Princess of Passyunk (16 page)

“Because you're not Catholic?”

Again, the shrug.

“I've sort of told a few people that you're real.”

“I know. I
am
real.”

“Father Z doesn't think so. He says I should be able to make you Catholic.”

“Really? Try it and see.”

“You'd let me do that? You wouldn't mind?”

She laughed. “Just try it.”

He closed his eyes—because it seemed the right thing to do under the circumstances—fisted his hands, and thought of Svetlana as Catholic. Moreover, he decided that when he opened his eyes again he and she would be in the sanctuary at Saint Stanislaus so he could test the fruits of his efforts.

He thought about it very hard, even resorting to a brief prayer (
Please God, make Svetlana Catholic!
) and capped it off with a quick ‘Hail Mary.'

He opened one eye, then the other.

He was still in Connie Mack Stadium. He looked at the girl who sat next to him, munching popcorn.

“Are you Catholic yet?”

She shook her head, smiling ruefully. “Sorry. Still Jewish.”

“But you don't go to Megidey Tihilim.”

“When I was a little girl we did. Then Papa got into a ‘thing' with the rabbi, so we moved to Mikveh Israel. I haven't been to synagogue for while,” she added, her voice wistful.

“Why not?” Ganady asked, forgetting all about making her Catholic.

“I had a ‘thing' with my Da. A
big
thing. The last time I went to synagogue, I got tossed out.” She gave him a sideways grin.

Ganady was shocked. What could she have done? “By the rabbi?”

“By the
rabbitsen
, actually. It's a long story. Maybe I'll tell it someday.”

“So, is your Da still mad at you?”

Her smile vanished. “Pretty much. I used to be his Lana, his golden girl. Now he says I'm a
shandeh un a charpeh
.”

A shame and a disgrace.

“What did you do?”

She shrugged, tearing little bits of red-and-white-striped paper from her popcorn bag. “I was disobedient. Now, I've got nobody to call me Lana.”

“
I'll
call you Lana...if you like,” Ganny said gallantly, willing to do anything if she would not look so sad.

She graced him with a smile that rivaled the brilliance of the nearly forgotten baseball diamond. “I'd like.”

“Lana,” he said, and meant
Will you marry me someday
?

Her smile deepened and grew even more radiant, until in all the vastness of Connie Mack Stadium and the vault of the night sky, it was all he could see. It was as bright as the moon.

Then it
was
the moon, beaming at him through his bedroom window.

He blinked. A dream. Again.

But so real.

Oh well, of course translucent baseball teams of long-retired heroes did not play in empty, twilight parks. And improbable old men did not metamorphose into impossible young women. But it had
felt
real.

And
he had not been able to make her Catholic—even having enlisted the aid of Saint Mary. What did that mean? That somewhere she
was
real? Somewhere in Philly? She'd gone to Mikveh Israel. Perhaps her family still did. If only he'd thought to ask her family name.

Next time, he promised himself. If there was a next time.

Movement on the moon-washed windowsill drew his eyes. There, in the pale light, sat a cockroach—perhaps
The
Cockroach—its carapace gleaming silver, its antennae sampling the darkness of the boys' room.

Ganady sat up. The antennae seemed to track his movement. He rolled out of bed and crossed to the window; the insect did not move except to track him with its antennae.

He knelt to look at it.
What does it mean?
He mouthed the words silently.

It was not lost on him that he had dreamed of Svetlana only to wake to
this
. There was no question that this was The Cockroach, the very same Cockroach he'd carried home from the alley behind the butcher shop.

“What
are
you?” he asked aloud.

The antennae waved at him, strangely graceful. Odd, that he should find grace in something so universally despised as a cockroach.

As Ganny considered the irony of this, the creature fluttered its wings. They trapped the moonlight in a webwork of tiny, transparent windowpanes traced by silver veins. They were beautiful.

He thought dreamily of his Baba's fairytales—of frog princesses bedecked in verdant lake weed, sparkling with water jewels.

Princess Cockroach, he decided, was even more resplendent in her fairy wings.

