Empty Ever After (2 page)

“No. I know stein means stone.”

“Amber.”

“Amber, like the resin with the insects in it?”

“Amber, yes. Bernstein, like burned stone. German, such an ugly language,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “But at least the words sound like what they mean.”

We walked on.

“A lotta dead Jews in this place, Mr. Moe.”

“I think that’s the point.”

“When I die, I don’t want this … this nonsense.”

“Why tell me, Mr. Roth?”

“And who else should I tell, my dead wife? Wait, we’re almost at Hannah’s grave. I’ll say Kaddish for her and then I’ll tell her, but I don’t think she’ll listen. I wasn’t a very good husband, so it’s only right she shouldn’t pay attention.”

“What about your son?”

He stopped in his tracks, turning to face me, taking a firm hold on my arm. There were very few moments like this between Israel Roth and me. He’d suffered through the unimaginable, but he very rarely let the pain show through.

“I’m serious here, Moses.” He almost never called me that. “This is not for me, to be cold in the ground. Kaddish and ashes, that’s for me.”

“Okay, Izzy, Kaddish and ashes.”

“Good, good,” he said. “Come already, we’re almost there.”

I stood away from the grave as Mr. Roth mumbled the prayer. “
Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may ra-bo, B’ol-mo dee-v’ro
…”

“Amen,” I said when he finished.

As was tradition, we both placed little stones atop Hannah Roth’s tombstone.

I never said Kaddish for my parents. Israel Roth had tried to rekindle whatever small embers of my Jewish soul still burned. Even so, they didn’t burn brightly. I wondered if they’d burn at all when he was no longer there to stoke them.

“Would she forgive me, do you think?” he asked, again twining his arm back through mine.

“Would you forgive her?”

His face brightened. “See, there’s the Jew in you, Mr. Moe. You answer my question with a question.”

“
I
would forgive you, Izzy.”

The brightness vanished as suddenly as it appeared. “You do not know my sins.”

That wasn’t quite true, but I didn’t press.

As we got close to my car, I slipped on the ice and landed square on my ass. Mr. Roth took great joy in my fall. His joy seemed to dissipate as we rode out of the cemetery and back to Brooklyn.

“Poland had miserable winters,” he said, staring out at the filthy slush and snow-covered reeds along the Belt Parkway. “The camps were muddy always, then frozen. Rain and snow all the time. The ground was very slippery.”

“I’d think that would be the last thing people in Auschwitz would worry about. Slippery ground, I mean.”

“Really? Part of self-preservation was to busy myself with the little things. Did you ever wonder what became of the ashes?”

“What ashes?”

“The ashes of the dead, of the ones the Nazis gassed, then burned. They didn’t all turn to smoke.”

“I never thought about it.”

He cupped his hands and spread them a few inches apart. “One body is only a little pile of ashes, but burn a few hundred thousand, a million, and you got piles and piles. Mountains. In the winter, the Germans made some of us spread the ashes on the paths so they shouldn’t slip. Everyday I spread the ashes. At first, I thought, ‘Whose ashes are these I am throwing like sawdust on the butcher shop floor? Is this a handful of my mother, of the pale boy who stood beside me in the cattle car?’ Then I stopped thinking about it. Thinking about the big things was a dangerous activity in such a place. Guilt too.”

“But you survived.”

“I survived, yes, by not thinking, by not feeling. But I’ve never stopped spreading the ashes.”

We fell silent. Then, as I pulled off the exit for my house, Mr. Roth turned to me.

“Remember what I said in the cemetery, no burial for me.”

“I know, Izzy, Kaddish and ashes. But where should they be spread?”

“You already know the answer to that,” he said. “And we will never speak of these things again, Mr. Moe.”

We never did, but never is a funny word. Time makes everyone’s never a little different.

SOME THOUGHTS ARE
traceable, but I don’t know why I was thinking of Israel Roth and that winter’s day in the cemetery. He was long dead now and I was all cried out. I was all cried out for the both of us. In death he was beyond the reach of my love and scorn. Even now, I am amazed at how he feared losing my affection. “You don’t know my sins,” he’d said. Hell, he didn’t know mine. It’s funny how that works. We were men of sins and secrets, Israel Roth and me. We could share love, but not sins. Too bad he died before mine were out in the open, before he could witness the bill come due.

