The Rest of Us: A Novel (12 page)

“Are you doing this to find out whether this woman Lyuba really is your cousin? The one who says she has your mother’s letters?”

“Exactly. As well as to learn more about my roots. A good genealogist can work wonders. A poet friend of mine claimed to have traced her family line back to the Jamestown settlement with a link to Thomas Jefferson. He was a libidinous man, but still.”

Genealogical research was heavy on the procedurals. The first was to sketch a family tree of known relations. His notepad showed
that he had stopped at his mother: Anna Golovnya, bn 1928, Lviv, Ukraine, one sister, Marta, with a question mark next to it, and one great-uncle.

“You don’t know anyone else?”

“There are those other sisters Chechna had heard of. The surname keeps changing, which makes them difficult to trace.” He took his eyes off the road to look at me. “You never had the desire to investigate your family history?”

I thought of my father, sitting in a lawn chair at the end of the driveway, buckets of zinnias at his feet to sell to the tourists coming down Route 25. On Fridays, Hallie would help out with the weekend traffic, attempting to set up dates for us when my dad was out of earshot. I’d stand behind her, cutting bouquets in my mother’s old straw visor. “Lose the hat,” she’d whisper every time a car pulled up. At the end of the day, my dad would bring out sun tea and let Hallie count up the cash box, always giving us a bigger cut than we deserved. Even then he seemed old, sitting beneath his striped umbrella, his rough, knobby hands on his work pants. When I tried to give him back some of the money, he’d say, “No, no. With you two gals working so hard today, there’ll be no wives crying into their pillows tonight.” It was a marginally profitable business, but my father understood it as a public service.

Entire summers stretched out this way. This seemed to be my history, just as removed from me as the dead relations Rhinehart was searching for. If I could, this would be what I’d revisit—the tough feel of the zinnia stems as I sawed through them, the dry fields behind me, the sound of the screen door slamming as my dad came out to join us.

The genealogist worked out of a basement apartment in a middle-class development of ranch houses with scrubby lawns and yew bushes. A small, hand-lettered sign hanging off the mailbox signaled his office, and we made a sharp right onto the sloping drive.

Rhinehart had dressed in a collared shirt, his papers in a manila
folder, as if he were going to see his lawyer. He patted his breast pocket reassuringly.

“What’s in your pocket?” I asked him as we went around to the back of the house. I had to watch my footing as the railroad ties that were supposed to pass for stairs were loose.

He smiled. “You’ll see.”

We opened the screen door and a little bell dinged. A cat shot past my legs into the yard.

The “office” looked like a rec room where Starsky and Hutch would relax with women. There was a rust-colored carpet and pine-paneled walls that made it dark for midday. The starburst clock said half-past two. Books were stacked under chairs—research, I guessed, until I saw that many were crime fiction hardcovers. The genealogist, whose name was Gerald, sat at a large, messy desk. He had an outmoded computer with a boxy monitor as big as an old TV set.

I had envisioned a thin man with a nervous tic and maybe a little pencil mustache, but Gerald was heavy-faced, with bulldoggish jowls and big plastic-frame eyeglasses, the lenses yellowed. He mistook me for Rhinehart’s wife, despite the age difference. I began setting up my tripod.

They sat in a couple of cracked easy chairs while Rhinehart laid out the details of his search for his mother’s relatives and Gerald took notes on a legal pad. “And your father?”

“His name was Yosyp, and his last name may have been either Romanchuk or Rudnitsky. Our last name was changed when my mother and I came over. He never emigrated with us. His mother was ill, and he stayed on with her in Ukraine. He died a couple of years after we arrived. My memory of his death is very faint, and I’m mostly dating it by a memory of my mother locking herself in the bathroom and wailing after she received the news. She couldn’t bear to talk about him after and so I never found out how he died—I assume sickness. There aren’t any letters between them, but I do have this—” He showed Gerald a photo, one I had seen before, of
his father as a young man, not very tall, in uniform on a barren field, squinting into the sun. It had been on Rhinehart’s desk when I had known him.

“Do you have any records for your father?” Gerald asked.

“No, I know so little about him. We may have to work forward to the present on his side.”

