Chapter 15
Close to four hours passed before the smoldering rubble cooled enough for the firemen to search for the unlikely survivor, Alex Miller. Virtually everything was burned beyond recognition, except for the kitchen sink, the marble mantelpiece from above the fireplace and a scattering of hot coins. Ida’s Holy Land folding money and her other important papers had turned to wet, sludgy ashes. The men sifted and shoveled in the fleeting hope of finding the little boy’s body—pray to God he died of smoke inhalation, not flames—but all they came up with was an orange cap that had somehow survived the inferno.
A veteran crime reporter from the
Pittsburgh Gazette Times
, Thomas Lowery discovered a tiny boy sitting on the steps of the house across the street, calmly taking in the spectacle. It had to be Alex Miller, given the description from the neighbors. He squatted down in front of him. “Are you Alex Miller?”
The child nodded.
“Can you talk?”
“Where’s Grandma?”
Before Lowery called for a doctor, his investigative reporter side got the best of him. He asked Alex how he’d escaped the blaze.
Alex said, “Like the cat. Where’s Grandma?”
Gradually the neighbors discovered Alex, too. Everyone said it was a miracle that he was alive. It had to be. How else could you explain that a child, especially one so tiny, could have made it out of that horrendous fire? Perhaps Ida, the poor woman, had been right all along, that God truly did favor the boy and look out for him. Or perhaps Alex had used some God-like powers to keep him from harm. Bess Foster, Alex’s most recent client, shouted that Alex
was
God before two of her neighbors led her away.
A minor squabble broke out as to who was going to take short-term custody of the demigod Alex until his next of kin had been notified, which in turn raised the question, who exactly was his next of kin?
Margaret Conroy had the answer.
Alex remained remarkably calm until Mrs. Conroy and her husband Marshall, who’d slept through the entire fire, brought him Abe’s house, but as soon as the front door closed, he wailed, “Grandma, where is Grandma? I want Grandma, I called her, but it was too hot from the fire to go upstairs and I was afraid, and then I crawled out through the screen door where the cat went, and I sat on the steps but she didn’t come out and the firemen came and then the men took her. Where did they take her?” As he babbled, tears rolled down his cheek and onto Abe’s chest and singed his father’s heart.
Arthur and Benjamin came running down the stairs. Arthur said, “Why is Alex home?”
Benjamin said, “Why is he crying?”
Abe said, “There was a fire at your grandmother’s house.”
Benjamin, who hadn’t stuttered for two years, said, “Wuh…where’s Grandma.”
Abe thought about what Mrs. Conroy had said when she brought Alex home, how smoke was still rising from charred Ida’s body as they carried her out, and sympathy pains shot up the backs of his legs. He explained to his sons that their grandmother was hurt, yes, but that they’d rushed her to St. Margaret’s, it’s a damn good hospital, boys, and he wondered if he’d sounded convincing, but from the looks on his son’s faces he knew they had their doubts.
“But are you sure she’s alive?”
Arthur punched Benjamin. “Sure she is, dummy. They don’t take you to the hospital if you’re dead.”
“That’s right, Arthur,” Abe said, even though he wasn’t sure his son was correct. “Boys, listen, they probably won’t let me in there tonight. I’ll go see your grandmother first thing tomorrow.” He wondered what he would see. He thought about a recent incident at the shop when Angus Foley’s shirt caught on fire, and how he howled, and how by the time the boys got close enough to rip the shirt from his back Foley’s flesh peeled off like strips of burned bacon, and that was nothing compared to what he imagined could have happened to Ida in a house full of flames.
He held Alex tighter. He shivered involuntarily. His precious little boy had almost died. If Irene were still alive, they wouldn’t be in this mess and Alex wouldn’t have been there at all. God knows what he saw in that burning house. It could have been the kind of thing that could scar him forever.
With his brothers and his father hovering around him, Alex gradually calmed down. Abe tried to feed him meatloaf and peas, but when he turned it down, he made a butter and jelly sandwich for him and a glass of milk. He washed his face and hands and took him upstairs to the master bedroom and held him in his arms until exhaustion got the better of him.
