Princess of Passyunk (18 page)

“That was you, eh?” Joseph Gusalev regarded him through wintry eyes above which shaggy brows of brown and gray went through a series of exclamatory expressions. “I suppose you want that old baseball back, is that it? Well, I tossed it out—”

“Yes sir. I know. I found it out back in the alley. With a big old cockroach sitting on it.”

He was careful to accord the word ‘Cockroach' the weight of a title and watched the butcher's expression closely, but the man did not slap his hands to his face and cry out in consternation or disgust. He simply crossed his arms over his barrel chest and continued to stare Ganady into the green and black tile floor of his shop.

“I...I wanted to come back sooner, but I guess I was afraid to. I thought you'd be pretty mad.”

Gusalev tilted his head to one side and shrugged. “Actually, not so much as you'd think. I'd meant to get that sign repainted and having it broke was as good an excuse as any. Cost me a pretty penny, though.”

“Yes sir. Well, um, I don't have any money to pay for it, but I could do some work for you, maybe.”

“Yeah? You think? What kind of work?”

“I don't know. I wash windows for Mr. Davidov over at Izzy's. I could do something like that, I guess.”

“Now that'd be poetic justice, wouldn't it—for you to wash the window you busted?” He turned to the younger butcher. “What d'you think of that, Mikhail? Would that be poetic justice?”

Mikhail (“poor Cousin Mikhail?”) regarded Ganady with pronounced disinterest. “I guess.”

Joseph Gusalev turned back to Ganny. “Yeah. Okay. You got a deal. You wash the window every Friday afternoon—before sunset, mind you—you're forgiven for busting it. How's that?”

“For how long?”

“How long?”

“For how long do I wash the windows? A month, maybe?”

“How about you wash and we'll see?”

“Well, okay, but can I do it Saturday? I have to go to shul with my Baba on Friday.”

Gusalev's eyes lit up. “You're Jewish?”

“Catholic. But my Baba is Jewish and she likes for me to go to temple with her.”

“I'll bet she does. We're closed Saturday. It's the Sabbath. How about Sunday?”

“Mama doesn't like us doing stuff like that on Sunday. It's the Sabbath.”

“Well, then? How are my windows to be clean and shiny for the new week?”

“If you left me a bucket and sponge I could clean them on Saturday.”

“Done,” said Mr. Gusalev, as if he had just negotiated a fat deal for tenderloin.

Ganny nodded and hesitated and tried to make himself ask The Question, but could not. Well, he reasoned, he might have just arranged to have a year of Saturdays in which to get up his courage.

oOo

That night he dreamed of Svetlana. He dreamed they went to a baseball game, then to an ice-cream parlor—the one over on 12
^th.
They sat by the window, sharing a sundae with strawberries and hot fudge, and somewhere toward the bottom of the dish, Lana stopped in mid-bite and said, “Why'd you bring me here?”

He looked up at her, taking in the way the phantom sunlight reveled in her hair as if it wanted nothing more than to live there. The way her eyes, illumined by that same sunlight, were sea and sky at once. The way her skin seemed to glow as if it were the source of the light and not merely reflecting it.

He absorbed all of this in one deep breath, committed it to his heart and said, “Huh?”

She shrugged. “Why here? I know you'd rather go to Izzy's. Why don't we go to Izzy's?”

“I brought you here?” he repeated. “How'd I do that?”

“I don't know. You just did.”

“Oh...well, Nadia didn't like Izzy's, so I thought—”

“That was Nadia. Not me. I think I'd like Izzy's.”

“Okay. Maybe next time?”

“Why not this time?”

Ganady looked down at the empty sundae dish and the fudge-gooey spoon in his hand. “Well, we've already eaten the ice cream.”

Svetlana threw back her head and laughed. “Are you full?”

He pondered that for a moment. “No.”

“You could eat ice cream all day long and not get full here. Or you could not eat the whole time and not be hungry.”

“Where is here?” Ganady asked, and Svetlana said,”Izzy's.”

And indeed they were standing outside of Izzy's deli. They went in. They sat at the counter. They ate more ice cream. Bittersweet chocolate, which Izzy's had and the regular ice-cream shop did not.