From behind the lens, I cut in, “How is it possible to work forward from hypothetical ancestors?”

Rhinehart was making a motion to me to be quiet, but I ignored him. He was always overly deferential to people he hired, as if they were volunteering help.

Gerald said, “Good question. Like all detective work, it takes a little fact, speculation, and inquiry. In theory, if you put together the genealogies of everyone in the world, they would fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Twenty-five years to a generation, roughly, and each of us had more than a million ancestors in the fifteenth century and more than a billion in the thirteenth. Although that number reflects a tremendous amount of overlapping, the same people popping up on the tree dozens of times.”

“Just think, Tatie,” Rhinehart said. “We could even be related.”

I frowned. Was he serious? He was giving me a polite but closed look that discouraged intimacy. I’d noticed it earlier in the car when he dove into genealogy, a one-way topic. It reminded me of how he used to withdraw, right in front of me, if I wasn’t giving him enough space. But he had invited me to come with him today. I hadn’t forced it.

“It’s an exciting process,” Gerald continued. “I found out I was related to Don Rickles, the artist Jasper Johns, and Helen Sobel—one of the best bridge players in the world.”

From behind the camera I spied on Rhinehart, staring at his hands, his lips. I was starting to wonder if all my desire—even the image of him sliding his hand up my thigh that I’d been half-willing to happen in the car—was the fantasy by-product of a hugely misinformed person. But I had felt the energy pass between us at Chechna’s. Or thought I had. He’d held my hand on the train.

I was having trouble shooting here, despite the initial potential of the place. Everything I framed was too candid, as if I’d been brought in as Rhinehart’s documentarian. He was looking inquiringly at Gerald, a customer intent on a purchase. How foolish I’d been to think that I’d inspire him to start writing poetry again. He wasn’t lost. As usual, he already had a project.

From his manila folder, Rhinehart had removed photocopies of his mother’s birth certificate, her passport and bank statements, a birthday card she had received from someone in the U.S., and a short letter that Lyuba had written and her son had translated. The originals were in a fireproof box. Rhinehart read us Lyuba’s letter out loud. She was recounting one of the times she’d seen Rhinehart, “a fat little boy with a big nose” and had taken him outside to play while the two mothers talked in the kitchen. Lyuba had been enthralled with the idea that this boy was going to America where there were trains, and car traffic, and big puffs of smoke, and tall buildings. Did he remember the chickens? the letter asked. That one had pecked him and he’d been scared? Rhinehart lifted his head to interject here. He did have a dim memory of a chicken pecking him, and he’d always had a mild phobia of them. The story ended ominously. Lyuba’s mother had looked into her tea cup after the visit and started crying, saying that there was a lot of bad in the world.

Despite myself, I was intrigued. “I don’t get the ending. What a strange thing to say about your sister leaving for a better life.”

“She was looking into her cup, so maybe she was reading the tea leaves. That was common then—my mother did it occasionally in New York, for a neighbor or sometimes for me.” Rhinehart looked to Gerald, who nodded in confirmation. “If so, Marta may have seen my mother’s death after leaving for America. Lyuba also sent this.” He handed me a photo of a chubby little boy in short pants, standing in front of a wood-sided row house, holding a ball with both hands.

“This is you! You’re so blond!” I’d never seen a childhood photo of him before. I had searched for one at Chechna’s but there had
been none. “It looks like it was taken in Brooklyn. How did Lyuba have it?”

“My mother must have sent it to her mother in Ukraine.”

“I wish you had the other part of the correspondence—the letters Marta wrote to your mother. You’d know so much more.”

“My mother wasn’t a sentimental person. She probably threw them away. I recently found this, though, between the leaves of an old book.” He carefully reached into his shirt pocket and removed a wax paper packet; inside were three round cutouts, black-and-white heads, which Gerald took over to the drafting table and looked at with an old-fashioned magnifying glass. Rhinehart said, “I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing these are likely my mother’s three sisters. She’d tell me about how they used to brush her hair and tell her stories. I believe two may have died while in their twenties, one when my mother was still a girl.” He pointed to the youngest-looking one with dark hair and a shy smile. “I think this must be Marta.”