“Are you enchanted?” he asked her. “Are you—”

“Ganny? What're you doing? Who're you talking to?” Nikolai's voice, thick with sleep, jolted Ganady from his one-sided conversation.

“I was—I was talking...to God,” he said, and felt an immediate stab of guilt. To lie was bad enough, but to make God party to the lie was worse.

Ganady crawled back into bed on a sigh, leaving Princess Cockroach on her moon-bathed perch, knowing that his immediate future held another trip to the confessional.

oOo

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

There was a momentary silence, then Father Zembruski said,”Are you sure?”

“Yes, Father. Pretty sure.”

“And what sins have you committed this week, my son?”

He'd had it all organized in his head. He'd even written it down on a scrap of notebook paper, which he'd folded and folded and folded yet again, until it was no bigger than a penny. But now, faced with the whisper quiet of the confessional, his hands shook as he unfolded his notes.

“Well,” he said, “I dreamed of that girl again. The—the not Catholic girl, I mean. She's Jewish, actually. And her family goes to Mikveh Israel because her Da had a
thing
with the rabbi at Megidey Tihilim. And I tried to make her Catholic like you said, but I couldn't. I even prayed to the Holy Mother, but she stayed Jewish.”

Father Z made a little
hmphing
sound, then said,”And the sin?”

“Well...dreaming of her again, first of all. And not having enough faith to make her Catholic. She says it's because she's real that I can't do it. But if she's real, then I'm not making up a Jewish girl to dream about. I'm dreaming about a
real
Jewish girl, which I figured was probably a sin, anyway. I mean, I should probably try not to do that...right?”

More silence met this bit of logic. Then Father Z said,”Is that all?”

Wasn't it enough?

“Not quite,” Ganady admitted. “You see, Lana... Well, she's being shunned by her family for disobedience. I don't know what she did—only that her Da won't speak to her and the last time she went to shul the rabbi's wife threw her out. So, I'm dreaming about a disobedient Jewish girl, and I can't make her Catholic, and I can't stop dreaming of her.” He hesitated, reluctant to make a final admission. “I...I
like
dreaming of her, Father.”

“Ah. And is
that
all?”

“Well...no. The worst thing...the
worst
thing is that when I woke up from the last dream...” He hesitated again, staring at the inadequate words he had written on his much-folded paper. “I lied to my brother about who I was talking to.”

This time the silence was longer. “You were talking to this girl, yes?”

“Not exactly.” Did he tell his Father Confessor he had been talking to a giant cockroach on his windowsill? “I was sort of talking to myself, really, but I told Nikki I was talking to God.”

Father Zembruski cleared his throat. “Your sins are forgiven you already, Gan— my son. But it might not hurt if you were to ask the intercession of the Blessed Virgin.”

“Should I say the Rosary, Father?”

“Oh, I should think a couple of
Hail Marys
should suffice. Perhaps one for each dream.”

“Father, why am I dreaming about a disobedient Jewish girl who refuses to be Catholic?”

“Far be it from me to say,” said his Father Confessor, “but have you considered that there is, in fact, a member of your family who lives in disobedience to the Lord?”

Ganady was thunderstruck. “Who?”

“Why, your Baba Irina, of course. She's Jewish, after all. In fact,” the priest went on, warming to his subject, “her being Jewish is the very substance of her disobedience. It is the duty of all men—and women, too, of course—to espouse the true Church. You know this, Ganady. And I'm sure your grandmother knows it. Yet, she chooses to continue in her stubbornness and her disobedience and remain Jewish. You see?”

Ganady firmly quashed any anger at the idea that his Baba was disobedient. He had to allow that there was a parallel; Baba Irina and Svetlana were both Jews who had no intention of becoming anything else, and yet...

“But Baba is...well, she's
old,
and Svetlana is my age.”

“Irina Kutshinska was once young, yes?”

“Sure, but her name's not Svetlana, it's Irina. Why would I dream about someone named Svetlana? I don't even know anyone named Svetlana.”