They did not speak of ghost baseball games or butcher shops or alienated fathers. They talked to Izzy about the old country and listened to klezmer music on the radio. They talked about the season the Phillies were having and about their chances for going to the World Series. And Ganady came close to mentioning his trip to a certain butcher shop in Passyunk Square, but did not.

oOo

It was odd, cleaning the windows in Joseph Gusalev's shop Saturdays. The shop was closed and all the meats put away in the cold room. Mr. Gusalev and his sons apparently did not begin sausage preparation until very early on Monday morning. And on that morning, at approximately five AM, the first new sausages of the week would be made.

But on Saturday late in the morning, Ganny would come to the shop and find a bucket of soapy water, a bucket of clear water and a sponge awaiting him on the sidewalk outside the shop. He would clean the outside of the big plate glass window and the glass in the front door. By this time, the Gusalevs would return from synagogue and Mr. Joe, or so he liked to be called, would let him into the shop and sit behind the counter on a tall stool and watch as he washed the insides of the windows and the glass cases, which had inexplicably been added to his contract.

“I'm not called the Sausage King for nothing,” Mr. Joe told him the third Saturday of their arrangement.

He was sitting behind the counter reading a newspaper, and had caught Ganady staring at a trophy that sat enshrined in the front window.

“Best sausages in Philly—that's what that trophy is for. The
best
. That's why I own such a shop in such a location. And I'll tell you something else, Ganady Puzdrovsky. I'm going to open another store one block north of Market. One block!”

“You're going to move your business?”

“Not at all. I'm expanding again. In a few weeks, I'll have another trophy to go with that one. What with advertising in the newspaper, in a few years, I'll have an
empire
of butcher shops. This isn't my only shop, you know. I have another one four blocks over. That's the original. Not a prime location, though. And the flat upstairs—whew! What a dump that was. But now we can afford this one, and soon, I'll begin looking for a real house.” He nodded, and his eyes seemed to be looking at something beyond the empty glass case they were focused on.

“So, your sons run the other shops?” Ganady buffed a smudge on the window near the trophy.

“My sons?” Mr. Joe blinked. “No. My wife runs the first shop, and she'll go to run the new one when it opens and Mikhail will take over the first one.” He hesitated for a moment, then added: “I got no sons.”

“But...but the sign...”

“Oh, that. I bought the shop from a guy named Otto Gusthof.
He
had sons. I don't have sons.”

There was something so infinitely sad about the way he said it, that Ganny had to stop himself from imagining that the butcher had wiped a tear from his eye. He recognized this for what it was—the moment for his question.

“Do you...do you have a daughter?”

Mr. Joe's eyes snapped to his face with such force that Ganady thought he should hear a click. “A daughter? Why do you ask?”

Ganady had not considered having to answer that particular question. “I...well...”

“What—you'd like to inherit my Sausage Empire?”

“No I...I know a girl whose last name is Gusalev, that's all.”

Now he had the butcher's complete attention. He felt it as a hot, prickling sensation upon his cheeks. Mr. Joe put his paper down on the glass top of the empty meat case and leaned forward on his stool.

“What girl is this? What's her given name?”

Ganny swallowed. “Svetlana,” he said, and he heard Mr. Joe let out a long, low sigh.

“Svetlana.”

Ganny nodded. “Svetlana.”

“How does she seem, this Svetlana? Is she well? Is she healthy?”

“She's...she seems okay. She's kind of hard to get to know though. I don't know where she lives or anything like that.”

“You don't know where she lives? Where'd you see her?”

“In church.”

Mr. Joe's eyes bugged out. “In a
church
? What kind of church?”

“Saint Stan's—Stanislaus. Over on Wharton.”

“A Catholic church?
Chas v'cholileh
! Well, at least it's not Protestant.”

“So, um...then your daughter isn't—”

“Daughter? I have no daughter. My daughter is dead.”

Ganny's heart turned to ice in his chest, but then the butcher muttered not quite beneath his breath: “The ungrateful wretch.”

“But she's not
dead
dead?”

The butcher threw him a strange look. “What do you mean,
dead
dead? You've seen her—you just said so.”