A full moon shone in through the window. Abe stared up at a settling crack in the ceiling. He thanked God for Alex’s sleep, and he prayed that the boy would have pleasant dreams, not nightmares, even though he realized that, after all his sins, God owed him no favors. He tried to blot out the image of Ida burning, her hair shriveling in the flames, her arms beating against the fire on her legs. His thoughts drifted to Irene, and how she’d suffered in her last days. It was a life full of suffering, that’s what it was.
He stroked his son’s hair. As much as he resented Ida, and all that Christian Holy Roller hogwash she’d pumped into the boy’s head, she’d done the both of them a tremendous favor by taking him five days a week. What now? What was he going to do with Alex?
He tried to think about something else, to focus on his last time with Delia, a month ago, and tried to envision her lying on her bed, wearing her stockings and a string of black beads and nothing else, but the image wouldn’t hold, and as he drifted off, what he saw was his mother-in-law reaching her arms out toward him, moaning his name, her limbs engulfed in flames.
Abe kept Arthur and Benjamin home from school the next morning to take care of Alex. He promised his sons they could visit their grandmother as soon as he learned more about her condition. Alex clung to his leg as he tried to leave, but Benjamin convinced him that they needed to stay home and make get-well cards for Grandma.
Abe stopped by his shop to explain why he needed the day off, so it was almost noon by the time he reached St. Margaret’s and found his way along the dimly lit marble hallways to the ward where Ida was being treated. The air was thick with the smell of antiseptic and the moans of the sick. Occasionally he saw patients in wheel chairs, or with tubes coming out of various orifices, and his thighs tingled with sympathy pains.
Several of Ida’s friends from the neighborhood, including Margaret Conroy, were conducting a vigil at the entrance to Ida’s ward. Abe moved through them, intent on seeing Ida, no matter how grisly she might be, until a nurse emerged from behind the curtains and informed him that Ida could not have visitors, not even family.
Abe returned to the cluster of neighbors. Bess Foster held a cluster of limp daisies. “Are you a relative, sir?”
“I’m her son-in-law.”
She looked him up and down. “Oh, my Lord, you’re Alex’s father.”
“Little Alex’s father is here!” cried another woman. She ran up to Abe. “But how is Alex? It’s a miracle he’s even alive, praise God.”
“God looks out for your son, Mr. Miller,” another voice cried. “Praise Alex. Praise him.”
The fervent sanctification of his son, however flattering, made Abe wary—why were these women singing his praises as if he were God come to Earth? What kind of religious voodoo had been going on in Ida’s house? But they seemed so genuinely concerned about Alex, maybe this wasn’t the time to ask. Instead, he said, “What do you know about Ida? What are they telling you?”
“It’s touch and go,” Bess said. “Burns over sixty percent of her body.”
Sixty percent. Abe’s skin crawled. “Well at least she’s alive.”
She wasn’t.
Unbeknownst to her son-in-law and the host of well-wishers, Ida’s lungs had given out minutes before Abe arrived at the hospital. Father Kiernan, the priest she detested for years, had been at her bedside during her final moments, offering Last Rites, which she refused, stating just before her last breath that Kiernan wasn’t half the man of God Reverend Billy Sunday was, and she didn’t regret it in the least telling him so. However, when Father Kiernan came out and told everyone that Ida had died, he added that she’d made final confession and passed in peace. He closed his eyes. Sometimes it took a little lie to keep the faithful faithful.
*
By early spring of 1914, Delia Novak’s windfall had dwindled to a pittance. If she wanted to continue to live alone in her apartment and wear decent clothes, she needed to find full-time employment to supplement the money she picked up waitressing at The Wheel. So with reluctance she took a full-time job as a maid in a recently completed mansion around the corner from the Mellon Estate, a mammoth 65-room spread resting on 11 acres. As she told Abe, The Mellon Estate was a damn long way from Mellon Street. She continued to put in two evenings a week and Saturdays at The Squeaky Wheel, hoping to get her mother’s diamond ring out of hock with her tip money. With all the work, there was hardly time to see Abe or anyone else.
So it was close to two weeks after Ida died that Delia finally saw Abe on a slow Thursday night. She sat down at his table opposite Abe and Davy O’Brien. She sipped Abe’s beer. “I heard about your mother-in-law. Sorry.”
“At least Alex was safe.”
