Baker Towers (2 page)

“He wore it when we got married,” she said. “I hope it still fits.”

Bernardi took the suit. “We’ll bring him back tonight. How about you get a couple neighbors to help us? He’ll be heavier with the casket.”

The widow nodded. In her arms the baby stirred. Bernardi smiled stiffly. He found infants tedious; he preferred them silent and unconscious, like this one. “A little angel,” he said. “What’s her name?”

“Lucy.” The widow stared over his shoulder at the car. “
Dio mio.
I can’t believe it.”

“Iddio la benedica.”

They stood there a moment, their heads bowed. Gently Bernardi patted her shoulder. He was an old man; by his own count he’d buried more than a thousand bodies; he had glimpsed the darkest truths, the final secrets. Still, life held surprises. Here was a thing he had never witnessed, an Italian wife on Polish Hill.

T
HAT MORNING
, the feast of Saint Anthony, Rose Novak had gone to church. For years the daily mass had been poorly attended, but now the churches were crowded with women. The choir, heavy on sopranos, had doubled in size. Wives stood in line to light a candle; mothers knelt at the communion rail in silent prayer. Since her son Georgie was drafted Rose had scarcely missed a mass. Each morning her eldest daughter, Dorothy, cooked the family breakfast, minded the baby, and woke Sandy and Joyce for school.

Rose glanced at her watch; again the old priest had overslept. She reached into her pocket for her rosary.
Good morning, Georgie,
she thought, crossing herself.
Buongiorno, bello.
In the past year, the form of her prayers had changed: instead of asking God for His protection, she now prayed directly to her son. This did not strike her as blasphemous. If God could hear her prayers, it was just as easy to imagine that Georgie heard them, too. He seemed as far away as God; her husband had shown her the islands on the globe. She imagined Georgie’s submarine smaller than a pinprick, an aquatic worm in the fathomless blue.

Stanley had wanted him to enlist. “We owe it to America,” he said, as
if throwing Georgie’s life away would make them all more American. Stanley had fought in the last war and returned with all his limbs. He’d forgotten the others—his cousins, Rose’s older brother—who hadn’t been so lucky.

Rose had resisted—quietly at first, then loudly, without restraint. Georgie was a serious young man, a musician. He’d taught himself the clarinet and saxophone; since the age of five he’d played the violin. Besides that, he was delicate: as a child he’d had pneumonia, and later diphtheria. Both times he had nearly died. If America wanted his precious life, then America would have to call him. Rose would not let Stanley hand him over on a plate.

For a time she had her way. Georgie graduated high school and went to work at Baker One. He blew his saxophone in a dance band that played the VFW dances Friday nights. When the draft notice came, Stanley had seemed almost glad. Rose called him a brute, a braggart—willing to risk Georgie’s life so he’d have something to boast about in the beer gardens. At the time she believed it. The next morning she found him gathering eggs in the henhouse, weeping like a baby.

He was strict with the children, with Georgie especially. Only English was to be spoken at home; when Rose lapsed into Italian with her mother or sisters, Stanley glared at her with silent scorn. Yet late at night, once the children were in bed, he tuned the radio to a Polish station from Pittsburgh and listened until it was time for work.

She left the warmth of the church and walked home through a stiff wind, wisps of snow swirling around her ankles, hovering above the sidewalk like steam or spirits. The sky had begun to lighten; the frozen ground was still bare. Good for the miners, loading the night’s coal onto railroad cars; good for the children, who walked two miles each way to school.

At Polish Hill the sidewalk ended. She continued along the rocky path, hugging her coat around her, a fierce wind at her back. Ahead, a group of miners trudged up the hill with their empty dinner buckets, cupping cigarettes in their grimy hands. They joked loudly in Polish and English: deep voices, phlegmy laughter. Like Stanley they’d worked Hoot Owl, midnight to eight; since the war had started the mines never stopped. Rose picked out her neighbor Andy Yurkovich, the bad-tempered father of two-year-old twins. He had a young Hungarian wife; by noon her nerves would be shattered, trying to keep the babies quiet so Andy could sleep.

Rose climbed the stairs to the porch. The house was warm inside; someone had stoked the furnace. She left her shoes at the door. Dorothy sat at the kitchen table chewing her fingernails. The baby sat calmly in her lap, mouthing a saltine cracker.

