Saint Mazie: A Novel (19 page)

Sweet Jesus is this house empty.

Last night I came in and I found Rosie standing at Jeanie’s door, her arms crossed, back hunched, face all twisted up into something I didn’t recognize. I touched her real gently on her back and she jumped, spooked. I stroked her back and calmed her.

I said: What are you thinking about?

She said: That money’s no good.

I said: It isn’t, but it’s ours anyway. And we’re good.

She said: Do you really think we’re good?

A year ago or maybe two or three I would have said we weren’t good, or at least that I wasn’t. But I know a little more these days.

I said: Well, we’re not bad. We’re definitely not bad people, Rosie. And that will have to do for now.

This morning, Rosie came into the city with me. First time she’d left the neighborhood since Louis died and we went to see the lawyer. She said she needed to check on the buildings in Chinatown, that she’d been hearing all kinds of stories about them being run into the ground. We might need a new superintendent. She wore a tidy suit. There was a new hat too, violet colored with a jewel on it, and some lace netting she drew around the edges of her face. There was some color on her cheeks. Where it came from I’ll never know. I only see it as a sign of life.

Sister Tee needed to buy some winter coats for some girls she knew so I took some money from the envelopes in Jeanie’s room. Not even an entire envelope, just a few bills was all it took. I don’t know what else it’s there for if not that.

Rosie took the train again with me this morning.

I said: More business in the city?

She said: I’m getting my hair done.

I said: Your hair looks fine.

She said: You got a problem with me going to the city, miss?

I said: I’m just asking what your business is, is all.

It went on like that for another stop, us having a not-conversation. Everything felt flipped around, me wondering what she was doing, her not answering me straight.

I said: Do what you like.

She said: I don’t need your permission.

The subway door opened just then and she got off. Her back to me on the platform. She didn’t even turn and wave.

There were forty-six envelopes in Jeanie’s room and now there are forty-one. I’m not crazy. I counted them myself. There were forty-six in February when I took money for Sister Tee. It’s not mine to wonder but wonder I will.

A postcard from Jeanie, Los Angeles. The sign that says
HOLLYWOODLAND
in the hills. I’ve been seeing pictures of that sign in my magazines forever. I got a little excited, I couldn’t help myself. But then I flipped it over.

It said: What happened to you just happened to me & it is terrible, Mazie.

A lot of things have happened to me in this life but I knew exactly what it was she was talking about.

As much as I wanted to add this postcard to my wall, I threw it away. I know it’s bad juju to have bad news floating all around you. Same as that money too, still sitting in our house. Thirty-nine envelopes left.

Tea leaves in a saucer, a haze of incense in the house. Dishes in the sink. Rosie’s nowhere. The house stinks of gypsies. I could not bring myself to count the envelopes.

My grandmother on my father’s side was part Romany, but she was not the kind of gypsy who conned, and anyway, even if she was, she married out of it. Her skin was colored so that she could pass for Italian, like Sicilian Italians, the real Mediterranean Italians. You should see me in the summer, my skin gets so dark, I can pass for all kinds of ethnicities, Latino, African-American. I’m a citizen of the world come June. Anyway, my grandmother knew grifters, and there were stories passed around our family, cautionary tales more than anything. One of them was about being a single person, a lonely person looking for companionship or comfort. Widows were easy targets. There was one con where they’d tell these widows, Oh, you give us X amount of dollars, ten dollars, a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, whatever, and we’ll burn it, we’ll burn your loss away, we’ll burn your pain away. And then it’s just this sleight-of-hand trick—they take the money during these sessions and they slip it into the linings of their skirts. They kept everything in these skirts. Coins, jewels, and cash. Gypsy skirts were like Fort freaking Knox.

I know that it was wrong when all Rosie did was clean, but now the house is pure filth. Worse, the summer heat is roasting the dirt. A trail of tea leaves across the kitchen table. A line of ants following. A march. I’m at the theater all day and night, holding everything together while Rudy’s out again. I can’t do it all. I can’t. I need help.

Rudy had five heart attacks in his lifetime. I’d guess in 1923 it was probably his third heart attack? Some of them were smaller than others. Each one he bounced back from within a few weeks, until the last one, from which he did not bounce back at all. He was this calm, loving, supportive man who took on the pain and stress of others without flinching, and his heart attacks were his moment of flinching. And when he was in the hospital, everything collapsed around him. My great-grandmother, their children, the theater. He held all these worlds in his head. I understand this. If you let go for a second, it all unravels. The loose threads of the universe.

I told Sister Tee everything about Rosie. It felt so good to tell someone even one little thing about my life, and this feels like the only thing in my life now. That and the theater.

Tee hates the gypsies as much as Tee is capable of hating anyone. She thinks they’re godless. I told her I’d known some kind ones but she’s come up against them too many times to forgive or at least to forget.

She said: They’ll rob you blind then leave you standing on the corner in the cold and the dark.

I said: I don’t think she thinks she’s being robbed.

She said: I think that money could be better spent elsewhere.

I said: But what if it soothes her?

She said: A con’s a con. Those gypsies should be punished.

When Tee turns to tough talk I have to laugh and kid her.

I said: Where’s your forgiveness, Tee? I thought everyone had a saint.

She stopped her ranting and thought about it.

She said: Saint Dismas watches over criminals. But it’s the ones who are seeking pentinence that he cares for.

I said: And these gypsies don’t care.