“Dreams,” said Father Zembruski, “are highly symbolic, my son. They're God's way of sending us messages. Like in these comics you boys read: you see, the dream is like a secret message from God. You need to decode it.”

Ganady was completely taken aback by the almost childlike glee in his Father Confessor's voice.

“Decode it?” he repeated,

“Certainly. Isaiah dreamed, Daniel dreamed, Joseph dreamed, Jeremiah and Ezekiel dreamed. And they had to decode those dreams to know what they were meant to do. You remember the story of Joseph, yes?”

“Sure, Father. He interpreted the dreams of the Pharaoh of Egypt.”

“Ah! You remember the first dream he interpreted?”

“Um...it was about corn, right?”

“Seven fat ears of corn were eaten by seven little, skinny ears of corn. That seems very strange, no? But when Joseph deciphered it, the meaning of the dream became clear. There would be seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. Just like Captain Midnight,” he finished.

“Captain Midnight, Father?” Ganady was fairly familiar with Captain Midnight. He listened to the radio show if not religiously, at least with some regularity, and he had almost all of the comics, but it had never occurred to him that Captain Midnight was the least bit Biblical.

“Well, I'm not saying Joseph was like Captain Midnight, although it could be argued both men are great heroes, I suppose. I am saying simply that both were called upon to decipher God's secret messages.”

“But how do you do that?”

“Prayer, Ganady. Prayer is...is God's Code-O-Graph.”

It seemed odd to think of oneself as receiving coded messages from the Almighty, but perhaps that was now the way of things. God no longer spoke in relatively plain language through burning bushes, or pillars of fire, or doves, or even prophets. He spoke in code. And, if what Father Z implied was true, then it seemed He also spoke in baseball diamonds and beautiful girls.

The question was: How did one decode such a message? It was all very well and good to think of prayer as if it were a Captain Midnight Key-O-Matic Code-O-Graph (of which Ganady had two now that Nikolai no longer wanted his). But it wasn't that simple, as Father Zembruski must surely have known, because prayer had no dials or charts that he could spin or read to gain understanding of how Svetlana—beautiful, vivid Svetlana—could be not a girl at all, real or otherwise, but a secret message.

When Ganady had asked Father Z for some assistance, the priest—who after all had only
heard
of Captain Midnight second-hand, but never actually heard an episode or read an issue—had no idea what possible meaning might lie in an old man turning into a beautiful young Jewish girl in an empty ballpark during a ghost baseball game.

He had read much about the dreams of the saints, but the saints, he informed Ganny, dreamed of angelic hosts, appearances of the Blessed Virgin, and such like. There was never, in Father Z's memory, a saint who dreamed of baseball.

“Do you think maybe the ghost baseball players were angelic hosts?” Ganady had asked.

Father Z was doubtful of this. Just as he was doubtful that God spoke through the mysterious Svetlana, who was not even Catholic. He took her, rather, for a symbol of the lure of disobedience.

Then it occurred to Ganady that since both of the speakers in his dream were Jewish, perhaps a Jewish interpreter would be of more help.

He tried his grandmother first.

“I dreamed about Mr. Ouspensky the other night,” he said, fingers aimlessly pattering at the keys of his clarinet.

Next to him on the stoop, Baba Irina hummed the tune he had lately been playing. “Oh?” she said.

“He was trying to tell me about how life changes, I wasn't listening very well, so he...he turned into Svetlana.”

“Ah. And
then
did you listen?”

He grinned at her arch look. “Yeah.”

“Well then, I suppose the dream must have met its purpose.”

“Do all dreams have a purpose?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But I think that one must.”

“Father Zembruski says God speaks through dreams in a secret code, and that we have to decipher the code to understand the dream. Like Captain Midnight.”

“Ah. A secret code. And?”

“And he said I should pray to God to be able to break the code.”

“So, you didn't understand your dream? I thought you said Stanislaus spoke to you about change.”

“He did.
They
did. Him and Lana.”

“Lana?”

“She asked me to call her ‘Lana' because her father called her that, and he's mad at her, so no one calls her that now.”

Baba Irina's eyebrows soared. “So you
did
understand the dream then?”