Princess of Passyunk (17 page)

“Sort of.” Ganny tongued his clarinet reed contemplatively. “Like I said, Mr. O was talking to me about how life changes. Well, I thought he was talking about baseball, but Lana said he meant life—he was talking about Nikki and Yevgeny. He meant that things change—all the time—but no matter how much they change, it's still the same life. So things with Nikki and Yevgeny might change, but they're still there...and I'm still here. We're still in the same game, I guess.”

“Well!” said Baba Irina. “And for this you needed a decoder? This is not clear enough?”

“But there's more to it than that, Baba. Why am I dreaming about Svetlana at all? She's Jewish—she says. And Father Z said I should be able to make her Catholic. But I couldn't. Why couldn't I make her Catholic? That's the part I don't understand. Is it maybe because she's one of those things that doesn't change—like baseball?”

“Why do you think she will not be Catholic?”

“She says it's because she's real.”

Baba Irina shrugged. “So? If she's real, you can find her.”

Find her
. It seemed so simple. Only where did he begin to look?

oOo

He excused himself to go to bed early, which prompted his mother to lay her wrist against his forehead.

“I'm
fine
, Mama,” he told her. “I just have a new comic book I want to read.”

“A new comic book? Oh, well, in that case, there is nothing at all wrong with you.” She shooed him on up the staircase with a waving of hands. “Don't let me keep you.”

He wasn't sleepy. He was wide awake, and after lying in the dark for some time, waiting for the dream to overtake him, he finally pulled a comic book out of his bedside table and settled in to read for a bit.

It was a Superman comic, and the story—one of life and death, earth-shattering events—was hardly calculated to put a seventeen-year-old boy to sleep, but Ganady was distracted. After the fourth reading of the same six frames, he gave in with a sigh and started to close the magazine.

“Ganny!”

He stared down at the page. Svetlana gazed up at him, wearing the person of the hapless Lois Lane, presently in the clutches of a green-skinned mutant.

“Were you waiting for me?” she asked.

“Well...uh...yeah. I was. I wanted to ask you something.”

“Oh, okay.” She looked down at the mutant, frozen in the act of carrying her off, his yellow teeth bared in a garish pen-and-ink snarl.

“This is pretty uncomfortable. Can we go someplace else to talk?”

“Oh...oh, sure. Where would you—”

Ganady found himself standing at home plate in Connie Mack Stadium. He was in the left-hand batter's box; Svetlana faced him across the plate from the right-hand box. She was wearing a Phillies cap and held a ball loosely in one hand.

“—like to go,” Ganny finished lamely.

“This is fine. What did you want to ask me?”

“Your family name.”

“My family name?”

He shrugged, feeling suddenly ridiculous. “I just wondered what it was.”

“Gusalev.”

This surprised Ganady. He'd half expected her to give a name he knew—the name of one of his classmates or a friend from shul or church. “I don't know anybody named Gusalev.”

“You do now.”

Lana's crooked grin, he discovered, did mysterious things to his insides.

“No, I mean I've never heard the name before.”

“Da's people are from Warsaw. Yours are from Keterzyn.” She shrugged artlessly. “It's not a common name, and until Da they didn't get out of town much.”

“So, if you went to Megidey Tihilim, you must live around here, huh?”

“I did. That was before...you know. Before Da got all up in the nose and decided he must move the family to a ‘better neighborhood.' With a better rabbi.”

“So you don't live in South Philly anymore?” Ganny tried not to look disappointed.

“Oh, no—they're still in South Philly: Ma and Da and my Uncle Tadeush and my Aunt Beyle and my cousin Mikhail. They just moved to a better neighborhood, according to Da.”

“I had an Aunt Beyle,” said Ganady, turning her words carefully in his mind.

“
Everybody
has an Aunt Beyle,” said Svetlana.

Ganady barely heard her. A chilling thought had just occurred to him as he stood there in the balmy, summer dream evening, and it made him shiver. She
had
lived here, she said. She had not moved, but her family had. Without her. And she hadn't said she still
lived
here in so many words.

“They...they
moved
? And...and left you behind? Just like that?”