“Sorry I’m late. That Polish priest, he need an alarm clock.” Rose reached for the baby. “Did she behave herself?” she asked in Italian.

“She was an angel,” Dorothy answered in English. “Daddy’s home,” she added in a whisper. She reached for her boots and glanced at the mirror that hung beside the door. Her hair looked flattened on one side. An odd rash had appeared on her cheek. She would be nineteen that spring.

“Put on some lipstick,” Rose suggested.

“No time,” Dorothy called over her shoulder.

In the distance the factory whistle blew. Through the kitchen window Rose watched Dorothy hurry down the hill, the hem of her dress peeking beneath her coat. People said they looked alike, and their features—the dark eyes, the full mouth—were indeed similar. In her high school graduation photo, taken the previous spring, Dorothy was as stunning as any movie actress. In actual life she was less attractive. Tall and round-shouldered, with no bosom to speak of; no matter how Rose hemmed
them, Dorothy’s skirts dipped an inch lower on the left side. Help existed: corsets, cosmetics, the innocent adornments most girls discovered at puberty and used faithfully until death. Dorothy either didn’t know about them or didn’t care. She still hadn’t mastered the art of setting her hair, a skill other girls seemed to possess intuitively.

She sewed sleeves at the Bakerton Dress Company, a low brick building at the other end of town. Each morning Rose watched the neighborhood women tramp there like a civilian army. A few even wore trousers, their hair tied back with kerchiefs. What precisely they did inside the factory, Rose understood only vaguely. The noise was deafening, Dorothy said; the floor manager made her nervous, watching her every minute. After seven months she still hadn’t made production. Rose worried, said nothing. For an unmarried woman, the factory was the only employer in town. If Dorothy were fired she’d be forced to leave, take the train to New York City and find work as a housemaid or cook. Several girls from the neighborhood had done this—quit school at fourteen to become live-in maids for wealthy Jews. The Jews owned stores and drove cars; they needed Polish-speaking maids to wash their many sets of dishes. A few Bakerton girls had even settled there, found city husbands; but for Dorothy this seemed unlikely. Her Polish was sketchy, thanks to Stanley’s rules. And she was terrified of men. At church, in the street, she would not meet their eyes.

Rose laid the baby down. Every morning she carried the heavy cradle downstairs to the kitchen, the warmest room in the house. From upstairs came the sounds of an argument, the younger children getting ready for school.

She went into the parlor and stood at the foot of the stairs. “Joyce!” she called. “Sandy!”

Her younger daughter appeared on the stairs, dressed in a skirt and blouse.

“Where’s your brother?”

“He isn’t ready.” Joyce ran a hand through her fine hair, blond like her father’s; she’d inherited the color but not the abundance. “I woke him once but he went back to sleep.”

“Sandy!” Rose called.

He came rumbling down the stairs: shirt unbuttoned, socks in hand, hair sticking in all directions.

“See?” Joyce demanded. She was six years older, a sophomore in high school. “I have a test first period. I can’t wait around all day.”

Sandy sat heavily on the steps and turned his attention to his socks. “I’m not a baby,” he grumbled. “I can walk to school by myself.” He was a good-humored child, not prone to sulking, but he would not take criticism from Joyce. His whole life she had mothered him, praised him, flirted with him. Her scorn was intolerable.

Joyce swiped at his hair, a stubborn cowlick that refused to lie flat. “Well, you’re not going anywhere looking like that.”

He shrugged her hand away.

“Suit yourself,” she said, reddening. “Go to school looking like a bum. Makes no difference to me.”

“You go ahead,” Rose told Joyce. “I take him.” He couldn’t be trusted to walk alone. The last time she’d let him he’d arrived an hour late, having stopped to play with a stray dog.

He followed her into the kitchen. Of all her children he was the most beautiful, with the same pale blue eyes as his father. He had come into the world with a full head of hair, a silvery halo of blond. They’d named him Alexander, for his grandfather; it was Joyce who shortened the name to
Sandy. As a toddler, she’d been desperately attached to a doll she’d named after herself; after her brother was born she transferred her affections to Sandy. “My baby!” she’d cry, outraged, when Rose bathed or nursed him. In her mind, Sandy was hers entirely.