You would think I’d be good at grief by now, having mourned a mother, a father, a marriage, and a miscarriage before him. Miscarriage, what an asinine term.
Oh, dear, I seem to have miscarried that baby. How clumsy of me!
That child had been a part of Katy and me, not a tray of dirty dishes. As I recall, no one shouted, “Oops!” But experience had taught me that God doesn’t say oops. You have to have faith in God’s big plan, so I’m told, and that misery is all just part of it. For Mr. Roth, misery had been a big part of the big plan. No more misery for him. He had gotten his wish. Kaddish and ashes, ashes and Kaddish.
Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may ra-bo, B’ol-mo dee-v’ro
… I hadn’t been quite so lucky.

Sure, there was some sense of relief in the secret being out, with Patrick dead and buried and buried again. Just lately, I find relief is overrated and secrets, no matter how potentially corrosive, can often sustain a man much the better than truth. I would know. Patrick’s vanishing act had changed the course of my life. Without his dis-appearance in December ’77, I would never have met his sister, Katy Maloney, my future and now ex-wife. With Katy and me, as with all things, the seeds of destruction
were sown at birth. Even if we hadn’t made Sarah, the most glorious child ever, I would not regret my time with Katy. She had taught me love and comfort and how not to be only an observer to my own life. So no matter what Patrick had or had not done, I could never hate him.

The same could not be said of my late father-in-law, Francis Maloney. I knew exactly how I felt about that cruel and callous fuck. My father-in-law chilled the earth when they laid him in it, not the other way around. He too had known the secret of his son’s disappearance, that I had found Patrick all those years ago and let him slip away. For twenty years, neither of us had managed the courage to confess our sin to Katy. We held the secret between us like a jug of acid, both of us scared to let it drop for fear of being maimed by the backsplash. We were right to fear it. For when, in death, Francis let go of the jug, the splash scarred us all.

Foolishly, he had assumed it would burn me worst. But the anticipation of the burn, the years of his taunting about ghosts and payback had hardened me. Secrets do that. If the secret’s big enough, you build a wall around it until there’s only wall and very little left of yourself. And Patrick’s secret was only one of many. As a PI, I had become a collector of secrets, a gatekeeper of orphaned truths. I kept the secrets of the murdered and murderers alike.

Since the divorce, secrets and loss were my only companions. I suppose, then, that it wasn’t such a mystery, my thinking about Israel Roth on a rainy Sunday in July. Katy and I had tried briefly to reconcile, but there are some wounds from which recovery is neither possible nor truly desirable. We had sold the house even before the divorce was finalized. Katy moved back upstate to Janus and I bought a condo in one of the new buildings across from the water in Sheepshead Bay. Sarah stayed in Ann Arbor over the summer instead of coming home to work at one of the stores. The wine business wasn’t for her. Like father like daughter.
Christ, I hoped not.

The phone rang and there was someone at the door. Amazing! I had sat alone for hours staring out at the rain making shiny little ripples out of the petroleum film floating atop the bay. Now I was pulled in two directions at once.

“One second!” I shouted at the door.

I picked up the phone, “Hello.”

“Dad!”

“Sarah! What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“At school still. It’s Mom.”

“What’s Mom?”

“Call her.”

“Sarah, what’s going on?”

“Somebody disturbed Uncle Patrick’s grave.”

I would never get used to her calling him Uncle Patrick. It was weird, like me thinking of him as my brother-in-law. As it happened, Patrick had been murdered before Sarah was born. She was now older than he ever was.

“What do you mean, someone disturbed his grave?”

“I don’t know, Dad. Mommy was hysterical crying when she called me. You better call her.”

“Okay, I’ll take care of it.” There was that banging again. “One second!”

“Dad, did you say something?”

“No, kiddo, there’s somebody at the door.”

“So you’ll call Mom?”

“As soon as I get the door, yeah. I promise.”

“Call me later and let me know what’s going on.”

“I will. Thanks for calling me about this.”

“I love you, Dad.”

“You too, kiddo.”

The banging at the door was more insistent, but I wasn’t in the mood for anyone else’s crap. Divorce, no matter how amicable, isn’t easy, and Katy, Sarah, and I were still in the midst of realigning our hearts to deal with the new tilt of our worlds. That’s why Katy had moved back upstate, why Sarah had made work for herself in Michigan, and why I was watching raindrops in Sheepshead Bay. The last thing I wanted was to be dragged back into the thing that had blown us all apart. I must’ve looked pretty fucking fierce to Mrs. Dejesus, the maintenance man’s wife.