She said: They don’t care one bit.

I took the money. I took it and I put it somewhere she can’t find it. There were just twenty envelopes when I did so. More than enough money to last us a long time, yet it seemed like not very much at all considering what we started with. It’s not hers, it’s not mine. It belongs to strangers now.

We’ve got archives dating back to the late 1800s. They’re treasures, really. All of the bookkeepers over the years have had the most darling handwriting. These teeny tiny letters and numbers in perfectly straight rows. It’s very sweet to me. I like the way the ledgers feel too. They have a real heft to them.

I found the ledger from 1929, and it indicates there was a fund set up by Miss Phillips-Gordon in honor of her mother, Ada Phillips. The money was earmarked to help women and children. It was blind on the part of Miss Phillips-Gordon, meaning she gave the church the money, but had made a request to never know what was done with it, or rather, who was helped with it. The fund was used to establish battered women in new homes, pay for doctors’ bills for them and their children. At the time we worked in tandem with churches in Montreal and Buffalo, and so these women from New York were set up with new lives in those communities. I wouldn’t be able to tell you how many women she helped. Hundreds? Thousands? I’ve no idea. Many, many women. There was a substantial initial deposit, and then this fund was maintained annually until Miss Phillips’s death in 1964.

I don’t know what we’d do if we got a comparable donation now. Gosh, we could do so much good with it. I don’t even want to think about it, but I do, you know? What a dream it would be.

She’s lost her mind. Tore the room apart looking for the envelopes. Bed up, sheets off, curtains down. Rug on sidewalk. I think she threw it out the window, but can’t be sure.

There was some bad blood between Mazie and Rosie for a while but no one knew why.

A screaming match at the cage. She was trying to claw me at the window. I didn’t even recognize her at first. The eyes confused me. The cruelty of her gaze. Then her hands were up against the cage, trying to shake it, shake me out of there. No blood of mine, is what I was thinking. She’s not my sister.

She said: Where is it?

I said: It’s gone and that’s all you need to know.

Rosie said: Give it to me. I need it.

I said: You’re being a fool, Rosie.

She said: You don’t know anything about anything.

Rudy came running and held her back as best he could with those tiny hands of his. She shook him off and ran.

Tee said: Wait it out. It’s all you can do.

What I want to say to Rosie is that I know her pain is like no other, but also that it is no worse or better than anyone else’s. We do not get to suffer forever.

She’s out there somewhere. I stopped by the Bayard Street building to collect this month’s rent, and the tenants said she’d been there already and taken their money. Likely handed it straight to the gypsies.

Happy Birthday to me. Twenty-six years old and my life’s chaos.

Sister Tee brought me some daisies, and later I threw one back with Mack. I haven’t forgiven him one thing. But I was lonely. Surrounded by people all day long yet as lonely as can be.

The rent’s gone again, in her pocket, in their pockets.

Saw her on the street, grabbed at her arm, and she ran. I chased her, chased her through Chinatown, we ran and ran.

I said: Please, Rosie, please.

I said: Please come home.

I said: Please, I love you.

I lost her on Canal Street.

I don’t even know if it really happened or if it was just a dream I had this morning. Or if it was even her, even Rosie at all.

Rosie’s home. I found her last night on the couch. Thin and gray and snoring. I just covered her with a quilt a moment ago. I was afraid to touch her, I thought she might disappear.

I’ll forgive her anything if only she’ll forgive herself too.

The thing about these gypsies is eventually they leave. There’s no long con in their world. Get in and get out. Change your look, and hit the road.

I found her in the ocean last night. The door was open when I came home from work. I walked the street calling her name like she was a lost dog. Then I saw her standing in the ocean, nearly waist high in it. Not close enough to drowning herself. I write this so that it will be true. That she does not want to drown herself.

The moonlight was all around her. The ghost of my sister. I waded my way in, pulled her back toward the sand. We stumbled a bit. The surf crashing around our ankles, both of us shivering. She was white and blue at the same time. I threw my whole self around her to warm her but she shook me off.

She said: It’s been a hard year, Mazie.

I said: I know.

She said: It’s been a hard life. Thirty-four, and I’ve nothing to show for it. A dead husband. No baby. What do I have left?

I said: You have me. I’m here. I’ll never leave you.

I’m not going to leave her. It’s not a lie.

I said: Come on, Rosie, it’s cold as a witch’s tit out here. You’ll catch your death. And if you die, I’ll murder you. I’ll do it with my own two hands.

I wanted her to be beautiful in the moonlight—everyone looks beautiful in the moonlight—but all of Rosie’s collapsed now. Been falling apart for years, Rosie has. More of her hair is gray now than not. It flew all about her, nearly purple in the moonlight. The lines around her eyes and lips jagged and deep in her skin. The chin, sunken and wobbling. Once it falls like that it never rises again. Those are the rules of life. Only the pale cream color of her skin remains. That reminds me of young Rosie.

Slow steps to the grave. I won’t be the one to bury her though.

I said: I’ll kill you if you die.

I put my arms around her throat. It was and wasn’t a joke. We just stood there like fools, our teeth clacking, our lips turning blue, two corpses in the ocean, only one of us more alive than the other.

Finally she fell on me, and held me for warmth. I don’t know if it was her body or mind that gave in first. I will take what I can get from her.

I said: At least you had a love.

Then we both started crying. I wept into my brokenhearted sister, and she wept into heartless me.