabbi responded that one morning, the village found that the couple and the child had disappeared.

His parents were not so naïve as to think that the three were on their way to America and the letter with the details of their trip had gotten lost in the mail. Josef and Ewa had a daughter who died as an infant. By 1928, they were in their forties. The nephew put in their arms was young enough to believe any lie about what happened to his first mama and papa, his brother, his pretty sisters.

Had they gone somewhere else in Poland? Or had they decided to slip into America? His mother said that her sister-in-law was a coward and would be afraid of American authorities. For years, she said, Poland! They are still in Poland. Then, the war. She had said it too firmly and too often to take it back: They are in Poland! For three days after the Nazi invasion in '39, she stayed in bed, weeping. When she got up, she would not speak to her husband. She said not a single word to him for three months. Then she did. She told him it was not his fault, but hers. She was the mother. She never should have left her child. But she had, and if he was not dead yet, he would be soon.

His father, though, continued to believe that the boy was still alive.

“I'm with my father. If I can go and fight, I will, so I can look for Miko myself.”

Delia asked, “Would you even know him now?”

He smiled. “What would your brothers look like?”

“Tall, like my father, with his hair, the way it waved in the front. It would be very dark brown like his. They had blue eyes. Same as mine.”

The man laughed softly. “You see? I will know Mikolaj Kwiatkowski. If not during the war, then when it ends, I will find him. He's eighteen now, a man. He can fight. He can survive.”

Delia wanted to believe this. She did.

“What's your name?” she asked.

He put out his hand. “Nathaniel.”

Accepting his hand, she said, “Delia.”

March 1947

Delia knelt on the welcome mat, though she knew the weave would dig into her bare knees, leaving its pattern. In the winter, wool stockings offered some protection, but it was a bursting spring afternoon and her cotton dress was useless for this.

She spoke into the keyhole, then tried the knob, but Nathaniel never left his door unlocked. “Nathaniel? Please come out? Please come out?”

Behind her, at the bottom of the stairs, Tamar Leventhal hovered. Tamar, who'd called her, saying that Mr. Kwiatkowski had not come down to the shop that morning. And he'd disappeared about three o'clock the day before. Tamar dialed Delia's number, kept on a pad by the phone. Like last time, she heard him walking around but not often, and he wouldn't open the door for her. Tamar, only twenty, was in love with him, a fact Nathaniel politely ignored.

Marry her, Delia said, just as crisply as Nathaniel had told her
not
to marry Luke O'Reilly, two months after Pearl Harbor.

“Be engaged throughout the war, it's just as good,” he said. “Then, if he comes back, see if you still like him.”