Alex. He seemed more upset than when his mother died, but maybe back then he was too young to understand death—as if anyone ever did. He’d perked up a bit lately, thanks to being with his brothers every night, but Abe couldn’t keep relying on Mrs. Traficante from across the street to watch him during the day until the boys got home from school. She was too old and her English was broken at best, and Alex had too much energy for her to keep up with him for long. “I got to figure out what to do with the boy.”
“He’s a cute little bugger. I could take him every once in a while, maybe a Sunday.”
“Really?” Abe sipped on his beer. It used to be just the sight of Delia was enough to make him happy and horny, but tonight she looked thin and drained and, he hated to admit it to himself, kind of ordinary. Knowing she worked so much and so hard depressed him. “I appreciate it, but it’s the weekdays that are the problem.”
She looked up at the bar, where John had set a plate of chicken legs. “Can’t you send him to school?”
“Now? He’s still too young.”
From behind the bar, John called, “Delia. Order’s up.”
She kissed Abe on the side of the head. She let her hand trail along his shoulder. “You know what? I got another idea. Don’t you Jews have religious schools or something?”
Her suggestion awakened uncomfortable memories of his Hebraic past. He recalled the teachers and the rabbis he’d suffered as a boy, always pushing his face down into the
siddur
, smacking the back of his head and shouting, you must look in book, Miller, you must look in book if you want to learn. He hated it so much he skipped it as often as he could, preferring his Uncle Morris’s yells and smacks to the rabbi’s. However, as much as he’d hated it, he thought maybe Delia had something there. He ought to go down to the local synagogue, the Beth Shalom on Negley Avenue, maybe it was different than the one he had to go to, maybe they had something for a little boy like Alex, like a nursery school or kindergarten during the summer, where he could place Alex. It wasn’t as if he knew anyone there, or ever set foot in it, but still, a Jew was a Jew, they couldn’t turn him away, they must have something to help out families like his, even if he wasn’t a dues-paying member of the tribe, so to speak. It was worth a shot, and even though Alex wasn’t one hundred percent Jewish and his head was full of Ida’s Christian bunk, still, the rabbis would straighten him out, and besides, what alternative did he have?
Chapter 16
Fifteen minutes after the Sabbath service, most of the worshippers at Beth Shalom Synagogue were downstairs in the function room for the Oneg Shabbat ceremony, enjoying cups of sweet wine and fresh challah and talking of food prices and politics and social justice. As they sang traditional songs in lively, hopeful voices, comfortable in their kinship, a young woman sat by herself in the front row of the sanctuary.
Her prayer book lay open on her lap. She read silently from the Yom Kippur service even though the Jewish New Year was nearly five months away. Over and over, she read a passage that admonished sinners who’d tarnished the beauty of the spirit by committing gross misdeeds. She closed her eyes and prayed that repentance would lead to forgiveness. In her right hand, she clutched an illustration torn from a magazine of a baby in a cradle.
Abe and Alex stood in the entrance to the sanctuary. Abe felt as if he didn’t deserve to be there, that despite his origins he was an outsider, that he was trespassing in a holy place. At least he wore a clean white shirt and had on a hat. He listened to the singing floating up from the floor below. He didn’t understand the words, but the melody was dimly familiar and somehow encouraging.
Alex tugged on his hand. “Daddy, where is the cross?”
Abe knelt down. “Like I told you on the way here, this is a different kind of church than your grandma’s. It’s called a shul. It’s for the Jewish people.”
“Am I a Jewish?”
You are today, son, you sure are. “Yeah, you’re Jewish enough.”
Alex pointed to a stained-glass window. “What’s that, Daddy?”
“That’s the Star of David.”
“Who’s David?”
Before he could answer, Abe noticed a pretty young woman with a white shawl walking up the aisle from the sanctuary. Her eyes were slightly closed, and her lips moved rapidly, as if she were reciting something or something was speaking through her. She came so close to Abe that she almost walked into him.
Abe said, “Miss?”
She stopped a foot short of him. She shrank back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.”
“No, I should have said something when I seen you—I mean, saw you walking this way.”
“That’s all right.”
“Well, I guess I’m blocking the way. Come on, Alex.”
The woman caught Alex’s eye the same time he caught hers. Her eyes widened, and her lips began to move again.
Dear God, do not be deaf unto my plea
.