“Well, not just like that, exactly.”

“You're not...you're not a ghost, are you?”

Her gaze had wandered up into the empty grandstands. Now it snapped back to his face. “Oh, poor Ganny! Did you think I meant I had died and that you were going to find me in a graveyard somewhere?”

“You said you were real. You didn't say you were
living
,” he observed.

She laughed, the sound alive and lively and sparkling in his ears. “I'm not a ghost, Ganady Puzdrovsky. No, not a ghost.”

Confusion mingled with relief. “Then—then what?”

She looked down at the ball in her hand, tossing it lightly, rolling it with long, slender fingers. “Once upon a time, I was a little princess. To my Ma and Da, anyway. Now, I'm a...a story they tell my poor cousin when they want him to behave. ‘Be good, Mishka, or you'll end up like that ungrateful Svetlana.'“

“What did you do?” he dared to ask, then quickly added: “You don't have to tell me, of course. I mean, if it's very private. Or...or something.”

She gazed at him across home plate, her hair spilling from beneath the scarlet baseball cap in a river of ruddy gold. She was smiling, but her eyes—her huge, sea-green eyes—were not smiling.

“Oh, that's a long story, Ganny,” she said. “And this is not the time.”

“We've got all night...don't we?”

She turned and started to walk along the first-base line, pulling Ganady into step beside her.

“I mean it's not the
right
time.” Her brown-and-white Oxfords raised little puffs of dust and chalk as she scuffed along the line.

“When's the right time?”

“Ask me when we get to first base,” she said.

“When's the right time?” he repeated as they stepped onto the bag in perfect unison.

She laughed. “That's your question? You only get three.”

“Huh?”

“One question for each base.”

“What about home plate?”

“You already asked a bunch of questions at home plate. The answer to the first-base question is: when it means the most to you.”

She stepped toward second base.

“Do I get a second-base question?” he asked, matching her stride. She was as tall as he was, and her strides were easily as long.

She gave him a sideways glance. “Three questions, Ganny. Two left.”

She skipped ahead of him then, down the base path, and leapt onto second base.

“Question?”

“Are you
really
real? Not a ghost, not a dream. But earthly real?”

“Would you believe me if I said ‘yes'?”

He considered that for a moment, his eyes straying across the field and up the spite fence, trying to imagine Mr. Ouspensky sitting there on his rooftop, at the center of his miniature diamond.

“Yes.”

“I'm as real as this baseball.”

She tossed the ball lightly into the air, then flipped it toward Ganady. He fielded it. It felt solid in his hand.

He glanced down at it and saw Eddie Waitkus's autograph scrawled across the seam. It was his baseball.
The
Baseball. The Miracle Ball. The ball he'd followed into the alley behind the butcher shop on the corner of Thirteenth and Reed. He tried to drag the shop back into memory, but Svetlana was in motion again, up the base path to third.

He hurried to catch her up, but she sprinted away and reached the bag before him, pirouetting neatly in the air. She landed lightly on the bag with a flourish and a smile.

“Third-base question, please,” she said, and Ganady was seized by the absurd desire to ask:
Are you a cockroach sometimes?

He didn't. Instead he asked: “Is your Da a butcher?”

“How'd you guess?”

“Does he have a shop at Thirteenth and Reed?”

“Three questions, Ganny. One for each base. That's all.”

“So now what?”

“Now I go home.” She made an odd little gesture with her head and the light seemed to go out of her eyes. She stepped toward home plate.

Ganady put out a hand to stop her. “I'm going to find you,” he said, and meant:
I will always find you
.

She was looking at him again, her eyes bright and soft at once. “You already have.”

“I mean
really
find you. In the real world. While I'm awake,” he added.

She blessed him with a brilliant smile and skipped away toward the plate. She reached it, crossed it, and vanished.

“Lana! Don't go!” he called, and dashed after her.

The stadium lights went out. Ganady stopped, staggered, and fell back into his bed.

The bedroom was dark, and for a moment, he couldn't think why. Then, out of the darkness to his right, a muffled voice said,”When'd you start talking in your sleep?”