“These remembrances were common,” Gerald said. “The father usually kept them.”

“My grandfather must have given them to her, although by rights they should have been passed down to the eldest, and according to Lyuba, her mother was older than mine. I think I should start with her side of the family.”

“Whatever you find, email to me, and I’ll start plugging the information into a tree. The history is out there, we just have to discover it.”

•  •  •

Back in the car, Rhinehart said, “He’s right. I do need to center my investigation on Ukraine.”

“He seemed sort of knowledgeable, despite the look of that office.”

“He’s one of the best,” Rhinehart said, giving me an amused look out of the corner of his eye.

“Did Lyuba tell you that Marta and your mother were sisters?”

“Like me, she’s trying to piece it together. But if she is my cousin,
she can tell me about my grandfather and my other aunts and cousins—maybe even my father since he stayed behind in Ukraine.”

“But wouldn’t this information be in those letters from your mother? Did you ask her about that?”

“I did but she hasn’t replied yet. The mail is very slow going back and forth. Things take forever.”

“What things? Gifts?”

He took his eyes off the road to give me a scolding look. “Nothing expensive. Don’t fault me my generosity.”

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea to jump in with presents. It sends the wrong message. Remember the candidate with the pro-union platform?” Rhinehart had backed him, even stuffing envelopes and stumping, and the guy had turned out to not even have a college degree. The closest he’d gotten to unions was a summer job doing carpentry.

“That was a long time ago, Saint Peter.”

I loved mysteries and had already figured out the process for solving this one. “What you need is for Lyuba to send over those letters your mother wrote her. You can see if you recognize her handwriting and then figure everything out. Have them translated over here. You don’t need her son for that.”

“She’s nervous to send them in case they get lost.”

“How about photocopies then?”

“Tatie, this is Ukraine. They don’t have easy access to modern conveniences.”

Already we had hit a snag. “Something seems off here.”

“I’m sure it will become clear eventually. I’m just beginning the research.”

•  •  •

We were already on the FDR, which was moving. I rapidly saw the day coming to a close, Rhinehart dropping me off at my building, with me having no clear idea of the meaning of this trip, how he felt about me, or when I would ever see him again. I sat brooding out the window, and he said, “You’re quiet.”

“Can I ask you something?”

I saw him almost imperceptibly tighten up. He suspected I was going to demand an emotional revelation. His eyes still on the road, he said, nonchalantly, “Sure.”

“After you won the Pulitzer—” I was drawing out my sentence, maybe unfairly, but I was also watching him. He seemed frozen, a painting of a man driving a car. “I sent you a letter. Did you ever receive it?”

“Yes. I did.” He gave me a serious look. “It was a beautiful letter. I saved it. I still have it.”

“But you never responded.”

“It was a difficult time,” he said. “The phone kept ringing. I talked and talked about myself until I was thoroughly sick.” He gripped the wheel. “No one prepares you for how terrifying success is. How strong the pressure is to enjoy it. Because if you’re not happy then, during the high point in your life, when will you ever be?”

We were nearing the exit for the Manhattan Bridge. “I started a letter to you many times,” he said. “I just wasn’t able to finish it.”

“And what about before that? When I’d first moved to the city and I wanted to just get a cup of coffee and I called you and you never called me back?”

“Tatie,” he said, shaking his head. “Even you must have felt at the time that wasn’t a good idea.”

•  •  •

Getting out of the car in front of my building, I said, “I should be able to get you the prints for Harold and Sue this week.” I’d been able to cull about ten shots I thought Sue would find acceptable. I jotted down the numbers of six of them to be made into 8 x 10s—I wasn’t about to show her the contact sheets and have her choose, especially as there were some of Harold that she’d find distressing, his dull eyes and mouth hanging loose like a stroke victim’s.

Rhinehart was standing awkwardly by the car, gazing up at my
building. “Would you like to drop them off, maybe come over for dinner at my apartment?”

I was feeling almost physically worn down by my own circling thoughts and confusion. How could he spend an entire day with me and not want to touch me, or even ask me about myself? I was merely a witness to his research. “I’m not sure what I have going on this week,” I said.