“Well, yeah, but only...”
Only in my dreams?

Ganny stopped himself from saying the words, picked up his bucket and sponge and rags and stood. “I've got to do the cases.”

“Sure,” said Mr. Joe, but he continued to watch Ganny work, which made Ganny shiver and sweat in turns.

Finally, he was finished and put away his tools and prepared to go. He was at the door when Mr. Joe asked him: “So, this Svetlana Gusalev you know—and I'm not saying she's my girl, mind you—she seems...normal to you?”

“Well, not exactly. She...she does things I don't think other people can do. And she seems sad. She says she misses her Da something terrible.”

Mr. Joe's eyes watered a little, but his face seemed hard as a frozen side of beef. “Does she? Well, that's as may be. But what things does she do that seem so strange to you?”

“It's kind of hard to say.”

Gusalev shrugged. “What—hard to say? Just say. Tell me one thing she does that's not exactly normal.”

“She comes into my dreams.” There, he'd said it.

The butcher shrugged again. “What's not normal about that? My Rodenka—my Stella—came into my dreams when we were courting. The next time you see her, this Svetlana—and I'm not saying she's my daughter, mind you—you tell her for me that a girl should do her duty to her family. It's that simple. A girl should do her duty. You'll tell her?”

Ganady could only nod, staring through the perfectly clean glass of the butcher shop's front door as it swung shut behind him. The muted, delicate tinkle of the little bell suspended above the lintel jarred him from his astonishment and he turned and ran home as fast as his feet would carry him.

oOo

Ganady did not dream of Svetlana that night. Not until the next sabes did he dream of her. They went to Passyunk Square and watched the old men play chess, and Ganny found it was all he could do not to look at the butcher shop that was on the corner even in his dreams. Svetlana, for her part, made no mention of it at all.

They went to Izzy's next. And Mr. O was there—or at least, Ganny thought, he had put Mr. O there. They talked of baseball heroes long gone and when the subject of Lefty O'Doul came up, they were suddenly at the ballpark with Mr. Ouspensky watching the Giants and Phillies play ghost baseball.

As he did most nights after dreaming of Lana, Ganady went to his dresser and, by the light of the moon, he studied the Cockroach. This night, he did something that would have been unthinkable even weeks ago—he took the baseball along with the wooden stand he had made for it, and the creature that sat atop it, and moved it to his bedside table. He found that if he set the ball just so, he could see the cockroach in silhouette against the window shade, backlit by moon and streetlamp.

What would Mr. Joe think, he wondered, if he asked him if his daughter was sometimes a cockroach?

“So, you are a businessman now, are you?” Baba Irina said, glancing at Ganady out of the corner of her eye.

They made their way down Tenth toward Izzy's for an after shul snack.

“I wash windows, Baba.”

“For two businesses. This is a beginning.”

Ganady smiled. Only Baba Irina could see two window-washing jobs as the start of a career.

At Izzy's they sat at their window table and listened to the radio.

“You do good work,” said Baba Irina, tapping the gleaming glass with a fingernail. “Doesn't he do good work, Isaacson?”

Isak Isaacson sat at the counter reading a paper. His wife Esther was not to be seen which, Ganny suspected, was fine with Baba Irina.

Now Isak glanced up from the sports page and said, “Eh?”

“Ganady washes the windows—good work, yes?”

“If you say so.”

“He could be washing
your
windows,” she said coyly.

“Baba!” Ganny objected.

Baba laughed at him and asked Izzy for two ice creams.

The radio sputtered ads for Sears Roebuck and Coca-Cola, then began to ooze klezmer. Ganady knew the song and daydreamed the clarinet fingerings.

“This is good,” said Mr. Isaacson, looking up from his paper. “Who is this?”

“It's the King,” said Ganady.

“Elvis?” asked Isaacson.

“Naftule Brandwein—the King of the Klezmer Clarinet,” said Baba, looking extremely pleased.

“You
like
this, Ganny?” Isaacson seemed dumfounded.

Ganny nodded. “Sure. He's my favorite.”

“What? Not Elvis Presley? A boy like you—I figured you'd listen to that rock and roll.”