“Huh?”

“You were talking in your sleep. I hope you're not going to do that every night.”

“I was reading a Superman comic and fell asleep.” Ganady hoped that would sufficiently explain the phenomenon.

“You were dreaming about Superman?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, don't make a habit of it, okay? A guy's gotta sleep.”

“Uh-uh.”

Ganady felt about for the comic. He found it, slid it back into the top drawer of his nightstand, and shimmied down under his sheet.

“So, who's ‘Lana'?”

“Huh?”

“You were calling to someone named ‘Lana.' That's what woke me up. You said, ‘Lana, don't go.' What's that all about?”

“She was...just someone in the story. A girl.”

“A girl, huh? I thought the girl in the comic book was Lois.”

“Well, there was a Lana too. She's a—a friend of Lois Lane's.”

“Oh,” Nikolai said, then fell silent.

Ganady was on the verge of sleep when he heard a muffled, singsong voice from the other bed.

“Ganny's got a girlfriend. Ganny's got a girlfriend.”

Saturday, at loose ends, Ganady wandered down to Passyunk Square and carefully—not to say reluctantly—approached the butcher shop on the corner of Thirteenth and Reed.

He needn't have bothered with care; the shop was closed for sabes. But he did notice that the window had been repaired. Arcing across it in gold letters were the words
Sausage King: Gusalev and Sons
, and in very small white letters beneath,
Kosher
.

He meant to try again on Sunday, but could not—or did not. Instead, he let himself be distracted by the fact that with Nadia and her parents out of town for the day to visit relatives in Trenton, Yevgeny sought him out to go to a ballgame.

Over Yevgeny's half-hearted protests, Ganny insisted they invite Mr. O along, but the old man was under the weather. The boys went alone.

It was a peculiar afternoon, for Ganny found himself suddenly tongue-tied with Yevgeny as if he had not been his best friend for almost as many years as either boy had been alive. Yevgeny wanted to speak of nothing but Nadia—and did. Ganady wanted to speak of nothing but Svetlana—and didn't.

What could he say? That he dreamed most nights of a girl who might be a ghost? Who popped out of comic books and spirited him away to empty baseball diamonds? And who had been so disobedient her father had disowned her?

So, he let Yevgeny prattle on about Nadia, until he couldn't stand any more.

“Hey,” he said, when Yevgeny had paused to stuff popcorn into his mouth, “you want to go see that new Humphrey Bogart movie?”

“Oh, we've already seen it. It was great. Kind of mushy, but great. We went with Nikolai and Antonia.”

Ganady was stunned. His best friend and big brother, double-dating, while he...dreamed.

“Oh,” Ganady said. “Well, I guess Lana and I will go see it alone then.”

Yevgeny stopped chewing his popcorn. “Lana?”

Ganny shrugged. “A girl I met...in church.”

That was all Ganady said, but he felt as if he had let the world's biggest true lie fall from his lips. When he failed to dream that night of Svetlana, he was sure it was the lie that had kept her away.

She did not enter his dreams once during the entire week.

The following Sunday morning he went to Saint Stan's with the rest of the family and had used up every bit of patience he possessed before Subdeacon Savitzky had even begun to intone the Epistle. By the time he had gotten home, changed out of this Sabbath clothes and walked back to Passyunk Square, he had made the journey in his head no less than a dozen times.

The butcher shop was open and several patrons waited at the long glass counter while the butchers filled their orders. There were only two men behind the counter. One of them was older—perhaps in his fifties—the other not much older than Nick. The older fellow's white apron bore a red nametag that proclaimed him to be ‘Joe.' The younger man was ‘Mik.'

Ganady loitered in the background, appearing to study a selection of kielbasa, until the shop was empty of customers. Then the older of the two men spoke to him.

“Hey, boy—you need something?”

Ganady blinked, looked up at the butcher and said,”Are you Mr. Gusalev?”

“That would be me.”

“Well sir, I...”
Do you have a daughter
? That was the question he was supposed to ask, but instead he said,”I'm the one who broke your window a while back. With my baseball.”