Rose scooped the last of the oatmeal into a bowl and poured the boy a cup of coffee. Each morning she made a huge potful, mixed in sugar and cream so that the whole family drank it the same way. In the distance the fire whistle blew, a low whine that rose in pitch, then welled up out of the valley like a mechanical scream.

“What is it?” Sandy asked. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Rose stared out the window at the number three tipple rising in the distance. She scanned the horizon for smoke. The whistle could mean any number of disasters: a cave-in, an underground fire. At least once a year a miner was killed in an explosion or injured in a rockfall. Just that summer, a neighbor had lost a leg when an underground roof collapsed. She crossed herself, grateful for the noise in the basement, her husband safe at home. This time at least, he had escaped.

She filled a heavy iron pot with water and placed it on the stove. A basket of laundry sat in the corner, but the dirty linens would have to wait; she always washed Stanley’s miners first. Over the years she’d developed a system. First she took the coveralls outdoors and shook out the loose dirt; then she rinsed them in cold water in the basement sink. When the water ran clean, she scrubbed the coveralls on a washboard with Octagon soap, working in the lather with a stiff brush. Then she carried the clothes upstairs and boiled them on the stove. The process took half an hour, including soak time, and she hadn’t yet started. She was keeping the stove free for Stanley’s breakfast.

“Finish your cereal,” she told Sandy. “I go see about your father.”

She found him lying on the floor, his face half shaven. The cuffs of his
trousers were wet. This confused her a moment; then she saw that the sink had overflowed. He had dropped the soap and razor. The drain was blocked with a sliver of soap.

S
HE WATCHED THE HEARSE
disappear down the hill. A neighbor’s beagle barked. For three days each November it was taken buck hunting. The rest of the year it spent chained in the backyard, waiting.

She had prepared for the wrong death. A month ago, before Christmas, a car had parked in front of the Poblockis’ house to deliver a telegram. Their oldest son was missing, his body—tall, gangly, an overgrown boy’s—lost forever in the waters of the Pacific. Since then Rose had waited, listened for the dreadful sound of a car climbing Polish Hill. Now, finally, the car had come.

In her arms the baby shifted. From the kitchen came a shattering noise.

“Sandy?” she called.

He appeared in the doorway, hands in his pockets.

“What happened?”

He seemed to reflect a moment. “I dropped a glass.”

The baby squirmed. Rose shifted her to the other shoulder.

“Where are they taking Daddy?”

“Uptown. They going to get him ready.” She hesitated, unsure how to explain what she didn’t understand herself and could hardly bear to think of: Stanley’s body stripped and scrubbed, injected with alcohol—with God only knew what—to keep him intact another day or two.

“They clean him up,” she said. “Change his clothes. Mr. Bernardi bring him back tonight.”

The boy stared. “Why?” he asked softly.

“People, they want to see him.” She’d been to other wakes on Polish Hill, miserable affairs where the men drank for hours alongside the body, telling stories, keeping the widow awake all night. In the morning the house reeked of tobacco smoke. The men looked unshaven and unsteady, still half drunk as they carried the casket into church.

Sandy frowned. “What people?”

“The neighbors. People from the church.”

The baby hiccuped. A moment later she let out a scream.

“I go change your sister,” said Rose. “Don’t touch that glass. I be back in a minute.”

Sandy went into the kitchen and stood looking at the jagged glass on the floor. He’d been filling it at the sink when it nearly slipped from his wet hand. A thought had occurred to him.
If I broke it, it wouldn’t matter.
He turned and threw the glass at the table leg. It smashed loudly on the floor. He had knelt to examine it. It was dull green, one he’d drunk from his whole life. Now, laying in pieces, it had become beautiful, the color deeper along the jagged edges, brilliant and jewel-like. When he reached to touch it, blood had appeared along his finger. Then his mother had called, and he’d jammed his hands in his pockets.

Now he looked down at his trousers. A dark spot in his lap, blood from his finger. He looked at the clock. School had already started; he’d heard the bell ringing as he ran across town for the priest.
Tell him to come right away,
his mother had said, tears streaming down her face. He’d seen her cry just once before, when Georgie left for the war.
Tell him your father is dead.