“For chrissakes!” She didn’t quite jump back at the sight of me. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Dejesus. I was on the phone with my daughter and …”

“Look!” she said, pointing down at my threshold and along the blue flecked terrazzo floor of the hallway. “Mud everywhere, Mr. Prager, to your door. And this!”

I knelt down to try and compose myself. There, on my welcome mat, was a withered red rose and, beneath it, drawn in the mud, was the Chinese character for eternity.

BONEYARDS WERE ABOUT
the only places yellow crime scene tape seemed not to attract a crowd. The bold black
CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS
was rather beside the point. There wasn’t much of a crowd inside the tape either. Even that number was shrinking. With the one deputy sheriff gone to pick up his boss and Katy headed back to her car to dry off, only the younger deputy and myself remained inside the perimeter. The longer I stood out there, the easier it was to see why Katy was distraught. Her father’s headstone was toppled and smashed to bits, while eleven rain-soaked red roses had been neatly arranged in a circle on her mother’s grave.

Then there was Patrick’s resting place. Although Patrick Michael Maloney’s grave wasn’t quite empty,
he
, or what was left of him, was gone. The lidless coffin box was still at the bottom of the hole, buried now not by dirt but under several feet of rainwater and murky runoff. Splinters, jagged shards, and larger chunks of the muddy coffin lid were strewn about the family plot. Even in death, the most damage was done to Patrick.

“Fooking kids, vandalous little gobshites,” the caretaker said.

“Watch your mouth, Mr. Fallon,” said Father Blaney.

“Sorry, father, but it had to be them kids.”

I didn’t agree. “Kids? I wouldn’t bet on it. This was a lot of work, not just random vandalism.”

“And kids don’t leave roses,” added the priest.

“A sin writ large, no matter,” said Fallon. “In Ireland tis not how you treat the living by which yer judged, but by yer care for the dead.”

“Amen to that, Mr. Fallon.” The priest crossed himself.

Both men stood under the priest’s umbrella just beyond the yellow tape, neither seeming much bothered by the rain. The same could not be said for either the young deputy sheriff or myself. Father Blaney took notice.

“Come lads, get out of the wet.”

The deputy, feeling he had to prove himself, politely refused. I was too old to worry about proving anything to anyone, even if it meant sharing an umbrella with Father Blaney.

I’d known the man for more than two decades. He was an old world priest, as avuncular as a meat hook and as politically correct as a minstrel show. He didn’t exactly get touchy-feely with his parishioners. So it was no wonder that he and Francis Maloney had been thick as thieves and equally disdainful of me.

“How have you been getting on, Moses? I mean, since Katy’s seen the light and ridded herself of you.”

“I’m good,” I lied.

“A pity.” He showed me a crooked grin of gray teeth and chapped lips.

I almost laughed. One thing about Blaney, you always knew where you stood with the man.

“Do you suppose Katy will return to the church now that she’s returned to her senses?”

“I was born a Jew, Father. Katy chose to be one. What do you think the implications of that are for you?”

Fallon smiled. I’d never met the caretaker before that day, but I liked him for his smile. Blaney saw it too and scowled. When Blaney scowled, clouds darkened.

“Such a lovely place, even in the rain,” said the priest, changing subjects.

“Tis that,” Fallon agreed.

The Maloney family plot was in a secluded corner of an old Catholic cemetery up in Dutchess County. This section of the graveyard, a grouping of low hills overlooking a stream and woods beyond, was reserved for the families of the local movers and shakers. My late father-in-law had certainly been one of those. Back when our paths first crossed in the winter of’78, Francis Maloney Sr. was a big time politico, a major fundraiser for the state Democratic party. Francis was an old school power broker in that he kept a low profile but wielded influence from the Bronx to Buffalo. A valedictorian at the Jimmy Hoffa Charm School, Francis Maloney Sr. traded in nepotism, patronage, kickbacks, and threats as easily as most men breathed. He’d have rather paid for your vote than make his candidate earn it. “Cleaner that way, less risk involved,” he would have said.